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

by Todd S. Purdum

  Black Robert would seek his revenge at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles on July 14, 1960, when he spent the better part of a day trying to get Johnson to give up the No. 2 spot on the ticket that his older brother had just held out. To the end of his life, Bob would maintain that Jack had merely offered the vice presidential nomination as a courtesy, never expecting Johnson to take it. In fact, John Kennedy’s own actions made evident that he wanted Johnson—who could help carry Texas—and was worried about making a firm offer that Johnson could then embarrass him by rejecting. The precise sequence of events has been in dispute for more than half a century, but the outcome was clear: Lyndon Johnson became John Kennedy’s running mate but never forgot that Bob Kennedy had tried to humiliate him by taking the prize away. For his part, Bob Kennedy would always remember that a prominent Johnson supporter—referencing his brother’s serious but undisclosed health problems (he suffered from the life-threatening adrenal insufficiency known as Addison’s disease)—had called John Kennedy a “spavined hunchback,” or that Johnson himself had referred to Joseph P. Kennedy as a “Chamberlain umbrella man.”

  The distrust would only grow after John Kennedy won the presidency. Mindful of the enormous power Lyndon Johnson had wielded as Senate majority leader—for the last half of the 1950s, second only to that of President Eisenhower himself—President Kennedy went out of his way to treat Johnson with public respect, making sure that he and Lady Bird were invited to official state functions. But real chemistry was elusive—their Boston-Austin styles were so different—and the Johnsons were sometimes left off the list when the Kennedys held glamorous private dinner dances for friends. On February 20, 1962, as the president and vice president watched television coverage of John Glenn’s historic orbital space flight, Johnson was heard to mutter, “If only John Glenn were a Negro!” It became one of the president’s favorite stories, an example of how Johnson was always counting votes and playing angles.

  As for substance, Kennedy denied Johnson’s request to become the first vice president in history to have an office next to his in the West Wing (though he did give him one in the adjoining Executive Office Building, which gave Johnson a leg up on Richard Nixon, whose only vice presidential office had been in the Capitol). The president simply ignored Johnson’s even bolder proposal for an executive order that would put the vice president in general charge of defense and space programs. The two assignments the president did give Johnson, the chairmanships of the National Space Council and the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, were not as impressive as they sounded on paper, since the first panel was purely advisory and the second mostly toothless.

  During the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October 1962, Johnson had, at almost every turn, advocated the opposite course from the one that Kennedy ultimately took. He had opposed the idea of a naval blockade, favoring surprise airstrikes instead. He also opposed the secret deal that ended the crisis, in which Soviet missiles were withdrawn from Cuba in exchange for the withdrawal of outmoded American missiles from Turkey, and he was pointedly excluded from the crucial meeting of the president’s advisers at which the final strategy was set.

  By the spring and early summer of 1963, with pressure building on the administration for action on civil rights, the attorney general twice burst into meetings of Johnson’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, rattling off skeptical questions about why it had not succeeded in producing more jobs for blacks across the South and, at the second meeting on July 18, walking out while Johnson was trying to answer his questions and explain the committee’s record.

  None of these encounters, grim as they were for Johnson, could compare with the bitter tensions that now erupted in the wake of the assassination. Bob Kennedy was incensed that Johnson had thoughtlessly telephoned him—and not some legal functionary—about the requirements for being sworn in as president aboard Air Force One before leaving Dallas, and resentful that Johnson had later insisted that the swearing-in had been performed at the attorney general’s insistence. Johnson, in turn, was insulted and confused that when the presidential plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base, the attorney general rushed aboard in shock and ran past him to Jacqueline Kennedy without so much as a greeting. There was a contretemps over precisely when Johnson should occupy the Oval Office for his official business. (He ultimately waited three days.) When the new president held his first Cabinet meeting the day after the assassination, Kennedy at first resisted attending, then insisted there be no photographs during the meeting.

  Finally, on the afternoon of November 27, just after Johnson had finished his address to Congress, he invited the attorney general to the Oval Office in an attempt to air their differences. “You can’t let your people talk about me and I won’t talk about you,” Johnson said. The encounter was awkward and tense and resolved nothing, and the two men would not meet again for nearly two months. In the interim, Johnson reached out to intermediaries. On December 11, the president telephoned Ken O’Donnell to ask “what we can do about Bobby.”

  “Tell me, and it won’t ever come from you,” Johnson implored. “But we don’t know. And ignorance is a terrible thing. If you were down in Texas trying to shoot a deer, you might need a little knowledge from us. So we need some of these things.”

  “During all of that period, I think [Bobby] seriously considered whether he would let me be president, whether he should really take the position [that] the vice president didn’t automatically move in,” Johnson would recall, with obvious hyperbole. For his part, Bob Kennedy would recall, “Our president was a gentleman and a human being … This man is not … He’s mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways. You know, as I say, I think his reaction on a lot of things is correct, but I think he’s got this other side of him in his relationships with human beings which makes it very difficult, unless you want to kiss his behind all the time.”

  * * *

  JOHNSON LIKED HAVING HIS behind kissed as much as anyone—and probably more than most—but it was his own kissing up to others that was paying off as his presidency took root. On December 13, he assured Harry Byrd that he was “working on my budget every night,” and promised to “get you a budget I think you’ll be proud of,” so the Finance Committee could move the tax bill to the floor. “You bother me any time,” Johnson told Byrd. “You help me, though, get that bill out. I know you’re against it, but you’re a good chairman and you help them vote. You’re tired of this talking yourself.”

  Byrd responded with a single word: “Right!”

  And five days later, on December 18, Howard Smith announced that he had scheduled hearings on the civil rights bill in the House Rules Committee, to begin January 9 and to be finished by the end of the month.

  But before Congress could wrap up business for the year, a new crisis arose. Both houses had passed separate versions of a long-pending $3 billion foreign aid appropriations bill, and the final conference report reconciling them was pending in the House on Saturday, December 21, with many Democratic members having already begun drifting out of town in anticipation of the Christmas recess. As if to make peace with his conservative critics in light of his civil rights compromise, Charlie Halleck took advantage of the moment to vote down a provision that would have given the president discretion to allow the Export-Import Bank to provide credit guarantees for private grain sales to Communist countries. An unnamed White House source told the columnist Mary McGrory that Halleck’s move was an attempt by the “Midwest isolationist wing” of the Republican Party to “impose its will upon the foreign policy of the United States.”

  The president canceled plans to fly to his Texas ranch and spent that Saturday afternoon on the phone rounding up absent members for a second vote—to be taken two days later, on Monday, December 23, in what turned out to be the midst of a snowstorm that delayed trains and planes throughout the mid-Atlantic region. But when the Monday vote came, another procedural hurdle loomed. Because the measure had not “rested on the spe
aker’s desk” for the required twenty-four hours, it would need a two-thirds majority to pass on this day, and it failed.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Johnson exclaimed when Larry O’Brien called him with the news. Johnson had already resolved to take the extraordinary step of holding the House over for a revote the next day, Christmas Eve, when only a simple majority would be required. And he had also decided to invite every member of the House and Senate who was still in town over to the White House for a bourbon and eggnog reception early that evening. “Bird, let’s have Congress over tonight!” he had called out to the First Lady.

  O’Brien and other aides were skeptical of such a last-minute charm offensive, but the president pressed ahead. “I don’t care if only twenty come,” he told Carl Albert, and he warned O’Brien, “You be damn sure you’re there to introduce them.”

  In the end, more than two hundred members showed up for the five o’clock party in the East Room, just as the black crepe of mourning for John Kennedy was coming down after thirty days and Christmas greenery was going up. Johnson himself lit a Yule log in the fireplace, then climbed up on a gilt chair.

  “Your attention, please,” the president said, as he proceeded to apologize to Charlie Halleck, “if anyone down here said anything ugly about you.” He praised the legislators who had “labored through the vineyard and plowed through the snow” to vote. “We’re Americans first,” the president said. “I hope we can disagree without being too disagreeable.”

  The House passed the foreign aid bill the next morning, in a special 7:00 a.m. meeting, ending the longest peacetime session of Congress in American history to that point. “At that moment,” Johnson would later recall, “the power of the Federal government began flowing back to the White House.” A year-end Newsweek poll found that the public blamed Congress by a margin of two to one for the partisan gridlock, while support for the civil rights bill stood at 62 percent.

  * * *

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF the congressional reception, Johnson was feeling expansive. He had summoned the celebrity hairdresser and makeup artist Eddie Senz from New York to work on his wife and daughters—and his secretaries to boot—all the while pleading for a reduced price, saying, “I’m a poor man; I don’t make much money.” (His estimated net worth was $14 million, or roughly $100 million in today’s currency.) “Now, bring whoever you need and we’ll pay their transportation,” the president told the stylist, “but we can’t pay you much else.” After Senz arrived, Johnson called Lady Bird in the White House residence to check up on his progress, asking especially about one of his secretaries, Yolanda Boozer. “She’s got to have about a bale cut off if I’m going to look at her through Christmas,” Johnson declared.

  Meantime, the president had it in mind to strike another visible blow for civil rights. For some time, he had had his eye on Geraldine Whittington, an attractive young black secretary in the office of Ralph Dungan, who had handled political appointments and Latin American policy for John Kennedy. Now, just before ten o’clock on this snowy Monday night, he telephoned Whittington at her home in distant Northeast Washington, across the Anacostia River, with a proposal.

  “Gerri, where are you?” the president called out into the receiver. “Gerri?”

  “Hello?” Whittington replied.

  “Where are you?” the president repeated.

  “I’m at home. Who’s this?”

  “This is the president.”

  “Oh!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, I think someone’s playing with me,” Whittington replied in a soft, cultured voice.

  “No, no, they’re not,” Johnson insisted. “I want to talk to you about our work, honey. Where are you—at home?”

  “Oh, yes, I am.”

  “Are you busy?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Can you come down here immediately?”

  “Oh, I’d be glad to.”

  “Come on down. I’ve got Jack Valenti and we want to talk to you about a little reassignment.”

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  “If you need a car sent out for you, I’ll get one, but you can get a cab quicker, can’t you?”

  “Well, as a rule I can, Mr. President, but inasmuch as the weather is so…”

  Whittington gave her address and phone number and the president continued, “All right … He ought to be there in fifteen minutes. How far are you away from the White House?”

  “Oh, I guess about twenty-five minutes.”

  “Twenty-five minutes!”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a hell of a long way. Do you walk to work?”

  “No, sir, I don’t,” Whittington giggled.

  “Okay, get ready now and get your walking clothes on.”

  Unable to contain his enthusiasm until Whittington arrived, Johnson called his assistant press secretary Andy Hatcher at 10:15 to announce his intention to hire Whittington and ask about her references.

  “She’s got good character? Good ability?… Respected by all her employees?” the president asked. Assured that the answers were all yes, Johnson then telephoned Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young to share the news. (A month later, Johnson would arrange to announce Whittington’s hiring to the nation at large by having her appear—along with an “all-girl” orchestra leader, a bird seed salesman, and the actor Van Heflin—on the popular Sunday night CBS game show What’s My Line? in which panelists tried to guess a contestant’s occupation.)

  At 11:00 p.m., Whittington finally arrived outside the Oval Office to find the president, Jack Valenti, Walter Jenkins, and Cliff Carter in a discussion that suggested the president might need some fresh administrative help, as Johnson complained bitterly about misspelled names in official correspondence. “These dumbbells! Who in the hell?” he spat.

  Valenti interrupted. “That girl is here—Gerri Wilkerson, or whatever her name is.”

  “I want to talk to her, and keep everybody else out of here,” Johnson replied, adding, “Now listen, it’s Gerri Whittington…”

  “Come in, honey,” the president said. “Pull up a chair.”

  Shortly afterward, Johnson telephoned two of his other secretaries, Juanita Roberts and Marie Fehmer, presumably to arrange for Whittington’s hiring. The following morning he upended his newest secretary’s plans for a quiet holiday with her mother, whisking her off instead to Philadelphia for the funeral of Congressman William Green and then on to the LBJ ranch for the holidays.

  A week later, on New Year’s Eve, with Lady Bird resting at the ranch with her relatives, the president took Fehmer, Whittington, and a third secretary, Vicki McCammon, off to Austin by helicopter for a round of parties, including a cocktail reception for his aide Horace Busby at the Forty Acres Club, the faculty club at the University of Texas. A group of professors had been boycotting the club because of its rigid segregationist policy, so just before his entourage entered, the president slipped Gerri Whittington’s arm through his.

  “Does the president know what he’s doing?” E. Ernest Goldstein, a Texas law professor, asked Bill Moyers.

  “He always knows what he’s doing,” Moyers answered.

  Whittington herself asked the president the same question. “I sure do,” he replied.

  On January 2, 1964, when a still stunned Goldstein called the club to make sure it would be all right if he brought black guests, the answer was clear: “Yes, sir. The President of the United States integrated us on New Year’s Eve.”

  7

  A Great Big Vote

  TUESDAY, JANUARY 21, 1964

  LYNDON JOHNSON RANKED AMONG the most stubborn and prideful of men, but in pressing for the civil rights bill, he humbled himself in striking ways. Just days after John Kennedy’s funeral, he had reached out to one of his most vocal critics, Joseph Rauh, one of the founders of Americans for Democratic Action and the general counsel of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. As a delegate to the 1960 Democratic Convention, Rauh had jumped to his fee
t in anger at the news that Kennedy had chosen Johnson as his running mate, shouting in full view of television cameras, “Jack! Don’t do it, Jack!” But in early December 1963, a stunned Rauh got a call from the White House, inviting him to accompany the president to the funeral of former governor and senator Herbert Lehman of New York—a rapprochement so striking that it prompted a front-page story in the Washington Post.

  “If I’ve done anything wrong in the past,” Johnson told Rauh in a subsequent White House meeting, “I want you to know that’s nothing now—we’re going to work together.”

  Now, on this January morning, Rauh was in the Oval Office, and with Johnson’s permission, he had brought with him an equally skeptical colleague: Clarence Mitchell of the NAACP. “Johnson had been dealing with me on the legislation, and I knew that wasn’t right,” Rauh would recall. “Clarence Mitchell was the leading civil rights lobbyist and it would only work if Johnson treated him so.”

  Two more different personalities could hardly be imagined than Clarence Mitchell and Joe Rauh. Rauh was a fiery, fast-talking Harvard-trained lawyer who had first come to Washington during the New Deal, had drafted the executive order that created the Fair Employment Practices Commission, had battled McCarthyism, and had stood perpetually on the ramparts for nearly all of the post–World War II liberal causes. Mitchell was a courtly former newspaper reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American who had recently earned a night school law degree from the University of Maryland after years of working for the NAACP. He still commuted daily to Washington from Baltimore and was such a tireless and ubiquitous advocate in the corridors of Capitol Hill that he would come to be known as “the 101st senator,” at a time when there were no black men in that body. In his personal attitude, and on issues other than civil rights, Mitchell was essentially a conservative, and Rauh liked to tease him by saying, “Clarence, if you were white, you would be a reactionary.”