Word: katzenbach
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...time," they still waited. They had, after all, waited a long while for this moment. Their patience was rewarded. In four days, 41 federal registrars added 6,998 Negro voters to the rolls in counties where there had previously been only 3,857. Beamed U.S. Attorney General Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach, 43, who played a central role in drafting the Voting Rights Act and was now direct ing the effort to make it work: "We're doing very well." Katzenbach had good reason to feel elated. Normally, congressional bills, like architects' blueprints, take a madden ingly long time...
Writing to Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, Chief Judge David Bazelon of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington sharply questioned the effect on the "poor Negro citizen" of such draft proposals as 20-minute street detention, dragnet arrests to sift suspects, station-house questioning up to 24 hours after arrest, and lack of free counsel for indigents. Protested Bazelon: "I cannot understand why the crimes of the poor are so much more damaging to society as to warrant the current hue and cry-reflected in the proposed code -for enlarging police powers, which primarily are directed against those crimes...
...blunt reply, Katzenbach said: "It would be ridiculous to state that the overriding purpose of any criminal investigation is to insure equal treatment. Obviously, criminal investigation is designed to discover those guilty of crime." To be sure, he said, the great purpose of appellate court decisions reforming police procedures has been to cure glaring inequities. "But as the cases have presented more and more difficult questions of fairness and propriety, I believe the judges have left the public behind...
Whatever the law should be, said Katzenbach, it is "particularly irrelevant" to fret because police questioning may bother the poor the most-"the simple fact is that poverty is often a breeding ground for criminal conduct, and that inevitably any code of procedure is likely to affect more poor people than rich people." Indeed, argued Katzenbach, more effective police procedure would benefit the poor, "for it is they who live in the high-crime areas." In short, criminal justice can go only so far in seeking social equality -a goal that courts alone cannot reach -and then it is time...
...Committee, summed up: "Throughout his public statements runs a consistent theme. He is the only person with the legal experience and skill to consistently outmaneuver the federal courts, Congress and the Executive. He is the thinking man's segregationist." Star witness for the Administration was Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, who argued that Coleman's steady defense of law and order in the hostile atmosphere of Mississippi was "worth a hundred campaign speeches." And, like President Johnson, Coleman himself admitted past "mistakes," said he now believed that "separation of individuals by reason of color and color alone is dead...