Historical Figures Series The Career Of Hubert Humphrey, Part 4: 1964 - The Passage of the Civil Rights Act, His Ascension to The Vice Presidency - And the Beginning of the End

 

Richard Russell had never truly gotten along with the Kennedys, but when news of his assassination hit D.C., he went directly to the Marble Room, just off the Senate Chamber.  A few minutes later, Roger Mudd found him there, reading the news aloud to a stunned group of Senators and staff, tears streaming down his cheeks. Mudd was profoundly moved: “Considering how stately and self-collected (Russell) was, he just really came apart that afternoon.”

In his office later that day, Russell’s thoughts turned to his protégé, the new President. “Lyndon Johnson has all the talents, abilities and equipment to make a very good president of this country.” The first year of Johnson’s administration more than demonstrated that he had that capability.

In the early days of his administration Johnson was modest and deferential. He constantly reached out for help and guidance. He asked Kennedy’s staff and cabinet to stay on board. And from the beginning Johnson made it clear that he would finish what Kennedy had started. On the night he became President, he told Jack Valenti that he intended to make sure the Civil Right Bill that Kennedy had proposed would become law.

Civil rights activists were stunned by Johnson’s acceptance of their cause. Under Kennedy, they had more or less been supplicants. Johnson turned him into lieutenants. He knew the battle ahead would be hard but he had every determination to get it done. And one of the men he turned to was his old friend Hubert Humphrey.

The speech that Johnson gave before a joint session of Congress right before Thanksgiving had been drafted by Kennedy men Ted Sorenson and John Galbraith. But the night before he gave it, he handed their draft to Humphrey and Abe Fortas.

It was one of the most memorable speeches given before Congress and not merely do the circumstances. Johnson made it very clear that he was going to use the legacy of John Kennedy to enact a civil rights bill. Many Southerners, including Russell, refused to applaud that part of the speech. But while many of them had doubted Kennedy’s ability to get the bill through Congress, they had far less doubts about Johnson. The reason that they were not alarmed was because that speech had come from one of them.

Russell was disappointed but not surprised by his old friend’s decision. He was not nearly as happy when Johnson drafted him to serve on what would be known as the Warren Commission. During most of 1964, Russell was badly overloaded by the Commission assignment, the coming fight over civil rights and his failing health.

Johnson was initially frustrated by the House to move on the bill, which was stranded in the Rules Committee by Judge Smith, an eighty year old Virginian and a fierce opponent of civil rights. He had been refusing to let the bill even come to debate since July of 1963 and was only forced to by public opinion. At the time, Johnson’s approval rating was at nearly 80 percent. “You’ll have to run us over,” he told the bill’s supporters when he called for hearings. He would add: “We know we’ll be run over.” And facts to bipartisan support, including that of the Republican Judiciary chairman William McCulloch, the bill got through the house with a whopping 290-130 margin. It emerged even stronger than it had been when Kennedy had submitted.

The Senate of 1964 was divided into three groups: pro-Civil rights Republicans and Democrats, moderate Republicans and Russell’s Dixiecrats. Two prominent far-right Republicans joined them, one of whom was Barry Goldwater, the leading candidate among Conservatives in the Republican party for the nomination that year. By themselves the pro-civil rights bloc had 51 votes. But in order to invoke cloture and break the filibuster, they would need 16 more.

Johnson decided to gamble on an audacious strategy. The man who had been willing to compromise to get a Civil Rights bill passed seven years earlier was not even entertaining one. Interestingly despite the fact the two men were determined not to yield in their respective positions, they remained close friends talking several times a day. Perhaps it was because Russell knew that the time had comes, and if it had to come better at the hands of a friend. “Now you tell Lyndon I’ve been expecting this for a while,” he told Bill Moyers, “but I’d rather it be his hand than anybody else’s I know. Tell him to cry a little when he uses it.

For decades finding cloture on civil rights had been a hopeless task. Working with Kennedy’s justice department and putting extra pressure on Mike Mansfield about how to handle the filibuster. While Mansfield remained firm on not having endless session during that time, he had no interest in assuming the day-to-day duties.

That role was left to Hubert Humphrey. Humbled and somewhat overwhelmed at the possibility of realizing the ambition he had hoped for since entering the Senate sixteen years earlier, he knew that this would be a test to finally realize his ambitions of the White House by getting on the ticket with Johnson that fall. Getting the bill passed would serve both his ambitions and he listened to Johnson when he knew the way through was with the minority leader, Everett Dirksen.

Dirksen was a fairly conservative Senator from Illinois when the conservative bloc of the Republican party had primarily been in the Midwest. One of Robert Taft closest allies, he might have cost himself the nomination for Vice-President in 1952 when he made a volcanic nominating speech for Taft and castigating Eisenhower on live TV. But Dirksen was more of a fiscal conservative than a social one, and he had a very good relationship with Johnson when the two had been in the Senate together. Humphrey publicly heaped praise on Dirksen in a Meet the Press interview in March, and Johnson praised him and advocated him to do everything he could to win Dirksen over. “You drink with Dirksen! You talk to Dirksen! You listen to Dirksen!” Johnson knew very well that the liberals in the party would not want to listen to Republicans. Everyone in his white House knew the leadership in the Republican Party was essential.

Before 1964 every civil rights filibuster was a one-way affair, with Southern troops led by Russell engaging lengthy monologues and colloquies while proponents of legislation watched from the sidelines. Humphrey intended to alter the equation. Working with minority whip Thomas Kuchel of California, he devised a system in which proponents of the bill would aggressively challenge, refute, question and debate the Southerners on every major point. He organized a series of four member groups of Senator to remain always in the Senate Chamber. He appointed a captain to each division of what would be known as the Civil Rights’ Corporal Guards. Every morning he would meet to coordinate the day’s activities. And as a result, members of the media became inspired in a way that previous civil rights debate had not.

He addressed the problems of quorum calls by every day having two platoons of roughly twenty-five Democrats present to make sure that the South would not be able to use their time-honored tactic of delay by making endless quorum calls.  And he enlisted the active participation of the nation’s religious leaders. On April 19^th a prayer vigil at the Lincoln Memorial began and it continued twenty-four hours a day until the Senate passed the bill.

Russell and his Southern forces knew that they were overmatched. History was on their side, but not much else. Russell was sixty-six, suffering from emphysema, and overburdened, but he never grumbled even knowing this was essentially the South’s last stand. With compromise impossible, his only chance was if he could keep the fight going long enough to force compromise with his old student. The problem was, by this point he was running out of soldiers: besides himself, there were only eighteen southerners and Republican John Tower of Texas to stand with him. And other members of his bloc such as Russell Long of Louisiana and William Fulbright of Arkansas did not want to fight as hard as the old guard that including Russell, Mississippi Senators John Stennis and Strom Thurmond, who would not be part of the Democratic Party much longer.

The southern rhetoric took tones of desperation. Senator Eastland told Humphrey that the bill ‘takes us back to Stalin, Khrushchev, Hitler and a dictatorship.” Humphrey countered: “What is closer to Stalin and Hitler is discrimination on the basis of race.” There were constant arguments that the bill was closer to communism and socialism and the idea of equality. But eventually the bill became the Senate pending business.”

Humphrey was blunt talking to reporters: “This is no longer a battle of the heart for the Southerners. They simply have to die in the trenches. They’re old and they haven’t any recruits…We have to beat them to a pulp.”

On March 30, Humphrey stood at his desk in the Senate and introduced the civil rights bill, speaking for over three and a half hours:

“We are participants in one of the most crucial eras in the long and proud history of the United States and, yes, in mankind’s struggle for justice and freedom which has gone forward since the dawn of history. If freedom becomes a full reality in America, we can dare to believe it will become a reality everywhere. If freedom fails here in America, the land of the free – what hope can we have for it surviving elsewhere?”

Humphrey directed his passionate speech to everyone in the Senate, but his primary target was Dirksen. Dirksen claimed that he was not a moralist but a legislator. And he and his Republican colleagues knew that they had compelling reasons to support the bill. In a presidential election year, he knew his party could suffer significant losses if they chose not to support this bill and be viewed as obstructionists or racists. (The irony is that would become the case in part because of one particular Republican in the Senate.)

Because of the necessity of winning Dirksen over, Humphrey listened to his initial proposed amendments with patience and deference, much against the will of his fellow liberals who wanted Dirksen to be treated as a supplicant. But on April 24^th, he made his first substantive move towards cooperation when it came to offering an amendment based on a southern one on jury trials. It was the first time he had shown he was willing to side with Humphrey. Over more than a month Humphrey went back and forth with Dirksen until he had nailed down 26 votes from the GOP for cloture.

On June 10^th, the final vote began. By a margin of 71-29 the vote for cloture passed.  Forty four Democrats and 27 Republicans had supported cloture, while only 23 Democrats and 6 Republican opposed. The bill eventually passed 73-27 on June 19, 1964 – one year after Kennedy had proposed the bill to Congress.

Yet despite Dirksen’s efforts, the Republican took a huge loss. One of the most prominent Republican opponents of the bill was Goldwater. Not only had he not voted for it, but he had also spoken strongly against it. His vote and his subsequent rise to becoming candidate for President the next month was the beginning of the end of the Democratic party’s dominance in first Presidential politics and elected offices in the South. It would also be the main cause of African-American voters leaving the Republican party for good.  Richard Nixon had carried nearly thirty percent of the African American vote four years earlier; in 1964, Goldwater would get less than seven and since then, it is rare for a Republican Presidential candidate to get any more.

Humphrey and Goldwater despite their ideological differences had been friends in the Senate, but they were about to go head to head. Johnson, however, had spent much of the months leading to the Atlantic City Convention, offering Humphrey the nomination with one hand and seeming to dangle to many on the other.

I have mentioned in a previous article about the struggle Johnson had with the boom for Bobby Kennedy for Vice President.  He also spent much of the next several months going through polls with Humphrey’s fellow Senator Eugene McCarthy. Then on the eve of the convention, Johnson made his old friend play mediator: who would represent Mississippi at the convention an all-white-delegation or the mostly black Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, claiming to represent nearly half a million black Mississippians who had been denied the right to vote. Many believed that if Humphrey had made a botch of this, he would have lost his spot on the ticket, and now he was being asked to use his considerable position on civil rights to avoid a conflict on a battle he had spent his career advocating  for.

The ‘compromise’ he finally negotiated pleased no one. The credentials committee would only seat those delegates who would take an oath pledging support for the ticket that November. Two Freedom Party delegates were seated with the rest of the all-white Mississippi delegation; the rest of the black delegates would be on the floor as ‘honored guests’. The agreement also would include a rule that barred any future all-white delegations. The Mississippi and Alabama delegations still walked out of the convention hall, and Johnson was not even put on the ballot in Alabama. (Both states went overwhelmingly for Goldwater that November in a portent of things to come.)

Even after all this Johnson still decided to add drama by announcing he was flying to the convention with Connecticut Senator Thomas Dodd. And even when Johnson offered him the job, Johnson still tried to talk him out of it: “calling it a thankless job” and that most Presidents and Vice Presidents don’t hit it off.” The office would require “complete loyalty. All people associated with the President will look down on you. They’re not interested in you and they’ll try to stir up difficulties between the President and the Vice President.” Humphrey would have to state his objections privately with no disagreements.

In no uncertain terms Johnson was telling Humphrey exactly what he was in for as Vice President and it was essentially a campaign promise he kept. But Humphrey wanted to be President and he knew this was the only way forward.

But one of his closest friends years later told the truth about it when he was asked what the high point of Humphrey’s vice presidency was.” He would always give the same answer: “It was the night he was nominated. Everything from there was downhill.”

It didn’t seem so initially. That November Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in one of the great landslides in history. He received nearly 61% of the popular vote and 486 electoral votes. Goldwater carried merely Arizona and five Southern states. It looked like Lyndon Johnson had an electoral mandate that would stand for his imagined Great Society and the conservative revolt led by Goldwater and his troops had doomed the GOP to irrelevance.

But in the first week of August in 1964, an incident in the Gulf Of Tonkin – involving one real attack on American ships and another fabricated would lead to Lyndon Johnson authorizing greater involving in the Vietnam War. A resolution would be passed in Congress authorizing greater involvement was passed less than two days later with no opposition in the house and only two Senators voted against it – Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska. (Both men lost their reelection campaigns.) Goldwater himself voted for it and while several liberal Senators such as George McGovern and Gaylord Nelson were reluctant, William Fulbright persuade them more to help Johnson than to allow Goldwater a chance to become President.

Richard Russell had always had severe doubts about America’s involvement in Vietnam. A month before Kennedy’s assassination, he had an extensive conversation with the President arguing against deepening the conflict. He expressed similar doubts to his old friend but on the Senate floor, he supported to resolution saying: “Our national honor is at stake. We can not and will not shrink from it.” Humphrey had voted for it  as well, and if he had any doubts at the time, he kept them to himself.

In the next entry I will deal with how the increasing involvement in Vietnam would permanently damage Humphrey relationship with Johnson, how it forced him to compromise in ways he truly didn’t believe in pursuit of the Presidency and his eventual campaign for the 1968 nomination was devastating from beginning to end.