The casus belli was a Democratic operative named Paul Corbin, who had been a loyal Kennedy infighter since the 1960 campaign and now held a minor job at the Democratic National Committee. Sometime in early February, Corbin had shown up in New Hampshire, which would hold its presidential primary on March 10, to help organize a write-in campaign for Robert Kennedy, aimed at boosting his prospects as Johnson’s vice presidential running mate. Corbin, always a bit of a loose cannon, was operating independently, but he was known for his unswerving loyalty to Bob Kennedy, who returned the favor, defending him to his many critics even in the Kennedy circle. Johnson himself was only a write-in candidate in New Hampshire—having expected no opposition, he had not bothered to file for the ballot—but he suspected the worst, and he now ordered the attorney general to have Corbin fired.
Kennedy balked, saying he hadn’t even known Corbin was in New Hampshire and insisting that Corbin had always been loyal to John Kennedy, “who thought he was good.”
Johnson replied in no uncertain terms that he, not Jack Kennedy, was now the president.
“Do it,” he ordered.
“I know you’re president,” Kennedy replied—Johnson would later say that “tears got in his eyes”—“and don’t you ever talk to me like that again.”
That evening, after consulting with top officials of the Democratic National Committee, Johnson telephoned Kennedy at the Justice Department to tell him that Corbin was being fired. Kennedy insisted Corbin was “harmless,” but the president maintained he had become “quite a problem,” because he did not want anyone at Democratic headquarters taking sides on prospective running mates. He added that he had sent Kennedy to Indonesia because he wanted to “keep things equal” among potential nominees.
“Don’t ever do a favor for me again!” Kennedy exploded. The attorney general spent the next four or five minutes staring out the window into the snowy night before gathering some papers into his briefcase and murmuring to a watching Ed Guthman: “I’ll tell you one thing: this relationship can’t last much longer.”
That same night, a couple of dozen blocks from the Justice Department, four young men from Liverpool played their first American concert for more than eight thousand ecstatic fans at the sold-out Washington Coliseum, less than forty-eight hours after their stateside debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. Their opening number: “Roll Over, Beethoven.”
“What do you think of President Johnson?” a reporter asked the Beatles at a press conference from the stage just before the show. John Lennon and Ringo Starr replied in unison, “Never met him.”
PART THREE
THE SENATE
8
You Listen to Dirksen!
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1964
AFTER LYNDON JOHNSON’S WEEKLY White House breakfast meeting with the Democratic congressional leadership, his old friend Hubert Humphrey, the voluble Senate majority whip, stayed behind for a private word. The day before, when H.R. 7152 arrived in the Senate, the majority leader, Mike Mansfield, had named Humphrey as the bill’s floor manager for the coming fight, and now Johnson, that past master of legislative tactics and peerless student of the Senate’s realities, had a few words of strategic advice.
In most ways, Humphrey was an ideal choice to shepherd the civil rights bill through the southern Democrats’ guaranteed filibuster. He was buoyant, resilient, relentless—respected by colleagues on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the civil rights question—and perhaps no issue had meant more to him throughout his political career. As the idealistic young mayor of Minneapolis and Democratic candidate for the Senate from Minnesota in 1948, he had electrified the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia by proposing a bold civil rights plank from the convention floor, after the party’s platform committee had declined to adopt it.
“My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights,” Humphrey told the astonished delegates, ad-libbing what would become the most famous passage in one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated political speeches, “I say to them we are 172 years late! To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!”
With the help of key big city bosses eager to appeal to black voters, Humphrey’s motion carried the day, and he won his Senate race as well. When Humphrey arrived in Washington in January 1949, his brashness at first rubbed the Senate’s old bulls the wrong way; it was a fellow freshman, Lyndon Johnson, already a Capitol Hill veteran from his years in the House, who helped their colleagues understand that the big-hearted liberal from Minnesota was worthy of acceptance by the club. Now, fifteen years later, Humphrey was a loyal lieutenant by the new president’s side, and Johnson took the opportunity to point out what he saw as the Minnesotan’s greatest vulnerability.
“You bomb throwers make good speeches,” the president said. “You have big hearts, you believe in what you say you stand for, but you’re never on the job when you need to be there. You spread yourself too thin making speeches to the faithful.” By contrast, Johnson warned, Richard Russell knew all the rules of the Senate and how to use them, while the liberals and civil rights supports could never seem to get organized.
“He was relentless, goading me, challenging me, belittling liberals in general as inept in dealing with parliamentary situations,” recalled Humphrey, who understood that his handling of the bill would amount to one long audition for the vice presidential nomination on Johnson’s ticket that fall. “He shook his head in apparent despair, predicting that we would fall apart in dissension, be absent when quorum calls were made and when critical votes were being taken.”
“I would have been outraged if he hadn’t been basically right and historically accurate,” Humphrey would remember. “As it was, I suffered his attack mostly in silence, with an occasional protest that things had changed. Having made his point, he shifted the conversation and more quietly and equally firmly he promised he would back me to the hilt. As I left, he stood and moved toward me with his towering intensity: ‘Call me whenever there’s trouble or anything you want me to do.’”
Nicholas Katzenbach, recalling this same period, retained a vivid impression of Johnson’s management style, especially as it compared to Robert Kennedy’s. “President Johnson, in contrast with Bobby, almost always told you not only what he wanted accomplished but, in excruciating detail, how he thought you should do it.” Even before his session with Humphrey, Johnson had given Katzenbach his own talking-to, cornering him at a White House reception on February 11—the same day as the president’s blowup with Bob Kennedy over Paul Corbin—demanding to know how Katzenbach and the Justice Department intended to get the bill through the Senate.
“I think we have to try for cloture,” Katzenbach replied.
That was a tall order. Under the rules then in place, achieving cloture required two-thirds of the Senate, or sixty-seven votes, to cut off debate—in a body that prided itself on its willingness to allow unlimited debate on any issue—and one in which a single senator’s objection could cause business to grind to a halt. Indeed, Senate Rule XXII, the rule that provided for cloture, had not even been adopted until 1917, and in the twenty-eight cloture votes taken since then, only five had succeeded. In the eleven times cloture had been proposed for a civil rights measure, it had been defeated every time. The representatives of small and western states whose support would most be needed to overcome the southern Democrats’ opposition to civil rights had always been especially reluctant to vote for cloture, since unlimited debate was the principal means by which they could ensure that the Senate paid obeisance to their states’ interests. The Senate’s senior member, Carl Hayden of Arizona, in the Senate since 1927 and first elected to the House of Representatives in 1911, a year before Woodrow Wilson won the White House, had never voted for cloture.
So J
ohnson was deeply skeptical that cloture could succeed this time. He made it clear to Katzenbach (and everyone else) that he favored wearing down the aging southern caucus with round-the-clock sessions, as he had done with the 1960 civil rights bill. The problem with this approach was twofold. First, Mike Mansfield refused to accept it, fearing that marathon sessions might literally kill some of the Senate’s older members. And second, Bill McCulloch was steadfastly insisting—as he had since his first meeting with Burke Marshall in July 1963—on no compromise, no weakening of H.R. 7152 in the Senate. That meant that cloture was the most logical strategy for forcing a vote on the bill that had passed the House, however difficult it might be to achieve.
“Talking voting details with the man who knew the Senate better than anyone was a little daunting,” Katzenbach would recall. But the deputy attorney general had solid grounds for his argument. For one thing, only the year before, the Senate had voted for cloture on the 1963 Satellite Communications bill, suggesting that members’ long-standing reluctance to invoke it was softening. Katzenbach also believed that members would be embarrassed to confess that they had voted to cut off debate on a technical measure like a communications bill while refusing to allow an up-or-down vote on a major constitutional question like civil rights. Katzenbach estimated the administration could get fifty-seven to sixty votes with reasonable ease—by combining about fifty pro-civil-rights Democrats with a handful of liberal Republicans. But the president would need a total of at least half the Senate’s thirty-three Republicans to prevail.
And whatever his private doubts about such a strategy, Lyndon Johnson knew there was only one man who could deliver those Republican votes: his old comrade, the Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who from the start had expressed strong opposition to the public accommodations section at the heart of the bill.
“The bill can’t pass unless you get Ev Dirksen,” Johnson now told Humphrey. “You and I are going to get Ev. It’s going to take time. We’re going to get him. You make up your mind now that you’ve got to spend time with Ev Dirksen. You’ve got to let him have a piece of the action. He’s got to look good all the time. Don’t let those bomb throwers, now, talk you out of seeing Dirksen. You get in there to see Dirksen. You drink with Dirksen! You talk with Dirksen! You listen to Dirksen!”
* * *
EVERETT MCKINLEY DIRKSEN WAS the single most flamboyant senator of his day, with a rumbling baritone foghorn of a voice that Bob Hope called a combination of Tallulah Bankhead’s and Wallace Beery’s, and that the New York Times’s drama critic Brooks Atkinson once likened to “the froth on a warm pail of milk just extracted from a fat Jersey cow.” He kept his vocal cords lubricated with a daily gargle of Pond’s cold cream and water (which he swallowed) and subsisted on a diet of Sanka, cigarettes, Maalox, and bourbon whiskey. He let his graying, curly hair arrange itself in a deliberate tousle—the better to stand out from the crowd, he once confessed—and he was fond of briefing reporters in the Senate press gallery while sitting atop a table in the lotus position. For years, he had waged an unapologetic campaign to make the marigold the national flower. When he took to the floor for one of his signature stem-winders, an excited cry would spread through the corridors: “Ev’s up!” Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee once strained the Senate’s rule of civility by accusing Dirksen—not without reason—of “pompous verbosity,” then apologized with mock praise, singling out his voluble colleague as “the inimitable and euphonious sockdolager from Illinois, one of the most ariose, mellifluous, dulcifulent orators” in the chamber.
But if Dirksen was the consummate Senate show horse, he was also a master of rules and procedures and a meticulous legislative draftsman, an expert on the fine print of pending bills, with a crackerjack legal staff. The light in the backseat of his official limousine burned bright each night as he pored over memos and reports on the hour-long drive home from Capitol Hill to Heart’s Desire, his farm overlooking a branch of the Potomac River in Sterling, Virginia.
He was born in “Beantown,” an immigrant enclave on the edge of Pekin, Illinois—so called because its hardscrabble residents grew vegetables to eat, not flowers to admire—at the beginning of 1896, ten months before the election to the White House of William McKinley, the popular Republican politician for whom he was named. His parents, Johann Frederick and Antje Conrady Dirksen, were staunch Republicans of stolid German immigrant stock. Everett was an early and passionate reader, waking on cold winter mornings to rub one barefoot leg against another to warm up while still in his nightshirt as he held a book in one hand. When he was five years old, his father suffered a crippling stroke, and he died four years later, leaving Everett and his brothers to milk cows, slop hogs, and tend 150 chickens and fifteen hives of bees to help stock their mother’s butter-and-egg stand.
By the time he reached high school, he was vice president of his class, the 150-pound center on the football team (proudly known then, and until 1981, as the Pekin “Chinks”), the business manager of the yearbook, and a good student of German and history. His vocabulary was so large that a classmate once surmised “he must have swallowed a dictionary,” and his senior yearbook declared that he suffered from hopeless “big-worditis.” In 1913, he won an oratorical contest sponsored by a Prohibition society that sent him to compete in the finals in Lexington, Kentucky, where he met the reigning orator of his age, the three-time losing Democratic presidential candidate and current secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan. When Dirksen asked the great man’s advice about public speaking, the reply was simple: “Always speak to the folks in the back rows, my boy, and the rest will be sure to hear you.”
Dirksen went off to the University of Minnesota to study prelaw, but his college days were interrupted by Army service in France in World War I, where he was a balloon surveillance officer floating 3,500 feet above the lines, observing and redirecting artillery fire. He never went back to school, but the war had provided its own kind of education, including a lesson in prejudice that would stick with him into the thick of the civil rights debate. Dirksen’s mother had received a commemorative picture of Kaiser Wilhelm II as a premium for subscribing to a local German newspaper, and she kept it on her wall, along with an American flag in the window, commemorating Everett’s service abroad. That “did not deter a self-appointed group of local loyalty monitors from coming to our home without legal process of any kind and by sheer intimidation demanding that the photograph be handed over for destruction,” Dirksen would recall years later. “Such are the little violations of liberty.”
On his return to Illinois, Dirksen held an assortment of jobs before going into partnership with his brothers in a wholesale bakery business, whose motto was, “If it’s made of dough, we make it.” He rolled piecrust and kneaded bread, but mostly he made sales calls, which enabled him to get to know a wide range of small businessmen throughout the region.
At the same time, he was active in amateur theatricals with the Pekin Players and took the lead in a Chinese-themed romance, A Thousand Years Ago, in which a fetching local girl named Louella Carver played the Princess of Pekin. She became his wife in real life. During their courtship, in 1924, he wrote her from a business trip outside Memphis, Tennessee, with a midwestern burgher’s withering view of the South.
“In a sense, girlie, this is terrible country,” he complained. “One would think that the Creator had either run out of fair material for this part of the South or had purposely created it as it is for punishment. Nothing but yellow and red soil from which the energy and fertility has been sapped years ago, and at the same time the energy and ambition of those who till the land must have flowed away and left a residue of indolent white trash and niggers who live in unpainted slatterns and seeming care not what happens from this day to the next.”
By this same period, Pekin itself, which had been abolitionist territory before the Civil War, had fallen under the sway of the Ku Klux Klan, which in 1923 took over the Pekin Daily Times as its local
mouthpiece. In 1920, just thirty-one black residents lived in Pekin; by 1940, not a single one was left, and it became a notorious “sundown town,” in which blacks knew they should not be caught after dark. But Dirksen himself felt an almost mystic kinship with his fellow Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln, and he would never pander to racist sentiment, from his earliest days in public life supporting efforts to outlaw the poll tax and ban lynchings.
Dirksen’s pathway to political office was his involvement in the American Legion, which brought him a wide circle of acquaintances throughout central Illinois. In 1927, he was elected to the part-time job of city commissioner in Pekin, and just three years later he challenged the incumbent Republican congressman in a primary, losing by 1,100 votes. Two years later, in the depths of the Depression, Dirksen won the nomination, and the seat—in a district that included the nearby city of Peoria, then the state’s second largest, and a major railroad and distilling center—with a campaign that carefully avoided explicit embrace of either Herbert Hoover or Franklin Roosevelt while urging economic reforms. He saw the Capitol dome in Washington for the first time when he arrived to take up his duties as a freshman member of Congress.
In his early years on Capitol Hill, he supported some aspects of the New Deal but was otherwise a conventional conservative isolationist—until September 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor, when the looming American involvement in World War II caused him to take a more internationalist stance. In 1944, he ran his own brief campaign for the White House, which many in the party saw mainly as an effort to deny the nomination to the Republicans’ liberal 1940 standard-bearer, Wendell Willkie. After World War II, he voted for the Truman Doctrine, the United Nations, and the Marshall Plan, but he also remained a staunch backer of the party’s conservative wing, led by Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio.
An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Page 24
