The Great Societizer (Page 5)

And help would have been provided then, if not for Lyndon Johnson. Help was contained in the civil rights bill proposed by the Eisenhower Administration and passed by the House, with strong provisions against discrimination in public accommodations and voting, along with effective enforcement mechanisms. But Johnson knew that such a bill was utterly unacceptable to his Southern colleagues. Thus, while Johnson recognized that he had to fight for a civil rights bill, it couldn't be this civil rights bill.

Consequently, Johnson's first maneuver was to help defeat an effort by Republicans and liberal Democrats to rewrite Senate Rule 22 in order to short-circuit the expected Southern filibuster. At the opening of the 1957 session, pro-civil rights senators sought a ruling from Vice President Richard Nixon, acting in his capacity as the Senate's presiding officer, that the Senate was not a continuing body and therefore was not bound by previous rules. That would mean that a majority of senators could establish a new rule allowing debate to be shut off with only a simple majority, not the usual and nearly unobtainable sixty-four votes. Indeed, Nixon, hoping to swing black votes to the GOP, would have issued such a decision. But before he could do so, Johnson used his prerogative as majority leader to move to table the proposed rules change. Using all the skill and power he had amassed as majority leader, Johnson managed to get a majority for his motion. But it was a 55-38 tally. If only seven votes had gone the other way (the three absentees having announced against Johnson's motion), the motion would have lost, Nixon would have issued his decision, the filibuster would have been broken and an effective civil rights bill would have been passed in 1957, not 1964. As a result of the defeat on Rule 22, the bill that ultimately did pass was only a very weak voting rights measure.

If ever one needs evidence of the contingency of history, imagine, if you will, those seven votes going the other way. Jim Crow would have died in the late 1950s, avoiding much of the tumult of the 1960s. The Republicans, led by Richard Nixon, would have been the party of civil rights, not the Democrats and Lyndon Johnson. From there, one can spin off any number of plausible scenarios that result in a very different history of the past forty years.

But none of these scenarios were acceptable to the Lyndon Johnson of 1957, since they would have conflicted with his ambition; and at that point, despite Caro's claim, his ambition was still more important than his compassion. Switching sides on Rule 22 would have destroyed his Southern support and with it any chance he had of becoming President. Johnson's compassion would eventually shine through, and as a result, civil rights would eventually come to black America. But they would not come until Lyndon Johnson's ambition would allow them to come.

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