Assassination

Typology

In his book American Assassins: The Darker Side of Politics (1982), James Clarke attacked the commonly held belief that most assassins suffer from some kind of mental disturbance. He felt that this “pathological myth” had clouded the popular understanding of assassinations of public figures in the United States. Much of the literature on the subject, including the Warren Commission's 1964 investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is guilty of the assumption that most assassins were deranged or insane. This may in part be due to the fact that many of the so-called experts cite each other and rely heavily on inaccurate secondhand accounts rather than examining primary sources. Post hoc error—the misperception that because one event occurs after another, it is caused by its predecessor—may also be responsible for the inaccurate view that most assassins are mentally unbalanced. Assassins may act mentally unbalanced because they were caught, not because they had a condition that caused them to be assassins.

In his examination of U.S. assassinations, Clarke made use of a wide variety of primary sources, including the National Archives, Library of Congress, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Secret Service, other government agencies, court hearings and investigations, trial transcripts, diaries, autobiographies, medical records, newspaper clippings, tapes, biographies, and historical documents. Through his research, Clarke identified five types of assassins: political, egocentric, psychopathic, insane, and atypical.

Political assassins murder public figures for ideological reasons. Such assassins are political criminals who view their acts as patriotic or in support of some higher cause. Political assassins include John Wilkes Booth, Leon Czolgosz, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, and Sirhan Sirhan. Actor John Wilkes Booth was a dedicated believer in the Confederate States of America who killed President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. After firing a single shot into the back of Lincoln's head, Booth leapt from the president's box to the stage, crying out to the audience, “Sic semper tyrannis” (death to all tyrants). Leon Czolgosz murdered President William McKinley in an unsuccessful attempt to spark a class revolution. The unsuccessful assassins of President Harry Truman, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, were Puerto Rican nationalists who hoped the murder would lead to that island's independence from the United States. Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy, was a Palestinian disturbed by statements Kennedy had made in support of Israel. Sirhan felt his action would help the Palestinian cause.

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