In 'Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ,' Nicholas deB. Katzenbach offers a behind-the-scenes look at the U.S. government's response to some of the most turbulent years in American history.
'Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ'
by Nicholas deB. Katzenbach
W.W. Norton, 320 pp., $27.95
Nicholas Katzenbach had a front-row seat to one of the most turbulent decades of our nation's history. As Deputy Attorney General under Bobby Kennedy and then Attorney General and Undersecretary of State for President Lyndon Johnson, Katzenbach played a key role in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In his newly released memoir, "Some of It Was Fun," Katzenbach details the behind-the-scenes action.
Katzenbach was hired by Bobby Kennedy as an assistant U.S. attorney general, heading the prestigious Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, which provides advice to the Attorney General and to the White House.
In that post, Katzenbach worked directly with President Kennedy and with Bobby Kennedy as they confronted the tumultuous 1960s. He describes the perspective of a White House struggling to protect the Freedom Riders, young activists who traveled south to challenge segregation, from violence.
Kennedy was under pressure from civil-rights activists and northern liberals to send federal troops into the South to protect the civil-rights protesters, and to assist in the desegregation of public institutions in the South, an idea that Kennedy ultimately rejected. Katzenbach points out the tension easily lost in hindsight: Sending federal troops into the South in large numbers would not only have been intensely unpopular in the South, but would likely have greatly exacerbated the racial tension and left troops performing police functions they were ill-equipped to handle - with no exit strategy that would not leave the situation on the ground worse than when they started.
Katzenbach was promoted to Deputy Attorney General when President Kennedy named Byron White to the Supreme Court in 1962. Bobby Kennedy sent Katzenbach to the University of Alabama in 1963 to monitor the desegregation of the University of Alabama and to confront then-Governor George Wallace, who had famously promised to "block the doorway" to any effort to desegregate the school. As the angry crowds on campus grew, with a belligerent Wallace adding fuel to the fire, Katzenbach monitored the troops on hand, deftly coordinated the admission of Vivian Malone and James Hood as students, and confronted Wallace in the doorway. Katzenbach provides a riveting minute-by-minute account as he struggles to avoid a race riot, confront Wallace, get the students admitted and keep Kennedy in the loop. That chapter alone is worth the price of the book.
President Johnson kept Katzenbach at arms length for months after assuming office, suspicious of his close ties to Bobby Kennedy, but eventually promoted him to become the attorney general. From that post, Katzenbach assisted in drafting and lobbying for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark civil rights legislation. Katzenbach later assumed the post of Undersecretary of State from which he helped to advise President Johnson on the Vietnam War.
Katzenbach's narrative begins with President Kennedy's inauguration and ends with Robert Kennedy's funeral train, fitting bookends to what many see as the heart of the '60s. Looking back, despite the violence, riots, demonstrations and assassinations, Katzenbach remembers the '60s mostly as "a time of hope, of shared aspirations for a better America" and a time when "nations all around the globe [saw] us vindicate our beliefs about human equality and individual worth in the face of opposition and looking to us for leadership to a better world." The contrast to the present is, as Katzenbach points out, dramatic.
Although a fascinating firsthand account of some of the most crucial government crises of the 1960s, Katzenbach's work is, unfortunately, flawed from a somewhat haphazard organization, weak editing and interesting but undeveloped political commentary on more contemporary public policy issues.
Of course, the whirlwind of a new Democratic administration and the rapidly changing world of the 1960s bears some obvious lessons that could be learned for our own time. There are few of the principal players left to tell the story and teach those lessons. Katzenbach's contribution should not be missed.