Paranoia runs deep in 1960s

Published 5:00 am Sunday, May 2, 2010

Looking back at the late 1960s through the prism of “Hair” and the Beatles’ White Album, it seems like an appealing era. It was. But it was also frightening and ugly. Hampton Sides conjures the full paranoia in “Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin” (Doubleday, $28.95).

Sides is a crack research artist with a feel for both halves of the American chronicle, the grandeur and the violence. In his last book, “Blood and Thunder” — a thrilling history of the conquest of the West — he confronted a national horror, the subjugation of the Navajos, without tarring the heroism of the settlers. It was a feat of narrative subtlety.

The period he’s writing about this time is altogether more depressing. Cities burned. Vietnam festered, driving an ugly wedge between King and his former ally, President Lyndon B. Johnson. King’s murder, by a lowlife George Wallace fanatic named James Earl Ray, hastened the denouement (Sides’s word) of the civil rights movement.

Sides structures the book around the contrasting personalities of King (ebullient, sorrowful) and Ray (barely there). King wasn’t feeling triumphant at the end of his life. He was weary and distraught over the direction of his movement. American blacks had grown increasingly angry and impatient, and violence simmered everywhere.

Soon after his murder, Sides reports, fires broke out in about 150 American cities, “resulting in 40 deaths, thousands of injuries, and some 21,000 arrests.”

Johnson himself said, in a moment of despair, “If I were a kid in Harlem, I know what I’d be thinking. I’d be thinking that whites had declared open season on my people — that they’re going to pick us off one by one unless I get a gun and pick them off first.”

As for the killer, the author stays right next to him from April 23, 1967, the day he escaped from the Missouri State Penitentiary, where he was serving time for armed robbery, to June 8, 1968, when he was seized at Heathrow Airport in London nine weeks after King’s assassination.

Since “Hellhound on His Trail” is a tale of clear good and evil, it lacks the moral complexity of “Blood and Thunder.” That makes it a somewhat lesser book. But it’s still a page turner, and something more: It brings the disquiet of an era fully alive.