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genius on a grand scale, including a strategic masterstroke that brought into line behind his efforts, in a single transaction, a dozen western senators, had succeeded in persuading his twenty-one fellow southern senators—the mighty “Southern Caucus”—to allow the passage of the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction, eighty-two years earlier. It was not a strong bill. By the time Johnson had finished fashioning a compromise that the southerners would accept, provisions that would have enforced school desegregation and banned racial segregation in housing, hotels, restaurants and other public places—provisions liberals considered essential—had been removed; only a single civil right, voting, remained, and the provisions for enforcing that lone right proved largely useless. But the mere fact of the bill’spassage—that after eighty-two years in which every civil rights bill that reached the Senate had died there, one had finally been passed—was of historic significance. “It opened a major branch of American government to a tenth of the population for which all legislative doors had been slammed shut,” Johnson’s longtime press secretary, George Reedy, said. And Johnson argued—in a contention that would be vindicated by history—that although there was only one right remaining in the bill, that was the right that mattered: that it gave blacks the power to at least begin fighting for other rights. Furthermore, he pointed out, once a bill was passed, it could be amended to correct its deficiencies. “It’s just a beginning,” he said. “We’ll do it again, in a couple of years.… Don’t worry, it’s only the first.”
    Although passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act did not eliminate the distrust with which liberals viewed him—far from it; his previous record on civil rights was too long, and too southern, for that, the bill he had forced through too weak—his Washington allies felt that the sharpest edges of that distrust had been blunted. As for the southern senators, a key reason they had allowed the measure to pass was their hope that enactment of a bill with which Johnson was identified might, by lessening northern distrust of him, enable the South to get its first President in a century; they were confident that as President, Johnson would keep civil rights reform to a minimum. He had, in years of private conversations, convinced the southerners that in his heart he was on their side. “We can never make him President unless the Senate first disposes of civil rights,” Russell had explained to Reedy. So if he ran for the 1960 nomination, expectations were that the eleven southern states would be solidly behind him—a bloc of 352 votes out of the 761 needed for nomination in the Democratic convention. And he had a real chance, political observers said, to go into the convention with a large bloc of votes from the West as well. Now, at last, was the moment Lyndon Johnson had been waiting for all his life. While Adlai Stevenson was still the idol of many Democratic liberals, his two losses in presidential campaigns disqualified him in the eyes of party professionals, and anyway he had said quite definitively that he would not be a candidate. The party’s perennial hopeful,Estes Kefauver of Tennessee (Adlai’s running mate in 1956), was distrusted by these same professionals because of his stubborn independence. And Kefauver, like the other potential candidates,John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota andStuart Symington of Missouri, was a senator, and he, Lyndon Johnson, was the Senate’s
Leader, their
leader, the man they had to come to—and
had
been coming to, for years—for every large and small favor in the Senate pantry. As Lyndon Johnson surveyed the field in early 1958, none of these men seemed a particularly formidable opponent.
    If he won the nomination, furthermore, he would not have to face Eisenhower, since the beloved President would have served