So now began the “working up.”
Sometimes, the working up was couched in terms of pragmatism. In the homes of longtime conservative, somewhat racist, friends, the phone would ring now, often long after midnight, and on the phone would be Lyndon Johnson. “I can’t sleep,” he would say, and he would begin talking—to convince himself as well as them. One of the friends was his protégé Joe M. Kilgore. When Johnson told the young Texas congressman one night in 1957 that a civil rights bill should be passed, Kilgore resisted the suggestion. “The problem with you is that you don’t understand that the world is trying to turn to the left,” Lyndon Johnson said vehemently. “You can either get out in front and try to give some guidance, or you can continue to fight upstream, and be overwhelmed or be miserable.” The congressman had known Lyndon Johnson for a long time, had “traveled the Valley with him” in 1941 and 1948, and, he says, he understood the purpose of the phone call, and of Johnson’s words: “He was talking like he was giving me advice, but it was really himself he was giving the advice to. He wasn’t talking to convince me; he was talking to convince himself.”
And sometimes the working up was couched in very different terms.
At dinner parties in the homes of liberal friends, Lyndon Johnson began to tell again the stories with which, during his early years in Washington, he had won Alice Glass’ heart and the hearts of the young New Dealers close to FDR, but which he had been telling less frequently in the years since he had come to the Senate. In the summer of 1957, there was a small dinner party in the Georgetown house of Daz and Richard Harkness, and one of the eight people at the table was Frank Church’s wife, Bethine. “I remember at this dinner party, Johnson talking about teaching the Mexican-American kids in Cotulla, and his frustration that they had no books,” Bethine Church recalls. “I remember it as one of the most passionate evenings I’ve ever spent.”
He had a new story, too—about a talk he had had some years before, probably about 1951, with Gene Williams, the husband of the Johnsons’ maid, Helen Williams.
At the end of each congressional session, the Johnsons’ car was driven back to Austin from Washington by Gene and Helen and the Johnsons’ third African-American employee, their cook, Zephyr Wright, while the Johnsons flew back in the Brown & Root plane. Then, when Congress reconvened in January, Ms. Wright and the Williamses drove the car back to Washington. During Johnson’s talk with Gene Williams, Johnson asked him to take along the Johnsons’ dog, Little Beagle Johnson.
Williams hesitated, and then asked, “Senator, do we have to take Beagle?” Johnson asked, “Tell me what’s the matter. Why don’t you want to take Beagle? What aren’t you telling me?” When Williams still hesitated, Johnson said, “Gene, I want an answer.”
“Well, Senator,” Gene finally replied, “it’s tough enough to get all the way from Washington to Texas. We drive for hours and hours. We get hungry. But there’s no place on the road we can stop and go in and eat. We drive some more. It gets pretty hot. We want to wash up. But the only bathroom we’re allowed in is usually miles off the main highway. We keep goin’ ‘til night comes—’ til we get so tired we can’t stay awake anymore. We’re ready to pull in. But it takes another hour or so to find a place to sleep. You see, what I’m saying is that a colored man’s got enough trouble getting across the South on his own, without having a dog along.”
In the memoirs he published during his retirement, Lyndon Johnson was to write that that discussion had been an awakening for him, because he realized “there was absolutely nothing I could say to Gene Williams, or to any black man, or to myself”; that while “of course” he had known “that such discrimination existed throughout the South … somehow we had deluded ourselves into believing that black people around us were happy and satisfied; into thinking that the bad and ugly things were going on somewhere else, happening to other people,” that the day of the discussion had been “the day I first realized the sad truth: that to the extent Negroes were imprisoned, so was I.” If Johnson actually experienced such an epiphany on that day, however, it was an experience he kept to himself, for quite some time. His three employees were excused from taking the dog—Little Beagle continued to fly back and forth to Texas with the Johnsons—but not from taking the car, year after year, twice a year, on that three-day drive across thirteen hundred miles of the South. In 1953, Zephyr simply refused to keep making the trip (“I just wouldn’t go,” she recalls), but Gene and Helen Williams went on making it every year. And while many associates and acquaintances of Lyndon Johnson interviewed by the author recall Johnson recounting the story of his talk with Gene Williams, if he told the story for some years after the conversation occurred, he didn’t tell it often. When the author asked these people when Johnson began telling it, none of them could give a precise answer. But, asked to make an estimate, every one of them who was willing to do so replied with some version of the phrase: “About the time he began fighting for civil rights.”
Now, however, in 1957, the story became a staple of his conversation at Georgetown dinner tables—and in other venues as well. He told it over and over—with his customary vividness. Harry McPherson, who overheard the story in 1963, when Johnson was telling it to John Stennis, describes the occasion, in doing so showing Johnson’s storytelling gift at work.
“You know, John,” Lyndon Johnson said, “the other day [sic] a sad thing happened. My cook, Zephyr Wright, who has been working for me for many years—she’s a college graduate—and her husband drove my official car from Washington down to Texas, the Cadillac limousine of the Vice President of the United States. They drove through your state and when they got hungry, they stopped at grocery stores on the edge of town in colored areas and bought Vienna sausages and beans and ate them with a plastic spoon. And when they had to go to the bathroom, they would stop, pull off on a side road, and Zephyr Wright, the cook of the Vice President of the United States, would squat in the road to pee. And you know, John, that’s just bad. That’s wrong.”
And as Lyndon Johnson told it, he felt it.
He may not have been moved by the story—at least not moved enough to tell it, and not moved enough to excuse his three employees from the car-transport assignment—during the intervening years since he had first heard it, but he was certainly moved by it in 1957. He not only had the gift of “reading” men and women, of seeing into their hearts, he also had the gift of putting himself in their place, of not just seeing what they felt but of feeling what they felt, almost as if what had happened to them had happened to him, too. He may not have understood the feelings of Ms. Wright and the Williamses before, but he understood—had made himself understand, had willed himself to understand—those feelings now. The hurt Gene Williams felt when a hotel clerk turned him away wasn’t only Gene Williams’ hurt now; it was Lyndon Johnson’s, too. He felt the hurt, and he felt for the people who had been hurt—felt the injustice and humiliation that had been visited upon them—grew angry for them, with an anger that was passionate and real. John, that’s just bad. That’s wrong. And when Stennis tried to say, “Well, Lyndon, I’m sure there are nice places where your cook and …,” Johnson, according to McPherson, “just said, ‘Uh-huh, Uh-huh,’ and just sort of looked away vacantly and said, ‘Well, thank you, John,’” and after the Mississippi senator walked away, “Johnson turned around to me and winked,” as if to say, “What can you expect?” and McPherson felt that “That was straight from real feelings. That made him angry … the simple indignity of discrimination was deep in Johnson.” “The indignities” that Ms. Wright and the Williamses had suffered “made him angry, sometimes just about to tears,” Califano says. Lyndon Johnson had, at last, put himself in their place as much as any white person could do so—which meant he had, as much as any white person could do so, put himself in the place of all the people of America on whom indignities and injustice were visited because their skins were not white. The empathy and compassion for black Americans had always been there inside Lyndon Johnson,
but it had always been held in check. Now it was unleashed. Lyndon Johnson believed in the need for a civil rights bill now, believed with that intensity which, in other crises in his career, had led him to take the “all or nothing” gamble, to “shove in his whole stack,” to determine, no matter how long the odds, to win. When Lyndon Johnson was this “worked up,” when he was as determined as he was upon returning to Washington from the ranch after Easter—beside that determination all other considerations paled. A civil rights bill had to be passed. And a civil rights bill was going to be passed.
And shortly after his return to Washington, he said so—to the surprise of a friendly journalist, Tris Coffin, with whom he was having an off-the-record breakfast in the Senate Dining Room. “A civil rights bill is going to be passed by this Congress,” Lyndon Johnson said. His tone was thoughtful, but suddenly he raised his big hand and smacked it down on his thigh to punctuate the words. “I’d like to see a bill the country can live with and not get torn apart,” he said. “I don’t know the answer, but I’m going to do a lot of listening.”
“DURING THE LATE SPRING and early summer months of 1957,” Booth Mooney would write, Lyndon Johnson began to go “tirelessly from faction to faction,” working “quietly, almost in secret,” refraining “from making any public statement of his intentions.” He was asking, probing, buttonholing senators and staff, lobbyists and lawyers, in the corridors of the Capitol and the SOB, sitting down beside a senator on one of the cloakroom couches and chatting in a relaxed manner, and then, suddenly, his eyes narrowing at some words that had caught his attention (words that had been spoken or words that hadn’t been spoken), taking the senator’s arm and asking him to step outside into the corridor for a moment for a more private conversation, dropping in on senators in their inner offices, closing the door behind him—listening, listening to what they were saying, and listening to what they weren’t saying. And out of the buttonholing, and the asking, and the listening, Lyndon Johnson was beginning to form a strategy. For as he listened, he heard something.
The most important thing a man tells you is what he’s not telling you. Talking to the southern senators, Lyndon Johnson was listening to a lot of furious tirades about the Brownell Bill. If one didn’t listen closely, all of the bill’s provisions appeared equally abhorrent to them. But Johnson, listening very closely, realized that one provision was not being mentioned nearly so much as the others. Sometimes, in fact, it was not mentioned at all. And when it was mentioned, while it was assailed just as harshly as the other provisions, Johnson was hearing, beneath the words, a somewhat different undertone.
The provision was not in Part III, the section of the bill that had been occupying most of both sides’ attention (and most of Lyndon Johnson’s attention) since January, and on which both sides held positions so intractable that compromise seemed impossible. The provision was Part IV, which dealt not with ending segregation on many fronts but instead with a single right: the right to vote.
When southern senators talked about the clauses in Part III that would force employers to hire blacks or that would allow blacks to sit next to whites in classrooms or movie theaters, they poured out their anger harshly, uncompromisingly. But when the right to vote came up, the tone of voice was different: less defiant—sometimes, in fact, almost ashamed.
“It was fascinating for me, a Yankee who might be able to comprehend but could not share, southern feelings, to hear him talk,” Reedy recalls. “Most southerners, he said, were not very concerned about depriving blacks of decent jobs. They had hypnotized themselves into a belief that Negroes were inherently unwilling to accept heavy responsibilities and were much more at ease doing menial tasks which did not require them to make decisions…. As for segregation, Dixie theoreticians had created a whole mythology about people being ‘happier with their own kind.’ None of those attitudes were going to change in the near future, in LBJ’s estimate, and it was futile to anticipate any ‘give’ on these points. There was one area, however, in which he contended that southern consciences were hurting. This was in the field of voting rights. Here, he claimed, even the most outspoken of white supremacists had a sense of doing something wrong.”
Partly this was because many of the southern senators believed if not always in the spirit but in the literal words of the Constitution, which was explicit on the question of suffrage, saying as it did that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged” on account of race or color. “They were constitutionalists, even though they were quite willing to concoct some peculiar interpretations of the document,” Reedy was to say. “The amended Constitution—however much they despised the amendments—did guarantee blacks the right to vote. [It] did not say anything about the right to a job or the right to social equality or even the right to decent treatment by society. On voting, however, it was unequivocal.” Even Harry Byrd sometimes murmured something about “a basic constitutional right” when the subject of voting came up. Even Thurmond, who had said, “I will never favor mixing of the races,” didn’t use the word “never” when that subject came up. The southern senators insisted that they were opposed to every aspect of the civil rights bill, but, listening to them closely, Johnson had come to feel that to one aspect of it they might be less opposed than to the others. While the South would not accept a Part III with or without a jury trial amendment, he realized, they might accept Part IV with a jury trial amendment. This price still seemed impossibly high. Liberals would never agree to a jury trial amendment for any part of the bill. But, Lyndon Johnson realized, there was a southern price—where there had never been a price before.
The southerners’ feelings were not new. They had almost certainly been expressed to Lyndon Johnson before, during the previous months of discussion of the bill. But they had been obscured during these months by the emphasis on Part III. And they had become obscured as well by the southerners’ insistence that any provisions in the bill be covered by a jury trial amendment. No one had focused on the voting right because of the overwhelming belief among liberals that no matter what rights were covered by the bill, that coverage would be meaningless if southern violators were tried by southern juries. But now Lyndon Johnson was focusing on Part IV, and he saw the potential in the southern attitude toward that part. The South was not insisting, as it had invariably insisted in the past, that it would not accept any civil rights bill, that it would, by filibustering, prevent any civil rights bill from coming to the Senate floor, and to a Senate vote. If he was somehow able to get Part III out of the bill, to get the 1957 Civil Rights Act limited to a single right—voting—and to guarantee jury trials to defendants in voting rights cases, the Act would be very weak, but it was possible that the South, while not of course actually voting for it, would not filibuster it: that the South would allow a civil rights bill to come to the Senate floor for the first time in eighty-two years, and then to be voted on there.
THIS VULNERABLE SPOT in the South’s position was, furthermore, in the very place he had hoped to find it—for Lyndon Johnson’s talents as a legislator went far beyond those of mere listening. He had the great lawmaker’s gift of identifying, amid a panorama of many proposed laws, the one that would best accomplish a larger purpose, and he saw now that if he could get only one provision of the civil rights bill enacted, voting was the one it should be. Of all the rights that black Americans had so long been denied, the right to vote was the one which, if he could get it for them, would be most valuable, for the granting of that right would, he knew, lead—perhaps slowly, but inevitably—to all the others. His reasoning sprang from his understanding of, and belief in, power. The way to end the indignities Negroes had to suffer was to give them the power to end them, and in a democracy, power comes from the ballot box. Give Negroes the vote—give them power—and they could start doing the rest for themselves. The liberals wanted to change so many laws: housing laws, transportation laws, public accommodations laws, private accommodations laws, school deseg
regation laws—all those laws that were covered in Part III of the Brownell Bill. The southern senators would never agree that these laws should be changed, and the southern senators had enough power to ensure that they would not be changed. Therefore, Lyndon Johnson saw, don’t try to change the laws; just change the officials who wrote the laws. Then they would change the laws. And the way to change the officials was to give southern Negroes the right to vote, so that officials who wanted to be elected would have to be solicitous of Negroes’ other rights. Those who weren’t sufficiently solicitous could be voted out of office: Negro voters could vote them out. Giving black Americans the vote would, moreover, change not only the laws but the administration of laws. The urgency for laws to restrain the brutality of small-town southern sheriffs would be alleviated, for example, since in many a southern small town, blacks had enough votes to elect the sheriff they wanted.
Lyndon Johnson started trying to explain this to liberals. “Just give Negroes the vote and many of these problems will get better,” he told James Reston. “Give them [the Negroes] the vote and in a few years, they [the southern senators] will be kissing their ass,” he told Hubert Humphrey. If out of all the civil rights that would be guaranteed by the Brownell Bill, only one could pass, he knew which right it should be—and it was the very one that the southerners, not seeing what he saw, were willing to let pass. Lyndon Johnson’s purpose was no longer merely to help himself. Now he was trying to lift up a whole people, a nation within a nation. And he knew what to do for these people. He had made himself one of them.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 141
