Assassinations: A Warning Five Years Later

All week, the lines of sightseers wound up the hill in Arlington National Cemetery, where the two assassinated brothers lie buried. On what would have been Robert F. Kennedy’s 43rd birthday, his brother Ted brought his own and the slain Senator’s family to pray and leave flowers. Two days later, on the fifth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s death in Dallas, the family returned to visit the flame-lit grave a little farther up the hill. In New York, Mrs. Aristotle Onassis took John and Caroline Kennedy to a special Mass for their father—one of many such memorial services across the country.

Preventive Measures. Others continued to replay the events of Nov. 22, 1963, and June 5, 1968, as if to exorcise a demon from the national spirit. No fewer than nine new books were on the market in the U.S. eulogizing John or Robert Kennedy, or probing their assassinations. In Russia, Anatoly Gromyko, son of Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, published a mildly sympathetic study on J.F.K.—the first book-length examination of any kind to be printed in the Soviet Union—entitled The 1036 Days of President Kennedy, borrowing heavily from Arthur Schlesinger and Theodore Sorensen, but mostly picturing the late President in a struggle with “monopoly capital.” In Chicago and California, two symposia of psychiatrists and other scholars examined why assassinations happen—and how they might be avoided.

At Stanford University, several participants advocated registration of all guns—if only, said one, to “see if this reduces crime or death rates.” Other preventive measures were linked to the predictability of assassin types. Drs. Robert L. Taylor and Alfred E. Weisz noted that of the nine men involved in the eight known attempts on the lives of American Presidents, all were Caucasian males aged 24 to 40. All were smaller than average in stature. All were unknowns, except John Wilkes Booth. Most importantly, “each of these men had some cause or grievance that appeared obsessional, if not delusional, in intensity.” (Richard Lawrence, for instance, who tried to kill Andrew Jackson, thought that he was Richard III of England and that the U.S. owed him huge sums of money.) Careful typing might permit psychiatrists to help—or security men to keep checking on—potential assassins. New laws requiring waiting periods before guns could be purchased, the experts said, might make it harder for such men to obtain weapons.

Russian Roulette. Both meetings suggested that it is not only the potential assassin who must be watched but the President or candidate, lest he exhibit too much bravado. “I play Russian roulette every time I get up in the morning,” Robert Kennedy once remarked, “but there is nothing I could do about it.” The psychiatrists urged that Presidents and presidential candidates be prohibited by law from “close contact” with crowds when a visit has been announced in advance. That is particularly urgent, they suggested, because assassinations themselves breed violent reactions in disturbed people, making other assassinations more likely.

Robert Kennedy, talking with Novelist Romain Gary in the weeks after Martin Luther King’s murder and just before his own, might have agreed with the analysis, if not the prescription. “I know there will be an assassination attempt sooner or later,” Kennedy told Gary. “Not so much for political reasons: just due to contagion and emulation. We are living in an era of extraordinary psychic contagion.”