Johnson, on the Senate floor, was waiting anxiously for news, and that morning Reedy handed him a note giving him some, which Reedy had received from one of the participants in the meeting, Ken Birkhead: “NAACP, ADA, and other civil rights organizations are going to put out a statement about noon damning the Senate bill… but saying in effect they prefer it to no bill at all,” the note said. That seemed like good news—but it turned out to be premature; “All day long we argued and struggled,” Rauh was to recall.
The most prominent African-American in that room was Wilkins. “If I had gone against the bill, I think it would have collapsed,” he was to say, and he was probably correct. “The Republicans … were for letting it die. The liberals would not have gone on against me.”
“I had never felt quite so much on the spot,” Wilkins was to recall. He was torn between the two sides. “I had wanted something much stronger [than the bill]. I had opposed the jury trial amendment. I had winced at the arguments of old friends who said that since the South had not filibustered to kill the bill it had to be too weak to be worth anything.” On the other hand, “from a dry-eyed point of view, I thought it was impossible to argue that the bill was worth less than nothing.” And “in the end,” he says, “I concluded that at the very least the measure would expand Negro registration…. I also hoped that if the bill passed we would be able to demonstrate its weaknesses by the 1960 election and get much stronger legislation. With the bill passed we were in a better position to campaign than we would have been without it…. At the end of that long afternoon, I decided to buck the prevailing sentiment against the bill and support it.” That decision, Wilkins was to say, “was one of the hardest I have ever made.” But it was crucial. Johnson had persuaded Graham, and Graham had persuaded Rauh, and Rauh had persuaded Wilkins—and now, in that law library on K Street, Wilkins persuaded the Leadership Conference. In the late afternoon, at the end of a long day, the conference issued a statement saying that “Disappointing as the Senate version is, it does contain some potential good,” and therefore should be passed. The Washington Post found the statement good. “The 16 national organizations … have taken a realistic view,” said its editorial the next day. “All of them recognize that an amended bill is vastly preferable to no bill at all. It is noteworthy that among the signers is Roy Wilkins….”
• • •
THE SENATE VOTE on the overall bill began at about eight o’clock that Wednesday night, by which time the Leadership Conference statement supporting the measure had been circulated on Capitol Hill. Its passage had already been assured, but it had been expected that some Republicans and liberals would join the South in voting against it. The statement changed that, even for Knowland. “With the pending bill we have made some advances in civil rights,” the Republican Leader said in his closing statement. And the bill, he said, “will be further improved in the [conference] committee. It will be greatly improved over the Senate version.” Not a single Republican, and only one liberal—Wayne Morse—voted against it. Only seventeen of the twenty-two southern senators joined Morse in voting against the bill. Florida’s Smathers voted for it, as did Tennessee’s Gore and Kefauver, and the two senators from Texas: Ralph Yarborough and Lyndon Johnson. Five senators didn’t vote, and the vote for passage—the decisive vote in the 1957 civil rights fight: the first time in eighty-two years, the first time since Reconstruction, that the Senate had passed a civil rights bill—was 72 to 18.
The next morning, at about six o’clock, Rauh received another telephone call, this time from Phil Graham. “I just had the strangest call,” Graham said. “I had the strangest call from Lyndon. He said, ‘Phil, of all the strange things, who the hell do you think is saving that bill for me? That crazy, goddamned friend of yours, Joe Rauh, is saving that bill for me.’”
“I wasn’t saving it for him, because I hated his guts for what he was doing to school desegregation,” Rauh was to say. “That was a crime against the Negroes when Lyndon Johnson knocked out Part III…. But Johnson was right. We had to have a breakthrough.” Thirty-five years later, when Joe Rauh died, Katharine Graham summed it up in the eulogy she delivered at his memorial service. “Joe understood that you had to show you could pass something, even something small, to go forward and pass something big.”
Whether or not Joe Rauh “saved” the civil rights bill, he certainly smoothed the way for the next steps needed if it was to become law. For more than two weeks following that Senate vote, Republicans sincerely committed to civil rights (notably New Yorkers Brownell, Rogers, and Congressman Kenneth Keating) insisted—as did Knowland and Joe Martin, both of them still unable to grasp the strategic situation—that the House reject the Senate version and repass its original, stronger version of the bill. Unless “major steps” were taken to “put more teeth” back into the measure, Martin said on August 10, the bill would be sent to a joint House-Senate conference committee—where, of course, it would die. But the Civil Rights Leadership Conference issued another statement—reiterating that the Senate version should be accepted as the best that was realistically possible. With that statement, the opposition to the bill crumbled. How could anyone contend that a civil rights bill should not be passed when the pre-eminent civil rights organization said it should? Know-land and Martin continued to bluster to reporters, Martin saying that it would be “infinitely better” to have no bill than to pass one as “bitterly disappointing” to America’s Negroes as the one the Senate had passed, and threatening to withhold Republican support from the bill and have the Republicans on the Conference Committee hold the bill there indefinitely unless it was strengthened. But there was one question—asked by reporters virtually every time Knowland or Martin made such statements—which punctured their bravado, a question to which every possible response was lame. As the New York Times put it: “Asked how he reconciled this [statement] with the fact that the NAACP was seeking approval of the Senate bill as the best available, Martin replied that the NAACP leaders did not speak for all Negroes.”
There was bluster, too, in the weekly meetings of GOP legislative leaders at the White House. Brownell’s deputy Rogers called the bill “a monstrosity—the most irresponsible act he had seen during his time in Washington…. [the] revised Section IV limited to voting rights and providing for jury trials would be like giving a policeman a gun without bullets.” The President, apparently firmly convinced by Brownell and Rogers of the unwisdom of a jury trial amendment, supported them. At one meeting, the minutes reported, “the President spoke at length in favor of fighting it out to the end to prevent the pseudo-liberals from getting away with their sudden alliance with the southerners on a sham bill…. The President thought it ironic that the Democrats had succeeded in making it appear that any civil rights legislation that might be enacted would be their proposal.” But there was a master of realpolitik in the room. “The Vice President summarized that the Republicans would be blamed for any failure to enact Civil Rights legislation in the event that Republicans voted to send the bill to Conference [a conference committee] and it died there.”
Eventually Nixon’s pragmatism carried the day in Republican councils. On the Democratic side of the House there were no councils; Sam Rayburn made his wishes known. On August 27, by a vote of 279 to 97, the House accepted the Senate bill with only one minor change—a face-saving compromise Johnson had worked out that slightly diluted the jury trial amendment and therefore slightly strengthened the bill. (It allowed judges to try minor voting rights offenses without a jury.) That crucial vote, unexpected in its one-sidedness, meant the measure could go back to the Senate, and if the Senate accepted that change, repassing the bill with that one change written into it, the bill would not go to conference.
More than a few of the southern senators, most notably Thurmond, Talmadge, and Harry Byrd, did not want to accept that change, and they felt they didn’t have to: that the year was by now so far advanced—and senators so eager to get out of Washington—that the will and the votes
to close off a filibuster did not exist, if indeed they ever had. “When, however, Thurmond attempted to persuade the Southern Caucus to filibuster, Dick Russell countered with the same reasoning he had been using all year to deflect one. The southerners could use that reasoning to deflect the anger of constituents over their failure to filibuster—and they did. As Willis Robertson wrote one constituent, “I can assure you that a careful appraisal of the situation confronting us convinces the Southern Senators that if we attempt a filibuster, cloture would promptly be imposed, in which event, not only would we lose our present fight but would invite the establishment of a precedent to plague us next year should an effort be made” to amend Rule 22. And in the end, all of the southerners but one agreed, as usual, to accept their general’s decision. When the bill returned to the Senate, Strom Thurmond held the floor for twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes—the longest one-man filibuster in the Senate’s history—drawling out the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and George Washington’s Farewell Address—but that scene from the Senate’s past was a solo performance; none of his fellow southerners would join him, and they were furious at him because they felt he was showing them up for not filibustering themselves; “They felt,” as one article said, “that Mr. Thurmond was leaving in the South a public image of a single southern senator standing at barricades that had been deserted by the others.” “Oh, God, the venomous hatred of his southern colleagues,” George Reedy was to recall. “I’ll never forget Herman Talmadge’s eyes when he walked in on the floor of the Senate that day and saw Strom carrying on that performance.” Even Russell, faced with what the Atlanta Constitution called “rumblings of criticism [that] are being heard” in Georgia, felt a need to justify his strategy, telling the Constitution that the South had “nothing to gain and everything to lose” by filibustering, and declaring, “Under the circumstances we faced, if I had undertaken a filibuster for personal aggrandizement, I would forever have reproached myself for being guilty of a form of treason against the South.” Thirty-five years later, Thurmond himself, his biographer Nadine Cohodas wrote, “was [still] adamant” that a full-scale filibuster would have been successful “if Russell had gone along. He refused to concede that the Georgian’s tactical compromises were necessary and remained convinced that Russell was motivated more by a desire to help Lyndon Johnson pass a civil rights bill—and thereby boost the Texan’s presidential hopes—than by a wish to protect the South or the filibuster rule.” When Thurmond finished talking, the Senate, on August 29, passed the revised bill by a 60–15 vote, and on September 9, President Eisenhower signed it into law.
AUGUST 27, the day of the crucial House of Representatives vote to approve the Senate’s version of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, was Lyndon Johnson’s forty-ninth birthday.
His fortieth birthday had been a very bad day in his life, a day on which it had seemed likely that he would never sit in the United States Senate. August 27, 1948, had been the eve of Election Day in his senatorial contest with Coke Stevenson, and polls taken that election eve showed that Stevenson was still solidly ahead. Johnson was intending to leave politics forever if he lost that election—and on his birthday, it had seemed likely that he would lose. He was convinced that a man’s fortieth birthday was a milestone in his life: that if he hadn’t accomplished anything by forty, he was unlikely ever to accomplish anything. On his fortieth birthday, Horace Busby recalls, he felt “he had done very little in his life”—and he felt that he never would.
August 27, 1957, was a very different day. He had come a long way in the nine years since 1948, and on this day, the day on which the House vote made his great achievement a certainty, he seemed to know it. He spent much of the day in the Senate Democratic cloakroom that he had made his domain, telephoning the twenty Texas representatives in the House to try to persuade them to vote for the bill, and in the end twelve of the twenty voted for it, a small exclamation point accentuating his triumph. During the day, Mary Rather came to the door of the cloakroom with a message that meant a lot to him. That morning’s Baltimore Sun had contained a favorable cartoon by Richard Yardley, whose drawings were a barometer of liberal opinion. He had told Willie Day Taylor to ask Yardley for the original. Willie Day had done so, and when Yardley agreed, had invited him to see the cartoon collection in Johnson’s office. Yardley said he would like to, “but I’d like to come see them hanging in the White House.” Ms. Rather relayed the message to Johnson, and when she returned to the Senate Office Building, told Willie Day his reaction: “This message made our tired boss smile.”
And there would be, that day, broader smiles.
The team that had won the Little League Baseball world championship was brought to the Capitol steps to meet the Majority Leader, and the team was from Monterrey, Mexico. As the little Mexican boys clustered around him, one of them, Angel Macias, handed him his baseball cap, and Lyndon Johnson suddenly bent down and scooped Angel up, holding him in one arm while he tried on the cap with the other. Thirty years before, he had made it possible for the Mexican boys in Cotulla to play baseball, and it had hurt him when, in the early mornings, he had heard trucks taking them away instead. He had wanted to do something for them, and had promised himself that if ever he had the power, he would. And now, on Lyndon Johnson’s face, as he held the little Mexican boy in his arms, posing for a photographer, was an expression that photographers almost never caught, an expression that was almost never on Johnson’s face when a camera was pointing at it because he always wanted to look statesmanlike or shrewd, so that when a camera was pointing at him, he looked either solemn and pompous, or calculating. On his face this time, as Angel Macias hugged him, and Lyndon Johnson tilted the baseball cap back as the photographer asked, was a wide, carefree smile, a smile that lit up his whole face, a smile as big and lighthearted—as happy—as the smile of the little boy grinning up at him.
That evening, at about six o’clock, there was a little party in Skeeter’s office to cut his birthday cake. Only a few senators had been invited, and all of them who were still in Washington came, and their names reveal the scope of his triumph: Russell, Byrd, Ervin, Smathers, Kerr, Fulbright—he had managed, despite passing a civil rights bill, to hold the South; Humphrey, Pastore, Kennedy—he had held some liberals, too.
And then there was the big party. It was a Texas party, so of course it was in Dale and Scooter Miller’s Mayflower suite. Before he went, Lyndon Johnson changed into a blue suit. Did he remember how, just two years before, he had told Bird to keep the blue one, that he would be able to wear it however things worked out? Now he knotted a tie, bright yellow because it was a Texas party, and tucked a bright yellow handkerchief into his breast pocket, and Bird, radiant in a lacy lemon-colored dress, a smile all over her face, too, pinned a yellow rose on his lapel, and walked behind him, carrying the remnants of the cake—there was no sense in wasting it—as he strode out to the long limousine with the chauffeur holding open the door, and was driven down to the Mayflower, where Scooter was arranging and rearranging the big bouquet of yellow roses that the Nixons had sent, and where Dale had been nervously telling the band for an hour that he wanted “The Yellow Rose of Texas” to be struck up the instant Senator Johnson appeared.
The party was perfect, too. Everyone was there: a dozen ambassadors (there was a brief ceremony when the Korean Ambassador made him an honorary citizen of that nation); Washington royalty—the Cafritzes and Perle Mesta; Texas royalty; as well as the man who mattered most to Lyndon Johnson. Sam Rayburn had a rare smile on his face, and a present that said a lot about this gruffly sentimental man’s feeling toward Johnson; it was a set of gold cuff links and shirt studs that he had, years before, given as a very special gift to his friend Alben Barkley. Barkley’s widow, Jane, had given them back to Rayburn when Barkley died, and Rayburn said he wanted Lyndon to have them now. Accepting the gift, Johnson told Rayburn, “I don’t know of anyone for whom I have had more affection in my forty-nine years than for you. But the greatest
thing you have ever done is what you and twelve other Texans did today when you voted as you did on this civil rights bill.” And then there was the moment that was the perfect ending to the perfect day. All that evening, back in the Senate Office Building, Walter Jenkins had been on the telephone to Wisconsin, where the special election to fill Joe McCarthy’s seat had been held that day. All evening, the news had been getting better and better, and just before midnight, it was confirmed, and Jenkins telephoned Johnson at the Mayflower, just moments before William Proxmire did so himself. “Senator Johnson,” Proxmire said, “I’ve got the biggest birthday present of them all for you: me.” Proxmire had indeed pulled off the upset victory, and would be the fiftieth Democratic senator. Even if Matthew Neely died (as, indeed, he would, four months later), Johnson would still be Majority Leader.
When Proxmire gave him the news, Lyndon Johnson said, “Well, the people of Texas have been awfully good to me for a long time. But I must say I never expected this much kindness from the people of Wisconsin.” He was almost beside himself with joy. The next evening, while he was in the Senate cloakroom waiting for Thurmond to finish his filibuster, he sent an aide to find out when Proxmire was planning to come to Washington, and was told he was already on his way, that he was flying in that night and was expected to arrive shortly. He hustled the nearest five senators out to his limousine and off to National Airport, where they were waiting on the tarmac to welcome the Proxmires when they came down the stairs from the plane. Seeing Proxmire there in the flesh—the living proof that he would still be Majority Leader when Congress reconvened in 1958—Johnson couldn’t do enough for him. He announced that he would give the newest senator a luncheon to celebrate his swearing-in the next day—a lunch for one hundred people in the grandest setting he could provide: the Old Supreme Court Chamber. And he gave him the committee he wanted: Banking and Currency. As soon as he took his desk, after the swearing-in, Proxmire asked for recognition from the chair and said that he knew it was tradition for a new senator to remain silent for a while, but that he felt it was his duty to thank Johnson “for the fine things that the Majority Leader has done for us.” Johnson jumped up to reply. Was Proxmire thanking him for the things he had done? He would do more! He announced on the spot that he was giving the newest senator the most prized junket he had available: a trip to West Germany at the invitation of the West German Bundestag. Reporters watching Lyndon Johnson saw a man transfused with happiness; as Mary McGrory wrote in the Washington Star: “Leadership of a Senate majority is not among the usual remedies prescribed for victims of a heart attack. In this case it seems to have been good medicine.” Johnson works very hard, McGrory wrote, but “he works hard because he enjoys it. One gets the impression that no matter what the future may hold, Senator Johnson right now would rather be Senate Majority Leader than anything else in the world.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 158
