Those Dangerous Loners

"I must have fame, fame!" cried John Wilkes Booth, and then established himself as the first of the modern American assassins. Though full of fustian about his love for the Confederacy (he managed to avoid fighting for it, or even living in it, during the Civil War), Booth was clear-headed and precise about the psychic rewards and second-hand renown that come with dispatching a famous man. "What a glorious opportunity for a man to immortalize himself by killing Abraham Lincoln!" he remarked two years before his crime.

Like Booth and unlike most assassins elsewhere in the world, Americans who try to kill the famous are engaged primarily in psychodrama rather than political drama. They do not seem to care much whether their victim belongs to the left or the right. Arthur Bremer, who crippled George Wallace, thought first of killing George McGovern. Lee Harvey Oswald apparently shot at General Edwin Walker, a right-wing fanatic, before killing President Kennedy. Giuseppe Zangara, who took aim at President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 (accidentally killing the mayor of Chicago), said that he would just as soon have killed Herbert Hoover.

Most, but not all, American assassins fit this group portrait: a young white male, a failure and a drifter, unloved and unloving; sexually dissatisfied, he has little or no contact with women. Ordinary murderers often come from violent homes or were violent as youngsters. But the assassins are deceptively calm, even passive. The pattern is that of shy, well-behaved, often mousy loners, whose efforts to control themselves succeed, until pressures explode in an assassination attempt.

Most assassins seem to have been the equivalent of "model prisoners" in their own families, diminished by a powerful parent, unable to express themselves or let out their normal aggressive and sexual feelings. When the demons inside finally burst through, an ordinary victim would not do. The target had to be as far above the average citizen as the parent was above the assassin-son.

Many have zigzagged from city to city, partly to stalk then" targets in an eery dance of death -- drawing close, then pulling away -- and partly to express in frantic motion a personality threatened with disintegration. Oswald traveled to the Soviet Union, New Orleans and Mexico; John Lennon's accused killer, Mark Chapman, moved from Tennessee to Atlanta to Honolulu and New York.

Lacking in selfesteem, many have donned and doffed different identities like costumes. Some have tried to weave identities out of fictional strands. Bremer imagined himself as the son of Actress Donna Reed. Sara Jane Moore, who tried to shoot President Ford, thought of herself as a Halo shampoo girl. The movie Taxi Driver wove together many themes found in the lives of American assassins. A taxi driver (played by Robert De Niro), obsessed with shooting a presidential candidate and protecting a young prostitute (Jodie Foster), beset by aggressive urges as well as sexual ones (coded in the film as a pure-hearted defense of a prostitute), finds an acceptable resolution: he spares the candidate and instead shoots the girl's pimp and one of her Johns, thus symbolically killing his lust and emerging in his own eyes as something of a hero.

Assassins have rarely shown remorse after their killings. They have, however, been generally interested in explaining their acts and claiming to have played a historic role. Zangara went quietly to the electric chair and lost his composure only at the last minute when he learned no phoographers were there to record the scene. Some psychiatrists say the assassin homes in on his target, not just to seize some of the victim's fame but to achieve, at long last, a permanent identity. "They can gas me, but I am famous," said Sirhan Sirhan. "I have achieved in one day what it took Robert Kennedy all his life to do."

Several assassins have conveniently left behind incriminating diaries and letters. Some have also left behind books and clippings of previous assassinations, a reminder that these murders, like hijackings, can break out in mini-epidemics. Who knows? Another awkward loner may today be cutting out articles about John W. Hinckley Jr.

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