Former Attorney General Katzenbach Making Return Trip To Jamestown
(article is from the news section of the Jamestown Post-Journal)
4/4/2004 - By JOHN WHITTAKER
Nearly 40 years ago, Nicholas Katzenbach made his first trip to Jamestown to
commemorate the 10th anniversary of Robert H. Jackson's death.
Katzenbach spoke during a graveside ceremony in the Maple Grove Cemetery before
stopping at the Robert H. Jackson Elementary School in Frewsburg en route to
a dinner with members of Jackson's family in the Carroll Town Hall.
His second visit to Jamestown promises to be a little more upbeat.
On April 28, Katzenbach will deliver the keynote address during a recognition
dinner for Cheryl Brown Henderson and Linda Brown Thompson, the sisters for
whom the famous school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
was argued.
Katzenbach's appearance is part of a two-day celebration that also includes
a discussion among several Supreme Court clerks who worked on the decision and
a discussion with the Brown sisters.
While the former attorney general didn't know Jackson well, he said Jackson
was a great advocate who wrote ''extremely well and very persuasively.'' Katzenbach
also said Jackson was willing to take a moral stand in Brown v. Board rather
than simply take part in a legal decision.
''There was a dispute between Felix Frankfurter and Jackson on the issues brought
by Brown and its companion cases,'' Katzenbach said. ''Frankfurter was willing
to go with reversing (the 1897 Plessy v. Ferguson case) as long as it was what
he thought was a legal decision. Jackson was happy to go with it because it
was politically right.''
On The Front Lines
Katzenbach hadn't begun his government service in 1954 when the Supreme Court
unanimously overruled the 1897 Plessy v. Ferguson case and its ''separate but
equal doctrine.'' But, the famous photograph of Katzenbach standing across from
a defiant Alabama Gov. George Wallace during the governor's ''stand at the schoolhouse
door'' might never have been taken were it not for the Brown decision.
''I don't think it would have been possible to have made any progress on civil
rights had that case not been decided,'' Katzenbach said. ''You can criticize
it by saying that it hasn't opened all the schoolhouse doors and that schools
are still segregated. But it opened other doors. You wouldn't have had Martin
Luther King demonstrating and all of those things that led to the Civil Rights
Act if you didn't have Brown v. Board.''
During his time as deputy attorney general from 1962-64 - and then later as
attorney general from 1964-66 following the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy - Katzenbach was part of the government's effort to enforce Brown.
In September 1962, Katzenbach oversaw the admission of James Meredith to the
University of Mississippi and of Vivian Malone Jones to the University of Alabama
in June 1963.
Katzenbach was instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He also said neither law would have been possible
without the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board.
''When the court unanimously decided Brown, they knew it was a very difficult
decision and knew that it would be received with a lot of skepticism in the
South,'' Katzenbach said. ''I doubt they thought there would be the massive
resistance of the kind there was. The court can decide things, but it's hard
for the court to enforce them. ... The situation had to be resolved somehow
and it couldn't be resolved in the courts. Congress had to act and they did
in 1964.''
Katzenbach's impact is still felt more than 30 years after he left government
service. His name is attached to three prominent Supreme Court decisions - Katzenbach
v. Morgan (1966), South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966) and Katzenbach v. McClung
(1964) - that validated the civil rights legislation he helped write. The three
cases have been cited in at least 131 future Supreme Court decisions and in
countless appellate court decisions.
Despite Brown's importance and the progress made in race relations since the
1960s, Katzenbach said, the problems surrounding school segregation haven't
been solved. The movement has resulted in creation of a black middle class,
but large cities still remain highly segregated as people gain money and move
to the suburbs.
''I think the only way the school issue can be resolved is by having some money
in the federal government to put out sufficient money as an opportunity to the
states to improve their system at the federal expense,'' Katzenbach said. ''I
think the states have to take some action to get rid of the importance of property
taxes as they currently are. I also think that large corporations ought to be
far more active in this area than they are. They're going to depend on the educational
process in this country.''
A Distinguished Career
Katzenbach will be depending on the nation's schools for his company's workforce.
On March 16, Katzenbach was named chairman of Worldcom Inc. to lead the company
from a $10.6 billion accounting scandal. He was named to the 11-member board
of directors in July 2002.
Katzenbach joined the U.S. Air Force after graduating from the Phillips Exeter
Academy. During World War II, he was captured by enemy troops and spent two
years as a prisoner of war in Italy. After the war, he attended Princeton University
and Yale Law School, where he was editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal. He
also received a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at Oxford University for two
years before becoming a lawyer in New Jersey in 1950.
After spending more than 10 years in private practice and as a law professor
at Yale and the University of Chicago, Katzenbach joined the Justice Department's
Office of Legal Counsel and, in April 1962, was promoted to the position of
deputy attorney general by President John F. Kennedy. One of his first assignments
from Kennedy was to secure the release of prisoners captured during the Bay
of Pigs raid on Cuba.
He left government service when President Johnson left office in 1969 and became
general counsel for International Business Machines Corp. before leaving in
1986 to become a partner in the law firm Riker, Danzig, Scherer, Highland &
Perretti until 1994.
Upon retirement, Katzenbach has been a speaker at several events, including
a conclusion of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation commemoration
of desegregation in October 2003, a discussion at the John F. Kennedy Library
and Foundation in November 2003.
He is also involved in the Continuity of Government Commission. Katzenbach's
longstanding involvement with the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice gives
Katzenbach an avenue to work on several social issues, including one that has
been near to his heart since his days as attorney general.
''The other part that interested me as attorney general, and which still interests
me, is the whole concept of prisons and what we do about when people get out
of prison and get back into society,'' he said. ''We have an awful lot we can
do to improve that. When I was attorney general, I used to visit prisons on
Christmas Eve, because having spent a couple of Christmases in jail, I knew
it was a tough time.''