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LBJ III pg 888

 

"for thirty years; when Johnson left Washington at the end of each congressional session, it was to the watering holes of these men—Falfurrias, St. Joe, Fort Clark—that he repaired, for the week-long, whiskey-soaked hunting trips that played so crucial a role in his political career. His rise was financed by men so bigoted that to talk to them when their guard was down was to encounter a racism whose viciousness had no limit"

 

"Parker was to write that on the whole working for Johnson was “a painful experience. Although I was grateful to him for getting me a job … I was afraid of him because of the pain and humiliation he could inflict at a moment’s notice. I thought I had learned to fight my bitterness and anger inside…. But Johnson made it hard to keep the waves of bitterness inside…. But I had to swallow or quit. If I quit, how would I support my family? I chose survival and learned to swallow with a smile.”

 

"Lyndon Johnson was able to win these victories in part because of empathy—a deep sense of identification with the poor, including the dark-skinned poor; he understood their thoughts and emotions said felt their thoughts and emotions as if they were his own. And this was not surprising, for in a way they were his own. His empathy was deeply rooted in his personal experience, in blisters and sunburn and windburn and humiliation.
This empathy was also a product of the place from which he came."

LBJ III pg 911

 

*LBJ routinely made self-boosting claims that were congruent to some behavior but at the same time difficult to prove.

 

" It was the fires of that youth that had made his needs, the imperatives of his nature, drive him with the feverish, almost frantic, intensity that journalists called “energy” when it was really desperation and fear, the fear of a man fleeing something terrible. And those fires had hardened the clay of his character, a clay hard in its very nature, into something much harder—into a shape that would never change. "

 

"Sometimes the two forces—compassion and ambition—ran on parallel paths, but sometimes they didn’t. And whenever those two forces collided, it was the ambition that won, as had been demonstrated at half a dozen turning points in his early career, even within his congressional district. "

 

" In Johnson’s unending, silent calculations about the best way to further his career, it was the Alvin Wirtzes and the Herman Browns who were the key figures, not some powerless black leaders"

 

"again this was followed, as soon as it became apparent to him that that solution would conflict with his ambitions, by a calculated, pragmatic drawing back that left in place the appearance of the solution but not the reality."

 

"AFTER HE BECAME PRESIDENT, Johnson wanted his image to be that of a man who had “never had any bigotry,” who had been a longtime supporter of civil rights. "

LBJ III pg 937

 

"The political factors in Lyndon Johnson’s calculations began to change. As Posh Oltorf, who was shortly to become a major participant in the unfolding drama, puts it, Johnson now “realized” that “if he pursued” his original course in the Longoria affair, at the end “he would have gained a lot of new friends but would have lost a lot of old ones”—old friends whom he could ill afford to lose."

 

Nor did Johnson’s backtracking in the Longoria battle hurt him with the rank and file of South Texas’ Mexican-Americans. The dexterity with which he had handled his retreat from the field—simply removing his name, and his presence, from the fight without any dramatic public statement—meant that most of the Mexican-Americans who had cheered his earlier, dramatic championing of the Longorias’ cause were unaware that he had stopped doing so. Realization that the Senator could have used the legislative hearings as a platform for their cause, or that a statement could have been issued from Washington, required a political awareness and experience still in short supply in 1949 within this newly militant group"

 

 

LBJ III pg 966 

 

LBJ and Civil Rights

 

"said Martin Luther King: “Freedom is never given to anybody, for the oppressor has you in domination because he plans to keep you there.” 

 

“Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding…. This is a nonviolent protest. We are depending on moral and spiritual forces.”

 

 Martin Luther King said, very firmly, “No, I’m not. My attitude is that this is a great cause, a great issue that we’re confronted with, and that the consequences for my personal life are not particularly important. It is the triumph of a cause that I am concerned about, and I have always felt that ultimately along the way of life an individual must stand up and be counted, and be willing to face the consequences, whatever they are, and if he is filled with fear, he cannot do it.” 

 

Praying for guidance at a mass meeting the next day, King said, “Lord, I hope no one will have to die as a result of our struggle for freedom in Montgomery. Certainly I don’t want to die. But if anyone has to die, let it be me.”

 

" Recalling his discussions with Rauh and Biemiller and Mitchell during the early days of 1956, Boiling would say that “We didn’t really care what was in the bill as long as there was something in it. We felt that as long as we could get the first bill passed, we could get others passed.” And these men felt that now, at last, with representatives from both parties behind it, they could get a bill passed. “Rayburn was for it. We got the idea that at last we could pass a civil rights bill!” The Supreme Court had, of course, already proven itself a friend of civil rights. Now, in 1956, the executive branch had, however tentatively, at last entered the fight—and it appeared that the House would come along, too.
THAT LEFT ONLY THE SENATE. And its Majority Leader"

 

LBJ III pg 969

 

 "Some of the Manifesto’s arguments demonstrated Russell’s gift for cloaking injustice in words of reason."

 

"Johnson’s strategy for winning his party’s presidential nomination—to hold his southern support while antagonizing northern liberals as little as possible, or at least not antagonizing them any more than he already had—was feasible only if the issue did not blaze up on the Hill, since if it did, he would have to take his position prominently on the southern side. For his strategy to work, the civil rights issue had to be tamped down in Congress, his involvement with it minimized"

 

"And his explanation was to evolve over time, his portrayal of himself—to journalists and to some of the more friendly liberal senators—to become increasingly heroic. The southerners had not asked him to sign, he said, because they knew he wouldn’t, as a matter of principle. It evolved further—into an implication that he had refused to sign despite intense southern pressure. "

 

"His explanations were accepted uncritically by those journalists he could count on to be uncritical."

 

"Actually, however, it was easy for him to avoid signing the Manifesto because of what Richard Russell wanted for him—and had persuaded the Southern Caucus to want for him. By this time, George Reedy says, “Russell was very determined to elect Johnson President of the United States.” And, Reedy says, “There was no question whatsoever that anybody that signed” such an inflammatory, anti-civil rights document “could never become President of the United States.” 

 

"Carried away by his eloquence, Johnson had gone too far, however. Growing worried that his statements might raise doubts among southern senators about his true feelings, he issued other statements—designed to reassure them that while his hand may not have written his name under theirs, his heart was with them."

LBJ III pg 985

 

*Timewasting/obstructionist tactics

 

"No sooner had Eastland taken Judiciary’s gavel than he made clear that in his view filibusters need not be confined to the Senate floor; they could be staged in his committee as well—with one difference: while ending a filibuster on the floor was difficult, in his committee it was impossible. "

 

During those five weeks, Hennings or some other liberal member of the committee would sometimes raise a hand and try to make a motion to schedule meetings more frequently, but Eastland would explain that the Senator from South Carolina was speaking, and a senator could not be interrupted."

 

"Boiling says, “I didn’t press in the Rules Committee, and since I was known as Mr. Rayburn’s man on the Rules Committee, and it was generally understood that I was speaking for [him], since I didn’t press, no one pressed.”"

 

"But Paul Douglas believed in the Senate’s “informing function,” believed, as he was also to write, that “even if every battle was unsuccessful, constant but peaceful struggle would hasten the ultimate coming of needed reforms.” He believed that justice would prevail if only men would not stop fighting for justice. He and Lehman and other liberal senators believed also that there was an informing function not only of the Senate but about the Senate—“that the southerners’ power had to function behind the scenes” to be effective, that turning “the searchlight on” that power would eventually erode it—and that there was no better time to turn on the searchlight than a national election year. He felt keenly, as well, that while a lot of public sentiment had been mobilized that year for civil rights, not nearly as much had been mobilized as could be mobilized—that while the leaders of the liberal battalions, the officers of labor unions and Jewish organizations and big church groups, were strong for civil rights, the battalions themselves had not been mobilized, their members had not been sufficiently educated; that the support for civil rights, while vocal, was still not the mass movement that was needed—and that there was no better instrument for education and mobilization than a Senate debate. "

 

"When he reached his suite, he went into his inner office, shut the door behind him, and cried, cried “for the first time in years,” he was to recall—cried less for himself than for his cause, the great cause, and for the strategic mistakes he felt he had made in fighting for it."

LBJ III pg  991

 

"Seeing the spectre of the “humiliation” he always dreaded if he were to be portrayed as an active candidate and then didn’t win—“He didn’t want to run and suffer a defeat for personal ego reasons,” Connally says—it was important to him that his denials be believed. Over and over again, he told reporters he wasn’t a “serious” candidate but only a favorite son; that he had never sought, and would not seek, any delegates outside Texas."

 

"He particularly did not want to be associated with Truman’s characterization of the Eisenhower Administration as “this bunch of racketeers,” and, as Rovere puts it, he simply “does not share Truman’s view of Truman as the greatest living expert on everything.”"

 

"To a man whose life in Washington was spent in the closed, insulated world of the Senate, a world in which these men had immense authority, it was perhaps only natural to assume that they had authority in their own states. But the belief revealed that Lyndon Johnson, knowledgeable though he was about power in Washington, had a woefully inadequate comprehension of power outside the capital. Anyone who held that belief, as Richard Rovere was to explain in The New Yorker, “forgot the wisdom of history, which is that members of the United States Senate almost invariably come to grief when they try to win Presidential nominations for themselves or to manipulate national conventions for any purpose whatsoever. For many reasons—patronage is one, and control of delegations is another—the big men at conventions are governors and municipal leaders.”

 

"Moreover, as now became apparent, this most pragmatic of men—capable, in Washington, of looking into others and seeing the fundamental realities behind their behavior—was, in Chicago, incapable of seeing a crucial reality: the true depth of the antipathy toward him of northern liberals"

 

"This, too, was understandable. Lyndon Johnson’s world, in Washington, was a world in which deals could always be made, bargains could always be arranged, in which men were reasonable in compromising their principles, except for a few crazies like Lehman and Douglas, who had so little power that they could safely be ignored. It was perhaps only natural that he believed that at least some northern liberals—enough, combined with southern and southwestern votes, to give him the nomination—could be brought under his standard if the right inducements were found, particularly since, in his view, he had already done so much for them by giving Meany and Reuther the Social Security and housing bills they wanted. But this belief demonstrated only that Lyndon Johnson simply had not grasped that there was another world, a world in which Douglas and Lehman were not crazies but heroes, in which principles mattered far more than they did in the Senate. In addition, Lyndon Johnson had not fully appreciated that it didn’t matter what he did for the liberals in Social Security and housing so long as he was not on their side on the “great issue.”"

 

 

 

LBJ III pg  1020

 

"“He told Mr. Rayburn, ‘I have supported you all these years, and I need your help. I have a chance here….’” Rayburn sat silent, a block of granite in his seat. “It was an embarrassing ride for everyone on the plane,” listening to Johnson’s acting “like a spoiled child,” one of Rayburn’s biographers was to write. “But there was silent applause for Rayburn,” who during the two-hour flight said hardly a word."

 

" One was the self-knowledge that had made him say, when he first got to the Senate, that it was “the right size”—the awareness that he was most effective when he dealt with men in private, behind closed doors, and least effective when he had to speak to them in large groups."

 

" Johnson spent hours that day pacing back and forth with a big hand wrapped around a receiver, talking, persuading, selling. "

 

"The men with whom Lyndon Johnson was meeting did not have the power to give him what he wanted."

 

"Rayburn had another reason, which he didn’t divulge, for opposing Kennedy; he had watched the young man’s performance in the House and considered him, as his biographers note, “a wealthy dilettante.”

 

Before the convention, Lyndon Johnson had been almost universally portrayed as an enormously powerful and influential figure in the Democratic Party. By the end of the convention, it had become obvious that that portrait was overdrawn. His image as a brilliant political strategist had also been smudged. “Lyndon Johnson’s reputation as an uncommonly astute Senate leader remains unimpaired, but the fact has been established—as it was not before—that in the jungle of a national convention he cannot employ the gifts he uses in the Senate,” Richard Rovere wrote in The New Yorker. He had, in fact, looked almost foolish. "

 

Lyndon can persuade himself that he is really a national and not a regional figure.” 

 

 

LBJ III pg  1024

 

"Then he turned to the Senate—as only Lyndon Johnson could. That morning, Reedy had given Johnson a memorandum on how to handle Schlesinger: “He is a man of genuine intellect and eye [sic] think all you really have to do is leave him with the feeling that Senate leadership may be much more complicated than he has realized.”
That was indeed the feeling that Johnson left him with. "

 

 he gave a generally fascinating account of the role which timing, persuasion, parliamentary knowledge, etc., have in getting bills through.”

 

 “I want you to know the kind of material I have to work with,” he said. Schlesinger was to recall that “he didn’t do all of them, but he did most of them”—in a performance the historian was never to forget. Senator by senator Johnson ran down the list: each man’s strengths and weaknesses, who liked liquor too much, and who liked women, and how he had to know when to reach a senator at his own home and when at his mistress’s, who was controlled by the big power company in his state, and who listened to the REA cooperatives, who responded to the union pleas and who to the Grange instead, and which senator responded to one argument and which senator to the opposite argument. He did brief, but brilliant, imitations"

 

"And who, Lyndon Johnson demanded, had to make all these diverse temperaments and philosophies work together? Who had to unite them into a workable majority? The Leader. He had to do everything, he said. It was as if his senators were a football team. He had to be the coach. He had to be the quarterback and call the signals. He had to be the center who snapped the ball, and the running back who ran the ball, and the blocker who blocked for the running back"

 

"But all that would do is destroy the Democratic Party. And the northerners would not get very far on their own, “for several reasons—among them the fact that the southerners were better politicians.”"

 

"There was a postscript to this conversation. During it, Schlesinger got to say very few words. “I had carefully thought out in advance the arguments to make when asked to justify my doubts about his leadership,” he was to recall, “but in the course of this picturesque and lavish discourse Johnson met in advance almost all the points I had in mind. When he finally paused, I found I had little to say…. After nearly two hours under hypnosis, I staggered away in a condition of exhaustion.”"

 

"Another liberal object of his attentions were the Grahams of the Washington Post, and Johnson’s courtship of them was at its most effective, for it took place on his native heath. In December, 1956, Phil and Kay finally accepted his open, insistent, invitation to the Johnson Ranch. "

 

 

LBJ III pg  1028

 

"Where did Johnson acquire those unusual persuasive qualities which enabled him to walk into the middle of a party split on almost any issue and come out with an agreement? The story is that he inherited his talent from his father, Sam Ealy Johnson, Jr…. Others say it traces from old Grandfather Sam Ealy Johnson, Sr., who predicted that his grandson would be a senator the moment he laid eyes on him."

 

"On his home ground, Lyndon Johnson was, in Mrs. Graham’s words, “sort of overwhelming—he sort of smothered you with hospitality and with charm.” "

 

"And there was the time spent cementing his bonds with the visitor. After dinner, “he and Phil would sit for hours and drink” and talk in the big living room with the frontier-size fireplace. As she and Lady Bird sat mostly silent, Mrs. Graham says, “Lyndon slouched down, Phil bending his elbow—political talk, political gossip, people talk.” "

 

"“Lyndon started complaining” about journalists, she says. This was par for the course for any politician, of course, but “in the middle of his diatribe,” Johnson made a remark that she felt went beyond the usual limits, saying: “You can buy any one of them with a bottle of whiskey.”"

 

" And it had a very clear theme: that, in Mrs. Graham’s words, “that was how civil rights could be accomplished, not by idealism but by rough stuff”; that he, not the speechmaking northern red-hots, knew how to get things accomplished for civil rights. He was, Mrs. Graham recalls, saying that “I was an idealist, this theoretical northern liberal,” and he, Lyndon Johnson, “was a practical fellow,” and that it was through “practical” means—“rough stuff”—that “things got accomplished.”"

 

"Rowe informed Johnson, “You certainly did a remarkable selling job there. They wasted at least an hour of my time telling me what a remarkable man you are.” Schlesinger’s impression of Johnson was recorded in his memoir to himself: “I found him both more attractive, more subtle and more formidable than I expected.”"

 

"And during this visit, “looking straight at me, separating me from him and Phil,” he kept making that argument, prefacing each supporting point by saying, “You northern liberals …” hammering “points home, as though trying to explain to me how the world really worked.”"

 

 

LBJ III pg  1031

 

"He could not, during these months just before the opening of the 1957 Congress, effect any significant change at all in prevailing liberal opinion about him, in part because to so many liberals the memory of earlier battles was still fresh (“What did he think—that we would forget what he did to Leland Olds?” says Alexander Radin of the American Public Power Association. “Well, I never would, I can tell you that”), but largely because of his more recent record on civil rights. "

 

"Herbert Lehman told Irwin Ross that while he might be leaving the Senate, he was not leaving the fight—and that no matter how hopeless the fight seemed, it should be continued. “A fight is worthwhile even if you know you’re going to lose it,” he told Ross. “It’s the only way to crystallize attitudes, educate people. And in the end I’ve seen many hopeless causes win out.” Looking back at the 1920s, when it had seemed impossible to win social advances that were now an accepted part of American life, he said: “We were called radicals and dreamers, but we were willing to wage seemingly hopeless fights."

 

" In a secret meeting near the end of November, Arvey and other seasoned professionals—liberal professionals—on the Democratic executive committee instructed National Chairman Paul Butler to formalize the challenge to the southern leadership in Congress by establishing a high-level “Democratic Advisory Council” to shape a party legislative program that would not coincide with, but challenge Eisenhower’s policies. Galbraith, one of its members, said that the purpose of the twenty-member council was to take “some of the Texas image off the party.” In the New York Times, Russell Baker said bluntly that “It is a challenge to Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas.”"

 

" “Democratic Declaration” had little power within the Senate, The Nation told its readers that that was not the point. “The Declaration,” it said, “is an important document” because it is “the first major move in a campaign to reconstruct and rehabilitate the Democratic Party,”"

LBJ III pg  1056

 

“The issue of civil rights had created a crisis of legitimacy for both the Senate and the Democratic Party.” And therefore the issue was a crisis for Lyndon Johnson. In a sense—in the journalistic view, the public view—Lyndon Johnson was the Senate, its Majority Leader, the senator who would be held responsible for its actions. If the Senate appeared ineffectual, incapable of dealing with the issue, he would appear ineffectual, incapable. If it appeared sectional, southern, racist, he would appear sectional, southern, racist. Furthermore, as far as the Senate was concerned, he was the Democratic Party. If the party looked ineffectual or racist, the blame would fall on his head. If the party split, the chasm between southern and northern senators becoming unbridgeable, the responsibility for that would fall on his head, also. And the issue was, in addition, a crisis for him in terms of his personal ambition. As Goodwin wrote: “As a man with presidential dreams, Johnson recognized that it would be almost impossible for him to escape all responsibility for the Senate to act, that failure on this issue at this time would brand him forever as sectional and therefore unpresidential.”

Lyndon Johnson had no choice, and he knew it. Recalling the situation years later, he would say: “One thing had become absolutely certain: the Senate simply had to act, the Democratic Party simply had to act, and I simply had to act; the issue could wait no longer.”

 

He understood as well the consequence of failure on this issue. “I knew,” he said, “that if I failed to produce on this one, my leadership would be broken into a hundred pieces; everything I had built up over the years would be completely undone.”

 

"But he wouldn’t. During Lyndon Johnson’s previous political life, compassion had constantly been in conflict with ambition, and invariably ambition had won. Given the imperatives of his nature, in such a conflict, it had been inevitable that the ambition would win. For the compassion to be released, to express itself in concrete accomplishments, it would have to be compatible with the ambition, pointing in the same direction. And now, at last, in 1957, it was.

So Lyndon Johnson changed—and changed the course of American history. For at last this leader of men would be leading, fighting, not only for himself but for a great cause. This man who in the pursuit of his aims could be so utterly ruthless—who would let nothing stand in his way; who, in the pursuit, deceived, and betrayed and cheated—would be deceiving and betraying and cheating on behalf of something other than himself: specifically, on behalf of the sixteen million Americans whose skins were dark."

 

"This capacity had always been held in check by his quest for power. Now he had the power. Power reveals. The compassion that had been hidden was to be revealed now—in full. Did those sixteen million Americans need a mighty champion in the halls of government? They were about to get one"

LBJ III pg  1070

 

"HIS FIRST JOB was to persuade southern senators that they should allow a civil rights bill to pass—that even though they had preserved the filibuster, they shouldn’t use it.
To persuade them, he employed, in individual conversations with these senators and in meetings of the Southern Caucus in Richard Russell’s office, several arguments that his actions on Rule 22 made them more disposed to accept."

 

"The whole Republican Party, from the top down, was going to pander to the Negroes; the President will put pressure on the Republican senators, the Vice President will, Bill Knowland will—and the Republican senators themselves will see the opportunity not only for the Republican presidential candidate but for themselves. "

 

"They could count on him, he told the southerners. He would get the bill amended down to something so weak that we have no real objection to it, to something we can live with. And then we won’t have to filibuster it. We can let it come to a vote. We’ll still vote against it, and if it passes, it won’t really matter."

 

"he would use the presidency as a means to heal century-old scars and make the South truly a part of the Union again, that he would “end the Civil War,” that he would be “a bridge” for the reconciliation between North and South? Certainly, some of Johnson’s aides believe this is the basic meaning. Harry McPherson was to write that “Johnson felt about the race question much as I did, namely that it obsessed the South and diverted it from attending to its economic and educational problems; that it produced among white southerners angry defensiveness and parochialism.” And most, if not all, Johnson biographers have believed it, too. “Johnson argued, and he probably believed, that the South was on the verge of new possibilities for rapid expansion,” but that those possibilities would not be exploited if the racial issue was not defused by civil rights legislation,"

 

"And Talmadge’s statement that the reason he was supporting Johnson was that “Johnson would be more favorable to the South’s position on States’ Rights” was not a statement about wound-healing or bridge-building, as became clear when the author, after ten years of trying to obtain an interview with Talmadge, was finally granted one, which took place on January 10, 2000, at Talmadge’s home on Lake Talmadge in Georgia’s Henry County "

 

"HIS NEXT JOB, now that he had persuaded the South to let a weak, token, bill pass, was to reduce the bill to a point at which it was so weak that it was only a token—and yet was still strong enough to satisfy northern liberals that something genuine had been accomplished for civil rights"

 

"

LBJ III pg  1082

 

*False/Trick promise

 

" Russell’s price for forgoing a filibuster—the excision of the “broad array” of civil rights guarantees, and the emasculation of the remaining provisions by the right of jury trial—was payable only in non-southern votes for those southern demands, Johnson had been unable to meet that price: had been unable to find those votes. The irresistible force of civil rights demands was indeed colliding with an immovable object—and Johnson had seemingly decided simply to step out of the way. During those months, he was no less “agreeable” to Knowland than he had been in January, he just wasn’t as active."

 

"To delay the attack on a stronghold—a citadel—the defenders try to fight first on its outskirts. During those days of Lyndon Johnson’s “agreeability,” there had been discussion, even optimism, among Republican leaders that he might in effect forgo that delaying action by allowing the battle to begin in the citadel itself—by allowing the civil rights bill to be taken up in the Senate first. Now, however, Johnson repeated what he had said in 1956: that the Senate would not take up the bill until after the House had passed it"

 

 

LBJ III pg  1084

 

 “You’ve got to believe in what you’re selling,” and that decades later, in his retirement, he would say: “What convinces is conviction. You simply have to believe in the argument you are advancing: if you don’t, you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there …” And Lyndon Johnson could make himself believe in an argument even if he had never believed in it before, even if he had believed in an opposite argument—and even if the argument did not accord with the facts. A devotee like Joseph Califano would write that Johnson “would quickly come to believe what he was saying even if it was clearly not true.”

When Lyndon Johnson came to believe in something, moreover, he came to believe in it totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs, or of the facts in the matter, came to believe in it so absolutely that, George Reedy says, “I believe that he acted out of pure motives regardless of their origins. He had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act…. He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.” 

 

"Califano, listening to Johnson tell a story which Califano knew was not true, and which Califano knew that Johnson himself knew, or at least had known at one time, was not true, writes of “the authentic increase in the President’s conviction each time he recited it.” The phrase used to describe the process by longtime Texas associates like Ed Clark—the “revving up” or the “working up”—was homier, but it was the same process: “He could start talking about something and convince himself it was right, and get all worked up, all worked up and emotional, and work all day and all night, and sacrifice, and say, ‘Follow me for the cause!’—‘Let’s do this because it’s right!’” And, Clark says, Johnson would believe it was right—no matter what he had believed before."

 

"To pass civil rights legislation, to convince senators of the need for such legislation, Lyndon Johnson therefore had to believe—to believe totally, with absolute conviction—that there was an urgent need for that legislation. He had to know that it was right to fight for it. And knowing it coldly, intellectually, was not enough. He had to feel it—to feel it wholeheartedly, to feel what the color of their skin meant to those Americans whose skin was darker than his. To fight wholeheartedly for justice for those people, he had to feel the injustice that had been visited upon them, and that was still being visited upon them. He had to make himself feel their fears and their doubts, had to make himself feel all the injustices and indignities that America had inflicted on them, from the lash and the leg irons all the way down through the decades, the generations, to the word “Colored” above the drinking fountains.
So now began the “working up.”"

 

 

 

LBJ III pg  1094

 

“The problem with you is that you don’t understand that the world is trying to turn to the left,” Lyndon Johnson said vehemently. “You can either get out in front and try to give some guidance, or you can continue to fight upstream, and be overwhelmed or be miserable.”

 

 “He was talking like he was giving me advice, but it was really himself he was giving the advice to. He wasn’t talking to convince me; he was talking to convince himself.”

 

 “I remember at this dinner party, Johnson talking about teaching the Mexican-American kids in Cotulla, and his frustration that they had no books,” Bethine Church recalls. “I remember it as one of the most passionate evenings I’ve ever spent.”

 

"He not only had the gift of “reading” men and women, of seeing into their hearts, he also had the gift of putting himself in their place, of not just seeing what they felt but of feeling what they felt, almost as if what had happened to them had happened to him, too. 

 

Lyndon Johnson began to go “tirelessly from faction to faction,” working “quietly, almost in secret,” refraining “from making any public statement of his intentions.” He was asking, probing, buttonholing senators and staff, lobbyists and lawyers, in the corridors of the Capitol and the SOB, sitting down beside a senator on one of the cloakroom couches and chatting in a relaxed manner, and then, suddenly, his eyes narrowing at some words that had caught his attention (words that had been spoken or words that hadn’t been spoken), taking the senator’s arm and asking him to step outside into the corridor for a moment for a more private conversation, dropping in on senators in their inner offices, closing the door behind him—listening, listening to what they were saying, and listening to what they weren’t saying. And out of the buttonholing, and the asking, and the listening, Lyndon Johnson was beginning to form a strategy. For as he listened, he heard something.

The most important thing a man tells you is what he’s not telling you. "

 

". Of all the rights that black Americans had so long been denied, the right to vote was the one which, if he could get it for them, would be most valuable, for the granting of that right would, he knew, lead—perhaps slowly, but inevitably—to all the others. His reasoning sprang from his understanding of, and belief in, power. The way to end the indignities Negroes had to suffer was to give them the power to end them, and in a democracy, power comes from the ballot box. Give Negroes the vote—give them power—and they could start doing the rest for themselves. "

 

"The southern senators would never agree that these laws should be changed, and the southern senators had enough power to ensure that they would not be changed. Therefore, Lyndon Johnson saw, don’t try to change the laws; just change the officials who wrote the laws. Then they would change the laws. And the way to change the officials was to give southern Negroes the right to vote, so that officials who wanted to be elected would have to be solicitous of Negroes’ other rights. Those who weren’t sufficiently solicitous could be voted out of office: Negro voters could vote them out. Giving black Americans the vote would, moreover, change not only the laws but the administration of laws. The urgency for laws to restrain the brutality of small-town southern sheriffs would be alleviated, for example, since in many a southern small town, blacks had enough votes to elect the sheriff they wanted."

 

 

LBJ III pg  1112

 

"Recruiting an entire bloc of allies for the South would require an ability to conceive and then create not merely individual deals, simple quid pro quos, and not merely a series of interrelated deals (complicated though that in itself could be), but a single, much broader, deal—a deal broad enough to bring an entire group of senators to the side of the South in one stroke: a quid pro quo of a magnitude so sweeping as to be truly national in scope. Lyndon Johnson found that deal—found a bloc—and found a means of bringing it to the South’s side."

 

LYNDON JOHNSON saw a potential connection between those two realities. No one else had seen it. During the ten years that Hells Canyon had been before Congress, there had never been the slightest link between the dam and civil rights. The civil rights issue had never aroused much interest in these western states—in part because so few of their residents would be directly affected by it. "

 

Johnson would explain his reasoning, with his customary hyperbole—and his customary brilliance. “I began with the assumption that most of the senators from the Mountain States had never seen a Negro and simply couldn’t care all that much about the whole civil rights issue,” he told her. “I knew what they did care about, and that was the Hells Canyon issue. So I went to a few key southerners and persuaded them to back the western liberals on Hells Canyon.”

 

JOHNSON’S DEAL was indeed one of profound cynicism. It wouldn’t give the westerners victory on Hells Canyon, it would give them only the opportunity to claim victory on Hells Canyon. It was indeed based, as Paul Douglas charged, on “counterfeit money.” In that sense, the deal was only one more in the long line of cynical maneuvers that had marked Johnson’s political career.

 

There were, however, differences this time. The deal had created a new reality in the Senate of the United States. For two decades, the dominant reality in the Senate had been its control by a coalition of southerners and conservative Republicans. In January, 1957, that coalition had been “knocked into bits.” The South had found itself isolated, without allies. But then Lyndon Johnson had brought new allies to the South’s side. In place of the southern-Republican coalition there was a southern-western coalition now.

 

And the deal had had a further result. Thanks to the arrangement that Johnson had conceived (“I went to a few key southerners and persuaded them to back the western liberals on Hells Canyon. And then, in return, I got the western liberals to back the southerners”) and that, against long odds, he had brought to completion, a civil rights bill was on the Senate Calendar, only one step removed from being on the floor, for the first time since Reconstruction. The result of Johnson’s cynicism this time was not merely a step forward for himself but a step forward for a great cause

LBJ III pg  1115

 

 

It was an ability that was needed in the hurly-burly of the legislative battlefield itself: the floor of the Senate during a violent struggle there. But though it was only a tactical ability, not grand strategy but battlefield maneuver, given the inherent nature of the legislative process—the fact that there was, on that Senate floor, an actual battlefield—it was no less vital.

 

"And because of the unique complexity of the civil rights issue, and the unique intractability of the problems surrounding it, this talent, too, would have to be exercised at a very high level. Passing a civil rights bill would require an ability to suddenly recognize, amid the turmoil, the cut and thrust and parry, of a legislative body in furious contention—amid the barrage of motions and amendments, amid the rapid-fire parliamentary maneuvers and countermaneuvers, the quick back-and-forth ripostes of debate and the magisterial drum roll of long, formal speeches—to suddenly recognize, amid the great mass of cutting words, witty words, brilliant words, empty words, those words that mattered, the phrase that could change the mood, the amendment that could turn the tide, that could swing votes if put to proper use (a use that might not be at all the use the speaker of the words or the author of the amendment had intended); to recognize the opportunity when suddenly, without warning, it came"

 

"The talent required had, moreover, to consist not alone of insight but also of decisiveness, of an ability not only to recognize a crucial moment but to seize it, to see the opening—and to strike; to move fast enough so that the opportunity did not vanish, perhaps never to come again. It was the ability to recognize the key that might suddenly unlock votes that had seemed locked forever away—and to turn the key, and turn it fast. This combination of rare insight, rare decisiveness, rare willingness to act produced, when it was added to unbending determination and a gift for grand strategy, a rare form of political leadership: legislative leadership."

 

“Surprise,” von Clausewitz said, “is half the battle.” A great general strikes when his enemy is not expecting the blow. "