Opinion: Caricature of the U.S.

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Even in the best of times, nations tend to view one another in caricature and stereotype. Riots, assassinations and Viet Nam have all contributed, justly or unjustly, to an image of an increasingly violent U.S. in the eyes of much of the world. In the first few hours after the shooting of Robert Kennedy, the outpouring of shock and sorrow from the public figures and press of the world expressed considerably more than the simple hope for Kennedy's survival. Much of it consisted of messages addressed to the American people and American society that said, in effect: Get well.

LAND OF THE GUN, headlined a London Sun editorial. "Violence has become the brutal hallmark of the most prosperous and most powerful nation on earth." Added Britain's Lord Harlech, a longtime friend of Kennedy: "Violence in the U.S. has become a world scandal." France, which came within an inch of violent collapse last month, found time in its recovery to fret over U.S. government: "America dreamed of a government of judges," said Paris' Le Monde, "but it suffers the law of violent people." Said Combat of Paris: "America is mad." The Times of India, where politically inspired mob action is not uncommon, found something "radically wrong" with a society that "harbors" fanatics. "The American society is sick," said the Frankfurter Rundschau, "sicker than most Americans want to admit."

Fact Observed. Communist nations were first to moralize about American violence. Contending that on-camera political assassination had become "a real American way of life," Izvestia declared that "Imperialism carries violence within itself." Russian Poet Evgeny Evtushenko warned: "You're firing at yourself, America. If you go on, you'll really kill yourself." Hanoi had a particular worry, reflecting its view of Kennedy as a man determined to halt the war. "American imperialism," said North Vietnamese Trade Leader Hoang Quog Viet, will now "run berserk on the battlefields of Viet Nam" as a result of the shooting.

There were some reappraisals abroad when the news came that Kennedy's suspected killer was less a product of U.S. society than of the festering hatred of the Middle East. "After we had all written about violence and cankers in American society," wrote London Daily Mirror Columnist George Gale somewhat soberly, "it came in a way as a sort of relief and undoubted surprise that Robert Kennedy was allegedly killed by an Arab for perfectly understandable political reasons." However, that fact, he predicted, will "become generally obscured," and indeed it was obscure enough in the continuing world comment.