Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [77]
At the White House, Vice President Nixon had reacted furiously to this paean to segregation, advocating a strong response. There were not only constitutional issues at stake, but moral implications as well, and Nixon believed the administration could not stand idly by while the South thumbed its nose at the Supreme Court. Ike’s inner circle, though, had different concerns. The 1956 election was just around the corner, and Eisenhower had been making considerable inroads with voters in the South. The time was not right to rock the boat. Already Nixon’s more liberal stance on civil rights was causing problems in the South, and while Ike decided in the end not to drop him from the ticket, tension remained between the president and the vice president. The Democrats focused their ire on Nixon rather than on the popular Eisenhower. “It was hard not to feel that I was being set up,” Nixon later reflected, noting his “disillusionment with the way Eisenhower was handling the affair.”
The election confirmed both Eisenhower’s high standing with the electorate and Nixon’s lowly position in the administration’s hierarchy. Ike clobbered Stevenson, but the Democrats easily carried both Houses, a sign that the vote had been more about Ike’s personality than a partisan endorsement of the Republicans. Following the landslide victory, Eisenhower sent Nixon a belated note that must have only added to the vice president’s growing sense of resentment. “Dear Dick,” the president wrote in late December, well over a month after the election. “I find that while I have thanked what seems to be thousands of people from Maine to California for their help in the political campaign, I have never expressed my appreciation to you.”
The new year brought renewed calls for action on civil rights, as African-American leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. developed larger followings. Nixon lobbied hard for the White House to introduce legislation that would update the nation’s ineffectual civil rights laws and in the process drive a wedge between the Democratic Party’s more liberal northern wing and the reactionary factions in the South. But once more Eisenhower wavered, thinking the time not right, and the initiative languished. Into this void stepped Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Like Symington, Johnson was maneuvering for the 1960 presidential nomination and searching for politically promising causes. As majority leader, LBJ outranked Symington and was a far more seasoned and skilled legislator. But while the media hailed Symington as patrician and formidable, Johnson was dismissed as preening and pompous. Symington was the blue-blooded Yale man; Johnson, the graduate of a provincial Texas teacher’s college with the uncouth manners of a shady oil tycoon. “He flashes gold cuff links, fiddles with the gold band of his gold wristwatch, toys with a tiny gold pill box, tinkers with a gold desk ornament,” Time magazine noted with evident distaste. “His LBJ brand appears everywhere, on his shirts, his handkerchiefs, his personal jewelry, in his wife’s initials, in his daughters’ initials. . . . Lyndon Johnson would rather be caught dead than in a suit costing less than $200.”
Symington was portrayed by the press as polished and statesmanlike, a leader immersed in the grave concerns of national security. Johnson, on the other hand, served hamburger patties shaped like the state of Texas at his Johnson City ranch, urging guests to “eat the panhandle first.” Hardly presidential material.
Despite his outlandish public image, Johnson’s position on civil rights was relatively moderate. And it was through this violently divisive issue that he saw a chance to make his mark.
The 1957 Civil Rights Act that he almost single-handedly wheeled through a reluctant Congress was at once