Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  And Johnson’s long attempt to avoid outright antagonism on the Senate floor may also have exploded because Russell was losing on the jury trial amendment—and because losing was something that, despite his urbanity, Russell could not bear. At one point during Douglas’ outburst, the Illinois Senator, still pointing across the floor at Russell, said that “the Senator from Georgia has evidently been counting noses,” and knows he is losing. And when Douglas said that, Russell jumped to his feet, and, as William V. Shannon wrote, “stood upon the Senate floor and tore the mask of civility from the face of the civil rights debate”—and in the process also allowed the mask to fall from his own face, as it had fallen before on the rare occasions when he had been losing. The high patrician brow and the arched patrician nose were flushed with anger, and in his eyes as he stared across the desks at Paul Douglas was fury. “The Senator from Illinois points his admonitory finger,” Russell shouted. “He says, ‘You gentlemen are too sensitive.’ Then he proceeds against our social order.”

  “Hypocrisy!” Richard Brevard Russell shouted. “Sanctimony! Holier-than-thou!” Then, as Shannon reported, “he defended segregation in all its aspects.”

  “You’ve failed in the North,” Russell said. “Your method does not work. You have race riots. But you come down and say, ‘We know better. We are going to force you to do things our way.’ I say, keep your race riots in Chicago. Don’t export them to Georgia.”

  Suddenly the scene among the four long arcs of desks was a scene unpleasantly reminiscent of Senate civil rights debates of previous years. Hoisting himself upright and holding on to his desk for support because in his emotion he had forgotten to pick up his crutches, Potter of Michigan shouted to the dais, “Mr. President, will the Senator yield?” Russell had no choice because, by mentioning Detroit, he had referred to Potter’s state, and if there was anything almost as sacred to Richard Russell as the untainted blood of a pure white race, it was the Senate rules. “I yield,” he said grudgingly.

  “None of us from the North are proud of the fact that race riots took place,” Potter began. “But Negro citizens in our state have every opportunity to vote.”

  Russell interrupted him. “Oh, they vote in my state, too,” he said. “They vote as freely in Georgia as they do in Michigan. I am becoming tired of hearing that kind of statement.” Russell had no right to interrupt him, Potter said. “The Senator referred to Michigan.” “Yes, I did,” Russell admitted. “I should like to have him listen to my reply for a moment,” Potter said. His reply was that despite the riots, “great progress has been made in Michigan…. Because there are tensions we do not stick our heads in the sand.”

  Russell’s face was a very deep red now. “I am delighted to hear the Senator say that progress is being made,” he said. Then he said, “The system which the senator from Michigan wants to impose on Georgia brought about race riots in Michigan…. If the Senator from Michigan would simply not seek to invade our state to fasten the race riot-generating system upon us, we would appreciate it. Let him keep it in Michigan.” All over the Chamber, on both sides of the aisle, senators were on their feet shouting for the floor. At first Russell refused to yield it, but one of the senators was Pat McNamara, also of Michigan. “Yes; I yield to the Senator from Michigan,” Russell said at last. “I mentioned his state.” McNamara said Michigan needed no defense, that his state could handle its affairs without outside interference. “Then why does not the Senator let us do the same?” Russell asked. There was applause from the southern senators seated around him, but he had asked a question, and he was to receive an answer to it. “McNamara,” Doris Fleeson wrote, “roared in the bull voice trained in a thousand union meeting halls: ‘Because you’ve had ninety years and haven’t done it!’”

  The galleries above burst into applause; appalled ushers rushed to still it. The two senators stood there shouting at each other, in their contrasting accents. “I do not know what all the smog is about,” McNamara said. “I agree with the Senator from Michigan that he doesn’t know what it is all about,” Russell said. The southerners laughed. “I agree that one of us does not know what it is all about, but I am not sure that I am the one,” McNamara said. The galleries applauded. Russell’s rhetoric escalated into the rhetoric of martyrdom: when Florida’s Spessard Holland tried to change the subject, Russell said, “Here we have a senator who wants to take time out from being crucified.” He didn’t want any time-outs; for more than three hours, he stood there, lashing out at the North—while the North lashed back.

  Almost as dramatic to the journalists as the shouts of the debaters was the demeanor of the Majority Leader. “As Russell raged on,” Shannon wrote, “Lyndon Johnson slumped further and further down in his seat. Misery and nervous irritability distorted his features.” Then, as the man standing at the desk immediately behind him continued to rage, Johnson turned his chair all the way around, either to look right up at Russell—or, as Doris Fleeson suggested, for another reason: so that his face would be concealed from the Press Gallery, “so that the reporters could not judge his reaction to the damage being done” to his plans.

  For seven months he had managed to maintain a layer of civility between the liberals and the South—against long odds. But now, “in three hours,” as Mary McGrory wrote, “the veneer of senatorial courtesy which has given a high gloss to … weeks of debate” had cracked wide open. “The attempt to make the whole question a constitutional problem rather than a human one abruptly collided, as Senator Russell… shouted … at the opposition.”

  Contained in the angry exchanges that had rumbled back and forth just over Lyndon Johnson’s head, moreover, almost lost in the general invective but picked up quite clearly by his keen ears, had been some particularly disturbing sentences. At one point, Douglas, taunting Russell because he didn’t have the votes, had demanded that the ballot on the jury trial amendment come soon—and had made the demand not only of Russell but of him: “I think the Majority Leader could do very well” by scheduling the vote “not later than Saturday,” Douglas had said. “I wonder if the Majority Leader would consider that as a possible proviso.” And when Johnson had replied that he had “not given any thought to the matter,” Douglas had been insistent: “How about Monday? How about voting on the O’Mahoney Amendment on Monday?” The civil rights forces, knowing they had the majority, were pressing for a vote—as they had pressed for a vote in past years. Russell, lashing back at McNamara, had suddenly said, apropos of nothing in his previous remarks, “So, Mr. President, we have tried to act like reasonable men. We have tried to act with restraint in the face of great provocation…. But, Mr. President, we reserve the right to defend ourselves…. As responsible men, we shall insist on our right to be heard fully on all amendments to the pending bill.” And there had been another development, peripheral but also an ominous straw in the wind. With funds for the Small Business Administration due to run out on Wednesday, July 31—the very next day—Johnson, attempting to avoid the closing of the agency, had requested a unanimous consent agreement to take up its appropriation bill, and then return immediately to the civil rights debate. His request, however, had not been granted: Wayne Morse had objected; and there had been other hands raised on the floor when the presiding officer had recognized Morse; other senators were prepared to object. The Senate had not been able to take up urgent public business. That Tuesday afternoon, the body had, as Fleeson wrote, “suddenly reverted to type.” It was beginning, more and more, to resemble Senates of the past, in which the position of the Majority Leader had not been an enviable one. Scott Lucas and Boob McFarland had been in the same position that Lyndon Johnson was very close to being in now, unable to muster either the votes to end a filibuster or the votes to pass the amendment that alone could persuade the South not to filibuster. He was coming closer and closer to losing control of the Senate—as Lucas had lost control, as McFarland had lost control just before becoming objects of ridicule. A column by Murray Kempton published that Tuesday showed
how perilously close Lyndon Johnson was to the same fate that had befallen his two hapless predecessors. Johnson, Kempton wrote, was “almost the prisoner of the South,” and “with the 20-year dominant coalition between Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans in ruins, Lyndon Johnson’s cupboard is bare. The politicians who count in the Senate today are William F. Knowland and Richard M. Nixon; and Lyndon Johnson is a state of things whose time is past.” Kempton wrote about “the desperation with which Lyndon Johnson wriggled for delay,” and about the fact that his wriggling was hopeless. “The Democrats wondered yesterday, with Johnson in the shadows, how they could meet Nixon’s triumphant kind of calculation.” There was a phrase in Kempton’s column that the leader was not used to seeing written about himself; the phrase was “poor Lyndon Johnson.” And the most hurtful aspect of the column by this bellwether of liberal opinion may have been its implications for Johnson’s hope that he could use the civil rights fight to get closer to the Democratic Party’s liberal wing. Kempton’s column showed how very far he was from achieving that end.

  LATE TUESDAY AFTERNOON, however, things began to improve. There had, during those last days in July, been two developments that Lyndon Johnson had hoped would get him some of the votes he needed, and they both began to come to fruition not long after he had dejectedly returned, at about four o’clock, to his office from those three hours of “misery” on the Senate floor.

  The first development could be called a lucky break—unless one believes that man in part makes his own luck, and that if he pushes against a wall long enough and hard enough, refusing to stop, a crack will eventually appear somewhere in the wall; and unless one believes also that the “crack” wouldn’t have produced Senate votes for civil rights had not Lyndon Johnson known, as apparently no one else knew, how to widen it.

  While Lyndon Johnson had been in Texas the previous weekend, the telephone calls from Reedy had told him that his attempt to woo leaders of organized labor like Reuther and Carey and Meany with a jury trial amendment had apparently failed. That Sunday, however, a dissenting if informal, even offhand, remark had been made by a less important labor figure, Cyrus Tyree (Cy) Anderson, the rough-spoken, incisive chief Washington lobbyist for the Railway Labor Association, a loose central committee representing twelve railroad unions, or “brotherhoods.” The remark was made in the unlikely setting of the Glen Echo Amusement Park in Maryland, where Anderson had taken his children for a Sunday outing, and it was made in the course of a rambling, desultory conversation with another man—a casual Capitol Hill acquaintance of Anderson’s—who had taken his children there, too. But this casual acquaintance to whom Anderson made the remark—“Any labor guy who is against jury trials ought to have his head examined”—happened to repeat it to George Reedy Monday morning. Reedy didn’t consider it especially significant, but he quoted it in a memorandum he gave to Johnson sometime after Johnson arrived back on Capitol Hill on Monday afternoon.

  And Johnson acted on it.

  No one had thought of the railroad brotherhoods as potential allies in the civil rights fight—for a very obvious reason: for almost a century they had been fighting against equal rights for black Americans. Ever since they had been formed, shortly after the Civil War, the brotherhoods had, in fact, been among the most rigid bastions of racial segregation in the entire labor movement. Most of them—including the four largest: the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, and the Order of Railway Conductors and Brakemen—had outright “whites only” clauses in their constitutions which barred Negroes from membership. When, in 1955, some of the brotherhoods had sought affiliation with the AFL-CIO, they had employed subterfuges to evade the Federation’s anti-discrimination requirement; the Trainmen, for example, had amended its constitution—not to remove the “whites only” clauses but rather to say that these clauses would not apply in states in which they conflicted with state law. In 1957, fewer than 2,000 of the Trainmen’s 217,000 members—fewer than one out of a hundred—were not Caucasian. And some of the brotherhoods were even more rigidly racist than the Trainmen: the Firemen’s Brotherhood, which had never had a Negro member, was that year determinedly contesting a lawsuit brought by Negro firemen to force that brotherhood to admit them. Few unions seemed less likely to be active supporters of a civil rights bill.

  But Johnson saw why the brotherhoods might be turned into supporters. He understood what Cy Anderson had meant by his remark: the brotherhoods had suffered greatly from judges’ use of criminal contempt proceedings without jury trials during the railroad labor wars of the 1880s and 1890s; and with the Taft-Hartley Act, which had revoked provisions of Norris-La Guardia, the spectre of such proceedings hung over the brotherhoods again. He understood, as well, that while the brotherhoods’ once-immense political power had been declining because of the decline of the railroads, in one area of the country that power was still substantial—the immense flat plains of the Midwest. The Midwest, across which ran the great transcontinental rail lines, the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific and the Southern Pacific; the Midwest, which contained so many of the railroads’ switchyards and stockyards and roundhouses, as well as the great hubs (Chicago, St. Louis, Topeka) from which lines ran out like spokes of a wheel; the Midwest, where so many small towns numbered railroad employees, well paid by the area’s standards, among their leading, and politically influential, citizens; where so many of the leading law firms were on retainer to the railroads; where railroads, and their unions, had always been a particularly potent political force; where the support of railroad brotherhoods was still a key factor in deciding which senators were sent to, and kept in, Washington—the Midwest, whose senators were Republicans, conservative Republicans, the conservative Republicans whom he had, despite months of effort, been unable to break off from Knowland and Nixon.

  On Tuesday morning, Lyndon Johnson telephoned Cy Anderson and asked for support for the jury trial amendment from the twelve brotherhoods—including a formal statement he could use to counter Carey’s.

  With his eyes focused on organized labor as a source of support for a jury trial amendment, suddenly Johnson saw more. There was one union to whom the memory of the power of federal court injunctions was especially fresh and bitter: the United Mine Workers. It had been as recently as 1946 that Harry Truman had seized the coal mines, and a federal judge had enjoined the UMW from striking, had then held the UMW’s glowering, bushy-eyebrowed John L. Lewis in contempt of court for refusing to obey the injunction, and had forced him to order his miners back to work by imposing a potentially ruinous fine on the union.

  The center of the UMW’s power was West Virginia. It was a one-industry state, and the industry was coal. No fewer than 117,000 miners, every one of whom belonged to the UMW, lived there. And West Virginia’s two senators were the Republican Chapman Revercomb and the Democratic liberal Matthew Neely, both of whom had refused—Revercomb loudly on the Senate floor, Neely through aides from his hospital bed—to support the jury trial amendment. The UMW’s chief counsel, and a man Lewis trusted as much as he trusted anyone, was none other than Johnson’s friend Welly Hopkins; it had been Hopkins who had dragged the raging Lewis back into his seat in the courtroom in 1946 before Lewis could compound the contempt offense; and then Hopkins, beside himself with anger, had shouted defiantly at the judge, “This day will live in infamy, sir!” Now, on Tuesday morning, Johnson telephoned Welly, and asked him for a formal statement of support from John L. Lewis.