Knowland, however, still believed his own vote count. At any time he might realize the truth, and if he did, he would naturally change tactics: stop pressing for an early vote, and instead try to delay one. Votes had been changing back and forth for days and White House pressure might well change some back again; a delay would afford time for that pressure to do its work. So Johnson made it very difficult for Knowland to change tactics. In a private talk now, he said he assumed that Knowland still wanted to vote as soon as possible. Knowland said he did, and Johnson quickly made those feelings public. Interrupting an exchange about the bill, he said, “I have conferred with the Minority Leader. I know how anxious he is for an early vote. I… am equally anxious to vote [and] I express the hope that we may be able to call the roll before the evening is over.” Turning to Knowland, who was standing next to him, he said, “I would assume that meets with the pleasure of my friend from California.” His friend from California said, “Yes … I wish to say that I am encouraged by the remarks of my good friend, the Senator from Texas, that he feels we may be approaching a time when we can get a vote.”
Later that afternoon, the GOP had yet another encounter with reality. While Knowland couldn’t count, Nixon could, and coming to the Capitol, he did so—and promptly launched a frantic Republican lobbying campaign. One after another, GOP senators were summoned to the Vice President’s Room, “for,” in Douglas Cater’s words, “the kind of subtle persuasion an administration in office can exert.” General Persons hurried over from the White House, and so did Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield, who, as Cater puts it, “suddenly found it a matter of convenience to discuss postmaster appointments.” Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers arrived to answer senators’ technical questions. But at 5:40 p.m., Lyndon Johnson asked for recognition from the chair to propose a unanimous consent agreement to set a time for the vote on the jury trial amendment. And the Majority Leader didn’t propose his own agreement, but rather the very same agreement that had been proposed on Wednesday—had been proposed three times on Wednesday—by the Minority Leader. “Mr. President,” Lyndon Johnson said, “yesterday the distinguished Minority Leader offered a unanimous consent agreement. I wish to offer the same agreement today with two modifications.” The modifications would bring on the vote even faster than the distinguished Minority Leader had wanted; Knowland had, for example, allowed six hours for debate on the amendment. “In view of the fact that we have spent a good deal of time today on the bill, I am reducing the … hours from six to four,” Johnson said. Know-land, aware now that the vote would be, at the least, very close, said he still preferred six, and Johnson suavely said that that was fine with him. Knowland could offer no other objection—he could hardly object to an agreement he himself had proposed over and over, telling the Senate each time how vital its passage was. As they realized the significance of Johnson’s proposal, and the reason why he had made it, liberal senators from both sides of the aisle gathered in little groups on the floor, trying to think what they could do about it. But they could do no more than Knowland had. If Knowland had proposed the agreement yesterday, they had supported it, with equal vehemence; they were hardly in a position to object to it now. Spessard Holland, in the chair, asked, “Is there objection to the unanimous consent request?” There was only silence. “The Chair hears none, and it is so ordered,” Holland said.
Johnson then addressed the chair again. The vote on the jury trial amendment would probably take place that very evening, he said. “It is the intention of the leadership to remain here until a vote is had.”
Irving Ives asked: “When does the debate start? Does it start right now?”
“Right now,” Lyndon Johnson said.
Checkmate.
THE REST was anticlimax. Offstage, off the floor, the Republican efforts intensified now that the Vice President was directing them in person. Aware now that every vote was needed, the GOP managed to contact Maine’s Senator Frederick G. Payne, who had been recuperating from a heart attack and was at his fishing camp in the Maine woods, and persuaded him to fly to Washington for the vote.
Other attempts were less successful, however. Schoeppel and Butler had been two votes of which Knowland had been confident, but now it was suddenly realized that that confidence had not been justified. General Persons telephoned the White House to have Eisenhower speak to the two senators in person. Ann Whitman had to tell the General that the President was out on the golf course, at Burning Tree. Whitman managed to get in touch with him there, and he agreed to see Schoeppel, but when Persons attempted to contact the Senator to arrange a time for the appointment, it proved so difficult that it became obvious that Schoeppel was “avoiding” Persons. “Senator Butler also would not come to see the President,” Whitman wrote in her diary.
That evening, Joe Rauh and Paul Sifton, chief lobbyist for Reuther’s UAW, bumped into Nixon and Rogers right outside the Chamber. “They stopped us and we compared notes on how the votes were going to go, and it was clear it was going to go very badly,” Rauh was to recall. “It was clear that Johnson had the votes.” Nixon could barely contain his anger. Encountering Johnson in the Senate Reception Room, he said, smiling tightly, “You’ve really got your bullwhip on your boys tonight, Lyndon.” As he started to walk by, Johnson replied angrily, “Yes, Dick, and from the way you’ve been trying to drive your fellows, you must have a thirty-thirty strapped to your hip, but it’s not doing you any good.” “Just wait,” Nixon said grimly (and incorrectly). “You’ll find out.”
The setting was the Senate Chamber, of course.
The word had gone out through official Washington that the big vote would be that evening, and the galleries in the Chamber had begun to fill up early in the evening, not with visitors to the city but with its own people, men and women connected with, or fascinated by, government, who wanted to see one of government’s big shows. Evening became night, a hot, muggy Washington summer night, and more spectators came in from dinner parties, some of which had been formal parties at foreign embassies, and in the galleries were jewels and bare shoulders and white shirtfronts and dark suits. The Capitol dome was lit. It gleamed over Washington, high above the men and women walking toward the long, shadowy eastern facade, or driving down Pennsylvania Avenue. The visitors came in out of the dark evening, up the broad marble stairs and between the tall columns, through the bronze doors into corridors sparkling with the crystal and cut glass of chandeliers, and they walked along those corridors past the busts of statesmen and the paintings of heroes, under the richly hued frescoes, into the galleries rimming the long, high-ceilinged room with its pale walls and its four glowing mahogany arcs, until finally even the aisles in the galleries were filled to overflowing, spectators sitting on each step. “There are times—they are very rare—when a scene worth remembering, a moment of real drama and meaning, occurs on the Senate floor,” Stewart Alsop was to write. “[This] was such a moment…. It was a scene of a sort that occurs only once or twice in a decade—every fit Senator on the floor, and the galleries choked with spectators. All present, spectators and senators alike, were caught up in the excitement of the great Senate game. A man’s pulse can be quickened, after all, by a close contest at chess, or on the golf course. But there is nothing quite like the Senate game….”
Below the spectators, among the arcs of desks, senators were making speeches as senators had been making speeches among the desks since the birth of the Republic. There were speeches by liberals assailing the amendment. “Somehow this debate got off on the wrong foot,” Hubert Humphrey said. “Somehow or other we have been more concerned about those who have abused the law, who have denied people the equal protection of the law, than we have been with those who have been victimized.” Paul Douglas said, “All that the pending bill seeks to do is to permit the government of the United States to come into the lists in defense of the poor, the weak, the disinherited, and the disenfranchised. The proposal to inject a jury trial will, if adopted, nullify the law
in most cases.” Liberals had become furious as there sunk in on them the realization that they had been outgeneraled, and that their victory was about to be snatched away from them, in that vote that was suddenly so close upon them. “I hope some of my colleagues … will give real and serious thought to whether the Church Amendment which was offered so recently is really understood by the members of this august body who are being called upon to pass it at this time,” Joe Clark said. Some of the liberals cited past cases—such as the one in Alabama’s Bullock County—to prove that southern justice could not be trusted; Cliff Case asked that the judge’s opinion in Sellers et al. v. S. B. Wilson et al. be read into the record, and said the outcome of this “travesty of justice” proved the need for a stronger bill. “What happened, Mr. President?” Case cried. “All members of the Board resigned. The court found, of course, that it was unable to grant the relief, because there was no one on whom its order could operate…. Mr. President, I suggest that the opponents of the pending legislation from those states do not come before the Senate with clean hands.” There were speeches by liberals emphasizing that it was only the addition of the Church Addendum that made it possible for them to vote for the jury trial amendment. “A vote against this amendment is not only a vote against the jury trial,” old Jim Murray said. “It is also a vote against the rights of Negroes to serve on our federal juries. I cannot cast a vote against two elementary civil rights.”
There was also a speech by Frank Church. Many speeches in great Senate debates since the birth of the Republic were bombast for the record, but there were some in this debate that were more than that, and Church’s was one of them. “I can still see him standing there in that back row, so tall and straight,” his wife was to say more than forty years later. “Senator Sunday School.” And she was not the only one in the Senate Chamber who was moved, particularly by the part of the speech in which the young senator was echoing the argument of his Leader that the most important consideration was to take a first step, even if it was not a perfect step.
“Civil rights legislation is long overdue,” Frank Church said. “But in no field of legislative endeavor must we build more carefully or more thoughtfully than here. This field bears the same relationship to other legislative fields as the building of a cathedral bears to the building of a factory. In the field of civil rights, we give voice to the finest impulses of our humanity…. Our workaday structures, as our workaday laws, may be built with ordinary materials. But we must build our places of worship and our laws of liberty with the finest of materials and the greatest of care. These we build for the ages…. Mr. President, I submit that our work in safeguarding civil rights cannot be accomplished in a single stroke. This law is but a single step. It is a law confined to voting rights. It may well be … that in the future this bill may need to be enlarged…. If we provide proper procedures in this bill that accord with the timeless principles of our ancient law, then we will find it possible in years to come to enlarge the scope of this … bill. But if we depart from our traditional procedures in this bill, our departure will haunt us as a recurring barrier to enlarging the scope of… civil rights in future years. That is why I am persuaded that this amendment is indispensable to the long-term interest of civil rights.”
And there was a speech by another young senator, forty-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who also sat in the back row, a speech explaining why he had now—at last—decided to support the amendment. His explanation was based in part on pragmatism—one reason to give the southerners what they want, he said, is to avoid a filibuster. “After observing the course of debate during the past days, I am persuaded that if the O’Mahoney Amendment is not accepted, the passage of the bill will be delayed for weeks and perhaps indefinitely,” he said. It was buttressed with expert opinion—“from outstanding liberal attorneys whom I have consulted…. I ask unanimous consent to have printed at this point in the Record a memorandum which is the result of a telephone conversation with Prof. Mark De Wolfe Howe, professor of law, Harvard Law School….” And it displayed concern not to offend the South, whose votes might be crucial at the 1960 convention. “I am confident that southern juries, presented with convincing evidence and ever mindful of the watching eyes of the nation—and indeed the world—will convict those who dare to interfere with orderly legal processes,” Kennedy said. But in its peroration, Kennedy’s speech rose to an eloquence that gave a hint of things to come. “Finally, Mr. President, this debate … represents … a turning point in American social and political thought. It represents a confrontation of problems which have plagued us too long…. It represents an almost universal acknowledgment that we cannot continue to command the respect of peoples everywhere, not to mention our own self-respect, while we ignore the fact that many of our citizens do not possess basic constitutional rights. However late, we have at last come to the point of a great decision. It is this fact which overshadows our deliberations. To this overarching achievement, history will bear witness.”
All during the hours consumed by speeches, however, the focus of the galleries’ attention was on Lyndon Johnson, who wasn’t speaking.
Johnson wanted it there, and he made sure it stayed there. This evening session of the Senate was his moment, and he made the most of it, and to any spectator who had arrived wondering who was going to be the victor in “the great Senate game,” or who was in charge on the Senate floor, his actions made the answers clear. Dressed in a dark blue suit and gleaming white shirt, with a bright bow tie and, in his breast pocket, a bright handkerchief, he sauntered up and down the aisles with long, loping strides, stopping by one desk to put an arm around a colleague’s shoulders, grinning widely at another, gesturing across the floor at another, bending close to still others to whisper in their ears, sometimes with a hand ostentatiously up to his mouth to make the spectators realize that something secret and important was being said, so that, even though other senators were speaking, he constantly caught the galleries’ eye. When he sat down at his desk, of course, he was sitting down front and center on the Senate stage, and at the adjoining desk, on the other side of the center aisle, was the perfect foil.
“There were many speakers, but the floor was wholly dominated by two big men, stationed cheek by jowl on the center aisle—big, chunky, earnest Minority Leader William Knowland, and lanky Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson,” Stewart Alsop wrote. “They made a fascinating contrast. Knowland sat stolidly, like a great cornered bull, his enormous forehead furrowed in parallel wrinkles, foretasting defeat. Johnson sat back easily, his long legs negligently crossed, when he was not moving restlessly about. Once, when Everett Dirksen of Illinois rose to support Knowland with his special brand of empty grandiloquence (‘I have been thinking much of Runnymede’), Johnson half-yawned and lazily scratched his chest, in a magnificent gesture of casual confidence.” The speeches didn’t matter; Johnson’s every gesture made that clear. What mattered was the votes—and he had the votes.
Finally, after Dirksen had finished, Knowland rose to make a last appeal, poignant because by this time even he knew what its result would be. “This will be a historic roll call. Let it come. Our successors and history will be able to judge the issues, even if for the moment there is confusion here tonight.” He ended by bellowing out a line that must have been difficult for him to say, but which he may have felt represented the only hope left for him. “Support our President, Dwight D. Eisenhower!” he shouted.
Then, as the hands on the clock neared midnight, and Nixon came in to take the presiding officer’s chair, a page placed a lectern on the Majority Leader’s desk, and Johnson himself rose to give the last speech. “Mr. President, sometimes in the course of debate we use loose language. But it is not speaking loosely to say that the Senate is approaching a truly historic vote. By adopting this amendment, we can strengthen and preserve two important rights. One is the right to a trial by jury. The other is the right of all Americans to serve on juries, regardless of race, creed or color.” And his last li
ne was the perfect climax, the most fitting last line, the only last line, really, for a legislative drama.
“Mr. President,” Lyndon Johnson said, “I ask for the yeas and nays.”
FOR A TIME, to those in the galleries, the vote may have seemed to be going against the Leader. The first two senators called—Aiken and Allott—responded “Nay,” and at the end of twenty-five names, with the roll just finishing the Ds, the tally was 16 to 9 against the amendment. But Johnson, sitting at his desk with the smudged tally sheet in front of him, wasn’t worried. He knew what was coming—and, with the start of the Es, it came. “Eastland?” Aye. “Ellender?” Aye. “Ervin?” Aye. By the time the clerk reached the Ms, the ayes were ahead—and so many of the Ms were from the Mountain States and the Northwest. “Magnuson?” Aye. “Malone?” Aye. “Mansfield?” Aye. “Murray?” Aye. Shortly after midnight—at 12:19 a.m. on August 2—Nixon announced that the amendment was approved, by 51 votes to 42.
BEFORE THE LAST WORDS were out of Nixon’s mouth, a senator jumped up at his desk on the far left-hand side of the Democratic arc and started not for the cloakroom but for the lobby, because that was where the closest telephone was. He was a senator who no longer moved very fast, because he was old, but he was moving as fast as he could. It was Joseph O’Mahoney. His wife, Agnes, was in a wheelchair, and hadn’t been able to come. He was hurrying to call her to give her the news.
IN THE WAKE OF THE VOTE, emotions spilled over. Richard Nixon could not contain his frustration and rage. When, as he was leaving the Chamber, reporters asked his reaction, the Vice President said, “This is one of the saddest days in the history of the Senate. It was a vote against the right to vote.” Clarence Mitchell went to Knowland’s office to discuss what to do now, and could hardly believe what he saw there. “That big, strong, brusque Knowland actually broke down and cried,” Mitchell was to recall.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 156
