Review of Kotz's Book, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America.

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Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America. Judgment Days chronicles how Johnson and King seemed fated to lead the collapse of America's segregation views. The reader is first introduced to Johnson, the master politician soon after President Kennedy’s catastrophic assassination. Kotz shows how LBJ makes his way through this crisis to seize the moment and take the reins of the nation. He then focuses on the agony King and his family felt upon hearing the news of Kennedy's premature death. Abruptly, Kotz shifts back in time to study the early lives of the two crucial figures and provides a broad perspective of the civil rights movement and the complex relationship between Johnson and King and how these two individuals were swept up in a time of monumental change. These astounding men were complete opposites tied only by their experience with southern culture and their need to help those who were on the margins of society in regard to wealth and opportunity. Their relationship was complex and difficult for many to understand, a fragile mix of professionalism and interdependence. This relationship would help to proliferate one of the greatest movements of social change in U.S. history. Kotz discusses how Johnson's memories of the depravation of his poverty-stricken farm life with his father in the western hill country of Texas and the impoverished Mexican Americans in his home region influenced his later decisions. Kotz reveals how a feeling of inadequacy gripped LBJ's psyche. This feeling of inadequacy sometimes drove Johnson into periods of dark depression. Yet it also encouraged him to ignore the intellectual shackles of southern traditions of racial prejudice a... ... middle of paper ... ...d disapproval of the American political system. The volume successfully captures King's distress at being the target of Hoover's FBI. It also depicts the seeming incomprehensibility of becoming a target of assassination. Regardless of the book's subtitle, it focuses on only three laws passed throughout the Johnson presidency, while failing to discuss others that are equally important to LBJ's legacy. Among those mostly ignored are the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the Social Security Act of 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Meanwhile, Kotz only outwardly addresses Johnson's nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court and the impact this appointment has had on the determining of public policy.

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