Assassination in America

Back in the day I took a 400-level history course on political assassinations in America.  It was a fascinating course in general, and one that brought up an interesting pattern in American politics as related to assassination.  See, everyone assumes that assassins kill for a larger purpose.  We attach that larger purpose to the zeitgeist of the time and attach a desire to assassinate to those who stand the most to gain.  If there’s no actual evidence combining those two topics, we invent self-replicating conspiracy theories and spin them to the Nth degree.[1]

This is an idea that makes sense.  Assassination has always been a tool of the political class.  In societies run by monarchs and strong men when the leader or the heir apparent died suddenly the person most likely to have killed him was the person who now found himself on the throne.[2]  “Who gained the most from King So-and-So’s untimely death?” was, therefore, a useful yardstick for interpretation.

It becomes less useful in a democracy, however.  In a situation specifically designed to offer the possibility of complete government overhaul every few years and with an idea of a specifically designated divine ruler completely removed the idea of assassination to ascend the throne is mitigated.  The idea, say, of a scheming LBJ assassinating JFK just to become President is, in a word, laughable.[3]  In fact, the standard, “Who stands the most to gain?” rubric becomes nearly useless in the face of the history of political assassination in the United States.

Let’s start by looking at the assassinations we can say were primarily politically motivated:

1.  Abraham Lincoln:  John Wilkes Booth and his cabal of co-conspirators wanted to kill Abraham Lincoln to help the South win the Civil War.  They also tried to take out Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward, but failed miserably.  The plan was botched and the reasoning unsound, as this was after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and the only army the CSA could still field was Joe Johnston’s Army of Tennessee, which was basically shadowing Sherman’s army through the Carolinas due to the fact that Johnston couldn’t hope to win a fight.  Johnston surrendered a week after Lincoln’s assassination, anyway.

2.  James Garfield:  Charles J. Giteau shot Garfield and announced, “I am a Stalwart of Stalwarts and Arthur is president now.”  The Stalwarts were a breed of Republicans who were basically big fans of the old-school system of patronage.  Garfield was a reformer who ran with the Stalwart Chester A. Arthur as his running mate to keep the party together.  Giteau had attempted to get a patronage job from Garfield but was rebuffed, so his response was to put a Stalwart in office through any means necessary.[4]  Not only did Giteau not get a job, but the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was pushed through in honor of Garfield’s legacy.

3.  William McKinley:  Leon Czolgosz was an anarchist.  He shot McKinley in an act of anarchist activism after the assassination of King Umberto I of Italy.  Apparently he wanted to change the world.  For anarchy.  Or something.  The point is that this one totally doesn’t fit in to any convenient benefit analysis, as anarchists aren’t well known for hewing to a two-party system.

4.  John F. Kennedy:  Lee Harvey Oswald was well known as a wannabe Communist operator.  He lived in Russia for a bit before getting kicked out.  He then tried to contact anyone and everyone involved in Communist Party operations wherever he went in America.  It’s my theory that he just happened to end up in the right place at the right time to kill Kennedy and saw that as his chance to prove to everyone who had snubbed him that he was an important operator.  Even if I’m wrong and there was a conspiracy, the most likely conspirators were Communists or the Mafia, meaning that no one stood to gain directly from the death of John F. Kennedy.  Y’know, if we take away the ever-so-minor possibility that LBJ did it, which I think we can safely do.

That’s the list.  Four assassinations of major political figures with politics as a motivating factor.  Only the Lincoln assassination was clearly cut-and-dry in terms of why the assassins did it and who stood to gain.  The Garfield assassination was based on what appear to be purely personal reasons.  The McKinley assassination was more of an abrupt statement than anything else.  The Kennedy assassination was…well, that one was complicated.  It’s my belief that the reasons were more personal than political and no one was explicitly backing Oswald up, but that’s just me.

The Kennedy assassination was far different than the previous assassinations, however.  Lee Harvey Oswald gained an instant infamy that escaped Czolgosz, Giteau, and Booth.  That infamy also long outlasted Czolgosz’s and Giteau’s.  The reason for this was simple: media proliferation.  The world experienced that dark day in Dallas and the events which followed in real time over the radio and through television.  The name of Lee Harvey Oswald imprinted itself upon an entire generation and stayed there.  He joined the not-so-storied list of people who will be remembered forever for that briefest moment on the world stage that included John Wilkes Booth, Gavrilo Princip, and, well, no one I can really think of at the moment.  But several names would be added later: Sirhan Sirhan, John Hinckley, Jr., and Arthur Bremer.  Let’s take a look at the men they assassinated (or tried to) to get their stories.

1.  George Wallace: Arthur Bremer was, basically, a loser.  He seemed to think that everyone would respect him if he could kill then-President Richard Nixon.  George Wallace turned out to be a pretty good target, too.  Bremer failed to kill Wallace, but the shot nicked Wallace’s spine, paralyzing him from the waist down and basically ending his chances of being elected president.  As Wallace’s outright racism was threatening to tear the Republican Party apart in a post-Civil Rights world, it could be argued that Bremer was acting as the agent of a conspiracy.  Evidence indicates that this is not the case and that he truly did achieve his primary goal of gaining notoriety.  In fact, the character of Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver was based on Bremer.

2.  Robert F. Kennedy:  Sirhan Sirhan’s motivations for killing RFK are confused at best.  They could be called purely political, as one of the strongest connections we have is between RFK’s stated support for Israel and Sirhan Sirhan’s streak of extreme anti-Semitism.  The problem is that I don’t see the assassination of RFK as being particularly political, but more a combination of religious zealotry and mental instability.  Like his brother, there were many people who stood to lose a lot of RFK had lived and won the Presidency.  Evidence that anyone backed Sirhan Sirhan is scant, and mostly based on the fact that Sirhan himself is either not willing or able to offer any really specific or consistent accounts of what led him to kill RFK.  So we just don’t know.

3.  Ronald Reagan:  John Hinckley, Jr. became obsessed with a young Jodie Foster, who starred opposite Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle in the movie Taxi Driver.  He then attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan to get her attention.  Life imitates art imitates life.

These are mere blurbs that can’t pretend to achieve the level of biography.  But what we get is a composite image of the US assassin as a failed loner who is probably mentally unstable looking to make an impact on the world.  The only real exception is John Wilkes Booth, who is also part of the only absolutely known conspiracy of assassins.

What, then, is my point?

A gunman opened fire in Tucson, AZ on Saturday.  He very nearly killed US Rep Gabrielle Giffords – his primary target – and did kill several bystanders, including a Federal Court judge and a nine-year old girl.  I know that as soon as I saw that Giffords is a Democrat in largely Republican (with extra wingnut flavor) Arizona my first thought was, “Uh oh.”  I then knew exactly how the story was going to be spun: gun-toting Tea Partier opens fire on a liberal Representative: blame it on Limbaugh, Beck, and Coulter!  On Fox News, though, the story would have been all about how one particular tiny bit of evidence proved that the shooter was actually a radical leftist involved in a false flag operation.  Then we would get the moralizing over toning down the rhetoric with Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground, and that one time that one guy on the internet said, “ZOMG, I just wish Sarah Palin would die already!” as proof that the Left is just as full of violent hate speech as the Right.

Then we were all reminded of Sarah Palin’s crosshairs map that included Giffords’ district and were treated to the immediate disappearance of said map and an explanation that the crosshairs were just “surveyors’ marks” from Rebecca Mansour, who is in charge of Palin’s internet operations.  The problem with that is that Palin herself called them crosshairs, she has been using weaponry-related images, and she did kinda-sorta break in to the public sphere with a prominent picture of her wearing a stars and stripes bikini and holding an AR-15.[5]  There was also the chilling reminder of the event that Giffords’ opponent held an event to “get on target” to remove Giffords from office and fire a fully automatic M16 with her opponent, Jesse Kelly.  There were also reminders of Sharon Angle and her “Second Amendment solutions” to the ills of the country.

Suddenly we had the entire story and the counter story.  It was the fault of the rhetoric on the Right and the constant demonization of all Democrats with the addition of gun-related imagery that pushed Laughner over the edge.  The counter story, then, was that we shouldn’t be politicizing this and we can’t blame the fact that a pretty obviously mentally unstable guy chose to shoot his Representative on political rhetoric.  It’s all metaphorical, after all.

The image I get of Loughner is somewhere closer to a combination Czolgosz and Bremer than anything else.  Evidence indicates that he developed anti-government obsessions before Sarah Palin showed up on the national scene and his influences aren’t nearly so straightforward as, “Limbaugh made me do it!”  Chances are he is mentally unstable and was a ticking time bomb no matter the politics of the day.

This doesn’t matter, though.  While Gabrielle Giffords was the target on Saturday, the real victim was democracy in America.  Our system is built on the assumption that people can respectfully disagree and that we can all be grown ups and create a strong society by agreeing on the big stuff even if we disagree on the little things.  That idea has been hijacked by ever-more-divisive political rhetoric and increasingly eliminationist framing.  You simply cannot spend months on end referring to someone as the Devil and suggesting that person needs to be shot and then turn around and say, “So let’s work together for a better country.”  You can’t work together with evil and must, instead, eliminate it.

Painting as evil some people who disagree on a few policy issues, then, is not a good way of acting like grown ups in a democracy.  It has to be said that this is mostly a product of the Right at the moment.  That doesn’t mean it’s always been that way, as these things seem to shift over time.  But no one was painting crosshairs on Republican districts last year.  Harry Reid wasn’t calling for “Second Amendment solutions.”  No one was showing up at McCain rallies openly carrying AR-15s.

That does not matter, however.  Loughner’s actions on Saturday are immaterial.  Even if he hadn’t opened fire in a crowded grocery store we know that rhetoric about killing political opponents is absolutely wrong.  Even if we can find definitive proof that he did it because his dog told him to we know that rhetoric about killing political opponents has no place in a civil and civilized society.

It’s really too bad that this won’t be the lesson we’ll learn.  We’ll instead bicker for a while about whose fault it was.  Then we’ll advance a few “solutions” that don’t actually get to the root of the problem.  Then we’ll forget about the whole thing in a couple weeks and nothing substantive will change.  We’ll just slide down the next rung of barbarity while the country burns down around our ears.

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[1]Read up on the theories surrounding JFK’s assassination.  If I recall, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 interested parties that could have had reason to want it to happen and each of those parties has had an entire theory developed.  It’s fascinating, really.

And don’t even get me started on Jack Ruby’s killing of Lee Harvey Oswald.  That added a whole other layer of conspiracy theory.

[2]I can pretty much use the masculine pronoun in this case, as the vast majority of rulers were men.  However, there were a few cases where this was not so clear-cut.  Several of the dowager Empresses of Byzantium were not to be trifled with, for one.  In most cases if a woman was behind an assassination, she did it for the benefit of her husband or son, however, and operated as a Grand Vizier due to the fact that women were generally not bestowed with the divine right of rule.

[3]It has been advanced as one of the conspiracy theories, though.  I believe that the train of “evidence” goes: LBJ was a Texan.  JFK was shot in Texas.  So, hey, why not?

This isn’t a particularly mainstream theory, by the by.  My prof in said history class mentioned it once and that was barely in passing.  I would have completely dismissed it as an actual theory except I have seen it batted about in other places.  But it’s somewhere below the Russians, the Cubans, and the Mafia on the list of people who totally killed JFK.

[4]For the record, Garfield’s chief physician was Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss.  He was a doctor, but his name was also Doctor.

Rumors that he stepped out of a mysteriously out of place Police call box mere moments after Giteau opened fire are spurious at best…

[5]Apparently that pic was a Photoshop.  D'oh.  Still, it's not like we couldn't come up with other gun-related stuff.  Thanks, though, AT.

Comments

[jessa]

Hear, hear!

[AT]

Good stuff. I'll be sharing this.

...But the stars n' stripes bikini pic was 'shopped. The underlying point about Palin's fixation on gun violence is good; I'd just hate to see it get derailed by a triviality.

[Big A]

They may be taken down now, but Loughner had a YouTube channel filled with rants about how the government was attempting to brainwash us all and how it was imperative to switch to a gold-based currency yesteryear. The guy was delusional, plain and simple.

When I saw Loughner's YouTube rantings I immediately thought of Hinkley - there's just no useful way to make sense out of an act committed by someone who's mind was in a different world.