The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (39 page)

Wallace’s victory was not a total shock to those who had watched him crisscross Wisconsin in the months before. He had packed the auditoriums of urban, ethnic, working-class neighborhoods in Milwaukee. And yet he also drew on a less evident but very rapidly growing fear among middle-class whites, the very people who were supposed to form the bedrock of national support for the civil rights bill. “Despite the Alabamian’s dramatically visible support in working-class ‘ethnic’ precincts,” wrote Wallace’s biographer Dan T. Carter, “the typical Wallace voter was just as likely to be a suburban member of the Rotary Club as a regular at the union hall.” But the details of the vote mattered less than what it said about the public’s support for the bill. If voters in early April were turning away from civil rights, what might happen if the expected summer of demonstrations and violence arrived and the filibuster was still on? President Johnson worried that Wallace’s success gave Southern Democrats a shot in the arm, and the “will to keep on fighting the civil rights measure until the liberal ranks began to crumble.” The bill’s opponents made great hay of the Wallace win; the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in
National Review
that “what the white North is awakening to is the danger to individual liberty of the new and radical plans breaking up traditional American patterns for racial assimilation and conciliation. For reasons that seem less and less coincidental, the proposals tend to be backed most conspicuously by a segment of the community which is far gone in a commitment to state socialism, which despises the American way of life and our civilization.”
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In fact, no one had to look beyond the other story in the papers on the day after the primary to find evidence of renewed racial tensions across the country. As voters went to the polls in Wisconsin, a young Cleveland clergyman named Bruce Klunder joined a protest against a construction project that local activists said had shut out black workers. At one point Klunder, a big, bespectacled man, “a sort of Clark Kent of the pulpit,” as
Time
called him, threw himself behind a bulldozer while three other protesters ran in front. The driver, who did not see him, put his six-ton vehicle in reverse to get away from the men; Klunder was caught under the treads and crushed to death. Shock turned to anger among the protesters, who attacked the driver, then other workers and the site itself. Cleveland police arrived and a two-hour street battle ensued.
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As the month dragged on, the energy behind the bill shifted rapidly to the back rooms, and the attention—within the Senate at least—shifted to Dirksen. And Dirksen knew it, had in fact known since before the bill was first introduced that its fate would come down to him, to his ability to lead enough conservative Republicans to back a significant expansion of federal power. And yet Dirksen was ready to play along. Since the early 1950s, he had acted as a bridge between the establishment and conservative elements in his own party, whether it was President Eisenhower’s internationalist foreign policy, which he sold to a Republican Senate still in the throes of Taftian isolationism, or the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts, which he sold to a wing of the party that highly prized its “conservative coalition” with the Southern Democrats. Dirksen’s magic lay in his ability to remain at the head of the Republican senatorial caucus even as, time and again, he crossed ranks against his colleagues. Dirksen imagined himself a statesman, cobbling together grand compromises in the greater interest of the country. He was, in the eyes of Senator Carl Curtis, “a superb leader in getting divergent factions together to get something done.” But other Republicans and observers were less enamored, and saw in Dirksen a man whose greatest interest lay in his own career. No one, wrote the columnist Kenneth Crawford, “gauges the political wind with a wetter finger.”
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Whatever his motives, Dirksen decided early on that he would support the bill. In late October 1963, Kennedy had invited Dirksen to accompany him, Katzenbach, McCulloch, and Halleck on a trip to Chicago to see the annual Army-Navy game at Soldier Field. At the last minute, a new crisis in Vietnam forced the president to cancel, but he sent the rest of the delegation on to the Windy City. Katzenbach later recalled that while Dirksen refused to commit one way or the other on the bill’s particulars, he left no doubt where he stood on it overall. “His final words to me then were, ‘Don’t worry. This bill will come to a vote in the Senate,’” Katzenbach wrote in his memoirs.
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Others in the Justice Department agreed that the minority leader would come along at the right time. Norbert Schlei, the Justice Department official who oversaw much of the early drafting of the bill, would regularly meet with Dirksen to discuss how the bill was coming along. Even as Dirksen railed against Title II in public, Schlei noted, “in private he was from the outset seemingly friendly to the bill and its purposes.” And by February, Dirksen was indeed laying the groundwork for a switch; at a February 20 press conference, he told reporters, with his own inimitable wit, that he was no longer opposed to Titles II and VII. “Do me the justice of putting in whatever you write down that I’ve always had an open mind and I always feel free to come along with alternatives and substitutes that are infinitely more to my liking because I still take my freedom straight. I’m like little Johnny when the teacher said to him, ‘Johnny, how do you spell “straight”?’ ‘S-t-r-a-i-g-h-t.’ ‘And what does it mean?’ ‘Without ginger ale.’”
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Dirksen knew that he could not simply order his colleagues to vote for the bill. Some would support it on their own volition. But the Senate was a different place from the House, where the leadership called the shots. In the Senate, members considered themselves independent, and persuasion and horse trading were more practical tools than force. And Dirksen had already frayed his connections with several leading conservatives, most notably Iowa’s Bourke Hickenlooper, a man of lower stature but equal ego (and greater seniority), who bristled at Dirksen’s support of the Kennedy administration on the 1963 Test Ban Treaty, which Hickenlooper and the conservative Republicans had opposed. It was not the first time the two were at odds, and such splits, wrote the journalist Elizabeth Drew in the
Reporter
, “often left Hickenlooper and his fellow conservatives standing in the shadows while Dirksen rode forth into glory, proclaimed a hero for rescuing the Kennedy administration from defeat.” Even Dirksen’s home state was starting to buck him. In 1963 the Illinois chapter of the National Federation of Republican Women passed a resolution criticizing Dirksen for crossing over too regularly to support the president.
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And so, as the bill wended its way through the House and into the Senate, Dirksen had to do two things. First, he needed to lay the groundwork for a plausible conversion from skeptic to supporter while remaining careful not to tip off his watchful conservative colleagues. On February 20, he told a press conference, “I have no assumption in mind at the present time” for whether the bill would win a cloture vote, but that he would keep an open mind about it.
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At the same time, he had to make it appear that he would exact a high price for his support. In late March, word leaked that he had prepared a long list of desired amendments, some of them quite significant. On March 26, he had given a long speech in which he criticized parts of Title VII, saying that it posed onerous record-keeping requirements on businesses and risked undermining the strong equal opportunity laws that already existed in some states—including, he pointed out, Illinois. Four days later, though, after drawing criticism for his speech, he went up into the press scrum in the Senate gallery to try to convince them that he did not want to “emasculate” or “water down” the title.
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But that was not the message that many of the bill’s supporters were getting. On the night of March 31, Clarence Mitchell had brought Humphrey a copy of what he said were Dirksen’s amendments; he would not say where he got it, and he would not let Humphrey keep it. The men were gobsmacked: as Raymond Wolfinger recalled, the amendments were aimed directly at Title VII. “He let us look at it long enough to get a clear idea that, far from being technical or trivial, Dirksen’s amendments would completely destroy the title.”
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The amendments, which Dirksen presented to the weekly Tuesday luncheon of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, included some forty changes to Title VII alone, a fact that pleased Hickenlooper, the committee chairman. Among other things, Dirksen wanted changes to spell out when federal law superseded state antidiscrimination law, to extend the title to cover federal and state employees, to require that discrimination be explicit and “willful,” to strike the House’s inclusion of sex discrimination, and to reinstate the provision banning discrimination against atheists. He would also bar whatever government agency was established to implement Title VII from filing suits itself, placing the onus on the complainant. After the meeting, Dirksen addressed reporters gathered outside. The amendments, he said, had broad Republican support, and he would present them to the full caucus at a meeting on Thursday.
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Whatever reception Dirksen thought he would get at that meeting, he was met with a hailstorm of invective from the Republican liberals and moderates. It did not help that he tacked on an additional Title VII amendment, one to delay enactment of the antidiscrimination regime for two years. GOP senators Clifford Case, Kenneth Keating, and Jacob Javits had already said that the Dirksen amendments were “unacceptable.” Still, they represented just twelve of the thirty-three Senate Republicans, and they were unable to force Dirksen into rescinding any of his proposals. The meeting adjourned after two and a half hours with nothing decided.
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The participants in the regular bipartisan civil rights meeting, which was going on at the same time in Humphrey’s office, struggled to make sense of Dirksen’s actions. Joe Rauh, who had been invited to attend, said he was perplexed by Dirksen’s atheism amendment, which strengthened the bill substantially. He suspected that something was up: “We can no longer assume that that is being constructive,” he said. Halfway through, Kuchel came in to report on the fight that erupted during the Republican meeting. Humphrey advised caution. Dirksen was solidifying his support for the bill the only way he knew how, Humphrey said. “Let the Republicans argue it out with their own leader,” he said. “Dirksen told me that if he did not get support, then he would retreat.” Steve Horn, Kuchel’s point man on civil rights, agreed. “Dirksen will go through his public acting process, take a licking, and then be with us,” he said.
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April 9 did see one bright spot in the filibuster. Edward Kennedy, the youngest brother of the slain president, gave his maiden speech on the Senate floor that afternoon. The thirty-two-year-old, elected the previous November, said he had initially planned to speak on industry and commerce in Massachusetts. “But I could not follow this debate for the last four weeks—I could not see this issue envelop the emotions and the conscience of the nation—without changing my mind,” he said. Drawing equally on his brother and Martin Luther King Jr., he said, “As a young man, I wanted to see an America where everyone can make his contribution, where a man will be measured not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character . . . My brother was the first president of the United States to state publicly that segregation was morally wrong. His heart and soul are in this bill.” When Kennedy finished and returned to his desk at the back of the chamber, five of his colleagues huddled around to congratulate him.
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After the April
4 debacle, the civil rights forces had gotten better at answering quorum calls, but that did not stop the Southern Democrats from making them. On the afternoon of April 13, Dirksen, Mansfield, Humphrey, Russell, and thirteen other senators joined President Johnson at D.C. Stadium (later RFK Stadium) for the opening day game between the Washington Senators and the Los Angeles Angels. Humphrey had warned his colleagues earlier that there might be a quorum call, but Dirksen had insisted to him that there was an informal agreement to eschew such procedural tricks that day. But around 2:30, after a lengthy attack on the bill from the floor of the chamber, Florida’s Spessard Holland looked around, saw how few senators were present, and suggested the absence of a quorum. A few minutes later and three miles away, in the middle of the third inning, the loudspeaker at D.C. Stadium called out, “Attention please! All senators must report back to the Senate for a quorum call.” A dozen men in suits suddenly rose from their seats around the president and hurried up the aisles, while a handful of Southerners, including Russell, an ardent baseball fan, remained. The fleeing senators filed into waiting limousines and made it back to the Senate in eight minutes, easily answering the quorum call.
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The Southerners struck again that night, this time during a performance of
The Comedy of Errors
by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the National Theater, cohosted by Lady Bird Johnson and Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. Several senators were in attendance. But when the call came in to the theater office announcing the quorum call, Udall refused to interrupt the play. The show went on, and the quorum call was met by other members of the chamber.
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Still, such hardball tactics raised the question of how long the pro-civil-rights forces could hold out. The growing possibility that they might craft a deal with Dirksen drove the civil rights lobby to fits. On April 10, Clarence Mitchell sent a memo to NAACP chapters warning them that the Dirksen amendments could be the first step toward a drastically weakened bill. “Senator Dirksen’s amendments are poison for the most part,” he wrote. “We must work hard to make sure all senators oppose them.”
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