Sic semper: Killing Kennedy and Lincoln

Lincoln and Kennedy are the bookends of presidential assassinations. There were attempts before and attempts since, as well as two other successful kills, but they are, so far, the alpha and omega of that story. Which is partly why their deaths attract the most attention. A quick google search for books on both topics will bring pages and pages of results, let alone web pages, papers, articles popular and academic, films, TV and yes, at least one musical, Sondheim's Assassins, which starts with Lincoln and ends with JFK. We probably don't need anymore - but here goes.

The Kennedy assassination is well-known, on film, and still controversial. How could a single gun-nut shoot down the president? Why was he killed himself while surrounded by policemen days later? Surely there is more to this than meets the eye. Coincidences, conflicting eye-witness reports, and inconsistencies all tend to prove there was a lie being told to the people.

Vincent Bugliosi would disagree. Bugliosi was a successful and experienced District Attorney in Los Angeles, prosecutor of the Manson Family, and the author of Helter Skelter. Having acted as prosecutor in a mock trial of Oswald, his professional curiosity was piqued, and the result is Reclaiming History: The assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a large (1600 pages)  ambitious book that aims to put to rest the idea that anyone but Oswald was responsible for Kennedy's death. (I didn't actually read this book, but instead listened to Edward Hermann reading it. Which was good, but I didn't get any illustrations - of which there are 32 pages!) As for the inconsistencies, the coincidences, Bugliosi will tell you that is part of any real-life murder, which rarely have a scriptwriter to neaten things up.

It would be pointless for me to reproduce Bugliosi's arguments, and more importantly evidence, as it would be tantamount to reproducing the book. The first section, available as a separate book, Four Days in November (which was made into a film, Parkland) details the assassination and what immediately followed, hour by hour, minute by minute, and during the assassination itself, second by second. It is as thorough a retelling of the events from Kennedy awaking on November 22 to Oswald's burial  on November 25 as you could ever find.

The second section goes through the main conspiracy theories and exposes their utter lack of evidence and their fantasist origins. Again, going into detail would be tedious, but in printed form Bulgiosi provided references and notes for you to follow. As an example, take the fourth shot. Oswald, as has been demonstrated several times, had plenty of time  and expertise to make his three shots. But when the House Selected Committee on Assassinations in 1976 , lead by a Senator who believed in the conspiracy theory, handed down their report, they said there was a fourth shot, hence a second gunman and a conspiracy. They could not name anyone who was part of that conspiracy and in fact explicitly ruled out the usual suspects - CIA, the mob, FBI etc. Their only evidence of a second shooter was an audio tape of a motorbike that was supposed to be part of the motorcade, allegedly recording a fourth shot. It was the only evidence for a fourth shot, and the expert who identified it as such said the tape could only be supportive evidence and not evidence in itself. Apart from technical problems with this tape, we are supposed to believe that a motorcycle policeman close enough to hear four shots, 150 meters behind the car, neither revved his engine to join the rush to the hospital, nor turned on his siren, but instead continued in the same fashion as he did before. Moreover, other acoustical evidence on the tape suggests the 'fourth shot' took place a minute after the first three. Far more likely then, it was a motorcycle in another part of town and the shot, static or some other innocent noise.

Not that evidence or lack thereof will put a conspiracist off their pet theory. Indeed, they will say people like myself are falling for the Big Lie, one told often enough so that people will believe it. But consider this: most people believe there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy despite the utter lack of evidence. What then is the Big Lie and who is falling for it?

The image of John Wilkes Booth leaping from a theatre box to the stage, and breaking his leg in the process  is imprinted on the historical imagination. It may also be wrong. Having shouted something  - Sic semper tyranis? The South is avenged? A theatre full of witnesses disagree - he walked quickly from the stage through the wings to the stage door, mounted a difficult horse and rode off. The leg was broken, it seems, later on his ride. What else do we picture incorrectly?

Lincoln was only one of the victims on April 14 1865. His Secretary of State Francis Seward was also attacked that night, and left with horrific injuries, while the attacker assigned to Vice-President Andrew Johnson lost his nerve at the last minute. The conspiracy was ambitious in scope, months in planning, had different members coming and in and trying to get out, transformed from a single kidnapping to a planned triple-murder, and yet we only really know one name, that of Booth. And having read American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies by Michael W Kauffman, I'm not entirely sure Booth would be unhappy about that.  What he would be deeply grieved by would be the high esteem Lincoln is held in today, and why: freeing the slaves, and prosecuting a successful war against the Confederacy. 

Like Bugliosi's book, this is a detailed account of the assassination. As this was a long conspiracy which started before November 1864, naturally the author can't go into hour by hour build up, but for the assassination itself and its immediate aftermath, Kauffman does just that. By the time the other conspirators were tried and hanged it was July 1865 so this book is covering a lot more time in a much more user-friendly length. It is a very readable book, wearing its deep research lightly. Clearly the emphasis is on Booth, his colourful family, his life and motivations. Again there are myths and misconceptions here that Kauffman is keen to clear up. Booth's career was not on the wane, nor was he losing his voice. His plan to kidnap Lincoln and take him to Richmond was a wild one, but not without possibility while the war was continuing. But he dithered so long, Robert E Lee surrendered and people were waiting for the other Southern armies to follow suit. Those who had heard of his plan mocked Booth and his grandiose scheme. The South was falling, Booth was losing face, so out of vanity and bitterness, he crept into the theatre box and shot the President at point blank range.

His other stated motivation was Lincoln's supposed tyranny. And he was not alone in that thought. Suspending habeas corpus and other sections of the Constitution for the duration had made Lincoln some bitter enemies, and more than one of them had wondered out loud and on the record where was the Brutus to stop this Caesar. Booth was consciously following in the Roman's footsteps to save a Republic. But even then he waited too long, by a day. As Kauffman so elegantly puts, it, "Booth had hoped to to kill Lincoln on the Ides and highlight his resemblance to Caesar; but instead he shot him on Good Friday, and the world compared him to Christ."

But Booth's victims went far beyond the President. Any hope of mercy for the defeated Confederacy was gone. Lincoln's wife was eventually committed. Henry Rathbone who was seriously injured trying to capture Booth in the theatre box, went mad with guilt years later, murdered his wife and saw out his days in an asylum. Seward  never fully recovered from his wounds. Booth would write to people with veiled hints, including Vice President Johnson, so as to implicate them in the conspiracy if it went wrong, to the point where lives and careers were damaged and destroyed, and people still ponder if Johnson was part of it. Booth was a vain, calculating and cunning man, who was a successful actor, and a successful assassin, whose actions brought more pain and trouble for the Southern states he was claiming to protect. Sic semper indeed.

Conflicting witness reports, inconsistencies, and coincidences are scattered throughout both the deaths of Lincoln and Kennedy. In one case we don't even consider them important, in the other we use them to create conspiracies to implicate the world. Lincoln died in a simpler time, we in the grip of the parochialism of the present would say, so his death was simpler. Kennedy was our hero, and heroes don't get killed by misfits. Extraordinary men get killed by extraordinary means, vast conspiracies, full of hundreds of evil men. But life is not neat nor well-written. A lone gun nut reaches for his moment, and the rest is history.

Born to Rule: Edward VIII

Nice photo-op

There is an air of romance about Great Britain's Edward VIII and fair enough; he did give up the throne for love. Beyond that, my only impressions of him have been garnered from popular culture - a selfish man (perhaps) a womaniser (true, although his marriage was a long and successful one) and nasty to his brother (not true, at least not before or during the abdication crisis: later perhaps) whose life after the abdication did not amount to much (well..) After reading Philip Ziegler's Edward VIII, while I feel more informed, I cannot say I feel much better towards the subject. I do think this is as sympathetic a biography as you're going to get, without lapsing into hagiography. It's a very effective retelling of the Abdication Crisis, which in the end is the most interesting thing about Edward.

 The marriage which was not expected to last - Simpson was not Edward's first great love affair, and the others had petered out -  did so until Edward's death in 1976. Given our next king will be a divorcee married to another divorcee, we can see that time has changed (although whether she will be Queen is still a matter of speculation.) It was Noel Coward who suggested that there should be a statue of Wallis Simpson in every town in Britain, as a tribute to the woman who stopped Edward becoming king. It was a typically waspish Coward thing to say, but contains more than a kernel of truth. A lot of the anger directed towards Simpson derived from her nationality and her marriage status, not to mention her commoner status. But she did seem to bring out the worst in Edward, through her love of money, jewellery, and attention. Not to mention her friends in Germany. But Ziegler dismissed the more lurid rumours about her life and sexuality, simply from lack of evidence.

The other use that Edward gets put to in literature is as King of England in the alternative universe where Germany won WWII. Edward, like many of his time, was an appeaser of the Germans and an admirer of the order that the Nazis brought to what had been a country in some chaos. He visited Germany in the late 30s, met the top Nazis, and has been accused of being pro-Nazi.

Ill-advised photo-op

Ziegler seems satisfied that Edward  would not have been a puppet king for the Nazis, should the opportunity present itself. But I cannot help thinking he might have been; not a puppet as such, but he would have seen himself as a mediator between the Germans and the British people. In any case, the point is moot. (In case you're wondering, WE WON!)

This book does spend what seems a lot of time on Edward's youth but I think Ziegler is trying hard to find the boy who became the man who renounced the throne. He felt constrained by his role as a prince, hated the ceremony and dressing up. During WW1, despite being in uniform and asking otherwise, he was kept from the  fighting and spent most of it at one headquarters or another which he resented. (He went on record several times saying how much he hated the Germans; indeed he seemed to share most of the common prejudices of his age.)  He was also aware of the working class and their life and often commented on a need to do something for them. But in the end he lacked the application, and to be fair, the means to do much at all. If he had kept his throne, he may have kicked against the traces but one suspects he would have stayed a conservative course.

 Edward's post-adbication life was about half of his life and yet it takes up perhaps a third of this book, even less, which gives you a fair indication of its action-packed nature. He does well as Governor of the Bahamas during the Second World War, working hard to improve the local economy and the position of the majority black population. But apart from that, most of his energy seemed to be spent on making the Royal Family keep him the style he had become accustomed and trying to get his wife made a Royal Highness. As neither of them were in the line of succession, it seems a fruitless argument. He never seemed to put his energy or his name to anything of use to anyone but himself and his wife.

Possibly from
the Abdication
Crisis

In the end, I kept thinking of what was the point of Edward VIII? If you are born to the royal family, supported by the resources of the people of Britain, and then opt out of what you were born to do, what is the point of you?  Perhaps once he had stopped being king, he should have gone out, got a job, and got on with things as Mr Windsor (or Saxe-Coburg or whatever. Actually, just change his name to Sax Coburg and become a jazz man. Ok, that's a bit silly.) Such a path would be unthinkable then, and perhaps now. But we fetishise self-fulfilment these days to the detriment of everything else - responsibility to others, for example. Responsibility to your society. Edward may have been the harbinger to the modern liberal fallacy that your happiness is the only thing that matters and damn everybody and anything else. Duty, sacrifice, selflessness are all qualities we disparage so we can all be the best you you can be, and I don't see society improving as a result. I don't suggest one should ignore personal fulfilment but I'm not convinced it should be the driver of society that it is. In The Madness of George III, the king's last line (in the film at least) is that the Royal Family is there to be an example. Maybe we all looked to the wrong King.

Fabulous monsters: The end of excess?

The 1960s are popularly held to be a watershed in human history. When the children of the Second World War, freed from the austerity of the last war, and under the shadow of the third, turned away from traditional values of family, law, sex, religion and headed off in a new direction, they began a seismic shift whose aftershocks we still are feeling today. We are over half a century from the 60s which means we live with those who knew the world before then, those who came of age then, and those who have only known the aftermath.

On the other hand, has that much changed? Two books I've just read both claim to detail a marker of the end of one era and the beginning of another. Furious love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the marriage of the century, by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger,  traces that turbulent love story, while Party of the century: The fabulous story of Truman Capote and his Black and White Ball, by Deborah Davis looks at the writer's life through the prism of his party. Tantalisingly, the stories almost cross: Burton and Taylor were invited to the ball, but were filming overseas and were unable to attend.

Both are stories of excess. The fabulous Burtons, or Dick and Liz as they were known to their distaste, were creatures of excess, of love, of sex, of money, of alcohol, of fighting. Their love seemed to consume them, and their lives together were a tumult. They gave each other strengths that made them both braver people and better actors, but she was the winner of two Oscars while he, nominated for seven, never won one. He was haunted by the stage career he never had, though he denied it. On one bender, he was carried away, crying out "I could have been Lear!" She claimed she was happier being Mrs Burton than Elizabeth Taylor movie star and indeed her acting career became less important to her as she got older. Their fights were legendary, part cathartic, part love-play, part putting on a show for their world-wide audience. 

But the fights became more real, more vicious. Though he tried several times to reform, Burton couldn't be sober and with Taylor at the same time. She too overindulged in food, her weight fluctuating alarmingly, and in alcohol, although she held her booze better than her husband. Their love affair was killing them. And younger actors were coming through with regional British accents, unlike the RP accent Burton spent so much time perfecting, the women with fashionable slender figures that Taylor could never hope to emulate. (And growing older is always professionally harder for an actress.) They separated, divorced, remarried and divorced again. In the end both personal and professional pressures forced

them apart, although they were part of each other's lives until the end. Burton married twice again before dying as a result of alcoholism and other long term health issues at only 58. Taylor, who married 8 times in all, became a movie star without movies. Famously she championed the AIDS cause from the 1980s, inspired she said from giving Burton the courage to admit publicly to his haemophilia but in the 1960s. Furious love is fascinating story, and well told, going well beyond any sort of trashy 'expose'.

Truman Capote's career peaked in 1966 with the publication of In Cold Blood. He had gone from a poor Southern boy to a friend of the rich and famous. He celebrated with a masked Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in November of that year. He planned it to be the party of the century and you could argue he achieved his aim. Davis looks at Capote's life both before and after this party, but the party dominates. Planned to the nth degree and publicised with a touch of genius, it was national news when it happened. The guest list, so revised, polished and altered over months, was a combination of the rich, the famous, the literary, the beautiful and included Capote's friends he had made in Kansas. The party itself was a success although some guests claimed otherwise. Candice Bergen said the party was dull and left early, and in a photo looks spectacularly bored. But that was not the popular perception, and that was all that mattered. But Capote was unable to follow up the spectacular success of In Cold Blood, and the time for palling around with the wives of rich men seemed to have passed. Capote's career was down hill from that time on, and in the end, he was a drunk and a drug addict. He too died young but his flame had died long before. Burton by contrast gave one of his great performances in 1984, the year he died.

Both claim their stories show an end to an era. And perhaps they are in their way. Actors and writers don't seem to live in the way of the Burtons and Capote. But celebrities spending money on frivolities that could save small nations has not gone away, nor has our fascination with them. On the contrary, it has increased to the point where we don't seem to care why they are celebrities, as long as we can see their photos, read their 'candid' interviews, follow the ups and downs of their relationships and careers, and when one of them dies, we mourn as if one of our immediate family has gone. Perhaps we have changed, but that doesn't mean we have changed for the better.

And his voice may or may not be heard: The intrusive biographers

Byrne's helmet. Compare the description

I've just read Peter Fitzsimon's latest tome, Ned Kelly: The story of Australia's most notorious legend. It's a best seller but I can't think why. While well-researched, it has no new insight into the topic or the people involved. It is written in present tense which according to Fitzsimons gives us the sensation of being there as, apparently, we have never used our imaginations before. If 727 pages of deathless prose like this appeals, by all means read on:

       Undoubtedly the best of the helmets is   the one that has been made for Joe Byrne. In a clever design twist, a curve at the top of his visor reaches down almost to the bottom, covering the exposure of   his nose and leaving his two piercing blue eyes staring out, rather like a bemused koala.

Otherwise, move on. There are many other and better books on Kelly out there.

Fab: An intimate life of Paul McCartney  by Howard Sounes is a sometimes sniping tome that again covers well-worn ground without finding anything particularly new.  I'm not sure there is any mystery to Paul McCartney, he's a pretty open book. He has an enviable gift for melody, which even John Lennon acknowledged, even if McCartney's detractors won't. He wrote the most covered song of all time in Yesterday, contributed to some of the greatest songs of modern popular music as part of the most influential rock band of all time, and by all accounts puts on a fantastic live show.

There is a quotation in from David Puttnam that I think does sum up McCartney, comparing him to Ridley Scott 

  [B]oth men of immense, immense, immense talent who on their deathbed are likely to look back on their career with some satisfaction, but with some dissatisfaction, in that I’m not sure that either of them — Ridley and Paul, both very wealthy and everything — I’m not sure either of them has absolutely delivered what was in them. 



Perhaps McCartney's problem was that his songs came too easily, and after Lennon, with rare exception, he never found someone to push him to the heights he was capable of. Mind you, I'd say the same about Lennon, who was a more interesting lyricist, but didn't always avoid the issue of disappearing up his own arse.

On the other hand, would McCartney care? By any definition he's had a successful and happy life, marred with the loss of his first wife and a failed second marriage (which this book dwells on to a distasteful degree) and of course, the loss of the friends of his youth and the partners of his extraordinary early success.  He's lived most of his life in the public eye and with astonishing riches. He's been very generous to his family, his home city and friends. And his children all seem quite happy and down to earth. That's a great success there.

Both these biographies suffer from the current affliction, that is the intrusive biographer, which is quite the trend. When I read a biography, I like to think I have heard the voice of the subject and not the author. Jim Henson: the Biography by Brian Jay Jones, is much closer to the old-fashioned style of biography and is all the better for it. By its end, I felt I had learned much more about Henson, and that, however at a remove, I had spent some time in his company. Which by all accounts was a pretty good place to be. This is an authorised biography but I cannot imagine anyone but the most perverse biographer finding much dirt on Henson. His creativity, his supportiveness, his curiosity, his optimism are all in plain view in his work.  And his influence goes on today. I'm sure I am not the only person in the world who knows his outlook on humour and life is indebted to both Sesame Street and The Muppet Show, as well as so many other projects. And who but perhaps George Lucas would prefer the CGI Yoda to the original puppet performed by Frank Oz?

Some years before his untimely death Henson wrote two letters to his family to be read after his death. (In one letter he said it felt an odd thing to be doing, but would be much more difficult once he had died.)The second ends like this:

Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It's a good life, enjoy it.

Now that's a man whose voice is worth hearing.

"Game as..." Ned Kelly, thief, murderer and hero.

A few months ago, an Ethiopian co-worker asked me, 'What's the thing with Ned Kelly? Wasn't he just a criminal?' I said 'I think it's the armour, have you seen the armour? And he had a Robin Hood thing going which helped.' But in the end, I had to agree, it is odd. For those not in the know, Ned Kelly was a bushranger, a Australian combination of highway man and cattle thief, whose gang eluded the police from 1878-1880 after they killed three police who were sent to capture or kill them.

He is not the first to ask this question. Victorian Police for example hate the Kellys.  Every year in their parade for officers killed in action, they have three riderless horses to represent the three policemen killed by the Kelly Gang. Without a doubt, Kelly was a career criminal and his final plan was to massacre a train full of policemen. If he were alive today, we wouldn't like him much at all.

But he isn't around now and that may be part of the point. Although his career as a criminal had started with some stock theft before Stringybark Creek, he had spent three years in prison for riding a horse that someone else had stolen. The actual thief got three months. His mother was put in jail with little provocation, having been arrested with her three day old arms in her arms. Kelly, and others in the district, had little reason to respect the law.

The relationship between the people and the police is different now than in 1878. Now we have a trained and professional force and if we think we detect them in corruption or other wrongdoing, there are mechanisms for reporting and dealing with such actions. In 1878 we had no such guarantees. Ian Shaw, in his book Glenrowan: The siege that changed a nation, says the Kelly Outbreak, as it was known, was caused in part by bad policing and bad policemen.

The Kelly Outbreak has been the subject of countless history books and novels, plays, two films (one of which claims to be the world's first feature film) and a major Australian mini-series, made on the 100th anniversary of Ned's death. Without a doubt it is one of the major myths of post-colonial Australia. Shaw's book focusses on the final act, the siege of Glenrowan, that started with the murder of an informant, and ended with three outlaws dead, police wounded, civilians wounded and killed, and Ned on his way back to Melbourne for his trial. (He was taken off the train at North Melbourne Station, where I work. That's not important, but I like to know it.)

The great strength of this book is the detail it can give to the siege. You can follow the police commissioner from his table at a Melbourne Club along the train ride from Spencer Street (now Southern Cross Station) to Glenrowan. While most accounts focus naturally on the outlaws and the leaders of the police, Shaw is able to investigate more of the characters around them. And here he finds heroism, stoicism and appalling behaviour. We (famously) have the wounded Ned coming back to try to rescue his friends, and we have a police officer firing deliberately on civilians. We have terrified civilians (and their names, and their relationships) and bravery from all over.

The siege at Glenrowan was designed to be mythic. Kelly saw it as the final act of defiance, an end to police presence in northeast Victoria, and the gang fought in armour, like knights lost in time. Whether he was planning to establish the Republic of North East Victoria, as Ian Jones believes, we'll never know. But as an end to the Outbreak, and the end of the bushranging era, no writer could have come up with anything better. The reporters who had made it to the little town knew they were witnessing the biggest story of their lives.

Perhaps that is part of the reason Kelly lives in our memories, because he set out to. In his statements to police, speeches he gave during his robberies, the Jerilderie letter, and at his trial, he gave himself a role as a man wronged, a family victimised, and painted himself part Robin Hood, part Masked Avenger. And it was not a portrait without some truth. When Ned Kelly walked out of the mist on the last morning of the Kelly Outbreak, clad in armour,  blood streaming from his wounds, calling a challenge to the police, did he know he was entering the history books? My bet is he did.