"In the long run," Katzenbach writes, the riot there "and the willingness of the president to use significant military force to enforce the court order" desegregating the university "was an essential foundation to the successful integration that eventually took place throughout the South."
Katzenbach's haunting portrait of Bobby Kennedy is the most memorable aspect of "Some of It Was Fun," but his depiction of Lyndon Johnson -- a highly complicated and contradictory figure -- is rich and valuable as well. Even as Katzenbach writes movingly of "the energy, the excitement, the hope" that RFK generated among his Justice Department colleagues, he also addresses the intense animus that festered between RFK and LBJ from 1960 onward.
"Bobby was direct, candid, and truthful. None of those adjectives could be applied to Johnson," Katzenbach bluntly states. RFK "was to a substantial extent a moralist," while LBJ was "the consummate politician," a man for whom the truth often was slippery and elusive indeed. "Bobby's dislike of a political rather than a moral approach" led him to see Johnson as "deceptive and dishonest," and in the wake of JFK's assassination, "everything Bobby said about President Johnson was negative and often bitter."
In contrast, LBJ "made an effort, never really reciprocated by Bobby," to work in harmonious tandem. "They could be civil to each other, but that was about the extent of it -- and even that took effort," Katzenbach reports.
Katzenbach came to be "tremendously impressed" with Johnson's passionate desire for racial justice and a society free from want. One evening at an intimate White House dinner, "the politician, the wheeler-dealer, the often crude manipulator disappeared" and LBJ unveiled the powerful eloquence he would later display in public when calling upon a joint session of Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
At other times, especially given Johnson's proclivity for telling demeaning stories and jokes about blacks, "it was difficult to see this man as the idealist I believe he was," Katzenbach admits.
In late 1966, feeling burnt out at the Justice Department, Katzenbach surprised even himself by volunteering to take the vacant post of undersecretary of State. The shift thrust him into the midst of Johnson's reluctant pursuit of military victory in Vietnam.
