The Promise and the dream The untold story of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy

Margolick is a respected journalist, and this book is primarily reminiscences about political figures and civil rights activists. He examines a belief Kennedy and King shared: the need to help the disadvantaged. This belief locked the two men together in opposing the Vietnam War long before that opposition became fashionable. In addition, both men had the premonition that they would die before achieving either the promise or the dream. Kennedy was seen as ruthless, though he softened through the 1960s, and King was considered cautious, but he became more aggressive. Kennedy first tied the Vietnam War to the issue of civil rights, but King's vocal opposition to the war soon outdistanced Kennedy's. Both men suffered from self-doubt and loss of focus, though by early 1968 Kennedy had determined to make a run for the presidency, and King, who was losing ground to more radical civil rights activists, had developed his plan to lead the Poor People's Campaign, a major protest in Washington, DC. Kennedy's and King's assassinations, only weeks apart, burnished both their reputations. The concluding "what ifs" are interesting, but the book is not as powerful as Steven Levingston's Kennedy and King (CH, Mar'18, 55-2579). Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Lower-division undergraduates; general readers. --Duncan R. Jamieson, Ashland University

for those of us who lived through it, 1968 was a year like no other. From the Tet offensive in Vietnam to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy to the mean streets of Chicago, Paris and Prague to the dark politics of Richard Nixon's road to the White House, one crisis after another challenged our ability to cope with the unexpected. Explaining this singularly frightening year to our children and grandchildren has never been easy. How can we recapitulate all of the traumas and lost dreams - especially the assassinations and descent into violence and despair - without wandering into a muddle of confusion? To have any hope of making sense of it all, we need a discerning and reliable guidebook, a work that not only identifies the most important events of 1968 but also puts them in historical context. This is what David Margolick's "The Promise and the Dream" gives us in large measure, an engaging work of popular history that revisits the interconnected lives of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. In Margolick's formulation, the greatest tragedy of 1968 lies in the political devastation wreaked by the dual assassinations of King on April 4 and Kennedy on June 6. In the short span of eight weeks, the country lost its most imaginative moral leader and its most progressive politician - and with their passings the chance of a meaningful national renewal all but disappeared. This calculus of loss rests on the supposition that the two men shared enough ideology and political motivation to foster a close working relationship following a Kennedy victory in the 1968 (or perhaps 1972) election. We can only speculate about the probability of such a victory or the nature of a hypothetical Robert Kennedy administration - or about how the administration would have addressed matters of war, poverty and social justice with King advising the new president either openly or behind the scenes. But the author's projection of such a progressive alliance is intriguing. Interestingly, Margolick, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, demonstrates that a solid M.L.K./R.F.K. combination would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the decade. He devotes much of the book to a painstaking reconstruction of each man's evolving moral and political consciousness - a dual narrative that reveals convergence but very little evidence of a developing relationship, either personal or public. Kennedy and King were neither friends nor formal political allies. While they had known each other since October 1960, when Robert Kennedy had phoned a Georgia judge to plead for King's release from jail, their subsequent personal contact was limited to a few cursory meetings and phone calls. Indeed, during their last four years they seem to have met only once, at a congressional subcommittee hearing on urban poverty. In one of the book's many clever asides, Margolick acknowledges this startling fact with a reference to Dion's musical tribute "Abraham, Martin and John." "Kennedy and King may be linked in a famous song," he writes - "both freed a lot of people and died young, it says - but they saw little more of each other than either saw of Abraham Lincoln." Even so, Margolick makes a strong case that the two leaders ended up in roughly the same place by 1968. Both had become sharp critics of America's military involvement in Vietnam, yet both had fastened upon the scourge of gross economic inequality as the greatest threat to American democracy. Despite the obvious differences between a pugnacious politician and an idealistic minister, they were essentially on the same page, reading and voicing the same lessons of freedom and redemption for the United States. With a halfcentury of historical perspective and Margolick's help, we can now see the full potential for creative collaboration between the politician of promise and the dreamer. But, as the author of this carefully rendered book points out, the celebrated singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte - one observer who knew both men well - already recognized this potential during that fateful spring, describing "a Kennedy-King alliance" as "the right wing's greatest fear." RAYMOND ARSENAULT is the author of "Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice," and "Arthur Ashe: A Life," to be published in August.

Vanity Fair editor Margolick (Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock) provides an enlightening perspective on Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., two iconic figures linked in the popular mind by shared agendas and tragic deaths. But Margolick makes it clear that the two men interacted infrequently, especially after President Kennedy's murder, and had less of the mythologized partnership than a "distant camaraderie." It was only after King's assassination, he explains, that "a revisionist mythology about the bond between King and Kennedy" was born that still persists in the popular understanding today. Margolick interweaves the two biographies skillfully and doesn't shy away from puncturing idealization of 1960s progressivism with warts-and-all depictions of both men and their faults, tempers, and agendas. The paths towards their deaths feel as inevitable as a Greek tragedy-both expected assassin's bullets, and King had even prepared detailed directives about his funeral. Margolick also makes palpable the inspiration and hope that King and Kennedy provided to millions, despite his reasoned but depressing conclusion: "That two men whose interests and passions overlapped interacted so little is but another illustration of the enduring chasm between the races, one which, for reasons of sentimentality and shame, our culture has every reason to minimize." This is a valuable contribution to the body of work on 1960s America. Photos. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.