The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (46 page)

By June 14 the Senate had covered only fifty-one of the six hundred proposed amendments. The Senate, so enthusiastic about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on June 10, now sank into the realization that, as Michigan’s Pat McNamara said, “We are in another form of filibuster.” For most senators, the process had become one of automatically voting no, since the amendments were poorly explained, often incoherently technical, and against the wishes of both parties’ leadership. Most took the advice of Vermont Republican George Aiken, who said he voted against any amendment that a senator took thirty seconds or less to explain. “The Aiken rule is a wonderful one and I endorse it,” said John Pastore of Rhode Island.
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Outside pressure was building, too; on June 15, in sweltering 95-degree temperatures, twelve hundred union and church demonstrators arrived from New York to urge an immediate end to the amendments and a vote on the bill. In a conscious reprise of the March on Washington, they listened to speeches at the Washington Monument, then passed through the offices on Capitol Hill, meeting with senators and presenting their demand that “no further crippling amendments dilute the civil rights bill as it is presently framed.”
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The next morning, Russell brought the Southern Democrats together to try to force an end to the charade—it was, he said, embarrassing for the Senate, embarrassing for the South, and embarrassing for him, personally, as the faction’s leader. But again, the zealots won out, and the meeting ended with no agreement.
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Hearing this, Mansfield decided, at long last, to press the button on his nuclear option. He had refused all entreaties from Johnson, his colleagues, and the civil rights community to go into extended days, in the hope that the goodwill generated by his restraint would bring the debate to an end faster. Now, he realized, he had no choice. “Harsher tactics” were necessary, he said, and on June 16 he launched the Senate on an epic run of thirty-four roll call votes in a single day.
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By late afternoon the senators, for whom five roll call votes would normally have been a long day, needed a steady stream of alcoholic lubrication to keep going. “Senators began to get rather well oiled by frequent visits to their respective hideaways around the Capitol,” Stewart wrote in his notes at the end of the day. The scene, he wrote, “has been almost festive.” Dirksen, a well-known imbiber of both whiskey and gin, appeared particularly deep in his cups. Around seven o’clock, Eastland moved to adjourn for the day, drawing the support of Republicans Peter Dominick of Colorado and Edwin Mechem of New Mexico. Dirksen ran over to Dominick, “stabbed him in the chest with his forefinger, and said in the very strongest possible way, that Dominick would do what the leadership wanted,” Wolfinger observed. Then, seeing that Mechem had slunk out of the chamber, the minority leader sent a squad of pages to hunt him down. When the New Mexico senator returned, “Dirksen almost assaulted him,” telling him that he had to follow the leadership on procedural matters. “Then he literally took Mechem by the arm, dragged him under the desk, and said to him quite fiercely, change your vote. Mechem, quite reluctantly, did so.”
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As the evening progressed, the scene in the Senate became as much about Dirksen’s energetic antics as it was about the bill itself. At one point Russell Long, who had promised the leadership that his amendment on private clubs would be his last, offered a sheaf of additional proposals. Dirksen exploded. Running over to Long, he yelled, “Goddammit, you broke our deal!” Dirksen inched closer to Long’s face, pointing his finger at his chest. “We should have never taken your amendment. Goddammit Russell, you broke your faith with us!” Finally Mansfield pulled Dirksen away. A few minutes later Dirksen came back to Long and apologized. The two shook hands, then hugged and walked out, presumably for a make-up tipple in Dirksen’s office.
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Mansfield finally called it a day at 12:01
a.m.
, ending a marathon thirteen-hour session. In all, thirty-four roll call votes were taken, more than double the sixteen-vote record set in 1951. Fourteen of them were proposed by Thurmond, eight by Ervin, and seven by Long. As the evening was winding down, Russell decided the Southerners had done enough damage, and he hatched a plot with Lister Hill to make Thurmond, Ervin, and Long stand down. John Stewart, Humphrey’s aide, overheard the Georgian tell the Alabaman, “If you can handle that damn fool Strom, I’ll take care of Ervin and Long. Those guys are disgracing all of us and creating a great deal of resentment against us.”
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Russell’s plan must have worked: the next day Humphrey sat down with Thurmond and Ervin and worked out a deal to bring the amendment roller coaster to an end that day, and move to a final vote on the nineteenth. But the agreement guaranteed another storm of amendments, and another long day: ten and a half hours, twenty-two amendments, with twenty-one defeats (one, a proposal by Long to protect fraternities from Title II, was accepted). When their amendments had run out, several of the most ardent Southerners burned the rest of their energy on long-winded speeches, including a forty-three-minute rant by Hill.
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When they were done, Thomas J. McIntyre of New Hampshire, the presiding officer for the day, called for a vote on the last amendment: the Dirksen-Mansfield substitute (though Mansfield, in his typical modesty, insisted it be called the “Dirksen-Humphrey” substitute). It passed 76 to 18. “Take it easy and go home and get a good night’s sleep,” Mansfield said—advice that, coming at 9:30
p.m.
after another long day of legislating, could be a comfort only to men who had just come off the longest filibuster in Senate history.
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Though few knew it at the time, in the middle of the day Humphrey had received word that his son Robert, then back in Minnesota, had developed a malignant brain tumor and needed an immediate operation. Despite breaking down in tears before Joe Rauh and Clarence Mitchell, Humphrey decided to stay in Washington.
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The morning of the eighteenth, with Edward M. Kennedy presiding, saw the rest of the Southerners unload their remaining time in heated, vitriolic attacks on the bill. Russell’s speech was mostly a postmortem of the Southern strategy against the bill, and an effort to take the high road after dropping so low during the filibuster. “We have sought to appeal to the sense of fairness and justice of the members of this body,” he intoned. “We made no secret of the fact that we were undertaking to speak in detail and at length in an effort to get the message across to the American people. We did not deceive anyone as to our purposes—”
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“The time of the senator from Georgia has expired,” rang out a voice from the dais. Kennedy, among the least experienced and youngest members of the august Senate, had just cut off one of its most venerable.

Russell turned and glared. “I express the hope that those who are keeping the time will apply the same rules to others which they have applied to me,” he said, and asked whether Humphrey had been given extra time during a June 17 speech.

“The senator from Minnesota was charged with nine minutes,” Kennedy replied.

“I am glad to hear that,” Russell said venomously, and sank into his chair.

At one point an eighteen-year-old onlooker named Jerry Lester Cochran unfurled a flag with a swastika on it and shouted from the gallery, “We have betrayed the white majority! Only Rockwell can save us now”—a reference to George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party. He was quickly removed by attendants and, as protocol demanded, taken to a hospital for “observation.”
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The biggest story of the day, however, was Barry Goldwater—now, after winning the California primary, the presumed Republican presidential candidate—and whether he would back the bill. “Rarely has one man’s vote been watched so closely as Barry Goldwater’s on the civil rights bill,” wrote
Time
magazine. That afternoon he announced that he would vote nay. “I am unalterably opposed to discrimination or segregation on the basis of race, color, or creed, or on any other basis,” Goldwater said. But he could not vote for the bill, because he believed that Titles II and VII represented “a grave threat to the very essence of our basic system of government.” Enforcement would require “the development of an ‘informer’ psychology in great areas of our national life—neighbors spying on neighbors, workers spying on workers, businessmen spying on businessmen—where those citizens for selfish reasons will have ample inducement to do so.”
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Goldwater’s opposition came as little surprise to some, but others, particularly in his own party, had hoped that the pull of presidential politics would work magic on his misgivings. Up to the last minute, Jacob Javits had been lobbying Goldwater to support the bill, for the party’s sake. According to the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Javits sent reams of memos to Goldwater’s office underlining the bill’s constitutionality. “It is now clear,” the New York Republican said on the Senate floor just before Goldwater rose to speak, “that the mainstream of my party is [in] support of this bill.” Others took a hard-line approach, charging that right-wing opposition to the bill, grounded in allegedly race-neutral principles of civil liberties and states’ rights, was no better than the open racism of the Southern Democrats. But Goldwater was unmoved. “If my vote is misconstrued, let it be, and let me suffer its consequences,” he said unhelpfully. “Barry, this is a dreadful mistake,” said Javits after Goldwater had finished.
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Of course, Goldwater may also have been playing to the Southern vote; he had deep ties with Southern businessmen and politicians, and he had been saying for years that the GOP should do all it could to win Southern votes. Many Southern Democrats, in turn, welcomed him. “If he opposes this bill he could carry most of the South,” said Allen Ellender of Louisiana. “I have not thought Goldwater could beat President Johnson but if he votes against this bill he is going to give the president a tough battle.”
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June 19 opened with a quick vote on a motion by Al Gore Sr. to send the bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee, on the grounds that it had not yet received a thorough, legal examination from the upper chamber. There was a time when Gore’s motion might have gotten traction, if only because the leadership thought he was one of the Southern Democrats who might “go Vandenberg” and switch sides. But Gore was facing a tight reelection campaign, and there was little to be gained by currying his favor—especially since the bill was now safe. His motion failed overwhelmingly.
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Then it was simply a matter of final speeches from the leadership. Humphrey discussed the long, hard slog that brought them to that day. “I doubt whether any senator can recall a bill which so tested our attitudes of justice and equity,” he said. Mansfield came next, praising Dirksen and Humphrey, but most poignantly, President Kennedy. “This, indeed, is his moment,” the majority leader said. Finally, Dirksen rose to explain once more his transit from opponent to full-throated supporter of the bill. It must pass, he said, “if we are to honor the pledges we have made when we held up out hands to take an oath to defend the laws and carry out the Constitution of the United States.” He concluded, “I am prepared to vote.”
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Once again, all one hundred senators were present—including the bedridden Engle—and once again, the vote was overwhelming. Supporting the bill were seventy-three senators, including four Westerners—Wallace Bennett, Alan Bible, Carl Hayden, and Milton Young—who had opposed cloture. Of the twenty-seven who voted against it, two—Cotton and Hickenlooper—had voted for cloture.

The leadership gathered for photos, though Mansfield humbly refused to stand in with Humphrey, Dirksen, Kuchel, and the rest. Humphrey and his aides and colleagues then strode out onto the eastern steps of the Capitol, where they were greeted by thousands of civil rights well-wishers. “Freedom!” they shouted. “You gave us justice!” Humphrey just beamed. “I feel like a heavy load has been lifted from my shoulders—a wonderful sense of relief and quiet joy,” he told the reporter James Reston. After a celebratory dinner with Stewart, Humphrey went home to rest before flying back to Minneapolis to see his son.
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The bill now went back to the House, where it faced one more hurdle: its old nemesis Howard Smith, whose committee had to approve the new version of the bill for it to go to the floor. Fortunately, Emanuel Celler and Bill McCulloch had ways of dealing with the obstreperous chairman. On the morning of Monday, June 22, Celler asked that the House grant unanimous consent to approve the Senate’s version of the bill. Four Southern Democrats immediately shot out of their seats in objection. Anticipating this, Celler proposed a resolution for the House to make the Senate draft its next order of business—a resolution that had to then pass the Rules Committee. Predictably, Smith was nowhere to be seen on the Hill, and he had already made it clear that he would delay considering it for as long as he could. But Celler then had three liberal members of the Rules Committee submit letters to Smith by registered mail insisting that he schedule hearings—the first step toward a vote to take control of the committee (upon receipt of such a letter, the chairman must schedule a hearing within seven days, or a simple majority of the committee can vote to take it away from him). Smith, seeing himself in a corner, agreed to open hearings on June 30, the last possible day.
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