Master of the Senate (171 page)

Everywhere in the South, violence was rising. That November and December, 1956, in the wake of the victory in Montgomery (it had been a week after the November election that the Supreme Court ruled Alabama’s bus segregation ordinances unconstitutional), Negroes had begun bus boycotts in other southern cities, and were trying to integrate schools and parks as well. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization created to launch civil rights protests all across the South, was organizing for its first meeting, which would be held in Atlanta on January 10. Southern whites were reacting to this new black determination with new fury. The bombings of Negro homes and churches increased; more snipers fired on integrated buses; in one incident, in Montgomery, a Negro woman was wounded in the leg, and when more shots were fired at the bus, it headed for a police station with its
passengers lying on the floor. There were new attempts on King’s life and family, including a shotgun blast fired into their home while they were sleeping. In Birmingham, Fred Shuttlesworth had announced that he and other Negroes would sit in the front rows of city buses on the day after Christmas. On Christmas night, a bundle of fifteen sticks of dynamite exploded beneath Shuttlesworth’s parsonage. The next day, he and a score of other Negroes were arrested on the buses. Police in other Alabama cities also ignored the Supreme Court ruling, arresting Negroes who sat in front. On the eve of the 1957 session of Congress, southern bombings, beatings, sniper fire, and cross-burnings were not stopping but increasing.

The perpetrators evidently felt they could act with impunity—and again and again they were proven correct. Every time black leaders asked Brownell to take action to stop the violence, the Attorney General had to reply that under existing law, the authority for maintaining intra-state law and order rested with the states, not the federal government. Two white men had actually been arrested for one of the bombings of Martin Luther King’s home, and had given, and signed, confessions. A Montgomery jury, all white naturally, had acquitted them nonetheless. “Deep Southern resistance,” John Bartlow Martin wrote, is “righteous, determined and sure of success. At the outset [it] probably was buying time. Not today. And they believe they have desegregation stopped. This is not a few loudmouth, rabble-rousing politicians…. This is all but unanimous white opposition.” He had taken a tour of the South to determine when the South might integrate its schools, and he gave his conclusion in the title of the book he wrote:
The Deep South Says “Never.”
The region’s attitude was personified in the Georgian who in 1956 drove gentlemanly old Walter George out of the Senate. Georgia’s new senator was Herman Talmadge—son of Gene Talmadge, hero of the woolhats, the Georgia Governor who during the 1930s and ’40s had been the incarnation of the suspender-snapping, tobacco-chewing, southern race baiter; while he had not actually been a member of the Klan, Gene once said, “I used to do a little whippin’ myself.” Herman was smoother, but just as unabashed a segregationist. As Governor he sponsored a state constitutional amendment allowing Georgia to close her public schools rather than desegregate them, and to send white and Negro children to separate, private, schools. Sitting contentedly in his stately home, filled with echoes of the Civil War (“When we remodeled we dug a few old Minié balls out of the house…. The only reason it was not burned was that Sherman occupied it”), he told Martin, “They couldn’t send enough bayonets down here to compel the people to send their children to school with Nigras.” Talmadge’s election to the United States Senate in November, 1956, was by the biggest majority in Georgia’s history. To Clarence Mitchell, says Mitchell’s biographer, “the supplanting of George by Talmadge” was “a tragedy that reaffirmed the South’s intention to stick to its unconstitutional way of life.”

The South was determined that its position on segregation would in fact
be hardened, that this new civil rights agitation would be defeated. And when southern strategists surveyed the situation, they were confident that it
would
be defeated, for after all, if all else failed, they still had their Senate citadel, where they still held their chairmanships and their subcommittees. When Congress reconvened in January, it would be faced again by the Brownell Bill, but although that bill had been passed by the House in 1956, it had been blocked in the Senate, and, if necessary, it would be blocked there again. And back in the states of the southern senators, the rising Rebel yell was not for compromise but for victory.

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
was in residence at the Johnson Ranch over Christmas vacation in December, 1956, so early each morning Mary Rather would walk down to the Pedernales, passing the family cemetery with its big live oak, and then across the river on the low-water bridge to collect the mail from the large, slightly tilted mailbox.

That December, late in the month, among the missives that Ms. Rather found in the mail and left on the dining room table for her boss to open over breakfast were three communications that were definitely not Christmas greetings. They were warnings—warnings, in the form of memoranda, that Lyndon Johnson took very seriously because of the identity of the men who had written them. Each of the three memoranda warned him that he must act on civil rights, and act soon. And each memo told him also what might never happen if he failed to act.

One of the memoranda, mailed from Washington on December 20, was from the man with whom he could not “afford to argue,” and it demonstrated that among people committed to the cause of social justice, not even personal affection could blunt the issue. Philip Graham had discussed the memo with his wife before sending it; in her memoirs, she would describe it as “arguing that the senator needed to counteract the reputation he had as a conservative, sectional … politician.” The memorandum itself said that Johnson’s past response to this “false stereotype … has been largely negative. He complains about ‘phony liberals,’ he criticizes columnists and some other parts of the press, etc.” And, Philip Graham told Johnson bluntly, that reaction hadn’t worked—and it was never going to. The only way for Johnson to change his stereotype, Graham wrote, was for him to announce a legislative program that would make possible a congressional session “marked by a high order of accomplishment.” The program, Graham wrote, would have several “principal themes,” of which an “essential” one (Katharine Graham would call it “perhaps the most important”) was civil rights. “Civil rights to be strengthened, not by phony speechmaking but by consequential action,” Graham wrote. “It is essential for LBJ to create and articulate a realistic philosophy on civil rights … a new Civil Rights program which can be embraced by people” of all persuasions, and which “can bring reality to this general field.”

Bluntly, Philip Graham warned Lyndon Johnson of the consequences of not acting on civil rights. “Fate’s decree may be that LBJ is destined only to be a Jimmy Byrnes or a more energetic Dick Russell,” he said. “On the other hand, he may be permitted to play a truly consequential role in the mainstream of history.”

“The only way to test the possibilities is to test them,” he said. “At the moment LBJ is not doing so.”

The other two memos were both from the man who Johnson thought was the person who “might make him Pope or God knows what.” Four months earlier, at the Chicago convention, Jim Rowe had warned him, in writing, not to become “another Dick Russell,” had told him that if he presented an image of a “Southern candidate … it will make it almost impossible for Lyndon Johnson” to be nominated “in 1960,” had said that he knew that such an image “is Lyndon Johnson’s private nightmare.” Now, in December, Rowe warned Johnson, in writing—in two memoranda, dated December 13 and 21—that the nightmare was coming true. There is, Rowe said, a “growing public impression that you are the leader of the Southern Conservatives.”

“This has long worried me and I know it worries you, too,” Rowe said. Nonetheless, he said, “it is clear to me that enough has not been done to change or stop or turn this impression. All you and I have done essentially is to point out to each other that this picture is utterly untrue…. We are inclined to dismiss it.” And, he told Johnson, you “cannot afford to” dismiss it if you want to win the presidential nomination. “It is time that we accept the obvious truth that a public impression is just as much a fact as anything else.” That impression must be changed—quickly.

To accomplish this, Rowe had a number of suggestions. Some were social—Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson will be in Washington immediately after the first of the year, he told Johnson, and you should invite them over for a drink and “conciliate” them; think of what they can do to you if they are hostile!: “If these two men would wish to wrap the [southern candidate] tag … around your neck, you would have a terrible time trying to get rid of it.” And some were strategic, of which the key one was that he immediately put the newly elected Democratic senator from Colorado, former Representative John Carroll, a liberal and ardent civil libertarian, on the Judiciary Committee.

“Your problem in the Senate in 1957 will be twofold,” Rowe wrote. The first is “To avoid becoming the symbol of the South,” and the second was linked with the first: “To cut the ground out from the northern liberals” by at least appearing to cooperate with them. “So on civil rights,” Rowe said, “you should be ready to give the civil libertarians something
which they already have.”
Carroll’s appointment to Judiciary would accomplish this, because it would be meaningless, Rowe said: “The appointment of a civil liberty senator to the Judiciary is nothing special, because they already have a large majority [on the committee].” Johnson had Reedy write Rowe a letter temporizing on the appointment, and Rowe didn’t press the subject, but in subsequent telephone
calls he did press the larger point: that to win the 1960 nomination, Johnson must make himself more acceptable to the North, and the only way to do that was by passing civil rights legislation. “Otherwise,” as Rowe was to say in an interview years later, “the northern bosses were just not going to take him. The Negro problem just wouldn’t allow it.”

The memoranda were not the only warnings from Washington delivered, on the same subject, to the Johnson Ranch that December. At least one other came in a telephone call from the capital, from another man whose advice Lyndon Johnson took very seriously. Tommy Corcoran was, as always, much blunter and less diplomatic than his partner, Rowe, and told Johnson flatly, he was to recall, “If he didn’t pass a civil rights bill, he could just forget [the] 1960 [nomination].”

These were warnings to a man who didn’t need warnings. “Johnson already knew” what he had to do in 1957, Rowe says. As Doris Kearns Goodwin was to write, “The issue of civil rights had created a crisis of legitimacy for both the Senate and the Democratic Party.” And therefore the issue was a crisis for Lyndon Johnson. In a sense—in the journalistic view, the public view—Lyndon Johnson
was
the Senate, its Majority Leader, the senator who would be held responsible for its actions. If the Senate appeared ineffectual, incapable of dealing with the issue,
he
would appear ineffectual, incapable. If it appeared sectional, southern, racist,
he
would appear sectional, southern, racist. Furthermore, as far as the Senate was concerned, he
was
the Democratic Party. If the party looked ineffectual or racist, the blame would fall on his head. If the party split, the chasm between southern and northern senators becoming unbridgeable, the responsibility for that would fall on his head, also. And the issue was, in addition, a crisis for him in terms of his personal ambition. As Goodwin wrote: “As a man with presidential dreams, Johnson recognized that it would be almost impossible for him to escape all responsibility for the Senate to act, that failure on this issue at this time would brand him forever as sectional and therefore unpresidential.”

Lyndon Johnson had no choice, and he knew it. Recalling the situation years later, he would say: “One thing had become absolutely certain: the Senate simply had to act, the Democratic Party simply had to act, and I simply had to act; the issue could wait no longer.”

“Something had to be done,” he said.

He understood as well the consequence of failure on this issue. “I knew,” he said, “that if I failed to produce on this one, my leadership would be broken into a hundred pieces; everything I had built up over the years would be completely undone.”

“P
RODUCING
” on civil rights seemed almost impossibly difficult, however. To win the Democratic presidential nomination, Lyndon Johnson had to keep the
support of the South. And the key to keeping that support was not passing civil rights legislation but rather stopping it from being passed.

Moreover, despite his success in chipping away some of the South’s power in the Senate and concentrating it in his hands, the South’s senatorial power was still immense; in 1957, southerners would be the chairmen of no fewer than five of the Senate’s eight most powerful Standing Committees, and their ally Hayden would be chairman of a sixth, Appropriations. On the key committees and subcommittees, they were stacked, in fact, more deeply than ever; on Appropriations, for example, there would be in 1957, in addition to Chairman Hayden, eleven other Democratic members. Eight were southerners, two were senators who voted with the South on appropriation bills—exactly one, the most junior member, was a vote of which the southerners could not be confident. Even if he decided to pass a bill,
could
he pass it? In a confrontation with the Majority Leader, the chairmen might still win.

And it was not winning that was the most crucial point, for if there was a confrontation between Johnson and the South, Johnson might no longer
be
Majority Leader. The Leader was elected by the Democratic Caucus. In 1957, there would be forty-nine Democratic senators, so only twenty-five votes, a majority of the forty-nine, would be necessary to remove him and pick a new Leader. Even without his own vote, and that of the other Texas senator, Price Daniel, and, possibly, Gore of Tennessee, the South would still have nineteen or twenty of the necessary twenty-five votes, and it could always muster the few necessary additional votes from its allies. And where would
he
get votes? From the liberals, whose every meeting was an exercise in denouncing him? From the liberals, like Paul Douglas, whom he had repeatedly humiliated? Even if Johnson changed his stance on civil rights, could he really count on liberal support? And how many liberal votes were there in the Democratic Caucus anyway? Nine or ten for certain—that was all. If the South turned against him, he could be voted out of the leadership very easily.