ABSTRACT
The civil rights issue emerged, as Senate Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen would later describe it, as “an idea whose time has come.” More accurately, perhaps, civil rights was an idea that Congress, and especially the Senate, could no longer evade. During the closing months of his life, President John F. Kennedy thrust aside the political caution that had led him to accept readily the advice of the congressional leadership and stall for two years on meeting the civil rights issue squarely. Most persuasive with Dirksen was his awareness that something larger than politics was involved in civil rights as the issue loomed before the Senate in the early 1960s. Mike Mansfield’s deferential approach to the Senate minority was neither calculated nor specifically related to the issue of civil rights. Fresh from victory in the House and with the president’s encouragement, supporters of the legislation were converging on the Senate in a massive lobbying effort.
