Master of the Senate (176 page)

But a civil rights bill had to be passed. And a civil rights bill was going to be passed.

H
IS NEXT JOB
, now that he had persuaded the South to let a weak, token, bill pass, was to reduce the bill to a point at which it was so weak that it
was
only a token—and yet was still strong enough to satisfy northern liberals that something genuine had been accomplished for civil rights.

That proved to be very difficult. For more than four months, in fact, it seemed impossible.

The heart of the bill—the part on which both sides were focusing almost exclusively—was its third part (or “title”), the part covering the “broad array” of civil rights, that would make segregation illegal in schools and in public places such as parks, swimming pools, hotels, motels, theaters, and restaurants. For a while, in mid-January, Johnson seemed to be having some success in persuading the southerners that the measure would be sufficiently weakened if an
amendment was added to provide that anyone indicted for a violation of any of the bill’s provisions be entitled to a trial by jury. With a “jury trial amendment” added, he told them, what would the other provisions matter? They could forgo filibustering against the bill because they could be sure—and could excuse themselves to their constituents by explaining—that the other provisions were now meaningless: what white man had to fear a southern jury? But the bill was simply potentially too destructive to southern mores for that argument to be convincing. The broadness of its attack on the southern way of life—the way in which the bill aimed at reducing it to nothing but a memory by mandating an intermingling of the races in so many “social” settings—infuriated the southern senators. Part III was not only a threat but an insult to their gentle Southland, with its friendly, harmonious relations between the races. And Part III raised, of course, the spectre of that worst of all possibilities: the mongrelization of the noble white race. Adding a jury trial amendment wouldn’t be enough. The southern senators couldn’t take a chance that the amendment would vitiate the bill sufficiently: what if federal judges found ways to circumvent that provision? Part III was totally unacceptable. It had to go—all of it. None of the senators were angrier than Richard Russell. Among the methods by which Johnson was attempting to influence the Southern Caucus was the planting of newspaper articles “reporting” the understanding among “responsible southerners” of the need for passage of civil rights legislation, and of their increased—and highly responsible—willingness to let the legislation pass if it included the jury trial amendment, but Russell was having none of it. On March 25, William S. White floated just such a Johnson trial balloon, suggesting the likelihood that a civil rights bill would pass with Part III largely intact but with a provision requiring a jury trial for all violations. Tearing White’s article out of the paper, Russell scribbled across it a note to himself: “This story embraces LBJ’s ideas and I believe was inspired by him—He talked to me as if this amendment was all we could expect—I don’t agree if he will go all out.”

“All out” meant removing Part III—entirely. To the Senate’s true civil rights believers, however—northern liberals of both parties—Part III was the most essential part of the bill, the part that made it their “dream bill.” The most hurtful racial injustices occurred in the very areas in which Part III would at last allow the federal government to intervene. Without it, even after Supreme Court decisions, African-Americans were still being forced to ride in the back of buses, and black schoolchildren still couldn’t go to school with white children. The liberals flatly refused to consider the elimination of Part III or, indeed, any substantial alteration in its wording. They refused also to consider any form of a jury trial amendment which would make a mockery of a civil rights bill, whatever its other provisions might be. And joining the liberals in refusal were moderate and even some conservative Republicans who were supporting the unamended bill out of loyalty to the Republican Administration which had proposed it, or out of desire for personal political gain.

In attempting to reconcile southern and northern demands, Johnson was engaging in the search for compromise—for some common ground—that is the essence of the legislative process, but on this issue no common ground seemed to exist. For the sake of Johnson’s presidential ambitions, for the sake of “cleaning him up” on civil rights, the South—at Richard Russell’s command—might allow civil rights legislation to pass, but only legislation so weak as to be meaningless. Nor was there any reason for it to allow any more; it had in the filibuster an unbreakable defense. “In the course of their many private conversations that Spring,” Merle Miller says, “Russell … advised Lyndon that the South would not under any circumstances accept Part III; they would filibuster first, he personally would lead the filibuster, and not only would Lyndon find it very difficult to pass a bill, he would find himself in an extremely ticklish position.” Yet when Johnson approached liberals about eliminating Part III, or substantially modifying it, they refused to consider the suggestion. Nor, they felt, was there any reason for them to consider it. At last, after so many years of frustration, they had Republicans on their side, and therefore had the votes to pass a civil rights bill. They were determined to pass one that was truly meaningful, which meant passing one that included Part III. And there was an additional, less altruistic, motive: revenge. “Frustration had … done peculiar things to the psychology of the northern civil rights advocates,” George Reedy was to say. “The feeling of impotence was preying on their mind…. There was a distinct note of retribution in their voices, and it was apparent that they wanted something more than a civil rights bill that would help blacks. They wanted a bill that would include every civil rights concept that had been concocted in over a half a century and they wanted to rub southern noses in it.” Watching Johnson search vainly for a compromise, Reedy felt that “everything had been said that could possibly be said, with the only result a hardening of positions and increasing polarization of attitudes,” and that “Movement in any direction was impossible because the question was not being treated as a legislative matter. Instead, it was a clash between the mores of two cultures—deep-seated moral beliefs that could not be compromised.”

A
T THE START
of the four-month period beginning in mid-January, 1957, optimistic predictions had been the order of the day. The fact that the margin for Lyndon Johnson’s tabling motion had been only seventeen votes “was hailed by civil rights advocates,” the
New York Times
reported, “as ‘historic’ and a ‘landmark’ that … would strengthen liberal chances ‘tremendously’ at the opening of future Congresses.” “We got thirty-eight votes for it!” Howard Shuman exulted. “In 1953, we only got twenty-one.” If Nixon turned his opinion into a ruling in 1959, only forty-nine votes would be necessary to defeat tabling—and to rewrite Rule 22—and suddenly that figure seemed within reach. Declaring that “we made very real gains,” an elated Paul Douglas said, “We’ll win either next time or the time after.”

This view was shared by the press, which, like Douglas, ignored Russell’s threat that a ruling to allow the rewriting of Senate rules would be followed by the rewriting of not one rule but forty. Nixon’s opinion,
Time
said, “raised an emotional floodgate for a piece of vital legislation that had been dammed too long by Senate rules.”
Newsweek’s
Sam Shaffer agreed. The “generation-old coalition of Southern Democrats and certain Northern Republicans in Congress lies in ruins,” he said, and with “their former allies defecting from the ranks … the final vote in the Senate revealed the southerners in a position hopelessly untenable.” Their victory on the tabling motion had been Pyrrhic, Shaffer said. “As they surveyed the field of victory, they saw that, in truth, they had lost.”

On January 21, the Brownell Bill, essentially the same bill guaranteeing a broad range of civil rights that had been submitted in 1956, was returned to Capitol Hill. Liberal senators, liberal strategists, columnists of all persuasions, and most of the Washington press corps agreed that this year the bill would pass. The southerners will try their old tactics,
Time
predicted, but this time, with liberals and Republicans united against the South, those tactics will fail. “There should be enough sympathetic votes to force the bill out of the Judiciary Committee lorded over by Chairman [Eastland]. Before Congress adjourns, everyone agreed, there will be a sizzling Senate filibuster,” but this time the filibuster will be “broken. When some 20 diehard Southern Senators attempt to talk the bill to death on the floor, there should be enough votes even under present cloture rules to cut off the filibuster and bring the measure to a vote.” And then at last,
Time
said, “a tiny band of Southerners who over the years have combined seniority and archaic rules to strangle legislation that displeased them will have suffered momentous defeat.”

The optimism was shared by the Republican leaders in Congress, as is shown by the typed summary of their weekly meeting with President Eisenhower on January 8. According to the summary, an unidentified participant said, “Civil rights—has to go early if to get it,” but the President was assured by House GOP Leader Joseph Martin that there would be “no trouble” getting “early” action on the Brownell Bill. “Republicans and Democrats want to get that bill out,” Martin said. If it came up first in the Senate, he said, there would be fast action. “If Knowland calls it up—pass quick—only 25 votes against.” And, as Martin indicated to reporters, if it came up first in the House, action would be even faster. There was “no question,” he said, that the House would approve the bill in “about two days.” Joining in the assurances, Knowland stated that this year there would not be the usual delays in the Senate—in part because of the cooperation of the Democratic Leader. “I talked with Johnson,” he had told Eisenhower during the meeting. “I told him if they [the Democrats] do not take it up, I intend to. He was agreeable, and he’s served notice on [the] Southerners.” Back at the Capitol, he was equally sanguine. Inviting Clarence Mitchell to his office, he “unequivocally promised” the NAACP lobbyist that if the South tried to filibuster, he would personally lead—and win—the fight for
cloture. A filibuster could delay a civil rights bill, he told a reporter for the
Congressional Quarterly;
it couldn’t stop it.

The customary route to the Senate floor, of course, was through a Senate committee, and the liberals set out along this route, and at first felt they were making good progress. Tom Hennings was brimming with confidence. His bill, similar to Brownell’s, had already been reintroduced and referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He himself was chairman of Judiciary’s three-man subcommittee that had jurisdiction over civil rights bills, but, he explained to reporters, hearings in that subcommittee would be unnecessary, since it had already favorably reported the same bill to the full committee last year. Therefore, Hennings said, the full committee—eight of whose fifteen members were, after all, strong civil rights supporters—could start holding hearings so early that Eastland’s delaying tactics would not work. Knowland agreed. The committee can “have hearings while the House is working, and get it reported by the time the House acts,” the Republican Leader said. “I’d like to start by mid-Feb or late Feb on civil rights.” And once the bill got to the Senate floor, the delaying tactics of the past would not be successful—not only Hennings but other senators assured reporters of that: there is a “belief that a filibuster now could be broken despite past failures,” John D. Morris reported in the
New York Times.
And, the
Times
said, in part this belief was based on the cooperation of the Majority Leader. “The Senate’s Democratic leadership has reached an understanding to bring the civil rights issue to a head early in the present session…. The leadership is hopeful … that if it gets the matter to the Senate floor within the next two months any southern attempt to thwart the decision by ‘extended debate’ can be beaten down….”

And then the reality of the Senate took hold, the reality of Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. and the Foreign Relations Committee when Woodrow Wilson had been trying to win approval of the League of Nations, the reality of the Judiciary Committee when Franklin D. Roosevelt had been trying to win approval of his court reorganization bill—the reality that was still the reality.

Hennings’ confidence about quick subcommittee and committee action lasted only until Judiciary’s first meeting, on January 22, at which there were some developments he had not anticipated. It was a chairman’s prerogative to appoint the members of his committee’s subcommittees, and Chairman East-land now read off the names of the members of Hennings’ subcommittee, and there were no longer three names but seven. The chairman had added to it four new members: southerners Olin Johnston and Sam Ervin and conservative Republicans Roman Hruska and Arthur Watkins. Olin the Solon said that of course there would have to be extensive subcommittee hearings on the civil rights bill for the benefit of the new members, and the other new members agreed with that.

At the subcommittee’s first meeting, on January 30, Hennings tried to persuade its members to agree to a two-week limit on hearings. The two holdover
members voted with him, making three votes in favor of the proposal. The four new members voted against it. Emerging from the subcommittee room after the meeting, Hennings told reporters he was “very disappointed,” but that he would still press for early action, holding long hearings if necessary. Long hearings? Hennings was asked. Was he saying that the subcommittee would meet while the Senate was in session? Did he have the Senate’s permission to do that? Senate permission was required for subcommittees as well as committees, he was reminded. Hennings then applied on the Senate floor for unanimous consent for the necessary permission. Do I hear any objection? the presiding officer asked. It turned out he heard several objections—all in southern accents. And the subcommittee’s favorable report would not be reported to the full committee until March 19.