American Echoes | The Political Assassinations of the 1960s
By Jasmine Criqui
Walt Cisco, Dallas Morning News, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
It’s become something of a truism to refer to the times we live in as “unprecedented.” The 24-hour news cycle has a strong grip and a short memory. But if you were forced to pick a time and place in U.S. history when young people felt that they were on the precipice of a new age, you could do worse than UC Berkeley in the 1960s. My grandma’s freshman year saw the existential terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis and her junior year the eruption of the student-led Free Speech Movement. But in her sophomore year, no news story had as seismic an impact on campus and across the country as the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
One 1963 survey found that 55 percent of Americans polled “found it more difficult to carry on” in the wake of the JFK assassination, and my grandma was no exception. She described the events of November 22, 1963 as a communal flashbulb memory: “Everybody in our generation knows exactly where they were when Kennedy died, and exactly what they were doing.” For her part, she recalls walking back from class, looking up, and noticing that everyone in the group of people walking toward her was crying. Asked what happened, they replied “Haven’t you heard? The President’s been shot.”
At this point, my grandma’s classmates had reason to hope that Kennedy was still alive. In the first news coverage of the shooting, which aired within minutes of bullets being fired, the severity of the president’s injuries was still unclear—live on air, CBS Evening News anchorman Walter Cronkite quoted initial reports that Kennedy had been “seriously wounded” in Dallas. Back at Berkeley, my grandma and others hurried to the Student Union building in search of updates. Minutes after arriving, they heard the announcement come over the microphone: the president was dead.
Still in a state of shock, my grandma and several girls she knew from her sorority made their way to a nearby cafe to sit down and process what they had heard. Soon after, they were joined by a younger member of the sorority, who had a decidedly different reaction to learning the news. “One of us said to her, ‘Oh, isn't this absolutely horrible, the President's died,’” my grandma recalled. “And she said, ‘Well, what do I care? I'm a Republican.’ And at that point, we got up and walked back out of there.”
After exiting the cafe, my grandma and one of her best friends “ended up walking around the far side of campus for about four hours, holding hands and just talking to each other about what had happened and how absolutely impossible it was.” She described the overall experience as one of tremendous disillusionment: “It shocked everybody’s belief in the United States—this kind of thing just didn’t happen here.”
Tragically, President Kennedy’s death was only the first in a string of high-profile political assassinations that would rock the United States over the next five years. Malcolm X was fatally shot in 1965, while Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were killed within three months of each other in 1968.
The day after X was assassinated, the New York Times ran a story implying that he had it coming, claiming that X’s “ruthless and fanatical belief in violence” had “marked him for notoriety, and for a violent end.” The same newspaper relayed more somber reactions to King’s assassination in 1968, but the grief was far from unqualified—in a somewhat backhanded denunciation of the violence, Texas Governor John Connally, a segregationist who had been seriously wounded during the JFK assassination, said King had “contributed much to the chaos and turbulence in the country, but he did not deserve this fate.” Nearly a third of adults polled by the National Opinion Research Center said their strongest reaction to the news was the feeling that King brought it on himself.
Other commentators tried to make sense of the violence by tying it to larger trends. In the wake of the RFK assassination, New York Times editor James Reston argued that RFK was only the latest victim of a “world morality crisis” threatening public order.
“There is something in the air of the modern world: a defiance of authority, a contagious irresponsibility, a kind of moral delinquency, no longer restrained by religious or ethical faith,” Reston wrote. Among other things, he blamed both real conflicts around the globe and also the “fantasy violence of American literature, television and the movies” for reinforcing the idea of force as an effective means of achieving political goals.
Following the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last month, Republican Senator Josh Hawley put the onus for recent political violence exclusively on Democrats, claiming that the United States has had “three assassinations, or assassination attempts, of major political figures in the last 18 months” and that “all the targets are one persuasion, and all the shooters are one persuasion.” As the New York Times recounts, “Mr. Hawley had to be reminded by a reporter of the assassination of Melissa Hortman, the former Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, who was killed in June.”
Other commentators seized on Kirk’s past statements to downplay his killing, with many responding to news of his death by pointedly recirculating his 2023 assertion that a certain number of gun deaths were “worth it” in order to preserve the Second Amendment. Meanwhile, Americans interviewed by the New York Times about Kirk’s death echoed Reston’s frustration and dread, describing the country as “broken” and speculating that the assassination could be a “dam buster” for political violence.
As I’ve been reading the news these past few weeks, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about my grandma’s story. For all that the United States has changed in the last sixty years, our knee-jerk reaction to political assassinations has remained remarkably consistent: alongside the shock and grief comes partisan callousness, finger-pointing, and attempts to reckon with how we got to this point.
The 1960s exposed not only a coarsening American political culture, but also the shortsightedness of celebrating the assassination of political rivals. Just days after King’s murder and wary of growing civil unrest, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prevented housing discrimination on the basis of race, nationality, and religion. National outrage had pushed it over the line, and those who hoped King’s death would destroy the movement he helped build were in for a rude awakening.
