Master of the Senate (203 page)

Nonetheless, while after the 1957 Civil Rights Act there remained substantial liberal suspicion and criticism of Lyndon Johnson, there was not nearly so much as there had been before. At least some of the southern stigma—the fatal “smell of magnolias”—had scrubbed off. Philip Graham had felt that for Johnson to become President, he had to be “cleaned up on civil rights,” and that
cleaning up had gotten off to a good start. Among the signatures at the bottom of the letters to the editor that appeared in newspapers during and just after the 1957 civil rights fight were names with real significance to liberals. One letter argued that “The Senate bill may not go as far as many think it should, but [its] significance should not be minimized…. If progress is to be achieved, differences as to what should be done must yield to a consensus as to what can be done.” The letter assured “friends and supporters of civil rights” that they could support the bill with “clear consciences.” And the arguments and assurances were given weight by the signature at the end of the letter: Benjamin V. Cohen. Another letter was from Dean Acheson. “I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the bill is among the great achievements since the war and, in the field of Civil Rights, the greatest since the Thirteenth Amendment…. Can’t we for once be proud of ourselves when we do the right thing?” (Richard Rovere was to note in
The New Yorker
that “If Mr. Eisenhower decides to sign the bill, he will have in common with Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman the experience of approving a piece of legislation whose vital and operative sections have come largely from the hands of Benjamin V. Cohen and Dean Acheson.”) That was a telling point for liberals: how could any true liberal ignore the opinions of men like Cohen and Acheson? When the American Civil Liberties Union denounced the bill,
The New Republic
denounced the American Civil Liberties Union. “It took the U.S. Senate nearly 90 years to approve a civil rights bill, and it took the ACLU lawyers several hours to decide (and notify the press) that the bill was worse than nothing,” a
New Republic
editorial said. “Unprecedented progress has already been made,” and the progress,
The New Republic
said, had been made because of Lyndon Johnson, who called “on two of the New Deal’s best draftsmen, Ben Cohen and Dean Acheson, for aid.”

And finally there was, under the dateline “Hyde Park,” a word from the liberal whose word meant the most of all. She had been torn as to whether or not to support the amended bill, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in “My Day.” “It is one of those difficult decisions in which you know that the way you are voting may possibly injure the objective you are trying to attain,” but, she said, she had finally decided that “the civil rights bill with the amendment would be a small step forward and I hope it will become law.” And, of course, the NAACP and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights had supported the measure. By passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Lyndon Johnson had obtained the political gain that his political ambition demanded. A moderate columnist, Roscoe Drummond, may have summed up the situation most definitively when he wrote, “If you think the Senate did wrong in cutting back the civil rights bill, much of the blame goes to Johnson. If you think the Senate acted responsibly and usefully in passing a compromise bill, much of the credit goes to Johnson…. He proved himself the ascendant leader of the whole Democratic party in Congress, Northern and Western liberals as well as Southern conservatives…. Because he voted for and is an architect of the right-to-vote law, he is
the first Southern Democratic leader since the Civil War to be a serious candidate for the presidential nomination.”

A
ND THERE WAS YET ANOTHER REASON
—the most important reason of all—that the Civil Rights Act of 1957 meant hope. There may have been only meagre significance in the Act itself, but there was massive significance in what the fight for the Act’s passage had revealed about the potentialities of the man who led that fight, about the possibilities that lay within that man for the advancement of social justice in America.

In the great “struggle for America’s soul” that was the civil rights movement, extraordinary black leaders had already emerged—Randolph, Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall—and during the 1950s, of course, another figure, who would eclipse them all, was coming to the forefront among blacks. But as that leader, Martin Luther King, was to say, the evil of racial discrimination in America was “so great that the Negro cannot fight it alone.” Help was needed not only from among men whose skins were dark but from among men whose skins were white; leadership was needed—effective leadership: leadership that not only enunciated ideals but that made progress, limited though it might be, toward achieving them. It was needed particularly in the halls of government, because it could only be from those halls that laws, the only permanent remedy for injustice, could issue. And until 1957 governmental leadership was particularly lacking, its absence particularly glaring and destructive. Dwight D. Eisenhower declined to provide moral leadership on the fundamental moral problem of the time, and on Capitol Hill the leadership of the fight for civil rights laws provided not laws but only words. In 1957, however, effective leadership in the fight for civil rights laws had been provided—by Lyndon Johnson. If he was not able to do more, if the leadership he had provided had been only on behalf of a weak bill, he had nonetheless done all he could, the most he could do in the position—Majority Leader of one of the two houses of Congress—in which he was situated.

But what if he were to rise, one day, to another position?

Lyndon Johnson was eventually to attain the post to which he had aspired all his life. And when he did, he would as President of the United States ram to passage the great Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, legislation that would do much to correct the deficiencies of the 1957 legislation. He would give black Americans a Voting Rights Act that was truly meaningful, would make them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life. It was Lyndon Johnson, among all the white government officials in twentieth-century America, who did the most to help America’s black men and women in their fight for equality and justice. It was he who was, among all those officials, their greatest champion. And it was in 1957—in that fight for the Civil Rights Act of 1957—that Lyndon Johnson’s capacity to one day be that champion was first foreshadowed.

The foreshadowing came not only in his drafting of the Act, and in his dealing and maneuvering, but, perhaps most significantly, in a speech he gave.

The speech was delivered on the Senate floor. It came near the end of the 1957 fight, on the evening of August 7. Sitting at his desk just before the 72–18 final vote, he made a small gesture with his hand, and a blue-suited page carried over a portable lectern and placed it on the desk. Johnson laid the speech on the lectern, put on his thick-lensed glasses, and rose to read.

Jim Rowe had told Lyndon Johnson that if he wanted to become President, he had to vote for a civil rights bill, to pass a civil rights bill, and to get the credit for that bill, and Johnson had done all those things. But Rowe had also told Johnson something else. “I know also that Lyndon Johnson is intellectually not a southerner but a national leader,” he had said. The need for such a leader was terribly urgent, he said. There would be “a very good chance to bury this plague of civil rights” if only a national leader would step forward. And with this speech, Lyndon Johnson showed that, if he was still not yet such a leader, he had the potential to become one.

In the speech—his first formal announcement that he would vote for the bill—he portrayed the measure in terms that would make it acceptable to his Texas constituency: it repeals a “bayonet-type Reconstruction statute,” he said, and under its provisions, “basic rights”—such as the jury trial—“are reemphasized and broadened.” Such sentences were typical Lyndon Johnson sentences, the careful, cliché formulas of a cautious politician.

But there were other sentences in that speech.

Some set forth the pragmatic philosophy that was part of Lyndon Johnson’s most fundamental belief: a belief in the possible. “In the past few days there has been considerable discussion about the things which the bill does not do,” he said. “I am aware” of those things. “But,” he said, “I cannot follow the logic of those who say that because we cannot solve all the problems we should not try to solve any of them…. I can understand the disappointment of those who are not receiving all they believe they should out of this bill. I can understand but not sympathize with their position.” The bill doesn’t have to be perfect, Lyndon Johnson said. “The possible necessity for change is no bar to action. The Senate will not disappear after the vote tonight. We shall be present throughout the years to come.”

And there were sentences that rose above pragmatism to something higher. Lyndon Johnson had, all his life, expressed a deep distrust of ringing phrases. But there were phrases in this speech that seemed to verge on what he had always said he distrusted.

“Out of [this] debate has come something even more important than legislation,” Lyndon Johnson said. “This has been a debate which has opened closed minds…. This has been a debate which has made people everywhere examine hard and fast positions. For the first time in my memory, this issue has been lifted from the field of partisan politics. It has been considered in terms of human beings and the effect of our laws upon them.”

Then he turned to politics. “There are,” he said, “people who are still more interested in securing votes than in securing the right to vote. There are … people who are still more interested in the issue than in a solution to the issue. But I state—out of whatever experience I have had—that there is no political capital in this issue. Nothing lasting, nothing enduring, has ever been born from hatred and prejudice—except more hatred and more prejudice.” Look at the legislation passed during Reconstruction, Lyndon Johnson said. That legislation was born out of hatred. But, he said, “We do not have to reconstruct Reconstruction in order to have a bill. We do not have to reopen the wounds.” He wanted to remove politics from the civil rights issue, he said. “There is no compelling need for a campaign issue.” But, he said, “there is a compelling need for a solution that will enable all America’s people to live in dignity and in unity.”

And finally Lyndon Johnson turned again to his own vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and to his own feelings about that vote. He knew, he said, that his vote “will be treated cynically in some quarters, and it will be misunderstood in others…. But the Senate has dealt fairly and justly with this measure. This is legislation which I believe will be good for every state of the Union—and so far as I am concerned, Texas has been a part of the Union since Appomattox.”

A part of the Union since Appomattox.
That was a phrase that could rally men to a cause. “When at last Johnson revealed his own feelings about the bill, and said, ‘So far as I am concerned, Texas has been a part of the Union since Appomattox,’ I was ready to commit myself to him, his ambitions and purposes, for the duration,” his young aide Harry McPherson was to recall. The man who distrusted ringing phrases, who despised men who used such phrases, was using some himself now. In that moment it was even possible, seeing that tall man standing at that desk on the floor of one of the houses of the Congress of the United States and uttering such phrases, to picture that man standing one day on the dais of one of the houses of Congress—and speaking not merely to his colleagues but to an entire nation in ringing phrases.

Phrases like
“We
shall overcome!”

Y
EARS LATER
, years after the passage of the great civil rights acts of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, Harry McPherson, who had served in Johnson’s White House, would be riding in a parade in his native East Texas. There were floats in the parade, and high school bands, and, McPherson realized, “the bands—were mixed!” There was “a Negro trombonist, next to a white cornetist; three black drummers, and a white cymbal player! And at the front of it all, black and white majorettes, in perfect unison.” There was a big sign on the side of the car in which McPherson was riding. It said: “Counsel to President Lyndon B. Johnson,” and as the car passed, spectators pointed to the sign and quietly applauded. And then the car entered a Negro neighborhood. Suddenly there
was more than applause. Men and women were cheering. They were waving at the car. And many of them were holding up their arms, and with their fingers making the sign of “V”—“V” for Victory. McPherson’s eyes met those of an elderly black man. The man grinned at McPherson, and nodded his head. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s right.”

“So there had been change,” McPherson would write, “so much that one could scarcely remember … the careful apprehensive steps which the Senate had taken in 1957, the struggle over Title III and the jury trials, the different words for Douglas and Ervin, the praise and resentment.” But, McPherson says, “it had all started there.” The great civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965 had all started there, in 1957.

That’s right. That’s right.

D
URING
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON’S
next three years in the Senate—his final three years in the Senate—there would be a challenge to his style of leadership. In the 1958 elections, recession, growing unemployment, anger among farmers at President Eisenhower’s veto of a bill to increase farm price supports (and at his Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson), and the revelation of influence-peddling by the President’s top aide, Sherman Adams, cost the Republican Party forty-eight seats in the House of Representatives and twelve in the Senate (including, improbably, even the Ohio seat that had been held by John W. Bricker; William Knowland, having resigned, lost his race for the governorship of California). In 1959 and 1960, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by almost two to one in both houses of Congress, in the Senate by 64 to 34.