The Passage of Power (103 page)

After Meany had left, Speaker McCormack said Judge Smith’s recalcitrance meant that getting the bill to the Senate early enough in 1964 for there to be any realistic hope of passage there was going to be difficult. “We cannot expect any action by Rules”—not even the setting of a date for hearings—“until the middle of January,” he said. A discharge petition was “the only thing we can do,” but “a lot of members don’t like the discharge petition as a matter of policy.”

Although he had given
Bolling the go-ahead for the petition the previous evening, Johnson’s first comment about the maneuver at the breakfast seemed to be merely an agreement with McCormack’s reservation. Then he added, however, “psychologically it [the petition] would be good for the country. All you are asking is a hearing.” Sentiment around the table moved toward a petition. Firming things up, he made sure they were all in agreement. “Does everybody agree that you get as many [Democratic] signatures [on the petition] as you can? Then tell the Republicans they must match us man for man.” Bringing the discussion to an end, he said that when he himself had been in the House,
“I
was always reluctant to sign a discharge petition. But you have a great moral issue.” McCormack had harbored some doubts, small but persistent, about whether Johnson’s commitment to the bill was as strong in private as in public; had been hoping, he had told a friend the day before, for some
“definite
word.” After that breakfast,
he knew he had it. He told the waiting reporters that the discharge petition would be filed as soon as possible.

And Johnson was not only laying out a strategy on Tuesday, he was counting the votes that would be behind it.

The first counts he received were an illustration of why bills hadn’t been getting passed. House Majority Leader
Carl Albert of Oklahoma assured him of 165 Democratic signatures for the petition, but when Johnson asked the House Majority Leader—and the other leaders—specifically where those signatures would come from, since so many Democrats were from the South and border states, no one seemed to know. And even if the 165 number was correct, 53 Republican signatures would be needed to reach the required 218, and, as Albert was to confess, he had no idea how many Republicans would sign. When Johnson pressed the Majority Leader at the breakfast, his answers were the answers of a man who only thought he knew.
“Where
do you get your count of 165?” Johnson asked him. “We may have trouble getting it,” Albert had admitted. “I think 150 would be more like it.” “That includes twenty Republicans,” Majority Whip
Boggs chimed in.

“What good is thinking to me?”
Telephoning Albert after the breakfast, Johnson asked,
“Can
we make a little poll of our own?” Congressmen should be asked one by one, each by the Democratic assistant whip responsible for knowing his views. “Just start going down them by whips,” he said. And get answers that could be relied on.
“Thinking isn’t good enough. I need to
know
!”
“Just say to each whip, ‘Now we’ve got to know and this is it.’ ”

Counting the votes—and getting the votes. Larry O’Brien arrived on Capitol Hill with his assistants, and soon the Hill was buzzing with reports of the pressure the White House was putting on congressmen. And Meany was not the only labor leader Johnson was contacting.
“We’re
going to either rise or fall … on the results of [the petition],” Johnson had told Dave McDonald of the Steelworkers, “and I think if there’s ever a time when you really talk to every human you could … you ought to do it. If we could possibly get that bill out of the Rules Committee.… We’ve got to get 219 [
sic
] …. Until we get 219 we’ll be a failure. And if we fail on this, then we fail in everything.”

“I’ll have all my legislative people report to Nordy immediately,” McDonald had promised, and on this Tuesday, when his call to Johnson was put through while the President was talking to Martin Luther King, the Steelworkers lobbyists were working the Hill under the direction of Frank Nordhoff (“Nordy”) Hoffman. “We’ve got thirty-three guys at work covering forty-five states,” McDonald told Johnson. “Our boys are staying on top. We still haven’t contacted North and South Carolina, Georgia or Tennessee, but that’ll be done today.”

“Well, you won’t get that many [votes] there,” Johnson said.

“No, but we can put the muscle on them,” McDonald replied.

Getting the votes himself.

Albert’s 165—or 150, or 130, or whatever—count of petition supporters did not include any from Texas. Since the state was still so overwhelmingly southern
in its racial attitudes, getting any would be hard. A key to getting them, however, could be
Albert Thomas, whose appropriations subcommittee chairmanships, and access to
Brown & Root campaign funds, made him a congressman to whom other Texas congressmen paid attention.

Thomas was an advocate neither of civil rights nor of interference with House prerogatives, and when Johnson first asked him about the petition, he said he was against it. He was, however, an advocate of appropriations for Brown & Root projects such as the deep-ocean drilling project called “Mohole,” and wanted assurances that Johnson’s budget economizing wouldn’t extend to the annual appropriation for that project that added so substantially to Brown & Root’s annual profit. And he wanted to know also that he would continue to have the final say over matters before his subcommittees, that the new President wouldn’t interfere with that. Giving him what he wanted, Johnson told Thomas that he would rely on
“your
judgment on the [National] Science Foundation before I send my budget up there,” but coupled this assurance about Thomas’ influence with a request that he use that influence for civil rights. When, that morning, Thomas had said he was against the petition, Johnson, as he was to relate to
Homer Thornberry,
“told
him” that nonetheless “I sure hoped he’d sign it, and he said all right”; after all, Johnson said to Thornberry, Republicans, “the party of Lincoln wouldn’t do anything” to help it pass—and in fact Thomas quickly called together the members of the Texas delegation whose districts did not include large numbers of African-Americans, and after that meeting Thornberry said the petition would have “six signatures from Texas,” six more than it had had before.

Covering the House of Representatives for the
New York Times
that Tuesday,
Anthony Lewis felt the mood shifting, and by evening, he understood the reason why. Sitting down at his typewriter, he wrote his lead:
“President
Johnson threw his full weight today behind the effort to pry the civil rights bill out of the House Rules Committee.”

Pointing out that “It is extraordinary for any President to give direct support to a discharge petition,” Lewis said that “The petition procedure is unusual, and it rarely works.… But the President’s intervention could provide the psychological push to get past those obstacles.” It hadn’t taken long for the President’s intervention to begin having an effect, he wrote. “By this evening,” he said, “there was some evidence of a dramatic impact on the situation in the House.” One veteran legislator, Lewis wrote, had told him, “It is too turbulent to predict anything certainly now, but I’ve never seen one before where we’ve had the President going, and the civil rights groups, and labor, and the church people.”

A
ND IN FACT
it didn’t take long at all. The next day, Wednesday, December 4, the headlines were made by the Republican leaders of the House, who at a conference of the Chamber’s Republican members that morning denounced the discharge
petition (
“This
move for a petition is irritating some people” who otherwise would have supported the civil rights bill, warned Ohio’s McCulloch, ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee), announced that none of the leaders would sign it, and predicted that few other Republicans would, either.
“The
consensus appeared to be that the Rules Committee should be allowed a reasonable time to hold hearings and act on the bill before a … petition was used,” Conference chairman Gerald Ford told reporters. Not a single congressman had spoken in favor of a petition at the conference, Ford said.
RIGHTS BILL STYMIED
, the
Washington Star
was to proclaim the next day.
HOUSE G.O.P. SCORNS PLAN TO FORCE ACTION ON RIGHTS
, the
Times
said.

Those headlines, however, didn’t take sufficient account of other meetings that day, among them two at which Johnson spoke: the first with the
Business Advisory Council, eighty-nine of the nation’s biggest businessmen; the second with the twenty-member
AFL-CIO Executive Council. At both of the meetings the President showed again his gift for political phrasemaking. He had found his phrase now. Just as a key to his strategy was to make the public understand the issue—to make the public understand that Republican congressmen voting against the petition were actually opposing civil rights—another key was to make these congressmen wary of voting against it, to let them know that their vote could put them in an embarrassing position. And he had found a phrase that would dramatize the issue vividly, a phrase that would touch with Republican congressmen, because they were, after all, members of the party of the President who had freed the slaves. It was a phrase that had a ring to it, and Johnson knew it. Over dinner with old colleagues that evening, he told them what he had said at the two meetings:
“I
talked to both of them about the party of Lincoln.”

He had indeed, and had hammered the phrase home. After telling the businessmen that he knew that most of them were Republicans, and, due to fundamental philosophical differences, might be his opponents, but that, nonetheless,
“I
am the only President you have; if you would have me fail, then you fail, for the country fails,” he told them that at this moment they should be supporting him on civil rights. “I will say to those of you who belong to the party of Lincoln,” he said, “that the civil rights bill was sent to Congress in May,” and Judge Smith was blocking it, and Republicans—members of “the party of Lincoln”—were supporting Smith. He had, he said, told the businessmen
“that
they either had to have two members [on the Rules Committee] from the party of Lincoln for civil rights, or they oughtn’t to have one single Republican re-elected and they ought to have 60 or 70 or whatever you need on that petition—they’re [the public is] going to know who’s responsible and it’s going to be right in the Republicans’ lap.”

To the labor leaders, he spoke as a general aware that he was speaking to men some of whom had been his enemies but who now should be his supporters—a general rallying troops.
“I
need you, want you, and believe you should be at my side,” he said. “This nation will be grateful to you—and so will I.” Labor
leaders showed their enthusiasm more visibly than business leaders. As he got to the last sentences in his speech, all around him men were standing and applauding.

He had rallied them to his side—and they came. The Steelworkers’ thirty-three lobbyists were already at work, and by the end of the day, the halls of the House Office Buildings were filled with perhaps two hundred more
“guys
with big stomachs and big watches,” in the words of a congressional aide—lobbyists from the Electrical Workers and the Auto Workers and the railroad brotherhoods—with, behind them, the promise of labor’s telephone banks, and labor’s field-workers, and labor’s money for next year’s election campaign.

And there was a third meeting that day—of the two hundred members of the
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights at a Washington hotel—and this time the anger and bitterness of these men at social injustice had a focus. Congress was no longer an amorphous problem that they couldn’t solve; Johnson had given them a clear target. Meany explained
“that
the discharge petition offered the only method” that would work, the
Washington Post
reported, and Wilkins “repeated the NAACP’s intention of purging congressmen who voted against” it. Johnson and O’Brien knew that the civil rights groups alone didn’t have enough broad strength to get the petition signed, but among the participants in the conference were leaders of religions organizations. Four thousand priests and ministers were at that moment in Philadelphia, attending a
National Council of Churches convention; the Leadership Conference decided to contact them and ask them to return home by way of Washington so that they could visit their representatives and urge them to vote for discharge. By that evening, in fact, an advance guard had already arrived on Capitol Hill.
“Negro
and labor leaders are streaming in,”
Doris Fleeson reported, and there were clerics’ collars in the halls, too. Mail to congressmen about civil rights had been increasing. That afternoon, it was, one report said,
“heavy
in favor of action now.”

And all day the President hammered home, over and over again, the theme he wanted emphasized, the phrase that would make it politically untenable for Republicans to keep opposing the petition.
“We’ve
just got to [get] the party of Lincoln on that goddamned spot and keep them there, and carry it right on through the election,” he told O’Brien. “If they’re anti-civil rights, let’s find out about it right now.… We’ll play it for keeps.”

By the end of Wednesday, in fact, it was over. Despite the headlines, it wasn’t Wednesday morning’s Republican conference with its defiant anti-petition stance that was decisive but a quiet meeting Wednesday evening, mostly unreported at the time, between
Clarence Brown of Ohio, the pro–civil rights Republican who was the GOP’s ranking member on the Rules Committee, and the committee’s chairman.

Brown told Judge Smith, as a later account puts it, that “the heat was getting so great” that Republicans—by neither signing the petition nor voting against Smith in committee, thereby in effect supporting him—were being put
in an embarrassing and politically untenable position. “Appealing to their friendship, Brown said he did not want to have to push him, but something had to be done.” Whether or not Brown made a specific threat, he didn’t have to, so clear was the situation. Two Republican votes could overrule Smith within his own committee and have the committee release the bill to the floor. Or enough Republican signatures could be added to the discharge petition so that it would have the necessary 218. Either course would be a public repudiation of Smith’s authority. Smith agreed to issue a statement, which he did early Thursday morning.