The Passage of Power (116 page)

“If you go with us … I’ll appreciate it and I’ll remember it,” Johnson told Ribicoff. He had
put
Ribicoff on Finance, he told him. “When you wanted to go on that committee, I just stood up and said, ‘By God, it’s going to be.’ Now I just want one vote [one motion], and I want to get that bill out of there, and I’ve got to have it, Abe.” Ribicoff said that his amendment “is for something in my home state that’s already been announced” and that he had “a problem with saving [face]” with his constituency. “I’ll save your face,” Johnson said. “You save my face this afternoon, and I’ll save your face tomorrow.” “Okay, Mr. President,” was the reply. When Hartke said he needed to have a separate vote on his amendment
because it was vital to a company in Indiana, Johnson said he couldn’t have it. “We want to just have a general vote.… See if you can’t do that for me.” Laughing, Hartke said, “All right.”

“I’ll do something for you,” Johnson said.

“I know you will,” Hartke replied.

Johnson’s calls to the three senators had lasted a total of nine minutes.

But of course, despite his success with the senators, everything depended on Byrd, on his rulings—and on his vote, too. For all his telephoning Johnson was still one vote short. He telephoned Byrd to ask him to allow the motion for a single vote that very afternoon, and then, on that vote, to vote no.
“I
hope you can help,” Johnson told the chairman in a call to Byrd’s office at 1:17. “Because that [Dirksen amendment] throws
everything
out of caboodle if we lose 450 million”—all the careful budget calculations. “If you’ll go with me on that, we can do it.… Just have one general motion that covers them all.” Byrd said he would have a problem doing that because he had already committed himself to vote in favor of several individual excise tax amendments, but Johnson kept pleading. “I’ll do the best I can,” Byrd said finally. “Help me, Harry,” Lyndon Johnson said.

Late that afternoon, Byrd called the Oval Office, getting the same White House switchboard operator on the line who had connected him to the President that morning. He was so excited that he delivered his news to her, not the President.
“Well,
I want to tell you—the President called me this morning in regard to votes,” he said. “Yes, sir,” the operator said. “We had a 9–8 vote,” Byrd said. “My vote was the one that carried it his way.”

“Ohhh, wonderful!” the operator said. The senator and the operator laughed happily together.

“Tell him, and I won’t bother him, but I … Nine to eight was about cutting out these … reductions of the excise taxes, you know.” The operator said she
did
know. Byrd told her that he had ruled that all the reductions “could be lumped together in a single bill,” and “they were taken out of the bill by nine to eight.”

The operator gave another long “ohhh” of admiration.

“My vote,” the old senator said proudly.

T
HE CALL ENDED
with the operator saying, “I’ll tell him.” She evidently did, because a few minutes later, her boss called Byrd.
“That
Harry Byrd,” Lyndon Johnson said. “He can do anything.”

It was a moment for remembering long-ago days. “You’ve learned to count since I left up there,” Johnson said. “I used to do your counting, but when you can beat them nine to eight, you’re doing all right.”

T
HERE WAS STILL A NEED
for haste. By that last 9–8 vote, the committee had finally finished its hearings on the tax bill, but it could not go to the Senate floor
until the committee’s majority report on the bill was written, printed and filed with the secretary of the Senate, and since a tax bill report was a complex document, the committee’s staff usually took a week or more to write it. And over in the House, Republicans, eager to avoid further reminders about whose party they were the party of, had agreed that the civil rights bill would be reported out of Rules, and passed by the entire House, before members left town on February 8 to begin giving speeches for Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12.
“The
clock is ticking,” Johnson told reporters.

The staff couldn’t take a week.
“You
make them write that Majority Report over the weekend, Harry,” Johnson urged Byrd when he spoke to him that Thursday evening. “They’re going to pass this other bill [the civil rights bill] before Lincoln’s Birthday, and I want to get this tax bill out of the way before that civil rights bill gets there.” Byrd made them—and Johnson made them.
“Startled
officials at the
Government Printing Office” picked up their telephones to find that the caller was the President, ordering them not to close for the weekend in case the Finance Committee report was completed, one account said. Then a “flabbergasted” Elizabeth Springer picked up the phone to find the President of the United States on the line to tell her that the Printing Office was waiting for the manuscript. “No other President of the United States,” this account said, “had ever been quite so familiar with the minutiae of the legislative process.”

Springer’s staff couldn’t finish writing the report over the weekend, as it turned out, but they finished it on Tuesday, January 28—
“record
time,” the
Washington Post
reported—and the Government Printing Office printed it the same day, and on that same day it was filed with the Senate, and Mansfield announced that no other matter would be allowed on the floor until the tax bill was passed, which it was on February 7, three days before the civil rights bill passed the House.

D
IFFICULT THOUGH IT HAD BEEN
to pass the tax cut bill, the effort would be justified by the results. The reductions instituted by the bill, and the increased spending they inspired, were a key element in what would become one of the longest economic expansions in American history. And the bill was passed because of what Lyndon Johnson had done during those first days after he was thrown, with no warning and no preparation, into the budget and tax cut fights, thrown into them and presented at the same time with deadlines that had to be met, and met very quickly. His grasp in an instant of the reality that underlay the haggling over the budget, that Byrd had to be given what he wanted; his promise to let Byrd see the figures for himself; and most important, his ability to take advantage of the affection and trust of an older man, to “get” the ungettable Harry Byrd—these were the crucial elements in breaking a deadlock that, before November 22, had seemed all but unbreakable.

T
HE CIVIL RIGHTS BILL ARRIVED
in the Senate as early as it did—on February 10—because of the outcome of the early skirmish on that bill, the skirmish that had begun before Christmas to pry civil rights loose from Judge Smith’s House Rules Committee. That encounter had ended almost on schedule—on the schedule which back in December Smith and House Republican Leader Halleck had agreed to accept.

Not that that had been an indication of good faith on the part of the judge.

Hardly had Smith gaveled the Rules Committee into order on January 9 to open its hearings on the bill when his agreement began to demonstrate a certain elasticity. During testimony by the very first witness, House Judiciary Committee chairman
Emanuel Celler of New York,
“the
undercurrent of bitter feelings over the measure began showing,” UPI reported, as Smith accused Celler of “railroading” the bill through his committee. “We don’t railroad bills through,” Celler said. “Do you prefer the word ‘strong-armed’?” Smith asked, and it had immediately become apparent that “railroading” (or “strong-arming”) was not a crime of which the judge himself was
going
to be guilty. He allowed each witness to testify at such length—asking them innumerable questions himself and allowing another southern stalwart, Representative
William M. Colmer of Mississippi, to ask innumerable others,
“going
over and over the same points” hour after hour, the
Times
reported—that
after
seven days of hearings, only eight of the thirty witnesses scheduled to testify had been heard. At that pace, the schedule that had been agreed upon in December—that the hearings would not last longer than twelve days—was rapidly becoming meaningless.

That schedule was going to be accelerated, however.

Celler began mentioning to reporters the lever that Johnson had put in place in December with his telephone call to
Richard Bolling, the lever behind which the President had thrown “his full weight,” and that would, if pushed far enough, subject Smith to the “indignity” of having his committee discharged from consideration of the bill. Celler said he certainly expected Smith to live up to the agreement,
and complete the hearings expeditiously. “But,” UPI reported, “Celler also made clear that efforts to get enough votes for a discharge petition, which could bypass the committee if there were a prolonged stall, would not be abandoned.” Johnson told Larry O’Brien to go back to work rounding up signatures to add to the 130 that had been placed on the petition before Christmas.
¹

And when that lever appeared to be stuck, Johnson inserted another one. Despite O’Brien’s efforts, on January 18 the petition still bore only 178 signatures, forty short of the required number, and since 153 of them were Democratic signatures, not too many more could be expected from the Democratic side of the House. And while most of the necessary forty would have to come from the Republican side, Republican leaders, from Halleck on down, were still advising GOP congressmen not to circumvent traditional House procedure by signing. Republican members of the Rules Committee who wanted the bill released were getting the same advice, and, the
Times
reported, were still
“reluctant
to take it away from the chairman.” But at noon on January 18,
Charles Halleck was in the Oval Office. Using logic at first, as Johnson was later to recall,
“I
said, ‘If I were you, Charlie, I wouldn’t dare … go out and try to make a Lincoln Birthday speech that’ll laugh you out of the goddamned park when Howard Smith’s got his foot on Lincoln’s neck. You’d better get that [the bill] out before then.’ ” And then he used a blunter weapon. Picking up the telephone, with Halleck sitting in front of him, the President called NASA Administrator James Webb about requests the Republican Leader had made of NASA, one of them concerning
Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, the largest educational institution in his congressional district.

“He
wants to know what he can tell his people when he’s running for reelection that he’s done for them lately, and he wants to know what we
can
do for Purdue,” Johnson told Webb. “I need to do anything I can for Charlie Halleck. Now isn’t there something you can do?”

Webb replied that he would “talk with him” and “work out something that he’ll come back to you and tell you he’s pleased with.” Johnson set up a time for the two men to meet. And then, after Halleck had left the Oval Office, Johnson got down to the nut-cutting. “Now, Jim,” he said. “This is it.… Let’s help him.” Webb said that he would certainly “do everything I can, and I hope when he comes back to you he’ll tell you that I’ve …” Hoping, however, was not what Lyndon Johnson had in mind. The civil rights bill was still stalled. “If he’s not satisfied when he comes back to me, why, then, I’m going to be talking to you again,” he said.

Webb got the message. After meeting with Halleck on January 21, he telephoned the President.
“I
showed him that we could do some things at Purdue,” Webb said, “a building that would run three-quarters of a million dollars, and we’re talking about some research grants and contracts”—grants and contracts for which, he was careful to say, Purdue was well qualified. And Webb, having worked for Lyndon Johnson for fifteen years, knew that once Johnson had found a weapon that would help him control a man, he liked to keep it in place for further use. He had worked things out, the NASA administrator said, to facilitate Halleck’s cooperation not only immediately but in the future as well. The key research grant “would be spread over three years and then renewed each year,” he said. “The net effect, Mr. President, is that if you tell him that you’re willing to follow this policy as long as he cooperates with you, I can implement it on an installment basis. In other words, the minute he kicks over the traces, we stop the installment.”

“Sounds good,” Lyndon Johnson said. Whether or not the contracts for Purdue had anything to do with it, the following day, January 22, some Republican members of the Rules Committee began doing what Halleck had previously advised them not to do: meeting with Democratic committee members to devise a move to force Judge Smith to speed up the civil rights hearings and release the bill to the floor.
“All
during” the next morning, Thursday, January 23, while the hearings were going on, “members were leaving the hearing to take calls from party leaders,” the
Times
reported, and reports were circulating that Republican signatures, previously withheld from the petition, were about to be added to it. Just before lunch, Judge Smith surrendered. Saying
“I
have been here long enough to know the facts of life,” he announced that he had agreed to a definite date on which the hearings would end—January 30—and said the bill “will be voted out” and sent to the floor on that date. “By the agreement,” the
Times
said, “Mr. Smith was spared the humiliation of having the bill taken away from him by his committee.” At a press conference on Saturday, January 25, Johnson said he was
“very
happy about the progress being made in civil rights. I have said to the [Republican] leadership that I … thought it would be rather unbecoming to go out and talk about Lincoln when we still had the civil rights bill that Lincoln would be so interested in locked up in a committee that couldn’t act on it.” Whatever the reasons, the Rules Committee sent the bill to the floor of the House on January 30, and the House passed it on February 10, sending it to the Senate.
“Congress
,”
Marquis Childs wrote, “is moving on the tax cut and civil rights at a pace that a short time ago seemed inconceivable.”