The Filibuster

On the half-deserted floor of the Senate one night last week, a group of Senators huddled tightly around the lanky person of the human calculating machine known as Lyndon Baines Johnson. Some of them glanced up as North Carolina's jolly Sam Ervin went by. Chuckled old Judge Ervin: "That scene reminds me of something from Hamlet: 'Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes.' " Foul or fair, the deeds done last week by the august U.S. Senate were indeed rising all over the place, and there was plenty of o'erwhelming still to come. The Southern filibuster, aimed at blocking passage of a civil rights bill, had begun (TIME, Feb. 29). To wear it down, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and Minority Leader Everett Dirksen kept the Senate in round-the-clock session. In counterattack the Southerners kept their colleagues coming and going all through the night with regular quorum calls. Meanwhile Texas' Johnson was hard at work doing what comes most naturally: dealing, persuading, cajoling--all in an effort to shape a meaningful moderate bill whose basic purpose is to guarantee Negro voting rights in the South.

Refugees. In many respects the filibuster (or "sustained educational campaign," as one Southerner put it) was as hollow as Southern hopes; civil rights legislation--whether it carries the imprint of the Administration, or Northern Democrats or both--is inevitable in this session, and the Southerners, from Georgia's fiercely eloquent Richard Russell on down, know it. Even so, Dick Russell, as general of the delaying forces, set up his well-organized willful minority, selecting three teams of six men each who could spell each other in relays of pairs, with each pair holding the floor for four hours at a time.

Like refugees from a storm, members of all persuasions had cots brought into their offices and spare rooms; even the old Supreme Court chamber was turned into a Senate dormitory. Lady Bird Johnson showed up with a fresh change of pajamas for the majority leader. Maine's Margaret Smith posed daintily for photographers as she tucked herself into a cot (fully clothed) for the night. Wyoming's Gale McGee hauled in a sleeping bag. Wisconsin's Bill Proxmire got himself photographed in his skivvies. At first it almost seemed fun: a visit to the Senate gallery became a social must for Washington's late-evening crowds.

From Louisiana's Allen Ellender came word that he was at last prepared to deliver the 55-hour speech that he had been polishing for five years for just such a situation--though by week's end he had mercifully spared his colleagues. But there was no dearth of talk. When filibusterers got tired of orating on civil rights matters, they turned to the Bible (Louisiana's Russell Long did both, in an eleven-hour talkathon). Once in a while the Southerners gave way for subject matter of a more businesslike tone, e.g., a speech on U.S. defense by Massachusetts' Presidential Candidate Jack Kennedy. Here and there, a speaker attacked the "Warren" Supreme Court: Mississippi's James Eastland scornfully labeled the Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of the 1957 Civil Rights Act as "crap" (though a thoughtful clerk recorded it as "claptrap"). Arkansas' William Fulbright, time-tested segregationist, took the occasion to lambaste President Eisenhower for turning the U.S. into "a 20th century Babylon, headless and heartless, a big fat target of the ably led Communist world and the clamoring, poverty-ridden new states."

Safe Passage. The only device that the civil rights coalition could use to halt the filibuster was the rarely invoked cloture rule by which two-thirds of those Senators present and voting can close off debate and bring the bill to a vote. But neither Republican Leader Dirksen, who was carrying the burden of the Administration's fight with backstage help from Vice President Nixon, nor Lyndon Johnson, as he sought some moderating compromise, had a solid enough agreement from combined civil rights advocates to guarantee safe passage of a bill. Johnson kept a platoon of lawyers and staff assistants drafting and redrafting secret proposals. But mostly he waited, trusting to his uncanny instinct about the Senate to signal the right time to produce a proposal that had a chance to satisfy Northern liberals, moderate Democrats and Republicans, give him the 67 (two-thirds plus one) votes to win cloture and pass the legislation itself. Apparently the time was days away; when Oregon's maverick Democrat Wayne Morse offered a cloture petition in one predawn session, Kentucky's usually affable Thruston Morton, chairman of the Republican National Committee, strode to the clerk's desk and ripped it up.

The truth was that the civil righters themselves could not get together. Everett Dirksen's original bill (really a civil rights amendment tacked to a relatively unimportant bill) had for its core the Justice Department's Federal Referee Plan, which would provide Negroes with a safe, bully-proof opportunity to register and vote in local and national elections (see box}. Civil righters--both Republican and Democratic--agreed in principle, but they disagreed heatedly on how the principle ought to work. Flurries of amendments poured onto the floor and out of caucuses; amendments were followed with amendments to other amendments, and for a time it seemed as if only the page boys had no amendments to offer. Florida's Spessard Holland guessed that, altogether, the many proposals on civil rights weighed eight lbs. Part of the Northern liberal opposition to the Dirksen "proposals" stemmed from an unwillingness to accept a Republican-labeled bill; similarly. Republican opposition to tougher proposals from such liberals as Illinois Democrat Paul Douglas and New York Republican Jack Javits was based on the reasonable assumption that a punitive bill would never pass.

Flesh & the Spirit. Between carcassing on the cots and caucusing in the corridors, the civil rights coalition ended up the first week's filibuster with baggy eyes and saggy spirits. Purred rumpled Ev Dirksen: "The flesh rides herd on the spirit. Soon I must lie down and let Morpheus embrace me."

Before inviting Morpheus home for the night. Ev Dirksen. Lyndon Johnson & Co. had much more to do. Dick Russell's determined Southerners seemed prepared to filibuster for at least another week; they had already broken the 1954 high mark (of 85 hr. 23 min.) by rattling off about 1,000,000 words in no less than 125 hr. 31 min. And Lyndon Johnson, working furiously day and night to create a unified front and a workable bill, had to continue laboring within a complex framework made more difficult by his own presidential ambitions and by his desire to help his Southern friends retire gracefully from their lost cause. Most of Johnson's colleagues agreed, though, that when the U.S. Senate finally turns out its civil rights bill this year, the chief architect of victory will have been Lyndon Baines Johnson. But Johnson had yet to pull the blueprints out of his hat.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.