Third Force

Into the continuing Senate debate on civil rights came a powerful, persuasive, familiar third force. For a fortnight the session's bitterest battle had raged between polar opposites--Georgia's Richard Brevard Russell and his determined Southerners, Senate Republican Leader William Fife Knowland and his coalition of Republicans and Democratic liberals. Last week, with the pressures carefully remeasured, the crosscurrents analyzed, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson calculated that it was time to come out of the wings and exercise his superb cloakroom skill in the name of moderation. Johnson's goal: enactment of a compromise civil rights bill that most of the South could swallow (including Texan Lyndon Johnson), that Dick Russell would not filibuster against, and that Bill Knowland and Northern Democrats could hold up as a symbol of civil rights progress.

Johnson waited carefully for the right moment. It came on a vote on a relatively uncontested point: the Administration's civil rights bill had made a highly technical reference to a law of Reconstruction days that seemed to empower the President to use troops to enforce the law (a right he has, anyway). So forcefully had Russell's forces broadened this indelicate slip into a virtual rape of the South that everybody agreed it would be a good thing to vote it out of the bill--to "clarify the atmosphere," as Knowland put it. The atmosphere was clarified by a vote of 90 to 0. But so, to Lyndon Johnson, was the fact that Knowland was on the defensive, and ripe to be pushed even more in the direction of the Southern position.

All but Gone. Johnson's first move was on Part III of the Administration bill, which would empower the U.S. Attorney General to step in and seek injunctions to prevent not only violations of voting rights but violations of any other federally guaranteed civil rights, e.g., education in integrated schools. Many a Northerner (including Dwight Eisenhower) had already made it clear that this was much too broad a sweep for a bill which the Justice Department had advertised as a right-to-vote bill. When New Mexico's liberal Democrat Clinton Anderson expressed doubts about Part III, Johnson encouraged Anderson to write down his doubts in a compromising amendment, encouraged him also to confer with Vermont's sturdy liberal Republican George Aiken.

Anderson and Aiken produced an amendment striking most of Part III from the bill; Johnson saw that the amendment got onto the Senate floor for action. Moreover, he rounded up so many votes to carry it that at the last moment he was able to allow some Northern Democrats to vote against the bill to strengthen their civil rights reputations back home. The amendment carried 52 to 38, and Part III was all but gone.

From Part III, Johnson--with Georgia's Russell now in the wings--moved the Senate toward Part IV. This the South--and Johnson--hoped to weaken by writing in a provision that the Attorney General's civil rights contempt charges must be tried not by a federal judge but by a jury.* Defeated on Part III, Knowland's coalition rallied raggedly to hold the line on Part IV. Knowland himself breakfasted with President Eisenhower. Ike offered to fight openly for Part IV, but agreed with Knowland that open intervention might drive away the shaky Northern Democrats, e.g., Montana's Mike Mansfield, Rhode Island's John Pastore, in Knowland's coalition. Instead, Knowland himself was authorized to spread the word that the President backed Part IV. Meanwhile, in the Capitol's corridors, Vice President Nixon was buttonholing the 18 Republicans who had voted for the Part III compromise, and trying to persuade them to stand firmer on the matter of no jury trials; a compromise here, said the Justice Department, would "gut" the bill.

Ultimate Weapon. In an effort to offset such maneuvers and strike another compromise, Lyndon Johnson was ready with another amendment, drawn up by three liberal Democrats: Wyoming's Joe O'Mahoney, Tennessee's Estes Kefauver and Idaho's Frank Church. The amendment proposed a revision of the Federal Code to allow jury trials in all criminal (but not civil) contempt proceedings, whether the Government instituted them or not. Russell reluctantly accepted it; Knowland flatly turned it down, and both sides prepared for the showdown vote this week. "I think it's touch and go," said a Knowland stalwart, "and I think we've got the touch." But Russell called an emergency caucus to provide a thought-provoking touch of his own. If they lose on jury trials, Russell made clear, the Southerners are ready to use their ultimate weapon--a full-blown filibuster.

All this seemed like the long-awaited challenge to the death. But to Lyndon Johnson it was only a fresh challenge to the third-force talents of a master compromiser.

* Since a charge of contempt is historically the court's weapon of enforcing its own orders, there is no generally recognized legal or constitutional right to trial by jury in contempt cases. But Section 3691 of the Federal Code (from the Clayton Act) guarantees a trial by jury in contempt cases if the defendant, in violating the court order, also violates criminal statutes. In the same statute there is one all-important exception: if the contempt arises from an action brought by the U.S. Government, there is no guarantee of jury trial. It is this exception that the Administration's civil rights bill exploits by permitting the Attorney General (on behalf of the U.S.) to bring contempt charges if violation of civil rights is suspected.

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