>> WILLIAM: Good afternoon. Welcome to the
William G. McGowan Theater at National Archives.
I'm William J.  Bosanko, the Chief Operating Officer
at the National Archives. I'm pleased that
you could join us whether you're here in the
theater or joining us through YouTube. Before
we hear from David Margolick, The Promise
and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy I would
like to tell you about some of our other programs
taking place in the location in the near future.
On Tuesday, July 17th at noon Stuart Eizenstat,
Chief Domestic Policy Advisor to President
Jimmy Carter will discuss his book, President
Carter: The White House Years where he gives
us a behind‑the‑scenes look at how the
presidency works. On Wednesday July 18th as
part of the series of programs related to
our Remembering Vietnam exhibit, Medal of
Honor recipient Bennie Adkins and those of
you that are here we invite you upstairs to
Remembering Vietnam, we will have medal of
honor recipient Benny Adkins to discuss his
book A Tiger Among Us: A Story of Valor in
Vietnam's A Shau Valley where he will discuss
the story of how a small group of warriors
outfought and outmaneuvered their enemies
and lived to tell about it and how Adkins
repeatedly risked his life to save his fellow
soldiers. Check the website or sign up the
table outside the theater to get e‑mail
updates. You will also find information about
other National Archives programs and activities.
Another way to get more involved with National
Archives is to become a member of the National
Archives Foundation. The foundation supports the work
of the education and outreach programs. Pick
up your application for membership in the
lobby or become member online at archivesfoundation.org. Today we have the opportunity to hear from
David Margolick about his new work, The Promise
and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. In
today's world it is all too often incorrectly
assumed that all the holdings of the National
Archives are available online. While we aim
to make more and more of our holdings discoverable
and usable online, the reality is that only
a fraction and tiny fraction at that, of holdings
have been digitized. That is what makes the
efforts of authors such as David Margolick
so important. The holdings of National Archives
which document national rights and work of
the government contain countless untold stories
that need to be discovered and told. David
Margolick is long‑time contributing editor
at Vanity Fair and has held similar posts
at Newsweek and Portfolio. For 15 years he
was a legal affairs correspondent for the
New York Times. He covered O.J. Simpson and
Lorena Bobbitt trials, 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 Wall
Street Journal weekly Review section. Prior
books include Elizabeth and Hazel: Two women
of Little Rock, a study of the iconic photograph
taken outside Little Rock Central High School
during the desegregation crisis of 1957; Beyond
Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a
World on the Brink; and Strange Fruit: The
Biography of a Song. He is now working on
a study of Sid Caesar and seminal television
comedy program Your Show of Shows. Ladies
and gentlemen, please welcome David Margolick.
[APPLAUSE]
>> DAVID: Thank you, Jay. You even pronounce
my name correctly which my mother appreciates.
And thank you all for coming today. It is
very impressive to me to see people who are
interested enough on a beautiful day in Washington
to come off the mall, come off this incredible
spectacle outside of the City of Washington
and the epic design of Washington and come
in here and hear somebody talk about a book.
I'm not sure that I had have the dedication
to do that myself and I appreciate you all
coming here. I also want to express my appreciation
publicly to Jay as I just did privately. This
book sort of started at the Archives in a
way there was an opening of photo exhibition
about the life of John F. Kennedy that my
colleague Larry Schiller put together just
up the street and he had worked with the Archives
on that and David Ferriero, the Archivist
that was at the opening. He came up to me
and I just had agreed to do this book, and
he came up to me and said if there's anything ‑‑
any way that I can help you, please let me
know, which for some people is kind of proforma
thing but not for him. In fact, I turned to
him very quickly and asked for help because
there were certain collections, certain histories,
oral history at JFK Library in Boston whose
status was unclear and they were open but
they weren't ajar, I will put it that way.
They were open but weren't really available
and it took, you know, a little bit of intervention
just to break down the sort of bureaucratic
barriers. This was a collection of interviews
that had been done for a book about Robert
F. Kennedy's last train ride, which many of
you will know about. The train that took his
body from funeral at St. Patricks cathedral
to Union Station and over to Arlington and
there were dozens of dozens of people that
were interviewed for the projects and many
of whom were no longer around and interviews
were not only about the train ride itself
but aspects of Robert Kennedy's career and
they were very precious and I just inscribed
the book to David. I said that he unlocked
all of this history to me in that much of
the history that's in the book is really thanks
to him. One wants in a book like this to be
very ‑‑ there's been a lot that's been
written about Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther
King obviously for them and I see there are
students here and younger people. I mean ‑‑
it is okay for you guys to write book reports.
You're still supposed to be writing book reports,
but once I got out of sixth grade, I would
like to think I wrote my last book report.
No author wants to come into a book project
with the idea of rewriting what other people
have done. What's the point? We all want to
make our contributions to history and find
these things in the Archives that Jay mentioned.
No matter how much has been written about
somebody, there's always more and there are
always things that people haven't looked at
and the key is to know where they are and
to have access to them and so there's no way
you can thank enough people that open up things
to people that no one has looked up before,
so this is my way of thanking the people at
this wonderful institution. I thought I would
start by reading a short portion of the book.
This describes the night that Martin Luther
King was killed. Back they went to room 306
of the Lorraine motel. Could the grieving
disciples of Martin Luther King Jr. have possibly
chosen a grimmer spot to reconvene, the spot
where he had been murdered only a few hours
earlier where his blood still stained the
cement on the balcony outside and yet when
they left the hospital in Memphis where King
had died on the evening of April 4th, 1968,
what better place was there to mourn him than
where he had spent much of his last day on
earth. Gathered there with King's personal
effects nearby, his small attache case, a
crumpled white shirt, a can of hidden magic hair
spray, his Bible, a half filled styrofoam coffee cup, a pair of glass tumblers and remnants of dessert, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young and others grappled with
the catastrophe that had just befallen them.
What would now happen to their movement?
Who would take King's place? What if his murder was only the first of a series that was still underway? Who among
them would be next and how could they stop
the rioting that had broken out in ghettos
across America, the violent antithesis of everything for
which King had stood, but the same 19‑inch
Philco television set that beamed scenes of
America aflame that night also brought some
consolation from Indianapolis where Senator
Robert F. Kennedy had spoken shortly after
King had been declared dead. Huddled against
the cold in his big brother's old overcoat he told
stunned and edgy crowd in the city's most
dangerous neighborhood that King had just
been killed, then pleaded for calm and brotherhood
reminding everyone as if anyone could not
have known that someone he had loved had also
been killed and also by a white man and unlike
so many of the other cities that night, Indianapolis
had stayed calm. We wanted to get on television
and tell people not to fight, not to burn
down the cities recalled Andrew Young. We
were trying to get the message out to people.
This is not what Dr. King would have you doing
but the press didn't want to talk to us, they
were right there at the hospital and all they
wanted to do was talk about the autopsy or
going around chasing kids with firebombs trying to interview them and
almost like they were trying to provoke a
riot. We were saying, Look, Dr. King is gone the important
thing is to keep his work going and people
are out on the streets now doing things that
he wouldn't want them to do. They weren't
interested in that. Bobby Kennedy's was the
only voice we identified with that night.
We were grateful he was out there. Kennedy's
most senior advisers, the one running the
fledgling presidential campaign urged him
to cancel the event, doing anything political
on such night it would look bad and going into
the ghetto was just too dangerous. So had
the mayor of Indianapolis, Richard Lugar,
lifelong resident never set foot along 17th and
Broadway where Kennedy was speaking. Where
a couple thousand people, nearly all of them
black, had already gathered. So had the Indianapolis
police and so had customarily fearless Ethel Kennedy
who had gone back to the hotel, praying in
the backseat every minute on route. Even
Kennedy might have had second thoughts while his
relationship with King had slowly improved
from contentious to careful to respectful
over the eight years they'd known each other
and causes came increasingly to overlap and
two men had never been close. The racial and
cultural divide between them had simply become
too broad. They had become allies but never had they
been friends. Why would Kennedy of all people
subject himself to such a risk and yet, improbably, Bobby Kennedy, a near total stranger to black America, only ten years
earlier, felt more at home in it now than any politician
in America. When the moment came he knew instantly
what he wanted and needed and promised to
do, so when shortly after he landed in Indianapolis
police officials reiterated their warning
he brushed it aside. My family and I could
lay down in the street there and they wouldn't
bother me, he told them with a confidence
bordering on bravado that would have been
unimaginable from just about any other white person in
America. If they would bother you, you're
the one with the problem. That everyone urged
him to stay away was for him only another reason
to go. They were roughly the same
age Kennedy barely three years older. Both
had larger than life tyrannical fathers and
both were deeply religious and both were charismatic
both forever in a hurry, each knew about the
capriciousness and brevity of life but their
difference not just in race and class but
geographical origin, temperament, power and position were much more dramatic. Given the distant poles from
which they began it is impressive inspiring
to see how closely aligned on the issues at
least that they became. At first both ‑‑
for both John and Robert Kennedy King meant
trouble. Distraction from things like managing
the cold war or the American economy they
would come to Washington to do. Every big
step demonstration or turmoil that Martin
King led was a problem for the President,
Robert Kennedy's key deputy at the just department
Burke Marshall later said, but as Attorney
General Robert Kennedy was usually King's point of
contact. That meant three years of tense telephone
standoffs, telegram pleas for protection,
stiff formal typewritten complaints and occasionally
compliments. At the same time it was Robert
Kennedy who had helped spring King from jail
in Georgia, saved his life or so he thought
when King huddled in the basement as angry
mob besieged a Montgomery Alabama church and
pleaded with him to halt the freedom rides
and when King refused to drop two aides with past
communist ties, directed that  his telephones be tapped.
Their's was uneven relationship and for King
a slightly degrading one. He was the one black ‑‑
he was the black man invariably asking for
things and Kennedy the white man doling them
out, but only when his brother's political
interest permitted. King was the one to say
please and thank you. King was not without
his power as he had arguably gotten John Kennedy
elected and he was the custodian of a large
chunk of his legacy and while he hectored,
lectured, criticized and exasperated Robert
Kennedy he also helped educate them and when
they met Kennedy had little experience with
or interest in or understanding over empathy
for blacks. King helped coax out Robert Kennedy's better angels, especially
with the 1963 protest in Birmingham that led
to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The ostensibly spiritual
King approached Bobby Kennedy with a hardheadedness
that pragmatic Kennedy would have admired.
He had no illusions about Kennedy's instincts
which were reviewed initially by the skeptical
civil rights community as authoritarian, pragmatic
and not especially sympathetic but it was with Robert Kennedy whom  he
knew he would have to deal and he'd his ordered colleagues, most notably, Harry Belafonte, to go find
Robert Kennedy's moral center and not return until
he had. So over the last four years of their truncated
lives they barely saw each other, maybe only
once. This was after the assassination of
John Kennedy, no longer after Robert Kennedy
had stopped being Attorney General, no longer
compelled to deal with each other they didn't.
Their preoccupations in goals ending the war
in Vietnam tackling racial discrimination
in the United States, South Africa and elsewhere
fighting poverty increasingly overlapped and
yet Robert Kennedy typically took care not
to cozy up to King who by now was the more
radical later Martin Luther King rather than
the avuncular Martin Luther King of the March
on Washington and eventually the national
holiday. It might not have posed a problem
in New York but would have him done no good among white voters
nationally. King's views on Vietnam he favored
immediate withdraw which far too extreme for
Kennedy to embrace, as was larger critique
of American foreign policy and culture. Other
factors kept them apart. Some thought the
straight laced Kennedy was put off by King's
sexual indiscretions, minutely chronicled by
the FBI under Jay Edgar Hoover. Paradoxically
King's saintliness was also hard to take. Stylistically
Kennedy seemed to prefer the company of grittier
black leaders like the ones who organized
the rally for him in Indianapolis. Kennedy
might also have been bitter over King's sex‑laced
wise cracks about his late brother and his
wife overheard and recorded and then gleefully
transmitted to him by the FBI's Hoover. But
guilt too may have been a barrier. Just how
do you befriend somebody you've wiretapped? Wary
is the word most frequently invoked to describe
the two of them. They were friends and they
didn't even know they were friends, said John
Louis who worked with them both. The prospect
of a Kennedy King alliance, one that was emerging
as Kennedy assembled his electoral coalition
was in his final campaign was Harry Belafonte, theorized
the right wing's greatest fear until Memphis
April 4, 1968. What do I say, Kennedy asked his press secretary Frank Mancowitz on the flight into Indianapolis
that night, should he use what speech writers
hastefully prepared for him or go with his
gut? In fact, it was often true when Kennedy
asked such questions he already knew the answer.
Standing on the back of a flatbed truck at
17th and Broadway in Indianapolis he spoke
for seven minutes. On that cold and drizzly
night little that he said on that cold and
drizzly night elicited commentary afterwards
that came too late for the morning papers
and like King's equally memorable remarks
the night before his last speech, one about
having been to the mountaintop, it was lost
in the enormity of the assassination but in
room 306 of the Lorraine motel Kennedy's words
were duly noted. He was in the middle of a
totally black community and he stood there
without fear and with great confidence and
empathy and literally poured his soul out
talking about his brother, Young later recalled.
The amazing thing to us was that the crowd
listened. He reached them. Kennedy could never
replace King but to his disciples back in
the Lorraine Motel that night and throughout
the black community he had picked up his torch.
In him and everyone in the room at the motel
agreed resided pretty much all of whatever
hope remained, there was but one question
about that torch, how long Robert Kennedy
would get to hold it. I don't know, I almost
feel like somebody said, he is probably going
to be next, Young later recalled. I can't remember
but that was the feeling many of us had. That
was all from that interview with ‑‑ that
was from an interview I had with Andrew Young
almost at the end of my research and there's
a lesson for historians and journalists and
anybody writing about anything historical
that even people who have been interviewed
many, many times still have things to say,
new things to say, matter of what questions
you ask them and Andrew Young had written
his memoirs and the story wasn't in his memoirs.
When you have an eventful life‑like Young's
you can't get everything in your memoir. One
of those conversations I had in my career
and anybody in my business had in my career
you can't believe your good fortune, the good
fortune that you have to sit on the phone
or in person and actually hear somebody tell
a story like that. I thanked him after that
and the privilege to have the conversation.
He said I should be the one that's thanking
you because I will never be able to tell all
the stories I have and you're doing me a favor.
You're rescuing this stuff. You're getting
this stuff out of me and you're rescuing it
and I felt pretty good about that. That was
one of the high points really in doing a book
like this. There are many high points. When
you're given a slice of history to record
it is a great privilege. It is also, of course,
a great responsibility not to do it well
and to do it conscientiously and honestly
and accurately and not to have people find
lots of mistakes in it afterwards that you
have to fix if you're lucky enough to have
a second edition and it is a great responsibility
to write something. A book of this kind. This
book was ‑‑ I think that story ‑‑
what I just read I think makes a pretty persuasive
case that there was a need and there was ‑‑
there was a need for a book like this and
historical slot to fill. This was a good topic
and yet there were a couple of problems. One
problem was as I say that there had been enormous
amount written about these two guys, and though
I lived through ‑‑ I mean I remember
them. I was 16 when both of them were killed.
I wasn't an authority in either one of them
and I had a lot of catching up to do and how
do you ‑‑ you know, how do you master
the historical record of two people with ‑‑
I mean even Taylor Branch's biography of King is 2,000
pages long. You could spend all of your time
reading the basic books and never getting
beyond that. As I say not even getting to
the point make it original and the contribution,
that was the first problem. The second problem
is that the documentary record of these two
guys for all that's been written about them
is very, very sparse. It was a lesson that
I learned ‑‑ this was originally supposed
to have been a picture book. I mean it was
originally going to be published by National
Geographic and it was going to be a picture
book and my contribution was going to be ‑‑
I describe it as grouting and I was going
to do the masonry workaround the pictures
and just write a little bit in journalistic
terms I was writing 40,000 words which is
a very short book. We want our work to matter
and to last so I got a little bit more ambitious
than that and wrote 110,000 words and the
pictures got cut and it became more of a book
and not just a picture book. Though there
are still great pictures in it. But in the
course of researching photos of the books and
hundreds of thousands of photos, there's no
good pictures of them together. That is amazing.
I was really startled by that. Looking through
the book I think virtually every picture of
the book in approximate range of one another
is in there. You know, there are pictures ‑‑
group pictures at the White House of the two
of them together. And there's a snapshot of
King with a couple of other people at the
justice department, meeting with Kennedy 1
day. And there are other pictures, the pictures
when King testified before sent ‑‑ Senate
committee that Kennedy was on and hanging
around a knot of people and together when the
Civil Rights Bill was signed in 1965 and in
the same room together but there are no pictures
of the two of them talking intensely to one
another or smiling together by themselves
or shaking hands. Now, why is that? That's
not an accident. Somebody didn't want pictures
of these two guys taken. I don't think it
was King for the reason that I suggested in
the introduction. I mean King ‑‑ Bobby
Kennedy was King's main man in the Kennedy
administrations. He was the man whom King
had to turn wherever he wanted anything. He
wanted to maximize his connections to Robert
Kennedy. But as I suggested King posed perils
to the Kennedys. King was a dangerous man.
The Kennedys were politicians first and what
do politicians think about? Politicians think
about survival before anything else. You have
to survive in order to do anything. So the
first thing to do is stay in office and not
irk people, not anger people and King was
a dangerous man. King was a dangerous man
in the south, hard to believe a time when
the Democratic party still had a chance to
win in the south but back then it did and
tying himself too explicitly to King endangered
Democratic votes in states like Georgia and
Kennedys didn't want to do that. So the Kennedys
kept their distance from King and the documentary
record, not just the photographic record is
skimpy. There aren't a lot of letters between
the two of them. Few phone calls but most
of them were not recorded. Only a couple transcripts
of phone calls. They never visited one another.
Lots of ‑‑ Kennedy had various black
leaders to Hickory Hill, his house in Virginia
like Harry Belafonte and James Baldwin but
he never invited King there. One of the striking
things I learned in the course of the book
was even after Kennedy gave the speech in Indianapolis,
first of all, the speech in Indianapolis that
night, which I'm sure many of you have seen
many times on video and documentaries. I mean
it is among the most famous footage of Robert
Kennedy and surely his greatest speech. That
was the only time really he spoke explicitly
and publicly about Martin Luther King. So
when it comes down to it when he felt free
to embrace Martin Luther King was after Martin
Luther King had died. And even then it was
a fleeting moment. Kennedy gave one more speech
the next day before the campaign was paused
for King's funeral for several days and Kennedy
spoke about violence in America and gave a
very powerful speech the next day in Cleveland
before the campaign was adjourned. How do
you talk about violence the night after Martin
Luther King has been murdered and not mentioned
Martin Luther King in the speech but he didn't.
He reel ‑‑ really didn't mention King
for the campaign which was again truncated
only two more months. So as I say, the material
on the two of them, the direct encounters
of between the two of them are limited and
this was why in one of the early interviews
that I did for the book was with Robert Kennedy's
eldest daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend,
who many of you will know, and she was perfectly
courteous, she didn't have to meet with me.
The Kennedys get lots of interview requests.
She was totally courteous with me but she
was also very blunt and said you don't have
a book here. There's no book. She said the
mere fact that these two guys rubbed up against
each other a little bit, that doesn't mean
that they had a relationship and if they didn't
have a relationship they didn't have a book
and I didn't have a book. I tried not to be
discouraged by that and I think that ‑‑
I guess my feeling was that anybody who could
give a ‑‑ the mere existence of the Indianapolis
speech binds the two men together so profoundly
you have to work backwards from that and look
into the corners and crevices in history and
they knew they were acutely aware of one another
and they were following one another and they
were working on parallel courses with one
another at the end and they were fencing and
struggling and manipulating one another before
that. Their lives were profoundly intertwined
and so the book would consist really of explaining
all of these subtle ‑‑ these subtle and
important ways and really the most important
white black partnership I think in the history
of the civil rights movement. I can't think
of another that's more important. Surely there's
a book about that and then part of the book
has to be why ‑‑ a historians task our
journalist ‑‑ I never know whether to
call myself a historian or journalist. Historian
sounds too highfalutin but journalist not
quite accurate, I'm somewhere in between.
Part of the task is to explain the gaps in
the historical record, why doesn't something
exist, and that was part of my job too. So
I think that then when you learn things like,
you know, Andrew Young's account that night
at the hotel, at the Lorraine Motel and juxtapose
that with a speech in Indianapolis and the
fact that Kennedy wiretapped Martin Luther
King and the fact that Kennedy's dramatic
evolution from having worked with for Senator
Joe McCarthy and being an early sort of skeptic ‑‑
not skeptic to the civil rights movement and
quite indifferent of the civil rights movement.
You have dramatic evolution in Robert Kennedy's
life to the point where at the very end Martin
Luther King, who never endorsed anyone, was
prepared to endorse him for the presidency,
so you have a dramatic evolution between the
two and kind of shadowy but substantive relationship
between the two, there's a book and as I said,
I was supposed to write 40,000 words and I
wrote three times as many. So I feel as if
I filled an important gap in the historical
record 
and elucidating how the two men overlapped
and felt about each other and what they achieved
toghether and what they might have achieved.
How do you do that? You do that by as I say
coming to the Archives and looking where nobody
else has ever looked. Reading interviews that
nobody else has ever read. Reading interviews
with people that are gone and no longer can
speak for themselves. You look at newspapers.
I was ‑‑ as Jay said I was a reporter
for the New York Times for 15 years and I
feel very loyal to the New York Times but
the New York Times has sort of unfair strangle
hold on history because it is the easiest
paper to research and it is scanned and available
everywhere and it is indexed but there are
lots of other papers that covered these guys
that aren't consulted and easily accessible
and aren't consulted as much because writers
often take the path of least resistance and
requires a little bit of imagination to look
in other places. You know, for instance, the
black press which had a lot of coverage of
the Kennedys and Kennedy administration and
it is interesting that ‑‑ the black leadership
people like King were very dissatisfied with
John and Robert Kennedy whom they felt were
moving far too slowly on civil rights, but
the black press loved the Kennedys and there
are wonderful stories in there. It was one
night when ‑‑ 100th anniversary of the
Emancipation Proclamation there was a gathering
at the White House and you there were hundreds
and hundreds of black guests at the White
House that night, black entertainers, black
athletes, black politicians, civil rights
people and that had never happened before.
Some of you will know that it was a major
event when Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker
T. Washington to the White House, to have a black man, who wasn't a servant in the White House to meet the President
of the United States it was a major event.
Here was the black community coming on mass
to the White House, and this was the kind
of thing that played very well in the black press.
When John F. Kennedy was killed the eulogies
in Ebony and Jet and black papers are quite
extraordinary and partly explains the great
affection with which Robert Kennedy was held.
He done very little to justify in a way until
his brother was killed and a way that's really
not quite fair. There was this great outpouring
of affection for John Kennedy in the black
community after he was murdered that Robert
Kennedy inherited. And the event had a transformative
effect obviously on his life after the assassination
that he went to South Africa, that he went
to the Mississippi Delta and saw poverty firsthand
that he got to the extraordinary point whereas
I mentioned where he felt more at home in
the ghetto really than he did anywhere else
and he was received with such adulation and
could say, you can't help but think about
the present President talking about, you know, how
he could ‑‑ somebody could shoot him
in 5th avenue or whatever he said about that.
When I read that quote from Robert Kennedy
saying I could lie down in the middle of the
ghetto in Indianapolis with my family and
no one would bother me. What an extraordinary
thing to say. How could he have felt so confident
about that? Yet it was true. I mean that was
the feeling of incredible affection that he
generated in that community and really quite
an amazing thing. So you look at documents,
you look at newspapers that no one had read
before and then you talk to the eyewitnesses
and this is another mission that we have as
journalists/historians. I often felt this
when Jay was reading the titles of the books
that I have done. They are all ‑‑ there
are cases of triage in a way. There are rescue
missions and attempts to get the people before
they die. Really that's what you have to do.
I forget who said when a person dies a library
is ‑‑ a library dies. It is true and
these people that I was privileged enough
to interview like Andrew Young, John Louis,
Harry Belafonte, Clarence Jones who was Martin
Luther King's lawyer and people on the Robert
Kennedy side, Peter Edelman, one of the speech
writers, Marian Wright Edelman, one of the
few people that was liaison between King and
Kennedy, one of the people that moved between
the two of them and knew the two of them and
sort of was a back channel between the two
of them. There are other ‑‑ Bobby Kennedy's
chief speech writer Adam Walinsky, I interviewed
him. These are people you could instantly ‑‑
you could turn to them and in one sentence
and learn more than you could learn from reading
lots of books because they were there and
they just ‑‑ they can talk turkey with
you. They just know the truth. For instance,
one theory about why Robert Kennedy tapped
Martin Luther King's phone, there was a theory
that. It was really ‑‑ it was benign
to protect King. King was surrounded by communists
FBI said and Bobby Kennedy wanted to clear
the record up and wiretapped and no conversations
between communists, it would prove King was
not a communist as he was repeatedly labeled.
So he really did it as a favor to Martin Luther
King. You know, one conversation with Martin
Luther King's lawyer who said that's a fantasy.
You know, that's all that you need. Refutes
all the speculation later on about the explanation
for the wiretap. There's no substitute for
that kind of contemporaneous comment from
an eyewitness. One of the great dangers in
writing a book like this ‑‑ writing a
book on this subject, and I'm sure some of
you have witnessed some of that, some of this
in the last couple of months as commemorations
were held, is canonization. There are lots
of people that sort of feel ‑‑ they elevate
themselves by writing about a saintly person
and it is in their interest to sort of airbrush
out all the inconvenient facts about somebody.
For instance, that Robert Kennedy's record
on civil rights was not a good one before
he was Attorney General. You know, that Martin
Luther King was horrified at the thought that
Robert Kennedy was going to determine the
direction of the civil rights movement. You
know, King had his own piccadillies as we
know and these are all in there. I gave a
reading last night and somebody said in the
first 60 pages he felt a little bit disillusioned
with Robert Kennedy. It wasn't that I took
any joy in putting these things in there.
In fact, I felt that it was part of the historical
record and that the very journey that Robert
Kennedy took, I think Kennedy's journey was
longer than King's, the very journey that
he took and the very sort of retrograde position
from which he started makes him an even greater
figure. You don't need to write a hagiography,
don't need to turn man into a saint. The more
real he is the more heroic he is. That goes for both of them. To be given this slice of history to write about and all
started here at the Archives and sort of ending
here at the Archives and I find that fitting
and great honor for me andI'm grateful to all of
you for coming and listening to all of this.
I'm happy to take questions with the proviso
that you go to the microphone to ask them.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
>> DAVID: Somebody has to be the first. Good.
>> I was wondering if you could add in Lyndon
Johnson to the mix in records ‑‑ you
mentioned Martin Luther King wanting a strategic
relationship with the Kennedys when John F.
Kennedy obviously and Robert Kennedy were
there and then obviously that was different
after the fact and how that dynamic changed
with Lyndon Johnson becoming President and
Robert Kennedy being in a position where was
he in a stronger position for Martin Luther
King or directing Lyndon Johnson and talk
about that.
>> DAVID: I think that I'm not an authority
on this, I'm no Robert Caro on this and I
had to be rather strategic about my research
here because the book was written in less
than a year. So I didn't go very far down
that ‑‑ very far down that path. I think
that Robert Kennedy faded in importance to
Martin Luther King after John Kennedy was
shot and they had really very, very little
to do with one another until 1968 when Robert ‑‑
when Bobby ran for President. Johnson, of
course, because he became President and it
was much more important to King and I think
that King had a better relationship with Johnson
initially than he had with John Kennedy or
Robert Kennedy. He understood him and Johnson
was a southerner and Johnson was intense on
burnishing his record and making his record
in civil rights and sort of proving to the
world that he wasn't a racist and that he
had overcome his own origins. So I think that
even ‑‑ I think ‑‑ I think it is
in the book after Kennedy was shot, after
John Kennedy was shot, I think that King says
to Coretta, this may not be so bad for us.
Johnson sort of gets it. I think he felt that
he had more of a friend in the White House
when Johnson was there. The flip side of that,
that Johnson was much more volatile and Johnson
was more insecure and Johnson felt more easily
betrayed and so when King came out against
the war in Vietnam he was on Johnson's enemy
list and Johnson was talking to Hoover and
he was persona non grata and lived and died
by the same sword. Does that answer the question?
>> Yes. Thank you.
>> I think we all appreciate you putting the
book together and encourage future historians
to come here.
>> DAVID: It is great.
>> Struggle through the process of ‑‑
>> DAVID: To tell the truth and try to say
something new and not be ‑‑ not muzzle
yourself to placate certain people or favor
or whatever and write up whatever you find.
>> My question is on faith. Bobby Kennedy
being Catholic and Martin Luther King being
Baptist and those ‑‑ their faith claimed
a strong role in their lives. Could you discuss
how they respected each other with the different
faiths, what they shared in common? Could
you elaborate how faith drove them and people
that they were?
>> DAVID: You're right about that. They were
both very religious. I don't think it was
a great bond between them. I think ‑‑
I think it was one thing that they shared
but they had different religious traditions
and I don't ‑‑ I saw no sign that they
ever bonded over their belief in God, their ‑‑
whatever they shared. Their religions were
also part of their culture. You know, the
Catholic culture and Baptist culture and they
were very, very different and everybody always
stressed to me, all the people again you had
to go back to the people who knew them because
I was desperate to find connections between
these guys. That was the premise of the book
so this was something ‑‑ that was an
obvious connection that I wanted to explore
and wherever I did explore it people sort
of shot ‑‑ people that knew them kind
of shot me down. All right? And they would
say they had fundamentally different temperaments.
Didn't matter that they both went to church.
They had fundamentally different temperaments.
King was spiritual man and Kennedy was a politician.
I don't think it was that much of a bond.
I don't think it brought them together. I
saw very little sign that they appreciated
one another more because of it and as somebody
said, I think that Kennedy found King to be
a stuffed shirt, sort of, you know, uptight.
You know, when King was with Kennedy he was
uptight. I watched Kennedy upstairs of King
in an interview. There's a southern reporter
asking him repeatedly about do you support ‑‑
how far does your support for civil rights
go? You know, does it extend ‑‑ does
it extend to private businesses? If somebody
wants to exclude somebody from a private business
why shouldn't he be able to? Isn't that his right?
And what if, you know ‑‑ what if letting
blacks into his business turns off all of
his white clientele and loses business? What
kind of risk ‑‑ the guy was baiting him.
There was King sitting there very politely
and fielding his questions and never ‑‑
he always had to behave himself. Behavior
always had to be impeccable. It is the reason
why I had this idea in the book. You know,
Kennedy gave the famous speech the night that
King was killed. What would King have said
the night Kennedy was killed? How different
would his speech have been had he been around
to give it and my theory is that he wouldn't
have given nearly as good of speech because
he would have had to keep it within certain
parameters. You know, he couldn't ‑‑
he would have to be entirely proper. That
was the role that he played. His behavior
had to be beyond reproach all the time. I
think that Kennedy found him stuffy. That's
my impression. I don't have any direct evidence
of that, which is why I think he was a little
bit uncomfortable with him. Of course, King
had a great sense of humor but only when he
was comfortable and he wasn't comfortable
with the Kennedys. As I said in the introduction
that Kennedy found King overly saintly and
couldn't really mix it up with him, which
is why he preferred to meet with other kinds
of black leaders rather than with King. Don't
think he ever felt comfortable with him and
I think that was part for the religious ‑‑
that trumped the religious in a way. Their
piety and I'm not expert on Catholicism and
black baptism and they are as different as
church services are and what could be more
different? My impression was it was not a
great bond between them.
>> Hi. Just on the part about sanctifying
people after they have died and so on, do
you think in the case of King that there's
now too much of treating him as sort of cuddly
figure with a universal message, approaching
one line from the speech and now forgot about
his more radical edge and trouble making edge?
For example, I sometime hear it said that
throughout the corporate breakfast to try
to make everybody feel better and attempt
to overlook his more radical side.
>> DAVID: I think your question is an excellent
one but I think you almost answered it yourself.
I think that you need to read the Riverside
speech that King gave and some other speeches
that King gave at the end of his life ‑‑
near the end of his life. That was a year
before he died. To realize how radicalized
he had become and he was ‑‑ he had become
sort of radical socialist and if you read
the Riverside speech, he is basically challenging
American capitalism and he is saying that
Americans are just despoiling the world and
taking it ‑‑ Americans are colonialists
and Americans are running amuck throughout
the world and America is a malign influence
in the world, not just in Vietnam. It is a radical
speech. I'm convinced ‑‑ there were couple
instances they exchanged notes after speeches
they gave. I think King wrote Kennedy a note
after Kennedy spoke in the Mississippi Delta
but Kennedy didn't write King a note after
the Riverside speech. It was a reminder that
King was radioactive and that Kennedy had
to keep his distance from him and so, yes,
I think that ‑‑ I think white America
has sort of frozen King at the march on Washington
and that's the end of the King story and doesn't
really want to concentrate very much on the
Martin Luther King that emerged after that.
He is a very embattled figure because he is
getting it from all directions. Getting it
from whites and black moderates, getting it
from black radicals, people think that he
has overstepped his boundaries by pining on
the war in Vietnam. He was profoundly depressed
at the criticism he was getting and friends
thought he was suicidal. There was a really
good document ‑‑ HBO documentary called
King and the wilderness about the last few
years. It is excellent in this regard because
really illustrates that part of the story
and I think it is kind of ‑‑ conveniently
forgotten part of the story and crucial part
of his story. One more? We are out of time.
Okay. Thank you all again.
[APPLAUSE].
>> Folks, just a reminder there's a book signing.
