FOR YEARS LYNDON JOHNSON had harbored dreams of becoming president and addressing his former colleagues from the rostrum of the House as president of the United States. But not like this.
Five days after Kennedy’s death, Johnson appeared before both chambers of Congress in a somber dark suit and tie. After more than two decades on the Hill as a congressman and then a senator, Johnson had developed a reputation as a bombastic, unsubtle man. On this evening, as he delivered a speech to a country still in shock, he showed a different side—a level of naked vulnerability that stunned the legislators and Supreme Court justices before him. “All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today,” he said so softly that those in the back of the chamber could barely hear. But as he spoke of the future, Johnson’s voice gathered force. He urged lawmakers to pass the civil rights legislation supported by his predecessor, because “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory,” and added that there was also a tax bill awaiting action and foreign policy to be continued. “In short, this is no time for delay. It is a time for action.”
The address brought everyone in the room to their feet, and impressed Washington observers who took note of Johnson’s “quiet confidence,” as The New York Times put it. The emotional attunement with the country that Johnson displayed that evening would allow him to help heal a grieving country while simultaneously galvanizing it to action. He would be consoler-in-chief, but he would also assert control and legitimacy. Most of all, he would appoint himself executor of Kennedy’s legislative will. “Everything I had ever learned in the history books taught me that martyrs have to die for causes,” Johnson recalled years later. “John Kennedy had died. But his ‘cause’ was not really clear. That was my job. I had to take the dead man’s program and turn it into a martyr’s cause. That way Kennedy would live on forever and so would I.”
If Johnson hoped to complete Kennedy’s unfinished business, he would first need to enlist the help of Kennedy’s men, many of whom were torn over whether to stay. “I know how much he needed you,” he told them. “But it must make sense to you that if he needed you I need you that much more. And so does our country.” Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman decided to remain until the end of Johnson’s presidency in January 1969. After seeing Mike Feldman’s resignation letter, Johnson called Feldman and invited him for a swim at the White House pool—“the greatest honor you can get in the White House,” Feldman recalled—and persuaded him to remain in his job for another several months. Not everyone heeded Johnson’s pleas—Sorensen quickly exited, and Bobby Kennedy, falling into a deep depression, rarely showed up to work. But those who stayed witnessed something extraordinary. The same legislative agenda, including the long-shot immigration bill, that had stalled out time and again under Kennedy was about to come to life.
LARRY O’BRIEN, a brilliant son of Irish immigrants who had helped to engineer Kennedy’s rise in Massachusetts politics, noticed the difference immediately. As the designated liaison to Congress in the Kennedy White House, O’Brien had given the president efficient updates on legislation. Conversations had passed quickly and stayed focused. With Johnson, there was no sense trying to hold back details. The president wanted to know everything. O’Brien remembered losing a tussle on the Hill that had gone into the early hours of the morning. On his way home, depressed, he stopped at a sandwich shop for food he did not even want to eat. He waited a few more hours until six-thirty, when he knew the president would be awake, to call and fill him in. “When did this happen?” Johnson asked. “It was the early hours of the morning,” O’Brien explained. “Why didn’t you call me?” Johnson admonished him. “You should have called me and told me about it. You know, when you’re up there bleeding, I want to bleed with you. We have to share these things.”
At the president’s weekly Tuesday breakfast meetings with congressional leaders, O’Brien soon found himself presenting elaborate flow charts showing how various priorities were faring on the Hill, something he would not have dared to attempt with Kennedy. Johnson loved the charts, which would sit on an easel in the corner of the room and show the exact status of every bill Johnson wanted passed. He and O’Brien enjoyed talking strategy so much—their conversations going down endless tangents—that Lady Bird would sometimes gently interrupt them at night to tell her husband that he needed to get some dinner.
Johnson knew of no other way to conduct business. As vice president, he had grown frustrated watching Kennedy’s priorities founder on the Hill. He had thought the president was too passive, that he did not lean on his vice president’s considerable knowledge of congressional procedure and temperament nearly enough. Now that he was president, Johnson understood that his success depended entirely on how well the White House managed the inner workings and large egos on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. “The most important people you will talk to are senators and congressmen,” Johnson instructed his aide Jack Valenti. “You treat them as if they were president. Answer their calls immediately. Give them respect. They deserve it.” Under Kennedy, an aide would ask the president to make a special phone call to a lawmaker only when all other avenues had been exhausted. Johnson, by contrast, worked the phones constantly. Every morning he woke up to fresh clips and summaries of the Congressional Record. Every night before bed, he reviewed staff memos with the latest updates.
His first major tests were a foreign aid bill and a tax cut that had cleared the House under Kennedy only to be trapped in the Senate. He dispatched with both within months of taking office. “There is but one way for a President to deal with the Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption,” Johnson reflected years later. “If it’s really going to work, the relationship between the President and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous. He’s got to know them even better than they know themselves. And then, on the basis of this knowledge, he’s got to build a system that stretches from the cradle to the grave, from the moment a bill is introduced to the moment it is officially enrolled as the law of the land.”
On February 11, 1964, Johnson called Mannie Celler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, to congratulate him: Celler had helped shepherd Johnson’s sweeping civil rights bill through the House, winning passage the night before. “I’m mighty proud of you,” Johnson said, before turning immediately to his next priority. “I hope you get my immigration bill out now.” Celler responded with some anxiety. “I’m having some trouble with it . . . I’ll get to work on it.”
It was not obvious, at first, that immigration would be one of Johnson’s priorities as president. He had made special efforts as a congressman to save refugees from Nazi Germany, but he had also voted for the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952 and had experienced the hurdles of passing immigration reform firsthand when he and Lehman had made a failed attempt in the Senate.
Johnson had grand visions for his presidency—he wanted to surpass his hero, Franklin Roosevelt, by passing as many bills as possible that would improve Americans’ lives—and he knew he had limited political capital to spend. Any bill that stalled could sap his momentum. Would immigration reform—which had failed so many times before—be worth the effort?
The key to persuading Johnson to proceed on immigration, as Feldman and others discovered, was to tie it to the president’s other priorities, civil rights and foreign policy, and convince him that the national origins quotas were as discriminatory as the Jim Crow laws. Broad moral arguments captivated Johnson, who quickly picked up on the inherent unfairness of the quotas and became a harsh critic of them almost overnight once Feldman pressed his case.
On January 7, 1964, Abba Schwartz at the State Department penned a memo for the White House to bring Johnson up to speed on immigration and to make recommendations for what to do next. He suggested that the president’s State of the Union speech endorse immigration reform—something Kennedy had not done in any of his annual addresses. Schwartz also recommended that Johnson invite leaders of different groups supporting the bill to the White House to ask for their help. By the end of the month, Johnson had done both.
At a televised meeting in January, Johnson invited both reform advocates and a few skeptics—Senator Eastland and Congressman Feighan. Johnson wanted to put the screws to immigration opponents, with TV cameras to provide a public record. He began by laying out some straightforward moral reasoning. “Now I would hope that each of us and all of us are descended from immigrants. I hope we would ask ourselves this question: How would we feel, if we were put in the other fellow’s place? Maybe by doing that and engaging in a little introspection for a time we would find it a good feeling to apply the Golden Rule and do unto others as we would have them do unto us.” Then he startled Eastland and Feighan by putting them on the spot, asking them what they planned to do on reform. They both offered vague answers.
In truth, they were in no mood to work with the president. Johnson’s immigration proposal was nearly identical to Kennedy’s. The bills proposed by Philip Hart in the Senate and Celler in the House were simply reintroduced, and they were running into the same dead-ends that had stymied them the year before. Feighan, as chair of the House immigration subcommittee, was refusing to hold hearings because he wanted funding for the separate joint committee on the subject. Celler and several Johnson officials believed rightly that a joint committee, with more drawn-out hearings and investigations, would derail immigration reform yet again.
Democrats managed to block funding for Feighan’s joint committee. But the Ohio congressman was only growing more difficult to manage. In April the columnist Drew Pearson reported that seven months earlier Feighan had behaved erratically at a two-week conference in Geneva on European migration. He missed most of the sessions, including one honoring his predecessor the late Francis Walter; representatives from twenty-nine countries appeared to memorialize Walter, but Feighan himself was a no-show. He also failed to attend the conference’s last two sessions because he was touring Mont Blanc in a limousine, according to Pearson. When he did make appearances, he horrified the other attendees. At one point, in a closed-door session with the other U.S. delegates—plus his son, who was mysteriously also in attendance—he berated the State Department for admitting a few hundred Russian Orthodox refugees from Turkey, among whom, he claimed with no proof, were Russian spies. But his most disturbing behavior during the trip came at a dinner of American and European diplomats: Feighan insulted recently deceased leaders of his own party. He loudly accused Kennedy of being so soft on Communism that he never would have supported him for reelection. He then accused the late Eleanor Roosevelt of “nigger loving activities.” His fellow Americans at the dinner, Congressmen Frank Chelf of Kentucky and Arch Moore of West Virginia, were so horrified and embarrassed that they staged a vaudeville routine, complete with funny voices, to drown out their misbehaving colleague.
But with Feighan in control of the immigration bill through his subcommittee, the Johnson White House had no choice but to deal with him. On June 17 White House aide Jack Valenti struck up a conversation with Feighan on Air Force One; the president and a number of Ohio lawmakers were headed to Cleveland for a convention of the Communications Workers of America. On the flights there and back, Valenti prodded Feighan to make a commitment on the immigration bill that session. “In a loud voice I told the President that Congressman Feighan had made an unequivocal commitment,” Valenti wrote that day in a memo to O’Brien. “The President thanked Feighan for this.” Knowing that Feighan could not be entirely trusted, Valenti followed up on the conversation with a memo noting what they had discussed. “I just want you to know that the President was delighted with your unequivocal commitment today that the immigration bill would definitely become law this session,” Valenti wrote. “This is wonderful news and the President is very grateful to you for your efforts.”
That month Feighan, who had just barely survived a primary challenge back home in Ohio, finally relented on allowing testimony before the immigration subcommittee, leading to the first hearings in nearly a decade on the national origins quota system. The first person to offer testimony, fittingly, was Celler, who pointed out that it had been forty years “almost to the day” since the 1924 law had been enacted. “I submit that the fears and phobias of four decades ago have no place in our society in 1964.”
In an eerie echo of the past, John Trevor’s son, John B. Trevor, Jr., returned to testify and defend the quotas scheme hatched by his father. The younger Trevor had picked up a number of his father’s causes, becoming a director of the Pioneer Fund, a group founded by his father that supported research into eugenics and gave financial aid to children “descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.” He also chaired the immigration committee for the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, another right-wing group started by the elder Trevor, whose greatest cause was “to keep America American” by opposing immigrants and Communism. At the hearing, Trevor Jr. argued that the national origins quotas had “provided a realistic approach to protecting this Nation from the evils of unrestricted immigration,” and he said that any effort to rush through “ill-considered immigration legislation for political gain during an election year” was “potentially dangerous.”
Over the years, the arguments on both sides of the immigration debate had calcified into broad slogans: one side preached tolerance and equality, and the other warned about the risks to national security and the country’s racial homogeneity. Few supporters of reform bothered mastering the details of the policy, which meant that testifying before Congress, in the face of skeptical lawmakers, would serve as the first real test of their knowledge and commitment. General hand-waving about the virtues of immigration would not do.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk realized this only at the last minute, the night before he was due to testify on July 2, and he called Abba Schwartz, the State Department’s expert on immigration reform, abruptly at home. “Abba,” he said, “I’m not inclined to testify on the immigration bill tomorrow, because I’m a reluctant witness. You don’t really think we should let in people like the . . . on a world-wide competitive basis, do you? After all, we are an Anglo-Saxon country.”
Schwartz replied that it was pretty late to be withdrawing as a witness, and that Rusk should speak to the president, who had “a strong political commitment” to the bill. Rusk hung up without replying. But within the hour, he phoned again, clearly having read the briefing book prepared for him on the subject. Rusk peppered Schwartz with technical questions and then told him to meet him in his office earlier than usual before going to the hearing.
Despite his last-minute doubts, Rusk proved an effective witness, though his testimony revealed just how little government officials foresaw of the actual effects of abolishing the quotas. Most everyone spoke in the realm of theory, emphasizing the symbolism of the national origins quotas. At the hearing, Rusk told lawmakers that the country’s immigration policy was integral to achieving its foreign policy goals, since it sent important signals to other countries about what the United States thought of them. In this regard, the national origins quota system telegraphed to the world that “our standards of judgment are not based on merit” but rather on “bias and prejudice,” in particular in Asia, where strict limits still applied. Rusk added that immigration “is not today the potentially disruptive element . . . that it might have been had it continued at the relative rate at which we were receiving immigrants, say, in the second half of the nineteenth century. The impact of immigration in quantity on our society is relatively limited.” When asked how many more immigrants would enter the country if the law were changed, Rusk guessed “on the order of 14,000 or 15,000,” and added, “It is not the numbers that I am worried about today, sir. It is the symbolic element of the national origins idea which is used against us in ways that we should seek to avoid, if possible, in my judgment.”
Later that month, when Bobby Kennedy appeared before the subcommittee as attorney general, he, too, focused on the symbolic importance of abolishing the quotas. When asked about the effect of abolishing the Asia-Pacific Triangle, Kennedy estimated there would be an influx of about five thousand immigrants in the first year, “after which immigration from that source would virtually disappear.” He and the other officials were basing their figure on the existing number of Asian immigrants waiting for an open slot under the existing quotas, though because the quotas had been so small for so long, very few Asians had even bothered to apply for visas.
Another familiar face arrived to speak before the subcommittee offering a similar assessment of Asian immigration. Mike Masaoka said that while the JACL was “proud of its role in securing the enactment of the 1952 [law], we would be the first to concede that the [law], though an improvement over the then existing laws, is far from perfect legislation.” The Asia-Pacific Triangle, and its severe limits on Asian immigration, needed to be abolished, argued Masaoka, who reminded lawmakers again of the sacrifices made by Japanese-American soldiers during World War II. When asked about how the new law might affect the total number of immigrants, Masaoka predicted that once the existing backlog was cleared, “the number would be relatively small.”
New allies in the fight to overhaul the country’s immigration system showed up at the hearings. Labor unions had for years lobbied hard against any loosening of the immigration standards. The American Federation of Labor (AFL), under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, had viewed immigrants as a threat to workers’ wages and collaborated with right-wing groups to pass both the literacy test in 1917 and the law instituting quotas in 1924. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), by contrast, had thousands of members within its ranks who were immigrants. In 1955 the AFL and CIO merged under a new president, George Meany, a plumber from the Bronx who supported liberalizing immigration laws.
Soon after taking over the AFL-CIO, Meany removed the AFL’s legislative affairs director, who opposed immigration, by storming into his office and shouting, “You’re out! Get out!” Meany replaced him with Andy Biemiller, a stocky man with a clipped mustache who often wore a fresh rose in his lapel and was impossible to miss in the halls of the Capitol. “When Andy comes lumbering up here, you know they are really serious,” one liberal senator, who was too scared to be quoted by name, told The Washington Post. The leadership of the AFL-CIO told Biemiller and his team that one of the group’s biggest priorities was abolishing the quota system. The decision by organized labor to switch sides on immigration would transform the political calculus for reform and make it much more difficult for the pro-restriction forces to win.
ON AUGUST 7, 1964, Kenneth A. Meiklejohn, a member of Biemiller’s team, told the immigration subcommittee that the AFL-CIO was a full-throated supporter of abolishing the national origins quotas. “Racial and ethnic bigotry can no more be justified from the standpoint of justice and morality in our treatment of those who seek to come to our shores than it can be in the treatment of our own citizens.” Meiklejohn testified that the AFL-CIO was not worried about competition for its members since most of the immigrants arriving in the country were seeking professional-class jobs. And regardless, the bill would only increase by seven thousand the number of immigrants admitted annually.
In fact, all the pro-reform witnesses were careful to claim that the bill’s effect on overall immigration numbers would be minimal both because they believed it and because without such assurances, the public was unlikely to support the administration’s effort. In a Gallup poll taken in July and August 1965, 51 percent of Americans favored changing the quota system so that people would be admitted based on their occupational skills rather than on their country of origin; 32 percent opposed. But when asked whether immigration should be kept at its present level, increased or decreased, only 8 percent said the number of immigrants should grow; 39 percent said the current level should be maintained, and 33 percent said it should decrease.
Despite this testimony, the Johnson administration found that negotiations with Feighan were again at a standstill. On July 1, 1964, Valenti wrote to Johnson that Feighan had been “rough and mean over the phone” and was still demanding a joint committee on immigration, or there would be no bill. “That is his quid pro quo,” wrote Valenti, who explained to Johnson that this was impossible because Celler and other Democrats were “dead set against the Joint Committee” and “sick and tired of Feighan and his tactics.” Johnson wrote back that all such calls should be referred to Larry O’Brien, and that phone conversations with Feighan should be recorded.
Later that month Henry H. Wilson, a White House assistant, wrote O’Brien a memo concluding that the chances of getting past Feighan were slim. “As a practical matter I think we have to call it about an impossibility to get this out of subcommittee,” he wrote in a memo, adding that chances in the other chamber looked grim as well. “Senate Democrats are pretty well stacked against it.”
But like almost everyone else, O’Brien underestimated the influence of another Kennedy who was ready to make his mark on the Senate.
TED KENNEDY, THE KID BROTHER who had always been so eager to catch up to his older siblings, was now trying to keep his family from falling apart. On the day of Jack’s death, he hurried to Hyannis Port to be with his parents. His mother had heard the news; his father, who had suffered a stroke two years earlier, had not. When Ted arrived at the family’s house, he rushed up the stairs to his father’s bedroom. Joe Sr.’s eyes were closed, and when Ted saw the television set next to his bed, he lunged at the wires and tore them from the wall. The next morning he told his father that another Kennedy child was gone. Decades later, the memory of the conversation still brought Ted to tears.
Then there was Bobby, whose depression “veered close to being a tragedy within the tragedy,” Ted recalled. Rather than dealing with his own grief, Ted kept watch over his family and poured himself into his work, heeding the words of Johnson to honor Jack’s memory by passing legislation.
On June 19, 1964, Ted Kennedy cast one of the prevailing seventy-three votes in the Senate to pass the Civil Rights Act. The margin of victory masked the difficulty of the journey, which had required overcoming a fierce filibuster by a wall of southern Democrats. When the bill passed, Mannie Celler, who had tried and failed countless times over his career to pass aggressive civil rights legislation, declared, “I feel like I’ve climbed Mount Everest.”
For Kennedy, it was a welcome moment of joy and relief after months of sorrow. The bill passed exactly a year after his older brother had sent his own civil rights bill to the Hill. That evening, after casting his vote, Kennedy hurried to Washington National Airport to board a private plane to Springfield, Massachusetts, for the state Democratic Party’s annual convention, where he was scheduled to be endorsed for his first full term as a senator. He was joined on the plane by his administrative assistant Edward Moss, Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, who was giving the keynote address at the event, and Bayh’s wife, Marvella.
The flight nearly killed them all. As the pilot, Ed Zimny, approached the airport just outside Springfield, Kennedy looked out in front of the plane and saw fog where he expected runway lights, followed by a hill covered with large rocks. As Zimny desperately tried to lift the plane, it skidded over the tops of some trees before slamming into one and then plowing into the earth. While Bayh and his wife crawled out, Moss and Zimny were motionless in the front. Kennedy, whose body was halfway through a window, could not move his legs. But there was no time to spare. Bayh said he smelled fumes and hurried to drag Kennedy out of the plane. The Bayhs then went to a nearby road and flagged down a driver for help.
At the hospital, the doctors said Kennedy would live but his back and several ribs were broken, while one lung had collapsed. The two men who had been in the front of the plane—Zimny and Moss—were dead. Had Kennedy not been wearing a seatbelt, authorities later concluded, he would most certainly have died as well.
At first the doctors suggested back surgery, to which Joe Sr., remembering Jack’s medical struggles, furiously shook his head and shouted, “Naaaa, naaaa, naaa!,” the stroke having blunted his speaking ability but not his personality. Instead, Ted tried to allow his back to heal naturally by spending the next five months immobilized, lying flat, able only to lift his chin and move his arms and legs. He turned the time into what he called a “postgraduate seminar,” demonstrating an academic seriousness that had been wanting when he was at Harvard. Two evenings a week, from 7:30 to 9:30, various teachers came to his hospital room for lessons. John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard professor and onetime aide to Jack Kennedy, crammed his tall frame into a bedside chair to teach Ted economics. Another noted Harvard scholar, Sam Beer, lectured on political science. Alain Enthoven, the Pentagon’s weapons systems expert, flew in from Washington to share his knowledge.
Immigration was never far from Kennedy’s mind during this time. He knew that as head of the Senate subcommittee, he needed to be ready for action when he returned to Washington.
From his hospital bed, Ted assisted Mike Feldman in finishing the project of finally publishing Jack’s A Nation of Immigrants, which had been abruptly aborted after the assassination. All that was missing was an introduction, which everyone involved had settled on Ted to write. After the crash, Feldman and Milt Gwirtzman, one of Ted’s Senate aides, helped him finish the piece—Feldman read it aloud to the young Kennedy for his approval.
When the book came out in early October, its first printing quickly sold out. And there was no mistaking its purpose: to fuse John F. Kennedy’s legacy to the cause of immigration reform. “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies,” read the introduction, exaggerating the late president’s interest in the issue. “When President Kennedy sent his historic message to Congress calling for a complete revision of the law, he decided it was also time to revise the book, for use as a weapon of enlightenment in the coming legislative battle. He was working on the book at the time of the assassination. This legacy should not be denied those committed to the battle for immigration reform.”
Mysteriously, the introduction now carried Bobby’s name rather than Ted’s.
When the book project was first conceived in 1963, Ted was the family member who had needed more public exposure and gravitas, given his youth and inexperience as a senator. But by the fall of 1964, it was Bobby who required whatever boost the book might offer. His brother’s assassination had devastated Bobby, who had built his life around supporting his older brother’s political career. Less than two months after testifying before the House immigration subcommittee, Bobby resigned from his post as attorney general. Utterly lost as to what to do next, he briefly flirted with the idea of trying to become Johnson’s running mate in the presidential race that fall. But the two men could not stand to be in each other’s company. There was no particular slight that anyone could point to as the cause of all the bad blood—in fact, Johnson had established a decent relationship with Jack and enjoyed a friendly one with Ted. Bobby, on the other hand, never trusted Johnson and would always resent him for taking his brother’s place. As Johnson would write in his memoir years later, “Too much separated us—too much history, too many differences in temperament.”
Both men were wildly ambitious, and Bobby soon settled on what to do next. He would run for one of New York’s Senate seats. The upper chamber made sense; he had worked there before, under McCarthy, and had managed Jack’s Senate campaign. But claiming ties to New York was a stretch. His only connection to the state was the limited time he had spent in Riverdale and Bronxville as a child. Making things even tougher for Bobby, the fact that he had investigated the mob at the Justice Department meant that Italian-Americans, who represented a substantial voting bloc in the state, looked at him with suspicion. Nor would it be easy for him to win over Jewish voters, who were partial to the state’s popular incumbent, Kenneth Keating, a regular at bar mitzvahs and Jewish weddings who had carved out a reliable record of supporting Israel. Bobby, by comparison, showed his clumsiness as a campaigner for Jewish votes by once ordering milk at a kosher deli. Then there were the old suspicions left over from the 1940s and ’50s of Joe Sr.’s anti-Semitism.
But by now the Kennedy family knew what to do when ethnic voters viewed them with skepticism: wrap themselves in the flag of immigration reform. Someone—it remains unclear exactly who—swapped out Ted’s name for Bobby’s on the immigration book, which was to be published in the thick of Bobby’s race against Keating. There’s not much evidence that the book helped Bobby’s campaign; though he won, he captured only 60 percent of the Jewish vote, less than Keating’s last opponent had six years earlier.
Becoming a senator would be a strange fit for Bobby, as it had been for Jack. He grew impatient with the limitations of the job almost immediately. Still, it provided him a national platform and a chance for the Kennedy dynasty to live on after so much tragedy. When Bobby and Ted posed together for pictures after their successful campaigns in November, a photographer said to Bobby, “Step back a little, you’re casting a shadow on Ted,” to which the younger brother joked, “It’s going to be the same in Washington.”
MEANWHILE, THE SHADOW CAST by President Kennedy over his successor’s presidency was receding. No event sealed Johnson’s legitimacy more than his landslide win in 1964 over Barry Goldwater. Johnson blasted nearly every record for winning the presidency: most popular votes, the largest percentage of the country’s votes, and nearly the biggest margin in the Electoral College (surpassed only by Franklin Roosevelt). He basked in the results as he watched them come in at his Texas ranch. “It was a night I shall never forget,” he remembered. “Millions upon millions of people, each one marking my name on their ballot, each one wanting me as their President. . . . For the first time in all my life I truly felt loved by the American people.”
Further validation arrived in the form of stunning congressional results, as Democrats scored their biggest majority in the House since the high point of the Roosevelt New Deal in 1936. In the House, Democrats would now outnumber Republicans 295 to 140, and in the Senate, 68 to 32. Finally, for the first time in decades, the party had enough numbers to overcome the conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats who had blocked so many presidents before. On the morning after the election, The New York Times declared that the “once powerful conservative coalition . . . appeared to have been rendered impotent, or nearly so.” The overall results sent a strong signal to those Republicans who had survived the rout: it was time to get on board with the Johnson agenda, or risk losing the next election.
However much Johnson had been able to accomplish during his first year in office, what followed marked one of the most remarkable stretches of legislative achievement in the country’s history. A year later he would look back and tell the lawmakers, “This has been the fabulous 89th Congress.”
At a meeting in February 1965 to plot out his legislative strategy, Johnson told his staff, “I want you to work for my legislative program and get as much passed in the next 90 days and in 1965 as is humanly possible.” After observing presidents falter before him, he knew exactly what to avoid and warned his staff with stories about Wilson and Roosevelt squandering their political advantages. “Look, I’ve just been elected by an overwhelming vote, but every day that I will be in office, I will be losing some of my ability to convert that victory into legislative reality,” he told them. It was time to build what he called the Great Society, a framework that he had conceived while swimming with his aide Richard Goodwin one day and that he had introduced the previous spring at a commencement speech at the University of Michigan. Johnson’s vision was pure New Deal liberalism—an effort to combat society’s largest problems through powerful government action. As Johnson had explained in his State of the Union speech in January, “We do not intend to live in the midst of abundance, isolated from neighbors and nature, confined by blighted cities and bleak suburbs, stunted by a poverty of learning and an emptiness of leisure. The Great Society asks not how much, but how good; not only how to create wealth but how to use it; not only how fast we are going, but where we are headed.” Central to this plan would be efforts to open up opportunities for all Americans. In Johnson’s mind, these initiatives were all linked: supporting the elderly with health care and higher Social Security payments; helping the poor; enforcing the right to vote for African-Americans; and passing an immigration law “based on the work a man can do and not where he was born or how he spells his name.”
The Washington Post observed in early February that the Congress was “off to the fastest start of any in recent memory,” following a pep talk from Johnson to all the committee chairmen. Rather than spending the first month fussing over rules or organizing committees, as they usually did, lawmakers sprang into action. Less than a month into the new term, the Senate passed three bills on water pollution, fighting poverty in Appalachia, and an international coffee agreement. Senate and House committee hearings on health and education were speeding along.
In April, the president signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provided the largest infusion ever of federal money into local school districts. Another bill created the Head Start program, which offered education and support for preschool-age children living in poverty. In July he established Medicare and Medicaid to administer government health insurance to the poor and the elderly.
Johnson was at first unsure whether to pursue another civil rights bill so soon after the hard-won success of the year before. He believed a law explicitly protecting the right to vote for African-Americans was necessary; he just did not know whether Congress could rise to the occasion yet again. But events in the Deep South gave Johnson and the civil rights activists the momentum they needed. In March police attacked civil rights protesters marching from Selma to Montgomery with clubs, whips, and tear gas. Americans watching the events unfold on their televisions grew outraged. Later that month, to gin up more support from the Hill, Johnson delivered the most moving speech of his career in a joint session of Congress, exhorting the lawmakers to pass a voting rights law and concluding his remarks with words straight from the hymn of the civil rights movement itself: “We shall overcome.”
When Johnson had finished speaking, the congressmen and senators sat before him in stunned silence. Then seventy-six-year-old Mannie Celler on the House floor “leaped to his feet,” remembered Richard Goodwin, “cheering as wildly as a schoolboy at his first high-school football game.” Perhaps no legislator was more thrilled by this resurgence of New Deal liberalism than Celler. Now the most senior member of the House, Celler could tell that as chair of the Judiciary Committee, he was on the cusp of passing the agenda of his dreams. “I have climbed the greasy pole,” he boasted to a reporter.
Celler played a pivotal role for Johnson on the Hill, deftly maneuvering the president’s priorities through the House Judiciary Committee. In August, Johnson signed the landmark Voting Rights Act, which ended the literacy tests that had blocked African-Americans from registering to vote and forced states with a history of discrimination to submit any changes in their voting laws first to the federal government for approval.
Between this and the previous year’s Civil Rights Act, Johnson, son of the South, had done more to advance the rights of African-Americans than any American president since Abraham Lincoln. Everything the president wanted, he seemed to get.
IT WAS EARLY EVENING by the time Michael Feighan arrived at the White House on May 7, 1965. The day had already been a busy one for Johnson. There had been a signing ceremony in the East Room for a bill pouring an extra $700 million into the U.S. military’s uncertain adventures in Vietnam. That afternoon he had received a leather-bound book of photos from the White House Photographers Association, marking his presidency from its first day in November 1963 through his 1965 inauguration—a memento that surely delighted Johnson, since it documented a stretch of his life that had become the fulfillment of his wildest political fantasies.
His appointment with Feighan was important. For more than a year, seemingly the entire Johnson White House—not least the president himself—had been trying to persuade the Ohio congressman to stop blocking the immigration bill. Feighan, unused to finding himself at the center of any significant legislative push, was flattered by the attention and had begun to crave Johnson’s approval, just as the president had hoped. In early January he asked for a one-on-one meeting with Johnson. When he was told the president did not have time but would be meeting with all the congressional committee chairmen, he asked whether subcommittee chairmen handling important legislation could be included—even though the idea of dozens more subcommittee chairmen being included in such a meeting, already packed with people, was preposterous. Johnson’s loyal vice president, Hubert Humphrey, buttonholed Feighan at every opportunity, including at a party hosted by Illinois congressman Barratt O’Hara. Humphrey sent Feighan a note after the party, trying again to apply pressure. “As you know, the President has his heart set on passing the immigration bill this year. It means a great deal to him. I know it also means a great deal to you. Why not surprise the President? Let’s pass the bill this year.”
All the cajoling seemed finally to be having an effect. Feighan, who had been so stubborn the year before, was now coming to the White House to discuss his intent to abolish the national origins quotas once hearings for the Voting Rights Act were over. What had made him change his mind was not simply the pressure from the White House. It was an unusual view that was beginning to gain traction among right-wing groups: that the national origins quota system was in fact not restrictive enough—or at least not working as designed. They were not wrong.
The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act was supposed to reinforce the framework of the 1924 law, essentially renewing a system based on national origins quotas that was limited to 158,000 slots per year. By 1965, this should have allowed just over 2 million new immigrants since the law’s passage. In reality, there had been 3.5 million, according to immigration scholar Roger Daniels. This was because there were more immigrants counted outside the quotas than within them. With one president after another signing special provisions for refugees who could be admitted with no regard to quotas, the number of people exempt from the country’s cap had ballooned. Between 1945 and 1965, more than 750,000 refugees had been admitted into the country, as a patchwork of laws had allowed refugees “of Chinese ethnic origin,” Palestinians, Hungarians, and many others to seek shelter in the United States. Most alarming to those who favored restrictions, Europeans were making up a declining percentage of the new arrivals. By 1965, 20 percent of immigrants were coming from Asia, roughly double the share of a decade earlier.
In February, at the thirty-sixth annual conference of the right-wing American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, Feighan called the quota system “a myth” and vowed to eliminate it. He cited numbers to prove his point: Greece, which was supposed to have 308 entrants a year, had an average of 2,666. China, with a quota of 100, was sending an annual average of 2,103. Portugal, with a quota of 438, was sending 2,736, thanks in part to Kennedy’s legislation to assist those on the Azore Islands displaced by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. “It is futile to support myths and corruptive of national purposes to hold tightly to theories which have little practical application,” Feighan told the audience of anti-Communist and anti-immigrant activists.
Feighan appeared to be edging closer to support for the Johnson administration’s basic framework for the bill, but he still had some demands to make. The Johnson bill—like the one proposed by Kennedy—prioritized immigrants with special skills over those trying to reunify with their families. Feighan wanted those preferences swapped, thinking that giving family members a higher preference would help to preserve the country’s ethnic status quo. He also wanted assurances that Schwartz would later be pushed out of the State Department—he had unhappily tussled with him over the visa for actor Richard Burton and other security issues. In the end, the White House acceded to both requests. But ahead of Johnson’s May meeting with Feighan, Norbert Schlei of the Justice Department warned the president that Feighan had one major request that the administration could not support: the congressman wanted to impose an overall cap on the number of immigrants entering the country from the Western Hemisphere.
This was a radical idea—one that had never been carried out before.
GIVEN TODAY’S FIXATION on the U.S.-Mexico border, it’s remarkable to think that just over a century ago, the border between the two countries was effectively open. Anyone who could brave the difficult terrain could cross; no one was “illegal.” The line between the United States and Mexico felt especially fluid given that in the 1800s, the Mexican government itself had encouraged Americans to colonize the land now known as Texas. After the Americans rebelled and tried to claim the land as their own, the U.S. military trampled Mexican forces and claimed a shockingly large part of its neighbor’s territory, including not just Texas but land that is now California, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and even Wyoming. From the beginning, figuring out who belonged on which side of the border was not easy. In the ensuing confusion of the war, an 1848 treaty allowed more than eighty thousand Mexicans living on land that had, overnight, become part of the United States to either leave or become U.S. citizens.
There had been a brief push to limit Western Hemisphere immigration during the debate over the Johnson-Reed Act in 1921. But those favoring restriction—because they viewed Mexicans and other Latin Americans as racially inferior—did not prevail because of the growing clout of industry in America’s West and employers’ demand for Mexican labor. The ban on Chinese immigration in 1882 had forced businesses to look increasingly to Mexico as a major source of labor, and by the turn of the twentieth century, Mexicans made up the vast majority of track crews building railroads in the Southwest. Then came an even greater transformation: in 1902 Theodore Roosevelt signed the National Reclamation Act, which created large-scale irrigation projects that would allow farming to flourish where there used to be merely desert. In California, between 1909 and 1929, the amount of irrigated land expanded by more than 2 million acres. Without a large enough local population—and again because of restrictions on Asian immigration—farms became dependent on Mexican workers. A violent revolution in Mexico that began in 1910 made it an especially easy time to recruit.
The line between the two countries continued to feel porous because most Mexicans who worked for American employers cycled back home when their seasonal work was finished, rarely settling down permanently in the United States. Only in 1917, after the passage of an immigration act requiring literacy for all newcomers, did a barrier to movement between the two countries emerge. Even then, concerned about the impact on farms and rail companies, employers demanded an exemption from the rule so they could continue to hire Mexican workers, many of whom were illiterate.
Apart from all of these practical economic considerations, Washington had a basic understanding that the United States should not be trying to cut off immigration from its neighbors, if only as a matter of maintaining good relations. Just as the Japanese had interpreted the ban on immigration in 1924 as an insult, there was a risk that Mexico—which was even more important for the country’s security, given its proximity—could be offended.
Adding limits to Western Hemisphere immigration, Schlei explained in his memo to the president, “would disturb our relations with Latin America at a very bad time.” Jack Valenti agreed, telling Johnson that Secretary of State Rusk felt that going along with Feighan’s plan would “vex and dumbfound our Latin America friends” and would be “too much too quick for them to take.”
The timing was especially poor because of a growing crisis in the Dominican Republic, where the U.S. military had hastily intervened in a local power struggle. In 1961 Rafael Trujillo, a ruthless dictator who tortured and killed his political opponents and once ordered the massacre of thousands of Haitians, was assassinated after ruling for more than three decades. His successor, a democratically elected liberal reformer named Juan Bosch, lasted less than a year before being overthrown by the Dominican military in 1963. But two years later, in April 1965, pro-Bosch forces tried to reinstate their leader. Fearing that Bosch was a Communist sympathizer who would turn the Dominican Republic into another Cuba, and convinced that violence against American nationals trapped on the island was imminent, Johnson sent hundreds of Marines to the island. Using the same techniques he had employed to sell the Great Society, Johnson tried to persuade the American public that he had no choice but to act. He claimed that bullets were flying at Americans on the island and that “the lives of thousands, the liberty of a nation, and the principles and the values of all the American Republics” were at stake. When reporters arrived to investigate, they discovered that no Americans had been wounded or killed, and that the situation was nowhere near as dire as Johnson had claimed. When asked for proof that Communists were behind the revolt, the government was unable to. Alongside Johnson’s hyperbolic claims, the push to send troops to the Dominican Republic appeared to be a fiasco in the making. Thankfully for Johnson, the two sides soon signed a cease-fire agreement, though the damage to his credibility would last the rest of his presidency.
Given that relations with Latin America were delicate, it was no time to be imposing immigration limits for the first time. So the administration proposed a compromise to Feighan. Rusk suggested that a line be added to the bill requiring the president to notify Congress and make recommendations if the total number of immigrants in a given year surpassed 350,000. “What this will do is keep non-quota status for Latin America—but allow Feighan to tell his right-wing friends that the Congress and the President will act if immigration looks like it’s getting out of hand,” Valenti explained in a memo to the president.
The meeting between Feighan and Johnson did not resolve all of the Ohio congressman’s concerns, but it kept negotiations moving in the right direction. A week later Valenti had good news to report to Johnson. He had held two long meetings with Feighan in two days, and the Ohio congressman appeared ready to drop the request for a worldwide ceiling on immigration, including the Western Hemisphere, and told Valenti that he would “get a bill the President likes.” Valenti was still a bit wary of Feighan, though, “since he is not what I would call a thoroughly reliable fellow.”
Indeed, Feighan had still not given up on demanding funds for a joint committee. The year before, a House vote led by Celler had defeated his request; now Feighan asked again for funds at a House Appropriations hearing, which Celler did not attend. This time he received $120,000. During a Senate Appropriations Committee meeting to review the request, Celler showed up and rehashed his argument against the joint committee: it had met once in fifteen years for a session that had lasted four minutes and had never met again. And it was not needed for any action that a regular House or Senate committee could not already do. The senators, who, as The New York Times reported, “were impressed with Mr. Celler’s thunder,” agreed and cut the funds to $24,000. When Feighan discovered this, he was furious, taking to the House floor multiple times to attack his colleague. He demanded that Celler resign from the joint committee and accused him of “misrepresenting the facts.” The Post mocked Feighan with the headline, “Feighan Asks Celler to Quit Dutyless Job.” Celler, not a man of few words, said icily, “To what the gentleman from Ohio says, I give the thunder of my silence.”
The fighting continued on July 21, when Feighan intoned dramatically on the House floor that it was “a black day in the annals of representative government.” He explained that he had dropped his demand for a limit on Western Hemisphere immigration only because he had been assured that the joint committee would undertake an “immediate review of the policy implications of nonquota status for natives of the independent countries of the Western Hemisphere. I did not seek immediate repeal of that privileged status because of this firm agreement. With this unexpected and inexplicable turn of events the issue now remains open.”
Celler saucily replied, “There is an old saying that when two men ride a horse one man must ride behind. I am going to tell you that nobody is going to ride in front of me when I ride the horse of the Committee on the Judiciary.”
The next day, July 22, at three-fifteen p.m., the House immigration subcommittee met to vote on the legislation. The bill was now a compromise between Feighan and the Johnson administration: the national origins formula would be phased out in three years, compared to the five proposed by Johnson. Overall immigration would be capped at 330,000 a year. Unlimited immigration was allowed from the Western Hemisphere, as well as spouses, parents, and minor children of American citizens. Families seeking to reunify would get highest priority, followed by those possessing special skills.
Feighan, angry over his confrontation with Celler, moved to reconsider an amendment from Clark MacGregor, a Minnesota Republican congressman, to add a limit to Western Hemisphere immigration. The proposal was defeated six votes to three, with even Feighan voting against it, apparently giving up his battle for good. With that, Frank Chelf, a Kentucky Democrat, moved that the subcommittee vote to report H.R. 2580 to the full House Judiciary Committee. The vote was 8 to 0. That evening Valenti wrote a memo to the president laced with palpable relief: “We got it out.” Peter Rodino, an unassuming Democrat from New Jersey who had made a last-minute fuss since he wanted his name on the bill, “performed like a soldier after innumerable conversations.” And Schlei “shepherded this bill through the entire tangle.”
Even though Johnson had driven his staff hard, he knew how to thank them when they had done extraordinary work. On July 26 Johnson wrote to Schlei, “Your unflagging work on the immigration bill did not go unnoticed by me. . . . Your Nation is grateful to you for this task and the hope that an ancient and outworn procedure may now be reconstructed.”
AFTER THREE YEARS of being trapped in Feighan’s subcommittee, the bill was finally ready to reach the House Judiciary Committee. Feighan promised that the bipartisan support for the bill “virtually assures its swift enactment by the House.” As the administration looked toward the Senate, Henry Wilson instructed Schwartz that the bill was “not to be changed by one comma,” and that any contacts between Schwartz and Congress should be reported back to Wilson.
On July 27, after a committee session on the bill, Celler told Larry O’Brien that “things went awfully well,” and that the committee would likely report out the bill two days later. Things did not move quite that quickly. An exhausted Nicholas Katzenbach, another Johnson aide tasked with pushing the immigration bill forward, updated Johnson on the phone on July 30: that day, the committee had run out of time, since the ever-loquacious Celler had spoken for too long and had given the committee only three minutes to vote. “Honest to Pete, there are times I could resign on stupidity,” said Katzenbach.
The following week, on August 3, the Judiciary Committee finally reported the bill out by a vote of 27 to 4. The procedure made front-page news, with Johnson congratulating the committee and calling the vote “a breakthrough for reason, a triumph for justice.”
Right until the end, Feighan behaved like a petty child. He picked fights with Celler, complaining in a long letter to Jack Valenti that he wanted to manage the bill when it reached the House floor, rather than Celler, who he claimed “played no part whatever” in the bill and was “not intimately informed on its substantive content or the intent” of the legislation. Ever delusional, Feighan said of Celler, “I am not convinced he is in agreement with its purposes.” There was no way to respond except in disbelief. O’Brien, upon seeing the letter, sent a note to Valenti: “Congratulations! You have only the finest of pen pals.”
On August 25, the full House voted to pass the immigration overhaul 318 to 95, with most Republicans and northern Democrats supporting the bill and, as usual, southern Democrats opposing it. On the floor of the House, Celler was filled with pride and emotion, reflecting on how long it had taken to reach this point. He was the only member of the House who had also been in Congress in 1924 when the original national origins law had passed. “I made a speech then against this theory. I am glad I am living today and have lived to see that my theories have been vindicated, that we are now to obliterate and nullify and cancel out this abomination called the national theory of immigration.”
Now it was up to the Senate, “if you’ll ever get Teddy Kennedy to catch up with old man Celler,” Johnson told his attorney general Katzenbach in a phone call later that month. “Here he is, 70 years old, and he’s already got his bill passed.”
SINCE RETURNING TO THE SENATE after his accident, Ted Kennedy had impressed his colleagues. During the debate over the Voting Rights Act, he had spearheaded an ambitious effort to add a provision that would prohibit states from charging voters or people registering to vote with a poll tax. Marshaling support from colleagues and civil rights groups, Kennedy showed mastery of a complex subject and a talent for parliamentary procedure. The measure lost, 49 to 45, but political journalists took notice. One reporter called Kennedy’s effort a “legislative tour de force.” Another said Ted “earned the right not to be called ‘kid’ anymore.”
James Eastland, self-appointed mentor to the young Kennedy, was taking note as well. And Eastland could tell that the power of southern Democrats was waning. A genuine admirer of Johnson, Eastland resolved that rather than fight the president on immigration, it was time to extract as much as he could and then get out of the way. In August, Eastland told Johnson aide Mike Manatos that he was putting Ted Kennedy “in charge of immigration,” and that it was time to “give in.” “I received the definite impression that he will be guided by Ted Kennedy’s wishes in the matter,” noted Manatos. Eastland’s price would be a judge in Mississippi, but otherwise he would not try to stop the bill from exiting the immigration subcommittee or the Judiciary Committee.
There was trouble elsewhere on the Senate Judiciary Committee, however. Sam Ervin of North Carolina, a Democrat who liked to call himself an “old country lawyer” with a primary allegiance to the American Constitution, was not convinced that abolishing the quotas was a good idea. Ervin would be one of the few legislators during the debate in 1965 who correctly predicted that the immigration bill would have dramatic consequences for the country’s ethnic makeup. During Senate hearings in February, Ervin testified that the bill was “just one little hole in the dike for unrestricted immigration,” and if there were more immigration from Africa and Asia, “the country will be drastically changed.”
Ervin told Manatos that he would support the bill on one condition—that there be a cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. It was the provision that the Johnson aides had fought so hard to kill in the House. O’Brien concluded that “it is clear some sort of compromise involving a worldwide quota may be necessary to spring a bill from the Judiciary Committee.” Ervin wasn’t alone; Minority Leader Everett Dirksen also wanted a cap on the Western Hemisphere. Dirksen, like Ervin, suspected that supporters of the bill were underestimating the potential rise of immigration levels from around the world. He predicted that the population of Latin America, which was 200 million, would grow to 374 million in fifteen years, and that a strong flow of people from Latin America would soon enter the United States if Congress did not act. That week Katzenbach gave Dirksen language regarding the limit that he felt would get the immigration bill out of the committee. He had also received a sign-off from Secretary of State Rusk, who had been so fiercely opposed to a Western Hemisphere cap but was now willing to go along as a last resort. They settled on a ceiling of 120,000 annually, the country’s first-ever limit on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. Valenti assured Johnson, though, that they would handle the politics delicately. It was important that “the new language be played as a Committee sponsored thing—not as something the Administration has consented to.”
On September 8 the Senate Judiciary Committee reported the bill out on a vote of 14 to 2. Eastland and John McClellan of Arkansas voted against it, asking in their minority view report, “Why is it that of all the nations of the world the United States is the only one that must answer to the rest of the world and be apologetic about its immigration policy? Certainly no other country that we are aware of seems to be concerned about its ‘image’ in other countries.” Kennedy, Philip Hart, and Jacob Javits criticized the new limit on Western Hemisphere immigration: “At no other time in the history of our immigration policy have we disturbed or altered the unique relationship that exists among the nations of the New World.”
While Kennedy served as the bill’s floor manager, the four days of debate that followed echoed the arguments from decades past, as southern Democrats defended an ethnic nationalist vision. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina argued, “The wish to preserve one’s identity and the identity of one’s nation requires no justification—and no belief in racial or national superiority—any more than the wish to have one’s own children, and to continue one’s own family through them, need be justified or rationalized by a belief that they are superior to the children of others.” Spessard Holland of Florida asked of his colleagues, “Why for the first time, are the emerging nations of Africa to be placed on the same basis as are our mother countries, Britain, Germany, the Scandinavian nations, France, the Mediterranean nations, and the other nations from which most Americans have come?”
Alarmed by Holland’s comments, Ted and Bobby Kennedy together quickly leaped to the bill’s defense. “I am very pleased and proud of the fact that our family came from Ireland,” Bobby Kennedy said, words that would have mortified his father. “As the Senator from Massachusetts has said, we are past that period in the history of the United States when we judge a person by his last name or his place of birth or where his grandfather or grandmother came from.”
But there was no need to debate more, for Holland was well outnumbered. After just four days of deliberation, the Senate overwhelmingly passed the law on September 22, in a vote of 76 to 18.
Because there were differences in the Senate and House versions, the bill headed to a conference between the two chambers to iron out discrepancies. Celler still held out hope that the Western Hemisphere cap could be removed. “I’m going to raise hell,” he vowed to Johnson in a phone call. But in the end, the fight was over. The final bill contained an annual limit of 170,000 visas for immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, and 120,000 in the Western Hemisphere. No single country could have more than 20,000 slots. Rather than prioritizing highly skilled immigrants, as the McCarran-Walter Act had done, the new law gave far greater preference to families trying to reunite. Three-fourths of the visas would be for those reunifying with family members; spouses, minor children, and parents of U.S. citizens would be exempt from the caps.
On September 30 the House adopted the final version, 320 to 69. An hour later the Senate approved the bill by a voice vote.
Johnson immediately announced that he would sign the immigration bill in three days at the Statue of Liberty. The last president to have visited the statue was his hero, Franklin Roosevelt, in 1936, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the statue’s dedication. “Perhaps Providence did prepare this American continent to be a place of the second chance,” Roosevelt had said then as he gazed out at the harbor. “Certainly, millions of men and women have made it that. They adopted this homeland because in this land they found a home in which the things they most desired could be theirs—freedom of opportunity, freedom of thought, freedom to worship God. Here they found life, because here there was freedom to live.”