This interview is badass.

why didn't Katzenbach ever get more involved in NJ?

How about this, Let's just close down the White House, let George set a new record for most vacation days--have him mail in the next two state of the union addresses and be done with it. What is so wonderful about the American system is that these miscreants will leave the Bushie White House and make millions of dollars pimping for corporations. Ain't America Grand??

They dig up some really great fossils.

Who is Katzenbach kidding? You mean the author of the famous "it must be Oswald" memo? November 25, 1963: "The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial." "We need something to head off public speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong sort." Yeah. And it was easy, too. After Ruby dusted Oswald, it was easy for the government to blame everything on the patsy. Katzenbach should be proud of himself.

Did then Assistant Attorney General and later Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach speak out against Johnson's Vietnam oopses, like oops I know Lyndon said we weren't sending troops into Cambodia but, or oops they didn't really attack us in the Gulf of Tonkin like Lyndon said, both of which happened on his watch?

Could it be that Katzenbach gave his principal client what he wanted rather than what the Constitution called for? Or perhaps, like Chertoff he was loyal to his employer and kept his mouth shut.

From testifying for Clinton in the Monica/impeachment mess and in defence of the former deputy director of the FBI in his trial over his use of illegal wiretaps on American citizens, to his collaboration with J Edgar Hoover to create the Warren Commission so that, in JEH's words "we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin," it sure seems like he's a very strange messenger for this particular message.

But perhaps not. After all, with all that crap in his background maybe he should be lecturing the current Administration on their use of toilet paper...

Oh Yeah. He did do a great job with Wallace in the school house door.

Good points, querty, and, a little more to the point on the subject of Viet-Nam, perhaps Mr. Katzenback (or whoever submitted the comments in this post for him) would care to address his personal failure to act on principle during Viet-Nam, and his decision to remain silent through to the end of the Johnson Administration, in spite of what he had apparently personally concluded about that war at least two years previously.

Where were his principals, and those of Robert S. McNamara in late 1966 when the then-Secretary of Defense claimed he concluded (contrary to the views of many others in the Johnson Administration) that we could not win in Viet-Nam, and that in their minds, the continuation of the war would likely never succeed?

It took McNamara nearly 30 years to finally address his own silence, when in 1995 he published his mea culpa on the war, In Retrospect. Though he was the principal architect of that war, many saw the book as his Johnny-come-lately effort to pass the buck of blame to others.

Therein, he detailed his view of the internal debate within the Johnson Administration during the final two years, about what he said he came to believe was the impossibility of success in Viet-Nam. McNamara described how he had detailed in writing his pessimistic views to Johnson in 1966, and on page 264 of the book, he said:

Under Secretary of State Nick Katzenbach generally shared my views. Nick had been Attorney General but had been moved to State because of the president's dissatisfaction with Dean's [Rusk] administration of the department.

Again on page 283, McNamara cited the fact that he and Nick Katzenbach visited Viet-Nam at the request of Johnson, and that their subsequent pessimistic views were essentially the same.

Yet, Katzenbach held on to his job through to the end of the Administration. He only left his post in the beginning of 1969 when Nixon entered office.

Where was he when, as described by McNamara, the generals held sway with Johnson? Why didn’t Nick then publicly conclude that Johnson had become (in his juvenile characterization of George Bush) the “dictator in chief?”

Was he merely hoping to “promote political advantage” by keeping his trap shut in 1968, in hopes that Hubert Humphrey might be elected and that he might then be elevated to a top position?

What a complete, utterly partisan and phony point of view he has expressed! At his advanced age – 85 -- one must suspect that some enterprising anti-war “progressive” has somehow prompted his sudden re-emergence into the political maelstrom, solely to take a cheap and disingenuous political shot at Michael Chertoff.

And how phony that the very criticism that he levels at Chertoff -- not openly being critical of the Administration -- is the self-same behavior that Katzenback exhibited in spades during the final two years of the Johnson Administration!

These pompous fellows, who all apparently bought into the PR nonsense of Ted Sorensen that they were “the best and the brightest,” simply never got over it.

Even today, in spite of their manifest failures, they still deign to publicly look down their noses at those like Michael Chertoff who are attempting to address a new set of international realities.

Finally, the laughable comments about the “almost unprecedented” views of “disdain for Congress” constitute nothing less than silly immature rantings -- a view that hopefully will never ever again gain traction again in this nation.

We can ill-afford to have key foreign policy decisions of the United States turned over to a series of bloviating committee chairman, like Frank Church, each one falling all over the other unwittingly seeing who can cause more lasting damage to the nation’s prestige, and incalculable danger ot our national security.

by Trochilus