Into the continuing Senate debate on civil rights came a powerful, persuasive, familiar third force. For a fortnight the session's bitterest battle had raged between polar opposites—Georgia's Richard Brevard Russell and his determined Southerners, Senate Republican Leader William Fife Knowland and his coalition of Republicans and Democratic liberals. Last week, with the pressures carefully remeasured, the crosscurrents analyzed, Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson calculated that it was time to come out of the wings and exercise his superb cloakroom skill in the name of moderation. Johnson's goal: enactment of a compromise civil rights bill that most of the South...
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