Sympathy & Scrutiny

On and on went the extraordinary outpouring of grief for John Kennedy. No American, not even Franklin Roosevelt, had been so deeply mourned abroad. The great churches echoed the requiems -- Paris' Notre Dame, Rome's St. John Lateran, London's St. Paul's. In smaller London churches, too, there were so many services that the U.S. embassy nearly ran out of American flags to lend. In Kenya, the Communist-leaning Minister for Home Affairs prayed before 5,000 people to Mungu (God) to give Kennedy a good place in heaven.

Throughout Europe and Africa, cit ies were renaming buildings, bridges, streets in honor of the dead President. Hamburg now has a John F. Kennedy Bridge, Algiers a Place John F. Kennedy. In West Berlin, 300,000 people gathered before the city hall to pray, and to hear a band play Ich hatt' einen Kameraden -- the dirge of the fallen soldier. In East Berlin, a Chinese Commu nist was hissed at a political meeting when he criticized Kennedy's policies.

Irish Playwright Sean O'Casey, nearly blind at 83, painfully scrawled a note to a New York friend: "Peace, who was becoming bright-eyed, now sits in the shadow of death: her handsome champion has been killed. Her gallant boy is dead. We mourn here with you, poor sad American People." And BBC's famed satirical TV program, That Was The Week That Was, turned sentimental, broadcast a memorial to Kennedy that included a synthetic folk song:

A young man rode with his head held high

Under the Texas sun.

And no one guessed that a man so blessed

Would perish by the gun.

Lord, would perish by the gun.

The Plot Theory. Amid the mourning for Kennedy, the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald brought an image of U.S. lawlessness to millions abroad. A West German government spokesman, usually friendly to the U.S., said: "It was in credible. How can you announce you are going to transfer a man and have the cameras there waiting? Do the TV networks run the United States today?"

Most people simply could not or would not believe that the two murders were isolated events. It seemed impossible, as one Beirut paper put it, that "the craziest of crazy fools destroyed Kennedy with the ease of one swatting a fly" -- and did so unaided. Communists everywhere presented it as a carefully conceived "rightist" plot, tied up with the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society. In this version, Oswald had somehow been a tool of the rightists, and Jack Ruby had shot Oswald, with police connivance, to silence him. A headline in a Warsaw paper called it BAD WESTERN.

Communist propaganda aside, millions held the plot theory on their own, mostly because it is easier to accept evil than meaninglessness in life, to see in the two murders a wicked plan rather than wicked pointlessness. Out of the bitter need to give the event some meaning, men cast their own enemies in the villain's role.

Reply for Zik. The Arab press, pointing out that Jack Ruby is Jewish, spoke of a "Zionist plot." The Chinese Nationalists thought that Peking was behind it all, and the white supremacists of South Africa blamed Communism, regretting that Senator Joseph McCarthy was not alive to expose it. Virtually all the rest of Africa and Asia, all evidence to the contrary, went on blaming racists in the U.S. South.

Said the chancellor of Teheran University: "Like the Prophet Mohammed, Kennedy believed in human equality of human beings, and he was killed because of his struggle to put his idea into reality." Nigeria's President Nnamdi ("Zik") Azikiwe suggested that perhaps U.N. headquarters ought to be moved away from New York, cabled President Johnson: "Slaughter of this typical American reformer shows clearly that among some Americans there is a deep-seated hatred of the black man as a human being." This was too much for Johnson, who replied: "The act of one individual cannot and should not obscure the dedication and active support of the American people for the principles of democracy and human justice."

Cervantes Needed. The head of India's Swatantra Party, strongly pro-American Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, mused out loud that Oswald had been killed to "prevent the exposure of the conspiracy behind the crime" and speculated that "there may be big money behind the plot." Le Monde, one of France's most distinguished papers, ran an analysis of Oswald's killing, concluded that the police were implicated. France-Observateur ran a picture of a Dallas police official over the caption: "Suspect No. 1." A Parisian public opinion poll found that 57% of those questioned believed that Ruby had shot Oswald to silence him.

Most foreigners seemed reluctant to blame the U.S. as a whole, and instead concentrated on Texas--or on their vision of it as a lawless, uncontrollable little world of its own. "Texas was always a joke," said Britain's Denis Brogan. "Now Texas is a bad joke." The Texas-style "Western ethic" and the "rule of the gun," observed Salisbury's Rhodesia Herald, is an anachronism, as was the ethic of chivalry: "A Cervantes is needed to laugh it out of court and purge the civilized world as Don Quixote purged it of the sour hangover from the age of chivalry."

From such views of Texas, it was a quick jump to find a basic flaw in American society. To many observers in Japan, where political assassination is all too familiar, Oswald's death was a stunning negation of the rule of law and order that Americans have been urging ever since V-J day. German politicians did not dare criticize the U.S. in public, so strong was the popular wave of emotion about Kennedy, but in private they talked about America's "instability and immaturity," its "mixture of adventurers from all over the world."

France's Le Nouveau Candide mourned: "There is, at almost every level of American life, a cancer of violence which is far more serious than a few revolutions in South America or the Middle East, and even than the murderous manifestations of the O.A.S. in the struggle over Algeria."

Through the Telescope. At week's end, such talk seemed to many, particularly in Britain, a considerable overstatement. Author-Critic Richard Hoggart expressed the belief that there had been no conspiracy at all and added: "For all kinds of historical reasons, America is much more hospitable to extremism. And there is the extraordinary availability of lethal weapons. So the paranoiac, instead of throwing himself off Waterloo Bridge, looks down his telescopic sights." Even Texas found its defenders, in a rough and ready way. Said London University's History Professor Harry Allen: "You don't conquer a great land, you don't drive off Indians, you don't exploit natural resources, without having a tough streak."

Two events contributed to the calmer view. One was the silent, heroic posture of Jacqueline Kennedy. Even more significant was the orderly transition with which one democratic leader gave way to another in a moment of great stress. Acknowledged with profound respect, it created a sense of reassurance and clarity about the U.S.'s role in the free world. In Bonn, a political scientist said: "The mechanism of a great democracy turned on, smoothly, calmly, if somberly, adjusting to tragedy, overcoming it. The Cabinet and legislature continued to function. It was, as it had to be, business as usual. How many nations could guarantee the same if their heads of state were murdered?"

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