Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America.

Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America

by Nick Kotz Houghton Mifflin, January 2005 $25, ISBN 0-618-08825-3

Lyndon Johnson has, in some respects, become the "lost" president of post-World War II America. Nick Kotz, a discerning, veteran journalist and author, has taken one fascinating facet of Johnson's presidency--his complex relationship with Martin Luther King Jr.--and produced a book indispensable not only for understanding more about both of these great, progressive figures, but also about the course the black freedom struggle and American society as a whole took from the mid-1960s on. His work here is proof that despite all the glib summaries of the 1960s in the mainstream books and media, there remains much more to say about the importance of that decade and much more to explore about Lyndon Johnson, too. Johnson's importance to the movement for civil rights is summed up in what he said when asked at his final press conference what his proudest moment as president had been.

"Without hesitation," Kotz writes, "Johnson replied, 'I expect the thing that has pleased me as much as any other thing ... is the response that the Congress made to my Voting Rights Act.'"

Lee A. Daniels is editor of the National Urban League's The State of Black America magazine.