This is a sad book. That final year of King's life almost exactly begins with the speech in which he strongly and unequivocally condemned the Vietnam War and the Johnson administration's execution of that war. King was strongly condemned both within and without of the Civil Rights movement for this action. He was told by whites, conservatives and liberals alike, that he should stick to civil rights and leave politics and the war in particular to the people who knew what they were talking about. From within the movement, many of his closest advisors felt strongly that King was basically taking his eye off the ball and, worse, risking alienating the liberal whites who had been the movements allies up until then. The FBI stepped up their campaign of hounding King and executing their disinformation campaign against him. And at the same time, more radical Blacks in the Panthers and SNCC criticized King from the left, accusing him and his insistence on non-violence of becoming increasingly irrelevant. King came up with the idea of a Poor Person's March on Washington, as he began identifying a 3-pronged system of oppression in America: racism, poverty and militarism. Even within his own Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King faced growing discontent with this idea. One of the most bitter blows to King was longtime friend and ally Bayard Rustin's spurning of the Poor Person's March idea. Rustin thought this was a waste of time and money. He thought the time for mass demonstrations of this sort had passed, and wanted to focus on getting more legislators elected who would help them pursue their policy goals in Congress. In all, Smiley portrays King's final year as harrowing and disheartening. King began to muse ever more frequently on his own death, which he assumed was coming soon. And yet King never did fully lose heart, according to Smiley. He continued pushing for his March plan, and insisted on going to Memphis to help out with the long and bitter strike being waged by the garbage men's union there.

There were a couple of small irritations with the book for me. Smiley insisted on continually referring to MLK as "Doc," which was his nickname among his friends and advisors. I didn't feel that was necessarily appropriate here and it irked me from time to time, though not seriously. Also, Smiley relatively frequently writes as if he knows King's thoughts. He explains this in his introduction, saying he only does this when his interviews with King's close advisors reveal what these people felt sure King was thinking, or sometimes what he said to them. I was willing to give Smiley the benefit of the doubt on this effect, basically trusting that he had the ideas and emotions correct. Somebody who knew King might have a different idea.

All in all, I thought this book was very much worth reading, though frequently depressing. I had tended to think of King's live as mostly single-toned, if that makes sense. King was just King, the great man who sometimes had his missteps but was consistent in the long run. Understanding the that the enormous pressures of the times--the discord, hatred and doubt--had on King during his last year only adds to my esteem for his life and what he was able to accomplish. ( )

An excellent account of Martin Luther King Jr.'s last year. The Baptist preacher from Georgia takes on an insane schedule to fight for his beliefs and he feels increasingly misunderstood and rejected by his own people. Before I read this book, I was not aware how strongly Martin Luther King opposed the Vietnam war - he saw the bigger connection between poverty, war and race. Many others criticized him saying he was taking on too much - and how could he oppose President Lyndon Johnson, after he had made concessions toward civil rights. MLK even considers a fast like Gandhi to show that he is firm in his conviction - he disregards politics, popularity, but sometimes also his own safety. "I am not a consensus leader", he says, "a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus." He wanted to substitute courage for caution. An impressive testimony to one of America's greatest democratic public intellectuals.