An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964
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And Lyndon Johnson, that sprawling riddle wrapped in an enigma, a president of unmatched achievements shrouded in pathologically outsize flaws? In the popular myth, he has come to be seen as almost single-handedly responsible for the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The truth is more complex but no less admirable, especially given the discipline it must have required for such an impulsive, impassioned man to so strategically limit his own role in Congress’s consideration of the bill. Johnson did indeed help round up crucial votes for cloture, and he was always “the shotgun behind the door,” as John Stewart put it. But Johnson’s biggest contribution was that he never wavered in his public or private support for the strongest possible bill, while letting Humphrey, Mansfield, and Dirksen determine just what that would be.
Johnson died on January 22, 1973, almost exactly four years after leaving office. His last public appearance was at a civil rights symposium at his presidential library in Austin in December 1972. He was unwell and suffered a visibly agonizing attack of angina during his speech, slipping a nitroglycerin tablet from his pocket into his mouth to ease the pain. He told the crowd that the cache of documents just released by the library, including those on civil rights, “holds most of myself and holds for me the most intimate meaning.” He said he was ashamed that he had not been able to do more for the cause in five years in office and insisted that civil rights should remain the entire country’s concern.
“To be black,” he said, “is to be proud, is to be worthy, is to be honorable. But to be black in a white society is not to stand on level and equal ground.” He added: “Whites stand on history’s mountain, and blacks stand in history’s hollow.” The challenge, he concluded, was to “get down to the business of trying to stand black and white on level ground.”
* * *
IT IS A POIGNANT paradox that the man whom no less a judge than Nick Katzenbach considered the single most important influence in passing the bill—Bill McCulloch—is the least remembered of all. That is as much a testament to McCulloch’s unwavering modesty as it is to history’s fickle eye. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, McCulloch kept up his quiet fight for justice, again playing a crucial role in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, while also maintaining his staunch fiscal conservatism. It was no surprise that Johnson named him (together with John Lindsay, by then mayor of New York City) to the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois and charged with investigating the riots that swept American cities in 1967. The most famous line from the commission’s report belied the promise of H.R. 7152: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
In a 1967 essay, McCulloch envisioned a central role for his beloved party in the civil rights struggles yet to come. “The old battles have been won,” he said. “The Republican Party, however, is not content with the past. For all the dreams have not come true. There is work to be done. History shows that the Republican Party will be the party which, in large part, will see that these dreams come true.” He would not live long enough to see how far off the mark he was.
In May 1970, McCulloch slipped and fell on a newly waxed floor at his home in Washington. He suffered a concussion—undiagnosed at first—and was in and out of hospitals for a year. Though he lived on until 1980, he was never again in robust health. He announced that he would not run for reelection in 1972, prompting an extraordinary three-page handwritten letter from one close observer of the battles of 1963, who remembered with aching clarity all that he had done. “Please forgive the emotional tone of this letter,” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis wrote from aboard the yacht Christina on June 24, 1971, “but I want you to know how much your example means to me.”
“I know that you, more than anyone, were responsible for the civil rights legislation of the 1960s,” the former First Lady wrote. “You made a personal commitment to President Kennedy in October 1963, against all the interests of your district. When he was gone, your personal integrity and character were such that you held to that commitment despite enormous pressure and political temptations not to do so. There were so many opportunities to sabotage the bill, without appearing to do so, but you never took them. On the contrary, you brought everyone else along with you.
“And as for my dear Jack, it is a precious thought to me that in the last month of his life, when he had so many problems that seemed insoluble, he had the shining gift of your nobility, to give him the hope and faith he needed to carry on. May I thank you with all my heart, and may God bless you.”
* * *
IN THE SHORT TERM, neither side of the bipartisan coalition that had made the Civil Rights Act possible reaped much political benefit from the bill. Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee in the 1964 election, was, after all, one of the six Senate Republicans who had voted against it, and for better or worse his candidacy set the Party of Lincoln on a course that turned it into the party of white backlash, as he carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Lyndon Johnson won election in his own right in a national landslide, but his gloomy presentiment that he had delivered the South to the Republicans for a generation proved correct. Even a brave, 1,628-mile whistle-stop tour of southern states by Lady Bird Johnson could not make up for the electoral damage the civil rights bill had done. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon and George Wallace between them won all the states of the Old Confederacy, except Johnson’s own state of Texas, and four years later, Nixon’s “Southern strategy” made it a clean sweep. Only Nixon’s resignation and the advent of a southerner, Jimmy Carter, put the South back in play for the Democrats in 1976, before Ronald Reagan recaptured it in 1980. More than a decade would pass until Bill Clinton, yet another southerner, again made the South competitive.
Over the decades, Republican dominance of the South continued and grew, especially in Congress, where the region wielded disproportionate power under its new party label just as the southern Democrats had in the past, fueled by white resentment and, later, by the rise of the Tea Party movement. At the same time, the Republican Party as exemplified by the South became increasingly isolated and marginalized from the rest of the country in ways that hurt its national standing, particularly with the new waves of Hispanic voters that were coming to the fore. By 2008, the legal changes begun by the Civil Rights Act, and the demographic changes wrought by shifting populations, made it not only possible for a black Democratic candidate to win presidential primaries throughout the South, but almost certain that he would—and that he could go on to carry such once unimaginable states as Virginia and North Carolina in the general election. That candidate was a freshman senator from Illinois, who, as it happened, held Everett Dirksen’s old seat. His name was Barack Obama.
In his tense meeting with black intellectuals in 1963, Robert Kennedy had reflected on the prejudice that his immigrant Irish ancestors had faced, only to have a son of the old sod in the White House just over a century later. There was every reason to believe, Kennedy continued, that there could be a “Negro president” in forty years.
He was wrong, of course. But only by five years.
Notes
The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.
The following abbreviations are used in the notes:
CAHP
Papers of Charles A. Halleck, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
CR
Congressional Record
CQ
Congressional Quarterly
EMDP
Papers of Everett McKinley Dirksen, Dirksen Congressional Center, Pekin, Illinois
HHHP
Papers of Hubert H. Humphrey, Minnesota State Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota
JFKL
John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts
Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas
LCCR
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
LOC
Library of Congress
OH
Oral History
PPP
Public Papers of the Presidents
TPR
The Presidential Recordings, University of Virginia Miller Center, published by W. W. Norton
WMMP
William Moore McCulloch Papers, Ohio State University Archives, Columbus, Ohio
Prologue
“Your brother,” Riedel began: Roger Mudd, The Place to Be (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), pp. 126–29; Richard Langham Riedel, Halls of the Mighty: My 47 Years at the Senate (Washington: Robert B. Luce, 1969), p. 183; William Manchester, The Death of a President (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 197–98.
A few blocks down: Hubert H. Humphrey, The Education of a Public Man (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 190–93.
The attorney general struggled: Manchester, Death of a President, pp. 195–96.
In Atlanta, Martin Luther King: David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: HarperCollins Perennial Classics, 2004), p. 307.
“The president’s dead”: Manchester, Death of a President, pp. 256–57.
“For most of us who gathered there”: Humphrey, Education of a Public Man, p. 192.
“Only someone suffering”: New York Times, Nov. 22, 1963.
As the bulletins came in from Dallas: Mudd, Place to Be, p. 127.
The crusty House Republican leader: Statement by Charles A. Halleck, Nov. 23, 1963, CAHP.
“This is what’s going to happen to me”: Coretta Scott King, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Puffin Books, 1993), p. 227.
“a tragic death”: CR, 88th Congress, 1st Session, Dec. 5, 1963, p. 23469.
Now, King thought: Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 307.
“consistent commitment to and espousal of basic human rights”: New York Times, Nov. 23, 1963.
“He didn’t even have the satisfaction”: Manchester, Death of a President, p. 407.
“Well, Mr. President, you may well do that”: Jack Valenti, This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House and Hollywood (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), p. 41.
1: A Century’s Unfinished Business
“The best commemoration lies not”: PPP, John F. Kennedy, 1962, p. 702.
Rockefeller urged the nation to rededicate: http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/staffpubs/docs/20491.pdf.
Kennedy’s principal personal reaction: Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 464.
The Davises’ presence: Lee C. White OH, JFKL.
“a freedom more fictional than real”: Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 464.
“The most cynical view holds”: Nick Bryant, The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2006), p. 373.
The Supreme Court had outlawed segregation: Frank H. Mackaman, The Long Hard Furrow: Everett Dirksen’s Part in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pekin, Ill.: Dirksen Congressional Center, 2006), p. 3.
One black Army captain: Colin Powell, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 108.
“I am not enthusiastic about the amendment”: Robert Mann, The Walls of Jericho: Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell, and the Struggle for Civil Rights (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1997), p. 321.
A similarly weak bill was passed by Congress: Mackaman, Long Hard Furrow, pp. 3–4.
In fact, Richard Russell: Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), pp. 58–59.
“When my administration takes office”: Harold Brayman, The President Speaks Off the Record (Princeton, N.J.: Dow Jones Books, 1976), p. 637.
“Toward the end of ’61 and ’62”: White OH.
“Tell these ambassadors”: Bryant, Bystander, p. 221.
Yet another case loomed: Ibid., p. 254.
The attorney general’s ringing tone: Edwin Guthman, We Band of Brothers: A Memoir of Robert F. Kennedy (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 162.
“My belief does not matter”: Bryant, Bystander, p. 258.
CORE’s press release announcing the rides: Guthman, We Band of Brothers, p. 166.
Attorney General Kennedy sent a top aide: Reeves, President Kennedy, pp. 122–25.
Seigenthaler received assurances: Guthman, We Band of Brothers, p. 170.
“I knew, suddenly, betrayal”: “Freedom Riders: A Film by Stanley Nelson,” American Experience (PBS), 2011.
“I grabbed her by the wrist”: Ibid.
Seigenthaler was beaten unconscious: Guthman, We Band of Brothers, p. 171.
“Now, Reverend, don’t tell me that”: Ibid., p. 178; Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 131; Bryant, Bystander, pp. 270–73. The expression “dead as Kelsey’s nuts” refers neither to legumes nor to gonads, but to John Kelsey, a pioneering automobile wheel manufacturer. Kelsey’s wheels were attached with nuts and bolts that were reputed to be “dead” tight, and thus highly safe.
Neither man would ever talk to Governor Patterson again: Gerald S. and Deborah H. Strober, Let Us Begin Anew: An Oral History of the Kennedy Administration (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 272.
“That was the attitude the Kennedys had”: Ibid., p. 280.
“What we did was to outline”: Robert F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy in His Own Words: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 100.
“What in the world does he think I should do?”: Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, p. 126.
Furious that the new president had not: Bryant, Bystander, p. 331.
After a long legal battle: Ibid.
“But he likes Ole Miss”: Guthman, We Band of Brothers, p. 191.
Kennedy ordered his aides: Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 356.
Even as the president prepared: Ibid., p. 362.
“Where’s the Army?”: Philip Zelikow et al., eds., The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, vol. 2 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 280; Bryant, Bystander, p. 350.
With the crisis over: Edwin Guthman papers, Box 1, JFKL.
Days later, the president’s pollster: Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 364.
In January 1963: White House staff files, Lee White papers, Box 22, JFKL.
“Let it be clear”: PPP, John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 222.
he insisted that the time was not ripe: Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 468.
There, on scraps of paper: Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Signet Classics, 2000), p. 91.
He expressed special disappointment: Ibid., p. 97.
“Look at those niggers run!”: Bryant, Bystander, p. 386.
The next afternoon: Oval Office Meetings, Tape #85, JFKL.
“This has a lot of Oxford in it”: Jonathan Rosenberg and Zachary Karabell, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 101.
2: A Great Change Is at Hand
“awfully damn nervous”: White OH, JFKL.
“For in the final analysis”: PPP, John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 464.
“quietly going frantic”: White OH.
Together, the brothers scratched notes: President’s Office Files, Speech Files, Box 45, JFKL.
“The monitor is all right”: Hugh Sidey, John F. Kennedy: President (New York: Atheneum, 1964), p. 334.
At the beginning of his Senate career: Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 460.
His civil rights adviser: Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings, p. 177.
By May 17, on a flight to Asheville: Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy in His Own Words, p. 172.
“They can stand at the lunch counters”: Rosenberg and Karabell, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice, p. 12
0.
Still, Larry O’Brien: Ibid., p. 121.
“The trouble with King is”: Ibid., p. 125; Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 501.
When a former policeman kicked: Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 501.
“I think it’s absolutely essential”: Oval Office Meetings, Tape #90, JFKL.
(A statement drafted that same day): President’s Office Files, Speech Files, Box 45, JFKL.
“I haven’t read the bill”: Oval Office Meetings, Tape #90, JFKL.
In fact, Johnson had much more specific advice in mind: Office Files, George Reedy, Edison Dictaphone Recording, Box 1, LBJL.
“Doctor, I don’t know five people”: Bryant, Bystander, pp. 23–25.
“this marvelous expression”: Chris Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), p. 231.
“I don’t know any Negroes”: Strober and Strober, Let Us Begin Anew, p. 278.
“We had bigger houses, more servants”: Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), p. 31.
As president, he would tell: Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 62; Laurence Leamer, The Kennedy Men, 1901–1963 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), p. 100.
They might banter: Bryant, Bystander, p. 24; Leamer, Kennedy Men, p. 94.
The signers were thrown in the brig: Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt; The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 166.
After the war: Reeves, President Kennedy, p. 62.
That didn’t spare Thomas: Benjamin C. Bradlee, Conversations with Kennedy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 223.