Viewers would probably prefer a warts-and-all Dr King biopic. But his legacy is worth protecting
Question: what do Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and Martin Luther King Jr have in common? Answer: both are suspected of having plagiarised their PhD theses. A 1980s committee of investigation went further, in the case of MLK, and put on record that his doctorate was undeserved. Had young Martin's examiners failed his thesis, as they should have done, and drummed him out of Boston University in disgrace, he could have gone on to dream all he wanted – and posterity would, for the larger part, never have heard of him.
King died, by a still-mysterious assassin's hand, 43 years ago today. And the dream he proclaimed on 28 August 1963 has gone some way to being realised, with an African American in the White House. It should be a time of rejoicing.
It isn't. It's a time of ignominious squabbling. Paul Greengrass, the British film director, has been rudely decommissioned by Universal Studios from doing a big budget biopic of King after protest from the family. The Kings' objections have been made public by Andrew Young – a black city mayor and comrade of King in the 1960s. Having pored over the script, these defenders of "the legacy" determined that Greengrass was intending to concentrate overly on "trivia".
The PhD jiggery-pokery is one such trivial thing. Weightier, probably, is the evidence of the microphones the odious J Edgar Hoover had the FBI put under MLK's bedsprings as he lodged in motels in his civil rights marches across America. There were, as the biographer David Garrow has established, flagrant infidelities. Hoover, one is told, circulated recordings of the black leader's "catting around" in his bizarre quest to prove that he was a communist stooge.
The family would rather Greengrass had followed the line of Coretta King's wifely My Life With Martin Luther King Jr. Or, as Young put it, they wanted "someone to do with Martin Luther King what Sir Richard Attenborough did with Gandhi". Steven Spielberg is said to be willing to be that someone.
Meanwhile the latest biography of Gandhi, by Joseph Lelyveld, has been denounced in India and banned in Gujarat (Gandhi's home state) for delving into his sexual tastes. And the History Channel had commissioned a mini-series, The Kennedys, due to start this week; but at the last minute it has caved into pressure on grounds of too much attention to "trivia' – sex, drugs, mafiosi. The series was, it has said, "not fit for the History Channel" (not history?).
This nervousness about how to square biography with hagiography focuses attention on the primary problem in all commemoration of the great and the good. On one side are those like Thomas Carlyle, who was convinced that humans needed icons to hold them together as communities. In a godless age the iconic slot is filled by biography of great men – and, if necessary, bucketfuls of whitewash.
There is an alternative doctrine more popular today – what one might call the blackwash biography. It takes as its premise the belief that only after death, when libel no longer threatens, can the truth be told. Blackwash justifies itself in ways that can be worthy or prurient. The worthy justification is that the public does not have to be deluded to make correct judgments. There are, however, occasional practical considerations that justify pussy-footing, even suppression. During the Monica Lewinsky feeding frenzy Bill Clinton was neutered, incapable of carrying out the duties of office with the kerfuffle about stains on blue dresses and the exact configuration of the presidential penis.
It might have been disastrously distracting if, during the Cuban missile crisis, it had been known the Kennedy brothers were passing Marilyn Monroe round between them. The great affairs of the world are more important than such trivia. MLK's vision has not yet been entirely fulfilled. Until it is his legacy must be protected, as was the Kennedys' public reputation. If that requires a bucketful of whitewash, so be it. The continuing struggle for civil rights is non-trivial.
Nonetheless, I would much rather see Greengrass's film than Spielberg's. Wouldn't you?