Even if you don't recognize his name, odds are you know the prematurely balding pate of Nicholas Katzenbach, who in 1963 famously confronted Gov. George C. Wallace when the first black students desegregated the University of Alabama.
Katzenbach was Robert F. Kennedy's deputy attorney general, and when Kennedy resigned to run for the U.S. Senate after his brother's assassination, Katzenbach succeeded him as President Lyndon B. Johnson's attorney general.
Katzenbach was intimately involved in almost every civil rights crisis of the early 1960s -- the 1961 Freedom Rides, the 1962 desegregation of the University of Mississippi, the 1963-64 efforts to win congressional passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act and the 1965 voting rights crusade centered on Selma, Ala. But he rightly stresses that his often powerfully poignant memoir "Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ" is "not intended to be a historical work of scholarship."
Still, if we can't rely upon the book for entirely dependable accounts of events such as the battle at Ole Miss, Katzenbach's perceptive and insightful portrayals of RFK and LBJ will enrich future histories for decades to come.
Katzenbach was a 39-year-old law professor when he joined John F. Kennedy's administration in 1961. JFK's appointment of his brother as attorney general drew widespread criticism, and Katzenbach admits that "clearly Bobby was not qualified by any traditional standards. He was too young, too inexperienced, too political, too brash, too immature in every way. All of these shortcomings were obvious to everyone, including Bobby."
When the Senate confirmed Katzenbach's initial appointment within minutes of a brief committee hearing, RFK phoned to offer congratulations on the speedy approval. "I guess they thought I needed a lawyer pretty badly," he joked.
Civil rights took up a good portion of RFK's and his aides' time. As Katzenbach reflects, "[N]either Bobby nor the rest of us fully appreciated the lengths to which Southern political leaders would go to try to preserve" racial segregation and white supremacy.
The Kennedy administration's philosophy was "to try to make Southern officials obey the law, not do the job for them," but the 1962 confrontation at Ole Miss showed that sometimes federal force of arms was necessary to squelch segregationist violence.
