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. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, c. 2005. Pp. xxii, 522. Paper, $15.00, ISBN 0-618-64183-3; cloth, $25.00, ISBN 0-618-08825-3.)

Nick Kotz's book tells the story of the working relationship between Lyndon Baines Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. from Johnson's accession to the presidency in 1963 to his death in 1973. The narrative is set against the backdrop of the 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As one might expect from a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, the story is told with epic drama and polished prose, and the book is clearly a work of popular history aimed at a mass audience.

For academic scholars, Kotz's book presents a number of problems. Foremost among them is that the period he examines has already been exhaustively mined. A large number of books have been written on Johnson and his presidency and on King and the civil rights struggle. There are monographs on the civil rights legislation of the period. And there is a vast amount of literature on America and the 1960s. Is there anything new left to say? Kotz's book suggests not. There is virtually nothing substantive here that advances our knowledge of the subject that cannot be found in existing published secondary sources. Kotz's work includes around 150 original oral-history interviews together with archival work. Yet all this research really succeeds in doing is plowing deeper the well-worn narrative furrows. For the most part, it simply adds extra dialogue and detail to key episodes and scenes but does little else.

Another problem with the book is that the bibliography is tellingly light for a study of this scope. Kotz cites no scholarly articles or journals at all. Moreover, his use and grasp of the secondary literature is patchy. Had he, for example, consulted the influential study of Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill, 1997), he could have avoided revisiting and repeating civil rights folklore about just how well planned and well organized King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) "Project C" campaign in Birmingham was, something that Eskew effectively rebuffs. Had he read James R. Ralph Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), he might have dated King and the SCLC's Chicago campaign more accurately as beginning in 1965 rather than in 1966. These are just two examples among many others.

But Kotz is not really interested in local civil rights struggles. His book presents a world where important men make important laws, which makes important history. Even within this limited purview there are strict hierarchies. The main man here is Johnson, who receives the lion's share of the book's attention, with King left as the decidedly junior partner. The major plays in the civil rights movement here emanate from the White House and Congress, with King and the SCLC's campaigns merely a sideshow (only their 1965 Selma campaign really receives anywhere near the attention it deserves), and local civil rights struggles are hazy in the distance. In short, Kotz seems largely oblivious to the main currents in civil rights historiography of the past twenty-five years.

Beyond these gripes, there are some intrinsic problems with Kotz' s project. Central among them is the seeming lack of any sort of genuine relationship existing between King and Johnson in the first place. The two men met on very few occasions, and when they did there was a high level of professional detachment and mutual suspicion between them. Perhaps largely because of that, Kotz is disappointing in delivering the insights on their relationship that the book promises. Admittedly, Kotz does do a good job of looking at the political machinations and difficulties in passing civil rights laws, although he rarely pauses to look at the actual impact that such legislation had. Kotz's use of dramatic license is also questionable in places. For instance, when he tells us that King "set out to destroy" Johnson in the post-1965 period, it provides a skewed analysis of King's intentions and wildly overestimates King's latent power to influence events (p. xix).

For the general reader, Kotz' s study is a fluently written introduction to the period that manages overall to get most things right most of the time. For those already familiar with the literature, there is little new and much more to be desired here.

JOHN A. KIRK

Royal Holloway, University of London