by Risen, Clay
Mansfield gave one last concession to Dirksen: that they not file for cloture, the first step toward voting on the jury trial amendments, the substitute amendment, and then the bill itself, until after the June 2 primaries, for fear that injecting civil rights into the Republican primaries could upset what was by now a coronation of Goldwater as the party’s candidate. Because of the time required between filing for cloture and taking a vote, it would be June 9 at the earliest before the first stab at ending debate could be made.100
But in one last shot at the bill, Russell announced on June 1 that he was ready to allow votes on the jury trial amendments. The move was in part a way to win back filibuster-weary Republicans. But it was also a clever way of sabotaging the carefully orchestrated proceedings—the civil rights bill still needed time to lock down enough guaranteed votes. Early votes that went against the bill’s leadership could disrupt their fragile momentum, leading to a cascade of recriminations that might sink the whole thing.101
And so, in response, the Democrats launched a filibuster of their own—a counterfilibuster to keep the original filibuster alive. Meanwhile, they did all they could to collect more votes. On June 4, Republican Jack Miller of Iowa agreed to support cloture after weeks of intense lobbying by the archbishop of Dubuque. When Senator Wayne Morse told Humphrey he could not be there for the June 9 vote because he was giving a commencement speech in a small town in Washington State, Humphrey offered to send a jet to get him. Morse countered that the local landing strip was too small for a jet. Well, Humphrey replied, then we’ll send a helicopter to take you to the closest jet-accommodating airport. Eventually, Morse gave in to Humphrey’s relentless wheedling and said he would skip the speech after all.102
Still, the carefully erected edifice began to teeter. Dirksen came down with a fever and retired to his northern Virginia farm to recuperate. While he was away, Hickenlooper struck. With as many as twenty senators behind him, the Iowan charged that Dirksen had failed to consult with them on all his changes and that he and his backers were no longer beholden to his leadership on the bill—and in fact would refuse to support it unless given the opportunity to present their own amendments.103
Humphrey and Kuchel went into a tailspin. Who knew what Hickenlooper might ask? Could he really muster enough votes to kill the bill? And if they gave in to him, and he won his amendments, would that kill the bill’s chances in the Senate—or later, in the House?104
Chapter 8
Breaking the Filibuster
Hickenlooper’s rebellion may have caught Dirksen in a bind, but Mansfield still had a move to make. On Saturday, June 6, he rose in the Senate chamber to present the motion for cloture—and then immediately offered to postpone it if his colleagues agreed to vote on Hickenlooper’s amendments.1
This was a brilliant parry by Mansfield. It used the immediate, surmountable challenge presented by Hickenlooper to overcome the greater challenge presented by Richard Russell. In proposing to delay the vote until Hickenlooper had his moment in the spotlight, Mansfield was playing to the Iowa senator’s great vanity, thus defusing the threat that he and his supporters posed to the bill. And it worked: that evening Humphrey managed to wangle cloture commitments from three of Hickenlooper’s troops, Karl Mundt, Roman Hruska, and Norris Cotton. “I do believe this unanimous consent agreement,” Humphrey wrote shortly after the vote, “brought us the extra votes that we needed for cloture.” Hickelooper agreed to come along soon after.2
But Mansfield was also putting the Southern Democrats in a terrible position. If they opposed the vote, they would lose any chance of winning over Hickenlooper’s faction. But if they allowed it, they would be giving in to Mansfield and allowing a demonstration of how strong the bloc was behind the bill. After some internal debate, the Southerners chose the second course, even though they knew they had been checkmated. “This whole thing has been a very graceful ballet . . . but I have not derived much pleasure from it,” Russell said. “I have concluded there is very little chance of me winning anything out of this situation.”3
Hickenlooper’s amendments, which he offered Saturday afternoon for a vote on Tuesday, were anticlimactically small: a revised amendment, originally from Morton, which would offer all criminal contempt defendants the right to a jury trial except under Title I; a limit on Title VII to cover companies with one hundred or more employees, originated by Cotton; and Hickenlooper’s own proposal to eliminate any plank of the bill dealing with aid for school desegregation.
On Monday, the Senate opened with Mansfield’s cloture motion, signed by twenty-seven Democrats and eleven Republicans—intentionally far fewer than publicly supported it, since the leadership did not want to reveal precisely how many senators they had behind them. That set in motion a two-day waiting period, meaning that the Senate would vote on Hickenlooper’s and Cotton’s amendments on Tuesday and make its historic cloture vote on Wednesday.
Despite the momentous occasion, the minds of many senators were elsewhere. Over the weekend two Navy reconnaissance jets had been shot down by Communist rebels over Laos, which the Pentagon answered by ordering armed escorts for such flights—evidence, if anyone still needed it, of the country’s inexorable slide toward greater involvement in Southeast Asia.4
The next day the Senate narrowly voted to approve the Morton amendment, 51–48, thanks to last-minute reversals by senators Stuart Symington, Edward Long, and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, liberal Democrats who otherwise supported the civil rights bill. But both the Hickenlooper and the Cotton proposals went down handily (40–56 and 34–63, respectively). The leadership also allowed one more amendment vote, on a proposal by Senator Ervin to scratch the entirety of Title VII—a move that was roundly defeated and thus helped underline the momentum behind the bill.5
The way was now cleared for the cloture vote the next day. But Humphrey and the White House still were unsure whether they had the votes. On Monday, Mike Manatos had informed Larry O’Brien that they had 42 Democrats and 23 Republicans in hand, two short of the 67 they needed to end the debate (Humphrey was a bit more sanguine, counting 66 votes in favor). There was a small number of wild cards, some of them less likely than others—even after the vote on Hickenlooper’s amendments, the Iowan had made it clear he was uncommitted on cloture (he eventually voted for it); on the other hand, Manatos ranked border-state senators Ralph Yarborough of Texas and Herbert Walters of Tennessee, along with Howard Edmondson of Oklahoma, as possible to likely supporters.6
At precisely 7:38 p.m. on June 9, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia took a final, lonely stand against cloture. With a black leather notebook filled with several hundred pieces of paper before him, he began reading a speech that would ultimately last fourteen hours and thirteen minutes, well into the next morning. As Byrd settled into his one-man filibuster, the Senate emptied. Humphrey went off to dinner with the journalist Andrew Glass from the New York Herald Tribune at the Monocle, a new restaurant set between the Senate office buildings and Union Station. Outwardly, Humphrey was confident. At 7:30, he told Johnson he had the votes in hand. Johnson, Humphrey recalled, “said he hoped so, but he said it would be difficult. I told him I was sure of it.”7
Privately, though, Humphrey was worried. He knew that no civil rights cloture vote since 1950 had won even a simple majority of the senators present and voting. After dinner, he went back to the office and spent most of the night working the phones, trying to win over the remaining fence sitters. That night John Williams and Carl Curtis passed word that they would support cloture. But by 1:00 a.m., Humphrey still did not have commitments from the three outstanding senators he thought should have been the easiest to get—Edmondson, Yarborough, and Howard Cannon of Nevada.8
Humphrey finally went to sleep around three in the morning, but was awake by 7:30, when he called Johnson to reiterate that he had the votes. Again, he was less sure than he let on; after hanging up with the president, he called Edmondson, Yarborough, and Cannon. The first two, as expected, fell in line
and said they would support cloture. But Cannon had been an ambivalent supporter of civil rights in the past, and he felt a vote to back cloture now might hurt him in his reelection bid that fall (he ended up winning by just 84 votes). However, Humphrey knew that Cannon was under heavy lobbying pressure from the United Steel Workers, who had given significant financial support to his 1958 race and promised to do so again—if he supported cloture. Cannon had also journeyed to the White House to meet with the president on May 27, where he presumably received the full “Johnson treatment”—with the Texan wheedling, pleading, and perhaps threatening his former Senate colleague to vote to end debate. By the time Humphrey got Cannon on the phone that morning, he was ready to concede—almost. He told Humphrey that he would wait in the cloakroom while the votes were called; if he was needed, he would come out and vote yea. (According to the union lobbyist Jack Biedler, Cannon was finally swayed by a White House promise to open a facility in Nevada to mint silver dollars.)9
As Humphrey made his final telephonic rounds, reporters began to filter into his outer office. Humphrey emerged to find a packed antechamber, where he spied his old friend Cecil E. Newman, a Minneapolis businessman and editor of the Minneapolis Spokesman and St. Paul Recorder, the state’s two largest black newspapers. He and Newman toasted the upcoming vote with glasses of orange juice. Humphrey then left for the Senate chamber; along the way, he passed a note to Phil Hart that said they had 69 votes—two more than needed.10
Meanwhile, rumors swirled about additional votes turning up—Lee Williams, a staffer for Arkansas senator William Fulbright, sent word to the White House that his boss had decided to vote for cloture; others said Johnson had persuaded him to vote for it after promising him the secretary of state position after the fall election. (Johnson had done nothing of the kind, and in any case Fulbright voted against cloture.)11
Outside, the thermometer was climbing toward an oppressive 100 degrees, a drastic change from the blizzard conditions that had marked the beginning of the Senate debate. Just before 10:00 a.m., the Senate chamber began to fill—senators on the floor, surrounded by their staffs; onlookers and reporters in the gallery, peering down to catch a glimpse of history. Senator Byrd was still winding down his eight-hundred-page speech, which ended just nine minutes shy of the top of the hour, when Senate President Lee Metcalf gaveled the day to order.12
Before the vote came a cavalcade of final speeches. Mansfield, true to his role as arbiter, downplayed his support for the bill and instead invoked the need for the bill to receive a proper vote. “The Senate now stands at the crossroads of history,” he said, “and the time for decision is at hand.” He then read a letter from one of his constituents, a young mother in Montana. “I wish there was something I could do to help,” she implored. “The only way I know how to start is to educate my children that justice and freedom and ambition are not merely privileges, but their birthrights.” The majority leader then ceded the floor to Russell, who loosed one last attack on the bill. It would, he said in his thirty-minute speech, “destroy forever the doctrine of the separation of powers.”13
Finally it was Dirksen’s turn. The minority leader had spent the previous night at his farm in Broad Run, Virginia, writing what he intended to be a historic speech. He rose at 5:00 a.m., finished the final draft, clipped some flowers for his office, and rode in to the Capitol. He arrived just as Byrd was finishing.14
Dirksen stood at his desk and began by introducing the final amendment in the form of a substitute, essentially the Mansfield-Dirksen package, with the newly accepted Morton amendment attached. Looking pale from his recent illness and gulping pills as he spoke, Dirksen launched into a plea for his party to hew to its pro-civil-rights legacy. Equality was, he said, inevitable. Citing yet again his paraphrased quotation from Victor Hugo, he said, “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come. The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education, and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here.”15
But just as Dirksen moved toward the end of his speech, Metcalf cut him off. “The time of the senator from Illinois has expired,” he said. “All time has expired.” It was a rude and unkind move, especially by an ally of the bill, but Metcalf likely figured he needed to take some shots at the pro-civil-rights senators first if he was going to beat back any underhanded Southern maneuvers later.16
Per the Senate rules, Metcalf then ordered the clerks and staffers to leave the floor. “The chair submits to the Senate, without debate, the question: Is it the sense of the Senate that the debate shall be brought to a close? The secretary will call the roll.” All one hundred senators were on hand for the vote—a vanishingly rare occurrence.17
Outside, Roger Mudd stood in the muggy heat beside a big board constructed by the CBS art department, with the names of all the senators. At the insistence of the Southern Democrats, who did not appreciate Mudd’s obvious preference for the civil rights bill, the Capitol Police had forced him to move off the Capitol grounds, so he was broadcasting from across the street. As the secretary of the Senate, Felton M. Johnston, called the roll, a runner inside the Senate gallery would step outside and whisper each senator’s vote to a producer, who sat on the phone with Mudd’s producer on the other end of the line. Whenever a new vote came in, Mudd would check yea or nay beside the senator’s name on the chalkboard.18
A few moments before the clerk read the name of Clair Engle of California, a Navy corpsman wheeled the senator—by then horribly weakened by brain cancer—into the chamber. He wore a steel brace to support his head, and a black bandana held his right arm up to his face.19
The clerk called Engle’s name. Silence. He called it again. Then Kuchel, his fellow California senator, walked over to the clerk. “I do not believe that the senior senator from California is able to speak,” he said. “I am certain, however, that he is prepared to vote. Upon the last call of his name I believe that the senators present today noticed that he made a perceptible motion of the index finger of his right hand toward his eye, in a manner which indicates that he wishes to cast a ‘yea’ vote on the bill. If the clerk will call his name again and if the distinguished senator makes the same motion, I request that the Senate record a yea vote.” The clerk called Engle’s name, and the ailing senator slowly lifted his finger to his eye. His vote cast, Engle was wheeled from the chamber. He died on July 30, 1964.20
Watching from the wings was John Synon of CCFAF. The committee, despite all its money and effort, had failed to sustain the initial wave of anti-civil-rights sentiment it had captured early in the filibuster. It had been unable to co-opt business antipathy toward Title VII, unable to capitalize on Wallace’s primary wins. And yet up to the day of the vote the committee thought it had thirty-four sure votes against cloture. But Synon turned out to be a poor vote counter, and it did not take him long to realize that many of the “sure” votes were anything but. Synon said that by the time Nebraska’s Carl Curtis voted yea, he knew it was over.21
When Johnston got to Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, the vote was still five short, with nineteen votes left to go. Then came five Southern “nays” in a row—Robertson, Russell, Smathers, Sparkman, and Stennis—a list Mudd referred to, on air, as a “murderers’ row.” Stuart Symington’s yea vote put the vote at sixty-six, just one away—but then came four nays: Talmadge, Thurmond, Tower, and Walters.
Finally came John J. Williams, a Republican from Delaware known around the capital as “Whispering Willie”—with some irony, because while soft-spoken, he was also a relentless partisan and a tireless advocate of small government and cutting federal waste. He had used the filibuster on many occasions to take personal stands against bills that he thought might add to the federal cash cow, and he had most recently taken the Johnson administration to the woodshed over the Bobby Baker scandal. None of that mattered now. “Yea,” Williams said.
The room exhaled. What no one thought could happen had happened. For the first time in histor
y, cloture had been invoked on a civil rights measure. The South had been broken. Humphrey looked up at the gallery and raised his arms in silent triumph.22
Johnston finished the roll, then read it again, a standard practice to make sure late-arriving senators had their chance to vote. This time Cannon emerged from the cloakroom and voted yea. When it got to Hayden’s turn, Mansfield shouted, “It’s all right, Carl. We’ve got the votes.” The Arizona senator emerged and voted nay.23
When the roll call was finished, the clerk read the results: 71 yea, 29 nay—Humphrey’s prediction, which some had thought overly optimistic, was short by two. Forty-four Democrats and twenty-seven Republicans supported cloture; on the losing side were twenty-three Democrats and six Republicans, including Barry Goldwater and John Tower.
The seventy-five-day filibuster—totaling 534 hours, 1 minute, and 51 seconds of debate, by far the longest in history—was over. The chamber erupted in cheers. Larry O’Brien said, “It was like the home team winning the Super Bowl.”24
The path to cloture was never assured, nor was it easy. Contrary to the conventional storyline, it was not primarily about “beating” the Southerners. Rather, it was about cobbling together a coalition of votes from the liberal and conservative Republicans to pair with the pro-civil-rights Democrats. This cobbling together was performed not by a single field marshal—Lyndon Johnson, or perhaps Hubert Humphrey—but by a loose and often unstable assortment of forces in Congress, the executive branch, and the civil rights movement. Senators who might never have backed the bill, such as Jack Miller of Iowa or Howard Cannon of Nevada, were brought into the yea column thanks to the persistent urging of religious and labor organizations, which had been deployed through a coordinated effort by the Justice Department and the Leadership Conference. The story of the civil rights bill is about the interplay between elected officials, government officials, lobbyists, and countless thousands of activists around the country, pushing and pulling each other toward their common goal. If the bill did not satisfy everyone, it was broadly acceptable—and as such it demonstrated, more than perhaps any single piece of legislation before or since, the messy political genius of American democracy.
