Lawyer shaped civil rights policy

Nicholas Katzenbach, an unflappable lawyer who served as the Kennedy brothers' emissary to the South during the violent confrontations over racial segregation in the early 1960s, and who later was an architect of landmark civil-rights laws and Vietnam War policy under President Lyndon Johnson, died May 8 at his home in Skillman, N.J. He was 90.

He had been in failing health since breaking a hip last December, said his wife, Lydia Stokes Katzenbach.

A hulk of a man with a penchant for rumpled suits, Katzenbach was a law professor at the University of Chicago and Yale before joining the Kennedy administration in 1961. He built a reputation as a sure-footed problem-solver who was called on to deal with many of the crises that defined the 1960s.

He wrote a key midnight brief during the Cuban missile crisis, challenged FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover over the wiretapping of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., conceived of the Warren Commission to investigate John F. Kennedy's assassination, and argued with some of the most powerful federal officials over how to extricate the country from the war in Vietnam.

He is perhaps most widely remembered, however, for his role as a graceful negotiator during political and physical altercations over court-ordered desegregation in the South.

In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, feared that sending military troops to force integration of public institutions would spark an anti-Democrat revolution in the South. So they twice turned to Katzenbach, then deputy attorney general, to lead federal marshals in securing safe passage for black students attempting to register at previously all-white schools.

In June 1963, Katzenbach successfully registered two blacks students despite having segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace plant himself in the doorway of the state university to block them. Katzenbach procured the students' room keys by telling university officials that Justice officials needed to do a security sweep -- and the students were registered without incident later that day.

His performance there earned him admiration from the Kennedys and a reputation as a "courageous egghead, committed activist, and intellectual who put principle ahead of expediency, public good before personal safety," Victor Navasky wrote in 1971 in the New York Times.

That night in a nationally televised address, President Kennedy called for a comprehensive civil rights bill. Katzenbach largely wrote that bill, and his soft-pedal salesmanship was crucial in passing the bill over a Senate filibuster in 1964.