Personal History (46 page)

“For more than eighty years no civil rights act had passed Congress,” President Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs. He had tried to make some modest progress the year before, with a bill that passed the House and died in the Senate, where Lyndon Johnson had helped kill it. In June 1957, the same legislation passed the House with a wider margin of Republicans than Democrats supporting it. On July 16, the Senate agreed to take up the House bill. The following day, the Senate amended the bill, weakening it with a jury-trial amendment that LBJ had added to the bill to satisfy Georgia Senator Richard Russell and prevent a filibuster. Since juries were still all-white in the South, this was an obvious watering down of the bill’s strength. However, besides voting rights, the bill provided for a Civil Rights Commission and a new assistant secretary to head a civil-rights division in the Department of Justice.

All of this was in line with Phil’s plans for LBJ to take the lead in this field. As a Southerner, Lyndon couldn’t go as fast or as far as Phil may
have wanted him to, but, given his legislative skills and strengths, he could move the country forward. From the point of view of many political observers, what LBJ did was to take everything out of the bill except the right to vote. Phil’s argument was that the only thing that really counted about the bill was the right to vote.

Phil’s involvement in the whole matter—besides pushing Lyndon on its importance from the beginning of their relationship—began in earnest in July, when he invited Joe Rauh to the farm. Phil’s invitations often came in the form of commands, and this was one. He needed Joe’s help because Joe had a solid relationship with the black leadership in the country, especially Roy Wilkins, then executive secretary—in effect, leader—of the NAACP, and because Joe was a liberal influence in general, making what he thought about the civil-rights bill particularly important.

Phil also asked Joe to bring Felix Frankfurter along. Joe later recalled that he didn’t divine any ulterior motive in the invitation and certainly didn’t connect it with the pending civil-rights legislation. However, as he and his wife, Olie, and Felix drove to the farm, he began to suspect he was about to be worked on. All the way out, Felix was trying to persuade him of the overwhelming importance of voting rights. Both Phil and Felix did indeed work on Joe throughout our dinner, suggesting that he was asking for too much in wanting all the other items on the civil-rights agenda at that time—e.g., real and rapid integration and enforcement of school desegregation. The argument by which Phil and Felix stood was that the most important first step for the 1950s was the right to vote. Now I can see how extraordinary—and out of order—it was for a Supreme Court justice to be stepping over the boundaries to this extent, but I didn’t then. It was very much in Felix’s nature, and he was dealing with two men—Phil and Joe—to whom he was as close as though they were his sons. And clearly he thought it was important to help Phil persuade Joe that the bill was the best they could get and, therefore, that he should support it.

Sometime after the “brainwashing” party, Johnson urged Phil to come up to Washington to be at his side during the final push for passage of the bill. So Phil returned to Washington, somewhat to my concern, and stayed with Lyndon almost constantly for several days, working day and night. A large part of his role, I believe, was to keep in touch with Joe and the liberal civil-rights group with which Joe was connected. The sticking point was the jury-trial amendment. Negotiations between and among the various groups lobbying for and against the bill centered largely on what would happen to this amendment. Enlisting the help of notable lawyers and legal minds, Phil worked on trying to find a formula that would be acceptable to all parties in order to get the vote to final passage.

In the end, civil-rights activists may have lost on the jury-trial fight but they gained a bill. Joe and his like-minded friends bought Phil’s argument
that this bill was better than nothing. Roy Wilkins agreed and called a meeting of the Leadership Conference of Civil Rights, which debated for an entire day. Wilkins wrote in his memoirs: “Joe argued for the bill on grounds that after 87 years, the time had finally come for a civil rights bill, even a watered-down bill, and that once Congress had lost its virginity on civil rights, it would go on to make up for what had been lost.” Supporting the bill was the hardest decision of his life, Wilkins wrote. In retrospect, he knew it was the right decision. He recalls Hubert Humphrey saying to him in the middle of the struggle, “Roy, if there’s one thing I have learned in politics, it’s never to turn your back on a crumb.”

This was superb politics for Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon was still a Texas senator who had to get re-elected, and the one thing they wouldn’t be mad at him for in Texas was voting rights. So the whole strategy of going for voting rights was inspired—the idea for which Phil was the architect. Lady Bird Johnson, in recalling those days, described Phil and LBJ together as a sort of bridge between two very set-in-their-ways blocs of people. Phil could talk to both groups, but Lyndon couldn’t talk very successfully to ardent liberals. “He would talk,” Lady Bird said, “but they would not believe.” Lyndon wrote Phil the day after passage, saying, “You stepped into the breach at the critical hour. That is something that I will never forget and I wish there was some way of telling the country that your contribution to an effective, enforceable bill was decisive.”

Phil used the opportunity to press his point with Lyndon about the importance of looking to his political future. He argued that Lyndon shouldn’t have overt designs on the presidency: “Your present attitude strikes me as just right. Anyone who works up noticeable and passionate designs on that particular office harms himself in two ways. He begins to lose control of his own judgment; he also gives aid and comfort to the political enemy. So just sit,” he advised. “Don’t deny or confirm—or even conjecture. Three years is a long, long time. All rushing and panting should be left to fellows from Tennessee and Massachusetts,” referring to Kefauver and Kennedy.

T
HE EFFORT
Phil made to push the civil-rights bill for Johnson was enormous, particularly coming at a time when he knew how exhausted he was. Perhaps if the turmoil had ended there he might have been able to rest again at Glen Welby and get his strength back. Instead, just a month later, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to bar nine Negro students from the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock. The next step in the battle for civil rights was on.

Since Eisenhower was not very interested, except in theory, and was concentrating on his vacation golf games, there was a vacuum within the
administration. On the day that Press Secretary Jim Hagerty announced from Newport that the president thought patience was what was needed, the
Arkansas Gazette
received from a wirephoto service a picture of the president lying down on a putting green, lining up a putt. They played the story on page one and put a caption on the picture, “Study in Patience.”

Into this vacuum in Washington, Phil moved swiftly and with great assurance. He was determined to solve the problem—to get the children admitted to the school peacefully, to get Faubus to back down, and, above all, to prevent the federal government from having to send in troops. It was, of course, highly unlikely as a concept—essentially, he hoped to take over the government and pull the strings of policy.

At heart, Phil still felt a strong empathy with the South. He believed devoutly in school desegregation, but he also understood how hard it would be to accomplish in the face of Southern resistance. So he injected himself into the situation with frenzy as well as with conviction. Believing that he knew enough of the key players so that he could solve the problem with behind-the-scenes maneuvering, he kept several phones going day and night, calling, among others, Sherman Adams and Maxwell Rabb in the White House; Bill Rogers (about to become attorney general) in Washington; Harry Ashmore, the fine editor of the
Gazette
, in Arkansas; Brooks Hays, the congressman from Little Rock; Thurgood Marshall, then head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund; and Roy Wilkins, still head of the NAACP. He called Joe Rauh one night at 3:00 a.m., demanding Marshall’s home telephone number. When Joe said he didn’t have it, Phil ordered, “Well, goddamn it, get it.” Indirectly he was in touch with the president, ex-President Truman, and Vice-President Nixon.

When Eisenhower finally sent in federal troops, the violence ceased, but events in Little Rock sputtered on for two more years. However, the act that ended the immediate crisis—the sending in of the troops—was a crushing blow for Phil. He saw it as a defeat not only for the South but for himself personally.

Phil’s activities in regard to Little Rock were the first sign for me that something was wrong with him, that his powerful talents could be used in such an idealistic but confusing and irrational way. His health, already frail, was affected physically and mentally. He held on to his activities—and his balance—for only another month after Little Rock before his first major depression set in. On October 28, in the middle of the night, he broke. There is no other way to express it. All of the latent physical and psychological symptoms came to such a sudden crisis that I didn’t even connect them in my mind. He was racked with pain and in despair, in a total and overwhelming depression. He wept and wept and couldn’t stop. He said that he felt trapped, no longer able to go on, that everything was
black. We were both up all night, with me trying desperately but to no avail to be of some reassuring help, to convince him everything would be all right. There was little I could do except stay close to him. We discovered that a hot bath helped, so he took several during the night in an effort to stem the tears and alleviate the desperation.

Early in the morning, I called my brother in Baltimore, who was at that time a psychiatrist on the staff of Johns Hopkins Hospital, describing what had happened and asking him what we should do. He gave me the name of someone at the National Institute of Mental Health who could see Phil for analysis of what was wrong and in turn recommend a psychiatrist. It was a relief to both of us to have some plan of action, with the hope of someone to lean on in this ghastly and incomprehensible crisis. Phil saw this doctor for a time or two, after which he was sent to Dr. Leslie Farber, with whom he began a long, bizarre relationship that in the end did more harm than good.

I had no idea what had happened and didn’t recognize what I was witnessing. I couldn’t put a name to it, and didn’t for a very long time to come. I only knew that Phil had had what seemed like an intense and complete nervous breakdown, which I thought had been brought on by all the activity in which he had been engaged, climaxed by Little Rock—the activity day and night and the ensuing disappointment. It was all kept very private; our one idea was to conceal what had happened not only from the world but from our friends, my family, and even our children. For some reason, beyond my initial phone call I never even talked to my brother about what was the matter or what had brought on the crisis. As a result, I had no one on whom to lean for advice and just concentrated on trying to be of help to Phil. Still, despite my lack of knowledge about his illness and all the unknowns, I believed that we’d get through this—that with enough rest he’d recover and we’d go on. Phil, I thought, with all his self-assurance, his glamour, his good humor, his brilliance, his wit and sagacity, would surely recover his good health, and things would return to normal. There was no need to share the temporary problem with the world, and every reason to conceal it.

M
OST OF THE
year following Phil’s breakdown was spent in slow, gradual recovery. He had all the symptoms of severe depression—overwhelming doubt about himself and his abilities, a desire to seclude himself from the world and from people, a deep uncertainty that led to indecision even about which pair of shoes to wear, guilt about whatever he felt he had done wrong, and even occasional talk of suicide.

We escaped to Glen Welby whenever possible—frequently just the two of us, without the children, since sometimes even dinner with them was too much for him. These long visits to Glen Welby were hard on me, because I was his only support system. There was one period of about six months in which he was so depressed he couldn’t be alone. We hadn’t been out at all, nor had I left the house except when he visited his psychiatrist. At his most depressed, he was completely dependent on me, almost like a child. I was “on duty” a great deal of the time for long talks about what he was thinking. I confess I felt the need to escape at times, to lead a normal life again, to see friends, but being with someone in this kind of severe depression is compelling. And though it was grueling, there was also something strengthening in being needed that much—in being able to help him by talking about whatever was on his mind or, sometimes, whatever I could think of with which to try to reach him. Gradually I learned to say whatever helped him to hear. The experience literally taught me how to talk. If I had any strength later, much of it came from surviving these exhausting months.

What Phil mostly did was go to his psychiatrist, read, and think about the basic issues that someone in severe depression tends to reflect on. The doctor to whom he was sent, Leslie Farber, was heavily into existential psychology, inspired by Dr. Rollo May, an originator of the humanistic psychology school. One thing Farber did was to start Phil, and therefore
me, reading existentialist philosophy and, in my case, Dostoyevsky, for whom I had always had an affinity. Farber himself was working on a study of the importance of “will” in life. It was he who instilled in Phil a distrust, fear, and horror of any drugs, not to mention shock therapy, claiming that these treatments reduced people to something less than human—something tranquilized and fishlike. In addition, Farber believed that labeling something, giving a name to a disorder, changed how the patient viewed himself and was viewed by those around him. Because of this, he never put a name to Phil’s illness. I didn’t hear the term “manic-depression” until some years later. Throughout this period, I viewed what was happening with confusion and very little understanding.