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BYJONATHANEIG
F
OOL. CHUMP. Traitor.
False shepherd. Rev. Dr.
Chickenwing. Uncle Tom.
These are a few of the
ways that Malcolm X
described Martin Luther King Jr.
King spoke more diplomatically
about Malcolm, but not flatteringly,
calling the Nation of Islam a “hate
group” for its insistence on black
separatism and supremacy.
They were the yin and yang of an
American revolution, the two most
stirring and lasting voices of the civil-
rights battle of the 1950s and ’60s.
We remember King the pacifist in
contrast to Malcolm the provocateur;
the man with the dream and the man
who decried the black American
nightmare. Yet, as Peniel E. Joseph
argues in his incisive, smartly written
new book, “The Sword and the Shield,”
history has turned both men into
caricatures. We’ve lost sight of King’s
true radicalism. We’ve lost sight of
Malcolm’s more moderate approach to
black nationalism that emerged after
his break with the Nation of Islam. And,
in Mr. Joseph’s view, we’ve lost sight of
how each man shaped the other.
King grew so radical and Malcolm
mellowed so much, James Baldwin
wrote, that “by the time each met his
death there was practically no differ-
ence between them.”
Plenty of differences remained
between the men, but Baldwin never-
theless captured an essential truth.
King and Malcolm each found it use-
ful to cast the other in the role of
adversary, and yet the more they
struggled against institutionalized
racism and economic inequality, the
more they found commonality in their
political goals. Mr. Joseph, a history
professor at the University of Texas at
Austin, weaves their stories fluidly and
with vivid detail, helping to strip away
the high gloss of mythology.
King, born in 1929 in Atlanta, was
influenced deeply by the black Southern
Baptist church. His father, maternal
grandfather, uncle and brother all were
preachers. His approach to fighting
segregation grew from his experience
in the church as well as his extensive
philosophical and theological training.
Malcolm Little, born in 1925 in Omaha,
Neb., was also the son of a Baptist
preacher, an itinerant one who or-
ganized for Marcus Garvey’s black-
nationalist movement. While impris-
oned for burglary between 1946 and
1952, Malcolm discovered the Nation
of Islam, which urged black Americans
to reject racial integration and prepare
for the fast-approaching day when Allah
would destroy white society.
King launched his career as a minis-
ter at a church in Montgomery, Ala., as
Malcolm Little dropped his so-called
slave name and became Malcolm X, the
Nation of Islam’s most exciting young
minister. At the time, decolonization
was reshaping Africa and Asia. African-
Americans were moving to cities,
whites to the suburbs.Brown v. Board
of Educationoutlawed legal segrega-
tion in public education and sparked
new waves of civil disobedience, in-
cluding a bus boycott in Montgomery
that turned King, at age 27, into the
movement’s most dynamic figure and,
thanks to television, the most famous
activist of his time.
As each man gained fame, he found
it useful to attack the other. King built
his movement on Christian principles,
advocating nonviolence, urging his
followers to love their enemies. He
embraced pacifism, but there was
nothing passive about his work. He
endured bombings, beatings and
frequent arrests. In fact, he counted
on violent attacks by police and sher-
iffs to win the sympathy and support
of white Americans for his cause.
Invoking Gandhi and Jesus, he seized
the moral high ground and attained the
kind of influence usually associated
with leaders of state.
Malcolm, for most of his public
career, mocked that approach. Why
should black Americans love the people
who had enslaved, suppressed and
lynched them? Why negotiate with
an opponent who insists on your fun-
damental inferiority? What’s to be
gained for the lamb by expressing love
for the lion while being devoured?
At times, especially in the first half
of his book, Mr. Joseph works hard to
portray King and Malcolm as equallybetween two beleaguered warriors.
In the days that followed, the men
continued to throw jabs, but they
increasingly showed mutual respect.
They nearly met again in 1965 in
Selma, where Malcolm asked Coretta
Scott King to pass along a message to
her husband: “I want him to know that
I didn’t come to make his job more
difficult,” Malcolm said. “I thought that
if the white people understood what
the alternative was that they would
be willing to listen to Dr. King.”
It was a comment that captured
both men’s strengths and weaknesses.
Malcolm inspired fear in the white
community and courage in the black
community, while King worked with
both sides and looked for concrete
results that seemed to grow more
elusive.
Less than three weeks after his trip
to Selma, Malcolm was assassinated
while speaking to an audience in Har-
lem. In death he became “the patron
saint of black radicalism,” Mr. Joseph
writes. But his greatest legacy, the
author argues, may have been his
impact on King.
After helping to win passage of the
1965 Voting Rights Act, King watched
as riots exploded in black urban areas,
fulfilling one of Malcolm’s prophecies
and ripping apart the nonviolent civil-
rights movement. King still preached
nonviolence, but his approach became
more radical, and he loudly insisted
that voting rights and desegregation
were no longer sufficient.“What both Martin and Malcolm
began to see,” Baldwin wrote, “was
that the nature of the American hoax
had to be revealed—not only to save
black people but in order to change
the world in which everyone, after all,
has a right to live.”
King began to call for massive civil
disobedience in the service of a wide-
spread revolution, one that would
reshape American democracy and
inspire ordinary citizens around the
world to fight for the poor and
racially oppressed. He ruptured his
relationship with President Lyndon
Johnson by calling for an end to the
Vietnam War before the war became
overwhelmingly unpopular. King’s
advisers warned him not to take such
a radical step, not to lose focus and
not to stray from the path that had
led to his past successes, but he
wouldn’t listen.
His journey had begun with a mod-
est attempt to end segregation on
Montgomery’s buses. As his fame and
power grew, he argued that justice
would not be done until everyone was
assured integrated schools, decent
housing, safe neighborhoods, health
care, jobs and a living wage. He staked
everything on his hope for a better
world until he found himself united
with Malcolm X by one last thing:
a bullet.Mr. Eig, the author of “Ali: A Life,”
is working on a biography of Martin
Luther King Jr.important figures in the quest for a
“moral and political reckoning,” as he
puts it, “with America’s long history
of racial and economic injustice.” He
describes King as a defense attorney
and Malcolm as a prosecutor, suggest-
ing they played equally necessary roles.
But in those early chapters it’s King
notching one victory after another,
profoundly changing American life andlaw, while Malcolm inspires audiences
with his defiance and sharp words but
searches for the most effective use of
his skills.
The men met only once, on March
26, 1964. While King held a press
conference at the Capitol building in
Washington, D.C., Malcolm entered
the room and quietly took a seat.
Afterward, they met in a corridor,
shook hands and exchanged pleas-
antries. “Now you’re going to get
investigated,” Malcolm joked with
King as photographers snapped
pictures. Of course, both men had
long been under investigation by
the FBI, but the comment neverthe-
less counted as a kind of bondingThey were the yin and
yang of civil-rights
activism—and remain
the movement’s most
stirring and lasting voices.The Sword and the Shield
By Peniel E. Joseph
Basic, 373 pages, $30
Embodiments of the Struggle
POLARIZINGMartin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in Washington, D.C., on March 26, 1964.
MARION S. TRIKOSKO/UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGESBOOKS
‘I don’t think that any black person can speak of Malcolm and Martin without wishing that they were here. Our children need them...’—JAMES BALDWIN, 1972
Taft is a reasonable, if uninspiring,
choice. But Charles Beard, the author of
“An Economic Interpretation of the
Constitution of the United States”
(1913)? He “eluded easy categorization,”
Mr. Bacevich writes. Indeed, and a prac-
titioner of Marxian economic deter-
minism can safely elude the category
of conservative. Or Reinhold Niebuhr?
I am an admirer of the Protestant theo-
logian and intellectual Niebuhr, but
the fact that in later years he shed
his socialism and adopted more tough-
minded ideas on U.S. foreign policy
doesn’t make him a part of the “conser-
vative tradition.”
These and similar choices appear to
be the result of Mr. Bacevich’s hatred of
a body of opinion on foreign policy that
generally takes the name “neoconserv-
atism.” In matters of foreign relations,
if I may offer a gross oversimplification,
neoconservatives believe that the asser-
tive use of American power, including
military power, tends to dissuade bad
actors from assailing the U.S. and its
allies, whereas American docility tends
to invite it. So strongly does Mr.
Bacevich reject this view that, as he
puts it in the book’s introduction, he has
“excluded altogether anyone associated
with what in the last quarter of the
twentieth century became known as
ContinuedfrompageC7
neoconservatism” on the grounds that
neoconservatism “is a heresy akin to
antinomianism, its adherents declaring
themselves unbound by the constraints
to which others are obliged to attend.”
It strikes me as unpardonable to include
Charles Beard and not Charles Kraut-
hammer in a collection of writings by
American conservatives, but there it is.
How strange, then, to find a long
entry in “American Conservatism” by
Irving Kristol, correctly said by Mr.
Bacevich to be thought of as the “god-
father of neoconservatism.” The entry
by Kristol is among the most bracing
things any conservative wrote in the
second half of the 20th century, the
essay “When Virtue Loses All Her Love-
liness,” which appeared in these pages
in 1977 and later as the epilogue of
his book “Two Cheers for Capitalism”
(1978). In that essay, Kristol drew a dis-
tinction between the “free society” as
envisioned by Friedrich von Hayek
and other free-market theorists, on the
one hand, and bourgeois capitalism, on
the other. The latter, Kristol held, made
room for traditional mores, “a strong
homogeneity of values among the citi-
zenry,” and so encouraged both the
work ethic and patriotism.
The argument was entirely in the
spirit of neoconservatism, an outlook
that favored practical, real-world policy
aims over pristine theoretical argu-
ments that take no account of America’s
cultural distinctiveness. I conclude that
Mr. Bacevich either has little idea what
neoconservatism means or that he bun-
gled by including an essay from a view-
point he explicitly vowed to exclude.
There are some trenchant pieces in
this book, to be sure: William F. BuckleyTo Each
His Own
Conservatism?
on the exclusion of Ayn Rand, prophet-
ess of hyperindividualism, and Robert
Welch, founder of the John Birch
Society, from the conservative move-
ment; Shelby Steele on affirmative ac-
tion; John Crowe Ransom and Eugene
Genovese on Southern conservatism;
Richard John Neuhaus on atheism.
There are a few fine pieces that none-
theless don’t belong here: for
example Joan Didion’s short
essay “The Women’s Move-
ment,” from 1972—Ms. Did-
ion was never much of a con-
servative and in any case did
not,paceMr. Bacevich, de-
scribe her own outlook as an
“unorthodox conservatism.”
The phrase was usedabout
her in the New York Times,
notbyher.
Among the most pre-
scient pieces to my mind is
a chapter from Willmoore
Kendall’s unjustly forgotten
book “The Conservative Af-
firmation” (1963). Kendall,
in his distinctively fluent but
prolix style, asks what the controversy
over Sen. Joseph McCarthy was really
about. It was not, he deduced, about
the low character of McCarthy himself
or about his unscrupulous methods,
or even about whether there were or
weren’t communists furtively working
in the U.S. government and taking or-
ders from the Soviets. It was, Kendall
contended, fundamentally a philosoph-
ical fight about whether Americans had
the right to proscribe certain beliefs and
practices as anathema to the Consti-
tution and American culture. The anti-
McCarthyite liberals, who held that allquestions are open questions and that
there is no such thing as an American
orthodoxy, won the fight by sidestep-
ping the whole debate. It was allowable
to exclude communism and commu-
nists, the liberals held (this according
to Kendall), because communism
amounted to a “clear and present dan-
ger.” Not, in other words, because com-munism is intrinsically un-American or
abhorrent to humane values but be-
cause it was ill-advised, from a practical
viewpoint, to allow Soviet sympathizers
to remain in the U.S. government and
damage the national interest.
Thus did midcentury liberals, honor-
able Cold Warriors though most of
them were, refuse to acknowledge that
there is anything irreducibly American,
any set of doctrines or cultural mores
that may not be disputed by loyal
American citizens. Over the decades,
their liberal successors, and now their
“progressive” ones, have filled that voidwith their own preferred doctrines, and
suddenly we have a new, far more rigid,
orthodoxy.
The fight over Joe McCarthy, if Ken-
dall was right, was an adumbration of
2016 and beyond. The fight over Donald
Trump is not, at its most basic level,
about the man and his behavior; it is
about whether Americans are permitted
to favor America simply be-
cause it’s America. Or, to adapt
a phrase sometimes attributed
to Robert Frost, it’s about
whether we’re allowed to take
our own side in a quarrel.
Mr. Bacevich deserves credit
for including Kendall’s essay,
but I note with irritation that
the book’s biographical note is
needlessly dismissive. Kendall
was “a brilliant man who never
fulfilled his promise.” His inclu-
sion in this volume would sug-
gest differently, but never
mind. Kendall couldn’t get
along with his colleagues at
Yale, whose administrators
paid him to leave, and he
“ended his career at the University of
Dallas, on the periphery of the nation’s
intellectual life,” Mr. Bacevich sniffs.
On the periphery. It’s not a bad way
to describe modern American conserva-
tism itself—always adapting to its lib-
eral and progressive opponents; always
considered by them vaguely suspect.
And always being defined by allegedly
sympathetic scholars who show little
understanding of the “tradition” they
mean to “reclaim.”Mr. Swaim is an editorial page
writer for the Journal.NEOCONIrving Kristol in the 1970s.
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