The Promise and the Dream - by David Margolick (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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