Master of the Senate (158 page)

There were, however, other areas, outside the field of education, in which Dwight Eisenhower felt that the responsibility was his, and the issue more clear-cut (his aide Bryce Harlow had been surprised by how
“strong”
the President was for voting rights; “he felt very strongly that nothing good would happen until Negroes got the vote”), and in these areas it was “the compulsion of duty” that won, together with what Ambrose calls “one of his core beliefs—that he was President of all the people.” He, not some governor, was Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and in the District of Columbia it was not a state that had jurisdiction but the federal government. In his first State of the Union address, Eisenhower had promised to carry out Truman’s edict and end segregation in the military and in the District, and he had kept that promise. By the end of 1953, all public facilities in the capital had been desegregated, and he could boast that in the Navy and the Air Force, segregated units were “a thing of the past”; that would soon be the case in the Army, too.

Furthermore, Dwight Eisenhower, behind his sunny smile, was a canny political strategist—only now, four decades after he left office, is the true extent of that canniness beginning to be grasped—and a man whose desire to win, to win
everything
, is also inadequately understood. On the evening of his 1956 election victory, he would give his speechwriter Emmet John Hughes a glimpse behind his supposed indifference to the outcome, telling him, when Hughes started to congratulate him on his landslide, that he wasn’t yet satisfied: “There’s Michigan and Minnesota still to see. You remember the story of Nelson—dying, he looked around and asked ‘Are there any of them still left?’ I guess that’s
me.
When I get in a battle, I just want to win the whole thing…. Six or seven states we can’t help. But I don’t want to lose any more. Don’t want any of them ‘left.’” Ever since the 1952 election, Eisenhower had seen a chance that he could do for the GOP what Roosevelt had done for the Democrats: make his party the majority party. A delicate balancing act would be required if he was to increase the GOP’s appeal to the African-Americans who held the key to the Democratic strongholds of the North while not losing the beachhead he had already established among whites in the once solidly Democratic South, but in his 1956 State of the Union address, he took a first step, making a request—his first request after four years in office—for civil rights legislation, focusing on the right to vote.

Somewhat sparse though it was in civil rights proponents, the Eisenhower
Administration did have Attorney General Herbert Brownell, for whom the President, in Ambrose’s words, “had developed unbounded admiration.” Not only the keenest of political strategists himself, Brownell was also a longtime civil rights advocate; as a member of the New York State Legislature, he had, he was to recall, first begun fighting “the scourge of segregation” during the 1930s by advocating a compulsory Fair Employment Act with enforcement powers strong enough to ensure compliance; he had left instructions as to the songs to be played at his memorial service at Christ Church on Park Avenue in New York; and when he died at the age of ninety-two in 1996, two hymns were added to the traditional Methodist program: the Negro spiritual “Amazing Grace” and the marching song of Lincoln’s armies, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And he had been frustrated “quite deeply” by the fact that “our hands were tied” by the lack of federal jurisdiction in the Emmett Till case, and over so many other areas in which black Americans had supposedly been guaranteed “the equal protection of the law.” He was anxious to draft a new civil rights law, and Eisenhower gave him permission to do so.

“I initially concentrated almost exclusively on voting rights,” Brownell was to recall, but the memory of his frustration in the Till case was too fresh, and “I decided that a more ambitious bill was necessary. So I created … a set of proposals that would give the Attorney General unprecedented power to enforce civil rights” in housing, in parks, in theaters, in restaurants, in hotels and motels—in many aspects of daily life—as well as the power to do so without being forced to wait for individuals to sue first, since individuals might be too poor, or too afraid, to sue. Under the Brownell Bill, an Attorney General could institute suits himself, in the name of the United States—suits not only to redress past injustices but to prevent new ones by obtaining judicial injunctions against them.

When Brownell’s draft legislation was completed in early 1956, the President called a Cabinet meeting for a full debate on the issue. Sentiment seemed to be moving against introduction of the bill, but Eisenhower interrupted, saying, “Where do you think that the Attorney General’s suggestions are moving too rapidly? They look to me like amelioration”—and, of course, sentiment promptly turned the other way.

“After the meeting,” Brownell was to write—in a sentence whose ambiguity was later to prove significant—“I was told by the secretary of the cabinet that the President had decided not to support the general civil rights section of the proposed bill” but only the other sections, and “to submit the bill to Congress … only as a Justice Department,” not as an Administration, proposal. (Cautioning Brownell not to act like “another Charles Sumner” when he testified, Eisenhower illustrated the dangers in stirring up racial emotions with a jocular remark: a southern Negro had recently remarked: “If someone doesn’t shut up around here, particularly those Negroes from the North, they’re going to get a lot of us niggers killed.”) But liberals wanted a broad bill, and in hearings
before the House Judiciary Committee, New York’s Kenneth Keating, an old ally of Brownell’s, elicited from Brownell—probably by prearrangement—the fact that another section had been drafted, asked Brownell to send it over, and then amended the bill so that section was included.

A
MONG MEN
of good will at both ends of the Capitol there was not only determination but a new unity of purpose. Many Democratic House liberals, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler of New York, had handed proposed civil rights bills up to the desk in the first days of the 1956 congressional session, but pride of authorship was to be subordinated to a cause. Since Republicans would be more inclined to support a Republican bill, giving it the bipartisan backing it would need for passage, key civil rights strategists Joe Rauh, Clarence Mitchell, Andrew Biemiller, and Richard Boiling, the young representative from Missouri who had become a Rayburn favorite, asked Celler to subordinate his bill to Brownell’s—and Celler agreed, and agreed further to delay reporting
any
bill until Brownell’s arrived. In the Senate, Paul Douglas helped draft a new civil rights bill, “a model bill,” similar to Brownell’s in “encompassing a whole battery” of provisions empowering the federal government to move against rights violations in many areas besides voting—“a dream bill from the civil rights movement’s point of view,” Joe Rauh was to call it. “A perfect bill.”

At one end of the Capitol, liberal determination seemed likely to produce results. When, still early in the session, southern vote-counters began polling House members, the results surprised and disturbed them. Conservative Republicans who had stood shoulder to shoulder with them for years were standing there no longer. And neither, in their own party, were more than a few congressmen who had never been particularly liberal on civil rights: solid, dependable, “safe” men who in a crunch had also always come down on the side of the South, partly because of the power of the southern committee (and subcommittee) chairmen over these legislators’ own bills, partly because they felt that their party could not afford to lose the South, that the Old Confederacy was the bedrock of Democratic strength. But the burgeoning northern Negro vote had injected into their calculations a new factor—which, the southerners realized with growing astonishment and dismay, was beginning to equal in weight, or to exceed, the old factors.

In the House, of course, the Speaker was a weighty factor in himself, and his reaction was surprising, too. When, after a Board of Education meeting one evening in January, Boiling walked Sam Rayburn upstairs to his office so that he could have a private word with him about civil rights, the brief (as always) discussion was, as was so often the case with Rayburn, not about strategy but about principle, the very simple principle that mattered to Rayburn. “He wanted to find out what was right and fair, and then do it.” And to Boiling’s surprise,
ardent southerner though Rayburn was, with those pictures of Robert E. Lee on his wall, Rayburn felt it was
right
, that it was “only fair,” that “black people have the right to vote.” Interrupting the eloquent young congressman in full flight, the Speaker said: “I’m not against the right to vote. Every citizen should have that.” Though he said no more, “I walked from his office in relief and delight,” Boiling was to recall. “I was certain that… the Speaker would step in at the critical time in order to give the push that only he could effectively give.” Recalling his discussions with Rauh and Biemiller and Mitchell during the early days of 1956, Boiling would say that “We didn’t really care what was in the bill as long as there was
something
in it. We felt that as long as we could get the first bill passed, we could get others passed.” And these men felt that now, at last, with representatives from both parties behind it, they
could
get a bill passed. “Rayburn was for it. We got the idea that at last we could pass a civil rights bill!” The Supreme Court had, of course, already proven itself a friend of civil rights. Now, in 1956, the executive branch had, however tentatively, at last entered the fight—and it appeared that the House would come along, too.

T
HAT LEFT ONLY THE
S
ENATE.
And its Majority Leader.

If one listened to Democratic liberals in the early days of January, 1956, one would have thought that in the Senate, too, the barriers were crumbling. “I am sick of seeing our party bullied and intimidated … in order to accommodate itself to Southern prejudices,” one midwestern Democratic senator said. “If the Southern conservatives want to split off, I for one am for letting them do it. I believe it has got to happen sooner or later anyway, and 1956 might be as good a year for it as any.” There were the usual liberal prognostications that this was the year that the Senate would pass a civil rights bill.

Hardly had the Senate convened, indeed, when Hennings of Missouri introduced four separate civil rights bills that were referred to the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, which he chaired, and which quickly reported out the bills, with a favorable recommendation, to the full Judiciary Committee. The same subcommittee—and committee—would also handle Douglas’ bill. Judiciary was one of the three Senate committees chaired by liberals. There was a good chance that under Harley Kilgore’s gavel, the full committee would also report these bills out favorably, which would mean that while the South would still be able to kill them, it would not be able to kill them quietly but only after a highly public floor fight it was anxious to avoid.

In reality, however, the Senate was still the Senate. While some—
most
—of the political barriers blocking civil rights legislation were, in 1956, less solid than in the past, the walls of the South’s citadel were higher and stronger than ever. On January 3, the first day of its 1956 session—in the very midst of the
rosy civil rights prognostications—a meeting of liberal senators was held in Herbert Lehman’s office. For a similar meeting in 1953, nineteen senators had shown up, and had decided to try to reform the cloture rule, an attempt that had mustered a total of a meagre twenty-one votes. Now, at the 1956 meeting, exactly twelve senators showed up—and in a discussion among the twelve it was concluded that a similar attempt at reforming cloture would not muster even twenty-one votes. Since the attempt would therefore reveal that they were even weaker than before, they decided not to make it.

And not long after the 1956 session began, the walls were made even higher—with Lyndon Johnson lending a helping hand.

On February 28, the sixty-three-year-old Kilgore died of a stroke, and the ranking Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, the senator who would, under the seniority rule, succeed to Judiciary’s chairmanship, was James O. Eastland of Mississippi.

Surely, said the ADA and the NAACP and the great liberal journals, surely the seniority system would not be allowed to prevail in
this
case. Judiciary (which was referred to as the “powerful Judiciary Committee” so often that its title sometimes seemed to have three words) had jurisdiction over all civil rights legislation. Making Eastland Judiciary’s chairman would place at the committee’s head the senator most outspokenly committed to killing all civil rights legislation, the senator who openly boasted that he had killed such legislation before when he had been only chairman of one of Judiciary’s subcommittees (“I had special pockets put in my pants, and for three years I carried those bills around in my pockets …”). Judiciary, what’s more, had jurisdiction over all legislation “relating to federal courts and judges.” Elevating Eastland to Judiciary’s chairmanship would place at the head of the committee in charge of the courts a senator who had openly advocated defiance of the highest court after its
Brown
ruling (“You are not required to obey any court which passed out such a ruling. In fact, you are obligated to defy it”), who had proposed a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court decisions that had helped “slimy, juicy” African-Americans. The chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said
The New Republic
, “is the one seat of power in Washington where a dedicated opponent of civil rights can do his greatest damage.” For Eastland to be given that seat “is unthinkable,” the ADA said, joining the NAACP in telegrams appealing to Lyndon Johnson to see that East-land was not given the post. “Maybe there is no easy substitute for seniority,” the
New York Times
editorialized. “There is no substitute for wisdom, either. There is no substitute for faith in the American system of democracy. If something has to give way, it had better be seniority.”