DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
Lyndon Baines Johnson
A Powerful Force for Civil Rights
The new president possessed two enormous assets: a singularly powerful personality and a mastery of the procedures and personalities of the U.S. Congress perhaps unparalleled in American history. From 1954 to 1960, Johnson had served, in the words of biographer Robert Dallek, as “the most effective majority leader in Senate history.” To his command of the Senate’s often arcane rules and traditions, Johnson added what one might call intense powers of personal persuasion. “He’d come on just like a tidal wave,” said Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. “He went through walls. … He’d take the whole room over.”
The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who served as a White House fellow under Johnson, recalled Johnson’s ability to focus all his energies on extracting a needed vote from a recalcitrant senator. She called it “The Treatment.” King biographer Marshall Frady described it as
… a ferocious manner of persuasion that proceeded by a kind of progressive physical engulfment: wrapping one giant arm around a colleague’s shoulder with his other hand clenching his lapel, then straightening the senator’s tie knot, then nudging and punching his chest and sticking a forefinger into his shirt. Johnson would lower his face closer and closer to his subject’s in escalating exhortation until the man would be bowed backward like a parenthesis mark.
Johnson had been born poor in Texas and understood intimately the conditions under which African Americans and Mexican Americans labored. As a congressman and then senator from a southern state, electoral realities obliged Johnson to mute some of his progressive views on civil rights and racial equality. But elevated unexpectedly to the presidency, Johnson placed the full measure of his political skills to work for the passage of the landmark civil rights laws.
As the new president told Richard Russell, an influential senator from Georgia whose opposition to civil rights legislation posed a formidable obstacle: “I’m not going to cavil and I’m not going to compromise. I’m going to pass it just as it is, Dick, and if you get in my way I’m going to run you down. I just want you to know that because I care about you.”
