This morbid topic came to me last week when I heard a historian on TV speak about the effect the assassination of President Lincoln has had on civil rights in America.  Reflecting I found myself thinking about the effects of assassinations in history.  Unfortunately, there have been many, starting with that of Julius Caesar in 44 BC (“Et tu Brute.”)  The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo led to the start of WWI.  We have had too many in the United States; three of them Jack Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, helped ignite the tinderbox of the 1960s.  I would like to talk about three important ones.

            President Lincoln was assassinated five days after the end of the Civil War while attending a play at Ford’s Theatre.  His assassin was John Wilkes Booth, a southern sympathizer; I’m sad to say Booth’s evil deed indirectly accomplished much that he would have liked.  Lincoln, as eloquently stated in his second inaugural address, wanted to do all he could to reunite the country.  In addition, his plans for reconstruction, together with private efforts, would have gone a long way to help the former slaves make successful lives as free citizens.  Lincoln’s successor, President Johnson, through incompetence and southern aristocratic sympathies led to the abandonment and/or failure of much of Lincoln’s proposed programs.  By the end of his Presidency most places in the south had enacted “black codes” that restricted the rights of the former slaves and ensured that they would be a source of cheap labor; they would later evolve into the Jim Crow laws that would only be repealed in the 1960s.  The historian I heard on TV said that the assassination of Lincoln set civil rights back at least one hundred years.

            Yitzhak Rabin was the Prime Minister of Israel in 1995 when he was assassinated by Avishi Raviv in Tel Aviv.  Prior to becoming Prime Minister in 1992, Rabin had spent 30 years in the Israeli military; he was a war hero for leading Israel to victory in the 1967 Six Day War.  Ironically, as Prime Minister he diligently worked for peace.  He signed a peace treaty with Jordan and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat for a peace accord with the Palestinian leadership.  He was continuing this quest at the time of his death.  Raviv was rabidly against peace with the Palestinians and felt that the death of Rabin would halt the process.  I’m afraid that he was right.  No Israeli since that time has had the will, standing, or courage to make peace.  One year, Paulette and I were lucky enough to take a tour of Israel, and I was able to stand at the place where Rabin was shot.  I was completely awed, and my strongest emotions were sadness and regret for what might have been.

            It’s ironic that one of the fundamental parts of our faith, the crucifixion of Jesus, was an evil assassination.  A group of Jewish leaders in Jerusalem felt that their power was threatened by the growing popularity of an itinerant preacher from Galilee, Jesus.  They bribed one of his followers, Judas, to betray him, and then manipulated the Roman Pontius Pilate to have him crucified.  In the short term they accomplished their goal, but in 70 AD they too felt the wrath of the Romans when their temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.  The good news is that this became God’s free gift of grace.  His son, Jesus, took our sins with him to the grave, and then he was resurrected giving us the promise of eternal life.  I still think this assassination was evil, but it showed that God’s love for us was unconditional.

Jim