Troubling Dwight Eisenhower and many another American at week's end was a civil rights vote as surprising as it had been dramatic. Climaxing a legislative day that spanned 14 maneuver-packed hours, the Senate, in the minutes after a muggy Washington midnight, agreed to tack on to Part IV the disputed amendment guaranteeing trial by jury to any person charged with criminal contempt.
In achieving the decision, Senate Democratic leadership skillfully gutted the first civil rights bill to approach congressional approval in 82 years. It was a triumph—of a sort—for the strategy laid down weeks earlier by the commander of the Southern Democratic rearguard, Georgia's Senator Richard Brevard Russell (see below). No one claimed that the debate had not been full or the tactics fair (the South argued redundantly but on the points at issue), or that the net bill did not mark some slight progress. But by the same token, no one could argue that the verdict was not a hard slap in the face of a nation generally trying to live up to its own constitutional guarantees. It was also a shrewd political blow to an Administration that put presidential prestige and power behind a strong bill and to the Republican leadership that had staked its political prestige on the outcome.
Word from Harvard. As the week's infighting commenced, Minority Leader William Fife Knowland seemed to have every right to mask his customary gravity with a confident smile. Five days earlier he had been beaten when the Senate struck out the bill's sweeping Part III and limited the bill only to enforcing the right of all qualified citizens to vote (TIME, Aug. 5). But he had bounced back to re-form his coalition of Republicans and Democratic liberals for a surer battle. He had grown so certain that he could fend off attempts to weaken the enforcement powers of Part IV with compulsory jury trials that he declined White House aid lest it offend his group of Northern Democratic liberals. By midweek Bill Knowland could tick off a safe 39 Republicans, another ten or eleven Democrats ranged against the jury trial.
What Bill Knowland did not realize was the essential infirmity of his "sure" votes. A handful of moderates in both parties—enough to swing the scales—still had serious doubts over the complex legal problem of jury trials in contempt cases. Massachusetts' Democrat Jack Kennedy had asked four Harvard law professors whether the concept of jury trials in criminal contempt cases was sound or not, received an unhelpful 2-2 reply.
Candy Coating. Across the Senate aisle from Knowland sat a man who shrewdly sensed the fence sitters' quandary. And Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had staked out a role for himself as compromiser, set about trying to get passed the kind of jury-trial amendment that Dick Russell and his diehard Southerners would not filibuster against. Johnson's solution: to lure the doubtful and undecided, he would try to sweeten the jury-trial amendment by adding some kind of "new civil right."