Word: dirksenism
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...Taking a second look at David Stone Martin's cover portrait of Senator Kennedy a question came to mind. Would Bobby be flattered by a picture which makes him look like a young Everett Dirksen...
...months, with all the rhetorical flourishes at his command, Everett Dirksen had trumpeted his implacable opposition to the Administration's 1966 civil rights bill. Even so, when Dirksen was ushered into the President's oval office last week, Lyndon Johnson clapped a hand on his shoulder and said plaintively: "Ev, I thought you were in my corner." "Mr. President," replied the Senate minority leader, "how long has it been since I told you that I wasn't in your corner?" Then Johnson asked: "Is the door absolutely closed?" Dirksen: "Absolutely." Next year too? "If you send...
With this exchange, the bill was clearly doomed. Against a backdrop of Negro-incited violence in the cities, the public showed little enthusiasm for new ventures into civil rights-and outright antipathy to the bill's open-housing section. What is disturbing the nation, in Dirksen's phrase, is "conduct, not color." Indeed, the Administration itself had lobbied only halfheartedly for the measure. As a result, its Senate supporters failed last week by ten votes to get the two-thirds majority needed to stop a filibuster against it by imposing cloture. In a last, hopeless attempt to resuscitate...
...physical harm of civil rights workers or of voters. It would also forbid discrimination in the sale or rental of housing by anyone selling or leasing more than three units (other than their own house) in any one year. It is this provision that prompted Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen to oppose the law as "unconstitutional" and refuse to put his enormous prestige behind the measure. When the Democratic leadership tried to bring the bill to the floor, it took two days even to muster a quorum...
...There is a cyclonic enthusiasm for something other than this bill," said Dirksen. The housing clause would be the first civil rights legislation to hit harder north of the Mason-Dixon line than south of it. From New York to Los Angeles, the law's provision would strike at thousands of entrenched white neighborhoods like the Chicago suburb where whites battled Negro marchers this summer. Few Senators are anxious to go on record in support of the bill, and many Negro leaders, who hoped for a much tougher housing clause, maintain that it is so watered down...