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Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes Jonathan Rosenberg and Zachary Karabell W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 2003 368 Pages
The civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s is generally thought of a grassroots, bottom-up movement of ordinary black Americans attempting to utilize their rights as citizens. We are reminded of leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall, and countless others who risked their lives to defend the liberty their fellow African-Americans. Yet what many students of history and American politics are often less familiar with is the top-down battle, one felt by the political leaders who grappled with the moral injustice permeating the nation and the political necessity of bringing about civil rights legislation. Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice provides an inside look at how to two presidents, albeit in their own unique ways, dealt with the moral and political dilemma of segregation.
As part of the Presidential Recordings Project at the University of Virginia's Miller Center for Public Affairs, the book provides actual transcripts of secretly taped and previously unreleased presidential conversations. Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and later Nixon also made secret recordings, but Kennedy was the first to elaborately wire the oval office and make frequent use of it. The transcripts in the book pertain mainly to civil rights and the few other domestic issues that were important in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Various other affairs enter the conversations to the extent that the reader is reminded that presidents often juggle many issues at a time, even on the global scale.
Kennedy began his term ambivalent and nonchalant with regard to civil rights. Race was never completely ignored, but the issue was seen as more of a distraction than a subject matter worth undertaking. However, Kennedy's stance would ultimately change when violence erupted in Mississippi and bombs exploded in Birmingham both of which would result in grave injuries and numerous deaths. The transcripts begin in the fall of 1962 when President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy were forced to confront the ensuing crisis of registering James Meredith at the segregated University of Mississippi. Conversations between the President and Mississippi Governor, Ross Barnett highlight the extensive...