Master of the Senate (201 page)

Eventually Nixon’s pragmatism carried the day in Republican councils. On the Democratic side of the House there were no councils; Sam Rayburn made his wishes known. On August 27, by a vote of 279 to 97, the House accepted the Senate bill with only one minor change—a face-saving compromise Johnson had worked out that slightly diluted the jury trial amendment and therefore slightly strengthened the bill. (It allowed judges to try minor voting rights offenses without a jury.) That crucial vote, unexpected in its one-sidedness, meant the measure could go back to the Senate, and if the Senate accepted that change, repassing the bill with that one change written into it, the bill would not go to conference.

More than a few of the southern senators, most notably Thurmond, Talmadge, and Harry Byrd, did not want to accept that change, and they felt they didn’t have to: that the year was by now so far advanced—and senators so eager to get out of Washington—that the will and the votes to close off a filibuster did not exist, if indeed they ever had. “When, however, Thurmond attempted to persuade the Southern Caucus to filibuster, Dick Russell countered with the same reasoning he had been using all year to deflect one. The southerners could use that reasoning to deflect the anger of constituents over
their failure to filibuster—and they did. As Willis Robertson wrote one constituent, “I can assure you that a careful appraisal of the situation confronting us convinces the Southern Senators that if we attempt a filibuster, cloture would promptly be imposed, in which event, not only would we lose our present fight but would invite the establishment of a precedent to plague us next year should an effort be made” to amend Rule 22. And in the end, all of the southerners but one agreed, as usual, to accept their general’s decision. When the bill returned to the Senate, Strom Thurmond held the floor for twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes—the longest one-man filibuster in the Senate’s history—drawling out the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and George Washington’s Farewell Address—but that scene from the Senate’s past was a solo performance; none of his fellow southerners would join him, and they were furious at him because they felt he was showing them up for not filibustering themselves; “They felt,” as one article said, “that Mr. Thurmond was leaving in the South a public image of a single southern senator standing at barricades that had been deserted by the others.” “Oh, God, the venomous hatred of his southern colleagues,” George Reedy was to recall. “I’ll never forget Herman Talmadge’s eyes when he walked in on the floor of the Senate that day and saw Strom carrying on that performance.” Even Russell, faced with what the
Atlanta Constitution
called “rumblings of criticism [that] are being heard” in Georgia, felt a need to justify his strategy, telling the
Constitution
that the South had “nothing to gain and everything to lose” by filibustering, and declaring, “Under the circumstances we faced, if I had undertaken a filibuster for personal aggrandizement, I would forever have reproached myself for being guilty of a form of treason against the South.” Thirty-five years later, Thurmond himself, his biographer Nadine Cohodas wrote, “was [still] adamant” that a full-scale filibuster would have been successful “if Russell had gone along. He refused to concede that the Georgian’s tactical compromises were necessary and remained convinced that Russell was motivated more by a desire to help Lyndon Johnson pass a civil rights bill—and thereby boost the Texan’s presidential hopes—than by a wish to protect the South or the filibuster rule.” When Thurmond finished talking, the Senate, on August 29, passed the revised bill by a 60–15 vote, and on September 9, President Eisenhower signed it into law.

A
UGUST 27
, the day of the crucial House of Representatives vote to approve the Senate’s version of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, was Lyndon Johnson’s forty-ninth birthday.

His fortieth birthday had been a very bad day in his life, a day on which it had seemed likely that he would never sit in the United States Senate. August 27, 1948, had been the eve of Election Day in his senatorial contest with Coke Stevenson, and polls taken that election eve showed that Stevenson was still solidly ahead. Johnson was intending to leave politics forever if he lost that
election—and on his birthday, it had seemed likely that he would lose. He was convinced that a man’s fortieth birthday was a milestone in his life: that if he hadn’t accomplished anything by forty, he was unlikely ever to accomplish anything. On his fortieth birthday, Horace Busby recalls, he felt “he had done very little in his life”—and he felt that he never would.

August 27, 1957, was a very different day. He had come a long way in the nine years since 1948, and on this day, the day on which the House vote made his great achievement a certainty, he seemed to know it. He spent much of the day in the Senate Democratic cloakroom that he had made his domain, telephoning the twenty Texas representatives in the House to try to persuade them to vote for the bill, and in the end twelve of the twenty voted for it, a small exclamation point accentuating his triumph. During the day, Mary Rather came to the door of the cloakroom with a message that meant a lot to him. That morning’s
Baltimore Sun
had contained a favorable cartoon by Richard Yardley, whose drawings were a barometer of liberal opinion. He had told Willie Day Taylor to ask Yardley for the original. Willie Day had done so, and when Yardley agreed, had invited him to see the cartoon collection in Johnson’s office. Yardley said he would like to, “but I’d like to come see them hanging in the White House.” Ms. Rather relayed the message to Johnson, and when she returned to the Senate Office Building, told Willie Day his reaction: “This message made our tired boss smile.”

And there would be, that day, broader smiles.

The team that had won the Little League Baseball world championship was brought to the Capitol steps to meet the Majority Leader, and the team was from Monterrey, Mexico. As the little Mexican boys clustered around him, one of them, Angel Macias, handed him his baseball cap, and Lyndon Johnson suddenly bent down and scooped Angel up, holding him in one arm while he tried on the cap with the other. Thirty years before, he had made it possible for the Mexican boys in Cotulla to play baseball, and it had hurt him when, in the early mornings, he had heard trucks taking them away instead. He had wanted to do something for them, and had promised himself that if ever he had the power, he would. And now, on Lyndon Johnson’s face, as he held the little Mexican boy in his arms, posing for a photographer, was an expression that photographers almost never caught, an expression that was almost never on Johnson’s face when a camera was pointing at it because he always wanted to look statesmanlike or shrewd, so that when a camera was pointing at him, he looked either solemn and pompous, or calculating. On his face this time, as Angel Macias hugged him, and Lyndon Johnson tilted the baseball cap back as the photographer asked, was a wide, carefree smile, a smile that lit up his whole face, a smile as big and lighthearted—as
happy
—as the smile of the little boy grinning up at him.

That evening, at about six o’clock, there was a little party in Skeeter’s office to cut his birthday cake. Only a few senators had been invited, and all of
them who were still in Washington came, and their names reveal the scope of his triumph: Russell, Byrd, Ervin, Smathers, Kerr, Fulbright—he had managed, despite passing a civil rights bill, to hold the South; Humphrey, Pastore, Kennedy—he had held some liberals, too.

And then there was the big party. It was a Texas party, so of course it was in Dale and Scooter Miller’s Mayflower suite. Before he went, Lyndon Johnson changed into a blue suit. Did he remember how, just two years before, he had told Bird to keep the blue one, that he would be able to wear it however things worked out? Now he knotted a tie, bright yellow because it was a Texas party, and tucked a bright yellow handkerchief into his breast pocket, and Bird, radiant in a lacy lemon-colored dress, a smile all over her face, too, pinned a yellow rose on his lapel, and walked behind him, carrying the remnants of the cake—there was no sense in wasting it—as he strode out to the long limousine with the chauffeur holding open the door, and was driven down to the Mayflower, where Scooter was arranging and rearranging the big bouquet of yellow roses that the Nixons had sent, and where Dale had been nervously telling the band for an hour that he wanted “The Yellow Rose of Texas” to be struck up the instant Senator Johnson appeared.

The party was perfect, too. Everyone was there: a dozen ambassadors (there was a brief ceremony when the Korean Ambassador made him an honorary citizen of that nation); Washington royalty—the Cafritzes and Perle Mesta; Texas royalty; as well as the man who mattered most to Lyndon Johnson. Sam Rayburn had a rare smile on
his
face, and a present that said a lot about this gruffly sentimental man’s feeling toward Johnson; it was a set of gold cuff links and shirt studs that he had, years before, given as a very special gift to his friend Alben Barkley. Barkley’s widow, Jane, had given them back to Rayburn when Barkley died, and Rayburn said he wanted Lyndon to have them now. Accepting the gift, Johnson told Rayburn, “I don’t know of anyone for whom I have had more affection in my forty-nine years than for you. But the greatest thing you have ever done is what you and twelve other Texans did today when you voted as you did on this civil rights bill.” And then there was the moment that was the perfect ending to the perfect day. All that evening, back in the Senate Office Building, Walter Jenkins had been on the telephone to Wisconsin, where the special election to fill Joe McCarthy’s seat had been held that day. All evening, the news had been getting better and better, and just before midnight, it was confirmed, and Jenkins telephoned Johnson at the Mayflower, just moments before William Proxmire did so himself. “Senator Johnson,” Proxmire said, “I’ve got the biggest birthday present of them all for you: me.” Proxmire had indeed pulled off the upset victory, and would be the fiftieth Democratic senator. Even if Matthew Neely died (as, indeed, he would, four months later), Johnson would still be
Majority
Leader.

When Proxmire gave him the news, Lyndon Johnson said, “Well, the people of Texas have been awfully good to me for a long time. But I must say I
never expected this much kindness from the people of Wisconsin.” He was almost beside himself with joy. The next evening, while he was in the Senate cloakroom waiting for Thurmond to finish his filibuster, he sent an aide to find out when Proxmire was planning to come to Washington, and was told he was already on his way, that he was flying in that night and was expected to arrive shortly. He hustled the nearest five senators out to his limousine and off to National Airport, where they were waiting on the tarmac to welcome the Proxmires when they came down the stairs from the plane. Seeing Proxmire there in the flesh—the living proof that he would still be Majority Leader when Congress reconvened in 1958—Johnson couldn’t do enough for him. He announced that he would give the newest senator a luncheon to celebrate his swearing-in the next day—a lunch for one hundred people in the grandest setting he could provide: the Old Supreme Court Chamber. And he gave him the committee he wanted: Banking and Currency. As soon as he took his desk, after the swearing-in, Proxmire asked for recognition from the chair and said that he knew it was tradition for a new senator to remain silent for a while, but that he felt it was his duty to thank Johnson “for the fine things that the Majority Leader has done for us.” Johnson jumped up to reply. Was Proxmire thanking him for the things he had done? He would do more! He announced on the spot that he was giving the newest senator the most prized junket he had available: a trip to West Germany at the invitation of the West German Bundestag. Reporters watching Lyndon Johnson saw a man transfused with happiness; as Mary McGrory wrote in the
Washington Star:
“Leadership of a Senate majority is not among the usual remedies prescribed for victims of a heart attack. In this case it seems to have been good medicine.” Johnson works very hard, McGrory wrote, but “he works hard because he enjoys it. One gets the impression that no matter what the future may hold, Senator Johnson right now would rather be Senate Majority Leader than anything else in the world.”

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON’S EXULTATION
was justified for many reasons, but one of them was not the effectiveness of the bill he had gotten passed. To excuse its inadequacies, his partisans in later years would argue what Joe Rauh argued at the time: that little as it was, it was better than nothing. There was a phrase that summed up that argument—“Half a loaf is better than none”—and the phrase could be employed to evoke poignant overtones: “It seems to me,” George Reedy said, “that people who sneer at half a loaf of bread have never been hungry.” The validity of this metaphor to describe the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was undercut, however, by the Act’s results, for in terms of what was needed to bring justice to black Americans, the Act was not half a loaf of bread, or even a slice. Hubert Humphrey had described it more accurately when he called it a “crumb.”

Even before it was signed, events overtook it. On September 3, five days
after the final Senate vote had sent the measure to the White House for signature but before Eisenhower had signed it, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas had, as Stephen Ambrose writes, “presented Eisenhower with exactly the problem he had most wished to avoid, outright defiance of a court order by a governor,” and after three weeks of further defiance, all the controversy that had surrounded Part III became moot. Richard Russell had said that if Part III was passed, it would give the President power to enforce school desegregation with federal bayonets; Part III had been removed. But on September 24 the President nonetheless enforced school desegregation with bayonets, sending a thousand paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division, bayonets fixed, into Little Rock to ensure the safety of nine Negro schoolchildren who wanted to attend Central High School. At least part of the blame for the crisis has to be laid at the President’s doorstep: as Ambrose was to write, “By allowing events to run their course, by attempting to negotiate with Faubus, by failing to ever speak out forcefully on integration, or to provide real leadership on the moral issue, he found himself in precisely the situation he had most wanted to avoid. His options had run out. [He had] no choice but to use force.” But when he decided to use it, there was no legal impediment; as Brownell had contended all along, the President clearly had the power to use force to compel obedience to a court order—with or without Part III.