Surprising Defeat

Troubling Dwight Eisenhower and many another American at week's end was a civil rights vote as surprising as it had been dramatic. Climaxing a legislative day that spanned 14 maneuver-packed hours, the Senate, in the minutes after a muggy Washington midnight, agreed to tack on to Part IV the disputed amendment guaranteeing trial by jury to any person charged with criminal contempt.

In achieving the decision, Senate Democratic leadership skillfully gutted the first civil rights bill to approach congressional approval in 82 years. It was a triumph--of a sort--for the strategy laid down weeks earlier by the commander of the Southern Democratic rearguard, Georgia's Senator Richard Brevard Russell (see below). No one claimed that the debate had not been full or the tactics fair (the South argued redundantly but on the points at issue), or that the net bill did not mark some slight progress. But by the same token, no one could argue that the verdict was not a hard slap in the face of a nation generally trying to live up to its own constitutional guarantees. It was also a shrewd political blow to an Administration that put presidential prestige and power behind a strong bill and to the Republican leadership that had staked its political prestige on the outcome.

Word from Harvard. As the week's infighting commenced, Minority Leader William Fife Knowland seemed to have every right to mask his customary gravity with a confident smile. Five days earlier he had been beaten when the Senate struck out the bill's sweeping Part III and limited the bill only to enforcing the right of all qualified citizens to vote (TIME, Aug. 5). But he had bounced back to re-form his coalition of Republicans and Democratic liberals for a surer battle. He had grown so certain that he could fend off attempts to weaken the enforcement powers of Part IV with compulsory jury trials that he declined White House aid lest it offend his group of Northern Democratic liberals. By midweek Bill Knowland could tick off a safe 39 Republicans, another ten or eleven Democrats ranged against the jury trial.

What Bill Knowland did not realize was the essential infirmity of his "sure" votes. A handful of moderates in both parties--enough to swing the scales--still had serious doubts over the complex legal problem of jury trials in contempt cases. Massachusetts' Democrat Jack Kennedy had asked four Harvard law professors whether the concept of jury trials in criminal contempt cases was sound or not, received an unhelpful 2-2 reply.

Candy Coating. Across the Senate aisle from Knowland sat a man who shrewdly sensed the fence sitters' quandary. And Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had staked out a role for himself as compromiser, set about trying to get passed the kind of jury-trial amendment that Dick Russell and his diehard Southerners would not filibuster against. Johnson's solution: to lure the doubtful and undecided, he would try to sweeten the jury-trial amendment by adding some kind of "new civil right."

In his own mind he mulled over the notions of adding 1) abolition of the poll tax, and 2) a U.S. conciliation service to mediate race disputes, discarded both. But his problem was solved when liberal Democrat Frank Church, Idaho's 33-year-old freshman, volunteered an amendment. Church's suggestion, after some polishing sessions with Washington Democrat Henry Jackson: amend the federal code so that states cannot prescribe qualifications for federal jury duty, e.g., state voting registration, property holding and sex. Under this proposal, the Southern white could have his jury trial, but the Southern Negro might be sitting on the jury. Johnson easily won permission from Wyoming's Joe O'Mahoney and Tennessee's Estes Kefauver to tack the Church rider on their jury-trial amendment. He got a tacit promise from Dick Russell that the South would not object. At Johnson's bidding, Church rounded up eleven additional sponsors before he took the floor to propose the amendment. When he did, a fatigued Senate accepted it, but only a few recognized the rider for what it turned out to be: the breakthrough that swung the odds against Knowland.

The Goon Squad. By next morning Knowland himself began to sense that he and not the South was in trouble. He tapped out a hasty S O S to the White House. By telephone and conference the President tackled a handful of Republicans who were in favor of jury trials, but might be won back, Maryland's John Marshall Butler, South Dakota's Francis Case, et al.

Acting Attorney General William P. Rogers (Attorney General Herbert Brownell was in Europe) hurried to Capitol Hill, closeted himself with Richard Nixon in the Vice President's office off the Senate Chamber. Nixon and Rogers summoned defecting Republicans one by one, pressured them to return to the Knowland fold. Their strongest lecture was reserved for West Virginia's Chapman Revercomb, who had cooled toward Knowland and warmed toward the jury-trial amendment.

Revercomb's reason was significant: the jury-trial amendment would also broaden the use of juries in labor contempt cases (a use sharply limited by the Taft-Hartley Act), and that wild-haired Old Union Boss, the United Mine Workers' John Lewellyn Lewis, had already trumpeted hearty approval. Chappie Revercomb and other pressured Republicans hustled out of Nixon's office unmoved; Democrats gibed at the Vice President's "goon squad." It was soon too clear that the goon squad and Ike himself had failed. Dick Russell announced quietly that he was ready at last to vote.

Inevitable Return. Two days earlier Bill Knowland had been ready to vote, had pressed without success to set a time. Now with the tables turned, Knowland had to stall when Majority Leader Johnson suggested setting a time. As the galleries filled until even the aisles were jammed, he persuaded Johnson to expand a scheduled four-hour prevote debate to six hours, spent the grace period rounding up absent supporters. Into Washington flew an Air Force plane with Maine's ailing (heart attack) Frederick Payne aboard. Missouri's Tom Hennings, convalescing at his Washington home from surgery (gallstones), limped to Capitol Hill. Knowland himself made the concluding speech against the amendment.

"If we do not succeed here tonight, it is inevitable that this issue will return again and again until justice is done," he warned. "It cannot be delayed, and it will not be denied." But when the last yea had been shouted, Knowland's justice had been denied. Voting for the jury-trial amendment were 39 Democrats and twelve Republicans, voting against were 33 Republicans and nine Democrats. To Knowland's chagrin, Majority Leader Johnson had scooped up such Democratic moderates as Massachusetts' Jack Kennedy, Ohio's Frank Lausche, Rhode Island's John Pastore, Washington's "Scoop" Jackson and Warren Magnuson, such Republicans as Maine's Margaret Chase Smith, Indiana's Homer Capehart, and West Virginia's Chappie Revercomb.

In the utter gloom that followed the vote, the Knowland forces freely predicted that there would be no civil rights legislation this session. Reason: the House, which passed a tough bill 286 to 126, would never agree to the watered-down Senate version. And even if it did, Dwight Eisenhower would be virtually forced to veto it because the four-page, 650-word jury-trial amendment was so loosely drawn that it would devastate the whole legal mechanism for dealing with cases under such laws as antitrust, atomic energy and securities exchange by the accepted injunction and contempt-of-court procedures (see box). It would even force jury trials for contempt of the United States Court of Appeals, which has no jury mechanism at all.

Meanwhile, the Senate got ready to pass its handiwork this week by a generous vote. It was left to Georgia's Dick Russell to administer the coup de grace in grand style. The South, said he after a post-victory caucus, had decided not to filibuster against the bill as it now stands.

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