Poor People’s Campaign and a march on Washington.) He also, however, came to see that the other enemy of basic rights for his people was the very war in Vietnam in which Lyndon Johnson felt trapped, that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today[is] my own government.” The final campaign before his assassination took King to Memphis, Tennessee, to organize support for the sanitation workers’ strike for better pay and working conditions, but the war in Vietnam he increasingly opposed would last another five years after his death.

The volume is long, but it is difficult to see where cuts could be made. Branch includes more than two hundred pages of notes and bibliography, which attest to the detailed account of the history he is rendering. What makes the story so compelling, in fact, is the detail with which it is told, which re-creates the history for readers forty years after its finish. The life of Martin Luther King, Jr., is also the story of America in one of its defining moments, for King was one of the main figures moving the country forward, what Branch here calls lifting “the patriotic spirit of the United States toward our defining national purpose.”

At Canaan’s Edge captures that double story in all its richness and complexity: the Civil Rights movement moving forward to effect changes in both federal law and human consciousness and the United States sinking deeper into the morass of Vietnam. Branch sketches the background of issues that ariseracial, military, historicaland paints the broad cultural canvas against which this history is moving. Readers can see life as it then occurred, but with the accent marks at different places: The death of two sanitation workers in a gruesome accident draws King to Memphis, for example, but the event people read about in their national papers in February of 1968 is the birth of Lisa Marie Presley in another Memphis hospital. It is the middle of the 1960’s, with all the change and confusion that decade embodied, from the Beatles to the New Left, from hippies to teach-ins, from urban riots in American cities to the Six-Day War in the Middle East.

Branch’s titles for his three volumes suggest but Old Testament parallels, but also emerging from this account are the outlines of an almost classic Greek tragedy, a powerful drama with not one but two tragic figures. King’s weaknesses are clear herehis misjudgments, his depressions, his philandering. Branch captures King’s highest moments as well, however: the sermons and speeches that moved the nation. “I’ve been to the mountaintop,” King proclaimed in his last sermon in Memphis on April 3, 1968, “and I have s-e-e-e-e-e-n the promised land.” The power of that vision continues to reverberate today.

Johnson was an equally complex leader. On one hand, as Branch shows again and again, Johnson accomplished a great deal in the few years he led the United States, enacting important legislation in immigration, education, and health care (Medicare), as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other civil rights bills benefiting women and minorities. In many ways, Johnson was a brilliant leader, who could both charm and bully others into doing his will. (He would swing from hugging King in one meeting to avoiding him in the next.) Johnson stood as an Abraham Lincoln-like figure in domestic policy and yet he could not extricate himself from Vietnam. The quicksand almost swallowed him and certainly sunk any further political ambitions he had. Branch takes readers back and forth between these two tragic heroes.

There are more than enough villains in this tragedy as well. The greatest is J. Edgar Hoover, whose illegal surveillance of King went on for years. He paid informants and had agents working tirelessly to uncover damaging stories about the head of the SCLC. (Many of Branch’s sources for the facts and quotations in his notes read simply “Wiretap of telephone call,” “reports by police surveillance,” and so on.) He undercut King’s support at every turn; tragically, if some of the many police and FBI agents who were watching King that day in April, 1968, in the Lorraine Motel had turned their gaze outward, they might have stopped James Earl Ray from killing King.

Like the word “terrorist” at the start of the twenty-first century, the word “communist” was all Hoover had to utter in order to get anything he wanted, legal or not. The media fluctuated between casting its news subjects in hero and villain roles. “Don’t you find that the American people are getting a little bit tired, truly, of the whole civil rights struggle?” Mike Wallace asked King on CBS in 1966, in a continuing attempt by media to stall the movement. The New York Times castigated King for his criticism of war policy and helped to perpetuate the war. On the other hand, it was images of the violence in Selma that helped to mobilize white America in support of civil rights. The popular tide against the Vietnam War turned in part because of reports like Harrison Salisbury’s in The New York Times in 1967 on the damage to civilian targets that American bombing was inflicting in North Vietnam and observations like Walter Cronkite’s in February of 1968, “that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory, conclusion.”

The themes in this double tragedy are equally clear. One is violence, the way America deals with its enemies, within and without. At the beginning of Branch’s account only a handful of Americans had been killed in Vietnam, but by the end the numbers were in the thousands and growing, and the figures for Vietnamese dead are staggering. Likewise in the Civil Rights movement: Branch follows from the start some of the people who will be killed in this crusade, people such as Jimmie Lee Jackson“a twenty-six-year-old pulpwood worker whose application to register for the vote had been rejected five times”James Reed, Viola Liuzzo, Jonathan Daniels, James Meredith, and other people who were working to improve life for themselves and for others. Their murderers are at first acquitted, but by the end of this account all-white juries are beginning to find the courage to mete out justice. In fact, the larger theme of this book is the confirmation of the underpinning principles of American democracy, the self-governance and nonviolence which can lead to change.

The America Branch describes in this volume is torn by dissent and violence but emerges in the end stronger and fairer. The tragic heroes have fallen, but others have risen to carry their flags forward, and King’s is still waving decades later. As Branch says, Martin Luther King “grasped freedom seen and unseen, rooted in ecumenical faith, sustaining patriotism to brighten the heritage of his country for all people. These treasures abide with lasting promise from America in the King years.”