Political Assassination: The History of an Idea

Page 154

234 concluding that the assassin might be irrational. There also was ample scientific presumption to the same effect. Psychiatrists tell us that the President symbolizes author- ity at its highest peak, abide authority.19 and the assassin often cannot By the same token, there is some thought that in killing Oswald, Jack Ruby was in effect killing the man who had killed Ruby's "father image." But Americans are not even amateur historians or psychologists, so why the gratuitous assumption that Kennedy's assassin must have been irrational? To begin with, there are certain ideological -- or, if you will, phiIOSOphical u- reasons for susPecting the assassination of an American president to be the work of a deranged mind. As the Deseret News put it in an edi- torial published the day after the Kennedy assassination: . . . no matter how rational he may appear to be outwardly, his (the assassinvs) is a deranged mind and he cannot even begin to realize what he has done. No man can know, really, the full consequences of an act such as this one. The course of history seems bound to change because of it, to be sure. But who can say how or in what direction? The man who committed this crime against the conscience of the world put his individual will above the will of the majority that elected John F. Kennedy as President of the United States. In the process he put himself above both law and moral- ity, which no man can do with impunity. l9W'olk, Op. cit., p. 22.