USA TODAY International Edition
Why Biden worked with segregationists
It was then the only way to advance civil rights
After hearing Sen. Kamala Harris attack former Vice President Joe Biden’s civil rights record, I felt a little bit like the Vietnam War veteran who feels the need to defend his role in the unpopular war by saying, “You weren’t there; you don’t know what it was like.”
I had a ringside seat at the Senate in the late 1970s while writing my book “Friend and Foe in the U.S. Senate.” I can attest that had Harris been serving at the time, she’d have been as ingratiating with Southern segregationists from her own party as she accuses Biden of being back then.
Fifty years ago, the South still reigned supreme in the Senate, and the chairmanships of the major committees were dominated by men whose racial views are scarcely imaginable today: Richard Russell of Georgia on Armed Services, James Eastland of Mississippi on Judiciary, and John McClellan of Arkansas on Appropriations.
Even now, committee chairs are formidable figures who determine whether a bill will get a hearing and, if so, how many witnesses will appear for each side or even whether any witnesses at all will be allowed. Fifty years ago it was worse, with chairmen dominating not only the full committees but their many subcommittees as well. As a liberal Democrat, you had to find a way around them by deference, flattery or, at times, acceding to their retrograde attitudes on race and their appalling views of African Americans.
By humoring these dinosaurs, it was possible to achieve objectives not otherwise attainable in the face of their opposition. Rebecca Lubot’s recently completed doctoral dissertation on the origins of the 25th Amendment on presidential succession recounts the adroit maneuvering by liberal Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana to become chairman of a subcommittee that had the power to initiate constitutional changes. It was only his relentless cultivation of the segregationist Eastland that allowed this historic amendment to be ratified.
The old Democratic bulls of the Senate were acutely aware of the impassioned attacks on them by their northern Democratic colleagues at election time. Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania, running for his first Senate term, had vowed to his constituents that his principal goal would be to depose Eastland as Judiciary Committee chairman.
As Clark told me in a 1979 interview, he was gripped by second thoughts about the harshness of his attacks on Eastland and fearful of being a pariah on the committee. Advised to make peace with the chairman, he entered Eastland’s office and began his apology. But he was cut short by Eastland waving his cigar and assuring Clark, “Don’t worry Joe, I know what it takes to get elected in Pennsylvania.”
Biden faced similar obstacles. He quickly sized up what it took to circumvent or humor these cranky old men whose racial views were repugnant, but who determined whether you could move racial equality ahead, even incrementally.
Even the redoubtable Lyndon Johnson assiduously courted the Dixie troglodytes during his years as Democratic leader of the Senate. But upon becoming vice president under John F. Kennedy, Johnson came to believe that age and disability were reducing the clout of the Southern committee chairs. According to Sen. Eugene McCarthy, Johnson once cornered a group of liberal colleagues in the Capitol and told them: “Dick Russell has throat cancer, Russell Long (of Louisiana) is a drunk,” and they were no longer able to block civil rights legislation.
The battle had yet to be won when Biden entered the Senate at age 30 in 1973. He had to find a way around these autocrats — by sweet-talking them or accommodating their last-ditch obstacles — to get the opportunity for even the most limited civil rights gains.
This was not evidence of collaboration with the enemies of civil rights or an abandonment of principle, Sen. Harris. It was, with no small amount of resignation, laying the groundwork for the landmark civil rights advances of the future.