Master of the Senate (189 page)

Breaking a filibuster once it had started would be as “hopeless” in 1957 as it had been in previous years, Anderson says. Feeling the pressure more than in the past, the southerners “seemed to sense that this time they had to yield a little, if they were not ultimately to lose everything.” But they weren’t going to yield to the extent of allowing a strong bill to pass. “The [Administration] bill would never pass … in its present form,” he says. “The southerners were determined, and the northerners didn’t have enough votes and they couldn’t break the filibuster.” So, unlike the other liberals who had ruled out any talk of compromise, Anderson “just sat myself down on the floor and glued myself there … to listen to the reason the southerners couldn’t do it.” And that Thursday afternoon, shortly before Lyndon Johnson noticed him, Anderson felt he had finally found what he was looking for.

“Hints kept emanating from [the southerners] that a compromise bill was possible,” he felt, but there could be no compromise on Part III largely because of the fear, enunciated by Russell, that that section could be used to authorize the use of military force against the South. “They seemed to accept” voting, but “it seemed clear to me that as long as [Part III] remained, they would filibuster to defeat the entire measure…. They were afraid they were going to have another march through Georgia.” Sitting there at his front-row desk near the lobby, turned slightly around and listening carefully as the southerners to his right and behind him spoke, Anderson understood that their anxiety, justified or not, was genuine, and “I thought if you could just remove the southern fears that we would march an army into the South … they’d probably yield thereafter. I finally decided one day that we could stop this thing [the impending filibuster] by removing that one threat.” Opening the printed draft of H.R. 6127 on his desk, he pulled out a pencil.

At first, he tried to tinker with Part III, rewording it, as other senators had been trying to do. At one point, for example, trying to defuse another southern concern—that Brownell or some other politically motivated Attorney General would be able to institute suits without clearing the action with the President—he crossed out, on page 9 of H.R. 6127, the word “may” in the sentence “The Attorney General may institute for the United States,” and substituted, in blunt pencil, the words “upon order of the President shall.” But that Thursday afternoon, Anderson had come to feel that no amount of tinkering would be enough to reassure the South about Part III. That section, he concluded, would have to be not merely reworded but removed. Bending over his desk, he turned back to page 9, on which the first fourteen lines of Part III were printed, and drew a large
X
across all of them. Turning to page 10, on which the rest of the part was printed, he drew an
X
across the first eight lines on that page. All that was left of Part III was an innocuous last paragraph. All the rest of it was gone.

It was not long after Anderson drew those two
Xs
that Lyndon Johnson walked over to his desk and began to chat. “He was curious what I was doing sitting there on the floor for about two or three days,” Anderson was to recall. Anderson showed him his work and said Johnson should arrange to have it introduced as an amendment by some southerner or conservative who opposed Part III. And almost without a pause, almost in the instant that Clint Anderson made his suggestion, Lyndon Johnson saw what was wrong with it—and also saw what was right with it, saw what it could mean, if only it was used correctly. And he saw in that instant
how
it could be used correctly. “Okay,” he said, approving the amendment. But then he added:
“You
do it.”

The introduction of the amendment by a southerner or a conservative would accomplish nothing, Johnson saw. It would then seem like merely one more attempt by civil rights opponents to gut the civil rights bill; it wouldn’t get him any of the Democratic votes he needed to meet the South’s price. Opponents had already suggested dozens of amendments to weaken Part III; every one had been rejected out of hand by Democratic liberals and moderates because it came from an enemy. But there was a difference—a crucial difference—between this amendment and the others. This one was being suggested not by an enemy of civil rights but by a friend, by a prominent liberal, by a member of the Douglas Group. Johnson felt at that moment, as we know from George Reedy, that moderate Democrats, anxious to find a way out of the civil rights impasse but not willing to accept an enemy’s suggestion, might accept an amendment that came from one of their own. He saw in an instant that this amendment should be not merely suggested by but also introduced by a friend: in fact, by the man who had written it. Put the amendment in, Johnson was telling Anderson, but don’t have it put in by a southerner.
“You
do it.”

And Johnson saw more—in the same instant. When, standing there looking down at Anderson, he said,
“You
do it,” Anderson replied, “How can I? I’m a civil rights man.” Anderson was saying that he didn’t want to be identified with the foes of civil rights, didn’t want to be called a betrayer of the cause. Johnson saw the answer to Anderson’s question in the very instant the question was asked. And he also saw in that instant that the answer was also the answer to another aspect of the problem that he had not been able to solve: how to get votes to pay the South’s price not only from Democratic moderates but from Republican moderates as well. When Anderson asked, “How can I?” Lyndon Johnson told him how he could. Without even a pause, he said: “Get a Republican to go in with you. Get a
good
Republican.”

Johnson meant that Anderson should obtain as a co-sponsor for his amendment a Republican with impeccable civil rights credentials. Anderson’s name would then be linked on the amendment with a friend of civil rights; he would not appear to be participating in an anti-civil rights move. That end could be accomplished by obtaining a Democratic liberal as a co-sponsor, of course, but Johnson’s purpose, the purpose he grasped so quickly, went
beyond that. If Anderson could obtain a Republican co-sponsor, a Republican civil rights advocate, a Republican whose opinion carried weight with his colleagues—“a
good
Republican”—Johnson might be able to get some GOP moderates to go along with the amendment; he might at last, despite Nixon and Knowland, be able to crack that solid Republican front.

Clint Anderson took Johnson’s meaning. And he picked the right Republican—George Aiken of Vermont, whose liberal credentials were impeccable—approached him, “and,” Anderson recalls, “asked him if he would join” him. After thinking it over for a while, Aiken said, in his laconic New England way, “Well, I believe I will.” When Aiken gave the news to friends on the Republican side of the aisle, several immediately said not only that they would vote for the amendment, but that they would join Aiken as co-sponsors.

Aiken reported this response to Anderson, Anderson reported it to Johnson, and Johnson reported it to Russell—who understood immediately not only that this amendment would give him what he wanted, by narrowing the scope of the civil rights bill to voting rights—but also that this amendment, unlike the others, would
pass.
*
The change the South wanted would now be proposed by liberals, by respected liberals of both parties. Moderate liberals in both parties would be happy to support an amendment with so impeccable a liberal provenance. With their votes added to those of the South and the Hells Canyon bloc (and the six or seven Republican conservatives already enlisted), the amendment would command a solid majority. For the first time since the bill had been introduced in January, Russell could be confident that if he allowed it to reach the floor, there would be, on the floor, the necessary votes to eliminate Part III. Johnson had met the first half of the South’s price. He still couldn’t pay the other half—the addition of a jury trial amendment to Part IV—but if that section remained in a form unsatisfactory to the South, Russell would still have another opportunity to use the filibuster: on the motion to bring the bill to a final vote. He would not be foreclosing the use of that weapon. A big step had been taken toward meeting his demands, and he could therefore allow the bill to take a big step—could allow it to come to the floor. And by so doing, he would avoid using the filibuster now and thereby keep alive his hopes of avoiding the damage to the South, and to Johnson’s presidential hopes, that its use would entail. Russell asked for a quorum call, so that he would have time to check with moderate senators, both Democratic and Republican, to make certain that his assessment of the new situation was correct. He found that it was.

The days of Lyndon Johnson’s low profile ended abruptly. Late that Thursday afternoon, there was a dramatic announcement. It concerned the Minority Leader’s motion, but this time it wasn’t made by the Minority Leader.

“I hope tomorrow we can work out a [unanimous consent] agreement on a time to vote” on Knowland’s motion to bring the bill to the floor, Lyndon Johnson said, and, he said, he hoped the time would be during the very next week. Reporters rushed to learn Russell’s reaction and were surprised to learn that his feelings had changed—that the southern leader was now, suddenly, amenable to that timetable. Suddenly the name in the headlines about the Senate fight wasn’t “Knowland” or “Douglas” but a new name: “
JOHNSON SEEKING VOTE ON CIVIL RIGHTS.
”

The next morning, the southern senators caucused again in Russell’s office. Although some of them could hardly bear to go along with his suggestion that they neither filibuster Knowland’s motion nor object to a unanimous consent agreement, thereby allowing a civil rights bill to reach the floor, they agreed at last because it was Russell who was making the suggestion. (He reminded them that should the bill later come to a vote, they would of course be able to cast their own, individual votes against it, so they would be able to tell their constituents they had opposed it.) Johnson thereupon introduced the agreement, which did indeed set the vote on Knowland’s motion for the next week—for Tuesday, July 16 (“Mr. President, I have at the desk a proposed unanimous consent agreement….” “Is there objection? … Without objection, the proposed agreement is approved”)—and then delivered a speech. “I believe the Senate … is proving that it can meet any issue with dignity and thoroughness,” Johnson said. “This may disappoint those who were looking for a bitter and bloody brawl, but it will not disappoint the American people. I think we all realize that in a very real sense the Senate is on trial, and the American people want us to win.” And when, immediately after the speech, photographers sent a request to the floor to have Johnson step into the lobby to have his picture taken, they found him newly agreeable, and the Associated Press photograph reproduced the next day in newspapers across the country showed him sitting between Russell and Knowland, as the architect of the agreement that would at last bring a civil rights bill to the Senate floor.

O
N
T
UESDAY
, J
ULY 16
, Anderson sent his amendment to the desk, saying, “I do this jointly with the able senior Senator from Vermont … a man of outstanding integrity and a man of the highest character, with whom I delight to associate myself,” and Aiken told the Senate why he was co-sponsoring the amendment: “We who support the cause of civil rights know that Part III is unacceptable to a sizable segment of the Senate. Its retention in the bill could result in no legislation at all during this session or any other session in the near future.” After a last outburst from Harry Byrd, who could barely restrain his rage at what was happening (charging that Earl Warren, the ADA, and the NAACP were the evil geniuses behind the bill, he called Warren a “modern Thaddeus Stevens,” and, shaking his fist at Mitchell and Wilkins, who were sitting
together in the gallery, he insulted them by likening them to Goldy and Dusty, the fictitious African-American twins whose ignorance and laziness had enlivened a 1940s radio comedy. “There they are,” he said—“the Gold Dust twins”), the Senate voted, 71 to 18, to make H.R. 6127 its pending business. The eighteen votes against the motion were all from southerners; Gore and Kefauver of Tennessee did not vote with the South, and neither did Yarborough and Johnson. Johnson announced that his support for the motion to bring the bill to the floor was “not to be construed” as support for the bill in its present form. “Some of us to whom this bill is unacceptable in its present form are ready to allow it to be debated out of a decent respect for the convictions of others.”

At the conclusion of the vote, Lyndon Johnson and William Knowland, each seated at their front-row desks, leaned across the center aisle and shook hands. Both had broad smiles on their faces, Johnson because he had won, Knowland because he didn’t realize he had lost.

That realization may not have dawned fully on the Minority Leader for four days. It was just a few minutes after the vote that allowed the bill to come to the floor that Anderson stood up at his desk near the far end of the Democratic arc and said, “Mr. President, I call up my amendment” (the amendment that, by striking from the bill its key provision, made it in effect a different, much weaker, bill than the one Knowland had been supporting), and no sooner had the clerk read out the amendment’s title than Johnson made a “parliamentary inquiry” of the chair to emphasize that the amendment was now the “pending question” and the chair confirmed that it was. Knowland had been outsmarted again. He had not wanted to accept amendments, but Johnson’s inquiry meant that the bill could not be voted on until after the amendment had been voted on. The vote on the Anderson-Aiken Amendment was not held for four more days, to give senators a chance to get their views on the record. During those days, Knowland apparently grasped what was going to happen in the vote, and just before the clerk called the roll, he made an emotional last-ditch plea to his Republicans to stand fast and defeat the amendment. Ten days earlier, however, Johnson had seen in a moment—the moment in which Anderson handed him the draft with the two
Xs
penciled across it—that if Anderson got a
“good
Republican” to co-sponsor the bill, the near-solid Republican front on Part III would be broken, and when the roll was called now, it was broken wide open. No fewer than eighteen of the forty-six Republicans—not only every midwestern conservative but Aiken’s fellow northeastern moderate liberals Saltonstall (Knowland’s own Assistant Leader), Cotton, Flanders, John J. Williams, and H. Alexander Smith—went against their leader and voted to eliminate Part III from the Administration’s bill. Johnson had seen in a moment that if Anderson introduced the amendment himself instead of letting a southerner or a conservative introduce it, Democratic moderates and some liberals would accept it, and they accepted it with open arms. Kerr and Monroney of
Oklahoma, Chavez, Theodore Green, Bible, Frear—they all joined the southerners in voting for the amendment. Johnson had so many votes lined up behind it that he didn’t need them all, and “at the last minute,” as
Time
reported, “he was able to release” several Hells Canyon westerners from their commitment to vote with the South, and allow them “to vote against the bill to strengthen their civil rights reputations back home”; only four Hells Canyon Democrats—Church, Mansfield, Murray, and O’Mahoney—were recorded for the amendment. The Democratic “coalition” Johnson had put together was a very unusual one. As the
Baltimore Sun
commented, “It was … strange to see so-called ‘liberals’ voting on an issue such as this with Senators Eastland and Johnston.” But it was an overwhelming coalition. Thirty-four Democrats—every Democrat but the thirteen most ardent liberals—voted for the Anderson-Aiken Amendment. It was adopted by a vote of 52 to 38. Part III was gone.