CHAPTER 22

FREE AT LAST

AS THESECONDRECONSTRUCTION GAINED MOMENTUMin the early 1960s, southern conservatives decided to try a nonconfrontational approach. They convinced themselves that the vast majority of their black fellow citizens were satisfied with their second-class status. After all, most Negroes they knew went about their business as tenant farmers, day laborers, or domestic workers quietly and without complaint. If only this message could be gotten across to the rest of the nation. A group of Chamber of Commerce types found an aged black man, obviously deeply rooted in southern traditions, and asked him if he would tell his story on a national television broadcast. He agreed to. The director brought in to film the testimony insisted that it had to be spontaneous. The old man was duly positioned on the porch of his ramshackle cabin, seated in his rocking chair, attired in his tattered work clothes. The producer said, “Now when we get ready we’re going to give you the signal to go, and just start talking and tell the people in your own words just how you feel.” The red light came on and the signal was given. He said, “Is it time to talk now?” The producer whispered, “Yes, yes, go on.” He said, “Now can I say anything I want to?” The producer said with urgency, “Yes, yes, go on.” The aged black man turned to the camera, raised his voice, and shouted, “Help!”¹

 

ASLBJSAW MATTERS, if civil rights was not resolved as an issue, it could prevent progress on all other fronts, from education to health care to poverty. And vice versa. The civil rights bill the Kennedy administration had introduced was sweeping—and stalled. It would make completion of the sixth grade prima facie proof of literacy for the right to vote in federal elections; compel access to hotels, motels, places of entertainment, stores, restaurants, and other public facilities without regard to race, religion, or national origin; empower the commissioner of education to establish programs to desegregate public schools and the attorney general to file suit against school boards that did not participate; establish a Community Relations Service to mediate disputes over segregation and discrimination; require federal agencies to withhold funds from state and local entities and programs that discriminated; and establish a permanent Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity.²Unlike the 1957 civil rights bill, this one had teeth and was bound to elicit the unrelenting opposition of the Dixie Association. The key to breaking the logjam lay in a tacit partnership between the Kennedy-Johnson administrations and civil rights forces in the field.

The wanton brutality of Bull Connor’s Birmingham, Alabama, police had sickened much of white America in 1962, and created a groundswell of sympathy for Martin Luther King’s SCLC and the hundreds of young SNCC workers who staged sit-ins, registered rural blacks to vote, and conducted protest demonstration. “The picket line” now extends from the dime store to the United States Supreme Court and beyond that to national and world opinion,” observed a Greensboro, North Carolina, newspaper.³

Frustrated, angry, paranoid, southern segregationists struck back. Cross burnings, night ridings, and bombings multiplied at a frightening rate during 1963. In June, Medgar Evers, NAACP field representative in Mississippi, was shot dead by a sniper outside his home in Jackson. Three months later, after black youths attempted to desegregate several previously all-white schools, a huge dynamite bomb shattered the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. In the rubble lay the lifeless bodies of four girls, ages eleven to fourteen, who had been changing for choir practice.

On August 28, 1963, two hundred thousand Americans, black and white, had descended on Washington to express their support for the civil rights measure then pending in Congress. The participants, who included hundreds of nationally prominent church and civic leaders, marched peacefully from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. There they heard pledges of support from politicians, the folk music of Peter, Paul, and Mary, and the gospel songs of Mahalia Jackson. The culmination of the March on Washington was Martin Luther King Jr.’s incomparable “I Have a Dream” speech.

Lyndon Johnson’s decision to push the 1964 civil rights bill through Congress, no matter the cost, was fraught with danger. His advisers told him that he could not afford to lose, and he could not afford to compromise. African Americans were sick of palliatives. “The Negroes have seen two significant bills on civil rights [1957 and 1960] become law,” George Reedy told him. “From here on out, they will regard any measure which does not pass as a cynical gesture.” And there was good reason to believe that the measure would not pass. “It must be realized that the proper groundwork has not been laid,” Reedy said. “Negroes are not convinced that the Administration is really on their side. Southern whites still believe that the turmoil is a combination of ‘ward politics’ and ‘outside agitators.’ Republicans believe that the issue is a matter of partisanship.”⁴When Johnson subsequently asked Hubert Humphrey to spearhead the civil rights bill in the Senate, LBJ told him, “This is your test. But I predict it will not go through.”⁵And what if it did pass? Southerners would be so embittered that there was a real possibility that white voters south of the Mason-Dixon line would abandon the Democratic party, and LBJ would be ignominiously defeated in the forthcoming presidential election. Moreover, the defection might prove permanent. Thus, in attempting to serve the cause of social justice, there was a very real possibility that Lyndon Johnson would become its primary victim.

Despite these negatives, Johnson never hesitated. There was, first, the very nature of the man. His parents, his upbringing, his psyche made for a compelling social conscience. Second, LBJ believed that the continued existence of the Union depended on the guarantee of civil equality and equality of opportunity for all Americans. In taking the lead in compelling adherence to the Constitution, the president and the federal government might be risking turmoil and even bloodshed in the short run, but if they did not, there would be hell to pay in the long. In the face of the Birmingham bombings, the murder of Medgar Evers, continuing police brutality, and ongoing segregationist intransigence, one could not expect the Negro to be realistic about the difficulties of getting legislation through Congress.⁶And then there was the South. Jim Crow had been a burden that the South had carried since the Civil War, and it had barred the region from full participation in the life of the republic. The end of segregation and discrimination would bring Dixie finally and firmly into the national mainstream, with all of the economic prosperity and political influence that would mean. Racial justice, Johnson believed, was just as much in the interest of southern whites as southern blacks.

In fact, the president and his counselors were convinced that if racial harmony were to come to America, it would come first to the South. Once white southerners realized that by integration and equal opportunity, blacks did not mean miscegenation or even social mixing, but a right to travel freely, live and work where they wanted, compete for jobs on an equal basis, and enjoy the comforts of public accommodation and the benefits of truly equal education, animosity would quickly subside. “If the Southerners understand this, they will solve the problem much easier than the North because Southerners have lived with Negroes longer than Northerners and really like them better,” Reedy observed to Johnson.⁷This came not only from LBJ’s white advisers but his black aides as well. “There’s something in the folklore of Negro life that a reconstructed southerner is really far more liberal than a liberal Yankee,” Louis Martin, the black journalist-politician who handled the African American press for the White House, observed.⁸Finally, Johnson believed that passage of a sweeping civil rights bill had at last become politically possible. Because he was associated with the civil rights legislation Congress was then considering, because he had gone on national television to condemn the church bombing in Birmingham, JFK’s name had become identified with the Second Reconstruction. In the wake of his assassination, activists forgot his and his brother’s timidity, and the fallen president became a martyr to the cause. What John Kennedy failed to do in life—make civil rights a compelling moral issue—he could do, or be made to do, in death.

 

POLLS TAKENfrom the fall of 1963 through the spring of 1964 were revealing. As of June 1963, 49 percent of those queried favored a public accommodations law; 42 percent opposed. In January 1964, the approval rating stood at 61 percent. There was even some movement in the South, where opposition shrank from 82 to 72 percent. Most important, perhaps, polls revealed that southerners were becoming fatalistic about civil rights. Although the vast majority remained opposed to integration, 83 percent of those questioned believed racial integration to be inevitable; 49 percent predicted that it could come about in the South within five years.⁹

It was his political genius that caused Johnson to realize that the time had come, and his particular achievement to act on that realization. LBJ’s role in civil rights reminded Harry McPherson of a quote from Sir Robert Peel, the eminent nineteenth-century English statesman: “Public opinion, as it is said, rules, and public opinion is the opinion of the average man. [Charles James] Fox used to say of [Edmund] Burke, ‘Burke is a wise man, but he is wise too soon.’ The average man will not bear this. Politicians, as has been said, live in the repute of the commonality. They may appeal to posterity, but of what use is posterity?”¹⁰

Johnson and his chief political strategists on the civil rights bill—Larry O’Brien and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach—began huddling within days of the assassination. Key to passage, they recognized, would be the civil rights organizations, labor, business, the churches, and the Republican party. The first order of business, Johnson perceived, was to reassure black leaders that he was and would continue to be their unwavering ally. On November 24, two days after JFK’s death, LBJ talked with Whitney Young of the Urban League, asking his advice on congressional strategy. He also secured invitations to the Kennedy funeral for Young and other civil rights leaders.¹¹Five days later, the president met with Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, and assured him that passage of the civil rights bill would top the new administration’s list of priorities.¹²During the next six months, the president would talk and meet regularly with Wilkins, urging him especially to remind Republicans in Congress that the GOP was the “party of Lincoln,” and to persuade firebrands in the civil rights movement to show some restraint until the fate of the civil rights measure became clear. Before the end of November, Johnson also spoke with Martin Luther King, James Farmer, and A. Philip Randolph. He explained that the poverty bill was basically a civil rights bill and that he wanted to secure its passage before the great battle over the accommodations and employment measure began. Don’t go off half-cocked, he pled. “I don’t want to stir up the folks on the Hill until we get ready to see the whites of their eyes,” he told Randolph.¹³All did or would issue public statements expressing confidence in the new president, but they still were somewhat wary, not of LBJ’s visceral commitment to civil rights but of his fondness for pragmatism and compromise. Johnson might indeed become “another Hugo Black,” black intellectual and King adviser Bayard Rustin observed; he might “be able to control the South better than Mr. Kennedy did … SNCC must help Mr. Johnson—but to help Mr. Johnson means to create an atmosphere in which he is pushed even further.”¹⁴

On his way to the office on the morning of December 4—the Johnsons were still living at The Elms—LBJ had his driver swing by and pick up George Meany, who lived nearby. During the ride, Meany promised that he would do everything possible to secure support for the civil rights bill from leaders of the AFL-CIO, no small task because the measure covered apprenticeship programs. A day later, LBJ gathered up House Republican Minority Leader Charles Halleck for the trip downtown. Halleck was noncomittal; Johnson made it plain that he was going to hold the GOP’s feet to the fire on civil rights: “I’m going to lay it on the line … now you’re either for civil rights or you’re not … you’re either the party of Lincoln or you’re not … By God, put up or shut up.”¹⁵

In January, Johnson spoke to business and corporate leaders who had agreed to participate in Plans for Progress. Urging them to take “affirmative action” to eliminate discrimination in hiring, he declared, “I can just almost guarantee each of you men that when your retirement time comes and you sit on your front porch in that rocking chair with your white Panama pulled down over your eyes and in retrospect look back over your days as a leader in your company, I can almost guarantee that one of your proudest moments and one of your greatest achievements will be the day that you took the leadership to destroy bigotry and bias and prejudice from the atmosphere of your own company.”¹⁶At the same time, the president was not above appealing to conservative fears. “There’s all this stuff [bombings, beatings, killings] going on,” he told Robert Anderson, wealthy Texas businessman and Eisenhower confidante, “and we’ve been talking about this for 100 years … and I just think that we’re going to have them out in the streets again if we don’t make some little progress.”¹⁷Johnson did not have to rally the churches. In the wake of the killing of the four black girls in Birmingham, Catholic, mainline Protestant, and Jewish organizations instructed their representatives in Washington to lobby in behalf of the civil rights bill.

Johnson and O’Brien next turned their attention to the House, Judge Smith, and the Rules Committee. Of the fifteen members on Rules, ten were Democrats and five Republicans, but four of the Democrats were from the Deep South. To Smith’s delight, the conservative majority had been blocking measures of social justice for years. The most attractive option for bypassing the Rules Committee was a petition of discharge. If a majority of the House—218 members—so voted, a measure could be removed from the purview of the committee and introduced directly on the floor. Because it would appear to the public to be democracy in action, the president favored this option. Ninety of those sitting in the lower house were from the South, so fifty-plus Republicans would be required to achieve the requisite majority. Halleck told the White House to forget a petition; it would open the door to direct consideration of other liberal measures that the GOP opposed. But his was not the last word.

Two Republican members, William McCulloch and Clarence Brown of Ohio, were conservative on every issue but civil rights. They treasured their party’s link to the Great Emancipator. Moreover, Wilberforce and Central, two predominantly black colleges, were located in Brown’s district.¹⁸They indicated to Smith that if he did not release the civil rights bill, they would lead a revolt. “I know something about the facts of life around here,” Smith confided to a friend, “and I know that many members want this bill considered. They could take it away from me and they can do it any minute they want to.”¹⁹Consequently, the chairman of the Rules Committee announced that hearings on the bill would begin January 9, 1964. They were quickly concluded, and the measure was reported out with a positive recommendation on January 30.

In a last-ditch effort to cripple or defeat the civil rights measure, Howard Smith proposed an amendment to add a word to Title VII, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of national origin, race, and religion. That word was “sex.” As the judge well knew, many conservatives, men as well as women, were opposed to legislation mandating gender equality. He assumed that a majority of those whites favoring advances in civil rights would not be willing to extend the same rights to women, that is, that most liberals were sexist. Smith was wrong. The House added the gender amendment by a vote of 168 to 133, and then on February 10, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by a vote of 290 to 110.²⁰

Johnson was jubilant. No sooner had the civil rights bill passed than one of the phones in the telephone area of the House cloakroom rang. It was LBJ looking for Joe Rauh, then vice president of the Americans for Democratic Action, and Clarence Mitchell, director of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the NAACP. “I don’t know how he ever managed to get us on that phone,” Mitchell later recalled, “but he was calling to say, ‘All right, you fellows, get on over there to the Senate and get busy because we got it through the House and now we’ve got the big job of getting it through the Senate.’ ” At two o’clock in the morning, Johnson telephoned Congressman Jake Pickle, one of only six southerners to have voted for the bill, to congratulate him.²¹

Bill Moyers recalled that during a press conference in the midst of the fight over the civil rights measure, Jim Deakin, a reporter for theSt. Louis Post-Dispatch , asked LBJ, “Mr. President, I don’t understand. You didn’t have a very sterling progressive record on civil rights either in the House or in the Senate, and yet here you have thrown the full weight of your presidency behind the civil rights movement. Would you, please sir, explain the contradiction?” Johnson paused a full thirty seconds before answering. Resisting the temptation to rationalize or to defend his past actions, he said, “Well, Jim, some people get a chance late in life to correct the sins of their youth and very few get a chance as big as the White House.”²²

On New Year’s Eve, some five weeks after he had succeeded to the presidency, LBJ attended a party in honor of Horace Busby at the Forty Acres Club on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. The club had been strictly segregated since its inception. Johnson swept in at the head of a small entourage. On his arm was his new, attractive black secretary, Gerri Whittington. Before they went in, Whittington had asked, “Mr. President, do you know what you are doing?” LBJ replied, “I sure do. Half of them are going to think you’re my wife, and that’s just fine with me.”²³From that point on, the Forty Acres Club accepted black members.

As a former colleague, Johnson felt close enough to several southern senators to appeal to them to moderate their opposition to the civil rights bill. He called young Robert Byrd of West Virginia and pled with him to allow the accomodations and employment bill to come to the floor for a vote. “No … No … No sir, I wouldn’t make them vote on it because I know if they vote on it, they’re going to get it,” Byrd replied. “And if a man starts to coming to my house if I can’t beat him with my fist … I’m going to take a poker to him … The only way we can win here is to not let them vote.”²⁴LBJ gave up. It was clear that the Dixie Association was going to filibuster, to “fight to the last ditch,” as Richard Russell subsequently declared. “You can’t do anything with the Southern Democrats,” LBJ told Joe Rauh. “There ain’t nobody that can get Thurmond or Olin Johnston, Dick Russell, or Talmadge.”²⁵Thus, it seemed that civil rights advocates were back to square one, where they had been in 1957 and 1960. But Johnson was now president of the United States, not the senior senator from Texas.

As the civil rights bill was being transferred from the House to the Senate, LBJ let it be known that he would not compromise, not even if the filibuster lasted the rest of the year. Shortly after the fight over the measure began, LBJ asked his old friend Dick Russell to the White House to have a frank talk. “The President sat in a wing chair,” Jack Valenti recalled. “The Senator sat at one end of a small couch. Their knees almost touched … ‘Dick, you’ve got to get out of my way. I’m going to run over you. I don’t intend to … compromise.’ ‘You may do that,’ ” Valenti remembered Russell replying. “ ‘But by God, it’s going to cost you the South and cost you the election.’ ” So be it, Johnson responded.²⁶

The administration understood that it had the votes to pass the civil rights bill if it were ever allowed to be considered by the Senate as a whole. But the Dixie Association would use the filibuster to see that that never happened. Two methods were available for defeating Russell and his troops. The first consisted of exhausting the talkers, a stratagem LBJ had employed in 1960 and one he still favored. The rules of the Senate limited members to two speeches per calendar day. Once debate on a measure began, the calendar day lasted as long as the debate lasted—a week, a month. LBJ wanted to keep the Senate in continuous, twenty-four-hour-a-day session. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, however, was opposed. The tactic had not worked in the past. Opponents of the filibuster had become just as fatigued as its supporters, and the result had been no measure or one so weakened as to be almost meaningless.²⁷Mansfield favored a petition of cloture, which required two-thirds of the Senate to end debate and force a floor vote. The problem was that of the eleven past cloture petitions dealing with civil rights, all had been defeated, including two in 1962 on a bill that Kennedy had submitted dealing with literacy tests. LBJ thus resisted the cloture approach throughout the February 11 meeting at the White House. At a diplomatic reception immediately afterward, Johnson and Nick Katzenbach pulled two chairs together and continued the argument. “I think we’ve got fifty-eight votes for cloture,” Katzenbach said. “Well, where are you going to get the others?” Johnson asked. Katzenbach pulled out a copy of the Senate roster and identified fourteen possible. “We get nine of those we’ll get out sixty-seven votes.” Finally, Johnson acceded.²⁸

The key to both cloture and passage was Republican support. Of the sixty-seven Democrats in the Senate, twenty-one of them came from states of the former Confederacy. Unless twenty-three to twenty-five Republicans withdrew from the conservative coalition, there would be no breakthrough in public accomodations and employment. That meant winning over Minority Leader Everett Dirksen. As Johnson told Humphrey, “This bill can’t pass unless you get Ev Dirksen. You and I are going to get Ev; it is going to take time. You make up your mind now that you’ve got to spend time with Ev Dirksen. You’ve got to let him have a piece of the action. He’s got to look good all the time. Now don’t let those bomb throwers [Paul Douglas, Joe Clark, and other liberal Democrats] talk you out of seeing Dirksen. You get in there to see Dirksen; you drink with Dirksen, you talk with Dirksen, you listen to Dirksen.”²⁹

The sixty-eight-year-old minority leader shielded a shrewd, agile mind with a veneer of buffoonery. Heavy-set with wavy, silver hair, a mellifluous speaking voice, and a broad face folded in wrinkles, Dirksen was a man who delighted in his own oratory. He was given to unusual words, like “baleful” and “felicitous.” His speeches were often studies in digression. An avid gardener, he rose on the floor of the Senate every spring to propose that the marigold be selected as “the national floral emblem of our country.”³⁰He could be partisan, but he was jealous of his place in history. As a result, there was little consistency in his voting patterns: for foreign aid one day, against it the next, for example. Like Johnson, Dirksen was a shrewd calculator of men and counter of votes. He liked to deal and he could be dealt with. He was, in short, Johnson’s kind of politician.³¹Friends worried about his health. Although he suffered from a peptic ulcer, Dirksen drank moderately but almost continuously. “Champagne is Mrs. Dirksen’s favorite vegetable … and I prefer a fellow by the name of Jonathan Daniels,” he told a reporter.³²After he was elected minority leader, Dirksen cordoned off part of his office and named it the “Twilight Lodge.” All of the numerals on the clock that hung there were fives.

Humphrey commenced the courtship. “I would have kissed Dirksen’s ass on the Capitol steps” to secure his support for cloture, Humphrey later said, and he virtually did.³³Appearing onMeet the Press , Humphrey responded to a question concerning Dirksen’s stated reservations about the civil rights bill: “Senator Dirksen is not only a great senator, he is a great American, and he is going to see the necessity of this legislation. I predict that before this bill is through Senator Dirksen will be its champion.”³⁴

On February 26 the Senate adopted a Mansfield motion to bypass the Judiciary Committee and consider the civil rights bill directly. On March 9, 1964, the longest filibuster in the history of the U.S. Senate began. The debate over whether to take up the bill continued through March 26, when the Senate finally voted to make it the next order of business. Formal debate began on March 30 and continued for nine straight weeks.³⁵

During the filibuster, LBJ worked assiduously to wrap white America in a moral strait jacket. How could individuals who fervently, continuously, and overwhelmingly identified themselves with a merciful and just God continue to condone racial discrimination, police brutality, and segregation in education and public accommodations? Johnson’s language was not that traditionally wielded by liberal intellectuals—cerebral Jeffersonian phrases rooted in a deep faith in progress and reason—but the words of the believer who has encountered profound evil, Lincolnesque words founded in the notions of suffering and sacrifice.³⁶Where in the Judeo-Christian ethic was there justification for killing young girls, denying an equal education to black children, barring fathers and mothers from competing for jobs that would feed and clothe their families? Was Jim Crow to be America’s response to “Godless Communism”? Addressing business executives who had committed to Plans for Progress, LBJ said, “I don’t know why you can’t say, ‘Except for the grace of God, I might be in his place and he might be in mine.’ ” Capitalism did not guarantee social and economic justice; only the consciences of God-fearing men and women could do that. The only way America could lay claim to world leadership would be “because of our moral standards and not because of our economic power.”³⁷To the Interreligious Convocation on Civil Rights, Johnson pointed out that the story that Christ chose to illustrate the meaning of love was that of the Good Samaritan: “The Samaritan’s attitude was one of good will born of a recognition of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men—an attitude that expressed itself in action on the behalf of another’s needs.”³⁸Even so conservative a newspaper as theFort Worth Star-Telegram was moved by Johnson’s sacred logic. “Now I knew that as President I couldn’t make people want to integrate their schools or open their doors to blacks,” he later said, “but I could make them feel guilty for not doing it and I believed it was my moral responsibility to do precisely that—to use the moral persuasion of my office to make people feel that segregation was a curse they’d carry with them to their graves.”³⁹

Johnson’s decision to define civil rights as a moral issue, and to wield the nation’s self-professed Judeo-Christian ethic as a sword in its behalf, constituted something of a watershed in twentieth-century political history. All presidents were fond of invoking the deity, and some conservatives like Dwight Eisenhower had flirted with employing Judeo-Christian teachings to justify their actions, but modern-day liberals, both politicians and the intellectuals who challenged and nourished them, had stayed away from spiritual witness. Most liberal intellectuals were secular humanists. Academics in particular had historically been deeply distrustful of organized religion, which they identified with small-mindedness, bigotry, and anti-intellectualism. Moreover, as historian David Burner has observed, liberals “are most at home with the worldly vocabulary of law and education and the compromise of government.”⁴⁰Johnson distrusted organized religion to an extent, but he embraced Judeo-Christian teachings, particularly those found in Isaiah and the New Testament. For him, they offered the Western world’s most compelling call to social justice. He did seem to foresee that to employ Christian moral philosophy might open the door, à la John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison, to appeals to a higher law. He was convinced that the U.S. Constitution was the ultimate expression of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Others, of course, were not. Out of the admixture of religion and civil rights would come nonviolent civil disobedience, a tactic that would arouse a great deal of angst in the thirty-sixth president.

 

IN THE SECOND WEEK INMAY,the president electrified the nation by stumping Georgia in behalf of the civil rights bill. On May 8, he addressed a breakfast attended by members of the Georgia legislature in Atlanta, the city that Sherman had burned to the ground a century earlier. Governor and Mrs. Carl Sanders appeared on the dais with him, as did Senator Herman Talmadge and his wife. LBJ declared that the motto of the state of Georgia—“Wisdom, Justice, Moderation”—should be the motto of the nation in its time of trouble. Johnson quoted Atticus Haygood, president of Emory College, who in 1880 declared, “We in the South have no divine call to stand eternal guard by the grave of dead issues.” How Georgia went, so would go America, the president proclaimed. “Heed not those who would come waving the tattered and discredited banners of the past, who seek to stir old hostilities and kindle old hatreds, who preach battle between neighbors and bitterness between States.”⁴¹At Franklin D. Roosevelt Square in Gainesville, he declared, “Full participation in our society can no longer be denied to men because of their race or their religion or the region in which they live.”⁴²As remarkable as his words was the reception that he and his message were accorded. The crowd that lined the streets in Atlanta to greet LBJ numbered at least a half million. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my 18 years in Atlanta, even for ‘Gone With the Wind’ and Franklin Roosevelt,” the police chief remarked.⁴³The presidential motorcade took almost two hours to cover the fifteen miles in from the airport. Johnson stopped twenty-five times to address the cheering throng. The crowd in Gainesville, a town of eighteen thousand, was estimated at over fifty thousand.⁴⁴

The filibuster wore on. Rhetoric from the Dixie Association was as fiery as ever, but close observers begin to sense an air of resignation. Russell, already suffering from the emphysema that would eventually kill him, seemed deflated. In December 1963, before the battle, Russell had visited with Orville Freeman. “He said that Lyndon Johnson was the most amazingly resourceful fellow,” Freeman recalled, “that he was a man who really understood power and how to use it … He said that man will twist your arm off at the shoulder and beat your head in with it, and then he said, you know we could have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights, but not Lyndon Johnson.”⁴⁵After the filibuster began, Russell ran into Bill Moyers. “Now you tell Lyndon,” he said, “that I’ve been expecting the rod for a long time, and I’m sorry that it’s from his hand the rod must be wielded, but I’d rather it be his hand than anybody else’s I know. Tell him to cry a little when he uses it.”⁴⁶

By mid-April, Dirksen was ready to move. On the afternoon of the 21st, Humphrey sat down beside the minority leader. As the southerners droned on, Dirksen declared that the administration’s bill was a good one and he was ready to support it. He wished, however, to avoid a cloture vote; in fact, he did not think he could muster a sufficient number of his colleagues to shut off debate. Humphrey said no. The White House had promised Rauh, Mitchell, and the liberals that they would not stand for a watered-down bill. Besides, if he lost a cloture vote, Russell could claim to his segregationist supporters that he had fought to the last, but in the end had been overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Dirksen conceded the point. “The jig is up,” Russell remarked privately.⁴⁷

Dirksen proceeded to play out his self-scripted drama as the latter-day Abraham Lincoln. The minority leader arranged a meeting with the president for April 29. The day before, he told Republican leaders at lunch that he intended to give the Dixie Association one week to end their filibuster; if by then they had not, he would file a cloture petition. Over the next two weeks, Humphrey, Mansfield, and Nick Katzenbach met almost daily with Dirksen and in essence let him write the bill. There was no change in substance, but the language was Dirksen’s, and he could proudly claim to be the coauthor. Johnson called the minority leader to thank him. “You’re worthy of the Land of Lincoln,” he said. “And the Man from Illinois is going to pass the bill, and I’ll see that you get proper attention and credit.”⁴⁸

As the climax neared, the president opened his pork barrel to ensure success. He arranged for Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall to meet with Carl Hayden of Arizona. Representing a small constituency that was jealous of minority rights, Hayden had never voted for cloture. But when Udall promised administration support for the Central Arizona Water Project, a massive scheme to divert waters from the Colorado River to Tucson and Phoenix, Hayden offered his vote. To soften the blow for southerners, Johnson arranged for northern urban votes in support of the cotton and wheat bill.⁴⁹That measure passed on April 9 by a vote of 211 to 103. “We just whipped the living hell out of your friend Charlie Halleck,” he chortled to Russell (Republicans had opposed the measure), “and we had to do it with Yankees.”⁵⁰LBJ pressured a reluctant Kermit Gordon to approve $263 million for the Tennessee River-Tom Bigby project, a federally funded enterprise to improve river navigation from Tennessee to the Gulf.⁵¹

On June 10, following seventy-five days of debate, the Senate voted on cloture. Dirksen had the last, dramatic word. Relishing the moment, he quoted Victor Hugo: “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come. The time has come for equality … in education and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here.”⁵²Humphrey predicted sixty-nine yea votes. He and Johnson followed the proceedings intently. Upstaging Dirksen was Senator Clair Engle of California, who, dying of a brain tumor, appeared on the floor of the Senate in a wheelchair. Unable to speak, he pointed to his eye when it came his turn to vote.⁵³The final tally was seventy-one for and twenty-nine against, four more than needed and two more than Humphrey had predicted. The cloture vote, of course, ensured passage of the civil rights bill. Richard Russell was the last to speak, until he was cut off, with tears in his eyes. His protégé had finally succeeded in launching the Second Reconstruction.

 

IN THE WAKEof the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the leader of the Dixie Association counseled his constituents to be calm and obey the law, rather than invoking massive resistance. Perhaps the Georgian was a conservative, not a reactionary after all—a man committed to slowing change rather than obstructing it. For better or worse, his beloved South was entering the twentieth century, joining the political mainstream. Ambivalence, an awareness and even an appreciation of paradox, is the fate of all introspective individuals, and Russell was certainly that.

A jubilant Johnson scheduled a televised signing ceremony for July 2. But before the president could count his coup, the murder of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi threatened to touch off a cycle of violence that would undermine all of his plans for peaceful change in American race relations.

 

ALTHOUGHAFRICANAMERICANSconstituted 42 percent of Mississippi’s population, only 5 percent were registered to vote. The median income for black families was under $1,500 a year, less than one-third of that for white families. Like its economy, Mississippi’s politics was dominated by a tiny white elite that for a century had manipulated white working-class prejudices to keep blacks “in their place.”

Early in 1964, Bob Moses and David Dennis of CORE had come up with the concept of Freedom Summer. Black and white college students, carefully trained in the techniques of nonviolent resistance and political activism, would spread out across rural Mississippi encouraging African Americans to register to vote, teaching in “freedom schools,” and organizing a “freedom party” to challenge the all-white Mississippi Democratic party.⁵⁴

On June 21, reports reached Moses and Dennis that three young project workers—Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney—had disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Goodman and Schwerner were white, Chaney black. Six weeks later, the three were discovered buried in an earthen dam. Goodman and Schwerner had been shot in the heart and Chaney beaten to death. “In my twenty-five years as a pathologist and medical examiner,” declared the attending physician, “I have never seen bones so severely shattered.” Before the summer was out, three more civil rights workers died violently. A volunteer from the Mississippi Summer Freedom Project wrote home in July 1964: “Yesterday while the Mississippi River was being dragged looking for the three missing civil rights workers, two bodies of Negroes were found. Mississippi is the only state where you can drag a river any time and find bodies you were not expecting.⁵⁵In McComb there were seventeen bombings in three months, and white extremists burned thirty-seven black churches to the ground.

After Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were reported missing, LBJ conferred daily with J. Edgar Hoover, urging the FBI director to leave no stone unturned to find the culprits and to make a case against them, even after it became apparent that local law enforcement officials were involved. “I asked Hoover … to fill up Mississippi with FBI men and infiltrate everything [the KKK, White Citizens’ Councils, etc.],” he told Lee White, his assistant for civil rights matters. “I’ve asked him to put more men after these three kids … I’ve asked him for another report today … I’m shoving in as much as I know how.”⁵⁶On June 23, Hoover reported in: “Mr. President, I wanted to let you know we’ve found the car … [It] was burned and we do not know yet whether any bodies are inside of the car because of the intense heat … Apparently what’s happened—these men have been killed.”⁵⁷That afternoon Johnson met with Schwerner’s and Goodman’s parents to console them. He then consulted with Mississippi Senator Jim Eastland, who predicted that the whole thing would turn out to be a hoax. There were no “white organizations” in that part of the state. Everyone knew that most of the so-called bombings were staged by local Negroes stirred up by outside agitators. The whole thing was a “publicity stunt.”⁵⁸Shortly thereafter, the bodies were discovered.

To make matters worse, the NAACP began picketing the White House to protest the federal government’s inability or unwillingness to protect civil rights workers in Mississippi. James Farmer called to add his voice to the indignant. Civil rights leaders were only slightly mollified when the Neshoba County sheriff and several local Klan members were arrested.⁵⁹

In the wake of his civil rights triumph, LBJ was characteristically conflicted. He had worked his will on Congress in a historic manner and won a place of honor for himself in the American social justice movement. But he felt for the white people of the South, people he had grown up with and loved. He appealed to LeRoy Collins, Buford Ellington, Luther Hodges, and other southern moderates to tell the governors, legislators, and people of the South that he had not abandoned them. “I moved a bunch of FBI people into Mississippi last night,” Johnson told Hodges during the Schwerner-Goodman-Chaney crisis, “but I’m not going to send troops on my people if I can avoid it, and they got to help me avoid it.”⁶⁰He still hoped that when the scales of prejudice dropped from the eyes of poor whites in the South they could make common political cause with poor blacks within the context of the Democratic party. “I can’t make people integrate,” he told Richard Goodwin, “but maybe we can make them feel guilty if they don’t. And once that happens, and they find out the jaws of hell don’t open, and fire and brimstone doesn’t flood down on them, then maybe they’ll see just how they have been taken advantage of.”⁶¹At the same time, Johnson was aware that the accommodations, employment, and education bill just passed was not the end of the struggle for racial justice in America. “He used to tell me,” Humphrey wrote in his memoirs, “ ‘Yes, yes, Hubert, I want all those other things—buses, restaurants, all of that—but the right to vote with no ifs, ands, or buts, that’s the key. When the Negroes get that, they’ll have every politician, north and south, east and west, kissing their ass, begging for their support.’ ” Within days of passage of the 1964 Act he was badgering Nicholas Katzenbach “to write me the goddamn best, toughest voting rights act that you can devise.”⁶²

Johnson was afraid that the more militant members of the civil rights movement would become intoxicated by their success in passing the civil rights bill and press too hard. Immediately after the signing ceremony, Johnson met with Wilkins, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, and other civil rights leaders and asked them to hold off on further demonstrations, lest they provoke a white backlash and prevent enforcement of the measure just signed. Young promised to help: “I know you are working on the southern governors and southern businessmen and … I don’t want to see King and Farmer and everyone else talking about how they’re going to insist on immediate compliance … If you can keep the southeners as you are from issuing defiance orders then we ought not to be talking about how we’re going to test ’em.”⁶³But Johnson sensed, correctly as it turned out, that the movement was metamorphosing into something Young and the conservatives could not control. And then there was the political situation. The evening of the signing, Bill Moyers visited the president in his bedroom and found him deflated. Why so down, Moyers asked. “Because, Bill,” he replied, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.”⁶⁴

Unlike theBrown decision, the Civil Rights Act did not bring in its wake a wave of violence, calls for massive resistance, or even major defections from the ranks of the Democratic party. Richard Russell believed that the contrast was due to theBrown decision’s being an edict of the court and the Civil Rights Act’s being a series of laws enacted by a duly elected majority. As Johnson’s remarkable reception in Georgia revealed, the relative calm was also due to the president’s southern roots and his determination to make integration and nondiscrimination a gift to the nation from the South, not something that was imposed on the region from the outside.

 

THROUGHOUT THE SPRINGand summer of 1964, Lady Bird basked in the reflected glory of her husband, but reflected glory was mostly what she had to settle for. Lady Bird recorded in her diary that she felt a “gulf ” opening up between her and Lyndon after they entered the White House. He was putting in eighteen-hour days, and she had become First Lady, an office in and of itself with staff, permanent duties, endless invitations to functions, and unending correspondence. On one particular day, she received forty-four thousand communications. And there was the ongoing reminder that there were other women in her husband’s life. Despite his health problems and the unflattering image picked up by the television cameras, Lyndon Johnson remained a physically compelling man. “Lyndon Johnson was giant-sized,” recalled John Bullion, a historian and family friend. “He had huge bones, and he was carrying too much weight even for his expansive frame. But the overall impression was one of size, power, and force, not soft flabby fatness. His gut, though pooched out, looked rock hard, the result of hearty eating after heavy work, not the souvenir of hours idled away drinking beer … Both the image and the reality he was consciously projecting … were ones of powerful maleness.”⁶⁵

In early January, Johnson called Helen Douglas to ask her to fly to Liberia and represent him at a celebration commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of that country. Lady Bird was in the Oval Office at the time and overheard her husband tell Douglas that he was giving her four days’ notice, “four days more than I usually give you.” Douglas laughed and said she would have to ask her husband, Melvyn Douglas, quipping that, of course, “he never knew you the way I did.” Near the end of the conversation, Lyndon put Lady Bird on, who was at her honeyed best: “Ah, Hell-en, so nice to hear you … honey.” She remarked that she had recently met some women friends of Douglas’s from California who seemed quite taken with Lyndon. She said, “I guess I’m used to it ’cause I like for women to like him, and I like him to like them.”⁶⁶

Two months later, LBJ ran into Helen Douglas at a banquet honoring Eleanor Roosevelt. Unbeknown to Lady Bird, he invited Douglas to spend the night at the White House. If Lady Bird was surprised to see her husband’s consort the next morning, she did not let on. “He had supplied her, apparently, with my nightgown and robe,” she recorded in her diary, “and there she was on the third floor. So at breakfast I called her to come down in her robe (my robe) and have breakfast with me in my room while we watched Lyndon depart by helicopter from the South Lawn … She is indeed the same vivid person I knew back in 1949-50 … She’s an extraordinarily handsome woman, with an enormous appetite for life … I spent a wonderful hour and a half with her … and had simply loved it.”⁶⁷

Lady Bird may have been accommodating, but her husband’s flaunting of Douglas hurt; she quickly grew lonely. Following several weeks of spending her evenings alone, she called the Oval Office. “I’m lonesome over here and I wish you’d come home,” she told Lyndon, sounding almost desperate. He invited her over to swim with him and his aides, but she refused.⁶⁸On another occasion, she showed up at the Oval Office at 8:45 in the evening to find LBJ with Marianne Means, the pert blond reporter who was another of Lyndon’s flirtations. Again she accommodated: “I had a drink with them, asked her to dinner. We picked up Gerri Whittington. We stopped off by the pool. We found suits for both of them … Called up Marianne’s date and asked him to join us, which he did presently … Lyndon was astonished that Gerri Whittington couldn’t swim and in his very forthright way, he said, ‘What’s the matter, couldn’t you go in any public pools?’ And she, I must say, with very creditable poise, said, ‘That is right, so I never learned to swim’ … Lyndon and I and Gerri and Marianne and her date … had dinner and Lyndon rushed off, very much against my wishes, to put in an appearance at the Mexican Inter-parliamentary dinner.”⁶⁹

The marriage did have strengths. LBJ trusted Lady Bird implicitly, discussing affairs of state and politics with her. He made it clear that he respected her expertise as a businesswoman, journalist, judge of people, and observer of affairs. He was harsh with her, but rarely if ever devious. Her famous evaluation of him that followed his March 7, 1964, press conference—a tough one that featured questions about his relationships with Charles de Gaulle and Bobby Kennedy—was revealing. She called the Oval office: “You want to listen for about one minute to my critique, or would you rather wait until tonight?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m willing now.”

“I thought you looked strong, firm, and like a reliable guy. Your looks were splendid. The close-ups were much better than the distance ones … You were a little breathless and there was too much looking down and I think it was a little too fast … Not enough change of pace. Dropping voice at the end of sentence.” Johnson tried to make excuses, but she would have none of it. “In general,” she said, “I’d say it was a good B-plus.”⁷⁰