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

by Jonathan Rosenberg, Zachary Karabell

Peer inside the White House as Presidents Kennedy and Johnson grapple with racial injustice in America. This remarkable book is composed of actual transcripts―most never before published―from the secret recordings that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson made of White House meetings and telephone conversations between the violent crisis in 1962, when James Meredith attempted to enroll at the all-white University of Mississippi, and the groundbreaking passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Setting these transcripts within an historical narrative, Jonathan Rosenberg and Zachary Karabell present the story of America's struggle for racial equality during two tumultuous years.

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. Part of the Presidential Recordings Project, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, General Editors: Ernest May and Philip Zelikow.

Genres: History

352 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2003

Reviews

[Billy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very cool background on what was going on in the civil rights era from the perspective of the White House. In general, a lot of the written historical literature of that time is focused, appropriately, on movement figures, i.e., from the ground up. But this shows how Kennedy and Johnson, lionized figures within the Democratic Party for their courage on civil rights, were actually quite conservative, and found figures like King annoying, disruptive and unnecessarily provocative. Which just goes to show that's exactly what you need to be to get things done. At the same time, it shows the consummate political skills of LBJ -- he seized upon a "national tragedy" - - the death of Kennedy -- to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Read this--it goes quick and is very interesting.

[Eclectic Review · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very enlightening novel regarding Johnson's views on the civil rights movement.