King specials remember the achievements -- and the loss

Reliving the turbulent year of 1968 40 years later might be even harder than it was to live through it the first time.

We already have another knockdown, drag-out Democratic presidential campaign going with a chaotic convention in sight. Now comes a series of specials commemorating the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. -- with Robert F. Kennedy no doubt to follow.

The new deployment of prime-time TV series after the writers' strike can't get here soon enough, because reliving the past in this anniversary year figures to be a major bummer.

That's the case with two very fine, but very depressing new King specials coming this weekend. One takes an overview of his life, emphasizing the triumphs, but it leaves a viewer mourning the immense loss of a great man killed before he was 40 years old. The other focuses more specifically on the actual assassination, and proves to be even more of a downer because of the uncertainty even yet surrounding it -- and the potential government involvement.

The latter of those two actually comes first, as the ambitious new occasional series "CNN Presents: Black in America" starts out with the auspicious "Eyewitness to Murder: The King Assassination," a two-hour documentary debuting at 8 p.m. today on the all-news channel.

"The full story has yet to be told, and we'll try," says reporter-host Soledad O'Brien, who will be the lead correspondent on the "Black in America" series.

It might come as a shock to some that the murderer is still in doubt. Jumping ahead for a moment to the History Channel's new "King" documentary, reporter-host Tom Brokaw will hear that there's very little argument that James Earl Ray pulled the trigger on King's murder weapon.

Yet O'Brien sows much doubt, pointing out that the FBI considered King "the most dangerous Negro leader in the country," that it sent compromising hotel tapes to King's wife (also reported in "King"), that Ray was befriended by a mysterious man named Raoul before the murder and, perhaps most eerie of all, that two of the few black police officers and firefighters in Memphis were reassigned from their usual duties near the Lorraine Hotel on the day King was shot there.

Even allowing that Ray might have pulled off a downstate Illinois bank robbery in the months before the murder, his choice of ride (a white '66 Mustang) and his adroit movements after the assassination (he had little difficulty getting to Canada, then England, where he was caught and extradited) are beyond what one would expect of a small-time criminal.

Ray at first confessed, then attempted to withdraw the confession and denied firing the murder shot to the end. One witness suggests he was a "nebbish," better suited as a stooge than an assassin. His denials were later accepted by King's heirs and even former aides like Andrew Young.

Much of this is circumstantial, but keep in mind, this is CNN and Soledad O'Brien reporting, not some fringe conspiracy theorist.

The two-hour "King" debuts at 7 p.m. Sunday on the History Channel. It's a pity it doesn't come first because it really tells his story in its entirety, going back to his involvement in the Birmingham, Ala., bus boycott, then up through his 1963 "I have a dream" speech at the march on Washington, D.C., and on through his Nobel Peace Prize win and his increased radicalization in the later '60s, opposing poverty and, most stinging to President Johnson, the Vietnam War.

Yet just as the twin assassinations of King and RFK marked 1968, five years earlier the Birmingham church bombing, resulting in the deaths of four little girls, was followed two months later by the John F. Kennedy assassination.

"If they'll kill a president, I won't live to be 40," King predicted all too accurately.

As Andrew Young says in "Eyewitness to Murder," that sense of dread lent urgency to King's actions. And, as he adds in "King": "It was never important to us who killed Martin Luther King. We knew what killed Martin Luther King."

Whatever one's beliefs on entrenched racism and government conspiracies, these two specials are not to be missed. And if they're unrelentingly depressing taken together, that's what the 40th anniversary mourning this great man is in large part about.