Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  Furthermore, Dwight Eisenhower, behind his sunny smile, was a canny political strategist—only now, four decades after he left office, is the true extent of that canniness beginning to be grasped—and a man whose desire to win, to win everything, is also inadequately understood. On the evening of his 1956 election victory, he would give his speechwriter Emmet John Hughes a glimpse behind his supposed indifference to the outcome, telling him, when Hughes started to congratulate him on his landslide, that he wasn’t yet satisfied: “There’s Michigan and Minnesota still to see. You remember the story of Nelson—dying, he looked around and asked ‘Are there any of them still left?’ I guess that’s me. When I get in a battle, I just want to win the whole thing…. Six or seven states we can’t help. But I don’t want to lose any more. Don’t want any of them ‘left.’” Ever since the 1952 election, Eisenhower had seen a chance that he could do for the GOP what Roosevelt had done for the Democrats: make his party the majority party. A delicate balancing act would be required if he was to increase the GOP’s appeal to the African-Americans who held the key to the Democratic strongholds of the North while not losing the beachhead he had already established among whites in the once solidly Democratic South, but in his 1956 State of the Union address, he took a first step, making a request—his first request after four years in office—for civil rights legislation, focusing on the right to vote.

  Somewhat sparse though it was in civil rights proponents, the Eisenhower Administration did have Attorney General Herbert Brownell, for whom the President, in Ambrose’s words, “had developed unbounded admiration.” Not only the keenest of political strategists himself, Brownell was also a longtime civil rights advocate; as a member of the New York State Legislature, he had, he was to recall, first begun fighting “the scourge of segregation” during the 1930s by advocating a compulsory Fair Employment Act with enforcement powers strong enough to ensure compliance; he had left instructions as to the songs to be played at his memorial service at Christ Church on Park Avenue in New York; and when he died at the age of ninety-two in 1996, two hymns were added to the traditional Methodist program: the Negro spiritual “Amazing Grace” and the marching song of Lincoln’s armies, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And he had been frustrated “quite deeply” by the fact that “our hands were tied” by the lack of federal jurisdiction in the Emmett Till case, and over so many other areas in which black Americans had supposedly been guaranteed “the equal protection of the law.” He was anxious to draft a new civil rights law, and Eisenhower gave him permission to do so.

  “I initially concentrated almost exclusively on voting rights,” Brownell was to recall, but the memory of his frustration in the Till case was too fresh, and “I decided that a more ambitious bill was necessary. So I created … a set of proposals that would give the Attorney General unprecedented power to enforce civil rights” in housing, in parks, in theaters, in restaurants, in hotels and motels—in many aspects of daily life—as well as the power to do so without being forced to wait for individuals to sue first, since individuals might be too poor, or too afraid, to sue. Under the Brownell Bill, an Attorney General could institute suits himself, in the name of the United States—suits not only to redress past injustices but to prevent new ones by obtaining judicial injunctions against them.

  When Brownell’s draft legislation was completed in early 1956, the President called a Cabinet meeting for a full debate on the issue. Sentiment seemed to be moving against introduction of the bill, but Eisenhower interrupted, saying, “Where do you think that the Attorney General’s suggestions are moving too rapidly? They look to me like amelioration”—and, of course, sentiment promptly turned the other way.

  “After the meeting,” Brownell was to write—in a sentence whose ambiguity was later to prove significant—“I was told by the secretary of the cabinet that the President had decided not to support the general civil rights section of the proposed bill” but only the other sections, and “to submit the bill to Congress … only as a Justice Department,” not as an Administration, proposal. (Cautioning Brownell not to act like “another Charles Sumner” when he testified, Eisenhower illustrated the dangers in stirring up racial emotions with a jocular remark: a southern Negro had recently remarked: “If someone doesn’t shut up around here, particularly those Negroes from the North, they’re going to get a lot of us niggers killed.”) But liberals wanted a broad bill, and in hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, New York’s Kenneth Keating, an old ally of Brownell’s, elicited from Brownell—probably by prearrangement—the fact that another section had been drafted, asked Brownell to send it over, and then amended the bill so that section was included.

  AMONG MEN of good will at both ends of the Capitol there was not only determination but a new unity of purpose. Many Democratic House liberals, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler of New York, had handed proposed civil rights bills up to the desk in the first days of the 1956 congressional session, but pride of authorship was to be subordinated to a cause. Since Republicans would be more inclined to support a Republican bill, giving it the bipartisan backing it would need for passage, key civil rights strategists Joe Rauh, Clarence Mitchell, Andrew Biemiller, and Richard Boiling, the young representative from Missouri who had become a Rayburn favorite, asked Celler to subordinate his bill to Brownell’s—and Celler agreed, and agreed further to delay reporting any bill until Brownell’s arrived. In the Senate, Paul Douglas helped draft a new civil rights bill, “a model bill,” similar to Brownell’s in “encompassing a whole battery” of provisions empowering the federal government to move against rights violations in many areas besides voting—“a dream bill from the civil rights movement’s point of view,” Joe Rauh was to call it. “A perfect bill.”

  At one end of the Capitol, liberal determination seemed likely to produce results. When, still early in the session, southern vote-counters began polling House members, the results surprised and disturbed them. Conservative Republicans who had stood shoulder to shoulder with them for years were standing there no longer. And neither, in their own party, were more than a few congressmen who had never been particularly liberal on civil rights: solid, dependable, “safe” men who in a crunch had also always come down on the side of the South, partly because of the power of the southern committee (and subcommittee) chairmen over these legislators’ own bills, partly because they felt that their party could not afford to lose the South, that the Old Confederacy was the bedrock of Democratic strength. But the burgeoning northern Negro vote had injected into their calculations a new factor—which, the southerners realized with growing astonishment and dismay, was beginning to equal in weight, or to exceed, the old factors.

  In the House, of course, the Speaker was a weighty factor in himself, and his reaction was surprising, too. When, after a Board of Education meeting one evening in January, Boiling walked Sam Rayburn upstairs to his office so that he could have a private word with him about civil rights, the brief (as always) discussion was, as was so often the case with Rayburn, not about strategy but about principle, the very simple principle that mattered to Rayburn. “He wanted to find out what was right and fair, and then do it.” And to Boiling’s surprise, ardent southerner though Rayburn was, with those pictures of Robert E. Lee on his wall, Rayburn felt it was right, that it was “only fair,” that “black people have the right to vote.” Interrupting the eloquent young congressman in full flight, the Speaker said: “I’m not against the right to vote. Every citizen should have that.” Though he said no more, “I walked from his office in relief and delight,” Boiling was to recall. “I was certain that… the Speaker would step in at the critical time in order to give the push that only he could effectively give.” Recalling his discussions with Rauh and Biemiller and Mitchell during the early days of 1956, Boiling would say that “We didn’t really care what was in the bill as long as there was something in it. We felt that as long as we could get the first bill passed, we could get others passed.” And the
se men felt that now, at last, with representatives from both parties behind it, they could get a bill passed. “Rayburn was for it. We got the idea that at last we could pass a civil rights bill!” The Supreme Court had, of course, already proven itself a friend of civil rights. Now, in 1956, the executive branch had, however tentatively, at last entered the fight—and it appeared that the House would come along, too.

  THAT LEFT ONLY THE SENATE. And its Majority Leader.

  If one listened to Democratic liberals in the early days of January, 1956, one would have thought that in the Senate, too, the barriers were crumbling. “I am sick of seeing our party bullied and intimidated … in order to accommodate itself to Southern prejudices,” one midwestern Democratic senator said. “If the Southern conservatives want to split off, I for one am for letting them do it. I believe it has got to happen sooner or later anyway, and 1956 might be as good a year for it as any.” There were the usual liberal prognostications that this was the year that the Senate would pass a civil rights bill.

  Hardly had the Senate convened, indeed, when Hennings of Missouri introduced four separate civil rights bills that were referred to the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, which he chaired, and which quickly reported out the bills, with a favorable recommendation, to the full Judiciary Committee. The same subcommittee—and committee—would also handle Douglas’ bill. Judiciary was one of the three Senate committees chaired by liberals. There was a good chance that under Harley Kilgore’s gavel, the full committee would also report these bills out favorably, which would mean that while the South would still be able to kill them, it would not be able to kill them quietly but only after a highly public floor fight it was anxious to avoid.

  In reality, however, the Senate was still the Senate. While some—most—of the political barriers blocking civil rights legislation were, in 1956, less solid than in the past, the walls of the South’s citadel were higher and stronger than ever. On January 3, the first day of its 1956 session—in the very midst of the rosy civil rights prognostications—a meeting of liberal senators was held in Herbert Lehman’s office. For a similar meeting in 1953, nineteen senators had shown up, and had decided to try to reform the cloture rule, an attempt that had mustered a total of a meagre twenty-one votes. Now, at the 1956 meeting, exactly twelve senators showed up—and in a discussion among the twelve it was concluded that a similar attempt at reforming cloture would not muster even twenty-one votes. Since the attempt would therefore reveal that they were even weaker than before, they decided not to make it.

  And not long after the 1956 session began, the walls were made even higher—with Lyndon Johnson lending a helping hand.

  On February 28, the sixty-three-year-old Kilgore died of a stroke, and the ranking Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, the senator who would, under the seniority rule, succeed to Judiciary’s chairmanship, was James O. Eastland of Mississippi.

  Surely, said the ADA and the NAACP and the great liberal journals, surely the seniority system would not be allowed to prevail in this case. Judiciary (which was referred to as the “powerful Judiciary Committee” so often that its title sometimes seemed to have three words) had jurisdiction over all civil rights legislation. Making Eastland Judiciary’s chairman would place at the committee’s head the senator most outspokenly committed to killing all civil rights legislation, the senator who openly boasted that he had killed such legislation before when he had been only chairman of one of Judiciary’s subcommittees (“I had special pockets put in my pants, and for three years I carried those bills around in my pockets …”). Judiciary, what’s more, had jurisdiction over all legislation “relating to federal courts and judges.” Elevating Eastland to Judiciary’s chairmanship would place at the head of the committee in charge of the courts a senator who had openly advocated defiance of the highest court after its Brown ruling (“You are not required to obey any court which passed out such a ruling. In fact, you are obligated to defy it”), who had proposed a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court decisions that had helped “slimy, juicy” African-Americans. The chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said The New Republic, “is the one seat of power in Washington where a dedicated opponent of civil rights can do his greatest damage.” For Eastland to be given that seat “is unthinkable,” the ADA said, joining the NAACP in telegrams appealing to Lyndon Johnson to see that East-land was not given the post. “Maybe there is no easy substitute for seniority,” the New York Times editorialized. “There is no substitute for wisdom, either. There is no substitute for faith in the American system of democracy. If something has to give way, it had better be seniority.”

  Which showed only that the ADA and the NAACP and the Times didn’t fully grasp how the Senate felt about the seniority system—or what Lyndon Johnson’s first priority was.

  To all such appeals, the Leader replied that it was not he but the Democratic Steering Committee that made committee assignments, and that he was only one member of that committee, and as such had only limited influence. Eastland, however, was in later years to give him more credit than that. “I had Lyndon’s support all the way,” he was to recall. And, he said, Lyndon had also gone out of his way to spare him the embarrassment of a floor fight on his nomination, or even of a roll-call vote—which might have resulted in an unseemly high number of votes against him. “He [Lyndon] worked it out so that two fellows would make speeches against me, but would not ask for a roll call vote,” Eastland was to say. On March 2, the Senate, following a unanimous recommendation of the Democratic Steering Committee—based, the committee said, on seniority—named Eastland to the chairmanship. It did so, on the motion of Majority Leader Johnson, in an unrecorded voice vote so that senators’ views would not go on record; the voices of only a very few senators—journalists in the Press Gallery estimated no more than four or five—could be heard shouting “No” “A mad dog is loose in the streets of justice,” the NAACP’s Clarence Mitchell said. Since Jim Eastland was only fifty-one years old, he might be loose a long time.

  34

  Finesses

  EVEN WHILE THE EASTLAND MATTER was being pushed through, another threat to Lyndon Johnson’s hopes of winning the 1956 Democratic presidential nomination—another threat born out of the escalating civil rights conflict—was boiling up on Capitol Hill. Feeling itself under attack on a dozen fronts, the South now rallied its forces—with a rallying cry that came from its Capitol citadel.

  Infuriated by the Brown ruling, southern senators had been working since the beginning of the year on a proclamation that would guide the region’s future response to that ruling. “A Declaration of Constitutional Principles” was its formal title, but the press quickly coined a shorter name: the “Southern Manifesto.” Drafted by South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, with assistance from Virginia’s Harry Byrd, it had been edited by Richard Russell, and its more intemperate phrases had therefore been deleted and its arguments decked out in legalisms that seemed reasonable and logical—as long as one ignored the fact that it had been the Supreme Court, not Congress, that had, in Plessy v. Ferguson, interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to mean that separate but equal facilities were perfectly legal, and that therefore the Supreme Court had the right to reinterpret the Amendment. The southern “Declaration” said that since “there has been no amendment [to the Constitution] or Act of Congress” to override the Plessy decision, the Warren Court had had no “legal basis for its action” in overriding it in Brown. In a “clear abuse of judicial power,” the Manifesto declared, the Court had simply “substituted their personal and social ideas for the law of the land,” encroaching on “the reserved rights of the states.”

  Some of the Manifesto’s arguments demonstrated Russell’s gift for cloaking injustice in words of reason. The separate but equal doctrine “is founded on elemental humanity and common sense, for parents should not be deprived by government of the right to direct the lives and education of their own children,” it said. The
Brown decision, it said, “is destroying the amicable relations between white and Negro races that had been created through ninety years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there had been heretofore friendship and understanding.” And the Manifesto called on the South to resist the Brown decision. Commending “those States which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means,” it said that “We pledge ourselves to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.” Its signatories were nineteen senators and eighty-one representatives from the eleven states of the Old Confederacy, and it was read in full on the Senate floor on March 11—just nine days after the shouted “ayes” that had put Eastland in Judiciary’s chair—by the South’s greatest orator (in the House it was simply inserted in the record). And it made headlines across the nation—as it should have, for the Southern Manifesto was nothing less than an outright call by one hundred elected legislators in the national government for massive, unified, defiance of an order from the nation’s highest court. Hardly had Walter George’s organ-like tones stopped rolling across a hushed and solemn Senate when Wayne Morse rose to his feet. “One would think that Calhoun was walking across the floor of the Senate today,” he said.