I wish that President Obama’s deeds were anything near the best that Martin Luther King had to offer. As I have written over and over again, as have others, the President has embraced virtually all of the Bush Administration’s pathological obsession with arbitrary executive power. The administration’s latest moral and intellectual debacle, the Mansour Arbabsiar “assassination plot,” plays directly into the hands of the right-wing neocon and Likudist forces demanding a “showdown” with Iran, precisely the last thing that the U.S. and the world needs.
One would like to believe that the Administration will somehow right itself in foreign policy matters. Well, one can always hope. But it would be nice to have a reason to hope. The President hasn’t given us one.
Afterwords
President Obama’s remarks on King’s record naturally accentuated the positive. Although King helped accomplish great things, he had more than his share of flaws. His compulsive promiscuity, which made him the near equal of both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was even more irresponsible than theirs. A single outraged father or husband could have turned him into a national laughingstock, leaving the civil rights movement deeply compromised.
King’s career reached its zenith with the March on Washington in 1963. After that, there was nowhere to go except down. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act made him a man without a mission. His refusal to fall in line behind President Johnson alienated almost all of the other civil rights leaders, who could not but help resent his star power in the first place. Yet it was impossible for him to outflank the new generation of militant blacks—most notably Malcolm X, of course—who were not afraid to express the passionate hatred for whites that blacks had always felt and always repressed.
King’s attacks on the Johnson Administration’s disastrous policy in Vietnam were welcomed by white radicals, but not his traditional allies. As his impact weakened, his rhetoric became wilder, and often hysterical. His last civil rights crusades, in Chicago and Memphis, were failures. He was fighting against an indistinct enemy, and his allies often failed him.
Revolutions are nothing if not parricidal. King’s ego eventually overwhelmed his greatness, but not before he did as much as any man to lift the greatest stain America’s conscience ever applied to itself. We could definitely use some more cleansing now.
