FOR PERSPECTIVE & DETERMINATION

ONCE again the crackle of gunfire. Once again the long journey home, the hushed procession, the lowered flags and harrowed faces of a nation in grief. Once again the simple question: Why?

The second Kennedy assassination--almost two months to the day after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.--immediately prompted, at home and abroad, deep doubts about the stability of America. Many saw the unleashing of a dark, latent psychosis in the national character, a stain that had its start with the first settlement of a hostile continent. For the young people, in particular, who had been persuaded by the new politics of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy to recommit themselves to the American electoral system, the assassination seemed to confirm all their lingering suspicions that society could not be reformed by democratic means.

The killing of Kennedy was horrifying in itself and forever haunting to all who had suffered through the earlier agony. Yet for all the pain and shame, in retrospect it could hardly be construed in itself as a new symptom of any intrinsically American malaise. "Violence," said Columbia University Sociologist Daniel Bell, "flows and ebbs, and I shy away from easy generalizations such as the country is sick."

Other Hatreds. Kennedy was not shot by a white racist angry with his defense of the Negro, or a Negro militant incensed with his white liberalism, or a high-school dropout like Lee Harvey Oswald who felt himself rejected by a capitalist society. The man charged with his murder is a virulent Arab nationalist, whose hatreds stem from the land where he spent the early part of his life, and where political assassination is commonplace and violence as accepted as the desert wind.

That, for most Americans, did not make the loss any easier to bear. Lyndon Johnson, who has more than once brooded late into the night with friends on the subject of violence, seemed shaken and visibly disturbed by the shooting in Los Angeles. He did what he thought had to be done. He promised the stricken family any help that the Government could provide, appointed a commission to study the causes of violence, and called, in the most vigorous language at his command, for an end to the "insane traffic" in guns--a trade, as he observed, that makes instruments of death as readily purchasable as baskets of fruit or cartons of cigarettes. Almost as he spoke, Congress sent him a crime bill with a gun-control section, but the measure was so flabby as to be almost as scandalous as the lack of any legislation in all the years. Congress, on Johnson's request, also passed emergency legislation authorizing Secret Service protection for the other major presidential candidates (cost: $400,000 this month alone).

"Must Not Demoralize." Disturbed as he was, Johnson also reminded the nation in a TV address that "200 million Americans did not strike down Robert Kennedy" any more than they struck down his brother or Dr. King. While it would be "self-deceptive to ignore the connection between lawlessness and hatred and this act of violence," he said, "it would be just as wrong and just as self-deceptive to conclude from this act that our country itself is sick, that it's lost its balance, that it's lost its sense of direction, even its common decency." In his funeral eulogy, New York's Archbishop Terence Cooke, a member of the new violence commission, also urged that "the act of one man must not demoralize and incapacitate 200 million others."

Americans, contemplating both the inexpungeable crime of Kennedy's killing and the prevalence of violence in their proper perspective, can best maintain the proper processes of American political life by eradicating the conditions that trigger the assassin's finger.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.