On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Robert F. Kennedy, who was pursuing the Democratic nomination for President, spoke to the Cleveland City Club about the “mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.”
In a mournful cadence, Kennedy told the crowd that a sniper is a coward, not a hero; that the “uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.” Violence, whether it is carried out by one man or a gang, he said, degrades an entire nation:
• Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire. . . . Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.
On Saturday afternoon, a twenty-year-old man identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks positioned himself on a roof in Butler, Pennsylvania, and attempted to murder former President Donald Trump, who was speaking at a rally of his supporters. From more than a hundred yards away, Crooks allegedly fired off a series of rounds from what has been described as an “AR-15-style” rifle. One bullet grazed Trump’s right ear, he said. Had the shooter’s aim been even infinitesimally more accurate, Trump would have been mortally wounded. As it was, he was left stunned and bleeding from his ear. Before the Secret Service could sweep him off the stage, Trump paused near the steps to pump his fist and, in defiance, mouthed the words, “Fight, fight.”
President Joe Biden, who is facing calls from some Democratic leaders, various pundits, and much of the electorate to step aside, did the decent thing. In a statement, he expressed relief that Trump was safe and in good health: “I’m praying for him and his family and for all those who were at the rally.” Later, he appeared before reporters in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and insisted that “everybody must condemn” the “sick” attack on his opponent, adding that he hoped to reach “Donald” later by phone. Biden momentarily set aside his profound differences with Trump, and his firm belief that the election would decide fundamental questions about the future of the country and its essence. “We cannot allow for this to be happening,” he said. Biden’s sole misstep was to add, “The idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of.” If only that were true.
It remains to be seen if there is any leader in these hideous times who is capable of the pained eloquence and reason that Kennedy showed on the day after King’s murder. Set aside the sickening rush of accusation on social media, the vicious taunts, the crackpot theories that what happened in Pennsylvania was staged, a “false-flag operation,” a “fake,” the fault of the political left, the Democratic Party, and Biden himself. Set aside, for a moment, what influence the attempt on Trump’s life will have on voters in November.
Who is capable of bringing to this terrible moment the kind of moral sense that R.F.K. managed just hours after Dr. King was shot dead outside Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel? Many elected officials, Republican and Democrat, did issue statements denouncing violence and expressing relief that Trump had survived the attack. Many refrained from exploiting the event for political gain. But not all.
J. D. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio and a candidate to be Trump’s running mate, declared on social media that the shooting in Butler was “not just some isolated incident.” He added, “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Senator Tim Scott, of South Carolina, added more fuel to the atmosphere of conspiracy: “Let’s be clear: This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.”
Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, tied the shooting in Pennsylvania to Trump’s myriad criminal convictions and indictments. “They try to jail him. They try to kill him. It will not work,” he posted on X. “He is indomitable.”
In the coming days, things will not likely get better. In a fevered and divided country, some will try to generalize the person and meaning of Crooks, a twenty-year-old high-school graduate who is both a registered Republican and, reportedly, a fifteen-dollar donor to a liberal voter-turnout group. When more details of his life emerge—and they inevitably will—it may be hard to know what it all means. If it means anything at all.
“For historians violence is a difficult subject, diffuse and hard to cope with,” Richard Hofstadter wrote, in his essay “Reflections on Violence in the United States.” “It is committed by isolated individuals, by small groups, and by large mobs; it is directed against individuals and crowds alike; it is undertaken for a variety of purposes (and at times for no discernible rational purpose at all), and in a variety of ways ranging from assassinations and murders to lynchings, duels, brawls, feuds, and riots; it stems from criminal intent and from political idealism, from antagonisms that are entirely personal and from antagonisms of large social consequence.”
What must be said, contrary to the rhetoric of Vance, Scott, and Abbott, is that Trump has, to say the least, done little to calm or to unify the country he once led and is campaigning to lead again. Unfortunately, it is hard to recall a public voice in living memory who has done more to arouse the lowest passions that so often percolate within individuals and the greater society. Even as one expresses genuine relief that Trump escaped a worse fate on Saturday (and sympathy for the family of the spectator at the rally who was killed), it is legitimate to describe what Trump and his rhetoric have meant to the country. He began his political career with statements like “When I was 18, people called me Donald Trump. When he was 18, @BarackObama was Barry Soweto.” And he went on from there, year after year. After Obama attended a public viewing for Antonin Scalia, but not the funeral, Trump asked, “I wonder if President Obama would have attended the funeral of Justice Scalia if it were held in a Mosque?” With dizzying frequency, he trafficked in the demagogic language of dehumanization, of “scum” and “vermin” and “animals” and “enemies of the people.” And then there was “Lock her up!” and “Stand back and stand by.” In 2016, he deployed familiar bigoted tropes, declaring that “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty.” Over and over, he has glorified brutality, whether it was the desirability of police throwing “thugs” into “the back of a paddy wagon” or a congressional candidate body-slamming a reporter because he dared to ask about health-care policy. (“Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my type,” Trump said.) When he heard that MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi had been hit by a rubber bullet during a demonstration in the wake of the death of George Floyd, he called it “a beautiful sight.”
Trump has always dismissed the idea that he has contributed to the division and inflammation of the country’s state of mind. When asked if his language was divisive, he replied, “I don’t think my rhetoric does at all. My rhetoric is very—it brings people together.” And yet he has not hesitated to mock his victims, even when their loved ones were victims of assault. Nancy Pelosi was “crazy,” he said. And when Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was brutalized by a hammer-wielding attacker, he asked, sarcastically, “How’s her husband doing? Anybody know?” The Capitol Hill insurrection, which threatened the lives of Pelosi, Mike Pence, and other political leaders, found its inspiration in the rhetoric of one man.
That language, that lack of empathy, cannot serve as an example or a way forward. It is absolutely right and necessary to denounce in the clearest terms the crime that we witnessed Saturday in Pennsylvania and feel relief that the result was not even worse than it was. At the same time, one hopes for a sensibility and moral temper of the sort that stepped to the microphone in Cleveland, in April, 1968, to reject violence as an instrument of politics or rage and to pay tribute to an avatar of humanity and peace:
• Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution. But we can perhaps remember—even if only for a time—that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek—as we do—nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.
Two months after delivering that speech, Robert Kennedy won the California and South Dakota primaries and had a good chance to defeat Richard Nixon and win the Presidency. He addressed his cheering supporters in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom, in Los Angeles, and then tried to leave the building through a crowded kitchen. A man in his mid-twenties named Sirhan Sirhan approached him, raised a handgun, and fired multiple times. Kennedy died at Good Samaritan Hospital the next day. He was forty-two years old.
