Kennedy: The Classic Biography by Ted Sorensen

rule on filibusters. He had been the first member of Congress from New England to appoint a Negro to his staff.
    In 1957 he supported the administration’s mild but precedent-setting voting rights bill, endorsing the effort to extend under Title III the Attorney General’s injunctive powers to cases on schooling and other rights. He asked me, however, to examine whether there was any legal basis in Vice President Richard Nixon’s proposed ruling to by-pass committee consideration of the bill. When I reported that I could find no such basis in either the Senate’s rules and precedents or the Constitution, and that similar manipulation could be employed by conservative Senators on right-to-work and other House bills, he supported the unsuccessful Morse request that the civil rights bill proceed normally to committee, subject to discharge in one week.
    Many of the civil rights Democrats privately agreed with Morse that the ill-feeling engendered by abandoning traditional procedures would make passage of a strong bill more difficult. But fearful of being outmaneuvered politically by Nixon and the Republicans, most of them voted to uphold the Vice President’s ruling; and Kennedy’s vote for orderly procedure was condemned by civil rights leaders as a bid for Southern Presidential support. At a convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in mail from Boston Negro leaders, in editorials and columns, Kennedy’s vote was assailed.
    The full force of their fury, however, was yet to come. Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, whose own star had been rising on the national horizon, was determined to obtain passage of the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction. A careful counter of Senate heads, he knew that he did not have the votes to break a Southern filibuster, that adoption of the “jury trial amendment” might avoid a full-scale filibuster, and that the votes of Kennedy and his friend John Pastore were needed for the adoption of that amendment.
    The question dealt with by this amendment was whether local voting officials who had defied court orders on the registration of Negroes could be tried for criminal as well as civil contempt of court without a jury trial. The amendment required a jury trial in both kinds of cases. Both sides exaggerated its importance, with some Northerners calling the bill meaningless with such an amendment and some Southerners calling the bill monstrous without it. Enforcement of the bill could not, in fact, depend upon criminal (as opposed to civil) contempt proceedings. But emotion and oversimplification made the amendment a symbol at the expense of the facts. And although some three dozen other non-Southern Senators supported it, Kennedy’s vote was regarded as crucial.
    He turned for advice to two Harvard professors of law, both noted for their devotion to civil rights, Mark DeWolfe Howe and Paul Freund. Both answered that acceptance of the amendment to pass the bill involved no betrayal of principle. Kennedy, followed by Pastore, supported the “jury trial amendment.” It passed. The bill passed. “It would be a heavy blow,” the Senator said to his critics, to abandon “a bill of real merit for the doubtful satisfaction of standing dogmatically by a provision which does not…add significantly to the substantive effect of the measure.”
    But his critics would not be stilled. His vote for broad injunctive powers under Title III was dismissed as “playing both sides.” His other votes and statements on behalf of the bill were ignored. NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins told New England members that Kennedy had not earned their support. 2
    That storm eventually passed; Wilkins in fact praised Kennedy’s civil rights record during his 1958 Senate re-election campaign as “one of the best…of any Senator in Congress.” But the Senator would always marvel at the comparative public inattention paid, except by its enemies in the South, to his more