Word: dirksens
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...when the 70-year-old patient, staying overnight in Walter Reed Hospital for a routine early-morning checkup, swung his legs from under the covers to get up. Drowsy and unaccustomed to the high hospital bed, Everett Dirksen went sprawling onto the vinyl floor of his third-floor V.I.P. suite, instantly felt a pain shoot along his hip. The diagnosis: a fracture of the right femur...
...leader often jests about his ailments-complaining about what he likes to call "this old carcass"-last week's accident was no joke to official Washington. President Johnson, flying back from Texas, placed a worried call to the hospital and dispatched a White House plane to bring Mrs. Dirksen to her husband's bedside from Nashville, where she was visiting their daughter. Later in the week, Johnson paid Dirksen a personal call. The President's concern was more than a reflection of longstanding friendship. It was also acknowledgment of Dirksen's unique eminence in American politics...
Hours after the accident, the fractured bone was reset and pinned without complications and the patient was reported "alert and joking with his doctors." Dirksen is expected to stay in the hospital for two weeks, after which he will be on crutches for two months or so. Meanwhile, with no major legislation scheduled for immediate Senate action, the mishap had one welcome effect. His hospital stay, as Senate Democratic Leader Mike Mansfield noted, will give the hard-driving Republican a "well-earned rest...
...historic civil rights bills of 1964 and 1965 would never have become law if Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen had not marshaled the G.O.P. votes that quashed Southern resistance. Nor does the most controversial proposal in President Johnson's 1966 civil rights bill, a clause banning racial discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of all housing, have any chance of approval without Republican backing. That support may not be forthcoming for the provision, at least in its present form. Last week Dirksen pronounced the housing section "absolutely unconstitutional," on grounds that it would invade the rights of private...
Katzenbach admitted that G.O.P. support is essential. Dirksen, however, said that he could see no way in which the housing provision could be rewritten to his satisfaction and "still get the effect they want." There were suspicions, of course, that Dirksen's dubiety did not wholly reflect constitutional qualms. The G.O.P. would dearly like to see the Democrats ride into November's congressional election in the embarrassing position of having angered whites by proposing the fair-housing provision-and disappointed Negroes by failing to pass...