Episode list

The opening installment of an unprecedented multi-part documentary series, filmed primarily from the vantage point of their children, close associates, and witnesses to their assassinations. Four Died Trying considers the "turning" President John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy were making in the last year or so of their lives. Were they embracing ever-broader conceptions of the struggle for peace, social change and economic justice, and what forces may have stirred in opposition? What lessons do their lives and deaths hold for us today, as the world once again trembles on the cliff of an uncertain future?

Chapter 1 : "The World as It Was" reexamines America's original cancel culture: McCarthyism, the Red Scare, and the Blacklist, revealing the entrenched prejudices and extreme tensions of the Cold War that JFK had to overcome to become President of the United States. Director John Kirby says, " To properly understand that history, we realized that people who never knew or had forgotten about the post-World War Two Red Scare would have to be told the story. That was how 'The World As It Was' was born, and in revisiting that era we were struck by the way it 'rhymed' with today...It illustrates a simpler age, when the term for 'cancelled' was 'blacklisted,' when Russians were called 'Soviets,' and 'shelter in place' was pronounced 'duck and cover.' It was the era of Joe McCarthy and the Military-Industrial Complex, the crucial Cold War run-up to the 1960's, where most of our saga of heroism and horror takes place. But as astute viewers and critics have already pointed out, 'The World as it Was' is eerily similar to the world as it is. "