Product Review

A lively, intimate memoir that vividly recalls the idealism of the Kennedy administration.

As deputy attorney general under Bobby Kennedy and then attorney general and under secretary of state for Lyndon Johnson, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach offers a unique perspective on the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and other issues of the day. In this engaging memoir, by turns intensely dramatic and charmingly matter-of-fact, we are treated to a ringside seat for Katzenbach's confrontation with segregationist governor George C. Wallace over the integration of the University of Alabama, his efforts to steer the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress, and then his transition to the State Department, where he served at the center of the storm over Vietnam. In the political climate of this election season, Some of It Was Fun provides a refreshing reminder of the hopes and struggles of an earlier era, speaking both to readers who came of age in the 1960s and to a generation of young people looking to that period for political inspiration. 16 pages of photographs