Did America Shoot Wallace?

By Edwin Warner

NO sooner had the bullets from Arthur Bremer's pistol found their mark in George Wallace than another kind of withering fire was directed at the U.S. Declared New York Mayor John Lindsay: "The insane attack upon George Wallace is yet another terrible and inevitable example of the violence of our nation. From the needless neglect of our most pressing national needs, we have reaped a harvest of division, despair and death." In his New York Times column, Tom Wicker searched for an explanation of the assassinations among "violent western movies, the organized violence of professional football, the endless lines outside theaters showing The Godfather" The blasts from overseas were even more extravagant than usual. Said Milan's Corriere della Sera: "The U.S. is built on a structure of violence on every level. It is a perpetual state of siege that affects the whole society, from the mugger who kills a man for $20 in a subway to the B-52 pilot who calmly exterminates thousands of yellow men in order to give liberty to Indochina."

This quickly triggered reaction to the shooting of a prominent American politician raised more questions than it answered. Should the whole American society be condemned for the criminal act of one of its members, possibly one who is mentally ill? Do the American people bear the guilt for the handful of deranged assassins who have cut down in turn Medgar Evers, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and now George Wallace? How just an assessment is the view that America is, in some special way, an intrinsically violent nation?

There is little question that violence has risen in America in the past few years. It is in the air, in speech, in gesture. People are uneasy on the streets, uneasy in their inner selves. The crime rate--especially violent crime --has mounted alarmingly. No laws have stemmed the tide of handguns that make killing so simple. Authority, legitimate or otherwise, is under attack as never before. Talk about politics is often murderous ("Oswald, where are you now that we need you?"). The Viet Nam War has had a profound effect on the American psyche, not only conditioning it to violence but often creating its own antiwar violence at home.

Yet violent as it undeniably is, the U.S. has no monopoly on that tendency. If violence is as American as cherry pie, in that overcelebrated phrase, it is also as German as strudel, as Russian as borsch, as Japanese as sake. Last week a bomb went off when the wife of a German Supreme Court Justice stepped on the accelerator of her Volkswagen; luckily she escaped with minor injuries from a left-wing plot against her husband. The week before, a top policeman in Milan was shot to death as he walked out of his apartment building. The list grows as long as one wants to make it: foreign diplomats held hostage and killed in peace-loving Sweden, eight Philippine senatorial candidates wounded by a hand grenade blast.

Despite the prevalence of violence elsewhere, however, there is something undeniably different about the American variety. The individualism of American assassins is what Europeans, and some Americans too, find hard to grasp. In other parts of the world, political assassination is usually the result of an elaborate plot. The object is to bring about a shift in power; it is a rational exercise, even if a murderous one.

No such plan appears to guide the American assassin. He acts on apolitical impulse. He is a pathetic loner--a Lee Harvey Oswald, a Sirhan Sirhan, an Arthur Bremer. "The would-be assassins have all been people who were mentally disturbed, living out of the mainstream of the political issues of the day," says John Spiegel, director of the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence at Brandeis University. "They were people who lived in fantasy worlds with no real contact with their intended victim." The man they prefer to strike down is the charismatic leader of an aroused constituency, someone who brings excitement to politics as well as a sense of hope and movement.

Curiously, the assassins may not really hate the man they plot to kill. If psychoanalysts can be believed, he is a surrogate victim, a replacement for the mother or father whom the killers would like to slay but dare not. "It's as if they have a latent need to be loved by the man they kill," notes Beverly Hills Psychoanalyst Robert Dorn. Did Bremer hate Wallace? He had Wallace literature in his room and Wallace stickers on his car. Did he follow Wallace from rally to rally in order to kill him or because he was obsessed by him? The shooting has elements of a ritual emptied of emotion. Says William Crotty, a political scientist at Northwestern University: "Somehow, these people believe that if they can eliminate this one man, their own lives will magically improve."

To kill a prominent politician in one instant removes the stain of failure and testifies to an unqualified success. The assassin wins his footnote in history, becomes a somebody, shows that he is not to be laughed at. He has made it in America when everybody thought he was a hopeless outcast. He joins the mainstream. "In the U.S.," says Harvard Sociologist Seymour Lipset, "the thing that matters is who wins, no matter how. There is more emphasis on accomplishing something no matter what means are used."

Hence the vulnerability of the politician in America. He is too prominent, too exposed. The President, in particular, is the object of incessant attention. He does not have the protection of a strong political party that can take the blame for some of the things he does. There is no parliamentary system to share the burdens of office; the powers of Congress are atrophied. The President stands alone, a perfect target--and aspirants to his high office undergo the same fierce scrutiny.

That scrutiny has been enhanced by television. The political leader is always on view, with few chances for escape. Thus George Wallace makes a speech behind a bulletproof lectern--and then darts out to shake hands with a crowd that includes his would-be assassin, who seeks the same limelight. John Wilkes Booth, a professional actor, plotted to murder Abraham Lincoln in a theater where he would have a captive audience. Contemporary assassins are supplied with a much larger stage by television. They know that their deed, or its immediate aftermath, will be witnessed by millions of horror-struck citizens.

It is a spectacle hard to resist for a man who has been deprived of attention all his life. Marshall McLuhan has written hopefully of the global village of shared tastes and sympathies that television is creating. But along with the village has come the village idiot, vastly strengthened by technology, torn loose from the mores that used to restrain him. He may not be able to keep up with the Joneses, but he can keep up with the Oswalds.

America cannot be completely absolved from responsibility for the assassinations, if only because it has created the conditions in which the killers live and flourish. Something in U.S. society leads them to favor one particular outlet, now morbidly familiar. The assassinations are, in a way, a reflection of the emotionalism of life in America today: near-utopian expectations from American life and a spurned lover's disillusion when these expectations are unfulfilled. This is often combined with rootlessness, both geographic and moral. Cut off from any real community, the lonely men in rooming houses (but sometimes also on campuses or in the midst of prosperous suburbs) substitute fantasy for roots; life--and death--becomes equally unreal.

All this points to an aberration, partly the result of dizzying social change and the restless mobility of a free society, which urgently requires stabilization and saner, more civil politics. But it is not a national disease or a case of national guilt that deserves the world's condemnation. In the long run, it is more useful to try to understand America--no simple matter--than to write off the entire country as uncontrollably Violent. "Edwin Warner

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