Senator Goldwater Dissents .
From MURRAY KEMPTON
WASH INGTON
THE Senate passed the Civil Rights Bill by 73-27, a majority, which, had it not been for lust one dissent, could have signalled the national consensus so long and so desperately needed for the resolution of this issue.
The dissenter was, of course, Senator Barry Goldwater and no larger cloud could be con- ceived. Goldwater cannot this summer be dis- missed as a figure in isolation. He remains the Mostly likely Republican nominee for President; Governor Scranton, his last challenger, is struggling commendably but not gaining visibly. If Goldwater's nomination is as certain as it seems, Civil Rights will be a campaign issue, the one thing most professionals in both parties have laboured all spring to avoid. The Negro's place in America, instead of being a closed and healing question, will remain an open and running one at least until November. That is certainly too long for comfort.
The principle of the Negro's equal status was established by law in the Supreme Court school decisions ten years ago, and, ever since, the South has been encouraged in its resistance by intima- tions that the rest of the country did not mean it. For the Republicans, General Eisenhower temporised through 1960; for the Democrats, Governor Stevenson and Senator Kennedy were still not clear-cut enough. Now there is Senator Goldwater to encourage the resistance. The Civil Rights law will be signed in lune; its enforcement city. by city is not an easy matter; it will depend on local compliance, and the illusion of future rescue by a future President Goldwater will argue Powerfully for delay in compliance.
The small businessmen who operate the restaurants and hotels whose acceptance of Negro custom is a. key requirement of the new law are precisely, in fact, the group most infected by the Goldwater illusion; if he had told them the law was just, he could have been an important contributor to its acceptance. But now he is on `moral with what he was careful to indicate as moral objections'; instead of soothing them he has aroused them. Until now, Goldwater had seemed only a problem to his party; now he is a Problem to the whole nation and he will be a harder problem as the campaign goes on.
The day before the Senate voted, Goldwater appeared at his desk long enough to read the short statement which announced and defended
his `Nay.' When he had finished, three Repub- licans and three Southern Democrats went over to shake his hand. Yet Senators Russell of Georgia and Hill of Alabama, the captains of the Southern cadre, sat gloomily in their seats; no commander ever looked with more jaundice upon a fresh reinforcement than Russell upon Goldwater. Russell and Hill are Johnsonian Southerners; they had fought and lost and were ready to bind up the wounded. Russell had just finished his own statement of defeat, a careful distribution of blame upon Northern Democrat and Republican alike; he plainly intends to go back to Georgia and urge his betrayed country- men to support. Lyndon Johnson because they can hope for nothing better from the Repub- licans. But now Barry Goldwater comes offering them something better.
And yet Goldwater remains a man with whom it is difficult to be angry. His advisers were re- ported united in agreement that he should vote against the Civil Rights Bill; and their advice was, in large measure, founded on the calculation that his only chance to beat Mr. Johnson is to play on white resentment of the Negro advance. But Goldwater cannot calculate; he can do what will help him only when he can tell himself that it supports his principles. His objections to the Bill were, he declared, that government had no right so to interfere with the rights of property- holders; if he must suffer for this moral position, then suffer he would.
A moral position so focused on the right of property has a peculiar and special cast; but it is a moral position and it is as a moralist that Gold- water will present so terrible a problem to his party and to his country this summer. His in- trusion into the civil rights debate for the first time and near its end was a particular affront to Senator Dirksen of Illinois, the Republican leader of the Senate and the one legislator most respon- sible for the Bill's passage. Dirksen is a mag- nificent old artificer, a bishop of orthodox Republicanism, and the custodian of the Taft faith and the Taft tradition in the Senate.
The latter history of the civil rights laws is really the sinuous progress of Dirksen's voyage through his conscience and his sense of reason. He began it impatient with all moral urgings; last spring, he was set upon by a deputation of Illinois clergymen come to solicit his conscience for the Bill. 'I am not a moralist,' he told them then, `I am a legislator.' And he proceeded there- after through a ritual ceremony of deliberation, self-quarrel and final acceptance, coming out at the end for the Bill and taking with him nearly all the orthodox Republicans in the Senate be- cause Dirksen is their surrogate in conscience; for him to have struggled and resolved amounts to their having struggled and resolved. But Gold- water spent most of the months of Dirksen's pilgrimage away from Washington seeking Republican delegates; he is not a legislator but a moralist, or anyway a campaigner; and, at the end, he took the position at which Dirksen had started.
To a Goldwater, a bill is an issue; to a Dirksen a bill is a process. Just before the vote, with his other sheep safely in the fold, the old man's only passion was his scorn for Goldwater; and the leader of the Republicans in the Senate turned directly to the choice of the Republicans for the Presidency and said:
In the history of mankind there is an in- exorable moral force that moves us forward. Utter all the extreme opinion that you will, it will carry forward. You can go and talk about conscience. It is man's conscience that speaks in every generation.
No one could remember when Dirksen last mentioned `conscience' in public; he laughs at morality and shudders at the sight of a turned collar. Conscience to him is the collective balanc- ing and deliberation of numerous careful men; moral judgments are communal. He has no principle except his love of order and his hatred of nonsense. He had saved the order of the Senate and he had done his best for the order of his country.
And now he must go to the Republican Con- vention where he will be chairman of the Illinois delegation and must watch most of its delegates vote for Goldwater. He is helpless; but, for that one last time, he had tried to tell Barry Gold- water that government is a business of pro- fessionals and a process rather than a proclamation. It is Already too late fcir that les- son. In 1952, the Eisenhower Republicans beat Robert A. Taft and exalted the amateur moralist over the professional legislator. Dirksen was a Taft leader and Goldwater an Eisenhower dele- gate to that convention. And now those unfor- tunate events of 1952 have their final logical con- clusion: the Republican Party has been cap- tured entirely by the worst sort of moralist, the amateur.
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