The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (25 page)

The next morning, Katzenbach went to see McCulloch, hat in hand, yet again. And yet again, McCulloch was furious that the administration could not control its party’s rank-and-file members, particularly on such an important vote. His old suspicion of a double-cross started to sneak up—after all, he had known the day before that Libonati was going to withdraw his amendment. How could the attorney general not have?
34

Finally, Katzenbach convinced him that Libonati had gone off the reservation and that both Celler and the president were still committed to a deal. But McCulloch said that after the latest incident, there was no way their current deal would garner more than seven Republican votes—not enough for the bill to pass safely, and far too few to justify calling it a bipartisan vote with a straight face. A new deal would have to be struck, one that cut even further into the subcommittee draft, starting with the FEPC.
35

Given his druthers, Katzenbach might have been fine ditching the FEPC; under the administration’s playbook, everything outside the original bill was just ballast that could be jettisoned in a legislative storm. But both the president and the Speaker had told him over the previous weeks that they wanted the title to remain, and so he was in a bind with McCulloch—or would have been, if not for a fortuitous conversation the previous afternoon in the office of an old friend, the New Jersey Democrat Frank Thompson. Katzenbach was desperate for ideas that might placate McCulloch, particularly compromise measures that would not concede too much of the meat of the bill.
36

What about the Griffin bill? Thompson asked.

Katzenbach pleaded ignorance. The Griffin bill, Thompson explained, was a piece of FEPC legislation from a few years back—but instead of giving the commission cease-and-desist powers, it was required to sue in federal court. The agency would still have power, but the role of the courts would provide a built-in check on it. Better yet, Griffin was a Republican, whereas the version currently attached to the civil rights bill came from the office of the ultraliberal James Roosevelt. Republicans had rejoiced when the Griffin bill was voted out of the House Labor and Education Committee, and they had been crestfallen when it did not survive the Southern-dominated Rules Committee. Swapping Griffin for Roosevelt would achieve several things at once: it would soften the bill; it would give the Republicans a trophy in their mission to shape, and win credit for, the bill; and, most importantly, it would raise the price for opposing the bill. How could Republicans oppose a title that they had championed just a few years before?

Katzenbach thought it was a brilliant idea. He cleared the idea with Robert Kennedy and O’Brien, then took it to his next meeting with McCulloch. The Ohio Republican was for it, and thought it would help the bill get through the Judiciary Committee. But he did not think Halleck would go for it—and without Halleck, they would never get the sixty rank-and-file votes they needed in the full House.

Over the next few days Katzenbach and McCulloch met constantly—including once at McCulloch’s apartment, to avoid being seen—and hammered out the rest of their new deal. McCulloch, perhaps impressed by the bipartisan gesture on the Griffin bill additon, did not ask for much else; his primary demand was the elimination of the Community Relations Service from the bill, a request Katzenbach gladly conceded.
37

With a new compromise starting to gel, on the evening of October 23, Kennedy called the bipartisan House leadership to the Cabinet Room of the White House. The men entered through the Diplomatic Reception Room off the South Portico, away from the prying eyes of journalists in the West Wing. Along with Halleck and McCormack were Majority Leader Carl Albert of Oklahoma, Minority Whip Leslie Arends of Illinois, McCulloch, and Celler, as well as Vice President Johnson, Robert Kennedy, Katzenbach, and Marshall.
38

The meeting began with Halleck’s report on a meeting of the GOP leadership that morning, which he had rushed back from Indiana to attend, only to hear that many of his members wanted to ditch the bill entirely. “I think it’s only fair to say that this damned thing has gotten all fizzled up and fouled up,” he said. “I must say that Bill McCulloch and Les Arends and I kind of got our ears beat down a little bit this morning. Isn’t that a fair statement?”

“That is a fair statement,” McCulloch concurred.

After letting the two men vent a bit more, President Kennedy stepped in. The bill could still work, he said—everyone in the room wanted it to pass, and getting it there was just a matter of making the right concessions to bring in just enough support from each side. “I think that if we both do our job, we ought to be able to put together a majority.”

McCulloch agreed: “I don’t think we’re too far apart,” he said. But then, on the verge of agreement, the two sides drifted apart over a detail regarding the ballot impoundment provisions under Title I. For another hour, this was the pattern: Kennedy, or Halleck, or McCulloch would take the lead in urging unity, suggesting that compromise was right around the corner, only to have things collapse a moment later.

It became clear that the nub of the issue was how to sell the agreement to their respective parties without knowing for sure that the men across the aisle were on board first. Kennedy pleaded with McCulloch to get together with Katzenbach and work out a preliminary deal. “Then I can say to the Democrats, ‘Here’s the best we can do, and my judgment is, we ought to try to do it,’” he said. “Then if I can get them to agree, the numbers it requires, I’m confident we can get the Republicans.”

Halleck was not quite convinced—at which point Kennedy put the screws on. It did not matter to him, politically, if the subcommittee bill or a compromise went to the House floor. If Halleck did not play ball, Kennedy would just endorse the subcommittee bill, let it go down in flames, and reap the political windfall of having supported a strong civil rights proposal only to have the Republicans and Southern Democrats kill it.
39

“I’m in a pretty good position,” Kennedy said. But, he added, “I think we’re both better off, if we got together.” He suggested that Katzenbach sit down with Celler and McCulloch the next day and work out a rough draft. “Then I will ask the Democrats to come down to the house, down here, and I’ll ask them if they’ll go for it. If I can then get enough of them to go for it, I will call you.”

Still, Halleck was uncomfortable. “Our principle trouble over there has been the conviction that got abroad, after Manny’s subcommittee blew this thing up to be hell, that the whole purpose of that was to put the Republicans in the position of emasculating the bill,” he said. What he did not mention was that he was under particular criticism from young-gun members of his party, particularly Griffin and Gerald Ford, for what they said was Halleck’s imperious, self-interested leadership style. His history of meetings like this one, with Halleck and McCulloch essentially deciding policy for the entire House delegation, had led in January to a coup against Charles Hoeven, a close ally of Halleck and the chair of the House Republican Conference, replacing him with Ford and putting the minority leader on notice. It was bad enough that Halleck was once again unilaterally reaching a compromise with the president; if the bill failed, he would be run out on a rail.
40

Eventually, though, he gave in to Kennedy’s wheedling and deputized McCulloch to reach a deal with Katzenbach. Asked later why he conceded, he said in part it was because he figured civil rights legislation was inevitable, and he did not want to set his party up to be on the wrong side of history. Celler offered to host the meeting in his office, but McCulloch demurred. “As Charlie says, you have your arm around me too much now,” he said. They decided to meet in Katzenbach’s office instead.
41

With the meeting ended, John Kennedy headed upstairs, where he met Jackie and their friends Ben and Tony Bradlee for dinner. Ben Bradlee, then the Washington bureau chief for
Newsweek
, recalled that Kennedy was in a foul mood after going toe-to-toe with Halleck. “Trying to touch Charlie is like trying to pick up a greased pig,” the president said. To boot, “it’s a lousy bill as it now stands”—in part because of the concessions on Title I, which included giving districts the right to appeal judicial findings of discrimination, opening up the possibility of endless legal wrangling before a single black voter could go to the polls. Still, over the next week Kennedy fought for the bill with a skill and tenacity that gave the lie to the notion that he was out of touch with Congress and unwilling to get his hands dirty in legislative power politics—he was, after all, Joe Kennedy’s son, the scion of a tough line of Boston Irish operators.
42

The next day Halleck and Everett Dirksen held one of their regular joint conferences, referred to by the press, with mild disdain, as “the Ev and Charlie Show.” The two would crack lame jokes, go on endless tangents, and rarely say anything of consequence—one political cartoonist had a reporter ask Dirksen, “In a thousand words or less, are you verbose?” But this event was a bit different. Though both expressed skepticism that the bill could get to the Senate by the end of the year, Halleck put himself squarely behind passage of the bill in the Judiciary Committee. “I must say that some things were written in [the subcommittee bill] that would make it very difficult for me to support the bill, and I guess that’s pretty much the attitude of the administration,” he said. Still, he said in his typical loquacious style, if the Democrats were willing to set aside the subcommittee draft and negotiate a compromise, “I can see no reason why the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee would not in the future as they have very evidently done in the past do their level best to try to write good legislation.”
43

Afterward, Halleck and McCulloch sat down with the Republican Judiciary Committee members to discuss compromise. Halleck told them he was getting “a lot of heat from the president. You’d better make up your minds. When you guys decide what you want, I’ll take it down to the White House.” Then McCulloch pressed his own angle. “If you have one iota of compassion in your heart, and if you support the Constitution, you know there’s only one thing to do,” he said. One or both tactics worked, and the majority agreed at least to oppose the Moore motion, if not vote for the bill itself.
44

Around the same time, Kennedy called a meeting in the White House’s Yellow Room of the Northern Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. The president, recalled representative Don Edwards of California, was in a convivial mood, laughing and smoking a cigar. “He was wearing a beautiful blue shirt,” Edwards said. Kennedy began by explaining the rough outlines of the compromise, then asked the men to give up on the subcommittee draft and support the compromise instead. “We want to pass something,” he said. “We sympathize with what you’ve done but we can’t pass the bill in its present form.”
45

George Senner, a representative from Arizona, spoke up first. “We’re with you, Mr. President.” But the rest remained muted, shifting uncomfortably in their chairs to indicate their dissent from Senner’s hasty exclamation. Their unresponsiveness did not faze Kennedy, though. He still had a few days to win them over; the important thing was that they not make promises in the meantime to the LCCR. He told them to stay loose, not to commit to anything too early, and that the bill was still being worked out.
46

The meeting over, Kennedy twiddled his thumbs waiting for Halleck to call to tell him how many Republicans would get behind him. The minority leader had promised he would call by noon, and Kennedy began to worry as the clock ticked into the afternoon hours. “The thought crossed our minds that we had been had, that the crafty Republican leader had only been pulling our legs with his promise of cooperation,” recalled O’Brien, who sat nervously in the room with the president. A few minutes before one o’clock, Kennedy decided to call Halleck. “It was a measure of his anxiety about the civil rights bill that he was willing to call a Republican leader who had failed to make a promised call to the President and who, for all we knew, was sitting in his office with a few cronies having the laugh of his life,” O’Brien said.

When he did get Halleck on the phone, though, the news was better than he could have expected. “Mr. President, I’m terribly sorry, I had a hard time catching a couple of my fellows and I just talked to the last one,” Halleck said. “But I was just about to call you with good news—I’ve got you the vote[s] to get your bill out of the committee.” Kennedy, O’Brien said, “was overjoyed.”
47

Things were not quite as rosy as Halleck made them out to be. Ironically, he had commitments from most of the conservative Republicans, but he still faced a potential problem with the liberals, particularly John Lindsay, who might throw roadblocks in front of the compromise out of sheer petulance for being excluded from the negotiations. So Halleck sent McCulloch to appease him.

McCulloch first sent one of his Judiciary staff aides, William Copenhaver, to speak with Robert Kimball, Lindsay’s closest staff adviser and point man on civil rights. Kimball said he did not think Lindsay would vote for the bill. “Lindsay simply doesn’t trust the administration to keep any kind of commitment,” he said. Still, Copenhaver said, it would be worth trying to win him over. “I’ll go to Lindsay if you think this time there’s a chance” of the compromise bill happening, Kimball said. “I’ll try to help, but only if that is the case.”
48