Nicholas Katzenbach

Nicholas Katzenbach (1968)

Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach (born January 17, 1922 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † May 8, 2012 in Skillman , New Jersey ) was an American lawyer and politician ( Democratic Party ). From 1965 to 1966 he was Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson .

Life

Nicholas Katzenbach came from a family that had emigrated from the Palatinate in the 18th century. His father, Edward L. Katzenbach, headed the New Jersey judiciary, and his mother, Marie Katzenbach, was the first woman president of the US State Department of Education. In 1939 he began general education at Princeton University , which was interrupted by World War II.

On February 23, 1943 he was shot down as a navigator of a B-25 over North Africa and was in the Stalag Luft III , a prisoner of war in Germany, until the end of the war. This outbreak was discussed in the 1962 film Broken Chains .

He finished his studies at Princeton University in 1945 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) cum laude , then he completed a law degree at Yale Law School , which he graduated with a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) in 1947. Following this, he studied until 1949 with a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College of Oxford University .

After his admission to the bar , he became a partner in the law firm Katzenbach, Gildea & Rudner in New Jersey in 1950 . In 1955 he was also admitted to the Connecticut bar.

Katzenbach began his professional career from 1950 to 1952 as an employee of the legal advisory office in the Air Force Ministry . He was then initially an associate professor at the University of Chicago , before being appointed full professor of law there in 1956.

During the tenures of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, he held several senior positions in the Justice Department and later in the State Department.

After leaving the government, he took up a position as Vice President and Legal Counsel at the information technology company IBM in 1969 , which he held until 1986. He then worked as a lawyer for a few years before becoming CEO of the major bank, Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), involved in an international financial scandal in 1991 . In 1988 Katzenbach was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1992 to the American Philosophical Society .

In July 2002 he was first a member of the board and then on March 16, 2004 CEO of the third largest telephone company in the world MCI Worldcom , which was taken over in January 2006 by Verizon Communications .

Katzenbach was the father of the successful writer John Katzenbach , who translated his father's experiences as a prisoner of war in the novel The Tribunal . The novel was filmed in 2002 under the title Hart's War (German: The Tribunal).

Political career

Promotion to Attorney General under President Johnson

After John F. Kennedy won the election in 1961, Katzenbach became assistant to the attorney general and head of the legal advisory office. Just one year later, he was appointed Deputy Attorney General of Justice Minister Robert F. Kennedy .

Katzenbach (right) with federal police officers in front of Governor George Wallace (left in the door) in front of the University of Alabama

In 1963, as assistant attorney general, he was one of the main characters in a racial segregation dispute in the state of Alabama . On June 11, 1963, then- Governor of Alabama , George Wallace , stood at the door of a building at the University of Alabama to prevent two African-American students , Vivian Malone and James Hood, from enrolling there against the would have violated previous practice of racial segregation. Only after federal police , the Alabama National Guard, and Katzenbach forced him to step away, did he clear the way for the students. Later in his life, Wallace apologized for his action at the time, called the Stand in the Schoolhouse Door , to integrate African Americans.

In 1979, a House Special Committee dealt with the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and civil rights activist Martin Luther King and the conduct of the politicians responsible at the time. It was found that Katzenbach had already written on November 25, 1963, three days after the President's assassination, a letter to Bill Moyers, the special assistant to the previous Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson . In this memorandum, he called on the public to be convinced of Oswald's individual perpetrators, while suppressing speculation about his motive. The committee's final report assumed that Katzenbach, along with the director of the FBI , J. Edgar Hoover , and a few others, was the key person in setting up the so-called Warren Commission to investigate the attack.

After the election of Robert Kennedy to the US Senator on September 3, 1964, he was initially acting attorney general before President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to his cabinet as Attorney General on February 11, 1965 after Kennedy was sworn in as Senator .

In the course of his career, he repeatedly took a positive stance on the observance of civil rights . Among other things, he ordered the suspension of wiretapping measures against Martin Luther King in April 1965. He was also instrumental in drafting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . He held this office until his replacement by his previous deputy Ramsey Clark on October 2, 1966.

Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

After retiring from the Ministry of Justice, he was State Secretary (Under Secretary) in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs . In this capacity he made visits to South Vietnam in 1966 and 1967 to investigate the situation there. In addition, he was head of diplomatic missions to Africa , India , Western Europe and Eastern Europe . He was also a member of a three-person special commission appointed by the President to investigate the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). On the basis of the report of the commission, the President of the CIA prohibited the establishment of so-called reptile funds for use in private studies and cultural organizations. Although he resigned as Undersecretary in November 1968, he remained in the State Department until the end of Johnson's tenure on January 20, 1969.

Web links

Commons : Nicholas Katzenbach  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Nicholas Katzenbach in the catalog of the German National Library
• Nicholas Katzenbach in the Miller Center of Public Affairs of the University of Virginia (English)
• Biography on the homepage of the Ministry of Justice
• Challenge from the South. Article in TIME magazine on January 28, 1966
• Blackbelled from Arlington. Article in TIME magazine on February 4, 1966
• Nicholas Katzenbach in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Nicholas Katzenbach dies: Lawyer, who served as attorney general, shaped civil rights policy in 1960s
2. ↑ Nicholas de Belleville Katzenbach in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
3. ↑ Emergency sacrifice Vietnam . In: Der Spiegel . No. 2 , 1968 ( online ). "The 1.88 meter tall former bomber and prisoner of war in the Stalag III camp near Munich is the descendant of a family who emigrated from the Palatinate in the 18th century."
4. ↑ member History: Nicholas Deb. Katzenbach. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 18, 2018 . 
5. ↑ history-matters.com