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 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 Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Nicholas deB Katzenbach (1922 - 2012) taught law at Yale University and the University of Chicago, and served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, before becoming senior vice president and general counsel for IBM. From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley The photograph on the cover of Nicholas Katzenbach's splendid memoir shows the author, then 41 years old, wearily wiping his brow with a handkerchief. Tall, balding, correctly attired in a standard-issue Brooks Brothers suit, Katzenbach stands alone on the front of Some of It Was Fun, but readers of a certain age will immediately know why he was wiping his brow -- it was June 1963 in Alabama, and the weather was scorching -- and what he was doing: As deputy attorney general of the United States, he was trying to enroll two African American students in the University of Alabama, while a few feet away the state's governor, George Wallace, was making the "stand in the schoolhouse door" that had been central to his gubernatorial campaign in 1962. It was one of the signal events of the civil-rights struggle -- Vivian Malone and James Hood quickly were registered at the university without incident or resistance -- and it cemented Katzenbach's reputation as a calm, dedicated, resourceful and occasionally witty champion of black rights. He had earned his stripes the previous year at the University of Mississippi, where the enrollment of James Meredith had been accompanied by violence that was subdued only after President Kennedy sent in federal troops, a decision that Katzenbach now sees as "an essential foundation to the successful integration that eventually took place throughout the South," though at the time "it seemed a failure in virtually every respect." It was a surpassingly stressful time in which the Department of Justice under Robert F. Kennedy played a heroic role. 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. Katzenbach had never met either Kennedy before signing on with the new administration in 1961, and like many other lawyers he had doubts about the appointment of John F. Kennedy's 35-year-old brother as the nation's highest law-enforcement officer. But he had a strong urge for public service and got in touch with Byron White, "a friend from my student days at Yale Law, [who] was named deputy attorney general." He met with Bobby Kennedy, whom "I could not help liking," quickly was appointed assistant attorney general heading the Office of Legal Counsel, the "most important duty"