Nicholas Katzenbach

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Nicholas Katzenbach at the White House, 1968

Alabama Governor George Wallace (in front of door) standing defiantly against desegregation while being confronted by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (standing opposite of Wallace) at the University of Alabama.

Nicholas DeBelleville Katzenbach (born January 17, 1922) is an American lawyer who served as United States Attorney General during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration.

1 Early life
2 Government service
3 Role in JFK assassination investigation
4 Later years
5 See also
6 References

[edit] Early life

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Katzenbach attended Phillips Exeter Academy, received his B.A. cum laude from Princeton University in 1945 and his LL.B. cum laude from Yale Law School in 1947. From 1947 to 1949, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford.

Katzenbach was admitted to the New Jersey bar in 1950 and the Connecticut bar in 1955. He was an associate in the law firm of Katzenbach, Gildea and Rudner in 1950.

[edit] Government service

From 1950 to 1952 he was attorney-advisor in the Office of General Counsel to the Secretary of the Air Force. Katzenbach was an associate professor of law at Yale from 1952 to 1956, and a professor of law at the University of Chicago from 1956 to 1960.

He served in the U.S. Department of Justice as Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel in 1961-1962 and as Deputy Attorney General from 1962 to 1965. President Johnson appointed Katzenbach the 65th Attorney General of the United States on February 11, 1965, and he held the office until October 2, 1966. He then served as Under Secretary of State from 1966 to 1969.

[edit] Role in JFK assassination investigation

In the 1979 account from the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), it came out that on November 25, 1963, only 3 days after the John F. Kennedy assassination and before any investigation had been conducted; Nicholas Katzenbach, then deputy Attorney General, had written a memo to Presidential Assistant Bill Moyers at the White House. Katzenbach's memo comes the closest of any known official document (Katzenbach's memo) to discussing a government coverup (although in the context of the memo it seems just as likely that he hoped to head off panicked media speculation about a Communist plot - hence to avoid inadvertently escalating the Cold War):

"The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he had no confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial...Speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off...Unfortunately the facts on Oswald seem about too pat—too obvious (Marxist, Cuba, Russian wife, etc.)...We need something to head off public speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong sort."

The Committee's final report implies Katzenbach, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and others were the key actors behind the creation of the Warren Commission. According to the report, Hoover told staff members on November 24, 1963 that he and Katzenbach were anxious to have "something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin," though the idea of a commission was initially opposed by President Johnson.

[edit] Later years

Katzenbach left government service to work for IBM in 1969, where he stayed until 1986. He returned to private practice and was named chairman of the failing Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in 1991. See Katzenbach, Nicholas (de Belleville) in John S. Bowman, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography (Cambridge, England: The Cambridge University Press, 1995).

In 1980, Nicholas Katzenbach testified in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for the defense of W. Mark Felt, later revealed to be the "Deep Throat" of the Watergate scandal and later Deputy Director of the FBI; accused and later found guilty of ordering illegal wiretaps on American citizens.

In December 1996, Katzenbach was a member of the New Jersey State Electoral College, one of 15 electors casting their votes for the Clinton/Gore ticket.^[1]

Mr. Katzenbach also testified on behalf of President Clinton on December 8, 1998, before the House Judiciary Committee hearing, considering whether to impeach President Clinton ^[2].

On March 16, 2004, MCI Communications in a press release announced "its Board of Directors has elected former U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach as non-executive Chairman of the Board, effective upon MCI's emergence from Chapter 11 protection. Katzenbach has been an MCI Board member since July 2002." MCI later merged with Verizon.