Read The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act Online
Authors: Clay Risen
With the changes settled, Dirksen, Mansfield, Humphrey, and Kuchel strode into the Senate chamber the next day to present their compromise bill. “As a result of various conferences and by the process of give and take, we have at long last fashioned what we think is a workable bill,” said Dirksen. “We have now reached the point where there must be action.”
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Not everyone was enamored with the new version of the bill, or with Dirksen. Russell said the deal “puts Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and Ben Wade”—three of the most radical Republicans during Reconstruction—“to shame.” That Humphrey or Kuchel might be proud to be affiliated with the abolitionist spirit seems not to have crossed the mind of the Southern senator, who could see in them only a deep hatred of the South. But Russell reserved a special place in his own personal hell for Dirksen, who had cast aside the comforts of the conservative coalition to curry favor with liberals. In doing so, Russell warned, “He has killed off a rapidly growing Republican Party in the South”—evidence, again, of how out of touch Russell had become with the pulse of the region.
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Mansfield gave one last concession to Dirksen: that they not file for cloture, the first step toward voting on the jury trial amendments, the substitute amendment, and then the bill itself, until after the June 2 primaries, for fear that injecting civil rights into the Republican primaries could upset what was by now a coronation of Goldwater as the party’s candidate. Because of the time required between filing for cloture and taking a vote, it would be June 9 at the earliest before the first stab at ending debate could be made.
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But in one last shot at the bill, Russell announced on June 1 that he was ready to allow votes on the jury trial amendments. The move was in part a way to win back filibuster-weary Republicans. But it was also a clever way of sabotaging the carefully orchestrated proceedings—the civil rights bill still needed time to lock down enough guaranteed votes. Early votes that went against the bill’s leadership could disrupt their fragile momentum, leading to a cascade of recriminations that might sink the whole thing.
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And so, in response, the Democrats launched a filibuster of their own—a counterfilibuster to keep the original filibuster alive. Meanwhile, they did all they could to collect more votes. On June 4, Republican Jack Miller of Iowa agreed to support cloture after weeks of intense lobbying by the archbishop of Dubuque. When Senator Wayne Morse told Humphrey he could not be there for the June 9 vote because he was giving a commencement speech in a small town in Washington State, Humphrey offered to send a jet to get him. Morse countered that the local landing strip was too small for a jet. Well, Humphrey replied, then we’ll send a helicopter to take you to the closest jet-accommodating airport. Eventually, Morse gave in to Humphrey’s relentless wheedling and said he would skip the speech after all.
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Still, the carefully erected edifice began to teeter. Dirksen came down with a fever and retired to his northern Virginia farm to recuperate. While he was away, Hickenlooper struck. With as many as twenty senators behind him, the Iowan charged that Dirksen had failed to consult with them on all his changes and that he and his backers were no longer beholden to his leadership on the bill—and in fact would refuse to support it unless given the opportunity to present their own amendments.
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Humphrey and Kuchel went into a tailspin. Who knew what Hickenlooper might ask? Could he really muster enough votes to kill the bill? And if they gave in to him, and he won his amendments, would that kill the bill’s chances in the Senate—or later, in the House?
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Hickenlooper’s rebellion may have caught Dirksen in a bind, but Mansfield still had a move to make. On Saturday, June 6, he rose in the Senate chamber to present the motion for cloture—and then immediately offered to postpone it if his colleagues agreed to vote on Hickenlooper’s amendments.
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This was a brilliant parry by Mansfield. It used the immediate, surmountable challenge presented by Hickenlooper to overcome the greater challenge presented by Richard Russell. In proposing to delay the vote until Hickenlooper had his moment in the spotlight, Mansfield was playing to the Iowa senator’s great vanity, thus defusing the threat that he and his supporters posed to the bill. And it worked: that evening Humphrey managed to wangle cloture commitments from three of Hickenlooper’s troops, Karl Mundt, Roman Hruska, and Norris Cotton. “I do believe this unanimous consent agreement,” Humphrey wrote shortly after the vote, “brought us the extra votes that we needed for cloture.” Hickelooper agreed to come along soon after.
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But Mansfield was also putting the Southern Democrats in a terrible position. If they opposed the vote, they would lose any chance of winning over Hickenlooper’s faction. But if they allowed it, they would be giving in to Mansfield and allowing a demonstration of how strong the bloc was behind the bill. After some internal debate, the Southerners chose the second course, even though they knew they had been checkmated. “This whole thing has been a very graceful ballet . . . but I have not derived much pleasure from it,” Russell said. “I have concluded there is very little chance of me winning anything out of this situation.”
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Hickenlooper’s amendments, which he offered Saturday afternoon for a vote on Tuesday, were anticlimactically small: a revised amendment, originally from Morton, which would offer all criminal contempt defendants the right to a jury trial except under Title I; a limit on Title VII to cover companies with one hundred or more employees, originated by Cotton; and Hickenlooper’s own proposal to eliminate any plank of the bill dealing with aid for school desegregation.
On Monday, the Senate opened with Mansfield’s cloture motion, signed by twenty-seven Democrats and eleven Republicans—intentionally far fewer than publicly supported it, since the leadership did not want to reveal precisely how many senators they had behind them. That set in motion a two-day waiting period, meaning that the Senate would vote on Hickenlooper’s and Cotton’s amendments on Tuesday and make its historic cloture vote on Wednesday.
Despite the momentous occasion, the minds of many senators were elsewhere. Over the weekend two Navy reconnaissance jets had been shot down by Communist rebels over Laos, which the Pentagon answered by ordering armed escorts for such flights—evidence, if anyone still needed it, of the country’s inexorable slide toward greater involvement in Southeast Asia.
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The next day the Senate narrowly voted to approve the Morton amendment, 51–48, thanks to last-minute reversals by senators Stuart Symington, Edward Long, and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, liberal Democrats who otherwise supported the civil rights bill. But both the Hickenlooper and the Cotton proposals went down handily (40–56 and 34–63, respectively). The leadership also allowed one more amendment vote, on a proposal by Senator Ervin to scratch the entirety of Title VII—a move that was roundly defeated and thus helped underline the momentum behind the bill.
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The way was
now cleared for the cloture vote the next day. But Humphrey and the White House still were unsure whether they had the votes. On Monday, Mike Manatos had informed Larry O’Brien that they had 42 Democrats and 23 Republicans in hand, two short of the 67 they needed to end the debate (Humphrey was a bit more sanguine, counting 66 votes in favor). There was a small number of wild cards, some of them less likely than others—even after the vote on Hickenlooper’s amendments, the Iowan had made it clear he was uncommitted on cloture (he eventually voted for it); on the other hand, Manatos ranked border-state senators Ralph Yarborough of Texas and Herbert Walters of Tennessee, along with Howard Edmondson of Oklahoma, as possible to likely supporters.
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At precisely 7:38
p.m.
on June 9, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia took a final, lonely stand against cloture. With a black leather notebook filled with several hundred pieces of paper before him, he began reading a speech that would ultimately last fourteen hours and thirteen minutes, well into the next morning. As Byrd settled into his one-man filibuster, the Senate emptied. Humphrey went off to dinner with the journalist Andrew Glass from the
New York Herald Tribune
at the Monocle, a new restaurant set between the Senate office buildings and Union Station. Outwardly, Humphrey was confident. At 7:30, he told Johnson he had the votes in hand. Johnson, Humphrey recalled, “said he hoped so, but he said it would be difficult. I told him I was sure of it.”
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Privately, though, Humphrey was worried. He knew that no civil rights cloture vote since 1950 had won even a simple majority of the senators present and voting. After dinner, he went back to the office and spent most of the night working the phones, trying to win over the remaining fence sitters. That night John Williams and Carl Curtis passed word that they would support cloture. But by 1:00
a.m.
, Humphrey still did not have commitments from the three outstanding senators he thought should have been the easiest to get—Edmondson, Yarborough, and Howard Cannon of Nevada.
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Humphrey finally went to sleep around three in the morning, but was awake by 7:30, when he called Johnson to reiterate that he had the votes. Again, he was less sure than he let on; after hanging up with the president, he called Edmondson, Yarborough, and Cannon. The first two, as expected, fell in line and said they would support cloture. But Cannon had been an ambivalent supporter of civil rights in the past, and he felt a vote to back cloture now might hurt him in his reelection bid that fall (he ended up winning by just 84 votes). However, Humphrey knew that Cannon was under heavy lobbying pressure from the United Steel Workers, who had given significant financial support to his 1958 race and promised to do so again—if he supported cloture. Cannon had also journeyed to the White House to meet with the president on May 27, where he presumably received the full “Johnson treatment”—with the Texan wheedling, pleading, and perhaps threatening his former Senate colleague to vote to end debate. By the time Humphrey got Cannon on the phone that morning, he was ready to concede—almost. He told Humphrey that he would wait in the cloakroom while the votes were called; if he was needed, he would come out and vote yea. (According to the union lobbyist Jack Biedler, Cannon was finally swayed by a White House promise to open a facility in Nevada to mint silver dollars.)
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As Humphrey made his final telephonic rounds, reporters began to filter into his outer office. Humphrey emerged to find a packed antechamber, where he spied his old friend Cecil E. Newman, a Minneapolis businessman and editor of the
Minneapolis Spokesman
and
St. Paul Recorder
, the state’s two largest black newspapers. He and Newman toasted the upcoming vote with glasses of orange juice. Humphrey then left for the Senate chamber; along the way, he passed a note to Phil Hart that said they had 69 votes—two more than needed.
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Meanwhile, rumors swirled about additional votes turning up—Lee Williams, a staffer for Arkansas senator William Fulbright, sent word to the White House that his boss had decided to vote for cloture; others said Johnson had persuaded him to vote for it after promising him the secretary of state position after the fall election. (Johnson had done nothing of the kind, and in any case Fulbright voted against cloture.)
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Outside, the thermometer was climbing toward an oppressive 100 degrees, a drastic change from the blizzard conditions that had marked the beginning of the Senate debate. Just before 10:00
a.m.
, the Senate chamber began to fill—senators on the floor, surrounded by their staffs; onlookers and reporters in the gallery, peering down to catch a glimpse of history. Senator Byrd was still winding down his eight-hundred-page speech, which ended just nine minutes shy of the top of the hour, when Senate President Lee Metcalf gaveled the day to order.
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Before the vote came a cavalcade of final speeches. Mansfield, true to his role as arbiter, downplayed his support for the bill and instead invoked the need for the bill to receive a proper vote. “The Senate now stands at the crossroads of history,” he said, “and the time for decision is at hand.” He then read a letter from one of his constituents, a young mother in Montana. “I wish there was something I could do to help,” she implored. “The only way I know how to start is to educate my children that justice and freedom and ambition are not merely privileges, but their birthrights.” The majority leader then ceded the floor to Russell, who loosed one last attack on the bill. It would, he said in his thirty-minute speech, “destroy forever the doctrine of the separation of powers.”
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Finally it was Dirksen’s turn. The minority leader had spent the previous night at his farm in Broad Run, Virginia, writing what he intended to be a historic speech. He rose at 5:00
a.m.
, finished the final draft, clipped some flowers for his office, and rode in to the Capitol. He arrived just as Byrd was finishing.
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Dirksen stood at his desk and began by introducing the final amendment in the form of a substitute, essentially the Mansfield-Dirksen package, with the newly accepted Morton amendment attached. Looking pale from his recent illness and gulping pills as he spoke, Dirksen launched into a plea for his party to hew to its pro-civil-rights legacy. Equality was, he said, inevitable. Citing yet again his paraphrased quotation from Victor Hugo, he said, “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come. The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education, and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here.”
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