Word: prayers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Keys, SANE's executive director, says: "Now it's not enough to run full-page ads in the New York Times. You have to run double-page spreads." In fact, petitions are apt to be most successful on local issues. Nationally, a notable failure involved the school prayer amendment, which again died in Congress, even though Sponsor Everett Dirksen could point to petitions signed by some 500,000 people. While Dirksen professes to take the "wagonloads" of such documents seriously, most Washington legislators are wary of them, suspect that many people do not know what they are signing...
...losing his eyesight. Though a sure winner, he declined to run for a ninth term and went home to Pekin, Ill., to pray. Dirksen, who today is almost as sound of vision as he is of voice, is genuinely convinced that what saved him from blindness was prayer-and he is determined to pass on its 20/20 benefits to the rest...
Last week, fresh from his successful battle to kill the 1966 Civil Rights Act, Dirksen rose in the Senate to introduce his so-called "Amen Amendment"-a measure designed to strike at two Supreme Court decisions by modifying the First Amendment so as to permit voluntary prayer in public schools. Few religious leaders favored the amend ment, but that hardly daunted the minority leader. Who did support his cause? "Not the professionals in the church hierarchy," declared Dirksen. "Not the cocktail-party, luncheon-circuit bunch. I'm talking about the church members-the rank and file-and they...
Nobody had to. Dirksen got expected support from most Republicans and Southern Democrats, but he ran into a formidable obstacle in the form of North Carolina Democrat Sam Ervin, whose concern for the Constitution rivals Dirksen's passion for prayer. "For God's sake," bellowed Ervin, "and for freedom's sake, let us not vest arbitrary permission power in school boards." When the vote came, Dirksen never really had a prayer. Though he won a 49-to-37 majority, he fell nine short of the two-thirds margin required to amend the Constitution...
...kind of bipartisan support that Johnson himself gave President Eisenhower, or to with-hold it -- as he did over the new civil rights bill. With vital legislation teetering between passage and defeat, Dirksen could tip the vote against bills in order to drum up bargaining power for his prayer amendment. And if the Republicans make the expected off-year gains this November in the Senate, the minority leader's leverage will increase...