The Modern Political Assassin

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One prevailing stereotype of a political assassin is someone with strong convictions: John Wilkes Booth, for example, who is thought to have shot Abraham Lincoln because he was a Confederate sympathizer. Another stereotype conjures up James Bond, a professional with a silencer acting on higher orders. But Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Routh, the two men who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump earlier this year, represent an evolution in these kinds of attackers. Nothing in their backgrounds turned up consistent themes about their political beliefs. Neither left behind a manifesto or seemed to have connections to any group or movement. They more fit the loner, misfit stereotype of a school shooter than ingrained assumptions about political assassins.

In this live recording of a taping of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols about the nature of these modern figures. Why would this era of seemingly more prevalent political violence produce an apolitical would-be assassin? What’s the difference between an individual and a government attempting an assassination? Why are assassination attempts more common in certain eras of history? And have the stereotypes about assassins simply reflected a desire to impose a taxonomy on chaotic minds?

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And with a second recent attempt on Donald Trump’s life, we’re spending this week’s episode on political assassins. Who they are, what’s motivated them, and what has changed over the years. I was joined on stage last week at The Atlantic Festival by my colleague Tom Nichols. This is a recording of that show. Enjoy.

[Applause]

Rosin: Hello, and welcome to this live Radio Atlantic here at The Atlantic Festival. I’m Hanna Rosin, host of Radio Atlantic, and with me on stage is Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols.

Hey, Tom.

Tom Nichols: Hey, Hanna.

Rosin: Thank you for coming.

[Applause]

Rosin: For those of you out there who don’t know him, Tom is a professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval War College. He writes about history, democracy, and national security. That’s the official bio. I’m going to tell you why I love talking to Tom, which is that he has a unique ability to meld together, like, a news story that happened yesterday, a movie from the 1970s, and some kind of giant, sweeping arc of military history and make it all seem seamless. So anyway, it’s a total pleasure to hear Tom talk and to talk to Tom whenever I can.

So it’s been less than a week since a would-be assassin was arrested at a golf course. And just a little over two months before that, there was another attempt on Trump’s life. There is something different about these would-be assassins, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today: the nature of the modern assassin.

Except, I’m going to start this conversation in 1975. That’s in honor of Tom. In 1975, it does seem like an incredibly short period to have two attempted assassinations, but it has happened before, and that was in 1975.

So, Tom, I see you are already nodding. Tell me what happened in 1975.

Nichols: Donald Trump had two attempts on him in two months. Gerald Ford—and really think about it: Why would anybody want to kill Gerald Ford? You know, nobody had voted for him. He was an accidental president. And yet, he had two attempts on him in, like, 17 days, which is incredible.

And one of them—this sounds like the plot for a bad ’70s TV movie. One of them was a member of the Manson family: Squeaky Fromme came after him. And the other was a dedicated revolutionary, kind of suburban revolutionary named Sara Jane Moore, who was obsessed with Vietnam and thought that taking out Gerald Ford would spark a revolution. I don’t know how you get to that in your head, saying, If I kill Gerald Ford, that’s the moment people go into the streets and, you know, overthrow the regime, or something.

And in both cases, Ford just got lucky. These assassins got within a few feet.

Rosin: So we’re in 1975. The important part of what Tom is talking about is why they wanted to kill Gerald Ford. I’m not saying it was a good narrative or an effective one, but what was the nature of the narrative? It was political. Like, they had a political motive.

Nichols: Well, definitely for Sara Jane Moore. Asking what Squeaky Fromme thinks about anything is really asking to walk into a dark place. You know, Why would a member of the Manson family want to kill anyone? kind of answers its own question, I guess. But this wasn’t, like, random loners.

Like, one of them was a no-kidding celebrity. I mean, everybody in America knew who Squeaky Fromme was. They knew her nickname. But Moore had a distinctly political point of view.

Rosin: And do you think that’s what colors our cultural notion of what an assassin is about? That we’ve inherited this notion of an assassin as someone who is politically motivated?

Nichols: Yeah, we really want to believe that. And if you go back—since we’re staying with history—I mean, if you go back far enough, you know, there was always this sense that assassins might be crazy, but they have agendas.

And terrorists—same thing about terrorists. If you’ve never read The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad, it’s about an anarchist who’s going to plant a bomb, and he’s kind of nuts, but on the other hand, he’s working for a foreign government, and you’re not supposed to know who that government is. (Russia.) He’s gonna do all these terrible things for a purpose. When we go back to earlier assassinations, they had a purpose. I don’t mean to say that approvingly, but they weren’t random.

Rosin: They had a narrative. We can put it that way. Like, they had a story about them. That story could be covered for the press: My aim was this. I was trying to get the country to do this. I was trying to show that the presidency was bankrupt for this reason. There was a story you could tell about that.

Nichols: Right: Abraham Lincoln, the last act of the Civil War. But the problem is we want to believe that is still the case, because that makes assassinations, I would argue, more comprehensible and, in a way, less frightening than thinking about them just being kind of random weirdos.

Rosin: Okay. So now let’s move to the modern era.

This has flummoxed me. I, as a journalist, and I bet you, as consumers of news, have sat down with these two assassins, or would-be assassins: Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Wesley Routh are their names. And we look every day—it’s the habit of a news consumer—What’s up? What were you after? What did you believe? What did you think? You keep searching for the news. And in both cases: nothing, or nothing comprehensible. What do we know about the two of them?

Nichols: Not much. You know, going back to your question, Hanna, about our image of assassins: You say to someone, an assassin, and you think of a James Bond guy with black gloves, and he’s kind of screwing a silencer onto a rifle, and he’s got his night goggles and all that.

Yeah, there are guys like that, I suppose. I don’t know any, just for the record. But that helps us to kind of comprehend this because that’s a person with a history and a paycheck and a record. You know, “The Jackal,” right? Like, “Carlos the Jackal,” a famous assassin.

The problem with Crooks and Routh is: They just come out of nowhere. We don’t know anything about them, and we were putting them in this basket that we call assassins, when I would argue they are just part of the general trend we’ve seen of mass killers, of school shooters, of people who attack public places.

We’re probably never gonna know what Thomas Crooks was about, in the same way we’re never gonna know what the guy in Las Vegas was thinking when he opened fire on that concert in Las Vegas. And people say: How can this be? The FBI’s not doing its job. There must be a reason. This is the really scary part: Sometimes there might not be a reason, and it might not be a reason you’re ever going to know.

Rosin: Because I know you love movies and because we were talking about the mid-’70s—

Nichols: “You talkin’ to me?”

Rosin: Yep. Exactly.

Nichols: “I don’t see no one else here.”

[Laughter]

Nichols: Yeah, we were talking about this the other day. I mean, if you want to go back to kind of a great cultural touchstone about this, go rewatch Taxi Driver, because it was very prescient that you have this guy who’s a social misfit, you know—like old New York, where Times Square was still Times Square, if you get me.

You know, what’s his idea of a date? He takes Cybill Shepherd to a porn theater. He is totally a misfit and then decides, well, he’ll become famous. He’ll be a hero. He’s gonna take out this politician. Now, it’s very clear: This is a guy who’s going to explode and hurt someone at some point.

And the fame issue. Around that time, Arthur Bremer shoots George Wallace. And what’s Bremer all about? Did he shoot Wallace because he’s a racist and a bad guy? It’s: I’m going to be famous. I’m going to be somebody.

I know it’s sort of a stereotype to say, Well, you know, a loner, right? But there’s a reason that meme kind of came into existence. I mean, Crooks, in particular, kind of just didn’t exist, outside of going to this kind of dead-end job that he was at. And look: People need to work in nursing homes. I mean, we have to take care of old people. But a 20-year-old guy who had no apparent life other than living at home with his folks and then going to the kitchen in a nursing home—we just aren’t going to know a lot about that guy. And you know, that personality type is increasingly the type that lashes out in a school, in a church, at a mall, wherever.

And primarily, I think, the one thing I think we can divine from what Crooks did by his internet searches is: No one ever noticed me, but they’re gonna remember me now. Like, this is my one shot, and I go down, and I’m remembered. I’m gonna kill somebody famous.

Rosin: I guess we can put a name to that. I mean, it is narcissism in an age where individual brand and celebrity are very attainable for lots of people.

Nichols: Right.

Rosin: You can do it yourself. You can be a self-made minicelebrity.

Nichols: Yeah. And I think, as well, this starts to pick up speed the more we know about each other. It starts with the computer era somewhat, but it really picks up speed with social media, where people really do feel like, Hey, every time I go to Facebook—

Let’s face it, nobody goes on Facebook and says, Here’s me coming out of rehab, and, This is my son getting out of jail. I mean, it’s always: [On] Facebook, your life is awesome. And I think it does create people who say, Why not me? And you know, one of the things you see with all of these school shooters, for example: massive insecurity next to towering narcissism, side by side. And resolving that is like, Well, I’m going to live up to the sort of heroic and grandiose person that I think I should be.

Rosin: Yeah. I did rewatch Taxi Driver last night. I’ll tell you a couple things I noticed. One is, exactly like what you just said about Facebook: It’s incredibly prescient because you watch him watching the world through the window. You know, three-quarters of the movie is driving with him in his taxi. It is the experience of Facebook. He’s driving in his taxi, peering into the windows of couples, people working, Cybill Shepherd at her office, and he’s like, Why not me? And then he goes home alone, and he’s alone. It’s very prescient.

Nichols: You know, the American right now talks a lot about the anger of young men. Well, a lot of these young men weren’t even born in the ’70s, when Scorsese made this movie. There are always, I mean, young men with anger. And the real question is: Does society, you know, tame that, channel it, redirect it into other things?

The idea that this problem of these kind of anomic young men is new: I’m sorry, but Taxi Driver is [about] 50 years ago that this was made, and it was made about people that were born—what?—in, like, the ’50s.

Rosin: Right. Right. It’s true. Every era has its particular flavor of disaffected man. Although, as the author of the book The End of Men, I feel like our era is especially florid in that vein.

So now that we’ve presented this theory, it’s time to complicate the theory. We’re talking about assassins who are apolitical, who fit more into the vein of school shooter. And yet, we all have the sense and we talk a lot about how we are living in an era of political violence.

Nichols: Right.

Rosin: How do we square those two things?

Nichols: Because we are living in an era of political violence, just as we were in the ’70s, but to try to lump in the people who lash out at society for their own inner, messed-up reasons as somehow part of the general problem of political violence I think is a category error.

People that are going and threatening to hurt people at election centers or school-committee meetings—they’re not school shooters. They’re not Travis Bickle. They’re just people that are, I think, I would say: They’re bad people. They’re people that have gotten swept up in this notion that violence is okay. More and more we see that people accept the role of violence in public life.

And I mentioned the ’70s. It’s easy to forget now because it’s a long time ago, but America was living through a wave of left-wing violence, including bombing campaigns. I mean, you know, universities and public institutions were literally exploding with people who—in the same way that the folks going to, you know, school-committee meetings—they had an obvious political agenda. And you didn’t have to agree with it, but it was comprehensible. But in both eras, that’s a separate problem, in my view, from the people who say, I have to go shoot George Wallace to be famous.

Rosin: Okay, so the distinction you’re making is between organized political violence and individual political violence? Because as I was thinking about this panel last night, I went and read whatever court documents exist of the young man who broke into Nancy Pelosi’s house and attacked her husband, Paul Pelosi.

And the words he was saying were kind of deep-internet-conspiracy, far-right MAGA words. Like, you could say that he had a political agenda, just like you could say that the guy who showed up at Comet pizza had a political agenda, because he was reading a lot of stuff on the web, and he repeated that stuff. And the Nancy Pelosi guy did too.

But clearly, it’s not stitched together or making any sense. So I wasn’t sure if he fits into our category or doesn’t fit into our category. Or what’s the taxonomy?

Nichols: But I think what you’re seeing with a lot of these guys is that: They’re going to hurt someone, and then they go shopping for the reason that they’re going to hurt someone.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Nichols: That these were people that were, you know, on the edge, and then they sit down, and they say, I have this kind of inchoate, diffuse anger. And what’s it about? Oh, it’s because they’re trafficking children in a pizza joint.

You see the same thing, I think, with some of the young people who turned to terrorism. Like, in Britain, some of the kids who, you know, ran off to Syria to join ISIS—these were misfit kids, a lot of them. You know, I always love, for some reason in Britain, the resume of these young kids turned terrorists always includes, like, “failed hip-hop star” for some reason. But you can almost see that the anger comes first—the social isolation comes first—and then the shopping for the cause comes next.

Rosin: So maybe this is the way to think about it. It’s the easy availability and ubiquity of the cause language. So there are eras of political assassination. Say, post-Civil War, late ’60s, now.

Nichols: And the guy who went shopping for a cause like that, I think, before our modern era that we haven’t talked about is Lee Harvey Oswald.

Rosin: Okay, so let’s talk about him.

Nichols: Oswald was, I mean—we still argue about this today: Oh, Oswald. Kennedy was killed by a communist. Kinda.

Kennedy was killed by a crazy right-winger. Sorta. Same guy.

You know, it’s easy to forget because, you know, we’ve become so drenched in Kennedy-paranoid conspiracy, you know. But his first target was General Edwin Walker, who was, like, one of the most right-wing guys. And Oswald vacillated. He defects to the Soviet Union, and he doesn’t like it there, and he comes home, and, you know, his wife, at one point, literally locks him in the bathroom because she’s scared he’s going to kill somebody.

Oswald was—his life history is: He was a messed-up, bad seed. He was probably going to hurt somebody. And you can see him in his life shopping for, I’m doing this for, you know, Cuba. I’m doing this for America. I’m doing this—he was going to do it for some reason. And let me contrast this because I feel the vibe building of, Oh, you’re just dismissing all assassins as nuts.

No. In the 1950s, Puerto Rican nationalists attacked Truman and Congress in an organized, multiple assassins involved, clearly politically aimed campaign where they were going to try and take out the president. They shot up the House of Representatives. And as one of them said later, I didn’t just want to kill people. I was here to die for Puerto Rico and be part of that movement. That’s a completely comprehensible attack. And again, I don’t mean “acceptable”; I mean “understandable.”

Rosin: Like a suicide bomber, maybe.

Nichols: Who says, I have this cause.

Rosin: I have this cause—

Nichols: And I’m willing to die for it, as opposed to the guy who says—I mean, Hinckley’s almost an unfair example, because it’s such a clean, obvious case of a mental problem, right?

Like, If I do this, Jodie Foster will notice me. But there are other guys. You notice that all the school shooters now—they leave manifestos. Every time I see one of these mass attacks, I check and I say: Manifesto incoming within hours. You’re going to find it somewhere. What was interesting about Crooks was there was nothing.

Rosin: There’s nothing. Yeah.

Nichols: And I think that that guy was just so far down in the dark.

But I think the one point I want to make about this is: This is why it’s dangerous, though, to try and mobilize these incidents for politics, because I really think it’s something that’s a kind of—we didn’t want to use the term postmodern, because it sounds kind of literary, you know.

Rosin: Sexy and literary. Yeah. It makes it sound cool.

Nichols: But there is something different about assassins after World War II, maybe into the ’60s and certainly by the ’70s and the ’80s. And I would argue: That tracks with what’s different about mass-casualty attacks, which don’t really become a thing. Here’s a bit of music trivia for you: The first really big one that gets people’s attention is when a young girl, 16 years old, opens fire on a schoolyard, which became the inspiration—anybody know this?—the inspiration for a famous song.

[Crowd murmur]

Nichols: There it is. “I Don’t Like Mondays,” by the Boomtown Rats. That was 1979. Now, something happens in our culture that starts producing more of these folks, whether they’re kind of anomic, isolated assassins or mass shooters. But I think they’re all in the same kind of category of people that we see more of after the late ’70s.

Rosin: After the break, Tom and I look outside the U.S. to see how what seems to us like a very American phenomenon plays out elsewhere. That’s in a moment.

[Music]

Rosin: So in the last part of this, I want to expand our horizons a little bit to outside the U.S. Is this an American phenomenon? Is this a larger phenomenon? I mean, we could start easy with Japan, and then we can go a little more difficult to the Middle East. But let’s start in Japan.

Nichols: Well, I think Japan—I think the killing of Shinzo Abe proves this is not an American phenomenon. I mean, that was not a political assassination. The guy was upset. His mom had lost some money. And in a country where it’s very hard to get guns, this guy was dedicated enough and had the time to go basically build, like, a blunderbuss, you know, in his house.

Rosin: So that’s more like the school-shooter model that you’re talking about.

Nichols: It’s more like an American presidential assassination, where a guy with a grievance kind of gets it into his head about, you know—kind of like the Pizzagate guy, right? Like: My mother went broke, and Abe is behind it, kind of thing. Now, if you want to go to the Middle East, which is, you know, this whole other—

Rosin: Well, because it’s on people’s minds, I want to understand if, say, something like the killing of Ismail Haniyeh—and, you know, Tehran did blame that on Israel. How do we think about that, in this category of politically motivated or somehow-motivated assassination?

Nichols: I think we don’t. I think that we look at countries that are de facto at war with each other and in long conflict with each other. Killing each other’s military and political leaders is a different category. It’s a different thing.

For example, you know, did we “assassinate” Soleimani? I would say no. I mean, the guy was wearing a military uniform. He’s in a theater of conflict. He was targeted. You know, we have this term of art now: targeted killing. Assassination has a kind of—

Rosin: Rogue, maybe?

Nichols: Rogue, but also, an assassination has this sort of, you know—outside of politics, outside of war. You know, when we shot down Yamamoto in World War II, was that an assassination? You know, did we assassinate Japanese or German leaders? We were technically at war with them.

Did we assassinate Osama bin Laden? Bin Laden had said, I’m at war with the United States. And I think the United States basically said, Challenge accepted. And that was our argument, by the way, every time the Pentagon took out a car full of bad guys. They said, Well, you know, they say they’re at war with us, and this is a conflict.

Rosin: So if the actor is a government, we should go by the euphemism? We should accept the euphemism? “Targeted killing” is okay to say?

Nichols: Targeted killings, or we can call them acts of war. We can call them war crimes if we think they are operations that were wrongly executed.

We have a whole kind of language about this. You know, I used to argue with my students when I was teaching. They’d say, Well, what about when states do terrorism? I’m like, Terrorism, for me, is nonstate actors inflicting misery on civilians.

States engaging in terrorism—we have a word for that: Crimes against humanity. War crimes. Go to The Hague for that.

And the only reason I’m kind of a pedant about this is that I think it’s dangerous to start labeling all things you don’t like with a term that happens to be congenial to you. Because then I think you start making bad policy decisions about what to do.

So if everything is “terrorism,” then you live as we—look: After 9/11, we labeled everything “terrorism,” and we ended up living in a national-security state that did nothing but think about terrorism. And that was bad.

I still think there is a fundamental difference in most people’s minds and in their gut about a guy who is a veteran military commander carrying out regular and irregular operations in a field of combat who gets aced by an exploding phone or a drone, or whatever it is, as opposed to a president giving a speech in front of a Walmart who gets hit by somebody who says, I’ve had problems for a long time, and you’re going to be the solution to it by making me famous.

Those are just two different categories of things to me.

Rosin: I want to end on not theory or history but something that us—all of you—are going to be living and thinking about in these weeks leading up to the election: Donald Trump has very explicitly said that politics has caused the violence and assassination attempts against him.

What he literally said was, “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at.” I’ll read you from an email he sent to reporters earlier this week. He said, “The psycho,” who brought this rifle to the golf course, “was egged on by rhetoric and lies that has flowed from Kamala Harris, Democrats, and their fake news allies for years.”

It does seem as if the assassins are apolitical, but he’s turning it into a political agenda. Does that in and of itself just kind of raise the temperature of things?

Nichols: It certainly sounds like encouragement for other people to avenge that. And an even more disgusting comment, if it’s possible, was J.D. Vance saying to our colleague David Frum, “People from your team tried to kill Donald Trump.” I mean, there isn’t—I mean, it’s just a despicable thing to say.

Rosin: But what’s the dynamic in calling it out? He manifests it?

Nichols: Well, it’s turning to millions of your followers and saying, This guy is part of a conspiracy to murder me. And again, it becomes like the Comet pizza thing, of like, Well, I’m not saying you should do something about it, but maybe you should.

There’s a couple of things to think about here. First of all, for Donald Trump to argue that rhetoric is dangerous is just the most amazing deflection and turnabout in American presidential history.

And I would remind people that there’s a guy in prison who used to drive around in a Trump van, who’s in prison for a pipe-bomb campaign against prominent liberals across the board. Trump didn’t seem real concerned about whether or not your rhetoric could motivate people to violence back then—sort of, you know, waved it away.

Look: We risk, at this point, not a heckler’s veto but an assassin’s veto. You know, Don’t say anything bad in politics, because somebody might go nuts and shoot up a pizza joint or send pipe bombs. I think that’s a sign of Trump’s desperation, because he didn’t do it after Butler. He didn’t do it after the attack on him in Pennsylvania, which I—you know, no one is less willing to give Donald Trump credit for anything than me. But I gave him credit for that to say, you know, he gave this maudlin speech at the GOP convention. Fine. You know, to your faithful.

But when you start saying, “You people, your team” is causing people to come after us, I think it was really important that the Democrats didn’t respond to that by saying, Really? Here’s a list of the people that have done—

You know, for a guy that says, It’s not my fault that people tried to sack the Capitol. I had nothing to do with it. I just gave a speech. I told them to come peaceably, I mean, it really is a remarkable amount of hypocrisy.

Look—the one thing Donald Trump is right about (Vocalizes shudder.)—

[Laughter]

Nichols: —is that political rhetoric will always be mobilized by people who are unstable looking for political rhetoric.

That’s a fact. That’s what I was talking about earlier when I said these folks will go shopping. And if they don’t get the message to engage in violence, they’ll intuit it. They’ll say, Ah, you know, so and so said Donald Trump would be bad for the economy. I think that’s very clear. He meant for me to go take out Donald Trump.

I mean, at some point, you just reduce this to: Don’t say anything at all, which is what Donald Trump wants right now because he’s losing and he’s scared, and he’s trying to use this to bully his opponents into being quiet.

Rosin: Well, Tom, thank you for scaring us. Thank you for joining me on the show today.

[Applause]

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend, edited by Claudine Ebeid, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. And our sincere thanks to the Atlantic Live team who made the event possible. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.