Anderson had to go through channels, with twelve separate brotherhoods. Hopkins had to make only one telephone call. At 2:48 that same day—Tuesday, July 30—while Johnson had been slumped down in his seat on the Senate floor listening to Richard Russell rant, John L. Lewis sent him a telegram. The United Mine Workers, the telegram said, “HAVE TRADITIONALLY, AND DO NOW, SUPPORT APPROPRIATE LEGISLATION LOOKING TO THE FULL ENJOYMENT BY ALL CITIZENS OF ALL CIVIL RIGHTS.” And, the telegram said, the UMW also supported the jury trial amendment—“A WISE, PRUDENT AND PROPER AMENDMENT…. THE STRONG POWER OF INJUNCTION HAS BEEN IN THE PAST SO OFTEN ABUSED….”
Sometime after Johnson had returned to his office from the Senate floor about four o’clock, the telegram was shown to him. He returned to the floor. The time was about 5:40. Olin Johnston was droning on. Asking the South Carolinian to yield, Johnson read the telegram, maximizing the impact by implying that it was an unsolicited bolt from the blue. “John L. Lewis had never communicated with me directly or indirectly until 2:48 p.m. today, when he sent me the following telegram,” he said. And even before he came to the floor, Johnson had used the telegram; he “saw to it,” as James Reston commented drily, that it “was brought to Revercomb’s attention.” On Lyndon Johnson’s smudged tally sheet, a number was erased from the right side of Revercomb’s name, and a number was written on the left side.
And Neely’s staff had been contacted, and a message had been sent to Bethesda. The dying liberal had promised Douglas and Knowland that he would leave the hospital and come to the Chamber in a wheelchair to cast his vote against the amendment if it was needed. Now, through his aides, that promise was withdrawn. Neely could not bring himself to vote for the amendment, but he said he would not leave the hospital to cast a vote at all. Although only one West Virginia vote would be added to the votes for the amendment, therefore, two were subtracted from the votes against it. The count had been perhaps 53–42 against Johnson before, but it was 51–43 now. He was only eight behind.
WITH THE OTHER DEVELOPMENT that came to fruition that Tuesday, luck had no connection at all. It was the result of another talent Lyndon Johnson had been displaying during the civil rights fight. Although it was not a new talent, it had previously been used mainly with his own staff. It had never before been used with senators—because never before had Lyndon Johnson been fighting for a great cause.
It was a talent not merely for persuading men, but for inspiring them.
Frank Church had had six months now to learn the cost of crossing Lyndon Johnson. Young as he was, the tall, slender senator looked even younger with his big, toothy grin, shiny black hair, and cheeks so pink that he seemed to be perpetually blushing; once, while he was waiting for an elevator in the Capitol, a woman tourist said to him, “I understand that one of you page boys gets mistaken for Senator Frank Church”; “Yes, ma’am,” Church replied, “one of us often does.” And sometimes during his first months in the Senate, he acted younger, too, and not only because he was, as his biographer wrote, “bursting with energy and ambition”; in some ways, in those days, he displayed an idealism reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart as the young senator in the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—right down to the fact that both of them had been amateurs in politics (a lawyer by profession, Church’s only political venture before his victorious Senate campaign had been an unsuccessful try for the State Legislature), and for both of them their first major Senate issue was the same: opposition to a private power company dam. Wags in the Press Gallery, amused by Church’s naïveté as much as by his youthfulness, mockingly called him “Senator Sunday School.” But he was already making a mark in Washington, with the help of his vivacious wife, Bethine.
Bethine Clark Church did not fit that era’s mold of the docile Washington political wife, for while Frank was new to politics, she had been born into it, into Idaho’s Democratic dynasty, the “Clark Party.” She had been raised in the Governor’s Mansion; during her girlhood her father was Idaho’s Governor, one of her uncles, D. Worth Clark, was Idaho’s United States Senator; another uncle had been the state’s Governor some years before. She and the young man who had fallen in love with each other in high school were an exceptionally close couple; years later, one of Church’s staffers would call their marriage “the longest-running high school romance in history.” She loved to watch the Senate. “I had one child when we came here, and then two, but somehow I always managed to go,” she would say. “It was the best show in town…. I was so fascinated. The Senate … made you think of the letters of Jefferson and Adams.” And she understood the Senate, and explained its mores to her husband (“It was through his wife mainly that he understood the senatorial tradition,” says his administrative aide, John Carver), giving him advice with a canniness that would later lead political insiders to call her “Idaho’s third senator.”
In early July, Johnson’s iciness—his refusal even to speak to Church which had begun in January after Church cast the vote that made Johnson throw his pen down on his desk—had not begun to melt. After Clint Anderson had made him understand that it was Johnson’s “doing, not yours,” that had gotten the Hells Canyon bill passed, he had tried to mend fences in writing (“All credit is due to your leadership”), but while Reedy wrote a warm response for Johnson’s signature, the Leader was as cold as ever in person, and Bobby Baker’s warning that “The Leader’s got a long memory” was proven correct. After six months, her husband was still “a pariah,” Bethine recalls; “I was in a deep freeze,” Church would say. And he very much wanted to thaw it.
Although Church was in favor of civil rights legislation, his interest in the subject was, according to his legislative aide, Ward Hower, “only intellectual,” not “a visceral thing.” The plight of black Americans “was not a big issue to Frank Church,” perhaps because out of the six hundred thousand persons who lived in Idaho in 1957, only about one thousand were black. Bethine recalls that “one night Frank came home, and I asked are you going to get into this thing deeply, and he said, ‘I’ve got a lot on my platter. It’s not something I’m going to get involved over my head in.’” He would vote for the civil rights bill but not become an active participant in the struggle to pass it, he told her. Furthermore, in 1957, Idaho had only two representatives in the House, “so,” Hower explains, “the Senate was the key for Idaho, like it was for the southerners. In the Senate, Idaho is equal to New York. For all the western senators, the Senate is their states’ protection. The right to filibuster is important to them.” He felt—as did many western senators from sparsely populated states—an identity with the southern senators’ need to preserve the Senate’s rules. But, Hower says, Church also knew that a reconciliation with Johnson was essential for his career, and “He was looking for a way to do something major for Johnson”—and “he understood that the civil rights bill was a key to Johnson’s strong ambition to be President.” And it was this understanding that, in mid-July, first got Church involved more deeply in the civil rights fight. In January, on the vote that had angered Johnson, Church had voted against the South; on July 24, on the vote to eliminate Part III from the bill, Church voted with it. Johnson’s attitude toward him became noticeably warmer. On July 26, when O’Mahoney was introducing the jury trial amendment that the South wanted, Church rose from his back-row desk as O’Mahoney was speaking, walked down one row and over along the desks to O’Mahoney’s, and whispered in his ear, whereupon O’Mahoney announced, “Mr. President, since I began the presentation of this matter, the distinguished junior senator from Idaho has asked to be recognized as a co-sponsor of the amendment…. We shall be happy to welcome the Senator from Idaho as a co-sponsor.”
Johnson had appealed to Frank Church on civil rights partly on pragmatic grounds; Hower, for one, believes that the Foreign Relations seat was the key: “I don’t think anything explicit was ever said—you didn’t deal with Lyndon Johnson that way. But you knew that if you did him a favor, when the time came, if he could do you a favor…. This was the
way Lyndon Johnson operated. There was a tacit quid pro quo!” But Johnson had also appealed to elements in the young senator’s character that were not pragmatic at all, as Bethine Church came to understand when, late each July evening now, her husband “replayed” for her the day’s events. The Leader had appealed to her husband’s sense of duty. “You’re a senator of the United States,” he told Church. “You have to function as a senator of the United States. This is your national duty.” He appealed to his sense of history—and to his desire to be part of it. “Frank always had a sense of history,” Bethine says, “and he made Frank feel like he would be a big piece of history if he got involved in this.” He appealed to his love of a challenge. “Lyndon knew he [Lyndon] needed something [to get the civil rights bill passed], and [he knew] he didn’t have it,” Bethine says. “They weren’t going to beat a filibuster. They just wouldn’t get the votes. And unless they got something more, there was going to be a filibuster. The South had said the blood was going to flow if there wasn’t a jury trial amendment. And yet the other people felt the blood would flow if there was a jury trial amendment. Lyndon had to have something more.” And, she says, he made her husband want to find that something. “He made Frank realize that they needed him. Lyndon said: If you don’t help with this, there’s not going to be a civil rights bill. It was a tremendous challenge, and Frank never loved anything as much as a challenge.”
And Lyndon Johnson appealed to elements in Frank Church’s character that were even less pragmatic than that.
Her husband’s sense of justice, his wife says, was one of the things that had made her love him. Although she understood that the nickname “Senator Sunday School” was a sneer at his idealism, she “loved” that nickname, she would say. “That’s how I saw him.” Johnson made Church understand that the important thing was to get a bill passed, even if it wasn’t a perfect bill (“that you could go on later and make it better,” in Bethine’s words), and that even if the bill protected only voting rights, it was worth passing, for voting rights were the key to equality for Negroes. And Johnson also made Church understand why equality for Negroes was important. Although her husband had never said it, Bethine says, “I knew that down deep underneath he cared terribly about equality. He just had never thought about it. And Lyndon brought it out. He appealed to this feeling in Frank. Lyndon made him realize that he cared very much about a civil rights bill. And that they needed him to get one passed. He would come home: ‘This is my fight, too. I’m a United States Senator, and this is the only right way for the country.’ Lyndon brought that out. It’s almost a disservice to Frank to say this, but in the Senate, you have so much to do—you have too much to do. You really do have to pick your fights. And then suddenly Frank found out this was his fight, that this was something he deeply believed in.” Why did Frank come to feel this way?—“Lyndon. Lyndon brought this out. It was a crusade for Lyndon. He was not going to be stuck with this southern image. And he believed in it—he talked about Cotulla. Lyndon brought this out in Frank.”
Astute politically, Bethine Church understood that her husband was far from the only senator with whom Johnson was employing such appeals—that “when he said something like, We need you, if you don’t help, there’s not going to be a civil rights bill—well, I think Lyndon said that to everyone he could, to get them enlisted in this crusade.” But she saw how effective such appeals were with her husband. Frank had said he wasn’t going to get deeply involved. “And the next thing I knew, he was staying late, and at night, he was dead tired, but he just couldn’t unwind. He was in all the way. Lyndon had gotten him in.”
Knowing that Johnson needed “something more”—something that would attract new liberal and Republican votes for the jury trial amendment while not making it totally unacceptable to the South—Church, “being a lawyer,” tried to “think about the amendment” as a lawyer, Bethine says, trying to imagine the details of a voting rights trial. He drafted—often in the evening, at home, on a yellow legal pad—more than a few proposed changes, but discarded them himself either after rereading them or after conferring on the telephone with O’Mahoney. And then one afternoon—probably on the Monday or Tuesday of that climactic week of July 29—while sitting with Bethine in his inner office in the Senate Office Building, “he started to think about the juries themselves and … it was like a light bulb going off!” Liberal antipathy to the amendment centered on the impossibility of getting a just verdict from the South’s all-white juries. “All right,” Bethine recalls Frank saying, “how about this?”—what if the juries weren’t all-white? “If the juries couldn’t be segregated, we could get the jury trial amendment through.”
Church telephoned O’Mahoney, who, Bethine says, “refined the language—he was a wonderful lawyer,” and then it was further refined, by Ward Hower and Siegel and Horwitz, and when they had all finished, the proposed new paragraph in the jury trial amendment—the technical name for this amendment to an amendment is addendum—repealed the section of the United States Code that barred from federal jury duty citizens who did not meet their state’s qualifications for jury duty. Since in southern states, one of the qualifications for proposed jurors was that they be registered to vote in the state, and since in southern states most Negroes were not registered to vote, it was primarily this section that allowed southern states to bar Negroes from jury duty. Church’s addendum said that with the exception of illiterates, mental incompetents, and convicted criminals, “any citizen” twenty-one years old “is competent to serve as a juror.” No one recalls who came up with the phrase that summed up the addendum’s purpose in persuasive terms: with the addition of the new paragraph, the phrase went, the civil rights bill would not only reinforce an existing civil right, the right to vote, but would also confer on southern Negroes “a new civil right”: the right to sit on juries.
Church’s addendum would appeal to northern liberals of both parties—Republicans like Case of New Jersey and Smith of Maine, Democrats like Frank Lausche, Green, Pastore, and Kennedy—who had been unwilling to vote for a civil rights bill that included a jury trial amendment that weakened the bill’s primary purpose of strengthening the civil rights of Negroes to vote. That weakness would now be at least partially offset because the bill would give Negroes a new civil right. And for those liberals who were worried about the reaction of their constituencies (“They didn’t want to be seen as participating in too much vitiating of the bill,” Hower explains), the addendum would furnish them with a response to constituent anger. They could say that the addendum ensured that juries in voting cases would no longer be all white. While this statement was true, it ignored a significant point: although the addendum would allow Negroes to serve as jurors, there would still be whites on the juries, in the southern states probably a majority of whites, and even if there was only one white on a jury, one vote on a jury would be enough to prevent conviction, so that southern juries would probably still not convict whites in racial cases. Church saw the addendum as “symbolic,” less a means of ensuring justice than “the means to pass the bill,” says his administrative assistant, Carver; Church’s legislative assistant, Hower, says, “In practice it would have meant very little in the Deep South, and I think he realized [this]. I’m tempted to use the word ‘gimmick’—okay, I’m using the word ‘gimmick.’” At first glance, however, the addendum appeared to make the bill significantly stronger, and that gave these civil rights-conscious senators an argument—a catchphrase, “a new civil right,” which might be as effective with their constituents as the southern senators’ catchphrase (“You can’t be tried as a criminal without a jury”) was with their constituents. The addendum “enabled a number of senators who could not have otherwise supported [the civil rights bill] to do so,” Hower says. “All this going on in the context of the very delicate balance of changing one, or two, or three votes without losing someone on the other side,” and the new paragraph accomplished that. What had been needed to attract new votes for the bill was
an excuse, an excuse that would allow liberals to vote for it without provoking the South to vote against it. Now Church had thought of one. The “gimmick” might give the civil rights bill the last few votes it needed to pass—and the important thing was that it pass.
CHURCH WANTED to introduce his addendum immediately, but Johnson told him to wait. Every previously proposed alteration designed to make the jury trial amendment more acceptable to liberal senators had been scrutinized for flaws by liberal lawyers, and then those flaws had been criticized by liberal newspapers and by civil rights organizations until it was difficult for these senators to accept it. To minimize scrutiny of this proposed change, Johnson wanted it introduced only at the last possible moment, so that, as Reedy explains, “there would be no chance for opposition to be mobilized.” He wanted it introduced at exactly the right moment—at the moment when the addition of a new, unexpected, element to the civil rights debate had the best chance of tipping the balance. And he didn’t want the addendum simply to be introduced, he wanted its introduction staged for maximum effect. Lyndon Johnson, master of so many aspects of the legislative art, was about to demonstrate his mastery of one final aspect: the floor debate. While debates seldom change votes, there are rare issues on which they can do so, and this jury trial amendment with its tangle of compelling and conflicting arguments on both sides which had left many senators torn, might be one of them. If Frank Church’s addendum was introduced at the right moment, and if the debate on the addendum was properly orchestrated for maximum effect, it might change a few votes—and a few was all Lyndon Johnson needed.
ON THE MORNING of Wednesday, July 31, Johnson still had only about forty-three votes. Knowland still had about fifty-one. That morning, the Republican Leader repeated his earlier flat refusals to compromise—to accept a jury trial amendment in any form whatsoever. With the amendment included, he said, the bill simply “would not be a workable piece of legislation.” And he sent to the desk three unanimous consent agreements to set a definite hour for a vote on the complete bill. Under the first, the vote would be held on Thursday; under the second, on Friday; under the third, on Saturday. Each would allow six hours for debate prior to the vote. It quickly became apparent, however, that to the South the details of such agreements were irrelevant; no agreement was going to pass. When the clerk finished reading each agreement, Richard Russell said, “Mr. President, I object.” After the third objection, Knowland, calling it “obvious that there are in prospect a considerable number of speeches on this issue,” announced that he would insist on longer sessions “with a view to forcing a vote.” But the South was not going to be forced. Russell rose to speak, and senators waited to hear what the South was going to do. “I have no desire to unduly prolong the debate but I shall insist that it be carried on so long as the representative of a single sovereign state … desires to address himself to it,” he said. The escalation of debate into open filibuster was very near.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 154
