RUSSELL’S VISIT TO THE OVAL OFFICE was followed, probably that same day, by one from Lyndon Johnson. The Majority Leader came secretly. No reporters were waiting for him when he emerged from the White House, because no reporters knew he was there—his limousine didn’t stop where reporters could see it—and so far as can be determined, neither Eisenhower nor Johnson ever wrote a word about the meeting. “He sneaked down to see us,” Bryce Harlow would tell the author. “He called me, and said he wanted to see Ike, and that he couldn’t afford to have anyone know he was asking. It was very important. I laid it on. Very confidential. No one was to know he was there. Just the three of us. In the Oval Office. His limousine drove past the main entrance and stopped by the Oval Office entrance, and I brought him in the side door to the Oval Office.”
That must have been quite a meeting, too, if of a tone quite different from the other. “This wasn’t fun and games,” says Harlow, who sat in on the meeting although “I never wrote a memo for the record about it”—and said he could not recall any details about it. “These were big boys.”
In discussing, years later, the fate of Part III, Brownell would link it to that meeting, which Eisenhower had described to him. Eisenhower had indeed, Brownell said, “become worried” that Part III would involve his Administration “in a myriad of school-desegregation cases,” but “I had tried to assure the President otherwise.” But, Brownell would say, “Lyndon Johnson went directly to the Oval Office…. A shrewd political operator, [he] had unprecedented power over the Senate,” and in this meeting he let the President know how he was prepared to use that power—let him know, Brownell says, in very blunt terms, what would happen to the bill if Part III was not removed. “Johnson told Ike that the entire bill would be defeated on the Senate floor if section three … was included. He said he had the votes to do this,” and he made Eisenhower understand that he would do this. “The President was convinced.” Beyond this, he let the President know not only what would happen to the civil rights bill but what would happen to other bills the President wanted passed. “Eisenhower was dealing with a hostile Democratic majority in the Senate … and the fate of much of the Administration’s legislative program in the Senate hung in the balance. Majority Leader Johnson made that clear to the President.” And, Brownell says, Eisenhower therefore made “a highly practical decision…. It was a political decision. [Eisenhower] concluded that this political compromise was a necessary price to pay … to get other badly needed Administration bills through Congress before the end of the session….” At his next press conference, the President made his position on Part III clear. First, he reiterated his belief that the most important part of the bill was not the one that would foster faster school desegregation but the one furthering the right to vote. And when Rowland Evans asked whether, in that case, he was “convinced that it would be a wise extension of federal power at this stage to permit the Attorney General to bring suits on his motion, to enforce school segregation in the South,” Eisenhower replied: “Well, no,” and later said, “I personally believe if you try to go too far too fast in laws in this delicate field that has involved the emotions of so many million Americans, you are making a mistake.”
Eisenhower’s statement gave Johnson new Republican votes for the elimination of Part III, but only a few. Having learned that Eisenhower could be flouted with impunity, Republican senators were more susceptible to the arguments, of either conscience or calculation, made to them by Knowland and Nixon, particularly by the latter; they felt that Nixon was likely to become the next President, and that he would be a very different kind of President from Eisenhower, more likely to remember who had not gone along with him. The arguments and pressure of their Senate Leader and the Vice President held a majority of the Republican senators in line behind Part III.
IF THERE WAS A SINGLE KEY TARGET on the Democratic liberal side, a single liberal who could, more than any other, perform the almost impossible task of persuading other liberals to change their views and accept a civil rights bill limited to voting rights—a bill without Part III, in other words—it was Joe Rauh, chairman of both the ADA and the Civil Rights Leadership Conference.
Rauh was also, however, perhaps the liberal leader whose feelings about Lyndon Johnson came closest to outright hatred. He hated him because of what Johnson had done eight years before to Leland Olds (“a great American, a hero of mine”) and because of that 76–6 vote against Paul Douglas (“It was just Johnson putting his foot on Douglas’ face”) and because of a score of other anti-liberal and, in Rauh’s view, unnecessarily cruel actions by Lyndon Johnson in the years between the Olds and Douglas episodes. Rauh’s very acceptance speech, when he had been elected ADA chairman in 1955, had been largely an attack on Johnson. Johnson had been able to go to Eisenhower. There was no point in his going to Rauh.
Rauh’s closest friends, however, included the man who was Johnson’s most powerful liberal weapon, Philip Graham, and another potent liberal, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, for whom Rauh had, in his youth, been a clerk. And now Rauh received a call from Phil Graham inviting him and his wife, Olie, down to the Grahams’ farm, Glen Welby, for the day, and asking him to “bring the Justice” along.
Rauh was to recall that at first he didn’t suspect any ulterior motive in the invitation, not even when “all the way out” on the hour-plus drive to Glen Welby, there was “this business from Felix about the only thing that counts is the right to vote…. I never even thought there was anything more to it than a nice friendly afternoon” of playing tennis and swimming in the Grahams’ pool.
“Then came cocktails,” Rauh was to say, “and Phil and Felix and I are starting to talk some more. By God, if Phil doesn’t sound just like Felix on the right to vote…. Both of them hammered at me: ‘The only thing that matters is the right to vote.’ We had the goddamnedest argument.” At dinner the topic remained the same. “Phil was saying [that] we shouldn’t be so obstinate in demanding everything at once. That we’d get the right to vote first. And that was the most important. Both of them hammered at me. And even then I could hardly recognize that this was not just a dinner party,” that “I was being worked on.” It took a long time, Rauh says, for him to realize that “Felix and Phil and Johnson had had a very thorough talk,” and that the afternoon in the country was “a cute way for Lyndon to exercise his will.”
The exercise failed, however. The day at Glen Welby left Rauh unconvinced. Black Americans had waited so long for the rights embodied in Part III. Now, at last, there was a solid majority in the Senate behind those rights. Were black Americans to be told they would have to wait still longer? Rauh remained adamant in his determination to keep Part III intact.
Which meant that Lyndon Johnson still couldn’t pay the southern price. And there seemed no way for him to get more of the Republican and liberal votes he needed to pay it.
OFFERING HIS MOTION on Monday, July 8, Knowland emphasized that he was asking merely that the bill be brought off the Calendar to the floor and debated there. The motion, he said, was simply “to enable the Senate of the United States to perform its legislative function.” From the other side of the aisle, the Democratic civil rights leader reiterated the point. Knowland’s motion “is merely that the Senate proceed to consider the civil rights bill,” Paul Douglas said. “He is not, at this time, moving its passage.” Both senators said that therefore they would refuse to consider any amendments until that motion was passed. “Then, and only then, will it be germane for us to discuss the merits of the bill itself,” Knowland said. Until the bill is on the floor, “I shall resist any amendment,” Douglas said.
Should the South attempt to filibuster Knowland’s motion, the two senators said, they would invoke cloture, and, they said, they had the votes to do so. Republican leaders agreed. A civil rights bill “will pass at this session … without compromise,” Richard Nixon said flatly. “We’ll win on Part III,” Sherman Adams said. “We have our finger on the Senate pulse. We know what’
s going on.”
Behind Knowland’s bluster was, apparently, belief. He told a GOP Legislative Leaders’ Meeting that “he expected the vote” on his motion “to be successful.” With the bill then on the floor, there might, perhaps, have to be some “clarifying amendments,” he said, but if the southerners continued trying to block it, he would simply put the Senate on a “round-the-clock basis” and secure passage that way. Attempting to inject a note of reality, some of the other leaders had, the conference minutes show, an utter lack of success. “Congressman Halleck asked whether Senator Knowland would interrupt consideration of this bill in order to take up other bills. Senator Knowland said he … was inclined to think it best to drive through on the Civil Rights Bill. Mr. Halleck recalled that, for a number of departments, money will run out on August 1st. Senator Knowland said that it is a calculated risk that must be taken….” Behind Nixon’s bluster was, apparently, a cold calculation: if attempts to drive the bill through caused a southern Democratic filibuster, that filibuster would be a political boon to the GOP.
Neither Knowland nor the Douglas Group seemed to understand—and if Nixon understood, he did not disclose what he understood—that the existence of sufficient votes to pass the bill simply meant that no vote would be allowed on the bill, not even on the motion to bring it to the floor. Knowland, anxious to be prominently identified with the civil rights bill he was sure would pass, was keeping his name in the newspapers with a stream of communiqués, and his pronouncements were as patronizing as if he were dealing with an already defeated foe. If the southerners permitted a quick vote on his motion, he said, they would find that civil rights supporters “will not be unreasonable” (although, he made clear, that reasonableness would not extend to any substantive weakening of Part III).
The press accepted both Knowland’s view of his own role (he was now being identified by journalists as “the leader of the bipartisan civil rights forces in the Senate”) and his optimism. With the southerners, during the first day or two of debate, generally obeying Russell’s injunction to sound “restrained and not inflammatory,” journalists applauded this stance as if good manners were as important as social justice, and interpreted the restraint to mean that the bill would indeed be allowed to come to the floor. Knowland’s motion “is likely to be adopted by a decisive majority vote without resort to cloture,” said the Herald Tribune’s Rowland Evans. “[An] expected Southern filibuster … will not materialize until after Sen. Knowland’s motion has been adopted and the second stage of the battle is under way.” White of the New York Times was only slightly more cautious. “There was,” he wrote, “at least an even possibility that [the southerners] would reserve their truly implacable resistance until the time to deal with the substance of the bill.” And the optimism involved not only the motion but the bill’s ultimate fate. With both sides so reasonable, “Speculation concerning ultimate compromise is dominating the atmosphere,” readers of the Times were told.
Knowland’s predictions in July, however, were not only as confident as those he had made in January, February, March, April, May, and June, but as accurate. His July predictions, too, began to slip—faster and faster—almost as soon as they were out of his mouth. On Monday, he predicted passage of his motion “within the week”; on Tuesday, he said flatly that his motion would be brought to a vote “within a week” (italics added); on Wednesday, he told a reporter that the debate might run into September. So wildly optimistic were his vote counts and those of his Democratic liberal allies that they appear to have been based on the belief that since the cause was just, the need for a civil rights bill obvious, and press and public support for it widespread, certainly the motion to consider the bill would pass, and the bill was certain to pass, too. Journalistic analyses showed little understanding that Russell was privately insisting not only that Part III be eliminated but that the amendment to eliminate it be agreed upon before he would allow the bill to come to the floor. Most of the journalists somehow managed to ignore a statement Russell had made on the Senate floor that Monday, not long after Knowland and Douglas had finished speaking. There seemed to be some misunderstanding on the part of his distinguished colleagues, Russell had said. “We are … told that it is highly inappropriate” to discuss the merits of the bill “in connection with the pending motion to proceed to its consideration.” That, he said, was incorrect. “We are justified in discussing it on its merits, at every opportunity we get to discuss it…. If that be an unreasonable position for us to take, the Senate must make the most of it. Senators may call it a filibuster if they wish.” But whatever it is called, he said, “Mr. President, we will resist. We will resist.” Resist, he said, not merely during a debate on the bill itself. “We will explain and discuss the issues which are embraced in the bill on the motion to take up the bill [italics added] until we are convinced that each and every Member of the Senate fully understands them in all their implications.” The South had two opportunities remaining to filibuster; it was not forgoing one of them. And, indeed, while the southern senators’ discussion of the motion remained germane, it continued on Tuesday and Wednesday. If an “extended discussion” is extended long enough, it becomes a filibuster whether it is called by that name or not, and whether or not its tone is, at least at the moment, restrained. (Instead of rantin and ravin’, we’d talk about the merits of the bill—at least for a while.) On Wednesday, readers of most newspapers were still being told that this was not a filibuster yet, and that compromise was still the probable outcome. But Philip Graham, in daily touch with Johnson, had a better understanding of the situation, and on Wednesday his Washington Post said simply, “The Senate has begun what may become its most momentous filibuster.” The southerners intended to keep extending their discussion until they got what they were insisting on. “It became apparent after a few days that the southerners absolutely wouldn’t take … even [a] cleaned-up Title III,” George Reedy was to recall. “That if you want Title III, you’re going to have to break a filibuster.” Asked by a reporter on Wednesday for a response to Knowland’s prediction of a September conclusion, Russell said, “If the bill is not modified, we may be here until the snow flies.”
During the first three days of debate, one amendment after another to substantially weaken Part III was either suggested or formally introduced by midwestern conservatives or southerners. Determined that their “dream bill” pass unaltered, the liberals whom William White called “the most ardent civil righters”—the Douglas Group—were refusing even to consider proposed modifications. Other, more moderate, liberals in both parties were more willing to consider amendments, but not from such sources. These moderates wanted a civil rights bill but were willing to settle for a more modest one, and were coming to realize that an unaltered bill would result in a filibuster, and no bill at all. Some of them, furthermore, had other legislation they wanted enacted—legislation that might not be enacted if there was a filibuster. More amenable to amendments though they were, however, these moderates were predisposed to distrust any submitted by southerners who they knew were trying to preserve the South’s infamous Jim Crow system or by Republican reactionaries who gave lip service to civil rights but whose hearts, they knew, were on the side of the South. The moderates saw amendments from such sources as simply the latest attempts to gut a civil rights bill by senators who had been gutting civil rights bills for years—saw them as attacks on racial justice by senators whose motives on racial justice were indefensible. And even if these moderates could come around to voting for an amendment introduced by a southerner or southern sympathizer, what excuse for doing so could they give to those of their constituents who were knowledgeable about civil rights? There was little support in the Senate for any substantial modification of Part III, and without such modification, the bill was going to encounter a southern filibuster—and the filibuster was going to win. Says Reedy: “I don’t think a filibuster could have been broken because the southerners … would have enough allies in the western stat
es to keep it going indefinitely. You just weren’t going to get a civil rights bill with Title III.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 147
