The Passage of Power (97 page)

A
ND NOT ONLY
had the civil rights bill not yet reached the Senate, there was no indication of when it would.

The first step in the southern strategy of denying supporters of civil rights sufficient time to pass the bill in the Senate was to delay the moment at which the Senate could begin considering the bill—to delay, in other words, the time at which the bill came over from the House, to have Chairman Smith keep it bottled up in his House Rules Committee as long as possible, and Smith had already begun doing that.

On November 21, after a five-month-long battle in the House Judiciary Committee, the bill had finally been reported out—not to the House floor, but only to Smith’s Rules Committee, since no bill can go to the House floor without an accompanying “rule” setting the length of debate and whether amendments to the bill can be offered. On the morning of November 22, at about the time Kennedy was speaking at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Fort
Worth, House Speaker John McCormack was asking Smith when Rules might take up, and report out, the bill, so that the House could vote on it; Smith had said blandly that he didn’t know. Not enough time remained to hold hearings before the Christmas recess, he said. The hearings would have to begin after Congress reconvened in January.

Trying to bargain with him, McCormack said that if Smith would agree to hold hearings before the recess, he in return would agree not to call the bill up for floor action until after Congress reconvened. Smith wasn’t interested in bargaining. He told the Speaker he wouldn’t agree to anything. He refused even to say when in January the hearings would begin, or how long they might last after they had begun. He would discuss that matter with members of his
committee, he said, but he wouldn’t begin those discussions until after Congress reconvened. When, on November 29, Johnson asked McCormack,
“He
won’t give you a hearing of any kind [before the recess]?,” McCormack’s reply was a flat “No.” “He was frank about it,” McCormack said. “He won’t do anything to help [the bill] along.” Asked about his plans for the bill by the
Washington Post,
Smith was equally frank.
“No
plans,” he replied. He would make plans in January, he said.

Smith’s statement to McCormack—that he would not begin discussing the starting date and the duration of the Rules Committee hearings on the civil rights bill until after Congress reconvened—had ominous implications. If he had not agreed before the Christmas recess on a date for the beginning of the hearings, what would begin when Congress reconvened was not the hearings but only the discussions with committee members: the negotiations between Smith
and liberal committee members over the date. And if Smith had not agreed before the recess on a date by which the hearings would end, that date as well would have to be negotiated in January. Negotiations with Judge Smith could be lengthy negotiations. The hearings themselves might not begin until quite some time after Congress had reconvened.

Understanding the strategy, Johnson explained it to people whose support he needed.
“He
[Smith] won’t do one damned thing,” he told
Robert Anderson in a telephone call on November 30. “His idea, of course, is that he’ll run it [the civil rights hearings] over until January. And then in January they’ll be late coming back [getting back to work after
the recess], and he’ll piddle along and get it into February, and then maybe they won’t get it out [of the full House] until March. And then in March, the Senate will be able to filibuster it until it goes home, and there’ll be nothing done.” Understanding it, he explained what had to be done to defeat it—to, for example, break the Rules Committee impasse immediately, before Christmas, 1963, since otherwise there would be little hope of passing
civil rights by July, 1964.

“We’re
going to have to do it now,” he told
Katharine Graham in another call.
“If
we don’t, they’re going to start quitting here about the eighteenth of December, and they’ll come back about the eighteenth of January. Then they’ll have hearings in the Rules Committee until about the middle of March. And then they’ll
pass the bill and it will get over [to the Senate], and Dick Russell will say it’s Easter and Lincoln’s Birthday, and by the time he gets them [the civil rights bill], he will screw them to death, because he is so much smarter than they are.” Understanding the strategy, Lyndon Johnson understood that it was working—both parts of it. The southern tactics were designed to prevent any progress on the civil rights bill until Congress reconvened in
1964—to keep the bill stalled during the three weeks remaining before the Christmas recess—and that’s what the South was doing, at both ends of the Capitol. And it was far from clear that progress would be made in January; on the main battlefield, the Senate, Byrd’s refusal to accelerate his pace meant that his hearings might not resume until Congress got down to business in mid-January; the amendments to the
tax bill
would still be before his committee then, still to be debated and voted upon, when the civil rights bill arrived in the Senate. The tax bill would still be imprisoned in committee, still available as a hostage.

And of course the civil rights bill wasn’t even in the Senate yet—and there was no schedule to get it there. Chairman Smith was refusing to even discuss the Rules Committee’s hearings on the bill. His tactic (in Johnson’s words, to “run it over into January,” to “piddle along and get it into February”) was already under way. If civil rights wasn’t moving through the congressional roadblocks before Christmas,
the chances of its passing in July were slim.

And it wasn’t moving.

M
AKING OTHER CALLS
that weekend, Johnson checked up on the most recent attempts to accelerate the tax bill’s progress through the Finance Committee.

They hadn’t succeeded. “If we don’t have [Harry] Byrd” there was little hope of their succeeding, as Smathers told him on Saturday, November 30—“We’d need Harry Byrd.” They didn’t have Harry Byrd. The South was using the
strategy that had worked for years. And it was working again. “To get the tax bill marked up it would be
a
miracle,” Smathers
said. Smathers was talking about a markup before Christmas, but an equally unequivocal statement about the Finance Committee situation made some years later by the committee’s ranking majority member, second in power to Byrd,
Russell Long of Louisiana, dealt with a longer time frame.
“I
couldn’t move the bill out of committee,” Long said. “He [Byrd] wasn’t going to permit the
bill to pass.”

“Go around Harry Byrd?”
Nobody was going to go around Harry Byrd. Even some of Kennedy’s people had finally gotten the idea.
“It
was stalled.… The tax cut was stalled when Lyndon Johnson became President,” Kennedy Budget director
Kermit Gordon was to say. “Stalled completely,” says Russell Long, the committee member with whom Kennedy’s
aides were working closely. The
“two
Virginians”—Byrd and Judge Smith—backed by the power of the
Southern Caucus and directed by a master legislative strategist “had been thwarting Presidents almost, it seems, since time began,”
Richard Rovere wrote that November. It seemed clear that they would be able to do it again.

O
NE SENATOR DID NOT
share those feelings. “Smarter than they are” though Richard Russell may have been—smarter than his opponents in the Senate—it was not other senators who were Russell’s real opponent now, but the new President, and Russell felt that fact would change everything. The Kennedy bills would be passed now, Russell told a friend.
“He’ll
pass them,
whereas Kennedy could never have passed them.”

Lyndon Johnson, Russell felt, would even pass the bill against which Russell had been fighting, and winning, for thirty years. Discussing agricultural appropriations with Orville Freeman a few days after the assassination, Russell changed the subject and began talking about Lyndon Johnson.
“He
said that Lyndon Johnson was the most amazingly resourceful fellow, that he was a man who really understood power and how to use it,”
Freeman recalls. And then, Freeman recalls, Russell said, “That man will twist your arm off at the shoulder and beat your head in with it.”

“You know,” Russell said, “we could have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights, but not Lyndon Johnson.” There was a pause. A man was perhaps contemplating the end of a way of life he cherished. He was perhaps contemplating the fact that he had played a large role—perhaps the largest role—in raising to power the man who was going to end that way of life. But when, a moment later, Richard Russell spoke again, it was only to repeat
the remark. “We could have beaten Kennedy on civil rights, but we can’t Lyndon.”

S
HORT AND SLIGHT
, seventy-six-year-old Harry Flood Byrd walked softly (in recent years, as he grew older, in scuffed crepe-soled shoes and often with a cane), with a pigeon-toed, mincing gait, and talked softly, in a voice so whispery that his speeches could barely be heard in the high-ceilinged
Senate Chamber in which he had sat for three decades. His manner, unvaryingly formal, with a graciousness that a friend described as
“almost
archaically elaborate,” was mild and diffident, almost meek. His face, round, remarkably boyish, and very ruddy—since he owned the world’s largest privately held apple orchards, generations of journalists had been unable to resist describing him as an
“apple-cheeked
apple-grower”—almost always bore a small but pleasant and friendly smile, and above the red cheeks shone a pair of blue eyes so bright they were continually being described as “twinkling.” It might have been the face of a benevolent if aging cherub—if behind those twinkling eyes there had not been hatreds, hatreds so intense that sometimes they broke through the courtly façade; once, unable to restrain his rage when he saw NAACP President
Roy Wilkins and lobbyist
Clarence Mitchell, both black men, sitting in the gallery, he shook his fist at them, and in a voice quite loud enough to be heard throughout the Chamber, insulted them by likening them to Goldy and Dusty, the fictitious black twins whose ignorance and laziness enlivened a weekly radio comedy, shouting,
“There
they are—the Gold Dust twins!” His other hatred, an abhorrence of deficits, of big government and big government spending, was scarcely less intense; a biographer wrote of
“his
extreme obsessive hatred of debt, his dogged fixation on economy.” Looking over the dollar numbers attached to some proposed new government program, he would jab his fingers into the offending figures; his voice would generally remain soft and courtly at such moments, but the red face would grow redder still. It might have been the face of an aging cherub had it not been for the way Harry Byrd—the man his Senate colleagues fondly called “Old Harry” or “Old Man Harry”—wielded power in the two domains over which he ruled: his state and the Senate Finance Committee.

“The
name Byrd has been written across all the pages of
Virginia’s history” since
William Byrd I sailed up the James River in 1674 to found what became, with the help of generations of slaves, a vast tobacco plantation, one chronicler wrote; among the other Byrds in the fourteen generations that followed were a captain in
George Washington’s army, a colonel in
Robert E. Lee’s, and a speaker of the Virginia General Assembly; as Richard Russell was a Russell of the Russells of Georgia, Harry Byrd was a Byrd of the Byrds of Virginia. And since becoming governor in 1926, he had written his own pages in that history, with a statewide political machine known simply as “the Organization.”
“The
Byrd Machine is genteel,” the liberal
Reporter
magazine had to admit. “There are no gallus-snapping or banjo-playing characters in Virginia politics.” Its hallmark was courtliness, not the demagoguery prevalent in other southern states.
“Virginia
breeds no
Huey Longs or Talmadges,”
John Gunther wrote in
Inside U.S.A.
“The
Byrd Machine is the most urbane and genteel dictatorship in America.” But a dictatorship it was. Candidates for office—almost any office, from state legislator down to local school board trustee—would, if the senator approved of them, receive an endorsement known as the “nod.” Without the Byrd nod, it was all but impossible to win an election in Virginia. The state’s last nine governors had all received the nod. As had, of course, Howard Smith of the House Rules Committee. And candidates who tried to win without it encountered tactics that had earned the Organization a different nickname: “the Steamroller.” The Organization (or Steamroller)
“runs
the commonwealth as effectively as Prendergast ever ran Kansas City … though with much less noise,” Gunther observed. “Because of its control over practically every office, no matter how minor, it is quite possibly the single most powerful machine surviving in the whole United States.” Gunther had written that in 1947. Times might change
—had
changed, in some respects, since 1947. Virginia’s demographic makeup had become dramatically more urban and African-American as the District of Columbia’s suburbs spread into the state. But in 1963, the Organization, unchanged, was as powerful as ever. Voting by the newcomers hadn’t altered the pattern of politics in the state, because, in general, the newcomers couldn’t vote. Virginia’s efficiency—Byrd’s efficiency—in the use of the
poll tax to restrict voting by the black people he hated was a model for the tactic. In the state’s last gubernatorial election, in 1961, only 17 percent of Virginia’s voting-age population had cast ballots. A very wealthy man, Harry Byrd lived in a colonnaded mansion, Rosemont, that, as one writer admiringly put it, “surmounts the nearby town of Berryville like a manor house over an English village,” like “the seat of an all-powerful country squire.” And that was still, well into his fourth decade of power, the way Harry Byrd—courtly, gracious, mild mannered—towered over Virginia politics.
“The
apparent invincibility of the organization makes it seem useless for the dissatisfied to oppose it,” the
Reporter
said.