The Plan
Author: Rahm Emanuel
The Plan offers a bold vision of what America can be. It shows the way for both parties to move beyond the old political arguments and make progress for the American people. And it offers an innovative agenda for America – with ideas that address the nation's most pressing challenges by doing more for Americans and asking Americans to do more for their country in return. Each of these ideas offers a clean break with the status quo, yet all are positive, practical, and can be put into action right away. Built on the authors' firm beliefs that politicians owe the people real answers, that citizenship is a responsibility, not an entitlement program, and that the Democratic Party succeeds when America succeeds, the highly anticipated Plan delivers, challenges, and inspires.
Foreign Affairs
Washington, write Emanuel and Reed, is divided between Hacks andWonks. Wonks focus on policy; Hacks want to win. What the country, and especially the Democratic Party, now need, they claim, is a synthesis of both: people with good policy ideas who know how to win elections. This insight does not exactly dazzle with its originality, nor will readers be surprised that the authors modestly suggest that this wondrous synthesis is precisely what they themselves embody — but let all that pass. The book's real importance is as a guide to the thinking of two bright, centrist Democrats whose views will be carefully reviewed as the party prepares for 2008. The most important big idea in the book is that Democrats should stop defending the New Deal and instead concentrate on recasting it for a more mobile society. Portable pensions and health care are two of the cornerstones of this vision. Less hopeful is an idea that the authors appear to set great store by: a compulsory period of three months of national service and training for all Americans under 25. Wonks will observe that the time is too short to teach anything useful and that while the cost would be high, the real benefits would be few. Hacks will wonder whether even a short-term, nonmilitary draft is really the proposal best calculated to build widespread support among younger voters.
Some of It Was Fun
Author: Nicholas Katzenbach
Nicholas de B. Katzenbach's lively, intimate memoir casts an insider's eye over the federal government of the turbulent 1960s.
The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley
…[a] splendid memoir…Some of It Was Fun brings it all back with an immediacy that I find haunting, bracing and ultimately heartbreaking, because nothing else that I have read conveys so vividly and intimately just what we lost with Bobby Kennedy's assassination in 1968.
Publishers Weekly
Katzenbach is perhaps most famous for his role in 1962-1963, as deputy attorney general under Robert F. Kennedy, confronting Mississippi governor Ross Barnett and Alabama governor George Wallace when each was forced to racially integrate their state universities. In this fascinating memoir, Katzenbach gives an invaluable insider's view of life in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, in the latter of which he was attorney general and undersecretary of state. Katzenbach is uniquely positioned to throw light on the personal and political animosities between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson: an uncomfortable Katzenbach was often forced to become an emissary between the two. At one private White House meeting, Katzenbach has Johnson accusing the antiwar Senator Kennedy of prolonging the war, causing more American deaths: "You have blood on your hands," Johnson shouted. "I had never seen [Johnson] like this," Katzenbach writes, "almost totally out of control.... 'I don't have to listen to this, I'm leaving,' " Kennedy retorted. Such tales as this, never before told, are more than worth the price of admission. Illus. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Library Journal
Katzenbach, IBM's senior vice president, served from 1961 to 1968 as deputy attorney general in Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department and then as Lyndon B. Johnson's attorney general and undersecretary of state. Here, he shares his memories about JFK, RFK, LBJ, and Dean Rusk, Johnson's secretary of state and the only one of these officials that the author did not highly regard. The most fascinating chapters describe Katzenbach's important roles in such landmark civil rights victories as the desegregation of the universities of Mississippi and Alabama, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. His narratives about Vietnam are less illuminating because he was not in the diplomatic loop. Katzenbach's writing becomes dull when he digresses in detail about the operations of government and preachy when he assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the administrations he served and the current one. Yet, this is a balanced, often insightful insider's account that is recommended for large public and academic libraries.-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA
Kirkus Reviews
A deputy attorney general under Robert F. Kennedy, then attorney general and undersecretary of state for Lyndon B. Johnson, recounts his experiences. Katzenbach's memoir opens with the 1960 U.S. election, which he followed with interest from abroad in Geneva, where he was on a Ford Foundation Fellowship. Sensing a new administration with unprecedented energy, youth and hope, he made some calls to friends and found himself in the attorney general's office. His colleagues come vibrantly to life in this firsthand account, which includes vivid re-creations of conversations among RFK, J. Edgar Hoover, George Wallace and LBJ. One brief exchange between LBJ and Wallace perfectly captures each man's personality and positions. Katzenbach does not reveal anything groundbreaking, and his discussions of major political movements are best when they concern something he was passionate about, civil rights in particular. Two especially engrossing sections chronicle his experiences while attempting to enroll African-American students at Ole Miss and the University of Alabama. Explaining the painstaking organization and effort that went into passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Katzenbach provides some select anecdotes. Beyond these skillfully told personal histories, he chronicles the decline of the optimism that characterized the Attorney General's office during the Kennedy administration into the faltering uncertainty that followed JFK's assassination and continued into Johnson's term. The author is always candid, though occasionally a bit repetitive, and his devotion to his work comes through clearly. The book is less effective when discussing subjects Katzenbach viewed with pessimism, such as the warin Vietnam. It seems evident that the end of LBJ's term was the right time for him to leave. Not always riveting, but an intelligently written eyewitness account of some of 20th-century America's most critical moments.
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