An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964
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I am grateful beyond words to the many other House, Senate, White House, and Justice Department staff members, and to the veterans of the labor and ecumenical movements, who took the time to share their memories, answer my queries, and check my work, including Bill Connell, Richard Donohue, Nancy Dutton, Charles Ferris, David Filvaroff, James Hamilton, Lloyd Hand, Neal Kennedy, Robert Kimball, Jane O’Grady, Jack Rosenthal, Norman Sherman, Peter Smith, James Symington, Kenneth Teasdale, Ted Van Dyk, and [the late] Lee C. White. I owe a special debt to my fellow Princetonian Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who took the time to speak to me even as he was dying. The sharp mind and sense of humor that must have helped so much in passing the bill were palpably intact, even as his body failed him. Two of the last surviving members of the Senate that passed the bill—Birch Bayh and the late Daniel Inouye—likewise took time to recall a signal moment in the life of the institution they loved. Former vice president Walter F. Mondale shared warm insights about his friend and colleague Hubert Humphrey and about the Senate they served. Representative John Dingell of Michigan, the “Dean of the House,” was equally generous with his time. Among contemporary journalists, Roger Mudd of CBS News and the late E. W. Kenworthy of the New York Times provided conspicuously trenchant and helpful accounts of the bill’s creation.
Family members of many figures involved in the history of the bill offered support, beginning with Caroline Kennedy, whose encouragement was unflagging. I am also grateful to Jean Kennedy Smith, Catie Marshall, Anne Talbot Kennedy, Ann McCulloch Carver, and Nancy McCulloch, and to Peter Douglas and Kate Douglas Torrey for working to unseal the oral history of their late father, John Douglas, at the John F. Kennedy Library after four decades.
Karen Adler Abramson, the Kennedy Library’s chief archivist, supported my request to open the Douglas files, and her colleague Stephen Plotkin tirelessly answered many questions and pointed me in the right direction in reviewing the civil rights–related papers of both John and Robert Kennedy. At the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, I received enthusiastic backing from its director, Mark K. Updegrove, and eagle-eyed help from archivist Allen Fisher, who specializes in the library’s civil rights collection. Frank Mackaman at the Dirksen Congressional Center in Pekin, Illinois, is a peerless one-man band, a veteran archival librarian and the reigning expert in all things Ev. His monograph on Dirksen’s role in the bill was never far from my side, and I am everlastingly grateful for his help, including his willingness to read the final manuscript. Jeffrey Thomas and Laura Kissel at the Ohio State University Archives in Columbus were my wise guides to the papers of Bill McCulloch, and James Oda and his colleagues Gary Meek and Roger Hartley played the same role at the Piqua Public Library. David K. Frasier at the Lilly Library at Indiana University eased my journey into the world of Charlie Halleck, as the “Minnesota nice” staff of the Minnesota State Historical Society in St. Paul did with my trip to the world of Hubert Humphrey. Ted Widmer, director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and the editor of Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy, answered more than one pesky question.
The tireless team at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, including Timothy Naftali, Philip Zelikow, Ernest May, Jonathan Rosenberg, Zachary Karabell, Robert David Johnson, David Shreve, Kent B. Germany, Max Holland, Guian A. McKee, and David C. Carter, are the guardians of purest historical gold. Their exquisitely edited, carefully annotated, lovingly compiled transcripts of the secret White House tape recordings of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, published in conjunction with W. W. Norton & Company and now numbering eleven volumes and counting, are the single most vivid record of those two vivid presidencies.
I am indebted to my friend Charles Johnson III, retired parliamentarian of the House of Representatives, for his patient help with technical questions of House procedure, and for showing me the annotated copy of H.R. 7152 that appears on the cover of this book. I thank, as well, his colleague in the “other body,” Peter Robinson, senior assistant parliamentarian of the Senate, for the same. The Senate historian, Donald A. Ritchie, was generous enough to read the portions of the manuscript involving the Senate debate, and to point me toward the remarkable series of oral history interviews that he conducted with Bobby Baker. Ken Keto, associate historian of the House of Representatives, offered a trenchant critique of the chapters involving the People’s House, and his colleague Farar Elliott, the House’s curator, helped me re-create the look and feel of hearing rooms on Capitol Hill circa 1963–64. Walter Oleszek of the Congressional Research Service provided a crucial early tutorial on such arcane topics as the Senate’s morning hour, the concept of the “legislative day,” and the differences between recessing and adjourning.
I am lucky enough to count myself not only a devoted reader but a friendly acquaintance of the leading popular historians of the Kennedy-Johnson era: Michael Beschloss, Robert Dallek, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Richard Reeves, and Sally Bedell Smith. The footnotes show the debt I owe to them, and to the indefatigable Robert A. Caro, whom I have never met but whose work I have read with avid appreciation for forty years, since the first serialization of The Power Broker in the New Yorker.
I am also lucky beyond measure to have come to the coverage of Washington and national politics for the New York Times just in time to know, interview—and, in many happy cases, dine and drink with—so many of the journalistic and political veterans of the New Frontier and Great Society, and this book reflects, if only by osmosis, scores of their recollections, impressions, and anecdotes. Happily still among us are Russell Baker, Harry Belafonte, Benjamin C. Bradlee, John Doar, Elizabeth Drew, Max Frankel, Marianne Means, Newton N. Minow, George Stevens Jr., Sander Vanocur, Harris Wofford, and Rosalind Wyman. Treasured in memory are R. W. Apple Jr., Letitia Baldrige, David S. Broder, Robert J. Donovan, Edwin O. Guthman, Haynes Johnson, James J. Kilpatrick, Fletcher Knebel, Anthony Lewis, Harry MacPherson, Mary McGrory, Burke Marshall, Robert Novak, George Reedy, John Reilly, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Theodore C. Sorensen, Godfrey Sperling Jr., and Helen Thomas. It is not an overstatement to say that they—and my colleagues and editors on the Times—taught me everything I know.
To my parents, Connie and the late Jerry Purdum, I owe life itself, along with a love of books, music, and politics—and an expensive education that has enriched that life. My sister Edie and my brother Steve always have my back, and they helped combine research trips to Indiana and Minnesota with family gatherings. The dedication of this book only hints at the role that Dee Dee Myers has played, for nearly two decades now, as partner, first line of defense, and last voice in the ear—in my life and work. She has been all that and more, for better—and yes, for worse. I hope she has some small sense of what no words can tell her. I can only keep trying to make sure that she does. Our children, Kate and Stephen, make us ever mindful of the gift they are growing up with, one their mother and I did not share in our own childhoods, when the turmoil of the civil rights movement swirled around us without our understanding it. They are children of the twenty-first century, and their generation—black and white alike—lives in a better world because our brothers and sisters, living and dead, heard freedom’s song and marched into the sunshine.
ALSO BY TODD S. PURDUM
A Time of Our Choosing: America’s War in Iraq
(with the staff of The New York Times)
About the Author
TODD S. PURDUM is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and senior writer at Politico. He previously spent more than twenty years at the New York Times, where he served as diplomatic correspondent, White House correspondent, and Los Angeles bureau chief. A graduate of Princeton University, he lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Dee Dee Myers, the political commentator and former White House press secretary, and their two children.
An Idea Whose Time Has Come. Copyright © 2014 by Todd S. Purdum. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
.
www.henryholt.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Purdum, Todd S., author.
An idea whose time has come: two presidents, two parties, and the battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 / Todd S. Purdum.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8050-9672-9 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-8050-9673-6 (electronic book)
1. United States. Civil Rights Act of 1964. 2. Civil rights—United States— History—20th century. 3. United States—Politics and government—1961–1963. 4. United States—Politics and government—1963–1969. I. Title.
KF4744.5151964.P87 2014
342.7308’5—dc23
2013038545
e-ISBN 9780805096736
First Edition: May 2014