Master of the Senate (180 page)

The most important thing a man tells you is what he’s not telling you.
Talking to the southern senators, Lyndon Johnson was listening to a lot of furious tirades about the Brownell Bill. If one didn’t listen closely, all of the bill’s provisions appeared equally abhorrent to them. But Johnson, listening very closely, realized that one provision was not being mentioned nearly so much as the others. Sometimes, in fact, it was not mentioned at all. And when it was mentioned, while it was assailed just as harshly as the other provisions, Johnson was hearing, beneath the words, a somewhat different undertone.

The provision was not in Part III, the section of the bill that had been occupying most of both sides’ attention (and most of Lyndon Johnson’s attention) since January, and on which both sides held positions so intractable that compromise seemed impossible. The provision was Part IV, which dealt not with ending segregation on many fronts but instead with a single right: the right to vote.

When southern senators talked about the clauses in Part III that would force employers to hire blacks or that would allow blacks to sit next to whites in classrooms or movie theaters, they poured out their anger harshly, uncompromisingly. But when the right to vote came up, the tone of voice was different: less defiant—sometimes, in fact, almost ashamed.

“It was fascinating for me, a Yankee who might be able to comprehend but could not share, southern feelings, to hear him talk,” Reedy recalls. “Most southerners, he said, were not very concerned about depriving blacks of decent jobs. They had hypnotized themselves into a belief that Negroes were inherently unwilling to accept heavy responsibilities and were much more at ease doing menial tasks which did not require them to make decisions…. As for segregation, Dixie theoreticians had created a whole mythology about people being ‘happier with their own kind.’ None of those attitudes were going to change in the near future, in LBJ’s estimate, and it was futile to anticipate any ‘give’ on these points. There was one area, however, in which he contended that southern consciences were hurting. This was in the field of voting rights. Here, he claimed, even the most outspoken of white supremacists had a sense of doing something wrong.”

Partly this was because many of the southern senators believed if not always in the spirit but in the literal words of the Constitution, which was explicit on the question of suffrage, saying as it did that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged” on account of race or color. “They
were
constitutionalists, even though they were quite willing to concoct some peculiar interpretations of the document,” Reedy was to say. “The amended Constitution—however much they despised the amendments—
did
guarantee blacks the right to vote. [It] did not say anything about the right to a job or the right to social equality or even the right to decent treatment by society. On voting, however, it was unequivocal.” Even Harry Byrd sometimes murmured something about “a basic constitutional right” when the subject of voting came up. Even Thurmond, who had said, “I will never favor mixing of the races,” didn’t use the word “never” when that subject came up. The southern senators insisted that they were opposed to every aspect of the civil rights bill, but, listening to them closely, Johnson had come to feel that to one aspect of it they might be less opposed than to the others. While the South would not accept a Part III with or without a jury trial amendment, he realized, they might accept Part IV with a jury trial amendment. This price still seemed impossibly high. Liberals would never agree to a jury trial amendment for any part of the bill. But, Lyndon Johnson realized, there was a southern price—where there had never been a price before.

The southerners’ feelings were not new. They had almost certainly been expressed to Lyndon Johnson before, during the previous months of discussion of the bill. But they had been obscured during these months by the emphasis on Part III. And they had become obscured as well by the southerners’ insistence that
any
provisions in the bill be covered by a jury trial amendment. No one had focused on the voting right because of the overwhelming belief among liberals that no matter
what
rights were covered by the bill, that coverage would be meaningless if southern violators were tried by southern juries. But now Lyndon Johnson was focusing on Part IV, and he saw the potential in the southern attitude toward that part. The South was not insisting, as it had invariably insisted in the past, that it would not accept
any
civil rights bill, that it would, by filibustering, prevent any civil rights bill from coming to the Senate floor, and to a Senate vote. If he was somehow able to get Part III out of the bill, to get the 1957 Civil Rights Act limited to a single right—voting—and to guarantee jury trials to defendants in voting rights cases, the Act would be very weak, but it was possible that the South, while not of course actually voting for it, would not filibuster it: that the South would allow a civil rights bill to come to the Senate floor for the first time in eighty-two years, and then to be voted on there.

T
HIS VULNERABLE SPOT
in the South’s position was, furthermore, in the very place he had hoped to find it—for Lyndon Johnson’s talents as a legislator went far beyond those of mere listening. He had the great lawmaker’s gift of identifying, amid a panorama of many proposed laws, the one that would best accomplish a larger purpose, and he saw now that if he could get only one provision of the civil rights bill enacted, voting was the one it should be. Of all the rights that black Americans had so long been denied, the right to vote was the one which, if he could get it for them, would be most valuable, for the granting of that right would, he knew, lead—perhaps slowly, but inevitably—to all the others. His reasoning sprang from his understanding of, and belief in, power. The way to end the indignities Negroes had to suffer was to give them the power to end them, and in a democracy, power comes from the ballot box. Give Negroes the vote—give them power—and they could start doing the rest for themselves. The liberals wanted to change so many laws: housing laws, transportation laws, public accommodations laws, private accommodations laws, school desegregation laws—all those laws that were covered in Part III of the Brownell Bill. The southern senators would never agree that these laws should be changed, and the southern senators had enough power to ensure that they would not be changed. Therefore, Lyndon Johnson saw, don’t try to change the laws; just change the officials who
wrote
the laws. Then
they
would change the laws. And the way to change the officials was to give southern Negroes the right to vote, so that officials who wanted to be elected would have to be solicitous
of Negroes’ other rights. Those who weren’t sufficiently solicitous could be voted out of office: Negro voters could vote them out. Giving black Americans the vote would, moreover, change not only the laws but the administration of laws. The urgency for laws to restrain the brutality of small-town southern sheriffs would be alleviated, for example, since in many a southern small town, blacks had enough votes to elect the sheriff they wanted.

Lyndon Johnson started trying to explain this to liberals. “Just give Negroes the vote and many of these problems will get better,” he told James Reston. “Give them [the Negroes] the vote and in a few years, they [the southern senators] will be kissing their ass,” he told Hubert Humphrey. If out of all the civil rights that would be guaranteed by the Brownell Bill, only one could pass, he knew which right it should be—and it was the very one that the southerners, not seeing what he saw, were willing to let pass. Lyndon Johnson’s purpose was no longer merely to help himself. Now he was trying to lift up a whole people, a nation within a nation. And he knew what to do for these people. He had made himself one of them.

H
E KNEW SOMETHING ELSE
, too—that the most important thing wasn’t what was in the bill. The most important thing was that there
be
a bill.

One of the reasons for this was psychological. The South had won in the Senate so many times that there existed in the Senate a conviction that the South could not be beaten, particularly on the cause that meant the most to it. A number of senators—not the most ardent liberals, but a few others—intimidated already by the southerners’ power over their bills and their committee assignments, were further intimidated by this conviction: what was the point of challenging the South, risking so much, when in the end the South was bound to win? “You felt this around the Senate,” Jim Rowe was to say. “There was a mystique about them [the southern senators]. ‘God, don’t get the South mad!’ And why get them mad, when you weren’t going to win anyway? With westerners or midwesterners who didn’t care too much about civil rights anyway, this was a big consideration.” A victory over the South would begin destroying this mystique. Demonstrate that the South could be beaten and more attempts would be made to beat it.

Johnson saw this, as Rowe and Corcoran and Reedy and others close to him in 1957 attest. He used a typically earthy phrase to explain it. “Once you break the virginity,” he said, “it’ll be easier next time.” Pass one civil rights bill, no matter how weak, and others would follow.

And there was a further reason, Lyndon Johnson saw, why the passage of
any
civil rights bill, no matter how weak, would be a crucial gain for civil rights. Once a bill was passed, it could later be amended: altering something was a lot easier than creating it. Aware though he became after his return to Washington following the 1957 Easter recess that his only slim hope of passing
a civil rights bill would be to amend it down into a very weak bill, Johnson nonetheless realized that however insignificant the bill’s provisions, passage of the measure would be deeply significant—not only for his personal dreams but for the dreams of the sixteen million American citizens whose skins were black.

T
HE PRICE THAT
L
YNDON
J
OHNSON
now realized the South would accept to allow a civil rights bill to pass—that the bill be restricted to voting, and include a jury trial amendment—seemed a price simply too high for him to meet. Most of the twenty-seven non-southern Democratic senators, and the overwhelming majority of the forty-six Republicans,
*
were opposed to both these conditions. “The South,” with its twenty-two Senate votes, “is completely without allies,” George Reedy wrote in a memo to Johnson in the Spring of 1957, and he was exaggerating only slightly; when, in late Spring, Johnson embarked on his quest for a civil rights bill, there was available, should the South’s two conditions come to a showdown, no place to find enough votes to meet them. And since the South would lose on a vote, it would simply not allow one. It would filibuster. And though they had no allies on civil rights, on a filibuster the situation would be far different. On a cloture vote,
you got up to thirty-three real fast.
There could be filibusters at any one—or all—of several points. Since killing the bill was so important to the South, Richard Russell would not want to risk everything on a single cloture vote, and would begin filibustering at the earliest point: the vote to put the bill on the Calendar. The measure would be kept bottled up in the Judiciary Committee as long as possible, and if a motion was finally made on the Senate floor to discharge it from Judiciary and place it on the Calendar, the South would filibuster that motion, beginning debate on it, and then extending the debate, and continuing to extend it—for as long as was necessary to block the motion from coming to a vote. And if that filibuster was cut off by cloture, the South could filibuster again to prevent the bill from being called off the Calendar and brought to the floor for debate and vote, and if that filibuster failed, too, could filibuster yet again to prevent that final floor vote. (The South would also, of course, filibuster a motion to place a House-passed
civil rights bill directly on the Calendar without it being sent to Judiciary.) For Lyndon Johnson to pass the bill, he had to find allies for the South: votes for its positions on Part III and jury trials, as well as the assurance of votes against cloture in case it lost on those points. And, with the session already deep in May, he had to find those votes almost immediately. Only if the South felt confident that the votes would be there if they were needed would it allow the bill to reach the Calendar. Johnson had to let the South know that it was not alone, that it had allies in the Senate.

He had, in addition, to let the South know that it had
enough
allies. The bill was too important for Russell to risk everything on a vote in which the margin would be so narrow that it might be changed at the last moment. A handful, or two handfuls, of promised votes would not make the South feel confident that an unacceptable bill could not pass, confident enough so that it could allow the measure to reach the Calendar. Lyndon Johnson had to find not merely a few votes but a whole group of votes: a large, solid Senate bloc.

In May, 1957, with Republicans and liberal Democrats lined up solidly behind a civil rights bill, with the necessity for a bill dramatized by the struggles in the South, and with the press and public demand for a bill rising, the formation of such a bloc seemed outside the realm of possibility. Determined though Johnson might be, determination couldn’t create that bloc. Listening couldn’t create it. This problem was so dramatically intractable that something more was needed—not only legislative leadership, but legislative genius.

Recruiting an entire bloc of allies for the South would require an ability to conceive and then create not merely individual deals, simple
quid pro quos
, and not merely a series of interrelated deals (complicated though that in itself could be), but a single, much broader, deal—a deal broad enough to bring an entire group of senators to the side of the South in one stroke: a
quid pro quo
of a magnitude so sweeping as to be truly national in scope. Lyndon Johnson found that deal—found a bloc—and found a means of bringing it to the South’s side.