by Risen, Clay
That is not to say that there was complete cohesion among the Southerners. While some, like Strom Thurmond and Sam Ervin, were willing to go all out to fight the bill, others, particularly younger, more worldly members like George Smathers, Al Gore Sr., and William Fulbright, were less determined and even considered possible crossover votes for the bill. None of them ultimately did cross over, but they helped in less overt ways: voting for or against key amendments (or not at all), supporting quorum calls, and providing back-channel intelligence. Among other things, Fulbright provided valuable information about Southern planning sessions to the White House through one of his aides, John Yingling.4
Holding these differing factions together was the unofficial chairman of the Southern Democrats, Georgia senator Richard Brevard Russell. Since 1948 the wiry, nasal-voiced patrician had led his troops time after time against civil rights bills. Under his rule, the Southerners had filibustered all but one of the civil rights bills that reached the Senate floor, and that was only because that bill, the 1957 civil rights act, had already been gutted by his acolyte, the then majority leader Lyndon Johnson (technically, even that bill had been filibustered, though only by a single senator, Thurmond, who spoke for eighteen hours against it). All but one Southern filibuster had resulted in the targeted bill’s defeat, and again, that bill, the 1960 civil rights act, squeaked through thanks to Johnson’s willingness to negotiate away all but a few meaningless titles.
And yet by the early 1960s, Russell was coasting on reputation; he was considered an anachronism by many in the Senate, and even among the Southern Democrats. On January 23, 1964, the country approved the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, banning poll taxes, a step Russell called “an embarrassment to me.” Unruffled, one Georgia state senator who supported the amendment said that despite whatever sway Senator Russell might have held in the past, the people of Georgia “are now going forward with a little different beat of the drum.”5
Yet if Russell was an anachronism, he also recognized that the days of the old racial order were numbered. He simply wanted it to change at his own glacial pace. “I believe the Negro has been imposed upon,” he told Newsweek in August 1963. “He has been subjected to indignities. But we shouldn’t upset the whole scheme of constitutional government and expect people to swallow laws governing their most intimate social relations. The tempo of change is the crux of the whole matter. Any realist knows that the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine is finished.”6
Russell had long been torn by two competing desires—to integrate the South into the American mainstream, but also to protect traditional Southern society, particularly its racial hierarchies. Now, suddenly, the region was slipping quickly toward his first goal but away from his second, and he did not know how to respond. At times he seemed ready to give up completely; in October 1963 he wrote on a desk pad, “As of today am completely disassociated from any leadership responsibility of our group . . . too many hearts are not in it who have same priority.” As Johnson’s close aide George Reedy reflected, “I think Russell realized that a civil rights bill was inevitable, and I think that he also thought it was better to get the thing over with.”7
But as the debate on the bill neared, Russell showed no sign of giving up. “I shall oppose this misnamed civil rights proposal with all the power at my command,” he wrote to a constituent in early December 1963. “I must say, however, that we are terribly handicapped in our opposition. The two major parties have been combined in bidding for the minority bloc vote to such an extent that they disregard states’ rights and the opinion of Southern white people amounted to nothing in their sight.” When asked whether he would compromise, he said there was as much a chance of his laying down his opposition as Stone Mountain, a rocky outcropping east of Atlanta held sacred by Confederate sympathizers, moving to Dalton, Georgia, a hundred miles north.8
And so, as the bill neared passage in the House, Russell pressed forward with his planned filibuster. The idea behind the maneuver is simple, deriving from the seemingly virtuous notion that the Senate is a deliberative body, which considers all aspects of a piece of legislation before approving it. Unlike in the House, debate on the Senate floor is unlimited, brought to an end only when at least two thirds (now three fifths) of the senators agree to end discussion and bring the bill to a vote, a step called “cloture.” To prevent cloture, the Southerners needed to organize just thirty-four senators in opposition. There were not enough of them to do that alone, but in the past they had drawn the balance from conservative Republicans as well as small-state senators, who saw the filibuster as a critical tool in protecting their diminutive constituencies from the political power of larger states. Russell’s hope—a Hail Mary pass, really—was that he could keep this coalition together through the middle of 1964, when, he predicted, renewed black protests and the ensuing violence would turn white America against the bill.
Russell organized his 21 men—19 Southern Democrats plus Tower and West Virginia senator Robert Byrd, who was not technically a Southerner but sided with the Southern faction in opposing civil rights legislation—into three platoons, led by Hill, Louisiana’s Allen Ellender, and Mississippi’s John Stennis. Each platoon was responsible for keeping the debate going for a day; the other two days they rested. Rest was important: youngsters like Fulbright (fifty-eight years old) and Gore (fifty-six) aside, the Southern Democrats were significantly older than the Senate average, and some, like the seventy-six-year-old Willis Robertson of Virginia, were so feeble they could speak for only a half hour at a time before growing winded. Still, like the Confederacy during the Civil War, they did not have to defeat their opponents outright; they just needed to draw out the fight long enough that the other side gave up.9
None of this was a secret to the bill’s supporters, led by Hubert Humphrey and his Republican comrade, California’s Thomas Kuchel. They were devising their own strategies in response. The first order of business was to decide whether they would try to out-talk the Southerners, grinding them down until they stopped talking and simply conceded the debate was over, or whether they would try to shut off debate by rounding up the sixty-seven votes needed for cloture. Most senators and their staffs supported the second option; there was simply no telling how long the Southerners could hold out, and the longer they waited, the more the country might turn against the bill.
That, at least, was the view inside the Capitol. Those outside, like Mitchell, Rauh, and the other civil rights lobbyists, saw things differently: to them, the bigger risk was in the compromises that might be made to win over conservative Republicans—and in particular Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader. They had reason to be skeptical: since 1950, no cloture vote on civil rights had ever won even a simple majority of the senators present and voting, let alone two thirds.10
For all involved—the Southern Democrats, the pro-civil-rights faction, and the movement activists—the variable that would determine whether they got their way was the man who succeeded Johnson as Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield. How far would Mansfield push the bill? The problem was, no one except Mansfield himself knew the answer.
Mansfield was in every way the opposite of his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson: quiet and mannerly where Johnson had been loud and often willfully rude, a stickler for rules and scrupulous honesty where Johnson had been willing to do just about anything in the name of a favored piece of legislation. “These fellows are about as similar as Winston Churchill and St. Francis of Assisi,” a colleague told Time magazine. Johnson liked to spit and curse; Mansfield puffed serenely on his pipe, packed with his favorite Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco. Johnson had cobbled together a scattered empire of office space around the Capitol; after taking over in 1961, Mansfield relinquished much of it. His treatment of Johnson’s favorite room, S-211, located just off the chamber floor, must have grated on Johnson the most: it was designed as the Senate library and decorated with ceiling frescoes by the artist Constantino Brumidi, but Johnson had given it a gaudy new paint job and hun
g fluorescent lights that obscured the art hidden above. Reporters took to calling it the Taj Mahal. When Johnson left, he made a bid to keep it as a base for when he sat as president of the Senate, but Mansfield denied the request. He then had Johnson’s lights and other latter-day interventions removed and left the room empty, taking a much smaller office across the hall instead.11
Mansfield ran the Senate in much the same way: hands off, minimalist, letting senators go their own way—he called himself the “servant not the suzerain of the Senate,” a new tack that most of his colleagues loved, except when it produced fits of anarchy in the chamber. He was quiet to the point of exasperation; TV interviewers said they had to prepare twice as many questions for him as usual, knowing his answers would be terse. And yet Mansfield was greatly admired among his colleagues, particularly the Southerners, for his respect for Senate tradition—something they no doubt thought they could abuse when necessary.12
None of this was surprising to those who knew something of Mansfield’s biography. Few modern senators had as rough or varied a life. Born in Lower Manhattan to Irish immigrant parents, he had moved out to Great Falls, Montana, at age seven to live with relatives after his mother died. He was a hardworking troublemaker, who worked for his uncle’s delivery business but also ran away from home twice, once ending up in jail. When he was fifteen, after the United States had joined World War I, he talked his way into the Navy; he later served in the Army and the Marines before receiving his discharge in 1922. He returned to Montana, where he worked in copper mines during the day and toward his high school equivalence and bachelor’s degrees at night; he received both in 1932, then a master’s in 1934, after which he became a professor of Latin American and Asian history at Montana State University (now the University of Montana). He won his first House race in 1942, and a decade later, a Senate seat.13
There may be other men whose careers before their fortieth birthday included stints in the Marines, the mines, and the college classroom, but not many. Partly as a result of those experiences, Mansfield as a politician acted like he had nothing to prove; he never craved attention or approval. He had fallen into the leadership after Johnson had chosen him as his deputy in 1957; after Johnson left, Mansfield was the one man in the Democratic leadership that all sides—South and North, liberal and conservative—could agree on. Mansfield always insisted it was a job he never asked for, and one he performed only out of his sense of duty to the Senate.
Still, for all the respect accorded Mansfield, more than a few people wondered if he was the best fit for the majority leader’s hat. By 1963 the Senate, many complained, had lost the energy of the Johnson years. “Fewer and fewer senators showed up for the daily sessions,” wrote Frank Valeo, the Senate secretary. “The flow of legislation from the committees to the floor slowed to a trickle.” And it was one thing to have a laissez-faire leader during normal times—but during a time of heightened tension, like the civil rights bill debate, you wanted a gut fighter, someone like Johnson who would crack the whip, cut the deals, make the bill happen. Mansfield would not—could not, by his nature—do those things. And who knew if he could take the pressure of a lengthy filibuster?14
It did not help the skeptics that as early as July 1963, Mansfield chose a decidedly un-Johnsonian strategy for the bill. Johnson had taken the Senate into round-the-clock sessions to break the 1960 filibuster, but Mansfield refused to follow suit. He also refused to enforce the often-ignored Rule 19, which limited senators to two speeches in a legislative “day” (different from a calendar day, a legislative day continues until the Senate decides to adjourn, which might not happen for weeks at a time). Johnson fumed, but Mansfield stood his ground. When a group of rabbis pressed him to reconsider during a meeting on February 5, he replied, “When Johnson was majority leader, he ran things the way he wanted them. Now I am majority leader and will run things the way I want them.”15
Instead, Mansfield’s plan was to be an honest broker, keeping the Senate on a normal schedule and letting the Southerners know his plans in advance. Mansfield believed that keeping things aboveboard would make the Southern filibusterers look bad, shoring up public opinion and, hopefully, swaying some senatorial fence sitters. But he also feared that a contentious, drawn-out debate could cause lasting harm to the Senate’s reputation. As he told the Senate on June 18, 1963, “The majority leader has no suave parliamentary tactics by which to bring legislation to a vote. He is no expert on the rules and he is fully aware that there are many tactics which can forestall a vote.”16
Mansfield’s initial plan was to go for cloture votes on the new bill as early as March or April, the better to get the tumult over quickly. But under pressure from Robert Kennedy, he agreed to wait until Katzenbach and Marshall could round up the requisite sixty-seven votes—which, they all knew, could mean well into the summer, if ever.17
Mansfield did, however, make two decisions that pleased civil rights supporters. One was his selection of Hubert Humphrey as the bill’s floor manager. Normally a bill would be handled by the relevant committee chairman—but in this case, that meant Mississippi’s James Eastland. Humphrey, though, was a perfect choice. As mayor of Minneapolis in 1948, he had given a stemwinder of a speech at the Democratic National Convention that beat back a Southern attempt to add an anti-civil-rights plank to the party platform; his speech was so successful, in fact, that the convention ended up adopting the strongest pro-civil-rights plank in party history. Johnson, who became majority leader in 1953, saw a pragmatic streak in Humphrey, and he brought him into the Democratic leadership in the hope that doing so could give him an avenue into the party’s liberal corners. Thanks to Johnson, by the end of the decade, Humphrey was one of the most powerful men in the Senate.18
Selecting Humphrey gave Mansfield several advantages: the majority leader could remain above the fray, free to meet equally with Southerners, Northern Democrats, and Republicans; he could exploit Humphrey’s close relationship with the White House; and he could turn loose this man of seemingly boundless political energy on a subject that demanded more hours each day than most mortal men have to give.
But before Humphrey could take charge, Mansfield had to make sure the bill did not slip into Eastland’s hands. Normally when a bill comes over from the House, it is read twice and then immediately shuffled over to the relevant committee, where it receives the same marking-up treatment that it did in the lower body before it heads to the Senate floor for even more debate, followed by a vote. But this was no normal situation. Since taking over the Judiciary Committee in 1955, Eastland had turned it into a graveyard for civil rights legislation. He had already scrapped one version of the bill—the hearings for which brought both George Wallace and Robert Kennedy to the witness table. Mansfield did not want to risk a repeat with the real bill.
There was an alternative. As soon as the bill arrived on the Senate floor, Mansfield could move to have it put directly on the legislative calendar, skipping the Judiciary Committee and teeing it up for debate by the entire Senate. It was an unconventional move, but hardly unprecedented: Johnson had used the same procedure to bypass Eastland during the debate over the 1957 civil rights act.
And so, a few minutes past noon on February 17, after the Senate had returned from the Lincoln Day recess, a clerk from the House entered the chamber to announce that the lower body had passed H.R. 7152 and that it was now ready for the Senate (Johnson had urged Mansfield not to wait until after the holiday to introduce the bill, but as usual, the majority leader ignored him). A page then took the bill from the clerk and carried it to the president pro tempore. Following normal procedure, Mansfield said, “Mr. President, I request that House bill 7152 be read the first time.” A clerk then read the bill’s titles, which sufficed for “reading” it in its entirety.19
Had the clerk read it a second time, as was usually the case, the bill would have immediately gone to Judiciary Committee purgatory. Instead, Mansfield rose again. “Mr. President,” he said, “I object to the
second reading of the bill today.”20
No one was surprised by Mansfield’s move; not only had he been planning it since the previous summer, but he had even contacted Eastland a few days earlier to make sure he knew what was coming. Still, the Southerners immediately began protesting.
Mansfield, still standing, conceded that his maneuver was unconventional. “The reasons for unusual procedures are too well known to require elaboration,” he said. But desperate times required extraordinary measures. “We hope in vain if we hope that this issue can be put over safely to another tomorrow, to be dealt with by another generation of senators. The time is now. The crossroads is here in the Senate.”21
Mansfield’s words were then echoed by his Republican counterpart, Everett Dirksen—“the distinguished minority leader,” as Mansfield called him, “whose patriotism has always taken precedence over his partisanship.” Almost since the moment the bill was conceived, it was apparent to everyone involved that Dirksen would be the key to its survival in the Senate. No matter what strategy the civil rights forces chose, they would need moderate and conservative Republican support—and the only man who could deliver that was the portly, curly-haired Illinois senator. Even the lobbyists knew it: in the fall of 1963 both Blake and Miller, from the National Council of Churches, traveled to Dirksen’s hometown of Pekin, Illinois, to press him personally on the bill.22
