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The Story Of King's 'Beyond Vietnam' Speech

Dr. Benjamin Spock (2nd-L), Martin Luther King, Jr. (C), Father Frederick Reed and Cleveland Robinson lead a huge pacifist rally protesting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war, Mar. 16, 1967 in New York. AFP/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" was a powerful and angry speech that raged against the war. At the time, civil rights leaders publicly condemned him for it.

PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley's new documentary, MLK: A Call to Conscience explores King's speech. The film is the second episode of Tavis Smiley Reports . Smiley spoke with both scholars and friends of King, including Cornel West, Vincent Harding and Susannah Heschel.

By the time King made the "Beyond Vietnam" speech, Smiley tells host Neal Conan, "he had fallen off already the list of most-admired Americans as tallied by Gallup every year." Smiley continues, "it was the most controversial speech he ever gave. It was the speech he labored over the most."

After King delivered the speech, Smiley reports, "168 major newspapers the next day denounced him." Not only that, but then-President Lyndon Johnson disinvited King to the White House. "It basically ruins their relationship," says Smiley. "This was a huge, huge speech," he continues, "that got Martin King in more trouble than anything he had ever seen or done."

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Dr. Martin Luther King’s ‘Beyond Vietnam’ Speech

On the evening of April 4, 1967, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King lent his full-throated oratory to a growing chorus of opposition to the rapidly expanding American role in the Vietnam War . King’s sharp rebuke of U.S. policy and call to protest brought him into direct conflict with President Lyndon B. Johnson , who was an ally of King’s in the struggle for equal rights for African Americans.

From the pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church, King eloquently speaks of breaking “the betrayal of my own silences” and goes on to reveal the “seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision.”

With this pivotal address, the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner sought to bridge the movement for civil rights and justice to the antiwar movements: “I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission—a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’”

One year later, April 4, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis.

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This Day In History : April 4

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Martin Luther King Jr. speaks out against the war

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr ., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, delivers a speech entitled “ Beyond Vietnam ” in front of 3,000 people at Riverside Church in New York City. In it, he says that there is a common link forming between the civil rights and peace movements. King proposed that the United States stop all bombing of North and South Vietnam; declare a unilateral truce in the hope that it would lead to peace talks; set a date for withdrawal of all troops from Vietnam; and give the National Liberation Front a role in negotiations.

King had been a solid supporter of President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society , but he became increasingly concerned about U.S. involvement in Vietnam and, as his concerns became more public, his relationship with the Johnson administration deteriorated. King came to view U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia as little more than imperialism. Additionally, he believed that the Vietnam War diverted money and attention from domestic programs created to aid the Black poor. Furthermore, he said, "The war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home…We were taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem."

King maintained his antiwar stance and supported peace movements until he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, one year to the day after delivering his "Beyond Vietnam" speech.

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated

Allies drive back germans in second battle of the somme, "operation babylift," transporting south vietnamese children, starts in tragedy, president harrison dies—32 days into office, first detective story is published, maya angelou is born, "ben-hur" wins 11 academy awards, dirigible crash kills 73 in new jersey, north atlantic treaty organization (nato) pact signed.

Beyond Vietnam: The MLK speech that caused an uproar

Exactly one year before his assassination, on April 4, 1967, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech that may have helped put a target on his back. That speech, entitled Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break The Silence , was an unequivocal denunciation of America’s involvement in that Southeast Asian conflict.

The speech began conventionally. King thanked his hosts, the antiwar group Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. But he left little doubt about his position when he quoted from the organization’s statement.

“…I found myself in full accord when I read (the statement’s) opening lines: 'A time comes when silence is betrayal,’ “ King told the crowd gathered at Riverside Baptist Church in New York.

He indicated that his commitment to non-violence left him little choice. “…I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos, without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government.”

King had given an antiwar speech in February 1967. But that sentiment was often described as pro-Communist in an America that was in the midst of the Cold War. So King spoke again two months later, to ensure his position was clear.

In the April speech, King carefully laid out the history of the nation’s involvement in Vietnam. He started at 1945, when Vietnam's prime minister Ho Chi Minh overthrew the French and Japanese. He carried his audience through American support for France’s effort to regain its former colony, and for Vietnam’s dictatorial first president Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, assassinated in 1963. Through it all, King noted, America sent more and more soldiers to Vietnam.

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"The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. … Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy, " he said.

King also accused increasing military costs of taking money from domestic programs meant to fight poverty and racism. Instead, he said, young black men "crippled by our society" were being sent "eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they have not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem."

In the decades since his assassination, the speech has all but disappeared from the public consciousness. His career is almost solely represented by the the last half of the 1963 I Have A Dream  speech, delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, in which King anticipated a world where content of character matter more than skin color.

In 1967, however, Beyond Vietnam  ignited an uproar.

In its April 7 editorial “Dr. King’s Error,” The New York Times lambasted King for fusing two problems that are “distinct and separate.”

“The strategy of uniting the peace movement and civil rights could very well be disastrous for both causes,” the paper said. Similar criticism came from the black press as well as from the NAACP.

“He created a firestorm ... of criticism,” said Clarence B. Jones, King’s adviser and the speechwriter who helped shape the iconic Dream  speech. Jones is now a diversity professor at the University of San Francisco, and a scholar-in-residence at Stanford University's Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute

“People were saying, ‘Well you know you’re a civil rights leader, mind your own business. Talk about what you know about.’”

But King did not see himself as a civil rights leader at all, according to Clayborne Carson, who directs the institute. Carson is also a professor of history at Stanford University.

“…I think Rosa Parks recruited him to be that,” Carson said. “Had he not been in Montgomery in 1955 (for the bus boycott), he would have not become a civil rights leader; he would have certainly become a social gospel minister. He was already that.”

King articulated his commitment to social justice issues while a graduate student at Crozer Theological Seminary in the late 1940s. His stated concerns included unemployment and economic insecurity, not race relations.

King made good on that commitment in 1966, when he joined forces with local Chicago activists to fight for fair housing. But black churches refused to work with him, so he set up headquarters at an integrated West Side church, Warren Avenue Congregational Church.

“I think (the black churches) were scared of the (Richard J.) Daley administration and the political machine,” said Prexy Nesbitt , a long-time activist who worked with King. He now teaches African history at Columbia College in Chicago.

In Chicago, and later in Detroit, King was challenged by younger activists who mocked his insistence on nonviolence at home while American soldiers were killing thousands in Vietnam.

By the time of the Riverside speech, it had taken King two years to become an outspoken critic of the war. Doing so would destroy his relationship with President Lyndon Johnson, who was widely revered for pushing through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 and 1965.

“Had there been some way of carrying on the Vietnam War without having any cost to domestic programs, (King) might have maintained his silence,” Carson said.

The aftermath of the speech and the mounting opposition took a personal toll on King. Nesbitt saw King in 1968 and was struck by his changed demeanor.

“What I saw was a person who was more aware of the world situation, most of all Vietnam, and the forces of mal-intent that were mobilized and mobilizing against him.”

Almost 50 years later, Nesbitt is convinced the speech was the final straw for people who were determined to kill King, who was ultimately shot to death by James Earl Ray at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

“The racists were saying, ‘That going too far. Now he’s gonna tell us how to run our country. Who does he think he is?’ ” Nesbitt said.

Carson doesn’t think the speech directly caused King’s death. But he thinks it was a factor in a fate that was “already determined.”

“There were a lot people who preferred that (King) be dead," Carson said. "If they wouldn’t bring it about, they certainly weren’t disturbed by it. My feeling is that King would not have survived the ‘60s in any case.”

Vietnam War

May 11, 1961 to April 30, 1975

Four years after President John F.  Kennedy  sent the first American troops into Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Jr., issued his first public statement on the war. Answering press questions after addressing a Howard University audience on 2 March 1965, King asserted that the war in Vietnam was “accomplishing nothing” and called for a negotiated settlement (Schuette, “King Preaches on Non-Violence”).

While King was personally opposed to the war, he was concerned that publicly criticizing U.S. foreign policy would damage his relationship with President Lyndon B.  Johnson , who had been instrumental in passing civil rights legislation and who had declared in April 1965 that he was willing to negotiate a diplomatic end to the war in Vietnam. Though he avoided condemning the war outright, at the August 1965 annual  Southern Christian Leadership Conference  (SCLC) convention King called for a halt to bombing in North Vietnam, urged that the United Nations be empowered to mediate the conflict, and told the crowd that “what is required is a small first step that may establish a new spirit of mutual confidence … a step capable of breaking the cycle of mistrust, violence and war” (King, 12 August 1965). He supported Johnson’s calls for diplomatic negotiations and economic development as the beginnings of such a step. Later that year King framed the issue of war in Vietnam as a moral issue: “As a minister of the gospel,” he said, “I consider war an evil. I must cry out when I see war escalated at any point” (“Opposes Vietnam War”).

King’s opposition to the war provoked criticism from members of Congress, the press, and from his civil rights colleagues who argued that expanding his civil rights message to include foreign affairs would harm the black freedom struggle in America. Fearful of being labeled a Communist, which would diminish the impact of his civil rights work, King tempered his criticism of U.S. policy in Vietnam through late 1965 and 1966. His wife, Coretta Scott  King , took a more active role in opposing the war, speaking at a rally at the Washington Monument on 27 November 1965 with Benjamin  Spock , the renowned pediatrician and anti-war activist, and joined in other demonstrations.

In December 1966, testifying before a congressional subcommittee on budget priorities, King argued for a “rebalancing” of fiscal priorities away from America’s “obsession” with Vietnam and toward greater support for anti-poverty programs at home (Semple, “Dr. King Scores Poverty”). King led his first anti-war march in Chicago on 25 March 1967, and reinforced the connection between war abroad and injustice at home: “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home—they destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America” (“Dr. King Leads Chicago”). A few days later, King made it clear that his peace work was not undertaken as the leader of the SCLC, but “as an individual, as a clergyman, as one who is greatly concerned about peace” (“Dr. King to Weigh Civil Disobedience”).

Less than two weeks after leading his first Vietnam demonstration, on 4 April 1967, King made his best known and most comprehensive statement against the war. Seeking to reduce the potential backlash by framing his speech within the context of religious objection to war, King addressed a crowd of 3,000 people at Riverside Church in New York City. King delivered a speech entitled “ Beyond Vietnam ,” pointing out that the war effort was “taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem” (King, “ Beyond Vietnam ,” 143).

Although the peace community lauded King’s willingness to take a public stand against the war in Vietnam, many within the civil rights movement further distanced themselves from his stance. The  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , for example, issued a statement against merging the civil rights and peace movements. Undeterred, King, Spock, and Harry  Belafonte  led 10,000 demonstrators on an anti-war march to the United Nations on 15 April 1967.

During the last year of his life, King worked with Spock to develop “Vietnam Summer,” a volunteer project to increase grassroots peace activism in time for the 1968 elections. King linked his anti-war and civil rights work in speeches throughout the country, where he described the three problems he saw plaguing the nation: racism, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. In his last Sunday sermon, delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968, King said that he was “convinced that [Vietnam] is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world” (King, “Remaining Awake,” 219). Nearly five years after King’s  assassination , American troops withdrew from Vietnam and a peace treaty declared South and North Vietnam independent of each other.

Branch,  At Canaan’s Edge , 2006.

“Dr. King Leads Chicago Peace Rally,”  New York Times , 26 March 1967.

“Dr. King to Weigh Civil Disobedience If War Intensifies,”  New York Times , 2 April 1967.

“Dr. Martin Luther King: Beyond Vietnam and Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” 90th Cong., 2d sess.,  Congressional Record  114 (9 April 1968): 9391–9397.

Garrow,  Bearing the Cross , 1986.

King, “ Beyond Vietnam ,” in  A Call to Conscience , ed. Carson and Shepard, 2001.

King, Excerpts, Address at mass rally on 12 August 1965, 13 August 1965,  MLKJP-GAMK .

King, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” in  A Knock at Midnight , ed. Carson and Holloran, 1998.

(Scott) King,  My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. , 1969.

“Opposes Vietnam War,”  New York Times , 11 November 1965.

Paul A. Schuette, “King Preaches on Non-Violence at Police-Guarded Howard Hall,”  Washington Post , 3 March 1965.

Robert B. Semple, Jr., “Dr. King Scores Poverty Budget,”  New York Times , 16 December 1966.

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Beyond Vietnam”

Film clip. Voices of a People’s History. Dramatic reading of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam” (1967) speech by Michael Ealy.

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Civil rights and anti-war activist, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech was delivered at the Riverside Church in New York exactly one year before his assassination. Some civil rights leaders urged King not to speak out on the Vietnam War, but he said he could not separate issues of economic injustice, racism, war, and militarism. (The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had issued a statement against the Vietnam War the year before after the murder of Sammy Younge Jr.)

Dr. King’s speech was performed by Michael Ealy , February 1, 2007, at All Saints Church, Pasadena, California. Ealy reads from Voices of a People’s History of the United States edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove.

Here is an excerpt:

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death….

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.

With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain …”

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter-but beautiful-struggle for a new world.  — Dr. Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967

More video clips can be found at the  Voices of a People’s History website and in the film  The People Speak .

Related Resources

A Revolution of Values

Teaching Activity. By Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 3 pages. Text of speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the Vietnam War, followed by three teaching ideas.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Radical Vision

Teaching Activity. By Craig Gordon, Urban Dreams, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project. 2003, updated in 2017. Lesson to introduce students to the speeches and work of Dr. King beyond “I have a dream.”

Jan. 3, 1966: Sammy Younge Jr. Murdered

Samuel Younge Jr., Navy vet, Tuskegee student, activist was killed in Alabama for using a “whites-only” bathroom. SNCC issued a powerful statement about his murder and in opposition to the Vietnam War.

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Martin Luther King Jr. on the Vietnam War

“The greatest irony and tragedy of all is that our nation, which initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world, is now cast in the mold of being an arch anti-revolutionary.”

Image above: American soldiers in Long Binh, Vietnam, observe King’s birthday on January 15, 1971, 15 years before it was first observed as a federal holiday.

King’s opposition to the Vietnam War gained national attention on February 25, 1967, when he appeared alongside four anti-war U.S. senators at a daylong symposium in Beverly Hills, California. In a powerful address, King described how the casualties of the increasingly unpopular war had spread beyond its physical horrors to wreck the Great Society and threaten American principles and values. His outspokenness about an issue not ordinarily seen as a question of civil rights brought a storm of criticism.

I need not pause to say how happy I am to have the privilege of being a participant in this significant symposium. In these days of emotional tension when the problems of the world are gigantic in extent and chaotic in detail, there is no greater need than for sober-thinking, healthy debate, creative dissent and enlightened discussion. This is why this symposium is so important.

I would like to speak to you candidly and forthrightly this afternoon about our present involvement in Viet Nam. I have chosen as a subject, “The Casualties of the War in Viet Nam.” We are all aware of the nightmarish physical casualties. We see them in our living rooms in all of their tragic dimensions on television screens, and we read about them on our subway and bus rides in daily newspaper accounts. We see the rice fields of a small Asian country being trampled at will and burned at whim: we see grief-stricken mothers with crying babies clutched in their arms as they watch their little huts burst forth into flames; we see the fields and valleys of battle being painted with humankind’s blood; we see the broken bodies left prostrate in countless fields; we see young men being sent home half-men—physically handicapped and mentally deranged. Most tragic of all is the casualty list among children. Some one million Vietnamese children have been casualties of this brutal war. A war in which children are incinerated by napalm, in which American soldiers die in mounting numbers while other American soldiers, according to press accounts, in unrestrained hatred shoot the wounded enemy as they lie on the ground, is a war that mutilates the conscience. These casualties are enough to cause all men to rise up with righteous indignation and oppose the very nature of this war.

But the physical casualties of the war in Viet Nam are not alone the catastrophes. The casualties of principles and values are equally disastrous and injurious. Indeed, they are ultimately more harmful because they are self-perpetuating. If the casualties of principle are not healed, the physical casualties will continue to mount.

One of the first casualties of the war in Viet Nam was the charter of the United Nations …

Our government blatantly violated its obligation under the charter of the United Nations to submit to the Security Council its charge of aggression against North Viet Nam. Instead we unilaterally launched an all-out war on Asian soil. In the process we have undermined the purpose of the United Nations and caused its effectiveness to atrophy. We have also placed our nation in the position of being morally and politically isolated. Even the long standing allies of our nation have adamantly refused to join our government in this ugly war. As Americans and lovers of Democracy we should carefully ponder the consequences of our nation’s declining moral status in the world.

The second casualty of the war in Viet Nam is the principle of self-determination. By entering a war that is little more than a domestic civil war, America has ended up supporting a new form of colonialism covered up by certain niceties of complexity. Whether we realize it or not our participation in the war in Viet Nam is an ominous expression of our lack of sympathy for the oppressed, our paranoid anti-Communism, our failure to feel the ache and anguish of the have nots. It reveals our willingness to continue participating in neo-colonialist adventures …

Today we are fighting an all-out war—undeclared by Congress. We have well over 300,000 American servicemen fighting in that benighted and unhappy country. American planes are bombing the territory of another country, and we are committing atrocities equal to any perpetrated by the Vietcong. This is the third largest war in American history.

All of this reveals that we are in an untenable position morally and politically. We are left standing before the world glutted by our barbarity. We are engaged in a war that seeks to turn the clock of history back and perpetuate white colonialism. The greatest irony and tragedy of all is that our nation, which initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world, is now cast in the mold of being an arch anti-revolutionary.

A third casualty of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society. This confused war has played havoc with our domestic destinies.

Despite feeble protestations to the contrary, the promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefield of Viet Nam. The pursuit of this widened war has narrowed domestic welfare programs, making the poor, white and Negro, bear the heaviest burdens both at the front and at home.

While the anti-poverty program is cautiously initiated, zealously supervised and evaluated for immediate results, billions are liberally expended for this ill-considered war. The recently revealed mis-estimate of the war budget amounts to ten billions of dollars for a single year. This error alone is more than five times the amount committed to anti-poverty programs. The security we profess to seek in foreign adventures we will lose in our decaying cities. The bombs in Viet Nam explode at home: they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America.

If we reversed investments and gave the armed forces the anti-poverty budget, the generals could be forgiven if they walked off the battlefield in disgust.

Poverty, urban problems and social progress generally are ignored when the guns of war become a national obsession. When it is not our security that is at stake, but questionable and vague commitments to reactionary regimes, values disintegrate into foolish and adolescent slogans.

It is estimated that we spend $322,000 for each enemy we kill, while we spend in the so-called war on poverty in America only about $53.00 for each person classified as “poor.” And much of that 53 dollars goes for salaries of people who are not poor. We have escalated the war in Viet Nam and de-escalated the skirmish against poverty. It challenges the imagination to contemplate what lives we could transform if we were to cease killing.

At this moment in history it is irrefutable that our world prestige is pathetically frail. Our war policy excites pronounced contempt and aversion virtually everywhere. Even when some national governments, for reasons of economic and diplomatic interest, do not condemn us, their people in surprising measure have made clear they do not share the official policy.

We are isolated in our false values in a world demanding social and economic justice. We must undergo a vigorous re-ordering of our national priorities.

A fourth casualty of the war in Viet Nam is the humility of our nation. Through rugged determination, scientific and technological progress and dazzling achievements, America has become the richest and most powerful nation in the world. We have built machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable range of interstellar space. We have built gargantuan bridges to span the seas and gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Through our airplanes and spaceships we have dwarfed distance and placed time in chains, and through our submarines we have penetrated oceanic depths. This year our national gross product will reach the astounding figure of 780 billion dollars. All of this is a staggering picture of our great power.

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But honesty impels me to admit that our power has often made us arrogant. We feel that our money can do anything. We arrogantly feel that we have everything to teach other nations and nothing to learn from them. We often arrogantly feel that we have some divine, messianic mission to police the whole world. We are arrogant in not allowing young nations to go through the same growing pains, turbulence and revolution that characterized our history. We are arrogant in our contention that we have some sacred mission to protect people from totalitarian rule, while we make little use of our power to end the evils of South Africa and Rhodesia, and while we are in fact supporting dictatorships with guns and money under the guise of fighting Communism. We are arrogant in professing to be concerned about the freedom of foreign nations while not setting our own house in order. Many of our Senators and Congressmen vote joyously to appropriate billions of dollars for war in Viet Nam, and these same Senators and Congressmen vote loudly against a Fair Housing Bill to make it possible for a Negro veteran of Viet Nam to purchase a decent home. We arm Negro soldiers to kill on foreign battlefields, but offer little protection for their relatives from beatings and killings in our own south …

All of this reveals that our nation has not yet used its vast resources of power to end the long night of poverty, racism and man’s inhumanity to man. Enlarged power means enlarged peril if there is not concomitant growth of the soul. Genuine power is the right use of strength. If our nation’s strength is not used responsibly and with restraint, it will be, following Acton’s dictum, power that tends to corrupt and absolute power that corrupts absolutely. Our arrogance can be our doom. It can bring the curtains down on our national drama. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. We are challenged in these turbulent days to use our power to speed up the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked places shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”

A fifth casualty of the war in Viet Nam is the principle of dissent. An ugly repressive sentiment to silence peace-seekers depicts … persons who call for a cessation of bombings in the north as quasi-traitors, fools or venal enemies of our soldiers and institutions. Free speech and the privilege of dissent and discussion are rights being shot down by bombers in Viet Nam. When those who stand for peace are so vilified it is time to consider where we are going and whether free speech has not become one of the major casualties of the war …

Nothing can be more destructive of our fundamental democratic traditions than the vicious effort to silence dissenters.

A sixth casualty of the war in Viet Nam is the prospects of mankind’s survival. This war has created the climate for greater armament and further expansion of destructive nuclear power.

One of the most persistent ambiguities that we face is that everybody talks about peace as a goal. However, it does not take sharpest-eyed sophistication to discern that while everybody talks about peace, peace has become practically nobody’s business among the power-wielders. Many men cry peace! peace! but they refuse to do the things that make for peace.

The large power blocs of the world talk passionately of pursuing peace while burgeoning defense budgets that already bulge, enlarging already awesome armies, and devising even more devastating weapons …

The stages of history are replete with the chants and choruses of the conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace. Alexander, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon were akin in their seeking a peaceful world order, a world fashioned after their selfish conceptions of an ideal existence. Each sought a world at peace which would personify their egotistic dreams. Even within the life-span of most of us, another megalomaniac strode across the world stage. He sent his blitzkrieg-bent legions blazing across Europe, bringing havoc and Holocaust in his wake. There is grave irony in the fact that Hitler could come forth, following the nakedly aggressive expansionist theories he revealed in Mein Kampf , and do it all in the name of peace.

So when I see in this day the leaders of nations similarly talking peace while preparing for war, I take frightful pause. When I see our country today intervening in what is basically a civil war, destroying hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese children with napalm, leaving broken bodies in countless fields … when I see the recalcitrant unwillingness of our government to create the atmosphere for a negotiated settlement of this awful conflict by halting bombings in the north and agreeing to talk with the Vietcong—and all this in the name of pursuing the goal of peace—I tremble for our world. I do so not only from dire recall of the nightmares wreaked in the wars of yesterday, but also from dreadful realization of today’s possible nuclear destructiveness, and tomorrow’s even more damnable prospects.

In light of all this, I say that we must narrow the gaping chasm between our proclamations of peace and our lowly deeds which precipitate and perpetuate war. We are called upon to look up from the quagmire of military programs and defense commitments and read history’s signposts and today’s trends.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows. One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. How much longer must we play at deadly war games before we heed the plaintive pleas of the unnumbered dead and maimed of past wars? Why can’t we at long last grow up, and take off our blindfolds, chart new courses, put our hands to the rudder and set sail for the distant destination, the port city of peace?

President John F. Kennedy said on one occasion, “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” Wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminates even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war. In a day when vehicles hurtle through outer space and guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory in war. A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil, and spiritual disillusionment. A world war—God forbid!—will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to ultimate death. So if modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war, he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno such as even the mind of Dante could not imagine.

I do not wish to minimize the complexity of the problems that need to be faced in achieving disarmament and peace. But I think it is a fact that we shall not have the will, the courage and the insight to deal with such matters unless in this field we are prepared to undergo a mental and spiritual re-evaluation …

Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Viet Nam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. There can be no great disappointment where there is no great love …

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We cannot remain silent as our nation engages in one of history’s most cruel and senseless wars. America must continue to have, during these days of human travail, a company of creative dissenters. We need them because the thunder of their fearless voices will be the only sound stronger than the blasts of bombs and the clamor of war hysteria.

Those of us who love peace must organize as effectively as the war hawks. As they spread the propaganda of war we must spread the propaganda of peace. We must combine the fervor of the civil rights movement with the peace movement. We must demonstrate, teach and preach, until the very foundations of our nation are shaken. We must work unceasingly to lift this nation we love to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humane-ness …

All the world knows that America is a great military power. We need not be diligent in seeking to prove it. We must now show the world our moral power.

There is an element of urgency in our re-directing American power. We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now .

This excerpt appears in the special MLK issue print edition with its original title, “ The Casualties of the War in Vietnam .” © 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, © renewed 1995 Coretta Scott King. All works by Martin Luther King Jr. have been reprinted by arrangement with the Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., care of Writers House as agent for the proprietor, New York, New York.

• world affairs

The MLK Speech We Need Today Is Not the One We Remember Most

M ost Americans remember Martin Luther King Jr. for his dream of what this country could be, a nation where his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” While those words from 1963 are necessary, his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” from 1967, is actually the more insightful one.

It is also a much more dangerous and disturbing speech, which is why far fewer Americans have heard of it. And yet it is the speech that we needed to hear then–and need to hear today.

In 1963, many in the U.S. had only just begun to be aware of events in Vietnam. By 1967, the war was near its peak, with about 500,000 American soldiers in Vietnam. The U.S. would drop more explosives on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia than it did on all of Europe during World War II, and the news brought vivid images depicting the carnage inflicted on Southeast Asian civilians, hundreds of thousands of whom would die. It was in this context that King called the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Many of King’s civil rights allies discouraged him from going public with his antiwar views, believing that he should prioritize the somewhat less controversial domestic concerns of African Americans and the poor. But for King, standing against racial and economic inequality also demanded a recognition that those problems were inseparable from the military-industrial complex and capitalism itself. King saw “the war as an enemy of the poor,” as young black men were sent to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

What King understood was that the war was destroying not only the character of the U.S. but also the character of its soldiers. Ironically, it also managed to create a kind of American racial equality in Vietnam, as black and white soldiers stood “in brutal solidarity” against the Vietnamese. But if they were fighting what King saw as an unjust war, then they, too, were perpetrators of injustice, even if they were victims of it at home. For American civilians, the uncomfortable reality was that the immorality of an unjust war corrupted the entire country. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned,” King said, “part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.”

In his speech, which he delivered exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated, King foresaw how the war implied something larger about the nation. It was, he said, “but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality … we will find ourselves organizing ‘clergy and laymen concerned’ committees for the next generation … unless there is a significant and profound change in American life.”

King’s prophecy connects the war in Vietnam with our forever wars today, spread across multiple countries and continents, waged without end from global military bases numbering around 800. Some of the strategy for our forever war comes directly from lessons that the American military learned in Vietnam: drone strikes instead of mass bombing; volunteer soldiers instead of draftees; censorship of gruesome images from the battlefronts; and encouraging the reverence of soldiers.

You can draw a line from the mantras of “thank you for your service” and “support our troops” to American civilian regret about not having supported American troops during the war in Vietnam. This sentimental hero worship actually serves civilians as much as the military. If our soldiers can be absolved of any unjust taint, then the public who support them is absolved too. Standing in solidarity with our multicultural, diverse military prevents us from seeing what they might be doing to other people overseas and insulates us from the most dangerous part about King’s speech: a sense of moral outrage that was not limited by the borders of nation, class or race but sought to transcend them.

What made King truly radical was his desire to act on this empathy for people not like himself, neither black nor American. For him, there was “no meaningful solution” to the war without taking into account Vietnamese people, who were “the voiceless ones.” Recognizing their suffering from far away, King connected it with the intimate suffering of African Americans at home. The African-American struggle to liberate black people found a corollary in the struggle of Vietnamese people against foreign domination. It was therefore a bitter irony that African Americans might be used to suppress the freedom of others, to participate in, as King put it, “the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.”

Americans prefer to see our wars as exercises in protecting and expanding freedom and democracy. To suggest that we might be fighting for capitalism is too disturbing for many Americans. But King said “that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we … must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin … the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” Those words, and their threat to the powerful, still apply today. For the powerful, the only thing more frightening than one revolution is when multiple revolutions find common cause.

The revolution that King called for is still unrealized, while the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism” are still working in brutal, efficient solidarity. He overlooked how misogyny was also an evil, but perhaps, if he had lived, he would have learned from his own philosophy about connecting what seems unconnected, about recognizing those who are unrecognized. Too many of today’s politicians, pundits and activists are satisfied with relying on one-dimensional solutions, arguing that class-based solutions alone can solve economic inequality, or that identity-based approaches are enough to alleviate racial inequality.

King argued for an ever expanding moral solidarity that would include those we think of as the enemy: “Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view … For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”

This was the dream of King’s that I prefer–the vision of a difficult and ever expanding kinship, extending not only to those whom we consider near and dear, but also to the far and the feared.

Nguyen is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer . His latest collection is The Refugees

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Gaza War Protests Don’t Yet Rival Anti–Vietnam War Movement

F or many a baby-boomer, the sights and sounds of student protests against U.S. complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza brought back vivid memories of the anti–Vietnam War movement of their youth and of the conservative backlash that ultimately placed its legacy in question. Some of today’s protestors consciously promote an identification with their forebears of the 1960s and 1970s. And some events — notably the huge deployments of NYPD officers at Columbia University 56 years to the day after police crushed an anti–Vietnam War protest at the school — are eerily evocative of that bygone era.

As someone who was involved in a minor way in the earlier protests (mostly as a member of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), I’m both fascinated by the comparisons and alert to the very big differences between the vast and nearly decadelong demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the nascent movement we’re seeing today. Here’s how they compare from several key perspectives.

Size: Gaza protests are smaller than anti-Vietnam demonstrations.

While early protests against Israeli military operations in Gaza were often centered in Arab American and Muslim American communities, the latest wave is principally college-campus-based, albeit widespread, as the Washington Post reported :

The arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University on April 18 set off the latest wave of student activism across the country. The outbreak of nearly 400 demonstrations is the most widespread since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. From the Ivy League to small colleges, students have set up encampments and organized rallies and marches, with many  demanding that their schools divest from Israeli corporations .

The size of these protests has ranged from the hundreds into the thousands, but they can’t really be regarded as a mass phenomenon at this point.

There are, however, similarities to the earliest phase of the anti–Vietnam War movement: the campus-based “teach-ins” of 1965 (the year U.S. ground troops were first deployed in Vietnam). These began at the University of Michigan and then went viral, as a history compiled by students of the university recalled:

The March 1965 teach-in at the University of Michigan inspired a wave of more than fifty similar teach-ins at universities around the nation and directly challenged the Johnson administration’s ability to shape public opinion about the War in Vietnam. At Columbia University, just two days after the UM event, professors held an all-night teach-in attended by 2,000 students … At UC-Berkeley, after an overflow crowd attended the initial UM-inspired teach-in, the Vietnam Day Committee organized a second outdoor event that drew 30,000 students. 

The anti–Vietnam War movement soon outgrew its campus origins as the war intensified and U.S. deployments soared. By 1967, monster rallies and marches were held in major cities — notably a New York march that attracted an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 protesters and a San Francisco rally that filled Kezar Stadium . At the New York event, the expansion of the antiwar movement to encompass elements of the civil-rights movement that had in part inspired the early protesters was exemplified by the participation of Martin Luther King Jr. , who had just made his first overtly antiwar speech at Riverside Church .

By then the antiwar movement was beginning to attract support from a significant number of politicians, mostly Democrats but some Republicans, who soon exceeded the tiny group in Congress who opposed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 that committed the U.S. to the war.

The pro-Palestinian protest movement could eventually grow to this scale and breadth of support, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Durability: Gaza protests are new; anti–Vietnam War movement lasted a decade.

The fight to end American involvement in Vietnam lasted as long as the war itself; protests began in 1964, grew to include a mainstream congressional effort to cut off U.S. military aid , and continued as the South Vietnam regime collapsed in 1975. It had multiple moments of revived participation. Once such moment was Moratorium Day in October 1969 , when an estimated 2 million Americans joined antiwar demonstrations once it became clear that Richard Nixon had no intention of ending the war begun by Lyndon Johnson. Another was the massive wave of protests in May 1970 when Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia; student walkouts and strikes occurred on around 900 college campuses and students were killed in Ohio and Mississippi .

It’s unclear whether the pro-Palestinian protests have anything like that kind of staying power. That’s a significant issue, since the goal shared by many protesters — a fundamental shift in the power relations between Israelis and Palestinians — could be harder to execute than an end to the Vietnam War.

Focus: Gaza protests have less clear-cut goals than Vietnam demonstrations.

Most pro-Palestinians protesters have embraced multiple demands and goals: an immediate permanent cease-fire in Gaza; termination of U.S. military assistance to Israel; and an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Campus-based protesters have also called for termination of university investments in companies operating in Israel and, in some cases, closure of academic partnerships with Israeli institutions.

If this is going to become a sustained movement rather than a scattershot series of loosely connected local protests, some clarification of tangible goals will be necessary. Some of these aims are more achievable than others. If, for example, the Biden administration and the Saudis succeed in negotiating a significant cease-fire that temporarily ends the carnage in Gaza, does that take the wind of out of the sails of protesters seeking a definitive withdrawal of support for Israel? That’s unclear at this point.

For the most part, the anti–Vietnam War protest movement had one principal goal: the removal of U.S. military forces from Vietnam. Yes, factions of that movement expanded their goals to include such war-adjacent issues as university divestment from firms manufacturing weapons, closure of ROTC programs, draft resistance, and non-war-related issues like Black empowerment and anti-poverty efforts. But there was never much doubt that bringing the troops home was paramount.

Leadership: Gaza protests include more radical organizers.

One of the reasons for a perception of unfocused goals in the current wave of protests stems from organizers with more radical positions and rhetoric than some of their followers. As my colleague Jonathan Chait has pointed out , two major groups helping organize pro-Palestinian protests subscribe to ideologies incompatible with mainstream support:

The main national umbrella group for campus pro-Palestinian protests is Students for Justice in Palestine. SJP takes a violent eliminationist stance toward Israel. In the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks, it issued a celebratory  statement  instructing its affiliates that all Jewish Israelis are legitimate targets … A second group that has helped organize the demonstrations at Columbia is called Within Our Lifetime. Like SJP,  WOL  takes an uncompromising eliminationist stance toward Israel, even calling for “the abolition of zionism.”

This was intermittently a problem in the anti–Vietnam War movement, particularly as such campus-based pioneers of protests as Students for a Democratic Society drifted into Marxist sectarianism. I vividly recall an antiwar march I attended in Atlanta in 1969 wherein the organizers (mostly from the Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance) put Vietcong flags at either end of the march and controlled bullhorns bellowing slogans like “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh / The NLF is gonna win,” referring to the communist insurgency in South Vietnam. This effectively turned a peace rally into something very different.

But over time, the extremist wing of the anti–Vietnam War movement went its own way, falling prey to fragmentation (the collapse of SDS into at least three factions that included the ultraviolent and Maoist Weatherman group epitomized its self-marginalization) and irrelevance. If the pro-Palestinian protest movement is to last, it needs to shed its more extreme elements.

Relevance: Gaza protests aren’t impacting U.S. politics as deeply.

There was never any doubt that anti–Vietnam War protesters were talking about something that vitally affected Americans, even if it took them a while to get on board. 2.7 million American citizens served in the Vietnam War with 58,000 losing their lives. 1.9 million young Americans were conscripted into the military during that war. While what Americans did to the people of Indochina wasn’t often called “genocide,” millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians perished at the hands of the U.S. and its allies, and the humanitarian disaster did increasingly trouble the consciences of many people not directly affected by the conflict. As many military leaders and reactionary politicians bitterly argued for decades , U.S. public opinion eventually ended the Vietnam War.

While the rise in sympathy for Palestinians and support for some sort of cease-fire has been palpable as deaths soar in Gaza, it remains unclear how invested Americans are in any sort of policy change toward the conflict. Yes, unhappiness with Joe Biden ’s leadership in this area is a real political problem for him, but much of the unhappiness stems from conservatives (particularly conservative Evangelicals) who want stronger support for Israel. And the effort to make this issue an existential threat to Biden’s renomination during the 2024 Democratic primaries failed in contrast to the major role played by anti–Vietnam War sentiment in sidelining LBJ in 1968 .

Making Gaza a crucial issue in American politics grows more challenging to the extent protesters choose more radical goals, like a single secular (i.e., non-Zionist) Palestinian state. And at the same time, more modest goals could undermine the strength and unity of the protest movement if protesters reject half-measures (much as anti–Vietnam War protesters rejected “Vietnamization,” phony peace talks, and other steps that prolonged the war).

Legacy: Gaza protests could provoke a similar backlash.

Arguably, the many sacrifices and eventual triumph of anti–Vietnam War protesters were more than offset by a conservative backlash that treated the “disorder” and alleged lack of patriotism associated with protests as a social malady to be remedied with heavy-handed repression. In the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon and George Wallace, the two candidates who engaged in law-and-order rhetoric and often espoused more violent steps to win the war, won 57 percent of the national popular vote. Other successful conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan made crackdowns on “coddled” student protesters a signature issue.

Today, Donald Trump and other Republicans are eagerly making pro-Palestinian protests part of a law-and-order message aimed at both student protesters and the “elite” faculty and administrators who are allegedly encouraging them. If protesters deliberately or inadvertently help Trump get back into the White House, they may soon encounter a U.S. administration that makes “Genocide Joe” Biden’s look like an oasis of pacific benevolence.

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s up-close view of JFK and LBJ

In “An Unfinished Love Story,” the best-selling historian writes about her marriage to Richard Goodwin and the couple’s prolonged debate about the legacies of the presidents they served.

We live in dangerous times. But nothing we’re feeling can rival the convulsions of the years between 1961 and 1969.

For a brief moment when everything seemed possible but only some of it was, Americans of all colors fought and bled and died to redeem the promise of emancipation that remained massively unfulfilled 100 years after the official end of the Civil War. No one was more important to those battles, or to America’s imagination, than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Each of them inspired the greatest possible hope, and then the worst imaginable despair.

The Kennedys and King were assassinated. The end of Johnson’s public life was closer to suicide. Using what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin calls “a formidable combination of will, conviction, and energy” to produce “an unnerving force field of persuasive power,” famously known as “the treatment,” Johnson relentlessly hammered members of Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, immigration reform, Medicare, Medicaid and the first federally funded aid program for higher education. Then he laid waste to the rest of his presidency by deepening America’s efforts in the Vietnam War.

There are hundreds of books about the politics of this period, including several by writers blessed with (and tilted by) special access to their subjects: Theodore H. White’s “The Making of the President 1960,” Theodore Sorensen’s and Arthur Schlesinger’s accounts of Kennedy’s New Frontier, and, especially, Lady Bird Johnson’s tremendous “White House Diary.”

But despite so many predecessors, Goodwin’s new book, “ An Unfinished Love Story ,” manages to be different than anything that has come before. Goodwin and her husband, Richard, were both extremely close to the Kennedys and Johnson, and each of them held on to their fierce and competing loyalties to the presidents through four decades of marriage.

Richard Goodwin was the Zelig of Democratic politics in the 1950s and ’60s. After serving as president of the Harvard Law Review and clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, he led the congressional investigation that revealed Charles Van Doren had won $129,000 on the quiz show “Twenty-One” by being fed all of the answers by the show’s producers. The next year, 1960, Goodwin became deputy speechwriter for John Kennedy’s presidential campaign (and his constant companion on the plane), and later a White House aide and speechwriter, deputy assistant secretary of state, and director of the International Peace Corps.

Goodwin, who died in 2018 at 86 , had 300 boxes full of documents from his life with the Kennedys and Johnson. The boxes had remained untouched until 2011, when Goodwin turned 80 and told his wife that it was time for them to mine the archives together . This book is the product of that mining.

In 1968, Goodwin became even closer to Bobby Kennedy than he had been to Jack, when he joined the younger Kennedy’s campaign for president. He was with the senator in the Ambassador Hotel when he was murdered.

But after Jack and before Bobby, Goodwin returned to the White House to write many of Johnson’s greatest speeches, including his vision for a new “Great Society” and the “We Shall Overcome” address, delivered eight days after Alabama police brutally beat 67 marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

A taped conversation between Johnson and his aide Bill Moyers captures the moment when the new president decided to ask Goodwin back to write for him. Moyers told Johnson that Goodwin was the only one who could provide the “rhythm” Johnson wanted for his first major speech about the War on Poverty. The speech, delivered at the University of Michigan’s commencement in 1964, was filled with peak ’60s idealism. It presented the Great Society as “a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”

After the triumph of the speech, Johnson showed its writer more warmth than Goodwin had ever felt from Kennedy. “You’re going to be my voice, my alter ego,” Johnson told him.

Barely a month later, Goodwin was treated to Johnson’s much less pleasant side. The president became enraged when a Time magazine reporter learned that Goodwin had coined the phrase Great Society. “As far as I know, he had nothing to do with the Ann Arbor speech,” Johnson told the baffled journalist.

In the fall, Johnson was reelected in a landslide, carrying 44 states, and Democrats won supermajorities in the House and Senate. But just 10 months later, Johnson’s growing escalation of the war in Vietnam led Goodwin to leave the White House. By 1967, he was writing pseudonymous pieces attacking the president in the New Yorker.

It was also in 1967 that a 24-year-old Doris Kearns applied to be a fellow in Johnson’s White House. Though she did not yet know her future husband (they wouldn’t meet until 1972), she shared his opposition to the war in Vietnam. In May of that year, she learned she had been picked for the fellowship and attended a celebration at the White House where Johnson danced with the three women among the 16 new fellows. “He whirled me with surprising grace around the floor,” Goodwin writes.

The following week, her name was one of two bylines on a piece for the New Republic titled “How to Remove LBJ in 1968,” which argued that a new third party could prevent Johnson’s reelection. She was certain her fellowship would be rescinded. But the president was apparently as impressed with her dance moves as she was with his. After demanding to see her FBI file, Johnson stunned his aides by telling them she could keep her new job. “Bring her down here for a year, and if I can’t win her over, no one can,” he said.

This was the beginning of a friendship that continued after Johnson left the White House, when Kearns agreed to visit him regularly at his Texas ranch to help him write his memoir. There they were in such close proximity — she used to “sit in a chair in his walk-in closet” during his afternoon nap, in case he needed anything — that a “suggestive” magazine piece eventually appeared questioning her frequent visits to Texas. Johnson told her “not to give such chattering nonsense a second thought.” And Lady Bird either believed her to be innocent or was supernaturally forgiving. “You give comfort to my husband,” Lady Bird told her, “and that is all that matters.”

Kearns gives us hundreds of interesting vignettes about the time she and her husband spent with these historic characters. But the spine of the book is the eternal debate about who deserved more credit for the landmark legislative accomplishments of the ’60s — JFK or LBJ.

Doris argued that nearly all of Kennedy’s domestic promises were realized only by Johnson, while Dick would counter by starting to conjecture about how Vietnam would have turned out had Kennedy lived. But he would stop himself and say, “Who knows?” Goodwin writes that “tremors from this division” continued throughout their marriage.

The truth is that Johnson masterfully catalyzed the country’s grief after Kennedy’s assassination to accomplish more than any other president since Franklin Roosevelt. In his first speech to Congress, five days after Kennedy was killed, Johnson declared that “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.”

In the end, the Goodwins decided that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was possible only because of Kennedy’s inspiration and Johnson’s execution. But Doris correctly identifies “the most profound force” behind the bill as the grass-roots movement itself: “By touching the conscience of the country, the Civil Rights Movement transformed public sentiment and drove Congress to act.” That’s the noblest ’60s legacy of all.

Charles Kaiser is the author of “ 1968 in America ,” “ The Gay Metropolis ” and “ The Cost of Courage .”

An Unfinished Love Story

A Personal History of the 1960s

By Doris Kearns Goodwin

467 pp. Simon & Schuster. $35

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Democratic convention organizers work to balance free speech with safety amid tensions over protests

CHICAGO — The U.S. Secret Service has led security planning for nearly a year. Chicago police have spent hundreds of hours training officers to responsibly handle protesters. Public officials are vowing to strike a balance between keeping order and allowing free speech.

Yet tensions remain high over the prospect of a Democratic National Convention in Chicago this August.

The rash of protests at college campuses across the nation over the Israel-Hamas war, including violent clashes at UCLA and most notably a building takeover by protesters at Columbia University in New York City, has added a new urgency over security and whether protests could spiral out of control this summer. The focus comes as the city expects more than 5,000 delegates to descend on the DNC, with tens of thousands of additional visitors, including from the highest levels of government, from the president on down.

Groups vary in their expectations for how many activists will travel to the city, with the ACLU putting it in the thousands and one pro-Palestianian group putting it at the tens of thousands.

Those involved with security and logistics planning — including the Secret Service, the Chicago Police Department and those directly involved with the convention arena itself — insist there will be a balance between allowing freedom of speech and keeping order. They also say they’re ready for what’s to come, and while they’re paying close attention to the kinds of protests that have broken out on college campuses, they are not scrambling security plans because of them.

“Individuals can expect to see a very heavy presence of uniformed officers to ensure the highest level of safety for residents, business owners and attendees,” said U.S. Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he felt confident about the city and state’s ability to hold a peaceful convention.

“There are always protests at conventions. I have been to almost every convention since I was able to vote. I have seen protests at every single one of them on a variety of issues,” Pritzker said in an interview. “I don’t think any better or worse this coming summer. I do think, though, that even though there will be protests, the security plan for Chicago, and the experience that people who are coming here for the convention will have, will be an outstanding one just like it was in 1996.”

Meantime, a slew of activist groups are challenging security plans in court, saying the location where they are now allowed to march — more than 3 miles away from the convention facility — violates their First Amendment rights, and they should be within “sight and sound” of the United Center.

“This is politics at play. I think there’s a lot of pressure from the DNC not to put President Biden in a position to be within sight and sound of protesters,” said Christopher Williams, an attorney representing a coalition of groups whose protest permits have so far been denied and are asking the city to move protests closer to the United Center. “You see that in the way that his campaign is handling events now, that they don’t want to see any protests in the backdrop of President Biden.”

Guglielmi, who himself spent years working with the Chicago Police Department, noted that federal authorities have offered more than 400 hours of training to Chicago officers on a combination of handling civil disturbances and protecting free-expression rights.

National political conventions are designated as National Special Security Events, which require the highest levels of security and allow officials to extend their reach, if necessary, into other federal agencies. Dozens of other agencies are already involved in security planning: the Cook County Sheriff’s Police, the Illinois National Guard and the Illinois Emergency Management Agency are a few examples.

“This is not just on the city of Chicago’s shoulders,” Guglielmi said. “You’ve got immense help from every federal agency that you can think of that we would want to engage.”

“I’m uniquely positioned here just because I was the chief spokesman [for the Chicago Police Department],” he added. “They are incredible partners. I know they’re very prepared, and they already even have plans should there be a dispersal during a demonstration.”

That includes training officers to protect the media’s role and “safeguard the freedom of the press during these things,” he said.

Activists and free speech advocates, though, have a decidedly different view. Deep concerns still exist over exactly what the security perimeter — the fenced-off area where only those with credentials can enter — will ultimately look like and whether protesters will be allowed to get close enough to the event. And they’ve vowed that if they are not given a permit, they will march anyway.

“We clearly do not have a plan in Chicago for accommodating free expression during the course of the DNC,” Ed Yohnka, director of public policy and communications at ACLU Illinois, said in an interview. “It raises a number of troubling factors in terms of how ultimately people will respond.”

Faayani Aboma Mijana, whose Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression is among the 70 organizations that are part of the Coalition to March on the DNC, said they are expecting tens of thousands of protesters in the city. Even if there is a cease-fire by August, the protests will not stop until there is a free state of Palestine, he said, and the United States stops funding Israel. But they said they have every intention for their activism to be peaceful.

“My fear is around whether or not the police officers and federal agents don’t infringe on our right to assemble and protest,” they said. “We’re aiming to have a family-friendly protest that families can come to.”

The Secret Service said the exact perimeter has not yet been set. It is still being worked out and a door-to-door canvass of residents in and around the United Center is underway to make sure security checkpoints are the least disruptive possible.

Williams, the attorney representing the coalition, acknowledged that city officials reached out to him after he filed a motion for an injunction this week, asking to discuss alternative routes for marches.

Williams said he also has some trust in Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a longtime progressive organizer who broke a tie vote in the Chicago City Council to pass a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza: “I’m inclined to give this mayor the benefit of the doubt.”

Johnson has repeatedly said he would work to strike a balance between the rights of protesters and not allowing events to devolve into chaos.

A Democratic National Convention official close to logistics planning told NBC News in an interview that they felt “absolutely” assured about the safety and security of the convention and delegations.

“I feel comfortable and I’m confident that we’re going to have a great convention,” the person said.

The logistics planner described intricate, long-term planning over how to safely move delegates from hotels and events to the convention center.

One Democratic strategist familiar with the planning described concerns tied to recent protests as “overblown.”

“Staff is making necessary plans and going through every scenario to make sure they’re prepared. There is no question there are a lot of protests at the president’s events, so they are concerned and want to make sure they’ve got mitigation tactics in place,” the person said. “The concern over the protests is not driving the daily process.”

That person did say there has been talk of convening a team to “remove protests at the private events the president is doing,” and noted that this is an existing protocol.

Reasons for a deeper distrust between activists and authorities are as complicated as Chicago itself, including decades of fraught relations between police and the community, layered over by present-day crime challenges in a city that’s still struggling to shed the stain left by a violent Vietnam War-era Democratic National Convention in 1968.

But one doesn’t have to look back that far for comparisons. During the George Floyd protests , the city struggled with its response to ward off crowds and took the controversial move of raising the bridges in Chicago’s Loop to keep people away.

Less often noted, however, is Chicago’s peaceful convention of 1996, where the most memorable moments were not around police pelting protesters but cringey “Macarena” dancing . A 2012 NATO summit saw large-scale demonstrations and days of protests. While there were some clashes with law enforcement, police largely showed restraint .

While the specter of the 1968 convention still hovers over Chicago, planners call it alarmist thinking.

One historian who was present at the 1968 convention in Chicago called it a “lazy” comparison. Sean Wilentz, a historian and professor at Princeton University, said — while not minimizing today’s conflict — the political climate in the Vietnam War era was incomparable. Thousands of Americans were drafted to fight in the war and were dying. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated that year, as well as Bobby Kennedy.

“The divisions inside the Democratic Party were so profound, much more profound than they are today. … It’s in a wholly different political historical context,” Wilentz said. “I mean, Dan Rather was getting the death kicked out of them by some detective. There were journalists being assaulted on the floor, OK?”

But there’s also a deep-seated distrust between the community and the Chicago police that the department has been trying to shed for decades. Beyond the 1968 convention, where police officers openly clubbed protesters, former police commander Jon Burge strained race relations for a generation after he and his so called “midnight crew” routinely tortured Black suspects into confessing to crimes. It wasn’t until 2008 that Burge was charged in federal court. In 2014, the killing of LaQuan McDonald was another inflection point. A white police officer fired 16 shots at McDonald, who was holding a knife.

Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling this week noted that the college protests in Chicago have so far been peaceful.

“If people are just trying to have their voices heard, hey, this is America, it’s their choice. And it’s our responsibility to protect them while they do it,” he said at a recent forum.

Snelling addressed preparations for the DNC this summer, saying that Chicago police officers are getting multiple hours of training on the First and Fourth amendments. “It’s embedded in every aspect of their training,” he said. “Crime is something we’re not going to tolerate. Because the minute we start tolerating that everything else breaks down and then it’s no longer peaceful protesting, it turns into a riot.”

Activists, however, remain skeptical.

“We don’t see the superintendent as a friend of ours,” said Aboma Mijana, who also does work involving police crimes. “He’s opposed to what we do.”

Natasha Korecki is a senior national political reporter for NBC News.

Kristen Welker is the moderator of "Meet the Press."

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