‘Manchurian Candidate’ in Dallas
Richard Condon
The Nation, 28 December 1963, pp. 449–451
Richard Condon is the author of The Manchurian Candidate (McGraw-Hill), The Oldest Confession (Appleton) and other books.
Paris
I was reading about how Senator Thruston
Morton of Kentucky absolved the American people from any guilt in the
assassination of the President when a reporter from a South African press
association telephoned from London to ask if I felt responsible for the
President’s killing, inasmuch as I had written a novel, The Manchurian
Candidate, on which had been based a film that had just been “frozen” in
the United States because it was felt that the assassin might have seen it and
been influenced by it. I told the reporter that, with all Americans, I had
contributed to form the attitudes of the assassin; and that the assassin, and
Americans like him, had contributed to the attitudes which had caused me to
write the novel.
The differences between Senator Morton’s
views on this and my own are vast. The man who shot John Kennedy, Senator Morton
said, “was a stranger to the American heritage” and “his mind had been
warped by an alien violence, not by a native condition.”
Brainwashing to violence and assassination
is the line taken in my novel. On its melodramatic surface, the book is a study
of the consequences of “a mind warped by alien violence,” but I had also
hoped to suggest that for some time all of us in the United States had been
brainwashed to violence, and to indicate that the reader might consider that the
tempo of this all-American brainwashing was being speeded up.
I meant to call attention, through
example, to the proved brainwashing to violence shown by the increased sale of
cigarettes after they had been conclusively demonstrated to be suicide weapons.
I meant to show that when the attention of a nation is focused upon
violence—when it appears on the front page of all newspapers, throughout
television programming, in the hundreds of millions of monthly comic books, in
most motion pictures, in the rhythms of popular music and the dance, and in
popular $5 novels which soon become 50c paperbacks; when a most violent example
is set by city, state and federal governments, when organized crime merges with
organized commerce and labor, when a feeble, bewildered set of churches cannot
counteract any of this and all of it is power-hosed at all of us through the
most gigantically complex overcommunications system ever developed—we must not
be surprised that one of us bombs little girls in a Sunday school or shoots down
a President of our republic. We can feign surprise, as we did with the murder of
President Kennedy, but none of us seemed either surprised or moved by the murder
of Medgar Evers, who was also a man who had a young wife and children, and whose
assassin most certainly matched the basic, American psychological pattern of the
killer of our President.
I was not surprised at the similarities
between the two American products, Lee Oswald and Raymond Shaw, one all too
actual, the other the fictional leading character of The Manchurian Candidate.
Oswald’s wife has said she married him because she felt sorry for him;
absolutely no one had liked him, “even in Russia.” The novel says, “It was
not that Raymond was hard to like. He was impossible to like.” Oswald spoke
frequently of the hardships his mother had experienced in the depression, before
he had been born, and his mother had been quick to say that “they” had
always been against her boy. In the novel, I quoted Andrew Salter, the Pavlovian
psychologist. “…the human fish swim about at the bottom of the great ocean
of atmosphere and they develop psychic injuries as they collide with one
another. Most mortal of these are the wounds gotten from the parent fish.” The
Associated Press dug up a truancy report on Oswald which said his resentment had
been fixed on “authority.” On the surface he was calm, but inside there was
much anger. “The resenters,” says the Chinese brainwasher in The
Manchurian Candidate, “those men with cancer of the psyche, make the great
assassins.” Raymond Shaw’s account of his past was confusingly dramatic, as
was Oswald’s. It all seemed to revolve around his mother, as did Oswald’s.
The brainwasher who was describing Raymond
Shaw to an audience in an amphitheatre might have been describing the murderers
of John Kennedy and Medgar Evers. “It has been said that only the man who is
capable of loving everything is capable of understanding everything. The
resentful man is a human with a capacity for affection so poorly developed that
his understanding for the motives of others very nearly does not exist. They are
men of melancholic and reserved psychology. They are afflicted with total
resentment.”
Lee Oswald’s indicated murder of Mr. Kennedy seems motivated only by
his resentment against the most successful man in the world, resentment against
a wonderfully intelligent, puissant, healthy, wealthy, witty and handsome man
who was so rich in spirit that he made no attempt to conceal his superiority,
who dominated the world and outer space, and who had an inexpressibly fine wife
and two lovely children. From the view of this resentment, as long as this
fellow stayed out of Lee Oswald’s path he would be all right, but when he came
laughing into Dallas, and the newspapers printed a map that showed he would
drive right past where Lee Oswald worked for a lousy fifty bucks a week, it was
more than this classical resentment could bear.
It takes time to achieve such resentment
and to fire it there must be careful nurturing by constant unrelenting
conditioning to violence. Oswald was not the only violence-packed American who
was capable of murdering President Kennedy. The assassination was a wasteful,
impersonal, senseless act, but the United States has undergone such a massive
brainwashing to violence that such a senseless waste is á la mode.
Ralph Gleason wrote in the San
Francisco Chronicle after the President’s murder: “…we bred his
murderer, our society produced him and he is, in one sense, a part of us all.”
Then Senator Morton said: “…let us not mourn the American soul…let the
blame be on him who actually committed the crime…what happened was not
America’s fault.”
John Hay Whitney, publisher of the New
York Herald Tribune and thus a leading figure in the overcommunications
industry, most hotly denied that the American people must share the guilt for
President Kennedy’s murder. He amplified his defense by saying: “It’s true
that there is hate in America, and violence, and brutality. But violence has not
been and is not now a dominant strain in our character.”
To me, it seems certain that Mr. Gleason
is right and Senator Morton and Mr. Whitney are mistaken. Neither saints nor
assassins appear among us fully grown and wholly developed. All of us are
nothing more than the result of our conditioning.
When the fanatic is a ruler, rather than
the assassin of a ruler, the people who permitted him to take power must be
blamed—whether they be the Germans of 1933–35 for Adolf Hitler, or the
people of Chicago, Illinois, for their local government. But when the fanatic is
the assassin, he emerges from the very fabric of the people. In answer to
Senator Morton: if the American people are encouraging a mass educational
system—the overcommunications industry—which instructs for the production of
the highest crime rate and the most widely shared violence dependencies of any
country in the world, is it not time to say, most particularly by our
government, that each American is responsible for that state of affairs because
he does nothing to change it? We are not, as some well-meaning European
newspaper put it, a violent and unstable people because such “toughness” was
required to tame the wild frontier 125 years ago. We are violent and unstable
because we have been so conditioned to these responses that civilized,
thoughtful conduct has become impossible for us.
It is a hell of a spot for a country to be
in. Who, the least brainwashed among us, will cast the first redemptive thought?
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