Judgment Days
Posted by admin on Feb 3, 2006
Author: Nick Kotz. Title: Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. E847.2 .K67 2005
From the publisher: In the first thorough account of the complex working relationship between Lyndon Baines Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nick Kotz offers an engrossing investigation of a little-known element of the Johnson presidency. Tracing both leaders’ paths, from Johnson’s assumption of the presidency in 1963 to King’s assassination in 1968, Kotz describes how they formed a wary alliance that would become instrumental in producing some of the most substantial civil rights legislation in American history: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Drawing on a wealth of newly available sources- Johnson’s taped telephone conversations, voluminous FBI wiretap logs, and secret communications between FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the president- Kotz examines the forces that drew the charismatic men together and those that eventually drove them apart. Kotz’s focused and incisive examination significantly enriches our understanding of both men