Master of the Senate (160 page)

It had to be stopped, furthermore, before it reached the Senate floor. The South could feel confident that it could stop any civil rights bill on the floor by filibustering, but for Johnson, the South’s use of that tactic, guaranteed to antagonize northern liberals, would be damaging. Imbued as it was with drama, the tactic invariably turned a national spotlight on the Senate, and on the Senate’s Majority Leader, and liberals would be reminded of Johnson’s previous efforts to preserve Rule 22 and thereby preserve the filibuster and thwart civil rights. Johnson could not afford a floor fight of any type, in fact: any public battle would turn that spotlight on the Senate stage—and reveal him standing with the South.

The bill had to be stopped, in fact, before it reached the Senate Calendar, the place from which it could be sent to the floor. Once it was on the Calendar, any liberal senator could then make a motion to bring it off the Calendar to the floor. The southerners would then have three options: to move to table that
motion, to defeat the bill outright, or to filibuster it. But in the heated civil rights atmosphere of 1956, any of these options would precipitate an attention-getting floor fight. Once a senator moved to “proceed” to the “consideration” of a House-passed civil rights bill, there was no way, really, to keep the measure from receiving the attention that Johnson didn’t want it to have. The very arrival of the House civil rights bill on the Senate Calendar would deal a body blow to his presidential ambitions. And unlike bills introduced by senators—Hennings’ bills, for example—a bill that had originated in, and been passed by, the House could not be kept from the Calendar simply by referring it
pro forma
to a committee. Senate rules allowed a House-passed bill to be referred to a committee only by unanimous consent; a single liberal objection would send H.R. 627 not to Judiciary but directly to the Calendar. It had to be kept from getting there.

And it was—because Johnson had Rayburn on his side, and because the Senate was still the Senate.

Eisenhower’s insistence on getting input from all Cabinet members delayed the arrival of Brownell’s bill at the House of Representatives until April 9, late in a congressional session for a controversial measure to arrive on the Hill. Emanuel Celler’s selfless willingness to subordinate his bill to the Brownell version allowed the combined measure, H.R. 627, to be reported out of Celler’s Judiciary Committee quickly—on April 25—but scheduling the measure for floor action was the province of the House Rules Committee, a conservative bastion headed by Representative Howard Smith of Virginia. And the bill would only be scheduled for early action if a strong effort was made to push it through—and although Rayburn had let Boiling know he was sympathetic to at least some of the bill’s aims, the Speaker did not give it such a push.

Asked years later for an explanation of Rayburn’s procrastination, Boiling said it involved the hopes he and other liberals had for civil rights legislation and Rayburn’s hopes for a Democratic victory in November—and Johnson’s hopes for the presidency.

Boiling—Rayburn’s young protégé and “point man” on civil rights—was getting a close-up view of Lyndon Johnson at the Board of Education and at several dinners in a private dining room at Martin’s at which he was the only person present with Mr. Sam and Lyndon. And, observing Johnson behind closed doors, he was struck by the depth of Johnson’s affection for the Speaker (“I had seen him kiss Rayburn on the head many times, of course, but the first time I saw him do that and say, ‘How are you tonight, my beloved?’ I just couldn’t believe it,” Boiling says); by the nakedness of Johnson’s desire for the Democratic nomination (“He was just desperate for it, he was slavering for it,” he says); and by the extent to which Johnson felt his chances for the nomination depended on H.R. 627 not reaching the Senate in 1956. “He [Johnson] would say he’d be ‘destroyed’ if it got there—that was his word: ‘destroyed.’” In addition, watching Johnson evening after evening behind
closed doors, the young liberal got an impression of Johnson’s attitude on civil rights. “Johnson said he didn’t want to face it [a civil rights bill] in 1956,” Boiling says. “He didn’t want to confront it. And more. He said he didn’t
want
it. I began to have a very funny feeling about Johnson. The more I saw of him, the more suspicious I got. [He was] really quite negative on civil rights.” Whatever his reasons, Boiling says, Johnson was “just desperate” for H.R. 627 to be delayed in the House long enough so that the Senate would not have to take it up in 1956. “He didn’t want it pushed in the House.”

Rayburn, Boiling says, went along with Johnson’s wishes. He did so partly because those wishes made political sense. With the congressional session already so far advanced, no matter how hard the bill was pushed through the Rules Committee and the full House, it couldn’t possibly be passed by the House in time for there to be any chance of Senate passage. The only result of a Senate floor fight would be to spotlight to the electorate, on the very eve of the Democratic National Convention, the party’s deep divisions—and the fact that the committee chairman who was keeping the bill bottled up was a Democrat. There was no point in rushing. Partly, Boiling says, Rayburn was responding with his usual paternal sympathy to Johnson’s desperation. While the Speaker knew that Adlai Stevenson had the nomination sewn up and that Johnson had no chance to get it, “Lyndon was asking him for help, and he loved Lyndon, and he didn’t want to hurt him.”

“To my shame,” Boiling admits, he, too, went along and did not try to persuade the Speaker to push the bill. For a civil rights bill to pass the Senate, Johnson’s support was essential, he felt; without it there was not even a remote possibility of breaking a southern filibuster. “It was what Lyndon wanted to do that counted over there.” There was no chance that Johnson would give a civil rights bill his support in 1956—and therefore there was no point in trying to rush the bill through the House that year; there would be a better chance for the bill to pass the following year, when it might be possible to get it over to the Senate earlier in the session. So, Boiling says, “I didn’t press in the Rules Committee, and since I was known as Mr. Rayburn’s man on the Rules Committee, and it was generally understood that I was speaking for [him], since I didn’t press, no one pressed.” It was not until some weeks after Judiciary reported out the bill that Rayburn threw his weight behind it, summoning Rules Committee members to his office. When he did that, Rules Committee Chairman Smith said, “The jig’s up. I know it.” But, because of Rayburn’s delay, H.R. 627 was not reported out by Rules until June 27, and debate on the measure did not begin until July 16. Trying to catch the liberals unprepared, southerners suddenly called for a vote at an unexpected moment on July 23. But “Speaker Rayburn senses the mood of the House better than any living man”; stepping down from the dais, he caught Boiling in the corridor. “You’d better get your boys in here,” he said. Boiling started to reply with a joke, but then he saw Rayburn’s face. “I started running,” he says—“just as fast as I could run.” As the
members Boiling rounded up came pouring into the Chamber, the House’s overwhelming sentiment, out of conscience or calculation or both, for civil rights legislation became clear: the vote by which the bill passed was 279 to 126. July 23 was the Tuesday of the last week that Congress would be in session, however, so that there was obviously no time for it to be passed by the Senate, and Johnson expected no objections to sending it to Judiciary. He had not wanted to confront it in 1956—and, it seemed, he would not have to.

S
MOOTHLY THOUGH THE GEARS
of Johnson’s strategy were running, however, a bit of sand was now to be thrown into them—by the men who were always trying to throw sand into his gears: the “red-hots” and “crazies” he despised, the little group of Senate liberals.

Under the procedure customary at the time, after a bill was passed by the House of Representatives it would be “engrossed”—typed, with any amendments inserted, in the precise form in which it had been passed—in the office of the House Enrolling Clerk, and then printed, by the nearby Government Printing Office; the printed copy would then be brought to the House dais and signed by the Clerk of the House, Ralph R. Roberts, as a guarantee that the copy was correct. Then, one of the “Reading Clerks” at the dais would carry it by hand to the Senate, walking the length of that long corridor that runs between the two Chambers. Opening the swinging doors at the rear of the Senate Chamber, he would wait until one of the Senate clerks on the dais noticed him and walked up the center aisle to stand beside him. When the presiding officer nodded to the Senate clerk to give him permission to speak, he would announce: “Mr. President, a message from the House.” Then, making an “obeisance”—a deep bow—to the presiding officer, the House clerk would say: “Mr. President, I am directed by the House to deliver to the Senate H.R. 627, a Bill to provide means of further securing and protecting the civil rights of persons within the jurisdiction of the United States, in which the concurrence of the Senate is requested.” Handing the bill to the Senate clerk, he would bow again, and leave. The Senate clerk would bring the bill to the dais, the presiding officer would enact the customary
pro forma
ritual, asking for unanimous consent to have the bill read a first and second time and referred to the “appropriate committee,” in this case Judiciary. July 23 was a Tuesday; the Senate was planning to adjourn for the year by Saturday of that week; Judiciary met on Mondays—there wouldn’t be another meeting of Judiciary at which the bill could be brought up (not that Eastland would allow it to be brought up anyway). The civil rights bill would be dead on arrival at the committee—quietly dead: no debate, no floor fight, no spotlight on Lyndon Johnson’s position on civil rights.

A handful of Senate liberals, notably Paul Douglas, Herbert Lehman and Tom Hennings, were, however, determined, that, in the case of this bill, that would not happen—that the bill would not be buried in Judiciary but brought to the floor. They had decided to try to accomplish this by refusing to give the
unanimous consent required in the presiding officer’s ritual; when he asked if there were any objections, one of them, probably Douglas, would object. The bill would therefore not be referred to a committee, but instead, as a House-passed measure, would be placed directly on the Senate Calendar.

Other senators could try to stop Douglas from objecting by demanding the floor themselves so he couldn’t be recognized; Johnson could use the Leader’s first recognition prerogative for the same purpose. But this tactic would work only briefly, not for the four days remaining in the session: for a senator not to be recognized for four days would be virtually, if not totally, unprecedented. “I don’t know of any instance in history where that has happened,” says the Senate historian Richard A. Baker. “Not recognizing only works for a limited time. Eventually anyone who wants to speak will be recognized. Every other senator knows it could be him someday.”

These liberals were fully aware of the arguments against the maneuver they were planning: that, in Douglas’ own words, “The session was nearing its end,” that there was therefore no possibility of passing the bill, that their fight was a hopeless gesture foredoomed to failure. They understood that, as he would later write, “the Democratic Party would [be] revealed as badly divided on the eve of the national convention,” that African-American voters would be reminded that Eastland and other southern committee chairmen were Democrats, that the maneuver would rouse journalists to ridicule and the party’s hierarchy—including the party’s powerful and vengeful Senate Leader—to fury. But Paul Douglas believed in the Senate’s “informing function,” believed, as he was also to write, that “even if every battle was unsuccessful, constant but peaceful struggle would hasten the ultimate coming of needed reforms.” He believed that justice would prevail if only men would not stop fighting for justice. He and Lehman and other liberal senators believed also that there was an informing function not only of the Senate but
about
the Senate—“that the southerners’ power had to function behind the scenes” to be effective, that turning “the searchlight on” that power would eventually erode it—and that there was no better time to turn on the searchlight than a national election year. He felt keenly, as well, that while a lot of public sentiment had been mobilized that year for civil rights, not nearly as much had been mobilized as
could
be mobilized—that while the leaders of the liberal battalions, the officers of labor unions and Jewish organizations and big church groups, were strong for civil rights, the battalions themselves had not been mobilized, their members had not been sufficiently educated; that the support for civil rights, while vocal, was still not the mass movement that was needed—and that there was no better instrument for education and mobilization than a Senate debate. And besides, these liberals felt, why did the session have to be nearing its end anyway? Why couldn’t the Senate adjourn instead while the conventions were being held, and then return to work in the Fall? Even Reedy, in his memoir, was to write, in a statement that conflicts rather strongly with the memos he was writing to Johnson in 1956, that while “the prospect of any legislative action [still] seemed
more remote than a landing on the moon,” and “their [the liberals’] only power was to make noise,” nonetheless “it was an uncomfortable noise that grated upon the ears, and, in time, the national conscience….”

Moreover, Douglas and Lehman and their colleagues felt that even if their fight on behalf of black Americans was only a gesture, didn’t those women in Montgomery who for months had been trudging long miles every day—who were still trudging that July—didn’t those women deserve a gesture? Might not a gesture be meaningful to Emmett Till’s mother, to Autherine Lucy, to the millions of black citizens whose children were still not being allowed to attend school with white children—despite an order from the country’s highest court more than a year before? Surely they deserved a gesture,
needed
a gesture—a gesture from Capitol Hill, a sign that someone there was making a fight, futile though it might be, on their behalf? Douglas and Lehman had no doubts about the answer to that question. One of Lehman’s aides, William Welsh, who loved the old man, tried to dissuade him from making the hopeless fight that year. He might find that only a very few senators were willing to make it with him, Welsh warned. What if it was only a
very
few? Welsh asked. “Even if it’s only me, I’ll make it,” Lehman said.