Assassinations

Political assassinations in the United States are rare. Yet during the 1960s, the nation experienced a rash of assassinations: Medgar Evers, 1963; President John F. Kennedy, 1963; and Malcolm X, 1965. Then, on April 4, 1968, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot to death while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Authorities quickly apprehended James Earl Ray, who confessed to the murder, and sentenced him to 99 years. Many suspected that Ray acted as part of a larger conspiracy of southern racists, but no accomplices were ever identified. Ray later recanted his confession, but his appeal for a new trial was rejected. Just two months after King’s murder, Senator Robert Kennedy was fatally shot on the night of his victory in the California Democratic primary. The shooter, Sirhan Sirhan, was apprehended at the scene and later convicted of first-degree murder.

Later, Congress took up the question of assassination. At first, congressmen investigated whether the United States was involved in assassination attempts outside the American border. In 1975 a Senate committee led by Senator Frank Church published their discovery that American intelligence operatives under President Kennedy’s administration were involved in plans to assassinate the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro. The report caused some to question Castro’s involvement in Kennedy’s assassination. The following year, Congress reopened investigations into President Kennedy’s and King’s assassinations. After two years

Surrounded by police officers and secret service agents, President Ronald W. Reagan waves to spectators outside the Hilton Hotel, Washington, D. C., seconds before an assassination attempt. (Hulton/Archive)

Of study, the committee refuted reports of Cuban involvement in Kennedy’s assassination but suggested a conspiracy of at least one other shooter involved with his death. The committee arrived at similar conclusions for the King assassination.

Two assassination attempts were made on Gerald Ford when he was president of the United States, but both failed. One attempt was made by a mentally ill woman and another by a cult member of the Charles Manson “family” (a counterculture group that had committed a series of brutal murders in Southern California), but both attempts failed.

In 1980 Mark David Chapman killed the former leader of the Beatles music group, John Lennon, outside his New York apartment. A year later, evidently inspired by the Chapman killing and the movie Taxi Driver and one of its stars, Jodie Foster, John W. Hinckley shot President Ronald W. Reagan in the chest on March 30, 1981. The president survived the assassination attempt, but a District of Columbia police officer, a Secret Service agent, and Reagan’s press secretary, James S. Brady, were also wounded. Hinckley was later found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a mental hospital. In the 1990s, the entertainment industry capitalized on America’s conspiracy fascination with sensational accounts, such as Oliver Stone’s JFK, and the television series The X-Files; each alleged elaborate criminal conspiracies with possible government involvement. These claims had no factual support; nevertheless, they became a common theme in popular entertainment. The public atmosphere of the late 1990s became so sympathetic to allegations of government conspiracy that Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King’s widow, and other family members supported James Earl Ray’s appeal efforts, based on their conviction that a much larger conspiracy was responsible for King’s death. Ray died in prison with no successful appeals.

—Aharon W. Zorea