The Passage of Power (101 page)

Dillon had to make more of an effort, Johnson told him. Every one of the committee’s nine Democratic members had to show up for every meeting, so that there would be a quorum, and they had to vote against every amendment, to prevent any further delays. “You’ve got to get them all in there, and get them organized, and say, ‘God almighty, fellows. We can’t stand this. We can’t have this follow civil rights. You’re going to ruin us on our fiscal program.’ ” Exactly what he had feared would happen
was
happening. “I’m terribly distressed,” he told Dillon. “I’m just distressed that it’s going to get behind civil rights. If it does, it’s Good night, Grace.”
¹

The next day—December 13—there was another conversation between Johnson and Byrd. President though Johnson may have been now, he pleaded with Byrd, pleaded as if Byrd was not a foe but an ally. He was working to give Harry what he wanted on the budget, he told him.
“I’m
working in [
sic
] my budget every night. I was up till one o’clock last night. And I’m going to get you a budget I think you’ll be proud of.… I’m going to help you with the budget.” Pleaded as if Byrd was an old ally—and an old friend—who, like him, might see all their hard work go down the drain.

He found a line that worked. If the tax reduction bill was passed as part of the arrangement with the budget, he told the old senator,
“You
can tell your grandchildren you were the senator who finally got a President to cut his budget.” And, having found the perfect line, he used it. Unless the bill had Harry Byrd’s help, he told him, the bill might not pass.

“What we want to do, Senator, is to try to get those amendments voted on before we go home, or at least as many of them as we can,” he said. “What I’m afraid of is” if the civil rights bill arrived on the Senate floor first,
“if
your [note the pronoun] tax bill got behind it, why all of our work would have been done in vain. So I’m just
so
anxious to run it [the hearings] morning, afternoon and night, and try to get these amendments voted on.” They had both been working so hard, he said. “You help me … get that bill out. I know you’re against it, but you’re a good chairman, and you help them vote. You’re tired of this talking yourself.”

And he began to
make
him an ally—finally, during that December 13 call, began to “get him,” as Bob
Anderson had predicted he would get him, persuading Byrd to subordinate at least to a degree his desire to stall the tax cut bill, to subordinate it to this opportunity to realize the grand aim of his public life: to slow down government’s headlong rush along the path of fiscal profligacy on which a budget over the magic figure would have been yet another step; to pass a
budget that might signal a beginning at last of a turn toward governmental prudence and economy.

Russell Long watched it happen. He had been unable “to move the [tax cut] bill,” he was to recall. “I couldn’t move the bill out of committee.” Then, he says, “Johnson worked with Byrd—promised to cut spending, and Harry changed [his] attitude. Up until then he wasn’t going to permit the bill to pass.” But now, when Lyndon Johnson told Harry Byrd that he knew Byrd was “tired of this talking” and wanted his committee to send the tax bill to the floor, Byrd replied with a single word:
“Right
.” From Harry Byrd a single word was enough. The amendments started to move faster.

“I
’D MOVE MY CHILDREN
on through the line and get them down in the storm cellar” before “I’d make my attack” on civil rights, Johnson had told Sorensen in June. The tax cut bill wasn’t down in the cellar yet, wasn’t safely “locked and key,” but it was—at last—moving through the line, and he had a commitment from Harry
Byrd to keep it moving. And the time remaining during which Congress could pass a civil rights act was a lot shorter now than it had been in June. The moment for the attack had come.

Strong as was Lyndon Johnson’s compassion for the poor, particularly poor people of color, his deep, genuine desire to help them had always been subordinated to his ambition; whenever they had been in conflict, it had been compassion that went to the wall. When they had both been pointing in the same direction, however—when the compassion had been unleashed from ambition’s checkrein—then not only Lyndon Johnson but the cause of social justice in America had moved forward under the direction of this master at transmuting sympathy into governmental action. Now, in the days following the assassination, they were pointing in the same direction again—with every week that became more obvious; as one of Larry O’Brien’s aides,
Henry Wilson, was to put it to O’Brien,
“I
think civil rights is the total touch point for the press—if we passed it relatively intact plus the
tax bill and nothing else … we’d be credited with having a good year,” and if we don’t, no matter what else was passed, “we’ll be credited with having a bad year.”

The highest hurdle in the path of President Kennedy’s civil rights bill would be the Senate—decade after decade, civil rights bills that had passed the House had died there—and the reports Johnson was getting from the Senate indicated that nothing had changed.
“They
tell me they’ve [the South] got enough votes to never allow cloture.… They say they can never get the seventy [
sic
] votes we
need,” he told
Andrew Hatcher. The bill hadn’t even reached the Senate yet, hadn’t even reached the floor of the House, where a vote would be required to send it to the Senate; it was still trapped in Judge Smith’s House Rules Committee, and if Smith was allowed to “piddle along and get it into February, and then maybe they won’t get it out [of the House] until March,” the civil rights bill would be as dead in 1964 as it had been in 1963.

When, in the first days after the assassination, Johnson started exploring the civil rights situation, there was seemingly very little that could be done. A vote within the Rules Committee could be held, to have a majority of its fifteen members overrule its chairman and set a date for hearings. While ten of Rules’ members were Democrats, however, three of them in addition to Smith were from the South, so there would be, at most, only six Democratic votes to overrule. At least two Republican votes would be needed to provide a majority. And every time the possibility of using Republicans to strip a committee chairman of his authority had been raised with House Republican leader
Charles Halleck and his deputies, they had recoiled at the very hint of overturning the body’s traditional procedures. There was only one other possibility (
“the
only thing we can do,” Speaker McCormack told Johnson), a single remaining lever that might move the immovable judge: to obtain the signatures of a majority of the 435 House members—218, in other words—on a
“discharge
petition,” a resolution to discharge the Rules Committee from its control of the bill and send it to the floor. Although this was also, as the
New York Times
put it,
“a
procedure rarely invoked because it offends traditionalists to whom time-hallowed House rules are sacred,” the procedure had in fact not only been employed against Smith before, in 1960, but employed successfully. As the number of signatures on that petition had slowly mounted, Smith, fearing what the
Times
called the “indignity of being relieved of responsibility for the bill,” had given in; when the number reached 209, he had allowed his committee to release that year’s civil rights bill to the floor. During the week following President Kennedy’s assassination, a rebellious liberal congressman (a constant irritant to party leaders McCormack and
Albert),
Richard Bolling of Missouri, had introduced a discharge resolution, but when Johnson began looking into the civil rights logjam, a memo from O’Brien on November 29 told him that the discharge lever had been inserted into it too late to break the bill out of Rules before Congress adjourned.
“Given
signature of the … petition by a majority of the members of the House even immediately,” the memo said, “it still would not be technically possible to put the bill on the floor” before December 23, by which date Congress would probably already have adjourned. House rules required a waiting period of seven business days after a petition acquired the 218 signatures, “and then can be called up [for a vote] only on a second or a fourth Monday [of a month].” The seven-day waiting requirement made a vote on December’s second Monday, December 9, impossible. And getting a majority to sign was unlikely anyway. The 209 votes had been obtained in 1960 only because that petition had
Sam Rayburn behind it; there was no Rayburn
now, and without him, there was no one to persuade the House to bend its normal procedures. Of the 257 Democrats in the House, 90 were from the South, and others, from the adjoining border states, were allied with the South. The maximum number of Democratic signatures that could be hoped for was about 160. To reach 218, about sixty Republican signatures would be needed. The enthusiasm for civil rights expressed by many Republicans—particularly the GOP’s large bloc of midwestern conservatives—was more on their lips than in their hearts. Committed though they were to vote for the bill itself, they would welcome any excuse—such as the inviolability of sacred House procedures—to avoid doing so. In addition, seeing the civil rights issue as one that split—and spotlit the split in—the Democratic Party, Republicans didn’t want it settled. Reaffirming his opposition to the petition on the Thanksgiving weekend Sunday television talk shows, Halleck said that during his twenty-eight years in the House,
“I’ve
never signed one yet.” In a Republican caucus the following day, he, other GOP leaders and even a key architect of the House civil rights bill—William M. McCulloch of Ohio—assailed the very concept of bringing a bill to the floor without the customary “rule” from the Rules Committee. As
Henry Wilson reported,
“Republicans
have no intention whatever of pushing Smith into early action.” And without Republican votes—without any realistic chance of passing the discharge petition—“our last threat to Smith will have been removed, and he could hold out forever,” as Wilson gloomily put it in one of his memos to O’Brien.

But Lyndon Johnson was worked up now, “revved up,” “all worked up and emotional, and work all day and all night, and sacrifice, and say, ‘Let’s do this because it’s
right
!’ ” Those commentators who have questioned the sincerity of Lyndon Johnson’s commitment to civil rights—questioning that persists to this day—simply haven’t paid sufficient attention to the words that had burst out of him when he had been telling the governors why a civil rights bill should be passed: “So that we can say to the Mexican in California or the Negro in Mississippi or the Oriental on the West Coast or the Johnsons in Johnson City that we are going to treat you all equally and fairly.” He had lumped them all together—Mexicans, Negroes, Orientals and Johnsons—which meant that, in his own heart at least, he was one of them: one of the poor, one of the scorned, one of the dispossessed of the earth, one of the Johnsons in Johnson City. What was the description he had given on other occasions of the work he had done in his boyhood and young manhood? “Nigger work.” Had he earned a fair wage for it?
“I
always ordered the egg sandwich, and I always wanted the ham and egg.” Nor was it financial factors alone that accounted for his empathy for the poor, for people of color—for the identification he felt with them. Respect was involved, too—respect denied because of prejudice. He had understood those kids in Cotulla, “the disappointment in their eyes … the quizzical expression on their faces: ‘Why don’t people like me? Why do they hate me because I am brown?’ ” They had been denied respect for a reason, the color of their skin, over which they had no control; so had he—for him the reason was his family, his father.
“Never amount to anything. Too much like Sam.”
He had “swore then and there that if I ever had the power to help those kids I was going to do it.” And now, he was to say, “I’ll let you in on a secret. I have the power.”
“Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”
He could use only a modicum of presidential power as yet; he couldn’t—daren’t—rage and threaten and bully as yet. But whatever power he had, he was going to use—and no one knew how to use power better than he. If there was only one lever, Lyndon Johnson was going to push it.

Telephoning Bolling on Monday evening, December 2, after reading O’Brien’s memo, he was cautious at the start, wary of saying something that, if quoted back to House leaders, would offend them as presidential interference in their affairs. He hoped Bolling would not discuss the call with them, he said. “I want to keep this secret. I don’t want them to be thinking I’m going around them or anything.… You just keep this confidential, but give me your ideas about what are your prospects up there?” But when Bolling told him the prospects were “
bad
” (“our maximum Democratic signatures” on the petition—about 160—would be obtained “pretty quick,” he said, but Republicans were balking, and Smith’s flat refusal to “even set a date for” hearings “convinced me that we absolutely had to go this route or we wouldn’t have any lever at all”), secrecy gave way to urgency, as Johnson spurred the congressman to the cause, rallying him as he had once rallied young senators to civil rights,
¹
rallying him and guiding him, telling him what to say to colleagues uncertain about signing the petition. Was Smith refusing even to hold hearings?—“I think you can
really
make a point of that,” he said. “Just say that the humblest man anywhere has the right to a hearing.… You [civil rights supporters] have been denied any opportunity to be heard at all, and the only way you
can
be heard is on the House floor itself,” and therefore the petition should be signed so that the bill could be discharged to the floor for debate and a vote.