Mystery swirls around the murder of John F. Kennedy. In this month’s cover story: Hazem Kandil examines the theories, their origins, and their credibility.
‘Assassination has never changed the history of the world’ – so said Benjamin Disraeli, addressing the House of Commons in 1865 after the murder of Abraham Lincoln. ‘Even the costly sacrifice of a Caesar did not propitiate the inexorable destiny of his country’, he continued, confronting the (until then) most obvious contradiction to his argument. Disraeli couldn’t have known it, but he was speaking on the cusp of what more than one historian has called the ‘Golden Age of Assassinations’. The end date of this ‘Age’ has been given as 1914, a year in which an assassination certainly did change the direction of history. The 20th century would yield various examples to refute Disraeli’s opinion, with fallen tsars, civil rights campaigners and unpopular Habsburg princes among them.
That the assassination featured in this month’s cover story is among the century’s most famous is beyond dispute. But did it change the history of the world? One of the many theories surrounding the murder of John F. Kennedy is that the president was killed so that the US could ramp up its war with communism in Vietnam. But, as Hazem Kandil shows, the escalation of the war was not a direct consequence of Kennedy’s death. ‘When such crimes are perpetrated the public mind is apt to fall into gloom and perplexity, for it is ignorant alike of the causes and the consequences of such deeds’, said Disraeli in 1865, a judgement as applicable to Kennedy as it was to Lincoln. Sixty years on, with the consequences clearer, can they reveal the cause?
Assassination (or the absence of) hovers around Kristin Semmens’ piece for the 100th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch. Annual celebrations were held at Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller during the Third Reich. Destroyed after the war, there is now a memorial in its place marking the location where Georg Elser placed a bomb with the intention of killing Adolf Hitler on 8 November 1939. Unlike the putsch, there is no ambiguity about the success or otherwise of Elser’s plot. As it is, we can have a good idea of the cause, but can only speculate on potential consequences.
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In this issue...
What Killed Kennedy? Was it the mob? A coup? Cuban dissidents? War hawks? 60 years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the theories are still debated.
A Tutor Without a Tongue Seen to be less capable because of their deafness, deaf artists in the Renaissance used their art as a powerful means of expression.
