36

Choices

TWO INTERNATIONAL CRISES in the Fall of 1956—the brutal Russian suppression of the Hungarian uprising and the escalating Mideast conflict over the Suez Canal—rallied Americans behind their President, whose smile was as fatherly reassuring as ever. Dwight Eisenhower’s landslide popular plurality in his rematch with Adlai Stevenson approached ten million; Adlai won only seven states (all in the South). The Democrats hung on to Capitol Hill, however, overcoming Earle Clements’ medical discharge from the Senate to hold their 49–47 margin there. When Congress reconvened in January, 1957, Lyndon Johnson would still be Majority Leader.

Down in Texas, furthermore, with Sam Rayburn and the state’s conservative establishment behind him, Johnson had solidified his power in the state’s Democratic Party by ruthlessly putting down a liberal uprising. Freed from the restraints of civility imposed on him in the Senate, his tactics had been very blunt: he ordered Texas congressmen and their aides to determine which delegates to the party’s state convention were flirting with the liberals, and these delegates, one congressional aide said, were confronted by their “banker, preacher, lawyer, congressman, brother, and threatened unless they got back in the fold.” Some were confronted by Johnson himself, in his most aggressive, lapel-grabbing, chest-poking mode. Holders of federal or state jobs were asked, in a tone described as “ferocious,” how they liked their jobs; to others, hoping for jobs, Johnson made the price clear: “If you don’t help me, you ain’t never gonna get to be a judge!” he said to one. Johnson had supported County Judge Woodrow Bean in an intra-party convention fight in return for Bean’s promise of support from his El Paso delegation on other issues; when Bean was unable to deliver, Johnson called him in, and, glaring at him and jabbing his forefinger into his chest, demanded, “You with me or against me?” When Bean tried to explain his dilemma, Johnson cut him off. “Woodrow Bean,” he said, “I’m going to give you a three-minute lesson in integrity. And then I’m going to ruin you.” And he had the convention’s credentials committee decertify Bean’s entire delegation.

Nonetheless, during the post-election weeks of November and December, 1956, Lyndon was in one of his black depressions. Not getting the Democratic presidential nomination that year had proven to be something of a blessing: the election results had convincingly reaffirmed that no one could have beaten Eisenhower. But the lesson he had had pounded into him in Chicago—that you couldn’t win the nomination as the “southern candidate,” that you had to have substantial northern support, and that northern antipathy to him ran very deep—had devastating implications for his chances to win the nomination in 1960. He understood now that there was only one way to change his image in liberals’ eyes: to support the cause that mattered to them above all others; that so long as he didn’t change his position on civil rights, it didn’t matter what he did for them on other issues. That hard fact of Democratic political life was being reiterated that December in a letter written to Paul Douglas by Herbert Lehman. “In all fairness,” Lehman wrote, “it must be said that the Democrat-controlled 84th Congress did pass some fairly good legislation in fields like social security and health research. But … the civil rights issue was buried alive.” This could not be allowed to continue, the New York liberal said. “We must put principle above so-called party unity.” Lyndon Johnson will not learn this, Lehman said—“cannot or will not learn it.” Therefore, he said, Johnson must be removed as Leader. “I want to run the Senate,” Lyndon Johnson told allies in private conversation. “I want to pass the bills that need to be passed. I want my party to do right. But all I ever hear from the liberals is Nigra, Nigra, Nigra.” He knew now that the only way to realize his great ambition was to fight—really fight, fight aggressively and effectively—for civil rights; in fact, it was probably necessary for him not only to fight but to fight and win: given their conviction that he controlled the Senate, the only way the liberals would be satisfied of his good intentions would be if that body passed a civil rights bill. But therein lay a seemingly insoluble dilemma: that way—the only way—did not seem a possible way. Because while he couldn’t win his party’s presidential nomination with only southern support, he couldn’t win it with only northern support, either. Scrubbing off the southern taint thoroughly enough within the next four years to become so overwhelmingly a liberal favorite that he could win the nomination with northern votes alone was obviously out of the question, so dispensing with southern support was not feasible: he had to keep the states of the Old Confederacy on his side. And yet a public official who fought for civil rights invariably lost those states.

The problem seemed one without a solution. Lyndon Johnson’s path to power had always been a hard, treacherous, twisting path. Had it now become too twisting, too tortuous, for even him to negotiate?

DURING THE MONTHS following the 1956 election, Lyndon Johnson tried to make himself more appealing to liberal northerners—tried, in the words of one, John Kenneth Galbraith, “to cultivate us, to some degree.”

He asked for their pity. Delivering a memorandum from Paul Douglas to Johnson’s office in the Capitol one day that December, Douglas’ administrative aide Frank McCulloch, accustomed to being treated by Johnson with disdain as the representative of the despised “Professor,” was surprised to find that Johnson was making an effort to be friendly. Inviting him into his private office, the Leader had him sit down for a chat, and after a few minutes, asked, in an earnest, sincere tone, “Frank, why do the liberals hate me?” McCulloch responded, “Senator, they don’t hate you but they certainly are displeased by your positions and your conduct on some of the key issues on which the Democratic Party has taken a position,” but Johnson said that no, it was personal, that liberals just didn’t like him, he didn’t know why—“He was appealing to me for sympathy as an object of hatred. I tried to explain that they really cared about civil rights, about justice, and that he kept opposing, but I can’t recall that it [that argument] fazed him in any way; he just kept on about the personal stuff… about people’s attitude toward him, about how they just hated Lyndon Johnson, speaking in a gloomy, mournful tone. ‘No, Frank, they just hate me, and Ah can’t understand why.’”

He tried to charm them, and to impress them: to convince them of his selflessness and altruism—of his utter selflessness, total altruism; of his complete lack of interest in political advancement, of the absolute absence in his makeup of any personal ambition whatsoever—and to make them appreciate the difficulties he had to face as Democratic Senate Leader, and the brilliance with which he overcame them; and he tried to convince them as well that he was on their side, that he had always been on their side, that he was more liberal than they thought, particularly on civil rights.

Jim Rowe and George Reedy had made him understand the growing importance in liberal intellectual circles of thirty-nine-year-old Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a noted Harvard historian with a gift for incisive phrasemaking, and he wrote Schlesinger inviting him to call on him the next time he was in Washington. And when Schlesinger did so, coming to his office on a Saturday, Johnson pulled out all the stops.

It was a memorable conversation—or, to be more precise, monologue; it lasted for an hour and a half, and although Schlesinger, “never known,” as a friend says, “for his shyness,” had prepared a long list of questions, Johnson talked the whole time almost without interruption.

First came the disclaimer of ambition. According to an aide-mémoire which Schlesinger wrote after the conversation, Johnson reminded him that he had had a heart attack; he was a sick man, he said. He had no political future, and he didn’t want one. “His main desire, he said, was to live a few more years. He had no interest in the presidential nomination”; he wasn’t cut out for the presidency anyway; he knew that. In fact, he said, he wasn’t even going to run for the Senate again. All he wanted to do was “to serve out his present term. Being entirely disinterested, he wanted only to do the best he could for his party and his nation in the three, or two, or one year remaining to him.” Then he could go back to Texas, where he belonged, and live out whatever few years the Good Lord gave him in peace.

Then he turned to the Senate—as only Lyndon Johnson could. That morning, Reedy had given Johnson a memorandum on how to handle Schlesinger: “He is a man of genuine intellect and eye [sic] think all you really have to do is leave him with the feeling that Senate leadership may be much more complicated than he has realized.”

That was indeed the feeling that Johnson left him with. In what Schlesinger’s memo calls a “stream-of-consciousness on the problems of leadership in the Senate,” Johnson “described the problems of keeping the conservative southerners (he called them ‘the Confederates’) and the liberal northerners in the same harness; he analyzed a number of insoluble parliamentary situations which he had mastered through his own brilliance and perseverance; he gave a generally fascinating account of the role which timing, persuasion, parliamentary knowledge, etc., have in getting bills through.”

Then he turned to the individual senators, the other forty-eight Democratic senators. “I want you to know the kind of material I have to work with,” he said. Schlesinger was to recall that “he didn’t do all of them, but he did most of them”—in a performance the historian was never to forget. Senator by senator Johnson ran down the list: each man’s strengths and weaknesses, who liked liquor too much, and who liked women, and how he had to know when to reach a senator at his own home and when at his mistress’s, who was controlled by the big power company in his state, and who listened to the REA cooperatives, who responded to the union pleas and who to the Grange instead, and which senator responded to one argument and which senator to the opposite argument. He did brief, but brilliant, imitations; “When he came to Chavez, whose trouble is alcoholism, Johnson imitated Chavez drunk—very funny.”

And who, Lyndon Johnson demanded, had to make all these diverse temperaments and philosophies work together? Who had to unite them into a workable majority? The Leader. He had to do everything, he said. It was as if his senators were a football team. He had to be the coach. He had to be the quarterback and call the signals. He had to be the center who snapped the ball, and the running back who ran the ball, and the blocker who blocked for the running back. To demonstrate, he lunged out of his chair. I’m the center, he said, bending over and snapping an imaginary ball. I’m the quarterback, he said, taking the ball and throwing an imaginary pass. I’m the end, he said, holding out his arms to catch the pass. I’m the runner, he said, tucking the ball under his arm and taking a charging step or two across the office. And I have to be the blocker, too, he said, and he threw a block.

And finally Lyndon Johnson came to the crucial point that he wanted Schlesinger to understand. “He seemed quite annoyed,” Schlesinger wrote in his aide-mémoire, “that the organized liberals do not regard him as one of their [own].” “Look at Americans for Democratic Action,” Johnson said. “They regard me as a southern reactionary, but they love Cliff Case. Have you ever compared my voting record with Cliff Case’s? I said, ‘No, I hadn’t,’ whereupon he opened his drawer and pulled out a comparison of his voting record … on fifteen issues. On each one he had voted for the liberal side and Case for the conservative side. ‘And yet they look on me as some kind of southern bigot.’ He added that maybe he was showing undue sensitivity to liberal criticism. ‘But what a sad day it will be for the Democratic Party when its Senate leader is not sensitive to liberal criticism.’” In particular, Lyndon Johnson said, there was the civil rights issue. On that issue, he said, the liberal feeling toward him was particularly unjust. “I’ve never said or done anything in my life to aggravate sectional feeling,” he said. Why, he said, every time he ran in Texas, he had the support of Negroes, because he had treated them fairly during his term as NYA director. “Maybe, he said sadly, the northerners won’t be satisfied until they split off and try to form a party of their own.” But all that would do is destroy the Democratic Party. And the northerners would not get very far on their own, “for several reasons—among them the fact that the southerners were better politicians.”

(There was a postscript to this conversation. During it, Schlesinger got to say very few words. “I had carefully thought out in advance the arguments to make when asked to justify my doubts about his leadership,” he was to recall, “but in the course of this picturesque and lavish discourse Johnson met in advance almost all the points I had in mind. When he finally paused, I found I had little to say…. After nearly two hours under hypnosis, I staggered away in a condition of exhaustion.” But evidently even a few words were more than was required. When, some months later, Galbraith, Schlesinger’s friend and fellow Harvard professor, was visiting Johnson in Texas, Johnson said: “I had a good meeting with Schlesinger. I found him quite easy to get along with. The only trouble was that he talked too much.”)

Another liberal object of his attentions were the Grahams of the Washington Post, and Johnson’s courtship of them was at its most effective, for it took place on his native heath. In December, 1956, Phil and Kay finally accepted his open, insistent, invitation to the Johnson Ranch. From the moment Lyndon loaded them into his car at the little Fredericksburg airstrip, it was a typical Johnson Ranch weekend: the ritual visits to the “birthplace,” to the little family graveyard on the riverbank, and to the stone barn in Johnson City; the stories about the Johnson forebears who had fought the Indians from that barn, about the Johnson brothers who had driven the great herds north to Abilene, about his grandmother Eliza Bunton who had ridden out ahead of the herd to scout and who had, during a Comanche raid, hidden under her log cabin and tied a diaper over her baby’s mouth so it wouldn’t make a sound. And the rituals and stories made vivid and believable one of the points he had been trying to make to northeastern liberals: that while Texas was certainly below the Mason-Dixon Line, he was, because of the part of Texas from which he came, not really a southerner but more a southwesterner. “The idea was that they were fighting Indians and they were pioneers—this southwestern kind of pioneering,” Katharine Graham recalls. “And it was ‘my animals’ and ‘my ranch’—you see him ride over those acres; it was like he was saying, ‘This is my background, and my roots.’ After that visit, I understood him more.”

(A glowing profile of Johnson that appeared in the Washington Post shortly after the Grahams’ return to Washington showed how well Phil had grasped the point:

On the civil rights issue, Johnson has always taken the traditional Southern view. But it may be well to remember that Johnson is from the highly individualistic “hill country” of Texas, which seldom echoes the prejudices of other sections of the Deep South. Where did Johnson acquire those unusual persuasive qualities which enabled him to walk into the middle of a party split on almost any issue and come out with an agreement? The story is that he inherited his talent from his father, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr…. Others say it traces from old Grandfather Sam Ealy Johnson, Sr., who predicted that his grandson would be a senator the moment he laid eyes on him. In any event, Johnson’s antecedents root deep in the country around Johnson City, which his forebears settled in the 1840s and battled the Comanches to keep.

The article was written by Robert Albright, but Johnson knew whom to thank for it. “I know how much I owe to you,” he wrote Phil, “and any time I can donate an arm, a leg or anything else to the Graham cause, you can count on it.”)

On his home ground, Lyndon Johnson was, in Mrs. Graham’s words, “sort of overwhelming—he sort of smothered you with hospitality and with charm.” There was the invariable insistence that the guest shoot a deer—whether the guest wanted to or not. “Phil—who loved hunting birds, in part because they are hard to shoot, which meant he mostly missed them, couldn’t stand the idea of killing a deer,” Mrs. Graham recalls. When they came upon a small group of deer standing on a hill and Johnson told Phil to shoot, “he couldn’t bear the thought,” and, with the gun on his shoulder, hesitated until the deer turned away from them and started to leave the scene. Then, when Johnson shouted, “Shoot, Phil!” Graham said, “I can’t shoot him in the ass, Lyndon,” as the deer bounded away. Spotting another group of deer a few minutes later, Johnson stopped the car again, and again ordered Graham to shoot. “I can’t, Lyndon,” Graham said this time, “He looks like Little Beagle Johnson.” But, Mrs. Graham says, “instead of laughing” and accepting Graham’s reluctance, Johnson grew angry. “Phil realized he had no choice but to comply, and he shot his deer”; later, Phil and Lyndon laughed over the episode.

And there was the time spent cementing his bonds with the visitor. After dinner, “he and Phil would sit for hours and drink” and talk in the big living room with the frontier-size fireplace. As she and Lady Bird sat mostly silent, Mrs. Graham says, “Lyndon slouched down, Phil bending his elbow—political talk, political gossip, people talk.” (One after-dinner session didn’t add much cement to the bonds between Lyndon and Mrs. Graham. “Lyndon started complaining” about journalists, she says. This was par for the course for any politician, of course, but “in the middle of his diatribe,” Johnson made a remark that she felt went beyond the usual limits, saying: “You can buy any one of them with a bottle of whiskey.” “I was much too reticent to enter into the conversation or to object,” Mrs. Graham says, “but when Phil and I went upstairs I denounced Lyndon for saying what he said, and Phil for letting it go unchallenged.” “How could you sit there and listen to that?” she demanded. “How could you?”)

Johnson’s parting gifts did not improve the situation. Phil’s present was a ten-gallon Stetson, hers a charm bracelet with charms attached, including one in the shape of Texas, and another of a microphone. “When it hit my hand, it was so heavy I realized it was gold,” she recalls, and, in the context of Johnson’s remark about the press being purchasable, “it rankled.” She asked her husband, “Should I give it back—it’s just what he was talking about,” but he said not to—that they would return a gift of equal value, which they did, sending Johnson a water purifier that he had mentioned needing.

In addition to the customary rituals, during the Grahams’ visit there was an added note, a concentration not only on the publisher but on the publisher’s wife—to make another point that Johnson wanted liberals to understand: that it was not through idealism and speeches that civil rights would be attained. Philip Graham had for some years been trying to persuade Johnson to “take the lead” on civil rights. “Phil always wanted Johnson to be President,” Joe Rauh was to say. “Maybe that [was] because of … his [Graham’s] feeling for the South. [Graham had grown up in Florida.] That he wanted a southerner [to be President]…. He wants to make Johnson President. Well, you got to clean him up on civil rights.” Graham had been “pushing Lyndon on its importance from the beginning of their relationship,” Mrs. Graham was to say. Since the publisher was himself pragmatic and realistic, “Phil and Lyndon were completely comfortable with each other” on the issue, but, as she puts it, “Lyndon regarded me quite differently [from Phil]”—as one of the flag-waving “red-hots” who couldn’t understand that their methods were not improving the chances for social justice. And during this visit, “looking straight at me, separating me from him and Phil,” he kept making that argument, prefacing each supporting point by saying, “You northern liberals …” hammering “points home, as though trying to explain to me how the world really worked.”

Illustrating the message was an anecdote, which Mrs. Graham would always think of as “The Story of How Civil Rights Came to Johnson City.” “You liberals,” Lyndon Johnson said. “You think that you fight for civil rights in the North. Well, I want to tell you how civil rights came to Johnson City.” And he launched into a story about an incident he said had occurred during his boyhood, when a road was being built through the town, and the road gang included “some Negras” (which, according to Mrs. Graham’s oral history, was how Johnson pronounced the word).

“At that time,” Lyndon Johnson said, “niggers weren’t allowed to stay in Johnson City” after sundown, but the road was coming “nearer and nearer,” and obviously the foreman of the road gang was planning to have the gang sleep in town.

“The town bully found” the foreman in the barbershop, and said, “Get them niggers out of town,” Johnson said. And then he said, the foreman “got off the chair, took the towel off his neck, put it aside, and they wrestled up and down Main Street.” And finally, Johnson said, the foreman “got on top” and took the bully’s head in both hands and started banging it against the pavement, asking, with each bang, “Can I keep my niggers? Can I keep my niggers? Can I keep my niggers”—until finally the bully agreed that he could.

“And that’s how civil rights came to Johnson City,” Lyndon Johnson concluded.

The story was of course told with the customary Johnson vividness. “It was rather a marvelous example—I think he’s the best storyteller in the world,” Mrs. Graham would recall years later, and, showing Johnson pounding an imaginary head down with both hands and shouting, “Can I keep my niggers? Can I keep my niggers?” she would break into a fond smile of reminiscence. And it had a very clear theme: that, in Mrs. Graham’s words, “that was how civil rights could be accomplished, not by idealism but by rough stuff”; that he, not the speechmaking northern red-hots, knew how to get things accomplished for civil rights. He was, Mrs. Graham recalls, saying that “I was an idealist, this theoretical northern liberal,” and he, Lyndon Johnson, “was a practical fellow,” and that it was through “practical” means—“rough stuff”—that “things got accomplished.”

With Schlesinger and the Grahams, this cultivation bore fruit. Shortly after their return from Washington, the Grahams told Jim Rowe about their visit to the ranch, and Rowe informed Johnson, “You certainly did a remarkable selling job there. They wasted at least an hour of my time telling me what a remarkable man you are.” Schlesinger’s impression of Johnson was recorded in his memoir to himself: “I found him both more attractive, more subtle and more formidable than I expected.” And, the historian said, “One got the sense of a man … with a nostalgic identification of himself as a liberal and a desire, other things being equal, to be on the liberal side.”

In other liberal fields, however, the seeds Johnson tried to plant after the 1956 elections fell on stonier ground. When Schlesinger told Joe Rauh of Johnson’s contention “that he was not running for the presidency or for the Senate in 1960,” Rauh just laughed heartily. He “said anybody who will believe that will believe anything.” Among most liberals, in fact, no planting was even possible; their antipathy toward the Majority Leader was far too strong to permit informal or social attempts at conversion to the Johnson cause. And overtures he had others make on his behalf to liberal journalists like Doris Fleeson or Thomas Stokes, to liberal labor leaders like Walter Reuther or Alex Rose, or to members of the New Deal-Fair Deal pantheon like Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman were notably unsuccessful. He could not, during these months just before the opening of the 1957 Congress, effect any significant change at all in prevailing liberal opinion about him, in part because to so many liberals the memory of earlier battles was still fresh (“What did he think—that we would forget what he did to Leland Olds?” says Alexander Radin of the American Public Power Association. “Well, I never would, I can tell you that”), but largely because of his more recent record on civil rights. Stokes described the “anguish and guilt” of Democratic northern leaders who “are scouring themselves for compromising with the southern wing of the party and permitting the southern leaders to shove civil rights legislation under the rug at the last session of Congress and, at the national convention, to put over a mealy-mouthed civil rights plank without even making a real fight against it.” To other northern leaders, it was the recent cruelty to Paul Douglas that left the bad taste in their mouths when they thought of Lyndon Johnson.

The first weeks after the election brought, as well, fresh signs that in 1957 the liberals were going to take the field again for social justice, and that in their view Lyndon Johnson was still very much the enemy. Declaring that “the Democrats are digging their own grave by inaction in the field of civil rights,” Hubert Humphrey announced that on the first day of the new session, he and five other liberal senators would jointly introduce a sixteen-point “Democratic Declaration,” a liberal legislative program highlighted by strong civil rights laws—and would also attempt to remove the main barrier to the program’s enactment by introducing a motion to repeal Rule 22. Fleeson predicted that Johnson would, as usual, oppose the motion because “Johnson is a southerner, deeply obligated for support and counsel to southerners.” Charles Diggs, the African-American congressman, said that if Johnson was unable to support the motion, he should resign as the party’s Senate Leader.

Schlesinger’s growing admiration for the Texan was most decidedly not shared by most of the historian’s fellow members of the ADA’s executive committee, who, while not going as far as Diggs in demanding Johnson’s outright resignation, passed a resolution asking him to recuse himself during the Rule 22 fight, and not “use his post to betray the Democratic platform.” ADA Chairman Rauh “regards the pivotal position of Lyndon Johnson as a major block to effective liberal legislation,” Irwin Ross reported in theNew York Post. Before the sixteen-point Declaration had even been announced, Rauh said, its six senatorial sponsors, afraid of Johnson’s power, had watered it down so that it would “be harder for Lyndon to complain.” Another coalition of liberal leaders, the National Committee for an Effective Congress, accused Johnson of wanting “to be the Democratic spokesman nationally—in a position tandem to that of the President,” and said that because of his views on civil rights he must not be allowed to have that role. One after another, leading liberals made the same point, none more eloquently than the New Yorker who in the Senate may have been almost an object of ridicule but who outside it, among liberals everywhere, was an object of reverence. In a valedictory interview he gave over the Christmas holidays of 1956, just before his retirement, Herbert Lehman told Irwin Ross that while he might be leaving the Senate, he was not leaving the fight—and that no matter how hopeless the fight seemed, it should be continued. “A fight is worthwhile even if you know you’re going to lose it,” he told Ross. “It’s the only way to crystallize attitudes, educate people. And in the end I’ve seen many hopeless causes win out.” Looking back at the 1920s, when it had seemed impossible to win social advances that were now an accepted part of American life, he said: “We were called radicals and dreamers, but we were willing to wage seemingly hopeless fights. In the same way, we will get complete school desegregation, and Negroes will get the right to vote in the South. These things are coming—quicker than people realize.”

Liberal dislike and distrust of Lyndon Johnson was not confined to idealists and intellectuals. At one Democratic conference, a speaker referred to the “great victory” the party had achieved in retaining control of Congress despite Eisenhower’s huge plurality. The next speaker was that most practical of politicians, Colonel Jacob M. Arvey of Illinois, who commented caustically: “All this talk about a great victory is fine. I think we scored a great victory. I also think we got hit by a truck.” And, the Colonel said, “if 1958 is to be a Democratic year, it may be necessary to get a few new pass catchers on the Democratic team.” An attempt was made to institutionalize the opposition. In a secret meeting near the end of November, Arvey and other seasoned professionals—liberal professionals—on the Democratic executive committee instructed National Chairman Paul Butler to formalize the challenge to the southern leadership in Congress by establishing a high-level “Democratic Advisory Council” to shape a party legislative program that would not coincide with, but challenge Eisenhower’s policies. Galbraith, one of its members, said that the purpose of the twenty-member council was to take “some of the Texas image off the party.” In the New York Times, Russell Baker said bluntly that “It is a challenge to Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas.”

Butler publicly invited Johnson and Rayburn to join the council—a tactical mistake on two counts. First, by including Rayburn, he infuriated scores of Democratic congressmen who took the formation of an “Advisory Council” as a personal insult to their beloved “Mr. Sam,” particularly because of his accomplishments in liberal causes. “I don’t think any outside committee can undertake to advise Rayburn,” said veteran Ohio congressman Michael Kirwan. “As Interstate Commerce Committee Chairman, as Majority Leader, and as Speaker, he pushed through the House all the important laws of the New Deal and Fair Deal. Certainly I can’t advise him. Who are they to advise him?” Second, by issuing a public invitation—without ascertaining beforehand whether it would be accepted—Butler allowed Johnson and Rayburn to decline publicly (and to make sure that other congressional invitees followed suit) in a statement that emphasized the council’s powerlessness by saying that a legislative program could only be promulgated by legislative leaders. “The first blood has gone to the congressional leadership of the party,” Gould Lincoln wrote. But with liberal icons like Lehman, Stevenson, Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt as members, the Democratic Advisory Council could hardly be ignored. “Our fight has just started,” Butler said, and his efforts were supported by liberal editorial writers, columnists, and cartoonists. They made it clear that the civil rights issue was not going to go away. Supporting the move to repeal Rule 22, the New York Times said that “Though similar efforts have failed before this … the interests of Democratic government require that it be made again, and again, and again, until at least it succeeds as it eventually will…. It is a travesty to wrap the mantle of ‘free speech’ around the filibuster. That is exactly what the filibuster is not.” And in words and pictures they also made clear what side of the issue they felt Lyndon Johnson was on. In the months since the Democratic convention the label he had worn there had been pasted on him more firmly than ever. Even his supporter Arthur Krock had to note that the criticism of his tactics at the convention had now been revived: “that he used his influence, with calamitous consequences, to induce the convention to ‘appease’ the South in the party platform plank on civil rights.” Conceding that the senatorial signers of the “Democratic Declaration” had little power within the Senate, The Nation told its readers that that was not the point. “The Declaration,” it said, “is an important document” because it is “the first major move in a campaign to reconstruct and rehabilitate the Democratic Party,” and because it was also “a vote of ‘no confidence’ in the leadership of Senator Johnson.” A Herblock cartoon on November 28 showed a “Senate Liberal” handing Johnson a paper labeled “Proposals for Cloture and Civil Rights Legislation.” In one hand, Johnson is holding a wastepaper basket in which he is going to deposit the paper; his other hand, hidden behind his back, is holding an outsize gavel with which he is preparing to knock the liberal on the head.

WHEN, FURTHERMORE, hard-eyed men in both parties—the poll-takers and strategists to whom politics is percentages—began analyzing the 1956 election results, certain percentages leapt out at them: those in the columns headed Negro.

The trend among African-American voters which in 1952 had so disturbed Democrats—and so encouraged Republicans—had intensified in 1956, they realized. In 1952, the 68 percent of the black vote that Adlai Stevenson had polled had been far below the percentages that Democratic strategists had come to expect. In 1956, Stevenson’s percentage was 61 percent. “Of all the major groups in the nation’s population,” pollster George Gallup reported, “the one that shifted most to the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket was the Negro voter.” And at the same time that the Democratic share of the Negro vote had declined, the size of that vote had grown—not in the South, of course, where a mere 15 percent of eligible Negroes had voted—but in the North, for between 1952 and 1956 the Negro exodus to northern cities had continued.

The concatenation of these two trends—an increase in the black vote and in the percentage of that vote going Republican—intensified the hopes tantalizing the GOP. It was in the big cities of California and the North’s eight big industrial states that the Negro vote—perhaps three million black voters—had been concentrated in 1956, and, “from every available evidence,” as the Democratic pollster Richard Scammon told his clients, during the next four years that vote “will continue to increase.” This possibility provided the GOP with a great opportunity: to take the big states and thereby to be able to hold the White House even without an Ike at the head of the ticket.

The more closely that these trends were analyzed—congressional district by congressional district, ward by ward—the more attainable that prospect appeared. The larger the Negro population in a particular district or ward, the larger had been Eisenhower’s margin of gain between his two elections. The heart of New York’s Negro population, for example, was the city’s Sixteenth Congressional District: Harlem. And in Harlem, where once a Republican presidential candidate counted himself lucky if he received 10 percent of the vote, Eisenhower had received 17 percent in 1952 and 34 percent in 1956. In Illinois’s First Congressional District—Chicago’s South Side—his share had increased from 25 percent to 36 percent. And “even a 50–50 break in the up-to-now heavily Democratic Negro vote might well push key doubtful states into the Republican column,” Scammon concluded. The Democrats might then be denied the White House until some new major adjustment of American political forces shifted the balance their way.”

And, strategists saw, a key reason for the Republican trend among African-American voters remained: the Democrats’ control of Capitol Hill. “The Negro voter by and large appears convinced that it is the Democrats who prevent any legislative help in his race’s striving for a better share in American democracy,” the Atlantic Monthly reported. “The Negro voter, and the white voter, too, who feels strongly on the subject, sees only Mississippi Senator Eastland blocking the door of his powerful Judiciary Committee and backed by Southern Democrats determined to filibuster any civil rights legislation.” NAACP lobbyist Clarence Mitchell, speaking to NAACP branches across the country during the 1956 campaign, had said that a heavy Negro vote for Republicans “would automatically eliminate twenty-one Southern chairmen from the key committee posts they now hold.” Campaigning in Harlem, Vice President Richard Nixon had told audiences that civil rights legislation “cannot pass … as long as the filibuster exists in the Senate.” (He also said that if Eisenhower was elected, “we are going to have performance on civil rights, not just promises,” because Eisenhower “is going to have a vice president who opposes the filibuster.”) The effectiveness of such pleas had been documented in the upsurge in the GOP vote in Harlem. Said Mitchell after the campaign: “Seldom in the long political history of our country has a man been so helpful in defeating members of his own party as Eastland.” Democrats knew Mitchell was right. Returning to Washington from Oregon, where he and his wife, Maurine, had made more than 350 speeches urging the re-election of Wayne Morse, Richard Neuberger said that although “less than two percent of Oregon’s population is colored,” “we are continually confronted with the charge that a vote for Senator Morse … was a vote to continue Senator Eastland as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee….”

There was a further disturbing note for Democrats. The concentration of northern Negro voters in the cities’ ghetto wards, together with gerrymandering that kept the Negro vote confined to those wards, meant that the shift in that vote toward the GOP had not yet been heavily felt in elections below the presidential level. But, as U.S. News & World Report said, if the shift continues, “it could affect the choice” of aldermen, city councilmen, and scores of House members. “This kind of political fallout in Negro precincts is causing major recalculations of party strength all over America.”

The recalculations were going on in both parties. Once a basic Democratic belief had been that the party could not afford to alienate the South. Now there was a new calculation. The eleven southern states had a total of 128 electoral votes, and that figure included Texas, which Eisenhower had carried twice and whose twenty-four electoral votes could no longer be considered safe for a Democratic presidential candidate. Without Texas, the South’s electoral vote was 104. The nine key northern states had 223 electoral votes. Accustomed though Capitol Hill had become to discounting Hubert Humphrey’s extravagant rhetoric, his remark that the Democrats were “digging their own grave” brought many nods in Democratic offices. “The civil rights dilemma loads down the Democrats in the North, as the Old Man of the Sea sat athwart the shoulders of Sinbad the Sailor,” said Senator Neuberger; unless the party’s stance on that issue was changed, “the result could be banishment for the Democrats for many decades from the executive branch of government.” Long indispensable, the South might, suddenly, now be expendable.

And while Democrats were constrained from taking full advantage of these new calculations by another reality—a change in the party’s stance might alienate the committee chairmen who were so important a source of its strength—no such constraint operated on the GOP. Republicans had little to lose, and a great deal to gain. Give us a civil rights bill, one Republican leader told James Reston, “and by 1960 we will break the Roosevelt coalition of the large cities and the South, even without Eisenhower.” No sooner had the 1956 election results been analyzed than Republican leaders began laying plans to exploit the situation, and among these leaders were the party’s two leading candidates to succeed Eisenhower, both of whom, as it happened, were from California, with its 194,000 Negro voters, which meant that both men had been sensitized to the potentials of black voting power (and both of whom, as it happened, were there in the Senate Chamber with Lyndon Johnson, one of them, William Knowland, seated just across the aisle from him, the other, Richard Nixon, on the low dais just a few feet away, his eyes almost level with those of the tall Majority Leader). Knowland, the Taft acolyte whose passion for civil rights had heretofore been extremely well concealed, now unequivocally promised the NAACP’s Mitchell that he would lead the fight to pass a civil rights bill in 1957. As for Knowland’s rival, as Marquis Childs said, “One thing even Nixon’s bitterest enemies have never denied him. That is a sure understanding of the main chance.” And, Childs wrote, Nixon was “working with all the intensity of a very intense nature, to try to shape … for his party” a strategy to position it on the right side of “the issue that contributed, more than any other, to the Republican landslide of last November.” Nixon’s ally, of course, was Brownell, and the Republican Attorney General had lost none of his enthusiasm for his proposed bill that would give the Justice Department “unprecedented power” to enforce a “broad array” of civil rights—the bill in whose inherent aims, and political possibilities, he deeply believed. Within a few days after the election, it was known that the Brownell Bill would be reintroduced in 1957. In 1956, it had been introduced late in the session, late enough for the Senate to avoid confronting it, but the Senate would not be able to avoid confronting it again.

SINCE THE 1956 ELECTION, there had been a further escalation of white hostility in the South. When the new school year had begun in September, before the election, there had been only minor progress in the seventeen states which, before the Brown decision, had required school segregation. Of the 2,731,750 Negro schoolchildren who were in school that September in the seventeen states, some 115,000–4 percent—were in schools also attended by whites. And even that small figure was misleading, for almost all of those 115,000 were in border states. In the eleven former Confederate states, 3,400 of Texas’ 248,000 Negroes were in integrated schools; a total of 1,200 more were in integrated schools in Arkansas or Tennessee; three years after Brown, that was the extent of southern compliance with the Court’s decree. And as John Bartlow Martin found on his tour through the South that Fall, “in recent months resistance [to school desegregation] has been hardening”; in most of the Deep South, he reported, “there is no prospect of school integration in the foreseeable future.” State legislatures would be convening in January, and scores of bills had been introduced that would have the effect of nullifying the educational integration decree. In Virginia, they were introduced by legislative members of the Byrd Machine. There was no time to lose, Harry Byrd said; a federal judge had issued a ruling designed to force integration in Virginia. “We face the gravest crisis since the War Between the States.” If laws were not passed to circumvent the ruling, he said, six-year-old children of both races would be “assembled in little huts before the bus comes, and the bus will then be packed like sardines…. What our people most fear is that by this close intimate social contact future generations will intermarry.” The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee called for “massive resistance” to all such court rulings; law enforcement, he said, should be “by the white people of this country.”

Other bills dealt with voting, intending to make it more difficult for African-Americans to register—not that such legislation seemed particularly urgent, for while black voting had been rising sharply in the North, in the South voting statistics were little more encouraging than those on schools. Among the more than six million Negroes in the eleven southern states who were twenty-one years of age in 1956, only 1,238,000 had been registered—still only one in five. There were entire counties in these states—counties in which thousands of Negroes lived—in which not a single Negro was registered to vote. In Mississippi, the number of registered Negroes may actually have declined during those four years. Further increases seemed likely to come even more slowly. Five states still had a poll tax, and in all the southern states the use of literacy tests and of outright intimidation, economic and/or physical, was increasing. A new tactic—wholesale “challenges” by Citizens Councils representatives of Negro voters on a county’s registration lists—had been instituted in 1956, and it had proven effective: in one Louisiana parish, more than three thousand of the four thousand registered Negroes had been purged from the registration books shortly before the 1956 election—and its use was expected to increase. The number of Negroes who actually voted in the South may actually have been smaller in 1956 than in 1952.

Nor was it only in schools and voting that the South was strengthening its defenses. “The [legislative] hoppers of the South are spilling over with legislation aimed at keeping the Negro ‘in his place,’” Stan Opotowsky of the New York Post found on a tour of the South in December, 1956. One bill that was about to be introduced—and passed—in Louisiana specifically prohibited the performance of George Gershwin’s musical Porgy and Bess since it raised the possibility of blacks and whites appearing on the same stage; it also prohibited the annual meeting of the state Red Cross, since a previous annual meeting had been attended by Negroes and whites.

Anger was escalating everywhere in the South. In the White Citizens Councils, the South had found, in John Bartlow Martin’s phrase, “a flag to rally round,” and in 1956 as in 1955 tens of thousands of white southerners joined their rolls. One huge rally followed another. The Councils’ vigilance extended into areas previously not thought of: incensed that some of Southern Bell’s party lines were used by both black and white subscribers, Mississippi’s Monroe County Council demanded that the company segregate its telephones.

The Councils’ targets included not only Negroes but white southerners whose racial views, while perhaps not pro-integration, were unacceptably moderate. They, too, Opotowsky found, “are subjected to the same terror if they dare stray from the most rigid segregation line.” “There is a consistent and insistent attempt to force all white southerners into a rigid pattern of defiance of the courts and to a position of rigidity on every aspect of the race question,” said Morris B. Abram, president of the American Jewish Committee. And these “enormous pressures,” Abram said, were succeeding. “The field is being preempted by the extremists.” The White Citizens Councils had the South—the white South as well as the black—firmly in its grip. “The domination is total,” Opotowsky wrote. “There is no middle ground, no shade of gray. Only black and white. And woe betide the black.” Reported Martin: “The Deep South is solid once more.”

Even more ominously, a growing number of southern whites were not satisfied with the Councils’ actions. There was, the New York Times reported that December, “an upsurge by the frustrated elements that want more boldness and action.” The Ku Klux Klan, in disrepute for more than a decade because of its violent redneck tactics, was again on the rise: that Fall, Martin reported, it “has burned crosses in the fields and paraded openly through many a small town.” And the Klan, as Opotowsky pointed out, “does not claim the niceties which the Councils wear as their mantle. They’re back to flogging again.” In one incident, in Camden, South Carolina, a white fifty-two-year-old high school music teacher was taken from his car, tied to a tree, and beaten with tree limbs and with a wooden plank by a group of men in white hoods because it was thought that he had advocated school integration. Only later was it learned that the beating had been given to the wrong man; the music teacher had, in fact, opposed integration.

Everywhere in the South, violence was rising. That November and December, 1956, in the wake of the victory in Montgomery (it had been a week after the November election that the Supreme Court ruled Alabama’s bus segregation ordinances unconstitutional), Negroes had begun bus boycotts in other southern cities, and were trying to integrate schools and parks as well. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization created to launch civil rights protests all across the South, was organizing for its first meeting, which would be held in Atlanta on January 10. Southern whites were reacting to this new black determination with new fury. The bombings of Negro homes and churches increased; more snipers fired on integrated buses; in one incident, in Montgomery, a Negro woman was wounded in the leg, and when more shots were fired at the bus, it headed for a police station with its passengers lying on the floor. There were new attempts on King’s life and family, including a shotgun blast fired into their home while they were sleeping. In Birmingham, Fred Shuttlesworth had announced that he and other Negroes would sit in the front rows of city buses on the day after Christmas. On Christmas night, a bundle of fifteen sticks of dynamite exploded beneath Shuttlesworth’s parsonage. The next day, he and a score of other Negroes were arrested on the buses. Police in other Alabama cities also ignored the Supreme Court ruling, arresting Negroes who sat in front. On the eve of the 1957 session of Congress, southern bombings, beatings, sniper fire, and cross-burnings were not stopping but increasing.

The perpetrators evidently felt they could act with impunity—and again and again they were proven correct. Every time black leaders asked Brownell to take action to stop the violence, the Attorney General had to reply that under existing law, the authority for maintaining intra-state law and order rested with the states, not the federal government. Two white men had actually been arrested for one of the bombings of Martin Luther King’s home, and had given, and signed, confessions. A Montgomery jury, all white naturally, had acquitted them nonetheless. “Deep Southern resistance,” John Bartlow Martin wrote, is “righteous, determined and sure of success. At the outset [it] probably was buying time. Not today. And they believe they have desegregation stopped. This is not a few loudmouth, rabble-rousing politicians…. This is all but unanimous white opposition.” He had taken a tour of the South to determine when the South might integrate its schools, and he gave his conclusion in the title of the book he wrote: The Deep South Says “Never.” The region’s attitude was personified in the Georgian who in 1956 drove gentlemanly old Walter George out of the Senate. Georgia’s new senator was Herman Talmadge—son of Gene Talmadge, hero of the woolhats, the Georgia Governor who during the 1930s and ’40s had been the incarnation of the suspender-snapping, tobacco-chewing, southern race baiter; while he had not actually been a member of the Klan, Gene once said, “I used to do a little whippin’ myself.” Herman was smoother, but just as unabashed a segregationist. As Governor he sponsored a state constitutional amendment allowing Georgia to close her public schools rather than desegregate them, and to send white and Negro children to separate, private, schools. Sitting contentedly in his stately home, filled with echoes of the Civil War (“When we remodeled we dug a few old Minié balls out of the house…. The only reason it was not burned was that Sherman occupied it”), he told Martin, “They couldn’t send enough bayonets down here to compel the people to send their children to school with Nigras.” Talmadge’s election to the United States Senate in November, 1956, was by the biggest majority in Georgia’s history. To Clarence Mitchell, says Mitchell’s biographer, “the supplanting of George by Talmadge” was “a tragedy that reaffirmed the South’s intention to stick to its unconstitutional way of life.”

The South was determined that its position on segregation would in fact be hardened, that this new civil rights agitation would be defeated. And when southern strategists surveyed the situation, they were confident that it would be defeated, for after all, if all else failed, they still had their Senate citadel, where they still held their chairmanships and their subcommittees. When Congress reconvened in January, it would be faced again by the Brownell Bill, but although that bill had been passed by the House in 1956, it had been blocked in the Senate, and, if necessary, it would be blocked there again. And back in the states of the southern senators, the rising Rebel yell was not for compromise but for victory.

LYNDON JOHNSON was in residence at the Johnson Ranch over Christmas vacation in December, 1956, so early each morning Mary Rather would walk down to the Pedernales, passing the family cemetery with its big live oak, and then across the river on the low-water bridge to collect the mail from the large, slightly tilted mailbox.

That December, late in the month, among the missives that Ms. Rather found in the mail and left on the dining room table for her boss to open over breakfast were three communications that were definitely not Christmas greetings. They were warnings—warnings, in the form of memoranda, that Lyndon Johnson took very seriously because of the identity of the men who had written them. Each of the three memoranda warned him that he must act on civil rights, and act soon. And each memo told him also what might never happen if he failed to act.

One of the memoranda, mailed from Washington on December 20, was from the man with whom he could not “afford to argue,” and it demonstrated that among people committed to the cause of social justice, not even personal affection could blunt the issue. Philip Graham had discussed the memo with his wife before sending it; in her memoirs, she would describe it as “arguing that the senator needed to counteract the reputation he had as a conservative, sectional … politician.” The memorandum itself said that Johnson’s past response to this “false stereotype … has been largely negative. He complains about ‘phony liberals,’ he criticizes columnists and some other parts of the press, etc.” And, Philip Graham told Johnson bluntly, that reaction hadn’t worked—and it was never going to. The only way for Johnson to change his stereotype, Graham wrote, was for him to announce a legislative program that would make possible a congressional session “marked by a high order of accomplishment.” The program, Graham wrote, would have several “principal themes,” of which an “essential” one (Katharine Graham would call it “perhaps the most important”) was civil rights. “Civil rights to be strengthened, not by phony speechmaking but by consequential action,” Graham wrote. “It is essential for LBJ to create and articulate a realistic philosophy on civil rights … a new Civil Rights program which can be embraced by people” of all persuasions, and which “can bring reality to this general field.”

Bluntly, Philip Graham warned Lyndon Johnson of the consequences of not acting on civil rights. “Fate’s decree may be that LBJ is destined only to be a Jimmy Byrnes or a more energetic Dick Russell,” he said. “On the other hand, he may be permitted to play a truly consequential role in the mainstream of history.”

“The only way to test the possibilities is to test them,” he said. “At the moment LBJ is not doing so.”

The other two memos were both from the man who Johnson thought was the person who “might make him Pope or God knows what.” Four months earlier, at the Chicago convention, Jim Rowe had warned him, in writing, not to become “another Dick Russell,” had told him that if he presented an image of a “Southern candidate … it will make it almost impossible for Lyndon Johnson” to be nominated “in 1960,” had said that he knew that such an image “is Lyndon Johnson’s private nightmare.” Now, in December, Rowe warned Johnson, in writing—in two memoranda, dated December 13 and 21—that the nightmare was coming true. There is, Rowe said, a “growing public impression that you are the leader of the Southern Conservatives.”

“This has long worried me and I know it worries you, too,” Rowe said. Nonetheless, he said, “it is clear to me that enough has not been done to change or stop or turn this impression. All you and I have done essentially is to point out to each other that this picture is utterly untrue…. We are inclined to dismiss it.” And, he told Johnson, you “cannot afford to” dismiss it if you want to win the presidential nomination. “It is time that we accept the obvious truth that a public impression is just as much a fact as anything else.” That impression must be changed—quickly.

To accomplish this, Rowe had a number of suggestions. Some were social—Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson will be in Washington immediately after the first of the year, he told Johnson, and you should invite them over for a drink and “conciliate” them; think of what they can do to you if they are hostile!: “If these two men would wish to wrap the [southern candidate] tag … around your neck, you would have a terrible time trying to get rid of it.” And some were strategic, of which the key one was that he immediately put the newly elected Democratic senator from Colorado, former Representative John Carroll, a liberal and ardent civil libertarian, on the Judiciary Committee.

“Your problem in the Senate in 1957 will be twofold,” Rowe wrote. The first is “To avoid becoming the symbol of the South,” and the second was linked with the first: “To cut the ground out from the northern liberals” by at least appearing to cooperate with them. “So on civil rights,” Rowe said, “you should be ready to give the civil libertarians something which they already have.” Carroll’s appointment to Judiciary would accomplish this, because it would be meaningless, Rowe said: “The appointment of a civil liberty senator to the Judiciary is nothing special, because they already have a large majority [on the committee].” Johnson had Reedy write Rowe a letter temporizing on the appointment, and Rowe didn’t press the subject, but in subsequent telephone calls he did press the larger point: that to win the 1960 nomination, Johnson must make himself more acceptable to the North, and the only way to do that was by passing civil rights legislation. “Otherwise,” as Rowe was to say in an interview years later, “the northern bosses were just not going to take him. The Negro problem just wouldn’t allow it.”

The memoranda were not the only warnings from Washington delivered, on the same subject, to the Johnson Ranch that December. At least one other came in a telephone call from the capital, from another man whose advice Lyndon Johnson took very seriously. Tommy Corcoran was, as always, much blunter and less diplomatic than his partner, Rowe, and told Johnson flatly, he was to recall, “If he didn’t pass a civil rights bill, he could just forget [the] 1960 [nomination].”

These were warnings to a man who didn’t need warnings. “Johnson already knew” what he had to do in 1957, Rowe says. As Doris Kearns Goodwin was to write, “The issue of civil rights had created a crisis of legitimacy for both the Senate and the Democratic Party.” And therefore the issue was a crisis for Lyndon Johnson. In a sense—in the journalistic view, the public view—Lyndon Johnson was the Senate, its Majority Leader, the senator who would be held responsible for its actions. If the Senate appeared ineffectual, incapable of dealing with the issue, he would appear ineffectual, incapable. If it appeared sectional, southern, racist, he would appear sectional, southern, racist. Furthermore, as far as the Senate was concerned, he was the Democratic Party. If the party looked ineffectual or racist, the blame would fall on his head. If the party split, the chasm between southern and northern senators becoming unbridgeable, the responsibility for that would fall on his head, also. And the issue was, in addition, a crisis for him in terms of his personal ambition. As Goodwin wrote: “As a man with presidential dreams, Johnson recognized that it would be almost impossible for him to escape all responsibility for the Senate to act, that failure on this issue at this time would brand him forever as sectional and therefore unpresidential.”

Lyndon Johnson had no choice, and he knew it. Recalling the situation years later, he would say: “One thing had become absolutely certain: the Senate simply had to act, the Democratic Party simply had to act, and I simply had to act; the issue could wait no longer.”

“Something had to be done,” he said.

He understood as well the consequence of failure on this issue. “I knew,” he said, “that if I failed to produce on this one, my leadership would be broken into a hundred pieces; everything I had built up over the years would be completely undone.”

“PRODUCING” on civil rights seemed almost impossibly difficult, however. To win the Democratic presidential nomination, Lyndon Johnson had to keep the support of the South. And the key to keeping that support was not passing civil rights legislation but rather stopping it from being passed.

Moreover, despite his success in chipping away some of the South’s power in the Senate and concentrating it in his hands, the South’s senatorial power was still immense; in 1957, southerners would be the chairmen of no fewer than five of the Senate’s eight most powerful Standing Committees, and their ally Hayden would be chairman of a sixth, Appropriations. On the key committees and subcommittees, they were stacked, in fact, more deeply than ever; on Appropriations, for example, there would be in 1957, in addition to Chairman Hayden, eleven other Democratic members. Eight were southerners, two were senators who voted with the South on appropriation bills—exactly one, the most junior member, was a vote of which the southerners could not be confident. Even if he decided to pass a bill, could he pass it? In a confrontation with the Majority Leader, the chairmen might still win.

And it was not winning that was the most crucial point, for if there was a confrontation between Johnson and the South, Johnson might no longer be Majority Leader. The Leader was elected by the Democratic Caucus. In 1957, there would be forty-nine Democratic senators, so only twenty-five votes, a majority of the forty-nine, would be necessary to remove him and pick a new Leader. Even without his own vote, and that of the other Texas senator, Price Daniel, and, possibly, Gore of Tennessee, the South would still have nineteen or twenty of the necessary twenty-five votes, and it could always muster the few necessary additional votes from its allies. And where would he get votes? From the liberals, whose every meeting was an exercise in denouncing him? From the liberals, like Paul Douglas, whom he had repeatedly humiliated? Even if Johnson changed his stance on civil rights, could he really count on liberal support? And how many liberal votes were there in the Democratic Caucus anyway? Nine or ten for certain—that was all. If the South turned against him, he could be voted out of the leadership very easily.

Nor would voting him out even be necessary. The South had not found it necessary to remove Scott Lucas or Ernest McFarland as Majority Leader. The South had simply refused to cooperate with them—and without the South’s cooperation, those two men had been ineffectual, objects of ridicule. The South could do the same to Lyndon Johnson.

Even if Johnson was to decide to confront the South, and try to pass legislation over its opposition—was such a course feasible? Even if all the other defenses that the South could erect against civil rights legislation were somehow breached, there would remain still that last defense, the strongest of all, the defense that, decade after decade, had proven impregnable. Even if Lyndon Johnson decided to try to break a filibuster, could it be broken?

With more senators than ever before sympathetic to the plight of black Americans, and with more Republican support due to both conscience and calculation, a civil rights bill might well command a majority of votes in the Senate. But would the bill be allowed to come to a vote? There might be a majority for passage; would there be the necessary two-thirds for cloture? Western senators, of both parties, were supportive (sometimes only lukewarmly) of civil rights but were adamantly opposed to cloture, since the right of unlimited debate was their states’ ultimate protection. “Some conservative Republicans (from the Midwest) believe … that even the mildest civil rights legislation is wrong,” George Reedy notes. They might nonetheless be pressured by the White House into voting for such legislation, he says, but that did not mean they could also be pressured into voting for cloture. “Unlimited debate is regarded as an absolute principle by many senators,” Reedy wrote. “It is NOT [italics in original] just a dodge to keep civil rights legislation from passage.” On the eve of the Eighty-fifth Congress, some liberals were saying, as they had on the eve of the Eighty-fourth Congress, and the Eighty-third, and on the eve of Congresses going back for years before that, that there was a real chance that this time there would be enough votes to impose cloture, but among more realistic Capitol Hill observers there was considerable doubt about that. Only thirty-three votes or absences were necessary to defeat cloture; when to the nineteen or twenty southern votes were added the votes of conservative northeastern Republicans like Styles Bridges and John Marshall Butler and others, and conservative midwestern Republicans like Hickenlooper and Bricker and Jenner and Thye and Capehart and Curtis and Schoeppel and Hruska and Young and others, and western senators like Hay den and Goldwater and Alan Bible and Malone and Henry Dworshak and others, “you got up to thirty-three real fast,” as one vote-counter was to explain, even without including those senators who mouthed a support for civil rights that they did not feel in their hearts. Years later, putting down his thoughts in a definitive way, George Reedy was to write, “They [the southerners] unquestionably had the power to defeat—through filibuster—any or all Civil Rights proposals and there was no prospect whatsoever of shutting off their filibuster through a cloture move.” The last civil rights law had passed in 1875. During the eighty-two intervening years—eight decades; four generations—some civil rights bills had passed the House (five since the end of the war alone); not one had passed the Senate. And passing a civil rights bill in the Senate in 1957 seemed as difficult—almost impossible—as ever.

There was yet another consideration, the most daunting of all. A successful southern filibuster would wreck Johnson’s chances of winning the nomination—but so would an unsuccessful filibuster. The very launching of a filibuster would not only emphasize the split in his party, it would force him, as the Senate’s procedural leader, to take a stand on one side or the other, to take steps either to support it or to end it. From the moment one began, there was no way to avoid taking a stand: if he did nothing—took no action to stop the filibuster and simply let it go on—he would be supporting it, standing with the South, and he would never get the northern support he needed for the nomination. Moving to cut the filibuster off—moving for cloture—would cost him the support of the South. To “produce” on civil rights, therefore he would have to pass civil rights legislation—legislation that had invariably provoked the start of a filibuster whenever there was a chance of its passage—without allowing a filibuster to start. He had to persuade the members of the Southern Caucus, not only somewhat open-minded southerners like Hill and Sparkman and Fulbright but also Jim Eastland, to whom black Americans were “unbearably stinking” and who was chairman of Judiciary, and Olin Johnston, who had refused a dinner invitation because his wife might have to sit next to a black person, and who was chairman of Post Office, and Harry Byrd, chairman of Finance, who had called for “massive resistance” to civil rights laws lest there be “close intimate” contact between white and black children, and Allen Ellender, chairman of Agriculture, who studded his speeches with the word “nigger,” and Spessard Holland, the “true racist,” and John Stennis, a racist “smarter” than but “equally rabid” as his predecessor Bilbo—he had to persuade them all, not to mention the newcomers Talmadge (“They couldn’t send enough bayonets down here to compel the people to send their children to school with Nigras”) and Thurmond (“I will never favor mixing the races”)—Lyndon Johnson had to persuade these senators of the Old South, with all their power and all their hate, to allow a civil rights bill to become law without using their most effective weapon.

HE HAD ONE THING GOING FOR HIM: the southerners’ desire to make him President. New fuel had been added to Richard Russell’s determination to put Lyndon Johnson in the White House by the injustice he had seen perpetrated on Johnson at the Democratic Convention—the same injustice that had been perpetrated on him at the 1952 convention, and for the same reason: northern prejudice against his beloved Southland. And Chicago had also given Russell fresh proof that his plans for Johnson required the erasure from the Texan’s image of at least some of the southern tint—and that there was only one possible way to erase it. This was made clear to George Reedy one evening in mid-November in a very unlikely locale: a small bistro in Paris. Aware that his presidential hopes required him to show more interest in foreign affairs, Johnson had reluctantly added his name to a senatorial delegation to a NATO conference in Paris. Russell was a member of the delegation, and Johnson brought Reedy along. Russell and Reedy were having a companionable dinner by themselves at the bistro when suddenly, “out of nowhere,” Russell said, “George, we’re going to get that man elected President yet.” Then, Reedy recalls, there was a long pause, which was broken at last by Russell. “But we can never make him President unless the Senate first disposes of civil rights,” Richard Russell said.

The Grahams were not the only important visitors to the Johnson Ranch that December: Russell, accompanied by his favorite nephew, Bobby, came too (not at the same time as the Grahams, of course). Russell’s itinerary during his five days in Texas included the trips to St. Joseph Island and the Brown & Root ranch at Falfurrias that he had come to enjoy, but it included as well several long walks alone with Johnson. What the two senators discussed during those walks no one knows (“When they went off down there, they went off by themselves,” says Posh Oltorf, who had now become a full-time Brown & Root lobbyist), but it was to become apparent from their aftermath that the conservative southerner Richard Russell was as fully aware as the liberal southerner Philip Graham that for Lyndon Johnson to have a chance to become President he would first have to be “cleaned up on civil rights”—and it was to become apparent as well that to accomplish that objective, Russell had decided to give Johnson some leeway, to cut some slack in the ties that had bound him to the South.

How little leeway was to become apparent even before the session, however, because in December it became known that the key issue at the start of Congress would be again, as it was at the start of each new Congress, Rule 22—“the gravedigger in the Senate graveyard for civil rights bills”—which required sixty-four votes to limit debate, and which also provided that there could be no limit at all on a motion to proceed to a change in the rules.

Russell’s reaction to Humphrey’s declaration that a new attempt would be made to change Rule 22 was cold anger at this liberal to whom he had been so tolerant. He told Johnson he wanted Humphrey cut off completely from access to “the Senate leadership”—and the “leadership” acquiesced. Humphrey quickly realized that word had been passed that “he was to get the cold shoulder,” and he got it not only from the southerners but from his “friend” from Texas. With his usual warmth, Humphrey walked up to Johnson but was met with a chilliness that stopped just short of being an outright snub. Saying, “You broke faith with me,” Johnson turned and walked away. Humphrey’s reaction was instant grovel. “Now, Lyndon, you know I wouldn’t do that,” he said in an abject phone call. “You can get more votes out of this body than anybody can. You are a great, great leader, Lyndon. I was simply trying to make you an even better leader.” When this personal obeisance proved insufficient, Humphrey had an aide approach Bobby Baker to ascertain the price of peace, and it was promptly paid. The surrender was reported in an Associated Press dispatch about a speech Humphrey delivered in New York City, in which “Senator Humphrey took a decidedly different tack from that of other liberal democrats who recently have urged greater militancy in seeking liberal legislation.” The difference was indeed decided. More progress would be made, Humphrey said, if liberals became less militant. The question, he said, is, “Do you want to make progress or do you want to fight?” Sometimes, he said, “You have to be willing to inch along.” And he made it clear that on one issue he was certainly not willing to fight. “I’m not going to spend all my time fighting the Senate rules.” The dispute with Lyndon Johnson? As one of Humphrey’s biographers puts it, “In a few days it was patched up.” During the dispute, furthermore, a Washington Post reporter asked Johnson “if he himself favors any change in the filibuster rule,” and Johnson, the reporter wrote, “replied with a flat ‘No.’” Before the 1957 congressional session had begun, Johnson had lined up in support of the measure that was the highest barrier to civil rights legislation.

He had also, before leaving for Paris, tried to take another step to solidify the South’s Senate defenses. Earle Clements’ loss had left vacant the post of majority whip. There were both liberal and southern candidates for the job, and Johnson’s choice was a southerner: George Smathers. Telephoning Smathers at his Miami home, Johnson said, “I want to meet you up here tomorrow at eleven o’clock.” “I can’t get there by then,” Smathers said. “Goddammit, you can get there,” Johnson replied.

Smathers did, checking into the Mayflower Hotel. But on the flight north he decided not to take the job, partly because his chairmanship of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had already given him a taste of Johnson’s demands on subordinates, and he simply did not want to continue working that hard—but also because if he accepted the post, the South would hold both top Democratic senatorial leadership positions and this, he felt, “might invite trouble.” The next morning, a Mayflower desk clerk telephoned up to Smathers’ room to tell him that Mr. Johnson and Mr. Baker were on the way up. “There’s a knock, and there they are,” Smathers was to recall. “Johnson’s there in a raincoat, it was cold. He had a big cowboy Texas hat on. And Bobby was with him. Bobby usually was.” Taking it for granted that Smathers would accept the Assistant Leader’s job, Johnson began issuing instructions. Smathers said, “I don’t want to be your assistant,” and he was never to forget what followed. “It was just as though you had unleashed an awful smell of something. His nostrils flared, his eyes sort of looked funny. He said, ‘What are you saying?’ I said, ‘I don’t know that I want to be the whip.’ He said, ‘Do you really mean that?’ He hadn’t sat down the whole time, neither did Bobby, we were all standing. I said, ‘Yeah, Johnson, I don’t know that I want to do it.’ So he said, ‘Come on, Bobby, let’s go.’” Despite this setback (Johnson gave the post to Mike Mansfield of Montana, a highly respected but unassertive westerner who Johnson was sure would follow his instructions and who, Time noted, had been “a special protégé” of Walter George), on the eve of the 1957 session, Johnson appeared to be standing shoulder to shoulder with the enemies of civil rights—as he had been standing with them for more than twenty years.

THE SESSION’S OPENING DAYS did nothing to modify that impression. Johnson’s actions during those days furnished new evidence that while he may have been cut a little slack by the South, he hadn’t been cut much—that he was still going to be operating at the end of a very tight rope. During those days he moved effectively not for a civil rights bill, but against it.

At a January 2 meeting in Paul Douglas’ office on the ground floor of the Senate Office Building, the liberals had decided that Clinton Anderson would offer the same motion he had introduced in 1953, and would have reintroduced in 1955 had not Johnson tricked the liberals out of doing so: that deceptively simple motion to have the Senate adopt rules for the current session. And this year the liberals had a new ally, a very shrewd one. So high had the stakes become in the civil rights game that Richard Milhous Nixon had decided to take a hand himself—at the game’s big table, the Senate: to sit in on the game literally, by taking the presiding officer’s chair on the Senate dais at crucial moments, including the game’s opening hand. Aware of the Republican aim—of Nixon’s aim—of winning the African-American vote, Senate liberals had privately sounded out the Vice President, and he had privately let them know he would be on their side. It had therefore been agreed that as soon as Anderson made his motion, Douglas and other liberal senators would ask Nixon to rule on whether it was in order—on whether, in other words, the adoption of new Senate rules was permissible. And Douglas would also ask Nixon, “Under what rules is the Senate presently proceeding?” Nixon would then rule that the motion was in order, because it would be in order under normal parliamentary rules—and he would rule further that the Senate was at that moment proceeding under standard parliamentary rules because it was not a continuing body but a new Senate which had not yet adopted any rules of its own.

Anderson’s motion—coupled with Nixon’s ruling—would carry in it the seeds of death for the filibuster. Under standard parliamentary rules, all votes are decided by a simple majority. If Nixon held that the Senate was operating under those rules, not only could Anderson’s motion be passed by a simple majority, but if the South tried to filibuster against it, a liberal cloture motion to cut off that filibuster could also be passed by a simple majority. And then, approval having thereby been given to adopt new rules, a motion to adopt a new Rule 22—stating that cloture could be imposed by a simple majority—could be introduced. And if a filibuster against that motion was begun, a simple majority would suffice to defeat it.

Russell, well aware of the threat, was aware also that the GOP, all too willing to pander to the NAACP, might well make the vote on Anderson’s motion a party issue for its forty-seven senators—and that even Republican senators unenthusiastic about civil rights, and even less enthusiastic about making cloture easier, might support their Vice President on an issue that might make them the majority party and give them the chairmen’s gavels. Under Nixon’s ruling, not sixty-four but only forty-nine votes would be needed for passage of Anderson’s motion—and there might well be forty-nine votes to pass it.

Russell reacted by convening the Southern Caucus. Behind the closed doors of his office (on the second floor of the SOB, almost directly over Douglas’ office), resentment over “Judge Nixon’s” tactics spilled over, but Russell, emerging to meet a hallful of reporters, was urbane and confident, giving, one reporter wrote, “a classic performance of a southern politician uttering hard words in a soft manner.” His only hint of criticism was directed at Nixon. “Vice Presidents have always been trying to change the rules of the Senate, over which they have no control,” he said. Otherwise, stated another reporter, Russell was “calm and easy-going.” He managed nonetheless to make it clear that if Anderson’s motion for new rules carried, there would be a filibuster—a king-size one. If the Senate decided it could change rules, he said, then Rule 22 would not be the only rule changed. “We would then have to start with Rule 1, and write a completely new set of rules of the Senate. We would start from scratch.” Changes in every one of the Senate’s other thirty-nine rules would be introduced. And, as the New York Times reported, “Senator Russell suggested” that in this process “legislative business of the Senate might be halted.” “Extended debate” would be held on every proposed change, he said, forcing a separate cloture proceeding on every one. Even if votes could be obtained for the passage of thirty-nine cloture motions, the process would tie up the Senate completely for months. In fact, Russell said, if this “Pandora’s box” was opened, “there would be no way as I see it to bring the debate to a close.” He didn’t employ the word “ever,” but the word was implicit.

But even as Russell was describing the “Pandora” card, he knew that playing it was not going to be required. He had another, even better, ace up his sleeve, one that he knew would take the opening hand, because he had played it before, in the opening hand of 1953, and it had taken the hand then. It was an ace that could not be played by him, but only by the Majority Leader. In 1953 the then Majority Leader Taft had played it. Now, in 1957, the Majority Leader was Lyndon Johnson—and Johnson played it, too.

He played it the next day. Anderson introduced his motion. The liberals were expecting to make the next move as well: the moment Anderson finished speaking, Douglas and Humphrey were on their feet, waving their arms, requesting recognition from Nixon so that they could ask for the preplanned ruling. But the two liberals’ desks were in the far bend of the Democratic arc. Even as Douglas and Humphrey jumped up, a commanding figure rose in front of them, in the center of the floor. Lyndon Johnson was on his feet directly in front of the dais, almost eye to eye with the Vice President, demanding the prior recognition that was the Majority Leader’s prerogative. Nixon had no choice but to recognize him first—and when the Vice President did so, Johnson made his own motion: to table Anderson’s motion.

Russell’s ace took the pot in 1957 as it had in 1953. Since Anderson’s motion was no longer the pending business before the Senate—Johnson’s motion took precedence over it—Humphrey and Douglas could not ask for a ruling on it as they had planned to do, but could make only a “parliamentary inquiry” as to what would happen if it became the pending business, and Nixon could not give a ruling but only an “advisory opinion.” In his opinion, the Vice President came down strongly on the side of civil rights. The Constitution, he said, stated that each House could determine its own rules, “and this constitutional right… may be exercised by a majority of the Senate at any time. When the membership of the Senate changes, as it does upon the election of each Congress, it is the Chair’s opinion that there can be no question that the majority of the new existing membership” can “determine the rules.” Therefore, he said, any “Senate rule adopted in a previous Congress” which denies the right of a majority of a new Senate to adopt rules “is, in the opinion of the Chair, unconstitutional,” and, he added, “in the opinion of the Chair,” specifically Rule 22 is unconstitutional. But Johnson’s motion made Nixon’s opinion irrelevant. Had the Vice President been allowed to rule that Anderson’s motion was in order, a vote on that motion not only would have been a vote with clear-cut, even dramatic, civil rights implications because it struck at the hated filibuster, but would also have been in effect a vote on Nixon’s ruling, and would therefore have attracted heavy Republican support. “He was their Vice President, and he was going to be their candidate [for President in 1960], and a substantial number of Republicans would vote to support him because of that,” Howard Shuman explains. Their votes, added to the votes of liberal Democrats, might have added up to the necessary forty-nine, the necessary majority, and for the first time in decades, there would have been a realistic possibility of obtaining a civil rights bill. “That [a vote on Anderson’s motion] was our big chance,” Shuman says.

Johnson’s maneuver, however, meant that not Anderson’s motion but his own tabling motion would be voted on first. And that vote would not be on Nixon’s decision—and not directly on civil rights—but only on “tabling,” a procedural matter difficult to explain to voters.

Johnson’s work for the South during those first days of January, 1957, was not confined to parliamentary maneuvers. He threw onto the Senate table not only the ace that Richard Russell had placed in his hand, but some cards of his own—cards on which the face was the naked face of senatorial power. The cards were played against liberal members of his own party, to reduce Democratic support for civil rights to a minimum—and the cards were played with a ruthlessness that was striking in the rawness of its violation of what remained of the Senate’s seniority system.

The meeting of Johnson’s rubber-stamp Democratic Steering Committee, which made committee assignments, had been abruptly postponed until January 7, so that it would come after the vote on the tabling motion. And in more than one instance assignments were made on the basis not of seniority but of a senator’s vote on that motion. In the case of senators whose vote had been in doubt, a vote for Johnson’s motion—in effect a vote against civil rights—earned a reward, as was shown by the fate of Tennessee’s two senators. One of them, Albert Gore, whose sympathy for civil rights had been worrisome to the South, voted for Johnson’s motion (and against civil rights), and was rewarded with the Finance Committee seat he had been seeking. Tennessee’s other senator, Estes Kefauver, voted against Johnson’s motion—and was punished. Having asked repeatedly for a seat on Foreign Relations since the day he arrived in the Senate, Kefauver was confident that he would inherit the seat made vacant by Walter George’s retirement, since, with eight years’ seniority, he had more than any other applicant. The press, and everyone else familiar with the situation, was treating his appointment as a fait accompli. But when the Steering Committee’s press release on Democratic committee assignments was dropped on the table in the Capitol pressroom, reporters were startled to see that the new name on Foreign Relations was not “Estes Kefauver” but “John F. Kennedy,” who had only four years’ seniority but who was a northerner and whose vote against tabling had therefore been anticipated and was excusable. Kefauver’s reaction was restrained. “I am disappointed,” he said. “Of course, I do not blame Senator Kennedy for trying to better his position, but I am interested to learn that seniority is a rule that may or may not be applied by the Senate leadership in deciding the rights of senators.”

Other assignments made by the Steering Committee met the same criteria. Johnson had been seriously considering following Jim Rowe’s advice to appoint John Carroll to Judiciary, but Carroll, loyal to civil rights, had voted against his motion. He got neither Judiciary nor his second choice, Finance, for which he was considered well qualified because he had been an active member of the House’s counterpart committee, Ways and Means. Instead, he was appointed to Interior, “which he resented,” according to his administrative assistant, Harry Schnibbe.

And the loss of a committee assignment was, in some cases, only part of the punishment that Johnson inflicted for the wrong vote—as one of the newly elected senators, thirty-two-year-old Frank Church of Idaho, was to find out.

Having just taken his oath in the well of the Senate on January 3, Church was starting to walk back up the center aisle when, as he was passing the first desk, “I encountered this long arm of Lyndon Johnson reaching out and grabbing me.” Pulling him close, Johnson said: “Now Frank, you are the youngest member of this Senate, and you have a great future. There’s lots going for you. But the first thing you ought to learn is that in Congress you get along by going along.

“We’ve got a motion here that Clint Anderson is going to offer and it relates to a matter that is not important to your state,” Johnson said. “The people of your state don’t care how you vote on this one way or the other, but the leadership cares. It means a lot to me. So I just point this out to you. Your first vote is coming up, and I hope you’ll keep it in mind, because I like you, and I see big things in your future, and I want for you to get off on the right foot in the Senate.”

Church recalls giving only a noncommittal answer, saying something like, “I would study it further”—but, he says, “Apparently I left Senator Johnson with the impression that I would vote with him, and he never came back to me for a second time before the vote.” Since the new senator didn’t understand the importance of the vote—or the significance of Johnson’s combined threat and promise—his “studying” consisted only of a casual inquiry to one or two fellow senators as to how they were voting, and when they said they were voting against tabling, Church decided to do the same. When, on Friday, his name was called, he shouted “No.”

That was when Frank Church knew he had made a big mistake. From his desk in the back row, he could see Lyndon Johnson sitting below him at his front-row center desk, keeping tabs on the vote on a tally sheet. “When … I didn’t vote with him, he threw his pen down on the desk, and I didn’t see him pick it up again. I knew then that I was in deep trouble.”

Just how deep the youthful freshman was soon to find out. “For the next six months,” he was to recall, Lyndon Johnson “never spoke to me. He said nothing to me that was insulting, he just simply ignored me. When I was present with other senators, he talked to the other senators.”

And one thing Johnson did not talk to him about mattered a great deal to Frank Church. Young as he was to have begun a senatorial career—he was six years younger than any other senator—he had already known for a long time the senatorial footsteps he wanted to walk in: the footsteps of his legendary predecessor, the Lion of Idaho.

Even as a boy, Frank Church had idolized William Borah; in the eighth grade, he had written a letter to a newspaper applauding Borah’s warning to avoid foreign “entanglements”; one of his most vivid memories was of Borah’s funeral in Boise in 1940, when the fifteen-year-old youth had walked past the open casket; he wanted to be a senator, Church would say, “because he was a senator.” There was a point of resemblance between Church and Borah, the former Shakespearean actor whose Senate Chamber funeral was held without a eulogy because no one could match his eloquence. Church was also a spellbinding orator who, as a high school junior, had won first prize in a national oratorical contest. Church wanted not only to walk in Borah’s footprints but to step beyond them: “He arrived here [in the Senate] very determined to run for President,” recalls his legislative aide, Ward Hower. He knew the Senate post that would best help him achieve both goals: the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee that Borah had held for nine years. “He was aiming not just at a seat but at the chairmanship, because that gives a senator from a small state a chance to make a name for himself,” Hower says. And Church was aware that if a senator wanted to eventually become chairman of a committee, it was important that he go on that committee early. Talking to Church a day or two before the Senate convened, Johnson had made it clear that he understood that ambition, and might well be willing to help it along, not immediately, of course, but at some early opportunity. Now suddenly any chance of going on Foreign Relations seemed extremely remote. When Church attempted to make a peace overture through Bobby Baker, Baker was not encouraging. “The Leader’s got a long memory,” he said.

Johnson’s tactics and methods were effective. His tabling motion had cut the ground out from under the liberal attempt to enlist Republican senators on the side of civil rights. When his motion had been voted on—on January 4—only seventeen Republicans had voted against it and for civil rights. Twenty-eight had voted against civil rights. (Two Republicans had been absent.) And his use of raw power on his own side of the aisle had given the southern senators additional proof of his loyalty—that he would, in fact, move on their behalf with all the determination they could desire. Only twenty-one Democrats had defied the Leader’s power by voting for civil rights. Twenty-seven Democrats had voted against civil rights. There had therefore been a total of only thirty-eight votes for civil rights, fifty-five against. He had done precisely what the Southern Caucus—and in particular, its general—wanted.

Despite the effectiveness of his tactics and methods, in the light of his longer-term goal, the overall weakness of his position had become very clear during that first week in January—because during that fight Richard Russell’s position had become very clear. However much affection Russell might feel for Lyndon Johnson, the overriding reason that Russell wanted him to become President was to protect the interests of the South; when Johnson’s interests collided with those interests, it was the South’s, not Johnson’s, that would be protected. In fact, in the final analysis, it would be only the South’s interests that mattered. Aware though Russell might be that Johnson could never become President “unless the Senate first disposes of civil rights,” if “disposing” of civil rights entailed Senate actions that hurt the South, and the rigid racial segregation that Russell felt was vital to the South, then the disposing would be dispensed with. Use of the filibuster would put an end to Lyndon Johnson’s dreams, but the filibuster was the South’s ultimate defense, and Russell’s firm determination to fight Clint Anderson’s motion to the death had demonstrated that he would never agree to any weakening of that defense, no matter how damaging the consequences of such a fight for Johnson’s presidential ambitions. Johnson had stood solidly with the South in that fight, but if he hadn’t, and if the South had been losing, what would have been the result? “Extended debate” on forty separate rules—the most massive filibuster of them all. To advance along his path, Lyndon Johnson had to persuade the southerners to allow him to distance himself from them on civil rights, and from the filibuster that defended civil rights, and in the first test of 1957, the southerners had shown not the slightest inclination to allow him any real distance at all.

WITH THE SUCCESS of Lyndon Johnson’s tabling motion, voices across the entire spectrum of liberal opinion were raised against him. “Once again, democracy has taken a beating in the halls of the United States Senate,” the New York Post editorialized. “It was a bad day for the cause of freedom. The unholy alliance [of southern Democrats and midwestern Republicans] still holds sway.” And, the Post said, it holds sway largely because of the Majority Leader. “How can the Democrats explain the continued eminence of Lyndon Johnson, who is justly taking bows for the grand maneuvers of the filibuster legion?” The Post’s was always one of the shrillest voices in the liberal chorus, but that January there was, in liberal discussions of Lyndon Johnson, a harsh note even in voices that were generally calm and reasonable. In a long, thoughtful analysis of the Senate, Richard Rovere wrote in The New Yorker that one of the institution’s most striking aspects is its esprit de corps, which “unites senators of differing political views … against the world outside the Senate.” And proof of this, Rovere said, is “the support that [Senate] Democrats of left, right and center have given” to Johnson, while outside the Senate, “among liberal northern Democrats as a group, it has become an article of faith that Senator Johnson plays a generally destructive role, and that no good can come of his continuing as spokesman for the party.”

This liberal anger certainly appeared justified. In fighting for the filibuster, Lyndon Johnson had seemingly only been doing in early January, 1957, what he had done so many times before. It was only natural for liberals who for twenty years had seen Lyndon Johnson standing squarely on the side of the South and against civil rights to assume that during the rest of 1957 he would be standing on the same side again.

But he wouldn’t. During Lyndon Johnson’s previous political life, compassion had constantly been in conflict with ambition, and invariably ambition had won. Given the imperatives of his nature, in such a conflict, it had been inevitable that the ambition would win. For the compassion to be released, to express itself in concrete accomplishments, it would have to be compatible with the ambition, pointing in the same direction. And now, at last, in 1957, it was.

So Lyndon Johnson changed—and changed the course of American history. For at last this leader of men would be leading, fighting, not only for himself but for a great cause. This man who in the pursuit of his aims could be so utterly ruthless—who would let nothing stand in his way; who, in the pursuit, deceived, and betrayed and cheated—would be deceiving and betraying and cheating on behalf of something other than himself: specifically, on behalf of the sixteen million Americans whose skins were dark. All through Lyndon Johnson’s political life—as congressman and senator, as congressman’s secretary and NYA director—there had been striking evidence not only of compassion but of something that could make compassion meaningful: signs of a most unusual capacity, a very rare gift, for using the powers of government to help the downtrodden and the dispossessed. This capacity had always been held in check by his quest for power. Now he had the power. Power reveals. The compassion that had been hidden was to be revealed now—in full. Did those sixteen million Americans need a mighty champion in the halls of government? They were about to get one.

HIS FIRST JOB was to persuade southern senators that they should allow a civil rights bill to pass—that even though they had preserved the filibuster, they shouldn’t use it.

To persuade them, he employed, in individual conversations with these senators and in meetings of the Southern Caucus in Richard Russell’s office, several arguments that his actions on Rule 22 made them more disposed to accept.

Some of these arguments were valid. The times were changing, he told them, and we (he always used “we” in talking with the southerners; he had been using that pronoun since his “We of the South” speech in 1949) had better wake up to that. Demand for civil rights legislation was rising. Civil rights was a big issue, and it was going to get bigger—and we look bad on that issue. The Republicans had decided to do anything they had to do to win the nigger vote. (He usually used that noun in talking with southerners, varying its pronunciation to fit the senator; it was “Nigras” with some senators from the Middle South, “Negras” with Eastland or Olin Johnston.) The Republicans were making civil rights a party issue—their issue. It’s a tough issue for the Democrats. It’s hurting us. Look what happened in the last election; look at that vote in Harlem! And it’s hurting us because of what we’re doing here in the Senate. The perception is that the Senate is the roadblock, the reason that no civil rights bill has passed in eighty-two years. And it’s easy for Negroes to put the blame on the Senate, because we’re exposed here. Did you hear what the voters out in Oregon were saying to Dick Neuberger about ol’ Jim? And we’re not only weak in the Senate because our Republican friends seem to have suddenly forgotten everything we’ve done for them, and not only because Bill Knowland is going to run for Governor of California, and he needs the Negro vote. Don’t forget who the presiding officer is. Nixon is going to try to out-nigger Knowland. He’s conniving with the NAACP right now to put us on the spot so we’ll look bad. If we don’t do something, that issue is going to hurt the whole Democratic Party even worse in ’58 and ’60. Look what can happen to us in the Senate. All the Republicans have to do is take one seat. One seat! Then it’ll be a tie, and Nixon will break it, and we won’t even get to organize the Senate again. They will. And the only way to defuse that issue is to let a token bill go through so the Republicans can’t say we’ve stopped all civil rights legislation again.

The validity of some of the other arguments he was making to the southern senators is more difficult to assess. One argument that Johnson made a centerpiece of his case to the southerners was that we might not even win a filibuster this time, that cloture might be imposed—first, because we’ve got fewer votes: Kefauver isn’t going to vote with us, all he can think about is being President, and maybe Gore won’t be with us, either; that brings us down to twenty votes. And there were other arguments. For a long time we didn’t have to worry about cloture, because we could count on the support of the Republicans in the Senate. Now, he said, that support was gone, and we’d better realize that. The whole Republican Party, from the top down, was going to pander to the Negroes; the President will put pressure on the Republican senators, the Vice President will, Bill Knowland will—and the Republican senators themselves will see the opportunity not only for the Republican presidential candidate but for themselves. What are we going to do, Lyndon Johnson asked the southerners, if one day we go to the Republicans for the rest of the thirty-three votes we need to sustain a filibuster and the votes aren’t there? And the problem wasn’t only with the Republicans. The times were changing, he told them, agitation for civil rights legislation was rising, and therefore pressure on all their Senate colleagues, Democrat as well as Republican, was rising. It was going to be steadily more difficult for non-southern Democrats to vote with the South.

And even if we do stave off cloture this year, he told the southerners, filibustering this year will hurt us in years to come. There was just too much sentiment out there in the country against filibustering. It’s too easy a target. You heard what Nixon said in Harlem: “If you support Ike and elect a Republican Senate, you’ll get action, not filibusters.” Thurmond aide Harry Dent, who had been assigned by Thurmond, more suspicious of Johnson than the other southern senators, to “hang out in the Democratic cloakroom” and listen to “what LBJ was up to,” says that Johnson was arguing that, “Yes, the southern leaders had power, but these powers would erode.” And, Johnson said, if enough Republicans go along with those goddamned bomb-throwers in our own party, how can we be sure that cloture won’t be imposed, if not in 1958, then in 1959? What if we lose the next vote to table? If Nixon then firms that opinion up into a ruling, and the Republicans have the votes to sustain it—what’re we going to do then? We might win a filibuster this year, but if we use one this year, then next year or the year after we might lose the whole right to filibuster—might lose it forever. And without a filibuster, the South is defenseless. They can pass any goddamn thing they want. Johnson, Reedy says, was telling the southerners, “Don’t filibuster! You have to let a civil rights bill pass this year! If you don’t, God knows what is going to happen!”

Another argument he was using was that they shouldn’t filibuster because there was no need to filibuster. The Brownell Bill might be objectionable, he said, but, he said, it could be amended. Some of our friends on the other side of the aisle don’t like Brownell, or his bill, any more than we do, he said. There are some people on our side of the aisle who feel the same way, even if they can’t say so. These senators, he said, might need to vote for a civil rights bill to satisfy their constituents, but it didn’t have to be a strong bill. All these senators were his friends, he said. He could work with them. They would negotiate together. The bill might be a strong bill now, but by the time it came to a vote it would be a very different bill. It would be amended down until it was so weak that it was only a token bill.

They could count on him, he told the southerners. He would get the bill amended down to something so weak that we have no real objection to it, to something we can live with. And then we won’t have to filibuster it. We can let it come to a vote. We’ll still vote against it, and if it passes, it won’t really matter. “We’re up against the wall,” he told the southerners. “We have to get the best that we can get—and we can get it! The future of the South is at stake here. We have to save the South as much as we can. If we don’t do this [let a token bill go through], all the southern principles will go down the tubes. We can’t have everything the way we want it, but we can have most of it. We’re up against the wall!” And the way to forestall all these unpleasant possibilities—of the passage of a law that would transform the southern way of life; of a defeat of a filibuster this year; of the outlawing of the filibuster in some year to come—was to allow a civil rights bill to go through this year; a weak bill but a bill, so that the Republicans could not say that the Democrats were standing in the way of any civil rights legislation at all.

The validity of these arguments is impossible to evaluate from this distance, for what is involved is the predicting of the votes of individual senators, and so many factors might have influenced the senators that after so many years the votes can’t be predicted with any confidence. Even by the most generous estimate, however, those arguments appear to be doubtful. You got up to thirty-three real fast, Bryce Harlow says, and not only southern aides but many observers on the liberal side and the Republican side also agree. A typical comment is that of Sam Zagoria, administrative assistant to the liberal Republican Clifford Case. The liberals, he said, “felt they could win a straight vote, but they felt they couldn’t beat a filibuster.” Murray Zweben, secretary to the Senate Parliamentarian, says, “Down deep, if push came to shove, the liberals wouldn’t have had the votes they thought they had.” But some of the southerners didn’t count, had never counted—Byrd, for example. “Johnson counted for him.”

And this helped Johnson frighten the southerners. When he told them that a filibuster might lose, many of them believed him. And some of them were frightened: the southern way of life was precious to them; how could they gamble it on an uncertainty?

ANOTHER ARGUMENT BEING MADE to the southern senators was being made much less explicitly—generally only by implication, only in hints. And it was only occasionally made by Lyndon Johnson; usually it was made by Richard Russell—for since the argument concerned Lyndon Johnson, at times it was better that it come from someone else. It was a very persuasive argument. The South should let a civil rights bill pass, this argument said, because if it passed, Lyndon Johnson would have a better chance of becoming President.

Was Johnson, as Reedy puts it, “in private conversations, taking advantage of a growing belief that he might be a presidential candidate”? When he told Eastland or Olin Johnston or Harry Byrd, “I’ve just got to give those bomb-throwers something to get them off my back,” did they understand him to be really saying that, as Reedy puts it, he “had to have some leeway to get national recognition”?—that if there was a no-holds-barred fight in the Senate, and he lined up on the side of the South, he would never get to be President?

When this argument was employed on a southern senator, implicit in it, of course, was the assumption that a Johnson presidency would be a desirable thing for the South.

Johnson—and Russell—were, in 1957, reassuring southern senators that this would indeed be the case. With the more senior southerners, those who had been working with Johnson and Russell for years and who understood the implications of the argument, it wasn’t necessary to spell them out or in some cases even to mention them. In 1957, however, there were three new southern senators, and to them things were made more explicit. Having won a special election in March, 1957, to replace Price Daniel, Texas liberal Ralph Yarborough would, on his arrival on Capitol Hill that month, pay the obligatory visit to Richard Russell about his committee assignments, and would be asked by Russell to sign the Southern Manifesto, which had been passed the year before. Yarborough declined, and tried to excuse himself by saying that his fellow Texan Johnson hadn’t signed. Russell, Yarborough recalls, replied that “he [Johnson] was running for President, and this [signing] would ruin him”—and that it was important that Johnson not be “ruined.” Thereafter, listening in the Democratic cloakroom and on the Senate floor to Johnson talk to the other southern senators, Yarborough understood the reason for Russell’s feelings. “He [Johnson] made them think he was with them, and that he’d be with them forever,” Yarborough says. The two other new members of the Southern Caucus, Herman Talmadge and Strom Thurmond, had both been sworn in on January 3, 1957—As soon as Talmadge arrived in Washington, the facts of Senate life were explained to him: thereafter he would support Johnson for the presidency, explaining his stand by saying, as a story in the Atlanta Constitution put it, that as President, “Johnson would be more favorable to the South’s position on States’ Rights, and therefore his choice … would be Johnson.” Thurmond, the former presidential candidate of Dixieland’s States Right Party and an ardent racist (after listening one day in 1957 to the South Carolinian deliver, in a dispassionate tone, a long, dogmatic discourse on the irremediable inferiority of the Negro race, Olin Johnston, ardent racist himself, was moved to comment: “Strom really believes that stuff!”), was astonished to find that Russell was not adamantly opposed to any civil rights bill at all. He felt he understood Russell’s reasoning. “I think Russell didn’t fight it [the bill] as hard as he ordinarily would have” if he hadn’t wanted Johnson to be President, Thurmond was to tell an interviewer. “He was trying to help Lyndon get elected President…”

What did this argument mean to the southern senators? What was Johnson saying to make them feel “he would be with them forever”? Did it mean merely, as George Reedy says, that he would use the presidency as a means to heal century-old scars and make the South truly a part of the Union again, that he would “end the Civil War,” that he would be “a bridge” for the reconciliation between North and South? Certainly, some of Johnson’s aides believe this is the basic meaning. Harry McPherson was to write that “Johnson felt about the race question much as I did, namely that it obsessed the South and diverted it from attending to its economic and educational problems; that it produced among white southerners angry defensiveness and parochialism.” And most, if not all, Johnson biographers have believed it, too. “Johnson argued, and he probably believed, that the South was on the verge of new possibilities for rapid expansion,” but that those possibilities would not be exploited if the racial issue was not defused by civil rights legislation, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote. And with some of the more tolerant, less racist southern senators such as Lister Hill or John Sparkman, that was probably what the argument meant. But did Johnson’s persuasion of other southern senators rest also on other grounds? Probably there is not one answer; almost certainly there were different emphases, depending on which senator he was talking to—arguments tailored to specific individuals by someone supremely gifted at telling each man what he wanted to hear. “We’re talking about twenty different individuals, you know,” Harry Dent says. But persuasion is in part a matter of tone, and the tone of the words and phrases that Lyndon Johnson was heard using to the southern senators—“the nigger bill,” “Negras,” “uppity”—was not that of a man interested primarily in healing wounds or building bridges or facilitating economic progress. What’s more, the Southern Caucus included not only southern moderates like Hill and Sparkman but southern racists like Byrd and Talmadge and Eastland and Olin Johnston to whom economic progress was not the predominant concern. And these racists were without exception among Johnson’s most enthusiastic supporters for the presidency. Johnson was to joke about the depth of Eastland’s racial beliefs, and about the Mississippian’s other obsession—Communist subversion—and Johnson’s aides and biographers repeat these jokes as if they are evidence of Johnson’s true feelings. Writing that “Johnson deplored East-land’s militant racism” as well as his Communist obsession, Booth Mooney quotes him as saying, “Jim Eastland could be standing right in the middle of the worst Mississippi flood ever known, and he’d say the niggers caused it, helped out by the Communists.” But until Johnson became President, Eastland did not deplore what he felt were Johnson’s beliefs on the issue. There was nothing about Johnson that Eastland deplored. Indeed, this archetypal racist constantly praised Lyndon Johnson in the most laudatory terms. “You have certainly made the best Majority Leader we have ever had,” he wrote him in 1956, adding, “I am leaving tomorrow for the Convention and will vote for you for President.” And he actively promoted him for the 1960 presidential nomination as well.

And Talmadge’s statement that the reason he was supporting Johnson was that “Johnson would be more favorable to the South’s position on States’ Rights” was not a statement about wound-healing or bridge-building, as became clear when the author, after ten years of trying to obtain an interview with Talmadge, was finally granted one, which took place on January 10, 2000, at Talmadge’s home on Lake Talmadge in Georgia’s Henry County (reached by driving south from Atlanta on Herman Talmadge Highway and turning off at the exit marked “Herman Talmadge Road”).

Asked about his relationship with Lyndon Johnson in the Senate, Talmadge said, “At first, for years, I liked him. He spent a lot of time cultivating me—hours and hours.” They would talk about “everything,” Talmadge said. “Girls, hunting.” And, Talmadge said, they would talk about civil rights, and the relationships between whites and Negroes. How did Lyndon Johnson view the relationship between whites and Negroes? “Master and servant,” Talmadge replied. Well, didn’t he have any sympathy for their situation? “None indicated,” Talmadge replied.

Talmadge said that during the 1950s, Johnson would assure the southerners that they could count on him to weaken a civil rights bill as much as possible, that he was on their side on civil rights, that he had to pretend that he wasn’t, to meet the Southern Caucus as infrequently as possible, but that he really was their ally. “He would tell us, I’m one of you, but I can help you more if I don’t meet with you.” And, Talmadge said, the southerners believed him, believed that while changes in the civil rights laws were inevitable, Johnson would keep them as minor as possible, that “he was with us in his heart.”

“I believed him,” Talmadge said, but “I changed my opinion.” When? “When he was President,” Talmadge said. How did you feel then? “Disappointed,” Talmadge said. “Angry.” There was a long pause, and then he added, “Sick.” When asked, How did you feel when he said, “We shall overcome?,” Talmadge repeated, “Sick.”

The author then asked, “Did you feel that Lyndon Johnson betrayed you?” There was a longer pause. It could not have been easy for a politician as wily as Herman Talmadge to admit he had been fooled so completely. “Yes,” he finally said.

Of all the top aides to the southerners, the one with the best view of Johnson’s arguments was probably Dent, because of the time he spent “keeping an eye on Johnson” in the Democratic cloakroom. Dent says, “LBJ’s whole gambit was, ‘You guys can put me in the White House,’ and that will give you more authority and power…. And that would keep the South where the South wanted to be, which was a certain amount of segregation, at least. He was telling them, If LBJ was in the White House, the South would not get everything it wanted, but it would be far better off than if a Hubert Humphrey was President.”

When Dent’s assessment was repeated to John A. Goldsmith, head of the United Press Senate staff in the 1950s, Goldsmith said, “I think it’s much more ambivalent [than what Dent said]. Whether he [Johnson] or Russell would have said it in words that blunt I doubt.” And, Goldsmith said, that argument was just one of “a whole flock of the considerations” that southern senators were taking into account. “I think it was one of the things that the southerners would understand. I have no doubt that Russell conveyed something along these lines to the Southern Caucus.” And when Goldsmith was asked, “Was Lyndon Johnson, in 1957, making them believe that if he became President he would do as much as possible to protect segregation?” Goldsmith replied, “These guys would have taken that as a given.” What Lyndon Johnson was saying, or hinting, about racial segregation during his private conversations with the members of the Southern Caucus we don’t know; we only know the final outcome. Strom Thurmond was suspicious of, and unconvinced by, Johnson, but the other members of the Southern Caucus were not.

Most important, Richard Russell was not. As John Goldsmith has written, Russell’s motives “have been debated over the years…. Russell himself may not have known” in 1957 “how much his long-standing, reasoned opposition to all civil rights initiatives was being tempered by his hope that Johnson might succeed in national politics and even become a President attuned to the southern culture.” And, Goldsmith adds, “Those considerations were not at odds with one another….” Russell validated Johnson’s arguments by assuring the Southern Caucus that they were true, and he reminded its members of his grand design; it wasn’t necessary for Lyndon Johnson to hint to the southern senators that the South’s first priority should be to put him in the White House, because Russell did the hinting. These senators had been following where Russell led for many years now, and they would follow him still. At the end of one Southern Caucus in 1957, Harry Byrd summed up the feeling around the huge mahogany table by saying simply, “Dick, it’s up to you.” Inconceivable as it might seem that these men would allow a civil rights bill—even a very weak bill—to pass, they would allow one to pass if Russell told them to. That same January of 1957, a strange rumor began circulating on Capitol Hill. Clint Anderson was telling friends that Lyndon Johnson had told him that a civil rights bill was going to be passed in 1957—and that he, Lyndon Johnson, was going to support it. Anderson didn’t believe either part of that prediction, but it was being heard elsewhere, “REPORT BEING CIRCULATED IN WASHINGTON THAT MAJORITY LEADER LYNDON JOHNSON HAS PROMISED THAT A CIVIL RIGHTS BILL WILL BE PASSED,” Roy Wilkins wired to NAACP headquarters in New York. Then the rumor was put in print; the Herald Tribune reported that “The Senate’s Democratic leadership had reached an understanding to bring the civil rights issue to a head early in the present session…. The leadership is hopeful … that if it gets the matter to the Senate floor within the next two months any southern attempt to thwart the decision by ‘extended debate’ can be beaten down….” And there was an even stranger rumor: that among the senators to whom Johnson had told this were the southern senators. In mid-January, reports began to circulate that Russell had convened a secret meeting of the Southern Caucus, and that at that meeting Johnson had laid down a timetable for action on a civil rights bill. And then that timetable was in print: Johnson, Newsweek reported, had told southerners that “Floor debate will open in early Spring…. By the end of April, the bill will be passed.” Lyndon Johnson, who as President just a few years later would do so much to end the racial discrimination that was a keystone of the South’s way of life, who would do more to end racial discrimination than any other President of the twentieth century, was being given a crucial boost toward the presidency by the South’s own senators, fervent believers, most of them, in racial discrimination. And at least some of them were helping Johnson at least partly because they believed that while, if he were to become President, he might have no choice but to do something about racial discrimination, they could count on him to do as little as possible.

Whether or not Lyndon Johnson was already planning in 1957 to take giant steps toward racial justice if he ever became President, we do not know, and perhaps no one will ever know. But whether or not in 1957 he was misleading the southern senators deliberately, misled they certainly were. Did he intend to mislead them?—we don’t know. But if we take him at his word—his word that at Cotulla, “I swore then and there that if I ever had a chance to help those underprivileged kids I was going to do it”—then Lyndon Johnson was misleading the southern senators deliberately. To whatever extent Johnson in 1957 was already planning, at least in outline, the things he would do if he ever became President, he was planning to betray, and to betray on a very large scale, the men, some of them very clever men, who were, for years, not only his most loyal but his most important supporters. “Civil rights didn’t get accomplished by idealism but by rough stuff”—that was the lesson that Katharine Graham had taken away from her visit to Lyndon Johnson’s ranch. What Johnson was doing now with the Southern Caucus, in the service of both his great ambition and his great purpose, was “rough stuff” indeed.

But a civil rights bill had to be passed. And a civil rights bill was going to be passed.

HIS NEXT JOB, now that he had persuaded the South to let a weak, token, bill pass, was to reduce the bill to a point at which it was so weak that it was only a token—and yet was still strong enough to satisfy northern liberals that something genuine had been accomplished for civil rights.

That proved to be very difficult. For more than four months, in fact, it seemed impossible.

The heart of the bill—the part on which both sides were focusing almost exclusively—was its third part (or “title”), the part covering the “broad array” of civil rights, that would make segregation illegal in schools and in public places such as parks, swimming pools, hotels, motels, theaters, and restaurants. For a while, in mid-January, Johnson seemed to be having some success in persuading the southerners that the measure would be sufficiently weakened if an amendment was added to provide that anyone indicted for a violation of any of the bill’s provisions be entitled to a trial by jury. With a “jury trial amendment” added, he told them, what would the other provisions matter? They could forgo filibustering against the bill because they could be sure—and could excuse themselves to their constituents by explaining—that the other provisions were now meaningless: what white man had to fear a southern jury? But the bill was simply potentially too destructive to southern mores for that argument to be convincing. The broadness of its attack on the southern way of life—the way in which the bill aimed at reducing it to nothing but a memory by mandating an intermingling of the races in so many “social” settings—infuriated the southern senators. Part III was not only a threat but an insult to their gentle Southland, with its friendly, harmonious relations between the races. And Part III raised, of course, the spectre of that worst of all possibilities: the mongrelization of the noble white race. Adding a jury trial amendment wouldn’t be enough. The southern senators couldn’t take a chance that the amendment would vitiate the bill sufficiently: what if federal judges found ways to circumvent that provision? Part III was totally unacceptable. It had to go—all of it. None of the senators were angrier than Richard Russell. Among the methods by which Johnson was attempting to influence the Southern Caucus was the planting of newspaper articles “reporting” the understanding among “responsible southerners” of the need for passage of civil rights legislation, and of their increased—and highly responsible—willingness to let the legislation pass if it included the jury trial amendment, but Russell was having none of it. On March 25, William S. White floated just such a Johnson trial balloon, suggesting the likelihood that a civil rights bill would pass with Part III largely intact but with a provision requiring a jury trial for all violations. Tearing White’s article out of the paper, Russell scribbled across it a note to himself: “This story embraces LBJ’s ideas and I believe was inspired by him—He talked to me as if this amendment was all we could expect—I don’t agree if he will go all out.”

“All out” meant removing Part III—entirely. To the Senate’s true civil rights believers, however—northern liberals of both parties—Part III was the most essential part of the bill, the part that made it their “dream bill.” The most hurtful racial injustices occurred in the very areas in which Part III would at last allow the federal government to intervene. Without it, even after Supreme Court decisions, African-Americans were still being forced to ride in the back of buses, and black schoolchildren still couldn’t go to school with white children. The liberals flatly refused to consider the elimination of Part III or, indeed, any substantial alteration in its wording. They refused also to consider any form of a jury trial amendment which would make a mockery of a civil rights bill, whatever its other provisions might be. And joining the liberals in refusal were moderate and even some conservative Republicans who were supporting the unamended bill out of loyalty to the Republican Administration which had proposed it, or out of desire for personal political gain.

In attempting to reconcile southern and northern demands, Johnson was engaging in the search for compromise—for some common ground—that is the essence of the legislative process, but on this issue no common ground seemed to exist. For the sake of Johnson’s presidential ambitions, for the sake of “cleaning him up” on civil rights, the South—at Richard Russell’s command—might allow civil rights legislation to pass, but only legislation so weak as to be meaningless. Nor was there any reason for it to allow any more; it had in the filibuster an unbreakable defense. “In the course of their many private conversations that Spring,” Merle Miller says, “Russell … advised Lyndon that the South would not under any circumstances accept Part III; they would filibuster first, he personally would lead the filibuster, and not only would Lyndon find it very difficult to pass a bill, he would find himself in an extremely ticklish position.” Yet when Johnson approached liberals about eliminating Part III, or substantially modifying it, they refused to consider the suggestion. Nor, they felt, was there any reason for them to consider it. At last, after so many years of frustration, they had Republicans on their side, and therefore had the votes to pass a civil rights bill. They were determined to pass one that was truly meaningful, which meant passing one that included Part III. And there was an additional, less altruistic, motive: revenge. “Frustration had … done peculiar things to the psychology of the northern civil rights advocates,” George Reedy was to say. “The feeling of impotence was preying on their mind…. There was a distinct note of retribution in their voices, and it was apparent that they wanted something more than a civil rights bill that would help blacks. They wanted a bill that would include every civil rights concept that had been concocted in over a half a century and they wanted to rub southern noses in it.” Watching Johnson search vainly for a compromise, Reedy felt that “everything had been said that could possibly be said, with the only result a hardening of positions and increasing polarization of attitudes,” and that “Movement in any direction was impossible because the question was not being treated as a legislative matter. Instead, it was a clash between the mores of two cultures—deep-seated moral beliefs that could not be compromised.”

AT THE START of the four-month period beginning in mid-January, 1957, optimistic predictions had been the order of the day. The fact that the margin for Lyndon Johnson’s tabling motion had been only seventeen votes “was hailed by civil rights advocates,” theNew York Times reported, “as ‘historic’ and a ‘landmark’ that … would strengthen liberal chances ‘tremendously’ at the opening of future Congresses.” “We got thirty-eight votes for it!” Howard Shuman exulted. “In 1953, we only got twenty-one.” If Nixon turned his opinion into a ruling in 1959, only forty-nine votes would be necessary to defeat tabling—and to rewrite Rule 22—and suddenly that figure seemed within reach. Declaring that “we made very real gains,” an elated Paul Douglas said, “We’ll win either next time or the time after.”

This view was shared by the press, which, like Douglas, ignored Russell’s threat that a ruling to allow the rewriting of Senate rules would be followed by the rewriting of not one rule but forty. Nixon’s opinion, Time said, “raised an emotional floodgate for a piece of vital legislation that had been dammed too long by Senate rules.” Newsweek’s Sam Shaffer agreed. The “generation-old coalition of Southern Democrats and certain Northern Republicans in Congress lies in ruins,” he said, and with “their former allies defecting from the ranks … the final vote in the Senate revealed the southerners in a position hopelessly untenable.” Their victory on the tabling motion had been Pyrrhic, Shaffer said. “As they surveyed the field of victory, they saw that, in truth, they had lost.”

On January 21, the Brownell Bill, essentially the same bill guaranteeing a broad range of civil rights that had been submitted in 1956, was returned to Capitol Hill. Liberal senators, liberal strategists, columnists of all persuasions, and most of the Washington press corps agreed that this year the bill would pass. The southerners will try their old tactics, Time predicted, but this time, with liberals and Republicans united against the South, those tactics will fail. “There should be enough sympathetic votes to force the bill out of the Judiciary Committee lorded over by Chairman [Eastland]. Before Congress adjourns, everyone agreed, there will be a sizzling Senate filibuster,” but this time the filibuster will be “broken. When some 20 diehard Southern Senators attempt to talk the bill to death on the floor, there should be enough votes even under present cloture rules to cut off the filibuster and bring the measure to a vote.” And then at last, Time said, “a tiny band of Southerners who over the years have combined seniority and archaic rules to strangle legislation that displeased them will have suffered momentous defeat.”

The optimism was shared by the Republican leaders in Congress, as is shown by the typed summary of their weekly meeting with President Eisenhower on January 8. According to the summary, an unidentified participant said, “Civil rights—has to go early if to get it,” but the President was assured by House GOP Leader Joseph Martin that there would be “no trouble” getting “early” action on the Brownell Bill. “Republicans and Democrats want to get that bill out,” Martin said. If it came up first in the Senate, he said, there would be fast action. “If Knowland calls it up—pass quick—only 25 votes against.” And, as Martin indicated to reporters, if it came up first in the House, action would be even faster. There was “no question,” he said, that the House would approve the bill in “about two days.” Joining in the assurances, Knowland stated that this year there would not be the usual delays in the Senate—in part because of the cooperation of the Democratic Leader. “I talked with Johnson,” he had told Eisenhower during the meeting. “I told him if they [the Democrats] do not take it up, I intend to. He was agreeable, and he’s served notice on [the] Southerners.” Back at the Capitol, he was equally sanguine. Inviting Clarence Mitchell to his office, he “unequivocally promised” the NAACP lobbyist that if the South tried to filibuster, he would personally lead—and win—the fight for cloture. A filibuster could delay a civil rights bill, he told a reporter for the Congressional Quarterly; it couldn’t stop it.

The customary route to the Senate floor, of course, was through a Senate committee, and the liberals set out along this route, and at first felt they were making good progress. Tom Hennings was brimming with confidence. His bill, similar to Brownell’s, had already been reintroduced and referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He himself was chairman of Judiciary’s three-man subcommittee that had jurisdiction over civil rights bills, but, he explained to reporters, hearings in that subcommittee would be unnecessary, since it had already favorably reported the same bill to the full committee last year. Therefore, Hennings said, the full committee—eight of whose fifteen members were, after all, strong civil rights supporters—could start holding hearings so early that Eastland’s delaying tactics would not work. Knowland agreed. The committee can “have hearings while the House is working, and get it reported by the time the House acts,” the Republican Leader said. “I’d like to start by mid-Feb or late Feb on civil rights.” And once the bill got to the Senate floor, the delaying tactics of the past would not be successful—not only Hennings but other senators assured reporters of that: there is a “belief that a filibuster now could be broken despite past failures,” John D. Morris reported in theNew York Times. And, the Times said, in part this belief was based on the cooperation of the Majority Leader. “The Senate’s Democratic leadership has reached an understanding to bring the civil rights issue to a head early in the present session…. The leadership is hopeful … that if it gets the matter to the Senate floor within the next two months any southern attempt to thwart the decision by ‘extended debate’ can be beaten down….”

And then the reality of the Senate took hold, the reality of Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. and the Foreign Relations Committee when Woodrow Wilson had been trying to win approval of the League of Nations, the reality of the Judiciary Committee when Franklin D. Roosevelt had been trying to win approval of his court reorganization bill—the reality that was still the reality.

Hennings’ confidence about quick subcommittee and committee action lasted only until Judiciary’s first meeting, on January 22, at which there were some developments he had not anticipated. It was a chairman’s prerogative to appoint the members of his committee’s subcommittees, and Chairman East-land now read off the names of the members of Hennings’ subcommittee, and there were no longer three names but seven. The chairman had added to it four new members: southerners Olin Johnston and Sam Ervin and conservative Republicans Roman Hruska and Arthur Watkins. Olin the Solon said that of course there would have to be extensive subcommittee hearings on the civil rights bill for the benefit of the new members, and the other new members agreed with that.

At the subcommittee’s first meeting, on January 30, Hennings tried to persuade its members to agree to a two-week limit on hearings. The two holdover members voted with him, making three votes in favor of the proposal. The four new members voted against it. Emerging from the subcommittee room after the meeting, Hennings told reporters he was “very disappointed,” but that he would still press for early action, holding long hearings if necessary. Long hearings? Hennings was asked. Was he saying that the subcommittee would meet while the Senate was in session? Did he have the Senate’s permission to do that? Senate permission was required for subcommittees as well as committees, he was reminded. Hennings then applied on the Senate floor for unanimous consent for the necessary permission. Do I hear any objection? the presiding officer asked. It turned out he heard several objections—all in southern accents. And the subcommittee’s favorable report would not be reported to the full committee until March 19.

And of course that report was not to the Senate, but only to the parent committee: Judiciary—Jim Eastland’s Judiciary. After interviewing Eastland, a young reporter, twenty-eight-year-old Tom Wicker of the Winston-Sal em Journal, wrote that “the soft-spoken man propping his gouty foot on the big cluttered desk doesn’t seem to mind” that he had become a “byword for prejudice.” And when he asked Eastland about the liberals’ plans to hurry the bill through Judiciary, the chairman said, “It’s not going to be as easy as they thought, old scout.”

The chairman was correct. Every time Hennings attempted to bring up his report for committee action, Eastland recognized another committee member instead, usually one of its three other southerners. Judiciary’s once-a-week meetings began every Monday at 10:30 a.m., and at twelve noon the Senate bells rang to signal the beginning of the day’s session—the time at which Senate rules required the adjournment of committee meetings. Eastland enforced the rule to the minute, and one of the southerners was almost always still holding the floor, with Hennings still unheard, when the bell rang. Once, Hennings actually got to start reading his resolution, but the bell rang before he finished; before its echo had died away, Eastland had rapped his gavel for adjournment.

And of course, should the bill ever emerge from Judiciary, it would still have to face the Senate itself. Judiciary might, of course, be bypassed if the Senate took up a House-passed version of the bill instead, but unanimous consent was required for the Senate to do that. A Washington Star reporter asked Russell whether, in the light of public, and Republican, support for civil rights, there was “any prospect” that the South might be willing to compromise its stand against the passage of any civil rights legislation whatsoever and allow a House bill to be taken up. Compromise? Russell said. “I will not compromise in the slightest degree where the constitutional rights of my state and her people are involved.

“I am well aware of the fact that there is great political pressure for the passage of these misnamed civil rights bills,” he said, but “If they reach the floor in their present form, they will be vigorously resisted by a resolute group of senators.” And those senators, he promised, would insist that the Senate follow “orderly procedure.” Orderly procedure, of course, included “extended debate.” Writing his story, the reporter put on it a lead that summed it up: “Senator Russell, Democrat of Georgia, yesterday threw down the gauntlet to advocates of civil rights legislation who contend this is their victory year.” The North wanted the legislation in essentially its present form. Russell was saying that if the legislation reached the floor in its present form, there would be a filibuster. And whatever its result, a filibuster would wreck Lyndon Johnson’s chance for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Observers who felt that Russell was short on allies, moreover, were overlooking one—one they seemed to overlook every year. Russell was indeed on the defensive on Capitol Hill now, seemingly beaten, as Lee had been on the defensive in 1865, with Grant pressing him back and back; even as Lee devised one stratagem after another, he had been aware that they were only delaying actions that could postpone, but not avert, defeat. There was, however, a crucial difference between the strategic situations facing the two great southern generals, for in war there is no time limit: no deadline at which, if neither side has won, a final armistice is declared. Robert E. Lee had not had time on his side.

Time was on Richard Brevard Russell’s side, though. For him, delay would not necessarily end in defeat; delay could, in fact, be the means of victory: victory at least for another year, or for another two-year Congress—and perhaps for many Congresses to come. For there was a time limit on Capitol Hill: each Congress is only two years long, and a bill that has not been passed at the end of two years dies, and must start over, from scratch, in the next Congress; must be reintroduced, must renegotiate all the preliminary committee procedures in both houses, must be passed by both houses.

During the 1950s, in addition, the actual time available to pass a bill was far less than two years because it was only in wartime that Congress met for a full year each year. Usually its sessions were considerably shorter. Of the twenty-three peacetime annual sessions since 1933, when Congress had begun convening in January, exactly one had lasted as long as the end of August—eight months. Many had ended in June or July. And because of the holiday recesses Congress awarded itself—a traditional week in February for Lincoln’s Birthday; another few days in February for Washington’s Birthday; ten or eleven days for Easter; additional vacations for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July; numerous pro forma Monday and Friday sessions at which most congressmen were traveling back and forth from their districts—even eight months actually meant far less. If a controversial bill, one entailing lengthy hearings and intra-committee fights and perhaps floor battles as well, was to be passed, it had to begin moving through the congressional committee processes rather early.

In the case of a bill controversial enough to possibly provoke a filibuster, an early start was indispensable for another reason as well. If such a bill was brought to the Senate floor late in the session, too close to the time when the Senate was rushing toward adjournment and senators were anxious to go home, the prospect of fighting a filibuster out to the end, no matter how many weeks or months it takes, was particularly unappealing. Pressure to end the matter—to simply drop the bill—was intensified. “If you wait too long,” George Reedy explains, “then what [happens] is that the looming end of the session becomes a weapon to be used by the filibusterers.” So delay was a potent weapon. On a legislative battlefield, delay could mean victory.

This was understood on Capitol Hill in 1957. “Has to go early if to get it,” the White House had been told. There was even an understanding of how early it had to go—that unless the civil rights bill reached the Senate floor by the Easter vacation in mid-April, or at the very latest, by the early part of May, there would be almost no hope of passing it over a southern filibuster. But there had been confidence among Republican leaders that this year it would “go early”: the Senate Majority Leader “was agreeable, and he’s served notice on the southerners.” Knowland had spoken of getting the civil rights bill to the floor by “mid-Feb or late Feb.” But that had been in January, when Russell and Johnson had optimistically felt the bill might be made sufficiently meaningless so that the South could let it pass. Now, in February and March and April, Russell was using delay as a weapon. Years later, when he was President, Johnson would explain to Katharine Graham how civil rights bills had invariably been defeated, by delay, on Capitol Hill: “They’d come back about the 18th of January and then they’ll have hearings in the [House] Rules Committee till about the middle of March and then they’ll pass the bill and it will get over and Dick Russell will say, ‘It’s Easter and Lincoln’s Birthday.’ And by the time you get him, he will screw them to death because he’s so much smarter than they are.” Now, in 1957, Russell was screwing them to death in the way that Johnson described to Mrs. Graham—screwing them again, as he had in the past, by delay. And, in February and March and April of 1957, it was beginning to become apparent that in the use of this weapon, the South and Russell were being assisted by the Senate Majority Leader.

IN JANUARY, Lyndon Johnson had assured the southerners that he would be able to make the civil rights bill meaningless enough so that they could live with it, but he had been unable to deliver. Russell’s price for forgoing a filibuster—the excision of the “broad array” of civil rights guarantees, and the emasculation of the remaining provisions by the right of jury trial—was payable only in non-southern votes for those southern demands, Johnson had been unable to meet that price: had been unable to find those votes. The irresistible force of civil rights demands was indeed colliding with an immovable object—and Johnson had seemingly decided simply to step out of the way. During those months, he was no less “agreeable” to Knowland than he had been in January, he just wasn’t as active. No more was heard of the January “understanding” “to bring the civil rights issue to a head early,” to get it “to the Senate floor within the next two months.”

And those actions that Lyndon Johnson did take spoke louder than words.

To delay the attack on a stronghold—a citadel—the defenders try to fight first on its outskirts. During those days of Lyndon Johnson’s “agreeability,” there had been discussion, even optimism, among Republican leaders that he might in effect forgo that delaying action by allowing the battle to begin in the citadel itself—by allowing the civil rights bill to be taken up in the Senate first. Now, however, Johnson repeated what he had said in 1956: that the Senate would not take up the bill until after the House had passed it.

To ensure that flanking movements against the citadel itself were not launched against his wishes, he was employing another tactic. This was a traditional southern tactic—one whose repeated use over the years had not dulled its effectiveness. It was simply to delay consideration of other major bills while waiting to take up the civil rights bill. If all the other major bills had been taken up, then by the time the civil rights measure arrived on the floor, precipitating a filibuster, it would be the only major piece of unfinished Senate business. But if other major bills remained to be disposed of at the time a filibuster brought Senate activity to a halt, these bills would become weapons in the southerners’ hands. Other senators would realize that if the civil rights bill was not dropped—if the southerners were not allowed to win; if instead the Senate decided to fight it out on the filibuster front as long as it took and not move on to other business—that other necessary legislation might not be taken up. “Therefore,” as Reedy explains, “if you know you’ve got an issue coming up that is going to start a filibuster, you try to get those [other important] bills out of the way….” Otherwise senators will say, “My God, we’re holding up this [other] bill.” A Leader who wants a filibuster to lose “always tries to get the desks cleared before the filibuster comes up.” A Leader tries to clear the decks early in the year, in fact—before “the looming end of the session” made the many senators who didn’t particularly care about civil rights say, as the civil rights bill approached, “Don’t bring it up. Otherwise, we’ll never get to the other important bills.”

Lyndon Johnson was not doing this. The Eisenhower Administration had a list of legislation it considered essential: not only its big school construction program but a law to provide federal aid to chronically depressed communities; authorization for United States participation in the Organization for Trade Cooperation; and a badly needed increase in postal rates to cover a rapidly worsening deficit in the Post Office Department. In addition, with Egypt’s President Nasser stalling on reopening the Suez Canal, Israel stalling on withdrawing its troops from the Gaza Strip, and the threat of Russian intervention escalating, Eisenhower had asked for a congressional resolution giving him advance authorization to intervene economically or militarily in the Middle East, authorization Eisenhower considered vitally necessary to deter Russia, since, with “modern war” perhaps “a matter of hours only,” there might not be time to go to Congress if an attack occurred. At an extraordinary meeting of thirty congressional leaders of both parties at the White House on New Year’s Day, Eisenhower had stressed the need for rapid approval, as he did in a special message he delivered in person on Capitol Hill five days later. Although there were differences within the Senate on the resolution’s wording, general agreement existed that some form of authorization was desirable: the situation was precisely the kind on which Lyndon Johnson had, so many times, worked out a unanimous consent agreement.

No such agreement was brought forward now, however. Week after week, the “debate” on the Middle East Resolution dragged on, tying up the Senate before a notably empty Chamber in a scene out of the Senate’s pre-Johnsonian foot-dragging past, complete with legalistic nitpicking—“I am waiting for the opposition point of view to provide some answers before I proceed to rebuttal and surrebuttal and rebuttal of the surrebuttal,” Wayne Morse announced at one point (he was not kidding)—and senatorial frustration. “Why cannot we vote?” Dennis Chavez shouted one day. “I am ready to vote now.” Eisenhower’s other “essential” legislation also remained stalled behind the resolution; until that resolution was out of the way, the Senate would not be able to turn to the other Administration priority bills and get them out of the way. Slow as is the first year of most Congresses, this was slowness indeed. And the foot-dragging had a special significance this year. “The 85th Congress has been in session now for six weeks,” the New York Herald Tribune noted on February 14, “and the civil rights issue, which was to have been the burning question at hand, has been pushed into the background … by the Senate debate over President Eisenhower’s Mideast policy.” When the Senate finally voted, it adopted the original resolution, 72 to 19, but that vote was not taken until March 5.

JOHNSON HAD SAID THE SENATE would not act on the civil rights bill until the House acted, and House action was not, in fact, coming in “about two days.” The tone of the Republicans’ weekly White House legislative conference began to change. At the January 8 meeting, Knowland had predicted that the Judiciary Committee would report the bill to the Senate floor by “mid-Feb or late Feb.” In the summary of Knowland’s report to the next meeting, held on January 22, a new month is being mentioned: “Hope to get it out by late February or early March.” A week later, on January 29, the minutes start mentioning Easter, a holiday which falls not in March but in April: “Every effort will be made to secure action on the legislation prior to any Easter recess. Speaker Martin noted the appearance of some sign of a Democratic desire to delay action.” (Eisenhower was moved to muse: “Strange. Years ago, we talked [about] the same things….”) The minutes of the March 12 meeting show that reality was beginning to penetrate even the densest material: “Sen. Knowland said that if the President’s moderate proposal is to be achieved, then there was a need to get it moving soon. He had to report, however, that the Opposition had told him that if Republicans insisted on moving on Civil Rights, there would be some other legislation that would automatically be lost.” And the minutes of the March 26 meeting summarize an exchange between Knowland and Halleck which shows further penetration.

KNOWLAND.  If we are to get it, must get before last stages.

HALLECK.  Think you’re too late already.

KNOWLAND.  Not yet, but close.

On April 2, “Senator Knowland thought the Democrats seemed to be dragging hard on this. They did not even want a Committee report to come out until after the Easter recess.” Senator Dirksen chimed in that there was a “problem in Committee.”

There was a problem, all right. The report of Hennings’ subcommittee had finally reached the full Judiciary Committee. The morning of April 1, in fact, Chairman Eastland would actually recognize Hennings, and allow him to make a motion: that the committee take a final vote on the measure by April 15. The reason for Eastland’s generosity then became apparent. While he had allowed Hennings to make the motion, he would not allow the committee to vote on it. It “would be patently unfair,” he said, for the committee to vote before it had studied the transcript of the subcommittee’s hearing. He had inquired of the Senate Printing Office, the chairman said, as to when that transcript would be available, and it would not be ready for two weeks. And, the chairman added, subcommittee member Ervin had notified him that he wanted to write a minority dissent to its report—and that he would not be able to begin writing until he had studied the transcript. Hennings’ motion, Eastland said, would therefore not be in order.

At the White House, on April 9, a new month was mentioned in the discussion on civil rights. “Sen. Knowland again pointed to Democratic foot-dragging and their apparent determination to keep this subject off the floor until mid-May … so that other legislation may then take priority.” That long a delay would probably kill the bill, Knowland said. “He thought the Republicans would have to put on a drive to get earlier action than that if any bill is to be forthcoming this year. If [the Republicans are] to get [a bill], they must make major drive to get [action] pre-Easter.”

That warning—that a civil rights bill could pass only if it reached the Senate floor by the Easter recess—had, of course, first been made months before. Now, on April 12, the Easter recess arrived. The bill was not on the floor. It was nowhere near the floor. Furthermore, should it ever get there, other urgent legislation was now piled up behind it, including the thirteen appropriation bills necessary to keep the government running. The House had passed six of those bills. The Senate had passed none. “It is always true that Congress begins slowly and ends in a whirlwind,” the New York Times said. “But the beginnings this year have seemed even slower than usual.”

The tone of press coverage had changed, too. The civil rights bill “is in serious trouble,” the Washington Post said on April 28. It has “a fair chance of enactment in the House, but the once-bright prospect of Senate enactment this session appears increasingly dim.” When Clifford Case said that the tactics fatal to past civil rights bills were being repeated in 1957, and would have the same effect, Roscoe Drummond understood. “Sen. Case is quite right in warning that it is happening all over again this spring,” the columnist wrote. “Senator Johnson and Republican leader Sen. William Knowland have both said that they hoped to expedite action on the Civil Rights program so that the Senate would not have to debate it during the closing days of the session. That expediting is not yet visible.”

Some civil rights advocates still had hopes, although they were fading. “There is need for a dramatic rescue if the civil rights bill is not to be smothered to death,” Philip Graham’s Washington Post editorialized. For others, hope was all but gone. “Everything is waiting on something else,” Senator Norris Cotton of New Hampshire said on April 27. “The Senate is waiting for the House…. Aid for school construction is waiting on civil rights. Civil rights seems to be waiting for the millennium.”

And among those who had, seemingly, all but lost hope was Lyndon Johnson. In early January, he had predicted that a civil rights bill would pass—but shortly afterwards he had begun pulling back from the fight. Those early optimistic predictions were not repeated, were replaced by silence. From January 19 to May 29, Lyndon Johnson made not a single public statement on civil rights. And if, during these four months, his lack of words spoke loudly, so did his lack of actions. Not only was he not clearing the Senate decks for a filibuster fight, his behind-the-scenes efforts to find a compromise acceptable to both sides had become perfunctory. For a surprisingly large portion of this period, in fact, he wasn’t behind the scenes—or even in Washington. During this four-month period, he took a nine-day vacation in Florida and a nineteen-day vacation, over Easter, at his ranch. If one includes short trips—one to New York, one to Miami, several to Huntlands—he was away from Washington for some forty-two days out of the 130 days in this period. During these trips he was, as always, constantly on the telephone with his staff in Washington about Senate matters, but civil rights was not uppermost among them. “There was a time, there … when you would have thought he had all but given up [on civil rights],” Reedy says. “You could understand that. It looked hopeless.”

•    •    •

CONGRESS’S RETURN from the Easter recess on April 30 brought only more of the same. The minutes of the first post-recess Republican Legislative Leaders’ Meeting at the White House report that “It is expected that this legislation [civil rights] will reach the House floor in about two weeks.” But somehow that happy event did not occur. (May 14—“The importance of early action on this legislation was again stressed.” May 21—“It is expected that this measure will be reported by the House Rules Committee and that the House will begin to discuss it within the next few days.”) At the first post-recess meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Hennings raised his hand, intending to introduce a motion setting a firm, early, date for a vote on the civil rights bill. But at the foot of the Democratic side of the committee table, another hand shot up, that of Senator Ervin, and it was Ervin whom Chairman Eastland recognized. Ervin launched into what was evidently going to be a long speech, and every time Hennings attempted to break in, Eastland would ask him not to interrupt another senator.

In the halls of government, there was still no real leadership for the cause of social justice. The President was again ducking every chance to show any, resolutely avoiding every opportunity to press for action on his Attorney General’s civil rights bill. Asked if he was “satisfied with the progress” on the bill, Eisenhower replied, “Progress in Congress is a very spotty thing.” His party’s congressional leaders, he said, had assured him that they were “making their best effort to bring these bills up and get them passed.” The House Rules Committee did indeed report the bill—H.R. 6127—out on May 22, so that a date to begin debate on the measure in the House could be set, but that action only began to increase attention on the Senate, and the Washington Post reported that “Senate leaders weren’t too optimistic”; Knowland forecast a “lengthy debate which some might call a filibuster.” “The South is still in control,” Senator Alexander Wiley said.

Attention was also beginning to focus on Lyndon Johnson. After his return from the ranch on April 28, he tried to avoid public statements on the issue, as an exchange on the Senate floor on May 13 showed. Responding to White House criticism of senatorial inaction on Eisenhower’s program, he listed the various bills that were shortly going to be brought to the floor, without mentioning the civil rights bill. Knowland, standing across the aisle from him, twitted him on the omission: “I notice—perhaps by inadvertence—that my distinguished friend, the Majority Leader, had not mentioned the proposed civil-right legislation…. We are now in the month of May. I was very hopeful that the distinguished Majority Leader might throw some light on the question as to when we could expect that proposed legislation on the floor.” Johnson’s angry reply (“Mr. President, my friend from California has asked me a question. I am not sure that he is really soliciting information …”) seemed to show a sympathy for the southern view that the Supreme Court had already pushed civil rights as far as could be expected, and that the country should now be allowed a respite from further action. “It is the view of the Senator from Texas,” the Senator from Texas said, “that the Supreme Court has acted in connection with the education and transportation problem, and that all over the land the American people are doing their best to adjust themselves to the situation created by the Court’s decision and are attempting to evolve a workable solution in the light of that decision.” His reply also showed irritation with those who were “nevertheless” still agitating for civil rights. “The Majority Leader,” said the Majority Leader, “although he does not agree with all the proposals made—and, indeed, does not agree with many of them—realizes that a substantial number of members of both the House and Senate wish to vote on some so-called civil-rights legislation, because to fail to do so would permit those who have no hesitancy in exploiting this political issue to continue to do so in the months ahead.” His reply showed no sympathy for aggressive senatorial action on civil rights. To Knowland’s request for a date “when we could expect that proposed legislation on the floor,” Johnson’s only response was that he would “take no offense if … after the [Judiciary] Committee had acted or failed to act,” Hennings or Knowland himself “should make a motion to discharge the committee.” If they did, Johnson said, “I believe this question will be acted upon…. Some action will come by the early part of next month.” Some action. Not favorable action. And the action he was talking about was not action on a civil rights bill, but only action on a motion to put that bill on the Senate Calendar, a motion that could be filibustered—as the bill, should it ever get to the floor, would be filibustered. When Johnson finished, Hennings rose at his desk and characterized his Leader’s statement. “The same old hocus-pocus, and the same old claptrap, and the same old backing and filling,” he said. In the New York Times, reporter C. P. Trussell was gently sarcastic. “Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, of Texas, the Majority Leader, while letting everybody know that he was against the program, said that he would not be ‘offended’ if Mr. Knowland, or Senator Hennings … should force it to floor action.” Trussell concluded that “it does not appear that it will be passed by Congress at this session.”

And if dreams of social justice seemed, once more, all but dead, so too did Lyndon Johnson’s dreams for himself.

He knew that the realization of that goal at which he had been aiming all his life required him to “produce” on civil rights—knew that “if I failed to produce on this one … everything I had built up over the years would be completely undone.” And yet producing on civil rights seemed as hopeless a task as ever. A strong, meaningful, civil rights bill was moving, slowly but moving, through the House, but then it would come to the Senate—where, if there was any chance of its passing, it would be filibustered to death. There would be no Civil Rights Act—and no removal from Lyndon Johnson’s image of the “scent of magnolias” fatal to his presidential hopes. It seemed that spring of 1957 as if there was scarcely a newspaper or magazine that didn’t remind him of that harsh reality. In April, for example, there was an article in the Progressive. Entitled “The Legend of Lyndon Johnson,” it said that his contention that he stood midway between “Thurmond and Douglas, between the Southerners and the liberals,” is “far from being the whole truth,” for while “Johnson himself is not the type of Southerner whose opposition to civil rights stems from the sincere depths of bigotry,” while “early in his life, he taught classes of Mexican-Americans,” and while “his opposition to civil rights springs not from passion but from political calculation,” that fact does not make him any less dangerous a foe of civil rights. “Johnson never strays far from his real power base in the Senate—his fellow-Southerners,” the article said. “In fact, many observers still consider him little more than a pliant instrument of Senator Russell.” And its evaluation of Johnson as a Majority Leader was devastating: “He knows everyone’s value—and knows even better his price, if he has one. He is not the leader of great causes, but the broker of little ones.”

That article was written by David C. Williams, editor of ADA World, the official publication of that body of “crazies” and “red-hots.” But on May 25, newspapers around the country carried an Associated Press interview with Colonel Jake Arvey, not a “crazy” (or indeed a particularly ardent civil libertarian) but one of the most pragmatic and most powerful northern political leaders, about possible 1960 Democratic presidential nominees, and he said party leaders throughout the North were “very high” on two candidates: Kennedy and Symington. He didn’t mention Lyndon Johnson, but the reporter asked about him. Senator Johnson, Arvey replied, would be hampered by “the question mark concerning his health”—and by his “Texas origins”: “Northerners,” Arvey said, “would be fearful of his position on the segregation issue.”

Though Lyndon Johnson realized the situation, however, there seemed to be nothing he could do about it. Looking back on the situation years later, George Reedy would be struck by the seeming “impossibility” of negotiating any type of compromise. The “prospect of any legislative action,” he said, “seemed more remote than a landing on the moon.”

BUT THERE HAD BEEN EARLIER EPISODES in Lyndon Johnson’s career in which his chances appeared hopeless—that first campaign for the House, that campaign for the Senate against the invincible Coke Stevenson, other episodes, too—and always Lyndon Johnson had reacted, after spells of depression and despair, in the same way: with a refusal to give up hope, with a willingness to fight on, and to make in the fight an effort so intense that “days meant nothing, nights meant nothing, weekdays, weekends, they meant nothing,” with that implacable determination to triumph no matter what the cost that had made Ava Johnson Cox and Estelle Harbin say about Lyndon Johnson when he was young that “he could not stand to lose, just could not stand it,” that “he had to win, had to.”

And that was how Lyndon Johnson reacted now.

What crystallized his feelings is not known, but it occurred on the ranch. Not long after he had returned to Washington from that three-week Easter vacation on the Pedernales—even while he was still making public statements that “let everybody know that he was against” a civil rights bill—a difference in his attitude was becoming apparent to those who saw him behind closed doors. Richard Boiling, who had come to hate Johnson, in part because he had felt he was “really quite negative on civil rights,” and who had watched Johnson “grow very quiet” during the early months of 1957 as he had grown very quiet during 1956 “whenever civil rights came up” behind the closed doors of Sam Rayburn’s late-afternoon Board of Education, now began to see “a change in Lyndon Johnson,” a change that began almost imperceptibly, but that, afternoon by afternoon, became more marked.

That was on the House side of the Capitol. On the Senate side there were indications, too. “Something changed,” Gerald Siegel would say. And after it did, “he never had any hesitation at all.”