Master of the Senate (183 page)

The elation of all the twelve Hells Canyon Democrats was understandable, at least in political terms. They had been fighting for a federal dam for a long time, and they had never before had a victory in the fight. This Senate vote would not, as it turned out, be a true victory but only a temporary win in a losing battle, because Lyndon Johnson’s cynical prediction would prove correct: neither the favorable House vote nor the presidential signature needed to make the dam a reality were realistic possibilities. In the event, some years later, three smaller dams—only slightly improved versions of the ones Idaho Power had proposed—would eventually be built. But at the moment of the Senate vote, these senators saw at least a first step toward the federal dam. And in political terms, the victory truly
was
a victory. They had delivered on their promises to their constituents: the body of which they were members had passed the bill they had promised. How could they be blamed if the bill didn’t pass in the House? A great favor had been done for them, and they knew whom to thank for it. Church, still learning the ropes in the Senate, and perhaps understandably a bit overimpressed with the power of his oratory, had had to have the facts of Senate life explained to him. As he had been heading back to his office after his speech, still filled with emotion, he had heard footsteps behind him and, turning, saw Clinton Anderson, who had not merely congratulations but a question: had Church been consulting Lyndon Johnson on the issue? And when Church had replied in the negative, Anderson had said, “If this bill gets passed, it will be his doing, not yours.” “I understood that it was true,” the young senator would say later. “But until he said it to me, it hadn’t gelled.” Now, after the victory, as he thought about the southern senators’ switch, it gelled further—“All credit is due to your leadership,” he wrote Johnson. The older westerners understood the realities without being told. “If it hadn’t been for his [Johnson’s] leadership, we never would have passed the bill for the high dam in Hells Canyon,” Richard Neuberger was to say. “During those days, he worked ’til eleven or midnight buttonholing senators for us. I feared for his health….”

H
ARDLY HAD THE FIVE WESTERNERS VOTED
against putting civil rights on the Calendar when they had to begin defending themselves—against charges that their votes had been a
quid pro quo
for five southern votes on the dam authorization. However ringingly unequivocal their denials—calling the charges “a vicious falsehood,” Morse said he had “never in my life made a trade” on a Senate vote; Montana’s Mansfield said, “There was no deal of any kind, sort or nature, and there were no trades on the part of any Democrat with any other Democrat for votes”—they nonetheless rang false in some ears. The skeptics included Republicans. “Civil rights yesterday had a lot do with the [dam] vote today, more than most people realize,” Arthur Watkins of Utah said.
Republican National Chairman Meade Alcorn charged more flatly that the five Democrats had betrayed the cause of social justice for a dam, making “a deal to swap off civil rights for Hells Canyon,” and Charles Potter of Michigan, a fervent Republican supporter of civil rights, expressed misgivings about the deal’s future consequences. He noted that “fellows supposed to be great advocates of civil rights” had lined up with the southerners. “These Southerners are pretty shrewd,” Potter said. “I hope it doesn’t include a sellout of future civil rights votes.” And the skeptics also included Democrats—including the Democratic leader in the Senate civil rights fight.

It did not take long for Paul Douglas to grasp the reality beneath the Hells Canyon vote: that, because the House almost certainly would not authorize a federal dam, the Senate vote would prove meaningless. It was only a few hours after he had raised Frank Church’s arm that he told the young senator, “Frank, I’m afraid you Hells Canyon people have been given some counterfeit money.” On the morning after the civil rights vote, newspapers were filled with Republican cries of triumph—“Look, we did it,” a White House aide said, predicting that the Administration’s civil rights bill would pass substantially as written—and with journalistic analyses of the “victory” of bipartisan civil rights forces in bypassing the long-impregnable Judiciary Committee. The vote “beat down” the southerners “for the first time in this generation,” Robert Albright wrote in the
Washington Post.
Advancing the bill to the Calendar put it “within easy reach of a Senate majority vote to call it up [and] thus opened up a possible route to early passage of the bill.” The papers were filled with what journalists saw as proof that, as Albright put it, “the once-powerful Republican-Southern Democratic coalition … was knocked into bits and may never get completely together again.” William S. White wrote that “The action greatly improves the prospect for the first major Senate action on civil rights since the Reconstruction era.” But Douglas, a better judge of the reality, saw in the southern-western alliance ominous implications for future civil rights votes—when the votes would be more crucial to hopes for social justice, when the votes would not be merely about putting a bill on the Calendar but on bringing the bill to the floor, and, on the floor,
passing
the bill. Morse’s vote was particularly distressing. The other four defecting westerners were not members of Douglas’ civil rights cadre, but Morse had been one of its leaders. Douglas saw Morse’s vote as a hint that there would be further cracks in the liberal core essential for victory. And he was incensed that Morse, who had publicly pledged only three days before to vote against the South on the Calendar proposal, had not informed him in advance that he would not in fact be voting with him. Arriving at the SOB that morning, Douglas hurried up the broad steps and called a caucus of his liberal group for three o’clock in the District of Columbia Committee Room, and the meeting turned into a scene of extreme rancor among men who were supposedly celebrating a victory.

Anger made Douglas’ face almost as white as his hair when, opening the
meeting, he turned to Morse. “The first thing I want to take up is the conduct of the senior senator from Oregon,” he said. “If this were a military group he would be court-martialed. He has betrayed our cause. Furthermore, he did it on the Senate floor.” At the last caucus, he said, Morse had committed himself to vote with the rest of them—Carroll and Humphrey and Pastore and Neuberger and Clark and the rest—to wrest the bill from Jim Eastland’s hands; then he had voted to keep the bill there, and “He did not take the trouble to come back to this group first and discuss it with his colleagues.” “We can’t court-martial him,” but something must be done about this “betrayal.” “I won’t embarrass his colleague [from Oregon], Dick Neuberger,” Douglas said, “but I will call on Joe Clark for advice as to what we should do.”

Erupting in return, Morse told Douglas, “That’s what you think you’re going to do.” Instead, he said, “You’re going to listen to me and then I’m going to excuse myself. I shan’t sit here and listen to myself being abused.” His stand had changed, he said, out of conviction, not expediency—the conviction that bypassing Senate rules just to get action on a specific issue was wrong. “What I did was not easy,” he said. “I was not lacking in courage…. The Senator has said I did not come back to this group. But what good would it have done? It would just create a row.” Then, standing up, he said, “I now excuse myself,” and stalked out of the room.

There followed what Drew Pearson’s handwritten notes (one of the persons in the room evidently gave the columnist an extremely detailed account of the proceedings) referred to as a “hell of a row”—one so bitter that at its end, one of the senators, not identified in the notes, said, “There are so few of us that I feel very sad” that they were disagreeing among themselves. During the argument, Douglas voiced his forebodings, saying that he wondered if Morse’s change of heart had resulted from a larger
quid pro quo
with the South for Hells Canyon that would have future repercussions for the civil rights bill. Neuberger tried to reassure Douglas—“I’m sure no such thing happened. I’m sure I would know about it if he had made any such commitments”—and other senators assured him they would hold fast. “Civil rights is not a major issue in my state,” John Carroll said. “It isn’t popular in Colorado. But I’m sticking to the agreement. I consider this civil rights bill to be important and very much needed.”

Douglas’ forebodings were justified, however. Even while the westerners were firmly denying the existence of a western-southern alliance, the southerners were not reluctant to spell out for a reporter they trusted, Tom Wicker, the precise details of that alliance. After talking with several of them about their votes for Hells Canyon, Wicker wrote that “authoritative sources indicate that the Southern action was a
quid
for which they expect to receive a
quo
[on] the civil rights bill.” The
quo
, Wicker reported, was “that Western senators, who had unsuccessfully sought passage of a Hells Canyon bill for years, would now deliver enough votes for jury trial to attach it to the civil rights bill by about five votes.” That, Wicker reported, was the explanation for the five western votes
against bypassing Judiciary. On that vote, “Western Democrats handed Southerners five votes—not enough to sustain their position but enough, as one observer put it today, ‘to let ’em know where the votes are.’”

Indignant though the western Democrats might be—or at least act—about charges that a deal had been struck,
*
their subsequent actions during 1957 would provide ammunition for those who believed the charges—as will be seen. Over and over again, during the succeeding weeks, the West would provide votes for the South.

J
OHNSON’S DEAL
was indeed one of profound cynicism. It wouldn’t give the westerners victory on Hells Canyon, it would give them only the opportunity to
claim
victory on Hells Canyon. It was indeed based, as Paul Douglas charged, on “counterfeit money.” In that sense, the deal was only one more in the long line of cynical maneuvers that had marked Johnson’s political career.

There were, however, differences this time. The deal had created a new reality in the Senate of the United States. For two decades, the dominant reality in the Senate had been its control by a coalition of southerners and conservative Republicans. In January, 1957, that coalition had been “knocked into bits.” The South had found itself isolated, without allies. But then Lyndon Johnson had brought new allies to the South’s side. In place of the southern-Republican coalition there was a southern-western coalition now.

And the deal had had a further result. Thanks to the arrangement that Johnson had conceived (“I went to a few key southerners and persuaded them to back the western liberals on Hells Canyon. And then, in return, I got the western liberals to back the southerners”) and that, against long odds, he had brought to completion, a civil rights bill was on the Senate Calendar, only one step removed from being on the floor, for the first time since Reconstruction. The result of Johnson’s cynicism this time was not merely a step forward for himself but a step forward for a great cause.

A
NOTHER LEGISLATIVE TALENT
would be necessary if a civil rights bill was to become law in 1957, and it was a talent very different from the strategic, conceptual ability on a national scale that could conceive a relationship between Hells Canyon and jury trials—very different, and of a much less elevated order. It was an ability that was needed in the hurly-burly of the legislative battlefield itself: the floor of the Senate during a violent struggle there. But though it was only a tactical ability, not grand strategy but battlefield maneuver, given the inherent nature of the legislative process—the fact that there
was
, on that Senate floor, an actual battlefield—it was no less vital. And because of the unique complexity of the civil rights issue, and the unique intractability of the problems surrounding it, this talent, too, would have to be exercised at a very high level. Passing a civil rights bill would require an ability to suddenly recognize, amid the turmoil, the cut and thrust and parry, of a legislative body in furious contention—amid the barrage of motions and amendments, amid the rapid-fire parliamentary maneuvers and countermaneuvers, the quick back-and-forth ripostes of debate and the magisterial drum roll of long, formal speeches—to suddenly recognize, amid the great mass of cutting words, witty words, brilliant words, empty words, those words that mattered, the phrase that could change the mood, the amendment that could turn the tide, that could swing votes if put to proper use (a use that might not be at all the use the speaker of the words or the author of the amendment had intended); to recognize the opportunity when suddenly, without warning, it came.

The talent required had, moreover, to consist not alone of insight but also of decisiveness, of an ability not only to recognize a crucial moment but to seize it, to see the opening—and to strike; to move fast enough so that the opportunity did not vanish, perhaps never to come again. It was the ability to recognize the key that might suddenly unlock votes that had seemed locked forever away—and to turn the key, and turn it fast. This combination of rare insight, rare decisiveness, rare willingness to act produced, when it was added
to unbending determination and a gift for grand strategy, a rare form of political leadership: legislative leadership.

B
Y THE TIME THE OPENING CAME
, Lyndon Johnson had all but given up hoping for it. But when it came, he saw it—and seized it.

It came at a moment when it was desperately needed. He had, through his Hells Canyon deal, been able to persuade the South to allow one step toward passage of a civil rights bill: the placement of H.R. 6127 on the Senate Calendar. But three steps still remained: the bill now had to be called off the Calendar—brought to the floor for debate, in other words; then it had to be brought to a vote; then it had to pass. And those steps were going to be even harder than the first had been. Persuading the South to allow them required him to meet the South’s price: amendments that eliminated the Part III provisions protecting a broad array of civil rights; and that added to Part IV a new provision guaranteeing the right of jury trial. That price seemed as difficult to meet as it had ever been.