A few liberal Democrats and Republicans—squeezed between Negroes and Eisenhower on one side and Johnson, the Southerners, and organized labor on the other—sided with Johnson. Senators Henry Jackson and John F. Kennedy went with Johnson at the last minute, a defection that civil rights leaders would not soon forget, and the jury trial amendment passed by a vote of 51-42. Reporters who swarmed onto the Senate floor heard Vice President Nixon denounce the Senate’s action as “a vote against the right to vote.”
