Word: cellers
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Still at issue was a civil rights bill produced by an eleven-member Judiciary subcommittee chaired by Brooklyn's civil righteous Democratic Representative Emanuel Celler, who also heads the full Judiciary Committee. That bill went far beyond what the Kennedy Administration had asked-and far beyond what either the House or the Senate would accept...
...Administration, fearful that the barbed-wire subcommittee bill would snag all chances for civil rights legislation this year, put Celler under heavy pressure to back down and support a more moderate measure. He agreed, and with the help of Ohio Republican William McCulloch, ranking minority member of the Judiciary Committee, put together a shaky coalition in favor of modifying the subcommittee bill...
...only for his devotion to the bidding of Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley and as a master of the malapropism-he once welcomed autumn as the time when "the moss is on the pumpkin." Gingerly handling the prickly political pear that the civil rights bill had become, Manny Celler needed someone to make the necessary Judiciary Committee motions to delete the toughest sections of the subcommittee package. He picked Libonati, partly because of Lib's record of strict party obedience, partly because Lib did not need to worry about political repercussions in his machine-run district...
Libonati was happy to oblige, and all might have gone well-if Celler had kept his mouth shut and if Lib were not a televiewer. But Celler submitted to a television interview, Libonati caught the show, and did not like what he heard. Explained Libonati later...
...Inevitable Outbursts. Manny Celler got the message. Late in the week he promised to "put aside my own feelings" and "exert every effort" toward reporting a compromise version of the bill from his committee within two weeks. Inevitably, there were some angry outbursts. Clarence Mitchell, Washington director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, cried that "there is no reason for this kind of sellout." The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, an association of top civil rights leaders, sent a three-page letter to Celler urging him to ignore Bobby's advice. For all that...