Master of the Senate (195 page)

L
ATE
T
UESDAY AFTERNOON
, however, things began to improve. There had, during those last days in July, been two developments that Lyndon Johnson had hoped would get him some of the votes he needed, and they both began to come to fruition not long after he had dejectedly returned, at about four o’clock, to his office from those three hours of “misery” on the Senate floor.

The first development could be called a lucky break—unless one believes that man in part makes his own luck, and that if he pushes against a wall long enough and hard enough, refusing to stop, a crack will eventually appear somewhere in the wall; and unless one believes also that the “crack” wouldn’t have produced Senate votes for civil rights had not Lyndon Johnson known, as apparently no one else knew, how to widen it.

While Lyndon Johnson had been in Texas the previous weekend, the telephone calls from Reedy had told him that his attempt to woo leaders of organized labor like Reuther and Carey and Meany with a jury trial amendment had apparently failed. That Sunday, however, a dissenting if informal, even offhand, remark had been made by a less important labor figure, Cyrus Tyree (Cy) Anderson, the rough-spoken, incisive chief Washington lobbyist for the Railway Labor Association, a loose central committee representing twelve railroad unions, or “brotherhoods.” The remark was made in the unlikely setting of the Glen Echo Amusement Park in Maryland, where Anderson had taken his children for a Sunday outing, and it was made in the course of a rambling, desultory conversation with another man—a casual Capitol Hill acquaintance of Anderson’s—who had taken his children there, too. But this casual acquaintance to whom Anderson made the remark—“Any labor guy who is against jury trials ought to have his head examined”—happened to repeat it to George Reedy Monday morning. Reedy didn’t consider it especially significant, but he quoted it in a memorandum he gave to Johnson sometime after Johnson arrived back on Capitol Hill on Monday afternoon.

And Johnson acted on it.

No one had thought of the railroad brotherhoods as potential allies in the civil rights fight—for a very obvious reason: for almost a century they had been fighting
against
equal rights for black Americans. Ever since they had been formed, shortly after the Civil War, the brotherhoods had, in fact, been among the most rigid bastions of racial segregation in the entire labor movement. Most of them—including the four largest: the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, and the Order of Railway Conductors and Brakemen—had outright “whites only” clauses in their constitutions which barred Negroes from membership. When, in 1955, some of the brotherhoods had sought affiliation with the AFL-CIO, they had employed subterfuges to evade the Federation’s anti-discrimination requirement; the Trainmen, for example, had amended its constitution—not to remove the “whites only” clauses but rather to say that these clauses would not apply in states in which they conflicted with state law. In 1957, fewer than 2,000 of the Trainmen’s 217,000 members—fewer than one out of a hundred—were not Caucasian. And some of the brotherhoods were even more rigidly racist than the Trainmen: the Firemen’s Brotherhood, which had never had a Negro member, was that year determinedly contesting a lawsuit brought by Negro firemen to force that brotherhood to admit them. Few unions seemed less likely to be active supporters of a civil rights bill.

But Johnson saw why the brotherhoods might be turned into supporters. He understood what Cy Anderson had meant by his remark: the brotherhoods had suffered greatly from judges’ use of criminal contempt proceedings without jury trials during the railroad labor wars of the 1880s and 1890s; and with the Taft-Hartley Act, which had revoked provisions of Norris-La Guardia, the spectre of such proceedings hung over the brotherhoods again. He understood, as well, that while the brotherhoods’ once-immense political power had been declining because of the decline of the railroads, in one area of the country that power was still substantial—the immense flat plains of the Midwest. The Midwest, across which ran the great transcontinental rail lines, the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific and the Southern Pacific; the Midwest, which contained so many of the railroads’ switchyards and stockyards and roundhouses, as well as the great hubs (Chicago, St. Louis, Topeka) from which lines ran out like spokes of a wheel; the Midwest, where so many small towns numbered railroad employees, well paid by the area’s standards, among their leading, and politically influential, citizens; where so many of the leading law firms were on retainer to the railroads; where railroads, and their unions, had always been a particularly potent political force; where the support of railroad brotherhoods was still a key factor in deciding which senators were sent to, and kept in, Washington—the Midwest, whose senators were Republicans, conservative Republicans, the conservative Republicans whom he had, despite months of effort, been unable to break off from Knowland and Nixon.

On Tuesday morning, Lyndon Johnson telephoned Cy Anderson and asked for support for the jury trial amendment from the twelve brotherhoods—including a formal statement he could use to counter Carey’s.

With his eyes focused on organized labor as a source of support for a jury trial amendment, suddenly Johnson saw more. There was one union to whom the memory of the power of federal court injunctions was especially fresh and bitter: the United Mine Workers. It had been as recently as 1946 that Harry Truman had seized the coal mines, and a federal judge had enjoined the UMW from striking, had then held the UMW’s glowering, bushy-eyebrowed John L. Lewis in contempt of court for refusing to obey the injunction, and had forced him to order his miners back to work by imposing a potentially ruinous fine on the union.

The center of the UMW’s power was West Virginia. It was a one-industry state, and the industry was coal. No fewer than 117,000 miners, every one of whom belonged to the UMW, lived there. And West Virginia’s two senators were the Republican Chapman Revercomb and the Democratic liberal Matthew Neely, both of whom had refused—Revercomb loudly on the Senate floor, Neely through aides from his hospital bed—to support the jury trial amendment. The UMW’s chief counsel, and a man Lewis trusted as much as he trusted anyone, was none other than Johnson’s friend Welly Hopkins; it had been Hopkins who had dragged the raging Lewis back into his seat in the courtroom in 1946 before Lewis could compound the contempt offense; and then Hopkins, beside himself with anger, had shouted defiantly at the judge, “This day will live in infamy, sir!” Now, on Tuesday morning, Johnson telephoned Welly, and asked him for a formal statement of support from John L. Lewis.

Anderson had to go through channels, with twelve separate brotherhoods. Hopkins had to make only one telephone call. At 2:48 that same day—Tuesday, July 30—while Johnson had been slumped down in his seat on the Senate floor listening to Richard Russell rant, John L. Lewis sent him a telegram. The United Mine Workers, the telegram said, “
HAVE TRADITIONALLY, AND DO NOW, SUPPORT APPROPRIATE LEGISLATION LOOKING TO THE FULL ENJOYMENT BY ALL CITIZENS OF ALL CIVIL RIGHTS.
” And, the telegram said, the UMW also supported the jury trial amendment—“
A WISE, PRUDENT AND PROPER AMENDMENT
….
THE STRONG POWER OF INJUNCTION HAS BEEN IN THE PAST SO OFTEN ABUSED
….”

Sometime after Johnson had returned to his office from the Senate floor about four o’clock, the telegram was shown to him. He returned to the floor. The time was about 5:40. Olin Johnston was droning on. Asking the South Carolinian to yield, Johnson read the telegram, maximizing the impact by implying that it was an unsolicited bolt from the blue. “John L. Lewis had never communicated with me directly or indirectly until 2:48 p.m. today, when he sent me the following telegram,” he said. And even before he came to the floor, Johnson had used the telegram; he “saw to it,” as James Reston commented
drily, that it “was brought to Revercomb’s attention.” On Lyndon Johnson’s smudged tally sheet, a number was erased from the right side of Revercomb’s name, and a number was written on the left side.

And Neely’s staff had been contacted, and a message had been sent to Bethesda. The dying liberal had promised Douglas and Knowland that he would leave the hospital and come to the Chamber in a wheelchair to cast his vote against the amendment if it was needed. Now, through his aides, that promise was withdrawn. Neely could not bring himself to vote for the amendment, but he said he would not leave the hospital to cast a vote at all. Although only one West Virginia vote would be added to the votes for the amendment, therefore, two were subtracted from the votes against it. The count had been perhaps 53–42 against Johnson before, but it was 51–43 now. He was only eight behind.

W
ITH THE OTHER DEVELOPMENT
that came to fruition that Tuesday, luck had no connection at all. It was the result of another talent Lyndon Johnson had been displaying during the civil rights fight. Although it was not a new talent, it had previously been used mainly with his own staff. It had never before been used with senators—because never before had Lyndon Johnson been fighting for a great cause.

It was a talent not merely for persuading men, but for inspiring them.

Frank Church had had six months now to learn the cost of crossing Lyndon Johnson. Young as he was, the tall, slender senator looked even younger with his big, toothy grin, shiny black hair, and cheeks so pink that he seemed to be perpetually blushing; once, while he was waiting for an elevator in the Capitol, a woman tourist said to him, “I understand that one of you page boys gets mistaken for Senator Frank Church”; “Yes, ma’am,” Church replied, “one of us often does.” And sometimes during his first months in the Senate, he acted younger, too, and not only because he was, as his biographer wrote, “bursting with energy and ambition”; in some ways, in those days, he displayed an idealism reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart as the young senator in the movie
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
—right down to the fact that both of them had been amateurs in politics (a lawyer by profession, Church’s only political venture before his victorious Senate campaign had been an unsuccessful try for the State Legislature), and for both of them their first major Senate issue was the same: opposition to a private power company dam. Wags in the Press Gallery, amused by Church’s naïveté as much as by his youthfulness, mockingly called him “Senator Sunday School.” But he was already making a mark in Washington, with the help of his vivacious wife, Bethine.

Bethine Clark Church did not fit that era’s mold of the docile Washington political wife, for while Frank was new to politics, she had been born into it, into Idaho’s Democratic dynasty, the “Clark Party.” She had been raised in the
Governor’s Mansion; during her girlhood her father was Idaho’s Governor, one of her uncles, D. Worth Clark, was Idaho’s United States Senator; another uncle had been the state’s Governor some years before. She and the young man who had fallen in love with each other in high school were an exceptionally close couple; years later, one of Church’s staffers would call their marriage “the longest-running high school romance in history.” She loved to watch the Senate. “I had one child when we came here, and then two, but somehow I always managed to go,” she would say. “It was the best show in town…. I was so fascinated. The Senate … made you think of the letters of Jefferson and Adams.” And she understood the Senate, and explained its mores to her husband (“It was through his wife mainly that he understood the senatorial tradition,” says his administrative aide, John Carver), giving him advice with a canniness that would later lead political insiders to call her “Idaho’s third senator.”

In early July, Johnson’s iciness—his refusal even to speak to Church which had begun in January after Church cast the vote that made Johnson throw his pen down on his desk—had not begun to melt. After Clint Anderson had made him understand that it was Johnson’s “doing, not yours,” that had gotten the Hells Canyon bill passed, he had tried to mend fences in writing (“All credit is due to your leadership”), but while Reedy wrote a warm response for Johnson’s signature, the Leader was as cold as ever in person, and Bobby Baker’s warning that “The Leader’s got a long memory” was proven correct. After six months, her husband was still “a pariah,” Bethine recalls; “I was in a deep freeze,” Church would say. And he very much wanted to thaw it.

Although Church was in favor of civil rights legislation, his interest in the subject was, according to his legislative aide, Ward Hower, “only intellectual,” not “a visceral thing.” The plight of black Americans “was not a big issue to Frank Church,” perhaps because out of the six hundred thousand persons who lived in Idaho in 1957, only about one thousand were black. Bethine recalls that “one night Frank came home, and I asked are you going to get into this thing deeply, and he said, ‘I’ve got a lot on my platter. It’s not something I’m going to get involved over my head in.’” He would vote for the civil rights bill but not become an active participant in the struggle to pass it, he told her. Furthermore, in 1957, Idaho had only two representatives in the House, “so,” Hower explains, “the Senate was the key for Idaho, like it was for the southerners. In the Senate, Idaho is equal to New York. For all the western senators, the Senate is their states’ protection. The right to filibuster is important to them.” He felt—as did many western senators from sparsely populated states—an identity with the southern senators’ need to preserve the Senate’s rules. But, Hower says, Church also knew that a reconciliation with Johnson was essential for his career, and “He was looking for a way to do something major for Johnson”—and “he understood that the civil rights bill was a key to Johnson’s
strong ambition to be President.” And it was this understanding that, in mid-July, first got Church involved more deeply in the civil rights fight. In January, on the vote that had angered Johnson, Church had voted against the South; on July 24, on the vote to eliminate Part III from the bill, Church voted with it. Johnson’s attitude toward him became noticeably warmer. On July 26, when O’Mahoney was introducing the jury trial amendment that the South wanted, Church rose from his back-row desk as O’Mahoney was speaking, walked down one row and over along the desks to O’Mahoney’s, and whispered in his ear, whereupon O’Mahoney announced, “Mr. President, since I began the presentation of this matter, the distinguished junior senator from Idaho has asked to be recognized as a co-sponsor of the amendment…. We shall be happy to welcome the Senator from Idaho as a co-sponsor.”