2009 John Phillips Award Recipient
Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach '39

citation | remarks

The John Phillips Award is given to an alumnus or alumna of the Academy, still living at the time of nomination, whose life demonstrates John Phillips' ideal of goodness and knowledge united in noble character and usefulness to mankind. The nominee should have contributed significantly to the welfare of community, country or humanity, beyond any volunteer service to the Academy.

Citation for Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach '39
Awarded at Assembly on October 13, 2009

Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach—You have been a central figure in some of the defining moments of the Civil Rights Era and a principal strategist in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—legislation that has transformed the landscape of our nation. Your determination to use the law to ensure equality for all citizens helped to close the door on segregation and lay the foundation for an African American to lead our country today.

Born in 1922, you were raised in New Jersey by a family dedicated to public service and politics. Your father was the state’s attorney general; your mother, the first woman to serve as president of the New Jersey Board of Education. Your uncle served as a Supreme Court justice. With such influences, it was clear that education and justice would loom large in your life.

You came to the Academy in 1935. The perfect grades you earned as a hard-studying prep became more elusive as you immersed yourself in extracurricular activities, serving as head of the Dramatic Society and managing editor of The Exonian, and playing on the varsity soccer, ice hockey and lacrosse teams. Still, you demonstrated an enviable ability to participate in Harkness discussions with minimal preparation—a gift that earned you the superlative “Biggest Bluffer” in your senior yearbook.

After graduating from Exeter in 1939, you enrolled at Princeton. You left college shortly after Pearl Harbor to join the U.S. Army Air Force. Your bomber was shot down in 1943 and you spent two years as a prisoner of war, studying and reading so assiduously that upon your repatriation you graduated from Princeton two years early. You then enrolled at Yale Law School, where you served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and graduated cum laude. Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, you spent the next two years studying at Oxford University in England.

In 1946 you married Lydia, who shared your passion for truth and education, and with whom you raised four children—two of whom attended the Academy. You practiced law in New Jersey and went on to teach at Yale and the University of Chicago. But with the election of President John F. Kennedy, it was public service to which you were drawn.

You were the kind of man President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, valued: educated, ambitious, yet practical and tempered by war. At age 38, you were asked to join the Department of Justice. As head of the Office of Legal Counsel, you were part of the group that relentlessly negotiated—and ultimately secured—the release of Cuban-exile prisoners captured during the Bay of Pigs invasion. During this time you also served as an Academy trustee.

Your most demanding assignments came as part of federal desegregation efforts in the South. In 1962, Robert Kennedy sent you to the all-white University of Mississippi to uphold a federal court order allowing James Meredith, a student of color, to register for classes. Riots erupted and before federal troops arrived to restore order, you directed U.S. marshals to fire tear gas to disperse the angry mob, helping to assure Meredith’s safe entry to the school.

You also provided courageous leadership when the University of Alabama was ordered to admit its first African-American students and, in an act of defiance, Governor George Wallace vowed to “stand in the schoolhouse door” to prevent it. Intent on upholding the law, you stood toe-to-toe with Wallace, handed him a presidential proclamation saying he must obey the federal edict, and then personally escorted James Hood and Vivian Malone onto campus. Your actions that day helped change that institution, and others like it, forever.

Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon Johnson announced his determination to pass legislation to end racial discrimination in employment, education and public accommodations. He called on you to serve as his attorney general, and you became a key advocate in the long battle that preceded the enactment of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, which you cite as your proudest achievement.

The following year you drafted—and helped to pass—the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discriminatory voter-registration practices and enabled thousands of African Americans to vote for the first time. At President Johnson’s request, you then became undersecretary of state to focus on the Vietnam War.  Finally, after serving the country during one of the most electrifying and exhausting decades in American history, you decided in 1969 to return to corporate and private law, although your political counsel is still sought to this day.

Nicholas Katzenbach, throughout your life, you have stood for the cause of freedom and pursued justice for every American. As an institution dedicated to opening its own school doors to “youth from every quarter,” we recognize you as a person who embodies the pursuit of knowledge with a deep concern for the welfare of humanity. Today, it is our honor to present you with the 2009 John Phillips Award.

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Remarks by Nicholas Katzenbach '39
Given at Assembly on October 13, 2009

I am very honored to receive the John Phillips Award. I had four very wonderful and formative years at Exeter during which, like all of you students, I learned far more than what was taught in the classroom, excellent as that was. So I am grateful to Mrs. Reusch and the members of the selection committee for choosing me, whatever that may say about their judgment. It is not only a high honor but it serves to bring back many happy memories. I am very grateful.

There are so many outstanding graduates of this school that when an award of this nature is made, cynics often say it depends on who you know. As every Exeter student knows, that is wrong.  It’s not “who” you know, it’s “whom”.

Sometimes I think awards such as the John Phillips Medal are a little like the lottery and awarded to someone who had good luck. Indeed, I think the role of luck in life is rarely appreciated and people sometimes confuse it with merit. My good luck was becoming a member of Bobby Kennedy’s team at the Justice Department and joining there an old Exeter friend, Burke Marshall, who, like my classmate and friend Ward Chamberlin, received this award some years ago. I am proud of what we accomplished with respect to civil rights, equal opportunities for women, immigration reforms, a good start toward a decent criminal justice system (since abandoned in favor of brutal nonsense), Medicare and Medicaid.  Vietnam cast a pall over all those accomplishments. We were far from perfect. But perhaps the most exciting part of that experience was the number of young people, mostly college students, who cared about civil rights and who often risked their lives to help southern Blacks register to vote. They also protested vigorously and effectively against the war in Vietnam. I know. My sons, Exeter students, were among the protesters.

What I found exhilarating was simply that these young people — perhaps members of your own families — cared deeply about this wonderful country of ours, cared about those who were less fortunate than they, cared about making government responsive to the needs of all its citizens. It took me back to my own youth and the inspiring way we responded to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan — the sheer joy of working one’s tail off with others to defend our democratic freedoms and to try to make this a better world.

What happened? I wish I knew. Somewhere along the line that spirit of liberty and opportunity for all lost momentum. We turned from compassion to greed, from the common good to personal success, from us to me. As a result we old fogies are not leaving all of you the world we thought we were and it’s going to be up to you to pick up the pieces and put them together so that this country continues to be what it has always been — a place where we care about each other and want all to live a decent life.

I can’t tell you what to do — and even if I could you still would have to make up your own minds as to the life you want to lead. I am not about to urge you to commit to some form of public service, although I hope some of you will. That’s up to you. 

I do hope you will use your education here and at college to improve your skills in what you want to do—what you enjoy doing — what gives you a sense of accomplishment — be it business, law, medicine, art, drama, architecture, sports, research, engineering, teaching, whatever. To the extent you can, I urge you to follow your dreams, enjoy what you are doing, and do it as well as you can. You may not always be lucky but you can always try to be ready when fortune smiles. And I suggest that democracy means that each of you will think about and participate as citizens in those processes of government which seek to guarantee each of us the freedom and the opportunity to realize those dreams. Government is important and it’s a factor in all our lives.

Our country is too divided today and, as a citizen, you should ask yourself why. We don’t want to be divided; it’s more productive and more fun to work together. We know we can do so because we have done so countless times to meet a crisis. 

There are those who maintain that the problem is government itself. If our government is doing the wrong thing, or doing things inefficiently and poorly, surely that can be corrected with effort. The people in government come from the same pool of citizens as those in business or the professions. There is no reason that I can see which makes a person working for government less competent than if he worked for IBM or Wall Street or the Boston Symphony.

I think those who say government is the problem are saying something else. They are appealing to a part of our history where we have rebelled against the authority of the British King, where we have depended on our individual skills and ingenuity to build our own futures, to turn a whole continent into hundreds of prosperous communities. It is a powerful appeal. All of us have a streak of rebellion in us — something I surely don’t have to tell students of your age. 

That appeal to freedom from authority is reinforced by an ideology of capitalism, an ideology which has served this country well as we gradually matured. Part of its appeal is freedom from government interference in economic matters, the idea that Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand will efficiently and fairly allocate resources and wealth through competition in the marketplace -- an argument against virtually any government interference. Part of its appeal is that if everyone simply follows his or her own economic interests all of us will be better off. Phrased less appealingly, that is to say greed is a good thing. Where there are several competitors and a level playing field, it works pretty well to reward merit and ability. We don’t want more government than we need — or less than we need.

The other side of our ideological divide says we all share the objective of maintaining a society where everyone has an opportunity to succeed. Obviously that requires a playing field which is reasonably level, where wealth is not a substitute for merit, where equal opportunity is more of a reality than it is today.  They see a greater need for government to regulate large economic institutions to insure that the power of money is not misused to favor one group over another, and for government to attempt to see that all have an opportunity to use their varied talents to the best of their ability. They seek, also, to build limits to inequality not only by assuring equal opportunity but by creating conditions where even the least talented can lead a decent life.

I want to suggest to you that the apparent divide we see is not as deep and bitter as it often sounds and that the problems we face are soluble. Most Americans want a society which is fair, productive, and where hard work is rewarded. All of us prize our freedoms. The problem is how best to achieve it —to give all the opportunity to follow those dreams, to be free to make our own mistakes and be responsible for them. I believe that is the society most of us want to achieve. We prize and reward success in many fields, but greed is not an attitude we value, and accomplishment is rarely measured by wealth alone.  Many of our heroes have had some measure of monetary success; many have not. Very few were the wealthiest of their time.

I said at the outset that I cannot tell you how to achieve either success in your own eyes — most importantly —or in the eyes of others, which should always be taken with a grain of salt.  That is up to you. But I suggest your best chance of doing so is to use your education in an effort to understand what is going on around you, to listen to and understand the opinions of others even when you disagree with some of their ideas and conclusions, and to see if you can shape your own ideas into your own proposals and values. Most important of all is the wisdom to know you may well be wrong, that no one has all the answers, and there is always knowledge still to be discovered and used. Working to solve problems is fun for the simple reason that we don’t have all the answers and there is joy in the discovery of something new and better — always accepting that it is never perfect. That is true whatever career path your passion leads you to choose. Something better is always within your reach.

So thank you for the John Phillips Award and good luck to all of you.

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