40

Yeas and Nays

IF ONE ASPECT of legislative leadership is a talent for compromise, for determining the essence of different points of view (what Lyndon Johnson called “listening”), and then for composing those differences—locating a common ground, and then, through negotiating, bringing both sides to that place—there is another aspect of legislative leadership that is also a form of compromise, but on another, higher level, for there are cases in which listening and reconciliation cannot help, cases in which the differences between the two sides are so deep that no meeting place can be located, for no such place exists. For legislation to be enacted in such cases, it is necessary for a legislative leader to create a common ground. It was this rare creative ability that Lyndon Johnson was going to have to demonstrate if, after eighty-two years, a civil rights bill was finally to be passed, for, with the month of July, 1957, drawing to a close, it was becoming increasingly obvious that all the compromises and deals that had been hammered out in seven months of negotiations had only brought the two sides to an impasse at which no compromise seemed possible. What he had done on Part III had been very hard. What he had to do on Part IV was harder. From the moment Brownell’s bill had been introduced, southern outrage had focused not only on the broad, sweeping powers it conferred on the Attorney General—the powers embodied in Part III—but on a single specific phrase used not only in Part III but in Part IV, which dealt solely with voting rights: in both parts, the Attorney General was empowered to initiate actions, including applications to judges for injunctions, “in the name of the United States.” Under existing federal law, a person who violated a judicial injunction and was cited by the judge for criminal contempt was entitled to trial by jury except “in any suit or action brought or prosecuted in the name of the United States,” and the South therefore contended, as Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina put it, that “the only reason this bill provides that these actions shall be brought in the name of the United States is so that those involved in civil-rights cases can be robbed of their right to trial by jury.” The South had insisted that the act be amended to guarantee that right to defendants in civil rights cases. In its original form—when it included Part III—the bill would have allowed the Attorney General to ask for injunctions against violators of many types of civil rights. Now, with Part III gone, the bill covered only one civil right, voting, but the southern senators still insisted that the bill include a jury trial amendment—an amendment providing that any person who, in the Attorney General’s opinion, “shall intimidate, threaten or coerce … any other person for the purpose of interfering” with his right to vote, and against whom the Attorney General moved in either a criminal or a civil injunction proceeding, should be entitled to trial by a jury of his peers. There were political reasons for such insistence, as George Reedy notes. If the bill included that amendment, “Southern senators could tell their constituents that … they had added jury trials so that no southerner could be jailed as a ‘criminal’ at the whim of a federal judge” (and those constituents could, of course, be confident also that there was little chance of a southerner—a white southerner—being jailed by a southern jury). But constitutional and moral considerations also militated for its inclusion: so integral to the American concept of freedom was the right of the accused to trial by jury that it had been incorporated in the Bill of Rights; it was as sacred to Americans as the right to vote.

In one area of the country—the West, where judges had broken the great railroad strikes at the turn of the century by the arbitrary use of injunctions and jail terms against strikers—the right to jury trial had special resonance, and a jury trial amendment to the civil rights bill had been drafted by a western senator, a senior senator who as a junior senator two decades earlier had demonstrated a particular susceptibility to constitutional and moral considerations.

Seventy-two-year-old Joseph C. O’Mahoney of Wyoming was in a way the embodiment of senatorial resistance to unwarranted expansion of executive authority. A small man with large, bushy eyebrows and a large, “crowd-challenging” voice, the Wall Street-hating Populist had been an eloquent, even impassioned, supporter of the New Deal after he arrived in the Senate in 1934. When Franklin Roosevelt’s 1937 court-packing proposal came before the Judiciary Committee, however, O’Mahoney had been noticeably silent. The White House, noting that he would shortly need Administration help on a bill vital to Wyoming, was confident that, in the end, he would come around, but after a while an Administration representative had had an intermediary telephone O’Mahoney in his rooms at Washington’s Wardman Park Hotel to make sure he was in line. O’Mahoney thereupon telephoned the Administration’s man directly. He was sorry that there seemed to be some doubt about his views on the President’s court bill, he said; he was calling to remove those doubts. The bill, he said, was “undemocratic,” “obnoxious,” and an “insult to the Senate.” It would violate the constitutional separation of powers. He would never vote for it. And when some Democratic colleagues on Judiciary suggested killing the bill by simply not reporting it to the floor—thereby saving as much Administration face as possible—O’Mahoney demanded that it be reported, together with a recommendation that it be defeated. He wrote the recommendation himself. Roosevelt’s bill, it said, “is a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the representatives of the free people of America.”

Now, in 1957, O’Mahoney felt that Brownell’s bill violated the constitutional guarantee to jury trial. While the fight on Part III had still been raging, he had drafted and on July 8 had sent to the desk a brief amendment adding to Part IV a guarantee of a jury trial for defendants in civil rights cases, and had announced that he was going to fight for that amendment. The bushy brows were white now, the challenging voice a little gravelly with age, the name of his hotel had been changed to the Sheraton-Park, but O’Mahoney still lived in the same suite there, and while the voice was hoarse, the words it spoke were still eloquent, and, with his seniority and his passionate independence, this “spirit out of the Senate past” was to some extent the spiritual leader of the younger Democratic liberals from the West. Even while attention had still been focused on Part III, the jury issue was bubbling up below the surface, and it reinforced the alliance with the South that had already been forged among the western senators by Hells Canyon. A jury trial amendment was part of the South’s price—its rock-bottom, non-negotiable price—for not filibustering. And in its fight on this issue, the South would not have to stand alone.

But if the South would not, could not, compromise on a jury trial amendment, compromise was not an option for its opponents, either. The acquittal of Emmett Till’s murderers was only one of hundreds of verdicts that documented the prejudice of southern juries; not two months earlier, two white men who had confessed to bombing Negro churches and ministers’ homes in Montgomery had nonetheless been given a trial. The defense attorney had waved the banner not of innocence but of segregation—“Every white man, every white woman and every white child in the South is looking to you to preserve our sacred traditions,” he told the jury. The two men had been acquitted. “It is this kind of justice, dispensed by these kinds of juries, that the opponents of the civil rights bills in Congress are trying to tack onto that bill,” Roy Wilkins said. The amendment “can only be intended to cripple the enforcement of the law by introducing into the proceedings the very local prejudice against which protection is sought,” declared a committee of southern liberal educators and churchmen. Senate liberals agreed. How could any senator who truly cared about civil rights vote for this amendment? asked Charles Potter of Michigan, standing beside his desk on crutches because he had lost both legs in World War II. “I fought beside Negroes in the war,” he said. “I saw them die for us. For the Senate of the United States to repay these valiant men … by a watered-down version of this legislation would make a mockery of the democratic concept we hold so dear.” The elimination of Part III had removed everything but voting rights from the bill, Paul Douglas said. Now the South was trying to make voting rights meaningless, too. The Douglas Group vowed “to resist [any jury trial amendment] to the end.”

With the raising of the jury issue, the civil rights battle at once became even more complicated—a tangle now not only of legal and parliamentary complications but of moral complications as well. No longer was all the right clearly on the side of the liberals. Even Hubert Humphrey, who was to stand fast against the amendment because “you could not really rely on southern juries to be fair,” was to confess that his emotions were “mixed, really”—“This was a terribly difficult issue for me because my Populist background had always emphasized the importance of jury trial. My father talked to me about things like that.” With the raising of the jury issue, both sides held some moral high ground—and since granting one right, the right to a jury trial, would nullify the other right, the right to vote, there seemed to be no basis for compromise between them. And if the South, with the West on its side, would not have to stand alone in the fight to come, neither would the liberals: the GOP was standing by their side. On Part IV, unlike on Part III, Brownell had his boss’s support. The elimination of Part III narrowed the scope of the Administration’s bill to the one area, voting, for which Dwight Eisenhower’s support was unequivocal, and the President understood that the amendment would, as Brownell put it, “practically nullify” any voting rights provision. Placing “a jury trial between a court order and the enforcement of that order” would mean that “we are really welcoming anarchy,” Eisenhower told a press conference. With the President behind him, Knowland was taking the step, rare with Republicans, of making the vote on O’Mahoney’s amendment a “party policy” position, and Knowland’s efforts were being supplemented now by a politician much more wily, and far tougher, than he. Recognizing the magnitude of the stakes involved in the struggle for civil rights legislation, and recognizing as well the caliber of his main adversary, Richard Nixon had decided to engage him hand to hand. He had begun spending long hours in the Vice President’s office off the Senate lobby. Visiting him there, Stewart Alsop found him, as he reported to Johnson through George Reedy, “full of admiration for the job you have done.” (On Nixon’s desk, Alsop told Reedy, was “a list of nine Republicans that are going to be worked on. One of them is [Gordon] Allott but Alsop did not see the other names.”) “It is Nixon, maneuvering quietly and deftly in the background, who is spearheading the bipartisan ‘no compromise’ bloc that is adamantly against writing a jury trial amendment into the bill,” Robert S. Allen reported. “[He] is working closely” not only with Knowland but with “such Democratic militants as Douglas, Humphrey, and McNamara….”

Knowland may not have been able to count votes, but Nixon could, and he was counting more than enough. After talking with the Vice President, Allen told his readers that “Defeat is in store” for the amendment. Conservative columnists agreed. Many Republican senators had “been willing to support amendments against Section III, [but] they are not expected to go along with the jury trial amendment,” Gould Lincoln reported. As soon as Part III was removed on July 24, Knowland announced that he would press for an early vote—during the very next week, in fact—on Part IV, and predicted that “an overwhelming majority” of the GOP senators would vote against the amendment. Defeat did indeed appear to be “in store” for the South on the vote—which, of course, meant that the South would not allow a vote: that it would launch a filibuster that would mean defeat for civil rights, and for Lyndon Johnson.

The chasm between the two sides seemed unbridgeable. “Every so often the play of history turns up an issue so full of personal and regional conflict, so grounded in moral philosophy, and so subject to the clash of ancient but contending principles, that it stands apart from all the normal preoccupations of political life,” James Reston wrote. “Such an issue is now before the Senate….”

“At this point,” George Reedy writes, “Johnson rose to what I will always regard as his greatest height…. He was absolutely determined that there would be a bill…. Against all reason, Johnson kept insisting that a compromise must exist somewhere…. Most observers thought that [the] two poles were too far apart to find a middle ground. But using the same set of facts, LBJ insisted that the reality was the other way around—that if two opposing sides had a degree of validity in their contentions, there simply had to be a legitimate way of meeting them both.”

IF THERE WAS A WAY, Lyndon Johnson was going to find it. “He pleaded and threatened and stormed and cajoled,” Reedy recalls. “He prowled the corridors of the Senate grabbing senators and staff members indiscriminately, probing them for some sign of amenability to compromise.”

He had begun while the Part III fight had still been going on. Trying to find a middle ground—some form of jury trial amendment acceptable to both liberals and the South—he had “spent hours on the phone in nonstop conversations with the most ingenious legal minds he knew,” pleading with Corcoran, Rowe, Clifford, Fortas, Acheson, and a dozen other lawyers “for something to break the logjam.” He had had Tommy Corcoran assemble a group of lawyers—a dozen leading legal minds of the New and Fair Deals—in the conference room at Corcoran & Rowe, and Corcoran had told them how important it was that a solution be found: “You know, we’re all pros here, and we can talk to each other. We know we’re here to elect Lyndon Johnson President. Who’s kidding whom, and let’s get going!” Dean Acheson put several bright associates at his law firm, Covington & Burling, to work on the problem. Senators were flooding the Democratic Policy Committee with amendments and suggestions for amendments (O’Mahoney edited and reedited the version he had introduced), where they were run by the committee’s lawyers, Siegel and the brilliant Solis Horwitz. “We drafted twenty-five or thirty different versions,” Horwitz was to recall. “We were constantly trying to satisfy both sides.” The search grew desperate. “O’Mahoney kept introducing these various amendments one right after the other. It got ridiculous….” Each suggestion proved to have a fatal weakness; some foundered on conflicts with other statutes already on the books, others on either the rock or the hard place: every amendment that would add to the civil rights bill a provision that required jury trials—in no matter what form—was totally unacceptable to liberals; every amendment that did not include an absolute guarantee of jury trials was totally unacceptable to Russell and the South. For some time, Reedy says, “every effort turned out to be a false start.” And time was running out—and now, with Part III disposed of, it was running out fast, thanks to Knowland’s stubbornness. Confident that he would win a vote on Part IV, the “leader of the bipartisan civil rights coalition” was pushing for one more and more insistently, repeatedly announcing that he was prepared to move for an immediate vote. If that motion came to the floor without a compromise already in place, the civil rights bill, bipartisan coalition or not, would be dead.

At the close of a Senate session one evening in July, however—while the fight, and the focus, were still on Part III—Lyndon Johnson had returned to his office and reached for Walter Jenkins’ yellow legal pad with the list of persons who had telephoned during the day, and Jenkins had silently pointed to a name on the pad, and Johnson, before he turned to the rest of his messages, told Jenkins, “Get me Ben Cohen.”

By the 1950s, the name of Benjamin V. Cohen had faded in Washington’s memory, in part because it had been a long time since he and another young bill-drafter, Tommy Corcoran, working closely with Sam Rayburn, had drafted the Securities Exchange Act and the Public Utilities Act, and other keystones of the great New Deal arch; in part because while the accordion-playing, storytelling, relentlessly self-promoting Corcoran had made himself a flamboyant figure in the Capitol, head of one of Washington’s most influential political law firms, the shy and dreamy Cohen, who looked and talked, as a friend wrote, “like a Dickens portrait of an absent-minded professor,” had withdrawn from the Washington social scene to spend more and more time alone in his book-cluttered Dupont Circle apartment. In the days since they had been part of the same little group of New Dealers,* Lyndon Johnson had seen less and less of Ben Cohen—“You had to be very patient with him,” Gerald Siegel was to explain, and Johnson was “an impatient man”—but decades before, men who knew Corcoran and Cohen well had learned that despite his charm and gift for the blarney, Corcoran’s mind, canny and politically astute though it was, was not the equal of his silent partner’s. A remark of Sam Rayburn’s still circulated among men on Capitol Hill who had been there during the early days of the New Deal: after one meeting at which Corcoran did almost all the talking, Ray-burn confided to a friend, “Cohen’s the brains.” Cohen had been among the lawyers whom Johnson had telephoned to ask for suggestions about the jury trial amendment, and now, on that July evening when Johnson returned his call, Cohen said he had a suggestion to make, and Johnson asked him to come to lunch, and, as Gerald Siegel said, reminiscing years later, “Everyone came up with a different plan. And all of them were worth nothing, except one man, Ben Cohen.”

Cohen was to recall, after the author, during an interview in 1976, had finally persuaded him to talk about the 1957 episode, that he had been “working on the problem” of reconciling the right to trial by jury with enforceable civil rights legislation when his attention had been caught by an article that had appeared in the April 29 issue of a journal of liberal opinion, The New Leader.

The article, by a University of Wisconsin law professor, Carl A. Auerbach, addressed that problem—and had a solution for it. It was not necessary to rely only on jury trials to enforce civil rights, Professor Auerbach had written, because jury trials are required only in criminal contempt proceedings. They are not required in civil contempt proceedings—and civil contempt proceedings could also be employed to enforce civil rights.

In criminal contempt, Auerbach said, the judge is punishing a defendant for violating—disobeying—a judge’s specific injunction, or order. In civil contempt, Auerbach said, the aim is different—not to punish a defendant for having violated a court order, but to force the defendant to obey the order in the future. “If the court’s order is disobeyed, the judge will hold the violator of his injunction in contempt of court and have him imprisoned until he does obey.” As soon as he does, he will be freed. “He can open his prison door and walk out anytime he pleases by obeying the court’s order”—and therefore jury trials were not required.

The impasse over the 1957 civil rights bill, Auerbach wrote, had come about because the bill contemplated only criminal contempt proceedings. If a provision for civil contempt was added, the impasse would be broken. “If the United States proceeds against an alleged violator of a civil-rights injunction in order to punish him for criminal contempt, all the protections accorded the accused in a criminal trial should be extended,” including a jury trial, he said. But “the United States should” also “be authorized to bring civil-contempt actions against alleged violators of civil-rights injunctions…. Its objective would be purely remedial—not to punish the violators for their past disobedience but to coerce future obedience to the court decree. If the decree, for example, ordered the registration of Negro voters, the local officials refusing to do so could be imprisoned until they obeyed the order.” If they did so, they would be released. There would therefore be no need for a jury trial.

Auerbach’s solution would require merely the addition to O’Mahoney’s amendment of a new paragraph, one authorizing the use of civil as well as criminal contempt, Cohen explained. But, he explained, that new paragraph might help create the necessary new ground, the new ground that could become the middle ground, the common ground, for a compromise that would enable the civil rights bill to pass. While southern senators would still be able to tell their constituents that the bill, by including a jury trial amendment, guaranteed southerners trials by southern juries and was therefore so weak as to be meaningless, northern senators, on the other hand, would now know that, despite that guarantee, the bill contained strong enforcement provisions unvitiated by any provision for trial by southern juries.

Twenty years before, Cohen told the author, he had considered young Representative Johnson “promising material.” Subsequently, he said, he had been somewhat put off by the “intensity” of Johnson’s ambition. But now, in 1957, talking to Johnson over lunch, he felt that the promise had been fulfilled: “He was a man with a mission”—to pass a civil rights bill—who grasped with impressive speed the significance of the Auerbach article. “He asked Senator O’Mahoney to see me,” Cohen recalled, and together—along with Siegel—by July 17, they had worked out the wording of the necessary new paragraph. (“Ben was simply my closest adviser,” Siegel says. There were seemingly insuperable problems to arriving at a wording that would be accepted by all sides, but every time there was a problem, “Ben solved it.”) O’Mahoney’s amendment guaranteed jury trials in civil rights criminal contempt proceedings; the new paragraph said that that guarantee shall not “be construed to deprive courts of their power, by civil contempt proceedings, without a jury, to secure compliance with … any lawful writ, process, order, rule, decree or command of the court… including the power of detention.” On that date, while the fight over Part III was still being waged, O’Mahoney had sent the revised amendment to the desk, and now, on July 24, as soon as the 52–38 vote on Part III was announced, it became the Senate’s pending business.

The new version of the O’Mahoney Amendment allowed Lyndon Johnson to add additional numbers, representing new votes for the amendment, on the left or “yea” side of the names on his long tally sheet, but only a few more numbers; they were next to the names of Hells Canyon westerners who had wanted to help the South but had been shying from doing so because the amendment would have made the whole civil rights bill too blatantly meaningless. Their tentative commitment was now solidified. Even if every one of the twenty-two southerners and twelve Hells Canyon Democrats voted for the amendment, however, that would be a total of only thirty-four votes, whereas forty-eight were required for passage. There were still no numbers, or almost none, in that left-hand “yea” column next to the names of the forty-six Republicans and about fifteen non-southern and non-Hells Canyon Democrats who made up the bulk of the “civil rights coalition”—a solid majority against the amendment. The odds against passage of the civil rights bill were still very long. The South was willing—to avoid being forced to filibuster, and also to help Lyndon Johnson become President—to accept a weak bill, and since the amendment’s new version still contained a jury trial guarantee, it was still weak enough for the South to accept it. Republicans and liberals, however, still would not accept it. While the new version gave them part of what they wanted—a means of allowing judges to jail civil rights violators without a jury trial—it still ensured that southerners would not be jailed for criminal contempt, and it was therefore still too weak to be acceptable. Since, with a solid majority, they could pass the bill unweakened—without any jury trial amendment at all—they felt they had no reason to accept one. They would vote against, and defeat, the amendment; the South would then filibuster, and thereby defeat, the bill. To pass the amendment, and thus the bill, Lyndon Johnson still needed perhaps fourteen Republican and liberal votes. The main advantage of the O’Mahoney Amendment was not that it in itself got Johnson the votes he needed—it didn’t—but that it provided a base from which to fight for those votes. While before the new version, no ground for a compromise had existed, there was new ground now, ground too narrow but nonetheless more than had existed before.

HE SET OUT to broaden that ground. With the Senate’s attention now focused on Part IV, the hailstorm of proposed changes in the jury trial amendment pouring into G-14 increased in intensity, and Johnson read every one that Siegel or Horwitz thought might be a possibility, and as he read each proposed change, he asked the same question: “If I take this one, how many votes will it get me?” And suddenly, out of that storm of proposals, there was one—no one remembers who made it—that he felt might get him quite a few votes.

This proposal would create more new ground. Since the civil rights bill was going to deal with jury trials, the proposal went, maybe this bill was the place to remedy an injustice that had been perpetrated against labor unions in 1948 when the Taft-Hartley Act had limited strikers’ right to jury trials in contempt cases arising out of labor disputes. Unions had attempted repeatedly to have the right restored but without success. Perhaps, the proposal went, it could be restored in the civil rights act.

This suggestion—about labor disputes, not civil rights—was new ground indeed. But Johnson saw how it could win him some new votes for the amendment from liberal senators—not the most ardent civil righters, but liberals with more moderate civil rights views. The opposition of these senators to any jury trial amendment was intensified by their fear of the reaction of their pro-civil rights constituencies if they supported an amendment that weakened the civil rights bill. But a key element of their constituencies was organized labor: big unions such as Walter Reuther’s UAW and Jim Carey’s Electrical Workers and the dominant national labor organization, the AFL-CIO, were ardent supporters of civil rights, and therefore adamant opponents of jury trials. If labor could bepersuaded, through the inclusion of this new provision, to look more kindly on the jury trial amendment, it would be much easier for liberal senators to vote for it. New additions to the O’Mahoney Amendment were hurriedly drafted by Johnson’s young bill-drafters, and on Friday, July 26, O’Mahoney introduced them. The key provision extended the guarantee of jury trial for criminal contempt beyond civil rights cases: “In any [italics added] proceeding for criminal contempt … of any court of the United States, the accused, upon demand therefor, shall be entitled to trial by jury.” When O’Mahoney rose at his desk in the far corner of the third row and announced that “I desire to have laid before the Senate [a] modification of my amendment,” Douglas, in the third row three desks closer to the center, rose to attack this constant rewriting. “Is there to be another edition tomorrow?” he asked. Sitting right in front of Douglas, however, was the more moderate Kefauver. Turning around, he told Douglas that the modification “represents a great advance of civil liberties because … it will again assure labor unions of their day in court before a jury of their peers.” “Labor,” Kefauver said, “should be anxious for the passage of this act with this amendment [included].”

JOHNSON HAD SOME GROUND to fight on now—and he fought.

To keep the two sides negotiating—to keep the 1957 civil rights fight from degenerating into the open hostility and bitterness on the Senate floor in which so many previous civil rights bills had died—he had to persuade them to conduct the debate in an atmosphere of outward friendliness and respect, or at least civility, so for some days after Part III had been disposed of, the opening scene of the Senate each noon hour featured the Majority Leader as Emily Post. In statements written by Reedy and delivered during his opening remarks each day, Johnson encouraged the Senate to mind its manners, saying on one day that the Senate was on trial, that the world was watching it, and that he was confident that the Senate would do itself proud, that his colleagues would “continue the debate as reasonable men.” On another day, he said he was happy to see that his confidence was justified. “Never before have I seen in the Senate a debate which has contributed so much to understanding. In that sense, I think the debate has been one of the finest the Senate has ever had.” Day after day, he reminded his colleagues that they were taking part in an historic debate, repeated his plea that they be fair and open-minded, open to reason and compromise, and praised them for being so reasonable and open-minded thus far—which of course made it harder for them to act otherwise, and kept them, as much as possible, on their best behavior.

Often, on Friday of that week, and during the next week, those statements were read to long arcs of almost empty desks—desks that stayed empty all day. In the days following the hectic floor fight on the Anderson-Aiken Amendment, the Senate Chamber was a scene, as the New York Times put it, “of such calm that at times hardly half a dozen senators were on the floor.” Johnson’s opening homilies, moreover, were almost his only public utterances on the subject of civil rights. He had again assumed a low profile, and was not often on the Senate floor, spending his time in the Democratic cloakroom or huddling behind the closed doors of G-18 with George and Solis and Gerry, or with senators in his offices in the Capitol or back in the SOB. But there, in the cloakroom or behind closed doors, he was fighting, too, using the gifts he had demonstrated so vividly during his entire life.

All his life, he had had what George Brown called a “knack” for simultaneously convincing people on opposite sides of an issue that he was on their side, and that knack was desperately needed now. He was the only bridge between the two sides, and if he was to keep them negotiating through him, he had to convince each side that it was in its best interest to negotiate through him, that he was trying to obtain for it the best deal that could be obtained; that while it was necessary for him to maintain a veneer of neutrality for the benefit of the outside world, in reality he was on their side, that he believed what they believed, that he was their friend, that he wanted them to win. And never had this knack been more vividly displayed. He did it with the tone of his voice: with northerners, his Texas twang became harder, more clipped; when he talked to southerners the twang softened into a full-fledged southern drawl. He did it with words. “If we’re going to have any civil rights bill at all, we’ve got to be reasonable about this jury trial amendment,” he said to Paul Douglas in the cloakroom one day. Five minutes later, he was at the opposite end of the cloakroom, telling Ervin to “be ready to take up the Nigra bill again.” “Let’s face it, our ass is in a crack—we’re gonna have to let this nigger bill pass,” he told Stennis.

With the southern senators, the key words—in addition to “nigger” and “Nigra”—were we and us, to emphasize that he was one of them. Keeping the South in line—persuading Thurmond not to march on the White House and Eastland not to give the Judiciary Committee a monthlong vacation and Olin Johnston not to deliver his forty-page speech—was, despite all that Richard Russell could do, becoming increasingly difficult. He had to persuade the southerners to allow some sort of civil rights bill to pass, not to employ the filibuster to kill it, even though their constituents were expecting them to use the filibuster if necessary. To do so, he made things personal. Over and over again, he told the southerners, “We have to give them something”—and, he told them, as long as they trusted him, the something would be as little as possible. “I’m on your side, not theirs. Be practical. We have to give them something. But we don’t have to put teeth in it.” He made it political. “You always thought you wouldn’t have to worry about Republican opponents. Well, look around you. I look around and I see the Republicans shaking bushes all over the South. Well, one day, they’ll shake the right bush and flush out an opponent for you…. My ass is on the line, and your ass is on the line, and the Democratic Party’s ass is on the line….” He tried to make them understand that as long as the bill contained a jury trial amendment, its passage would have minimal political repercussions for them. “You can go back [home] and say, ‘Listen, we couldn’t stop them entirely. They just had too many votes, so they rolled over us. But look what we got. We fought and fixed it up so that those damned Yankee carpetbaggers couldn’t come back, and also they couldn’t brand you a criminal without a jury trial.’” He played on their pride as southerners. We’ve got a chance to show the Yankees that we’re not all ignorant redneck racists down here like they’d like to think, he said. He played on their hopes: their hope that he might become President, and that if he did, that would be a victory for the South, a victory so great that its possibility should overrule all other considerations. “He used this feeling, he played on it—this was a deliberate tactic of his,” Reedy says. He played on their fears for the South. For the first time, he said, Negroes have a real leader. “A religious leader. A nonviolent man of the cloth. You all know what that means, don’t you? A colored Baptist preacher? That’s one man who controls the colored community…. The colored are not going to give up. They’re determined…. We can’t continue to push these things down their throats. They won’t sit still any longer. We have to give them something.” He told them, “If we don’t allow progress on this issue, we’re going to lose everything. There’s going to be cloture. Rule 22 is going to go. And our opportunity to delay, or to slow down, and to bring some kind of an order to change, will be gone.” Or: “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they’ve never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all kinds of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.”

And he played on their fears for themselves—an effective tactic, because Matt Neely’s death, expected daily, would reduce the number of Democrats in the Senate to forty-eight. There were currently only forty-six Republicans, but the Republican Governor of West Virginia was expected to name a Republican to Neely’s seat, so there would be forty-seven. Joe McCarthy had died in May, and a special election to fill his seat would be held on August 28, between a Democrat, William Proxmire, and a Republican, Walter J. Kohler, a popular former governor. Since no Democrat had won a Senate seat from Wisconsin in twenty-five years, it was expected that after the special election, the Republicans would have forty-eight seats. The party count would be tied, a tie would be broken by the Vice President—the Republicans were planning to reorganize the Senate as soon as Kohler was sworn in. A confidential memo sent to Lehman in Switzerland by Julius Edelstein reported that “Lyndon Johnson [has] been warning all the southerners that unless they relaxed a little and let some kind of a civil rights bill go through, they were in danger of losing their chairmanships. He urged them not to filibuster because to filibuster the civil rights bill would ensure a victory for Kohler….”

With the liberals—not with the most ardent “red-hots,” for with them there was no hope, but with the rest of the Democratic liberals—the key words were also we and us. He made them feel that they were in a battle, and that in that battle he was on their side. Warning one liberal senator that there must be a liberal “sentry” on the floor at all times to guard against a sudden southern legislative maneuver, he told him, “They’ll get us on the floor if we’re not manned on the floor at all times, so we always have to have a man there.” He told him, “They’ll pick our moment of least resistance and move in.” He played on their fears—the fear of what southern power in the committees could do to their vital projects. Once, when Wayne Morse was threatening, in order to bring the South to heel, to block a unanimous consent agreement some southerners wanted, Johnson told him, “Look, you’re going to be in the position of wanting [their] support in the future. This [the jury trial amendment] isn’t that hurtful to your state’s interest or to your own convictions. Don’t build it up into a blockage.”

He had to persuade the northerners to allow some sort of jury trial amendment in the bill, even though such an amendment stripped the bill of its teeth. He tried to make them understand that the important thing was to get some bill, any bill, passed “to show them we can do it”—“Once we’ve got the first one passed, we can go back and improve it”—and that the only way to get it passed was to vote for the amendment. “Jim Eastland knows we have to have a civil rights bill,” he said to them. “But he has to have a jury trial amendment. We’ve got to give him a jury trial amendment.” He tried to make them understand that so long as the bill contained provisions for voting rights, it was still worth passing: “Give them the vote, that’s what matters. Then things’ll change, you’ll see,” he said. When Humphrey tried to argue with him, he said, “Yes, yes, Hubert, I want all those other things—buses, restaurants, all of that—but the right to vote with no ifs, ands or buts, that’s the key. When the Negroes get that, they’ll have every politician, north and south, east and west, kissing their ass, begging for their support.”

Keeping the liberals from forcing the issue to a vote was becoming more and more difficult, for, knowing that they had a majority of the Senate on their side, they thought only about the vote, not about the maneuvers that would precede it, and he tried to make them understand. Because of their distrust of him, he often relayed his word through others. In one liberal caucus, Clint Anderson interrupted a barrage of red-hot bravado about their chances of carrying some amendment to tell them their vote count was wrong (“Let me give you some advice,” Anderson said. He named five Democratic senators whom the liberals were counting on their side. You’re right in thinking that “you’re going to need their help,” he told them. “But you haven’t got it now”) and to advise them to stick with a man whose counts were more accurate (particularly since that man was of their party): “I remember that for many years whenever we tried to do something on civil rights, Bob Taft would go over and whisper to Dick Russell and we’d be licked. So let’s follow our own leader and not these recent Republican converts.” Once, John Carroll told his administrative assistant, Harry Schnibbe, “Goddammit, we’ll go on the floor with this. McNamara will do this, and Paul will do that, and we’ll make an issue of this.” Having learned of the liberals’ plans, Johnson sent Bobby Baker to intercept Schnibbe on the floor: “Harry, this is a grave mistake. If you do this, Russell will do this, and Ellender will do this…. The Majority Leader has got to cool this down before we can go forward.” And sometimes he delivered the warning himself. “Look, if you press too hard, if you insist on perfection, you’ll get it, but it won’t be passed.” Day after day, he was arguing one side of a point with the southerners and the other side with the liberals—and arguing both sides with equal persuasiveness. At the same time that he was telling the South that he had counted votes and had found that a filibuster couldn’t win, he was telling liberals that he had counted votes and had found that they couldn’t beat a filibuster. “He was playing it out of both sides,” Harry McPherson was to recall. “He was down in the trenches with guys who were determined not to let the bill pass, and he was doing his damnedest by every conceivable device to bring them around. He warned them [the southerners] that much worse would come unless they would pass this modest bill.” They believed him. “He made them think … he’d be with them forever.” At the same time, McPherson says, “he would tell some of the northerners that if they would only let this modest bill go through, they would get a better bill later.” And they believed him. He told Joe Rauh, “You can’t beat a filibuster,” and Rauh says he was correct: “We had the majority, but we didn’t have two-thirds.”

HIS VOTE-COUNTING ABILITY was needed, too, for if the jury trial amendment came to a vote without the necessary number of yeas and was therefore defeated, the South would not then permit a vote on the overall bill. Lying before him on the desk in his office was a long Senate tally sheet; when he left the office, the sheet was in his breast pocket. In contrast to most of his tally sheets, this one was notably untidy, for so intense was the pressure from both sides that senators were changing their votes, and then changing back again—some of them several times; the long, narrow paper was smudged with erasures and covered not only with numbers but with notes he had jotted down to remind him of what might be the best time to approach a particular senator again, or of some new argument that might work with him. In the cloakroom, he would, over and over again, pull the tally sheet out of his pocket, put on his eyeglasses and study it intently, his thumb moving very slowly down the sheet, seeming to pause at every line, making sure that he was certain of every vote, that he wasn’t just thinking, that he knew. And what he knew, counting the votes, was that he didn’t have enough. Knowland, as Doris Fleeson was to write, “twice daily assured his Democratic allies he would lose at most five or six GOP votes,” and Johnson knew that for once Knowland’s error was not on the side of optimism. Johnson needed forty-eight absolutely “sure” votes to make passage of the amendment certain. The exact number of votes he was counting at this stage cannot be determined, but it appears to have been no more than forty-two.

To try to get more votes, he used all the weapons at his command—used them with his customary ruthlessness. The ruthlessness was usually cloaked under senatorial courtesy; it took the form of hints rather than threats. But with these men, threats were not needed. Senators understood the nuances of power; they were well aware that the man asking for their help on the civil rights bill had the power to help them—or not help them—on other bills, bills that were vital to them; to help them with committee assignments or campaign cash or office space.

The Niagara situation was becoming desperate because frost comes early in autumn on the Niagara Frontier, and time was running out. The bill authorizing New York State to begin construction of the huge power dam had been passed through Public Works, but it was still stalled on the floor behind the civil rights bill, and Johnson let New York’s senators know that it was going to stay stalled until a civil rights bill was passed. Addressing the Majority Leader, New York’s Irving Ives said that the “Niagara Frontier is without adequate power. Business will have to cease there. Unemployment will increase. There will be a dire situation there in a very short time unless this redevelopment is begun this year…. This measure must have the right-of-way….” But the Majority Leader, standing at his desk looking across the aisle at Ives and Javits, said that while “I shall do what I can to have it brought to a vote in this body as soon as possible,” it might not be possible in the immediate future. Thanks to a decision by the Republican Leader and the Republican White House, the pending business, he said, was still civil rights. The next voice came from a desk behind him—in the back row of the Democratic side of the aisle. “The bill authorizing the Tennessee Valley Authority to issue … revenue bonds … is of an emergency nature equal to that of the Niagara Bill,” Albert Gore said; “It is urgent that it be considered.” “I thank the Senator from Tennessee,” Lyndon Johnson said. “I assure him that I shall urge the Senate at the appropriate time to give consideration to the Tennessee Valley Bill, in which he is so deeply interested.” But, he said, the appropriate time would be when “a majority of the Senate” want to proceed to business other than the civil rights bill. “So far as the Majority Leader is concerned, he is prepared to proceed to the consideration” of these bills “and get the earliest possible decision….” But it wasn’t up to him, he said, but to “the majority of the Senate.” Couched though it was in soft senatorial courtesy, the message was hard and clear. If the South was pushed too hard on the civil rights bill, it would filibuster. And if there were not sufficient votes to get the bill off the floor by imposing cloture on the filibuster, the only way to get it off the floor, so that the Senate could move on to other business, such as Niagara and the TVA, would be to withdraw the bill. So the South had better not be pushed too hard.

And if the South was insisting on a jury trial amendment, maybe it would be a good idea to give it one.

HE WAS WORKING the cloakroom and the corridors now, working them with everything he had.

He used his health. He had had his heart attack, he said, he was a sick man and he knew it, he had no interest in a presidential nomination or even for another term in the Senate, all he wanted to do was what was best for the country. The strain was too much for him, he said, when he went home at night, he couldn’t sleep, the doctors kept giving him new pills, they didn’t work, he was starting to get chest pains again. “Ah don’t want to die right here,” he said. “Ah don’t want to fall on my face, drop dead right on the floor of the Senate.” He couldn’t take much more strain; “He made you feel that if you wouldn’t go along with what he was asking, you might be murdering this man,” one senator recalls.

He used the liberals’ fear of Russell to explain why he couldn’t give them more; when a liberal senator had a suggestion, he would reply that he thought it was a good idea, but of course there was no sense pushing it unless Russell approved. “I’ll have to run that by Dick,” he said. He used the southerners’ fear of the wild men to explain why he couldn’t give them more. “Well, you do that, you’re gonna lose Wayne Morse and them,” he said.

He used their pride in the Senate: “We’ve got the world looking at us here! We’ve got to make the world see that this body works!” He used their pride in their party: “You’re the party of Lincoln,” he reminded one Republican. “That’s something to be proud of. You’re the image of Lincoln.” To Democrats, he said, “Our party’s always been the place that you can come to whenever there’s injustice. That’s what the Democratic Party’s for. That’s why it was born. That’s why it survives. So the poor and the downtrodden and the bended [sic] can have a place to turn. And they’re turning to us now. We can’t let them down. We’re down to the nut-cutting now, and we can’t let them down!” He used his power and his charm. “I can see him now,” Bobby Baker says, “grasping hands and poking chests and grabbing lapels, saying to the southern politicians something like, ‘We got a chance to show the way. We got a chance to get the racial monkey off the South’s back. We got a chance to show the Yankees that we’re good and decent and civilized down here, not a bunch of barefoot, tobacco-chewin’ crazies.” When he had finished presenting his arguments to a senator, Harry McPherson was to say, “he would sink back into the chair, his eyes wide with the injustice of his burdens, the corners of his mouth inviting pity and support” Then he “would come back face to face, perhaps sensing that the other wanted to help and in that event should hear the whole story, all the demands, the pressures and the threats, as well as the glory and the achievement that awaited reasonable men if they would only compromise, not on the main thing, but just on this part that the other side would never accept as it was; unless there could be some accommodation, there would be nothing, the haters would take over, the Negroes would lose it all, I need your help.” He used his stories, and he used his jokes, he used his promises, used his threats, backing senators up against walls or trapping them in their chairs, wrapping an arm around their shoulders and thrusting a finger in their chests, grasping lapels, watching their hands, watching their eyes, listening to what they said, or to what they didn’t say: “The greatest salesman one on one who ever lived”—trying to make his biggest sale. Never had he tried harder. In the intensity of his effort, he even instituted a new variation on one of his old devices. Lapels had long been for grabbing, but now he used them—or rather the buttonhole in them—for another purpose. Trying to persuade a senator who was resisting persuasion, Lyndon Johnson would stick his long forefinger through the hole in the senator’s lapel to prevent him from moving away. “The other day,” George Dixon wrote, “I spied Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson holding Senator Estes Kefauver in captive conference. Kefauver couldn’t have gotten away without leaving his lapel behind.”

To every crisis in his life, he had risen with that effort that made men say, “I never knew it was possible for anyone to work that hard,” that effort in which “days meant nothing, nights meant nothing.” Now, in this greatest crisis, Lyndon Johnson, heart attack or no, rose again to that kind of effort. In the early-morning hours the residential districts of Washington and its suburbs were dark and silent, but now, in the night, the silence of a darkened street would be broken by the faint ringing of a telephone in a senator’s house. The senator, picking it up, would hear, “This is Lyndon Johnson.” The persuasion would begin, and it might go on for quite some time. Finally, the call would be over. The senator would go back to bed, to sleep if he could. And on another street, in another senator’s home, the phone would ring. The streets of the Kalorama section of the District were, in the early-morning hours, row after row of darkened houses—and of one house, on Thirtieth Place, in which, night after night during these climactic last weeks of July, every night, lights would be on.

TRY THOUGH HE DID, however, it appeared, as July drew to a close, that he wasn’t going to win. On Friday, July 26, the lines had stiffened dramatically. That morning, there had been another meeting of the Southern Caucus in Richard Russell’s office, Ellender and Byrd in ice cream suits, most of the others in senatorial dark blue despite the heat, and around the huge mahogany table that morning there weren’t many smiles. Emerging from the meeting, Russell was accosted by Bill White of the Times. Russell told him that the Caucus had decided to support the jury trial amendment “to the end.” If the amendment was defeated, Russell said, the southerners would then fight the complete bill “with every resource open to us.” In his article the next day, White explained the meaning of Russell’s phrases. “He meant that [if the amendment was defeated] the southerners would put in the most implacable filibuster of which they were capable.”

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue that Friday morning, Knowland and Saltonstall were breakfasting with Dwight Eisenhower. Encircled by reporters as he was leaving the White House, Knowland held up a copy of the President’s July 17 statement and pointed to a sentence that someone had underlined at that breakfast table: “A jury trial should not be interposed in contempt of court cases growing out of violations of [court] orders.” Knowland told the reporters that he was authorized to say that that sentence still represented the President’s views.

Arriving back at the Senate Office Building, Knowland took the statement into a waiting Republican caucus in the Senate Caucus Room, and emerged to say that most of the eighteen Republicans who had deserted the Administration on Part III had returned on Part IV, and had pledged to stand against any jury trial amendment. Pressed for the number of Republican votes that were certain against the amendment, Knowland said, “Thirty-nine or forty.” Saltonstall said, “More than forty.” Checking with individual senators, reporters felt that these estimates were correct. If the fifteen “ardently civil rights” Democrats stick together, the New York Post observed, “their votes plus this GOP strength would be ample to insure the amendment’s defeat.”

Johnson flew to Texas late that Friday, but during his weekend on the ranch, he received another blow: proof that he had underestimated the depth of organized labor’s commitment to civil rights. He had been hoping that labor would be enticed into support of the amendment by the extension of its jury trial guarantee to unions, but on Saturday, July 27, labor began to be heard from, in the form of a letter to Johnson from James B. Carey, president of the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers. The amendment, Carey wrote, in a letter read to Johnson by Reedy over the telephone, “would prevent effective enforcement of the right to vote.”

“The issue must be faced squarely,” Carey said. “With respect to voting rights we can have either the right to vote or trial by jury for contempt. We cannot have both.” And he said, “Labor will not barter away effective protection of the right of a Negro to register and vote” just to obtain gains for itself. Reedy also told Johnson that when the AFL-CIO issued its statement, it would echo Carey’s. (Reedy’s information was to prove reliable. Assailing the “iron determination of the Southern bloc in the Senate to resist any civil rights legislation,” the labor federation would say that it “cannot and will not permit itself” to support a “crippling amendment” just because it offers “advantages to organized labor.” Hubert Humphrey said he had checked with many union leaders, and had not “found a soul who was buying this stuff.”

That weekend was filled with the boasts of Johnson’s liberal and Republican opponents. Beaming out of the television screens on CBS’s Sunday Face the Nation show, Humphrey said that the amendment’s supporters “haven’t got the votes.” Announcing that he was going to demand a ballot that very week, Knowland said he had the votes—enough to defeat the amendment and pass the bill intact, not only enough votes but votes to spare. Journalists agreed. “The Republicans have an extraordinary unity” on Part IV, Doris Fleeson wrote. “Not more than five will join the Southern demand for jury trial.” There was also a significant statement that weekend from Richard Russell. Catching him in the Senate Dining Room on Saturday, the AP’s John Chadwick asked him if he would be willing to vote on the amendment during the next week. “I can’t say that I am,” Russell replied. Having come to the same conclusion as Knowland—that the South did not have enough allies to pass the amendment, and would lose the vote—the South was going to “extend debate” so that there would be no vote. The only news Johnson received that weekend was bad news. He had waged a spectacular fight, but he was going to lose. All his work, it seemed, had been for nothing.

ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY, or at least most of Tuesday, developments on the Senate floor appeared to confirm that appraisal. Monday, when Johnson returned from Texas, was bad, with Carey’s letter being read into the record by Joe Clark, who used the occasion to jeer at Johnson’s attempt to get labor support (“I hope that in due course the Majority Leader … will feel free to reveal to the Senate who are the labor leaders who favor a jury trial amendment”), with Javits holding the floor for hours, further antagonizing southerners by his manner, and with increasingly bitter squabbling between liberals and southerners. Knowland could not contain his gloating. In Robert Mann’s words, “He taunted the southerners to begin their filibuster. ‘Let’s have it now and fight it out,’ he said.”

Tuesday—for most of the day at least—was worse. The day began for Johnson when, still in bed that morning, he was leafing through the Washington Post and came upon a large advertisement. It was “An Open Letter” to “the Senate of the United States,” but it might have been addressed to him personally, so directly did it attack what he had been doing: “It would be better not to pass any civil rights legislation at all than to pass [this] bill…. We are in a better position to get justice in civil rights cases under existing laws than we would be if you pass the proposed ‘jury trial’ amendment.” The letter was signed by eighty-one southern liberal leaders—including Aubrey Williams, Johnson’s onetime boss at the National Youth Administration and for two decades one of his staunchest supporters. When he reached his office in the Capitol, the day got even worse, for Reedy handed him the AFL-CIO statement, and just as he walked down the stairs and out onto the Senate floor, his attempt to tamp down the outright antagonism between the South and the liberals that would destroy any hopes of compromise appeared to explode.

The explosion may have occurred partly because that morning two officers of the Tuskegee Civic Association appeared in the Senate Office Building to describe the ongoing voting dispute in Alabama’s Macon County. They did it at a news conference called by “the all-out civil rights forces.” The conference had been designed to attract publicity, and in that aim it failed: coverage the next day would be scant; the New York Times didn’t carry a word. But while reporters didn’t come to the conference, senators did—eleven of them, including Paul Douglas and ten members of the Douglas Group, Republicans as well as Democrats—and they heard for themselves as the two Alabamans, W. P. Mitchell and Linwood T. Dorsey, told not only about the voucher system and other devices employed to discourage Negro voting, but also about brutal police raids on the offices of organizations that encouraged Negro registration. As the senators listened, the gravity that some of them had assumed for the benefit of the one or two photographers present seemed to deepen into a feeling more genuine, and several picked up the printed text of the two Alabamans’ statements and began reading intently, with expressions of shock on their faces. If these liberal senators had forgotten what they were really fighting for, they were reminded that morning. The news conference ended shortly after the Senate’s noon bell rang, and they walked out on the Senate floor full of indignation, and as they came through the double doors, Richard Brevard Russell was speaking, at his center-aisle desk, as courteous and urbane as ever, and he was denying that Negroes were excluded from voting or jury service in the South, illustrating his point with homey anecdotes (“Mr. President, I well remember the first time I ever went into a federal court as an attorney…. I think it was in the year 1920…. It so happened that I was representing a man by the name of Polk Manders, who had been caught at a still where illicit whiskey was being made…. A great deal of that kind of activity has occurred in my section of the country in times past…. On the panel which tried him were two of our Negro citizens …”)—and their indignation boiled over. As soon as Russell finished, Javits said, “Mr. President, I do not think it is fair to let the record stand as it is…. I know, and every other senator knows, that there are Negroes who serve on juries in the South. We also know that there are Negroes who vote in the South…. I invite the attention of senators to the facts on the merits, Mr. President. One fact is that in case after case after case, including cases in Georgia, the Supreme Court has had to void verdicts of juries in cases involving crimes as serious as murder because there was a systematic exclusion of Negroes from juries.” Then Douglas was recognized. Russell had referred to the recent race riots in Chicago and Detroit, and Douglas admitted that such riots had occurred. “But I can say that in the city of Chicago, Negroes vote,” he went on. “They are not compelled to ride on segregated cars. They are not segregated in the schools. They have access to the parks and other public facilities. In these respects and many others their dignity is not offended. They are treated as human beings.” He pointed a long arm at Russell, sitting among his massed southerners in the center section. “We are not trying to cover up abuses,” Douglas shouted. “We are trying to remedy them; and I only wish my good friends from the South would adopt a similar attitude, instead of trying to sprinkle rose water on what we know to be great abuses.”

And Johnson’s long attempt to avoid outright antagonism on the Senate floor may also have exploded because Russell was losing on the jury trial amendment—and because losing was something that, despite his urbanity, Russell could not bear. At one point during Douglas’ outburst, the Illinois Senator, still pointing across the floor at Russell, said that “the Senator from Georgia has evidently been counting noses,” and knows he is losing. And when Douglas said that, Russell jumped to his feet, and, as William V. Shannon wrote, “stood upon the Senate floor and tore the mask of civility from the face of the civil rights debate”—and in the process also allowed the mask to fall from his own face, as it had fallen before on the rare occasions when he had been losing. The high patrician brow and the arched patrician nose were flushed with anger, and in his eyes as he stared across the desks at Paul Douglas was fury. “The Senator from Illinois points his admonitory finger,” Russell shouted. “He says, ‘You gentlemen are too sensitive.’ Then he proceeds against our social order.”

“Hypocrisy!” Richard Brevard Russell shouted. “Sanctimony! Holier-than-thou!” Then, as Shannon reported, “he defended segregation in all its aspects.”

“You’ve failed in the North,” Russell said. “Your method does not work. You have race riots. But you come down and say, ‘We know better. We are going to force you to do things our way.’ I say, keep your race riots in Chicago. Don’t export them to Georgia.”

Suddenly the scene among the four long arcs of desks was a scene unpleasantly reminiscent of Senate civil rights debates of previous years. Hoisting himself upright and holding on to his desk for support because in his emotion he had forgotten to pick up his crutches, Potter of Michigan shouted to the dais, “Mr. President, will the Senator yield?” Russell had no choice because, by mentioning Detroit, he had referred to Potter’s state, and if there was anything almost as sacred to Richard Russell as the untainted blood of a pure white race, it was the Senate rules. “I yield,” he said grudgingly.

“None of us from the North are proud of the fact that race riots took place,” Potter began. “But Negro citizens in our state have every opportunity to vote.”

Russell interrupted him. “Oh, they vote in my state, too,” he said. “They vote as freely in Georgia as they do in Michigan. I am becoming tired of hearing that kind of statement.” Russell had no right to interrupt him, Potter said. “The Senator referred to Michigan.” “Yes, I did,” Russell admitted. “I should like to have him listen to my reply for a moment,” Potter said. His reply was that despite the riots, “great progress has been made in Michigan…. Because there are tensions we do not stick our heads in the sand.”

Russell’s face was a very deep red now. “I am delighted to hear the Senator say that progress is being made,” he said. Then he said, “The system which the senator from Michigan wants to impose on Georgia brought about race riots in Michigan…. If the Senator from Michigan would simply not seek to invade our state to fasten the race riot-generating system upon us, we would appreciate it. Let him keep it in Michigan.” All over the Chamber, on both sides of the aisle, senators were on their feet shouting for the floor. At first Russell refused to yield it, but one of the senators was Pat McNamara, also of Michigan. “Yes; I yield to the Senator from Michigan,” Russell said at last. “I mentioned his state.” McNamara said Michigan needed no defense, that his state could handle its affairs without outside interference. “Then why does not the Senator let us do the same?” Russell asked. There was applause from the southern senators seated around him, but he had asked a question, and he was to receive an answer to it. “McNamara,” Doris Fleeson wrote, “roared in the bull voice trained in a thousand union meeting halls: ‘Because you’ve had ninety years and haven’t done it!’”

The galleries above burst into applause; appalled ushers rushed to still it. The two senators stood there shouting at each other, in their contrasting accents. “I do not know what all the smog is about,” McNamara said. “I agree with the Senator from Michigan that he doesn’t know what it is all about,” Russell said. The southerners laughed. “I agree that one of us does not know what it is all about, but I am not sure that I am the one,” McNamara said. The galleries applauded. Russell’s rhetoric escalated into the rhetoric of martyrdom: when Florida’s Spessard Holland tried to change the subject, Russell said, “Here we have a senator who wants to take time out from being crucified.” He didn’t want any time-outs; for more than three hours, he stood there, lashing out at the North—while the North lashed back.

Almost as dramatic to the journalists as the shouts of the debaters was the demeanor of the Majority Leader. “As Russell raged on,” Shannon wrote, “Lyndon Johnson slumped further and further down in his seat. Misery and nervous irritability distorted his features.” Then, as the man standing at the desk immediately behind him continued to rage, Johnson turned his chair all the way around, either to look right up at Russell—or, as Doris Fleeson suggested, for another reason: so that his face would be concealed from the Press Gallery, “so that the reporters could not judge his reaction to the damage being done” to his plans.

For seven months he had managed to maintain a layer of civility between the liberals and the South—against long odds. But now, “in three hours,” as Mary McGrory wrote, “the veneer of senatorial courtesy which has given a high gloss to … weeks of debate” had cracked wide open. “The attempt to make the whole question a constitutional problem rather than a human one abruptly collided, as Senator Russell… shouted … at the opposition.”

Contained in the angry exchanges that had rumbled back and forth just over Lyndon Johnson’s head, moreover, almost lost in the general invective but picked up quite clearly by his keen ears, had been some particularly disturbing sentences. At one point, Douglas, taunting Russell because he didn’t have the votes, had demanded that the ballot on the jury trial amendment come soon—and had made the demand not only of Russell but of him: “I think the Majority Leader could do very well” by scheduling the vote “not later than Saturday,” Douglas had said. “I wonder if the Majority Leader would consider that as a possible proviso.” And when Johnson had replied that he had “not given any thought to the matter,” Douglas had been insistent: “How about Monday? How about voting on the O’Mahoney Amendment on Monday?” The civil rights forces, knowing they had the majority, were pressing for a vote—as they had pressed for a vote in past years. Russell, lashing back at McNamara, had suddenly said, apropos of nothing in his previous remarks, “So, Mr. President, we have tried to act like reasonable men. We have tried to act with restraint in the face of great provocation…. But, Mr. President, we reserve the right to defend ourselves…. As responsible men, we shall insist on our right to be heard fully on all amendments to the pending bill.” And there had been another development, peripheral but also an ominous straw in the wind. With funds for the Small Business Administration due to run out on Wednesday, July 31—the very next day—Johnson, attempting to avoid the closing of the agency, had requested a unanimous consent agreement to take up its appropriation bill, and then return immediately to the civil rights debate. His request, however, had not been granted: Wayne Morse had objected; and there had been other hands raised on the floor when the presiding officer had recognized Morse; other senators were prepared to object. The Senate had not been able to take up urgent public business. That Tuesday afternoon, the body had, as Fleeson wrote, “suddenly reverted to type.” It was beginning, more and more, to resemble Senates of the past, in which the position of the Majority Leader had not been an enviable one. Scott Lucas and Boob McFarland had been in the same position that Lyndon Johnson was very close to being in now, unable to muster either the votes to end a filibuster or the votes to pass the amendment that alone could persuade the South not to filibuster. He was coming closer and closer to losing control of the Senate—as Lucas had lost control, as McFarland had lost control just before becoming objects of ridicule. A column by Murray Kempton published that Tuesday showed how perilously close Lyndon Johnson was to the same fate that had befallen his two hapless predecessors. Johnson, Kempton wrote, was “almost the prisoner of the South,” and “with the 20-year dominant coalition between Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans in ruins, Lyndon Johnson’s cupboard is bare. The politicians who count in the Senate today are William F. Knowland and Richard M. Nixon; and Lyndon Johnson is a state of things whose time is past.” Kempton wrote about “the desperation with which Lyndon Johnson wriggled for delay,” and about the fact that his wriggling was hopeless. “The Democrats wondered yesterday, with Johnson in the shadows, how they could meet Nixon’s triumphant kind of calculation.” There was a phrase in Kempton’s column that the leader was not used to seeing written about himself; the phrase was “poor Lyndon Johnson.” And the most hurtful aspect of the column by this bellwether of liberal opinion may have been its implications for Johnson’s hope that he could use the civil rights fight to get closer to the Democratic Party’s liberal wing. Kempton’s column showed how very far he was from achieving that end.

LATE TUESDAY AFTERNOON, however, things began to improve. There had, during those last days in July, been two developments that Lyndon Johnson had hoped would get him some of the votes he needed, and they both began to come to fruition not long after he had dejectedly returned, at about four o’clock, to his office from those three hours of “misery” on the Senate floor.

The first development could be called a lucky break—unless one believes that man in part makes his own luck, and that if he pushes against a wall long enough and hard enough, refusing to stop, a crack will eventually appear somewhere in the wall; and unless one believes also that the “crack” wouldn’t have produced Senate votes for civil rights had not Lyndon Johnson known, as apparently no one else knew, how to widen it.

While Lyndon Johnson had been in Texas the previous weekend, the telephone calls from Reedy had told him that his attempt to woo leaders of organized labor like Reuther and Carey and Meany with a jury trial amendment had apparently failed. That Sunday, however, a dissenting if informal, even offhand, remark had been made by a less important labor figure, Cyrus Tyree (Cy) Anderson, the rough-spoken, incisive chief Washington lobbyist for the Railway Labor Association, a loose central committee representing twelve railroad unions, or “brotherhoods.” The remark was made in the unlikely setting of the Glen Echo Amusement Park in Maryland, where Anderson had taken his children for a Sunday outing, and it was made in the course of a rambling, desultory conversation with another man—a casual Capitol Hill acquaintance of Anderson’s—who had taken his children there, too. But this casual acquaintance to whom Anderson made the remark—“Any labor guy who is against jury trials ought to have his head examined”—happened to repeat it to George Reedy Monday morning. Reedy didn’t consider it especially significant, but he quoted it in a memorandum he gave to Johnson sometime after Johnson arrived back on Capitol Hill on Monday afternoon.

And Johnson acted on it.

No one had thought of the railroad brotherhoods as potential allies in the civil rights fight—for a very obvious reason: for almost a century they had been fighting against equal rights for black Americans. Ever since they had been formed, shortly after the Civil War, the brotherhoods had, in fact, been among the most rigid bastions of racial segregation in the entire labor movement. Most of them—including the four largest: the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, and the Order of Railway Conductors and Brakemen—had outright “whites only” clauses in their constitutions which barred Negroes from membership. When, in 1955, some of the brotherhoods had sought affiliation with the AFL-CIO, they had employed subterfuges to evade the Federation’s anti-discrimination requirement; the Trainmen, for example, had amended its constitution—not to remove the “whites only” clauses but rather to say that these clauses would not apply in states in which they conflicted with state law. In 1957, fewer than 2,000 of the Trainmen’s 217,000 members—fewer than one out of a hundred—were not Caucasian. And some of the brotherhoods were even more rigidly racist than the Trainmen: the Firemen’s Brotherhood, which had never had a Negro member, was that year determinedly contesting a lawsuit brought by Negro firemen to force that brotherhood to admit them. Few unions seemed less likely to be active supporters of a civil rights bill.

But Johnson saw why the brotherhoods might be turned into supporters. He understood what Cy Anderson had meant by his remark: the brotherhoods had suffered greatly from judges’ use of criminal contempt proceedings without jury trials during the railroad labor wars of the 1880s and 1890s; and with the Taft-Hartley Act, which had revoked provisions of Norris-La Guardia, the spectre of such proceedings hung over the brotherhoods again. He understood, as well, that while the brotherhoods’ once-immense political power had been declining because of the decline of the railroads, in one area of the country that power was still substantial—the immense flat plains of the Midwest. The Midwest, across which ran the great transcontinental rail lines, the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific and the Southern Pacific; the Midwest, which contained so many of the railroads’ switchyards and stockyards and roundhouses, as well as the great hubs (Chicago, St. Louis, Topeka) from which lines ran out like spokes of a wheel; the Midwest, where so many small towns numbered railroad employees, well paid by the area’s standards, among their leading, and politically influential, citizens; where so many of the leading law firms were on retainer to the railroads; where railroads, and their unions, had always been a particularly potent political force; where the support of railroad brotherhoods was still a key factor in deciding which senators were sent to, and kept in, Washington—the Midwest, whose senators were Republicans, conservative Republicans, the conservative Republicans whom he had, despite months of effort, been unable to break off from Knowland and Nixon.

On Tuesday morning, Lyndon Johnson telephoned Cy Anderson and asked for support for the jury trial amendment from the twelve brotherhoods—including a formal statement he could use to counter Carey’s.

With his eyes focused on organized labor as a source of support for a jury trial amendment, suddenly Johnson saw more. There was one union to whom the memory of the power of federal court injunctions was especially fresh and bitter: the United Mine Workers. It had been as recently as 1946 that Harry Truman had seized the coal mines, and a federal judge had enjoined the UMW from striking, had then held the UMW’s glowering, bushy-eyebrowed John L. Lewis in contempt of court for refusing to obey the injunction, and had forced him to order his miners back to work by imposing a potentially ruinous fine on the union.

The center of the UMW’s power was West Virginia. It was a one-industry state, and the industry was coal. No fewer than 117,000 miners, every one of whom belonged to the UMW, lived there. And West Virginia’s two senators were the Republican Chapman Revercomb and the Democratic liberal Matthew Neely, both of whom had refused—Revercomb loudly on the Senate floor, Neely through aides from his hospital bed—to support the jury trial amendment. The UMW’s chief counsel, and a man Lewis trusted as much as he trusted anyone, was none other than Johnson’s friend Welly Hopkins; it had been Hopkins who had dragged the raging Lewis back into his seat in the courtroom in 1946 before Lewis could compound the contempt offense; and then Hopkins, beside himself with anger, had shouted defiantly at the judge, “This day will live in infamy, sir!” Now, on Tuesday morning, Johnson telephoned Welly, and asked him for a formal statement of support from John L. Lewis.

Anderson had to go through channels, with twelve separate brotherhoods. Hopkins had to make only one telephone call. At 2:48 that same day—Tuesday, July 30—while Johnson had been slumped down in his seat on the Senate floor listening to Richard Russell rant, John L. Lewis sent him a telegram. The United Mine Workers, the telegram said, “HAVE TRADITIONALLY, AND DO NOW, SUPPORT APPROPRIATE LEGISLATION LOOKING TO THE FULL ENJOYMENT BY ALL CITIZENS OF ALL CIVIL RIGHTS.” And, the telegram said, the UMW also supported the jury trial amendment—“A WISE, PRUDENT AND PROPER AMENDMENT…. THE STRONG POWER OF INJUNCTION HAS BEEN IN THE PAST SO OFTEN ABUSED….”

Sometime after Johnson had returned to his office from the Senate floor about four o’clock, the telegram was shown to him. He returned to the floor. The time was about 5:40. Olin Johnston was droning on. Asking the South Carolinian to yield, Johnson read the telegram, maximizing the impact by implying that it was an unsolicited bolt from the blue. “John L. Lewis had never communicated with me directly or indirectly until 2:48 p.m. today, when he sent me the following telegram,” he said. And even before he came to the floor, Johnson had used the telegram; he “saw to it,” as James Reston commented drily, that it “was brought to Revercomb’s attention.” On Lyndon Johnson’s smudged tally sheet, a number was erased from the right side of Revercomb’s name, and a number was written on the left side.

And Neely’s staff had been contacted, and a message had been sent to Bethesda. The dying liberal had promised Douglas and Knowland that he would leave the hospital and come to the Chamber in a wheelchair to cast his vote against the amendment if it was needed. Now, through his aides, that promise was withdrawn. Neely could not bring himself to vote for the amendment, but he said he would not leave the hospital to cast a vote at all. Although only one West Virginia vote would be added to the votes for the amendment, therefore, two were subtracted from the votes against it. The count had been perhaps 53–42 against Johnson before, but it was 51–43 now. He was only eight behind.

WITH THE OTHER DEVELOPMENT that came to fruition that Tuesday, luck had no connection at all. It was the result of another talent Lyndon Johnson had been displaying during the civil rights fight. Although it was not a new talent, it had previously been used mainly with his own staff. It had never before been used with senators—because never before had Lyndon Johnson been fighting for a great cause.

It was a talent not merely for persuading men, but for inspiring them.

Frank Church had had six months now to learn the cost of crossing Lyndon Johnson. Young as he was, the tall, slender senator looked even younger with his big, toothy grin, shiny black hair, and cheeks so pink that he seemed to be perpetually blushing; once, while he was waiting for an elevator in the Capitol, a woman tourist said to him, “I understand that one of you page boys gets mistaken for Senator Frank Church”; “Yes, ma’am,” Church replied, “one of us often does.” And sometimes during his first months in the Senate, he acted younger, too, and not only because he was, as his biographer wrote, “bursting with energy and ambition”; in some ways, in those days, he displayed an idealism reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart as the young senator in the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—right down to the fact that both of them had been amateurs in politics (a lawyer by profession, Church’s only political venture before his victorious Senate campaign had been an unsuccessful try for the State Legislature), and for both of them their first major Senate issue was the same: opposition to a private power company dam. Wags in the Press Gallery, amused by Church’s naïveté as much as by his youthfulness, mockingly called him “Senator Sunday School.” But he was already making a mark in Washington, with the help of his vivacious wife, Bethine.

Bethine Clark Church did not fit that era’s mold of the docile Washington political wife, for while Frank was new to politics, she had been born into it, into Idaho’s Democratic dynasty, the “Clark Party.” She had been raised in the Governor’s Mansion; during her girlhood her father was Idaho’s Governor, one of her uncles, D. Worth Clark, was Idaho’s United States Senator; another uncle had been the state’s Governor some years before. She and the young man who had fallen in love with each other in high school were an exceptionally close couple; years later, one of Church’s staffers would call their marriage “the longest-running high school romance in history.” She loved to watch the Senate. “I had one child when we came here, and then two, but somehow I always managed to go,” she would say. “It was the best show in town…. I was so fascinated. The Senate … made you think of the letters of Jefferson and Adams.” And she understood the Senate, and explained its mores to her husband (“It was through his wife mainly that he understood the senatorial tradition,” says his administrative aide, John Carver), giving him advice with a canniness that would later lead political insiders to call her “Idaho’s third senator.”

In early July, Johnson’s iciness—his refusal even to speak to Church which had begun in January after Church cast the vote that made Johnson throw his pen down on his desk—had not begun to melt. After Clint Anderson had made him understand that it was Johnson’s “doing, not yours,” that had gotten the Hells Canyon bill passed, he had tried to mend fences in writing (“All credit is due to your leadership”), but while Reedy wrote a warm response for Johnson’s signature, the Leader was as cold as ever in person, and Bobby Baker’s warning that “The Leader’s got a long memory” was proven correct. After six months, her husband was still “a pariah,” Bethine recalls; “I was in a deep freeze,” Church would say. And he very much wanted to thaw it.

Although Church was in favor of civil rights legislation, his interest in the subject was, according to his legislative aide, Ward Hower, “only intellectual,” not “a visceral thing.” The plight of black Americans “was not a big issue to Frank Church,” perhaps because out of the six hundred thousand persons who lived in Idaho in 1957, only about one thousand were black. Bethine recalls that “one night Frank came home, and I asked are you going to get into this thing deeply, and he said, ‘I’ve got a lot on my platter. It’s not something I’m going to get involved over my head in.’” He would vote for the civil rights bill but not become an active participant in the struggle to pass it, he told her. Furthermore, in 1957, Idaho had only two representatives in the House, “so,” Hower explains, “the Senate was the key for Idaho, like it was for the southerners. In the Senate, Idaho is equal to New York. For all the western senators, the Senate is their states’ protection. The right to filibuster is important to them.” He felt—as did many western senators from sparsely populated states—an identity with the southern senators’ need to preserve the Senate’s rules. But, Hower says, Church also knew that a reconciliation with Johnson was essential for his career, and “He was looking for a way to do something major for Johnson”—and “he understood that the civil rights bill was a key to Johnson’s strong ambition to be President.” And it was this understanding that, in mid-July, first got Church involved more deeply in the civil rights fight. In January, on the vote that had angered Johnson, Church had voted against the South; on July 24, on the vote to eliminate Part III from the bill, Church voted with it. Johnson’s attitude toward him became noticeably warmer. On July 26, when O’Mahoney was introducing the jury trial amendment that the South wanted, Church rose from his back-row desk as O’Mahoney was speaking, walked down one row and over along the desks to O’Mahoney’s, and whispered in his ear, whereupon O’Mahoney announced, “Mr. President, since I began the presentation of this matter, the distinguished junior senator from Idaho has asked to be recognized as a co-sponsor of the amendment…. We shall be happy to welcome the Senator from Idaho as a co-sponsor.”

Johnson had appealed to Frank Church on civil rights partly on pragmatic grounds; Hower, for one, believes that the Foreign Relations seat was the key: “I don’t think anything explicit was ever said—you didn’t deal with Lyndon Johnson that way. But you knew that if you did him a favor, when the time came, if he could do you a favor…. This was the way Lyndon Johnson operated. There was a tacit quid pro quo!” But Johnson had also appealed to elements in the young senator’s character that were not pragmatic at all, as Bethine Church came to understand when, late each July evening now, her husband “replayed” for her the day’s events. The Leader had appealed to her husband’s sense of duty. “You’re a senator of the United States,” he told Church. “You have to function as a senator of the United States. This is your national duty.” He appealed to his sense of history—and to his desire to be part of it. “Frank always had a sense of history,” Bethine says, “and he made Frank feel like he would be a big piece of history if he got involved in this.” He appealed to his love of a challenge. “Lyndon knew he [Lyndon] needed something [to get the civil rights bill passed], and [he knew] he didn’t have it,” Bethine says. “They weren’t going to beat a filibuster. They just wouldn’t get the votes. And unless they got something more, there was going to be a filibuster. The South had said the blood was going to flow if there wasn’t a jury trial amendment. And yet the other people felt the blood would flow if there was a jury trial amendment. Lyndon had to have something more.” And, she says, he made her husband want to find that something. “He made Frank realize that they needed him. Lyndon said: If you don’t help with this, there’s not going to be a civil rights bill. It was a tremendous challenge, and Frank never loved anything as much as a challenge.”

And Lyndon Johnson appealed to elements in Frank Church’s character that were even less pragmatic than that.

Her husband’s sense of justice, his wife says, was one of the things that had made her love him. Although she understood that the nickname “Senator Sunday School” was a sneer at his idealism, she “loved” that nickname, she would say. “That’s how I saw him.” Johnson made Church understand that the important thing was to get a bill passed, even if it wasn’t a perfect bill (“that you could go on later and make it better,” in Bethine’s words), and that even if the bill protected only voting rights, it was worth passing, for voting rights were the key to equality for Negroes. And Johnson also made Church understand why equality for Negroes was important. Although her husband had never said it, Bethine says, “I knew that down deep underneath he cared terribly about equality. He just had never thought about it. And Lyndon brought it out. He appealed to this feeling in Frank. Lyndon made him realize that he cared very much about a civil rights bill. And that they needed him to get one passed. He would come home: ‘This is my fight, too. I’m a United States Senator, and this is the only right way for the country.’ Lyndon brought that out. It’s almost a disservice to Frank to say this, but in the Senate, you have so much to do—you have too much to do. You really do have to pick your fights. And then suddenly Frank found out this was his fight, that this was something he deeply believed in.” Why did Frank come to feel this way?—“Lyndon. Lyndon brought this out. It was a crusade for Lyndon. He was not going to be stuck with this southern image. And he believed in it—he talked about Cotulla. Lyndon brought this out in Frank.”

Astute politically, Bethine Church understood that her husband was far from the only senator with whom Johnson was employing such appeals—that “when he said something like, We need you, if you don’t help, there’s not going to be a civil rights bill—well, I think Lyndon said that to everyone he could, to get them enlisted in this crusade.” But she saw how effective such appeals were with her husband. Frank had said he wasn’t going to get deeply involved. “And the next thing I knew, he was staying late, and at night, he was dead tired, but he just couldn’t unwind. He was in all the way. Lyndon had gotten him in.”

Knowing that Johnson needed “something more”—something that would attract new liberal and Republican votes for the jury trial amendment while not making it totally unacceptable to the South—Church, “being a lawyer,” tried to “think about the amendment” as a lawyer, Bethine says, trying to imagine the details of a voting rights trial. He drafted—often in the evening, at home, on a yellow legal pad—more than a few proposed changes, but discarded them himself either after rereading them or after conferring on the telephone with O’Mahoney. And then one afternoon—probably on the Monday or Tuesday of that climactic week of July 29—while sitting with Bethine in his inner office in the Senate Office Building, “he started to think about the juries themselves and … it was like a light bulb going off!” Liberal antipathy to the amendment centered on the impossibility of getting a just verdict from the South’s all-white juries. “All right,” Bethine recalls Frank saying, “how about this?”—what if the juries weren’t all-white? “If the juries couldn’t be segregated, we could get the jury trial amendment through.”

Church telephoned O’Mahoney, who, Bethine says, “refined the language—he was a wonderful lawyer,” and then it was further refined, by Ward Hower and Siegel and Horwitz, and when they had all finished, the proposed new paragraph in the jury trial amendment—the technical name for this amendment to an amendment is addendum—repealed the section of the United States Code that barred from federal jury duty citizens who did not meet their state’s qualifications for jury duty. Since in southern states, one of the qualifications for proposed jurors was that they be registered to vote in the state, and since in southern states most Negroes were not registered to vote, it was primarily this section that allowed southern states to bar Negroes from jury duty. Church’s addendum said that with the exception of illiterates, mental incompetents, and convicted criminals, “any citizen” twenty-one years old “is competent to serve as a juror.” No one recalls who came up with the phrase that summed up the addendum’s purpose in persuasive terms: with the addition of the new paragraph, the phrase went, the civil rights bill would not only reinforce an existing civil right, the right to vote, but would also confer on southern Negroes “a new civil right”: the right to sit on juries.

Church’s addendum would appeal to northern liberals of both parties—Republicans like Case of New Jersey and Smith of Maine, Democrats like Frank Lausche, Green, Pastore, and Kennedy—who had been unwilling to vote for a civil rights bill that included a jury trial amendment that weakened the bill’s primary purpose of strengthening the civil rights of Negroes to vote. That weakness would now be at least partially offset because the bill would give Negroes a new civil right. And for those liberals who were worried about the reaction of their constituencies (“They didn’t want to be seen as participating in too much vitiating of the bill,” Hower explains), the addendum would furnish them with a response to constituent anger. They could say that the addendum ensured that juries in voting cases would no longer be all white. While this statement was true, it ignored a significant point: although the addendum would allow Negroes to serve as jurors, there would still be whites on the juries, in the southern states probably a majority of whites, and even if there was only one white on a jury, one vote on a jury would be enough to prevent conviction, so that southern juries would probably still not convict whites in racial cases. Church saw the addendum as “symbolic,” less a means of ensuring justice than “the means to pass the bill,” says his administrative assistant, Carver; Church’s legislative assistant, Hower, says, “In practice it would have meant very little in the Deep South, and I think he realized [this]. I’m tempted to use the word ‘gimmick’—okay, I’m usingthe word ‘gimmick.’” At first glance, however, the addendum appeared to make the bill significantly stronger, and that gave these civil rights-conscious senators an argument—a catchphrase, “a new civil right,” which might be as effective with their constituents as the southern senators’ catchphrase (“You can’t be tried as a criminal without a jury”) was with their constituents. The addendum “enabled a number of senators who could not have otherwise supported [the civil rights bill] to do so,” Hower says. “All this going on in the context of the very delicate balance of changing one, or two, or three votes without losing someone on the other side,” and the new paragraph accomplished that. What had been needed to attract new votes for the bill was an excuse, an excuse that would allow liberals to vote for it without provoking the South to vote against it. Now Church had thought of one. The “gimmick” might give the civil rights bill the last few votes it needed to pass—and the important thing was that it pass.

CHURCH WANTED to introduce his addendum immediately, but Johnson told him to wait. Every previously proposed alteration designed to make the jury trial amendment more acceptable to liberal senators had been scrutinized for flaws by liberal lawyers, and then those flaws had been criticized by liberal newspapers and by civil rights organizations until it was difficult for these senators to accept it. To minimize scrutiny of this proposed change, Johnson wanted it introduced only at the last possible moment, so that, as Reedy explains, “there would be no chance for opposition to be mobilized.” He wanted it introduced at exactly the right moment—at the moment when the addition of a new, unexpected, element to the civil rights debate had the best chance of tipping the balance. And he didn’t want the addendum simply to be introduced, he wanted its introduction staged for maximum effect. Lyndon Johnson, master of so many aspects of the legislative art, was about to demonstrate his mastery of one final aspect: the floor debate. While debates seldom change votes, there are rare issues on which they can do so, and this jury trial amendment with its tangle of compelling and conflicting arguments on both sides which had left many senators torn, might be one of them. If Frank Church’s addendum was introduced at the right moment, and if the debate on the addendum was properly orchestrated for maximum effect, it might change a few votes—and a few was all Lyndon Johnson needed.

ON THE MORNING of Wednesday, July 31, Johnson still had only about forty-three votes. Knowland still had about fifty-one. That morning, the Republican Leader repeated his earlier flat refusals to compromise—to accept a jury trial amendment in any form whatsoever. With the amendment included, he said, the bill simply “would not be a workable piece of legislation.” And he sent to the desk three unanimous consent agreements to set a definite hour for a vote on the complete bill. Under the first, the vote would be held on Thursday; under the second, on Friday; under the third, on Saturday. Each would allow six hours for debate prior to the vote. It quickly became apparent, however, that to the South the details of such agreements were irrelevant; no agreement was going to pass. When the clerk finished reading each agreement, Richard Russell said, “Mr. President, I object.” After the third objection, Knowland, calling it “obvious that there are in prospect a considerable number of speeches on this issue,” announced that he would insist on longer sessions “with a view to forcing a vote.” But the South was not going to be forced. Russell rose to speak, and senators waited to hear what the South was going to do. “I have no desire to unduly prolong the debate but I shall insist that it be carried on so long as the representative of a single sovereign state … desires to address himself to it,” he said. The escalation of debate into open filibuster was very near.

That morning, however, at eleven o’clock, Cy Anderson had been ushered into Johnson’s private office in G-14 by George Reedy. Although the railroad brotherhoods had begun lobbying some senators on behalf of the jury trial amendment on Tuesday, their efforts had been desultory, and the brotherhoods themselves had not issued a statement publicly backing the amendment, as John L. Lewis had done. Lewis’ support had brought West Virginia’s two senators around, but in the midwestern states where the brotherhoods were strong, not a single senator’s vote had been changed.

Behind the closed door of his office, Johnson explained to Reedy and Anderson why some of these midwestern Republican conservatives should change their votes, and the following day, Reedy, at Johnson’s direction, embodied these arguments in a memorandum. Typed on plain white paper, the memo bore neither signature nor attribution. Its authorship and purpose, however, are clear from an attached cover note from Reedy to Johnson calling it “Some arguments tailored for Jenner, Goldwater, [Frank] Barrett, et al.” It had been written by Reedy—at Johnson’s close suggestion, if not dictation—to be handed to Republican conservatives to sum up, and lend the force of the printed word to, Johnson’s attempts to persuade them to change their votes.

The memo struck at the heart of the argument that Nixon, Knowland, and the White House liaison men had been making, thus far with success, to hold these senators in line: that it was to the senators’ political advantage to array themselves on the side of black Americans by opposing the jury trial amendment.

Despite the “glib talk” about “political advantages,” the Johnson-Reedy memo said, “there are senators who had better stop, look, listen and think about the politics.” Certainly “there is some political advantage for a man who is running for the Presidency in opposing the jury trial section,” the memo said, but, it pointed out, these senators weren’t running for the presidency. “A senator must run within his state,” and therefore a senator “should think about those groups within his state that feel strongly.” Among the groups opposing the jury trial amendment, the memo said, are the NAACP, “the Walter Reuther-Jim Carey-CIO-social reform section of labor,” and “possibly some unorganized negroes,” and a senator primarily interested in the support of such groups the next time he runs for re-election should therefore vote against the amendment. But, “on the other hand,” the memo said, there are also groups supporting the amendment: “a) the railroad brotherhoods; b) Americans who feel strongly about the jury trial issue.” And “some senators may feel that they would rather have the good will of the railroad brotherhoods and of [these] Americans.” Senators should weigh this support against the other—“they should weigh carefully.”

For senators more interested in the support of the brotherhoods than of the NAACP, for senators from states in which the right of jury trial was at least as prized as civil rights for Negroes—for midwestern senators, in other words—these were compelling reasons to reverse their position and support the jury trial amendment. And the memo gave other reasons, too, and while the political analysis had been couched in conventional, if incisive, terms, and cushioned with civility and ostensible sympathy, in the memo’s discussion of these other reasons, the cushioning grew very thin, as if, with time almost run out, the velvet glove of senatorial courtesy was being stripped off the iron fist of senatorial power. In giving the other reasons, this memo, written by Reedy but embodying the thinking of Lyndon Johnson, comes close, in these last desperate days of a great battle, to putting in writing some realities of life in the Senate, where projects vital to a senator’s future are at the mercy of leaders and chairmen with long memories.

“Another factor which must be considered,” the memo said, “is the future relationships which Senators will have with their fellow Senators. This frequently affects the type of legislation they can pass in the Senate [italics in text]. Those who feel they are better off legislatively cooperating with Douglas, McNamara, Javits and Clifford Case will naturally have a tendency to vote against the jury trial amendment. Those who feel they are better off cooperating with Russell, Mansfield, Pastore, Young, etc…. may have a tendency to vote” for the amendment.

WERE THE GLOVES almost off in the memo? In the face-to-face discussions that Johnson held with Anderson and lobbyists for the other brotherhoods, the gloves may have been removed completely, as not merely “future relationships” but present realities were laid bare. That 15 percent increase in retirement benefits that the brotherhoods wanted so badly? That bill was before the Senate Labor Committee, Lister Hill chairman—and southerner. Another bill giving the brotherhoods a generous tax exemption on retirement contributions was before the House Ways and Means Committee, Jere Cooper chairman—and southerner. And there were other unions with bills they wanted passed—and with their lobbyists, too, with time almost run out now, the gloves were off. There was a bill that would grant a pay raise to postal workers. The senatorial facts of life about that bill were laid out to representatives of the postal workers—not by Lyndon Johnson but by others, possibly by the chairman of the Senate’s Post Office and Civil Service Committee, Olin Johnston. The facts were evidently laid out clearly enough so that they were understood. Suddenly, that Wednesday, outside the east door to the Senate Chamber, in that ornate, chandeliered reception room, there was a crowd of lobbyists, “the swarming representatives,” as Newsweek put it, “of a dozen railroad brotherhoods and fifteen different postal workers unions….”

“These lobbyists felt that if they urged the jury-trial amendment upon doubtful Republicans, they could reasonably expect a certain amount of gratitude on the part of Southern legislators,” Newsweek reported. “And so they went to work, buttonholing one Republican after another” as the senators emerged from the Chamber to go to the dining room or the bathroom, sending notes in to senators who tried to avoid them by not emerging, and then, when in response to the notes these senators emerged, circling them in packs. That Wednesday afternoon, Knowland telephoned President Eisenhower to tell him, Ann Whitman’s notes state, that “the lines were holding and that the Senate was in pretty good shape—that they had all the votes necessary.” Actually, however, the lines were not holding, and late that afternoon there began to be word of “dramatic shifts” in Republican votes. It seems impossible, after the passage of so many decades, to determine exactly what factors motivated various Republican senators to change their stance on the jury trial amendment that day. In most cases, it was probably a combination of factors, and their relative weight can’t be determined. In the case of one midwestern Republican, Schoeppel of Kansas, a key reason, according to contemporary news accounts, was a promise that Eastland’s Judiciary Committee would at last report out the bill authorizing an additional federal judgeship for Kansas. But among the senators of whom Nixon and Knowland had been confident but who, according to news reports, changed their stance that day were not only Schoeppel but two other midwestern conservatives, Capehart and Curtis. And Republicans were not the only senators highly sensitive to union feelings. Thanks to John L. Lewis’ telegram, as Evans and Novak were to write, “Wobbly Democratic liberals who, until then, had refused to join Johnson and the jury trial amendment, out of fear of alienating their liberal constituencies, now had a soft cushion to fall back on: support from an important segment of organized labor.” At least one Democratic liberal, John Pastore, was swayed to the amendment’s side that Wednesday. Under intense pressure from Nixon and Knowland, one or perhaps two Republicans who had been leaning toward the amendment leaned back that day, and the exact count shown on that smudged tally sheet in Lyndon Johnson’s hands is not known, but if he had started the day with forty-three votes, he had more now, and if Knowland had started the day with fifty-one, he had fewer now.

The margin was down to two or three—or less.

IT WAS ALMOST TIME for the curtain to rise—for the drama that Lyndon Johnson was staging for the Church Addendum to begin—and Johnson had it all arranged. He had assembled an all-star cast of orators—fiery old O’Mahoney, fiery young Church, fiery little Pastore—and even the minor roles had been filled with care: a slow-talking, fast-thinking southerner with great presence, Herman Talmadge, was playing “the presiding officer.” Johnson had given all of them their cues, and Church could hardly wait for his moment, but it was dinnertime, and many senators had left the floor to eat. Johnson told him to wait a little longer. He wanted a full house, and at about eight o’clock, when most senators had finished dinner, he asked for a quorum call. And when the floor was again full of senators—almost every desk occupied—the curtain went up.

O’Mahoney had the opening lines—two or three eloquent minutes: “Mr. President, it is my purpose tonight … to explain to the Senate, and to those who may be listening in the galleries, the reasons why I believe, from the depth of my soul, that the trial-by-jury amendment” should pass. Defeating it won’t help Negroes to vote, O’Mahoney said. “Denial of trial by jury will not hasten a wise and permanent solution of the grave social problem of racial discrimination that is before us…. It will only make matters worse than they are, for trial by jury for criminal offenses is itself a civil right guaranteed to every citizen.” And then, recalls Bethine Church, who was seated in the gallery, “Frank looked up at me, and I knew it was going to come.”

Standing up at his desk in the back row, Church shouted, “Mr. President, will the Senator yield?” and O’Mahoney acted surprised at the interruption, and pretended reluctance. “I yield only with the understanding that I shall not lose the right to the floor,” he said. Johnson, playing himself as Majority Leader, delivered his line in the charade. “Mr. President,” he said, “I ask unanimous consent that the Senator from Wyoming may yield for not to exceed two minutes, with the understanding that he shall not lose the floor.” Presiding Officer Talmadge intoned, “Without objection, so ordered,” and Church introduced his amendment, saying it “is designed to eliminate whatever basis there may be for the charge that the efficacy of trial by jury in the Federal courts is weakened by the fact that, in some areas, colored citizens, because of the operation of State laws, are prevented from serving as jurors.” Standing tall and straight among the freshmen in the back row, he said, “We believe the amendment constitutes a great step forward in the field of civil rights. We believe also that it can contribute significantly in forwarding the cause to which most of us are dedicated—the cause of enacting a civil rights bill in this session of the Congress.” Then, as if he was unsure of the answer, he asked if O’Mahoney “would be agreeable to modifying [his] amendment to include the addendum I have before me.” It turned out that O’Mahoney was indeed agreeable. “It was perfectly appropriate for the Senator from Idaho to offer this amendment, which I [am] so happy to accept,” O’Mahoney assured him with a straight face. Ardent Johnson supporter that he was, Richard Neuberger could barely contain himself. In a reference to a hokey stage melodrama of the nineteenth century, he muttered: “What’s next week? East Lynne?”

Stilted though it may have been, the opening scene captured the critics. Daughter of a governor, niece of a senator, born to politics, Bethine Clark Church glanced automatically over at the Press Gallery when O’Mahoney agreed to accept the amendment, and what she saw was rows of reporters jumping up “like a wave” and running up the stairs to the telephones in the Press Room.

Then the rest of Johnson’s scenario unfolded. The Rhode Island bantam with the nimble mind asked for recognition from the chair. No one—not even Johnson’s staff—knew “what John Pastore was going to do,” says Solis Horwitz, who had been invited to sit, on a folding chair, next to Johnson to watch the show. “[Lyndon] did, because he said, ‘Now you just watch the little Italian dancing master and see what happens here.’”

Johnson had cast Pastore in a demanding role: that of a skeptic and doubter who, by giving voice to his doubts, convinces himself that they are groundless and is converted into a true believer. The subject of his doubts, of course, was the jury trial amendment; Johnson had arranged with Pastore to, in Mann’s words, “feign skepticism” of the amendment, to raise the questions about it that many senators were asking, and then to think through the answers to the questions out loud—and finally, seeing the validity of the answers, to be convinced by them, to “almost imperceptibly dissolve his skepticism into outright support” for the amendment. The Rhode Islander began to ask questions of O’Mahoney—the questions that many senators, uncertain about the amendment, were asking themselves: Would the amendment, for example, permit a southern registrar who had been jailed by a judge for civil contempt and then freed when he promised to register Negroes then be able to violate his promise and be in effect immune from punishment because that violation would be criminal contempt, and he would therefore be eligible for trial before a sympathetic jury that would not convict him? When O’Mahoney replied that there was no danger of this, because the judge would have ordered the registrar to register Negroes, and any violation of this order would still be civil, not criminal, contempt, Pastore said, “I think the Senator from Wyoming is moving a little too quickly. I think I know what he means, but I do not believe the Record is abundantly clear”—and led O’Mahoney through the reasoning again step by step until the densest senator could grasp it. And with each question that he asked, Pastore reiterated that he was asking it only to try to resolve his own doubts, that he still had “an open mind…. I have not as yet definitely resolved the matter in my own mind.” As he assured himself on point after point—after saying, on point after point, “I have not been able to make up my mind”—his “misgivings” about the amendment faded, to be replaced by support.

“All of this had been preplanned,” Horwitz was to realize, “and [Pastore] did one of the most effective jobs that was ever done.” His colloquy with O’Mahoney riveted the attention of both sides of the aisle. There were senators—Republican conservatives from the Midwest, most of them—who still had sincere questions about the amendment. From far across the floor, Thye of Minnesota, hater of Democrats, interrupted to ask a question of a Democrat. “The Senator from Rhode Island was making a very impressive statement,” Thye said. “He asked a question. I am as vitally concerned with the answer to that question as [he] is…. If he [O’Mahoney] has the answer, I hope he will give it.” And while O’Mahoney was giving it—during the entire long colloquy, in fact—the Chamber was so still that although the two Democrats’ desks, both in the third row, were somewhat far to the side of the Chamber, and only three desks apart, no one in the Chamber had any difficulty hearing them. By the time Pastore finished “resolving” his doubts—in favor of the jury trial amendment—and said earnestly, “I cannot subscribe to the argument” that the amendment “would be emasculating the bill … I cannot go along with that argument,” he had convinced others. The show Johnson had staged produced the result he wanted. “The impact of Pastore’s performance was profound,” Mann writes. “He played the role of an earnest, undecided senator. But he had actually led his colleagues through a crafty, subtle argument for the amendment.” All through Senate history, there had been speeches that made senators rethink their views. This was one of them. It “actually changed some votes,” George Reedy says. And the next morning—Thursday, August 1—brought to Lyndon Johnson’s office the telegram he had been waiting for: a statement signed by the presidents of the twelve railroad brotherhoods. It was much shorter than John L. Lewis’ and quite straightforward: “WE FAVOR THE ENACTMENT OF AN AMENDMENT TO THE CIVIL-RIGHTS BILL THAT WOULD PRESERVE OR EXTEND THE RIGHT TO TRIAL BY JURY.” Now Johnson had all the ammunition he needed. That morning, Welly Hopkins telephoned him to ask how things were going. They were going just fine, Johnson said. Hopkins recalls that Johnson mentioned “certain senators…. He said, ‘I’ve got them. I’m just going to pick my time to call them. That’s when I’m going to put it to a vote.’” And that day, August 1, Lyndon Johnson sprang his trap.

WILLIAM KNOWLAND WALKED straight into it—blind till the last. That very Thursday morning, at about the same time that Johnson was telling Hopkins that everything was going fine, Knowland was telling reporters—and the White House and Vice President Nixon—that everything was going fine, and reiterating his confidence that “at least thirty-nine or forty” Republican senators would join at least a dozen Democratic liberals in voting against the jury trial amendment. Asked by a reporter whether Church’s addendum would strip away any of the Republican votes, the Republican Leader said he thought not. That morning, copies of the brotherhoods’ telegram were delivered to the offices of individual senators, to be followed by visits from Cy Anderson and other union lobbyists. Pastore’s logic had had time to sink in. And that morning, Lyndon Johnson made his calls—and after several of them, erased the number that he had placed next to senators’ names in one column on his tally sheet and wrote a number in the other column. Richard Russell was also keeping his own very careful tally sheet, and early that afternoon he told Johnson, “I’m ready to vote. I’ve got fifty votes.”

Knowland, however, still believed his own vote count. At any time he might realize the truth, and if he did, he would naturally change tactics: stop pressing for an early vote, and instead try to delay one. Votes had been changing back and forth for days and White House pressure might well change some back again; a delay would afford time for that pressure to do its work. So Johnson made it very difficult for Knowland to change tactics. In a private talk now, he said he assumed that Knowland still wanted to vote as soon as possible. Knowland said he did, and Johnson quickly made those feelings public. Interrupting an exchange about the bill, he said, “I have conferred with the Minority Leader. I know how anxious he is for an early vote. I… am equally anxious to vote [and] I express the hope that we may be able to call the roll before the evening is over.” Turning to Knowland, who was standing next to him, he said, “I would assume that meets with the pleasure of my friend from California.” His friend from California said, “Yes … I wish to say that I am encouraged by the remarks of my good friend, the Senator from Texas, that he feels we may be approaching a time when we can get a vote.”

Later that afternoon, the GOP had yet another encounter with reality. While Knowland couldn’t count, Nixon could, and coming to the Capitol, he did so—and promptly launched a frantic Republican lobbying campaign. One after another, GOP senators were summoned to the Vice President’s Room, “for,” in Douglas Cater’s words, “the kind of subtle persuasion an administration in office can exert.” General Persons hurried over from the White House, and so did Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield, who, as Cater puts it, “suddenly found it a matter of convenience to discuss postmaster appointments.” Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers arrived to answer senators’ technical questions. But at 5:40 p.m., Lyndon Johnson asked for recognition from the chair to propose a unanimous consent agreement to set a time for the vote on the jury trial amendment. And the Majority Leader didn’t propose his own agreement, but rather the very same agreement that had been proposed on Wednesday—had been proposed three times on Wednesday—by the Minority Leader. “Mr. President,” Lyndon Johnson said, “yesterday the distinguished Minority Leader offered a unanimous consent agreement. I wish to offer the same agreement today with two modifications.” The modifications would bring on the vote even faster than the distinguished Minority Leader had wanted; Knowland had, for example, allowed six hours for debate on the amendment. “In view of the fact that we have spent a good deal of time today on the bill, I am reducing the … hours from six to four,” Johnson said. Know-land, aware now that the vote would be, at the least, very close, said he still preferred six, and Johnson suavely said that that was fine with him. Knowland could offer no other objection—he could hardly object to an agreement he himself had proposed over and over, telling the Senate each time how vital its passage was. As they realized the significance of Johnson’s proposal, and the reason why he had made it, liberal senators from both sides of the aisle gathered in little groups on the floor, trying to think what they could do about it. But they could do no more than Knowland had. If Knowland had proposed the agreement yesterday, they had supported it, with equal vehemence; they were hardly in a position to object to it now. Spessard Holland, in the chair, asked, “Is there objection to the unanimous consent request?” There was only silence. “The Chair hears none, and it is so ordered,” Holland said.

Johnson then addressed the chair again. The vote on the jury trial amendment would probably take place that very evening, he said. “It is the intention of the leadership to remain here until a vote is had.”

Irving Ives asked: “When does the debate start? Does it start right now?”

“Right now,” Lyndon Johnson said.

Checkmate.

THE REST was anticlimax. Offstage, off the floor, the Republican efforts intensified now that the Vice President was directing them in person. Aware now that every vote was needed, the GOP managed to contact Maine’s Senator Frederick G. Payne, who had been recuperating from a heart attack and was at his fishing camp in the Maine woods, and persuaded him to fly to Washington for the vote.

Other attempts were less successful, however. Schoeppel and Butler had been two votes of which Knowland had been confident, but now it was suddenly realized that that confidence had not been justified. General Persons telephoned the White House to have Eisenhower speak to the two senators in person. Ann Whitman had to tell the General that the President was out on the golf course, at Burning Tree. Whitman managed to get in touch with him there, and he agreed to see Schoeppel, but when Persons attempted to contact the Senator to arrange a time for the appointment, it proved so difficult that it became obvious that Schoeppel was “avoiding” Persons. “Senator Butler also would not come to see the President,” Whitman wrote in her diary.

That evening, Joe Rauh and Paul Sifton, chief lobbyist for Reuther’s UAW, bumped into Nixon and Rogers right outside the Chamber. “They stopped us and we compared notes on how the votes were going to go, and it was clear it was going to go very badly,” Rauh was to recall. “It was clear that Johnson had the votes.” Nixon could barely contain his anger. Encountering Johnson in the Senate Reception Room, he said, smiling tightly, “You’ve really got your bullwhip on your boys tonight, Lyndon.” As he started to walk by, Johnson replied angrily, “Yes, Dick, and from the way you’ve been trying to drive your fellows, you must have a thirty-thirty strapped to your hip, but it’s not doing you any good.” “Just wait,” Nixon said grimly (and incorrectly). “You’ll find out.”

The setting was the Senate Chamber, of course.

The word had gone out through official Washington that the big vote would be that evening, and the galleries in the Chamber had begun to fill up early in the evening, not with visitors to the city but with its own people, men and women connected with, or fascinated by, government, who wanted to see one of government’s big shows. Evening became night, a hot, muggy Washington summer night, and more spectators came in from dinner parties, some of which had been formal parties at foreign embassies, and in the galleries were jewels and bare shoulders and white shirtfronts and dark suits. The Capitol dome was lit. It gleamed over Washington, high above the men and women walking toward the long, shadowy eastern facade, or driving down Pennsylvania Avenue. The visitors came in out of the dark evening, up the broad marble stairs and between the tall columns, through the bronze doors into corridors sparkling with the crystal and cut glass of chandeliers, and they walked along those corridors past the busts of statesmen and the paintings of heroes, under the richly hued frescoes, into the galleries rimming the long, high-ceilinged room with its pale walls and its four glowing mahogany arcs, until finally even the aisles in the galleries were filled to overflowing, spectators sitting on each step. “There are times—they are very rare—when a scene worth remembering, a moment of real drama and meaning, occurs on the Senate floor,” Stewart Alsop was to write. “[This] was such a moment…. It was a scene of a sort that occurs only once or twice in a decade—every fit Senator on the floor, and the galleries choked with spectators. All present, spectators and senators alike, were caught up in the excitement of the great Senate game. A man’s pulse can be quickened, after all, by a close contest at chess, or on the golf course. But there is nothing quite like the Senate game….”

Below the spectators, among the arcs of desks, senators were making speeches as senators had been making speeches among the desks since the birth of the Republic. There were speeches by liberals assailing the amendment. “Somehow this debate got off on the wrong foot,” Hubert Humphrey said. “Somehow or other we have been more concerned about those who have abused the law, who have denied people the equal protection of the law, than we have been with those who have been victimized.” Paul Douglas said, “All that the pending bill seeks to do is to permit the government of the United States to come into the lists in defense of the poor, the weak, the disinherited, and the disenfranchised. The proposal to inject a jury trial will, if adopted, nullify the law in most cases.” Liberals had become furious as there sunk in on them the realization that they had been outgeneraled, and that their victory was about to be snatched away from them, in that vote that was suddenly so close upon them. “I hope some of my colleagues … will give real and serious thought to whether the Church Amendment which was offered so recently is really understood by the members of this august body who are being called upon to pass it at this time,” Joe Clark said. Some of the liberals cited past cases—such as the one in Alabama’s Bullock County—to prove that southern justice could not be trusted; Cliff Case asked that the judge’s opinion in Sellers et al. v. S. B. Wilson et al. be read into the record, and said the outcome of this “travesty of justice” proved the need for a stronger bill. “What happened, Mr. President?” Case cried. “All members of the Board resigned. The court found, of course, that it was unable to grant the relief, because there was no one on whom its order could operate…. Mr. President, I suggest that the opponents of the pending legislation from those states do not come before the Senate with clean hands.” There were speeches by liberals emphasizing that it was only the addition of the Church Addendum that made it possible for them to vote for the jury trial amendment. “A vote against this amendment is not only a vote against the jury trial,” old Jim Murray said. “It is also a vote against the rights of Negroes to serve on our federal juries. I cannot cast a vote against two elementary civil rights.”

There was also a speech by Frank Church. Many speeches in great Senate debates since the birth of the Republic were bombast for the record, but there were some in this debate that were more than that, and Church’s was one of them. “I can still see him standing there in that back row, so tall and straight,” his wife was to say more than forty years later. “Senator Sunday School.” And she was not the only one in the Senate Chamber who was moved, particularly by the part of the speech in which the young senator was echoing the argument of his Leader that the most important consideration was to take a first step, even if it was not a perfect step.

“Civil rights legislation is long overdue,” Frank Church said. “But in no field of legislative endeavor must we build more carefully or more thoughtfully than here. This field bears the same relationship to other legislative fields as the building of a cathedral bears to the building of a factory. In the field of civil rights, we give voice to the finest impulses of our humanity…. Our workaday structures, as our workaday laws, may be built with ordinary materials. But we must build our places of worship and our laws of liberty with the finest of materials and the greatest of care. These we build for the ages…. Mr. President, I submit that our work in safeguarding civil rights cannot be accomplished in a single stroke. This law is but a single step. It is a law confined to voting rights. It may well be … that in the future this bill may need to be enlarged…. If we provide proper procedures in this bill that accord with the timeless principles of our ancient law, then we will find it possible in years to come to enlarge the scope of this … bill. But if we depart from our traditional procedures in this bill, our departure will haunt us as a recurring barrier to enlarging the scope of… civil rights in future years. That is why I am persuaded that this amendment is indispensable to the long-term interest of civil rights.”

And there was a speech by another young senator, forty-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who also sat in the back row, a speech explaining why he had now—at last—decided to support the amendment. His explanation was based in part on pragmatism—one reason to give the southerners what they want, he said, is to avoid a filibuster. “After observing the course of debate during the past days, I am persuaded that if the O’Mahoney Amendment is not accepted, the passage of the bill will be delayed for weeks and perhaps indefinitely,” he said. It was buttressed with expert opinion—“from outstanding liberal attorneys whom I have consulted…. I ask unanimous consent to have printed at this point in the Record a memorandum which is the result of a telephone conversation with Prof. Mark De Wolfe Howe, professor of law, Harvard Law School….” And it displayed concern not to offend the South, whose votes might be crucial at the 1960 convention. “I am confident that southern juries, presented with convincing evidence and ever mindful of the watching eyes of the nation—and indeed the world—will convict those who dare to interfere with orderly legal processes,” Kennedy said. But in its peroration, Kennedy’s speech rose to an eloquence that gave a hint of things to come. “Finally, Mr. President, this debate … represents … a turning point in American social and political thought. It represents a confrontation of problems which have plagued us too long…. It represents an almost universal acknowledgment that we cannot continue to command the respect of peoples everywhere, not to mention our own self-respect, while we ignore the fact that many of our citizens do not possess basic constitutional rights. However late, we have at last come to the point of a great decision. It is this fact which overshadows our deliberations. To this overarching achievement, history will bear witness.”

All during the hours consumed by speeches, however, the focus of the galleries’ attention was on Lyndon Johnson, who wasn’t speaking.

Johnson wanted it there, and he made sure it stayed there. This evening session of the Senate was his moment, and he made the most of it, and to any spectator who had arrived wondering who was going to be the victor in “the great Senate game,” or who was in charge on the Senate floor, his actions made the answers clear. Dressed in a dark blue suit and gleaming white shirt, with a bright bow tie and, in his breast pocket, a bright handkerchief, he sauntered up and down the aisles with long, loping strides, stopping by one desk to put an arm around a colleague’s shoulders, grinning widely at another, gesturing across the floor at another, bending close to still others to whisper in their ears, sometimes with a hand ostentatiously up to his mouth to make the spectators realize that something secret and important was being said, so that, even though other senators were speaking, he constantly caught the galleries’ eye. When he sat down at his desk, of course, he was sitting down front and center on the Senate stage, and at the adjoining desk, on the other side of the center aisle, was the perfect foil.

“There were many speakers, but the floor was wholly dominated by two big men, stationed cheek by jowl on the center aisle—big, chunky, earnest Minority Leader William Knowland, and lanky Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson,” Stewart Alsop wrote. “They made a fascinating contrast. Knowland sat stolidly, like a great cornered bull, his enormous forehead furrowed in parallel wrinkles, foretasting defeat. Johnson sat back easily, his long legs negligently crossed, when he was not moving restlessly about. Once, when Everett Dirksen of Illinois rose to support Knowland with his special brand of empty grandiloquence (‘I have been thinking much of Runnymede’), Johnson half-yawned and lazily scratched his chest, in a magnificent gesture of casual confidence.” The speeches didn’t matter; Johnson’s every gesture made that clear. What mattered was the votes—and he had the votes.

Finally, after Dirksen had finished, Knowland rose to make a last appeal, poignant because by this time even he knew what its result would be. “This will be a historic roll call. Let it come. Our successors and history will be able to judge the issues, even if for the moment there is confusion here tonight.” He ended by bellowing out a line that must have been difficult for him to say, but which he may have felt represented the only hope left for him. “Support our President, Dwight D. Eisenhower!” he shouted.

Then, as the hands on the clock neared midnight, and Nixon came in to take the presiding officer’s chair, a page placed a lectern on the Majority Leader’s desk, and Johnson himself rose to give the last speech. “Mr. President, sometimes in the course of debate we use loose language. But it is not speaking loosely to say that the Senate is approaching a truly historic vote. By adopting this amendment, we can strengthen and preserve two important rights. One is the right to a trial by jury. The other is the right of all Americans to serve on juries, regardless of race, creed or color.” And his last line was the perfect climax, the most fitting last line, the only last line, really, for a legislative drama.

“Mr. President,” Lyndon Johnson said, “I ask for the yeas and nays.”

FOR A TIME, to those in the galleries, the vote may have seemed to be going against the Leader. The first two senators called—Aiken and Allott—responded “Nay,” and at the end of twenty-five names, with the roll just finishing the Ds, the tally was 16 to 9 against the amendment. But Johnson, sitting at his desk with the smudged tally sheet in front of him, wasn’t worried. He knew what was coming—and, with the start of the Es, it came. “Eastland?” Aye. “Ellender?” Aye. “Ervin?” Aye. By the time the clerk reached the Ms, theayes were ahead—and so many of the Ms were from the Mountain States and the Northwest. “Magnuson?” Aye. “Malone?” Aye. “Mansfield?” Aye. “Murray?” Aye. Shortly after midnight—at 12:19 a.m. on August 2—Nixon announced that the amendment was approved, by 51 votes to 42.

BEFORE THE LAST WORDS were out of Nixon’s mouth, a senator jumped up at his desk on the far left-hand side of the Democratic arc and started not for the cloakroom but for the lobby, because that was where the closest telephone was. He was a senator who no longer moved very fast, because he was old, but he was moving as fast as he could. It was Joseph O’Mahoney. His wife, Agnes, was in a wheelchair, and hadn’t been able to come. He was hurrying to call her to give her the news.

IN THE WAKE OF THE VOTE, emotions spilled over. Richard Nixon could not contain his frustration and rage. When, as he was leaving the Chamber, reporters asked his reaction, the Vice President said, “This is one of the saddest days in the history of the Senate. It was a vote against the right to vote.” Clarence Mitchell went to Knowland’s office to discuss what to do now, and could hardly believe what he saw there. “That big, strong, brusque Knowland actually broke down and cried,” Mitchell was to recall.

What overflowed in Bethine Church was pride. She had been sitting in the Family Gallery all evening, and when the vote began, she did not know how it was going to go. “You couldn’t take notes in the gallery, so I was tallying the vote on my hands and feet,” she was to recall. The vote went, of course, the way her husband wanted it to go, “and when I left the gallery I was so excited.” She hoped there was awareness of Frank’s importance in the civil rights fight, and as she was leaving the Capitol that night, she found out there was. “I got to the bottom floor, and I started through the swinging doors, and Jack Kennedy caught my arm as I was going through the door and he said, ‘Your man pulled it off! He did a great job!’”

Kennedy wasn’t alone in that assessment. “After my role in the passage of that civil rights legislation, Lyndon Johnson was warmly and massively grateful, so much so that I was almost stifled in his embrace,” Frank Church said. “He would pick you up and wrap his arms around you and just squeeze the air out.” The gratitude of the Leader took tangible forms. At a cocktail party early in the year, Bethine, talking with a group of people, had remarked that she had always wanted to visit South America. Johnson had heard her, and two weeks after the jury trial vote, she was in South America. After the vote, Johnson named her husband the Senate’s representative to a ten-day conference, in Buenos Aires, of the Organization of American States. The assignment was “a kind of indication of his new friendship and embrace,” Church realized.

There were other indications. “Nothing was too good for me,” Church was to say. “First [in March, 1958] he put me on the McClellan [Labor] Rackets Committee,” which was about to begin its publicity-rich hearings into the Teamsters Union and Jimmy Hoffa, and told Church why he was doing so: “I’ve got a vacancy there to fill, and it will give you some good exposure…. I think it will be good for you.” And then there was the committee appointment for which Church had longed. “After a decent interval [after the jury trial addendum], Johnson put him on Foreign Relations, in what was a tacit quid pro quo, which was never expressed, but which I think was understood,” Ward Hower says.

Actually, the interval was barely decent. The very next vacancy on Foreign Relations occurred in January, 1959, and Church was appointed to it. In making the appointment Johnson simply bypassed not only Estes Kefauver but Scoop Jackson and a half dozen other senators with greater seniority than Church who had requested the post. Church had wanted “not only to go on” the committee, but “to go on early,” so that he could be chairman, like Borah, someday. Now he had gone on early; calling on its staff director, Carl Marcy, not long after his appointment, he looked at the portraits of the committee chairmen hanging on the wall, and said, “Maybe someday I’ll be there.”

And there was a note—undated, but it was probably written in 1958—scribbled by Lyndon Johnson one day when he was sitting in on a meeting of the Interior Committee of which Church was a member, a note that indicates how accurately Johnson had read the easy-to-follow text that was Frank Church. “Frank,” the note said, “I told Drew Pearson yesterday I wanted him to help me give you a build up over the years that would give you the recognition your ability deserve[s]. Someday you can, may & should be our President.”

*See Volume I, The Path to Power, pp. 450–53.