Master of the Senate (200 page)

In the first flush of resentment over the jury trial amendment, those senators who were derided as “the all-out civil rights forces” felt the same way. Nixon’s suggestion had struck a responsive chord in the deeply disappointed Rauh, and after the yeas and nays had confirmed their gloomy prediction and Rauh was leaving the gallery, he told Paul Sifton angrily, “This bill is worth less than nothing.” Leaving Sifton, he walked out of the Capitol, into the night,
and felt himself seized with anger. “Well, let’s kill the bill, maybe Nixon’s right,” he muttered to himself. Other members of the Douglas Group felt the same way. Wayne Morse said he hoped the Senate would reject “this bad bill” when the vote on the entire bill was taken on August 7. And of course the South agreed. What, from Richard Russell’s standpoint, had been the most desirable result all along but the death of the bill? What difference did it make, ultimately, where it was killed? If it hadn’t been done on the Senate floor, then the Conference Committee would do just fine.

While that was liberals’ first reaction, however, it didn’t last. Liberals and black leaders—the veteran, battered crusaders for civil rights—had been fighting for so long in vain that, on more sober consideration, they realized how hard it had been to pass
any
civil rights bill, and how essential it was that that accomplishment, no matter how meagre it was, be recognized. The morning after the 51–42 vote, Joe Rauh was just getting out of bed when his telephone rang, and it was Clarence Mitchell saying, as Mitchell’s biographer recounts, “that the civil rights forces had to support what was left of the bill before people got the idea that the legislative process could not work in the field of civil rights.” This bill, no matter how weak it was, was proof that the process could work, Mitchell said. Congress hadn’t passed a civil rights law in eighty-two years, but it was on the very verge of passing one now. Mitchell recognized, his biographer says, “the psychological and historical importance” if it was actually passed.

Dealing with these leaders was made easier also by their hope that if the accomplishment was finalized—if the House and Senate versions were reconciled into one bill, and the bill was signed into law—future accomplishments would become easier; Johnson’s argument was being accepted, right down to its wording. Recalls Richard Boiling: “All of a sudden you started hearing it all over the place: ‘We’ve got to break the virginity.’ You heard guys saying that thing about ‘Once they do it the first time, it won’t be so hard to get them to do it the next time.’” And it was made easier by their understanding—since they for so long had gotten, for all their efforts, nothing—that this bill, no matter how weak it was, was
not
nothing. It may not have been much, but it was
something.

In addition, Johnson had on his side, in Philip Graham, a very potent weapon. Johnson needed that weapon. It was difficult for him to talk directly to some of these leaders—including the one who was probably the single most influential, ADA National Chairman Rauh—so great was their distrust of him. So the weapon had to be deployed, no matter what the cost.

“By the summer of 1957, Phil was clearly exhausted and in need of rest,” Katharine Graham would say. She did not know then how ill her husband was, but it was, she would write, “obvious … that he was high-strung and had overextended himself.” They had decided, in her words, to “retreat to Glen Welby,” and had spent the summer “playing with the children and just doing
nothing,” except for occasional interludes like the luncheon for Rauh and Frankfurter. And then, right after the passage of the jury trial amendment, Lyndon Johnson telephoned Phil at the farm and asked him “to come back to Washington to help him win passage” of the civil rights bill. Mrs. Graham tried to persuade him not to go. “I knew that he was very frail,” she would say. “I knew that he shouldn’t go up and do that.” She was, however, unsuccessful. “So Phil returned to Washington, somewhat to my concern, and stayed with Lyndon almost constantly for several days, working day and night,” telephoning Rauh and other civil rights leaders to urge them to support the bill even in its weakened form, making one call after another, far into the evening. On several nights, he slept on a couch in Johnson’s office. Graham would, of course, have been a wonderful advocate even had he not brought with him the power of the
Post
, so deeply did he believe in what he was fighting for. “From the point of view of many political observers, what LBJ did was to take everything out of the bill except the right to vote,” Mrs. Graham was to write. “Phil’s argument was that the only thing that really counted about the bill was the right to vote.” He spent a great deal of time on the telephone with Rauh, George Reedy recalls. “You could see he was very tired, nervous, but more than anyone else, I think you have to say it was he who persuaded Rauh.”

Graham persuaded Rauh, and Rauh helped persuade Roy Wilkins, who in 1957 was another civil rights leader whose feelings about Lyndon Johnson were, at best, ambivalent. “In those days, Johnson was just beginning to get religion on civil rights,” Wilkins was to write in his autobiography. “He dreamed of becoming President himself, and knew that so long as he had Jim Crow wrapped around him, the rest of the country would see him only as a Southerner, a corn-pone Southerner at that, rather than a man of national stature. So around 1957 he began to change his course on civil rights.”

“With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet,” Wilkins was to write. He and other black leaders had had “a number of meetings with Johnson during the spring and early summer” of 1957, at which “he told us frankly that all he cared about was voting rights, that the bill couldn’t pass with Title III.” Wilkins could understand that—“That was too much for Dixie,” he was to say. But it was much harder to swallow the jury trial amendment. That, he was to say, “was simply a device to defend segregation, not to defend the sanctity of the jury system.” But Rauh and other liberals worked on Wilkins—“Roy,” Hubert Humphrey said to him one day, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned in politics, it’s never to turn your back on a crumb”—and Wilkins finally agreed to call a meeting of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights: the leaders of sixteen organizations—the NAACP, the ADA, three Jewish organizations including the American Jewish Congress, the American Council on Human Rights, the international Elks organization, a Quaker organization, the National Community Relations Advisory Board, and seven major labor unions—to “thrash the problem out.”

The Senate vote on the overall civil rights bill was scheduled for Wednesday evening, August 7, and the meeting, held in the library of Rauh’s law firm on K Street, began on Wednesday morning. At the beginning of the day, the prevailing sentiment was to decline to support the bill, but the prevailing sentiment hadn’t had Phil Graham talking to it. “Joe [Rauh] argued that … once Congress had lost its virginity on civil rights, it would go on to make up for what had been lost,” Wilkins wrote.

Johnson, on the Senate floor, was waiting anxiously for news, and that morning Reedy handed him a note giving him some, which Reedy had received from one of the participants in the meeting, Ken Birkhead: “NAACP, ADA, and other civil rights organizations are going to put out a statement about noon damning the Senate bill… but saying in effect they prefer it to no bill at all,” the note said. That seemed like good news—but it turned out to be premature; “All day long we argued and struggled,” Rauh was to recall.

The most prominent African-American in that room was Wilkins. “If I had gone against the bill, I think it would have collapsed,” he was to say, and he was probably correct. “The Republicans … were for letting it die. The liberals would not have gone on against me.”

“I had never felt quite so much on the spot,” Wilkins was to recall. He was torn between the two sides. “I had wanted something much stronger [than the bill]. I had opposed the jury trial amendment. I had winced at the arguments of old friends who said that since the South had not filibustered to kill the bill it had to be too weak to be worth anything.” On the other hand, “from a dry-eyed point of view, I thought it was impossible to argue that the bill was worth less than nothing.” And “in the end,” he says, “I concluded that at the very least the measure would expand Negro registration…. I also hoped that if the bill passed we would be able to demonstrate its weaknesses by the 1960 election and get much stronger legislation. With the bill passed we were in a better position to campaign than we would have been without it…. At the end of that long afternoon, I decided to buck the prevailing sentiment against the bill and support it.” That decision, Wilkins was to say, “was one of the hardest I have ever made.” But it was crucial. Johnson had persuaded Graham, and Graham had persuaded Rauh, and Rauh had persuaded Wilkins—and now, in that law library on K Street, Wilkins persuaded the Leadership Conference. In the late afternoon, at the end of a long day, the conference issued a statement saying that “Disappointing as the Senate version is, it does contain some potential good,” and therefore should be passed. The
Washington Post
found the statement good. “The 16 national organizations … have taken a realistic view,” said its editorial the next day. “All of them recognize that an amended bill is vastly preferable to no bill at all. It is noteworthy that among the signers is Roy Wilkins….”

•    •    •

T
HE
S
ENATE VOTE
on the overall bill began at about eight o’clock that Wednesday night, by which time the Leadership Conference statement supporting the measure had been circulated on Capitol Hill. Its passage had already been assured, but it had been expected that some Republicans and liberals would join the South in voting against it. The statement changed that, even for Knowland. “With the pending bill we have made some advances in civil rights,” the Republican Leader said in his closing statement. And the bill, he said, “will be further improved in the [conference] committee. It will be greatly improved over the Senate version.” Not a single Republican, and only one liberal—Wayne Morse—voted against it. Only seventeen of the twenty-two southern senators joined Morse in voting against the bill. Florida’s Smathers voted for it, as did Tennessee’s Gore and Kefauver, and the two senators from Texas: Ralph Yarborough and Lyndon Johnson. Five senators didn’t vote, and the vote for passage—the decisive vote in the 1957 civil rights fight: the first time in eighty-two years, the first time since Reconstruction, that the Senate had passed a civil rights bill—was 72 to 18.

The next morning, at about six o’clock, Rauh received another telephone call, this time from Phil Graham. “I just had the strangest call,” Graham said. “I had the strangest call from Lyndon. He said, ‘Phil, of all the strange things, who the hell do you think is saving that bill for me? That crazy, goddamned friend of yours, Joe Rauh, is saving that bill for me.’”

“I wasn’t saving it for him, because I hated his guts for what he was doing to school desegregation,” Rauh was to say. “That was a crime against the Negroes when Lyndon Johnson knocked out Part III…. But Johnson was right. We had to have a breakthrough.” Thirty-five years later, when Joe Rauh died, Katharine Graham summed it up in the eulogy she delivered at his memorial service. “Joe understood that you had to show you could pass something, even something small, to go forward and pass something big.”

Whether or not Joe Rauh “saved” the civil rights bill, he certainly smoothed the way for the next steps needed if it was to become law. For more than two weeks following that Senate vote, Republicans sincerely committed to civil rights (notably New Yorkers Brownell, Rogers, and Congressman Kenneth Keating) insisted—as did Knowland and Joe Martin, both of them still unable to grasp the strategic situation—that the House reject the Senate version and repass its original, stronger version of the bill. Unless “major steps” were taken to “put more teeth” back into the measure, Martin said on August 10, the bill would be sent to a joint House-Senate conference committee—where, of course, it would die. But the Civil Rights Leadership Conference issued another statement—reiterating that the Senate version should be accepted as the best that was realistically possible. With that statement, the opposition to the bill crumbled. How could anyone contend that a civil rights bill should not be passed when the pre-eminent civil rights organization said it should? Know-land and Martin continued to bluster to reporters, Martin saying that it would
be “infinitely better” to have no bill than to pass one as “bitterly disappointing” to America’s Negroes as the one the Senate had passed, and threatening to withhold Republican support from the bill and have the Republicans on the Conference Committee hold the bill there indefinitely unless it was strengthened. But there was one question—asked by reporters virtually every time Knowland or Martin made such statements—which punctured their bravado, a question to which every possible response was lame. As the
New York Times
put it: “Asked how he reconciled this [statement] with the fact that the NAACP was seeking approval of the Senate bill as the best available, Martin replied that the NAACP leaders did not speak for all Negroes.”

There was bluster, too, in the weekly meetings of GOP legislative leaders at the White House. Brownell’s deputy Rogers called the bill “a monstrosity—the most irresponsible act he had seen during his time in Washington…. [the] revised Section IV limited to voting rights and providing for jury trials would be like giving a policeman a gun without bullets.” The President, apparently firmly convinced by Brownell and Rogers of the unwisdom of a jury trial amendment, supported them. At one meeting, the minutes reported, “the President spoke at length in favor of fighting it out to the end to prevent the pseudo-liberals from getting away with their sudden alliance with the southerners on a sham bill…. The President thought it ironic that the Democrats had succeeded in making it appear that any civil rights legislation that might be enacted would be their proposal.” But there was a master of
realpolitik
in the room. “The Vice President summarized that the Republicans would be blamed for any failure to enact Civil Rights legislation in the event that Republicans voted to send the bill to Conference [a conference committee] and it died there.”