by Jon Meacham
“They tell [this] story [about] the difference between Kennedy as president and Johnson as president,” recalled James H. Rowe, Jr., an old FDR hand:
A senator would come to Kennedy and say, “I’d love to go along with you, Mr. President, but it would give me serious trouble back home.” Kennedy would always say, “I understand.” Now Johnson knew damn well the senator was going to tell him that, and he never let the senator get to the point of his troubles back home. He would tell him about the flag, and by God, the story of the country, and he’d get them by the lapels and they were out the door. That’s why he got so much done so fast. Roosevelt would do that, too. He would do it, let’s say, with more charm than Johnson, but they’d get the same results. They’d get what they wanted.
Richard Russell, Jr., of Georgia, a segregationist and a Johnson mentor, appreciated his apprentice’s gifts—so much so that he feared defeat for the Southern way of life at the hands of a Southern president. “I have no doubt that the president intends to throw the full weight of his powerful office and the full force of his personality—both of which are considerable—to secure the passage of this program,” Russell said in January 1964.
From the White House, Johnson wheedled and cajoled, pressing the case again and again (rightly, as it turned out) that history would reward those who voted with him. “I made my position unmistakably clear: We are not prepared to compromise in any way,” Johnson recalled. “ ‘So far as this administration is concerned,’ I told a press conference, ‘its position is firm.’ I wanted absolutely no room for bargaining….I knew that the slightest wavering on my part would give hope to the opposition’s strategy of amending the bill to death.”
The president would not bend. “Dick, you’ve got to get out of my way,” Johnson told Russell. “If you don’t, I’m going to roll over you. I don’t intend to cavil or compromise”—a phrase Johnson had also used on the night of the assassination.
“You may do that,” Russell said. “But it’s going to cost you the South, and cost you the [1964 presidential] election.”
“If that’s the price I have to pay,” Johnson said, “I’ll pay it gladly.”
Which was not strictly true—Johnson never found anything gladdening about political defeat. But it says much about his commitment to doing the right thing that he was willing even to entertain the possibility of sacrificing the presidency itself for the cause of a single bill.
He tasked Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota with a great deal of management of the legislation. The Republican minority leader, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, was a key player. “Now you know that this bill can’t pass unless you get Ev Dirksen,” Johnson told Humphrey. “You and I are going to get him. You make up your mind now that you’ve got to spend time with Ev Dirksen. You’ve got to let him have a piece of the action. He’s got to look good all the time.” The president was emphatic: “You get in there to see Dirksen! You drink with Dirksen! You talk to Dirksen! You listen to Dirksen!”
Johnson and his allies never gave up. “We were well organized, very well organized,” Humphrey recalled. “We issued a daily newsletter, I think for the first time in history, that reported what had happened the day before and gave our supporters answers to the arguments of the opposition. But the main thing was that we had complete liaison at all times with the White House, with the president himself, and he answered every question and so far as I can remember did everything we asked—and usually a lot more, too.”
The president did not believe such a large legislative and cultural undertaking could be done on a partisan line vote. “Unless we have the Republicans joining us and helping us,” Johnson told Humphrey, “we’ll have a mutiny in this goddamn country, so we’ve got to make this an American bill and not just a Democratic bill.” He used similar language in talking to Dirksen. “We don’t want this to be a Democratic bill,” Johnson told the Republican from Illinois. “We want it to be an American bill. It is going to be worthy of the ‘Land of Lincoln,’ and the man from Illinois is going to pass the bill, and I’m going to see that he gets proper credit.”
Finally, in the early summer of 1964, Johnson won the cloture vote to shut down the segregationist filibuster of the civil rights bill in the Senate. “It’s just a miracle,” Robert Kennedy remarked to Johnson, but it wasn’t, really—it was the result of incredibly intense work by the president to force the triumph of hope and history over political calculation and fear. “There was a glorious feeling about it, there really was,” recalled Ramsey Clark, a Kennedy-Johnson Justice Department official. “It just seemed like there was immense generosity in the American people, and goodwill, and they were going to do something about this great wrong.” One Southern member of the House, Congressman Charles Weltner, a Democrat from Atlanta, changed his initial nay to a yea on the final bill. “I would urge that we at home now move on to the unfinished task of building a new South,” Weltner said. “We must not forever be bound to another lost cause.” President Johnson could not have put it better.
He signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the East Room on Thursday, July 2. Two days later, on the Fourth, Robert Kennedy called Johnson at the president’s ranch. “Well, listen, we had a good day!” Kennedy said.
“Good,” Johnson said.
“I think that the most significant thing is that the Chamber of Commerce in Jackson, Mississippi, voted last night to abide by the law,” Kennedy said. “And the vote was sixteen to one.”
“Good,” said Johnson. “That’s wonderful!”
“Yeah, and then…Savannah, Atlanta, and all these cities went along. Birmingham, Montgomery, and a lot of the cities went along very, very well.”
Johnson was pleased, but he knew, too, that it was a battle, not the war. “I want you to write me the goddamndest, toughest voting rights act that you can devise,” Johnson told Nicholas Katzenbach of the Justice Department. He made the same point to Hubert Humphrey, who would soon become Johnson’s vice president. “He used to tell me, ‘Yes, yes, Hubert, I want all those other things—buses, restaurants, all of that—but the right to vote with no ifs, ands, or buts, that’s the key,” Humphrey recalled of Johnson. “ ‘When the Negroes get that, they’ll have every politician, north and south, east and west, kissing their ass, begging for their support.’ ”
On the 1964 bill, Johnson had risen to the occasion created by the voices of protest—had, in fact, surpassed the occasion. And he knew that he and his party would pay a political price. “It is an important gain,” Johnson told Bill Moyers after signing the 1964 law, “but I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”
In the hour of victory—he had done something of a scale no president since Lincoln had seriously attempted to do—Johnson suffered a fairly common fate: gloom amid the grandeur of achievement. (“Nothing except a battle lost,” Wellington once remarked, “can be half so melancholy as a battle won.”) He mused for a time about bowing out of the 1964 presidential campaign and retiring to Texas. “You are as brave a man as Harry Truman—or FDR—or Lincoln,” Mrs. Johnson, addressing her husband as “Beloved,” wrote him in this period. “You have been strong, patient, determined beyond any words of mine to express. I honor you for it. So does most of the country. To step out now would be wrong for your country, and I can see nothing but a lonely wasteland for your future.”
Johnson remained in the fight. The presidency seemed to be everything (or close to it) to him, and he believed it could be everything (or close to it) for the nation as well. In the first week of June 1963, in a recorded telephone call with Kennedy counsel and speechwriter Theodore C. Sorensen, Johnson, then the vice president, had pressed Sorensen on the need for President Kennedy to make an explicit statement of support for civil rights—ideally in the South. Kennedy, Johnson told Sorensen, should say something like this:
We’re all Americans. We got a Golden Rule,
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Now I’m leader of this country. When I order men into battle I order the men without regard to color. They carry our flag into foxholes. The Negro can do that, the Mexican can do it, others can do it. We’ve got to do the same thing when we drive down the highway at places they eat. I’m going to have to ask you all to do this thing. I’m going to have to ask the Congress to say that we’ll all be treated without regard to our race.
Johnson said that he was certain such candor would be worth it. “I believe that he’d run some of the demagogues right in the hole,” Johnson said of Kennedy. The key thing, LBJ believed, was to make the moral case for racial justice so self-evident that the country could not help but agree. “Then a man is put in the position almost where he’s a bigot to be against the president,” Johnson told Sorensen. “This aura, this thing, this halo around the President, everybody wants to believe in the President and the Commander in Chief….The good people, the church people, I think have to come around to him, not the majority of them maybe, but a good many of them over the country….I’m telling you they’d be out there by the hundreds of thousands.”
Major civil rights progress was possible, Johnson said, and only the president could successfully press the message. “I think the presidency can get it for him,” LBJ said, still referring to Kennedy. “I have spoken from Milwaukee to Chicago to New York to Los Angeles to Illinois last night, and Gettysburg and Dallas, and Johnson City, Texas, and I think that I know one thing, that the Negroes are tired of this patient stuff and tired of this piecemeal stuff and what they want more than anything else is not an executive order or legislation, they want a moral commitment that he’s behind them.”
Proud of his own remarks at Gettysburg, where he had spoken out in favor of civil rights the week before, on Memorial Day, the vice president recalled other encouraging moments on the road. “I’ve been in North Carolina this year….I’ve been into Florida,” Johnson said. “Neither place would they allow Negroes to come. I said, ‘I’m going to come and I’m going to talk about their constitutional rights and I want them on the platform with me, and if you don’t let them I’m not coming, period.’ By God, they put them on both places, right on the platform and…eating with us.”
Johnson was thinking about the uses of TR’s “bully pulpit,” returning to his argument for presidential leadership:
The President is the cannon. You let him be on all the TV networks just speaking from his conscience, not at a rally in Harlem, but at a place in Mississippi, or Texas or Louisiana and just have the honor guard there with a few Negroes in it. Then let him reach over and point and say, “I have to order these boys into battle, in the foxholes carrying that flag. I don’t ask them what their name is, whether it’s Gomez or Smith, or what color they got, what religion. If I can order them into battle I’ve got to make it possible for them to eat and sleep in this country.” Then…everybody…goes home and asks his wife, “What’s wrong with this?” and they go to searching their conscience. Every preacher starts preaching about it. We ought to recognize that and [keep] them busy.
In the 1964 general election campaign against Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, the conservative senator from Arizona, LBJ got the chance to act on the advice he had given Sorensen. In October, the president was due in New Orleans. His aide Bill Moyers passed along some advice by wire: “Several people in New Orleans, including our advance men, feel the President should not refer to ‘civil rights.’ ” The preferred term, Johnson was told, was “constitutional rights.”
The president had other ideas. At an evening banquet at the Jung Hotel in New Orleans, Johnson said, “If we are to heal our history and make this Nation whole, prosperity must know no Mason-Dixon line and opportunity must know no color line.” He called for unity against the forces of fear. “Now, the people that would use us and destroy us first divide us….If they divide us, they can make some hay. And all these years they have kept their foot on our necks by appealing to our animosities, and dividing us.”
Now was the time, the president said, to rise above racism. “Whatever your views are, we have a Constitution and we have a Bill of Rights, and we have the law of the land, and two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate voted for [the Civil Rights Bill of 1964] and three-fourths of the Republicans,” Johnson said. “I signed it, and I am going to enforce it, and I am going to observe it, and I think any man that is worthy of the high office of President is going to do the same thing….I am not going to let them build up the hate and try to buy my people by appealing to their prejudice.”
In his memoirs, Johnson recalled that the “applause was less than overwhelming. But I was in it, and I had to continue. I wanted the whole nation to know how profoundly animosity and hatred waste the common effort and dissipate the common energy.” He could, he recalled, “only say what I deeply believed. I spoke off the cuff and from the heart.”
An old Democratic senator from the South, Johnson told the New Orleans audience, had been chatting one evening with Sam Rayburn, then a young congressman from Texas. (Though Johnson did not name him in the speech, he was referring to Senator Joe Bailey, Sr., who was raised in Mississippi and represented Texas in the House and in the Senate.) “He was talking about how we had been at the mercy of certain economic interests, and how they had exploited us,” Johnson recalled. And he said, “Sammy,…I would like to go back down there and make them one more Democratic speech. I just feel like I have one in me. The poor old State, they haven’t heard a Democratic speech in 30 years. All they ever hear at election time is Nigra, Nigra, Nigra!”
The crowd was shocked—and then rose to give the president a prolonged ovation. “Many of his most acerbic critics have affirmed that this was Johnson’s finest hour,” the historian William E. Leuchtenburg wrote. “There was no way a northerner could have delivered that speech and had it carry the same meaning.” Johnson had done what he had come to do. Determined to preach the gospel of inclusion in the segregated South, he had done so, he recalled, “not in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, but in New Orleans—near home, in my own backyard.”
In November LBJ won a full presidential term in his own right with 61.1 percent of the popular vote in a forty-four-state landslide; Goldwater took just six states. (Though, with the exception of Arizona, Goldwater’s victories all came in the old Confederacy and included Louisiana, where Johnson had made his impassioned plea for civil rights.)
No matter the margin, Johnson could not remain still. “I’ve just been elected and right now we’ll have a honeymoon with Congress,” the president told his staff. “But after I make my recommendations, I’m going to start to lose the power and authority I have….Every day that I’m in office and every day I push my program, I’ll be losing part of my ability to be influential, because that’s in the nature of what the President does. He uses up capital. Something is going to come up…something like the Vietnam War or something else where I will begin to lose all that I have now. So I want you guys to get off your asses and do everything possible to get everything in my program passed as soon as possible, before the aura and the halo that surround me disappear.”
Just as he had wooed Dirksen the previous year, Johnson reached out to Congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan, the new House Republican leader. “I don’t want to start out fighting with you, because I’m not running for re-election [a debatable proposition in 1965],” Johnson told Ford. “I’m just trying to make a good president and I want you to help me. I thought you could support me when you thought it was right and be proud of it.”
* * *
—
King marked his thirty-sixth birthday on Friday, January 15, 1965, and the president of the United States called to wish him the best. Voting rights, which were routinely denied to blacks in the South, were top of mind for Johnson. “There is not going to be anything, Doctor, as effective as all [black citizens] voting,” Johnson told King.
“That will give you a message that all the eloquence in the world won’t bring,” for votes meant the powerful—and a candidate aspiring to power—“will be coming to you then, instead of you calling him.”
King and his colleagues in the movement understood, and they had launched a voting-rights drive in Alabama in the first days of 1965. The flashpoint: Selma, Alabama, the seat of Dallas County. On Sunday, March 7, 1965, a voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery had barely begun when Alabama state troopers charged a line of nonviolent demonstrators. Trapped between asphalt and his uniformed attackers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, inhaling tear gas and reeling from two billy-club blows to his head, John Lewis, then twenty-five-years old, felt everything dimming. He could hear screams and racial slurs and the clop-clop-clop of the troopers’ horses. His skull fractured, his vision blurred, Lewis believed the end had come. “People are going to die here,” he said to himself. “I’m going to die here.” Yet for Lewis there was, strangely, no sense of panic, no gasping, no thrashing, no fear. He was at peace.
The world around him on that day, though, was at war, and the television cameras were whirring. Images of the Alabama troopers’ attack on Lewis and his fellow marchers ran that evening; ABC broke into the network broadcast premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg to show the footage. What had begun as an ordinary day in a small Southern city was soon to be known as Bloody Sunday, and the scene at the bridge became that rarest of things: a crossroads in the long story of civilization.
Lewis’s was a vision of nonviolent social change that has more in common with the martyrs of old than with the politics of a given hour. “At the moment when I was hit on the bridge and began to fall,” Lewis recalled, “I really thought it was my last protest, my last march. I thought I saw death, and I thought, ‘It’s okay, it’s all right—I am doing what I am supposed to do.’ ” Which was to dramatize the injustice of segregation and to call white America to redemption—not through violence but through witness.