The Promise and the Dream
The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
"A fascinating, elegiac account" of the bond between two of the Civil Rights Era's most important leaders—from the journalist and author of Strange Fruit (Chicago Tribune).
With vision and political savvy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy set the United States on a path toward fulfilling its promise of liberty and justice for all. In The Promise and the Dream, Margolick examines their unique bond, both in life and in their tragic assassinations, just sixty-two days apart in 1968. Through original interviews, oral histories, FBI files, and previously untapped contemporaneous accounts, Margolick offers a revealing portrait of these two men and the mutual assistance, awkwardness, antagonism, and admiration that existed between them.
MLK and RFK cut distinct but converging paths toward lasting change. Even when they weren't interacting directly, they monitored and learned from one another. Their joint story, a story each man took pains to hide during their lives, is not just gripping history but a window into the challenges we continue to face in America.
Complemented by award-winning historian Douglas Brinkley's foreword and more than eighty revealing photos by the foremost photojournalists of the period, The Promise and the Dream offers a compelling look at one of the most consequential but misunderstood relationships in our nation's history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
