The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act

by Risen, Clay

  When he finally finished, at 11:52 a.m., Celler said a few words, then passed the floor to McCulloch. “It is important at this point not to yield for anything but a question, particularly not an amendment of any kind whatsoever,” Katzenbach had instructed, and Celler did not. On cue, as soon as McCulloch finished, Rodino offered a motion to close the debate and move to a vote. Celler recognized him; several members offered to second the motion, and it went to a vote. The clock ticked; as soon as the noon bell rang to announce the opening of the House floor, the opposition forces would surely call a point of order to end the session. The clerk tore through the names, finishing just as the bell rang. The bill passed 20 votes to 14, with the Southern Democrats and a smattering of liberals in the minority.62

  When Kennedy got the news a little while later, he cheered. But not everyone agreed with his jubilation. “Today’s events are no cause for rejoicing but are a challenge to work to strengthen the bill,” said Roy Wilkins. James Farmer, of CORE, called it “a slight improvement on the original Administration package, still it is not acceptable.” Others were less welcoming. The Washington Post sent a reporter to a showing of Lilies of the Field, the Sidney Poitier star vehicle, at the Tivoli Theater in north central Washington, D.C. Several members of the black elite were there, and all had an opinion about the just-passed bill. “I don’t think very much of the new bill,” said Julius Hobson, a local civil rights activist. “I didn’t think much of the original bill, and this is just a watered down version of that.” Walter Reuther was incensed; he had the UAW issue a scathing analysis of the new draft. “The public accommodations section of the compromise bill draws a morally indefensible distinction between places that are and are not covered,” it read. “Under its provisions, it would appear that an American citizen, simply because of color, could be denied the right to try on a suit or dress in a department store, get a haircut or beauty treatment or a shoeshine or go swimming or bowling.” The harshest words came from the LCCR: “We deplore the actions of the administration and the Republican House leadership in securing the defeat of the Subcommittee bill on civil rights.”63

  The next day Kennedy went to Philadelphia to stump for Mayor James Tate, who was running a tough reelection campaign. But he found the streets half empty, save for protesters bearing signs with messages such as “Kennedy—why compromise on civil rights?” (The compromise was not the only reason for the protesters’ ire: Tate had been vilified by the civil rights community for not fighting harder against job discrimination.)64

  Kennedy’s temporary woes were nothing compared with the more lasting scars left on Halleck. A few hours after the vote, Kennedy called the minority leader to thank him. “I got a lot of mad people up here,” Halleck said. “A lot of guys bitching, I’m not sure they’ll make me leader again, but I don’t give a damn.”65

  Halleck’s imperiousness won him few supporters among the liberals, while his leadership mistakes, compared with his support for a too-liberal bill, touched off a near civil war within the House GOP. On October 30, about sixty House Republicans met at a Washington hotel to hash out their grievances and propose a coup—this time against the minority leader himself. Halleck had ignored them, they groused; worse, he had embarrassed them by forcing his rank and file to support a draft version of the bill that many were already on the record opposing. Worse, though, was the fact that the Republican House leader was holding secret meetings with the White House, appearing to accede to Kennedy’s every demand. How could they disagree with Democratic senator Richard Russell, who said that Halleck was now “adorned in the leather shirt and tasseled moccasins of the New Frontier”?66

  A petition went around, calling for Halleck’s resignation. Clarence Brown, the ranking minority member of the Rules Committee and no friend of Halleck, nevertheless saw the danger in setting off a war with the party leadership and urged calm. After a heated debate, Brown won the day, and the members filtered back to the Hill—though they were hardly pacified. A few days later one of them, reportedly Durward G. “Doc” Hall of Missouri, left a folded black umbrella on Halleck’s desk, a pointed reference to that infamous compromiser Neville Chamberlain, who was seen carrying just such an accessory during his negotiations with Adolf Hitler before World War II. After the 1964 elections, Halleck was defeated by Gerald Ford in the minority leader vote, thanks undoubtedly to his actions on the civil rights bill.67

  The bill was now ready to go to the Rules Committee, pending the final majority and minority reports. For reasons that can only be chalked up to Celler’s poor control over his committee, the minority report was not ready until November 20, some three weeks after the bill passed. The minority reports, penned by Moore, Meader, and others, were a litany of purple-prosed complaints against both the bill and the suspect manner in which Celler had moved it to a vote. “Where it came from is a deep, dark secret,” wrote Moore. “The bill reported was conceived in segregation, born in intolerance, and nurtured in discrimination.”68

  Though the minority reports would later provide rich fodder for the mailing campaigns of the Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms and other anti-civil-rights groups, they made no difference to the course of the bill. With the reports filed, Celler could officially hand off the bill to the Rules Committee—and the next great challenge. Howard Smith, the Southern Democratic chair, was on record saying that the bill would take weeks, if not months, to consider fully—a bald attempt to delay its almost inevitable passage in the House.

  While the committee dawdled, the lobbyists swarmed. All that month, armies of activists from across the LCCR had been trooping through the House office buildings, meeting with representatives and urging action on the bill. On November 13, dozens of members of the United Steel Workers of America came to town for a three-day stint; two days after they left, 315 college students and advisers from 86 campuses, jointly sponsored by Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic organizations, came for their own three-day campaign.69

  The delay gave Halleck and Dirksen an opportunity to distance themselves from the administration. “There is a faltering effort now underway by apologists for the White House to blame the Congress because President Kennedy’s legislative program is in a mess,” Dirksen said at the next “Ev and Charlie Show,” on November 21. “The president, who had promised major civil rights legislation in 1961, failed to live up to his promise . . . Then he expected Congress to act in a few months on a program he had delayed for two and one half years.”70

  The next day, President Kennedy was in Dallas. By early afternoon on November 22, 1963, the country had lost its thirty-fifth president. A few hours later, its thirty-sixth, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was sworn in—and a new chapter in the story of the civil rights bill began.

  Chapter 5

  “Let Us Continue”

  Lyndon Johnson, that most enigmatic of modern presidents, was never more of a puzzle than on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, when Air Force One touched down at Andrews Air Force Base bearing both him and the body of his slain predecessor. Kennedy had always seemed more than just a man; he was, for many Americans, the embodiment of an idea, a hope for the new. Even Richard Russell cried when he learned of the assassination.

  Now that brash youthfulness had been replaced by a man most Americans knew only slightly, and then only by his taglines: the masterful Senate majority leader, the vice president chosen mainly as a sop to the South, the Dixie Democrat who had pushed through two civil rights bills. Had Kennedy gone with one of his other top choices in 1960—young New Frontier poster boys like Governor Orville Freeman of Minnesota or Senator Henry Jackson of Washington—the country might have been more at ease in its mourning. It would have continued in Kennedy’s brisk footsteps. But no one knew where Johnson would take the country, because no one knew Johnson.

  Almost no one, that is. Within the White House, and particularly within the vice president’s inner circle, it was common, if often unspoken, knowledge that Johnson had been evolving rapidly, particu
larly on matters of race. Histories of the Johnson era often look to his senatorial experience for insight into his approach to the presidency. But while his time on Capitol Hill no doubt helped him in the White House, the differences between Senator and President Johnson are more telling than the similarities. It is the thousand days in between that explain the most. Lyndon Johnson’s time in the vice president’s office might be compared to the period a butterfly (or a moth) spends in a chrysalis. Before it, he was driven by the accumulation and deployment of power as its own end; as he sat in the vice president’s office, or beside Kennedy at cabinet meetings, he thought deeply about what that power might be used for, what he would do with it if he ever had it. Not everyone around him noticed, but at critical moments—in his May 30 speech at Gettysburg, or in his comments to Sorensen and Schlei in June—one could glimpse a new Johnson, one passionately concerned about the welfare of the less privileged, the downtrodden, the oppressed, and one committed to throwing the entire weight of the federal government behind their uplift. Perhaps, as Johnson claimed in his memoir, that concern had always been there, ever since his days teaching poor Mexican American schoolchildren in Texas. But if it was, it had long been buried by ambition to scale the political heights, and it was only during his almost three years of static captivity—unable to legislate, unable to act—that he realized what the whole exercise was about in the first place.

  Almost as soon as he landed at Andrews, Johnson began converting his pent-up energy into a kinetic frenzy. That night, after speaking by phone with former presidents Truman, Hoover, and Eisenhower, he decided to prepare an address to a joint session of Congress the following week. It would, above all, honor the fallen president—but it would also introduce the nation to his successor and assure them that he planned to follow Kennedy’s agenda. And while the speech would range across the spectrum of President Kennedy’s program, pride of place would go to the civil rights bill—as he told his aide Jack Valenti, “to get civil rights off its backside in the Congress and give it legs.” Much of Johnson’s first several months were shaped by his intense focus on the civil rights bill; it has even been suggested that one reason he opposed letting the FBI take the lead on the assassination investigation—instead letting Texas authorities, who had a jurisdictional claim over the case as a murder investigation, take charge—was that he did not want anything to intimate the specter of federal power over states’ rights while he was organizing for a massive push behind the bill.1

  But while Johnson very much wanted to see the Civil Rights Act pass, even the bill was just a means to an end. Through the course of 1963, two lines of thinking had emerged within the pro-civil-rights forces inside the federal government. One, behind the Kennedys, believed that the issue was fundamentally a question of political rights: give blacks the right to vote, the right to compete in the job market, the right to go to good schools, and equality will be realized. The other, which found its most forceful advocate in Lyndon Johnson, believed that political equality, though important, was inevitable, and that presidential and congressional energies were better spent on a wide-ranging, deep-pocketed program of material uplift, a second New Deal. But to get the political capital he needed to introduce such a plan, Johnson needed to shore up his base among the liberals. “I knew that if I didn’t get out in front of this issue, they would get me. They’d throw up my background against me, they’d use it to prove that I was incapable of bringing unity to the land I loved so much,” he said later. “I had to produce a civil rights bill that was even stronger than the one they’d have gotten if Kennedy had lived. Without this, I’d be dead before I could even begin.”2

  Over the weekend Johnson spoke with the congressional leadership, almost all of them in person, including his mentor and now, on civil rights, opponent, Senator Russell.

  “Dick,” he said, “I love you. I owe you. But I’m going to run over you if you challenge me or get in my way. I aim to pass the civil rights bill, only this time, Dick, there will be no caviling, no compromise, no falling back. This bill is going to pass.”

  Russell, who refused to call his old friend by anything besides his new title, replied, “You may do just that, Mr. President. Bu I am here to tell you that it will not only cost you the south, it will cost you the election.”

  “Dick, my old friend, if that’s the price for this bill, then I will gladly pay it.”3

  Johnson also began reaching out to civil rights leaders: he asked Walter Reuther for ideas to put into his speech; he asked Roy Wilkins to meet with him at the White House the next week. “We’re just beginning to fight,” he told Whitney Young during a phone call on Sunday, November 24. The next day, he told King the same—and that he would push Congress to the wall to pass the items on Kennedy’s agenda, including civil rights. “We just got to not let up on any of them and keep going,” he said. “I’m going to ask the Congress Wednesday to just stay there until they pass them all. They won’t do it. But we’ll just keep them there next year until they do, and we just won’t give up an inch.”4

  That night he talked on the phone with Hubert Humphrey from his mock French château home, known as the Elms, in Washington’s hilly, forested Spring Valley neighborhood (it would be another decade before the Naval Observatory was designated the vice president’s official residence). Humphrey had called to tell him about the defeat of a bill to block credits on sales behind the Iron Curtain. Johnson asked what the senator was doing for dinner.5

  Humphrey, one of the hardest-working men in the Senate, declined Johnson’s implicit invitation to dine with him, saying he had had a snack and needed to stay at the office.

  “Well, come on over anyway and have something more to eat,” Johnson said. “I want to talk to you.”

  When Humphrey arrived, he realized it was more than a social call: some of Johnson’s closest aides, including Abe Fortas, Valenti, and Cliff Carter, were there, and over dinner—and into the next morning—the men edited the developing draft of Johnson’s upcoming speech. Ted Sorensen had been working on it since Saturday, and Johnson had already gathered substantial input from a range of sources, from Reuther to Adlai Stevenson, on everything from jobs to the United Nations. But Johnson wanted these men, and Humphrey and Fortas in particular, to give it polish. Humphrey said it should be short and direct, and he suggested what became one of Johnson’s most memorable lines: to answer Kennedy’s inaugural call “Let us begin,” Johnson should respond, “Let us continue.” Humphrey and Fortas left around 2:30 a.m., and they worked on the draft for the next two days.6

  Despite a few memorable addresses here and there through his career, Johnson was not much for speeches. So when he entered the House chambers on the evening of November 26, just a day after Kennedy’s funeral, expectations for a great oration were not particularly high—and yet, paradoxically, both the audience in the Capitol and the millions of Americans watching on TV hoped desperately for a clear sign that, yes, everything was going to be all right.7

  Johnson mounted the podium, expressionless behind his rimless glasses, peering out over the audience: the full complement of House and Senate members, the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the mayors of New York and Chicago. Robert Kennedy sat at the end of the front row, his body shrunken in mourning—“White with fatigue and grief, and he stared glassily ahead without a flicker of emotion,” wrote Anthony Lewis in the New York Times.8

  The president looked down at his speech, held in a black loose-leaf notebook, with text in large, spaced type and notes in between the lines. Just before he spoke, he looked up to the gallery, where his wife, Lady Bird, sat with Zephyr Wright, the family’s longtime servant and the black woman whose daily humiliations under Jim Crow, Johnson often said, had inspired his pursuit of civil rights legislation.

  Then, as if speaking directly to the grief-stricken attorney general, Johnson began. “All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today. The greatest leader of our time has been struck down by the foulest deed of
our time.”9

  But he then immediately pivoted to the core of his speech, the point he would hammer again and again through the next several minutes. “Today John Fitzgerald Kennedy lives on in the immortal words and works that he left behind,” he said. “No words are sad enough to express our sense of loss. No words are strong enough to express our determination to continue the thrust of America that he began.”

  And at the spear-tip of that thrust, he said, was civil rights. “Above all, the drama of equal rights for all Americans, whatever their race or color—these and other American dreams have been vitalized by his drive and by his dedication.” The audience broke into a deafening roar. He went on to speak of the United Nations, military support for allies abroad, defense of a strong dollar—all of which were at the core of Kennedy’s agenda, and all of which Johnson would continue. Kennedy, he said, had told America that its work would not be done “‘in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetimes on this planet. But let us begin.’ Today,” Johnson said, “in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue.”

  Johnson then turned to the civil rights bill itself, whose passage, he declared, would be a fitting tribute to its author. “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law,” Johnson said. “I urge you again, as I did in 1957 and again in 1960, to enact a civil rights law so that we can move forward to eliminate from this nation every trace of discrimination and oppression that is based upon race or color.” As he spoke, he stuck out his chin, a point of physical pride, but he eschewed the finger-pointing and voice-raising that typified his stump speeches.