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 President Obama has authorized U.S. airstrikes for the first time in Syria and their expansion in Iraq against the militant group Islamic State. In a prime-time address, Obama vowed to hunt down Islamic State militants "wherever they are." Obama also announced he is sending 475 more U.S. military troops to Iraq, bringing the total to 1,600. He also called for congressional support to arm and train the Syrian opposition. We get analysis of Obama’s speech and this latest U.S. military foray into the Middle East with two guests: Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia who has worked on issues involving Iraq since the 1980s and a former adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government; and Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College and author of several books. Prashad’s latest article is "What President Obama Should Not Do About ISIS."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In a prime-time televised address last night, President Barack Obama announced he had authorized U.S. airstrikes for the first time in Syria and their expansion in Iraq against the Islamic State, which has seized broad stretches of Iraq and Syria. He vowed to hunt down militants from the Islamic State, quote, "wherever they are." Obama also announced he is sending 475 more U.S. military troops to Iraq, bringing the total to 1,600. He also called for congressional support to arm and train the Syrian opposition. Obama’s speech came on the eve of the 13th anniversary of the September 11th attacks.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: So tonight, with a new Iraqi government in place and following consultations with allies abroad and Congress at home, I can announce that America will lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat. Our objective is clear: We will degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL through comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.
First, we will conduct a systematic campaign of airstrikes against these terrorists. Working with the Iraqi government, we will expand our efforts beyond protecting our own people and humanitarian missions, so that we’re hitting ISIL targets as Iraqi forces go on offense. Moreover, I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.
Second, we will increase our support to forces fighting these terrorists on the ground. In June, I deployed several hundred American servicemembers to Iraq to assess how we can best support Iraqi security forces. Now that those teams have completed their work, and Iraq has formed a government, we will send an additional 475 servicemembers to Iraq. As I’ve said before, these American forces will not have a combat mission. We will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq. But they are needed to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence and equipment. We’ll also support Iraq’s efforts to stand up National Guard units to help Sunni communities secure their own freedom from ISIL’s control.
Across the border in Syria, we have ramped up our military assistance to the Syrian opposition. Tonight I call on Congress again to give us additional authorities and resources to train and equip these fighters. In the fight against ISIL, we cannot rely on an Assad regime that terrorizes its own people, a regime that will never regain the legitimacy it has lost. Instead, we must strengthen the opposition as the best counterweight to extremists like ISIL, while pursuing the political solution necessary to solve Syria’s crisis once and for all.
Third, we will continue to draw on our substantial counterterrorism capabilities to prevent ISIL attacks. Working with our partners, we will redouble our efforts to cut off its funding, improve our intelligence, strengthen our defenses, counter its warped ideology, and stem the flow of foreign fighters into and out of the Middle East. And in two weeks, I will chair a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to further mobilize the international community around this effort.
Fourth, we will continue to provide humanitarian assistance to innocent civilians who have been displaced by this terrorist organization. This includes Sunni and Shia Muslims who are at grave risk, as well as tens of thousands of Christians and other religious minorities. We cannot allow these communities to be driven from their ancient homelands.
So this is our strategy. And in each of these four parts of our strategy, America will be joined by a broad coalition of partners.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about President Obama’s speech, we’re joined by two guests. Peter Galbraith is former U.S. ambassador to Croatia. He’s worked on issues involving Iraq since the 1980s and is a former adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government. He testified before a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, currently a senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. His books include The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. He joins us from Washington, D.C.
In Chicopee, Massachusetts, we’re joined by Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College, author of several books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter and, most recently, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Vijay Prashad is also a columnist for Frontline, where he’s been writing extensively about the Islamic State, his latest piece headlined "What President Obama Should Not Do About ISIS."
Ambassador Galbraith, let’s begin with you. Your response to President Obama’s speech last night?
PETER GALBRAITH: He outlined a strategy, and I think the strategy has a good prospect of accomplishing the goal of degrading ISIS. But I don’t think it’s capable of destroying ISIS. So let’s look at the parts of it. Airstrikes are effective when there are forces on the ground. And that really is the dilemma. Inside Iraq and Syria, there are three main forces that you could be supporting. There’s the Kurdistan Peshmerga, which suffered setbacks in August, but the units remained intact. With air support, they’ve been able to retake territory. But they are not going to go significantly beyond Kurdistan, and they’ve more or less retaken that territory. In the rest of Iraq, there’s the Iraqi army, which has largely disappeared since the beginning of the year. We spent billions building it up, and the end result was that the weapons we provided ended up in ISIS’s hands. I don’t see how you reconstitute that. The president’s talking about supporting local forces, and that, in theory, could be effective in the Sunni areas, but it’s going to be hard to get them set up, given that ISIS is there, and also that they would have to work with a government that Sunnis absolutely don’t trust. They don’t see a big difference between al-Abadi and his predecessor, Maliki. So, and in Syria, the problem with supporting the Syrian opposition is that we don’t really have a good feel for who all these people are, and they really have no prospect of defeating Assad, and we don’t really know if we can rely on them to fight ISIS, with the exception of, again, in the Kurdish north, the YPG, the Syrian Kurdish military. They have been fighting ISIS for well more than a year and at least have been holding their own.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Vijay Prashad, I wanted to ask you your reaction to the president’s speech and his new policy, and also this whole idea of asking Congress to finance the retraining once again, a creation of a new Iraqi army, after the last one that the United States spent billions on training has basically disintegrated.
VIJAY PRASHAD: Well, I found the speech interesting, because the details on Iraq were definitely much more significant than the details on Syria. It was very light on Syria, for a good reason. At least in Iraq, as Ambassador Galbraith said, there is the possibility of providing close air support to the Kurdish Peshmerga from Iraqi Kurdistan. There’s a possibility of providing close air support through whatever remains of the Iraqi army. After all, they did take back the town of Amerli. But in Syria, there is no real easy group to which the United States can give close air support.
You know, the YPG—that is to say, the Kurdish force in the northeast of Syria—is backed by the Kurdish Workers’ Party from Turkey. The United States sees them as a terrorist organization. So I doubt very much that they will overtly have any coordination with the YPG and the PKK. They’ve already said they will not coordinate with the Syrian government. That’s the second force that could be mobilized to attack the ISIS fighters, particularly as ISIS is moving beyond Raqqa toward the homeland of the Kurdish government. The third major force is the other Islamist opposition. And it’s important to point out here that just a few days ago there was an enormous bomb attack on one of the most, you know, fierce fighting units among the other Islamists, and that was Ahrar al-Sham’s, which lost basically its entire leadership. The Free Syrian Army is basically a shell of what it had been. It’s more in name only.
So the idea that the United States is now going to outsource the training of a moderate Syrian opposition fighting force to Saudi Arabia has created, I think, a lot of worry in the region, a lot of concern, because Saudi Arabia’s own cutout in the Syrian war has been Jaysh al-Islam, which is not known for its moderation in any way. So the United States, if it wants to provide close air support to take on the Islamic State inside Syria, has no effective partner. So, in that sense, Mr. Obama’s speech yesterday was very confusing and was much more rhetoric than actual strategy.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, then come back to this debate. We’re joined by Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College, also by Ambassador Peter Galbraith. Stay with us.
[break]
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We continue to look at President Obama’s speech last night authorizing airstrikes in Syria and expanding attacks in Iraq against the Islamic State.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil. This counterterrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist, using our air power and our support for partners’ forces on the ground. This strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines, is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years. And it is consistent with the approach I outlined earlier this year: to use force against anyone who threatens America’s core interests, but to mobilize partners wherever possible to address broader challenges to international order.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the speech, again, we’re joined by two guests, Ambassador Peter Galbraith, former adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government, and Trinity College professor Vijay Prashad. Vijay Prashad, do you think the U.S. should be bombing at all?
VIJAY PRASHAD: Well, you know, there’s a big difference between bombing from the sky to, you know, destroy the advance of something like the Islamic State, and to give close air support. And I think that this is the confusion, is what exactly is the United States prepared to do? Is it prepared to wipe out the city of Raqqa? Or does it want to give close air support to people on the ground who are fighting directly and engaging with the group, the Islamic State? In Syria, as far as I can see in, unless there is a serious political discussion between all the parties, there is no way that you can reconstitute a significant enough fighting force that will be able to take on the Islamic State. It seems that the United States wants to have it both ways: on the one side, take on the Islamic State, and on the other side, continue with promoting chaos inside Syria. You cannot promote chaos and take on the Islamic State. You have to pick one particular strategy, and Mr. Obama actually has chosen both. Bombing is not a panacea, unless there’s a real strategy of how you’re going to defeat the Islamic State on the ground.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ambassador Galbraith, what about this issue of the president saying that he believes he has the authorization to be able to carry out these actions and says he would welcome a vote by Congress but doesn’t feel he needs it? I’d like to ask you about that specifically in relationship to Syria itself.
PETER GALBRAITH: I spent 14 years working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, from '79 to ’93, and repeatedly the issue of the War Powers Act came up. It was enacted to prevent another Vietnam, but the kind of conflicts that we've had since then have been much smaller scale. The Congress is not serious about having a role in making decisions about these kinds of interventions. And presidents, when they really want to do it, are not interested in getting congressional support. So I think this is really an academic debate that is not of much interest to the American people, not to the foreign policy community. Frankly, it’s a sideshow.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you agree with that, Professor Prashad?
VIJAY PRASHAD: Well, you know, I don’t have the kind of experience in Washington, D.C., but I do think that a lot of what happens in American foreign policy making, or has happened in the last few years, is much more for domestic consumption than it is actually about the problems around the world. If you just take the examples that Mr. Obama said yesterday of successes, you know, he mentioned Yemen and Somalia. Well, that’s news to the people of Somalia and Yemen that the American strategy has been a success. Indeed, Yemen, principally because it’s out of the American news, appears to be a quiet place, but it’s definitely not a quiet place for the people of Yemen. In fact, the problems in Yemen have since compounded. And even in Somalia, where the leader of al-Shabab was assassinated recently, there was a bomb blast. And, you know, I don’t know, they counted about 20 people dead. So it’s not clear that—when foreign policy decision making is made in the public domain in the United States, it’s not clear that that’s directly in the interests of people overseas or whether it’s for domestic consumption. And it seems to me this is much more for domestic consumption than it is for the actual pragmatic problems for people in that region.
AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador Prashad [sic], the issue of Saudi Arabia, I believe—rather, Ambassador Galbraith, Saudi Arabia, I think Secretary of State Kerry is there today. Saudi Arabia as a funder of the Islamic State and the U.S. role as an ally with Saudi Arabia, do you think it is putting the proper pressure it should, whether we’re talking about Saudi Arabia, whether we’re talking about Qatar, whether we’re talking about Jordan?
PETER GALBRAITH: Well, the first point is that these countries don’t see the situation as we do. As far as they’re concerned, the top threat is Iran, and then probably the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Islamic State would be in third place. So, to the extent that the Islamic State is useful in fighting the Iranian-backed regime in Iraq and in Syria, they are much more ambivalent. And that raises a question about a strategy of having the Saudis involved in training the so-called moderate Islamic opposition. And there’s always a question about whether the Saudis are moderate in this matter.
But the other problem in Syria, which I think people don’t focus on, is some 35 percent of the Syrian population is not Sunni Arab. That is to say, they are Alawites, Christian, Druze, other religious minorities and Kurds. And the striking thing about this opposition is that it doesn’t include significant support from any of those communities. The Alawites fear, with very good reason, that if the opposition were to prevail, even the moderates, that they would face genocide. So even if they don’t like Assad, he’s an Alawite, and at least he’s there and capable of preventing genocide.
Now, the one thing that I think was—one of the things that I think was good in the president’s speech, which hasn’t been remarked on, is he made a distinction between trying to eliminate ISIS and having a political settlement in Syria. And I think there’s no prospect that the Syrian war can be resolved militarily. I think it’s going to be very difficult to do it politically. But at least there’s a recognition in his speech that as far as the Assad regime goes, we’re not looking at a military defeat, we’re looking at a political settlement. And I think that’s right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Vijay Prashad, what would you see as the solution to the continuing crisis in Iraq and Syria? And how does the United States counter this view in the Arab and Muslim world that it’s going from one country to another seeking to impose its solutions on the local domestic conflicts?
VIJAY PRASHAD: Well, Juan, I’ll put it in two different ways. I was actually struck by President Obama’s use of words like "Shia" and "Sunni," very loosely used, and I don’t think this is helpful. I think the most important direction is to create a rapprochement, for the United States to work towards creating a de-escalation and rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Unless the United States is able to bring these two countries or at least help bring these two countries to the table, there is going to be continued chaos in the region. And in fact, there has been an opportunity to bring them together, and that was the ill-starred Syria contact group which was formed by Egypt in 2012, which had the most important countries in the region sit around the table, and that was Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and Egypt. I think something like that needs to be reconstituted. I utterly agree with Ambassador Galbraith that from the standpoint of Riyadh, they still see Iran as the principal threat. And if this continues to happen, well, God help the Middle East, because the most important thing is to de-escalate the tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia. It is what is principally going to be an impediment to any—let’s not say "peace," but any de-escalation of the immense violence that has inflicted Syria and Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Professor Prashad, the same question to you about the role of Saudi Arabia in all of this?
VIJAY PRASHAD: Well, I mean, it’s a curious business. Again, like Ambassador Galbraith, I agree. It’s a serious question whether Saudi Arabia has moderate goals in the region. I mean, the fact is that their cutout in Syria, which is Jaysh al-Islam, was not at all considered a moderate group. I mean, people have worried about the people that Saudi officially has been financing. Forget the private financing from Saudi, Qatari and Kuwaiti sheikhs; the official organization itself is not moderate. So how does that give people confidence that the new force that will be constituted, you know, after the Islamic Front, the Southern Front, and this will be the third attempt—how are we confident that this is going to be moderate? I think, you know, this is really hoping against hope for some kind of development which there is no evidence to indicate can happen—in other words, the making of a moderate military force through the good auspices of Saudi Arabia.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ambassador Galbraith, I’d like to ask you about Iraq specifically. You’ve argued in some of your writings that the national project of Iraq is essentially a failed project and that, especially in terms of the Kurds, greater independence would probably be a better route. How do you see what is going to be happening in Iraq, even assuming the United States is able to prevail against the Islamic State with the support of the local Iraqi and Syrian militias or fighters?
PETER GALBRAITH: Well, Iraq had broke apart a long time ago. Kurdistan in the north is, in all regards, an independent state with its own parliament, army. We’re now supplying it directly. We speak of it, you know, as if it were also an independent state. And there’s no way that it’s going to go back to be just a region of Iraq. The president of Kurdistan said he’s going to have a referendum on independence. I think that’s probably been put off for a while. But the operative thing is "put off for a while."
And with regard to Sunnis and Shiites, the problem is that the Sunnis ran Iraq for its first 90 years and their policy was to keep the Kurds in and the Shiites down. Since 2003, the Shiites, who are the majority, have been in charge. It has been a—the last three prime ministers have come Dawa, a Shiite religious party. They seek to define Iraq as a Shiite state with close ties with Iran. That’s unacceptable to the Sunnis. And there’s no way that Sunnis are going to turn against ISIS and work with a government that they see doesn’t really include them, and indeed is hostile to them.
And the president made a lot in his speech of this national unity government. That was the basis for the strategy. But there isn’t one. The Kurds, of the 30 Cabinet ministries, they got three. They haven’t actually even named their people. By their strength in Parliament, they should have had twice as many. They didn’t want to join the government. They did so—and they’ve said this very clearly—only because of very intense U.S. pressure, and because of the deadline of President Obama’s speech. The Sunnis, the members of the government, if any of them live in the Sunni areas of Iraq, they can’t go home. So they aren’t really representing the people who are there. And also, none of those tensions have been solved. Abadi is really—although he speaks better, maybe isn’t as dour and paranoid as his predecessor, he comes from exactly the same party, exactly the same approach, that of a centralized state that is not going to be accommodating to either the Kurds or the Sunnis. So, this national government is not real, and that’s a fundamental problem with the strategy.
AMY GOODMAN: Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday the rapid rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria can be attributed to the failure of President Obama to assert American influence in the region.
DICK CHENEY: ISIS does not recognize a border between Syria and Iraq, so neither should we. We should immediately hit them in their sanctuaries, staging areas, command centers and lines of communication, wherever we find them. We should provide significantly increased numbers of military trainers, special operations forces and intelligence architecture and air power to aid the Iraqi military and the Kurdish Peshmerga in their counteroffensive against ISIS. We work to defeat ISIS and prevent the establishment of a terrorist safe haven in the heart of the Middle East. We must move globally to get back on offense in the war on terror.
AMY GOODMAN: Aside from criticizing the Obama administration, is what President Obama is doing that different from what Dick Cheney wants, Vijay Prashad?
VIJAY PRASHAD: Well, not really, except, of course, firstly, it’s a hubris matter to take Dick Cheney seriously, who after all was one of the architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which, you know, basically broke the state up completely and provided the opportunity for Iraqi society, which had never really had any kind of al-Qaeda group, to incubate al-Qaeda. So, it’s an odd thing for him to now give advice. But on the other hand, what he’s saying is similar to what Mr. Obama is saying. He’s being more specific. I don’t know what intelligence he is reading, but it’s amazing to hear somebody talk about the Islamic State having command and control centers, supply routes. I don’t think he knows what he’s talking about. This is not a group that’s functioning in the way that he imagines. This is a very different kind of insurgency, much more fragmented. And I’m not sure that it’s going to be so easy to find targets from up on high without people on the ground.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Ambassador Galbraith, the subtitle of your book is War Without End. Are we now looking at a war without end?
PETER GALBRAITH: Yes. I think President Obama’s strategy may be able to degrade the Islamic State, but there isn’t the prospect of putting together a unified Iraqi government that is going to win over the Sunnis and make them partners in an effort to eradicate ISIS in the Sunni areas of the country. So, this is likely to continue for many years. And in Syria, you know, I thought Syria, in its demography, has a lot of similarities to Lebanon. And that civil war went on for 15 years, and it ended when Syria intervened. But there isn’t a Syria to intervene in Syria, so this war also could go on for decades. It’s a real tragedy for the peoples of that part of the world, and it’s going to be a challenge for U.S. and world foreign policy. We’ve had a lot of talk about pivoting from Europe to Asia, but inevitably we’re going to be focused on this part of the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Peter Galbraith, I want to thank you for being with us, former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, worked on issues involving Iraq since the '80s, former adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government, now with the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, among his books, Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America's Enemies and The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. And thank you to Professor Vijay Prashad of Trinity College, author of a number of books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter and, most recently, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, what would Dr. King do? Stay with us.
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What would Dr. Martin Luther King do? As debate continues over U.S. plans to launch airstrikes in Syria, we look at the final year of King’s life when he became a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy and the Vietnam War, calling his government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." We speak to public TV and radio broadcaster Tavis Smiley, author of the new book, "Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What would Dr. Martin Luther King do? As debate continues over the expansion of another U.S. military operation in the Middle East, we turn to look at the final year of King’s life, when he became a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy in the Vietnam War, calling the United States, quote, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dr. Martin Luther King speaking on April 4th, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York, explaining why he opposed the war in Vietnam. The speech was delivered exactly a year to the day before King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4th, 1968.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by public television and radio broadcaster Tavis Smiley. He has a new book out this week, Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year. You can read its introduction and first chapter at democracynow.org.
Tavis, welcome back to Democracy Now! What a week to come out with this book.
TAVIS SMILEY: Amy and Juan, good to be back, first of all. Thanks for the invitation.
It is interesting, not just a week, but today, as we sit here for this conversation on the 13th anniversary of 9/11. I have been thinking for the last 48 hours, knowing that this day would come, what King would be saying on this particular day. And his heart would certainly bleed for those persons who lost—those fellow citizens who lost their lives in this great city 13 years ago, no doubt about that, because he abhorred violence anywhere in the world. He said many times that it’s either nonviolent co-existence or violent co-annihilation. And so, he was against violence anywhere, which is why he came out against the war in Vietnam, because he was sitting at breakfast one day, eating, and he was looking at a magazine and saw the pictures of these children in Vietnam who had been napalmed to death, and he just stopped eating. And one of his aides says, "Doc, what’s wrong? Does the food not taste good?" He says, "This food doesn’t taste good, nor will anything else I ever eat, if I don’t commit myself to do something about the violence that’s being perpetrated on these young children in Vietnam." So he was against violence here, he was against violence there.
And I’ve often wondered what that bust of Martin King in the Oval Office must be whispering to President Obama late at night as he’s making these kinds of plans. Everybody quotes Martin. It’s almost become pablum and platitude to quote him every time we have a public gathering. But to really wrestle with the subversiveness of his truth about that triple threat that he talked about, Amy—racism, poverty and militarism? What did we see on display in Ferguson a few weeks ago? Racism, poverty and militarism. And now here we are again, on—what is the irony that on 9/11 the headline in every major paper in this country is that here we go again? And King would just be—he’d have some issues with that.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we’ve often talked on this show about that last year of his life, when he really became not so much a hero for the establishment of the country at the time. But you go behind the scenes talking about what it was for him—
TAVIS SMILEY: Yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —how he reached the decision first. You start the book right on—just before his speech at Riverside Church, and then you go through that year.
TAVIS SMILEY: Yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about your decision to do that, after all these other books that have come out about Dr. King in the past?
TAVIS SMILEY: Sure. Glad you raised that, Juan. It’s always the first question: Why another book about Dr. King? Because this one has not been written before, to your point that it focuses just on that last year, April 4, '67, when he gives that speech, to April 4, ’68, a year to the day later, and what happens to Martin in that last year, what kind of person is he really, when all this hell and hate is being directed at him. So let me just say very quickly that this book is impossible without the heavy lifting that's already been done by his three principal biographers, Taylor Branch, David Garrow and Clayborne Carson. I thank them all the time, because they’ve done the real work here. But no book has ever focused just on this last year, because, for me, I think it’s the case that whether you’re talking to Amy or Juan or Tavis or anybody else, any human being, we come to know who we really are in the most difficult and dark days of our lives. And for King, that happened to be the last year of his life.
So if you think you know Dr. King and you don’t know what happened to him in the last year, then you really don’t know Martin, because, to your question, Juan, what happens is, when he comes out against that war and starts talking, Amy, about a Poor People’s Campaign—as long as Martin was talking about civil rights, he was OK. "But, Negro, we didn’t give you license to talk about foreign policy. We didn’t give you license to talk about federal budget priorities." And Martin was saying that war is the enemy of the poor, and that the bombs that you’re dropping in Vietnam are landing in the ghettos and barrios of American cities. And for saying that, for being so vocal about that, what happens, Juan? The White House turns on him. He’s worked with Lyndon Johnson to get the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act passed. But now Johnson is after him. So the White House turns on him, number one. The media turns on him. When you read—you all know this stuff; I feel like I’m telling you stuff you already know—but when you read what The New York—almost 50 years after his death, you read what The New York—the liberal New York Times said about him, what the liberal Washington Post said about him, what Time magazine said about him, it’s embarrassing to read what they said about Martin when he came out against the war in Vietnam all these years later. So the media turns on him. First the White House, then the media. And I might add, the black media turned on Martin King. And then white America turned on him.
The last poll in his life, the Harris Poll, found that nearly three-quarters of the American people, 75 percent, thought that Martin was irrelevant. Get this. Martin King dies with approval ratings or disapproval ratings about the same as George Bush when he left the White House. That’s how bad his numbers were, believe it or not. So, white America turns on him. And hold onto your hat, almost 60 percent of black folk in the country thought he was persona non grata. And so, in his own lifetime, that last year, he really didn’t have a constituency. He couldn’t get his own organization, SCLC, to support him the way he wanted on the Poor People’s Campaign. So, everybody turns on him, and he has to navigate that until he died.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet he stuck to his guns.
TAVIS SMILEY: Oh, absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: Or I don’t actually want to use that analogy there, sticking to his guns, but he was adamant.
TAVIS SMILEY: Yeah, yeah. He stood in his truth.
AMY GOODMAN: Right.
TAVIS SMILEY: Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to a clip from "Beyond Vietnam."
REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" And they ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. That question has hit home. And 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 today, my own government.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Dr. King a year to the day before he was gunned down in Memphis. This was at Riverside Church, April 4th, 1967. So, his organization in this last year is in financial trouble. People are turning against him. And what were his conversations?
TAVIS SMILEY: He was despondent. We don’t shy away from this in the text. He was despondent. He was depressed. There were times he was admitted to the hospital for what they said was exhaustion. And it was exhaustion, but there was a certain mania that he was enduring, as well, because, again, you’ve got everybody against you, and on top of that, you’re getting death threats every day. And on top of that, he could feel, and told the folk around him he could feel, the death angel hovering around him. He knew there was a bullet out there with his name on it. And so, how do you get up every day and try to tell your truth, when everything, everybody—when it appears even that the cosmos has sort of shifted against you, but you have to speak the truth and stay with the truth and stand in the truth? That’s a very difficult thing to do for most of us, but King, to Amy’s point earlier, never wavered. And the most beautiful part of this book is to see somebody who, when everything is coming at him, still tells the truth. And we don’t have leaders these days who love us enough always to tell us the truth.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, you mention in the book that he was inspired by another legendary figure who was at the nadir of his life and career at the time, Muhammad Ali, and how Ali had just been banned from boxing and basically lost all of his income because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam. But yet, King admired his courage.
TAVIS SMILEY: He indeed admired his courage and told him so; admired his courage, admired the courage of Eartha Kitt, who fell out of favor with the American people when she went to the Johnson White House and challenged Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson face to face in a gathering at the White House, a ladies’ tea, as it were. But she just, you know, wrecked the whole room when she spoke out against the war in Vietnam, and again, just got—just that really blackballed her, in many ways, in the entertainment industry. And King sent her a personal telegram and then called her to tell her how courageous he thought she was. So, whether it’s Eartha Kitt or Muhammad Ali, he wanted to be in solidarity with those who saw that the Vietnam War was wrong.
What’s great, I think, about the book, if I can say that, is the way we chose to write this. Again, those biographers have written the history. Nobody has focused just on the last year. But the narrative was a bit different. This is what I would call a historical novel. It is historic: Everything in it is accurate. There are tons of end notes at the back of the text to tell you where the research comes from. But it’s written as a novel, historical novel, so that every chapter is a page-turner, because, for the first time ever, we put you with King in his seat. And he’s never Dr. King. He’s Doc, because to his family—I mean, to his friends and his co-workers and colleagues, he was Doc. So, from page one to the last page of the book, he’s not Dr. King to you. He’s Doc. You’re in the seat with him. And everything he goes through and feels and endures in that year, you get to feel that with him, because the story is told from his perspective.
AMY GOODMAN: Tavis, you mentioned Ferguson, and I want to go to Ferguson for a minute, where certainly Democracy Now! went in these last weeks. Residents of the town packed a City Council meeting on Tuesday night, the first since last month’s police killing of 18-year-old African American Michael Brown. The City Council unveiled reforms that have stemmed from activists’ demands, including a citizen review board, a cap on how much of city revenue can come from fines, and a one-month recall program for warrants. But a number of residents voiced criticism the reforms don’t go far enough, calling for the resignation of top officials and the arrest of the officer who shot Brown, Darren Wilson. Over the course of the night, many who spoke gave their names simply as "Mike Brown," like this young man.
"MIKE BROWN": The police do not represent us. It is time for us to start getting suited and booted, and kick their you know what out of office. We got the power. They don’t. We’re trying to figure out, how do we get this young man, this old man, or whatever, the man, the mayor, that’s up on his iPad, don’t care what we got to say—how do we get him out? We vote him out. We recall him out. It’s time for him to go.
AMY GOODMAN: Last night, a number, scores of Ferguson residents were arrested, once again, protesting in the streets. What would Dr. King do?
TAVIS SMILEY: Protest has its place, there’s no doubt about it. And there’s no way the civil rights movement accomplishes what it does without those kinds of protests. So King would certainly be in support of protest against unjust laws and against practices that take the lives of innocents and precious young people who are unarmed. And so, Dr. King, certainly, was always concerned about this. As you recall, he spoke at the funeral of the four little girls who were killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the only time that we see King actually crying in public in a public address, because that hurt him so much. But he was so concerned about young people.
And one of the tragedies of his life, at the end of his life, is that he thought that he—there was a disconnect between Dr. King and young people, like the brother you saw speaking there, because Stokely Carmichael was coming on, and H. Rap Brown was coming on, and Huey Newton was coming on, and "Black Power" was the slogan. And Dr. King was trying to get them to understand that "We want the same thing. Our tactics may differ, but I love you, and I care about you." So he went to Newark to talk to young people. Everywhere he went, he wanted to talk to young people.
There’s a great story in the book where, speaking of young people, he’s in Cleveland one day. And they’re in the car, and on the corner there are a bunch of young black women, young black girls, but they’re prostitutes. And they see Dr. King in the car, and they start chiding him and calling him Uncle Tom and calling him other names, because while they’re prostitutes, they’re into this Black Power thing, so they start calling Dr. King names. And the car—the light turns green. The car pulls away. And Andy Young and Bernard Lee, who are his aides in the car, are trying to get him to a church, Olivet, where he’s going to be late for this appearance. And Dr. King says, "Turn the car around." And they said, "Doc, we’re going to be late. We’ve got to keep moving." Doc says, "Turn the car around." And Andy knew what he was feeling. Andy said, "Doc, let that go. They’re kids. Don’t—they’re just kids. Don’t worry about that." Doc said, "I told you, turn this car around." And they turn the car around at the next street. Dr. King went back, got out of the car and stood there for 15 to 20 minutes, talking to these young prostitutes. He wanted to understand why these young folks felt that way, and he wanted them to understand why he was fighting so hard on their behalf. And he had to leave to go to the church. He says to them, "Why don’t you meet me back at"—these are prostitutes—"meet me back at my hotel at 3:00, and we can continue this conversation." So he goes to the church, does what he has to do. At 3:00, the front desk attendant calls his room and says, "Dr. King, did you ask"—he just couldn’t believe that these prostitutes were there to see Dr. King. And sure enough—
AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds.
TAVIS SMILEY: —they sat for hours, and Dr. King was able to connect to them.
AMY GOODMAN: Tavis, as we say goodbye to you, we also say happy birthday.
TAVIS SMILEY: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Happy 50th birthday. Are you really doing Dancing with the Stars on Monday?
TAVIS SMILEY: Can you believe it? Yeah, the last foolish thing I’m doing before 50.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s show some of the video as we’re going out. Can we show that video of Tavis Smiley dancing? How you came to do this?
TAVIS SMILEY: Just I decided to do one last really foolish, crazy thing before I turn 50, and here we are, early in rehearsals. I’m actually much better than this now.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ll check you out.
TAVIS SMILEY: But Monday night, you be the judge.
AMY GOODMAN: Tavis Smiley, I want to thank you for being with us. Tavis Smiley, public TV and radio broadcaster, renowned journalist. His latest book, Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year. You can go to our website to read the first chapter.
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Headlines:
•Obama Claims Authority to Expand Strikes to Syria
President Obama has authorized U.S. airstrikes for the first time in Syria and their expansion in Iraq against the militant group Islamic State. In a prime-time address, Obama vowed to hunt down Islamic State militants "wherever they are."
President Obama: "We will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are. That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven. ... I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil. This counterterrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist, using our air power and our support for partners’ forces on the ground."
Obama also announced he is sending 475 more U.S. military troops to Iraq, bringing the total to 1,600.
•Family: Sotloff Was Sold to ISIS by "Moderate" Rebels
President Obama’s plan includes more than $500 million to arm and train Syrian rebels. One group that has cast doubt on aiding the Syrian opposition is the family of Steven Sotloff, the American journalist whose videotaped beheading helped mobilize calls for U.S. airstrikes. Speaking to CNN, a family spokesperson said Sotloff was sold off to ISIL by other Syrian rebels.
Barak Barfi: "For the first time, we can say Steven was sold at the border. Steven’s name was on a list that he had been responsible for the bombing of a hospital. This was false. Activists spread his name around."
Anderson Cooper: "He was sold at the border?"
Barak Barfi: "Yes. We believe that the so-called moderate rebels that people want our administration to support, one of them sold him probably for something between $25,000 and $50,000 to ISIS. And that was the reason that he was captured."
•Saudi Arabia to Host Training of Syrian Opposition
To coincide with President Obama’s speech, the White House announced Saudi Arabia will host a training program for "the moderate Syrian opposition" to combat ISIL. Saudi Arabia is one of the largest sources of funding for ISIL and other jihadist groups.
•Dozens Arrested in Ferguson at Highway Protest
Dozens of people have been arrested in Ferguson, Missouri, in a protest over the police shooting of Michael Brown. A crowd of more than 100 gathered Wednesday to block a state highway in a call for the replacement of St. Louis County Attorney Robert McCulloch in favor of a special prosecutor.
Unidentified: "Our problem ain’t in Afghanistan. It’s right here with these racist police officers. That’s where our problem is. Our problem ain’t in no other country. Our black folk problem is right here in America with these racist white folks."
The demonstrators were blocked from entering the highway by a larger number of police in riot gear, who arrested around 35 people for failure to disperse. A handful of demonstrators threw objects at police. Organizers say they plan to stage more blockades until the officer who killed Brown, Darren Wilson, is indicted.
•U.N.: Ozone Layer Recovering; New Steps Needed to End HFCs
New figures show the ozone layer is restoring after years of depletion. The United Nations says stratospheric ozone is on pace to fully recover by the middle of the century. Achim Steiner of the United Nations Environment Programme credited the banning of certain chemicals from aerosol and refrigerants under the 1987 Montreal Protocol.
Achim Steiner: "The world avoided a major problem by getting rid of ozone-depleting substances by the Montreal Protocol. Indeed, without this protocol and all the actions that we have taken across the globe, we would be seeing a very substantial global ozone depletion today. We’ve seen evidence of a decline in ozone-depleting substances over the past decade. Now we are starting to see increasingly encouraging signs from ozone measurements that the ozone layer is on track to recovery by the middle of this century."
Without the Montreal Protocol, the United Nations says two million extra cases of skin cancer would have occurred each year by 2030. But this rare bit of environmental news has also come at a cost. Many companies have replaced ozone-depleting chemicals with hydrofluorocarbons, HFCs, which worsen global warming.
Achim Steiner: "We are at a critical point. Where HFCs were introduced in order to address the issue of ozone depletion, what we did not anticipate at the time or what was not foreseen is that if the use of HFCs continues to increase at the rate that we now envisage, which is roughly increasing at a rate of 7 percent a year, and you begin to extrapolate that, then by the year 2050 you could have a major negative issue and challenge in terms of global warming."
The United Nations says HFCs can be phased out if new action is taken, on top of broader action to tackle global warming. Michel Jarraud of the World Meteorological Organization said: "International action on the ozone layer is a major environmental success story. This should encourage us to display the same level of urgency and unity to tackle the even greater challenge of climate change."
•Ebola Toll Tops 2,300; 4th Patient Arrives in U.S.
The official death toll from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has topped 2,300 with warnings of a significant jump in the coming days. A Liberian minister is warning the virus is "devouring everything in its path." The coordinator of United Nations Operations in Liberia, Karin Landgren, said the numbers do not capture the actual toll.
Karin Landgren: "I can’t say enough about just how grave this is, just how deep the needs are and just how great the challenge is going to be. The Ebola numbers that we have officially today are over 2,000 suspected, probable or confirmed cases and over 1,200 deaths due to Ebola in Liberia. But as the Wold Health Organization has warned us, these are not the true numbers. They don’t capture the true toll of Ebola. And in the next few days we should expect to be working with significantly higher numbers."
The Pentagon is building a 25-bed field hospital in Liberia, but it will only treat foreign healthcare workers affected by the virus. Meanwhile, a fourth Ebola patient arrived in the United States this week to receive treatment at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.
•Israel Probes 2 High-Profile Gaza Killings
The Israeli military says it has opened criminal probes of two of its most publicized killings of Palestinian civilians during the summer’s assault on Gaza. Investigators will examine the killing of four Palestinian children on a Gaza beach and a later attack that killed 14 people in a U.N. school, one of several hitting U.N. shelters. At least 2,100 Palestinians, more than 75 percent civilian, were killed in the Israeli assault. Critics say Israel is seeking to deflect international scrutiny, including a United Nations Human Rights Council probe and potential cases before the International Criminal Court.
•Israeli Officials Admit Hamas Leadership Had No Part in Kidnappings
The Israeli government has quietly acknowledged Hamas leaders had no role in the abduction of three Israeli teens that led to a massive raid in the West Bank and the ensuing Gaza assault. According to the New York Times, documents released by Israeli police "provide no evidence that the top leaders of Hamas directed or had prior knowledge of the plot to abduct the three Israeli youths." The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports Israeli intelligence has concluded the abduction "was carried out by an independent cell."
•Israeli Officer Charged for Beating of U.S. Teen
An Israeli police officer meanwhile has been charged with the beating of a Palestinian-American teenager that was caught on tape. Tariq Abu Khdeir was watching demonstrations in East Jerusalem when he was seized. The video shows him lying on the ground as the officers repeatedly beat him with batons. He was left with facial bruises and severely swollen eyes and lips. Tariq was a cousin of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the Palestinian teen burned alive in a revenge attack for the killings of the three Israelis in the West Bank.
•Hundreds Attend Funeral for Palestinian Killed in Israeli Raid
In the West Bank, hundreds of people gathered for the funeral of a Palestinian man shot dead by Israeli forces in an overnight raid. Twenty-two-year-old Issa al Qitri is one of more than two dozen Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank in the past two months.
•Bahrain Allies Urged to Pressure Monarchy for Political Prisoners’ Release
Bahrain continues to face calls to release more than a dozen dissidents and human rights activists jailed for criticizing the U.S.-backed monarchy. Human rights activist Maryam Alkhawaja has been jailed for over a week after trying to enter the country. Alkhawaja says customs officials told her she no longer holds citizenship. She had been trying to visit her ailing father, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, who remains on a hunger strike behind bars. Hundreds of people have taken part in rallies inside Bahrain since her detention. In a statement, Human Rights Watch said: "[They] are in jail only because they vigorously called for democratic reforms … Washington and London and others … should make their voices heard loud and clear in Manama." Bahrain is a key U.S. government ally, hosting the Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
•NFL Was Sent Rice Video; Former FBI Chief to Lead Probe
A law enforcement official says the National Football League was sent the video of Ray Rice knocking out his fiancée in a casino elevator. The tape’s release this week led to Rice’s indefinite suspension. Details of the case had been known for months, but the NFL said the new tape forced it to act. Speaking to the Associated Press, an anonymous official said an NFL executive was sent a copy of the tape in April. The source could not confirm if anyone at the NFL watched the tape, but could confirm the league acknowledged its delivery. The office of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has said neither he nor any other official obtained or saw the video before this week. ABC News also reports Rice’s team, the Baltimore Ravens, was made aware Rice’s lawyers had a copy of the video, but did not follow up. In response to the controversy, Goodell has brought in former FBI Director Robert Mueller to conduct an independent investigation on the league’s behalf. According to the website Sidespin, NFL players have been involved in 56 domestic violence cases under Goodell’s tenure. Of those 56, the players have been suspended a combined 13 games.
•Texas Carries Out Execution after Failed Appeal
Texas has executed a convicted double-murderer by lethal injection, the eighth by the state this year. The killing of Willie Trottie came shortly after the Supreme Court rejected his last-minute appeals. Attorneys had argued Texas was using expired drugs to end Trottie’s life and that he had received inadequate counsel at his original trial.
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"The Climate Marches On" by Amy Goodman
“Unjust laws exist.” So wrote Henry David Thoreau in his 1849 essay, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” The naturalist and pacifist asked, “Shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?” His answer was simple: “I say, break the law.”One hundred and sixty-four years later, on May 15, 2013, Ken Ward Jr. and Jay O’Hara did just that. They navigated a small lobster boat, named “The Henry David T.,” to a point off the Massachusetts coast near the enormous Brayton Point Power Station, a coal-fired power plant built in 1963 that is the largest source of carbon emissions in the region. They dropped anchor and blocked access to the pier, preventing a cargo ship from unloading 40,000 tons of coal. They suspended banners from their boat reading “#CoalIsStupid” and “350,” a reference to the international climate action group 350.org. Three hundred fifty parts per million (ppm) is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that scientists feel is the maximum level that will allow the planet to avoid catastrophic human-induced climate change. Ward and O’Hara succeeded in blocking the coal shipment. From the boat, they reported themselves to the local police and were later arrested by the U.S. Coast Guard.
O’Hara, a Quaker and a sailmaker on Cape Cod, explained, “We were charged with ... disturbing the peace, conspiracy to disturb the peace, negligent operation of a motor vessel and a failure to act to avoid a collision of a boat.” They faced years in prison. They decided to mount a “necessity defense,” admitting that they broke the law, but claiming that they did so only to prevent a much greater harm, i.e., the burning of coal that increases global warming. Last Monday, Sept. 8, they finally went to court. Bristol County District Attorney Sam Sutter offered them a deal. He dropped all criminal charges against them in exchange for a guilty plea to a civil offense and a fine. D.A. Sutter then went a step further—a few steps, actually, to the plaza in front of the courthouse, where he shocked the two defendants and close to 100 of their supporters with a short speech:
“The decision [we] reached today ... certainly took into consideration the cost to the taxpayers in Somerset, but was made with our concern for their children, the children of Bristol County and beyond, in mind. Climate change is one of the gravest crises our planet has ever faced. In my humble opinion, the political leadership on this issue has been gravely lacking ... we were able to reach an agreement that symbolizes our commitment at the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office to take a leadership role on this issue.”
Sutter’s incredible demonstration of political leadership is timely, indeed. This week, the World Meteorological Organization released its latest Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, packed with dire statistics about the accelerating threat of climate change. “The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new record high in 2013,” the WMO reported, with current concentration of carbon dioxide at 396 ppm. The WMO also warned, ominously, “The current rate of ocean acidification appears unprecedented at least over the last 300 million years.” Defendant Ken Ward, a former deputy director of Greenpeace USA, noting the urgency he feels for the climate, told me, “We should ... be taking emergency actions everywhere we can. And the very first emergency action is to stop burning coal.”
Henry David Thoreau is best known for his book “Walden,” in which he describes the year he spent living in a cabin he built on Walden Pond, near Concord, Mass. Thoreau opposed the 1847 U.S. invasion of Mexico. He was a staunch opponent of slavery. To protest these violent policies, he decided he would not pay taxes. When he was jailed for his protest, he was visited by his friend, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is said that when Emerson asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there,” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, what are you doing out there?” Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience was one of the first modern articulations of the resistance tactic of nonviolent noncooperation. His words and actions have inspired millions, among them Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
The People’s Climate March will happen in New York City on Sunday, Sept. 21. Organizers expect it to be the largest march for the climate in history. The march’s slogan: “To Change Everything, We Need Everyone.” Sam Sutter says he’ll be there, as will the two activists he prosecuted. I asked the district attorney and the defendants if they would be marching together. They all smiled. Prosecutor Sutter said, “It’s certainly possible.” Jay O’Hara concurred, “Sounds like a plan.”
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
© 2014 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
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“Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year” by Tavis SmileyWatch Tavis Smiley on Democracy Now! Thursday, and read the introduction and first chapter of his new book, Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year. In it, he examines the personal struggles of Martin Luther King Jr. during his final year, when he faced rejection by the press, the president, and much of the country’s black middle class and militants, after he spoke out against the Vietnam War.
Tavis Smiley is a TV, radio broadcaster, philanthropist and New York Times bestselling author. He hosts the TV show "Tavis Smiley" on PBS and two radio shows: "The Tavis Smiley Show" and "Smiley & West," which he hosts with Cornel West. Watch all of his interviews on Democracy Now!
Excerpted from "Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year" by Tavis Smiley. Copyright © 2014 by Tavis Smiley. Used by permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2014 by Tavis Smiley
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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“Tribute to a King” lyrics courtesy of William Bell / Booker T. Jones
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smiley, Tavis
Death of a King : the real story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final year / Tavis Smiley with David Ritz. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-316-33276-7 (hardcover) / 978-0-316-41065-6 (large print)
1. King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929–1968. 2. African American civil rights workers—Biography. 3. African Americans—Civil rights—History—20th century. I. Ritz, David. II. Title.
E185.97.K5S56 2014
323.092—dc23 2014018814 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 rrd-c
Printed in the United States of America
DeathOfKing_HCtextF1.indd iv
INTRODUCTION
I hold this project precious for reasons that are both intensely personal and politically urgent. As a young boy growing up in a trailer park in rural Indiana, my initial encounter with the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. altered the very course of my life. During the most difficult period of my childhood, a time when I
had fallen into deep despair, his spirit entered my soul and excited my imagination. I recognized the rhythms of his rhetorical passion as more than hypnotic: I knew they were righteous. As a result of their disturbing truths, I became a lifelong student of his work as a minister, advocate, and writer. His call to radical democracy through redemptive love resonated with me on a profound level.
I was barely a teenager when I began entering statewide oratorical interpretation competitions by declaiming King’s most famous speeches. The thrill of channeling his voice — not to mention my frequent victories — had me believing that my connection to the man was preternatural. It was certainly life affirming. Through the voice of the prophetic minister I eventually found my own voice. My study of King’s pivotal role in the history of this country has never stopped. Over the years, I have spoken with his most important critics, chroniclers, and defenders.
I was privileged to enjoy a rewarding friendship with Coretta Scott King, whom I interviewed many times. Her last national television interview was an appearance on my public television program filmed in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in 2005, on what would have been her husband’s seventy-sixth birthday. At her behest, I served on the advisory board at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Non-violent Social Change in Atlanta.
Yet for all the years that I have read, discussed, and analyzed King’s work, this is the first time I have sought to capture my feelings about him in a book. That’s because now, after decades of study, I have come to firmly believe that, in a critical way, he is misunderstood. I further believe that misunderstanding is robbing us of the essence of his character and crusade.
Ironically, his martyrdom has undermined his message.
As a public figure who fearlessly challenged the status quo, he has been sanitized and oversimplified. The values for which he lived and
died—justice for all, service to others, and a love that liberates, no matter the cost—are largely forgotten. He is no longer a threat, but merely an idealistic dreamer to be remembered for a handful of fanciful speeches. That may be the Martin Luther King that the
world wishes to remember, but it is not the Martin Luther King that I have come to better understand and love even more.
The King that moves me most is the man who, during the final season of his earthly journey, faced a torrent of vicious assaults from virtually every segment of society, most painfully from his own people.
The symmetry is remarkable:
On April 4, 1967, he comes to the Riverside Church in New York City and delivers a dramatic and controversial speech in impassioned opposition to the Vietnam War. Exactly twelve months later to the day, on April 4, 1968, he is assassinated in Memphis, where he has traveled on behalf of garbage workers. The question I attempt to answer in this book is simple:
In his last year, what kind of man has Martin LutherKing Jr. become?
In my view, he is a man whose true character has been
misinterpreted, ignored, or forgotten. I want to remember—and bring to life—the essential truths about King in his final months before they are unremembered and irrecoverable. This is the King that I cherish: the King who, enduring a living hell, rises to moral greatness; the King who, in the face of unrelenting adversity, expresses the full measure of his character and courage. This is the King who, despite everything, spoke his truth, the man I consider the greatest public figure this country has ever produced.
In constructing this chronicle, I’ve conducted a series of fresh interviews with three distinct groups: scholars, including his major biographers Taylor Branch, David Garrow, and Clayborne Carson; close friends like Harry Belafonte and Gardner C. Taylor; and associates including Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, Dorothy Cotton, and Clarence Jones, among others. The insights gleaned from these firsthand observations have convinced me that the final leg of King’s journey was far rougher than I had imagined.
The pressures he faced were crushing. Yet he never compromised his core commitment to nonviolence. Not for a minute did he diminish his efforts to address the burning issues of racism, poverty, and the inherent immorality of this nation’s unchecked militarism.
Nearly fifty years after King’s death, these issues are more pressing than ever. And if, as we relive these last excruciating months in his life, we are made to understand that his mission remains
unfulfilled—that the causes for which he gave his life continue to demand the immediate attention of our hearts and minds — then the purpose of this text will be fulfilled.
One final note about the tone of this text:
You will see that I attempt to convey King’s inner thoughts during rare moments of self-reflection. Because he was a man in constant motion, these quiet, precious moments were few. My interpretation of these moments — my reading of what was on his mind — derives from my
conversations with associates who were actually with him during those intimate times and privileged to hear him voice his heart.
Introduction
You will also see that I refer to King as “Doc.” This was how his most trusted colleagues addressed him. In adopting this nomenclature, I trust that I am not being presumptuous. I use this term of endearment as a way to bring me — and you — closer to the soul of the man.
Tavis Smiley
Los Angeles, California
Chapter On “VOCATION OF AGONY”
On Tuesday, April 4, 1967, Doc sits in his suite at the Americana Hotel in midtown Manhattan, realizing that everything about his public life is about to change. The moment of truth—Doc’struth — has arrived. An hour from now, when he stands in the pulpit of the Riverside Church, he will face a congregation of four thousand people prepared to hang on his every word.
His mind is made up. He knows what he has to do. But his conviction, no matter how deep, cannot drown out the dissenting voices that clamor inside his head. These voices are more than mere phantoms. They reflect the views of the majority of his supporters. These voices, though now silent assaults, were once spoken aloud with feverish certainty.
Stay in your lane.
You’re a preacher, not a politician.
Don’t overstep your bounds.
Don’t overplay your hand.
You helped push through two of the most important pieces of legislation in our history — for civil and voting rights. Only a fool would now oppose the president who so aggressively championed our cause.
Attacking the Vietnam War is tantamount to attacking Lyndon Johnson. Why turn our most powerful ally into an enemy?
Why undermine the very movement to which you’ve devoted your life?
Why venture into an area — international politics — about which you have little or no expertise?
Why run the risk?
You’re a Nobel laureate, a man respected the world over for his views on matters concerning minority rights and minority dignity. Why undermine your own dignity and standing—your exalted position as a leader of your people—by moving into the morass of arguments over a war that’s irrelevant to your purpose?
Why destroy the hard-fought progress you have already made?
Your ego has run amok.
Your sense of restraint has abandoned you.
Where’s your common sense?
Where’s your concern for your supporters?
Why are you injuring them?
Why are you injuring yourself?
The voices are persistent. Their ominous tone reflects the grave doubts of one of his most trusted aides and chief fund-raiser, Stanley Levison, who openly opposes the speech Doc is about to deliver.
Doc thinks back to the first draft of the speech written by Clarence Jones, a brilliant young black lawyer whom he recruited to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1960. Jones had been reluctant to leave his Pasadena, California, home and promising corporate legal career. Even the fact that Doc had come to Jones’s home on a Saturday night to personally persuade him didn’t move
the attorney. But come Sunday morning, sitting in the first pew of the Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church and listening to King, as guest preacher, masterfully skewer the black middle class for refusing to fight for its own people, Jones surrendered to the preacher’s call to action. The lawyer left his old life behind and became a tireless supporter. It was Jones, in fact, who visited Doc during the spring of 1963 when he was incarcerated in Alabama, where he had written in the margins of newspapers and small scraps of paper “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” his celebrated defense of
nonviolence.
“We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal,’” wrote King, “...[and] it was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious
laws.”
Clarence Jones was dear to Doc’s heart, but Jones’s first draft of this Vietnam speech was too restrained, too balanced, too reflective of the lawyer’s sense of moderation.
King had come out against the war on previous occasions, but there had yet to be a definitive statement. So when the national conference of the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam asked him to deliver its keynote address at Riverside, he quickly accepted.
As a man who has skillfully sought media attention to bring his message home, Doc understands the power of today’s platform.
Riding in the back of the car as it winds its way through the city’s swarming streets, he remembers a few months back, when, flipping through a magazine at an airport restaurant, he stopped at a photograph showing the horrific effects of napalm attacks on Vietnamese children.
His aide, seeing that he was no longer eating the food, said, “Doc, doesn’t it taste any good?”
“Nothing will ever taste any good for me until I do everything I can to end that war.”
In recent weeks Doc has twice canceled meetings with the world’s most powerful man, Lyndon Johnson, whose civil rights support he had long courted and secured. Like all mortals, Doc is impressed by a White House invitation.
But deeper wisdom tells him to avoid an encounter with a politician whose powers of persuasion are legendary. No doubt LBJ wants to get Doc to tone down his statements on the war when, in fact, Doc is about to dramatically turn up the volume.
It was only sixteen months ago — in January of 1966 — that Doc had sent the president a telegram endorsing LBJ’s peace efforts and his “reassuring” commitment to keep Vietnam from impeding progress in civil rights. But since the conflict has escalated alarmingly, Doc has come to view Johnson’s win-at- all- costs policy as a catastrophe. Right now the last thing he needs is a one-on-one arm-
twisting session with LBJ.
Martin Luther King is probably the only Negro in America prepared to turn down a private meeting with the president. It’s not that his ego isn’t excited by the prospect.
Doc is a fiery preacher, and fiery preachers have strong egos. He likes recognition. He likes adulation. Yet his moral mission trumps his hunger for personal glory. He avoids Johnson because he does not want to be played by Johnson.
His moral mission cannot be compromised.
The prepared text that he carries in his briefcase is largely the work of Vincent Harding — Korean War veteran, Mennonite peace activist, chairman of the history department at Spelman College, and Doc’s Atlanta neighbor. It is a speech that, while setting out a compelling pro-peace position on high moral ground, carefully delineates the modern history of war-torn Vietnam.
As Doc arrives at 120th Street and Riverside Drive and looks out at the great Gothic edifice, his mind goes to the ironies of the moment. He reflects on the proximity of this opulent church, built largely through the contributions of John D. Rockefeller Jr. to the nearby neighborhood of Harlem, where impoverished people struggle for mere subsistence. He thinks of Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Riverside’s
founding minister and eloquent voice of liberal Christianity, who fearlessly denounced racism during the dark days of the thirties and forties. He also thinks that were he ever to leave his beloved home church of Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta, where he and his father are co-pastors, it would only be to lead a great progressive congregation like Riverside.
Stepping from the car and walking to the main sanctuary, he considers the furor he is about to create. He remains resolute.
After a standing ovation, the applause quiets and Doc gets down to business, declaring, “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice.”
He quotes the directive of the conference’s executive committee: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.”
“Some of us,” he says, “who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.”
He speaks of his own past ambivalence.
“Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path....When I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern,
I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. . . .
“In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly...why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church—the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate — leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.”
Now Doc is off and running. He quickly links the war — indeed, the very forces of militarism — to racism and poverty. Blacks are fighting and dying at almost twice their proportion of the population. He points to the “cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together at the same schools.” He speaks about the rioters who, in answer to his plea for nonviolence, question America’s own unchecked violence in Vietnam.
“Their questions hit home,” he says, “and 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 today — my own government.”
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.
The phrase will send shock waves through the media.
Doc’s full-frontal attack on the war is unequivocal. His five-point plan is clear: Stop bombing, issue a unilateral ceasefire, abandon all bases in Southeast Asia, negotiate with North Vietnam’s National Liberation Front, and set a date for complete troop removal.
The war is immoral. The immorality of the war is married to the immorality of poverty and racism. America must turn from the mad pursuit of this war to the pursuit of its moral integrity. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” he claims, “is approaching spiritual death.”
Like the Old Testament prophets he has studied and loved so well, Doc is delivering a prophesy in the sternest possible terms. “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now....We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”
Moving away from his prepared speech, Doc begins to improvise. True to his bedrock Baptist roots, he points to Amos 5:24, calling forth a sense of faith and hope inherent to his tradition. He invokes a time when “justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
The church explodes with thunderous applause. Again, an impassioned and sustained standing ovation.
His speech concluded, Doc leaves the sanctuary.
And then the real fireworks begin.
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