CHAPTER EIGHT “And We Shall Overcome”
Pages of Dick’s draft of LBJ’s “We Shall Overcome” speech delivered before a joint session of Congress. March 15, 1965.
DURING THE YEARS OF OUR joint venture, Dick and I, like two nosy neighbors on a party line, had listened in on conversations recorded on LBJ’s secret taping system. On the whole, the experience was grand entertainment—making us laugh, bewildering us, clarifying things we didn’t know. Even if particular moments might anger or irritate us, the audiotapes and published transcripts always furnished a touchstone for further reflection and discussion.
The first phone call Lyndon Johnson made on the morning of November 4, 1964, after a long night of celebration and only a few hours of sleep, was to Special Assistant Bill Moyers.
After joyfully reviewing results of state races from different parts of the country, their conversation turned to potential staff changes at the White House: Who should be kept on, who should be let go, who they might try to recruit. And suddenly, Dick was at the center of the conversation.
NOVEMBER 4, 1964
MOYERS: The one thing that does bother me most, frankly, is the writing end of it, not just from the standpoint of getting it done, but getting it done in such a way that you leave an impression on history. And I argue very strongly, therefore, for doing everything we have to do to keep the fellow who’s already made another commitment, and that’s Dick Goodwin. I recognize all of Dick’s liabilities, but, on the other hand, there’s not another man in town who can—
LBJ: What are his liabilities?
“Liabilities!” I could imagine Dick interrupting their phone call, and slapping down the morning newspaper. “What liabilities?”
MOYERS: He is a—he got himself in hot water three or four years ago as an aggressive overly ambitious young man.
LBJ: Well, he’s not in hot water to me to a damn certainty.
As I read on, I was filled with delight and pride.
The telephone exchange now transcribed between Johnson’s Texas bedroom and the White House became even more intriguing once National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy chimed in.
BUNDY: Dick is a loner, and he’s a—he’s ambitious and proud. He’s been magnificent—
LBJ: I think he’s entitled to the highest job we got, the highest pay, I think that even if he is a loner we just can’t afford to have him—
BUNDY: Can’t afford to lose him.
MOYERS: Cannot afford to lose him, Mr. President. You could lose me but you can’t lose Goodwin.
BUNDY: You couldn’t lose either one. I think the fundamental thing about Dick is that it has to be clear… where he’s supposed to check in.
Moyers notes that he heard from a good friend of Dick’s that he would stay if Moyers “put it on a personal basis that he just had to stay.”
LBJ: Well, go on and put it on a personal basis and let’s get that straightened out.
A loner… Overly ambitious… Aggressive… Proud… Magnificent: Over the years I had read dozens of extreme descriptions of Dick’s character and behavior, the impressions he made on others. On the one hand, “loveable as a sullen porcupine,” stated Jack Valenti. On the other hand, Valenti also acknowledged that he could be “incandescent, a near genius… the most skilled living practitioner of an arcane and dying artform, the political speech.” Such characterizations rarely occupied a middle ground, and even now—all these years later—these negative opinions make me feel like a defensive mother at a middle school conference.
Other comments over time focused on Dick’s eccentric appearance, the billowing smoke from his ever-present cigars, his rumpled suits, untamed eyebrows—the direct, arresting gaze that had captivated me from the moment we met. To those who did not know him well, his irony was thought abrasive, his shyness construed as aloofness or arrogance. And he was always difficult to classify—an intellectual but not an academic, a literary lawyer without a practice, first gregarious, then withdrawn, undeniably brilliant but sometimes socially awkward. Clearly, he never had the makings of a conventional bureaucrat or a company man. He would vanish from the office for days at a time without telling anyone where he was going or when he would return. His gifts, nonetheless, became indispensable to Lyndon Johnson in the year ahead.
When Moyers suggested that Dick had “already made another commitment,” I remembered that Wesleyan University had offered him a standing invitation to become a writer-in-residence, and that he had planned to start the fellowship once the election was over. There, in the quiet college town of Middletown, Connecticut, Dick had hoped to return to his original dream of becoming a full-time writer—and, in no small part, to try to repair the damage that absolute immersion in politics inflicts on a person, a marriage, and the very possibility of a conventional family life.
After both Moyers and the president implored him to stay through the new administration’s “formative period,” Dick finally agreed. The moment he made that commitment, Dick recalled, the White House issued a public announcement that he had been appointed a special assistant to the president. Indeed, I found a copy of the announcement in Dick’s archive, preserved by him with special care in a plastic sleeve.
When I showed him the unearthed formal notice, Dick wagged it happily in the air. “No longer hidden away in the Executive Office Building, transferred at last from the State Department payroll to the White House, back in the same office suite I had been evicted from after my date with Che Guevara, even given permission to speak with the press about what I was doing!”
Dick’s satisfaction recollecting his return to Room 212 was palpable, as was our anticipation about the next step of our journey. We were about to revisit the wondrous year when the 89th Congress would produce the greatest progressive legislation in our lifetime.
“Let’s get to work,” Dick said to me, sweeping his hand toward the boxes we had yet to explore. “It’s time for us to start building the Great Society,” he smiled. “I hope I’m up to it.”
The actual planning of the Great Society, Dick recalled, had begun six months before Johnson’s reelection. At the University of Michigan the previous May, the president had promised to “set our course toward the Great Society” by corralling “the best thought and the broadest knowledge” from every section of the country to establish working groups that would address major problems facing the country.
As Johnson explained in his memoir, over the years he had watched “the standard method” of developing legislative proposals, which depended on ideas from governmental agencies. He concluded that reliance on internal sources thwarted fresh thinking. By their very nature, government bureaucracies were invariably “dedicated to preserving the status quo.”
While Kennedy had also reached out beyond the agencies, Johnson believed his predecessor’s task forces had been “overweighted with scholars.” Very few practical ideas had emerged from them. By contrast, Johnson directed that his working groups be comprised of “doers” as well as “thinkers”—politicians, philanthropists, business leaders, and community activists as well as scholars and academics. The entire process, which was kept secret until the reports were completed to allow freedom from speculation, was more expansive, accelerated, and imaginative than the traditional “standard method.”
As a result, the Johnson task forces were able to find a remedy for a long-standing problem that had stymied Kennedy’s legislative agenda. While Kennedy’s team failed to resolve the central problem of how to include parochial schools in federal aid to education, Johnson’s education task force devised a formula for providing aid to poor districts rather than schools, thus avoiding the old thorny issue of separation of church and state. Similarly, the task force on health managed to unravel the problem of doctors’ fees before the Medicare bill was sent to the Hill.
Johnson assigned Moyers the massive job of quilting together and coordinating the various task forces. Looking back after fifty years, Moyers considered his work helping to create and coordinate the 1965 legislative agenda “the most important” and “exhilarating” of his entire time in government service.
Each task force was given a White House aide as a liaison. Dick was charged with the task forces on the cities, conservation, and the arts. He wrote the special messages to Congress that called for legislation suggested by those task forces. Meanwhile, a dozen additional task forces and messages were concurrently underway in the hands of other White House aides.
Taken together, a factory was assembled that was able to investigate and produce landmark legislation on medical care, economic opportunity, education, the environment, the cities, immigration, housing and urban development, the arts, and much more that would come to alter the social, economic, and political landscape of the country.
LBJ instructed the task forces to set goals “too high rather than too low.” Final reports were to reach his desk around Election Day. It was imperative that the administration be prepared to move forward on the first day, operating on the assumption that he would win.
Two weeks after Johnson’s victory, Dick presented the president with the report from the Task Force on the Cities: “It has new ideas and a fresh approach. It represents the first direct attack by any American President on the biggest single problem of American life. It can be the first step toward really making our cities a decent place to live, thus improving the lives of the great majority of the American people.”
The massive problems of the cities were so interrelated, Dick noted, that legislation had to cut across fields of housing, public schools, poverty, jobs, transportation, crime, and delinquency. Existing programs were not reaching the urban poor, incarcerated within “an iron ring of affluence that has led not only to the doom of school integration but to a physical segregation that has condemned many to lives of corrupting despair.” These problems had reached such a magnitude that they demanded representation at the highest level—resulting in a call for a new Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In similar fashion, the task force on conservation moved beyond the purview of traditional concerns with national parks and wildlife preserves to knock on the door of a wide range of environmental concerns. The report recommended new legislation to regulate water and air pollution, clean up rivers, control the manufacture of pesticides, and rescue both cities and countryside from the uncontrolled waste products of modern technology.
There was emotion in Dick’s voice as he recounted for me these developmental months of the Great Society. “The White House was boiling with excitement and activity,” Dick recalled, “I had never felt it to the same degree before. We all felt that way. This is what it was all for. We wanted to—no, not wanted to—we believed we were about to make the country far better from top to bottom. It was an awesome, intoxicating time.”
JANUARY 4, 1965
After leafing through sheaves of memos and suggestions vying for inclusion in Johnson’s 1965 State of the Union message, we found a series of drafts Dick had worked up for the occasion. At last, we discovered the version the president actually delivered:
On this Hill which was my home, I am stirred by old friendships.
Though total agreement between the Executive and Congress is impossible, total respect is important.
I am proud to be among my colleagues of the Congress whose legacy to their trust is their loyalty to their nation.
I am not unaware of inner emotions of the new Members of this body tonight.
Twenty-eight years ago I felt as you do now. You will soon learn that you are among men whose first love is their country, men who try each day to do, as best they can, what they believe is right.
“What an unusual opening,” I commented to Dick. “Emotional, sentimental, so flagrantly flattering to the assembly.”
“Of the many proposals Lyndon made during that speech,” Dick replied, a grin lighting his seriousness, “the most important was his marriage proposal to the Congress. He told me he wanted to make love to the Congress just like he made love to Lady Bird.”
I laughed. No further elaboration was necessary.
Calls for partnering with Congress to take some form of action marked nearly every paragraph of the speech. LBJ proposed federal aid for education to ensure every child, from preschool to college, achieved the fullest development of his or her skills; a medical care program for the elderly and the underprivileged; a national effort to make the city a better place to live; an environmental program to end the poisoning of rivers and the air we breathe; a national foundation to support the arts; an initiative to eliminate barriers to the right to vote, and major reform of restrictive immigration laws.
Johnson barely mentioned the war in Vietnam, according it only 132 out of over 4,000 words in the address. America, he stressed, was “in the midst of the greatest upward surge of economic well-being in the history of any nation.” The challenge before the president and the Congress was how to use that wealth to benefit the everyday lives of the American people.
This full-blown courtship of Congress—an appeal deeper than partisanship, beyond camaraderie, and nostalgia—was propelled by Johnson’s profound insight into the political process. It was his golden ticket to board an express train that would become known as the historic 89th Congress.
Everything was set. This was no longer the preliminary vision of the Great Society that LBJ had set forth in Michigan eight months before. Now the trucks and wheelbarrows, the bricks and mortar had been assembled and the work of realization was ready to begin.
Johnson reflected on these beginnings as he and I later worked together on the chapter of his memoirs dealing with Congress. He talked as we walked together around the ranch inspecting his Hereford cattle, talked as he drove his Lincoln Continental convertible on the roads of his beloved Hill Country, talked as we sat over the edge of the pool, talked over barbecue. He never stopped talking! At the time I hardly realized what a remarkable opportunity this was for me—still in my twenties, fresh from earning a doctorate in government and teaching a course on the presidency—to spend my days as the sole student listening to the real thing, the greatest presidential practitioner of the legislative process in the last half of the twentieth century. After all, he could talk from experience as director of the National Youth Administration, a congressman, senator, majority leader, vice president, and president. Drawing from a service in government almost without parallel, he was without a doubt the most overwhelming teacher of government I had ever had.
There is, he explained to me, underlining his point with an emphatic tap of his finger on the desk, but one way for a president to deal with the Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. 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.
Without this marriage, this full-court press, no Great Society would have been possible. From start to finish he included Congress, even seeking their counsel on which problems the task forces should tackle. Members of Congress contributed to the resulting reports. Their input was solicited on the very messages they themselves would later receive on the Hill.
Was it not, I asked Johnson, the formal prerogative of Congress to decide which bills to take up and when? LBJ agreed with a nod, but explained that a president can shape the legislative calendar by determining the order and the speed with which he sends messages to the Hill.
A measure must be sent to the Hill at exactly the right moment, and that moment depends on three things: first, on momentum; second, on the availability of sponsors in the right place at the right time; and third, on the opportunities for neutralizing the opposition. Timing is essential.
Momentum is not a mysterious mistress. It is a controllable fact of political life that depends on nothing more exotic than preparation.
The machinery must be paced properly, as LBJ explained to staffers: “It’s like a bottle of bourbon, if you take it a glass at a time, it’s fine. But if you drink the bottle in one evening, you have troubles. I plan to take a sip at a time and enjoy myself.”
Johnson decided to space the messages on the production line, delivering one or two a week to avoid pushing the “sensitive animal” of Congress so hard that it would balk or turn on him. He resolved to deliver messages to Congress on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to allow briefing sessions on Monday and Wednesday evenings for key members of Congress. These briefings would take place over dinners in the small dining room in the basement of the West Wing, creating social occasions while simultaneously providing a preview of coming messages, an opportunity for members to ask questions of cabinet officials and White House staff. “It may seem like nothing,” he told me, while describing these intimate dinner meetings, “but, in fact, it was everything.”
It gave the chosen ones—between the charts and the tables and the answers to their questions—a knowledgeable understanding of what often turned out to be complex legislation. This understanding put them in good shape the next day when reporters and cameramen began pounding the Hill for reactions. The ones who had been at the briefing had their thoughts in order; they made the best statements on the 6 o’clock news. They looked smart before their constituents and that made an enormous difference in their attitude toward the bill.
Shortly after the State of the Union, the president gathered his core team in the Fish Room to lay out the legislative schedule they must implement posthaste. Here Johnson’s intuitive sense took over. The first two messages to be sent up were medical care and education, “two monumental measures,” White House staffer Eric Goldman noted, “with long accumulated support behind them and an excellent chance of going through without serious trouble.” As soon as these bills had begun moving forward, two more messages would be sent up and then several more. Each new law, Dick remembered Johnson saying, would put “meat on the bones of the Great Society.”
Laurels, Johnson warned his team, were nothing to rest upon. Though he had been elected by more than fifteen million votes, “the biggest popular margin in the history of the country,” by early January he was already feeling the size of his victory and the political capital thereby amassed beginning to dwindle: “Just by the natural way people think and because Barry Goldwater scared hell out of them, I have already lost about two of these fifteen million and am probably getting down to thirteen. If I get in any fight with Congress, I will lose another couple of million and if I have to send any more of our boys into Vietnam I may be down to eight million by the end of the summer.”
Such shrinkage, he explained, was “in the nature of what a president does. He uses up his capital.”
This exercise in subtraction added up to a single exhortation, a goad to drive his team. “So I want you guys to get off your asses and do everything possible to get everything in my program passed as soon as possible before the aura and the halo that surround me disappear.”
JANUARY 15, 1965
“They were in cahoots from the start,” Dick exclaimed as we studied the January 15 telephone exchange between LBJ and Martin Luther King Jr.
The president had called King shortly after noon to wish him a happy birthday. “Only thirty-six years old,” I said. “And you, just turned thirty-three. Astonishing.”
“Yes,” Dick said wistfully.
The transcript of the conversation between the politician and the activist that day was revelatory. Each man seemed so astutely aware of the needs and pressures on the other that it occasionally became difficult to distinguish their positions.
Like almost every other conversation LBJ had in his life, he did most of the talking. After accepting King’s congratulations on the vision of the Great Society laid out in the State of the Union message, Johnson solicited the Reverend’s support for the initial bills that had already been sent to the Hill by illustrating exactly how one hand could help the other:
LBJ: We’ve got to try with every force at our command—and I mean every force—to get these education bills that go to those people under two thousand dollars a year income…. And this poverty [bill] that’s a billion and a half, and this health [bill]… We’ve got to get them passed before the vicious forces concentrate and get them a coalition that can block them….
Your people ought to be very, very diligent in looking at those committee members that come from urban areas that are friendly to you to see that those bills get reported right out. Because you have no idea—it’s shocking to you—how much benefits they will get.
Johnson confided that he wasn’t advertising how tilted these first bills were to Blacks for fear of losing white support, but knew that King understood who the people were who made less than $2,000 a year.
Though King was in Alabama, organizing what was then his top priority—the coordinated drive to register Black voters—he did not bring up voting rights. He knew that the president believed that voting rights should be addressed later so as not to lose southern support for federal aid to education, Medicare, poverty, and the cities. Furthermore, within the administration, there were many who believed that after the process of desegregating public facilities, “some breathing space” was necessary before being plunged into another dramatic battle.
Aware of LBJ’s legislative agenda, King therefore opened up with his hope that the president would appoint the first Black cabinet member. Such a trailblazing appointment, King argued, would “give a new sense of dignity and self-respect to millions of… Negro youth who feel that they don’t have anything to look forward to in life,” and “would improve the health of our whole democracy.” Johnson wholeheartedly agreed, strongly hinting that if his bill to create a new department of housing and urban affairs (HUD) got through, he would likely make Robert Weaver the cabinet secretary.
Then, to King’s surprise and delight, Johnson himself turned the conversation to voting rights.
LBJ: There’s not going to be anything, though, Doctor, as effective as all of them voting. That will get you a message that all the eloquence in the world won’t bring because the fellow will be coming to you then, instead of you calling him.
Once LBJ had laid out his reasoning on the absolute primacy of the vote, a reversal of roles took place. King insisted that LBJ would gain massive political advantage if Blacks could vote in greater numbers while LBJ followed with strategic advice on how to advance and accelerate the Civil Right Movement itself.
KING: It’s very interesting, Mr. President, to notice that the only states that you didn’t carry in the South… [the five southern states] have less than 40 percent of the Negroes registered to vote….
It’s so important to get Negroes registered to vote in large numbers in the South. It would be this coalition of the Negro vote and the moderate white vote that will really make the new South.
The key to their entire interchange was sounded when Johnson suggests to King that they take steps to expose the severity and the bigotry that was still employed to prevent the participation of southern Black voters.
LBJ: I think you can contribute a great deal by getting your leaders and you yourself—taking very simple examples of discrimination where a man’s got to memorize Longfellow or whether he’s got to quote the first ten amendments, or he’s got to tell you what Amendment 15, 16, 17 is….
If you can find the worst conditions that you run into in Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or South Carolina… and if you just take that one illustration and get it on radio and get it on television, and get it in the pulpits, get it in the meetings, get it every place you can, pretty soon, the fellow that didn’t do anything but drive a tractor will say, “That’s not right. That’s not fair.” And then that will help us on what we are going to shove through in the end.
KING: Yes you’re exactly right about that.
LBJ: And if we do that… it will be the greatest breakthrough of anything… it’ll do things that even the ’64 Act couldn’t do.
KING: That’s right….
LBJ:… And let’s try to get health, and education, and poverty through the first ninety days.
KING: Yes… You can count on our absolute support.
In essence Johnson’s advice to King boiled down to this: While the president would work within the federal government, directing the Justice Department to focus on a voting rights bill, King would take the cause directly to the American people.
If not exactly a collaboration, the heart of the conversation between the politician and the activist reveals that their hopes and dreams were linked from the start.
By the time Martin Luther King next visited President Johnson in the White House, on February 9, 1965, he had spent the month busily organizing street marches and demonstrations throughout Alabama. He had settled upon Selma, labeling the city “a symbol of bitter-end resistance to the civil rights movement in the Deep South,” the perfect staging ground for mobilizing empathetic public sentiment. “In a democracy,” Dick often held, “life on the streets is the horse and the government is the cart.”
Better than three fifths of the city’s population was Black, yet only 2 percent were registered to vote. Black residents were only able to register on two days a month. And the demeaning bag of tricks and tests to which Black applicants were subjected were not simply formidable, but absurd and contemptible. “How many bubbles in a bar of soap?” applicants were asked. “How many seeds in a watermelon?”
Through relentless organization and demonstrations on the streets, King had resolved “to turn Selma upside down and inside out in order to make it right-side up.”
King’s meeting with the president that February day was brief. Johnson was preoccupied. The simmering problem of Vietnam was beginning to boil. Three days earlier, Viet Cong guerrillas had raided a barracks in Pleiku where U.S. Army advisers were housed. Eight American soldiers were killed, scores were wounded. After a series of meetings with State, Defense, and military leaders, Johnson decided to retaliate with air strikes against military targets in North Vietnam.
Before the meeting with King concluded, however, Johnson had given his tacit support to the organized marches, though both he and King worried about the thickening atmosphere of retribution and violence that hovered over Alabama.
As the demonstrations continued day after day, tensions mounted. Into this already flammable circumstance was thrown an accelerant in the person of Sheriff Jim Clark, a rabid racist straight out of central casting who would terrorize the demonstrators much as Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor did in Birmingham.
On the evening of February 18 in Marion, Alabama, Sheriff Clark and a squad of twenty nightstick-wielding state troopers launched a brutal attack against a peaceful voting rights march, sending the protesters—including young Jimmie Lee Jackson, his mother, and eighty-two-year-old grandfather—fleeing for safety. The troopers chased Jackson and his family into a café where they beat him as he tried to protect his mother, then shot him twice in the stomach and dragged him into the street. He died eight days later. Since turning twenty-one, Jimmie Lee Jackson had tried to register to vote five times. Dead at twenty-six years old, he became a martyr to the cause that believed the right to vote and the right to freedom were one and the same.
Out of such savage but all too commonplace depravity was conceived the idea of a fifty-four-mile march from Selma to the state capital at Montgomery to confront Governor George Wallace and demand an end to brutality and voter suppression. The call went out. Six hundred marchers answered and assembled. On Sunday, March 7, the procession set out for Montgomery from Selma’s Brown Chapel across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
SUNDAY, MARCH 7, 1965
I was twenty-two years old that Sunday, March 7, and had gathered with a group of Harvard school friends to watch The Sunday Night Movie, featuring the televised premiere of the Nazi war crimes film Judgment at Nuremberg. Shortly after the movie began, ABC made the rare decision to interrupt the broadcast with a special news report that a violent clash had taken place that afternoon at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The quickly cobbled footage taken of the confrontation and flown to New York ran for nearly fifteen minutes before the station returned, with grim irony, to “Nuremberg.”
Along with tens of millions of Americans, we watched the peaceful parade of marchers, led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams, civil rights leaders and associates of Martin Luther King, reach the crest of the bridge. Ahead, a wall of helmeted state troopers blocked their way. The footage glimpsed troopers with protective gas masks in readiness and behind them ranks of men on horseback.
As I had discovered while trying to retrieve something of my experience at the March on Washington, iconic events make it difficult to separate out actual memories from what we later learned from newspapers, television, and multiple historical accounts absorbed over the years. What I do remember, unfiltered, was a stunned sorrow at witnessing the wrenching events that followed on what was to become known as “Bloody Sunday.”
What I know now is that police whistles shrieked and a megaphoned voice commanded: “You are ordered to disperse. This march will not continue.”
“May we have a word,” Hosea Williams asked of the major in charge of the troops. “There is no word to be had,” the major replied. The marchers were told they had two minutes to disperse. They stood in silence.
Then suddenly an order came: “Troopers Advance,” and the blue uniformed line tore into the marchers’ orderly columns. Troopers bludgeoned the marchers with clubs, nightsticks, and whips, felling the unarmed activists to the ground. Then, as tear gas bombs were set off, the mounted men spurred their horses forward, trampling fallen bodies and lashing the retreating crowds with nightsticks. Over the screams and cries of the marchers could be heard the crazed whoops and cheers of white spectators waving Confederate flags.
Few public events in my lifetime have caused the ground to shift, as if the ocean had pulled the sand out from underfoot, leaving you unbalanced. We learned that dozens had been hospitalized with fractured skulls, arms, and legs and scores more were receiving emergency treatment on-site. Long into the night we talked about what we had witnessed on the black-and-white television screen and what we might do.
Two days later we heard the news of the brutal beating of a white Boston minister, James Reeb. He had answered King’s call, issued immediately after Bloody Sunday, asking for clergymen of all denominations to come to Selma and join the demonstrators. As Reeb and two colleagues were walking on the street the night of their arrival in Selma, four white men shouting “Nigger lovers” attacked them with clubs. One assailant swung a three-foot club at the side of Reeb’s head. The other assailants kicked and bloodied Reeb’s colleagues before vanishing down a nearby alley. The three ministers stumbled into Brown Chapel, where Reeb fell unconscious. He soon developed a large blood clot on the side of his head and was transported to a Birmingham hospital for emergency brain surgery.
The story of the ambush made national news, far surpassing the notices of the pursuit and murder of the young black activist Jimmie Lee Jackson. President Johnson called the minister’s wife, Marie, and provided a plane to take her to Birmingham. As she and the nation sat vigil in the days that followed, we learned that the thirty-eight-year-old Reverend Reeb, a father of four, had moved his family to an impoverished, predominantly Black neighborhood in Dorchester where he had launched a public campaign to improve housing for the urban poor. He wanted his family to live in the same community where he served, to have his children attend the same public schools.
When Reverend Reeb died two days later on Thursday, March 11, he was hailed a civil rights martyr. Throughout the country newspapers carried stories of this exemplary young minister and prayer rallies were held in churches and synagogues across the country.
I joined with three thousand others who marched to the Boston Common the following Saturday afternoon. A large contingent of us walked from Harvard Square, merging with others from the surrounding suburbs. There was no cheering, no singing of freedom songs. We listened in silent grief and reflection, many in black armbands, as colleagues spoke of the Reverend Reeb’s life and work.
Toward the end of the memorial service, however, the assembly began to shake off the pall of despondency, and before long the mourning transformed into a rally. We cheered in response to the call for federal troops to be sent to protect the Selma marchers, who were determined to try again to reach Montgomery. And we cheered even louder when the demand was made to expedite legislation to ensure voting rights for all. Such calls for action renewed our spirits. Anger and determination transcended grief, and we began to focus on the urgent work that lay ahead.
Coming and going from the West Wing during this turbulent period, Dick encountered an atmospheric change both surrounding and inside the White House. The days of prayer and protest held across the country had come home to roost in the nation’s capital. Hundreds, then thousands of protesters began to picket in front of the White House, demanding that Johnson send federal troops to intervene directly in Selma. Vigils were held day and night in Lafayette Park, protesters blocked rush-hour traffic, and crowds chanted the warning: “LBJ just you wait, see what happens in ’68.” Inside the White House, a dozen young Black and white demonstrators refused to leave following a regular White House tour, commencing a sit-in for immediate federal action in Selma.
Dick sensed the mounting tension, and saw that it had begun to take its toll on both the White House staff and LBJ. At a staff meeting, Johnson clearly laid out his quandary: “If I just send federal troops with their big black boots and rifles, it’ll look like Reconstruction all over again. I’ll lose every moderate, not just in Alabama, but all over the South. If it looks like Civil War all over again that’ll force them into the hands of extremists and make a martyr out of Wallace.”
Desiring “a real victory for the black people, not a psychological victory for the North,” Johnson ordered Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach “to work night and day” to settle the complex legal and constitutional questions involved in designing a federal law that would strike down the restrictions being used to deny southern Blacks the right to vote. But the immediate action that committed civil rights activists demanded—sending federal troops to Selma—was precisely the action Johnson feared would destroy all chances for securing such a comprehensive Voting Rights Bill.
In her diary, Lady Bird, ever a keen reader of her husband’s emotional thermometer, noted that a “fog of depression” had settled upon him. Caught in a whipsaw between doing nothing and overreaching, he seemed paralyzed by a “gloom” that Lady Bird described as “thick enough to cut by a knife.”
A shaft of light was cast into that gloom when news arrived that George Wallace had requested an immediate meeting with the president. Johnson understood Wallace’s dilemma: He knew that continued brutality would destroy the governor’s dreams of national leadership. If Johnson could find a way to persuade Wallace to carry out his gubernatorial duty to send state troops to protect peaceful marchers without losing his hard-core base, the problem for both men might be solved. The bond between the Civil Rights Movement and the federal administration would hinge upon the outcome of that encounter—a bond that was needed against their segregationist adversary, Wallace, masquerading as a champion of states’ rights.
Dick had a peculiar vantage of this historic three-hour meeting with the Alabama governor and the president. He pieced together—from his own view, from what Moyers related to him afterward, and especially from Johnson’s elaborate rendition (recounted later with theatrical gusto during which the president played both himself and the beleaguered governor)—such a compelling story that it has since taken its place in scores of history books.
Despite the enormous stakes and strain, Johnson, like an Oval Office set designer, saw to every detail. He led Wallace to a low, deep-cushioned sofa beside the fireplace, where Wallace sank down. Then Johnson pulled up his own rocking chair so close that he hung above the little governor like a six-foot-four-inch hammer over Wallace’s five-foot-seven-inch nail.
For the first fifteen minutes as Wallace recited a prepared speech defending states’ rights against federal intervention, Johnson never took his eyes off Wallace’s face. Finally, the president began to speak:
LBJ: Now Governor, I know you’re like me, not approving of brutality.
WALLACE: Of course Mr. President, but they were just doing their duty.
Johnson raised his hand and was delivered the evidence, a newspaper with photos showing the onslaught on the bridge in Selma, troopers kicking a Black man in the fetal position.
LBJ: Now that’s what I call brutality. Don’t you agree?
WALLACE: Yes, but they were just trying…
LBJ: Now, Governor, you’re a student of the Constitution. I’ve read your speeches and there aren’t many who use the text like you do.
WALLACE: Thank you Mr. President. It’s a great document, the only protection the states have.
LBJ: And somewhere in there it says that Nigras have the right to vote, doesn’t it Governor?
WALLACE: They can vote.
LBJ: If they’re registered.
WALLACE: White men have to register too.
LBJ: That’s the problem, George; somehow your folks down in Alabama don’t want to register them Negroes. Why, I had a fellow in here the other day, and he not only had a college degree, but one of them Ph.Ds, and your man said he couldn’t registra because he didn’t know how to read and write well enough to vote in Alabama. Now, do all your white folks in Alabama have Ph.D.s?
WALLACE: Those decisions are made by the county registrars, not by me.
LBJ: Well then, George, why don’t you just tell them county registrars to registra those Nigras?
WALLACE: I don’t have that power, Mr. President, under Alabama law…
LBJ: Don’t be modest with me, George, you had the power to keep the president of the United States off the ballot. [Johnson had been omitted from the 1964 presidential ballot as the Democratic candidate.] Surely you have the power to tell a few poor county registrars what to do.
WALLACE: I don’t. Under Alabama law, they’re independent.
LBJ: Well, then, George, why don’t you just persuade them?
WALLACE: I don’t think that that would be easy.
LBJ: Don’t shit me about your persuasive power, George. Just this morning I was watching you on television… and you was attacking me. And you know what, you were so damn persuasive I had to turn off the set.”
“I’d seen the president’s nose-to-nose, space-violating, physical treatment,” Dick said, shaking his head at me of the memory of it, “but this was a masterpiece of persuasion. He knew Wallace in his bones, and before the meeting was over, Wallace was simply ground down.”
Before he was done with Wallace, Johnson reached a level that transcended simple political arm wrestling. He began to talk about the decades to come, of future legacy:
“You and me we’ll be dead and gone then, George. Now you’ve got a lot of poor people down there in Alabama, a lot of ignorant people. You can do a lot for them, George. Your president will help you. What do you want left after you when you die? Do you want a Great… Big… Marble monument that reads, ‘George Wallace—He built’?… Or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board lying across that harsh, caliche soil, that reads, ‘George Wallace—He Hated’?”
The meeting over, they came to a tenuous pact. The president maneuvered the governor into a press conference where he announced that “the Governor told me the problems he had in Alabama, the fears that he entertained, and he expressed the hope that I do something to help bring the demonstrations to an end. I told him that our problem… was to remove the cause of those demonstrations.”
The governor had agreed that “if local authorities are unable to function [because of the enormous costs of needed protection] the federal government will completely meet its responsibilities.” In short, federal force was not going to invade Alabama. Rather, the governor was asking for federal help; Alabama was inviting the federal government to maintain peace and law and order. “That,” Johnson later said, “made all the difference in the world.”
“Hell, if I’d stayed in there much longer,” Wallace later groused to the press, “he’d have had me coming out for civil rights.”
“I knew what it was like,” Dick remembered, shaking his head, “to be on the receiving end of the ‘Johnson Treatment.’ It was almost enough to feel a bit of sympathy for little George Wallace.” Dick met my eyes with a sardonic smile, “But not quite.”
Lyndon Johnson’s swift recovery from depression was stunning and authentic. When Lady Bird Johnson next laid eyes on her resilient husband, the “Black Pig” of depression had lifted and all of a sudden he was “composed, in charge, in command of the situation.” Now that the troop dilemma had been resolved in Alabama, he could focus on the Voting Rights Bill and the accompanying message to the Hill that he aimed to send to Congress two days later—on Monday, March 15.
Late Sunday afternoon, Johnson convened a bipartisan meeting in the Cabinet Room with Vice President Hubert Humphrey and the leaders of the House and Senate. Ostensibly, he wanted their advice on how best to approach Congress, whether in writing as tradition dictated, or in person—a rarity; nearly twenty years earlier, President Harry Truman had been the last president to go to the Hill in support of a bill.
While Johnson had already decided he wanted to speak at a joint session, he let the conversation flow, hoping by the conclusion of the meeting he would gain their consensus and the desired invitation.
The conversation did not begin well, according to Jack Valenti’s notes. Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen forcefully argued for sending the traditional written message. “Don’t panic now,” Dirksen advised Johnson. “This is a deliberative government. Don’t let these people say: ‘we scared him into it.’ ”
Democratic House Speaker John McCormack disagreed. He strongly recommended that the president go before a joint session to describe the reasons behind a bill. Humphrey supported the idea of a public appeal. (LBJ had gone to church with the vice president that morning and had lunch with him afterward.) “Logic is what you are saying,” Humphrey addressed Mansfield and Dirksen, “but emotions are running high. A message of what the government is doing—simply—is what is needed.”
Eventually everyone came around to what Johnson had wanted all along, a televised speech delivered before an extraordinary convening of a joint session of Congress that would allow him simultaneously to address the Congress and the nation at large. Despite his awareness that a push for voting rights might disrupt his carefully designed production line for the Great Society, it was a risk he was willing to take.
Just as the conclusion of Johnson’s meeting with Wallace had hinged upon whether federal troops intervened or were invited into the state of Alabama, so now the president would not be circumventing Congress by appealing to the public directly on television. Instead, he would be accepting a formal invitation to the Hill. At the conclusion of this Cabinet Room meeting, the following statement was issued:
The Leadership of Congress this afternoon invited the President to address a joint session of the Congress on Monday evening to present the President’s views and outline of a voting rights bill and any other matters that the President desires to discuss.
The President has accepted the invitation and will address a joint session at 9 p.m., Monday evening, March 15th, in the House of Representatives.
Johnson phoned civil rights leaders Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and Martin Luther King to invite them to attend the joint session as his special guests. After spontaneously accepting, King discovered that by the time he finished his scheduled eulogy for Rev. James Reeb in Selma on Monday afternoon, there were no flights that could get him to Washington in time. “Please know that I regret this very deeply,” he telegraphed the president. “I had looked forward to being there with all of you. I will be listening to your message with great interest and appreciation.”
Now the clock was ticking. In about twenty-four hours, 535 members of the House and Senate, along with the nation, would be focused on the president and no speech had yet been drafted. It was like “deciding to climb Mt. Everest,” said Lady Bird, “while you are sitting around a cozy family picnic.”
Dick spent that Sunday evening at a dinner party at historian Arthur Schlesinger’s home. As the party neared its end, the guests learned that the president was going to address a Joint Session of Congress the following night. Having heard nothing about these plans, Dick called the White House to see if any special messages had been left for him. No messages had been left.
“I was perplexed and disappointed,” Dick told me. “Someone else, I thought, must be writing the speech. We had several more drinks and decided to call it a night.”
MONDAY, MARCH 15, 1965
The moment Dick stepped into the West Wing on the morning of March 15, there was an unusual hubbub and tension. And there, pacing back and forth in a dither outside Dick’s second floor office, was Jack Valenti. Normally full of glossy good cheer, Valenti pounced on Dick before he could even open his office door. “He needs the speech from you, right away.”
“From me! Why didn’t you tell me yesterday? I’ve lost the entire night,” Dick responded.
“It was a mistake, my mistake,” Valenti acknowledged.
“Poor Valenti was distraught,” Dick told me. “Apparently, the first words out of the president’s mouth that morning were, ‘how’s Dick coming with the speech?’ When Valenti confessed that he had assigned the speech to Horace Busby, who was in the office the night before, Johnson exploded: “The Hell you did. Don’t you know that a liberal Jew has his hand on the pulse of America? Get Dick to do it and now!”
The overwrought Valenti handed Dick a folder of notes from his conversations with the president the prior night as well as draft notes for a written message that would accompany the bill. The speech had to be finished before 6 p.m., Valenti told Dick, in order to be loaded on the teleprompter in advance of the president’s televised address. Valenti asked Dick if there was anything—anything at all—he could get for him.
Dick told me he remembered giving Valenti a one word response, “Serenity.”
“Serenity?” inquired the puzzled Valenti.
“A globe of serenity,” Dick replied. “I can’t be disturbed. If you want to know how it’s coming, ask my secretary.”
Dick looked at his watch. Nine hours away!
“I didn’t want to think about time passing,” Dick recalled to me. “I lit a cigar, looked at my watch, took the watch off my wrist and put it on the desk beside my typewriter. Another puff of my cigar and I took the watch and put it away in my desk drawer.”
“The pressure would have short-circuited me,” I said. “I never had the makings of a good speechwriter or journalist. History is more patient.”
“Well,” Dick laughed, “miss the speech deadline and those pages are only scraps of paper.”
Dick examined Valenti’s notes. Johnson wanted no uncertainty about where he stood. He wanted no argument about states’ rights versus federal rights, no blaming oppositions between South and North. To deny fellow Americans the right to vote was simply and unequivocally wrong. He wanted the speech to be affirmative and hopeful. He would be sending a bill to Congress to protect the fundamental right to vote for all Americans, and he wanted this speech to drive and speed public sentiment.
In the year since Dick had started to work at the White House, he had listened to Johnson talk for hundreds of hours—on planes and in cars, during meals in the Executive Mansion and at the ranch, in the swimming pool and over late-night drinks. He understood Johnson’s deeply held convictions about civil rights. He knew the cadences of his speech. The speechwriter’s job, Dick explained, was to clarify, heighten, and polish the speaker’s convictions in the speaker’s own language and natural rhythms. If the words did not sound authentic to the speaker, the emotional current of the speech would not hit home.
I knew that Dick often searched for an arresting short sentence to begin every speech or article he wrote. On this day, he surely found it.
I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.
He then sought to situate this pivotal moment in the sweep of our nation’s history.
At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.
“The basic concept underlying the entire speech,” Dick explained to me, “is that our government has been summoned, pushed by the people, and to that force and pressure, we will respond.”
There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma…. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight. For the cries of pain, the sound of clubs, the protests of oppressed people—like some great trumpet—have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this government of the greatest nation on the earth.
No sooner would Dick pull a page out of his typewriter and hand it to his secretary than Valenti would somehow materialize, a nerve-worn courier, eager to personally express pages from Dick’s secretary into the president’s anxious hands. Johnson’s edits and penciled notations were incorporated into the text while he awaited the next installment, lashing out at everyone within range—everyone except Dick.
It soon became clear that the speech was no lawyer’s brief debating the merits of the bill soon to be sent to Congress. Rather, it was a credo of what we are as a nation, and who we are as a people—a redefining moment in our history brought forth by the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement.
The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this nation….
He has called upon us to make good the promise of America. And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery, and his faith in American democracy.
By mid-afternoon of that day, as the pages were beginning to flow from Dick to the president and back again, the Reverend King mounted the pulpit of Brown Chapel in Selma to eulogize the Reverend James Reeb: “Who killed James Reeb?” asked King, only to replace that question with the far darker one:
“What killed James Reeb?” When we move from the who to the what, the blame is wide and responsibility grows.
James Reeb was murdered by the irrelevancy of a church that will stand amid social evil and serve as a taillight rather than a headlight, an echo rather than a voice. He was murdered by the irresponsibility of every politician who has moved down the path of demagoguery, who has fed his constituents the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism.
Yet, out of this darkness and evil, King believed, goodness would emerge.
One day the history of this great period of social change will be written in all of its completeness. On that bright day, our nation will recognize its real heroes. They will be thousands of dedicated men and women with a noble sense of purpose.
When this glorious story is written, the name of James Reeb will stand as a shining example of manhood at its best.
Reading these words, I realized that at nearly the same moment Dick was extolling the heroism of the Black foot soldiers from the South, King was eulogizing the bravery and courage of the young white minister from the North who had answered the call and given his life for Black voting rights and freedom.
As the light shifted across the room, Dick became aware that the day suddenly seemed to be rushing by. He opened the desk drawer, peered at the face of his watch, took a deep breath, and quickly slammed the drawer shut. For the first time that day he walked outside to get air and refresh his mind.
In the distance Dick heard the muffled voices of chanters, singers, and demonstrators. Mindful of the vanishing afternoon, Dick hustled back to his office. There had seemed something forlorn about the sound of their receding voices—such a great contrast to the March on Washington only a year and a half earlier when he heard the joyous chorus of “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem that had instilled courage, purpose, and hope to the Civil Rights Movement. That spirited resolve was what he was after now. Loud and clear, the words “We Shall Overcome” sounded in his head.
Already, the sun was beginning to set that chilly March evening when the phone in Dick’s office rang for the first time that day. It was after six o’clock, past the deadline to feed all the finished pages of the speech into the teleprompter. The voice at the other end was “so calm, sweet, and sedate” that Dick hardly recognized it as the voice of the president of the United States.
“Far and away,” Dick told me, “the gentlest tones I ever heard from Lyndon.”
“You remember, Dick,” Johnson said in a whisper, “that one of my first jobs after college was teaching young Mexican Americans in Cotulla. I told you about that down at the Ranch. I thought you might want to put in a reference to that,” Dick recalled Johnson telling him.
What Johnson impressed on him, Dick told me, was that those kids in Cotulla had nothing. They had a hard, hard life. “Hell,” he told Dick, “I spent half my pay to buy sports equipment for the school.”
Not twenty minutes had passed when the phone range a second time. In that second call, Dick told me, Johnson was still musing about his time in Cotulla. “It was a long time ago,” he said, “but those kids have their own kids. And now we do something about it.”
Hardly four minutes passed and the phone rang a third time. “I almost forgot, Dick, I’d like you to ride up to the Hill with me tonight.”
“When I finished,” Dick recalled, “I felt perfectly blank. It was done. It was beyond revision. It was dark outside and I checked my wrist to see what time it was, remembered I had hidden my watch away from my sight, retrieved it from the drawer and put it back on.”
There was nothing left to do but shave, grab a sandwich, and stroll over to the Executive Mansion. There, greeted by an exorbitantly grateful Valenti, Dick hardly had the energy to talk. Before he knew it, he was sitting in the presidential limousine with Valenti and Busby. There was a flurry of Secret Service activity around the limousine and, without a word of hello, Johnson was ushered into the backseat.
As they exited the White House gate, they passed picketers demonstrating against government inaction. Motorcycles with police and Secret Service glided by outside their windows, flanking the limousine as it proceeded along the emptied streets to the Capitol.
Inside, a reading light was shining onto the president’s lap illuminating the black-leather loose-leaf notebook that contained his speech. Dick told me that he remembered the silence in the limousine, the eerie, trancelike focus with which the president fastened on the pages before him.
“Amazing concentration,” said Dick. “No distraction. No small talk. No talk at all.” Johnson’s somber concentration was totally narrowed upon the words and feelings of that long day, all squeezed into the notebook on his lap.
When they arrived at the Capitol, the president met with the welcoming committee in the Speaker’s office. Dick and his companions were escorted to the well of the House, the small area in front of the rostrum where there was room to stand in the chamber filled beyond capacity. On the floor was arrayed the full panoply of the United States government—members of Congress, the cabinet, the Supreme Court, the diplomatic corps; and from the galleries families and invited guests peered down.
A hush filled the chamber as the president began to speak. “From the moment the speech began,” Dick remembered, “it was not a matter of oratory or rhetorical display, but intensity, conviction, and heart.” The president placed the events in Selma alongside pivotal moments in history—the battles in Lexington and Concord that signaled the start of the Revolutionary War, the armistice signed at Appomattox that brought the Civil War to an end, and the savagery that had rocked Selma and the entire country eight days earlier and had gathered the audience together in this chamber on this night.
“Once the speech started,” I asked, “were you able to relax?”
“It was eerie. At first there was no applause. A weird silence, an acute listening greeted his opening words. I was too tense, too tired standing there. The whole place seemed transfixed, as if holding its collective breath.” The atmosphere in the historic chamber seemed to intensify, Dick remembered, filled with the soft, slow deliberate voice of the president:
Rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or our security, but rather to the values, and the purposes, and the meaning of our beloved nation. The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue.
A single person in the galleries began to clap. Others followed and soon a mounting round of applause swept the entire chamber, the first of thirty-six interruptions over the course of the thirty-minute speech. The president paused for only a moment.
As he watched from the well, Dick marveled at Johnson’s emotional gravity. They had worked together on the speech only a single day. Yet, the president’s somber, urgent, relentlessly driving delivery gave the occasion something that transcended a virtuoso performance. He demonstrated a conviction and exposed a vulnerability that surpassed anything Dick had experienced from him before.
There is no Negro problem. There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans—not as Democrats or Republicans…. we are met here as Americans to solve that problem.
The applause began to roll again, wave after rising wave.
Many of the issues of civil rights are very complex and most difficult. But about this there can and should be no argument. Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote….
Wednesday I will send to Congress a law designed to eliminate illegal barriers to the right to vote….
There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights….
This time on this issue there must be no delay, no hesitation, no compromise with our purpose….
But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches in every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice….
AND… WE… SHALL… OVERCOME.
The words came staccato, each hammered and sharply distinct from the others. Then Johnson paused. “There was an instant of silence,” as Dick later described the moment, “the gradually apprehended realization that the president had proclaimed, adopted as his own rallying cry, the anthem of black protest, the hymn of a hundred embattled black marches.” Senators and representatives, generals and diplomats, leapt to their feet, delivering a shouting, stomping ovation that Johnson later said he would “never forget as long as I live.”
In Montgomery, Alabama, Martin Luther King had gathered with friends and colleagues to watch the president’s speech. At this climactic moment, John Lewis witnessed tears rolling down King’s cheeks, a sight he had never seen before. Lewis saw something different in King at that moment, and something different in the president as well. For the first time he saw Lyndon Johnson not simply as a politician, but “a man who spoke from the heart, a statesman, a poet.”
“The Voting Rights Act,” King murmured with certainty, “WILL be passed!” King had instantly understood what had just been accomplished with Johnson’s speech. A current had been generated from outside the government and the president had directed that force to the Congress, and the country beyond.
My circle of graduate school friends had been transfixed by the unfolding civil rights drama of the past week. Many had accompanied me on the solemn march to the Boston Common to honor the slain Minister James Reeb. We had come together again to watch this nighttime address to the joint session. A chill ran through me when Lyndon Johnson uttered the words “And we shall overcome” leaving me in tears of joy and pride in my president, my government, and my country. I was not alone. Side by side, we stood and circled the television. I felt a connectedness I had not felt since the March on Washington. And to this day, after hundreds of readings and listenings, these lines retain their potency.
Johnson was keenly aware of how these words would wrench his southern colleagues, many of whom had remained in their seats. The finger of blame should not only point to the South, but to every point of America’s compass. To that end he began the process of stitching the country together.
Now let none of us in any section look with prideful righteousness on the troubles in another section, or the problems of our neighbors. There is really no part of America where the promise of equality has been fully kept. In Buffalo, as well as in Birmingham, in Philadelphia as well as Selma, Americans are struggling for the fruits of freedom.
The time had come to draw on his own experience, to tell the formative story he had related to Dick only hours before.
My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican-American school. Few of them could speak English, and I couldn’t speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry. And they knew, even in their youth, the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so, because I saw it in their eyes. I often walked home late in the afternoon, after the classes were finished, wishing there was more that I could do….
Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child. I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country.
But now I do have that chance—and I’ll let you in on a secret. I—mean—to—use it.
And I hope that you will use it with me.
After Lyndon Johnson laid bare the depth of his personal commitment to the cause of civil rights, reaching back to his days as a young teacher, the audience stood to deliver perhaps the largest ovation of the night. He had transformed the lectern into a bully pulpit from which, as never before, he inspired, roused, and consolidated public sentiment across the nation. A witness recounting the response in Selma’s Brown Chapel said, “everyone in the room where we stood throughout, was crying. Men and women, old and young, black and white.”
Even as the president exited the chamber, surrounded by jubilant colleagues reaching out to touch his shoulder or shake his hand, he remained acutely sensitive to the power of momentum. He called out to the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Emanuel Celler, “Manny, I want you to start hearings tonight.”
As for Dick, he told me he was so exultant after the speech that he barely remembered the ride back to the White House with the president. “I only remember that the protesters whose voices and placards had harried Johnson for what seemed to be weeks had vanished.”
A very small group gathered in the sitting room of the White House. Hour after hour, calls of congratulations flooded the small room. Dick called it “one of the happiest nights the president and I ever spent together.” It was almost midnight by the time they sat down for dinner. They began to decompress. Finally, after much drinking and storytelling, Johnson rose to retire from a night that no one wanted to end.
Back on November 4, when Moyers had urgently championed Dick to the president, he had insisted that Dick’s contribution as a speechwriter would leave “an impression on history.” Lyndon Johnson’s “We Shall Overcome” speech had done just that. “Your speech,” Martin Luther King telegraphed Johnson the next day, “was the most moving, eloquent, unequivocal, and passionate plea for human rights ever made by any president of this nation.”
“Of course, the praise was gratifying,” Dick said to me. “But most important was not the music of the speech, but what it helped set in motion.” A huge impetus was given to the Voting Rights Bill. The president had infused the bill with a massive jolt of emotion.
I told Dick that I had read an account that when Johnson was later asked who had written the speech, he pulled out a photo of his twenty-year-old self surrounded by a cluster of Mexican American kids, his former students at Cotulla, Texas. “They did.”
“You know,” Dick smiled, “in the deepest sense, that might just be the truth.”
“Cotulla,” exclaimed Dick fondly, “there aren’t too many things left on my bucket list, but Cotulla, Texas, is one of them. Let’s go there someday.” Patting his knee, I promised, “We’ll do just that.”
“God, how I loved Lyndon Johnson that night,” Dick remembered. “Unimaginable it would have been to think that in two years’ time I would, like many others who listened that night, go into the streets against him.”
Nor, as I talked excitedly with my school friends late into that night, certain that a new tide was rising in our country, could I have imagined that only a few years later I would work directly for the president who delivered that speech. Or that ten years later I would marry the man who drafted that speech.