Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  The Civil Rights Bill of 1957 was going to suffer the same fate as the civil rights bills of 1950, and 1948, and 1946, and 1944, and 1938, and 1936. There was not going to be a vote on it on the floor. It was going to die, in a filibuster, on the motion to bring it to the floor. The dam that for so long had held back the tide of social justice was going to hold it back again. Civil rights was going to lose. Lyndon Johnson was going to lose.

  JIM ROWE HAD TOLD HIM that it was “most important” that he “get all the credit” for a bill, but what if at the end of the day there was no credit to be gotten, but only, as in every civil rights fight of recent decades, blame? Desperately as he was attempting to find a compromise, therefore, his attempts were cloaked in secrecy. Unavailable to reporters for almost two weeks down on the ranch, the Majority Leader was hardly more available after his return to Washington; there was no leaking to journalists—indeed, almost no contact with them. His decision to allow Knowland to introduce the motion calling up the bill was evidence of his fears that it wouldn’t pass, and in other ways too he kept a low profile. Rising at the beginning of the July 8 session to announce the “Order of Business,” he did so not by laying out the order, as was his prerogative—a prerogative, of course, which he was customarily adamant in exercising—but by announcing that the Minority Leader would do so instead. The Senate’s pending business, Johnson said, was an emergency measure to authorize construction by Robert Moses and New York State of a huge power dam on the Niagara River to replace one washed away by a flood, but, Johnson said, “I am informed that the distinguished Minority Leader” is about to make a motion to bring up the civil rights bill, and, he said, “I should like to inform all my colleagues that the Minority Leader, in his usual gracious and courteous manner, has told me” that after he makes the motion “he and those who support him will resist any motion to proceed to other business” until the civil rights bill is finally disposed of. As he was speaking, standing at his front-row center desk, Knowland rose to stand at his front-row center desk, almost at Johnson’s elbow, and confirmed that what Johnson was saying was correct. Three senators—New York’s Javits and Ives and Robert Kerr, whose Public Works Committee had considered the Niagara situation—jumped to their feet to protest that that situation was, in Kerr’s words, an “extreme emergency” which must be acted upon immediately. “This measure must have the right of way,” Ives said. Johnson said he certainly agreed. “The Senator from New York understands, I am sure, that I heartily favor the [Niagara] bill.” But, he said, it was not his decision to make. “Mr. President, the Minority Leader has pointed out that he does not intend to have other proposed legislation brought before the Senate.” He was washing his hands of the situation, Lyndon Johnson said. “That is the decision of the Minority Leader, and, I assume, of this administration. They will have to accept the responsibility for it.” Since the day he had assumed the majority leadership, Lyndon Johnson had insisted on keeping strict control of the Senate’s schedule. Now he was abdicating that control. The most accurate indication of the true chances for passage of a civil rights bill was the fact that, in William S. White’s words, “Mr. Johnson, normally in control of Senate procedure, now in effect folded his arms.” Another indication came every afternoon, when newspaper photographers sent in messages to senators asking them to come to the Senate Reception Room to be photographed. Knowland, “the untitled leader of the civil rights coalition,” as White described him, invariably came out to be photographed studying the civil rights bill. Russell and Ervin posed together, intently studying it. Lyndon Johnson declined to be photographed. He was trying to distance himself as much as possible from what was likely to happen.

  HARDLY HAD THE FOURTH DAY of debate—Thursday, July 11—begun when two statements made it apparent that the gulf separating the two sides on Part III was as wide as ever. Stennis of Mississippi said Part III “should be stricken”—all of it. McNamara of Michigan demanded that none of it be stricken—that the bill be passed with its “basic provisions” intact. When McNamara sat down, furthermore, Javits stood up to express his concern over the failure by the Senate to take action on New York’s “vital” Niagara bill—and Knowland’s reply showed how adamant he was about any action that might weaken the position of the civil rights forces. The Niagara bill would not be brought up, Knowland said, until the civil rights legislation was disposed of.

  As the day dragged on, the debate became, in the New York Post’s phrase, “increasingly bitter.” From the far right side of the Chamber, Javits shouted across the arcs of desks as he interrupted Olin Johnston of South Carolina, and Spessard Holland of Florida shouted back, literally jumping up and down in rage, with a hostility that leaks through even the carefully sanitized version in the Congressional Record: “I hope the distinguished senator from South Carolina will not allow himself to be cozened from his very proper and very correct position by the importunities of the distinguished senator from New York, aggressive though they may be.” One by one, the members of the Southern Caucus—Johnston, Ervin, Eastland, Thurmond, Robertson—rose, to denounce the bill in terms that grew less and less restrained. “A rape upon the constitutional and legal systems of the United States,” Ervin called it. The proposed new Civil Rights Division would be a “new Gestapo,” Olin the Solon said, pounding his desk. “If this monster bill passes, we can all say, ‘It has happened here.’” Eastland’s ponderous drawl seemed inappropriate to the sharpness of his words, and to the glare with which he surveyed, across the aisle, that unfortunate row of desks at which sat not only Douglas and Hennings but Pastore and Humphrey. The Judiciary Committee chairman assailed the measure as “a cunningly devised scheme,” “a devious scheme,” and a “travesty of justice,” and then asked, looking hard at that row of liberals, “We are entitled to know the answer to this question, which I ask the proponents: Do you intend to surround our schools with tanks, troops, guns and bayonets? … Is that the object of the bill, the hidden intent?” Liberals had hoped that Lister Hill, more moderate on some non-civil rights issues than his southern colleagues, might this time be a voice of reason from the South on civil rights as well. Then Hill spoke. “Let us all, men of good will everywhere, join hands and send this measure down to the tongueless silence of dreamless dust,” he said.

  Even more discouraging to Lyndon Johnson, aware that the bill would not be allowed to reach the floor until agreement had been reached on some major compromise on Part III, civil rights supporters remained insistent that the bill be on the floor before compromise was even discussed. Clifford Case of New Jersey, a Republican and a staunch member of the Douglas Group, rose to deplore any talk of amending the bill before the motion was passed to bring it to the floor. “The immediate matter before the Senate is a procedural one—whether to make this bill the pending business of the Senate,” Case said. That was the only matter that should be discussed at the present time. “There will be ample time once [Knowland’s] motion is agreed to, to debate the substance of the bill and … various amendments…. Mr. President, as a sponsor of the civil rights bill, I am certainly not willing to consider changes now.” Talking to reporters outside the Chamber, Knowland was equally rigid. “There are going to be no amendments agreed to, nor any negotiations or agreements looking toward amendments, until after the bill becomes the pending business in the Senate,” he said. The scene in the long, cavernous Senate Chamber—southerners drawling defiance, liberals scorning compromise, the galleries emptying hour by hour as the day went on, as if even the public knew that the civil rights fight had degenerated into a meaningless farce, very few black faces in the gallery now as if America’s Negroes, whose hopes had died so often on the Senate floor, had come to feel that they were going to die there again, and couldn’t bear to watch—the scene was depressingly similar to the scenes in the last stages of debates in previous years over whether to bring other civil rights bills to the floor, bills that had, every last one of them, died. It seemed that this bill was going to die, too. Time to sav
e it was growing very short. With every moment, the mood of sullenness and hostility on the floor was worsening, hardening. It hardly seemed likely that any amendment from these southerners who were shouting “rape” and “Gestapo” at the liberals—or from the southerners’ allies—would be considered by the liberals, much less accepted by them.

  Time might, in fact, run out, without warning, at any moment. The seeming impossibility of compromise and the bitterness in the air might have their effect on the impulsive, easily angered, overconfident Knowland. Lyndon Johnson kept glancing uneasily at the Minority Leader, sitting at his desk right in front of the presiding officer. At any moment—without having consulted with anyone—Knowland might suddenly rise to his feet, ask for recognition, and announce that he would begin rounding up votes for cloture. The moment that word was out of his mouth, it would be in headlines, and so would the companion word—“filibuster”—that would spell the end of the bill, and of all Lyndon Johnson’s plans. To save the bill, to avert a filibuster, Johnson needed moderate liberal votes from both parties for a compromise amendment to Part III. And as the day dragged on, his hopes of getting such votes were steadily fading.

  And then, sometime that afternoon, Lyndon Johnson, his gaze roving around the Chamber, noticed, beyond the angrily gesticulating men in debate, a tall, lanky figure sitting quietly at his desk in the far corner of the Democratic side, in the front row of the last section before the lobby door. It was Clinton Anderson—and Johnson suddenly realized that all week Anderson had been spending much more time at his desk than he usually did. He walked over to find out why.

  Anderson was sitting there only partly because of his interest in civil rights. Proud though he was of his longtime identification with that cause, he was nonetheless less fervent about the cause itself than about the device that was being used, once again, to frustrate it. “I’m afraid I’m one of those senators who, coming from a state in which there were few Negroes, never quite acquired a passionate feeling about racial injustice,” he was to say. “My principal outrage” was rather against the filibuster, “which permitted a small body of men to obstruct the business of the Senate.” A man who, as Lyndon Johnson often commented, “didn’t like to lose,” his defeat by a southern filibuster during his term as Secretary of Agriculture had left him with a bad taste in his mouth, and his principal role as a member of the Douglas Group had been to lead three fights against Rule 22—all of which had ended in defeat. He had become somewhat obsessive about “extended debate” (“I took it as a personal challenge to break the challenge of the filibuster”), and he hated to think it was going to win again in 1957—and he saw it was going to, unless something was done. In addition, he had become, since his heart attack, somewhat obsessive about his health, and the two subjects had become linked in his mind: he felt that “I wouldn’t get a bit of rest that summer if we had to remain in Washington listening to an endless filibuster.” The Douglas Group’s most pragmatic and realistic member, one less ideological and more amenable to compromise than its other members, he was also a highly partisan one. Other liberals might discuss the civil rights bill in terms of social reform; Anderson talked also in the language of a tough, practical politician passionately loyal to his party—and he saw clearly the danger to the party from a filibuster, and felt the Republican maneuvers were at least in part designed to provoke one. “Knowland seemed thoroughly willing to let the southerners filibuster the bill to death—an event which would permit him to blame the Democrats for its defeat and permit the Republicans, in future elections, to pose as defenders of the American Negro,” he was to recall. “I had no intention of letting” that happen.

  Breaking a filibuster once it had started would be as “hopeless” in 1957 as it had been in previous years, Anderson says. Feeling the pressure more than in the past, the southerners “seemed to sense that this time they had to yield a little, if they were not ultimately to lose everything.” But they weren’t going to yield to the extent of allowing a strong bill to pass. “The [Administration] bill would never pass … in its present form,” he says. “The southerners were determined, and the northerners didn’t have enough votes and they couldn’t break the filibuster.” So, unlike the other liberals who had ruled out any talk of compromise, Anderson “just sat myself down on the floor and glued myself there … to listen to the reason the southerners couldn’t do it.” And that Thursday afternoon, shortly before Lyndon Johnson noticed him, Anderson felt he had finally found what he was looking for.

  “Hints kept emanating from [the southerners] that a compromise bill was possible,” he felt, but there could be no compromise on Part III largely because of the fear, enunciated by Russell, that that section could be used to authorize the use of military force against the South. “They seemed to accept” voting, but “it seemed clear to me that as long as [Part III] remained, they would filibuster to defeat the entire measure…. They were afraid they were going to have another march through Georgia.” Sitting there at his front-row desk near the lobby, turned slightly around and listening carefully as the southerners to his right and behind him spoke, Anderson understood that their anxiety, justified or not, was genuine, and “I thought if you could just remove the southern fears that we would march an army into the South … they’d probably yield thereafter. I finally decided one day that we could stop this thing [the impending filibuster] by removing that one threat.” Opening the printed draft of H.R. 6127 on his desk, he pulled out a pencil.

  At first, he tried to tinker with Part III, rewording it, as other senators had been trying to do. At one point, for example, trying to defuse another southern concern—that Brownell or some other politically motivated Attorney General would be able to institute suits without clearing the action with the President—he crossed out, on page 9 of H.R. 6127, the word “may” in the sentence “The Attorney General may institute for the United States,” and substituted, in blunt pencil, the words “upon order of the President shall.” But that Thursday afternoon, Anderson had come to feel that no amount of tinkering would be enough to reassure the South about Part III. That section, he concluded, would have to be not merely reworded but removed. Bending over his desk, he turned back to page 9, on which the first fourteen lines of Part III were printed, and drew a large X across all of them. Turning to page 10, on which the rest of the part was printed, he drew an X across the first eight lines on that page. All that was left of Part III was an innocuous last paragraph. All the rest of it was gone.

  It was not long after Anderson drew those two Xs that Lyndon Johnson walked over to his desk and began to chat. “He was curious what I was doing sitting there on the floor for about two or three days,” Anderson was to recall. Anderson showed him his work and said Johnson should arrange to have it introduced as an amendment by some southerner or conservative who opposed Part III. And almost without a pause, almost in the instant that Clint Anderson made his suggestion, Lyndon Johnson saw what was wrong with it—and also saw what was right with it, saw what it could mean, if only it was used correctly. And he saw in that instant how it could be used correctly. “Okay,” he said, approving the amendment. But then he added: “You do it.”

  The introduction of the amendment by a southerner or a conservative would accomplish nothing, Johnson saw. It would then seem like merely one more attempt by civil rights opponents to gut the civil rights bill; it wouldn’t get him any of the Democratic votes he needed to meet the South’s price. Opponents had already suggested dozens of amendments to weaken Part III; every one had been rejected out of hand by Democratic liberals and moderates because it came from an enemy. But there was a difference—a crucial difference—between this amendment and the others. This one was being suggested not by an enemy of civil rights but by a friend, by a prominent liberal, by a member of the Douglas Group. Johnson felt at that moment, as we know from George Reedy, that moderate Democrats, anxious to find a way out of the civil rights impasse but not willing to accept an enemy’s suggestion, might accept an ame
ndment that came from one of their own. He saw in an instant that this amendment should be not merely suggested by but also introduced by a friend: in fact, by the man who had written it. Put the amendment in, Johnson was telling Anderson, but don’t have it put in by a southerner. “You do it.”

  And Johnson saw more—in the same instant. When, standing there looking down at Anderson, he said, “You do it,” Anderson replied, “How can I? I’m a civil rights man.” Anderson was saying that he didn’t want to be identified with the foes of civil rights, didn’t want to be called a betrayer of the cause. Johnson saw the answer to Anderson’s question in the very instant the question was asked. And he also saw in that instant that the answer was also the answer to another aspect of the problem that he had not been able to solve: how to get votes to pay the South’s price not only from Democratic moderates but from Republican moderates as well. When Anderson asked, “How can I?” Lyndon Johnson told him how he could. Without even a pause, he said: “Get a Republican to go in with you. Get a good Republican.”

  Johnson meant that Anderson should obtain as a co-sponsor for his amendment a Republican with impeccable civil rights credentials. Anderson’s name would then be linked on the amendment with a friend of civil rights; he would not appear to be participating in an anti-civil rights move. That end could be accomplished by obtaining a Democratic liberal as a co-sponsor, of course, but Johnson’s purpose, the purpose he grasped so quickly, went beyond that. If Anderson could obtain a Republican co-sponsor, a Republican civil rights advocate, a Republican whose opinion carried weight with his colleagues—“a good Republican”—Johnson might be able to get some GOP moderates to go along with the amendment; he might at last, despite Nixon and Knowland, be able to crack that solid Republican front.