Would Johnson have become president if Kennedy lived?
I'd imagine not. He was a bit contentious.
And Kennedy, as history has shown, was not a universally popular figure.
He was involved in shady stuff anyway, and there were plenty of people who weren't exactly crying over the magic bullet.
Upstream, somebody said...
Plus, some disturbed individuals aside, few people have the capacity to plan and execute this kind of murder. It still might happen,of course, but I don't think it is any more likely than it was with Clinton, say.
Well, imagine if Timothy McVeigh had undergone sniper training. He was a Persian Gulf veteran who did what he did as a political act. It was not an assassination, but still. He had the will, he found the means.
The first round of soldiers are back home from Afghanistan now, and some portion of them are inevitably going to have been changed by what happened over there.
They might be "disturbed individuals" but they probably wouldn't act out of devotion to Jodie Foster... more out of vengeance for a ruined marriage, or an inability to hold down a customer service job.
There was a story on the radio Friday that had interviews with some of the soldiers home from Afghanistan -- because the Army has started a new program aimed at keeping these vets better adjusted than McVeigh and the DC snipers.
Here's a brief excerpt (full story, audio only, at the link):
Specialist Roger Lint(ph) is a thin 21-year-old with huge blue eyes who looks more like a poet than a soldier. In his unit he was known as the man to talk to, the smart guy who got along with everyone. And while Lint doesn't think the war has altered his basic character, he does feel the experience has changed him.
Specialist ROGER LINT (US Soldier): I am a definitely a lot more combative then I was, a lot more aggressive, you know. 'Cause over there we were the law; anything we said went, you know, whether they liked it or not. Basically we treated them like animals. You know, that's how we had to treat them. You know, 'cause they're used to a dictator so they only respond by a show of force; that's the only you can tell 'em anything. You can shout at 'em, 'Turn around, go away,' but they're not going to listen to you till you point a .50 cal at 'em, you know? And suddenly you view yourself as the master, you know.
SPIEGEL: Now that he's back in the states, Specialist Lint finds this attitude difficult to shake.
Spc. LINT: It's just--you get so used to, you know, forcing them to do something. And you come back and it's the same thing all over again. Somebody does the wrong thing, your initial response is, you know, force them to do it. I've had that impulse a few times. I know I accidentally shoved a few people during the reunion.
SPIEGEL: A tall soldier who asked not to be identified said more or less the same thing, that whenever they were challenged in Iraq they used force--'Snatched them the hell up' is how he phrased it--and that this impulse keeps surfacing even when he doesn't want it to.
Unidentified Soldier: Last night inside of Blockbuster, you know, this lady got smart on me, you know, and I wanted to reach for her and, you know, snatch her the hell up, you know.
In 2002, there was another rash of murders at Ft. Bragg, too. Weird, violent shit happens there all the time, but still. |
