American Experiment (343 page)

The young congressman had an uncanny ability to draw political money from older businessmen, in part because he knew how to defer to them, flatter them,
listen
to them. And he needed big money when a Senate seat opened up in 1941—again because the incumbent had died. Embarking on a huge statewide campaign requiring a big and costly personal organization, once again running on FDR’s coattails, he raised tens of thousands of dollars from both Texas contractors and Washington New Dealers— only to be ignominiously defeated by Governor “Pappy” (“Pass the Biscuits”) O’Daniel and his hillbilly band that included two of Pappy’s sons, fiddler Patty Boy and banjo-playing Mickey Wickey. When a second Senate seat opened in 1948, Johnson waged another campaign of furious energy and big campaign contributions, but with a difference. This time he distanced himself from the memory of FDR and even from Truman; and this time he won—but with a margin of fewer than 100 votes out of 900,000 cast, leaving him with an imperishable nickname in Texas, “Landslide Lyndon.”

The Senate that Lyndon Johnson entered in January 1949 was already peopled by famous men—the reserved and formidable Richard Russell of Georgia, FDR’s 1938 purge target Walter George, the racist Mississippian James Eastland, the liberal Republican Wayne Morse of Oregon, the Senate president and United States Vice President, Alben Barkley. Johnson’s own “Class of 1948” glittered with younger talent: Estes Kefauver, Huey’s son Russell Long, civil rights leader Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the dean of the liberal Democrats, Paul Douglas of Illinois. But three years later, as Doris Kearns noted, it was none of the above who was elected Democratic party whip, but rather the little-known newcomer from Texas.
Two years later, Johnson was chosen Minority Leader, and two years after that, when the Democrats regained control of the upper chamber, he became the Senate Majority Leader.

How could this “youngster” rise so fast in what looked like a gerontocracy? In part because he deferred to the gerontocrats—men like Russell who stood guard over Senate rules and customs. Once again LBJ showed his capacity to adjust to his environment—and then dominate it. From his old roles of Texas populist and flag waver for FDR and the New Deal he shifted easily into the transactional leadership of a parliamentary coalition broker. The Senate and he seemed made for each other, as he quickly mastered its procedures, nosed out its corridors and cloakrooms of power, calculated the influence of parties, blocs, and individual senators.

The Senate mastered him as well. It softened the sharp edges of his personality, dampened down the fire of his populist ideology, and forced him to operate within its own channels. As Democratic leader, Johnson was perched at the center of a four-way clustering of Senate power. On his farther left were the liberal Democrats, mainly from the North and led by such senators as Humphrey and Douglas. To his immediate left sat the moderate Republicans headed by politicos close to the Eisenhower White House and by East and West Coast Republicans. Just to the right sat a cluster of conservative Democrats, mainly Southerners like Russell and Eastland, entrenched in powerful committees such as Finance and Judiciary. And to the farther right were the congressional Republicans, headed by Everett Dirksen of Illinois and largely responsive to the conservative business interests of the nation’s hinterland. LBJ’s talents lay in keeping his distance from each of these groups even while he traded with all of them.

His talents were put to the test by the harshest challenge the Senate had faced since the 1937 Court fight or even the League of Nations struggle. Johnson’s wheeling and dealing, his coalition making and unmaking, his geeing and hawing, worked reasonably well as long as he was trading with the White House and among the Senate parties over bread-and-butter legislation. He brokered between Eisenhower’s modest proposals for housing, farm, defense, and education and programs opposed or supported by congressional factions. There were limits: Republicans would not retreat on the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, which LBJ had defended; Democrats fought off major erosion of New Deal and Fair Deal legislation. But these were mainly “quantitative” measures on which the Majority Leader could skillfully cut deals involving the size of appropriations and the extent of regulations.

The storm that gathered during the 1950s was not over such quantifiable
matters, however, but over a transcending moral and ideological issue. This was freedom for southern and other Negroes. For many decades major civil rights legislation had been the great “undoable” for the United States Senate. The old, southern-dominated Democracy had lived off racism politically. FDR hated discrimination, whether in the South or the North, but feared to throw an explosive issue into Congress that would shatter his North-South Democratic coalition; as World War II approached he set up a Fair Employment Practices Committee under pressure from militant blacks, but he only weakly defended it against its enemies. Year after year, Truman’s broad civil rights proposals to Congress were killed in committee or on the floor. “Negroes could protest, presidents could recommend, party platforms could endorse, the House of Representatives could act,” James Sundquist noted, “but no civil rights bill could become law without a change in the Senate rule requiring a two-thirds majority to end debate.” And the filibuster rule itself could be protected by a filibuster. In the House the Rules Committee, controlling the traffic flow of bills, was almost equally lethal, and in both chambers southern committee gerontocrats shielded by the seniority rule stood in phalanxes against civil rights spear carriers.

A grim interplay of personality, politics, and place, the civil rights battle by the mid-1950s was so convoluted as both to demand and to defy untangling. The two cardinal issues were black voting rights in the South and desegregation of schools and other public facilities. With notable exceptions northern presidential Democrats favored both a voting rights bill and school desegregation; presidential “waterside” Republicans, including the Eisenhower Administration, supported vote legislation but backed a school bill only to the degree that they feared that northern Democratic appeals to black voters might swing the next election; congressional Democrats would accept a weak voting bill but indignantly opposed a school bill; and congressional Republicans put either or both issues at the bottom of their priority lists. With racial tension mounting in the South, the government of the United States seemed mired in deadlock over civil rights.

Suddenly the third horse in the American
troika
came galloping to the rescue when the Supreme Court—supposedly the “nonpolitical” branch— in the Brown case on May 17, 1954, held racially segregated public schools in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision burst on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers like a bombshell, but Court-watchers were not so surprised. Roosevelt appointees, including Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and Felix Frankfurter, still held a majority on the High Court; gifted black and white attorneys for the NAACP and other civil
rights organizations had been pressing the courts for redress; and the Supreme Court in 1950 had struck down state laws failing to satisfy blacks’ Fourteenth Amendment rights in higher or professional education. Still, the Brown decision was breathtaking—in its extension of these rights to hundreds of thousands of children in elementary schools and in its frank reversal of the pro-segregation Plessy decision of 1896 and its endorsement by all nine justices, headed by Eisenhower appointee Earl Warren.

But even the Supreme Court, acting decisively in the policy void left by anti-civil rights congressional leadership and presidential nonleadership, could not shake the Senate bastion. How would the justices’ decision be enforced, especially since the Warren Court had left open the implementation formula? Against the gathering civil rights forces North and South the southern Democratic senators fought to defend the right to filibuster— which for them was a fight for the “southern way of life.” Johnson, eternally balancing interests, institutions, and ideologies, struggled to find some common ground. “I knew that if I failed to produce on this one,” he said later, “my leadership would be broken into a hundred pieces.”

The upshot was the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which emerged from the legislative obstacle race as a weak voting rights bill, stripped of its provisions enforcing school desegregation. Liberal Democrats found some consolation in the hope that once southern blacks gained the right to vote with the help of the new measure, they could use their newfound power to gain more goals. Others, including many blacks, contended that Negroes could win freedom and equality only by pressing ahead on all fronts—desegregation, fair employment, housing, welfare, as well as voting—in a manner that allowed these changes to be mutually reinforcing. This strategic issue was never put to the test because the voting measure of 1957 produced very little voting. Two years later fewer than two hundred blacks were registered to vote in Alabama’s Dallas County, only a total of five blacks in three other Alabama counties. For countless blacks and others, “liberal democracy,” American style, did not appear to be working even for the most elementary of rights, the right to vote.

Nor did “liberal democracy” now have the luxury of time. Even as Eisenhower signed the 1957 bill in mid-September, tension was rising over the barring of blacks from Little Rock high schools by order of the governor. In two weeks the President reluctantly sent a thousand federal paratroopers to the Arkansas capital to force integration against the will of the state government and the mob. The blacks there were making school integration, not voting rights, the issue. As the mobilized civil rights forces
pursued direct action and as massive resistance and noting by whites broke out elsewhere in the lower South, it was more and more evident that Congress must once again face the issues of voting rights and schools.

A long guerrilla battle broke out in the Capitol contrapuntally to the struggle in the South. Once again the filibuster rule stood firm in the Senate; indeed, this kind of obstruction reached a new high when a moderate civil rights bill ran into a filibuster in the Senate Judiciary
Committee,
which was found to have no cloture rule. With Eisenhower offering little support because, he said, he had “very little faith in the ability of statutory law to change the human heart, or to eliminate prejudice,” the 1957 voting rights bill was somewhat strengthened in 1960 but enforcement of school desegregation was killed.

Johnson was still the Negotiator-in-Chief, bargaining with the White House and helping build coalitions for or against specific sections of the civil rights bill. But now the political environment was changing as the 1960 presidential election neared. And Lyndon Johnson, determined to seek the presidency, confronted a rival who as a senator was no great shakes but was vigorously building a national constituency. This was John F. Kennedy.

The two men had more in common than either might wish to admit. Each had had a nurturing mother and a demanding father who had fired up his ambition and helped satisfy it. Each had represented a poverty-stricken congressional district that he had won after furious battles with a bevy of fellow Democrats. Both had been bored in the House of Representatives. Each was highly ambitious, politically cautious, rhetorically bold. Both had had serious health problems. Navy veterans, they were part of the postwar generation of tough-minded, “pragmatic” politicians. But the differences between them were more profound. JFK had observed poverty; LBJ had lived in it. Kennedy could depend on his father to supply political money; Johnson had to turn to businessmen outside his family. The Massachusetts senator had an inbred cosmopolitan style that the Majority Leader disdained and envied. The biggest contrast, though, lay in their constituencies—Johnson’s in the Senate, in the congressional parties he traded with, and in the South; Kennedy’s in the larger, urban, ethnic states that held the big, balance-of-power chunks of the electoral college.

On civil rights Kennedy had hardly shown a profile in courage. He had favored sending the 1957 measure to that graveyard of civil rights legislation, the Judiciary Committee, to the outrage of black leaders and northern liberals, and to the delight of southern senators including Eastland, who promptly stated his support for Kennedy for President. Later he lined up with the liberals in voting for the desegregation part of a 1960 bill,
although—or perhaps because—it had little chance of passing. His civil rights stand, as his loyal aide Theodore Sorensen later lamented, was still “shaped primarily by political expediency instead of basic human principles.”

The shape of “political expediency” had changed by 1960. While Johnson as an established national leader thought he could campaign for the presidency from the Senate, Kennedy knew that he must convert his magazine-cover fame into grass-roots voting support in the key presidential primaries, every one of which posed critical challenges for him. He had to placate ADA liberals turned off by his compromises on McCarthy and civil rights, veteran party leaders like Harry Truman who flatly opposed him, southern conservatives against him for both religious and ideological reasons, Stevenson loyalists who wanted their man to have the opportunity to run against someone besides Ike.

The Kennedy people believed they could deal with such traditional political pressures, but three other “issues” bristled: the candidate’s religion, his youth, and his father. The Kennedy office made intensive studies of the “Catholic element” in voting, put out analyses suggesting the
advantages
of a Catholic running for office, and were immensely relieved when Protestant West Virginia, stimulated by heavy campaign spending, gave Kennedy a clear win over Humphrey in its primary. Kennedy rebutted the youth issue with talk about a “new generation of leadership.” His father and his father’s money he handled with humor. To a 1958 Gridiron Club dinner, he read a telegram from his “generous daddy”: “Dear Jack—Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary—I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” The remorseless correspondents replied with a song at the next year’s Gridiron to the tune of “All of Me”: