How Silly Can You Get?

Among other things, the civil rights bill created some new Government jobs --among them the directorship of the Federal Community Relations Service, which will offer Southern communities help in ironing out their integration problems.

Who should the director be? Ideally, he ought to be someone acceptable to the South with a good record on integration. Such men are hard to find, and President Johnson was perplexed. Then Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges, an ex-Governor of North Carolina, suggested LeRoy Collins, 55, an ex-Governor of Florida. During six years in office (1955-60) in Tallahassee, his native city, Collins had talked a fair-to-middlin' civil rights game while doing little to implement it.

Some Soothers. Lyndon liked Luther's idea, and so did LeRoy--up to a point. Trouble was, the director of the Community Relations Service will receive only $22,500 a year, while Collins, as president of the National Association of Broadcasters since 1961, has been getting $75,000 in annual salary plus a $12,500-a-year living allowance. Loath to give up such a job, Collins suggested that he merely take a year's leave of absence from the N.A.B., with some compensatory financial arrangement. As it happens, Collins has not been a particularly popular N.A.B. president (a recent motion to oust him lost only by a 25-18 vote of the association's board of directors), and the organization turned him down cold on his proposition.

Now re-enter Lyndon Johnson. He summoned the N.A.B. board members to the White House for a little chat, convinced them that they should make it easy for Collins to go. They did, with 1) $60,000 in severance pay, 2) retention of the 1964 Cadillac, which was one of his perquisites of the N.A.B. office, 3) a color TV set, 4) a radio, and 5) a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

That did it, as far as Collins was concerned, and President Johnson, in his television speech immediately preceding his signing of the civil rights bill, was able to announce that he was appointing the Floridian to the new commission's directorship.

But both Johnson and Collins had reckoned without South Carolina's Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat candidate for President in 1948 and now the longest-winded, strongest-muscled of all the U.S. Senate's Democratic segregationists. In Collins' confirmation hearings before the Senate Commerce Committee, Thurmond needled his fellow Southern Democrat mercilessly, intimated that he was a traitor to his own section of the country. Collins flushed and retorted: "Senator Thurmond," he said, "I love the South, and I am sure you must have sensed that. Don't you challenge my deep feelings about the South."

That was by no means the end of it, and two days later, Thurmond's hostility toward Collins brought on one of the silliest episodes in the Senate's history.

Suddenly Serious. As Senators headed toward the committee room for a vote on Collins' confirmation, Thurmond posted himself outside. Up came Texas

Democrat Ralph Yarborough, who favored Collins' confirmation. He gently pushed Thurmond toward the door, saying, "Come on in, Strom." Thurmond hauled Yarborough back, not roughly, but not playfully either. "I'll make an agreement with you, Ralph," he said. "If I can keep you out, you won't go in; and if you can drag me in, I'll stay."

All of a sudden it became a deadly serious matter, and the two Senators, both 61, peeled off their coats, handed them to aides, and huffed and puffed their way into what turned out to be a ten-minute rasslin' match.

Thurmond had all the best of it: a trim, 170-pounder, he is the Senate's No. 1 physical fitness bug, does not smoke or drink (not even carbonated beverages), just that morning had done 59 push-ups on his office carpet. Yarborough is a fairly flabby 200-pounder.

Grunt, groan, wheeze--and down went Yarborough, with Thurmond atop him. "Tell me to release you, Ralph, and I will," said Thurmond. Yarborough looked bravely up from his position on the terrazzo floor and averred: "I'm waiting for my second wind."

Ohio's Democratic Senator Frank Lausche came rushing up, warned both rasslers that they were running the risk of heart attacks. Said Thurmond: "I'll release him if he wants to be released." Yarborough allowed as how he was still waiting for that second wind.

Finally, Washington's Democratic Senator Warren Magnuson, the Commerce Committee chairman, heard of what was happening and hurried out of the committee room. Cried he: "Let's break this up." At that point Thurmond, apparently tired of sitting on Yarborough, said with characteristic gallantry: "I will have to yield to the order of my chairman."

Thereupon he arose, and all the Senators went into the committee room to vote, 16 to 1, for confirming Collins. The lone dissenter was--guess who?

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