Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate

by Marc C. Johnson 

In contrast to today’s polarized politics, the US Senate of the 1960s functioned with a great deal more civility and bipartisan cooperation, despite deep political divisions. This book is both a history lesson and a study in the leadership styles majority leader Michael Mansfield (Democrat) and minority leader Everett Dirksen (Republican).

“In personal style the senators from Montana and Illinois could not have been more different: Mansfield, lanky, ramrod straight, laconic, had a scholar’s precision with words. Dirksen, a perpetually rumpled bear of a man whose wavy silver hair seemed perpetually in need of a comb, was dedicated, as one reporter said, ‘to the proposition that a man should never use one word if he can dredge up twenty.’ Yet each man’s approach to rhetoric, humor, language, and political substance related directly to both men’s success and longevity as political leaders. It was not a matter of style over substance in either senator’s case, but rather an example of how style can enhance substance and provide strength and effectiveness in leadership.”

“It is not an overstatement to say that in the 1960s members of each political party were frequently united by little more than a shared label and a sense of loyalty to the partisan brand. Democrats, for example, divided along regional and ideological lines into southern conservatives and northern and western liberals… Republicans also had at least two factions… Consequentially, communication and compromise became all the more critical.”

“Senate leaders of the 1960s clearly lived in an era vastly different than our own, when politics often depended more on memorable oratory than on ten-second sound bites.”

LYNDON JOHNSON

Mansfield’s predecessor as Senate majority leader was Lyndon Johnson, whose domineering style was the opposite of Mansfield’s. The book includes an interesting insight about why John F. Kennedy chose Johnson as his running mate.

“Kennedy’s close aide Kenneth O’Donnell… wrote in a memoir, quoting Kennedy. ‘I’m 43 years old and I’m the healthiest candidate for president of the United States. You’ve traveled with me enough to know that. I’m not going to die in office, so the Vice Presidency doesn’t mean anything. I’m thinking of something else, the leadership of the Senate. If we win, it will be by a small margin and I won’t be able to live with Lyndon Johnson as the leader of a small majority in the Senate. Did it occur to you that if Lyndon Johnson becomes Vice President, I’ll have Mike Mansfield as the leader of the Senate, somebody I can trust and depend on?’”

MIKE MANSFIELD

“Mike Mansfield was a remarkably self-effacing, laconic former history professor who had once worked in copper mines of his adopted home town of Butte, Montana. Reporters frequently became exasperated with Mansfield’s cryptic ‘yup’ and ‘nope’ answers to their questions, but he came to command a level of respect, indeed reverence, that has not been seen since his departure from the Senate in 1977… Mansfield displayed an unusual trait, unthinkable to virtually all other politicians: he disdained publicity.”

“As majority leader, Mike Mansfield practiced a kind of leadership by deference, insisting that every senator without regard to party, position, or power was an equal to the other ninety-nine senators… As Mansfield told the New York Times in 1998, ‘I’ve always felt the true strength of the Senate lay in the center, not on the right and not on the left, but with those people who could see both sides and were not so convinced of their own assumptions that they wouldn’t listen to the other side.’”

“Mansfield’s foreign travel—he was easily the most traveled member of Congress—and the detailed, scholarly writing informed by those trips are, by today’s congressional standards, astounding.”

“A defining characteristic of Mike Mansfield’s approach to political leadership was his overarching sense of propriety. There were certain ways to do things, Mansfield believed, and definite standards to be maintained… ‘I am not going to turn the Senate into a circus,’ Mansfield said when challenged about his rejection of all-night or even late-night sessions.”

EVERETT DIRKSEN

“Dirksen biographer Neil MacNeil, who reported on Congress for years and became a well-regarded expert on the Senate, contended that the responsibilities of leadership changed Dirksen. ‘When he first came to the Senate, he was an arrogant and vain politician, full of himself,’ MacNeil wrote…. After Dirksen became Republican leader in 1959, MacNeil claimed, ‘he was a changed man,’ and never reverted to his old ways.”

“‘You have to hear them out,’ Dirksen would later say of his approach toward Senate colleagues. ‘You have to be careful not to be too precipitous or capricious in pointing out what the weakness of the other fellow’s case may be, especially if he is on your side of the aisle, politically speaking. So that requires, I think, gentle discussion and a gentle ‘oilcan’ art, as I call it, so that the bearings never get hot.’”

“The Chicago Sun-Times… harped on Dirksen’s inconsistencies, ‘reminding readers of Dirksen’s frequent changes of position on foreign and agricultural policies.’ Dirksen responded as he later did whenever his political ‘flexibility’ was criticized, by saying, ‘In a society such as ours you can’t plow just that one furrow. You have to re-examine your premises in the light of changing conditions.’”

“When asked to characterize Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the usually voluble Everett Dirksen did so in four words: ‘A blueprint for paradise.’ That pithy statement was not extended as praise. The minority leader bristled at much of what Johnson proposed as too big, too expensive, and too unworkable, but when he did oppose, he did so in a measured way. On one occasion, Dirksen said Johnson was pursuing his massive agenda with ‘the pop-eyed ardor of Harpo Marx chasing blondes.’ Yet his outnumbered Republican conference had two basic options: oppose the Johnson program or attempt to shape it. Dirksen chose the latter course.”

NUCLEAR TEST BAN TREATY – 1963

After the Cuban missile crisis, president Kennedy “pressed the Soviet premier for a renewed effort to negotiate a test ban treaty.” On July 25, presidential envoy Averill Harriman, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, and British negotiator Lord Hailsham came to agreement on a draft of the treaty.

Kennedy faced considerable resistance, including from the military Joint Chiefs of Staff. Republican National Committee Chairman William E. Miller warned, “the complete record of the Russians ever since World War II is breaking every single promise they ever made.” Constituent mail was also strongly opposed to the treaty.

Mansfield and Dirksen met Kennedy at the White House and advised him on what he needed to do to overcome objections impeding a Senate approval. “‘Now this is a little presumptuous on my part,’ Dirksen told Kennedy as he began reading aloud the draft of a letter he was hoping the president would agree to send to the Senate. The proposed letter offered ‘unqualified and unequivocal assurances’ that the United States would pursue underground nuclear testing, maintain a posture of readiness to resume atmospheric testing, enhance detection capabilities to ensure the Russians were not cheating, and maintain a robust weapons development capability. Kennedy readily agreed to send the letter with Dirksen’s proposed language… After the meeting, Dirksen immediately announced he would support the treaty and would resist any efforts to amend or attach reservations to the agreement.”

On September 24, 1963, the Senate approved the treaty with 14 more votes than the required two-thirds.

CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964

“When the Civil Rights Act arrived in the Senate on February 17, 1964, having passed the House a week before,” Mansfield assigned majority whip Hubert Humphrey to “assume direct responsibility for the handling of this legislation on the floor,” rather than having it go through the Judiciary Committee. “The move was also critical to keep Mansfield in the position of an honest broker who could remain above the hourly wrangling over legislative details while keeping communications open with all Senate factions.”

“Georgia’s powerful, segregationist Democrat Richard B. Russell led the Senate’s anti-civil rights Southerners.”

“Washington journalists and civil rights activists saw delay as a sign that failure loomed, but Dirksen needed time to persuade 20 to 25 of his Republican colleagues that a civil rights bill was more than a priority of a Democratic administration, but indeed was a national imperative.”

“‘I carried the flag in the Eisenhower administration for all civil rights legislation,’ Dirksen told the NAACP’s Clarence Mitchell, and for his trouble he was now being portrayed as an opponent to civil rights. Mitchell was alarmed at Dirksen’s anger toward Black leaders because, like Lyndon Johnson and Mike Mansfield, he knew that without Dirksen there would be no civil rights bill.”

“Dirksen’s willingness to oppose the presidential candidate of his own party [Barry Goldwater] on the highest-profile issue in the country remains a remarkable statement about the minority leader’s conviction that the time had come for the Senate to address civil rights.”

“Final passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 came on June 20, the 83rd day of debate… 73 in favor, 27 opposed.”

VOTING RIGHTS ACT OF 1965

“The filibuster against the voting rights legislation consumed 24 days, roughly one-third the time southern Democrats had talked against the Civil Rights Act. The cloture vote on May 25 was 70 to 30, with the bill passing the next day by a vote of 77 to 19… The House and Senate versions of the legislation had to be reconciled, and in the end Mansfield and Dirksen brokered an agreement permitting poll taxes to continue but giving the attorney general the power to investigate any potentially discriminatory use of poll taxes at state and local levels.”

This struck me as odd. My understanding was that poll taxes were made unconstitutional the year before. The book does not discuss the 24th Amendment to the Constitution, which was approved by the House and Senate in 1962, and ratified by the states in 1964.

Wikipedia offers some additional context: “When the 24th Amendment was ratified in 1964, five states still retained a poll tax: Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia. The amendment prohibited requiring a poll tax for voters in federal elections. But it was not until 1966 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections that poll taxes for any level of elections were unconstitutional. It said these violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Subsequent litigation related to potential discriminatory effects of voter registration requirements has generally been based on application of this clause.”

VIETNAM WAR

“During his 1962 trip, one of his frequent visits to Vietnam, Mansfield rejected the canned, optimistic, and often superficial briefings that were offered up to visitors by US embassy personnel in Saigon. Instead, he met alone with four American reporters.”

“Mansfield’s outreach to Saigon reporters, as he surely knew, came at the very time many journalists were under fire from Washington politicians… Kennedy had complained personally to Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger about Halberstam’s reporting, pointedly telling the publisher that Halberstam should be replaced. He was not replaced and Halberstam later won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Vietnam.”

“Back from his [six-week] globe-circling trip, Mansfield produced two lengthy and remarkable reports, one for public release… and a second that he supplied privately to Kennedy… When Kennedy finished reading, he said, ‘Mike, this is not what my people are telling me.’”

“Mansfield told biographer Don Oberdorpher that he verbally conveyed to Kennedy his strong belief that the United States should not send more troops to Vietnam and should instead begin a withdrawal.”

Mansfield made another trip to Saigon in 1965 and again wrote up his assessment.

Scripps-Howard columnist Richard Starnes wrote, “‘It strips away the deceit, the foolishness and the wishful thinking, and exposes gathering disaster in Southeast Asia in all its naked horror’ … The headline above the column in the Missoulian was stark: ‘Mansfield Report Shows Viet Nam War Could Be Endless.’”

“‘He didn’t like it,’ Mansfield said of Johnson’s reaction to his blunt reporting.”

“Even accounting for complex and shifting Senate politics, including the chasms existing within both parties on Vietnam, the fact that Mansfield and Dirksen, who were so skillful in advancing bipartisan consensus on critical national priorities in the 1960s, failed to find constructive common ground on Vietnam ranks as their singular leadership failure… 55,000 dead, 305,000 wounded.”

SENATE SCANDAL

“Only once in his long political career did scandal even remotely attach to Mike Mansfield, and that scandal was a legacy of Lyndon Johnson’s tenure as majority leader. Early on, Mansfield’s colleagues had warned him about Bobby Baker, the smooth South Carolinian and one-time Senate page who rose, through ambition, scheming, and guile, to become Johnson’s indispensable aide as secretary of the Senate.”

“At least one senator did not hold Bobby Baker in high regard. John J. Williams, a starchy, irascible Republican from Delaware, considered Baker at best a shyster, at worst a crook… Williams demanded an investigation of Baker’s finances. How had Baker financed a side business—The Quorum Club—a hangout for lobbyists, congressional staffers, young women, and old senators, located across the street from what is now the Russell Senate Office Building? How had Baker managed to acquire a resort hotel on the Maryland shore?”

“The Baker affair eventually faded from headlines, but Baker’s troubles persisted. He was indicted in 1967 for tax evasion, fraud, and theft and ultimately served 16 months in prison.”

I was not familiar with the role Secretary of the Senate, so I did a quick search. The Secretary of the Senate is the keeper of legislative records and chief financial officer. According to the Senate website, the Secretary of the Senate from 1955-1965 was Felton M. Johnson. Bobby Baker never held this position.

Rather, Baker was Senate Democratic Party Secretary from 1955-1963. “Momentum for reform grew after Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, Secretary to the Senate Democratic Majority, resigned from his job in October 1963, following allegations that he had misused his official position for personal financial gain.”

TELEVISION’S ROLE

“CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, who often covered Congress in the 1960s, began to notice a change in the Senate as the decade progressed. Despite Mansfield’s constant efforts and personal example, civility was suffering. Schorr had to admit that television was responsible. Senators, Schorr recalled, ‘frequently raised their voices for no reason at all, just because they knew it would get our attention by doing that.’ Dr. King complained to Schorr that the now-ubiquitous presence of television, always seeking out conflict, also influenced the civil rights movement by focusing on the most inflammatory, radical language while exhibiting little interest in King’s nonviolent approach to protest.”

The role of media is an interesting postscript to the book’s main subject. I think we can extend this thought from where the author leaves off.

Daily newspapers and weekly newsmagazines were still widely read in the 1960s. Television and then cable news became bigger influences in subsequent decades. In more recent years, social media dominates. Arguably, journalism as it was known in the 1960s no longer exists; the advertising that funded it now goes to Google and Facebook. This is a shame, because as the Mansfield reports on Vietnam demonstrated, White House press releases are not exactly a reliable source of truth. In any case, we have ever-greater immediacy of increasingly shallow information, fueling the polarized soundbite culture of today’s politics.

Johnson, Marc C. Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate. University of Oklahoma Press, 2023. Buy from Amazon.com

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. I received a review copy of this book.

Selected books cited:

Dirksen on Debt

Mansfield report to Montanans

Published by andreweverett360