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41 ■ The Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News ■ Sunday, January 8, 1989
Stennis participated in filibusters to prevent votes on civil rights issues
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bate once he got to Washington.
His first two speeches on the floor of the Senate were against federal anti-lynching, anti-poll tax and equal employment legislation — claiming that they represented unconstitutional interference with the states’ rights to govern themselves.
He became a leader of the move to maintain racial segregation in the South and participated in filibusters that prevented votes being taken on civil rights legislation. In 1956, he helped draft the Southern Manifesto, a document signed by 101 Southern congressmen to voice their opposition to desegregation.
Like most Southerners, he was stunned by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 1954 prohibiting segregated public schools.
But once the civil rights laws were enacted in the 1960s, Stennis urged compliance with the changes.
In a 1965 plea that went largely unheeded, Stennis said Mississippi “above all must maintain a spirit of law and order. Any other course will take us downward and will eventually blight our future.”
By 1982, with a re-election to a seventh term looming, Stennis’ stance on racial issues had changed to the point where he voted for an extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
“I didn’t want to go back to all the days of misunderstanding,” he said. “I didn’t want to turn around and go back.”
His supporters say his about-face was a genuine philosophical change and not politically based.
“He was never inflammatory on the race issue,” said former Gov. William Winter, a Stennis protege. “He was a moderate in the sense he felt desegregation needed to be done over, a period of time.”
Impressed with MacArthur
Stennis’ first brush with controversy came in 1951 with President Harry Truman’s firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, which touched off a national debate.
Stennis says:
Writing after a 1958 tour of the Soviet Union, where he met with a group of schoolchildren and received the gift of a flower from a small girl:
“The experience really made me feel good because I saw the possibilities of things in common which can be bridges of understanding.”
“There was so much mail coming in we couldn’t get it open, much less answer it,” Stennis recalled.
Stennis landed a spot on a joint Senate committee to hear MacArthur’s side of the story in the dispute with the president. MacArthur’s “old soldiers never die, they just fade away” speech, carried on radio and television and made to a packed crowd, wowed the committee, Stennis said.
“He was one of the best witnesses I ever heard,” Stennis said. “But when the talk of the Constitution came up, he couldn’t overcome that. The Constitution said the president had power and the Congress had power. But it didn’t say anything about the general having power.”
The hearings dashed any hopes that MacArthur had of running for president in 1948 on the Republican ticket.
“Public opinion gradually changed and when the hearings were over he was not put forward by any group for president.” Stennis remained mostly in the background during the MacArthur controversy, but stepped to the forefront in 1954 when he became the first Senate Demo- * crat to publicly call for the censure of redbaiting Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
In a speech that made national headlines, Stennis said that if the Senate condoned McCarthy’s personal attacks on Senate members, “then something big and fine will have gone from this chamber.”
File photo
Sen. John C. Stennis with U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia in 1972. Byrd, a Democrat, was Senate majority whip at the time.
McCarthy, Stennis argued, had poured “slush and slime” on the Senate with his attacks. His speech was seen by Senate observers as a serious blow at McCarthy’s efforts to work out a compromise and escape censure.
“I don’t ordinarily make statements about matters where the other party has passed away,” Stennis said in a recent interview. “But his remarks about various members of the body I thought demanded an answer.
“I wasn’t tryingto punish anyone. I was trying to protect the institution.”
Stennis’ speech drew accolades from around the country and made him an overnight sensation. “I didn’t know what it was to get such press as that,” he said.
Teamed with Eastland
For 31 years, Stennis was the junior
senator from Mississippi, teaming with the late Sen. James Eastland of Dodds-ville, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and later president pro tem, to form a powerful but improbable coalition involving different personalities and styles.
“Senator Eastland would tell you in about half-a-minute where he stood on an issue,” said Coleman. “Senator Stennis was more diplomatic.”
“It’s like having twin children who don’t resemble each other at all.”
Bill Simpson, a Washington, D.C., lobbyist for Mississippi, said the Stennis-Eastland team “was as close a working relationship as any I’ve ever seen in my life.”
But, he said, the two weren’t known for having lengthy conferences to discuss is-
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