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120 11 YOU’LL NEVER GET A CIVIL RIGHTS BILL The early s were bleak times for Richard Russell. The civil rights cause was on the march—literally—and Russell had little stomach for the momentous social changes he knew were inevitable. “We have come to evil days,” he told a friend. “He was,” observed longtime aide Proctor Jones, “out of step with what was likely to happen.” With its bold commitment to civil rights legislation, Russell’s beloved Democratic party had veered sharply to the left in the  election. “My party . . . deviated from the past and has gone off and left me,” he had complained during the presidential contest. In the Senate, Lyndon Johnson was gone, and Russell was no longer a hidden hand behind the leadership. Two liberals, Mike Mansfield and Hubert Humphrey, ran a much more progressive Senate. Mansfield, while always friendly and courteous, was not Russell’s protégé and owed him no special debt. Russell’s once-fearsome domination of the steering and policy committees had been eroded by Johnson’s departure and by the addition of liberals such as Mansfield, Humphrey, Philip Hart, Edmund Muskie, and Joseph Clark. The southern bloc that Russell led was shrinking—and aging. Of the bloc’s eighteen members, more than half were sixty or older, and four were over seventy. As chairman of the Armed Services Committee and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, Russell still wielded enormous power, but only within certain realms—defense, agriculture, and, to a rapidly declining degree, civil rights. Furthermore, because of age and his deteriorating health, Russell had simply lost some of his enthusiasm for waging legislative battles. He had rarely if ever been an offensive combatant in the fight against civil rights, but now he seemed more defensive and fatalistic than ever. He was afraid, he wrote to himself in , that “my leadership has lost inspiration.” None of this meant that Russell would ever capitulate to demands 121 YOU’LL NEVER GET A CIVIL RIGHTS BILL for civil rights. In early  he led a surprisingly spirited fight against liberalization of the cloture rule and threatened a filibuster against the proposal. With no real support from the Kennedy White House, the rule change died. Except for agricultural policy, Russell found himself at odds with every major legislative initiative proposed by President Kennedy. His relationship with Lyndon Johnson was not much better. As vice president, Johnson now wholeheartedly supported Kennedy’s program of executive action on civil rights. One of his first acts as chairman of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity had been to force the desegregation of the Lockheed plant in Russell’s home state. Russell had hoped that Johnson, the southern moderate, would exert a moderating influence on the liberals in Kennedy’s White House. He was mistaken. To the extent he had any influence, Johnson seemed to have become an all-out civil rights liberal. Russell, quite naturally, felt betrayed. One Saturday afternoon, probably in , William “Buddy” Darden witnessed Russell’s growing disillusionment with his former protégé. A Capitol elevator operator under Russell’s patronage, Darden (later a congressman from Georgia) was walking toward Russell’s office when Johnson ’s chauffeur-driven limousine pulled alongside him. “Hey, boy,” Johnson shouted, “is Dick in?” “Well, yes, sir,” Darden replied. “Well, tell him I’m out here in the car and I want to see him.” Darden scurried inside to deliver the message, but Russell was in no mood for Johnson that afternoon. “You just tell the son of a bitch I’m not here. I don’t want to fool with him today.” Darden was petrified. “Here I was, just walking in off the street, carrying a message from the vice president of the United States to the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and I was supposed to go back and tell him that he wasn’t in—yet I had already told him he was in.” Not knowing what to do, Darden shuffled his feet and remained in Russell’s outer office, hoping, he said, “that something would happen.” Before long, an impatient Johnson burst through the door and barged into Russell’s office, where Russell received his old friend warmly. Darden said when he realized the two men “weren’t going to come to blows, I exited and wasn’t around there anymore.” [18.218.184.214] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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