The Deepest Cut

Assassination is a subject that fascinates us for any number of reasons. The sudden disruption of seemingly great men and institutions. The seductive power of a person willing to give his own life for something he believes in, regardless of how absurd those beliefs may be. But there is a tendency to lump all assassinations together in a way that obscures profound differences between them.

Assassinations should be categorized into two groups: those with a rational political motive and those with notoriety as the primary obsession of the assassin. To take the 4 presidential assassinations in American history as case-studies, we quickly see that the former are far outweighed by the latter; the most common motive of the American assassin is narcissism or mental illness.

The assassins of Presidents Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy were motivated by a non-descript and historically unsatisfying mix of boredom, frustration, and chance opportunity. Garfield was shot by a disgruntled job-seeker (and was killed more by his doctors than his assassin). McKinley was shot by an unemployed, deranged anarchist who seemed to have no specific quarrel with McKinley or any of his policies.

And President Kennedy, whose death has been transfigured into so many different absurd renditions that it has lost nearly all meaning, was shot by, quite simply, a loser. Oswald had no motive. Weeks before killing the President, he had fired that very same rifle in a failed attempt to kill a certain General Walker, a rabid right-winger. This alone proves that Oswald was far more concerned with killing than with motive.

In an interesting aside, one of my students proved that Oswald was the shooter after viewing the film of the assassination for the first time. This teenager with absolutely no prior knowledge of the event viewed it once and saw things that conspiracy theorists are blind to no matter how often they rewatch the gruesome spectacle.

Whenever I show the Zapruder film to students for the first time, I ask them "where did the shots come from?" They inevitably say "the front", which is the reaction of most people. But this time, one student said, "from behind". I was very intrigued by this, so I informed that student that he was correct and asked him to explain his reasoning.

"That nigga in front of him got shot, too", he casually observed. And there it was. The person in front of the President (Governor Conally) could only have been hit if the shooter was behind them. Case closed. The case was already closed for me, of course, but I was very impressed by this clarity of observation.

The sad truth is that John F. Kennedy was killed for no reason at all. His slaying has been elevated for some absurd reason to take its place next to the crucifixion of Christ or the stabbing of Caesar. But there is one American assassination that was a "real" assassination as classically understood. The killing of Abraham Lincoln.

This one has it all. The assassin with an actual motive. The American Brutus, John Wilkes Booth who, like the original Brutus, felt that his target was a tyrant worthy of tyrannicide. Whether one agrees with Booth's critique of Lincoln, it is manifest that the man had a genuine and comprehensible motive.

Booth aimed to slay the warlord who had laid waste to his homeland. And this Lincoln had indeed done. Again, we can argue with the justice of the Civil War, but not with its reality. The South was invaded, burned, and looted for the sin of an attempted peaceful disunion.

Booth wanted revenge. This is a motive which all people can comprehend. He also felt that Lincoln had become a tyrant, another charge to which there is no small amount of truth. Booth also had to assume that the cost for his crime would be his life, yet he willingly carried it out, a sacrifice which the original Brutus sought to avoid.

Lincoln's assassination was so "real" because friend and foe alike saw it for what it was: a rational act carried out by a disciplined if criminal mind, the intention of which was to undo certain concrete political and military realities. And friend and foe alike understood that the assassination had succeeded in undoing (or at least derailing) the great undertaking of its victim.

Despite what I consider Lincoln's crimes, his assassination was truly a tragedy for this nation and probably for the Confederacy as well. None of our other slain Presidents were irreplaceable, despite what people may have thought at the time. But Lincoln was. This, then, was assassination in its purest and worst form.

And it was the only true presidential "assassination" that this country has ever experienced. The other assassinations were simply murders. To paraphrase Chris Rock, the other presidents didn't get assassinated; they just got shot. But as Lil' Wayne points out, "when you're great, it's not shot, it's assassinate".

And therein lies the contradiction. Assassination can not be all about the victim. The motive of the killer must matter as well. If we take this more precise and more mature definition, we find only one true presidential assassination in our history. The other sordid acts say far more of far less interest about the criminals than they do about their victims.