Master of the Senate (159 page)

Which showed only that the ADA and the NAACP and the
Times
didn’t fully grasp how the Senate felt about the seniority system—or what Lyndon Johnson’s first priority was.

To all such appeals, the Leader replied that it was not he but the Democratic
Steering Committee that made committee assignments, and that he was only one member of that committee, and as such had only limited influence. Eastland, however, was in later years to give him more credit than that. “I had Lyndon’s support all the way,” he was to recall. And, he said, Lyndon had also gone out of his way to spare him the embarrassment of a floor fight on his nomination, or even of a roll-call vote—which might have resulted in an unseemly high number of votes against him. “He [Lyndon] worked it out so that two fellows would make speeches against me, but would not ask for a roll call vote,” Eastland was to say. On March 2, the Senate, following a unanimous recommendation of the Democratic Steering Committee—based, the committee said, on seniority—named Eastland to the chairmanship. It did so, on the motion of Majority Leader Johnson, in an unrecorded voice vote so that senators’ views would not go on record; the voices of only a very few senators—journalists in the Press Gallery estimated no more than four or five—could be heard shouting
“No”
“A mad dog is loose in the streets of justice,” the NAACP’s Clarence Mitchell said. Since Jim Eastland was only fifty-one years old, he might be loose a long time.

E
VEN WHILE THE
E
ASTLAND MATTER
was being pushed through, another threat to Lyndon Johnson’s hopes of winning the 1956 Democratic presidential nomination—another threat born out of the escalating civil rights conflict—was boiling up on Capitol Hill. Feeling itself under attack on a dozen fronts, the South now rallied its forces—with a rallying cry that came from its Capitol citadel.

Infuriated by the
Brown
ruling, southern senators had been working since the beginning of the year on a proclamation that would guide the region’s future response to that ruling. “A Declaration of Constitutional Principles” was its formal title, but the press quickly coined a shorter name: the “Southern Manifesto.” Drafted by South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, with assistance from Virginia’s Harry Byrd, it had been edited by Richard Russell, and its more intemperate phrases had therefore been deleted and its arguments decked out in legalisms that seemed reasonable and logical—as long as one ignored the fact that it had been the Supreme Court, not Congress, that had, in
Plessy v. Ferguson
, interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to mean that separate but equal facilities were perfectly legal, and that therefore the Supreme Court had the right to reinterpret the Amendment. The southern “Declaration” said that since “there has been no amendment [to the Constitution] or Act of Congress” to override the
Plessy
decision, the Warren Court had had no “legal basis for its action” in overriding it in
Brown.
In a “clear abuse of judicial power,” the Manifesto declared, the Court had simply “substituted their personal and social ideas for the law of the land,” encroaching on “the reserved rights of the states.”

Some of the Manifesto’s arguments demonstrated Russell’s gift for cloaking injustice in words of reason. The separate but equal doctrine “is founded on elemental humanity and common sense, for parents should not be deprived by government of the right to direct the lives and education of their own children,” it said. The
Brown
decision, it said, “is destroying the amicable relations
between white and Negro races that had been created through ninety years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there had been heretofore friendship and understanding.” And the Manifesto called on the South to resist the
Brown
decision. Commending “those States which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means,” it said that “We pledge ourselves to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.” Its signatories were nineteen senators and eighty-one representatives from the eleven states of the Old Confederacy, and it was read in full on the Senate floor on March 11—just nine days after the shouted “ayes” that had put Eastland in Judiciary’s chair—by the South’s greatest orator (in the House it was simply inserted in the record). And it made headlines across the nation—as it should have, for the Southern Manifesto was nothing less than an outright call by one hundred elected legislators in the national government for massive, unified, defiance of an order from the nation’s highest court. Hardly had Walter George’s organ-like tones stopped rolling across a hushed and solemn Senate when Wayne Morse rose to his feet. “One would think that Calhoun was walking across the floor of the Senate today,” he said.

T
HE
S
OUTHERN
M
ANIFESTO
and Herbert Brownell’s civil rights bill menaced—from opposite sides—Lyndon Johnson’s master plan. Manifesto and bill both threatened to add kindling to the civil rights issue on Capitol Hill. Johnson’s strategy for winning his party’s presidential nomination—to hold his southern support while antagonizing northern liberals as little as possible, or at least not antagonizing them any more than he already had—was feasible only if the issue did not blaze up on the Hill, since if it did, he would have to take his position prominently on the southern side. For his strategy to work, the civil rights issue had to be tamped down in Congress, his involvement with it minimized.

And it was. Nineteen of the twenty-two southern senators signed the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles.” The three who didn’t were the two senators from Tennessee, both of whom had national political aspirations in 1956—Estes Kefauver for President and Albert Gore for Vice President (and Tennessee, of course, was the only southern state in which Negro voters had become a political force to be reckoned with)—and Lyndon Johnson. His explanation for not signing, however, was different from that given by the two Tennesseans. They declared that they hadn’t signed the Manifesto because they didn’t agree with it, Gore calling it “a dangerous, deceptive propaganda move which encouraged southerners to defy the government and to disobey its laws.” Johnson declared that he hadn’t signed it because he hadn’t been asked to sign it—that, in fact, he had never even
seen
it, that, as William S. White wrote, “he
had not been shown the document because” the Southern Caucus “did not want to appear to be trying to ‘formulate Democratic or Senate policy.’”

Johnson’s statement that he had never seen the Manifesto may have been disingenuous, since he had been present during at least one Southern Caucus—on February 8, in Walter George’s office—when the Manifesto was being revised sentence by sentence. And his explanation was to evolve over time, his portrayal of himself—to journalists and to some of the more friendly liberal senators—to become increasingly heroic. The southerners had not asked him to sign, he said, because they knew he wouldn’t, as a matter of principle. It evolved further—into an implication that he had
refused
to sign despite intense southern pressure. “You liberals—you have all got your big heroes,” Johnson told Hubert Humphrey. “I want you to notice who signed and who didn’t. Now all your bomb-throwers over there think I am the worst thing that came down here…. But I didn’t [sign].”

His explanations were accepted uncritically by those journalists he could count on to be uncritical. His refusal to sign, White was later to write in his biography of Johnson, “was, indeed, an act of courage,” although “it was other things as well. [Johnson] believed his responsibilities as leader of
all
the Senate Democrats would have prohibited him from adopting the sectional view of the Manifesto, even if he had not considered it wrong in principle.” They were accepted by some liberal senators: Richard Neuberger took the floor of the Senate to call Johnson’s refusal to sign “one of the most courageous acts of political valor I have seen take place in my adult life.”

Actually, however, it was easy for him to avoid signing the Manifesto because of what Richard Russell wanted for him—and had persuaded the Southern Caucus to want for him. By this time, George Reedy says, “Russell was very determined to elect Johnson President of the United States.” And, Reedy says, “There was no question whatsoever that anybody that signed” such an inflammatory, anti-civil rights document “could never become President of the United States.” As Russell’s biographer, Gilbert C. Fite, wrote, “Russell was much more interested in pushing Johnson for President, which he was then doing, than in having another name on the Manifesto.”

By 1956, of course, the other southern senators understood the importance of Russell’s plan, and, except for two or three of them, agreed with it. Since it was recognized that “he had to work with all sides” in the Senate, John Stennis says, “it wasn’t held against him by the southerners, I’ll put it that way, that he didn’t sign it.” Carried away by his eloquence, Johnson had gone too far, however. Growing worried that his statements might raise doubts among southern senators about his true feelings, he issued other statements—designed to reassure them that while his hand may not have written his name under theirs, his heart was with them. One of his statements dovetailed with the Manifesto’s argument that the
Brown
decision had usurped the sacred constitutional rights of the individual states. “In my opinion, the solution of the problem cannot be
found on the federal level, for it involves basic values reflected in the sovereignty of our States,” Lyndon Johnson said. “It’s my hope that wise leaders on the local levels will work to resolve these differences.” A reporter who asked him to clarify that statement wrote that “He [Johnson] believed the integration problem was one best left to individual states to handle.” And indeed, on the very day, March 12, 1956, on which the front page of the
New York Times
reported the issuance of the Southern Manifesto, there was, also on the front page, another article, which provides more than a hint that Johnson’s non-signing of the Manifesto had caused no strain between him and the other southern senators—that it had actually been a strategic maneuver arranged among them, “
A JOHNSON BOOM STARTS IN SOUTH
,” the headline on this article stated, and the article quoted several southern senators as supporting Johnson’s possible candidacy for the Democratic nomination—and among the southerners quoted were the Manifesto’s two principal architects, Strom Thurmond, the former presidential candidate of the States Rights Party, who said Johnson would be an “attractive candidate,” and the South’s general, Richard Russell, who said that if Johnson decided to make the race, “I will support him one hundred per cent.” In a later statement, Russell said, “There is no question in my mind that Johnson is the best qualified man and more sympathetic with the Southern point of view on civil rights than any other candidate.”

The percentage Russell named turned out to be a popular one among Johnson’s southern senatorial colleagues—Louisiana’s Ellender, for example, said that if he ran, “I’d be one hundred per cent for Johnson”—except when that figure was not large enough to fully express their enthusiasm for his candidacy: “I’m for him not one hundred percent but one thousand per cent,” Florida’s Smathers said. Within weeks, almost every signer of the Southern Manifesto had endorsed the colleague who didn’t sign.
*

F
INESSING THE
S
OUTHERN
M
ANIFESTO
was easy for Lyndon Johnson, and so was the finessing of Hennings’ four civil rights bills, now that Eastland was chairman of the committee under whose jurisdiction they fell. No sooner had Eastland taken Judiciary’s gavel than he made clear that in his view filibusters need not be confined to the Senate floor; they could be staged in his committee as well—with one difference: while ending a filibuster on the floor was difficult, in his committee it was impossible. A committee that has no written rules is governed by the general Senate rules, he explained, and “the Senate rules provide that a cloture petition must be signed by sixteen senators.” Judiciary,
he pointed out, had only fifteen members. “There wasn’t any way anyone could file a cloture petition” in the committee. “So we had unlimited debate.” A committee member could speak on any subject as long as he wished—and once he began speaking, there was no way on earth to stop him. When Hennings raised his hand to make a motion to bring up one of his civil rights bills for consideration by the committee, the senator sitting next to him, South Carolina’s Olin Johnston, quickly raised his, and it was Johnston whom Eastland recognized. “Olin the Solon” asked for permission to read a legal brief that dealt with some other—non-civil rights—matter. The brief was a lengthy one, and Olin was a notoriously deliberate reader. And the committee met—once a week—for only ninety minutes. It was to take Johnston five committee sessions to finish reading the brief. During those five weeks, Hennings or some other liberal member of the committee would sometimes raise a hand and try to make a motion to schedule meetings more frequently, but Eastland would explain that the Senator from South Carolina was speaking, and a senator could not be interrupted. An interruption could be accomplished only by the filing within the committee of a cloture petition, he explained—and he was sorry to have to remind the committee that there were not enough members on it for a petition to be filed. A committee member could, of course, make a motion to establish a rule to permit the filing of a cloture petition with less than sixteen signatures. But of course that motion would be subject to Senate rules—which meant that debate on it would be unlimited. “Stepin Fetchit, in his prime, had nothing on the slow-motion paces through which Eastland is dragging the Senate Judiciary Committee,” Louis Lautier of the
Baltimore Afro-American
wrote.

The Brownell Bill now before the House Judiciary Committee was a very different story. Dodging the Manifesto had been easy for Johnson; it was only a symbol, a rallying cry. The bill was substance, hard substance. Broad in scope and skillfully drawn, its passage would revolutionize the treatment of Negroes in America. It had to be stopped.