Missing Reunions to stare down segregation

Katzenbach, 87, served as attorney general and undersecretary of state in the administration of former president Lyndon Johnson and was a key figure in passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and authoring the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Katzenbach has fought on the front lines of desegregation, in the air over North Africa and in the halls of the nation’s Capitol with some of America’s most prominent politicians.

A native of central New Jersey born into a family of Princetonians, Katzenbach said it never occurred to him to go to school anywhere other than Princeton.

“I can tell you all about the [Princeton] football teams from when I was 10 years old, from when Fritz Crisler was the coach,” he said. “They could have been invited to the Rose Bowl that year if Princeton allowed them to play in the postseason. The team that was invited to the Rose Bowl instead was Columbia, who Princeton beat 21-0 that year.”

During his time on campus, the University was in a period of turmoil because of World War II and the lingering effects of the Great Depression, but students carried on their everyday lives much as they do now, Katzenbach said. He explained that as a freshman, he played soccer, ice hockey and lacrosse but “didn’t do much else.”

But before he could complete his time at the University, the war came calling, and Katzenbach left to join the Army Air Corps as a navigator.

While Katzenbach was stationed in North Africa in 1943, his plane was shot down over the ocean, and the crew was stranded in a lifeboat until a German fighter ship approached, soon followed by two Italian sea planes, which captured the crew. It was during this incident that Katzenbach decided he wanted to become a lawyer.

“I noticed that the Italian officers were drinking wine,” he explained. “Under the Geneva Convention, we were entitled to the same treatment as them. Believe it or not, they provided wine. That’s the last time I was ever provided wine as a prisoner.”

Held as a prisoner of war for two years, first in Italy and then in Germany, Katzenbach was liberated by the Russians in 1945, but the time was not wasted, he said, noting that he did substantial reading and studying during his imprisonment.

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Upon his return to Princeton in 1945, he went straight to the dean of the college’s office to ask whether he could take the exams for all of the courses he had missed and write his senior thesis during his 60 days on leave from the armed forces. The dean said yes, and 60 days later, Katzenbach was ready to graduate.

After finishing Yale Law School in just two years, Katzenbach attended the University of Oxford as an unlikely Rhodes Scholar.

“My wife thought it would be a good life in England,” he explained. “I said I wasn’t interested, but she said she would do the application, and I would sign it.”

When he went for his Rhodes interview, he said, the interviewers were left convincing him to take the scholarship. Appreciating the absurdity of the situation, Katzenbach noted, “I had the Rhodes Scholarship and the G.I. Bill. I had never been so wealthy in my whole life.”

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After two years at Oxford, Katzenbach returned to New Jersey and private practice, moving to professorships at Yale and then the University of Chicago before settling in Washington, D.C., in 1961.

“I called a law school friend, Byron White, who was the deputy attorney general, and I went back to D.C.,” Katzenbach explained. “He got me a job as assistant attorney general, and then he went to the Supreme Court, and I became deputy attorney general. Then [Attorney General] Bobby Kennedy went to the Senate after his brother’s death, and I became attorney general.”

During his time in the attorney general’s office, Katzenbach was a staunch proponent of civil rights. In June 1963, he traveled to Alabama to help desegregate the University of Alabama in the face of strong protest from Wallace.

“I remember Bobby [Kennedy] called me on the way down, and he asked me what I would say to the governor,” Katzenbach recalled. “I said I didn’t know, and he said, ‘The president wants you to make the governor look foolish.’ I said, ‘How do I do that?’ Bobby just said I’d do fine.”

Wallace famously tried to stop two African-American students from entering the University of Alabama. Katzenbach, with the support of the National Guard, faced off against Wallace, convincing him to grant the students entry.

“I don’t know what I said [to Wallace],” Katzenbach said. “The only line I can remember is, ‘I don’t know what this show is all about. These are just students trying to be admitted to the University,’ which did annoy him.”

Despite the serious nature of the negotiations, Katzenbach remembered at least one humorous exchange from the day, which coincided with his 20th Princeton reunion.

“One of the local officers in the guard was one of my classmates at Princeton,” Katzenbach recalled. “He was furious. He said, ‘Somebody’s up there at Princeton drinking all my beer.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Did you pay for that reunion?’ I said yes, and he said, ‘Well, thank God for that, you’re missing it, too.’ ”

History professors Sean Wilentz and Kevin Kruse cited Katzenbach as one of the foremost figures of the American civil rights movement.

“Though Katzenbach’s term as attorney general was brief, his place in American history is quite significant,” Kruse said in an e-mail. “His predecessor Robert F. Kennedy cast a long shadow, but Katzenbach was able to step out of that and emerge as an important and influential figure in his own right.”

Calling Katzenbach “a giant of the civil rights [movement],” Wilentz noted that the lawyer was “instrumental in advancing some of the most important legal changes in that era with regards to civil rights.”

The highlight of his career in government was getting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, Katzenbach said.

“I almost became an alcoholic because of it,” he said. “I spent so many hours drinking bourbon over the act, and making changes … That was fine as long as [the others were] sober enough to agree to it and remember it.”

During his time as attorney general, Katzenbach encountered a wide and varied cast of prominent characters, including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

“I would always go to [Hoover’s] office,” Katzenbach said, laughing. “He thought I was paying tribute to his old age, but I did it because I could never figure out how to get him out of my office.”

Calling Hoover “old and a little senile,” Katzenbach said the two men often disagreed, especially on the topic of civil rights.

“[Hoover] was very anti-Martin Luther King,” Katzenbach explained. “Not only because [King] was black, but also because he was very anti-FBI. You may think you know what original sin is, but if you talk to J. Edgar Hoover, it’s being critical of the FBI.”

Hoover was one of the more controversial characters Katzenbach dealt with, but he stirred up a bit of controversy on his own with an internal memo following President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Many interpreted the memo as evidence of a government cover-up of the assassination, but Katzenbach explained it was merely poorly worded.

“I missed two years of Princeton. I guess that’s why my English wasn’t so great,” he said, adding that he does not think there was any conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy.

“The Russians weren’t that dumb, and the mafia weren’t, either,” he explained. “Why would they hire such a nutty guy to assassinate the president? That’s crazy. I thought it was possibly some racist group, conceivably … [or Fidel] Castro could have done it. He could have, but he wasn’t that dumb, I think.”

Katzenbach left the Department of Justice partly because Hoover moved to prosecute student activists protesting the Vietnam War.

“I didn’t want to prosecute those kids,” he said. “That was a reason I left. It was plain unpleasant. They were breaking the law, and publicly you couldn’t defend them [as much as I wanted to].”

“What was so interesting about students from the ’60s and ’70s was the causes they were [involved] in,” he said. “The students would go down to register blacks in the South to vote, and some got killed. I take my hat off to that ... I would much rather have students working on something than sitting on their ass.”

After Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, Katzenbach left Washington to serve as IBM’s chief legal adviser before returning to private practice in New Jersey.

In addition to acting as an arbitrator, Katzenbach took part in many high-profile cases in the 30 years before he retired in 1999.

In 1980, Katzenbach testified on behalf of W. Mark Felt — later revealed to be “Deep Throat” — when he was charged with authorizing unlawful home break-ins by FBI agents. Felt was convicted but later pardoned by President Ronald Reagan. Katzenbach said that did not know about Felt’s involvement in the Watergate scandal until Felt publicly announced it in 2005.

In 1981, Katzenbach represented the University before the Supreme Court in Princeton Univ. v. Schmid, a suit challenging the University’s right to stop unaffiliated members of the public from using the campus as a protest site. The University altered its regulations during the proceedings, and the Supreme Court dismissed the case in a January 1982 per curiam decision.

Sixteen years later, he testified on behalf of President Bill Clinton in the impeachment proceedings against Clinton.

“It was very unpleasant, really,” he said. “I had testified many, many times in front of the judiciary committee, and they had always been polite, but not this time. They were not gracious. The Republicans were all set against Clinton, and the Democrats were all for him. I had no possibility of convincing anybody of anything.”

Looking back on Katzenbach’s life, scholars will judge him kindly, Wilentz said. “James Madison’s the greatest [Princetonian], but [Katzenbach] belongs in any pantheon of Princetonians especially given ‘Princeton in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations,’ ” he explained. And in 2008, Princeton Alumni Weekly named Katzenbach the 16th most influential Princetonian in history.

Katzenbach made no such claims, explaining that he doesn’t need outside praise.

“Anybody’s life is fun,” he said. “But whether it’s a worthwhile life or not, the only person who can judge it is the person whose life it is. I think I did pretty well.”