Might for Rights

"The country is tired of this bill, and the Senate is tired of this bill," said Republican Leader Everett Dirksen to a colleague as the civil rights debate dragged toward the end of its second month. "All the political juice has been squeezed out of it." In the Senate, that once formidable bastion of Southern filibuster and fury, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and Minority Leader Dirksen had decided on a course of power and performance. Moving with sure control, they worked to get roadblocks out of the way of the substantial civil rights bill sent over from the House (TIME, April 4), a bill that notably strengthens Negro voting rights by authorizing federal courts to appoint voting referees. Among the tests met and bested:

P: Senator Estes Kefauver, long a banner-waving Democratic liberal, but running for re-election this year in segregation-prone Tennessee, suddenly chose to attack the vital voting-rights heart of the bill with a crippling amendment. In the Judiciary Committee, Kefauver proposed an amendment that would change a would-be Negro voter's private hearing before the voting referee into a public hearing open to challenge by local officials. By the time civil rights partisans realized that this would gut the strongest part of the bill, Dixie Senators had rushed Kefauver's amendment through committee on a one-vote margin. (In the confusion, Colorado Democrat John Carroll voted with the Southerners to his subsequent chagrin, and Wisconsin Republican Alex Wiley could not be found to vote at all.) But on the Senate floor the Johnson-Dirksen team rallied their forces, smashed the amendment by a decisive 69-to-22 vote.

P: Dirksen resolutely reversed his own month-old vote in the drive for unity, voted to make it a federal crime to obstruct any order by a U.S. court--not just an order concerning school integration. Dirksen's switchover to the broader proposal helped line up a 68-to-20 majority for this amendment.

P: New York Republican Jacob Javits, wheelhorse for the civil rights team, tried to delay Senate action on his proposal giving permanent, statutory standing to the President's Committee on Government Contracts, now a temporary committee chaired by Vice President Nixon.

Republican Dirksen backed Democrat Johnson's move to force Javits to "stoo talking and start voting." Red-faced, Javits turned control of his amendment over to Dirksen, who promptly put it up for brief debate, quick defeat by a 48-to-38 vote.

Soon after the North's Javits, like the South's Kefauver, went down to defeat.

Senators adjourned to rest their frayed nerves, prepare for this week's drive to finish their long-delayed job of buttressing the voting rights of Negroes. So sure of victory was Majority Leader Johnson that he began practicing on office visitors a triumphant address celebrating the final vote.

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