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

by Todd S. Purdum

  Mike Mansfield then took to the floor to sum up the struggle, full of praise for Everett Dirksen but also for “the insistence of the opposition on prolonged debate.”

  “It was learned and thorough, and it played an essential role in refining the provisions of the bill,” the majority leader said. “But, in my judgment, its most important function was to discourage self-righteousness on the part of the majority. There is no room for unwarranted sentiments of victory if the legislation we have molded is to be given constructive meaning for the nation in the years ahead. If we are about to enter upon a second Reconstruction—as the Senator from Georgia called it—then it must be a reconstruction of the heart, a reconstruction involving, not one section, but all sections of the nation. The dimensions of the problem with which we have been struggling these past months stretch the length and breadth of the nation. An accurate appraisal of them leads, not to a sense of triumph over the passage of this bill, but to a profound humility. No one, let me say, understood this reality better than the late President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. This, indeed, is his moment as well as the Senate’s.”

  The last word was left for Everett Dirksen. He did not disappoint.

  “On occasion, a number of the boys up in the gallery have asked me, ‘How have you become a crusader in this cause?’” he began. “It is a fair question, and it deserves a fair answer.” The answer, he said, lay in the words of the poet John Donne. “He left what I believe is a precious legacy on the parchments of history. He said, ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.’ I am involved in mankind, and whatever the skin, we are all involved in mankind. Equality of opportunity must prevail if we are to complete the covenant that we have made with the people, and if we are to honor the pledges we made when we held up our hands to take an oath to defend the laws and to carry out the Constitution of the United States.” From time to time, Dirksen stared directly at Barry Goldwater, as if to scold him, but he never mentioned the Arizonan by name. Finally, Dirksen declared, “I am prepared for the vote.”

  Once again, Clair Engle appeared in his wheelchair as the clerk called the roll. Once again, he lifted his hand toward his eye. At 7:40 p.m., the clerk announced that H.R. 7152 had passed, 73 to 27. All but six of the Senate’s thirty-three Republicans had voted for it, compared with just forty-six of its sixty-seven Democrats. (Two Republicans who had voted for cloture—Cotton and Hickenlooper—voted against the bill, while two who had voted against cloture—Milton Young of North Dakota and Wallace Bennett of Utah—voted for the bill.)

  In San Francisco for a Democratic fundraising dinner where he had received a hero’s welcome, Lyndon Johnson hailed the bill’s passage by the Senate—and anticipated its final victory in the House of Representatives in the coming days. “No single act of Congress can, by itself, eliminate discrimination and prejudice, hatred and injustice,” the president said. “But this bill goes further to invest the rights of man with the protection of law than any legislation in this century.” For her part, Lady Bird Johnson wondered in her diary whether “anybody but me” would remember that June 19 had long been a special day in her home state. “Juneteenth was always celebrated by all the Negroes in Texas,” she wrote. “Nobody’s maid worked on Juneteenth because it was the day the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in Texas a hundred or so years ago.”

  Hours later, when Hubert Humphrey and the faithful John Stewart finally left the Senate, hundreds of spectators, who had gathered to await the final vote, were still clustered around the East Front steps of the Senate wing, and they raised a rousing cheer. “Never in my fifteen years in the Senate, nor in the memory of Senators with a far longer period of service than mine,” Humphrey would remember, “had there ever been anything like it.”

  12

  The Law of the Land

  THURSDAY, JULY 2, 1964

  FROM THE MOMENT THE Senate approved the bill, there had been press reports that Johnson wanted to have it on his desk in time to sign it on the Fourth of July. Now, just before 10:30 a.m., with the House of Representatives about to give final passage to the amended Senate version of H.R. 7152, the president received an outraged telephone call from his friend and former congressional colleague Clare Boothe Luce, the Connecticut Republican who was also a playwright and the wife of the founder of the Time-Life publishing empire.

  “I heard … that you were going to sign the civil rights bill on the Fourth of July and it seemed to be such an appalling idea,” Luce began.

  “No, I never had any thought of doing that,” Johnson replied.

  “It was in all the papers,” she countered.

  “I know it, honey,” the president rejoined, by now chuckling, “but I don’t want to be critical of the press … No human being has ever discussed it with me, and I’ve never given any indication that I would do anything except to sign it the first moment it was available, which would be Thursday” (as it happened, that very day).

  Leaving aside the notion that anyone might find it “appalling” to sign a law guaranteeing equal rights for all Americans on the holiday commemorating the idea that “all men are created equal,” Luce’s phone call was only one among the many considerations and complications that had besieged Johnson since the Senate passed the bill.

  Just hours after the final vote on June 19, Ted Kennedy had nearly been killed in a small-plane crash in western Massachusetts as he and Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana were on their way to address the state Democratic convention. They had been delayed in Washington waiting for the vote and then ran into bad weather as their pilot tried to bring the plane in for a night landing. The pilot and a friend of Kennedy’s were killed on impact, while the senator himself, dragged from the plane by a dazed Bayh, had three fractured vertebrae, two broken ribs, a bruised kidney, and multiple lacerations. He faced immobilization in a kind of a mesh waffle iron of a bed, plus six months or more of intensive rehabilitation. (In fact, he would never again walk normally.) Johnson had sent four doctors from Walter Reed Army Hospital to the Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts, to aid in the treatment, and had been especially solicitous of the Kennedy family.

  Barely an hour after the call from Clare Boothe Luce, Johnson was on the phone with Robert Kennedy, who was just back from a trip to Warsaw and West Berlin, where he had gone to dedicate John F. Kennedy Platz in memory of the late president’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech of the year before. Kennedy, too, had some pressing concerns about how and when the civil rights bill might be signed.

  “If it’s signed today,” the attorney general warned, “we’re going to have a rather difficult weekend, a holiday weekend … That Friday and Saturday, with the Fourth of July and firecrackers going off … with Negroes running all over the South figuring that they get the day off, that they’re going to go into every hotel and motel and every restaurant … If it’s possible … to postpone it till Monday and sign it … I don’t know whether it’s gone so far that you feel it’s necessary to sign it today.”

  In fact, Johnson was certain that it would be better to sign the bill as soon as possible. For one thing, he had promised to sign it as soon as it reached his desk in part to scotch the notion of signing it on July 4—a notion that he blamed Kennedy’s Justice Department for helping to float in the first place. Moreover, he had promised Charlie Halleck, who was eager to get his members out of town as soon as possible to prepare for the Republican National Convention in San Francisco on July 13, that he would sign the bill before the long July 4th weekend if at all possible—and he did not want to deprive the Republicans who had been vital to its passage of the chance to be present at this final moment. “Now when it gets to us,” the president told Kennedy, “I don’t know, but I think it will be late today.”

  But Johnson’s distrust of his attorney general was so complete that he did not give a definitive answer of his own. Instead, he promptly called five other people to air Kennedy’s proposal, all the while making clear his own doubts
about it.

  Roy Wilkins at the NAACP assured Johnson that “signing it as soon as it’s available is the correct idea.”

  “No, sir,” said Johnson’s press secretary, George Reedy. “I think it’d be very bad if you waited.”

  Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges advised, “Mr. President, I don’t think you can hold it up,” while Hubert Humphrey allowed, “That would be very unfortunate.” Larry O’Brien echoed the president’s own thinking, “God, we ought to go forward with this, this evening.”

  Fifty years later, Bob Kennedy’s warning seems overblown, if not racist. But in the first week of July 1964, there was already serious racial turmoil throughout the South. In St. Augustine, Florida, Martin Luther King had been besieged (and jailed after trying to eat in a whites-only motel restaurant) when a desegregation march touched off two weeks of violent disturbances. On Sunday, June 21, two days after the Senate passed H.R. 7152, three young voting rights workers—part of an idealistic army bound for “Freedom Summer”—had gone missing outside Philadelphia, Mississippi. The whereabouts of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were still unknown as Johnson prepared to sign the bill, though the burned-out husk of the station wagon they had been driving had been found off Highway 21 in Neshoba County, leading J. Edgar Hoover himself to inform the president that he assumed they had been killed. On this same Thursday, Johnson would ask Hoover to “put fifty, a hundred people” on the trail of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups in Mississippi lest they cause disruptions in the wake of the bill signing. “I don’t want these Klansmen to open their mouth without your knowing what they’re saying,” Johnson told Hoover.

  The president had asked his new in-house intellectual adviser, the Princeton historian Eric F. Goldman (who had succeeded Arthur Schlesinger), to draft a statement for him to deliver upon signing the civil rights bill. “The season of summer is upon us,” Goldman wrote in his draft. “Summer means a thousand delights—the gardens full with blossoms, the long, lazy flicker of a trout line in the sunlight, the happy skip-and-jump of our children. But the summer of 1964 is no ordinary season. It brings not only anticipation of delights but deep anxieties. I would be failing in my duty if I did not inform you that responsible observers, white and Negro, warn me of the possibility of serious racial disturbances in the North or South of this country, and possibly in both.”

  As he flew to Washington to witness the signing of the bill into law, Martin Luther King told reporters that the new statute “will bring a great deal of practical relief to Negroes in many southern communities.” In the short term, he noted, the law would raise expectations for further progress, but “it will probably take five years to see the civil rights bill fully implemented in the South.” He added, “The scope of direct action this summer will depend on the scope of compliance” with the bill.

  * * *

  THE AMENDED H.R. 7152 had arrived back in the House at the opening of business on Monday, June 22, when a Senate clerk carried it down the chamber’s center aisle and solemnly intoned, “A message from the Senate.” The previous Friday, just after the Senate passage, Manny Celler and Bill McCulloch had issued a joint press release urging its swift adoption by the House.

  “Not all the amendments are to our liking,” the Judiciary Committee chairman and his ranking member said. “However, we believe that none of the amendments do serious violence to the purpose of the bill. We are of a mind that a conference could fatally delay enactment of this measure. We believe that the House membership will take the same position.”

  All along, the paramount strategy of the civil rights forces had been to avoid a House-Senate conference committee, in which the bill might be amended further, requiring it to go back once more to the Senate, where it would face the threat of yet another filibuster. So Celler and McCulloch now wanted the House to adopt the Dirksen-revised Senate bill unchallenged and unchanged.

  But before agreeing to such an unorthodox course, Charlie Halleck had a price: two weeks’ vacation for his members, starting July 3. “Now wait a minute, Mr. President,” Halleck told Johnson on June 22. “I appreciate your calling me and I don’t want to detain you because you’re a damn sight more important than I am. But let me just tell you this, my friend. We get your civil rights bill passed, and you can’t do it without us, understand? You sign that up July 4. Give us the next two weeks off in the House—”

  Johnson argued that the administration had a total of thirty-one measures—including his hotly desired antipoverty program—pending in both houses. But Halleck was insistent.

  “Now, goddamn it, Mr. President, I’ll do a few of those things, but you ain’t going to curry any favor with me, I might as well be blunt about it, making us stay here when we got twenty, thirty guys from the House wanting to go to our convention.”

  Johnson might be able to finesse Charlie Halleck, but there was no practical way to avoid another trip to Judge Smith’s Rules Committee before the bill could get to the House floor. The civil rights forces had briefly considered asking for a suspension of the rules in order to send the bill instead to the Judiciary Committee, where a sympathetic Celler would promptly report it out. But such a procedure would require a two-thirds vote, and it could only be invoked on the first and third Mondays of the month—meaning on July 6 at the earliest. That would run afoul of Charlie Halleck’s wishes, so Celler and McCulloch resigned themselves to one more audience with the Rules Committee, whose most progressive members in both parties were willing to play along.

  Celler and McCulloch prepared House Resolution 789, to provide for the “concurrence of the House of Representatives to the Senate amendment to H.R. 7152,” and Speaker McCormack promptly referred it to the Rules Committee. Under House rules, any three members of the Rules Committee could request a meeting, and if the chairman failed to comply within seven calendar days, including at least three legislative days, any eight members of the committee could demand a hearing at a time of their choosing. Just as had been the case in the winter, the civil rights supporters on the committee were prepared to force Howard Smith’s hand.

  On Wednesday, June 24, after waiting the required three days, Dick Bolling of Missouri filed a formal request that Judge Smith hold a hearing on Resolution 789. Smith was no more supportive of the bill than he had ever been, but he also well knew that the rump caucus of his committee had the power to beat him, so he reluctantly scheduled a hearing for the last possible day under the rules—Tuesday, June 30.

  On that day, Celler was the committee’s lead witness. “These changes are not lethal,” he assured his colleagues of the Senate’s amendments. It was Bill McCulloch’s turn next, and when a contemptuous Howard Smith drawled, “I understand you were one of the architects of the Senate bill,” McCulloch replied drily, “I had some consultation with some senators.” That same afternoon, the committee, with support from Republican members like the reliable Clarence Brown of Ohio, voted to overrule Judge Smith’s wishes to prolong testimony, ending consideration of Resolution 789 that day. The committee then voted to grant the resolution a “closed” rule, allowing a single hour of floor debate in the full House, to be divided evenly between supporters and opponents. And, in a final indignity, Bolling proposed that Ray Madden of Connecticut, a civil rights supporter, and not Judge Smith, be given the privilege of presenting the resolution on the floor. This was too much for Smith’s loyal No. 2, Bill Colmer of Mississippi, who declared, “If Martin Luther King were chairman of this committee and I was opposed to his position, I would do nothing to take the chair away from him and slap him in the face.” Judge Smith’s frustrated members had at last done something awfully close to just that—and, then, in one last rebuke, three times they defeated his proposals to extend floor debate to four, three, or even two hours, from the agreed-upon one.

  * * *

  ON THURSDAY, JULY 2—ONE year to the day since Burke Marshall’s visit to Piqua to seek Bill McCulloch’s support for the bill—the House of Repre
sentatives convened, with 402 of its 435 members present. Ray Madden spoke first. “I want it to be understood that the members of the Rules Committee in my judgment were displaying no disregard or lack of confidence in the integrity of our chairman,” he insisted. “The majority of our members decided that it was time to call a termination to some of the shenanigans and delays to which the progress of this legislation has been a victim.”

  Then Judge Smith had his last, bitter fifteen-minute say. “The bell has tolled,” he said. “In a few minutes, you will vote this monstrous instrument of oppression upon all of the American people. You have sowed the wind. Now an oppressed people are to reap the whirlwind. King, Martin Luther, not satisfied with what will be the law of the land, has announced his purpose, with the backing of the executive department, to begin a series of demonstrations inevitably to be accompanied by mob violence, strife, bitterness and bloodshed. Already, the second invasion of carpetbaggers of the Southland has begun. Hordes of beatniks, misfits and agitators from the North, with the admitted aid of the Communists, are streaming into the Southland on mischief bent, backed and defended by other hordes of Federal marshals, Federal agents and Federal power.”

  Basil Lee Whitener of North Carolina spoke next for the South. “Forever and a day, July 2, 1964, will be marked as the day on which greater violence was done to the U.S. Constitution than had ever been witnessed by Americans.”