Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  HIS VOTE-COUNTING ABILITY was needed, too, for if the jury trial amendment came to a vote without the necessary number of yeas and was therefore defeated, the South would not then permit a vote on the overall bill. Lying before him on the desk in his office was a long Senate tally sheet; when he left the office, the sheet was in his breast pocket. In contrast to most of his tally sheets, this one was notably untidy, for so intense was the pressure from both sides that senators were changing their votes, and then changing back again—some of them several times; the long, narrow paper was smudged with erasures and covered not only with numbers but with notes he had jotted down to remind him of what might be the best time to approach a particular senator again, or of some new argument that might work with him. In the cloakroom, he would, over and over again, pull the tally sheet out of his pocket, put on his eyeglasses and study it intently, his thumb moving very slowly down the sheet, seeming to pause at every line, making sure that he was certain of every vote, that he wasn’t just thinking, that he knew. And what he knew, counting the votes, was that he didn’t have enough. Knowland, as Doris Fleeson was to write, “twice daily assured his Democratic allies he would lose at most five or six GOP votes,” and Johnson knew that for once Knowland’s error was not on the side of optimism. Johnson needed forty-eight absolutely “sure” votes to make passage of the amendment certain. The exact number of votes he was counting at this stage cannot be determined, but it appears to have been no more than forty-two.

  To try to get more votes, he used all the weapons at his command—used them with his customary ruthlessness. The ruthlessness was usually cloaked under senatorial courtesy; it took the form of hints rather than threats. But with these men, threats were not needed. Senators understood the nuances of power; they were well aware that the man asking for their help on the civil rights bill had the power to help them—or not help them—on other bills, bills that were vital to them; to help them with committee assignments or campaign cash or office space.

  The Niagara situation was becoming desperate because frost comes early in autumn on the Niagara Frontier, and time was running out. The bill authorizing New York State to begin construction of the huge power dam had been passed through Public Works, but it was still stalled on the floor behind the civil rights bill, and Johnson let New York’s senators know that it was going to stay stalled until a civil rights bill was passed. Addressing the Majority Leader, New York’s Irving Ives said that the “Niagara Frontier is without adequate power. Business will have to cease there. Unemployment will increase. There will be a dire situation there in a very short time unless this redevelopment is begun this year…. This measure must have the right-of-way….” But the Majority Leader, standing at his desk looking across the aisle at Ives and Javits, said that while “I shall do what I can to have it brought to a vote in this body as soon as possible,” it might not be possible in the immediate future. Thanks to a decision by the Republican Leader and the Republican White House, the pending business, he said, was still civil rights. The next voice came from a desk behind him—in the back row of the Democratic side of the aisle. “The bill authorizing the Tennessee Valley Authority to issue … revenue bonds … is of an emergency nature equal to that of the Niagara Bill,” Albert Gore said; “It is urgent that it be considered.” “I thank the Senator from Tennessee,” Lyndon Johnson said. “I assure him that I shall urge the Senate at the appropriate time to give consideration to the Tennessee Valley Bill, in which he is so deeply interested.” But, he said, the appropriate time would be when “a majority of the Senate” want to proceed to business other than the civil rights bill. “So far as the Majority Leader is concerned, he is prepared to proceed to the consideration” of these bills “and get the earliest possible decision….” But it wasn’t up to him, he said, but to “the majority of the Senate.” Couched though it was in soft senatorial courtesy, the message was hard and clear. If the South was pushed too hard on the civil rights bill, it would filibuster. And if there were not sufficient votes to get the bill off the floor by imposing cloture on the filibuster, the only way to get it off the floor, so that the Senate could move on to other business, such as Niagara and the TVA, would be to withdraw the bill. So the South had better not be pushed too hard.

  And if the South was insisting on a jury trial amendment, maybe it would be a good idea to give it one.

  HE WAS WORKING the cloakroom and the corridors now, working them with everything he had.

  He used his health. He had had his heart attack, he said, he was a sick man and he knew it, he had no interest in a presidential nomination or even for another term in the Senate, all he wanted to do was what was best for the country. The strain was too much for him, he said, when he went home at night, he couldn’t sleep, the doctors kept giving him new pills, they didn’t work, he was starting to get chest pains again. “Ah don’t want to die right here,” he said. “Ah don’t want to fall on my face, drop dead right on the floor of the Senate.” He couldn’t take much more strain; “He made you feel that if you wouldn’t go along with what he was asking, you might be murdering this man,” one senator recalls.

  He used the liberals’ fear of Russell to explain why he couldn’t give them more; when a liberal senator had a suggestion, he would reply that he thought it was a good idea, but of course there was no sense pushing it unless Russell approved. “I’ll have to run that by Dick,” he said. He used the southerners’ fear of the wild men to explain why he couldn’t give them more. “Well, you do that, you’re gonna lose Wayne Morse and them,” he said.

  He used their pride in the Senate: “We’ve got the world looking at us here! We’ve got to make the world see that this body works!” He used their pride in their party: “You’re the party of Lincoln,” he reminded one Republican. “That’s something to be proud of. You’re the image of Lincoln.” To Democrats, he said, “Our party’s always been the place that you can come to whenever there’s injustice. That’s what the Democratic Party’s for. That’s why it was born. That’s why it survives. So the poor and the downtrodden and the bended [sic] can have a place to turn. And they’re turning to us now. We can’t let them down. We’re down to the nut-cutting now, and we can’t let them down!” He used his power and his charm. “I can see him now,” Bobby Baker says, “grasping hands and poking chests and grabbing lapels, saying to the southern politicians something like, ‘We got a chance to show the way. We got a chance to get the racial monkey off the South’s back. We got a chance to show the Yankees that we’re good and decent and civilized down here, not a bunch of barefoot, tobacco-chewin’ crazies.” When he had finished presenting his arguments to a senator, Harry McPherson was to say, “he would sink back into the chair, his eyes wide with the injustice of his burdens, the corners of his mouth inviting pity and support” Then he “would come back face to face, perhaps sensing that the other wanted to help and in that event should hear the whole story, all the demands, the pressures and the threats, as well as the glory and the achievement that awaited reasonable men if they would only compromise, not on the main thing, but just on this part that the other side would never accept as it was; unless there could be some accommodation, there would be nothing, the haters would take over, the Negroes would lose it all, I need your help.” He used his stories, and he used his jokes, he used his promises, used his threats, backing senators up against walls or trapping them in their chairs, wrapping an arm around their shoulders and thrusting a finger in their chests, grasping lapels, watching their hands, watching their eyes, listening to what they said, or to what they didn’t say: “The greatest salesman one on one who ever lived”—trying to make his biggest sale. Never had he tried harder. In the intensity of his effort, he even instituted a new variation on one of his old devices. Lapels had long been for grabbing, but now he used them—or rather the buttonhole in them—for another purpose. Trying to persuade a senator who was resisting persuasion, Lyndon Johnson would stick his long forefinger through the hole in the senator’s la
pel to prevent him from moving away. “The other day,” George Dixon wrote, “I spied Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson holding Senator Estes Kefauver in captive conference. Kefauver couldn’t have gotten away without leaving his lapel behind.”

  To every crisis in his life, he had risen with that effort that made men say, “I never knew it was possible for anyone to work that hard,” that effort in which “days meant nothing, nights meant nothing.” Now, in this greatest crisis, Lyndon Johnson, heart attack or no, rose again to that kind of effort. In the early-morning hours the residential districts of Washington and its suburbs were dark and silent, but now, in the night, the silence of a darkened street would be broken by the faint ringing of a telephone in a senator’s house. The senator, picking it up, would hear, “This is Lyndon Johnson.” The persuasion would begin, and it might go on for quite some time. Finally, the call would be over. The senator would go back to bed, to sleep if he could. And on another street, in another senator’s home, the phone would ring. The streets of the Kalorama section of the District were, in the early-morning hours, row after row of darkened houses—and of one house, on Thirtieth Place, in which, night after night during these climactic last weeks of July, every night, lights would be on.

  TRY THOUGH HE DID, however, it appeared, as July drew to a close, that he wasn’t going to win. On Friday, July 26, the lines had stiffened dramatically. That morning, there had been another meeting of the Southern Caucus in Richard Russell’s office, Ellender and Byrd in ice cream suits, most of the others in senatorial dark blue despite the heat, and around the huge mahogany table that morning there weren’t many smiles. Emerging from the meeting, Russell was accosted by Bill White of the Times. Russell told him that the Caucus had decided to support the jury trial amendment “to the end.” If the amendment was defeated, Russell said, the southerners would then fight the complete bill “with every resource open to us.” In his article the next day, White explained the meaning of Russell’s phrases. “He meant that [if the amendment was defeated] the southerners would put in the most implacable filibuster of which they were capable.”

  At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that Friday morning, Knowland and Saltonstall were breakfasting with Dwight Eisenhower. Encircled by reporters as he was leaving the White House, Knowland held up a copy of the President’s July 17 statement and pointed to a sentence that someone had underlined at that breakfast table: “A jury trial should not be interposed in contempt of court cases growing out of violations of [court] orders.” Knowland told the reporters that he was authorized to say that that sentence still represented the President’s views.

  Arriving back at the Senate Office Building, Knowland took the statement into a waiting Republican caucus in the Senate Caucus Room, and emerged to say that most of the eighteen Republicans who had deserted the Administration on Part III had returned on Part IV, and had pledged to stand against any jury trial amendment. Pressed for the number of Republican votes that were certain against the amendment, Knowland said, “Thirty-nine or forty.” Saltonstall said, “More than forty.” Checking with individual senators, reporters felt that these estimates were correct. If the fifteen “ardently civil rights” Democrats stick together, the New York Post observed, “their votes plus this GOP strength would be ample to insure the amendment’s defeat.”

  Johnson flew to Texas late that Friday, but during his weekend on the ranch, he received another blow: proof that he had underestimated the depth of organized labor’s commitment to civil rights. He had been hoping that labor would be enticed into support of the amendment by the extension of its jury trial guarantee to unions, but on Saturday, July 27, labor began to be heard from, in the form of a letter to Johnson from James B. Carey, president of the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers. The amendment, Carey wrote, in a letter read to Johnson by Reedy over the telephone, “would prevent effective enforcement of the right to vote.”

  “The issue must be faced squarely,” Carey said. “With respect to voting rights we can have either the right to vote or trial by jury for contempt. We cannot have both.” And he said, “Labor will not barter away effective protection of the right of a Negro to register and vote” just to obtain gains for itself. Reedy also told Johnson that when the AFL-CIO issued its statement, it would echo Carey’s. (Reedy’s information was to prove reliable. Assailing the “iron determination of the Southern bloc in the Senate to resist any civil rights legislation,” the labor federation would say that it “cannot and will not permit itself” to support a “crippling amendment” just because it offers “advantages to organized labor.” Hubert Humphrey said he had checked with many union leaders, and had not “found a soul who was buying this stuff.”

  That weekend was filled with the boasts of Johnson’s liberal and Republican opponents. Beaming out of the television screens on CBS’s Sunday Face the Nation show, Humphrey said that the amendment’s supporters “haven’t got the votes.” Announcing that he was going to demand a ballot that very week, Knowland said he had the votes—enough to defeat the amendment and pass the bill intact, not only enough votes but votes to spare. Journalists agreed. “The Republicans have an extraordinary unity” on Part IV, Doris Fleeson wrote. “Not more than five will join the Southern demand for jury trial.” There was also a significant statement that weekend from Richard Russell. Catching him in the Senate Dining Room on Saturday, the AP’s John Chadwick asked him if he would be willing to vote on the amendment during the next week. “I can’t say that I am,” Russell replied. Having come to the same conclusion as Knowland—that the South did not have enough allies to pass the amendment, and would lose the vote—the South was going to “extend debate” so that there would be no vote. The only news Johnson received that weekend was bad news. He had waged a spectacular fight, but he was going to lose. All his work, it seemed, had been for nothing.

  ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY, or at least most of Tuesday, developments on the Senate floor appeared to confirm that appraisal. Monday, when Johnson returned from Texas, was bad, with Carey’s letter being read into the record by Joe Clark, who used the occasion to jeer at Johnson’s attempt to get labor support (“I hope that in due course the Majority Leader … will feel free to reveal to the Senate who are the labor leaders who favor a jury trial amendment”), with Javits holding the floor for hours, further antagonizing southerners by his manner, and with increasingly bitter squabbling between liberals and southerners. Knowland could not contain his gloating. In Robert Mann’s words, “He taunted the southerners to begin their filibuster. ‘Let’s have it now and fight it out,’ he said.”

  Tuesday—for most of the day at least—was worse. The day began for Johnson when, still in bed that morning, he was leafing through the Washington Post and came upon a large advertisement. It was “An Open Letter” to “the Senate of the United States,” but it might have been addressed to him personally, so directly did it attack what he had been doing: “It would be better not to pass any civil rights legislation at all than to pass [this] bill…. We are in a better position to get justice in civil rights cases under existing laws than we would be if you pass the proposed ‘jury trial’ amendment.” The letter was signed by eighty-one southern liberal leaders—including Aubrey Williams, Johnson’s onetime boss at the National Youth Administration and for two decades one of his staunchest supporters. When he reached his office in the Capitol, the day got even worse, for Reedy handed him the AFL-CIO statement, and just as he walked down the stairs and out onto the Senate floor, his attempt to tamp down the outright antagonism between the South and the liberals that would destroy any hopes of compromise appeared to explode.

  The explosion may have occurred partly because that morning two officers of the Tuskegee Civic Association appeared in the Senate Office Building to describe the ongoing voting dispute in Alabama’s Macon County. They did it at a news conference called by “the all-out civil rights forces.” The conference had been designed to attract publicity, and in that aim it failed: co
verage the next day would be scant; the New York Times didn’t carry a word. But while reporters didn’t come to the conference, senators did—eleven of them, including Paul Douglas and ten members of the Douglas Group, Republicans as well as Democrats—and they heard for themselves as the two Alabamans, W. P. Mitchell and Linwood T. Dorsey, told not only about the voucher system and other devices employed to discourage Negro voting, but also about brutal police raids on the offices of organizations that encouraged Negro registration. As the senators listened, the gravity that some of them had assumed for the benefit of the one or two photographers present seemed to deepen into a feeling more genuine, and several picked up the printed text of the two Alabamans’ statements and began reading intently, with expressions of shock on their faces. If these liberal senators had forgotten what they were really fighting for, they were reminded that morning. The news conference ended shortly after the Senate’s noon bell rang, and they walked out on the Senate floor full of indignation, and as they came through the double doors, Richard Brevard Russell was speaking, at his center-aisle desk, as courteous and urbane as ever, and he was denying that Negroes were excluded from voting or jury service in the South, illustrating his point with homey anecdotes (“Mr. President, I well remember the first time I ever went into a federal court as an attorney…. I think it was in the year 1920…. It so happened that I was representing a man by the name of Polk Manders, who had been caught at a still where illicit whiskey was being made…. A great deal of that kind of activity has occurred in my section of the country in times past…. On the panel which tried him were two of our Negro citizens …”)—and their indignation boiled over. As soon as Russell finished, Javits said, “Mr. President, I do not think it is fair to let the record stand as it is…. I know, and every other senator knows, that there are Negroes who serve on juries in the South. We also know that there are Negroes who vote in the South…. I invite the attention of senators to the facts on the merits, Mr. President. One fact is that in case after case after case, including cases in Georgia, the Supreme Court has had to void verdicts of juries in cases involving crimes as serious as murder because there was a systematic exclusion of Negroes from juries.” Then Douglas was recognized. Russell had referred to the recent race riots in Chicago and Detroit, and Douglas admitted that such riots had occurred. “But I can say that in the city of Chicago, Negroes vote,” he went on. “They are not compelled to ride on segregated cars. They are not segregated in the schools. They have access to the parks and other public facilities. In these respects and many others their dignity is not offended. They are treated as human beings.” He pointed a long arm at Russell, sitting among his massed southerners in the center section. “We are not trying to cover up abuses,” Douglas shouted. “We are trying to remedy them; and I only wish my good friends from the South would adopt a similar attitude, instead of trying to sprinkle rose water on what we know to be great abuses.”