41

Omens

THE PASSAGE OF THE JURY TRIAL AMENDMENT, coming on top of the elimination of Part III, infuriated Republicans—those who had been fighting for Brownell’s unamended bill out of a sincere belief in civil rights because they felt that those two changes rendered the original bill meaningless, those who had been fighting for political advantage for the GOP because they felt the advantage had been lost. They sought to regain it. Fuming from his long and fruitless day trying to win back GOP senators, Vice President Nixon, flanked by Deputy Attorney General Rogers, was heading out for dinner on the evening of the jury trial vote when he encountered Joe Rauh and Paul Sifton in a Senate corridor. They had a brief conversation—the conversation in which all four agreed that they were about to lose that vote—and then Nixon said, “Boys, I think we ought to consider whether the best strategy wouldn’t be to just let the civil rights bill die in conference this year, and then make an all-out fight for a stronger bill next year.” President Eisenhower, informed of the result when he awoke the next morning, could not have been angrier if he had missed an easy putt. He opened that day’s Cabinet meeting by calling the Senate action “one of the most serious political defeats of the past four years, primarily because of a denial of a basic principle of the United States,” the right to vote, and his formal statement at that day’s press conference, read with a grim expression on his face, was one of the angriest he had ever made publicly about Congress. “Rarely in our entire legislative history have so many extraneous issues been introduced into the debate,” he said, adding how “bitterly disappointing” the vote had been to “millions of Americans who … will continue … to be disenfranchised.” “The blackest of black days,” Ann Whitman wrote in her diary.

The gutting of the bill—even with Church’s addendum to the jury trial amendment—infuriated some African-American leaders. Among those who urged Eisenhower not to sign it were some from a new generation, like Jackie Robinson, who telegraphed, “HAVE WAITED THIS LONG FOR BILL WITH MEANING—CAN WAIT A LITTLE LONGER,” and some from the old, like A. Philip Randolph, who said, “It is worse than no bill at all.” And some black Americans blamed Lyndon Johnson for the gutting. Ethel Payne, who was covering the Senate for theChicago Defender, was to recall how “We all sat watching while Lyndon Johnson, the most astute maneuverer on the Hill, cracked his whip and marshalled his forces to cut the guts and the heart out of the bill.” And the changes infuriated liberals, who saw the addendum as a cynical device to give the appearance of meaningfulness to something that had no meaning since southern juries would almost certainly include at least one white. “Can one then picture a jury from the Deep South unanimously finding a white election official guilty for depriving a Negro of the right to vote?” Paul Douglas asked. “A hung jury is almost as good as an acquittal.” Church’s idealistic young staff members Ward and Phyllis Hower felt their senator had been wrong to introduce it; so “emotional” was Phyllis about it that for weeks she could barely bring herself to talk to her boss.

What good was the bill as a whole? liberals asked. The jury trial amendment rendered toothless the provisions about voting—and voting was now the only right covered by the bill. “The Federal government is still prevented from coming to the aid of hard-pressed citizens whose civil rights to unsegregated schooling, transportation, and other public facilities are denied,” Paul Douglas said. “These people, who are almost universally poor and weak [must still] fight their costly and protracted legal battles alone…. It has been the advocates of segregation and white domination who have won the major triumph.” An old man who for years had stood shoulder to shoulder with Douglas, and who had left the Senate battlefield because he was afraid he could no longer be effective on it, had been anxiously following the debate in a Congressional Record that he had arranged to have flown every day to his hotel in Switzerland, and he wrote to console his longtime ally. “I know how deeply you have felt on this subject, and of your inevitable sense of disappointment and frustration,” Herbert Lehman wrote. “I want you to know, however, how much I have admired your leadership…. What you have done has been one of the few bright spots in an otherwise very gloomy and frightening situation.” But Lehman had to confess that he himself was “sorely disappointed…. The bill in its present form will be merely a gesture and quite ineffective.” The anger of such liberals focused on Lyndon Johnson—“I was so mad at Johnson I was speechless, for gutting the bill so much,” recalls Joe Rauh—and was given voice by liberal columnists. On August 5, for example, Thomas Stokes denounced “the sham perpetrated upon the Senate and the American people” which “intrudes upon the human dignity of millions of persons who for a long time have suffered denial of guaranteed rights which the rest of us take for granted.”

“The civil rights fiasco in the Senate … was admittedly a triumph for the southern wing,” Stokes wrote. “It was, too, a compliment, if of dubious character, for the ingenious and slick leadership of Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas. In this case, he virtually compromised the civil rights bill out of existence in the zeal of exercising his talents of maneuver and behind-the-scenes negotiations of which he is so proud…. Looking back on it all, we might say that never was strategy so brilliant to bring about so evil a result.” The New York Post, which had been denouncing Richard Nixon for years, said that in this fight Lyndon Johnson had made even Nixon look good.

FRUSTRATION AND ANGER LED some Republican senators at first to favor the course that Nixon had suggested in the Senate corridor. Somehow the civil rights issue, which was their issue, had been captured by the Democrats. “The Republicans are understandably quite furious that Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, the Senate Democratic Leader, is now getting the credit of sorts for having navigated a civil rights bill through the Senate without… a filibuster,” Rowland Evans wrote. And if the Democrats got credit, the Republicans might well get blame. The bill had been stripped of its enforcement provisions—and the burden of enforcement would fall on a Republican Justice Department. When enforcement efforts failed, as, thanks to the jury trial amendment, they would inevitably fail, “the Republicans, not the Democrats, will have to make the explanations to disillusioned Negro voters,” Evans wrote. The solution for the GOP might lie in the next stage of the bill’s legislative journey: the House had passed a bill—Brownell’s original bill, a bill that included Part III and did not include any provision for jury trials—very different from the bill the Senate had passed. The two bills had to be reconciled, and unless some unusual step was taken, they would go for reconciliation to a joint House-Senate conference committee. Southern representatives and senators were generally heavily represented on these committees, which also included key members of the committees into whose jurisdiction the bill fell—so not only Judiciary’s Olin Johnston but Judiciary’s Chairman Jim Eastland might well be members of the Senate delegation. If a compromise could not be agreed on, the bill would die in conference. That prospect was not at all displeasing to some Republicans: Since the bill could only hurt their party, why not just let it die? Since the conference committee would be dominated by Democrats, Democrats would be blamed for the death, and civil rights would then be a potent issue for the GOP in the 1958 election year. “It would be infinitely better to let the bill die and wait three months [until January, 1958, when the next session of Congress would begin] and get a real bill,” House GOP Leader Joseph Martin said.

In the first flush of resentment over the jury trial amendment, those senators who were derided as “the all-out civil rights forces” felt the same way. Nixon’s suggestion had struck a responsive chord in the deeply disappointed Rauh, and after the yeas and nays had confirmed their gloomy prediction and Rauh was leaving the gallery, he told Paul Sifton angrily, “This bill is worth less than nothing.” Leaving Sifton, he walked out of the Capitol, into the night, and felt himself seized with anger. “Well, let’s kill the bill, maybe Nixon’s right,” he muttered to himself. Other members of the Douglas Group felt the same way. Wayne Morse said he hoped the Senate would reject “this bad bill” when the vote on the entire bill was taken on August 7. And of course the South agreed. What, from Richard Russell’s standpoint, had been the most desirable result all along but the death of the bill? What difference did it make, ultimately, where it was killed? If it hadn’t been done on the Senate floor, then the Conference Committee would do just fine.

While that was liberals’ first reaction, however, it didn’t last. Liberals and black leaders—the veteran, battered crusaders for civil rights—had been fighting for so long in vain that, on more sober consideration, they realized how hard it had been to pass any civil rights bill, and how essential it was that that accomplishment, no matter how meagre it was, be recognized. The morning after the 51–42 vote, Joe Rauh was just getting out of bed when his telephone rang, and it was Clarence Mitchell saying, as Mitchell’s biographer recounts, “that the civil rights forces had to support what was left of the bill before people got the idea that the legislative process could not work in the field of civil rights.” This bill, no matter how weak it was, was proof that the process could work, Mitchell said. Congress hadn’t passed a civil rights law in eighty-two years, but it was on the very verge of passing one now. Mitchell recognized, his biographer says, “the psychological and historical importance” if it was actually passed.

Dealing with these leaders was made easier also by their hope that if the accomplishment was finalized—if the House and Senate versions were reconciled into one bill, and the bill was signed into law—future accomplishments would become easier; Johnson’s argument was being accepted, right down to its wording. Recalls Richard Boiling: “All of a sudden you started hearing it all over the place: ‘We’ve got to break the virginity.’ You heard guys saying that thing about ‘Once they do it the first time, it won’t be so hard to get them to do it the next time.’” And it was made easier by their understanding—since they for so long had gotten, for all their efforts, nothing—that this bill, no matter how weak it was, was not nothing. It may not have been much, but it was something.

In addition, Johnson had on his side, in Philip Graham, a very potent weapon. Johnson needed that weapon. It was difficult for him to talk directly to some of these leaders—including the one who was probably the single most influential, ADA National Chairman Rauh—so great was their distrust of him. So the weapon had to be deployed, no matter what the cost.

“By the summer of 1957, Phil was clearly exhausted and in need of rest,” Katharine Graham would say. She did not know then how ill her husband was, but it was, she would write, “obvious … that he was high-strung and had overextended himself.” They had decided, in her words, to “retreat to Glen Welby,” and had spent the summer “playing with the children and just doing nothing,” except for occasional interludes like the luncheon for Rauh and Frankfurter. And then, right after the passage of the jury trial amendment, Lyndon Johnson telephoned Phil at the farm and asked him “to come back to Washington to help him win passage” of the civil rights bill. Mrs. Graham tried to persuade him not to go. “I knew that he was very frail,” she would say. “I knew that he shouldn’t go up and do that.” She was, however, unsuccessful. “So Phil returned to Washington, somewhat to my concern, and stayed with Lyndon almost constantly for several days, working day and night,” telephoning Rauh and other civil rights leaders to urge them to support the bill even in its weakened form, making one call after another, far into the evening. On several nights, he slept on a couch in Johnson’s office. Graham would, of course, have been a wonderful advocate even had he not brought with him the power of the Post, so deeply did he believe in what he was fighting for. “From the point of view of many political observers, what LBJ did was to take everything out of the bill except the right to vote,” Mrs. Graham was to write. “Phil’s argument was that the only thing that really counted about the bill was the right to vote.” He spent a great deal of time on the telephone with Rauh, George Reedy recalls. “You could see he was very tired, nervous, but more than anyone else, I think you have to say it was he who persuaded Rauh.”

Graham persuaded Rauh, and Rauh helped persuade Roy Wilkins, who in 1957 was another civil rights leader whose feelings about Lyndon Johnson were, at best, ambivalent. “In those days, Johnson was just beginning to get religion on civil rights,” Wilkins was to write in his autobiography. “He dreamed of becoming President himself, and knew that so long as he had Jim Crow wrapped around him, the rest of the country would see him only as a Southerner, a corn-pone Southerner at that, rather than a man of national stature. So around 1957 he began to change his course on civil rights.”

“With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet,” Wilkins was to write. He and other black leaders had had “a number of meetings with Johnson during the spring and early summer” of 1957, at which “he told us frankly that all he cared about was voting rights, that the bill couldn’t pass with Title III.” Wilkins could understand that—“That was too much for Dixie,” he was to say. But it was much harder to swallow the jury trial amendment. That, he was to say, “was simply a device to defend segregation, not to defend the sanctity of the jury system.” But Rauh and other liberals worked on Wilkins—“Roy,” Hubert Humphrey said to him one day, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned in politics, it’s never to turn your back on a crumb”—and Wilkins finally agreed to call a meeting of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights: the leaders of sixteen organizations—the NAACP, the ADA, three Jewish organizations including the American Jewish Congress, the American Council on Human Rights, the international Elks organization, a Quaker organization, the National Community Relations Advisory Board, and seven major labor unions—to “thrash the problem out.”

The Senate vote on the overall civil rights bill was scheduled for Wednesday evening, August 7, and the meeting, held in the library of Rauh’s law firm on K Street, began on Wednesday morning. At the beginning of the day, the prevailing sentiment was to decline to support the bill, but the prevailing sentiment hadn’t had Phil Graham talking to it. “Joe [Rauh] argued that … once Congress had lost its virginity on civil rights, it would go on to make up for what had been lost,” Wilkins wrote.

Johnson, on the Senate floor, was waiting anxiously for news, and that morning Reedy handed him a note giving him some, which Reedy had received from one of the participants in the meeting, Ken Birkhead: “NAACP, ADA, and other civil rights organizations are going to put out a statement about noon damning the Senate bill… but saying in effect they prefer it to no bill at all,” the note said. That seemed like good news—but it turned out to be premature; “All day long we argued and struggled,” Rauh was to recall.

The most prominent African-American in that room was Wilkins. “If I had gone against the bill, I think it would have collapsed,” he was to say, and he was probably correct. “The Republicans … were for letting it die. The liberals would not have gone on against me.”

“I had never felt quite so much on the spot,” Wilkins was to recall. He was torn between the two sides. “I had wanted something much stronger [than the bill]. I had opposed the jury trial amendment. I had winced at the arguments of old friends who said that since the South had not filibustered to kill the bill it had to be too weak to be worth anything.” On the other hand, “from a dry-eyed point of view, I thought it was impossible to argue that the bill was worth less than nothing.” And “in the end,” he says, “I concluded that at the very least the measure would expand Negro registration…. I also hoped that if the bill passed we would be able to demonstrate its weaknesses by the 1960 election and get much stronger legislation. With the bill passed we were in a better position to campaign than we would have been without it…. At the end of that long afternoon, I decided to buck the prevailing sentiment against the bill and support it.” That decision, Wilkins was to say, “was one of the hardest I have ever made.” But it was crucial. Johnson had persuaded Graham, and Graham had persuaded Rauh, and Rauh had persuaded Wilkins—and now, in that law library on K Street, Wilkins persuaded the Leadership Conference. In the late afternoon, at the end of a long day, the conference issued a statement saying that “Disappointing as the Senate version is, it does contain some potential good,” and therefore should be passed. The Washington Post found the statement good. “The 16 national organizations … have taken a realistic view,” said its editorial the next day. “All of them recognize that an amended bill is vastly preferable to no bill at all. It is noteworthy that among the signers is Roy Wilkins….”

•    •    •

THE SENATE VOTE on the overall bill began at about eight o’clock that Wednesday night, by which time the Leadership Conference statement supporting the measure had been circulated on Capitol Hill. Its passage had already been assured, but it had been expected that some Republicans and liberals would join the South in voting against it. The statement changed that, even for Knowland. “With the pending bill we have made some advances in civil rights,” the Republican Leader said in his closing statement. And the bill, he said, “will be further improved in the [conference] committee. It will be greatly improved over the Senate version.” Not a single Republican, and only one liberal—Wayne Morse—voted against it. Only seventeen of the twenty-two southern senators joined Morse in voting against the bill. Florida’s Smathers voted for it, as did Tennessee’s Gore and Kefauver, and the two senators from Texas: Ralph Yarborough and Lyndon Johnson. Five senators didn’t vote, and the vote for passage—the decisive vote in the 1957 civil rights fight: the first time in eighty-two years, the first time since Reconstruction, that the Senate had passed a civil rights bill—was 72 to 18.

The next morning, at about six o’clock, Rauh received another telephone call, this time from Phil Graham. “I just had the strangest call,” Graham said. “I had the strangest call from Lyndon. He said, ‘Phil, of all the strange things, who the hell do you think is saving that bill for me? That crazy, goddamned friend of yours, Joe Rauh, is saving that bill for me.’”

“I wasn’t saving it for him, because I hated his guts for what he was doing to school desegregation,” Rauh was to say. “That was a crime against the Negroes when Lyndon Johnson knocked out Part III…. But Johnson was right. We had to have a breakthrough.” Thirty-five years later, when Joe Rauh died, Katharine Graham summed it up in the eulogy she delivered at his memorial service. “Joe understood that you had to show you could pass something, even something small, to go forward and pass something big.”

Whether or not Joe Rauh “saved” the civil rights bill, he certainly smoothed the way for the next steps needed if it was to become law. For more than two weeks following that Senate vote, Republicans sincerely committed to civil rights (notably New Yorkers Brownell, Rogers, and Congressman Kenneth Keating) insisted—as did Knowland and Joe Martin, both of them still unable to grasp the strategic situation—that the House reject the Senate version and repass its original, stronger version of the bill. Unless “major steps” were taken to “put more teeth” back into the measure, Martin said on August 10, the bill would be sent to a joint House-Senate conference committee—where, of course, it would die. But the Civil Rights Leadership Conference issued another statement—reiterating that the Senate version should be accepted as the best that was realistically possible. With that statement, the opposition to the bill crumbled. How could anyone contend that a civil rights bill should not be passed when the pre-eminent civil rights organization said it should? Know-land and Martin continued to bluster to reporters, Martin saying that it would be “infinitely better” to have no bill than to pass one as “bitterly disappointing” to America’s Negroes as the one the Senate had passed, and threatening to withhold Republican support from the bill and have the Republicans on the Conference Committee hold the bill there indefinitely unless it was strengthened. But there was one question—asked by reporters virtually every time Knowland or Martin made such statements—which punctured their bravado, a question to which every possible response was lame. As the New York Times put it: “Asked how he reconciled this [statement] with the fact that the NAACP was seeking approval of the Senate bill as the best available, Martin replied that the NAACP leaders did not speak for all Negroes.”

There was bluster, too, in the weekly meetings of GOP legislative leaders at the White House. Brownell’s deputy Rogers called the bill “a monstrosity—the most irresponsible act he had seen during his time in Washington…. [the] revised Section IV limited to voting rights and providing for jury trials would be like giving a policeman a gun without bullets.” The President, apparently firmly convinced by Brownell and Rogers of the unwisdom of a jury trial amendment, supported them. At one meeting, the minutes reported, “the President spoke at length in favor of fighting it out to the end to prevent the pseudo-liberals from getting away with their sudden alliance with the southerners on a sham bill…. The President thought it ironic that the Democrats had succeeded in making it appear that any civil rights legislation that might be enacted would be their proposal.” But there was a master of realpolitik in the room. “The Vice President summarized that the Republicans would be blamed for any failure to enact Civil Rights legislation in the event that Republicans voted to send the bill to Conference [a conference committee] and it died there.”

Eventually Nixon’s pragmatism carried the day in Republican councils. On the Democratic side of the House there were no councils; Sam Rayburn made his wishes known. On August 27, by a vote of 279 to 97, the House accepted the Senate bill with only one minor change—a face-saving compromise Johnson had worked out that slightly diluted the jury trial amendment and therefore slightly strengthened the bill. (It allowed judges to try minor voting rights offenses without a jury.) That crucial vote, unexpected in its one-sidedness, meant the measure could go back to the Senate, and if the Senate accepted that change, repassing the bill with that one change written into it, the bill would not go to conference.

More than a few of the southern senators, most notably Thurmond, Talmadge, and Harry Byrd, did not want to accept that change, and they felt they didn’t have to: that the year was by now so far advanced—and senators so eager to get out of Washington—that the will and the votes to close off a filibuster did not exist, if indeed they ever had. “When, however, Thurmond attempted to persuade the Southern Caucus to filibuster, Dick Russell countered with the same reasoning he had been using all year to deflect one. The southerners could use that reasoning to deflect the anger of constituents over their failure to filibuster—and they did. As Willis Robertson wrote one constituent, “I can assure you that a careful appraisal of the situation confronting us convinces the Southern Senators that if we attempt a filibuster, cloture would promptly be imposed, in which event, not only would we lose our present fight but would invite the establishment of a precedent to plague us next year should an effort be made” to amend Rule 22. And in the end, all of the southerners but one agreed, as usual, to accept their general’s decision. When the bill returned to the Senate, Strom Thurmond held the floor for twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes—the longest one-man filibuster in the Senate’s history—drawling out the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and George Washington’s Farewell Address—but that scene from the Senate’s past was a solo performance; none of his fellow southerners would join him, and they were furious at him because they felt he was showing them up for not filibustering themselves; “They felt,” as one article said, “that Mr. Thurmond was leaving in the South a public image of a single southern senator standing at barricades that had been deserted by the others.” “Oh, God, the venomous hatred of his southern colleagues,” George Reedy was to recall. “I’ll never forget Herman Talmadge’s eyes when he walked in on the floor of the Senate that day and saw Strom carrying on that performance.” Even Russell, faced with what theAtlanta Constitution called “rumblings of criticism [that] are being heard” in Georgia, felt a need to justify his strategy, telling the Constitution that the South had “nothing to gain and everything to lose” by filibustering, and declaring, “Under the circumstances we faced, if I had undertaken a filibuster for personal aggrandizement, I would forever have reproached myself for being guilty of a form of treason against the South.” Thirty-five years later, Thurmond himself, his biographer Nadine Cohodas wrote, “was [still] adamant” that a full-scale filibuster would have been successful “if Russell had gone along. He refused to concede that the Georgian’s tactical compromises were necessary and remained convinced that Russell was motivated more by a desire to help Lyndon Johnson pass a civil rights bill—and thereby boost the Texan’s presidential hopes—than by a wish to protect the South or the filibuster rule.” When Thurmond finished talking, the Senate, on August 29, passed the revised bill by a 60–15 vote, and on September 9, President Eisenhower signed it into law.

AUGUST 27, the day of the crucial House of Representatives vote to approve the Senate’s version of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, was Lyndon Johnson’s forty-ninth birthday.

His fortieth birthday had been a very bad day in his life, a day on which it had seemed likely that he would never sit in the United States Senate. August 27, 1948, had been the eve of Election Day in his senatorial contest with Coke Stevenson, and polls taken that election eve showed that Stevenson was still solidly ahead. Johnson was intending to leave politics forever if he lost that election—and on his birthday, it had seemed likely that he would lose. He was convinced that a man’s fortieth birthday was a milestone in his life: that if he hadn’t accomplished anything by forty, he was unlikely ever to accomplish anything. On his fortieth birthday, Horace Busby recalls, he felt “he had done very little in his life”—and he felt that he never would.

August 27, 1957, was a very different day. He had come a long way in the nine years since 1948, and on this day, the day on which the House vote made his great achievement a certainty, he seemed to know it. He spent much of the day in the Senate Democratic cloakroom that he had made his domain, telephoning the twenty Texas representatives in the House to try to persuade them to vote for the bill, and in the end twelve of the twenty voted for it, a small exclamation point accentuating his triumph. During the day, Mary Rather came to the door of the cloakroom with a message that meant a lot to him. That morning’s Baltimore Sun had contained a favorable cartoon by Richard Yardley, whose drawings were a barometer of liberal opinion. He had told Willie Day Taylor to ask Yardley for the original. Willie Day had done so, and when Yardley agreed, had invited him to see the cartoon collection in Johnson’s office. Yardley said he would like to, “but I’d like to come see them hanging in the White House.” Ms. Rather relayed the message to Johnson, and when she returned to the Senate Office Building, told Willie Day his reaction: “This message made our tired boss smile.”

And there would be, that day, broader smiles.

The team that had won the Little League Baseball world championship was brought to the Capitol steps to meet the Majority Leader, and the team was from Monterrey, Mexico. As the little Mexican boys clustered around him, one of them, Angel Macias, handed him his baseball cap, and Lyndon Johnson suddenly bent down and scooped Angel up, holding him in one arm while he tried on the cap with the other. Thirty years before, he had made it possible for the Mexican boys in Cotulla to play baseball, and it had hurt him when, in the early mornings, he had heard trucks taking them away instead. He had wanted to do something for them, and had promised himself that if ever he had the power, he would. And now, on Lyndon Johnson’s face, as he held the little Mexican boy in his arms, posing for a photographer, was an expression that photographers almost never caught, an expression that was almost never on Johnson’s face when a camera was pointing at it because he always wanted to look statesmanlike or shrewd, so that when a camera was pointing at him, he looked either solemn and pompous, or calculating. On his face this time, as Angel Macias hugged him, and Lyndon Johnson tilted the baseball cap back as the photographer asked, was a wide, carefree smile, a smile that lit up his whole face, a smile as big and lighthearted—as happy—as the smile of the little boy grinning up at him.

That evening, at about six o’clock, there was a little party in Skeeter’s office to cut his birthday cake. Only a few senators had been invited, and all of them who were still in Washington came, and their names reveal the scope of his triumph: Russell, Byrd, Ervin, Smathers, Kerr, Fulbright—he had managed, despite passing a civil rights bill, to hold the South; Humphrey, Pastore, Kennedy—he had held some liberals, too.

And then there was the big party. It was a Texas party, so of course it was in Dale and Scooter Miller’s Mayflower suite. Before he went, Lyndon Johnson changed into a blue suit. Did he remember how, just two years before, he had told Bird to keep the blue one, that he would be able to wear it however things worked out? Now he knotted a tie, bright yellow because it was a Texas party, and tucked a bright yellow handkerchief into his breast pocket, and Bird, radiant in a lacy lemon-colored dress, a smile all over her face, too, pinned a yellow rose on his lapel, and walked behind him, carrying the remnants of the cake—there was no sense in wasting it—as he strode out to the long limousine with the chauffeur holding open the door, and was driven down to the Mayflower, where Scooter was arranging and rearranging the big bouquet of yellow roses that the Nixons had sent, and where Dale had been nervously telling the band for an hour that he wanted “The Yellow Rose of Texas” to be struck up the instant Senator Johnson appeared.

The party was perfect, too. Everyone was there: a dozen ambassadors (there was a brief ceremony when the Korean Ambassador made him an honorary citizen of that nation); Washington royalty—the Cafritzes and Perle Mesta; Texas royalty; as well as the man who mattered most to Lyndon Johnson. Sam Rayburn had a rare smile on his face, and a present that said a lot about this gruffly sentimental man’s feeling toward Johnson; it was a set of gold cuff links and shirt studs that he had, years before, given as a very special gift to his friend Alben Barkley. Barkley’s widow, Jane, had given them back to Rayburn when Barkley died, and Rayburn said he wanted Lyndon to have them now. Accepting the gift, Johnson told Rayburn, “I don’t know of anyone for whom I have had more affection in my forty-nine years than for you. But the greatest thing you have ever done is what you and twelve other Texans did today when you voted as you did on this civil rights bill.” And then there was the moment that was the perfect ending to the perfect day. All that evening, back in the Senate Office Building, Walter Jenkins had been on the telephone to Wisconsin, where the special election to fill Joe McCarthy’s seat had been held that day. All evening, the news had been getting better and better, and just before midnight, it was confirmed, and Jenkins telephoned Johnson at the Mayflower, just moments before William Proxmire did so himself. “Senator Johnson,” Proxmire said, “I’ve got the biggest birthday present of them all for you: me.” Proxmire had indeed pulled off the upset victory, and would be the fiftieth Democratic senator. Even if Matthew Neely died (as, indeed, he would, four months later), Johnson would still be Majority Leader.

When Proxmire gave him the news, Lyndon Johnson said, “Well, the people of Texas have been awfully good to me for a long time. But I must say I never expected this much kindness from the people of Wisconsin.” He was almost beside himself with joy. The next evening, while he was in the Senate cloakroom waiting for Thurmond to finish his filibuster, he sent an aide to find out when Proxmire was planning to come to Washington, and was told he was already on his way, that he was flying in that night and was expected to arrive shortly. He hustled the nearest five senators out to his limousine and off to National Airport, where they were waiting on the tarmac to welcome the Proxmires when they came down the stairs from the plane. Seeing Proxmire there in the flesh—the living proof that he would still be Majority Leader when Congress reconvened in 1958—Johnson couldn’t do enough for him. He announced that he would give the newest senator a luncheon to celebrate his swearing-in the next day—a lunch for one hundred people in the grandest setting he could provide: the Old Supreme Court Chamber. And he gave him the committee he wanted: Banking and Currency. As soon as he took his desk, after the swearing-in, Proxmire asked for recognition from the chair and said that he knew it was tradition for a new senator to remain silent for a while, but that he felt it was his duty to thank Johnson “for the fine things that the Majority Leader has done for us.” Johnson jumped up to reply. Was Proxmire thanking him for the things he had done? He would do more! He announced on the spot that he was giving the newest senator the most prized junket he had available: a trip to West Germany at the invitation of the West German Bundestag. Reporters watching Lyndon Johnson saw a man transfused with happiness; as Mary McGrory wrote in the Washington Star: “Leadership of a Senate majority is not among the usual remedies prescribed for victims of a heart attack. In this case it seems to have been good medicine.” Johnson works very hard, McGrory wrote, but “he works hard because he enjoys it. One gets the impression that no matter what the future may hold, Senator Johnson right now would rather be Senate Majority Leader than anything else in the world.”

LYNDON JOHNSON’S EXULTATION was justified for many reasons, but one of them was not the effectiveness of the bill he had gotten passed. To excuse its inadequacies, his partisans in later years would argue what Joe Rauh argued at the time: that little as it was, it was better than nothing. There was a phrase that summed up that argument—“Half a loaf is better than none”—and the phrase could be employed to evoke poignant overtones: “It seems to me,” George Reedy said, “that people who sneer at half a loaf of bread have never been hungry.” The validity of this metaphor to describe the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was undercut, however, by the Act’s results, for in terms of what was needed to bring justice to black Americans, the Act was not half a loaf of bread, or even a slice. Hubert Humphrey had described it more accurately when he called it a “crumb.”

Even before it was signed, events overtook it. On September 3, five days after the final Senate vote had sent the measure to the White House for signature but before Eisenhower had signed it, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas had, as Stephen Ambrose writes, “presented Eisenhower with exactly the problem he had most wished to avoid, outright defiance of a court order by a governor,” and after three weeks of further defiance, all the controversy that had surrounded Part III became moot. Richard Russell had said that if Part III was passed, it would give the President power to enforce school desegregation with federal bayonets; Part III had been removed. But on September 24 the President nonetheless enforced school desegregation with bayonets, sending a thousand paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division, bayonets fixed, into Little Rock to ensure the safety of nine Negro schoolchildren who wanted to attend Central High School. At least part of the blame for the crisis has to be laid at the President’s doorstep: as Ambrose was to write, “By allowing events to run their course, by attempting to negotiate with Faubus, by failing to ever speak out forcefully on integration, or to provide real leadership on the moral issue, he found himself in precisely the situation he had most wanted to avoid. His options had run out. [He had] no choice but to use force.” But when he decided to use it, there was no legal impediment; as Brownell had contended all along, the President clearly had the power to use force to compel obedience to a court order—with or without Part III.

Equally important, with Part III gone, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 dealt only with voting rights. The Act did not even pretend to deal with such manifestations of injustice as segregation in housing, in restaurants, in schools. “When Johnson took Part III out of the House bill, he set back integration in the South for seven years,” Joe Rauh was to say. “Part III passed in 1964—the Part III that was taken out in ’57 in essence became a part of the ’64 Act. But for seven years there was no federal power to bring injunction suits.”

As for Part IV—the amended Part IV—it proved to be all but useless, not only because local election officials, certain that they would still be tried by friendly juries, were emboldened to continue discriminatory election practices, but because of what would be called a “lack of will within the administration to enforce” that Part. During its remaining three years in office, the Eisenhower Justice Department filed only ten suits against southern registrars for “arbitrary refusals to register” qualified Negroes. These suits were stalled by state judges; one Georgia judge ordered officials in Terrell County to withhold voter records from federal agents even if a special police force had to be enlisted—and presumably armed—to enforce that order. At the end of 1958, in the eight southern states in which the Southern Regional Council was able to obtain official figures, not only had the number of registered black voters not risen, it had actually fallen—and those states did not include Mississippi or Alabama, probably the two most recalcitrant states, where no official registration figures were kept; at the end of 1960, the net gain in black registration in the Old Confederacy appears to have been a flat zero.

There were other reasons, however, to justify Johnson’s sense of accomplishment.

The Act was, after all, the first civil rights legislation that had been passed in eighty-two years—and that fact had tremendous significance. For decades, for more than three-quarters of a century, men and women, black and white, who fought for social justice had watched as civil rights bills died in the Senate—every bill, without exception. Many supporters of civil rights no longer believed that a civil rights bill would ever be passed by the Senate.

The Civil Rights Act of 1957 changed that, as Lyndon Johnson tried to explain to journalists and liberals who criticized its inadequacies. “It’s just a beginning,” he told them. “We’ve shown that we can do it. We’ll do it again, in a couple of years.” Critics of the Act “were right in claiming that it contained only limited substance … but they failed to recognize the irrelevancy of the point,” George Reedy was to write. “The crucial significance of the civil rights bill was that it opened a major branch of American government to a tenth of the population for which all legislative doors had been slammed shut since 1875”—and once the doors were opened, it would be impossible to close them again. Johnson believed “that if he got one civil rights act through, he could get more…. He felt if you could get something through, it would be no longer a question of yes or no, but how much.” Lyndon Johnson tried to explain this, over and over again, to the journalists and liberals who criticized the bill at the dinner parties he attended. “We’ve started something now,” he would say. “Don’t worry, it’s only the first. We know we can do it now. We know the ropes.” He was right. After decades, generations, in which the great dam had been impenetrable, the sharp point of a wedge had now been hammered into it. The point could hardly have been tinier. But once the point of a wedge is hammered in, the rest of the wedge will, sooner or later, follow.

GETTING THE FIRST ACT THROUGH—“starting something”—was important for another reason. If “half a loaf” is an invalid metaphor with which to justify the Civil Rights Act of 1957, there is another metaphor which, though even more amorphous, is more justifiable, when there is taken into account the effect of the bill’s passage on men and women who for so long had watched every other bill die in the Senate.

The opening of “legislative doors” that “had been slammed shut since 1875” meant, Reedy says, that perhaps other laws, stronger laws, “could be passed someday,” and the “impact of this upon people who had previously been denied participation in the institutions that ruled over them was extraordinary.” On the afternoon of the day on which the Senate was passing the civil rights bill, Robert Graetz, a white minister whose Montgomery home had twice been dynamited because of his support of the bus boycott, was talking to Murray Kempton. Kempton, having observed the Senate in action, was pessimistic about the prospects of future legislation, but Graetz said that now that one bill was being passed, soon “There will be a [strong] voting rights bill, and then sooner than you think, there will be Negro representatives in the Legislature.” Kempton said that this seemed like a wild dream. “Perhaps it is,” Graetz said, “but if we did not believe it, we could not live here, and we would be wrong to be as happy as we are.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was more than half a loaf, a lot more. It was hope.

AND THERE WERE STILL OTHER REASONS for Lyndon Johnson to be exultant.

In 1957, great historical forces—a rising demand for social justice, a new militancy among blacks, new political equations that endowed the black vote with new significance—had come together in a tide sweeping toward the enactment of new civil rights legislation. But great forces had swept forward before and always, if they reached the Senate, they had been blocked by the Senate. Had it not been for Lyndon Johnson, they would have been blocked by the Senate again. At the moment that he stepped wholeheartedly into the civil rights fight, these forces had seemingly been blocked by the Senate again. That they had in some measure been victorious in that body, and therefore in government as a whole, had been due to him; he had understood the forces (“The world is moving to the left; you can either move with it or be crushed”), and had ridden them, and at the same time had directed them into channels that made it possible for them to flow forward and win for social justice a beachhead staging area from which, the next time the forces came together, they could advance still further.

The direction that he had given these forces, and the maneuvers he had made on their behalf, had all been legislative in nature. During the civil rights fight of 1957, Lyndon Johnson had displayed, in discovering underneath the seemingly impenetrable southern defiance a weak spot (voting) on which southerners might yield; in locating underneath the impassioned northern rhetoric an area (loss of the right of jury trial) in which some northerners felt themselves on weak moral ground; and in using these two points of vulnerability to carve out, amendment by amendment, an area of reconciliation that could attract a majority—in doing all this he had displayed a remarkable ability in that most vital of legislative arts: the art of compromise. In seeing the need to bring together the South and the West, and in recognizing, in the Hells Canyon Dam, the means of bringing them together, he had displayed a mastery of legislative strategy on a grand, nationwide, scale. By grasping in a moment, on the Senate floor, the possibilities in Clint Anderson’s amendment; by seizing that moment before it could vanish from the floor; by delicately adding jury trial amendment after jury trial amendment until he finally had the amendment that would attract enough votes to let the bill pass, he had displayed a mastery of small-scale, intricate legislative maneuver. In a republic which had, during the past century of its existence, grown accustomed to thinking of governmental leadership almost solely in terms of executive leadership, he had provided a vivid demonstration of the potentialities in legislative leadership. A master of a profession cannot but know he is a master, cannot but feel joy and pride in exercising that mastery. Lyndon Johnson knew what he had done, and gloried in what he had done. So I went to a few key southerners and persuaded them…. And then, in return, I got the western liberals … and then I was able to show that as long as they trusted me…

His triumph was a triumph of something even larger than legislative expertise and leadership. The common ground on which he had at last brought both sides together was not ground he had discovered, but ground he had created. The bill he had gotten passed might still bear the number—H.R. 6127—that it had been given in the House of Representatives when it was still the Eisenhower Administration’s bill, but it bore little resemblance to the bill drawn up by Attorney General Brownell. The excisions in and amendments to it that Lyndon Johnson had fashioned had been so substantial that the bill was in effect a new bill, in whose creation he had had the major hand. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was therefore a demonstration not only of legislative expertise and leadership, but of legislative creativity—of creativity on a very high order.

And this was a demonstration that was badly needed. As C. Vann Woodward, perhaps the nation’s pre-eminent historian of southern history, wrote in the October, 1957, issue of Commentary, “The trouble was not in the House of Representatives, which frequently yielded to the pressure, but in that formidable institution,” the United States Senate. “Moving between the incorrigible right and the immovable left, Senator Johnson worked mainly in the shifting center to shape and mold a … workable compromise to replace a futile stalemate. The air of compromise is rarely appreciated fully by men of principle,” and working out this compromise was very difficult. Its success “called for political astuteness on Johnson’s part amounting to genius … The senator, it proved, had what it took.”

ON THE SUNDAY after the Act’s passage the great media organs that set the liberal tune pulled out all the stops. There was so much praise in the New York Times and the Washington papers that it couldn’t be confined to one section. The Post, that Sunday, carried not only an editorial that reflected Philip Graham’s opinions (“Mr. Johnson came out of the debate a national rather than a regional figure”), but, under the headline “JOHNSON’S MASTERPIECE,” a political analysis by Robert Albright (“The Senate last week did an incredible thing…. Famed for his legislative miracles, this beyond any doubt was Johnson’s masterpiece”), and, in the Society section, a long profile by Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer that began “This, but definitely, is LBJ Week.” In the Washington Star there was an editorial, as well as an analysis of his tactics by David Koonce (“Some of the veteran observers in the Senate Press Gallery … confidently expected to be writing about a civil rights filibuster for weeks and months…. Everybody knew there would be a filibuster. Everybody, that is, except Lyndon Baines Johnson …”), and a long profile in the Society section by Liz and Leslie Carpenter. A few days later, The New Republic weighed in: “Moderates of both parties share [a] feeling of triumph…. [T]he leaders were thoroughly reasonable men…. Here was bipartisanship at its best….” Douglas Cater of the Reporter, so critical of Johnson in the past, now extended himself to make amends. Reedy had written a long memorandum and given it to Cater “for background,” and Cater asked permission to use sentences from Reedy’s memo as if Johnson himself had spoken them to him, Cater, in an interview. Reedy edited the quotes (“Eye think it is all right providing the words I have bracketed in the first paragraph are eliminated,” he told Johnson), and Cater used them as edited, no matter how they distorted reality. His article said, “Johnson remarked to me recently: ‘It was realized that there could be no “compromise” in the sense of an empty and evasive deal.’… ‘Everything that happened, short of technical drafting work, took place right on the Senate floor in plain sight of the press and public’” The article as a whole substantially revised Cater’s earlier view of Johnson. And there was praise for Lyndon Johnson in publications that had very seldom bestowed praise on him in the past—the publications that he needed. “Senator Lyndon Johnson’s performance in driving the ‘right-to-vote’ bill through the Senate … is the most remarkable feat of political generalship in years…. Johnson is a spectacular operator.” Those sentences came from theAFL-CIO News. The AFL-CIO! Meany! Labor! Labor, which always liked liberals—and which had never liked him. That Sunday he sat at home watching the morning television shows on which he was invariably praised, and on Monday morning there was a memorandum from Willie Day Taylor on shows he hadn’t been able to watch: “Sen. Bible was also complimentary of your leadership on WTOP’s City Side.” Columnists compared him favorably to America’s great legislative leaders of the past. “Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson is now recognized as a modern Henry Clay, the great compromiser on the issue of slavery,” said Ray Tucker. No wonder he was exultant, euphoric. Just before he left for Texas, Joseph C. Duke, the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms, presented him with a large American flag, together with a letter “to certify that the enclosed flag was flown over the Senate wing of the United States Capitol from the First to the Thirtieth of August, Nineteen Hundred and Fifty-seven, during which period was adopted by the United States Congress the Civil Rights Bill.” Lyndon Johnson took the flag back to the ranch with him, and on his first morning home, Lady Bird had it raised to the top of the tall flagpole on the front lawn. It fluttered there against the sky—that brilliant blue “sapphire” Hill Country sky, so often cloudless in summer, that had spelled doom for his father and his father’s father. When he had been a boy, Lyndon had watched his father and mother look up at that sky, hoping in vain for a sign of the rain that could save their land. He had looked up at it himself then, in vain. When he looked up now, the blue in the flag was deeper than the sky’s blue, and across the sky’s pitiless brightness, broad red and white stripes waved triumphantly, sapphire blue no longer doom but only background.

Liberal suspicion of Lyndon Johnson had not been completely dissipated, though—far from it. Even during the first chorus of praise there were dissenting voices. Some of the liberal senators who had fought to the end for a stronger bill were unable to reconcile themselves to the one that had passed, feeling the public had been led to believe it would achieve at least small advances in civil rights, while they felt that in fact there was no chance of that. Wayne Morse, urging Eisenhower to veto it, called it a “hoax and sham bill.” And they were bitter about Lyndon Johnson. “Johnson,” Paul Douglas was to write, somehow “emerged from the shadows of opposition as the great apostle of civil rights…. [The bill] was a triumph, so he said, for his policy of moderation over the extremists, who would have prevented action by their wild talk. Some of his favorite columnists, including William S. White, burst into a chorus of antiphonal praise. Somehow I now became the man who had impeded progress. Johnson, our opponent, became, in their version, the great hero.” Not all liberal newspapers saw good in the bill—or in the man who had masterminded its passage. “The moderate Texas leadership … seems willing to sacrifice anything except party unity,” the Detroit News editorialized. Liberals at their dinner parties still argued among themselves about the bill, and about Lyndon Johnson. Bethine Church would never forget the explosion of pent-up anger with which Clayton Fritchey, director of the Democratic National Committee’s Public Affairs Division, greeted her husband when, at a Georgetown party, Frank walked through the front door, or how Fritchey continued, “for hours, it seemed,” to assail Frank in a “brutal, brutal argument” for helping to pass the jury trial amendment. “Some of his [Church’s] liberal friends thought it was the damnedest sellout in history,” his aide John Carver would recall. Paul Douglas used a memorable phrase: the bill, he said, reminded him of Lincoln’s old saying that “it was like a soup made from the shadow of a crow which had starved to death.” Within a day, it seemed, that saying was being repeated over dinner tables in Georgetown and Cleveland Park. And as time passed, and the ineffectiveness of the Act became increasingly evident, liberal criticism was to grow louder.

Nonetheless, while after the 1957 Civil Rights Act there remained substantial liberal suspicion and criticism of Lyndon Johnson, there was not nearly so much as there had been before. At least some of the southern stigma—the fatal “smell of magnolias”—had scrubbed off. Philip Graham had felt that for Johnson to become President, he had to be “cleaned up on civil rights,” and that cleaning up had gotten off to a good start. Among the signatures at the bottom of the letters to the editor that appeared in newspapers during and just after the 1957 civil rights fight were names with real significance to liberals. One letter argued that “The Senate bill may not go as far as many think it should, but [its] significance should not be minimized…. If progress is to be achieved, differences as to what should be done must yield to a consensus as to what can be done.” The letter assured “friends and supporters of civil rights” that they could support the bill with “clear consciences.” And the arguments and assurances were given weight by the signature at the end of the letter: Benjamin V. Cohen. Another letter was from Dean Acheson. “I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the bill is among the great achievements since the war and, in the field of Civil Rights, the greatest since the Thirteenth Amendment…. Can’t we for once be proud of ourselves when we do the right thing?” (Richard Rovere was to note in The New Yorker that “If Mr. Eisenhower decides to sign the bill, he will have in common with Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman the experience of approving a piece of legislation whose vital and operative sections have come largely from the hands of Benjamin V. Cohen and Dean Acheson.”) That was a telling point for liberals: how could any true liberal ignore the opinions of men like Cohen and Acheson? When the American Civil Liberties Union denounced the bill, The New Republic denounced the American Civil Liberties Union. “It took the U.S. Senate nearly 90 years to approve a civil rights bill, and it took the ACLU lawyers several hours to decide (and notify the press) that the bill was worse than nothing,” a New Republic editorial said. “Unprecedented progress has already been made,” and the progress, The New Republic said, had been made because of Lyndon Johnson, who called “on two of the New Deal’s best draftsmen, Ben Cohen and Dean Acheson, for aid.”

And finally there was, under the dateline “Hyde Park,” a word from the liberal whose word meant the most of all. She had been torn as to whether or not to support the amended bill, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in “My Day.” “It is one of those difficult decisions in which you know that the way you are voting may possibly injure the objective you are trying to attain,” but, she said, she had finally decided that “the civil rights bill with the amendment would be a small step forward and I hope it will become law.” And, of course, the NAACP and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights had supported the measure. By passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Lyndon Johnson had obtained the political gain that his political ambition demanded. A moderate columnist, Roscoe Drummond, may have summed up the situation most definitively when he wrote, “If you think the Senate did wrong in cutting back the civil rights bill, much of the blame goes to Johnson. If you think the Senate acted responsibly and usefully in passing a compromise bill, much of the credit goes to Johnson…. He proved himself the ascendant leader of the whole Democratic party in Congress, Northern and Western liberals as well as Southern conservatives…. Because he voted for and is an architect of the right-to-vote law, he is the first Southern Democratic leader since the Civil War to be a serious candidate for the presidential nomination.”

AND THERE WAS YET ANOTHER REASON—the most important reason of all—that the Civil Rights Act of 1957 meant hope. There may have been only meagre significance in the Act itself, but there was massive significance in what the fight for the Act’s passage had revealed about the potentialities of the man who led that fight, about the possibilities that lay within that man for the advancement of social justice in America.

In the great “struggle for America’s soul” that was the civil rights movement, extraordinary black leaders had already emerged—Randolph, Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall—and during the 1950s, of course, another figure, who would eclipse them all, was coming to the forefront among blacks. But as that leader, Martin Luther King, was to say, the evil of racial discrimination in America was “so great that the Negro cannot fight it alone.” Help was needed not only from among men whose skins were dark but from among men whose skins were white; leadership was needed—effective leadership: leadership that not only enunciated ideals but that made progress, limited though it might be, toward achieving them. It was needed particularly in the halls of government, because it could only be from those halls that laws, the only permanent remedy for injustice, could issue. And until 1957 governmental leadership was particularly lacking, its absence particularly glaring and destructive. Dwight D. Eisenhower declined to provide moral leadership on the fundamental moral problem of the time, and on Capitol Hill the leadership of the fight for civil rights laws provided not laws but only words. In 1957, however, effective leadership in the fight for civil rights laws had been provided—by Lyndon Johnson. If he was not able to do more, if the leadership he had provided had been only on behalf of a weak bill, he had nonetheless done all he could, the most he could do in the position—Majority Leader of one of the two houses of Congress—in which he was situated.

But what if he were to rise, one day, to another position?

Lyndon Johnson was eventually to attain the post to which he had aspired all his life. And when he did, he would as President of the United States ram to passage the great Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, legislation that would do much to correct the deficiencies of the 1957 legislation. He would give black Americans a Voting Rights Act that was truly meaningful, would make them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life. It was Lyndon Johnson, among all the white government officials in twentieth-century America, who did the most to help America’s black men and women in their fight for equality and justice. It was he who was, among all those officials, their greatest champion. And it was in 1957—in that fight for the Civil Rights Act of 1957—that Lyndon Johnson’s capacity to one day be that champion was first foreshadowed.

The foreshadowing came not only in his drafting of the Act, and in his dealing and maneuvering, but, perhaps most significantly, in a speech he gave.

The speech was delivered on the Senate floor. It came near the end of the 1957 fight, on the evening of August 7. Sitting at his desk just before the 72–18 final vote, he made a small gesture with his hand, and a blue-suited page carried over a portable lectern and placed it on the desk. Johnson laid the speech on the lectern, put on his thick-lensed glasses, and rose to read.

Jim Rowe had told Lyndon Johnson that if he wanted to become President, he had to vote for a civil rights bill, to pass a civil rights bill, and to get the credit for that bill, and Johnson had done all those things. But Rowe had also told Johnson something else. “I know also that Lyndon Johnson is intellectually not a southerner but a national leader,” he had said. The need for such a leader was terribly urgent, he said. There would be “a very good chance to bury this plague of civil rights” if only a national leader would step forward. And with this speech, Lyndon Johnson showed that, if he was still not yet such a leader, he had the potential to become one.

In the speech—his first formal announcement that he would vote for the bill—he portrayed the measure in terms that would make it acceptable to his Texas constituency: it repeals a “bayonet-type Reconstruction statute,” he said, and under its provisions, “basic rights”—such as the jury trial—“are reemphasized and broadened.” Such sentences were typical Lyndon Johnson sentences, the careful, cliché formulas of a cautious politician.

But there were other sentences in that speech.

Some set forth the pragmatic philosophy that was part of Lyndon Johnson’s most fundamental belief: a belief in the possible. “In the past few days there has been considerable discussion about the things which the bill does not do,” he said. “I am aware” of those things. “But,” he said, “I cannot follow the logic of those who say that because we cannot solve all the problems we should not try to solve any of them…. I can understand the disappointment of those who are not receiving all they believe they should out of this bill. I can understand but not sympathize with their position.” The bill doesn’t have to be perfect, Lyndon Johnson said. “The possible necessity for change is no bar to action. The Senate will not disappear after the vote tonight. We shall be present throughout the years to come.”

And there were sentences that rose above pragmatism to something higher. Lyndon Johnson had, all his life, expressed a deep distrust of ringing phrases. But there were phrases in this speech that seemed to verge on what he had always said he distrusted.

“Out of [this] debate has come something even more important than legislation,” Lyndon Johnson said. “This has been a debate which has opened closed minds…. This has been a debate which has made people everywhere examine hard and fast positions. For the first time in my memory, this issue has been lifted from the field of partisan politics. It has been considered in terms of human beings and the effect of our laws upon them.”

Then he turned to politics. “There are,” he said, “people who are still more interested in securing votes than in securing the right to vote. There are … people who are still more interested in the issue than in a solution to the issue. But I state—out of whatever experience I have had—that there is no political capital in this issue. Nothing lasting, nothing enduring, has ever been born from hatred and prejudice—except more hatred and more prejudice.” Look at the legislation passed during Reconstruction, Lyndon Johnson said. That legislation was born out of hatred. But, he said, “We do not have to reconstruct Reconstruction in order to have a bill. We do not have to reopen the wounds.” He wanted to remove politics from the civil rights issue, he said. “There is no compelling need for a campaign issue.” But, he said, “there is a compelling need for a solution that will enable all America’s people to live in dignity and in unity.”

And finally Lyndon Johnson turned again to his own vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and to his own feelings about that vote. He knew, he said, that his vote “will be treated cynically in some quarters, and it will be misunderstood in others…. But the Senate has dealt fairly and justly with this measure. This is legislation which I believe will be good for every state of the Union—and so far as I am concerned, Texas has been a part of the Union since Appomattox.”

A part of the Union since Appomattox. That was a phrase that could rally men to a cause. “When at last Johnson revealed his own feelings about the bill, and said, ‘So far as I am concerned, Texas has been a part of the Union since Appomattox,’ I was ready to commit myself to him, his ambitions and purposes, for the duration,” his young aide Harry McPherson was to recall. The man who distrusted ringing phrases, who despised men who used such phrases, was using some himself now. In that moment it was even possible, seeing that tall man standing at that desk on the floor of one of the houses of the Congress of the United States and uttering such phrases, to picture that man standing one day on the dais of one of the houses of Congress—and speaking not merely to his colleagues but to an entire nation in ringing phrases.

Phrases like “We shall overcome!”

YEARS LATER, years after the passage of the great civil rights acts of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, Harry McPherson, who had served in Johnson’s White House, would be riding in a parade in his native East Texas. There were floats in the parade, and high school bands, and, McPherson realized, “the bands—were mixed!” There was “a Negro trombonist, next to a white cornetist; three black drummers, and a white cymbal player! And at the front of it all, black and white majorettes, in perfect unison.” There was a big sign on the side of the car in which McPherson was riding. It said: “Counsel to President Lyndon B. Johnson,” and as the car passed, spectators pointed to the sign and quietly applauded. And then the car entered a Negro neighborhood. Suddenly there was more than applause. Men and women were cheering. They were waving at the car. And many of them were holding up their arms, and with their fingers making the sign of “V”—“V” for Victory. McPherson’s eyes met those of an elderly black man. The man grinned at McPherson, and nodded his head. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s right.”

“So there had been change,” McPherson would write, “so much that one could scarcely remember … the careful apprehensive steps which the Senate had taken in 1957, the struggle over Title III and the jury trials, the different words for Douglas and Ervin, the praise and resentment.” But, McPherson says, “it had all started there.” The great civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965 had all started there, in 1957.

That’s right. That’s right.