The President, the Pastor, and the Battle over Civil Rights
Starred review from April 3, 2017
Levingston (Little Demon in the City of Light), nonfiction book editor at the Washington Post, comprehensively evaluates the antagonistic interplay of Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy during the civil rights movement. He contrasts the unstoppable forces of King’s soaring oratory, Christian principles, and moral authority with the immovable objects of Kennedy’s privilege, political calculation, and presidential power. Their push and pull unfolded in a cultural cauldron that encompassed the Montgomery bus boycott, the freedom rides, King’s stints in jail, the children’s crusade in Birmingham, Gov. George Wallace’s segregationist stand at the University of Alabama, and the march on Washington. Students of the movement will appreciate Levingston’s portrayals of two key behind-the-scenes movers and shakers: Harry Belafonte, the entertainer who served as the intermediary between the pastor and the politician, and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, whose early support of King was pivotal in the pastor’s triumphal moving of the president from political agnosticism to action, which led to President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “Through his persistence, King developed a successful strategy for speaking truth to power,” Levingston writes. “Although ambivalent from the start, President Kennedy demonstrated that progress occurred when power listened and learned.” Agent: Dan Lazar, Writers House.
April 1, 2017
A dual biography chronicles three years of upheaval in the civil rights movement.Journalist Levingston (Little Demon in the City of Light: A True Story of Murder and Mesmerism in Belle Epoque Paris, 2014, etc.), the nonfiction book editor of the Washington Post, synthesizes voluminous material--biographies, memoirs, histories, and archival documents--to produce a comprehensive examination of the relationship between John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. That relationship was fraught even before the two men met in secret in 1960: Kennedy had decided to run for president and hoped for an endorsement from King, already a major figure in the fight for racial equality. "King had much to offer Kennedy," writes the author, but Kennedy had little but promises to offer King. "He did not have the grasp and the comprehension of the depths and dimensions of the problem," King recalled. Moreover, Kennedy was reluctant to upset Southern Democrats by aligning himself with King. Distilling many sources, Levingston wavers in his analysis of Kennedy's commitment to civil rights: some sources hail him as a man "sympathetic to the suffering of others" with "a reflexive dislike of unfairness." Others saw him as a political opportunist, "deaf" to "cries for freedom," feigning interest in order to win the black vote but ignoring civil rights unless it directly benefited his own agenda. Although Levingston insists that Kennedy was "a man of intellect and compassion," some evidence he presents supports the idea that the Kennedy brothers saw civil rights as the "moral issue" that would burnish the president's image. A stronger argument would have helped to reconcile this contradiction, which persists throughout the book. Similarly, Levingston presents Robert Kennedy as sometimes passionately sympathetic to civil rights and sometimes harshly impatient of King's pleas for help from the White House. The author does make a case for the brothers' naivete, calling them "novices plunged into a maelstrom far more complicated than they realized at first." Not surprisingly, King was repeatedly frustrated in his dealings with them. A well-documented narrative that would benefit from more consistent analysis.
COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from April 15, 2017
In January 1963, African Americans earnestly hoped in vain for decisive federal action to mark the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, action giving belated substance to Lincoln's promissory note. Levingston here recounts the story of how those cruelly disappointed hopes surged anew just five months later when President Kennedy delivered a stirring speech urging Congress to pass civil rights legislation conferring full citizenship on the nation's largest minority group. Since the president delivering the galvanizing speech in June was the same one ignoring black activists' pleas in January, Levingston's story necessarily traces one man's change of heart. But the inspiration for that remarkable change comes largely from a second mannamely, Martin Luther King Jr. Readers watch as the Kennedy-King relationship matures between 1960 and 1963 as King's bold rhetoric and bolder acts first capture the attention, and then pierce the conscience, of a patrician president initially paralyzed on civil rights issues by fears of political backlash. The author of Profiles in Courage learns real-life valor from a fearless Baptist pastor: Kennedy finally recognizes what he must do after seeing this preacher of Christian love and nonviolence press for racial justice even when it means imprisonment and death threats. A riveting episode in American history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)
December 1, 2016
Nonfiction book editor of the Washington Post, Levingston describes the relationship of two great American leaders. In particular, we see how Kennedy's initial caution on civil rights spurred King to greater effort. In time for the centennial of Kennedy's birth; with a 50,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
April 1, 2017
In June 1960, Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy (1917-63) met secretly with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-68), seeking his endorsement. King demurred. He was wary of Kennedy's ambition and equivocal record on civil rights. Conversely, the privileged future president failed to grasp the moral exigency of the civil rights question. Kennedy and King spent the early 1960s building pressure on each other--King leading mass civil disobedience to awaken the conscience and moral courage of the president and America, Kennedy trying to protect protestors from white mobs as well as to contain the political tumult produced by King's protests. Hardheaded and ambitious, but also keen to grow into his office, Kennedy distilled the essence of his relationship with King into one simple sentence: "It helps me to be pushed." Three years into his presidency, Kennedy finally went all-in on civil rights, denouncing brutal police crackdowns on peaceful marchers and introducing new laws in Congress. VERDICT Biographers struggle to say anything new about Kennedy or King, but in this bracing dual biography, Levingston (Little Demon in the City of Light) adds an upbeat, humanistic flavor to the intersecting lives of his subjects. This book will hold wide appeal. [See Prepub Alert, 11/14/16.]--Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.