(3 of 7)
Presidential Break. Senator Russell had assigned himself the most exacting and perhaps the most surprising role of all: any harsh words that had to be spoken would be spoken not by Georgia's cowlicked Talmadge, not by Mississippi's Racist Jim Eastland, but by Richard Brevard Russell himself. It was understood without words that a diatribe from a Talmadge or an Eastland would predictably get lost, as usual, in the Senate swirl; but if it came from reasonable, respected Dick Russell, a sharp blast would be heard with respectful attention. One day last month Dick Russell put on a brand-new, dark blue (his best color) suit, took the Senate floor to denounce the civil rights bill as nothing but another Reconstruction-style force bill, "cunningly contrived," based on bayonet rule, and designed to "destroy the separate system for the races on which the social order of the Southern states is built.
"If it is proposed to move into the South in this fashion," he cried, "the concentration camps may as well be prepared now, because there will not be enough jails to hold the people of the South who will oppose the use of raw federal power forcibly to commingle white and Negro children in the same schools and in places of public entertainment."
The speech and the strategy had precisely the telling effect that Dick Russell had intended. President Eisenhower began to back away—"I was reading part of that bill this morning and there were certain phrases I didn't completely understand"—and set up a man-to-man meeting with Dick Russell in the White House. Such Northern Republicans as Massachusetts' Leverett Saltonstall and New Jersey's Alexander Smith, such Western liberal Democrats as Montana's Mike Mansfield and New Mexico's Clinton P. Anderson allowed that they had no notions of coercing the South. Such powerful Northern newspapers as the New York Times, Washington Post and Times Herald and the Washington Star carefully re-examined their consciences to see whether they were being fair to Russell's position, came out extolling a great many of its merits.
As the South gained one point after another in debate, the rearguard commander became a new kind of Confederate hero back home. "The South owes a great debt to Senator Russell," cheered the often critical Savannah News. "He has proven himself an unflinching champion of the region that gave him birth." Said the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "The South's hour may not yet be at hand."