Volume 24, Number 16 · October 13, 1977
The Assassins
By Daniel Schorr
Everything about assassination seems un-American. The word assassin comes from 'hashish.' The first assassins, almost a thousand years ago, were the 'hashshashin,' the 'hashish-users,' a fanatical Moslem sect in Persia who considered murder of their enemies a sacred duty. Violence may be, in the words of the black militant H. Rap Brown, 'as American as cherry pie,' but for most Americans political assassination was an Old World phenomenon of bomb-throwing Bolsheviks and Balkan fanatics. Even though four presidents fell to assassins' bullets and others were targets of assassination, the staff of President Johnson's National Commission on Violence concluded in 1969 that the general pattern was not one of conspiracy but of 'freelance assassins in varying states of mental instability.'[1] The wave of assassinations that cut down, in less than a decade, President Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X must have made many Americans wonder whether this alien aberration was becoming a feature of American life.
Feature, 8816 words
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