An outstanding lawyer and true gentleman, Nicholas DeBelleville Katzenbach recently died at his Skillman home. His father was a respected lawyer who became attorney general of New Jersey, and his mother was a member of the State Board of Education for 44 years. Katzenbach left Princeton University to enlist in the army at the outbreak of World War II, and became an Army Air Force navigator. When his plane was shot down, it is said that he read over 400 books while a prisoner of war for 15 months. As a result, he completed Princeton on an accelerated basis and graduated cum laude. He went on to Yale Law School, where he became Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal. He was a Rhodes Scholar and professor of law at Yale and the University of Chicago Law School before joining the Justice Department after the election of John F. Kennedy as president.
In the Justice Department, Katzenbach headed the Office of Legal Counsel to the Attorney General and subsequently replaced Byron White as deputy attorney general when White went on the Supreme Court in 1962. President Lyndon Johnson appointed Katzenbach as attorney general in February of 1965. He resigned less than two years later, in October 1966, after published reports of his disagreements with J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, over the scope of the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. Not wanting him to leave the administration, however, President Johnson appointed Katzenbach as undersecretary of state. It is said that while he defended the Vietnam War in the Congress, in light of the Bay of Tonkin resolution, he worked quietly to bring about an end to the controversy.
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