this far, but he briskly relates how John-

THE CRITICS sonSelma moved to outright from annoyedcollaboration doubt within about a

were ideal-studio-cast thugs &an- BOOKS teed to provoke national outrage and in- stigate federal intervention. The from Selma to Mont- THE MISSION gomery is one of America's grandest sagas, a racial, regional, and constitu- Martin Luther King, Jr.,'sjnaIchapter. tional crisis whose flash points illuminate the country's path to social democracy. BY DAVID LEVERING LEWIS In his earlier volumes, Brartch followed King's first steps d~ngthas path. "Part- n one of his more bizarre Oval Office grams for Medicare, Medicaid, edu- ing the Waters; ArnericaZn the King Iconfidences, Lyndon Johnson said cation, and poverty were pending, and Years, 1954-$9" went firnithe Mont- that he didn't want to "follow Hider" the had al- o the March on but that Hider had the right idea: Tust ready depleted congressional good will. sad?& refused take a simple thing and repeat it often King was by then expert at telling John- enough, even ifit wasn't true, why, peo- son what Johnson wanted to hear, and ple accept it." Johnson was speaking by managed to interrupt the Presidential telephone to Martin Luther King, Jr., in monologue long enough to tell Johnson Selma, Alabama, about how to convince what he felt Johnson needed to know. Southern whites that Southern blacks He pointed out that, in the five South- deserved the franchise. The curious ern states that Johnson lost to Goldwa- political-science tutorial came on the after- ter in 1964, fewer than forty per cent of rates in and noon of January 15,1965, King's thii- eligible African-Americans were regis- sixth birthday. Whatever he may have tered to vote. A voting-rights act would thought of Johnson's inaccurate anal- produce a coalition of blacks and white ogy, King had already begun repeating, moderates, changing the electoral map Mples in , he developed a phi- on television, in the press, and from of the South. Johnson liked that. It , losophy of nonviolent passive resistance church pulpits, the moral necessity of a could be his greatest achievement, he out of what had been, back in Mont- guaranteed vote for every American, re- said-"It will do things that even that gomery, a commonsense tactic. But it gardless of color. Two weeks earlier, '64 Act couldn't do." was the March on Washington, on Au- King had publicly announced that the gust 28,1963, that projected King indeli- Southern Christian Leadership Confer- t Canaan's Edgey'(Simon &Schus- bly into the national consciousness. ence, the alliance of Baptist preachers he "Ater; $39, the third and final vol- "Parting the Waters" ended with led, would launch voter-registration ume of 's monumental King at the head of a civil-rights move- protests in Selma, where fourteen thou- chronicle, "America in the King Years," ment that had long been dominated by sand four hundred whites had, by legal covers the ~eriod&om 1965 to 1968, and the National Association for the Ad- ruse and naked force, limited fifteen charts civil-rights history as the parallel vancement of Colored People and the thousand blacks to one per cent of the , and faced with biographies of two tragic titans-Martin 5 registration rolls. Luther &ng, Jr., the modem Moses, and a pending civil-rights bill that Congress 2 Johnson, as recorded by the secret Lyndon Baines Johnson, the would-be seemed unlikely to pass. But John F. 2 Oval Office taping system, both com- Lincoln. The tape of Johnson's phone Kennedy's assassination assured its pas- mended and cautioned King on his call to King has inspired speculation sage, and it became the Civil Rights Act $ Selma strategy. He was, he said, com- about their collusion in the design and of 1964. Branch's second volume, "Pillar 3 mitted to getting federal voting legisla- execution of the Selma-Montgomery of Fire: America in the King Years, Q tion enacted, but he implied that King's campaign; one student of the period re- 1963-65," followed the civil-rights pa& 0 timing and his tactics were dangerously cently called it the Johnson-King voting- through an arena of white-supremacist precipitate. Johnson's Great Society pro- rights "pas de deux." Branch doesn't go violence in Birmingham, Alabama, and @

The wary alliance between Lyndon Johnson andmarfin Luther King may have been the high point of each man? career. in Mississippi during the Freedom Sum- not even the Nazis had been more sav- life" for the c~untry'~Negroes. "Because mer, and culminated in King's receiving age. Branch says, "The Nuremberg inter- it is not just Negroes, but it is all the Nobel Peace Prize. On January 18, ruption struck with the force of instant ofus, who must overcome the crip- 1965,he registered as a guest at the Hotel historical icon." pling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And Albert, in Selma, the first black man ever King and Abernathy were not at we-shall--overcome." Liberal whites to enter the front door of this antebellum the Pettus Bridge on March 7th; they were electrified; whites in the Deep South replica of the Doge's Palace, in Venice. were preaching to their respective con- were stupefied.Johnson was indeed on The civil-rights bill behind him, Martin gregations in Atlanta, something that the verge of altering the South's Luther King had gone to Selma to launch Branch is more prepared to excuse than landscape, but not in the way that he and a voter-registration drive. It escalated other commentators have been. Two King had discussed on the phone. The into a virtual replay of Reconstruction. days later, King led a second attempt withdrawal of Southern whites' alle- In the engrossing narration of Branch's to march across the bridge, but with giance from the Democrats-the Great final volume, events seem to unfold al- dangerously equivocal results. Gover- White Switch, as it has been called- most in real time. On a late January nor George Wallace, segregation's last gathered speed soon after Johnson's morning, in two proud waves, more best hope, ordered Alabama officials to speech. On the other side-for in- than a hundred teachers, the backbone hold the line at all costs while he and stance, in the SNCC leader James For- of Selma's black middle class, shook off King sought injunctions against each man's sneering comment "That cracker more than two generations of diffidence other. Forbidden to conduct a second was talkin' shit"-was the voice of rising and gathered at the county courthouse, march toward Montgomery, King faced black nationalism. demanding to be registered, while Jim an. unprecedented dilemma: defjr a fed- Branch's panoptic approach exposes Clark barked orders to disperse them. eral court order and jeopardize Presi- telling juxtapositions: we see Johnson Two weeks later, he arrested King and dential good will, or cancel the march approving the reluctant recommen- Abernathy as they led a demonstration across Pettus Bridge, demoralize thou- dation of Attorney General Nicho- of more than seven hundred local citi- sands of ordinary men and women, and zens. National newspapers carried pic- risk vindicating the deep mistrust of the tures of scores of black youngsters being movement's more radical factions, such pursued by police cars and pickup trucks as the Student Nonviolent Coordinat- with electric cattle prods dangling from ing Committee. Branch calls this chap- the windows. ter "Devil's Choice." King, having prom- On March lst, King preached at the ised the Brown Chapel audience that he Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, in would "rather die on the highways of Selma, and proclaimed, 'We are going to Alabama than make a butchery of my bhga voting bi into being in the streets conscience," ended up doing the latter of Selma." These challenging words in the eyes of young militants. He or- raised the stakes for a procrastinating dered a retreat from the bridge just as Administration, as did the events at the the blocking phalanx ofAlabama troop- the following ers stepped aside. Sunday. Branch's description of Bloody Still, it was probably the right choice Sunday, one of this booKs many effective for history. Eight days after Pettus set pieces, vividly captures the exact hour Bridge, Lyndon Johnson delivered his when the political order of the Deep '" speech to Con- South finally invalidated itselfin the eyes gress, an example of Presidential ora- of mainstream America. The carnage tory arguably unsurpassed in idealism inflicted by municipal and state police at and emotional impact. The reworked the bridge and along the marchers' route phrases of the speechwriter Richard of retreat accomplished for voting rights Goodwin fell upon a hushed chamber. what song, prayer, and marching had Speaking that night "for the dignity of not. That evening, ABC was broadcast- man and the destiny of democracy," the ing the television premikre of "Judgment President pledged the Administration at Nuremberg." Suddenly, forty-eight to secure "the fill blessings of American million Americans who had been watch- ing an elderly German couple protesting their innocence of the Holocaust were thousand pilgrims were exhilarated by contionted with scenes of people chok- King's preaching. His sermon was a ing on tear gas, snarling dogs tearing at stem-winder, beginning with an encap- flesh, baton-wielding troopers on horse- sulation of Reconstruction history and back, and bruised and traumatized men, ending in a riff of magnificent call and women, and children. The activist Hosea response. "How long will justice be Williams, a war veteran, bellowed that crucified and truth buried?" he asked, 88 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 23 & 30,2006 ~ ruse and went on to provide the answer: "Not ;all long!" Branch writes, "Already shouts ip- echoed and anticipated his refrain at a hd driving pace, above cries of encourage- ites ment and a low roar of anticipation." King All these developments stoked the RICHARDGROSSMAN, ED~R uth continued, "How long? Not long! Because growing radicalism in SNCC, which was BARRYMOSER, ILLUSTRATOR on the arc of the moral universe is long, but it soon beyond the reach even of King's A Year WthEmerson id persuasive powers. He could only gri- bends toward justice. How long? Not David R. Godine. 2003 md long! Because mine eyes have seen the mace when or Stokely ISBN 1-56792-234-1 The glory of the coming of the Lord." Carmichael provided the media with Ue- I inflammatory sound bites. 'We're going a -eat he voting-rights bill became law to tear this county up," Carrnichael told ALICE A. CARTER,AUTHOR ! ERICMUELLER, DESIGNER 1- 1- i on the sixth day of August, 1965, one gathering. King and the S.C.L.C. 1 T Cecilia Beaur: A Modern r n's with and King and the other had hardly begun to plan the next chap- Painter In 7he GuildedAge in- 1 principal civil-rights leaders present for ter in nonviolent racial progress when or- I Rizzoli . 2005 the signing ceremony, at the Capitol. the nation was confronted by the spec- ISBN 0-8478-2708-9 ker 1E hostfrom that moment, in Branch's tacle of the , which began i"g telling, the reader has the sensation of just five days after the Voting Rights Act watching history escape the control of was signed. Ten days after the signing, SHERODSANTOS, TRANSLATOR lses I the book's two main characters. The King risked his first public criticism of Greek Lyric Poety ;on principal story lines (better balanced the . "Reporters bolted for W.W. Norton 2005 ISBN o-393-06056-X :n- between the two men than in the sec- telephones," Branch notes, after King, in 10- 1 ond volume) are Johnson's sinlung fast an address to the S.C.L.C.'s annual con- Lon into the Vietnam quagmire, and King's vention in Birmingham, announced his Prize Sponsored by Arts and his increasing isolation as his mission ex- intention to write personal appeals for Humanities Foundation crt PO Box 16326, Minneapolis, MN 55416 ~andsto challenge America's funda- peace negotiations to world leaders, in- ph. 952-938-4972 nd mental social inequalities. The effect is cluding Ho Chi Minh. A month later, Ion I like watching two bio-pics simultane- at the President's insistence, King and ik- ously. And, thanks to F.B.I. wiretaps Arthur Goldberg, the Ambassador to UY) 1 and Oval Office tapes, the reader is at the United Nations, engaged in a frank es- all times aware of each man's calcula- seventy-minute give-and-take on the lb- tions about the other. issue of Vietnam. Speaking afterward

Before the end of 1965, Johnson had to the U.N. press corps, King outlined Broadway 0 Off-Broadway Natlonwide 'ng approved General William Westmore- his "unthinkable" proposals-a halt to Over 510,000 members enjoy 1t- land's request for more than a hundred bombing, negotiations with the Viet- our theater discounts and special offers. ns , thousand troops to supplement those al- cong, and U.N. recognition of Commu- JOIN FOR FREE nNo you MAVWIN TlcKEssTaA HIT SHOWI tes, ready engaged in propping up the Sai- nist China. The fiuy of the Administra- )US gon regime. In the course of Branch's tion at this and the dlsdain of the media on book, the agonizing in the Oval Office, nearly matched the negative reaction of at as the President alternately rails at and the African-American leadership class. ge pleads with his advisers about the un- F.B.I. agents, listening in on a confer- Pearl Necklace and Earrings led winnable Vietnam dilemma, starts to ence call between King and his advis- ng seem more farcical than tragic. "The ers, heard a beleaguered King say, with a :n- North Vietnamese just said, 'hck you,' " sigh, that he had to find a way to "grace- "g he tells a sympathetic U.S. senator. fully pull out." - ts. "They're winning-why would they Both Vietnam and civil rights began I a want to talk?" George Ball, the Under- to play poorly with much of the elector- id, secretary of State, tells the President in a ate as the midterm congressional elec- :a, secret memo that "humiliation would be tions approached. Richard Nixon, Ger- tta more likely" than achieving U.S. objec- ald Ford, Strom Thurmond, and other g- tives on the battlefield, while the histo- Republicans blamed Johnson for not ve rian and Presidential adviser Arthur conducting the war vigorously enough. by Schlesinger, Jr., publicly warns of the ter- At the polls, liberals signalled their lack a rible consequences of "either enlargement of support for the war, and the congres- P- or withdrawal." Bewildered and bellicose, sional Democrats lost badly. In early ld Johnson dreaded being seen as a President March of 1967, Robert F. Kennedy sug- ld too indecisive to win a war. He put a de- gested that the heavy bombing of Viet- termined face on the State of the Union nam be suspended. Within twenty-four address in January, 1966, and vowed to hours, headlines carried news of Kenne-

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 23 & 30,2006 P dy's involvement in a plot to assassinate ement apartment in Chicago-a city Mississippi state line, King lent his name gr Fidel Castro. Branch sets out the facts, that was home to the world's largest to an improvised, hyperbolic manifesto, can( and the reader is left to connect the dots public-housing complex and to two of then walked with three hundred and two running from an avenging Oval Office to the poorest census tracts in the country. fi@student radicals to the Greenwood duri an obliging F.B.I. headquarters. After six months of bruising marches courthouse, where Thi J. Edgar Hoover looms unforgetta- through ethnic neighborhoods, fruitless shouted "!" for the first time. stur bly in these pages. No reader who has exchanges with Chicago's real-estate and This provocative slogan established Car- Wa digested the Church Committee re- education boards, and much shadow- michael as a media phenomenon, and COJ ports will be surprised by Branch's ev- boxing with the nimble mayor, Richard one who made Martin Luther King ap- sevt idence of F.B.I. transgressions against Daley, King was ill and starting to realize pear ineffective and dated. In January, 7 King and anyone else Hoover deemed that the political terrain here was rougher 1967, a year after launching the Chicago the un-American. Referring to King as "the than in the South. Then, Branch writes, campaign, King was no longer among latc burr head," Hoover provided Johnson he heard that "his latest sta.fFprodigy," the Gallup Poll's ten most admired de I with spurious reports of Communists the young , "had commit- personalities in America. 'Whites have Kat at the center of the S.C.L.C. and with ted him impulsively to a suicidal mmch." ceased to believe in him, or really care," unc copious evidence of King's prolific ex- Jackson had shouted, "Pm going to Cic- a lengthy dismissal in The New York Re- for tramarital calisthenics. Worse, he kept ero!"The prospect of Jackson attempting view ofBookr alleged. "The blacks hardly L.1 intelligence of assassination plots from to desegregate Cicero, one of the city's listen." re9 King and barred F.B.I. agents from prov- most entrenched white working-class King had begun to perceive that soci- iB iding covert protection. suburbs, was terrible enough to bring ety tends to confine its indignation to in- mr King, Daley, Archbishop John Cody, the justices that can be attenuated without Po o longer primarily a Southern pas- veteran community leader A1 Raby, and imperiing fundamental economic re- wa N tor fighting regional racism, Martin seventy-five contending parties swiftly to la@ipships. He was working in an era CI Luther King, as a Nobel Peace Prize lau- the negotiating table. vi.k#r the controversial Moynihan Re- he reate, had acquired an emboldened sense At times, Branch serves up more con- mi&ch blamed black matriarchs and esl of mission. The Voting Rights Act ad- tent than interpretation, assuming that abs&a%hers for black poverty, rather to1 dressed political disenfranchisement; it facts speak for themselves. The Chicago tha&Qliq&tjobs, was widely accepted, of was now time to address economic dis- Summit Agreement on open-housing whe~d$&$& prophetic Kerner Comrnis- th enfranchisement, or so he had told an and employment objectives, we read, si~n;l&.,:;+:' g~hitesoeety as "deeply of increasingly wary and distracted John- glossed over details, in fine language hp~dXp&&e,$*#h. %, ghetto," was ignored. Jal son. King believed that, just as marching intended to "minimize potential rid- Near''&~~~iid~&&~hch'sfourteen-year Pr in Alabama had caused Johnson to em- icule" resulting from the fact that lit- saga of a ndho~alte@ately affirming and C brace an accelerated voting-rights time- tle had been accomplished. One wishes denyirig @$!C$&%#ty of race, there is a th table, so marches exposing slums, un- that Branch had attempted to assess telling m$~$i&&t$ OW evening, while of employment, and inferior public schools more closely the damage that the Chi- his ad+f~w@ti:$~t&&&ts debated the F? in particular Northern cities would force cago campaign did to King's national s.c.L,C.S~..~& after the disap- m the Administration and Congress to pass standing and to the prospects of John- pointing {B@$%@$@$D campaign, King in remedial legislation. However, he se- son's Great Society. Three weeks after momend1y*%$topressure. Branch 01 I /, .- riously underestimated the difference the Summit Agreement, the Civil Rights writes: " ' t.2.. , ri , < between targeting parochial Southern Act of 1966, containing open-housing King lite~afl~fiojf~~iiB~tthe paralyzed C( hierarchies and espousing a truly redis- provisions that Illinois's Senator Everett debate. "I d~tl'P~~Mttt~:d~this any more!" he tl tributive program that called into ques- ~ih~~called package ofmischieffor shouted alone3q~gt t~-o,go back to my little church!" ~e bangpa &ynd and yelled, which tion the way of life of most middle-class the country:' failed to pass in the Senate. sumoned anxi&$'&ien& outside his room a white Americans. After the congressional Democrats' mid- until Young and &b@nathy gently removed k King also found it bitterly hard to term disaster that fall, a brooding John- his whiskey and t*ed himto bed. tl gain any credence for his evolving so- son insisted that he hadn't "lost that elec- a cial prescriptions either from the stodgy tion"; rather, "the Negroes lost it." n the determinationxto omit nothing h N.A.A.C.P. and Urban League leader- King had no illusions about what Irelevant, "At CmWh Edgen seems to I: ship or from the emergent inner-city ac- happened in Chicago, but, in his view, keep the entire exa in"&&dat all tirnes- v tivists of SNCC. SNCC officers, with the a worse failurafailure ofjudgment- immigration reform, m~dacoverage of t notable exception of , dis- was his participation in the Meredith civil rights, education, the workof~~s~, t missed him as too cautious. But a clear march across Mississippi: a "temble mis- the Six-Day War, campus unrest, and t majority of the S.C.L.C. board felt that take." Consulting no one, James Mer- much else. Such perspective yields fine i King was becoming too outspoken. For edith had started a two-hundred-and- insights. While narrating the passage of j them, his antiwar pronouncements un- twenty-mile walk from Memphis to the Voting Rights Act, Branch weaves I dermined the core mission of ongoing Jackson, Mississippi, to establish the in an extended discussion of the Im- I registration in the South. right of black men to walk in the Deep migration Reform Act of 1965. Then i Late in January, 1966, King surprised South unmolested. When, one day into he vaults forward to remind us that, al- ( America by taking up residency in a ten- his walk, he was shot by a sniper at the though neither politicians nor the press

90 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 23 & 30, lame esto, and BRIEFLY NOTED vood .hael Sme. Dog Days, byAna Marie Cox (Riverhead State of War, by Jams Risen (Free Press; Car- $23.95). This first novel, by a former $26).Last month, the author, a Times re- . and eneral, came fiom writer of the political blog Wonkette, porter, broke, with his colleague Eric 5 ap- aims at being a satire of Washington Lichtblau, the story of President Bush's uary, and King met at mores but comes off as Beltway chicklit. authorization of warrantless domestic icago for the last time, in MelanieThorton, a~arn~aignworkerforwiretapping by the N.S.A., in apparent nong heir civil-rights pas a Democratic Presidential candidate, is defiance of Congress and the Foreign In- lired bored with her job, her Me, and her affair telligence Surveillance Act. This account have with a married journalist. She launches a doesn't go much beyond what has been in xe," fictitious Internet diary intended to ex- the Times-indeed, follow-ups have (Re- pose the seamier side of Washingtonlife. overtaken it-but Risen offers a useful &Y When the career of the fake blogger, perspective on what the C.I.A. has been Capitolette, takes off, the deception doing since September llth, and some soci- ng spring, both comes to light. The situation is rooted, devastating summary judgments. In the to in- rsible and op- slightly, in real life: as Wonkette, Cox Bush years, Risen writes, "no otha insti- &out ng s splendid anti- created a scandal when she linked to the tution failed in its mission as completely." LC re- nhattan's Riverside blog of a Senate staffer who dished about George Tenet, the director, pandered to n era 2, 1967, in which her sexual escapades. But there's some- Bush and to Donald Rumsfeld; the I Re- overnment the "great- thing self-defeating about a roman i clef agency passed on weapons intelligence a and that deals with people who were pseu- that many knew was bad; the abuse of ather donyrnous in the first place. And the prisoners became accepted. But the main pted, plot's many twists just add more bones to leadership failure Risen sees is that of the ~mis- the skeleton rather than fleshing it out. President, who, he writes, got fiom the .eeply C.I.A. no more than what he asked for. !ored. The Accidental, by AZi Smith (Pantheon; I-year $22.95). Smith's book, which has just Building Jerusalem, by Tristram Hunt g and won Britain's Whitbread Novel Award, (Metropolitan; $32.50).This fun, if me- -e is a concerns an attractive stranger who andering, intellectual history of city- while shows up on the doorstep of an unhappy building in Victorian Britain traces the d the family and is unquestioningly taken in. evolution of grim industrialized towns, lisap- Thevisitor, armed with aperfect combi- with their "rat-haunted slums" and King nation of candor, fiee-spiritedness, and "vomiting chimneys," through their 'ranch rough love, proceeds to manipulate each heyday as wealthy cultural centers, and rifle shot on the Lorraine Motel bal- of her hosts. Just as abruptly, and, per- beyond. Hunt relates how a newly pros- ,alyzed cony, fired by an assassin about whom haps, predictably, she disappears. We perous middIe class, eager to legitima- re!" he this book says little more. never learn much about her-her only tize its economic power and distance it- ~ylittle Martin Luther King, Jr., survived for purpose, it seems, was to jolt the family self from accusations of philistinism, .which a time the machinations of an unscrupu- members out oftheir respective messes- began "manufacturing a new cultural i room moved lous national police force. He rose above and her righteous self-assurance can get identity," in which architecture and gov- the particularism of his own people in an tiresome. But the novel is saved by its ernment reflected social and moral val- &nost quixotic and ultimately tragic at- skillful and touching rendering of the ues. Using various models-from the 'thing tempt to deliver the entire country from mental state of each family member. buccaneering "municipal gospel" of Jo- :ms to racism, war, and greed. Taylor Branch, Smith's well-honed, even obsessive prose seph Chamberlain to the example of nes with his concluding volume, walks with gives a feeling of eavesdropping on her Renaissance Florence, with its traditions ?iF of the prophet and the President toward characters' innermost thoughts. of self-government and public design- NASA, the promised land at the head of an in- the Victorians created the Age of Great t, and terracial throng pledged to a new Amer- Cities. No model was wholly successful L fine ican covenant of social and economic in combatting the miserable living con- .ageof justice. He leaves us there, pensive and ditions of the poor, and an "anti-civic" veaves remorseful, at Canaan's edge-King, solution-the suburbs-signalled the e Im- his people, and aLl of us who were once end of "urbs triumphant." Yet, Hunt ar- Then inspired and then deceived by a great gues, aspects of the Victorian frame- kit, al- dream of a nation rising up to "live out work hold valuable lessons for revivify- \ 2 press the true meaning of its creed." + ing contemporary cities.

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 23 & 30,2006 91