Politics and Murder
H., I.
WE no NOT KNOW why the United States has been subject in the last few years to a wave of political assassinations. Nor do we think anyone else knows. There is the conspiracy theory,...
...The air is heavy with death...
...WE no NOT KNOW why the United States has been subject in the last few years to a wave of political assassinations...
...We are told that the American people (all 200 million) is sick...
...There is the conspiracy theory, convenient for those who like their disasters neat...
...Nor do we think anyone else knows...
...Yet there remains a small chance—and we must all work to make it a large chance—that the supporters of McCarthy, who have already done so many astonishing things, will this time be able to arouse so large and determined an expression of the popular will, that there will be major repercussions within the organizational apparatus of the Democratic party...
...I doubt that the U.S...
...How do you dete-mine whether an entire nation is more violent than it was in the past...
...King was planned by a group of fanatic white racists...
...Is the notion that we have become a more violent nation an adequate explanation...
...is today more violent than it was in the 1930's, when we had at least as much social injustice and brutality as today but not the same kind of political assassinations...
...It's a bad moment, right now...
...I think it would be good if intellectuals were to resist the kind of generalizations—the generalizations of side-show psychiatrists and telephone sociologists—which can be quoted in the New York Times the morning after a disaster...
...And besides, is "violence" a category that lends itself to easy measurement...
...And what precisely is the connection between Jesse James and the Jordanian immigrant charged with Senator Kennedy's murder...
...And the first prerequisite for such an attempt is that the supporters of Senator McCarthy make certain he is encouraged to keep campaigning independently, without paying attention to the "unity" bait that is likely to be forthcoming from the Humphrey people...
...violence occurred in strikes, protest marches, farmers' demonstrations...
...but thus far, this theory cannot be entirely dismissed for the same reason it cannot be at all substantiated: the lack of evidence...
...Withdrawal and despair are predictable consequences...
...Unlikely...
...we may discover that the killer of Senator Kennedy had entirely different aims yet that somehow— and the somehow is just what is so difficult to pin down—he was enabled to act upon his murderous fantasies because he was living in a social atmosphere that had been shaped by the previous killings and by the violence attendant on racial struggle...
...But we think the political struggle is too important'to allow for such responses...
...We may discover that the murder of Dr...
...For that matter, what does it mean or does it mean anything at all to speak of the violence of an entire nation...
...I suppose so...
...In the 1930's this country was torn apart by social struggle...
...I doubt it...
...But right now, as we draw close to the 1968 election, there are more immediate urgencies...
...Yet it is quite possible that the link between, say, the assassination of Dr...
...but in a more important sense—in its stress upon the need for continuing to fight politically—his article remains entirely to the point...
...Why then does this tradition operate so much more urgently in 1968 than it did in 1928...
...What discernable meaning can such a statement have, and to what significant consequences can lead...
...There is the `contagion" theory, more sophisticated in approach, but less an explanation of the outburst of assassinations than a description of the ways in which they occurred...
...it seems likely, at this moment, to make it much easier for the Administration forces to capture the Democratic nomination and thereby confront us with the dismal prospect of a Humphrey-Nixon choice...
...No matter who is elected, we will need the continuing presence and pressure of these young people who form, whether they know it or not, the basis for a new politics of the democratic'Left...
...There is no reason to doubt that deranged people—paranoid, fanatic, alienated, or whatever— have been drifting on the margins of our social life for a period of time much longer June 12, 1968 than that of the recent assassinations...
...This lends the accumulation of tragedies a peculiarly sinister cast, for to large numbers of black citizens the causes seem to matter less than the consequences—and who, in this regard, is to say they are wholly wrong...
...What brings the killings into an apparent sequence is the fact that all the victims have been prominent men identified in the public mind with active leadership in or sympathy toward the Negro cause...
...In one sense, therefore, it is sadly dated...
...but will provide affluent intellectuals with a moral purgation...
...The Comments by B. J. Widick and Stanley Plastrik were also written before the assassination of Senator Kennedy...
...The murder of Senator Kennedy is not only a tragedy in its own right...
...We are told, for example, that our troubles stem from the frontier tradition of lawless individualism...
...King and that of Senator Kennedy is "atmospheric"—the same encompassing atmosphere of social disarray and violence enables different persons to act from, or act out, sharply different motives...
...What we need to know is why such people feel encouraged to act upon their hatreds as they did not in the past...
...There are problems here to study, and they are the kinds of problems that will take close investigation, subtle analysis, patient accumulation of data...
...That possibility has now been removed, and the probable result is a Humphrey victory...
...that will sharply realign our social priorities...
...At least as important is the need to keep together in some sort of movement, perhaps as a formal organization, those thousands of young people who threw themselves into the McCarthy campaign and brought new life to American politics...
...Is the United States as a nation more violent than the Irish...
...To exercises in collective guilt which will leave our social evils unchallenged (if we are all "sick," how can it help to tear down slums or provide decent jobs to Negro youth...
...But that is what has to be tried...
...H. There follows a dispatch from DISSENT editor Arnold Kaufman, who has been active in the McCarthy campaign in California...
...yet the country did not suffer from the crisis of collective values, the sense of a vague but ominous malaise, in quite the way it does today...
...that will undertake, along the lines of the Freedom Budget, a major campaign to rebuild the cities and bring hope to the ghettos.—I...
...the French...
...He wrote his report just as the primaries were closing but before Senator Kennedy was killed...
...we think the fight must continue for a politics that will quickly end the Vietnam War...
...the Nigerians...
...By late May it began to seem that Humphrey and all he represents could be defeated at the Convention only if both Kennedy and McCarthy were to stay in the race, to work out some partial cooperation, and then join forces at the Convention...
Vol. 15 • July 1968 • No. 4
