Master of the Senate (199 page)

“There were many speakers, but the floor was wholly dominated by two big men, stationed cheek by jowl on the center aisle—big, chunky, earnest Minority Leader William Knowland, and lanky Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson,”
Stewart Alsop wrote. “They made a fascinating contrast. Knowland sat stolidly, like a great cornered bull, his enormous forehead furrowed in parallel wrinkles, foretasting defeat. Johnson sat back easily, his long legs negligently crossed, when he was not moving restlessly about. Once, when Everett Dirksen of Illinois rose to support Knowland with his special brand of empty grandiloquence (‘I have been thinking much of Runnymede’), Johnson half-yawned and lazily scratched his chest, in a magnificent gesture of casual confidence.” The speeches didn’t matter; Johnson’s every gesture made that clear. What mattered was the votes—and he had the votes.

Finally, after Dirksen had finished, Knowland rose to make a last appeal, poignant because by this time even he knew what its result would be. “This will be a historic roll call. Let it come. Our successors and history will be able to judge the issues, even if for the moment there is confusion here tonight.” He ended by bellowing out a line that must have been difficult for him to say, but which he may have felt represented the only hope left for him. “Support our President, Dwight D. Eisenhower!” he shouted.

Then, as the hands on the clock neared midnight, and Nixon came in to take the presiding officer’s chair, a page placed a lectern on the Majority Leader’s desk, and Johnson himself rose to give the last speech. “Mr. President, sometimes in the course of debate we use loose language. But it is not speaking loosely to say that the Senate is approaching a truly historic vote. By adopting this amendment, we can strengthen and preserve two important rights. One is the right to a trial by jury. The other is the right of all Americans to serve on juries, regardless of race, creed or color.” And his last line was the perfect climax, the most fitting last line, the
only
last line, really, for a legislative drama.

“Mr. President,” Lyndon Johnson said, “I ask for the yeas and nays.”

F
OR A TIME
, to those in the galleries, the vote may have seemed to be going against the Leader. The first two senators called—Aiken and Allott—responded “Nay,” and at the end of twenty-five names, with the roll just finishing the Ds, the tally was 16 to 9 against the amendment. But Johnson, sitting at his desk with the smudged tally sheet in front of him, wasn’t worried. He knew what was coming—and, with the start of the
Es
, it came. “Eastland?”
Aye.
“Ellender?”
Aye.
“Ervin?”
Aye.
By the time the clerk reached the Ms, the
ayes
were ahead—and so many of the Ms were from the Mountain States and the Northwest. “Magnuson?”
Aye.
“Malone?”
Aye.
“Mansfield?”
Aye.
“Murray?”
Aye.
Shortly after midnight—at 12:19 a.m. on August 2—Nixon announced that the amendment was approved, by 51 votes to 42.

B
EFORE THE LAST WORDS
were out of Nixon’s mouth, a senator jumped up at his desk on the far left-hand side of the Democratic arc and started not for the cloakroom but for the lobby, because that was where the closest telephone was.
He was a senator who no longer moved very fast, because he was old, but he was moving as fast as he could. It was Joseph O’Mahoney. His wife, Agnes, was in a wheelchair, and hadn’t been able to come. He was hurrying to call her to give her the news.

I
N THE WAKE OF THE VOTE
, emotions spilled over. Richard Nixon could not contain his frustration and rage. When, as he was leaving the Chamber, reporters asked his reaction, the Vice President said, “This is one of the saddest days in the history of the Senate. It was a vote against the right to vote.” Clarence Mitchell went to Knowland’s office to discuss what to do now, and could hardly believe what he saw there. “That big, strong, brusque Knowland actually broke down and cried,” Mitchell was to recall.

What overflowed in Bethine Church was pride. She had been sitting in the Family Gallery all evening, and when the vote began, she did not know how it was going to go. “You couldn’t take notes in the gallery, so I was tallying the vote on my hands and feet,” she was to recall. The vote went, of course, the way her husband wanted it to go, “and when I left the gallery I was so excited.” She hoped there was awareness of Frank’s importance in the civil rights fight, and as she was leaving the Capitol that night, she found out there was. “I got to the bottom floor, and I started through the swinging doors, and Jack Kennedy caught my arm as I was going through the door and he said, ‘Your man pulled it off! He did a great job!’”

Kennedy wasn’t alone in that assessment. “After my role in the passage of that civil rights legislation, Lyndon Johnson was warmly and massively grateful, so much so that I was almost stifled in his embrace,” Frank Church said. “He would pick you up and wrap his arms around you and just squeeze the air out.” The gratitude of the Leader took tangible forms. At a cocktail party early in the year, Bethine, talking with a group of people, had remarked that she had always wanted to visit South America. Johnson had heard her, and two weeks after the jury trial vote, she was in South America. After the vote, Johnson named her husband the Senate’s representative to a ten-day conference, in Buenos Aires, of the Organization of American States. The assignment was “a kind of indication of his new friendship and embrace,” Church realized.

There were other indications. “Nothing was too good for me,” Church was to say. “First [in March, 1958] he put me on the McClellan [Labor] Rackets Committee,” which was about to begin its publicity-rich hearings into the Teamsters Union and Jimmy Hoffa, and told Church why he was doing so: “I’ve got a vacancy there to fill, and it will give you some good exposure…. I think it will be good for you.” And then there was the committee appointment for which Church had longed. “After a decent interval [after the jury trial addendum], Johnson put him on Foreign Relations, in what was a tacit
quid pro quo
, which was never expressed, but which I think was understood,” Ward Hower says.

Actually, the interval was barely decent. The very next vacancy on Foreign Relations occurred in January, 1959, and Church was appointed to it. In making the appointment Johnson simply bypassed not only Estes Kefauver but Scoop Jackson and a half dozen other senators with greater seniority than Church who had requested the post. Church had wanted “not only to go on” the committee, but “to go on early,” so that he could be chairman, like Borah, someday. Now he had gone on early; calling on its staff director, Carl Marcy, not long after his appointment, he looked at the portraits of the committee chairmen hanging on the wall, and said, “Maybe someday I’ll be there.”

And there was a note—undated, but it was probably written in 1958—scribbled by Lyndon Johnson one day when he was sitting in on a meeting of the Interior Committee of which Church was a member, a note that indicates how accurately Johnson had read the easy-to-follow text that was Frank Church. “Frank,” the note said, “I told Drew Pearson yesterday I wanted him to help me give you a build up over the years that would give you the recognition your ability deserve[s]. Someday you can, may & should be our President.”

T
HE PASSAGE OF THE JURY TRIAL AMENDMENT
, coming on top of the elimination of Part III, infuriated Republicans—those who had been fighting for Brownell’s unamended bill out of a sincere belief in civil rights because they felt that those two changes rendered the original bill meaningless, those who had been fighting for political advantage for the GOP because they felt the advantage had been lost. They sought to regain it. Fuming from his long and fruitless day trying to win back GOP senators, Vice President Nixon, flanked by Deputy Attorney General Rogers, was heading out for dinner on the evening of the jury trial vote when he encountered Joe Rauh and Paul Sifton in a Senate corridor. They had a brief conversation—the conversation in which all four agreed that they were about to lose that vote—and then Nixon said, “Boys, I think we ought to consider whether the best strategy wouldn’t be to just let the civil rights bill die in conference this year, and then make an all-out fight for a stronger bill next year.” President Eisenhower, informed of the result when he awoke the next morning, could not have been angrier if he had missed an easy putt. He opened that day’s Cabinet meeting by calling the Senate action “one of the most serious political defeats of the past four years, primarily because of a denial of a basic principle of the United States,” the right to vote, and his formal statement at that day’s press conference, read with a grim expression on his face, was one of the angriest he had ever made publicly about Congress. “Rarely in our entire legislative history have so many extraneous issues been introduced into the debate,” he said, adding how “bitterly disappointing” the vote had been to “millions of Americans who … will continue … to be disenfranchised.” “The blackest of black days,” Ann Whitman wrote in her diary.

The gutting of the bill—even with Church’s addendum to the jury trial amendment—infuriated some African-American leaders. Among those who urged Eisenhower not to sign it were some from a new generation, like Jackie Robinson, who telegraphed, “
HAVE WAITED THIS LONG FOR BILL WITH MEANING—CAN WAIT A LITTLE LONGER
,” and some from the old, like
A. Philip Randolph, who said, “It is worse than no bill at all.” And some black Americans blamed Lyndon Johnson for the gutting. Ethel Payne, who was covering the Senate for the
Chicago Defender
, was to recall how “We all sat watching while Lyndon Johnson, the most astute maneuverer on the Hill, cracked his whip and marshalled his forces to cut the guts and the heart out of the bill.” And the changes infuriated liberals, who saw the addendum as a cynical device to give the appearance of meaningfulness to something that had no meaning since southern juries would almost certainly include at least one white. “Can one then picture a jury from the Deep South unanimously finding a white election official guilty for depriving a Negro of the right to vote?” Paul Douglas asked. “A hung jury is almost as good as an acquittal.” Church’s idealistic young staff members Ward and Phyllis Hower felt their senator had been wrong to introduce it; so “emotional” was Phyllis about it that for weeks she could barely bring herself to talk to her boss.

What good was the bill as a whole? liberals asked. The jury trial amendment rendered toothless the provisions about voting—and voting was now the only right covered by the bill. “The Federal government is still prevented from coming to the aid of hard-pressed citizens whose civil rights to unsegregated schooling, transportation, and other public facilities are denied,” Paul Douglas said. “These people, who are almost universally poor and weak [must still] fight their costly and protracted legal battles alone…. It has been the advocates of segregation and white domination who have won the major triumph.” An old man who for years had stood shoulder to shoulder with Douglas, and who had left the Senate battlefield because he was afraid he could no longer be effective on it, had been anxiously following the debate in a
Congressional Record
that he had arranged to have flown every day to his hotel in Switzerland, and he wrote to console his longtime ally. “I know how deeply you have felt on this subject, and of your inevitable sense of disappointment and frustration,” Herbert Lehman wrote. “I want you to know, however, how much I have admired your leadership…. What you have done has been one of the few bright spots in an otherwise very gloomy and frightening situation.” But Lehman had to confess that he himself was “sorely disappointed…. The bill in its present form will be merely a gesture and quite ineffective.” The anger of such liberals focused on Lyndon Johnson—“I was so mad at Johnson I was speechless, for gutting the bill so much,” recalls Joe Rauh—and was given voice by liberal columnists. On August 5, for example, Thomas Stokes denounced “the sham perpetrated upon the Senate and the American people” which “intrudes upon the human dignity of millions of persons who for a long time have suffered denial of guaranteed rights which the rest of us take for granted.”

“The civil rights fiasco in the Senate … was admittedly a triumph for the southern wing,” Stokes wrote. “It was, too, a compliment, if of dubious character, for the ingenious and slick leadership of Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas.
In this case, he virtually compromised the civil rights bill out of existence in the zeal of exercising his talents of maneuver and behind-the-scenes negotiations of which he is so proud…. Looking back on it all, we might say that never was strategy so brilliant to bring about so evil a result.” The
New York Post
, which had been denouncing Richard Nixon for years, said that in this fight Lyndon Johnson had made even Nixon look good.

F
RUSTRATION AND ANGER LED
some Republican senators at first to favor the course that Nixon had suggested in the Senate corridor. Somehow the civil rights issue, which was
their
issue, had been captured by the Democrats. “The Republicans are understandably quite furious that Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, the Senate Democratic Leader, is now getting the credit of sorts for having navigated a civil rights bill through the Senate without… a filibuster,” Rowland Evans wrote. And if the Democrats got credit, the Republicans might well get blame. The bill had been stripped of its enforcement provisions—and the burden of enforcement would fall on a Republican Justice Department. When enforcement efforts failed, as, thanks to the jury trial amendment, they would inevitably fail, “the Republicans, not the Democrats, will have to make the explanations to disillusioned Negro voters,” Evans wrote. The solution for the GOP might lie in the next stage of the bill’s legislative journey: the House had passed a bill—Brownell’s original bill, a bill that included Part III and did not include any provision for jury trials—very different from the bill the Senate had passed. The two bills had to be reconciled, and unless some unusual step was taken, they would go for reconciliation to a joint House-Senate conference committee. Southern representatives and senators were generally heavily represented on these committees, which also included key members of the committees into whose jurisdiction the bill fell—so not only Judiciary’s Olin Johnston but Judiciary’s Chairman Jim Eastland might well be members of the Senate delegation. If a compromise could not be agreed on, the bill would die in conference. That prospect was not at all displeasing to some Republicans: Since the bill could only hurt their party, why not just let it die? Since the conference committee would be dominated by Democrats, Democrats would be blamed for the death, and civil rights would then be a potent issue for the GOP in the 1958 election year. “It would be infinitely better to let the bill die and wait three months [until January, 1958, when the next session of Congress would begin] and get a real bill,” House GOP Leader Joseph Martin said.