The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence (38 page)

But the howls for glory of assassins had been unanswered in their mundane pre-attack lives. The assassin might be weird or unusual, but we cannot say we don’t understand his motives, his goal. He wants what Americans want: recognition, and he wants what all people want: significance. People who don’t get that feeling in childhood seek ways to get it in adulthood. It is as if they have been malnourished for a lifetime and seek to fix it with one huge meal.

The same search for significance is part of the motivation for the young gang member who kills, because violence is the fastest way to get identity. Murderer Jack Henry Abbott describes the “involuntary pride and exhilaration all convicts feel when they are chained up hand and foot like dangerous animals. The world has focused on us for a moment. We are somebody capable of threatening the world.”

Ernest Becker writes, “The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to society.”

Well, Bremer, Hinckley, and Bardo all admitted it, with devastating results. Each first aspired to make it in Hollywood but gave that up for a faster, easier route to identity. They knew that with a single act of fraudulent heroism, with one single shot, they could be forever linked to their famous targets.

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Like all endeavors, assassination is reached by a certain protocol, certain hoops one jumps through. Many of these are detectable, observable hoops that leave a trail we can follow. Assassins teach each other, each learning something from the ones before. When I worked on the Bardo case, I was struck by the fact that he did so many things that Hinckley had done before him. The two young men had early life experiences with some similarities, and that’s no surprise, but the similarities of the choices they made later are nothing short of remarkable. For example, Hinckley knew that Mark Chapman had brought along a copy of
Catcher in the Rye
on his trip to murder John Lennon, so he brought one with him on his trip to shoot President Reagan. Bardo brought the same book along when he killed Rebecca Schaeffer, later telling me he read it “to find out how it had made Chapman kill John Lennon.”

Look at this list of things that John Hinckley did before shooting President Reagan:

• wrote letters to an actress
  
• wrote songs
  
• took a job in a restaurant
  
• read
  Catcher in the Rye
  
• criss-crossed the country
  
• stalked public figures other than his final target
  
• traveled to Hollywood
  
• kept a diary
  
• studied other assassins
  
• visited the Dakota Building in New York City to see the place where John Lennon was murdered
  
• considered an attention-getting suicide
  
• sold off his possessions
  
• wrote letters to be found after the attack
  
• took a bus to the attack location
  
• stalked his final target at more than one site before the attack
  
• brought along
  Catcher in the Rye
  
• didn’t shoot at the first opportunity
  
• left the scene after the first encounter
  
• waited about a half hour and then shot his target
  

Amazingly, Bardo also did every one of the things on this list. There are more than thirty striking similarities in the behavior of the two men. The predictability of pre-attack behaviors of assassins was confirmed by the work of Park Dietz, the psychiatrist and sociologist who first came to national attention as the lead prosecution expert in the Hinckley case. In 1982, when I was on the President’s Advisory Board at the Department of Justice, I proposed a research project to study people who threaten and stalk public figures. Dietz was the expert we chose to run the project. From this and his other pioneering work, he assembled ten behaviors common to modern assassins. Nearly every one of them:

  1.    Displayed some mental disorder

  2.    Researched the target or victim

  3.    Created a diary, journal, or record

  4.    Obtained a weapon

  5.    Communicated inappropriately with
some
public figure, though not necessarily the one attacked

  6.    Displayed an exaggerated idea of self (grandiosity, narcissism)

  7.    Exhibited random travel

  8.    Identified with a stalker or assassin

  9.    Had the ability to circumvent ordinary security

10.    Made repeated approaches to some public figure

In protecting public figures, my office focuses on those who might try to kill clients, of course, but also those who might harm clients in other ways, such as through harassment or stalking. In evaluating cases, we consider a hundred and fifty pre-incident indicators beyond those covered above.

If we had to choose just one PIN we’d want to be aware of above all others, it would be the one we call ability belief. This is a person’s belief that he can accomplish a public-figure attack. Without it, he cannot. In fact, to do anything, each of us must first believe on some level that we can do it. Accordingly, society’s highest-stakes question might be: “Do you believe you can succeed at shooting the president?” Would-be assassins won’t always answer this question truthfully, of course, nor will society always get the opportunity to ask it, but to the degree it can be measured, ability belief is the preeminent pre-incident indicator for assassination.

If the truthful answer is “No, what with all those Secret Service agents and special arrangements, I couldn’t get within a mile of the guy,” the person cannot shoot the president. Of course, this isn’t a permanently reliable predictor, because ability belief can be influenced and changed.

If, for example, I believe I could not possibly dive into the ocean from a two-hundred-foot-high cliff, then I cannot. But a coach might influence my belief. Encouragement, teaching of skills that are part of the dive, taking of lesser dives—first from 20 feet, then 30, then 50—would all act to change my ability belief. No single influence is more powerful than social proof, seeing someone else succeed at the thing you might have initially believed you could not do. Seeing a diver propel himself off an Acapulco cliff, sail down into the Pacific and then emerge safely dramatically influences my belief that it can be done, and that I could do it.

Similarly, the enormous media attention showered on those who attack public figures bolsters ability belief in other. It says, “You see; it can be done.” Little wonder that in the period following a widely publicized attack, the risk of other attacks goes up dramatically. It is precisely because one encourages another that public-figure attacks cluster (President Ford—two within two weeks; President Clinton—two within six weeks).

Society appears to be promoting two very different messages:

1)    It is nearly impossible to successfully attack a public figure, and if you do it and survive, you will be a pariah, despised, reviled, and forgotten.

2)    It is very easy to successfully attack a public figure, and if you do it, you’ll not only survive, but you’ll be the center of international attention.

Since we are discussing what amounts to a form of advertising, information following a public-figure attack could be presented quite differently than it is now. Law-enforcement personnel speaking with the press about a criminal who has been apprehended have tended to describe the arrest in terms of their victory over a dangerous, powerful, well-armed and clever adversary: “Investigators found three forty-five caliber handguns and more than two hundred rounds of ammunition in his hotel room. Since the perpetrator is a skilled marksman, it was touch and go when we stormed the building.”

This attaches to the criminal a kind of persona doubtless attractive to many who might consider undertaking a similar crime. I have recommended a different approach on my cases, one that casts the offender in a far less glamorous light. Imagine this press conference following the arrest of a person who was planning an assassination:

Reporter: Would you describe the man as a loner?

Federal agent: More of a loser, actually.

Reporter: Did he put up any resistance when taken into custody?

Federal agent: No, we found him hiding in the bathroom—in the clothes hamper.

Reporter: Could he have succeeded in the assassination?

Federal agent: I doubt it very much. He’s never succeeded at anything else.

Ideally, the agent would always switch the focus to the people and special methods that act in opposition to assassins, keeping the focus off the criminal.

Federal agent: I want to commend the eight-man team of special agents whose investigative work and application of new technologies made the apprehension possible so rapidly.

I propose that we don’t show the bullets on the bureau in the seedy hotel room; show instead the dirty underwear and socks on the bathroom floor. I propose that we don’t arrange photo opportunities that show the offender being escorted by ten federal agents from a helicopter to a motorcade of waiting cars. Show him instead in a mangy T-shirt, handcuffed to a pipe in some gloomy corridor, watched by one guard, and a woman at that. Not many identity-seeking would-be assassins would see those images and say, “Yeah, that’s the life for me!”

Conversely, guarded by federal agents (just like the president), whisked into waiting helicopters (just like the president), his childhood home shown on TV (just like the president), the type of gun he owned fired on the news by munitions experts extolling its killing power, the plans he made described as “meticulous”—these presentations promote the glorious aspects of assassination and other media crimes. Getting caught for some awful violence should be the start of oblivion, not the biggest day of one’s life.

But it was the biggest day in the life of accused Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who was paraded in front the waiting press surrounded by FBI agents, rushed to a motorcade, and then whisked away in a two-helicopter armada. We saw this even more with accused Unabomber Ted Kazynkski, whose close-up appeared on the covers of TIME, U.S. News and World Report, and Newsweek (twice). The cover text of all three described Kazynkski as a “genius.”

Reporters usually refer to assassins with triple names, like Mark David Chapman, Lee Harvey Oswald, Arthur Richard Jackson. One might come to believe that assassins actually used these pretentious triple names in their pre-attack lives; they didn’t. They were Mark, Lee, and Arthur.

I propose promoting the least glamorous incarnation of their names. Call a criminal Ted Smith instead of Theodore Bryant Smith. Better still, find some nick-name used in his pre-attack life:

Federal agent: His name is Theodore Smith, but he was known as Chubby Ted.

Our culture presents many role models, but few get as much hoopla and glory as the assassin. Those who have succeeded (and even some of those who failed) are among the most famous people in American lore. John Wilkes Booth survives history with more fame than all but a few other Americans of his time.

The tragically symbiotic relationship between assassins and television news is understandable: Assassins give great video—very visual, very dramatic. Assassins will not sue you no matter what you say about them, and they provide the story feature most desired by news producers: extendability. There will be more information, more interviews with neighbors and experts, more pictures from the high school yearbook. There will be a trial with the flavor of a horse race between lawyers (made famous just for the occasion), and there will be the drama of waiting for the verdict. Best of all, there will be that video of the attack, again and again.

The problem, however, is that that video may be a commercial for assassination. As surely as Procter and Gamble ever pushed toothpaste, the approach of television news pushes public-figure attack.

Way back in 1911, criminologist Arthur MacDonald wrote, “The most dangerous criminals are the assassins of rulers.” He suggested that “newspapers, magazines and authors of books cease to publish the names of criminals. If this not be done voluntarily, let it be made a misdemeanor to do so. This would lessen the hope for glory, renown or notoriety, which is a great incentive to such crimes.”

MacDonald would be disappointed to see that media-age assassins end up with virtual network shows, but he would not be surprised. After all, the early morning mist of mass media hype was already thick even in his day. In 1912 a man named John Shrank attempted to kill Theodore Roosevelt. While he was in jail, his bail was abruptly raised because “motion picture men” had planned to pay it and secure his release long enough to re-stage the assassination attempt for newsreels. Objecting to the movie, the prosecutor told the Court he was concerned about “the demoralizing effect such a picture film would have. It would tend to make a hero out of this man, and I don’t propose that the young shall be allowed to worship him as a hero.” Probably not realizing they were pioneering a new genre, the frustrated motion-picture men picked out a building that resembled the jail and filmed an actor who looked like Shrank emerging between two bogus deputy sheriffs.

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No discussion of assassination would be complete without exploring the precautions that can be taken to prevent these attacks. First, of course, just as with any danger, one must learn that a hazard exists. In the Bardo case, for example, there were many warnings: Over a two-year period he had sent Rebecca Schaeffer a stream of inappropriate letters through her agents in New York and Los Angeles. When Bardo showed up at the studio where her show was taped, it was a studio security guard who told him which stage she was on. Bardo himself said, “It was way too easy.”