An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

by Todd S. Purdum

  As the endless day at last wound down, Johnson summoned his aides Cliff Carter, Bill Moyers, and Horace Busby—together with a Houston advertising man named Jack Valenti, whom he had dragooned into service that afternoon in Dallas without so much as a suitcase of clothes—to the Elms, his sprawling French-style house in the Spring Valley section of Washington. After greeting several dozen close friends and colleagues who had been waiting for him, the president ordered a glass of orange juice and, finally, as midnight neared, gathered the aides in his bedroom for a restless monologue. He vowed to pass not only the stalled civil rights bill, but also the still barely dreamed-of social welfare measures—health insurance, aid to education—that would soon be known as the “Great Society.” None of the aides felt compelled to offer much in the way of commentary. “If LBJ had said he was going to ride Pegasus to the nearest star, I would have bet on it,” Valenti would recall.

  Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, recorded a simpler, clearer-eyed sentiment in her diary entry for that night. Lyndon had always been, she recalled, “a good man in a tight spot.”

  * * *

  WHEN HE FINALLY LET them go to their own bedrooms sometime between 3:30 and 4:00 a.m. on the morning of Saturday, November 23, Johnson had told his aides, “Get a lot of sleep fast. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.” True to his word, the new president was back in the White House before nine the next morning. Like the grieving Kennedy team, who had to observe all the solemn rituals of national mourning, Johnson would be occupied with ceremonial duties. Unlike them, he also had to run the country—and he set about doing so with his trademark energy, zest, and zeal.

  The night before, Johnson had reached out to the three living former presidents—Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower—and now Eisenhower was in the White House complex, down from his farm at Gettysburg. In Johnson’s outer office, the old general picked up a yellow pad and began making notes of advice to the new president, suggesting that he address a joint session of Congress in a speech of “not over ten or twelve minutes,” making the point that “it will be your purpose to implement effectively the noble objectives so often and so eloquently stated by your great predecessor.” Johnson was grateful enough for the gesture that he would reproduce Ike’s memo verbatim in his memoirs. But on this sad Saturday he had already thought of just such moves. In early afternoon, he telephoned Ev Dirksen to ask his opinion of a joint session address. “I believe it’d be reassuring to the country,” the senator from Illinois replied.

  In this moment, Johnson faced innumerable challenges: reassuring allies around the world of the steadiness of Washington’s course; undertaking a detailed investigation of an assassination that still remained a mystery; persuading the grieving Kennedy aides that he—and their country—needed all the help they could give him; consolidating his support with old allies; and reaching out to skeptical would-be adversaries. But perhaps no challenge loomed larger or more immediately in his mind than moving Kennedy’s stymied legislative agenda in Congress. So just after 2:00 p.m., he called Senator George Smathers of Florida, who had not only been Kennedy’s closest friend in the Senate but was also a longtime ally of Johnson and a skilled vote counter. Smathers was a member of the powerful Finance Committee, and Johnson wanted his take on the status of Kennedy’s tax cut bill, which had been subject to weeks of desultory hearings by the committee’s fiscally conservative chairman, Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, who opposed the measure as too costly.

  Smathers informed Johnson that he had cut a deal with Byrd, who had agreed at last to move the hearings along in exchange for a pledge that the handful of Democratic liberals on the committee would oppose any effort to take the bill out of his hands and send it directly to the Senate floor. Still, Smathers warned, “I’d hate to see you make [the tax bill] a big issue because I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to do it.” This was bad news indeed, because if the tax bill were still pending once the infinitely more controversial civil rights bill wound up in the Senate, the southern caucus would hold it and everything else hostage to civil rights. Johnson had worried about just this outcome when Kennedy had first talked of proposing the bill in June.

  Then Smathers, a political moderate and a shrewd judge of people, reported on a conversation he had had with Hubert Humphrey after the congressional leadership’s meeting with Johnson the night before, a “most interesting visit,” he called it. Smathers said he had told Humphrey, a fierce advocate of civil rights and a darling of the Senate’s liberal caucus, that he would be a logical vice presidential candidate for 1964, but only if he could “keep these damn liberals in line, and keep things going,” in the Senate. Humphrey, Smathers continued, “was not at all averse to that idea,” and agreed that the Democrats should work together to keep the new president from looking like “an old Texas oilman” who would not be committed to the Kennedy agenda.

  Over the next three days, as he joined Jacqueline Kennedy and a raft of foreign leaders in the carefully choreographed pomp of public mourning, Lyndon Johnson would spare no effort to reassure anyone and everyone that his first priority was the passage of his fallen predecessor’s program, especially the civil rights bill. “I knew that if I didn’t get out in front on this issue,” the liberals “would get me,” he would recall. “They’d throw up my background against me, they’d use it to prove that I was incapable of bringing unity to the land I loved so much … I couldn’t let that happen. I had to produce a civil rights bill that was even stronger than the one they’d have gotten if Kennedy had lived. Without this, I’d be dead before I could even begin.”

  So on Monday evening, November 25, after Kennedy’s state funeral and meetings with such visiting dignitaries as Charles de Gaulle, Johnson addressed a gathering of some thirty-five of the nation’s governors—all that the White House had been able to catch before they headed home—in Room 274 of the Old Executive Office Building. In a riveting talk, Johnson described the horror of the scene in Dallas. “Here is our president shot in the head and his wife holds his skull in her lap.” He went on, “We have to do something to stop that hate, and the way we have to do it is to meet the problem of injustice that exists in this land, meet the problem of inequality that exists in this land, meet the problem of poverty that exists in this land, and the unemployment that exists in this land.”

  And the best way to do that, Johnson said, was to pass the tax bill and the civil rights bill, “so that we can say to the Mexican in California or the Negro in Mississippi or the Oriental on the West Coast or the Johnsons in Johnson City that we are going to treat you all equally and fairly. And you are going to be judged on merit and not ancestry, not on how you spell your name.”

  Less than an hour later, Johnson was on the phone to Martin Luther King with a similar message. King had not been invited to Kennedy’s funeral but came on his own anyway, and Johnson now called to thank him for having made supportive remarks about the new president in a television interview. “We know what a difficult period this is,” King said.

  “It’s a—it’s just an impossible period,” Johnson replied, the weight of the world on his shoulders. “We got a civil rights bill that hasn’t even passed the House, and it’s November, and Hubert Humphrey told me yesterday that everybody wanted to go home. We got a tax bill that they haven’t touched. We just got to let up—not let up on any of them and keep going.”

  Two days later, at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 27, Johnson went before the joint session in the House chamber, where he had first sat as a young congressman twenty-six years earlier. In his audience were eighty-seven House members and seventy-eight senators who had served with him. And in the front row of the First Lady’s box in the gallery, one seat away from Lady Bird herself, was Zephyr Wright, a college graduate and a black woman, who for twenty-one faithful years had been the Johnson family’s cook and was even then planning their Thanksgiving dinner of turkey and cornbread dressing for the next day.

  “Let us put an end to the teaching and
the preaching of hate and evil and violence,” Johnson declared. “Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law, and those who pour venom into our nation’s bloodstream. I profoundly hope that the tragedy and the torment of these terrible days will bind us together in new fellowship, making us one people in our hour of sorrow.”

  Then, borrowing from Lincoln, he concluded in words both high-flown and homey, “So let us here highly resolve that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not live—or die—in vain. And on this Thanksgiving Eve, as we gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing and give him our thanks, let us unite in those familiar and cherished words:

  America, America

  God shed his grace on thee,

  And crown thy good

  With brotherhood,

  From sea to shining sea.”

  * * *

  THE SPEECH TO CONGRESS was the American public’s first wide window into the character, personality, and style of Lyndon Johnson, and the reaction to it was effusively positive. But he was not a simple man.

  “He was thirteen of the most interesting and difficult men I ever met,” his onetime aide Bill Moyers would recall, while his longtime adviser George Reedy, who understood him as well as anyone, believed, “He was a man of too many paradoxes.”

  “Almost everything you find out about him you can find a directly contrary quality immediately, and your problem is always which quality was real and which quality was assumed,” Reedy would recall. “Or maybe neither quality was real. Or maybe both were real, who knows?”

  Hubert Humphrey once called him a “tidal wave … he went through the walls.” He could be tender and thoughtful, crude and cruel. He could be gentle and solicitous, heedless and egomaniacal. He could be brave and forthright, cowardly and devious. “He had an animal sense of weakness in other men,” Moyers judged. “He could inflict on them a thousand cuts before flying in at his own expense the best doctor to heal them or, if that failed, a notable for the last rites.” The least—or most—that can be said of him is that he came by his contradictions honestly.

  Later in life, Johnson liked to brag, “My ancestors were teachers and lawyers and college presidents and governors when the Kennedys in this country were still tending bar.” But, in fact, he had a childhood of sometimes wrenching privation and emotional complexity—an upbringing that left lasting and painful scars. Yes, his mother, Rebekah Baines, came from an upright line of Baptist worthies and had graduated from Baylor University, a rare accomplishment for a woman in her time and place. And yes, his father, Sam Houston Johnson, was finishing his second term in the Texas state legislature when Lyndon was born on August 27, 1908. But the Baines family had lost its money in bad business dealings, and Sam Houston Johnson had a checkered financial career as a small farmer and dealer in real estate and cattle. Lyndon grew up first in a cabin on the family homestead on the Pedernales River, and then in a frame house in nearby Johnson City in the Texas Hill Country. Austin was two days away on dirt roads that turned to mud at the first rain. “To know fully the disabling conditions of Johnson’s youth can only increase admiration for the inexplicable power of his will,” Johnson’s biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin has written.

  From his earliest days, he would be torn between his mother’s pretensions to culture and gentility and his rough-hewn father’s determination that she not make a sissy out of him. One of his first memories, from about the age of five, was of his father cutting off his long curls one Sunday morning when Rebekah was away at church. She refused to speak to her husband for a week, just as, three years later, she would refuse to speak to Lyndon when he declined to continue the violin and dancing lessons she had arranged for him. Years later, as senator and president, he would replicate this “Johnson freeze-out” on aides or friends he considered disloyal.

  In 1924, after his father lost his legislative seat and the family was living at the poverty level, Johnson took off with some friends in a Model T for California and a series of jobs picking grapes, washing dishes, and fixing cars—and finally as a clerk to a lawyer who was a cousin of his mother. Two years later, he returned to Texas and the only college available to him, Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos. There, despite his academic deficiencies and lack of money, he ultimately mastered campus politics, defeating the ruling student fraternal organization in which athletes were king by creating a rival group that supported debate, drama, and the glee club. By sheer relentlessness and force of personality (“He could look busy doing nothing,” one contemporary would recall), he became the editor of the college paper, a star debater, and an honors student. “His greatest forte,” his classmate Bill Deason would remember, “is to look a man in the eye and do a convincing job of selling him his viewpoint.”

  To pay for his senior year at San Marcos, Johnson took a job that would mark him for life, as a teacher in the Mexican school in the small Texas town of Cotulla, where his twenty-eight fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth graders lived in shanties and were barely literate. He quickly organized clubs and games, spelling bees and a band. “His being there,” one student said, “was like a blessing from the clear sky.” He himself would later say, “You never forget what poverty and hatred can do, when you see the scars on a hopeful face of a young child. They never seem to know why people dislike them. But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their eyes.”

  After graduation, he briefly held another job teaching public speaking and business arithmetic at Sam Houston High School in Houston. But soon enough he would embark upon the vocation that had always been his calling: politics, first as secretary to a newly elected Texas congressman, Richard Kleberg, the owner of the giant King Ranch (from whose office he led a caucus of the other congressional aides), and then, barely more than five years later, as a congressman himself. Along the way, he had conducted a whirlwind courtship of Claudia Alta Taylor, a genteel East Texan whose family nickname was Lady Bird and who became the flywheel that lent a measure of balance to his overpowering drive.

  Following a pattern he would establish time and again, he attached himself to older, more powerful men—in this case, Speaker Sam Rayburn and President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself—and he rose rapidly. In brief, essentially ceremonial Navy service in World War II he rode as an observer on a single bombing run against a Japanese base in New Guinea, winning the Silver Star, the military’s third-highest decoration for valor, from General Douglas MacArthur himself while the rest of the crew went unrewarded. (Johnson himself apparently drafted a letter saying that he did not deserve the award, but there is no evidence he ever sent it, and he was wearing the Silver Star lapel bar in Dallas on November 22.)

  In 1948, by a dubious margin of eighty-seven votes, he won election to the Senate, and before the end of his first term, he had become the Democrats’ minority leader, ascending to the majority leader’s office when his party took control in 1955.

  Johnson’s extraordinary rise in the Senate had been aided by the affections and affinity of the men who ruled the chamber, the southern Democrats, led by Richard B. Russell of Georgia. But he was more than smart enough to know that the very quality that had fueled his rise—his southernness—would now limit his prospects for the biggest job of all, the presidency.

  “There were no ‘darkies’ or plantations in the hill country where I grew up,” he would recall. “I never sat on my parents’ or grandparents’ knees listening to nostalgic tales of the antebellum South. In Stonewall and Johnson City I was never a part of the Old Confederacy. But I was part of Texas … And Texas is a part of the South.”

  In fact, in his very first speech on the Senate floor, an hour-and-twenty-five-minute broadside against the Truman administration’s civil rights proposals in 1949, Johnson had declared, “We of the South who speak here are accused of prejudice. We are labeled in the folklore of American tradition as a prejudiced minority.” But, he insisted, “We are not speaking against the Negro
race. We are not attempting to keep alive the old flames of hate and bigotry. We are, instead, trying to prevent those flames from being rekindled. We are trying to tell the rest of the nation that this is not the way to accomplish what so many want to do for the Negro.”

  So it came as a shock that after years of voting against civil rights measures—against elimination of the poll tax or literacy tests, against federal antilynching laws—Johnson would shepherd the first civil rights law since Reconstruction through the Senate. To many liberals and civil rights groups, Johnson was the villain who had watered down the 1957 Civil Rights Act’s most sweeping provisions. But the plain truth was that he was also the reason that any bill passed at all. George Reedy would recall that Johnson’s motives for supporting the bill were “highly mixed”—and presumably included his own presidential ambitions—but were in no way driven by personal prejudice.

  By Johnson’s own account, his epiphany on civil rights was gradual, but it was real. In his Senate days, besides Zephyr Wright as cook, he and Lady Bird employed two other black servants: Helen Williams as a housemaid and her husband, Gene, as driver, gardener, butler, and breaker-in of new shoes. (His feet were the same size as Johnson’s, so he could soften up each fresh pair the boss bought.) At the end of one Senate session, Johnson asked Gene Williams if he would not only drive the extra Johnson family car back to Texas for the summer, but take the family dog—Little Beagle Johnson, like everyone else in the clan, LBJ—along for the ride.