Essay: POLITICS & ASSASSINATION

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THROUGHOUT the world, industrialization is spurring millions to want more—and to feel more thwarted when affluence and equality are too slowly achieved. In the highly industrialized U.S., the fever is intensified by racial and generational clashes. The result is impatience with the political process: a yen for direct action has created a charged emotional climate that inflames inherently violent minds.

Robert Kennedy was a natural target for what New York Psychiatrist Frederic Wertham calls "magnicide—the killing of somebody big." Historically, that somebody has often symbolized the political assassin's hated father; in the U.S., such murders are also frequently motivated by simple envy. Democracy, says Harvard Sociologist David Riesman, presents the question: "Why are you so big and why am I so small?" It is not legitimate to be a failure in America. And the frustration of failure adds New York Psychiatrist David Abrahamsen, is "the wet nurse of violence."

Verbal Overkill

Equally inflammatory to unstable minds is the rising hyperbole of U.S. political debate. Race, Viet Nam, crime— all lend themselves to verbal overkill, not so much by candidates as by extremists: the John Birchers, the Rap Browns, the most ardent war critics, the Ku Kluxers. The evidence is everywhere. In Dallas, Assistant District Attorney William Alexander snarls on a TV show: "Earl Warren shouldn't be impeached—he should be hanged." Cries Rap Brown: "How many whites did you kill today?" Lyndon Johnson is routinely excoriated as a mass murderer. Robert Kennedy was branded by San Francisco hippies as a "fascist pig." Eventually verbal assassination becomes physical assassination.

"Assassination," George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "is the extreme form of censorship." In most U.S. cases, the assassins have indeed dedicated themselves to blotting out viewpoints that disagree with their own. When Sirhan Sirhan was seized after the shooting of Robert Kennedy, he cried: "I can explain! Let me explain!" The appalling thing is that he really thought that he could.

Many foreigners fear that U.S. violence is rapidly becoming almost banal, espoused by Maoists and Minutemen alike, routinely threatened—if not actually practiced—by students, racial militants and antiwar dissenters. Such fears sound odd coming from, say, the impeccably rational Frenchmen who only recently applauded student anarchists in Paris. Even so, the U.S. is undeniably starting to lead all advanced Western countries in what Swedish Economist Gunnar Myrdal calls "the politics of assassination." No French President has been murdered since 1932; West German leaders go virtually unguarded; the last (and only) assassination of a British Prime Minister occurred in 1812.