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  • Judgment Days Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws that Changed America
  • Jack Bass (bio)
Judgment Days Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws that Changed America By Nick KotzHoughton Mifflin, 2006522 pp. Cloth $26.00

In contrast to the current emptiness of "compassionate conservatism," Nick Kotz has written an important book about a president from Texas and a preacher from Georgia who both understood civil rights for black Americans as a moral issue that the American people needed to confront with action.

Judgment Days captures the soaring hopes and successes of the 1960s, when, in the wake of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, the vision and moral leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and the collective Civil Rights Movement joined together with the masterful political leadership and skill of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. It forces a new look at LBJ as a man of moral courage who deeply understood and confronted the crippling effects of three centuries of racial discrimination and who suffered from the failure of his effort to succeed in his war on poverty. It also captures the heartbreaking conflicts and devastating impact of the expanding war in Vietnam, including the ultimate breach between King and Johnson over the war's morality as well as its commandeering of the resources that both recognized were needed to correct what Johnson would characterize as "the conditions that breed despair and violence" at home. He learned too late the fatal flaw in his belief that the country could afford guns and butter, a failure that fed bitter public divisiveness.

Kotz has roots through his mother's family to the New Deal tradition of LBJ's Texas hill country, and he uses both the tools of journalists and historians to produce a fresh and vivid account of the combined role of Johnson and King in unlocking the legal barriers to equality. (At a time when Congress cuts back on food stamps and medical care for the poor as a means of financing tax cuts for the wealthy, this book provides clues to what another wave of reform would require.) Kotz may be viewed as a reporter interviewing sources or as an oral historian collecting revealing personal narratives; either way, his roughly 150 interviews of [End Page 110] men and women on the front lines of conflict and change add depth to our understanding of this traumatic era.

The story of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's vendetta against King isn't new, but Kotz tells it with greater depth and nuance than ever before. He gained access to thousands of pages of previously closed FBI documents and interviewed contemporary top officials of the Bureau. We learn how one top Hoover aide finds out that the Ford Foundation is about to award $4 million to King's financially strapped Southern Christian Leadership Conference, calls a former FBI agent working for Ford Motor Company, and the grant is cut to $250,000. (The firewall separating the company and the foundation apparently came later.)

The full story of Hoover's determination to destroy King is sordid. His top associates delivered to a receptive White House detailed reports filled with dubious counterintelligence and distorted interpretations of Communist influence over King, details of sexual exploits, and advance knowledge of his tactical moves. The approval for the initial wiretaps came from Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and Johnson devoured it all.

Johnson emerges as a flawed giant, King as a brave and shrewd moral leader who becomes more radical as he's overcome by events and, finally, an assassin's bullet. Readers will learn how two lives, both well documented, intersect from the time LBJ moves into the White House until MLK is murdered in Memphis.

We see in vivid detail Johnson cajoling, persuading, bribing with political favors, and using powerful moral arguments to move Congress to pass the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and then exploiting the climate of remorse after King's death to gain passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act and outlaw housing and jury discrimination.

Missing from this story is Johnson's failure, as a lame...

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