POLITICS & ASSASSINATION

THROUGHOUT the world, industrialization is spurring millions to want more--and to feel more thwarted when affluence and equality are too slowly achieved. In the highly industrialized U.S., the fever is intensified by racial and generational clashes. The result is impatience with the political process: a yen for direct action has created a charged emotional climate that inflames inherently violent minds.

Robert Kennedy was a natural target for what New York Psychiatrist Frederic Wertham calls "magnicide--the killing of somebody big." Historically, that somebody has often symbolized the political assassin's hated father; in the U.S., such murders are also frequently motivated by simple envy. Democracy, says Harvard Sociologist David Riesman, presents the question: "Why are you so big and why am I so small?" It is not legitimate to be a failure in America. And the frustration of failure adds New York Psychiatrist David Abrahamsen, is "the wet nurse of violence."

Verbal Overkill

Equally inflammatory to unstable minds is the rising hyperbole of U.S. political debate. Race, Viet Nam, crime-- all lend themselves to verbal overkill, not so much by candidates as by extremists: the John Birchers, the Rap Browns, the most ardent war critics, the Ku Kluxers. The evidence is everywhere. In Dallas, Assistant District Attorney William Alexander snarls on a TV show: "Earl Warren shouldn't be impeached--he should be hanged." Cries Rap Brown: "How many whites did you kill today?" Lyndon Johnson is routinely excoriated as a mass murderer. Robert Kennedy was branded by San Francisco hippies as a "fascist pig." Eventually verbal assassination becomes physical assassination.

"Assassination," George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "is the extreme form of censorship." In most U.S. cases, the assassins have indeed dedicated themselves to blotting out viewpoints that disagree with their own. When Sirhan Sirhan was seized after the shooting of Robert Kennedy, he cried: "I can explain! Let me explain!" The appalling thing is that he really thought that he could.

Many foreigners fear that U.S. violence is rapidly becoming almost banal, espoused by Maoists and Minutemen alike, routinely threatened--if not actually practiced--by students, racial militants and antiwar dissenters. Such fears sound odd coming from, say, the impeccably rational Frenchmen who only recently applauded student anarchists in Paris. Even so, the U.S. is undeniably starting to lead all advanced Western countries in what Swedish Economist Gunnar Myrdal calls "the politics of assassination." No French President has been murdered since 1932; West German leaders go virtually unguarded; the last (and only) assassination of a British Prime Minister occurred in 1812.

The key U.S. problem is the high importance of personality in most political campaigns. Whereas Europeans generally vote for parties rather than individuals, U.S. campaigning requires the candidate to plunge into crowds, to "press the flesh" until his right hand bleeds, to ride in open cars, to stand silhouetted against TV lights. Nor is the assassination in Los Angeles likely to alter such techniques. Two weeks before his death, Robert Kennedy himself told French Novelist-Diplomat Remain Gary: "There is no way to protect a candidate during an electoral campaign. You have to give yourself to the crowd and from then on count your luck." Kennedy, of course, pressed his luck recklessly.

There is a grim possibility that yet another candidate will become a target. What to do? Stop crowd contact, use sealed cars, exploit TV to the exclusion of almost every other campaign tactic? In the Los Angeles aftermath, a stricken Eugene McCarthy pondered: "Maybe we should do it in a different way. Maybe we should have the English system of having the Cabinet choose the President. There must be some other way." But most politicians--including highly vulnerable Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Hubert Humphrey and John Lindsay--emphatically veto such suggestions. If a candidate cannot mingle with crowds, said Rockefeller, "then we've lost one of the great resources and strengths of this great land of ours--freedom of movement, freedom of expression, freedom of the individual to go and be with the people."

All the same, steps can be taken to minimize the danger. For one thing, TV ought to be used more effectively--and at public expense to avoid domination by the richest candidates. Why not devote national network time to each major candidate for a full day or even two? For once, voters could view the whole man instead of fleeting images. On a more practical level, security can be sharply improved. Had the Secret Service been guarding Kennedy last week--as it will guard presidential candidates from now on--the route through the Ambassador Hotel's serving kitchen would have been scouted and secured by at least seven agents. Kennedy would also have had the benefit of a computer that the Service uses to keep check on individuals known to be dangerous. Programmed into the computer are the names of 100,000 possible assailants, largely taken from "hate" letters (which have risen startlingly since January). Whenever the President travels, local police keep such people under close surveillance. The U.S. might look to France for further ideas. When De Gaulle travels, his car is flanked by tough Compagnie Republicaine de Securite troopers on motorbikes; helicopters hover overhead, and the pace is a brisk 80 miles an hour or more. In towns en route, operating rooms are reserved in hospitals and a supply of De Gaulle's blood type is stocked.

Uncritical Lovers & Unloving Critics

Not that Americans want a police-state climate. It would hardly improve democracy; nor should the U.S. ironically honor Robert Kennedy by choosing fear over faith in people. Instead, the chief hope for excising the canker of political assassination is that a far more temperate political dialogue can somehow replace the incendiary language of anger, bigotry and vituperation--that millions of individual American citizens may now realize that freedom basically depends on persuading rather than provoking.

This, in turn, would require sluggish bureaucracies to respond more rapidly to social needs. John W. Gardner put it best at Cornell's commencement earlier this month, when he imagined himself as a 23rd century thinker. He had discovered, he said, that "20th century institutions were caught in a savage crossfire between uncritical lovers and unloving critics. On the one side, those who loved their institutions tended to smother them in an embrace of death, loving their rigidities more than their promise, shielding them from life-giving criticism. On the other side, there arose a breed of critics without love, skilled in demolition but untutored in the arts by which human institutions are nurtured and strengthened and made to flourish. Between the two, the institutions perished."

Gardner's dire diagnosis may or may not be overstated. What is beyond dispute is that all too many of the nation's most creative leaders are perishing, and that the trend must be checked by a national restoration of reason rather than emotion.

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