Time Essay: The Wars of Assassination

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To many, assassination appears to have become a kind of international adventure serial, available both in paperback and next door, and so is to be considered as something quasi-fictional, set apart by razzle-dazzle technology and melodrama from the life of real grief and real blood. The bestselling Matarese Circle has at the base of its plot the idea of the original assassins, the hashshashin, a bunch of hashheads who practiced contract murders at the behest of an "Old Man of the Mountains." We have had Three Days of the Condor, one Day of the Jackal, even a Day of the Dolphin—all equally preposterous and plausible, thanks to the strapped imaginations of real-life bureaucrats. Who but a hack could have thought up 1978's Bulgarian defector "poison umbrella" caper in London? The first time a dolphin is hauled in for questioning, who will giggle?

Perhaps fiction writers have hit on a truth that murderous regimes have always known: that many people secretly admire murders, even real ones, provided they can be kept at a respectable distance and performed with a touch of class. After all, murder can be the most romantic, if temporary, solution to a problem, which is why the Romantics could not get enough of it. Thomas De Quincey, the Romantic essayist, went so far as to propose "Murder as One of the Fine Arts." Historian Franklin Ford observed, in a brilliant article in Harvard magazine (February 1976), that throughout most of the 18th century there were no important political murders in Europe or America (until the final decade, when the Age of Reason could no longer contain itself) primarily because that period was notably short on fanaticism. Not so the 20th century. It has given birth to a cause a minute, and causes make heroes, and heroes targets.

It may also be that the world has never really shaken its revolutionary cast of mind since that final decade of the 18th century, when the French Reign of Terror wed murder to freedom. All the revolutions since have sealed the knot, if only theoretically, and somewhere in the modern mind may lie the automatic connection of assassination with something good and hopeful. That would be especially true of places where corrupt administrations are unseated at gunpoint. The assassin states in turn may depend on that connection, trusting that the elimination of ex-employees of defunct governments will be held akin to the expunging of the Tsars.