From Dallas to Tucson

In the aftermath of Rep. Giffords' shooting, the American media reacted much as they did in 1963, after Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy.

An American politician takes a bullet to the head in broad daylight. Three days later, under the headline “The spiral of hate, ” The New York Times editorial board has this to say about it: “None of us can escape a share of the fault for the spiral of unreason and violence that has now found expression in [gunfire].” In the same spirit, a U.S. Supreme Court justice blames the act on “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” A leading Christian leader adds that the shooting stemmed from a “sin in the hearts of man not only in this country, but the world over. That is, the sin of prejudice.”

Unreason. Hatred. Bitterness. Prejudice. This more or less summarizes the liberal chorus we heard in the days after the Tucson shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford. But all of the words quoted in the paragraph above were spoken or printed in 1963, immediately following the assassination of JFK. Then, as now, the American intelligentsia felt a reflexive certainty that what they’d witnessed was not an act perpetrated by just one man, but rather a mere symptom of a great body of societal evil.

Just as initial media commentaries about Jared Lee Loughner’s crazed act focused on right-wing opposition to health-care reform and immigration, many 1963-era journalists assumed that Lee Harvey Oswald’s act of murder was, in some vague way, connected to the Civil Rights Act. The day after JFK’s death, the Times printed an article entitled “Why America Weeps: Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought To Curb In Nation,” promoting the idea that JFK’s killer somehow stood in moral solidarity with “those who wanted to be more violent in the racial war.” Playing on this notion, President Lyndon Johnson would tell Congress, two days after JFK’s funeral, “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill.”

All of this was nonsense. Just as Loughner is a clinical lunatic whose views have nothing to do with politics or race relations (he once told his community-college professor that the numbers 6 and 18 are actually the same), so too was Oswald a devout Marxist whose views had nothing to do with conservative ideology. As James Piereson wrote in his 2007 book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution (to which this column is much indebted): “Oswald assassinated President Kennedy for political reasons connected to Cuba that were completely unrelated to … other social factors. [He] was not representative of any major group or cultural tendency.” (And, again like Loughner, “he recognized no conventional morality by which he might have been bound.”)

Even after all the reporting that’s been done on Loughner’s past, the myth that he is in some way emblematic of Tea Party culture likely will remain embedded in American political lore, just as left-wing conspiracy theorists still claim that Oswald was a front man for the CIA and the military-industrial complex. As the JFK example shows, the ideologically engaged mind is drawn to interpret every tragedy through the lens of pre-existing dogmas. (In this narrow sense, the liberals who claim Loughner to be a symptom of Tea Party America aren’t that different from the Westboro Baptist Church Christian fanatics, who claim Loughner’s rampage to be divine retribution against a godless America.)

Even the finest mind can be seduced by this dogmatic reflex. For years, I have been listening every weekday to On Point, a National Public Radio talk show hosted by Tom Ashbrook, a serious journalist who has born witness to genocidal hatred in Europe and Africa, and who is old enough to remember JFK’s death. Yet even he could not help himself from writing these words on Sunday: “This is the river’s edge. We’ve got to pull back. Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford’s shooter was 22. That means he grew up in America’s years of trash talk — of increasingly rash, intolerant, hate-filled talk. Years of framing disagreement as Armageddon and opponents as traitors. This has to stop.”

Variations of this were penned by a million different journalists, Facebook pundits, and Tweeters. All of them effectively rehashed on the 1963 Times editorial informing Americans that none of them could “escape a share of the fault for the spiral of unreason and violence.” And all of them missed the point that Loughner didn’t care a whit about any “trash talk” except that contained in his own sick head.

Sometimes, it’s not about us — or our proximity to the “river’s edge.” Sometimes, lone gunmen just go out and do horrible things. Five decades after Dealey Plaza, this is a truth that intellectuals still can’t accept.