Assassinations

Kevin Drum calls into question the idea that assassins usually fail to achieve their objectives, arguing, among other things:

John Wilkes Booth may not have saved the Confederacy, but in the longer term he was probably pretty effective — though I suppose you can always make the argument that things would eventually have turned out the same regardless of whether or not Lincoln had served out his second term. But that's cheating: if you take that view of history, then assassins are ineffective by definition and the game is over before it begins.

For one thing, I think you need to take the Confederates' goals here a little more seriously. It's true that the Jim Crow system that replaced slavery was grossly inadequate from the standpoint of social justice, but it really was a step up from chattel slavery. If the rebels had wanted white supremacy without slavery, they could have gotten that without firing a shot. Indeed, if they'd been willing to accept so much as a prohibition on the further expansion of slavery, they could have gotten that without firing a shot. Confederates wanted the Confederacy, and Booth didn't achieve it.

What's more, though, it's not only "in the long run" that the assassination didn't make a difference, it didn't make much of a difference in the short-run either. Lincoln's death brought Andrew Johnson to power, and he was committed to white supremacy, but by 1869 Ulysses Grant and other Republicans committed to reconstruction were back in office. "Redemption" didn't happen until the 1870s and 1880s and the main Jim Crow laws were put in place in the 1890s. The Supreme Court overturned civil rights legislation in 1883 and Plessy v. Ferguson happened in 1896. The key political battles, in other words, happened after Lincoln would have been out of power anywhere.

That said, Henry Farrell has recently pointed to two papers on the assassination question that I ought to look at. First, Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken (2007), “Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War":

Assassinations are a persistent feature of the political landscape. Using a new data set of assassination attempts on all world leaders from 1875 to 2004, we exploit inherent randomness in the success or failure of assassination attempts to identify assassination’s effects. We find that, on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy. We also find that assassinations affect the intensity of small-scale conflicts. The results document a contemporary source of institutional change, inform theories of conflict, and show that small sources of randomness can have a pronounced effect on history.

Next, Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn (forthcoming), “The Political Consequences of Assassination”:

The assassination of a political leader is among the highest-profile acts of political violence, and conventional wisdom holds that such events often have substantial political, social, and economic effects on states. We investigate the extent to which the assassination of a head of state affects political stability, through an analysis of all assassinations of heads of state between 1952 and 1997. We examine the political consequences of assassination by assessing the levels of political unrest, instability, and civil war in states that experience the assassination of their head of state. Our findings support the existence of an interactive relationship among assassination, leadership succession, and political turmoil: in particular, we find that assassinations’ effects on political instability are greatest in systems in which the process of leadership succession is informal and unregulated.

So with that, happy Veterans Day: heck of a job Princip.

Comments

What about the assassination of Huey Long by Dr. Carl Weiss? It may have saved the US a fascist dictatorship.

Posted by Joe S. | November 11, 2007 2:55 PM

"If the rebels had wanted white supremacy without slavery, they could have gotten that without firing a shot. Indeed, if they'd been willing to accept so much as a prohibition on the further expansion of slavery, they could have gotten that without firing a shot. Confederates wanted the Confederacy, and Booth didn't achieve it."

Ugh.

While they could've gotten both of those goals in 1859 without firing a shot, they couldn't have gotten either of them in 1865 without firing a shot.

Better thought through counterfactuals, please.

Posted by Petey | November 11, 2007 3:02 PM

Are you limiting your analysis to assassination of presidents? That might generally support your point, but what about the long-term combined effect of the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Can we really argue that the country's path did not change as a result? Would Ronald Reagan be an American avatar today if all three of them had lived to old age? How about the assassination of Gandhi? Did that make so little difference in the long term?

Posted by Walter Crockett | November 11, 2007 3:24 PM

Anyone see the BBC's "CSA"?

http://www.csathemovie.com/

Hilarious, spookily realistic.

Posted by El Cid | November 11, 2007 3:34 PM

Walter:
Don't forget the assassinations of Moscone and Milk. We are still living with the aftermath of that.

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | November 11, 2007 3:37 PM

Don't forget the assassinations of Moscone and Milk. We are still living with the aftermath of that.

No kidding.

Posted by Tyro | November 11, 2007 3:50 PM

There is a lingering belief that Lincoln, being a saint, would have somehow managed to reconcile everyone. The sainthood, however, is posterity's reaction to the assassination rather than anything people thought about Lincoln before he was killed. If Booth had missed, I suspect that Lincoln would have ended up getting impeached like Johnson . . .

Posted by rea | November 11, 2007 3:59 PM

Some weird absences in the list of assassinations used for the Jones-Olken paper. No King Umberto I of Italy (1900), for instance. Damned political scientists.

Rea - do you really think Lincoln would've gotten impeached? I am highly dubious. Obviously, Lincoln's plan for reconstruction was considerably more cautious than the Radicals', who initially even thought Johnson would be more to their liking. But Lincoln, unlike Johnson, was a party leader, and would have been very concerned to keep the whole Republican party united. Lincoln also moved progressively throughout his tenure in more radical directions, doing things one moment that a year before he would have dismissed as too radical. It seems to me quite likely that Lincoln would have done much better than Johnson in maintaining his leadership over the Republican Party, sufficient to prevent the kind of breach which would lead to him being impeached.

What exactly the result of all this would be in terms of concrete policies adopted in the south, I'm less certain. I doubt that, in the long term, there would have been too much change. The basic issue is that unless the north had been willing to completely uproot the previous ruling classes in the south - which Lincoln, no more than Johnson, was not inclined to do, and which the Radical Republicans, even at their most dominant in Johnson's later years in office, were never able to accomplish, there was no long term way to force the south to accept Black political equality - it always depended on the presence of northern soldiers, and the north was too racist to be willing to keep soldiers in the south indefinitely to prop up the reconstruction governments.

Walter - I'm going to suggest that Gandhi's assassination at the age of 79, following the accomplishment of Indian independence and partition, did, indeed, have very little long term effect.

Posted by John | November 11, 2007 4:49 PM

I repeat Chiun's wisdom:

Armies cause problems by killing many, when the solution to all problems is to kill one - the right one.

The problem with assassins is they usually kill the WRONG one - the figurehead, not the "men behind the throne."

Kill the top ten thousand assholes running this country and it probably would change for the better.

Or - chimpanzees being chimpanzees - maybe not. They'd just find another ten thousand assholes to ruin the country.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | November 11, 2007 4:58 PM

I happen to have on my shelf a book title Assassination by Miles Hudson. It consists of case studies of about 20 political assassinations, including the history behind them, the motives of the killer, and the broader consequences. Quote:

In over half the assassinations studied the result was the exact opposite of what was intended; in one-third of the cases nothing much happened; in one case, something else, a world war, was the result; and in only one instance can it be said that the assassin's sponsor succeeded in his political aims.

From the Salon.com review:

The lone successful assassination was that of Leon Trotsky, in Mexico in 1940. Hudson asserts it succeeded because all Stalin hoped to prove was that, if he wanted to, he could have Trotsky killed.

He rates the assissinations of Gandhi, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr as counterproductive (which is not the same thing as having no impact on history). Gandhi was against partition and so was his assassin; India and Pakistan were partitioned anyway. Lincoln was probably more inclined towards reconciliation with the South than Johnson was. The assassination of King advanced the cause of civil rights. And so on.

Posted by Chris Conway | November 11, 2007 5:07 PM

For me, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin comes to mind. Shimon Peres lost the 1996 election by just fractions of a percentage point. If Rabin had lived, it's not unreasonable to think he may have been just marginally more popular. If Rabin had implemented the Oslo Accords in good faith, would we be in a different situation in the occupied territories now? We'll never know, but in Rabin's case, the assassination seems to have had exactly the intended effect.

Posted by GiantDuck | November 11, 2007 5:12 PM

Re: If Booth had missed, I suspect that Lincoln would have ended up getting impeached like Johnson .

Probably not. But the GOP might have ruptured between the Radicals and the Lincoln-led moderates. My guess is the business wing, and the Union army led by Grant, would have rallied to Lincoln and after a few years the Radicals would have faded from the scene, which is pretty much what happened any way.

In regards to Booth's success, he was actually just part of a larger plot whose object was the throw the US government into chaos (the CSA was already beyond ressucitation on Apr 14 1865). Not just Lincoln, but also Johnson, Sec. of State Seward and Gen. Grant were supposed to be murdered that night. Seward was wounded in an attack, but Johnson and Grant's assailants got cold feet and never attempted their assigmments. Still, what if the plot had succeded 100%? There was no Presidential succession act. Who would have taken the reins of power? Sec of War Stanton? One of the Congressional Republicans? Sherman presumably would have taken charge of the Union armies (he was in North Carolina starting to hammer out a general armistice with CSA Gen Joe Johnston and CSA vice president Alex Stephens), but there would have been quite a power struggle in Washington.

Posted by JonF | November 11, 2007 5:13 PM

Seems to me that in many cases, the "objective" of an assassination is simple revenge and blood-lust. Assassination as the product of well-executed political conspiracy would seem to be the exception and not the rule.

Posted by dry_fish | November 11, 2007 5:47 PM

Matthew's implied focus seems to be on assassinations of autocrats. But some of the more influential assassinations have been of social reformers --with somewhat unpredictable results.

As I've noted before, America's Founding Fathers modeled the creation of the USA -- via the Constitution -- upon the Roman Republic. Our evolution in the 225 years since have largely followed the path of the Roman Republic.

In that regard, the Roman Historian Appian --in his book "The Civil Wars" -- noted that the Roman commoners (the plebes) and Rome's wealthy elite (the patricians of the Senate ) had fought bitter political disputes for several hundred years --but NEVER with violence -- until the assassinations of the social reformers Tiberius Gracchus and Caius Gracchus by the patricians.

Appian noted that those murders started a cycle of increasingly violent civil conflicts that ended --within 70 years -- in the collapse of the Republic into a long term military dictatorship.

Appian's judgment is supported by eyewitness accounts from that violent period -- Cicero's letters, Sallust's account of Cataline's conspiracy,etc.

Once violence is used, the gloves come off. Each faction becomes increasingly willing to use preemptive , extreme measures -- either out of fear for their own safety or out of raging hatred and the conviction that such measures are justified by past acts of their enemies.

Posted by Don Williams | November 11, 2007 8:53 PM

" Not just Lincoln, but also Johnson, Sec. of State Seward and Gen. Grant were supposed to be murdered that night. Seward was wounded in an attack, but Johnson and Grant's assailants got cold feet and never attempted their assigmments. Still, what if the plot had succeded 100%? There was no Presidential succession act. "

This isn't true on two counts. First, there was no plot to assassinate Grant along with Lincoln, Johnson, and Seward. He was rejected as a target early in the planning because he wasn't in Washington. Second, according to the law at the time, the next in line after the vice president was the President Pro Tempore of the Senate. At the time it was Lafayette S. Foster. The Secretary of State wasn't even in the line of succession.

Posted by Greg | November 11, 2007 8:56 PM

If the rebels had wanted white supremacy without slavery, they could have gotten that without firing a shot. Indeed, if they'd been willing to accept so much as a prohibition on the further expansion of slavery, they could have gotten that without firing a shot.

Those options were not on the table at the time Booth assassinated Lincoln. Booth was trying to prevent what at that point was probably Lincoln's most likely course: the complete dismantling of the plantation system and white supremacy in the South.

And in this, as Kevin points out, Booth was quite successful

Posted by moron | November 11, 2007 9:44 PM

It's true that the Jim Crow system that replaced slavery was grossly inadequate from the standpoint of social justice, but it really was a step up from chattel slavery.

Spoken like a black man.

Posted by Black Power Yglesias | November 11, 2007 11:23 PM

Seems to me that in many cases, the "objective" of an assassination is simple revenge and blood-lust.

I agree. This is especially true in Lincoln's case. Booth couldn't possibly have thought he was saving the confederacy.

Assassinations may be less effective in Democracies, but they've been quite effective a deciding who gets to rule throughout history.

Posted by Jinchi | November 12, 2007 12:36 AM

Re: . First, there was no plot to assassinate Grant along with Lincoln, Johnson, and Seward. He was rejected as a target early in the planning because he wasn't in Washington.

??
I don't know here you are getting this, but you are wrong. Grant was not only in Washington (returning after Lee's surrender at Appomattox a few days before), he had also initially planned to attend the theater with Lincoln that night of Apr 14 1865. But he begged off because his wife was not feeling well, an excuse that later created rumors that Grant was "in on" the assaination plot.

Re: Second, according to the law at the time, the next in line after the vice president was the President Pro Tempore of the Senate. At the time it was Lafayette S. Foster. The Secretary of State wasn't even in the line of succession.

Please cite the Presidential Succesion law at the time. I'm willing to believe there was one-- but for sure the current one was not in existence back then. Also, it is a matter of fact that Sec of State Seward was almost murdered by a knife attack from one of Booth's co-conspirators (I think the assassin's name was Lewis Payne?)

Re: Booth was trying to prevent what at that point was probably Lincoln's most likely course: the complete dismantling of the plantation system and white supremacy in the South.

In Feb 1865 Lincoln had offered Alex Stephens (the Confederate VP) a deal whereby the South would re-enter the Union and abolish slavery without any further requirements. There is no evidence that Lincoln intended to abolish "white supremacy" at the war's end beyond the abolition of slavery. Certainly the deal he offered Stephens would have allowed the South to do as it pleased with its Blacks as long as they were freed from slavery.

Posted by JonF | November 12, 2007 12:37 AM

In terms of assassinations backfiring we could add to the list the Taliban assassination of Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud on September 9th 2001 in anticipation of 9/11. Thinking that without Massoud they'd be safe in Afganistan. That worked out well for them.

One thing I haven't seen discussed are the death squad type assassinations of community leaders of the sort that terrorized Central American countries in the 80s. They very much did have their intended effect which was to sow terror and decapitate every type of progressive organization.

Posted by Kent | November 12, 2007 12:43 AM

A lot of people who lived through the Sixties have the same vague sense that the country sort of fell apart when JFK was shot. When I heard Reagan was shot in 1981, I had feeling, "Uh-oh, here we go again..." Fortunately, he, like the Pope and Mrs. Thatcher, all survived their assassination attempts, and the world turned out pretty well.

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 12, 2007 1:15 AM

Was Jodie Foster impressed?

Posted by MikeJ | November 12, 2007 1:22 AM

The militarists in Japan relied on assassination to facilitate taking power before WWII. They won otherwise fair elections (by historical standards) by murdering the liberal leaders in large numbers. They never staged a coup until the waning days of the war, and that failed.

Posted by Njorl | November 12, 2007 2:11 AM

"First, there was no plot to assassinate Grant along with Lincoln, Johnson, and Seward. He was rejected as a target early in the planning because he wasn't in Washington. ..."

I believe that Grant was in town. As I recall he refused an invitation to the theater that night because Mrs. Grant claimed illness but, in reality she couldn't stand Mrs. Lincoln.

"Re: Booth was trying to prevent what at that point was probably Lincoln's most likely course: the complete dismantling of the plantation system and white supremacy in the South."

Something like that. Lincoln gave a speech a couple of days before in which he declared for equal citizenship for the freed slaves. Hearing the speech Booth said 'That's the last speech he'll ever make'- or words to that effect.

"

Posted by cal1942 | November 12, 2007 4:57 AM

Allende's murder cemented a right-wing dictator in power for a fairly long time, so I suppose that worked. Though I think it would be more productive to separate assassinations from coups d'etat.

Posted by ajay | November 12, 2007 5:00 AM

Matt is making a very noticeable mistake in only really adressing the bigger assassinations throughout history. Most assassinations are committed against presidents, or dictators. Most are committed against lower ranking government officials as part of ongoing guerrilla wars.

Indeed, the efficacy of assassination is really undoubtable. Even in this country, the 60's saw a parade of political assassination of government officials, candidates, and activists indicate that better reflects the natural of assassination. It's hard to argue that they weren't effective. After JFK, MLK, and RFK were murdered, progressives got a lot less willing to challenge the status quo. It's hard not to look at the fear and weakness of our current politicians and not to trace it back to those assassinations.

Posted by Soullite | November 12, 2007 8:04 AM

That statement would have been a lot more coherent if I hadn't made it with a half awake mind. Basically, Assassination does work. IT just doesn't work if you only pick one target and only carry out one assassination. It has to be part of a sustained campaign of violence against the elite in power for it to start to have the desired effect.

Posted by Soullite | November 12, 2007 9:13 AM

Re: After JFK, MLK, and RFK were murdered, progressives got a lot less willing to challenge the status quo.

JFK's assassination didn't particularly change anything. Johnson carried through on every one of Kennedy's policies, perhaps even more effectively than Kennedy would have.
MLK's assassination deprived the country of an inspirational and visionary leader, but by 1968 the major legal battles of the Civil Rights movement had all been won so I'm not sure his death changed history.
With RFK's murder history likely did change: he probably would have been the Democratic nominee and would have won the election of 1968, and the country would be in a very different place today.

Posted by JonF | November 12, 2007 9:16 AM

JonF, I would suggest you honestly examine why it is before all that happened, many progressives were plenty willing to challenge the status quo. Plenty of Democrats had brtoad, ambitious agenda's. Now, we are a party without any real direction and without any real leadership. We are now a party of cowards. Where do you think that fear came from?

While I used those three instances, there were quite a few more assasinations than just those three. Plenty of activists got murdered or simply went 'missing'. That took a toll on the will of the progressive movement, even if you don't want to come to grips with that.

The point of assassination is rarely of one big act changing history. Assassination did not start out as such, and it is not usually used as such when it is used as a real tactic. It's usually the same as any other form of 'terrorism'. It's not always aimed at the target, but instead at any who would follow in their footsteps.

Posted by Soullite | November 12, 2007 11:43 AM

Most assassinations aren't committed against presidents, or dictators. Most are committed against lower ranking government officials as part of ongoing guerrilla wars.

That's my thought, too. The first thing that popped into my mind when reading Matt's post was Saddam Hussein's public arrest and execution of Baath party leaders as he consolidated power in 1979. You'd be crazy to think that that had no affect on the Iraqi government for the next 20 years.

Posted by Jinchi | November 12, 2007 12:19 PM

The heck with shooting Lincoln in 1865. If Booth had shot Lincoln in 1861 or early 1861, then we'd be getting into some interesting counterfactuals. I always assumed that Booth shot Lincoln to punish him, not to get a certain post-assassination outcome. In that regard he's an outlier in any study of the political consequences of assassination.

Posted by Rich | November 12, 2007 1:09 PM

"In terms of assassinations backfiring we could add to the list the Taliban assassination of Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud on September 9th 2001 in anticipation of 9/11. Thinking that without Massoud they'd be safe in Afganistan. That worked out well for them."

You know, it's probably unlikely that they actually knew about 9/11 - OBL was unpopular enough with certain segments of the Taliban that they might have actually notified the west of it, just to bring OBL down a notch

Posted by Sajid | November 12, 2007 1:21 PM

Re: Now, we are a party without any real direction and without any real leadership.

I think the demon's name you are looking for is "Ronald Reagan". That's what happened to the Democratic party. When the nation so utterly rejected the Democrats in 1980 and again in 1984 (even more resoundingly) the Democrats lost their faith in their own ideals. Nixon's earlier victories had not had this effect since in 1968 Nixon won by a whisker (with George Wallace muddying the waters) and moreover Nixon, for all his crookery, embraced a form of progressivism himself: universal healthcare, the EPA, affirmative action, the opening to China, the end of the draft, a guaranteed minimum income, wage and price controls-- the Left was comforted by the fact that even one of its worst foes was on board for its agenda.

Re: Plenty of activists got murdered or simply went 'missing'.

Can you name names? Malcom X obviously. And some Civil Rights workers, murdered by the KKK. But did anyone "just go missing"? I believe there may have been some long-unsolved murders but I cannot think of any mysterious disappearances.

Re: The first thing that popped into my mind when reading Matt's post was Saddam Hussein's public arrest and execution of Baath party leaders as he consolidated power in 1979.

I think you have to separate executions from assassinations-- just as you have to separate coup deaths like Allende's or Ceauscescu's from outright assassination.

Re: I always assumed that Booth shot Lincoln to punish him, not to get a certain post-assassination outcome.

You may be right. Although assassins and terrorists sometimes have wildly inaccurate notions of what their deed will achieve. Booth and his conspirators may have hoped against all reason that by creating chaos in the US government (if all four assassinations had succeeded) they could still revive the CSA from its newly-dug grave. After all, Tim McVeigh thought he would spark a popular uprising against the federal government by blowing up the Fed Building in OKC. Such people are usually not playing with a full deck.

By the way here's an assassination not yet mentioned: Rasputin's murder by reactionary Russian nobles late in 1916. It was actually sparked by the fraudulent "holy man's" attempt to get the Tsar to grant equality to the Jews (Rasputin held some interestingly progressive, if quite confused, political notions; he also opposed Russia's entry into WWI). Nicholas went ahead with the plan anyway, losing the support of the reactionaries, his last support in Russia, and when a minor uprising turned into a revolution almost no one remained on his side.

Posted by JonF | November 12, 2007 3:56 PM

"Was Jodie Foster impressed?"

Actually, she was the one most harmed (aside from Hinckley himself of course) by the Reagan attempt.

First, she had to deal with an insane amount of press attention that had her at one point having to hide in the trunks of cars to get to her classes at Yale. Lying to the press about how much contact she had had with Hinckley didn't help, either (she said she had never spoken to him - when in fact he had phoned her several times and recorded the conversations, later revealed.)

Secondly, it resulted in a copycat assassination attempt on HER which was aborted by the assassin because he decided she was "just too pretty to kill." He was discovered, tracked down and arrested. There was also a third assassination threat toward her by a psycho woman who was in love with Hinckley after he gained notoriety.

Third, she's had to deal with the issue for the last twenty years, despite having said everything she wanted to say about it in her Esquire article a year or so later.

Fourth, every time Hinckley is up for visiting rights to his parents, the issue comes up again as to whether he could still be considered a threat to her.

But nobody has ever explained how a Bush relative was dining with Hinckley's parents before the assassination attempt, or what Hinckley was doing near a Bush resident in a town in Texas before the attempt either.

Or why Judy Woodruff claimed to have heard shots fired from a Secret Service overwatch position, then later recanted when she remembered how many unwitting Kennedy assassination witnesses ended up dead...

Not to mention that Hinckley, a complete incompetent with firearms (he bought a .22 to assassinate the President - if he was trained Mossad, that would make sense, but he presumably wasn't) managed to hit Reagan in the one spot where his vest wasn't protecting him.

OTOH, if someone competent was supposedly trying to hit Reagan, it should have been one hundred percent successful. It would have been a head shot and there would have been no question of a vest.

Personally I will always believe that George H. W. Bush simply didn't want to wait for Reagan to retire.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | November 12, 2007 9:18 PM