An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

by Todd S. Purdum

  “Senator, do I have to take Beagle?” an obviously reluctant Williams asked.

  When Johnson probed, as doubtless only he could, for the source of Williams’s hesitation, his driver confessed:

  Well, Senator, it’s tough enough to get all the way from Washington to Texas. We drive for hours and hours. We get hungry. But there’s no place on the road we can stop and go in and eat. We drive some more. It gets pretty hot. We want to wash up. But the only bathroom we’re allowed in is usually miles off the main highway. We keep going till night comes, till we get so tired we can’t stay awake anymore. We’re ready to pull in. But it takes us another hour or so to find a place to sleep. You see, what I’m saying is that a colored man’s got enough trouble getting across the South on his own, without having a dog along.

  At the time, Johnson would recall, “there was nothing I could say to Gene.” But Johnson himself had done menial jobs that the idiom of the day had derided as “nigger work.” He himself, poor and struggling, had “always ordered the egg sandwich, and I always wanted the ham and egg.”

  * * *

  THE PARADOX OF JOHNSON’S role as John Kennedy’s running mate in 1960 is that he was chosen to help Kennedy win Texas and the South, but his own growing support for civil rights, and his alliance with Kennedy, made that job all the harder—even in his own home state. Four days before the election, Johnson and Lady Bird were accosted in Dallas by an angry crowd of demonstrators, including many women, as they attempted to enter a Democratic rally at the Adolphus Hotel. The crowd waved placards declaring, LBJ SOLD OUT TO YANKEE SOCIALISTS, and pulled off Lady Bird’s gloves, as spit flew her way. Johnson waved away the Texas National Guard officers who tried to intercede and endured the crowd’s abuse, later telling the rally, “I wanted to find out if the time had come when I couldn’t walk my lady through the corridors of the hotels of Dallas.”

  If civil rights leaders viewed Johnson with suspicion and distrust because of his Texas roots and his past legislative compromises, they, too, were beginning to change their views. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP would recall an audience with Johnson after the vice president had returned from a goodwill trip to Senegal in 1961. Wilkins had come to deliver an NAACP complaint about discrimination at a Lockheed Aircraft Corporation Plant in Marietta, Georgia—where the workers’ time cards were in separate colors for blacks and whites—that had just won a $1 billion federal contract. “We’re working on that,” said Johnson, who had been assigned by Kennedy to be the administration’s point man on employment discrimination. By the end of the year, the plant had hired two hundred black workers and had made fifty-nine promotions, including, for the first time, some to professional jobs. What impressed Wilkins just as much, though, was Johnson’s account of his experiences in Senegal. “When I looked into the eyes of the mothers there, they had the same look as the people in Texas,” the vice president said. Wilkins concluded that Johnson was “sentimental, old-fashioned, manipulating, but at bottom somehow sincere. He didn’t have to talk that way. You could tell by his tone that behind all the soft soap, there was genuine feeling.”

  In February 1963, when Johnson learned that a political banquet he had been invited to address in St. Augustine, Florida, the following month would be segregated, he at first refused to attend. Ultimately, he arranged for two tables of blacks to be seated in a prominent place in the dining room and accepted the invitation. On the plane back to Washington, he was “happier than he had been for months,” George Reedy would recall. As that spring wore on, and the crisis in Birmingham exploded, Johnson became more and more outspoken on civil rights. When he learned that Marian Anderson would be performing at the University of Texas in Austin, he invited her to spend the weekend at his ranch. He addressed the annual banquet of the black press club in Washington, warning that action on civil rights was urgently needed and saying, “The hours are short and we have no moral justification in asking for an extension.” And in a Memorial Day address at Gettysburg, he was the most eloquent and emphatic of all, going well beyond anything the president himself had yet said on the topic by declaring: “One hundred years ago, the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin. The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we reply to the Negro by asking, ‘Patience.’ It is empty to plead that the solution to the dilemmas of the present rests on the hands of the clock. The solution is in our hands.”

  “Until justice is blind to color,” he added, “until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.”

  In the group meetings with civic leaders that the White House arranged that early summer to build support for the civil rights bill, Arthur Schlesinger and other witnesses would recall that the vice president was invariably more articulate, and more passionate, on the subject than the president himself—and more knowledgeable, too.

  Yet even as Johnson spoke out on the issue in public (and, indeed, because he did speak out), he continued to suffer in his dealings with the Kennedy White House—and with the Kennedy brothers. Because he believed his candid counsel was not wanted, Johnson did not often give it, especially in group staff meetings where he feared that any critical comment to sound a note of caution on legislative strategy would be seen as disloyal or leaked to the press to paint him in an unfavorable light. His old comrade Bobby Baker would recall that Johnson had always “felt that if he said something, they’d leak it to the New York Times or somebody, and try to make him look like he didn’t know what he was talking about, to be disdainful.” When he finally unburdened himself, in his impassioned telephone conversation with Ted Sorensen on June 3, 1963—a week before the president announced the bill—Johnson had plenty to say.

  “I think he’s got to have his bill,” Johnson told Sorensen, but added, “I think he ought to make them pass some of this stuff”—like the tax bill—“before he throws this thing out.” Johnson warned that every other item on the president’s agenda would be held hostage to civil rights once the bill was on the floor of the House or Senate. “They’re going to cut his outfit off and put it in their pocket and never mention civil rights,” he said. “So I’d move my children through the line and get them down in the storm cellar and get it locked and key, and then I’d make my attack.”

  When Johnson uttered those words in June, he had no power to carry them out. “Don’t try to kill the snake until you have the hoe in your hands,” he liked to say. Now, in November, he had the hoe in his hands, he was in charge, and his was precisely the strategy that he intended to follow.

  * * *

  AS HE TOOK POWER and plotted his course, little escaped Lyndon Johnson’s notice, and civil rights was always on his mind. He had asked his personal pilot, Air Force Major James Cross, who had been flying the vice president’s small Lockheed Jetstar, to become qualified as quickly as possible to command the larger Boeing 707 that usually served as Air Force One, and on Thursday, November 28, Thanksgiving Day, Cross dictated a memo for the president saying, “It is my thought that you might wish me to make a careful selection of other crew members from a wide cross-section of American culture.”

  The next day, the president met with Roy Wilkins about how to force action on the civil rights bill in the Rules Committee. “Johnson talked quickly, earnestly,” Wilkins would recall. “It was the first time I had really felt those mesmerizing eyes of Texas on me … He put all his being into the task. Leaning forward, almost touching me, he poked his finger at me and said quietly, ‘I want that bill passed.’” Johnson added, “I’m going to help wherever the Constitution will let me,” but noted, “I can’t do the lobbying myself. I don’t think you would expect me to do that.”

  But the only way to pass the civil rights bill was to get it out of the House Rules Committee, where Chairman Howard Smith, universally known as “Judge” for his prior judicial service in V
irginia, so far showed no sign of even being willing to hold the first hearing on the bill that had passed the Judiciary Committee on October 29.

  The Rules Committee is the turnstile at the entry to the House of Representatives, the body that sets the terms and conditions—and exacts the price—for debating most every bill that reaches the House floor. Unlike the Senate, with its tradition of unlimited debate, the House is so large that legislative action would grind to a halt without limits on speaking time and procedures that its 435 voting members must follow. It is the Rules Committee that spells out those limits and procedures—those rules—and these can have major effects on a bill’s ultimate fate.

  Howard Smith well knew that the surest way to doom a bill he disliked—and he disliked many—was to refuse to grant it a rule at all. And there were only three conceivable ways to force his hand, none of them easy.

  The first way was so far-fetched as to be impossible: a procedural move known as “Calendar Wednesday,” under which, on any Wednesday, the Speaker of the House is allowed to call the roll of committees in alphabetical order and any chairman can order a bill already reported out of his committee directly to the floor. In theory, this meant that Manny Celler could demand consideration of the Judiciary Committee’s compromise bill. But the catch was that the bill would have to be disposed of by day’s end, and eleven other committees would be called on before the roll reached the letter J—half of them with southern chairmen who would be more than willing to run out the clock.

  The second option, under House Rule 11, would allow any three members of the Rules Committee to request that the chairman hold a meeting. If, after three days, he had not scheduled one, a simple majority of the committee could compel a meeting at a specified date and time, to consider a specified topic. But because of the southern conservatives’ dominance of the Rules Committee, any such move would require Republican support, and Charlie Halleck and his House leadership, respectful of the seniority system, had always resisted questioning a chairman’s prerogatives or interfering in committee affairs.

  The third option would be a “discharge petition,” which, if signed by a majority of the whole House, or 218 members, could send the bill out of the Rules Committee directly to the floor. It was this last option that Lyndon Johnson now began to pursue—secretly, but emphatically.

  * * *

  THE SAME DAY THE president met with Wilkins, he telephoned Dave McDonald, the president of the United Steelworkers of America, and confided, “We’re going to have to get a discharge petition.”

  “I can’t say that myself,” Johnson added, “but it’s already filed … And I think if there’s ever a time when you really talk to every human being you could…” The president said the Democrats might provide 150 signatures to start but would still need at least sixty to seventy Republicans to join them. “They’ll be saying they don’t want to violate procedure,” Johnson predicted, adding that the Democrats’ answer would have to be that “a man’s entitled to a hearing.” If such a move succeeded, the president said, “that would almost insure passage in the Senate, because they could see it—we had the power to discharge them and therefore we’d have the power to apply cloture.” But, he warned, “don’t be quoting the fact that I’m calling you, because—that’ll just create problems.” And, the president added, “If we fail on this, then we’ll fail on everything.”

  Three days later, on Monday, December 2, Johnson telephoned Representative Richard Bolling of Missouri, one of the most stalwart liberals in the House, who agreed that a discharge petition was “the only lever we’ve really got in our arsenal.” But when the president held his first weekly meeting with the Democratic congressional leadership at the White House the next morning, he was not impressed with the reliability of their head count, so after breakfast he telephoned Majority Leader Carl Albert and asked for a more complete poll. By day’s end, the Hill was abuzz with reports of the president’s interest, and Anthony Lewis of the New York Times was able to report that there was “some evidence of a dramatic impact on the situation.”

  Johnson did not confine his efforts to counting noses. He actively lobbied the Republican leadership of both houses, inviting Ev Dirksen to breakfast at the White House on Wednesday, December 4. “Now he is the president—my president—and words can never be put in his mouth,” Dirksen told the Chicago Tribune. “So now I can tell you only that he contacted me, not what he said.” It was Charlie Halleck’s turn to break bread the next day, and since Johnson was still living at the Elms, just a few blocks from Halleck’s own house in Spring Valley, he stopped to pick up the minority leader for the morning ride downtown together in the presidential limousine, with motorcycle escort, flashing lights, and sirens—“quite a little trip,” Halleck would recall. The ride was followed by a hearty meal, with “thick bacon—the kind he knew a fellow from Indiana would like,” Halleck told reporters.

  The president also met with the leadership of both the AFL-CIO and the Business Advisory Council on December 4, telling the latter that he knew there were many Republicans among them, and that if the civil rights bill did not get out of the Rules Committee, “it’s going to be right in the Republicans’ lap.” And he warned them: “I am the only president you have; if you would have me fail, then you fail, for the country fails.”

  Halleck and Bill McCulloch had made it plain that they opposed the discharge petition, again out of fealty to seniority and a reluctance to second-guess a chairman’s wishes, even one of the opposite party. A discharge petition was, indeed, a drastic step. Since 1932, when the prevailing discharge rule was adopted, 333 motions to discharge bills from committee had been filed. Of those, only thirty-two had received enough votes to be placed on the House calendar, fourteen had passed the House, and just two became law. “This move for a petition is irritating some people who materially helped rescue the civil rights legislation from the sticky morass in which partisan political considerations had apparently placed it,” McCulloch complained.

  But one of McCulloch’s fellow Ohio Republicans was providing Johnson—and H.R. 7152—with some quiet help of his own.

  Representative Clarence Brown, a gruff former newspaper publisher and a stalwart conservative, was the ranking Republican on the Rules Committee. He was also a close friend of McCulloch, whose district adjoined his own. Like McCulloch, Brown had long supported civil rights, and he had two historic black colleges—Wilberforce and Central State—in his district. On the evening of December 4, Brown stopped by Judge Smith’s office to serve notice that he had enough Republican votes on the committee to trigger the option Smith had always feared most: to force him to hold a hearing. “I don’t want to run over you, Judge, but…,” Brown said. That is all he said, but Smith knew what he meant. The next day, the chairman announced that the Rules Committee would begin hearings “reasonably soon.”

  That same day, December 5, Johnson turned his attention to the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Harry Byrd of Virginia, who was being just as stubborn about the tax bill pending in his committee as Smith was about the civil rights bill in his. Byrd, elfin and rosy-cheeked, was invariably courtly and so perpetually soft-spoken that listeners often had to strain to hear him. But he was also an implacable racist who, once spying Joseph Rauh and Clarence Mitchell in the Senate gallery, had shaken his fist at them and exclaimed of the longtime civil rights lobbyists, “There they are—the Gold Dust twins!” That was a reference to the crude, caricatured tutu-wearing black twins who had once adorned the label of a popular scouring powder. Byrd was wealthy—he owned the nation’s largest private apple orchards—and a fierce fiscal conservative. He was adamantly opposed to John Kennedy’s proposed tax cut, and appalled at the prospect of a federal budget that was set to exceed $100 billion for the coming year.

  But Harry Byrd was something else as well: he was one of those powerful older men whom Lyndon Johnson had worked so hard to cultivate in his Senate days, and whom he would now court as never before. Whereas Jack Kenned
y had complained that negotiating with the immovable Byrd was “a pillow fight in the dark,” Johnson was able to get Byrd to do what no one else had been able to do: let the tax bill move along through his committee, despite his personal opposition. Byrd’s price: a solemn promise from the president to bring in the federal budget at under $100 billion.

  In all these fevered early days of consultation and conversation, of strategizing and nose counting about the civil rights bill, there was one person intimately involved in the effort to pass it to whom Lyndon Johnson did not talk—indeed, to whom he would not talk even once, for the whole month of December, and well beyond: the attorney general, his attorney general, Robert Francis Kennedy.

  * * *

  AS REGARDED CIVIL RIGHTS, there was a bitter twist in Johnson’s rift with Bob Kennedy. Both men had come slowly to the cause and both were now passionately committed to it. But by late November 1963, there was so much accumulated mutual distrust, enmity, and—in Johnson’s case—fear between them that neither could fully appreciate the other’s concern. Their division became one of the defining political realities of the decade, and the comedian David Frye, a demon mimic of both, would imitate Kennedy by saying, “Despite what you’ve heard, Lyndon Johnson and myself are becoming like brothers: Cain and Abel.”

  They were as unlike as two people could be, and their mutual ill will went back to at least 1955, when Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy had offered to finance a 1956 presidential campaign for Johnson, if he would take Jack Kennedy as his running mate. Johnson politely declined, assuming that the elder Kennedy’s real calculus was that any Democrat would lose to Dwight Eisenhower and thus a Johnson defeat would pave the way for his son’s own candidacy in 1960. But Bob Kennedy never forgave what he regarded as a slight, and matters were not improved four years later, when Bob was sent to the LBJ ranch to sound out Johnson on his intentions for 1960. Embarking on a deer hunt, Johnson handed Bobby a powerful shotgun, whose kick knocked Kennedy to the ground. “Son, you’ve got to learn to handle a gun like a man,” Johnson drawled.