Asked about his relationship with Lyndon Johnson in the Senate, Talmadge said, “At first, for years, I liked him. He spent a lot of time cultivating me—hours and hours.” They would talk about “everything,” Talmadge said. “Girls, hunting.” And, Talmadge said, they would talk about civil rights, and the relationships between whites and Negroes. How did Lyndon Johnson view the relationship between whites and Negroes? “Master and servant,” Talmadge replied. Well, didn’t he have any sympathy for their situation? “None indicated,” Talmadge replied.
Talmadge said that during the 1950s, Johnson would assure the southerners that they could count on him to weaken a civil rights bill as much as possible, that he was on their side on civil rights, that he had to pretend that he wasn’t, to meet the Southern Caucus as infrequently as possible, but that he really was their ally. “He would tell us, I’m one of you, but I can help you more if I don’t meet with you.” And, Talmadge said, the southerners believed him, believed that while changes in the civil rights laws were inevitable, Johnson would keep them as minor as possible, that “he was with us in his heart.”
“I believed him,” Talmadge said, but “I changed my opinion.” When? “When he was President,” Talmadge said. How did you feel then? “Disappointed,” Talmadge said. “Angry.” There was a long pause, and then he added, “Sick.” When asked, How did you feel when he said, “We shall overcome?,” Talmadge repeated, “Sick.”
The author then asked, “Did you feel that Lyndon Johnson betrayed you?” There was a longer pause. It could not have been easy for a politician as wily as Herman Talmadge to admit he had been fooled so completely. “Yes,” he finally said.
Of all the top aides to the southerners, the one with the best view of Johnson’s arguments was probably Dent, because of the time he spent “keeping an eye on Johnson” in the Democratic cloakroom. Dent says, “LBJ’s whole gambit was, ‘You guys can put me in the White House,’ and that will give you more authority and power…. And that would keep the South where the South wanted to be, which was a certain amount of segregation, at least. He was telling them, If LBJ was in the White House, the South would not get everything it wanted, but it would be far better off than if a Hubert Humphrey was President.”
When Dent’s assessment was repeated to John A. Goldsmith, head of the United Press Senate staff in the 1950s, Goldsmith said, “I think it’s much more ambivalent [than what Dent said]. Whether he [Johnson] or Russell would have said it in words that blunt I doubt.” And, Goldsmith said, that argument was just one of “a whole flock of the considerations” that southern senators were taking into account. “I think it was one of the things that the southerners would understand. I have no doubt that Russell conveyed something along these lines to the Southern Caucus.” And when Goldsmith was asked, “Was Lyndon Johnson, in 1957, making them believe that if he became President he would do as much as possible to protect segregation?” Goldsmith replied, “These guys would have taken that as a given.” What Lyndon Johnson was saying, or hinting, about racial segregation during his private conversations with the members of the Southern Caucus we don’t know; we only know the final outcome. Strom Thurmond was suspicious of, and unconvinced by, Johnson, but the other members of the Southern Caucus were not.
Most important, Richard Russell was not. As John Goldsmith has written, Russell’s motives “have been debated over the years…. Russell himself may not have known” in 1957 “how much his long-standing, reasoned opposition to all civil rights initiatives was being tempered by his hope that Johnson might succeed in national politics and even become a President attuned to the southern culture.” And, Goldsmith adds, “Those considerations were not at odds with one another….” Russell validated Johnson’s arguments by assuring the Southern Caucus that they were true, and he reminded its members of his grand design; it wasn’t necessary for Lyndon Johnson to hint to the southern senators that the South’s first priority should be to put him in the White House, because Russell did the hinting. These senators had been following where Russell led for many years now, and they would follow him still. At the end of one Southern Caucus in 1957, Harry Byrd summed up the feeling around the huge mahogany table by saying simply, “Dick, it’s up to you.” Inconceivable as it might seem that these men would allow a civil rights bill—even a very weak bill—to pass, they would allow one to pass if Russell told them to. That same January of 1957, a strange rumor began circulating on Capitol Hill. Clint Anderson was telling friends that Lyndon Johnson had told him that a civil rights bill was going to be passed in 1957—and that he, Lyndon Johnson, was going to support it. Anderson didn’t believe either part of that prediction, but it was being heard elsewhere, “REPORT BEING CIRCULATED IN WASHINGTON THAT MAJORITY LEADER LYNDON JOHNSON HAS PROMISED THAT A CIVIL RIGHTS BILL WILL BE PASSED,” Roy Wilkins wired to NAACP headquarters in New York. Then the rumor was put in print; the Herald Tribune reported that “The Senate’s Democratic leadership had reached an understanding to bring the civil rights issue to a head early in the present session…. The leadership is hopeful … that if it gets the matter to the Senate floor within the next two months any southern attempt to thwart the decision by ‘extended debate’ can be beaten down….” And there was an even stranger rumor: that among the senators to whom Johnson had told this were the southern senators. In mid-January, reports began to circulate that Russell had convened a secret meeting of the Southern Caucus, and that at that meeting Johnson had laid down a timetable for action on a civil rights bill. And then that timetable was in print: Johnson, Newsweek reported, had told southerners that “Floor debate will open in early Spring…. By the end of April, the bill will be passed.” Lyndon Johnson, who as President just a few years later would do so much to end the racial discrimination that was a keystone of the South’s way of life, who would do more to end racial discrimination than any other President of the twentieth century, was being given a crucial boost toward the presidency by the South’s own senators, fervent believers, most of them, in racial discrimination. And at least some of them were helping Johnson at least partly because they believed that while, if he were to become President, he might have no choice but to do something about racial discrimination, they could count on him to do as little as possible.
Whether or not Lyndon Johnson was already planning in 1957 to take giant steps toward racial justice if he ever became President, we do not know, and perhaps no one will ever know. But whether or not in 1957 he was misleading the southern senators deliberately, misled they certainly were. Did he intend to mislead them?—we don’t know. But if we take him at his word—his word that at Cotulla, “I swore then and there that if I ever had a chance to help those underprivileged kids I was going to do it”—then Lyndon Johnson was misleading the southern senators deliberately. To whatever extent Johnson in 1957 was already planning, at least in outline, the things he would do if he ever became President, he was planning to betray, and to betray on a very large scale, the men, some of them very clever men, who were, for years, not only his most loyal but his most important supporters. “Civil rights didn’t get accomplished by idealism but by rough stuff”—that was the lesson that Katharine Graham had taken away from her visit to Lyndon Johnson’s ranch. What Johnson was doing now with the Southern Caucus, in the service of both his great ambition and his great purpose, was “rough stuff” indeed.
But a civil rights bill had to be passed. And a civil rights bill was going to be passed.
HIS NEXT JOB, now that he had persuaded the South to let a weak, token, bill pass, was to reduce the bill to a point at which it was so weak that it was only a token—and yet was still strong enough to satisfy northern liberals that something genuine had been accomplished for civil rights.
That proved to be very difficult. For more than four months, in fact, it seemed impossible.
The heart of the bill—the part on which both sides were focusing almost exclusively—was its third part (or “title”), the part covering the “broad array” of civ
il rights, that would make segregation illegal in schools and in public places such as parks, swimming pools, hotels, motels, theaters, and restaurants. For a while, in mid-January, Johnson seemed to be having some success in persuading the southerners that the measure would be sufficiently weakened if an amendment was added to provide that anyone indicted for a violation of any of the bill’s provisions be entitled to a trial by jury. With a “jury trial amendment” added, he told them, what would the other provisions matter? They could forgo filibustering against the bill because they could be sure—and could excuse themselves to their constituents by explaining—that the other provisions were now meaningless: what white man had to fear a southern jury? But the bill was simply potentially too destructive to southern mores for that argument to be convincing. The broadness of its attack on the southern way of life—the way in which the bill aimed at reducing it to nothing but a memory by mandating an intermingling of the races in so many “social” settings—infuriated the southern senators. Part III was not only a threat but an insult to their gentle Southland, with its friendly, harmonious relations between the races. And Part III raised, of course, the spectre of that worst of all possibilities: the mongrelization of the noble white race. Adding a jury trial amendment wouldn’t be enough. The southern senators couldn’t take a chance that the amendment would vitiate the bill sufficiently: what if federal judges found ways to circumvent that provision? Part III was totally unacceptable. It had to go—all of it. None of the senators were angrier than Richard Russell. Among the methods by which Johnson was attempting to influence the Southern Caucus was the planting of newspaper articles “reporting” the understanding among “responsible southerners” of the need for passage of civil rights legislation, and of their increased—and highly responsible—willingness to let the legislation pass if it included the jury trial amendment, but Russell was having none of it. On March 25, William S. White floated just such a Johnson trial balloon, suggesting the likelihood that a civil rights bill would pass with Part III largely intact but with a provision requiring a jury trial for all violations. Tearing White’s article out of the paper, Russell scribbled across it a note to himself: “This story embraces LBJ’s ideas and I believe was inspired by him—He talked to me as if this amendment was all we could expect—I don’t agree if he will go all out.”
“All out” meant removing Part III—entirely. To the Senate’s true civil rights believers, however—northern liberals of both parties—Part III was the most essential part of the bill, the part that made it their “dream bill.” The most hurtful racial injustices occurred in the very areas in which Part III would at last allow the federal government to intervene. Without it, even after Supreme Court decisions, African-Americans were still being forced to ride in the back of buses, and black schoolchildren still couldn’t go to school with white children. The liberals flatly refused to consider the elimination of Part III or, indeed, any substantial alteration in its wording. They refused also to consider any form of a jury trial amendment which would make a mockery of a civil rights bill, whatever its other provisions might be. And joining the liberals in refusal were moderate and even some conservative Republicans who were supporting the unamended bill out of loyalty to the Republican Administration which had proposed it, or out of desire for personal political gain.
In attempting to reconcile southern and northern demands, Johnson was engaging in the search for compromise—for some common ground—that is the essence of the legislative process, but on this issue no common ground seemed to exist. For the sake of Johnson’s presidential ambitions, for the sake of “cleaning him up” on civil rights, the South—at Richard Russell’s command—might allow civil rights legislation to pass, but only legislation so weak as to be meaningless. Nor was there any reason for it to allow any more; it had in the filibuster an unbreakable defense. “In the course of their many private conversations that Spring,” Merle Miller says, “Russell … advised Lyndon that the South would not under any circumstances accept Part III; they would filibuster first, he personally would lead the filibuster, and not only would Lyndon find it very difficult to pass a bill, he would find himself in an extremely ticklish position.” Yet when Johnson approached liberals about eliminating Part III, or substantially modifying it, they refused to consider the suggestion. Nor, they felt, was there any reason for them to consider it. At last, after so many years of frustration, they had Republicans on their side, and therefore had the votes to pass a civil rights bill. They were determined to pass one that was truly meaningful, which meant passing one that included Part III. And there was an additional, less altruistic, motive: revenge. “Frustration had … done peculiar things to the psychology of the northern civil rights advocates,” George Reedy was to say. “The feeling of impotence was preying on their mind…. There was a distinct note of retribution in their voices, and it was apparent that they wanted something more than a civil rights bill that would help blacks. They wanted a bill that would include every civil rights concept that had been concocted in over a half a century and they wanted to rub southern noses in it.” Watching Johnson search vainly for a compromise, Reedy felt that “everything had been said that could possibly be said, with the only result a hardening of positions and increasing polarization of attitudes,” and that “Movement in any direction was impossible because the question was not being treated as a legislative matter. Instead, it was a clash between the mores of two cultures—deep-seated moral beliefs that could not be compromised.”
AT THE START of the four-month period beginning in mid-January, 1957, optimistic predictions had been the order of the day. The fact that the margin for Lyndon Johnson’s tabling motion had been only seventeen votes “was hailed by civil rights advocates,” the New York Times reported, “as ‘historic’ and a ‘landmark’ that … would strengthen liberal chances ‘tremendously’ at the opening of future Congresses.” “We got thirty-eight votes for it!” Howard Shuman exulted. “In 1953, we only got twenty-one.” If Nixon turned his opinion into a ruling in 1959, only forty-nine votes would be necessary to defeat tabling—and to rewrite Rule 22—and suddenly that figure seemed within reach. Declaring that “we made very real gains,” an elated Paul Douglas said, “We’ll win either next time or the time after.”
This view was shared by the press, which, like Douglas, ignored Russell’s threat that a ruling to allow the rewriting of Senate rules would be followed by the rewriting of not one rule but forty. Nixon’s opinion, Time said, “raised an emotional floodgate for a piece of vital legislation that had been dammed too long by Senate rules.” Newsweek’s Sam Shaffer agreed. The “generation-old coalition of Southern Democrats and certain Northern Republicans in Congress lies in ruins,” he said, and with “their former allies defecting from the ranks … the final vote in the Senate revealed the southerners in a position hopelessly untenable.” Their victory on the tabling motion had been Pyrrhic, Shaffer said. “As they surveyed the field of victory, they saw that, in truth, they had lost.”
On January 21, the Brownell Bill, essentially the same bill guaranteeing a broad range of civil rights that had been submitted in 1956, was returned to Capitol Hill. Liberal senators, liberal strategists, columnists of all persuasions, and most of the Washington press corps agreed that this year the bill would pass. The southerners will try their old tactics, Time predicted, but this time, with liberals and Republicans united against the South, those tactics will fail. “There should be enough sympathetic votes to force the bill out of the Judiciary Committee lorded over by Chairman [Eastland]. Before Congress adjourns, everyone agreed, there will be a sizzling Senate filibuster,” but this time the filibuster will be “broken. When some 20 diehard Southern Senators attempt to talk the bill to death on the floor, there should be enough votes even under present cloture rules to cut off the filibuster and bring the measure to a vote.” And then at last, Time said, “a tiny band of Southerners who over the years have combined seniority and archaic rules to strangle legislation that
displeased them will have suffered momentous defeat.”
The optimism was shared by the Republican leaders in Congress, as is shown by the typed summary of their weekly meeting with President Eisenhower on January 8. According to the summary, an unidentified participant said, “Civil rights—has to go early if to get it,” but the President was assured by House GOP Leader Joseph Martin that there would be “no trouble” getting “early” action on the Brownell Bill. “Republicans and Democrats want to get that bill out,” Martin said. If it came up first in the Senate, he said, there would be fast action. “If Knowland calls it up—pass quick—only 25 votes against.” And, as Martin indicated to reporters, if it came up first in the House, action would be even faster. There was “no question,” he said, that the House would approve the bill in “about two days.” Joining in the assurances, Knowland stated that this year there would not be the usual delays in the Senate—in part because of the cooperation of the Democratic Leader. “I talked with Johnson,” he had told Eisenhower during the meeting. “I told him if they [the Democrats] do not take it up, I intend to. He was agreeable, and he’s served notice on [the] Southerners.” Back at the Capitol, he was equally sanguine. Inviting Clarence Mitchell to his office, he “unequivocally promised” the NAACP lobbyist that if the South tried to filibuster, he would personally lead—and win—the fight for cloture. A filibuster could delay a civil rights bill, he told a reporter for the Congressional Quarterly; it couldn’t stop it.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 138
