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A new book details the tragedies of and the connections between the devastating assassinations of America’s foremost 1960s leaders.
On December 8, 1999, in what should have been “the trial of the century,” a jury of 12 convicted Lloyd Jowers, alongside the United States government, of conspiring to murder Martin Luther King, a man whom the very same government celebrates this month with a national holiday. More than a quarter of a century later, scores of American students are still taught that James Earl Ray, an avowed racist, acted alone in killing the legendary civil rights leader. From withdrawn security, to the fact that James Earl Ray wasn’t even at the Lorraine Motel at the time of the shooting, to the admission of Jowers to taking the gun from the man in the bushes, to the testimony of Jesse Jackson that the shot came from the bushes, and more, the list of King’s assassination inconsistencies with the official narrative is long, leaving little room for doubt. Certainly, the jury felt that way in coming to their verdict in less than an hour.
The trial was initiated by the King family. And while the country has celebrated not just MLK himself, but his wife Coretta Scott King, including since her passing in 2006, it has ignored her deeply held beliefs that the government conspired to murder her husband. “There is abundant evidence of a major high-level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband, Martin Luther King, Jr… the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband. The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame,” Mrs. King shared after the trial. A real way to honor her and her husband’s legacy would be not to build them more statues, although those are nice, but to speak and teach their truth.
The story of MLK’s murder, plus three more – those of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Senator and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, is told in James Douglass’s magnum opus, Four Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK. In a painstaking effort to document – through declassified records, witness testimonies, autopsy reports, interviews, and more – what really took place leading up to and during these murders, Douglass paints a picture of a government not only spying on its own leaders and citizens, but so deeply committed to the Cold War and the economic forces benefitting from war and maintenance of poverty, that nothing, not even murdering those who wish to change the status quo is out of bounds.
Each story is devastating on its own, but together, they break one’s heart completely. Two brothers, two preachers, two white, two black, all unimaginably young – JFK was killed in 1963 at the age of 46, Malcolm X in 1965 at the age of 39, and MLK (age 39) and RFK (age 42) in 1968, just two months apart. In less than five years, we killed our best and brightest, setting up scapegoats that were meant to take the fall for us all. The four martyrs were extraordinary men who thought deeply and passionately about the world. They loved this world. Their own words, which Douglass quotes over and over and over again, at once lift one’s spirits and then bring on a wave of sadness at the thought of it all. “Why, why, why?” as John Lewis shouted while watching the news of RFK’s murder from a hotel room in Los Angeles.
It is impossible not to think about the corollary question of what if. What if JFK had lived? Did his murder sentence the others to death, too? What if all four had lived? What if any one of them had?
This is not the first time that Douglass has investigated assassinations. He has also written two other books about the unspeakable: JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters and Gandhi and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment with Truth. The new book is less focused on the details of the JFK assassination story than the original. Instead, it sets up the connections between JFK and his brother, of course, but also with MLK, and between MLK and RFK and between MLK and Malcolm. JFK is the starting point. MLK feels like the center of the story.
Douglass borrows the term unspeakable from the Catholic philosopher Thomas Merton who refers to it as “the systemic, organized evil that permeates our public life, the void of responsibility and awareness in which atrocities can be committed without anyone seeming to do them.” The book contains endless references to declassified documents, witness statements from interviews and court testimonies, forensic reports, and more. In each case, a piece here and there that does not fit in the lone shooter puzzle would be disquieting, but not disqualifying. Put together, however, they appear to exonerate the accused, and implicate a web of people spanning FBI, CIA, the Mafia, and local police departments, where individuals connected with the CIA led investigations – or rather cover-up – efforts. The man behind it all appears to be J. Edgar Hoover, the long-time Director of the FBI who presided over the Bureau under six presidential administrations.
Douglass seamlessly moves between the individual narratives and the stories that connect them. To him, the answer to the why question is the existence of nuclear weapons. The final sections of the book are devoted to the Cuban Missile Crisis, a 12-day ordeal during which the Kennedy brothers prevailed, alongside Khruschev, but also got lucky. We all were lucky! The world could have ended in October of 1962. Once the Kennedy brothers internalized this, it was time to ensure it could never happen again. It was time to turn towards peace.
In telling the story of the four murders, Douglass is clearly heartbroken, but capable of expressing hope, the kind of hope that comes along as one travels the path of truth. He is most pained, his suffering on full display, when he talks about the present. We are living in challenging times, and Douglass, with 88 years under his belt, is tormented by the state of the world, most notably by what many and he himself see as a genocide in Gaza. He ends the book with a short story about yet another assassination for which no one was ever punished, the murder of the Swedish diplomat Folk Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg, in Jerusalem in 1948. Just like with Gandhi, who was killed in that same year, the unspeakable seems to know no borders and can take place far from the US shores, the CIA, the Mafia, and the FBI.
Douglass wants us to recognize that assassinations have painful consequences. While individuals can change and have indeed changed the course of history, for better and for worse, people coming together in pursuit of peace and liberty is the only way out of the mess we find ourselves in. The ball is in our court.
James Douglass’s Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK is available for purchase from Orbis Books HERE.
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