Abraham, Martin and John

In the tumultuous American year that was 1968, a sad song was written that became popular as another peaceful protest anthem. “Abraham, Martin and John” tied together the names of Lincoln, King and Kennedy, three good men who led efforts to achieve a better and more just America. Martin Luther King, Jr., the foremost civil rights leader and recipient of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a vocal critic of the War in Vietnam who was a front runner for the Democratic Presidential nomination, were both killed by bullets of assassins that year.

Dr. King had done much to educate the Kennedy brothers about the need for Federal Government involvement in protecting civil rights of Negroes [the preferred term of that time], and King successfully worked to pull the Kennedys into open support for the civil rights movement. Harkening back to President Lincoln’s assassination after guiding the successful defeat of the effort by southern states to secede from the Union, and tying into Lincoln issuing the emancipation proclamation and the assassination of President Kennedy who had begun to advocate for passage of civil rights legislation, the 1968 song was a plea and lament for justice brought about through peaceful means.

The three men named in the song title, and RFK who was mentioned in the lyrics, all shared a sincere compassion for humanity. Dr. King worked through spiritual and community activism, whereas the other three used politics as their means. Lincoln was commander-in-chief of the victorious side in our devastating civil war. John Kennedy’s determination that our national interests required us to commit to supporting an unjust regime in Vietnam against a popular insurgency was a mistake that his brother acknowledged as part of his 1968 Presidential campaign.

Dr. King chose the course of non-violent protest for justice. As the years pass, his legacy becomes more apparent. His choice for the Nobel Peace prize in 1964 seemed odd to most white Americans at the time, yet the presentation speech, his acceptance speech and forty plus years of improvements brought about by the civil rights laws enacted at that time shows what an accomplished and heroic life King led, even though he was just 35 years old at the time of the award.

As George W. Bush obstinately campaigns against public opinion and all good advice to further exacerbate the Iraq fiasco he created, he tries to compare himself with Lincoln, who proceeded vigorously to crush the rebellion of the south in order to preserve the Union, even in the face of lack of popular support and even to the extent of replacing generals until he found Grant, who was willing to wage the total war Lincoln came to determine was needed. That war may have been inevitable, given the failure of politics leading up to the war. Lincoln’s vision for the occupation of the South after the war was that it should be firm yet compassionate. His vision died with him, or at least succumbed to the failure of post war politics.

Bush deserves mention in the same article with these other men only as a point of contrast to see how low we have come to have him as President. His war in Iraq was a fraudulently obtained and disastrously ill-conceived pre-emptive war of aggression, whereas Lincoln’s war was started by the southern states and fought by Lincoln in order to preserve the Union. The Kennedy brothers accepted moral guidance from Dr. King in order to help bring about social and economic justice through civil rights legislation; but Bush uses religious leaders as political guides to obtain votes for socially reactionary and economically unjust laws.

War, even a just one successfully waged, is not the greatest legacy a leader can leave. Lincoln would have had a greater legacy if he had preserved the Union and accomplished emancipation without war. Kennedy started the civil rights ball rolling, but his legacy would have been greater if he had kept us out of Vietnam. George Bush will leave an overwhelmingly negative legacy, combining the foolishness of a botched unjust war with a fraudulent, reactionary and economically unjust domestic policy.

Dr. King left a most admirable legacy, showing us that justice can be obtained without war. We rightly celebrate his legacy.