The Filibuster

Monday, Mar. 14, 1960
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On the half-deserted floor of the Senate one night last week, a group of Senators huddled tightly around the lanky person of the human calculating machine known as Lyndon Baines Johnson. Some of them glanced up as North Carolina's jolly Sam Ervin went by. Chuckled old Judge Ervin: "That scene reminds me of something from Hamlet: 'Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes.' " Foul or fair, the deeds done last week by the august U.S. Senate were indeed rising all over the place, and there was plenty of o'erwhelming still to come. The Southern filibuster, aimed at blocking passage of a civil rights bill, had begun (TIME, Feb. 29). To wear it down, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and Minority Leader Everett Dirksen kept the Senate in round-the-clock session. In counterattack the Southerners kept their colleagues coming and going all through the night with regular quorum calls. Meanwhile Texas' Johnson was hard at work doing what comes most naturally: dealing, persuading, cajoling—all in an effort to shape a meaningful moderate bill whose basic purpose is to guarantee Negro voting rights in the South.

Refugees. In many respects the filibuster (or "sustained educational campaign," as one Southerner put it) was as hollow as Southern hopes; civil rights legislation—whether it carries the imprint of the Administration, or Northern Democrats or both—is inevitable in this session, and the Southerners, from Georgia's fiercely eloquent Richard Russell on down, know it. Even so, Dick Russell, as general of the delaying forces, set up his well-organized willful minority, selecting three teams of six men each who could spell each other in relays of pairs, with each pair holding the floor for four hours at a time.

Like refugees from a storm, members of all persuasions had cots brought into their offices and spare rooms; even the old Supreme Court chamber was turned into a Senate dormitory. Lady Bird Johnson showed up with a fresh change of pajamas for the majority leader. Maine's Margaret Smith posed daintily for photographers as she tucked herself into a cot (fully clothed) for the night. Wyoming's Gale McGee hauled in a sleeping bag. Wisconsin's Bill Proxmire got himself photographed in his skivvies. At first it almost seemed fun: a visit to the Senate gallery became a social must for Washington's late-evening crowds.