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

by Todd S. Purdum

  But when Bill McCulloch’s turn came, he was typically low-key, taking pains to debunk some of the prevailing myths about H.R. 7152, using a fact sheet he had carefully worked up weeks earlier in response to public attacks on the bill. The bill would not, he said, permit the federal government to tell banks to whom they must lend; or to tell any home owner to whom he must sell or rent; or to interfere with the day-to-day operations of business or unions; or to require an employer or union to hire or admit a quota of people from any given minority group; or “to interfere with or destroy the private property rights of individual businessmen.”

  “No statutory law will or can completely end the discrimination under attack by this legislation,” he concluded. “Such discrimination will finally end only when the mind and heart and conscience of everyone of goodwill decrees it.” Still, he said, “In the meantime, twenty million Americans can, for the first time, dream some dreams, and in due course see nearly all of them come true.”

  At this, John Lindsay asked if McCulloch would yield, and when he did, declared that his fellow Republican had worked “with dignity, with courage, with energy, and with great skill in a very difficult time on a very difficult subject.” In a rare tribute, the whole House rose in a standing ovation. Modest to the end, McCulloch simply paraphrased Churchill to say, “Never have so many of such ability worked so hard, and so effectively, for which so few received the credit.”

  Next came Charles Weltner, a freshman Democrat from Atlanta, who had voted against the bill in February. Now, he announced, he was changing his vote. “Change, swift and certain, is upon us, and we in the South face some difficult decisions,” he said. “We can offer resistance and defiance, with their harvest of strife and tumult. We can suffer continued demonstrations, with their wake of violence and disorder. Or we can acknowledge this measure as the law of the land. We can accept the verdict of the nation. I will add my voice to those who seek reasoned and conciliatory adjustment to a new reality, and, finally, I would urge that we at home now move on to the unfinished task of building a new South. We must not remain forever bound to another lost cause.”

  Then Manny Celler swiftly summarized the changes the Senate had made to the House bill. “Further delay, I will say, would be fatal,” he said. “Cervantes once said, ‘By the street of bye and bye, you reach the house of never.’” Celler concluded with words from the Old Testament. “I hope that we will have an overwhelming vote for this bill: that that vote will reverberate throughout the length and breadth of the land so that it can be said that Congress hearkens unto the voice of Leviticus, ‘proclaiming liberty throughout the land, to all the inhabitants thereof.’” Now it was Celler’s turn for an ovation, and the first man on his feet to lead the applause was Howard Smith.

  At 2:05 p.m., the House majority leader, Carl Albert, called the White House to tell the president where things stood. Johnson was in a Cabinet meeting, so his senior secretary, Juanita Roberts, took the message: “We are voting on the bill. Will be over in about ten minutes—fifteen at the most—we are past the danger point.” Moments later, a White House congressional liaison, Claude Desautels, delivered another message to Roberts, and she took a small slip of paper in to the president in the Cabinet Room. He interrupted the meeting to read Roberts’s note. “House passed the bill: 289 yeas, 126 nays…”

  As soon as the Cabinet meeting was over, Johnson called Albert, whose Oklahoma constituents had little fondness for the bill, to congratulate him, adding, “I guess you know that probably you’ll get more congratulations up here that you’ll get at home.” By now, Johnson had already decided to sign the bill in the ceremonial East Room of the White House, and he had left it to Larry O’Brien to organize the details. “Just as long as … you’re in charge of it,” he said, “I’ll feel relieved, and I don’t want to know.”

  But being Lyndon Johnson, he could not help sweating the details. Moments after getting off the phone with O’Brien, he was back on it with George Reedy and Bill Moyers to discuss the timing of his speech. The White House had asked for national airtime at 7:00 p.m., but the networks said they would prefer 6:45, when they claimed they would have a larger audience. Johnson was skeptical, as perhaps only a man who had grown rich through the ownership of a local television station could be. “I don’t believe that,” the president said. “That’s cheaper time. Six forty-five is four-forty-five in a good part of our country, George.” He added, speaking of the network executives, “They’re selfish bastards” who, like his own station manager in Austin, wanted public affairs programming carried in the afternoon because they “don’t want to give up that night primary time.”

  Johnson had also given a great deal of consideration to how he wanted to sign the bill, and what he wanted to say when he did so. On June 16, he had asked the advice of his civil rights adviser, Lee White. “Mr. President, it’s so monumental,” White replied. “It’s equivalent to a … signing an emancipation proclamation and it ought to just have all the possible attention that you could focus on it. It’s so significant.”

  Eric Goldman, Richard Goodwin, Douglass Cater, and Bill Moyers all had a hand in working up a speech. The early, unused draft that contained Goldman’s paean to summer also contained this alliterative passage: “We are a people who believe in law and order. We believe in ballots, not bullets; arguments, not arms; laws and courts, not license and chaos,” along with some strong words about the violence in Mississippi. A penciled note on this draft on June 24 from presidential aide Dick Nelson passed on Johnson’s views: “Get Doug Cater and Dick Goodwin to start working on this, hard. I like it but I don’t want to go this strong on Mississippi at this time.”

  In the end, there were at least six drafts. As late as July 2 itself, Horace Busby sent a memo to Moyers objecting to having the president say he was signing the bill because “the moral law of a just God forbids” segregation. “The thought must be in the speech,” Busby wrote, “but I seriously question this wording. Theologically, it is difficult to support with specifics—at least to the satisfaction of many southern clergymen and laymen (including some Catholics as well as Protestants). Likewise, there is a question of propriety about the presidential usage of a ‘just God.’ This may seem a small exception to some. But this is the head of a needle on which many, especially in the South, would dance at length, challenging the president ‘to cite chapter and verse.’ My suggestion would be ‘Morality forbids it,” or ‘The weight of the moral beliefs of our society forbids it.’”

  At 4:30 that afternoon, Johnson ducked into the White House barbershop for a prespeech haircut, and then he went to the residence for a celebration of his daughter Luci’s seventeenth birthday. By six o’clock, scores of invited guests were gathering in the East Room for the signing ceremony—one year to the day after the organizers of the March on Washington had held their first planning meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York.

  * * *

  DESPITE LARRY O’BRIEN’S BEST efforts, the signing had been arranged so hastily—final invitations did not go out to most people until after the House vote—that there were bound to be hurt feelings and overlooked names. Marvin Caplan of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, who was among the overlooked, would recall a moment marred by “pettiness, self-interest and haste,” while Joe Rauh described the scene as “an exciting mishmash,” albeit one “with all kinds of people around who had nothing to do with the bill.”

  In the grand white and gold East Room where Abigail Adams had once hung her washing in the still unfinished White House and where Union troops once bivouacked during the Civil War, the bill’s supporters gathered as the president began his speech at 6:45. In the front row sat the bipartisan team that had passed the bill: Humphrey and Dirksen, Celler and McCulloch (the latter two wearing pink carnations in their lapels). A grim-faced Bob Kennedy stared straight ahead, his face blank. Lady Bird Johnson sat hard by J. Edgar Hoover. Scattered in rows near the front were Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and o
ther civil rights leaders.

  At a small table in the center of the room, peering into the television camera from behind his black-rimmed glasses, sat Lyndon Johnson. Reading from a script of half-inch type with grease-penciled underlining on a spool of perforated yellow paper threading its way through the teleprompter, he solemnly invoked the country’s founding ideal.

  “We believe that all men are created equal,” he began in his distinctive Texas twang. “Yet many are denied equal treatment. We believe that all men have certain unalienable rights. Yet many Americans do not enjoy those rights. We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings of liberty. Yet millions are being deprived of those blessings—not because of their own failures, but because of the color of their skin. The reasons are deeply imbedded in history and tradition and the nature of man. We can understand—without rancor or hatred—how this all happened.

  “But it cannot continue,” he went on. “Our Constitution, the foundation of our Republic, forbids it. The principles of our freedom forbid it. Morality forbids it. And the law I will sign tonight forbids it.”

  In Vicksburg, Mississippi, student volunteers of Freedom Summer crammed into their headquarters. “He’s signing!” someone shouted, and a chorus of “We Shall Overcome,” and then “We Have Overcome,” rang out.

  Johnson continued. Strikingly—but understandably, given the deep divisions at play in the country—the president described the guts of the bill in the most minimalist terms.

  “It does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long as he respects the rights of others,” he said. “It does not give special treatment to any citizen. It does say the only limit to a man’s hope for happiness, and for the future of his children, shall be his own ability. It does say that there are those who are equal before God shall now also be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.”

  The president closed on a note of hope, urging “every public official, every religious leader, every business and professional man, every workingman, every housewife—I urge every American—to join in this effort to bring justice and hope to all our people—and to bring peace to our land.”

  “My fellow citizens,” he concluded, “we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail. Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our Nation whole. Let us hasten that day when our unmeasured strength and our unbounded spirit will be free to do the great works ordained for this Nation by the just and wise God who is the Father of us all.”

  With Larry O’Brien at his side, Johnson began dipping the first of more than seventy pens in an inkwell, using each one to inscribe a small portion of his vigorous, jagged signature—which always looked something like the up-and-down line of a busy EKG monitor. He passed the first pen to Dirksen, the second to Humphrey. After Charlie Halleck, Bill McCulloch, and Manny Celler had their moments, a beaming Martin Luther King eased his way behind the president and happily accepted his pen. “Thank you, sir. Thank you!” he exclaimed, then lingered unhurriedly, enjoying his moment in camera range. (Back in Atlanta, King’s wife, Coretta, was not smiling. She had taken her two sons, Martin and Dexter, to have their tonsils removed, and King had promised to call home after the signing. In his excitement, he had forgotten, and Coretta was deeply pained by the lapse.)

  “Hello, Roy, so glad to see you all,” Johnson said as Roy Wilkins approached. “Has anybody talked to you all about I want to talk to you before you leave? Will you see that the others, I want to talk to ’em when this is over with … Cabinet Room.”

  “Hello, Edgar, good to see you, my man,” the president greeted his FBI director, thrusting a fistful of pens his way. “You deserve several of those…”

  As the others surged forward to collect their pens, Robert Kennedy hung back. Roy Reuther of the United Auto Workers grabbed him by the arm and led him across the floor to the president. Barely looking up, Johnson passed pens over his shoulder. “Mr. Attorney General,” he said, “give this one to Katzenbach, and give this one to Burke Marshall, and give this one to John Doar.” (In fact, Kennedy had Doar’s pen framed and sent it to him with this inscription: “Pen used to sign President Kennedy’s civil rights bill.”) For the Reverend Walter Fauntroy, the SCLC’s District of Columbia representative, the joy of the occasion was “dampened by the sadness that we saw in Bobby’s eyes.”

  In the Cabinet Room, after the signing was complete, the president met with King, Wilkins, Young, Farmer, and the other leaders of civil rights organizations. He told them that there must now be an acknowledgment that the rights they had been seeking were guaranteed by law, making demonstrations unnecessary or even self-defeating. King and the others knew, however, that Johnson had another kind of self-defeat in mind: his own, at the polls that November, just four months away. Indeed, for all the excitement of the bill’s passage, Johnson could not shake a sense of foreboding.

  In the wake of the Senate passage in June, Lady Bird Johnson had written in her diary: “Now, with victory in sight, everybody’s mind turns to the problems that victory will bring in its wake. No solutions yet, not for a decade, or several decades—but tension and trouble and probably bloodshed lie ahead. But it is a path that has to be taken—a step forward long overdue.”

  The president’s immediate impulse was to get home to Texas. Bags had already been packed. Lady Bird was ready with a bite of dinner, and then the Big Bird of Marine One landed on the South Lawn. The chopper took them to Andrews Air Force Base, where a small Lockheed Jetstar would take them directly to the LBJ ranch. (Gerri Whittington and others would join them there.) On the flight down, the president read the papers and then took a nap.

  “When he signed the act he was euphoric,” Bill Moyers would recall, “but late that very night I found him in a melancholy mood as he lay in bed reading the bulldog edition of the Washington Post with headlines celebrating the day. I asked him what was troubling him.” Johnson replied to Moyers, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

  Still, when the Johnsons arrived at the ranch in the wee hours and got a quick briefing on rainfall levels and the state of their cattle and crops, Lady Bird could not contain her satisfaction. “This was one of those rare nights, starry in every way, when one does not think about tomorrow,” she wrote, “a wonderful state of euphoria rarely attained.”

  * * *

  THE PRESIDENT SLEPT LATE on the morning of July 3, no doubt done in by his labors. His first call on waking was to his attorney general. Johnson summarized the favorable drift of the White House mail about the bill in Texas-sized, mathematically impossible percentages. “It runs about 70–50,” he said, adding: “I don’t tell that figure to anybody, but I don’t give it out, but just for you.” Bob Kennedy informed the president that the unrepentant Governor Paul Johnson of Mississippi had called for noncompliance with the law until it could be tested in court. He suggested that the president might call Governor Johnson—who had been, after all, a strong Kennedy man in 1960—to suggest that he might amend his view to explain that, if and when the courts upheld the law, Mississippi would obey it.

  “It’s been relatively calm,” Kennedy said, “and for the first time in Jackson, Mississippi, they’ve got some of the Negroes and whites sitting down and talking over some of the problems, some of the people that are down there now. So, you know, there’s some promising things.”

  Later, Johnson talked with Governor John Connally of Texas about how to handle his own obligations under the new law. “Talk about observance,” the president told his old friend. “Everybody wants to observe the law … When you go to enforcing something, a man gets his back up.” Johnson told Connally that he was pleased with southern reaction to his signing speech. “I didn’t cuddle up to them,” he said. “But I wasn’t … I wasn’t the least bit critical o
r vicious or demanding, and I just appealed for us reasoning together.”

  As if to prove the point, the president soon reached out to Governor Johnson in Mississippi, carefully explaining the advice he had given the civil rights groups the night before. “Let’s take this thing slow and easy,” he said. “And kind of adjust to it instead of making mass invasions and mass violations and things of that kind.” For his part, Governor Johnson replied that he had told Mississippi reporters that “the success of this thing depended upon how fast, you know, some of these big niggers like to move, you know? And they could make it mighty, mighty rough.”

  “Well, you keep a stiff upper lip, and if you need me, call me,” the president advised.

  Then Johnson took a call from one of his oldest Texas political friends, C. C. “Charley” McDonald, of Witchita Falls. “You became president yesterday,” McDonald said. “That was your most wonderful hour. It only comes to a president about every forty years.”

  At some point during the long weekend, a restless Lyndon Johnson knocked on the door of Gerri Whittington’s guest room in the wee hours of the morning. Without waiting to learn why he was there—and, she later thought, he may simply have wanted to talk—she told him she wasn’t feeling well, that it was her “time of the month,” and he immediately left. But the experience discomfited her, and when she and the president’s party returned to Washington after the holiday, she made a point of avoiding Johnson for a few days. She never again returned to the ranch, and about a year later, she transferred to the State Department, where she went to work for the chief of protocol, Lloyd Hand.

  On Independence Day, Johnson again checked in with Bob Kennedy, who told him that the Jackson, Mississippi, Chamber of Commerce had voted to abide by the law, and that the cities of Savannah, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Montgomery had all swiftly followed suit. Johnson confided that the traveling White House press corps had spent the previous day interviewing the motel proprietors of Johnson City, Texas.