Vice President Lyndon Johnson grasped the worn ivory ball that serves him as a gavel, rapped smartly, and declared: "Two-thirds of the Senators present and voting having voted in the affirmative, the sense of the Senate is that debate shall be brought to a close."
That was the announcement of a historic action: the U.S. Senate, which prides itself as the earth's last bastion of unlimited debate, had just imposed cloture on a small band of filibustering liberal Democrats. For seven days the filibusterers had tied up the Senate by fighting an Administration bill that would turn over communications satellites to a corporation owned half by the public and half by private companies. Led by Oregon's splenetic Wayne Morse, they charged that the measure was a "giveaway" by Government, principally to the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. Ironically, the liberals used the same tactics for which they had long denounced Southern Senators fighting civil rights legislation.
Back to Caesar. The cloture vote came hard to Senators fond of tracing the history of the legislative filibuster back to ancient Rome, where an eloquent praetor named Julius Caesar tried (unsuccessfully) to talk to death a measure ordering the execution of Catiline's coconspirators.
Until 1917 the U.S. Senate did not have a clear-cut rule to limit debate. That year eleven Senators filibustered against President Woodrow Wilson's proposal to arm merchant ships, precipitating a famed presidential denunciation: "A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible." Under Wilson's angry urging, the Senate adopted Rule XXII, which provided that cloture could be invoked by two-thirds of the Senators present and voting.
Still the Senators droned on and on.
Eleven times cloture votes have been taken against Southerners filibustering against civil rights; eleven times the votes have failed. Until last week, cloture had not been imposed since 1927, when Drys gagged a filibuster by Wets against a bill to beef up Prohibition enforcement.
Just Stay Away. Last week's pro-cloture forces were headed by Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. Nearing the end of a frustrating Senate session, and smarting under charges that his mild-mannered methods were at fault, Mansfield finally began to act like a Senate leader. White House aides were ready to get into the fight, but Mansfield, fearing that they would only irritate the Senators, asked them to stay clear. Then, with the help of Oklahoma's Robert Kerr, Mansfield went to work.
His problem was plain to see. The key to imposing cloture lay with Southern Senators—most of them dead set against the filibustering liberals but, by tradition and principle, violently opposed to cloture. First, Mansfield tried to persuade Georgia's Richard Russell to vote for cloture. Said Russell: "I'll vote to gag the Senate when shrimps start to whistle Dixie." In the vote, Russell cast a resounding "no." But significantly, he did not try to influence his Southern Senate followers.