In his thoroughly researched and passionately argued book, Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK, author and peace activist James W. Douglass presents a sweeping and unified theory of political murders in the 1960s America. Serving as a long-awaited sequel to his landmark 2008 work, JFK and the Unspeakable, Douglass expand his lens to encompass the killings of four transformative figures: President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. His thesis is stark and profound: these were not isolated acts by lone gunmen, but interconnected political assassinations carried out by a shadowy alliance of forces within the U.S. national security state; including elements of the CIA, FBI, the Mafia, and local police departments, to silence voices that threatened the military-industrial complex and the established order .
Douglass argues that understanding this "hidden history" is essential to grasping the painful consequences for American democracy and for finding a path toward the peace and justice these martyrs envisioned.
The Unspeakable and the National Security State
Douglass borrows the term "the Unspeakable" from the writings of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, using it to describe a force of systemic evil that is beyond conventional understanding—a void of moral accountability into which these four leaders were swallowed. This force is embodied by the national security state, a vast apparatus that, in the name of protecting the nation, operates outside democratic oversight and views any threat to its power as an enemy to be neutralized.
The book painstakingly documents how this apparatus, which had been honed to overthrow foreign leaders, was ultimately turned inward against American citizens who dared to challenge its core tenets: Cold War militarism, institutionalized racism, and an economy built on perpetual war.
A central pillar of Douglass's argument is the "web of people" connecting various agencies and organizations. He demonstrates that the investigations into these assassinations were often led or heavily influenced by individuals with deep ties to the very agencies suspected of complicity, ensuring a cover-up rather than a genuine pursuit of the truth. This pattern of protecting the state by sacrificing its critics is the book's most damning theory.
John F. Kennedy: From Cold Warrior to Peacemaker. The book revisits the story of JFK, establishing the template for the subsequent assassinations. Douglass traces Kennedy's evolution from a conventional Cold Warrior, who stumbled into the Bay of Pigs fiasco, to a leader who stared into the abyss during the Cuban Missile Crisis and emerged as a determined peacemaker. His secret pursuit of peace with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, culminating in the signing of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, was seen as a betrayal by the military-intelligence establishment. His plans to withdraw from Vietnam and his promise to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces" after the Bay of Pigs made him a direct threat to the national security state's power and ideology.
Douglass argues that the forces arrayed against Kennedy, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, Mafia chieftains angered by Robert Kennedy's crackdown, and rogue CIA operatives like those running Operation Northwood: coalesced in Dallas. He contends that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy, framed to take the fall for a conspiracy orchestrated by elements within the intelligence community. The subsequent Warren Commission, led by former CIA Director Allen Dulles (whom Kennedy had fired), was the first major instance of a cover-up being managed by the very people implicated in the crime.
Malcolm X: The Evolution to Human Rights. The assassination of Malcolm X on February 21, 1965, is presented as the next act in this tragic drama. Douglass movingly chronicles Malcolm's spiritual and political transformation following his pilgrimage to Mecca, where he experienced a vision of racial brotherhood that transcended the black separatism of his Nation of Islam years. Upon his return, Malcolm X sought to internationalize the struggle, framing the fight for civil rights as a human rights issue to be brought before the United Nations, linking the oppression of Black Americans to the global anti-colonial movement. This was a far more dangerous threat to U.S. power than his earlier, more inflammatory rhetoric. "It's a time for martyrs now," Malcolm told a friend two days before his death. "If I'm to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That's the only thing that can save this country”.
Douglass connects the dots between the New York Police Department, the FBI, and rogue members of the Nation of Islam, suggesting that law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which had thoroughly infiltrated Black nationalist groups, did nothing to stop the assassination and may have facilitated it. By eliminating Malcolm at that very moment, when he was building a bridge to the third world, the forces of the Unspeakable silenced a powerful voice for global justice.
Martin Luther King Jr.: The Poor People's Campaign and Vietnam. For Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the pivotal moment that sealed his fate was his public opposition to the Vietnam War. In his famous "Beyond Vietnam" speech at Riverside Church in 1967, King linked the war abroad with the injustice at home, condemning the U.S. government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" . This critique transformed him from a respected civil rights leader into a feared radical who threatened the very foundations of American imperialism. Douglass highlights that King was planning a Poor People's Campaign to occupy Washington, D.C. and demand an economic bill of rights for all Americans—a direct challenge to a capitalist system built on racial and economic inequality.
In Memphis, where King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Douglass uncovers a damning pattern of collusion. The Memphis Police Department was led by Frank Holloman, a former FBI agent who had worked directly for J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director who had waged a relentless and illegal war (COINTELPRO) to destroy King. Within 24 hours of King's arrival, his police security detail was "quietly, systematically" removed, leaving him vulnerable to a known assassin. The web of connections between the local police, with its FBI pedigree, and the larger forces of the national security complex is presented as the enabling condition for the murder.
Robert F. Kennedy: The Pursuit of Truth. The final martyr in Douglass's quartet is Robert F. Kennedy, shot on June 5, 1968, moments after winning the California Democratic primary. Douglass argues that RFK, having undergone his own painful evolution, had become the single greatest threat to the state of national security. His campaign for the presidency was built on a platform of peace and justice, echoing the very ideals for which his brother and Dr. King had been killed. More critically, Douglass suggests that RFK, armed with secret knowledge as a former Attorney General, was the only person with the motive and the platform to truly investigate the truth behind his brother's assassination. His victory in California made his path to the nomination unstoppable, and therefore, he had to be stopped.
The cover-up in this case was immediate and blatant. In Los Angeles, the police department, in an unprecedented move, pushed the FBI aside and took sole control of the investigation. They placed a police lieutenant named Manny Pena in charge, a man who, Douglass reveals, was a former CIA operative with extensive experience in Latin America. The investigation was thus led by an agent of the very agency that had the deepest motive to protect the secrets of JFK's death, ensuring that the truth would remain buried.
The Assassination of Folke Bernadotte: A Precursor. While the book focuses on the 1960s, Douglass implicitly connects these American tragedies to an earlier, pivotal assassination: that of Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948. Bernadotte, the first official mediator of the United Nations, was sent to Palestine to negotiate a peace between the newly declared state of Israel and its Arab neighbors. His plan, which proposed internationalizing Jerusalem and repatriating Palestinian refugees, was seen as an existential threat by hardline Zionist factions.
On September 17, 1948, Bernadotte was assassinated in Jerusalem by members of Lehi (the Stern Gang), a militant Zionist group led by figures including Yitzhak Shamir, a future Prime Minister of Israel. A declassified U.S. State Department telegram describes the attack as a "planned, cold blooded attack" by assailants in Israeli Army uniforms. Including Bernadotte's story serves a crucial purpose in Douglass's framework: it demonstrates that the mechanism of political assassination as a tool to silence a peacemaker was not an American invention of the 1960s. It was a brutal practice of the post-World War II order, deployed against a diplomat who, like JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK, had dared to put the cause of peace and human rights above the strategic interests of a powerful and determined faction. It is a chilling precursor to the domestic martyrdoms Douglass documents.
The Painful Consequences and a Call to Action
Ultimately; Martyrs to the Unspeakable is not a work of despair but of somber hope. Douglass wants readers to recognize that these assassinations had, and continue to have, painful consequences. The destruction of these leaders created a void in American political life, a "what if" that haunts the nation. The success of the cover-ups, he argues, entrenched the power of the national security state and fostered a deep and lasting cynicism in the American public's faith in its own government.
However, Douglass's final message is one of resurrection and collective action. He argues that while individuals like JFK, Malcolm X, King, and RFK can change and indeed have changed the course of history through their witness, their ultimate power lies in their example. Their mission was not extinguished with their lives. "They're not dead; they're alive, if we dedicate ourselves to the reasons why they gave their lives for us," he states. He concludes that the only way out of the "mess we find ourselves in" is for people to come together in pursuit of peace and liberty, to continue the work these four martyrs began. The truth of their lives and deaths, he believes, should not just be a source of grief, but an inspiration to carry on their unfinished struggle for a more just and peaceful world.
