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From 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 [Johnson] 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. (Oct.)
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From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley The photograph on the cover of Nicholas Katzenbach's splendid memoir shows the author, then 41 years old, wearily wiping his brow with a handkerchief. Tall, balding, correctly attired in a standard-issue Brooks Brothers suit, Katzenbach stands alone on the front of Some of It Was Fun, but readers of a certain age will immediately know why he was wiping his brow -- it was June 1963 in Alabama, and the weather was scorching -- and what he was doing: As deputy attorney general of the United States, he was trying to enroll two African American students in the University of Alabama, while a few feet away the state's governor, George Wallace, was making the "stand in the schoolhouse door" that had been central to his gubernatorial campaign in 1962. It was one of the signal events of the civil-rights struggle -- Vivian Malone and James Hood quickly were registered at the university without incident or resistance -- and it cemented Katzenbach's reputation as a calm, dedicated, resourceful and occasionally witty champion of black rights. He had earned his stripes the previous year at the University of Mississippi, where the enrollment of James Meredith had been accompanied by violence that was subdued only after President Kennedy sent in federal troops, a decision that Katzenbach now sees as "an essential foundation to the successful integration that eventually took place throughout the South," though at the time "it seemed a failure in virtually every respect." It was a surpassingly stressful time in which the Department of Justice under Robert F. Kennedy played a heroic role. Some of It Was Fun brings it all back with an immediacy that I find haunting, bracing and ultimately heartbreaking, because nothing else that I have read conveys so vividly and intimately just what we lost with Bobby Kennedy's assassination in 1968. Katzenbach had never met either Kennedy before signing on with the new administration in 1961, and like many other lawyers he had doubts about the appointment of John F. Kennedy's 35-year-old brother as the nation's highest law-enforcement officer. But he had a strong urge for public service and got in touch with Byron White, "a friend from my student days at Yale Law, [who] was named deputy attorney general." He met with Bobby Kennedy, whom "I could not help liking," quickly was appointed assistant attorney general heading the Office of Legal Counsel, the "most important duty" of which "was to give legal advice to the attorney general." The team that Kennedy was assembling at Justice was extraordinary and so, Katzenbach quickly came to understand, was Kennedy himself. "His pride was in the department he ran, the people who surrounded him, and service to his brother," and he was as aware of his shortcomings as any of his critics, which made him all the more determined to overcome them. One of the things he did was to "create his own mini crime commission, of which he was the chairman and leader," which brought together people from throughout the government at meetings that Katzenbach occasionally attended: "Bobby was clearly the leader, and not simply because he was attorney general. He impressed the group with his factual knowledge, and he encouraged free-flowing discussion and differing views. He was quick to appreciate suggestions, to praise efforts, to push for more without being critical. You could sense that this varied group was prepared to follow him and wanted desperately to please him. . . . What Bobby was able to do was to communicate his own enthusiasm and energy to others, to make them feel that they were members of a team and that what they were doing was important. . . . He saw law for what it is -- a tool to implement policy, a part of the political system through which hopes and aspirations can be realized. . . . He almost always tended to identify with the underdog, with the poor, the weak, the disenfranchised, and in a sense he saw law as the road to justice. I had thought of Bobby as a tough political pragmatist -- and indeed he could be. But more and more I saw a young idealist struggling with the realities of a difficult world." In the second year of Kennedy's presidency, Byron White was appointed to the Supreme Court, and Katzenbach succeeded him as deputy attorney general, which imposed "a big administrative responsibility" on him that he didn't especially enjoy, but which also made him "alter ego to the AG, so I often had the choice of deciding matters or discussing them further" with Kennedy, a position from which he was able to observe Kennedy often and with considerable intimacy. He remembers "with both sentiment and admiration" the annual "party for underprivileged children at Christmastime in the courtyard of the Justice Department" that Kennedy had instituted. He also remembers the funeral service for Kennedy at St. Patrick's Cathedral: "Tears were streaming down my face, but the tears made me feel at one with the others in the church. Bobby had that effect on people, and I think the country suffered a loss the magnitude of which may never be fully appreciated." By then Katzenbach had been in the service of Lyndon Johnson for more than three years -- he was named attorney general in 1965, after Kennedy left to run for the Senate in New York, and then became undersecretary of state in 1966 -- and had come to admire and respect the man for whom RFK felt little except loathing. "In many respects I was as different from LBJ in background as Bobby had been," he writes, " -- thoroughly eastern, educated at elite institutions, with a mixture of idealism and pragmatism. LBJ was poorly educated in the formal sense; very Texan in his demeanor, his accent, his storytelling; and extremely intelligent. His almost rough exterior, tall with enormous hands and big facial features, made it difficult for people easily to see the first-rate mind he possessed. He understood government better than anyone else I have ever met. Part of this was his experience as a legislator and part of it was an extraordinary innate ability with people." There's a wonderfully Johnsonian scene in which George Wallace was summoned to the White House to discuss anti-civil-rights violence in Alabama. "After some small talk," Katzenbach reports, "the president began an absolutely virtuoso performance, flattering Wallace, then confronting him, pretending to seek his advice, then giving him hell. . . . At times he was harsh and demanding, at others flattering and cajoling. . . . It was like a violin concert by a virtuoso, with every note perfection. At the end, Wallace declined to meet with the press and left quietly and inconspicuously through a side door." Once Katzenbach moved to State -- the move, which some took as a demotion, actually was made at his own request, as by 1966 "we seemed to be just marking time" at Justice -- he was sucked into the maelstrom of Vietnam: "Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam -- it got in the way of everything: LBJ's Great Society programs, our African initiatives, the Middle East, everything. The protests were increasing, dissent in Congress was more serious, and there simply were not any good answers." Johnson "wanted me to make a priority of exploring a negotiated peace in Vietnam along every avenue possible," but he came up against the secretary of state, Dean Rusk, and Walt Rostow in the White House, and also against Johnson himself: "LBJ desperately wanted to get out of Vietnam but was unwilling to just cut and run." Even before Robert Kennedy's assassination, Katzenbach "had made up my mind . . . to leave government at the end of President Johnson's term, irrespective of the election results." He was tired, short on money, in need of a change. He stayed on loyally to the end, helping with the transition to the Nixon State Department, then went to IBM as vice president and general counsel. Now in his mid-80s, he lives in retirement in Princeton but remains active in public service and looks back on his years in Washington with "satisfaction from the progress we made on race and . . . sadness from the failure to end the venture in Vietnam, with so many unnecessary deaths long before it eventually collapsed." He also recalls those years as "a time of hope, of shared aspirations for a better America" in which members of both parties worked in a genuinely bipartisan spirit "to face up to our problems." That is reason enough for Some of It Was Fun to be required reading in Washington today.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About the Author
Nicholas deB. Katzenbach taught law at Yale University and the University of Chicago, and served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, before becoming senior vice president and general counsel for IBM. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Customer Reviews

Some of it was Left Out!
Katzenbach is a remarkable man with a notable career. His term at the Justice Department occurred during a period that has left an impact on US foreign policy formulation and domestic lobbying. But one of the most important episodes--RFK and Katzenbach's massive showdown with the Israel lobby--is curiously absent in his otherwise comprehensive account.

Both men were sure that they could force the American Zionist Council (or AZC, the organization that spawned AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) to register as Israel's foreign agent after Senator Fulbright documented massive money laundering from Israel via AZC into Capitol Hill and Madison Avenue for aid, arms, and unconditional diplomatic support.

All of Camelot fought, some died, but Katzenbach just gradually capitulated to the lobby's demands. But you'd have to read his own declassified DOJ files to find out just how much:

[...]

We still don't know precisely why Katzenbach folded the hand of warranted law enforcement. His book simply doesn't mention any of this. I guess that was one of the "not fun" parts of the job. But if he had stuck to his guns, it is easy to imagine the US government gaining significant enough leverage over the lobby to achieve Middle East peace thereby avoiding costly lobby-driven tragedies like the Iraq invasion. Other DOJ officials like Irene Bowman wanted to get the lobby under control via proper Foreign Agent registration. Katzenbach simply overruled them.

"Some of it" was apparently just too *politically inconvenient* (perhaps a more accurate title ). Now we all continue to suffer the consequences.
If you want to read about that "not* fun stuff, see:

AMERICA'S DEFENSE LINE: The Justice Department's Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of a Foreign Government

Counselor
This book would be a great purchase for anyone with a speck of interest in the politics and policies of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.

Mr. Katzenbach, who is very bright, liberal, and calm, reflects back, in a style easy to read, on his own career a the center of some of the central issues of a turbulent time--such as passage of the Voting Rights Act, Vietnam, and the discord between Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The author is especially good at explaining the widely divergent leadership styles of RFK and LBJ.

This book does not pretend to be a complete history, but is instead the focused memoirs of a now older man who once was entrusted with top positions at Justice and State during a transformational time in our nation's history.

I think Mr. Katsenbach deserves the renewed gratitude of the nation for his quiet leadership and bravery during his entire career in government, but especially for the dangerous spent days upholding the rule of law when helping to ensure voting rights in the South and the racial integration of such higher educational institutions as the University of Alabama.

A Memoir that is also an important historical document
Now in his mid 80's, Nicholas Katzenbach has authored a fascinating memoir of his years in government service, in the Departments of Justice and State during the JFK and LBJ administrations. In addition to being a fine memoir, his unique perspective on these two presidents, as well as Robert F. Kennedy, combined with the important historical events in which he was involved, render this insider-account an important historical document in its own right. Katzenbach's period of service in DOJ (1961-65), as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Deputy AG, and finally AG, occurred during some of the most critical periods of American history. Katzenbach recounts his involvement in school desegregation in the South involving George Wallace (even having lived through this period, I found it incredibly bizarre given the election of Barack Obama). But the most valuable perspective the author affords is a really intimate portrait of Robert Kennedy as Attorney General, and later as Senator. RFK is sometimes seen as a distant and cold figure--those holding this view should read this book. The author also was one of those who advocated the creation of the "Warren Commission."

After DOJ, thanks to LBJ, Katzenbach became Under Secretary of State (1966-1969). Much as is true with the Kennedys, Katzenbach intimate portrait of LBJ is invaluable, admiring but tempered with some stringent judgments on Johnson. Given his State Dept. position, he was involved in much higher level policy making than at Justice. He recounts important developments in the Vietnam War policy, African diplomacy, and affords us an unique insight into how these important decisions were made (including the role of the so-called "Wise Men" such as Dean Acheson who served as advisors to LBJ). While this material is interesting, clearly I believe Katzenbach saw his center of gravity in government service as occurring during his DOJ years--at least I hope he does.

This is not meant to be a "scholarly" treatment--there are no footnotes, or bibliography, though the author is not shy about reminding us that he was a Rhodes Scholar, is a Princeton graduate, attended Yale Law School, and taught and wrote at Chicago Law. Rather, it is a relaxed and extremenly thoughtful recollection of the author's government service during the 1960's--tempered with the passage of 40 years. Katzenback is full of judicious opinions and perceptive insights, and focuses upon the events and personalities rather than himself, which is refreshing in a Washingtion memoir. I am very glad that he chose to record his recollections, and so should anyone else who has an interest in this country during the 1960's.