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Summary
Summary
Thurgood Marshall brought down the separate-but-equal doctrine, integrated schools, and not only fought for human rights and human dignity but also made them impossible to deny in the courts and in the streets. In this stunning new biography, award-winning author Wil Haygood surpasses the emotional impact of his inspiring best seller The Butler to detail the life and career of one of the most transformative legal minds of the past one hundred years.
Using the framework of the dramatic, contentious five-day Senate hearing to confirm Marshall as the first African-American Supreme Court justice, Haygood creates a provocative and moving look at Marshall's life as well as the politicians, lawyers, activists, and others who shaped--or desperately tried to stop--the civil rights movement of the twentieth century: President Lyndon Johnson; Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., whose scandals almost cost Marshall the Supreme Court judgeship; Harry and Harriette Moore, the Florida NAACP workers killed by the KKK; Justice J. Waties Waring, a racist lawyer from South Carolina, who, after being appointed to the federal court, became such a champion of civil rights that he was forced to flee the South; John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy; Senator Strom Thurmond, the renowned racist from South Carolina, who had a secret black mistress and child; North Carolina senator Sam Ervin, who tried to use his Constitutional expertise to block Marshall's appointment; Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who stated that segregation was "the law of nature, the law of God"; Arkansas senator John McClellan, who, as a boy, after Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House, wrote a prize-winning school essay proclaiming that Roosevelt had destroyed the integrity of the presidency; and so many others.
This galvanizing book makes clear that it is impossible to overestimate Thurgood Marshall's lasting influence on the racial politics of our nation.
From the Hardcover edition.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Haygood (The Butler) effectively uses the 1967 Senate confirmation hearings for Thurgood Marshall's barrier-breaking nomination to the Supreme Court as the framing device for a biography of this pioneering American. Marshall, who became the first African-American to serve as a Supreme Court justice, had previously enjoyed a remarkable career as a civil rights advocate, and Haygood provides details of his legal triumphs in an accessible way, along with a moving account of his upbringing in Baltimore, where he directly experienced the cruel injustices of segregation. In between the flashbacks to Marshall's life before July 1967, when he received President Johnson's nomination, Haygood paints well-rounded portraits of the powerful Southern Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, such as John McClellan and James Eastland, who fought bitterly to keep the Supreme Court lily-white. The behind-the-scenes look at the hard-fought battle that Lyndon Johnson and his supporters waged on Marshall's behalf creates suspense, even though readers will already know of their ultimate success. This is the definitive account of the life of a major American hero who deserves wider recognition. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In the midst of the civil rights movement and the violent reactions to protests that helped with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court was another major turning point in American race relations. President Johnson faced a fierce battle to stop the nomination, led by the powerful Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, whose state was the front line of school-desegregation violence following the Brown decision won by Marshall. With no vacancy to fill, Johnson orchestrated one and then prepared for what he knew would be a long and protracted battle. Democrats outnumbered Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the first hurdle toward nomination, but most of those Democrats were southerners, unlikely to favor the idea of naming a black man to the nation's highest court. Armed with determination and charm, Marshall drew on his long history of battling segregationists to prepare for his showdown with the Senate. Haygood details Marshall's remarkable career and the long journey that led to his tumultuous nomination to the Supreme Court, changing the course of American history.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THURGOOD MARSHALL SITS in Room 2228 of the New Senate Office Building on July 13, 1967, a month after Lyndon Johnson has named him to the United States Supreme Court. Facing him are, among others, four arch-segregationist Southerners on the Senate Judiciary Committee: John McClellan, Sam Ervin, Strom Thurmond and its chairman, James Eastland. Marshall is determined to become the first black man ever to sit on the nation's highest court. The senators are equally determined to block him. If a photograph of the scene existed, it would be as indelible an image of the civil rights era as the fire hoses of Birmingham, the lunch counters of Greensboro or the "I Am a Man" protesters of Memphis. Instead, Marshall's historic appointment, and the battle to confirm him, are almost entirely forgotten. The story gets lost, perhaps, amid Johnson's other landmark achievements, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of the following year. Perhaps it's also because, like other black trailblazers - Walter White and A. Philip Randolph are just two - Marshall has been relegated to the shadow of Martin Luther King Jr., little mentioned nowadays except by Amtrak conductors approaching the Baltimore airport. Or perhaps it's because Johnson's principal biographer, Robert Caro, hasn't yet reached that part of the story. But Wil Haygood now has. The outlines of the tale he tells in "Showdown" are beautifully captured by a photograph that does exist - in fact, it's the first photograph in the book - showing Marshall and Johnson standing together the day the appointment was announced. It suggests their compatibility was not just physical - they were both large and shambling men - but temperamental: Each was wily and resourceful, rough-hewed and plain-spoken. Johnson himself recognized as much. "Thurgood, I'm nominating you because you're a lot like me: Bigger than life, and we come from the same kind of people," he told him. Because there had been no Supreme Court vacancies handy, Johnson, the consummate wheeler-dealer, fashioned one, naming Ramsey Clark attorney general in order to induce his father, Justice Tom C. Clark, to quit. Johnson could then slide Marshall, solicitor general at the time, into Clark's slot. Before that, Marshall had been a federal appeals court judge in New York, begrudgingly named six years earlier by President Kennedy after Marshall had spurned his offer of a seat on the federal trial bench. ("My boiling point is too low for the trial court," Marshall had explained. "I'd blow my stack and then get reversed.") That initial offer had come from Robert Kennedy. "You don't seem to understand," he warned Marshall. "It's this or nothing." "I do understand," Marshall lectured him. "You don't know what it means, but all I've had in my life is nothing. It's not new to me, so goodbye." For much of that life, Marshall had been the founder and principal litigator of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, fighting, against great odds and at enormous personal risk, to dismantle Jim Crow in Southern schools, courtrooms, lunch counters and voting booths - that is, when he wasn't struggling frantically to spare individual indigent blacks from the electric chair or the rope. "Folks would come for miles, some of them on muleback or horseback, to see 'the nigger lawyer' who stood up in white men's courtrooms," an N.A.A.C.P. official would later recall. Not all of Marshall's beneficiaries, though, were black: By helping to invalidate Texas' whites-only primaries, thereby adding thousands of black voters to the rolls, he helped make Lyndon Johnson a senator. "He is one of the most distinguished lawyers in the land," Senator Jacob Javits of New York said in introducing Marshall to the Judiciary Committee. Javits's words were echoed 24 years later when the first President Bush introduced Marshall's replacement, Clarence Thomas. But in Marshall's case, they were true. In what was really Marshall's first victory over the segregationist senators, they did not dare challenge his civil rights work. Instead, seeking to exploit concerns about crime - riots in Detroit and elsewhere were taking place during the hearings - they asked him about (and, in effect, blamed him and people like him for) recent Supreme Court decisions expanding the rights of criminal defendants. At one point Senator Ervin, not yet the avuncular figure of the Watergate hearings, complained that the Fifth Amendment was never meant to invalidate "voluntary confessions." "Well, Senator, the word 'voluntary' gets me in trouble," Marshall replied. "I tried a case in Oklahoma where the man 'voluntarily' confessed after he was beaten up for six days." The hearings, startlingly unscripted compared with today's antiseptic proceedings, furnished one of the first debates on originalism - the idea that the Constitution was frozen in time rather than, as Marshall argued, a "living document" - and which, in this instance, was the refuge of bigots. They also featured Senator Thurmond trying to trip Marshall up on historical trivia that no one but a specialist, and certainly not Thurmond himself, could possibly have known. "Are you prejudiced against white people in the South?" Senator Eastland asked Marshall. It was not, as Haygood writes, the "penultimate" question, but it was the ultimate one, and Marshall handled it with aplomb. Shortly thereafter, he was overwhelmingly confirmed, and far more easily than Haygood leads us to expect he would be. Miraculously (though Haygood fails to point it out) only one Republican, Thurmond, voted against him. For all his fears, Lyndon Johnson was famously persuasive (and were Marshall to falter, he even had another black candidate, William Coleman, waiting in the wings). He could also count noses. Haygood, the author of previous biographies of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Sammy Davis Jr. and Sugar Ray Robinson, is passionate and, at times, eloquent. But "Showdown" can be very rough going. There are spasms of bad writing, filled with tortured metaphors and redundancies: A "risky tightrope" and "Jewish synagogues" are but two. "The entire American federal judiciary was nearly all white," he writes. Characters are continually reintroduced, characterizations and facts needlessly repeated. Grousing about such potholes can seem petty. But they're distracting, and besides, a figure and a story this grand deserve better. Haygood hypes. He repeatedly and portentously calls Marshall "Thurgood Marshall," in much the way Bill Clinton morphs into "William Jefferson Clinton" whenever he wants to sound solemn. He tells us such confirmation hearings were "gravely important, the highest mission for judiciary members," only to concede later on that before Marshall came along, they were often perfunctory: For instance, both William J. Brennan Jr. and an earlier Johnson nominee, Abe Fortas, sailed through in under a day. And happy though he surely was at Marshall's swearing in - it was no accident that Justice Hugo Black, once a member of the Ku Klux Klan, administered the oath - can one imagine Lyndon Johnson ever being "delirious with joy"? There are many mistakes. The Federal troops Dwight Eisenhower sent to Little Rock did not, as Haygood tells us, remain there "for an entire year." Franklin Roosevelt wasn't president - or Eleanor first lady - when World War II ended. Sometimes he seems tone-deaf. Even before Atticus Finch's recent unmasking in "Go Set a Watchman," can it really be true, as Haygood writes, that "Negroes would tell you Thurgood Marshall was Atticus Finch before Atticus Finch"? Inexplicably, the book omits Marshall's oral argument in Brown v. Board of Education. And, apart from some condescension from Joseph Kraft of The Washington Post - Marshall "will not bring to the court penetrating analysis or distinction of mind," he predicted - there's next to nothing about press coverage of the hearings. Instead, Haygood relies almost entirely on transcripts for his account. Haygood offers little meaningful eye-witness testimony. The endnotes confirm his dependence largely on previously published books; his account lacks the grit and specificity that comes with original research. How and with whom did Marshall prepare for the hearings? How was this outspoken and salty man - he later called Eastland "the meanest son of a bitch that ever walked the earth" - taught to hold his tongue? Which senators did Johnson lobby most aggressively, and how? It's hard to believe that Johnson's papers, which Haygood says he consulted, don't provide at least some clues. ONE MIGHT THINK there was neither the time nor space for these queries, but that's not it. Instead, the book subjects readers to something Marshall himself never faced: a filibuster. Or filibusters. Again and again Haygood detours, into everything from the flight of John Wilkes Booth to the making of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." As interesting as these digressions - and digressions from digressions - can be, they don't warrant the copious space he gives them. Though Haygood quite rightly loves his story, he also doesn't love it enough; otherwise, he'd have stuck more closely to it. Haygood has done a great service by reminding us of an extraordinary man at an extraordinary moment. He correctly notes that someone even remotely like Marshall, with his liberal record and instincts, would never be confirmed today. But for the real inside story of how all this happened, we'll just have to wait - for Robert Caro. Both Marshall and Johnson were wily, resourceful, rough-hewed and plain-spoken. DAVID MARGOLICK, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is the author of "Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock."
Choice Review
Haygood (media, journalism, and film, Miami Univ.) is best known for his Washington Post story that ultimately became the basis for the movie The Butler. This work is every bit as interesting and informative as that earlier work. Haygood's use of Marshall's five-day Senate confirmation hearing to become the first African American justice on the US Supreme Court as the framework for the book is unique for this type of biographical work. Along the way readers are treated to an examination of Marshall's life from his childhood on, including his successful fight to end "separate but equal" and his many other NAACP battles. Readers are also introduced to a panoply of politicians who fought for and against Marshall's confirmation, including Strom Thurmond, Sam Ervin, James Eastland, and John McClellan in the latter category and Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedy brothers in the former. Although Haygood regales readers with many details about this revolutionary Supreme Court justice and his legacy, there is nothing dry about this book. It is a rich work highly worth reading by all readers. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels. --Michael Wayne Bowers, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Kirkus Review
Longtime journalist and biographer Haygood (The Butler: A Witness to History, 2013, etc.), whose previous subjects have included Sammy Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., examines the confirmation battle over the first African-American nominated to the Supreme Court. During the summer of 1967, Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) appeared for an unprecedented fifth day before the Senate Judiciary Committee. This confrontation between arguably the most consequential appellate attorney ever and the "Old Bulls" who dominated the interrogating panel is both the spine of Haygood's narrative and the occasion for a number of ancillary stories that lend blood and guts to the superficial civilities of a Senate hearing. So we learn about Lyndon Johnson's backstage maneuvering, first to create an opening on the court and second, to devise a backup plan in case Marshall's nomination faltered; Marshall's surprisingly good rapport with J. Edgar Hoover and testy relations with Robert Kennedy; Marshall's early life and undergraduate career (he was a classmate of Langston Hughes); his legal training under famed mentors Charles Hamilton Houston and William Hastie; his work for the NAACP and the signal civil rights cases that made his reputation; his controversial interracial marriage; publisher Henry Luce's threat to Southern senators who held up Marshall's earlier nomination to the court of appeals; and the extraordinary scrutiny accorded Marshall compared to previous Supreme Court nominees. Most interesting is Haygood's presentation of the Southern DemocratsArkansas' John McClellan, Mississippi's James Eastland, North Carolina's Sam Ervinwho considered Marshall "a public enemy of the South" and who strove to embarrass him before the nation and to expose him as dangerous and ill-suited to the high court. The author's almost wholly admiring portrait of Marshall unfortunately includes some occasionally excessive or inexact language, but the stories are so good the author is easily forgiven. An intensely readable, fully explored account of what the New York Times called an "ordeal by committee," an important hinge in American history. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
As the first African American nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall (1908-93) serves as a transition figure between Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and Barack Obama's presidency. Haygood (media, journalism, and film, Miami Univ.), a journalist for nearly three decades (Boston Globe, Washington Post), is also the author of biographies on Sammy Davis Jr. (In Black and White) and Sugar Ray Robinson (Sweet Thunder); he understands the arduous path to racial equality in the 20th century. This biography focuses on Marshall's upbringing in Baltimore and his pioneering work with the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund, while weaving this material into the five days of Senate confirmation hearings in 1967. (Lyndon B. Johnson outfoxes Marshall's Southern segregationist foes on the Judiciary committee even during the urban violence of the time.) In contrast to the moral leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., Marshall is portrayed as a pragmatic politician who works inside the system. VERDICT Haygood's highly recommended page-turner is for a general audience, especially those interested in African American history and political science. This is ripe material for another film based on the author's work, akin to his 2013 best seller The Butler: A Witness to History.-William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 The Ghosts of Little Rock Please, sir, no nigger on the Supreme Court bench. --an Arkansas family in a letter to Senator John McClellan about the Marshall nomination John mcclellan was going to stop Thurgood Marshall. He simply could not imagine the likes of Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court, so he convinced himself he could prevent it. He was Senator John McClellan, and he was powerful, and people feared him. He had a hard face--a dead ringer for the comic Jack Benny if Benny had been dipped in plaster--and a hard, scratchy voice. He wore horn-rimmed glasses from which, time and again during previous hearings while sitting in judgment of others, he peered down on witnesses with menacing glares. He combed his hair straight back, in a severe manner. McClellan was one of the Senate barons--men who had served for years and seemed to have grown out of the very building that housed the U.S. Senate. He loathed small talk and abhorred social teas and the like, which many senators and their wives seemed to enjoy. Even when his Arkansas constituents visited his Washington office, he seemed impatient, as if he wished they could state their business as fast as possible and be on their way. He'd shoot an aide that look and then the aide would begin motioning toward the door and McClellan would toss final words at his guests: thanks for coming by, say hi to the folks back home, don't forget to take a souvenir. He had been sent to Washington by Arkansas voters, first as a congressman in 1934 and then, in 1942, as a U.S. senator. And now he found himself with a coveted seat on the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee. He told his aides to start digging. He wanted as much information on Thurgood Marshall as he could get, and he wanted it as fast as he could get it. John McClellan looked upon himself as a force for good, standing between Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court of the United States of America. In Washington, McClellan prided himself on his activities, his constant motion. At one time, he sat on fourteen subcommittees. In 1954, he found himself on a committee with the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, who was galloping around the nation's capital on a one-man witch hunt for Communists. McCarthy had charged the State Department with having dozens of Communists in its employ. At a time when Americans were fearful of Communism, McCarthy's charges landed him on the front pages. Many were riled up. All of this intrigued McClellan, as ready as anyone to corral a Communist. But McCarthy, who was a shambling and reckless figure, soon made McClellan nervous. It was McCarthy's lack of discipline and some of his aides who were utterly unprofessional. "I'm fond of Joe McCarthy," McClellan allowed, "but he's getting out of hand, and we have to do something to control him." McClellan quit the McCarthy-led committee he was on. He escaped the shadow of McCarthy with prescient timing, as the Army-McCarthy hearings, nationally televised, exposed McCarthy as a mean-spirited liar. The Senate eventually censured him. In 1957, McClellan led the celebrated Senate Labor Rackets Committee, which took on mobsters and their henchmen and eventually exposed the criminal underworld in America. That was the moment that John McClellan's profile rose in America. Because of disclosures exposed by his committee, two teamsters, Jimmy Hoffa and Dave Beck, had been sent to prison. Another round of hearings in 1963 offered up Joseph Valachi, a mobster who seemed to thrill television viewers with his insider's account of cold-blooded doings in the Mafia. The Omaha World-Herald had once said of McClellan that he possessed a "steely mask of Old Testament righteousness." If John McClellan had stopped gangsters, he figured he could certainly thwart LBJ's new Supreme Court nominee. In Washington, they didn't bother to refer to him as Senator McClellan; they called him "the Chairman," because he had been chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, as well as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, which was the committee that provided him with the tools to go after the mobsters. Because those racketeering hearings were nationally televised, everyone knew Senator John McClellan. The young aides in the Johnson White House knew well how dangerous McClellan could be to their efforts in getting Thurgood Marshall onto the U.S. Supreme Court. "Virtually every speech he made inscribed a rising curve from the prudent statement of fact to polemical rage, his powerful voice quavering with indignation," is how the Johnson aide Harry McPherson put it. The Johnson administration had drawn a battle line. Thurgood Marshall was the lawyer who had won the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, a ruling that led to utter embarrassment in McClellan's home state in the fall of 1957, when nine Negro schoolchildren had tried to desegregate Little Rock Central High School and been stopped by whites hurling epithets, spit, and large rocks. (It was also the year that Time magazine named McClellan its Man of the Year.) Reporters on the scene to cover the story were chased and bloodied by the mobs. This had forced President Dwight Eisenhower to go into military mode and dispatch troops to protect the children. The troops had to remain at the school watching over the Negro children for an entire year. Little Rock was thus seared into the nation's psyche as mean and bigoted. And on his trips back home to Arkansas at the time, to attend all those social events and grand openings and visit family as all politicians do, John McClellan had to endure all the chatter about Little Rock, about how the government was attacking states' rights, how Negroes were trying to take over the schools. And all he could do was assure his constituents that he was doing everything he could to protect their way of life, the southern way of life. It made McClellan angry, though, how he had to take up all of this time defending himself and how hard he was working in Washington to keep Arkansas as it had always been. Thurgood Marshall, if he made it to the Supreme Court, was not going to keep Arkansas as it had always been. But first, before McClellan could do anything about Marshall, he had to clear his throat. He did not like it one bit that President Johnson had stunned him with the suddenness of the Marshall nomination. After all, he was a southern Democrat like Johnson himself! John McClellan so prided himself on having the pulse of government, of government at the highest levels, of what they were doing over at the White House, that this series of events--a justice departing, then, in a flash, a new nomination--only gnawed at his sense of propriety and even decorum. McClellan couldn't figure out how all of this had transpired, had been put into motion without any hints falling his way. And he did not like any of it at all. it was often said around the Johnson White House that what LBJ wanted, LBJ got. And in the summer of 1967, LBJ wanted to put Thurgood Marshall, a Negro, on the Supreme Court. There was a small problem: there was no vacancy nor had a single sitting justice been talking about stepping down from his lifetime appointment. Johnson looked to his Texas roots and saw clearly how he could solve the problem. Lyndon Johnson had first met the associate justice Tom Clark back in Texas in 1938, when Johnson was a young congressman. The Johnson and Clark families went on outings together, their little children romping across wide lawns. "A friendship developed that included the whole family; it was much more than a professional relationship between the two men," Tom Clark's daughter, Mimi Clark Gronlund, would recall. When Johnson's daughters, Lynda and Luci, became engaged, the Clarks threw parties for them. (There was something interesting about Texas men who had more amenable attitudes toward Negroes than others in the state. "I knew him when he first came to Washington," Thurgood Marshall would come to recall of Tom Clark. "I knew his mother. And his brother in Dallas . . . His mother, way back--this will go back to the late thirties--her housekeeper, a Negro, ate dinner with her. They ate right at the same table together. Now, back in the thirties, you didn't do that in Texas.") Clark had originally been encouraged to come to Washington in 1937 by the House majority leader, Sam Rayburn, who was Johnson's mentor. Clark joined the Justice Department as a special assistant. After the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, President Truman appointed Clark attorney general. And when the Supreme Court justice Frank Murphy died in 1949, Truman nominated Clark to the court. Court openings were created, often, by grave and declining health, or death. But in 1967, as Justice Clark's family knew, he was in good health and had not at all talked of resigning from the court. In order to nominate Marshall, Johnson had to make some fast chess-like moves. First, Johnson encouraged Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to resign, then appointed Katzenbach undersecretary of state. Johnson intended to appoint Ramsey Clark--the deputy attorney general, who happened to be Tom Clark's son--to the position permanently. But Johnson knew others--inside the legal profession and out--would wonder about a perceived conflict of interest because Clark's father sat on the high court. But Lyndon Johnson knew people; he knew the dynamics of fathers and sons, how a rising son could make a father swoon with pride, and how a father, if called upon to make a sacrifice for his one and only son, might do it almost as reflex, without giving it a second thought. "He talked to Tom Clark to tell him he wanted to appoint Ramsey attorney general," Johnson's aide Joseph Califano would recall. "Johnson needed a vacancy to put Thurgood Marshall on the court. So Tom Clark had to retire, and Johnson got the vacancy." Decades later, recalling the Johnson maneuverings, Califano could still beam with amazement: "It was a classic Johnson move." So grateful was Johnson for Tom Clark's resignation that he sent Clark and his wife on a once-in-a-lifetime trip around the world. Ostensibly, it was a goodwill mission sponsored by the Department of State with Clark expected to exchange ideas with foreign officials about their respective judiciaries, but it really was a gift to the Clarks for Tom Clark's stepping down. The couple set foot in more than a dozen exotic locales, among them Honk Kong, New Zealand, Jordan, Indonesia, Greece, Turkey, Tokyo, and finally Rome--where they dined in style and saw the ruins. Mrs. Clark called it their "great adventure." The Johnson White House aimed to use surprise as a weapon in its strategic rollout of the Clark-Marshall announcements. And it worked, because some of the Senate Judiciary Committee members--especially the southerners--complained bitterly about the swiftness of the move, which had caught them off guard. "He'd just call Senator Eastland, Senator Thurmond, and say, 'Senator, I'm nominating Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court,' and before they could say anything," says Califano, "he'd hang the phone up and call the next senator." McClellan, James Eastland, Strom Thurmond, and all the other Judiciary Committee members were treated with similarly fast phone calls. The Marshall announcement unleashed waves of pride within the Johnson White House, a pride that bubbled especially among Negroes nationwide. The White House, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, had a peculiar and vexing relationship with blacks throughout history. In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt had the educator--and onetime slave--Booker T. Washington to the White House to dine. The engagement was private, unannounced. But word quickly seeped out. The southern newspapers let the epithets fly: "Roosevelt Dines a Darkey." "A Rank Negrophilist." "Our Coon-Flavored President." "Roosevelt Proposes to Coddle the Son of Ham." "At one stroke, and by one act," The Richmond News opined of Teddy Roosevelt, "he has destroyed the kindly, warm regard and personal affection for him which were growing up fast in the South. Hereafter . . . it will be impossible to feel, as we were beginning to feel, that he is one of us." Not many years later, in 1915, the D. W. Griffith movie The Birth of a Nation opened in theaters. It was based on Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman, a vile piece of fiction that painted blacks with evil stereotypes. They were thieves and sexual marauders lusting after white women. The NAACP condemned the movie, but not President Woodrow Wilson, who hosted a screening at the White House, then heaped praise on the movie. Wilson also went on to segregate the federal workforce in the nation's capital. A Negro was not appointed to an executive White House position until President Eisenhower's first term, and even that move was fraught with pain. E. Frederic Morrow--a Bowdoin College grad, a CBS public relations executive, a man of steely resolve and great dignity--had done campaign work for the candidate Eisenhower. Members of Eisenhower's team were so impressed with his work they promised a White House position. When Ike won, Morrow's phone did not ring. He complained. He was finally given a job at the Commerce Department. But it did not sit well with him; he had been promised a White House position. Republican allies of Morrow's in New York City put pressure on the White House to deliver on its promise, and Morrow finally became a White House staff member in 1955. Little wonder Negro newspapers around the nation proudly trumpeted the Marshall nomination. But with pride aside, the Johnson White House knew the first stop was the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was a historic committee and one of the original standing committees in the Senate, first authorized in 1816. Throughout its history, the committee took on a wide range of assignments, from bankruptcies, to state boundaries, to contested Senate elections. The committee even played a role in the aftermath of Reconstruction, settling matters when it came to Confederate states and their restoration to the Union. It had long been a committee steeped in thorny challenges and national urgency. "There was clear knowledge that there would be a fight," remembers the Johnson aide Clifford Alexander. "Johnson knew because he came out of the leadership of the Senate. It was key to get the nomination out of the Judiciary Committee. The Democrats were the segregationists." Excerpted from Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America by Wil Haygood All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.