On March 15, 1965 President B. Lyndon Johnson spoke to a joint
session of Congress for 48 minutes. His speech on civil rights was noteworthy. An article by David
Boeri at WBUR on March 14, 2014 discussed The Making of LBJ’s Historic ‘We
Shall Overcome’ Speech. You can read the full text in an article at Presidential
Rhetoric on March 15, 1965 simply titled We Shall Overcome. There is a CSpan
video too.
In 2024 historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who later was Dick Goodwin’s wife, published a book titled An Unfinished Love Story: A personal
history of the 1960s. She has the following detailed account of how that speech
was created (starting on page 224):
“Eventually everyone came around to what Johnson had wanted
all along, a televised speech delivered before an extraordinary convening of a
joint session of Congress that would allow him simultaneously to address the Congress and the
nation at large. Despite his awareness that a push for voting rights might disrupt
his carefully designed production line for the Great Society, it was a risk he
was willing to take.
Just as the conclusion of Johnson’s meeting with Wallace had
hinged upon whether federal troops intervened or were invited into the state of
Alabama, so now the president would not be circumventing Congress by appealing
to the public directly on television. Instead, he would be accepting a formal
invitation to the Hill. At the conclusion of this Cabinet Room meeting, the
following statement was issued:
‘The Leadership of Congress this afternoon invited the
President to address a joint session of the Congress on Monday evening to
present the President’s views and outline of a voting rights bill and any other
matters that the President desires to discuss.
The President has accepted the invitation and will
address a joint session at 9 p.m., Monday evening, March 15th in the House of
Representatives.’
…. Now the clock was ticking. In about twenty-four hours,
535 members of the House and Senate, along with the nation, would be focused on
the president and no speech had yet been drafted. It was like ‘deciding to
climb Mt. Everest,’ said Lady Bird, ‘while you are sitting around a cozy family
picnic.’
Dick spent that Sunday evening at a dinner party at
historian Arthur Schlesinger’s home. As the party neared its end, the guests
learned that the president was going to address a Joint Session of Congress the
following night. Having heard nothing of these plans, Dick called the White
House to see if any special messages had been left for him. No messages had
been left.
‘I was perplexed and disappointed,’ Dick told me. ‘Someone
else, I thought must be writing the speech. We had several more drinks, and
decided to call it a night.’
MONDAY, MARCH 15, 1965
The moment Dick stepped into the West Wing on the morning of
March 15, there was an unusual hubbub and tension. And there, pacing back and
forth in a dither outside Dick’s second floor office, was Jack Valenti.
Normally full of glossy good cheer, Valenti pounced on Dick before he could
even open his office door. ‘He needs the speech from you, right away.’
‘From me! Why didn’t you tell me yesterday? I’ve lost the
entire night,’ Dick responded.
‘It was a mistake, my mistake,’ Valenti acknowledged.
‘Poor Valenti was distraught,’ Dick told me. ‘Apparently,
the first words out of the president’s mouth that morning were, ‘how’s Dick
coming with the speech?’ When Valenti confessed that he had assigned the speech
to Horace Busby, who was in the office the night before, Johnson exploded: ‘The
Hell you did. Don’t you know that a liberal Jew has his hand on the pulse of
America? Get Dick to do it and now!’
The overwrought Valenti handed Dick a folder from his
conversations with the president the prior night as well as draft notes for a
written message that would accompany the bill. The speech had to be finished
before 6 p.m., Valenti told Dick, in order to be loaded on the teleprompter in
advance of the president’s televised address. Valenti asked Dick if there was
anything – anything at all – he could get for him.
Dick told me he remembered giving Valenti a one word
response, ’Serenity.’
‘Serenity?’ inquired the puzzled Valenti.
‘A globe of serenity,’ Dick replied. ‘I can’t be disturbed.
If you want to know how it’s coming, ask my secretary.’
Dick looked at his watch. Nine hours away!
‘I didn’t want to think about time passing,’ Dick recalled
to me. ‘I lit a cigar, looked at my watch, took the watch off my wrist and put
it on the desk beside my typewriter. Another puff of my cigar and I took the
watch and put it away in my desk drawer.’
‘The pressure would have short-circuited me,’ I said. ‘I
never had the makings of a good speechwriter or journalist. History is more
patient.’
‘Well,’ Dick laughed, ‘miss the speech deadline and those
pages are only scraps of paper.’
Dick examined Valenti’s notes. Johnson wanted no uncertainty
about where he stood. He wanted no argument about states’ rights versus federal
rights, no blaming oppositions between South and North. To deny fellow
Americans the right to vote was simply and unequivocally wrong. He wanted the
speech to be affirmative and hopeful. He would be sending a bill to Congress to
protect the fundamental right to vote for all Americans, and he wanted the
speech to drive and speed public sentiment.
In the year since Dick had started to work at the White
House, he had listened to Johnson talk for hundreds of hours -on planes and in
cars, during meals at the Executive Mansion and at the ranch, in the swimming
pool and over late-night drinks. He understood Johnson’s deeply held
convictions about civil rights. He knew the cadences of his speech. The speechwriter’s
job, Dick explained, was to clarify, heighten, and polish the speaker’s
convictions in the speaker’s own language and natural rhythms. If the words did
not sound authentic to the speaker, the emotional current of the speech would
not hit home.
I knew that Dick often searched for an arresting short
sentence to begin every speech or article he wrote. On this day, he surely
found it.
I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of
democracy.
He then sought to situate this pivotal moment in the sweep
of our nation’s history.
At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a
single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So
it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Apppomattox. So it
was last week in Selma, Alabama.
‘The basic concept underlying the entire speech,’ Dick
explained to me, ‘is that our government has been summoned, pushed by the
people, and to that force and pressure, we will respond.’
There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma
…. But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is
happening here tonight. For the cries of pain, and the hymns and protests of
oppressed people – like some great trumpet – have summoned into convocation all
the majesty of this government of the greatest nation on earth.
No sooner would Dick pull a page out of his typewriter and
hand it to his secretary than Valenti would somehow materialize, a nerve-worn
courier, eager to personally express pages from Dick’s secretary into the
president’s anxious hands. Johnson’s edits and penciled notations were
incorporated into the text while he awaited the next installment, lashing out
at everyone within range – everyone except Dick.
It soon became clear that the speech was no lawyer’s brief
debating the merits of the bill soon to be sent to Congress. Rather, it was a
credo of what we are as a nation, and who we are as a people – a redefining
moment in our history brought forth by the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights
Movement.
The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His
actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life,
have awakened the conscience of this nation.
….He has called upon us to make good the promise of America.
And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not
for his persistent bravery, and his faith in American democracy.
…. As the light shifted across the room, Dick became aware
that the day suddenly seemed to be rushing by. He opened the desk drawer,
peered at the face of his watch, took a deep breath, and quickly slammed the
drawer shut. For the first time that day he walked outside to get air and
refresh his mind.
…. Already the sun was beginning to set that chilly March
evening when the phone in Dick’s office rang for the first time that day. It
was after six o’clock, past the deadline to feed all the finished pages of the
speech into the teleprompter. The voice at the other end was ‘so calm, sweet,
and sedate’ that Dick hardly recognized it as the voice of the president of the
United States.
‘Far and away,’ Dick told me, ‘the gentlest tones I ever
heard from Lyndon.’
‘You remember, Dick,’ Johnson said in a whisper, ‘that one
of my first jobs after college was teaching young Mexican Americans in Cotulla.
I told you about that down at the Ranch. I thought you might want to put in a
reference to that,’ Dick recalled Johnson telling him.
What Johnson impressed on him, Dick told me, was that those
kids in Cotulla had nothing. They had a hard, hard life. ‘Hell,’ he told Dick, ‘I
spent half my pay to buy sports equipment for the school.’
Not twenty minutes had passed when the phone rang a second
time. In that second call, Dick told me, Johnson was still musing about his
time in Cotulla. ‘It was a long time ago,’ he said, ‘but those kids have their
own kids. And now we do something about it.’
Hardly four minutes passed ad the phone rang a third time. ‘I
almost forgot, Dick, L’d like you to ride up to the Hill with me tonight.’
‘When I finished,’ Dick recalled, ‘I felt perfectly blank.
It was done. It was beyond revision. It was dark outside and I checked my wrist
to see what time it was, remembered I had hidden my watch away from my sight,
retrieved it from the drawer, and put it back on.’ “
I got the book after seeing an article by David Murray at Pro
Rhetoric on September 3, 2024 titled Doris Kearns-Goodwin’s account of her
husband Dick Goodwin’s political speechwriting career is fascinating and
touching, both.
A portrait of LBJ came from Wikimedia Commons.
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