_]june ]8, 1964. Midafternoon. The filibuster droned on, but
its end was near. The great debate had been going on for
eighty-two days. The issue was an omnibus civil-rights bill,
the most sweeping ever proposed. Unlike most civil-rights
bills, this one was going to pass the Senate--and without
being watered down to meaninglessness. President Lyndon
Johnson had pledged it as a tribute to his predecessor, the
slain John Kennedy. Senator Edward Kennedy sat in the
presiding officer s chair in the Senate as Senator Richard
Russell of Georgia, leader of the Southerners opposing the
bill, made his last speech. Russell s time was almost up. The
Senate had voted cloture--limiting debate to one hour per
senator--for the first time ever in a civil-rights fight. Russell
and others believed that the Senate was a unique forum of
the sovereign states, and that no limits of any kind must ever
be applied to a senator s right to speak. So June 1964 was a
turning point in the history of the institution that had been
called, not only in jest, the South s revenge for Appomattox.
Russell was characteristically a courteous gentleman, even
in defeat. But not today. His last speech was full of invective
and bitterness.
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