Master of the Senate (185 page)

Russell’s analysis of the bill’s references and cross-references had been couched in dry, precise legal phraseology, but other portions of his speech were more emotional, for in studying the proposed legislation, he had found that the powers given to the President to enforce Part III included powers that the Senate had not been informed about, and he had come to believe that Brownell’s underlying intention was nothing less than to resurrect the spectre that had haunted his entire life, as it haunted the history of the Southland he loved—Reconstruction.

Brownell’s bill, Russell said, has the same aim “as the measures proposed by Sumner and Stevens in Reconstruction days in their avowed drive ‘to put black heels on white necks.’” Section 1985 was one of the old Reconstruction laws, he said, and Reconstruction was what the bill was trying to bring back, in more subtle, and more pernicious, form. “If this bill is used to the utmost, neither Sumner nor Stevens, in the persecution of the South in the twelve tragic years of Reconstruction, ever cooked up any such devil’s broth as is proposed in this misnamed civil rights bill.”

The South had courage, he said; it would not submit tamely to the proposed persecution. “What I say now is in no sense a threat. I speak in a spirit of great sadness. If Congress is driven to pass this bill in its present form, it will cause unspeakable confusion, bitterness, and bloodshed in a great section of our common country. If it is proposed to move into the South in this fashion, the concentration camps may as well be prepared now, because there will not be enough jails to hold the people of the South who will oppose the use of raw Federal power forcibly to commingle white and Negro children in the same schools and places of public entertainment.” The South would not submit tamely in the Senate, he said. It would fight there by whatever means were necessary. A filibuster, he said, is “a lengthy educational campaign,” and “we shall require a long time to get the facts across to the country.” Turning to his right, Russell looked across the center aisle at the Republicans who had long been the
South’s allies but had now deserted the South. They sat listening as the senator they so deeply respected spoke directly to them. He assumed that they would also use all their rights if they were ever faced with such a terrible threat to the people of their states; he assumed they would use every means at their command to fight it. “If they did not fight it to the very death, they would be unworthy of the people who sent them here.” If they were to fight, he said, he would support them. “If it is ever proposed to use the military forces of this Nation to compel the people represented by other senators to conform their lives and social order to the rest of the country, those senators need not be afraid of the word ‘filibuster’ or of attempting to exercise all their rights under the rules.” If they did so, “I hope Providence will give me the strength and the courage to stand by their side.” And he hoped they would support him now. “I hope that our colleagues will not be intolerant of us as we seek to discharge our duty to the American people of our states who have honored us by sending us here.”

When Russell had finished his speech, Stennis rose to congratulate him on it, saying it “will be a landmark, a turning point.” It was. In succeeding days, the Washington press corps portrayed Russell as a towering, tragic figure. Under the headline “
CHAMPION OF A LOST CAUSE
,” William S. White wrote that “Every supreme moment in [his] career … every one of those rare times when his power is at its peak, is a moment not of elation and triumph but of melancholy and the inner knowledge of ultimate defeat. For the irony of Senator Russell’s life as a public man lies in the fact that he can be a primary leader only in a cause that he knows already to be lost in the unfolding movement of history.” White assailed those who would classify the Georgian “erroneously and with great over-simplification, as all but in the company of the ‘pecker-woods’—the ill-born, ill-educated and bloody-minded kind of Southerner who uses a word—the word is ‘nigger’—that could not pass the lips of Richard Brevard Russell.” To Clarence Mitchell, seated in the gallery above, the Georgian was also a towering figure—a very dangerous one. The NAACP’s perceptive lobbyist saw a “subtle dramatist” (who had “riveted” the Senate’s attention on him with his dramatic opening line) standing with “baronial elegance” as he vented “with volcanic fury the sectional bitterness that had been bottled up inside him for so long—feelings that the South was victim of ‘conscious hate.’” But the speech also reminded Mitchell, as his biographer says, “why this normally urbane gentleman was such a highly respected master strategist.” By his accusation that the bill’s supporters, who had called it a “moderate” measure, had been engaged in a “campaign of deception,” he had, with “astounding effectiveness,” thrown the “Knowland-Douglas forces on the defensive”; his masterful invocation of the names of Sumner and Stevens had awakened ghosts that stalked the Senate halls.

Russell’s speech had another strategic effect. Its charge that the bill was “cunningly designed” to deceive Congress into passing legislation giving the federal government “sweeping” new powers was aimed at the weakest links in
the civil rights alliance: the midwestern Republican conservatives who were philosophically opposed to any expansion of federal power. Russell’s aim was true. While the Senate was still sitting all but transfixed by his oratory, Olin Johnston jumped up and shouted, “Senators, do you want to be responsible for a second Reconstruction?” Some of the midwestern conservatives did not want that responsibility, as became clear when several of them spoke at the next Republican caucus. One of them, Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, said that passage of Brownell’s bill would be “a violation of the civil rights of the white race.” More votes had been needed to support the southern position on Part III, and Russell had gotten some with his monumental speech.

H
E WAS TO GET MORE.
A great general has the ability to find a weak spot in his foe’s defenses that no one else has found, and Richard Russell was a great general in the civil rights war. There was indeed a weakness related to the Administration’s civil rights bill: the head of the Administration didn’t know what was in it. And Russell had guessed that. His speech contained the following sentence: “I would be less than frank if I did not say that I doubt very much whether the full implications of the bill have ever been explained to President Eisenhower.”

Astonishing as was that statement—that the President was not familiar with a major point (perhaps
the
major point) in his Administration’s most highly publicized bill, one that had been a subject of controversy for more than a year—it became apparent the next day that there was, at the least, a considerable amount of truth in it. Russell had said that his statement was based “on my analysis of his [Eisenhower’s] answers to questions at press conferences.” Eisenhower’s next press conference was on the morning after Russell’s speech, and at it James Reston of the
New York Times
asked about Russell’s charge that the Administration’s bill “was a cunning device to enforce [wholesale] integration of the races in the South.” Perhaps some of the journalists present had expected the President to reply with a defense of the bill, and of his Attorney General. If so, they were to be disappointed. “Well,” Dwight Eisenhower replied, “naturally I am not a lawyer, and I don’t participate in drawing up the exact language of the proposals.”

The President went on to say that he had thought the bill was primarily a voting rights bill. “I know what the objective was that I was seeking, which was to prevent anybody illegally from interfering with any individual’s right to vote….” In light of that, Reston asked, would the President be willing to see the bill rewritten so that it would deal specifically only with the right to vote—in other words, to strike out Part III? “Well,” the President replied, “I would not want to answer this in detail, because I was reading part of that bill this morning, and I—there were certain phrases I didn’t completely understand. So, before I made any more remarks on that, I would want to talk to the Attorney General and see exactly what they do mean.”

Eisenhower’s initial ignorance is understandable. The President had, of course, authorized Brownell in April, 1956, to submit only the voting rights portion of the bill; Part III had been put back in the bill through the stratagem worked out by Brownell and Representative Keating. And apparently the fact that it was back in the bill had never—during the intervening fifteen months—been conveyed to Eisenhower. That afternoon, he spoke to Brownell over the telephone. Eisenhower’s secretary Ann Whitman heard only the President’s side of the conversation, but her notes indicate that Eisenhower may have felt he had not been sufficiently informed about the bill’s contents: “He said that some two years ago when they had discussed civil rights legislation, he had understood verbally from the Attorney General that the right of the Attorney General to go into the south was to be concerned with interference of right to vote. Now he understands that the bill… is in general terms…. He wondered whether this bill was not somewhat more inclusive in that particular factor than had been intended. The President said that when he and the Attorney General had talked, they had mentioned criminal proceedings only in cases where Negroes not give[n] right to vote…. If the bill has been expanded to a form so general that it scares people to death, that is something else again….” More than one Republican senator, reading the transcript of the President’s press conference, stopped worrying about what the White House reaction would be if the senator voted with the South.

Later that month, the President would write a friend that some of the bill’s language “has probably been too broad.” And he would also, that July, privately write the friend about his distress about the
Brown
decision (“I think that no other single event has so disturbed the domestic scene in many years”), his lack of distress with the pace of the South’s compliance with that decision (it is, he wrote the friend, “impossible to expect complete and instant reversal of conduct by mere decision of the Supreme Court”), and added sentences that hardly evidence a burning desire for sweeping new civil rights legislation, saying that “Laws are rarely effective unless they represent the will of the majority,” and “when emotions are deeply stirred,” “human feelings” should be given emphasis and progress should be gradual. Eisenhower “had waged two successful campaigns to become the nation’s leader, but he did not want to lead on the issue of civil rights,” his biographer Ambrose has written.

W
HILE
R
ICHARD
R
USSELL’S SPEECH
had given Lyndon Johnson more of the votes he needed to amend Part III and thereby pay part of the South’s price, it hadn’t given him enough. Even with four or five midwestern Republicans now joining the southern and western Democrats, there were still not nearly the forty-eight votes necessary to pass an amendment. Liberals were shocked by the speech’s revelations. As Russell was linking the Brownell Bill to Sections 1985 and 1993, Paul Douglas whispered to Frank McCulloch, “Why wasn’t I told this?” but Douglas’ aides hadn’t told him because they hadn’t known.
“When Russell brought this out, we were all surprised,” McCulloch recalls. But their determination was undiminished: to them the cause of social justice was more important than what they considered mere legalisms. Most of the liberal Democrats were still planning to vote for the unamended, strong bill. And despite the midwestern defections, most of the forty-six Republicans were still sticking with Knowland. A comfortable majority was still available to pass it.

Russell had wounded the civil rights cause in another way, however. His speech had shrewdly appealed not only to Republican conservatives’ belief in the limitation of governmental powers but also to their belief in a senator’s right to unlimited debate. The appeal he had made to them across the center aisle—“I hope that our colleagues will not be intolerant of us as we seek to discharge our duty to the people of our states”—had touched a chord. In the list of conservative priorities, civil rights did not necessarily rank above senatorial rights. Some of these GOP conservatives had never been particularly enthusiastic about civil rights. Considerations of party harmony, of party power and (because of the chairmanships at stake) of personal power had brought them into line behind Knowland to support the Administration’s civil rights bill, and despite Russell’s speech, those considerations would probably still hold them in line to vote for the measure; the bill itself would still command an overwhelming Senate majority. After Richard Russell’s speech, however, many conservatives were no longer willing to vote for limiting debate on the bill—as was shown by another midwestern comment made after that GOP caucus. While not going so far as Hickenlooper in disavowing the aims of the bill, Karl Mundt of South Dakota pledged that the measure is not “going to be rammed down the throats of southerners by relentless or roughshod methods.” Russell’s speech had won to his side a few votes against Part III—but many more votes against limiting debate. All the pressure that Knowland, Nixon and the White House could apply couldn’t hold the GOP midwesterners in line on that issue any longer. There were enough votes to pass the bill. There weren’t enough votes for cloture.

Returning to his office after his speech, Russell had made some telephone calls to check on its effect, and then had called a meeting of the southern senators for the following morning, and beginning at 9:45 a.m., they filed in and took seats around the huge table: Byrd of Finance, Eastland of Judiciary, Ellender of Agriculture, Hill of Labor, Fulbright of Banking, McClellan of Government Operations, Johnston of Post Office and Civil Service—the mighty chairmen—all sitting with the chairman of Armed Services (and with the strong young recruits Talmadge, Ervin, Thurmond) around the mahogany oval, in front of the wall with the pictures of Russell’s twelve brothers and sisters, and of the old judge with the walrus mustache administering the oath—“Dick Russell’s Dixieland Band,” the fearsome Southern Caucus. And there, at the very same time that the President, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, was refusing to defend the civil rights bill, the South’s general laid out his strategy
for attacking it, a surprising strategy, except in light of Russell’s larger objectives, both for the South and, in the interests of the South, for Lyndon Johnson.