Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at Politico and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, as well as author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The placid town of Piqua, Ohio, sits in the state’s west-central section, barely half-an-hour’s ride from the Dayton bicycle shop where Orville and Wilbur Wright helped prove that man could fly. Its name comes from the Shawnee Indian phrase “Othath-He-Waugh-Pe-Qua,” meaning “He has risen from the ashes!” and its best-known homegrown product is probably the Mills Brothers, the close harmony African-American singing ensemble that thrived from the Great Depression through the Vietnam War. The modern municipality incorporates a community once known as Rossville, which became the first free-black enclave in the region after a local slave owner’s death in 1833.

Today, Piqua is represented in Congress by the Honorable John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, who has shown himself politically unwilling (or at least unable) to protect gay men and lesbians from employment discrimination, to address the need for comprehensive immigration reform or simply to keep the government up and running in the face of the tea party’s caprice last fall.


Fifty years ago, the congressman from Piqua was an equally conservative fellow — but an altogether different man. His name was Bill McCulloch, and at the height of John F. Kennedy’s effort to pass the first comprehensive federal civil rights law since Reconstruction, it was McCulloch — a now forgotten figure — who rose above mere partisanship to give first Kennedy, and then Lyndon B. Johnson, the power to pass the single most important law of the 20th century.

McCulloch’s name is hardly a household one — even in Ohio. But one witness to the role he played in forcing the country to live up to its founding creed bore passionate, private testimony to his importance. “Please forgive the emotional tone of this letter,” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis wrote from aboard the yacht Christina, when she got word in 1971 of McCulloch’s planned retirement from Congress. “But I want you to know how much your example means to me.”

“I know that you, more than anyone, were responsible for the civil rights legislation of the 1960s,” she continued. “You made a personal commitment to President Kennedy in October 1963, against all the interests of your district. When he was gone, your personal integrity and character were such that you held to that commitment despite enormous pressure and political temptations not to do so. There were so many opportunities to sabotage the bill, without appearing to do so, but you never took them. On the contrary, you brought everyone else along with you.

“And as for my dear Jack, it is a precious thought to me that in the last month of his life, when he had so many problems that seemed insoluble, he had the shining gift of your nobility, to give him the hope and faith he needed to carry on.”

***

William Moore McCulloch was a rock-ribbed conservative Republican from small town Ohio — and also a passionate backer of civil rights. He was the ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee and his conditions for supporting the bill drove the legislative strategy of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and required trying something that had never succeeded before: breaking a civil rights filibuster in the Senate.

In popular myth, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was the work of Martin Luther King Jr.’s street demonstrations, John Kennedy’s murder and Lyndon B. Johnson’s indomitable will. The full story is more complex — and far more interesting. And Bill McCulloch was at its very heart. On July 2, 1963 — the same day that leading civil rights groups met in New York to plan the March on Washington, Burke Marshall, the Kennedy administration’s point man on civil rights, flew to Ohio for a crucial meeting with McCulloch, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee. McCulloch was an important member of Congress, but in the custom of the day, he still kept his hometown law office in Piqua, on the second floor of the National Bank Building, where the sole decoration was a framed copy of an excerpt from Edmund Burke’s letter to the electors of Bristol, in which the great 18th-century statesman had declared: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Judgment was precisely what Bill McCulloch had been delivering to the voters of Ohio’s 4th Congressional District since 1947. In most ways, he was a conventionally conservative Republican, an avatar of fiscal probity. “There is no such thing as easy money from Washington,” he declared during his 1948 campaign. He was among the few members of Congress who never spent his entire office allowance, but instead returned the excess funds to the government.

The March on Washington. | Marion S. Trikosko/Library of Congress

But McCulloch was the descendant of pre-Civil War abolitionists, and he was an avid supporter of civil rights, even though his district had a black population of just 2.7 percent. In January 1963 — 4½ months before Kennedy addressed the nation promising a broad civil rights law — McCulloch had introduced his own civil rights measure in the House. But the Democrats who controlled the House had yet to schedule a single hearing on McCulloch’s measure — or on any of nearly 90 similar Republican-backed bills, including one from New York’s charismatic young Rep. John Lindsay. So McCulloch was more than ripe for Burke Marshall’s appeal. But he had two strict conditions.

First, McCulloch told Marshall that he expected the Kennedy administration to support a strong but practical bill, one that could pass the full House, and then to fight for that very same bill in the Senate, without accepting amendments that would weaken its impact or effectiveness. McCulloch had backed civil rights bills in 1957 and 1960, only to be dismayed when their toughest provisions were bargained away in the Senate. If Kennedy’s new bill suffered a similar fate, McCulloch warned, House Republicans would oppose it when it came back to the House for final approval — and no civil rights bill could pass either chamber without Republican support. Second, McCulloch wanted the White House to give full public credit to Republicans for the bill.

Kennedy accepted McCulloch’s terms, and an improbable alliance was born. But McCulloch’s demands had a fateful effect on all the subsequent legislative strategy. His insistence on no softening of the measure in the Senate – and his undoubted ability to deliver Republican votes — assured that the administration would have to attempt something that had never before succeeded in American history: to break a civil rights filibuster in the Senate, rather than avoid one by watering down the bill to cut off debate. McCulloch drove a hard bargain, but no man was ever more fair.

***

William Moore McCulloch was born in 1901 and raised on the family homestead. He earned a law degree from The Ohio State University, and after graduation, he taught school for a year before moving to Jacksonville, Fla., where he began the practice of law — and first witnessed the day-to-day realities of Jim Crow segregation. He returned to establish a thriving law practice in Piqua and steadily rose in local politics, eventually becoming speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives.

At the end of World War II, when the leaders of Piqua’s local NAACP chapter determined to integrate the local bus station’s lunch counter, it was McCulloch to whom they turned in case legal help should be needed. But the owner promptly desegregated the establishment, and McCulloch’s aid was not required.

A frugal man of simple tastes, he favored red suspenders and loved pumpkin pie (served with cold turkey gravy at the local Elks Club). He worked seven days a week, employed an office staff of one or two and returned home every June to make the rounds of his district, borrowing a room in each local courthouse where held open house, a pencil always ready in his shirt pocket for taking notes. One of his favorite phrases, with family or friends, was “Are you sure?” — as if by testing their assumptions, he might test his own. He liked a martini, but his limit was one. “If I ordered a second drink, I would get a look or an ‘Are you sure?’” his son-in-law David Carver would recall.

McCulloch had an unusually considered view of his job. “The function of Congress is not to convert the will of the majority of people into law; rather its function is to hammer out on the anvil of public debate a compromise between polar positions acceptable to a majority,” he would tell his House colleagues on the eve of his retirement in 1972, contrasting their work with the direct democracy of a town meeting, in which one position always prevails and the other loses. “In a republic, representatives vote for the people. There is discussion and debate. There are amendments. There is opportunity for compromise. It is less clear that there is a losing side.”

***

McCulloch’s Democratic counterpart on the Judiciary Committee, Chairman Emanuel Celler, could hardly have been more different — though the two had by this point served on the committee together for 16 years and were good friends. Celler, a scrappy, balding, bespectacled lawyer from Brooklyn, had first been elected to Congress during the Warren G. Harding administration and was a fierce liberal who had vigorously battled Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Yet the very differences between Manny Celler and Bill McCulloch now allowed for a most unusual division of labor — one that would produce serious short-term strains and stresses for their friendship, but ultimate success for the civil rights bill, formally known as H.R. 7152.

Emanuel Celler, a crusty liberal Democrat from Brooklyn (with a thriving immigration law practice on the side) chaired the House Judiciary Committee, and in the fall of 1963, he bowed so deeply to the wishes of organized civil rights groups who wanted a maximalist bill that he risked losing the vital support of Bill McCulloch and the other House Republicans whose support would be needed to overcome the Southern segregationists' opposition.

Throughout that summer and into the fall, the conservative McCulloch would become the Kennedy administration’s strongest friend on the bill. In a series of secret back-channel meetings with top Justice Department lawyers, he would work to make sure that H.R. 7152 could draw enough Republican support to pass the House and survive the Senate. For example, he proposed to alter the section of the bill dealing with public school desegregation, to permit the government to give technical assistance to local school boards to integrate schools, but not to address instances of racial imbalance that already existed. That had the effect of barring legal segregation in the South, while accepting de facto segregation in the North. Kennedy’s alliance with McCulloch was unorthodox, but it bore fruit.

“He was very reasonable,” said David Filvaroff, who arrived as a young legal aide in the Justice Department in the fall of 1963. “He cared about one thing: When others would stand up and talk about a Kennedy power grab leading toward dictatorship, he would stand up and say, ‘This is a reasonable, moderate bill,’ and you could just see all the air go out of the other side.”

If McCulloch was now the administration’s improbable insider, it fell to Manny Celler and the outside civil rights groups to try to strengthen the bill. Their time-tested strategy was to present the Senate with a maximalist piece of legislation, so that even if parts of it had to be bargained away what remained would be as far-reaching as possible. They were not privy to McCulloch’s deal with Kennedy and instead assumed that he and his fellow Republicans wanted to weaken the bill.

McCulloch and Celler | William M. McCulloch Papers, Ohio State University

In the end, Celler could not resist his fellow liberals’ entreaties or their increasingly sharp attacks. When the detailed drafting on H.R. 7152 began in earnest in closed hearings of Celler’s subcommittee, he rammed through a raft of changes that strengthened the Kennedy bill — by extending its voting rights protections to state and local elections, by allowing the attorney general to intervene in cases in which a person was denied access to virtually any public facility operated by any state or local government, including parks and libraries, and by forcing the desegregation of virtually every kind of business, including private schools and law firms.

Civil rights groups were jubilant, but Bill McCulloch was livid.

For weeks, he had been working to avoid just this outcome. “It’s a pail of garbage,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

President Kennedy was almost as distraught. He had been receiving upbeat reports that a more moderate bill was on track, and his frustration with the purists boiled over in a meeting with the head of the National Council of Churches. “The fact of the matter is, as you know, that a lot of these people would rather have an issue than a bill,” the president complained. “But, as I said from the beginning, to get a bill, we got to have bipartisanship.” And the key to that — the key to getting the needed Republican votes — was Bill McCulloch. “McCulloch can deliver 60 Republicans,” Kennedy said. “Without him, it can’t be done.”

***

McCulloch and his fellow Republicans insisted that the White House would have to use the full Judiciary Committee to clean up the mess that Celler and the liberals had made of H.R. 7152. The man chosen to deliver that message to the administration was a character every bit as singular as McCulloch or Celler — House Minority Leader Charles Abraham Halleck of Indiana.

Halleck, a scrapper from Hoosier farm country, had been gleefully battling Democrats since the days of the New Deal. The historian Eric Goldman once described his political views as “just left of King George III.” With his W.C. Fields nose and gravel-voiced Midwestern twang, he was one-half of the Republican congressional leadership, teamed with his Senate counterpart, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, in a weekly news conference of loyal opposition that the New York Times’s Tom Wicker had dubbed “The Ev and Charlie Show,” and that President Kennedy compared to the popular television drama about Prohibition-era gangsters and their tangle with federal agents, "The Untouchables."

Halleck held court in a hideaway office off a basement corridor of the Capitol, presiding over what he called “The Clinic,” his bibulous answer to former Speaker Sam Rayburn’s famous “Board of Education,” the private group of pals and protégés with whom Rayburn shared his opinions and wisdom regarding pending legislative business over Virginia Gentleman bourbon and branch water. In Halleck’s salon, the tipple of choice was Grant’s Standfast Scotch. He was, a friend would recall, a man who “never succumbed to the modernist theory that booze interferes with brain function.” (When Larry O’Brien once told Lyndon B. Johnson that Halleck worried that he might have been a little rough in a telephone call with Johnson because “he had a couple of pops,” Johnson demurred, “No, every time I talk to him, he’s drinking.” “Yeah, well, you catch him after noontime, that’s the way it has to be,” O’Brien replied.)

Now, as the bill arrived in the full Judiciary Committee, it was Halleck who told the Kennedy team that the Republicans would go halfway toward fixing the flawed subcommittee measure, but only halfway. They would also need backing from liberal Northern Democrats. Otherwise, he threatened, the Republicans would oppose any ameliorating amendments, condemning the bill to certain death at the hands of the Southern segregationists on the House floor.

Charles Abraham Halleck, a self-described "gut fighter" from Indiana, was the House Republican leader. He represented almost no black constituents, but in the custom of the day, heeded the wishes of his party's leading expert on civil rights: Bill McCulloch. Halleck risked his own political standing by backing first John Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson on the civil rights bill.

Like Bill McCulloch, Halleck had hardly any black constituents in his western Indiana district, and he was under assault from correspondents upset that he might support Kennedy’s civil rights program. On June 16, Frank Farr of San Diego demanded, “Would you care to have niggers in your home, marrying into your family, of course you would not. They have only been out of Africa and the trees for a short period of time.” Nonetheless, out of loyalty to McCulloch, Halleck found himself agreeing to help the White House salvage the bill.

***

Attorney General Robert Kennedy did his part, telling the Judiciary Committee that “Differences as to approach and emphasis must not be permitted to be escalated into the arena of politics — or else the country will be the loser.” McCulloch and the Kennedy team had agreed to scale back the bill. “What I want is a bill, not an issue,” Robert Kennedy said — just the opposite of the dismissive formulation that his brother had used in deriding the high-minded purism of the liberal groups. Predictably, the civil rights groups hit the ceiling. Clarence Mitchell, the NAACP’s chief Washington lobbyist, called it a “sellout.”

What the liberals saw was compromise and surrender. What they could not appreciate — in part because of the mutual mistrust that had built up — was the Kennedy administration’s hard-headed determination to produce a bill that could pass the House, by any means necessary.

Roland Libonati, a regular in Chicago's Democratic machine, drew the wrath of his political patron, Mayor Richard Daley, by waffling on the bill, after initially promising to help save it. A onetime lawyer for Al Capone, he paid the price for his perfidy when the Daley organization refused to support his reelection.

Manny Celler had agreed to get the ball rolling by amending the bill to limit voting rights provisions to federal elections. To offer this measure he had handpicked Rep. Roland “Libby” Libonati, a stalwart member of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago Democratic machine — and a onetime lawyer for Al Capone — who could usually be counted on to follow the party line. When the full Judiciary Committee met in early October, Libonati made his motion, as arranged. But for procedural reasons, the committee was forced to adjourn before a vote could be taken. That gave the liberals time to block Libonati’s move.

Libonati had his pride and did not want to look like anybody’s stooge, especially if he was one. His resolve was further softened when he happened to catch a television appearance in which Manny Celler, his own pride on the line, continued to insist for public consumption that he would resist efforts to weaken the bill. “I’m watching television and who do I see on the television but my chairman,” Libonati complained. “And he’s telling ’em up there in his district that he’s for a strong bill, and he doesn’t have anything to do with any motion to cut the bill down. So when I hear that, I says to myself, ‘Lib, where are we at here, anyway?’”

RFK making a speech on June 14, 1963. | Warren K. Leffler/Library of Congress

So when the Judiciary Committee reconvened nearly two weeks later, with Libonati’s pending motion as the first order of business, he withdrew it. Complete chaos ensued. At last, Rep. Arch Moore, a pro-civil rights Republican from West Virginia, grew so disgusted by all the maneuvering that he moved to send the strong subcommittee bill to the full House, with a favorable recommendation — the course the administration and Bill McCulloch most feared, because they believed this version of the bill could never pass there, much less survive the Senate. Only the sound of the noon bell — which meant that the full House was in session and, following the custom of the day, committee meetings had to be concluded — spared Celler immediate defeat. The chairman set the committee vote for one week hence, on October 29, but it was President Kennedy himself who would now have to do the toughest fighting.

***

The president’s first step was to summon the bipartisan House leadership to a meeting in the Cabinet Room the next day. Halleck had already met with the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee and had gotten an earful of their discontent. “I think it’s only fair to say that this damned thing has gotten all fizzled up and fouled up, into where some of the guys on our side who are normally pretty steady-going, they’ve got themselves all boiled up,” he told the president.

In the end, Kennedy proposed a compromise: If he could get a majority of Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, Halleck should provide half the Republicans to save the day. Joining his friend Ben Bradlee, then a reporter for Newsweek, for dinner in the upstairs residence a few minutes later, Kennedy complained that “trying to touch Charlie is like trying to pick up a greased pig.” But he acknowledged in the next breath, “It’s a lousy bill as it now stands.”

The next day, Halleck told a relieved Kennedy, “I’ve got you the votes to get your bill out of the committee.” Kennedy was delighted, but the challenge remained to fashion a substitute measure that would eliminate the parts of the bill that would alienate conservatives, while retaining enough teeth to attract the wavering liberals. McCulloch found the key, working with New York’s John Lindsay to forge a middle ground. The result: The voting rights section was limited to federal elections only; the public accommodations section would cover the integration of hotels, sports stadiums, theaters and restaurants but not barber shops and beauty parlors; the public facilities section dropped the provision that would allow the attorney general sweeping powers to file suit to desegregate parks, libraries and the like.

On October 28, with the committee vote looming the next day, it remained for the president himself to put the screws to the Judiciary Committee’s Northern Democrats one last time. Once more, Roland Libonati — who had caused so much trouble in the first place — proved to be a pain in the president’s neck, refusing to accept the new compromise. Kennedy was so irked that he ducked out of the meeting to telephone Libonati’s patron, Mayor Daley. “Roland Libonati is sticking it right up us,” Kennedy complained. “He’s standing with the extreme liberals who are gonna end up with no bill at all.”

“He’ll vote for it,” Daley exclaimed. “He’ll vote for any goddamned thing you want!”

At that Kennedy laughed and said, “Well, can you get him? … That’d be good.” Indeed, later that night, Libonati sent word to the White House that he would support the president. By the next morning, when the president convened one last meeting with McCulloch, Halleck and the usual suspects, Kennedy reported that he now had enough votes to block sending the liberal bill to the floor. “And we hope maybe Libonati will support us,” he added.

At 10:45 that morning, October 29, when Celler called the Judiciary Committee to order, the Kennedy team prevailed — but without Roland Libonati’s backing. The feckless ward-heeler had changed his mind yet again, and the deciding vote to defeat the motion to send the sweeping subcommittee bill to the full House came from a most unlikely candidate, Ed Willis of Louisiana, a staunch Democrat and segregationist who was nevertheless a close friend of both Celler and McCulloch, and who returned their friendship by voting with them. Then the committee raced to vote on the new compromise bill before the full House went into session at noon (which would have forced the committee to adjourn). Celler gave himself a mere 60 seconds to explain the new measure, with equal time for McCulloch, and it passed by a vote of 20 to 14, just as the noon bell sounded.

Reactions ran to form. The president called the bill “comprehensive and fair,” and said it would “provide the basis for men of good will in every city in our land to work together to resolve their racial problems within a framework of law and justice.” But the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the umbrella group of the pro-civil rights forces, complained that the bill was “inadequate to meet the needs of 1963.” The biggest loser was Libonati, who confided to a colleague that he had received word from the Daley machine that his political career was over.

After the vote, President Kennedy called Charlie Halleck with his thanks.

“I got a little trouble on my side,” Halleck responded, “a lot of guys bitching … and so I ain’t sure they’ll make me leader again but … I don’t give a damn.”

In fact, that same afternoon, someone placed a furled umbrella on the Republican leadership’s desk on the House floor, a gesture meant to compare Halleck’s actions to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938. Days later, a postcard signed with an illegible scrawl arrived in Halleck’s office from Xenia, Ohio. “You used to be the fair haired lad from Indiana,” it read. “NOW YOU ARE THE HAIRY APE OF THE PARTY — HOPE THE PARTY BOUNCES YOU.”

***

Kennedy himself was frustrated and fretful. On a political trip to Pennsylvania on the day after the Judiciary Committee passed the bill, his motorcade passed through sparse crowds in the racially tense wards of South Philadelphia, “one of the poorest receptions Mr. Kennedy has had in a major city since he became president,” the New York Times’s Tom Wicker wrote. Kennedy faced trouble on every front. The civil rights bill still had to pass the full House, and then survive a guaranteed filibuster in the Senate. Its fate — and Kennedy’s own reelection — remained in doubt. And the president had to contend with Charlie Halleck’s troubles, too. In late November, as if expiating his support of Kennedy on civil rights, Halleck unleashed a blistering critique of the president, refusing to shoulder any blame for Kennedy’s languishing legislative program. “With the Democrats in control of the White House and every government agency and with a 2-to-1 majority in the Senate and a 3-to-2 majority in the House of Representatives of the Congress, Mr. Kennedy can have no alibi,” Halleck said. “Any censure of Congress is a censure of the Democrat Party and of the lack of presidential leadership.”

But the very same day, Halleck made it clear that he was not above calling in a chit or two for his support on civil rights. He wrote Frederick Hovde, the president of Purdue University, the biggest educational institution in his district, that he was lobbying the administration hard to put a new electronic research center for NASA on the university’s campus. “My inclination is to talk to the president personally, but he left Washington this morning for a trip to Texas,” Halleck wrote. “Possibly I can get in touch with him early next week. In any event, that is my intention.” The date was November 21, 1963.

***

Excerpted from “An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964” by Todd S. Purdum. To be published in April 2014 by Henry Holt and Co. LLC. Copyright © 2014 by Todd S. Purdum. All rights reserved.