An account of the contentious relationship between the thirty-fifth president and Martin Luther King, Jr. throughout the tumultuous early years of the civil rights movement explores their influence on one another and the important decisions that were inspired by their rivalry."The story of civil rights in the early 1960s is a tale of courageous sit-ins and marches, police brutality, violence, and murder. It is also a tale of two men: John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., a pair of gifted, charismatic, and ambitious leaders from strikingly different worlds. When they first met in 1960, as Kennedy lobbied King to back his bid for the presidency, the wealthy Irish Catholic and the Southern Baptist preacher had little natural rapport. Kennedy was cool and Witty, King taut and high-minded.

Kennedy was slow to embrace a full-throated position on equality for black Americans, fearing the wrath of southern Democrats. Over the next three years---as America was transfixed by a series of dramatic demonstrations across the South--it was King, more than any other figure, who led Kennedy to finally make a moral commitment to civil rights; and it was Kennedy's hesitation that prompted King to achieve his greatest potential as an activist. This unique and transformative relationship has never been explored in such gripping fashion. From Harry Belafonte's Manhattan apartment to the Birmingham city jail to Joseph Kennedy's Palm Beach estate, [this book] delivers a narrative both public and intimate: the risky strategies, secret meetings, outrageous personalities, and private struggles that absorbed the lives of these two men--and forever bound them together."--Jacket.