Johnsons voting recorda record twenty years long, dating back to his arrival in the House of Representatives in 1937 and continuing up to that very daywas consistent with the accent and the word. During those twenty years, he had never supported civil rights legislationany civil rights legislation. In Senate and House alike, his record was an unbroken one of votes against every civil rights bill that had ever come to a vote: against voting rights bills; against bills that would have struck at job discrimination and at segregation in other areas of American life; even against bills that would have protected blacks from lynching. His first speech in the Senatea ringing defense of the filibuster that was a key southern tactichad opened with the words We of the South, and thereafter, as this book will demonstrate, he had been not merely a member of the Senates southern anticivil rights bloc, but an active member...
Sometimes he (Johnson) would indulge in an even more blatant manifestation of his power. Somehow the vote hadnt worked out as he had thought it would; he was a vote or two short of victory. So a vote or two would be changedright out in the open. Johnson would walk across the floor to a senator who had been in opposition, and whisper to him, and the senator would rise and signal the clerk that he had been incorrectly recorded. You would see votes changed right in front of your eyes, the Senate aide says. Neil MacNeil, who knew the Senate so well, could hardly believe what he was seeing. He did it in front of God, MacNeil was to recall. It didnt happen much, but it happened. He was absolutely brazen about it. He put the arm on guys right on the floor.
Sometimes Johnson would not even bother to walk across the floor. Once he yelled across the well to Frear, who was sitting at his desk: Change your vote, Allen! The Senator from Delaware did not immediately respond, so Johnson yelled again, in a shout heard, in the words of one writer, by more than eighty senators and the galleries: Change your vote, Allen! Allen changed his vote. Small wonder that Hugh Sidey, remembering years later the tall man with his mind attuned to every sight and sound and parliamentary nuance, who signaled the roll calls faster or slower, who gave another signal, and the door would open, and two more guys would run in, would say, My Godrunning the world! Power enveloped him.
If I may borrow a phrase from the sainted leader of the Democrt's civil rights movement, then Harry Belefonte is one goddamned nigra who knows how to serve his Democrat masters.