In an article on 'Assassination: The Ultimate Public Theatre', reprinted in the program for Stephen Sondheim's brilliant and ineluctable musical Assassins, Robert Jay Lifton affirmed that the pistol or rifle was the appropriate technology 'for annihilating king, leader and father, for becoming immortal by absorbing the power of all three. The "equalizer" presides over a grotesque caricature of American Egalitarianism.' In an article of my own on the killing of the great, I noted ex-President Theodore Roosevelt's courage in continuing a public speech while pouring with blood after being shot in the heart and only saved by his spectacle-case. He reckoned that assassination was 'a trade risk, which every prominent public man ought to accept as a matter of course'. But it seemed a paradox to me, because political assassination was justified in a sense by its success:
The questions posed by Sondheim's "Assassins" have never been solved. Does the safety of the state demand that a rebel should be butchered in cold blood, even if he happens to be a brave man halfway to sainthood? And if that sort of state exists, which can use murder as a weapon, then does not each man have the right to pick up a gun and assassinate the agents of the government in order to create a better one? In a police state which denies human rights, who is the political assassin--the tyrannical policeman who murders the innocent citizen, or the armed citizen who murders the soldier obeying orders? The answer is brutal in history. All assassinations which succeed in changing governments for long periods of time are accepted by their societies, and thus justified. All political assassinations which fail are condemned as treason. As in so many walks of life, in the murder of the great, success is justification. (Darnton John 3)
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