CHAPTER 45
May 30, 1956
“...Hungarian President Imre Nagy has announced that the police have restored order in Budapest.” The BBC announcer said. “This marks the end of four days of protests and riots in the city that are believed to have claimed the lives of several demonstrators. Meanwhile in France, the political crisis brought on by disputes between the government and the army over the war in Algeria may also be nearing an end. Famed war hero Charles de Gaulle has recently announced that he will come out of retirement to restore stability to the government and work towards a resolution of the Algerian crisis...”
Click.
Winston Churchill turned off the radio. He’d had to listen to De Gaulle all through the war, and hadn’t been sorry to see the back of him since. Now, ten years later, that man was back.
“Bloody hell.”
***
Senator Knowland’s nomination as the Republican presidential candidate for 1956 was never in doubt. He had emerged as the successor to Robert Taft as leader of the party’s conservative wing, and he had the endorsement of a popular President. The only contest of note was offered by John Bricker of Ohio, who won only the primary in his home state. With the exception of New Hampshire, where hundreds of voters wrote in MacArthur’s name in a last-chance effort to convince him to run for a second term, every other primary returned a nearly unanimous win for Knowland.
When the Republican National Convention came, Knowland was sure that he would be able to pick his Vice President and take his ‘Continue Success’ message all the way to the White House. MacArthur remained as popular as ever, and he was the chosen successor. The economy was good, and the nation was at peace. There had hardly been a better time to be the incumbent party’s candidate.
At the Convention, Knowland was quickly confirmed as the nominee, but when he proposed the strongly conservative Representative Walter Judd of Minnesota as his running mate, the party bosses overruled him. Throughout the campaign, Knowland had been even more vocal than MacArthur had ever been about the need to concentrate America’s diplomacy in Asia, but Judd put the both of them to shame on that front. If Judd was picked, the ticket would be made up of two conservatives, leaving the party’s liberal wing off the ticket entirely. Judd was unlikely to help pick up electoral votes that Knowland would need: the Northeast had decided 1952 in MacArthur’s favour, and with the South certain to oppose the Republican stance on civil rights, the Northeast would be critical again. Nor could Knowland rely on his status as MacArthur’s chosen heir to push for Judd either: MacArthur’s face might be on the campaign posters, but the President had not campaigned for Knowland since the initial endorsement. Although it was not made public, the party bosses knew that MacArthur was privately angered by Knowland’s proposal to subject labour unions to antitrust laws, and as if to prove the point, when MacArthur had travelled to California in May, he had gone there not for Knowland, but for Nixon’s Senate campaign.
The convention’s choice was Connecticut’s moderate Senator Prescott Bush, who could offer ideological balance and support in the Northeast. Bush, not Judd, would go on the ticket.
Knowland was furious. He was furious at the party bosses for thwarting his choice of running mate. He was furious at MacArthur for not doing more to help his campaign. He was furious at Lyndon Johnson for ripping out line after line, and then whole pages, of the civil rights bill. He couldn’t do much about Bush, not after Vice President Lodge announced that he would be honoured to be succeeded by Bush, but he could do something about the other two. Or at least, he thought he could.
On the morning of July 9th, the Monday after the Convention, Knowland announced that he would be putting the civil rights bill to a vote - immediately. Even after Clint Anderson’s amendments had passed at the end of May and the expansive bill was reduced to one purely concerning voting rights, it had still been in a state of gridlock. It might have had a majority of votes, but not the two-thirds needed to beat a filibuster. Knowland knew that by calling for a vote, he was inviting a filibuster, and by inviting a filibuster he was dooming the bill. Earlier, Knowland had wanted to help his President’s bill, and had followed Nixon’s recommendations that it not be forced through too quickly, but now his President had failed him. Once he was President, he would push for a civil rights bill - a real civil rights bill - in 1957. This weak one could be left to die, and he could blame the Democrats for killing it. He would have succeeded too, had he been in the Senate over the past two weeks.
While Knowland was busy on a campaign trip through the Mountain States, Lyndon Johnson had been on the Senate floor, and in the cloakrooms and offices, desperately trying to save the bill. He knew time was running out: Knowland had been getting impatient, and if he wanted to use a filibuster to split the Democratic Party ahead of the election, it would have to be before the Democratic Convention in the third week of July. Likely weeks before. All throughout June, he had been looking for something he could use.
He found it, of all places, in MacArthur’s Labour Unions Act. That was another bill that MacArthur had talked about incessantly, but in reality was rather disappointing. The only thing of note it had accomplished was to guarantee strikers the right to a jury trial. A similar guarantee for those accused of civil rights offences, Johnson realised, would be just the sort of provision that would weaken this bill enough to appease the South: Blacks could not serve on Southern juries, so no White man had to fear one, and MacArthur couldn’t well oppose the provision without looking hypocritical.
The Northern liberals, who hadn’t spent months talking up the bill, would see through that amendment immediately, and would oppose it if he didn’t give them something too. Again he returned to MacArthur’s jury idea: Blacks could not serve on Southern juries, but if this bill allowed them to, he could pass it off as another civil right being granted to them. In practice, it would not matter: as long as there was at least one White on a jury, they would be able to prevent the unanimous verdict required for conviction. The Southerners knew they would have nothing to fear from the amendment. The liberals wouldn’t be given a chance to realise their mistake. Johnson called for votes on the amendment on July 6th, and had enough to pass it. Knowland was off at the Convention in California. He found out that the amendment passed in the Saturday morning paper, but never realised what it meant.
When he called for votes on Monday, he received seventy-one ‘yea’s. MacArthur’s civil rights bill had passed.
But it had become a hollow shell in the process.
The ink of the newspapers announcing the bill’s passage was hardly dry before the bill was proving divisive. Some civil rights activists celebrated the fact that a bill - any bill - had passed the Senate for the first time in eighty years. Others denounced it as a pathetic effort, and argued that MacArthur should veto the bill as a waste of time and allow Knowland to work for a stronger bill in 1957. Johnson was given credit for navigating the competing and often contradictory demands of the Senate, and was lambasted for acting as a pawn of the segregationists. MacArthur had either fulfilled his promise to deliver a civil rights bill, or had failed to deliver the great civil rights package that he had campaigned on.
Inside the Oval Office, the question was just as difficult as it was proving to be outside. MacArthur still had the power to veto it, and if he did there would be plenty of senators willing to uphold his veto. Richard Nixon, who for months had been pushing for the bill’s passage, had been disgusted by the end result. Johnson had made the administration look foolish, the jury amendment was a disgrace. He suggested MacArthur “scrap the damned thing”. Knowland’s election was practically a sure thing, and now that the President had riled up the civil rights crowd, he was confident that a stronger bill, one much more similar to the 1953 one, could be passed in 1957.
MacArthur had many reservations about the bill. It was far weaker than he would have liked, and was an almost pitiful end to a year of campaigning. It didn’t do anything to resolve the underlying issue of segregation in the South, and now that the South had offered the compromise he had demanded from Russell, it would be much harder to justify using the Army to enforce Brown whether he signed it or not. But Nixon was wrong. There was no guarantee that a 1957 bill would be any better than the 1956 one, or even that there would be a 1957 bill at all. For all its flaws, and it had many, this was a bill, one that had passed. Knowland could try to get something better next year, but the progress that had been made could now be made certain. Cameras were called into the Oval Office: the world would see him sign this bill.
***
While the press debated whether the Civil Rights Act of 1956 was a breakthrough or a bill “worse than nothing”, and MacArthur considered whether to sign or veto it, Lyndon Johnson was looking to capitalise on his greatest legislative accomplishment yet. Although he wanted to be selected as the Democratic nominee, he had stubbornly refused to officially announce his candidacy, convinced that he would have the South behind him at the Convention and would be able to somehow leverage that into the party nomination.
When the Democratic National Convention began on Monday July 23rd, he soon found out that he was mistaken. Adlai Stevenson had won the majority of the primaries, and had already gained the support of most of the convention delegates, who blamed his loss in 1952 on the personal popularity of MacArthur. His most promising challenger, and his former running mate, Estes Kefauver, had begun with a strong campaign only to suffer several defeats against Stevenson. Kefauver, knowing he would ultimately lose and unwilling to repeat the ticket that had failed four years earlier, withdrew from the race shortly before the convention. Averell Harriman, who had the public backing of former President Truman, was Stevenson’s only other serious competition, but his campaign had struggled to gain support. Even if Johnson could get the South behind him, and that was far from being a sure thing, it wouldn’t matter. Stevenson had, and received, enough votes without them. It would be Stevenson, not Johnson, who would face Knowland in November.
As had been the case in the Republican Convention two weeks earlier, the more contentious choice would not be who was on the top of the ticket, but who would be their running mate. Kefauver was the favoured choice, but he reiterated his desire not to repeat the exact ticket that had failed against MacArthur. The next choice was the young, charismatic, and until-now relatively unknown Senator John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts, but while Kennedy captured the attention of the party’s liberals, the prospect of two liberals on the ticket (and Kennedy a Catholic at that) alarmed the Democratic conservatives just as a Knowland-Judd ticket had alarmed the Republican liberals. Stevenson’s campaign was including a civil rights plank, if only to prevent Knowland from using the issue against him, but if Kennedy was his running mate, the Southerners feared they would have no voice in the executive branch and that integration would be imposed on them without any way to resist, a fear that only grew with MacArthur’s recent signing of the Civil Rights Act. The demand was made: a Southerner would serve as Stevenson’s running mate, or the South would leave the convention and run their own ticket, in the same manner as the Dixiecrats of 1948.
Without Kefauver, there were only two prominent Southerners who hadn’t signed the Southern Manifesto and would thus be acceptable to the whole party: Al Gore of Tennessee, and Lyndon Johnson. As Stevenson refused to endorse either, preferring to let the convention decide, the party bosses turned to Johnson, who had just seized the national spotlight by passing a civil rights bill after eighty years of gridlock and filibusters. The only problem was, Johnson didn’t want to be number two. He turned them down. Gore, in the name of party unity, accepted.
When Johnson opened the newspaper on Friday morning, he wondered if he hadn’t just dodged a bullet. On one topic much more than any other, the public had always trusted MacArthur’s judgement. After the story on the front page, Johnson was certain that that topic would decide the 1956 election. Now, if MacArthur said to vote for Knowland, the people would. Because that topic wasn’t civil rights.
It was war.
- BNC