King and his killer

In the late days of the Bush administration, it was fashionable among liberals to call George W. Bush the ‘worst’ president since the founding of the republic and to suggest that under his leadership America experienced its own version of the Dark Ages.

In the late days of the Bush administration, it was fashionable among liberals to call George W. Bush the ‘worst’ president since the founding of the republic and to suggest that under his leadership America experienced its own version of the Dark Ages.

Even allowing for Bush’s considerable ignorance and malevolent world view, those contemporary doomsayers had forgotten recent history. As bad as the Bush era was, the moral and political nadir of modern America more likely took place, as Hampton Sides’s brilliant narrative reminds us, under Lyndon Johnson’s liberal Democratic administration during the the two months beginning 4 April, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

It was then that an escaped convict and drifter, living under an alias, aimed a high-powered hunting rifle at Martin Luther King, Jr’s head and squeezed the trigger.