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FEAR ITSELF.
The New York Times today features an article on a subject that, up until now, hardly dared to speak its name in mainstream media: fears of an assassination attempt against Barack Obama. I've been hearing comments from friends and acquaintances such as those highlighted in the piece by Jeff Zeleny for a while, but haven't blogged about them, doing my bit (until now) to prevent the evil eye from turning its gaze to the nation's first truly viable African-American candidate.
A few days after the Washington, D.C., primary, I was talking to some friends after a jazz concert. One man, an African-American, a Julliard-educated classical musician in his 60s, said of Obama, "Even if they kill him, he'll have done a great thing by getting all of these young people engaged in the process."
"Don't even think that!" I barked back.
But, of course, my mind wanders there, too. Those of the baby-boom generation and older have a political experience defined as much by assassinations and assassination attempts as by the great political accomplishments (and defeats) of their time. Yet we treat these assassinations as little more than mile-markers on the highway of national memory, and think little about how they have shaped the course of American politics. We deride cynicism, but fail to attribute any of its extremes to a history of political killings and attempted killings that marked a generation. We abandon the field to the tin-foil hat crowd.
One quibble with the Times piece: Zeleny suggests, as something of a rationale for Obama's willingness to take the risk, that the tender age of six at which Obama experienced the national trauma of the RFK and MLK killings rules it far from his consciousness. If anything, I think the result was likely the opposite. I'll bet Obama remembers exactly where he was when he learned of those shootings.
--Adele M. Stan
COMMENTS (12)
Wasn't he in Indonesia when he was six?
Posted by: Brian Ulrich | February 25, 2008 11:48 AM
I am a black male three months younger than Barack Obama, and my father was a foreign service officer stationed in Bogota, Colombia in 1968. And I remember exactly where I was when I heard about the MLK assassination.
Posted by: Brian Morton | February 25, 2008 12:44 PM
fwiw, i'm a baby boomer, and i think all the time about how if rfk hadn't been assassinated, he probably would have wrested the nomination from humphrey, beaten nixon, and the history of the last 40 years would be so much the better for it.
and, of course, the country would have been much better off had mlk remained alive to continue to bear witness, and i think about that frequently as well.
Posted by: howard | February 25, 2008 12:57 PM
RFK -- friend of Joe McCarthy; the AG who wiretapped Martin Luther King, Jr. and who authorized CIA to team up with the Mafia to kill Castro; who worked to discredit civil rights leader Bayard Rustin in Washington by spreading rumors (true, but nonetheless damaging) about his homosexuality; and who used his own back-channel contacts with the Soviets to undermine LBJ's diplomacy.
Look, maybe I'm the wrong generation to viscerally understand the Kennedy hagiolatry, but I don't find much about the Kennedy saga -- organized crime, sexual misconduct and hardball politics wrapped up in a gift box of saccharine platitudes and distorted hindsight -- to be either edifying or exemplary.
Better than Nixon? Probably. But RFK was not so pure as we'd like to believe nor Nixon so bad as we remember.
Posted by: tWB | February 25, 2008 1:20 PM
Do Madrassas get CNN?
Posted by: Steve H. | February 25, 2008 1:33 PM
Nice, stay classy SH. 1) It wasn't a madrassa, it was Indonesian public school, and 2) CNN (Clinton News Networks) wasn't around yet.
I've been amazed at exactly how UNcareful Obama is on the trail In the times I've seen him, he often surprises his SS detail by jumping to the rope line or leading them out on stage... And of course there are no metal detectors at these things (like there are at Bush's events)
Posted by: DBH | February 25, 2008 1:45 PM
I'm no baby boomer, but I've always understood their organized crime connections are what finally did the Holy Kennedys in.
No?
Posted by: Anonymous | February 25, 2008 2:00 PM
No need to bet...he remembers where he was. I'm sure he remembers. I was 5 when JFK got shot and I can remember details of that weekend like it was yesterday.
This kind of talk will only get worse as things progress throughout the summer and fall.
Let's all try to keep a level head about this stuff, eh?
Posted by: Cleveland Bob | February 25, 2008 2:23 PM
So ho is that the same people who are worried about this are the same people who are preaching a big tent?
I mean if there's so much love to go around then there is nothing to worry about right?
Either that or maybe he should come out and actually attempt to deal with racial justice in this country rather than pretending we are all living in some kind of post-race nirvana...
Posted by: patience | February 25, 2008 4:18 PM
I was born in 1961 also. The only time I ever remember my mother crying was the day MLK got shot. She was a white woman from Kansas and checked out his speeches on vinyl from our library so we could understand how powerful words could move others into action.
Posted by: AYC | February 25, 2008 6:07 PM
Some of the speculation about Obama's assassination seems almost to wish it will happen, to prove America is bad or something. One factor that makes it less likely is that the secret service has stepped up its game since the 60's. Although Hinckley got a round off into Reagan.
One factor that makes it more likely is the Cuckoo’s Nest effect. It is harder to lock up crazy people since One Flew Over won the Oscar. This increased homelessness and also increases random violence by crazy people e.g. Virginia Tech shooting. Unfortunately speculation about Obama's assassination probably increases the very small possibility that it might happen by planting the idea in the minds of the mentally infirm.
Posted by: buck smith | February 25, 2008 10:48 PM
tWB, generation has nothing to do with it: you're just poorly informed.
bobby kennedy through at least '63-'64 was a political apparatchik and thug, but then he changed (perhaps as a result of his brother's assassination, perhaps a natural evolution, perhaps something else).
and the bobby kennedy that resulted had skills that put those of obama to shame: at a time when it mattered, bobby kennedy could get angry, agitated wallace-leaning white working class voters and civil rights-supporting black working class voters into the same coalition, a skill that no one - not one single front-line politician - has demonstrated since.
if you don't know that much about bobby kennedy, close your mouth and learn, because you don't impress anyone with your outdated list of kennedy's failings: we all know that, pal, and we understand that bobby kennedy was much more than that by 1968.
Posted by: howard | February 26, 2008 1:03 AM