Master of the Senate (174 page)

Despite the effectiveness of his tactics and methods, in the light of his longer-term goal, the overall weakness of his position had become very clear during that first week in January—because during that fight Richard Russell’s position had become very clear. However much affection Russell might feel for Lyndon Johnson, the overriding reason that Russell wanted him to become President was to protect the interests of the South; when Johnson’s interests collided with those interests, it was the South’s, not Johnson’s, that would be protected. In fact, in the final analysis, it would be only the South’s interests that mattered. Aware though Russell might be that Johnson could never become President “unless the Senate first disposes of civil rights,” if “disposing” of civil rights entailed Senate actions that hurt the South, and the rigid racial segregation that Russell felt was vital to the South, then the disposing would be dispensed with. Use of the filibuster would put an end to Lyndon Johnson’s dreams, but the filibuster was the South’s ultimate defense, and Russell’s firm determination to fight Clint Anderson’s motion to the death had demonstrated that he would never agree to any weakening of that defense, no matter how damaging the consequences of such a fight for Johnson’s presidential ambitions. Johnson had stood solidly with the South in that fight, but if he hadn’t, and if the South had been losing, what would have been the result? “Extended debate” on forty separate rules—the most massive filibuster of them all. To advance along his path, Lyndon Johnson had to persuade the southerners to allow him to distance himself from them on civil rights, and from the filibuster that defended civil rights, and in the first test of 1957, the southerners had shown not the slightest inclination to allow him any real distance at all.

W
ITH THE SUCCESS
of Lyndon Johnson’s tabling motion, voices across the entire spectrum of liberal opinion were raised against him. “Once again,
democracy has taken a beating in the halls of the United States Senate,” the
New York Post
editorialized. “It was a bad day for the cause of freedom. The unholy alliance [of southern Democrats and midwestern Republicans] still holds sway.” And, the
Post
said, it holds sway largely because of the Majority Leader. “How can the Democrats explain the continued eminence of Lyndon Johnson, who is justly taking bows for the grand maneuvers of the filibuster legion?” The
Post’s
was always one of the shrillest voices in the liberal chorus, but that January there was, in liberal discussions of Lyndon Johnson, a harsh note even in voices that were generally calm and reasonable. In a long, thoughtful analysis of the Senate, Richard Rovere wrote in
The New Yorker
that one of the institution’s most striking aspects is its
esprit de corps
, which “unites senators of differing political views … against the world outside the Senate.” And proof of this, Rovere said, is “the support that [Senate] Democrats of left, right and center have given” to Johnson, while outside the Senate, “among liberal northern Democrats as a group, it has become an article of faith that Senator Johnson plays a generally destructive role, and that no good can come of his continuing as spokesman for the party.”

This liberal anger certainly appeared justified. In fighting for the filibuster, Lyndon Johnson had seemingly only been doing in early January, 1957, what he had done so many times before. It was only natural for liberals who for twenty years had seen Lyndon Johnson standing squarely on the side of the South and against civil rights to assume that during the rest of 1957 he would be standing on the same side again.

But he wouldn’t. During Lyndon Johnson’s previous political life, compassion had constantly been in conflict with ambition, and invariably ambition had won. Given the imperatives of his nature, in such a conflict, it had been inevitable that the ambition would win. For the compassion to be released, to express itself in concrete accomplishments, it would have to be compatible with the ambition, pointing in the same direction. And now, at last, in 1957, it was.

So Lyndon Johnson changed—and changed the course of American history. For at last this leader of men would be leading, fighting, not only for himself but for a great cause. This man who in the pursuit of his aims could be so utterly ruthless—who would let nothing stand in his way; who, in the pursuit, deceived, and betrayed and cheated—would be deceiving and betraying and cheating on behalf of something other than himself: specifically, on behalf of the sixteen million Americans whose skins were dark. All through Lyndon Johnson’s political life—as congressman and senator, as congressman’s secretary and NYA director—there had been striking evidence not only of compassion but of something that could make compassion meaningful: signs of a most unusual capacity, a very rare gift, for using the powers of government to help the downtrodden and the dispossessed. This capacity had always been held in check by his quest for power. Now he had the power.
Power reveals.
The compassion that had been hidden was to be revealed now—in full. Did those sixteen
million Americans need a mighty champion in the halls of government? They were about to get one.

H
IS FIRST JOB
was to persuade southern senators that they should allow a civil rights bill to pass—that even though they had preserved the filibuster, they shouldn’t use it.

To persuade them, he employed, in individual conversations with these senators and in meetings of the Southern Caucus in Richard Russell’s office, several arguments that his actions on Rule 22 made them more disposed to accept.

Some of these arguments were valid. The times were changing, he told them, and we (he always used “we” in talking with the southerners; he had been using that pronoun since his “We of the South” speech in 1949) had better wake up to that. Demand for civil rights legislation was rising. Civil rights was a big issue, and it was going to get bigger—and we look bad on that issue. The Republicans had decided to do anything they had to do to win the nigger vote. (He usually used that noun in talking with southerners, varying its pronunciation to fit the senator; it was “Nigras” with some senators from the Middle South, “Negras” with Eastland or Olin Johnston.) The Republicans were making civil rights a party issue—their issue. It’s a tough issue for the Democrats. It’s hurting us. Look what happened in the last election; look at that vote in Harlem! And it’s hurting us because of what we’re doing here in the Senate. The perception is that the Senate is the roadblock, the reason that no civil rights bill has passed in eighty-two years. And it’s easy for Negroes to put the blame on the Senate, because we’re exposed here. Did you hear what the voters out in Oregon were saying to Dick Neuberger about ol’ Jim? And we’re not only weak in the Senate because our Republican friends seem to have suddenly forgotten everything we’ve done for them, and not only because Bill Knowland is going to run for Governor of California, and he needs the Negro vote. Don’t forget who the presiding officer is. Nixon is going to try to out-nigger Knowland. He’s conniving with the NAACP right now to put us on the spot so we’ll look bad. If we don’t do something, that issue is going to hurt the whole Democratic Party even worse in ’58 and ’60. Look what can happen to us in the Senate. All the Republicans have to do is take one seat.
One seat!
Then it’ll be a tie, and Nixon will break it, and we won’t even get to organize the Senate again. They will. And the only way to defuse that issue is to let a token bill go through so the Republicans can’t say we’ve stopped all civil rights legislation again.

The validity of some of the other arguments he was making to the southern senators is more difficult to assess. One argument that Johnson made a centerpiece of his case to the southerners was that we might not even win a filibuster this time, that cloture might be imposed—first, because we’ve got fewer votes: Kefauver isn’t going to vote with us, all he can think about is being
President, and maybe Gore won’t be with us, either; that brings us down to twenty votes. And there were other arguments. For a long time we didn’t have to worry about cloture, because we could count on the support of the Republicans in the Senate. Now, he said, that support was gone, and we’d better realize that. The whole Republican Party, from the top down, was going to pander to the Negroes; the President will put pressure on the Republican senators, the Vice President will, Bill Knowland will—and the Republican senators themselves will see the opportunity not only for the Republican presidential candidate but for
themselves.
What are we going to do, Lyndon Johnson asked the southerners, if one day we go to the Republicans for the rest of the thirty-three votes we need to sustain a filibuster and the votes aren’t there? And the problem wasn’t only with the Republicans. The times were changing, he told them, agitation for civil rights legislation was rising, and therefore pressure on
all
their Senate colleagues, Democrat as well as Republican, was rising. It was going to be steadily more difficult for non-southern Democrats to vote with the South.

And even if we
do
stave off cloture this year, he told the southerners, filibustering this year will hurt us in years to come. There was just too much sentiment out there in the country against filibustering. It’s too easy a target. You heard what Nixon said in Harlem: “If you support Ike and elect a Republican Senate, you’ll get action, not filibusters.” Thurmond aide Harry Dent, who had been assigned by Thurmond, more suspicious of Johnson than the other southern senators, to “hang out in the Democratic cloakroom” and listen to “what LBJ was up to,” says that Johnson was arguing that, “Yes, the southern leaders had power, but these powers would erode.” And, Johnson said, if enough Republicans go along with those goddamned bomb-throwers in our own party, how can we be sure that cloture won’t be imposed, if not in 1958, then in 1959? What if we lose the next vote to table? If Nixon then firms that opinion up into a ruling, and the Republicans have the votes to sustain it—what’re we going to do then? We might win a filibuster this year, but if we use one this year, then next year or the year after we might lose the whole right to filibuster—might lose it forever. And without a filibuster, the South is defenseless. They can pass any goddamn thing they want. Johnson, Reedy says, was telling the southerners,
“Don’t filibuster!
You have to let a civil rights bill pass this year! If you don’t, God knows what is going to happen!”

Another argument he was using was that they shouldn’t filibuster because there was no need to filibuster. The Brownell Bill might be objectionable, he said, but, he said, it could be amended. Some of our friends on the other side of the aisle don’t like Brownell, or his bill, any more than we do, he said. There are some people on our side of the aisle who feel the same way, even if they can’t say so. These senators, he said, might need to vote for a civil rights bill to satisfy their constituents, but it didn’t have to be a strong bill. All these senators were his friends, he said. He could work with them. They would negotiate together. The bill might be a strong bill now, but by the time it came to a vote it
would be a very different bill. It would be amended down until it was so weak that it was only a token bill.

They could count on him, he told the southerners. He would get the bill amended down to something so weak that we have no real objection to it, to something we can live with. And then we won’t have to filibuster it. We can let it come to a vote. We’ll still vote against it, and if it passes, it won’t really matter. “We’re up against the wall,” he told the southerners. “We have to get the best that we can get—
and we can get it!
The future of the South is at stake here. We have to save the South as much as we can. If we don’t do this [let a token bill go through], all the southern principles will go down the tubes. We can’t have everything the way we want it, but we can have most of it.
We’re up against the wall!”
And the way to forestall all these unpleasant possibilities—of the passage of a law that would transform the southern way of life; of a defeat of a filibuster this year; of the outlawing of the filibuster in some year to come—was to allow a civil rights bill to go through this year; a weak bill but a
bill
, so that the Republicans could not say that the Democrats were standing in the way of any civil rights legislation at all.

The validity of these arguments is impossible to evaluate from this distance, for what is involved is the predicting of the votes of individual senators, and so many factors might have influenced the senators that after so many years the votes can’t be predicted with any confidence. Even by the most generous estimate, however, those arguments appear to be doubtful.
You got up to thirty-three real fast
, Bryce Harlow says, and not only southern aides but many observers on the liberal side and the Republican side also agree. A typical comment is that of Sam Zagoria, administrative assistant to the liberal Republican Clifford Case. The liberals, he said, “felt they could win a straight vote, but they felt they couldn’t beat a filibuster.” Murray Zweben, secretary to the Senate Parliamentarian, says, “Down deep, if push came to shove, the liberals wouldn’t have had the votes they thought they had.” But some of the southerners didn’t count, had never counted—Byrd, for example.
“Johnson counted for him.”

And this helped Johnson frighten the southerners. When he told them that a filibuster might lose, many of them believed him. And some of them were frightened: the southern way of life was precious to them; how could they gamble it on an uncertainty?

A
NOTHER ARGUMENT BEING MADE
to the southern senators was being made much less explicitly—generally only by implication, only in hints. And it was only occasionally made by Lyndon Johnson; usually it was made by Richard Russell—for since the argument concerned Lyndon Johnson, at times it was better that it come from someone else. It was a very persuasive argument. The South should let a civil rights bill pass, this argument said, because if it passed, Lyndon Johnson would have a better chance of becoming President.