The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy
No issue in America in the 1960s was more vital than civil rights, and no two public figures were more crucial in the drama of race relations in this era than Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
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.
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David Margolick is a long-time contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Prior to that, for fifteen years he was a legal affairs reporter at the New York Times, where he covered the trials of O.J. Simpson and Lorena Bobbitt, among others, and wrote the weekly "At the Bar" column. His work there was nominated four times for the Pulitzer Prize. He has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street Journal's weekly Review section.
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.
"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." --Harold Evans, author of The American Century
"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." --Ambassador
Andrew Young
"A vivid, vibrant, deeply thoughtful and well-informed
reflection on the 1960s' two most fascinating public figures." --David
J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross and Rising
Star "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." --Daniel
Okrent, author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition and
former public editor of the New York Times
