Voting in the South: Price, Negro Voter in the South; Mendelson, Discrimination; Southern Regional Council, The Negro and the Ballot in the South; Fairclough, Race and Democracy; Lawson, Black Ballots. Klan on the rise: Martin, p. 157. “Legislative hoppers”: Stan Opotowsky, “Dixie Dynamite: The Inside Story of the White Citizens Councils,” NYP, Jan. 7–18. Porgy, Red Cross: Opotowsky, NYP, Jan. 7.
“A flag”: Martin, p. 41. “Are subjected”: Optowsky, “Dixie Dynamite,” NYP, Jan. 7. “Consistent and insistent”: Abram, quoted in NYT, Dec. 1, 1956. “Solid once more”: Martin, p. 41. “An upsurge”: NYT, Dec. 2–27, 1956. Klan: Martin, pp. 157–59; Optowsky, “Dixie Dynamite,” NYP, Jan. 7, 1956. Camden incident: NYT, Dec. 29, 1956. Violence rising; Brownell’s attitude: Branch, pp. 197–203. “Resistance”: Martin, p. 169. “Most southerners agree,” he concluded. “One, a liberal editor, said regretfully, ‘It’s gone now. The segregationists moved too fast.’ Never? Never is a long time. But for so long that I can’t see when.” Talmadge interview: Martin, pp. 176–81. “The supplanting”: Watson, p. 382.
Philip Graham memo: Undated, but attached to note, “This memo is very rough …,” Graham to Johnson, Dec. 20, 1956, Box 101, LBJA SF. Johnson’s reply, on Dec. 22, is pro forma: “I have read and reread your memorandum a number of times and I am greatly impressed…. I don’t know that I agree with every part of it, but it has a direction and an impact with which I am greatly intrigued and I am going to ponder it thoroughly.” Johnson to Graham, Dec. 22, 1956, Box 101, LBJA SF. Arguing; “perhaps”: Graham, Personal History, p. 238.
“Pope or God”: Reedy OH IX, p. 71. Rowe memos; temporizing: Rowe to Johnson, Dec. 13, 21, 1956; Johnson to Rowe, Dec. 17, 1956, Box 32, LBJA SN. At the bottom of the typed letter, Johnson wrote in hand what he considered an important question about Carroll: “How does he feel about Johnson?” “If he didn’t”: Corcoran interview. “Already knew”: Rowe interview. “The issue”; “as a man”; “One thing”: “I knew”: Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson, pp. 147–48.
Almost impossibly: Description of Johnson’s thinking relies on Reedy memos and on interviews and OHs with Clark, Connally, Corcoran, Jenkins, Reedy, Rowe. “Some conservative”: Reedy OH. “Unlimited”: Reedy to Gillette, June 2, 1982, p. 5, attached to Reedy OH XI. Some liberals: For example, Stokes, WS, June 20, Box 2045, JSP. Among more realistic: Including Corcoran, Harlow, Rowe interviews; W P, June 22. “You got up”: Harlow interview. “They unquestionably”: Reedy to Gillette, June 2, 1982, p. 4, attached to Reedy OH I. Five since: The House passed bills to outlaw the poll tax in 1945, 1947, and 1949; a bill to make the FEPC permanent and expand its powers in 1950, and, of course, the Brownell civil rights bill in 1956 (SHO). “They couldn’t send”: Talmadge, quoted in Martin, p. 180. “I will never”: Thurmond, quoted in Cohodas, Strom Thurmond, p. 90.
“Out of nowhere”: Reedy interview. Reedy remembered Russell’s words slightly differently on other occasions. In an oral history interview for the Lyndon Johnson Library, he said that in Paris Russell had said, “George, maybe we can get this man elected President yet” (Reedy OH V, p. 12). He told John Goldsmith that Russell had said, “George, we’ll make this man President yet!” (Colleagues, p. 52). In a letter, Reedy wrote that “During one memorable (to me) evening … in Paris, he confided to me that ‘we can never make him President unless the Senate first disposes of civil rights.’” In this letter Reedy added that “Russell never went so far as to say to me that if he had to choose between accepting a civil rights bill or leaving the gap unbridged that he would accept the bill. But I had the clear impression that such a thought was somewhere in his mind” (Reedy to Gillette, June 2, 1982, p. 6, attached to Reedy OH XI). “When they”: Oltorf interview.
Russell’s reaction, Johnson’s acquiescence: Solberg, p. 178. “You broke”: Pearson, W P, Jan. 13; Solberg, p. 178. “Now, Lyndon”: Eisele, p. 104. “Senator Humphrey”: AP 11, 12, 15—“Humphrey,” undated. “In a few”: Solberg, p. 178. “A flat ‘No’”: W P, Nov. 27, 1956. Smathers scene: Smathers OH.
Liberal meeting: Shannon, NYP, Jan. 2; NYT, Jan. 3. Nixon’s decision: Childs, SLP-D, Aug. 1. Nixon’s maneuver: Anderson with Viorst, Outsider in the Senate, pp. 144–45; NYT, NYHT, WP, WS, Jan. 5. “MEMORANDUM: It has been suggested,” attached to Rauh to Wilkins and Aronson, Jan. 7, Box 44, Rauh Papers, LC; Rauh, Rogers, Schnibbe interviews. And see Mann, p. 183.
“A classic performance”; “calm”: Shannon, NYP, Jan. 3. “Vice Presidents”: NYHT, Jan. 5. “We would then”: NYT, Jan. 3. “Senator Russell suggested”: Howard Shuman, “Senate Rules and the Civil Rights Bill: A Case Study,” APSR, Dec. 1957, p. 958; NYT, Jan. 3. Johnson demanding recognition; Nixon’s opinion: CR, 85/1, pp. 9–11, 178–79; Howard Shuman, “Lyndon B. Johnson: The Senate’s Powerful Persuader,” in Baker and Davidson, eds., First Among Equals, p. 225; Krock, NYT, Jan. 4; NYT, NYHT, WP, Jan. 5; Howard Shuman, “Senate Rules,” APSR, Dec. 1957, p. 960; Watson, p. 359; Rauh, Zweben interviews. “Their vice president”; “our big chance”: Shuman interview. “Fait accompli”: Fleeson, NYP, Dec. 6, 1956. And see Robertson to Johnson, Dec. 1, 7, 1956, Box 53, LBJA SN. “Disappointed”: Amarillo News, Jan. 9. “He resented”: Schnibbe interview. “I encountered”: Church, quoted in Miller, pp. 209–10.
Church wanted to follow Borah: Ashby and Gramer, Fighting the Odds, pp. 11–12; Carver interview. “He arrived”; “was aiming”; Johnson had: Ward Hower interview. “The Leader’s”: Carver interview. Vote on Johnson’s motion: NYT, Jan. 5.
“Once again”: NYP, Jan. 6. Rovere: In The New Yorker, Jan. 26.
Persuading the southerners: This description of Johnson’s conversations with the southern senators is based on the author’s interviews with BeLieu, Cresswell, Dent, Easley, Fulbright, Goldsmith, Guard, Harlow, Reedy, Steele, Talmadge, Van der Linden, Yarborough, and Zweben; on the oral history interviews of, among many others, Ellender, Ervin, Harlow, Hill, Rowe, Siegel, Smathers, Sparkman, Stennis, Talmadge, and Thurmond. With Reedy, Steele, and Yarborough, in particular, the author had them try to re-create, at length, the arguments they heard Johnson using to the southerners. William Jordan’s perceptive analysis of the southerners’ thinking was also helpful. “Hang out”; “would erode”: Dent interview. “Don’t filibuster!”: Reedy interview. Doris Kearns Goodwin (Lyndon Johnson, p. 148) deals with this point this way: Johnson, she says, influenced “the action of others by persuading them to share in his apprehension of dangerous possibilities. Johnson determined that his first task must be to persuade the ‘reasonable’ southerners to abandon their support for a filibuster, by demonstrating that even if it was successful the only result would be a Pyrrhic victory for the South. Northern passions were rising …and would no longer accept defeat by filibuster; instead the attack would focus on the filibuster rule itself.” Siegel told Miller (Lyndon, p. 209): “His approach to the southern senators was, ‘Well, if you don’t allow progress on this issue, you’re going to lose everything. There’s going to be cloture; and your opportunity to delay or to slow down and to bring some kind of order or change will be gone.’ They recognized this was a possibility, and it had an effect.”
Validity difficult: Reedy, in his books, Lyndon B. Johnson: A Memoir and The U.S. Senate, in his oral histories and in his interviews with the author, sometimes seems to feel that a filibuster could be beaten, and, at other times, that it couldn’t. On p. 144 of LBJ, for example, he writes: “There was sufficient Southern strength in the Senate to kill this measure by filibuster. Legislative victory for civil rights was possible only if they were persuaded that the cost of successful obstruction would be too high.” In his OH III, p. 15, he says, “I don’t think a filibuster could have been broken because the southerners all by themselves couldn’t sustain one, but they would have enough allies in the western states to have kept it going indefinitely.” On June 2, 1982, he wrote an eleven-page letter to Michael L. Gillette, then Chief of Acquisitions and Oral History Programs at the LBJ Library, to clarify his views. In it (
p. 4) he states that the senators “from the former Confederate states … unquestionably had the power to defeat—through any fillibuster—any or all Civil Rights proposals and there was no prospect whatsoever of shutting off their fillibuster through a cloture move.” And Reedy was also to write (in Lyndon B. Johnson, p. 84) that “His capacity to exaggerate liberal strength in talking to conservatives and conservative strength in talking to liberals was little short of outrageous.”
No need to filibuster: Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson, p. 149. “We’re up against”: Dent interview. “Felt”: Zagoria interview. “Down deep”: Zweben interview.
“In private conversations”; “some leeway”; “he deliberately”: Reedy OH V, pp. 10, 11. And during one interview with the author, Reedy said, “He now [by 1957] had the southerners under sufficient control that they understood that he had to do something on civil rights if he was ever going to become President. And if they had gone this far, they might as well go the rest of the way.” In his oral history interviews with the Johnson Library, Reedy said, “I know that he was deliberately using the fact that he might be President as one of the ways of buying elbow room from the southern Democrats. That I know. Because I wrote too many memos that he used and too many speeches and everything else based on that assumption” (OH V, p. 13—italics in original). “He used this feeling; he played on it; this was a deliberate tactic of his,” Reedy said.
“He was running”; “he made them think”: Yarborough interview. “Johnson would be”: Talmadge, quoted in AC, Feb. 20, 1959. “Strom really”: Barr interview. “I think”: Thurmond OH.
“Johnson felt”: McPherson, A Political Education, p. 153. “Johnson argued”: Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson, p. 148. “We’re talking”: Dent interview. “Johnson deplored”: Mooney, LBJ, pp. 49, 50. “You have”: East-land to Johnson, Aug. 11, 1956, Box 43, LBJA CF. Actively: “Sen. Eastland …yesterday put Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson at the top of his list for the Democratic presidential nomination”: WS, July 10, 1959. Supported for presidency: Wilkinson, p. 250. Stennis: Face the Nation, transcript, Jan. 6, 1959. Robertson: Robertson to Johnson, Aug. 29, 1958, Box 53, LBJA CF.
“At first”: Talmadge interview. In his memoir, Talmadge: A Political Legacy, A Politician’s Life, Talmadge wrote (pp. 192, 193) that when Johnson became President, “It came as quite a surprise to me that he would become a crusader for civil rights.” Although Johnson “shifted his loyalties from the Southern bloc to the national party” after he became Majority Leader, “still, Lyndon seemed more of a follower than a leader on this issue…. We thought that in his heart Lyndon was still one of us” (italics added).
“LBJ’s whole gambit”: Dent interview. “I think”; “these guys”: Goldsmith interview. “Have been debated”: Goldsmith, Colleagues, p. 65. “We’ll do”: Byrd, quoted in McConaughy to Williamson, July 31, SP. Anderson telling: Evans and Novak, p. 24. REPORT BEING: NYP, Jan. 12. “The Senate’s”: NYHT, Jan. 12. Even stranger: Newsweek, Jan. 21; Douglass Cater, “How the Senate Passed,” The Reporter, Sept. 5; “Washington,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1957. “Floor debate”: Newsweek, Jan. 21.
“This story”: Russell’s handwritten note on White’s article in NYT, March 25, “Winder Materials 10, Civil Rights,” RBRL. “Dream bill”: Rauh, in interview conducted by Katharine Graham, p. 26. Most hurtful: Rauh interview with author; McCulloch interview. “In the course”: Miller, Lyndon, p. 208. “Frustration”: Reedy, LBJ, p. 111.
“Was hailed”: NYT, Jan. 5. “We got”: Shuman OH. “In 1953”: Shuman interview. “We made”: Douglas, quoted in NYT, Jan. 6. “Raised”: Time, Jan. 21. “Generation-old”; “As they”: Newsweek, Jan. 21, Jan. 14. “There should”: Time, Jan. 21.
“Civil Rights”: LLM, Box 2, Jan. 8, DDEL. “No trouble”: Minnich, LMS, Box 4 (handwritten notes), Jan. 8, DDEL. “No question”; “Unequivocably”: CR, Jan. 9, p. 312; Congressional Quarterly, Jan. 11, p. 61; Watson, p. 361. Couldn’t stop it: Congressional Quarterly, March 1.
Hennings and Judiciary: Javits with Steinberg, Javits, pp. 324–26; Howard E. Shuman, “Senate Rules and the Civil Rights Bill: A Case Study,” APSR, Dec. 1957, pp. 955–75, particularly pp. 961–65; CR, 85/1, pp. 6191–94; Mitchell to Wilkins, Jan. 22; Jackson, M. D., “Telephoned messages from Clarence Mitchell—Apr. 29,” NAACP III A73 (Civil Rights Legislation), NAACPP, LC; McCulloch, Reedy, Shuman interviews; WP, Jan. 23. “Have hearings”: Knowland, in Minnich, LMS, Box 4 (handwritten notes), Jan. 8, DDEL. Eastland now: NYT, WP, Jan. 23; WS, Jan. 22, 24. “Very”: W P, Jan. 31. “The soft-spoken”: Wicker, W-SJ, March 15. “I will not”: WS, Jan. 13.
Length of sessions: Joint Committee on Printing, Congressional Directory, 106th Cong., S. Pub. 106–21, Washington, GPO, pp. 530–31. “If you wait”: Reedy OH VII, p. 16. “They’d come back”: Johnson, in Beschloss, Taking Charge, p. 85.
Senate would not: Johnson, quoted in NYT, May 1. “Therefore”: Reedy OH VII, pp. 15, 16. Administration’s list: NYT, NYHT, July 14. “I am waiting”: “Why can’t?”: Morse, Chavez, quoted in Time, March 11. “The 85th”: NYHT, Feb. 14.
Tone changing: Minutes, “Supplementary Notes,” and Minnich’s handwritten notes of Legislative Leadership Meetings, Jan. 23, 29, Feb. 5, March 5, 12, 26, April 2, Bi-Partisan Legislative Meeting, Feb. 20, “Pre-Press Conference Notes,” March 7, Box 5, DDEL. And see W P, Feb. 15, NYT, WP, Feb. 19, NYT, Feb. 22, 27, 28.
Eastland’s generosity: Best is Wicker, W-SJ, April 2, April 16; Pearson in WP, April 28. “Sen. Knowland again”: Minnich, LMS, Box 4, April 9, DDEL. “It is always”: NYT, April 11. See also NYT, April 23. “In serious”: WP, April 28. “Quite right”: Drummond, in NYHT, April 29. “There is need”: WP, May 5. “Everything”: Cotton in WP, April 28.
Johnson losing hope: Corcoran, Reedy, Rowe interviews. “There was”: Reedy OH, interview.
“It is expected”: “Legislative Leadership Meetings,” May 1, 14, 21. Hennings raised: WP, May 5; Wicker, W-SJ, May 14. Eisenhower’s leadership: NYT, May 23. “Senate leaders”: WP, May 22. “Still in control”: Wiley in NYHT, May 14. May 13th exchange: CR, 85/1, pp. 6782–84; NYT, May 14. “Far from”: Williams, “The Legend of Lyndon Johnson,” The Progressive, April. Arvey interview: For example, in FWS-T, May 26. “Impossibility”: Reedy interview. “More remote”: Reedy, LBJ, p. 109.
“A change”: Bolling interview. “Something changed”: Siegel interview.
37. The “Working Up”
Lyndon Johnson’s need to believe in arguments he was making was explained to the author by, among many others, George R. Brown, Edward A. Clark, John Connally, Thomas G. Corcoran, Ava Johnson Cox, Sam Houston Johnson, Joe Kilgore, Frank C. (Posh) Oltorf, and James H. Rowe Jr.
“He was”: SHJ. “What convinces”: Johnson interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin, quoted in Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson, p. 124. “Would quickly”: Talking about Johnson’s “credibility problem” as President, Joseph Califano writes that it “was exacerbated because LBJ became the most gullible victim of his own revisionist claims.” Citing an example of Johnson’s coming “to believe” a certain story even though “what he was saying …was clearly not true,” Califano writes that he “had witnessed the authentic increase in the President’s conviction each time he recited it” (Triumph, pp. 174–75, and see pp. 99–100). “I believe”: Reedy, LBJ, pp. 2, 3. “He was an emotional man”: Clark interview.
“‘The problem’”: Kilgore interview. “I remember”: Bethine Church interview.
A new story: There are many versions of Johnson telling it. This one is the version Johnson himself gave in his memoir, Vantage Point, pp. 154–55, 160. Eugene Williams, in his oral history interview, recalls Johnson demanding, “Gene, I want an answer.” Probably about 1951: In his OH, p. 7, Williams says, “Then in ’51, I would make the drive twice a year…. At this time, he asked me to take Beagle with us.” But, Williams makes clear, although he explained to Johnson why he was reluctant to do so, and was excused from taking the dog, they still had to make the drive twice
a year: “From here to [Texas] and back twice a year…. I would go from here [Washington] to the ranch and from the ranch back here…. I remember one night …I won’t forget. I believe Zephyr was with us. We got into Knoxville, Tennessee, I guess, around ten o’clock. I guess it was one o’clock that night before we could find a place to sleep. You know, things like that. So that’s most of the experience I had, from here to Texas and back on those kind of deals.” Saying that Johnson’s three black employees began making the drive to Texas “about 1950 or ’51, I guess,” Jenkins said that after they expressed reluctance to take Beagle, they no longer had to do so, but that they continued to drive the Johnsons’ car back and forth each year. Asked how long they did so, he said he couldn’t recall exactly but that they did so “all through the Senate period, so far as I can recall. And thereafter.” “I just wouldn’t go”: Wright OH, p. 7. She says, “I wouldn’t go to Texas for ten years; I just wouldn’t go.” It is impossible to date her refusal exactly, but Jenkins says it came “quite early on, as I remember.” McPherson’s description: McPherson OH. “Made him angry”: Califano, p. 53.
A civil rights: Coffin, “How Lyndon Johnson Engineered Compromise on Civil Rights Bills,” The New Leader, Aug. 5, 1957. “Tirelessly”: Mooney, LBJ, p. 99. “Quietly”: Mooney, The Politicians, pp. 268–69.
“Areas”; “They were”: Reedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, pp. 112–14;Reedy interviews. “A basic”: Byrd, quoted in Miller, Lyndon, p. 434. Lyndon Johnson realized: This description of Johnson’s feelings is from interviews with Connally, Corcoran, Reedy, Rowe, and from Cater, “How the Senate,” The Reporter, Sept. 5, 1957.
“Just give”: Johnson, quoted in Reston, Deadline, p. 307. “Kissing their ass”: Johnson, quoted in Humphrey OH. “You felt this”: Rowe interview. “Break the virginity”: Rauh interview.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 184