Master of the Senate (186 page)

Hearing Russell’s speech as a call to battle, many of the southerners had expected him to announce at the meeting that the South would deploy against Knowland’s threatened motion to bring the civil rights bill to the floor the South’s most potent weapon—an all-out filibuster in the traditional style that would hold the floor until the bill’s proponents gave up and allowed the motion to die. They were more than ready to enlist in the fight: Olin Johnston, for one, had prepared a forty-page speech, and others had begun making notes for extended presentations.

Instead, Russell, after announcing in that calm southern drawl, “Well, fellows, I think there are some things we ought to talk about,” said that in his opinion, although they should hold the floor, they should do so, at least at first, not by reading the telephone book or recipes for pot likker but by arguments to the point, attempting, during the debate on Knowland’s motion, to amend the bill drastically by eliminating Part III and inserting a jury trial amendment. “We’ve got a good case on the merits,” he urged. “Let’s keep the arguments germane. Let’s see if we can keep our speeches restrained and not inflammatory.”

Not all of the men around the table agreed with the strategy. Johnston wanted to deliver his
magnum opus
immediately, and Strom Thurmond suggested that they all march in a body down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House and let Eisenhower know in person that they intended to filibuster. Russell responded that he was not ruling out a no-holds-barred, plainly declared, traditional filibuster, but merely saying that they should hold that weapon in reserve. After arguing Thurmond out of his proposal, he told Johnston to keep his speech handy, that it might well be needed later on. Explaining his reasoning, he used Lyndon Johnson’s arguments, the ones Johnson had been using—and had had George Reedy put in writing—in Johnson’s own attempt to head off an open filibuster: that this time a filibuster might not win, and that, even if it did, it would inflame northern passions and make more likely a future change in Rule 22. Skeptical of that assessment, several of the southerners weren’t sure that Russell himself really believed in it, but no one wanted to argue with him; it was in summing up the feeling around the oval table that Harry Byrd said simply: “Dick, it’s up to you.” One of the other senators would later describe the strategy agreed on at the meeting: “Instead of rantin’ and ravin’, we’d talk about the merits of the bill—at least for a while.”

The strategy was flawless. Thanks to the new allies Russell’s speech had won for the South, there was now little danger that the bill would come to a vote if the southerners didn’t want it to. Since an old-style filibuster, an adamant, defiant, blatantly obvious attempt to cripple the Senate, might hurt the South in future years, if possible that type of filibuster should be avoided, held off to the last possible minute and used then only if it was absolutely necessary.
And after Russell’s speech, a filibuster
could
be held off to the last possible minute. It was no longer necessary at the beginning of the fight over the civil rights bill; the southerners could wait until the end, until just before the votes either on the motion to bring the bill to a vote or on the bill itself, and see if the bill had been hammered into a shape acceptable to them. And if it hadn’t—if they still hadn’t gotten what they wanted—they could always filibuster then. They could keep that weapon in reserve—holding it for the last stand—because, thanks to the speech and Hells Canyon, they could be sure that, in that last stand, the filibuster would win.

These facts had the most ominous implications both for the cause of civil rights and for Lyndon Johnson. For both the cause and himself, he needed to pass a bill, needed to persuade the South to compromise. His strongest argument to persuade the South to do that had been that it was “isolated,” “utterly without allies”—that a filibuster might be defeated. That argument had now been destroyed; the South no longer had to compromise. For months, the South—Russell—had been insisting on the addition of amendments that would eliminate Part III and add jury trials to the bill. Now those amendments
had
to be added, or there would be no bill; the South would have to be given what it wanted. But to add those amendments, Johnson would have to find liberal and Republican votes—votes it seemed impossible for him to find. As the Senate recessed for the Fourth of July holiday, it seemed inevitable that the end of the 1957 civil rights fight would be simply another filibuster.

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON WASN’T IN
W
ASHINGTON
that Fourth of July weekend. On June 23, shortly after Russell told him he had decided to give his speech, Johnson had abruptly left Washington for the Pedernales Valley. At least some of his key—and worried—Washington advisers believed that he knew the impact that Russell’s speech would have, and felt it would destroy his last hopes of getting a compromise, and that he had, in Tommy Corcoran’s phrase, “given up,” and wanted to be identified as little as possible with another civil rights defeat. He stayed on his ranch for two weeks, continuing his months-long public silence on the issue but removing himself as far from the Washington spotlight as possible.

On the ranch, the days were filled with lolling around and occasionally floating in the pool, with business meetings with KTBC salesmen and executives, drives around the ranch to inspect the cattle and into Austin for dinner at El Matamoros and El Toro with his young staff members Bill and Nadine Brammer and Mary Margaret Wiley, and long domino games; one, with Wesley West, A.W. Moursund, and Gene Chambers, began in the morning, resumed after lunch, and then, after dinner at the West Ranch, went on there for several more hours. What was noticeable was the absence, to any substantial degree, of
telephone calls back to Washington on Senate business. Mary Rather’s log of telephone calls showed that very few were being made to senators.

Near the end of the two weeks, however, George Reedy telephoned Johnson to read him a memo that had been received that day in the Washington office. The memo told him that, hopeless though the fight for a civil rights bill might seem, he could not avoid it and should stop trying to do so, and the memo was from the man who Johnson felt
knew
—had
proven
he knew—how to become President.

The memo’s first line was a little sarcastic—“I hope you are finding the Perdenales
[sic]
River peaceful before the coming storm,” Jim Rowe wrote—and the rest of it told Johnson, in notably candid terms, that if he wanted to become President, he had no choice as to what he had to do in the civil rights fight. “As you probably know,” the memo said, “both your friends and your enemies are saying that this is Lyndon Johnson’s Waterloo. They are saying that you are trapped between your southern background and your desire to be a national leader and that you cannot escape. I personally think this is Armageddon for Lyndon Johnson. To put it bluntly, if you vote against a civil rights bill you can forget your presidential ambitions in 1960.”

To keep those ambitions alive, Rowe’s memorandum said, it was necessary for Johnson not merely to vote for a civil rights bill but to fight for one. “Lyndon Johnson would have to be active in bringing about cloture” if that was necessary. It was necessary not merely that he fight but that he win. “The important thing about civil rights in 1957 is to pass a civil rights bill… solely for the purpose of getting this absurd issue off the Hill for a few years….” And, Rowe said, it was necessary that the bill that was passed not be identified as a Republican bill but as a Lyndon Johnson bill. “The public relations … are most important. It would be most important that Johnson get all the credit for getting a compromise bill through.”

Following this course “is imperative,” Rowe said. “It may not be imperative to Johnson, but it is imperative to Rowe! I would not like to see the 1960 nomination go down the drain because of one vote in 1957….”

Rowe’s memo was read to Lyndon Johnson on July 3. And the next day there was only one guest for dinner at the Johnson Ranch—and the identity of that guest was interesting in light of the lasting hold on Johnson’s emotions that was exerted by anything that had to do with his family.

The guest was his twenty-eight-year-old cousin William (Corky) Cox—and Corky’s life had intersected with Johnson’s twenty years earlier, when Johnson, then twenty-eight himself, had been in another situation that appeared hopeless. Despite his weeks of desperate effort, newspaper polls published on March 25, 1937, two weeks before Election Day, showed him further behind than ever in his first campaign for Congress. The custom in the Hill Country’s little towns was for a candidate to be introduced at rallies by the towns’ most prominent citizens; by now these leaders had almost all endorsed one or
another of his opponents, and that day Johnson had learned that not a single prominent person could be found to introduce him at any of the next day’s rallies.

Lyndon was very dejected as he sat in his parents’ home in Johnson City that evening, talking to his parents, his brother, his uncle Tom, his cousin Ava Johnson Cox, and Ava’s eight-year-old son, Corky, but as had happened before in times of political crisis for Lyndon, his father had a suggestion for him. The leaders’ opposition could be made to work for him, Sam Ealy Johnson said; instead of trying to conceal their opposition, Lyndon should emphasize it by being introduced by the antithesis of a veteran leader—by a young child who would recite a particularly appropriate poem (“You know the poem,” Sam told Rebekah—“the one about the thousands”). The child Sam had in mind was Corky, who, in an area in which horsemanship was esteemed, was being called the best young cowboy in the Hill Country because of his riding and calf-roping feats in children’s events in recent rodeos. “Corky can do it,” Sam said. And Corky did do it. The next day, a vicious Texas norther had hit the Hill Country, but all that day Lyndon and Corky had driven from town to town through freezing rain that rolled across the hills in blinding sheets—and in each town Lyndon would tell the audience, “They say I’m a young candidate. Well, I’ve got a young campaign manager, too,” and then Corky would recite a stanza of Edgar A. Guest’s “It Couldn’t Be Done” (“There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done, / There are thousands to prophesy failure, / There are thousands to point out to you one by one, / The dangers that wait to assail you. / But just buckle in with a bit of a grin, / Just take off your coat and go to it; / Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing / That ‘cannot be done,’ and you’ll do it”), and when the boy finished, Lyndon would take off his coat and give his version of a bit of a grin, and attack the “thousands” who said that just because he was behind, he couldn’t win. That corny poem and the fresh-faced boy who delivered it had touched a chord with the audiences of farmers and their wives and had ignited Lyndon Johnson’s campaign, and “hard as he had run before, now, with the race seemingly lost, he ran harder,” ran to victory.
*
No one, of course, can know for certain the role memories may have played down on the Johnson Ranch during those two weeks in 1957, and it may have been only coincidence that on July 4, 1957, the day after he heard Jim Rowe’s memo, Ava Cox received a telephone call from her cousin Lyndon asking where Corky was living these days. Ava said that her son was a schoolteacher down in Ingram, near Kerrville, a town about sixty miles south of Johnson City, and Johnson telephoned him and said he’d like to drive down and see him. That evening, he brought Corky back to the Johnson Ranch for dinner. No one knows what they talked about—Corky Cox died in 1993—but when, on July 6, Lyndon Johnson
returned to Washington, hard as he had fought before for the civil rights bill, now, with the fight seemingly lost, he fought harder.

T
RUE TO HIS WORD
, Knowland introduced, shortly after the Senate reconvened on Monday, July 8, his motion to “proceed to the consideration” of the civil rights bill—to bring the bill to the floor for debate. Carrying out Russell’s strategy, southern senators began to discuss the motion—not by reading recipes or the phone book but in germane, if lengthy, arguments. The South knew that if the bill came to a vote in its present form, with Part III in it, it would pass. Despite the votes of some Far Northwest and Mountain States senators—and of the five or six reactionary midwestern Republicans whose support for the measure had been stripped away by Russell’s speech and Eisenhower’s admission—a solid majority of the Senate was still for it. Lyndon Johnson knew, as the historian Robert Mann writes, “the price for southern acquiescence—to render the bill a toothless voting rights measure.” Most immediately, the price was the removal of Part III. But Johnson also knew that he “did not have the votes to pay this price.” To persuade the South to stop talking and allow the civil rights bill to come to the floor, he would have to get more votes from Republicans, and he would have to get some from liberals, too.

In an attempt to do so, he deployed, upon his return from Texas, his most powerful weapons—against the largest targets.

The intellect and eloquence of Richard Russell were now deployed in the privacy of the Oval Office. During his July 3 press conference after Russell’s speech, Eisenhower had said he would be glad to talk to Russell personally about his Administration’s bill, but Russell had done nothing about the invitation. Immediately upon his return to Washington on July 6, Johnson, “aware,” as Rowland Evans was to put it, of Russell’s “rare ability to articulate his point,” urged him to accept, urged him so forcefully that, on July 10, Russell met with the President for almost an hour.

That must have been quite a meeting. No one knows exactly what was said in it. Writing to a friend about it, Eisenhower described an exchange that cast him in a favorable light. After Russell had “delivered an impassioned talk on the sanctity of the 1896 decision
[Plessy]
by the Supreme Court,” Eisenhower wrote, “I merely asked, ‘Then why is the 1954 decision not equally sacrosanct?’ Russell ‘stuttered,’ and finally said, ‘There were wise men on the Court. Now we have politicians.’” Then, according to Eisenhower, he asked Russell to name a single member of the 1896 Court, and “He just looked at me in consternation and the subject was dropped.” The President’s description may not, however, have reflected with total faithfulness the overall tenor of his remarks. Recalling the meeting years later, Russell said: “He [Eisenhower] just sat there and poured out his soul about that bill and the Supreme Court and several other things. I was amazed, and then I realized that he had known me for a long
time.” Emerging from the White House, Russell, in answering the questions of a small knot of reporters, gave his customary modest disclaimer of influence. “I couldn’t say we had a meeting of the minds,” he said. “The President and I don’t agree on the basic philosophy of the legislation.” Asked if he felt better than he had before he saw Eisenhower, Russell replied, “I can’t say that I do.” But, adding that “I think in the course of the discussion there were some features I emphasized that the President had not considered,” he said that the President’s “mind is not closed” to possible amendments to “clarify the bill,” and privately, reporting on the meeting to his southern colleagues, he went a little further. “The President indicated, in effect, to Senator Russell that he would not be averse to considering some changes,” Willis Robertson was to write a friend the next day. And Ann Whitman spoke to the President immediately after Russell left (“While emotional about the matter, he [Russell] conducted himself very well,” she wrote in her diary) and while the meeting may or may not have made Russell feel better, it definitely made Whitman, a fervent believer in civil rights, feel worse. Despite her almost invariably unquestioning loyalty to Eisenhower’s policies, she wrote in her diary on this occasion that the President “is not at all unsympathetic to the position people like Senator Russell take,” and was “far more ready than I am, for instance, to entertain their views.” Whitman may even have offered a rare face-to-face rebuke to her boss for doing so, for, she wrote, he reminded her that “I have lived in the South, remember.”