Master of the Senate (194 page)

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ONDAY AND
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, or at least most of Tuesday, developments on the Senate floor appeared to confirm that appraisal. Monday, when Johnson returned from Texas, was bad, with Carey’s letter being read into the record by Joe Clark, who used the occasion to jeer at Johnson’s attempt to get labor support (“I hope that in due course the Majority Leader … will feel free to reveal to the Senate who are the labor leaders who favor a jury trial amendment”), with Javits holding the floor for hours, further antagonizing southerners by his manner, and with increasingly bitter squabbling between liberals and southerners. Knowland could not contain his gloating. In Robert Mann’s words, “He taunted the southerners to begin their filibuster. ‘Let’s have it now and fight it out,’ he said.”

Tuesday—for most of the day at least—was worse. The day began for Johnson when, still in bed that morning, he was leafing through the
Washington Post
and came upon a large advertisement. It was “An Open Letter” to “the Senate of the United States,” but it might have been addressed to him personally, so directly did it attack what he had been doing: “It would be better not to pass any civil rights legislation at all than to pass [this] bill…. We are in a better position to get justice in civil rights cases under existing laws than we would be if you pass the proposed ‘jury trial’ amendment.” The letter was signed by eighty-one southern liberal leaders—including Aubrey Williams, Johnson’s onetime boss at the National Youth Administration and for two decades one of his staunchest supporters. When he reached his office in the
Capitol, the day got even worse, for Reedy handed him the AFL-CIO statement, and just as he walked down the stairs and out onto the Senate floor, his attempt to tamp down the outright antagonism between the South and the liberals that would destroy any hopes of compromise appeared to explode.

The explosion may have occurred partly because that morning two officers of the Tuskegee Civic Association appeared in the Senate Office Building to describe the ongoing voting dispute in Alabama’s Macon County. They did it at a news conference called by “the all-out civil rights forces.” The conference had been designed to attract publicity, and in that aim it failed: coverage the next day would be scant; the
New York Times
didn’t carry a word. But while reporters didn’t come to the conference, senators did—eleven of them, including Paul Douglas and ten members of the Douglas Group, Republicans as well as Democrats—and they heard for themselves as the two Alabamans, W. P. Mitchell and Linwood T. Dorsey, told not only about the voucher system and other devices employed to discourage Negro voting, but also about brutal police raids on the offices of organizations that encouraged Negro registration. As the senators listened, the gravity that some of them had assumed for the benefit of the one or two photographers present seemed to deepen into a feeling more genuine, and several picked up the printed text of the two Alabamans’ statements and began reading intently, with expressions of shock on their faces. If these liberal senators had forgotten what they were really fighting for, they were reminded that morning. The news conference ended shortly after the Senate’s noon bell rang, and they walked out on the Senate floor full of indignation, and as they came through the double doors, Richard Brevard Russell was speaking, at his center-aisle desk, as courteous and urbane as ever, and he was denying that Negroes were excluded from voting or jury service in the South, illustrating his point with homey anecdotes (“Mr. President, I well remember the first time I ever went into a federal court as an attorney…. I think it was in the year 1920…. It so happened that I was representing a man by the name of Polk Manders, who had been caught at a still where illicit whiskey was being made…. A great deal of that kind of activity has occurred in my section of the country in times past…. On the panel which tried him were two of our Negro citizens …”)—and their indignation boiled over. As soon as Russell finished, Javits said, “Mr. President, I do not think it is fair to let the record stand as it is…. I know, and every other senator knows, that there are Negroes who serve on juries in the South. We also know that there are Negroes who vote in the South…. I invite the attention of senators to the facts on the merits, Mr. President. One fact is that in case after case after case, including cases in Georgia, the Supreme Court has had to void verdicts of juries in cases involving crimes as serious as murder because there was a systematic exclusion of Negroes from juries.” Then Douglas was recognized. Russell had referred to the recent race riots in Chicago and Detroit, and Douglas admitted that such riots had occurred. “But I can say that in the city of Chicago, Negroes vote,” he went on.
“They are not compelled to ride on segregated cars. They are not segregated in the schools. They have access to the parks and other public facilities. In these respects and many others their dignity is not offended. They are treated as human beings.” He pointed a long arm at Russell, sitting among his massed southerners in the center section. “We are not trying to cover up abuses,” Douglas shouted. “We are trying to remedy them; and I only wish my good friends from the South would adopt a similar attitude, instead of trying to sprinkle rose water on what we know to be great abuses.”

And Johnson’s long attempt to avoid outright antagonism on the Senate floor may also have exploded because Russell was losing on the jury trial amendment—and because losing was something that, despite his urbanity, Russell could not bear. At one point during Douglas’ outburst, the Illinois Senator, still pointing across the floor at Russell, said that “the Senator from Georgia has evidently been counting noses,” and knows he is losing. And when Douglas said that, Russell jumped to his feet, and, as William V. Shannon wrote, “stood upon the Senate floor and tore the mask of civility from the face of the civil rights debate”—and in the process also allowed the mask to fall from his own face, as it had fallen before on the rare occasions when he had been losing. The high patrician brow and the arched patrician nose were flushed with anger, and in his eyes as he stared across the desks at Paul Douglas was fury. “The Senator from Illinois points his admonitory finger,” Russell shouted. “He says, ‘You gentlemen are too sensitive.’ Then he proceeds against our social order.”

“Hypocrisy!” Richard Brevard Russell shouted. “Sanctimony! Holier-than-thou!” Then, as Shannon reported, “he defended segregation in all its aspects.”

“You’ve failed in the North,” Russell said. “Your method does not work. You have race riots. But you come down and say, ‘We know better. We are going to force you to do things our way.’ I say, keep your race riots in Chicago. Don’t export them to Georgia.”

Suddenly the scene among the four long arcs of desks was a scene unpleasantly reminiscent of Senate civil rights debates of previous years. Hoisting himself upright and holding on to his desk for support because in his emotion he had forgotten to pick up his crutches, Potter of Michigan shouted to the dais, “Mr. President, will the Senator yield?” Russell had no choice because, by mentioning Detroit, he had referred to Potter’s state, and if there was anything almost as sacred to Richard Russell as the untainted blood of a pure white race, it was the Senate rules. “I yield,” he said grudgingly.

“None of us from the North are proud of the fact that race riots took place,” Potter began. “But Negro citizens in our state have every opportunity to vote.”

Russell interrupted him. “Oh, they vote in my state, too,” he said. “They vote as freely in Georgia as they do in Michigan. I am becoming tired of hearing
that kind of statement.” Russell had no right to interrupt him, Potter said. “The Senator referred to Michigan.” “Yes, I did,” Russell admitted. “I should like to have him listen to my reply for a moment,” Potter said. His reply was that despite the riots, “great progress has been made in Michigan…. Because there are tensions we do not stick our heads in the sand.”

Russell’s face was a very deep red now. “I am delighted to hear the Senator say that progress is being made,” he said. Then he said, “The system which the senator from Michigan wants to impose on Georgia brought about race riots in Michigan…. If the Senator from Michigan would simply not seek to invade our state to fasten the race riot-generating system upon us, we would appreciate it. Let him keep it in Michigan.” All over the Chamber, on both sides of the aisle, senators were on their feet shouting for the floor. At first Russell refused to yield it, but one of the senators was Pat McNamara, also of Michigan. “Yes; I yield to the Senator from Michigan,” Russell said at last. “I mentioned his state.” McNamara said Michigan needed no defense, that his state could handle its affairs without outside interference. “Then why does not the Senator let us do the same?” Russell asked. There was applause from the southern senators seated around him, but he had asked a question, and he was to receive an answer to it. “McNamara,” Doris Fleeson wrote, “roared in the bull voice trained in a thousand union meeting halls: ‘Because you’ve had ninety years and haven’t done it!’”

The galleries above burst into applause; appalled ushers rushed to still it. The two senators stood there shouting at each other, in their contrasting accents. “I do not know what all the smog is about,” McNamara said. “I agree with the Senator from Michigan that he doesn’t know what it is all about,” Russell said. The southerners laughed. “I agree that one of us does not know what it is all about, but I am not sure that I am the one,” McNamara said. The galleries applauded. Russell’s rhetoric escalated into the rhetoric of martyrdom: when Florida’s Spessard Holland tried to change the subject, Russell said, “Here we have a senator who wants to take time out from being crucified.”
He
didn’t want any time-outs; for more than three hours, he stood there, lashing out at the North—while the North lashed back.

Almost as dramatic to the journalists as the shouts of the debaters was the demeanor of the Majority Leader. “As Russell raged on,” Shannon wrote, “Lyndon Johnson slumped further and further down in his seat. Misery and nervous irritability distorted his features.” Then, as the man standing at the desk immediately behind him continued to rage, Johnson turned his chair all the way around, either to look right up at Russell—or, as Doris Fleeson suggested, for another reason: so that his face would be concealed from the Press Gallery, “so that the reporters could not judge his reaction to the damage being done” to his plans.

For seven months he had managed to maintain a layer of civility between the liberals and the South—against long odds. But now, “in three hours,” as
Mary McGrory wrote, “the veneer of senatorial courtesy which has given a high gloss to … weeks of debate” had cracked wide open. “The attempt to make the whole question a constitutional problem rather than a human one abruptly collided, as Senator Russell… shouted … at the opposition.”

Contained in the angry exchanges that had rumbled back and forth just over Lyndon Johnson’s head, moreover, almost lost in the general invective but picked up quite clearly by his keen ears, had been some particularly disturbing sentences. At one point, Douglas, taunting Russell because he didn’t have the votes, had demanded that the ballot on the jury trial amendment come soon—and had made the demand not only of Russell but of him: “I think the Majority Leader could do very well” by scheduling the vote “not later than Saturday,” Douglas had said. “I wonder if the Majority Leader would consider that as a possible proviso.” And when Johnson had replied that he had “not given any thought to the matter,” Douglas had been insistent: “How about Monday? How about voting on the O’Mahoney Amendment on Monday?” The civil rights forces, knowing they had the majority, were pressing for a vote—as they had pressed for a vote in past years. Russell, lashing back at McNamara, had suddenly said, apropos of nothing in his previous remarks, “So, Mr. President, we have tried to act like reasonable men. We have tried to act with restraint in the face of great provocation…. But, Mr. President, we reserve the right to defend ourselves…. As responsible men, we shall insist on our right to be heard fully on all amendments to the pending bill.” And there had been another development, peripheral but also an ominous straw in the wind. With funds for the Small Business Administration due to run out on Wednesday, July 31—the very next day—Johnson, attempting to avoid the closing of the agency, had requested a unanimous consent agreement to take up its appropriation bill, and then return immediately to the civil rights debate. His request, however, had not been granted: Wayne Morse had objected; and there had been other hands raised on the floor when the presiding officer had recognized Morse; other senators were prepared to object. The Senate had not been able to take up urgent public business. That Tuesday afternoon, the body had, as Fleeson wrote, “suddenly reverted to type.” It was beginning, more and more, to resemble Senates of the past, in which the position of the Majority Leader had not been an enviable one. Scott Lucas and Boob McFarland had been in the same position that Lyndon Johnson was very close to being in now, unable to muster either the votes to end a filibuster or the votes to pass the amendment that alone could persuade the South
not
to filibuster. He was coming closer and closer to losing control of the Senate—as Lucas had lost control, as McFarland had lost control just before becoming objects of ridicule. A column by Murray Kempton published that Tuesday showed how perilously close Lyndon Johnson was to the same fate that had befallen his two hapless predecessors. Johnson, Kempton wrote, was “almost the prisoner of the South,” and “with the 20-year dominant coalition between Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans in ruins,
Lyndon Johnson’s cupboard is bare. The politicians who count in the Senate today are William F. Knowland and Richard M. Nixon; and Lyndon Johnson is a state of things whose time is past.” Kempton wrote about “the desperation with which Lyndon Johnson wriggled for delay,” and about the fact that his wriggling was hopeless. “The Democrats wondered yesterday, with Johnson in the shadows, how they could meet Nixon’s triumphant kind of calculation.” There was a phrase in Kempton’s column that the leader was not used to seeing written about himself; the phrase was “poor Lyndon Johnson.” And the most hurtful aspect of the column by this bellwether of liberal opinion may have been its implications for Johnson’s hope that he could use the civil rights fight to get closer to the Democratic Party’s liberal wing. Kempton’s column showed how very far he was from achieving that end.