OPINION:
KENNEDY AND KING: THE PRESIDENT, THE PASTOR, AND THE BATTLE OVER CIVIL RIGHTS
Hachette, $28, 528 pages
There are many biographies of President John F. Kennedy. There are many biographies of his contemporary politician and activist, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. There are many, many histories of the Civil Rights Era, with many breaking new or under-reported stories about this amazing and influential era.
Steven Levingston’s book, “Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle Over Civil Rights” does not offer anything new in that department. As the current book editor to The Washington Post, Mr. Levingston sees, presumably, what does and does not entice or excite audiences. Often, The Post refuses to review a book, but to no effect on its scholarship or commercial success. Sometimes, The Post will drool over books done time and time again. They also drool over book authors who commit plagiarism, as long as the writer is a lefty. The Post drooled over Mr. Levingston’s book, but that is like house-league soccer. Everybody gets a trophy.
“Kennedy and King” falls into the latter category of being a book that does not entice readers. Essentially, to summarize this review in a sentence: If you’ve read books about Kennedy, MLK or the Civil Rights Era, then you’ve read this book. And this book is boring, too.
Race and race-relations had always been a central part of America, ever since the days of the Colonies, with clear players on the moral issue. Kennedy, however, was reluctant. He was running for president, and he could not afford to upset the racists in the party, including Southern Democrats. He was intellectually against it, of course; but being intellectually against segregation and racism did not make laws. Jackie Robinson, the famed black baseball player, on the other hand, was an unabashed supporter of Richard Nixon. What was Kennedy to do?
He employed the help of pastor Martin Luther King Jr., who successfully helped rally Northern blacks to vote for this Massachusetts senator to win the presidency. The popular vote was won by Kennedy by 0.2 percent. However, nonwhites voted for the Democrat with an overwhelming 68 percent.
But that didn’t stop the reluctance. It was a bitter three years, with bureaucratic hurdles and red tape to go through, to the extent that King couldn’t get a visit to the White House.
In this way, Mr. Levingston’s book does a mediocre job of showing this period. He focuses on the micro and the macro, the everyday American and the domestic policy. The book’s writing is passable, nothing to write home about. He paints a fuzzy picture of the troubles African-Americans went through during this decade, and does an average job showing Kennedy’s reluctance to jump feet first into the fight (something that would only happen under his successor, Lyndon Johnson). But everybody knows that.
Overall, “Kennedy and King” offers the reader an unrevolutionary biography of two men and the period in which they lived. In that way, Mr. Levingston succeeds. But he does not succeed in writing a book that offers anything different than the thousands of books already written on the era. Though newspaper articles and biographies and memoirs and White House papers were all cited, nothing substantial comes out of it. You come out of reading this book with an appreciation of the period — but if you read any other book on Kennedy or the Civil Rights Era, you’ll best want to skip this.
Clearly, Mr. Levingston chose this topic to burnish his left-wing credentials in his liberal crowd, but in the future, he should leave history to historians.
• Craig Shirley is a Reagan biographer and presidential historian.
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