Four days after the bombing, King and several black leaders from Birmingham met at the White House with the president. During the meeting, King declared, “The real problem that we face is this. The Negro community is about to reach a breaking point.” But the president once again insisted that the administration had no legal grounds for sending troops. Four days later, Kennedy would tell a group of white civic leaders from Birmingham that he was equally powerless to curtail black demonstrations. “It may be the feeling in Birmingham that this administration can move these people in and out,” Kennedy said. “I’m just telling you flatly we can’t do it.”
Kennedy’s response to the latest violence was to send two presidential emissaries to Birmingham on a fact-finding mission: Kenneth Royall, a North Carolinian who had served as secretary of the Army in the Truman administration, and Earl “Red” Blaik, the legendary West Point football coach. That move left civil rights leaders badly disappointed, because Blaik had fielded all-white teams at the military academy and Royall had resisted integration of the Army. Some thoughtful southern whites were no more impressed with Blaik and Royall’s efforts, and in the end, they never even produced a formal report to the White House.
E. L. Holland, the sympathetic editorial page editor of the Birmingham News, wrote to Ed Guthman at the Justice Department on October 3 expressing his concern that Blaik and Royall had “been ‘snowed,’ sold a bill of goods,” by the white business community in Birmingham. “Nobody in any established position of leadership has yet dared say publicly the first word of reality as to what has to be done. They still dread the term ‘concession,’ and not only that, they still dread any soothing synonym for ‘concession.’” He concluded, “This is wholly confidential, of course, and I trust you will protect me, for I am wholly vulnerable.”
Kennedy’s handling of the new Birmingham crisis left the leaders of the civil rights groups more skeptical than ever of his administration’s commitment, and of its intentions about the bill. And so, just as the White House and Bill McCulloch feared, the liberals on Subcommittee No. 5 kept the pressure up from their end, steadily reshaping H.R. 7152 in ways that made it more in line with what the civil rights groups wanted, but that also jeopardized its prospects in the full House. In mid-September, Representative Byron Rogers of Colorado offered an amendment to the bill’s education section allowing the attorney general to intervene in cases in which a person was denied access to virtually any public facility operated by any state or local government, including parks and libraries. Bob Kastenmeier proposed to amend the public accommodations section to include almost every form of business, including private schools and law firms (while maintaining the administration’s exclusion for small boardinghouses). Celler himself offered a new section that would allow federal appellate courts to review civil rights cases that had been sent to unsympathetic state courts by federal district court judges.
By the end of the month, still more liberal amendments had been added, all with Celler’s support. Rogers offered a new section granting the attorney general broad authority to initiate or intervene in pending civil suits charging discrimination, while Peter Rodino of New Jersey proposed to give the bill’s equal employment section real teeth by giving the proposed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission the authority to investigate discrimination by any business with more than twenty-five employees and, after an administrative hearing, to order such practices stopped. (This would replace the weak employment discrimination provision in the administration’s bill, which covered only government contractors and lacked any enforcement mechanism.)
Up to this point, Celler had let the subcommittee proceed in a casual way, with tacit understandings of agreement but no binding votes on the bill or the various amendments. In part he followed this course because the president’s all-important tax bill was pending in the full House, and the administration did not want to give southern opponents of civil rights any reason to vote against that measure in retribution. But once the House passed the tax bill on September 25, Celler’s demeanor changed. On October 1, he began to ram through the amended civil rights bill—summarily accepting amendments from liberal Democrats and squelching Republican alternatives. Celler was content to load the bill with liberal provisions, confident that they could yet be traded away for passage by the full House. The next day, the amended H.R. 7152 passed Subcommittee No. 5 on a series of voice votes and was favorably reported to the full Judiciary Committee. Civil rights leaders were jubilant.
But Bill McCulloch was livid.
For weeks, he had been working, at considerable risk to his own reputation and standing in his party, to avoid just this outcome. He and the Justice Department lawyers had worked out a middle-ground approach to the desegregation of public accommodations—one that Celler had said in the past that he could support. So he was shocked to learn that Celler now supported a bill that would extend the law’s reach to almost every form of private enterprise, including private schools and law firms. “It’s a pail of garbage,” McCulloch told the Wall Street Journal.
President Kennedy was almost as distraught. He had been receiving upbeat reports from Katzenbach and from his legislative liaison, Lawrence O’Brien, that a more moderate bill was on track, only to have Celler accede to the liberals’ demands at the last minute. To the White House, it did not matter that Celler himself believed he was pursuing the time-honored civil rights strategy of passing a strong subcommittee bill that could later be watered down in the full Judiciary Committee, again on the House floor, and finally in the Senate. That was the playbook that had worked—albeit to produce flawed final products—in 1957 and 1960. But this time around, Bill McCulloch had already rejected such a strategy, and the Republican votes that would be needed for passage in the full House rested in his hands. Manny Celler had now done nothing but raise the hopes of the civil rights groups and liberals, who, by themselves, could provide scant vote-getting help in the uphill legislative battles to come.
The president’s frustration with the purists boiled over on September 30, in a meeting with the Reverend Eugene Carson Blake of the National Council of Churches. “The fact of the matter is, as you know, that a lot of these people would rather have an issue than a bill,” the president complained. “But, as I said from the beginning, to get a bill, we got to have bipartisanship.” And the key to that—the key to getting the needed Republican votes—was Bill McCulloch. “McCulloch can deliver sixty Republicans,” Kennedy said. “Without him, it can’t be done.”
In the Washington of 1963, McCulloch’s power was neither mystic nor wholly personal, though he was deeply respected on both sides of the aisle. His power flowed from his status as the senior Republican on one of the House’s most powerful committees. The House was so big and unruly that, by tradition, the leaders of both parties deferred to their committee chairmen and ranking members, as even the president—who in his years in Congress had never been much of a legislator—well understood.
“To get the Republicans,” Kennedy repeated, “we’ve got to get McCulloch and we’ve got to get as strong a bill as McCulloch can take. And that’s the best way to get action.” As for the liberals and civil rights groups, he said, “They have to be dissatisfied. I don’t mind what they say, or you know, they’re going to do a lot of complaining.
“I’ll go as far as I can go, but I think McCulloch has got to come with us, or otherwise it is an exercise in futility.”
* * *
AS IF THE KENNEDY brothers did not already have enough trouble with Manny Celler, at this very moment they faced yet a new round of complications involving Martin Luther King and J. Edgar Hoover—complications that might also make it harder to pass H.R. 7152. To make matters even worse, the catalyst for these complications was a longtime Senate protégé of Lyndon Johnson’s, Robert G. Baker.
Bobby Baker had come to the Senate as a fourteen-year-old page in 1943, and though he was twenty years younger than Johnson, he had become one of his important early teachers and
guides in the folkways of the institution. By the late 1950s, with Johnson’s steady backing, Baker had risen to the post of secretary to the Senate’s Democratic majority, the man who made the trains run on time, and the best-known wheeler-dealer and fixer on Capitol Hill. By October 1963, he had become something else: the subject of an investigation into that very wheeling and dealing, and thus a source of potential embarrassment to both Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy.
The Baker inquiry—begun by a handful of sharp-eyed journalists but soon picked up by Senator John Williams of Delaware, the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee and a self-appointed ethics watchdog—was broad, stretching from Baker’s investment in a vending machine company that sought lucrative business from federal aerospace contractors, to his backing of a splashy resort motel on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. But the aspects of his activity that involved Johnson and Kennedy were all too specific—even if still unknown to the public.
First, Baker had arranged for a Maryland insurance broker, Don B. Reynolds, to write a $100,000 life insurance policy for Johnson after he had trouble getting coverage in the wake of his 1955 heart attack. Johnson paid the $2,500 commission, Baker would later explain, but wanted something else in return: Reynolds would have to advertise on the television station that the Johnsons owned in Austin, Texas. And if a Maryland insurance broker’s being forced to advertise on Texas TV was not payback enough, the Johnsons also wanted a new Magnavox stereo set, which Reynolds bought wholesale for $542.25 and shipped to their home. The gift of a mere vicuña coat had forced Dwight Eisenhower’s White House chief of staff, Sherman Adams, to resign in 1958, and Johnson was wary of anyone poking around in his personal finances, an area in which he knew he was vulnerable, having accumulated great wealth while on the public payroll.
Second, it was Bobby Baker who owned the smoky Capitol Hill retreat—known as the Quorum Club—where Ellen Rometsch, the German beauty whom the FBI suspected of being a spy, was a regular entertainer of senators of both parties. And it was Baker who would claim to have sent Rometsch to the White House to share her favors with the president.
So when Baker abruptly drank four martinis at lunch and resigned his Senate post on Monday, October 7, just before a scheduled meeting with Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen to defend himself from John Williams’s inquiries, Robert Kennedy was understandably alarmed. The attorney general well understood that J. Edgar Hoover knew all about the rumors swirling around Baker and Rometsch, and it cannot have been a coincidence that just three days later, on Thursday, October 10, he at last authorized Hoover’s request for wiretaps on Martin Luther King’s home and office. “There would have been no living with the Bureau” if he had refused, Kennedy would later tell a friend. Days later, the attorney general humbled himself even further with Hoover by asking the director to persuade Mansfield and Dirksen that no good could come—for either party—from an inquiry into Rometsch’s sexual exploits. In one more telling way, Hoover once again held the upper hand—over King, over the Kennedys, and, as his adversaries knew, over H.R. 7152 itself.
* * *
J. EDGAR HOOVER WAS NOT the only one in Washington exacting a price from the Kennedy brothers that October. Bill McCulloch and his fellow Republicans insisted that the White House would have to help clean up the mess that Celler and the House liberals had made of H.R. 7152. The man chosen to deliver that message to the administration was a character every bit as singular as McCulloch or Celler—the House minority leader, Charles Abraham Halleck of Indiana.
Halleck, a scrapper from Hoosier farm country, had been gleefully battling Democrats since the days of the New Deal. The historian Eric Goldman once described his political views as “just left of King George III.” He was a lawyer and onetime state prosecutor, and the highlight of his political career may well have been his nomination of his fellow Indianan, Wendell Willkie, for the Republican presidential nomination in 1940. (Halleck nursed abiding resentment that he had been narrowly passed over for the vice presidential nomination in 1948 by Thomas E. Dewey, who chose Earl Warren instead.) He had become the House Republican leader in 1959 by challenging and toppling his predecessor, Joseph Martin of Massachusetts. Now, with his W. C. Fields nose and gravelly midwestern twang, he was one half of the Republican congressional leadership, teamed with his Senate counterpart, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, in a weekly news conference of loyal opposition that the New York Times’s Tom Wicker had dubbed “The Ev and Charlie Show” and that President Kennedy compared to the popular television drama about Prohibition-era gangsters, The Untouchables. Halleck was the bull terrier to Dirksen’s baleful basset hound, the drum to his flute, the sandpaper to his velvet, as the liberal columnist Mary McGrory put it.
Halleck held court in a hideaway office off a basement corridor of the Capitol, presiding over what he called “the Clinic,” his bibulous answer to former Speaker Sam Rayburn’s famous “Board of Education,” the private group of pals and protégés with whom Rayburn shared his opinions and wisdom regarding pending legislative business over Virginia Gentleman bourbon and branch water. In Halleck’s salon, the tipple of choice was Grant’s Stand Fast Scotch. He was, a friend would recall, a man who “never succumbed to the modernist theory that booze interferes with brain function.” (When Larry O’Brien once told Lyndon Johnson that Halleck worried that he might have been a little rough in a telephone call with Johnson because “he had a couple of pops,” Johnson demurred, “No, every time I talk to him, he’s drinking.” “Yeah, well, you catch him after noontime, that’s the way it has to be,” O’Brien replied.)
Now, on Tuesday, October 8, the very day that the amended bill arrived at the full Judiciary Committee, it was Halleck who met with Nick Katzenbach and John McCormack, the elderly Speaker of the House. Halleck told them that the Republicans would go halfway toward fixing the flawed subcommittee bill, but only halfway. They would also need backing from the liberal Northern Democrats on the full Judiciary Committee. Otherwise, he threatened, the Republicans would oppose any softening amendments, condemning the bill to certain death at the hands of the southern segregationists on the House floor.
Like Bill McCulloch, Halleck had hardly any black constituents in his western Indiana district. If his support for civil rights was less emphatic than McCulloch’s, he had nevertheless consistently opposed poll taxes and had supported the 1957 Civil Rights Act, though such stands won him little support from the folks at home, whose letters filled his in-box. Among the hostile communiqués he received circa 1963 was a bogus application for membership in the NAACP that asked the respondent to list “Number of children claimed for relief check,” “number of legitimate children (if any),” and “Total children fathered (if known),” and to describe his marital status as “shacked up,” “making out,” or “worn out.”
In fact, almost certainly because of his bona fides as a scrappy conservative, Halleck was under assault that summer from constituents and other correspondents demanding to know what he intended to do about the Kennedys’ civil rights program. On June 16, W. E. Black of Indianapolis sent the minority leader a letter that began, “I am writing to you to find out what Kennedy and his little brother, that he put in as Attorney General, are trying to do to the white people of America. We all know it is for votes.” The same day, Frank Farr of San Diego demanded, “Would you care to have niggers in your home, marrying into your family, of course you would not. They have only been out of Africa and the trees for a short period of time.”
Halleck’s delicate situation as Republican leader had been summed up earlier that summer in a private note he had received from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the cream-colored, gold-embossed stationery of Dwight D. Eisenhower himself. Noting that President Kennedy had been lobbying for his support on the civil rights bill (and insisting, with his usual diffidence on the subject, that “I, as a layman, was not able to suggest the details that might be useful”), Ike suggested it might be a good idea for the Republicans to let the Democrats stew in their own jui
ces a bit.
Because strong Republican support would be required for the passage of any bill, Eisenhower continued, “The picture presented, then, is a curious one. The Democratic Party, while normally completely unified at election time, always becomes immersed in a hopeless civil war when anything remotely touching the race question is brought up in Congress … It puts you and your Republican colleagues in a rather awkward position. The electorate has declined to give the Republicans responsibility for leading the nation, yet the implication is that Republican Congressmen have a responsibility of overcoming the errors committed by the elected majority.” The former president concluded that he would support legislation “that seemed to me applicable, proper and constitutional,” but he added, “The situation is one that certainly poses tough decisions upon us all, first as good citizens, second as Republicans.”
Eisenhower’s letter is revealing, showing as it does how the Republican Party’s most revered elder statesman could view the civil rights bill through the cold-eyed prism of partisan politics. By contrast, Charlie Halleck, the dogged Republican “gut-fighter,” was finding himself thrust into the role of statesman by default. The same partisan loyalty that made Halleck a political scrapper meant that he was loyal to his party’s ranking campaigner for civil rights. That was Bill McCulloch, and McCulloch had already given his word to the administration. For better or worse, he and Halleck would now help the Kennedys salvage their bill.
* * *
THE FIRST STEP IN the Kennedy administration’s elaborate dance of reclamation was Robert Kennedy’s summons of Manny Celler to the woodshed—or at least to the Justice Department, where he gave the chairman a stern talking-to for not following the administration’s earlier wishes on the bill. “It was unpleasant,” Kennedy would recall. “But you see, we’d lost him. The problem was, it wasn’t just a gratuitous lecture. We’d lost him, and he wasn’t giving any leadership. He’d indicated that he’d come along with us—and then hadn’t … The reason that I was as strong as I was, was that he was no good to us with his present posture at the time. He liked me, and I liked him, but we’d lost the bill. So I just put the facts on the table: that the bill was going to go down the drain and we needed some leadership from him.”
An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Page 15
