BOOKS

...Nor is there much about the Vietnamese "boat people" or the ethnic Chinese forced out of Vietnam...

...I was also bothered by Garrow's endnote technique...

...New leadership has just taken over in Hanoi: Perhaps it will have some creative ideas that can penetrate the thick skulls of old leaders in Moscow, Beijing, and Washington...

...These shortcomings, though, have little to do with the overall believability of Bearing the Cross...

...Shaplen details the maneuverings which led to Khmer Rouge supremacy, the Vietnamese attack, and the creation of the Sihanouk-Son Sann-Khmer Rouge "coalition" that gets support from China and the United States while the Soviets support Vietnam and Cambodia's puppet Heng Samrin government...

...The earliest of these biographical sketches was written in 1962, the latest in 1986...

...One of the quotations I found most interesting (in which Julian Bond speaks in 1962 of his disappointment in King) is stashed away in an endnote on Page 659...

...He was a fallible, concerned man who was repeatedly pushed, sometimes against his own will, into leadership in the most exciting, significant, and dangerous confrontation America has had since the Revolution...

...The major events of King's life are richly detailed: the move to Atlanta and the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC...

...Through it all, there was King's intense and ongoing self-doubt, a reenactment of the kitchen scene on stages all over the nation and the free world...

...Thus it is not surprising that in recent years there have been efforts to turn Martin Luther King Jr., indisputably the most important figure in the American civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, into more of a statue and legend than a human being...

...Perhaps it's because we have less time than we once did, and so we pay attention only to those events and people certified as important by some trendy magazine or television news show...

...They all took their shots at him, and they all missed, even the one that ended his life in Memphis...

...He was a preacher's kid who could have lived at the social and economic top of a community that was segregated but that, for a Southern Baptist preacher, could be a fairly comfortable place...

...415 pp...

...The stage was thus set for the American invasion of Cambodia, falsely presented in heroic terms instead of as the act of desperation it was," Shaplen writes...

...True, Garrow was not at Albany, and he could not feel the drenching summertime heat or hear the singing or watch the cooks and postal workers march out the door and down the street to certain arrest...

...In the current environment, common folk are easily ignored...

...Unlikely Combination A FRIENDSHIP, 1967-1974 by Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald Alfred A. Knopf...

...Again, the reader is left with the sense of the Americans' diplomatic ineptitude-nay, incompetence—as Henry Kissinger is quoted about the events that led to Sihanouk's overthrow in 1970 and the takeover by Lon Nol...

...The victories over French and Americans "were classic and unique in military terms," he concludes, "but they have remained hollow...

...In a crowded field, he leads the pack...

...It details the building of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was not a trail at all but a sophisticated truck route of thousands of miles which all the Pentagon's vaunted technology could only harass...

...22.95...

...Shaplen notes the vast increase in schooling in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam but reports that "the trouble has been finding jobs in an economic system that is not only underdeveloped but unenterprising...

...If, on the other hand, you'd rather pursue your own obsessions than Roth's, you can skip The Counterlife without worrying...

...Return Trip BITTER VICTORY by Robert Shaplen Harper & Row...

...Bearing the Cross is an academic book...

...It was later patched, but scars remained...

...The text itself fills 625 tightly packed pages, and endnotes take up anFred Powledge, the author of thirteen books, is writing a history of the civil-rights movement...

...Black and gray markets continue to flourish...

...He covered the movement in the 1960s as a reporter for The Atlanta Journal and The New York Times...

...But then he heard an inner voice, "the voice of Jesus," telling him to fight on and promising never to leave him alone...

...Even more bothersome, the thousands of facts in this massive book seem to have been given equal weight—to have been strained through a colander so they all come out uniform in size and importance...

...You are the first American I have seen since Paris," Le Due Tho told him, referring, of course, to the Paris "peace" talks of 1972-1973...

...And that's called the mother lode...

...His reportage for The New Yorker in the 1960s and 1970s was distinguished by its depth and sensitivity...

...by Fred Powledge It is a requirement of the times we live in that everything and everyone we consider of value must be bigger and better than life...

...MacDonald thrives on quiet and solitude, Rowan on the fast-lane lifestyle of network politics, the California scene, and the nightclub circuit...

...As for the Cambodians, nothing can "expunge the dismal record of death and destruction wrought by the Khmer Rouge," but that won't meet the Cambodian aspirations for "full independence...

...Shaplen delves into Vietnam's economic "reformism," which is stumbling along the same path as China's...

...He was highly intelligent, to be sure, but he wasn't a genius...

...It was in the later years, particularly at the time of King's epochal speech at the 1963 March on Washington, that he became recognized everywhere as the significant leader he had been for some time...

...Caught in a web of consumerism, Rowan and his wife tour Europe in a new Mercedes...

...it touched the lives of millions, many of them forever and profoundly...

...There is little here about the hundreds of thousands of Cambodians who have sought refuge in Thailand and in far too many cases have wound up as semi-prisoners in Thai border "camps...

...culpability should read Shaplen's several pages about the effects of toxic sprays, including Agent Orange, on pregnant women...

...Garrow refers repeatedly to an event that occurred late one night in Montgomery as King sat alone in his kitchen...

...And he came out on top...

...generated in himself and in the people who believed in him...

...David J. Garrow, the political scientist whose passion for facts brought us earlier volumes on King's harassment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and on his involvement in the 1965 Voting Rights legislation, has written a marvelously detailed book...

...King was, as Julian Bond says in that footnote, a simple person...

...The Nobel Prize a year later made it likely that "there would never be any respite, never any retreat to a quiet pastorship or seminary professorship...

...Shaplen's long, last chapter, 104 pages, is devoted to Cambodia, still suffering almost twelve years after the Americans left Saigon from Vietnamese military occupation and the intermittent civil war conducted by the Khmer Rouge and the forces of Prince Sihanouk and Son Sann...

...The Cambodia policy tears at Shaplen...

...It is almost a dozen years since the last Americans were airlifted out of what is now Ho Chi Minh City and the problems of Vietnam—and all of Indochina-slipped from the forefront of American consciousness...

...The Sihanouk overthrow, of course, sparked the upsurge of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, which led to a million to two million Cambodian deaths and Vietnam's eventual invasion...

...Shaplen remarks: "It is difficult to persuade Hanoi's leaders that they no longer occupy the diplomatic limelight in Washington...

...From the early 1970s on, it was all downhill in Cambodia...

...Some of the reminiscences include grim memories of poverty and discrimination, but there is a consistent theme of devotion to the best in jazz...

...and both the north and the south...

...That's what Albany is to black people, in terms of just the concentrated essence of the spirit of the people...

...William Steif (William Steif, a former foreign and national correspondent for the Scripps-How-ard newspapers, reports frequently for The Progressive from abroad...

...More than that, the mass of fact, even though its presentation often slows the reader, leads one to a powerful conclusion or two...

...MacDonald calls himself a "compulsive adviser," and so indeed he is as he pens detailed, and sometimes tedious, suggestions for the Laugh-In scripts...

...The attacks on Cambodia's "Parrot's Beak" and "Fishhook" lasted two months, cost thousands of lives, and temporarily disrupted the North Vietnamese...

...In Hanoi, he talked to Le Due Tho...

...A basic source is Sihanouk, himself, to whom Shaplen has talked repeatedly...

...as far as the Vietnamese people are concerned...

...An anonymous caller had just threatened his life, and King was trying, as he later explained, to "think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward...

...There was some suspicion that the bombs were dropped on purpose by American officers who were against Harriman's coming to Cambodia in the first place," Shaplen writes...

...At this time of bitter conflict with China," Shaplen continues, "there are similarities between the goals of the Vietnamese pragmatists, who condone a limited free market, individual incentives, and greater management autonomy, and the objectives of those directing China's far more extensive program of modernization...

...There are, for example, scads of facts about what happened in the Albany movement, but little that illustrates the fervor that gripped Albany's black community night after night in mass meetings at the churches, often two of them a night...

...18.95...

...It is to Garrow's credit that he doesn't make too much of these comments...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY Obsessions THE COUNTERLIFE by Philip Roth Farrar, Straus, & Giroux...

...In his journey he saw a few old friends, but many more he sought were "unavailable...

...The Americans eventually realized Lon Nol's coup was "a mistake," as North Vietnamese troops poured into Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge surrounded Phnom Penh...

...Shaplen analyzes the 1968 Tet offensive, using Vietnamese sources...

...Shaplen devotes more than a half dozen pages to his role in the mid-1960s as an occasional emissary to Sihanouk...

...If you want to read still another tale of mid-life angst as experienced by an alienated Jewish intellectual groping for self-identity and sexual gratification in a world that swirls about his narcissistic ruminations, The Counterlife is the most sophisticated example of the genre you're likely to encounter...

...Indigenous Jazz AMERICAN MUSICIANS by Whitney Balliett Oxford University Press...

...Now, as the excellent reporter he is, he has gone back to Vietnam and Cambodia to give us a follow-up...

...It is never easy for one to accept the role of symbol without going through constant moments of self-examination...

...Shaplen was sent by President Johnson's "roving ambassador," the late Averell Harriman, who wanted to come to Phnom Penh to repair the breach between the United States and Cambodia...

...A Vietnamese general tells Shaplen of the "two major battles" that assured Hanoi it could win the war—the battles were at Apbac in the Mekong Delta in early 1963 and in Binh Gia Province, southeast of Saigon, in late 1964 and early 1965...

...And every segregationist in America, which is quite a few...

...growing dissent within the movement itself, primarily from the younger activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who saw King and others as trying too hard to impose their own strategies on indigenous leadership...

...He told a British television interviewer in 1961 that there were moments "when I feel a sense of inadequacy as a symbol...

...Life for the average Vietnamese today is no better than it was three or four decades ago, and in some respects worse...

...The movement was an exciting, suspenseful, and danger-filled thing, a procession of events and people that together took on monumental importance and power...

...Though Vietnam is blessed with unusual natural resources," Shaplen reports, "it remains shockingly poor and undeveloped today, with an annual per-capita income of about $ 150...

...It was kind of him to avoid excessive documentation in the text itself, and to tuck his notes away at the end rather than at the feet of pages, but the device of rounding up a dozen or so sources in one note frequently left me confused about who said what where and when...

...By 1970 "we were ready, as usual, to go along with right-wing generals like Lon Nol and his miserable and corrupt brother, Colonel Lon Non," he notes...

...who once threatened King with a "huge scandal," albeit a phony one, if King didn't call off a protest at the 1960 Democratic convention...

...you won't have missed a thing...

...John D. MacDonald, the crime novelist who created Travis McGee, and Dan Rowan, the comedian co-star of Laugh-In, a popular television series of the late 1960s, were unlikely correspondents...

...The two men and their wives eventually do meet, and Rowan buys Florida beachfront property near the Mac-Donalds...

...Embassy in Phnom Penh...

...The author doesn't often tell us what, among the great mass of material we just read, is significant and what isn't...

...other ninety...

...At the same time, the cross got weightier: Criticism within the movement became sharper, and as King and SCLC moved into areas much more complex than those defined by drooling Southern sheriffs—into political warfare in Chicago, poverty issues in general, and the immorality of the war in Vietnam—the opposition got tougher, the solutions more elusive...

...And it shouldn't...

...The deal seemed to be set until American planes bombed a Cambodian village near the Vietnamese border...

...When Garrow does break away from the chronological narrative and permits himself a rare summarizing paragraph or sentence, what he says sounds true and reasonable...

...Neither was he a saint...

...Bearing the Cross doesn't understand that important part of what happened in Albany, and so its conclusion is the surface one—that Albany served primarily as a lesson in what to avoid in later campaigns...

...It ends thirteen years later when King, the veteran of dozens of campaigns and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, was assassinated on a motel balcony in Memphis...

...For American veterans of Vietnam, Shaplen's chapter "The War Through Vietnamese Eyes" is must reading...

...Soldiers are still on guard, shelling still takes place, the stupidity of enmity between an imperial nation of more than a billion people and a struggling nation of barely sixty million still prevails, despite occasional diplomatic demarches...

...at home MacDonald congratulates himself on canceling an order for a Cadillac in favor of a Ford...

...He was allowed five weeks in Vietnam and a week in Cambodia in 1984, and he has dug through numerous secondary sources to offer his update on those two unhappy countries...

...Sihanouk's loss was accordingly our loss, too, except that it was his country, not ours, that was going down the drain...

...239 pp...

...King made frequent references then to the inevitability of his own death, and friends almost universally described him with terms such as "drained," "emotionally exhausted," and "despondent...

...The bountiful storehouse of details in Bearing the Cross is a reason, unfortunately, for my criticisms of it...

...Another has to do with the pure, simple courage that Martin Luther King Jr...

...It reads as if it were written by a scholar for other scholars...

...Little of that comes through in Bearing the Cross: The book lacks, above all, soul...

...He ended up getting himself involved in an alien world in which he was attacked, challenged, and deceived by some of the most powerful people in the world at the time—J...

...As a reporter, Robert Shaplen covered Indochina for almost thirty years, going back to the time when the French controlled the area...

...the slimy attacks by J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI on King, with the passive and sometimes active assistance of those in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations who publicly portrayed themselves as friends of the Negro, and the blooming of the movement, as it learned how to exploit the press, the predictable violence of its enemies, and the warm bodies of its members in ways that were increasingly sophisticated and often cynical...

...Doctrinaire Marxism is seen as not working: The tendency to create a choking bureaucracy has stifled any economic revival...

...18.95...

...Shaplen believes "a new generation of Vietnamese leaders" must "transcend their narrow nationalism" to rid Indochina of its "inheritance of bitterness...

...309 pp...

...In this aspect, Vietnam resembles Cuba...

...The book is a masterpiece of research, based on scores of contemporary records and hundreds of interviews by the author and more than two dozen other people...

...As jazz critic Whitney Balliett notes, the book was not planned...

...Sometimes the self-examination turned into depression, and one method King had for coping with this was through sexual activity...

...He was exposed almost routinely to the horrors of the Vietnam war: Anyone who doubts U.S...

...Then came years of American bombing along the Cambodian border, coordinated by Tom Enders, the economist who was number-one man at the U.S...

...324 pp...

...The Cambodian story is virtually a book unto itself: We have the charming, erratic Sihanouk establishing independence for the Khmers, who are "racially related to the island Polynesians" rather than the Vietnamese and Thais who have eagerly eyed their rich lands for centuries...

...Bernice Johnson Reagon, one of the SNCC workers who led the singing in the churches, says in the current public television series "Eyes on the Prize" (for which Garrow served as a senior consultant): "If you have a gold mine, then there is a point in the gold mine where you have the richest part...

...An enigmatic exchange, and tighter editing would have improved it...

...One chapter is devoted to what Shaplen calls "The Proud Center," towns such as Danang, Hue, Dongha, Quangtri, and Conthien, where some of the fiercest fighting of the 1960s took place...

...Shaplen shows Sihanouk jockeying to maintain "neutrality" for his nation of possibly ten million among the pressures of the superpowers—the Soviet Union, China, and the United States...

...it just evolved...

...As Rowan's marriage and career falter, the friendship fades and withers...

...Throughout those years, King maintained his belief that he and God were in this thing together...

...The United States, meantime, is stuck with supporting the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia's "official" government in the United Nations simply because of its anti-Vietnam stance...

...Unfortunately, there are no illustrations, and this readable personal encyclopedia lacks an index...

...The irony is compounded by the fact that both the Chinese and Vietnamese insist that their respective systems do not digress from Marxism but denounce each other's as having strayed far from the Marxist-Leninist fold...

...Their friendship on paper stemmed from Rowan's admiration for MacDonald's stories, particularly the Travis McGee series...

...One conclusion is that Garrow, without elaborating, clearly shows just how two-faced and unfaithful many of the movement's purported friends were, particularly those in the Government in Washington...

...he just reports them, without yielding to the temptations of hindsight...

...This delighted J. Edgar Hoover, who was obsessed with bugging and wiretapping King...

...Le Due Tho, like all top Vietnamese officials, wanted "normalization" of relations with the United States, on terms that don't seem to suit the United States...

...The account begins in 1955, with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, when the young Reverend King found himself an involuntary leader...

...He was impressed, as he had been before and during the war, "by how attitudes and behavior still varied between this central part of Vietnam...

...It is the most comprehensive document yet assembled on the civil-rights movement, and it surely will be a basic source for researchers far into the future...

...With his deft use of a tape recorder, Balliett gives his jazz musicians center stage...

...If you can imagine black people at our most powerful point in terms of community and peoplehood, then that's Albany, Georgia...

...Philip Roth writes the best Philip Roth novels...

...And yet, the most striking thing about King's life is that he was so clearly an ordinary person as well as an important one...

...16.95...

...But there are plenty of people who were there and who could have contributed to his account...

...The cast includes Duke Ellington, Marian and Jimmy McPartland, Art Tatum, Earl Hines, Art Hodes, Zoot Sims, Dick Wellstood, and many others...

...There is a detailed bibliography and a superior index...

...One sentence Pentagon brass will not appreciate-but should consider—is this: "In talking to other [Vietnamese] veterans of the French and American wars in Hanoi, I was surprised to discover that most of them had more respect and admiration for the manner in which the French fought than the Americans...

...Bearing the Cross makes amply clear the humanness of Martin Luther King Jr.— including his spells of uncertainty, self-doubt, transgression, and guilt—while never denying that King was the central figure of his era...

...He visited the Chinese border area, which China battered in its "brief and inconclusive attack in 1979...

...Edgar Hoover, a number of Presidents and their aides, many of his own colleagues in the movement, and even Adam Clayton Powell Jr...

...But Shaplen is exemplary in updating the sad stories of Vietnam and Cambodia...

...Most of the material originally appeared in The New Yorker...