Defining Danger

American Assassins and the New Domestic Terrorists

James W Clarke, James W. Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780765803412
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351523172
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since 1789, when George Washington became the first president of the United States, forty-three men have held the nation's highest office. Four were killed by assassins, and serious attempts were made on the lives of eight others. Add to that list the names of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and it is reasonable to conclude that political prominence in the United States entails grave risks. In "Defining Danger", James W. Clarke explores the cultural and psychological linkages that define assassinations and a new era of domestic terrorism in America. Clarke notes an upsurge in political violence beginning with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Since then, there have been ten assassination attempts on nationally prominent political leaders. That is two more than the eight recorded in the previous 174 years of the nation's presidential history. New elements of domestic terror in American life were introduced in the 1990s by Timothy McVeigh, the "Oklahoma City Bomber," Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber," and Eric Rudolph, the abortion clinic bomber. These men were politically motivated; their crimes unprecedented. These events and the perpetrators behind them are the subjects of this book. The volume conveys two central themes. The first is that individual acts of violence directed toward America's democratically elected leaders represent a defining element of American politics. The second addresses how danger is defined, through an analysis of the motives and characteristics of twenty-one perpetrators responsible for these acts of political violence where shots were fired, or bombs detonated, and, in most instances, victims died. The importance and originality of this material have been acknowledged in presentations to and consultations with the U.S. Secret Service and some of the nation's top independent private investigators. It is written in an accessible and engaging style that will appeal to the informed general reader, as well as to professionals in a variety of fields - especially in the wake of recent events and the specter of future violence that, sadly, haunts us all.

1 On Being Mad or Merely Angry

The title of this book, Defining Danger, conveys its two central themes. The first is that a sustained pattern of individual acts of violence directed toward America’s democratically elected leaders represents a defining element of American politics that sets it apart from the rest of the modern world. The second theme addresses the issue of how that danger is defined and may be confronted through an analysis of the motives and characteristics of twenty American assassins, would-be assassins, and domestic terrorists.

Assassination is the premeditated murder of a political figure for reasons associated with the victim’s prominence, or perspective, or some combination of both. In the 211 years between 1789, when George Washington became the first president of the United States and the conclusion of Bill Clinton’s second term in 2001, forty-two men have held the nation’s highest office. Four of them were killed by assassins,¹ and serious attempts were made on the lives of seven others.² Thus approximately one in four presidents was the target of violence. Furthermore, the political careers of four presidential candidates were interrupted, or ended, by violence.³ Add to that list of casualties the names of Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, who was murdered by members of his own sect in 1965, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., shot to death three years later by a contract killer, and the murders in 1998 of two Capitol security guards at the hands of a gunman intent on killing members of Congress, and it is reasonable to conclude that political prominence in the United States entails grave risks that exceed those faced by leaders in every other modern nation.

This is especially the case since 1963. In the thirty-seven years from the first Kennedy assassination and the end of the century, there were ten assassination attempts on the lives of nationally prominent political leaders. That is one more than the nine presidential elections during the same period. That’s two more assassination attempts in this recent period than the eight recorded in the previous 174 years of the nation’s presidential history. New elements of domestic terror in American life were introduced in the 1980s and 1990s by Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” Timothy McVeigh, the “Oklahoma City Bomber,” and Eric Rudolph, the Summer Olympics and abortion clinic bomber. All were politically motivated; their crimes unprecedented. The twenty-one subjects — assassins, would-be assassins, and domestic terrorists — their victims, actual or intended, and the dates of their attacks are presented in table 1.1.

Criminal Responsibility

Figure 1.1 American Assassins, Would-be Assassins, and Domestic Terrorists and Their Victims

Standards of criminal responsibility have evolved over the years and remain fluid. In one of the first cases to establish a standard which recognized mental illness as a mitigating factor in a defendant’s guilt, an English court in 1843 established what has since become known as the M’Naghten Rule.⁴ M’Naghten was based on the answers to two questions: Did the defendant know what he/she was doing at the time the crime was committed? Did the defendant know that his/her actions were in violation of the law? This was the standard adopted and followed in American courts until the 1950s when modifications began to be introduced to take into account expanding knowledge of mental illness and its effects on behavior. In 1962, the American Law Institute drafted what it called a Model Penal Code to incorporate these developments in the science of mental health. The code stated in part that:

A person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct, as a result of mental disease or defect, he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.⁵

This new approach to assessing criminal responsibility, sometimes referred to as the diminished capacity standard, stripped to its essentials, asks two questions: Did the defendant have a mental disease or defect? If so, was that mental disease or defect the cause of his criminal act? If both questions were answered in the affirmative, the defendant could not be held accountable for his crime.

Many states incorporated the concept of diminished capacity into state law during the 1960s and 1970s, setting aside the earlier M’Naghten Rule as being too insensitive to modern medical science and the complexities of mental illness. But that trend ended in reaction to the public outcry that followed the lenient sentences and acquittals handed down to defendants who the public believed were fully accountable for their crimes. Perhaps the best known of these cases was the acquittal by reason of insanity of President Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin, John W. Hinckley, Jr., in 1981. In direct response to that unpopular verdict, Congress enacted the Insanity Defense Reform Act in 1984 and many state legislatures followed its lead. Among the key changes in these new laws, was a return to standards of criminal responsibility resembling the more restrictive M’Naghten Rule. Many also included provisions which shifted the burden of proof from the prosecution to the defense, placing the difficult task of erasing “reasonable doubt” squarely on the defendant rather than the state. In the chapters that follow, we will see how important these changes have been in determining the degree to which some defendants are held accountable for their crimes.

Defining Danger

For some time, at least until the early 1980s, the psychological literature on American assassins mistakenly labeled them all “paranoid schizophrenics,” describing them as short, loner, white males, acting in the grip of delusions of persecution and grandeur.⁶ In similar fashion, historical accounts of American assassinations usually described the perpetrators of these unfortunate events as mentally disordered subjects driven by irrational or irresistible impulses. Subsequent research by the author challenged the medical/psychiatric model, suggesting, instead, that there is no single type of assassin in the American context. Moreover, fully a third of these subjects were primarily motivated by political ideals rather than personal deficits as the stereotype claims. Instead of a single “type,” four distinct motivational patterns are identified. The patterns are derived from an assessment of dispositional and contextual factors which describe the mental states and motivations of all but three of the twenty-one American assassins, would-be assassins, and domestic terrorists who are the subjects of this book. The typology presented in table 1.2 spans a motivational range from rational political extremism (Type I) through two shades of mental and emotional disturbance (Type II and Type III), to those who are truly mentally disordered (Type IV). This contextual perspective has, since then, informed the revised assessment strategies of the U.S. Secret Service.⁷

• Type I subjects — be they assassins or domestic terrorists — are primarily motivated by political issues. They view their actions as a probable sacrifice of self for some important political purpose. They are fully aware of what they are doing and the consequences of their actions. Such persons may or may not attempt to escape, but the sacrificial theme that characterizes their zeal suggests that capture and punishment, like death, is an acceptable risk. If apprehended, a Type I subject does not recant on his political principles, or seek clemency. While seeking to publicize the injustice that motivates him or her, purely personal motives, such as a quest for recognition or notoriety, are absent. Type I assassins are political extremists whose actions, within the context of their political beliefs, are rational and principled.

Figure 1.2 Types of American Assassins, Would-be Assassins, and Domestic Terrorists

• Type II subjects are primarily motivated by profound, seemingly unresolvable, personal problems. They are persons with overwhelming unmet needs for acceptance, recognition, and status. Almost always their difficulties are linked to failed relationships and/or careers that fuel their anger and deepen their depression, in some cases, to suicidal levels. What distinguishes them from other assassins is their “political personalities,” that is, their inclination to blame personal difficulties on their political victims and to rationalize their violent acts in terms of some larger political ideals.⁸ In this sense, they displace or redirect their anger, striking out at a prominent political figure who becomes a scapegoat for their personal problems. The notoriety that accompanies their acts generates the public attention and notoriety they desire. Type II subjects may or may not be self-destructive, but either way, their acts are intended to advance very personal concerns in a public manner. In some cases, their acts may serve as a form of vengeance, placing the burden of guilt for what they have done on those persons in their personal lives whose rejection is the real cause of their unhappiness. In others, the same acts may be intended to advance some highly personal — not political — concerns. But Type II subjects are not mentally disordered in the sense that they are fully aware of their actions and the consequences.

• Type III subjects differ only in degree from the Type II. They also are angry, depressed but, unlike Type II subjects, they are always suicidal, having slipped further over the edge into perversity in an obsessive desire for revenge and recognition. Cut off and isolated from persons in their personal lives who once mattered to them, their anger and resentment spills over and spreads out to society at large. Unlike the Type II assassin, the Type III subject makes no attempt to rationalize his actions in terms of political ideals. This is the essential difference between the two types. Political purpose, in any sense, has nothing to do with the deliberate, calculating, nihilistic plans of Type III assassins. Their objective is to strike out in the most perverse, outrageous way to show their contempt for a society that has no place for them. Revenge and notoriety are their only goals. Thus their victims may be selected for their prominence, such as a political figure or a celebrity, or for their number, such as a sufficiently large gathering of ordinary people who are killed in a public setting like a workplace, a restaurant, or a school. Either scenario — assassination or mass murder — ensures the page-one notoriety and media attention that the Type III subject desires for his final act of revenge.

• Type IV subjects are the only ones who fit the earlier stereotype of severe mental derangement. Unlike the others, Type IV subjects are afflicted with serious disorders that are reflected in delusional thinking and bizarre behavior. With only a tenuous and discontinuous grasp of reality, Type IV subjects act in the grip of delusions, of imaginary grievances, with only an incomplete sense of what they are doing and no awareness at all that it is wrong to do it.

Although this typology accurately describes the basic characteristics of all but the three atypical subjects in this research, it does not presume the purity of the four classifications. Human behavior is much too complex for that. The rationalizations of Type II subjects and the delusions of Type IVs, for example, may be couched in the ideological language of the politically motivated Type I. And the violent and perverse rage of the Type III subjects may be confused with the psychotic acts of Type IVs if the reasoned and controlled manner in which that rage is expressed is overlooked.

The lethally aggressive actions of all but one of the subjects in this book can be understood as responses to some frustration. The pattern — frustration which builds into anger, which is, in turn, expressed aggressively — is a familiar one in the social and behavioral sciences.⁹ It is the frustrating object which varies in the accounts that follow. The primary source of frustration may be political (Type I), personal (Types II and III, and one of the Atypical subjects), or purely imaginary (Type IV). The only exception is James Earl Ray who killed Martin Luther King, Jr. for money he never received. The distribution of subjects is presented in table 1.3.

My Approach

Table 1.3 A Typology of American Assassins, Would-Be Assassins, and Domestic Terrorists (1835–1996)

There are risks in writing a book about twenty-one complicated people. Given the scope of the study, no attempt is made to write complete biographies of each. My purpose is to focus on only those details of each subject’s life that lend the most complete understanding of his or her violent act. My hope is that such comparisons across cases yield insights about the assassination and domestic terrorism phenomenon in America that are missing in case studies of particular individuals. Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are stories about these men and women. The stories are presented in typological, rather than in chronological, order, moving from Types I through IV, an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• title
• copy
• dedication
• contents
• fmchapter
• ack
• preface
• Prologue
• 1 On Being Mad or Merely Angry
• Part 1 Type I
• 2 Type I—Region and Class: John Wilkes Booth and Leon F. Czolgosz
• 3 Type I—Nationalism: Oscar Collazo, Griselio Torresola, and Sirhan Bishara Sirhan
• Part 2 Type II
• 4 Type II—Rejection Lee Harvey Oswald and Samuel Joseph Byck
• 5 Type II—The Feminine Dimension Lynette Alice Fromme and Sara Jane Moore
• Part 3 Type III
• 6 Type III—Nihilism Giuseppe Zangara and Arthur Herman Bremer
• 7 Type III—Nihilism John W. Hinckley, Jr. and Francisco Martin Duran
• Part 4 Type IV and Atypical
• 8 Type IV—The Psychotics Richard Lawrence, Charles J. Guiteau, and John Schrank
• 9 The Atypicals—Family and Money Carl Austin Weiss and James Earl Ray
• Part 5 Domestic Terrorists
• 10 Industrial Society: Theodore John Kaczynski
• 11 Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Roe v. Wade Timothy James McVeigh and Eric Robert Rudolph
• Part 6 Conclusion
• 12 Criminal Responsibility and Risk
• Epilogue
• Selected Bibliography
• Index