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.But he was determined to riseabove his own limitations on race and to bring the country with him. I mgoing to be the President who finishes what Lincoln began, he said to several people.A few days after he became President, he asked Senator Russell to cometalk to him about the civil rights bill. The President sat in a wing chair. From JFK to LBJ :: 163The Senator sat at one end of a small couch.Their knees almost touched. As Jack Valenti remembered it, Johnson said: Dick, you ve got to get outof my way.I m going to run over you.I don t intend to cavil or compromise. You may do that, he replied. But by God, it s going to cost you theSouth and cost you the election. If that s the price I ve got to pay, said thePresident, I ll pay it gladly. The following week Johnson told labor leaders that the endless abrasions of delay, neglect, and indifference have rubbed raw the national conscience.We have talked too long.We have done too little.And all of it hascome too late.You must help me make civil rights in America a reality. Two days later, in a well-publicized meeting at the White House, he gavethe same message to the country s principal black leaders. This bill isgoing to pass if it takes all summer, he told them. This bill is going to beenacted because justice and morality demand it. He had several reasons for wanting to make good on civil rights.First,he felt that passing Kennedy s bill would help heal the wound opened byhis assassination.To Johnson s thinking, the President s murder resultedfrom the violence and hatred dividing America and tearing at its social fabric.As important, there was the moral issue or the matter of fairness thatJohnson felt with a keenness few could fully understand.Johnson, the mostpowerful political leader in the world, was also Johnson, the poor boy fromTexas, who identified with and viscerally experienced the suffering of thedisadvantaged.He repeatedly told the story of Zephyr Wright, his cook, a college graduate, who, when driving the Vice President s official car with her husbandfrom Washington to Texas, couldn t use the facilities in a gas station torelieve herself. When they had to go to the bathroom, Johnson told Mississippi Senator John Stennis, they would.pull off on a side road, andZephyr Wright, the cook of the Vice President of the United States, wouldsquat in the road to pee. He told Stennis: That s wrong.And there oughtto be something to change that.And it seems to me that if people in Mississippi don t change it voluntarily, that it s just going to be necessary tochange it by law. His sense of outrage was even more pronounced toward Alabama Klansmen who had killed four black youngsters by setting off a bomb at a Birmingham church in September 1963.He urged FBI Director J.EdgarHoover to leave no stone unturned in finding the perpetrators.He alsoasked Hoover to step up his investigations of several other Birminghambombings tied to racial intolerance.Yet all Johnson s rhetoric could not entirely disarm the suspicions of civil 164 :: lyndon b.johnsonrights advocates.If he had felt so strongly about the issue, why had it takenhim so long to act on it? Why was he going to make an all-out fight for thecivil rights bill now? Roy Wilkins asked him at their December meeting.Johnson thought a minute, wrinkled his brow and said: You will recognizethe words I m about to repeat.Free at last, free at last.Thank God almighty,I m free at last. Borrowing from Martin Luther King s speech to the civilrights advocates who had marched on Washington in the summer of 1963,Johnson was describing himself as liberated from his southern politicalbonds or as a man who could now fully put the national interest and moralconcerns above political constraints imposed on a Texas senator.At the same time, Johnson saw civil rights reform as essential to the wellbeing of his native region.He had known for a long time that segregationnot only separated blacks and whites in the South but also separated theSouth from the rest of the nation, making it a kind of moral, economic, andpolitical outsider, a reprobate cousin or embarrassing relative the nationcould neither disown nor accept as a respectable family member.An endto southern segregation would mean the full integration of the South intothe Union, bringing with it economic progress and political influence comparable to that of other regions.And though many in the South wouldabandon their roots in the Democratic party in response, Johnson wasdetermined to administer the unpleasant medicine that would cure theregion s social disease.The election of Presidents from Georgia, Texas, andArkansas during the next thirty years testifies to the region s renewed influence in the nation anticipated by LBJ.Johnson also saw personal political gain from pressing ahead with civilrights legislation.In the fall of 1963, 50 percent of the country had felt thatKennedy was pushing too hard for integration.Only 11 percent wanted himto go faster, while 27 percent were content with his pace.By February 1964the number opposing more vigorous civil rights efforts had dropped to 30percent, and the percentages favoring more aggressive action and whatJohnson was doing had increased to 15 percent and 39 percent, respectively
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