Lessons From the Presidents For Turbulent Times (2018)
Even before the House passed the bill, Russell mobilized to organize a filibuster, which would turn out to be the longest in history. Russell organized a tag-team filibuster where each “team” would hold the Senate floor hostage for four or five hours, gambling that LBJ could not get the necessary 67 votes for Cloture, which would end the filibuster. So, in effect, the battle over the Civil Rights bill in the Senate was over time, with Russell et al trying to talk the bill to death.
LBJ and Senator Hubert Humphrey, the liberal Democrat from Minnesota, had to instill discipline in the ranks, making sure that there were at least 51 Senators in the chamber when a quorum call was made, otherwise the day’s session ended and would recommence the next day. Meeting the quorum call was crucial, in that if the day’s session ended because there weren’t enough Senators on the floor to conduct business as usual, the filibustering Senators were off the hook and could rest. When the first quorum call resulted in only 39 Senators, LBJ lost it, telling Humphrey that he and his liberal Democrats needed to understand the rules, and if they were so passionate about Civil Rights, they wouldn’t miss another quorum call. Humphrey figured out a rotating system of Senators that stayed and those that could be away to campaign in an election year. In this situation, LBJ had identified the keys to success and put aside his ego to accomplish something for the greater good of the nation.
As LBJ had done with Byrd and Judge Smith, LBJ had an accurate read on Dirksen, and the President expected that Dirksen would have a laundry list of demands to be met in order to gain his support. LBJ appealed to Dirksen’s deep desire to be remembered in history as a true patriot, linking Dirksen’s name with Lincoln. That being said, LBJ refused to directly deal with Dirksen in terms of amendments, telling him to work with Humphrey, Robert Kennedy (who was still the Attorney General, but running for a Senate seat from New York), and the Civil Rights leaders on that front. It was at that point that Dirksen announced his support of the bill, and a Cloture petition was filed, citing 9 June 1964 as the date of the vote.
On 9 June 1964, Humphrey told LBJ that he had 67 votes, but the President told him to stay on top of the situation all the way to the final vote. In the end, due to extended debate, the final vote on Cloture was taken on 10 June 1964, and with over 67 votes, the longest filibuster in history ended. and there was no stopping the passage of the Civil Rights bill. On
2 July 1964, after the House accepted the Senate’s version, LBJ signed the Civil Rights bill into law. During the signing ceremony of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, LBJ gave out 75 signing pens, and among the recipients were Dirksen, Humphrey, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (that day also marked nine years since LBJ’s heart attack, as he reminded Lady Bird).
With the passage of the tax cut and Civil Rights bills, LBJ’s Great Society was off-and-running, in that with the passage of the two “JFK bills”, LBJ was able to focus on passing “his bills”. LBJ saw the Great Society as his gift to the nation, and the program that would cement his lofty place in US History.
LBJ had at least 14 secret task forces secret task forces getting reports ready by no later than Election Day 1964, and after that date LBJ sent flurries of special messages to Congress urging them to act on specific bills. Although LBJ won by a historic margin, he knew that the millions of Americans in his corner would slowly disappear over time. Due to that conclusion, LBJ kept pressuring his administration to get going on their part of the Great Society while the going was good, believing that preparation and momentum went together in tandem. LBJ did his best to not deliver too many bills at the same time for Congress to consider, in large part trying to avoid a bill being taken hostage by a committee. For the education and medical bills (e.g. Medicare), LBJ made sure that long-standing obstacles were dealt with before the bills were introduced, thereby streaming passage.
Before Vietnam took LBJ’s attention in the Fall of 1965, his attention was almost exclusively on the legislative process, micromanaging bills through Congress. LBJ used visuals and charts to keep track of the progress of each bill, and who to lobby and pressure to get the bill passed. During his first ten months as President, LBJ invited all the members of the House and the Senate to the White House in a long series of small dinner parties, which at least gave the illusion of access to the President.
LBJ had the opinion that the dust had to settle after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 before he could fully pursue a voting rights bill. LBJ wanted to use the time to heal the wounds over the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and on a practical level, the federal bureaucracy needed tim in order to figure out enforcement. That being said, LBJ’s commitment to a voting rights bill never waned in the least, contrary to what Civil Rights leaders such as MLK, Jr. believed by the Spring of 1965.
It had been over twenty years since a President addressed Congress in person on the topic of passing a bill, but LBJ decided it was time to ramp up the pressure with a direct address to Congress which would be nationally televised. LBJ gave one of the best speeches ever given by a President, and it proved to create the needed momentum for getting the process started for a voting rights bill. Russell told LBJ that while he couldn’t vote for the bill, he had seen the best speech a President had ever given in his lifetime, which was perhaps the best compliment LBJ could have received. LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law on 6 August, 623 days after the Assassination of JFK.
Among the last of the Great Society bills signed into law was an immigration bill that eliminated the quota system set in place in 1924 that favored white European immigration. With the immigration law, now any part of the globe was able to immigrate to the US, opening the door to Asian and African immigration and increasing the diversity of the nation. It was at this point that LBJ started his decline, showing an epic failure of leadership on the Vietnam War, which compromised his trust and credibility with the nation, tore the nation apart, and forever scarred his historical legacy.
LBJ didn’t have confidence in foreign affairs, which led him to place far too much confidence in JFK holdovers, who simply didn’t serve the President well at all, but LBJ didn’t seek out external perspectives for Vietnam as he had done with the Great Society. LBJ’s decision-making on Vietnam lacked conviction and coherence, which was seen in his decisions to escalate American involvement in 1965. LBJ never recognized the Vietnam War for what it was, a War of National Liberation, in which the US didn’t have the cards in any way (LBJ wasn’t alone in that belief by any means). While bombing North Vietnam with Operation Rolling Thunder on one hand, the other hand offered billion-dollar-plus New Deal-like programs, which of course was a non-starter for Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese government.
July 1965 was the crucial month for LBJ’s decision-making concerning US involvement in Vietnam, in that he chose to escalate while at the same time refusing to fess up and inform Congress and the nation of the upcoming national commitment to war. Unlike his honesty in submitting a sub-$100B budget to Senator Byrd, LBJ manipulated the next year’s proposed budget to hide rising defense costs, and he hid his 50,000 troop increase in a mundane press briefing. From July 1965 on, public dissatisfaction with his prosecution of the Vietnam War deepened, and while the protests increased, LBJ further isolated himself, seeing things for what he wished them to be instead of what they really were. The dam broke in early-1968 with the Tet Offensive, which led to a sort of national conclusion that LBJ had betrayed the American citizenry. LBJ believed that he had used up every ounce of his political capital, which led to his surprise announcement on national television on 31 March 1968 that he would not seek another term as President.