39

“You Do It”

ANOTHER LEGISLATIVE TALENT would be necessary if a civil rights bill was to become law in 1957, and it was a talent very different from the strategic, conceptual ability on a national scale that could conceive a relationship between Hells Canyon and jury trials—very different, and of a much less elevated order. It was an ability that was needed in the hurly-burly of the legislative battlefield itself: the floor of the Senate during a violent struggle there. But though it was only a tactical ability, not grand strategy but battlefield maneuver, given the inherent nature of the legislative process—the fact that there was, on that Senate floor, an actual battlefield—it was no less vital. And because of the unique complexity of the civil rights issue, and the unique intractability of the problems surrounding it, this talent, too, would have to be exercised at a very high level. Passing a civil rights bill would require an ability to suddenly recognize, amid the turmoil, the cut and thrust and parry, of a legislative body in furious contention—amid the barrage of motions and amendments, amid the rapid-fire parliamentary maneuvers and countermaneuvers, the quick back-and-forth ripostes of debate and the magisterial drum roll of long, formal speeches—to suddenly recognize, amid the great mass of cutting words, witty words, brilliant words, empty words, those words that mattered, the phrase that could change the mood, the amendment that could turn the tide, that could swing votes if put to proper use (a use that might not be at all the use the speaker of the words or the author of the amendment had intended); to recognize the opportunity when suddenly, without warning, it came.

The talent required had, moreover, to consist not alone of insight but also of decisiveness, of an ability not only to recognize a crucial moment but to seize it, to see the opening—and to strike; to move fast enough so that the opportunity did not vanish, perhaps never to come again. It was the ability to recognize the key that might suddenly unlock votes that had seemed locked forever away—and to turn the key, and turn it fast. This combination of rare insight, rare decisiveness, rare willingness to act produced, when it was added to unbending determination and a gift for grand strategy, a rare form of political leadership: legislative leadership.

BY THE TIME THE OPENING CAME, Lyndon Johnson had all but given up hoping for it. But when it came, he saw it—and seized it.

It came at a moment when it was desperately needed. He had, through his Hells Canyon deal, been able to persuade the South to allow one step toward passage of a civil rights bill: the placement of H.R. 6127 on the Senate Calendar. But three steps still remained: the bill now had to be called off the Calendar—brought to the floor for debate, in other words; then it had to be brought to a vote; then it had to pass. And those steps were going to be even harder than the first had been. Persuading the South to allow them required him to meet the South’s price: amendments that eliminated the Part III provisions protecting a broad array of civil rights; and that added to Part IV a new provision guaranteeing the right of jury trial. That price seemed as difficult to meet as it had ever been.

The allies he had procured for the South through Hells Canyon were enough to reassure the South about cloture. They weren’t enough to pass amendments. If every one of the twelve western Democratic votes were available to the South—and every one wouldn’t be available on every amendment—those twelve votes, added to a possible twenty-two from the South, would still give the South, at a maximum, a total of thirty-four votes, enough to prevent cloture but not the majority required to pass amendments. To amend—weaken—the civil rights bill, Johnson needed more votes: Democratic liberal votes and Republican votes. And while to western senators a civil rights bill didn’t mean much, to liberals and Republicans that bill meant a lot.

The focus came first on Part III. Believing that the most important part of the bill was the voting rights part, Part IV, Johnson had been trying for weeks—utterly without success—to persuade the “Douglas Group” to accept a drastically weakened Part III in the interests of “getting the first one”: breaking the Senate’s “virginity” on civil rights. But to these liberals it was Part III that made the bill the “dream bill.” It was the powers that section would confer on the Attorney General that would strike at injustice most directly. “It was Part III that was the big thing,” recalls the ADA’s Rauh. Weakening it would cut the very heart out of what those liberals were fighting for. Without Part III, the South could still say “never” to school desegregation. There had been no legal recourse against the men who killed Emmett Till; was there to be no recourse the next time a black body was pulled out of a river? The South was continuing to deny black Americans their rights even in spheres in which courts had ruled. Although blacks could now sit in the front of buses in Montgomery, Alabama, when, in June of 1957, a black minister had tried to do that in Georgia, he had been arrested and jailed. Justice had been denied to black Americans for centuries, these senators felt—were they, by agreeing to amend Part III, to consent to the indefinite continuation of this denial? The Douglas Group refused even to consider amendments that would substantially weaken, much less eliminate, that section. Often, a declaration against compromise is merely a negotiating position; not to these senators, not on this cause.

Some Republican liberals felt this way, too. Since “racial integration in the schools is of the same character as the right to vote,” Part III must not be weakened, explained newly elected Jacob Javits of New York, whose heart as well as head was for civil rights. As for the rest of the forty-six GOP senators, almost all of them, from Knowland down, were against compromise from considerations of, in varying degrees, conscience or calculation. Even the densest midwestern Neanderthals could grasp the tremendous benefits that could accrue to their party, and to them—the gavels!—through either passage of their Administration’s civil rights bill or a Democratic filibuster against it; from the political standpoint, a filibuster, which would dramatize that it was the Democratic Party, through its senators, that was standing in the way of civil rights, might be even better for the GOP than passage.

It is difficult, much as one admires them, to avoid the conclusion that liberals—because they couldn’t see more than a few moves down the Senate chessboard and weren’t very good at counting votes—also believed that since the Republicans were on their side at last, there was no need to compromise. And the Republicans believed that, too. White House strategists agreed with Knowland’s contention that “at least” forty Republicans would be solidly for the bill that had been drawn by a Republican Attorney General and endorsed by a Republican President. With such a solid, possibly overwhelming, majority behind the civil rights bill, its supporters determined to press for passage: to insist on calling the bill off the Senate Calendar and bringing it to the floor before any amendments had been added. But the reality was that despite their optimism and their majority, their insistence did not mean that the bill would pass. It meant that the bill would not pass, that in fact it would not even reach the floor: when the motion was introduced to make the bill the Senate’s “pending business,” the South would begin an outwardly reasonable and logical “extended debate” on that motion, and would simply keep extending the debate as long as necessary so that the motion could not be voted on. Attempts to impose cloture on this filibuster would fail because there would be fewer votes for cloture than for passage. Therefore there would never be a vote on the bill itself. But that was a reality the liberals and Republicans do not appear to have grasped. They felt, almost certainly incorrectly, that because they had the votes to beat the South on the bill, they had the votes to beat the South on cloture, too.

Knowland refused to compromise, saying there was no need to, and he meant it. As the Senate prepared to recess for a long Fourth of July holiday weekend, the Republican Leader pledged that when the Senate reconvened on July 8, he would immediately move to bring an unamended bill, including an unaltered Part III, to the floor. The Douglas Group applauded the move. Lyndon Johnson had been attempting for six months to arrange some sort of compromise on Part III with absolutely no success, and now, with the bill on the Calendar and the crucial debate—or filibuster—on the measure looming close ahead, the chasm separating the two sides seemed more unbridgeable than ever. Getting the votes for compromise seemed impossible.

AND THEN, in an hour, with the delivery of a single Senate speech, the chasm became even wider.

“Surprise,” von Clausewitz said, “is half the battle.” A great general strikes when his enemy is not expecting the blow. The Senate, winding down to the Fourth of July recess, was in the midst of a desultory discussion on defense appropriations when, on Tuesday, July 2, at the second desk from the front on the Democratic side of the center aisle, an arm was raised, and the chair recognized the senior senator from Georgia. The only sign that something momentous was about to occur was that frugal Richard Russell had purchased a new dark blue suit for the occasion.

The first blow should be a telling one. Russell’s first words ensured that this blow would be. “Mr. President,” he said, “for the first time since I have been a member of the Senate, I respectfully request that I not be interrupted in the course of my prepared discussion.” Senators who had been chatting with their colleagues stopped talking, and went to their desks to listen. Two staff members had been standing in the rear of the Chamber. One said to the other: “I bet this is really going to be something.”

It was. Part III of Herbert Brownell’s proposal was not a wholly new clause but rather an amendment to another law—to one of those three leftover “fragments” of the civil rights laws that had been on the statute books for almost a century: Section 1985 of Title 42 of the United States Code. The proposed amendment added to Section 1985 a new paragraph authorizing the Attorney General to apply on behalf of the government for a civil injunction by a judge whenever “any persons have engaged or are about to engage in any acts or practices” which would be crimes under the leftover section. But there were discrepancies between the amendment and the section it was amending, among which was the fact that Section 1985 dealt with suits against individuals by individuals, not suits by the government.

These discrepancies, and their possible implications, had been raised by, among others, a youthful attorney on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Robert Barnes Young—but they had gone largely unnoticed, in part because Brownell had managed, in his testimony before Hennings’ Judiciary Subcommittee on February 16, to avoid discussing the questions Young started asking him about them. It is unclear to this day whether Brownell and his assistants had deliberately avoided discussing the discrepancies in the hope that the Senate would pass the bill without understanding their implications. Later, when he was asked to explain them, Brownell would deny any such strategy. “No intrigue or design was involved,” he said; the writing of Part III as an amendment to an existing section rather than as a wholly new section, he said, had been “an accident”—because “so many hands were engaged in the drafting,” it was “impossible” to determine even who had done it. This explanation did not convince some of Brownell’s allies. Paul Douglas, talking later about the “mysterious Part III,” would recall that “Brownell, who deserves credit for the substance of this provision, although his method of operation was lamentable, had never explained it, nor had others…. The Democratic advocates of civil rights had not been taken into Brownell’s confidence, and I do not think Knowland had been either…. We had been dealt with unfairly.” And, they felt, given the caliber of Brownell’s opponent, that had been extremely foolish. The senior senator from Georgia had lost some of his energy; he had lost none of his intellect. “On the surface,” Part III “seemed innocent enough,” Douglas was to say, “but Dick Russell knew what it meant.” At night and on weekends, when other senators were socializing or with their families, Russell often sat alone in his apartment and read, and, reading the transcript of the February 16 subcommittee hearings, he had noticed Robert Young’s questions—and how Brownell had evaded answering them. One Saturday, June 15, he had asked Young to come to his office in the weekend-quiet Senate Office Building to discuss them, and after that discussion, as Russell was to recall, he had given the discrepancies “a great deal of study.” And, now, standing at his desk, he said that “I understand” them “completely.” His colleagues had been filing into the Chamber ever since word had spread that “Russell’s up,” and they now sat, rank on rank in the long arcs, attentive and still. He told them what the discrepancies were and what he felt was the true motive behind them.

He had, Richard Russell said, gone back to that original Section 1985 to learn what “acts or practices” would be covered by the new legislation. “I now read the pertinent part of the already existing law which the [Brownell] bill seeks to amend,” he said. “This is the existing law.” One part of Section 1985, he said, defined such “acts or practices” as any attempt to deprive anyone “of the equal protection of the laws or of equal privileges and immunities under the law”—any law, such as, for example, the law requiring desegregation of the schools.

Nor, Richard Russell said, was that the only significant discovery he had made. He had found that Section 1985 was referred to in another of the leftover civil rights fragments: Section 1993 of Title 42. Nowhere in Brownell’s bill was Section 1993 even mentioned, Russell said, but it should have been because Section 1985 automatically invokes Section 1993. And 1993 is the section, passed during Reconstruction, which authorized the President of the United States, “or such person as he may empower for that purpose,” to employ the military forces of the United States to enforce judicial edicts in the conquered South. Since the Brown decision was a judicial edict, Part III of the Brownell Bill would authorize the use of military troops to enforce that decision.

And, Russell said, military power was not the only power that would be conferred on the Attorney General by the passage of Brownell’s bill. He understood now, Russell said, other reasons why Part III had not been drafted fresh, but had been made an amendment to an existing section—a section which made violations not criminal but civil offenses, and which said that actions had to be instituted by individuals. In studying the bill, Russell said, “I was greatly puzzled by the fact that this proposed new law” would give the Attorney General power to sue in cases involving individuals—civil cases—and could sue “whether the aggrieved party wished him to sue or not.” But he understood it now, he said. “Mr. President, the Attorney General of the United States does not ordinarily participate in civil suits for damages between individual citizens” of the United States. “His primary duty is to enforce the penal or criminal law.” Part III would give him the right to enter civil cases with the full power he usually exercises only in criminal cases—including the power to seek injunctions from a federal judge.

Nor were schools the only area in which Part III would confer new powers on the federal government, Russell said, for schools were not the only areas of daily life in which judicial edicts were possible, and even probable. “Mr. President, if the Supreme Court so determines—and who can doubt their intent—that the separate hotels, eating places, and places of amusement for the two races in the South constitute a denial of equal privileges and immunities under the old law [Section 1985],” Part III of the new law would mean that “this great power can be applied throughout the South…. Under this bill, if the Attorney General should contend that separate eating places, places of amusement and the like in the South… constituted a denial of equal privileges and immunities, he could move in with all the vast powers of this bill,” and anyone who refused to conform to an injunction could be held in jail at the judge’s order, without benefit of trial by jury. “Under this bill, if the Attorney General should contend that separate places of amusement… constituted a denial of equal privileges and immunities, he could move in … even if the person denied admission did not request him to do so and was opposed to his taking that action. The white people who operated the place of amusement could be jailed without benefit of jury trial and kept in jail until they either rotted or until they conformed to the edict to integrate their place of business.” And, Russell said, “Who can doubt for a moment” that some Attorney General—perhaps not the present Attorney General but some future Attorney General—would do just that, “yielding to the demands of the NAACP and the ADA, who have been most zealous in pushing this proposal?”

The Senate floor was absolutely still now, and the faces of those listening—not only senators but staff members—were sober and intent as the tall, patrician figure continued reading from the pages on the lectern on his center aisle desk.

The true purposes of the legislation had been concealed from the Senate, Richard Russell said, and they had been concealed deliberately. An effort is being made “to sail this bill through the Senate under the false colors of a moderate bill … while obscuring the larger purposes of the bill,” which is “cunningly designed to … bring to bear the whole might of the Federal Government, including the Armed Forces if necessary, to force a commingling of white and Negro children in … the South, and, indeed, Mr. President, the unusual powers of this bill could be utilized to force the white people of the South at the point of a federal bayonet to conform to … a commingling of the races throughout the social order of the South.” The bill would, he said, give an “unlimited grant of powers … to govern by injunction and federal bayonet.”

Russell’s analysis of the bill’s references and cross-references had been couched in dry, precise legal phraseology, but other portions of his speech were more emotional, for in studying the proposed legislation, he had found that the powers given to the President to enforce Part III included powers that the Senate had not been informed about, and he had come to believe that Brownell’s underlying intention was nothing less than to resurrect the spectre that had haunted his entire life, as it haunted the history of the Southland he loved—Reconstruction.

Brownell’s bill, Russell said, has the same aim “as the measures proposed by Sumner and Stevens in Reconstruction days in their avowed drive ‘to put black heels on white necks.’” Section 1985 was one of the old Reconstruction laws, he said, and Reconstruction was what the bill was trying to bring back, in more subtle, and more pernicious, form. “If this bill is used to the utmost, neither Sumner nor Stevens, in the persecution of the South in the twelve tragic years of Reconstruction, ever cooked up any such devil’s broth as is proposed in this misnamed civil rights bill.”

The South had courage, he said; it would not submit tamely to the proposed persecution. “What I say now is in no sense a threat. I speak in a spirit of great sadness. If Congress is driven to pass this bill in its present form, it will cause unspeakable confusion, bitterness, and bloodshed in a great section of our common country. If it is proposed to move into the South in this fashion, the concentration camps may as well be prepared now, because there will not be enough jails to hold the people of the South who will oppose the use of raw Federal power forcibly to commingle white and Negro children in the same schools and places of public entertainment.” The South would not submit tamely in the Senate, he said. It would fight there by whatever means were necessary. A filibuster, he said, is “a lengthy educational campaign,” and “we shall require a long time to get the facts across to the country.” Turning to his right, Russell looked across the center aisle at the Republicans who had long been the South’s allies but had now deserted the South. They sat listening as the senator they so deeply respected spoke directly to them. He assumed that they would also use all their rights if they were ever faced with such a terrible threat to the people of their states; he assumed they would use every means at their command to fight it. “If they did not fight it to the very death, they would be unworthy of the people who sent them here.” If they were to fight, he said, he would support them. “If it is ever proposed to use the military forces of this Nation to compel the people represented by other senators to conform their lives and social order to the rest of the country, those senators need not be afraid of the word ‘filibuster’ or of attempting to exercise all their rights under the rules.” If they did so, “I hope Providence will give me the strength and the courage to stand by their side.” And he hoped they would support him now. “I hope that our colleagues will not be intolerant of us as we seek to discharge our duty to the American people of our states who have honored us by sending us here.”

When Russell had finished his speech, Stennis rose to congratulate him on it, saying it “will be a landmark, a turning point.” It was. In succeeding days, the Washington press corps portrayed Russell as a towering, tragic figure. Under the headline “CHAMPION OF A LOST CAUSE,” William S. White wrote that “Every supreme moment in [his] career … every one of those rare times when his power is at its peak, is a moment not of elation and triumph but of melancholy and the inner knowledge of ultimate defeat. For the irony of Senator Russell’s life as a public man lies in the fact that he can be a primary leader only in a cause that he knows already to be lost in the unfolding movement of history.” White assailed those who would classify the Georgian “erroneously and with great over-simplification, as all but in the company of the ‘pecker-woods’—the ill-born, ill-educated and bloody-minded kind of Southerner who uses a word—the word is ‘nigger’—that could not pass the lips of Richard Brevard Russell.” To Clarence Mitchell, seated in the gallery above, the Georgian was also a towering figure—a very dangerous one. The NAACP’s perceptive lobbyist saw a “subtle dramatist” (who had “riveted” the Senate’s attention on him with his dramatic opening line) standing with “baronial elegance” as he vented “with volcanic fury the sectional bitterness that had been bottled up inside him for so long—feelings that the South was victim of ‘conscious hate.’” But the speech also reminded Mitchell, as his biographer says, “why this normally urbane gentleman was such a highly respected master strategist.” By his accusation that the bill’s supporters, who had called it a “moderate” measure, had been engaged in a “campaign of deception,” he had, with “astounding effectiveness,” thrown the “Knowland-Douglas forces on the defensive”; his masterful invocation of the names of Sumner and Stevens had awakened ghosts that stalked the Senate halls.

Russell’s speech had another strategic effect. Its charge that the bill was “cunningly designed” to deceive Congress into passing legislation giving the federal government “sweeping” new powers was aimed at the weakest links in the civil rights alliance: the midwestern Republican conservatives who were philosophically opposed to any expansion of federal power. Russell’s aim was true. While the Senate was still sitting all but transfixed by his oratory, Olin Johnston jumped up and shouted, “Senators, do you want to be responsible for a second Reconstruction?” Some of the midwestern conservatives did not want that responsibility, as became clear when several of them spoke at the next Republican caucus. One of them, Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, said that passage of Brownell’s bill would be “a violation of the civil rights of the white race.” More votes had been needed to support the southern position on Part III, and Russell had gotten some with his monumental speech.

HE WAS TO GET MORE. A great general has the ability to find a weak spot in his foe’s defenses that no one else has found, and Richard Russell was a great general in the civil rights war. There was indeed a weakness related to the Administration’s civil rights bill: the head of the Administration didn’t know what was in it. And Russell had guessed that. His speech contained the following sentence: “I would be less than frank if I did not say that I doubt very much whether the full implications of the bill have ever been explained to President Eisenhower.”

Astonishing as was that statement—that the President was not familiar with a major point (perhaps the major point) in his Administration’s most highly publicized bill, one that had been a subject of controversy for more than a year—it became apparent the next day that there was, at the least, a considerable amount of truth in it. Russell had said that his statement was based “on my analysis of his [Eisenhower’s] answers to questions at press conferences.” Eisenhower’s next press conference was on the morning after Russell’s speech, and at it James Reston of the New York Times asked about Russell’s charge that the Administration’s bill “was a cunning device to enforce [wholesale] integration of the races in the South.” Perhaps some of the journalists present had expected the President to reply with a defense of the bill, and of his Attorney General. If so, they were to be disappointed. “Well,” Dwight Eisenhower replied, “naturally I am not a lawyer, and I don’t participate in drawing up the exact language of the proposals.”

The President went on to say that he had thought the bill was primarily a voting rights bill. “I know what the objective was that I was seeking, which was to prevent anybody illegally from interfering with any individual’s right to vote….” In light of that, Reston asked, would the President be willing to see the bill rewritten so that it would deal specifically only with the right to vote—in other words, to strike out Part III? “Well,” the President replied, “I would not want to answer this in detail, because I was reading part of that bill this morning, and I—there were certain phrases I didn’t completely understand. So, before I made any more remarks on that, I would want to talk to the Attorney General and see exactly what they do mean.”

Eisenhower’s initial ignorance is understandable. The President had, of course, authorized Brownell in April, 1956, to submit only the voting rights portion of the bill; Part III had been put back in the bill through the stratagem worked out by Brownell and Representative Keating. And apparently the fact that it was back in the bill had never—during the intervening fifteen months—been conveyed to Eisenhower. That afternoon, he spoke to Brownell over the telephone. Eisenhower’s secretary Ann Whitman heard only the President’s side of the conversation, but her notes indicate that Eisenhower may have felt he had not been sufficiently informed about the bill’s contents: “He said that some two years ago when they had discussed civil rights legislation, he had understood verbally from the Attorney General that the right of the Attorney General to go into the south was to be concerned with interference of right to vote. Now he understands that the bill… is in general terms…. He wondered whether this bill was not somewhat more inclusive in that particular factor than had been intended. The President said that when he and the Attorney General had talked, they had mentioned criminal proceedings only in cases where Negroes not give[n] right to vote…. If the bill has been expanded to a form so general that it scares people to death, that is something else again….” More than one Republican senator, reading the transcript of the President’s press conference, stopped worrying about what the White House reaction would be if the senator voted with the South.

Later that month, the President would write a friend that some of the bill’s language “has probably been too broad.” And he would also, that July, privately write the friend about his distress about the Brown decision (“I think that no other single event has so disturbed the domestic scene in many years”), his lack of distress with the pace of the South’s compliance with that decision (it is, he wrote the friend, “impossible to expect complete and instant reversal of conduct by mere decision of the Supreme Court”), and added sentences that hardly evidence a burning desire for sweeping new civil rights legislation, saying that “Laws are rarely effective unless they represent the will of the majority,” and “when emotions are deeply stirred,” “human feelings” should be given emphasis and progress should be gradual. Eisenhower “had waged two successful campaigns to become the nation’s leader, but he did not want to lead on the issue of civil rights,” his biographer Ambrose has written.

WHILE RICHARD RUSSELL’S SPEECH had given Lyndon Johnson more of the votes he needed to amend Part III and thereby pay part of the South’s price, it hadn’t given him enough. Even with four or five midwestern Republicans now joining the southern and western Democrats, there were still not nearly the forty-eight votes necessary to pass an amendment. Liberals were shocked by the speech’s revelations. As Russell was linking the Brownell Bill to Sections 1985 and 1993, Paul Douglas whispered to Frank McCulloch, “Why wasn’t I told this?” but Douglas’ aides hadn’t told him because they hadn’t known. “When Russell brought this out, we were all surprised,” McCulloch recalls. But their determination was undiminished: to them the cause of social justice was more important than what they considered mere legalisms. Most of the liberal Democrats were still planning to vote for the unamended, strong bill. And despite the midwestern defections, most of the forty-six Republicans were still sticking with Knowland. A comfortable majority was still available to pass it.

Russell had wounded the civil rights cause in another way, however. His speech had shrewdly appealed not only to Republican conservatives’ belief in the limitation of governmental powers but also to their belief in a senator’s right to unlimited debate. The appeal he had made to them across the center aisle—“I hope that our colleagues will not be intolerant of us as we seek to discharge our duty to the people of our states”—had touched a chord. In the list of conservative priorities, civil rights did not necessarily rank above senatorial rights. Some of these GOP conservatives had never been particularly enthusiastic about civil rights. Considerations of party harmony, of party power and (because of the chairmanships at stake) of personal power had brought them into line behind Knowland to support the Administration’s civil rights bill, and despite Russell’s speech, those considerations would probably still hold them in line to vote for the measure; the bill itself would still command an overwhelming Senate majority. After Richard Russell’s speech, however, many conservatives were no longer willing to vote for limiting debate on the bill—as was shown by another midwestern comment made after that GOP caucus. While not going so far as Hickenlooper in disavowing the aims of the bill, Karl Mundt of South Dakota pledged that the measure is not “going to be rammed down the throats of southerners by relentless or roughshod methods.” Russell’s speech had won to his side a few votes against Part III—but many more votes against limiting debate. All the pressure that Knowland, Nixon and the White House could apply couldn’t hold the GOP midwesterners in line on that issue any longer. There were enough votes to pass the bill. There weren’t enough votes for cloture.

Returning to his office after his speech, Russell had made some telephone calls to check on its effect, and then had called a meeting of the southern senators for the following morning, and beginning at 9:45 a.m., they filed in and took seats around the huge table: Byrd of Finance, Eastland of Judiciary, Ellender of Agriculture, Hill of Labor, Fulbright of Banking, McClellan of Government Operations, Johnston of Post Office and Civil Service—the mighty chairmen—all sitting with the chairman of Armed Services (and with the strong young recruits Talmadge, Ervin, Thurmond) around the mahogany oval, in front of the wall with the pictures of Russell’s twelve brothers and sisters, and of the old judge with the walrus mustache administering the oath—“Dick Russell’s Dixieland Band,” the fearsome Southern Caucus. And there, at the very same time that the President, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, was refusing to defend the civil rights bill, the South’s general laid out his strategy for attacking it, a surprising strategy, except in light of Russell’s larger objectives, both for the South and, in the interests of the South, for Lyndon Johnson.

Hearing Russell’s speech as a call to battle, many of the southerners had expected him to announce at the meeting that the South would deploy against Knowland’s threatened motion to bring the civil rights bill to the floor the South’s most potent weapon—an all-out filibuster in the traditional style that would hold the floor until the bill’s proponents gave up and allowed the motion to die. They were more than ready to enlist in the fight: Olin Johnston, for one, had prepared a forty-page speech, and others had begun making notes for extended presentations.

Instead, Russell, after announcing in that calm southern drawl, “Well, fellows, I think there are some things we ought to talk about,” said that in his opinion, although they should hold the floor, they should do so, at least at first, not by reading the telephone book or recipes for pot likker but by arguments to the point, attempting, during the debate on Knowland’s motion, to amend the bill drastically by eliminating Part III and inserting a jury trial amendment. “We’ve got a good case on the merits,” he urged. “Let’s keep the arguments germane. Let’s see if we can keep our speeches restrained and not inflammatory.”

Not all of the men around the table agreed with the strategy. Johnston wanted to deliver his magnum opus immediately, and Strom Thurmond suggested that they all march in a body down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House and let Eisenhower know in person that they intended to filibuster. Russell responded that he was not ruling out a no-holds-barred, plainly declared, traditional filibuster, but merely saying that they should hold that weapon in reserve. After arguing Thurmond out of his proposal, he told Johnston to keep his speech handy, that it might well be needed later on. Explaining his reasoning, he used Lyndon Johnson’s arguments, the ones Johnson had been using—and had had George Reedy put in writing—in Johnson’s own attempt to head off an open filibuster: that this time a filibuster might not win, and that, even if it did, it would inflame northern passions and make more likely a future change in Rule 22. Skeptical of that assessment, several of the southerners weren’t sure that Russell himself really believed in it, but no one wanted to argue with him; it was in summing up the feeling around the oval table that Harry Byrd said simply: “Dick, it’s up to you.” One of the other senators would later describe the strategy agreed on at the meeting: “Instead of rantin’ and ravin’, we’d talk about the merits of the bill—at least for a while.”

The strategy was flawless. Thanks to the new allies Russell’s speech had won for the South, there was now little danger that the bill would come to a vote if the southerners didn’t want it to. Since an old-style filibuster, an adamant, defiant, blatantly obvious attempt to cripple the Senate, might hurt the South in future years, if possible that type of filibuster should be avoided, held off to the last possible minute and used then only if it was absolutely necessary. And after Russell’s speech, a filibuster could be held off to the last possible minute. It was no longer necessary at the beginning of the fight over the civil rights bill; the southerners could wait until the end, until just before the votes either on the motion to bring the bill to a vote or on the bill itself, and see if the bill had been hammered into a shape acceptable to them. And if it hadn’t—if they still hadn’t gotten what they wanted—they could always filibuster then. They could keep that weapon in reserve—holding it for the last stand—because, thanks to the speech and Hells Canyon, they could be sure that, in that last stand, the filibuster would win.

These facts had the most ominous implications both for the cause of civil rights and for Lyndon Johnson. For both the cause and himself, he needed to pass a bill, needed to persuade the South to compromise. His strongest argument to persuade the South to do that had been that it was “isolated,” “utterly without allies”—that a filibuster might be defeated. That argument had now been destroyed; the South no longer had to compromise. For months, the South—Russell—had been insisting on the addition of amendments that would eliminate Part III and add jury trials to the bill. Now those amendments had to be added, or there would be no bill; the South would have to be given what it wanted. But to add those amendments, Johnson would have to find liberal and Republican votes—votes it seemed impossible for him to find. As the Senate recessed for the Fourth of July holiday, it seemed inevitable that the end of the 1957 civil rights fight would be simply another filibuster.

LYNDON JOHNSON WASN’T IN WASHINGTON that Fourth of July weekend. On June 23, shortly after Russell told him he had decided to give his speech, Johnson had abruptly left Washington for the Pedernales Valley. At least some of his key—and worried—Washington advisers believed that he knew the impact that Russell’s speech would have, and felt it would destroy his last hopes of getting a compromise, and that he had, in Tommy Corcoran’s phrase, “given up,” and wanted to be identified as little as possible with another civil rights defeat. He stayed on his ranch for two weeks, continuing his months-long public silence on the issue but removing himself as far from the Washington spotlight as possible.

On the ranch, the days were filled with lolling around and occasionally floating in the pool, with business meetings with KTBC salesmen and executives, drives around the ranch to inspect the cattle and into Austin for dinner at El Matamoros and El Toro with his young staff members Bill and Nadine Brammer and Mary Margaret Wiley, and long domino games; one, with Wesley West, A.W. Moursund, and Gene Chambers, began in the morning, resumed after lunch, and then, after dinner at the West Ranch, went on there for several more hours. What was noticeable was the absence, to any substantial degree, of telephone calls back to Washington on Senate business. Mary Rather’s log of telephone calls showed that very few were being made to senators.

Near the end of the two weeks, however, George Reedy telephoned Johnson to read him a memo that had been received that day in the Washington office. The memo told him that, hopeless though the fight for a civil rights bill might seem, he could not avoid it and should stop trying to do so, and the memo was from the man who Johnson felt knew—had proven he knew—how to become President.

The memo’s first line was a little sarcastic—“I hope you are finding the Perdenales [sic] River peaceful before the coming storm,” Jim Rowe wrote—and the rest of it told Johnson, in notably candid terms, that if he wanted to become President, he had no choice as to what he had to do in the civil rights fight. “As you probably know,” the memo said, “both your friends and your enemies are saying that this is Lyndon Johnson’s Waterloo. They are saying that you are trapped between your southern background and your desire to be a national leader and that you cannot escape. I personally think this is Armageddon for Lyndon Johnson. To put it bluntly, if you vote against a civil rights bill you can forget your presidential ambitions in 1960.”

To keep those ambitions alive, Rowe’s memorandum said, it was necessary for Johnson not merely to vote for a civil rights bill but to fight for one. “Lyndon Johnson would have to be active in bringing about cloture” if that was necessary. It was necessary not merely that he fight but that he win. “The important thing about civil rights in 1957 is to pass a civil rights bill… solely for the purpose of getting this absurd issue off the Hill for a few years….” And, Rowe said, it was necessary that the bill that was passed not be identified as a Republican bill but as a Lyndon Johnson bill. “The public relations … are most important. It would be most important that Johnson get all the credit for getting a compromise bill through.”

Following this course “is imperative,” Rowe said. “It may not be imperative to Johnson, but it is imperative to Rowe! I would not like to see the 1960 nomination go down the drain because of one vote in 1957….”

Rowe’s memo was read to Lyndon Johnson on July 3. And the next day there was only one guest for dinner at the Johnson Ranch—and the identity of that guest was interesting in light of the lasting hold on Johnson’s emotions that was exerted by anything that had to do with his family.

The guest was his twenty-eight-year-old cousin William (Corky) Cox—and Corky’s life had intersected with Johnson’s twenty years earlier, when Johnson, then twenty-eight himself, had been in another situation that appeared hopeless. Despite his weeks of desperate effort, newspaper polls published on March 25, 1937, two weeks before Election Day, showed him further behind than ever in his first campaign for Congress. The custom in the Hill Country’s little towns was for a candidate to be introduced at rallies by the towns’ most prominent citizens; by now these leaders had almost all endorsed one or another of his opponents, and that day Johnson had learned that not a single prominent person could be found to introduce him at any of the next day’s rallies.

Lyndon was very dejected as he sat in his parents’ home in Johnson City that evening, talking to his parents, his brother, his uncle Tom, his cousin Ava Johnson Cox, and Ava’s eight-year-old son, Corky, but as had happened before in times of political crisis for Lyndon, his father had a suggestion for him. The leaders’ opposition could be made to work for him, Sam Ealy Johnson said; instead of trying to conceal their opposition, Lyndon should emphasize it by being introduced by the antithesis of a veteran leader—by a young child who would recite a particularly appropriate poem (“You know the poem,” Sam told Rebekah—“the one about the thousands”). The child Sam had in mind was Corky, who, in an area in which horsemanship was esteemed, was being called the best young cowboy in the Hill Country because of his riding and calf-roping feats in children’s events in recent rodeos. “Corky can do it,” Sam said. And Corky did do it. The next day, a vicious Texas norther had hit the Hill Country, but all that day Lyndon and Corky had driven from town to town through freezing rain that rolled across the hills in blinding sheets—and in each town Lyndon would tell the audience, “They say I’m a young candidate. Well, I’ve got a young campaign manager, too,” and then Corky would recite a stanza of Edgar A. Guest’s “It Couldn’t Be Done” (“There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done, / There are thousands to prophesy failure, / There are thousands to point out to you one by one, / The dangers that wait to assail you. / But just buckle in with a bit of a grin, / Just take off your coat and go to it; / Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing / That ‘cannot be done,’ and you’ll do it”), and when the boy finished, Lyndon would take off his coat and give his version of a bit of a grin, and attack the “thousands” who said that just because he was behind, he couldn’t win. That corny poem and the fresh-faced boy who delivered it had touched a chord with the audiences of farmers and their wives and had ignited Lyndon Johnson’s campaign, and “hard as he had run before, now, with the race seemingly lost, he ran harder,” ran to victory.* No one, of course, can know for certain the role memories may have played down on the Johnson Ranch during those two weeks in 1957, and it may have been only coincidence that on July 4, 1957, the day after he heard Jim Rowe’s memo, Ava Cox received a telephone call from her cousin Lyndon asking where Corky was living these days. Ava said that her son was a schoolteacher down in Ingram, near Kerrville, a town about sixty miles south of Johnson City, and Johnson telephoned him and said he’d like to drive down and see him. That evening, he brought Corky back to the Johnson Ranch for dinner. No one knows what they talked about—Corky Cox died in 1993—but when, on July 6, Lyndon Johnson returned to Washington, hard as he had fought before for the civil rights bill, now, with the fight seemingly lost, he fought harder.

TRUE TO HIS WORD, Knowland introduced, shortly after the Senate reconvened on Monday, July 8, his motion to “proceed to the consideration” of the civil rights bill—to bring the bill to the floor for debate. Carrying out Russell’s strategy, southern senators began to discuss the motion—not by reading recipes or the phone book but in germane, if lengthy, arguments. The South knew that if the bill came to a vote in its present form, with Part III in it, it would pass. Despite the votes of some Far Northwest and Mountain States senators—and of the five or six reactionary midwestern Republicans whose support for the measure had been stripped away by Russell’s speech and Eisenhower’s admission—a solid majority of the Senate was still for it. Lyndon Johnson knew, as the historian Robert Mann writes, “the price for southern acquiescence—to render the bill a toothless voting rights measure.” Most immediately, the price was the removal of Part III. But Johnson also knew that he “did not have the votes to pay this price.” To persuade the South to stop talking and allow the civil rights bill to come to the floor, he would have to get more votes from Republicans, and he would have to get some from liberals, too.

In an attempt to do so, he deployed, upon his return from Texas, his most powerful weapons—against the largest targets.

The intellect and eloquence of Richard Russell were now deployed in the privacy of the Oval Office. During his July 3 press conference after Russell’s speech, Eisenhower had said he would be glad to talk to Russell personally about his Administration’s bill, but Russell had done nothing about the invitation. Immediately upon his return to Washington on July 6, Johnson, “aware,” as Rowland Evans was to put it, of Russell’s “rare ability to articulate his point,” urged him to accept, urged him so forcefully that, on July 10, Russell met with the President for almost an hour.

That must have been quite a meeting. No one knows exactly what was said in it. Writing to a friend about it, Eisenhower described an exchange that cast him in a favorable light. After Russell had “delivered an impassioned talk on the sanctity of the 1896 decision [Plessy] by the Supreme Court,” Eisenhower wrote, “I merely asked, ‘Then why is the 1954 decision not equally sacrosanct?’ Russell ‘stuttered,’ and finally said, ‘There were wise men on the Court. Now we have politicians.’” Then, according to Eisenhower, he asked Russell to name a single member of the 1896 Court, and “He just looked at me in consternation and the subject was dropped.” The President’s description may not, however, have reflected with total faithfulness the overall tenor of his remarks. Recalling the meeting years later, Russell said: “He [Eisenhower] just sat there and poured out his soul about that bill and the Supreme Court and several other things. I was amazed, and then I realized that he had known me for a long time.” Emerging from the White House, Russell, in answering the questions of a small knot of reporters, gave his customary modest disclaimer of influence. “I couldn’t say we had a meeting of the minds,” he said. “The President and I don’t agree on the basic philosophy of the legislation.” Asked if he felt better than he had before he saw Eisenhower, Russell replied, “I can’t say that I do.” But, adding that “I think in the course of the discussion there were some features I emphasized that the President had not considered,” he said that the President’s “mind is not closed” to possible amendments to “clarify the bill,” and privately, reporting on the meeting to his southern colleagues, he went a little further. “The President indicated, in effect, to Senator Russell that he would not be averse to considering some changes,” Willis Robertson was to write a friend the next day. And Ann Whitman spoke to the President immediately after Russell left (“While emotional about the matter, he [Russell] conducted himself very well,” she wrote in her diary) and while the meeting may or may not have made Russell feel better, it definitely made Whitman, a fervent believer in civil rights, feel worse. Despite her almost invariably unquestioning loyalty to Eisenhower’s policies, she wrote in her diary on this occasion that the President “is not at all unsympathetic to the position people like Senator Russell take,” and was “far more ready than I am, for instance, to entertain their views.” Whitman may even have offered a rare face-to-face rebuke to her boss for doing so, for, she wrote, he reminded her that “I have lived in the South, remember.”

RUSSELL’S VISIT TO THE OVAL OFFICE was followed, probably that same day, by one from Lyndon Johnson. The Majority Leader came secretly. No reporters were waiting for him when he emerged from the White House, because no reporters knew he was there—his limousine didn’t stop where reporters could see it—and so far as can be determined, neither Eisenhower nor Johnson ever wrote a word about the meeting. “He sneaked down to see us,” Bryce Harlow would tell the author. “He called me, and said he wanted to see Ike, and that he couldn’t afford to have anyone know he was asking. It was very important. I laid it on. Very confidential. No one was to know he was there. Just the three of us. In the Oval Office. His limousine drove past the main entrance and stopped by the Oval Office entrance, and I brought him in the side door to the Oval Office.”

That must have been quite a meeting, too, if of a tone quite different from the other. “This wasn’t fun and games,” says Harlow, who sat in on the meeting although “I never wrote a memo for the record about it”—and said he could not recall any details about it. “These were big boys.”

In discussing, years later, the fate of Part III, Brownell would link it to that meeting, which Eisenhower had described to him. Eisenhower had indeed, Brownell said, “become worried” that Part III would involve his Administration “in a myriad of school-desegregation cases,” but “I had tried to assure the President otherwise.” But, Brownell would say, “Lyndon Johnson went directly to the Oval Office…. A shrewd political operator, [he] had unprecedented power over the Senate,” and in this meeting he let the President know how he was prepared to use that power—let him know, Brownell says, in very blunt terms, what would happen to the bill if Part III was not removed. “Johnson told Ike that the entire bill would be defeated on the Senate floor if section three … was included. He said he had the votes to do this,” and he made Eisenhower understand that he would do this. “The President was convinced.” Beyond this, he let the President know not only what would happen to the civil rights bill but what would happen to other bills the President wanted passed. “Eisenhower was dealing with a hostile Democratic majority in the Senate … and the fate of much of the Administration’s legislative program in the Senate hung in the balance. Majority Leader Johnson made that clear to the President.” And, Brownell says, Eisenhower therefore made “a highly practical decision…. It was a political decision. [Eisenhower] concluded that this political compromise was a necessary price to pay … to get other badly needed Administration bills through Congress before the end of the session….” At his next press conference, the President made his position on Part III clear. First, he reiterated his belief that the most important part of the bill was not the one that would foster faster school desegregation but the one furthering the right to vote. And when Rowland Evans asked whether, in that case, he was “convinced that it would be a wise extension of federal power at this stage to permit the Attorney General to bring suits on his motion, to enforce school segregation in the South,” Eisenhower replied: “Well, no,” and later said, “I personally believe if you try to go too far too fast in laws in this delicate field that has involved the emotions of so many million Americans, you are making a mistake.”

Eisenhower’s statement gave Johnson new Republican votes for the elimination of Part III, but only a few. Having learned that Eisenhower could be flouted with impunity, Republican senators were more susceptible to the arguments, of either conscience or calculation, made to them by Knowland and Nixon, particularly by the latter; they felt that Nixon was likely to become the next President, and that he would be a very different kind of President from Eisenhower, more likely to remember who had not gone along with him. The arguments and pressure of their Senate Leader and the Vice President held a majority of the Republican senators in line behind Part III.

IF THERE WAS A SINGLE KEY TARGET on the Democratic liberal side, a single liberal who could, more than any other, perform the almost impossible task of persuading other liberals to change their views and accept a civil rights bill limited to voting rights—a bill without Part III, in other words—it was Joe Rauh, chairman of both the ADA and the Civil Rights Leadership Conference.

Rauh was also, however, perhaps the liberal leader whose feelings about Lyndon Johnson came closest to outright hatred. He hated him because of what Johnson had done eight years before to Leland Olds (“a great American, a hero of mine”) and because of that 76–6 vote against Paul Douglas (“It was just Johnson putting his foot on Douglas’ face”) and because of a score of other anti-liberal and, in Rauh’s view, unnecessarily cruel actions by Lyndon Johnson in the years between the Olds and Douglas episodes. Rauh’s very acceptance speech, when he had been elected ADA chairman in 1955, had been largely an attack on Johnson. Johnson had been able to go to Eisenhower. There was no point in his going to Rauh.

Rauh’s closest friends, however, included the man who was Johnson’s most powerful liberal weapon, Philip Graham, and another potent liberal, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, for whom Rauh had, in his youth, been a clerk. And now Rauh received a call from Phil Graham inviting him and his wife, Olie, down to the Grahams’ farm, Glen Welby, for the day, and asking him to “bring the Justice” along.

Rauh was to recall that at first he didn’t suspect any ulterior motive in the invitation, not even when “all the way out” on the hour-plus drive to Glen Welby, there was “this business from Felix about the only thing that counts is the right to vote…. I never even thought there was anything more to it than a nice friendly afternoon” of playing tennis and swimming in the Grahams’ pool.

“Then came cocktails,” Rauh was to say, “and Phil and Felix and I are starting to talk some more. By God, if Phil doesn’t sound just like Felix on the right to vote…. Both of them hammered at me: ‘The only thing that matters is the right to vote.’ We had the goddamnedest argument.” At dinner the topic remained the same. “Phil was saying [that] we shouldn’t be so obstinate in demanding everything at once. That we’d get the right to vote first. And that was the most important. Both of them hammered at me. And even then I could hardly recognize that this was not just a dinner party,” that “I was being worked on.” It took a long time, Rauh says, for him to realize that “Felix and Phil and Johnson had had a very thorough talk,” and that the afternoon in the country was “a cute way for Lyndon to exercise his will.”

The exercise failed, however. The day at Glen Welby left Rauh unconvinced. Black Americans had waited so long for the rights embodied in Part III. Now, at last, there was a solid majority in the Senate behind those rights. Were black Americans to be told they would have to wait still longer? Rauh remained adamant in his determination to keep Part III intact.

Which meant that Lyndon Johnson still couldn’t pay the southern price. And there seemed no way for him to get more of the Republican and liberal votes he needed to pay it.

OFFERING HIS MOTION on Monday, July 8, Knowland emphasized that he was asking merely that the bill be brought off the Calendar to the floor and debated there. The motion, he said, was simply “to enable the Senate of the United States to perform its legislative function.” From the other side of the aisle, the Democratic civil rights leader reiterated the point. Knowland’s motion “is merely that the Senate proceed to consider the civil rights bill,” Paul Douglas said. “He is not, at this time, moving its passage.” Both senators said that therefore they would refuse to consider any amendments until that motion was passed. “Then, and only then, will it be germane for us to discuss the merits of the bill itself,” Knowland said. Until the bill is on the floor, “I shall resist any amendment,” Douglas said.

Should the South attempt to filibuster Knowland’s motion, the two senators said, they would invoke cloture, and, they said, they had the votes to do so. Republican leaders agreed. A civil rights bill “will pass at this session … without compromise,” Richard Nixon said flatly. “We’ll win on Part III,” Sherman Adams said. “We have our finger on the Senate pulse. We know what’s going on.”

Behind Knowland’s bluster was, apparently, belief. He told a GOP Legislative Leaders’ Meeting that “he expected the vote” on his motion “to be successful.” With the bill then on the floor, there might, perhaps, have to be some “clarifying amendments,” he said, but if the southerners continued trying to block it, he would simply put the Senate on a “round-the-clock basis” and secure passage that way. Attempting to inject a note of reality, some of the other leaders had, the conference minutes show, an utter lack of success. “Congressman Halleck asked whether Senator Knowland would interrupt consideration of this bill in order to take up other bills. Senator Knowland said he … was inclined to think it best to drive through on the Civil Rights Bill. Mr. Halleck recalled that, for a number of departments, money will run out on August 1st. Senator Knowland said that it is a calculated risk that must be taken….” Behind Nixon’s bluster was, apparently, a cold calculation: if attempts to drive the bill through caused a southern Democratic filibuster, that filibuster would be a political boon to the GOP.

Neither Knowland nor the Douglas Group seemed to understand—and if Nixon understood, he did not disclose what he understood—that the existence of sufficient votes to pass the bill simply meant that no vote would be allowed on the bill, not even on the motion to bring it to the floor. Knowland, anxious to be prominently identified with the civil rights bill he was sure would pass, was keeping his name in the newspapers with a stream of communiqués, and his pronouncements were as patronizing as if he were dealing with an already defeated foe. If the southerners permitted a quick vote on his motion, he said, they would find that civil rights supporters “will not be unreasonable” (although, he made clear, that reasonableness would not extend to any substantive weakening of Part III).

The press accepted both Knowland’s view of his own role (he was now being identified by journalists as “the leader of the bipartisan civil rights forces in the Senate”) and his optimism. With the southerners, during the first day or two of debate, generally obeying Russell’s injunction to sound “restrained and not inflammatory,” journalists applauded this stance as if good manners were as important as social justice, and interpreted the restraint to mean that the bill would indeed be allowed to come to the floor. Knowland’s motion “is likely to be adopted by a decisive majority vote without resort to cloture,” said the Herald Tribune’s Rowland Evans. “[An] expected Southern filibuster … will not materialize until after Sen. Knowland’s motion has been adopted and the second stage of the battle is under way.” White of the New York Times was only slightly more cautious. “There was,” he wrote, “at least an even possibility that [the southerners] would reserve their truly implacable resistance until the time to deal with the substance of the bill.” And the optimism involved not only the motion but the bill’s ultimate fate. With both sides so reasonable, “Speculation concerning ultimate compromise is dominating the atmosphere,” readers of the Times were told.

Knowland’s predictions in July, however, were not only as confident as those he had made in January, February, March, April, May, and June, but as accurate. His July predictions, too, began to slip—faster and faster—almost as soon as they were out of his mouth. On Monday, he predicted passage of his motion “within the week”; on Tuesday, he said flatly that his motion would be brought to a vote “within a week” (italics added); on Wednesday, he told a reporter that the debate might run into September. So wildly optimistic were his vote counts and those of his Democratic liberal allies that they appear to have been based on the belief that since the cause was just, the need for a civil rights bill obvious, and press and public support for it widespread, certainly the motion to consider the bill would pass, and the bill was certain to pass, too. Journalistic analyses showed little understanding that Russell was privately insisting not only that Part III be eliminated but that the amendment to eliminate it be agreed upon before he would allow the bill to come to the floor. Most of the journalists somehow managed to ignore a statement Russell had made on the Senate floor that Monday, not long after Knowland and Douglas had finished speaking. There seemed to be some misunderstanding on the part of his distinguished colleagues, Russell had said. “We are … told that it is highly inappropriate” to discuss the merits of the bill “in connection with the pending motion to proceed to its consideration.” That, he said, was incorrect. “We are justified in discussing it on its merits, at every opportunity we get to discuss it…. If that be an unreasonable position for us to take, the Senate must make the most of it. Senators may call it a filibuster if they wish.” But whatever it is called, he said, “Mr. President, we will resist. We will resist.” Resist, he said, not merely during a debate on the bill itself. “We will explain and discuss the issues which are embraced in the bill on the motion to take up the bill [italics added] until we are convinced that each and every Member of the Senate fully understands them in all their implications.” The South had two opportunities remaining to filibuster; it was not forgoing one of them. And, indeed, while the southern senators’ discussion of the motion remained germane, it continued on Tuesday and Wednesday. If an “extended discussion” is extended long enough, it becomes a filibuster whether it is called by that name or not, and whether or not its tone is, at least at the moment, restrained. (Instead of rantin and ravin’, we’d talk about the merits of the bill—at least for a while.) On Wednesday, readers of most newspapers were still being told that this was not a filibuster yet, and that compromise was still the probable outcome. But Philip Graham, in daily touch with Johnson, had a better understanding of the situation, and on Wednesday hisWashington Post said simply, “The Senate has begun what may become its most momentous filibuster.” The southerners intended to keep extending their discussion until they got what they were insisting on. “It became apparent after a few days that the southerners absolutely wouldn’t take … even [a] cleaned-up Title III,” George Reedy was to recall. “That if you want Title III, you’re going to have to break a filibuster.” Asked by a reporter on Wednesday for a response to Knowland’s prediction of a September conclusion, Russell said, “If the bill is not modified, we may be here until the snow flies.”

During the first three days of debate, one amendment after another to substantially weaken Part III was either suggested or formally introduced by midwestern conservatives or southerners. Determined that their “dream bill” pass unaltered, the liberals whom William White called “the most ardent civil righters”—the Douglas Group—were refusing even to consider proposed modifications. Other, more moderate, liberals in both parties were more willing to consider amendments, but not from such sources. These moderates wanted a civil rights bill but were willing to settle for a more modest one, and were coming to realize that an unaltered bill would result in a filibuster, and no bill at all. Some of them, furthermore, had other legislation they wanted enacted—legislation that might not be enacted if there was a filibuster. More amenable to amendments though they were, however, these moderates were predisposed to distrust any submitted by southerners who they knew were trying to preserve the South’s infamous Jim Crow system or by Republican reactionaries who gave lip service to civil rights but whose hearts, they knew, were on the side of the South. The moderates saw amendments from such sources as simply the latest attempts to gut a civil rights bill by senators who had been gutting civil rights bills for years—saw them as attacks on racial justice by senators whose motives on racial justice were indefensible. And even if these moderates could come around to voting for an amendment introduced by a southerner or southern sympathizer, what excuse for doing so could they give to those of their constituents who were knowledgeable about civil rights? There was little support in the Senate for any substantial modification of Part III, and without such modification, the bill was going to encounter a southern filibuster—and the filibuster was going to win. Says Reedy: “I don’t think a filibuster could have been broken because the southerners … would have enough allies in the western states to keep it going indefinitely. You just weren’t going to get a civil rights bill with Title III.”

The Civil Rights Bill of 1957 was going to suffer the same fate as the civil rights bills of 1950, and 1948, and 1946, and 1944, and 1938, and 1936. There was not going to be a vote on it on the floor. It was going to die, in a filibuster, on the motion to bring it to the floor. The dam that for so long had held back the tide of social justice was going to hold it back again. Civil rights was going to lose. Lyndon Johnson was going to lose.

JIM ROWE HAD TOLD HIM that it was “most important” that he “get all the credit” for a bill, but what if at the end of the day there was no credit to be gotten, but only, as in every civil rights fight of recent decades, blame? Desperately as he was attempting to find a compromise, therefore, his attempts were cloaked in secrecy. Unavailable to reporters for almost two weeks down on the ranch, the Majority Leader was hardly more available after his return to Washington; there was no leaking to journalists—indeed, almost no contact with them. His decision to allow Knowland to introduce the motion calling up the bill was evidence of his fears that it wouldn’t pass, and in other ways too he kept a low profile. Rising at the beginning of the July 8 session to announce the “Order of Business,” he did so not by laying out the order, as was his prerogative—a prerogative, of course, which he was customarily adamant in exercising—but by announcing that the Minority Leader would do so instead. The Senate’s pending business, Johnson said, was an emergency measure to authorize construction by Robert Moses and New York State of a huge power dam on the Niagara River to replace one washed away by a flood, but, Johnson said, “I am informed that the distinguished Minority Leader” is about to make a motion to bring up the civil rights bill, and, he said, “I should like to inform all my colleagues that the Minority Leader, in his usual gracious and courteous manner, has told me” that after he makes the motion “he and those who support him will resist any motion to proceed to other business” until the civil rights bill is finally disposed of. As he was speaking, standing at his front-row center desk, Knowland rose to stand at his front-row center desk, almost at Johnson’s elbow, and confirmed that what Johnson was saying was correct. Three senators—New York’s Javits and Ives and Robert Kerr, whose Public Works Committee had considered the Niagara situation—jumped to their feet to protest that that situation was, in Kerr’s words, an “extreme emergency” which must be acted upon immediately. “This measure must have the right of way,” Ives said. Johnson said he certainly agreed. “The Senator from New York understands, I am sure, that I heartily favor the [Niagara] bill.” But, he said, it was not his decision to make. “Mr. President, the Minority Leader has pointed out that he does not intend to have other proposed legislation brought before the Senate.” He was washing his hands of the situation, Lyndon Johnson said. “That is the decision of the Minority Leader, and, I assume, of this administration. They will have to accept the responsibility for it.” Since the day he had assumed the majority leadership, Lyndon Johnson had insisted on keeping strict control of the Senate’s schedule. Now he was abdicating that control. The most accurate indication of the true chances for passage of a civil rights bill was the fact that, in William S. White’s words, “Mr. Johnson, normally in control of Senate procedure, now in effect folded his arms.” Another indication came every afternoon, when newspaper photographers sent in messages to senators asking them to come to the Senate Reception Room to be photographed. Knowland, “the untitled leader of the civil rights coalition,” as White described him, invariably came out to be photographed studying the civil rights bill. Russell and Ervin posed together, intently studying it. Lyndon Johnson declined to be photographed. He was trying to distance himself as much as possible from what was likely to happen.

HARDLY HAD THE FOURTH DAY of debate—Thursday, July 11—begun when two statements made it apparent that the gulf separating the two sides on Part III was as wide as ever. Stennis of Mississippi said Part III “should be stricken”—all of it. McNamara of Michigan demanded that none of it be stricken—that the bill be passed with its “basic provisions” intact. When McNamara sat down, furthermore, Javits stood up to express his concern over the failure by the Senate to take action on New York’s “vital” Niagara bill—and Knowland’s reply showed how adamant he was about any action that might weaken the position of the civil rights forces. The Niagara bill would not be brought up, Knowland said, until the civil rights legislation was disposed of.

As the day dragged on, the debate became, in the New York Post’s phrase, “increasingly bitter.” From the far right side of the Chamber, Javits shouted across the arcs of desks as he interrupted Olin Johnston of South Carolina, and Spessard Holland of Florida shouted back, literally jumping up and down in rage, with a hostility that leaks through even the carefully sanitized version in the Congressional Record: “I hope the distinguished senator from South Carolina will not allow himself to be cozened from his very proper and very correct position by the importunities of the distinguished senator from New York, aggressive though they may be.” One by one, the members of the Southern Caucus—Johnston, Ervin, Eastland, Thurmond, Robertson—rose, to denounce the bill in terms that grew less and less restrained. “A rape upon the constitutional and legal systems of the United States,” Ervin called it. The proposed new Civil Rights Division would be a “new Gestapo,” Olin the Solon said, pounding his desk. “If this monster bill passes, we can all say, ‘It has happened here.’” Eastland’s ponderous drawl seemed inappropriate to the sharpness of his words, and to the glare with which he surveyed, across the aisle, that unfortunate row of desks at which sat not only Douglas and Hennings but Pastore and Humphrey. The Judiciary Committee chairman assailed the measure as “a cunningly devised scheme,” “a devious scheme,” and a “travesty of justice,” and then asked, looking hard at that row of liberals, “We are entitled to know the answer to this question, which I ask the proponents: Do you intend to surround our schools with tanks, troops, guns and bayonets? … Is that the object of the bill, the hidden intent?” Liberals had hoped that Lister Hill, more moderate on some non-civil rights issues than his southern colleagues, might this time be a voice of reason from the South on civil rights as well. Then Hill spoke. “Let us all, men of good will everywhere, join hands and send this measure down to the tongueless silence of dreamless dust,” he said.

Even more discouraging to Lyndon Johnson, aware that the bill would not be allowed to reach the floor until agreement had been reached on some major compromise on Part III, civil rights supporters remained insistent that the bill be on the floor before compromise was even discussed. Clifford Case of New Jersey, a Republican and a staunch member of the Douglas Group, rose to deplore any talk of amending the bill before the motion was passed to bring it to the floor. “The immediate matter before the Senate is a procedural one—whether to make this bill the pending business of the Senate,” Case said. That was the only matter that should be discussed at the present time. “There will be ample time once [Knowland’s] motion is agreed to, to debate the substance of the bill and … various amendments…. Mr. President, as a sponsor of the civil rights bill, I am certainly not willing to consider changes now.” Talking to reporters outside the Chamber, Knowland was equally rigid. “There are going to be no amendments agreed to, nor any negotiations or agreements looking toward amendments, until after the bill becomes the pending business in the Senate,” he said. The scene in the long, cavernous Senate Chamber—southerners drawling defiance, liberals scorning compromise, the galleries emptying hour by hour as the day went on, as if even the public knew that the civil rights fight had degenerated into a meaningless farce, very few black faces in the gallery now as if America’s Negroes, whose hopes had died so often on the Senate floor, had come to feel that they were going to die there again, and couldn’t bear to watch—the scene was depressingly similar to the scenes in the last stages of debates in previous years over whether to bring other civil rights bills to the floor, bills that had, every last one of them, died. It seemed that this bill was going to die, too. Time to save it was growing very short. With every moment, the mood of sullenness and hostility on the floor was worsening, hardening. It hardly seemed likely that any amendment from these southerners who were shouting “rape” and “Gestapo” at the liberals—or from the southerners’ allies—would be considered by the liberals, much less accepted by them.

Time might, in fact, run out, without warning, at any moment. The seeming impossibility of compromise and the bitterness in the air might have their effect on the impulsive, easily angered, overconfident Knowland. Lyndon Johnson kept glancing uneasily at the Minority Leader, sitting at his desk right in front of the presiding officer. At any moment—without having consulted with anyone—Knowland might suddenly rise to his feet, ask for recognition, and announce that he would begin rounding up votes for cloture. The moment that word was out of his mouth, it would be in headlines, and so would the companion word—“filibuster”—that would spell the end of the bill, and of all Lyndon Johnson’s plans. To save the bill, to avert a filibuster, Johnson needed moderate liberal votes from both parties for a compromise amendment to Part III. And as the day dragged on, his hopes of getting such votes were steadily fading.

And then, sometime that afternoon, Lyndon Johnson, his gaze roving around the Chamber, noticed, beyond the angrily gesticulating men in debate, a tall, lanky figure sitting quietly at his desk in the far corner of the Democratic side, in the front row of the last section before the lobby door. It was Clinton Anderson—and Johnson suddenly realized that all week Anderson had been spending much more time at his desk than he usually did. He walked over to find out why.

Anderson was sitting there only partly because of his interest in civil rights. Proud though he was of his longtime identification with that cause, he was nonetheless less fervent about the cause itself than about the device that was being used, once again, to frustrate it. “I’m afraid I’m one of those senators who, coming from a state in which there were few Negroes, never quite acquired a passionate feeling about racial injustice,” he was to say. “My principal outrage” was rather against the filibuster, “which permitted a small body of men to obstruct the business of the Senate.” A man who, as Lyndon Johnson often commented, “didn’t like to lose,” his defeat by a southern filibuster during his term as Secretary of Agriculture had left him with a bad taste in his mouth, and his principal role as a member of the Douglas Group had been to lead three fights against Rule 22—all of which had ended in defeat. He had become somewhat obsessive about “extended debate” (“I took it as a personal challenge to break the challenge of the filibuster”), and he hated to think it was going to win again in 1957—and he saw it was going to, unless something was done. In addition, he had become, since his heart attack, somewhat obsessive about his health, and the two subjects had become linked in his mind: he felt that “I wouldn’t get a bit of rest that summer if we had to remain in Washington listening to an endless filibuster.” The Douglas Group’s most pragmatic and realistic member, one less ideological and more amenable to compromise than its other members, he was also a highly partisan one. Other liberals might discuss the civil rights bill in terms of social reform; Anderson talked also in the language of a tough, practical politician passionately loyal to his party—and he saw clearly the danger to the party from a filibuster, and felt the Republican maneuvers were at least in part designed to provoke one. “Knowland seemed thoroughly willing to let the southerners filibuster the bill to death—an event which would permit him to blame the Democrats for its defeat and permit the Republicans, in future elections, to pose as defenders of the American Negro,” he was to recall. “I had no intention of letting” that happen.

Breaking a filibuster once it had started would be as “hopeless” in 1957 as it had been in previous years, Anderson says. Feeling the pressure more than in the past, the southerners “seemed to sense that this time they had to yield a little, if they were not ultimately to lose everything.” But they weren’t going to yield to the extent of allowing a strong bill to pass. “The [Administration] bill would never pass … in its present form,” he says. “The southerners were determined, and the northerners didn’t have enough votes and they couldn’t break the filibuster.” So, unlike the other liberals who had ruled out any talk of compromise, Anderson “just sat myself down on the floor and glued myself there … to listen to the reason the southerners couldn’t do it.” And that Thursday afternoon, shortly before Lyndon Johnson noticed him, Anderson felt he had finally found what he was looking for.

“Hints kept emanating from [the southerners] that a compromise bill was possible,” he felt, but there could be no compromise on Part III largely because of the fear, enunciated by Russell, that that section could be used to authorize the use of military force against the South. “They seemed to accept” voting, but “it seemed clear to me that as long as [Part III] remained, they would filibuster to defeat the entire measure…. They were afraid they were going to have another march through Georgia.” Sitting there at his front-row desk near the lobby, turned slightly around and listening carefully as the southerners to his right and behind him spoke, Anderson understood that their anxiety, justified or not, was genuine, and “I thought if you could just remove the southern fears that we would march an army into the South … they’d probably yield thereafter. I finally decided one day that we could stop this thing [the impending filibuster] by removing that one threat.” Opening the printed draft of H.R. 6127 on his desk, he pulled out a pencil.

At first, he tried to tinker with Part III, rewording it, as other senators had been trying to do. At one point, for example, trying to defuse another southern concern—that Brownell or some other politically motivated Attorney General would be able to institute suits without clearing the action with the President—he crossed out, on page 9 of H.R. 6127, the word “may” in the sentence “The Attorney General may institute for the United States,” and substituted, in blunt pencil, the words “upon order of the President shall.” But that Thursday afternoon, Anderson had come to feel that no amount of tinkering would be enough to reassure the South about Part III. That section, he concluded, would have to be not merely reworded but removed. Bending over his desk, he turned back to page 9, on which the first fourteen lines of Part III were printed, and drew a large X across all of them. Turning to page 10, on which the rest of the part was printed, he drew an X across the first eight lines on that page. All that was left of Part III was an innocuous last paragraph. All the rest of it was gone.

It was not long after Anderson drew those two Xs that Lyndon Johnson walked over to his desk and began to chat. “He was curious what I was doing sitting there on the floor for about two or three days,” Anderson was to recall. Anderson showed him his work and said Johnson should arrange to have it introduced as an amendment by some southerner or conservative who opposed Part III. And almost without a pause, almost in the instant that Clint Anderson made his suggestion, Lyndon Johnson saw what was wrong with it—and also saw what was right with it, saw what it could mean, if only it was used correctly. And he saw in that instant how it could be used correctly. “Okay,” he said, approving the amendment. But then he added: “You do it.”

The introduction of the amendment by a southerner or a conservative would accomplish nothing, Johnson saw. It would then seem like merely one more attempt by civil rights opponents to gut the civil rights bill; it wouldn’t get him any of the Democratic votes he needed to meet the South’s price. Opponents had already suggested dozens of amendments to weaken Part III; every one had been rejected out of hand by Democratic liberals and moderates because it came from an enemy. But there was a difference—a crucial difference—between this amendment and the others. This one was being suggested not by an enemy of civil rights but by a friend, by a prominent liberal, by a member of the Douglas Group. Johnson felt at that moment, as we know from George Reedy, that moderate Democrats, anxious to find a way out of the civil rights impasse but not willing to accept an enemy’s suggestion, might accept an amendment that came from one of their own. He saw in an instant that this amendment should be not merely suggested by but also introduced by a friend: in fact, by the man who had written it. Put the amendment in, Johnson was telling Anderson, but don’t have it put in by a southerner. “You do it.”

And Johnson saw more—in the same instant. When, standing there looking down at Anderson, he said, “You do it,” Anderson replied, “How can I? I’m a civil rights man.” Anderson was saying that he didn’t want to be identified with the foes of civil rights, didn’t want to be called a betrayer of the cause. Johnson saw the answer to Anderson’s question in the very instant the question was asked. And he also saw in that instant that the answer was also the answer to another aspect of the problem that he had not been able to solve: how to get votes to pay the South’s price not only from Democratic moderates but from Republican moderates as well. When Anderson asked, “How can I?” Lyndon Johnson told him how he could. Without even a pause, he said: “Get a Republican to go in with you. Get a good Republican.”

Johnson meant that Anderson should obtain as a co-sponsor for his amendment a Republican with impeccable civil rights credentials. Anderson’s name would then be linked on the amendment with a friend of civil rights; he would not appear to be participating in an anti-civil rights move. That end could be accomplished by obtaining a Democratic liberal as a co-sponsor, of course, but Johnson’s purpose, the purpose he grasped so quickly, went beyond that. If Anderson could obtain a Republican co-sponsor, a Republican civil rights advocate, a Republican whose opinion carried weight with his colleagues—“a good Republican”—Johnson might be able to get some GOP moderates to go along with the amendment; he might at last, despite Nixon and Knowland, be able to crack that solid Republican front.

Clint Anderson took Johnson’s meaning. And he picked the right Republican—George Aiken of Vermont, whose liberal credentials were impeccable—approached him, “and,” Anderson recalls, “asked him if he would join” him. After thinking it over for a while, Aiken said, in his laconic New England way, “Well, I believe I will.” When Aiken gave the news to friends on the Republican side of the aisle, several immediately said not only that they would vote for the amendment, but that they would join Aiken as co-sponsors.

Aiken reported this response to Anderson, Anderson reported it to Johnson, and Johnson reported it to Russell—who understood immediately not only that this amendment would give him what he wanted, by narrowing the scope of the civil rights bill to voting rights—but also that this amendment, unlike the others, would pass.* The change the South wanted would now be proposed by liberals, by respected liberals of both parties. Moderate liberals in both parties would be happy to support an amendment with so impeccable a liberal provenance. With their votes added to those of the South and the Hells Canyon bloc (and the six or seven Republican conservatives already enlisted), the amendment would command a solid majority. For the first time since the bill had been introduced in January, Russell could be confident that if he allowed it to reach the floor, there would be, on the floor, the necessary votes to eliminate Part III. Johnson had met the first half of the South’s price. He still couldn’t pay the other half—the addition of a jury trial amendment to Part IV—but if that section remained in a form unsatisfactory to the South, Russell would still have another opportunity to use the filibuster: on the motion to bring the bill to a final vote. He would not be foreclosing the use of that weapon. A big step had been taken toward meeting his demands, and he could therefore allow the bill to take a big step—could allow it to come to the floor. And by so doing, he would avoid using the filibuster now and thereby keep alive his hopes of avoiding the damage to the South, and to Johnson’s presidential hopes, that its use would entail. Russell asked for a quorum call, so that he would have time to check with moderate senators, both Democratic and Republican, to make certain that his assessment of the new situation was correct. He found that it was.

The days of Lyndon Johnson’s low profile ended abruptly. Late that Thursday afternoon, there was a dramatic announcement. It concerned the Minority Leader’s motion, but this time it wasn’t made by the Minority Leader.

“I hope tomorrow we can work out a [unanimous consent] agreement on a time to vote” on Knowland’s motion to bring the bill to the floor, Lyndon Johnson said, and, he said, he hoped the time would be during the very next week. Reporters rushed to learn Russell’s reaction and were surprised to learn that his feelings had changed—that the southern leader was now, suddenly, amenable to that timetable. Suddenly the name in the headlines about the Senate fight wasn’t “Knowland” or “Douglas” but a new name: “JOHNSON SEEKING VOTE ON CIVIL RIGHTS.”

The next morning, the southern senators caucused again in Russell’s office. Although some of them could hardly bear to go along with his suggestion that they neither filibuster Knowland’s motion nor object to a unanimous consent agreement, thereby allowing a civil rights bill to reach the floor, they agreed at last because it was Russell who was making the suggestion. (He reminded them that should the bill later come to a vote, they would of course be able to cast their own, individual votes against it, so they would be able to tell their constituents they had opposed it.) Johnson thereupon introduced the agreement, which did indeed set the vote on Knowland’s motion for the next week—for Tuesday, July 16 (“Mr. President, I have at the desk a proposed unanimous consent agreement….” “Is there objection? … Without objection, the proposed agreement is approved”)—and then delivered a speech. “I believe the Senate … is proving that it can meet any issue with dignity and thoroughness,” Johnson said. “This may disappoint those who were looking for a bitter and bloody brawl, but it will not disappoint the American people. I think we all realize that in a very real sense the Senate is on trial, and the American people want us to win.” And when, immediately after the speech, photographers sent a request to the floor to have Johnson step into the lobby to have his picture taken, they found him newly agreeable, and the Associated Press photograph reproduced the next day in newspapers across the country showed him sitting between Russell and Knowland, as the architect of the agreement that would at last bring a civil rights bill to the Senate floor.

ON TUESDAY, JULY 16, Anderson sent his amendment to the desk, saying, “I do this jointly with the able senior Senator from Vermont … a man of outstanding integrity and a man of the highest character, with whom I delight to associate myself,” and Aiken told the Senate why he was co-sponsoring the amendment: “We who support the cause of civil rights know that Part III is unacceptable to a sizable segment of the Senate. Its retention in the bill could result in no legislation at all during this session or any other session in the near future.” After a last outburst from Harry Byrd, who could barely restrain his rage at what was happening (charging that Earl Warren, the ADA, and the NAACP were the evil geniuses behind the bill, he called Warren a “modern Thaddeus Stevens,” and, shaking his fist at Mitchell and Wilkins, who were sitting together in the gallery, he insulted them by likening them to Goldy and Dusty, the fictitious African-American twins whose ignorance and laziness had enlivened a 1940s radio comedy. “There they are,” he said—“the Gold Dust twins”), the Senate voted, 71 to 18, to make H.R. 6127 its pending business. The eighteen votes against the motion were all from southerners; Gore and Kefauver of Tennessee did not vote with the South, and neither did Yarborough and Johnson. Johnson announced that his support for the motion to bring the bill to the floor was “not to be construed” as support for the bill in its present form. “Some of us to whom this bill is unacceptable in its present form are ready to allow it to be debated out of a decent respect for the convictions of others.”

At the conclusion of the vote, Lyndon Johnson and William Knowland, each seated at their front-row desks, leaned across the center aisle and shook hands. Both had broad smiles on their faces, Johnson because he had won, Knowland because he didn’t realize he had lost.

That realization may not have dawned fully on the Minority Leader for four days. It was just a few minutes after the vote that allowed the bill to come to the floor that Anderson stood up at his desk near the far end of the Democratic arc and said, “Mr. President, I call up my amendment” (the amendment that, by striking from the bill its key provision, made it in effect a different, much weaker, bill than the one Knowland had been supporting), and no sooner had the clerk read out the amendment’s title than Johnson made a “parliamentary inquiry” of the chair to emphasize that the amendment was now the “pending question” and the chair confirmed that it was. Knowland had been outsmarted again. He had not wanted to accept amendments, but Johnson’s inquiry meant that the bill could not be voted on until after the amendment had been voted on. The vote on the Anderson-Aiken Amendment was not held for four more days, to give senators a chance to get their views on the record. During those days, Knowland apparently grasped what was going to happen in the vote, and just before the clerk called the roll, he made an emotional last-ditch plea to his Republicans to stand fast and defeat the amendment. Ten days earlier, however, Johnson had seen in a moment—the moment in which Anderson handed him the draft with the two Xs penciled across it—that if Anderson got a “good Republican” to co-sponsor the bill, the near-solid Republican front on Part III would be broken, and when the roll was called now, it was broken wide open. No fewer than eighteen of the forty-six Republicans—not only every midwestern conservative but Aiken’s fellow northeastern moderate liberals Saltonstall (Knowland’s own Assistant Leader), Cotton, Flanders, John J. Williams, and H. Alexander Smith—went against their leader and voted to eliminate Part III from the Administration’s bill. Johnson had seen in a moment that if Anderson introduced the amendment himself instead of letting a southerner or a conservative introduce it, Democratic moderates and some liberals would accept it, and they accepted it with open arms. Kerr and Monroney of Oklahoma, Chavez, Theodore Green, Bible, Frear—they all joined the southerners in voting for the amendment. Johnson had so many votes lined up behind it that he didn’t need them all, and “at the last minute,” as Time reported, “he was able to release” several Hells Canyon westerners from their commitment to vote with the South, and allow them “to vote against the bill to strengthen their civil rights reputations back home”; only four Hells Canyon Democrats—Church, Mansfield, Murray, and O’Mahoney—were recorded for the amendment. The Democratic “coalition” Johnson had put together was a very unusual one. As the Baltimore Sun commented, “It was … strange to see so-called ‘liberals’ voting on an issue such as this with Senators Eastland and Johnston.” But it was an overwhelming coalition. Thirty-four Democrats—every Democrat but the thirteen most ardent liberals—voted for the Anderson-Aiken Amendment. It was adopted by a vote of 52 to 38. Part III was gone.

“I BELIEVE THE BILL WAS STRENGTHENED” by the amendment, Lyndon Johnson told reporters after the vote. It had not been strengthened, of course, but weakened, weakened quite drastically. No longer would it provide legal recourse for black Americans who were forced to attend segregated schools, to sit in segregated sections of movie theaters, or to take their meals at the back door of restaurants (nor, for that matter, would it provide recourse for a black woman who was forced to “squat in the road to pee”). The two Negro leaders who had roamed the Capitol’s corridors for years lobbying for civil rights understood the import of what had happened. Roy Wilkins and Clarence Mitchell had sat in the Senate gallery a week earlier as Virginia’s apple-cheeked racist had shaken his fist at them and insulted them, and now Harry Byrd and his allies had won again. Before the vote, Wilkins had telegraphed senators whom he considered “on the fence” on Part III that a vote to remove it would be “impossible to forget and difficult to forgive,” but many of those senators nonetheless had voted to remove it. Now, from the Washington headquarters of the NAACP, Wilkins issued a statement: “The adoption of this motion [amendment] says plainly to Negro Americans that, so far as the Senate is concerned, they can expect little, if any, assistance from the federal government in attempts to win the enjoyment of their constitutional rights.”

White men who had fought for civil rights in the Capitol understood, too. “This is not a compromise,” said Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania. “It is an abandonment by the Senate of the United States of all effort to assist in the enforcement of the equal protection of the laws clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Liberals knew whom to blame for the removal of Part III. Roy Wilkins said simply: “He won. We didn’t.” The “he” was Lyndon Johnson. Joe Rauh was enraged every time Johnson told him that Part III had to go because “otherwise you’ll have a filibuster.” “The filibuster rule gave him a defense against the liberals,” Rauh says. “He [Johnson] would say, ‘I got you all I could.’” But, Rauh says, if Johnson had helped at the beginning of the session, they could have changed Rule 22. It was his tabling maneuver that had prevented the change—and preserved the filibuster—in January. “So he beats us down on the filibuster rule, and then he says, ‘You can’t have Part III because you can’t beat a filibuster.’ Pretty shabby stuff.”

Gerald Siegel absorbed some of their anger: Johnson’s aide was to remember Paul Douglas, after the vote, “almost literally grabbing me by the arms and shaking me, and saying, ‘Gerry, you’ve gutted the civil rights bill. I hope you’re happy.’ That’s how high the feelings were—‘I had done it’—that’s how angry people were when Title III came out of the bill, which had to come out or the bill wouldn’t pass.”

One of the journalists in the Senate Press Gallery during the civil rights debate had been Murray Kempton, and what he watched on the floor below him filled him with disgust. “No single body in the Western Hemisphere has done more to abuse human liberty than the United States Senate in the last 10 years; and no member of that body is entitled to discuss the rights of man without apology,” he wrote. “The sight of the Senate immunizes one against the feeling that there is any blood in any issue which comes before it. Collectively if not individually, the Senate of the United States is beneath the contempt of men of taste.” Not one senator “bothered to protest that ‘Gold Dust twins’ crack,” Kempton wrote. Not one senator suggested defending the NAACP. But, he wrote, “the NAACP is the agency of Willie Mays, limping and hitting a triple in the All-Star game, of Ella Fitzgerald singing the Cole Porter songs, of Autherine Lucy walking through the rocks into class at the University of Alabama. Name me not three, but just one senator in their class.” No one was going to remember the name of any of those men on the Senate floor, he wrote. “I will read to our children the names of every child born in Georgia in the last 40 years, and I will tell you now that they will recognize only the names of Ralph Ellison and Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. They will not know Harry Byrd…. Who did Mississippi put out lately that William Faulkner could talk to, except Richard Wright. It is people like these who are the legislators of mankind; they are more to the point than any senator can be.” And the Senate’s Majority Leader, whose allegiance to civil rights Kempton described as being as lukewarm as Karl Mundt’s, was not exempt from Kempton’s contempt—far from it. Our “children’s children’s children” will remember poets, he wrote; “they are unlikely to remember Lyndon Johnson.”

In their fury, however, the liberals were ignoring an essential fact. Although the civil rights bill had indeed been weakened, even gutted, nonetheless it was still a bill. It had not been killed by a filibuster. It was on the floor of the Senate.

And the bill was still alive because of Lyndon Johnson. At the moment when he had walked over to Clint Anderson’s desk, the bill was stalled dead in its tracks, seemingly beyond hope of rescue, about to die, as so many civil rights bills had died before it. The full-fledged filibuster that would spell its death might begin at any minute, thanks to the importunate Knowland and his constant threats to demand a vote. Southern anger, held in check for weeks by Russell, was on the verge of boiling over. Compromise seemed impossible. Seeing, in Anderson’s amendment, the weapon that could break the impasse, Lyndon Johnson had seized that weapon, and wielded it. Equally important, he had wielded it decisively, in the instant it came to his hand. He had had to wield it at that instant—at any moment, the opening it gave him might have disappeared; the focus might shift to some other amendment that would divide the Senate even more irreparably than it was already divided. The mood on the floor, already growing more bitter by the minute, might grow so bitter that no compromise would be accepted. By seeing the opportunity, seizing it, and making the most of it, Lyndon Johnson had turned the tide. He had gotten the South the support it needed to remove an important element of the bill, but because he had done so, the South had not killed the bill. Thanks to him, it was still alive.

*This scene is adapted from Volume I, The Path to Power, pp. 428–30. For another suggestion of his father’s during this campaign, seep. 399.

*“The Senate” would now, as Evans and Novak wrote, be “considering not the Russell-Eastland amendment but the Anderson-Aiken amendment, sponsored not by segregationists but by moderate liberals.”