One spring day in 1964, I rose from a red leather couch in the press lounge of the U.S. Senate, where the cushions bore permanent impressions from reportorial rears past, and wandered out to the gallery to watch debate on the civil rights bill.

That moment in my few years as a Washington correspondent were brought to mind by a long essay in The New Yorker about the ideologically frozen Senate today. In my time, there were giants in the Senate.

Two of them, in a largely deserted chamber below me, were debating opposite sides of the omnibus civil rights bill, the public accommodations bill.

White-haired, stooped Paul Douglas, a decorated and wounded Marine in World War II, a Ph.D. economics professor at the University of Chicago, was roaming the chamber like a bear with a broken back, speaking for the bill.

To his left stood North Carolina Sen. Sam Ervin, as merry and bright as a country squire. The self-styled “country lawyer” was a wounded veteran of World War I, a Harvard Law graduate and a former justice of the state Supreme Court.

Ervin was to serve the nation and the principle of justice by chairing the committee that censured the vagrant demagogue Joe McCarthy, and he later won wide approval for chairing the Watergate Committee that doomed Nixon’s presidency.

On this occasion, Ervin was trying to persuade Douglas that the civil rights bill was unconstitutionally vague in its description of what constituted discrimination.

Douglas yielded the floor to Ervin, and as the favorite son of Morganton, N.C., began to speak, his face took on an expression of amused craftiness:

“My friend, the distinguished senator from the great state of Illinois, puts me in mind of a justice of the peace down in Bertie County. Every time he had a case before his court represented by attorney, he would turn to the lawyer and say, ‘Son, I’d appreciate it if you would make no argument in this case, I find that when I hear two sides of an argument, it tends to confuse me.’”

Douglas’s lined face softened because the two men genuinely were friends, which was the norm in a day when comity ruled, though they were debating an act that would totally reorder American culture and politics.

The vote to end the Southern filibuster and pass the act was 71-29, a resounding majority of Republicans (27-6) voted to end debate and pass the bill, largely due to another giant, Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen.

The other senator from Illinois had a voice so deep, rich and sonorous that in the press lounge we called him “the wizard of ooze.” Once I dialed his office, and unexpectedly he answered himself, “HELLOOOOO.” For an instant, I felt as if I’d dialed a wrong number and had got the Almighty on the line.

Much of the negotiation for the bill was done in Dirksen’s office, which meant the press corps huddled outside the conference room would have to bear his acid wit as when he and other senators emerged from negotiations and Dirksen said, “Look what we have here, fake pearls before real swine.”

Here were men who with humor, courtesy and genuine friendship were closing the heavy oaken doors of history on one civilization and opening them onto another, yet undefined civilization with unseen possibilities and challenges.

Dirksen even managed to crown the occasion with a certain grandeur. In his statement to the press on passage of the bill, he quoted Victor Hugo, “No army is stronger than an idea whose time has come.”

How diminished does the current Senate minority leader, thin-lipped, taciturn Mitch McConnell, seem in comparison with the looming ghostly presence of his predecessor.

And how puny the task he has set for himself and his party, a mission he has the craft and iron discipline to enforce in the GOP caucus: it is to stop or at least delay every appointment or bill sent to the chamber by the president.

As a list of 56 appointments to judgeships or key executive posts was read in the Senate, Minority Whip John Kyl of Arizona objected to each, a single member stalling the work of government. Alabama’s Richard Shelby froze 70 appointments until his secret “hold” was discovered and denounced.

It is nothing short of amazing that not only reform of Wall Street’s dangerous gambles but also the extension of health care to 32 million without it could have squeezed through the Great Wall of obstruction McConnell has built.

His favored defense against any legislative progress on administration bills is the filibuster. From 1919 to 1971, there was less than one filibuster a year. Today, they are an everyday event. There were 112 in 2007-08, and this session McConnell’s talkative troops are on pace to break the record.

I expect the Senate press lounge today has new couches with firmer cushions, but through the swinging doors out to the gallery, where giants once filled the chamber, is the depressing site of Lilliputians talking … endlessly talking.

H. Brandt Ayers is the publisher of The Star and chairman of Consolidated Publishing Co.