The futility of assassinations to turn the tide

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The futility of assassinations to turn the tide

Published: 04 Aug. 2024, 20:05 Updated: 05 Aug. 2024, 08:01

Park Tae-gyun
The author is a professor of Korean studies at the Graduate School of International Studies, Seoul National University.

The repercussions of the July 13 assassination attempt on former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump still reverberate. The attempted murder immediately triggered a conspiracy theory — as expected. But the real question was what could have happened in the United States if Trump had been killed during his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. It could provoke a repeat of what had happened after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential race.

Several assassination attempts were made against incumbent U.S. presidents or presidential candidates in the past. The most shocking in U.S. history is arguably the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, shortly after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in the bloody Civil War (1861-1865).

Lincoln’s assassination took place at a time when Americans should have united and rebuilt their country. His Emancipation Proclamation was aimed to complete America’s founding spirit of freedom and democracy, but ending slavery also demanded embracing and integrating the Confederacy into the country. The huge popularity of the 1939 film “Gone with the Wind” which evoked Southern nostalgia even eight decades past the Civil War explicitly shows the importance of social integration.

The assassin wanted to kill the president, the vice president and the state secretary all at the same time to take revenge on the Republican Party’s — and the Union’s — triumph in the American Civil War. Among the three targets, only the president was killed eventually. At the moment of shooting at Lincoln, the killer shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis,” a Latin phrase meaning “thus always to tyrants.”

Could Lincoln’s assassin really reverse the results of the Civil War? The rebuilding process after the war actually became more messed up due to his assassination. Lincoln was trying to find ways to heal the wounds of the South from 1863 even during the war. That’s why he chose a Democrat as his running mate in the 1864 presidential election.

Lincoln hoped to mediate postwar conflicts from the position of the Moderate Republicans — not the Radical Republicans — in the party, as he worried that if the radicals who pushed for the liberation of slaves gained power, it would certainly hamper a smooth integration of the Confederate states into the United States of America. But Lincoln’s assassination led to the domination of those radical Republicans, and it helped the conservative party win a landslide victory in the midterm elections in 1865.

The ascendency of the Radical Republicans after Lincoln’s death was ironically met with strong resistance in the southern states and the Democratic Party. As a result of the bloodstained war, the Civil Rights Act was enacted — and the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution was made — to ensure human rights and voting rights for African Americans. But the KKK — the white supremacy-based terrorist organization — was founded in Tennessee in 1865, followed by the enactment of the merciless Jim Crow Laws aimed at enforcing racial segregation in southern states 10 years later.

The United States’ 16th President Abraham Lincoln, second from right, was shot in the back of his head by John Wilkes Booth, right, a famous American actor, at point-blank range during a special performance of the comedy, “Our American Cousin,” at Ford’s Theater on the night of April 14, 1865 and died at Peterson House near the theater the next day. [JOONGANG PHOTO]

The Civil War sparked by Lincoln didn’t result in the division of the United States, but achieved the abolishment of slavery. In the monumental Gettysburg address Lincoln delivered during the war at the dedication of the National Soldier Cemetery, he famously said, “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” But his assassination delayed the legal settlement of racial discrimination for another century. Then, the second assassination of an active U.S. president shook America.

Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, exactly 100 years after the election of Lincoln. The young and progressive Kennedy defeated his Republican rival Richard Nixon, who was the vice president under President Dwight Eisenhower. Kennedy’s election victory also reflected the dramatic transition of U.S. politics from the authoritarianism in the 1950s to the liberalism in the 1960s.

Kennedy had many drawbacks as the head of an administration — such as his short political career, a lack of allies in the Democratic Party, a feeble political base and his Irish Catholic identity, which was an ethnic and religious minority in the United States. With such political vulnerabilities, Kennedy showed his weak points in foreign policy shortly after his inauguration, as clearly seen in the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. The military campaign was first authorized by President Eisenhower to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro by training Cuban exiles in the U.S. But the operation ended in complete failure.

Despite the botched invasion, Kennedy demonstrated his strong leadership by dramatically overcoming the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year. In 1963, he delivered a historic speech to the rest of the world on his visit to Berlin, in which he famously said, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’” Kennedy suddenly emerged as a symbol of leaders of free democracies in the Cold War era.

The administration treading a tightrope came to an end with his assassination in November 1963. The motive for that killing was buried forever after the assassin was murdered even before being investigated by the FBI. Given Kennedy’s political characteristics, however, the assassination could have been plotted by Communists, the CIA or anyone else. But the assassination could not frustrate his policies.

After succeeding Kennedy as the vice president, President Johnson made more aggressive moves than his predecessor. As he came from Texas — a state much bigger than Massachusetts where Kennedy came from — Johnson had an even stronger political base than Kennedy. After signing the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Jim Crow Laws were scrapped once and for all. Johnson also signed the Voting Rights Act into law to guarantee African American participation in elections — also exactly 100 years after the end of the Civil War.

Johnson’s power succession also helped the United States get mired in the swamp of the Vietnam War after he decided to send combat troops there, a decision Kennedy withheld. Afterwards, Johnson said that if the United States had not intervened in Vietnam aggressively, it could have led to another round of McCarthyism in America.

The identity of Kennedy’s assassin is still a mystery. But if he was a commie, he could not have achieved his goal because Kennedy’s successor decided to engage in the Vietnam War more aggressively than before. Or if the assassin was a member of the conservative camp, he certainly failed to attain his political goal because Johnson is remembered as the president who legally ended racial discrimination in America.

You can find a similar case in Korea. In the Oct. 26 assassination of President Park Chung Hee, the identity of the assassin and the offshoot of the killing are clear, as it certainly ended the draconian October Restoration. Nevertheless, disputes over the motive of the assassin — and the results of the assassination — continue.

There are two theories to explain the reason for the assassination. One is related to the assassin’s need to take power from President Park. If so, he certainly succeeded in killing the president, but failed to take power. The other concerns the necessity for the assassin to stop the dictatorship and democratize the country. He certainly ended dictatorship, but couldn’t help achieve democratization.

History shows turning points mostly from revolutions or wars — like the 1388 Wihwado Retreat in which General Yi Song-gye of the Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392) decided to turn his army back to the capital city to stage a coup in defiance of the last Goryeo king’s order to march northward to invade the Liaodong Peninsula or the 1961 military coup by two-star general Park Chung Hee three centuries later. Another inflection point is an assassination of the leader to turn the tide of history.

It could be difficult to apply a universal rule to all assassinations. But clearly, the currents of history didn’t change to meet the original design of the assassins, given the developments in America and Korea.

Even though assassinations brought about some changes, adverse effects could have been bigger than otherwise. Another point to ponder over is the contrary effect of the assassinations of several members of the pro-Chinese conservative faction in the twilight of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) on its future. The episode could send a rude awakening to future assassins over the futility of their attempts to turn the tide of history through assassinations.
Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.