"As Robert Kennedy’s deputy and then successor as attorney general, Katzenbach charged into the scrum over civil rights. He was the top administration official present at the deadly 1962 battle between a segregationist mob and federal marshals enforcing a Supreme Court order to admit James Meredith to the University of Mississippi. And it was Katzenbach who confronted Governor George Wallace, in a carefully staged tableau of integration and resistance, at the door of the University of Alabama. Katzenbach’s government career had its share of dramatic and consequential moments, but his memoir of those years is also concerned — to an extent that will challenge the patience of many nonspecialist readers — with the routine inner workings of the federal bureaucracy. His purpose is to recall Washington’s political culture during a less partisan era. Robert Kennedy, Katzenbach writes, was an attorney general who would never “sacrifice law to political aspirations.” This is an implied contrast with George W. Bush’s Justice Department that is made explicit elsewhere in the book. But Katzenbach would soon find that it’s not so easy to put policy over politics. He became undersecretary of state in 1966, and though he was dovish on the Vietnam war, he acknowledges the predicament Lyndon Johnson faced as he contemplated the “domestic political consequences if territory was lost to the Communists.” It is a lesson in the limitations of good intentions: Katzenbach, who so honorably pursued racial justice, wound up affiliated with a war muddled by electoral calculation."
SOME OF IT WAS FUN
Working With RFK and LBJ
By Nicholas deB. Katzenbach
Norton, $27.95.
