The customary route to the Senate floor, of course, was through a Senate committee, and the liberals set out along this route, and at first felt they were making good progress. Tom Hennings was brimming with confidence. His bill, similar to Brownell’s, had already been reintroduced and referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He himself was chairman of Judiciary’s three-man subcommittee that had jurisdiction over civil rights bills, but, he explained to reporters, hearings in that subcommittee would be unnecessary, since it had already favorably reported the same bill to the full committee last year. Therefore, Hennings said, the full committee—eight of whose fifteen members were, after all, strong civil rights supporters—could start holding hearings so early that Eastland’s delaying tactics would not work. Knowland agreed. The committee can “have hearings while the House is working, and get it reported by the time the House acts,” the Republican Leader said. “I’d like to start by mid-Feb or late Feb on civil rights.” And once the bill got to the Senate floor, the delaying tactics of the past would not be successful—not only Hennings but other senators assured reporters of that: there is a “belief that a filibuster now could be broken despite past failures,” John D. Morris reported in the New York Times. And, the Times said, in part this belief was based on the cooperation of the Majority Leader. “The Senate’s Democratic leadership has 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 then the reality of the Senate took hold, the reality of Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. and the Foreign Relations Committee when Woodrow Wilson had been trying to win approval of the League of Nations, the reality of the Judiciary Committee when Franklin D. Roosevelt had been trying to win approval of his court reorganization bill—the reality that was still the reality.
Hennings’ confidence about quick subcommittee and committee action lasted only until Judiciary’s first meeting, on January 22, at which there were some developments he had not anticipated. It was a chairman’s prerogative to appoint the members of his committee’s subcommittees, and Chairman East-land now read off the names of the members of Hennings’ subcommittee, and there were no longer three names but seven. The chairman had added to it four new members: southerners Olin Johnston and Sam Ervin and conservative Republicans Roman Hruska and Arthur Watkins. Olin the Solon said that of course there would have to be extensive subcommittee hearings on the civil rights bill for the benefit of the new members, and the other new members agreed with that.
At the subcommittee’s first meeting, on January 30, Hennings tried to persuade its members to agree to a two-week limit on hearings. The two holdover members voted with him, making three votes in favor of the proposal. The four new members voted against it. Emerging from the subcommittee room after the meeting, Hennings told reporters he was “very disappointed,” but that he would still press for early action, holding long hearings if necessary. Long hearings? Hennings was asked. Was he saying that the subcommittee would meet while the Senate was in session? Did he have the Senate’s permission to do that? Senate permission was required for subcommittees as well as committees, he was reminded. Hennings then applied on the Senate floor for unanimous consent for the necessary permission. Do I hear any objection? the presiding officer asked. It turned out he heard several objections—all in southern accents. And the subcommittee’s favorable report would not be reported to the full committee until March 19.
And of course that report was not to the Senate, but only to the parent committee: Judiciary—Jim Eastland’s Judiciary. After interviewing Eastland, a young reporter, twenty-eight-year-old Tom Wicker of the Winston-Sal em Journal, wrote that “the soft-spoken man propping his gouty foot on the big cluttered desk doesn’t seem to mind” that he had become a “byword for prejudice.” And when he asked Eastland about the liberals’ plans to hurry the bill through Judiciary, the chairman said, “It’s not going to be as easy as they thought, old scout.”
The chairman was correct. Every time Hennings attempted to bring up his report for committee action, Eastland recognized another committee member instead, usually one of its three other southerners. Judiciary’s once-a-week meetings began every Monday at 10:30 a.m., and at twelve noon the Senate bells rang to signal the beginning of the day’s session—the time at which Senate rules required the adjournment of committee meetings. Eastland enforced the rule to the minute, and one of the southerners was almost always still holding the floor, with Hennings still unheard, when the bell rang. Once, Hennings actually got to start reading his resolution, but the bell rang before he finished; before its echo had died away, Eastland had rapped his gavel for adjournment.
And of course, should the bill ever emerge from Judiciary, it would still have to face the Senate itself. Judiciary might, of course, be bypassed if the Senate took up a House-passed version of the bill instead, but unanimous consent was required for the Senate to do that. A Washington Star reporter asked Russell whether, in the light of public, and Republican, support for civil rights, there was “any prospect” that the South might be willing to compromise its stand against the passage of any civil rights legislation whatsoever and allow a House bill to be taken up. Compromise? Russell said. “I will not compromise in the slightest degree where the constitutional rights of my state and her people are involved.
“I am well aware of the fact that there is great political pressure for the passage of these misnamed civil rights bills,” he said, but “If they reach the floor in their present form, they will be vigorously resisted by a resolute group of senators.” And those senators, he promised, would insist that the Senate follow “orderly procedure.” Orderly procedure, of course, included “extended debate.” Writing his story, the reporter put on it a lead that summed it up: “Senator Russell, Democrat of Georgia, yesterday threw down the gauntlet to advocates of civil rights legislation who contend this is their victory year.” The North wanted the legislation in essentially its present form. Russell was saying that if the legislation reached the floor in its present form, there would be a filibuster. And whatever its result, a filibuster would wreck Lyndon Johnson’s chance for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Observers who felt that Russell was short on allies, moreover, were overlooking one—one they seemed to overlook every year. Russell was indeed on the defensive on Capitol Hill now, seemingly beaten, as Lee had been on the defensive in 1865, with Grant pressing him back and back; even as Lee devised one stratagem after another, he had been aware that they were only delaying actions that could postpone, but not avert, defeat. There was, however, a crucial difference between the strategic situations facing the two great southern generals, for in war there is no time limit: no deadline at which, if neither side has won, a final armistice is declared. Robert E. Lee had not had time on his side.
Time was on Richard Brevard Russell’s side, though. For him, delay would not necessarily end in defeat; delay could, in fact, be the means of victory: victory at least for another year, or for another two-year Congress—and perhaps for many Congresses to come. For there was a time limit on Capitol Hill: each Congress is only two years long, and a bill that has not been passed at the end of two years dies, and must start over, from scratch, in the next Congress; must be reintroduced, must renegotiate all the preliminary committee procedures in both houses, must be passed by both houses.
During the 1950s, in addition, the actual time available to pass a bill was far less than two years because it was only in wartime that Congress met for a full year each year. Usually its sessions were considerably shorter. Of the twenty-three peacetime annual sessions since 1933, when Congress had begun convening in January, exactly one had lasted as long as the end of August—eight months. Many had ended in June or July. And because of the holiday recesses Congress awarded itself—a traditional week in February for Li
ncoln’s Birthday; another few days in February for Washington’s Birthday; ten or eleven days for Easter; additional vacations for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July; numerous pro forma Monday and Friday sessions at which most congressmen were traveling back and forth from their districts—even eight months actually meant far less. If a controversial bill, one entailing lengthy hearings and intra-committee fights and perhaps floor battles as well, was to be passed, it had to begin moving through the congressional committee processes rather early.
In the case of a bill controversial enough to possibly provoke a filibuster, an early start was indispensable for another reason as well. If such a bill was brought to the Senate floor late in the session, too close to the time when the Senate was rushing toward adjournment and senators were anxious to go home, the prospect of fighting a filibuster out to the end, no matter how many weeks or months it takes, was particularly unappealing. Pressure to end the matter—to simply drop the bill—was intensified. “If you wait too long,” George Reedy explains, “then what [happens] is that the looming end of the session becomes a weapon to be used by the filibusterers.” So delay was a potent weapon. On a legislative battlefield, delay could mean victory.
This was understood on Capitol Hill in 1957. “Has to go early if to get it,” the White House had been told. There was even an understanding of how early it had to go—that unless the civil rights bill reached the Senate floor by the Easter vacation in mid-April, or at the very latest, by the early part of May, there would be almost no hope of passing it over a southern filibuster. But there had been confidence among Republican leaders that this year it would “go early”: the Senate Majority Leader “was agreeable, and he’s served notice on the southerners.” Knowland had spoken of getting the civil rights bill to the floor by “mid-Feb or late Feb.” But that had been in January, when Russell and Johnson had optimistically felt the bill might be made sufficiently meaningless so that the South could let it pass. Now, in February and March and April, Russell was using delay as a weapon. Years later, when he was President, Johnson would explain to Katharine Graham how civil rights bills had invariably been defeated, by delay, on Capitol Hill: “They’d come back about the 18th of January and then they’ll have hearings in the [House] Rules Committee till about the middle of March and then they’ll pass the bill and it will get over and Dick Russell will say, ‘It’s Easter and Lincoln’s Birthday.’ And by the time you get him, he will screw them to death because he’s so much smarter than they are.” Now, in 1957, Russell was screwing them to death in the way that Johnson described to Mrs. Graham—screwing them again, as he had in the past, by delay. And, in February and March and April of 1957, it was beginning to become apparent that in the use of this weapon, the South and Russell were being assisted by the Senate Majority Leader.
IN JANUARY, Lyndon Johnson had assured the southerners that he would be able to make the civil rights bill meaningless enough so that they could live with it, but he had been unable to deliver. Russell’s price for forgoing a filibuster—the excision of the “broad array” of civil rights guarantees, and the emasculation of the remaining provisions by the right of jury trial—was payable only in non-southern votes for those southern demands, Johnson had been unable to meet that price: had been unable to find those votes. The irresistible force of civil rights demands was indeed colliding with an immovable object—and Johnson had seemingly decided simply to step out of the way. During those months, he was no less “agreeable” to Knowland than he had been in January, he just wasn’t as active. No more was heard of the January “understanding” “to bring the civil rights issue to a head early,” to get it “to the Senate floor within the next two months.”
And those actions that Lyndon Johnson did take spoke louder than words.
To delay the attack on a stronghold—a citadel—the defenders try to fight first on its outskirts. During those days of Lyndon Johnson’s “agreeability,” there had been discussion, even optimism, among Republican leaders that he might in effect forgo that delaying action by allowing the battle to begin in the citadel itself—by allowing the civil rights bill to be taken up in the Senate first. Now, however, Johnson repeated what he had said in 1956: that the Senate would not take up the bill until after the House had passed it.
To ensure that flanking movements against the citadel itself were not launched against his wishes, he was employing another tactic. This was a traditional southern tactic—one whose repeated use over the years had not dulled its effectiveness. It was simply to delay consideration of other major bills while waiting to take up the civil rights bill. If all the other major bills had been taken up, then by the time the civil rights measure arrived on the floor, precipitating a filibuster, it would be the only major piece of unfinished Senate business. But if other major bills remained to be disposed of at the time a filibuster brought Senate activity to a halt, these bills would become weapons in the southerners’ hands. Other senators would realize that if the civil rights bill was not dropped—if the southerners were not allowed to win; if instead the Senate decided to fight it out on the filibuster front as long as it took and not move on to other business—that other necessary legislation might not be taken up. “Therefore,” as Reedy explains, “if you know you’ve got an issue coming up that is going to start a filibuster, you try to get those [other important] bills out of the way….” Otherwise senators will say, “My God, we’re holding up this [other] bill.” A Leader who wants a filibuster to lose “always tries to get the desks cleared before the filibuster comes up.” A Leader tries to clear the decks early in the year, in fact—before “the looming end of the session” made the many senators who didn’t particularly care about civil rights say, as the civil rights bill approached, “Don’t bring it up. Otherwise, we’ll never get to the other important bills.”
Lyndon Johnson was not doing this. The Eisenhower Administration had a list of legislation it considered essential: not only its big school construction program but a law to provide federal aid to chronically depressed communities; authorization for United States participation in the Organization for Trade Cooperation; and a badly needed increase in postal rates to cover a rapidly worsening deficit in the Post Office Department. In addition, with Egypt’s President Nasser stalling on reopening the Suez Canal, Israel stalling on withdrawing its troops from the Gaza Strip, and the threat of Russian intervention escalating, Eisenhower had asked for a congressional resolution giving him advance authorization to intervene economically or militarily in the Middle East, authorization Eisenhower considered vitally necessary to deter Russia, since, with “modern war” perhaps “a matter of hours only,” there might not be time to go to Congress if an attack occurred. At an extraordinary meeting of thirty congressional leaders of both parties at the White House on New Year’s Day, Eisenhower had stressed the need for rapid approval, as he did in a special message he delivered in person on Capitol Hill five days later. Although there were differences within the Senate on the resolution’s wording, general agreement existed that some form of authorization was desirable: the situation was precisely the kind on which Lyndon Johnson had, so many times, worked out a unanimous consent agreement.
No such agreement was brought forward now, however. Week after week, the “debate” on the Middle East Resolution dragged on, tying up the Senate before a notably empty Chamber in a scene out of the Senate’s pre-Johnsonian foot-dragging past, complete with legalistic nitpicking—“I am waiting for the opposition point of view to provide some answers before I proceed to rebuttal and surrebuttal and rebuttal of the surrebuttal,” Wayne Morse announced at one point (he was not kidding)—and senatorial frustration. “Why cannot we vote?” Dennis Chavez shouted one day. “I am ready to vote now.” Eisenhower’s other “essential” legislation also remained stalled behind the resolution; until that resolution was out of the way, the Senate would not be able to turn to the other Administration priority bills and get them out of the way. Slow as is the first year of most Congresses, t
his was slowness indeed. And the foot-dragging had a special significance this year. “The 85th Congress has been in session now for six weeks,” the New York Herald Tribune noted on February 14, “and the civil rights issue, which was to have been the burning question at hand, has been pushed into the background … by the Senate debate over President Eisenhower’s Mideast policy.” When the Senate finally voted, it adopted the original resolution, 72 to 19, but that vote was not taken until March 5.
JOHNSON HAD SAID THE SENATE would not act on the civil rights bill until the House acted, and House action was not, in fact, coming in “about two days.” The tone of the Republicans’ weekly White House legislative conference began to change. At the January 8 meeting, Knowland had predicted that the Judiciary Committee would report the bill to the Senate floor by “mid-Feb or late Feb.” In the summary of Knowland’s report to the next meeting, held on January 22, a new month is being mentioned: “Hope to get it out by late February or early March.” A week later, on January 29, the minutes start mentioning Easter, a holiday which falls not in March but in April: “Every effort will be made to secure action on the legislation prior to any Easter recess. Speaker Martin noted the appearance of some sign of a Democratic desire to delay action.” (Eisenhower was moved to muse: “Strange. Years ago, we talked [about] the same things….”) The minutes of the March 12 meeting show that reality was beginning to penetrate even the densest material: “Sen. Knowland said that if the President’s moderate proposal is to be achieved, then there was a need to get it moving soon. He had to report, however, that the Opposition had told him that if Republicans insisted on moving on Civil Rights, there would be some other legislation that would automatically be lost.” And the minutes of the March 26 meeting summarize an exchange between Knowland and Halleck which shows further penetration.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 139
