An American Insurrection

July 30, 2001
When James Meredith was about 12 years old, he had a "young boy's dream of attending the football powerhouse school," the University of Mississippi. But when he became the first black student to register at "Ole Miss" in 1962, a "Byzantine legal struggle" ensued, which Doyle chronicles along with the military maneuvers by U.S. Deputy Marshals and others sent to contain the revolt by radical segregationists and hundreds of student and civilian "volunteers." The episode—which Time
magazine called the "greatest Constitutional crisis since the Civil War"—collapsed into complete mayhem and violence. Doyle (Inside the Oval Office), cowriter and coproducer of the A&E documentary The Secret White House Tapes, makes extensive use of the Kennedy tapes as well as interviews with over 500 eyewitnesses and participants. Unfortunately, his indiscriminate accumulation of detail (the governor's wife wore pearl-frame glasses; the average height of the 503rd Military Police Battalion is 5'10") mars the book. The sketches of Civil War battles (provided by way of analogy to the Mississippi crisis) and of assorted local, state and federal troop movements fail to cohere. Some of Doyle's facts—that World War II paratroopers served in "Normandy, Holland, Belgium, Sicily, Italy and North Africa"; references to JFK's "overlapping extramarital affairs and fleeting sexual experiences"; the price tag on Meredith's graduation suit ($85)—bring neither depth nor diversion to this unimaginative text. Agent, Mel Berger/William Morris.
(Sept. 18)Forecast:Military buffs may relish the logistical detail, but the dust jacket comparison to
Black Hawk Down is unwarranted, since this account is unlikely to break out of its niche.

October 15, 2001
Writer and documentary producer Doyle depicts the tumultuous events surrounding James Meredith's admission to the racially segregated University of Mississippi at Oxford in 1962. Descriptions of the dramatic and violent confrontation appear in virtually every recent book and film covering the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi. Doyle, however, shows Oxford in 1962 more as a battlefield than as one of many centers of social change. His is a story of heroes and villains, told as if he were describing a military invasion which, Doyle tells us, this was. To quell the rebellion against integration, President Kennedy not only sent federal marshals but also 30,000 combat soldiers. While Doyle's description is dramatic, it fails to provide an adequate context for what occurred before and after the focal events, unlike Nadine Cohodas's excellent The Band Played Dixie: Race and the Liberal Conscience at Old Miss (Free Pr., 1997). More disappointing is Doyle's inadequate closing, particularly given the energy with which he has told the narrative. He ends with a string of weak contradictions, providing very little to guide the reader through them. For large public libraries. Charles K. Piehl, Minnesota State Univ., Mankato

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2001
In compiling " In the Oval Office: The White House "Tapes from FDR to Clinton (1999), Doyle was struck by an incident he (and most Americans) had forgotten: the "little war" that erupted when African American James Meredith attempted to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Our forgetfulness stems from the horror of the events and the fact that they were succeeded in the headlines, that same month, by the Cuban missile crisis. But the battle of Oxford is a story worth retelling. Doyle draws on participant interviews and a voluminous archival record, including Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission files (unsealed in 1998) and 9,000 pages of FBI files accessed through a Freedom of Information Act request. Reconstructing what happened is surprisingly difficult because television and print journalists missed much of the action, and participants' memories disagree. Heroes identified by Doyle include Meredith, the soldiers Kennedy sent to Oxford (including blacks pulled from the front lines), the Mississippi National Guard (which Kennedy federalized), and white Mississippians who struggled to restore peace. A fascinating contribution to civil rights history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)