Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A lively, intimate memoir that vividly recalls the idealism of the Kennedy administration.
As deputy attorney general under Bobby Kennedy and then attorney general and under secretary of state for Lyndon Johnson, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach offers a unique perspective on the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and other issues of the day. In this engaging memoir, by turns intensely dramatic and charmingly matter-of-fact, we are treated to a ringside seat for Katzenbach's confrontation with segregationist governor George C. Wallace over the integration of the University of Alabama, his efforts to steer the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress, and then his transition to the State Department, where he served at the center of the storm over Vietnam. In the political climate of this election season, Some of It Was Fun provides a refreshing reminder of the hopes and struggles of an earlier era, speaking both to readers who came of age in the 1960s and to a generation of young people looking to that period for political inspiration.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Katzenbach is perhaps most famous for his role in 1962 1963, as deputy attorney general under Robert F. Kennedy, confronting Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and Alabama governor George Wallace when each was forced to racially integrate their state universities. In this fascinating memoir, Katzenbach gives an invaluable insider's view of life in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, in the latter of which he was attorney general and undersecretary of state. Katzenbach is uniquely positioned to throw light on the personal and political animosities between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson: an uncomfortable Katzenbach was often forced to become an emissary between the two. At one private White House meeting, Katzenbach has Johnson accusing the antiwar Senator Kennedy of prolonging the war, causing more American deaths: "You have blood on your hands," Johnson shouted. "I had never seen like this," Katzenbach writes, "almost totally out of control.... 'I don't have to listen to this, I'm leaving,' " Kennedy retorted. Such tales as this, never before told, are more than worth the price of admission. Illus.
