American Caesar

'He's a threat to our democracy. He's literally a threat to everything America stands for’

On the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination, the New York Times ran an article on Dallas and how ‘grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.’ From the tone of the article, you’d have got the impression that Kennedy was killed by Right-wing ‘hate’, rather than a lone communist with a gun.

It's natural to link assassinations to a wider narrative and that JFK, the charismatic, young liberal president representing a new age in America, was killed by a deranged Marxist jarred with many people’s sense of story; it would fit with the vibes of the period better were Kennedy to be the victim of a shadowy right-wing conspiracy, and so a vast and complicated theory was born.

No one blamed communist ideas for Oswald’s actions; there wasn’t great soul searching among Marxist academics that their theories might have poisoned a young mind, and rightly so. People aren’t responsible for the behaviour of unbalanced individuals who vaguely share a political worldview, and in the case of assassins their minds are often a jumble of confusing ideas and personal anguish. This seems to be the case with Donald Trump’s shooter, and yet following last Saturday’s shocking events it was natural that his allies might point the finger.