New book covers King's troubled last years

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History may freeze-frame the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as the heroic dreamer who thrilled the crowd at the March on Washington, but Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch takes a look at a far more troubled King in the latest Time magazine, which includes excerpts from Branch's upcoming book.

"At Canaan's Edge," which examines the turbulent last three years of King's life, is the final volume of Branch's civil rights trilogy. The 771-page book captures King at a point when everything seemed to be collapsing around him. He had lost President Lyndon Johnson's support. He was being harassed by the FBI and critics of nonviolence. Even the loyalty of his inner circle was fraying.

In the eight-page Time excerpt, Branch explains why King had been abandoned. The Atlanta-born pastor had decided to broaden the civil rights movement by coming out against the Vietnam War and by organizing a multiracial coalition of poor people to march on Washington for economic equality. The dreamer of 1963 was a lot more radical than people realized.

Branch even broaches the most delicate issue in King's life --- reporting two incidents of marital infidelity. "King's formidable armor wore down in midlife, draining assurance from his glib mantra as a young scholar that many great men of religion had been obsessed with sex," Branch writes, recounting one of King's affairs.

Instead of crumbling under the increasing pressure, King's "passion and rhetoric reach new levels of grace," says Time's introduction to the excerpt.

An example of his brilliance comes in an off-the-cuff remark to critics who said nonviolence was obsolete and riots more effective.

"Riots just don't pay off," King said. "For if we say that power is the ability to effect change, or the ability to achieve purpose, then it is not powerful to engage in an act that does not do that --- no matter how loud you are, and no matter how much you burn."

The excerpt ends with the act of violence that took King's life. He is standing on the balcony of a Memphis hotel in 1968 when a shot rings out. Branch writes: "King stood still for once, and his sojourn on earth went blank."