The Passage of Power (102 page)

That was what should be said to Democrats, he told Bolling, who responded, “Right!” As for Republicans reluctant to sign, they should not be allowed to say they were in favor of a civil rights bill and were refusing to sign the petition only because they didn’t want to overturn traditional House procedures. A vote against the petition was not just a procedural vote, he said. It was in reality a vote against civil rights because without the petition a civil rights bill had no chance of passage, and they should be told that. “Anyone who is for civil rights is going to be for signing this petition. If they are not for civil rights, all right. But don’t hide behind a procedural thing. Anybody that wants to be anti–civil rights, that’s their right. You’ve got no objection to that. They can do what they want to.”

“Right,” Bolling interjected.

“But they can’t pretend to be for civil rights and then say they won’t” sign the petition, Johnson said. “Let them sign the petition.”

The number of signatures on the petition was important, the President told the congressman—“the more you get to sign it the better.” Smith had released the bill in 1960 only after the Judge had realized that there was a real possibility that the bill might be taken away from him by force. Trying to ascertain exactly how many signatures Bolling was counting on, however, Johnson found the count disappointingly soft: “in the order of 160 Democrats,” Bolling said; as for the Republican number, “Well, that’s up in the air.” The President got specific about one state. “Are you going to get any from Texas?” he asked. “Well, I don’t know,” Bolling said. Johnson said he would make calls to some Texas congressmen. The petition
had
to be filed, he said. “I think it’s got to go.” And when Bolling said,
“This
is the only lever we’ve really got in our arsenal,” Johnson said, “I agree with you. I agree with you. I agree with you.”

I
F THERE WAS ONLY
one lever, Lyndon Johnson was going to really lean into it.

The African-Americans who were the leaders of the five key civil rights organizations—Roy Wilkins of the NAACP,
Whitney Young of the
National Urban League, Martin Luther King Jr. of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, James Farmer of the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and
A. Philip Randolph of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—had requested a group meeting with him, but a group meeting wasn’t what he wanted.
“What
about one meeting a day for each?” were the instructions
Juanita Roberts jotted down.
²

His conversations with these men were conducted at the informal end of the Oval Office, the civil rights leader sitting on one of the couches in front of the fireplace, Johnson sitting in the rocking chair. Since the rocker was higher than the couches, the President towered over the men he was speaking to. Becoming worked up as he talked to them, he leaned forward in the rocker, over the coffee table, closer and closer to them, his eyes never leaving theirs. Coffee cups sat on the table between them, untouched, as he told them how to advance their cause, and tried to persuade them that he believed in it.

He persuaded them. Aware though these men were of the political considerations that motivated the President, from the descriptions of these conversations that they were later to furnish, there emerges a picture of a Lyndon Johnson who in their opinion had a genuine passion for social justice. Wilkins’ feelings toward Johnson, for example, had always been ambivalent.
“With
Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet,” he was to write.

But now, seating Wilkins on one of the two sofas, Johnson pulled his rocking
chair, Wilkins says, “within a few inches of my knees” and began talking about the civil rights bill, and how hard the South was going to fight it. But Johnson also said, Wilkins recalls, “that such a law could be enacted if the people really wanted it.… He was asking us if we wanted it, if we would do the things required to be done to get it enacted.” And Johnson said, as Wilkins recalls, that “the outcome, the very future of our country, depended on how we all handled ourselves over the next few months.”

It wasn’t merely the words but the passion behind them that moved Wilkins. “It was the first time I had really felt those mesmerizing eyes of Texas on me. When Lyndon Johnson wanted to sell an idea, he put all his being into the task. Leaning forward, almost touching me, he poked his finger at me and said quietly, ‘I want that bill
passed.
’ ”

A passion rooted in empathy, a deep understanding of the indignities visited daily on black people in America.
“Some
of the southerners tell him that they’ll buy the bill if he will take out the public accommodations section, but he can’t do that because that’s the heart of the bill as far as he is concerned,” James Farmer recalls him saying, and, Farmer recalls, when he asked Johnson “how he got that way,” the President told Farmer how when Lady Bird had told
Zephyr Wright to take their dog to Texas when she drove down, Mrs. Wright had replied, “Please don’t ask me” to do that, because “we’re going to be driving through the South and our [trip] is going to be tough enough just being black without having a dog to worry about, too.” And how Mrs. Wright had explained how hard it was in the South for a black person—even a college graduate like her—to find a place along the main highway to eat, or to go to the bathroom.

“Well, that hurt me, that almost brought me to tears, and I realized how important public accommodations were,” Johnson told Farmer, and then the new President added that he had “determined that if ever I had a chance I was going to do something about it.”

“He said he was running into great difficulty” with the civil rights bill, Farmer recalls, “but he’s got to get that bill through, he’s got to get it through, it’s of vital importance.”

And from these descriptions, also, there emerges a picture of a Lyndon Johnson who was hard, tough, canny—tough enough and canny enough to transmute passion and empathy into the legislative accomplishment that had been so lacking during the past three years.

When he had entered the Oval Office for his conversation with Johnson, Wilkins had not had much hope for the civil rights bill. If it passed, he felt, it might do so only in a drastically watered-down form. Kennedy, he was to recall, “believed that his package would have passed Congress by the following summer. I am not quite sure how much of it would have survived.” But by the time the conversation ended, he had been “struck by the enormous difference between Kennedy and Johnson.… Where Kennedy had been polite and sympathetic on all matters of basic principle, more often than not he had been evasive on action.
Kennedy was not naïve, but as a legislator he was very green. He saw himself as being dry-eyed, realistic. In retrospect, I think that for all his talk about the art of the possible, he didn’t really know what was possible and what wasn’t in Congress.… When it came to dealing with Congress, Johnson knew exactly what was possible.… Johnson made it plain he wanted the whole bill. If we could find the votes, we would win. If we didn’t find the votes, we would lose, he said. The problem was as simple as that.” Wilkins had entered the Oval Office without much hope; that wasn’t the way he left it.

The votes he was talking to them about now weren’t for the civil rights bill, the President explained to them; they were for the discharge petition, because without the petition there might never be a vote on the bill. While he was talking to Young, who was sitting on the sofa to his right, Soapy Williams telephoned, and Johnson took the call, leaning in front of Young to lift the receiver off its cradle on the telephone console on the coffee table.

“We’re going to go all out on this civil rights bill,” Johnson told Williams. “But we’ve got to go the petition route, and that’s a mighty hard route, as everybody knows.” The public had to be made to understand that a vote against the petition was not a mere procedural matter but a vote against civil rights. “We’ve got to put the Republicans on the spot,” he said. “Halleck was on television yesterday saying, ‘Well, we’ve got to have hearings, and the bill was rushed through’ [so it shouldn’t be discharged by petition]. Rushed, my ass, it was there [in the Judiciary Committee] from May to November. But he was telling how it was rushed.… So we’ve got to find some way, somehow [to make the public understand that] these people [Republicans] either go with us [sign the petition] or they’re [actually] anti-civil rights.”

“I’ll take care of the bill itself,” Young heard the President say, but he needed help with the petition. “We’ll all work on it. Everybody will have his assignment.… We’re on the same team.”

These black leaders had been fighting on the streets with, some of them, the tactics of the orator, and, some of them, with the tactics of the revolutionary. Sitting on the Oval Office couch, the long telephone wire stretching in front of their faces up from the telephone console on the coffee table to the receiver in Lyndon Johnson’s hand, they heard, in a Texas twang, a President fighting with the tactics of the legislator. To a legislator, what counts is votes. Not merely explaining to Martin Luther King the importance of sufficient signatures on the discharge petition, he showed him a list of the congressmen who had not yet signed, pointed to the Republican names on it and told King to work on them.

The five civil rights leaders believed him, were convinced of his sincerity. Besieged by reporters, Young told them that “a magnolia accent doesn’t always mean bigotry.” The new President, he said, not only supported his predecessor’s civil rights program but had “deep convictions” of his own.

The other leaders echoed Young’s feelings. “I left the White House that day convinced that Johnson was willing to go much farther than he had ever gone
before,” Wilkins was to write. Despite his passage of the 1957 and 1960
civil rights bills,
“there
has been a lingering reservation in the minds of many Negro leaders whether Mr. Johnson, a Texan with close friendships among Southern legislators, whole-heartedly subscribed to the far-reaching Kennedy program,” the
New York Times
said. His meetings with the five leaders, the
Times
said, had erased their reservations. (The statements some of them made to reporters as they left the White House showed a certain relief, summarized tactfully in Martin Luther King’s statement that
“As
a Southerner, I am happy to know that a fellow Southerner is in the White House who is concerned about civil rights.” Their feeling was not only for public consumption. Speaking privately to two of his aides later that day, King told them,
“LBJ
is a man of great ego and great power. He is a pragmatist and a man of pragmatic compassion. It just may be that he’s going to go where John Kennedy couldn’t.”)

After these conversations, they believed
in
him. The speeches Lyndon Johnson had given as Vice President had made some of them start to look at him in a new light. To Wilkins, who had studied them closely, they could have been written
“almost
by a Negro ghostwriter.” The descriptions the knowledgeable NAACP lobbyist Mitchell had been giving them for years about the difficulties in getting, in 1957, even the “half a loaf,” even the “one crumb,” that they despised, had finally made them understand the magnitude of what Johnson had accomplished. And now, sitting with him in the Oval Office, they had talked with him themselves, had looked into his eyes. They had felt what Howard Woods had felt three years before sitting across from Lyndon Johnson on the campaign Convair. One evening later that month, on December 23, the phone would ring in Roy Wilkins’ apartment. It was 10:30, and Johnson was still in the Oval Office,
“still
signing mail,” he told Wilkins, but he had something he wanted to tell him—that he was about to hire a black secretary,
Gerri Whittington: “This Negro girl that’s been working for
Ralph Dungan.… She has good character and good ability.… You come on and you meet this woman the [next] time you’re in this White House”—and “three or four things” he wanted to talk to him about: suggestions about whom to appoint to the
Civil Rights Commission; what to include in his January State of the Union address; Wilkins’ opinion of a California state official he was considering appointing to a White House job because he was not only competent but “a Mexican” and “They’ve had nobody” in the White House—it wasn’t merely blacks he wanted to make a part of his Administration but other “minority groups” as well, he said. After those matters had been discussed, Johnson was about to hang up, but Wilkins had something he wanted to add. “Now, Mr. President,” he said, “may I say just a word to you? I hope you’re going to have, first, a Merry Christmas.… And I’d like to say this to you:
Please
take care of yourself.”

“I’m going to. I’m going to,” Johnson said.

“Please take care of yourself,” Wilkins repeated.
“We need you.”

If Lyndon Johnson, dealing with Wilkins and Young and King and Randolph and Farmer about matters which concerned, at bottom, the color of their
skin, was fooling these men, he was fooling men who were, where color was concerned, very hard to fool.

He wasn’t fooling them, wasn’t merely posturing. No television cameras had been present, no reporter taking down his words, when he had sat on the steps in Cotulla with the janitor
Thomas Coronado.

I
F THERE WAS ONLY
one lever, Lyndon Johnson was going to put his shoulder into it, as became apparent on Tuesday, December 3.

Not only the civil rights organizations but civil rights’ staunch ally,
organized labor, had to be mobilized behind the civil rights bill, and labor’s stud duck, who “liked the visible signs of consultation … the pictures of the two of you,” was invited to The Elms Tuesday morning for breakfast, and a ride downtown afterwards. No sign of consultation was necessary to line up the staunch old leader of the unions behind civil rights; Meany had been behind that cause for thirty years. But he hadn’t been behind Lyndon Johnson. As Johnson’s limousine nosed slowly out The Elms’ gates, the rear window was down, so that photographers could snap a picture of Meany in the back seat with the President. And at the White House, Johnson asked Meany if he’d like to come inside—and ushered him into the Cabinet Room to spend a few minutes at the legislative leaders’ breakfast. When he emerged to be met by the waiting White House press corps, he said that the President would have labor’s “full support” in the battle for the civil rights bill. Johnson would have had that even without the breakfast and the Cabinet Room, but,
AFL-CIO lobbyist
Andrew Biemiller would say, “This cemented Johnson with Meany.”