Once more, Roland Libonati—who had caused so much trouble in the first place by withdrawing his initial motion to weaken the bill—proved a pain in the president’s neck, announcing that he would refuse to accept the new compromise. Kennedy was so irked that he briefly ducked out of the meeting to telephone Libonati’s patron, Mayor Daley in Chicago. “Roland Libonati is sticking it right up us,” Kennedy complained. “He’s standing with the extreme liberals who are gonna end up with no bill at all.”
“He’ll vote for it,” Daley exclaimed. “He’ll vote for any goddamned thing you want!”
At that Kennedy laughed and said, “Well, can you get him?” and Daley suggested that Ken O’Donnell tell Libonati to call him in Chicago. But the president suggested it might be better for Daley himself to call Libonati later, “Otherwise, ’cause he might think—”
“That’s better,” Daley promptly agreed. “But he’ll do it.”
“That’d be good,” Kennedy said. (Indeed, later that night, Libonati sent word to the White House that he would support the president.)
Yet again, the meeting ended inconclusively, with Kennedy still uncertain of just how many votes he could count on.
But by 9:30 on Tuesday morning, October 29, when the president convened one last meeting at the White House with McCulloch, Halleck, and the usual suspects, Kennedy reported that he believed he now had nine votes to oppose Arch Moore’s pending motion to send the liberal bill to the floor. “And we hope maybe Libonati will support us,” he added.
“We’ve got at least seven and maybe another on our side,” Halleck reported.
That meant sixteen votes—just one short of the seventeen needed to block Moore’s motion. In fact, Halleck, canny as ever, was understating his tally on purpose; he already had a certain eighth vote in hand. But he had only pledged to Kennedy the support of half the committee’s Republicans—and seven fulfilled that promise. Now he was waiting to see whether the president could produce his promised half of the Democrats—that is, ten.
“I think we got a pretty good bill here,” Kennedy said. “We’ve got the FEPC that the Republicans—”
At this reference to Nick Katzenbach’s handiwork—the new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission proposal—Halleck interrupted, “Let’s understand one thing, Mr. President. You know my concern about FEPC. And so I wouldn’t want it understood here that when this gets out on the House floor that I support FEPC.”
Kennedy rejoined in disbelief, “That’s the Republican FEPC!” Indeed it was, and Katzenbach’s inclusion of it was doubly clever, because it was not only a Republican measure, but one that had been sponsored by three young Republican Turks—Robert Griffin of Michigan, Charles Goodell of New York, and Albert Quie of Minnesota—who had recently challenged Halleck’s leadership. The trio had engineered a successful effort to knock off Halleck’s conservative deputy minority whip, Charles Hoeven, in favor of an up-and-comer from Michigan named Gerald R. Ford. Whatever Halleck’s protestations, Kennedy knew he would be hard-pressed to oppose the FEPC provision now.
At 10:45 that morning, Chairman Celler called the Judiciary Committee to order. Leaving nothing to chance, the Justice Department had prepared a six-point script for him to conduct the meeting. The first step was a roll call vote on Arch Moore’s pending motion to send the liberal bill to the House floor. The number needed to defeat the motion was seventeen, exactly half the thirty-four votes available that morning. (One of the committee’s thirty-five members was absent, and a motion fails on a tie vote.) Because tradition dictated that the roll of the majority party be called first, the results of the president’s lobbying efforts were soon clear. He got his ten votes—but Roland Libonati’s was not among them. The feckless ward heeler had changed his mind yet again, and the tenth vote came from a most unlikely candidate, Ed Willis of Louisiana, a staunch segregationist who was nevertheless a close friend of both Celler and McCulloch and who returned their friendship by voting with them. A total of nine Republicans—two more than Halleck had promised—also voted against the motion, which was defeated 19–15.
The next task was for Celler to read the first sentence of the pending liberal bill and then move to strike everything following it, in favor of the new fifty-six-page compromise measure. The text of the new bill had been hand-delivered to all the committee members overnight, so none could claim they had not seen it before voting on it. The next requirement was the reading of the new bill and the committee’s aged clerk, William Foley, whose constitution was frail, barely managed to finish it by 11:52 a.m., just eight minutes before the full House would convene and force the committee to adjourn. Celler raced through the remaining steps, giving himself sixty seconds to explain the bill, and McCulloch equal time, before Peter Rodino of New Jersey called for a vote and an end to all discussion. Celler then ordered a vote on the new bill, which passed 20 to 14 just as the noon bell sounded, announcing the start of the House floor session. The administration had won ugly, but it had won.
Reactions ran to form. The president called the bill “comprehensive and fair” and said it would “provide the basis for men of good will in every city in our land to work together to resolve their racial problems within a framework of law and justice.” But the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, quoting Roy Wilkins, said the bill was “inadequate to meet the needs of 1963.” The biggest loser was probably Roland Libonati, who confided to a colleague in the aftermath of the vote that he had received word from the Daley machine that his political career was over.
After the vote, President Kennedy called Charlie Halleck with his thanks. “Well, you did a great job,” the president said.
“Oh, well, thanks,” Halleck replied, adding, “I got a lot of mad people up here.”
Kennedy laughed and assured him, “Oh, but that’s all right,” and Halleck acknowledged, “I know, you’ve got a few.”
“You really did what you said,” Kennedy told the minority leader, one smooth operator admiring another.
“I hated to overpromise,” Halleck replied.
Then Kennedy turned his scorn on Libonati, but with a twinkle that referenced his own close election in 1960, which many had credited to Mayor Daley’s delivery of Illinois. “Evidently that Cook County machine isn’t as strong as we hear,” the president said.
“I got a little trouble on my side,” Halleck concluded, “a lot of guys bitching … and so I ain’t sure they’ll make me leader again but … I don’t give a damn.”
Halleck’s break with his usual conservative-southern coalition was remarkable. The columnist Murray Kempton wrote that he had “violated the compact with the southerners which is the heart of his tactics” and had “stifled lust at the smell of a bleeding Democrat, which is the innermost response of his natural being.” The Washington Post editorialized that Halleck’s “action would have brought down a government in many parliamentary legislatures.”
In fact, that same afternoon, someone placed a furled umbrella on the Republican leadership’s desk on the House floor, a gesture meant to compare Halleck’s actions to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938. The next day, sixty-eight House Republicans—40 percent of the caucus—held a secret meeting to protest Halleck’s decision to support the bill without consulting the Republican Policy Committee. “They aren’t organizing a revolt,” said Representative Melvin Laird, an influential young Republican from Wisconsin. “But Halleck has been warned.” Another angry Republican member, quoted anonymously in the newspapers, was blunter. “We had Kennedy locked in a box on civil rights and Charlie Halleck gave him the key,” he said. “Now Kennedy will get credit for the bill among the Negroes, and the white voters will blame the Republicans for helping to pass it. So we are damned either way.”
Days later, a postcard signed with an illegible scrawl arrived in Halleck’s office from Xenia, Ohio. “You used to be the fair haired lad from Indiana,” it read. “NOW YOU ARE THE HAIRY APE OF THE PARTY—HOPE THE PARTY BOUNCES YOU.”
&
nbsp; For the rest of their days, the Kennedy brothers professed some puzzlement about just why Halleck had agreed to support their bill when he could have chosen to embarrass them with an election year coming up. Nick Katzenbach thought Halleck did so out of loyalty to McCulloch. “If the senior Republican on a committee was for something, then the party leader was for it,” he would recall. Near the end of his life, Halleck offered his own answer. “They couldn’t understand that once in a while a guy does something because it’s right,” he told Charles Whalen, a fellow Republican congressman who, with his wife, Barbara, wrote a sympathetic history of the bill, and of the Republicans’ crucial role in its passage. “I had a few experiences. I had a black driver. We used to go down to Warm Springs, Virginia, to see friends. We’d stop at a little bit of a restaurant. I’d go in and ask if he could go in with the Hallecks. They said no but they would be glad to serve him in the car. The goddamned thing just didn’t look right to me. Hell, I didn’t do it for political advantage. The colored votes in my district didn’t amount to a bottle of cold pee.”
Bill McCulloch had the same point of view. Ten days after the bill cleared the Judiciary Committee, he told the Dayton Journal Herald, “My purpose is to remove this bill from the political arena. I just want the people to know it has the imprint of both parties.”
* * *
IN THE AFTERMATH OF the committee vote, however, some liberals worried that the makeshift coalition that had brought the bill this far could not hold. H.R. 7152’s next stop before the House floor would be the all-powerful Rules Committee, which would set the terms for its debate by the full House. And the committee’s all-powerful chairman was Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, a staunch segregationist whose usual method for burying bills he disliked was to retreat to Cedar Hill, his farm in Fauquier County, to check up on the livestock.
Kennedy himself was frustrated and fretful. On a political trip to Pennsylvania on the day after the Judiciary Committee passed the bill, his motorcade passed through sparse crowds in the racially tense wards of South Philadelphia, “one of the poorest receptions Mr. Kennedy has had in a major city since he became president,” the New York Times’s Tom Wicker wrote. Not only the civil rights bill, but also the president’s long-pending tax bill, was now stalled on Capitol Hill. “I think it is unfortunate,” he said at his news conference on November 14. Five days later, in his regular weekly meeting with the Democratic congressional leadership, he professed astonishment that Congress had so far passed only four of the twelve standard appropriations bills, with the end of the session in sight. “What are you doing up there?” he demanded.
Two days later, on Thursday, November 21, Charlie Halleck refused to shoulder any blame for the president’s languishing legislative program. “With the Democrats in control of the White House and every government agency and with a two-to-one majority in the Senate and a three-to-two majority in the House of Representatives of the Congress, Mr. Kennedy can have no alibi,” he said at his regular weekly news conference with Everett Dirksen. “Any censure of Congress is a censure of the Democrat Party and of the lack of presidential leadership.”
The very same day, Halleck made it clear that he was not above calling in a chit or two for his support of Kennedy on civil rights. He wrote Frederick Hovde, the president of Purdue University, the biggest educational institution in his district, that he was lobbying the administration hard to put a new electronic research center for NASA on the university’s campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. “My inclination is to talk to the president personally, but he left Washington this morning for a trip to Texas,” Halleck wrote. “Possibly I can get in touch with him early next week. In any event, that is my intention.”
6
A Good Man in a Tight Spot
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1963
NOT THREE HOURS AFTER the fateful shots rang out in Dallas, the thirty-sixth president of the United States was aloft in Air Force One winging his way back to Washington with the body of the thirty-fifth president in a heavy bronze casket in the aft of the plane. Lyndon Johnson had suffered a great shock. No one yet knew whether he himself might have been the target of an assassination plot. Half the president’s Cabinet was airborne over the Pacific, diverted from a planned trip to Japan and now also returning to Washington. John F. Kennedy’s widow and aides, huddled together by his coffin, were numb with grief or blind with rage—or both—and drowning their sorrows in Scotch. Confusion and uncertainty reigned.
But as he sat in the high-backed chair in the presidential stateroom that only hours before had been another man’s, Johnson knew just what he wanted to do. He drew a small notepad from the desk and wrote:
1. Staff
2. Cabinet
3. Leadership.
Moments later, Malcolm Kilduff, an assistant White House press secretary and the ranking spokesman on the Texas trip, was on the plane’s radio with his colleague Andrew Hatcher back at the White House.
“On arrival, on arrival,” Kilduff said of the new president, “he will meet with at the White House … he will meet with the leadership … He will meet with the leadership…”
“Now is that bipartisan leadership or Democratic leadership?” Hatcher inquired.
“That is wholly bipartisan, wholly bipartisan,” Kilduff answered. “Over.”
Kilduff meant the bipartisan congressional leadership, of course. But the leadership in question that November afternoon was—wholly, wholly—Lyndon Johnson’s own. And with John Kennedy’s agenda—from the tax bill to civil rights—squarely stalled on Capitol Hill, he was wasting no time.
“I was a man in trouble, in a world that is never more than minutes away from catastrophe,” he would recall. “I knew it was imperative that I grasp the reins of power and do so without delay. Any hesitation or wavering, any false step, any sign of self-doubt, could have been disastrous. The nation was in a state of shock and grief. The times cried out for leadership.”
Johnson once told his biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin that he had “detested every minute” of his vice presidency, but the summer and fall of 1963 had been the absolute nadir of that famously thankless job—and perhaps the worst time of his whole life. He was mocked by sneering Kennedy aides as “Rufus Cornpone,” repeatedly needled and cruelly humiliated by the attorney general, and shut out of important policy deliberations by the president himself. (John Kennedy’s private name for his No. 2 was “Riverboat.”) In 1961, according to the diaries of the president’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, Johnson had spent just ten hours and nineteen minutes alone with the president. By 1963, that figure was down to one hour and fifty-three minutes. The popular CBS television show Candid Camera had asked a random sample of the public, “Who is Lyndon Johnson?” and the answers ranged from, “No, I don’t know him … I’m from New Jersey,” to “He’s not president. Am I getting close?” Time magazine had declared that “power has slipped from his grasp,” while The Reporter had published a headline that summed up his has-been’s fate: “Whatever Happened to Lyndon Johnson?”
He looked, his once and future aide Harry McPherson would recall, “absolutely gross. His belly was enormous and his face looked bad, flushed, maybe he had been drinking a good deal … His life was not causing him to come together physically, morally, intellectually, any way. On the contrary, it must have been a tremendous frustration.”
“I really don’t have anything going for me,” Johnson had told John Kennedy’s legislative liaison, Larry O’Brien. “They don’t listen to me as they used to.”
Now, in a flash, in an instant—in the crack of fire from a mail-order rifle—all that had changed, and Lyndon Johnson was in charge, while the New Frontiersmen with him aboard the big blue and white Boeing 707 despaired. “I thought they were just wineheads,” he would recall years later. “They were just drinkers, just one drink after another coming to them to try to drown out their sorrow, and we weren’t drinking, of course.”
Instead, the new president fortified himself with h
ot vegetable soup and crackers, and when Air Force One touched down at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington just after 6:00 p.m., Johnson made a statement whose eloquent brevity might have pleased Jack Kennedy: “I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.”
Barely two hours later, in the vice president’s suite in Room 274 of the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, Johnson asked for help from the congressional leaders who had been his colleagues for so long. (He had briefly kept them waiting while he finished writing condolence notes to Caroline Kennedy and John Kennedy Jr.) The new president had already had his press aide George Reedy draft a joint statement reassuring the world that American policy would not be changed because of “a very abrupt and sudden transition.” The journalist Hugh Sidey would later recall that in this meeting, “perhaps more than in anything else, lay the real clue to his flawless assumption of power.” It had no real purpose, except as a ritual display in a world where such meetings were a way of life, in which some men summoned and others came. For years as Senate majority leader, Johnson had convened hundreds of such meetings. As vice president, he had not. Now he was again the one doing the summoning and, Sidey believed, “those men understood.”
As the meeting broke up, one senator held back a moment for a private word—Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s old comrade in arms. “He put his arm around me and said that he needed me desperately,” Humphrey would recall. That was true enough, but it was also a phrase that Johnson, a proud man alert to the pride of other men, would use countless times in the hours and days after the assassination. Less than an hour later, the president gave a subtler indication of his thinking—and of the political implications for the task ahead, including passage of the stalled civil rights bill. In a telephone call to Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, he praised the Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen, summing up his meeting with the leadership by saying, “Needless to say, the Republicans were really better than the Democrats.”
An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Page 17
