The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (28 page)

Johnson then ran through lesser items—the tax bill, the foreign aid bill—only to return, yet again, to civil rights. “The time has come for Americans of all races and creeds and political beliefs to understand and to respect one another.”

And though he was interrupted by applause thirty-one times, no cheers were as loud as those that erupted each time he mentioned civil rights. “Everywhere you looked, people were crying,” wrote the journalist Hugh Sidey.
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Johnson’s genius was to tie the driving need for peace and tolerance in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination to the push for racial progress. Though Kennedy’s death had nothing to do with his push for civil rights, Johnson was able to link the two urges as part of the same whole—and to demand that achieving the former meant making progress on the latter. It was a theme he repeated less than twenty-four hours later, in his Thanksgiving Day address: “It is this work that I most want us to do: to banish rancor from our words and malice from our hearts; to close down the poison spring of hatred and intolerance and fanaticism; to perfect our unity north and south, east and west; to hasten the day when bias of race, religion, and region is no more; and to bring the day when our great energies and decencies and spirit will be free of the burdens that we have borne too long.”
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The acclaim for Johnson’s speech before Congress was overwhelming. The address “surprised even his admirers with its force, its eloquence, its mood of quiet confidence,” wrote the
New York Times
. But the most surprised were the civil rights leaders who had long held a dim view of Johnson’s commitment to the cause. Later that night Arnold Aronson of the LCCR sent Johnson a hastily compiled note full of praise. “At the conclusion, all of us were moved to applause,” he wrote. “It was not alone because you called for swift enactment of civil rights legislation; but also because after the terrible violence of the past few days, it was reassuring to hear a voice speak of the need for tolerance and understanding.” Dick Gregory, the black comedian and civil rights activist, quipped, “As soon as Lyndon Johnson finished his speech before Congress, twenty million of us unpacked.”
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Over the holiday weekend Johnson continued to court civil rights leaders. That week Joe Rauh got a call from Kenneth O’Donnell to come to the White House and meet with Johnson. When he arrived, Johnson began entreating him with tough talk on winning civil rights, on pushing poverty programs—basically, the LCCR wish list. “I’ve got to laugh because it’s so humorous,” Rauh recalled. “There was the president I’d fought so long and hard talking to me and taking the attitude of ‘it’s very important, let’s let bygones be bygones.’ Over and over again he said, ‘If I’ve done anything wrong in the past, I want you to know that’s nothing now—we’re going to work together.’”
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But it was one thing for Johnson to call for the bill’s passage; it was another to actually do something about it. And at first, there was little Johnson could do besides play cheerleader and exhorter in chief. The bill was stuck in the House Rules Committee, which was led by the archsegregationist Howard W. “Judge” Smith of Virginia. Since taking control of the committee in 1955, the courtly representative had used its power over deciding which bills moved to the House floor to block virtually every piece of civil rights legislation. The bill seemed likely to face the same fate. “John Kennedy’s bill was in real trouble when he died,” said Rauh.
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Smith’s delay tactics were part of the Southern Democrats’ overall strategy for the bill. They realized that, especially with Kennedy’s death, they had little chance of killing the bill outright. They had always leaned on public indifference and alliances with conservative Republicans to block bills in the past, but public sentiment and Capitol Hill politics were aligned too strongly, for once, in the other direction. Their best hope was to drag the bill into the next summer, when, they believed, increasing black militancy would create a backlash against the bill. Senator George Smathers, a moderate Southern Democrat and close friend of Johnson (and Kennedy), told the new president as much on December 29. “The more time that transpired between this talk about needing the civil rights bill, and the day that the civil rights bill was actually voted on, the stronger position the Southerners would be in.”
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But inside Congress, work was under way to get the bill moving. For one thing, whereas in the past the House Republicans on the Rules Committee, who held the balance of power between the Southern and Northern Democrats, had joined with Smith to hold up civil rights bills, this time they made clear that their patience was thin. Clarence Brown, the ranking Republican on the committee and a recent convert to civil rights (thanks to an odd-fellows friendship with the NAACP’s Clarence Mitchell), had said as much to Smith early on: after a short delay, if Smith did not let the bill go to the floor the Republicans would join with the Northern Democrats to force it out.
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Still, the Republicans and Northern Democrats could not agree on how to move the bill out of the committee—and each suspected the other of plotting to use the impasse to embarrass the other. Almost as soon as the bill arrived on Smith’s desk, the Northern Democrats made it clear they would push for a discharge petition, a contentious procedure designed to force the hands of obstreperous committee chairmen. It begins with a member of a committee filing a motion with the clerk to, in the words of the House rules, “discharge the committee from further consideration of the bill” and move it to the House floor. Once a member files a discharge petition, it lies open on a table in the House chamber for members to sign; it goes into effect if a majority of the entire House signs it.
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But there are two complications regarding a discharge petition. For one, members can remove their names at any time—and often do. “If you started to approach” 218 names, said O’Brien, “all of a sudden you’d find names disappear.” That meant that Republicans trying to court Southern Democrats but also keep their civil rights bona fides safe could sign the petition and thus claim to be for the bill at hand, but could also remove their signature if it looked as if the petition might be approved, thereby avoiding the wrath of Judge Smith.

Second, there is no time limit on how long a discharge petition can sit open—and as a result, the procedure itself, unless it has significant, immediate support, often has much less impact on the Rules Committee than its supporters hope. As the
Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report
noted at the time, discharge petitions are nearly impossible to win. Six had been filed in the 87th Congress, from 1961 to 1963, and not a single one passed.
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Still, both Johnson and the House Democratic leadership decided to go ahead with the discharge petition strategy. On November 29 the president got on the phone with David McDonald, the United Steelworkers president, who had just brought scores of his men to town to lobby Congress on the bill. Johnson told him he needed the union men back on the Hill, this time to push Midwestern representatives to sign a discharge petition. “See that every man that you’ve got is up there next week talking to them—and I don’t want it coming from me,” he said. That same day, he urged A. Philip Randolph to focus his civil rights colleagues on a petition as the only way to make Republicans move off the fence. Civil rights representatives needed to tell the House Republicans that they were either with the bill or against it—and that they would pay at the polls for their opposition.
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On the morning of December 4, Johnson, who was living at the Elms to give the Kennedys time to leave the White House, had an aide find out where George Meany lived; he then had his limousine driver swing by the labor leader’s house, and on the ride in to downtown Washington the president urged him to bring as much pressure as possible on House members to sign the discharge petition.
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The next morning he did the same with Charles Halleck, taking him to the White House for a breakfast of melon, fried eggs, coffee, and bacon—thick-cut bacon, Halleck noted later, “which I guess Lyndon knew a fellow from Indiana would like.” All the while, Johnson was pressing Halleck on the discharge petition, asking him to release his members to sign it, or at the very least to agree to hold the House in session after the beginning of the congressional Christmas break on December 14. Halleck refused both demands. Then Johnson brought up the possibility of placing a $50 million NASA electronics center at Indiana’s Purdue University. Halleck, who loved congressional pork as much as thick-cut bacon, said in that case he would think about it.
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The president moved into the White House on December 7 with a green-topped desk, four television sets, a bust of Franklin Roosevelt, and an eighteen-button phone—which he immediately put to heavy use. Two days later, Celler filed the motion to discharge the bill from the Rules Committee (Johnson had wanted Carl Albert to file the petition, but the majority leader demurred). Larry O’Brien recalled a meeting with Johnson soon after Celler’s filing in which he told the president he had a list of 22 members he thought were vulnerable to pressure on the discharge petition. “He wanted to know who the 22 were, so I pulled it out of the inside pocket of my jacket and showed it to him,” O’Brien said. “He promptly called the White House operator, the names were all given and the directive was to get them on the phone promptly wherever they could locate them. I don’t know whether he went through the whole 22, but I suspect he did.”
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Almost immediately, 131 members signed the petition—but the count stayed around there for the next several weeks, creeping up by just a couple of dozen by year’s end. “That ain’t many!” shouted Johnson when Albert called him on the night of the ninth to report the signatures. The signatories were almost all liberals and administration allies, but without sixty or so Republicans, the petition was worthless. Albert told Johnson he expected no more than twenty Republicans to sign.
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Johnson meant well, of course, but he was pursuing precisely the wrong tactics. Midwestern Republicans were unresponsive to big-city labor and civil rights lobbyists; if anything, these small-town men resented the implication that they should vote on anything other than their constituents’ interests. That was why the only effective means of getting to such representatives was through the clergy—a fact, in late 1963, of which Johnson still seemed unaware. But it was also growing increasingly clear that the discharge petition was a losing tactic.

To be fair, Johnson was not alone in trying, and failing, to ratchet up the signatures (nor was civil rights his sole concern; he was also wooing Senator Harry Flood Byrd, the chair of the Finance Committee, to get the stalled tax bill moving). Just before Thanksgiving the NAACP sent a memo to all its branches urging them to visit their congressmen over the break and demand that they help move the bill forward. “Every name added to the petition puts pressure upon [Smith] to honor his commitment and hold hearings reasonable soon,” the LCCR wrote in its December 16 newsletter. “Every name puts pressure on the other members of the Rules Committee to see that he does not delay consideration on the bill unduly.”
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Johnson also took pains to hedge his bets. Though he publicly supported the civil rights bill, he did everything he could to hide his involvement in the politicking around its passage. Early on, he told O’Brien to make sure that Robert Kennedy personally agreed with his tactics, and he made it clear to the attorney general that he expected the Department of Justice to be the public face of the executive branch push. “I’ll do on the bill what you think is best,” Johnson told him. “We won’t do anything that you don’t want to do on the legislation, and I’ll do everything you want me to do in order to obtain passage.” This merely sounded deferential; in fact, Johnson wanted to make sure, if the bill failed, that the blame fell as far away from the Oval Office as possible—and, conveniently, as close to his archrival Robert Kennedy as he could arrange it. This is not to say that Johnson did not believe in civil rights as a goal—only that he was more skeptical of its chances than he let on.
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Indeed, contrary to what many of his biographers have claimed, Johnson’s contribution to the bill’s success was largely symbolic. Though he worked the phones and pressed the flesh in its favor, there is little evidence that he did much to sway many votes. His main focus was giving speeches and press conferences in which he emphasized his desire for the bill to survive Congress intact. And that symbolism was critical. It mattered immensely that Johnson placed civil rights at the beginning and end of his November 27 speech to Congress. It did not get the bill out of the Rules Committee, but it underlined the moral case for it and placed behind that case the immense prestige of the presidency—which, in the days after it was consecrated by Kennedy’s death, had never been higher. Supporters of the bill could take risks, knowing that the will of the president was behind them.

Johnson repeated his commitment to the top civil rights leaders when they sat down with him at the White House—the men on a couch, the president in a rocking chair opposite and ever so slightly higher than his guests. James Farmer asked him why he supported civil rights, and Johnson reeled out his oft-told tale of the time he asked his black maid Zephyr Wright and her husband to drive his car from Washington back to Texas. As they traveled through the South, they found it hard just to locate a place to eat, or a hotel room for the night. That is why he wanted the bill.
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