THE POLITICS OF ASSASSINATION:

...Yet, however we trim the hedge of law and language, there will be cases in which assassination must be considered if not praised...

...The situations which justify assassination-indipensa-bility and usurpation-are severely limited, to be sure...

...We fear that assassination, like all political vio-lence, may-if it has not already-become a habit in our domestic political life...

...All our fears are well-founded, but they become selfdefeating if we seek to abolish political judgment and power where they must exist, most notably in foreign af-fairs but also in the great domestic crises like energy and the economy...

...An assassination would not change our government, and would only inspire our indignation...

...At some level, we all know how powerful such feel-ings are, and it is that knowledge that makes us appro-priately fearful of allowing anyone, and especially secret agencies like the CIA, a legitimate excuse for political murder...

...Until the tyrant was in his sights, he deceived himself into the belief that he only hunted for sport-it was an admittedly uneasy peacetime and bush-whacking was bad form...

...It did not help to rid Rome of Caesar or South Vietnam of Diem...

...Too, while crisis may lead a nation to turn to dictatorship (America has done so, for all practical purposes, during her major wars), once-necessary dictators are often tempted to cling to their powers after the crisis which justified them has vanished...

...We are anxious about the survival of our own institutions, not the lives of foreign dictators...

...In the days of Manhunt, Nazi spies did not set out, even in fiction, to assassinate our leading political figures...

...In Greece, to take only one ex-ample, liberal Americans repeatedly denounced the government for failing to do more to oppose the former military junta...

...It is even less true that we have relative immu-nity because of any deep feelings of public spirit or devotion to law...

...Indeed, the general rule is that dictators at-tempt to perpetuate popular acquiescence or support by vi eating crises, which makes tyranny the subject of just suspicion and possible interference on the part of out-siders and the international community as a whole...

...Suspecting that no one matters at all, we create myths and fantasies in which some people matter totally...

...However, if the tyrant is in some real sense indispen-sable, if his guile or genius is itself a major asset of his regime, it may be hard to argue against assassination...

...Our great industrial and governmental bureaucracies rumble mindlessly on, smash-ing old institutions, habits and ways of life, constantly changing and undeflectable...

...The story mirrored the lesson learned by pre-war generations: international politics is not a game: evil men and forces exist in the world...

...Americans need no lessons, after Watergate, in the ways in which ordinary men, not so different from the rest of us, can use the cover and color of the law...

...Repeatedly, the liberal community calls on the State Department to pressure some unpleasant foreign government to be more democratic or more libertarian...

...Nixon's presidency and subsequent revelations suggest what a shambles that government has become...

...Audiences were disappointed, and felt better when Pidgeon, having experienced a series of Nazi bar-barities, parachuted into Germany (this time, during the war) to have another try...

...But, while a lunatic might try to shoot a president or some other political figure, we were assured that there was no rational motive for doing so...

...For another view on the topic of assassination, see editorial on page 259...

...The attempt to correct the abuse of public power by absolute prohibition and law is an old one in America, but one which is most often either futile or destructive of our ability to apply public power to public purposes...

...Like an avalanche, one might say, except that an avalanche does not evoke the haunt-ing awareness that these great forces and organizations are human contrivances, in some sense things of our making and un-making...

...Indeed, the Agency would have been irresponsible if it had not at least considered assas-sination, as Pidgeon's admirers realized...

...And with reason...

...Of course, change is not always for the better, and the odds in favor of change for the worse are very high in dictatorial regimes...

...We know all this, and it makes us all a bit mad...

...It is probably still true that in the great industrial states an assassination does not have a major impact on policy, although we have certainly learned how critical the marginal difference can be between excellent and debased leadership...

...THE EDITORS...

...Nor is it true that those, like Senator Church, who are most outraged at evidence of CIA involvement, are op-posed to intervention in the domestic governance of an-other state...

...Judgment is critical, and we are wise to be cautious with and concerned to limit the CIA, whose record for suc-cess-let alone political acumen or moral sensibility- does not inspire confidence...

...And not far down the road from that impulse lies totalitarianism...

...In Manhunt, cast as a gallant English gentleman in the months before World War II, Walter Pidgeon stalked Adolf Hitler...

...Today, Senator Church is stalking the assassins, sup-ported by the great majority of liberals and applauded on many editorial pages and in the media...

...We hunger for authority, and fear our desire for it...

...In Aristotle's time, it was already trite to observe that the great weakness of even an effective tyranny is that it depends on one human being and that killing the tyrant may be the easiest and least humanly expensive method of change...

...And these days, to lack that power is to make ourselves even more the prisoners of the great impersonal forces we fear, a circular politics which could easily become a political danse macabre...

...The last argument of kings, war is the preferred and often the first self-justification of tyrants...

...Sometimes, to be sure, they set out to kill or kidnap a scientist (a theme that became even more pop-ular in the "atom spy" days of the early Cold War), for according to the popular mystique, scientists of genius were indispensable...

...Not so long ago, we thought ourselves reasonably immune...

...Most liberals, probably, would not be unhappy with cov-ert support for "democratic forces" in a tyrannical state, and almost all liberals support the use of economic coer-cion to achieve their ends...

...Senator Church would hardly be numbered among the admirers of the late General Trujillo...

...I do not know whether the Agency has connived at the murder of foreign rulers, though I have always assumed that it did from time to time...

...We were convinced, still, that this was a "govern-ment of laws" which had dispensed with the need for "enlightened statesmen," as Madison promised it would...

...Our relative stability is most strongly supported by the inertia of great bureaucratic regimes, the frustrating immobility produced by complexity and organizations of great size...

...Political crisis and civic corruption are necessary conditions of tyranny, and despots tend to perpetuate both...

...In severely limited circumstances, assassination is an appropriate technique of foreign policy, and the current mood of absolute condemnation says more about the quality of our domestic political life than it does about interna-tional affairs...

...Assassination is a relatively small matter, and we can probably afford a mistake...

...The truth of the charges against the Central Intelli-gence Agency does not concern me here...

...assassina-ting one dictator may only install a worse one or do no more than add instability and an anxiously suspicious ruler to the woes of a state...

...Rather, the assumption behind the investigations seems to be that assassination, at least in peacetime, is always wrong even if the hunted is politically odious...

...That self-delusion produced a fatal delay...

...Without Hitler, Germany would not have been a pleasant state-military authoritarianism might have been the best hope-but it would, in all probability, have been less effective and quite possibly more humane...

...It indicates, nevertheless, how easily we become diverted by small matters and facile answers, and how easily we ignore the real task: restor-ing a politics which provides the conviction and experi-ence that political life can matter, and which builds the public spirit and the sense of personal dignity which are the true foundation of a government of laws...

...The target of the alleged plots does not seem to matter...

...Assassination, in the era of World War II, was moral and heroic if you picked the right target...

...If assassination makes no crucial difference, it is not because the "government of laws" is in high order...

...The urge to assas-sinate is only the other side of the yearning to create tyrants worth assassinating...

...We do not even have the security of knowing that things will remain as they are...

...Compared to that danger, assassination may be a minor moral or political risk...

...We have, for some time, been engaged in a Manhunt of our own, not because we are setting out to slay a a tyrant, but because we seek some evidence that human will, intention and personality can matter in politics...

...Not that we can do much about it: individual people do not matter except as parts of social categories...

...Our current anxieties regarding assassination, how-ever, have a better and more alarming justification than that...

...at some cost to detente, the Senate sought to use economic power to change Soviet policy toward Jews...

...Assassination was a weapon formidable only to our enemies and to other, backward states ill-advised enough to rely on the govern-ment of one or a few men...

...That, certainly, is a major part of the phenomenon which includes both George Wallace and the Kennedys: the simultaneous desire to exalt and to slay, feelings which often coexist in the same person...

...stern and even shady measures may be needed to protect humanity-one's own humanity included-from intoler-able consequences...

...Few Americans lamented General Trujillo's passing, and liberals probably applauded when they believed his murder to be the self-moved act of a Dominican citizen...

...even protest movements, to be effective, must be impersonal aggregates, lacking the stability and intimacy of community...

...Commenting on the liberal preference for "eco-nomic sanctions," Reinhold Niebuhr once remarked that it reflected the belief that it is more moral to starve people than to shoot them, and it is tempting to let it go at that...