The Republicans who aided civil rights
In the spring of 2015, my friend and former Post colleague Robert Kimball made what I thought was a zany prediction: that Donald Trump, who had just announced his candidacy, would become the nation’s next president.
It was a brash statement from a guy I knew as a historian of American musical theater. Between compiling the definitive lyrics of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Ira Gershwin, he served as a a classical music critic for the New York Post during the 1970s and 1980s.
I was vaguely aware that Bob once had been a lawyer for Republican legislators who helped craft the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But I never guessed at his political acumen. At age 24, fresh out of Yale Law School, Kimball witnessed and participated in the congressional scrimmage during the tumultuous months when Black Southern churches were burned and Southern governors turned police dogs onto demonstrators. Until I read his memoir “Crisis and Compromise” (RiverGrove Books), out now, I had no idea that Republicans in the House of Representatives played a critical role in writing the law.
As a legislative aide to Rep. John V. Lindsay (later mayor of New York City, and who eventually became a Dem), my longtime friend was in the thick of the action — which the book brings vividly to life. Republicans led by Lindsay and Ohio Rep. William McCulloch struggled to craft a civil rights measure in the House Judiciary Committee. Kimball was one of only four people at the Oct. 28, 1963, meeting where a bipartisan compromise saved the bill from near-certain failure. It followed Machiavellian machinations by warring House factions, President John F. Kennedy and his attorney general brother, Robert F. Kennedy, and duplicitous newspaper columnists.
The blur of committees, subcommittees and commissions can overwhelm a reader unfamiliar with the background. But “Crisis and Compromise” belongs on the shelf of everyone who cares about the making of the most important federal legislation of the 20th century. (Lifelong Republican Kimball switched his party registration to Democratic when Trump was nominated in 2016.