The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy
400The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy
400Hardcover
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Overview
Fifty years after they were both murdered, noted journalist David Margolick explores the untold story of the complex and ever-evolving relationship between these two American icons. Assassinated only sixty-two days apart in 1968, King and Kennedy changed the United States forever, and their deaths profoundly altered the country’s trajectory.
In The Promise and the Dream, Margolick examines their unique bond and the complicated mix of mutual assistance, impatience, wariness, awkwardness, antagonism, and admiration that existed between the two, documented with original interviews, oral histories, FBI files, and previously untapped contemporaneous accounts.
At a turning point in social history, MLK and RFK embarked on 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 some pains to hide and which began to come into focus only with their murders, is not just gripping history but a window into contemporary America and the challenges we continue to face.
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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780578950518 |
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Publisher: | Ws Press |
Publication date: | 04/03/2018 |
Pages: | 400 |
Sales rank: | 992,554 |
Product dimensions: | 6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
He is the author of many books, including Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns; Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock; Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink; and Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song. He lives in New York City.
Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University, the CNN Presidential Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. The Chicago Tribune has dubbed him “America’s new past master.” His book Cronkite won the Sperber Prize for Best Book in Journalism. Six of his books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. And in 2017 he won a Grammy for producing Presidential Suite (Large Jazz Ensemble). As the New York Historical Society’s Presidential Scholar, he works to promote the teaching of U.S. history far and wide. He currently resides in Austin, Texas.
Table of Contents
Author's Note 9
Foreword Douglas Brinkley 15
Introduction David Margolick 23
1 History Would Keep Them Together 37
2 Look the Enemy in the Eye 67
3 The Face of Courage 93
4 The Unkindest Cut 119
5 The Meeting 145
6 As Old as the Scriptures 165
7 The Least Worst Thing 193
8 How Long? Not Long! 213
9 Ripple of Hope 235
10 A Fine Pair 263
11 Change Would Come 279
12 The Political Equation 299
13 What They Did To Jack 317
14 There Were No Words 353
Bibliography 395
Credits 398
What People are Saying About This
"I knew Martin Luther King like a brother, and David Margolick captures the cautious mutual admiration that existed between him and Robert Kennedy. Margolick has developed a portrait of two leaders cut down before the prime of life, and suggests what they might have done, separately or together, had they each lived twenty years longer."
"A vivid, vibrant, deeply thoughtful and well-informed reflection on the 1960s' two most fascinating public figures."
"Five decades may have passed, but in the adept hands of David Margolick the 1960s and two of its most compelling figures and are made vivid, immediate, and most of all inspiring. King and Kennedy were giants; Margolick traces the braided arcs of their lives and the confluence of their deaths with the narrative power and literary grace they both deserve."
"What might Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy have achieved together? David Margolick's prodigious research and narrative power gives us a haunting and original insight into the eight-year dance between the dreamer and the doubter. We relive the mental and spiritual anguish of the last two great years of King's life and Bobby Kennedy's valorous efforts to realize the deep poetic vision his critics never could see in the "ruthless brat" of an Attorney General"