The Dogs of Saint Bernard From MURRAY KEMPTON WASHINGTON p RESIDENT
KENNEDY'S Civil rights Bill has passed through the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives an altogether better thing than it went in. Since no minefield in the path ahead seems as highly charged as this one just traversed, the Kennedys have sound reason to hope that, by New Year's Day, the Congress will have given them the authority to do as much as law can do to achieve equality for the American Negro.
In general they can also appreciate the lesson of Lefty Gomez, a wise old craftsman for the New York baseball Yankees, who used to say that, in his trade, he would rather be lucky than good. Two weeks ago, the President and the Attorney-General had every cause to fear that their civil rights Bill would be torn apart between the tug of Democrats of the North and the resistance of Democrats of the South. But now, against all reason and tradition, they have been rescued by a Republican whose life in the Con- gress has been devoted to the cultivation of internal Democratic rancours as an instrument for the torture of Democratic Presidents.
On the afternoon of the day the Judiciary Committee approved the compromise civil rights Bill and sent it to the House Rules Committee with the endorsement of both the Democratic and Republican leadership, the President and the Attorney-General each expressed particular gratitude for the statesmanship of Charles Halleck, leader of the Republican minority. Pilgrims of the, Middle Ages could hardly have spoken with a more awful conviction that direct divine revelation can be a fact after they had lain down in the snows and yielded up the ghost and then seen the approaching curly wolf trans- formed into a rescuing dog of Saint Bernard.
The Judiciary Committee had wrangled over this matter long enough for detached observers to have identified three main conflicting currents. These were the Northern liberals, identified as 'bomb-throwers'; the Southern resisters, identi- fied as 'boll weevils'; and, smallest of all, the mere mercenaries of both parties, identified as 'brokers.' The bomb-throwers had taken control of the sub-committee appointed to redraft the admit .ration's original proposals and had pro- duced stringencies of a sort which both Kennedys feared would so unsettle tenants of the great swamp which is the centre of the House and Senate as to make the passage of any civil rights law impossible. The boll weevils, of course, since they are against any Bill hard or soft, made it plain that they would give enough votes to the hard Bill to send it to the House floor and what they had every reason to hope would be its doom. Citizens of a logical society might as well expect to find the league of Empire Loyalists marching from Aldermaston; but this sort of thing is stan- dard in the American legislative process, one of whose most conspicuous functions is sabotage. It was altogether a situation quite beyond sal- vage by brokers and one in which partisan Republicans had only to sit by with satisfaction and observe the torments of a Democratic administration. Then near dawn Tuesday, the Republicans awoke to discover that Charles Halleck, their leader and commander of the crew of sappers which so long tunnelled under Presi- dents Roosevelt and Truman in company with the Southern Democrats, had accepted a com- promise civil rights Bill which did not merely guarantee the Negro access to every hotel and restaurant within reach of Federal authority but granted the Attorney-General even more power than he had asked to prosecute the registration of Negroes as voters in the South and established, although in attenuated form, the Fair Employ-
ment Practices Commission (FEPC) so long and futilely demanded as a means of giving the Negro a chance at equal job opportunity.
As a party the Republicans can expect to get too little of the credit and too much of the blame that will fall to the President from the accomplishment of these things. Senator Gold- water, for example, has offered himself as a presidential candidate on the theory that he is the only Republican who can make use of the white South's now useless rage at the Kennedys; that expectation, at a minimum, is hardly advanced by a statute which could register thobsands of Southern Negroes who will thank and therefore reward the President for the oppor- tunity. If the Bill had failed, the President would have been the major loser; and, had it not been for Charley Halleck, it would have failed. A few minutes after the Judiciary Committee vote, a 'Republican Congressman, unidentified but repre- sentative of the spirit pervading the back- benchers of his party, laid an umbrella upon the desk where Charles Halleck sits as minority leader of the House.
At the same time, the hagiography which always grows around a man who has interrupted a lifetime's dedication to malignity with a single kind deed had already begun for Charles Halleck. It offered the story that he had read the civil rights Bill and had said, 'I will take this, because it is what the country needs.' That story was disposed of by Representative Clarence Brown, Halleck's sapper-in-chief with the House Rules Committee. in the tones of affront it deserved.
'I have,' said Clarence Brown, 'known Charley Halleck for thirty years and I've never heard him say one word about what the country needs.' Brown will be a long time forgiving Halleck this deviation; even so, he was saying what Charles Halleck would want said about him. This is a nature which could bear more cheerfully the indignation of the friends who called him a traitor than the gratitude of the hereditary enemies who called him a statesman. There was also the story, and a more persuasive one, that when Congressman McCulloch of Ohio, Halleck's man on the Judiciary Committee, brought him a draft of a compromise Bill, Halleck had rasped 'An FEPC? What are you making me take?' No God had ever dismounted more sullenly from the machine.
Still he had not merely spared the Kennedys; he had rescued them. The key seems to have been his loyalty to McCulloch, who is what the party of memory calls a Robert A. Taft Republi- can and almost the only one left because, like Taft, he is a problem-solver. McCulloch, as a broker, had two choices: he could either ruin the civil rights Bill or he could write it. He chose to write the Bill; and he had a unique position among all those who wanted a law this session: a record of loyalty to Charley Halleck that gave him a creditor's claim. Last week, with scissors and paste, McCulloch's man sat up all weekend with Attorney-General Kennedy's men at the Congressional Hotel here and among them they wrote the compromise. McCulloch took it and served it up to Charles Halleck and, in the final extraordinary scene of a weekend of unexpected ones, a Democratic administration was salvaged by the least placable of partisan Republicans still holding a seat in Congress.
Whatever dispute about its effect as law, the leadership of both parties in Congress now stands behind a Bill which declares to be public policy those Negro rights which, however closed in the Federal courts, has remained embarrassingly open in the legislature. The accident of McCul- loch and the accident of Halleck may have brough us that national consensus of all three branches of the government for which we have waited so long.
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