The Biggest Guns

When Georgia's somber Richard Brevard Russell rose in the Senate last week, the skirmishing was over and the great civil rights battle of 1957 was joined. As the Southern camp's chosen general in the fight, Dick Russell was set to fire the biggest propaganda guns in a determined attack on the Administration's House-passed civil rights bill--an attack that will probably turn into a lengthy Democratic filibuster.

"I speak in a spirit of great sadness," said Russell in his slow drawl. "If Congress is driven to pass this bill in its present form, it will cause unspeakable confusion, bitterness and bloodshed in a great section of our common country. Concentration camps may as well be prepared now, because there will not be enough jails to hold the people of the South who will oppose the use of raw federal power forcibly to commingle white and Negro children in the same schools and places of public entertainment."

Ghosts Under the Bed. The "wickedly designed" Administration bill, Russell went on, has been sailing "under the false colors of a moderate bill to assure and protect voting rights." Actually, it takes in a lot more than the right to vote: it empowers the Attorney General to seek court injunctions to protect such sweeping rights as "equal protection of the laws" and "equal privileges and immunities under the law." Thus the bill's real purpose, Dick Russell charged, is to use "bayonet rule" to "destroy the separate system for the races on which the social order of the Southern states is built."

After going on in this vein for an hour or so, Russell sat down. The most apt rejoinder soon came from Illinois' Republican Everett McKinley Dirksen: "Seldom in my long legislative experience have I seen, within the framework of a single speech, so many ghosts discovered under the same bed."

Big Winds Ahead. In picking Dick Russell as their general, the Southerners put their best face forward. Gentlemanly Bachelor Russell is one of the most respected men in the Senate--and one of the most formidable parliamentarians. He is also battle-seasoned: since entering the Senate 24 years ago (he was its youngest member, aged 35), he has lived through many a filibuster. For the one now looming ahead, he has set a strategy of moderation: avoid such customary filibuster time-killers as reading almanacs, keep speeches reasonably relevant, use legal argument instead of invective. By this approach, Russell hopes to win enough support from non-Southern conservatives on both sides of the aisle to cripple the bill with amendments.

If he can hold back the firebrands--South Carolina's Strom Thurmond, Louisiana's Allen Ellender et al.--Russell will probably hold off on his filibuster when Minority Leader William Fife Knowland moves to bring the bill to the floor this week. The really big winds will start blowing when debate on the bill itself begins. Unless 64 Senators vote to shut off debate by invoking the cloture rule (a remote possibility distasteful to most Senators, including Bill Knowland), the Southerners will very likely go on talking until 1) they get tired and give up, or 2) the civil rights camp gets tired and drops the bill. To keep the talkathon going, Russell will have only 18 men, counting himself. The remaining four Southern Democrats--Texas' Johnson and Yarborough, Tennessee's Kefauver and Gore--will sit on the sidelines as neutrals.

Compromise in the Air. With Texas' Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson out of the battle (but doing his talented best to work out cloakroom compromises), Minority Leader Knowland will in effect control the Senate. His strategy: gradually stretch out the sessions until finally the Southerners have to keep talking round the clock. Then the real drama of a filibuster will set in, as the orators battle not the hated bill but the fatigue that creeps into bone and brain.

How long will it last? Possibly until early September, ventured Bill Knowland. Bent on pushing some kind of civil rights bill through no matter how long it takes, Knowland announced following Russell's speech that he was willing to consider on its merits any amendment the Southerners propose. With that spirit of give and take in the Senate air, South Dakota Republican Karl Mundt rose up to predict a compromise "for which the South can't vote, but with which the South can live."

Dwight Eisenhower, too, seemed to be in a conciliatory mood. His objective, he said at his press conference, is to prevent interference with anybody's right to vote. Looking at the actual text of the bill, he had found "certain phrases" that he did not completely understand, so he was going to "talk to the Attorney General and see exactly what they do mean." And he was "ready to listen," he said, to anyone who considered the bill "extreme." In other words, "wickedly designed" or no, the Administration's bill will not bar Dick Russell from taking a taxi downtown to present his case to the President any time he feels like it.

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