Looking Over Jordan

Recordings of phone conversations -- either conducted by Johnson in the Oval Office or overheard by bugs and wiretaps planted by the FBI -- further enrich Branch's narrative. Like other historians who have usefully mined these materials, Branch paints a devastating portrait of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who privately called King a "burrhead" and had earlier publicly branded him "the most notorious liar in the country." Even after King's death, FBI officials circulated malicious stories about his personal relationships and his associates.

Those associates were a contentious crew. Much of At Canaan's Edge catalogues the sharp intra-movement disagreements that drained King's energies. Two of his top lieutenants, James Bevel and Hosea Williams, clashed endlessly over strategy and access to the SCLC's pitifully small resources. Bevel, heading the Chicago effort, demanded that King highlight his opposition to Vietnam; Williams, trying to manage civil rights campaigns in Alabama, complained repeatedly that SCLC deprived him of funds and manpower. After a long night of argumentative strategizing in September 1967, King shouted, "I don't want to do this any more! I want to go back to my little church!" The livid King "banged around and yelled, which summoned anxious friends" until aides "talked him to bed."

Meanwhile, civil rights leaders outside the SCLC openly criticized King's moves. Harlem's longtime congressman, the ever wily Adam Clayton Powell Jr., referred to him as "Martin 'Loser' King." More worrisome were black leaders who began to renounce racial integration and nonviolence itself. "Nonviolence has no meaning," the activist James Meredith told reporters in April 1966. A month later, Stokely Carmichael of the increasingly militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) announced that "integration is a subterfuge for white supremacy." Following bitter internal debate in December 1966, SNCC expelled its last seven white staff members.

Although Branch notes King's depressive moments, he admires his almost superhuman tolerance amid these disputes. While giving ample space to the views of leaders such as Bevel, Williams, Stanley Levison, Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young, John Lewis, Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy and many others, he regards King's religiously based, unswerving and inspiring adherence to nonviolence and integration as the glue that held the increasingly fractious and fragile civil rights movement together until April 1968. The "glaring impact of nonviolent power," Branch concludes, later helped to force the collapse of the Soviet Union and to inspire Chinese protesters at Tiananmen Square.

Nor is this mere hindsight; at the time, King deeply believed that nonviolence should not stop at the water's edge. Branch, emphasizing King's mounting opposition to the Vietnam War, devotes many pages to accounts of the fighting in Asia, as well as to meetings of Johnson and his foreign policy advisers. Because the war diverted funds as well as public attention from racial issues after 1964, Branch is right to attend seriously to it. Moreover, King's antiwar beliefs were inseparably connected to his faith in nonviolence, and they fueled his increasingly radical statements about the United States itself. "There is something strangely inconsistent," he declared in April 1967, "about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say be nonviolent toward [the segregationist Selma sheriff] Jim Clark, but will curse you and damn you when you say be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children! There is something wrong about that!" In Feb. 1968, King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

But as Branch's day-to-day narrative moves ahead, it frequently veers away from racial issues in order to describe at length a host of other matters: anti-Vietnam teach-ins, LBJ's thinking about the war, his administration's struggles to promote Great Society legislation, the career of Ho Chi Minh and the massacre by U.S. troops of hundreds of Vietnamese villagers at My Lai in March 1968. Detailed digressions such as these wrench the reader about, resulting in a somewhat sprawling book.

Intent on sustaining narrative pace (no mean feat in a volume of such heft), Branch also does not always give readers his considered opinion about King's and others' key decisions. Was it wise for the resource-strapped, Southern-based SCLC to undertake large-scale civil rights work in the North as well as the South in 1965? Should King have dumped such problematic advisers as Hosea Williams? Was one of King's major goals in Chicago -- open housing -- a well-conceived strategy? Should he have heeded associates who urged him to soft-pedal his politically controversial opposition to the war? Was it sensible of SCLC to press ahead with a campaign in 1968 in support of sanitation workers in Memphis and with an ill-managed Poor People's Campaign scheduled for Washington later that year?

Even in hindsight, these remain difficult questions to resolve, and Branch may be wise to focus on describing the rushing streams of events -- letting readers cast judgments for themselves. At Canaan's Edge is a deeply researched book that completes a superior narrative trilogy of America's civil rights struggles between 1954 and 1968.

James T. Patterson, a professor emeritus of history at Brown University, is the author of "Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy" and, most recently, "Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore."