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?