Kennedy addressing supporters in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel. Photograph Source: Sven Walnum – CC0

The imperialist U.S. state stops at nothing; anything goes. Really? After victory in World War II and with U.S. manufacturing in high gear, the United States in the 1960s dominated world finances, trade, and politics. One dark cloud was the Soviet Union. Its industrialization had greatly expanded before the War and afterwards was recovering. The USSR was mentoring nations emerging from colonization.

Other challenges were a maturing Chinese Revolution, socialist revolution in neighboring Cuba, and the Soviet Union’s and China’s nuclear capabilities. Economic bounty at home was no panacea for the country’s rampant racial and social inequalities. War was looming in Vietnam.

Resistance was showing: California’s Free Speech Movement; Black people’s fight for political participation and constitutional guarantees, women’s demands for equality, rejection of U.S war in Vietnam, and alternative lifestyles.

The killings of four high-profile political figures intruded. They were President John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy. Agents of the U.S. government were responsible. Individually or together, the victims had denounced war in Vietnam, possession and potential use of nuclear weapons, racial and economic oppression, and colonialism.

James Douglass reports on the assassinations. His JFK and the Unspeakable, first appearing in 2008, tells of the murder of President Kennedy. Douglass’s new book, Martyrs to the Unspeakable (Orbis Press), explores the killings of the other three leaders.

He states[WW1] at the outset that, “Because they asked why, turned to create a better world, and were willing to die for it, they were shot down …They were targeted to keep us from realizing our movement for a more just and peaceful world.” He regards them as witnesses and martyrs. They knew they would die.

He continues: “The method of those four movement-shattering assassinations of the sixties had its root in the criminal conduct of their nation in World War II. The leveling of cities by U.S. fire-bombings in Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo, by nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki …devastated the hope of humanity for a better world … As leaders for change, [they] had to be stopped to prevent a rising countermovement from spreading across the world, ending the Cold War and initiating a new era of justice and peace. U.S. security agencies thought they had no choice.”

He writes that the nuclear attack in 1945 “turned me toward Mohandas Gandhi, who had said the Bomb (sic) had in fact continued the war in a more terrible form under the cloak of peace.” Douglass values Gandhi’s “experiment with truth” as a model for non-violent political struggle. Gandhi was assassinated in 1948. Douglass published Gandhi and the Unspeakable: his Final Experiment with Truth” (Orbis) In 2012.

Catholic Workers Movement founder Dorothy Day spoke at the college Douglass was attending. Her influence inspired his lifelong dedication to opposing war and nuclear weapons. He and his wife Shelley in 1993 founded a Catholic Worker hospitality house in Birmingham, Alabama. They live and work there still.

In this crowded, detail-filled new book, Douglass documents the doings and thinking of victims and their associates alike, U.S. intelligence and security operatives, Soviet officials, and many others. He gained information from his subjects’ speeches and writings, their colleagues’ recollections, news reports, commentary from biographers and observers, interviews he conducted, and declassified government documents, notably from the FBI.

The book has three sections: “The Witness,” “The Way,” and “The Why.” The first two of them offer historical segments on various episodes in his subjects’ lives. The pace quickens as their deaths draw near. He records the doings of government agents plus aspects of the wider political and international context. His third section attends to the convergence of Malcolm X and MLK that so alarmed so government officials, and to the interaction among JFK, RFK, and Soviet officials that allowed for resolution of the October (1962) Missile Crisis.

Bits of each victim’s history crop up in........

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