Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice; The Civil Rights Tapes

New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2003. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xiv, 368, [2] pages. Inscribed and dated by both authors on title page. Includes The Presidential Recording Project by Philip Zeilow and Ernest May. Also includes Introduction, Conclusion, Bibliographic Essay, Key Players, Summary of Civil Rights Act of 1964, Acknowledgments, and Index. Chapters cover The Twentieth-Century Struggle; Ole Miss; Protest in Birmingham; The Bill and the March; Bombs in Birmingham; The Bill Moves Forward; Johnson Takes Over; Through the House; Into the Senate; and the Final Flight. Jonathan Seth Rosenberg (born March 14, 1958) is an American historian and author. He is a professor at Hunter College. Rosenberg earned his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1997. His thesis, which he later published in expanded form as a book, was titled How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam. He has been at Hunter College since 2001. Zachary Karabell is a New York-born author, columnist and investor. Karabell has written widely on economics, investing, history and international relations, and on the role and impact of alarmist thinking in our culture. Karabell taught at several leading universities, including as a History Tutor at Harvard University as well as a History Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Karabell received a BA in history from Columbia University and an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St. Antony's College, University of Oxford. He earned his Ph.D. in history/international relations from Harvard in 1996. In September 1962, a new phase in the struggle for civil rights began when twenty-eight year-old James Meredith attempted to become the first African American student to matriculate at the segregated University of Mississippi. The campus became an armed battleground, as local police, the National Guard, and angry demonstrators clashed. Reluctantly, President John F. Kennedy intervened to resolve the crisis. He sent army forces to quell the violence and forced Governor Ross Barnett to allow Meredith to enroll. This dramatic episode began the transformation of the White House from a passive spector in the civil rights struggle to an active, and willing, advocate for civil rights reform. Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice brings the reader into the room as Kennedy argues with Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and the white business leaders of Birmingham, Alabama, and as Johnson makes late-night phone calls to Martin Luther King Jr., NAACP head Roy Wilkins, and Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham. As fly-on-the-wall history, this book gives us an unprecedented grasp of the way the White House affected civil rights history and consequently transformed America. This book contains actual transcripts of the secret recordings--most never before published--that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson made of their meetings and telephone conversations between the fall of 1962 and the groundbreaking passage of the Civil Rights Act in the summer of 1964. Derived from a Kirkus review: A collection of primary, hitherto unknown documents in the history of the civil-rights movement. Drawing on archival materials available only 40 years after the fact, and centering on a trove of audiotapes now housed at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, historians Rosenberg and Karabell offer a fly-on-the-wall view of the often tense, often combative stance of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in pressing for equality across the land. One question to ask of those documents early on, the editors suggest, is this: "Why did Kennedy and Johnson come to believe that civil rights reform was the single most important domestic issue facing the nation and decide it was worth fighting for?" Both presidents, after all, had much to lose in potentially alienating the South. Yet, as is clear from the transcripts of meetings and telephone conversations presented here, both Kennedy and Johnson took to the cause, often playing hardball to get their point across, as when Kennedy clashed with Mississippi governor Ross Barnett over James Meredith's effort to enroll in the state university in 1962. Kennedy may not have always known the players, but his heart was clearly in the right place, as was Johnson, who emerges from these pages, as from Robert Caro's recent Master of the Senate, as a consummate politician not afraid of breaking a few bones while engaging in a little friendly arm-twisting. The result, of course, was the groundbreaking Civil Rights Act of 1964. A notable effort, essential for the study of the civil-rights movement.