The voice at the end of the phone comes through in a very familiar sounding south Texas drawl. For an instant it could be mistaken for the voice of Lyndon Johnson, the president who, through legislation, finally fulfilled the 100-year-old promise made by Abraham Lincoln to destroy apartheid in America. But the voice belongs to Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist Nick Kotz, whose new book, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America, has just been published by Houghton Mifflin.

Kotz is calling from Broadrun, Va., "over the first foothill of the Blue Ridge," where he and his wife "raise a few cows, that's my Texas tradition." In Judgment Days Kotz was able to get inside the giant personality of his fellow Texan, LBJ, and, in a fascinating demonstration of the political genius of Johnson, show how the president—with enormous help from Dr. King—brought about the major civil rights legislation of the 1960s. In fact, the whole book is personality driven with lively portraits of not only Johnson but John and Robert Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover and, of course, Dr. King. And Johnson, as was his wont, overshadows them all, including King. "That was true of Johnson and just about anyone," says Kotz deliberately, "and the reason we know is that we have these thousands of tapes of telephone conversations. In the case of King, when King came out of his first meeting with Johnson, he said it was very different than meeting with Kennedy. When he met with Johnson, Johnson dominated the conversation and told King exactly what he was going to do and how he wanted King to help him. But King was never cowed by this. King was reading Johnson just as Johnson was reading King."

The heroes in this book are many. In fact, there is only one villain and his name is FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Even 40 years after the fact, some of the revelations about Hoover are shocking. "I was taken aback," admits Kotz, "despite the fact that some of the information about Hoover we have known for more than 25 years. But the new insights that I got was in seeing all of the Hoover-Johnson memos back and forth, listening to all the telephone conversations, I was taken aback at just how driven Hoover was to destroy King."

Hoover tried to get newspapers around the country to print allegations about King's sexual affairs as a way of discrediting King and the Civil Rights movement. Not one publication would print it. "I think it did not get printed in part," says Kotz, "because of decent instincts and standards in the media at that time, which I don't think would be true today. Today I think it would be in the papers one way or another in 48 hours. But it did not happen."

One of the historical delights of this book is to watch two men who absolutely hated each other—Johnson and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy—come together to work for the national good. "I wasn't surprised," says Kotz, "because I think that both Johnson and Robert Kennedy realized that this was something very important that had to be done. They cared about it. "

And although the world knows what a master politician LBJ was, Kotz has painted a picture of Dr. King as just as wily. "Some of King's abilities and the ability to manipulate—in the best sense of the word—haven't received much attention," says Kotz. "Part of that has to do with King's style. King would sit in a meeting with people from all these different organizations, each with their own agenda, their own huge egos, and his style was just to sit there and listen until the very end because he needed unity if he was going to get anywhere in the demonstrations. So people didn't recognize how effective King was in getting things to go the way he thought they should go. He didn't do it by pounding on the table, he did it very subtly."

Kotz was born in San Antonio, in 1932. After attending Dartmouth College and the London School of Economics, and after a stint at the Des Moines Register, he found himself at the Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1968. Surprisingly, it wasn't for political reporting. "The Pulitzer Prize was [for a story on] dirty meat-packing plants," he says dryly. "It was Upton Sinclair revisited. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in the early part of the 20th century so this was something like 60-odd years later. All muckraking has to be repeated every couple of decades." He also won the first Robert Kennedy Memorial Award in Journalism in 1969 for his coverage of civil rights and poverty in the South, including a story and a television program about how Sen. James O. Eastland of Mississippi received government subsidies not to grow cotton while poor people who lived and worked on his plantation received nothing. This led to Let Them Eat Promises (1969), which was followed by The Unions (1972), A Passion for Equality: George A. Wiley and the Movement, coauthored with his wife Mary Lynn Kotz (1977) and Wild Blue Yonder (1988), about the politics surrounding the history of the B-1 bomber.

With Robert Caro's third volume on Johnson anxiously awaited, there is renewed interest in America's controversial 36th president. "Vietnam in the popular memory has sort of been erased," Kotz reflects, "and I thought it was time we saw some of this other stuff. The civil rights people are not confused about who gave them civil rights—they know it was Johnson. The Kennedys deserve credit for many things, but the Kennedys have gotten a lot of credit that really should have gone to Johnson. He was the guy who got the job done."