Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ

In 1960, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach ’47 watched the presidential election from Geneva, Switzerland, with the sense of anticipation that gripped many Americans. On leave from his faculty position at the University of Chicago, Katzenbach was an academic, having taught at Yale Law School prior to joining Chicago. He was not a government man, and he had no connection to the Kennedys. But when John F. Kennedy won the presidency, Katzenbach became anxious to get involved—he felt sidelined in Switzerland and was eager to play a role in what he considered to be an administration with potential to change the world.

In short order, friends, former classmates, and colleagues of Katzenbach began to work with the Kennedy administration and Katzenbach grew even more restless from his station in Switzerland. When former classmate Byron White ’46 was appointed deputy attorney general, Katzenbach’s wife, Lydia, urged him to give White a call. Within a day of that phone call, Katzenbach was on a plane to Washington and joined White (as well as fellow YLS graduates Burke Marshall ’51, Louis Oberdorfer ’46, and later Norbert Schlei ’51) in the Department of Justice.

Katzenbach, of course, served as a trusted aide to both Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, acting as legal counsel and deputy attorney general under RFK and then as attorney general and under secretary of state for LBJ. His time with those two leaders is the subject of his new book, Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ. A key participant in watershed moments of the 60s, including the confrontation with segregationist George C. Wallace during the integration of the University of Alabama, Katzenbach takes his readers back to the time period of 1961 to 1969 in this 352-page memoir. He describes Washington in 1961 as a time and place of “collective optimism, full of energy and determination on the part of many of us, mostly World War II veterans.”

Some of It Was Fun is simultaneously backward and forward looking. As a memoir, it allows its reader access behind the doors of some of the most important meetings of the 1960s. But, ultimately, Katzenbach uses his book as a lens to reexamine the trajectory of politics today. “I was motivated to write the memoir because I felt that we were losing sight of government for and by the people in a wave of greed and ideology which was divisive and often irrational,” Katzenbach explained. “WWII veterans had experienced what this country can do when we all work together for the common good, and I wanted to share with young people the belief that even the most difficult problems have solutions if we are willing to seek them together.”

Among the things Some of It Was Fun laments about contemporary politics: partisanship.

“I think there are lessons from this period that are applicable today,” Katzenbach writes. “Our most important legislation then depended on bipartisan support, and of the hundreds of calls I made on members of both houses of Congress, I can recall very few that were not discussions centered on the merits of the legislation, whether it dealt with civil rights, immigration, prison reform, or federal criminal law…I hope young people will have the passion for government I had many years ago (and still have). It is, after all, their future that is at stake.”