In debate over shootings, both sides use JFK assassination

The assassination of President Kennedy took place nearly half a century ago. But this week, people on both sides of the debate over the causes of Saturday's deadly shootings in Tucson, Ariz., have revisited the trauma of John F. Kennedy's assassination -- and those on each side claim, not surprisingly, that it bolsters their interpretation of events.

Some commentators -- mostly on the left -- argue that the atmosphere of Dallas in 1963, one of intense right-wing hatred toward the president, may have seeped into the mind-set of his killer. And so, they suggest, today's climate of political vitriol may indirectly have played a role in the Tucson shootings.

But others -- mostly on the right -- draw the opposite conclusion from the Kennedy murder. They note that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't a conservative, he was a pro-Castro leftist -- so Dallas's climate of right-wing hostility to Kennedy ultimately wasn't relevant. Jared Loughner, the suspect in the Tucson shootings, also isn't a right-winger in any conventional sense, they say, so it's wrong to blame the attack on extreme right-wing political rhetoric.

James Fallows of The Atlantic made the first case on the night of the shootings. "The political tone of an era can have some bearing on violent events," wrote Fallows, a former speechwriter for President Carter. "The anti-JFK hate-rhetoric in Dallas before his visit was so intense that for decades people debated whether the city was somehow 'responsible' for the killing. (Even given that Lee Harvey Oswald was an outlier in all ways.) ...

"We don't know why the Tucson killer did what he did. But we know that it has been a time of extreme, implicitly violent political rhetoric and imagery, including SarahPac's famous bulls-eye map of 20 Congressional targets to be removed -- including Rep. Giffords," Fallows wrote (link is his). "It is legitimate to discuss whether there is a connection between that tone and actual outbursts of violence, whatever the motivations of this killer turn out to be."

Conservative columnist Ross Douthat of the New York Times argued the reverse in Monday's newspaper. "When John F. Kennedy visited Dallas in November of 1963, Texas was awash in right-wing anger. ... But Lee Harvey Oswald was not a right-winger, not a John Bircher, not a segregationist. Instead, he was a Marxist of sorts," Douthat wrote (link is his).

He continued: "The anti-Kennedy excesses of Texas conservatives were real enough, but the president's assassin acted on a far more obscure set of motivations. ... Chances are that Loughner's motives will prove as irreducibly complex as those of most of his predecessors in assassination."

It's worth noting that the Warren Commission, established by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination, found "no evidence" that the "general atmosphere of hate" in Dallas at the time played into Oswald's crime.

But it's not as simple as it might appear. In "The Death of a President," an exhaustively researched account of the assassination, William Manchester wrote that the commission's finding "was a consensus."

"Individual commissioners had strong reservations," wrote Manchester, who was writing his book at the request of his friend Jackie Kennedy. "The verdict was influenced by expediency. The Commission's members hoped their report would receive the widest possible acceptance. A majority believed that conjecture about Dallas might tend to discredit their other findings. Therefore they hedged. They acknowledged that the assassin had known of Dallas' political tension, but they concluded that there was 'no way to judge what the effect of the general political ferment present in the city might have been, even though Oswald was aware of it.'"

What's striking here is the sense that the debate over the Kennedy assassination appears to have been as political as the current debate over Tucson. In the 1960s, those who were already concerned about extreme right-wing opposition to the Kennedy administration tended to see that opposition as a factor in Oswald's violent act. But those who themselves opposed the president on the whole believed the two were unrelated. In other words, the polarized public debate that President Obama decried in his memorial speech Wednesday night isn't an entirely recent phenomenon -- though things may be even worse today.

For what it's worth, it seems clear that Manchester, who died in 2004, would have agreed with Fallows about the Tucson shootings. He goes on to write:

"Lee Harvey Oswald was called a loner. … But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society. John Wilkes Booth was not an agent of the Confederacy. Despite early assumptions, he had acted on his own. But his victim was murdered at a critical hour in our history, in a city swarming with Southern sympathizers and hardened by seditious talk. Establishing the precise link between deed, era, and locale is a hopeless task, yet to suggest that there was no relationship — that the crime in Ford's Theatre could have been committed in a serene community untroubled by crisis — is absurd.

(Photo from Dallas on the day JFK was assassinated: AP)