Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy are figures linked by great achievement and greater tragedy. Their twin assassinations in 1968 seemed to close the door on a better America, leading directly to the paranoid and destructive Nixon administration. They were two major figures in the civil rights movement, and at first glance a parallel biography seems a fine idea. However, as Margolick discusses in the opening, the parallels are weaker than they seem. King and Kennedy communicated relatively rarely, and mostly in official capacities. They were mostly adversaries on civil rights, barely allies, and certainly not friends. While the Kennedy archive is voluminous and staffed with helpful experts, the King Paper Project has only published their sources up to 1962. This, combined with Margolick's own youth in a conservative New England town where Civil Rights was distant agitation, results in an unbalanced book that is a fine character study of Bobby Kennedy, and merely decent on King. The connection between the two is mostly ether.

First Bobby. Raised in privilege as part of Joe Kennedy's sprawling family, Bobby was thrust both forward and into a supporting role. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. was the heir, until he was killed in WW2, and then John was the Kennedy to be President. Bobby got a law degree, and then through his father's connections joined Senator McCarthy's infamous investigation, where he investigated communist infiltration and links between labor and organized crime. Bobby was always the hardest of the Kennedy boys, "Ruthless" the most common adjective to describe him. As Attorney General during the Civil Rights Era, he was in favor of order over change, and only reluctantly ordered Federal law enforcement to protect the Freedom Riders and other anti-segregation protesters. In the great error of his life, he approved FBI surveillance of King.

But Kennedy's black and white morality included a capacity for change, and with his brother's assassination, and his own election to Senate, he became a staunch critic of injustice everywhere, speaking against Apartheid South Africa, poverty in America, and the escalating Vietnam War. Bobby was one of the most forceful advocates for He seemed to truly connect with the youth, and his campaign in 1968 may have well defeated both Vice President Hubert Humphrey and the future President Nixon, till he was slain by an assassin's bullet.

Martin Luther King, Jr was born to an important and egotistical preacher, but the senior King was nowhere near Joseph Kennedy Sr., and no black man could rise far in Jim Crow America. King could have been a comfortable minister to the black middle class, but the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott demonstrated the power of non-violent direct action, and King rose on the strength of his charisma and vision to fight segregation across the South, and lead the 1963 Million Man March on Washington DC and the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. His vision was not matched by his organizational chops, and he found himself outflanked by the street-tough Black Power advocates from Northern cities, and alienated from his wealthy liberal backers as he turned increasingly against the war in Vietnam. King was organizing a massive white and black 'poor man's movement' when the assassin's bullet he long expected found him and made him a martyr.

This is a good book, but as I said, unbalanced. Kennedy's moral progress is followed in agonizing detail. King's struggles, with other figures in the civil rights movement, with the powers that be, with his own philosophy of love and non-violence against the brutality of "Bull" Connor and others like him, is treated abruptly and mostly with cliched references towards Gandhi. It's a good book, but far from being great.