Master of the Senate (43 page)

The incident might have embarrassed another man who for years had been assuring the Senate that in the South blacks and whites lived in “peace and harmony,” and that anti-lynching and voter-protection legislation was unnecessary—as he might also have been embarrassed by the announcement a few days later from the head of the Georgia State Police that “we can’t cope with the situation” because neither the farmer nor any of “the best people in town” would “talk about this” (and by the subsequent finding by a coroner’s jury that the blacks had met their deaths at the hands of “persons unknown”). It didn’t embarrass Richard Russell. When California Senator William Knowland inserted an article describing the lynching in the
Congressional Record
, Russell rose in indignation. “Mr. President,” he said, standing at his desk, as dignified, reasonable and sincere as ever, “no member of the Senate deplores for a moment more than I do the murders which are said to have been recently committed in my state…. I know the people of Walton County…. The people of that county are law abiding and upright, and would be as much opposed to any murder as would the people of any other county in this country. There are no better people than the people of Walton County. I have no doubt that the State authorities of Georgia will prosecute to the full extent of their powers any person who may be charged with the commission of that crime.” There was, he said, no excuse for a senator to insert in the
Record
a newspaper article insulting to the State of Georgia. “Crimes of this nature are not confined to the State of Georgia,” he said. “I doubt not that if I were to peruse the newspapers of California I would find that there have been brutal crimes committed by people of that State.”

On July 30, 1946, a black farmhand was flogged to death by six white men near Lexington, Mississippi; on August 3, in Gordon, Georgia, a black mine worker was shot to death; on August 7, a black veteran was hung near Minden,
Louisiana. And also in 1946, a young black sergeant, discharged from the Army just three hours before at a demobilization center in Atlanta, boarded a bus for South Carolina. When the driver refused to let him use the lavatory, the sergeant argued with him, and at the next town, Batesburg, South Carolina, the driver called the police. Two policemen dragged the young veteran, still in uniform, from the bus, took him to jail and ground out both his eyes with a blackjack. That year, not only in Georgia but in other southern states, there were also uncounted beatings—with fists and baseball bats and bullwhips; not fatal, they were not classified as lynchings—of black veterans who, in the words of one Alabaman, “must not expect or demand any change in their status from that which existed before they went overseas.” As one act of violence after another went unpunished, the demand for federal legislation intensified. In 1946, President Truman appointed, by executive order, a blue-ribbon committee to study the civil rights problem in all its aspects, and the committee’s report, “To Secure These Rights,” called not only for a permanent FEPC, abolition of the poll tax, and federal laws against lynchings but also for the establishment of a permanent Commission on Civil Rights in the Executive Office of the President, and for an end to segregation in education, in housing, in health services—for an end to racial discrimination in the broadest terms. Firmly endorsing the recommendations for these “new concepts of civil rights,” Truman told reporters afterwards, “I mean every word of it—and I am going to prove that I do mean it.”

Never—never, at least, since Appomattox—had the threat been more ominous. Lee studying maps in his tent and watching, night after night, the arrows that signified the huge, well-equipped northern armies closing in on Atlanta, had seen doom no more clearly than Russell saw it now—now that a President of his own party had decided to join the “South haters.” He was convinced that the motive behind Truman’s decision, and the northern agitation in general, was strictly political: a coldly calculated political decision “to alienate Southern Democrats in exchange for the black vote” in the politically crucial big cities of the North. But that was a strong motive. Moreover, he knew that the President was not the only politician counting black votes: senators of the other party, and some of the once-staunch midwesterners of his own party, were counting them, too.

Russell’s anger against those who, for such sordid reasons, were determined to “harass” and “hellhack” his beloved Southland, to make its people “a special object of obloquy,” boiled over in private. In a letter to a Florida man, he pointed out that there were forty-three counties in Georgia in which blacks outnumbered whites. White people in these counties, he said, “cannot be expected to turn their children … over to schools that are run by negroes, or to live in counties that have negro sheriffs, county school superintendents or other officials.” Occasionally it boiled over in public. Calling Truman’s bill a “Gestapo” approach—“the most outrageous affront to the people of our section that we have had to face since Reconstruction Days”—he predicted that eventually
it would mean that blacks and whites would “attend the same schools, swim in the same pools, eat together, and eventually, intermarry.” But with the threat so serious, a public display of these emotions was a luxury the South could not afford, and generally in public—as in a nationwide radio address he made on behalf of the southern senators—Russell tried to keep his tone reasonable and moderate, and to concentrate on issues more palatable to northern ears, saying that if the proposed expansion of federal power was adopted, not merely southerners but all Americans would find they had lost some of their freedoms to “hordes of federal bureaucrats” who would in effect be “federal policemen.” On the floor of the Senate, the personality of Richard Russell was as grave, deliberate, judicious, reasonable as ever.

He tried to make the entire Southern Caucus adopt the same tone and arguments—a job made easier by Cotton Ed’s defeat in 1944 and Bilbo’s death in 1947. The last holdout was Tom Connally, and in one of the meetings of the Caucus in Russell’s office, the Georgian faced the old Texan down, in a bitter confrontation in which one man was loud, and the other quiet—and the quiet man won. Over and over, Russell would try to make the other southern senators understand what he understood—that the tactics he was proposing were the best tactics for their cause, and that much as they might personally enjoy picturesquely defying the world, the Cause was all that mattered. Racist pejoratives and stalling tactics antagonized northern senators and inflamed anti-Southern opinion, he said. The South didn’t need antagonism; it needed allies. Furthermore, such tactics made the South, their beloved South, look foolish—foolish and backward. “We’ve got a good case on the merits,” he said at one meeting of the Southern Caucus. “Let’s keep the arguments germane. Let’s see if we can keep our speeches restrained, and not inflammatory.”

The big table at which the Caucus met was round—Russell didn’t want to be at the head of a table—but wherever he sat
was
the head of the table, and the references to blacks as “niggers” and “coons” died out of the Senate debate. The demands that the entire
Journal
of the previous day’s session be read and amended were abandoned. Instead, states’ rights and other constitutional issues (in particular the right to unlimited debate in the Senate, the right that made filibusters effective), along with the argument that civil rights agitation was Communist-inspired—an argument that had proved effective with conservative non-southern senators—became the staples of southern senatorial rhetoric.

And these tactics were indeed the most effective tactics for the South. When during one debate a northern senator sneeringly asked Russell “whether the Senator is going to devote his attention to a discussion of the bill or to the question of the
Journal
,” Russell was able to reply with quiet dignity, “I have discussed only the bill and I have no other purpose.” His discussion was, he always assured the Senate, “without reference to racism.” His voice rang with sincerity when he assured the Senate that interference in the affairs of the South was not necessary, saying, “We’ve had our problems, but we’ve solved them pretty well.”

Journalists took note of the change in southern tone. As one article put it: “The Negro, who is at the heart of the Civil Rights issue, is never mentioned, and none of the Southern coalition … ever breaks into the demagogic ranting of a Bilbo or Rankin. Discussion swirls around the parliamentary procedure at issue, and the speeches, though interminable, are germane.” The journalists approved the change. As this article said: “Under Russell, filibuster oratory has improved greatly in quality”—as if it was the oratory that mattered, not the cause in which it was employed. There was little fundamental difference between the racial views of Richard Russell—those views expressed with a courtliness and patrician charm that made men refer to him as “knightly”—and the rantings of a Bilbo or Cotton Ed Smith, however much this Russell of the Russells of Georgia might feel that demagoguery was beneath him. The difference lay in their effectiveness. The knightliness accomplished what Richard Russell wanted it to accomplish: made it more difficult for the foes of his beloved Southland to prevail.

A
S EFFECTIVE AS
R
USSELL’S TACTICS
was his personality, for it drew from his colleagues respect as deep as ever. In 1949, when Lyndon Johnson came to the Senate, Richard Russell was fifty-one. The outlines of his once-thin face were beginning to be blurred by flesh, and a paunch was starting to show beneath his senatorial blue (or, on a wild day, dark gray) suits. But there had been no softening of the dignity and reserve that had always, along with the grave, thoughtful demeanor and unfailing courtesy, set him apart from his peers—they were as rigid as ever. The backward tilt of the head had become more pronounced, and since the front of his head was now completely bald, his nose was even more prominent than when Richard Russell had been young; journalists described him in the same terms as had been used years—decades—earlier. “Senator Russell’s almost Roman presence is enhanced by more than a suggestion of the eagle in his profile, and, on most occasions, by a marble rigidity of posture and an august manner of speech,” Frederic Collins was to write in the
New York Times Magazine.
“His projection of himself toward those he wishes to sway is not chummy but Olympian.” He was very conscious of the Senate’s position in American political life, and of his position in the Senate—and he brooked no affront to either of them. Once, in 1957, a thirty-year-old reporter newly arrived in Washington, Tom Wicker of the
Winston-Salem Journal
, jokingly repeated in a group including Russell and newly elected Senator Frank Church the explanation Church had given him for his recent upset victory: that he had been “in the middle between two nuts,” Idaho’s right-wing Senator Herman Welker and the left-wing former Senator Glen H. Taylor.

“No one laughed,” Wicker was to recall.

The son of the man who had said, “You can always be honorable,” had what a friend calls “a monumental sense of honor,” and it merged with his monumental patriotism. He regarded his responsibility for America’s fighting men as a sacred trust. Once, after his Armed Services Committee had held a closed hearing on confidential military information, committee member Wayne Morse, looking for headlines, leaked a piece of that information. When reporters asked Russell to comment, he said he would comment not on the information but on the leak; his comment was one simple word: “dishonorable.” Colleagues’ confidences were safe with him—always. As his biographer wrote, “His colleagues considered him absolutely trustworthy.” When Richard Russell died, a reporter was to say, “a thousand Senate secrets would die with him.” When he gave a commitment on a piece of legislation, there was, his colleagues said, never an excuse given later; the commitment was kept. Estes Kefauver, whom Richard Russell despised, had to admit that Russell’s “word is his bond.” For many senators, Richard Russell embodied what they wanted to be: the quintessential Senator, in all the highest senses of that title. “He was incomparably the truest Senate type,” William S. White was to write.

B
EHIND THE PERSONALITY
was the power—the senatorial brand of power.

Russell’s dominance on the Armed Services Committee, a dominance that lasted for more than a quarter of a century, gave him a full measure of power in dealing with other senators—at least with any senator whose state contained an Army camp or an airfield or a naval base (or indeed any defense-related installation), or a major defense contractor. That power was magnified by his role on the Appropriations Committee (of which he would also later become dominant member and then chairman). In 1949, he was still, as he had been since 1933, Chairman of Appropriations’ agricultural subcommittee—so that he still stood athwart that strategic Senate narrows, in a position to exact tribute from any senator who needed funding for an agricultural project. Magnifying his power further was his leadership of the Southern Caucus, which of course included in its ranks guardians of other senatorial narrows: chairmen of other two Appropriations subcommittees, other chairmen of Standing Committees, so the power of the South—the power exercised at Russell’s command—was interwoven between committees and subcommittees into a very strong web indeed.

If further magnification was needed, it was provided by his role within his party. Richard Russell was the only senator who sat on both the Democratic Policy Committee, which controlled the flow of legislation to the floor, and the Democratic Steering Committee, which controlled the party’s committee
assignments. Nor was Russell’s power limited to his party’s side of the aisle, for the conservative coalition was not limited to one side of the aisle. “I remember so well how Bob Taft had a working relationship with Dick Russell on certain issues,” Hubert Humphrey was to recall. The relationship was very discreet—it was once said that Russell and Taft ran the Senate “with a wink and a nod”—and very effective. “Dick Russell would outmaneuver the Republicans five times a day, but he was always getting them when he needed them.” When compromises were being worked out on controversial legislation, it wasn’t merely Democrats but Republicans who were told to “Check it with Dick.” An observer was to write in the 1960s—in words that would to a great extent have been applicable also to the 1940s and 1950s—“No major compromise can be concluded in the Senate without submission to his professional hand.” His power was senatorial power: informal, vague, unwritten—and immense.