Master of the Senate (44 page)

The use of this power to help other senators is documented in letters, and in senatorial reminiscences—as is the graciousness, the unpretentiousness, even diffidence, with which the assistance was tendered. A freshman senator was to recall how, standing at his desk, he was watching in despair as a bill vital to his future was being voted down on the floor when suddenly the famous Senator Russell, with whom he had hardly ever exchanged a word, was standing beside him. He had read the bill, Russell said, and he thought it was a project worthy of support; he was wondering if he might give a little help with it. Certainly, the freshman senator replied, wondering what Russell could do. Well, Russell said, why don’t you bring it up again after the afternoon recess? The young senator wasn’t sure what good that would do, but he said he would. When the bill was called that afternoon, he noticed that the Senate floor wasn’t as empty as it had been earlier. He recognized the faces of the newcomers: the southerners had arrived. One by one they voted; all the votes were “aye.” The young senator was to recall Russell’s embarrassment when he sought him out to express his gratitude, and how quickly the older man tried to walk away. “He actually seemed embarrassed to be thanked,” the freshman said. Russell never referred to the incident—not even when he wanted the young senator’s vote on a matter of his own.

Another freshman senator, newly elected and nervous, was to recall how he told Russell that he had been warned that if he opposed certain legislation, a number of powerful senators might punish him by opposing projects for his state. After listening intently to the freshman’s reason for his opposition, Russell said, “Well, I want to say that you ought to go ahead with this cause, and to the best of my ability, I’ll see to it you don’t get hurt.” When a senator asked for help in securing passage of a pet project, Russell would often say no more than, “We should be able to put this over.” But of course, “this” was indeed “put over,” and the freshman was indeed not “hurt”—Russell’s power might be vague, hard to define, but, as his biographer Fite notes, “Scores of other senators … turned
to ‘Dear Dick’ for help in getting local projects approved and funded” because they knew that it was his decision that would determine the projects’ fate. And the help was invariably given with graciousness and dignity. He was, Fite said, “everybody’s favorite uncle.”

R
USSELL’S USE
of his immense power to punish senators instead of to help them was very seldom referred to—perhaps because it was exercised with the same diffidence; Richard Russell rarely if ever used the direct threat. But, as Meg Greenfield of the
Washington Post
was later to write, “It has not escaped the notice of other senators who are interested in projects for their districts or in good committee assignments for themselves that Russell, like the Lord, has the power both to give and to take away.”

And the power
was
used to punish. Senators knew that—and acted accordingly. The number of individual votes that were, over the years, changed by the unspoken threat of its use, no one can know—but combined with Russell’s knowledge of and use of the Senate’s rules and precedents, and the indefinable, but monumental, power of his personality, the number was enough. Russell may have been afraid that he was going to be “licked,” but he wasn’t. With Russell as the “General” of the southern forces fighting civil rights legislation against long odds, the South had won in 1942 and 1944; in 1946, even with a President of Russell’s own party determined to put through legislation, the South won again.

The South did suffer one defeat during the balance of Harry Truman’s first term, but it was not on a piece of legislation. With Truman determined to integrate the armed forces, Russell countered with an amendment to the Selective Service Act that would allow draftees the option of serving in units made up only, as he put it, of “men of their own race and kind.” (It was then that Russell raised the spectre of venereal disease: was not the Senate aware of its prevalence among Negroes?; “I could not bear, Mr. President, to confront some young man who would carry through life the marks of some disease contracted by him, through no fault of his own.”) Russell couldn’t get that amendment through the Senate, but he could keep the Administration from getting
its
amendment through; the President was finally forced to achieve integration through an executive order.

Of all Truman’s other proposals—on desegregation of public facilities, on the FEPC, on the poll tax—not one got through the Senate in 1946, 1947, or 1948. With Russell basing his arguments on constitutional grounds (“We are not defending the poll tax as such. We are defending the rights of the States to govern their own elections and to keep Federal police and the Federal government away from the voting places…. The passage of these laws will strip the once-proud States of their last remaining rights …”), most proposals did not even make it to the floor; outmaneuvering the liberals with a parliamentary tactic
they did not understand until it was too late, Russell ended the fight on the poll tax without it even coming to a vote.

As for the anti-lynching bill, what would be the sense of passing it in the House, asked the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, since “it would be impossible to put [it] through in the Senate?” The anti-lynching bill died, and as southern prosecutors declined to indict and southern juries declined to convict, the policemen who gouged out the eyes went unpunished, as did the mob that shot the wives as well as the husbands, and the mobs that did not kill but only whipped and kicked. Under the leadership of Richard Brevard Russell Jr. the Senate was indeed the place where the South did not lose the Civil War. The great gifts for parliamentary rhetoric and maneuver, for personal leadership, of the “knightly” Richard Russell—his courtliness and gracious-ness, his moderation, his reasonable, genteel words—their cost had to be reckoned in tears and pain and blood. His charm was more effective than chains in keeping black Americans shackled to their terrible past.

O
FTEN, DURING THE 1940S
(as would also be the case during the 1950s and 1960s), Washington journalists would liken Richard Russell to the great general of the Lost Cause, the general who had been the young Dick Russell’s hero, the general after whom a barefoot boy in Winder had named his fort. “A thin gray line is once again deployed against superior forces to resist what the Old South regards as an unwarranted assault on its way of life,” as the
New York Times
put it during one senatorial civil rights battle. “The field general is a man whose dignity, integrity and high principle are recognized even by his opponents.” Like “the Confederate commander of a century ago, Robert E. Lee, Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia is also a master of tactics and strategy and a much respected, even beloved adversary.”

Russell accepted the comparison. His speeches were filled with what one reporter called “the words of war”: “surrender,” “treason,” “appeasement,” “retreat.” “If we are overwhelmed,” he said once, “you will find me in the last ditch.” To Sam Ervin, he wrote, “Our position is desperate, for we are hopelessly outnumbered. But we are not going to yield an inch.” And the comparison was apt—in more ways than some of the writers apparently realized. Lee was indeed the best of generals, military generals—but he was fighting in the worst of causes. Russell was the best of parliamentary generals.

But his cause was the same cause.

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER
motif as pervasive in Richard Russell’s life as power, and it was loneliness.

Within the Senate world, there would for years be speculation about the reason that this man, who possessed “that persuasive charm that no woman can resist” had never married. Some said the explanation was Dick Russell’s never-fading adoration for “the greatest woman I’ve ever known.” At least one remark he made lent plausibility to another theory: that the explanation lay partly in his intense ambition, personal and political, both for himself and for his family, which had made him raise up early and never let drop the fallen banner of the Russells. Asked, when he was old, why he had never married, Russell replied to a reporter friend: “That’s a question I’ve been asked many times, and I’ve asked
myself
many times. I think it was because I was too ambitious to start with. I wanted to be Governor of Georgia younger than any man had ever been in history … so I didn’t marry until after I was elected, and somehow after that I didn’t get around to it, didn’t have time.”

The denouement of the single episode in which Russell broke his lifelong pattern of “shying away from serious relationships” was viewed as support for this theory. During the 1930s, Russell and Patricia Collins, an Atlanta-born attorney for the Department of Justice in Washington, dated for three years, and were, acquaintances recall, obviously deeply in love. They set a wedding date. And then on the very eve of the wedding, it was canceled; Russell telephoned the editor of the
Atlanta Constitution
, which had already set the wedding announcement in type to run the next day, to ask him not to print it. Ms. Collins was a Catholic. In the highest circles of Georgia politics there were whispers that, at the very last moment, Richard Russell had finally bowed to the reality that, no matter how popular he might be, in a state with a Baptist-dominated, Catholic-hating Bible Belt, marrying a Catholic might end his political career. Russell and Ms. Collins continued to date frequently in Washington for several more years, and then less frequently, although they were still seeing each other when, in 1947, she told Russell she was going to marry someone else.

Nobody really knows the reason Dick Russell never married—perhaps not even he knew. But he knew the cost. When he was old, that reporter friend asked him whether perhaps it was fortunate that he had never married, and so had been able to concentrate fully on his work, and Russell answered, “Well, no—well, it certainly has permitted me to have more hours to work … but I would not recommend it to anyone. If I had my life to do over again, I would certainly get married.”

In Winder, where his mother kept his room furnished as it had been furnished when he was a boy, and where, during the months he lived there every year, he often wandered around the house and the yard barefoot, as he had liked to wander barefoot as a boy, he had his family. His father, still Georgia’s Chief Justice, had died in 1938, at the age of seventy-six—of a heart attack following a long day studying cases in his judicial office—and on a gentle hill behind the house, in a clearing surrounded by pines and red oak trees, Russell erected a gray granite obelisk, monumental in sleepy, small-town Barrow County, and wrote the inscription himself: “Richard Brevard Russell—Son of the Old South, Defender and Builder of the New.” And he took his father’s place at the head of the family table. At the sprawling Russell family gatherings, to which the other twelve children, each of them without exception a success in his or her chosen field, would bring their own children, “Uncle Dick,” surrounded by scores of nephews and nieces, would preside—patriarch of the Russells, once again one of the first families of Georgia. He remained very close to his brothers and sisters; of his brother Robert E. Lee Russell, manager of his early political campaigns, he was to say, “We were about as close as two brothers could be.” As for his mother, the flow of tender letters that had begun between them during his youth didn’t stop when he was a senator. In 1952, the town of Winder held a parade in Ina Dillard Russell’s honor; it was then, as her son rode beside her in an open car, that the newsreel camera for once caught, as pride and joy conquered reserve, a broad smile on Richard Russell’s face. When she died, in 1953, to be buried with her husband under the same tall tombstone, he would draft her inscription: “There has never been a married relationship more tender than existed between this noble woman and her eminent husband.” Thereafter, on his visits to Winder he lived alone in the big white frame house, tended by the family’s elderly black housekeeper, and frequently walked up the hill in back, through pines and holly bushes, to the graveyard, and puttered around it for hours, plucking out weeds and neatening the plots, or just sitting there and thinking. He could think best there, he told a friend, close to his family. When years later, the Senator lay dying in Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, and his brother Henry visited him, Dick told him of a thought that was comforting him—that perhaps dying meant that “we could run jump up in God’s lap like we used to run jump up in Mother and Dad’s lap when we were little boys.”

And in Winder he had friends. So at ease was he in his hometown that,
clad in a sweatshirt and stained dungarees, he would sit on a curb with old friends and chat with them for hours. “He just likes to talk,” the editor of the
Winder News
explained. “If he has an enemy in Barrow County, I’ve never heard of it.”

But Richard Russell seemed at home and at ease nowhere except in that little town. “He had warm feelings for individuals, but, outside of his family, he did not express them,” says his biographer, Gilbert Fite. “He was not a man” who could talk about “his personal feelings.” In Georgia—where he had been Speaker and Governor, and now, as senator, was known as “the Georgia Giant,” where he was so respected that no politician dared to run against him—“he had a host of acquaintances and casual friends, and friends who would do almost anything for him,” but “very few close or intimate friends.”

And in Georgia, Dick Russell had been young. In Washington, he was growing older, and traits sometimes deepen, harden, as a man grows older, no matter how much he may wish them not to. “He became,” as his biographer says, “somewhat more aloof.”