The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (34 page)

None of this was surprising to those who knew something of Mansfield’s biography. Few modern senators had as rough or varied a life. Born in Lower Manhattan to Irish immigrant parents, he had moved out to Great Falls, Montana, at age seven to live with relatives after his mother died. He was a hardworking troublemaker, who worked for his uncle’s delivery business but also ran away from home twice, once ending up in jail. When he was fifteen, after the United States had joined World War I, he talked his way into the Navy; he later served in the Army and the Marines before receiving his discharge in 1922. He returned to Montana, where he worked in copper mines during the day and toward his high school equivalence and bachelor’s degrees at night; he received both in 1932, then a master’s in 1934, after which he became a professor of Latin American and Asian history at Montana State University (now the University of Montana). He won his first House race in 1942, and a decade later, a Senate seat.
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There may be other men whose careers before their fortieth birthday included stints in the Marines, the mines, and the college classroom, but not many. Partly as a result of those experiences, Mansfield as a politician acted like he had nothing to prove; he never craved attention or approval. He had fallen into the leadership after Johnson had chosen him as his deputy in 1957; after Johnson left, Mansfield was the one man in the Democratic leadership that all sides—South and North, liberal and conservative—could agree on. Mansfield always insisted it was a job he never asked for, and one he performed only out of his sense of duty to the Senate.

Still, for all the respect accorded Mansfield, more than a few people wondered if he was the best fit for the majority leader’s hat. By 1963 the Senate, many complained, had lost the energy of the Johnson years. “Fewer and fewer senators showed up for the daily sessions,” wrote Frank Valeo, the Senate secretary. “The flow of legislation from the committees to the floor slowed to a trickle.” And it was one thing to have a laissez-faire leader during normal times—but during a time of heightened tension, like the civil rights bill debate, you wanted a gut fighter, someone like Johnson who would crack the whip, cut the deals, make the bill happen. Mansfield would not—could not, by his nature—do those things. And who knew if he could take the pressure of a lengthy filibuster?
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It did not help the skeptics that as early as July 1963, Mansfield chose a decidedly un-Johnsonian strategy for the bill. Johnson had taken the Senate into round-the-clock sessions to break the 1960 filibuster, but Mansfield refused to follow suit. He also refused to enforce the often-ignored Rule 19, which limited senators to two speeches in a legislative “day” (different from a calendar day, a legislative day continues until the Senate decides to adjourn, which might not happen for weeks at a time). Johnson fumed, but Mansfield stood his ground. When a group of rabbis pressed him to reconsider during a meeting on February 5, he replied, “When Johnson was majority leader, he ran things the way he wanted them. Now I am majority leader and will run things the way I want them.”
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Instead, Mansfield’s plan was to be an honest broker, keeping the Senate on a normal schedule and letting the Southerners know his plans in advance. Mansfield believed that keeping things aboveboard would make the Southern filibusterers look bad, shoring up public opinion and, hopefully, swaying some senatorial fence sitters. But he also feared that a contentious, drawn-out debate could cause lasting harm to the Senate’s reputation. As he told the Senate on June 18, 1963, “The majority leader has no suave parliamentary tactics by which to bring legislation to a vote. He is no expert on the rules and he is fully aware that there are many tactics which can forestall a vote.”
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Mansfield’s initial plan was to go for cloture votes on the new bill as early as March or April, the better to get the tumult over quickly. But under pressure from Robert Kennedy, he agreed to wait until Katzenbach and Marshall could round up the requisite sixty-seven votes—which, they all knew, could mean well into the summer, if ever.
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Mansfield did, however, make two decisions that pleased civil rights supporters. One was his selection of Hubert Humphrey as the bill’s floor manager. Normally a bill would be handled by the relevant committee chairman—but in this case, that meant Mississippi’s James Eastland. Humphrey, though, was a perfect choice. As mayor of Minneapolis in 1948, he had given a stemwinder of a speech at the Democratic National Convention that beat back a Southern attempt to add an anti-civil-rights plank to the party platform; his speech was so successful, in fact, that the convention ended up adopting the strongest pro-civil-rights plank in party history. Johnson, who became majority leader in 1953, saw a pragmatic streak in Humphrey, and he brought him into the Democratic leadership in the hope that doing so could give him an avenue into the party’s liberal corners. Thanks to Johnson, by the end of the decade, Humphrey was one of the most powerful men in the Senate.
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Selecting Humphrey gave Mansfield several advantages: the majority leader could remain above the fray, free to meet equally with Southerners, Northern Democrats, and Republicans; he could exploit Humphrey’s close relationship with the White House; and he could turn loose this man of seemingly boundless political energy on a subject that demanded more hours each day than most mortal men have to give.

But before Humphrey could take charge, Mansfield had to make sure the bill did not slip into Eastland’s hands. Normally when a bill comes over from the House, it is read twice and then immediately shuffled over to the relevant committee, where it receives the same marking-up treatment that it did in the lower body before it heads to the Senate floor for even more debate, followed by a vote. But this was no normal situation. Since taking over the Judiciary Committee in 1955, Eastland had turned it into a graveyard for civil rights legislation. He had already scrapped one version of the bill—the hearings for which brought both George Wallace and Robert Kennedy to the witness table. Mansfield did not want to risk a repeat with the real bill.

There was an alternative. As soon as the bill arrived on the Senate floor, Mansfield could move to have it put directly on the legislative calendar, skipping the Judiciary Committee and teeing it up for debate by the entire Senate. It was an unconventional move, but hardly unprecedented: Johnson had used the same procedure to bypass Eastland during the debate over the 1957 civil rights act.

And so, a few minutes past noon on February 17, after the Senate had returned from the Lincoln Day recess, a clerk from the House entered the chamber to announce that the lower body had passed H.R. 7152 and that it was now ready for the Senate (Johnson had urged Mansfield not to wait until after the holiday to introduce the bill, but as usual, the majority leader ignored him). A page then took the bill from the clerk and carried it to the president pro tempore. Following normal procedure, Mansfield said, “Mr. President, I request that House bill 7152 be read the first time.” A clerk then read the bill’s titles, which sufficed for “reading” it in its entirety.
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Had the clerk read it a second time, as was usually the case, the bill would have immediately gone to Judiciary Committee purgatory. Instead, Mansfield rose again. “Mr. President,” he said, “I object to the second reading of the bill today.”
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No one was surprised by Mansfield’s move; not only had he been planning it since the previous summer, but he had even contacted Eastland a few days earlier to make sure he knew what was coming. Still, the Southerners immediately began protesting.

Mansfield, still standing, conceded that his maneuver was unconventional. “The reasons for unusual procedures are too well known to require elaboration,” he said. But desperate times required extraordinary measures. “We hope in vain if we hope that this issue can be put over safely to another tomorrow, to be dealt with by another generation of senators. The time is now. The crossroads is here in the Senate.”
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Mansfield’s words were then echoed by his Republican counterpart, Everett Dirksen—“the distinguished minority leader,” as Mansfield called him, “whose patriotism has always taken precedence over his partisanship.” Almost since the moment the bill was conceived, it was apparent to everyone involved that Dirksen would be the key to its survival in the Senate. No matter what strategy the civil rights forces chose, they would need moderate and conservative Republican support—and the only man who could deliver that was the portly, curly-haired Illinois senator. Even the lobbyists knew it: in the fall of 1963 both Blake and Miller, from the National Council of Churches, traveled to Dirksen’s hometown of Pekin, Illinois, to press him personally on the bill.
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For the moment, at least, Dirksen played along. He would, he said, “cooperate in every possible way, consonant always with the duty to make an independent judgment.” Then, forebodingly yet with seemingly casual élan, he added, “Already some amendments have occurred to me. I shall try to shape them. I shall try to put them in form. If I think they have merit, I shall offer them.”

The speeches over, the bill went on the back burner so that the Senate could consider and pass the tax cut, which had finally emerged from Harry Byrd’s Finance Committee. Strangely, after pressing so hard to get the tax cut bill moving, Johnson now urged Mansfield to hold off until after the civil rights bill had passed so as to bring pressure from business groups on the Southern Democrats to end the filibuster and move on. Mansfield quietly refused. The Senate set the civil rights bill aside and voted for the tax cut on February 26.
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Mansfield and Humphrey did not ignore civil rights while waiting on the other bill. As part of his commitment to transparency, on the morning of February 19, Mansfield sat down with Russell to talk through how each side would approach the bill. Mansfield began by telling Russell that he would not make any major moves without informing the Georgia senator first; he also explained his intention to bypass the Judiciary Committee and place the bill directly on the Senate calendar. Russell, obviously impressed with the majority leader’s candor, said he would not delay the tax bill, and that he would not oppose letting committees meet during the debate, though he could not guarantee other Southerners would go along with him. Russell was not acting out of pure magnanimity—he recognized that pushing too hard against the bill could create a backlash among moderate senators, not to mention the public. It is why Russell also let slip a critical concession: Mansfield’s plan to skip the Judiciary Committee and take up the bill immediately was a debatable move under the Senate’s rules, and therefore open to its own filibuster—something Russell planned to do. But, he told Mansfield, he would drop the “mini-filibuster” after a few weeks. Though he did not say it at the time, he feared that if this first filibuster came to a cloture vote and he lost, a precedent of support for the bill would be set, and Russell might see the real filibuster fall to pieces quickly.
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The next day Mansfield’s advisers prepared the results of an internal study, based on interviews with senators and their staffs, about the bill’s chances. The news was not good. “The success of a cloture attempt is precarious at best even with the support of Senator Dirksen,” it concluded. “Once cloture is attempted and support for it is shown to be insufficient it will encourage the Southerners all the more and will identify those Senators who are disposed not to vote for cloture. The trading power wielded by these Southern committee chairmen is prodigious and could be used to persuade uncommitted Senators to hold the line.”
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Dirksen’s centrality to the bill’s success, once hypothetical, was becoming increasingly real—without his endorsement, it was unlikely that more than a handful of moderate and conservative Republicans would vote for cloture, and the bill needed almost all of them to clear the sixty-seven-vote hurdle. And yet Dirksen himself was growing enigmatic. At times he seemed to be open to almost everything in the bill, including Title II, which he had vilified the previous summer; at the same time, he hinted mischievously that he had several major amendments up his sleeve, pounds of flesh that he might demand be cut from the bill in order to grant his support.

Most civil rights supporters interpreted Dirksen’s caginess as the mark of an operator, someone less interested in the substance of the bill than in the opportunity to leave his fingerprints on a piece of major legislation. Dirksen’s vanity was well known; he loved to speak, and to tell people how well he spoke (to be fair, he was a gifted orator, and would win a Grammy for his spoken-word album
Gallant Men
in 1968). The White House and the bill’s supporters set out to cultivate his ego, to win him over by underlining for any and all to see just how historical his vote for the bill would be. Humphrey, knowing how much Dirksen loved flowers, sent him a bunch of red tulips in early February to soften him up.
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Later, on an episode of
Meet the Press
on March 8, Humphrey said that “Senator Dirksen is not only a great senator, he is a great American.” After watching the show, Johnson called Humphrey and said, “Boy, that was right. You’re going just right now. You just keep at it. Don’t let those bomb throwers talk you out of seeing Dirksen. You get in there to see Dirksen! You drink with Dirksen! You talk to Dirksen! You listen to Dirksen!” Still, the expectation as the debate in the Senate began was that Dirksen would exact a significant price for his support, and that the bill’s supporters would just have to pay it.
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