Famous Assassinations in World History An Encyclopedia

Famous
Assassinations
in World History
This page intentionally left blank
Famous
Assassinations
in World History
An Encyclopedia
Volume 1: AP
MICHAEL NEWTON
Copyright 2014 by ABC-CLIO, LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations
in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Newton, Michael, 1951
Famous assassinations in world history : an encyclopedia / Michael Newton.
volumes cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-61069-285-4 (hard copy : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61069-286-1
(ebook) 1. AssassinationHistoryEncyclopedias. I. Title.
HV6278.N49 2014
364.152'403dc23
2013031554
ISBN: 978-1-61069-285-4
EISBN: 978-1-61069-286-1
18
17
16
15
14
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.

Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.
ABC-CLIO, LLC
130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911
Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911
This book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Preface
xv
Introduction
xvii
The Encyclopedia
Volume 1
Abdallah Abderemane, Ahmed (19191989)
Aguiyi-Ironsi, Johnson Thomas Umunnakwe (19241966)
al-Banna, Sheikh Hasan Ahmed Abdel Rahman Muhammed
(19061949)
Albert I of Habsburg (12551308)
al-Din Shah Qajar, Nasser (18311896)
Alexander I of Serbia (18761903)
Alexander I of Yugoslavia (18881934)
Alexander II of Russia (18181881)
Ali, Muhammad Mansur (19191975)
Amin, Hafizullah (19291979)
Aquino, Benigno Simeon, Jr. (19321983)
Araujo, Manuel Enrique (18651913)
Argaa Ferraro, Luis Mara del Corazn de Jess Dionisio
(19321999)
Assassins Cult (ca. 10921275)
Bahonar, Mohammad-Javad (19331981)
Balbinus (165 CE238 CE)
Balewa, Abubakar Tafawa (19121966)
Bandaranaike, Solomon West Ridgeway Dias (18991959)
Bautista Gill Garca del Barrio, Juan (18401877)
Becket, Thomas (11181170)
Belzu Humerez, Manuel Isidoro (18081865)
Bearan Ordeana, Jos Miguel (19491978)
1
2
3
6
7
9
10
12
14
15
17
20
21
23
27
28
30
32
34
35
38
40
vi
CONTENTS
Bent, Charles (17991847)

Bhutto, Benazir (19532007)
bin Laden, Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad (19572011)
Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev (19452001)
Bishop, Maurice Rupert (19441983)
Bobrikov, Nikolay Ivanovich (18391904)
Bolles, Don (19281976)
Borgia, Giovanni (14761497)
Borsellino, Paolo (19401992)
Boudiaf, Mohamed (19191992)
Buback, Siegfried (19201977)
Bush, George Walker (1946 )Attempted
Caesar, Gaius Julius (100 BCE44 BCE)
Caligula (12 CE41 CE)
Calinescu, Armand (18931939)
Canalejas y Mndez, Jos (18541912)
Cnovas del Castillo, Antonio (18281897)
Carlos I of Portugal (18631908)
Carranza de la Garza, Venustiano (18591920)
Carrero Blanco, Luis (19041973)
Castillo Armas, Carlos (19141957)
Castro Ruz, Fidel Alejandro (1926 )Attempted
Catargiu, Barbu (18071862)
Cermak, Anton Joseph (18731933)
Chain Murders (Iran) (19791998)
Charles VII of Sweden (11301167)
Chillingworth, Curtis Eugene (18961955)
Chinnici, Rocco (19251983)
Chitunda, Jeremias Kalandula (19421992)
Clinton, William Jefferson (1946 )Attempted
Collins, Michael, Jr. (18901922)
Danilo I, Prince of Montenegro (18261860)
Daoud Khan, Mohammed (19091978)
Delgado Chalbaud Gmez, Carlos (19091950)
Deligiannis, Theodoros (18201905)
Dessalines, Jean-Jacques (17581806)
42
43
45
48
49
51
52
54
56
57
59
61
65
67
69
71
72
73
75
76
78
80
83
84
87
92
93
94
96
97
99
103
104
106
108
109
CONTENTS
Devi, Phoolan (19632001)

indic, Zoran (19522003)
Doe, Samuel Kanyon (19511990)
Dollfuss, Engelbert (18921934)
Dubs, Adolph (19201979)
Duca, Ion Gheorghe (18791933)
Dudayev, Dzhokhar Musayevich (19441996)
Earp, Morgan Seth (18511882)
Edmund I (922946)
Edward the Martyr (962978)
Eisner, Kurt (18671919)
Elisabeth of Austria (18371898)
Eric V of Denmark (12491286)
Eric XIV of Sweden (15331577)
Erim, Ismail Nihat (19121980)
Evers, Medgar Wiley (19251963)
Ewart-Biggs, Christopher Thomas (19211976)
Faisal bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud (19061975)
Faisal II of Iraq (19351958)
Falcn, Ramn Lorenzo (18551909)
Ferreira do Amaral, Joo Maria (18031849)
Ford, Gerald Rudolph, Jr. (19132006)Attempted
Foster, Marcus Albert (19231973)
Franz Ferdinand (18631914)
Gaddafi, Muammar (19422011)
Gandhi, Indira Priyadarshini (19171984)
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (18691948)
Gandhi, Rajiv Ratna (19441991)
Garca y Moreno y Morn de Buitrn, Gabriel Gregorio
Fernando Jos Mara (18211875)
Garfield, James Abram (18311881)
Gaulle, Charles Andr Joseph Marie de (18901970)Attempted
Gaviria Correa, Guillermo (19622003)
Gegeen Khan, Emperor Yingzong of Yuan (13031323)
George I of Greece (18451913)
111
113
115
117
118
120
121
125
128
129
131
132
135
136
138
140
142
145
146
148
150
152
155
156
161
164
165
167
169
171
173
176
177
179
vii
viii
CONTENTS
Goebel, William Justus (18561900)

Gonzlez Dubn, Eduardo Epaminondas (19451993)
Goulart, Joo Belchior Marques (19191976)
Guerin, Veronica (19581996)
Guevara, Ernesto Che (19281967)
Guinness, Walter Edward (18801944)
Gunn, David (19461993)
Gustav III of Sweden (17461792)
Habyarimana, Juvnal (19371994)
Hamidaddin, Yahya Muhammad (18691948)
Hammarskjld, Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl (19051961)
Hampton, Fred (19481969)
Hani, Martin Thembisile Chris (19421993)
Harald IV of Norway (ca. 11021136)
Harrison, Carter Henry, Sr. (18251893)
Hennessy, David C., Jr. (18581890)
Henriot, Philippe (18891944)
Henry III of France (15511589)
Henry IV of France (15531610)
Heureaux Lebert, Ulises (18451899)
Heydrich, Reinhard Tristan Eugen (19041942)
Hitler, Adolf (18891945)Attempted
Idiarte Borda, Juan Bautista (18441897)
Ige, James Ajibola Idowu (19302001)
Inejiro Asanuma (18981960)
Jackson, Andrew (17671845)Attempted
Jackson, Wharlest, Sr. (19301967)
James I, King of Scots (13941437)
John Paul II (19202005)Attempted
Kabila, Laurent-Dsir (19392001)
Kadyrov, Akhmad Abdulkhamidovich (19512004)
Kahane, Meir (19321990)
Kapodistrias, Ioannis Antonios (17761831)
Kapuuo, Clemens (19231978)
Karume, Sheikh Abeid Amani (19051972)
181
183
184
186
188
190
193
195
199
201
202
205
208
209
211
213
215
217
219
220
222
225
231
232
234
237
239
240
241
245
247
249
252
254
255
CONTENTS
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald (19171963)

Kennedy, Robert Francis (19251968)
Khoyski Isgender oglu, Fatali Khan (18751920)
King, Martin Luther, Jr. (19291968)
Ku Klux Klan (1866 )
Lambrakis, Grigoris (19121963)
Laporte, Pierre (19211970)
Lennon, John Winston (19401980)
Letelier del Solar, Marcos Orlando (19321976)
Lincoln, Abraham (18091865)
Litvinenko, Alexander Valterovich (19622006)
Liu, Henry (19321984)
Long, Huey Pierce, Jr. (18931935)
Lumumba, Patrice mery (19251961)
Luwum, Janani Jakaliya (19221977)
Madero Gonzlez, Francisco Ignacio (18731913)
Maher Pasha, Ahmed (18881945)
Manassara, Ibrahim Bar (19491999)
Malcolm X (19251965)
Marat, Jean-Paul (17431793)
Maskhadov, Aslan Aliyevich (19512005)
McGlinchey, Dominic (19541994)
McKinley, William, Jr. (18431901)
Medici, Giuliano de (14531478)
Mitrione, Daniel Anthony (19201970)
Moawad, Ren (19251989)
Mohammed, Murtala Ramat (19381976)
Mondlane, Eduardo Chivambo (19201969)
Moore, Harry Tyson (19051951)
Moro, Aldo (19161978)
Moscone, George Richard (19291978)
Mosharraf, Khaled (19381975)
Mountbatten, Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas George
(19001979)
Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea (18831945)
257
264
269
271
277
281
282
285
288
291
295
298
299
302
305
307
309
311
312
317
320
321
323
326
328
330
331
333
335
336
339
341
342
344
ix
CONTENTS
Nader Shah Afshar (16881747)

Nadir Shah, Mohammed (18831933)
Narutowicz, Gabriel (18651922)
Ndadaye, Melchior (19531993)
Ngo Dinh Diem (19011963)
Ngouabi, Marien (19381977)
Nicholas II (18681918)
Obama, Barack Hussein, II (1961 )Attempted/Threatened
Obregn Salido, lvaro (18801928)
Olympio, Sylvanus Epiphanio (19021963)
Operation Wrath of God (19721992)
Osman II (16041622)
Ouko, John Robert (19311990)
Palme, Sven Olof Joachim (19271986)
Pardo Leal, Jaime (19411987)
Park Chung-hee (19171979)
Patterson, Albert Leon (18941954)
Paul I of Russia (17541801)
Perceval, Spencer (17621812)
Peter III of Russia (17281762)
Petliura, Symon Vasylyovych (18791926)
Philip of Swabia (11771208)
Philip II of Macedon (359 BCE336 BCE)
Phoenix Program (19651972)
Pizarro Gonzlez, Francisco (14711541)
Pompey the Great (106 BCE48 BCE)
Premadasa, Ranasinghe (19241993)
Prim y Prats, Juan (18141870)
351
353
355
358
361
366
369
375
381
384
386
391
393
397
401
403
406
409
412
415
418
420
422
425
427
431
435
438
Volume 2
Qadir, Haji Abdul (19512002)
Qutuz, Saif ad-Din (?1260)
Rabin, Yitzhak (19221995)
Radama II (18291863)
Rahman, Ziaur (19361981)
Rasputin, Grigori Yefimovich (18691916)
441
444
447
451
453
456
CONTENTS
Rathenau, Walther (18671922)

Ratsimandrava, Richard (19311975)
Razmara, Sepahbod Haj Ali (19011951)
Reagan, Ronald Wilson (19112004)Attempted
Reina Barrios, Jos Mara (18541898)
Remeliik, Haruo Ignacio (19331985)
Remn Cantera, Jos Antonio (19081955)
Ritavuori, Heikki (18801922)
Rockwell, George Lincoln (19181967)
Rhm, Ernst Julius Gnther (18871934)
Romero y Galdmez, scar Arnulfo (19171980)
Roosevelt, Theodore (18581919)Attempted
Ryan, Leo Joseph, Jr. (19251978)
Rzayev Gurbanoglu, Rail (19452009)
S Carneiro, Francisco Manuel Lumbrales de (19341980)
Sadat, Anwar El (19181981)
Sadulayev, Abdul-Halim Abu-Salamovich (19662006)
Salim, Ezzedine (19432004)
Snchez Cerro, Luis Miguel (18891933)
Sandino, Augusto Nicols Caldern (18951934)
Sankara, Thomas Isidore Nol (19491987)
Sargsyan, Vazgen (19591999)
Schneider Chereau, Ren (19131970)
Seleucus I (350s BCE281 BCE)
September, Dulcie Evonne (19351988)
Shaka kaSenzangakhona (1781/871828)
Sharples, Richard Christopher (19161973)
Shermarke, Abdirashid Ali (19191969)
Shevket Pasha, Mahmud (18561913)
Smith, Joseph, Jr. (18051844)
Sogdianus (?423 BCE)
Somoza Debayle, Anastasio (19251980)
Somoza Garca, Anastasio (18961956)
Stamboliyski, Aleksandar (18791923)
Stambolov, Stefan Nikolov (18541895)
460
462
464
465
470
471
473
475
476
481
483
486
491
494
497
499
502
504
505
507
511
513
515
517
520
522
525
526
528
530
534
535
538
541
543
xi
xii
CONTENTS
Steunenberg, Frank (18611905)

Stewart, James, Earl of Moray (15311570)
Strang, James Jesse (18131856)
Sverker I (?1156)
Takahashi Korekiyo (18541936)
Taraki, Nur Muhammad (19171979)
Taseer, Salmaan (19442011)
Tisza de Borosjeno et Szeged, Istvn (18611918)
Tjibaou, Jean-Marie (19361989)
Tolbert, William Richard, Jr. (19131980)
Tombalbaye, Franois (19181975)
Trotsky, Leon (18791940)
Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leonidas (18911961)
Truman, Harry S. (18841972)Attempted
Umar ibn Al-Khattab (586/590644)
Umberto I (18441900)
Uwilingiyimana, Agathe (19531994)
Valko, Ernest (19532010)
Vance, Robert Smith (19311989)
Verwoerd, Hendrik Frensch (19011966)
Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom
(18191901)Attempted
Vieira, Joo Nino Bernardo (19392009)
Villa, Francisco Pancho (18781923)
Villarroel Lpez, Gualberto (19081946)
Vom Rath, Ernst Eduard (19091938)
Wallace, George Corley, Jr. (19191998)Attempted
Welch, Richard Skeffington (19291975)
Wenceslaus I (907935)
William I, Prince of Orange (15331584)
William II of England (10561100)
Wood, John Howland, Jr. (19161979)
Xerxes I of Persia (519 BCE465 BCE)
Yuldashev, Tohir Abduhalilovich (19672009)
Zapata Salazar, Emiliano (18791919)
544
548
550
552
555
558
559
562
564
567
569
572
576
580
585
588
591
595
597
600
604
606
610
614
616
621
625
628
630
634
637
641
645
649
CONTENTS
Zhang Zuolin (18751928)
652
Zorig, Sanjaasuren (19621998)
655
Primary Documents
1. Assassination of Pompey the Great (48 BCE)
Plutarchs Description of the Murder of Pompey in Egypt
661
2. Assassination of Julius Caesar (44 BCE)

Letter of Brutus to Cicero on Caesars Assassination (43 BCE)
664
3. Assassination of the Roman Emperor Caligula (41 CE)

Suetoniuss Account of the Murder
668
4. Death of William II, King of England (1100)

Description of Williams Death by Chronicler Peter of Blois
671
5. Murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket (1170)

The Eyewitness Account of Edward Grim
672
6. Assassination of Albert I of Habsburg (1308)

Act V, Scene 2 of the Play Wilhelm Tell
by Friedrich Schiller (1804)
675
7. Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1865)Official

Messages and Correspondence Relating to the
Shooting of President Lincoln (April 15, 1865)
680
8. Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1865)

General Court-Martial Orders No. 356 for
Trial of the Lincoln Assassination Conspirators
683
9. Assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia (1881)

Prince Peter Kropotkins Account of the Murder
688
10. Assassination of James A. Garfield (1881)

Address of Vice President Chester A. Arthur
upon Assuming the Presidency
691
11. Assassination of Morgan Earp (1882)

Tombstone Epitaph Account of the Murder
693
12. Assassination of William McKinley (1901)

Newspaper Accounts of the Shooting and
Death of the President
694
13. Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1914)

Austrian Official Report on the Assassination
700

Excerpts from American Newspaper Accounts of the
Murder of the Archduke and His Wife
703
xiii
xiv
CONTENTS
15. Assassination of Emiliano Zapata (1919)

Three Accounts of the Ambush
16. Assassination of Senator Huey P. Long (1935)
Senator Longs Share the Wealth Program (1934)
17. Assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem (1963)
State Department Cables Concerning the Coup That
Overthrew President Diem of South Vietnam
18. Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1963)Excerpts
from the Warren Commission Report (1964)
19. Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968)
Excerpts from the Department of Justice Report on
Allegations of Conspiracy in the Death of Dr. King (2000)
20. Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (1968)Edward M.
Kennedys Eulogy for His Brother Robert F. Kennedy
21. Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (1968)Excerpts from
the Report of Special Counsel Thomas F. Kranz on His
Reinvestigation of the Murder of Robert Kennedy (1977)
22. Attempted Assassination of Ronald Reagan (1981)
Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (1993)
23. Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (1995)
Last Speech of Israeli Prime Minister Rabin
709
715
720
727
780
797
800
808
812
Appendix: World Timeline of Assassinations
815
Selected Bibliography
835
Index
837
Preface
Famous Assassinations in World History: An Encyclopedia aims to fill a gap in

scholarship concerning political murder, as practiced worldwide, throughout
recorded history. It is intended to serve both a general audience and the more
specific needs of professional, scholarly researchers active in the study of criminology, terrorism, and related fields. At the time of writing, no comparable
source was available in print.
The work in hand defines assassination as the murder of a prominent public figure: heads of state and other government officials, religious leaders,
spokespersons for political parties and social movements, journalists active in
molding public opinion, and so on. Professional criminals slain during internecine gang wars are excluded, regardless of their national or global notoriety,
on grounds that their murders accomplish nothing but installment of a new
boss or godfather for a particular syndicate. Likewise, celebrities killed by
obsessive stalkers are ignored, with one exception, since their deaths have no
impact on society at large beyond the transient grief of fans. The lone exception, musician John Lennon, is included here because of his sociopolitical
activities in later life, and the persistent claims of government conspiracy behind his death.
The encyclopedias two volumes include 266 main entries, arranged alphabetically, selected on the basis of their prominence in history and impact on
events of their respective eras. Four entries chart the histories of specific organizations involved in multiple assassinations spanning centuries, and the
remainder describe specific assassinations (or attempted assassinations) occurring between 465 BCE and 2012. Entries describing a particular assassination
include details of the event, a brief biography of the victim(s), and the aftermath of each slaying, including its political and societal impact, plus pertinent
depictions in popular culture. Entries are cross-referenced as necessary. To facilitate additional research, each entry includes suggested sources for further
reading, and a selected bibliography of general works on assassination is also
included.
As supplements to the main entries, 54 shorter sidebar articles enhance the
text with information on groups, movements, persons, or events related to
a particular assassination or to assassinations in general. These sidebars help
to place specific murders in context, further illuminate the motives and the
xvi
P R E FA C E
backgrounds of participants, and describe events that sprang from violence directed against public figures.
The section of entries is followed by a selection of 23 primary documents.
Arranged chronologically, these documents comprise accounts of assassinations
and reports of investigations, as well as speeches and statutes that preceded or
resulted from the murders. The documents included range from Plutarchs description of the murder of Pompey the Great in Egypt in 48 BCE, through the
last speech of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, delivered moments before
his murder in 1995.
Finally, to ensure complete coverage of the subject, an appendix provides a
timeline of other prominent assassinations omitted from the main text entries
due to space constraints. That list includes 486 cases, spanning the globe and
the years from 748 BCE to 2012. In that timeline, continents and their countries
are arranged alphabetically, with assassinations and attempts for each specific
country listed chronologically. A detailed subject index will help users find important figures, events, and ideas in the main entries.
Every effort has been made to present timely, complete, and accurate information throughout Famous Assassinations in World History. That said, available
sourcesparticularly those concerned with ancient crimes and modern, controversial casesfrequently provide conflicting dates, names, and descriptions
of events. In each case, I have chosen what appears to be the best and most
substantive information currently available. Readers wishing to suggest corrections for perceived inaccuracies, or to offer further data on the cases here
described, may contact the author through ABC-CLIO, or directly through his
Web site at www.michaelnewton.homestead.com.
Introduction
Assassination may be viewed as the ultimate expression of protestagainst

a government regime or its opponents, a religious or sociopolitical movement, even against an idea deemed hateful by the assassin. Whether the act is
committed by a disaffected individual, a gang of conspirators, or an official
government agency, whether its result is mourned or cheered by millions, an
assassinationsimple murder elevated to a noteworthy event by the selection of its victimshas the potential to change history.
We often hear it said that violence accomplishes nothing. Sociologists may
quarrel with historians over that hoary adage, parsing the impact of mayhem
ranging from petty street crimes to acts of terrorism and genocide, but with
regard to assassination, the record is indisputable: selective murders have
changed history, for good or ill, and sometimes on an epic scale.
A few examples should suffice.
Abraham Lincolns assassination in 1865 doomed any hope of peaceful reconciliation between the victorious North and defeated South after Americas
Civil War, plunging the former Confederacy into the decade of turmoil and terrorism knownat least in the minds of white supremacists affected by the loss
of their former slavesas Radical Reconstruction.
Archduke Franz Ferdinands slaying in 1914 triggered the global tragedy
of World War Iperhaps inevitable, in the climate of the times, but waiting
for a trigger incident to light the fuse. That four-year struggle claimed at least
9,407,136 lives on three continents, and while publicly billed as the War to
End All War, World War I in fact set the stage for an even more devastating
conflict, beginning only 20 years later.
The mass execution of Russias royal family in 1918 climaxed one of the
worlds great revolutions, setting the stage for seven decades of hot and cold
war between Moscow and the reputed free world. The final death toll for that
worldwide war of shadows, police actions, and counterrevolutions may only
be vaguely estimated, but it certainly ran into millions.
The murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 prompted many
African American leaders to abandon nonviolent protest against racial inequity, igniting ghetto fires from coast to coast and hastening the rise of militant
groups fixed on a dead-end collision course with hostile authorities. The slaying of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, one month after King, clearly contributed to
xviii
INTRODUCTION
the outcome of that years presidential election, an outcome leading inexorably

to U.S. military escalation, then defeat, in Southeast Asia, climaxed by the national shame of Watergate.
Speculation and debate persist, surrounding other assassinations and bungled attempts. Few deny that killing Adolf Hitler in 1944 might have saved
lives in the hundreds of thousands, at least. Recorded statements from President John F. Kennedy ( JFK) suggest that, had he lived beyond November 22,
1963, the long nightmare of Vietnam may not have devoured 58,000 U.S.
lives. What might have transpired, had would-be assassins been successful in
their attempts on the lives of Presidents Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, George W.
Bush, or Barack Obama?
Selection of main entries for Famous Assassinations in World History was, admittedly, subjective. Why does the murder of American Nazi Party founder
George Lincoln Rockwell rate inclusion, while antiapartheid activist Stephen
Biko is relegated to the concluding appendix/timeline? Such choices were determined by multiple factors.
First, no comprehensive, detailed accounting of every known assassination
or attempt throughout history could ever be contained within the covers of
one volumeor, in this case, two. Decisions based on word count and economy determine the final scope of every published reference work.
Second, some entries were selected (or omitted) based on the authors personal interest, and/or preexisting coverage in other published works. Although
hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been published describing
the JFK assassination, for instance, its exclusion here would have been a grievous oversight. In Rockwells case, mentioned earlier, although he was primarily
a nuisance on the fringes of society, largely forgotten and ignored by readers
born since 1967, he remains a central touchstone for the far-right, neo-Nazi/
white nationalist movement (with 29 competing factions active in 44 states
during 2012).
The United States most famous assassinations, aside from those of President Lincoln and Malcolm X, stand officially solved with assignment of blame
to lone gunmen. Nonetheless, conspiracy theories persist in those cases, with
proffered evidence ranging from persuasive to the bizarre. Even in the cases of
Lincoln and Malcolm X, where multiple plotters were tried and convicted,
broader conspiracy claims suggest the involvement of powerful, shadowy forces.
Some researchers still blame the Roman Catholic Church, or its Society of Jesus,
for Lincolns murder in 1865. A century later, citing statements from Malcolm X
and government files released under the Freedom of Information Act, other students point accusing fingers at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central
Intelligence Agency, or rogue agents of both acting in collaboration.
Famous Assassinations in World History explores those conspiracy claims, with
the evidence presented to support them, while permitting readers to determine
INTRODUCTION
whether they have any credence. In cases where facts are disputed, witnesses
contradicted, or evidence has vanished, further detailed information may be
found within the sources suggested for further readingand, in turn, through
their bibliographies. Although the author has opinions in most cases, they are
not presented here. Critics of the official verdictsand their detractors, in
turnare permitted to speak for themselves.
There can be no last word on assassinations, as long as discontent and violence persist on Earth. If anything, our world appears to be a more chaotic, violent place today than during many eras of the past. Between 2006 and 2012,
Mexicos drug war claimed at least 54,927 lives, with another 10,000 victims
disappeared; some estimates of the seven-year death toll top 99,000. Narcoterrorism in Central America is equally lethal: Honduras, El Salvador, Belize,
Guatemala, and Panama all had higher per-capita murder rates than Mexico in
2010. La Violencia (The Violence) engulfed Colombia in 1946, resulting in
300,000 homicides by 1958. Today, that nations plague of narcoterrorism produced 13,520 murders in 2011hailed by Colombias National Police as the
lowest violent death toll since 1984. Reports from Iraq, Afghanistan, and parts
of Africa are equally dismal.
Famous Assassinations in World History presents a chronicle of malice and
mistakes, in hope that something may be learned, at least, from the mistakes.
Whether those lessons are absorbed depends in equal part on public leaders,
law enforcement, and an educated populace.
xix
A
ABDALLAH ABDEREMANE, AHMED
(19191989)
On November 26, 1989, armed rebellion erupted in Moroni, capital of the
Comoros, an island chain located in the Mozambique Channel between Madagascar and the African mainland. The coups leader, Said Mohamed Djohar, was
the half-brother of former president Ali Soilih Mtsashiwa, chafing under the
rule of his siblings successor, President Ahmed Abdallah Abderemane. Rebels
captured President Abdallah during the first day of fighting, and executed him
on orders from Djohar.
Born on the island of Anjouan on June 12, 1919, when Comoros was still
a French colony, Abdallah entered politics in the 1940s, served as president
of the general council from 1949 to 1953, and assumed chairmanship of
the Chamber of Deputies in 1970. Two years later, leading his own political
partythe Comoros Democratic Union (UDC)Abdallah was elected chief
minister of Comoros and held that post until the islands achieved independence on July 6, 1975. Voters chose him as their new nations first president,
but he lasted less than a month, deposed by Said Mohamed Jaffar on August 3.
Jaffar, in turn, was overthrown by revolutionary socialist Ali Soilih Mtsashiwa
in January 1976.
Soilih sought to make Comoros a self-sufficient nation, melding Maoist
principles with certain progressive Islamic philosophies, a goal that brought
him into conflict with traditional Muslim society. He abandoned classic grand
marriage (Anda) and funerary rituals, banned veiling of women, discouraged young Comorians from studying history, and encouraged them to take
a greater role in government. To that end, Soilih young Moissy militia units
patterned on Chinas Red Guards, legalized cannabis, and proposed lowering
the voting age to 14. Moissy units raided rural pockets of resistance and killed
its conservative elders.
Soilihs reforms spurred hostile reactions in France, whose government
cut off financial and technical aid to Comoros. In Paris, Ahmed Abdallah
hired French mercenary Bob Denard to organize a team of 50 soldiers to depose Soilih. Their coup succeeded on May 13, 1978, installing former interior
minister Said Atthoumani as Chairman of the Politico-Military Directorate.
Ten days later, Abdallah and ally Mohamed Ahmed succeeded Atthoumani
AGUIYI-IRONSI, JOHNSON THOM AS UMUNNAK WE
as cochairmen. Abdallahs men executed Soilih on May 29, and Abdallah removed Ahmed to become sole chairman on October 3. Three weeks later he
assumed office as president of a newly proclaimed Islamic Federal Republic of
the Comoros.
Abdallah ruled Comoros for the remainder of his life, disbanding the UDC
in 1982 and replacing it with the Comorian Union for Progress as the nations
only legal party. Discord between Abdallah and Bob Denart inspired Supreme
Court judge Said Djohar to lead an uprising against Abdallah. On the day after
Abdallahs murder, Djohar assumed leadership of a new provisional government and became chief director of the African International Bank.
Ironically, Denarts mercenaries returned to depose Djohar in September 1995.
French authorities held him in Runion until January 1996, then permitted his
return to Comoros, where he briefly resumed his presidency. Rival Mohamed
Taki Abdoulkarim defeated Djohar in March 1996, whereupon Djohar retired
from public life.
Further Reading
Bratton, Michael, and Nicholas van de Walle. Democratic Experiments in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Ottenheimer, Martin, and Harriet Ottenheimer. Historical Dictionary of the Comoro Islands. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1994.
Schraeder, Peter. African Politics and Society: A Mosaic in Transformation. Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth, 2004.
Seddon, Peter. A Political and Economic Dictionary of Africa. London: Routledge, 2005.
A G U IY I-IRONSI, J OH NSON THOMAS

UMUNNAKWE (19241966)
Nigerias first military head of state established his junta by violence in January 1966 and left office the same way, 194 days later. While touring the nation
he ruled, Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi stopped at Ibadan, capital of
Nigerias Western Region1, to spend the night of July 28 with military governor
Adekunle Fajuyi at Government House. Fajuyi alerted Aguiyi-Ironsi to rumors
of mutiny within the army, but Aguiyi-Ironsi was unable to reach army chief
of staff Yakubu Gowon. In the predawn hours of July 29, soldiers led by Captain Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma invaded Government House, subsequently
executing Aguiyi-Ironsi and Fajuyi in the nearby forest, whereupon Yakubu
Gowon assumed command of the country.
Born at Umuahia, Nigeria, on March 3, 1924, Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi joined
the army at age 18 and trained with Englands Royal Army Ordnance Corps before securing promotion to lieutenant in June 1949. He served as aide-de-camp
to Governor-General John Macpherson and led Nigerian troops on a four-year
peacekeeping mission during the 1960s Congo Crisis. In February 1965, he
AL-BANNA, SHEIKH HASAN AHMED ABDEL RAHMAN MUHAMMED
replaced British major general Welby-Everard as commander of the Nigerian

army. On January 14, 1966, Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu staged a
military coup against Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewas civilian government, but Aguiyi-Ironsi eluded would-be assassins and arrested Major
Nzeogwu in Lagos, emerging as Nigerias leader when acting president Nwafor
Orizu ceded power to the army.
While Aguiyi-Ironsi emerged from the turmoil in charge, his reluctance to
court-martial and execute coup leaders from his own Igbo tribe sparked opposition against him. Aguiyi-Ironsi sought to defuse the situation by granting
patronage appointments to members of other ethnic groups, and then made
matters worse with a series of decrees consolidating power in his hands. Decree no. 1 suspended most provisions of Nigerias constitution, while leaving
certain basic liberties intact. Decree no. 2 restricted freedom of the press, while
decree no. 34 abolished Nigerias federal system in favor of military rule, closing many of the countrys embassies abroad. Decree no. 44 made it a crime to
display or pass on pictorial representation, sing songs, or play instruments
the words of which are likely to provoke any section of the country. With
Igbo leaders in charge, other ethnic groups viewed Aguiyi-Ironsis regime as
repressive.
Captain Danjuma, a member of the rival Jukun ethno-linguistic group,
led the countercoup of July 1966, installing Yakubu Gowon as head of state,
thereby earning promotion to lieutenant colonel in 1967, to colonel in 1971,
to brigadier in 1975, and to army chief of staff in 1976. He retired to run a
commercial shipping line in 1979, and founded South Atlantic Petroleum Limited in 1995. Thomas Aguiyi-Ironsis son was appointed to serve as Nigerias
defense minister on August 30, 2006, forty years after his fathers assassination.
Further Reading
Barrett, Lindsay. Danjuma, the Making of a General. Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension,
1979.
Ezrow, Natasha, and Erica Frantz. Dictators and Dictatorships: Understanding Authoritarian Regimes and Their Leaders. London: Continuum International Publishing, 2011.
Kapuscinski, Ryszard. The Shadow of the Sun. New York: Vintage Books, 2001.
Nigerias Former Presidents. Africa 24 Media. http://photography.a24media.com/
index.php/photogallery/prominent-faces/121-nigerias-former-presidents.
Osaghe, Eghosa. The Crippled Giant: Nigeria Since Independence. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1998.
A L - B A N N A , S H E IKH H ASAN AHMED ABDEL

RAHMAN MUHAMMED (19061949)
On the afternoon of February 12, 1949, Sheikh Hasan al-Banna and his brotherin-law, Abdul Karim Mansur, visited the headquarters of the Young Mens
Muslim Association in Cairo, Egypt. They were scheduled to meet Zaki Ali
Basha, a spokesman for King Farouk I, and negotiate a resolution of grievances
between the monarchy and al-Bannas rival Muslim Brotherhood. When Basha
failed to appear by 5:00 P.M., al-Banna and Mansur prepared to leave. They
stood outside, waiting for a taxi, when two gunmen approached and opened
fire at close range, fatally wounding both men.
Hasan al-Banna was born in Mahmoudiyah, northwest of Cairo in the Nile
Delta, on October 14, 1906. The son of a local imam (mosque leader) and
teacher of Hanbali (religious law of Sunni Islam), al-Banna was raised in accordance with strict conservative traditions. At age 13 he joined in demonstrations
against British colonial rule, and at 16 was initiated into Sufism, a mystical dimension of Islam defined by its leading scholars as a science whose objective
is the reparation of the heart and turning it away from all else but God. In
adulthood al-Banna struggled to earn a living, operating a watch-repair shop
and selling gramophones, while collaborating with fellow Sufis on theological
writings in his spare time. Married and relocated to Cairo in 1924, he found
himself unable to compete financially with manufacturers of cheap timepieces,
and he was increasingly distressed by the lax religious piety in Egypts capital.
Al-Bannas response, in March 1928, was the creation of the Society of Muslim Brothersmore commonly known as the Muslim Brotherhoodlaunched
as a quasi-fascist pan-Islamic political party, defining the Quran as the sole
reference point for . . . ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community . . . and state. The Suez Canal Company funded construction of the
Brotherhoods first mosque, at Ismailia, but al-Banna moved the headquarters
to Cairo four years later. From a membership of 800 in 1936, the Brotherhood
expanded to claim 200,000 by 1938, with branches established in Syria and
Transjordan. Despite recurring challenges to his leadership, al-Banna prevailed
as the movements general guide, steering the Brotherhood toward opposition
against British rule. A public admirer of Adolf Hitler, he nonetheless argued
for constitutional government to preserve in all its forms the freedom of the
individual citizen, to make the rulers accountable for their actions to the people and finally, to delimit the prerogatives of every single authoritative body.
A paramilitary wing carried out selective acts of terrorism, while al-Banna remained ambivalent toward violence.
World War II brought martial law to Egypt in 1941, and al-Banna was twice
imprisoned as a subversive. Brotherhood journals were suppressed, its meetings banned, and any reference to it in newspapers prohibited. Still the movement grew to include 2,000 branches by 1948, with an estimated two million
members. Renewed antigovernment violence in that year prompted a ban on
the Brotherhood in November 1948, with 32 leaders of its secret apparatus
arrested. Al-Bannas February 1949 meeting with Zaki Ali Basha was meant to
resolve that tension, but led to his own death instead.
THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

Following Sheikh al-Bannas assassination, the Muslim Brotherhood continued its expansion, marked by acts of violence. Members rioted in
Cairo on January 26, 1952, burning some 750 buildings, mostly nightclubs, theatres, hotels, and restaurants patronized by foreigners. Six
months later, the Brotherhood inspired and supported the overthrow of
Egypts monarchy in a military coup led by members of the Free Officers
Movement. Still dissatisfied with the secular state that replaced royal rule,
Brotherhood members plotted unsuccessfully to kill President Gamal
Abdel Nasser in October 1954. Banned as a political party thereafter, suffering cyclical crackdowns from successive governments, the Brotherhood still grew into the Middle Easts most influential Muslim movement,
recognized as the largest political opposition organization in several
Arab states. Banned from operating as a party in Egypt, the Brotherhood
fielded numerous independent candidates in the 2005 parliamentary
campaign, winning 88 seats20 percent of the totaldespite hundreds
of arrests and widespread electoral fraud. Six years later, after the popular
revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood was legalized once more and launched a new political vehicle, the
Freedom and Justice Party. Egypts new presidentMohamed Morsi Isa
El-Ayyat, elected in June 2012is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood,
a fact that resonated in that years U.S. presidential elections, when Morsi
proved less than zealous in defending Cairos U.S. embassy against Muslim rioters on the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Two days
after that incident, President Barack Obama told an interviewer, I dont
think that we would consider [Egypt] an ally, but we dont consider them
an enemy. A military coup against President Morsi in July 2013 ostensibly broke the Brotherhoods hold over Egypt, with various senior members of the organization placed under arrest. That, in turn, sparked a rash
of violence by Muslims against Egypts Coptic Christian minority.
Further Reading
Abdelkader, Deina. Islamic Activists: The Anti-Enlightenment Democrats. London: Pluto
Press, 2011.
Ikhwanweb: The Muslim Brotherhoods Official English Web site. http://www.ikhwanweb
.com.
Lia, Brynjar. The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass
Movement. Reading, United Kingdom: Garnet, 1998.
ALBERT I OF HABSBURG
Mitchell, Richard. The Society of the Muslim Brothers. London: Oxford University Press,
1969.
Pargeter, Alison. The Muslim Brotherhood: The Burden of Tradition. London: Saqi Books,
2010.
Pryce-Jones, David. The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs. Chicago: Ivan R.
Dee, 2009.
Rubin, Barry. The Muslim Brotherhood: The Organization and Policies of a Global Islamist
Movement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
ALBERT I OF HABSBURG (12551308)

In the 10th year of his reign as king of the Romans and Duke of Austria, Albert I
of Habsburg faced an uprising in Swabia, one of five stem duchies (tribal domains) of the medieval German kingdom, thrown into chaos with the death
of Hohenstaufen duke Conradin in October 1268. Alberts father, Rudolf von
Habsburg, had attempted to revive the duchy under his control, but had not
prevailed before his death in July 1291. Determined to succeed where his
father had failed, Albert planned a new show of force in spring 1308, but
on May 1 was separated from his attendants at Windisch, while crossing the
Reuss River. Caught unguarded, he was ambushed by a rebel party under an
18-year-old rival, Duke John of
Swabia.
The eldest son of Rudolf I,
born in July 1255, Albert
was groomed for the German
throne but saw that ambition
dashed by objections from
Wenceslaus II, king of Bohemia
and Poland. Rudolfs backup
plan, to install Albert as successor to the murdered King Ladislaus IV of Hungary in July 1290,
also failed when Andrew III of
Hungary claimed that throne.
At Rudolfs death, the Holy
Roman Empires prince-electors
bypassed Albert, seeking to prevent establishment of a hereditary monarchy, and chose
instead Count Adolf of NassauWeilburg as next king of the
Albert I of Habsburg, assassinated by rebels in Romans. Ostensibly retiring to
May 1308. (De Agostini/Getty Images)
the Habsburg realm at Vienna,
AL-DIN SHAH QAJAR, NASSER
Albert continued scheming to obtain the throne, and by 1298 had secured
backing from several princes troubled over Adolfs alliance with Wenceslaus II.
The rival kings clashed at the Battle of Gllheim, on July 2, 1298, where Adolf
was slain. Albert was then elected to the thrown on July 27, and formally
crowned on August 24, though Pope Boniface VIII weakened his authority by
refusing to recognize Alberts election. Subsequent meddling in a quarrel over
succession to the Hungarian throne climaxed with Alberts defeat by Frederick I,
margrave of Meissen, at the Battle of Lucka on May 31, 1307.
Alberts final downfall resulted from a slight to John of Swabia in 1306. As
nephew of Albert, being the son of his younger brother, John suffered humiliation when Albert denied him his inheritance and placed his own son, Rudolf III,
on the Bohemian throne. Mocked thereafter as Duke Lackland, John plotted
Alberts murder with local allies and personally swung the axe that killed Albert on May 1, 1308. While Alberts sons sought vengeance, Duke Johnnow
dubbed John Parricida ( John the Parricide)escaped and vanished from history. Reports of his settlement at an Italian monastery, visited briefly by King
Henry VII of Luxembourg in 1313, remain unconfirmed. John appears briefly
in Friedrich Schillers play William Tell (1804), seeking Tells aid against a mutual enemy, Bailiff Albrecht Gessler. Tell refuses and suggests that John seek
papal absolution from Rome instead.
Further Reading
Berenger, Jean. A History of the Habsburg Empire, 12731700. Harlow, Essex: Longman
Group United Kingdom, 1994.
Holmes, George, ed. The Oxford History of Medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992.
Wheatcroft, Andrew. The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
Wheatcroft, Andrew. The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire. New York: Penguin, 1997.
AL-DIN SHAH QAJAR, NASSER (18311896)

On April 30, 1896, King Nasser al-DinIrans third-longest serving monarch,
in the 48th year of his reignvisited the Shah Abdol Azm Shrine in Ray. As
he prayed, a gunman approached and shot al-Din at point-blank range with
a rusty antique revolver. The wound proved fatal, though physicians claimed
a thicker coat might have saved al-Dins life from the underpowered bullet.
Before succumbing on May 1, King al-Din reportedly said, I will rule you all
differently if I survive!
The son of Persian king Mohammad Shah Qajar, born on July 16, 1831,
Nasser al-Din assumed his fathers Peacock Throne at age 17, with aid from
his premier-to-be, Amir Kabir. Hailed by some historians as Irans first reformer, Kabir influenced the young shah, but could not sway him from ruling
A L- D I N S H A H Q A JA R , N A S S E R
dictatorially. Encouraged by his

queen mother Malek Jahan Khanom, al-Din demoted Kabir to
a military rank, then ordered
his death in January 1852
based on allegations that Kabir
was a secret ally of Russia.
Relieved of Kabirs restraining influence, al-Din persecuted followers of Bbism and
the offshoot Bah faith as heretics, killing an estimated 2,000
victims in various purges. In
1856, he also sparked a war
with Britain, sending Persian
troops to seize Herat, Afghanistan. The resultant AngloPersian War climaxed with
Persias defeat in April 1857,
whereupon al-Din was forced
to recognize the kingdom of
Nasser al-Din Shaa Qajar, shot while praying at a
Afghanistan. Al-Dins relationshrine in April 1896. (Getty Images)
ship with Britain stabilized in
time for him to visit London in
1873, where Queen Victoria appointed him a knight of the Order of the Garter.
He returned in 1878, for the Royal Navy fleet review, and in 1890 granted British merchant Gerald Talbot a virtual monopoly over Persias tobacco industry
(canceled after Ayatollah Mirza Mohammed Hassan Husseini Shirazi issued a
fatwa banning cultivation, trading, or consumption of tobacco).
Ultimately, Nasser al-Dins attempts to westernize Iran cost him his life. Islamic activist Sayyid Muh.ammad ibn S.afdar Husayn , known as The Afghan,
despite his apparent birth in Iran, was expelled in 1891 on orders from al-Din,
for agitating against the shahs reforms. Although frequently embroiled in bitter arguments even with Muslims who supported him, historians agree that
Husayn reserved his strongest hatred for the Shah. Al-Din, in turn, blamed
Husayn for the fatwa against tobacco, which cost him a small fortune and, on
a personal note, prompted his wives to insist that he stop smoking.
The gunman who killed al-Din, Mirza Reza Kermani, was an ardent follower
of Husayn . Captured at the scene of the attack, Kermani endured months of
interrogation telling jailers, I had a chance to kill him before, but I didnt because the Jews were celebrating their picnic after the eighth day of Passover.
I did not want the Jews to be accused of killing the Shah. Kermanis wife
ALEXANDER I OF SERBIA
divorced him prior to his execution on August 10, 1896, while his son was reduced to being a slave.
Further Reading
Amanat, Abbas. Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah and the Iranian Monarchy,
18311896. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Axworthy, Michael. A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
Katouzian, Homa. The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2010.
ALEXANDER I OF SERBIA (18761903)

On the night of June 1011, 1903, a group of Serbian army officers led by
Captain Dragutin Dimitrijevic stormed the royal palace in Belgrade, battling
guards, before they captured and summarily executed King Albert I and his
wife, Queen Draga Main. That May Overthrowso called because it occurred on May 2829 under the obsolete Julian calendar, still used in Serbia
at the timeextinguished the House of Obrenovic that had ruled from
1815 to 1842, and again since 1858, passing Serbias throne to the House of
Karador
devi
c under King Peter I.
Born in Belgrade on August 14, 1876, Alexander I became Serbias king at
age 13, with the surprise abdication of his father, King Milan I. Before retiring to
private life in France, Milan named his queen consort and Alexanders mother,
Natalija Obrenovic,
to serve as regent until Alexanders 18th birthday. Tired of
waiting by April 1893, Alexander staged a coup dtat and proclaimed himself
a qualified adult at age 16. Although many Serbs admired that action, and his
appointment of radical ministers, popular support waned in May 1894, when
Alexander repealed his fathers liberal constitution of 1888, restoring a more
conservative one from 1869. At the same time, Alexander named Milan as commander in chief of the army in 1897.
Relations between father and son soured in August 1900, when Alexander
married Draga Main. Both royal parentsand, apparently, most Serbians at
largeregarded Draga as a fortune-hunting seductress, whose father had died
in a lunatic asylum while her mother descended into alcoholism. After the
wedding, Milan resigned his military post and Alexander exiled his mother to
mute her ongoing objections. Public opinion of Alexander, already damaged,
plummeted further with the announcement that one of Queen Dragas brothers, Lieutenant Nikodije Main, would be heir to Alexanders throne. When
senators opposed to Nikodijes succession aired their criticism in March 1903,
Alexander suspended the constitution for 30 minutesjust long enough to
dismiss his detractors and replace them with compliant newcomers.
In that tense atmosphere, Captain Dimitrijevic and other junior army officers conspired to kill the king and queen. On the night of the coup, Lieutenant
10
A L E X A N D E R I O F Y U G O S L AV I A
Nikodije and his brother, Nikola Main, died defending the palace, their corpses
tossed from a balcony onto a garden manure heap with Alexanders and Dragas. Captain Dimitrijevic, badly wounded, survived and was proclaimed the
savior of the fatherland by Serbias parliament, and appointed professor of
tactics at the nations military academy. Subsequently, as a leader of the secret
society Unification of Death, also called the Black Hand, Dimitrijevic plotted
unsuccessfully to kill Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria in 1911, and played a
leading role in the 1914 assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand.
The House of Karador
devi
c,
established through Dimitrijevics conspiracy,
ruled Serbiaand subsequently, Yugoslaviauntil King Peter II was deposed
and driven into exile in November 1945. Peter died in the United States in
1970, following a failed liver transplant to cure his longstanding cirrhosis.
Further Reading
Gildea, Robert. Barricades and Borders: Europe 18001914. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003.
Glenny, Misha. The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 18041999. New
York: Penguin, 2001.
Roberts, J. M. The European Empires. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Sulzberger, C. L. The Fall of Eagles. New York: Crown, 1977.
ALEXANDER I OF YUGOSLAVIA (18881934)

On October 9, 1934, King Alexander I arrived in Marseilles, beginning a state
visit to the Third French Republic which he hoped would strengthen French
ties to the Little Ententean alliance of Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, formed 13 years earlier to block restoration of the Habsburg Empire.
As Alexander drove through Marseilles with French foreign minister Louis Barthou, Bulgarian revolutionary Vlado Chernozemski opened fire with a pistol
concealed in a bouquet of flowers, killing Alexander and his chauffeur. A police
officer fired at Chernozemski and missed, fatally wounding Barthou. Vlado
Chernozemski tried to shoot himself, but was cut down by a mounted policemans sword, then beaten to death by furious spectators.
Born in Montenegro on December 16, 1888, Alexander was the son of King
Peter I of Serbia, who replaced assassinated King Alexander I of Serbia in 1903.
Almost killed by typhus in 1910, Alexander was not first in line for the throne,
but his elder brother, Crown Prince George, was forced to renounce his succession rights after kicking a servant to death in 1909. Emerging as a military hero
of the Balkan Wars of 19121913 and the Serbian Campaign of World War I,
Alexander assumed the throne upon his fathers death, in August 1921. Eleven
months later, he married Princess Maria of Romania, daughter of that nations
King Ferdinand.
A L E X A N D E R I O F Y U G O S L AV I A
Alexanders reign was marked

by alienation between Serbs
and Croatians, exacerbated in
June 1928 when Montenegrin
Serb politician Punia Racic
shot several members of the
Croatian Peasant Party (CPP)
in parliament, fatally wounding
CPP leader Stjepan Radic. Radic
died in August, and escalating
turmoil prompted Alexander to
abolish Yugoslavias constitution on January 6, 1929, establishing one-man rule known as
the January 6th Dictatorship.
Ten months later, he formally
changed the countrys name to
the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, reducing its political subdivisions
from 33 oblasts (zones) to 9 banovinas (provinces). At the same
time, he banned use of Serbian
Cyrillic, replacing it with the
Latin alphabet. A new constitution, imposed by fiat in 1931, Alexander I of Yugoslavia, shot by revolutionary
Vlado Chernozemski in 1934. (Getty Images)
transferred all executive power
to Alexander, while granting
him power to appoint half the members of parliaments upper house. Henceforth, legislation could be enacted by one house alone, if the king approved.
Opposition to Alexander was particularly strong in Vardar Macedonia (todays Republic of Macedonia), where the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary
Organization (IMRO) agitated for secession from Yugoslavia. Alexanders assassin, Vlado Chernozemski, was an IMRO member linked to rebel skirmishes
with Yugoslavian police. Sentenced to die for killing a fellow IMRO member
in 1930, he was pardoned in 1932 and went to Italy, where he trained Croatian Ustae guerrillas at a camp near Borgetoro. Although ostensibly Croatian
nationalists, the Ustae were also fascists sponsored by Italian dictator Benito
Mussolini. During World War II the group ruled part of occupied Yugoslavia
as the Independent State of Croatia, in fact an Axis puppet state, collaborating
in the Holocaust.
Peter II Karador
devi
c followed his father to the throne at age 11, with Alexanders cousin Prince Paul named as regent. In defiance of Peter and his
11
12
ALEX ANDER II OF RUSSIA
antifascist advisors, Paul announced Yugoslavias alliance with Germany and

Italy on March 25, 1941, forming a new tripartite pact. Peter led a coup two
days later, prompting a fascist retaliatory campaign dubbed Operation Punishment. Peter fled and Yugoslavia surrendered on April 17, with its territory
divided between among the victors.
Further Reading
Chaliand, Grard, and Arnaud Blin. The Golden Age of Terrorism. In The History of
Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Graham, Stephen. Alexander of Yugoslavia. North Haven, CT: Shoe String Press, 1972.
Roberts, Allen. The Turning Point: The Assassination of Louis Barthou and King Alexander I
of Yugoslavia. New York: St. Martins Press, 1970.
Singleton, Fred. A Short History of the Yugoslav Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
ALEXANDER II OF RUSSIA (18181881)

Each Sunday without fail, Russian tsar Alexander II attended military roll call at
the Mikhailovsky riding academy in St. Petersburg, accompanied by a large entourage. The traditional procession always traveled by the same route from the palace, crossing the Catherine (now
Griboyedov) Canal via Pevchesky Bridge. On March 13,
1881, the street-side audience
to Alexanders ritual included
several members of the revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya
(Peoples Will), armed with
bombs. Terrorists Nikolai Rysakov and Timofey Mikhaylov
lobbed their charges first, but
both missed the tsars carriage,
killing one Cossack guard and
wounding several more. When
Alexander emerged to aid the
injured men, bomber Ignacy
Hryniewiecki set off another
blast, fatally wounding the tsar
and himself. A fourth would-be
assassin, Ivan Emelyanov, fled
without detonating his device.
The eldest son of Tsar
Tsar Alexander II of Russia, slain in a terrorist
bombing on March 13, 1881. (Getty Images)
Nicholas I, Alexander II was
ALEXANDER II OF RUSSIA
born in Moscow on April 29, 1818. He was a liberal by Russian standards

in the 19th century, known during his reign as Alexander the Liberator.
Succeeding to the throne in March 1855, after pneumonia claimed his fathers life, Alexander inherited a kingdom rife with corruption, defeated
and exhausted by the Crimean War. He embarked on a course of reform,
emancipating Russias serfs, including sons of wealthy families in military
conscription, remodeling the judiciary, and establishing a new penal code,
instituting local self-government by elective assemblies for rural districts,
increasing Finlands autonomy from Russia, and fattening the treasury with
$7 million ($200 million today) from the sale of Alaska to the United States.
Still, Alexander was not universally admired. His reforms did not extend
to territories of the former PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, where martial
law suppressed the January Uprising of 18631864, with some 10,000 rebels slain and an equal number exiled to Siberia. Before his murder in 1881,
Alexander survived four assassination attempts. Dmitry Karakozov, a member
of the revolutionary Ishutin Society, tried to shoot Alexander at St. Petersburgs
Summer Garden on April 4, 1866, but was captured and subsequently hanged,
with 10 alleged accomplices imprisoned. On April 20, 1879, revolutionist
Alexander Soloviev fired five shots at the tsar in Palace Square but missed each
time, and was sent to the gallows on May 28. Seven months later, Narodnaya
Volya dynamited the railroad line between Moscow and Livadia, but missed
Alexanders train. A bomb set in the Winter Palace dining room exploded on
February 5, 1880, killing 11 persons and wounding 30, but Alexander was
late for dinner and escaped the blast. In that case, bomber Stepan Khalturin
another Narodnaya Volya memberescaped to participate in other revolutionary acts, but was captured and hanged for the murder of a high-ranking
Odessa police officer in March 1882.
Agents of Russias secret police, the Okhrana, learned of the latest plot
against Alexander in February 1881. They arrested ringleader Andrei Zhelyabov, but under torture he vowed that nothing could save the tsars life.
After the fatal March bombing, authorities jailed five more conspirators.
Bomber Nikolai Rysakov and Timofey Mikhaylov were hanged on April 3,
1881, with Zhelyabov, Sophia Perovskaya, and Nikolai Kibalchich. Gesia
Gelfman died in prison, while fugitive Nikolai Sablin killed himself to avoid
capture.
Tsar Alexander III, a witness to his fathers slaying, soon revoked the various reforms instituted since 1855. He was convinced that Russia could only be
saved by strict adherence to Official Nationality, embodied in strict autocracy and adherence to tenets of the Russian Orthodox Church, including overt
anti-Semitism. Successive pogroms and the May Laws of 1882 and restricting areas of Jewish habitation and fields of occupation, set the stage for future
Russian revolutionary movements.
13
14
ALI, MUHAMMAD MANSUR
A curious footnote to Alexanders reign is his appearance in the opening

chapters of Jules Vernes adventure novel Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the
Czar. Regarded by many critics as one of Vernes best books, Michael Strogoff
is a tale of espionage, rather than the more familiar science fiction. Published
while Alexander II was still alive, the story finds him embroiled with a Tatar
rebellion threatening to separate the Russian Far East from tsarist control.
Alexander sends the eponymous hero to aid his (Alexanders) brother, besieged at Irkutsk. Portraying Alexander in a very positive way, Michael Strogoff
was adapted as a play by Verne himself, and decades later into several films
and cartoon series.
Further Reading
Graham, Stephen. A Life of Alexander II: Tsar of Russia. London: Ivor Nicholson &
Watson, 1935.
Moss, Walter. Alexander II and His Times: A Narrative History of Russia in the Age of
Alexander II, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. London: Anthem Press, 2002.
Radzinsky, Edvard. Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar. New York: The Free Press, 2005.
Van Der Kiste, John. The Romanovs 18181959: Alexander II of Russia and His Family.
St. Albans, United Kingdom: Sutton Publishing, 1998.
ALI, MUHAMMAD MANSUR (19191975)

Four years after winning independence through a fierce guerrilla war with Pakistan, the Peoples Republic of Bangladesh was engulfed in fresh turmoil. On
August 15, 1975, conspirators led by Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad assassinated
Bangladeshs founder and president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, with 19 members of his family in Dhaka. Assuming the presidents office, Ahmad invited
Prime Minister Muhammad Ali to join his new government, with prominent
Rahman loyalists Tajuddin Ahmad, Syed Nazrul Islam, and Abul Hasnat Muhammad Qamaruzzaman. All four refused to comply, whereupon Ahmad abolished the prime ministers office and ordered the quartet imprisoned at Dhaka
Central Jail on August 23. When they still refused to endorse Ahmads regime,
Ali and the rest were shot by soldiers at the jail, on November 3, 1975.
Born in the former Indian province of Bengal, sometime in 1919, Muhammad Ali graduated from Calcuttas Islamia College, then pursued degrees in
economics and law at Aligarh Muslim University, where he joined the Muslim League, rising to serve as its vice president in Pabna district from 1946
to 1950. The leagues primary goalcreation of Pakistan as Muslim state independent from Indiawas achieved in June 1947. Ali served in Pakistans
army, attaining the rank of captain, then retired to practice law in 1951. At
the same time, he left the Muslim League to join an offshoot, East Pakistans
Awami League, which sought Bengali independence from Pakistan. Jailed for
leading antigovernment protests in 1952, Ali won election to the East Pakistan
AMIN, HAFIZULLAH
Legislative Assembly in 1954, serving at various times as the provinces minister of law, food, agriculture, industry, parliamentary affairs, and commerce.
In October 1958, after Field Marshal Ayub Khan staged a military coup and
seized office as Pakistans president, declaring martial law nationwide, Ali was
jailed once more.
Released in 1959, Ali joined Mujibur Rahman Six Point Movement, agitating
for Bengali independence as the state of Bangladesh. With the outbreak of war in
March 1971, Ali went underground to lead the Mujibnagar government in exile,
serving as its minister of finance. Victory brought independence for Bangladesh
in December 1971, and Rahman emerged from prison to serve as the new nations first prime minister in January 1972, retaining Ali as minister of finance. In
January 1975, with Rahmans election to the presidency, Ali filled the prime ministers postan office left vacant following his murder, until June 1979.
On November 6, 1975, three days after Ali and his fellow inmates were murdered at Dhaka Central Jail, President Ahmad was himself deposed in a coup
led by two pro-Mujib military officers, Brigadier Khaled Mosharraf and Colonel Shafaat Jamil. The uprising unseated Rahman but failed to establish the
insurgents as rulers, with Mosharraf himself assassinated and Jamil arrested.
Ahmad survived the coup, succeeded by President Abu Sadat Mohammad
Sayem, but was imprisoned until 1978. On leaving prison, he formed a new
Democratic League and tried to revive his political career, but rallied no significant support. He died in 1996, shortly before Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina
opened fresh investigations of the 1975 political slayings.
Jail Killing Day is still commemorated in Dhaka each November 3, by
members of the Awami League. Twelve military officers were belatedly convicted for the murders in October 2004 and sentenced to death, eight of them
in absentia. The four in custodySyed Faruque Rahman, Shahriar Rashid
Khan, Mohammad Bazlul Huda, and A.K.M. Mohiuddin Ahmed were executed on January 28, 2010.
Further Reading
Lewis, David. Bangladesh: Politics, Economy and Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge
Mitchell, Neil. Democracys Blameless Leaders: From Dresden to Abu Ghraib, How Leaders
Evade Accountability for Abuse, Atrocity, and Killing. New York: New York University
Press, 2012.
Van Schendel, Willem. A History of Bangladesh. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009.
AMIN, HAFIZULLAH (19291979)

Hafizullah Amin had ruled as Afghanistans chief of state for 104 turbulent
days when Soviet occupation forces moved to unseat him in a plot code
15
16
AMIN, HAFIZULL AH
named Operation Storm-333. On December 27, 1979, 170 Soviet soldiers

and 520 members of an allied Muslim battalion stormed the Tajbeg Palace
outside Kabul, defended by members of the Afghan National Army. In the
ensuing battle, Amin was killed and his 11-year-old son died from shrapnel
wounds. Some 200 defenders fell in the fighting, with a like number wounded
and 1,700 arrested. Reports of Soviet losses ranged from an official low of
19 to more than 100, estimated by KGB senior archivist Vasili Mitrokhin
years later.
Born at Paghman, near Kabul, on August 1, 1929, Hafizullah Amin trained
as a teacher at Kabul University, then entered politics in 1965 and was elected
to Afghanistans parliament in 1969. By then, he was associated with Nur Muhammad Taraki, communist founder of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), rising to the partys second-highest post by 1973. That same
year, ex-prime minister Mohammed Daoud Khan deposed King Mohammed
Zahir Shah in a military coup, with PDPA support. Party relations with Khan
soured over the next five years, however, and Amin helped organize the Saur
Revolution of April 1978, which toppled Khans regime and imposed communist rule under Taraki, serving as chairman of the council
of ministers.
Institution of socialist reforms created turmoil in Afghanistan. By March 1979,
uprisings by Muslim mujahideen (strugglers) made travel
unsafe for government officials
in 25 of the countrys 28 provinces. Amin directed the PDPAs
military response, but felt increasing dissatisfaction with
Taraki. After building a virtual cult of personality around
Tarakihailing him as The
Star of the East or The Great
Thinker, Amin found Taraki
believing his own propaganda,
growing arrogant and imperious. On March 27 he ceded
chairmanship of the council to
Afghanistan president Hafizullah Amin, killed Amin, while promoting himby Soviet forces in Operation Storm-333 on self to general secretary of the
December 27, 1979. (Associated Press)
PDPA, a position dominating
AQUINO, BENIGNO SIMEON, JR.
and effectively emasculating Amins. Furious, Amin staged a coup and arrested
Taraki on September 14, 1979, having him smothered with pillows (allegedly
on advice from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev). On September 16 he replaced
Taraki as Afghanistans ruler.
Amin sought to pacify the mujahideen by dissociating himself from Taraki
and presenting himself as a devout Muslim, blaming Taraki for some 18,000
executions carried out since April 1978. Whereas that effort failed to win him
broad support, Amin also lost ground with the USSR. Never greatly admired
in Moscow, Amin seemed unaware that KGB agents had infiltrated the PDPA,
reporting on his secret meetings with anticommunist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Tataki loyalists exiled in Russia, branded Amin a CIA agent, even
as the murder of U.S. ambassador Adolph Dubs strained Amins relationship
with the United States. In early December 1979, when Amin proposed a summit meeting with Pakistani president Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, Brezhnev and
Russias politburo announced their military-intervention plan. Soviet troops
crossed the border on December 24 and assaulted Amins Tajbeg Palace three
days later.
Before sending troops en masse to kill Amin, the Soviets first tried to poison
him (nearly killing a nephew), then sent a sniper to assassinate him (foiled by
tight security measures). A second poisoning attempt allegedly occurred mere
hours before the assault of December 27, causing Amin and several guests to
lose consciousness at a palace banquet celebrating Minister of Public Works
Ghulam Dastagir Panjsheris return from Moscow, but that near miss remains
unconfirmed. Amins successor, Babrak Karmal, promised sweeping democratic reforms but made limited progress before he was deposed, on orders
from Moscow, in November 1986.
Further Reading
Ansary, Tamim. Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan. New
York: Public Affairs, 2012.
Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from
the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
Jones, Seth. In the Graveyard of Empires: Americas War in Afghanistan. New York: W. W.
Norton, 2010.
Male, Beverly. Revolutionary Afghanistan: A Reappraisal. London: Taylor & Francis,
1982.
Rasanayagam, Angelo. Afghanistan: A Modern History. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005.

(19321983)
Opponents of longtime Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos rallied at Manila
International Airport on August 21, 1983, to celebrate the return of former
17
18
AQ U I N O, B E N I G N O S I M E O N , J R .
senator Benigno Aquino Jr. Imprisoned from 1973 until a heart attack threatened his life in 1980, Aquino had been paroled to the United States for medical
treatment and had remained there in self-imposed exile since then. President
Marcos, unrelenting, had dispatched a prison van to collect Aquino and return
him to custody, with 1,000 soldiers to provide security. Despite that wall of
uniforms, supposed Communist Party member Rolando Galman allegedly shot
Aquino in the head as he left the aircraft, killing him instantly. Government
agents then riddled Galman with bullets.
Aquino was born in Concepcion on November 27, 1932, a descendant of
prosperous landowners, grandson of a general in Emilio Aguinaldos revolutionary army. His father served as vice president of Jos Laurels collaborationist government under Japanese occupation in World War II and died in 1947
while awaiting trial for treason. Educated in private schools, Aquino was the
youngest Filipino war correspondent during the Korean War, winning the
Philippine Legion of Honor at age 18 for courage under fire. Entering politics
at 22, he was elected mayor of Concepcion in 1955, as vice governor of Tarlac province in 1960, as governor in 1961, as secretary general of the Liberal
Party in 1966, and as the countrys youngest-ever senator in 1967. A year later,
Aquino launched an outspoken opposition to President Marcos, warning that
Marcos planned to establish a garrison state by militarizing our civilian government offices. Four years later, Marcos proved Aquino right with a declaration of martial law, imposing autocratic rule throughout the Philippines.
The precipitating cause of that announcement was a Liberal Party rally at
Manilas Plaza Miranda on August 21, 1971. Aquino was not present when
two hand grenades exploded in a crowd of 4,000, killing nine persons and
wounding 120. Liberals blamed President Marcos for the bombing, while
Marcos blamed the leftist New Peoples Army. Marcos suspended habeas corpus
and jailed Aquino with dozens of supposed Maoists, along with a bombing
suspect later identified as a sergeant of the Philippine Constabularys firearms and explosive section. Aquino subsequently claimed that the bomber,
once identified as a policeman, was spirited away and disappeared. Marcos
declared martial law on September 21, 1972, and Aquino was one of the
first subversives detained for trial by military commission on trumped-up
charges of murder and gunrunning. In the midst of his protracted trial, in
April 1975, Aquino declared a hunger strike to the death and shriveled to
75 pounds over the course of 40 days, before relenting and accepting nourishment. The court-martial dragged on until November 25, 1977, when Major
General Jose Syjuco convicted Aquino on all charges and sentenced him to
death by firing squad.
More delays ensued, while Marcos granted Aquino permission to participate in the 1978 parliamentary election from his prison cell, and granted him
a television interview on Face the Nation. That appearance rallied liberal support, but the partys candidates were buried in a Marcos landslide marked
by flagrant fraud. Still theoretically awaiting execution, Aquino suffered a

heart attack in March 1980, followed by another on arrival at Quezon Citys
Philippine Heart Center. Slated for coronary bypass surgery, Aquino refused the
operation out of fear that Marcos would arrange his death. Following a televised appearance on Pat Robertsons 700 Club, Aquino received a surprise
visit from Marcos on May 8, 1980. Marcos granted permission for Aquino
and his family to visit the United States, in return for promises that Aquino
would return when cured, and that he would abstain from criticizing Marcos
in the United States.
Transported to Texas, Aquino recovered quickly from surgery and flew to
Damascus, Syria, five weeks later. Meeting with Muslim leaders, he conceded
plans for a return to Manila, then received a message from President Marcos
extending his medical furlough. Simultaneously, Aquino rescinded his promise to Marcos, declaring that a pact with the devil is no pact at all. Settled in
a Boston suburb, he embarked on anti-Marcos lecture tours for the next three
years, funded by grants from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Finally, in August 1983, Aquino announced plans for a
belated homecoming, telling reporters that the Filipino is worth dying for.
Approaching Manila International, he warned journalists aboard his flight,
You have to be ready with your hand camera because this action can become
very fast. In a matter of 3 or 4 minutes it could be all over, and I may not be
able to talk to you again after this.
Aquinos corpse lay in state for nine days at his home in Quezon City, his
head wounds undisguised in a glass casket, prior to burial with the cardinal
archbishop of Manila presiding. President Marcos created a fact-finding commission to investigate the assassination, but its members resigned after their
appointment was challenged in court. Next, on October 14, Marcos issued
presidential decree no. 1886 establishing a five-member independent board of
inquiry. The panel heard 193 witnesses, reporting to Marcos on October 24,
1984, that Aquinos murder was a military conspiracy, with Rolando Galman
sacrificed as a scapegoat. Twenty-five soldiers and one civilian faced murder
charges, but all were acquitted on December 2, 1985.
After President Marcos was deposed in 1986, a new investigation charged
16 military menincluding one brigadier generalwith Aquinos murder. All
were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. They appealed that verdict, claiming the murder was ordered by Eduardo Cojuangco Jr., a cousin of
former first lady Imelda Marcos. By 2009, all of those convicted were paroled.
The site of Aquinos murder is today called Ninoy Aquino International Airport, and the anniversary of his death is a Filipino national holiday.
Further Reading
Bonner, Raymond. Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American
Policy. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.
19
20
A R AU J O, M A N U E L E N R I Q U E
Burton, Sandra. Impossible Dream: The Marcoses, the Aquinos, and the Unfinished Revolution. New York: Warner Books, 1959.
De Castro, Arturo. Mistrial: A Case Study of the Assassination of Senator Benigno S. Aquino, Jr.
Manila: Current Events Digest, 1986.
Festin Martinez, Manuel. The Grand Collision: Aquino vs. Marcos. Manila: Martinez,
1987.
Hill, Gerald. The True Story and Analysis of the Aquino Assassination. Aylesbury, United
Kingdom: Hilltop, 1984.
ARAUJO, MANUEL ENRIQUE (18651913)

On the night of February 4, 1913, El Salvadors president, Dr. Manuel Araujo,
attended a concert at San Salvador Bolivar Park. During the performance, three
menlater identified as farmers Fabian Graciano, Fermin Perez, and Mulatilo
Virgilioattacked Araujo with machetes, inflicting mortal wounds. He died
on February 9, while his assailants were detained for military trial, swiftly convicted, and executed by firing squad without any significant investigation of
their motives.
The son of a wealthy Basque coffee grower and his Portuguese wife, Manuel
Araujo was born at Alegria, in El Salvadors Usulutn Department, on October 12,
1865. He earned a medical degree from the University of El Salvador in 1891,
then traveled to Europe for specialized surgical training. Upon returning home,
he prospered as a physician and maintained his familys ties with Salvadoran
high society. In 1910, Fernando Figueroathe nations last military ruler, in
a line of dictators dating from 1885gave his support to Araujo in Novembers presidential election. Chosen by the voters without a party affiliation,
Dr. Araujo took office on March 1, 1911.
Although civilian rule had been restored for the time being, Araujo repaid
Figueroas support by granting increased funding to the army and importing
foreign military advisors to train Salvadoran officers. In 1912, he also created
a National Guard to police rural districts, trained by retired members of the
Spanish Civil Guard who doubled as Araujos personal bodyguards. On other
fronts, President Araujo established a ministry of agriculture to expand cultivation of coffee, thus benefiting his relatives and other wealthy growers. Decline
in sales of indigo had left coffee as El Salvadors only significant export since
1880, but production had lagged by comparison to that in Guatemala and
Costa Rica, as preceding government administrations failed to court external
financing and technical assistance.
Dr. Araujos policies sparked opposition in the Salvadoran countryside, despite exemption from military service for coffee plantation workers. Rural villagers had hoped for sweeping economic reforms and the redistribution of
land, but instead saw wealthy growers reap rewards from tax reductions and
ARGAA FERRARO, LUIS MARA DEL CORAZN DE JESS DIONISIO
elimination of export duties. Dissatisfaction was compounded by reports that

some high-ranking members of the government were both corrupt and ineffective. Nonetheless, Araujos regime was regarded as stable until the surprise attack claimed his life in February 1913. Various theories were advanced for his
murder, but none was ever substantiated.
President Carlos Melndez succeeded Araujo, inaugurating a dynasty that
ruled El Salvador in the name of the National Democratic Party until March
1931. Melndez himself served two terms, from February 1913 to August
1914, and again from March 1915 to December 1918. Others in the lineup
included Melendezs brother-in-law, Alfonso Quinez Molina (three terms),
and his brother Jorge Melndez (one term). Po Romero Bosque finished the
lineup, declining to name a handpicked successor in 1930. A distant relative
of Dr. Araujo, Arturo Araujo, won that election as a member of the Labor Party,
but was deposed by a coup dtat in December 1931, after just 11 months
in office. That uprising restored military rule in El Salvador for another halfcentury, until May 1982.
Further Reading
Keen, Benjamin, and Keith Haynes. A History of Latin America, Volume 2: Independence
to Present. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 2009.
LaFeber, Walter. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1993.
Langley, Lester, and Thomas Schoonover. The Banana Men: American Mercenaries and Entrepreneurs in Central America, 18801930. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1995.
White, Christopher. The History of El Salvador. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008.
ARGAA FERRARO, LUIS MARA DEL

CORAZN DE JESS DIONISIO
(19321999)
Luis Argaa Ferraro, vice president of Paraguay, left his home in Asuncin as
usual on the morning of March 23, 1999. This time, however, he had barely
pulled out of the driveway when several gunmen sprang from hiding, spraying Argaas sport utility vehicle with fire from automatic weapons, killing him
instantly. President Ral Cubas Grau ordered the countrys borders sealed, but
the assassins eluded capture and remain unidentified today. Suspicion that Cubas himself might be responsible prompted Chamber of Deputies to vote his
impeachment on March 24. Facing near-certain conviction in the senate and
removal from office, Cubas resigned four days later and fled to Brazil while
rioting rocked Asuncin.
Luis Argaa Ferraro was born in Asuncin on October 3, 1932. He earned
degrees in law and social sciences from the Universidad Nacional de Asuncin
21
22
A R GA A F E R R A R O, L U I S M A R A D E L C O R A Z N D E J E S S D I O N I S I O
in 1958, and remained as a professor until he entered politics, with his election
to Paraguays Chamber of Deputies. He later served as a judge and as president
of Paraguays Supreme Court from 1983 to 1988, followed by a term as foreign minister (19891990). He lost a presidential bid in 1993, but rebounded
five years later with election as vice president.
Some observers speculated that Argaas murder may have been inspired by
his service as a judge, and later head of Paraguays judicial system, under the
despotic regime of Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda, who ruled the nation with an
iron hand from 1954 to 1989, while granting sanctuary to Nazi war criminals,
including Auschwitz Angel of Death Josef Mengele. Critics claimed that Argaa had used his position to abet and whitewash Stroessners reign of terror,
including political murders, torture, and unjust imprisonment amply documented by archives of terror discovered at a police station in the Asuncin
suburb of Lambar on December 22, 1992.
Another theory blamed Argaas death on ex-general Lino Csar Oviedo
Silva, commander of Paraguays army from 1993 until April 1996, when President Juan Carlos Wasmosy forced his resignation. Oviedo had threatened a
coup dtat, then relented when Wasmosy offered him a post as minister of
defensethen reneged on the day of Oviedos scheduled swearing-in ceremony. Embittered, Oviedo ran for president in 1998 and won the ruling Colorado Partys nomination, then was slapped with a 10-year prison term a month
before election day, for his abortive coup attempt in 1996. Running mate Ral
Cubas went on to win the election and liberated Oviedo days after taking office
in August 1998, over protests from opposition leaders and the Paraguayan Supreme Court. Luis Argaa was inaugurated as vice president of Paraguay under
Cubas, on August 15.
Argentina granted asylum to General Oviedo upon his departure from
prison, and refused an extradition request from Paraguays National Congress
following Argaas murder. Oviedo subsequently left for Brazil, where expresident Cubas had settled following his impeachment, then returned to Paraguay voluntarily on June 28, 2004. Arrested on arrival, he was taken to the
military prison at Vias Cu, near Asuncin, to complete his original 10-year
sentence. Authorities paroled him for good behavior on September 6, 2007, and
Paraguays Supreme Court overturned Oviedos conviction on October 30, 2007,
by a vote of eight to one, deciding that no coup dtat was actually attempted
in 1996.
Thus vindicated, Oviedo resumed his campaign for the presidency. In January 2008, he was nominated without opposition by a Colorado Party splinter
group, the National Union of Ethical Citizens. Whereas Oviedos party won
25 congressional seats in Aprils election, Oviedo lost his bid to rival Fernando
Armindo Lugo Mndez, candidate of the Patriotic Alliance for Change. Oviedo
received only 22.8 percent of the popular vote nationwide.
ASSASSINS CULT
Further Reading
Calvert, Peter. A Political and Economic Dictionary of Latin America. London: Europa
Publications, 2004.
Lambert, Peter. Muero con mi patria! Myth, Political Violence, and the Construction
of National Identity in Paraguay. In Political Violence and the Construction of Identity
in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Miranda, Carlos. The Stroessner Era: Authoritarian Rule in Paraguay. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.
Mora, Frank, and Jerry Cooney. Paraguay and the United States: Distant Allies. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2007.
ASSASSINS CULT (CA. 10921275)

Assassination owes its name to a religious sect founded in Persia shortly before
the First Crusade (10961099). Although information on the movements origin is vague and issues chiefly from the pens of hostile authors, its foundation
is traceable to Hassan-i Sabbah, an evangelist of Ismailism (the second-largest
branch of Shia Islam). Various authors writing from the 17th through the
19th century claimed that the cult drew its name from the derogatory Arabic
term Hashishin (users of hashish), first applied to Syrian Ismailis by Fatamid Caliph Al-Amir bi-Ahkami l-Lah in 1122, later corrupted to assassins.
Modern author Edward Burman disagrees, writing that the attribution of the
epithet hashish eaters or hashish takers is a misnomer derived from enemies
of the Ismailis and was never used by Muslim chroniclers or sources. It was
therefore used in a pejorative sense of enemies or disreputable people. This
sense of the term survived into modern times with the common Egyptian usage of the term Hashasheen in the 1930s to mean simply noisy or riotous.
It is unlikely that the austere Hassan-i Sabbah indulged personally in drug
taking. . . . [T]here is no mention of that drug hashish in connection with the
Persian Assassins.
Whatever Sabbahs personal habits or motives for founding the cult may
have been, he found a secure base for the order in 1090, with capture of a
Zaidiyyah Shia mountain fortress at Alamut, 60 miles from present-day Tehran, Iran. Proclaiming himself grand headmaster of the order, Sabbah schooled
his disciples in a pyramidal hierarchy with ranks including greater propagandists, propagandists, companions, and adherentsthe latter also known
as fedayin (the martyrs or men who accept death), who would perform the
task of murder.
The sects first known victim was a Sunni Muslim, Seljuq vizier Nizam alMulk, ambushed and murdered while en route from Isfahan to Baghdad on
October 14, 1092. More slayings followed, carried out during religious or political feuds and as contract killings commissioned by wealthy clients. From
Persia the sect spread to Syria, establishing cells in various cities during the
23
24
A S S A S S I N S C U LT
early 12th century. Grand master Sabbah died at Alamut in 1124, succeeded
by Kiya Buzurg-Ummid, and the sect grew stronger than ever. Its next wellknown victim, in 1125, was Abul-Fad.l Ibn al-Khashshab, the foremost Shia
qadi ( judge) at Aleppo, Syria. A year later, also in Aleppo, a fedayin assassin
killed Emir Porsuki on November 26, 1126.
Later in the 12th century, Assassins seized nine castles in Syrias An-Nusayriyah
Mountains. From one of those, at Masyaf, Old Man of Mountain Rashid ad-Din
Sinan ran his own branch of the order, virtually independent of the grand master
at Alamut. Pledged to kill Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim sultan of Syria and Egypt,
Sinan twice dispatched assassins who failed to complete their assignment. Saladin
laid siege to Masyaf in August 1176, then retired after finding a threatening note
in his tent, pinned to a table with a poisoned dagger. Sinans last major contract
claimed the life of Conrad of Montferrat, elected king of Jerusalem on April 24,
1192, and killed four days later, allegedly on orders from King Richard I of England. Sinan himself died that same year, his successor handpicked by then
grand master Nur al-din Muhammad at Alamut.
Mongol invaders under Hulagu Khan laid siege to Alamut, commanded
at the time by Imam Rukn al-Din Khurshah, on December 15, 1256. Khurshah surrendered his stronghold soon thereafter, and although fedayin warriors
briefly recaptured the fortress in 1275, they were soon routed, the survivors
scattered and vanishing into obscurity. Mamluk Sultan Baibars of Egypt seized
control of the orders Syrian wing in 1273 and used its members as killers for
hire. Moroccan author Ibn Battuta (13041368) claims that remaining Assassins finally resulted to taqiyya, a tactic of religious dissimulation masking their
beliefs in mainstream Muslim society while waitingin vain, it appearsfor a
new leader to awaken them.
It comes as no surprise, perhaps, that the Assassins cult has featured frequently in literature, film, on televisioneven in modern computer and video
games. Friedrich Nietzsche seemed to admire the order when, in 1887, his On
the Genealogy of Morality referred to that invincible Order of Assassins. Vladimir Bartol, by contrast, seemed to take a decidedly negative view in his novel
Alamut (1938), though later critics maintain that he compared the order favorably to antifascist resistance fighters in his native Slovenia. Louis LAmour,
best known for novels set in the American Old West, departed from type with
The Walking Drum (1984), in which 12th-century hero Mathurin Kerbouchard
seeks to rescue his father from the Assassins. Peter Berlings The Children of the
Grail (1996) also examines the Assassins in their historical setting, and other
novelsDan Browns Angels & Demons (2000) and A. W. Hills Nowhere-Land
(2009)imagine the orders survival into modern times. In comics, the Assassins have contended both with ancient warrior Conan the Barbarian and quasisupernatural Wild West gunman Jonah Hex.
ASSASSINS CULT
On the big screen, Assassins have appeared as antagonists in the feature

films Secondhand Lions (2003) and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2009),
the latter a Hollywood adaptation of a popular video game launched in 1989.
Other role-playing games featuring the order include Broken Sword, Dungeons &
Dragons, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Final Fantasy, The First Templar, Gothic 3,
Infinity, Knights of the Temple, Legend of the Burning Sands, Medieval II: Total
War, and Vampire: The Masquerade. On television, BBCs Robin of Sherwood featured Assassins in an episode titled The Greatest Enemy, originally aired
on April 13, 1985.
Further Reading
Burman, Edward. The AssassinsHoly Killers of Islam. Wellingborough, United Kingdom: Crucible, 1987.
Lewis, Bernard. The Assassins, a Radical Sect of Islam. London: Oxford University Press,
1967.
Lung, Haha. Assassin! The Deadly Art of the Cult of the Assassins: The Deadly Art of the
Cult of the Assassins. New York: Citadel, 2004.
25
B
BAHONAR, MOHAMMAD-JAVAD
(19331981)
On August 30, 1981, a bomb exploded in the Tehran office of Iranian prime
minister Mohammad-Javad Bahonar. The blast killed Bahonar, as well as
President Mohammad-Ali Rajai and three other members of the Islamic Republican Party. Survivors described the explosion occurring when one victim
opened a briefcase, brought into the office by Massoud Kashmiri, a state security official. Subsequent investigation revealed that Kashmiri was an agent
of the leftist Peoples Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), supported by Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein and blamed for 17,000 Iranian deaths during the IranIraq
War of 19801988.
Bahonar was born in Kerman, Iran, on September 3, 1933. A Muslim cleric
and author of textbooks on Islamic studies, he also engaged in politics and was
jailed in 1963, during protests led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against Shah
Mohammad Reza Pahlavis White Revolutiona program of supposed reforms
designed primarily to strengthen and legitimize the Pahlavi dynasty. Upon release
from custody, Bahonar abstained from further activism until the Islamic Revolution of 19781979 drove the shah into exile and established Khomeini as Irans de
facto ruler. For his service in the revolution, Bahonar was named to lead the new
governments ministry of culture and Islamic guidance, essentially responsible for
censoring any media disapproved by Muslim leaders in Tehran. From that post, he
also directed a purge of all secular influence from Iranian universities.
The outbreak of war with Iraq, in September 1980, hampered but did not
derail the ultraconservative Iranian Cultural Revolution. Mayhem on the home
front escalated as the MEKfounded by leftist Iranian students in 1965 to
oppose Shah Pahlavishifted focus to attack to attack Khomeinis rigid theocracy and its political organ, the Islamic Republican Party (IRP). Irans first
elected president, Abulhassan Banisadr, took office in February 1980 but was
impeached in June 1981 for bucking clerical authority. One week after his
removal, MEK militants bombed IRP headquarters, killing 70 high-ranking
members. In that tense atmosphere, presidential successor Mohammad-Ali
Rajai chose Mohammad-Javad Bahonar as his running mate. They won the
election with 91 percent of the popular vote, but survived less than four weeks
after taking office on August 4, 1981.
28
BALBINUS
Although the BahonarRajai assassination was solved with identification of

bomber Massoud Kashmiri as an MEK agent, he remained unpunished. Various mujahedin were arrested and executed in reprisal, but Kashmiri apparently slipped through the dragnet. MEK murders of Iranian officials continued
sporadically over the next year, while Iraqi troops occupied Iranian territory,
supported and encouraged by special envoy Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of
U.S. president Ronald Reagan. Following Iraqs withdrawal and Irans ultimate
victory in summer 1982, the MEK moved its headquarters to France, remaining there until l986. Still supported by Saddam Hussein, the group carried out
several high-profile Iranian assassinations in the 1990s and fielded an army
of 6,000 men against U.S. troops in 2003. Formally designated as a terrorist
group in 2006, the MEK suffered numerous arrests and coalition air strikes in
Iraq, as late as 2009.
Further Reading
Abrahamian, Ervand. The Iranian Mojahedin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1992.
Brownlee, Jason. Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization. Cambridge: Cambridge
Keddie, Nikki. Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.
Parsa, Misagh. Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
Wright, Robin. The Iran Primer: Power, Politics, and U.S. Policy. Washington, DC: United
States Institute for Peace, 2010.
BALBINUS (165 CE238 CE)

The year 238 is known in ancient Roman history as the Year of the Six Emperors. Fourth in line and sharing power with Co-Emperor Pupienus Maximus, Balbinusformally known as Decimus Caelius Calvinus Balbinus Pius
Augustusheld office for only three months before both emperors were
slain by mutinous members of the Praetorian Guard on July 29.
A patrician by birth, Balbinus was the son of Caelius Calvinus, who served
as legate to Cappadocia in 184. Author Herodians colorful eight-volume History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus credits Balbinus with governing
seven separate provinces, while also serving as proconsul of Africa and Asia,
but no other evidence supports those claims. Modern historians dismiss those
stories as inventions, while granting Balbinus two terms as consul. The first is
vague, variously dated from 203 and 211; the second, in 213, found Balbinus
serving Emperor Caracalla (himself assassinated in April 217).
Romes Year of the Six Emperors began with rebellion against Maximinus
Thrax, assassinated in April 238, with his son and chief ministers, by soldiers
BALBINUS
Emperor Balbinus of Rome, assassinated by his palace guards in 238 C.E. (Getty Images)
of the Second Parthian Legion. The senate then approached 79-year-old Gordian, regional governor of North Africa, who demurred until his son was accepted as co-emperor. Accordingly, Gordian I and II were named to rule in
tandem, but they reigned for only 36 days. Gordian II died fighting soldiers
loyal to Maximus at the Battle of Carthage, and Gordian I hanged himself
on learning of his sons demise. Next, on April 22, the senate elected elderly
members Balbinus and Pupienus as co-emperors, a decision so unpopular
with Gordian loyalists that they thronged Romes streets, pelting both men
with sticks and stones. As a pacifying measure, senators named Marcus Antonius Gordianus Pius Augustus, 13-year-old grandson of Gordian I, to nominally reign as Caesar, thus presumably defusing anger against Balbinus and
Pupienus.
29
30
B A L E WA , A B U B A K A R TA FAWA
That stopgap measure failed to guarantee smooth governance, however. Dissension simmered between Balbinus and Pupienus from the first day of their
joint reign, each emperor fearing assassination by the other. Seeking to crown
their election with military laurels, thereby achieving some legitimacy, they
planned an ambitious dual campaign, Balbinus plotting to subjugate the Carpians (inhabiting the eastern region of present-day Moldavia), and Pupienus
targeted the Parthians (occupying northeastern Iran). Collaborating on logistics failed to heal the rift between the emperors, however. Balbinus and Pupienus were engaged in yet another bitter quarrel on July 29, when disgusted
Praetorian Guards burst in and hacked both men to death.
With Gordian III still too young to rule, control of the empire was ceded to
aristocratic families who directed Romes affairs through the senate. Gordian
married Furia Sabinia Tranquillina, daughter of the newly appointed praetorian prefect Timesitheus, who assumed de facto rule of Rome until his death in
243. The following year, Gordian died combating Persian invaders at the Battle
of Misiche. Quickly deified by the senate, he was succeeded by Marcus Julius
Philippus Augustus, also called Philip the Arab.
Further Reading
Frey, Oliver. Complete Chronicle of the Emperors of Rome. Ludlow, United Kingdom:
Thalamus Publishing, 2005.
Grant, Michael. The Roman Emperors: A Biographical Guide to the Rulers of Imperial Rome
31 BCAD 476. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1985.
Kerrigan, Michael. Dark History of the Roman Emperors. London: Amber Books, 2012.
Potter, David. Emperors of Rome: Imperial Rome from Julius Caesar to the Last Emperor.
London: Quercus Books, 2008.
Scarre, Chris. Chronicle of the Roman Emperors: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers
of Imperial Rome. London: Thames & Hudson, 1995.
BALEWA, ABUBAKAR TAFAWA (19121966)

Nigerias first and only prime minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, fell victim to the nations persistent tribal animosities after ruling for five tempestuous years. His death occurred during a military coup on January 15, 1966,
led by junior military officers of Igbo extraction under Major Chukwuma
Kaduna Nzeogwu. Igbos, from southern Nigeria, opposed rule by Hausa
and Falani tribal members from the north. The circumstances of Balewas
death remain unclear, as his corpse was found beside a road near Lagos on
January 24. The rebels also killed Premier Ahmadu Bello of Nigerias Northern Region, Premier Ladoke Akintola of the Western Region, and Finance
Minister Festus Okotie-Eboh. Before Balewas body was discovered, on January 16, Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi proclaimed himself Military
Head of State.
B A L E WA , A B U B A K A R TA FAWA
Abubakar Balewa was born

in Bauchi, in December 1912,
the son of a Muslim district
leader, educated at the local
Koranic school and at Katsina
College, where he earned a
teaching certificate. He taught
at Bauchi Middle School until
1944, then went to study for a
year at the University of Londons Institute of Education.
On his return, he served briefly
as a school inspector, then won
election to the Northern House
of Assembly in 1946, progressing to the legislative assembly in 1947. With colleague
Ahmadu Bello, Balewa founded
the Northern Peoples Congress
(NPC) as a vehicle to pursue
rights for residents of north- Nigerian Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa,
killed by rebel soldiers in 1966. (Bettmann/Corbis)
ern Nigeria, primarily Muslims.
Their chief rivals were the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), representing mostly
Christian Igbos from the south. In 1952, Balewa was elected minister of works,
later serving as minister of transport. In 1957, voters chose him as chief minister, forming a coalition government between the NPC and NCNC, led by
Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe. Queen Elizabeth II knighted Balewa in January
1960, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sheffield
four months later.
Britain released Nigeria from colonial rule on October 1, 1960, with
Nnamdi Azikiwe named as president of the First Nigerian Republic, and
Balewa took office as prime minister. From that post, doubling as minister of
foreign affairs, Balewa led protests against the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960,
allied himself with Commonwealth of Nations ministers who sought expulsion of South Africa, participated in negotiations during the Congo crisis of
19601966, and played a leading role in creating the Organization of African
Unity, founded in 1963. Although those efforts saw him dubbed the Golden
Voice of Africa, Balewa lost support from allies in the western region of his
homeland after NPC ally Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo was convicted of treason in 1965, for allegedly conspiring with Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana to topple Nigerias federal government. During 1965s national elections, Awolowos
31
32
B A N D A R A N A I K E , S O L O M O N W E S T R I D G E W AY D I A S
followers threw their support to the southern NCNC in a campaign marked

by rioting.
That turmoil set the stage for Balewas assassination and the collapse of the
First Nigerian Republic. Major General Aguiyi-Ironsi died in a countercoup six
months after seizing power, accompanied by Muslim massacres of Christian
Igbos living in the north. Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, military
governor of the Igbo-dominated southeast, proclaimed his district the independent Republic of Biafra in May 1967, thereby plunging Nigeria into civil war.
Further Reading
Clark, Trevor. A Right Honourable Gentleman: The Life and Times of Alhaji Sir Abubakar
Tafawa Balewa. Zaria, Nigeria: Hudahuda Publishing, 1991.
Falola, Tony, and Ann Genova, Historical Dictionary of Nigeria. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009.
Herbst, Jeffrey. States and Power in Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2000.
Meredith, Martin. The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence.
New York: Public Affairs, 2011.
BANDARANAIKE, SOLOMON WEST

RIDGEWAY DIAS (18991959)
On September 25, 1959, Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike kept his
normal schedule of greeting constituents at Tintagel, his private residence
in Colombo, largest city of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). One of the visitors was
Talduwe Somarama, a Sinhalese Buddhist monk allied with Mapitigama Buddharakkitha, chief priest of the Kelaniya Raja Maha Vihara temple and exsupporter of Bandaranaike who had soured on the prime ministers failure
to pursue nationalist reforms. Exempted from the usual pat-down search because of his religious status, Somarama carried a revolver to his meeting with
Bandaranaike, firing it as Bandaranaike knelt to greet him in the traditional
Buddhist style. Aides disarmed Somarama and rushed Bandaranaike to the
nearest hospital, where he died on September 26 after protracted surgery.
A native of Colombo, Ceylon, born on January 8, 1899, Solomon Bandaranaike was the son of Sir Solomon Dias Bandaranaike, an Anglican Christian
and chief native interpreter/advisor to the governor of Ceylon under British colonial rule. Educated at the College of St. Thomas the Apostle in Ceylon, then
at Christ Church, Oxford University, Bandaranaike qualified as a barrister in
England before returning home to Colombo and joining the Ceylon National
Congress. He converted to Buddhism shortly thereafter, courting political support from the island nations 70-percent religious majority, and was elected to
the Colombo Municipal Council in 1926, subsequently serving on the State
Council of Ceylon from 1931 to 1947. In 1934, he founded the Sinhala Maha
B A N D A R A N A I K E , S O L O M O N W E S T R I D G E WAY D I A S
Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike of Ceylon, shot by a Buddhist priest in 1959.

(Associated Press)
Sabha organization to promote Sinhalese culture and community interests.

Backing the United National Party (UNP) in 1946, he held ministerial posts
with that group from 1947 to 1951, then broke with the UNP to form a new
Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SFLP).
The SFLP initially sought to bridge national ethnic divisions by supporting
official use of both the Sinhala and Tamil languages, but later passed Official
Language Act No. 33 of 1956, popularly called the Sinhala Only Act. September 1958 brought partial reversal of that exclusionist policy, with passage of the
Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Act, dubbed Sinhala Only, Tamil Also.
Bandaranaike won election by a landslide in 1956, thanks to SFLP collaboration with the Trotskyite Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Communist Party of
Sri Lanka, a move that soon alienated prominent supporter Mapitigama Buddharakkitha. Although the SFLP presented itself as a staunch defender of Buddhist principles, the leftward drift in government prompted Buddharakkitha
to plot Bandaranaikes murder, recruiting Talduwe Somarama as the reluctant
triggerman.
In the wake of Bandaranaikes death, Buddharakkitha initially decried the
shooting over Radio Ceylon, but an investigation by officers of Scotland Yard exposed him as the plots ringleader. At trial, prosecutors described Buddharakkitha
33
34
B AU T I S TA G I L L GA R C A D E L B A R R I O, J UA N
as a wealthy businessman and heavy drinker (an offense for Buddhist monks),
who had engaged in a sexual affair with Minister of Health Wimala Wijewardene, the only female member of Bandaranaikes cabinet. Convicted of murder
and sentenced to death in 1961, Buddharakkitha saw his sentence commuted
to life imprisonment on appeal. He died in prison, from a heart attack, in
1967. Talduwe Somarama was hanged on July 7, 1962. A third conspirator,
businessman H. P. Jayawardena, also received a life sentence.
Further Reading
De Alwis, Malathi. Gender, Politics, and the Respectable Lady. In Unmaking the
Nation: The Politics of Identity & History in Modern Sri Lanka. Colombo, Sri Lanka:
Social Scientists Association, 1995.
Manor, James. The Bandaranaike Legend. In The Sri Lanka Reader: History, Culture,
Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Manor, James. The Expedient Utopian: Bandaranaike and Ceylon. Cambridge: Cambridge
Tambiah, Stanley. Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Weiss, Gordon. The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers.
New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2012.
BAUTISTA GILL GARCA DEL BARRIO,

JUAN (18401877)
On April 12, 1877, while passing through downtown Villarrica, Paraguay,
President Juan Bautista Gill was ambushed and shot by three gunmen, killed
instantly on impact. The assassins, who escaped and fled to Argentina, were
identified as Nicanor Silvano Godoi, brother of an exiled political opponent,
and two lackeys identified only as Goiburu and Molas.
Bautista was the grandson of Don Juan Miguel Gill, a leader in the revolution against Spanish rule in 1811. Born to wealthy parents in Asuncin on October 28, 1840, he completed his secondary education and medical training
in Buenos Aires, Argentina, then returned to Paraguay in 1863. A year later,
when his homeland entered the War of the Triple Alliance against Argentina,
Brazil, and Uruguay, Bautista joined the elite 40th Battalion, then was transferred to the armys military health division. Captured by enemy forces in December 1868, at the Battle of Ita Ybat, he was paroled in January 1869 with
a promise to abstain from further service in the war. Paraguay was defeated in
March 1870, with estimates of total losses ranging from 450,000 to 900,000
dead. Historian William Rubinstein suggests that only 220,000 Paraguayans
survived the war, of whom 28,000 were adult males.
In the wake of that disaster, Bautista entered politics, serving initially as finance minister and chairman of the senate. He was elected president in 1874,
B E C K E T, T H O M A S
taking office on November 25 with cousin Jos Higinio Uriarte y Garca del
Barrio as vice president. Their administration initiated use of paper currency
and substantially increased taxation, while adopting the Argentine Civil Code
in a bid to stabilize Paraguays ravaged economy. Another statute, the Tobacco
Law of April 1875, granted the government a five-year monopoly on tobacco
exports while barring private dealers from the trade. The same law imposed a
three-year government monopoly on trading in salt and soap. Those measures
were predictably unpopular, as was the border treaty signed with Argentina on
February 3, 1876, surrendering Misiones Province and adjacent territory, plus
some islands in the Paran River. Bautistas establishment of a National College
in Asuncin failed to offset criticism of his other policies.
General Germain Serrano, former minister of the interior, led an insurrection against Bautistas regime at Caacup in December 1875, but that uprising collapsed with the death of Serrano and other rebel leaders. Conspiracies
against the president continued, however, with Don Juan Silvano Godoi hatching the plot that finally succeeded in April 1877. Following Bautistas assassination, Silvano spent 18 years in Buenos Aires, finally returning to Paraguay in
1895. Six years later he was appointed general director of the National Library
of Paraguay.
Vice President Higinio Uriarte completed Bautistas four-year term, succeeded by Cndido Pastor Bareiro Caballero, former Paraguayan charg
daffaires in Europe. Under his administration, Paraguay reclaimed some territory from Argentina's Ro de la Plata basin, subsequently named the Presidente
Hayes Department, after U.S. president Rutherford Hayes, who helped negotiate the transition.
Further Reading
Bethell, Leslie. The Cambridge History of Latin America, Vol. 5: c. 18701930. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Lewis, Paul. Political Parties and Generations in Paraguays Liberal Era, 18691940. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Tuohy, John. Biographical Sketches from the Paraguayan War18641870. Charleston,
SC: CreateSpace, 2011.
BECKET, THOMAS (11181170)

On December 29, 1170, four British knightsSir Richard le Breton, Sir Hugh de
Morville, Sir William de Tracy, and Sir Reginald FitzUrsearrived at Canterbury
Cathedral to confront Thomas Becket, archbishop of the diocese. A month earlier,
Becket had excommunicated three rival clerics from York and Salisbury, who had
preempted Canterburys privilege of coronation by crowning Henry the Young as
king of England. The four assassins, acting in accordance with supposed orders
from Henry, first told Becket that he must accompany them to Winchester, to
35
36
explain his actions, but Becket

refused. As Becket proceeded to
a vespers ceremony, the knights
retrieved hidden swords and
overtook him on a staircase,
stabbing him to death.
Becket was born to Norman
parents in Cheapside, London,
on the feast day of St. Thomas
the Apostle (December 21)
in 1118. He studied at Merton Priory, in Surrey, and later
in Paris, though he curiously
failed to master Latin. When
Thomas returned from France,
his father used family connections to find him a position
on the staff of Theobald of Bec,
then archbishop of Canterbury.
Archbishop Thomas Becket, slain by royal order in
Theobald sent Becket on misDecember 1170. (Getty Images)
sions to Rome, and compelled
him to learn cannon law before
naming him archdeacon of Canterbury and provost of Beverly in 1154. Impressed with his performance in those posts, King Henry II named Becket Lord
Chancellor in January 1155, assigned to enforce taxation of bishoprics and
landowners. Henry also sent his son to live with Becket as a foster child, their
close bond prompting Henry the Younger to say that Becket showed him more
love in a day than his father had since birth.
Theobald of Bec died in April 1161, after a long illness, and the archbishops
post remained vacant until a royal council of bishops and noblemen elected
Becket on May 23, 1162, and he formally assumed office on June 3. Henry of
Blois, bishop of Winchester, performed Beckets consecration, but later turned
against him as Becket extended his authority over various suffragan (subordinate) bishops of the archbishopric. By October 1863, Becket was embroiled in
a dispute with King Henry concerning jurisdiction of secular courts over clergymen. That prompted Henry to draft the Constitutions of Clarendon, 16 articles to assert secular authority and weaken the English clergys ties to Rome.
Becket agreed in principle but refused to sign the document, whereupon
Henry summoned him to answer charges of malfeasance and contempt for
royal authority in October 1164. Convicted of those charges at Northampton
Castle, Becket fled to France, spending two years under protection from King
Louis VII. Pope Alexander III intervened in 1167, finally negotiating a compromise that permitted Beckets return to Canterbury in early December 1170.
Meanwhile, Henry II had decided to crown his son, Henry the Young, as
kinga move that required approval from Canterburys archbishop. Becket
resisted, whereupon the coronation proceeded without him in June 1170,
performed by archbishop of York Roger de Pont Lvque, joined by bishop
of London Gilbert Foliot and bishop of Salisbury Josceline de Bohon. Becket
excommunicated all three in November, whereupon the three fled to Normandy. At that point, Henry uttered his famous rhetorical question, transcribed in various histories as Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest? or
What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my
household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a
low-born cleric? Whatever the precise wording, Beckets assassins interpreted
Henrys words as a royal command and proceeded to kill Becket upon his return to England.
Pope Alexander III canonized Becket on February 21, 1173. Two months later,
French noblemen led a rebellion against Henry II in France (see sidebar), prompting Henry to perform acts of penance at Beckets tomb and at the Church of
St. Dunstans, Canterbury, in July 1174. Beckets killers fled to North Yorkshire
and were excommunicated in March 1171 by Pope Alexander, who further sentenced them to 14 years exile in Jerusalem. They were never charged in England,
nor required to forfeit any of their lands. Thomas Beckets remains were exhumed
in 1220 and transferred to a shrine at Canterbury Cathedrals Trinity Chapel.
REVOLT OF 11731174
Henry the Young mourned Thomas Beckets assassination as the slaying
of his surrogate father. Married by that time to a daughter of French king
Louis VII (also first husband of young Henrys mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine), young Henry was 18 in April 1173, when the Counts of Flanders and
Boulogne rose against his father, invading Normandy. Young Henry joined
in the attack, while William the Lion, king of Scots, launched an offensive
in Northumberland. Henry II defeated those offensives, but the rebellion
continued as the Earl of Leicester raised an army of Flemish mercenaries
and crossed from Normandy to England, joining forces with Hugh Bigod,
1st Earl of Norfolk. That thrust also failed, when it was met by superior
forces under Richard de Luci, chief justiciar of England. Even then, fighting continued until July 1174, when Henry II returned from France and
pacified most opponents with public acts of penance for Beckets slaying.
Henry and his son reconciled in September 1174, but the younger Henry
led a new rebellion in 1183. He died from dysentery in June of that year,
during a campaign against his father and brother Richard, later called The
Lionheart.
37
38
BELZU HUMEREZ, MANUEL ISIDORO
Becket remains a popular figure in modern fiction, appearing in T. S. Eliots

play Murder in the Cathedral (1935); Jean Anouilhs play Becket (1959), filmed
under the same title in 1964; Ken Folletts novel The Pillars of the Earth (1989),
adapted as an eight-part television miniseries in 2010; and Paul Webbs play
Four Nights in Knaresborough (1999). In 2006, BBC History magazine polled
prominent historians for a list of worst Britons throughout the previous millennium, choosing one candidate per century. John G. H. Hudson, professor of
Legal History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, nominated Becket
for the 12th century, calling him hypocritical, greedy, a master of the sound
bite, and the founder of gesture politics. In the final poll, Becket ranked second, trailing unidentified 19th-century serial killer Jack the Ripper.
Further Reading
Barlow, Frank. Thomas Becket. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Guy, John. Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel. New York: Random House, 2012.
Knowles, David. Thomas Becket. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971.
Morris, John. The Life and Martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket. Charleston, SC: BiblioLife, 2010.
Staunton, Michael. Thomas Becket and His Biographers. Woodbridge, United Kingdom:
The Boydell Press, 2006.
Urry, William. Thomas Becket. St. Albans, United Kingdom: Sutton Publishing, 1999.

(18081865)
Former Bolivian president Manuel Belzu Humerez felt power within his grasp
once again on the morning of March 23, 1865. Though out of office for a decade,
he saw opportunity in Bolivias unsettled political climate, after a military coup
dtat ousted incumbent Jos Mara Ach and drove him into exile on December 28, 1864. The coups leader, General Mariano Melgarejo, had declared himself president, prompting Belzu to raise a private army and march on the seat of
government at La Paz. Now, with battle imminent, he had received an invitation
from Melgarejo to discuss a power-sharing scheme. Upon Belzus arrival at the
presidential palace, Melgarejos soldiers shot him down.
A child of humble mestizo parents, born in La Paz on April 14, 1808,
Manuel Belzu was educated by Franciscan friars, then joined in Bolivias
long-running war for independence from Spain. At age 18 he participated
in the Battle of Zepita, where Peruvian troops under Andrs de Santa Cruz
defeated Spanish royalist forces on August 23, 1823. Belzu subsequently
served as an aide to Peruvian general (and future two-time president)
Agustn Gamarra Messia, but he left Gamarras service when the general invaded Bolivia on May 28, 1828. Employed next as a garrison commander
at Tarija, Belzu improved his status by marrying the daughter of wealthy
Argentinean expatriates residing in that southern district of Bolivia. His

personal acquaintance with the new presidents of Bolivia (Andrs de Santa
Cruz) and Peru (Agustn Gamarra) also enhanced his prospects.
Gamarras dream involved unification of the two countries, achieved after
a fashion in 1836, with creation of the PeruBolivian Confederation, ruled by
Supreme Protector Andrs de Santa Cruz. Internal dissent coupled with opposition from Argentina doomed that tenuous alliance by August 1839, driving Santa Cruz into European exile. Gamarra then invaded Bolivia once more,
and Belzu found himself opposing his former commander, as he was appointed
by President Jos Ballivin to lead Bolivias army. The hostile forces met on November 18, 1841, for the Battle of Ingavi, where Gamarra was slain and his
army repulsed.
Belzus close relationship with President Ballivin soured in 1845, after Ballivin tried to seduce Belzus wife. Belzu fired a shot at Ballivin, and while he
missed, their personal feud blossomed into political conflict. Joining forces
with rebels led by former president Jos Miguel de Velasco Franco, Belzu drove
Ballivin into exile in December 1847. Belzu initially agreed to let Velasco
become president, while serving as his minister of war, but then he doublecrossed his ally and seized power for himself.
Placating his mestizo base with cosmetic reforms and liberal platitudes,
Belzu secured popular election in 1848, while behaving in fact as a traditional
caudilloan authoritarian politicalmilitary leader. Rival warlords and supporters of wealthy presidential hopeful Jos Mara Linares Lizarazu mounted
successive rebellions during Belzus time in office, and he narrowly escaped
assassination at Sucre, in September 1850, by army officer (and future president) Pedro Agustn Morales Hernndez. Belzu ostensibly retired in August
1855, after arranging the election of his son-in-law, General Jorge Crdova.
Jos Linares deposed Crdova by force in October 1857, proclaiming himself president for life, but was himself unseated and banished in 1861 by Jos
Ach. Mariano Melgarejo, in turn, deposed Ach on December 28, 1864, and
thereby set the stage for Belzus final actions, which climaxed with his murder.
President Melgarejos regime was marked by worse incompetence than any
of his predecessors, but he ruled by ruthless force until January 15, 1871,
when he was ousted by General Agustn Morales. Resettled in Lima, Peru,
Melgarejo survived another 11 months, then was murdered by his lovers
brother on November 23.
Further Reading
Alexander, Robert. A History of Organized Labor in Bolivia. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2005.
Klein, Herbert. Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
39
40
BEAR AN ORDEANA, JOS MIGUEL
Klein, Herbert. A Concise History of Bolivia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Scheina, Robert. Latin Americas Wars: The Age of the Caudillo, 17911899. Dulles, VA:
Potomac Books, 2003.
BEARAN ORDEANA, JOS MIGUEL

(19491978)
On December 21, 1978, a car bomb killed Basque separatist leader Jos Bearan
Ordeana in Anglet, in the Pyrnes-Atlantiques Department of southwestern
France. A fugitive from justice in his native Spain, Bearan had lived in hiding
both from the authorities and from various right-wing paramilitary opponents.
His murder remains officially unsolved, but media reports suggest involvement
by members of the Spanish government, including an agent of the nations
principal intelligence agency, another from naval intelligence, and a third from
the military chiefs of staff. Suspected participants in the actual bombing include French mercenary Jean-Pierre Cherid, a member of the Organisation de
larme secrte that attempted to kill President Charles de Gaulle; Jos Maria
Boccardo, affiliated with the Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance);
and Mario Ricci, a member of Italys neo-fascist National Vanguard.
Born at Arrigorriaga, south of Bilbao in northern Spains Basque Country, Bearan was indoctrinated with the principles of Basque nationalism from infancy
and studied Marxism in his youth. In 1968, he joined the ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Basque Homeland and Freedom), and eluded capture the following
year, when dictator Francisco Francos secret police arrested most of the ETAs
leaders in Bilbao and Cantabria. In the wake of those raids, Bearan joined in
Operation Botella, freeing several inmates from prison in December 1970. On
September 30, 1971, he led a team that stole 10 million pesetas from the Banco
de Vizcaya. Four months later, on January 19, 1972, he helped kidnap industrialist Lorenzo Zabala Suinaga from Abadio, Biscay, releasing him three days
later with Zabalas promise to improve conditions for his workers. Civil guard
officers missed Bearan in October 1972, while killing several of his friends
at Hasparren, France. The ETA retaliated with Operation Ogre, assassinating
Spanish prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco on December 20, 1973.
Hunted by Francos agents and their hired guns, Bearan moved frequently,
spending time in Paris and Madrid, in Biscay, and in smaller towns such as Eibar
and Elgoibar, Spain. After his death, a former Spanish soldier using the pseudonym Leonidas claimed that the explosives used to kill Bearan were obtained
from a U.S. military base in Spain, either at Rota or Torrejn. The explosives
were willingly provided, he said, as a favor to one Pedro el Marino, a far-right
activist who had aided U.S. intelligence agencies in anticommunist actions. Marino was affiliated with the Batalln Vasco Espaol, a terrorist group previously
linked to the murders of ETA officer Juan Lopetegui Carrasco in August 1977,
and that of Yolanda Gonzlez Martn, a member of the Socialist Party of the
BEARAN ORDEANA, JOS MIGUEL
THE ETA (19592011)

Organized to carry out armed action in support of independence for the
Greater Basque Country in the western Pyrenees Mountains, Euskadi Ta
Askatasuna (ETA) has been designated as a terrorist organization by Spain,
France, the European Union, and the United States. Founded on July 31,
1959, ETA held its first assembly in France three years later, adopting a
declaration of principles including creation of underground activist cells,
and the motto Bietan jarrai (Keep up on both), referring to its symbol,
which depicts a snake (representing politics) wrapped around an axe (representing armed struggle). The groups first confirmed killing occurred in
June 1968, after a policeman stopped member Txabi Etxebarrieta for a routine traffic violation. Etxebarrietas subsequent killing by officers prompted
ETA to assassinate Melitn Manzanas Gonzlez, a former Nazi Gestapo associate and police chief of San Sebastin, known for brutal treatment of
Basque prisoners. Since 1968, ETA has been blamed for killing 829 persons, wounding thousands more in bombings and shootings, and committing scores of kidnappings. It counters with claims that state violence
claimed at least 474 lives in Basque Country between 1960 and 2010,
and a dirty war waged by paramilitary Antiterrorist Liberation Groups
claimed 27 between 1983 and 1987. During Spains transition to democracy, after 1975, ETA split into rival factions: ETA political-military and
ETA military, both refusing amnesty offers while pursuing guerrilla warfare. Successive ceasefires in 1989, 1996, 1998, and 2006 did not stem the
violence, nor did the incarceration of 800 ETA members, with extrajudicial slayings of various others. A final ceasefire, declared on September 5,
2010, has proved more effective, buttressed on October 20, 2011, by a
declaration that the ETA had undertaken a definitive cessation of its armed
activity. A successor organizationIrrintzi, founded in 2006continues
bombings aimed at entrepreneurs intruding on Basque territory.
Workers, in February 1978. Between Bearns murder and its dissolution in

1981, the Batalln Vasco Espaol killed four other ETA members, six members
of Herri Batasuna (Unity of the People), two members of GRAPO (the First
of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups), one member of Euskadiko Ezkerra
(Basque Country Left), and four victims of unknown political affiliation.
Further Reading
Anderson, Wayne. The ETA: Spains Basque Terrorists. New York: Rosen Publishing, 2003.
Aretxaqa, Begoa. States of Terror. Reno, NV: Center for Basque Studies, 2005.
41
42
B E N T, C H A R L E S
Mickolus, Edward, and Susan Simmons. The Terrorist List. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger,
2011.
Woodworth, Paddy. Dirty Wars, Clean Hands: The ETA, the GAL, and Spanish Democracy.
Cork: Cork University Press, 2001.
Zulaika, Joseba. Terrorism: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009.
BENT, CHARLES (17991847)

On January 19, 1847, Mexicans and Pueblo Indians, who were unhappy with
the U.S. seizure of New Mexico five months earlier, rose in revolt against U.S.
authorities at Don Fernando de Taos (present-day Taos). Mexican activist Jose
Pablo Montoya and Pueblo tribesman Toms Romero led a raiding party to
the home of Governor Charles Bent, where they shot Bent with arrows, then
scalped him in front of his wife and children. Bent survived those wounds,
escaping with his family and several friends, digging through the adobe wall of
their house to another next door. The raiders belatedly noticed Bents escape
and gave chase, finally killing him, but left the other witnesses unharmed.
Elsewhere in Taos, rebels killed and scalped sheriff Stephen Lee, probate Judge
Cornelio Vigil, and circuit attorney J. W. Leal. Two other massacres, at Arroyo
Hondo and Mora on January 20, claimed 15 more American lives.
A West Virginia native, born in Charleston on November 11, 1799, Charles
Bent attended the United States Military Academy at West Point and served in
the army until 1828, when he joined his younger brother to lead a series of
mercantile wagon trains over the Santa Fe Trail. In 1832, he joined Missouri
trader Ceran St. Vrain to form the Bent & St. Vrain Company, building a series
of fortified trading posts between St. Louis and Taos. In 1835, Bent married
Taos native Maria Ignacia Jaramilla, whose younger sister later married famous
frontier scout Christopher Kit Carson.
Bents commercial empire was well established by April 1846, when war
erupted between Mexico and the United States. Governor Manuel Armijo surrendered New Mexico on August 14, following a week-long siege of Santa Fe
in which no shots were fired. U.S. commander Stephen Watts Kearny named
Bent as first governor of New Mexico Territory, while leaving Colonel Sterling
Price in charge of occupying troops. Predictably, in Bents words, those troops
undertook to act like conquerors. Bent wrote to Prices superior, Colonel
Alexander Doniphan, imploring that he interpose [his] authority to compel the
soldiers to respect the rights of the inhabitants. These outrages are becoming
so frequent that I apprehend serious consequences must result sooner or later
if measures are not taken to prevent them. Doniphans inaction paved the way
for armed revolt in January 1847.
After the massacres of January 1920, Colonel Price led troops to suppress the rebellion, defeating insurgent forces at Santa Cruz on January 24, at
BHUTTO, BENAZIR
Embudo Pass on January 29, and at Taos on February 35, 1847. Rebels repulsed a second force under Captain Israel Hendley at Mora, on January 24, but
were routed by Captain Jesse Morins troops on February 1. Pueblo rebel leader
Toms Romero was captured and jailed at Taos, shot dead in his cell by Private John Fitzgerald on February 8 without the formality of trial. A subsequent
court-martial convicted Jose Montoya and 14 other rebels on charges of murder
and treason against the territorial government. Montoya and five more rebels
were hanged on April 9, 1847, with the remainder executed two weeks later.
Meanwhile, combat between insurgents and occupying troops continued at Red
River Canyon (May 2627), Las Vegas ( July 6), and Cienega Creek ( July 9).
Further Reading
Crutchfield, James. Tragedy at Taos: The Revolt of 1847. Dallas: Republic of Texas Press,
1995.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, and Simon Ortiz. Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure
in New Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.
Durand, John. The Taos Massacres. Elkhorn, WI: Puzzlebox Press, 2004.
Flint, F. Harlan. Hispano Homesteaders, The Last New Mexico Pioneers, 18501910. Santa Fe,
NM: Sunstone Press, 2012.
Sides, Hampton. Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the
American West. New York: Anchor Books, 2006.
BHUTTO, BENAZIR (19532007)

On December 27, 2007, two-time Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto attended a campaign rally for the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) at Liaquat National Bagh (park) in Rawalpindi. Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan had been
assassinated at the same location 56 years earlier, but Bhutto disregarded death
threats in her preparations for the January 2008 parliamentary elections. Rising
through the sunroof of her bulletproof limousine, she was waving to the crowd
when gunfire and explosions erupted, wounding Bhutto and killing 24 bystanders. Bhuttos driver rushed her to Rawalpindi General Hospital, where she
entered surgery at 5:35 P.M. and was pronounced dead at 6:16 P.M. The cause
of death remained in question until February 2008, when Scotland Yard investigators blamed blunt force trauma to the skull, as a result of the explosions.
Benazir Bhutto seemed destined for politics. The daughter of former prime
minister and PPP founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, born in Karachi on June 21,
1953, she was educated in Karachi until age 16, then studied at Radcliffe College and Harvard University in the United States (19691973), then at Oxford
in England (19731977). A military coup deposed her father in July 1977; he
was hanged on April 4, 1979, on charges of conspiring to kill a rival politicians father. Many Pakistanis thought that charge was fabricated by Zulfikar
Bhuttos successor, military dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Benazir Bhutto,
43
44
B H U T T O, B E N A Z I R
her mother, and her younger

brother spent 18 months under
house arrest; Benazir was then
moved to solitary confinement at Sukkur after the PPP
swept local elections in 1981.
Released that December, she
spent another 26 months confined at home before international pressure on General
Zia-ul-Haq forced him to let her
leave the country. In July 1985,
while she resided in London,
her brother was poisoned in
France. That crime remains officially unsolved.
General Zia-ul-Haq died in
a plane crash on August 17,
1988, clearing the way for
Bhuttos election as prime minister. She took office on December 2, leading a coalition of
Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, killed
the centerleft PPP and liberal
in an ambush in 2007. (AFP/Getty Images)
Muttahida Qaumi Movement
that faced constant opposition
from conservative president Ghulam Ishaq Khan. In 1989, Khan and army
chief of staff General Mirza Aslam Beg collaborated on Operation Midnight
Jackal, a covert intelligence campaign to smear Bhutto and the PPP with fabricated charges of corruption. Reporters exposed that plot, which resulted in
several army officers being sent to prison, but President Khan persevered, vetoing each of Bhuttos progressive efforts, finally invoking a rarely used constitutional amendment to dismiss her in December 1990.
For the next three years, Bhutto served as opposition leader in Pakistans
parliament, winning elections to her second term as prime minister, in April
1993. She survived an abortive military coup dtat in 1995, but was dismissed
a second time in November 1996, this time by President Farooq Leghari, on
fresh charges of corruption. Two months before her dismissal, police had killed
Bhuttos younger brother, Murtaza, in Karachi. Fearing for her life, Bhutto
moved to Dubai in in 1998 and lived in self-imposed exile until October 2007,
when military president General Pervez Musharraf dismissed outstanding
criminal charges. Suicide bombers attempted to kill Bhutto at Jinnah International Airport on October 18, but she was unharmed by the devastating blasts
B I N L A D E N , O S A M A B I N M O H A M M E D B I N AWA D
that killed 136 other victims and wounded 450. Two weeks later, on November 3, President Pervez Musharraf declared a nationwide state of emergency,
briefly placing Bhutto under house arrest until public outrage forced her release. Bhutto proceeded with her plan to win a third term as prime minister,
aborted by the suicide attack that claimed her life.
Al-Qaeda field commander Saeed al-Masri claimed responsibility for Bhuttos assassination, whereas the Pakistani government spokesmen named Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud as the attacks planner. Bhuttos family and the
PPP disputed both claims, blaming opponents in the militaryintelligence
community. A U.S. drone aircraft killed Mehsud at the home of his second
wifes father, on August 5, 2009, and another killed al-Masri with his wife and
three children on May 21, 2010. An antiterrorism court in Rawalpindi ordered
ex-president Musharrafs arrest on February 12, 2011, charging him with complicity in Bhuttos assassination, and the Sindh High Court charged him with
treason on March 8, 2011. At the time of this writing, he remains in London,
battling extradition.
Further Reading
Bhatia, Shyam. Goodbye Shahzadi: A Political Biography of Benazir Bhutto. New Delhi:
Lotus Roli Books, 2008.
Bhutto, Fatima. Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughters Memoir. New York: Nation
Books, 2010.
Hughes, Libby. Benazir Bhutto: From Prison to Prime Minister. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2000.
Hussain, Zahid. Frontline Pakistan: The Path to Catastrophe and the Killing of Benazir
Bhutto. London: I.B. Tauris, 2008.
United Nations Security Council. Report of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry
into the Facts and Circumstances of the Assassination of Former Pakistani Prime Minister
Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto. Blue Ridge Summit, PA: United Nations Publications, 2009.
BIN LADEN, OSAMA BIN MOHAMMED

BIN AWAD (19572011)
On May 2, 2011, members of Seal Team Sixformally designated the United
States Naval Special Warfare Development Groupexecuted Operation Neptune Spear by storming a fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The
raiders killed five persons, four men and one woman, while suffering no injuries themselves. Their primary target, fugitive terrorist leader Osama bin
Laden, was identified via DNA testing and other means, before his corpse
was extracted and buried at sea on May 3, to deprive supporters of a physical
rallying point. Followers of bin Laden acknowledged his death on May 6 and
vowed retaliation.
A Saudi native, born to an affluent family in Riyadh on March 10, 1957,
Osama bin Laden married the first of five wives at age 17, ultimately siring
45
46
26 children. By the time of his first marriage, bin Ladens father and a halfbrother were partners with future U.S. president George H. W. Bush in the
Carlyle Group, a U.S.-based global asset management firm. In 1979, bin Laden
received a degree in civil engineering from King Abdulaziz University, then
moved to Pakistan, joining the CIA-assisted mujahideen resistance to Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In August 1988, six months before the Soviet withdrawal, bin Laden organized al-Qaeda (The Base, in Arabic) to lift the word
of God, to make his religion victorious. In August 1990, following Iraqs invasion of Kuwait, bin Laden offered to defend Saudi Arabia in the event of an
attack. FBI agents raided the New Jersey home of al-Qaeda associate El Sayyid
Nosair two months later, discovering plans to bomb Manhattan skyscrapers.
Nosair subsequently confessed his involvement in the November 7, 1990,
murder of controversial rabbi Meyer Kahane.
Bin Laden, meanwhile, broke with the Saudi government over its U.S.
ties and was banished to Sudan in 1992, and stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994. In 1995, he joined in an abortive plot to kill Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. May 1996 found bin Laden back in Afghanistan,
where he issued a declaration of war against the United States three months
later, declaring that the evils of the Middle East arose from Americas attempt to take over the region and from its support for Israel. Saudi Arabia
had been turned into an American colony. With Taliban support, he effectively seized control of Ariana Afghan Airlines, using it to shuttle terrorists
around the world.
Mayhem ensued, beginning with al-Qaedas bombing of the Gold Mihor
Hotel in Yemen, killing two persons on December 29, 1992. Principals in the
February 1993 World Trade Centers bombing were linked to al-Qaeda, though
the attack was not an official bin Laden project. Bin Laden financed the Luxor
massacre of November 17, 1997, which killed 62 civilians at an Egyptian archaeological site, and coordinated the bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi,
Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 223 persons and wounding more
than 4,000. In October 2000, al-Qaeda suicide bombers struck the destroyer
USS Cole in Aden, killing 17 seamen and injuring 39. Investigation of the 1998
embassy bombings placed bin Laden on the FBIs most wanted list, with a $6
million reward for information leading to his capture (subsequently increased
to $25 million).
On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda members executed the worst terrorist
strikes in U.S. history, hijacking four airliners and using them as vehicles for
suicide attacks. Targets included New Yorks World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and the White House, but passengers aboard the plane en route to strike
the presidential residence overpowered their kidnappers, crashing the jet into
a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The days grim toll included 2,996 dead,
with more than 6,000 injured. On the same day, bin Ladens half-brother Shafig
was feted as guest of honor by the Carlyle Group, at Washingtons Ritz-Carlton

Hotel, with ex-president George H. W. Bush in attendance. Eight days later,
President George W. Bush permitted Shafig bin Laden and 12 relatives to leave
the United States for Saudi Arabia, without being questioned by FBI agents.
On September 26, President Bush declared his intent to smoke out bin Laden
at any cost, but he changed his stance on March 13, 2002, telling reporters,
I truly am not that concerned about him.
Bin Laden eluded capture throughout the remainder of Bushs White House
tenure, while al-Qaeda continued its campaign of terror. On October 12,
2002, members bombed a tourist resort on Bali, killing 202 people and
wounding 240. Four truck bombs, detonated in Istanbul on November 15
and 20, 2003, killed 57 and injured 700. The February 27, 2004, bombing
of SuperFerry 14 killed 116 persons in Manila Bay. On March 11, 2004911
days after 9/11bombs aboard a Spanish commuter train killed 191 people
and wounded 1,800. Al-Qaeda hostage-takers in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, killed
22 captives and injured 25 more on May 2930, 2004. A suicide bombing at
the Hayatt Amman Hotel killed 60 and wounded hundreds on November 9,
2005. Two bombings in Algiers killed 33 on April 11, 2007. Yet another blast,
at the Danish embassy in Pakistan, killed six on June 2, 2008. Throughout
this period, al-Qaeda also claimed responsibility for many bombings in U.S.occupied Afghanistan and Iraq.
Following bin Ladens death, Pakistans Foreign Office categorically denied
reports that the government had sheltered bin Laden or had any foreknowledge of the assault that killed him. Husain Haqqani, Pakistans ambassador to
the United States, promised a full inquiry while admitting that obviously bin
Laden did have a support system; the issue is, was that support system within
the government and the state of Pakistan or within the society of Pakistan?
Federal prosecutors dismissed all outstanding charges against the late terrorist
leader on June 15, 2011.
Further Reading
Bergen, Peter. Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin LadenFrom 9/11 to Abbottabad.
New York: Crown Publishers, 2012.
Bowden, Mark. The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden. New York: Atlantic Monthly
Press, 2012.
Furnish, Timothy. Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden.
Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2005.
Owen, Mark. No Easy Day: The First-hand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin
Laden. New York: Dutton Adult, 2012.
Pfarrer, Chuck. SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama bin
Laden. New York: St. Martins 2011.
Scheuer, Michael. Osama bin Laden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
47
48
BIRENDRA BIR BIKRAM SHAH DEV
BIRENDRA BIR BIKRAM SHAH DEV

(19452001)
On June 1, 2001, Prince Dipendra, heir presumptive to Nepals throne,
drank heavily during a banquet at the Narayanhity Palace Museum in Kathmandu. Following an incident of drunken misbehavior with a dinner guest,
King Birendra ordered his son out from the room, escorted by his younger
brother Prince Nirajan and a cousin, Prince Paras. An hour later, Dipendra
returned to the dining room with two automatic weapons and sprayed the
room with gunfire, killing his father and mother (Queen Aishwarya), brother
Nirajan and a sister, two uncles, an aunt, and a female cousin of his father.
Four other members of the family were wounded, but survived. Finally,
Dipendra shot himself in the head and fell comatose. Although officially proclaimed Nepals new king, Dipendra died on June 4 without regaining consciousness.
King Birendra was the son of King Mahendra, and was born on December 28, 1945, at the palace where he later died. He succeeded his father at
age 26, when Mahendra died on January 31, 1972. Before ascending to the
throne, he studied at St. Josephs College in Darjeeling, India, at Englands
Eton College, at the University of Tokyo, and at Harvard University. He married a daughter of the aristocratic Rana family, Aishwarya Rajyalaxmi Devi
Rana, in February 1970, in a lavish ceremony costing $9.5 million. Their
union produced three children, none of whom survived the palace massacre
of June 2001.
Birendras reign was marred by controversy and violence, including the 1976
arrest of Nepalese Congress Party leaders who opposed him, student revolts in
1979, nationwide civil disobedience in 1985, and strikes and pro-democracy
riots in 1990. Despite Birendras promulgation of a new constitution in November 1990, political upheavals continued and degenerated into civil war
by February 1996. That conflict, between government forces and the Unified
Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), bent on establishing a Federal Republic
of Nepal, would continue, claiming an estimated 12,700 lives, until the signing of a comprehensive peace accord in November 2006.
Following the royal massacre of June 2001, a surviving witnessNepalese
soldier Lal Bahadur Lamteritold the newspaper Naya Patrika that Prince
Dipendra was actually shot before the other victims, by an unidentified gunman wearing a mask that resembled Dipendras face. A two-man investigating
committee, consisting Supreme Court chief justice Keshav Prasad Upadhaya
and House Speaker Taranath Ranabhat, disputed that claim and confirmed
Dipendras guilt. Conspiracy theorists noted that the building where the homicides occurred had been demolished, ruling out forensic recreation of
events.
B I S H O P, M A U R I C E R U P E R T
Speculation persists as to Dipendras motive for the slayings. Drunken

anger over being chastised by his father seemed inadequate, and former king
Gyanendrarecalled from exile in India to serve as regent while Dipendra
lingered in a comainitially blamed the deaths on accidental discharge of
an automatic weapon. Later, speculation arose that Dipendra was angry over
a marriage dispute concerning prospective fiance Devyani Rana, who fled
Nepal after the massacre. Gyanendra succeeded Dipendra for a second term as
king, ending with formal abolition of the monarchy on May 28, 2008.
Further Reading
Gregson, Jonathan. Massacre at the Palace: The Doomed Royal Dynasty of Nepal. New York:
Miramax, 2002.
Hutchins, Francis. Democratizing Monarch: A Memoir of Nepals King Birendra. Gainesville,
FL: Vajra Publications, 2007.
Willesee, Amy, and Mark Whittaker. Love and Death in Kathmandu: A Strange Tale of
Royal Murder. New York: St. Martins Press, 2003.
BISHOP, MAURICE RUPERT (19441983)

On October 19, 1983, Grenadian deputy prime minister Bernard Coard ordered the arrest of his nominal superior, Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, with
most of Bishops ministers. Bishop was briefly placed under house arrest,
then released when his supporters marched en masse through the capitals
streets. Bishop made his way to the army headquarters at Fort Rupert (now
Fort George), apparently intending to reclaim his seat. More troops arrived,
directed by Coard, and the resultant fighting claimed numerous lives. Bishop
was captured during the battle and executed with seven others. His body has
never been found.
Born in Aruba on May 29, 1944, Bishop moved to Grenada with his parents
as an infant. After high school he studied at the London School of Economics,
then earned a law degree from the University of London. Bishop remained in
England for three years of private practice, cofounding a legal aid clinic that
assisted West Indians immigrants. He returned to Grenada in 1973 and soon
emerged as leader of the Marxist New Jewel Movement (NJM; Joint Endeavor
for Welfare, Education, and Liberation). He won election to parliament and
worked in opposition to Prime Minister Eric Gairy, whose paramilitary Mongoose Gang retaliated by beating Bishop in November 1973.
A month later, Britain announced that Grenada would be independent
under Gairys leadershipby February 1974. NJM members demonstrated
on January 22, and police fired on the crowd, killing Bishops father. Opposition to Gairy continued, increasing as he sought advice on governance from
49
50
B I S H O P, M A U R I C E R U P E R T
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and spoke publicly on paranormal subjects, declaring 1978 The Year of the UFO. Bishop and the NJM deposed
Gairy on March 13, 1979, suspending Grenadas constitution and ruling by
decree in the name of a Peoples Revolutionary Government, inviting Cuban
teachers, technicians, and physicians to help improve the countrys standard of living. Even then, the socialist reforms were not enough for hard-line
Marxists in the NJM, who rallied around Bernard Coard to unseat Bishop
in 1983.
Following Bishops execution, General Hudson Austin of the Peoples Revolutionary Army named himself chairman of a military junta. To forestall protests, Austin imposed a four-day total curfew, warning that any person found
away from home without official sanction would be shot on sight. Word soon
reached Washington that Cuban soldiers and construction workers were building a new 10,000-foot landing strip, presumably for use by military aircraft.
On October 23, President Ronald Reagan initiated Operation Urgent Fury,
invading Grenada with 7,300 U.S. troops and 353 supporting forces from various Caribbean nations. At a reported cost of 113 dead and 533 wounded, invaders toppled the juntaand incidentally rescued a number of U.S. medical
students from St. Georges University. The United Nations General Assembly,
by a vote of 108 to 9, condemned the invasion as a flagrant violation of international law.
In the wake of that invasion, Hudson Austin, Bernard Coard, his wife Phyllis, and various others were arrested on charges of murdering Bishop. At trial
in 1986, Austin, Coard, and six others were sentenced to death, but their penalty was later commuted to life imprisonment. In February 2007, Londons Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ordered resentencing of the defendants,
and in June their prison terms were reduced to 30 years. Austin and two others were released on December 18, 2008. Bernard Coard was the last to leave
prison, on September 5, 2009.
Further Reading
Adkin, Mark. Urgent Fury: The Battle for Grenada. Philadelphia: Trans-Atlantic Publications, 1989.
Brizan, George. Grenada: Island of Conflict. New York: Macmillan Caribbean, 1998.
Gilmore, William. The Grenada Intervention: Analysis and Documentation. New York:
Facts on File, 1984.
Marcus, Bruce, and Michael Taber. Maurice Bishop Speaks: The Grenada Revolution and
Its Overthrow 197983. Atlanta: Pathfinder Press, 1983.
Sandford, Gregory, and Richard Vigilante. Grenada: The Untold Story. Toronto: Madison
Books, 1984.
Seaga, Edward. The Grenada Intervention: The Inside Story. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 2009.
B O B R I K O V, N I K O L AY I VA N O V I C H
BOBRIKOV, NIKOLAY IVANOVICH

(18391904)
Nikolay Bobrikov, governor general of Finland under Russias tsar Nicholas II,
was immensely unpopular with the subjects he had ruled since August 1898.
Each year brought new decrees imposing Russian rules, language, and customs on the Finns. On June 16, 1904, Finnish nobleman and nationalist Eugen
Schauman accosted Bobrikov at Helsinkis Government Palace. Drawing a revolver, he fired three hand-loaded explosive bullets at Bobrikov, then pumped
two rounds into his own chest. Whereas Schauman died instantly, Bobrikov
nearly escaped. Two of the homemade slugs ricocheted from medals pinned to
his coat, and the third glanced off his belt bucklethen ripped into his stomach. Bobrikov died that night, after surgery failed to repair his wound.
An aristocratic native of St. Petersburg, born on January 27, 1839, Bobrikov
joined the Russian army as an officer in 1858, at age 19. He served in the
Kazan military district upon its creation in August 1864, then as divisional
chief of staff in Veliky Novgorod, where he rose to a colonels rank by 1869.
The following year saw him transferred to St. Petersburg for service with the
tsars Imperial Guard. There, he ingratiated himself with members of the royal
court and was promoted to major general by Alexander III in 1878. Twenty
years later, Nicholas II dispatched him to rule the Grand Duchy of Finland, occupied since March 1809 but still regarded as a potential threat to Russia.
Finlands frtrycksperioderna (years of oppression) began in earnest with the
February Manifesto of 1899, mandating use of Russian currency and stamps,
imposing press censorship, and establishing Russian Orthodoxy as Finlands
state religion. The Language Manifesto of 1900 made Russian the administrative language of Finland, although the grand duchy contained only 8,000
Russians (in a population of 2.7 million). A conscription statute passed in July
1901 subjugated Finnish military force to the Imperial Russian Army. In April
1903, Nicholas granted Bobrikov dictatorial powers, including the authority to
dismiss Finnish government officials and abolish newspapers.
Russia responded to Bobrikovs assassination with more stringent rules and a
purge of Finnish politicians who opposed Russification, but resistance continued
and achieved a de facto reversal of the 1901 conscription law. Russias revolution of
1905 temporarily halted Russification efforts, although the campaign resumed in
1908 and continued until the October Revolution of 1917. Finlands parliament
declared independence on November 15, sparking a civil war between Whites
(middle- and upper-class Finns, with farmers who dominated two-thirds of the
land) and Reds (socialistcommunist urban laborers and landless peasants). The
Whites triumphed in May 1918, with an estimated loss of 37,000 lives.
Eugen Schauman left a letter addressed to Tsar Nicholas, justifying Bobrikovs murder proclaiming that he had acted alone. Russian authorities buried him in an unmarked Helsinki grave, but later exhumed him for burial with
51
52
BOLLES, DON
other family members at Porvoo, as a means of easing political tension. A large

monument marks his grave today, and a plaque at the assassination site reads
Se Pro Patria Dedit: He gave himself for his country. A 2004 television program on Great Finns ranked Schauman 34th among 100 national heroes.
Further Reading
Deriabin, Peter. Watchdogs of Terror: Russian Bodyguards from the Tsars to the Commissars. Westport, CT: Arlington House, 1984.
Kirby, David. A Concise History of Finland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Kirby, David. Finland and Russia, 18081920: From Autonomy to Independence. New York:
Macmillan, 1975.
BOLLES, DON (19281976)

On June 2, 1976, reporter Don Bolles left a note on his desk at the Arizona Republic office in Phoenix, declaring his plan to meet an informant for lunch and
return by 1:30 P.M. He drove
to the Hotel Clarendon, but
his informant failed to appear.
Following a two-minute phone
conversation in the hotels lobby, Bolles returned to his car
parked outside. As he started
the car, a bomb exploded underneath the drivers seat. Bystanders rushing to aid Bolles
recalled his final words before
he lapsed into unconsciousness: They finally got me. The
Mafia. Emprise. Find John.
Bolles reached St. Josephs Hospital alive, where surgeons amputated both legs and one arm,
but their efforts were in vain.
He died without regaining consciousness, on June 13.
Born in Teaneck, New Jersey, on July 10, 1928, Don
Bolles was a third-generation
journalist. He graduated from
Wisconsins Beloit College beInvestigative reporter Don Bolles, victim of a 1976 fore joining the U.S. Army and
serving in the Korean War.
underworld car-bombing. (AP Photo)
BOLLES, DON
Back in civilian life, he joined the Associated Press, working in New York,
New Jersey, and Kentucky before Republic editor Eugene Pulliam hired him
in 1962. From sports reporting, Bolles quickly advanced to the investigative
beat, probing Mafia influence on Arizona dog and horse racing, revealing
bribery and kickbacks on the state tax and corporation commissions, exposing
real-estate swindles, and spotlighting a conflict-of-interest scandal involving
state legislators. In 1974, he was honored as Arizona Press Club Newsman of
the Year.
But by the next year, colleagues noted signs of disillusionment and burnout. Bolles requested and received a transfer from the crime beat to city government and the state legislature. It should have been less hazardous, but the
fatal bombing and Bolless final words suggested he was still probing organized
crime. Although the motive for his death remains obscure, early suspicion focused on Kemper Marley, Arizonas godfather of land fraud and a longtime
partner in the liquor trade with John Hensley, father-in-law of Senator John
McCain. Marley was never charged, however, though police did net a clutch
of suspects.
On the day Bolles died, Phoenix detectives arrested John Harvey Adamson, a
racing-dog owner and the informant who stood Bolles up on June 2. On January 15, 1977, Adamson confessed planting a remote-control bomb in Bolless
car, on orders from contractor Max Dunlap, assisted by plumber James Robison.
Adamson agreed to provide evidence on behalf of the state in exchange for a
20-year sentence, providing testimony that convicted Dunlap and Robison of
murder on November 6, 1977. Both men were sentenced to death in January
1978, but marathon appeals ensued. Arizonas Supreme Court ordered a new
trial in February 1980, but Adamson balked at testifying a second time. Murder
charges against both defendants were dismissed in June 1980, and authorities
revoked Adamsons plea bargain and charged him with first-degree murder. Convicted in October 1980 and sentenced to death the following month, Adamson
saw his sentence reduced to life imprisonment on appeal in May 1986 and again
(after its reinstatement) in December 1988.
Meanwhile, prosecutors refiled murder charges against Robison in November 1989, and against Dunlap in December 1990. They were granted
separate trials, with Dunlap convicted in April 1993 (receiving life with no
parole for 25 years), and jurors acquitted Robison in December 1993. On
cross-examination at his trial, Robison admitted asking a fellow inmate to
kill Adamson, a separate crime that earned him five years in federal prison
following a July 1995 guilty plea. John Adamson left prison on August 12,
1996, and entered the federal Witness Protection Program, then emerged
from hiding in the early 21st century. Robison was paroled in 1998, at age 76.
Dunlap died in prison on July 21, 2009. No suspects have been positively
named to date as instigators of the bombing.
53
54
B O R G I A , G I O VA N N I
EMPRISE CORPORATION
The company named as such by Don Bolles in his dying remarks was
founded in Buffalo, New York, in 1915. Its creatorsbrothers Charles,
Louis, and Marvin Jacobsoperated concession stands in various sporting
venues and theaters, expanding from the 1920s through the 1950s with
financial support that included interest-free loans from recognized Mafia
bosses in Cleveland and Detroit. Emprise, in return, occasionally granted
loans to mobsters, including Las Vegas godfather Moe Dalitz. Business
flourished under the firms original name, and later as Sportservice. In
1939, the company acquired its first racetrack, reborn in 1980 as Delaware
North Companies Gaming & Entertainment. In 1987, Delaware North acquired Sky Chefs, gaining a foothold in airports nationwide. Six years later,
it won the contract to provide visitor services in Yosemite National Park.
In 1995, the company assumed management of Floridas Kennedy Space
Center Visitor Complex. Delaware North entered the European market in
2006, with a contract for Londons Emirates Stadium, followed by another
for Wembley Stadium in 2007. By 2010, the company owned several casinos and had assumed management of RMS Queen Mary, permanently
docked at Long Beach, California. No link between the firm and the assassination of Don Bolles has been established.
Further Reading
Headly, Lake. Loud and Clear: The Don Bolles Murder Case. New York: Henry Holt,
1990.
Kaiser, Robert Blair. Desert Injustice. n.p. Amazon Digital Services, 2011.
Tallberg, Martin. Don Bolles: An Investigation into His Murder. New York: Popular
Library, 1977.
Wendland, Michael. The Arizona Project: How a Team of Investigative Reporters Got
Revenge on Deadline. Riverside, NJ: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1977.
BORGIA, GIOVANNI (14761497)

On June 14, 1497, Giovanni Borgia, 2nd Duke of Ganda (in eastern Spain)
dined in Rome with his mother, Vannozza dei Cattanei, and his brother Cesare.
He arrived for dinner with an unidentified masked man, who had been seen with
Giovanni frequently in recent weeks. At the meals conclusion, Giovanni and
Cesare left together, with the masked stranger riding double on Giovannis horse.
They subsequently separated, Giovanni ignoring his brothers warning about the
nocturnal dangers of Rome, riding off with his mysterious companion. When he
B O R G I A , G I O VA N N I
failed to reappear next day, a search began and authorities found a Tiber boatman who had seen a man leading a horse with an apparent body draped across
its saddle. Moments later, after someone said, My lord, there came a splash.
Officers dragged the river and retrieved Borgias body, torn by nine stab wounds,
with 30 gold ducats still in his purse.
Giovanni Borgiaalso known as Juan or Joanwas the son of Pope
Alexander VI. Clerical vows of celibacy notwithstanding, Alexander also
sired Giovannis siblings Cesare, Lucrezia, and Gioffre. Different records cite
his year of birth as 1474 and 1476, with most historians today accepting the
latter date, which makes Cesare the oldest Borgia son and Giovanni the second of four children. In September 1493, Borgia married Maria Enriquez de
Luna, Spanish fiance of his deceased elder half-brother Pier Luigi de Borgia,
1st Duke of Ganda.
In the atmosphere of 15th-century Rome, motives for Borgias murder were
plentiful. Some observers suspected brother Cesare, Duke of Valentinois, noting that Giovannis death cleared the way for Cesare to launch a long-awaited
military career in the Italian War of 14991504. Others suspected that the
murder may have sprung from Giovannis dalliance with Sancha of Aragon,
illegitimate daughter of King Alfonso II of Naples. Sancha had married the
younger Borgia brother Gioffre in 1494, but still enjoyed romantic liaisons
with Cesare and Giovanni. Further confusing matters, Sanchas brother Alfonso married Lucrezia Borgia in 1498 and was murdered in 1500, allegedly
on orders from Cesare. By that time, as historian Barbara Tuchman observed,
In the bubbling stew of Romes rumors, no depravity appeared beyond the
scope of the Borgias. Even Pope Alexander was not immune from suspicion: humorist Jacopo Sannazaro dubbed him a fisher of men, referring to
Giovannis discovery in the Tiber.
Although no sure verdict is possible in Giovannis slaying, the House of Borgia is indelibly linked to murder. Historian Johann Burchard (ca. 14501506)
wrote of Cesare: One day he went so far as to have the square of St. Peter enclosed by a palisade, into which he ordered some prisonersmen, women and
childrento be brought. He then had them bound, hand and foot, and being
armed and mounted on a fiery charger, commenced a horrible attack upon
them. Some he shot, and others he cut down with his sword, trampling them
under his horses feet. In less than half-an-hour, he wheeled around alone in a
puddle of blood, among the dead bodies of his victims, while his Holiness and
Madam Lucrezia, from a balcony, enjoyed the sight of that horrid scene.
Like other famous assassination victims, Giovanni Borgia survives in popular fiction. His murder is a central feature of Mario Puzos novel The Family
(2001), and is portrayed in various films and television series: the 2010 animated short film Assassins Creed: Ascendance; the French/German series Borgia
(2011); and the second season of Showtimes series The Borgias (2012).
55
56
B O R S E L L I N O, PAO L O
Further Reading
Cloulas, Ivan. The Borgias. Danbury, CT: Franklin Watts, 1989.
Hibbert, Christopher. The Borgias and Their Enemies: 14311519. New York: Mariner
Books, 2009.
Johnson, Marion. The Borgias. New York: Penguin, 2002.
Mallett, Michael. The Borgias: The Rise and Fall of the Most Infamous Family in History.
Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005.
BORSELLINO, PAOLO (19401992)

On July 19, 1992, anti-Mafia magistrate Paolo Borsellino prepared for a Sunday
visit to his mother in Palermo, Sicily. Bearing in mind the May 23 murder of his
predecessor, Giovanni Falcone, Borsellino traveled with six heavily armed policemen as his bodyguards. They could not help this day, however, as a powerful
remote-control car bomb exploded along Borsellinos route of travel, demolishing his vehicle and instantly killing all aboard. Slain with Borsellino in the blast
were Officers Agostino Catalano, Walter Cosina, Emanuela Loi, Vincenzo Li
Muli, and Claudio Traina.
Paolo Borsellino was born to middle-class parents in the Kalsa district of Palermo, on January 19, 1940. He earned a law degree with honors from the University of Palermo in 1962, and was admitted to the bar a year later. After practicing
in several Sicilian cities, he returned to Palermo in 1975 and
joined Magistrate Rocco Chinnici in his fight against the Mafia.
By May 1980, when mafiosi
murdered colleague Emanuele Basile in Monreale, Borsellino had convicted six syndicate
members. Thereafter, Borsellino
received round-the-clock protection from the Carabinieri, Italys paramilitary national police.
As a member of Palermos Antimafia Pool, working daily with
Magistrates Chinnici, Giovanni
Falcone, Giuseppe Di Lello, and
Leonardo Guarnotta, Borsellino
conducted extensive research into
the Mafias history and organizaItalian anti-Mafia judge Paolo Borsellino, was killed tional structure, recruiting informants who would break the oath
by a Mafia car bomb in Palermo. (Sygma/Corbis)
B O U D I A F, M O H A M E D
of silence (omert) in exchange for leniency at trial. Mafiosi killed Rocco Chinnici in
July 1983, followed by Palermo chief of police Antonino Cassar in August 1985,
ex-mayor Giuseppe Insalaco in January 1988, Magistrate Rosario Livatino in September 1990, Supreme Court prosecutor Antonio Scopelliti in August 1991, and Salvo
Lima, another ex-mayor, in March 1992. On May 21, 1992, a half-ton car bomb
killed Giovanni Falcone, his wife, and three bodyguards on the highway between Palermon International Airport and the citys center.
Borsellino, serving since 1986 as chief prosecutor of Marsala, knew that he
was on the Mafias hit list. In his last interview, taped on the day of Falcones
assassination, Borsellino announced plans to probe links between the Mafia
wealthy Italian businessmen such as future prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Curiously, that interviewtaped by French journalistsdid not air in Italy
until 2000, with 20 minutes cut from its original 50-minute length.
Authorities named Mafia boss Salvatore Tot Riina, alias The Beast, as
the mastermind of the Falcone and Borsellino murders. He remained at large,
in hiding, until Carabinieri officers surprised him at traffic light in Palermo,
on January 15, 1993. Police credited informer Baldassare Di Maggio, Riinas
former chauffeur, with directing them to Riina, a revelation that led to the
murders of several Di Maggio relatives. At his first trial, in October 1993,
Riina was convicted of ordering hits on brothers Pietro and Vincenzo Puccio,
resulting in a life sentence. In 1998, he was convicted of Salvo Limas murder.
Meanwhile, in 1996, Giovanni Bruscanamed as the hit man who planted
the Falcone bombwas captured and turned informer. His testimony added further life terms to Riinas slate, for ordering the murders of Falcone and
Borsellino.
Palermo International Airport was subsequently renamed FalconeBorsellino
Airport, featuring a memorial to the slain magistrates by sculptor Tommaso
Geraci. Borsellinos sister Rita ran for president in the Sicilian regional election
of 2006, but lost to incumbent Salvatore Tot Cuffarowho was convicted of
collaboration with the Mafia in January 2008, receiving a five-year sentence.
Further Reading
Dickie, John. Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Maran, A.G.D. Mafia: Inside the Dark Heart. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010.
Seindal, Ren. Mafia: Money and Politics in Sicily 19501997. Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum Press, 1998.
Stille, Alexander. Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic.
New York: Vintage, 1996.
BOUDIAF, MOHAMED (19191992)

On June 29, 1992, Mohamed Boudiafseventh president of Algerialeft
the nations capital for the first time since his January inauguration, to speak
57
58
B O U D I A F, M O H A M E D
at the opening of a cultural center in Annaba. As he delivered that televised

address, one of his bodyguards, Lieutenant Lembarek Boumarafi, drew a
pistol and shot Boudiaf in the head at close range, killing him instantly.
Boumarafi escaped in the resulting chaos, but was captured several hours
later, telling police, I killed Boudiaf knowing of his heroic past and that he
was a good man. But he didnt do enough against the mafia. And he opposed
the choice of the people. I belong to no political party but I belong to the
Islamic movement.
Mohamed Boudiaf was born June 23, 1919, in Ouled Madhi, Algeria, to
a former noble family that lost its status under French colonial rule. He suffered from tuberculosis as a child and quit school early, but recovered strength
enough to join the nationalist Algerian Peoples Party (APP) and its covert paramilitary branch, the Special Organization. French authorities failed to arrest
him, but sentenced him in absentia to a 10-year prison term for his guerrilla
activities in Stif Province. Boudiaf subsequently left the APP to join the rival
Revolutionary Committee of Unity and Action, surviving an assassination attempt by his former comrades that left him gravely wounded in Algiers.
During the Algerian War of
Independence, Boudiaf emerged
as a leader of the National Liberation Front (NLF). Arrested
after an airline hijacking in October 1956, he was imprisoned
in France and remained in custody for a time after Algeria won
its freedom in 1962. In his absence, former ally Ahmed Ben
Bella gathered military support
and installed himself as Algerias
first president in a one-party system. Operating from Morocco,
Boudiaf founded an opposition
movement, the Party of Socialist Revolution, which opposed
Ben Bellas regime and that of
his successors, Colonels Houari
Boumediene and Chadli Bendjedid. Civil war erupted in December 1991, after the ruling NLF
party canceled elections in the
President Mohamed Boudiaf of Algeria, shot while face of growing strength from
delivering a televised speech. (AFP/Getty Images) the Islamic Salvation Front (ISF),
BUBACK, SIEGFRIED
formed in 1988. In January 1992, Algerias military junta invited Boudiaf to return
from exile, accepting leadership of a new High Council of State, a figurehead
group hastily created to defuse popular opposition.
Boudiaf accepted the post, then surprised his junta sponsors by calling for
substantive reform, with an end to military rule. The civil war continued, and
although Boudiaf was presented as a victim of Muslim violence, his widow and
other observers had doubts. Rumors spread that Boudiaf had tried to open
dialogue between the government and ISF, while launching an investigation
into state corruption. That campaign indicted retired Major General Mustapha
Beloucif for embezzling $6.6 million. The lead investigator in that effort was
murdered several days before Boudiafs assassination.
Authorities clung to their portrayal of Lembarek Boumarafi as a crazed
lone assassin. Convicted of murder and sentenced to death on June 3, 1995,
Boumarafi lost his appeal before Algerias Supreme Court in March 1997.
Thus far, no report of his execution has surfaced. Mohamed Boudiaf is venerated as a martyr in Algeria today, with the countrys largest airport named in
his honor.
Further Reading
Burgat, Francois. Face to Face with Political Islam. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005.
Roberts, Hugh. The Battlefield: Algeria 19882002, Studies in a Broken Polity. London:
Verso, 2003.
Stone, Martin. The Agony of Algeria. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Stora, Benjamin. Algeria, 18302000: A Short History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2001.
Sueur, James Lee. Between Terror and Democracy: Algeria Since 1959. London: Zed
Books, 2010.
BUBACK, SIEGFRIED (19201977)

On the morning of April 7, 1977, German attorney general Siegfried Buback
left his home in Neureut, bound for the Federal Court of Justice, accompanied
by judicial officer Georg Wurster. While their car was stopped at a traffic light
in Karlsruhe, a motorcycle pulled alongside and its backseat passenger fired
15 bullets from an automatic weapon at close range. Buback and driver Wolfgang Gbel died instantly, and Wurster survived until April 13 at a local hospital. The triple slaying opened the German Autumn campaign of the terrorist Red Army Faction (RAF)also known as the BaaderMeinhof Group (or
Gang), after founders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.
Siegfried Buback was born in Wilsdruff, Saxony, on January 3, 1920. He
studied at the University of Leipzig, and joined the Nazi Party at age 20, supporting Adolf Hitler for the duration of World War II. Held as a prisoner of
war from 1945 to 1947, he joined countless other Third Reich loyalists in
59
60
BUBACK, SIEGFRIED
German attorney general Siegfried Buback, shot by the Red Army Faction. (SVEN SIMON/
dpa/Corbis)
returning to public life after denazification of West Germany. Appointed to

serve as attorney general in 1974, Buback was an ardent prosecutor of the
RAF, founded four years earlier and blamed for five murders, with 42 victims
wounded in bombings, since October 1971. In the five months after his assassination, RAF guerrillas killed seven more persons, while losing one of their
own in a shootout with police at Kerkrade, Holland.
Authorities charged and convicted four RAF membersKnut Folkerts,
Christian Klar, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, and Gnter Sonnenbergfor Bubacks
murder, while admitting that the motorcycles driver and his gunman-passenger
remained at large. In April 2007, paroled RAF survivor Peter-Jrgen Boock
contacted Bubacks son, naming the triggerman as Stefan Wisniewski. Another
RAF member, Verena Becker, confirmed that identification in an interview
with Der Spiegel, prompting Interior Minister Wolfgang Schuble to reopen
the investigation of Bubacks assassination. Further investigation by Der Spiegel
suggested that prosecutors suppressed evidence to protect an RAF informer
in 1977, perhaps resulting in wrongful conviction of alleged participants in
Bubacks murder.
B U S H , G E O R G E WA L K E R
Prior to Boocks revelations, Brigitte Mohnhaupt was paroled on March 25,

2007. Christian Klar, eligible for parole in 2009, requested a pardon from
President Horst Khler, supported by Bubacks son on grounds that information from RAF circles confirmed Klars innocence. Reporters also discovered
that RAF member Verena Becker, sentenced to life on six counts of attempted
murder in December 1977, had turned informer in prison, telling police in
1990 that Knut Folkerts was in Amsterdam when Buback died. Further exculpatory evidence includes the fact that police found the Buback murder weapon
at Verena Beckers home, together with a screwdriver from the murder cycles
tool kit, and that one of her hairs was recovered from a helmet worn during
the attack.
Authorities blamed the RAF for 34 murders between 1971 and the groups
announcement of final dissolution in April 1998. Other prominent victims included Hanns-Martin Schleyer, president of the Confederation of German Employers Associations, Deutsche Bank chairman Alfred Herrhausen, and Detlev
Karsten Rohwedder, manager of Germanys Treuhandanstalt (Trust Agency).
Further Reading
Aust, Stefan. Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009.
Hanshew, Karrin. Terror and Democracy in West Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Smith, J., and Andr Moncourt, Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win: The Reed Army Factions 1977 Campaign of Desperation. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2008.
Varon, Jeremy. Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction,
and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
BUSH, GEORGE WALKER (1946 )

ATTEMPTED
Official reports list three reported attempts on the life of the 43rd president of
the United States, George W. Bush. The first occurred on February 7, 2001, less
than three weeks after Bushs inauguration. At 11:30 that morning, Robert W.
Picketta 47-year-old accountant from Indiana, embroiled in long-running
civil litigation with former employers at the Internal Revenue Servicefired
several pistol shots toward the White House from a perimeter fence facing the
south lawn. Secret Service officers responded to the scene, and one of them
shot Pickett in the knee when he refused to drop his weapon. Following surgery, Pickett was charged with discharging a firearm during a crime. He subsequently pled guilty to a reduced local firearms violation, and also pled no
contest on a charge of assaulting a federal officer. In July 2001, he received a
three-year prison sentence, with an additional three years probation, and was
61
62
released from custody on September 19, 2003. Although President Bush was
never in actual danger, spokesmen for the U.S. Park Police said that Picketts
shots would have reached the White House if his view had not been obstructed.
A more serious attempt on Bush apparently occurred on September 11,
2001the day when coordinated terrorist strikes by al-Qaeda claimed 2,996
lives in New York and Pennsylvania. On that day, Bush was in Florida, lodged
at Colony Beach and Tennis Resort on Longboat Key, in preparation for a public appearance in Sarasota. While the president went jogging with Secret Service agents, a van occupied by several men of apparent Middle Eastern descent
arrived at the lodge, claiming they were scheduled for a poolside interview
with Bush. No such appointment was registered, and the still-unidentified
men were turned away. Authorities speculated that the strangers intended to
kill Bush, as a similar party had slain anti-Taliban militia leader Ahmad Shah
Massoud in Takhar Province, Afghanistan, only two days earlier. Although
nothing was provedand Secret Service agents failed to detain the men after
questioning themwitnesses subsequently claimed sightings of 9/11 skyjacking ringleader Mohamed Atta at the Longboat Key Holiday Inn, near the
Colony Beach, on September 7, 2001. That day, coincidentally or otherwise,
was the date when White House spokesmen announced Bushs upcoming visit
to Sarasota.
The last reported attempt on President Bush occurred in Tbilis, Georgia,
on May 10, 2005. Bush was speaking to an audience in Freedom Square, accompanied by his wife and Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, when
ethnic Armenian Vladimir Arutyunian tossed a hand grenade toward the podium. The grenade struck a bystander and fell short of its mark, then failed
to explode. Although it was live, and Arutyunian had pulled its pin, a handkerchief he wrapped around the grenade to conceal it from view prevented
the safety levers release to produce detonation. Arutyunian escaped from the
scene, but was caught on film by a tourists camera and subsequently identified by FBI agents, acting in concert with Georgian authorities. Cornered at
his mothers home on July 20, 2005, Arutyunian engaged in a shootout with
police, killing Zurab Kvlividze, chief of the interior ministrys counterintelligence department, before he was wounded and captured. Arutyunian initially confessed, then refused to speak at his trial, stitching his lips shut on
one occasion. On January 11, 2006, he received a life prison term without
possibility of parole.
George W. Bush was born on July 6, 1946, the grandson of a U.S. senator.
His father, George H. W. Bush, served variously in Congress (19671971), as
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (19711973), as director of the Central
Intelligence Agency (19761977), as vice president (19811989), and as president (19891993). The younger Bush, commonly known by his middle initial, served as governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000, then won the presidency
in a close and extremely controversial race against incumbent vice president

Al Gore. His electioncritics say appointment, in effect, by a five-to-four vote
of the U.S. Supreme Courtset the stage for eight years marked by the 9/11
attacks, two foreign wars, and a crushing economic recession. High public approval ratings in the wake of September 2001 dissipated over time, leaving
Bush No. 43 one of Americas least popular presidents, both absent and literally unmentioned at his partys national conventions in 2008 and 2012.
Bushs father was also the target of a reported assassination attempt, although it did not occur until three months after he left office. On April 13,
1993, the former president visited Kuwait University, in Kuwait City. Local
authorities arrested 17 persons on charges of plotting to assassinate Bush with
a car bomb. Two of the suspects allegedly confessed, then recanted at trial,
claiming they were coerced into signing the incriminating statements. FBI investigators linked captured explosives from the car bomb, found on April 14
in Kuwait City, to a manufacturer in Iraq, where dictator Saddam Hussein
presumably plotted to kill Bush in retaliation for Americas defense of Kuwait
in the first Gulf War (19901991). On June 27, 1993, acting under the code
name Operation Southern Watch, President Bill Clinton retaliated with 23
Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from U.S. naval ships against the Iraqi Intelligence Headquarters in Baghdad.
Further Reading
CNN News. Bush Grenade Attacker Gets Life. January 11, 2006. http://www.cnn
.com/2006/WORLD/europe/01/11/georgia.grenade/index.html.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Case of the Failed Hand Grenade Attack. January 11, 2006. http://web.archive.org/web/20070411035739/http://www.fbi.gov/
page2/jan06/grenadeattack011106.htm.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI Laboratory: An Investigation into Alleged Misconduct in Explosives-Related and Other Cases. http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/oig/
fbilab1/05bush2.htm.
Martin, Susan Taylor. Of Fact, Fiction: Bush on 9/11. St. Petersburg (FL) Times. http://
www.sptimes.com/2004/07/04/news_pf/Worldandnation/Of_fact__fiction__Bus
.shtml.
63
C
CAESAR, GAIUS JULIUS (100 BCE44 BCE)
On March 15, 44 BCE, Roman chief of state Julius Caesar kept a scheduled appointment with the senate, some 40 to 60 of whose members had conspired
to kill him, thereby ending his seven-week reign as dictator in perpetuity. As
Caesar entered the chamber, Tillius Cimber approached him with a petition
for the recall of Cimbers exiled brother, while more conspirators crowded
around in support. The crowd drew knives, with Servilius Casca reportedly
striking first. Caesar received 23 wounds, but historian Gaius Suetonius
Tranquillus reports that only oneto the chestwas fatal. His account, and
that of historian Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, records no dying words from
Caesar. The dying dictators comment Et tu, Brute?supposedly addressed
to friend-turned-killer Marcus Junius Brutuswas an apocryphal remark
added posthumously, already well known by the time it was echoed in
William Shakespeares play Julius Caesar.
Gaius Julius Caesar was born on July 13, 100 BCE, into the gens Julia, an
ancient patrician family that claimed descent from the goddess Venus by way
of Iulus, son of the mythical Trojan prince Aeneas. Four different explanations
are offered for the cognomen (third name) Caesar: Pliny the Elder asserts that
it derived from an ancestor born by caesarean section, whereas the Augustan
history speculates that the first Caesar either had gray eyes (Latin oculiscaesiis),
thick hair (Latin caesaries), or had killed an elephant (Moorish caesai) at some
point in time. Julius Caesar indirectly supported the last theory by minting
coins impressed with images of elephants.
Caesar came of age in an era of turmoil, marked by war and the political
purges of dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla. With his fathers death in 85 BCE,
16-year-old Caesar became head of the family, promoted the following year to
serve as a high priest of Jupiter. As a nephew of Gaius Marius and son-in-law
of Lucius Cornelius Cinnaboth enemies of SullaCaesar was targeted for
eradication, stripped of his wealth and priesthood, driven into exile. He returned to Rome in 78 BCE, with Sulla safely dead, and labored to restore his fortune as a legal advocate, earning renown for captivating oratory.
In 75 BCE, while crossing the Aegean Sea, Caesar was taken prisoner by Sicilian pirates. After he was ransomed for a price of 50 talents (3,550 pounds)
of gold, Caesar raised a fleet, captured his kidnappers, and had them crucified.
66
CAESAR, GAIUS JULIUS
That incident secured his election as a military tribune, the

first step in a Roman political
career, and the year 69 BCE saw
him elected as a quaestor
treasurerof Roman-occupied
Spain. In 63 BCE, he won election as Pontifex Maximus,
the highest-ranking priest of
Romes official state religion,
and after two years in that post
he returned to Spain as governor. In 60 BCE, Caesar and
Marcus Bilbulus were elected
as consuls of Rome, the republics highest office, held by two
men jointly. His support in that
election marked by fraud and
bribery came chiefly from Marcus Licinius Crassus and from
Julius Caesar, Romes first emperor, murdered by Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus,
commonly known as Pompey.
senators in March 44 B.C.E. (Getty Images)
A consuls one-year term was
barely long enough for Caesar to enrich himself from graft in his province,
which encompassed northern Italy and southern France. Dodging threats of
prosecution for embezzlement, he next launched the military career that would
enshrine him in Roman history.
Caesars Gallic Wars of 5852 BCE left Rome in control of Gaul (now
France), crushing both domestic uprisings and Germanic invasions. In
50 BCE, the senate, led by Pompey, ordered Caesar to disband his forces
and return to Romepresumably for prosecution on outstanding charges
from his year as consul. While dispersing part of his army, Caesar kept the
elite Thirteenth Legion intact and led it back to Italy, crossing the Rubicon
River in force on January 10, 49 BCE. A four-year civil war ensued, with Caesar and second-in-command Mark Antony marching into Rome. Chief rival
Pompey fled to Spain, then to Egypt, where he was finally killed in September 48 BCE, by King Ptolemy XIII, acting in concert with Caesar. Victorious, Caesar was proclaimed dictator of Rome for a one-year term, but was
soon embroiled in conflict between Ptolemy XIII and his sister/wife/queen
Cleopatra. Caesar defeated Ptolemys armyand killed the young kingat
the Battle of the Nile, in February 47 BCE.
CALIGULA
MURDERED ROMAN EMPERORS

Although Julius Caesars assassination is the most famous from ancient
Rome, he was not the only Roman emperor to die by violence. Excluding those who fell in battle, 43 heads of state were dispatched by assassination or summary execution over a span of 1,142 years. They include
Gaius Caligula (41 CE), Claudius (54), Galba (69), Vitellius (69), Domitian (96), Commodus (192), Didius Julianus (193), Geta (211), Caracalla
(217), Macrinus (218), Diadumenian (218), Elagabulus (222), Alexander
Severus (235), Maximus Thrax (238), Pupienus Maximus (238), Balbinus
(238), Phillip the Arab (249), Gallus (253), Volusianus (253), Aemilianus
(253), Gallienus (268), Aurelian (272), Tacitus (276), Florianus (276), Probus (282), Carinus (285), Constans I (350), Gratians (383), Valentinan III
(455), Petronius Maximus (455), Athemius (472), Julius Nepos (480), Maurice I (602), Phocas (610), Constans II (668), Leontios (698), Tiberius III
(706), Justinian II (711), Leo V (820), Michael III (867), Nicephoros II
(867), Romanus (1034), and Alexius II (1183).
Back in Rome by 46 BCE, Caesar was reelected as consul, this time without
sharing the office. His subsequent election as dictator in perpetuity, in February 44 BCE, focused opposition from supporters of the late republic and set the
wheels in motion for his murder. Ironically, many Romans resented the aristocratic plot against Caesar, a sentiment Mark Antony used to stir up riotous
mobs. Gaius Octavian, Caesars grandnephew and sole heir led the disaffected
populace in a new round of civil warfare that ultimately doomed the republic
Caesars assassins had tried to save.
Further Reading
Freeman, Philip. Julius Caesar. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.
Goldsworthy, Adrian. Caesar: Life of a Colossus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2006.
Parenti, Michael. The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A Peoples History of Ancient Rome.
New York: The New Press, 2003.
CALIGULA (12 CE41 CE)

On January 24, 41 CE, while addressing a troupe of actors scheduled to perform
in celebrations for the divine spirit of Julius Caesar, Emperor Caligula was accosted by centurion Cassius Chaerea and other members of the Praetorian Guard.
67
68
CALIGULA
Chaerea hated Caligula for the emperors relentless insults, focused chiefly on
insinuations of effeminacy after Chaerea had suffered a genital wound while
serving Caligulas father, General Germanicus. This day, after a furious exchange of words, Chaerea stabbed Caligula, with other soldiers joining in to
inflict 30 wounds. Hours later, conspirators also killed Caligulas wife, Milonia
Caesonia, and their daughter, Julia Drusilla, thus extinguishing the royal line.
Caligulaborn Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus on August 31,
12 CEwas a member of Romes Julio-Claudian dynasty, founded by Julius
Caesar and ending with Nero. His popular name, translated from Latin as
little soldiers boot, refers to his father Germanicus, one of Romes best-loved
military champions. Following the death of Germanicus at Antioch in October 19, widow Agrippina the Elder returned to Rome and became embroiled
in a feud with Emperor Tiberius, whom she blamed for killing Germanicus
(his adopted son). That 10-year conflict decimated Agrippinas family and
ended with her own death in prison, leaving Caligula as her only surviving
son. When Tiberius died in March 37 CE, Caligula succeeded his adoptive
grandfather as emperor.
His reign was controversial, to say the least. Contemporary sources from
37 CE and 38 CE describe him as a moderate and exemplary ruler, whereas
later documents portray him tyrannical, perverse, and possibly insane. Historian Suetonius reports that 160,000 animals were sacrificed in celebration
during the first three months of Caligulas reign, and Philo described the first
seven months as completely blissful. Caligula granted bonuses to Roman
troops, repealed the convictions of alleged traitors prosecuted under Tiberius,
recalled some prominent Romans from exile, and staged lavish entertainment
in Rome, including gladiatorial contests.
On the other hand, he executed his cousin and adopted son Tiberius Gemellus (an act that drove their mutual grandmother to suicide), along with
father-in-law Marcus Junius Silanus and brother-in-law Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, sparing uncle Claudius to serve as a public laughingstock. Caligula also
exiled his sisters, Julia Livilla and Agrippina the Younger. Financial crises and
famines ensued, and Caligulas relations with the Roman senate deteriorated.
Aspiring to divinity by 40 CE, Caligula adopted the garb of various gods and
demigods from mythology, naming himself as Jupiter in certain public documents and posing as a sun god on newly minted coins. Royal scandals multiplied, involving adultery, sexual perversion, and murders committed for
sadistic pleasure. On occasion, he paraded his wife in the nude before visitors,
threatening to torture and kill her as an odd form of affection. The exile of
his sisters followed accusations that Caligula had forced them into incest.
Surrounded by enemies, Caligula ensured his own destruction by publicly
humiliating Cassius Chaerea. He mocked Chaereas high-pitched voice, compelled Chaerea to kiss his hand while forming and moving it in an obscene
C A L I N E S C U , A R M A N D
fashion, and constantly forced Chaerea to use embarrassing passwords

Priapus (for erection) and Venus (contemporary slang for a eunuch)
while serving on guard duty. Following the murders of Caligula, his wife, and
daughter, Chaereas conspirators sought to kill Claudius and restore the Roman
Republic, but Claudius escaped and loyal officers of the Praetorian Guard
named him to succeed Caligula as emperor. Chaerea was condemned for the
assassination and, at his own request, was executed with the sword he used to
stab Caligula.
Caligulas near-mythical status assured his frequent portrayal in popular
fiction and drama. Examples include the novel I, Claudius, by Robert Graves
(1934), adapted several times for stage, radio, film, and television: the play Caligula, by Albert Camus (written in 1938, performed in 1945); two films with
Jay Robinson cast as Caligula, The Robe (1953); Demetrius and the Gladiators
(1954); Independent Televisions 1968 series The Caesars; the X-rated feature
film Caligula (1979); another film, also titled Caligula (1996); and the 2004
TV miniseries Imperium Nerone. Less traditional portrayals of Caligula include
a 1978 Judge Dredd comic strip; a videogame, The Elder Scrolls, premiered in
1994; another game, Viva Caligula, produced online by Adult Swim in 2008;
and a comic book series based on Caligula, launched by Avatar Press in 2011.
All adhere to the usual themes of Caligulas pathological addiction to sex and
violence.
Further Reading
Barrett, Anthony. Caligula: The Corruption of Power. London: Batsford, 1989.
Ferrill, Arthur. Caligula: Emperor of Rome. London: Thames & Hudson, 1991.
Kerrigan, Michael. Dark History of the Roman Emperors. London: Amber Books, 2012.
Winterling, Aloys. Caligula: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
LINESCU, ARMAND (18931939)

CA
Romanian prime minister Armand Ca linescu faced a critical challenge in September 1939. Elected six months before the German invasion of Poland began
World War II, Calinescu and his National Renaissance Front were committed
to neutrality in the expanding conflict. They were opposed by the Iron Guard,
a fascist group supported by Adolf Hitlers Gestapo, which had assassinated
Prime Minister Ion Duca in December 1933. By mid-September, a strike force
had been organized to kill Ca linescu, including attorney Dumitru Miti Dumitrescu, draftsman Ion Vasiliu, and four students: Ion Ionescu, Ion Moldoveanu,
Cezar Popescu, and Traian Popescu. On September 21, as Calinescu was returning to Bucharest from the Cotroceni Palace, the assassins staged their ambush in the Prahova Valley. Dumitrescu crashed his car into Calinescus Cadillac
and the others opened fire, killing Calinescu, bodyguard Radu Andone, and
69
70
C A L I N E S C U , A R M A N D
their driver. The killers then proceeded to invade the headquarters of Radio
Romnia, holding employees at gunpoint for a bungled attempt to broadcast
news of Calinescus death.
A native of Pites ti, the son of an affluent veterinarian and landowner, Armand Calinescu was born on June 4, 1893. He studied law and philosophy
at the University of Bucharest, then earned a PhD in economics and political
science from the University of Paris. Rejected by Romanias National Liberal
Party for his leftist views, C a linescu joined the opposing Peasants Party and
won elections to the Chamber of Deputies in 1926, serving there for 11 years.
In 1931, he led a move to outlaw the Iron Guard, earning him the hatred of its
leaders. In December 1937, he accepted appointment as Prime Minister Octavian Gogas minister of the interiora move resulting in Ca linescus expulsion
from the Peasants Party. A stroke killed Goga in May 1938, thus leading to the
dissolution of his government. Calinescu retained his post under King Carol II,
and then replaced Prime Minister Miron Cristea at his death, on March 6, 1939.
Regarded as a man of steel who could defeat the Iron Guard, C a linescu
ordered sweeping arrests of its leaders in May 1939, resulting in an estimated
300 deaths. On September 1, in Copenhagen, Gestapo agents and representatives from Fascist Italy met with Iron Guard members and Mihail Sturdza
Romanias ambassador to Denmark and a friend of exiled Iron Guard leader
Horia Sima. Together, as later described by Iron Guard turncoat Mihai Vrfureanu, they planned to murder Calinescu, King Carol, and General Gavrila
Marinescu, among other Romanian leaders. Dumitru Dumitrescu received Gestapo training for the project, then returned home through Hungary to lead the
murder team on September 21.
Harsh repression of the Iron Guard followed Calinescus death. His assassins
were executed, their corpses displayed with a placard reading De acumnainte,
aceastava fi soartatradatorilor de tara (From now on, this shall be the fate of
those who betray the country), and another 253 Iron Guard members were
killed without trial in various towns. The movement subsequently triumphed,
briefly, in alliance with pro-Nazi prime minister Ion Antonescu, beginning in
September 1940, but its failure to unseat him in a coup on January 24, 1941,
doomed the Iron Guard in Romania. Sima and other leaders fled to Germany,
organizing a government in exile, while the regime at home collaborated in the
Holocaust. Antonescu was executed for war crimes on June 1, 1946.
Further Reading
Ancel, Jean. The History of the Holocaust in Romania. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2011.
Dogaru, Mircea. History of the Romanians. Bucharest: Amco Press, 1996.
Georgescu, Vlad. The Romanians: A History. London: I.B. Tauris, 1991.
Hitchens, Keith. Rumania 18661947. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
CANALEJAS Y MNDEZ, JOS
CANALEJAS Y MNDEZ, JOS (18541912)

On November 12, 1912, Spanish prime minister Jos Canalejas followed his
normal daily routine of walking from home to the ministry of the interior, in
downtown Madrid. Two plainclothes policemen accompanied him as bodyguards, but on orders from Canalejas they remained 20 paces behind him.
Pausing on his way to inspect books displayed in the window of the San Martin
Library, Canalejas was approached and shot repeatedly by 32-year-old anarchist Manuel Pardias. A bodyguard rushed forward and struck Pardias on
the head, dodging a bullet the gunman fired in return; Pardias then used his
last round on himself. Carried by police to the ministry, Canalejas died moments after telling a police inspector, This wretch has killed me.
Born at Ferrol, in Galicia, on July 31, 1854, Jos Canalejas graduated from
the University of Madrid in 1871, earned his PhD a year later, and joined the
school as a lecturer in the literature department in 1873, later publishing a
two-volume history of Latin literature. Turning to politics, he was elected as a
deputy from Soria in 1881, served as undersecretary for Prime Minister Jos
Posada Herrera in 1883, acted as Prxedes Mateo Sagastas minister of justice
from 1888, then as his minister of finance in 18941895. Under Segismundo
Moret, Canalejas was elected president of the Congress of Deputies. In February 1910, as head of the Liberal Party, he became prime minister.
During his two-year term in office, with support from King Alfonso XIII, Canalejas introduced electoral reforms aimed at curbing the power of rural political bosses, weakening Roman Catholic influence over Spains government, and
nudging Spain in the direction of democracy. Those policies upset some clerics
and conservatives who saw their power threatened, but the moderate reforms
were insufficient to defuse radical anger on the left. A week of bloody rioting in
Barcelona, in July 1909, had targeted the government and church alike, leaving 112 dead, 124 wounded, and 1,700 charged with armed rebellion (5 of
whom were executed, 59 sentenced to life imprisonment).
One of those executed, in October 1909, was anarchist spokesman Francesc Ferrer i Gurdia. Before Manuel Pardias died from his self-inflicted head
wound, police determined that he was a great admirer of Ferrer and acted
in retaliation for his heros execution without trial. Spanish historian Salvador
de Madariaga later asserted that his homelands subsequent troublesmilitary
rule from 1923 to 1931, a bloody civil war in 1936, Fascist rule under dictators Francisco Franco and Luis Carrero Blanco from 1936 to 1973stemmed
from the Canalejas murder, which deprived Spain of an influential advocate for
true democracy.
Further Reading
Carr, Raymond. Spain: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Peirats, Jos. Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution. London: Freedom Press, 1990.
71
72
C N O VA S D E L C A S T I L L O , A N T O N I O
Phillips Jr., William, and Carla Phillips. A Concise History of Spain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
CNOVAS DEL CASTILLO, ANTONIO

(18281897)
Serving his sixth term as prime minister of Spain, Antonio Cnovas ranked
among the most despised and feared of politicians serving under King Alfonso
XIII. By August 1897, his suppression of dissent in Cuba and at homewhere
mass arrests and brutal torture were compared by critics to the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th centuryhis list of enemies ranged from domestic anarchists to
President William McKinleys administration in Washington, D.C. On August 8,
while visiting the Santa gueda spa in Mondragn, Cnovas was shot and
killed by 26-year-old anarchist Michele Angiolillo Lombardi, who surrendered
to police without resistance. Confronted in jail by his victims widow, Angiolillo
said, Pardon, Madame. I respect you as a lady, but I regret that you were the
wife of that man.
A native of Mlaga, born on February 8, 1828, Antonio Cnovas was raised
by his mothers cousin in Madrid after his fathers death. He studied law but focused on politics at an early age. In July 1854, he wrote the Manifesto of Manzanares, justifying General Leopoldo ODonnells coup dtat against dictator
Baldomero Espartero. Cnovas later served Queen Isabella II as an envoy to
Rome, governor of Cdiz, and director general of local administration. Briefly
retired from government after the Glorious Revolution deposed Isabella in
1868, Cnovas remained an outspoken champion of monarchy, and returned
to serve his first term as prime minister in 18741875, after General Arsenio
Martnez-Campos y Antn toppled the First Spanish Republic and placed King
Alfonso XII on the throne.
Thereafter, Cnovas was rarely far from the seat of power in Madrid. Joaqun
Jovellar y Soler replaced him as prime minister in September 1875, but Cnovas regained his office three months later, with his second term extending to
March 1879. Subsequent terms ran from December 1879 to February 1881,
January 1884 to November 1885, and July 1890 to December 1892. Back
again in March 1895, Cnovas faced an imperial crisis in Cuba.
Claimed by Spain in 1492, the distant island had simmered with violent dissent throughout the 19th century. A Ten Years War (18681878) and subsequent Little War (18791880) had failed to throw off Spanish rule, but exiled
rebel Jos Mart tried again in February 1895. His death in May, at the Battle of
Dos Rios, failed to quell the uprising, so Prime Minister Cnovas and General
Valeriano Weyler opted for a policy of cruel oppression, establishing reconcentration camps where some 300,000 civilians suffered and died in captivity,
often under torture. Cnovas ignored strident protests from the Red Cross and
CARLOS I OF PORTUGAL
U.S. senator Redfield Proctor (former secretary of war), and William Randolph
Hearst used his newspaper chain to agitate for U.S. intervention.
Seemingly oblivious to world opinion, Cnovas imposed the tactics used in
Cuba on dissident Spaniards at home. In June 1896, after a bomb exploded
during a Corpus Christi procession in Barcelona, Cnovas ordered the arrest of
300 anarchists, socialists, and trade unionists. Confined at Montjuc Fortress,
87 were condemned and executed, and others suffered brutal torture, some of
them driven insane. Seventy-one defendants were acquitted of all charges
but Cnovas still deported them to Ro de Oro, a Spanish colony in West Africa
(now Western Sahara).
It was during this period of turmoil that Michele Angiolillo traveled from
Paris to seek revenge against Cnovas. He was executed by garotte, at Bergara,
on August 20, 1897. The New York Times reported that he died bravely, with
his pulse quiet and unaltered, whereas Spanish newspapers suppressed details of his execution.
Further Reading
Barton, Simon. A History of Spain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Pierson, Peter. The History of Spain. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Ross, Christopher. Spain Since 1812. London: Hodder Education, 2009.
Trask, David. The War with Spain in 1898. New York: Macmillan, 1981.
CARLOS I OF PORTUGAL (18631908)

On February 1, 1908, the Portuguese royal family returned to Lisbon from a
month-long holiday at Vila Viosa. Disembarking from their train at Cais do
Sodr station in central Lisbon, they boarded an open carriage for the last leg of
their journey to the Queluz National Palace. While passing through the Praa do
Comrcio (Commerce Square), beside the Tagus River, they were ambushed by
republican activists Manuel Buia and Alfredo Costa. Armed with a rifle and pistol, respectively, they fired multiple shots into the carriage, killing King Carlos I
instantly, fatally wounding Prince Royal Lus Filipe, striking Prince Manuel
in the arm, and wounding the coachman in one hand. Buia also wounded
a soldier, Henrique da Silva Valente, who intervened to spoil his aim. Only
Queen Amlie of Orleans escaped injury, as police killed both assailants and an
innocent bystander.
Born in Lisbon on September 28, 1863, the son of King Lus I and Queen
Maria Pia of Savoy, Carlos Fernando Lus Maria Vctor Miguel Rafael Gabriel
Gonzaga Xavier Francisco de Assis Jos Simo boasted a roster of royal relatives including King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, King Frederick Augustus III
of Saxony, and King Ferdinand I of Romania. Succeeding to the Portuguese throne upon his fathers death, in October 1889, Carlos faced his first
73
74
CARLOS I OF PORTUGAL
crisis three months later, with

the British ultimatum of January 1890, breaching the 1386
Treaty of Windsor to dispute
Portuguese territorial claims
in Africa. Carlos signed the
controversial Treaty of London
in August 1890, relinquishing
much of Angola and Mozambique, while furious protests
erupted at home.
Chief among the protesters were leaders of the Portuguese Republican Party and
the Carbonria, a conspiratorial revolutionary society opposed to both the monarchy
and the Catholic Church. Republicans won only 2.7 percent
of the popular vote nationKing Carlos I of Portugal, assassinated by repub- wide in 1906four seats in
the National Assembly, all from
lican rebels. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)
Lisbonbut its support concentrated in the capital and in Porto, where party leader Bernardino Machado
proclaimed, We are the majority. The Carbonria, founded in 1896 by Artur
Augusto Duarte da Luz de Almeida, preferred direct action to electioneering,
organizing along military lines to recruit an estimated 40,000 members
including many frustrated republicans. Further agitation came from the Liberal Regenerator Party, organized by Joo Franco in 1901, and from Progressive
Dissidence, founded by Jos Maria de Alpoim in 1905. Dissident parties battled one another, while condemning the monarchy for inefficiency and failure
to support reform.
Carlos responded to that opposition by naming Joo Franco as prime minister in May 1906. Franco tried to form a coalition with Progressive Party leader
and two-time former prime minister Jos Luciano de Castro, but failing there,
he persuaded Carlos to suspend future elections until Franco deemed them
practical, while censoring the press and jailing dissidents. Those moves predictably increased political tension, prompting Republican Party spokesman
Alfons Costa to say that for less than Dom Carlos has done, the head of Louis
XVI fell. Franco responded to increasing agitation with Costas arrest, detention of 93 other republicans, and a ban on public meetings.
CARR ANZ A DE L A GAR Z A, VENUSTIANO
After the assassinations of February 1908, Prince Manuel was proclaimed

king of Portugal. He proved to be the nations last monarch, deposed and exiled by a republican revolution in October 1910. Joo Franco was long gone by
then, driven from office and from public life by successor Francisco Joaquim
Ferreira do Amaral on February 4, 1908. A two-year investigation of the royal
murders indicted several Carbonria suspects on October 5, 1910, but they
were spared from trial by a republican coup dtat that deposed King Manuel II
and established the First Portuguese Republic.
Further Reading
Anderson, James. The History of Portugal. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Birmingham, David. A Concise History of Portugal. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003.
Hatton, Barry. The Portuguese: A Modern History. Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2011.
CARRANZA DE LA GARZA, VENUSTIANO

(18591920)
Mexican president Venustiano Carranza literally dodged a bullet on April 20,
1920, when an aide to rival candidate lvaro Obregn Salido tried to kill him
in Mexico City. Frustrated, Obregn allied himself with Adolfo de la Huerta,
the rebellious governor of Sonora, and led troops to the capital. Carranza fled
with his cabinet ministers toward Veracruz, but stopped to rest at Tlaxcalantongo in the Sierra Norte de Puebla Mountains. There, the party was surprised
by hostile troops under General Rodolfo Herrero, with Carranza shot dead
while he slept.
Venustiano Carranza was the son of an affluent cattleman, born at Cuatro
Cinegas in the state of Coahuila on December 28, 1859. His familys wealth
secured him a first-class education and propelled him into politics, becoming
municipal president of his hometown in 1887. Disillusioned by the authoritarian style of President Porfirio Daz, Carranza joined 300 other Coahuila
ranchers to oppose the rigged reelection of Governor Jos Mara Garza Galn
in 1893. Diaz sent an emissary to negotiate with Carranza, and accepted his
aides recommendation that Garza retire, while Carranza serve a second term
as president of Cuatro Cinegas (18941898), then advanced to the state legislature, and finally to the Mexican senate (in 1904). Diaz approved his candidacy for governor of Coahuila in, then reneged in favor of Jess de Valle.
Embittered, Carranza won the coveted post in 1911, while scheming to unseat Diaz.
Before he could strike, Francisco Madero led a revolution that deposed
Diaz and drove him into exile, in May 1911. Victoriano Huerta deposed and
75
76
C A R R E R O B L A N C O, L U I S
executed Madero in February 1913, installing himself as president, and Carranza drafted the Plan of Guadalupe, raising a Constitutional Army with support from rebel leaders including Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. As that
armys Primer Jefe (First Chief ), he forced Huertas surrender in August 1914,
officially succeeding him on August 14.
The winning coalition soon dissolved, Zapata first deserting Carranza in
September 1914, when Carranza refused to institute the sweeping reforms
Zapata demanded. Villa soon followed, citing issues of his own, and fighting
resumed among the former allies. Victorious by January 1915, Carranza instituted his own program of reform, including propagation of a new constitution,
ratified in 1917. He was determined to retire with that accomplishment, when
his term expired in 1920, but insisted that Mexicos next president should be a
civilian. lvaro Obregn and other generals opposed that plan, prompting intrigue that culminated with Carranzas April assassination.
Adolfo de la Huerta served as Mexicos provisional president until December 1, 1920, when Obregn officially secured the office, with Huerta demoted
to secretary of the treasury. Obregn charged General Herrero with Carranzas
murder, but he was acquitted on grounds that the actual triggerman could not
be identified. Herrero still spent seven months in the military prison at Santiago Tlaltelolco, fighting treason charges, then was released with a dishonorable
discharge from the army. Curiously, Obregn later reinstated him as a general,
leaving President Lzaro Crdenas to make Herreros dismissal permanent, in
the 1930s.
Further Reading
Boot, Max. The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. New
York: Basic Books, 2002.
Gibbon, Thomas. Mexico Under Carranza: A Lawyers Indictment of the Crowning Infamy
of Four Hundred Years of Misrule. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1919.
Richmond, Douglas. Venustiano Carranzas Nationalist Struggle, 18931920. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
Stout, Joseph. Border Conflict: Villistas, Carrancistas and the Punitive Expedition,
19151920. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1999.
CARRERO BLANCO, LUIS (19041973)

When ailing dictator Francisco Franco formally retired as Spains prime minister, in June 1973, handpicked successor Luis Carrero Blanco assumed office
and inherited the enmity of militant Basque separatists organized as the ETA
(Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Basque Homeland and Freedom). While serving as
vice president, from 1967, Blanco had supervised repressive measures targeting the ETA and other dissidents. Now, the ETA mounted Operation Ogre,
fielding a team that rented a Madrid apartment on the street Carrero Blanco
C A R R E R O B L A N C O, L U I S
to church each Sunday. Tunneling beneath the road over a fivemonth period, the team planted
176 pounds of explosives stolen
from a government arsenal. As
Carrero Blancos car passed on
December 20, 1973, the bombers detonated their charge,
launching the vehicle 65 feet
in the air, over one five-story
building, to land on the secondfloor balcony of a Jesuit college.
Carrero Blanco died in the blast,
with a bodyguard and his chauffeur. The ETA claimed responsibility on January 22, 1974.
A native of Santoa, born
on March 4, 1904, Luis Carrero Blanco entered the Spanish
Naval Academy in 1918, subsequently participating in the
Rif War of 19241926, against
Moroccan Berber tribesmen. He Spanish prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco died at
initially supported the Second the hands of Basque separatists. (Bettmann/Corbis)
Spanish Republic when civil
war broke out in 1936, then defected in June 1937 to serve as a naval officer
with Francos rebel forces. Rising through the ranks and gaining influence in
Francos Falange Party, Carrero Blanco became a cabinet minister in 1957, a
vice admiral in 1963, and a full admiral in 1966. In 1967, he succeeded General Agustn Muoz Grandes as Spains vice president and heir apparent to post
of Caudillode Espaa (Leader of Spain) upon Francos demise.
ETA spokesman Julen Agirre justified Carrero Blancos assassination in a
manifesto that declared:
The execution in itself had an order and some clear objectives. From the beginning of 1951 Carrero Blanco practically occupied the government headquarters
in the regime. Carrero Blanco symbolized better than anyone else the figure of
pure Francoism and without totally linking himself to any of the Francoist tendencies, he covertly attempted to push Opus Dei into power. A man without
scruples conscientiously mounted his own State within the State: he created a
network of informers within the Ministries, in the Army, in the Falange, and also
in Opus Dei. His police managed to put themselves into all the Francoist apparatus. Thus he made himself the key element of the system and a fundamental
77
78
CASTILLO AR M AS, CARLOS
piece of the oligarchys political game. On the other hand, he came to be irreplaceable for his experience and capacity to manoeuvre and because nobody
managed as he did to maintain the internal equilibrium of Francoism.
Franco survived and controlled Spain through puppet presidents until November 1975. Carrero Blancos killers eluded police, but the teams leader,
Jos Bearan Ordeana, was himself assassinated with a car bomb in December 1978, a reprisal carried out by allied neo-fascist groups including Argentine Anticommunist Alliance and Italys National Vanguard, with collaboration
from Spains Naval Intelligence Service.
Further Reading
Agirre, Julen. Operation Ogro: The Execution of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. New York:
Ballantine, 1976.
Anderson, Wayne. The ETA: Spains Basque Terrorists. New York: Rosen Publishing, 2003.
Clark, Robert. The Basque Insurgents: ETA, 19521980. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.
Kurlansky, Mark. The Basque History of the World. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.
Woodworth, Paddy. Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy.
Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 2001.
CASTILLO ARMAS, CARLOS (19141957)

Carlos Castillo Armas celebrated his third anniversary as president of Guatemala
on July 8, 1957. Eighteen days later, he was assassinated at the National Palace
in Guatemala City. Authorities said Castillo was shot at 9:00 P.M. on July 26, in
the palace dining room, as he and his wife sat down for dinner. They blamed the
crime on 20-year-old Romeo Vasquez Sanchez, a member of the palace guard
who then committed suicide. A communiqu released on August 3 described
Vasquez as a Communist fanatic who was expelled from the Guatemalan army
in June 1955, then somehow found his next job at the palace. At his death,
Vasquez allegedly carried a card from the Latin American service of Radio
Moscow, reading: It is our pleasure, dear listener, to engage in correspondence
with you. We are very thankful for your regular listening to these programs.
Police also claimed to possess a 40-page diary, in which Vasquez wrote, I have
had the opportunity to study Russian communism. The great nation that is
Russia is fulfilling a most important mission in history . . . the Soviet Union
is the first world power in progress and scientific research. That document
reportedly closed with a reference to the gunmans diabolic plan to put an end
to the existence of the man who holds power.
Born on November 4, 1914, Carlos Castillo Armas served in Guatemalas
army until 1950, when he led an abortive coup dtat against President Juan
Jos Arvalo. Wounded and imprisoned, he escaped from custody and fled
to Colombia, then to Honduras, where he worked as a furniture salesman,
CASTILLO AR M AS, CARLOS
biding his time for a comeback.

His opportunity arrived with
the 1951 election of Jacobo rbenz Guzmn, whose administration launched a campaign
of agrarian reform in Guatemala threatening the economic
interests of the United Fruit
Company (UFC).
Major UFC stockholders included U.S. secretary of state
John Foster Dulles and his
brother, Allen, director of the
Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA). With the blessings of
President Dwight Eisenhower,
the Dulles brothers launched
Operation PBFORTUNE in
1952, enlisting military aid from
Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio
Somoza Garca and compiling Guatemalan president Carlos Castillo Armas, allega list of top flight Commu- edly shot by a Communist rebel in 1957. (Bettmann/
nists whom the new government Corbis)
would desire to eliminate immediately in the event of a successful anti-Communist coup. Castillo Armas agreed to lead the CIAs National
Liberation Movement against rbenz, and although his first incursion failed on
March 29, 1953, rbenz was deposed by a second offensive (code-named Operation PBSUCCESS) in June 1954. Castillo Armas took office as president on
July 8, bankrolled with $80 million from Washington over the next three years,
and the CIA conducted Operation PBHISTORY, manipulating world opinion
toward belief that rbenz was a tool of Moscow.
Once in power, Castillo Armas swiftly reversed the rbenz reforms, driving
peasants from the land they had been granted during 19511953, purging the
government and trade unions of alleged leftists, banning political parties and
peasant organizations, and signing a Preventive Penal Law against Communism,
which imposed prison terms for various subversive activities (including organization of labor unions). Encouraged by the CIA, Castillo Armas also organized the
National Committee of Defense against Communism (NCDAC), invested with
power to detain any suspected Reds for six months without trial. By November
1954, the committee had compiled a list of 72,000 alleged communists, many
of whom were arrested and tortured, with some disappeared forever. Today, the
NCDAC is widely regarded as Latin Americas first death squad.
79
80
CASTRO RUZ, FIDEL ALEJANDRO
U.S. vice president Richard Nixon visited Guatemala in 1955, proclaiming

that President Castillo Armass objective, to do more for the people in two
years than the Communists were able to do in ten years, is important. This is
the first instance in history where a Communist government has been replaced
by a free one. Freedom was relative, however, as the new regime maintained
repressive policies, later deemed genocidal by the countrys Historical Clarification Commission. In the year of Nixons visit, Castillo Armas canceled presidential elections, while permitting only members of his own party to run for
Congress. In 1956, he imposed a new constitution, naming himself as president until 1960.
Various generals succeeded Castillo Armas as Guatemalas dictator, prompting a leftist coup in November 1960 that touched off a 36-year civil war. At
least 200,000 persons died in that conflict, with another 40,000 to 50,000
missing. Peace accords were signed in December 1996. Several military officers
were later convicted of war crimes and sentenced to prison, with trials continuing through 2011.
Further Reading
Cullather, Nick. Secret History: The CIAs Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala
19521954. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Grow, Michael. U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change
in the Cold War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.
Kinzer, Stephen. Overthrow: Americas Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.
New York: Times Books, 2006.
Kinzer, Stephen, and Stephen Schlesinger. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup
in Guatemala. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
La Feber, Walter. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. New York:
Norton, 1993.
CASTRO RUZ, FIDEL ALEJANDRO (1926 )

ATTEMPTED
On November 28, 2006, Britains television Channel 4 aired a documentary
film titled 638 Ways to Kill Castro, detailing some of the murder plots directed
against Cuban president Fidel Castro over half a century. Sponsored by the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in league with organized crime and
far-right Cuban exiles, the methods employed or debatednone successful
included snipers, exploding seashells and fungus-laden wetsuits, cigars and
handkerchiefs infected with bacteria, a radio loaded with poison gas, and a
fountain pen containing a lethal syringe.
Born on August 13, 1926, at Birn, in Cubas Holgun Province, Fidel Castro
was initially supported by the CIA in his campaign against longtime dictator
Fulgencio Batista, whose corruption and brutality made him embarrassing as
a U.S. ally. Castro deposed Batista in January 1959, encouraging Washington

with his announcement that power does not interest me, and I will not take
it. He changed his mind a month later, however, and embarked on a sharp
leftward course that included nationalizing land and facilities owned by U.S.
investors. At the same time, he closed casinos and brothels owned by U.S.
gangsters, ensuring their support for subsequent plots to destroy him.
In a CIA memo dated December 11, 1959, CIA director Allen Dulles ordered that consideration be given to the elimination of Castro. A month
later the agency launched Operation 40, aimed at careful planning of covert actions to legitimize U.S. intervention in Cuba. On March 9, 1960,
recommendations were advanced to eliminate the leaders [Fidel Castro,
brother Raul Castro, and Che Guevara] with a single blow. In August the
CIA acquired a box of Fidels favorite cigars and spiked them with poison.
On September 2, 1960, CIA chief of operational support James OConnell
reported that the murder plan had officially commenced. When the cigars
failed, OConnell hatched a new plan with the agencys technical services division, involving poison pills.
By October 1960, Mafia leaders Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante (briefly
jailed by Castro in 1959), and John Rosselli were embroiled in fresh CIA conspiracies, officially dubbed Operation ZR/RIFLE in February 1961. Rosselli delivered poison pills to a friendly Cuban official on March 16, 1961, but the
selected hit man was dismissed before he had a chance to strike. In April 1961,
Rosselli passed more pills to Juan Orta, Castros personal secretary, but Orta
was exposed and imprisoned. On September 24, 1961, Castro announced the
exposure of Operation AM/BLOOD, a murder plot involving Cuban exiles
trained by the CIA at Guantanamo Bay. Eleven days later, another plot was revealed, involving Castro opponent Antonio Veciana and CIA agent Maurice
Bishop. Veciana fled Cuba, and his three accomplices were jailed. On November 1, 1961, the CIA launched Operation Mongoose, led by agent James
OConnell. Giancana, Trafficante, and Rosselli remained as key players, aided
in some scenarios by mob financial genius Meyer Lansky (a key figure in Havana gambling prior to Batistas downfall). ZR/RIFLE continued, meanwhile,
with conspiracies running on parallel tracks.
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, ever jealous of the CIA, revealed those plots
to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in May 1962, and although Kennedy reportedly chastised CIA leaders for dealing with hoodlum elements, the plots
continued. John Rosselli visited Cuba twice that summer, reporting on June 21
that a new assassin had infiltrated the island. Maxwell Taylor, chairman
of special group created to pursue Castros elimination, authorized development of more aggressive plans on August 20, 1962. Operation Mongoose
was officially disbanded three months later, following the Cuban missile crisis, but Castros enemy Rolando Cubela (code-name AMLASH) revived the
81
82
assassination plots in February 1963 and CIA agent William Harvey resumed
meetings with Rosselli in April. President Lyndon Johnson privately suspected
that attacks on Castro prompted Cuban retaliation in November 1963, with
the assassination of President John F. Kennedy ( JFK).
Be that as it may, efforts to murder Castro did not end with JFKs administration. The last known attempt on Castros life occurred in 2000, during a
visit to Panama. Cuban terrorist and ex-CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles placed
200 pounds of high explosives under a podium where Castro was scheduled
to speak, but Cuban security personnel discovered the bomb and defused it.
Posada and three accomplices were imprisoned for that attempt, later pardoned by outgoing president Mireya Moscoso in August 2004. Posada was
subsequently convicted by Venezuelan prosecutors in absentia for the October
1976 bombing of Cubana Flight 455, which killed 73 persons, and for a series
of 1997 bombings in Cuban hotels and nightclubs. Detained in Texas during
2005, Posada avoided extradition thanks to a superseding U.S. indictment and
trial, ending with his acquittal on April 8, 2011.
Although deadly serious, some of the plots against Castro assumed the aspect of black comedy. Supplied with poison pills, presidential lover Marita Lorenz hid them in a jar of cold cream, only to have them dissolve. She balked at
forcing the cream into Castros mouth while he slept, and finally confessed to
the plot. Castro, bemused, offered her his own pistol, whereupon Lorenz tearfully replied, I cant do it, Fidel.
Over time, Castros longevity became a running joke among his enemies.
Fidel himself once remarked, If surviving assassination attempts were an
Olympic event, I would win the gold medal. One apocryphal story, recounted
in New Yorker magazine, described a friend presenting Castro with a Galpagos
tortoise. On hearing that his new pet might live for 100 years, Castro declined
the gift, saying, Thats the problem with pets. You get attached to them and
then they die on you.
Further Reading
Bohning, Don. The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations against Cuba, 19591965.
Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005.
Breuer, William. Vendetta! Fidel Castro and the Kennedy Brothers. New York: John Wiley &
Sons, 1997.
Escalante, Fabin. The Cuba Project: CIA Covert Operations 195962. New York: Ocean
Press, 2004.
Hinckle, Warren, and William Turner. The Fish Is Red. New York: Harper and Row, 1981.
Russo, Gus. Live By The Sword: The Secret War against Castro and the Death of JFK. Baltimore: Bancroft Press, 1998.
Von Tunzelmann, Alex. Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean.
New York: Henry Holt, 2011.
C ATA RG I U, BA R B U
CATARGIU, BARBU (18071862)

Romanian prime minister Barbu Catargiu left a hectic session of parliament at
5:00 P.M. on June 20, 1862, accompanied by Colonel Nicholas Bibescu, prefect
of police for Bucharest. As their open carriage passed the ancient Metropolitan
Church (now the Romanian Patriarchal Cathedral), a gunman hidden in the
shadows fired two shots, one striking Catargiu at the base of his skull and
killing him instantly. The frightened horses galloped on for several hundred
feet before Bibescu could control them, and the assassin fled into vineyards
on Metropolitanate Hill. He was never apprehended, and the crime remains
officially unsolved.
Barbu Catargiu was born in Wallachia on October 26, 1807, the son of a
well-known political activist. From age 18 to 27 he lived in Paris, where he
studied history, law, and philosophy. Returning home to serve in Wallachias
Obsteasca Assembly, he left again during the Revolution of 1848 and earned
his living abroad as a journalist until the violent upheaval subsided. Upon his
next return, he entered politics with the intention of promoting evolutionary
change over radical revolution. (Some accounts name Catargiu as a member
of Romanias Conservative Party, but in fact that group was not created until
February 1880, long after his death.) He championed the boyars (serf-holding
land owners), while asserting that feudalism in Romania has never existed.
Under Prince of Wallachia Alexandru Ioan Cuza, Catargiu served as minister of
finances from 1859 until he outgrew his liege, taking office as Romanias first
prime minister on February 15, 1862.
An advocate of Romanian unity, Catargiu simplified government by reducing the number of administrative districts and began construction of a railroad
to connect Moldavias provinces. At the same time, he continued his defense of
boyar rule over serfs, censored the Romanian press, and banned large public
assemblies. When Romanians gathered on June 13, 1862, to commemorate the
Revolution of 1848 in Blaj, Transylvania, Catargius soldiers barred them from
Cmpia Libertatii (The Field of Liberty), creating widespread anger and resentment. His assassination followed one week later.
Dr. Nicolae Cretulescu, a relative liberal, replaced Catargiu as prime minister on June 24, 1862. He avoided contentious debates over land reform, focusing instead on unification of Romanias public health system, improving
education through a Council for Public Instruction, and creating the Directorate General of the Public Archive to preserve historical documents. Prince
Cuza was deposed and exiled by a military coup dtat in February 1866, replaced by Prince Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (proclaimed King Carol I
in May 1881). Carol I presided over an era of stability and progress, ending
with his death in October 1914. Despite Catargius general unpopularity, a
statue of the late prime minister was erected near the site of his assassination,
which remained in place until 1984.
83
84
CERMAK, ANTON JOSEPH
Further Reading
Hitchins, Keith. The Romanians 17741866. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Jelavich, Barbara. Russia and the Formation of the Romanian National State 18211878.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
CERMAK, ANTON JOSEPH (18731933)

On February 15, 1933, president-elect Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) addressed
a crowd at Bayfront Park in Miami, Florida. After his brief remarks spectators flocked around his open touring car, but a flurry of gunshots disrupted
the rush for handshakes. Bullets wounded five persons, including Chicago
mayor Anton Cermak, who took a shot to the stomach. Before he was rushed
to Jackson Memorial Hospital, Cermak purportedly told FDR, Im glad it
was me instead of you. Bystanders and police seized gunman Giuseppe Zangara, swiftly tried and sentenced to 80 years in prison for assault with intent
to kill. That charge was upgraded to murder on March 6, when Cermak died
from infection despite the best efforts of local physicians, and Zangara died
in the electric chair on March 20, 1933.
Anton Cermak was born in Kladno, Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic) on May 9, 1873, emigrating to Chicago with his parents as an infant. He
entered Windy City politics as a
precinct captain, was elected to
the state legislature in 1902, became alderman of the 12th Ward
in 1909, and was elected president of the Cook County Board
of Commissioners in 1922. He
failed to win a U.S. Senate seat
in 1928, but received 46 percent of the vote and finished
that year as chairman of Cook
Countys Democratic Party. In
1931, he challenged mayoral
incumbent William Big Bill
Thompson and emerged victorious despiteor because of
Thompsons racist slurs, such as
Bohunk Chermack, or whatever his name is, against Eastern European immigrants.
Although some observers porChicago mayor Anton Cermaks murder remains a
trayed Cermak as a reformer in
subject of controversy. (Bettmann/Corbis)
the final years of Prohibition, Chicago insiders dubbed him Ten-percent Tony,
a reference to the share of cash he skimmed from local rackets and corrupt government deals. Where Mayor Thompson had allied himself with mobster
Al Caponeconvicted of tax evasion six months after Cermaks election
Cermak cast his lot with rival gangster Roger Touhys syndicate. On December 19, 1932, a police squad led by Detective Sergeants Harry Lang and Harry
Miller raided Capone successor Frank Nittis headquarters at the La Salle Hotel.
Lang shot Nitti three times, then gave himself a superficial wound and called
the shooting self-defense. Nitti surprised his would-be killers by surviving and
beat a charge of attempted murder in February 1933, when Sergeant Miller testified that Lang had received $15,000 to kill Nitti. Another member of the raiding party testified that Nitti was unarmed when shot by Lang. As a result, Lang
and Miller were fired and fined $100 each for simple assault.
Cermak was shot within days of that verdicts return. Miami prosecutors portrayed Giuseppe Zangara as a delusional immigrant and quasi-anarchist who
blamed chronic stomach pain on wealthy public figures. FDR was named as
his primary target, though he also appeared to despise Republican incumbent
Herbert Hoover. Gossip columnist Walter Winchell, coincidentally present at
the Miami shooting scene, later surmised that Cermak was Zangaras primary
target, marked for death after offending Chicago mobsters. The usual twist
to that story paints Cermak as a martyred reformer, but if gangsters were involved, retaliation for the attempted police assassination of Frank Nitti seems
a more likely motive.
Cermaks gangland ally, Roger Touhy, was indicted for kidnapping Missouri
brewer William Hamm in August 1933, but jurors acquitted him three months
later and the blame for that abduction was later (rightly) placed on the Barker
Karpis outlaw gang. FBI agents arrested Touhy again in December 1933, this
time for the faked kidnapping of Chicago felon Jacob Factor. Convicted on
that charge and sentenced to 99 years, Touhy was freed in 1959 after a federal
judge determined that Factor was never kidnapped. The case was a frame-up
concocted by Nitti and company, with aid from corrupt prosecutors. Soon after
his release, Touhy was gunned down in Chicago. His dying words: The bastards never forget.
Cermaks daughter, Helena, married Otto Kerner Jr., who served as governor
of Illinois from 1961 to 1968, then as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the Seventh Circuit. Kerner resigned that position in July 1974, following his
conviction on 17 counts of bribery, conspiracy, perjury, and other charges. He
received a three-year prison term but was released early upon diagnosis of terminal cancer and died in Chicago on May 9, 1976.
The controversy surrounding Cermaks death makes it a natural subject for
fiction and drama. The first effort, a film billed as an imaginative biography
of Cermak, was hastily released on June 30, 1933, casting the mayor as an
85
86
FRANK THE ENFORCER NITTI (18861943)

Born Francesco Raffaele Nitto in Angri, Italy, Chicagos future mob boss
emigrated to New York with his family at age seven. He quit school after
seventh grade and worked as a barber in Brooklyn until he moved west in
1913. The onset of Prohibition in 1920 found him allied with John Torrio
and Al Capone, rising through syndicate ranks as each boss in turn was
convicted on federal charges. Nitti suffered his own tax-evasion conviction in 1931, but received an 18-month sentence, compared to Capones
11 years, retaining power as a major figure in the national crime syndicate.
In 1943, he was indicted, with other Chicago gang leaders, on charges of
extorting millions from the motion picture industry through labor racketeering. Police found him shot to death in a Chicago railyard on March 19,
1943, and ruled his fate a suicide, speculating that the prospect of a second prison term left Nitti panicked and depressed. However, local gambler
George Redston claimed he saw Nitti in custody of two Chicago detectives
shortly before his body was found, suggesting the possibility that police
succeeded in killing him on their second attempt, where Detectives Lang
and Miller failed in 1932. Ever popular on television and in films, Nitti
has been portrayed at various times by actors Bruce Gordon in The Untouchables (19591963); Harold J. Stone in The St. Valentines Day Massacre
(1967); Sylvester Stallone in Capone (1975); Billy Drago in The Untouchables (1987); Anthony LaPaglia in Nitti: The Enforcer (1988); Paul Regina in
The Untouchables (1993); Stanley Tucci in Road to Perdition (2002); and Billy
Camp in Public Enemies (2009).
inadvertent hero for saving FDR. Cermak also got the hero treatment in a twopart episode of The Untouchables, aired on February 25 and March 3, 1960,
then recycled later that same year as a full-length TV movie, The Gun of Zangara. Cermaks rise to power was portrayed in Jeffrey Archers novel Kane and
Abel (1979), and best-selling mystery author Max Allan Collins solved the
case four years later, blaming Frank Nitti in True Detective (1983). Unexpectedly, Cermaks murder also inspired a November 1998 episode of the science
fiction TV series, Babylon 5, titled Objects in Motion.
Further Reading
Allsop, Kenneth. The Bootleggers: The Story of Prohibition. New York: Arlington House, 1970.
Bergreen, Laurence. Capone: The Man and the Era. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Gottfried, Alex. Boss Cermak of Chicago: A Study of Political Leadership. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
CHAI N MU RDERS ( I R AN )
Humble, Ronald. Frank Nitti: The True Story of Chicagos Notorious Enforcer. Fort Lee,
NJ: Barricade Books, 2008.
Lindberg, Richard. To Serve and Collect: Chicago Politics and Police Corruption from the
Lager Beer Riot to the Summerdale Scandal, 18551960. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
Russo, Gus. The Outfit: The Role of Chicagos Underworld in the Shaping of Modern
America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2001.
CHAIN MURDERS (IRAN) (19791998)

The term chain murders is applied to a series of Iranian homicides and disappearances, in which all victims were dissident intellectuals publicly critical of
the Islamic Republic established in February 1979. Slayings were not restricted
to Iran, but included attacks throughout Europe and North America. Although
no official tally is available, estimates of the final death toll range from dozens
to 107. Recognized victims include:
Prince Shahryar Shafiq, son of the exiled shahs twin sister, gunned down
in Paris on December 7, 1979.
Ali Akbar Tabatabaei, former press attach to Irans U.S. embassy, killed at
his home in Bethesda, Maryland, on July 22, 1980. Suspect Dawud Salahuddin, reportedly paid $5,000 for that killing, escaped to Iran on July 31.
He confessed the murder in a 1996 televised interview, calling it an act
of war.
Shahrokh Missaqi, supporter of the Peoples Fedaii exiled to the Philippines, stabbed in Manila on January 14, 1982.
Ahmad Zolanvar, a member of the dissident Mojahedin of the Islamic
Revolution Organization (MIRO), fatally beaten in Karachi, Pakistan, on
August 29, 1982. He died on September 5.
Abdol-Amir Rahdar, a leader of student opposition to the Islamic Republic,
hacked to death with machetes in Bangalore, India, on September 10, 1982.
MIRO supporter Esfandiar Rahimi Taqanaki, killed with machetes in Manila, on February 8, 1983.
General Gholam-Ali Oveissi, military governor of Tehran under the shah,
killed with his brother Gholam-Hossein in Paris, on February 7, 1984.
Behrouz Shahvardilou, a police colonel under the shah, killed in Istanbul
on January 6, 1985.
Mir Monavat, exiled politician from Balochistan Province, shot by three
men at his home in Karachi, Pakistan, on September 28, 1985.
Ex-colonel Aziz Moradi, killed in Istanbul on December 23, 1985.
87
88
Ahmad Madani, the shahs former defense minister, poisoned with a gift of
candy in Paris on January 1, 1986.
Ahmadhamed Monfared, another ex-colonel, shot in Turkey by two men
with silenced pistols on October 24, 1986.
Vali Mohammad, a former marine officer under the shah, shot in Pakistan
on November 12, 1986.
Ali Akbar Mohammadi, former pilot for Chairman of Parliament Ali
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, killed by two gunmen in Hamburg, Germany,
on January 16, 1987.
Hamid Reza Chitgar, First Secretary of Hezb Kaar (Labor Party), killed at
an apartment in Vienna, Austria, on May 19, 1987, with his corpse found
a week later. Suspect Ali Amiztab allegedly lured Chitgar from Paris to Vienna, after a two-year correspondence from Iran.
Alireza Hassanpour Sharifzadeh and Faramarz Aqai, killed at their homes
in Karachi on July 8, 1987, in an attack with rocket launchers and machine guns that left 33 other persons wounded. Pakistani border guards
detained nine members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as suspects.
Exiled dissident Mohammad Hassan Mansouri, killed with a companion
at his home in Istanbul, by two gunmen, on July 25, 1987.
Ahmad Talebi, former fighter pilot in the shahs air force, shot by two assassins in Geneva, Switzerland, on September 10, 1987.
Ali and Noureddin Nabavi Tavakoli, father and son royalists, shot in their
London home on October 3, 1987.
Javad Haeri, stabbed by two men at his home in Istanbul on December 1,
1987.
Behrouz Bagheri, son of a general in the shahs army, killed by a bomb at
his shop in Paris on November 28, 1987.
Ataollah Bayahmadi, ex-colonel with military intelligence, killed in his
Dubai hotel room on June 4, 1989.
Abdulrahman Ghassemlou, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of
Iran (KDPI), ambushed at a meeting with Iranian officials in Vienna, on
July 13, 1989. Also killed in that shooting were KDPI members Abdollah
Ghaderi, Fadal Mala, and Mamoud Rassoul. Austrian police released the
suspects, then expelled them from the country.
Gholam Keshavarz, exiled member of the Worker-Communism Unity
Party of Iran, killed in Cyprus in August 1989.
Bahman Javadi, a member of Komalah (a Kurdish political party), killed
in an August 26, 1989, shooting in Cyprus that also wounded party member Youssef Rashidzadeh.
Komalah member Sadiq Kamangar, murdered at his office in Iraq on September 4, 1989.
Exiled royalist Hadj Balouch Khan, shot by members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in Taftan, Pakistan, on February 16, 1990.
Dr. Kazem Rajavi, Irans first ambassador to the United Nations after the
1979 revolution and elder brother of Massoud Rajavi, leader of the National Council of Resistance, killed in a village near Geneva, Switzerland,
on April 24, 1990.
Ali Kashefpour, a member of the KDPIs Central Committee, kidnapped in
Turkey and tortured to death on July 15, 1990.
Effat Qazi, daughter of Kurdish dissident leader Gazi Mohammed, killed
by a letter bomb addressed to her activist husband in Sweden, on September 6, 1990.
Political refugee Gholam Reza Nakhai, beaten to death in a Turkish hotel
room on October 1, 1990.
Cyrus Elahi, a member of the opposition monarchist group Derafsh-e
Kaviani (Flag of Freedom), shot at his home in Paris on October 23, 1990.
KDPI members Ahad Aqa and Khaled Hosseinpour, killed by a bomb
planted at party headquarters in Iraq on January 1, 1991.
Abdolrahman Boroumand, executive committee member of the National Resistance Movement of Iran, stabbed on a Paris street, on April 8,
1991.
Dr. Shapour Bakhtiar, last prime minister under the shah and founder of
the National Resistance Movement, stabbed to death in Paris with his secretary, Soroush Katibeh, on August 7, 1991. Killers Nasser Ghasemi Nejad
and Gholam Hossein Shoorideh Shirazi escaped to Iran, and a thirdAli
Vakili Radwas captured in Switzerland, extradited to France, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Saeed Yazdanpanah, member of the Revolutionary Union of Kurdish People, was fatally stabbed at his home in Iraq, on September 19, 1991, along
with his secretary Cyrus Katibeh.
Nareh Rafizadeh, wife and sister-in-law of exiled royal intelligence agents,
shot outside her home in New Jersey, on March 26, 1992.
Exiled dissident Seifollah Seimanpour, machine-gunned in Iraq on May 1,
1992.
KDPI member Shahpour Firouzi, shot with automatic weapons in Iraq on
May 31, 1992.
Union of Iranian Communists member Kamran Mansour Moqadam,
machine-gunned in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, on June 3, 1992.
89
90
MIRO member Ali-Akbar Ghorbani, kidnapped from his home in Istanbul on June 4, 1992, and tortured to death. Suspects in custody later confessed and led police to his grave.
Exiled singer Fereydoun Farrokhzad, beheaded at his home in Bonn, Germany, on August 8, 1992. The attackers also severed his tongue.
KDPI leader Dr. Sadeq Sharafkandi, shot with aides Homayoun Ardalan,
Fattah Abdollahi, and Nouri Dehkordi at a Berlin restaurant on September
17, 1992. Two Iranians were convicted in April 1997, and the court issued
an arrest warrant for Ali Fallahian, then Irans minister of intelligence.
Abbas Golizadeh, former bodyguard to the shah, kidnapped from home
in Istanbul on December 26, 1992, and still missing, presumed dead.
MIRO member Gholam-Hossein Kazemi, ambushed and shot while driving between the groups camps in Iraq, on January 21, 1993.
Heybatollah Naroui and Delaviz Naroui, exiled Naroui tribal chiefs from
Balochistan, killed at their home in Karachi, Pakistan, on March 9, 1993.
Mohammad Hossein Naghdi, spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, shot in Rome on March 16, 1993.
Mohammad Ghaderi, a former KDPI member, kidnapped from home in
Kirshahir, Turkey, on August 25, 1993. His mutilated corpse was found
10 days later.
KDPI member Bahram Azadifar, shot at his home in Ankara on August 28,
1993, by two men disguised as Turkish police officers.
Hossein Barazandeh, an engineer and close aide of expatriate scholar Dr.
Ali Shariati, reported missing after he left a Quran recitation session in
Mashhad on January 3, 1995. His body was found the next day, with his
death attributed to cardiac arrest, but colleagues believed he was poisoned.
Ahmad Khomeini, younger son of Iranian ruler Ayatollah Khomeini, pronounced dead from a heart attack on March 17, 1995, one month after
publicly criticizing regime hardliners. Outside observers claim the ministry of intelligence killed him with cyanide.
MIRO members Effat Haddad and Fereshteh Esfandiari, shot in Baghdad
on May 19, 1995.
Ahmad Mir Alaei, signatory of an open letter criticizing the Islamic Republic, reported missing en route to deliver a speech at the medical school
in Isfahan, on October 24, 1995. An unknown caller canceled his appearance, and Alaei was found six hours later, another victim of cardiac
arrest.
Javad Saffar and Jalal Mobinzadeh, kidnapped and killed in Mashhad,
Iran, on January 1, 1996.
Sunni cleric Dr. Ahmad Sayyad, murdered and mutilated at Bandar-Abbas,

Iran, on February 2, 1996.
MIRO members Abdul-Ali Muradi and Zahra Rajabi, shot in Istanbul on
February 20, 1996.
Sunni cleric Molavi Abdul-Malek Mollahzadeh, shot at his Karachi home
on March 4, 1996.
MIRO member Hamed Reza Rahmani, shot in Baghdad on March 7, 1996.
Exile Taher Rouhani, killed in Sulaymaniyah on March 13, 1996.
Kurdish exiles Taher Azizi, Hassan Ebrahimzadeh, Faramarz Keshavarz,
and Osman Rahimi, shot in Erbil, Iraq, on March 18, 1996.
Novelist Ghazaleh Alizadeh, strangled at home in northern Iran on
May 11, 1996, with her death initially ruled suicide.
Reza Mazlouman, deputy minister of education under the shah, shot at
his apartment in Paris on May 28, 1996.
Sunni cleric Abdolaziz Kazemi, snatched from his office at the University
of Sistan and Baluchestan on November 5, 1996, found shot to death outside Zahedan, Iran, two days later.
Sunni cleric Molla Mohammad Rabiei, killed with the injection of air bubbles to simulate a heart attack on November 30, 1996, in Kermanshah, Iran.
Opera singer Hossein Sarshar, tortured, then killed in a staged car accident at Abadan, Iran, on February 14, 1997.
Married former exiles Manouchehr Sanei and Firouzeh Kalantari, kidnapped from home in Tehran on February 17, 1997, found stabbed to
death five days later.
Poetscholar Hamid Hajizadeh, stabbed 38 times at his home in Kerman,
Iran, on September 22, 1998.
Irans Islamic Republic News Agency broke the chain murders story on
November 22, 1998, whereupon President Mohammad Khatami formed a
committee to investigate. On January 4, 1999, the ministry of intelligence issued a statement blaming the murders on a small number of irresponsible,
misguided, headstrong and obstinate staff . . . who are no doubt under the influence of rogue undercover agents and acting toward the objectives of foreign
and estranged sources when committing these criminal acts. Alleged ringleader Saeed Emami died in prison on June 19, 1999. Regime critics were not
satisfied with that conclusion.
Further Reading
Iran Watch Canada. http://moriab.blogspot.com/2006/11/these-are-people-who-have-_
116460629705367011.html.
91
92
CHARLES VII OF SWEDEN
Sahimi, Muhammad. The Chain Murders: Killing Intellectuals and Dissidents,

19881998. Frontline. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/
2011/01/the-chain-murders-killing-dissidents-and-intellectuals-19881998.html.
Victims of Serial Killings by the Information Ministry. Middle East Left Forum. http://
www.iran-bulletin.org/witness/infominlist.html.
CHARLES VII OF SWEDEN (11301167)

Murder was rife in the royal courts of 12th-century Sweden. King Charles VII
was a prime suspect in the May 1160 assassination of rival monarch Eric IX,
and his supposed accomplice in that killingKing Magnus IIwas murdered
the following year, propelling Charles onto the throne. Still, he contended
with Knut Erikson for primacy in Sweden, and Eriksons assassins overtook
Charles on the island of Visings, in Lake Vttern, on April 12, 1167. His
death continued the tradition of hostility between dynasties intent on ruling
Sweden.
Born Karl Sverkersson in southern Swedens Gtaland region, circa 1130,
Charles was the son of Sverker I, also called Sverker the Elder, who ruled as
king from 1130 until his murder on December 25, 1156. Successor Magnus
Henriksson was suspected of arranging Sverkers death, and succeeded him
on the throne. The rival House of Erik, meanwhile, coveted control of Sweden, was establishing its own monarchy north of Gtaland, in Uppsala, under
Erik Jedvardsson, also called Eric IX and Eric the Lawgiver. Eric ruled Uppsala
from 1155 until his murder on May 18, 1160, presumably by agents of Magnus and Charles. The 1161 assassination of Magnus, in turn, was viewed by
many Swedes as Charless belated vengeance for his fathers slaying five years
earlier.
If Charles believed the House of Erik had been neutralized with Eric IXs
removal, he was badly mistaken. Successor Knut Erikssonbetter known to
history as Canute Icontinued the familys struggle to unite and dominate
Sweden. Though driven into exile following his fathers death, Canute returned
in 1167 to assert authority and plot the death of Charles. With that accomplished, he faced opposition from Charless siblings Boleslaw (or Burislev) and
Kol Sverkersson. Both claimed to be king, but any homicidal rivalry between
them was forestalled by fear and hatred of Canute. Their fates are vague: historians suggest that Kol was probably assassinated by Canutes men or killed
in battle around 1170, and Boleslaw was either murdered or escaped to Poland
three years later. The Sverker line would not produce another Swedish king
until the rise of Sverker II, crowned in 1196 and slain at the Battle of Gestilren
in July 1210.
Canute, meanwhile, died peacefully from natural causes in 1195, with no
sons old enough to claim his throne. Influential courtiers chose Birger Brosa to
CHILLINGWORTH, CURTIS EUGENE
succeed Canute as Sverker II. Canutes four sons were exiled, but returned with
Norse support in 1205 to face Sverker II in the Battle of lgars. All but Erik
Knutsson died there, and he fled once again, but returned a second time with
more Norwegians in 1208, defeating Sverker II at the Battle of Lena. Crowned
Eric X thereafter, he disposed of Sverker once and for all two years later, at Gestilren. A sudden fever claimed his life in April 1216.
Further Reading
Kent, Neil. A Concise History of Sweden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Moberg, Vilhelm. A History of the Swedish People from Prehistory to the Renaissance.
Vol. 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
CHILLINGWORTH, CURTIS EUGENE

(18961955)
On the night of June 14, 1955, Judge Curtis Chillingworth and wife Marjorie
dined with friends in West Palm Beach, Florida. They left for home at 10 P.M.,
saying that they expected a carpenter to come the next morning and build a
playground for their grandchildren, at their home in Manalapan. When the
carpenter arrived at 8 A.M. on June 15, he found their front door open and
the house deserted. Judge Chillingworth missed a scheduled court hearing at
10 A.M., and police then visited his house. They found the porch light shattered, with a blood trail on a walkway to the nearby beach. Two rolls of adhesive tape were also found, one in the living room and one outside. Speculation
of an accidental double-drowning was dismissed, and robbery was ruled out
when investigators found $40 in Marjorie Chillingworths purse. Likewise, the
judges car was still outside the house, with keys in the ignition. Two years later,
with no solution in sight, a court pronounced the couple legally dead.
Curtis Chillingworth was born on October 24, 1896. He graduated from
the University of Florida in 1917 and was admitted to the state bar that same
year, then entered the U.S. Naval Academy and served as an ensign aboard the
cruiser USS Minneapolis for the duration of World War I. Upon discharge, he
practiced law with his father in West Palm Beach, then was elected as a county
judge in 1921. Two years later, he won election to the circuit court bench, a
post he held for the remainder of his life, with a hiatus for recall to active military duty during World War II.
Police were stymied on the Chillingworth case until 1959, when they heard
that career criminal Floyd Lucky Holzapfel had bragged to a friend, James
Yenzer, that he knew the persons responsible. Yenzer and policeman Jim Wilber lured Holzapfel to a Titusville hotel, plying him with liquor while detectives
eavesdropped from an adjoining room. Over three drunken days, Holzapfel admitted taking care of the Chillingworths, providing enough details to
93
94
CHINNICI, ROCCO
support his arrest on October 1, 1960. He pled guilty to double murder on

December 12, 1960, and was sentenced to death (commuted to life imprisonment in 1966). Accomplice George Bobby Lincoln, who had helped abduct
the victims, weight their bodies, and drop them at sea while still living, was
already imprisoned on a 1958 moonshine conviction. Prosecutors granted him
immunity from murder charges, in exchange for testimony against the double
murders mastermind.
That defendant was former West Palm Beach municipal judge Joseph Alexander Peel Jr., known for his association with local bootleggers and gamblers.
His hatred of Chillingsworth dated from 1953, when Chillingworth censured
Peel for representing both sides in a divorce case. A similar breach of ethics
brought him back before Judge Chillingworth in 1955, resulting in a 90-day
suspension. Furious, and fearing that Chillingworth might take steps to have
him disbarred, Peel then arranged the killings to protect himself. Jurors convicted Peel as an accessory to murder on March 30, 1961, but spared him from
the electric chair by recommending mercy. Sentenced to a double life term,
he served 18 years in Florida, then was paroled in 1979 to begin an 18-year
federal sentence resulting from an unrelated mail fraud conviction. Diagnosed
with terminal cancer in 1982, Peel was released from custody and died after
nine days of freedom. Bobby Lincoln completed his federal moonshining sentence in 1962 and vanished into obscurity.
Further Reading
Cole, Catherine, and Cynthia Young. True Crime: Florida. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2011.
McIver, Stuart. Murder in the Tropics: The Florida Chronicles. Sarasota, FL: Pineapple
Press, 1995.
CHINNICI, ROCCO (19251983)

Friday, July 29, 1983, began routinely for Chief Prosecutor Rocco Chinnici in
Palermo, Sicily. His driver waited outside Chinnicis apartment house with two
bodyguards, beside the prosecutors armored Alfa Romeo Alfetta. Chinnici left
the building, speaking briefly to concierge Stefano Li Sacchi, and was turning
toward his car when a small Fiat filled with explosives detonated at the curb.
The blast killed Chinnici, Li Sacchi, and bodyguards Salvatore Bartolotta and
Mario Trapassi, while wounding 40 others. Chinnicis chauffeur, Giovanni Paparcuri, was partly shielded by the armored Alfa Romeo, but still suffered crippling injuries.
Rocco Chinnici was born at Misilmeri, Sicily, on January 19, 1925, and earned
his law degree from the University of Palermo in 1947. After five years in private practice, he was named to serve as a magistrate in Trapani, where the bulk
CHINNICI, ROCCO
of his criminal cases involved

livestock rustling. In 1966, he
transferred to the Palermo prosecutors office, confronting mafiosi for the first time with the
Viale Lazio massacre of December 1969. Twenty-four defendants were suspected in that
case, but none were finally
convicted. Frustrated, Chinnici
sought a way to crack the Mafias code of silence through use
of informers.
As he explained the plan,
The Mafia is a way to practice politics by means of violence. . . . We live in a sick
society that doesnt recognize
the proportions of the sickness,
the gravity, the dimensions of the
disease. . . . I dont believe in Mafia bombers killed Sicilian prosecutor Rocco
the repentance of the mafioso. Chinnici in July 1983. (Associated Press)
The mafioso is a different character than the terrorist. The mafioso is an individual who always carries with him
a bent for violence and crime. He doesnt have a moral sense and therefore he
cant be repentant. However, there can be a mafioso who knows he has been sentenced to death by an enemy group. To escape the sentence, he desperately grabs
hold of the only possible force that can protect him: the state and the justice that
he has always despised. Justice is his last refuge. In that sense the mafioso can
expect a lesser punishment if decides to collaborate with justice, provided, naturally, that his contribution is effective and valid. All the better, then, to have a law
for repentant mafiosi. It wont reward moral redemption for a collaboration dictated by terror. In the end its a useful way to fight the Mafia.
Promoted to chief prosecutor in 1979, upon the murder of predecessor Cesare Terranova, Chinnici organized the Antimafia Pool, a group of investigating magistrates that included Paolo Borsellino, Giuseppe Di Lello, Giovanni
Falcone, and Leonardo Guarnotta. One of their leading targets was Michele
Greco, head of the Sicilian Mafia Commission, known as The Pope for his
ability to mediate feuds between rival mob bosses. Indicted with 14 other mafiosi on July 9, 1983, for the September 1982 murder of Carabinieri general
Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, Greco fled into hiding and plotted the eradication of his enemies. The bomb that killed Chinnici was triggered by Giuseppe
95
96
CHITUNDA, JEREMIAS K AL ANDUL A
Pino Greco, Micheles nephew and enforcer, subsequently murdered in September 1985, while still a fugitive from justice.
Police captured Michele Greco on February 20, 1986, in time for him to join
354 codefendants for a Maxi Trial in Palermo. He was convicted of ordering 78
murders, including Chinnicis, and received a life prison term on December 16,
1987. An appellate court freed Greco on February 27, 1991, but his sentence
was reinstated in February 1992. He died in prison, still claiming innocence,
on February 13, 2008.
Further Reading
Jamiesen, Alison. The Antimafia: Italys Fight against Organized Crime. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Orlando, Leoluca. Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture. Jackson, TN: Encounter Books, 2003.
Schneider, Jane, and Peter Schneider. Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia, and the
Struggle for Palermo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Seindal, Ren. Mafia: Money and Politics in Sicily 19501997. Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum Press, 1998.
Stille, Alexander. Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic.
New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
CHITUNDA, JEREMIAS KALANDULA

(19421992)
In September 1992, after 17 years of warfare between the National Union for
the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and the rival Peoples Movement
for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), Angola scheduled its first presidential
election. MPLA candidate Jos Eduardo dos Santos received 49.57 percent of
the vote, and UNITA standard-bearer Jonas Savimbi railed with 40.6 percent.
Lacking a 51-percent majority for either candidate, prevailing law demanded
a fresh round of voting, but the process collapsed with the Halloween Massacre of October 30November 2, wherein MPLA forces slaughtered scores
of UNITA supporters. One of those slain was UNITA vice president Jeremias
Chitunda, killed in Luanda when UNITA gunmen stopped his convoy on November 2, summarily executing him with party officials Aliceres Mango and
Elias Salupeto Pena. Their corpses were displayed on state-run television, but
were not returned to their families for burial.
Jeremias Chitunda was born in Chimbuelengue on February 20, 1942, and
educated in a mission school at Bela Vista, before attending Joo de Castro
College and Huambo National Secondary School. From there, he received a
scholarship to the University of Arizona at Tucson, where he earned a degree in
mining engineering. Returning to Angola in 1966, midway through his homelands war for liberation from Portugal, he joined the newly organized UNITA.
CLINTON, WILLIAM JEFFERSON
Fearing arrest by Portuguese authorities for revolutionary agitation, Chitunda

subsequently fled to Zaire, then worked in the United States, soliciting aid for
UNITA. Portuguese withdrawal in 1975 cleared the way for Chitundas return,
but it brought no cessation of violence. Civil war erupted between UNITA and
the MPLA before the end of 1975, soon involving Congolese, South African,
and Cuban troops, as well as agents of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and
their mercenaries.
Chitunda was elected as UNITAs vice president in 1986, at the partys sixth
national congress. Jos dos Santos, named as president by the MPLAs Central
Committee in September 1979, failed to suppress the fighting or prevent South
African incursions, but his welcoming of troops from Cuba prompted U.S. conservatives to back UNITA with formation of a Democratic International opposing communist influence in Angola. To balance that campaign, the Soviet Union
bankrolled MPLA rulers with an estimated $1 billion. President Ronald Reagan,
in turn, furnished cash and weapons to UNITA until December 1988, with the
United Nations dispatched a peacekeeping force to the troubled nation. The Bicesse Accords of May 1991 sought to demobilize 150,000 combatants, while
merging 50,000 UNITA and MPLA troops into a cohesive Angolan Armed Forces,
laying groundwork for the ultimately disastrous 1992 elections campaign.
After the Halloween Massacre, UNITA forces rejected conventional politics
and resumed their armed struggle against the MPLA, capturing provincial capitals Caxito, Huambo, MbanzaKongo, Ndalatando, and Uge. The civil war continued, with brief occasional ceasefires, until government troops killed Jonas
Savimbi on February 22, 2002. UNITA vice president Antnio Dembo succeeded him, then died from diabetes nine days later. Paulo Lukamba, UNITAs
secretary general, announced an end to fighting on March 13 and signed a
memorandum of understanding with the government on April 4, 2002.
Further Reading
Cohen, Herman. Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent.
London: Macmillan Press, 2000.
Fish, Bruce, and Becky Fish. Angola, 1880 to the Present: Slavery, Exploitation, and
Revolt. New York: Chelsea House, 2001.
James, W. Martin III. Historical Dictionary of Angola. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,
2011.
Weigert, Stephen. Angola: A Modern Military History, 19612002. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011.
CLINTON, WILLIAM JEFFERSON (1946 )

ATTEMPTED
Public records include three supposed assassination attempts against President
Bill Clinton during his eight years in office. The first occurred on September 12,
97
98
CLINTON, WILLIAM JEFFERSON
1994, when Maryland aircraft mechanic Frank Eugene Corder crashed a

single-engine Cessna 150 onto the south lawn of the White House. The president and his family were away from home that day. Corder died on impact, the
only casualty. No motive was advanced for the attack, and acquaintances of
Corder claimed that he had never voiced antipathy toward Clinton personally,
suggesting that the crash may have been a bungled publicity stunt. Background
investigation revealed that Cordertwice divorced, and estranged from his
third wifehad been arrested for theft in April 1993, and again for drug dealing in October 1993. He spent 90 days in a rehab facility on the latter charge,
afterward suffering from depression and thoughts of suicide.
On October 29, 1994, New Mexico native Francisco Martin Duran approached a fence overlooking the north lawn of the White House, firing
29 shots from a Chinese-made semiautomatic rifle toward a group of men
dressed in business suits. President Clinton was not among them, but was
inside the White House when the shooting occurred. Three tourists tackled Duran and disarmed him before Secret Service agents reached the scene.
An ex-convict, previously incarcerated for aggravated assault with a vehicle while serving in the U.S. Army, Duran now faced charges including attempted murder of the president, four counts of assaulting a federal officer,
illegal possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, use of an assault weapon
during a crime of violence, destruction of U.S. property, and interstate transportation of a firearm with intent to commit a felony. At trial in March 1995,
Duran pled not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming that he had tried to save
Earth by destroying an alien mist, linked to the umbilical cord of an extraterrestrial being hidden somewhere in Colorado. Prosecutors countered with
a parade of 60 witnesses who testified that Duran hated the federal government in general, and Clinton in particular. Jurors found him sane and guilty,
resulting in a 40-year sentence.
The third attempt on Clintons life reportedly occurred in November 1996,
during his visit to an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) gathering in
Manila, although it was not publicized until 2009. During Clintons Manila visit,
New York Times reporter David Sangar revealed that two terrorist bombs had
been found and defused at proposed meeting sitesone at Manilas airport, another at Subic Bay, a former U.S. Navy base where APEC members were slated
to gatherbut Sangar apparently knew nothing of a third device that narrowly
missed Clinton himself. According to author/professor Ken Gormley, in his 2009
book The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, the presidents motorcade
was about to cross a bridge in downtown Manila when a Secret Service agents
radio earpiece picked up a faint transmission including the words bridge and
weddingthe latter recognized as a code word for assassination. Clintons car
was diverted, and a bomb was found under the bridge, allegedly traced back to
the terrorist group al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden.
COLLINS, MICHAEL, JR.
Bill Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III, in Hope, Arkansas, on August 19, 1946. His father died in an auto accident before Clintons birth, and his
mother later remarried, with Clinton assuming his stepfathers surname. Scholarships enabled Clinton to attend Georgetown Universitys Edmund A. Walsh
School of Foreign Service, where he obtained a BS degree in 1968, followed by a
Rhodes Scholarship to University College, Oxford, in England. Clinton entered
Arkansas politics in 1974, losing a congressional race, then was elected as the
states attorney general (1976) and as governor (1978). Defeated by gubernatorial challenger Frank White in 1980, Clinton rebounded to win a second term,
unseating White in 1984thereby securing a reputation as the comeback kid.
Reelections as governor followed in 1986 and 1990. In 1992, Clinton defeated
incumbent President George H. W. Bush, and successfully defended that office
against challenger Bob Dole in 1996.
Despite Clintons 1996 reelection by some eight million votes in a threeparty race (including independent candidate Ross Perot), his White House tenure was beset by bitter controversy and dissension. First Lady Hillary Clinton
blamed a vast right-wing conspiracy for the attacks, and although extremist groups certainly played a role, fueled by flamboyant talk-show hosts, the
president contributed to his own difficulties as private behavior turned public.
In 1998, a Republican Congress led by Clinton foe (and presidential hopeful)
Newt Gingrich of Georgia voted to impeach Clinton for testifying falsely under
oath about a sexual affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The U.S.
Senate acquitted Clinton in February 1999, and despite that sordid episode, he
left Washington in January 2001 with the highest end-of-office approval rating of any U.S. president since World War II. Subsequent public opinion polls
rank him high among all former presidents, ranging from second to fourth in
popularity.
See also: bin Laden, Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad (19572011).
Further Reading
Gormley, Ken. The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr. New York: Crown, 2010.
Malanowski, Jamie. Did Osama Try to Kill Bill Clinton? True/Slant. December 21, 2009.
http://trueslant.com/jamiemalanowski/2009/12/21/did-osama-try-to-kill-bill-clinton.
Summary Statement of Facts (the September 12, 1994 Plane Crash and the October 29,
1994 Shooting) Background Information on the White House Security Review. http://
prop1.org/park/pave/rev6.htm.
COLLINS, MICHAEL, JR. (18901922)

On August 22, 1922, in the midst of Irelands civil war, Michael Collins
chairman of Southern Irelands provisional government and commander in
chief of its National Army, led a military convoy into County Cork, seeking
99
100
opponents from the Irish Republican Army (IRA; see sidebar). En route from
Bandon to Cork, the column stopped at the village of Balnam Blth (The
Mouth of Flowers) to ask directions, inadvertently receiving advice from
Dinny Long, an IRA supporter. Long directed Collins and his men along a
route guarded by hostile troops under Liam Deasy, an officer in the IRAs 3rd
Cork Brigade. When the ambush party opened fire at 8 P.M., Collins ordered
his men to stop and return fire. The skirmish lasted 20 minutes, and Collins
was the sole fatality, struck in the head by a rifle shot. Participants in the firefight later named the triggerman as Denis (Sonny) ONeill, a former British
army marksman turned IRA sniper.
Michael Collins was born at Sams Cross, near Clonakilty, in West County
Cork, on October 16, 1890. His father was a retired member of the Fenian
Brotherhood, which opposed British rule of Ireland in the latter part of the
19th century. On his death bed, Michael Sr. reportedly predicted that his
son would do great work for Ireland. At first, however, Michael Jr. seemed
to serve the British. Leaving school at age 15, he worked for the Royal Mail
from 1906 to 1910, then moved to London as a messenger for Horne and
Company, a stockbroking firm. Unknown to his employers, though, he
joined Londons Gaelic Athletic Association, and through it, the covert revolutionary Irish Republican Brotherhood. After a stint with J.P. Morgan &
Company in New York, he returned to Ireland in time for the Easter Rising
of April 1916.
While that revolt failed to throw off British rule, landing Collins in custody at Frongoch internment camp in Wales, he escaped execution and was
freed in December 1916, later joining in the Irish War of Independence that
began on January 21, 1919. By then, he was a leading figure in Sinn Fin (We
Ourselves), a nationalist party, and director of its paramilitary Irish Volunteers, created to secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to the
whole people of Ireland. With the outbreak of war, that group expanded to
become the IRA, battling British troops and the Black-and-Tan Royal Irish
Constabulary.
In December 1919, Britains House of Commons introduced a Better Government of Ireland Bill, proposing two Irish parliaments: one for the six
northern counties of Ulster, and another for 26 southern counties of a proposed Irish Free State. That proposal of division split public opinion in Ireland, with strongest support drawn from Ulsters Protestant majority. It also
split the IRA, one faction willing to settle for partial victory, while the other
opposed any treaty. With the war for independence still ongoing, the AntiTreaty IRA began attacks on treaty supporters in June 1922, touching off the
Irish Civil War. As a defender of the existing provisional government, Michael
Collins took the field against his former IRA comrades, and thus went to his
death. Despite ongoing opposition, the treaty dividing Ireland was ratified in
IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY (IRA)

Founded in 1919, the IRA was a descendant of the earlier Irish Republican Brotherhood, created in November 1913 and active in the Easter Rising of April 1916. The new organization, led by Michael Collins, waged
guerrilla campaigns during the Irish War of Independence (19191921),
then split with the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that severed
Northern Ireland from the Irish Free State. Supporters of the treaty followed Collins into the Irish National Army, and opponents waged a
losing civil war against their former comrades during 19221923. Thereafter, the IRA condemned both the Irish Free State and the loyalist government of Northern Ireland as tools of British imperialism. After flirting
with communism under leader Moss Twomey, between 1926 and 1937,
the IRA collaborated with Axis enemies of Great Britain during World
War II, staging sabotage attacks in England. Chief Tony Magan led a border campaign against Northern Ireland from 1952 to 1962, then relative
quiet ensued until 1969, when renewed militancy in Belfast brought another split between the official (or old) IRA (OIRA) and a new provisional IRA (PIRA). The OIRA abandoned armed struggle and focused on
politics via its party, official Sinn Fin, known since 1982 as the Workers
Party of Ireland. The PIRA remained committed to guerrilla warfare, as
Northern Irelands troubles claimed at least 3,526 lives between 1969
and 2001. An official tabulation blamed republican groups for 2,057 of
those deaths; loyalist paramilitaries claimed 1,019 victims, security forces
killed 368, and unknown perpetrators slew 82. After announcement of
a ceasefire in 2001, PIRA spokesman declared resumption of hostilities
in April 2011, declaring that they had now taken on the mantle of the
mainstream IRA. We continue to do so under the name of the Irish Republican Army. We are the IRA.
December 1922. It took another five months to conclude the civil war, but
mayhem had become an ingrained habit, continuing with troubles spanning
eight more decades.
Ranked as one of Irelands greatest popular heroes, Michael Collins has been
portrayed several times on screen and stage. Beloved Enemy, a 1936 feature
film, cast Brian Aherne as Dennis Riordan in a fictionalized version of Collinss life (including survival of the final ambush by IRA rivals). Collins had his
real name restored for The Treaty, a 1991 film for television starring Brendan
Gleeson and Michael Collins (1996), with Liam Neeson in the title role. The
Cork Opera House commissioned a musical about Collins in 2005, staged for
101
102
the first time in 2009. In the interim, playwright Mark Kenny penned Allegiance in 2006, depicting a meeting between Collins (played by Michael Fassbender) and Winston Churchill (portrayed by Mel Smith).
Further Reading
Coogan, Tim Pat. Michael Collins: The Man Who Made Ireland. Boulder, CO: Roberts
Rinehart, 1996.
Dwyer, T. Ryle. Michael Collins: The Man Who Won the War. Blackrock, Ireland: Mercier
Press, 2009.
Hittle, J.B.E. Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War: Britains Counterinsurgency Failure.
Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2011.
MacKay, James. Michael Collins: A Life. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1997.
OConnor, Frank. The Big Fellow: Michael Collins and the Irish Revolution. Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, 1965.
OConnor, Ulick. Michael Collins and the Troubles: The Struggle for Irish Freedom 19121922.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
D
DANILO I, PRINCE OF MONTENEGRO
(18261860)
On August 13, 1860, while boarding a ship at Kotor, Montenegro, Prince
Danilo I was shot and fatally wounded by Todor Kadic,
a chief of the Bjelopavlici
tribe. Danilo died the following day, and although Kadic refused to explain the
killing, various theories were advanced. Some authors claim that Kadic was
enraged by Danilos adulterous affair with Kadi c s wife. Others claim he acted
to avenge atrocities committed on his kinsmen by Danilos troops. Another
theory claims that Austrian authorities recruited him to kill Danilo, fearing that
the prince would forge an alliance with Russian czar Alexander II. The truth
remains obscure.
A native of Njegui, born on June 29, 1871, Danilo was born into the House
of Petrovic-Njego,
hereditary rulers of Montenegro from 1696 to 1918. In October 1851, with the death of vladika (prince-bishop) Petar II Petrovic-Njego,
the senate proclaimed Petar IIs elder brother, Pero Tomov Petrovic,
to succeed
him. Danilo trumped that choice with popular appeal, having negotiated peace
between the warring Crmnica and Katunjani tribes, thereby winning recognition from all Serb bratzvos (clans) except the contentious Bjelopavlici.
At the
same time, he secured endorsement from Russian emperor Nicholas I and was
ordained as vladika Danilo II in Vienna, Austria. Returning to Montenegro in
1852, Danilo accommodated senators by permitting Montenegros change to a
secular principality, whereupon he became knyaz (prince) Danilo I.
That same year, he declared war on the Ottoman Empire, which claimed
jurisdiction over Montenegro. That struggle dragged on for seven years, ending in Montenegrin victory when Danilos elder brother, Grand Duke Mirko
Petrovic-Njego,
routed a superior Turkish force at the Battle of Grahovac

(April 28May 1, 1858). That victory compensated for Montenegros defeat in
the Crimean War of 18531856, achieving de facto independence from Turkey. Danilo sought to strengthen his position through alliance with France,
negotiating payments of 200,000 francs per year from Napoleon III, but those
overtures alienated Russia and troubled Austria, both longtime enemies of
France. On the home front, Danilo ruled as a sometimes brutal autocrat, imposing heavy taxes and dispatching brother Mirko with orders not only to slay
all leaders but also to kill even the babies in cradles among tribes that failed
104
DAOUD KHAN, MOHA M MED
to pay up. The Bjelopavlici

who had failed to back Danilo in the power play in
1851 were hardest hit.
Such policiesand his outwitting of the senates plan to crown Pero Tomov
Petrovicraised
an army of domestic enemies, with senate president ordije
Petrovic chief among them. A plot was organized to oust Danilo and replace
him with exiled rival Stevan Perovic Cuca, but Danilo sent assassins to kill
Cuca in Istanbul. He failed to reckon with the vengeful Bjelopavlici,
though,
and thereby met his end.
Nephew Nikola Mirkov Petrovic-Njego
succeeded Danilo as Prince Nicholas I, pursuing a series of administrative, educational, and military reforms.
In 1900, he proclaimed himself Montenegros first (and only) king. Five years
later, bowing to popular pressure, he granted the nation its first constitution.
Deposed and exiled in 1918, Nicholas maintained his futile claim to the throne
until his death, in Antibes, in March 1921.
Further Reading
Boehm, Christopher. Blood Revenge: The Enactment and Management of Conflict in Montenegro and Other Tribal Societies. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984.
Morrison, Kenneth. Montenegro: A Modern History. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009.
Roberts, Elizabeth. Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2007.
Stevenson, Francis. A History of Montenegro. London: Jarrold & Sons, 1914.
DAOUD KHAN, MOHAMMED (19091978)

On April 27, 1978, the communist Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan
(PPDA) joined military units in an uprising against President Mohammed
Daoud Khan. An armored column attacked the ministry of defense and ministry of interior at noon, in downtown Kabul, followed by airborne rocket attacks
on Daouds palace. Surrounded by the early hours of April 28, President Daoud
faced demands for his surrender. Rather than submit, Daoud and his brother
Naim burst from the palace, firing pistols, and were cut down in a storm of bullets. His death was not acknowledged; rather, the assassins claimed that Daoud
had resigned for health reasons. Thirty years elapsed before discovery of two
mass graves in Kabuls District 12, Pul-e-Charkhi, on June 28, 2008. Diggers
found 16 bodies in one pit, 12 in the other. On December 4, 2008, the Afghan
health ministry reported that Daoud had been identified from dental records
and a small golden Quran presented to him by King Khalid of Saudi Arabia.
Daoud received a belated state funeral on March 17, 2009.
The eldest son of Prince Mohammed Aziz Khan, nephew of King Mohammed Nadir Shah, Daoud was born in Kabul on July 18, 1909. He was 24 when
an assassin killed his father in Berlin. A short time later, in November 1933,
DAOUD KHAN, MOHAMMED
President Mohammed Daoud Khan of Afghanistan, killed during a military coup. (Associated Press)
the king was also murdered, in Kabul. Daoud was thereafter tutored in politics
by an uncle, Prince Hashim Khan, and studied in France. He served two terms
as governor of the Eastern Province, in 19341935 and 19381939, with an
intervening term as governor of Kandahar. In 1939, as a lieutenant general,
he assumed command of the Kabul Army Corps, holding that post until his
promotion to minister of defense (19461948), ambassador to France (1948),
then minister of the interior (19491951). Back in uniform by 1951, he served
as commander of the Central Forces in Kabul until September 1953, when he
began a decade as prime minister.
As prime minister, Daoud courted antagonism with his plan to reunite the
Pashtun people (ethnic Afghans) of Pakistan with their ancestral homeland,
a move that simultaneously angered Pakistan and worried non-Pashtun minorities in Afghanistan, such as the Tajiks and Uzbeks. Pakistan closed its borders with Afghanistan in 1961, damaging the Afghan economy and pushing
Daouds regime into closer alliance with the Soviet Union as the countrys foremost trading partner. In 1962, armed with Russian tanks, planes, and artillery, Daoud invaded Pakistans Bajaur region, but was repulsed by superior
forces. That crisis was defused with Daouds forced resignation in March 1963,
105
106
DELGADO CHALBAUD GMEZ, CARLOS
whereupon Pakistan reopened its border for trade. Daouds brother-in-law,

King Mohammed Zahir Shah moved to prevent any future repetition of the
problem in 1964, promulgating a new constitution that barred royal family
members from Afghanistans Council of Ministers.
Daoud bided his time, then deposed King Zahir in a bloodless coup on
July 17, 1973. Instead of claiming title as the shah, however, he declared Afghanistan a republic, with himself as president. Where Zahirs constitution
provided for separation of powers and popular election of legislators, Daoud
established the Loya Zirga (Grand Assembly), with most of its members appointed. By 1976, while promoting a proxy guerrilla war with Pakistan, Daoud
faced a rising Islamic fundamentalist movement led by exiled clerics, aided
openly by Pakistani prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In 1978, Daoud began
severing ties with the PPDA, and thereby sowed the seeds of revolution that
destroyed him and his family.
Afghan Air Force colonel Abdul Qadir Dagarwal ruled Afghanistan during
the coup, from April 27 to 30, 1978, then was replaced by Nur Muhammad
Taraki, chairman of the PPDAs Revolutionary Council. Taraki was assassinated
on September 14, 1979, by order of successor Hafizullah Amin, who was in
turn killed three months later, as Soviet troops occupied Afghanistan.
Further Reading
Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. Little America: The War within the War for Afghanistan. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
Ewans, Sir Marti. Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics. New York:
Harper Perennial, 2002.
Feifer, Gregory. The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.
Freedman, Lawrence. A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East. New York:
Public Affairs, 2008.

(19091950)
Venezuelan president Carlos Delgado Chalbaud left home for his office as usual
on November 13, 1950, but he was stopped en route by several carloads of gunmen, some 20 in all. The attackers drove Delgado, an aide, and his chauffeur to
an abandoned house, where, as authorities later explained, the president was
brutally slugged and shot at least six times. His aide was also wounded but
survived, and the chauffeur was left unharmed. Agents of Venezuelas National
Security Directorate tracked ringleader Rafael Simon Urbina to the Nicaraguan
embassy, where he had taken refuge, and arrested him, reporting on November 14 that he had been shot dead in a scuffle with a prison guard. A second
suspect died in custody on November 16, sparking rumors of conspiracy and
cover-up by Venezuelas ruling military junta. By November 24, police had

captured 28 suspects, 23 of whom were formally indicted on March 27, 1951.
A native of Caracas, born on January 20, 1909, Carlos Delgado Chalbaud
fled to Paris with his family at age four, when dictator Juan Vicente Gmez imprisoned his father. Released in 1927, Roman Chalbaud joined his wife and
children in Paris, plotting with other Venezuelan exiles to depose Gmez. Carlos joined in an abortive invasion, on August 11, 1929, but his father died
in battle and Delgado retreated to Paris, where he earned a degree in engineering and married a Romanian communist. President Gmez died in December 1935, and Delgado returned to Venezuela after completing studied at
the School of War of Versailles. He joined the Military Engineering Service in
1938, and advanced to command of an engineering battalion in 1941.
Four years later, in October 1945, Delgado joined in a coup dtat that deposed President Isaas Medina Angarita, emerging as a member of the sevenman military junta ruling Venezuela under leader Rmulo Betancourt Bello.
Successor Rmulo Gallegos Freire retained Delgado as minister of defense in
February 1948, but Delgado was unsatisfied. He led another coup nine months
later, on November 24, unseating Gallegos and naming himself president of a
new three-man junta, with Marcos Prez Jimnez and Luis Llovera Pez.
Early in 1950, Delgado opened dialogue with various opponents of his
military regime, ostensibly seeking an accord between the army and various
political parties to permit open elections. The move may have troubled his
co-rulers in Caracas. Although they blamed Delgados kidnapping and accidental murder on rebels led by Rafael Urbina and his nephew Domingo,
some observers named Marcos Prez Jimnez as the mastermind of the assassination. Others countered that assertion by noting that Prez was married to
a cousin of Delgado, suggesting that the family association would have ruled
out a conspiracy.
In any case, Prez ruled Venezuelas junta until December 1952, when he
took office as provisional president. Officially inaugurated as president in
April 1953, he held that post until January 1958, when he was succeeded by
Rmulo Betancourt (subsequently dubbed The Father of Venezuelan Democracy). Prez fled to the United States in 1959, accused of embezzling some
$200 million. He fought extradition until 1963, then was convicted, his prison
term commuted to exile in Spain. Venezuelas voters elected him to a senate
seat in 1968, but his would-be colleagues swiftly passed a law excluding convicted felons from public office. Prez remained in Spain and died there in
2001, at age 87.
Further Reading
Scheina, Robert. Latin Americas Wars Volume II: The Age of the Professional Soldier,
19002001. Dulles, VA: Brasseys, Inc., 2003.
107
108
DELIGIANNIS, THEODOROS
Tarver, H. Michael, and Julia Frederick. The History of Venezuela. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005.
Trinkunas, Harold. Crafting Civilian Control of the Military in Venezuela: A Comparative
Perspective. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
DELIGIANNIS, THEODOROS (18201905)

At 5:00 P.M. on June 13, 1905, Prime Minister Theodoros Deligiannis arrived
by carriage at the Greek Chamber of Deputies in Athens. An unfamiliar man
approached the vehicle, saluted Deligiannis, and opened his door. As Deligiannis thanked the man, his greeter pulled a long knife from beneath his coat
and plunged it into the prime ministers abdomen. Police swarmed the assailant
and disarmed him, and aides took Deligiannis to a nearby Red Cross station,
but attempts to stop his bleeding proved futile and he died at 7:30 P.M. A lynch
mob gathered, bent on hanging the assassin, but police secured him in prison.
Identified as a professional gambler named Gherakaris, the attacker confessed
to slaying Deligiannis in retaliation for passage of a recent anti-gaming statute.
Theodoros Deligiannis was born at Lagkadia, a mountain village in northwestern Arcadia, on January 2, 1820. He studied law in Athens, and in 1843
joined the ministry of the interior, advancing by 1859 to the post of permanent secretary. Three years later, King Otto appointed him minister of foreign
affairs. That led to a Parisian posting in 1867, and Deligiannis allied himself
with Alexandros Koumoundouros, founder (in 1865) of the Nationalist Party.
Their chief opponent was Charilaos Trikoupis, publisher of the anti-royalist
newspaper Whos to Blame? and founder (in 1873) of the liberal New Party.
Constantly at odds, Koumoundouros and Trikoupis served alternating terms as
prime minister from 1875 to 1882. When Koumoundouros resigned in February 1883, Deligiannis claimed leadership of the National Party, declaring himself against everything Trikoupis was for. A champion of nationalism and
Greek territorial expansion, he capitalized on unfolding military events and
economic crises to win office as prime minister in May 1885.
The seesaw struggle for control of government continued. Dimitrios Valvis
briefly succeeded Deligiannis in May 1886, before Trikoupis took office once
more. Deligiannis recaptured the office in November 1890, then was voted
out again in March 1892. He served a third term between June 1895 and April
1897, then returned for his fourthand laston December 6, 1902. He is
remembered today for grandiose schemesthreatening Turkey over boundary disputes in 1885, declaring war in 1897, building up Greek military forces
to the point that worried neighbor nations mounted blockades at Piraeus and
other ports to prevent importation of armsbut he never seemed to grasp
the need for balance between aspiration and economy. Intensely controversial,
nearly bankrupt at his death, he left two nieces who resided with him destitute, until his party voted pensions to support them.
DESSALINES, JEAN-JACQUES
Dimitrios Rallis succeeded Deligiannis, serving six months as prime minister

before the New Party regained control in Athens, under Georgios Theotokis.
Rallis bounced back for another term in July 1909, but was deposed a month
later by a coup dtat that established control by a Military League, composed
of 1,300 soldiers furious and mortified by Greek defeats since 1895.
Further Reading
Clogg, Richard. A Concise History of Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002.
Keridis, Dimitris. Historical Dictionary of Modern Greece. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
Press, 2009.
Woodhouse, C. M. Modern Greece: A Short History. Chatham, United Kingdom:
Mackays, 1998.
DESSALINES, JEAN-JACQUES (17581806)

On October 17, 1806, while leading troops to fight a band of rebels, Haitian
dictator Jean-Jacques Dessalinesself-styled emperor Jacques Iwas killed at
Pont Larnage (now Pont-Rouge), north of Port-au-Prince. Several contradictory accounts describe his death, one claiming he was lured to the home of
successor Alexandre Sabs Ption and murdered there, whereas another says
he was ambushed on the road and shot. A third version says Dessalines was
arrested and beaten to death by his captors. A fourth claims he was hacked and
stabbed to death by his own mutinous soldiers, after which a peasant mob dismembered his corpse and dumped the remains in Government Square.
As with his death, the birth of Jean-Jacques Dessalines is subject to dispute.
Some biographers contend that he was born in Africa, transported as a slave to
French-owned Saint-Domingue; others insist he was born on the island to enslaved parents, on September 20, 1758. Known in his youth as Jean-Jacques Duclos, a name ostensibly adopted by his father from their mutual owner, Duclos/
Dessaline spent his early life on a plantation near Grande-Rivire-du-Nord. Rising
to the rank of foreman on the Duclos plantation by age 30, he was then purchased
by a free black man named Dessalines, and adopted his new masters surname.
Three years later, in 1791, Dessalines joined in the slave rebellion led by
Georges Biassou and Jean-Franois Papillon at Plaine du Nord, the first uprising in what soon became the Haitian Revolution. He soon met rebel military
commander Toussaint Brda, later called Toussaint Louverture, and allied with
Spanish forces from neighboring Hispaniola against the French. When France
abolished slavery in May 1794, Louverture shifted allegiance to the French
Republic, battling Spain and Britain. Biassou and Papillon opposed him, but
Dessalines fought with Louverture, attaining the rank of brigadier general in
his army by 1799. In 1801, he crushed an insurrection by Louvertures own
nephew and second-in-command, General Moyse, earning a reputation as a
109
110
D E S S A L I N E S, J E A N -J AC Q U E S
warrior who granted his enemies no quarter. That March, Toussaint convened
a constitutional assembly, and by July had forged a document that made him
president for life, while reaffirming loyalty to France.
In Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte felt pressure to restore slavery in SaintDomingue. In December 1801, he sent his brother-in-law, General Charles
Leclerc, to restore French control on the island. Leclerc arrived with 40,000
troops in February 1802, arrested Louverture in May, and shipped him back to
France, where he later died in prison. Yellow fever killed Leclerc in November,
leaving Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, vicomte de Rochambeau, in command of French forces. Dessalines defeated Rochambeau in November 1803,
at Vertires, and Napoleons army surrendered on December 4.
Dessalines declared Saint-Dominguenow Haitian independent nation
on January 1, 1804. The following month, he launched a campaign to eradicate the islands white minority, killing at least 3,000 persons (some accounts
say 5,000, including 1,700 whites and various loyal servants) by April 22,
when the campaign ceased. On September 22, Dessalines named himself as
emperor, with his official coronation occurring at Cap-Franais on October 6.
A constitution, published on May 20, 1805, established him as emperor for life
with the right to name his successor.
Under Dessaliness reign, whites were forbidden to own property, and a
harsh regimen of caporalisme agraire (agrarian militarism) was imposed, requiring that all black males work either as soldiers or plantation laborers. Dessalines also retained strict control of foreign trade, specifically export of sugar
and coffee, favoring British and American buyers over French. Dissension simmered until 1806, when conspirators Alexandre Ption and Henri Christophe
succeeded in eliminating Dessalines.
After the assassination, Ption and Christophe suffered a falling out. Both
hoped to rule in the late emperors place, resulting in the division of Haiti in
1810. Ption ruled the southern Republic of Haiti as president (transformed
to president for life in 1816), and Christophe proclaimed himself king of the
northern kingdom of Haiti. Ption suspended his realms legislature in 1818,
while seizing plantations from the landed gentry and granting parcels to peasants, a tactic that earned him the label Papa Bon-Cur (Good-hearted Father). Ption died from yellow fever in March 1818, succeeded by president
for life Jean-Pierre Boyer, and King Christophe committed suicide in October
1820. Haiti was reunified that same month, with full independence recognized
by France in 1825.
Although widely reviled in life for his despotic rule, Jean-Jacques Dessalines was rehabilitated in the early 20th century, emerging as a national icon.
The city of Dessalines is named in his honor, as is Haitis national anthem, La
Dessalinienne (The Dessalines Song). His great-grandson, Cincinnatus Leconte,
ruled briefly as president from August 1911 to August 1912.
DEVI, PHOOLAN
Further Reading
Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Girard, Philippe. Haiti: The Tumultuous HistoryFrom Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken
Nation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Girard, Philippe. The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence 18011804. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011.
Nicholls, David. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in
Haiti. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
Popkin, Jeremy. You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery.
DEVI, PHOOLAN (19632001)

On July 25, 2001, three gunmen lay in wait outside a home on Ashoka Road
in New Delhi, India. Their target was Phoolan Devi, a notorious former outlaw,
serving since 1996 as a member of the Lok Sabha (House of the People, the
lower house of Indias parliament). As her car arrived, the shooters opened fire,
killing Devi and wounding Balender Singh before escaping in
an auto-rickshaw. Suspect Sher
Singh Rana later surrendered
in Dehradun and confessed his
role in the slaying, claiming he
acted to avenge 22 fellow clan
members killed by Devis former gang of outlaws at Behmai,
in 1981.
Phoolan Devi was born on
August 10, 1963, in the Jalaun district of Uttar Pradesh, a
member of Indias mallah (boatmen) caste. Forced into marriage at age 11, to a man of very
bad character, she suffered incessant domestic abuse while
pursuing a financial quarrel
with a cousin who dominated
her family. He accused her of
theft at age 16, and she spent
three days in jail, reportedly
beaten and gang-raped by po- Bandit Queen Phoolan Devi, killed while serving
lice. Later that same year, 1979, in Indias parliament. (AFP/Getty Images)
111
112
DEVI, PHOOL AN
she joined a gang of dacoits (bandits) and married its leader, Vikram Mallah.
The band soon raided her ex-husbands home and left him near death, with a
letter threatening other men who married young girls.
From that point, Devi joined enthusiastically in bandit raids across Uttar
Pradesh and neighboring Madhya Pradesh, robbing trains, looting high-caste
villages, and kidnapping wealthy victims for ransom. Over time, a rift developed between gang members of the mallah caste and rival Thakur Rajputs,
considered divine by some elements of Indian society. In September 1979,
Thakar brothers Shri and Lala Ram killed Vikram Mallah, seized control of
the gang, and left Devi at Behmai, where she endured three weeks of rape and
torture by their fellow clansmen. Upon escaping, she built a new gang and set
off on a quest for revenge, pursing Shri and Lala Ram while killing any other
men she met along the way, suspected of abusing women or children. Whenever I heard of it, Devi explained, I crushed the serpent they used to torture
women. I dismembered them.
On February 14, 1981, Devi returned to Behmai with her gang, disguised as
police; the gang executed 22 Thakur men and looted the village. She eluded police for two years, forcing the resignation of Vishwanath Singh, chief minister of
Uttar Pradesh, then surrendered in February 1983 on condition that she would
not face execution. Charged with 48 criminal counts, Devi spent 11 years in jail
awaiting trial; she was released in 1994, when Chief Minister Mulayam Singh
Yadav dismissed all charges. A film released that same year, Bandit Queen, dramatized Devis life and elevated her to folk hero status, although she protested
its inaccuracies and even threatened suicide until producers paid her 40,000.
In 1996, Devi won election to the Lok Sabha from Mirzapur, in Uttar Pradesh,
as a member of the Bharatiya Janata (Indian Peoples) Party, vowing to protect
the weaker sections of society. Her candidacy and successful reelection bid
in 1999 were bitterly opposed by widows of the Behmai massacre, and on
a broader scale by the Kshatriya Swabhimaan Andolan Samanvay Committee (KSASC), representing the military and ruling elite of the Vedic-Hindu social system. Ostensibly repulsed by the election of a once-indicted felon, the
KSASC also opposed Devis commitment to providing drinking water, electricity, schools, and hospitals to the poor, further exacerbated by her stand on
equal rights and opportunities for women.
The course of justice for Devis killers has been as slow and tortuous as her
own prosecution for the Behmai massacre (still officially unsolved at this writing, with a score of suspects awaiting trial). Sher Singh Rana escaped from
jail on February 17, 2004, with aid from an accomplice dressed as a policeman, and was not recaptured until April 20, 2006. Another suspect in Devis
assassination, Shravan Kumar, was not arrested until July 2004. Their longdelayed trial was transferred to a fast track court in January 2009, but was
still ongoing three years later. On January 24, 2012, Sher Singh Rana received
I N I C , Z O R A N
official permission to campaign from his jail cell, for a seat in the Uttar Pradesh
Assembly.
Further Reading
Devi, Phoolan. The Bandit Queen of India. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2006.
Sen, Mala. Indias Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
Shears, Richard, and Isobelle Gidley. Devi: The Bandit Queen. London: Allen & Unwin,
1984.
I N I C , Z O R A N ( 1 9 5 2 2 0 0 3 )
Serbian prime minister Zoran indi
c had official business to perform on
March 12, 2003, specifically a meeting with Anna Lindh, Swedens minister of
foreign affairs, and colleague Jan Karlsson, minister for development cooperation, migration, and asylum policy. Despite an attempt on his life three weeks
earlier, indi
c chose to walk from his home in Belgrade to the National Assembly building, accompanied only by bodyguard Milan Veruovic.
At 12:23 P.M.,
Zvezdan Jovanovica
police lieutenant colonel and ex-member of the Serbian

armys Red Beret Special Operations Unitfired on the pair with a snipers
rifle from a window 195 yards distant. indi
c died an hour later, at a local
hospital, and Veruovic survived his stomach wound. Arrested on March 25,
Jovanovic admitted killing indi
c,
describing his victim as a traitor to Serbia.
A native of Bosanskiamac, Yugoslavia (now Bosnia and Herzegovina), born
on August 1, 1952, Zoran indi
c traveled widely with his family, due to his fathers assignments as an officer in the Yugoslav Peoples Army. Finally settled in
the capital, he earned a degree in philosophy from the University of Belgrade in
1974. Already drawn to politics, he was convicted for his role in organizing an
independent (noncommunist) students movement. Chancellor Willy Brandy
persuaded Yugoslavian authorities to release indi
c and permit his emigration
to West Germany, where he continued his studies and earned a PhD in philosophy from the University of Konstanz in 1979.
indi
c returned to Yugoslavia a decade later, to accept a teaching post at
the University of Novi Sad, and in December 1989 participated in the foundation of the Democratic Party. He was elected to parliament in 1990, then
served as Belgrades first noncommunist mayor of the postwar era, from February to September 1997. Democrats, with indi
c as their president, boycotted that years presidential election, watching from the sidelines as Yugoslavia
disintegrated under President Slobodan Miloevic.
Named by Time magazine in
1999 as one of Europes most important politicians, indi
c was photographed
shaking hands with U.S. president Bill Clinton while NATO forces bombed his
homeland. indi
c was jailed and tried in secret that July on charges of endangering state security.
113
114
I N I C , Z O R A N
Meanwhile, nearly lost in the regions nightmare of civil war and ethnic
cleansing, Yugoslavia suffered a series of assassinations: Defense Minister
Pavle Bulatovic on February 7, 2000; Socialist Party officer ika Petrovic on
April 26, 2000; and ex-president Ivan Stambolic on August 25, 2000. Those
deaths and others were later blamed on Red Berets, acting in concert with the
Zemun Clan, a Belgrade organized-crime family.
indi
c played a leading role in the so-called Bulldozer Revolution that
unseated President Miloevic in October 2000, and thereafter he was chosen as prime minister, assuming office on January 25, 2001. He advocated
pro-democratic reforms and opposed civic corruption, a stance that placed
him at odds with the Zemun Clan and their Red Beret allies. On February 7,
2003, Zemun Clan member Dejan Milenkovic tried to ram indi
cs car with
a truck in New Belgrade, but indi
c escaped injury. A friendly judge released
Milenkovic,
explaining that he was a salesman whose absence imperiled his
business.
Serbian police continued their hunt for conspirators after Zvezdan Jovanovic
confessed to shooting indi
c.
On March 27, 2003, officers killed Zemu Clan
members Dusan Spasojevic and Mile Lukovic in a Belgrade suburb, during a
fierce shootout with automatic weapons. Roughly 1,000 other suspects were
detained, including Red Berets and members of Serbias secret police. Suspicion
quickly focused on Red Beret ex-commander Milorad Ulemek, alleged ringleader of the plots to kill indi
c and Ivan Stambolic,
as well as a bungled attempt to slay Serb opposition leader Vuk Drakovic in October 1999 and June
2000. Suspect Aleksandar Simovic was not apprehended until November 2006.
Finally, on May 23, 2007, Belgrade's High Court Special Department for
Criminal Acts of Organised Crime convicted Ulemek, Simovic,
and 10 other
defendants on charges of murdering indi
c. Ulemek and Zvezdan Jovanovic
received 40-year prison terms, and the othersincluding five still at large,
tried in absentiadrew sentences ranging from 8 to 35 years.
Anna Lindh, the Swedish minister of foreign affairs (and presumed future
prime minister), was herself assassinated on September 10, 2003, by an attacker who stabbed her repeatedly as she shopped, unprotected, in the ladies department of Stockholms Nordiska Kompaniet department store. Her
slayinglike that of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986remains officially unsolved.
Further Reading
Cox, John. The History of Serbia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Gagnon, V. P. Jr. The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca, NY:
Judah, Tim. The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia. New Haven, CT:
DOE, SAMUEL KANYON
Stojanovic, Svetozar. Serbia: The Democratic Revolution. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books,
2003.
DOE, SAMUEL KANYON (19511990)

On September 9, 1990, in the midst of an apparent losing battle against rebel
forces bent on toppling his government, Liberian president Samuel Doe visited
leaders of the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group
in Monrovia, Liberias capital. Guerrillas led by rival Prince Yormie Johnson
raided the meeting and captured Doe, dragging him off to a site where he was
tortured prior to execution. Johnson later denied participation in the murder, but a videotape of the eventbroadcast worldwide in the wake of Does
assassinationshowed Johnson sipping from a can of beer while soldiers severed the presidents ear. Johnson briefly claimed the presidency after killing
Doe, then fled to Nigeria when fellow rebel leader Charles Taylor emerged as
the nations dominant strongman.
Born at Tuzon, on May 6, 1951, Samuel Doe was a member of the Krahn
tribe, one of several indigenous groups that had been dominated by AmericoLiberian rulers since Liberia was founded in 1847, as a homeland for American ex-slaves and free-born blacks. Dissatisfaction with that system prompted
Doea master sergeant in the armyto lead a coup dtat against President
William R. Tolbert Jr., on April 12, 1980. Establishing himself as Liberias first
indigenous leaderChairman of the Peoples Redemption CouncilDoe inaugurated a reign of terror against his opponents. Within days, he jailed 91 True
Whig Party members, publicly executing 13 on charges of high treason, rampant corruption and gross violation of human rights. Hundreds more fled the
country, rather than face trial without legal representation before a court-martial.
He suspended Liberias constitution, then sought to legitimize his regime by
promulgating a new one in 1984, promising free elections the following year.
That fraudulent contest, condemned by observers from various other nations, climaxed with Does election as president. Inaugurated on January 6,
1986, he continued on a path of corruption and cronyism favoring fellow
Krahn tribesmen, which bred dissatisfaction both at home and overseas. Civil
war erupted when Charles Taylordisgruntled over his dismissal from Does
government on charges of embezzlementraised an army of ethnic Gios and
Manos in Cte dIvoire, operating as the National Patriotic Front of Liberia,
and invaded Nimba County on December 24, 1989. Does army retaliated with
a scorched-earth campaign against the countys population, further inflaming
his opposition. By September 1990, Doe controlled only a small part of Liberia, centered around the capital, and that hold was demolished by his death.
Liberias civil war dragged on until August 1996, claiming more than 200,000
lives before various factions agreed to disarm and permit free elections in July
1997. Taylor and his National Patriotic Party crushed 12 rivals in that contest,
115
116
D O E, SA M U E L K A N YO N
AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY (ACS)

Organized in 1816 as the Society for the Colonization of Free People of
Color of America, the ACS counted among its founders such early 19thcentury luminaries as future secretary of state Henry Clay, Congressman
and future U.S. minister to Russia John Randolph, Congressman Charles
Fenton Mercer, and former congressman Richard Bland Lee. Their stated
purpose was the return of free blacks to Africa as a means of gradually eradicating slavery through voluntary deportation. Committed as he
was to compromise between free and slave states to preserve the Union,
Henry Clay and his associates encouraged repatriation of African Americans who had never before set foot in Africa, and to that end helped
found the colony of Liberia in 1821, promoted to the status of an independent republic in 1847. Future president Abraham Lincoln, an admirer of Clay, initially supported the ACS program, but later admitted,
in 1854, that its slow progress offered little hope for ending slavery. The
ACS continued its efforts after Americas civil war, shipping more than
13,000 black Americans to Liberia by 1867. It published a journal, the
African Repository and Colonial Journal, until 1919, and did not formally
disband until 1964.
winning 75 percent of the vote from a populace hoping for peace. Instead, they
found themselves dwelling in a pariah state, as Taylor used blood diamonds
and illegal timber exports to finance the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra
Leones civil war. Bloodshed resumed in Liberia during April 1999, when exiles
fighting as the Organization of Displaced Liberians invaded the country from
Guinea. In June 2003, the Special Court for Sierra Leone indicted Charles Taylor for war crimes. Taylor resigned in August and fled to Nigeria, but he was
captured in March 2006 and convicted at The Hague on April 26, 2012.
Meanwhile, Prince Johnson returned to Liberia in March 2004, but left
again in April, citing death threats. He won a senate seat from Nimba County
in 2005, and sought the presidency in 2011, but failed to unseat incumbent
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
See also: Tolbert, William Richard, Jr. (19131980).
Further Reading
Ellis, Stephen. The Mask of Anarchy Updated Edition: The Destruction of Liberia and the
Religious Dimension of an African Civil War. New York: New York University Press,
2006.
DOLLFUSS, ENGELBERT
Meredith, Martin. The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence. New
Waugh, Colin. Charles Taylor and Liberia: Ambition and Atrocity in Africas Lone Star
State. London: Zed Books, 2011.
Williams, Gabriel. Liberia: The Heart of Darkness. Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2006.
DOLLFUSS, ENGELBERT (18921934)

On July 25, 1934, the outlawed Austrian Nazi Party staged a coup dtat against
the Austrian government led by Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. Disguised as
soldiers and police, 154 members of the Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron)
invaded the chancellery building and shot Dollfuss, and the remainder of his
cabinet escaped unharmed. Another group of putschists seized a Viennese radio station and broadcast a false report that Dollfuss had ceded authority to
Nazi leader Anton Rintelen.
Two days of fighting ensued,
claiming 250 lives and injuring at least 500 persons. Four
thousand Nazis were detained,
of whom 13 were later hanged,
and 7 more committed suicide.
Others escaped to Germany
and Yugoslavia.
Engelbert Dollfuss was born
on October 4, 1892, in Texing,
Lower Austria, to an unwed
mother who never named his
father. After education at a
Roman Catholic seminary, he
studied law at the University
of Vienna, then economics at
the University of Berlin. Initially rejected by the AustroHungarian army in World War I,
due to his short stature, he
was finally accepted for combat in Italy, where he was decorated for valor, then captured
in 1918. With arrival of the
armistice, he joined the rightwing Christian-Social Party. He
took over Austrias ministry of Nazi terrorists killed Austrian chancellor Engelbert
agriculture as secretary to the Dollfuss in July 1934. (Associated Press)
117
118
DUBS, ADOLPH
farmers association, and was elevated to serve as director of Lower Austrias

Chamber of Agriculture in 1927. Three years later, he became president of
Austrian Federal Railways, then switched again in 1931 to serve as minister of
agriculture and forests.
In May 1932, following the resignation of Chancellor Karl Buresch, President Wilhelm Miklas offered the post to Dollfuss. After a night of prayer and
fasting, Dollfuss accepted leadership of a coalition government involving four
contentious parties and faced with an economic crisis in the middle of the Great
Depression. In March 1933, after a quarrel over voting procedures prompted
leaders of parliaments lower house to resign in protest, Dollfuss persuaded
President Miklas to adjourn the legislature indefinitely, fielding police to bar its
members from returning. Henceforth, he ruled as dictator of Austria, mingling
church and state in a system that outsiders dubbed Austrofascism. On May 1,
1934, he proclaimed a one-party government led by the Vaterlndische Front
(Fatherlands Front).
By that time, Dollfuss faced a challenge from Austrian Nazis loyal to Adolf
Hitlers Third Reich. Dollfuss banned the native Nazis paramilitary Republikanischer Schutzbund (Republican Protection League) in June 1933; a fourday civil war erupted in February 1934, with estimated death tolls ranging
from 242 to 1,118. Authorities crushed the Nazi revolt, executing 10 of its
leaders, but the conflict between fascist factions continued, culminating in the
abortive July coup of 1934.
An estimated 500,000 of Austrias 6.5 million citizens attended funeral services for Dollfuss in Vienna. Vice Chancellor Ernst Rdiger Starhemberg briefly
succeeded Dollfuss, then ceded power to Kurt Schuschnigg on July 29, 1934,
while returning to his normal duties. Supported by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, French foreign minister Pierre Laval, and British prime minister Ramsay
MacDonald, Schuschnigg ruled Austria through the Stresa Front until German troops invaded and annexed Austria in March 1938.
Further Reading
Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. Prelude to Infamy: The Story of Chancellor Dollfuss of Austria.
New York: I. Obolensky, 1962.
Kitchen, Martin. The Coming of Austrian Fascism. London: Routledge, 1980.
Maass, Walter. Assassination in Vienna. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1972.
Messner, Johannes. Dollfuss: An Austrian Patriot. Norfolk, VA: Gates of Vienna Books,
2004.
DUBS, ADOLPH (19201979)

On February 14, 1979, four men dressed as traffic police approached a
black Chevrolet stopped in a no-parking zone outside the cultural center in
downtown Kabul, Afghanistan. When the driver rolled down his window, the
DUBS, ADOLPH
officers drew guns and directed him to the government-owned Kabul Hotel,
two miles away. Arriving there, the gunmen removed their targetU.S. ambassador Adolph Spike Dubsfrom the car and marched him into the hotels
lobby. While three fired shots into the ceiling, the fourth made a phone call
to the Afghan foreign ministry, announcing, Weve got the ambassador. Proclaiming themselves members of the Settam-e-Melli (National Oppression)
movement, the kidnappers demanded release of imprisoned leader Badruddin
Bahes, in exchange for Dubs. Minister of national defense Hafizullah Amin
denied that Bahes was in government custody, and refused to negotiate with
terrorists in any case. Three hours after the abduction, Afghan security forces
and Russian advisors stormed Room 117 of the hotel, killing Dubs and his
kidnappers in a brief firefight.
Adolph Dubs was born in Chicago on August 4, 1920, earned a degree in
political science from Beloit College in 1942, and served in the U.S. Navy
during World War II. After the war, he completed his graduate studies in
political science at Georgetown University, then Foreign Service studies at
Harvard and at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. From there,
he joined the United States Foreign Service as a career diplomat, filling posts
in Canada, Germany, Liberia, Russia, and Yugoslavia, while earning a reputation as an expert on the Soviet Union. After the Saur Revolution of April
1978 brought the Khalq (masses) faction of the Peoples Democratic Party
to power in Afghanistan, Dubs was appointed ambassador to that perpetually
troubled nation.
Washington did not replace Dubs with a new ambassador. The Kabul embassy was closed in 1989, with no new ambassador appointed until 2002,
following occupation of the country by U.S. troops. Meanwhile, in 1992, defecting Soviet major Vasili Mitrokhin arrived in the United States with 25,000
pages of classified documents, including reports that KGB advisor Sergei Batrukihn recommended the failed rescue attempt over U.S. protestsand authorized execution of one captured gunman before he could be questioned by
U.S. investigators. In March 1992, President Mohammad Najibullah offered
to appoint a high-level investigative commission when an official appeal is
made to us by the U.S. State Department. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he added, I do not have so much hope, but we will begin the work.
My personal view is that there has been no document from the very beginning.
But of course, when we look, something will be found. At least we will achieve
something.
In fact, Najibullah left office the following month and was killed by Taliban opponents in 1996. The promised investigation never occurred. Vasili Mitrokhin published six volumes of KGB history and documents in the United
States between 1999 and 2005, known collectively as the Mitrokhin Archive,
with the final installment appearing after his death.
119
120
DUCA, ION GHEORGHE
Further Reading
Ansary, Tamim. Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan. New
Barfield, Thomas. Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Fitzgerald, Paul, and Elizabeth Gould. Invisible History: Afghanistans Untold Story. San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009.
Tomsen, Peter. The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the
Failures of Great Powers. Philadelphia: Public Affairs, 2011.
DUCA, ION GHEORGHE (18791933)

On December 30, 1933, Romanian prime minister Ion Duca was ambushed by
assassins at the railway station in Sinaia, a mountain resort patronized by the
royal family and prominent guests. His killers were three members of the fascist
Iron Guard, dubbed the Nicadori by their comrades, after their initials: Nicolae Constantinescu, Ion Caranica, and Doru Belimace. Arrested at the murder
scene, all three were convicted and sentenced to life at hard labor, but they
were subsequently killed with other Iron Guard assassins during transport to
Jilava prison, on November 30, 1938.
A native of Bucharest, born
on December 20, 1879, Ion
Duca was elected to Romanias
Chamber of Deputies (lower
house of the countrys bicameral legislature) in 1907, as a
member of the National Liberal
Party. In 1914, he joined the
cabinet of Prime Minister Ion
Bra tianu, and in the same year
participated in the founding
of Cercetasii Romniei (Romanias Scouts), a branch of the
international Scouting movement. When Prime Minister
Bratianu returned for a fourth
term in 1922, he named Duca
as his minister of foreign affairs, supporting the Little Entente with Czechoslovakia and
Yugoslavia, to prevent Hungary
Iron Guard assassins murdered Romanian prime from regaining territory lost to
minister Ion Duca in 1933. (AP/Corbis)
its neighbors after World War I.
D U D AY E V, D Z H O K H A R M U S AY E V I C H
On November 14, 1933, King Carol II named Duca as prime minister, replacing Alexandru Vaida-Voevod of Transylvania. Duca clashed immediately
with the Iron Guard, ordering thousands of its members arrested for acts of violence preceding general elections scheduled for December 2029, 1933. That
action led directly to his murder by the three Nicadori, as an act of retaliation.
His murder was the first major Romanian assassination since that of Barbu
Catargiu in 1862, but it would not be the last.
With the Nicadori imprisoned, Iron Guardists formed a new death squad,
Decemviri, so called because it had 10 members. On July 16, 1936, they killed
Iron Guard defector Mihai Stelescu at a Bucharest hospital, where he had
checked in for an appendectomy. After shooting Stelescu at least 38 times (some
accounts say 200), they dismembered his corpse with axes and danced around
the ward in celebration until they were arrested. They were killed by guards,
together with the Nicadori, in November 1938. Another team, the Ra zbunatori
(Avengers), assassinated Prime Minister Armand C a linescu in 1939.
The Iron Guard ultimately gained control of Romania and struck back at its
enemies on November 26, 1940, executing at least 14 prisoners at Jilava penitentiary. Those slain included ex-prime minister Gheorghe Arges anu, former
justice minister Victor Iamandi, former Bucharest police prefect Gabriel Marinescu, former gendarmerie inspector general Ioan Bengliu, former chief of
secret police Mihail Moruzov, Colonel Vasile Zeciu (who organized the 1938
executions), Majors Aristide Macoveanu and Iosif Dinulescu (who carried
them out), and Staff Sergeant Srbu (who personally strangled Nicolae Constantinescu). Following the massacre, the killers thanked the prisons warden
for assisting them, then held a brief ceremony at Constantinescus grave.
Further Reading
Frantz, Douglas, and Catherine Collins. Death on the Black Sea. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Hitchens, Keith. Rumania 18661947. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Petreu, Marta. An Infamous Past: E. M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania. Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee, 2005.
Riley, Dylan. The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania,
18701945. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
DUDAYEV, DZHOKHAR MUSAYEVICH

(19441996)
On April 21, 1996, President Dzhokhar Dudayev used a satellite phone to
call Russian statesman Konstantin Borovoy from the village of Gekhi-Chu,
18 miles southwest of Grozny in the breakaway Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. A Soviet Beriev A-50 surveillance aircraft, already hunting the rebel leader,
intercepted his call and alerted Sukhoi Su-25 fighter planes to Dudayevs
121
122
location. The fighters fired two laser-guided missiles, and the ITAR-TASS news
agency subsequently announced that Dudayev died in the resulting explosions.
Chechen guerrilla commander Shamil Basayev confirmed Dudayevs death,
whereas Interfaxa nongovernmental Russian news agencycontradicted
that report, quoting Saipudi Khasanov, Dudayevs private secretary, as saying
that the president is alive and working as usual. Claims of Dudayevs survival
continued into 2003, but no evidence of a faked death has yet been produced.
Dzhokhar Dudayev was born at Yalkhoroy, a village named for its dominant
clan in the former ChechenIngush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, on
February 15, 1944. Days after his birth, the regions entire population was deported to the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic on orders from Russian dictator Joseph Stalin, living in exile until 1957. Following repatriation, Dudayev
studied to become an electrician, then joined the Russian army in 1962. Four
years later, he graduated from the Higher Military Aviation School for Pilots at
Tambov, then joined the Communist Party and thereby gained admission to
the Soviet Air Force Academy. Ultimately rising to the rank of major general,
he served in Afghanistan during 19861987, winning the Order of the Red
Banner and the Order of the Red Star for bravery. From 1987 to 1990, Dudayev commanded a unit of long-range nuclear bombers based at Tartu, Estonia, where he appeared to sympathize with nationalist dissidents, ignoring
orders to muzzle the Estonian media.
Retired from military service by May 1990, Dudayev returned to Chechnya and entered politics, winning election to the executive committee of the
separatist All-National Congress of the Chechen People (NCChP). Dissolution
of the Soviet Union in 1991 encouraged militant action, prompting NCChP
members to seize the local Supreme Soviet on September 6. A hasty referendum created the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria on November 1, with Dudayev
elected as its first president. Conflict between Ingush and Ossetian ethnic factions split the republic in June 1992, leaving the state of Ichkeria to declare
independence from the rest in June 1993. President Dudayev dissolved parliament and demanded withdrawal of all Russian troops from Chechnya.
The resultant First Chechen War erupted on December 1, 1994, when Russian bombers decimated Dudayevs air force at Grozny airport. A full-scale
invasion proceeded 10 days later, with Russian troops capturing Grozny, driving Dudayevs into hiding at a missile silo near the historic Chechen capital
of Vedeno. Although some native Muslims questioned their presidents faith,
based on his prior actions in Afghanistan, Dudayev appointed Akhmad Kadyrov as chief mufti of Ichkeria, followed by a declaration of jihad against Russian forces. Muslim volunteers from other nations bolstered Chechen ranks,
and the war dragged on, killing more than 23,000 soldiers and an estimated
100,000 civilians. Fighting continued for another four months after Dudayevs
assassination, ending with the Khasavyurt Accord on August 30, 1996.
Vice President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev succeeded Dudayev in office, even

as tales of the martyred presidents survival persisted. Dudayevs son-in-law,
Salman Raduyev, met with reporters and swore on the Quran that he had spoken to Dudayev in an unnamed European country on July 5, 1996. Raduyev
promised that his father-in-law would soon return, but the appointed Hour X
passed with no sign of Dudayev. In August 2001, Chechen president Akhmad
Kadyrov declared that Dudayev may be alive, living incognito to avert further warfare. In September 2003, other sources declared that a twin of Dudayev was killed in 1996, announcing plans to put him in front of TV cameras
in Turkey before Chechnyas next presidential election, but Dudayev remains
among the missing.
Further Reading
Jagielski, Wojciech. Towers of Stone: The Battle of Wills in Chechnya. New York: Seven
Stories Press, 2009.
Sheets, Lawrence. Eight Pieces of Empire: A 20-Year Journey through the Soviet Collapse.
New York: Broadway Paperbacks, 2011.
Smith, Sebastian. Allahs Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005.
Treisman, Daniel. The Return: Russias Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev. New York:
Free Press, 2011.
123
E
EARP, MORGAN SETH (18511882)
The Wild Wests most famous gunfight occurred in Tombstone, Arizona, on
October 26, 1881. At 3:00 P.M. that Wednesday, the Earp brothersMorgan,
Virgil, and Wyatt, all local or federal lawmanjoined gambler John Doc Holliday to, as they later claimed, disarm a group of outlaws including William
Claiborne, Ike and Billy Clanton, and Frank and Tom McLaury. Claiborne
and Ike Clanton fled the battleground before the shooting started. When the
gun smoke cleared, with 30 shots fired in as many seconds, Billy Clanton and
both McLaury brothers were dead, and Holliday and two of the Earps suffered
flesh wounds. Ike Clanton charged the Earps and Holliday with murder, but a
month-long preliminary hearing exonerated them. Two months later, on December 28, unidentified gunmen shot Virgil Earp in an ambush, leaving him
with one arm permanently crippled. On March 18, 1882, at 10:50 P.M., an
unseen sniper killed Morgan Earp at a Tombstone billiards parlor, in the presence of Wyatt and three other witnesses. Recalling a family promise to share
any visions observed near the moment of death, Morgan gasped to Wyatt,
I cant see a damned thing.
Morgan Earp was born in Pella, Idaho, on April 24, 1851, the fourth of six
sons in a family today regarded as iconic Western figures. Eldest brother Newton Earp was satisfied to farm and raise a family after his service in the Civil
War, but his brothers passed into history, often lionized in fabricated tales of
derring-dofrom early dime novels to Hollywood filmsthat cast them as heroes. The truth, unearthed by slow degrees since the 1960s, is rather different.
James Earp, second oldest of the brothers, was a saloon keeper by preference, married in 1873 to a Wichita prostitute, but he also dabbled in law
enforcement as a deputy marshal in Dodge City, Kansas. Morgan joined him
there, also as a deputy, in 1875, followed by brother Wyatt in 1876 and Virgil in 1877. While arresting drunks, the brothers also managed gambling dens
and brothels in Dodge, earning a reputation as the fighting pimps for their
belligerence. James was the first to pull up stakes and move to Tombstone, in
1879, followed in 1880 by the other three and youngest brother Warren Earp.
Again, they settled in as gamblers, saloon keepers, and panderers, and Virgil
doubled as a deputy U.S. marshal for the eastern portion of Pima County, subsequently named as Tombstones city marshal. In that post, he deputized Morgan and Wyatt to help him enforce the Earps brand of law and order.
126
E A R P, M O R G A N S E T H
Their opposition in Tombstone included John Behan, named as sheriff of

newly formed Cochise County in February 1881, and his cohorts in a gang
known as the Cowboys, a loose-knit band of rustlers and robbers dominated
by the Clanton and McLaury families, with quick-draw killers Johnny Ringo
and Curly Bill Brocius. The Cowboys specialized in stagecoach robberies and
stealing Mexican cattle for sale in the United States. Trouble between the Earps
and Cowboys began on March 15, 1881, with a stage holdup near Contention
that netted the bandits $26,000 in silver bullion ($626,000 today). The Earps
accused four Cowboys; others claimed Doc Holliday himself had led the raid.
A month later, on April 19, Tombstones city council passed an ordinance directed chiefly at the Cowboys, banning anyone from carrying firearms, Bowie
knives, or dirks within the citys limits. After several confrontations with the
Cowboys, who ignored the ordinance, the Earps set out to strip them of their
weapons on October 26.
The rest is historyor fiction, as the case may be. After Morgan Earps assassination, a coroners jury named Cowboys Pete Spence, Frank Stilwell, Florentino Indian Charlie Cruz, Frederick Bode, and another known only as
Fries as the probable killers. Witnesses reported them skulking near the pool
hall when Earp was shot, and Spences wife claimed the outlaws had boasted
of the shooting, within an hour of its occurrence. Spence surrendered to sheriff
Behan for protective custody, and the surviving able-bodied Earps and Holliday determined to eradicate their enemies in a campaign memorialized today
as the Earp vendetta ride.
Retribution began on March 20, 1882, in Tucson. Wyatt and Warren Earp,
with Holliday and two other deputies, were escorting Virgil and his wife
aboard a train to California when they saw Frank Stillwell and Ike Clanton,
apparently lying in ambush. Clanton fled once again, but the Earps cornered
Stillwell and riddled him with bullets, leaving him, in the words of witness
George Hand, the worst shot up man I ever saw. Tucson Justice of the Peace
Charles Meyer issued arrest warrants for Stillwells killers, but they refused to
surrender when confronted by sheriff Behan in Tombstone. Behan responded
by deputizing various Cowboys and leading them in pursuit of Earps manhunting posse.
Thus began the peculiar spectacle of county deputies pursuing federal
lawmena total of 10, deputized by Wyatt Earpwhile their quarry hunted
Cowboys with clear homicidal intent. There is no indication that the Earps
ever intended to arrest the men they stalked. On March 22, 1882, they surprised Florentino Cruz at a camp in the Dragoon Mountains, shooting him
four times at close range. Two days later, near Iron Springs in the Whetstone
Mountains, they met Curly Bill Brocius and eight other cowboys, engaging
in a pitched battle that left Brocius dead and another Cowboy, Johnny Barnes,
mortally wounded.
E A R P, M O R G A N S E T H
The day after that shootout, March 25, Tucsons grand jury indicted Pete
Spence, Frank Stilwell, Indian Charlie Cruz, Frederick Bode, and John Doe
Fries for Morgan Earps murder. Cruz and Spence were dead by then, and Fries
was absconding, but Spence and Bode faced trial on April 2. The prosecutor
called Spences wife, whereas defense attorneys objected to her evidence as
hearsay and insisted that a wife should not be forced to testify against her husband. The judge agreed, then dismissed the charges for lack of evidence.
Around the same time, Earps posse left Arizona for New Mexico Territory,
moving on from there to Colorado, beyond the reach of sheriff Behan. Denver police arrested Doc Holliday on May 15, 1882, for extradition to Tucson,
but Wyatt Earp persuaded friend Bat Mastersonthen marshal of Trinidad,
Coloradoto wangle Hollidays release from custody. Two months later, the
Cowboy gunman was shot and killed near Chiricahua Peak, in Arizonas Cochise County. His slayer was never identified, and whereas some researchers
blame Doc Holliday, court records from Pueblo County, Colorado, place Holliday there on July 11, 14, and 18, 1882.
Although Wyatt was unquestionably the most famous Earp brotherthanks
in large part to dime novels and his own self-promotional skillsMorgan also
appears in various film and television portrayals of the familys often-fictionalized
adventures. Actors who have portrayed him include Harvey Stephens in Tombstone, the Town Too Tough to Die (1942); Ward Bond in My Darling Clementine
(1946); Peter Graves in Wichita (1955); DeForest Kelley in Gunfight at the O.K.
Corral (1957); Sam Melville in Hour of the Gun (1967); Rex Holman in Spectre
of the Gun, a Star Trek episode originally aired on October 25, 1968; Philip
Shafer in Doc (1971); Bill Paxton in Tombstone (1993); Ray Boyle in Wyatt Earp:
Return to Tombstone (1994); Linden Ashby in Wyatt Earp (1994); and Austin
Nicols in an episode of HBOs Deadwood series, Leviathan Smiles, originally
aired on July 30, 2006. To date, the O.K. Corral gunfight and its aftermath
have been depicted in at least nine feature films since 1939, plus various documentaries. Perspectives on the conflict differ radically, and there seems little
doubt that controversy will continue.
Further Reading
Guinn, Jeff. The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. CorralAnd
How It Changed the American West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.
Marks, Paula. And Die in the West: The Story of the O.K. Corral Gunfight. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
Roberts, Gary. Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons,
2006.
Tefertiller, Casey. Wyatt Earp: The Life behind the Legend. New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1997.
Waters, Frank. The Earp Brothers of Tombstone. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1976.
127
128
EDMUND I
EDMUND I (922946)
On May 26, 946, King Edmund I of England celebrated St. Augustines Mass
Day at Pucklechurch, a village in South Gloucestershire. While feasting with
other nobles, Edmund cast his eyes over the crowd and saw an exiled thief
named Leof (or Leofa, in some accounts) seated among the revelers. Recognizing the uninvited diner as an atrocious robber he had banished six years
earlier, Edmund rushed to arrest Leof himself. Grabbing the bandit by his hair,
he threw Leof to the floor, but was stabbed in the chest when Leof drew a hidden dagger. As Edmund lay dying, his attendants mobbed the killer, reportedly
tearing him limb from limb.
Born at Wessex in 922, Edmund was the son of King Edward the Elder and
his third wife, and half-brother to Aethelstan, first king of a unified England
from 927 to 939. In 937, he fought at Aethelstans side in the Battle of Brunanburh, defeating the combined forces of Norse-Gael king Olaf Guthfrithsson,
Constantine II of Scotland, and Owen I of Strathclyde. At Aethelstans death,
on October 27, 939, Edmund
succeeded him as king.
Olaf Guthfrithsson, still
smarting from his previous defeat, conquered Northumbria
and part of Mercia (now the
Midlands), but Edmund began
recapturing that territory after
Olaf died in 941. Four years
later, he conquered Strathclyde,
then ceded it to King Malcolm I of Scotland in return
for a pledge of mutual military
support. Those campaigns
as well as Edmunds revival of
monasteries in England, and his
role in restoring Louis IV to the
throne of Franceearned him
recognition in his lifetime as Edmund the Deed-doer, Edmund
the Just, and Edmund the Magnificent. In retrospect, his primary achievement as king was
the establishment of a safe borKing Edmund I of England, murdered by an exiled der and peaceful relations with
bandit at a feast. (Getty Images)
Scotland, to the north.
E D WA R D T H E M A R T Y R
Following his murder, Edmunds younger brother Eadred ruled as king

until his death from a digestive malady in 955. Eadred died a childless bachelor, whereupon Edmunds son, Eadwig the Fair, assumed the throne. Eadwig quarreled with other members of his family, and with church leaders,
including Archbishop Oda of Canterbury and Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury.
Though driven into exile, Dunstan raised support for an alternate monarch,
Athelstan half-king of West Anglia, leaving Eadred to rule only Wessex and
Kent from 957 to his death on October 1, 959. His younger brother and successor, Edgar Ithough dubbed Edgar the Peaceablehad already seized
Northumbria and Mercia from Eadred in 958. At Eadreds death, Edgar made
peace with the church by recalling Dunstan to serve as bishop of Worcester,
later as bishop of London and archbishop of Canterbury. Historians mark his
death in 975 as the effective end of Anglo-Saxon England, which succumbed
to 11th-century conquests by Danes and Normans.
Further Reading
Fraser, Antonia, ed. The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2000.
Panton, Kenneth. Historical Dictionary of the British Monarchy. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
Press, 2011.
Phillips, Charles. The Complete Illustrated Guide to the Kings & Queens of England. Leicester: Anness Publishing, 2006.
Stafford, Pauline. Unification and Conquest: A Political and Social History of England in
the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries. London: Edward Arnold, 1989.
EDWARD THE MARTYR (962978)

On March 18, 978, King Edward of England stopped at Corfe Castle in Dorset to visit his half-brother brother thelred and his sister-in-law, lfgifu of
York. He was slain on the castle grounds that evening, in circumstances still
disputed by historians. One version says that he was murdered by a group
of thelreds advisors on arrival, while dismounting from his horse. Another
story claims that lfthryth, thelreds mother, organized the attackor even
killed Edward herselfto advance her son. Modern historian Frank Stinton
portrays Edward as an unstable ruler who had offended many important persons by his intolerable violence of speech and behavior. Long after he had
passed into veneration as a saint it was remembered that his outbursts of
rage had alarmed all who knew him, and especially the members of his own
household. An early text, the Peterborough Chronicle, was more charitable,
stating that: No worse deed for the English race was done than this was, since
they first sought out the land of Britain. Men murdered him, but God exalted
him. In life he was an earthly king; after death he is now a heavenly saint. His
129
130
E D WA R D T H E M A R T Y R
earthly relatives would not avenge him, but his Heavenly Father has much
avenged him.
The eldest son of King Edgar the Peaceable, born circa 962, Edward was
crowned at Edgars death in July 975, supported by Archbishops Dunstan and
Oswald, despite protests from his younger half-brother, dubbed thelred the
Unready. Hostile noblemen lfhere of Mercia and thelwine of East Anglia
soon took advantage of young Edwards weakness to seize lands bestowed by his
father to various Benedictine monasteries, briefly threatening a civil war that is
sometimes called the anti-monastic reaction to Edgars close relations with the
church. The appearance of a comet in the heavens seemingly encouraged many
superstitious folk to join church leaders in supporting Edwards coronation.
If so, his succession did not help clerical reformers who had supported his father. Corrupt secular clerics, banished under Edgar, soon returned and routed
their opponents from various English monasteries, and nobles forced beleaguered
abbots to surrender leases granted under Edgar. Although few documents remain
from Edwards reign, it is known that he reversed his fathers policy of minting
coins only at Westminster. That change, coupled with his inability to halt quarrels
between rival lords in the hinterlands, leaves an impression of weakness and disorganization for his short tenure as king.
Following Edwards murder, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle declared that he was
buried at Wareham, in Dorset, without any royal honors. Archbishop Wulfstan II, writing between 1010 and 1016 in his Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (Sermon
of the Wolf to the English), goes further yet, stating that Edwards corpse was
burned. Something must have remained, because his corpse was reburied with
high ceremony in February 980, at Shaftesbury Abbey in Dorset, then moved
again in 1001 to a more prominent place at the same abbey. His portrayal as a
martyr apparently springs from Edwards support of his fathers policy toward
the church, as portrayed in clerical writings. King Henry VIII dissolved Englands monasteries in the 16th century, but monks concealed Edwards remains
to avert desecration. Archaeologists recovered and tentatively identified his
bones in 1931. A dispute arose, as to who should claim the relics, with claims
filed by Shaftesbury abbey and the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia.
Edwardif it was Edwardspent decades in a Surrey bank vault, before he
was finally consigned to Wokings Brookwood Cemetery, in September 1984.
Further Reading
Fell, Christine. Edward, King and Martyr. Leeds: University of Leeds School of English,
1971.
Higham, Nick. The Death of Anglo-Saxon England. Stroud, United Kingdom: Sutton,
1997.
Panton, Kenneth. Historical Dictionary of the British Monarchy. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
Press, 2011.
EISNER, KURT
EISNER, KURT (18671919)

Bavarian ministerpresident Kurt Eisner bears the distinction of having been
murdered unnecessarily by a political opponent. On February 21, 1919, while
en route to resign from Bavarias parliament, he was shot in the back by German nationalist Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley. Historians speculate that ArcoValley (as he is more commonly known) killed Eisner to win approval from the
anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalist Thule Society, a cult of sorts that had rejected
his membership application. Speaking for himself, Arco-Valley explained that
he hated Eisner because the ministerpresident is a Bolshevist, a Jew; he isnt
German, he doesnt feel German, he subverts all patriotic thoughts and feelings. He is a traitor to this land.
Born in Berlin, then capital of the kingdom of Prussia, on May 14, 1867, Kurt
Eisner studied philosophy, then switched to journalism, serving from 1890 to
1895 as a contributing editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung. An outspoken member
of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), he served nine months in prison for an
editorial that criticized Kaiser Wilhelm II and emerged unrepentant. In 1900,
he replaced the late Wilhelm Liebknecht as editor of Vorwrts (Forward),
the SDPs chief public organ, which featured articles by Communist Manifesto
coauthor Friedrich Engels,
among other leftists. Leaving
Vorwrts in 1905, Eisner thereafter confined his political efforts to Bavaria, writing as a
freelance journalist and serving as chief editor of Nurembergs Frnkische Tagespost from
1907 to 1910.
In the midst of World War I,
Eisner shifted his allegiance to
the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, and
served another nine-month
prison term for treason, after
inciting a strike by munitions
workers. Freed in a general amnesty that October, he played a
key role in fomenting the German Revolution of 19181919,
which deposed King Ludwig III
as Bavarias monarch. Eisner
proclaimed a Bavarian Repub- Bavarian minister-president Kurt Eisner, killed by
lic on November 23, 1918, but a political rival in February 1919. (DB/dpa/Corbis)
131
132
ELISABETH OF AUSTRIA
the rebellion continued until August 1919, with adoption of the Weimar Constitution declaring Germany a democratic parliamentary. Eisner did not live to
see that transient victory, however, as German backlash over the harsh Treaty
of Versailles led to his partys electoral defeat in January 1919, overwhelmed by
the conservative Bavarian Peoples Party.
Anton Arco-Valley was convicted of Eisners murder and sentenced to death
in January 1920, but a friendly right-wing judge commuted his sentence to five
years in prison, and the state prosecutor declared, If the whole German youth
were imbued with such a glowing enthusiasm we could face the future with
confidence. Arco-Valley remained in Cell 70 at Stadelheim Prison until 1924,
when he was released to make room for recently convicted Adolf Hitler. Placed
on probation until 1927, Arco-Valley was then pardoned and apparently retired from public life, although Third Reich leaders later decorated him as a
hero of the [Nazi] movement. Hitler seemed ambivalent toward Arco-Valley,
writing that Eisners death only hastened developments and led finally to the
Soviet dictatorship, or to put it more correctly, to a passing rule of Jews, as
had been the original aim of the instigators of the whole revolution. Perhaps
ironically, Arco-Valleys elder brother married a cousin of Raoul Wallenberg, a
Swedish diplomat who rescued thousands of Jews from Nazi-occupied Hungary during World War II.
Further Reading
Grunberger, Richard. Red Rising in Bavaria. Galway, Ireland: M.W. Books, 1973.
Luhrssen, David. Hammer of the Gods: The Thule Society and the Birth of Nazism. Dulles,
VA: Potomac Books, 2012.
Mitchell, Allan. Revolution in Bavaria, 19181919: The Eisner Regime and the Soviet
Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965.
ELISABETH OF AUSTRIA (18371898)

In September 1898, Empress Elisabeth of Austria traveled incognito to Geneve,
Switzerland, with her lady in waiting, Countess Irma Sztray de Sztra et
Nagymihly. They lodged at the Htel Beau-Rivage, on Lake Geneva, where
the empress had stayed during a previous visit, in 1897. At 1:35 P.M. on September 10, they left the hotel to catch the paddle steamer Genve, bound
for Montreux. Elisabeth, despising royal processions, had insisted that they
walk without the other members of her entourage. As they approached the
steamers dock, Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni approached and stabbed Elisabeth beneath her left breast with a four-inch needle file attached to a wooden
handle. The empress collapsed, then walked another 100 yards, supported by
two passersby, and reached the Genve before Countess Sztray noticed blood
on her dress. The boat had sailed by then, but soon returned to port when
Elisabeths injury was discovered. Carried back to the Htel

Beau-Rivage on an improvised
stretcher, she was attended by
two doctors who pronounced
her dead at 2:10 P.M.
A tragic figure in AustroHungarian history, Her Royal
Highness Duchess Elisabeth
Amalie Eugenie was born in
Munich on December 24,
1837, the fourth child of eccentric Duke Maximilian Joseph of
Bavaria. In April 1854, she entered into an arranged marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph
I of Austria, thus becoming
both empress of Austria and
queen of Hungary. Elisabeths
mother-in-law, the domineering
Princess Sophie of Bavaria, virtually kidnapped the empresss
first two daughters, born in Empress Elisabeth of Austria, stabbed by an anar1855 and 1856, refusing to let chist while on holiday, in 1898. (Alinari via Getty
Elizabeth nurse either infant or Images)
take in part in their care, naming the first child after herself.
The younger Sophie died from typhus in 1857, and her namesake harangued
Elisabeth to produce a male heir and printed an anonymous pamphlet denouncing her for failure to conceive a son. She finally fulfilled that duty, bearing
Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, in August 1858, but festering tension still
blighted her relationship with Princess Sophie.
Although renowned for her great beauty, which inspired a cult of sorts
among high-born Austrian women, Empress Elizabeth habitually wore tight
leather corsets (leading the Prince of Hesse to describe her as almost inhumanly slender), practiced a strict regimen of exercise (with fencing lessons begun
at age 50), and undertook fasting cures with steam baths whenever her weight
topped 110 pounds. Hairdressing along consumed two hours of her daily
schedule, extended further by applications of various beauty creams concocted
in the court pharmacy or by Countess Sztray. Looks aside, Elisabeth suffered
from depression, exacerbated by her mother-in-law, the death of her first child,
her fathers death in November 1888, and the suicide of son Rudolf in January
133
134
1889 (found with his murdered mistress, Baroness Marie Alexandrine von Vetsera). She avoided having any other children, and was heard to say, Children
are the curse of a woman, for when they come, they drive away Beauty, which is
the best gift of the gods. On the day of her assassination, Elisabeths trademark
corset initially prevented her from realizing that she had been stabbed.
On receiving news of his wifes death, Franz Joseph feared that it was suicide. An autopsy proved otherwise, after which the postmortem instruments
and photographs were destroyed on orders from the emperor. Meanwhile,
Luigi Lucheni was detained while fleeing from the scene of the attack, and his
discarded weapon was recovered on September 11. In custody, Lucheni said
he had chosen his toolused to file the eyes of industrial needlesbecause he
lacked 12 francs to purchase a stiletto. Committed to the propaganda of the
deed, he declared, I am an anarchist by conviction . . . I came to Geneva to
kill a sovereign, with object of giving an example to those who suffer and those
who do nothing to improve their social position; it did not matter to me who
the sovereign was whom I should kill . . . It was not a woman I struck, but an
Empress; it was a crown that I had in view.
At trial in October 1898, Lucheni was enraged to hear that Geneva had abolished capital punishment. Seeking martyrdom, he penned a letter demanding
trial in the Canton of Lucerne, where executions were still permitted, signing
the note, Luigi Lucheni, anarchist, and one of the most dangerous. Instead,
he was sentenced to life imprisonment and began work on a lengthy memoir.
After guards seized that manuscript, in October 1910, Lucheni hanged himself
in his cell.
Despite Luchenis insistence that he acted alone, Elisabeths murder inspired
the International Conference of Rome for the Social Defense against Anarchists,
held between November 24 and December 21, 1898, with delegates from 21
nations attending. After defining anarchism as as any act that used violent
means to destroy the organization of society, all participating countries agreed
to create special agencies to conduct surveillance on suspected anarchists, ban
membership in anarchist organizations, restrict civilian access to explosives,
limit press coverage of anarchist activities, and impose mandatory capital punishment for killing heads of state.
Empress ElisabethSisi to her friends, frequently misspelled Sissi for
some unknown reason in fictional workshas proved irresistible to authors
of stage productions, films, novels, and television programs. Stage productions
based on her life include Fritz Kreislers comic operetta Sissi (1932); Jean Cocteaus play LAigle deux ttes (The Eagle with Two Heads), written in 1943 and
first produced in 1946; Kenneth MacMillans ballet Mayerling (1978); the musical Elisabeth (1992); and Maurice Bjarts 1993 ballet Sissi, limpratice anarchiste (Sissi, Anarchist Empress). Feature films include Kaiserin Elisabeth von
sterreich (1921), coauthored by Elisabeths niece, Marie Larisch; The King Steps
ERIC V OF DENMARK
Out (1936); Cocteaus The Eagle with Two Heads (1948); Sissi (1955); SissiThe
Young Empress (1956); SissiFateful Years of an Empress (1957); Forever My
Love (1962); Mayerling (1968); Michelangelo Antonionis The Mystery of Oberwald (1981); and Sisi/Last Minute (1991). Fictionalized television portrayals of
Elisabeth include Fall of Eagles (1974); Princess Sissi (1997); Sissi, limpratrice
rebelle (2004); The Crown Prince (2006); and Sisi (2009). Elisabeth also appears
as a character in at least three novels: Stars in My Heart, by Barbara Cartland
(1981); Spangle, by Gary Jennings (1987); and Elisabeth: The Princess Bride, by
Barry Denenberg (2003).
Further Reading
Buschek, Alfred. Elisabeth, Empress of Austria. Concord, MA: Infinity Publishing, 2010.
Cunliffe-Owen, Marguerite. Martyrdom of an Empress. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2005.
Hamann, Bridget. The Reluctant Empress. Berlin: Ullstein Taschenbuch, 2000.
Haslip, Joan. The Lonely Empress: Elisabeth of Austria. Phoenix, NY: Phoenix Press,
2000.
Stephan, Renate. Empress Elisabeth of Austria, 18371898: The Fate of a Woman Under
the Yoke of the Imperial Court. Vienna: Austria Imperial, 1998.
ERIC V OF DENMARK (12491286)

On November 22, 1286, after a long days hunt in the countryside surrounding
Viborg, on Denmarks Jutland peninsula, King Eric V and his royal entourage
stopped for the night in the village of Finderup. As they slept in the local church
barn, a group of assassins disguised as Franciscan monks crept among them,
surrounding Eric and stabbing him 56 times, leaving his corpse to be found the
next morning. Suspicion fell first upon nobleman Stig Andersen Hvide, who
hated Eric for seducing his wife while Andersen was serving as a general in Denmarks army, then expanded to include Count Jacob Nielsen of Halland (a Swedish province ruled by Denmark). A special court convicted Andersen, Nielsen,
and seven other suspectsall members of Erics inner circlewhereupon all of
their property was forfeited and they were banished under threat of death.
Born in 1249, the son of King Christopher I, Eric was deemed too young
to rule in his own right when his father diedperhaps a victim of poison
in May 1259. The Danish court chose Erics mother, queen dowager Margaret Sambiria, to reign as regent, no easy task when powerful rivals vied for
the throne. One contender, Archbishop Jakob Erlandsen, was a suspect in
King Christophers death and had excommunicated the bishop who anointed
10-year-old Eric as his fathers successor. Another was Chief Jarimar II of Rgen
(an island in the Baltic Sea), who promptly invaded neighboring Danish-held
Zealand. Queen Margaret fought back, but Danish forces lost to Jarimar at
Ringsted, whereupon his troops pressed on to sack Copenhagen before years
135
136
ERIC XIV OF SWEDEN
end. Jarimar might have pressed farther, but he was slain by a rural farmers
wife, whereupon his leaderless army withdrew.
Queen Margaret, meanwhile, faced a new challenge from Duke Valdemar of
southern Jutland, supported by German allies. Their combined might defeated
Danish forces at the Battle of Lo Heath, capturing both Margaret and Eric in
1261, compelling Margaret to cede royal property in Jutland as the price of
their release. Archbishop Erlandsen, meanwhile, persisted in his efforts to depose the queen and Eric, until Pope Urban IV intervened.
As an adult monarch, Eric aggravated other Danish nobles by attempting to
reduce their personal authority, breaking his promises at every turn, and by
seducing any woman who aroused him, regardless of age or marital status. He
earned the nickname Klippingfrom the common medieval practice of cutting coins to reduce their valueas a demonstration of popular opinion that
he had cheated or short-changed both his subjects and the Danish monarchy
itself. Historians remain undecided as to which of his unfortunate character
traits contributed the most to Erics murder.
One point of broad agreement is that the conviction of his supposed assassins
was probably a miscarriage of justice. Although Stig Andersen Hvide had ample
reason to wish Eric dead, no evidence placed him or any of his codefendants at
the scene of the crime. Neither was the accused permitted to testify in their own
defense, or to call supporting witnesses, rights clearly granted to them under
Danish law. Even their motive was dubious, because all nine were intimates of
Eric and actually stood to lose influence at his death. Convicted nonetheless,
Andersen settled on the island of Hjelm and raised a band of pirates who terrorized the Danish coast until his death in December 1293. Count Nielsen retired
to Halland and allied himself with King Eric II of Norway, but his influence declined as Eric II and successor Haakon V lost interest in conquering Denmark.
Twelve-year-old Eric VI succeeded his father as king of Denmark in 1286,
with his motherqueen consort Agnes of Brandenburgruling as regent until
1294. Unrest persisted, and his reign continued Denmarks Age of Decay, including further conflict with the church and rival noblemen.
Further Reading
Jespersen, Knud. A History of Denmark. Houndsmill, Hampshire, United Kingdom:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Jordan William. Europe in the High Middle Ages. London: Penguin Books, 2004.
ERIC XIV OF SWEDEN (15331577)

A mentally unstable monarch, likely schizophrenic and prone to killing those
he thought were plotting against him, King Eric XIV of Sweden was deposed by
ERIC XIV OF SWEDEN
rebellious nobles on September 30, 1568. The rebels chose Erics half-brother,
Duke John of Finland, to replace him on the throne, while Eric was imprisoned, shuttled around various castles in Sweden and Finland over the next
eight years. He died on February 25, 1577, after consuming a meal of pea
soup that was said to be poisoned. A document signed by King John III and Sir
Bengt Bengtsson Gilt, a Swedish judge, empowered Erics jailers to poison him
if anyone tried to release him from custody, but his cause of death remained
uncertain until 1958, when exhumation and autopsy revealed lethal levels of
arsenic in Erics remains.
Born at Stockholms Tre Kronor (Three Crowns) Castle on December 13,
1533, Eric lost his motherqueen consort Catherine of Saxe-Lauenburg
seven weeks before his second birthday. Rumors spread that Erics father,
Gustav I, had murdered Catherine with a hammer, but a 20th-century examination of her skeleton revealed no evidence of homicide. Gustav married
Swedish noblewoman Margaret Leijonhufvud in 1536, and she bore him seven
children, including two future kings. At Gustavs death, in September 1560,
Swedens parliament elected Eric as the nations next monarch.
Whereas Gustav had satisfied himself with ruling an independent kingdom,
Eric sought to build an empire in the Baltic region and by seizing territory
from Estonia. By 1563, when those ambitions sparked the Northern Seven
Years War, with Sweden battling a coalition of Denmark, Norway, the Free
City of Lbeck, and the PolishLithuanian Union, Erics mental instability had
grown apparent to his family and other members of his court. Arbitrary rule,
marked by fits of personal violence, reached its nadir in July 1566, when a
group of concerned nobles gathered in Stockholm to discuss Erics increasingly erratic behavior. Learning of their treason, Eric invited them to Svartsj
Palace, where they were confined and placed on trial, convicted, and subsequently murdered in their cells on May 24, 1567.
That massacre, during which Eric personally stabbed one of the prisoners to death, paved the way for the rebellion that dethroned Eric in 1568. Although his life was spared, the order for jailers to kill him if escape seemed
imminent suggests the danger that was seen in his attempting to regain the
throne. John III ruled Sweden for another 15 years after his brothers death in
custody, also assuming the title Grand Prince of Finland in 1581. His son, Sigismund III Vasa, was crowned king of Poland in September 1587, thereby resolving one of Swedens foreign conflicts. At Johns death, in November 1592,
Sigismund succeeded him as Swedens king. He tried to rule from Poland,
while restoring strict Roman Catholicism to his homeland, but that effort led
to his defeat at Battle of Stngebro, in September 1598. Thereafter, Sigismund
ruled Sweden from abroad, but he returned to Poland and was then officially
deposed in July 1599.
137
138
E R I M , I S M A I L N I H AT
Further Reading
Bain, Robert. Scandinavia: A Political History of Denmark, Norway and Sweden from 1513
to 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905.
Robert, Michael. The Swedish Imperial Experience, 15601718. Cambridge: Cambridge
ERIM, ISMAIL NIHAT (19121980)

On July 19, 1980, two assassins ambushed former Turkish prime minister Ismail Erim outside his summer home in the Kartal district of eastern Istanbul,
killing Erim and a bodyguard with close-range gunfire. Although the shooters escaped, spokesmen for Turkeys militant Dev Sol (Revolutionary Left)
organization claimed responsibility for the attack. Authorities speculated that
shooting was retaliation for Erims order to execute three radicals in May 1972,
following their conviction for a January 1971 bank robbery in Ankara. One
of those hanged, Deniz Gezmis, had been a founder of the Peoples Liberation
Army of Turkey and was regarded as a martyr by Dev Solitself a splinter of a
spin-off from the original organization.
Born in 1912 at Kandra, in Hdavendigr, Ismail Erim graduated from Istanbul University Law School in 1936 and earned his LLD from Paris Law
School three years later. He taught at Ankara Universitys law school from 1939
Turkish prime minister Ismail Erim, shot by members of the Revolutionary Left in Istanbul. (Bettmann/Corbis)
E R I M , I S M A I L N I H AT
to 1943, when he was named as legal advisor to the Turkish ministry of foreign affairs. In 1945, he joined Turkeys delegation to the founding conference
of the United Nations, and was elected to represent Kocaeli Province in Turkeys parliament, as a member of the Republican Peoples Party. Appointed as
minister of public works in June 1948, Erim held that post until January 1949,
when he was elevated to the job of deputy prime minister.
Erims party lost its parliamentary majority in May 1950, whereupon he
became chief political editor for the newspaper Ulus (Nation). When that
paper shut down in 1953, Erim published his own, Yeni UlusHalk (New
NationPopulist). In 1956, he was elected as Turkeys representative to the
European Commission of Human Rights, and also participated in negotiations over Cyprus, held in London. His involvement with Cyprus continued
through 1959, when Erim led Turkeys committee on preparation of a new
Cypriot constitution.
Turkeys military coup of May 27, 1960, toppled the ruling Democrat Party,
but the junta restored civilian government in October 1961. Erim was reelected to parliament from Kocaeli Province, and began nine years of service
as Turkeys representative to the Council of Europe, winning election as that
bodys deputy secretary general. In 1969, he was appointed as a member of
the United Nations International Law Commission, at The Hague. Meanwhile,
political mayhem continued in Turkey, capped by another military coup on
March 12, 1971. Two weeks later, the ruling junta chose Erim as a neutral
prime minister, seated to form a coalition government for national unity. That
effort proved fruitless, and mass resignation of his cabinet led Erim to resign
on December 3, 1971. President Cevdet Sunay restored Erim to his post eight
days later, but poor health led Erim to resign for good on April 17, 1972.
Violence on right and left accelerated through the remainder of the 1970s,
with 5,388 political murders recorded by 1978. At the time of Erims death,
planning was underway for Turkeys third coup dtat, initially scheduled
for July 11, 1980, then pushed back to August 26, and yet again to September 12. On that final date, General Kenan Evren, army chief of staff, seized
Turkish airwaves and declared martial law nationwide in the name of the
National Security Council. Later investigation revealed that Evren had solicited
support from other army officers a full year earlier, beginning on September 11, 1979. The generals of Turkeys War Academy had voted to support the
coup on December 21, 1979, with a formal proposal for the plandubbed
Operation Flagdrafted in March 1980.
In June 1981, the junta appointed 160 persons to draft a new constitution for
Turkey, which was approved by public referendum in June 1982. Democratic
elections resumed in November 1983, but although the generals sought to dictate terms of their own retirement, they were not entirely successful. Another
referendum, in September 2010, launched an investigation of the coup and led
139
140
EVERS, MEDGAR WILEY
to the foundation of a Specially Authorized Ankara Deputy Prosecutors Office in June 2011. In January 2012, indictments were filed against ex-generals
Evren and Tahsin Sahinkaya, the only coup leaders still living. Charged with
the deaths of 191 political prisoners, the defendants were scheduled to face
trial in April 2012.
Further Reading
Ahmad, Feroz. The Making of Modern Turkey. London: Routledge, 1993.
Hale, William. Turkish Politics and the Military. London: Routledge, 1993.
Zrcher, Eric. Turkey: A Modern History. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005.
EVERS, MEDGAR WILEY (19251963)

On June 12, 1963, a snipers bullet killed Medgar Evers, state leader of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Police found a rifle hidden in bushes
nearby and identified its last known owner as Byron De La Beckwith, a resident of Greenwood, Mississippi, and an outspoken member of various racist
groups including the Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan. Facing trial for
murder in February 1964, Beckwith was surprised and delighted when exgovernor Ross Barnett appeared in court to shake his hand, in full view of
jurors. That panel failed to reach a verdict, and a second jury likewise deadlocked in April 1964. Released thereafter without further charges, Beckwith
returned to a heros welcome in Greenwood and ran for lieutenant governor in
1967, on the slogan Hes a straight-shooter.
Medgar Evers was born outside Decatur, Mississippi, on July 2, 1925, and
attended segregated schools there until he was drafted for service in World
War II, at age 18. Soon after his return, in 1945, an incident occurred that set
the stage for his lifes work. Evers and brother Charles were sitting on the steps
of a rural Mississippi courthouse when U.S. senator Theodore Bilbo emerged,
telling police, Get those niggers out of here. The next thing you know, theyll
be running for office. As Charles Evers recalled the event, Medgar turned to
him, smiling, and remarked, You know, thats not a bad idea.
It was premature, however, in a state where most African Americans were
barred from voting and the races were rigidly segregated from cradle to grave.
After attending all-black Alcorn College (now Alcorn State University), with a
major in business administration, Evers worked as an insurance agent until 1954,
when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered school integration with all deliberate
speed. Despite that order, Evers was denied admission to the University of Mississippis law school, and focused instead on work for the NAACP, rising quickly
to statewide leadership as the organizations field secretary. In an atmosphere of
escalating violence, harassed with countless threats, logging frequent reports of
EVERS, MEDGAR WILEY
unpunished race-related murders, Evers campaigned to register black voters

and supported legal offensives including the federal lawsuit that secured James
Merediths admission to the University of Mississippi in September 1962.
Despite that victorymarked by a racist riot that left two men dead and
scores injured, including more than 100 deputy U.S. marshalsnone of Mississippis elementary or high schools were desegregated by the time Evers was
killed in 1963. His best efforts had registered 28,000 African American voters
statewide, but the vast majority were still excluded from the ballot box. The
year of his murder, two new militant Ku Klux Klan (KKK) factions established
themselves in Mississippi, eclipsing the respectable Citizens Councils and
inaugurating years of mayhem that saw 75 black churches bombed or burned
by arsonists in 1964 alone.
MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM SUMMER

From the 1880s onward, Mississippi earned notoriety as the United States
most segregated state, a closed society impervious to outside influence, where white supremacy was enforced by a combination of law, police brutality, and vigilante terrorism. In 1963, young members of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organized a mock
Freedom Vote demonstrating the desire of black Mississippians to vote,
if unimpeded by intimidation. Soon afterward, a Council of Federated
Organizationscombining elements of SNCC, the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial
Equality, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conferencebegan laying
plans for a Freedom Summer campaign in 1964. The operations vehicles
were local freedom schools, voter-registration drives conducted in the face
of stolid, often violent resistance, and a new Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party with interracial membership. More than 1,000 out-of-state volunteers, 90 percent of them white, teamed with Mississippi-born African
Americans for the 10-week campaign. Additionally, more than 100 volunteer doctors, nurses, psychologists, medical students, and other medical
professionals from the Medical Committee for Human Rights donated their
services for emergency care, health-education classes, and improvements
in Mississippis Jim Crow health system. An official tabulation for summer
listed 7 deaths; 4 persons critically wounded by gunfire; 80 persons beaten;
1,062 arrests; and 117 churches, homes and businesses bombed or burned
by nightriders. Visible results were modest, with few new voters registered,
but the bold campaign helped motivate passage of the federal Voting Rights
Act, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in August 1965.
141
142
E WA R T- B I G G S, C H R I S T O P H E R T H O M A S
Byron De La Beckwith was in the thick of that white resistance, serving

as a Klan recruiter and motivational speaker, hobnobbing with terrorists, finally convicted in August 1975 of conspiring to murder a prominent Jewish
community leader in Louisiana. Paroled in January 1980, Beckwith relocated
to Tennessee, serving as pastor for a Knoxville congregation of the Christian
Identity secta white supremacist, anti-Semitic cult whose leaders teach that
subhuman Jews were spawned in the Garden of Eden, after Eve had sex with
Satan in serpentine form.
For decades it seemed that Beckwith would avoid conviction for killing
Medgar Evers, but Mississippi prosecutors reopened the case in 1993, based
on new evidence including FBI reports that Beckwith had confessed the slaying to friends and at KKK rallies. Convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994, Beckwith stalled incarceration with appeals until 1997, when
the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld his conviction. He died in custody,
from complications of heart disease, hypertension, and other ailments, on January 21, 2001. Medgar Evers is an icon of the 1960s civil rights movement,
and Beckwith remains a martyr to hard-core white-supremacists.
Charles Evers, older brother of Medgar, was elected as mayor of Fayette,
Mississippi, in 1969. That same year, police arrested three other members of a
KKK splinter group, the Knights of the Green Forest, on charges of conspiring
to kill the mayor-elect. Captured at a local motel with automatic weapons, the
trio served time on various charges. Hollywood examined the Medgar Evers
case in Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), with James Woods cast as Byron De La
Beckwith. Evers himself, played by James Pickens Jr., appears only in the films
opening sequence, and the remainder depicts events from the 1990s.
See also: Ku Klux Klan (1866 ).
Further Reading
Evers, Myrlie, and William Peters. For Us, the Living. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.
Massengill, Reed. Portrait of a Racist. New York: St. Martins Press, 1994.
Nossiter, Adam. Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers. Boston:
Addison-Wesley, 1994.
Vollers, Maryanne. Ghosts of Mississippi: The Murder of Medgar Evers, the Trials of Byron
De La Beckwith, and the Haunting of the New South. New York: Back Bay Books, 1995.
Williams, Michael. Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr. Little Rock: University of Arkansas
Press, 2011.
EWART-BIGGS, CHRISTOPHER THOMAS

(19211976)
On July 21, 1976, members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA)
detonated a mine in the Dublin suburb of Sandyford, demolishing a car
E WA R T- B I G G S , C H R I S T O P H E R T H O M A S
occupied by British ambassador to Ireland Christopher Ewart-Biggs and others. The blast killed Ewart-Biggs and civil servant Judith Cooke, while wounding driver Brian ODriscoll and passenger Sir Brian Cubbon, then Northern
Irelands highest-ranking government official as permanent undersecretary of
state. Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Liam Cosgrave declared the bombing an
atrocity [that] fills all decent Irish people with a sense of shame, and British
prime minister James Callaghan branded the killers a common enemy whom
we must destroy or be destroyed by. Authorities detained 13 suspected PIRA
members after the assassination, but no convictions were obtained and the
crime remains officially unsolved.
Christopher Ewart-Biggs was born in Thanet, Kent, on August 5, 1921, the
son of a captain in the Royal Engineers. He attended Wellington College, in
Berkshire, and University College, Oxford, prior to the outbreak of World
War II. Enlisting with the British armys Queens Own Royal West Kent Regiment, he participated in the Second Battle of El Alamein (October 1942), and
was wounded there, losing his right eye to shrapnel. Thereafter, Ewart-Biggs
wore a false eye partially disguised by a smoked-glass monocle that became his
personal trademark.
Leaving the army for a career in diplomatic service, Ewart-Biggs next found
his life at risk in Algeria, where he served as British consul in early 1961,
during transition from French colonial rule to independence. Perhaps fortunately, diehard colonialists operating as the Organisation de larme secrte (Secret Army Organization) focused most of their homicidal energy on French
president Charles de Gaulle, and Ewart-Biggs left Algiers unscathed, while an
estimated 50,000 persons were slain by lynch mobs in the wake of liberation.
Ireland was another danger zone for British diplomats in 1976, when
Ewart-Biggs replaced Sir Arthur Galsworthy as ambassador to Dublin. The latest
round of Northern Irelands troubles had begun in May 1966, when a loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), publicly declared war
on the Irish Republican Army. A campaign of sectarian murders targeting Catholics ensued, followed by rioting between loyalists and republicans in Belfast
and elsewhere. A split in IRA ranks spawned the new PIRA in December 1969,
pursuing a policy of armed resistance against right-wing terrorists, police, and
British occupation forces. By spring 1974, the PIRA had expanded its bombing
campaign to England and the Republic of Ireland, with lethal blasts in Dublin,
Monaghan, and West Yorkshire. A PIRA truce, announced in February 1975,
foundered in January 1976, as Ambassador Galsworthy prepared to retire. The
UVF renewed hostilities by executing six Catholic civilians in County Armagh,
whereupon PIRA gunmen killed 10 Protestants in the same district. As Britains
new ambassador to Ireland, appointed in July, Ewart-Biggs became an irresistible target.
Following her husbands murder, Jane Ewart-Biggs entered politics as a
member of the Labour Party and became a Life Peer in the House of Lords, in
143
144
E WA R T- B I G G S, C H R I S T O P H E R T H O M A S
May 1981. There, she campaigned to improve Anglo-Irish relations, and also
served in 1984 as president of the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF).
Outside of politics, in 1977, she established the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, awarding 5,000 annually to a book, a play, or a piece of journalism that promotes peace and reconciliation in Ireland, a greater understanding
between the peoples of Britain and Ireland, or closer cooperation between
partners of the European Community.
Further Reading
Bishop, Patrick, and Eamonn Mallie. The Provisional IRA. London: Corgi, 1987.
Coogan, Tim. The IRA. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
McKearney, Tommy. The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament. London: Pluto
Press, 2011.
Shanahan, Timothy. The Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Morality of Terrorism.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
F
FAISAL BIN ABDUL-AZIZ AL SAUD
(19061975)
On March 25, 1975, while entertaining petitions from his subjects at the royal
residence in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, King Faisal greeted visitors from neighboring
Kuwait. His half-brothers son, Prince Faisal bin Musa'id bin Abdul-Aziz, was
also present, having recently returned from the United States. As King Faisal
leaned in to kiss his nephew, Prince Faisal drew a pistol and shot his uncle
twice, in the chin and ear. A bodyguard slashed at the prince with a sheathed
sword, while Oil Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani shouted orders to spare the
princes life. King Faisal reached the hospital alive, but surgeons could not save
his life. Despite reports that he forbade Prince Faisals execution with his dying
breath, the assassin was convicted of murder on June 18, 1975, and publicly
beheaded the same afternoon, before a crowd of thousands. His brother, Bandar, served a year in prison on suspicion of conspiracy, and was then released.
Born in Riyadh, in April 1906, Faisal was the third son of Abdul-Aziz ibn
Saud, first king of Nejd and Hejaz from 1926 to 1932, then first king of Saudi
Arabia from August 1932 until his death in November 1953. Son Saud bin
Abdul-Aziz Al Saud assumed the throne, and younger brother Faisal graduated from service as governor of Hijaz (appointed by their father in 1925) to
become minister of foreign affairs, also commanding an army unit that participated in the SaudiYemeni War of early 1934. Vast wealth derived from oil
in the wake of World War II sent King Saud on an epic spending spree that,
coupled with his evident incompetence in foreign affairs, appeared to threaten
both the monarchy and the nation.
In 1958, senior members of the royal family and high-ranking Muslim clerics persuaded Saud to make Faisal prime minister, with sweeping executive
powers. Faisal curbed spending, then resigned his post in December 1960,
in a dispute with Saud over the level of authority granted to Saudi Arabias
Council of Ministers. He was reinstalled as prime minister in 1962, but conflicts with his brother continued, prompting Saud to abolish the office by
royal decree. In January 1963, while Saud sought medical treatment abroad,
Faisal replaced key office holders with his own supporters and placed his
brother Abdullah in charge of the National Guard. Saud returned to find himself outnumbered and outgunned, pressured to accept a purely ceremonial
146
FA I S A L I I O F I R AQ
role and Faisal assumed command of the country. Saud resisted until March
1964, when Faisal was appointed as regent, formally replacing his brother as
king on November 2, 1964.
As king, Faisal balanced the nations budget, increased oil production, and
supported selective modernization of Saudi Arabias government, including
the establishment of a judicial system and civil service, a modern welfare system, creation of administrative regions, and pursuance of five-year plans for
economic development. Faisal had already established the nations first television station, although broadcasts were delayed until 1965. A year later, one of
his ultraconservative nephewsPrince Khalid ibn Musaid, brother of Faisals
assassinwas killed by police while attacking a Saudi television station he
condemned as decadent. In 1969, Faisal arrested hundreds of army officers,
announcing that they had conspired to depose him by force. Closely allied
with the United States, he reportedly learned of the budding coup from agents
of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Journalists suggested three possible motives for Faisals assassination. One
school of thought suggested that Prince Faisal acted belatedly to avenge his
brothers killing by police, nine years earlier. The Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar
speculated that his death was retribution for deposing King Saud in 1964. A rival
paper, Al-Bayrak, alleged that King Faisal had restricted his nephewassassins
foreign travels, based on concern over Prince Faisals drinking and drug abuse
while outside the country. A fourth theory, popular with anti-American elements,
claimed that the CIA had used Prince Faisal to eliminate the king. No motive for
the agencys decision to assassinate a seeming friend was ever clarified.
King Faisal was succeeded by a younger brother, Khalid bin Abdul-Aziz
Al Saud, who reigned until his death from heart failure in June 1982. Another brother, Fahd bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, then occupied the throne until
his death from pneumonia in August 2005. The countrys present king, brother
Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, maintains his familys longstanding alliance
with the United States.
Further Reading
Beling, Willard. King Faisal and the Modernisation of Saudi Arabia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980.
de Gaury, Gerald. Faisal: King of Saudi Arabia. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2008.
Stefoff, Rebecca. Faisal. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2008.
Vassiliev, Alexi. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia: Personality, Faith and Times. London: Saqi
Books, 2013.
FAISAL II OF IRAQ (19351958)

In the early hours of July 14, 1958, while en route to Jordan in support of King
Hussein and President Camille Chamoun against rebellious opposition led by
FA I S A L I I O F I R A Q
Prime Minister Rashid Karami,

Iraqi troops led by General Abd
al-Karim Qasim marched on
Baghdad instead, staging a coup
dtat against King Faisal II,
Crown Prince Abd al-Ilah,
and Prime Minister Nuri asSaid. By 8:00 A.M., the rebel soldiers had surrounded the royal
familys al-Rahab Palace and
Nuri as-Saids residence. Royal
guards offered no resistance
as Faisal, the crown prince,
Princess Hiyam (Abd al-Ilahs
wife), Princess Nafeesa (Abd
al-Ilahs mother), Princess
Abadiya (Faisals aunt), and
several servants were herded
into the palace courtyard, lined
up against a wall, and cut
down by machine-gun fire. All
but Faisal were killed outright;
the king was placed aboard an King Faisal II of Iraq died in a military coup, on
July 14, 1958. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
ambulance but died en route
to Baghdads Royal Hospital.
Nuri as-Said, forewarned of the attack, briefly eluded his pursuers, but was
killed by insurgents on July 15, effectively ending Iraqs 37-year Hashemite
monarchy.
Born in Baghdad on May 2, 1935, Al-Malik Fais.al Ath-than was the only son
of Ghazi I, Iraqs second king, and Queen Aliya bint Ali. A mysterious singlecar crash killed Ghazi in April 1939, leaving some Iraqis convinced he was murdered on orders from Nuri as-Said, then serving the second of his eight terms
as prime minister. That case remained unproven, and although three-year-old
Faisal officially succeeded his father, uncle Abd al-Ilah ruled as regent until
Faisal attained his majority in May 1953. He spent the years of World War II
in England, studying at Harrow School with his cousin, future King Hussein
of Jordan. Meanwhile, Abd al-Ilah injured the monarchy by signing the AngloIraqi Treaty of January 1948 (extending British influence over Iraq, established
in prior treaties from 1922 and 1930), and by persuading Faisal to sign the
Baghdad Pact of 1955, allying Iraq with Britain, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey, in
the anticommunist Central Treaty Organization. Massive protest demonstrations
followed ratification of both agreements, with hundreds of protesters killed by
Iraqi troops and police.
147
148
FA L C N , R A M N L O R E N ZO
By the time Faisal assumed his throne, rebellion was already brewing inside
his army. A corps of pan-Arab Free Officers, inspired by those who toppled
Egypts monarchy in 1952, fomented uprisings in Hayy and Najaf in 1956. In
February 1957, a coalition of the Arab Socialist Baath Party, Iraqs Communist
Party, and the National Democrats organized a Front of National Union, supported by a parallel Supreme Committee of Free Officers within the Iraqi officer corps, which ultimately served as the spearhead of rebellion against King
Faisal.
Following destruction of the monarchy, a revolutionary council was established, with General Qasim serving as prime minister and minister of defense,
and Colonel Abdul Salam Arif became deputy prime minister, minister of the
interior, and commander in chief of the army. A three-man Sovereignty Council was created, with representatives from Iraqs three largest ethnic groups:
Muhammad Mahdi Kubbah spoke for Shiite Muslims; Muhammad Najib arRubaI represented Sunnis; and Khalid al-Naqshabandi served as spokesman
for the Kurds. Despite those measures, and announcement of a temporary
constitution on July 27, 1958, an era of political upheaval followed the July
revolution. In March 1959, the New York Times declared Iraq confused and
unstable, plagued by cross currents of communism, Arab and Iraqi nationalism, anti-Westernism and the positive neutrality of President Gamal Abdel
Nasser of the United Arab Republic.
That instability resulted in ultimate triumph for the Baath Party, which led a
coup against President Qasim in February 1963, supported by the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency. Party chief Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr seized office as prime
minister, advanced to the presidency and chairmanship of the Revolutionary
Command Council in July 1968, then was replaced by fellow Baathist Saddam
Hussein in July 1979.
Further Reading
de Gaury, Gerald. Three Kings in Baghdad: The Tragedy of Iraqs Monarchy. London: I.B.
Tauris, 2008.
Khadduri, Majid. Independent Iraq, 19321958. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960.
Tripp, Charles. A History of Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
FALCN, RAMN LORENZO (18551909)

On November 14, 1909, mourners gathered in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for
the funeral of Antonio Ballv, director of the countrys National Penitentiary.
Among those present was Ramn Falcn, chief of the Capital Police, attending with Juan Lartigau, his executive secretary. After the service, as they were
returning to headquarters on Moreno Street, Ukrainian immigrant anarchist
Simn Radowitzky rushed to Falcns carriage and lobbed a homemade bomb
FA L C N , R A M N L O R E N Z O
through the window. Its explosion fatally wounded both Falcn and Lartigau,
both victims dying before they reached the nearest hospital. Arrested at the
scene, Radowitzky described his attack as retribution for the Semana Roja (Red
Week) in May 1909, when Falcns police shot and brutalized striking workers in Buenos Aires. Convicted of murder and sentenced to death, 18-year-old
Radowitzky secured commutation of his sentence to indefinite imprisonment
by proving that he was a minor.
A native of Buenos Aires, born on August 30, 1855, Ramn Falcn was
among the first enrollees at Brazils National Military College, graduating with
honors in 1873. He subsequently served as aide-de-camp to President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, then joined in General Julio Argentino Rocas Conquest of the Desert campaign during 18781879, annihilating native villages
whose land was coveted by wealthy cattle ranchers. As General Roca explained
the campaign: Our self-respect as a virile people obliges us to put down as
soon as possible, by reason or by force, this handful of savages who destroy our
wealth and prevent us from definitely occupying, in the name of law, progress
and our own security, the richest and most fertile lands of the Republic.
On a lighter note, in 1887, Falcn founded the Club de Gimnasia y Esgrima
La Plata, today the Western Hemispheres oldest soccer club, still in existence
today. Retiring from the army as a colonel, in 1898, he was elected to Argentinas Chamber of Deputies as a member of the ruling National Autonomist
Party. In 1906, with the outbreak of organized labor unrest, President Jos
Figueroa Alcorta chose Falcn to lead the Polica de la Capital and crush insurgent movements.
To that end, Falcn employed the tactics he had learned in military service, while annihilating aboriginal tribesmen. During the Buenos Aires Tenants
Strike of July 1907, he fielded mounted troops armed with sabers against unarmed protesters, and drove rent strikers from their homes with high-pressure
hoses. On May 1, 1909, members of the anarchist Argentine Regional Workers Federation (FORA) staged a May Day demonstration in the capital, where
Falcns shock troops killed 11 marchers and wounded more than 100. That
incident sparked a general strike, and led in turn to Falcns Red Week of unbridled violence, coupled with anti-Semitic propaganda against Russian Jewish
instigators and enforced censorship of newspaper reports on police brutality.
On Falcns orders, police also shut down FORAs newspaper, La Protesta Humana, and La Vanguardia, published by the Socialist Party of Argentina. Benito
Villanueva, president of Argentinas senate, later intervened to reduce the long
prison terms handed out to demonstrators jailed in May 1909, but President
Alcorta and members of the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange staged a rally in the
chiefs support.
Following Falcns assassination, President Alcorta declared a nationwide
state of siege and signed a Law of Social Defense, permitting deportation of
149
150
FERREIR A DO A M AR AL, JOO M ARIA
accused agitators. After winning commutation of his death sentence, Simon

Radowitzky was initially jailed in Buenos Aires, but he escaped briefly in 1911,
with 12 other inmates. Upon recapture, he was transferred to the dreaded National Penitentiary in Ushuaia, the capital of Tierra del Fuego Province. There,
he endured harassment and brutality allegedly including gang rape by a deputy
warden and three guards, yet persisted in leading inmate hunger strikes and
protest choirs. Anarchist colleagues engineered a second escape in 1918, but
Radowitzky was recaptured 23 days later, punished with solitary confinement
at Ushuaia until January 1921. President Hiplito Yrigoyen released Radowitzky in 1930 and expelled him from Argentina. He participated in the Spanish
Civil War of 1936, then fled to Mexico after the fascist victory in Spain, surviving there as a toy factory worker until a heart attack claimed his life in February 1956.
In Buenos Aires, in November 1943, the Capital Police force was transformed into the Argentine Federal Police (AFP). President Pedro Pablo Ramrez
appointed his son as the chief, and although the force was slowly modernized,
it retained an unsavory reputation. In 1973, returning President Juan Pern
named Alberto Villara member of the right-wing Argentine Anticommunist
Alliance death squadto lead the department. Following Villars assassination
in 1974, the AFP participated in a March 1976 coup dtat that deposed President Isabel Pern, thereafter collaborating with the military junta that tortured
and murdered thousands of Argentineans.
Further Reading
Rock, David. Argentina, 15161987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsn. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987.
Romero, Luis. A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.
FERREIRA DO AMARAL, JOO MARIA

(18031849)
Macau, China, was a hotbed of dissension and conspiracy in 1849. Three hundred years of Portuguese occupation, including importation of opium and African slaves, had primed the native Chinese population for rebellion. Governor
Joao Ferreira do Amaral stoked the fires of animosity in 1849 by imposing new
taxes, expelling Qing dynasty officials from Macau and closing their Customs
house, while simultaneously ceasing rent payments to the Qing government in
Beijing. On August 22, 1849, seven Chinese led by Shen Zhiliang ambushed
the governor outside Macaus Lin Fong Temple, dragging him from his horse
and stabbing him repeatedly, then dismembering him and leaving his head at
FERREIRA DO AMARAL, JOO MARIA
the temples entrance, fleeing with their victims severed limbs into Guangdong
Province.
Joao Ferreira do Amaral was born in Lisbon, Portugal, on March 4, 1803,
the eldest son of a sergeant in the Portuguese Legion who had joined Napoleons invasion of Russia in 1812 and lost his life there. Ferreira subsequently
joined the Portuguese navy as a midshipman, advancing to the rank of commander by 1821. That same year, he was wounded in a naval engagement with
Brazilian rebels, requiring amputation of one arm. After the surgery, performed
while Ferreira smoked a cigar, he reportedly tossed his severed limb overboard
with a shout of Viva Portugal!
That incident and other exploits marked Ferreira for further advancement.
By 1839, he was designated Captain of Sea and War (equivalent to full captain in the U.S. or British navies), and a knight fidalgo (son of somebody
i.e., an important person) of the Portuguese Royal household. After serving
as a legislator for Angola in Portugals Chamber of Deputies, Ferreira was appointed to serve as governor of Macau on April 21, 1846. Within a month
of taking office, he imposed a poll tax, property tax, and ground rent on all
Chinese residents of the colony. Protests from Beijing were immediate and
prolonged, ending only when Ferreira expelled Qing officials en masse from
Macau.
Ferreiras assassination prompted demands for retribution from Portugal,
echoed by supporting statements from the U.S., British, and Spanish consulates in nearby Hong Kong. It also triggered the Baishaling Incident, as Chinese imperial troops mobilized on the border separating mainland Guangdong
Province from Macau. On August 25, Second Lieutenant Vicente Nicolau de
Mesquita staged a preemptive strike against a Chinese fort at Baishaling, capturing the garrison of 400 soldiers and 20 cannons with a force of only 36 Portuguese troops. Authorities in Guangdong forestalled further attacks by arresting
and executing Shen Zhiliang. In the process, they also recovered Ferreiras
missing arms and legs, returning them to the Portuguese colonial government.
Guangdong villagers buried Shen under a headstone calling him a fighter for
justice, whereas the Portuguese stamped the seal of their nations royal family on a stone outside the Lin Fong Temple. Perhaps surprisingly, given conditions in the colony, Ferreira was the only one of 189 Portuguese rulers killed in
Macau by their Chinese subjects, during 450 years of colonial rule.
Further Reading
Ng, Maria. Pilgrimages: Memories of Colonial Macau and Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press, 2009.
Yik-yi Chu, Cindy. Foreign Communities in Hong Kong, 1840s1950s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
151
152
F O R D, G E R A L D R U D O L P H , J R .
FORD, GERALD RUDOLPH, JR.

(19132006)ATTEMPTED
Gerald Ford, the 38th president of the United States, was an easy target for comedians who focused on his seeming clumsinessstumbling as he deplaned
from Air Force One, slicing his golf ball into crowds of spectators, beaning his
tennis partner with an awkward servebut he also incited violent emotions
from some U.S. residents, beginning with his controversial pardon of disgraced
predecessor Richard Nixon, granted one month after his inauguration. Simple
luck appeared to spare him in September 1975, when he survived two assassination attempts within 17 days.
The first attempt occurred on September 5, at Capitol Park in Sacramento,
California. While touring the park, Ford was approached by Lynette Squeaky
Fromme, a follower of imprisoned cult leader Charles Manson (see sidebar).
Dressed in a red flowing robe, Fromme brandished a .45-caliber Colt pistol at
Ford, but Secret Service agent Larry Buendorf grabbed the weapon, jamming
its hammer with the webbing of his thumb. Police later discovered that although the pistols magazine contained four cartridges, the firing chamber was
empty, unloaded by Fromme before she left her motel room. Fromme claimed
that she hoped to speak with Ford concerning Californias endangered redwoods (a recent Manson theme), saying, I stood up and waved a gun for a reason. I was so relieved not to
have to shoot it, but, in truth,
I came to get life. Not just my
life but clean air, healthy water
and respect for creatures and
creation. Prosecuted under
a 1965 statute that made attempted murder of a president
a federal crime, Fromme received a life sentence and was
paroled in August 2009, after
serving 34 years.
Ford was still in California
when the second, more serious
attempt on his life occurred, on
September 22. Sara Jane Moore,
a 45-year-old FBI informant
and bookkeeper for People In
Need (recently created by media
mogul Randolph Hurst, on dePresident Gerald Ford survived two assassination mand from members of the
attempts in September 1975. (Library of Congress) Symbionese Liberation Army
FORD, GERALD RUDOLPH, JR.
who had kidnapped his daughter), fired a .38-caliber revolver at Ford as the
president left San Franciscos St. Francis Hotel. A bystander deflected the shot,
which struck a wall six inches from Fords head and ricocheted to wound a
taxi driver. As Moore explained her act: The government had declared war
on the left. Nixons appointment of Ford as vice president and his resignation
making Ford president seemed to be a continuing assault on America. I didnt
want to kill anybody, but there comes a point when the only way you can
make a statement is to pick up a gun. I do regret I didnt succeed, and allow
the winds of change to start. I wish I had killed him. I did it to create chaos.
Like Fromme, Moore was sentenced to life, paroled in December 2007 after
serving 32 years.
Gerald Ford was born Leslie Lynch King Jr., in Omaha, Nebraska, on July 14,
1913. His parents separated 16 days after his birth, and divorced when he was
five months old. His mother remarried in 1916, to Gerald Rudolff Ford, and
applied the same name to her son, although her new husband never adopted
the child. In later life, Ford changed the spelling of his middle name to the
more conventional Rudolph and kept the Junior.
Ford graduated from the University of Michigan in 1934, working as a boxing and basketball coach. Yale Law School rejected him in 1935, then reconsidered three years later, after Ford had spent a year of study at his alma maters
law school. He earned his LLB in 1941, was admitted to Michigans bar that
same year, then joined the U.S. Navy following the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor. Discharged as a lieutenant commander in 1946, he returned to Michigan and entered politics as a Republican, winning the first of 12 congressional
terms in 1948. During 19631964 he served on the Warren Commission, appointed to investigate the assassination of President John Kennedy, and critics of that investigation cite Fords close friendship with FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover to support claims of a whitewash, suggesting that Ford was Hoovers
man on the commission. From January 1965 to December 1973, Ford served
as House Minority Leader.
In October 1973, President Nixon nominated Ford to succeed Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had resigned and later pled no contest to taxevasion charges. The House confirmed Ford on December 6, and Nixon
subsequently resigned in August 1974, leaving Ford as president. He remains the only Oval Office occupant in U.S. history who was never elected
as president or as vice president by the Electoral College. On September 8,
1974, when Ford pardoned Nixon for any and all crimes committed during
his presidency, many observers railed against the appearance of a corrupt
bargain between Ford and Nixon. Ford, for his part, described Nixons humiliation as a tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and
on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only
I can do that, and if I can, I must.
153
154
F O R D, G E R A L D R U D O L P H , J R .
THE MANSON FAMILY

The so-called Manson Family was a cult of sorts, including up to 50
members at one time, mostly young drifters and runaways who fell into
the orbit of middle-aged ex-convict Charles Milles Manson between 1967
and 1969. Roaming throughout and beyond California, the family lived
hand-to-mouth, indulged in drug-fueled orgies at Mansons direction,
and listened with rapt attention as he spun predictions of an apocalyptic race war he called Helter Skelter, from the lyrics of a then-popular
Beatles song with the same title. That conflict, Manson said, would climax with annihilation of whites by African Americans, who would then
recognize their own ineptitude and seek his leadership to run the country
they had captured. To precipitate that war, Manson dispatched his blackclad creepy-crawlers on a series of murderous home invasions in 1969,
claiming at least eight lives (some estimates exceed 30 victims, including Mansons own biological father, slain in Kentucky). In various trials,
Manson and seven of his disciples were sentenced to death, those verdicts
commuted to life imprisonment by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972. At
the time of this writing, five are still in custody. Defendant Steve Grogan
was released in 1985, after he led police to the remains of murder victim Donald Shorty Shea. Susan Atkins died in prison, from cancer, on
September 24, 2009, and ex-family member Bruce Davis was paroled in
October 2012, after serving 40 years for the 1969 slayings of Shea and
musician Gary Hinman.
Lingering controversy over that pardon, coupled with various domestic and
foreign issues, ensured that Ford would be a one-term president. He agreed reluctantly to seek another term, but floundered in debates with former Georgia
governor Jimmy Carter, despite Carters own missteps in the public eye. On
election day, Ford carried 27 states to Carters 23, but he failed to secure an
electoral majority. Ford remained active in the Republican Party after his defeat, and lived longer than any other U.S. president, dying in December 2006
at the age of 93 years and 165 days.
Further Reading
Bravin, Jess. Squeaky: The Life and Times of Lynette Alice Fromme. New York: St. Martins
Press, 1997.
Brinkley, Douglas. Gerald R. Ford. New York: Times Books, 2007.
Livesy, Clara. The Manson Women: A Family Portrait. Florham Park, NJ: Richard
Marek, 1980.
FOSTER, MARCUS ALBERT
Mollenhoff, Clark. The Man Who Pardoned Nixon: A Documented Account of Gerald Fords
Presidential Retreat from Credibility. New York: St. Martins Press, 1976.
Sanders, Ed. The Family. New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 2002.
FOSTER, MARCUS ALBERT (19231973)

On November 6, 1973, as Superintendent of Schools Marcus Foster and his
deputy, Robert Blackburn, left a school board meeting in Oakland, California,
they were ambushed by members of the radical-leftist Symbionese Liberation
Army (SLA). Foster suffered fatal wounds from hollow-point bullets filled
with cyanide, and Blackburn was struck by a shotgun blast but survived.
Following the murder, an SLA communique accused Foster and Blackburn
of being fascists who wanted all Oakland students to carry identification
cards. In fact, Fosteran African American popular with liberalshad opposed that plan and only grudgingly accepted more moderate plans to track
school enrollees.
A native of Athens, Georgia, born on March 31, 1923, Marcus Foster left
the Jim Crow South with his family, as a child, and attended public schools in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He earned his bachelors degree from historically
black Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, followed by a doctorate from the
University of Pennsylvania. Between 1957 and 1970, he taught school in Philadelphia, advancing to the rank of principal at Gratz High School, then serving
associate superintendent for community relations until the Oakland Unified
School District recruited him as its new school superintendent. Before departing Philadelphia, he was honored with an award naming him as the person
who had done the most for his adopted hometown.
The early 1970s were a hectic time for schools in California and nationwide.
Those years also witnessed the birth of the SLA, founded after inmate Donald
David DeFreeze, aka General Field Marshal Cinque, escaped from Soledad
Prison in March 1973. A small, strange group, the SLA was led by an African American (DeFreeze), but most of its members were whitethough some
wore blackface makeup, either as a disguise or a display of solidarity with
ghetto residents. Fosters assassination was the SLAs first overt action, followed
in February 1974 by the abduction and apparent brainwashing of newspaper
heiress Patricia Hearst. (Hearst joined in a $10,000 San Francisco bank robbery and was later convicted as a willing participant, despite her claims of coercion.) On May 17, 1974, DeFreeze and four others died in a shootout with
Los Angeles police and FBI agents.
Meanwhile, Oakland police arrested SLA members Russell Little and Joseph
Remiro for Fosters assassination on January 10, 1974. Both were convicted and
sentenced to life imprisonment, but the California Court of Appeal overturned
Littles verdict on June 5, 1981. Jurors acquitted him at his second trial, based
155
156
FR ANZ FERDINAND
on statements from surviving SLA members professing his innocence. According to Little, Who actually pulled the trigger that killed Foster was Mizmoon
[Patricia Monique Soltysik]. Nancy [Ling Perry] was supposed to shoot Blackburn, [but] she kind of botched that and DeFreeze ended up shooting him with
a shotgun. Patricia Hearst, testifying at her own trial, named Soltysik and SLA
member Emily Yolanda Harris as Fosters killers. Harris served eight years in
prison for Hearsts kidnapping, and received another seven-year term in 2003,
after pleading guilty to second-degree murder related to an April 1975 bank
holdup. No charges were filed against her in the Foster case.
Further Reading
Bryan, John. This Soldier Still at War: The True Story of Joe Remiro and the Symbionese Liberation Army. London: Quartet Books, 1976.
McCorry, Jesse. Marcus Foster and the Oakland Public Schools. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978.
McLellan, Vin, and Paul Avery. The Voices of Guns. New York: Putnam, 1977.
Payne, Les, Tim Findley, and Carolyn Craven. The Life and Death of the SLA: A True
Story of Revolutionary Terror. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976.
Spencer, John. In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School
Reform. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
FRANZ FERDINAND (18631914)

In some respects, the double murder that ignited World War I may be regarded
as a tragicomedy of errors. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was traveling with his wife, Duchess
Sophie of Hohenberg, from Ilida Spa to Sarajevo, Serbia (now the Federation
of Bosnia and Herzegovina), on June 28, 1914. A six-car motorcade conveyed
them from Sarajevos railway station toward a military barracks, which Ferdinand was scheduled to inspect before proceeding to the town hall. Unknown
to Ferdinand and company, a team of Bosnian Serb assassins lay in wait along
the archdukes route, hoping to kill him as a first step toward severing AustriaHungarys south-Slav provinces and creating an independent Serbia.
The first would-be killer, Muhamed Mehmedbaic,
was armed with a bomb
but did not hurl it as the procession passed his station, at the Mostar Caf.
Vaso Cubrilovi
c,
standing nearby with a pistol and bomb, likewise did noth
ing as his target came and went. The third man in line, Nedeljko Cabrinovi
c,
threw his bomb, but it bounced off the folded convertible roof of Franz Ferdinands car, detonating beneath the next car in line and wounding 20 people.
Cabrinovi
c instantly swallowed a cyanide pill and leaped into the Miljacka River,
but the poison failed to kill him and a furious mob dragged him from the
water, beating him before police arrested him and hauled him off to jail. The
motorcade, meanwhile, sped past assassins Cvjetko Popovic,
Gavrilo Princip,
and Trifun Grabe and reached the town hall without further incident.
FRANZ FERDINAND
After an angry exchange

with Sarajevos mayor, protesting his outrageous welcome
to the city, Ferdinand delivered
his scheduled speech, then announced his plan to visit victims of the mornings bombing
at Sarajevo Hospital. The motorcade left city hall at 10:45
A.M., but Governor Oskar Potiorek forgot to tell Ferdinands
driver, Leopold Lojka, that
hePotiorekwished the procession to travel along Appel
Quay. Lojka turned onto Franz
Josef Street instead, coincidentally passing a delicatessen
where plotter Gavrilo Princip
had stopped to eat after the
bungled ambush. There, Lojka Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinands murder trigtook another wrong turn, then gered the First World War in 1914. (Bettmann/
stalled the car while trying to Corbis)
reverse and change directions.
Princip seized his unexpected second chance, rushing the open car and shooting Ferdinand in the throat, then wounding Duchess Sophie in the abdomen.
Police instantly seized him, but the damage was done. Sophie died en route to
the hospital, and her husband bled to death 10 minutes later.
Franz Ferdinand was born in Graz, Austria, on December 18, 1863, the
eldest son of Archduke Karl Ludwig, nephew of Austro-Hungarian emperor
Franz Joseph I and Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico. His cousin, Crown Prince
Rudolf, committed suicide in 1889, leaving Ferdinands father next in line for
the throne, but typhoid fever killed Karl Ludwig seven years later, making
Ferdinand the heir presumptive. Far from politics, however, Ferdinands primary passion seemed to be hunting: his diaries listed some 300,000 kills, and
100,000 trophies were displayed at his castle in Konopite, Bohemia (now the
Czech Republic). His political philosophies remain obscure, and proved to be
irrelevant in any case.
Ferdinands assassination is universally regarded as the trigger incident for
World War I. Austria-Hungary quickly declared war against Serbia, setting off
a chain reaction as Serbias alliesthe Triple Entente of France, Britain, and
Russiaresponded with declarations of war against Austria-Hungary. That, in
turn, drove the other Central PowersGermany, the Ottoman Empire, and the
kingdom of Bavariato support Austria-Hungary by declaring war against the
157
158
FR ANZ FERDINAND
Triple Entente. Over the next four years, the global conflict would claim an estimated 16.6 million lives, with countless more wounded or missing.
All of the conspirators in Ferdinands assassination were eventually captured.
Twenty-five defendants faced trial at Sarajevo in October 1914, with 16 con
victed. Danilo Ilic,
Veljko Cubrilovi
c,
and Mihaijlo Jovanovic were sentenced
to death and hanged in February 1915. Two other condemned defendants,
Jakov Milovic and Nedjo Kerovic,
won commutation of their sentences to life
imprisonment and 20 years, respectively. The others receiving prison terms in
cluded Mitar Kerovic (life); Nedeljko Cabrinovi
c,
Gavrilo Princip, and Trifko
Grabe (20 years); Vaso Cubrilovic (16 years); Cvjetko Popovic (13 years);
THE BLACK HAND

The Black Hand was a secret society organized by a group of seven Serbian army officers on September 6, 1901, pledged to unite all territories
annexed by Austria-Hungary that contained significant Serb populations.
(It should not be confused with the Black Hand extortion gangs led by
members of the Mafia and Camorra that preyed on Italian immigrants to
the United States between the 1880s and the 1920s.) The groups first target
was King Alexander I of Serbia, assassinated with his consort Draga Main
in June 1903, by Black Hand founder Captain Dragutin Dimitrijevic;
and
several confederates. Five years later, in October 1908, Austria-Hungary
annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, prompting creation of two larger resistance groups. One, called Narodna Odbrana (National Defense), focused
Serbian anger against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the other
Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia)served ethnic Bosnians. Narodna Odbrana
hatched multiple plots to kill the king of Montenegro during 19081909,
but none were successful. The final Black Hand organizationproperly
known as Ujedinjenje ili Smrt (Unification or Death)was founded by
10 conspirators on May 9, 1911, gaining an estimated 2,500 members by
1914. Comprised of separate three-to-five-member cells, it required new
members to vow that I, by entering into the society, do hereby swear by
the Sun which shineth upon me, by the Earth which feedeth me, by God,
by the blood of my forefathers, by my honor and by my life, that from this
moment onward and until my death, I shall faithfully serve the task of this
organisation and that I shall at all times be prepared to bear for it any sacrifice. After sparking World War I with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the Black Hand was engulfed in the resulting carnage and dissolved
sometime before wars end in 1918.
FRANZ FERDINAND
Lazar Djukic and Ivo Kranjcevic (10 years); Cvijan Stjepanovic (7 years); and
Marko Perin and Branko Zagorac (3 years).
A second trial disposed of four more plotters in March 1917. Muhamed
Mehmedbaic,
who had failed to throw his bomb as planned, received a 15-year
sentence, but was pardoned in 1919. Three Serbian soldiers linked to the conspiratorial Black Hand movementColonel Ljuba Vulovic,
Captain Dragutin
Dimitrijevic,
and Rade Malobabicwere
sentenced to death and executed by

firing squad in June 1917, after paying court costs and fees for the transportation of witnesses.
Further Reading
Brook-Shepherd, Gordon. Archduke of Sarajevo: The Romance and Tragedy of Franz
Ferdinand of Austria. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1984.
Cassels, Lavender. The Archduke and the Assassin: Sarajevo, June 28th, 1914. New York:
Stein & Day, 1985.
Dolph Owings, W. A. The Sarajevo Trial. Chapel Hill, NC: Documentary Publications,
1984.
Remak, Joachim. Sarajevo: The Story of a Political Murder. New York: Criterion, 1959.
Smith, David. One Morning in Sarajevo: 28 June 1914. St. Albans, United Kingdom:
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2008.
Strauss, Roberta. The Desperate Act: The Assassination of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.
159
G
GADDAFI, MUAMMAR (19422011)
On February 17, 2011, mass protests erupted in Libya against the regime of
Brotherly Leader Muammar Gaddafi, the nations dictator since 1969. The
states brutal response, including alleged importation of Ghanaian mercenaries,
prompted all-out civil war and intervention by elements of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO). Officially deposed and stripped of international
recognition by mid-July, Gaddafi fought on from hiding until October 20,
when his troops made a last-ditch stand against opponents from the National
Transitional Council (NTC) in the Battle of Sirte. That morning, NATO aircraft
intercepted a satellite phone call from Gaddafi and fired on his motorcade, two
miles outside of Sirte. With their vehicles disabled, Gaddafi and others sought
refuge in nearby houses, where they were quickly surrounded by NTC soldiers.
Conflicting accounts of Gaddafis demise claim that he was wounded by gunfire
or grenade shrapnel, then captured alive, whereupon he was beaten, stabbed,
and shot at close range, with his body displayed on the hood of a car. Gaddafis
son, Mutassim, died in the same engagement.
Born in Qasr Abu Hadi, near the site of his desperate last stand, in June
1942, Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi attended a Muslim elementary school, participated in anti-British demonstrations during the 1956
Suez Crisis, and graduated from the Benghazi Military University Academy in
1966, before pursuing further studied in Europe. He attended Britains Royal
Military Academy Sandhurst, then returned to Libya and joined the armys
engineering corps, rising to the rank of lieutenant in 1969. On September 1
of that year, while King Idris was touring Greece, Gaddafi led a bloodless
military coup dtat that abolished the Libyan monarchy. Assuming the rank
of colonel, Gaddafi proclaimed himself head of state, ruling for the next
42 years under ever-changing titles that included chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, prime minister, secretary general of the General
Peoples Congress, and Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution.
Once in power, Gaddafi ordered evacuation of U.S. and British military bases
in Libya, demanded an increased share of Western oil drilling proceeds from
50 to 79 percent, expelled Italian settlers, and replaced the Gregorian calendar
with an Islamic version, renaming the months to suit himself (August became
Hannibal, July became Nasser, and so on). After a lengthy contemplative
162
GADDAFI, MUA M M AR
Rebels killed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in February 2011. (Associated Press)
exile, Gaddafi published The Green Book, dictating his views on Islamic law
and advocating direct rule by Peoples Committees, while he retained power
as head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces. Using oil profits
to develop his country, Gaddafi increased Libyas literacy rate from 10 to 90
percent, established equal rights for women and blacks, and added 20 years
to average life expectancy through improved medical care. The reverse side of
that coin included cases of arbitrary arrest and detention under Law 73, which
restricted freedom of expression. Between 1980 and 1987, Libyan agents murdered at least 25 dissident expatriates, and at home, Gaddafi launched repressive campaigns against Libyas Berber minority.
In foreign affairs, Gaddafi sought to unify the Arab states of North Africa as a
single Great Islamic State of the Sahel. To that end, he invaded Chad, fought
a brief war with Egypt, and organized an Islamic Legion to agitate for Muslim
rule as far afield as Lebanon, Syria, Uganda, and Palestine. Gaddafis intelligence service also supported terrorist actions abroad, including various raids
on Israel and the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland,
GADDAFI, MUAMMAR
in December 1988. Additionally, Gaddafis World Revolutionary Center near

Benghazi trained Africans who subsequently seized control or led guerrilla actions in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Burkina Faso.
Prior to his ultimate downfall, Gaddafi survived at least five other assassination attempts. The first occurred soon after he assumed power in Libya, when
the deposed royal family hatched a counterrevolution plan with Britains Special Air Service. The plot involved liberating 150 political prisoners from jail
in Tripoli, then leaving them to kill Gaddafi, but the United States persuaded
Englands Secret Intelligence Service (SIS; MI6) to cancel the coup on grounds
that Gaddafi was an acceptable anticommunist.
Seven years later, in 1976, Tunisian television reported that a lone assassin had fired shots at Gaddafi but missed his target. French president Valry
Giscard dEstaing plotted Gaddafis death in 1981, collaborating with hostile
Egyptian officials, but once again the United States intervened. Five years later,
possessed of a new attitude, the U.S. Air Force bombed Gaddafis family compound in Tripolis Bab al-Azizia Barracks, in retaliation for the terrorist bombing of a Berlin discotheque that wounded 79 U.S. servicemen.
In 1993, some 2,000 Libyan soldiers from the Berber Warfalla tribe rebelled against Gaddafis regime, claiming discrimination in the ranks, but
they were crushed by the air force (dominated by members of Gaddafis own
Qadhadhfa tribe). Islamic militants attacked Gaddafis motorcade near Sirte,
in February 1996, prompting Gaddafi to blame Britains SIS for the attempt
on his life. Robin Cook, then Englands shadow foreign secretary, officially
refuted that charge, but told reporters, We have never denied that we knew
of plots against Gaddafi. In June 1998, Muslim extremists staged a second attack on Gaddafi, near Dirnah, reportedly wounding him in one arm.
Two months later, David Shayler, a former agent of Britains Security Service
(MI5) claimed that MI6 agents had donated 100,000 toward the latest Gaddafi murder plot.
Further Reading
Forte, Maximilian. Slouching towards Sirte: NATOs War on Libya and Africa. Montreal:
Baraka Books, 2012.
Oaks, John. Libya: The History of Gaddafis Pariah State. Charleston, SC: The History
Press, 2012.
Pargeter, Alison. Libya: The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2012.
Sicker, Martin. The Making of a Pariah State: The Adventurist Politics of Muammar Qaddafi. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1987.
Simons, Geoff. Libya and the West: From Independence to Lockerbie. Oxford: Centre for
Libyan Studies, 2003.
163
164
G A N D H I , I N D I R A P R I YA D A R S H I N I
GANDHI, INDIRA PRIYADARSHINI

(19171984)
On October 30, 1984, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi visited Odisha, on
the Bay of Bengal, and addressed a recent spate of mayhem between Sikhs and
Hindus. I am alive today, she told her audience. I may not be there tomorrow. I shall continue to serve till my last breath, and when I die every drop of
my blood will strengthen India and keep a united India alive. The following
day, at Gandhis home in New Delhi, Sikh bodyguards Beant Singh and Satwant
Singh fired 33 shots at the prime minister, striking her 30 times. Other guards
returned fire, killing Beant Singh, and Satwant Singh threw down his weapon
and surrendered. Gandhi survived to reach the All India Institute of Medical
Sciences at 9:30 A.M., but was pronounced dead following surgery, at 2:20 P.M.
At trial, Satwant Singh and conspirator Kehar Singh admitted plotting Gandhis
murder in retaliation for Operation Blue Star, a military action that routed
Sikh separatists from Amritsars Golden Temple in June 2004, claiming at least
575 lives. Both defendants were convicted and condemned, executed by hanging in Delhi on January 6, 1989.
Indira Gandhi was born in Allahabad on November 19, 1917, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indias future prime minister. She studied at Britains
Somerville College, Oxford, but left in 1941 without obtaining a degree. After
her fathers death in office, in 1964, she was appointed to serve in Indias upper
house, and joined Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastris cabinet as minister of
information and broadcasting. Shastris sudden death in January 1966, perhaps
by poisoning, allowed kingmaker Kumarasami Kamaraj to install Gandhi as
Indias third prime minister, supporting left-wing economic policies at home
and demonstrating strong leadership in foreign policy, exemplified by Indias
victory in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971.
Gandhi served three terms as prime minister, from 1966 to 1977, when a
prolonged state of emergency (officially declared in June 1975) undermined her
popularity and led to electoral rejection of her regime in March 1977. The victorious Janata Partys home minister, Choudhary Charan Singh, ordered Gandhis
arrest on charges that she had planned or thought of killing all opposition leaders in jail during the Emergency, but her long-running trial failed to produce a
conviction. Opposition leader Jayaprakash Narayan died in October 1979, effectively dissolving the Janata Party, and Gandhi returned to the prime ministers
office with a landslide victory in January 1980, doubling as minister of defense.
Gandhis fourth term in office was plagued by monetary crises that saw the
value of Indian rupees decline by 40 percent against the U.S. dollar, and by
heightened agitation among Sikhs beginning in July 1982. Their occupation of
Amritsars Golden Temple prompted Operation Blue Star, with unofficial estimates of the final death toll running as high as 8,000. That action, in turn, led
directly to the plot that claimed Indira Gandhis life two years later.
GANDHI, MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND
In the wake of Gandhis assassination, anti-Sikh riots swept northern India,

killing at least 2,700 persons over a four-day period. Unofficial estimates of the
death toll topped 20,000, leading Sikh spokesmen to charge genocide, and the
Peoples Union for Civil Liberties cited another 50,000 left homeless. In 2011,
with Human Rights Watch condemning the governments persistent failure to
prosecute any killers from that rampage, WikiLeaks published classified U.S.
diplomatic cables charging Indias National Congress party with complicity in
the massacres. That same year, mass graves were discovered in Haryana, dating
from the 1984 attacks. Sonia Gandhi, widow of Indiras son Rajiv, has led the
Indian National Congress since 1998.
Further Reading
Aguiar, Benny. Indira Gandhi: A Political Biography (19661984). New Delhi: Vitasta,
2011.
Dhar, P. N. Indira Gandhi, the Emergency, and Indian Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Frank, Katherine. Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi. New York: HarperCollins,
2001.
Gupte, Prane. Vengeance: India after the Assassination of Indira Gandhi. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1985.
GANDHI, MOHANDAS KARAMCHAND

(18691948)
On January 30, 1948, Indian nationalist leader Mohandas Gandhi left his home
at Birla House, in New Delhi, to attend a prayer meeting. As he walked with
several companions, militant Hindu activist Nathuram Vinayak Godse accosted
Gandhi and shot him three times in the chest with a .38-caliber pistol. Gandhi
collapsed, gasping, Hay Raam (Oh God!), and bystanders disarmed Godse
and detained him for police. Instead of rushing Gandhi to the hospital, for
reasons still unclear, his entourage carried him home, where he died soon after
arrival. Eleven suspected conspirators were subsequently jailed with Godse,
including his brother Gopal. Nathuram Godse and conspirator Narayan Dattatraya Apte were condemned and hanged together on November 15, 1949,
despite pleas for mercy from Gandhis two sons and Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru. Three other defendantsGopal Godse, Shankar Kishtiya, and Madan
Lal Pahwareceived life sentences, but Godse and Kishtiya were later acquitted by a higher court. Pahwa remained in prison until 1964.
Mohandas Gandhi, later known as Mahatma (Great Soul), was born on October 2, 1869, the son of a high official in Porbandar, British India. His household was religiously divided, with his father a Hindu and his mother a devout
Jain, convinced that every living being has a soul and is potentially divine.
165
166
GANDHI, MOHANDAS K AR A MCHAND
Married at age 13, by local custom, Gandhi graduated from

Samaldas College with marginal grades, then studied law
in London from 1888 to 1891,
when he was called to the bar
of the Inner Temple. Two years
later, hired by an Indian firm in
South Africa, Gandhi relocated
and experienced his first real
clash with racism under that
British colonys strict system of
apartheid.
Immersing himself in the
early civil rights struggle, Gandhi founded the Natal Indian
Congress in 1894 and was
nearly lynched by whites in
Durban, three years later, before he was rescued by the poHindu extremists killed Indian nationalist leader lice superintendents wife. In
Mohandas Gandhi in January 1948. (Getty Images) 1906, he led nonviolent protests against a new law requiring registration of Indian residents, launching a seven-year campaign that saw
thousands of Indians shot, beaten, or jailed for acts of civil disobedience before
racist leader Jan Smuts agreed to a compromise.
Gandhi returned to India in 1915, rising to leadership of the Indian National
Congress (INC) by 1920 and constantly pressing for new demands for native
self-determination. In World War I, he recruited volunteers for Britains Ambulance Corps, while opposing any form of violence and vowing that he personally will not kill or injure anybody, friend or foe. In 1918, he led protests against
compulsory cultivation of indigo at Champaran, and agitated for relief from taxes
after catastrophic flooding in Kheda. The Khilafat Movement of 1919Islamic
protests against the Caliphs declining world statusallowed Gandhi to seek an
alliance with Muslims through foundation of the All-India Muslim Conference.
At the same time, he began the first of many noncooperation campaigns designed to undermine the British Raj, often countered by official violence such as
the Amritsar massacre of May 1919 (379 Indians killed, with 1,100 wounded by
British troops). Convicted of sedition in March 1922, Gandhi received a six-year
sentence but was freed on medical grounds in February 1924.
His next major campaign, in 1930, was an epic march protesting a new tax
on salt. At the same time, the INC declared independence from Britain, but the
G A N D H I , R A J I V R AT N A
decree went unrecognized by London and the world at large. More prison time
followed for Gandhi, marked by hunger strikes in custody, but it remained for
World War II to crack the British Empire, with India winning independence in
August 1947. Almost immediately, sectarian riots between Hindus, Sikhs, and
Muslims claimed an estimated half-million lives, climaxed by partition of the
country and creation of Pakistan as a primarily Muslim state.
Prior to his murder, Gandhi survived several other assassination attempts.
The first, a bombing of his motorcade in Pune on June 25, 1934, wounded
nine persons and remains officially unsolved today, with no surviving record of
police investigation. Ten years later, in May 1944, Nathuram Godse led a group
of 15 to 20 young men who rushed at Gandhi, Godse brandishing a knife, during a prayer meeting at Panchgani. The crowds prevented Godses gang from
reaching Gandhi, who followed his longstanding policy of refusing to press
criminal charges.
Nathuram Godse led another group that obstructed Gandhis passage from
Sevagram to Mumbai on September 9, 1944. Caught with another dagger,
Godse was released again, after uttering threats to kill Gandhi. Eight days before Gandhis actual murder, at Birla House in New Delhi, the Godse brothers
and five others detonated a bomb attached to a podium where Gandhi was
scheduled to speak, but its premature blast caused no damage. Confessions secured by police in that case were responsible for most of the charges filed after
Gandhis slaying on January 28, 1948.
In 1982, Sir Richard Attenborough produced and directed an epic motion
picture charting the life of Mohandas Gandhi. Starring Ben Kingsley, Gandhi
was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won eight, including Best Picture,
Best Director, Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film
Editing, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Costume Design.
Further Reading
Brown, Judith. Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.
Fisher, Louis. The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
Lelyveld, Joseph. Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. New York:
Vintage Books, 2011.
Wolpert, Stanley. Gandhis Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001.
GANDHI, RAJIV RATNA (19441991)

On May 21, 1991, exprime minister of India Rajiv Gandhi traveled by motorcade from Madras (now Chennai) to Sriperumbudur, for a campaign rally
in support of winning him a second term. As he approached the dais to speak,
suicide bomber Thenmozhi Gayatri Rajaratnam greeted Gandhi and stooped
167
168
GA N D H I, R A J I V R AT N A
to touch his feeta common gesture of respectthen detonated a belt of RDX

(an abbreviation of Research Department eXplosive, formally cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine, also called cyclonite, hexogen, or T4) plastic explosive hidden
beneath her dress, killing Gandhi, herself, and 14 bystanders. Rajaratnam was
identified as a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a Sri
Lankan separatist group angered by Indias creation of a peacekeeping force in
the island nations civil war. LTTE spokesmen denied responsibility for Gandhis assassination, but Indias Supreme Court blamed the murder on Gandhis
August 1990 declaration that he would disarm the group if he regained the
prime ministers office. Twenty-six LTTE members were subsequently convicted
and sentenced to die as conspirators, but 22 of those capital sentences were
reduced to prison terms on appeal.
Born in Bombay (now Mumbai) on August 20, 1944, Rajiv Gandhi was the
grandson of Indias first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and son of former
prime minister Indira Gandhi. He studied at Trinty College, Cambridge, from
1962 to 1965, then for a year at Londons Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, but obtained degrees from neither. In 1966, when his
mother became prime minister, Gandhi joined Indian Airlines as a pilot. He
eschewed politics until June 1980, with the death of his brother Sanjay, who
served their mother as a close advisor and was touted as the next head of the
Indian National Congress (INC) party. Stepping into Sanjays shoes reluctantly,
Rajiv stood for elections to his late brothers parliamentary seat from Amethi,
in Uttar Pradesh, and won with some 200,000 votes. In 1984, following his
mothers assassination, Gandhi led the INC to the greatest landslide victory
in Indian history, himself elected as the nations youngest prime minister, and
INC members claimed 411 of parliaments 552 seats.
Despite that strong beginning, Gandhis tenure was beset by crises. In 1987,
he sent an Indian Peace Keeping Force to Sri Lanka for the first time, setting in
motion events that led to his eventual killing by Tamil militants. A year later,
he organized Operation Cactus to defeat a coup dtat in Maldives, led by secessionist members of another Tamil group, the Peoples Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam. Meanwhile, the Bofors scandal broke, with Gandhi and
several other high-ranking INC members accused of taking bribes to approve
Indias purchase of artillery pieces from Swedens Aktiebolag Bofors-Gullspng.
No charges were filed against Gandhi, but his administration brought pressure
to kill media coverage of the unfolding scandal and thereby tarnished his reputation for incorruptibility and doubtless contributed to his electoral defeat in
December 1989.
Determined to regain his office, Gandhi began campaigning well before new
elections were announced in 1991. A point of strength, as he perceived it, was
his stand on Sri Lanka. Successor V. P. Singh had withdrawn Indian peacekeepers from Sri Lanka in December 1989, after losing 1,100 soldiers and killing
GARCA MORENO, GABRIEL
some 5,000 Tamil civilians, but the violence continued unabated. Investigators
generally agree that Gandhis promise to resume policing of Sri Lanka led directly to his death.
Six months after the assassination, in November 1991, Schweizer Illustrierte
(Swiss Illustrated) magazine published an expos on black money stashed by
15 leaders of various Third World nations. Gandhi was among those named,
accused of hiding 2.5 billion Swiss francs in Zurich. Critics raised the issue in
parliament a month later, but Gandhis name was subsequently expunged from
the record of those proceedings. Another posthumous scandal broke in 1992,
when two newspapersThe Hindu and The Times of Indiaalleged that Gandhi had received cash payments from the Soviet KGB. Russias new government confirmed the payments as an action necessary for the Soviet ideological
interest.
Despite those blemishes to his record, Gandhi holds the Bharat Ratna, Indias highest civilian award, thus far bestowed on 41 recipients (as of 2011).
The list also includes Gandhis grandfather and mother.
Further Reading
Kaarthikeyan, D. R., and Radhavinod Raju. Triumph of Truth: The Rajiv Gandhi AssassinationThe Investigation. Elgin, IL: New Dawn Press, 2004.
Mehta, Ved. Rajiv Gandhi and Ramas Kingdom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1996.
Nugent, Nicholas. Rajiv Gandhi: Son of a Dynasty. London: BBC Publications, 1991.
Sharma, Rajeev. Beyond the Tigers: Tracking Rajiv Gandhis Assassination. New Delhi: Kaveri Books, 1998.
GARCA Y MORENO Y MORN DE BUITRN,

GABRIEL GREGORIO FERNANDO
JOS MARA (18211875)
Ecuadorian president Gabriel Garca Moreno anticipated danger when he was
elected to a third term in 1875. A staunch conservative and ardent member of
the Roman Catholic Church, he had angered liberal and leftist elements during his 12 years in office, while disgruntling certain office holders through his
opposition to corruption. On August 5, 1875, a priest warned Garca Moreno
that his death was decreed by the Freemasons, who were going to try and
carry out their plot at once. The president acknowledged receipt of previous
similar warnings, telling the priest that his only hope was to prepare himself to appear before God. The next day, August 6, four men attacked Garca
Moreno on the porch of the presidential palace, three firing revolvers, and the
fourthFaustino Rayo, dismissed from a government post by Garca Moreno
for briberystruck the president repeatedly with a machete. The gunshots
169
170
GA R C A M O R E N O, GA B R I E L
only grazed their target, but Rayos blade split the presidents skull and nearly
severed one arm. Soldiers arriving on the scene shot Rayo as he fled, but the
other three conspirators escaped. Peruvian currency found in Rayos pockets
suggested a murder for hire, and although no other plotters were identified, officials declared that Garca Moreno was slain by members of a secret society,
presumably Freemasons.
Born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on December 24, 1821, Gabriel Garca Moreno
was the son of an aristocratic Spanish merchant. He studied law and theology
at the University of Quito, preparing himself for the priesthood. He proceeded
to the minor orders and shaved his head in the traditional clerical tonsure, but
friends persuaded him to seek a secular career instead. At graduation from the
university, in 1844, he was admitted to the bar and simultaneously operated as
a freelance journalist, in opposition to the liberal regime of President Vicente
Ramn Roca.
Returning from travels abroad in 1856, Garca Moreno found Ecuadors government in the hands of liberal, anticlerical elements, on the verge of civil
war with strictly religious members of the Conservative Party. Garca Moreno
joined Jernimo Carrin and Pacfico Chiriboga in opposing incumbent president Francisco Garcia Robles, and General Guillermo Franco, commanding
the district of Guayas, sought to seize power for himself, bargaining with Peruvian president Ramn Castilla to trade land for military support. Defeated at
the Battle of Guayaquil, in September 1860, Franco fled to Peru, and Garca
Moreno assumed command of a provisional government in Quito. Similar governing bodies seized control in the provinces of Cuenca, Guayas, Loja, Caar,
and Azuay. That chaos was resolved, and Ecuador reunified, in January 1861,
with Garca Morenos election as interim president. A general election, held
four months later, confirmed him as president for a full four-year term.
Garca Morenos conservatism and outspoken support for the Catholic
Church alienated liberals throughout Ecuador and beyond, but he maintained
iron-fisted control. Vice President Rafael Carvajal Guzmn succeeded Garca
Moreno in August 1865, but lasted only two months before he was replaced
by Jernimo Carrin. The seesaw world of Ecuadorean politics saw Garca
Moreno reelected as president in January 1869, deposed in May of that same
year, then elected once again in August 1869. That year, he drafted a new constitution making Catholicism the nations official religion, welcomed fugitive
Jesuit priests from neighboring countries, and signed a law banning secret societies, which Freemasons viewed as a personal attack on their order. Liberals also condemned his use of Indian slave labor to build new roads and other
public works.
Perhaps anticipating his own murder, Garca Moreno wrote to Pope Piius IX,
seeking a special blessing prior to his scheduled inauguration in August 1875.
That letter read:
GARFIELD, JAMES ABRAM
I wish to obtain your blessing before that day, so that I may have the strength
and light which I need so much in order to be unto the end a faithful son of our
Redeemer, and a loyal and obedient servant of His Infallible Vicar. Now that the
Masonic Lodges of the neighboring countries, instigated by Germany, are vomiting against me all sorts of atrocious insults and horrible calumnies, now that the
Lodges are secretly arranging for my assassination, I have more need than ever
of the divine protection so that I may live and die in defense of our holy religion
and the beloved republic which I am called once more to rule.
While prescient, that plea failed to protect him from his enemies.
Further Reading
Berthe, Augustine. Garcia Moreno. London: Burns and Oates, 1889.
Henderson, Peter. Gabriel Garca Moreno and Conservative State Formation in the Andes.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.
Larson, Brooke. Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes,
18101910. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
GARFIELD, JAMES ABRAM (18311881)

President James Garfield was scheduled to leave Washington, D.C., for his
summer vacation on July 2, 1881, following a stop to speak at his alma matter, Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Accompanied by sons
Harry and James, he walked to the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station on
Sixth Street, where Secretary of State James Blaine and Secretary of War Robert
Todd Lincoln waited to bid him farewell. Also waiting was Charles Julius Guiteau, a failed lawyer and preacher who had dabbled on the fringes of Garfields
presidential campaign, then demanded an ambassadorship as his presumed
reward. Secretary Blaine had personally banned him from the White House
seven weeks earlier, on May 1. Guiteau, deemed insane by his own family, later
claimed that God had ordered him to kill the ungrateful president. He shot
Garfield twice with a .44-caliber revolver, before police seized him. President
Garfield survived until September 19, finally succumbing to infection apparently caused by incompetent medical treatment. Convicted of Garfields murder
in January 1882, Guiteau danced up the gallows steps and saluted spectators
before he was hanged on June 30, 1882.
James Garfield was born on an Ohio farm on November 19, 1831, the
youngest of five children, raised by his mother alone when his father died before Garfields second birthday. He attended Geauga Seminary, then worked
as a teacher before enrolling at Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (now Hiram
College), completing his studied at Williams College. He then returned to the
Eclectic Institute as a teacher, later serving as principal from 1857 to 1860,
campaigning at the same time for Republican abolitionist candidates. That led
171
172
G A R F I E L D, J A M E S A B R A M
to his election as a state senator, but he stepped down in

1861 to join the Union Army
as a lieutenant colonel, commanding the 42nd Ohio Infantry. In October 1862, while still
on active duty, Garfield won a
seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, then returned to
military campaigning, but still
won reelection to a second
term in 1864.
Garfield finished the war as
a brigadier general and set his
sights on higher political office, but progress took time. In
1880, rather than seek a 10th
term in the House, Garfield negotiated to support Republican presidential hopeful John
Sherman, in exchange for a
President James Garfield was shot by a disgruntled U.S. Senate seat. At the partys
convention, however, delegates
ex-supporter. (Library of Congress)
deadlocked in a three-way split
between Sherman, James Blaine, and former two-term president Ulysses Grant.
Finally, the convention chose Garfield as a dark horse candidate to heal divisions in the party, and he defeated Democratic opponent Winfield Scott Hancock by a perilously narrow margin of 4,446,158 popular votes to 4,444,260,
each candidate carrying 19 states. Garfields victory in the Electoral College
was more decisive, with 214 votes to Hancocks 155. Inaugurated on March 4,
1881, Garfield was shot four months later and died after only 200 days in
office.
A strong advocate of civil service reform, Garfield achieved that goal posthumously, with passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in January
1883. Vice President Chester Arthur succeeded Garfield, then lost the GOPs
(Grand Old Party) 1884 nomination to Jamed Blainewho, in turn, was defeated by Democrat Grover Cleveland. Part of Charles Guiteaus preserved
brain is displayed at Philadelphias College of Physicians, in the Mtter Museum. The remainder, with some of his bones, plus Garfields spine and some
ribs, are housed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in the National Museum of Health and Medicine. Despite the countrys second presidential slaying
GAULLE, CHARLES ANDR JOSEPH MARIE DE
within 16 years, Congress took no steps to mount a special guard over the
president until after the murder of William McKinley, in 1901.
Further Reading
Ackerman, Kenneth. Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of James A.
Garfield. New York: Avalon Publishing, 2004.
Millard, Candice. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a
President. New York: Anchor Books, 2012.
Peskin, Allan. Garfield. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1978.

(18901970)ATTEMPTED
Charles de Gaulle once declared, I am France, but many fellow Frenchmen
and outsiders violently disagreed. During a Middle Eastern confrontation, U.S.
president Harry Truman opined that those French ought to be taken out and
castrated. British prime minister Winston Churchill branded de Gaulle one of
the greatest dangers to European peace and a great danger to Great Britain.
When Churchills wife tried to mediate between them, urging de Gaulle not
[to] hate your friends more than you hate your enemies, de Gaulle replied,
France has no friends, only interests.
Born at Lille, in northern France, on November 22, 1890, Charles de Gaulle
reportedly chose a military career at age eight, after suffering alleged traumatic
humiliation when British troops expelled French forces from the upper Nile region. He spent four years at the elite Special Military School of Saint-Cyr, later
serving in both World Wars and emerging from the second as prime minister
of France. De Gaulle resigned that office on January 20, 1946, then returned
with the collapse of the Fourth Republic in May 1958.
During the Algerian Revolution, when de Gaulle served as prime minister
and minister of defense (19581959), then held a term as president (1959
1969), he both encouraged and concealed acts of brutality, including the Paris
massacre of 40-plus Algerian protesterssome reports claim 200in October
1961. Then, in March 1962, he alienated supporters of French colonialism in
Algeria with the vian Accords, pronouncing Algeria an independent nation
in July. That waffling behavior enraged members of a far-right terrorist group,
the Organisation de larme secrte (OAS; Secret Army Organization) and fueled
conspiracies to kill de Gaulle.
In April 1961, a Generals putsch endeavored to depose de Gaulle and establish an anticommunist military junta, but the campaign was thwarted after
five days of fighting in Algiers. The bungled coups ringleadersretired generals Maurice Challe, Raoul Salan, and Andr Zellerwere charged with treason
173
174
GAULLE, CHARLES ANDR JOSEPH M ARIE DE
and condemned, Salan being tried in absentia (captured in April 1962). President de Gaulle granted the rebels amnesty in July 1968, with Challe and Zeller
restored to their former ranks in November 1982.
Meanwhile, the OAS made multiple attempts to kill de Gaulle in France.
Whereas some accounts claim 44 murder conspiracies in all, two in particular stand out. On September 8, 1961, de Gaulle and his wife traveled 150
miles by car from Paris to their country home, La Boisserie, in Colombeyles-Deux-Eglises. At one point on the road, a propane tank packed with 100
pounds of plastic explosive lay concealed under a sand pile, with a canister
containing 15 liters of napalm. Detonated by remote control as de Gaulle
sped past in his chauffeur-driven Citron DS, the bomb spewed burning
gasoline across the highway, but the de Gaulles and their driver escaped
injury.
On August 22, 1962, OAS member Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, a lieutenant
colonel in the French air force, staged another ambush for de Gaulle in PetitClamart, a suburb of Paris. In an eerie replay of the last attempt, de Gaulle and
his wife were en route once more to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, when OAS
thugs sprayed their car with submachine guns, firing 187 bullets. Once again,
the sturdy Citron DS saved its passengers, despite four flattened tires and a
shattered rear window. Two police escorts died in the fusillade, but President
de Gaulles sole injury was a scratch on one finger, suffered while brushing
broken glass from his jacket.
Bastien-Thiry was traveling in England, on OAS business, when his men
botched the ambush. Police arrested him on his return to France, and he faced
trial by court-martial with two accomplices, convened on January 28, 1963.
Bastien-Thirys defense team included Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, a far-right
politician who would challenge de Gaulle for the presidency in 1965, placing
THE DAY OF THE JACKAL

In 1971, British author Frederick Forsyth published his first novel, The
Day of the Jackal, depicting a fictional Organisation de larme secrte (OAS)
plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle. The plot follows professional killer
Charles Calthrop, known as The Jackal, through the preparation and final
execution of a plan to shoot de Gaulle on Liberation Day (August 25),
in Paris. The Day of the Jackal became a best seller, and was honored by
the Mystery Writers of America with its Edgar Award for best novel in
1972. The story has been adapted for film three times: in 1973, with its
original title and plot; in 1988, as August 1, an Indian political thriller in
the Malayalam language; and in 1997, as The Jackal, wherein a Russian
mafia boss hires a killer to assassinate the U.S. vice president. A British newspaper, The Guardian, dubbed international terrorist Ilich Ramrez
Snchez The Jackal in 1975, after police raiders found a copy of Forsyths novel in the fugitives London apartment. Twenty years later, a Hebrew translation turned up in the possession of Yigal Amir, right-wing
assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. At the time, police suggested that Amir used the novel as a how to manual for murder, though
in fact he used a pistol to kill Rabin at close range, rather than employing
a sniper rifle.
fourth in a field of six candidates. The defense adopted a two-pronged strategy, first claiming that Bastien-Thiry only planned to capture de Gaulle and
hold him for trial on hypothetical charges, simultaneously claiming that his
death would have been justified as payback for the genocide of European residents in newly independent Algeria. Convicted on March 3, Bastien-Thiry was
condemned with codefendants Alain de La Tocnaye and Buisines Prevost. De
Gaulle later pardoned Tocnaye and Prevost, the actual shooters, but BastienThiry died before a firing squad on March 11, 1963.
The OAS dissolved after Bastien-Thirys execution, but some of its members
remained active as terrorists, linked to the murders of Parisian leftists Henri
Curiel in 1978 and Pierre Goldman in 1979, but the last known plot against de
Gaulle was hatched by a group of radical students in Paris. On July 1, 1966
the same day de Gaulle was featured on the cover of Time magazinethe president prepared to leave France for a visit to the Soviet Union. Parked along the
Boulevard Montparnasse, his route to Orly Airport, a car packed with nearly
a ton of dynamite waited to detonate by remote control, but the signal never
came. The would-be bombers, members of a self-styled National Resistance
Council, were arrested the night of June 30, during a robbery intended to raise
money for their flight abroad after they killed the president.
Further Reading
Aussaresses, Paul. The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria,
19551957. New York: Enigma Books, 2010.
Fenby, Jonathan. The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2010.
Lacouture, Jean. De Gaulle: The Ruler 19451970. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Le Sueur, James. Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization
of Algeria. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
Williams, Charles. The Last Great Frenchman: A Life of General De Gaulle. New York:
John Wiley & Sons, 1993.
175
176
G AV I R I A C O R R E A , G U I L L E R M O
GAVIRIA CORREA, GUILLERMO

(19622003)
On April 17, 2002, the governor of Colombias Antioquia Department, Guillermo Gaviria Correa, embarked on an 85-mile march against violence that had
plagued his province for years. He was accompanied by Gilberto Echeverri
Meja, an electrical engineer whom Gaviria had named the districts peace
commissioner, with mayors from several towns and roughly 1,000 civilians.
The march began in Medelln, proceeding toward Caicedo, but was stopped
on April 21 by members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC), who kidnapped Gaviria and Echeverri at gunpoint. Guerrillas held
the two men hostage in a mountain stronghold until May 5, 2003, then killed
bothwith eight other captivesduring a bungled rescue attempt by Colombian soldiers.
The eldest of eight children in a prominent Medelln family, born on November 27, 1962, Guillermo Gaviria Correa earned a bachelors degree from the Colorado School of Mines in 1988, then returned home to work at Cerro Matoso
S.A., mining company located near Montelbano, in the northern Colombian
province of Crdoba. Six years later, President Ernesto Samper Pizano chose Gaviria to head the new Institute of National Roads, supervising construction and
repair of Colombian highways and bridges. Gaviria held that post until he was
elected governor of Antioquia Department, taking office in 2000.
Violence was a critical issue in Antioquia and throughout Colombia at large.
Aside from bloodshed related to the countrys multibillion-dollar cocaine trade,
revolutionary groups such as the FARC and the Ejrcito de Liberacin Nacional
(National Liberation Army) controlled an estimated 30 to 35 percent of Colombia by 1999, operating from secret bases in the Andes to raid villages and
government outposts over an area of some 190,000 square miles. In addition
to focusing on housing, education, nutrition, reforestation, and administrative
transparency, Governor Gaviria launched a Congruent Peace Plan based on
the teachings of nonviolent leaders Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King
Jr., embodied by the Peace Commission formed in 2001. Before his abduction,
he was also elected to preside over the Colombian Federation of Governors.
While a prisoner of the FARC, Gaviria kept a journal that was subsequently
published under the title Diary of a Kidnapped Colombian Governor. One entry,
written as an open letter to his constituents, read:
Dear People of Antioquia:
The trust you placed in me as your Governor obliges me to seek, without rest,
the roads to overcome the pain that the use of violence and injustice cause to our
people. This search has moved me to undertake the Nonviolent March of Reconciliation and Solidarity with the people of Caicedo. With this pilgrimage I invite
you to apply the strategy of nonviolence.
GEGEEN KHAN, EMPEROR YINGZONG OF YUAN
The philosophy of nonviolence brings spirits closer, brings souls closer, brings
human beings closer and will allow us, together, to build true roads to social
transformation. Nonviolence is not simply saying no to violence, because if so it
would end up being confused with passively accepting suffering, injustice and
abuse. Nonviolence is a way to overcome violence, investigating and discovering just means to oppose injustice. Nonviolence is not only about neutralizing all
forms of direct violence, but also all manifestations of structural violence, because
it builds peace through justice and solidarity and helps to prevent future forms
of violence, by offering methods and models of peaceful struggle to those social
groups left out and sacrificed by unbalanced power and systemic maladjustment.
If you are reading this letter it is surely because the FARC were not able to listen or understand my message. If I have been murdered, my spirit will be praying for peace in Colombia. In this case I hope that Anbal, my brother, will take
up the flag I have been carrying to build a new Antioquia.
Gaviria received a posthumous nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in

2004, but the prize went instead to Wangari Maathai of Kenya. In accordance
with Gavirias last wish, his brother sought and won the governors office in
Antioquia, and was named Colombias best governor in 2007 by the national
nonpartisan institute Colombia Lder. Anbal Gavirias noted accomplishments
included a 60-percent reduction in the districts murder rate, construction of
elementary and intermediate schools for an additional 90,000 students, improved housing for 110,000 low-income families, and provision of potable
water to an additional 72 communities.
Further Reading
Gaviria Correa, Guillermo. Diary of a Kidnapped Colombian Governor. Telford, PA:
DreamSeeker Books, 2010.
Len, Juanita. Country of Bullets: Chronicles of War. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 2009.
Roldn, Mary. Cambio de Armas: Negotiating Alternatives to Violence in the Oriente
Antioqueo. In Colombia: Building Peace in a Time of War. Washington, DC: United
States Institute of Peace, 2009.
GEGEEN KHAN, EMPEROR YINGZONG

OF YUAN (13031323)
On September 4, 1323, five jealous princes staged a coup dtat against Emperor Geegen Khan, the ninth Grand Khan of the Mongol Yuan Empire. Led
by Tegshi, the adopted son of recently deceased grand councilor Temuder,
the other key participants included Princes Altan Bukha, Bolad, Kulud
Bukha, Ulus Bukha, and Orlug Temur. Geegen Khanalso known by his
birth name, Shidebalahad stopped at Nanpo (in present-day North Korea)
while en route to his summer palace in Dadu (now Beijing), the imperial
177
178
GEGEEN KHAN, EM PERO R YI NGZONG OF YUAN
capital. While at Nanpo, the rebels attacked Shidebalas party, killing the emperor and his companion Baiju, recently named to succeed Temuder as grand
councilor.
Born on February 22, 1303, Shidebala was the oldest son of Ayurbarwada
Buyantu Khan, Emperor Renzong of Yuan, who had captured the throne by
devious means. Ayurbarwadas elder brother, Khayishan, had ruled as Klg
Khan, Emperor Wuzong of Yuan, from June 1307 until January 1311, when
terminal illness forced him to confront his own mortality. Ayurbarwada promised that if Khayishan named him successor to the throne, Ayurbarwada would
anoint Khayishans eldest son as crown prince and next in line to rule. When
Khayishan died, however, Ayurbarwada banished his sons to the hinterlands
and purged the court of any loyal adherents to the former emperor. Formally
crowned in April 1311, Ayurbarwada ruled for eight years, dying from natural
causes on March 1, 1320.
Successor Shidebaladubbed Gegeen (enlightened) Khanintended to
continue various political reforms initiated by his father, but he inherited
Grand Councilor Temuder, formerly dismissed for corruption in 1317, but
reinstated by the new emperors powerful grandmother, Empress Targi, upon
the death of her son Ayurbarwada. Temuder quickly ordered the execution
of several persons he deemed responsible for his prior embarrassment, joining Empress Dowager Targi to manipulate and dominate the new teenage
emperor.
Gegeen Khan was chafing under control of his elders by October 1322,
when Temuder died in Dadu. He was married by then, to Empress Sugabala,
but their union produced no children. At Temuders death, influenced by Confucian scholars who had detested the tyrannical grand councilor, Shidebala appointed Baijua man of his own age and a descendant of the honored general
Mukhalito succeed Temuder. Relieved by his grandmothers death near years
end, Gegeen Khan embarked on a more aggressive course of reform that placed
him fatally at odds with Temuders protgs and the traditional Mongol warrior
elite. That conflict led inevitably to his murder and plunged the Yuan Empire
into a decade of chaos.
With the assassination accomplished, ringleader Tegshi asked Yesn Temr,
a great-grandson of Kublai Khan, to assume the throne, and while agreeing,
first annihilated Teghsis faction before taking office as Emperor Taiding of
Yuan. Crowned in October 1323, Yesn Temr Khan ruled as emperor until
his sudden death in August 1328. Son Ragibagh Khan succeeded him, but
was deposed and presumably executed (his body was not found) by rival
Tug Temr in mid-November of the same year. Tug Temr then occupied the
throne as Jayaatu Khan, Emperor Wenzong of Yuan, but died in September
1332, leaving six-year-old Rinchinbal Khan in charge of the swiftly declining
Yuan Empire.
GEORGE I OF GREECE
Further Reading
Brook, Timothy. The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press, 2010.
Twitchett, Denis, Herbert Franke, and John Fairbank. The Cambridge History of China:
Volume 6, Alien Regimes and Border States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994.
GEORGE I OF GREECE (18451913)

When Montenegro declared war on Turkey in October 1912, igniting the First
Balkan War, King George I of Greece was determined to salvage his countrys
reputation, soiled by humiliation in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. On November 9, Greek troops liberated Thessaloniki, the nations second-largest city,
from Ottoman troops, prompting George to plan a triumphant victory celebration while the general fighting continued elsewhere for another six months.
On March 18, 1913, while strolling unguarded near the White Tower of Thessaloniki, King George was shot in the back at close range and killed instantly
by Alexandros Schinas, described in press reports as a member of an unnamed
Socialist organization. In custody, Schinas initially refused
to speak, but was forced to undergo examinationsunderstood to mean torturefinally
producing a confused confession that mixed anarchist sentiments with a claim that he
had killed the King because he
refused to give him money. On
May 6, 1913, Schinas fell to his
death from an upper window
of Thessalonikis police station.
Authorities proclaimed his
death a suicide, but some critics suspected he was dropped
by officers. Conspiracy theories
linking Schinas to plotters from
Bulgaria, Germany, or AustriaHungary were never substantiated.
George I began life as a Danish prince, born in Copenhagen on December 24, 1845, the King George I of Greece, shot by an alleged Socialsecond son of Prince Christian ist assassin in March 1913. (Bettmann/Corbis)
179
180
GEORGE I OF GREECE
of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glcksburg, later King Christian IX of Denmark. Originally known as Prince Vilhelm (William), he joined the Royal Danish Navy at 17, then was elected king of the Hellenes on March 30, 1863, by
the Greek National Assembly, filling a throne left vacant since King Otto was
deposed by a coup in October 1862. That twist of fate made Vilhelmnow
Georgea king eight full months before his father ascended to the throne of
Denmark. In fact, however, George did not arrive in Athens until October 30,
1863, two weeks before his fathers coronation in Copenhagen.
Georges reign of nearly half a century began with lengthy constitutional debates, climaxed in November 1864 with the creation of a unicameral legislature and institution of Europes first universal male suffrage by secret ballots.
The constitution subordinated royal authority to that of duly-elected officials,
but it failed to eradicate corruption or political infighting, with the result that
between 1864 and 1910 Greece endured 21 elections and 70 government administrations, the longest lasting for 18 months.
On the international stage, George used his relationship with brother-in-law
Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later Britains King Edward VII) to settle territorial disputes between Greece and Britain. Georges marriage to Grand Duchess Olga Constantinovna of Russia produced five sons and two daughters, all of
whom married into royal families of Prussia, France, Russia, and Britain, thus
creating an international dynasty. His relationship with Russia served George
well after the Russo-Turkish War of 18771878, when he laid claim to Cyprus,
Epirus, and Thessaly over strident Ottoman objections, seeing those territorial
gains confirmed in 1880. In February 1897, he sent his son, Prince George, to
liberate Crete from Turkish rule, but Greek forces lost that campaign in April.
On February 26, 1898, two men identified only as Giorgis and Karditza fired
rifles at King Georges open carriage, while George, his daughter Marie, and a
groom were returning to Athens from the seaside resort of Phalerum. The groom
and both horses were wounded, while George stood in plain view of the gunmen, brandishing a cane and shielding Marie. The nervous snipers missed their
target and fled, but Karditza surrendered the following day, describing himself
to police as a member of a secret society pledged to kill George in retribution
for Greeces recent military loss to Turkey. Giorgis was captured on February 28,
but no information on the disposition of their case is presently available.
The death of Britains Queen Victoria, in January 1901, left George I as the
second-longest-reigning European monarch, bound by marriage to Victorias
successor, King Edward VII. By 1908, George faced opposition from the Stratiotikos Syndesmos (Military League), a group of army officers who sought to
strip royal family members of their military commissions. The league staged an
abortive coup dtat on August 28, 1909, beginning at the Goudi barracks outside Athens, but loyal troops frustrated the rebellion, whereupon George gave
his support to revision of the Greek constitution.
GOEBEL, WILLIAM JUSTUS
George was succeeded by son Constantine as king, reigning from March

1913 to June 1917, and again from December 1920 to September 1922, replaced in turn by brother George II. The interruption of Constantines rule was
occasioned by Allied propaganda branding him a German sympathizer during
World War I, subsequently repudiated by his overwhelming reelection to resume the throne.
Further Reading
Campbell, John. Modern Greece. London: Ernest Benn, 1968.
Van der Kiste, John. Kings of the Hellenes. Gloucestershire, United Kingdom: Sutton
Publishing, 1994.
GOEBEL, WILLIAM JUSTUS (18561900)

Kentuckys gubernatorial election of 1899 was a bitterly disputed contest. Incumbent governor William Bradley, a Republican, was barred by law from seeking a
second term, prompting his party to nominate Attorney General William Taylor
as its nominee. Democrats nominated state senator William Goebel, and another
Democrat, John Y. Brown, also sought the office without official sanction from
his party. In the November election, Goebel trailed Taylor by 2,396 votes, but
Democrats charged fraud based on 12,040 votes for Brown which, they claimed,
should have gone to Goebel. Democrats in the state assembly arbitrarily invalidated enough votes to give Goebel the victory, and Kentucky was teetering on
the brink of civil war by January 30, 1900, when an unseen gunman fired on
Goebel and two bodyguards at the Old State Capitol, wounding Goebel in the
chest. Sworn in as governor on January 31, Goebel died from his wounds on
February 3.
William Goebel was born in Albany Township, Pennsylvania, on January 4,
1856, to German immigrant parents, moving with his family to Kentucky after
his father returned from military service in the Civil War. Apprenticed to a Cincinnati jeweler after he attended school in Covington, Kentucky, Goebel left
that trade and briefly enrolled Hollingsworth Business College, before dropping out to study law with the firm of exKentucky governor John Stevenson,
then graduated from Cincinnati Law School in 1877. After 10 years in private
practice, he entered politics to seek a state senate seat vacated by James Bryan,
and won the three-way election by a mere 56 votes.
Politics seemed an unlikely choice of careers for Goebel, for various reasons.
Far from genial, he refused to shake hands with any but his closest friends and
impressed many other people as abrasive. Never married, or even linked romantically to a specific woman, he broke the mold for safely settled Bluegrass
politicians. Even his appearance should have worked against him, described
by Kentucky journalist Irvin S. Cobb as reptilian, viewed by others as merely
181
182
GOEBEL, WILLIAM JUSTUS
contemptuous. Nonetheless, he was a crafty politician, skilled at making

and breakingbargains, collecting nicknames that included King William I,
William the Conqueror, and Boss Bill.
While completing Bryans unfinished term, Goebel launched an investigation of corrupt lobbying practices by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, defeating a bill sponsored by pro-railroad legislators that would have abolished
Kentuckys Railroad Commission. That victory permitted Goebel to run unopposed for a full term in 1889, and he won reelection in 1893 by a three-to-one
margin over his Republican rival. Two years later, after Democratic politicianturned-banker John Sanford used his influence to block Goebel from a seat
on the state supreme court, Goebel penned a newspaper article dubbing his
nemesis Gonorrhea John. When next they met, on a Convington street, the
men exchanged pistol fire, leaving Sanford dead, and Goebel escaped injury.
Acquitted of illegal dueling on a plea of self-defense, Goebel retained his senate
seat and looked forward to achieving higher office.
In 1896, alleging that fraud by county election commissioners had secured
victories for Republican governor William Bradley and president-elect William
McKinley, Goebel wrote and secured passage of the Goebel Election Law and
created a three-member state election commission, appointed by the General
Assemblythen dominated by Democratsto choose county election commissioners. Following the contentious election of 1899 and Goebels assassination, the commission was abolished in 1900.
With Goebels swearing-in and subsequent death, his running mate, Lieutenant Governor John Beckham, assumed the governorship. Suspicion of conspiracy focused on sore loser William Taylor, who exacerbated matters by
fleeing to Indiana, where Republican governor James Mount denied Kentuckys
writ of extradition. Taylor was indicted with fifteen others, but only five alleged conspirators faced trial, and jurors acquitted two of those. Defendants
convicted in three separate trials, all before pro-Goebel Democratic judges, included accused ringleader Caleb Powers (Kentuckys Republican secretary of
state, elected in November 1899), middleman Henry Youtsey, and purported
shooter Jim Howard. Republican appellate judges overturned the verdicts on
Powers and Howard, but both were convicted anew in successive retrials. Republican governor Augustus Willson pardoned both men in 1908, and extended the same favor to fugitive William Taylor in 1909.
Henry Youtsey did not appeal his conviction and resulting life prison term,
but he turned states evidence to testify as a prosecution witness at the various
retrials of his two codefendants, securing their repeatedthough ultimately
futileconvictions. Authorities paroled Youtsey in 1916, and he was pardoned
three years later by Democratic governor James Black. Goebel remains the only
state governor ever assassinated in the United States.
G O N Z L E Z D U B N , E D U A R D O E PA M I N O N D A S
Further Reading
Cobb, Irvin. Exit Laughing. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941.
Woodson, Urey. The First New Dealer, William Goebel: His Origin, Ambitions, Achievements, His Assassination, Loss to the State and Nation; the Story of a Great Crime. Louisville: Standard Press, 1939.
GONZLEZ DUBN, EDUARDO

EPAMINONDAS (19451993)
As president of Guatemalas five-member Constitutional Court, Eduardo
Gonzlez Dubn was accustomed to threats against his life. The latest had arisen
from the courts conflict with President Jorge Antonio Serrano Elas, who had
suspended the constitution on May 25, 1993, dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court, all in a supposed bid to fight corruption. Gonzlez and his fellow jurists ruled those actions unconstitutional, and Guatemalas army stood
ready to enforce the ruling against the countrys rogue president. In a parallel
and equally dangerous decision, the court had ruled in favor of extraditing
Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Ochoa Ruiz to the United States, where he faced
drug-trafficking charges. Then, on May 31Good Fridayunidentified gunmen killed Gonzlez in his car, outside his home in Guatemala City, as he prepared to leave for work.
Gonzlezs assassination was sadly typical for Guatemala, where the United
Fruit Company and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had conspired to depose President Jacobo rbenz Guzmn in 1954, replacing him with a military
junta and plunging the nation into decades of violence, climaxed by a nearly
endless civil war (19601996) that claimed at least 200,000 lives, with another
50,000 victims disappeared. While wracked by political mayhem from right
and leftincluding ethnic cleansing by the army, random murders by quasiofficial death squads such as the Secret Anti-Communist Army, and guerrilla
actions by 13 November Revolutionary MovementGuatemala also became
a primary channel for Colombian cocaine in transit to the North America and
Western Europe. That traffic, as always, depended on official protection from
high-ranking military officers and officers of the Judicial Police.
President Serrano fled Guatemala the day after Judge Gonzlez was murdered, seeking refuge in Panama, where friendly officials denied multiple requests for his extradition. Meanwhile, the Constitutional Courts four surviving
judges hedged their bets and reversed their decision to extradite Lieutenant
Colonel Ochoa for trial in the United States. Ochoa remains under open indictment, charged by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration with using his
own private plane to smuggle a half metric ton of cocaine, valued at $40 million, from Guatemala to Tampa, Florida. Prospects for his successful prosecution are dim.
183
184
G O U L A R T, J O O B E L C H I O R M A R Q U E S
Guatemalan police eventually charged three suspectsMario Salazar Lpez,

Marlon Salazar Lpez, and Antonio Trabanino Vargaswith killing Judge
Gonzlez. All three were convicted at trial, but no information is currently
available on their sentencing. Published reports indicate that Mario Salazar
Lpez successfully appealed his conviction, but was arrested again in 2001,
once more with no further data available.
After President Serrano fled the country in June 1993, Vice President Gustavo Adolfo Espina Salguero briefly succeeded him, but his participation in
Serranos so-called self-coup prompted Congress to force Espinas resignation
after just four days in office. Replaced by Human Rights Ombudsman Ramiro
de Len Carpio, Espina spent four years in exile, then returned to Guatemala
in 1997. Convicted of violating the constitution, he received a prison term, but
it was instantly commuted to payment of a small fine. In Espinas absence, in
December 1996, Guatemalas long civil war ended with the signing of a peace
accord between the state and a coalition of hostile groups known collectively as
Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity.
Further Reading
Schirmer, Jennifer. The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Shepard, Scott. The Long Road to Justice: Establishing the Rule of Law in Post-War El Salvador and Guatemala. Washington, DC: Storming Media, 1997.
GOULART, JOO BELCHIOR MARQUES

(19191976)
On December 6, 1976, former Brazilian president Joo Goulart died suddenly
at age 57, in Mercedes, Argentina. Authorities blamed his death on a heart attack, but performed no autopsy. An estimated 30,000 mourners attended his
funeral, but media coverage of that service was censored by the military junta
that had deposed Goulart in 1964. Nearly a quarter-century elapsed before
Leonel de Moura Brizola, former governor of Rio Grande do Sul (19591963)
and Rio de Janeiro (19831987 and 19911994) announced his suspicions
that Goulart and another Brazilian president, Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira,
had been murdered by the junta as part of a cover terror campaign dubbed
Operation Condor. In January 2008, the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo published an interview with former Uruguayan intelligence officer Mario Neira
Barreiro, alleging that Goulart was poisoned on orders from Brazilian president Ernesto Beckmann Geisel, with the slaying carried out by agents of Srgio Fleury, head Brazils Department of Political and Social Order.
Joo GoulartJango to his friendswas born on March 1, 1919, at So
Borja, Brazil, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, a descendant of 18th-century
G O U L A R T, J O O B E L C H I O R M A R Q U E S
Portuguese immigrants from the Azores. His father was a prosperous rancher,
who also served as a colonel in the National Guard. Goulart enrolled early at
the Federal University of Rio Grande do Suls law school, aided by a birth certificate his father falsified, showing his birth year as 1918. While attending that
school, he reportedly contracted a venereal disease that, left untreated, virtually paralyzed his left knee. Graduating in 1939, Goulart was admitted to the
bar but never entered legal practice professionally. Instead, he managed his
fathers extensive land holdings, accruing substantial wealth by the time his
father died in 1943.
Two years later, Goulart accepted an invitation from Protsio Vargas,
brother of retiring president Getlio Vargas, to join the Brazilian Labor Party
(PTB), beginning as a local leader, swiftly rising through the ranks. Elected to
the state assembly in 1947, Goulart backed Getlio Vargass presidential campaign three years later, advancing at the same time to a seat in the Chamber
of Deputies. His service in that body was short-lived, however, as President
Vargas soon appointed him secretary of the interior and justice, with a mandate to reform Brazils archaic prison system. In 1953, Vargas shifted Goulart
to a new position in his cabinet, as minister of labor, helping to suppress a
coup dtat by the right-wing National Democratic Union (UDN).
By February 1954, when Goulart left the cabinet to resume his work in the
Chamber of Deputies, President Vargas was immersed in economic crisis, exacerbated when one of his bodyguards tried to kill UDN leader Carlos Lacerda
on August 5. Vargas called Goulart to his home on August 24, presenting him
with a sealed letter and orders to read it only upon his return to Rio Grande do
Sul. It proved to be the presidents suicide note, and he shot himself soon after
Goulart departed. After considering retirement from politics, Goulart changed
his mind and agreed to run for vice president in 1955, on the PTB ticket led
by Juscelino Kubitschek. Four years later, he was reelected as vice president,
this time under President Jnio da Silva Quadros. For reasons best known to
himself, Quadros resigned his office in August 1961, after serving only seven
months, and Goulart succeeded him.
Goularts liberal policiesincluding a Basic Reforms plan to improve adult
literacy and force reinvestment of foreign corporate profits in Brazilproved
unpalatable to Brazils right-wing elements. Following the pattern of subversion practiced elsewhere in Latin America, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
teamed with the ITT Corporation to organized and finance a coup against
Goularts administration, culminating in his ouster from office at gunpoint on
April 1, 1964. Goulart escaped to Uruguay, leaving Brazil in the hands of a
military dictatorship that set new records for brutality in its long dirty war
against the political left.
Argentine president Juan Domingo Pern invited Goulart to Buenos Aires
in 1973, to help expand the nations export markets, despite opposition from
185
186
GUERIN, VERONICA
right-wing minister of social welfare Jos Lpez Rega. In March 1976, after
far-right terrorists botched a plan to kidnap Goularts son for ransom, Goulart moved 450 miles south of Buenos Aires, to Mercedes, where he died nine
months later.
Today, with the collapse of Brazils military junta, Goulart is widely revered
in his native land. At least 10 schools bear his name, as do streets in at least
15 cities. In November 2008, the government granted amnesty to Goulart and
his widow, entitling Maria Teresa Goulart to restitution of some $372,000 for
her years in exile.
Further Reading
Frank, Andre. The Goulart Ouster: Brazil in Perspective. New York: J. H. Richards, 1964.
Skidmore, Thomas. The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil: 19641985. Oxford: Oxford
Tavora, Araken. Rehearsal for the Coup. In The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Vargas, Getlio. Vargass Suicide Letter, 1954. In The Brazil Reader: History, Culture,
Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
GUERIN, VERONICA (19581996)

On June 26, 1996, Irish crime reporter Veronica Guerin was planning a trip
from Dublin to London, where she was scheduled to speak in two days time
at Freedom Forum. Her topic was to be Dying to Tell the Story: Journalists at
Risk. That afternoon, as her car was stopped at a traffic light near Newlands
Cross, on Dublins outskirts, a motorcycle bearing two men pulled alongside.
The pillion passenger drew a .357 Magnum revolver and fired six shots at
point-blank range, killing Guerin instantly, before the bike sped away. Garda
investigators named five members of Dublin mobster John Gilligans syndicate as participants in the murder, aimed at preventing Guerin from publishing an expos on Gilligans activities, and although several (with Gilligan)
were later convicted on various charges, only Brian Meehan and Paul Hippo
Ward faced trial for the slaying, receiving a life prison terms.
A Dublin native, born on July 5, 1958, Veronica Guerin was a sports star in
high school, studied accounting at Trinity College, and spent three years with
her fathers firm before leaving to start her own public-relations company in
1983. During 19831984 she also served as secretary for Irelands Republican
Party, Fianna Fil, and subsequently worked as Charles Haugheys personal assistant during his term as Taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland. Another shift
in careers soon followed, in 1990, when editor Damien Kiberd hired Guerin
as an investigative reporter for the Sunday Business Post and Sunday Tribune
newspapers. From 1994 onward, after a series of reports on the Provisional
GUERIN, VERONICA
Irish Republican Army, Guerin

applied herself exclusively to
investigations of the Irish underworld.
That pursuit soon led her
to focus on drug traffickers,
which in turn produced numerous death threats. In October 1994, following publication
of an article on murdered gangster Martin The General Cahill, drive-by gunmen fired
two shots into Guerins home.
Ignoring that incident, she
next fixed her sights on mobster John The Coach Traynor.
On January 30, 1995, one of
Traynors thugs rang Guerins
doorbell, pointed a gun at her
head, then shot her in the leg.
Traynors boss, John Gilligan,
also assaulted Guerin on September 13, 1995, when she Irish crime reporter Veronica Guerin, murdered by
confronted him publicly with underworld gunmen. (Associated Press)
questions concerning his lavish
lifestyle with no visible source of income. Gilligan subsequently telephoned
Guerins home, threatening to kidnap and rape her son if she published any
articles about him, but she persevered nonetheless, receiving an International
Press Freedom Awards from the New York based Committee to Protect Journalists in December 1995.
Taoiseach John Bruton attended Guerins funeral, calling her murder a direct attack on democracy. Soon afterward, Irelands parliament passed the
Proceeds of Crime Act and the Criminal Assets Bureau Act, permitting confiscation of money and other assets gained from illegal activities. The Garda
investigation of Guerins murder produced more than 150 felony arrests, culminating in official announcements that drug crimes in Ireland had declined
50 percent in Ireland over the following year.
John Gilligan left Ireland for Amsterdam the day before Guerins murder,
but he was captured in England a year later, while trying to board another
outbound flight with $500,000 in cash. Charged with money laundering, Gilligan lost a three-year extradition fight, then was acquitted in Ireland of ordering Guerins death. A subsequent trial convicted him of smuggling 20 tons of
187
188
G U E VA R A , E R N E S T O C H E
cannabis, and he received a 28-year sentence, reduced to 20 years on appeal.

Irelands Criminal Assets Board auctioned off his assets in January 2008.
Veronica Guerin was memorialized with a statue on the grounds of Dublin
Castle, and with addition of her name to the Freedom Forum Journalists Memorial at Arlington, Virginia. In 2000, the International Press Institute named
her as one of 50 World Press Freedom Heroes for the past half-century. Two
feature films have been based on her life: When the Sky Falls (2000), starring
Joan Allen as reporter Sinead Hamilton; and Veronica Guerin (2003), starring
Cate Blanchett in the title role.
Further Reading
OReilly, Emily. Veronica Guerin: The Life and Death of a Crime Reporter. London: Vintage, 1998.
Mooney, John. Gangster: The Biography of International Drug Trafficker John Gilligan.
Dunboyne, Ireland: Maverick House, 2011.
Williams, Paul. Evil Empire: The Irish Mob and the Assassination of Journalist Veronica
Guerin. New York: Forge Books, 2005.
GUEVARA, ERNESTO CHE (19281967)

On October 8, 1967, Bolivian Rangers directed by U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency asset Flix Rodriguesand, some say, by fugitive Nazi war criminal
Kalus Barbiesurprised a small band of guerrillas at Quebrada del Churro.
In a brief firefight, the soldiers killed two of the group, while wounding and
capturing its leader, Ernesto Che Guevara. Remaining defiant in custody, despite bound hands and a gunshot wound to his right leg, Guevara kicked one
policeman who tried to snatch his pipe as a souvenir, then spat in the face of
Bolivian rear admiral Horatio Ugarteche during an abortive interrogation. On
the morning of October 9, President Ren Barrientos Ortuo ordered Guevaras
execution, a move that U.S. national security advisor Walt Rostow called stupid, but understandable from a Bolivian standpoint. Sergeant Mario Tern
performed the execution in a rural schoolhouse, shooting Guevara nine times
with a semiautomatic rifle to support the fiction that he was killed in battle.
Tern then looted Ches corpse, wearing his watch for years afterward, and an
army doctor severed Guevaras hands and preserved them for fingerprint identification. Officials refused to say if Guevara was cremated or buried at some
still-undisclosed location.
Born in Rosario, Argentina, on May 14, 1928, Che Guevara overcame severe asthma to become a star athlete and member of the Club Universitario
de Buenos Aires rugby team. At the same time, he studied chess, world affairs,
and military history. While studying medicine, during 19501951, he traveled
widely through Latin America on a homemade motorcycle, observing conditions that converted him to revolutionary Marxism and deep-seated suspicion
G U E VA R A , E R N E S T O C H E
of U.S. activities in the region. Licensed to practice medicine in 1953, Che embarked on another epic journey through eight Latin American nations, finding
his way to Guatemala in time for the U.S.-sponsored coup that deposed President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. At the same time, he made his first contact with
members of Cubas July 26 Movement, led by Fidel Castro.
From Guatemala, Che moved on to Mexico City, lecturing on medicine at the
National Autonomous University of Mexico and doubling as a photographer for
the Latina News Agency. He met Fidel and Raul Castro there, in June 1955, and
joined their movement to depose Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Although
Che initially planned to serve as the small armys medic, he soon advanced to
become one of Castros leading strategists and field commanders. Finally, as second in command, he personally executed captured spies, informers, and deserters. Following Castros victory, in January 1959, Guevara played multiple roles
in the new revolutionary governmentsupervising a national literacy campaign, serving as minister of industries, promoting agrarian land reform, acting
as president of Cubas new national bank, training soldiers, and reviewing the
appeals of Batista loyalists sentenced to death by revolutionary courts.
In April 1961, Guevara played a key role in repelling the CIA-sponsored
Bay of Pigs invasion. Published reports also claim that he was instrumental
in bringing Soviet nuclear weapons to Cuba, thereby precipitating the Cuban
Missile Crisis of 1962. He left Cuba in 1965, tasked with exporting revolution to the world at large. That mission that led him first to the Republic of
the Congo, where he fought with rebels led by future president Laurent-Dsir
Kabila, opposing the national army, CIA contract agents, and South African
mercenaries. From Africa, he moved on to Bolivia in 1966, leading a 50-member
National Liberation Army of Bolivia against the military regime of President
Barrientos.
That campaign claimed his life, but Guevara remains an influentialand
controversialfigure worldwide, nearly half a century after his death. His
writings, including The Motorcycle Diaries (filmed in 2004), remain best-selling
works today. Alberto Kordas photo portrait of Che, titled Guerrillero Heroico (Heroic Guerrilla), has been labeled the most famous photograph in the
world by the Maryland Institute College of Art. World figures ranging from
Susan Sontag and Jean-Paul Sartre to Nelson Mandela have publicly hailed Che
as a freedom fighter and revolutionary inspiration. Conversely, posthumous
critics condemn him for his communist philosophy, his participation in executions, and the alleged role that his revolutionary actions played in strengthening U.S.-backed military dictatorships in Latin America.
Today, Che Guevara is arguably the Western Hemispheres most famous revolutionary, eclipsing Castro himself. His image appears on countless posters,
T-shirts, and other articles of clothing, and his life and death have been commemorated in at least 26 different songs, mostly in Spanish. Che had also been
189
190
G U I N N E S S, WA LT E R E D WA R D
portrayed in 14 feature films, by actors including Francisco Rabal (El Che Guevara, 1968), Omar Sharif (Che!, 1969), Michael Palin (Monty Python Live at the
Hollywood Bowl, 1982), Antonio Banderas (Evita, 1996), Miguel Ruiz Das (El
Che, 1997), Alfredo Vasco (Hasta la Victoria Siempre, 1999), Gael Garca Bernal
(Fidel, 2002), Karl Sheils (Meeting Che Guevara & the Man from Maybury Hill,
2003), Gael Garca Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004), Jsu Garcia (The Lost
City, 2005), Martin Hyder (The Mark Steel Lectures: Che Guevara, 2006), Sam G.
Preston (The True Story of Che Guevara, 2007), Eduardo Noriega (Che, 2007),
and Benicio del Toro (Che, 2008).
Further Reading
Anderson, Jon. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Grove Press, 1997.
Castaneda, Jorge. Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1997.
Crompton, Samuel. Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary. New York: Gareth Stevens, 2009.
James, Daniel. Che Guevara: A Biography. Lanham, MD: Cooper Square Press, 2001.
GUINNESS, WALTER EDWARD (18801944)

On the afternoon of November 6, 1944, two members of the Zionist guerrilla
organization Lohamei Herut Israel (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel)commonly known as the Stern Gang, after founder Avraham Sternambushed
Walter Guinness, 1st Baron of Moyne and British minister resident in the Middle East, outside his home in Cairo, Egypt, killing Guinness and his chauffeur.
The gunmen, Eliyahu Bet-Zuri and Eliyahu Hakim, fled on bicycles but were
soon overtaken by police, with Hakim wounded in an exchange of gunfire.
Stern Gang field commander Yaakov Banai announced that Guinness was killed
to dramatize the Zionist war against British Imperialism, saying: We accuse
Lord Moyne and the government he represents, with murdering hundreds and
thousands of our brethren; we accuse him of seizing our country and looting
our possessions. . . . We were forced to do justice and to fight. An Egyptian
court convicted Bet-Zuri and Hakim of murder on January 11, 1945, and they
were hanged on March 23.
A native of Dublin, Ireland, born on March 29, 1880, Walter Guinness was
the third son of Edward Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh, whose ancestors established the Guinness brewery in 1759. Educated at Eton, he volunteered for service in the Second Boer War (18991902), where he was wounded and received
the Queens South Africa Medal, being discharged with the rank of captain. In
1907, Guinness was elected to the London County Council and the House of
Commons and as a member of the Conservative Party. Back in uniform for World
War I, he served in Egypt, at Gallipoli, and received the Distinguished Service
G U I N N E S S , WA L T E R E D WA R D
Order for the battle at Passendale, Belgium, ending the war

as a lieutenant colonel. Returning to the House of Commons
as an ardent anticommunist, he
also opposed the postwar Irish
struggle for independence from
Britain.
Guinness served as minister of agriculture from November 1925 to June 1929, then
retired to the family brewing
business after that years defeat
of the Conservative Party. Expanding operations to Canada,
he established British Pacific
Properties in British Columbia
and commissioned the First
Narrows Bridge, spanning Burrard Inlet to link Vancouver
with the Canadian mainland.
In 1938, he was appointed Militant Zionists killed Walter Guinness, British minister of state in the Middle East. (Getty
chairman of the West Indies Images)
Royal Commission, tasked to
investigate labor disputes in the Caribbean and offer advice on administration
of British colonies in that region.
At the outbreak of World War II, Guinness chaired the Polish Relief Fund,
and then was transferred to Cairo as deputy resident minister in August 1942.
There, in April 1944, he reportedly participated in the grilling of Joel Brand,
a member of the Jewish-Hungarian Aid and Rescue Committee, who had attempted to negotiate with Nazi SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann for the
exchange of 10,000 trucks for one million Jewish prisoners. At Eichmanns
mass-murder trial, in 1961, Brand testified that Guinness asked him, What
can I do with a million Jews? Where can I put them? Brand was released by
British authorities in October 1944, and joined the Stern Gang team that killed
Guinness the following month.
Fearing British retaliation in the wake of Guinnesss assassination, Jewish leaders in Palestine sought to publicly distance themselves from the Stern
Gang, while still supporting its covert actions. The Jewish newspaper Haaretz,
published in Tel Aviv, declared that Guinnesss slayers have done more by this
single reprehensible crime to demolish the edifice erected by three generations
of Jewish pioneers than is imaginable. In London, Prime Minister Winston
191
192
G U I N N E S S, WA LT E R E D WA R D
ZIONISM
Zionism is broadly defined as a national movement for the return of the
Jewish people to their homeland and the resumption of Jewish sovereignty
in the land of Israel. Although theoretically dating from the Diaspora of
586 BCE, during the Babylonian occupation of Israel, the organized movement properly began with Joseph Nasi (15241579), a Portuguese Jew
who campaigned for Jewish emigration from the Ottoman Empire. Later
distinguished by many splinter ideologies, Zionism achieved its goal with
foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. Critics condemn the movement as
colonialist and racist, citing statements such as propagandist Israel Zangwills description of Arab-populated Palestine as a country without a people, for a people without a country. Acts of terrorism committed by the
Stern Gang and Irgun Zevai Leumi (National Military Organization in the
Land of Israel) between 1920 and 1948 also tarnished the broader movements reputation. Some critics of Zionism, particularly in the Arab states,
consider it a racist and/or colonialist movement. Some supporters of Zionism counter those arguments by claiming that any opposition to Zionism or Israel constitutes prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile,
Zionism remains a hot topic for far-right groups worldwide, including
neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups in the United States. Spokesmen
for those organizations spin conspiracy theories involving Jewish world
domination, often referring to the U.S. federal government in Washington,
D.C., as ZOGthe Zionist Occupation Government. In 1983, a farright group called the Orderalso known in German as Brder Schweigen
(Brothers Keep Silent)declared war on ZOG and on America at large,
committing multiple murders and other acts of terrorism before its members were convicted of racketeering in 1986.
Churchill, once a self-described Zionist, told the House of Commons, If our

dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of an assassins pistol, and the labours for its future produce a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany,
then many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained
so consistently and so long in the past.
Despite those comments, Hakim and Bet-Zuri were widely regarded as Zionist heroes. In 1975, Israel recovered their corpses from Egypt in exchange
for 20 prisoners from Gaza and Sinai. The bodies lay in state at the Jerusalem
Hall of Heroism, viewed by thousands including Israels president and prime
minister, then were buried with full military honors at Mount Herzl national
cemetery. In 1982, postage stamps were issued in their honor.
G U N N , D AV I D
Further Reading
Avner. Memoirs of an Assassin: Confessions of a Stern Gang Killer. London: Thomas
Yoseloff, 1959.
Golan, Zev. Stern: The Man and His Gang. Tel Aviv: Yahir Publishing, 2011.
Heller, Joseph. The Stern Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror, 19401949. London: Frank
Cass Publishers, 1995.
GUNN, DAVID (19461993)

On March 10, 1993, pro-life zealot Michael Frederick Griffin joined a group
of protesters outside Floridas Pensacola Womens Medical Services, where
Dr. David Gunn performed abortions. As Gunn arrived for work that morning,
Griffin rushed the doctors car, shouting, Dont kill any more babies, and shot
Gunn three times in the back at close range. Jurors convicted Griffin of murder
on March 4, 1994, resulting in a life prison term.
David Gunn was born and raised in Benton, Kentucky. He survived a childhood case of polio with a severe limp, defying the prediction of physicians that
he would never drive a car or
walk without a leg brace. Motivated by his own experience,
after graduating from Tennessees Vanderbilt University,
Gunn proceeded to study medicine at the University of Kentucky, specializing in obstetrics
and gynecology. A brother later
said Gunns partial disability
determined his course of specialized study: It was something we discussed, Peter
Gunn said. You delivered babies in a seated position. He
couldnt stand for hours and
hours without getting tired.
Dr. Gunn practiced first at
a public hospital in Brewton,
Alabama, choosing the Cotton
State because it had the highest infant-mortality rate in the
United States. By 1983, he
had established his own fertil- A "pro-life" zealot murdered Dr. David Gunn in
ity clinic in Eufala, Alabama. Florida. (Ralf-Finn Hestoff /Corbis)
193
194
G U N N , D AV I D
Nearby, in Columbus, Georgia, a clinic operated by the Womens Health Network (WHN) lost its elderly physician who had terminated pregnancies, and
executive director Susan Hill sought a replacement. Although raised in the
Church of Christ, with its prohibition against abortions, Gunn agreed to take
over the job, beginning a decade of relentless travel between six WHN clinics
in the South, often driving 1,000 miles per week. Hill described Gunn to reporters as a laid-back 60s kind of guy who didnt like the politics of medicine;
he wanted to help, but at the same time Gunn concealed his new activity from
members of his strictly religious parents and siblings.
Threats began immediately, from protesters outside the clinics Gunn served,
to North Carolinas White Patriot Party, formerly a branch of the Ku Klux Klan,
which issued Wanted posters on Gunn, including his photograph and home
address. Susan Hill recalled, He told me several times that he had been followed from city to city. He would take back roads and choose different paths
to throw them off. He didnt report the threats. None of us did. They happen
all the time. Gunn did prepare himself by carrying three pistols in his car
one in the glove compartment, one beneath the drivers seat, and another in
the trunkbut none of them helped on the day he was shot.
Acquaintances described assassin Michael Griffin as a fundamentalist
Christian and a loner with a bad temper. Two months before the shooting, he
had joined the Pensacola branch of Rescue America, an antiabortion group led
locally by self-ordained minister John Burta self-described former alcoholic
and ex-KKK member who claims that he abandoned the groups racist doctrine
when he became a born-again Christian. Before meeting Griffin, Burt served
as spiritual advisor to a group of zealots that bombed three womens clinics in
1984. Griffin initially told police that he shot Dr. Gunn for God, but at trial
ARMY OF GOD
The Army of God (AOG) is a loose-knit coalition of pro-life Christian
terrorists responsible for various acts of violence since August 1982,
when self-proclaimed members kidnapped Dr. Hector Zevallos and his
wife in Illinois, briefly holding them hostage under threat of death. In
1985, the groups East Coast Division claimed credit for clinic bombings in Maryland and Washington, D.C., which resulted in imprisonment
of Rev. Michael Bray and two accomplices. Rachelle Shelley Shannon,
who shot and wounded Kansas physician George Tiller in August 1993,
also declared herself a member of the AOG. Another self-described member, Scott Roeder, murdered Dr. Tiller in May 2009. The group also
claimed responsibility for Eric Rudolphs lethal 1997 clinic bombings in
G U S TAV I I I O F S W E D E N
Atlanta and Birmingham, along with a blast at a Georgia gay bar. Clayton Waagner, proclaiming himself a member of the AOGs Virginia Dare
Chapter, created an anthrax panic in 2001, by mailing some 500 envelopes filled with harmless white powder to 280 abortion providers nationwide. Paul Jennings Hill, executed in September 2003 for the 1994
Florida murders of Dr. John Britton and his bodyguard, advertised himself before that double killing as a national spokesman for the AOG.
Various researchers disagree as to whether the group has any leadership
structureor, in fact, whether it physically exists, outside the minds of
its fanatical activists. Meanwhile, the AOG, or some unknown person
claiming to represent it, maintains a Web site at http://www.armyofgod
.com. The site praises Paul Hill and Scott Roeder as American heroes,
offers graphic photos of aborted fetuses, and refers interested parties to
Rev. Donald Spitz, reachable via a post office box in Chesapeake, Virginia.
his attorneys claimed Griffin was brainwashed by Burt. No charges were filed
against Burt in Gunns murder, but he received an 18-year prison sentence in
2005, convicted on five counts of molesting a 15-year-old girl at Our Fathers
House, a home for troubled teenage girls and unwed mothers.
Gunns assassination prompted Congress to pass the Freedom of Access to
Clinic Entrances Act in May 1994, imposing federal penalties for any threats or
attacks against womens clinics, obstruction of free access to their facilities, or
stalking of clinic staff members. The statute upholds protesters First Amendment rights to assemble, picket, distribute literature, and shout outside clinics
from a safe distance, as long as no threats are made.
Further Reading
Baird-Windle, Patricia, and Eleanor Bader. Targets of Hatred: Anti-Abortion Terrorism.
New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Mason, Carol. Killing for Life: The Apocalyptic Narrative of Pro-Life Politics. Ithaca, NY:
Risen, James, and Judy Thomas. Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War. New York:
Basic Books, 1999.
GUSTAV III OF SWEDEN (17461792)

On March 16, 1792, King Gustav III attended a banquet and masquerade ball
at Stockholms Royal Opera House. Before leaving his palace, he had received
an anonymous letter containing a death threat, but Gustav ignored it as routine. Moments after entering the opera house, Gustav was accosted by three
195
196
G U S T AV I I I O F S W E D E N
conspirators wearing black masks: Count Claes Fredrik Horn, Count Adolph
Ludvig Ribbing, and army officer Jacob Johan Anckarstrm. While the counts
distracted Gustav with the greeting, Good-day, fine mask, Anckarstrm shot
him in the back with a pistol containing two balls, five pellets of shot and
six bent nails. Gustav initially survived for nearly two weeks, continuing his
function as head of state until infection claimed his life on March 29. All three
plotters were arrested and confessed in custody. On April 16, Anckarstrm was
sentenced to flogging and confinement in irons, with his right hand severed
before he was beheaded on April 27. Count Ribbing was stripped of his title
and sentenced to death in May 1792, later pardoned and exiled to France. No
record survives of Count Horns sentence.
Gustav was born in Stockholm on January 24, 1746, the eldest son of King
Adolf Frederick. His father died on February 12, 1771, remembered as the
king who ate himself to death with an epic meal including lobster, sauerkraut,
caviar, kippers, champagne, and 14 helpings of his favorite dessert. Gustav was
in Paris when his father died, and did not return until March 25, with his official coronation occurring on March 29. Chafing at the parliamentary reforms
instituted since the death of King Charles XII, in 1718, and personally at odds
with parliaments dominant liberal Caps faction, Gustavplanned a coup with
Finnish nobleman Jacob Magnus Sprengtporten in July 1772. By late August,
their forces had seized control of Sweden, thus ending the nations 54-year
Age of Liberty. Soon thereafter, Sprengtporten abandoned his partnership with
Gustav, complaining that the king had grown so violent and insolent that anything like agreement between them became impossible.
Over the next 17 years, Gustav pressed for restoration of royal autocracy
or enlightened despotism, as he saw itand achieved his goal at last with
passage of the Union and Security Act in 1789. That statute delegated most of
parliaments former powers to the king, including the sole authority to declare
war and make peace. He proved fickle in foreign policy, first plotting to capture
Norway with aid from Russia, then scheming to invade Russias Baltic provinces when the first plan failed. The French Revolution of 17881789 alarmed
Gustav, who feared similar revolts against monarchs throughout Europe, and
he contributed substantial funds toward an abortive plan to reinstate Louis XVI
as king of France.
In terms of domestic policy, while remaining autocratic and restricting freedom of the press, Gustav granted a measure of religious liberty to Jews and
Catholics (Gustav himself was Lutheran). He was a renownedsome said extravagantpatron of the arts and literature, founding several Royal Academies
to promote the arts, culture, and science in Sweden, and built the Royal Swedish Opera in 1782where he would be slain 10 years later.
Gustav was succeeded by his son, 13-year-old Gustav Adolf, with Gustavs brother Charles serving as regent. In 1805, Gustav Adolf joined the
G U S TAV I I I O F S W E D E N
Third Coalition against Napoleon Bonaparte, with the result that France occupied Swedish Pomerania. A popular rebellion against the young, inept king
prompted Gustav Adolf to abdicate and flee into exile, leaving his uncle in
charge as Charles XIII.
Further Reading
Barton, H. Arnold. Scandinavia in the Revolutionary Era, 17601815. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Ihalainen, Pasi, Michael Bregnsbo, Karin Sennefelt, and Patrik Winton. Scandinavia in
the Age of Revolution. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2011.
197
H
HABYARIMANA, JUVNAL (19371994)
At 8:20 P.M. on April 6, 1994, a Dassault Falcon 50 private jet approached
Rwandas Kigali International Airport. Aboard the plane were Rwandan president Juvnal Habyarimana, the nations three highest-ranking military officers,
the presidents foreign affairs advisor, and his personal physician. Also on board
was Cyprien Ntaryamira, president of Burundi, accompanied by Burundis
minister of communication and minister of public works. As the presidential
jet prepared to land, two surface-to-air missiles struck the aircraft, killing all
nine passengers and three French crewmen.
Juvnal Habyarimana was born on March 8, 1937, in Ruanda-Urundi, a Belgian suzerainty from 1916 to 1924, then a League of Nations Class B Mandate
until 1945, and a United Nations Trust Territory. A member of the dominant
Hutu tribe, Habyarimana was 22 years old during the Rwandan Revolution of
1959, when Hutus killed at least 20,000 Tutsi tribe members (some accounts
claim 100,000), and driving thousands more into exile. Three years later, independence from foreign rule saw Ruanda-Urundi separated into the neighboring sovereign states of Rwanda and Burundi (with a ruling Tutsi majority).
Ethnic violence between Hutus and Tutsis persisted in Rwanda, and Hutus
dominated the government and army.
Habyarimana chose the military as a path to power, rising to army chief of
staff at age 36. On July 5, 1973, he led a coup that deposed President Grgoire
Kayibanda and his ruling Parti du Mouvement de lEmancipation Hutu (Party
of the Hutu Emancipation Movement). By 1975, Habyarimanas National Revolutionary Movement for Development was Rwandas only legal party, reinforced in 1978 with a new constitution affirming one-party rule. A unique
feature of the revised constitution was the policy of Umuganda, under which
all Rwandans were compelled to work one-half day each week on projects
related to national infrastructure. Passage of the constitution was accompanied by Habyarimanas election to another five-year presidential term, running
unopposed.
Habyarimana initially posed as a friend of both Hutu and Tutsi alike, but
soon dropped that faade, favoring members of his own tribe in Rwanda and
sponsoring Hutu attacks on Burundis Tutsi-run government. Cronyism was
the order of the day, ensuring Habyarimanas reelection as the only presidential
200
H A B YA R I M A N A , J U V N A L
candidate in 1983 and 1989.

The presidents high-handed
methods evoked pressure from
France (Rwandas primary financial supporter), the World
Bank, and the International
Monetary Fund, seeking relaxation of one-party rule, and in
summer 1990 Habyarimana reluctantly agreed to permit campaigning by opposition parties.
By then, however, it was too
late to avert rebellion. Exiled
Tutsis, organized as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), invaded Rwanda from Uganda
in October 1990, sparking a
civil war that reached a bloody
climax in May 1992, finally
endedat least, for the moA rocket attack killed Rwandan president Juvnal mentwith signing of the Arusha Accords in August 1993.
Habyarimana in 1994. (Getty Images)
That treaty ostensibly shared
official power between Hutus
and Tutsis, but the war had hardened Hutu attitudes toward Rwandas ethnic
minority. Hutu extremists from the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic
claimed that RPF leaders sought to impose a Tutsi monarchy in Rwanda, publicly calling for extermination of Tutsi cockroaches. Ethnic violence escalated
through early 1994, and UN peacekeepers proved unable to stem the bloodshed. In early April, President Habyarimana embarked on visits to Zaire (now
the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Tanzania, before traveling with Burundian president Ntaryamira and his ministers on the journey that climaxed with
their death.
Responsibility for the April 6 rocket attack was never reliably assigned.
Hutu leaders blamed RPF chief Paul Kagame, whereas RPF spokesmen accused President Habyarimana own party, alleging a plot to provoke anti-Tutsi
pogroms. Rwandan prime minister Jean Kambanda claimed that Franois de
Grossouvrea high-ranking aide to French president Franois Mitterrand
had knowledge of a plot against Habyarimana, an assertion perhaps supported
by de Grossouvres suicide on April 7, 1994.
Whoever was responsible for killing Habyarimana, the assassination triggered the Rwandan genocide of 1994, with an estimated 800,000 to 1 million
H A M I D A D D I N , YA H YA M U H A M M A D
Tutsis slaughtered between April and July. That violence, in turn, led the Tutsi
RPF to renew its offensive against the predominately Hutu government, seizing the capital at Kigali on July 4. Fearing retribution, some two million Hutus
fled the country, leaving the government in Tutsi hands for the first time since
Rwanda achieved independence. RPF leader Paul Kagame assumed the presidency in March 2000 and retains it at the time of this writing.
Further Reading
Dallaire, Romo. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. New
York: Carroll & Graf, 2003.
Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Prunier, Grard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Straus, Scott. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
HAMIDADDIN, YAHYA MUHAMMAD

(18691948)
On February 17, 1948, Muslim reformers in the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of
Yemen staged a coup dtat against Imam (King) Yahya Muhammad Hamidaddin in Sanaa, killing the king and three of his 16 sons. Civil war erupted
between loyalists and the rebels, and spokesmen for the League of Arab States
attempted to negotiate a ceasefire. By March 14, the late imams eldest son
Prince Ahmad bin Yahya Hamidaddinhad retaken the capital from reformist
opponents, and conditions within Yemen were declared normal by March 16.
British colonial authorities in South Yemen (now Aden) recognized Ahmad as
the new and rightful king on April 21.
Yahya Muhammad Hamidaddin was born in Sanaa on June 18, 1869, a
member of the Al Qasimi dynasty that traced its ancestry to Imam Ali, a cousin
and son-in-law of Muslim prophet Muhammad, the first convert to Islam and
ruler of the Rashidun Caliphate from 656 to 661. Yahya succeeded his father
as king in 1904, ruling the area later known as North Yemen, although the Ottoman Turks who occupied the region refused to recognize his authority until
1913, when the Treaty of Daan conceded his status as the spiritual and temporal leader of the Zaydi Shia in Yemen. Under that agreement, Zaydi-controlled
areas were be governed by sharia law, with the Imam empowered to appoint
governors and judges, also collecting taxes, while himself remaining under Ottoman authority.
Late in World War I, the Armistice of Mudrossigned on October 30,
1918transferred control of Yemen from Turkey into British hands. Imam
201
202
H A M M A R S K J L D, D A G H J A L M A R A G N E C A R L
Yahya seized that opportunity to proclaim northern Yemen an independent,

formally renamed as the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen in 1926. Attempts
at territorial expansion into southern Tihamah and Asir sparked the Saudi
Yemeni War of 1934, settled with the Treaty of Taif in May, establishing the
current boundary line between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, Yahyas
border-hopping forced also clashed sporadically with British troops in the
Aden Protectorate.
From 1934 until his death, Imam Yahya on consolidating his authority inside Yemen, suppressing crime, and maintaining a viable government. His regime was the first to send students abroad, and Yahya created the first Yemeni
trading company to expand economic opportunities. Unexpectedly, in light of
later Middle Eastern events, Yemens Jews enjoyed the imams favor and praised
him as a paragon of justice.
Yahyas assassination revealed a rift in his family, as loyal tribesmen rallied to
support Prince Ahmad, while two of his brothersPrince Alabbass and Prince
Alhassandeclared themselves rulers from the capital. Ahmads troops suppressed that rebellion, and another abortive coup by two of his brothers in
March 1956, and a mutual defense pact with Egypt strengthened his regime
in April 1956. Two years later, Ahmad joined the United Arab Republic (Egypt
and Syria) to create a loose confederation called the United Arab States, but
internal dissension dissolved it in September 1961. King Ahmad died in September 1962, succeeded by his son, Crown Prince Muhammad al-Badr, but a
military coup deposed him after nine days on the throne, abolishing Yemens
monarchy.
Further Reading
Dresch, Paul. A History of Modern Yemen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001.
Dresch, Paul. Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1994.
Phillips, Sarah. Yemen and the Politics of Permanent Crisis. London: Routledge, 2011.
HAMMARSKJLD, DAG HJALMAR AGNE

CARL (19051961)
On the night of September 1718, 1961, a Douglas DC-6 airliner crashed near
Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), killing all 16 persons on board. One
of those lost was Dag Hammarskjld, Secretary General of the United Nations
(UN), en route to negotiate a ceasefire between UN peacekeepers and troops
led by Moise Tshombe in the Republic of the Congo. Eyewitness reports, describing a bright flash in the sky that preceded the plane crash, spawned multiple official inquiries and fueled persistent claims that Hammarskjld had been
HAMMARSKJLD, DAG HJALMAR AGNE CARL
assassinated, either with a bomb

or a surface-to-air missile.
Dag Hammarskjld was
born in Jnkping, Sweden,
on July 29, 1905, the youngest
son of Prime Minister Hjalmar
Hammarskjld. He studied at
Katedralskolan (The Cathedral
School) in Uppsala, then attended Uppsala University,
where he earned a bachelor
of laws and a masters degree
in political economy. While
working as secretary for a government committee on unemployment, he completed
his doctorate in economics at
Stockholm University.
His studies completed, Hammarskjld joined the Sveriges
Conspiracy theories surround the plane crash that
Riksbank as a secretary in killed Dag Hammarskjld in 1961. (Getty Images)
1936, rising swiftly to serve as
chairman from 1941 to 1948.
Simultaneously, in 1947, he joined Swedens ministry for foreign affairs, and
became its state secretary in 1949. In 1951, he was appointed as vice chairman of Swedens delegation to the UN General Assembly in Paris, promoted
to chairman of the delegation when UN headquarters moved to New York
City the following year. In April 1953, he replaced Norways Trygve Lie as the
UNs Secretary General, and was reelected to a second term in 1957. Widely
regarded as a competent administrator without any political agenda, Hammarskjld sought to ease tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors, negotiated with China for release of 15 U.S. pilots captured during the Korean War,
and established the UN Emergency Force, first fielded during the 1956 Suez
Crisis. June 1960 brought independence to the former Belgian Congo, and unleashed the civil war that would draw Hammarskjld to his death.
Three official inquiries probed the circumstances of the fatal crash at Ndola.
First was the Rhodesian Board of Investigation, convened on September 19,
1961, under British lieutenant colonel M.C.B. Barber. That panel concluded its
proceedings on November 2, 1961, and was followed by two weeks of hearings
before an independent Rhodesian Commission of Inquiry, in January 1962. Finally, a UN Commission of Investigation, chaired by Nepalese diplomat and
human rights activist Rishikesh Shaha, probed the crash, later in 1962. None
203
204
H A M M A R S K J L D, D A G H J A L M A R A G N E C A R L
of those panels determined a cause for the airliners crash. Two Swedish bodyguards aboard the plane had suffered multiple bullet wounds, but the UNs report deemed their wounds superficial, apparently caused when ammunition
on board the plane detonated while burning. The planes wreckage showed no
signs of foul play, and reports of a flash in the sky were dismissed as inconsistent, possibly occurring after the DC-6 crashed.
Those inconclusive verdicts failed to quash conspiracy theories surrounding Hammarskjlds death. One proposed scenario blamed Belgian and/or
U.S. intelligence agencies, citing their support for the July 1960 secession
of Katanga from the Republic of the Congo, and their evident participation in the murder of Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba. Further
suspicion was raised by the prominent role of British military officers in
the Rhodesian inquiries, suggestive to some critics of a possible whitewash.
Supporting allegations that critical evidence was suppressed or misrepresented, ballistics expert Major C. F. Westell stated, I can certainly describe
as sheer nonsense the statement that cartridges of machine guns or pistols
detonated in a fire can penetrate a human body. Westell based that conclusion on British experiments conducted to see if firefighters faced risks of
being accidentally gunned down while responding to conflagrations at military arsenals.
Long after the fact, in August 1998, Archbishop Desmond Tutu reported
that letters uncovered by South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission
implicated the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, South African intelligence services, and Britains Security Service (MI5) in the 1961 plane crash. One letter
stated that a bomb in the aircrafts wheel bay had been set to explode when the
landing gear was lowered. Britains Foreign Office rejected that charge, branding the letters in question a product of a Cold War era Soviet disinformation
campaign.
In July 2005, Norwegian major general Bjrn Eggethe first UN officer
to view Hammarskjlds corpse 44 years earlierreported that Hammarskjld
had an apparent bullet hole in his forehead, which was airbrushed out of photos taken at the scene before their publication. Egge further suggested that
Hammarskjld might have been thrown from the wreckage alive, then was
shot while crawling away. Around the same time, a U.S. intelligence officer
stationed on Cyprus in September 1961 reported hearing a cockpit recording from Ndolas control tower. According to that witness, the tape included
sounds of gunfire and an unidentified pilot announcing, Ive hit it. In September 2009, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi called for a new UN investigation of Hammarskjlds death and Patrice Lumumbas murder, but that
request was ignored.
See also: Lumumba, Patrice mery (19251961).
HAMPTON, FRED
Further Reading
Urquhart, Brian. Hammarskjld. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.
Van Dusen, Henry. Dag Hammarskjld: The Man and His Faith. New York: Harper &
Row, 1969.
Williams, A. Susan. Who Killed Hammarskjld? The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa. London: C. Hurst & Co., 2011.
HAMPTON, FRED (19481969)

On November 13, 1969, Chicago police raided the local office of the Black Panther Party (BPP), sparking a shootout that left two patrolmen and one Panther
dead, with seven other persons wounded. In the wake of that battle, the Chicago Tribune ran an editorial titled No Quarter for Wild Beasts, urging that officers approach all Panthers prepared to use lethal force. Three weeks later, at
4:45 A.M. on December 4, 14 officers of the Special Prosecutions Unit, deployed
by Edward Hanrahan, Illinois states attorney for Cook County, staged another
aid on Panther headquarters, killing BPP chairman Fred Hampton and another
party member, Mark Clark. Seven other Panthers were arrested, charged with on
charges of aggravated assault and the attempted murder, held in lieu of $100,000
bail. Crime scene evidence revealed at least 82 shots fired by officers during the
raid, versus one shot fired by Clark as he lay dying on the floor. Hampton was
shot while lying in bed with his
pregnant girlfriend, and Cook
County chemist Eleanor Berman, hired by Hamptons family, found traces of the barbiturate secobarbital in his corpse.
Relatives of Clark and Hampton
sued the city, state, and federal
governments for $47.7 million,
charging a conspiracy to violate the Panthers civil rights.
Federal judge J. Sam Perry dismissed the case after 18 months
of testimony, the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed that decision and
ordered a retrial. In 1982, the
defendants settled the claim for
$1.85 million.
Fred Hampton was born in Chicago police executed Black Panther Fred
Summit, Illinois, on August 30, Hampton as he slept, in 1969. (Bettmann/Corbis)
205
206
HAMPTON, FRED
1948, and raised in the Chicago suburb of Maywood. He graduated with honors from Proviso East High School in 1966, then enrolled as a pre-law student
at Triton Junior College in River Grove, Illinois. First active as a leader of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples Youth Council,
he demonstrated natural leadership qualities. Exposure to police racism in his
home environment drew Hampton to the BPP when its Chicago chapter organized, late in 1967. From that base, he negotiated a truce among the citys
largest African America street gangs, including the 30,000-member Blackstone
Rangers. Next came collaboration with the mostly white Students for a Democratic Society, the Hispanic Brown Berets, and the Chinese-American Red Guard
Party. In May 1969, Hampton publicly described that alliance as a rainbow
coalitiona term subsequently appropriated and popularized by Rev. Jesse
Jackson.
Hamptons charisma and achievements quickly made him a target for Chicago police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), collaborating in
illegal harassment of the Panthers under one of the FBIs covert counterintelligence programs (COINTELPRO). FBI documents secured by Senate investigators in 1975 revealed that the bureau engaged in activities ranging from
outlawed wiretaps and anonymous hate-mail campaigns to active promotion
of violence between Black Panthers and other ghetto organizations, provoking
multiple murders in cities from coast to coast. In Chicago, FBI agents first tried
to provoke a shooting war between Panthers and the Blackstone Rangers. Failing that, they hired agents provocateurs to infiltrate the Panthers and encourage
criminal activity. One such hireling, William ONeal, later committed suicide
after admitting that he drugged a drink consumed by Hampton on the night of
the fatal police raid.
Other evidence of a set-up and summary execution came from within the
FBI itself. Retired agent Mont Wesley Swearingen, in a 1995 memoir, described
fellow agent Gregg York telling him, We expected about twenty Panthers to
be in the apartment when the police raided the place. Only two of those black
niggers were killed, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. A survivor of the December raid, Panther Harold Bell, recalled the following exchange between uniformed raiders in the apartment:
Thats Fred Hampton.
Is he dead? Bring him out.
Hes barely alive.
Hell make it.
Two more shots rang out, then, and an officer replied, Hes good and
dead now.
Cook Countys Democratic Party declined to endorse Edward Hanrahan for
reelection, but he won the primary without party support, only to lose the general elections. In the 1970s he also lost two gubernatorial bids, and finished his
political career in the 1980s, defeated in a campaign for Chicagos City Council.
HAMPTON, FRED
FBI WAR ON THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY (BPP)

In August 1967, the FBI launched a covert action program to disrupt and
neutralize organizations designated as Black Nationalist Hate Groups.
Although these ranged from the Nation of Islam to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Martin Luther King Jr., agents paid
particular attention to the Black Panthers. In 1968, FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover labeled Panthers the greatest threat to the internal security of the
country. Bureau activities against the BPP included efforts to promote violence between Panthers and other organizations, including rival militant
groups, ghetto street gangs, and white radical organizations. In California alone, during 1969, at least three Panthers were murdered by members of United Slaves, a competing black militant organization founded
and led by an FBI/police informant. Nationwide, through 1970, 34 Panthers died in police shootings, or were slain by fellow party members. In
the case of New York Panther Alex Rackley, tortured and killed in May
1969 as a suspected police informant, it now appears that an actual police spy shifted suspicion from himself toward the innocent Rackley, then
joined in Rackleys interrogation and murder. Other BPP members, such
as Elmer Geronimo Pratt, were framed and imprisoned for crimes they
did not commit, only exonerated decades later. These illegal activities
were fully documented in 1976 by the U.S. Senate Select Committee to
Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,
accessible online at http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfin
alreportIIIc.htm. Although the FBI supposedly ended its illegal harassment campaigns with Hoovers death in 1972, similar tactics were used
against the American Indian Movement and other groups through the
1980s, and perhaps beyond.
Thirty-five years after Hamptons slaying that same council unanimously declared December 4, 2004, as Fred Hampton Day in Chicago.
Further Reading
Churchill, Ward. Agents of Repression: The FBIs Secret War against the Black Panther
Party and the American Indian Movement. Boston: South End Press, 2001.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. Fred Hampton. FBI Records: The Vault. http://vault
.fbi.gov/Fred%20Hampton.
Haas, Jeffrey. The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010.
Wilkins, Roy, and Ramsey Clark. Search and Destroy: A Report by the Commission of
Inquiry into the Black Panthers and the Police. New York: Metropolitan Applied Research Center, 1973.
207
208
HAN I, M ARTI N TH EM BISI LE CH RIS
HANI, MARTIN THEMBISILE CHRIS

(19421993)
White faces were not unusual in Dawn Park, a racially mixed suburb of Boksburg, South Africa, in April 1993. Chris Hanichairman of the South African
Communist Party and leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the
armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC)paid little attention to
the white man standing on his street when Hani came home, on the evening
of April 10. The stranger, Polish immigrant Janusz Walu s,
stepped forward as
Hani got out of his car, shooting Hani at close range and killing him instantly.
Walus fled, but was captured nearby. Police traced his pistol to Clive DerbyLewis a member of parliament from the Conservative Party, once described
by the Daily Telegraph as a right-wing extremist and someone who even by
South African standards . . . has acquired over the years a reputation as a rabid
racist. Walus and Derby-Lewis were both convicted of murder and sentenced
to death. In 1995, with abolition of capital punishment, their sentences were
commuted to life imprisonment.
Chris Hani was born in Cofimvaba, a small town in South Africas Eastern
Cape Province, on June 28, 1942. He studied classical and modern literature at
the University of Fort Hare, in Alice, East Cape. Some reports also describe him
as a student at Rhodes University, in Grahamstown, South Africa. A member
of the ANC Youth League by age 15, Hani participated in protests against the
Bantu Education Act (mandating racially segregated schools), and joined Umkhonto we Sizwe after graduating from the university. At age 20, following arrest
under the Suppression of Communism Act, Hani left South Africa for exile in
Lesotho, then moved on to receive military training in the Soviet Union.
Returning to Africa as a committed Red revolutionary, Hani fought in the
chaotic Rhodesian Bush War of 19641979, wherein five separate militant
groups waged guerrilla warfare against the white minority government led by
Prime Minister Ian Smith. That struggle was ultimately successful, achieving
universal suffrage in Zimbabwe Rhodesia and electing the nations first black
prime minister in April 1979. Hanis reputation for courage under fire marked
him as a prime target for white racists, and he survived several assassination attempts before returning permanently to South Africa in 1990. A year later, he
replaced Joe Slovo as head of South Africas Communist Party, opening negotiations to remove a legal ban imposed on the party in 1950.
Hanis assassination is regarded as a turning point in South Africas history.
Although widespread violence was anticipated, future president Nelson Mandela calmed furious crowds with a nationally televised plea for peace. Political
negotiations continued, resulting in elections that installed Mandela as president in May 1994.
Prosecutors suspected that Hani was slain as part of a conspiracy to subvert peaceful negotiations toward dismantling apartheid in South Africa. In
H A R A L D I V O F N O R WAY
addition to triggerman Walus and Clive Derby-Lewis, authorities also indicted

Gayle Derby-Lewis, Clives wife and a prominent Conservative Party member.
Police also investigated Arthur Kempa columnist for The Citizen, a tabloid
paper published by the racist National Partyfor allegedly providing a hit
list of targets including Chris Hani, Joe Slovo, and Nelson Mandela, but they
filed no charges against Kemp. At trial, jurors acquitted Gayle Derby-Lewis of
participating in Hanis murder.
In April 1999, Janusz Walu s and Clive Derby-Lewis appeared before South
Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission, seeking amnesty for their
crimes. Derby-Lewis admitted personal responsibility, stating that he acted in
defense of my people, who were threatened with a Communist take-over, and
citing tenets of his religion to say that my first duty is to the Almighty God before everything else. We were fighting against communism, and communism is
the vehicle of the Antichrist. Nonetheless, both men also claimed that Hanis
murder was sanctioned by higher-ranking members of the Conservative Party.
The commission denied their plea for amnesty, a decision upheld by the Cape
High Court in 2000. Their latest parole bids were denied in September 2011.
Further Reading
Mali, Thami. Chris Hani: The Sun That Set before Dawn. Johannesburg: Sached Books,
1994.
Suttner, Raymond. Chris Hani: Portrait of a South African Revolutionary. New York:
Ocean Press, 1998.
Waldmeir, Patti. Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New
South Africa. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
HARALD IV OF NORWAY (CA. 11021136)

Claimants to disputed thrones were an endangered species during Europes
Middle Ages, with the threat of homicide increased proportionately by the size
of royal families and promiscuity within an atmosphere where bastardy proliferated. One such target was King Harald IV of Norway, also known as Harald
Gille or Gilchrist (probably from Gylle Krist, servant of Christ). On the night
of December 14, 1136, as he slept in his palace at Bergen, assassins dispatched
by a rival crept into his room and stabbed him to death in his bed.
Details of Haralds early life are vague, with published dates of birth ranging from 1100 to 1103, the location cited in different accounts as either Ireland or the Hebrides (an archipelago off the west coast of Scotland, including
51 inhabited islands). In his youth, he became acquainted with Norwegian
merchants and sailors, including Rgnvald Kali Kolsson, a future earl of Orkney and a Norwegian saint. Enamored of the tales they shared, Harald traveled to Norway in 1127, presenting himself as an illegitimate son of the late
209
210
H A R A L D I V O F N O R W AY
King Magnus III, also known as Magnus Barefoot. Although no documentation

supported that claim, Magnus had died in battle on August 24, 1103, while attempting to conquer the region of present-day Northern Ireland. During that
campaign, Irish chronicles maintain that Magnus was particularly fond of at
least one Irish woman.
Haralds claim naturally disturbed King Sigurd the Crusader, successor to
Magnus and one of three other illegitimate sons (each from different mothers)
left behind at his fathers passing. Confronted with yet another supposed halfbrother, Sigurd commanded Harald to pass an ordeal by fire, which he survived with only minor burns. They struck a bargain then, Sigurd agreeing to
recognize Harald as long as Harald made no claim to the throne while Sigurd
or his son, Magnus, was living. Harald kept his word until Sigurd died in Oslo,
on March 26, 1130, then rallied Norse nobles to declare himself king. Instead
of granting Harald full authority, however, the gathering divided Norway into
rival kingdoms, one each ruled by Harald and Magnus IV.
Peace endured for a time under that arrangement, but jealousy got the better of
Magnus in in 1134. On August 9 of that year, his forces defeated Haralds army at
the Battle at Frlev, in Bohusln, Gtaland, Sweden. Harald fled to Denmark, and
Magnus retreated to Bergen and unwisely disbanded his army. Harrald gathered
more troops and returned to Norway, besieging Bergen in late December, capturing the city on January 7, 1135. Magnus IV was deposed and taken prisoner, his
eyes gouged out on Haralds order, also castrated, with one leg severed. Thereafter
known as Magnus the Blind, he was lodged at Nidarholm Abbey, a Benedictine
monastery on the island of Munkholmen, offshore from Trondheim.
Removal of Magnus did not eliminate Haralds competition, however. Next
in line to covet Norways throne was Sigurd Magnusson Slembe (from slembi,
Old Norse for noisy), yet another supposed illegitimate son of Magnus Barefoot. Sigurd arranged Haralds murder, then reinstated Magnus IV as king. If
he hoped that gesture would improve his status, Sigurd was mistaken. He was
convicted and outlawed for regicide, and blind and crippled Magnus faced
a new challenge from Haralds only legitimate son, Inge Haraldssonalso
known as Inge the Hunchback. Magnus recalled Sigurd to aid him in defending the realm, supported by troops on loan from King Eric II of Denmark, but
Inge defeated their combined force in a naval battle at Holmengr, on November 12, 1139. Magnus died in that engagement, impaled on a spear, and Sigurd
Slembe was captured and executed. Inge I then ruled Norway until his death
from natural causes, in February 1161.
Further Reading
Carlyle, Thomas. Early Kings of Norway. Charleston, SC: BiblioLife, 2008.
Sturluson, Snorri. Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1991.
H A R R I S O N , C A R T E R H E N R Y, S R .
HARRISON, CARTER HENRY, SR.

(18251893)
On October 28, 1893, deranged Irish immigrant Patrick Prendergast visited the
home of Chicago mayor Carter Harrison Sr. A maid admitted Prendergast and
woke the mayor, who had been napping. As Harrison emerged from his study,
Prendergast drew a revolver and shot him three times, then escaped after firing
a shot at Harrisons gardener. Thirty minutes later, he surrendered to police, delivering a semi-coherent confession. Investigators determined that Prendergast
had worked on the fringes of Harrisons recent election campaign, somehow
deluding himself that he would be appointed as Chicagos corporation counsel
(chief legal officer) when Harrison took office. No appointment was forthcoming, because Harrison had never heard of Prendergast, and the gunman was
not an attorney in any case. Convicted of murder despite an insanity plea and
the best efforts of celebrity lawyer Clarence Darrow, Prendergast was hanged
on July 14, 1894.
A native of Fayette County, Kentucky, born to an affluent family on February
15, 1825, Carter Harrison was educated by private tutors prior to enrollment
at Yale College, where he graduated in 1845. Thereafter, he studied in Europe
from 1851 to 1853, then returned to Lexington, Kentucky, where he graduated
from Transylvania Universitys law school and was admitted to the bar in 1855.
Seeking his fortune in Chicago, Harrison practiced law until 1872, then set his
sights on a political career. Defeated in his 1872 bid for a congressional seat,
he rallied sufficient support to win a place on Cook Countys board of commissioners in 1874. His next bid for Congress proved successful, and he served
two terms, from 1875 to 1879, when he replaced Monroe Heath as Chicagos
mayor. Voters appreciated Harrison enough to reelect him for successive twoyear terms in 1881, 1883, and 1885.
During the final year of Harrisons second term as mayor, in May 1886,
Chicago was rocked by the infamous Haymarket bombing and riot (see sidebar). Without bodyguards, Harrison stood between armed police and anarchists, both sides inflamed by bloodshed, and prevented further violence by
force of personality alone. Harrison did not stand for reelection that year, instead retiring to purchase the Chicago Times, where he also served as editor
from 1891 to 1893.
In 1893, Harrison ran for mayor a third time and won the election, replacing incumbent Hempstead Washburne. At the time, Chicago was hosting the
Worlds Columbian Exposition, a lavish worlds fair opened in October 1892 to
celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbuss arrival in the New
World. The fair was scheduled to close of October 30, 1893, with Mayor Harrison delivering the keynote address, but his murder canceled that appearance
and the expositions closing celebration was converted into a public memorial
service for Harrison.
211
212
H A R R I S O N , C A R T E R H E N R Y, S R .
HAYMARKET RIOT
In February 1886, managers of Chicagos McCormick Harvesting Machine
Company locked out union workers, prompting a general strike by some
40,000 Windy City laborers in sympathy with those discharged. On May 4,
1886, a demonstration was staged at Haymarket Square, proceeding
peacefully until some unknown person hurled a bomb at police on the
sidelines, killing one officer outright and fatally wounding six others. Police then fired on the crowd, killing four demonstrators and wounding 70
more. Subsequently, eight anarchists were indicted and convicted of conspiracy in the bombing, despite a prosecutors admission that none had
thrown the fatal bomb. All eight were convicted, with seven sentenced
to die, and one received a 15-year sentence. Governor Richard Oglesby
commuted two of the death sentences to life imprisonment, and a third
condemned prisoner committed suicide in jail before the other four were
hanged on November 11, 1887. Six years later, Governor John Altgeld
pardoned the surviving Haymarket defendants, criticizing the conduct of
their trial. The actual bomber remains unidentified.
Carter Harrison was Chicagos first five-term mayor, although his last term
was cut short. His son, Carter Jr., subsequently followed in his fathers political footsteps, serving five terms as mayor in his own right, from 1897 to 1905,
and 1911 to 1915. The younger Harrison hoped for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1904, but his party chose Alton Brooks Parker instead, then
suffered a crushing defeat by incumbent Theodore Roosevelt. During his final
term as mayor, Carter Jr. established the Chicago Vice Commission, closing
manybut by no means allof the Levee districts notorious brothels. His
efforts to clean up the Windy City were defeated by the advent of successors
William Big Bill Thompson and Anton Cermak, allied with rival crime syndicates during the era of Prohibition.
Further Reading
Abbott, W. J. Carter Henry Harrison: A Memoir. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1895.
Johnson, Claudius. Carter Henry Harrison I: Political Leader. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1928.
Larson, Erik. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that
Changed America. New York: Crown Publishers, 2003.
H E N N E S S Y, D AV I D C . , J R .
HENNESSY, DAVID C., JR. (18581890)

On the night of October 15, 1890, Chief David Hennessy left a meeting of the
New Orleans Police Board at City Hall and walked to his office on South Basin
Street, accompanied by close friend William OConnor, head of the private
Boylan Protective Police. At 11:00 P.M., they departed from the Central Police
Station, intending to stop at a nearby caf before going to their separate homes.
They dined at Dominick Virgets Oyster House, then said good night and parted,
Hennessy proceeding toward his house on Girod Street. On his doorstep, he
was ambushed, riddled with shotgun slugs from multiple weapons, but still
had strength enough to lurch after the fleeing gunmen, firing several shots
from his revolver. OConnor, hearing gunfire, rushed back to find Hennessy
prostrate and dying. They gave it to me good, Hennessy gasped, and I gave
it back the best I could. Who gave it to you? asked OConnor. With his dying
breath, the chief wheezed, Dagos.
OConnor understood. Chief Hennessy was fingering the Mafia for his assassination, but which Mafia? By 1890, two rival Sicilian clans were engaged
in a struggle for control of the New Orleans waterfront and the Crescent Citys
Italian community. One family, founded by brothers Raffaele and Joseph
Agnello, established itself in the French Quarter following the Civil War, but
rival Joseph Macheca had killed both Agnellos by summer 1872, expanding to
the waterfront with brothers Charles and Salvatore Matranga. There, they ran
headlong into another gang, led by Joseph Provenzano, who enjoyed a near
monopoly on fruit imported from Latin America. Both sides imported gunmen
from their native villages in Sicily, and mayhem ensued in typical Mafia style.
Chief Hennessy had been outspoken in opposing immigrant gangsters, but rumors also circulated that he had supported one side over the other in their internecine struggle.
The question remained: which dagos had murdered the chief ?
David Hennessy Jr. was born in New Orleans, sometime in 1858, three years
before his father went to war as a private in Company G of the 1st Louisiana
Heavy Artillery. In 1868, David Sr. joined the New Orleans Metropolitan Police,
a force of special officers created by carpetbag Governor Henry Clay Warmoth to suppress white mayhem against former slaves andsome saidobstruct voting by loyal (white supremacist) Democrats. In 1869, David Sr. was
murdered by fellow policeman Arthur Gurrin, either in a tavern or a coffeehouse
(according to the Daily Picyune newspaper), leaving his son fatherless at age 11.
He joined the Metropolitan Police as a messenger in 1870, and while still a
teenager captured two notorious thieves, knocking both men unconscious and
dragging them to jail single-handed. The Metropolitan Police dissolved at Reconstructions end, in 1877, replaced by the Crescent City Police under Chief
Thomas Boylan, and Hennessy soon had his own uniform, winning promotion
213
214
H E N N E S S Y, D AV I D C . , J R .
to detective at age 20. In 1881, he captured Giuseppe Esposito, a notorious

mafioso, and secured his deportment to Italy for trial and a life prison term.
A year later, Hennessy campaigned for the chiefs office, against Chief of Detectives Thomas Devereaux, but the race took a deadly turn when Hennessy
shot and killed his rival. Charged with murder, then acquitted on a plea of
self-defense, he left the department to join the Boylan Protective Police, and
supervised security at the Worlds Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition
in 18841885. An observer from the New York Times noted that Hennessys
watchmen were neatly uniformed and are a fine-looking and intelligent body
of men, far superior to the regular city force.
Three years later, in 1888, Joseph Ansoetegui Shakspeare won his second
term as mayor, unseating corrupt members of a Democratic political machine
dubbed the New Orleans Ring. He appointed Hennessy as his police chief,
with a mandate to suppress immigrant crime along the waterfront. Best evidence suggests that Hennessy surveyed the scene and reached an agreement
with the smaller, weaker Provenzano family to oust the MachecaMatranga
clan, which he deemed more dangerous. Whether Hennessy himself had a
piece of the action remains a matter of persistent, sometimes heated, speculation. In any case, the rivalry led to his death.
Although not the first Mafia killing on U.S. soil, Hennessys assassination was
the first to rate national headlines. Police initially swept 250 Italian suspects
off the streets, after which Mayor Shoemaker appointed a Committee of Fifty
to investigate the killing on October 18. That body first published a threatening
open letter to the Italian community, then established what the New York Times
described as a system of secret and anonymous denunciation to identify likely
defendants. Meanwhile, a Pinkerton detective infiltrated the local jail, securing a statement from inmate Emanuele Polizzi that named Joseph Macheca and
Charles Matranga as the masterminds of Hennessys murder.
Newspapers took that story and ran with it. A grand jury indicted 19 alleged
conspirators on December 13, including Macheca, Matranga, and four known
members of their gang; the remainder had no police records. Nine went to trial
on February 16, 1891, before Judge Joshua Baker, and although Emanuele
Polizzi did his best for prosecutors on the witness stand, his obvious mental
instability left him discredited. Stranger still, William OConnor refused to testify at all. On March 13, jurors acquitted Macheca and three other defendants,
while failing to reach verdicts on three more. Judge Baker himself directed acquittals of Matranga and his second-in-command, Bastian Incardona, based on
lack of evidence.
Although acquittal should have freed the six defendants, it did not. Spokesmen
for the Committee of Fifty called a mass meeting, heralded in the Times-Democrat
newspaper with an editorial headlined Who Bribed the Jury? Its message: Rise,
outraged citizens of New Orleans! . . . Peaceably if you can, forcibly if you must!
H E N R I O T, P H I L I P P E
William Parkerson, mouthpiece for the Committee of Fifty, met the assembled
mob and demanded that they remedy the failure of justice. An estimated 150
vigilantes marched to the Parish Prison, led by Parkerson, chanting, Kill the
dagos! On arrival, they battered their way inside against feeble resistance from
guards, removing 11 of the 19 defendants indicted for Hennessys murder (including four who had not yet been tried). Parkerson personally led a 12-man execution squad in lynching the 11, urged on by deafening cheer from bystanders.
Reactions to the New Orleans lynching were mixed. In far-off New York
City, a Times headline declared: Chief Hennessy avenged . . . Italian murderers shot down. Mayor Shoemaker told reporters, The Italians had taken the
law into their own hands and we had no choice but to do the same. A national
survey of 100 major newspapers found 42 in accord with the lynching, versus
58 opposed. As in most other Southern lynchings, a grand jury refused to indict the identified killers, proclaiming that so many had joined in the act that
guilt was collective. Italys ambassador protested the murders, prompting an
eventual $25,000 settlement from Congress. Mayor Shoemaker lost his bid for
a third term in 1892, but Charles Matranga fared considerably better. He survived the massacreby hiding under a mattress, he claimedand was later
released, remaining in control of the New Orleans Mafia until he voluntarily
retired in 1922.
Further Reading
Gentile, Joseph. The Innocent Lynched: The Story of Eleven Italians Lynched in New Orleans. San Jose, CA: Writers Showcase, 2000.
Hunt, Thomas, and Martha Sheldon, Deep Water: Joseph P. Macheca and the Birth of the
American Mafia. Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2010.
Smith, Tom. The Crescent City Lynchings: The Murder of Chief Hennessy, the New Orleans
Mafia Trials, and the Parish Prison Mob. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2007.
HENRIOT, PHILIPPE (18891944)

On June 28, 1944, three weeks after the D-Day invasion of occupied France,
members of COMACConseil National de la Rsistance (the National Council
of Resistance)disguised themselves as militia officers to execute Henriot
Philippe, Vichy minister of information and propaganda. Their uniforms persuaded Philippe to open his door, whereupon they shot him, killing him instantly. Unable to identify the assassins, Vichy authorities executed Georges
Mandel, a leading resistance spokesman imprisoned since August 1941, on
July 7, 1944.
Philippe Henriot was born in Reims, 80 miles northeast of Paris in the
Champagne-Ardenne region of France, on January 7, 1889. Raised in a strict Roman Catholic family, he was conservative by nature and joined the Third Republics
215
216
H E N R I O T, P H I L I P P E
largest right-wing party, the Republican Federation, but soon found even that
groups policies too liberal. In 1932, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in Gironde, one of 83 dpartements of France created after the French Revolution in 1790. His campaign speeches were virtually indistinguishable from
those of Adolf Hitler in Germany, coupling anti-Semitism and anticommunism
with attacks on Freemasons and opposition to the French parliamentary system. Henriots constituents agreed with him sufficiently to grant him a second
four-year term in 1936.
At the outbreak of World War II, Henriot joined most of his countrymen in
condemning Nazi Germany, but he changed his tune the following year, working as a propagandist for the collaborationist Vichy regime of puppet leader
Philippe Ptain. Broadcasting over Radio Paris, Henriot praised Germany for
its June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and waged a bitter war of words
against the exiled Free French Forces led by Charles de Gaulle from London.
He also frequently attacked resistance activists Pierre Dac (n Andr Isaac) and
Maurice Schumann for their anti-Nazi broadcasts over the British Broadcasting
Corporation. In January 1944, Ptain appointed Henriot as the Vichy regimes
official minister of information and propaganda, earning him scorn among
loyal Frenchmen and their allies as the French Goebbels.
In fact, however, Henriot never enjoyed the power held by Joseph Goebbels
in the Third Reich, and must have known he was a hunted man. In 1943, he
joined the paramilitary Milice franaise, organized that January with German
aid to fight COMAC and other French resistance groups, but no evidence exists that he participated in militia raids. If he was armed, his weapons failed to
save him when his enemies arrived on his doorstep.
Vichy France did not long survive its minister of information and propaganda. Aged Philippe Ptain stepped down as chief of state on August 19,
1944, and France was officially liberated from German control on September 7.
Convicted of treason in August 1945, Ptain was sentenced to die, that sentence later commuted to exile on an island off the French Atlantic coast. Some
1,500 other French collaborators were also condemned, and although many
of those later received amnesty, estimates of traitors executed without formal
trial range from 10,000 to 40,000. A handful of trials for war crimes continued
into the 1980s, and Ren Bousquet, former Vichy secretary general, was assassinated on June 8, 1993, while awaiting trial for crimes against humanity.
Further Reading
Azema, Jean-Pierre. From Munich to Liberation 19381944. Cambridge: Cambridge
Levendel, Isaac. Not the Germans Alone: A Sons Search for the Truth of Vichy. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001.
Neiberg, Michael. The Blood of Free Men: The Liberation of Paris, 1944. New York: Basic
Books, 2012.
HENRY III OF FRANCE
HENRY III OF FRANCE (15511589)

The summer of 1589 found King Henry III of France embroiled in one of his
countrys seemingly endless religious wars, ongoing since 1562 between Catholics and Protestants. Henry, although a staunch defender of the Roman faith,
had moderated since his election as king of heavily Protestant Poland in 1573,
and was accordingly expelled from Paris by Catholic zealots in December 1588.
On August 1, 1589, Henry camped with his army at Saint-Cloud, west of Paris,
preparing to retake his capital the following day. That night, Jacques Clment
a fanatical Dominican lay brother from Burgundyentered Henrys field headquarters, posing as a friendly messenger. Presented to the king, he stabbed Henry
with a dagger, then was cut down on the spot by royal bodyguards. Henry died
early the next morning, his death proclaimed an act of God by Catholic enemies, who briefly considered canonizing Clment as a saint.
Henry was born Alexandre douard de France on September 15, 1551, third
son of King Henry II and the clear favorite of his mother, Catherine de Medici,
who doted on him and called him Precious Eyes well beyond childhood.
At age nine, the year after his fathers death, Catherine made Alexandre the
Duke of Angoulme and Orlans. Four years later, she changed his given name
to Henri, and in 1566 appointed him Duke of Anjou. That lavish attention,
on top of Henrys superior athletic ability, prompted animosity from his elder
brothers. Sickly Francis II succeeded to the throne at age 15, in July 1559, then
died in December 1560. Brother Charles, tubercular and probably insane, propelled France into its first War
of Religion against Huguenot
(Calvinist) Protestants in 1562,
declining steadily in health and
mental state thereafter until his
death, at age 23, in May 1574.
Henry III brought baggage
of his own to the throne, as
he succeeded Charles. An ardent leader of French troops
against the Huguenots, credited with defeating Protestant
forces in battle at Jarmac (March
1569) and Moncontour (October 1569), he had also helped
plan the St. Bartholomews Day
massacre of August 1572, although he did not personally
join in the resultant slaughter of at least 2,000 Huguenots King Henry III of France, stabbed to death by a
(some accounts place the death Dominican priest. (Bettmann/Corbis)
217
218
HENRY III OF FR ANCE
toll as high as 70,000). Still, at age nine, Henrythen Alexandrehad flirted with
Protestantism himself, refusing to attend mass and haranguing his sister Margaret
to abandon Catholicism. Mother Catherine took him in hand, but he had earned a
reputation at court as un petit Huguenot, and the moderation of his religious bigotry
from 1573 onward counted against him with his Catholic subjects.
Another strike against Henry was the persistent rumorstill debated by
historiansof his supposed homosexuality or bisexuality. Some modern researchers refute that claim with reference to Henrys many famous mistresses,
including Italian courtesan Veronica Franco, Louise de La Braudire du
Rouhet, Rene de Rieux de Chteauneuf, and Marie van Kleef, countess of
Beaufort. In retrospect, it seems that Henrys religious and political opponents
may have branded him as homosexual based on his dislike of hunting, deemed
effeminate and thus a handy weapon to assail his reputation.
As successor to King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland, elected by the Polish
Lithuanian Commonwealth in September 1573, Henry ruled only briefly, distracted by warfare in France. He did not arrive in Poland for his coronation
until 1574, then left again that June, on learning of Charles IXs death. Warned
that he could not retain the Polish throne unless he returned by May 12, 1575,
Henry let the deadline pass and was accordingly deposed.
Meanwhile, in France, he was crowned on February 13, 1575. Fifteen
months later, he angered French Catholics by signing the Edict of Beaulieu,
which granted Huguenots the right of public worship throughout France, except in Paris and at court. Pressure from a newly formed Catholic League of
France forced him to backpedal in September 1577 with the Edict of Poitiers,
restricting open Protestant worship to the suburbs of one town in each judicial
district. Even that reversal failed to satisfy Catholic League founder Henry I,
Duke of Guise, who invaded Paris on May 12, 1588, forcing Henry III to flee.
The Duke of Guise did not live to enjoy that triumph, however. On December 22, 1588, Henry I spent the night with mistress Charlotte de Sauve,
a secret member of Catherine de Medicis female spy network, the Flying
Squadron. Next morning, summoned to meet the king at his Chteau de Blois
in the Loir Valley, Henry I was ambushed and stabbed to death by the kings
bodyguards, while Henry III stood watching. Henry Is brother, Louis II, cardinal of Guise, was slain in identical fashion on Christmas Eve, so outraging the
Catholic League that zealot Jacques Clment embarked on a path of personal
vengeance. At his death, Henry III was succeeded by Henry IV.
Further Reading
Freer, Martha. Henry III, King of France and Poland: His Court and Times. London: Hurst
and Blackett, 1858.
Major, J. Russell. From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy: French Kings, Nobles, and Estates. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
HENRY IV OF FRANCE
HENRY IV OF FRANCE (15531610)

Religious strife continued to inflame French politics and society after the assassination of King Henry III in 1589. Twenty years after that event, Catholic
zealot Franois Ravaillac claimed a divine vision commanding him to persuade Henry IV that all Huguenot Protestants must be converted to Catholicism. Over the next 12 months, Ravaillac failed in three attempts to gain a
royal audience, finally deciding that Henry must die after he had launched an
invasion of the Spanish Netherlands. On May 14, 1610, Ravaillac attended
the coronation ceremony of Marie de Medici in Paris. When traffic stopped
the royal coach on Rue de la Ferronnerie, he rushed forward and stabbed
Henry to death. Rescued from a lynch mob by police, Ravaillac was drawn
and quartered on May 27, a process that included flaying with pincers and
dousing with molten lead, after which Ravaillac was torn limb from limb by
horses. Surviving members his family were exiled, forbidden thereafter to use
their surname.
Born at Pau, in the Basque kingdom of Navarre, on December 13, 1553,
Henri de Bourbon was baptized as a Catholic in infancy, but was raised as
a Protestant by his Calvinist mother, Queen Jeanne dAlbret. As a teenager,
fought with Huguenot troops against Catholic forces in the Wars of Religion,
then succeeded to the throne of Navarre with his mothers death, on June 9,
1572. Two months later, he ranked as a prominent target of Catholic assassins
during the St. Bartholomews Day massacre, but Henry escaped thanks to a
timely warning from his new bride, Margaret of Valois, a daughter of massacre
instigator Catherine de Medici. Survival came with a price, as Henry was compelled to live with his wife and mother-in-law as a Catholic at the royal court
in Paris, but he escaped in February 1576 and rejoined Protestant forces in the
continuing religious warfare.
As the legitimate son of Antoine de Bourbon, Henry became legal heir to the
French throne in 1584, upon the death of Francis, Duke of Anjou, brother of
reigning King Henry III. However, following Henry IIIs assassination in August
1589, the powerful Catholic League contested Henry of Navarre succession, proclaiming his cousin Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon, the rightful king. That gesture
was futile, since Henry III had imprisoned Charles in 1588 and the cardinal remained in custody until his death, but Henry of Navarre was still forced to fight
for his kingdom, supported by troops on loan from Queen Elizabeth I of England. He laid siege to Paris in May 1590, but had failed to take the city by September, when Catholic reinforcements arrived. During the siege, an estimated
40,000 to 50,000 Parisians died from starvation and related diseases.
The religious war dragged on until July 25, 1593, when Henry followed
the advice of his mistress, Gabrielle dEstres, Duchess of Beaufort and Verneuil, by converting to Catholicism. He pacified Protestant critics by saying
that Paris is well worth a Mass. Crowned on February 27, 1594, he waited
219
220
H E U R E A U X L E B E R T, U L I S E S
four years before issuing the Edict of Nantes, granting substantial rights to Huguenots and finally ending the French Wars of Religion.
Despite his widespread popularity in France, Henry faced multiple assassination attemptssome accounts claim 20before the one that finally ended
his left. Details of most attempts are lacking, but we know that Pierre Barrire,
an Orlans boatman and soldier of the Catholic League, planned to kill Henry
in August 1593. Betrayed by a Dominican priest to whom he had confessed
his plan, Barrire was arrested on August 27 and executed four days later, by
breaking on the wheel prior to dismemberment.
Jean Chtel, the 19-year-old son of a cloth merchant, crept into Henrys private quarters on December 27, 1594, and attacked him with a knife, slicing the
kings lip. Captured at the scene and convicted of lse majest (injured majesty), Chtel received the prescribed punishment: the hand with which he
struck his king was burned with molten lead, sulfur and wax, before he was
dismembered while alive. Under interrogation, Chtel had described his education by Jesuit priests at the Collge de Clermont, which was subsequently
closed and confiscated as further punishment for the assault.
Punishment for Henrys assassination also extended beyond the slayer. In
January 1611, an acquaintance of Franois Ravaillac, Maddame Jacqueline
dEscoman, accused Jean Louis de Nogaret de La Valette, Duke of pernon,
of complicity in Henrys murder. Although she was swiftly imprisoned for life,
modern historian Philippe Erlanger claims a link between the duke and Ravaillac through the dukes mistress, Charlotte du Tillet. Erlanger suggests that
du Tillet and Henrys own mistress, Catherine Henriette de Balzac dEntragues,
planned the assassination.
Further Reading
Baird, Henry. The Huguenots and Henry of Navarre. New York: Charles Scribners Sons,
1886.
Holt, Mack. The French Wars of Religion, 15621629. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005.
HEUREAUX LEBERT, ULISES (18451899)

On July 26, 1899, General Ulises Heureaux Lebert, president of the Dominican
Republic, visited Moca to discuss the countrys current economic crisis with
prominent businessmen. As he prepared to leave the meeting, at 4:30 P.M.,
two gunmen stood waiting. One, 54-year-old Ramn Arturo Cceres Vasquez,
was the son of a politician murdered by Heureauxs order 21 years earlier. The
other, 16-year-old Jacobito Lara, was the son of a Dominican revolutionary.
Drawing revolvers, they both fired at Heureaux, who fumbled with his own
pistol but could not draw it, since an old war wound crippled his hand. At least
H E U R E A U X L E B E R T, U L I S E S
one bullet struck Heureaux, killing him instantly, although reports disagree as
to whether he was shot in the head or the heart. Another round missed and
killed an elderly beggar standing nearby. Both gunmen escaped in the confusion, aided by accomplices.
Ulises Heureaux, widely known as Lilis, was born in Puerto Plata on October 21, 1845, to a Haitian father and a mother from Saint Thomas, raised to
be fluent in English, French, and Spanish. He was 16 when Spain annexed the
Dominican Republic, and joined in the fight to regain independence, rising
to become a primary lieutenant of General Gregorio Lupern. That rebellion
was victorious in 1874, but governing the new republic proved to be a dicey
proposition. Multiple revolutions rocked the island nation, with Heureaux in
the thick of the action. In April 1876, he led a revolt that installed Ulises Francisco Espaillat Quiones as president for a brief six-month term, forced out by
a superior governing junta. Two more presidents rose and fell during the last
two months of 1876, before four-time president Buenaventura Bez Mndez
returned for a fifth time, on December 26.
Another coup deposed Bez in March 1878, and Heureaux helped overthrow the next two Dominican presidents within six months. It was during
that year that Heureaux arranged the murder of Manuel Cceres, an influential aide to President Bez, and thus lit the slow fuse for his own assassination two decades later. Gregorio Lupern finally attained the presidency
in December 1879, but he preferred life on his Puerto Plata tobacco plantation, delegating much of his authority to Heureaux in Santo Domingo.
Fernando Arturo de Merio succeeded Lupern in September 1880, but Lupern threw his substantial support behind Heureaux at the next election,
in September 1882.
Dominican politics remained volatile, but Heureaux faced only one minor
insurrection during his first two-year term as president. Following Luperns
advice and example, Heureaux stepped aside in 1884, succeeded by Francisco
Gregorio Billini. Billini resisted Heureauxs attempt to persist in the role of
puppet-master, declaring an amnesty for political prisoners, whereupon Heureaux spread rumors that Billini was conspiring to restore unpopular President
Cesreo Guillermo. The fabricated scandal forced Billinis resignation in May
1885, succeeded by more pliable Vice President Alejandro Woss y Gil. He, in
turn, resigned on January 6, 1887, ceding the presidents office once more to
Heureaux.
During his second term, Heureaux faced a rebellion in the Cibao Valley region, led by rival Casimiro de Moya, but suppressed the insurrection ruthlessly. In 1888, he exiled mentor Gregorio Lupern, presumably fearing his
influence with Dominicans who might resent Heureauxs strong-arm rule if
encouraged to rebel by a popular icon. Heureaux also established a network of
secret police to monitor signs of unrest, and he set about looting the country
221
222
H E Y D R I C H, R E I N H A R D T R I S TA N E U G E N
for personal profit, prompting one observer to remark that the separation between the presidents private means and state finances was vague, fluid and almost non-existent. The combination of kleptocracy and extensive borrowing
from European creditors drove the Dominican economy into crisis, slipping
toward bankruptcy over the next decade.
Mindful of growing discontent, Heureaux resigned on February 27, 1889,
then grew restive and reclaimed his office from acting president nine weeks
later, on April 30, retaining power thereafter until his own death. Before
the final act, in July 1894, he faced an insurrection plot described by the
New York Times as particularly daring and well-planned. The ringleader,
a general named Bobadilla, was arrested with 10 cohorts and shot with his
friends looking on, before Heureaux contemptuously pardoned the rest.
The Times referred to innumerable other plots against Heureaux before he
was finally killed, leaving the nation $35 million in debta sum 15 times
its annual budget.
Far from being punished, assassin Ramn Cceres Vasquez survived to become vice president under Carlos Felipe Morales, and was elevated to the presidents office when Morales resigned in December 1905. Perhaps ironically,
Cceres was himself assassinated on November 19, 1911, by rebels who ambushed his car in Santo Domingo.
Further Reading
Moya-Pons, Frank. Dominican Republic: A National History. New Rochelle, NY: Hispaniola Books, 1995.
Rodman, Selden. Quisqueya: A History of the Dominican Republic. Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1964.
Wucker, Michelle. Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999.
HEYDRICH, REINHARD TRISTAN EUGEN

(19041942)
On May 27, 1942, members of the Czech resistance trained in Britain ambushed a German staff car passing through the Liben suburb of Prague, carrying SS-Obergruppenfhrer Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the dreaded Geheime
Staatspolizei (secret state police, or Gestapo). Jozef Gab c ks submachine gun
jammed, and Heydrich spotted him, commanding his chauffeur to stop the
car. When Heydrich stepped out with pistol in hand, Jan Kubi hurled a bomb
whose explosion wounded both Heydrich and Kubi. Kubi escaped on a bicycle, and Gab c k shot Heydrichs driver in the leg, to prevent him giving chase.
Heydrich was taken to Na Bulovce Hospital, where he slipped into a coma on
June 2 and died two days later.
H E Y D R I C H , R E I N H A R D T R I S TA N E U G E N
Reinhard Heydrich as born

in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, on
March 7, 1904, the son of a
prominent opera singer and
composer. His first two names
derive from characters in the
operas Amen, written by his
father, and Richard Wagners
Tristan und Isolde. A talented
violinist from his youth, Heydrich inherited both his familys
love for music and his fathers
German nationalism. An excellent student and athlete, he
was nonetheless bullied for his
high-pitched voice and rumors
of Jewish ancestrythe latter doubtless contributing to
Heydrichs pathological antiGestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich, killed by Czech
Semitism in later life.
resistance fighters in 1942. (Corbis)
Although too young to fight
in World War I, Heydrich joined
a paramilitary unit at age 15, in February 1919, to recapture Halle from communist demonstrators. Soon afterward, he joined an overtly anti-Semitic group,
the National German Protection and Shelter League, organized to fight Judaism
throughout Germany. Heydrich joined the navy in 1922 and was sent to the German Imperial Naval Academy in April 1924, advancing to the rank of ensign, but
was discharged in April 1931 for conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentlemanspecifically, breaking his engagement with one woman to marry another.
Soon after leaving the navy, Heydrich joined the new counterintelligence division of Heinrich Himmlers Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron, or SS), becoming a Nazi Party member at the same time. By December 1931 he had
attained the rank of SS-Sturmbannfhrer (major), having survived a background check that deemed him of German origin and free from any colored
and Jewish blood. In summer 1932, Himmler named Heydrich to lead the
renamed Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, or SD), terrorizing opponents of
would-be German chancellor Adolf Hitler. Hermann Gring founded the Gestapo in 1933, then ceded control to Himmler the following year. Himmler
placed Heydrich in charge of the secret police in April 1934, and his SD was
declared the official Nazi intelligence service two months later. After joining in
the June 1934 purge of rival Sturmabteilung (Storm Detachment) Brownshirts,
Heydrich stood among the highest leaders of the new Third Reich.
223
224
H E Y D R I C H, R E I N H A R D T R I S TA N E U G E N
Heydrichs various duties included orchestration of the 1936 Summer Olympics for use as a Nazi propaganda tool, and leadership of a new Reich Main Security Office, created after the outbreak of World War II in September 1939.
In August 1940, he was named as chief of Interpol, a selection that prompted
the U.S. FBI to sever contact with the international police agency. In 1941, he
ran the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) campaign, under which some 7,000
persons endangering German security vanished without a trace. In September 1941, Heydrich was named Deputy Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia (parts of Czechoslovakia annexed by Germany in 1939), where he became
known as the Butcher of Prague for his ruthless tactics. Perhaps most critically, he chaired the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 (see sidebar), where
Nazi leaders met to sketch the outlines of Hitlers Final Solutionsystematic
extermination of Jews within German-occupied territory.
Although Nazis used Heydrichs assassination for propaganda purposes, Hitler himself blamed Heydrich for his own demise, saying, Since it is opportunity which makes not only the thief but also the assassin, such heroic gestures
as driving in an open, unarmoured vehicle or walking about the streets unguarded are just damned stupidity, which serves the Fatherland not one whit.
That a man as irreplaceable as Heydrich should expose himself to unnecessary
danger, I can only condemn as stupid and idiotic.
Still, reprisals were made. Heydrichs killers sought sanctuary at a church in
Prague, but a traitor in the Czech resistance betrayed them and they committed
WANNSEE CONFERENCE
On January 20, 1942, 15 senior officials of the Third Reich met in the
Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss mechanics of the genocidal program Adolf Hitler termed the final solution to the Jewish question.
Schutzstaffel (SS) General Reinhard Heydrich chaired the meeting and
presented an agenda calling for all Jews from Europe and French North
Africa (present-day Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) to be relocated in
German-occupied parts of Eastern Europe. Their destination, though not
plainly stated in the minutes of the conference, would be a series of extermination camps in Poland, including Auschwitz, Belzec, Chalmno,
Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Calculations made at the conference
and recorded by SS-Obersturmbannfhrer (lieutenant colonel) Adolf Eichmann included removal of 15,153,468 identified Jews from regions
under Nazi control or earmarked for future conquest, including England,
Ireland, and Switzerland.
HITLER, ADOLF
suicide to avoid capture. Various supporters were also executed, including

Bishop Gorazd (n Matej Pavlk) of the church where they were found. Hitler
also ordered the execution of 10,000 randomly selected Czechs, then changed
his mind and targeted the villages of Lidice and Leky, believed to be hotbeds
of resistance. On June 10, 1942, all male inhabitants of Lidice above the age of
16 were executed, along with all but four of Lekys women. Thirteen thousand others were deported to concentration camps. Eighty-one children from
Lidice were gassed at the Chelmno death camp, with a handful preserved for
Germanization.
Further Reading
Cowdery, Ray. Reinhard Heydrich: Assassination! Lakeville, MN: USM, Inc., 1994.
Dederichs, Mario. Heydrich: The Face of Evil. Drexel Hill, PA: Casemate, 2005.
Gerwath, Robert. Hitlers Hangman: The Life of Heydrich. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
MacDonald, Callum. The Killing of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich. New York:
The Free Press, 1989.
HITLER, ADOLF (18891945)ATTEMPTED

Few historical figures have inspired more heated passions than Adolf Hitler,
dictator of Germanys Third Reich (19331945) and architect of the Holocaust
that claimed at least 10.3 million civilian lives during World War II. Revered by
millions of fascists, bitterly detested by tens of millions more worldwide, Hitler
was a natural target for assassination throughout his tenure as Germanys head
of state. Published accounts cite 39 specific attempts to kill Hitler, with vague
references to several more. A plot to kill Hitlerdescribed, but never actually
namedwas also central to Geoffrey Households novel Rogue Male, published
in 1939 and filmed in 1941 as Man Hunt.
The basic details of Hitlers early life are well known. He was born at Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary, on April 20, 1889, moving to Germany with
his family at age three. His performance in school deteriorated after his fathers death, in 1903, and he quit two years later, gravitating to Vienna with
dreams of becoming an artist. Although failing at that, he devoured reams of
anti-Semitic propaganda prior to military service in World War I, where he was
wounded and gassed in two separate battles. Following the war, he plunged
headlong into paranoid far-right politics and rose through the ranks of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party to become its supreme leader.
Historians claim four attempts to kill Hitler before he took office as Germanys chancellor in January 1933, including bungled shootings in Munich
(July 1921), Leipzig (1923), Munich (March 15, 1932), Straslund (June 1932),
and Nuremberg (July 30, 1932). Enemies also tried to poison Hitler at Berlins
225
226
HITLER, ADOLF
Hotel Kaiserhof in 1930, but

further details are lacking.
Eleven more attempts on
Hitler during 1933 alone are
vaguely documented but include two specific cases: an unidentified Nazi Sturmabteilung
(Storm Detachment, or SA)
member tried to shoot Hitler
in Obersalzberg, and Karl Luttner was arrested on March 4
for plotting to kill Hitler with a
bomb at a rally in Kningsberg.
In June 1934, Hitler accused
SA leaders Ernst Rhm and Julius Uhl of scheming to kill him,
using that excuse to launch a
purge of the SA known as the
Night of the Long Knives,
during which at least 83 traitors to the Nazi Party were
Adolf Hitler survived 39 attempted assassinations annihilated. Today, most histoduring his time as dictator of Germanys Third rians agree that the conspiracy
Reich. (Photos.com)
chargesand, perhaps, allegations of rampant homosexuality
within the SAwere fabricated by SS leader Heinrich Himmler to remove his
competition in the party.
Other incidents from 1934 include two vague reports of plots by unidentified would-be assassins, and two more substantial attempts. Josef Beppo
Rmer, a member of the far-fight paramilitary Freikorps Oberland, was arrested
for plotting to kill Hitler and spent the next five years in Dachaus concentration camp. In February 1942, the Gestapo jailed him again, for abetting the
enemy, and he was executed in September 1944. Another 1934 plot, hatched
in Berlin by Dr. Helmut Mylius and several others, was also discovered before
the would-be assassins could strike.
David Frankfurter, a German rabbis son who had emigrated to Switzerland,
returned to Berlin in 1935, hoping to meet Hitler by chance and kill him.
When no opportunity materialized, Frankfurter went back to Switzerland and
murdered Nazi activist Wilhelm Gustloff on February 4, 1936. Initially sentenced to 18 years in prison, Frankfurter was pardoned in 1945 and moved to
Palestine.
Helmut Hirsch, a Jewish student and member of the Black Fronta group
of German expatriate anti-Naziswas arrested on December 20, 1936, for
HITLER, ADOLF
conspiring to bomb Nazi headquarters in Berlin, presumably killing Hitler in

the blast. Convicted at trial, he was executed on June 4, 1937.
Published accounts say that various migr groups in Britain, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland plotted to kill Hitler during 1937 and 1938, but none
of those plans reached fruition. On November 26, 1937, Gestapo agents arrested mental patient Josef Thomas in Berlin, charging that he planned to
shoot Hitler and Reichsmarschall Hermann Gring. During the same year, an
unidentified SS officer reportedly tried to kill Hitler during a rally at the Berlin Sportpalast.
Alexander Foote, a British subject and Soviet spy, reportedly investigated
the feasibility of killing Hitler in April 1938. Although he was able to approach
Hitler in the Fhrers favorite Berlin restaurant, he did not follow through on
the plan and was not discovered, subsequently fleeing from Britain to the USSR
in March 1947.
Also in 1938, during the Sudetenland crisis with Czechoslovakia, conspirators led by Major F. W. Heinz of the Brandenburg Regiment, abandoned plans
to arrest Hitler, in favor of assassination. Their plan collapsed when Hitler flew
to meet British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in Munich.
Yet another plot from 1938 linked several high-ranking German military
officers and diplomats in a plan to kill Hitler if Germany went to war with
Czechoslovakia over the Sudetenland. Britains capitulation on that issue frustrated the plot, but its organizers went on to play key roles in subsequent conspiracies against Hitler.
Maurice Bavaud, a Swiss theology student who spoke no German and
had never fired a gun in his life, bought a pistol and traveled to Germany
in October 1938, hoping for a chance to kill Hitler. He made his attempt at
the Field Marshals Hall in Munich, on November 9, 1938, and was arrested
at the scene. He was executed by guillotine at Pltzensee Prison, May 14,
1941.
Colonel Noel Mason-MacFarlane, military attach to the British embassy in
Berlin, reportedly suggested several plans for killing Hitler during 19381939,
but all were rejected by London. Johann Georg Elser set a bomb to kill Hitler
at Munichs Brgerbrukeller beer hall, on November 8, 1939, but Hitler left
the building 13 minutes before the explosion, which killed eight others. Franz
Halder, chief of the German General Staff, reportedly carried a pistol to one
meeting with Hitler in 1939, intending to shoot him, then decided against it at
the last moment.
Following the German conquest of France in 1940, two plots were hatched
against Hitler in Paris. That July, Oberleutnant Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg and Dr. Eugen Gerstenmaier planned to shoot Hitler during a victory parade through the city, but lost their nerve. Around the same time, Field Marshal
Erwin von Witzleben hatched a plan to arrest Hitler in France, but that scheme
also fell through, leaving him to join a more elaborate plot in 1944.
227
228
HITLER, ADOLF
German attorney Nikolaus von Halem, from Oldenberg, plotted Hitlers death
in 1941, but cohort Joseph Roman was arrested and named him under torture,
sending von Halem to prison, where he was executed on October 9, 1944.
Military plots against Hitler proliferated in 1943 and 1944, as German forces
suffered critical defeats on various fronts. A group led by General Karl Hubert
Lanz planned to strike in February 1943, when Hitler visited Poltawa in the
Ukraine, but a change in the Fhrers itinerary foiled the plan. The same sort
of glitches foiled two more plots organized around Smolensk, in the USSR,
during March 1943. Captain Rudolf von Gersdorff planned to kill Hitler with
a suicide bomb on March 13, at an exhibition of captured Russian weapons in
Berlin, but he was unable to get past Hitlers bodyguards. German nobleman
Axel von dem Bussche-Streithorst also volunteered as a suicide bomber, planning to kill Hitler during a troop inspection in East Prussia on November 16,
but an Allied air strike deprived him of transportation.
Wehrmacht officer Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzins was the next volunteer for a suicide strike against Hitler, in January 1944, during an inspection of new army uniforms, but postponement of the meeting foiled his plan.
Another soldier, Eberhard von Breitenbuch, took a concealed pistol to a military briefing with Hitler at the Berghof in Bavaria, on March 11, but SS guards
barred him from the room where Hitler met with higher-ranking officers.
By July 1944, military conspirators led by Eastern Front veteran Claus von
Stauffenberg were committed to eliminating Hitler. After one accomplice, General Helmuth Stieff, failed to succeed with a bomb at a uniform exhibition at
Klessheim castle near Salzburg, on July 7, von Stauffenberg decided to do the
job himself. He brought a bomb to Obersalzberg on July 11, then refrained
from detonating it because top Nazis Hermann Gring and Heinrich Himmler
missed the meeting. Nine days later, his bomb detonated on schedule, during
a strategy meeting at Hitlers Wolfs Lair near Rastenber, East Prussia (now
Ketrzyn, Poland). The blast killed four persons, but a heavy oak table spared
Hitler from serious injury.
Following that botched attempt, conspirator Friedrich Fromm panicked
and named his associates in futile attempt to save his own life. Von Stauffenberg and three other leading plotters were quickly arrested and executed by firing squad on July 21. Von Stauffenbergs older brother was convicted in August
and executed by slow strangulation. Before investigation of the plot was finally
concluded, some 20,000 suspected resistance members were either executed
or shipped off to concentration camps. Friedrich Fromm was discharged from
the army in September 1944, then sentenced to death for cowardice and shot
on March 12, 1945.
The last known plot to kill Hitler was allegedly conceived by Albert Speer,
Germanys minister of armaments and war production, in early 1945. Speer
later testified that he planned to drop a canister of poison gas into the air-intake
HITLER, ADOLF
system of Hitlers bunker in Berlin, but a high wall around the access hatch
foiled his plot.
Adolf Hitler married his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, in the same bunker as Soviet troops advanced through Berlin, on April 28, 1945. Two days
later, the couple reportedly committed suicide and their corpses were burned
by loyal officers. Some conspiracy theorists, however, still contend that Hitler
faked his own death and escaped to South America, along with other Nazis
such as Adolf Eichmann, Josef Mengele, and Klaus Barbie.
Further Reading
Fest, Joachim. Plotting Hitlers Death: The Story of German Resistance. New York: Holt
Paperbacks, 1997.
Hoffmann, Peter. The History of the German Resistance, 19331945. Montreal: McGillQueens University Press, 1996.
Kershaw, Ian. The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitlers Germany, 19441945.
New York: Penguin Books, 2011.
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, 18891936: Hubris. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, 19361945: Nemesis. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
Toland, John. Adolf Hitler. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.
229
I
IDIARTE BORDA, JUAN BAUTISTA
(18441897)
On August 25, 1897, Uruguayan president Juan Idiarte Borda attended a
church service at Montevideos cathedral on Constitution Square. As he left
the church, Idiarte was shot and killed by Avelino Arredondo, a member of a
dissident faction within Idiartes own Colorado Party. Curiously, the newspaper
El Da had erroneously named Arredondo as a participant in a previous attempt
on Idiartes life, in April 1897. Arrested at the murder scene, Arredondo was
convicted and imprisoned, but attempts to locate more conspirators proved
fruitless.
Juan Idiarte Borda was born and raided in Mercedes, Uruguay, to affluent
parents of Basque origin. As a teenager, his talent with the clarinet led relatives to think he would pursue a musical career, but his fathers death in 1860
placed him prematurely in charge of the familys cattle ranch at age 16. Three
years later, Idiarte and his brother, Peter, joined in a revolution against the ruling National Party, led by Venancio Flores, which sparked a civil war in Uruguay and ended with Flores assuming the presidency. Idiarte emerged from
that conflict as a lieutenant and parlayed his renown into a new political career,
supporting reforms deemed radical at the time.
In 1879, Idiarte left Mercedes for Montevideo and won election to parliament. He served until 1886, when personal conflicts with President Mximo
Benito Santos Barbosa encouraged Idiarte to leave the country, settling for eight
years in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He returned to Uruguay in February 1894,
seeking the office vacated by retiring president Julio Herrera y Obes. Three
weeks of voting and riotous senate debate climaxed on March 21, when Idiarte edged out interim president Duncan Antonio Stewart Agell by a margin of
47 ballots.
From the outset of his term as president, opponents charged Idiarte with electoral fraud. Jose Battle y Ordonez, editor of El Da in Montevideo, was among
Idiartes harshest critics, publishing charges of vote rigging and corruption that
encouraged violent dissent against Idiartes regime. In March 1897, members
of the White Party led by Aparicio Saravia rebelled against the Colorado Partys
government, sparking another civil war. In April, while alighting from a carriage
at his home, Idiarte was accosted by would-be assassin John A. Rabecca, who
232
IGE, JA MES A JIBOL A IDOWU
pressed a pistol to the presidents neck but did not fire. Idiartes family took the
incident as a warning from the White Party, but the president refused to back
down from his enemies.
Political struggles continued after Idiartes assassination, as Juan Lindolfo
Cuestas succeeded the murdered chief of state. By September 1897, White
Party forces controlled most of the Uruguayan countryside, and Aparicio Saravia was ranked as the countrys second most powerful figure when Jose Batlle
y Ordonez ascended to the presidency in 1903. Savaria died from wounds suffered in battle, in September 1904, and his party did not long survive him.
President Batlle held office until 1907, and the Colorado Party ruled Uruguay
without interruption until 1959.
Further Reading
Bethell, Leslie. The Cambridge History of Latin America, Vol. 5, c. 18701930. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Lpez-Alves, Fernando. State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 18101900.
IGE, JAMES AJIBOLA IDOWU (19302001)

On the night of December 23, 2001, unknown assassins invaded the home of
James Bola Ige, Nigerias minister of justice, in the Bodija district of Ibadan,
Oyo State. Proceeding to the bedroom, they killed Ige with multiple closerange gunshots, then fled the residence. Various suspects were arrested and
charged with complicity in the slaying, but all were acquitted at trial. Despite
speculation of official complicity and/or cover-up, the assassination remains
unsolved today.
James Ige was born in Zaria, Kaduna State, in north-central Nigeria, on September 13, 1930. His parents, members of the Yoruba tribe, moved to Ibadan
in 1943, where Ige completed grammar school and studied at the state university. From there, he proceeded to University College London, earning a law
degree at age 26, and was called to the bar 1961, with admission to Londons
Inner Temple. Rather than practice in London, he returned to Nigeria that
same year and established the fledgling law firm of Bola Ige & Company. Fluent in all three of Nigerias major languagesYoruba, Ibo, and HausaIge cast
himself as a reformer, winning designation as a senior advocate of Nigeria for
distinguished legal service.
At the same time, he became immersed in politics. Under the First Nigerian
Republic (October 1, 1963January 16, 1966), Ige joined the Action Group
(AG), a party formed in 1951 to mobilize Western Nigerians to prevent domination of their district by a rival group, the National Council of Nigeria and
the Cameroons. At the time, AG founder and former premier of Western Nigeria Obafemi Awolowo faced dissension in the ranks, with deputies Samuel
IGE, JAMES AJIBOLA IDOWU
Akintola and Olusola Olaosebikan vying for endorsement as Awolowos political heir. That rivalry ended with Akintolas assassination during the military
coup that ended the First Republic in January 1966.
Nigerias new ruler, General Yakubu Jack Dan-Yumma Gowon, named Ige
as commissioner for agriculture for Nigerias western region, operating from
the capital at Ibadan. A year later, that region was abolished, subdivided into
Lagos State and Western State, with Ige serving the latter from Ibadan. There,
he befriended army commander and future president Olusegun Obasanjo,
while dividing his time between official duties and antiracism campaign sponsored by the World Council of Churches.
General Murtala Ramat Mohammed led a successful coup against Gowons
regime on July 29, 1975, and proclaimed himself head of state, with Obasanjo
as his second-in-command. Ige, still loyal to Obafemi Awolowo, joined his
newest vehicle, the United Party of Nigeria (UPN). Following General Mohammeds assassination in 1976, General Obasanjo assumed control and laid the
groundwork for establishment to Nigerias Second Republic in 1979. In October of that year, Ige won election as the governor of Oyo State, serving one
term before he lost a reelection big to Dr. Victor Omololu Olunloyo in 1983.
Ige contested that election, but left office in October, when the courts ruled
against him. Olunloyo, in turn, was deposed three months later by another
military coup.
The leaders of that uprising detained Bola Ige for two years, on charges of
misappropriating UPN funds, but he was liberated in August 1985, following
yet another coup, led by General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. Returning to
legal practice with a sideline in writing, Ige shunned further political activity
until May 1999, when a new constitution established Nigerias Fourth Republic
and institution of sweeping democratic reforms. (A short-lived Third Republic
had been virtually stillborn during 1993.) Ige ran for president, representing
a new Alliance for Democracy, but lost the race to Olusegun Obasanjowho
then appointed Ige first as minister of mines and power (19992000), then as
minister of justice and attorney general. On the eve of his assassination, Ige
was earmarked to serve as Africas representative on the United Nations International Law Commission.
Some Nigerians blamed President Obasanjo for Iges assassination, although no clear motive was advanced beyond assertions that he may have
uncovered deep-seated government corruption and planned to expose it.
Calls for establishment of an independent truth commission have thus far
been ignored.
Further Reading
Ahworegba, Prosper. The Nigerian 100: The Most Influential Nigerians of All Time. Dartford, United Kingdom: Xlibris, 2008.
233
234
INEJIRO ASANUMA
Banjo, Ayo, ed. Bola Ige: Passage of a Modern Cicero. Lagos, Nigeria: Bookcraft, Ltd.,
2003.
Mohammed, Abubakar. Chief Bola Ige and the Destabilization of Nigeria. Zaria, Nigeria:
Centre for Democratic Development Research and Training, 1999.
INEJIRO ASANUMA (18981960)

On October 12, 1960, Inejiro Asanuma, head of Japans Social Democratic Party
(SDP), attended a debate among parliamentary candidates at Tokyos Hibiya
Hall. During those proceedings, 17-year-old Otoya Yamaguchi leaped onto the
stage and attacked Inejiro with a short sword (wakizashi), fatally wounding
him in full view of the audience and reporters. Police subdued Otoya and soon
identified him as a member of a right-wing, ultranationalist group, collectively
known in Japan as uyoku dantai. On November 2, Otoya hanged himself from
a light fixture in his cell at a juvenile detention facility, using a rope made from
torn and knotted sheets. He left a message written on the wall in toothpaste:
Seven lives for my country. Ten thousand years for His Imperial Majesty, the
Emperor!
Inejiro Asanuma was born in
the Chiyoda district of Tokyo,
on December 27, 1898. His
mother died in childbirth,
leaving Inejiro to be raised
by his father until his fathers
death from cancer left him orphaned. Inejiro joined one of
Japans many uyoku dantai in
the 1930s, supporting the military regime of General Hideki
Tojo. In 1936, he was elected
to a seat in the National Diet,
but dissatisfaction with the
course and conduct of the ensuing World War II led Inejiro
to retire from politics in 1942,
returning after the cessation
of hostilities as a left-wing activist promoting socialism. He
also attempted to block legislation in the Diet that established
Japanese politician Inejiro Asanuma, stabbed be- a treaty of mutual cooperation
fore a live audience in October 1960. (Getty and security between Japan
Images)
and the United States. In 1959,
INEJIRO ASANUMA
he faced a storm of condemnation after visiting the Peoples Republic of China,

where he denounced the United States as the shared enemy of China and
Japan. Many fellow SDP members chastised him for briefly affecting a Zhongshan suit like that worn by Chinas Chairman Mao Zedong, but in death Inejiro
was rehabilitated, his murder cast as a campaign issue in 1960.
Socialists depicted young assassin Otoya as a cats paw of monopolistic capitalist forces, specifically referring to the ruling Liberal Democrats led by Premier Hayato Ikeda. Even Otoyas suicide became a political issue, as acting SDP
chairman Saburo Eda told reporters, The fact that an important criminal was
able to commit suicide exposes the utter irresponsibility of the authorities in
charge. Meanwhile, a still photo of the assassination, snapped by photographer Yasushi Nagao, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the World Press Photo
Award for 1960.
Although the SDP failed to carry the 1960 elections, Otoya Yamaguchi
emerged as a martyr for the rabid uyoku dantai. Neo-fascists presented his parents with a burial coat, kimono, and belt, then escorted his corpse to a memorial service. Fifty years later, in October 2010, they still celebrated his murder
of Inejiro, in a ceremony convened at Hibiya Park on the assassinations golden
anniversary.
Further Reading
Inejiro Asanuma Assassination Footage 1960. Dailymotion. http://www.dailymotion
.com/video/x66vpe_inejiro-asanuma-assassination-foota_news.
Siniawer, Eiko. Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan,
18601960. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Zelizer, Barbie. About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
235
J
JACKSON, ANDREW (17671845)
ATTEMPTED
On January 30, 1835, President Andrew Jackson attended the funeral of South
Carolina congressman Warren Davis at the United States Capitol. Afterward, as
Jackson left the building from the East Portico, unemployed British housepainter
Richard Lawrence aimed a pistol at Jackson, but the weapon misfired. Bystanders, including legendary frontiersman (then congressman) Davy Crockett, disarmed Lawrence, with some accounts claiming that Jackson used a cane to strike
his would-be killer. In custody, Lawrence raved incoherently, blaming Jackson
for his unemployment and claiming that heLawrencewas King Richard III
of England (deceased for 350 years). At trial in April, prosecuted by Francis Scott
Key, Lawrence was found insane and committed to an asylum where he died in
June 1861.
Aside from the first attempted U.S. presidential assassination, Jackson had
also experienced the first attack on an U.S. president, two years earlier. On
May 6, 1833, he sailed aboard the USS Cygnet from Washington to Fredericksburg, Virginia, to lay the cornerstone for a monument to George Washingtons
mother. Stopping along the way near Alexandria, Jackson was accosted and
punched by Robert B. Randolph, earlier dismissed from the navy for embezzlement by Jacksons order. Again, bystandersthis time including author Washington Irgingcaptured Jacksons assailant, but the president declined to press
charges in that case.
Born at some uncertain point on the border between North and South Carolina, on March 15, 1767, Andrew Jackson was the son of Scot-Irish colonists. In
later life, he referred to rumors that his Mother . . . [was] held to public scorn
as a prostitute who intermarried with a Negro, and [that his] . . . eldest brother
[was] sold as a slave in Carolina, but no such claims were ever substantiated. He
joined a local militia during the American Revolution, at age 13, and was captured
by British troops with one of his brothers, scarred by a saber in captivity when he
refused to shine a redcoat officers boots. That experience, coupled with another
brothers death in battle, left Jackson with a bitter hatred of England at wars end.
Despite his own erratic education, Jackson later taught school, studied law,
and was admitted to the bar in North Carolina, practicing along the frontier.
He was a delegate to North Carolinas constitutional convention in 1796 and
won election to Congress that same year. In 1797, he advanced to the U.S.
238
JACKSON, ANDREW
Senate, but resigned after a year in office. Appointed to the Tennessee Supreme
Court in 1798, he held that post until 1804, simultaneously operating a plantation run by slaves and serving as a general in the state militia. During the War
of 1812, Jackson initially waged rural campaigns against hostile Native American tribes, then secured fame by defeating British troops in the Battle of New
Orleans, ironically fought two weeks after the United States and Britain made
peace with the Treaty of Ghent. Two years later he was back in action, leading
troops against more hostile tribesmen in the First Seminole War.
Tennessees legislature sent Jackson back to the U.S. Senate in 1822, and two
years later he ran for president against three fellow members of the DemocraticRepublican Party: John Quincy Adams, William Harris Crawford, and Henry
Clay. Jackson won the popular vote, with 151,271 ballots to 113,122 for Adams,
and also shaded Adams by a margin of 15 votes in the Electoral College, but still
had only 99 votes, with 131 required for victory. Under terms of the Twelfth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the House of Representatives decided
the election, choosing Adams over Jackson in a move that many observers denounced as a corrupt bargain.
Jackson resigned from the Senate in October 1825, but rebounded three
years later with another presidential campaign, this time unseating incumbent
Adams with a decisive electoral margin of 178 to 83. He won reelection in
1832 with an even more decisive edge, receiving 219 electoral votes versus
49 for National Republican Party nominee Henry Clay, and seven for William
Wirt, representing the Anti-Masonic Party.
Jacksons eight years in office were marked by successive bitter controversies. He paid off Americas national debt in 1835the only such accomplishment by any presidentthen saw the country plunge into severe depression
two years later, increasing the debt tenfold. His reliance on the spoils system
prompted charges of cronyism and corruption, and his dismantling of the national bank caused financial speculation and manipulation to proliferate. His
relentless campaign of Indian removal amounted, in effect, to ethnic cleansing
of Native Americans from land desired by whites, claiming the lives of some
4,000 Cherokees alone on the long Trail of Tears from the Deep South to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). On his last day in office, Jackson admitted
two lingering regrets: that he had been unable to shoot Henry Clay or to hang
John C. Calhoun. Tuberculosis claimed the former presidents life at his Tennessee plantation, on June 8, 1845.
Further Reading
Brands, H. W. Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times. New York: Anchor Books, 2006.
Meacham, Jon. American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. New York: Random
House, 2008.
Wilentz, Sean. Andrew Jackson. New York: Times Books, 2005.
J A C K S O N , W H A R L E S T, S R .
JACKSON, WHARLEST, SR. (19301967)

At 8:00 P.M. on February 27, 1967, Wharlest Jackson left his job at the Armstrong Rubber Company plant in Natchez, Mississippi, driving home through
a downpour of rain. As local secretary of the local National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), working at a factory infested by Ku
Klux Klan (KKK) members, Jackson routinely checked his pickup truck for bombs
and evidence of sabotage, but this night the weather discouraged his normal
precautions. On Minor Street, a few blocks from his home, an explosive charge
detonated in the pickups cab, demolishing the vehicle and killing Jackson instantly. The crime remains officially unsolved today.
Wharlest Jackson was a Natchez native, born on December 7, 1930, and
raised under Mississippis system of strict racial segregation, enforced by police
brutality and vigilante mayhem. He served in the Korean War and subsequently
joined the NAACP to fight discrimination, despite numerous murders of civil
rights activists throughout the Magnolia State in the 1950s and 1960s. In August 1965, fellow Armstrong employee and NAACP activist George Metcalfe
was crippled for life by a car bomb outside the factory. Two years later, with
the movement gaining ground, Jackson was offered promotion to a formerly
white position at the plant, earning an extra 17 cents per hour for his wife and
five children. Exerlena Jackson begged her husband not to accept the new job,
but he dismissed the dangers involved as a price of progress.
Although no one has been charged with Jacksons murder, FBI spokesmen
place the blame on a KKK faction known as the Silver Dollar Group, whose
members identified themselves with silver dollars minted in the year of their
birth. The splinter group drew its members from various larger Klan groups in
Mississippi and Louisiana, frustrated by advances in civil rights for African Americans and the old Klans inability to hold the color line. Aside from Wharlest
Jacksons slaying, Silver Dollar Klansmen are suspected in George Metcalfes
near-fatal car bombing; in the July 12, 1964, disappearance of black victim Joe
Edwards in Ferriday, Louisiana; and in the arson slaying of Frank Morris, also in
Ferriday, on December 10, 1964. Edwards was apparently selected as a random
target, because he worked as a porter at a motel where the Klansmen gathered.
Morris was accusedfalsely, as it appearsof making sexual advances to white
women who patronized his shoe-repair shop. All of those cold cases remain
open and subject to future prosecution if sufficient evidence is ever found, but
most identified members of the Silver Dollar Group are now deceased.
Further Reading
Davis, Jack. Race against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
Newton, Michael. The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: A History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2010.
239
240
JA MES I, KING OF SCOTS
Wharlest Jackson Case. The Civil Rights Cold Case Project. http://coldcases.org/
cases/wharlest-jackson-case.
Whitehead, Don. Attack on Terror: The FBI Against the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. New York:
Funk & Wagnalls, 1970.
JAMES I, KING OF SCOTS (13941437)

Scotland was in turmoil in the latter months of 1436. Allied with France in
an ill-conceived war against England, King James taxed the estates of Scottish
nobles to support his army, and was nearly arrested in October by opponent
Sir Robert Graham. In February 1437, James and his queen, Joan Beaufort,
sought refuge at the Blackfriars monastery outside Perth. On February 21,
the kings traitorous cousin, Sir Robert Stewart, admitted Graham and a small
group of assassins to the monastery. Servants warned James in time for him to
hide inside the monasterys sewer, but its exit was blocked and the assassins
killed him there. Queen Joan, though wounded, managed to escape. In May,
the leading conspiratorsGraham, Walter of Atholl, and Walters grandson
Robert Stewartwere publicly tortured to death.
James I was the youngest son of King Robert III, born at Dunfermline in July
1394. Both of his brothers died while he was still a child, Robert in infancy, and
David under vague circumstances while detained at Falkland Palace by Robert
Stewart, Duke of Albany. Despite his exoneration by parliament, tradition has it
that Steward ordered David
starved to death. Prince James
experienced his first personal
clash with hostile Scottish nobles in February 1406, when he
fought a skirmish with Archibald
Douglas, Duke of Touraine, and
was forced to hide on Bass Rock,
off the Scottish coast. Rescued
in March, he sailed for France,
but English pirates captured his
ship on March 22 and delivered
James to King Henry IV of England as a hostage. Robert III
died 12 days later, as James settled in for a strange 18-year
captivity.
Life could have been worse
for a medieval prisoner. At HenTraitors murdered James I, King of Scots, in 1437. rys court, James received a firstclass education, served with
(Getty Images)
J O H N PA U L I I
British troops in battle against France during 14201421, and married the Earl
of Somersets daughter in 1424. Meanwhile, long-winded negotiations for his
release dragged on, encompassing exchange of other prisoners. Murdoch Stewart, son of the Duke who allegedly killed Jamess brother, had been captured in
1402 and was finally exchanged for Henry Percy, 2nd Earl of Northumberland,
in 1416. He rushed home to succeed his father as Duke of Albany and governor of Scotland, while James awaited payment of 40,000 for his release in April
1424. That ransom was obtained by raising taxes, a circumstance that brought
James back to Scotland with one strike against him in the public mind.
Formally crowned on May 21, 1424, James anticipated the hostility of nobles
allied with the Duke of Albany. In March 1425, James arrested Murdoch, two
of his sons, and 25 of their allies on charges of treason. Murdoch, his sons, and
a fourth defendant were convicted in May, executed by decapitation at Stirling
Castle. Others detained by James at various times included Alexander of Islay,
Earl of Ross (1428), Archibald Douglas, 5th Earl of Douglas (1431), and George
II, Earl of March (1434). Each in turn was freed upon payment of ransom,
which James used for the construction of Linlithgow Palace in West Lothian.
Such treatment of his adversaries, coupled with ever-increasing taxation,
encouraged rebellion against James I. His ill-conceived alliance with France
against England, meanwhile, renewed hostilities across the border. James besieged the English outpost at Roxburgh Castle in August 1436, but suffered an
embarrassing defeat. Two months later came the attempt to arrest him, leading
ultimately to his murder.
Jamed II, only seven years old at his fathers death, ruled as best a child can
under the guidance of Archibald Douglashis first cousin and the same earl
imprisoned and ransomed by his father in 1431. Archibald died in June 1439,
and James II literally turned the tables on his keepers in November 1440, seizing and executing successor William Douglas and his brother during a banquet
in Edinburgh. Sporadic family feuding continued until August 1460, when
James II died in an attack on the same Roxburgh Castle that had broken his fathers spirit 24 years earlier.
Further Reading
Balfour-Melville, Evan. James I, King of Scots. London: Methuen, 1936.
Brown, Michael. James I. Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 2000.
Magnusson, Magnus. Scotland: The Story of a Nation. New York: Grove Press, 2003.
Traquair, Peter. Freedoms Sword: Scotlands Wars of Independence. London: HarperCollins, 1998.
JOHN PAUL II (19202005)ATTEMPTED

On May 13, 1981, while blessing visitors to St. Peters Square in Vatican City,
Pope John Paul II was shot four times and critically wounded by Turkish assassin
241
242
J O H N PAU L I I
Mehmet Ali Agca,

who previously murdered journalist and human rights activist Abdi Ipeki in Istanbul, on February 1, 1979. A member of the ultranationalistic Grey Wolves organization, Agca
this time was captured at the crime
scene and an accomplice, Oral elik, fled without joining in the attack. Convicted of attempted murder in July 1981, Agca was pardoned, at the popes
request, by the Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in 2000; he was then
extradited to Turkey for trial in the Ipeki murder and two 1970s bank robberies. Turkish authorities released him on January 18, 2010.
Pope John Paul II was born Karol Jzef Wojtya in Wadowice, Poland, on
May 18, 1920, rising through the ranks of the Roman Catholic Church to become that institutions second-longest serving pontiff and the first non-Italian
pope since Adrian VI died in 1523. Between his election as pope in 1978 and
his death in April 2005, John Paul II visited 129 nations in pursuit of a universal call to holiness. He also beatified 1,340 people and canonized 483 saints
both figures exceeding the totals for all preceding popes combined. Perhaps
fittingly, John Paul II was, himself, beatified on May 1, 2011.
Mehmet Agca
s attack on the pope was not the only attempt to kill John Paul II.
On May 12, 1982, Belgian lawyer and Catholic priest Juan Mara Fernndez
y Krohn, ordained in 1978, tried to stab the pope with a bayonet in Fatima,
Portugal. Reports differ on whether the pope was wounded, but if so, the injuries were not severe. At trial, Fernndez announced his opposition to changes
imposed on Catholicism by the Second Vatican Council in 1965, and further
claimed that John Paul II was a covert Soviet agent corrupting the Vatican. Sentenced to six years in prison, Fernndez served three, then was deported to
Belgium (by which time he had left the priesthood).
Another plot against the pope was hatched in 1994 by Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and his mentor, Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed. The popes assassination, scheduled to be carried out by
a suicide bomber on January 15, 1995, during a papal motorcade through
Makati, in the Philippines, was part of a global plan that included bombing of
12 airliners in flight from Asia to the United States, and crashing a 13th aircraft into the Virginia headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Yousef trained a score of terrorists for their roles in the Bojinka ( big noise)
plot, but it was scuttled after an apartment fire in Manila exposed one of the
groups cells.
Multiple conspiracy theories still surround Mehmet Agca
s attempt to kill
Pope John Paul II. Agca
contributed to that confusion with his ever-changing
stories, prompting prosecutor Antonio Marini to tell reporters that Agca
has
manipulated all of us, telling hundreds of lies, continually changing versions,
forcing us to open tens of different investigations. One theory linked the Grey
Wolves and the CIA to NATOs covert Operation Gladio, encompassing a
host of criminal activities designed to keep right-wing governments in power
J O H N PA U L I I
by promoting an atmosphere of tension through terrorist actions blamed on

leftist revolutionaries.
Another popular theory blamed the murder attempt on communists, including the Soviet KGB, East Germanys ministry for state security, and/or the
Bulgarian secret service. In that scenario, the pope was targeted for supporting
Solidarity, a noncommunist labor movement led by Lech Waesa in the popes
native Poland. KGB director Yuri Andropov had earlier issued a memorandum
to Russian schoolteachers, reading in part: The Pope is our enemy. . . . Due
to his uncommon skills and great sense of humor he is dangerous, because he
charms everyone, especially journalists. Besides, he goes for cheap gestures
in his relations with the crowd, for instance, [he] puts on a highlanders hat,
shakes all hands, kisses children, etc. . . . It is modeled on American presidential campaigns. . . . Because of the activities of the Church in Poland our
activities designed to atheize the youth not only cannot diminish but must intensely develop. . . . In this respect all means are allowed and we cannot afford
sentiments.
The pope himself had a different view of the matter. On June 26, 2000, he
released the long-suppressed Third Secret of Fatima, last in a series of supposed visions or prophecies delivered by the Blessed Virgin Mary to three Portuguese children in 1917. Noting that his brush with death occurred on the
64th anniversary of Marys supposed first appearance, John Paul II published
the allegedly divine message foretelling an apocalypse and calling for repentance. Perhaps ironically, former Trappist monk Laurence James Downey had
hijacked an Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to London on May 2, 1981one day
before the pope was shotdemanding among other things that John Paul II
reveal the third secret of Fatima. Instead, he received a five-year prison term
for air piracy.
Further Reading
Henze, Paul. The Plot to Kill the Pope. New York: Macmillan, 1985.
Sterling, Claire. The Time of the Assassins: Anatomy of an Investigation. New York: Henry
Holt, 1983.
West, Nigel. The Third Secret: The CIA, Solidarity and the KGBs Plot to Kill the Pope.
New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
243
K
KABILA, LAURENT-DSIR (19392001)
On January 16, 2001, while meeting with one of his top advisors, LaurentDsir Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), was
shot by one of his bodyguards. Other guards killed the shooter, Rashidi Kasereka,
as he tried to flee the scene. Kabila was rushed to Kinshasas hospital, where
he died on January 18. Son Joseph Kabila succeeded his father on January 26,
describing the assassination as the first move in an abortive coup. Police named
a cousin of Kabila, Colonel Eddy Kapend, as the coups ringleader, charging
him and 135 others with conspiracy. A military tribunal convicted Kapend and
89 other defendants, exonerating 45. Kapend and 25 others were sentenced to
death, but execution was deferred, sending them to prison with the 64 other
convicted defendants who received prison terms ranging from six months to
life. Observers of the proceedings differ in their opinions concerning the guilt
of those convicted.
Laurent-Dsir Kabila was a member of the Luba tribe, born at Baudoinville in the former province of Katanga, on November 27, 1939. His affluent
parents sent him abroad to study in France and Serbia, followed by graduation from Tanzanias University of Dar es Salaam. When Belgium granted independence to the Congo, in June 1960, Kabila was a member of the General
Association of the Baluba People of Katanga, allied with Patrice Lumumba in
conflict against rival Moise Tshombe. Lumumba won election as the DRCs first
prime minister, but was assassinated in September 1960. Five different prime
ministers held office in the next 12 months, before Cyrille Adoula managed to
complete a three-year tenure. Under Adoulas regime, in 1962, Kabila served as
cabinet chief for Minister of Information Ferdinand Tumba, while also being a
member of North Katangas provincial assembly.
Kabilas longtime adversary, Moise Tshombe, took office as prime minister in
July 1964, beginning a new round of conflict and violence. Kabila joined the
Conseil National de Libration, organizing revolution in the eastern Congo,
where he was assisted during 1965 by Che Guevara. Guevaras diaries indicate
his disappointment in Kabila as a revolutionary, noting his habitual distraction,
tardiness in joining various guerrilla actions, and failure to supply agreed-upon
support. Although Kabila possessed genuine qualities of a mass leader, Guevara found him sadly lacking in revolutionary seriousness.
246
K A B I L A , L AU R E N T- D S I R
That judgment aside, Kabila persevered in his war against Tshombe and his
successors, fighting on after the DRC was reborn in October 1971 as the Republic of Zaire. Leading a new Peoples Revolutionary Party (PRP), armed and
bankrolled by Chinese communists, Kabila established a stronghold in South
Kivu Province, declaring it a breakaway Marxist state, growing wealthy over
time from the proceeds of smuggling, extortion, and robbery. Kabila disappeared without a trace in 1988, leaving the PRP to flounder and disband. He
was presumed dead for eight years, then resurfaced in November 1996, at the
helm of a new Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo, leading attacks on the regime of President Mobutu Sese Seko with backing from
Rwanda and Uganda.
The campaign was successful, forcing Mobutu into exile by May 1997,
whereupon Kabila proclaimed himself president, suspended the constitution,
and changed the countrys name back from Zaire to the Democratic Republic
of the Congo. Abandoning his former hard-line Marxism, Kabila offered concessions to foreign investors, but critics denounced him as corrupt, declaring that he had simply revived the former South Kivu kleptocracy on a larger
scale. Complaints of despotism and human rights violations proliferated. By
1998, Kabilas former allies in Uganda and Rwanda had established yet another revolutionary groupthe Congolese Rally for Democracyto depose
him. So began the Second Congo War, with Kabila seeking new allies in Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. Despite insertion of United Nations peacekeeping forces, that war was still ongoing at the time of Kabilas assassination.
SECOND CONGO WAR

The Second Congo Waralso called the Great War of Africaembroiled
troops from nine African nations, plus 20-odd irregular guerrilla bands,
between August 1998 and July 2003. It ranks as the deadliest war in African history, with an estimated death toll of 5.4 million (extended through
2008 to include victims of war-related starvation and disease). Millions
more were driven from their homes and native countries, into foreign exile.
The initial conflict involved attempts by neighboring Burundi, Rwanda,
and Uganda to unseat Congolese president Laurent Kabila, once their ally
in another war against his predecessor. Under siege, Kabila formed new
alliances with Angola, Chad, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, whereas Sudan
joined the ranks of his opponents. Despite a ceasefire and establishment of
a transitional government in 2003, sporadic fighting continued, and international aid groups logged 1,000 deaths per day from war-related causes.
K A D Y R O V, A K H M A D A B D U L K H A M I D O V I C H
Conspiracy theories surround Kabilas murder. Critics of the trial that followed his assassinationincluding Mwenze Kongolo, who served as Kabilas
minister of justiceclaim that those convicted of plotting to slay Kabila are
scapegoats. Some investigative journalists believe the plot was orchestrated by
former child soldiers from South Kivu. Others point to agents of UNITA, the
National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, which had been at war
with the Angolan government since 1961. Yet another theory claims Rwandan
soldiers were involved, claiming that Colonel James Kabarebe, commander of
Rwandan forces inside the DRC, announced Kabilas death with the remark,
Good news from Kinshasa. Our boys did it.
See also: Lumumba, Patrice mery (19251961).
Further Reading
Autesserre, Sverine. The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Ngolet, Franois. Crisis in the Congo: The Rise and Fall of Laurent Kabila. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges. The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A Peoples History. London:
Zed Books, 2002.
Trefon, Theodore. Congo Masquerade: The Political Culture of Aid Inefficiency and Reform
Failure. London: Zed Books, 2011.
KADYROV, AKHMAD ABDULKHAMIDOVICH

(19512004)
On May 9, 2004, during a parade commemorating victory over Nazi German
in World War II, a bomb exploded at the Dinamo football stadium in Grozny,
capital of the Chechen Republic. The blast killed President Akhmad Kadyrov,
two of his bodyguards, the chairman of the Chechen State Council, and at least
a dozen others (some reports say 30-plus). Another 56 persons were wounded,
including Colonel General Valery Baranov, commander of Russian forces in
Chechnya, who lost a leg in the explosion. Investigators determined that the
charge had been planted inside one of the stadiums concrete pillars, during
recent repairs. The crime remains officially unsolved.
Akhmad Kadyrov was born to Chechen parents at Karaganda, in the Kazakh
Soviet Socialist Republic (now Kazakhstan), on August 23, 1951. When he was
six years old, his family returned to Chechnya, then known as the Chechen
Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR). Kadyrov began formal
study of Islam in 1980, at Mir-i-Arab Madrasah in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, continuing at Uzbekistans Tashkent Islamic University through 1986. By the early
1990s he was back in Chechnya, leading his own Islamic Institute in the town
of Kurchaloy.
247
248
K A D Y R O V, A K H M A D A B D U L K H A M I D O V I C H
Following dissolution of the

Soviet Union, former Russian
air force general Dzhokhar Dudayev led a rebellion against
the ChechenIngush ASSR Supreme Soviet, on September 6,
1991, declaring Chechen independence from Russia. By November, Russian troops had
occupied Grozny. The country
split in June 1992, with civil
war erupting. Akhmad Kadyrov soon emerged as a prominent military leader against
Russian forces and their allies,
winning appointment in 1995
as chief mufti (interpreter of
Islamic law) for the fledgling
Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.
Before the Khasavyurt Accord
ended the war in August 1996,
fighting had claimed an estimated 20,000 military lives,
Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov, killed in a while killing at least 50,000
2004 bombing. (AFP/Getty Images)
civilians.
The cessation of formal hostilities brought no true peace to Chechnya. Grozny lay in ruins, and chaos
reigned in the countryside, with local warlords establishing virtual fiefdoms. In
the face of economic collapse, ransom kidnapping quickly emerged as source
of income, with 1,300 abductions reported between 1996 and 1999. Nominal
authorities in Grozny declared a state of emergency in 1998, but open fighting continued. In July of that year, at Gudermes, 50 people died in a battle
between the Chechen National Guard and Muslim guerrillas. In March 1999,
after Russian general Gennady Shpigun was kidnapped from Groznys airport
(found dead a year later), Moscow planned a new invasion of Chechnya. War
resumed in September 1999, after Chechen Muslims invaded Dagestan, then
were chased back into Chechnya by Russian forces.
Despite his deep-seated belief in Islam, Chief Mufti Akhmad Kadyrov opposed Wahhabism, the ultra-fundamentalist creed espoused by most of
Chechnyas Muslim militias. At the outbreak of the Second Chechen War, he
shocked his coreligionists by switching sides and offering support to Russian occupation forces inside Chechnya. Chechen separatist leader Aslan
KAHANE, MEIR
Maskhadov immediately dismissed Kadyrov as chief mufti, but Kadyrovs

turnaround gained points for him in Moscow. When Russian troops secured
nominal control of Chechnya in July 2000, President Vladimir Putin named
Kadyrov as acting head of state. Voters selected him as Chechnyas first president on October 5, 2003.
Kadyrov was succeeded by Sergey Abramov, a Moscow-based executive of
Russian Railways, who served as acting president from May to August 2004,
when Putin replaced him with Alu Alkhanov, a career policeman who fought
for Russia in the First Chechen War. In February 2007, Putin demoted Alkhanov to serve as Russias deputy minister of justice, replacing him with present
incumbent Ramzan Kadyrov, a one-time Chechen rebel.
Further Reading
Greene, Stanley. Open Wound: Chechnya 19942003. London: Trolley Books, 2004.
Smith, Sebastian. Allahs Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya. London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2005.
KAHANE, MEIR (19321990)

On November 5, 1990, controversial rabbi and politician Meir Kahane delivered a speech in a lecture hall at Manhattans Marriott hotel, on Lexington Avenue. As he prepared to leave, shortly after 9:00 P.M., a gunman disguised as an
Orthodox Jew approached Kahane and shot him in the neck at close range with
a .357 Magnum revolver. Fleeing on foot, the assassin tried to commandeer
a taxi cab outside the Marriott, then shot off-duty policeman Carlos Acosta,
when Acosta tried to arrest him. Though gravely injured, Acosta returned fire,
striking his assailant in the face. Captured soon afterward, the killer was identified as El Sayyid Nosair, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Egypt, residing in
New Jersey. At his murder trial, in December 1991, jurors acquitted Nosair of
killing Kahane but convicted him of assault, possession of an illegal firearm,
and the unrelated shooting a U.S. Postal Inspection Service agent. He received
a sentence of 7 to 22 years in prison.
Martin David Kahane, more commonly known as Meir, was born in
Brooklyn on August 1, 1932, the son of an Orthodox rabbi and member of
the Revisionist Zionism movement led by Zeev Jabotinsky. A frequent visitor
to the Kahane home, Jabotinsky had trained Jews in military tactics since his
1919 discharge from the British army, advocating creation of a Jewish state
based on the British imperial model. He died in New York, in August 1940,
while visiting a paramilitary self-defense camp run by Betar, a revisionist
youth group he founded in Latvia 20 years earlier. Meir Kahane was a member
of Betar, and joined in protest demonstrations against British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, who restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine after World
249
250
K AHANE, MEIR
Controversial rabbi and politician Meir Kahane, assassinated in November 1990. (Associated Press)
War II. At age 15, Kahane was arrested for lobbing eggs and tomatoes at Bevin,
upon his arrival at New Yorks waterfront.
Kahane pursued an Orthodox education at the Yeshivah of Flatbush
(Brooklyn) and the Brooklyn Talmudical Academy, before receiving his rabbinical ordination. A bachelors degree in political science followed, from
Brooklyn College, after which he studied law, earning a JD and an LLM. At
26, he was a rabbi for a synagogue in Queens, but sparked rebellion when he
tried to install a partition separating men from women in the congregation.
Politics dominated Kahanes life from the late 1950s onward. An ardent anticommunist, he joined the far-right John Birch Society, but wife Libby later
claimed that he only infiltrated the group as an informant for the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. In 1968, he founded the Jewish Defense League
(JDL; see sidebar), pledged to protect New York Jews from overt acts of
anti-Semitism. Clashes with neo-Nazis ensued, and the organization grew
quickly, with membership exceeding 15,000. By then, the JDL had branched
out into terrorism, focusing primarily on hostile Arab targets in the United
States and Russian embassies or other symbols of Soviet anti-Semitism.
Kahane immigrated to Israel in 1971, declaring his intent to focus on Jewish education, but the lure of politics proved irresistible. Between scores of
arrests for public demonstrations, he found time to found the Kach (This is
KAHANE, MEIR
the Way) Party, espousing an ultranationalistic platform subsequently dubbed

Kahanism. In 1980, arrested for the 62nd time, Kahane drew a six-month
sentence for plotting armed attacks on Palestinians in retaliation for the deaths
of Jewish settlers. A year later, Israels Central Elections Committee banned him
from public office on grounds that Kach was a racist party, but the Supreme
Court overturned that ban, with a suggestion that the Knesset pass a law excluding racist parties from future elections. That law was passed in 1985, but
in the meantime, Kach won its first Knesset, occupied by Kahane.
Kahane set the tone for his legislative tenure by refusing to take the standard oath of office, insisting that a verse from Psalms be added, stating that
biblical law superseded any statutes passed by the Knesset. His various legislative proposals focused on expulsion of Arabs from Israel, revocation of Israeli
citizenship for non-Jews, and criminalizing sex or marriage between Jews and
Gentiles. A virtual pariah in the Knesset, many of whose members boycotted
his speeches, Kahane still rallied public support among conservative workingclass Jews. The new ban on racist parties and candidates barred Kahane from
seeking a second term in 1988, and this time the Supreme Court affirmed his
exclusion from office.
JEWISH DEFENSE LEAGUE (JDL)

Founded by Meir Kahane in 1968, the JDLs stated goal is to protect
Jews from anti-Semitism by whatever means necessary. Spokesmen
claim that the group maintains a strict no-tolerance policy against terrorism and other felonious acts, and that unequivocally condemns terrorism, but the JDLs history suggests otherwise. FBI files record 18 acts
of domestic terrorism committed by Jews between 1980 and 1985all
but three involving JDL members. In 1986, a report from the U.S. Department of Energy stated that For more than a decade, the Jewish Defense League ( JDL) has been one of the most active terrorist groups in
the United States. . . . Since 1968, JDL operations have killed 7 persons
and wounded at least 22. Thirty-nine percent of the targets were connected with the Soviet Union; 9 percent were Palestinian; 8 percent were
Lebanese; 6 percent, Egyptian; 4 percent, French, Iranian, and Iraqi;
1 percent, Polish and German; and 23 percent were not connected with
any states. Sixty-two percent of all JDL actions are directed against property; 30 percent against businesses; 4 percent against academics and academic institutions; and 2 percent against religious targets. In 2001, the
FBI formally labeled the JDL a right-wing terrorist group.
251
252
K APODISTRIAS, IOANNIS ANTONIOS
El Sayyid Nosair was finally punished, after a fashion, for Kahanes murder.
In 1993, FBI agents arrested Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and others for participation in an elaborate conspiracy that included bombing New Yorks World
Trade Centers and an abortive plot to liberate Nosair from prison. The indictment included Kahanes assassination as a part of that conspiracy, and Nosair
was convicted with the others at trial, receiving a sentence of life without parole plus 15 years. In 2002, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee reported
that Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had paid for some of Nosairs legal expenses in 1991.
Further Reading
Breslauer, Daniel. Meir Kahane: Ideologue, Hero, Thinker. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen
Press, 1986.
Friedman, Robert. The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, from FBI Informant to Knesset
Member. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1990.
Kahane, Meir. The Story of the Jewish Defense League. New York: Institute for Publication of the Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane, 2000.
Rosenthal, Richard. Rookie Cop: Deep Undercover in the Jewish Defense League. Wellfleet,
MA: Leapfrog Press, 2000.
KAPODISTRIAS, IOANNIS ANTONIOS

(17761831)
Greek governor Ioannis Kapodistrias woke early on Sunday, October 9, 1831,
to attend a church service in Nafplio. Bodyguards and aides counseled against a
public appearance, citing hostility over the recent arrest of rebel leader Petrobey
Mavromichalis, but Kapodistrias dismissed their concerns. As the governor approached the church of Saint Spyridonas, he was met by his enemys brother,
Konstantinos Mavromichalis, and nephew Georgios Mavromichalis. Konstantinos drew a pistol and fired at Kapodistrias but missed with his single-shot
weapon, then drew a dagger and stabbed the governor in the stomach, while
Georgios pulled his own pistol and delivered a fatal head shot. Bodyguards shot
and killed Konstantinos at the scene, whereupon a furious mob seized his body
and tossed it from a cliff into the Argolic Gulf. Gregorios fled to the French
embassy, then surrendered days later to face trial for treason. A court-martial
condemned him, and he was shot by a military firing squad.
Ioannis Kapodistrias was born on February 11, 1776, to a noble family
on the Ionian island of Corfu, ruled from Venice at the time. He studied law,
philosophy, and medicine in Italy, establishing a medical practice on Corfu at
age 21. Two years later, when Russian and Turkish forces occupied Corfu in
1799, the invaders chose Kapodistrias as director of their military hospital. In
1802, he founded Corfus National Medical Association, offering medical care
to residents throughout the island.
KAPODISTRIAS, IOANNIS ANTONIOS
Although of royal descent, Kapodistrias was a dedicated liberal and democrat. He entered politics at age 25, as chief minister of state for the Septinsular
Republic, established under nominal Ottoman sovereignty in the Ionian Islands, with native nobles in charge. A Byzantine Constitution, imposed by
the sultan at Constantinople in 1800, loosely governed the seven-island republic until 1807, when French forces regrouped and recaptured the Ionian
Islands, dissolving Ottoman rule. Two years later, Kapodistrias volunteered
for Russias diplomatic service under Czar Alexander I, and was dispatched
to Switzerland Russias unofficial ambassador in November 1813. There, he
helped begin the process of restoring Switzerlands federal regime, dismantled
by Napoleon Bonaparte a decade earlier, and secured for himself a six-year
term as Russias foreign minister, beginning in 1816.
Kapodistrias retired from Russian service in 1822, settling in Geneva for
the next five years, though he continued to support the cause of Greek independence from Ottoman rule. That long struggle climaxed with victory in
April 1826, and the following year, a new Greek National Assembly chose Kapodistrias in absentia as the first governor of independent Greece. In January
1828, Kapodistrias arrived on the Greek mainland for the first time in his life,
proceeding to the capital at Nafplio.
During his three years and nine months in office, Kapodistrias built rural
schools and the first modern Greek university, reorganized military forces scattered during conflict with the Turks, and established the nations first quarantine system to end epidemics of cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever. He
introduced potato cultivation, to enhance Greek agriculture, and created foundations to employ young women, while introducing modern currency in the
form of the Greek phoenix. Such sweeping changes inevitably sparked opposition in some quarters, including certain wealthy merchant families and rebellious inhabitants of the Mani Peninsula, with its capital at Areopoli, where
Petrobey Mavromichalis ruled in the style of a feudal warlord. The imprisonment of Petrobey, in 1831, provoked assassination in return.
Kapodistrias was briefly succeeded by his younger brother, Augustinos, but
his six-month term as governor proved chaotic. He left office in March 1832,
with three successive governing councils attempting to salvage the First Hellenic Republic between April 1832 and February 1833. They accomplished
nothing, beyond demonstrating the futility of government by committee, and
thereafter ceded power to King Otto, establishing a 114-year monarchy.
Further Reading
Clogg, Richard. A Concise History of Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002.
Sergeant, Lewis. Greece in the Nineteenth CenturyA Record of Hellenic Emancipation
and Progress: 18211897. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897.
253
254
K A P U U O, C L E M E N S
KAPUUO, CLEMENS (19231978)

On March 27, 1978, two unidentified gunman killed Clemens Kapuuoa
shopkeeper, school teacher, paramount chief of the Herero people, and leader
of the Democratic Turnhalle Alliance (DTA)in Katutura, a segregated black
township of Windhoek, capital of South African administered Namibia. The
killers struck as Kapuuo stood talking with friends, then escaped in the confusion following his murder. Fellow members of the DTA, engaged in a campaign
for Namibian independence, blamed South African officials for Kapuuos assassination. White police, in turn, blamed members of SWAPOthe South West
Africa Peoples Organizationwhom they claimed were put off by Kapuuos
political moderation. The crime remains officially unsolved today.
Clemens Kapuuo was born in the Okahandja district on March 16, 1923,
four years after South Africa assumed control of the former German SouthWest Africa as a League of Nations mandate. He graduated from St. Barnabas
Anglican Church School in Windhoek, then qualified as a teacher with studies
at Viljoensdrif, in the Orange Free State, and at the Stofberg Memorial School
(founded in 1907 to train black teachers, presently Groenpunt Correctional
Centre for offenders aged 18 to 21). During 1944 and 1945 he taught at elementary schools in Waterberg and Karibib, then returned to St. Barnabas as an
English instructor in 1946. From 1950 through 1953, Kapuuo served as president of the South West Africa Teachers Association.
Education led Kapuuo into tribal politics as a founding member of the South
West Africa National Union (SWANU), in 1958. Now Namibias oldest political
party, the SWANU drew most of its members from Kapuuos own Herero tribe,
whereas SWAPO (founded two years later) was dominated by Ovambo tribesmen. Kapuuo retired from teaching in 1960, to serve as deputy and designated
heir to aging Herero chief Hosea Kutako. To support himself, Kapuuo ran a
shop in Windhoeks Old Location (now Hochland Park), and led opposition to
South Africas forced removal of blacks to Katuturatranslated from Otjiherero as The place where we do not want to livein 1961.
Three years later, the Herero Chiefs Council tried to divorce itself from
politics, withdrawing from SWANU and directing Herero activists into a new
National Unity Democratic Organization (NUDO), led by Mburumba Kerina.
Himself a founding member of both SWANU and SWAPO, Kerina soon quarreled with the council over policy matters and with Kapuuo. In 1966, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) dismissed a complaint filed by Ethiopia and
Liberia, challenging South African rule of Namibia, but the panel reversed
itself five years later, issuing a toothless advisory opinion declaring South
Africas continued administration of the territory to be illegal. South Africa
ignored that judgment, while SWAPOs military armthe Peoples Liberation
Army of Namibiaconducted a guerrilla war against white rule from 1966
onward.
KARUME, SHEIKH ABEID AMANI
Following the ICJs unenforceable ruling of 1971, Kapuuo led NUDO into
a new National Convention, joining SWANU, SWAPO, and other groups in a
united front against South African rule of Namibia. Two years later, the United
Nations undercut Kapuuo by declaring SWAPO the sole legitimate representative of native Namibians. That decision shattered the National Convention in 1974, and Kapuuo and NUDO joined in the Turnhalle Constitutional
Conference of 19751977, laying the groundwork for eventual Namibian
self-government.
South African authorities used Kapuuos assassination as an excuse to purge
SWAPO. On May 4, 1978, white troops launched Operation Reindeer, a sixday invasion of neighboring Angola that killed more than 1,200 SWAPO members in base camps at Chetequera and Dombondola. South African spokesmen
justified the attacks with a list of criminal incidents blamed on SWAPO, including the murder of Clemens Kapuuo.
Many Hereros still reject that theory. In January 2002, Herero paramount
chief Kuaima Riruako accused South Africas former apartheid regime of planning and executing Kapuuos assassination. According to him, Kapuuo was
killed by colonial imperial capitalists especially the South African regime and
their cohorts. I am saying this because even today the inquest on his death is
not clear. Let us be honest. The very same people who are refusing to find out
who killed Kapuuo, gave him a state funeral.
Further Reading
Leys, Colin, and Susan Brown, Histories of Namibia: Living through the Liberation Struggle. London: Merlin Press, 2004.
Wallace, Marion. A History of Namibia: From the Beginning to 1990. London: C. Hurst
& Co., 2011.
KARUME, SHEIKH ABEID AMANI (19051972)

On April 7, 1972, members of Zanzibars Umma Partyformed nine years
earlier by disaffected Arab socialists opposed to the ruling Afro-Shirazi Party
(ASP)set off to arrest President Abeid Karume in Zanzibar Town. Their plan
was to seize Karume, take him to Radio Zanzibar, and force him to proclaim
their chosen candidate at the islands next president. The ill-conceived plan
was doomed, however, by inclusion of a party member named Humudi in
the kidnap party, whose father had been killed by state authorities. At sight of
President Karume playing bao (a board game) with some friends at party headquarters, Humudi shot Karume nine times at close range, killing him instantly.
Fifty-seven suspects were charged with treason following Karumes murder,
34 of whom were convicted.
Sheikh Abeid Karume was reportedly born at Mwera, Zanzibar, on August 4,
1905, though some natives of the island refused to believe it, insisting that he
255
256
K ARUME, SHEIKH ABEID AMANI
was a foreigner, possibly born in Uganda. That confusion may have arisen from
his widespread travels as a sailor, early in his life, achieving knowledge of the
world by experience, in lieu of formal education. Upon returning to his homeland, he entered politics as a member of the ASP, allied (and later merged)
with the Tanganyika African National Union. Britain controlled Zanzibar at
that time, but granted independence to the island in December 1963. In the
countrys first election, the ASP won a slim majority of the popular vote, but
the Arab-dominated Zanzibar Nationalist Party closed ranks with the mostly
African Zanzibar and Pemba Peoples Party to claim victory under Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah.
On January 12, 1964, with Karume traveling on the African mainland,
members of the Umma Party and ASP rebelled in Zanzibar, led by ASP member John Okello. They deposed the sultan and declared Zanzibar a republic,
with a Revolutionary Council in charge. To Okellos surprise, the council chose
Abeid Karume as president, while naming Umma Party leader Abdulrahman
Mohamed Babu as prime minister (later vice president). Okello was shuffled
aside and left for the Congo, where he was jailed several times, then vanished
forever after being seen with Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, in 1971.
Hassan Nassor Moyo, a member of Karumes cabinet, described the president as a man who loathed discrimination, working tirelessly to unite the islands
28 separate ethnic groups. Karume chose an Arab, Salum Rashid, as the Revolutionary Councils First Secretary, thus extending an olive branch to the deposed
regime, but subsequent events suggest that he did not go far enough to please Abdulrahman Babu or the Umma Party. Sixteen attempts to overthrow the government were logged between 1964 and Karumes eventual death, eight years later.
Following Karumes murder, 57 defendants were charged with treason, held
for trial in a curious proceeding where Attorney General Wolfgang Dourado
served as both prosecutor and defender of the accused. Chief Justice Ali Haji
Pandu, presiding at the trial, also displayed an apparent conflict of interest, admitting that 15 of the defendants were his personal friends and former classmates. The trial produced 35 convictions, and 23 defendants were acquitted
of all charges. Babu, named as the plots mastermind, was sentenced to death
with the other 34 convicted prisoners, but all of the death sentences were later
commuted to various prison terms. Babu and 12 others served the longest sentences, released in 1978 under an amnesty declared by President Julius Nyerere.
Karumes death proved disastrous for the Umma Party that hoped to replace
him. With most of its leaders in prison, the party soon dissolved, leaving the
ASP stronger than ever. Karumes son, Amani Abeid Karume, served as principal secretary in the ministry of finance (19711974), principal secretary in
the ministry of planning (19741978), and principal secretary in the ministry
of communications and transport (19781980), and finally spent a decade as
president, from November 2000 to November 2010.
K E N N E D Y, J O H N F I T Z G E R A L D
Further Reading
Burgess, G. Thomas. Race, Revolution, and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar.
Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009.
Petterson, Donald. Revolution in Zanzibar: An Americans Cold War Tale. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 2004.
KENNEDY, JOHN FITZGERALD (19171963)

At 12:30 P.M. on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy ( JFK) was
fatally wounded by rifle fire while riding in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza
in Dallas, Texas. Governor John Connally, riding in the same open limousine,
suffered multiple wounds from one bullet but lived to recover. At 1:15 P.M.,
a gunman shot and killed Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit, several miles from
Dealey Plaza. Thirty-five minutes later, officers arrested a suspect in that shooting, Lee Harvey Oswald, subsequently charging him with President Kennedys
murder at 11:26 P.M. Oswald denied all charges and declared that he was being
set up as a patsy. At 11:21 A.M. on November 24, during Oswalds televised
transfer to the county jail, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald
in the basement of Dallas police headquarters, in full view of numerous detectives and television cameras. President Lyndon Johnson appointed a special
commission to investigate the
Kennedy assassination on November 29, 1963. Its 888-page
report, published on September 27, 1964, with 26 volumes
of supporting evidence, declared that both Oswald and
Ruby acted alone, compelled
by psychological motives, and
that they had no connection to
each other.
John KennedyAmericas
35th president and the fourth
to die by violencewas the eldest living son of a wealthy and
powerful Massachusetts family, wholly dominated by patriarch Joseph Patrick Kennedy
Sr. Born in Brookline on May
29, 1917, he graduated from President John F. Kennedy was shot by Lee HarHarvard University and served vey Oswald while riding in a motorcade in Dallas,
with distinction in the U.S. Texas, in 1963. (John F. Kennedy Library)
257
258
Navy during World War II, in the Pacific theater. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1946, he served six years there, and seven in the Senate, before
emerging from a close and highly controversial White House race in 1960, as
the countrys youngest elected president. He also generated more public controversy than any president since Franklin Roosevelt, based in equal parts on
his religion (Roman Catholic), his civil rights initiatives for African Americans,
a failed invasion of Cuba in April 1961, a subsequent standoff with Russia over
missiles planted on that island, and his aggressive war against organized crime.
By 1963, as he began campaigning for a second term, there was no shortage of
potential enemies who wished him dead.
Murder of a U.S. president was still a state offense, equivalent to any other
murder, in November 1963. Dallas police emerged as seeming bunglers for
their handling of the case, from misidentification of the alleged murder rifle
detectives first described it as a 7.25-mm German Mauser; it was, in fact, a
6.5-mm Italian Mannlicher-Carcanothrough sensational press conferences,
to having their prime suspect gunned down live on national TV. Some other
agency would have to build a case, although if Oswald was a lone assassin,
there would be no trial.
There were problems, as well, with local handling of the presidents body
and analysis of his wounds. Physicians at Parkland hospital recorded three
wounds: one in front of Kennedys throat, described as an entrance wound; another in his back, five to six inches below the neck, with no projectile found
and no exit point; and a massive, obviously fatal wound at the right rear of
Kennedys skull. Texas law required that autopsies of murder victims be performed within the state, unless the crime occurred on federal property, yet Dallas Countys district attorney and medical examiner agreed to removal of the
corpse, at the demand of JFKs widow and President Lyndon Johnson. Kennedys autopsy was performed at Marylands Bethesda Naval Hospital (now Walter Reed National Military Medical Center), by Dr. George Burkley, then a rear
admiral in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps. He concluded that two shots struck
Kennedy, both from the rear, with neither projectile recovered.
Meanwhile, a single nearly pristine rifle bullet had been found at Parkland
Hospital, in Dallas, lying on a stretcher in the area where JFK and Governor
Connally were delivered for emergency treatment. No one could determine
which stretcher, but it was initially assumed that the slugtoday known as
Warren Commission Exhibit (CE) 399must have come from Kennedys
body, falling out of his shallow back wound, perhaps during cardiac massage.
That view changed radically in months to come, as we shall see.
J. Edgar Hoovers Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seemed to jump the
gun with its pronouncement of a single shooter in the Kennedy assassination.
At 3:01 P.M. on November 22, eight hours and 25 minutes before Lee Oswald
was accused of killing Kennedy, Hoover wrote a memo to his assistant directors,
saying, I called the attorney general at his home and told him I thought we
had the man who killed the president down in Dallas, at the present time.
On November 24, shortly after Oswalds death, another Hoover memo stated:
The thing I am most concerned about, and so is Mr. [Deputy Attorney General Nicholas] Katzenbach, is having something issued so that we can convince
the public that Oswald is the real assassin. On November 26, Hoover wrote to
Assistant FBI Director Alan Belmont, Just how long do you estimate [completion of a final report] will take? It seems to me we have all the basic facts now.
President Johnsons blue-ribbon investigative commission, chaired by
Chief Justice Earl Warren, included Allen Dulles, former director of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA); John McCloy, former president of the World Bank;
Kentucky senator John Cooper; Georgia senator Richard Russell Jr.; House Majority Leader Hale Boggs; and House Minority Leader Gerald Ford. Evidence
appended to the commissions final report included testimony or depositions
of 552 witnesses, plus more than 3,100 exhibits. Even so, critics found much
challenge in the panels two-lone-gunmen verdict, complaining that testimony
from inconvenient witnesses was censored or ignored, that photographic evidence was altered prior to publication, and that unpublished portions of those
records were initially sealed for 75 years (to 2039) by order of President Johnson (later changed to 2017 under the JFK Records Act of 1992).
Examples of discrepancies in the commissions findings include a false denial of Jack Rubys longstanding ties to organized crime in Chicago, Dallas, and
elsewhere; omission of testimony from 51 witnesses who reported shots fired
at JFKs motorcade from a grassy knoll in front of the presidents car, rather
than the book warehouse behind the limousine, where Oswald was employed;
preoccupation with irrelevant trivia, filling pages with biographical data on
Oswald, Ruby, and their parents, wholly unrelated to JFKs murder; a complete
failure to investigate Kennedys outspoken enemies in the Mafia, right-wing extremist circles, and the Cuban exile committee; publication of selected frames
from a home movie of the shooting, filmed by witness Abraham Zapruder,
with the frames rearranged to show Kennedys head snapping forward, rather
than backward, on impact from the fatal head shot; and a magic-bullet theory advanced to explain how one virtually undamaged projectile could produce most of the wounds suffered by JFK and Governor Connally. Commission
member Allen Dulles, whose own CIA was suspected by some of plotting the
presidents death, encouraged suspicion of a cover-up in a comment concerning the Warren Commissions voluminous records, quoted in declassified minutes of a closed hearing. Nobody reads, he said. Dont believe people read in
this country. There will be a few professors that will read the record. The public will read very little.
As it happens, he was wrong. From 1965 until the present day, a nonstop
stream of books and articles dissecting Kennedys assassination have dissected
259
260
the commissions findings, evidence, and items it ignored, hypothesizing various conspiracies. A smaller, but no less ardent body of literature defends the
commissions work and final judgment. Confusion over the original forensic
evidenceincluding reports of an entry wound in Kennedys throat, the fact
that FBI marksmen could not hit any target with Oswalds cheap Italian rifle
until they braced its telescopic sight with special shims, and the disappearance of JFKs preserved brain from the National Archivesonly increased the
clamor for full disclosure.
The Warren Commissions most controversial finding was its claim that a
single shot inflicted one of Kennedys wounds and all of those suffered by Governor Connally, a claim quickly derided by critics as the magic-bullet theory.
Ignoring medical reports of a shallow back wound with no exit path, the panel
decided that the Dallas stretcher bullet, CE 399, struck Kennedy in the back
of his neck and passed out the front (where an entry wound was reported at
Parkland Hospital), then angled downward to penetrate Connallys back, shatter a rib and exit from his torso, smash bones in his wrist, then bury itself in
his thigh, afterward dropping onto the hospital stretcher. Aside from its proposed erratic flight pattern, CE 399 itself challenged the single-bullet theory. It
was found to weigh 158.6 grains (10.28 grams), whereas new, unfired 6.5-mm
bullets leave the factory assembly line weighing 159.8 to 161.5 grains, with an
average weight of 160.844 grains. Fragments found in Connallys wrist alone
weighed 2 grains. Additionally, CE 399 was barely marked by firing, undeformed by smashing ribs and other bones, bearing no characteristic markings
of passage through fabric, human flesh, or blood. Still, the single-bullet theory
was essential to discrediting reports of a second gunman, firing from in front
of JFKs motorcade.
In February 1968, at request of the Attorney General Ramsey Clark, four
physicians met in Washington, D.C., to review the original JFK autopsy records, photos, and X-rays, as well as clothing, films, motion pictures, and
bullet fragments. Their confirmation of the Warren Commissions findings
that Kennedy was struck by only two shots, both fired from behind him
predictably failed to mollify critics of the commissions 1964 report. Indeed,
the panels finding of metallic fragments along the higher bullet trail through
JFKs neck, seemed to further weaken the Warren Commissions magic-bullet
scenario.
Original commission member Gerald Ford, now president, tried once more
to still that criticism in 1975, with creation of the presidents commission on CIA
activities within the United States. Launched in response to CIA assassinations
abroad, and mind-control experiments at home, the new panelchaired by
Vice President Nelson Rockefellersought to disprove claims that JFK had been
murdered by CIA agents or rogue agency associates. Once again, the 1963 autopsy was reviewed, in addition to films of the assassination taken by witnesses
at Dealey Plaza. And once again, the panel confirmed Warren Commission findings, reporting that there was no evidence to support the claim that President
Kennedy was struck by a bullet fired from either the grassy knoll or any other
position to his front, right front or right side. . . . No witness who urged the
view that the Zapruder film and other motion picture films proved that President Kennedy was struck by a bullet fired from his right front was shown to
possess any professional or other special qualifications on the subject.
Again, predictably, critics were unconvinced.
A year later, spurred by unending controversy, Congress created the House
Select Committee on Assassinations, to reopen investigation of Kennedys death
and the slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King. Three years later, based chiefly on
acoustical evidence, the panel found a high probability that at least two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy, but that the grassy knoll shooter
had missed, leaving Oswald in effect the lone assassin. The Committee failed
to identify the second gunman or any potential conspirators, reporting that
the Mafia and Cuban exile organizations were not involved as groups, but
that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual
members may have been involved in the conspiracy. That verdict, in turn,
produced mocking outcries from supporters of the Warren Commission, and a
new round of conspiracy literature.
Leading suspects in potential JFK assassination plots include:
The CIA, or some rogue element within it. Threatened with dismantling
by JFK after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961, pledged to continuance
of covert wars in Cuba, Central America, and Southeast Asia, the agency
had its own man on the Warren Commission, ideally placed to suppress
evidence. Several authors spin persuasive circumstantial webs linking
Oswald to the CIA, and Jack Ruby was a known participant in agencysponsored offensives against Fidel Castro.
The FBI, a long-shot contender for assassination per se, but clearly guilty
of suppressing evidence concerning its contacts with Oswald and Ruby
prior to November 1963. Agent James Hosty in Dallas admittedly destroyed notes of his pre-assassination interviews with Oswald, as well
as a note delivered to his office by Oswald shortly before JFKs murder.
J. Edgar Hoover personally despised both Kennedy brothers for their personal behavior, their liberal politics, and their insistence that the FBI belatedly engage in prosecution of high-ranking mobsters (some of whom
were the directors personal friends). It was also widely rumored that JFK
would celebrate his reelection by replacing Hoover with a younger successor, more amenable to the administrations goals.
Right-wing extremists, including violent segregationists such as the Ku Klux
Klan (KKK), White Citizens Council, and similar groups, bankrolled by
261
262
ultraconservative oilmen who feared the repeal of lucrative tax loopholes

threatened by Kennedy if he won a second term. Known associates of Lee
Harvey Oswald included members of the paramilitary Minutemen and the
neo-Nazi National States Rights Party (NSRP), both linked to covert CIA
training of Cuban exile groups attempting to depose Fidel Castro. Despite
his outspoken leftist sympathies, Oswald curiously shared an office with
those right-wing activists in New Orleans. NSRP member Joseph Milteer
predicted the events of JFKs assassination to a colleague two weeks in advance, saying that the president would be shot during a motorcade, with a
nut blamed for the crime. Secret Service agents took the claim seriously
enough to cancel Kennedys Miami motorcade on November 19then
sent him on to Dallas, where the same scenario played out.
Anti-Castro Cuban exiles, infuriated by the bungled Bay of Pigs invasion,
armed and financed by the CIA, acting in league with mobsters who
mourned the loss of their Havana casinos after Castros rise to power. Exile
groups such as Alpha 66 and Omega 7 have been linked to countless acts
of terrorism, ranging from individual murders to bombings of commercial
airliners in flight. In April 1963, a flier circulated among Cuban exiles in
Miami read, in part: Only through one development will you Cuban patriots ever live again in your homeland as freemen . . . if an inspired Act of
God should place in the White House within weeks a Texan known to be
a friend of all Latin Americans. Conspiracy theorists cite that pamphlet as
a reference to Texas native Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded JFK.
Fidel Castro, understandably concerned and angered by the hundreds of
reported attempts to assassinate him, sponsored by the CIA, the Mafia, and
Cuban exile groups. In this scenariodenied by Castro and the Cuban
government, flatly dismissed by House investigators in 1979Fidel retaliated with a hit on JFK. Alleged supporting evidence includes Lee Oswalds
outspoken (but contradictory) support for Castro, including fabrication of
his own one-man Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans.
Organized crime, a nexus for several conspiracy theories, supported by
claims that two Mafia leaders confessed to the crime late in life. Aside
from losing its Havana gambling revenues in 1959, the Mob had worked
hard to elect JFK in 1960, at the behest of his former-bootlegger father,
then found its leaders betrayed when the president-elect named brother
RFK to serve as attorney general (at their fathers insistence). Bobby
launched wholesale prosecution of high-ranking gangsters and corrupt
labor leaders, including Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa (who threatened the lives of both Kennedys on multiple occasions). The Mafia was
also entwined with CIA efforts to kill Fidel Castro, assisted in training of
Cuban exiles, and employed KKK members who despised the Kennedy
regime as muscle in Southern states. Prime suspects in the JFK assassination are New Orleans mafioso Carlos Marcello and colleague Santo Trafficante, from Tampa, Florida. Jack Ruby worked for Marcello in Dallas,
and had visited Trafficante in Cuba, during 1959. Both mobsters denied
involvement in the crime when questioned by the House Select Committee on Assassinationsbut both allegedly admitted their key roles in the
murder to underworld associates, before their deaths in the 1980s.
It remains to be seen whether the final release of Warren Commission files
in 2017 will resolve the nagging questions that surround President Kennedys
death. One thing seems fairly certain: controversies will continue.
INFAMOUS WEAPONS
Famous weapons are prized by collectors. Dallas police returned Jack Rubys revolver to his family, sparking a 28-year legal contest that climaxed
with a court order awarding custody to brother Earl Ruby. He sold it for
$220,000, but police in Washington, D.C., seized the gun when its buyer
offered to show it to Speaker of the House Thomas Foley. He regained it
through litigation in November 1993. He subsequently had Earl Ruby
fire 100 shots from the .38 and offered to sell the spent casings for $2,500
apiece.
Police also returned Lee Oswalds rifle to his widow. It was later purchased by the National Archives, along with the revolver that allegedly
killed Dallas Patrolman J. D. Tippit on November 22, 1963.
The derringer used to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln may be
viewed in the basement museum of Fords Theatre, in Washington, D.C.
The bullet removed from Lincolns head during his autopsy was kept by
the U.S. War Department until 1940, then passed to the Department
of the Interior. Today, it resides at the National Museum of Health and
Medicine in Washington, D.C.
The pistol used to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 was presented to the priest who administered last rites to the archduke and his
wife. It vanished when he died in 1926, then reappeared in 2004, whereupon it was donated to the Vienna Museum of Military History.
The rifle allegedly used to kill Dr. Martin Luther King in April 1968
remains in storage at the Shelby County Court, in Memphis, Tennessee.
Jerry Ray, brother of convicted assassin James Earl Ray, brought multiple
lawsuits to reclaim the weapon, but all were dismissed on grounds that
the rifle was voluntarily abandoned near the murder scene.
263
264
K E N N E D Y, R O B E R T F R A N C I S
Further Reading
Adams, Don. From an Office Building with a High-Powered Rifle: One FBI Agents View of
the JFK Assassination. Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2012.
Anson, Robert. Theyve Killed the President!: The Search for the Murderers of John F. Kennedy. New York: Bantam Books, 1976.
Benson, Michael. Whos Who in the JFK Assassination: An A to Z Encyclopedia. New York:
Citadel Press, 2003.
JFK Assassination Records. National Archives. http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk.
Meagher, Sylvia. Accessories after the Fact. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
Posner, Gerald. Case Closed. New York: Random House, 1993.
Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives.
National Archives. http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report.
Waldron, Lamar. Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination. Berkeley,
CA: Counterpoint Press, 2008.
KENNEDY, ROBERT FRANCIS (19251968)

At 12:10 A.M. on June 5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) claimed victory over two major rivals in Californias Democratic presidential primary. He
still trailed Vice President Hubert Humphrey by 168 delegate votes, but hoped
to make up the difference and win nomination at the partys convention in Chicago, two months later. Kennedy addressed a crowd of cheering supporters at
the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, then prepared to exit with his entourage
through the hotels kitchen. There, he was accosted by gunman Sirhan Bishara
Sirhan, who emptied his .22-caliber pistol before he was subdued and disarmed. Three bullets struck Kennedy, and other bullets wounded five bystanders. All except the senator would live: despite extensive surgery, Kennedy died
26 hours later, at Good Samaritan Hospital. Sirhan was convicted of murder
in April 1969 and received a death sentence, commuted to life imprisonment
three years later, when Californias Supreme Court ruled capital punishment
cruel and unusual under the states constitution.
Robert Bobby Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on November 20, 1925, a younger brother of future president John Fitzgerald Kennedy
( JFK). World War II interrupted his studies at Harvard, but he graduated in
1948 and earned his law degree from the University of Virginia in 1951. Following the family tradition of public service, he worked as an attorney for the
Justice Departments Internal Security Section in 19511952, then served as
a federal prosecutor in New York, before joining Senator Joseph McCarthys
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Pursuit of communists took a
backseat to management of his brothers political campaigns in the mid-1950s,
but Kennedy rejoined the committee to investigate labor racketeers under
new chairman John McClellan, developing an unexpected zeal for prosecuting mobsters. In 1961, at their domineering fathers insistence, JFK appointed
Bobby as U.S. attorney general, with a mandate to hunt mob bosses nationwide. Following brother Johns assassination, longtime rival Lyndon Johnson
demoted Bobby, then fired him from the Justice Department, whereupon RFK
pursued and won a U.S. Senate seat from New York state in November 1964.
By March 1968, when Johnson declined to seek a second term, Bobby was a
leading voice against the war in Vietnam, and a front-runner for the looming
presidential race.
The second Kennedy assassination within five years appeared to be an
open-and-shut case. Sirhan had been literally caught red-handed, with the
smoking pistol in his fist, surrounded by eyewitnesses and television cameras.
Investigators found his diary, filled with wild, semi-coherent rants denouncing Kennedy over the candidates remarks supporting IsraelSirhan was a
Jordanian expatriateand endlessly repeating RFK Must Die! His attorneys
broached the topic of a guilty plea in February 1969, hoping for life imprisonment, but Sirhan then dismissed the lawyers, telling Judge Herbert Walker,
I will ask to be executed. At trial, a month later, Sirhan admitted shooting
Kennedy with 20 years of malice aforethought. Jurors took his word for it,
convicting him and recommending death.
And yet, there were significant discrepancies in what appeared, at first, to be
a flawless case.
To start, the pistol seized from Sirhan held eight cartridges, but witnesses
reported hearing 13 shots or more. Although that could easily be written off to
panic of the moment, there remained the awkward count of bullets logged by
FBI agents, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), and Associated Press
(AP) photographers. Eight bullets struck the shootings victimsthree for Kennedy alonebut annotated crime scene photographs and notes clearly identify
at least five other bullet holes in door frames and ceiling panels. The frames
and panels were quickly removed and destroyed, allowing prosecutors to claim
that the bullets observed by detectives were nail heads, but contemporary
notes and statements contradict those claims. One AP photo showed two uniformed patrolmen pointing at a bullet hole, circled by a pencil mark, in the
door frame; the officers also told prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi that they saw a
bullet in the hole. FBI agent William Bailey saw another bullet in the double
doors central divider. Hotel waiter Martin Patrusky described watching policemen dig a bullet out of that divider, and carpenters who later removed the
door frame reported similar finds.
Another problem arose from Kennedys wounds. Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi reported that all of the shots that struck Kennedy came
from behind him, with the fatal head shot behind his right ear fired no farther
than one inch away from his skull. Meanwhile, unanimous eyewitness testimony and the TV tapes confirm that Sirhan stood in front of Kennedy, never
getting closer than three to four feet from his target. Even if Kennedy turned
265
266
from the first shots, as prosecutors suggested, Sirhans gun was never close
enough to scorch his skin with powder burns at anything approaching skintouch range.
A third problem involved the murder weapon itself. On June 11, 1968,
LAPD criminalist Dewayne Wolfer test-fired Sirhans supposed revolver and reported a ballistic match to the bullets removed from Kennedys body. Wolfer recorded the weapons serial number as H18602but in fact, the serial number
of Sirhans revolver was H53725. Questioned about the strange discrepancy
later, Wolfer called it a simple clerical error. By then, however, both revolvers had been melted down for scrap metal, so Wolfers test results could never
be confirmed.
In 1973, world-renowned criminologist Dr. Herbert Leon MacDonell examined bullets from the Kennedy crime scene, reporting in a sworn affidavit that
the slug from Kennedys neck (Exhibit #47) could not have been fired from
the same gun as Exhibit #54, removed from kitchen survivor William Weisel.
The following year, at a public hearing, Dr. Lowell Bradford, state criminologist for the California Division of Criminal Investigation, agreed with MacDonells findings. In 1975, a court-appointed panel of seven ballistics experts
convened to review the evidence, and although newspapers ran their decision
under headlines reading RFK Second Gun Theory Ruled Out, the panels report actually said that the question of a second shooter was more open than
before. Subsequently, researcher Rose Lynn Mangan discovered that Exhibit
#47, which should have had the coded designation TN31 etched in its base,
actually bore the etching DWTN. From that, she speculated that at least one
crime scene bullet had been switched with a slug from some other shooting,
accidentally or by design.
Another suggestion of evidence suppressed involves reports of a young
woman clad in a polka-dot dress, allegedly seen running from the Ambassadors kitchen area on June 5, saying, We shot him! We shot him! Witness
Sandra Serrano stopped the woman and asked what she meant, to which the
still-unidentified female replied, We shot Senator Kennedy! Several other
witnesses reported seeing the same person, including an elderly couple who
met her in a parking lot behind the hotel and reported her suspicious behavior
to LAPD officer Paul Sheraga. He, in turn, issued an all-points bulletin (APB)
for the young woman, described as well-built, with dirty blond hair and a
crooked or funny nose, wearing a white dress with blue or black polka-dots.
Stranger still, reports later surfaced of the same woman, or her virtual twin, loitering around the Ambassador days before the assassination, with a man who
resembled Sirhan.
Despite Sheragas APB on the mystery woman, investigators quickly abandoned their search for her and devoted unusual energy toward persuading
eyewitnesses that she did not exist. Sandy Serrano bore the brunt of what she
called aggressive bullying LAPD sergeant Hank Hernandez, memorialized in a

38-minute audio recording that includes the following exchange:
Hernandez: I think you owe it to Senator Kennedy, the late Senator Kennedy,
to come forth, to be a woman about this. If he, and you dont know
and I dont know whether hes a witness right now in this room
watching what were doing in here. Dont shame his death by keeping this thing up. I have compassion for you. I want to know why.
I want to know why you did what you did. This is a very serious
thing.
Serrano: I seen those people!
Hernandez: No, no, no, no, Sandy. Remember what I told you about that: you
cant say you saw something when you didnt see it.
Sergeant Hernandez was assigned to Special Unit Senator, an LAPD task

force formed specifically to investigate Kennedys murder. Commanding the
team was Lieutenant Manuel Pena, who had retired from the department in
November 1967, then returned to head the RFK investigation. Author and exFBI agent William Turner subsequently discovered that Pena had left LAPD
seven months before Kennedys slaying to attend a special training unit at
CIA headquarters in Virginia. FBI agent Robert LaJeunesse that Pena, prior
to his recent hiatus from LAPD, had also worked in South America with CIA
agent and torture instructor Daniel Mitrione. Turner obtained further confirmation from Penas brother, a high-school teacher, who casually mentioned to
television newsman Stan Bohrman how proud Manny was of his services for
the CIA over the years. Another sometime CIA employee assigned to Special
Unit Senator was Enrique Hank Hernandez, placed in charge of polygraphing witnesses.
If there was a second gunman in the hotel kitchen, who might it have been?
Several witnesses reported that a uniformed security guard stood behind Kennedy during the shooting, and that he drew his pistol from its holster. One
witness went further, stating that the guard fired his gun, striking the senator. Suspicion ultimately focused on Thane Eugene Cesar, a part-time private
guard who was present in the Ambassadors kitchen that night, photographed
at the scene, and whose clip-on necktie lies beside Kennedys out-flung hand in
a famous photo taken in the shootings aftermath. Cesar freely admitted drawing his gun in the kitchen, but insisted that it was a Rohm .38-caliber revolver,
and that he never pulled the trigger. Under questioning by LAPD, Cesar admitted owning a .22-caliber revolver, and showed it to Sergeant P. E. OSteen
on June 24, 1968. In a later interview, however, Cesar claimed he sold the
.22 before Kennedys murder. William Turner traced the guns buyer in 1972 and
retrieved the bill of salebearing Cesars signature and the date September 6,
1968. The revolver itself was found decades later, identified by its serial number
267
268
(Y13332), but was never test fired for comparison with the crime-scene bullets. Cesars odd, seemingly pointless lie fueled conspiracy theories, although
journalist Dan Moldeaan outspoken proponent of a Mafia conspiracy behind the JFK assassinationclaimed in 1995 that Cesar took a polygraph test
years after the fact and passed with flying colors. (Those tests are inadmissible in most U.S. courts, based on uncertain reliability.)
Controversy over details of the second Kennedy assassination continues to
the present day. In 2004, an audio recording of gunfire from the hotel kitchen,
taped by Polish freelance journalist Stanislaw Pruszynski, surfaced and was
analyzed by a team under audio technician Philip Van Praag, who reported
sounds of 13 shots fired in the space of five seconds. Although skeptics dismissed those findings, concurring views were logged by forensic audio specialists Wes Dooley and Paul Pegas of Audio Engineering Associates in Pasadena,
California, forensic audio and ballistics expert Eddy B. Brixen in Copenhagen, Denmark, and audio specialist Phil Spencer Whitehead of the Georgia
Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2008, assassination eyewitness
John Pilger reiterated his longstanding belief in a second kitchen gunman. Another witness to the slaying, Nina Rhodes-Hughes, told CNN in April 2012
that FBI agents had twisted her original statement, reporting the sound of
eight shots. I never said eight shots. I never, never said it, Rhodes-Hughes
insisted. There were more than eight shots. There were at least 12, maybe 14.
And I know there were because I heard the rhythm in my head.
Potential motives for a plot behind the RFK assassination mirror those suggested in his brothers case, with the added incentive of forestalling any reinvestigation of the Dallas murder. Intimates of RFK contend that he had promised,
if elected, to use his authority as president pursuing answers to the nagging
questions still unanswered from November 1963. Whoever set the stage in
Dallas, it is argued, had the most to fear from another Kennedy presidency. So,
too, would major mobsters, still recovering from persecution (as they saw it)
suffered in the years when Bobby Kennedy was the attorney general.
Aside from CIA involvement in the Los Angeles murder investigation, BBC
reporter Shane OSullivan produced a near-confession of sorts in November
2006. On the networks Newsnight program, he identified three men photographed at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, as agents of the CIAs JMWAVE operation in Miami, Florida, headquarters of covert action against
Cuban leader Fidel Castro. OSullivan identified them as Chief of Operations
David Morales, Chief of Maritime Operations Gordon Campbell, and Chief of
Psychological Warfare Operations George Joannides. The program also aired
an interview with Robert Walton, attorney for the late David Morales, who
quoted his client as saying, I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch
[JFK] and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.
Some students of the RFK assassination suggest that Sirhan may have been
used by the CIA as a brainwashed or hypnotized Manchurian candidate
K H O Y S K I I S G E N D E R O G L U , FATA L I K H A N
gunman. As evidence, they cite Sirhans consistent claims that he has no memory of the assassination or its immediate aftermath, bolstered with odd writings from his diary that include disjointed phrases like pay to the order of,
interspersed with ravings that Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before
5 June 68 and my determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more the [sic]
more of an unshakable obsession. A psychologist and hypnotist, Dr. Eduard
Simson-Kallas, spent 35 hours studying Sirhan in prison, during 1969, and
came away convinced that the convicts amnesia was legitimate.
Evidence also suggests at least a coincidental link between Sirhan and elements of organized crime. Prior to Kennedys murder, Sirhan worked for a time
at a race track owned by a mob associate, and one of his defense attorneys at
trial, the late Grant B. Cooper, also represented mafioso John Rosselli in a 1968
card-cheating scandal at the Los Angeles Friars Club. In that case, Cooper was
found in possession of stolen grand jury reports and fined $1,000. After his
conviction and death sentence, Sirhan complained that Cooper was crooked;
he had Mafia and CIA connections. More specifically, Sirhan alleged, Cooper
was picked to make sure I was convicted and sent to my death, and Cooper
complied because they were planning to kill him.
Kennedys death in 1968, for all intents and purposes, ensured victory for
presidential hopeful Richard Nixonbankrolled, as we know today, by illegal
campaign donations from the Teamsters Union, organized crime, and reclusive
billionaire casino magnate Howard Hughes. All that followed after, from escalation in Southeast Asia to the Watergate scandal and Nixons near-impeachment,
may arguably be seen as results of the kitchen ambush in Los Angeles.
Further Reading
Kaiser, Robert. R.F.K. Must Die!: Chasing the Mystery of the Robert Kennedy Assassination. New York: Overlook Press, 2008.
Melanson, Philip. The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy
and Cover-Up, 19681991. New York: S.P.I. Books, 1994.
Moldea, Dan. The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means, and Opportunity. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
OSullivan, Shane. Who Killed Bobby?: The Unsolved Murder of Robert F. Kennedy. New
York: Union Square Press, 2008.
Turner, William, and John Christian. The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Coverup. New York: Basic Books, 2006.
KHOYSKI ISGENDER OGLU, FATALI KHAN

(18751920)
In 1920, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) launched Operation
Nemesis, named after the Greek goddess of retribution, as a campaign to eliminate Turkish officials deemed responsible for the Armenian Genocide begun
in 1918, which would claim an estimated 1.8 million lives by 1923. The first
269
270
K H OYS K I I S G E N D E R O G L U, FATA L I K H A N
target was Fatali Khan Khoyski, then foreign affairs minister of the Azerbaijan
Democratic Republic and a key organizer of Armenian massacres at Baku that
claimed at least 10,000 lives (some accounts claim 30,000) in September 1918.
ARF leaders tried Khoyski for mass murder in absentia, convicted him, and sentenced him to death. On June 19, 1920, hand-picked gunman Aram Yerganian
shot and killed Khoyski on a street in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), then surrendered
to police for trial and execution. As ARF leader Shahan Natalie explained his
chosen tactic: You blow up the skull of the Number One nation-murderer and
you dont try to flee. You stand there, your foot on the corpse and surrender to
the police, who will come and handcuff you.
Fatali Khan Khoyski was born in Shaki, Azerbaijan, on December 7, 1875,
the son of a colonel in the Russian army, a descendant of the Donboli tribe that
ruled Khoy in the 18th century. His great-grandfather, Jafargulu Khan, allied
himself with Russia in the Russo-Persian War of 18041813, ending the conflict as a lieutenant colonel and head of the Shaki Khanate, installed by Tsar
Alexander I. Khoyski studied law at Moscow University, graduating at age 26,
serving as a court attorney and prosecutor in various jurisdictions. In 1906,
he was elected to the Second Duma of the Russian Empire from Elisabethpol,
using his office to oppose Russian colonization of Azerbaijan.
Russias February Revolution of 1917 upset the balance of empire. A month
later, Khoyski joined the newly formed Temporary Executive Committee of
Muslim National Councils, and argued for Azerbaijanian independence at the
first Msavat (Equality) Party convention in October. In December 1917, he
was elected to a new Transcaucasian Commissariat, and with creation of the
Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic in February 1918, Khoyski
became its minister of justice. That republic was short-lived, dissolving at the
end of May 1918, whereupon the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was established as the worlds first Muslim republic, with Khoyski serving as prime minister. He held that post until April 14, 1919, simultaneously serving as minister
of internal affairs (May 28June 18, 1918), minister of defense (November 18
December 25, 1918), and minister of foreign affairs (December 26, 1918
March 14, 1919).
The Baku massacre, for which he was condemned and subsequently
killed, was carried out on Khoyskis orders, in retaliation for a massacre of
Azerbaijanis and other Muslims, perpetrated at Baku by Bolshevik troops
between March 30 and April 2, 1918. Estimates of the civilian death toll in
that slaughter range from 12,000 to 30,000. Following Khoyskis assassination, Operation Nemesis went on to claim prominent victims in Berlin, Constantinople (now Istanbul), Rome, and Russia. Soviet occupation doomed
the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1920, transforming it into the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic until 1991, with the collapse of Russian
communism.
KING, MARTIN LUTHER, JR.
Further Reading
Derogy, Jacques. Resistance & Revenge. Edison, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990.
Isgenderli, Anar. Realities of Azerbaijan: 19171920. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2011.
KING, MARTIN LUTHER, JR. (19291968)

At 6:01 P.M. on April 4, 1968, a sniper shot premier U.S. civil rights leader, Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis, Tennessee. A single .30-06 rifle bullet struck King in the face, inflicting
massive injuries that claimed his life before he reached the nearest hospital. His
presumed killer dropped a rifle and various personal items outside a nearby
rooming house, from which authorities retrieved latent fingerprints, finally
identified on April 19 as belonging to an escaped convict from Missouri, James
Earl Ray. A federal fugitive warrant charged Ray and unnamed others with conspiracy to murder King. British police arrested Ray at Londons Heathrow Airport, on June 8, as he attempted to purchase a ticket to Belgium. Extradited to
Memphis on July 19, Ray pled guilty to Kings murder on March 10, 1969, and
received a 99-year sentence. Days later, he recanted that plea, repeating tales
of conspiracy that he had detailed since the time of his arrest. All appeals were
denied, and Ray died in prison, from liver and kidney disease, on April 23,
1998the 31st anniversary of his escape from a Missouri prison.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929,
son of a prominent African American minister, and followed in his fathers footsteps. He enrolled at Georgias Morehouse College in 1944, without formally
graduating from high school, and received his BA in sociology four years later.
From there, he proceeded to Pennsylvanias Crozer Theological Seminary, earning a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951, going on to earn his PhD from Boston
University, in June 1955. Meanwhile, he had received his first church assignment, in Montgomery, Alabama, during 1954, the same year when the U.S.
Supreme Courts ruling against segregated schools launched the modern civil
rights movement. In December 1955, King emerged as a leader of the Montgomery bus boycott against segregated seatingand suffered the first serious
threats against his life when members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) bombed his
home, on January 30, 1956.
King escaped injury in that attack, and a second bungled bombing of his
home in January 1957, but he was nearly killed on September 20, 1958, while
signing copies of his book Stride toward Freedom at a store in New York Citys
Harlem ghetto. A deranged black woman, Izola Ware Curry, approached King
and stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener, missing his aorta by a fraction of an inch. Although indicted for attempted murder, Curry was ruled mentally incompetent for trial, committed indefinitely to Matteawan State Hospital
for the Criminally Insane.
271
272
K I N G, M A R T I N L U T H E R , J R .
During the Montgomery boycott, King and close associates founded a new
civil rights group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC),
pledged to eliminate racial discrimination through nonviolent civil disobedience, in the style of Mohandas Gandhi. He subsequently led campaigns in
Albany, Georgia (1962); Birmingham, Alabama (1963); St. Augustine, Florida (1964); Selma, Alabama (1965); and Chicago, Illinois (1966), where he
protested de facto residential segregation and was struck with a brick during
one protest march. At every turn, he was stalked by racists from the KKK and
other groups that pledged to murder him, his close associates, and members
of his family. Specific attacks included two bombings in Birmingham on May
12, 1963, targeting Kings motel room and the home of his brother, Rev. A. D.
King; and a St. Augustine raid that left Kings rented beach cottage riddled with
bullets on May 29, 1964.
In June 1966, when King joined a March against Fear through Mississippi,
militant Klansmen hatched several plots to kill him with bombs or long-range
rifles. None worked out, but one Ku Klux factionthe self-styled Cottonmouth Moccasin Gangkidnapped elderly sharecropper Ben Chester White
on June 10, murdering him outside Natchez in the hope that Dr. King would
come to lead a memorial service, thereby presenting himself as a target. Once
again, their plans fell through.
On April 4, 1967, King delivered the first of several televised speeches denouncing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, calling U.S. government the
greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. That stance alienated many
self-styled liberalsincluding President Lyndon Johnsonwho were happy to
support black civil rights, as long as African Americans abstained from meddling in foreign policy. King also cited U.S. poverty as a critical issue, regardless of race, and planned a massive Poor Peoples March on Washington, D.C.,
for April 1968. Two months before that campaigns scheduled launch, black
sanitation workers in Memphis struck against discrimination in their salaries
and unsafe work conditions. Dr. King arrived to lead a protest demonstration
on March 28, but it degenerated into violence and left King disconsolate, refusing to proceed with the march on Washington unless he first could lead a
peaceful demonstration in Memphis.
King returned to the River City on April 3, in the face of numerous death
threats, and that night delivered his final speech to a capacity crowd at the
Mason Temple. Weve got some difficult days ahead, he declared. But it
doesnt really matter with me now. Because Ive been to the mountaintop.
I dont mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its
place. But Im not concerned about that now. I just want to do Gods will. And
Hes allowed me to go up to the mountain. And Ive looked over. And Ive seen
the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So Im happy, tonight.
Im not worried about anything. Im not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen
the glory of the coming of the Lord. With his murder the following day, some
observers hailed his last speech as prophetic.
Following Kings murder, African Americans rioted in 125 cities nationwide,
leaving 46 persons dead, 2,600 injured, and 21,270 jailed on various charges.
Published estimates of property damage ranged from $45 million ($296 million today) to $67 million (now $441 million). Kings death also persuaded
many African Americans to abandon nonviolent protestthe Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee promptly shortened its namewhile affiliating
with more militant groups, such as the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.
Indications of conspiracy in Kings assassination were apparent from the moment when the fatal shot was fired. Witnesses at the Lorraine Motel reported
a masked figure fleeing on foot from shrubbery across the street, and prosecutors later claimed the shot came from a bathroom in a nearby rooming house
(whose windows, critics noted, offered a poor view at best of the snipers target).
On Beale Street, where the killer conveniently dropped a rifle (never positively
matched to the fatal bullet) and other evidence incriminating James Earl Ray,
observers described a white Ford Mustang as the probable getaway car. During the manhunt that ensued, a CB (Citizens' Band) radio broadcast diverted
police to the wrong side of town, reporting a nonexistent car chase with shots
fired from a mythical second white Mustang (later dismissed as a prank by an
unidentified teenager). When Ray was finally identified from fingerprints and
traced to an Atlanta rooming house, FBI agents found the abandoned Mustangs
ashtray filled to overflowingbut Ray had never smoked a day in his life.
The FBI, in fact, was part of the problem. Director J. Edgar Hoover had despised King since the ministers emergence as a civil rights leader in 19551956,
and had conducted countless illegal harassment campaigns against King, his
colleagues, and the SCLC. Aside from bugging offices and bedrooms, furnishing prurient tapes of Kings extramarital affairs to President Lyndon Johnson and
Southern congressmen who held the FBIs budgetary strings, Hoover publicly
denounced King as the most notorious liar in the United States and regaled
anyone who would listenfrom the White House to the tabloid presswith
tales of Kings alleged communist ties. On one occasion in 1964, Hoover approved mailing of one bedroom recording to Kings home, with an anonymous
letter suggesting that King should commit suicide to avoid public disgrace. In
1967, Hoover launched a secret and illegal COINTELPRO operation (short for
Counter Intelligence Program) that labeled the SPLC a black nationalist hate
group and stated its goal in simple terms: Prevent the RISE OF A BLACK
MESSIAH who could unify, and electrify, the black nationalist movement. No
one who knew Hoover doubted that Dr. King was his primary target.
With that background, it is no surprise that some observers criticized the
FBIs performance in pursuit of Kings assassin. First, the bureaus legendary
273
274
fingerprint department took 15 days to identify the trove of latent fingerprints

left by Ray (or someone else?) in Memphis. Meanwhile, agents who participated in the chase reported egregious lapses in professionalism by various
G-men. In the Atlanta field office, Arthur Murtagh says that his fellow agents
gloated over Kings murder while drinking champagne, one cheering, They
got Zorro! [Spanish for fox, Hoovers code name for King]. They finally got the
son of a bitch! In Los Angeles, agent William Turner later said that indications
of conspiracy were systematically washed out by the FBI, in favor of a preconceived lone-gunman scenario.
On the ground in Memphis, there were hints aplenty. The day before Kings
arrival, April 2, a supposed advance man from the SPLCnever identified,
described variously as a dark-skinned white man or a light-skinned African
Americancalled at the Lorraine Motel to complain about the room booked for
King. Motel managers had reserved a large, secure room on the ground floor, but
the advance man insisted that King preferred a second-floor room overlooking
the swimming pool in back, where he would be gunned down on April 4.
Memphis police had prepared to keep watch over King on his visit, with
two of the citys rare black detectives assigned to cover the Lorraine Motel
from windows of a nearby fire station. Soon after Kings arrival on April 3,
both officers were relieved of duty on direct orders from the citys police
commissionera retired FBI agent. Subsequent claims that both were moved
because of anonymous threats to their lives remain undocumented today, but
their removal left Dr. King effectively unguarded at the moment he was shot.
James Earl Ray was an enigma, in himself. A lifelong petty criminal, who
once nearly fell out of his getaway car after a penny-ante stickup, he escaped
from Missouris state prison at Jefferson City on April 23, 1967, and was thereafter transformed into something resembling a trained secret agent. (Not without help, perhaps, because another inmates fingerprints were attached to his
Missouri Wanted poster.) In flight, with no visible means of support, Ray
traveled to Canada, back and forth across the United States, and after Kings
murder fled once more through Canada, to England, on to Portugal, then back
to London for his eventual capture. Passports were required, and Ray had several, each in the name of a living individual who at least vaguely resembled
him, but who, allegedly, had never met or heard of him. Overall, Ray spent at
least $9,000 ($61,643 today) in transit, while earning $664 from his only documented part-time job.
Rays story, from the day of his arrest until he died, was that a stranger called
Raoul had bankrolled and directed his extensive travels, leading him on
with promises of a free life in Rhodesia if Ray held up his end of a supposed
gun-running scheme. Various authors have attempted to identify Raoul, and
spokesmen for the Department of Justice insist that Ray survived on loans from
his brothers and various holdups on three continents (none of which can be
proven). Rays lone-gunman motive for killing King? A combination of personal racism (possible, but wholly absent from his long record of mercenary offenses), and pursuit of a hypotheticalpossibly mythicalbounty on King,
floated in prison rumors while Ray was incarcerated. How he planned to collect the payoff, if he lived and escaped, is anyones guess.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) tried to solve that
riddle in 1979, after concluding that although Ray shot King himself (a fact
that he denied), there is a likelihood that it was the result of a conspiracy.
The plotters, according to Congress, were Ray and his two brothers (neither
ever charged), the trio hoping to collect an open $30,000 contract ($206,000
today) on Kings life, offered to all comers by wealthy bigots John Kauffmann
and John Sutherland (both deceased when the committee accused them). The
HSCA speculated on possible contacts between Rays brothers and the wouldbe murder financers, but produced no evidence.
At least three alternate conspiracy theories exist. The suspects include:
(1) The Ku Klux Klan or an affiliated racist group. Klansmen undeniably
stalked King from 1956 to 1968, making several unsuccessful attempts
on his life. When James Earl Ray was arrested in London, he initially
retained defense lawyer Arthur Hanes Sr.a former FBI agent, segregationist ex-mayor of Birmingham, and (according to FBI informant Gary
Thomas Rowe) a dues-paying member of the KKK. Although Hanes denied Klan membership, his best-known clients prior to Ray included
Klansmen charged with murder in Alabama and North Carolina. The
HSCA heard testimony indicating that Klan headquarters paid Hanes
to represent Ray in 1968; Hanes and various KKK leaders denied it,
claiming his fee only covered representation of the North Carolina defendants. Later, while appealing his conviction, Ray was represented by
longtime Klansman J. B. Stoner, head of the neo-Nazi National States
Rights Party (NSRP). NSRP member Joseph Milteer described several
plots to kill King in 1963, at the same time that he predicted the murder
of President John F. Kennedy ( JFK).
(2) Unnamed racist politicians. Alabama author William Bradford Huie
joined to Rays defense team in 1968, and wrote a three-part series
for Look magazine about Ray. The first two installments claimed that
Huie had knowledge of a plot to kill King during that presidential election year, to spark ghetto riots (which it did) and thus elect a conservative successor to President Lyndon Johnson (which occurred, with
the victory of Richard Nixon). Strangely, in the third installment of the
seriesand a later book, He Slew the Dreamer (1970)Huie contradicted himself, contending that Ray either killed King himself, or as part
of an insignificant little conspiracy, involving only little men who
275
276
were, presumably, not worth pursuing. Explaining the strange turnaround, Huie claimed that his contract with Ray required him (Huie) to
publish only Rays version of events prior to adjudication of the case.
Publication of the full contract by journalist Harold Weisberg, in 1971,
disproved that contention. The contract contained no such stipulation.
(3) Organized crime. In early 1968, soon after joining the Memphis garbage strike, King reportedly called comedianactivist Dick Gregory with
questions about the Mafia. Gregory briefed him on underworld ghetto
rackets, and the Mobs extensive interests in trucking and waste-haulage
trades. Carlos Marcello, a prime suspect in the JFK assassination, was a
die-hard racist and supporter of the KKK, who used Klansmen as muscle to avoid self-incrimination. His empire encompassed Memphis
where witness John McFerren allegedly heard a Marcello associate on
April 4, 1968, giving some unknown phone caller instructions to shoot
the son of a bitch on the balcony. Unknown gunmen later fired on McFerrens home, and although the HSCA confirmed association between
Marcello and the man McFerren overhead, the committee ultimately
found McFerrens testimony meaningless.
Although actual courts consistently denied Rays appeals, a three-hour mock
trial was televised by HBO on April 4, 1993. That broadcast condensed 54
hours of testimony heard in January, in a Memphis courtroom, with a friend of
Dr. KingNew York attorney William Francis Pepperrepresenting Ray (who
attended the trial via satellite, from prison). The mock trials mock jury, perhaps predictably, acquitted Ray, which had no impact whatsoever on his reallife legal situation. Pepper subsequently wrote a book, Orders to Kill (1995),
which claimed to identify the elusive Raoul and labeled Kings murder a government contract killing.
Aside from Raoul, two identified suspects other than James Earl Ray have
been publicly named as alleged conspirators in Dr. Kings death. One, Loyd
Jowers, owned the Memphis Beale Street diner where the supposed murder
weapon and other items bearing Rays fingerprints were discarded on April 4,
1968. A quarter-century later, in December 1993, Jowers appeared on ABCs
Primetime news program, relating details of a supposed Mafiagovernment plot
to kill King, using Ray as a scapegoat. According to Jowers, King was actually
shot by a now-deceased Memphis policeman, Lieutenant Earl Clark. Kings
family filed a civil wrongful-death lawsuit in 1998, naming Jowers and other
unknown coconspirators as responsible for Kings murder. Jurors found Jowers alone responsible, on December 9, 1999, commenting that the plot also
included unspecified governmental agencies. (The King family claimed vindication, but received no financial award from the court.) A parallel investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, launched in August 1998, reported in
KU KLUX KLAN
2000 that conflicting statements and other odd behavior from Jowers made
it impossible to work with him. Jowers died from a heart attack on May 20,
2000, at age 73.
Later still, on April 5, 2002, a minister in Graham, Florida, named his late
father as the triggerman in Dr. Kings slaying. At a press conference convened
to clear his conscience, Rev. Ronald Denton Wilson, named his father, KKK
member Henry Clay Wilson, as the assassinor, at least, one of them. My father was the main guy, Wilson said. It wasnt a racist thing; he thought Martin
Luther King was connected with communism, and he wanted to get him out of
the way. He kept saying it was the patriotic thing to do. He said he had to save
the country. Three other Klansmen were involved, he said, while declining to
offer their names. Dead from emphysema since 1990, Henry Wilson was beyond interrogation, but FBI agent Ron Grenier interviewed the son, telling reporters that he took the statement seriously, but the issue had not risen to the
level of a full investigation. Rev. Wilson went on to say, My dad told me James
Earl Ray had nothing to do with the shooting other than to buy a rifle for them.
My dad was the one who shot Dr. King. He seemed about to disclose the rifles
whereabouts, when his sonalso a ministerinterrupted to read a statement
expressing sympathy for Kings family, adding that his own would make no further statements. Thus far, no evidence of any kind has been forthcoming.
Further Reading
Melanson, Philip, and Noah Griffin. The Martin Luther King Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover-Up, 19681991. New York: Shapolsky Publishers,
1994.
Newton, Michael. A Case of Conspiracy. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1980.
Pepper, William. An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King. London: Verso,
2008.
Posner, Gerald. Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther
King, Jr. New York: Random House, 1998.
Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives.
National Archives. http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report.
Wexler Stuart, and Larry Hancock. The Awful Grace of God: Religious Terrorism, White
Supremacy, and the Unsolved Murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2012.
KU KLUX KLAN (1866 )

The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is the oldest U.S. terrorist organization, dedicated
to white supremacy and far-right politics. Its name derives from kuklos (Greek
for circle), initially used in the name of a 19th-century collegiate fraternity,
Kuklos Adelphon. Throughout its history the KKK has indulged in violence,
including assassination of public figures.
277
278
KU KLUX KL AN
Six young Confederate veterans founded the original Klan as a social group
at Pulaski, Tennessee, in spring 1866. They adopted arcane titles, donned
ghostly costumes, and amused themselves by frightening the countys superstitious ex-slaves. More chapters organized, with some members acting as vigilantes to keep newly freed African Americans in their place. In April 1867,
with the advent of Radical Reconstruction, Klansmen reorganized their order
as a paramilitary force to defend white supremacy and Democratic home
rule. Ex-general Nathan Bedford Forrest served as the Klans grand wizard,
and other Confederate officers ruled individual states as grand dragons. At
its peak, with a purported 550,000 members, the KKK rode in all 11 former
Confederate states, plus Kentucky and Missouri. Reports of a small chapter
in New York, supported by a photograph that may have been hoaxed, remain
unconfirmed.
Wherever they gathered, Klansmen waged guerrilla war against Republicans, black freedmen, Northern carpetbaggers, and Southern-born scalawags who supported Reconstruction. They murdered thousands1,081 in
Louisiana alone, between April and November 1868and wounding, flogging, and mutilating many more. Most victims were not public figures, but
the list of dead included judges, law enforcement officers, state legislators,
and local officials. Federal prosecutions, including declaration of martial
law in South Carolina, allegedly dissolved the Klan by 1872, but reports of
masked violence continued through 1876. Related groups, including Louisianas White League and Red Shirts in the Carolinas, redeemed every Southern state for white rule by 1877. Vigilante whitecaps spread the Klans
tradition in the early 20th century, with migration of Southern farmers to the
Midwest.
William Joseph Simmons, a defrocked minister, revived the Klan as a fraternal order in 1915, restricting membership to native-born white Protestant
males, with auxiliaries added for women and children, plus a parallel Riders of the Red Robe for naturalized citizens. By 1924, the Klan had spread
to every state, with estimates of peak membership ranging from two to nine
million. The order dominated politics in several states, on both sides of the
MasonDixon Line, reputedly enlisting President Warren Harding. Although
most historians dispute that claim, various governors, U.S. senators and congressmen were certainly Klansmen, as were thousands more state and local
officials.
Again, the Klan pursued a violent course, adding attacks on immigrants,
Catholics, Jews, labor unions, and immoral whites to its traditional targets.
Less lethal than their forebears, Klansmen still killed dozens of victims over
two decades and flogging and assaulting hundreds more. The eras only bona
fide assassination occurred in May 1926, when Klansman Asa Bartlett killed
three persons with a bomb mailed to a political rival in Muskegon, Michigan.
KU KLUX KLAN
After confessing, Bartlett received a life sentence. Other notorious crimes,

coupled with recurring scandals, sapped Klan membership during the Great
Depression. A $685,305 federal tax lien officially retired the national Klan in
April 1944, but local units survived through World War II.
The Cold War and President Harry Trumans civil rights policy sparked another KKK revival in 1946. Racist murders resumed in the South, coupled
with bombings of black homes in formerly white neighborhoods. The eras
most prominent victim Harry Moore, Florida leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) killed with his wife in
the bombing of their home at Christmas 1951. Other black victims were slain
for attempting to vote, or for displaying lack of deference toward whites.
Three years later, in May 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court gave Klan recruiters a new lease on life by banning public school segregation. Rival Klans
proliferated, many resorting to violence. Over the next decade, civil rights
leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became targets for Klan murder
plots. A Mississippi Klansman assassinated NAACP official Medgar Evers
in June 1963, and evaded punishment for 31 years. Throughout the Deep
South, violence was encouraged by refusal of white juries to convict Klansmen who murdered blacks and civil rights workers. Other victims included
ONeal Moore, the first black deputy sheriff in Louisiana (June 1965), and
Wharlest Jackson, another Mississippi NAACP leader, killed by a car bomb
in February 1967. Klan members in the Chicago Police Department plotted
to kill Mayor Richard Daley with a bazooka in 1968, but were arrested before
they could strike.
In the 1970s, college-educated leader David Duke sought to give the Klan a
more sophisticated public image, then resigned from the group, and won election to Louisianas state legislature, but continuing affiliation with the KKK and
neo-Nazi groups scuttled Dukes political career. Rival Bill Wilkinson dominated the national Klan scene in the early 1980s, until his exposure as a longtime FBI informant. Thereafter, rival splinter Klans proliferated nationwide,
often holding joint rallies with young racist skinheads. Violent acts linked to
Klansmen in the latter decades of the 20th century include the massacre of
five Communist Workers Party members at Grennsboro, North Carolina, on
November 3, 1979; the lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama, on
March 20, 1981; the assassination of Denver radio talk-show host Alab Berg
on June 18, 1984; arson attacks on two South Carolina churches in June 1995;
and the November 2008 murder of Cynthia Lynch at a Klan initiation ceremony in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana.
The KKK endures today, with 28 rival factions claiming 152 chapters in
34 states during 2012. Sporadic violence continues, with a potential for future tragedy, as demonstrated by the case of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy
McVeigh, a Klansman before he joined the radical militia movement.
279
280
KU KLUX KL AN
See also: Evers, Medgar Wiley (19251963); Jackson, Wharlest, Sr. (19301967);
King, Martin Luther, Jr. (19291968); Moore, Harry Tyson (19051951).
Further Reading
Chalmers, David. Hooded Americanism. 3rd ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1987.
Newton, Michael. The Ku Klux Klan: History, Organization, Language, Influence and Activities of Americas Most Notorious Secret Society. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.
Trelease, Allen. White Terror. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Wade, Wyn. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
L
LAMBRAKIS, GRIGORIS (19121963)
On May 22, 1963, Dr. Grigoris Lambrakis, a Greek gynecologist and member
of parliament, delivered the keynote speech to an antiwar rally in Thessaloniki.
Soon afterward, right-wing extremists Emannouel Emannouilides and Spyro
Gotzamanis drove past him in a three-wheeled open truck, one striking Lambrakis over the head with a club in plain view of numerous witnesses. Lambrakis suffered a fractured skull and brain damage, dying in a local hospital
on May 27. Police initially described the killing as a traffic accident, assigning young magistrate Christos Sartzetakis to prove that contention. Instead,
Sartzetakis uncovered a network of extremists serving the police as extralegal terrorists. Emannouilides Spyro Gotzamanis were subsequently charged
with murder, and four high-ranking officers were indicted as accomplices.
They went to trial in February 1966 and were convicted in October, receiving
11-year prison terms.
Grigoris Lambrakis was born at Kerasita, a village in the Tegea district of Arcadia, Peloponnese, on April 3, 1912. He left home after high school, to study
medicine at the University of Athens, while simultaneously pursuing a lifelong
passion for athletics, breaking the Greek record for the long jump and winning
a spot on the national team. World War II interrupted his medical studies, as
the Axis Powers occupied his homeland. Lambrakis joined the Greek resistance, and in 1943 financed public food banks for displaced persons with proceeds from a newly created Union of Greek Athletes. After the war, Lambrakis
completed his studies and joined the University of Athenss School of Medicine
as a lecturer in gynecology. On the side, he maintained a free clinic for patients
unable to pay for health care.
His wartime experience with fascism pushed Lambrakis to the left, politically. He joined the pacifist movement, opposing nuclear weapons and war in
general. The Greek Civil War of 19461949 resulted in near-eradication of the
nations Communist Party, leaving the United Democratic Left (EDA) as the
only legally recognized leftist party in Greece. Lambrakis joined, and in 1961
was elected to the Hellenic parliament from Piraeus. During that same year, he
played a leading role in the creation of the Commission for International Dtente and Peace, serving as its first vice president. On April 21, 1963, the Commission for International Dtente and Peace led a pacifist march from Marathon
to Athens, interrupted by police who jailed many demonstrators. Lambrakis,
282
L APORTE, PIERRE
Z
The murder of Grigoris Lambrakis inspired Greek diplomat and author
Vassilis Vassilikos to publish a novel dramatizing the case in 1967. The
books title, Z, derives from the first letter of the Greek word Zei (translated as He lives!), frequently drawn on walls by graffitists during the
1960s. Expatriate Greek filmmaker Constantinos Gavras brought the
story to theaters worldwide in 1969, with Yves Montand caste as the martyred pacifist, and Jean-Louis Trintignant in the role of Magistrate Sartzetakis (avoiding all use of real names). The film received five Academy
Award nominations, winning Oscars for Best Film Editing and Best Foreign Language Film in 1970.
shielded from arrest by parliamentary immunity, finished the march alone with
a banner bearing a peace symbol.
Those activities made Lambrakis a natural target for right-wing forces led by
Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis. Supporters of Lambrakis blamed the
Karamanlis regime for orchestrating his murder, and although criminal charges
never reached the prime ministers office, Karamanlis and his National Radical Union party lost the parliamentary election in November 1963. Karamanlis
himself soon left Greece, traveling under the pseudonym Triantafyllides, and
spent the next 11 years in Paris, under self-imposed exile.
That victory for the moderate left was short lived. Greek generals staged a
coup in April 1967, imposing rule by a brutal military junta that continued
through 1974. Under the junta, Magistrate Sartzetakis and the attorney general
who prosecuted Lambrakiss killers were dismissed from their positions, and
Sartzetakis spent a year in prison. Many Greeks still feel that those responsible
for the assassination went unpunished.
Further Reading
Dulis, Thomas. The Iron Storm: The Impact on Greek Culture of the Military Junta,
19671974. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2011.
Miller, James. The United States and the Making of Modern Greece: History and Power,
19501974. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Nafpliotis, Alexandros. Britain and the Greek Colonels: Accommodating the Junta in the
Cold War. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.
LAPORTE, PIERRE (19211970)

On October 10, 1970, members of the radical Front de libration du Qubec (FLQ; Liberation Front of Qubec) kidnapped provincial Deputy Premier
LAPORTE, PIERRE
and Minister of Labor Pierre Laporte from his home in Saint-Lambert, across
from Montreal on the south bank of the St. Lawrence River. The abductors,
members of the FLQs Chnier Cellbased in Montreal and named after JeanOlivier Chnier, a martyr of the Lower Canada Rebellion against British rule, in
November 1837dubbed Laporte the Minister of Unemployment and Assimilation, holding him hostage in exchange for release of perceived political
prisoners jailed by the federal government. British diplomat James Richard
Cross had been kidnapped five days earlier, resulting in identical demands.
Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act of
1914, authorizing widespread raids against suspected FLQ supporters, telling
journalists, Nothing that either the Government of Canada or the Government of Quebec has done or failed to do, now or in the future, could possibly
excuse any injury to either of these two innocent men. The gun pointed at
their heads have FLQ fingers on the trigger. Should any injury result, there
is no explanation that could condone the act. Should there be harm done
to these men, the Government promises unceasing pursuit of those responsible. Laporte, shot dead, was found on October 18, in the trunk of a car
owned by Chnier Cell leader
Paul Rose. Cross was released,
unharmed, on December 3,
1967.
Pierre Laporte was born
in Montreal on February 25,
1921, a grandson of renowned
statesman Alfred Leduc, who
served in the Canadian House
of Commons from 1917 to
1921, and in the legislative assembly of Qubec from 1921
to 1931. Laporte was a reporter
for the newspaper Le Devoir
from 1945 through 1961, best
known for his attacks on Qubec premier Maurice Duplessis, between 1945 and 1959. In
1958, Laporte was one of the
reporters who broke the scandal linking Duplessis to kickbacks from sales of natural gas,
resulting in creation of a Royal Qubec separatists murdered Deputy Premier and
Commission on Morality in Minister of Labor Pierre Laporte. (Brian Smith/
Corbis)
Public Spending.
283
284
L APORTE, PIERRE
After Duplessis died in office, in September 1959, Laporte tried his own
hand at politics, winning election to the National Assembly of Qubec from
Chambly as a member of the Qubec Liberal Partys left wing. In 1970, he ran
for the seat of retiring premier Jean Lesage, but was edged out by rival Robert
Bourassa. Upon taking office, Bourassa, in turn, named Laporte to serve as his
vice premier and minister of labor. The FLQ was not impressed by Laportes
left-wing credentials, and selected him as a target during Qubecs 1970 October Crisis.
Between October 16, 1967, and years end, authorities in Qubec staged
1,628 raids under terms of the War Measures Act, jailing 468 persons on
FRONT DE LIBRATION DU QUBEC (FLQ)

The FLQ was founded in February 1963, as a Qubcois nationalist group with MarxistLeninist philosophies, ostensibly committed to
overthrowing the government of Qubec, leading the province in secession from Canada, and establishing a French-speaking workers society.
The groups first terrorist attack, firebombing of three military barracks,
occurred on March 8, 1963. By June 16, when 18 members were captured, the FLQ had executed 15 bombings, killing one victim. A second
wave of violence, between July 13, 1963, and April 9, 1964, included
two murders, two bombings, three arson attacks, and four robberies.
In 19651966, after merging with a rival groupthe Popular Liberation MovementFLQ members set off 12 more bombs, one of which
backfired to kill member Jean Corbo. FBI spokesmen claimed that FLQ
members conspired with elements of the Black Panther Party to bomb
New York Citys Statue of Liberty and other American monuments, but
jurors acquitted all defendants in that case. Nineteen more FLQ bombings rocked Montreal and environs during 19671969, before terrorism
peaked with the October Crisis of 1970. The last recorded acts of violence occurred in early 1971, with the firebombing of a Brinks Company office (January 6) and the dynamiting of a post office (February 19).
Federal authorities, led by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP),
waged their own covert, illegal war against the FLQ in 1971 and 1972,
including arson attacks on known FLQ meeting places and the murder of
FLQ member Franois Mario Bachand in Paris, on March 29, 1971. Exposure of that campaign paralleled revelations of the FBIs illegal COINTELPRO operations in America, resulting in dismissal of several RCMP
officers.
LENNON, JOHN WINSTON
suspicion of subversion; of those, 408 were later released without any formal charges being filed. FLQ members charged with participating in Laportes
abduction and murder or related crimes included Chnier Cell members
Paul Rose, Pierre Vallires, Robert Lemieux, Jacques Rose, Michel Chartrand,
Charles Gagnon, Jacques Larue-Langlois, Marc Carbonneau, Francis Simard,
and Bernard Lortie. Paul Rose received a life sentence for Laportes murder
on March 13, 1971, with a matching term for kidnapping on November 30.
Francis Simard was sentenced to life for murder on May 20, 1971. Jurors convicted Bernard Lortie of kidnapping on September 22, 1971, and he received
a life sentence on November 22. Jurors acquitted Jacques Rose of kidnapping
on December 9, 1972, whereupon prosecutors charged him with the lesser offenses of assisting kidnappers after the fact and forcible confinement, but jurors cleared him of those counts as well, on February 23, 1973. Pierre Vallires
received a one-year suspended sentence on October 4, 1972, for conviction on
three counts of counseling kidnapping for political purposes. Paul Rose was released on December 20, 1982, after a new investigation found he was not present when Laporte was killed.
Further Reading
Gray, Carol. The FLQ: Seven Years of Terrorism. Richmond Hill, ON: Simon & Schuster
of Canada, 1970.
Wainstein, Eleanor. The Cross and Laporte Kidnappings, Montreal, October 1970.
Arlington, VA: Rand Publications, 1976.
LENNON, JOHN WINSTON (19401980)

At 10:49 P.M. on December 8, 1980, expatriate British musician John Lennon
and wife Yoko Ono returned home from working at the Record Plant recording studio, to the Dakota, an elite apartment house located on Manhattans
Central Park West. Outside the Dakotas main entrance, obsessed stalker Mark
David Chapman fired five shots at Lennon from a .38-caliber revolver, striking
his target four times in the back and left shoulder. After Lennon fell, Chapman remained at the scene, reading a novelThe Catcher in the Rye, by J. D.
Salingeruntil police arrived to arrest him. Psychiatric evaluation at Bellevue
Hospital found Chapman delusional, but competent for trial. Charged with
second-degree murder, Chapman pled guilty on June 22, 1981, citing orders
from God to do so. In August 1981, Chapman received a sentence of 20 years
to life, with a court order for psychiatric treatment while in custody. Thus far,
all of his applications for parole have been denied.
A native of Liverpool, England, born on October 9, 1940, John Lennon was
a natural musician and songwriter, involved in Britains skiffle crazepopular
music blending jazz, blues, and folk influencesduring the 1950s. Lennon
285
286
formed his first band, the Quarrymen, in 1956, joined by Paul

McCartney the following year,
and by George Harrison in
1958. By August 1960, that
band had been transformed
into the Beatles, soon to take
the world by storm. Lennon
and McCartney teamed as
songwriters, their music and
lyrics eventually making the
Beatles the best-selling band
in history, with sales exceeding
one billion records. In 2008,
nearly four decades after the
groups dissolution, they still
topped Billboard magazines list
of the all-time most successful
Hot 100 artists. Four years
later, they still held Billboards
Musician John Lennon, alleged target of a CIA
record for most number-one
murder conspiracy. (Redferns)
hits on the Hot 100 chart, a
total of 20.
The Beatles broke up in 1970, each of its members pursuing solo careers
and, in McCartneys case, founding another successful band, Wings, with
wife Linda. Reasons cited for the breakup include personal fallings out, weariness over long-term collaboration, and the disruptive influence of Lennons
second wife, Yoko Ono. Whatever the case, none of the ex-Beatles suffered
financially from going their separate ways, and Lennon remained a fixture in
the public eye after emigrating to New York. While continuing to write and
record original music, Lennon became politically active, particularly in denunciation of the ongoing Vietnam War. President Richard Nixon sought to
deport him, ordering an FBI investigation to provide some rational excuse,
and although the bureau filed some 300 pages of reports on Lennons movements and affiliations during 19711972, the Watergate scandal soon distracted Nixon from petty harassment of perceived enemies, driving him
from office in 1974.
By then, the last U.S. troops had withdrawn from Vietnam, and a communist victory there, in April 1975, removed any further motive for leftist protests. Lennon announced his retirement in October 1975, devoting himself to
newborn son Sean, but he still found time to write a song for ex-Beatle Ringo
Starr in 1976. Four years later, in October 1980, Lennon returned to the music
scene with a single, (Just Like) Starting Over, and followed that with his
Double Fantasy album in November. A full-scale comeback appeared to be in
the offing, when Mark Chapman cut short his life.
Some observers ranked Lennons murder as an assassination, due to his
high public profile coupled with political activities, but no conspiracy theories surfaced until 1990, when author Fenton Bresler blamed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for plotting Lennons death. Breslers contention grew
from the observation of New York Police Department (NYPD) homicide detective Arthur OConnor, who said, Its possible Mark [Chapman] could have
been used by somebody. I saw him the night of the murder. I studied him
intensely. He looked like he could have been programmed. Chapmans own
statements in custody, describing dead silence in the brain and disembodied
voices chanting Do it, do it, do it, evoked memories of the CIAs long-running
mind-control experiments (Project MKUltra) during the 1950s and 1960s.
Similar allegations, involving hypnosis and drugs, have been raised in the case
of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, convicted of assassinating Senator Robert F. Kennedy
in 1968.
In 1997, after 15 years of litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union,
FBI headquarters released the bureaus file on John Lennons under the Freedom of Information Act. Documents collected in 1972 reveal that President
Richard Nixon ordered surveillance on Lennon, along with other antiwar activists, and that agents of the CIA collaborated in that surveillance as a part of
Operation Chaosa criminal violation of the CIAs charter, which at the time
forbid any activity on U.S. soil.
In 2010, British author Phil Strongman published a new study of Lennons
assassination, building on the Bresler theory that Chapman was in fact a CIA
pawn. His evidence includes the fact that Chapmana self-described obsessive fan of Lennonsdid not own a single one of Lennons recordings, nor
any books or magazines about his idol; that Chapman visited Beirut, Lebanon, for no apparent reason during a period of intense CIA activity there; and
that he embarked on an round-the-world trip in 1975, while unemployed and
virtually destitute. In fact, Strongman claims that Chapman was not Lennons
killer in fact. As he told The Guardian in December 2010, The bullets slapped
into Lennons body so closely together that pathologists later had trouble marking out the different entry points. If all of these shots came from Chapman, it
was a miraculous piece of shooting. Put simply, the authorities investigation,
or lack of it, into the assassination was shockingly slack and beggars belief. In
fact, if any of them came from him it was miraculous because Chapman was
standing on Lennons right and, as the autopsy report and death certificate later
made clear, all Lennons wounds were in the left side of his body. Prosecutors
in New York rejected the Bresler and Strongman conspiracy theories. The CIA,
thus far, has no comment.
287
288
LETELIER DEL SOL AR, MARCOS ORL ANDO
Further Reading
Bresler, Fenton. Who Killed John Lennon? New York: St. Martins Press, 1990.
The John Lennon FBI Files. http://www.lennonfbifiles.com.
Seaman, Fred. The Last Days of John Lennon. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1991.
Strongman, Phil. John Lennon: Life, Times and Assassination. Liverpool: Bluecoat Press,
2010.
LETELIER DEL SOLAR, MARCOS ORLANDO

(19321976)
On September 21, 1976, exiled Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier left home
in Washington, D.C., bound for his office with personal assistant Ronni Moffitt
and her husband, Michael. At 9:35 A.M., as their car rounded Sheridan Circle
on Embassy Row, a bomb attached beneath the drivers side exploded, shattering the vehicle and propelling it into collision with another car, parked outside
the Irish embassy. Michael Moffitt escaped with a minor head wound, and his
wife and Letelier were transported to George Washington University Medical
Center in dire condition. Letelier, with both legs severed and his lower torso
shattered, died at 9:50 A.M. Ronni Moffitt survived 47 minutes longer, with
her larynx and carotid artery severed by shrapnel. Spokesmen for the Federal
Bureau of Investigation linked Leteliers assassination to a series of murders
committed by Chiles National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), under orders
from dictator Augusto Pinochet, targeting expatriates opposed to his regime.
Orlando Letelier was born in Temuco, Chile, on April 13, 1932. He studied at the Instituto Nacional in Santiago, and completed his education at the
Chilean Military Academy prior to entering the army. Leaving the military at
age 20, he enrolled as a law student at the University of Chile and graduated in
1954, then spent the next five years as a research analyst with the states Copper Office (now the National Copper Corporation of Chile, CODELCO). In
1959, Letelier was dismissed from that position for supporting Marxist candidate Salvador Allendes second campaign for the presidency on a platform including nationalization of Chiles industry and natural resources. Allende lost
that raceas he had in 1952, and would again in 1958 and 1964but finally
emerged victorious in 1970, naming Orlando Letelier as his ambassador to the
United States in 1971.
Allendes leftist regime was despised in Washington, where President Richard
Nixon, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, and the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) schemed to depose Allende and restore the dominance of U.S.
corporate interests in Chile. Chief among the private-sector conspirators, later
confirmed by declassified CIA documents, was the ITT Corporation, 70-percent
owner of the Chilean Telephone Company and primary financial supporter of
El Mercurio, a right-wing Chilean newspaper clamoring for Allendes removal.
LETELIER DEL SOLAR, MARCOS ORLANDO
President Allende recalled Letelier from Washington in 1973, to serve successively as minister of foreign affairs, interior, and defense, but it was too late
to save Allendes administration. General Augusto Pinochet led a military coup
against the government on September 11 of that year, and Allende reportedly
committed suicide while besieged by troops at La Moneda Palace in Santiago.
Letelier was arrested the same day, and spent 12 months under torture at various concentration camps before his release and exile to Caracas, Venezuela, in
September 1974. From there, he made his way to Washington in 1975, and
became a senior fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. Later, he served as director of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute and taught at American
Universitys School of International Service in Washington, D.C. On the side,
he wrote, lectured, and lobbied tirelessly against the Pinochet regime, emerging as the primary voice of Chilean opposition to dictatorship. As a result, in
September 1976, the junta stripped Letelier of his Chilean citizenship.
FBI agents identified DINA agent Michael Vernon Townley, a U.S. expatriate and former CIA employee, as the mastermind behind Leteliers murder.
Townley and his chief accomplice, Armando Fernandez Larios, had received
visas to the United States from the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, collaborating with neo-fascist dictator Alfredo Stroessner, whose regime provided forged
Paraguayan passports. Chile agreed to Townleys extradition on murder charges
in 1978. In custody, Townley admitted hiring five Cuban exilesJos Dionisio
Surez, Alvin Ross Daz, Virgilio Paz Romero, Guillermo Novo Sampoll, and
Ignacio Novo Sampollto plant the bomb under Leteliers car, and to bomb
Cubana Flight 455 two weeks later, killing all 78 persons aboard. Townley and
his wife turned states evidence against the bombers, in exchange for immunity
from prosecution, testifying against Daz and the Novo Sampoll brothers at
their trial in January 1979. (Pinochets regime declined to extradite DINA officers Romero and Surez.)
The three defendants were convicted of first-degree murder, with the Novo
Sampoll brothers receiving life prison terms, and Daz was sentenced to 80
years. Townley and his wife vanished into the Witness Protection Program,
and remain in hiding today. Armando Fernandez Larios fled Chile with FBI
assistance in 1987, fearing that President Pinochet planned to kill him for refusal to cooperate in cover-ups related to Leteliers slaying. On February 4,
1987, he pled guilty to one count of serving as an accessory to the murder,
then was freed in exchange for testimony naming other plotters. Following
Pinochets retirement in 1990, Chilean authorities undertook their own belated investigation of Leteliers assassination. Ex-DINA leaders General Manuel
Contreras and Brigadier Pedro Espinoza Bravo were convicted of participation
in the slaying on November 12, 1993, receiving lenient prison terms of seven
and six years, respectively. General Pinochet was never charged with Leteliers
murder, though Chilean prosecutors indicted him for human rights violations
289
290
LETELIER DEL SOL AR, MARCOS ORL ANDO
in October 1998. Arrested in London, he remained under house arrest until

March 2000, then returned to Chile, where Congress passed a constitutional
amendment exempting ex-presidents from prosecution. He died in Santiago
on December 10, 2006, without ever facing trial on any charge.
Orlando Leteliers assassination inspired a dramatic sequence in the 1983
crime drama Scarface. Late in the film, Cuban drug trafficker Tony Montana
(played by Al Pacino) agrees to kill a troublesome journalist as a favor to his
Colombian cocaine supplier. Traveling from Florida to New York City, Montana trails his target with one of the Colombians henchmen, after attaching a
remote-control bomb to the reporters car, then balks upon seeing the reporters wife children in the vehicle. Before the imported assassin can trigger the
DIRECCIN DE INTELIGENCIA NACIONAL

Chiles National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) was founded in November 1973, as a military-intelligence unit under the fledgling dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, then was separated from the army to
become an independent agency in June 1974. Three years later, it was
renamed as the Central National de Informaciones (CNI; National Information Center), still led by General Manuel Contreras and Vice Director
Ral Iturriaga. Throughout the tenure of the Pinochet regime, suppression of dissent at home and abroad was the primary function of DINA/
CNI. Thousands of alleged subversives were detained, tortured, raped,
and often murdered by the agencies operatives, supportedand sometimes directedby the American CIA. As author Peter Kornbluh reports
in The Pinochet File (2003, p. 171): In some camps, routine sadism was
taken to extremes. At Villa Grimaldi, recalcitrant prisoners were dragged
to a parking lot; DINA agents then used a car or truck to run over and
crush their legs. Prisoners there recalled one young man who was beaten
with chains and left to die slowly from internal injuries. Rape was also a
reoccurring form of abuse. DINA officers subjected female prisoners to
grotesque forms of sexual torture that included insertion of rodents and,
as tactfully described in the Commission report, unnatural acts involving dogs. One such camp was Colonia Dignidad (now Villa Baviera), a
haven for fugitive Nazis and second-generation fascists in Linares Province, founded and ruled by German expatriate Paul Schfer. On a broader
scale, DINA collaborated with intelligence agencies of Argentina, Bolivia,
Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay in Operation Condor, murdering or disappearing at least 60,000 victims between 1975 and 1978.
LINCOLN, ABRAHAM
charge, Montana shoots him, thereby touching off a war with the Colombian
cartel that ends with Montanas death in a flamboyant gun battle.
Further Reading
Dinges, John, and Saul Landau. Assassination on Embassy Row. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1981.
Freed, Donald. Death in Washington: The Murder of Orlando Letelier. Chicago: Lawrence
Hill, 1980.
Hancock, Larry. Nexus: The CIA and Political Assassination. Southlake, TX: JFK Lancer
Productions, 2011.
Kornbluh, Peter. The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.
New York: The New Press, 2004.
McCann, Joseph. Terrorism on American Soil: A Concise History of Plots and Perpetrators
from the Famous to the Forgotten. Boulder, CO: Sentient Publication, 2006.
LINCOLN, ABRAHAM (18091865)

On the evening of April 14, 1865Good FridayPresident Abraham Lincoln
escorted his wife to Fords Theater in Washington, D.C., for a performance of
the British play Our American Cousin. Joining the Lincolns, after several others
had declined their invitation to the theater, were Major Henry Rathbone and
his fiance, the daughter of New York senator Ira Harris. Their mood, like that
throughout the nations capital, was buoyant, celebrating the surrender of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Virginia five days earlier. Lincolns bodyguard,
alcoholic slacker John Frederick Parker, left the presidential box unguarded
while he slipped off to a nearby tavern, repeating the behavior that had seen
him repeatedly chargedand curiously absolvedfor dereliction of duty during his tenure as a city policeman. In his absence, famous actor and fanatical
Confederate supporter John Wilkes Booth entered the box and shot Lincoln
behind the left ear with a .44-caliber derringer, then stabbed Rathbone with
a dagger before leaping down to the stage, breaking his left ankle on impact.
Despite that painful injury, Booth played out his scene, shouting, Sic semper
tyrannis! (Thus always to tyrants, in Latin), and hobbled out of the theater,
escaping on horseback. Lincoln was carried to a nearby home, where he died
at 7:22 A.M. on April 15.
Lincoln and Rathbone were not the nights only victims. Conspirators in
league with Booth also planned to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson and
Secretary of State William Seward. George Atzerodt rented a room at the Kirkwood Hotel, where Johnson resided, planning to attack the vice president in
his room at 10:15 P.M. Instead, he lost his nerve while drinking in the bar
downstairs, then wandered through the streets, discarding his knife, and spent
the night in stuporous sleep at the Pennsylvania House Hotel. Lewis Powell,
meanwhile, forced his way into Secretary Sewards home at 10:00 P.M., armed
291
292
LINCOLN, ABR AHAM
with a pistol and a Bowie knife, first pistol-whipping Sewards son, then stabbing Seward repeatedly as he lay in bed, recuperating from a fall suffered on
April 5. A splint on Sewards broken jaw saved him from fatal injury, before
Powell fled into the night.
Abraham Lincoln was born at Hodgenville, Kentucky, on February 12,
1809, and moved to Indiana with his family at age seven. He lost his mother
two years later, then resettled in Illinois with his father and siblings at 13. He
rarely saw the inside of a classroom, but educated himself at home, later remarking, I studied with nobody. Self-taught in law while working as a county
surveyor, Lincoln won election to the Illinois state legislature in 1834, and
was admitted to the bar two years later, practicing law with his wifes cousin in
Springfield. Although a free soil advocate, he did not favor outright abolition
of slavery, declaring that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy, but the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to
increase than abate its evils. In 1846, he was elected to Congress, with a vow
to serve only one term, then kept his promise and returned to private practice.
Increasing agitation over slavery prompted Lincoln to seek a U.S. Senate seat
in 1854, and again in 1858. He lost both races, but his speeches won sufficient
admiration to secure the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. Lincolns victory in that contest, on a free soil platform, propelled 11 Southern
states into secession from the Union, leading to the outbreak of Americas Civil
War in April 1861. Three years later, he won reelection by uniting Republicans
and War Democrats in the common cause of defeating the breakaway Confederacy and restoring the Union, an effort that ultimately proved successfulat
least, on the surfacein April 1865.
John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators initially planned to kidnap
President Lincoln and deliver him to the Confederate army as a hostage, to
compel release of Southern prisoners of war. Those involved in the plot, aside
from George Atzerodt and Lewis Powell, included Samuel Arnold, David
Herold, Michael OLaughlen, John Surratt, and Johns mother Mary Surratt,
who moved from Maryland to Washington, D.C., hosting repeated meetings
of the plotters at her home. An attempt to snatch Lincoln on March 17, 1865,
during a scheduled visit to Campbell Military Hospital, fell through when
Lincoln canceled the trip. Following General Lees surrender at Appomattox,
Booth switched his plan from abduction to assassination, writing in his diary,
Our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done.
After the attacks in Washington, Booth rendezvoused with David Herold
in Maryland and rode to the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd (see sidebar), who set
Booths broken ankle and provided him with crutches. Moving on from there,
they spent five days and nights in a swamp, finally reaching Richard Garretts
tobacco farm on April 24. Union soldiers arrived two days later, surrounding
the barn where Booth and Herold were concealed. Herold chose surrender,
LINCOLN, ABRAHAM
and Booth refused to be taken alive. With the barn in flames, he fled, holding a
rifle in one hand and a pistol in the other. Private Boston Corbett shot Booth in
the neck, clipping his spinal cord, and Booth died two hours later, after muttering, Tell my mother I die for my country.
Back in Washington, meanwhile, police raided Mary Surratts home, arresting her and son George, then remained to nab Lewis Powell when he turned
up on April 17. George Atzerodt was captured on a farm at Germantown,
Maryland, on April 20. Nine other suspects, including Booths brother Junius and the owner of Fords Theater, were jailed on suspicion of aiding the
conspirators, but seven were soon released. Those facing trial before a military tribunal on May 1, 1865, included Arnold, Atzerodt, Herold, Dr. Mudd,
OLaughlen, Powell, Mary Surratt, and Edmund Spangler (a Fords Theater
stagehand who briefly held Booths horse on April 14). All were convicted
on June 30, with Atzerodt, Herold, Powell, and Surratt sentenced to die, and
hanged in Washington on July 7. Arnold, Mudd, and OLaughlen received
life prison terms, and Spangler was sentence to six years. President Johnson
pardoned Mudd and Spangler in 1869.
Conspirator John Surratt escaped the original dragnet, fleeing through
Canada to Europe, and on from there to Egypt, where a U.S. government
agent nabbed him in November 1866. At his trial, in summer 1867, defense
attorneys called four witnesses who claimed sightings of Surratt in Elmira,
New York, between April 13 and 15, 1865. Fifteen prosecution witnesses
placed him in Washington on the day of Lincolns murder, but confused jurors failed to reach a verdict. A mistrial was declared, and prosecutors declined to try the case a second time.
Lincolns death effectively scuttled his plan for reintegration of the late Confederate states with malice toward none, sparking imposition of harsh terms
that embittered Southern Democrats and spawned various terrorist groups opposed to Radical Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan chief among them. After 12
years of bloodshed, violence redeemed the South for single-party home rule
by white supremacist Democrats, inaugurating the age of Jim Crow and another
century of oppression for African Americans below the MasonDixon Line.
Because Mary and John Surratt were Roman Catholics, conspiracy theories arose surrounding their church. Anti-Catholicism had found fertile soil
in North America from the 16th century onward, exacerbated by the violently
xenophobic Know-Nothing movement, active nationwide from 1845 until
the outbreak of the Civil War. Details of the supposed Vatican/Jesuit plot were
fine-tuned and expanded from 1865 onward by Charles Chiniquy, a Canadian priest born in 1809 and expelled from the church in 1858, after three
years of acrimonious litigation against a prominent Catholic layman in Illinois.
Abraham Lincoln served as Chiniquys attorney in that case, and Chiniquy accused Chicagos bishop of secretly aiding the opposition. After his expulsion,
293
294
LINCOLN, ABR AHAM
Chiniquy became a Presbyterian, regaling audiences with claims that the Catholic Church was pagan and anti-Christian. After the Civil War and Lincolns
death, he added allegations that Pope Pius IX had plotted both the war and
the assassination, themes expanded in two books: Fifty Years in the Church of
Rome and The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional. Chiniquy died in 1899,
but his claims were resurrected by the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, kept alive through
the 1960s by certain fundamentalist Protestant sects, and still circulate as fact
on the Internet today.
John Wilkes Booth, although not a Catholic, stands at the center of yet another Lincoln conspiracy theory. John Young, a seven-year-old witness to the
murder at Fords Theatre, later moved to Michigan and met James Kelley, who
once shared a dressing room with Booth as a member of the Richmond Theatre Company. Kelley, in turn, related the tale of a former slave who had served
DR. SAMUEL MUDD

Debate persists to this day of Samuel Mudds complicity in the Lincoln assassination. Although members of Mudds family insist that Booth caught
Mudd by surprise, arriving at the doctors home uninvited for treatment
of his broken leg, authors James Swanson and Richard Steers Jr. claim
that Mudd met Booth at least three times before the shooting at Fords
Theater. They say that agents of the Confederate Secret Service first sent
Booth to Mudd in November 1864, to aid his presidential kidnapping
plot. A month later, Booth allegedly stayed at Mudds farm a second time,
and Mudd supposedly traveled to Washington that same December, introducing Booth to Confederate agent John Surratt. At trial in 1865, George
Atzerodt also testified that Booth sent supplies to Mudd in Maryland, in
preparation for the abortive abduction. A search of Mudds home revealed
one of Booths monogrammed boots, hidden in the doctors attic, with
other incriminating evidence. Despite Mudds pardon in 1869, shame attached to his family, reputedly including the popular phrase His name is
mud (Mudd), denoting someone in grave disfavor. (The Online Etymology Dictionary disagrees, however, reporting that use of the derogatory
phrase dates from 1823, adapting a 1708 definition of mud to mean a
stupid twaddling fellow.) Two feature filmsThe Prisoner of Shark Island
(1936) and The Ordeal of Dr. Mudd (1980)portray Mudd as an innocent
victim of circumstance. More than a century after his conviction, successive presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both wrote letters to the
doctors grandson, Richard Mudd, expressing their belief that the physician committed no crime.
L I T V I N E N K O , A L E X A N D E R VA L T E R O V I C H
Booths brother Edwin, claiming that Lincolns killer escaped from the United
States alive, while Sergeant Corbett shot and killed a look-alike, one James
William Boyd. Booth fled to England, and from there to India, living out his
days in Bombay (now Mumbai) as John Wilkes. In 1977, director James Conway released a film, The Lincoln Conspiracy, promoting that story and going
further stillclaiming that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Chief of National
Police Colonel Lafayette Baker, and various Northern congressmen conspired
to kill Lincoln, thereby short-circuiting Lincolns plan of readmission for Confederate states on lenient terms. That film included photographs of Booths
alleged mummified remains. NBCs Unsolved Mysteries program echoed that
conspiracy theme in an episode aired on September 25, 1991.
Two years later, researchers sought to have Booths presumed remains exhumed from Baltimores Green Mount Cemetery for DNA testing, to confirm
or refute his identity. The cemetery fought that move, resulting in a civil trial
before Judge Joseph Kaplan in 1995. Kaplan denied the petition for exhumation, and an appellate court upheld that ruling in 1996. The debate continues.
Further Reading
Bishop, Jim. The Day Lincoln Was Shot. New York, Harper, 1955.
Good, Timothy. We Saw Lincoln Shot: One Hundred Eyewitness Accounts. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.
Kauffman, Michael. American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies.
New York: Random House, 2004.
Steers, Edward, and James Swanson. The Lincoln Assassination Encyclopedia. New York:
Harper Perennial, 2010.
LITVINENKO, ALEXANDER VALTEROVICH

(19622006)
On November 1, 2006, Russian expatriate author Alexander Litvinenkoa
former officer of both the Soviet KGB and the post-communist Federal Protective Service (FSO)fell suddenly ill in London, England. Earlier that day, he
had lunched with two other ex-KGB officers, Dmitri Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi, and an Italian acquaintance, attorney and self-styled nuclear waste expert
Mario Scaramella. Their conversation included discussion of ongoing investigations into KGB infiltration of Italian politics and the October 2006 murder
of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow. Litvinenkos condition rapidly deteriorated, and he died in a London hospital on November 23.
Afterward, pathologists attributed his death to radiation poisoning, induced
by a lethal dose of polonium-210. Spokesmen for Scotland Yard declared that
they were 100-percent sure who administered the poison, where and how,
but they declined to furnish further details, preserving their evidence in the
295
296
interest of some hypothetical future trial. Prime suspect Andrei Lugovoi escaped to Russia, and since his election to the Duma (Russian parliament) he is
legally immune to extradition.
Alexander Litvinenko was born in Voronezh, with conflicting reports citing
his birth date as August 30 and December 4, 1962. At age 18 he was drafted
into the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a now-defunct Soviet a paramilitary police force. He attended the Kirov Higher Command School
from 1981 to 1985, graduating as a platoon commander. The KGB recruited
him as an informant in 1986, and two years later Litvinenko officially joined
the KGBs Third Chief Directorate, Military Counter Intelligence, serving with
that branch until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the KGB officially
disbanded. Litvinenko remained with the new agency, reborn as the Federal
Counterintelligence Service (FSK), specializing in counterterrorist activities and
infiltration of Russian Mafia groups (see sidebar). At the same time, he also
continued to play an active military role during Russian campaigns in Chechnya
and Dagestan. In 1997, Litvinenko was promoted to serve as a deputy chief of
the FSB Directorate of Analysis and Suppression of Criminal Groups.
Litvinenko later claimed that his disaffection with Russia began in December 1997, when he received orders to kill Boris Berezovsky, a businessman and
member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He stalled until March 1998,
then warned Berezovsky, who went public with the claim and thus provoked a
major scandal. The FSB dismissed Litvinenko, disbanded his unit, then jailed
him for a month in 1999 on charges of abusing duties. Released on stipulation that he leave the country, Litvinenko moved to London, entering collaboration with MI6Britains Secret Intelligence Serviceat a reported wage of
2,000 per month. He became a naturalized British citizen in October 2006,
and continued working with the government until his death. At the same time,
he attracted death threats for his public statements and writings, condemning
Russian president Vladimir Putins regime. In January 2007, the Polish news
paper Dziennik Polska-Europa-Swiat
reported that Litvinenkos photograph was
used for target practice at a training center for private paramilitary security
forces in Balashikha, near Moscow.
Two days after Litvinenkos death, an article appeared under his byline in
Londons Mail on Sunday, titled Why I Believe Putin Wanted Me Dead. It read,
in part:
this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my
present condition. You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a
price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed. You have shown yourself to have no respect for life,
liberty or any civilised value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your
office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilised men and women. You may succeed
in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for
what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.
Londons Metropolitan Police investigated Litvinenkos death, assisted by

FBI agents and Interpol. Scientific equipment traced three distinct polonium
trails in and out of London, left by Litvinenko, Dmitry Kovtun, and Andrei
Lugovoi, respectively. Radioactivity levels indicated that Litvinenko had ingested the lethal material, and Kovtun and Lugovoi had handled it. Locations
RUSSIAN MAFIA
Although membership in the historical Mafia is strictly limited to individuals of Italian descent, it is common practice to use the term Mafia
for any crime syndicate, regardless of ethnic complexion. Thus, we read
reports of an Albanian Mafia, Cuban Mafia, Black Mafia, and so on, with
the Russian Mafiaor Russkaya Mafiyaranked among the more notorious syndicates of modern times. Russia, like all other countries, has
harbored a criminal underworld throughout its history, traditionally
known as a bratva (brotherhood), composed of vor v zakone (thieves in
law), with the present generation spawned in the Soviet Gulag network
of prison labor camps. Some eight million convicts were released upon
the death of dictator Josef Stalin in 1953, with hard-core gangsters establishing an unprecedented criminal class nationwide. Since the collapse
of the Soviet Union in 1991, competing crime syndicates have vastly increased their influence and have established lucrative outposts worldwide, involved in illegal gambling, prostitution and human trafficking,
drug trafficking, and sale of black-market weapons, reportedly including
loose nukes from postcommunist Eastern Bloc arsenals. Official opinions differ on the extent and organization of the Russian organized crime.
Timur Lakhonin, head of Russias Interpol branch, said in December
2009, Certainly, there is crime involving our former compatriots abroad,
but there is no data suggesting that an organized structure of criminal
groups comprising former Russians exists abroad. Eight months later,
French criminologist Alain Bauer disputed that view, calling the Russian
Mafia one of the best structured criminal organisations in Europe, with
a quasi-military operation. Worldwide, in 2010, Russian crime syndicates operated in at least 50 countries, with an estimated membership
of 300,000. The largest single group, with some 5,000 identified members, is the Moscow-based Solntsevskaya Bratva, founded in 1985 by Boris
Arshavin and Sergei Mikhailov.
297
298
L I U, H E N RY
cited included a hotel, a restaurant, a tavern, multiple taxi cabs, and British
Airways commercial jet airliners.
Further Reading
Cowell, Alan. The Terminal Spy: A True Story of Espionage, Betrayal and Murder.
Goldfarb, Alex, and Marina Litvinenko. Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander
Litvienko and the Return of the KGB. New York: Free Press, 2007.
Sixsmith, Martin. The Litvinenko File: The Life and Death of a Russian Spy. New York:
St. Martins Press, 2007.
LIU, HENRY (19321984)

On October 15, 1984, three assassins ambushed Taiwanese expatriate journalist Henry Liu in the garage of his home in Daly City, California, executing him
with multiple close-range gunshots. Investigators were baffled until FBI agents
found an audio tape recorded by gangster Chen Chi-li, aka King Duck, identified as head of Taiwans United Bamboo Gang. The tape blamed Vice Admiral
Wang Hsi-ling, chief of Taiwans Military Intelligence Bureau, for ordering Lius
murder, with direct approval from President Chiang Ching-kuo. Chen, Wang,
and triggerman Wu Tun were convicted at trial in Taipei, receiving life sentences in August 1985, then were granted presidential clemency and freed in
January 1991.
Henry Liu was born in Jingjiang, mainland China, on December 7, 1932,
and relocated to Taiwan in 1949, after the communist victory in that nations
civil war drove Generalisimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang (Chinese
Nationalist Party, or KMT) to the offshore refuge of Taiwan, officially renamed
as the Republic of China. Chiang, like KMT founder Sun Yat-sen before him,
was a member of the Triad underworld, running his government in exile as a
kleptocracy buttressed by U.S. support in the Cold War. By the time Chiang
died and was succeeded by son Chiang Ching-kuo in 1975, Liuwriting primarily as Chiang Nanhad earned a reputation as an outspoken critic of
Taiwans one-party autocratic government. Exiled to the United States, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen and continued his attacks on the KMT with a
critical biography of Chiang Ching-kuo, the project that provoked his murder.
Chen Chi-lis United Bamboo Gang, also known as the Bamboo Union, is
the largest of Taiwans three Triad syndicates, recognized for its close ties to the
Kuomintang, its members said to be motivated as much by right-wing politics
as by profits from gambling, drug dealing, and other illegal activities. At trial in
1985, Chen testified that Vice Admiral Wang ordered Lius murder on grounds
that Liu was a spy for the Peoples Republic of China, offering $20,000 for the
slaying, which Chen allegedly refused as a gesture of patriotism. Chen also
LONG, HUEY PIERCE, JR.
claimedbut failed to convince the courtthat he ordered his gunmen to

teach Liu a lesson without killing or crippling him, but the shooters got carried away in the moment. Jerome Cohen, a Harvard professor of law, attended
that trial as a representative of Lius family, and later described Chens testimony as a well-rehearsed performance aimed at covering for higher-ranking
KMT officials.
When Chen, Wang, and Wu were tried in Taipei, another member of the
execution party, Bamboo Union member Tung Kuei-sen was captured in California, acquitted on New York racketeering charges unrelated to Lius death,
then convicted of the actual slaying in March 1988. Two months later, he received a sentence of 25 years to life for murder, plus two more years for use of a
firearm in a felony. Confined at Pennsylvanias Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary,
Tung was stabbed by other inmates on February 21, 1991, and died from his
wounds on April 3.
Chen Chi-li left Taipei for Cambodia in 1996, to evade further charges of organized crime activity. In July 2000, Cambodian police arrested him for illegal
possession of firearms, but subsequently released him to live in peace on his
2,600-acre estate. Pancreatic cancer claimed his life in October 2007, and his
corpse was flown home to Taipei, where fellow gang member Wu Tung organized a lavish funeral.
Further Reading
Kaplan, David. Fires of the Dragon. New York: Scribner, 1992.
U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The Murder of Henry Liu. Washington, DC:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985.
LONG, HUEY PIERCE, JR. (18931935)

On September 8, 1935, Louisianas state legislature convened in special session to vote on a political redistricting bill. The bill, promoted by U.S. senator
Huey Long, aimed to remove Benjamin Pavya longtime political opponent
of Longsfrom his post as a district court judge. Debate over the bill was still
ongoing at 9:20 P.M., when Dr. Carl Weiss, Judge Pavys son-in-law, approached
Long in a hallway at the State Capitol. Weiss reportedly fired a pistol at Long,
striking him once in the abdomen, whereupon Longs bodyguards killed Weiss
with 62 bullets. Long survived to reach a nearby hospital, but died from his
wound two days later.
At the time of his death, Huey Long was one of the most controversial figures in the United States. Born at Winnfield on August 30, 1893, he was expelled from high school in his junior year, then won a debating scholarship
to Louisiana State University, but failed to attend because he could not afford
textbooks. After several years as a traveling salesman, Long enrolled at Tulane
299
300
L O N G, H U E Y P I E RC E , J R .
Senator Huey Longs 1935 assassination still spawns conspiracy theories. (Getty Images)
University Law School, completing its course of study in one year. Admitted to
the bar in 1915, Long courted working-class clients and won renown by suing
the Standard Oil Company for unfair business practices.
Long entered politics in 1918, after being elected to the Louisianas Railroad
Commission. His continuing attacks on Standard Oil rallied popular support,
propelling him to chairmanship of the states Public Service Commission in
1922 and election as governor in 1928, campaigning on the slogan Every man
a king, but no one wears a crown. Soon, he was dubbed The Kingfish, for
his power in Louisiana politics. While condemning giant corporations and the
wealthy parasites who ran them, Long used the governors office to enrich
himself. Every state employee was required to pay a portion of his or her salary into Longs political war chestdubbed the deduct boxduring election
years. Long also approved placement of illegal slot machines in New Orleans
and elsewhere, by arrangement with mobsters Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky, after Mayor Fiorello La Guardia had purged their New York City gambling
operations. By the time voters sent Long to the U.S. Senate in 1932, he was a
rich man in his own right and prepared to challenge the federal government.
Long initially supported President Franklin Roosevelts (FDR) New Deal, but
broke with the administration during summer 1933, promoting his own Share
LONG, HUEY PIERCE, JR.
Our Wealthand, some said, paving the way for his own White House race in
1936. In the Senate, Long opposed FDRs National Recovery Act as a sellout
to big business, and led a three-week filibuster against the Banking Act of 1933
until amendments extended deposit insurance to state banks. Roosevelt retaliated with federal investigations of Louisiana election procedures and Longs
income taxes, resulting in several indictments, but the Kingfish remained untouchable until his murder. Following Longs death, his family maintained control over Louisiana politics, with brother Earl serving as governor (19391940,
19481952, 19561960) and son Russell as U.S. senator (19481987).
Longs assassination, though officially solved, remains controversial. No autopsy was performed, despite requests from attending physician Edgar Hull,
and allegations of conspiracy or cover-up persist. In a 1973 biography of Meyer
Lansky, author Hank Messick claimed that the mobsterangry over Longs
demands for larger gambling payoffsordered physicians to let him die.
A quarter-century later, Dr. Donald Pavya nephew of Longs enemy, Judge
Pavypublished an account claiming that Dr. Weiss only punched Long during their September 1935 encounter, whereupon Longs troop of bodyguards
killed Weiss and fatally wounded the Kingfish with wild gunfire, then planted
a gun on Weiss in a posthumous frame-up.
Longs flamboyant life and murky death have prompted several fictional
portrayals, most portraying Long-like characters under various pseudonyms.
The first, Hamilton Bassos Cinnamon Seed (1934), lampooned Long with satire
and was followed by a posthumous sequel, Sun in Capricorn, eight years later.
Between those novels, Long critic Sinclair Lewis published It Cant Happen
Here (1935), a novel penned with the avowed purpose of undermining Longs
presidential hopes in 1936. Fictionalized in that work as President Berzelius
Windrip, Longs character emulates tactics from then-powerful Nazi Germany,
transforming the United States into a fascist dictatorship. Adria Locke Langleys novel, A Lion is in the Streets (1945), reached the silver screen eight years
later, with James Cagneys starring as rabble-rousing politician Hank Martin. Robert Penn Warren won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel of corrupted
idealist Willie Stark. All the Kings Men (1946), filmed under the same
title in 1949 and 2006 (with an opera, Willie Stark, produced in 1981).
Mystery novelist Max Allan Collins, having solved Anton Cermaks murder in 1983, with True Detective, did the same for Longs in 1995, in Blood
and Thunder. Meanwhile, sci-fi excursions into alternate history also feature
Huey Long. Harry Turtledoves American Empire trilogy (20012003) sees
Long assassinated for refusing to cast his lot with the Confederate States of
America. Barry N. Malzbergs short story Kingfish, in the Alternate Presidents anthology (1992), permits Long to survive the 1935 attempt on his life,
capture the White House in 1936, and conspire with ally John Nance Garner
to kill Adolf Hitler in the early days of World War II.
301
302
L U M U M B A , PAT R I C E M E RY
Further Reading
Pavy, Donald. Accident and Deception: The Huey Long Shooting. New Iberia, LA: Cajun
Publications, 1999.
White Jr., Richard. Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long. New York: Random House,
2006.
Zinman, David. Who Killed the Kingfish? The Enduring Controversy over the Assassination of Huey Long. New York: Newsday, 1985.
LUMUMBA, PATRICE MERY (19251961)

In September 1960, after just three months of independence from Belgian colonial rule, the First Republic of the Congo faced a major crisis. President Joseph
Kasa-Vubu dismissed Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, whereupon Lumumba
declared the presidential office vacant and secured a vote of confidence from
the senate. On September 14, 1960, army chief of staff Colonel Mobutu Sese
Sekoaka Joseph Mobutuled a military coup dtat supported by the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), placing Lumumba under house arrest. He
managed to escape, but was recaptured on December 1, after a failed attempt
to raise an independent army of his own. Despite protests from the United
Nations, Mobutu transported Lumumba to a military prison on December 3,
then moved him to Katanga Province on January 17, 1961. That same night,
Lumumba was shot by a firing squad, with former aides Maurice Mpolo and
Joseph Okito. Lumumbas corpse was then dismembered with a hacksaw, dissolved in sulfuric acid, and the remains were buried in an unmarked grave. His
death was formally announced three weeks later, with a false claim that he had
escaped from custody and was lynched by outraged villagers.
Patrice Lumumba was born at Onalua, in the Kasai region of the thenBelgian Congo, on July 2, 1925. After graduating from a Catholic missionary school, he passed a one-year training course for post office employment,
working as a postal clerk in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) and Stanleyville
(now Kisangani). In 1955, he embarked on a three-week study tour in Belgium, then returned to face arrest on a charge of embezzling post office funds.
Conviction in that case brought him a two-year prison sentence, commuted to
one year upon repayment of the stolen cash.
Released from custody in July 1956, Lumumba helped found the Mouvement National Congolais (MNCCongolese National Movement) two years
later, campaigning for Congolese independence from Belgium. By December
1958 he was the MNCs president, but the group split in early 1959, with leftist elements following Lumumba, and rival Albert Kalonji led more moderate
members into a new organization. Belgian authorities jailed Lumumba in October 1959, on charges of inciting a riot that claimed 30 lives. Sentenced to six
months in prison, he was nonetheless released to attend Januarys round-table
L U M U M B A , PAT R I C E M E R Y
discussions in Brussels, charting the Congos future, after the MNC carried
Decembers local elections.
That conference concluded on January 27, 1960, with the announcement of
Congolese independence scheduled for June 30. Lumumba and the MNC triumphed in Mays national elections, with Lumumba declared prime minister on
June 23, and Joseph Kasa-Vubu was slated to serve as president. On Independence Day, Belgian king Baudouin cautioned his former African subjects, Dont
compromise the future with hasty reforms, and dont replace the structures that
Belgium hands over to you until you are sure you can do better . . . Dont be
afraid to come to us. We will remain by your side, give you advice.
Lumumba took a different view, telling his native audience, For this independence of the Congo, even as it is celebrated today with Belgium, a friendly
country with whom we deal as equal to equal, no Congolese worthy of the
name will ever be able to forget that it was by fighting that it has been won,
a day-to-day fight, an ardent and idealistic fight, a fight in which we were
spared neither privation nor suffering, and for which we gave our strength and
our blood. We are proud of this struggle, of tears, of fire, and of blood, to the
depths of our being, for it was a noble and just struggle, and indispensable to
put an end to the humiliating slavery which was imposed upon us by force.
A few days later, Lumumba unilaterally raised the pay of all government
employees except those serving in the army, which remained under control of
white Belgian officers. The reaction was immediate and hostile, with rebellions
nationwide by soldiers who engaged in pillaging and mayhem. Meanwhile,
on July 11, Katanga Province declared independence under Premier Moise
Tshombe, backed by Belgiums government and Union Minire du Haut Katanga, a Belgian mining company. Prime Minister Lumumba sought military
and humanitarian aid from the Soviet Union, which encouraged the Joseph
Mobutu and the CIA to move against him as an alleged communist.
Conspiracy theories surround Lumumbas assassination. Most sources
agree that the execution was carried out under direction of a Belgian officer, Captain Julien Gat. Some accounts claim that Lumumba was first
buried by a CIA agent, but Belgian police commissioner Gerard Soete
later admitted exhuming the corpse, with his brothers help, dismembering and dissolving it before it was reburied at a site near the Rhodesian border. In 1975, the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study
Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities reported that CIA director Allen Dulles had ordered Lumumbas assassination as an urgent and prime objective, after President Dwight Eisenhower
said something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated.
A later report, issued in August 2000 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, agreed that the CIA had conspired to murder Lumumba, but denied active participation by the agency in his assassination.
303
304
L U M U M B A , PAT R I C E M E RY
The following year, an investigating commission in Belgium declared that

certain members of the Belgian government and other Belgian figures have a
moral responsibility in the circumstances which led to the death of Lumumba.
Although it found no document nor witness proving that the government
or any of its members gave the order to physically eliminate Lumumba, it acknowledged that it was manifestly clear that the government was unconcerned
with Mr. Lumumbas physical integrity. In February 2002, the Belgian government formally apologized, confessing a moral responsibility and an irrefutable portion of responsibility in the events that led to the death of Lumumba.
Finally, in July 2006, the U.S. government declassified CIA documents confirming that the agency had hoped to kill Lumumba, purchasing a vial of poison
CIA EXECUTIVE ACTION

Executive action was a term adopted by the U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency from the early 1950s through the mid-1970s as a euphemism for
assassination, specifically applied to killing foreign heads of state such as
Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and Ngo Dinh Diem. In the case of lesservalue targets, murder was often described as termination with extreme
prejudice. President Gerald Ford banned state-sponsored murder on
February 18, 1976, with Executive Order (E.O.) 11905, stating that No
employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire
to engage in, political assassination. President James Carter strengthened
and expanded that ban on January 24, 1978, with E.O. 12036, closing
loopholes in E.O. 11905 by stating that No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination. President Ronald Reagan revised that
language slightly on December 4, 1981, with E.O. 12333, stating that
No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination. President
Bill Clinton relaxed that proscription of murder in February 1998, with
regard to targets formally labeled as terrorists. On September 14, 2001,
Congress passed a joint resolution titled Authorization for Use of Military
Force, granting the president blanket permission to use all necessary and
appropriate force against those whom he determined had planned, authorized, committed or aided the September 11th attacks, or who harbored said persons or groups. On April 30, 2012, John Brennan, assistant
to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, publicly
acknowledged for the first time that unmanned drone aircraft had been
used repeatedly on orders from President Barack Obama, to assassinate
presumed members of the al-Qaeda terrorist group abroad.
L U W U M , J A N A N I J A K A L I YA
in September 1960, with intent to place it on the prime ministers toothbrush.

That plan fell through, as did similar plots against Cubas Fidel Castro, and no
ultimate verdict was reached concerning the extent of CIA culpability in Lumumbas murder or disposal of his body.
Six years before those revelations, Haitian filmmaker and political activist
Raoul Peck produced Lumumba (2000), depicting events in the Congo during
19601961. Ongoing turmoil in the Democratic Republic of the Congo required
Peck to shoot the film in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, with French actor Eriq
Ebouaney playing the part of Lumumba and Alex Descas cast as rival Joseph
Mobutu.
Further Reading
Heinz, G., and H. Donnay. Lumumba: The Last Fifty Days. New York: Grove Press, 1970.
Kanza, Thomas. Conflict in the Congo: The Rise and Fall of Lumumba. New York: Penguin, 1972.
McKown, Robin. Lumumba: A Biography. London: Doubleday, 1969.
LUWUM, JANANI JAKALIYA (19221977)

In early 1977, Janani Luwumarchbishop of the Church of Ugandadelivered
a note to dictator Idi Amin, protesting Amins policy of arbitrary executions
and the disappearance of political opponents. On February 16, Luwum was
arrested with Charles Oboth Ofumbi (Ugandas minister of the interior) and
Erinayo Wilson Oryema (minister of land, housing and physical planning).
Amin convened a trial in Kampala the same day, featuring confessions from
several accused traitors, implicating the trio in a plot to depose Amin, in favor
of ex-president Milton Obote. On February 17, Radio Uganda announced that
all three defendants had died in car crash while being transported to a police
interrogation center, supposedly after they tried to escape by overpowering the
driver of their vehicle. Minister of Health Henry Kyemba later wrote that The
bodies were bullet-riddled. The archbishop had been shot through the mouth
and at least three bullets in the chest. The ministers had been shot in a similar
way but one only in the chest and not through the mouth. Oryema had a bullet
wound through the leg. Subsequent testimony claimed the three were beaten
and shot at an army barracks, with Time magazine declaring: Some reports
even had it that Amin himself had pulled the trigger, but Amin angrily denied
the charge, and there were no first-hand witnesses.
Janani Luwum was born in the village of Mucwini, in the Kitgum district of
northern Uganda, bordering Sudan, in 1922. He attended Boro Boro Teacher
Training College, in the Lira district, and obtained employment teaching at a primary school. Luwum converted to Christianity in 1948, enrolled at the Church
of Ugandas Buwalasi Theological College the following year, and was assigned
to St. Philips Church in Gulu by 1950. Ordination as a deacon followed in
305
306
L U W U M , J A N A N I J A K A L I YA
1953, with Luwums elevation

to the priesthood in 1954. After
seven years of service in the
Nile Diocese and the Diocese
of Mbale, he was consecrated
as a bishop in 1961. Five years
later, church leaders appointed
Luwum to serve as archbishop
of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi, thus becoming one of
the most influential clergymen
in Africa.
When Idi Amin staged a military coup in January 1971,
deposing President Obote,
Archbishop Luwum stood in
opposition to the dictators
policies of repression, ethnic
persecution, extrajudicial killings, and pervasive corrupUgandan Archbishop Janani Luwum, killed on or- tion. Estimates of Amins final
death toll range from 100,000
ders from dictator Idi Amin. (Getty Images)
to 500,000 or more, including
many claims that Amin himself
took part in executions and indulged in cannibalism. Despite that reputation
and the global protests it evoked, Amin served as chairman of the Organization
of African Unity during 19751976, and Uganda was (rather ironically) appointed to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1977.
A year later, in October 1978, Amins attempt to annex the Kagera region of
northwestern Tanzania sparked a war that claimed an estimated 3,000 lives by
mid-April 1979. Despite reinforcements from Libya, Amins troops were driven
out of Tanzania, and the Tanzanian army rolled on to capture Kampala. Amin
fled to Libya, and later to Saudi Arabia, where he remained until his death in
August 2003. Amins departure touched off a struggle for power in Uganda, climaxed with Milton Obotes return to the presidency in December 1980.
Further Reading
Foden, Giles. The Last King of Scotland. New York: Vintage, 1999.
Smith, George. Ghosts of Kampala: The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin. Worthing, West Sussex:
Littlehampton, 1980.
M
MADERO GONZLEZ, FRANCISCO IGNACIO
(18731913)
On February 18, 1913, Mexican general Jos Victoriano Huerta Mrquez staged
a coup dtat against President Francisco Madero, arresting both Madero and
his brother Gustavo, along with Vice President Pino Suarez. Over the course of
that afternoon, Gustavo Madero was tortured by Huertas soldiers, then shot and
buried in an unmarked grave. President Madero and Suarez initially refused to
sign their resignations, as Huerta demanded, then agreed on February 19, after
they were promised safe passage out of Mexico with their families. Huerta assumed the presidency on February 20, while Madero and Suarez remained in
prison, and then executed both hostages near midnight on February 21.
Francisco Madero Gonzlez was born in Coahuila on October 30, 1873, to
one of Mexicos richest families, educated at a Jesuit college, then at the cole
des Hautes tudes Commerciales de Paris, founded in 1881 by the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry. From France, he moved on to study agriculture
at the University of California in Berkeley. At age 20, he assumed management
duties at his familys ranch in San Pedro, Coahuila, introducing cotton as a cash
crop, while installing irrigation systems and constructing plants to manufacture
ice and soap. At the same time, he earned a reputation for philanthropy, building rural schools, hospitals, and community kitchens.
Madero entered politics in 1904, disgusted with the authoritarian tactics of
longtime president Porfirio Daz. Madero founded the Benito Jurez Democratic Club in San Pedro that year, narrowly losing a municipal election race,
but continued opposition to Daz through his own newspaper, El Demcrata,
and a satirical magazine, El Mosco (The Fly). An ardent spiritualist, Madero
published a best-selling bookThe Presidential Succession of 1910in 1908,
citing the supposed claim of spirits from beyond that Dazs dictatorship had
sickened Mexico. He noted that Daz initially campaigned on a platform of
No Re-election in 1870, but after losing that campaign to incumbent Benito
Jurez had, in fact, had himself been elected to the presidency three timesin
1876, 1877, and 1884. Now, with Daz still in office, Madero claimed the No
Re-election slogan as his own, campaigning to unseat the dictator.
In 1910, as founder and presidential candidate of the Anti-Reelectionist
Party, Madero campaigned nationwide, warning supporters that Daz would
308
M ADERO GONZ LEZ, FR ANCISCO IGNACIO
not leave office peacefully. That prophecy proved accurate in June, as Daz
jailed Madero and 5,000 other members of his party, subsequently claiming
victory and a fourth term by an electoral vote of 196 to 187. Madero escaped
from custody on October 4, 1910, and fled to San Antonio, Texas, where he
hatched the Plan of San Luis Potos, calling for Mexicos citizens to rise in force
against Daz on November 20.
So began the Mexican Revolution, tacitly supported by U.S. president William Howard Taft. Maderos forces were led by commanders including Francisco Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, expanding to incite rebellions in
18 of Mexicos 31 states by April 1911. A month later, following a decisive victory by rebel troops at Ciudad Jurez, Daz resigned and ceded control of the
country to interim president Francisco Len de la Barra. Madero won the next
presidential election, taking office on November 6, 1911, and began dismantling the machinery of dictatorship. Ironically, after he instituted freedom of
the press, Madero faced a storm of criticism for his handling of several regional
uprisings during 19111912, prompting brother Gustavo Madero to complain
that the newspapers bite the hand that took off their muzzle.
One rebellion, led by ex-general Pascual Orozco in Chihuahua, brought Victoriano Huerta to the forefront of Maderos army after General Jos Gonzlez
Salas committed suicide. Huerta suppressed the uprising in September 1912,
driving Orozco into exile, but their relationship soured when guerrilla leader
Pancho Villa refused to take orders from Huerta. Huerta ordered Villas execution, but Madera commuted the sentence, leaving bad blood between them.
A month later, in October 1912, Flix Daza nephew of Maderos deposed
predecessorled a mutiny in Veracruz to reclaim the honor of the army trampled by Madero. Captured and condemned, Daz was spared by commutation
of his sentence from Mexicos Supreme Court, leaving him embittered and determined to strike back. By early 1913, Huerta and Daz were joined by U.S.
ambassador Henry Lane Wilson in a plot to depose Madero, culminating in the
actions of La Decena Tragicathe Ten Tragic Days of February.
Today, we know that Ambassador Wilson began predicting Maderos downfall on February 11, wiring President William Howard Taft for authority to
force negotiations between the contending rivals. When British, Spanish, and
German diplomats counseled peace, Lane advised them that President Taft
was visibly embarrassed and endeavored to fix the responsibility on General
Flix Daz. Wilson changed his tune on February 13, informing Secretary of
State Philander Knox that Public opinion, both Mexican and foreign, holds the
Federal Government responsible for these conditions. Two days later, Wilson
and Germanys ambassador visited the presidential palace, hoping to confer
with General Huerta privately, but as Wilson complained, upon arrival, much
to our regret, we were taken to see the President. By February 16, Wilson had
M A H E R PA S H A , A H M E D
received a covert message from Huerta saying that he expected to take steps
tonight towards terminating the situation.
By what means? According to Wilsons next memo, Huerta has sent his
messenger to say that I may expect some action which will remove Madero
from power at any moment, and that plans were fully matured. . . . I asked no
questions and made no comment beyond requesting that no lives be taken
except by due process of law. By Monday night, the 17th, Wilson was predicting Maderos arrest by noon on Tuesdaywhich, in fact, occurred. Following
the murders on February 22, Wilson washed his hands of the matter, claiming
it would be an impertinence for a foreign power to demand an investigation
into a purely domestic matter. Then, in a cruel twist, he added, In fact, the
person really responsible for Maderos death was his wife. She was the one to
blame. Madero had to be eliminated. By her telegram to the commander at Veracruz, she made it impossible to allow him to leave the Capital.
Mexicos revolution continued for another seven years. President Huerta,
although supported by Germany, was driven from office and into exile by
July 1914. Successor Francisco Carvajal lasted one day short of a month,
then ceded power to Venustiano Carranza, who restored a measure of peace
and promoted a new constitution prior to his assassination in May 1920.
Sporadic violenceendemic to Mexico then, as todaycontinued under
successors Adolfo de la Huerta (JuneNovember 1920), lvaro Obregn (December 1920 to November 1924), and Plutarco Elas Calles (December 1924
to November 1928).
Further Reading
Gonzales, Michael. The Mexican Revolution: 19101940. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 2002.
Krauze, Enrique. Mexico: Biography of Power. A History of Modern Mexico, 18101996.
McLynn, Frank. Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000.
Ross, Stanley. Francisco I. Madero: Apostle of Mexican Democracy. Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing, 2011.
MAHER PASHA, AHMED (18881945)

On February 24, 1945, Egyptian prime minister Ahmed Maher Pasha addressed
the Chamber of Deputies in Cairos Parliament building, reading a royal declaration of war against the Axis Powers, signed by King Farouk. From there, he
moved on toward the senate, to repeat the reading, but while passing through
the Pharaonic Hall he was accosted by 28-year-old Mustafa Essawy. Drawing a
pistol, Essawy shot Maher three times in the stomach at point-blank, inflicting
309
310
M A H E R PA S H A , A H M E D
wounds that claimed the prime ministers life a half-hour later. Captured at the
scene, dressed in a dapper black shirt and red necktie, Essawy was variously
described in press reports as a pro-Nazi lawyer and a veterinary student,
interned during 1940 for unspecified pro-German activities. Later reports
speculated that he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhoodthe target of a
fatwa declared by Prime Minister Maher in 1944but prior to his execution by
hanging, in September 1945, Essawy admitted membership in the Wafd ( Delegation ) Party, a group opposed to dynastic rule and favoring a constitutional
monarchy.
Details of Ahmed Maher Pashas early life are sparse. He was born in 1888,
and by the early 1920s he was serving as Egypts minister of education, appointed by King Fuad I. Maher had vacated that post by May 1925, when
British colonial authorities detained him as a suspect in the November 1924
assassination of Sir Lee Oliver Fitzmaurice Stack, governor-general of AngloEgyptian Sudan, but Maher was not among the eight defendants subsequently
convicted and hanged for that crime.
In 1937, Maher was a member of Egypts senate, elevated that December to
lead King Farouk Is royal cabinet. The move provoked tension when Farouk
rejected the cabinets nomination of a senate candidate to replace Maher,
choosing one of his own. By August 1939, Maher was installed as minister of
finance, charging members of the rival Wafd Party with libel after they accused
him of corruption. King Farouk named Maher as prime minister on October 10, 1944, whereupon Maher declared his fatwa against hostile Wafdists.
Striving for neutrality, on February 6, 1945, Maher announced that Egypt
would not tolerate any airfield belonging to any foreign power on her soil,
but his attitude toward the Allies soon changed after meetings with U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill, resulting in his assassination.
Mahers state funeral, on February 26, 1945, featured one of the longest
processions ever assembled in Cairo, including Indian, British, South African,
and U.S. troops in full dress uniform. His successor as prime minister, Mahmoud
Fahmi an-Nukrashi Pasha, served until December 1948, when he was murdered
in his office by a 21-year-old Muslim Brotherhood member disguised as a policeman. Ahmed Maher Pashas grandson, Ahmad Maher, served as Egypts foreign
minister from 2001 to 2004. Another grandson, Aly Maher, held various posts
including service as Egypts ambassador to France, secretary general of the Arab
Thought Foundation, director of the Institute for Peace Studies (20062008),
and as an officer of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (2008 to present).
Further Reading
Flower, Raymond. Napoleon to Nasser: The Story of Modern Egypt. Bloomington, IN:
AuthorHouse, 2002.
MANASSARA, IBRAHIM BAR
Vatikiotis, P. J. The History of Modern Egypt: From Muhammad Ali to Mubarak. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
MANASSARA, IBRAHIM BAR (19491999)

On April 9, 1999, President Ibrahim Manassara attempted to board a helicopter in the capital city of Niamey. While he was still on the tarmac, gunfire
erupted from his presidential guards and killed him instantly. Prime Minister
Ibrahim Assane Mayaki called the shooting a tragic accident, while trying
to dissolve the National Assembly and suspend all political activity. Former
diplomats from Niger, exiled to Burkina Faso, claimed Manassara was killed
to prevent him from fleeing the country. Resistance blocked Mayakis dissolution of the legislature, so he then announced that Niger be under military
rule until a new prime minister was chosen to restore national unity. France
quickly severed ties to Nigeronce part of colonial French West Africaand
the United States cut off foreign aid to the junta. Two days after Manassaras
death, reputed coup leader Daouda Malam Wank succeeded him president,
vowing to hold elections by years end.
Ibrahim Manassara was born at Dogondoutchi, in the Dosso region of
southwestern Niger, on May 9, 1949. He was 12 years old when Niger achieved
independence in 1961, under the one-party rule of President Hamani Diori.
Manassara pursued a military career, benefiting from that choice in 1974,
when catastrophic drought and public charges of corruption sparked a military coup, replacing Diori with a military junta under Colonel Seyni Kountch.
Kountch died from a brain tumor, in November 1987, whereupon new political parties and civic groups rose to promote a revised constitution. A caretaker
government took reign in November 1991. Parliamentary elections held in
January 1995 placed a mutually hostile president and prime minister in charge
of Nigers government, compelled to coexist. Three months later, Manassara
was promoted to serve as army chief of staff and began plotting his own seizure of power. He overthrew the Third Republic on January 7, 1996, and ruled
Niger until his death.
Manassara promulgated a new constitution, approved by referendum in
May 1996. Two months later, 52 percent of Nigers voters chose him as their
president, ostensibly, although outside observers called the election a sham,
exemplified by the arrest of four opposing presidential candidates. Local elections in February 1999 saw opposition parties win a majority over Manassaras
National Union of Independents for Democratic Renewal, whereupon Nigers
Supreme Court voided most of those results. Protests against that ruling were
scheduled for the day Manassara was assassinated in Niamey.
President Wank drafted yet another constitution, adopted by referendum
in July 1999, which granted amnesty to all participants in his coup dtat and
311
312
MALCOLM X
Manassaras 1996 rebellion. That amnesty suspended ongoing investigations

of Manassaras murder, prompting widespread allegations of a cover-up. Still,
Wank kept his promise, holding elections in December 1999 and ceding
power to successor Mamadou Tandja without a fight.
Further Reading
Kashi, Ed. Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta. New York: PowerHouse Books, 2010.
Obi, Cyril, and Siri Aas Rustad, eds. Oil and Insurgency in the Niger Delta: Managing the
Complex Politics of Petroviolence. London: Zed Books, 2011.
MALCOLM X (19251965)
On February 21, 1965, Muslim minister Malcolm X prepared to address
a gathering of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) at Upper
Manhattans Audubon Ballroom. Some 400 persons were present as Malcolm
approached the podium, but before he could speak, a man in the audience
shouted, Nigger, get your hand outta my pocket! A puff of smoke erupted
and a scuffle began, and while Malcolms bodyguards moved to control it,
three men rushed the dais. One fired a sawed-off shotgun at Malcolm, while
the other two blazed away with pistols, striking him 21 times in the chest,
left shoulder, arms and legs.
Malcolm survived to reach
Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, but was pronounced dead
at 3:30 P.M. Members of the
audience seized one shooter,
Talmadge Hayer (aka Thomas
Hagan), beating him before
police could intervene, and
witnesses identified two other
gunmen as Norman 3X Butler
and Thomas 15X Johnson. All
three belonged to the Nation
of Islam (NOI), a religious sect
widely known as Black Muslims.
At trial Hayer/Hagen admitted
the shooting, while denying that
Butler and Johnson were his accomplices. Jurors convicted all
Black nationalist Malcolm X, murdered by Nation three, resulting in life prison
of Islam gunmen in 1965. (Associated Press)
terms.
MALCOLM X
Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska.
His father, Earl Little, was a transplanted Georgia native, a Baptist lay minister, and an outspoken admirer of Marcus Garveys Universal Negro Improvement Association, a Pan-African movement that encouraged black Americans
to seek freedom in the homeland of their ancestors. According to Malcolms
autobiography, harassment by the racist Ku Klux Klan drove his family from
Nebraska to Wisconsin, then to Lansing, Michigan, where pressure continued
from Klansmen and from members of a spin-off faction, the Black Legion. Malcolms father accused Black Legion members of burning the familys home in
1929. Two years later, when Earl Little was struck and killed by a streetcar in
Lansing, Malcolm claimed Black Legion members had pushed him onto the
tracks. Years later, Malcolm also wrote that white supremacists had murdered
three of his paternal uncles.
Malcolms mother suffered a mental collapse in 1938, when her presumed
fianc discovered she was pregnant and left her to fend for herself. Louise
Little spent the next 24 years in a Michigan state hospital, her children scattered to various foster homes, until Malcolm and his siblings could afford
to support her themselves. Meanwhile, Malcolm excelled in junior high
school, but dropped out after a white teacher told him that practicing law
was no realistic goal for a nigger. Settled in New York Citys Harlem ghetto
by 1943, he survived in a criminal milieu by pimping, gambling, robbery
and drug dealing. Faced with the prospect of military conscription during
World War II, he avoided service by telling his draft board that he steal guns
and kill crackers.
Shifting his focus to Boston in 1945, Malcolm embarked on a series of burglaries targeting affluent white homes. Police nabbed him after he left a stolen
watch for repair at a jewelry shop, resulting in imposition of a 10-year prison
term in February 1946. At Bostons Charlestown State Prison, Malcolm met
John Bembry, a self-educated inmate who impressed Malcolm with his command of English and the respect it evoked. Encouraged by a brother on the outside, Malcolm studied the NOI, adopting its tenets in 1948 and discarding his
slave surname in favor of an X by 1950. Paroled in August 1952, he visited
NOI leader Elijah Muhammad in Chicago, and in June 1953 was named assistant minister of the sects Temple Number One in Detroit, Michigan. Further
service in Boston and Philadelphia saw Malcolm promoted to lead Harlems
Temple Number Seven by May 1954.
Immensely popular with NOI audiences, promoting the groups doctrine
that blacks are Earths original people, whereas whites are grafted blue-eyed
devils, Malcolm established new temples in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and
Georgia during 1955. By then, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was
also interested in his activities, initiating surveillance on orders from Director
J. Edgar Hoover in 1953. A notorious police brutality case from Harlem brought
313
314
MALCOLM X
Malcolm to national public attention in April 1957, whereupon the New York
City Police Department (NYPD) also initiated surveillance of Malcolm and the
NOI. By July 1959, when he was prominently featured in a television documentary on the Black Muslims, titled The Hate That Hate Produced, Malcolm
had begun to call himself Malcolm Shabazz or Malik el-Shabazz, though most
admirers still referred to him as Malcolm X. FBI/NYPD fears of Malcolms possible communist leanings spiked in September 1960, when he led a delegation
welcoming Cuban leader Fidel Castro to Harlem, during Castros visit to the
United Nations.
Malcolm remained the most visible face of the NOI through 1963, a circumstance that placed him in stark contrast to pacifist civil rights leader Martin
Luther King Jr. Malcolm himself emphasized the difference between their approaches to black liberation, branding King and his allies as stooges, mocking Kings August 1963 March on Washington as the farce on Washington.
In that instance, Malcolm expressed dismay that so many blacks were roused
by a protest run by whites in front of a statue of a president who has been
dead for a hundred years and who didnt like us when he was alive. In December 1963, asked to comment on the slaying of President John F. Kennedy,
Malcolm shocked many whites by saying that chickens coming home to
roost never did make me sad; theyve always made me glad. The public outcry against that statementand, some said, personal jealousy over Malcolms
growing popularity within the NOIprompted Elijah Muhammad to forbid
Malcolm from speaking publicly for 90 days.
Malcolm initially accepted the disciplinary order, then changed his mind at
the end of his sentence, announcing his break with the NOI on March 8, 1964.
Although still a committed Muslim himself, Malcolm said the NOI had gone as
far as it can based on strict religious doctrines. Instead, he hoped to heighten
the political consciousness of African Americans with a new movement, his
OAAU. J. Edgar Hoover, predictably, penned memos to his staff describing the
OAAU as a threat to U.S. national security, launching a campaign of illegal harassment designed to prevent the rise of a messiah from black America.
On March 26, 1964, Malcolm and Dr. King attended Senate hearings on a
pending civil rights bill, then emerged to hold a joint press conferencetheir
first and only meeting. In an April speech, titled The Ballot or the Bullet, Malcolm urged black Americans to register as voters and use their electoral power
to effect meaningful change. That same month, Malcolm converted to Sunni
Islam and embarked on a pilgrimage to Mecca, required by sharia law of every
Muslim who is able. That journey soon evolved into a tour of Africa, including
visits to Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Morocco, Nigeria,
Tanganykia (now Tanzania), Senegal, and Sudan. By the time he returned to
New York, in November 1964, Malcolm had met every African leader of consequence and had established himself as a global political figure.
MALCOLM X
Meanwhile, tension increased between Malcolm and the NOI. Even before
their rift, in February 1964, a leader of Harlems Temple Number Seven ordered
a bombing of Malcolms car. A member of the NOIs paramilitary arm, the Fruit
of Islam, wired an explosive charge to the vehicle, but it failed to detonate. The
following month, on March 23, Elijah Muhammad told Boston minister Louis X
(now Louis Farrakhan) that hypocrites like Malcolm should have their heads
cut off. An April issue of the sects newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, featured a
cartoon of Malcolms severed head. On July 9, NOI spokesman John Ali declared that anyone who opposes the Honorable Elijah Muhammad puts their
life in jeopardy. Septembers issue of Ebony magazine ran a photo of Malcolm
guarding his home with a rifle, as a result of incessant death threats that he
blamed on the NOI.
FBI agents kept track of the threats against Malcolm through illegal wiretaps. On June 8, 1964, a caller warned Malcolms wife to tell him hes as good
as dead. Four days later, an FBI informant told the bureau that Malcolm X is
going to be bumped off. One week before Malcolms murder, still-unidentified
arsonists burned his familys home to the ground. Despite the public NOI
threats, however, during the winter of 19631964 Malcolm told close friends
that he thought someone elseperhaps from the U.S. governmentwas responsible for the harassment.
Reactions to Malcolms assassination varied dramatically. Some 30,000 persons viewed his body while it lay in state at Harlems Unity Funeral Home, and
his funeral drew many of the nations highest-ranking black civil rights leaders
and celebrities on February 27, 1965. (Dr. King did not attend, but sent his condolences by telegram to Malcolms widow.) Actor/activist Ossie Davis delivered
Malcolms eulogy before live television cameras, calling him our shining black
prince. The white press, meanwhileincluding many reporters from J. Edgar
Hoovers private list of friendly journalistsreviled Malcolms memory. The
New York Times condemned Malcolm posthumously as an extraordinary and
twisted man who turn[ed] many true gifts to evil purpose, declaring that his
life had been strangely and pitifully wasted. Elijah Muhammad, speaking from
Chicago, ironically proclaimed that Malcolm X got just what he preached,
while insisting, We didnt want to kill Malcolm and didnt try to kill him. We
know such ignorant, foolish teachings would bring him to his own end.
Allegations of conspiracy in Malcolms murder were inevitable. The New
York Times itself spawned one, reporting the arrest of four suspects in its early
coverage of the shooting, dropping one without explanation from later editions. Who was the fourth man, some readers asked, and what had become
of him? Declassification of FBI documents under the Freedom of Information
Act revealed the bureaus long surveillance of Malcolm, and raised questions
about its failure to protect him. Other prime suspects included the NYPDs
Bureau of Special Servicesa Red squad that worked closely with the FBI
315
316
MALCOLM X
and emulated Hoovers outlaw tacticsand the U.S. Central Intelligence

Agency, known to conduct (or at least attempt) assassinations of nonwhite
Third World leaders.
Always, though, suspicion circled back toward the NOI. Malcolm had described sect spokesman John Ali as his archenemy within the NOI, and
further investigation revealed that Ali met with convicted assassin Talmadge
Hayer the night before Malcolms slaying. Meanwhile, during 19771978,
Hayer filed two sworn affidavits naming four members of the NOIs Temple
Number 25 in Newark, New Jersey, as his accomplices in the assassination.
Wilbur McKinley, he said, had caused the initial diversion by shouting and
detonating a smoke bomb. William Bradley fired the shotgun at Malcolm,
and Hayer and one Leon Davis fired pistols. Another NOI member, Benjamin
Thomas, helped plan the killing but did not join in the shooting. Louis Farrakhan, accused by Malcolms widow and children, seemed to take responsibility in 1993, when he told an NOI audience, Was Malcolm your traitor or
ours? And if we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell
business is it of yours? A nation has to be able to deal with traitors and cutthroats and turncoats. Seven years later, Farrakhan sounded more moderate
NATION OF ISLAM
The Nation of Islam (NOI) was founded in Detroit, in July 1930, by Wallace Dodd Ford, alias Wallace Fard and Wallace Fard Muhammad. An exconvict who served three years for drug dealing in California, Ford was
described in 1920 Census rolls as a white immigrant from New Zealand,
but he sometimes claimed to hail from Afghanistan. After several disputes
with Detroit police, Ford vanished forever in July 1934. NOI spokesmen
claim he is still alive aboard the Mother Plane, a spaceship described in
the biblical book of Ezekiel. Ford taughtand the NOI believesthat
Earth is 76 trillion years old, populated solely by blacks until an evil
scientist called Yakub grafted other races from them 6,600 years ago.
Committed to racial separatism, the NOI held meetings with the Ku Klux
Klan and American Nazi Party in the 1960s, supporting segregation. Various NOI spokesmennotably Louis Farrakhanhave also denounced
Jews in terms more familiar from white racist hate groups. In 1995, Farrakhan led a Million Man March on Washington, D.C., promoting African American solidarity. At least 400,000 attended that rally, making it
the largest gathering of its kind in U.S. history. Membership estimates in
the early 21st century range from 10,000 to 50,000.
M A R AT, J E A N - PA U L
on the TV program 60 Minutes, saying, I may have been complicit in words that
I spoke. I acknowledge that and regret that any word that I have said caused the
loss of life of a human being.
No charges were filed against the NOI suspects named in Hayers sworn affidavits. Norman 3X Butler (now Muhammad Abdul Aziz) was paroled in 1985
and assumed leadership of the NOIs Harlem mosque in 1998. Thomas 15X
Johnson (now Khalil Islam) abandoned the NOI while imprisoned and became a Sunni Muslim, winning parole in 1987. Talmadge Hayer (now Mujahid
Halim) was released from custody in 2010. The OAAU, deprived of Malcolms
guiding hand, survived briefly with his half-sister at the helm, then dissolved
due to declining membership.
Further Reading
Breitman, George, Herman Potter, and Baxter Smith. The Assassination of Malcolm X.
New York: Pathfinder Press, 1976.
Carson, Clayborne. Malcolm X: The FBI File. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991.
Cone, James. Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare. Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 1991.
Evanzz, Karl. The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X. New York: Thunders Mouth
Press, 1992.
Friedly, Michael. Malcolm X: The Assassination. New York: One World, 1992.
Goldman, Peter. The Death and Life of Malcolm X. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1979.
Lincoln, C. Eric. The Black Muslims in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961.
Lomax, Louis. To Kill a Black Man: The Shocking Parallel in the Lives of Malcolm X and
Martin Luther King Jr. Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1968.
MARAT, JEAN-PAUL (17431793)

On July 13, 1793, French journalist and politician Jean-Paul Marat was relaxing in the bath at his home in Paris, when an unexpected visitor arrived. The
caller, Charlotte Corday from Caen, was a member of the Girondist faction in
the ongoing French Revolution, amenable to toppling the monarchy but resistant to upsetting the entire social order through policies advocated by Marat and
his more radical allies. Posing as a hard-core revolutionist, Corday told Marats
wife that she possessed critical information on the whereabouts of fugitive Girondists. Admitted to Marats bathroom, where a makeshift desk had been arranged over the tub, Corday spoke briefly with Marat, discussing revolutionary
plans to execute French royalists, then drew a knife from her corset and stabbed
him in the throat, severing his carotid artery. At trial, where she was condemned
to execution on the guillotine, Corday told her prosecutors, I killed one man
to save 100,000.
317
318
M A R A T, J E A N - P A U L
Jean-Paul Marat was born at

Boudry, in the former Prussian
principality of Neuchtel (now
part of Switzerland), on May 24,
1743. He studied medicine in
Paris without obtaining a degree, and moved to London in
1765, where he practiced as an
unlicensed physician, simultaneously publishing essays on
politics and philosophy. Five
years later, while working as
a veterinarian in Newcastle
upon Tyne, Marat wrote Chains
of Slavery, subtitled A Work in
which the Clandestine and Villainous Attempts of Princes to
Ruin Liberty Are Pointed Out,
and the Dreadful Scenes of DesFrench journalist/politician Jean-Paul Marat, potism Disclosed. At the same
stabbed while bathing by Charlotte Corday. (Al- time, he pursued medical studfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive/Corbis)
ies, and published an essay on
gonorrhea that earned him an
honorary medical degree from Scotlands University of St. Andrews in June
1775. Back in Paris by 1777, Marat found employment as personal physician
to King Louis XVIs younger brother (later King Charles X).
From that exalted post, Marat soon acquired more royal patients, all the
while continuing his scientific research and political writing, the latter including demands for an overhaul of the French judicial system, incorporating 12man juries and a common mode of capital punishment for all condemned
inmates, regardless of social standing. After nine years at court, in April 1786,
Marat resigned his royal appointment to pursue full-time scientific research,
correspondence, and meetings with U.S. inventor Benjamin Franklin.
Marats dedication to healing may have derived from personal ailments that
evoked descriptions of him as being short in stature, deformed in person,
and hideous in face. Prominent among his various infirmities was a skin disease that blighted the final years of his lire, compelling Marat to take frequent
medicinal baths for relief from the itching and pain. Some portraits of Marat
depict him with bandana wrapped around his head, which in fact was soaked
with vinegar to soothe his blistered scalp. Dr. Joseph Jelinek, clinical professor
of dermatology at New York University, suggests that Marat may have suffered
from Duhrings disease, a severe form of dermatitis (see sidebar).
M A R AT, J E A N - PA U L
In 1788, as France began its drift toward revolution, Marat abandoned science in favor of campaigning for the Third Estatethat is, all Frenchmen
who were not among the clergy or nobility. In September 1789, he launched
his own radical newspaper, LAmi du peuple (The Friend of the People), which
attacked the high and might throughout French society. When the newspaper was banned, Marat sought refuge literally underground, hiding beneath
the streets of Paris in the citys sewers. Despite his appearance and fugitive life
style, he managed to marry a woman 23 years his junior, and emerged from
hiding after full-scale revolution erupted on August 10, 1792. A month later,
when France was declared a republic, Marat claimed a seat in the ruling National Convention and renamed his newspaper Le Journal de la Rpublique franaise (Journal of the French Republic). Following the execution of King Louis
XVI in January 1793, Marat devoted the rest of his life to pursuit of surviving
Girondists.
Marats assassination had the opposite effect of that intended by Charlotte
Corday, in that it helped precipitate the Reign of Terror that claimed some
42,000 lives nationwide between September 1793 and July 1794. Marat himself became a martyr to the revolutionary cause, glamorized in posthumous
portraits with unblemished skin and finely sculpted features. The entire National Convention attended Marats funeral, with his heart embalmed separately. In November 1793, his remains were exhumed and transferred to the
Panthon, where his good friend, the Marquis de Sade, delivered a eulogy comparing Marat to Jesus. His memory lived on 128 years later, in far-off Russia,
where Bolshevik revolutionists renamed the tsarist battleship Petropavlovsk
DUHRINGS DISEASE
Technically known as dermatitis herpetiformis, or DH, this chronic skin
disease is characterized by painful blisters filled with watery fluid. Its
Latin name refers to inflammation of the skin resembling herpes, but DH
is not in fact related to the herpes virus. Named after Dr. Louis Duhring,
who first officially described the ailment in 1884, DH is now believed to
result, in some still-uncertain manner, from celiac disease (gluten intolerance), an autoimmune disorder of the small intestine occurring in genetically predisposed persons of both sexes and all ages. Published estimates
of DH prevalence range from 1 in 400 to 1 in 10,000. If the suspected
link to celiac disease is true, that hypothesis apparently negates claims
that Jean-Paul Marat caught the ailment while hiding as a fugitive in the
Parisian sewers.
319
320
M A S K H A D O V, A S L A N A L I Y E V I C H
the Marat. The same year, after Soviets captured Sevastopol, they renamed the
citys main street for Marat.
Further Reading
Bax, Ernest. Jean-Paul Marat: The Peoples Friend. London: G. Richards, 1901.
Conner, Clifford. Jean Paul Marat: Scientist and Revolutionary. Buffalo, NY: Humanity
Books, 1997.
Gottschalk, Louis. Jean Paul Marat: A Study in Radicalism. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1967.
MASKHADOV, ASLAN ALIYEVICH

(19512005)
On March 8, 2005, Nikolay Patrushev, chief of Russias Federal Security Service (FSB), announced completion of a paramilitary operation targeting Aslan
Maskhadov, third president of the former Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and ongoing leader of guerrilla resistance against Russian occupation of Chechnya. According to Patrushev, FSB commandos hoped to capture Maskhadov alive, but
he was accidentally slain by a hand grenade tossed into his command bunker.
That claim was later refuted by ballistic evidence indicating that Maskhadov was
shot by his nephew/bodyguard, Viskhan Hadzhimuradov. One of four guerrillas caught alive in the May 8 raid, Hadzhimuradov claimed that he could not
remember shooting Maskhadov after the grenade exploded in their bunker, but
said, My uncle always told me to shoot him if he is wounded and his capture
is imminent. He said that if he is taken prisoner, he would be mistreated like
Saddam Hussein had been. Russian troops held Maskhadovs remains until
April 2006, then buried them in an unmarked grave, refusing to tell his relatives
the location on grounds that Maskhadov was criminally responsible for many
separate serious crimes on the territory of the Russian Federation, and that secret burial of his corpse was being pursued for our protection.
Aslan Maskhadov was born at Shakai, a village in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist
Republic (now Kazakhstan), on September 21, 1951. His parents were Chechens, deported from their homeland during Operation Lentil, ordered by Russian dictator Josef Stalin in 1944, as the climax of a four-year rebellion against
Russian rule. The family returned to Chechnya in 1957, and Maskhadov later
joined the Soviet army, graduating from its Tbilisi Artillery School in 1972,
then from Leningrads Mikhail Kalinin Military Artillery Academy in 1981. In
1991, as chief of staff for Soviet missile and artillery forces in Vilnius, Lithuania,
Maskhadov participated in the January Events that left 13 anti-Soviet protesters dead and more than 1,000 injured. He retired from military service as
a colonel, in 1992, following dissolution of the Soviet Union, and returned to
Chechnya. In March 1994, Maskhadov was appointed to serve as chief of staff
for his homelands armed forces.
M C G L I N C H E Y, D O M I N I C
The First Chechen War against Russian rule erupted on December 11, 1994,
with Maskhadov serving as first deputy chairman of the State Defence Council under President Dzhokhar Dudayev. He joined in peace talks at Grozny, in
June 1995, but the war continued for another 14 months, until the Khasavyurt
Accord achieved a temporary ceasefire. Appointed as prime minister on October 17, 1996, Maskhadov continued serving defense minister and army chief
of staff, while declaring himself a presidential candidate in elections scheduled
for January 1997. He won 60 percent of the popular vote in that contest, and
assumed office on February 12, 1997. Three months later, he signed a peace
treaty with Russian president Boris Yeltsin, but tension continued to simmer
between the two nations.
As president, Maskhadov inherited a republic infested with organized crime,
rife with ransom kidnappings, in which regional warlords constantly challenged
his authority. Maskhadov responded by imposing Islamic Sharia law, with
courts that imposed draconian sentences for crimes including adultery and
blasphemy. Several assassination attempts quickly followedon July 23, 1998;
March 21, 1999; and April 10, 1999with Maskhadovs assailants employing
bombs and antitank rockets. Maskhadov blamed Russian agents for those attacks, and was in turn accused of invading Dagestan on August 7, 1999, a raid
in fact carried out by warlord Shamil Basayevs Islamic International Brigade,
over Maskhadovs protests. Russia also blamed Chechnya for a series of apartment bombings that killed 293 people and wounded 651 in September 1999.
A Second Chechen War ensued, officially concluded with a Russian victory
in May 2000. Maskhadov refused to surrender, leading a guerrilla insurgency
that included terrorist actions both in Chechnya and Russianotably including the Dubrovka Theater siege of October 2002, which claimed at least 170
lives, and the Nazran raid of June 2004, which killed 98 police officers in the
Republic of Ingushetia. Finally repulsed by the Beslan school siege that left 385
dead in September 2004, Maskhadov issued an order suspending all military
action, other than self-defense, on January 15, 2005. The unilateral ceasefire
was supposed to facilitate peace talks, but Russias FSB took advantage of the
lull to eliminate their primary rival.
Further Reading
Schaefer, Robert. The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: From Gazavat to
Jihad. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, 2011.
Smith, Sebastian. Allahs Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya. London: Tauris Parke,
2005.
MCGLINCHEY, DOMINIC (19541994)

On February 10, 1994, Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) chief of staff
Dominic Mad Dog McGlinchey made a call from a public phone booth in
Drogheda, County Louth, in the Republic of Ireland. While he was engaged in
321
322
M C G L I N C H E Y, D O M I N I C
conversation, a car stopped nearby and two gunmen emerged, shooting McGlinchey 14 times with instantly fatal results. The crime remains officially unsolved today, with suggested suspects including loyalist paramilitary forces, the
rival Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), state security forces, or some
element of Irish organized crime. At McGlincheys funeral in Bellaghy, Northern
Ireland, Bernadette Devlin McAliskeyherself a target of would-be assassins
in 1981condemned journalists who accused McGlinchey or gangster activity as curs and dogs. May everyone of them rot in hell. They have taken away
Dominic McGlincheys character and they will stand judgment for it. He was
the finest Republican of them all. He never dishonored the cause he believed
in. His war was with the armed soldiers and the police of this state.
Dominic McGlinchey was one of 10 children born to staunch republican
parents in Bellaghy, raised from infancy to oppose British rule in Northern
Ireland. In August 1971, he was arrested and detained for 10 months without charges, on suspicion of participating in PIRA activity. Still devoted to the
struggle, he was jailed again in 1973, on weapons charges, and in 1977 for
hijacking a police car, threatening its driver with a gun. While confined at
Portlaoise Prison, in 1982, McGlinchey quarreled with PIRA leaders over the
proper tactics and course of armed struggle, prompting his expulsion from the
organization. Paroled before years end, he quickly found a place in the competing INLA, enlisting as operations officer for South Derry and winning promotion to chief of staff within six months.
McGlinchey streamlined the INLA and set it on a path of more aggressive
and effective action. British agents blamed him for planning a bombing at the
Droppin Well Bar, in Ballykelly, which killed 11 soldiers and six civilians in
December 1982, among other violent actions. Six days after that blast, on December 12, authorities tried to trap McGlinchey at a roadblock, but killed two
other INLA members instead. That bungled ambush was apparently planed by
The Det14 Field Security and Intelligence Companya unit of the British
armys Intelligence Corps, known for collaboration with Protestant gunmen in
acts of loyalist terrorism.
In addition to government plots and McGlincheys squabbles with the PIRA,
Irish historian Tim Pat Coogan reports that McGlinchey ran the INLA in autocratic fashion, executing members who challenged his authority and thereby
making enemies. In one such case, members of one INLA chapter were killed
for misappropriating 50,000 collected from a mail fraud operation mounted
to finance the organization. Some observers believe that internecine feud may
have resulted in McGlincheys death, years after the fact.
Meanwhile, in March 1994, he was wounded and captured in a shootout
with Garda officers in Ralahine, County Clare. Extradited to Northern Ireland, McGlinchey was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, but an appellate court overturned his conviction in October 1985, citing
M C K I N L E Y, W I L L I A M , J R .
insufficient evidence. Police returned McGlinchey to the Republic of Ireland,

where he faced a 10-year term on firearms charges. Gunmen murdered his
wife at home, in Dundalk, on January 31, 1987, and authorities denied McGlincheys request to attend her funeral.
Paroled once more in March 1993, McGlinchey announced plans to investigate criminal money laundering conducted by his longtime loyalist adversaries of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Billy Wright, commander of the UVFs
Mid-Ulster Brigade, tried to kill McGlinchey in June 1993 and was subsequently imprisoned, murdered in custody by the INLA in December 1997. By
that time, unknown others had succeeded in eliminating McGlinchey, where
Wright had failed.
The INLA outlived McGlinchey, and continued guerrilla warfare into the 21st
century. McGlincheys son, Declan, was jailed on explosives charges in October 2006, linked to a July bombing in Bellaghy. He was later cleared in that
case, then arrested on suspicion of killing a policeman in March 2009. Those
charges were also dismissed, as prosecutors convicted members of a rival republican group, the Continuity IRA, for the murder in March 2012.
Further Reading
Holland, Jack, and Henry McDonald. INLA: Deadly Divisions. Dublin: Poolbeg Press,
1994.
Taylor, Peter. Brits: The War against the IRA. London: Bloomsbury, 2002.
MCKINLEY, WILLIAM, JR. (18431901)

On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley visited the Pan-American
Exposition in Buffalo, New York, as part of a protracted national tour that had
seen his wife fall gravely ill in California, three months earlier. McKinleys secretary, George Cortelyou, warned of possible danger at the exhibition, twice
deleting a visit to the fairs Temple of Music from McKinleys schedule, but the
president insisted on keeping the appointment without any special security
precautions. While in the Temple, shaking hands with well-wishers at 4:07 P.M.,
McKinley was shot twice at close range by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. One bullet grazed the president; the other pierced his torso and was never found by
attending physicians. Although initially supposed to be recovering, McKinley
developed gangrene from his wound and died at 2:15 A.M. on September 14.
Czolgosz was convicted of murder on September 23, 1901, and died in New
Yorks electric chair on October 29. Authorities doused his corpse with acid to
dissolve it, before he was buried at Sing Sing Prison.
William McKinley Jr. was born in Niles, Ohio, on January 29, 1843, the seventh of nine children raised in a strict Methodist household. He joined the Union
army in June 1861 and served under Major (and future president) Rutherford
323
324
Hayes, who became McKinleys

political mentor. Ending the war
as a second lieutenant, McKinley studied law with an Ohio attorney and was admitted to the
bar in 1867. In 1869 he was
elected as a county prosecutor,
then lost his bid for a second
term two years later. His legal
defense of indicted labor organizers helped McKinley win a
congressional seat in 1876, and
his friendship with presidentelect Hayes further advanced
McKinleys political career.
Unseated by a Democratic rival
in 1882, McKinley vowed to
quit politics, but changed his
President William McKinley, shot by anarchist mind in time to win another
congressional term in 1884,
Leon Czolgosz in 1901. (Library of Congress)
holding that post until 1891,
when voters chose him as Ohios governor. Political connections, including close
ties to Ohio machine boss Mark Hanna, secured McKinley the GOPs (Grand
Old Party) presidential nomination in 1896, and he defeated rival William
Jennings Bryan by a margin of some 600,000 votes. He repaid his backers by
arranging Hannas appointment to the U.S. Senate in 1897.
The most significant event of McKinleys first presidential term was the
Spanish-American War, a four-month imperialistic contest that left the United
States in charge of Spanish colonies including Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. That splendid little war also made a national hero of
Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, winning Teddy the post of McKinleys running
mate in 1900, since Vice President Garret Hobart had died in office on November 21, 1899. McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan a second time in
1900, this time by more than 857,000 votes. The president was still celebrating his reelection when Leon Czolgosz shot him in Buffalo, six months after
McKinleys inauguration.
Teddy Roosevelt succeeded McKinley as president, launching in the United
States a progressive era and astounding old-line Republicans with his attacks on monopolies and support for organized labor, coupled with federal
legislation to protect consumers from tainted food and medicine. When he declined to seek reelection in 1908, the GOP suffered a schism between progressive and conservative elements, but confirmed the nomination of Roosevelts
hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft. Taft, in turn, handed a third defeat to William Jennings Bryan, who retired thereafter to private legal practice
and the Chautauqua lecture circuit.
McKinleys assassination drove Congress to demand better security for
U.S. presidents. Accordingly, the U.S. Secret Servicefounded in 1865, but
confined to investigation of counterfeiting and federal fraud violationswas
ordered to assume responsibility for safety of the president in 1902. Sixtysix years later, following the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy, Secret
ANARCHISM
Anarchism is broadly defined as a philosophy opposing hierarchical
government and supporting a stateless society. Within that wide generalization, many different schools of thought exist, ranging from radical
left-wing ideologies to far-right libertarianism. Some historians trace the
first anarchist philosophy ideology to Taoist philosopher Laozi, in the
6th century BCE, evolving through the ages to find expression from British author William Godwin (17561836). The first person to publicly
call himself an anarchist was French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (18091865), although he altered his self-designation to federalist
in 1848. That same year, revolutions against traditional authority rocked
10 European nations, most of which failed to unseat reigning monarchies.
The short-lived Paris Commune of spring 1871 was another radical experiment, doomed by a falling out between anarchists and more doctrinaire Marxists. Although many anarchists were also pacifists, Johann
Most (18461906) argued for violencepropaganda of the deedas
a means of deposing monarchs or other heads of state. By the 1880s,
bombing and assassination were staple tactics of the radical anarchist
movement, labeled illegalism. Aside from President McKinley, famous
victims of anarchist assassins include Tsar Alexander II of Russia, Spanish prime minister Antonio Cnovas del Castillo, King Umberto I of Italy,
King Carlos I of Portugal, and King George I of Greece. State repression
inevitably followed, creating an escalating climate of violence. In the
United States, a rash of anarchist bombings after World War I culminated
with a blast on Wall Street, in New York City, that killed 38 persons and
seriously wounded 143 on September 16, 1920. Following World War II,
anarchism resurfaced internationally with a network of organizations including the Mexican Anarchist Federation, the French Fdration Anarchiste, Italys Federazione Anarchica Italiana, and Koreas League of Free
Social Constructors, among others.
325
326
MEDICI, GIULIANO DE
Service protection was extended to all major presidential and vice presidential
candidates and nominees.
Further Reading
Johns, A. Wesley. The Man Who Shot McKinley. South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes,
1970.
Miller, Scott. The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of
the American Century. New York: Random House, 2011.
Morgan, H. Wayne. William McKinley and His America. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003.
Rauchway, Eric. Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelts America. New
York: Hill and Wang, 2004.
MEDICI, GIULIANO DE (14531478)

On Sunday, April 26, 1478, Giuliano de Medici attended High Mass at the Duomo in Florence, Italy, with his elder brother, Lorenzo the Magnificent. Recognized as co-rulers of Florence, the Medicis were patrons of the arts and bankers
to the Vatican, an exalted position inspiring both awe and envy. That morning,
before an audience of 10,000 worshipers, the brothers were attacked by rivals
Francesco de Pazzi and Bernardo Bandi. Giuliano de Medici died in his pew,
his skull cloven with a sword and his torso punctured by 19 stab wounds.
Lorenzo, also injured, managed to escape in the confusion and survived to
orchestrate revenge against his enemies.
Giuliano de Medici was a Florentine native, born in 1453, fourth child and
second son of Piero The Gouty de Medici, de facto ruler of Florence from
1464 to 1469. The House of Medici (medical doctors) had, by then, established prominence through their Medici Bank, founded in 1397, the financial
backer of assorted factories and a supporter of the Vatican. The line would also
spawn four popes (including Clement VII, Giuliano de Medicis illegitimate
son) and two regent queens of France, while reigning as hereditary dukes of
Florence and Tuscany.
A jealous, less powerful family of Florentine bankers, the Pazzis, schemed
incessantly to supplant the Medicis, encouraged from 1471 by Pope Sixtus IV.
Sixtus opened hostilities by purchasing the lordship of Imola, in the province of
Bologna, which Lorenzo de Medici coveted. Francesco de Pazzi financed that
transaction, after promising Lorenzo that he would not help Sixtus in any moves
against the Medicis, and Sixtus rewarded the Pazzis with a monopoly on alum
mined at Tolga (an essential substance used in dyeing fabrics for the Florentine
textile industry). The pope then named Girolamo Riario as governor of Imola,
while appointing Francesco Salviatiscion of another banking family opposed
to the Medicisas archbishop of Pisa. When Salviati and Francesco de Pazzi
hatched their final plot to depose the Medicis by force, Pope Sixtus promised his
MEDICI, GIULIANO DE
support, with the weak proviso as long as no one is killed. Less concerned with
bloodless victory, conspirator Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino and condottieri (mercenary warlord) for the Vatican, stationed 600 troops outside Florence, prepared to strike when the order was given.
In fact, however, the assassins botched their bid to kill Lorenzo de Medici
at the Duomo, and coordinated moves against the Gonfaloniere of Justice and
the nine-member Signoria of Florence also failed. Still hopeful of success,
Francesco and Jacopo de Pazzi convened a rally of supporters at the Palazzo
della Signoria (now Palazzo Vecchio) on April 27, chanting for liberty. To the
Pazzis surprise, enraged Florentines attacked the rally and hurled Francesco
to his death from the palazzos roof, then dragged him through the streets and
tossed his corpse into the Arno River. The mob also hanged Francesco Salviati,
and killed other suspected conspirators on sight. Jacopo de Pazzi managed to
escape, hiding in San Gimignano, but was hunted down and killed there in
1480. In his absence, the surviving Pazzis were divested of their titles and possessions and driven into exile.
With the conspiracys failure, Pope Sixtus IV placed Florence under interdict, forbidding its residents from participating in mass or communion. He
enlisted Ferdinand I, king of Naples, but Lorenzo the Magnificent trumped
Sixtus by sailing to Naples and placing himself in Ferdinands custody for three
POPE CLEMENT VII (14781534)

Giulio di Giuliano de Medici was born in Florence, 30 days after his
fathers assassination. Although Giuliano de Medici had never married
Giulios mother, Fioretta Gorini, a loophole in canon law granted the
child legitimacy on grounds that his parents were betrothed to wed when
Giuliano died. Orphaned in infancy, Giulio was adopted and educated
by uncle Lorenzo the Magnificent, and subsequently made a knight of
Rhodes and Grand Prior of Capua. When cousin Giovanni de Medici became Pope Leo X, he named Giulio archbishop of Florence. Consecrated
as a cardinal in September 1513, he held that post until 1523, when he
succeeded short-lived Pope Adrian VI. He survived the Sack of Rome by
Cardinal Pompeo Colonnas troops in 1527, but his power was sapped by
that incident and by his inability to keep Henry VIII or England from divorcing his first wife to marry Anne Boleyn. Clement died in Rome after
eating a poison mushroom in September 1534. That circumstance encouraged speculation that he may have been assassinated, but no investigation resulted. Two months later, Englands parliament passed an Act of
Supremacy, establishing an independent Church of England.
327
328
MITRIONE, DANIEL ANTHONY
months, while negotiating a truce. Lorenzo survived until 1492, ruling Florence and adopting Giulianos illegitimate son, grooming him for his future role
as cardinal and pope. The Pazzis returned to Florence in 1494, when Lorenzos
sonPiero the Unfortunateproved himself incompetent and was deposed
by King Charles VIII of France.
Further Reading
Hibbert, Christopher. The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall. New York: William Morrow, 1999.
Knecht, R. J. Catherine deMedici. Harlow, United Kingdom: Longman, 1998.
Martines, Lauro. April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici. New York: Oxford
Parks, Tim. Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
Unger, Miles. Magnifico: The Brilliant and Violent Times of Lorenzo de Medici. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2008.
MITRIONE, DANIEL ANTHONY (19201970)

On July 31, 1970, members of the Tupamaros National Liberation Movement
kidnapped Daniel Mitrione, a U.S. citizen assigned to the U.S. Office of Public
Safety in Montevideo, Uruguay. The guerrillas demanded release of 150 political prisoners in exchange for Mitriones safe return, but Uruguayan authorities
rejected the demand, supported in their decision by the U.S. State Department.
On August 10, police found Mitrione dead in an abandoned car. He had been
shot twice in the head, and also had a shoulder woundsustained during his
kidnappingwhich had been treated in captivity. Tupamaros spokesmen said
Mitrione was slain in retaliation for the deaths of student protestors, killed by
police whom Mitrione had trained in riot-control techniques.
Daniel Mitrione was born in Italy on August 4, 1920, and emigrated to the
United States as a child, with his parents. He entered law enforcement at age 25,
as an officer of the Richmond (Indiana) Police Department, and briefly joined
the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1959, before shifting to the State Departments International Cooperation Administration (ICA) the following year.
That job took him to Brazil, where Mitrione spent the next seven years teaching advanced counterinsurgency techniques to police and military officers.
Congress dissolved the ICA in 1961, transferring its functions to the new U.S.
Agency for International Development (AID), and Mitrione continued his duties without interruption.
Apologists would later claim that Mitriones work involved instruction in responsible and humane police administration, but the truthonly revealed after
his deathwas rather different. In fact, while collaborating with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he taught courses in torture, both in Brazil and later, after
MITRIONE, DANIEL ANTHONY
moving to Uruguay in 1969. There, operating from a private home in Montevideo with a basement interrogation chamber beneath its garage, Mitrione held regular classes, employing kidnap victims as his subjects. Speaking to a Cuban exile,
Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, Mitrione described his technique as employing the
precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.
Mitrione went on to say, When you get what you want, and I always get it, it
may be good to prolong the session a little to apply another softening-up. Not to
extract information now, but only as a political measure, to create a healthy fear
of meddling in subversive matters. You must always leave him some hope . . . a
distant light. A premature death means a failure by the technician. Its important
to know in advance if we can permit ourselves the luxury of the subjects death.
According to Hevia, he watched Mitrione personally kill four subjects with
electric shocks. As he described it in his published memoir:
Soon things turned unpleasant. As subjects for the first testing they took beggars, known in Uruguay as bichicomes, from the outskirts of Montevideo, as well
as a woman apparently from the frontier area of Brazil. There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the effects of different voltages on different parts
of the human body, as well as demonstrating the use of a drug which induces
vomitingI dont know why or what forand another chemical substance.
The four of them died.
SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS

Founded in Panama, in 1946, the School of the Americas (SOA) was
initially created to instruct Latin American and Caribbean authorities in
anticommunist counterinsurgency techniques. Although theoretically
committed to maintenance of ethical law enforcement, it has been derided by critics as a School for Dictators, School for Assassins, and
a Nursery for Death Squads. Panamanian president Jorge Illueca once
referred to the SOA as the biggest base for destabilization in Latin America. Training an average 2,000 soldiers and police officers per year, the
school moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984, and in 2001 was formally renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Allegations of training in torture, subversion, and assassination
persist to the present day, promulgated by a group founded in 1990, the
School of the Americas Watch. In El Salvador alone, under President
Ronald Reagans administration, the United Nations Truth Commission
identified 49 SOA graduates as participants in a series of massacres and
individual assassinations. In 1992, of 246 Colombian officers charged
with acts of brutality, 105 were identified SOA students.
329
330
M O A W A D, R E N
William Cantrell, a CIA operations officer stationed in Uruguay, confirmed

that Mitrione received special torture equipment from the United States,
shipped in diplomatic pouches to avoid discovery. He said: One of the pieces
of equipment that was found useful was a wire so very thin that it could be fitted into the mouth between the teeth and by pressing against the gum increase
the electrical charge.
Further Reading
Langguth, A. J. Hidden Terrors: The Truth about U.S. Police Operations in Latin America.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
McCoy, Alfred. A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on
Terror. New York: Owl Books, 2006.
Otterman, Michael. American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond.
Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2007.
Weschler, Lawrence. A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990.
MOAWAD, REN (19251989)

On November 22, 1989, Lebanese president Ren Moawad attended his nations Independence Day celebration in Beirut. Only 17 days had elapsed since
Moawads inauguration, but his tenure would proceed no further. As he returned from the festivities to his home in West Beirut, a 550-pound bomb
exploded near his car, killing Moawad and 23 others. Despite public accusations lodged against various suspects, no formal charges were filed and the case
remains officially unsolved today.
Ren Moawad was born in Zgharta, North Lebanon, on April 17, 1925, to
a Maronite Christian family. He was educated at Tripolis De La Salle School
and at Aintouras Saint Joseph College, before obtaining a law degree from Beiruts Saint Joseph University in 1947. Former prime minister Abdallah El-Yafi
welcomed Moawad as a partner in his law firm prior to 1951, when Moawad
opened his own office in Tripoli. That same year witnessed Moawads entry into
politics, with an unsuccessful campaign for a seat in the National Assembly.
In 1952, police detained Moawad for participating in an uprising that forced
President Bechara El Khoury to resign. Although soon liberated, Moawads outspoken opposition to successor Camille Chamoun prompted him to leave Lebanon, spending the next five years in Syria and Egypt.
Moawad came home in 1957, and won his second bid for a National Assembly seat that year; he was subsequently reelected in 1960, 1964, 1968, and
1972. He also served in cabinet posts under Prime Minister Rashid Karami,
first as minister of posts and telecommunications (October 1961 through
February 1964), then as minister of public works ( January through November 1969). Prime Minister Shafik Wazzan appointed Moawad as minister of
M O H A M M E D , M U R TA L A R A M AT
national education and fine arts in October 1980, serving through September 1982.
Much of Moawads political career played out against the background of
Lebanons multifaceted civil war, begun with violence between Christians and
Muslims in April 1975. Over the next 15 years, Moawad advocated nonviolent solutions to the countrys ethnic and religious schisms, stating his premise
as follows: There can be no country or dignity without unity of the people,
and there can be no unity without agreement, and there can be no agreement
without conciliation, and there can be no conciliation without forgiveness and
compromise. The Taif Agreement, ratified on November 4, 1989, ostensibly
ended the fightingalthough Syrian troops remained active in Lebanon until
April 2005and Lebanons National Assembly met the following day, electing Moawad as the countrys first president since Amine Gemayel left office
in 1988. Elias Hrawi succeeded Moawad on November 24, two days after the
fatal bombing in Beirut.
No serious investigation of Moawads assassination was ever attempted. Syrian spokesmen blamed Michel Naim Aoun, a former Lebanese army officer and
head of the countrys second largest political party, the Free Patriotic Movement. Aoun served as prime minister from September 1988 to October 1990,
in one of two rival governments, and he is currently a member of parliament.
No specific evidence against Aoun was offered by detractors who accused him
of plotting Moawads murder.
Further Reading
Johnson, Michael. All Honourable Men: The Social Origins of War in Lebanon. London:
I.B. Tauris, 2002.
Obalance, Edgar. Civil War in Lebanon, 197592. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1998.
MOHAMMED, MURTALA RAMAT (19381976)

On February 13, 1976, Lieutenant Colonel Buka Suka Dimka staged
an abortive coup against the Nigerian government led by General Murtala Mohammed. The rebels first act was an ambush of Mohammeds vehicle in the Ioki neighborhood of Lagos, while he was en route to his office
at Dodan Barracks. The attackers killed Mohammed, his driver, an orderly,
and his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Akintunde Akinsehinwa. Despite that initial success, loyal troops crushed the rebellion, arresting Dimka and 38 other
conspirators, while alleged ringleader Yakubu Jack Dan-Yumma Gowon
deposed as head of state by Mohammed in July 1975escaped to England, where authorities declined to extradite him. Dimka and the rest were
convicted by a court-martial and publicly executed at Bar Beach, in Lagos, by
a firing squad.
331
332
M O H A M M E D, M U R T A L A R A M A T
Murtala Mohammed was

born in Kano, Nigeria, on November 8, 1938, and completed
his education at Zarias Government (now Barewa) College in 1957. He joined the
Nigerian army and, because
Nigeria was then a British colony, trained as an officer cadet
at Englands Sandhurst Royal
Academy. Commissioned as a
second lieutenant in 1961, a
year after Nigeria achieved independence, Mohammed advanced to the rank of brigadier
over the next decade. Further
study in England, at the Joint
Services Staff College, prepared him for his first political
Nigerian general Murtala Mohammed died in a appointmentas commissioner
for communicationsin 1974.
military coup, in 1976. (Associated Press)
At the same time, Mohammed
kept his military post and prepared to move against General Yakubu Gowon,
who had reneged on his pledge to restore civilian rule by 1976. On July 25,
1975, while Gowon attended a meeting of the Organization of African Unity in
Uganda, Major General Joseph Nanven Garba announced his overthrow, then
named Murtala Mohammed as the new head of state.
Over the next 201 days, Mohammed gained wide popular support with
a variety of measures that included granting 12 of 25 ministerial posts on a
new Federal Executive Council to civilians and setting up of a public complaints commission to address grievances against the government. He created 19 states from the 12 established in 1967, while extending federal
authority and restricting the arbitrary power of state governors. Mohammed
purged some 10,000 federal employees on grounds of age, health, incompetence, or malpractice, and began demobilizing 100,000 troops from the
armys inflated ranks. He also scrapped a rigged census from 1973, which
favored northern Nigeria in electoral matters, and reinstated a more evenhanded tabulation from 1963. His foreign policy of Nigeria first aimed to
reduce inflation by aligning Nigeria with the Organization of the Petroleum
Exporting Countries, reducing the amount of currency in circulation, restricting foreign capitals access to certain Nigerian districts, and supporting
the Soviet-backed Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola.
M O N D L A N E , E D U A R D O C H I VA M B O
NIGERIAN CIVIL WAR

On July 6, 1967, Nigerias southeastern provinces attempted to secede
and form the independent nation of Biafra. Federal troops launched a
police action against the rebel districts, led primarily by northern officers from the Hausa ethnic group, whereas their opponents were primarily Igbos. The fighting reached a stalemate in 1968, amid allegations that
Nigerian forces were waging a war of starvation and genocide. The Republic of Biafra officially rejoined Nigeria on January 15, 1970, and later
agitation for a new secession movement proved fruitless. One legacy of
the war was creation of the independent humanitarian organization Mdecins Sans Frontires (Doctors Without Borders), which remains active today, honored with a Seoul Peace Prize in 1996 and a Nobel Peace
Prize in 1999.
None of those moves endeared Mohammed to the West, and in the wake of
his assassination, allegations of conspiracy were leveled against the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the Israeli Mossad. Despiteor because ofthat
foreign opposition, Mohammed remains one of the recognized national heroes
of the Nigerian nation. General Olusegun Obasanjo succeeded Mohammed
as Nigerias military head of state, until October 1979, and subsequently was
elected to a term as the countrys civilian president, serving from May 1999 to
May 2007.
Further Reading
Campbell, John. Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink. Plymouth, England: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.
El-Rufai, Nasir. The Accidental Public Servant. Seattle, WA: CreateSpace, 2011.
Osaghae, Eghosa. Crippled Giant: Nigeria Since Independence. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
MONDLANE, EDUARDO CHIVAMBO

(19201969)
On February 3, 1969, a package arrived by mail at the office of FRELIMOthe
Liberation Front of Mozambiquein Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The parcel was
addressed to FRELIMO president Eduardo Mondlane, and contained a book.
When Mondlane opened the book, a bomb exploded in his hands, killing him
instantly. The crime remains officially unsolved today, with various observers blaming dissident FRELIMO members or agents of Portugals secret police,
bent on maintaining Mozambiques 450-year status as a Portuguese colony.
333
334
M O N D L A N E , E D U A R D O C H I VA M B O
Eduardo Mondlane was born on June 20, 1920, at Manjacaze, in Gaza Province, the fourth of 16 sons sired by a Tsonga tribal chieftain. He worked as a
shepherd through early adolescence, while completing his primary education
at local schools, then enrolled at a Swiss-Presbyterian college in South Africas
Transvaal Province. From there, Mondlane proceeded to study at the Jan Hofmeyer School of Social Work and Johannesburgs University of the Witwatersrand, until the institution of apartheid resulted in expulsion of that schools
black students in 1949. The following year, Mondlane enrolled at the University of Lisbon, then transferred to Ohios Oberlin College in 1951. He graduated in 1953, with a degree in anthropology and sociology, before pursuing
doctoral studies at Northwestern University in Illinois, finally obtaining his
PhD from Harvard University.
By 1957, Mondlane was back in Africa, working as a researcher for the
Trusteeship Department of the United Nations (UN). The UNs ban on overt
political activity cramped his style, and Mondlane soon resigned to serve as an
assistant professor of anthropology at New Yorks Syracuse University, developing the schools East African Studies Program. In 1963, Mondlane left that post
and moved to Tanzania, immersing himself full-time in his homelands struggle
for independence with FRELIMO, founded the previous year. He arrived in the
second year of the Mozambican War of Independence, and was soon elected as
FRELIMOs president, operating from Dar es Salaam.
Mondlanes majority faction supported guerrilla war against Portuguese
colonial authorities, coupled with a campaign to establish Mozambique as a
socialist society. Opponents within FRELIMO, led by Lazaro Nkavandame
and Uria Simango, opposed a radical overhaul of Mozambican society
or, in the view of their critics, supported replacement of the ruling white
elite with a black FRELIMO elite. A party congress held in July 1968 chose
the socialist position and elected Mondlane to a second term as president,
while the war in Mozambique continued. Some historians believe that vote
prompted supporters of Nkavandame and Simango to assassinate Mondlane
seven months later.
Others blame Portugals Polcia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE:
International and State Defense Police) for Mondlanes murder. Founded in
1945, the PIDE changed its title shortly after Mondlanes assassination, becoming the General Security Directorate (DGS). Mozambiques liberation
struggle continued until September 8, 1974, when a ceasefire was declared
with negotiations proceeding toward independence in June 1975. That victory was occasioned, at least in part, by Portugals own Carnation Revolution of April 1974, which deposed the dictatorship established in 1926.
Peace remained elusive, however, as civil war erupted in Mozambique during May 1977 and continued through October 1992, claiming an estimated
one million lives.
MOORE, HARRY TYSON
Further Reading
Finnegan, William. A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Mondlane, Eduardo. The Struggle for Mozambique. Harmondsworth, United Kingdom:
Penguin Books, 1969.
Saul, John. Invasion from the Outside? The Roots and Resolution of Mozambiques
Un/Civil War. In Civil Wars in Africa: Roots and Resolution. Montreal: McGill-Queens
MOORE, HARRY TYSON (19051951)

Harry Moore, executive director of Floridas National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, celebrated the 25th anniversary of his marriage
to wife Harriette on Christmas Day, 1951. That night, a bomb exploded beneath the bedroom of their home in Mims, demolishing the house. Harry died
en route to a hospital in Sanford, and his wife survived until January 3, 1952.
Despite investigation by state authorities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the double murderand first assassination of a National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) official during the postwar civil
rights movementremains officially unsolved today.
Harry Moore was born in Houston, Florida, on November 18, 1905, lost his
father at age nine, and was raised by three maternal aunts when his widowed
mother proved unable to support the family alone. He earned a normal (teaching) degree from Bethune-Cookman College, at Daytona Beach, in 1936, and
began his career as a teacher in Cocoa, Florida, later advancing to serve as principal of the Titusville Colored School in Brevard County. In 1934, Moore and
his wife, also a teacher, founded a local branch of the NAACP, pursuing causes
that included equal pay for teachers of all races, prosecution of lynchers, registration of black voters, and legal challenges to Floridas whites-only primary
elections. In 1944, Moore founded the Progressive Voters League, registering
116,000 African American voters by 1950.
Those activities made Moore a marked man in Jim Crowera Florida. State
authorities fired Moore and his wife from their teaching positions in 1946,
whereupon he turned to NAACP work full-time, recruiting 10,000 members
by 1948. The following year, Moore became embroiled in the Groveland rape
case, involving four black defendants accused of assaulting a white woman.
Today, most historians agree that no rape occurred, but at the time, the very
allegation sparked racist hysteria. A posse killed one suspect, and three others
were arrested and tortured by sheriffs deputies until they confessed. At trial,
two were sentenced to die, and the thirdonly 16 years oldreceived a life
prison term. More led a personal investigation of the case, collaborating with
attorneys who appealed those verdicts and won an order for a new trial from
335
336
M O R O, A L D O
the U.S. Supreme Court in April 1951. Seven months later, while transporting
two of the defendants from prison to court, sheriff Willis McCall shot both at
close range, killing one and gravely wounding the other. Survivor Walter Irvin
was convicted and condemned a second time; his sentence was later commuted to life, with parole granted in 1968.
Moores civil rights campaigns and the Groveland case sparked a revival of
the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in Florida, producing a reign of terror against blacks,
Catholics, and Jews. Florida suffered 11 racist bombings in 1951, before the
blast that killed the Moores, plus several botched attempts and other KKK
crimes including homicides and floggings. Sheriff McCallan open Klan supporter, if not an actual memberescaped indictment in the 1951 shootings
and remained in office until 1972, when Governor Reuben Askew suspended
him for beating a black prisoner to death in the Lake County jail. Around the
same time, author Stetson Kennedy named McCall as a suspect in the Moore
bombing, but insufficient evidence existed to indict him.
Florida attorney general Charles Crist Jr. reopened Moores case in 2005, announcing the results of his investigation in August 2006. That report named
four deceased KKK members as suspects in the case. They included: Earl
Brooklyn and Tillman Belvin, both of whom died from natural causes within
a year of the bombing; Joseph Neville Cox, alleged ringleader of the plot, who
committed suicide after an FBI interview in 1952; and Edward Spivey, a Klansman who implicated Cox prior to dying from cancer in 1978.
See also: Ku Klux Klan (1866 ).
Further Reading
Green, Ben. Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, Americas First Civil
Rights Martyr. New York: The Free Press, 1999.
Newton, Michael. The Invisible Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Florida. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001.
Saunders, Robert. Bridging the Gap: Continuing the Florida NAACP Legacy of Harry T.
Moore. Tampa, FL: University of Tampa Press, 2000.
MORO, ALDO (19161978)

On March 16, 1978, members of the radical Red Brigades kidnapped Aldo
Moro, former prime minister of Italy and president of Christian Democracy,
Italys then-majority political party. The kidnappers stopped Moros car and its
police escort vehicle in Rome, killing five bodyguards in a fusillade from automatic weapons, then dragging Moro into a getaway car. Over the next 55 days,
the Red Brigades released nine bulletins detailing their interrogation of Moro,
detailing his supposed criticism of the Imperialist State of the Multinationals
and demanding release of imprisoned radicals in exchange for his safe return.
Moro also wrote 86 letters to his family, Pope Paul VI, and Christian Democracy
M O R O, A L D O
leaders, some highly critical of

his own party. When Italian
authorities refused to negotiate,
the kidnappers shot Moro on
May 9 and left his corpse in the
trunk of a car, directing police
to the site with a telephone call.
Aldo Moro was born in Paglie on September 23, 1916, and
graduated from high school in
Taranto before studying law at
University of Bari, obtaining
his degree in 1939. He taught
law for the next two decades,
while developing an interest
in politics. In 1946, as a member of Christian Democracy,
he was elected to Italys Constitutional Assembly, aiding in
revision of the national constitution through 1948. That
same year saw him elected Red Brigade terrorists killed Italian politician Aldo
to the Chamber of Deputies, Moro in March 1978. (Time & Life Pictures/Getty
while serving as vice minister Images)
of foreign affairs under Prime
Minister Alcide De Gasperi. Reelected to parliament in 1953, Moro also served
as minister of justice under Prime Minister Antonio Segni (19551957), and
as minister of education under successors Adone Zoli and Amintore Fanfani
(19571959).
Moro remained near the seat of power in years to come, as prime minister (19631968 and 19741976) and minister of foreign affairs (19641965,
19691972, and 19731974). In his second term as prime minister, Moro
forged a historic compromise between his party and Italian communists to
create a coalition government. Critics responded by implicating him in the
Lockheed bribery scandalinvolving political payoffs to facilitate sale of C-130
Hercules transport aircraftbut Moro was officially exonerated on March 3,
1978, two weeks before his kidnapping.
Ten Red Brigades members were identified as participants in Moros abduction and murder. Two, Alessio Casimirri and Alvaro Lojacono, fled the country and were never apprehended. Two captured in 1978Conrad Alumni and
Marina Zonireceived 50-year prison terms. Police arrested three more in
1979, including Adriana Faranda (sentenced to 15 years), Prospero Gallinari
(sentenced to life, paroled for health reasons in 1994. and Valerio Morucci
337
338
M O R O, A L D O
(sentenced to life, released in 1994). Confessed triggerman Mario Moretti remained at large until 1981, then received six life sentences but was paroled in
1998. Barbara Balzerani, arrested in 1985, received a life term and was paroled
in 2006. Rita Algranati, extradited from Egypt in 2004, remains in custody at
the time of this writing.
Conspiracy theories surrounding Moros murder include accusations directed at the secret Masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2), linked to terrorist
activities worldwide and sometimes described as a shadow state within Italy.
Other students of the case claim that the Red Brigades were infiltrated by the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or by agents of NATOs Operation Gladio, ostensibly to discredit leftist elements and the Soviet Union by promoting
random acts of terrorism. In 2005, former Christian Democracy vice-secretary
RED BRIGADES
Founded in 1970, the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) was a leftist organization based in Italy, initially pledged to creation of a revolutionary
state and Italys withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Modeled on Latin American guerrilla movements, the movements
motto was embodied in the title of its official newspaper: Mai piu Senza
Fusile (Never without a Gun). The Red Brigades began their campaign of armed struggle by sabotaging factories and staged their first
kidnappingof a factory foremanin 1972. The group committed its
first homicides in June 1974, killing two members of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement in Padua. Police captured Red Brigades founders
Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini three months later, resulting in
18-year prison terms. Notoriety from that case helped the group expand,
and its activities expanded into robbery, drug, and arms trafficking. Rightwing extremist groups responded in kind, sparking an era known in
Italy as the Years of Lead, with some 2,000 murders, plus thousands of
bombings, armed robberies, kidnappings, nonfatal shootings, and other
terrorist actions through 1981. In that year, the Red Brigades split into
two rival factions, the Communist Combatant Party (PCC) and the Union
of Combatant Communists (UCC). Both apparently dissolved in 1988,
but a new incarnationthe Red Brigades-PCCclaimed credit for two
political murders in 20022003. Five members received life prison terms
for those slayings in June 2005. In October 2007, police charged former
Red Brigades commander Cristoforo Piancone with stealing C170,000 in
a bank robbery, while he was free on a good conduct parole from a previous conviction.
MOSCONE, GEORGE RICHARD
Giovanni Galloni claimed that Moro, prior to his abduction, had described
infiltration and manipulation of the Red Brigades by CIA agents and operatives of Israels Mossad intelligence network. Similar charges of infiltration have
been labeled at traditional Italian crime syndicates, including the Sicilian Mafia
and Calabrias Ndrangheta, although neither qualifies as a left-wing or revolutionary organization.
Further Reading
Alexander, Yonah, and Dennis Pluchinsky. Europes Red Terrorists: The Fighting Communist Organizations. London: Routledge, 1992.
Drake, Richard. The Aldo Moro Murder Case. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1996.
Katz, Robert. Days of Wrath: The Ordeal of Aldo Moro, the Kidnapping, the Execution, the
Aftermath. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980.
Sciasia, Leonardo. The Moro Affair. New York: New York Review Books, 1978.
MOSCONE, GEORGE RICHARD (19291978)

On November 27, 1978, former San Francisco supervisor Daniel James White
entered City Hall to confront Mayor George Moscone. Elected to the Board
of Supervisors in 1977, White had resigned on November 10, after quarreling with rival Supervisor Harvey Milk over placement of a city rehab center
in Whites district. (White had previously angered Milk by casting the only
vote against San Franciscos new gay-rights ordinance, a project championed
by Milk.) White changed his mind about resigning on November 14, seeking
reappointment to the board, and although the mayor initially agreed, Milk and
others persuaded Moscone to pick liberal candidate Don Horzany. Whites appearance at City Hall coincided with the date of Horzanys scheduled appointment, a ceremony delayed when White shot Moscone and Milk at close range,
killing both instantly. White fled the scene, then surrendered at a nearby police
station. At trial, he pled diminished capacity due to depression. Jurors convicted
White on a reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter in May 1979, sparking
White Night riots by gays who regarded the shootings as premeditated hate
crimes. Paroled on January 7, 1984, after serving five years of a seven-year sentence, White committed suicide at home on October 21, 1985.
George Moscone was a San Francisco native, born on November 24, 1939,
the son of a state prison guard. He graduated from the University of California
Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and entered private practice in
1956. Four years later, friends in the Democratic Party encouraged him to seek
a seat in the California State Assembly, and although Moscone lost that race, he
won a seat on San Franciscos Board of Supervisors in 1963. Based on his reputation of support for racial minorities, the poor, and small business owners, he
next won a state senate seat, in 1966. There, party members chose him to serve
339
340
MOSCONE, GEORGE RICHARD
Mayor George Moscone was assassinated by retired Supervisor of the Board, Dan White
on November 27, 1978. (Bettmann/Corbis)
as Majority Leader. Voters reelected Moscone to the senate in 1970 and 1974.
His most noteworthy achievement was a bill repealing Californias old sodomy
law, which gave him a crucial advantage in San Franciscos 1975 mayoral race.
Unexpected support in that campaign came from the Peoples Temple, an
ostensibly liberal church with a mostly black congregation, led by white minister James Warren Jones. In return for that support, which helped carry certain minority precincts by 12-to-1 margins over Moscones Republican rival,
Moscone appointed Jones as chairman of the San Francisco Housing Commission. That move backfired in August 1977, when a media investigation of the
Temple revealed apparent criminal activity. Jones and most of his followers
decamped to Guyana, where the sectnow branded a cultcommitted mass
suicide nine days before Moscones murder in San Francisco. While the initial
investigation was still under way, defeated mayoral candidate John Barbagelata
agitated for a recall vote against Moscone, but Moscone easily survived that
challenge.
Dan Whites criminal defense at trial included claims that a change in his
diet, from healthy food to Twinkies and other sugary snacks, exacerbated his
depression and made him prone to explosive violence. Whatever its impact
on the jury, derisive comments concerning the Twinkie defense certainly
stimulated public condemnation of Californias statute concerning diminished
M O S H A R R A F, K H A L E D
capacity. New claims of premeditation on Whites part surfaced in 1998, when

homicide detective Frank Falzon related Whites admission of plans to kill two
other supervisors who escaped his wrath in November 1978. According to Falzon, White said, I was on a mission. I wanted four of them. Carol Ruth Silver,
she was the biggest snake . . . and Willie Brown, he was masterminding the
whole thing. At no time in that interview did White express remorse.
Further Reading
Hincle, Warren. Gayslayer! The Story of How Dan White Killed Harvey Milk and George
Moscone & Got Away With Murder. Las Vegas, NV: Silver Dollar Publishers, 1979.
Weiss, Mike. Double Play: The San Francisco City Hall Killings. Boston: Addison-Wesley,
1984.
MOSHARRAF, KHALED (19381975)

On November 6, 1975, Brigadier General Khaled Mosharraf of the Bangladesh army staged an inspection visit of the 10th East Bengal Regiments Dhaka
cantonment, accompanied by Colonels A.T.M. Haider and Najmul Huda. Less
than three months earlier, a military coup had toppled the regime of President
Mujibur Rahman, killing Rahman and most of his family, plunging Bangladesh
into political turmoil. General Mosharraf had led a coup against civilian rule on
November 3, and was anxious to confirm the loyalty of his troops three days
later, but they had a surprise in store for him. At 11:00 A.M. on November 7,
soldiers of the 10th East Bengal Regiment seized Mosharraf, Haider and Huda,
summarily executing all three.
Khaled Mosharraf was born in 1938 at Mosharrafganj, a village in Bengal
Province of then-British India (subsequently East Pakistan). He graduated from
Dhaka College in 1955 and immediately joined the Pakistan army, attending
its Military Academy in Kakul. During the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War, he was
promoted to adjutant of 4th Bengal Regiment, later receiving additional training in Britain and West Germany before serving as an instructor at the Kakul
academy.
Soon afterward, dissatisfaction in East Pakistan prompted secession, with
a declaration of independence for the new state of Bangladesh announced on
March 26, 1971. Mosharraf had assumed command of the 4th Bengal Regiments Comilla Cantonment two days earlier, and he led that unit in support
of the rebellion against Pakistan. Wounded seriously during the ensuing war
of liberation, Mosharraf and was appointed as staff officer at the Bangladesh
armys Dhaka headquarters in December 1971. Promoted to brigadier general,
he soon rose to become the chief of General Staff and was honored with the
countrys second-highest awardBir Uttom (Better among Braves)for his
wartime service.
341
342
M O U N T BAT T E N, LO U I S FR A N C I S A L B E R T V I C TO R N I C H O L A S G E O RG E
Following President Rahmans assassination in August 1975, successor

Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad promulgated an Indemnity Act on September 26,
exempting Rahmans killers from prosecution. That move enraged Mosharraf
and provoked his coup of November 3, cut short by his death during the countercoup of November 7. During his brief uprising, Mosharraf arrested and detained future president Ziaur Rahman, then a major general, but following
Mosharrafs death, Ziaur Rahman was freed and named to serve as army chief
of staff. Six years later, Rahmans presidential term would be cut short by another military coup, resulting in his death.
Although no one was charged with killing General Mosharraf, suspicion fell
on Lieutenant Colonel Mohiuddin Ahmed of the 2nd Field Artillery Regiment,
also suspected as a ringleader in President Rahmans assassination. Repeal of
the Indemnity Act in November 1996 paved the way for Ahmeds prosecution
in that case, although it finally required amendment of the national constitution to land him in court. Convicted of Rahmans murder, Ahmed was executed
on January 28, 2010.
Further Reading
Baxter, Craig. Bangladesh: From a Nation to a State. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.
Sisson, Richard, and Leo Rose. War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of
Bangladesh. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
MOUNTBATTEN, LOUIS FRANCIS

ALBERT VICTOR NICHOLAS
GEORGE (19001979)
In August 1979, Lord Louis Mountbatten joined family and friends at his traditional summer retreat in Mullaghmore, a small village in County Sligo, Republic
of Ireland, located only 12 miles from the border of strife-torn Northern Ireland.
Officers of Garda Sochnathe Irish national policewarned Mountbatten of
potential danger from border-crossing members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), but Mountbatten dismissed their concerns. On August 27,
Mountbatten and six companions went sailing on Donegal Bay, in the 30-foot
Shadow V. When they were several hundred yards offshore, a 50-pound bomb
exploded on board, demolishing the vessel and dumping its occupants into the
bay. Local fisherman rushed to the rescue and found Mountbatten still alive,
but he died before reaching shore. Others fatally injured included Baroness Doreen Knatchbull, 83-year-old mother-in-law of Mountbattens elder daughter;
Nicholas Knatchbull, Mountbattens 14-year-old grandson; and 15-year-old
crew member Paul Maxwell. Survivors included Nicholas Knatchbulls parents
and his twin brother Timothy. A PIRA spokesmen claimed credit for the blast,
M O U N T B AT T E N , L O U I S F R A N C I S A L B E R T V I C T O R N I C H O L A S G E O R G E
saying: This operation is one of the discriminate ways we can bring to the attention of the English people the continuing occupation of our country.
Louis Mountbatten was born in Windsor, England, as His Serene Highness
Prince Louis of Battenberg, on June 25, 1900. His father, Prince Louis Alexander of Battenberg, served 45 years in the British Navy, rising to First Sea Lord
of the Admiralty in 1912, but subsequent hostilities with Germany forced his
demotion and retirement. In 1917, Britains royal family cut all overt German
ties and changed their surname to Windsor. Prince Louis Alexander then became Louis Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven, and his son became
Lord Louis Mountbatten. Tutored at home to age 10, young Louis later attended Britains Naval Cadet School and joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman in World War I. Following the armistice, he studied engineering at Christs
College, Cambridge, followed by training at the Portsmouth Signal School in
1924, before he returned to the navy. In 1926, he was appointed assistant fleet
wireless and signals officer of the Mediterranean Fleet, promoted three years
later to senior wireless instructor. His first command, of a destroyer in the Pacific, came in 1934. Two years later, Mountbatten was appointed to the Admiralty at Whitehall as a member of the Fleet Air Arm.
Lord Mountbatten served with distinction and controversy during World
War II, first as commander of the 5th Destroyer Flotilla. German bombers sank
his ship, HMS Kelly, during the evacuation of Crete, on May 23, 1941. Five
months later, he was named to serve as chief of Combined Operations Headquarters, a post from which he organized the bungled Dieppe Raid of August
19, 1942, sacrificing 3,367 Canadian troops in a futile invasion of occupied
France. Another of Mountbattens brainstorms, Project Habakkuk, sought
to construct an invincible aircraft carrier from pykretea mixture of wood
pulp and icewhich was ultimately found to be impractical because of the
enormous production resources required and technical difficulties involved.
Despite those failures, Prime Minister Winston Churchill named Mountbatten
as Supreme Allied Commander of the South East Asia Command in October
1943; he remained in that post until the unit was dissolved in November 1946.
From there, Mountbatten was appointed as the last viceroy and governorgeneral of India, charged with supervising the transition from British India to
an independent nation by 1948. In fact, Indian independence was achieved in
August 1947, but for an unexpected cause, as Muslim portions of the country seceded to become East and West Pakistan. Winston Churchill, formerly a
great admirer of Mountbatten, was so angered by the viceroys roll in severing a
major portion of the British Empire that the two men never spoke again.
From India, Mountbatten moved on to command a cruiser squadron in the
Mediterranean Fleet (19481950), served as Fourth Sea Lord of the Admiralty
(19501952), as commander in chief of the Mediterranean Fleet (19521955),
and, finally, in his fathers old post as First Sea Lord of the Admiralty (19551959).
343
344
MUSSOLINI, BENITO AMILCARE ANDREA
Later, in civilian life, he served as president of the United World Colleges Organization (19681978) and as governor of the Isle of Wight (19691974). In a life
of historic attainments, it comes as no surprise that Lord Mountbatten also had
detractors. Philip Ziegler, author of Mountbattens official biography, wrote: His
vanity, though child-like, was monstrous, his ambition unbridled. The truth, in
his hands, was swiftly converted from what it was, to what it should have been.
He sought to rewrite history with cavalier indifference to the facts to magnify his
own achievements. There was a time when I became so enraged by what I began
to feel was his determination to hoodwink me that I found it necessary to place
on my desk a notice saying: REMEMBER, IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING, HE WAS
A GREAT MAN.
Following Mountbattens assassination, authorities identified the bomber as
PIRA member Thomas McMahon, who crept aboard the Shadow V the night
before its final sail, to plant a radio-controlled bomb. Ironically, McMahon was
arrested two hours before the explosion, by Garda officers who suspected him
of driving a stolen car. Forensics experts found flecks of paint from the boat
and traces of nitroglycerine on his clothes, resulting in McMahons conviction
and imposition of a life prison term on November 23, 1979. He was released
in 1988, under the Good Friday Agreement crafted to advance the Northern
Ireland peace process.
Further Reading
Butler, David. Lord Mountbatten: The Last Viceroy. New York: Pocket Books, 1986.
Knatchbull, Timothy. From a Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb. London:
Hutchinson, 2009.
Ziegler, Philip. Mountbatten: The Official Biography. Glasgow: William Collins, 1985.

(18831945)
On April 27, 1945, fugitive Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress,
Clara Petacci, were captured by communist partisans near the village of Dongo,
Lombardy. At the time, the couple was en route to Switzerland, hoping to catch
a flight to Spain and seek asylum from Generalisimo Francisco Franco. When
caught, Mussolini wore a German military uniform, in an attempt to disguise
himself, but he was recognized by Urbano Lazzaro, political commissar of the
52nd Garibaldi Brigade. Mussolini and Petacci were transported to Mezzegra,
on Lake Como, and thenon April 28to the village of Giulino di Mezzegra.
There, members of the partisans National Liberation Committee ordered Walter Audisio to execute the prisoners. Two pistols misfired before Audisio tried
a French MAS-38 submachine gun and succeeded in killing both captives.
Their corpses were driven to Milan on April 29, and dumped at a site where 15
antifascists had recently been

executed. There, a mob beat
and stoned the bodies, hanging
them from meat hooks.
Born on July 29, 1883, a native of Predappio, in the Italian province of Forl-Cesena,
Benito Mussolini was the son of
a revolutionary socialist whose
views incorporated elements of
anarchism. At age 19, Mussolini emigrated to Switzerland in
a bid to avoid military service,
and was arrested in Bern the
following year (1903) for inciting workers during a violent
general strike. Meanwhile, in
Italy, he was convicted of desertion in absentia, but returned
to take advantage of an amnesty in 1904, then spent two
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress
years in the army before findwere slain by partisans in April 1945. (Getty
ing work as a teacher.
Images)
Between 1909 and 1914,
Mussolini turned his hand to
journalism, in support of the Italian Socialist Party, but that group expelled
him for supporting Italian participation in World War I. Mussolini thereupon denounced socialism, attached himself to the new Revolutionary Fasci
for International Action movement, and joined the Italian army once more.
His new right-wing stance impressed Britains Security Service sufficiently for
agent Samuel Hoare to recruit him as an agent for the sum of 100 per week
(6,400 today, or $10,172). In March 1919, Mussolini organized a 200-man
Italian Combat Squad in Milan, donning black-shirted uniforms and rapidly
recruiting thousands more in the unsettled atmosphere of postwar Italy. Later
renamed the National Fascist Party, Mussolinis group marched on to Rome in
October 1922, deposed Prime Minister Luigi Facta, and accepted King Victor
Emmanuel IIIs invitation for Mussolini to serve as prime minister.
Through a combination of terrorism and legislation passed by a servile parliament, Mussolini soon emerged as Italys dictatorIl Duce (The Leader).
His rapid and violent ascent naturally provoked opposition in kind, including
several foiled assassination attempts. The first attempt, on April 7, 1926, was
made by Violet Gibson, an Irish woman, who fired three shots at Mussolini
345
346
following his address to an assembly of the International Congress of Surgeons.

Her bullets left Mussolini slightly wounded in the nose, and police prevented
a mob from lynching Gibson on the spot. Deported to Britain after Mussolini
declined to press charges, Gibson spent the rest of her life in a mental institution, dying there in May 1926.
Four months later, on September 11, 1926, anarchist Gino Lucetti threw a
bomb at Mussolinis car in Rome, as Il Duce drove through the Porta Pia gate.
The explosion failed to injure Mussolini, and Lucetti was quickly captured.
Sentenced to 30 years in June 1927, Lucetti escaped from prison in 1943, but
died soon afterward, during a German air raid on Ischia.
A month after Lucettis bungled bombing, on October 31, 15-year-old anarchist Anteo Zamboni tried to shoot Mussolini in Bologna. His shots missed,
and this time police made no effort to restrain the vengeful mob that lynched
Zamboni. Mussolini used the second murder attempt as an excuse to abolish
civil liberties and dissolve Italys remaining opposition parties. Today, a street
in Bologna bears Zambonis name.
Yet another anarchist, Michele Schirru, plotted to kill Mussolini in January 1931, but he had no more luck than his predecessors. Arrested on February 3, before making an actual attempt, Schirru attempted suicide, but merely
wounded himself in the face. Convicted and condemned by a special court on
May 28, he was executed by a firing squad the following day.
In his bid to create a new Roman Empire, Mussolini launched an invasion
of Ethiopia in October 1935, securing control of the country by May 1936.
Two months later, he sent troops to aid Francisco Francos Falangist forces
in toppling Spains republican government. Although initially opposed to
the overt racism of Adolf Hitlers Nazi Party, Mussolini overcame his qualms
in time to sign a Pact of Steel with Germany, creating the RomeBerlin
Axis in May 1939. Hitlers invasion of Poland sparked World War II four
months later, with Japan subsequently joining the Axis in a bid for world
domination.
The tide of Axis victories faltered and died in 1942, with Allied advances
in North Africa, Russia, and the Pacific. In Italy, growing dissatisfaction with
fascist rule and the presence of German troops prompted a wave of strikes in
March 1943. Four months later, Allied troops invaded Sicily, putting Italian
troops to flight. On July 24, five days after a crisis meeting with Hitler in northern Italy, the Grand Council of Fascism returned a no-confidence vote against
Mussolini, asking Victor Emmanuel III to resume full control of the country.
That same afternoon, the king ordered Mussolinis arrest and replaced him with
Marshal Pietro Badoglio. Two days later, Badoglio dissolved the Fascist Party
and began negotiating an armistice with the Allies, signed on September 3.
German troops fought on in Italy, and Badoglio raised troops of partisans to
expel them.
Nine days after Italys surrender, on September 12, 1943, German commandos rescued Mussolini from captivity at the Hotel Campo Imperatore, at Gran
Sasso dItalia. Adolf Hitler planned to arrest Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal
Badoglio, but they eluded him while Allied forces proceeded with the liberation of Italy. Under pressure from Hitler, Mussolini returned to Italy, acting
under Nazi orders to revive his fascist government. On arrival, he announced,
I am not here to renounce even a square meter of state territory. We will go
back to war for this. And we will rebel against anyone for this. Where the Italian flag flew, the Italian flag will return. And where it has not been lowered,
now that I am here, no one will have it lowered. I have said these things to the
Fhrer.
Over the next two years, Mussolini lived at Gargnano, on Lake Garda, operating as a puppet of Berlin. He supervised the executions of former fascists
who had turned against him, but was fatalistic in his outlook, telling an interviewer in January 1945, Seven years ago, I was an interesting person. Now, I am
little more than a corpse. Yes, madam, I am finished. My star has fallen. I have
no fight left in me. I work and I try, yet know that all is but a farce. I await the
end of the tragedy andstrangely detached from everythingI do not feel any
more an actor. I feel I am the last of spectators.
Following his execution and the desecration of his corpse, Mussolini was
buried in an unmarked grave north of Milan. Neo-fascists located the grave
and stole his body on Easter Sunday 1946, leaving a message at the site that
read: Finally, O Duce, you are with us. We will cover you with roses, but the
smell of your virtue will overpower the smell of those roses. Authorities recovered Mussolinis remains in August 1946 and held them for 10 months, before
he was interred at his birthplace in Predappio. His crypt is flanked by marble
fasces and an idealized sculpture of Il Duce in life.
Mussolinis political philosophy and melodramatic mode of self-expression
made him a target of satire in life, beginning with Charlie Chaplins 1940 film
The Great Dictator. Chaplin starred as tyrant Adenoid Hynkel, clearly modeled on Adolf Hitler, and co-star Jack Oakie mocked Mussolini in the role of
Benzino Napaloni. A year later, Il Duce was also lampooned by the Three
Stooges in Ill Never Heil Again, with Cy Schindell appearing as Chizzolini,
in conjunction with dictator-ally Moe Hailstone (played by Moe Howard),
Field Marshal Herring (Curly Howard), and Larry Fine cast as a minister of
propaganda modeled on Joseph Goebbels.
Serious portrayals of Mussolini on-screen include two by Rod Steiger in
Mussolini: The Last Act (1974) and Lion of the Desert (1981). Other portrayals include Mussolini: The Untold Story (1985), produced for television with
George C. Scott in the title role; Mussolini and I (1985), with Bob Hoskins cast
as Il Duce and Susan Sarandon portraying his daughter; Benito (1993) with
Antonio Bander, which depicts Mussolinis early years from his service as a
347
348
FASCISM
Although definitions of fascism vary, most sources agree that its major
tenets include extreme right-wing nationalism, an authoritarian or totalitarian state, aggressive militarism, xenophobia and racism, enforcement
of societal conformity, and state control or domination of a mixed economy (with regulation shared by government and wealthy private interests). Whereas fascisms ideology has its roots in the late 19th century, the
first self-styled fascist party appeared in October 1914, when a breakaway faction of the Italian Socialist Party created the Revolutionary Fascio for International Action. Fascism draws its name from the Latin fasces
(bundle)specifically a bundle of birch rods surrounding a bronze axe,
carried as a symbol of authority in ancient Rome. Variant forms of fascism include German National Socialism (Nazism) and its successor ideologies, as well as Spanish Falangism, exemplified by dictator Francisco
Franco. The Great Depression of the 1930s encouraged fascisms spread,
rejuvenating the economies of various nations through militarization and
foreign conquest, seizing upon author Randolph Bournes assertion that
war is the health of the state. Fascism survived the defeat of the Axis
Powers in World War II, surviving for decades in Spain and Portugal,
in Latin America (where fugitive Nazis found refuge), and elsewhere as
Allied victors actively encouraged far-right military governments in opposition to communism. Fascism also influenced the postwar apartheid
regime in South Africa, and various anti-Israeli groups in the Middle East,
including Lebanons Kataeb or Phalange Party, and the revolutionary Arab
nationalist philosophy known as Baathism, adapted by dictator Saddam
Hussein in Iraq.
teacher to the outbreak of World War I; and Tea with Mussolini (1999) with
Claudio Spadaros appearance as the dictator.
Further Reading
Bosworth, R.J.B. Mussolini. New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2011.
Finaldi, Giuseppe. Mussolini and Italian Fascism. Harlow, United Kingdom: Pearson
Education Limited, 2008.
Garibaldi, Luciano. Mussolini: The Secrets of his Death. New York: Enigma Books, 2004.
Hibbert, Christopher. Mussolini: The Rise and Fall of Il Duce. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Morgan, Philip. The Fall of Mussolini: Italy, the Italians, and the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Moseley, Ray. Mussolini: The Last 600 Days of Il Duce. Dallas: Taylor Trade Publishing,
2004.
Saunders, Frances. The Woman Who Shot Mussolini. New York: Metropolitan Books,
2010.
349
N
DER SHA
H AFSHA
R (16881747)
NA
In June 1747, Nader Shah Afsharrenowned as the Napoleon of Persia and
the Second Alexanderset off from Tabriz, then capital of Persia (now Iran),
to purge Kurdish rebels from the northeastern province of Khorasan. By the
time his army reached Fathabad, Nader had learned that one of his officesin
fact, his nephewwas plotting to depose him. Fearing that other officers had
joined in the conspiracy, Nader planned a preemptive strike, quietly recruiting
Turkmen and Uzbek soldiers from his ranks to massacre the Persian officers on
the night of June 19. Unknown to Nader, one of his Georgian slaves heard the
order given and reported it to the shahs would-be victims. An officer named
Salah Beg (or Bey) volunteered to kill Nader before the shahs assassins could
strike. Leading several confederates to Naders tent, Beg attacked, killing two
of shahs attendants before Nader confronted them with his saber in hand.
Although wounded in the first exchange of blows, Nader fought on, killing two
of his assailants, before he tripped on a tent rope and fell. Nader reportedly
pled for his life, whereupon Beg replied, You have not shown any mercy, and
therefore merit none, then beheaded the shah with a single sword stroke.
Accounts of Nader Shahs birth are confused, with reported dates ranging
from October 22, 1687, to August 6, 1698. Most agree that he was born in the
fortress at Dastgerd, in Khorasan Province, and named Nader Kouli. His family
belonged to the Qereqlu clan of the seminomadic Afshar tribe, a subgroup of
the Oghuz Turks. His father, a herdsman, died when Nader was 13. Four years
later, a band of Uzbek Tartar marauders enslaved Nader and his mother, but
Nader soon escaped, joining a rival band of outlaws. Despite his youth, based
on ferocity and cunning, Nader rose to lead the gang, while his mother languished and died in captivity.
Tiring of life as a fugitive by 1712, Nader approached a local chieftain, Baba
Ali Beg (or Baig), to seek employment. Beg retained him as a courier, delivering messages to the royal court at Isfahan with a companion, but Nader was
determined to be the chiefs sole messenger. On one trip to the shahs court,
Beg killed his coworker, then pled self-defense before Sultan Shah Hussein
and received a pardon. Chief Beg was less forgiving, when Nader returned
alone, and Nader surmised that he was marked for execution. Speaking either
from the heart or from self-interest, Nader proposed marriage to one of Begs
352
N A D E R S H A H A F S H A R
daughters, but the chief refused him. Nader then followed a practice that became his trademark, striking first to kill Beg, before fleeing to the mountains
with his fiance (some accounts say two). Other servants of the late chief followed Nader, forming his latest bandit gang to terrorize Mazandaran Province.
After two years of looting and murder, in 1714, Nader offered his services to
Babulu Khan, the governor of Khorasan Province. He proved himself in battle
against Tartar invaders, and by 1717 was placed in command of a 6,000-man
army, defeating a Tartar force that outnumbered his troops nearly two to one.
Idolizing Mongol warlords Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, Nader secured his
triumph with a combination of audacity and strategic planning that set him
apart from other regional commanders of the day. When he demanded promotion to a generals rank, however, Babulu Khan put him off, first requiring that
Nader seek approval from Shah Sultan Hussein, then promoting a younger,
less experienced officer in his place. When Nader accused Babulu Khan of acting dishonorably, he was subjected to falakaa form of torture where the victim is placed in stocks and beaten across the soles of his feetthen exiled in
disgrace.
Nader returned immediately to a life of crime, leading a band of some 800
brigands to loot villages in Khorasan Province, later extracting tribute payments
to ward off future pillage. In March 1722, Afghan invaders led by Mahmud Hotaki defeated Persian troops at the Battle of Gulnabad and captured Sultan Hussein; they then moved on from there to besiege and capture the Safavid Empires
capital at Isfahan. In Khorasan Province, Nader feigned subservience to the new
Afghan governor, Malek Mahmud, then raised an army to revolt against the intruders. A long war ensued, Nader joining forces with the sons of Sultan Hussein, defeating larger Afghan forces in a series of engagements at Herat (May
1729), Damghan (September 1729), and Murchakhort (November 1729).
Afghans were not Naders only enemies, however. In the spring of 1730, he
attacked Ottomans who had seized part of Persia after the Afghan invasion,
recapturing most of his homelands lost territory by 1733. In the process, he
also schemed to assassinate fellow general Fateh Ali Khan Khajar, a favorite of
Sultan Husseins son, Shah Tehmas. Tehmas then favored Nader with the title
of Khan, but Naders gratitude did not extend to the royal family at large.
At odds with another of Husseins sons, appointed successor Shah Tahmasp,
Nader lured Tahmasp into a drinking contest in 1732, then mocked him before the royal court, asking if a drunkard was fit to rule Persia. Rather than risk
his life in a war against Nader, Tahmasp abdicated in favor of his infant son,
Abbas III, whom Nader served as regent and de facto ruler. When Abbas died
in 1736, Nader ascended to the throne as shah, hailed on newly minted coins
as King of Kings and Glory of the Age.
Unsatisfied with the scope of his realm, Nader raised an army of 80,000 men
and marched for India in December 1736. He captured Kandahar in March
NADIR SHAH, MOHAMMED
1738, razing that city in the process, building a new town nearby, which he
named Naderabad. From there, he moved on to capture Ghazni, Kabul, Peshawar, Sindh, and Lahore, then crossed the Indus River, killing an estimated
20,000 Indian soldiers at the Battle of Karnal, in February 1739. A month
later, amid false rumors that Nader had been assassinated, his troops entered
Delhi, killing 200,000 men, women, and children in the nations capital. Captive ruler Mohammad Shah surrendered the keys to his national treasury, and
suffered further humiliation when Nader seized the empires famed Peacock
Throne. English historians estimate that Naders total haul from the Indian
campaign was valued in excess of 85.5 million at the time (6.7 trillion today,
or $7.1 trillion).
While looting India, Nader left his son Reza Qoli Mirza to rule Persia. Believing rumors of his fathers death in battle, Mirza laid plans to rule in his own
right, then saw them dashed when Nader returned alive. Mirza then hired an
Afghan to assassinate his father, but the sniper missed his shot, only wounding
Nader in the arm. A full-scale inquisition followed, exposing Mirzas treachery.
Nader showed his version of mercy to Mirza, sparing his life, but having his
firstborn blinded and castrated.
So it went, with successive purges of Naders royal court and army, until
none of his closest advisors felt they could trust him. After his assassination,
nephew Ali Qoli claimed the Persian throne, renaming himself Adil Shah
(righteous king). A likely suspect in the plot to kill his uncle, Adil Shah was
deposed in June 1748 and was blinded by coup leader Ebrahim Mirza. Six
months later, Naders grandson Shahrukh toppled Mirza and had him blinded,
and Adil Shah was tortured to death.
Further Reading
Axworthy, Michael. The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering
Tyrant. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006.
Floor, Willem. The Rise and Fall of Nader Shah: Dutch East India Company Reports,
17301747. Waldorf, MD: Mage Publishers, 2009.
Tucker, Ernest. Nadir Shahs Quest for Legitimacy in Post-SafavidIran. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006.
NADIR SHAH, MOHAMMED (18831933)

On November 8, 1933, King Mohammed Nadir Shah attended a high school
graduation ceremony in Kabul, Afghanistan. The occasion was routine, although
the king may have experienced some tension. Five months earlier, on June
6, his older half-brotherPrince Sirdar Mohammed Aziz Khan, Afghanistans
ambassador to Germanyhad been assassinated in Berlin by a 27-year-old
Afghan student. Now, in the midst of minor pomp and circumstance, the king
353
354
NADIR SHAH, MOHAMMED
met a similar fate, gunned down at point-blank range by teenage student Abdul
Khaliq Hazara. Guards captured Hazara at the scene, quickly discovering that
he had sought revenge for the execution of his father, ordered by the king in
1932. After 40 days of torture, Hazara was condemned to public execution. A
sword wielding executioner demanded to know which finger he had used to
pull the pistols trigger, which eye he had aimed with, and with which foot he
stepped forward prior to firing. When Hazara answered, the executioner cut
off that finger and foot, gouged out his eye, then proceeded to dismember him
alive. Several relatives of the assassin were also tortured and hanged as suspected accomplices to the kings slaying.
Mohammed Nadir Shah was born on April 9, 1883, at Dehradun India,
then subject to the British Raj. He was a member of the Mohammadzai clan
(sons of Mohammed in Pashto), grandson of Sultan Mohammed Khan Telai
(17951861), who served as chief minister of Afghanistan during 18241826.
At age 18, Nadir returned to his ancestral homeland and joined the Afghan army,
rising through the ranks to serve as a general under King Amanullah Khan during the brief Third Anglo-Afghan War (May 6 to August 8, 1919). Following the
armistice in that conflict, Amanullah Khan named Nader as his minister of war.
King Amanullah, meanwhile, embarked on a course of reform designed to
modernize Afghanistan, including establishment of a small air force staffed by
pilots from the newly emergent Soviet Union. At the same time, Amanullah
changed recruiting standards for the army, stripping tribal leaders of their
influence on the selection of recruits. Turkish advisors urged the king to retire his older army officers, promoting younger and more professional replacements; Nadir objected, counseling mindfulness of longstanding tribal
traditions. When Amanullah spurned his advice, in 1924, Nadir resigned as
minister of war and left Afghanistan to serve as its ambassador to France.
In Nadirs absence, during 1927, Amanullah embarked on an extended
tour of Europe, collecting even more ideas for the improvement of his country. Shortly after his return, in November 1928, dissident Shinwari tribesmen
rebelled in Jalalabad and marched on Kabul, prompting many royal troops to
desert and join the revolt. On January 14, 1929, Amanullah abdicated in favor
of elder brother Inayatullah Khan, who ruled as king for three days, then fled to
exile in Europe. Kabul fell on January 17 to Habibullah Kalakani, a Tajik tribesman who ruled as Emir of Afghanistan until October 16, 1929, when troops led
by Nadir Khan recaptured Kabul. Nadir installed himself as king that same day,
hanging Kalakani, his brother, and 10 other rebel leaders on November 1.
Nadirs four-year reign as king was an exercise in despotism. His first act
involved abolition of most reforms imposed by Amanullah Khan, which
strengthened tribal leaders to Nadirs detriment. The royal army, though triumphant over Habibullah Kalakani, remained relatively weak by comparison to
tribal forces still resentful of the monarchy and its ties to the Soviet Union. One
NARUTOWICZ, GABRIEL
Uzbek leaders raids across the Russian border prompted a Soviet incursion
in April 1930, and before years end, Nadir faced uprisings by Tajiks in Kabul
Province, as well as Shinwari rebellions farther south. Most were subdued by
late 1931, by Nadirs growing army, but the kings ruthless tactics aggravated
tribal dissatisfaction in the countryside.
In Kabul, meanwhile, Nadir organized a 10-member cabinet and a larger
loyajirga (grand council) of 286 members who formally confirmed his installment as king. In 1931, Nadir promulgated a new constitution in the name of
Allah the most merciful, confirming himself as a fit and worthy King who
was accepted by the Afghan nation in general . . . with the greatest esteem and
respect. Nadirs subjects were free to enjoy all rights conferred by Shariat [Islamic] law, although they were required to observe the injunctions and prohibitions of their Government in religious and political matters. Torture was
absolutely abolished, at least on paper, and freedom of the press was granted
to publications such as are not against religion.
In practice, conflict with regional tribes continued, and executions of offenders ultimately paved the way for Nadirs own assassination after four years on the
throne. His son and successor, Mohammed Zahir Shah, proved more durable, ruling as Afghanistans last monarch from November 8, 1933, until July 17, 1973,
when a coup dtat, deposed him. At the time, Zahir was in Italy, undergoing eye
surgery. Rather than risk a civil war, he abdicated and remained in exile for the
next 29 years, returning to Afghanistan in 2002. While still abroad, in 1991, Zahir
survived an assassination attempt by a knife-wielding assailant posing as a Portuguese reporter. Zahir died in Kabul, from natural causes, on July 23, 2007.
Further Reading
Baker, Kevin. War in Afghanistan: A Short History of Eighty Wars and Conflicts in Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier, 18392011. Kenthurst, NSW, Australia: Rosenberg
Publishing, 2011.
How did Nadir accede to the throne? Afghana! http://afghana.com/SocietyAndCulture/amanula.htm.
Mohammad Nader Shah. Encyclopdia Iranica. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/
mohammad-nader-shah-king-of-afghanistan.
Tanner, Stephen. Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War
against the Taliban. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2009.
Failures of Great Powers. New York: Public Affairs, 2011.
NARUTOWICZ, GABRIEL (18651922)

On December 16, 1922, Gabriel Narutowicz, first president of the Second
Polish Republic, visited the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. The
visit was among his first appearances as president, since he had only been
355
356
NARUTOWICZ, GABRIEL
inaugurated on December 11. While touring the exhibition, Narutowicz was

accosted by Eligiusz Niewiadomski, a painter and art critic affiliated since 1904
with the far-right National Democracy movement, pledged to Polonization of
the countrys German, Ukrainian, and Belarusian ethnic minorities. Drawing a
pistol, Niewiadomski shot President Narutowicz three times in the back, killing him instantly, then escaped from the gallery in the ensuing chaos. Police
captured Niewiadomski on December 30, and he was quickly condemned,
shot by a military firing squad at the Warsaw Citadel on January 31, 1923.
Gabriel Narutowicz was born on March 17, 1865, in Teliai, Lithuania, then
part of the Russian Empire. His fatherJan Narutowicz, a local district judge
from Brevikiai vikiaihad previously served a year in prison for his role in a
January 1863 uprising against Russian imperial rule, and subsequently died
with Gabriel was only one year old. Gabriels mother raised him and older
brother Stanislaw alone, moving the family to Liepaja, Latvia, in 1873, so that
her sons would not be forced to attend a Russian school. After completing
his secondary education in Liepaja, Gabriel enrolled at St. Petersburgs Institute for Mathematical Physics, but poor health forced him to withdraw, later
attending Zurichs Eidgenssische Polytechnische Schule (Federal Polytechnic
School) from 1887 to 1891. During his tenure there, Narutowicz helped Polish fugitives from Russia and joined the Proletariat Party, actions that resulted
in his being banned from Russia, with an open warrant issued for his arrest. Narutowicz became a Swiss citizen in 1895, and took his first job as an
engineer on the St. Gallen railroad, advancing by years end to serve as chief of
works on the Rhine River.
Hired by Kursteins technical office in 1896, Narutowicz pioneered electrification in Switzerland and saw his work displayed at that years International
Exhibition in Paris. He subsequently directed construction of Swiss hydroelectric power plants at Monthey and Mhleberg, plus another at Andelsbuch,
Austria. In 1907, he became a professor of engineering at his alma mater, Eidgenssische Polytechnische Schule, advancing to serve as dean from 1913 to
1919, doubling as chairman of an international committee for regulation of the
Rhine in 1915. In his sparse spare time, during World War I, Narutowicz collaborated with a General Swiss Committee aiding Polish victims of the conflict, and
joined La Pologne et la Guerre (Poland and War), a relief group based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Strongly influenced by Polands postwar chief of state, Jzef
Pisudski, Narutowicz received an invitation to Poland in September 1919 and
arrived in June 1920 to serve as minister of public works under newly elected
prime minister Wadysaw Grabski.
Narutowicz held that post until June 1922, and Grabski was succeeded
by rotating prime ministers Wincenty Witos and Antoni Ponikowski. During those two years, although he reduced the Reconstruction Administrations
bloated payroll by 80 percent, Narutowicz supervised rebuilding of 270,000
NARUTOWICZ, GABRIEL
buildings, more than 300 bridges, and 125 miles of highway. During the same
hectic period, he oversaw construction of several dams, hydroelectric power
plant at Porabka, and extensive work to control Polands longest and most
important river, the Vistula. As if that were not enough, in April and May 1922
he joined Minister of Foreign Affairs Konstanty Skirmunt at the Genoa Conference, where representatives of 34 countries met to discuss postwar economic
collaboration.
On June 28, 1922, Narutowicz became minister of foreign affairs under
Prime Minister Artur Sliwinski,
retaining that post under successor Julian

Nowak. In October of that year, he represented Poland at another international conference, held in Tallinn, Estonia. A month later, in Polands legislative elections, Narutowicz backed the National Public Union party, seeking a
seat in parliament, but failed to carry the vote. In December 1922, Narutowicz
expressed surprise over his nomination by the Polish Peasant Party as a presidential candidate, but he accepted despite Jzef Pisudskis advice to decline.
At the time, under Polands constitution of 1921, presidents were chosen by
the National Assembly. With five candidates in the running, Narutowicz survived four ballots, finally defeating Count Maurycy Klemens Zamoyski on the
fifth, with votes from disparate left-wing factions that despised Zamoyski. His
victory surprised the right wing, producing aggressive agitation against Narutowicz by Catholic and nationalist groups that accused him of being an
atheist, Freemason, and a Jew. Demonstrators tried to block his inauguration
on December 11, hurling mud at his motorcade, and failing that, stonewalled
the new presidents efforts to forge a functional government with members of
the rival Christian Democratic Party. Even his appointment of Maurycy Zamoyski as minister of foreign affairs failed to pacify the far-right opposition,
but the roadblock in Warsaw was broken by assassin Eligiusz Niewiadomski
on December 16, 1922.
Stanisaw Wojciechowski, a scientist and cofounder of the Polish Socialist
Party, succeeded Narutowicz as president. He held that office until May 14,
1926, when ex-friend Jzef Pisudski staged a coup dtat and forced his resignation. Successor Ignacy Mo scicki retained the Polish presidency until
September 30, 1939, when German invaders completed their occupation of
Poland.
Further Reading
Prybylla, Jan. When Angels Wept: The Rebirth and Dismemberment of Poland and Her
People in the Early Decades of the Twentieth Century. Tucson, AZ: Wheatmark, 2010.
Stachura, Peter. Poland, 19181945: An Interpretive and Documentary History of the Second Republic. London: Routledge, 2004.
Watt, Richard. Bitter Glory: Poland and Its Fate, 1918 to 1939. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1979.
357
358
N D A D AY E , M E L C H I O R
NDADAYE, MELCHIOR (19531993)

On October 21, 1993, officers of the Burundian army and the Union for National Progress (UPRONA), dominated by members of the Tutsi ethnic group,
staged a coup against President Melchior Ndadaye and his ruling party, the
Front for Democracy in Burundi (FRODEBU), consisting chiefly of Hutu tribe
members. The rebels quickly captured Ndadaye, along with Pontien Karibwami
and Gilles Bimazubute, who served, respectively, as president and vice president of Burundis National Assembly. Those captives, with several other officials
and cabinet members, were taken to an army barracks outside Bujumbura, and
executed en masse. Details of the slayings remain vague to this day, though
some reports indicate that President Ndadaye was stabbed with bayonets. Radio Rwanda announced the executions that night, and widespread violence
between Tutsis and Hutus raged through successive days.
Melchior Ndadaye was born on March 28, 1953, at Murama in Burundis
Muramvya Province, historically the seat of Burundian kings. The monarchy effectively dissolved in 1885, when Germany colonized the region of
present-day Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania as German East Africa. Defeat
in World War I forced Germany to surrender its African colonies, whereupon the land was divided between Britain and Belgium, with the latter nation controlling Ruanda-Urundi until 1924. After World War II, Belgium
continued to administer the region as a United Nations trust territory until
1962, when independence was granted to the fledgling states of Burundi
and Rwanda.
Only nine years old when his homeland achieved independence, Ndadaye
planned for a career in education, but his training was aborted in April 1972,
when genocidal violence erupted between Tutsis and Hutus. Most accounts
name Hutus as the initial aggressors, but the tide soon turned against them,
with an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 Hutus slaughtered by September. Another 200,000Melchior Ndadaye among themfled the country for their
lives. Ndadaye finished his studies at the National University of Rwanda, in
Butare, then proceeded to earn a second degree, in banking, from the National
Academy of Arts and Trades in Toulouse, France.
Returning to Rwanda, Ndadaye earned his living as a banker while gradually
becoming involved in politics. From 1976 to 1979, he served as the first president of the Mouvement des tudiants Progressistes Barundi au Rwanda, a group
of exiled Burundian students living in Rwanda. In August 1979, he also cofounded the Burundi Workers Party (UBU), a Marxist organization for Burundian refugees. Strategic squabbles prompted Ndadaye to leave the UBU,
returning to Burundi in September 1983. The UBU swiftly declined in influence without Ndadayes influence and leadership, officially disbanding
in 1986. Many of its former members joined Ndadaye in his new political
vehicleFRODEBUalthough it was legally banned, with all other opposition
groups, under the rule of Burundis Supreme Revolutionary Council, led since
November 1976 by Colonel Jean-Baptiste Bagaza.
While traveling in Europe, on September 3, 1987, Bagaza was deposed by
a rival military faction that imposed its own dictatorship over Burundi. Ndadayes FRODEBU continued covert operations under President Pierre Buyoya appointed, while HutuTutsi violence persisted, claiming another 20,000 lives
in August 1988 alone. Buyoya appointed a commission to mediate those conflicts, resulting in a new constitution that Buyoya approved in 1992, mandating
ethnic balance in a government run by a president and parliament. National
elections were scheduled for June 1993, and Ndadaye challenged President
Buyoya, winning 65 percent of the vote from a coalition of four Hutudominated political parties.
International observers certified the voting as free and fair, an endorsement echoed later in June, when legislative elections gave 65 of 81 available
parliamentary seats to FRODEBU members. Tutsi opponents voiced no complaints at the time, although a coup dtat against president-elect Ndadaye was
attemptedand swiftly defeatedon July 3, 1993. Inaugurated one week
later, Ndadaye thus became Burundis first Hutu president and its first leader
elected by democratic process.
Well aware of his homelands bitter ethnic divisions, President Ndadaye
charted a moderate, conciliatory course for governance. He appointed female
Tutsi leader Sylvie Kinigi as prime minister on July 10, while granting one-third
of his cabinet seats and two regional governorships to members of Pierre Buyoya UPRONA. At the same time, Ndadaye liberated most of Burundis political
prisoners, declared unfettered freedom of the press, and granted amnesty to
exiled Jean-Baptiste Bagaza. Moves to ameliorate longstanding Tutsi discrimination against Hutus progressed at a cautious pace, to avert further bloodshed.
None of it helped.
When President Ndadaye challenged sweetheart contracts and concessions
granted to Tutsis by politicians from their own tribe, members of the Tutsi
militaryindustrial elite balked and schemed against him. Military reforms
further aggravated high-ranking Tutsi officers, and the return of exiled Hutus
driven from the country in the 1970s raised specters of impending vengeance.
Burundis new free press divided along ethnic lines, each side hurling inflammatory charges at the other. In such an atmosphere, the coup that claimed
Ndadayes life was probably inevitable.
An estimated 100,000 persons died in ethnic violence following the coup
of October 1993, but the military plotters failed to seize control of Burundi
as planned. A military committee of Public Salvation chose a Hutu, former
minister of the interior Franois Ngeze, as head of state, but he ruled for only
four days, then persuaded Prime Minister Kinigi to emerge from hiding at
the French embassy and assume the post of acting president. Meanwhile, the
359
360
BURUNDI CIVIL WAR

This ethnic struggle between Hutu and Tutsi tribesmen, deeply rooted
in Burundis history, began in October 1993, following the murder of
President Melchior Ndadaye and his closest advisors. Tribal massacres
claimed an estimated 100,000 lives within the 12 months following
Ndadayes death, then escalated after the assassination of Ndadayes successor, President Cyprien Ntaryamira, in April 1994. Tutsi leader Pierre
Buyoya seized control of the government in July 1996, promulgating a
transition constitution and initiating peace talks two years later. Fighting
continued nonetheless, despite attempted intervention by the United Nations and South African President Nelson Mandela. Another coup attempt
failed to depose President Buyoya in April 2001, while pitched battles
and terrorist massacres continued unabated. A Hutu, Domitien Ndayizeye, assumed the presidency in April 2003 and supervised the peace
process that finally ended open warfare in August 2005. Leaving office
that same month, Ndayizeye was arrested one year later, for his alleged
role in a plot to overthrow his successor, President Pierre Nkurunziza. The
long wars estimated final toll300,000 dead, two-thirds of them civilian
noncombatantsis probably too conservative. Burundi remains a volatile nation, as demonstrated by rogue units from the National Forces of
Liberation.
United Nations condemned Ndadayes assassination and launched an investigation into the coup, releasing a report in 1996 that blamed Tutsi army commanders for the assassinations and subsequent Hutu massacres. Meanwhile,
Burundi had descended into civil war between Hutus and Tutsis (see sidebar),
claiming an estimated 300,000 more lives before hostilities officially ended in
August 2005. Establishment of a national army, merging Hutu and Tutsi armed
forces, appeared to quell the violence, but sporadic outbreaks continueas
when Hutu rebels from the National Forces of Liberation bombarded Bujumbura in April 2008, killing 33 persons.
While the civil war was still ongoing, in May 1999, authorities tried 117
defendants on charges related to President Ndadaye assassination. Alleged
ringleader Paul Kamana and four others were sentenced to death, although
Kamana was then in exile and safe from execution. Another 74 defendants
received prison terms ranging from one to 20 years, and 38 were acquitted.
Those discharged by the court included Colonel Jean Bikomagu, the armys
former chief of staff; Colonel Charles Ntakije, former minister of defense; and
NGO DINH DIEM
Colonel Isaie Nibizi, who had charge of the presidents security detachment
during the fatal coup.
Further Reading
Abdallah, Ahmedou. Burundi on the Brink, 199395: A UN Special Envoy Reflects on
Preventive Diplomacy. Washington, DC: United States Institute for Peace, 2000.
Burundi Civil War. GlobalSecurity.org. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/
war/burundi.htm.
Chronology for Hutus in Burundi. Minorities at Risk. http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/
mar/chronology.asp?groupId=51601.
Lemarchand, Ren. Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide. Cambridge, MA: Woodrow
Wilson Center Press, 1996.
Mwakikagile, Godfrey. Burundi: The Hutu and the TutsiCauldron of Conflict and Quest
for Dynamic Compromise. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: New Africa Press, 2012.
Mwakikagile, Godfrey. Identity Politics and Ethnic Conflicts in Rwanda and Burundi:
A Comparative Study. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: New Africa Press, 2012.
Scherrer, Christian. Genocide and Crisis in Central Africa: Conflict Roots, Mass Violence,
and Regional War. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.
United Nations Security Council. International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi: Final
Report. June 7, 2002. http://www.usip.org/files/file/resources/collections/commis
sions/Burundi-Report.pdf.
Uvin, Peter. Life after Violence: A Peoples Story of Burundi. New York: Macmillan, 2009.
NGO DINH DIEM (19011963)

On November 1, 1963, the South Vietnamese soldiers led by Generals Duong
Van Minh and Tran Van Don laid siege to the Gia Long Palace in Saigon, seeking
to arrest President Ngo Dinh Diem and his younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu.
In fact, their targets were forewarned of the attack and had escaped to Cholon, hoping to launch a countercoup. Upon discovering that his U.S. advisors
supported the rebels, however, Ngo surrendered with his brother in the early
hours of November 2. Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, personal bodyguard to
General Minh, asked Lucien Coneina U.S. Army officer doubling as an agent
of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)to arrange air transport of the brothers into honorable retirement outside of South Vietnam, then changed his
mind and had them executed in an armored personnel carrier, presumably to
thwart any future political comeback. Conein had supported the coup but denied any advance knowledge of the double murder, a plea of ignorance openly
questioned by numerous CIA critics. Roger Hilsman, U.S. assistant secretary
of state, had written in August 1963 that under no circumstances should the
Nhus be permitted to remain in Southeast Asia in close proximity to Vietnam
because of the plots they will mount to try to regain power. If the generals decide to exile Diem, he should also be sent outside Southeast Asia. One of the
361
362
NGO DINH DIEM
coup leaders was more direct,

stating that To kill weeds, you
must pull them up at the roots.
Today, most historians concur
that the CIA was complicit in,
if not directly responsible for,
the double assassination.
Ngo Dinh Diem was born
on January 3, 1901, in Hue,
capital of Vietnam under the
Nguyen Dynasty, from 1802
to 1945. Portuguese missionaries converted his ancestors
to Roman Catholicism in the
17th century, a religious alignment that later placed him
at odds with Vietnams Buddhist majority. His full name
at birth, incorporating that of
a Catholic saint, was Jean Baptiste Ngo Dinh Diem, and although he later claimed direct
descent from a clan of wealthy
CIA agents collaborated in the murder of South mandarins, biographers trace
Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. (Time &
his family roots to the central
Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Vietnamese village of Ph Cm.
Educated at a French Catholic
school, and later at a private academy run by his devout father Diem entered a
monastery at age 15, but found its spartan regimen distasteful, swapping plans
for a career in the church for a scholarship in Paris. From there, he progressed
to Hanois School of Public Administration and Law, another French institution
that trained Indochinas government bureaucrats.
Graduating with honors in 1921, Diem followed elder brother Ngo Dinh
Khoi into civil service, working first at Hues royal library, rising to the rank
of district chief by 1922, and to that of provincial chief in 1926, supervising
affairs in 300 rural villages. In 1929, he led a purge of communist agitators
within his jurisdiction, thereby securing promotion to the governorship of
Binh Thuan Province, on Vietnams south-central coast. During 19301931,
Diem joined with French colonial forces to crush peasant revolts in Binh
Thuan, sparking allegations of widespread atrocities. The return of exiled emperor Bao Dai, in 1932, saw Diem promoted to serve as minister of the interior, but he resigned after barely three months in office, stripped of all titles
?
NGO DINH DIEM
and kept under close surveillance after he asked French leaders to create a
Vietnamese legislature.
Formally unemployed over the next decade, Diem saw opportunity in the
Japanese invasion of French Indochina. In 1942, he lobbied Japanese occupation forces to declare Vietnamese independence, but they ignored his please.
Diem then founded a resistance group of sorts, the Association for the Restoration of Great Vietnam, which led to issuance of a warrant for his arrest in summer 1944. Disguised as a Japanese officer, Diem escaped to Saigon and made
one last effort to collaborate with the invaders in early 1945. The Japanese offered Diem the post of prime minister in a puppet regime under Emperor Bao
Dai, their parting gift to Vietnam, but he first declined, then changed his mind
too late, after the post was filled by Tran Trong Kim. Diem thus accidentally
escaped arrest as a collaborator when the Japanese withdrew, but his problems
were not over.
Whereas Diem had sought accommodation with his homelands enemies,
resistance leader Nguyen Sinh Cungbetter known to history as Ho Chi
Minhhad fought the Japanese at every turn. In September 1945, Ho declared
a Democratic Republic of Vietnam and turned his Viet Minh army against
French colonial forces. Diem embarked for Hue, hoping he could dissuade Bao
Dai from joining Ho Chi Minh, but he was arrested in transit and was held for
six months, during which he nearly died from a combination of virulent diseases. At liberty again in 1946, as conflict between the French and Viet Minh
erupted into full-scale war, Diem settled in Saigon and cofounded the Vietnam
National Alliance, calling on France to grant dominion status for his homeland. Although that effort ultimately failed, Diem gathered enough support
to be taken seriously in Paris, where diplomats sought his help in persuading
Emperor Bao Dai to join and endorse their fledgling State of Vietnam in 1949.
By 1950, Ho Chi Minh had sentenced Diem to death in absentia, and an attempt on his life that same year drove Diem into exile, first at the Vatican, then
in Japan.
Both sides in Vietnam requested aid from the United States, and although
President Harry Truman rejected overtures from Ho Chi Minh to expel French
colonial forces, the outbreak of war in Korea encouraged support for an anticommunist regime in Vietnam. Pope Pius XII lobbied European leaders on Diems behalf, and Diem spent the next three years at Cardinal Francis Spellmans
Maryknoll Seminary in Westchester County, New York. Thanks to Spellman,
Diem was named as a consultant to Michigan State Universitys Government
Research Bureau, where he joined Professor Wesley Fishel and various CIA
agents to form the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group, collaborating to save Vietnam from communism.
Viet Minh forces finally defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu, in May 1954,
prompting an international conference in Geneva, Switzerland, to decide the
363
364
NGO DINH DIEM
political fate of Indochina. That conference divided the former French colony
into three countriesVietnam, Laos, and Cambodiawhile imposing the 17th
parallel as a provisional military demarcation line between North and South
Vietnam, pending reunification with national elections in 1956. Ho Chi Minh,
confident of election based on his wartime record, ruled North Vietnam in the
interim, and Bao Dai named Diem as prime minister of South Vietnam, with
U.S. support. An estimated one million persons, mostly Catholics, left North
Vietnam for the south, and some 52,000 moved north of the 17th parallel.
Diem, meanwhile, had difficulty consolidating his rule in South Vietnam,
despite the influx of Catholic supporters. He quarreled incessantly with General Nguyen Van Hinh, a French citizen installed as army chief of staff by departing French officials; grappled for control of the countryside against large
militias of rival religious sects, the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao; and lost control of
his national police force to Saigons Bien Xuyen crime syndicate, courtesy of
a $1.25 million bribe paid by monsters to Bao Dai. General Hinh attempted
a coup in August 1954, foiled by the CIA, and Diem rebounded with a landslide victory in October 1955, when South Vietnamese voters affirmed him
as prime minister. His triumph was doubly remarkable for obtaining 605,025
votes in Saigon, where only 450,000 voters were registered. Three days later,
on October 26, Diem proclaimed himself president of a new Republic of South
Vietnam. With U.S. support, he cancelled the elections scheduled for 1956,
thereby negating the Geneva Accords.
Over the next eight years, despite occasional sham elections, Diem ruled
South Vietnam as a virtual despot in the French colonial style, filling his top
government posts with Catholic cronies. Although personally corrupt, he made
a show of moralism, banning abortion and prosecuting adulterers, reclaiming
Saigon from the Binh Xuyen gang, and crushing the larger religious militias.
Draconian punishment for various infractions included beheading with a mobile guillotine, towed around rural villages behind an army truck, with Viet
Minh supporters and anticorruption whistleblowers bearing the brunt of execution and torture. Observers estimate that Diems regime killed at least 50,000
persons in that manner, and imprisoning at least 75,000 more.
Increasing opposition to Diem was not limited to the Viet Minh or South Vietnams native National Liberation Front (the Viet Cong). Communist gunman Ha
Minh Tri failed in the first known attempt to kill Diem, on February 22, 1957,
but other attempts followed. On November 11, 1960, Colonel Nguyen Chanh
Thi and Lieutenant Colonel Vuong Van Dong led an abortive coup against
Diem, then fled the country when it failed. On February 27, 1962, two air force
pilotsFirst Lieutenant Pham Phu Quoc and Second Lieutenant Nguyen Van
Custrafed the presidential palace, killing three staffers and wounding 31 others. They missed Diem, however, and whereas Cu escaped to Cambodia, Quoc
was imprisoned until after Diems assassination in November 1963.
NGO DINH DIEM
Diems final crisis stemmed from his mostly Catholic regimes persistent discrimination against Buddhists, who comprised an estimated 80 percent of the
population. Exclusion of Buddhists from most public service positions, coupled with special concessions to Catholics on taxation and in business, were
among the chief Buddhist complaints. Diem also promoted Catholics to most
command positions in the military, and distributed weapons for counterinsurgency to Catholic villagers, while leaving most Buddhist settlements defenseless against Viet Cong raiders. The Catholic Church remained South Vietnams
largest landowner, and Catholics were exempted from the neo-feudal corve
system of forced labor required by Diems regime from most citizens.
By May 1963, when Buddhist flags were banned from the mostly Buddhist
city of Hue, where Diems elder brother served as Catholic archbishop, South
Vietnam stood on the verge of a religious uprising. Soldiers and police fired on
protesters, killing dozens, later spraying demonstrators with caustic chemical
weapons. Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc publicly burned himself to death
in Saigon, on June 11, and other fiery protests followed, prompting Diems
sister-in-law to gloat over her pleasure at the Buddhist barbecues. In August,
soldiers raided a pagoda in Saigon, vandalizing it and seizing Ducs cremated
MADAME NHU
Although South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem never married,
his sister-in-law, wife of presidential brother and chief advisor Ngo Dinh
Nhu, served as the nations de facto First Lady. Born Tran Le Xuan (Tears
of Spring), on August 22, 1924, South Vietnams future Dragon Lady
was yet another Catholic aristocrat whose family had forged alliances with
French colonial administrators. She married Ngo Dinh Nhu in 1943, at
age 18, and rose to power with him in the 1950s, as Nhus brother won
the presidency, taking Nhu along as his chief advisor in a regime notorious for nepotistic cronyism. Under President Diem, Madame Nhus father became South Vietnams ambassador to the United States, and her
mother served as an observer at the United Nations. In 1962, while erecting a monument to the Trung sistersheroines of an ancient rebellion
against ChinaMadame Nhu insisted that the statue bear her likeness.
The following year, her callous comments about Buddhist barbecues
focused animosity against her family and longstanding discrimination
against Vietnams religious majority. Following her husbands death, she
fled into exile, her property seized by Diems successors. Madame Nhu
died in Rome on Easter Sunday, April 24, 2011.
365
366
NGOUABI, M ARIEN
remains, after beating the priests. By November, most historians today agree,
Diem had become such an embarrassment that his erstwhile U.S. supporters
approved ofor, at least, refrained from preventinghis assassination.
One who did not approve, and who apparently was shocked by the Saigon
killings, was President John F. Kennedy. He called the double murder particularly abhorrent, telling National Security Council staffer Michael Forrestal that
it bothered him as a moral and religious matter. Coupled with the Cuban Bay
of Pigs fiasco from 1961, the Saigon incident probably influenced Kennedys
remark to future Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford that Something very bad
is going on within the CIA and I want to know what it is. I want to shred the
CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the four winds. Kennedy lost
that chance three weeks later, with his own assassination in Dallas, Texas.
In Vietnam, no one was ever prosecuted for killing Diem and his brother.
A French physician signed the death certificates without performing an autopsy, listing Diem occupations as Chief of Province and his brothers as
Chief of Library Service, posts they last held in the 1940s. They were buried
at an undisclosed location, still kept secret to the present day. General Duong
Van Minh succeeded Diem as president for two months, then ceded the office
to ex-general Nguyen Khanh. Minh would return as president in April 1975,
for an even shorter three-day tenure, prior to the communist capture of South
Vietnam.
See also: Kennedy, John Fitzgerald (19171963).
Further Reading
Hammer, Ellen. A Death in November: America in Vietnam, 1963. New York: E. P. Dutton,
1987.
Hoang Ngoc Thanh and Than Thi Nhan Duc. Why the Vietnam War? President Ngo Dinh
Diem and the US: His Overthrow and Assassination. Tuan-Yen, Vietnam: Mai-Nam
Publishers, 2001.
Jacobs, Seth. Americas Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S.
Intervention in Southeast Asia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Jacobs, Seth. Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of Americas War in
Vietnam, 19501963. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. New York: Anchor Books, 2008.
NGOUABI, MARIEN (19381977)

On March 18, 1977, four gunmen stormed the official residence of President
Marien Ngouabi in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo. The raiders killed
Ngouabi, who was described over Radio Brazzaville as dying in combat, with
gun in hand. A 11-member military committee of the Congolese Labour
Party, quickly formed to serve as an interim government until further orders
NGOUABI, MARIEN
were issued, described the killers as a suicide squad, although its alleged
ringleaderformer army captain Barthlemy Kikadidihad escaped alive. In
his absence, the committee rounded up more than a dozen other suspects, including ex-president Alphonse Massamba-Dbat, whom Ngouabi had deposed
by force in September 1968. All were convicted of treason, despite what some
observers called a dearth of solid evidence, and they were executed en masse
on March 25, 1977.
Marien Ngouabi was born at Ombell, in the Cuvette Department of thenFrench Equatorial Africa, on December 31, 1938. Completing his primary
education at Owando, in 1953, Ngouabi then matriculated to Brazzavilles military academy, Ecole des enfants de troupes Gnral Leclerc, graduating in 1957.
His first posting was to Bouar, in Oubangui-Chari (now the Central African Republic), followed by service in the FrenchBritish mandate of Cameroun from
1958 until January 1960, when it achieved independence as the Republic of
Cameroon.
Eight months later, in August 1960, France granted full independence to the
Republic of the Congo. Ngouabis superiors then dispatched him to the Ecole
Militaire Prparatoire in Strasbourg, France, and to the Ecole Spciale Militaire de
Saint-Cyr, for training as an officer. He returned home as a second lieutenant in
1962, promoted to full lieutenant the following year. In 1965, Ngouabi created
and trained the countrys first paratrooper battalion, simultaneously earning a
reputation for outspoken leftist views. In April 1966, when he refused a posting to Pointe-Noire, second-largest city in the nation, Ngouabi suffered demotion to the rank of soldier second-class. He nonetheless continued his political
agitation, and was arrested by order of President Alphonse Massamba-Dbat
on July 29, 1968.
Two days later, sympathetic soldiers freed Ngouabi and a fellow prisoner,
Second Lieutenant Eyabo, organizing a new National Revolutionary Council
on August 5, with Ngouabi in charge. President Massamba-Dbat retained his
office, as an emasculated figurehead ruler, until Ngouabi proclaimed himself
president on December 31, 1968. His first official act involved renaming his
homeland as the Peoples Republic of the Congo (PRC), Africas first Marxist
Leninist state. At the same time, Ngouabi established a new Parti Congolais du
Travail (Congolese Party of Labour, or PCT) as the PRCs only legal political
party. His regime forged close ties with the Soviet Union, but also maintained
relations with Franceat least, until he refused demands from Paris that he
annex Angolas oil-rich Cabinda Province. Some observers claim that France
thereafter promoted and financed a series of attempts to depose Ngouabi.
The first such coup occurred on February 22, 1972, prompting Ngouabi
to purge his armys ranks of suspected traitors. Former Congolese prime minister Ambroise Noumazalayewas among 13 defendants sentenced to die on
March 25, but President Ngouabi commuted their death sentences to life
367
368
NGOUABI, M ARIEN
imprisonment on the same day. An anti-Ngouabi militant group, M 22

short for Mouvement 22 de fevrier, February 22 Movementremained active
in the PRC until April 1973, when leader Ange Diawara was killed with most
of his supporters. Two months later, seeking a new global ally, President
Ngouabi visited the Peoples Republic of China.
On December 30, 1974, Ngouabi was reelected as chairman and permanent secretary of the PCT Central Committee, sworn in for a second term as
president on January 9, 1975. Having already nationalized the PRCs means
of productionfactories, mines, and so onhe now signed a formal economic pact with the Soviet Union. A communist state in Africa was the
Wests worst nightmare, prompting allegations of subversion by the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency. Four days after Ngouabis assassination, on
March 22, 1977, persons unknown kidnapped and murdered Brazzavilles
Catholic archbishop, Cardinal mile Biayenda. No one was apprehended for
that crime, though Radio Brazzaville blamed unnamed members of Ngouabis
family.
Following Ngouabis murder, the military committee of the Congolese Labour Party installed Colonel Joachim Yhombi-Opango as head of state, a post
he held until his forced resignation in February 1979, on charges of trying to
organize a ruling rightist faction. Before he was deposed, Yhombi-Opango
suspended the PRCs constitution and dissolved the national assembly. He
maintained ties to the Soviet Union, while strengthening alliances with
France and resuming diplomatic relations with the United States (severed in
1965). In 1991, the PRCs Sovereign National Conference removed the word
populaire (Peoples) from the countrys name, also replacing the flag and national anthem with symbols more appreciated in the West.
Meanwhile, on February 12, 1978, Brazzaville security forces reportedly
found the corpse of assassination ringleader Barthlemy Kikadidi, shot in the
back a short time before, at a hideout near the capital. Also found, they said,
was the fresh corpse of Brazzaville taxi driver Joseph Kifouani, posthumously
accused of helping Kikadidi hide since March 1977. Few observers were fully
satisfied with that convenient solution, which silenced Kikadidi forever, but
his death eventually helped to rehabilitate late president Massamba-Dbat,
celebrated today with a Brazzaville stadium named in his honor.
Further Reading
Clark, John, and Samuel Decalo. Historical Dictionary of Republic of the Congo. Lanham,
MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012.
Decalo, Samuel. Africa: The Lost Decades. Gainesville: Florida Academic Press, 2012.
Decalo, Samuel. Coups and Army Rule in Africa: Motivations and Constraints. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
NICHOLAS II
Onwumechili, Chuka. African Democratization and Military Coups. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.
Shubin, V. G. The Hot Cold War: The USSR in Southern Africa. London: Pluto Press,
2008.
NICHOLAS II (18681918)
On March 15, 1917, in the midst of the Russian Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated his throne, naming his brother, Grand Duke Michael, as the next emperor
of all of Russia. Michael declined, preferring election by popular vote, but Russian peasants wanted no more monarchs, opting instead for a provisional socialist
government. On March 22, Nicholas, his wife, and children were placed under
house arrest at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, south of Saint Petersburg.
In August, as fighting continued, the royal family was evacuated to Tobolsk, in Siberia, then transported once again to Yekaterinburg, in May 1918. Their captors
sought to keep them from advancing Bolsheviks (majority), battling to seize
control of Russia from Alexander Kerenskys Menshevik (minority) regime.
Captured by the Bolsheviks (or
Reds) at Yekaterinburg, Nicholas and his family were scheduled for trial, but their captors
panicked upon receiving word
of an anticommunist white
armys advance. On July 16,
1918, a telegram from Moscows
Supreme Soviet (council) ordered the Romanov familys
mass execution. Commandant
Yakov Yurovsky led the firing
squad that carried out that order, shooting Nicholas, his wife,
and their five children in a basement chamber, finishing the job
with bayonets.
Russias last tsar was born
Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov, in Saint Petersburg,
on May 18, 1868. His paternal
grandfather was Tsar Alexander
II, and his maternal grandfather was King Christian IX of Bolshevik revolutionaries killed Tsar Nicholas II
Denmark. His father was Tsar and his family in 1918. (Getty Images)
369
370
NICHOLAS II
Alexander III, and his motherPrincess Dagmar of Denmarkwas a sister

British queen Alexandra, mother of King George V. He was thus of Russian,
Danish, and German descent, but above all, a blue-blooded royal.
On March 13, 1881, Nicholas witnessed his grandfathers assassination in
Saint Petersburg, an act that prompted Alexander III to move his family outside
the city, to the more secure Gatchina Palace. With his fathers elevation to the
throne, Nicholas in turn succeeded him as Russias Tsesarevich (heir apparent).
From that post, he participated in opening ceremonies for the Trans-Siberian
Railway (March 1890), attended meetings of the Imperial Council, and survived
his first assassination attempt at Otsu, Japan, on May 11, 1891. That incident
occurred during a nine-month Eastern journey spanning India, Southeast
Asia, China, and Japan, when one of the royal partys security guards, Tsuda
Sanzo, swung a saber at Nicholas. The first blow gashed Nicholass forehead,
but he was saved from a second through quick action by his cousin, Prince
George of Greece and Denmark, who blocked the thrust with his cane. Rickshaw drivers captured the would-be assassin, who received a life prison term.
Alexander III died on November 1, 1894, whereupon Nicholas, age 26, assumed the throne. On November 26, he married Princess Alix of Hesse, subsequently known as Empress Consort Alexandra Feodorovna after her conversion
to the Russian Orthodox Church. Despite his early reputation as a ladies man,
Nicholas was apparently faithful to Alexandra throughout their marriage, which
produced four daughters and one son between 1895 and 1904. Although ruling as tsar from the moment of his fathers death, Nicholas did not undergo formal coronation until May 26, 1896. The following day, at a public celebration
on Khodynka Field outside Moscow, a stampede by 500,000 persons seeking
free food and beer left 1,389 dead and another 1,300 injured.
Whereas some observers took that disaster as an omen of the new regimes
ill fortune, others viewed a gala banquet for the French ambassadorheld
on the same nightas emblematic of the new tsars indifference toward his
people. Over the next five years, Nicholas pursued his late fathers domestic
and foreign policies, including reinforcement of a Franco-Russian Alliance that
would endure until disrupted by the revolution of 1917. He also sought to
negotiate peace between hostile nations of Europe, culminating in the Hague
Peace Conference of 1899 and the nomination of Nicholas for a Nobel Peace
Prize two years later. Nicholas lost the final vote for that award, and dual prizes
went to Henry Dunant of Switzerland, for founding the International Committee of the Red Cross, and to Frenchman Frdric Passy, for organizing the first
Universal Peace Conference.
Three years after his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, Nicholas found
himself at war with Japan, in February 1904. Both nations sought control over
Korea and Manchuria, but Japanese forces proved superior, defeating both the
Russian army and navy in separate engagements. In the midst of that conflict,
NICHOLAS II
on January 22, 1905, a series of strikes and uprisings launched Russias first
revolution against the royal family, continuing until resistance was crushed in
June 1907. Although overall casualty figures are vague and unreliable, an estimated 14,000 dissidents were executed during the revolution, with at least
75,000 imprisoned. Meanwhile, the Russo-Japanese War cost Russia some
53,000 lives lost in combat, and another 18,830 from disease. The Treaty of
Portsmouth, signed on September 5, 1905, ended that conflict and established
Japan as a global power, dominant over the Pacific Ocean.
The 1905 revolution produced a new constitution, ratified in April 1906.
Aside from charting guidelines for royal succession and promulgation of laws,
Chapter 8 detailed the rights and obligations of Russian citizens. For the
first time in history, they were guaranteed protection from arbitrary arrest and
imprisonment, with protection from illegal search and seizure, and promised
inviolability of their homes. They also gained the right to own private property, to travel through Russia (subject to restrictions), to assemble and express
themselves freely, to choose their own religion, and to organize labor unions or
guilds. Military service remained mandatory for all males, regardless of social
rank, as did payment of taxes and performance of other duties in accordance
with lawful decrees.
Count Sergei Yulyevich Witte took office as Russias first prime minister on
November 6, 1905, and although Nicholas initially enjoyed cordial relations
with him, Alexandra disliked him for personal reasonsspecifically Wittes
investigation of Grigori Rasputin, a shady mystic who had attached himself to
the Romanov clan that same year, with promises to cure Tsarevich Alexeis hemophilia. Rasputin failed in that, but still exerted quasi-hypnotic control over
Alexandra, and through her, over the tsar. Conflicts with the empress consort
and the State Duma (lower house of the federal legislature) forced Wittes resignation in May 1906, and his successor as prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, dissolved the Duma two months later. A Second Duma fared no better, dissolved
by Stolypin in June 1907.
The eruption of World War I, in July 1914, involved Russia through its
Triple Entente alliance with France and Great Britain, squaring off against the
Central Powers of Germany, Bulgaria, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the
Ottoman Empire. Before the 1917 revolution removed Russia as a combatant
in that global conflict, estimated military losses for the tsars empire ranged
from 1,811,000 to 2,254,369, with at least 1.5 million civilian deaths from
military action, or from disease, famine, and other war-related causes. Losses
on that scale were bound to spark dissension, even among loyal monarchists.
One such defender of the tsar, Vladimir Purishkevich, rose in the Duma on
December 2, 1916, to complain of dark forces surrounding the throne
specifically Grigori Rasputin. If the mad monks influence was not removed,
Purishkevich warned to thunderous applause, Revolution threatens and an
371
372
NICHOLAS II
obscure peasant shall govern Russia no longer! Enemies of Rasputin murdered him two weeks later, but time was already running out for the Romanov dynasty.
The year 1917 found Russia on the brink of collapse. Millions of deaths aside,
the country had lost 55 percent of its locomotives and 34 percent of its railroad
cars since 1914, and wartime prohibition of alcoholic beverages unexpectedly
drained the treasury through loss of tax revenue. Starvation prompted looting
in Petrograd, in February 1917, with public denunciation of Nicholas and the
German woman he had married. When police fired on the demonstrators,
widespread rioting resulted. Reserve troops mustered to suppress the rebels
mutinied instead, killing those officers who did not join them. By March 12,
1917, an estimated 60,000 soldiers were on the march against their monarch.
Nicholas abdicated three days later, in favor of his youngest brother, but it was
already too late to save the empire.
Alexander Kerensky, then minister of war in Russias new provisional government, ordered the countrys last military offensive of World War I on July 1,
1917. By then, discipline within the army had degenerated to the point that the
campaign was bound to fail, collapsing on July 19 with an estimated 60,000
Russian casualties. Vladimir Lenins Bolsheviks consolidated power over Russia
in November 1917, and although they sued for peace, German demands were so
extreme that fighting dragged on for another four months. Finally, on March 3,
1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended combat on the Eastern Front, while
affirming independence for Belarus, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and
Ukraine. Twelve days later, execution of the Romanovs signaled the final end
of monarchy in Russia.
As news of the murders spread through Yekaterinburg, Yakov Yurovsky ordered the corpses removed to another location. The chosen vehicle broke down
en route to Yurovskys chosen burial site, whereupon Nicholas and his family
were hastily planted in a pit along Koptyaki Road, 12 miles north of Yekaterinburg. In 1991, a Soviet government reclamation team found the remains of
five victimsexcluding daughter Maria and son Alexeiand reinterred them
in a state funeral at the St. Catherine Chapel of the Peter and Paul Cathedral in
Saint Petersburg. On August 15, 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church canonized the late tsar and his family, rather curiously citing their humbleness, patience and meekness as qualifications for sainthood.
In the summer of 2007, searchers found another grave site near the pit
where Nicholas, his wife, and three children were unearthed in 1991. This
grave held the remains of two more victims, identified through DNA, in May
2008, as Maria and Alexei Romanov. Five months later, on October 1, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation rehabilitated the slain Romanovs,
calling them victims of political repression. On August 26, 2010, Moscows
Basmanny Court ordered a new investigation of the Romanov murders with
NICHOLAS II
an eye toward prosecuting their slayers. That proved to be an empty gesture,

because all of the Bolshevik suspects were long since deceased.
For years after the Russian Revolution, various impostors surfaced, claiming
to be children of Tsar Nicholas who had, somehow, escaped the firing squad.
At least five women claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, and
no less than nine men posed as Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich. Three women
also posed as Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna, two as Grand Duchess Maria
Nikolaevna, and one as Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna. Yet another man
claimed to be Anastasias son, and a Dutch woman professed to be a previously
unknown fifth royal daughter, bornshe saidat the time when Empress
Alexandra suffered a hysterical pregnancy. None of the impostors was able to
establish royal identity.
See also: Alexander II of Russia (18181881); Rasputin, Grigori Yefimovich
(18691916).
Further Reading
The Execution of Tsar Nicholas II, 1918. Eyewitness to History. http://www.eyewit
nesstohistory.com/nicholas.htm.
The Home of the Last Tsar. Alexander Palace Time Machine. http://www.alexander
palace.org/palace/mainpage.html.
Lieven, D. C. B. Nicholas II: Twilight of the Empire. New York: St. Martins Griffin, 1996.
Lyons, Marvin. Nicholas II: The Last Tsar. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.
McNeal, Shay. The Secret Plot to Save the Tsar: New Truths behind the Romanov Mystery.
Radzinsky, Edvard. The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Richards, Guy. The Rescue of the Romanovs: Newly Discovered Documents Reveal How
Czar Nicholas II and the Russian Imperial Family Escaped. Greenwich, CT: DevinAdair Publishing, 1975.
Slater, Wendy. The Many Deaths of Tsar Nicholas II: Relics, Remains and the Romanovs.
London: Taylor & Francis, 2009.
Warth, Robert. Nicholas II: The Life and Reign of Russias Last Monarch. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1997.
373
O
OBAMA, BARACK HUSSEIN, II (1961 )
ATTEMPTED/THREATENED
Arguably the most controversial U.S. chief executive since Franklin D. Roosevelt, Barack Obama made history in 2008 with his election as the nations first
African American president. From the announcement of his candidacy in 2007,
he became a lightning rod for vitriolic attacks by white supremacists and other
far-right extremists, resulting in a series of assassination threats and alleged
murder plots spanning five years, as of this writing in November 2012.
Obama was a U.S. senator from Illinois when he announced his presidential candidacy in February 2007, and the first racist death threats came three
months later. As a result, Secret Service agents were assigned to guard Obama
and his family from that date onward, although federal law only mandates
protection of major candidates for 120 days preceding a presidential election.
No details of the threats in question are available today, and although the National Journal ran an August 2007 article headlined Authorities play down plot
against Obama, the protection detail remained in place.
On July 15, 2008, six weeks before the Democratic National Convention
nominated Obama as its presidential candidate, two residents of Charlotte,
North Carolina, reported threats made against Obama by local accountant
Jerry M. Blanchard, described today on racist Web sites as a stalwart Republican. Speaking to diners at a restaurant, Blanchard declared, Obama and his
wife are never going to make it to the White House. He needs to be taken out
and I can do it in a heartbeat. A third witness told authorities of a second incident, at a hotel, where Blanchard said, Ill get a sniper rifle and take care of
it myself. Somebodys got to do it. We both know Obama is the anti-Christ.
Indicted for threatening Obama in August 2008, Blanchard pled guilty in February 2009, receiving a 366-day prison term and a fine of $3,100, plus three
years supervised federal probation. In September 2009, he was permanently
stripped of his state accountants license.
On July 31, 2008, two weeks after the initial Blanchard incident, Raymond
H. Geisel held a training class for bail-bonds enforcement agents in Miami,
Florida. During the course of his lecture, Geisel referred to Obama as a nigger
and told the class, If he gets elected, Ill assassinate him myself. He also threatened to shoot then-president George W. Bush, but later claimed the comments
376
OBA M A, BAR ACK HUSSEIN, II
were made in jest. Secret Service agents arrested Geisel in August and searched
his motel room, seizing a loaded pistol and quantities of ammunition; tear gas;
various knives, including a machete; body armor; and military-style fatigues.
He spent a month in custody before being released.
On August 24, 2008, one day before Democrats convened to nominate
Obama in Denver, Colorado, authorities arrested three supposed white supremacists in Denver on charges of plotting to kill Obama. The suspects included cousins Shawn Robert Adolf and Tharin Gartrell, with a friend, Nathan
Johnson. Gartell was nabbed first, with four guns and a quantity of methamphetamine, and the other two were jailed later the same day. Authorities alleged that the trio traveled to Denver with murder in mind, a claim apparently
confirmed by Johnson in a radio interview, when he said, He [Obama] dont
belong in political office. Blacks dont belong in political office. He ought to
be shot.
Secret Service spokesmen later said the Denver plot was crude and posed
no credible threat to Obama, so the three were not indicted for threatening
a presidential candidate. On January 29, 2009, District Judge Robert Blackburn sentenced Gartell to 15 days in jail and six months in a halfway house
for possessing methamphetamine, adding, Frankly, Mr. Gartell, its time you
grew up. Gartell was released on June 12, 2009. Held on outstanding drug
warrants, Adolf faced additional charges of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person, possession of body armor by a violent felon, and possession of
methamphetamine with intent to distribute. He pled guilty to the gun charge
on November 6, 2009, and the other counts were dismissed. On February 5,
2010, Adolf received a 30-month federal sentence, concurrent with a 10-year
Colorado sentence on unrelated robbery charges. Prosecutors charged Nathan
Johnson with simple possession of methamphetamine and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. He pled guilty to the weapons charge on December
16, 2008, and completed his federal prison sentence on March 10, 2010.
While those events were still unfoldingon September 23, 2008Chicago
police arrested local resident Omhari L. Sengstacke near Obamas home, armed
with a pistol and wearing a bulletproof vest. Held in lieu of $250,000 bond
on charges of trespassing and unlawful use of a weapon by a convicted felon,
Sengstacke was convicted on both counts and received a five-year sentence on
July 10, 2009.
On October 22, 2008, officers in Memphis, Tennessee, arrested selfproclaimed white supremacists Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman for
plotting a racist mass-murder spree. Their plan included robbery of a local
gun store and home-invasion robberies to bankroll their conspiracy, culminating in the assassination of Barack Obama and the murder of 88 African
Americans in Tennessee, 14 of whom would be decapitated. (Among neoNazis, the number 88 symbolizes the letters HH, for Heil Hitler, and
OBAMA, BARACK HUSSEIN, II
the number 14 refers to the Fourteen Words originally penned by imprisoned racial terrorist David Lane: We must secure the existence of our people
and a future for White Children.) Cowart and Schlesselman got no further
with their plot than shooting up a Baptist church in Brownsville; they foolishly boasted of the attack to friends who reported the crime. Secret Service
spokesmen said they took the threat to Obama very seriously, but questioned the defendants ability to follow through. On November 5, 2008, a
federal grand jury indicted both men on charges of threatening to kill and inflict bodily harm upon a major presidential candidate, conspiracy, interstate
unlawful transportation of an unregistered firearm, interstate transportation
of a firearm with the intent to commit a felony, transporting a short-barreled
shotgun across state lines without a license, and unlawful possession of a
short-barreled shotgun. Cowart faced additional charges of damaging religious property and using a firearm during a crime of violence. Schlesselman
pleaded guilty to three counts on January 14, 2010, receiving a 10-year sentence. Cowart pled guilty to eight counts on March 29, 2010, and was sentenced to 15 years.
On November 10, 2009, Kristy Lee Roshia phoned the Boston office of the
Secret Service, stating that she planned to blow away First Lady Michelle
Obama during a forthcoming Christmas trip to Hawaii. Roshia declared that
she knew the exact location where the Obamas would be staying, and added
a threat to kill unspecified U.S. Marines. Already known to agents for her 2004
threat to kill President George W. Bush, Roshia was captured within two miles
of the Obamas Honolulu lodgings on December 19, 2009, punching a Secret
Service agent in the process. A judge ordered Roshia held without bond, pending psychiatric examination on February 9, 2010, but no further details are
presently available on disposition of her case.
On December 30, 2009, John Turnpaugh of New Orleans, Louisiana, called
that citys 911 emergency number and told a police dispatcher, Hey, yeah,
Im going to kill President Barack Obama and his wife this month. Although
Turnpaugh did not give his name, Secret Service agents traced the call to his
cell phone, leading to his arrest on January 2, 2010. Aside from threatening the
president, Turnpaugh faced charges of possessing of marijuana with intent to
distribute it and possessing four guns to aid his drug trafficking. He pled guilty
to the charges on February 2, 2010, and received an eight-year sentence from
U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey on May 11, 2010.
An unusual case involved Kentucky resident Johnny Logan Spencer, who
posted a poem titled The Sniperdescribing Obamas murderon a whitesupremacist Web site in 2007, and again after President Obama took office in
2009. Authorities arrested Spencer in February 2010, and a federal grand jury
indicted him in March. Despite claims that he wrote the poem to somehow vent
grief over his mothers recent death, Spencer abandoned a First Amendment
377
378
defense and pled guilty in July 2010, receiving a 33-month prison sentence on
December 5, 2010.
On March 21, 2010, Brian Dean Miller of Dallas, Texas, posted an Internet
message to Craigslist under the heading Obama Must Die. The body of his
message read: People, the time has come for revolution. It is time for Obama
to die. I am dedicating my life to the death of Obama and every employee of
the federal government. As I promised in a previous post, if the health care reform bill passed I would become a terrorist. Today I become a terrorist. In a
subsequent post, he invited readers to contact the Secret Service, saying, Feel
free to notify them if it helps you sleep better tonight. You should tell them I
threatened to kill the president and destroy the U.S. government. Maybe you
would like to quote the post as your evidence. A resident of nearby Arlington complied, and authorities traced Miller to his mothers home through his
e-mail address. Miller admitted posting the threat and repeated it to arresting
officers. On November 2, 2010, Miller received a 27-month prison term without possibility of parole.
On April 25, 2010, police in Asheville, North Carolina, arrested Ohio native Joseph Sean McVey at the citys airport, as President Obama arrived aboard
Air Force One. Armed with a pistol and driving a car disguised to resemble a
police cruiser, complete with working lights and siren, McVey was jailed on
charges of impersonating a police officer and going armed to the terror of the
public. The latter charge was dropped for lack of evidence, and McVey posted
$100,000 bond on April 28. Police who testified at his August trial admitted
that everything found in his car might have had some logical use for McVeys
public service volunteering in the Buckeye State. On August 25, 2010, Judge
Shirley Brown convicted McVey of violating an ordinance banning guns from
city property, sentencing him to time served in April.
The next threat came from Ireland, where ex-nurse and ex-convict Terence
Edward Kellyknown to fellow Irish Muslim converts as Khalid Kelly, Abu
Osama, and Taliban Terryonce led the outlawed Al-Muhajiroun militant
group in Dublin. A fugitive from British justice in 20082009, Kelly returned
to Dublin in April 2010 and briefly settled his legal affairs. In May 2011, interviewed by the Sunday Mirror, Kelly said that al-Qaeda was likely to kill Obama
on the presidents upcoming visit to Ireland, adding that heKellywould
like to do it himself. Personally I would feel happy if Obama was killed, he
said. How could I not feel happy when a big enemy of Islam is gone? Police
detained Kelly during Obamas visit, but he was not formally charged.
On the night of November 11, 2011, Idaho resident Oscar Ramiro OrtegaHernandez fired nine rifle shots at the White House from his car, parked on
Constitution Avenue. In custody, he told authorities that President Obama
was the devil and the Anti-Christ, sentiments shared with Idaho neighbors before he left the Gem State for Washington, D.C. Those neighbors
recalled his claims that he needed to kill Obama and will not stop until
OBAMA, BARACK HUSSEIN, II
its done. Others recalled Ortega-Hernandez claiming to be Jesus Christ. A

federal grand jury indicted Ortega-Hernandez on January 17, 2012, for attempting to assassinate the president and 18 other related counts. His trial
was scheduled for 2013.
The next plot against President Obama involved four soldiers of the U.S.
Army stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia. According to state prosecutors, the
fourSgt. Anthony Peden, Pvt. Isaac Aguigui, Pfc. Michael Burnett, and Pvt.
Christopher Salmonformed an anarchist militia aimed at killing President
Obama and toppling the federal government. The four spent at least $87,000
on guns and bomb components. On December 2011, the four killed ex-soldier
Michael Roark and his 17-year-old girlfriend, Tiffany York, to keep them from
informing police of the conspiracy. Arrested a week later, Burnett confessed,
pleading guilty to manslaughter, illegal gang activity, and other charges, while
agreeing to testify against his comrades. Peden, Aguigui, and Salmon stand
charged with malice murder, felony murder, criminal gang activity, aggravated
assault, and using a firearm while committing a felony.
The last threat to President Obamaat the time of this writing (2012)
was exposed on October 19, 2012, with the arrest of Bangladeshi native
Quasi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis. Federal agents reported placing
Nafis under surveillance during the summer, tracking his plan to launch a
holy war against the United States. His plans included murdering the president and bombing the New York Federal Reserve with a van full of explosives, but agents managed to replace the actual explosive charges with
inert substitutes; they then arrested Nafis after he parked the vehicle near
his Manhattan target. Held without bond on multiple charges of terrorism,
Nafis was described by a surprised acquaintance as polite and courteous.
He didnt rant or rave or say crazy stuff. He was helpful. All the things you
would expect from a good Muslim kid. He prayed five times a day. No trial
date has been scheduled at this writing.
The target of that rage, Barack Obama, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii,
on August 4, 1961, the son of a foreign exchange student from Kenya and a
Caucasian mother from Kansas. His parents divorced in 1964, with his father
returning to Kenyaa circumstance that later fueled baseless charges that
Obama was ineligible for the presidency as an African. Obamas mother
married an Indonesian exchange student in 1965, and followed him home in
1967, where her son attended Indonesian-language schools from ages six to
ten. Obama returned to Hawaii in 1971, living with his maternal grandparents, while his mother remained in Indonesia and died there, from cancer,
in 1995.
By that time, Obama had earned a BA in political science from Columbia
University (1983) and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School
(1991). Settling in Chicago, Obama directed Illinoiss Project Vote, seeking to
increase black voter registration, from April to October 1992. The following
379
380
year, he joined a law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he remained through 2004. At the same
time, he was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1997, serving through 2002.
In 2004, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, serving there until his election as
the first nonwhite president of the United States in 2008.
Obamas race and liberal politics inspired a right-wing backlash unrivaled
since attacks on Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression, or perhaps
on John F. Kennedy during his brief White House tenure in the early 1960s.
Aside from his race and paranoid suspicions that he was not American,
Obama inflamed the far right with policies that included withdrawal of U.S.
troops from Iraq, reform of national health care and immigration guidelines,
economic stimulus measures to lift the country from a near-depression, and
advocacy of equal rights for gay U.S. citizens. In November 2012, Obama was
reelected, defeating Republican challenger Mitt Romney by a margin of 3.5 million popular votes and 332206 in the Electoral College.
Further Reading
Bradley, Jim. Charlotte Man Charged with Making Threats against Obama. http://www
.wsoctv.com/news/news/charlotte-man-charged-with-making-threats-against-/nG4Jh.
Burnett, Sara. Drug Suspect Wanted to Shoot Obama at Invesco. Rocky Mountain
News (Denver, CO), September 3, 2008.
Bynum, Russ. Case Uncovers Terror Plot by Soldiers to Kill Obama. USA Today, August 27, 2012.
Date, Jack. Feds Thwart Alleged Obama Assassination Plot. ABC News, October 27,
2008. http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/Vote2008/story?id=6122962&page=1.
FBI Thwarts Obama Assassination Plot. Examiner.com. http://www.examiner.com/
article/fbi-thwarts-obama-assassination-plot.
Gardner, David. White Supremacists Cleared of Gun Plot to Assassinate President
Obama. Daily Mail (London), August 27, 2008.
Jordan, Lara. Feds Disrupt Skinhead Plot to Assassinate Obama. USA Today, October 28, 2008.
Lichtblau, Eric. Arrests in Plan to Kill Obama and Black Schoolchildren. New York
Times, October 27, 2008.
Man Arrested after Obama Leaves North Carolina. CNN, April 25, 2010. http://
news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/04/25/man-arrested-after-obama-leaves-north-carolina.
Man Indicted for Obama threat. United Press International, August 30, 2008.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/08/30/Man-indicted-for-Obama-threat/
UPI-27211220119296.
Maraniss, David. Barack Obama: The Story. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.
Mendell, Davis. Obama: From Promise to Power. New York: Amistad/HarperCollins,
2007.
Riccardi, Nicholas. Mens Threat to Kill Obama is Downplayed. Los Angeles Times,
August 26, 2008.
O B R E G N S A L I D O , L VA R O
Savage, Charlie. Idaho Man Charged with Trying to Assassinate Obama. Seattle
Times, November 17, 2011.
Woman Threatened to Murder Michelle Obama. Sky News, December 23, 2009.
http://news.sky.com/story/747031/woman-threatened-to-murder-michelle-obam.
OBREGN SALIDO, LVARO (18801928)

On July 17, 1928, General lvaro Obregn Salido attended a banquet in the
San ngel district of Mexico City, celebrating his election to a second term
as president. The recent electoral campaign coincided with Mexicos Cristero
War, a popular uprising against anti-Catholic policies of the ruling Mexican
Laborist Party. During the banquet, Catholic militant Jos de Len Toral gained
access to the restaurant by posing as an itinerant caricaturist, then approached
Obregn, drew a pistol, and shot him five times at close range, killing Obregn
instantly. Arrested at the scene, Len Toral told police that he decided to kill
Obregn in November 1927, after one of his friendsJesuit priest Jos Ramn
Miguel Agustn Pro Jurezwas executed without trial for his alleged role in a
bombing that wounded Obregn. At trial, Len Toral pled guilty, saying that he
killed Obregn to hasten the advent of Christs kingdom on Earth. Sentenced
to die, he was shot by a military firing squad on February 9, 1929. Concepcin
Acevedo de la Llata, a Catholic nun who allegedly encouraged the assassination, received a 30-year prison sentence.
lvaro Obregn Salido was born on February 19, 1880, at Siquisiva, in
the Mexican state of Sonora. His family, once affluent, had seen their estate
confiscated by the Liberal Party in 1867, during the rebellion against Frenchsupported Emperor Maximilian I, and Obregns father died in the year of his
only sons birth, leaving Obregn to be raised in poverty by his mother and
three older sisters. Employed at various jobs through adolescencefarming,
working at a sugar mill, selling shoes door-to-doorObregn became a tenant farmer in 1903, saving enough money to buy his own small chickpea farm
by 1906. Tragedy struck again the following year, with the death of his wife.
Entrusting two young daughters to the sisters who had raised him, Obregn
invented a chickpea harvester in 1909 and formed a company to manufacture
it, regaining a measure of wealth at last.
Obregn entered politics in 1911, winning election as municipal president
of Huatabampo, in Sonora. In November 1911, he threw his weight behind
new president Francisco Indalecio Madero Gonzlez, and in April 1912 he
volunteered to join troops opposing Pascual Orozco Vazquez, a rogue general
leading a rebellion against Maderos regime in Chihuahua. He fought under
the command of Jos Victoriano Huerta Mrquez, displaying previously unexpected military skill, and won promotion to the rank of colonel by the time
Orozco Vazquez was defeated in December 1912. Obregn planned a return
381
382
O B R E G N S A L I D O , LVA R O
to civilian life, but Huerta deposed Madero on February 22, 1913, whereupon
Obregn offered his services to loyalist forces in Sonora. Appointed as chief of
Sonoras War Department in March 1913, he defeated Huertas forces in four
successive battles over the next two months.
On September 30, 1913, Coahuila governor Venustiano Carranza named
Obregn commander in chief of the Constitutional Army in the Northwest,
with jurisdiction over five states. In April 1914, Obregn began his advance
toward Mexico City, capturing the nations capital on August 16. Convinced
that the Catholic Church had backed Huerta, Obregn fined the church
500,000 pesos, payable to a newly created Revolutionary Council for Aid to
the People. Likewise distrusting the wealthy, Obregn imposed punitive taxes
on capital, mortgages, real estate, automobiles, and other luxury items, while
forcing selected foreign businessmen to sweep the capitals streets.
While Obregn was thus engaged, Carranzanow the presidentsuffered
a falling out with his other top commanders, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Obregn, fearing another civil war, tried to remain neutral, but matters
came to a head after Carranza refused to attend the Convention of Aguascalientes in October 1914. The Convention declared itself sovereign, choosing
General Eulalio Gutirrez Ortiz as president, while naming Villa commander of
the Conventionalist Army, now at war with Carranzas forces. Obregn enlisted
Red Battalions from leftist labor unions, defeating Conventionalist troops at
Puebla on January 4, 1915, rolling on to victory in a series of four engagements (collectively known as the Battle of Celaya) between April 6 and June 5.
Although victorious, Obregn suffered a wound necessitating amputation of
his right arm. In the midst of his final battles against Villa and Zapata, in May
1915, Obregn accepted appointment as Carranzas minister of war. His efforts
to make the Mexican army more professional included establishment of a staff
college and school of military medicine, together with a Department of Aviation to train and field combat pilots.
In September 1916, President Carranza announced a forthcoming constitutional convention to revise and strengthen the liberal 1857 Federal Constitution of the United Mexican States. When that body met in December, however,
it was bitterly divided between conservative delegates backing Carranza and
radicals insisting on agrarian reform, which Carranza opposed. Obregn supported the leftists, including full separation of church and state, with a ban on
clergymen holding public office, canvassing on behalf of political parties or
candidates, or inheriting from persons other than blood relatives. Carranza,
courting Catholic support, opposed those provisions as well.
In June 1919, Obregn announced his presidential candidacy, promising
labor reforms and a new minister of industry and commerce if elected. Carranza retaliated by stripping Obregn of his military rank, which backfired
to create a new wave of popularity for the challenger. Hand-picked Carranza
successor Ignacio Bonillas defeated Obregn at the polls in April 1920, after
O B R E G N S A L I D O , L VA R O
Carranza falsely accused Obregn of plotting a military coup, but that lie soon
became a self-fulfilling prophecy. On April 23, supported by Sonoran governor
Adolfo de la Huerta, Obregn rose in revolt against Carranza. Carranza died in
an ambush on May 20, and de la Huerta served as provisional president until
December 1920, when Obregn won a special election, naming de la Huerta as
his secretary of the treasury.
Obregns first term as president, from 1920 to 1924, witnessed sweeping
educational reforms, including construction of more than 1,000 rural schools
and 2,000 public libraries. He also promoted artistic endeavors, inaugurating
the 50-year era of Mexican muralism, and forged an alliance with the Regional
Confederation of Mexican Workers to promote widespread (if imperfect)
labor reforms. In terms of land reform, Obregns administration distributed
921,627 hectares to Mexican farmers. Still suspicious of the Catholic Church
and its influence, Obregn proved less extreme than many church leaders had
feared, though they still condemned and despised him. An encyclical issued by
Pope Pius XI, in 1922, spawned militant Catholic Action groups that violently
opposed secular labor unions.
In 1923, Obregn endorsed Plutarco Elas Calles as his successor in the
following years presidential contest. Adolfo de la Huerta, who expected
the endorsement, organized a rebellion that enlisted more than half of Obregns standing army. Nonetheless, with the remainder of his troops, Obregn
crushed the insurgents on February 9, 1924, at Ocotln, Jalisco. Calles was
subsequently elected, and Obregon briefly retired from politics.
His successoran outspoken atheistproved more radical in dealings
with the Catholic Church, sparking the Cristero War. Scattered uprisings between August and October 1926 paved the way for a formal declaration of
rebellion on January 1, 1927, and the self-styled Cristeros scored their first
victory over federal troops at San Francisco del Rincn, Guanajuato, on February 23. Obregn, briefly content as a farmer and entrepreneur in Sonora,
donned his uniform once more to battle Yaqui insurgents between October
1926 and April 1927, then announced his candidacy for a second presidential term in May of that year. He emerged victorious from that election, but
did not survive to see inauguration day. He was succeeded by Minister of the
Interior Emilio Portes Gil, who held office for 14 months, until a new election was organized.
See also: Villa, Francisco Pancho (18781923); Zapata Salazar, Emiliano (18791919).
Further Reading
Beller, Susan. The Aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. Minneapolis: Twenty-first Century Books, 2008.
Brenner, Anita, and George Leighton. The Wind That Swept Mexico: The History of the
Mexican Revolution of 19101942. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984.
383
384
O LY M P I O , S Y LVA N U S E P I P H A N I O
Buchenau, Jrgen. The Last Caudillo: Alvaro Obregn and the Mexican Revolution. Chichester, United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Hall, Linda. lvaro Obregn: Power and Revolution in Mexico, 19111920. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1981.
Tuck, Jim. Cristero Rebellion: Part 1Toward the Abyss. Mexconnect. http://www
.mexconnect.com/articles/286-cristero-rebellion-part-1-toward-the-abyss.
Wasserman, Mark. The Mexican Revolution: A Brief History with Documents. New York:
Bedford/St. Martins, 2012.
OLYMPIO, SYLVANUS EPIPHANIO (19021963)

On January 13, 1963, a group of disgruntled noncommissioned army officers
staged a coup dtat against President Sylvanus Olympio in Lom, the capital
of Togo. Roused from sleep when the soldiers invaded his presidential palace,
Olympio scaled a wall to reach the U.S. embassy next door. He found the embassys door locked, and when no one answered his knocking, Olympio concealed himself in a car parked
nearby, within the embassy
compound. Ambassador Leon
Poullada arrived some time
later and spoke with Olympio,
but denied having keys to the
embassy. Poullada left, ostensibly to find the keys, but rebel
soldiers arrived in his absence
and entered the open compound, found Olympio hiding
in the car, and shot him. Most
accounts name the coups leader, Sergeant Emmanuel Bodjoll, as Olympios executioner,
but future president tienne
Eyadma Gnassingb later
claimed to have killed Olympio
personally.
Sylvanus Olympio was born
in Lom on September 6, 1902.
His homeland, then known as
Togoland, had been a German
protectorateand Germanys
only self-supporting African
President Sylvanus Olympio of Togo died in a mili- colonysince 1884. On Autary coup, in 1963. (Associated Press)
gust 9, 1914, soon after the
O L Y M P I O , S Y L VA N U S E P I P H A N I O
outbreak of World War I, French and British forces invaded Togoland, forcing
German occupation forces to surrender on August 26. On December 27, 1916,
the invaders divided Togoland into French and British administrative zones.
The Treaty of Versailles, ratified on July 20, 1922, made Togoland a League
of Nations Class B mandate, with France controlling roughly two-thirds of its
territory and Britain the remainder. Joint control persisted through the early
1950s, with Togolands status altered to that of a United Nations trust territory.
In May 1956, London authorized a referendum to decide the fate of British
Togoland, and a majority of voters chose to join Britains Gold Coast colony,
forming the newly independent nation of Ghana in March 1957.
Meanwhile, in October 1956, a similar referendum in French Togoland produced an overwhelming vote in favor of autonomy within the French union.
Nicolas Grunitzky was elected as the countrys first prime minister, but irregularities in that vote prompted another election in April 1958, supervised by
the United Nations. Sylvanus OlympioGrunitzkys brother-in-law and leader
since 1946 of Togos dominant party, the Committee of Togolese Unity
replaced Grunitzky as prime minister. Six months later, in October 1958,
France announced that it would grant Togo full independence as of April 27,
1960. Olympio remained in office as prime minister until April 9, 1961, when
the adoption of a new constitution required elections to seat a president for a
seven-year term. Nicolas Grunitzky challenged Olympio for that office, but a
statute banned his Togolese Progressive Party from participating in the contest, whereupon Olympio swept the field with 90 percent of the popular vote.
Grunitzky fled into exile, while other opposition leaders were imprisoned.
As president, Olympio adopted a pro-Western foreign policy that endeared
him to U.S. presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy. On the domestic front, Olympio terrorized opponents with a private militia, the Ablode
Sodjas, and supported dissident guerrilla forces opposing President Kwame
Nkrumah in neighboring Ghana. Nkrumah returned the favor, joining French
intelligence officers to bankroll Olympios enemies. Olympios ultimate downfall, however, stemmed from dissatisfaction among some 300 Togolese who
had served in the French colonial army, but were then discharged with the advent of full independence. Former sergeant Emmanuel Bodjoll chaired a ninemember Insurrection Committee, created to topple Olympios regime, and led
the final group of 30-odd men who killed the president in January 1963, while
arresting other leading members of his government.
The day after Olympios murder, President Kennedy issued a statement from
Washington, saying, President Olympios tragic assassination is a blow to the
progress of stable government in Africa. It is also a loss not only for his own
country but for all those who knew him here in the United States. In Togo,
Emmanuel Bodjoll held power in the name of the Insurrection Committee
for two days, then ceded the presidency to Nicolas Grunitzky, who had
385
386
O P E R AT I O N W R AT H O F G O D
returned from exile on January 16. Grunitzky sought to unify the country, inviting various parties to join in his administration, but the task was beyond
him. He survived on abortive coup dtat, on November 21, 1966, then was
ousted by Lieutenant Colonel tienne Eyadma Gnassingb on January 13,
1967. Grunitzky decamped for Paris, and Gnassingb installed himself as
Togos president on April 14, 1967. Declaring that that democracy in Africa
moves along at its own pace and in its own way, Gnassingb remained in office until February 5, 2005, when he died in a plane crash, on a visit to Tunisia.
His son, Faure Essozimna Gnassingb, assumed the presidency three months
later and rules Togo today.
Despite President Kennedys praise for Sylvanus Olympio, rumors persist
that the United States sanctioned and/or participated in his assassination. Specifically, some Togolese believe that then-ambassador Leon Poullada deliberately left Olympio exposed to his enemies in the U.S. embassy compound,
alerting his French counterpart in Lom to tell the rebels where they could find
their target. The late presidents son, Gilchrist Olympio, presently leads Togos
largest opposition party, the Union of Forces for Change.
Further Reading
Houngnikpo, Mathruin. Determinants of Democratization in Africa: A Comparative Study
of Benin and Togo. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001.
Melady, Thomas, and Margaret Melady. Ten African Heroes: The Sweep of Independence in
Black Africa. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011.
Schwab, Peter. Designing West Africa: Prelude to 21st Century Calamity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Seely, Jennifer. The Legacies of Transition Governments in Africa: The Cases of Benin and
Togo. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
OPERATION WRATH OF GOD (19721992)

On September 5, 1972, eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black
September penetrated the Olympic village in Munich, West Germany, seizing
11 Israeli athletes as hostages. The gunmen demanded freedom for 234 prisoners held in Israeli jails, as well as for founders of the violent Red Army Faction incarcerated in Germany. On September 6, a botched rescue attempt by
German police left five of the terrorists and all 11 of the hostages dead. Three
of the raiders were captured alive and jailed pending trial, then were released
in October 1972, after Black September guerrillas hijacked a Lufthansa airliner. The airline also paid Black September a $5 million ransom, prompting
furious Israelis to charge that officials in Bonn had staged the event to prevent
further terrorist raids in West Germany.
Prior to the Lufthansa skyjacking, on September 8, Israeli warplanes had
already bombed strongholds of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)
in Lebanon and Syria, killing some 200 persons, but Prime Minister Golda
Meir sought a more direct response against Black September and its allies.
To that end, she created and chaired Committee X, with Defense Minister
Moshe Dayan, Mossad director Zvi Zamir, and General Aharon Yariv. The resultant assassination campaignvariously dubbed Operation Wrath of God
and sometimes Operation Bayonetwas conceived, in the words of Mossad
deputy director David Kimche not so much revenge but mainly to make them
[the terrorists] frightened. We wanted to make them look over their shoulders
and feel that we are upon them.
Mossad agent Michael Harari supervised creation of a 15-member team,
divided into five squads designated by letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Taken
in alphabetical order, the group included two skilled assassins, called Alefs;
two guards for the killers, designated Bets; two agents labeled Hets, who
established cover by renting apartments and vehicles; seven Ayin operatives who mounted surveillance on targets and mapped escape routes; and
two Qoph members responsible for communications. Thus organized, Operation Wrath of God proceeded to hunt down its prey.
The first to die was Wael Zwaiter, a PLO spokesman ambushed in Rome on
October 16, 1972, shot 11 times in honor of the slain Israeli athletes. Next,
in Paris, PLO representative Dr. Mahmoud Hamshari was fatally injured by a
booby-trapped telephone on December 8, 1972, dying from his wounds on
January 9, 1973. Details remain vague on a third reported killing, around the
same time, of a Palestinian activist expertly pushed under a London bus.
Two weeks after Dr. Hamsharis death, on January 24, 1973, another Israeli bomb killed Jordanian Hussein Al Bashir, representative of the PLOs
Fatah political party, in his room at the Olympic Hotel in Nicosia. Dr. Basil
al-Kubaissi, a law professor at the American University of Beirut, died in a
drive-by shooting on April 6, 1973, prompted by suspicion that he helped
supply Black September with weapons.
Three more targets in LebanonBlack September operations leader Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar, PLO chief of operations Kamal Adwan, and
PLO executive committee member Kamal Nasserlived in heavily guarded
homes that frustrated normal assassination methods. To eliminate them, Israel launched Operation Spring of Youth as a Wrath of God special project,
enlisting Israeli Defense Forces commandos for an amphibious landing, supported by naval missile boats offshore. Disguised as civilians, some dressed
as women, the raiders struck by night, killing their intended targets, along
with al- Najjars wife, two Lebanese police officers, and an Italian citizen. As
part of the same operation, Israeli paratroopers struck at local headquarters
of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and at several
PLO facilities nearby. Estimates of the final death toll ranged from 12 to 100
PLO and PFLP members, plus two Israelis.
After that sweep, Operation Wrath of God proceeded in its established style.
On April 11, 1973, a hotel bombing in Athens killed Zaiad Muchasi, Hussein
387
388
Al Bashirs replacement as Fatahs front man in Cyprus. A short time later, while
en route to raid Romes office of El Al Airlines, Black September activists Abdel
Hadi Nakaa and Abdel Hamid Shibi suffered fatal wounds from an explosion
in their car. (Police in that case blamed a faulty detonator and closed the
case.) On June 28, 1973, another car bombing in Paris claimed the life of Mohamed Boudia, Algerian-born coordinator of PFLP terrorist actions for Europe
at large.
High on the list of Israeli targets was Red Prince Ali Hassan Salameh,
founder of Fatahs Force 17 commando unit and alleged mastermind of the
Munich Olympics massacre. Mossad agents believed they had tracked Salameh to Lillehammer, Norway, in summer of 1973, but when they struck on
July 21, they actually killed Ahmed Bouchiki, an innocent Moroccan waiter
with no link to Arab terrorists. Local police captured five members of the hit
team, all of whom were convicted and sentenced to prison, then released and
deported to Israel in 1975.
Six months after that fiasco, the Mossad tried again for Salameh, this
time in Switzerland. Expecting him to meet PLO leaders at a church on January 12, 1974, two Israeli assassins and killed three men of Arab appearance,
but failed to locate Salameh. Another false lead placed Salameh in London,
where a freelance female assassin seduced and killed an Israeli agent at the
Europa House Hotel. Traced to her home in Amsterdam, that killer was in
turn eliminated by Mossad gunmen on August 21, 1974. Michael Harari
then officially called off the plot to kill Salameh, but agents made one more
try, killing a security guard at Salamehs alleged safe house in Tarifa, Spain.
Once again, they missed their main prize.
Embarrassed by the Lillehammer scandal, Golda Meir suspended Operation
Wrath of God for the remainder of her term in office. Successor Menachem
Begin revived the program in 1977, including the contract on Ali Salameh.
Agents traced him to Beirut in November 1978, and a three-member team
mounted surveillance on a neighborhood around Rue Verdun that Salameh
was said to frequent. At 3:35 P.M. on January 22, 1979, a car bomb detonated
by remote control killed Salameh, four bodyguards, and four bystanders
including a German nunwhile wounding 18 others.
And the murders continued. On December 15, 1979, Palestinians Ali Salem
Ahmed and Ibrahim Abdul Aziz were gunned down at close range with silenced weapons, in Cyprus. Assassins struck twice in Rome on June 17, 1982,
shooting PLO official Nazeyh Mayer at his home, then killing another PLO
member, Kamal Husain, with a car bomb seven hours later. Fadl Dani, deputy
director of the PLO in Paris, died when a bomb demolished his car on July 23,
1982. Two gunmen on a motorcycle executed PLO official Mamoun Meraish in
Athens, on August 21, 1983. Khaled Ahmed Nazal, secretary general of a PLO
splinter faction, was shot four times outside an Athens hotel on June 10, 1986.
Four months later, on October 21, senior PLO official Munzer Abu Ghazala
died in an Athens car bombing. On February 14, 1988, yet another car bomb
killed Hamdi Adwan and Abu Al Hassan in Limassol, Cyprus, wounding a
third passenger in the vehicle.
Confusion surrounds some killings attributed to Operation Wrath of God.
Victims in those cases include PLO representative Said Hammami, shot in
London on January 4, 1978; Ezzedine Kalak, chief of the PLOs Paris bureau,
and deputy Hamad Adnan, killed in a raid on their office that left also three
other persons wounded on August 3, 1978; Zuheir Mohsen, head of PLO military operations, shot outside a casino in Cannes, France, on July 27, 1979;
PLO spokesman Naim Khader, killed in Brussels, Belgium, on June 1, 1981;
Abu Daoud, self-proclaimed planner of the Munich massacre, wounded by
gunshots at a caf in Warsaw, Poland, on August 1, 1981; PLO official Nabil
Wadi Aranki, murdered in Madrid, Spain, on March 1, 1982; and PLO chief
of intelligence Atef Bseiso, slain by two gunmen with silenced pistols in Paris,
on June 8, 1992. Whereas various authors credit Wrath of God agents with
all those assassinations, other sources blame the Hammami, Kalak, Adnan,
and Bseiso murders on a rival Palestinian terrorist group, the Abu Nidal Organization. Abu Daoud blamed his shooting on a Palestinian double agent for
Mossad, killed by the PLO in 1991.
Controversy also surrounds the fate of two Munich hostage-takers liberated
after the Lufthansa hijacking in October 1972, Adnan Al-Gashey and Mohammed Safady. Various published accounts claim that Israeli agents found
and executed both men, years after the Munich massacre, but other sources
disagree. Israeli author Aaron Klein asserts that Al-Gashey died from natural
causes in the latter part of the 1970s, and Lebanese Christian Phalangists murdered Safady sometime in the early 1980s. Meanwhile, in 2004, PLO veteran
Tawfiq Tirawi told Klein that Safady was still as alive as you are, refusing to
disclose his location. The third Munich survivor, Jamal Al-Gashey (cousin of
Adnan), was alive as late as 1999, when he sat for interviews with reporters in
North Africa.
Aside from outright assassinations, Operation Wrath of God engaged in
an extensive letter-bombing campaign that wounded various persons. Identified victims include: Emile Khayyat, a Rif Bank employee in Beirut (July 18,
1972); Dr. Anis Sayegh, director of the PLO Research Center in Beirut (July 19,
1972); Ahmad Wafi, a Palestinian intellectual in Algiers (October 25, 1972);
PLO representative Mustafa Awad Zaid and two bystanders in Tripoli (October 25, 1972); two employees of Beiruts Import-Export Bank (October 26,
1972); an Egyptian police officer checking suspicious parcels (October 26, 1972);
Omar Sufan, a representative of the Red Crescent humanitarian organization
in Stockholm (November 29, 1972); Palestinian student leader Adnan Hammad in Germany (November 29, 1972); three post office employees in Tunis
389
390
(November 29, 1972); and Palestinian student leader Ahmed Awadallah in Copenhagen (November 30, 1972).
When not engaged in lethal operations, Wrath of God agents practice psychological warfare against their enemies, publishing obituaries of Palestinian activists still alive, sometimes blackmailing others to leave the movement
with threats of releasing embarrassing personal information. In the wake of
some assassinations, Mossad agents also sent flowers to surviving relatives of
the victims, with cards reading A reminder we do not forget or forgive.
Predictably, Black September activists sought to retaliate for Israels campaign of retribution. Palestinian letter bombs were mailed to Israeli diplomatic
missions around the world in September and October 1972, one claiming the
life of Ami Shachori, agricultural counselor at Israels embassy in London, on
September 19. On December 28, 1972, four Black September gunmen invaded the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, seizing 12 hostages as a diversion from plans to assassinate Golda Meir on an upcoming visit to Pope
Paul VI in Rome. Mossad agents foiled that conspiracy, but they could not
protect Israelis worldwide. Baruch Cohen, representing Mossad in Madrid,
was murdered by a Palestinian contact on January 23, 1973. Black September
members also killed Vittorio Olivares, an Italian El Al employee in Rome, four
months later, and executed Colonel Yosef Alon, Israeli military attach to the
United States, in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on July 1, 1973.
Israels retaliation against Black September has inspired two feature films. Michael Anderson directed Sword of Gideon for HBO in November 1986, and Steven Spielberg produced Munich for the big screen in December 2005. The latter
film garnered many award nominations, including five Oscar nominations for
Best Picture, Best Director (Spielberg), Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best
Original Score. Although losing out on all of those, it won a Central Ohio Film
Critics Association Award for Best Ensemble Cast; Washington D.C. Area Film
Critics Association Awards for Best Director and Best Picture; and Kansas City
Film Critics Circle Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay.
Further Reading
Byman, Daniel. A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Jonas, George. Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team. Toronto:
Lester & Orpen Dennys Ltd., 1984.
Klein, Aaron. Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israels Deadly Response. New York: Random House, 2005.
Nasr, Kameel. Arab and Israeli Terrorism: The Causes and Effects of Political Violence,
19361993. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1996.
Reeve, Simon. One Day in September: The Full Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre
and the Israeli Revenge Operation Wrath of God. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000.
OSMAN II
OSMAN II (16041622)
On May 19, 1622, soldiers of the Turkish Janissary corps staged an uprising
against Emperor Osman II of the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople (now
Istanbul). After holding Osman captive overnight in the capital citys Yedikule
Fortress, leaders of the rebellion sent a soldier to kill him on May 20. The
assassin, accompanied by several guards, attempted to strangle Osman with
a bowstring, but the 18-year-old emperor slipped a hand under the noose,
dislodging it, and knocked his would-be slayer to the floor. A brawl ensued,
during which Osmans former grand vizier seized him by the most sensible
part of his body, while another soldier clubbed him with the blunt head of an
axe. Barely conscious and unable to resist further, Osmon was finally throttled
to death by his appointed executioner.
Osman IIwidely known to his subjects as Gen Osman (Osman the
Young)was born at Constantinoples Topkapi Palace on November 3, 1604,
the son of Sultan Ahmed I. His Greek mother supervised Osmans education, ensuring his fluency in Arabic, Greek, Italian, Latin and Persian, plus the
harem sign language employed by members of the royal court to communicate with deaf-mute pages, doormen, eunuchs, and executioners. From his
youth, Osman was also recognized as an accomplished poet.
Typhus claimed Ahmed Is life on November 22, 1617, whereupon he was
succeeded by his brother, Mustafa I. Prior to Ahmeds death, he had confined
Mustafa under house arrest in a wing of the imperial harem from age 12, beginning in 1603. That practiceknown as kafes (the cage)was routine
treatment for royal heirs, though some Ottoman sultans went further, killing
their brothers to weed out potential rivals. Because Mustafa had been spared,
and the Imperial Council deemed Osman too young to rule at age 13, Mustafa
became the first royal brother in 14 generations to succeed a sultan. Unfortunately for Mustafadubbed The Intestable (literally, incompetent to make a
will)and was deposed after less than a year on the throne, when Osman led
a coup dtat against him in summer of 1618. While replacing his uncle as sultan, however, Osman did not have Mustafa killed.
Eager to prove himself, Osman set out to make his mark against neighboring
states. In September 1618, he negotiated the Treaty of Serav, ending a threeyear war between the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia (now Iran), establishing a firm border between the two countries and exacting annual tribute
from Persia amounting to 100 wagonloads of treasure. Next, in the wake of
raids launched from Poland, Osman threatened King Sigismund III with invasion and sacking of Krakw. When bluster failed, Osman invaded Moldavia
to defeat a combined PolishLithuanian army at the Battle of Cecora, waged
between September 17 and October 7, 1620. Victorious in that engagement,
Osman next led an army of some 250,000 men from Constantinople to conquer Ukraine, in 1621. This time, defenders stopped him at the month-long
391
392
OSMAN II
Battle of Khotyn (September 2 to October 9, 1621), inflicting 42,000 Ottoman

casualties against losses of 14,500. Compelled to sue for peace, Osman signed
the Treaty of Khotyn, which left standing borders intact, and retreated to consider future options.
Osman blamed his Janissaries for the embarrassing loss at Khotyn. Despite the translation of their namenew soldiersthe Janissary corps had
been created in 1365, under Sultan Murad I, as the empires first standing
army, doubling as palace guards, police, and firefighters during peacetime.
Most were Christians, drafted under the devs irme system that required peasant families to offer sons as feudal dues paid to the sultan. As the Ottoman
Empire expanded, draftees included Bulgarians, Croats, Ukrainians, Russians, and other foreigners dragooned into service. Despite their life of virtual slavery, Janissaries cultivated a strong sense of pride in their martial skills
and ornate uniforms. Osmans attempt to blame them solely for the failure
of his Ukrainian campaign was insulting enough. Beyond condemning their
greed and indiscipline, Osman voiced fears of becoming subject to his own
slaves. Word of his plan to recruit a new army comprised entirely of ethnic
Turks threatened the Janissaries very existenceand thereby sealed the young
emperors fate.
After Osmans assassination, the rebels restored Mustafa I as sultan, but
if they expected gratitude, they were gravely mistaken. Mustafa ordered the
coups leaders arrested and executed, although the Janissary corps itself survived. Mustafa, seemingly deranged, appeared to think that his murdered
nephew was still alive and spent days searching the Topkapi Palace, knocking
on doors and calling out Osmans name, pleading for Osman to relieve him
from the task of ruling an empire. Osman could not hear him, but others at
court were listening, moving to depose Mustafa for the second time in 1623,
replacing him with Osmans 11-year-old half-brother, Murad IV.
Controlled by his mother, Ksem Sultan, for the first nine years of his reign,
Murad watched his once-prosperous empire fall into anarchy. Persia quickly
invaded Iraq, revolts flared in northern Anatolia, and Janissaries rose against
the throne once more in 1631, storming the palace and killing the grand vizier, with other members of Murads court. Finally asserting himself at age 21,
Murad suppressed that rebellion, did his best to reform corrupt governmental
practices, and retaliated in force against Persia, capturing Baghdad in 1638.
The Treaty of Zuhab, signed on May 17, 1639, restored Mesopotamia to the
Ottoman Empire, establishing borders that would remain secure until World
War I. Renowned for his personal strength, wielding a 132-pound mace in battle, Murad IV nonetheless died unexpectedly on February 9, 1640, at age 27.
Conflicting stories of his death blame gout and cirrhosis of the liverironic,
if true, because Murad had banned alcohol from his kingdom eight years
earlier.
OUKO, JOHN ROBERT
Further Reading
Finkel, Caroline. Osmans Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 13001923. New
York: Basic Books, 2006.
Goffman, Daniel. The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Goodwin, Jason. Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire. New York:
Picador, 1998.
Imber, Colin. The Ottoman Empire, 13001650: The Structure of Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Piterberg, Gabriel. An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play. Berkeley:
OUKO, JOHN ROBERT (19311990)

On the night of February 1213, 1990, Minister of Foreign Affairs John Ouko
disappeared from his country home on a farm at Koru, in western Kenyas
Nyanza Province. Housemaid Selina Ndalo said she was awakened around
3:00 A.M. by a sound like a door slamming, and reached her window in time
to see a white car leaving the property. Three hours later, Francis Cheruyot, an
employee at the nearby Rongo post office, claimed he saw a similar car with four
occupants drive past the post office twice. Cheruyot identified one of the passengers as Hezekiah Oyugi, chief of internal security for the Republic of Kenya, but
when pressed by police he refused to sign a statement to that effect. A local herdboy found Oukos body at 1:00 P.M., at Got Alila Hill, less than two miles from
Oukos home, but he failed to notify authorities. Searchers finally located Ouko
on February 16, an autopsy revealing one gunshot to the head. Oukos right leg
was also broken in two places, and his body was partially burned. Other evidence recovered at the scene included a pistol (but no bullet), a can of gasoline,
a torch and matches, and a single Caucasian hair. Investigators from Scotland
Yard arrested Hezekiah Oyugi and Energy Minister Nicholas Biwott as murder
suspects, but both were later discharged for lack of evidence.
John Robert Ouko was born on March 31, 1931, in the village of Nyahera,
in Nyanza Province. After graduating from Siriba Teachers Training College, he
worked as a primary school teacher until 1955, then was appointed to serve as
a revenue officer in the Kisii district of his native province, inhabited primarily
by members of the Bantu-speaking AbaGusii ethnic group. Three years later,
he enrolled at Ethiopias Haile Selassie I University (now Addis Ababa University), graduating in 1962 with a bachelors degree in public administration,
economics, and political science. From there, Ouko proceeded to Makerere
University in Kampala, Uganda, where he earned a masters degree in international relations and diplomacy.
Concurrent with his ongoing higher education, in early 1963, Ouko was
appointed to work as an assistant secretary for Kenyas last British colonial
393
394
O U KO, J O H N R O B E R T
governor Malcolm MacDonald. With the advent of independence, in December 1963, he was posted as a permanent secretary to the ministry of works
under Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta advanced to the presidency in
December 1964, leading Kenya into the East Africa Common Services Organization (later the East African Community) with Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. While remaining with the ministry of works, Ouko received
an honorary PhD from Pacific Lutheran University in Seattle, Washington,
in 1971.
Dissension within the East African Community forced its dissolution in
1977, whereupon Ouko was promoted to serve as Kenyas minister for economic planning and community affairs. Two years later, he was elected to parliament from Kisumu, reelected in 1983 and 1988 as a member of the nations
only legal political party, the Kenya African National Union. In 1990, while
pursuing doctoral studied at the University of Nairobi, he advanced to serve as
Kenyas minister of foreign affairs and international cooperation. On January 27
of that year, he visited Washington, D.C., with Kenyan president Daniel Toroitich arap Moi and 82 other officials, for a widely publicized prayer breakfast with U.S. president George H. W. Bush. Returning Nairobi on February 4,
Ouko spent the following morning in meetings with President Moi, Japans
ambassador to Kenya, the Canadian high commissioner, and various cabinet
ministers, before proceeding to his farm at Koru, where he was abducted and
killed one week later.
Kenyan authorities initially claimed that Ouko had committed suicide, a
finding made ridiculous by evidence that he was shot, then set afire. Public
outcry forced President Moi to seek help from Britain, in the person of Detective Superintendent John Troon and two other officers from New Scotland
Yards International Organized Crime Branch and a forensic pathologist provided by the Home Office. Troon and company first examined rumors that
President Moi held a grudge against Ouko, allegedly based on Ouko meeting with President Bush in Washington, while Moi was snubbed. In fact, no
evidence emerged of Ouko ever meeting Bush, and the investigators turned to
other suspects.
One source of conflict involved disputes within Oukos own family, dating
from 1985. Witnesses including Oukos wife, three siblings, and the familys
physician claimed that brother Barrack Ouko blamed John for an unwelcome
political transfer from Nakuru, in the Rift Valley Province, to the capital at Nairobi. Another brother, Collins Ouko, allegedly supported Barrack in that feud,
extending animosity to their mother and threatening her life. In his final report
of August 1990, Detective Superintendent Troon wrote that, with respect to
Oukos immediate family, I am not satisfied that they have told me everything
they know. There appears to be a shroud of fear surrounding the whole family
which prevents them fully disclosing what I believe some of them must know.
OUKO, JOHN ROBERT
Meanwhile, the investigators also probed claims that Ouko was killed as a
result of fraud allegations surrounding the Kisumu Town Council. That tale involved claims of bribery at a local molasses plant, which Ouko threatened to
expose. That case involved Domenico Airaghi and his mistress, self-described
international escort Marianne Briner-Mattern, who served as directors of BAK
International, a firm based in Switzerland. They had approached Ouko about reopening the molasses plant in Kisumu, with Airaghi seeking $1 million to complete a feasibility study, finally settling for $300,000. Ouko had canceled the
project in November 1987, and Troon found it unlikely that the alleged conspirators would have waited more than two years to retaliate against him. Troon
also deemed Airaghi and Briner-Mattern truthful and honest, despite the fact
of Airaghis March 1987 conviction on perjury charges in Italy, resulting in a
30-month prison term and a fine of 2 million lire, upheld on appeal in 1991.
Critics dismissed Troons final report as fatally flawed, persisting with
investigations into Oukos death. President Moi launched a public inquiry,
chaired by Chief Justice Evans Gicheru, in October 1990. In its 13th month,
with Detective Superintendent Troon on the witness stand in Nairobi, Moi
ended the inquiry abruptly, stating that Troon was urgently required in London. Troon never returned to Kenya, and the commission dissolved without
issuing a final report.
Soon afterward, Kenyan police began a new inquiry, reexamining Oukos
dealings with BAK International, including an anonymous letter mailed from
Rome, claiming that Mrs. Marianne and Mr. Airaghi were the masterminds
behind the murder of the late Dr. Ouko. In that instance, police found no
evidence to support the allegations. Officers also detained 10 government officials, including Hezekiah Oyugi and Energy Minister Nicholas Biwott, but ultimately filed no charges against them. A district commissioner from Nakuru,
Jonah Anguka, was charged with killing Ouko, then was acquitted in 1992, his
trial judge declaring that The manner the heinous act was planned and eventually executed . . . was so neat and professional that it could not have been
undertaken by an ordinary person in the nature of the accused.
President Emilio Mwai Kibaki convened a Parliamentary Select Committee of Inquiry in March 2003, which revisited claims that President Moi had
banished Ouko during their 1990 visit to Washington, stripping him of his
ministerial rank and sending him home on a separate flight, but airline records disproved the latter claim conclusively. Dissension within the committee,
including several resignations, doomed it to failure. The panel disbanded in
2005, claiming interference with its deliberations, and its incomplete report
sank without a ripple in the Kenyan House of Assembly, with several committee members voting against its final endorsement.
The last word on Oukos assassination, thus far, came in the form of another
parliamentary report, issued in 2010. That document alleged that Ouko was
395
396
O U KO, J O H N R O B E R T
MAU MAU REBELLION

After 57 years of British colonial rule, Kikuyu nationalists organized the
Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) to throw off foreign domination. The groups popular nameMau Mauwas apparently an acronym for the Swahili phrase Mzungu Aende Ulaya, Mwafrika Apate Uhuru
(Let the European go back to Europe, let the African regain independence). Other sources claim it was an anagram of Uma Uma (Get out!
Get out!). In either case, the sentiment was clear, and the Mau Maus
adopted armed struggle to achieve their goal. The resultant guerrilla
waror emergency, in British termsclaimed its first known European victim near Thika, on October 3, 1952, and continued until the
capture of rebel leader Dedan Kimathi on October 21, 1956, leading to
his execution on February 18, 1957. Although statistics are disputed,
official tabulations list 200 British and African security forces killed,
against 12,000 Mau Maus slain. Unofficial tallies place Mau Mau losses
closer to 20,000, with civilian deaths including 32 Europeans, 26,
Asians, and 1,819 Africans. The Lari massacre of March 2526, 1953,
killed at least 150 Kikuyus, burned alive in their huts by Mau Maus for
supporting the colonial regime.
killed at one of President Mois official residences, and called for further investigation of various ex-officials including Nicholas Biwott (who still denies any
involvement in the crime). Parliament rejected the report in December 2010,
citing dissent within the committee that filed it. Oukos murder remains officially unsolved today.
Further Reading
Branch, David. Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 19632011. New Haven, CT: Yale
Cohen, David, and E. S. Odhiambo. The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the
Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004.
Hornsby, Charles. Kenya: A History Since Independence. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.
P
PALME, SVEN OLOF JOACHIM (19271986)
On the night of February 28, 1986, Swedish prime minister Olof Palme
walked from their residence in Stockholm to the nearby Grand Cinema theater. Despite his high position in the government, Palme preferred to travel
without bodyguards whenever possible, and the Palmes were unguarded on
this occasion. After the filma Swedish comedy, The Mozart Brothersthe
Palmes began walking home along Sveavgen Street, near the citys center.
At 11:21 P.M., a lone individual approached them from behind and fired two
close-range gunshots from a .357 Magnum revolver. The first bullet struck
Olof, and the second wounded Lisbet Palme. Bystanders saw the shooter flee
on foot and disappear before police were summoned to the scene. An ambulance arrived 11:25 P.M., transporting the victims to Sabbatsberg Hospital,
where Olof Palme died at 12:06 A.M. on March 1. Lisbet Palme survived her
relatively minor wound and later identified the gunman as drug addict Carl
Gustaf Christer Pettersson, previously convicted of manslaughter in a 1970
stabbing, from a police lineup. Convicted of Palmes murder and sentenced
to life imprisonment in 1988, Pettersson won reversal of that verdict in 1989,
with the appellate court citing lack of evidence. He sued Stockholm police for
defamation and received an award of $50,000, which he spent on drugs and
alcohol. The crime remains officially unsolved today.
Olof Palme was born on January 30, 1927, to an affluent family in the stermalm district of Stockholm. Poor health kept him from school in early childhood, receiving his first education from private tutors, but he subsequently
graduated from the Sigtuna School of Liberal Arts at age 17 and proceeded into
mandatory military service. Discharged as a captain, Palme enrolled at the University of Stockholm, then attended Ohios Kenyon College on a scholarship,
earning his BA there in 1948. Hitchhiking through the United States and Mexico acquainted him with poverty, racism, and ongoing labor struggles, which
prompted Palme to join the Swedish Social Democratic Party in 1949. In 1951,
he was elected president of the Swedish National Union of Students, traveling
widely through Europe and Asia over the next two years.
Palme formally entered politics in 1953, as a secretary for Prime Minister
Tage Erlander. By 1955, he was a board member of the Swedish Social Democratic Youth League, lecturing at Bommersvik, the Youth Leagues college in
398
PA L M E , S V E N O L O F J OAC H I M
Sdertlje. Elected to parliament in 1957, he subsequently joined the Agency for

International Assistance and
was placed in charge of recommending aid to developing
countries. The year 1963 saw
him promoted to serve as minister without portfolio in Prime
Minister Erlanders cabinet,
promoted yet again in 1965 to
become minister of transport
and communications, then becoming minister of education in
1967. The latter post, ironically,
made Palme a target of left-wing
student protests against plans
to reform Swedens university
system. Despite that upheaval,
including brief occupation of
The murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme the Student Union Building
remains unsolved today. (Photo by Peter Jordan/ at Hollndargatan University,
Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Palme remained popular within
the Social Democratic Party
and was chosen to succeed Tage Erlander as prime minister on October 14,
1969, holding that post until October 8, 1976.
During his first term as prime minister, Palme earned a reputation as a revolutionary reformist, spearheading revision of Swedens 166-year-old constitution, abolishing its Privy Council and stripping King Carl XVI Gustaf of
ruling authority, overhauling parliament from a bicameral to a unicameral system, promoting a law that ensured job security, establishing government child
care centers, overhauling the public health system, and in general expanding
the national welfare state. Despite those sweeping reforms, tax rates remained
low by European standards, and Palme preached equality of sacrifice including wage restraints.
Despite those achievementsor because of themSwedens Centre Party
won a majority in parliament and replaced Palme with Prime Minister Thorbjrn Flldin, in October 1976. Flldin held office until October 1982with a
one-year interruption when the Liberal Peoples Party managed to elect Prime
Minister Ola Ullsten in 19781979but his policy on nuclear power, coupled
with tax issues, brought Palme and the Social Democrats back to power on October 8, 1982. Palmes popularity remained strong, and his marriage survived
PA L M E , S V E N O L O F J O A C H I M
numerous extramarital affairs, including one with psychic actress Shirley MacLaine (who claimed he was a reincarnation of Emperor Charlemagne). He
survived three years and 143 days in his second term as prime minister.
Physical evidence was sparse in Palmes murder. Revolvers do not eject cartridge cases, and although police test-fired some 500 revolvers, they failed
to locate the murder weapon. Neither were they aided by 130 false confessions to the crime from mentally unbalanced individuals. Detectives pursued
10 Magnum revolvers that were reported stolen prior to the killing and found
all but one, a pistol owned by Swedish filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff that went
missing in 1977. The presumed thief was a friend of Stockholm drug dealer
Sigvard Sigge Cedergrenwho, on his deathbed in March 1996, claimed he
had loaned a gun of the same type to assassination suspect Carl Pettersson
in December 1985. Pettersson phoned Mrten Palme, son of the murdered
prime minister, in September 2004, saying he had something to tell the family. Before they could meet, on September 16, Pettersson suffered critical head
injuries in obscure circumstances and lapsed into a coma, dying at Karolinska
University Hospital 13 days later. In February 2006, a television documentary
aired comments from friends of Pettersson, claiming he confessed the Palme
slaying to them and described it as a case of mistaken identity. Meaning to kill
a drug dealer who resembled Palme and who commonly walked along Sveavgen Street, Pettersson allegedly shot the wrong man.
Or did he?
Aside from Sigvard Cedergrens missing pistol, police also examined a .357 stolen
from Haparanda in 1983, with 91 Teflon-coated bullets designed to pierce
metal. The gun was supposedly used in a post office holdup at Mockfjrd that
same year, and fragments of a slug fired there possessed the same isotopic
composition as bullets from the Palme assassination. The gun in question was
pulled from a lake at Dalarna in autumn 2006, identified by its serial number,
but corrosion prevented test-firing. Thus, the bullets, although indistinguishable, could be traced no further than their manufacturer, without any connection to a specific weapon.
Conspiracy theories abound in Palmes murder case. Right-wing extremist
Victor Gunnarsson was questioned as a suspect on four occasions between
March and April 1986, also subjected to wiretap surveillance, but faced no
charges in the case. (He later moved to North Carolina, where an ex-policeman
murdered him in December 1993.) Several Kurds living in Sweden, members
of the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), were also questioned and released for lack of evidence, though allegations of PKK involvement in the slaying persisted as late as 2008.
In September 1996, former police colonel Eugene de Kock told South
Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Palme was murdered to
silence his criticism of apartheid and end his financial support for Nelson
399
400
PA L M E , S V E N O L O F J OAC H I M
Mandelas African National Congress. De Kock named the triggerman as

ex-police major Craig Williamson, linked to several other high-profile killings, but Williamsons former superior, Brigadier Johannes Coetzee, named
a member of the former Rhodesian armys Selous Scouts as the killer. A third
version, advanced by Swedish mercenary Bertil Wedin from exile in Cyprus,
identified one Peter Caselton as the pro-apartheid gunman, acting as a part
of Operation Longreach. Swedish police visited South Africa in October
1996 but found no evidence supporting any of those claims. Nonetheless, a
book written in 2007 named yet another apartheid supporterAthol Ivan
the Terrible Visseras Palmes assassin.
Meanwhile, in 2005, author Jan Bondeson blamed Palmes murder on the
arms trade with India, claiming that Palme had used his acquaintance with
Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to land an artillery contract for the Bofors armament company valued at 8.4 billion Swedish kronor ($1.2 billion).
Bondeson wrote that Palme was unaware of shady middlemen bribing Indian
officials to secure the deal until the morning of his murder, when he was informed of the sordid details by Iraqi ambassador Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf.
Enraged, Palme allegedly threatened to scuttle the deal and was murdered to
ensure his silence.
Other theories involve Germanys Red Army Faction, which claimed credit
for Palmes murder in a phone call to a London newspaper; Chilean neo-fascist
Roberto Thieme, acting in retaliation for Palme granting asylum to exiled leftist Chileans; far-right extremist elements within the Swedish Police Service; the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, striking to prevent Palme from airing information on the Iran-Contra scandal; and Yugoslavias State Security Administration, named by the German magazine Focus in January 2011, based on official
German interrogation records from an unrelated case in 2008.
In 1998, a cinematic conspiracy thriller, Sista kontraktet (The Last Contract),
portrayed Palmes murder as the work of a hired assassin, slain for his antiwar
beliefs and more specifically for rejecting deployment of nuclear weapons in
Sweden. A detective from Britains Special Branch, portrayed by actor Mikael
Persbrandt, finds his investigation obstructed by Swedish police.
Further Reading
Bondeson, Jan. Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Cooper, H.H.A., and Lawrence Redlinger. The Murder of Olof Palme: A Tale of Assassination, Deception and Intrigue. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004.
Derfler, Leslie. The Fall and Rise of Political Leaders: Olof Palme, Olusegun Obasanjo, and
Indira Gandhi. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Freeman, Ruth. Death of a Statesman: Solution to the Murder of Olof Palme. London:
Robert Hale, 1989.
PA R D O L E A L , J A I M E
PARDO LEAL, JAIME (19411987)

On October 11, 1987, a 14-year-old assassin shot and killed Jaime Pardo Leal,
former presidential candidate of the Patriotic Union party, in La Mesa, a city
in central Colombias Cundinamarca Department. Police killed the young gunman, but subsequent investigation named the man responsible for Pardos murder as William Infante, a member of the Medelln drug cartel run by Pablo
Escobar. According to authorities, Infante answered directly to a top cartel lieutenant called The Mexican, otherwise known as Jos Gonzalo Rodrguez Gacha. Prosecutors indicted Rodrguez Gacha and several subordinates for Pardos
assassination, all but one of them were still at large when their trial began on
February 3, 1989. None of them were convicted on that charge, although Infante was caught with a load of cocaine in Miami, Florida, in December 1988,
and received a 25-year prison sentence in that case. Colombian police tracked
Rodrguez Gacha to a farm at Tolu, on December 15, 1989, killing his son in
the ensuing shootout, whereupon Rodrguez Gacha reportedly committed suicide with a hand grenade.
Jaime Pardo Leal was born on March 28, 1941, at Ubaque, in Cundinamarca
Department. Largely forgotten today, outside of leftist circles in his homeland,
Pardo studied at Bogots National University of Colombia, in that schools Faculty of Law and Political Science, where he was a leading figure in the Colombian
Communist Youth movement. After graduation, he served as a judge in Cundinamarca, founded the National Association of Judicial Branch Employees, and
served as the unions first president. Concurrently, he was a member of Colombias Communist Party, rising to a seat on its central committee, and was recognized as a driving force behind formation of the Patriotic Union in 1985.
The Patriotic Union represented a merger of Colombian communists and
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which had waged guerrilla warfare against Colombias government since 1964. From its inception,
the Patriotic Union suffered threats and violence from right-wing elements and
their allies in Colombias powerful drug cartels. While advocating Marxist
Leninist policies, the Patriotic Union also denounced government corruption
and the flourishing drug trade, thereby ensuring a violent response in Colombias atmosphere of chaotic mayhem. Jaime Pardo Leal was among the first
victims, with Patriotic Union spokesmen claiming some 4,000 members murdered by 2005. A more conservative tally, published by the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights in 2004, listed 1,163 confirmed slayings of
party members. Amnesty International, in April 1988, charged the Colombian
government and army with pursuing a deliberate policy of political murder
against the Patriotic Union and its allies, an allegation angrily rejected at the
time by President Virgilio Barco Vargas.
Despite ongoing decimation of its leadership, the Patriotic Union enjoyed some
success in the 1986 campaign, electing 14 federal legislators, plus 14 deputies,
401
402
PA R D O L E A L , J A I M E
MEDELLN CARTEL
Founded by Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa Vzquez brothers in 1976,
the Medelln Cartel became one of the worlds most lucrative and violent
organized crime syndicates over the ensuing decade. By 1982, cocaine
surpassed coffee as Colombias primary export, amounting to 30 percent
of all cargo shipped to foreign countries. Defense of their multibilliondollar empire prompted cartel leaders to create a private army, acting
in conjunction with corrupt public officials, military leaders, and foreign allies. In early 1982, investigative journalists documented a series
of meetings at Puerto Boyac, involving cartel leaders and high-ranking
Colombian military officers, native legislators, industrialists, and cattle
ranchers, plus representatives of various U.S. industries. The participants
shared animosity toward leftist guerrillas who victimized wealthy targets,
resulting in the creation of a paramilitary force dubbed Muerte a Secuestradores (Death to Kidnappers). By late 1983, Colombian security agents
credited the group with 240 political murders. Rampant narcoterrorism
followed, claiming countless lives before the Colombian government responded, orchestrating a campaign that killed Escobar on December 2,
1993, andat least theoreticallyforced the cartel to disband.
351 councilmen, and 23 municipal mayors in local contests. Jaime Pardo Real
ran third in the years presidential race, with 350,000 votes, but later faced
charges of voter intimidation by soldiers of the FARC. In the elections of 1988
the party lost ground, electing only 14 of Colombias 1,008 mayors. By that
time, a rift had developed between FARC leaders and the Communist Party,
with the FARC escalating its guerrilla warfare campaigns. Another Patriotic
Union leader, Jose Antequera, was shot and killed on March 3, 1989, during an assassination attempt against President Ernesto Samper. Suspects
including some Colombian military personnelwere tried and convicted in a
few of the attacks, but most remain unpunished. Senator Manuel Cepeda Vargas, elected as a Patriotic Union member in July 1994, was murdered in Bogot
three weeks after taking office.
Further Reading
Bowden, Mark. Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the Worlds Greatest Outlaw. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.
Dudley, Steven. Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia. London:
Routledge, 2004.
Leech, Garry. The FARC: The Longest Insurgency. Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publishing, 2011.
PA R K C H U N G - H E E
Leech, Garry. Killing Peace: Colombias Conflict and the Failure of U.S. Intervention. New
York: Information Network of the Americas, 2002.
Livingstone, Grace, and Jenny Pearce. Inside Colombia: Drugs, Democracy and War. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Marcy, William. The Politics of Cocaine: How U.S. Foreign Policy Has Created a Thriving
Drug Industry in Central and South America. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2010.
PARK CHUNG-HEE (19171979)

On the evening of October 26, 1979, President Park Chung-hee held a banquet at his official residenceCheongwadae, or the Blue Housein Seoul,
South Korea. Invited guests included chief presidential bodyguard Cha Jicheol, Army Chief of Staff Jeong Seung-hwa, Korean Central Intelligence
Agency (KCIA) director Kim Jaegyu, Chief Secretary Kim Gye-won, and
popular singer Sim Soo-bong, and female college student Shin Jae-soon.
Cha and Director Kim were bitter rivals, based on personal antagonism and
Chas ongoing efforts to usurp KCIA authority, contravening the agencys
manipulation of elections for his own benefit. During the banquet, a quarrel
erupted over the proper means
of dealing with dissident protesters and opposition forces
in the National Assembly. Park
and Cha argued that their enemies should be mowed down
with tanks, whereas Director
Kim struck a more moderate tonethen left the dining hall to consult with two
of his aides, KCIA chief agent
Park Seon-ho and Colonel
Park Heung-ju in an adjoining chamber. Kim returned at
7:41 P.M., armed with a pistol, shooting Cha in the arm
and President Park in the
chest. His gun jammed when
he tried to shoot Cha again,
whereupon Director Kim ran
out to fetch another pistol
and returned, shooting Cha
in the abdomen and killing
President Park with a shot to Rebel soldiers assassinated South Korean President Park Chung-hee. (Getty Images)
the head.
403
404
Director Kim escaped, but was captured soon afterward. At trial, he offered
five motives for killing Park: Firstly, to restore free democracy; secondly, to
prevent further bloodshed of Korean people; thirdly, to prevent North Korean
aggression; fourthly, to completely restore the close relationship with our strong
ally the United States, which fell to the worst point since the founding of South
Korea and advance our national interest through closer cooperation in defense,
diplomacy, and economy; and fifthly, to restore Koreas honor in the international community by cleansing the bad image of Korea as a dictatorship country. None sufficed to save him, and he was hanged on May 24, 1980. Four
alleged KCIA conspiratorsPark Seon-ho, Yoo Seong-ok, Lee Ki-ju, and Kim
Tae-wonwere hanged the same day. A fifth, Park Heung-ju, had already been
shot by a military firing squad on March 6, 1980. Chief Secretary Kim and
Jeong Seung-hwa were also condemned as conspirators, then released after
Major General Chun Doo-hwan staged a military coup against Parks successor, President Choi Kyu-hah. Chief investigator Yi Hak-bong confused the issue
of conspiracy by ruling that Director Kims shooting of Park and Cha was too
careless for a deliberate act and yet too elaborate for an impulsive act.
Park Chung-hee was born at Gumi, in Koreas North Gyeongsang Province, on September 30, 1917, seven years after Japan annexed his homeland.
In April 1932, he enrolled at the Daegu Teachers Gymnasium, training as a
primary teacher and graduating in March 1937. He taught for three years in
Mungyeong, then opted for a military career instead, entering the Manchukuo
Imperial Army Academy in April 1940 and graduating in 1942, during the
fifth year of the Second Sino-Japanese War. From there, Park moved on to Tokyos Army War College, graduating a lieutenant in the 8th Infantry Division
of the Manchukuo Army. He saw active duty in the final months of World War
II, then shifted to the South Korean Army, but he was expelled in 1948, on
charges of joining a communist cell. That charge remained unproven, though
Parks name did appear on the membership roll of the communist Workers
Party of South Korea. Nonetheless, despite the onset of the Cold War, Park
was readmitted to the military after North Korea invaded the South, in June
1950. He received a year of training in logistics at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, eventually rising to the rank of general under President Syngman Rhee.
A popular uprising forced Syngman Rhee out of office on April 26, 1960,
succeeded by Prime Minister Chang Myon and his puppet, President Yun Boseon. Neither commanded widespread support, and Park led a military coup
against their inefficient government on May 16, 1961, emerging as chairman
of a new Supreme Council for National Reconstruction. One month later, he
created the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA)initially led by a relative, Kim Jong-pilto suppress political opposition. President Yun formally
resigned, in favor of Park, on March 24, 1962. Park subsequently permitted
civilian rule, under pressure from the Kennedy administration in Washington,
and defeated Yun at the polls in December 1963, running as a candidate of the
newly created Democratic Republican Party. Ex-president Yun tried again in
1967, as standard bearer for the Civil Rule Party, and was once again defeated.
As president, Park was credited for overhauling South Koreas economy,
vastly expanding industry and creating economic development agencies that
included an economic planning board, a ministry of finance, and a ministry
of trade and industry. In foreign policy, he had become a dedicated anticommunist, committing more than 300,000 troops to aid the United States in the
Vietnam War. At home, meanwhile, he ruled as a virtual dictator under South
Koreas state of emergency dating from 1950, frequently curtailing freedom of
speech and the press, and the KCIA enjoyed authority to arrest, detain, and
torture alleged subversives.
The first attempt on Parks life came from North Korea, when 31 members
of Unit 124, a Korean Peoples Army commando unit, tried to storm the Blue
House on January 21, 1968. Parks soldiers stopped them a half mile from their
target, killing 29 and capturing one, and the last soldier escaped back to North
Korea. In response to that raid, Park reportedly created Air Force Unit 684 to
kill North Korean Eternal President Kim Il-Sung, but the group was disbanded
three years later without trying to carry out its goal.
Despite a promise to vacate his office when his second term expired in
1971, thus abiding by the Korean Constitutions two-term presidential limit,
Park promoted an amendment permitting him to seek a third four-year term,
then retained the presidency by a narrow margin in that years election. Then,
on October 17, 1972, he declared a new state of emergency based on the
dangerous realities of the international situation, suspended the constitution, invoked martial law, dissolved the National Assembly. A new constitution
quickly followed, ratified by a rigged plebiscite on November 21. Under the
new Yushin (rejuvenation) regime, President Park ruled South Korea as a legally established dictator.
Economic growth continued under the new government, but dissent also
simmered. On August 15, 1974, while delivering a speech at Seouls National
Theater of Korea, Park came under fire from 22-year-old Mun Segwang, a North
Korean sympathizer born in Japan. Mun missed Park, but fatally wounded the
presidents wife, Yuk Young-soo, and a teenage choir singer. Park completed
his speech while his dying wife was carried offstage. Under KCIA interrogation, Mun allegedly confessed to plotting the attack with aid from Chongryon,
the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan. He was hanged in Seoul
on December 20, 1974.
By the eve of his assassination in October 1979, Park faced widespread
student demonstrations of the same kind that had forced Syngman Rhee out
of office in April 1960. He was also under pressure from a New Democratic
Party (NDP), led by Chairman Kim Young-sam, who brooked no compromise
405
406
PAT T E R S O N , A L B E R T L E O N
with Park in efforts to repeal the 1972 constitution. In September 1979, amid
mounting protests, a court suspended Kim from the party, and he was expelled
from the National Assembly, prompting a walkout by 66 more NDP members
on October 5. Riots then erupted in Busan, the topic of discussion at Parks
fatal banquet on October 26.
Although KCIA director Kim Jaegyu clearly murdered President Park, debate surrounding his motive persists. Theories range from insanity sparked
by progressive liver disease to personal jealousy over the rise of Cha Ji-cheol
in Parks esteem, and a frustrated yearning for national liberty. Based on Kims
frequent meetings with Robert G. Brewster, station chief of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Seoul, some conspiracy theorists maintain that the
CIA promoted Parks assassination, perhaps opposing his plan to develop nuclear weapons for use against North Korea. In support of that claim, observers
note that Kim met with U.S. ambassador William Gleysteen five hours before
the shooting.
In spite of despotism, many South Koreans still revere Park Chung-hee as
an anticommunist hero and his nations most efficient ruler of the postWorld
War II era. In 1999, Time magazine listed Park among the top 10 Asians of the
Century for rebuilding South Korea in the wake of the Korean War.
Further Reading
Brazinsky, Gregg. Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of
a Democracy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Clifford, Mark. Troubled Tiger: Businessmen, Bureaucrats and Generals in South Korea. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993.
Kim, Byung-kook, and Ezra Vogel, eds. The Park Chung Hee Era: The Transformation of
South Korea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Lee, Byeong-cheon. Developmental Dictatorship and the Park Chung-hee Era: The Shaping of Modernity in the Republic of Korea. Paramus, NJ: Homa & Sekey Books, 2005.
Lee, Chong-sik. Park Chung-Hee: From Poverty to Power. Seoul: Kyung Hee University
Press, 2012.
PATTERSON, ALBERT LEON (18941954)

On May 4, 1954, lawyer Albert Patterson of Phenix City, Alabama, led a field
of three candidates seeking the office of attorney general, but his plurality was
not large enough to secure the Democratic Party nomination (equivalent to
election in those days). A runoff election was scheduled between Patterson
and opponent Lee Porter of Gadsden, endorsed by incumbent Attorney General Silas Garrett III. Third-place loser MacDonald Gallion threw his support
to Patterson, who then surprised the states political machine by scoring a
decisive victory on June 10. Even then, facing death threats from organized
criminal elements in Phenix City, Patterson told a church group, I have only
a 100-to-1 chance of ever being sworn in as attorney general. On the night

of June 18, as he left his office, a still-unknown gunman accosted Patterson,
forced a pistol into his mouth, and fired three shots, leaving one spent cartridge jammed in the space where his front teeth were dislodged. Patterson
died before an ambulance arrived.
Albert Patterson was born at New Site, in Alabamas Tallapoosa County. His
year of birth ranges from 1891 to 1897 in various accounts, but his last drivers
license listed the date as January 27, 1894. One of seven siblings born to farming parents, he left home as a teenager, in search of better opportunities, and settled in Fairfield, Texas, where he finished high school while working on farms
and in oilfields. In 1916, he joined the Third Texas Infantry, commissioned as a
second lieutenant by the time the United States entered World War I. Deployed
to France with the 36th Infantry Division in July 1918, Patterson was seriously
wounded in battle at Saint-tienne, receiving the French Croix de Guerre with
silver gilt star for valor. Discharged as a first lieutenant, Patterson endured grueling physical therapy and required a cane to walk for the rest of his life.
Back in Alabama, Patterson enrolled at Jacksonville State Normal School
(now Jacksonville State University), graduating with a teachers certificate in
1921. He was immediately hired as a high school principal Clay County, later
serving in the same capacity in Coosa County. While discharging those duties,
he also graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Alabama, in 1926,
then moved on to earn a law degree in one year at Tennessees Cumberland
School of Law. Patterson opened his first practice in Opelika, Alabama, in
1927, relocated to Alexander City in 1928, and finally settled in Phenix City
in 1933.
By that time, Alabama journalists had christened Phenix City the wickedest
city in America. Although that distinction was debatable, the townlocated
on the Chattahoochee River across from Columbus, Georgiahad a 120-year
reputation for wide-open gambling, prostitution, and liquor sales, all banned
by law but protected by corrupt city and county law-enforcement agencies.
Soldiers from Fort Benning, Georgia, commonly patronized Phenix Citys vice
dens, run by a criminal syndicate, and many local residents found conditions
increasingly distasteful. So did General George Patton, one-time commander of
Fort Benning, who had threatened to raid the citys dives with tanks and soldiers before he was transferred to a European combat posting in World War II.
Patterson launched his political career in 1937, winning election to the Phenix City Board of Education. Three years later, he was named as chairman of
the Russell County Draft Board. In 1946, voters chose him to represent them
in the state senate, where he served from 1947 to 1951. From that post, he
sponsored laws including the WallaceCater Act (permitting use of state and
municipal bonds to finance industrial plants) and the Trade School Act (establishing trade schools throughout Alabama).
407
408
Defeated in a 1950 bid to become lieutenant governor, Patterson returned

to private practice as a member of the Russell Betterment Association (RBA),
pledged to eradicate organized crime from Phenix City. Criminals retaliated
by torching his office in 1952 and successfully blocked RBA candidates from
winning local offices. In the same year, machine politicians tried but failed to
keep Patterson from serving as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Encouraged by that small victory, he decided to run for attorney general
in 1954.
Patterson had predicted that it would take a decade to clean up Phenix City,
but public outrage at his murder helped advance that schedule. Governor Gordon Persons declared martial law in the vice-ridden city, sending National
Guard officers to relieve city and county lawmen of their duties. Montgomery
Circuit Court judge Walter B. Jones led a team of special prosecutors to Russell County, aided by agents from the Alabama Department of Public Safety,
dismantling the Phenix City syndicate within seven months. A special grand
jury in Birmingham indicted 734 defendants, including local law-enforcement
officers, elected officials and entrepreneurs linked to organized crime. Three
of thosechief deputy sheriff Albert Fuller, Circuit Solicitor Arch Ferrell, and
outgoing attorney general Silas Garrett IIIwere charged with complicity in
Pattersons murder. Jurors acquitted Ferrell but convicted Fuller, who received
a life sentence and was paroled after serving 10 years. Garrett sought refuge in
a Texas psychiatric clinic, and although Birminghams grand jury slapped him
with additional counts of lunacy and vote fraud (for the 1954 primary race), he
was never tried on any charges. The pending case against him was dismissed
by Attorney General Richmond Flowers in 1963.
Bernard Sykes briefly succeeded Garrett as acting attorney general, and John
Malcolm Patterson replaced his father on the Democratic ticket in November
1954. Running hard against organized crime, and compiling a sizable sympathy vote, Patterson was elected at a time when Alabama faced challenges to
white supremacy from the growing African civil rights movement. An ardent
racist allied with the Alabama Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) under Grand
Dragon Robert Shelton, John Patterson won election as governor in 1958 and
distinguished himself by refusal to protect integrated freedom riders in 1961,
threatening to fire any state policemen who collaborated with FBI agents in
pursuing KKK terrorists. John Patterson also played a key role in preparation
for the Central Intelligence Agencys invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, in
April 1961, providing Alabama Air National Guard planes to ferry Cuban exiles to their secret training camps in Nicaragua.
Today, a memorial statue of Albert Patterson stands outside the state capital
building in Montgomery. In addition to nonfiction books about his assassination, Pattersons murder inspired a 1956 film noir feature, The Phenix City Story
(see sidebar) and a novel by Ace Atkins, Wicked City, published in 2008.
PA U L I O F R U S S I A
THE PHENIX CITY STORY

Directed by Phil Karlson for Allied Artists, from a script by Daniel Mainwaring and Crane Wilbure, The Phenix City Story dramatized Albert
Pattersons crusade for justice and his subsequent murder. John McIntire portrayed Patterson, with Richard Kiley cast as son John, whereas
the names of other real-life and composite characters were changed for
legal reasons. Released on August 14, 1955, the film garnered critical
praise. Critic Bruce Eder called it One of the most violent and realistic crime films of the 1950s. . . . Filmed on location in Alabama with a
documentary-like look, the movie captured the ambiance and tenor of
its Deep South setting better than almost any other fact-based movie
of its era. Writing for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther concurred,
comparing it to On the Waterfront and All the Kings Men. He reserved
special praise for the director and screenwriters, who expose the raw
tissue of corruption and terrorism in an American city that is steeped
in vice. They catch in slashing, searching glimpses the shrewd chicanery of evil men, the callousness and baseness of their puppets and the
dread and silence of local citizens. And . . . they show the sinew and
the bone of those who strive for decent things.
Further Reading
Albert L. Patterson. Encyclopedia of Alabama. http://www.encyclopediaofalabama
.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1250.
Barnes, Margaret. The Tragedy and Triumph of Phenix City, Alabama. Macon, GA: Mercer
Grady, Alan. When Good Men Do Nothing: The Assassination of Albert Patterson. Tuscaloosa, AL: Fire Ant Books, 2005.
PAUL I OF RUSSIA (17541801)

In February 1797, Emperor Paul I of Russia launched construction of a new
royal palace, St. Michaels Castle, in the heart of St. Petersburg. The building
was consecrated on November 8, 1800St. Michaels Day, in the Eastern Orthodox calendarand Paul moved his family into the palace on February 12,
1801, although finishing work on its interior continued for another month. On
the night of March 23, a group of former military officers, dismissed by Paul,
invaded the emperors bedroom and demanded that he sign a proclamation abdicating the throne in favor of his 23-year-old, Alexander I. When Paul refused,
one assailant struck him with a sword or heavy snuff box (reports differ), then
409
410
PAU L I O F R U S S I A
he was strangled and stomped to death. One of the killers, Count Nikolay Alexandrovich Zubov, then proceeded to Alexanders suite in the palace, informing
him of his fathers death and saying, Time to grow up! Go and rule!
Paul I (n Pavel Petrovich) was born in the St. Petersburg Palace of Empress
Elizabeth on October 1, 1754. His parents were listed as Elisabeths nephew,
Grand Duke Peter (later Emperor Peter III) and Grand Duchess Catherine
(later Empress Catherine the Great), though Catherines memoirs suggest that
Pauls father was actually her lover, Count Sergei Vasilievich Saltykov. Some
biographers of Catherine contend that she despised Paul, and may have attempted to kill him. All accounts agree that she was distant from her son, leaving his upbringing to a governor and tutors. Isolated and sickly after a bout of
typhus at age 17, Paul entered into an arranged marriage two years later, but
his first wife died during childbirth on April 15, 1776. Less than six months
later, on October 7, Catherine arranged his second marriage to Sophie Dorothea of Wrttemberg.
Around that same time, Paul
became obsessed with the notion that others were plotting
to kill him, once accusing Catherine of mixing ground glass
with his food. Catherine generally ignored him, preoccupied
with a succession of lovers, and
tutor Nikita Ivanovich Panin
summarized Pauls status at
court as that of a bastard who
owed his position to his mothers sufferance. Paul responded,
after his appointment as fleet
admiral of the Russian navy and
colonel of the Cuirassier regiment at age 18, by criticizing
Catherines expansionist military policies. Catherine apparently planned to exclude Paul
from succession to the throne,
favoring his son Alexander, but
a stroke claimed her life on November 5, 1796, before she formalized that arrangement.
Pauls first act as emperor was
Disgruntled military officers murdered Emperor
Paul I of Russia in 1801. (De Agostini/Getty Images) to destroy Catherines testament,
PA U L I O F R U S S I A
perhaps in fear that it would cheat him of his role as emperor. Soon afterward, he
promulgated the Pauline Laws, establishing strict primogeniture and repealing
the decree of Peter the Great, which allowed each Russian monarch to designate
his or her successor. He also recalled the army that Catherine had dispatched
to invade Persia (now Iran), led by Count Valerian Alexandrovich Zubov,
younger brother of Catherines then current paramour, Prince Platon Alexandrovich Zubov. Pauls hatred for the whole Zubov family subsequently played a
key role in his death.
During the five years of his reign, Paul I was frequently accused (behind
his back) of engaging in eccentric behavior. He liberated some of Catherines
imprisoned critics, notably Tadeusz Kosciuszko
and Nikolay Novikov, then

confined them to their homes under police surveillance. Loathing denizens
of the royal court who had ostracized him in his youth, Paul sought to remake Russian high society in the form of a chivalric order, rewarding the
few who met his standard of modern knighthood with land and serfs. His
most controversialand ultimately fatalprogram was an effort to reform
the army, introducing Prussian uniforms, demanding daily parades around
his palace, and ordering soldiers flogged for the slightest infraction. Pauls
dismissal of seven field marshals and 333 generals created a pool of resentful
conspirators anxious to see him deposed by late 1800.
The plots mastermind was Count Nikolay Alexandrovich Zubov, whom
Paul rudely snubbed after Catherines death, when Zubov sought to congratulate Paul on his accession to the throne. Soon, all of the Zubov brothers were
exiled from St. Petersburg, only permitted to return in November 1800. Count
Zubov hatched the conspiracy with Count Peter Alekseyevich Pahlen, embittered by his dismissal as governor of St. Petersburg in August 1800. Allegedly
financed by Zubovs sister, Olga Zherebtsova, with funds procured from her
loverCharles Whitworth, 1st Earl Whitworth, Britains envoy-extraordinary
and minister-plenipotentiary at St. Petersburg under Catherinethe conspirators recruited others. They included Admiral Jos Pascual Domingo de Ribas
y Boyons, who died from a fever on December 14, 1800, before the plot was
executed (allegedly poisoned by Count Pahlen to prevent him from babbling
conspiratorial details in his delirium); German general Levin August Gottlieb
Theophil, dismissed in 1798 over his ties to the Zubov clan; and Prince Vladimir Mikhailovich Yashvil of Georgia. Zubov and Pahlen were present at Pauls
assassination, though direct participation by the others is disputed in some
accounts.
None of the conspirators were directly punished for killing Paul, but their
fates varied under successor Alexander I. Pauls widow, styled Empress Maria
Feodorovna, exiled Count Pahlen to Latvia on April 1, 1801, and he died there
in February 1826. Count Zubov remained in St. Petersburg, dying on August 9,
1805. Alexander I promoted Levin Theophil to serve as governor-general of
411
412
P E R C E VA L , S P E N C E R
Lithuania in 1801 and made him a cavalry general the following year. Theophil
remained in military service until 1818, then retired, and died at age 81, in December 1826. Conversely, Alexander dismissed Prince Yashvil from his rank of
major general, banning him from Moscow and St. Petersburg until Napoleon
invaded Russia in 1812. Briefly appointed as a militia officer, he was promptly
sacked once more on Alexanders order and returned to exile, dying at his rural
estate on July 20, 1815.
Some historians regard Alexander I as an active participant inor, at least, a
tacit supporter ofthe conspiracy against his father. In either case, he seemed
to live in fear of plots against him, particularly after an abortive attempt to kidnap him while he was en route to the 1818 Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. On
December 1, 1825, Alexander died from typhus while touring the port city of
Taganrog, in southern Russias Rostov Oblast. Despite his interment in St. Petersburg, three months later, rumors persist that Alexander faked his own death and
retreated to life as a hermit, perhaps resurfacing as the Russian Orthodox elder
Feodor Kuzmich. Kuzmich died on February 1, 1864, when Alexander would
have been 86 years old, and was canonized as a saint 120 years later.
Further Reading
Almedingen, E. M. So Dark a Stream: A Study of the Emperor Paul I of Russia, 17541801.
London: Hutchinson & Co., 1959.
Masson, Charles. Secret Memoirs of the Court of Petersburg: Particularly towards the End
of the Reign of Catherine II and the Commencement of That of Paul I. North Stratford,
NH: Ayer Company Publishers, 1971.
McGrew, Roderick. Paul I of Russia, 17541801. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Sablukov, N. A. Reminiscences of the Court and Times of the Emperor, Paul I of Russia, up
to the Period of His Death: From the Papers of a Deceased Russian General Officer. London: J. Fraser, 1865.
PERCEVAL, SPENCER (17621812)

At 5:15 P.M. on May 11, 1812, Prime Minister Spencer Perceval entered Englands House of Commons to attend an official inquiry. As he crossed the lobby,
a stranger armed with a pistol accosted Perceval, shooting him in the chest at
point-blank range. Witnesses to the shooting later disagreed as to whether his
last words were Murder! or Oh my God! In either case, Perceval quickly
lapsed into unconsciousness and died before a physician arrived, moments later.
The gunman, who made no attempt to flee, identified himself as 43-year-old
John Bellingham, a merchant who had served four years in Russian debtors prison and, since his return to England in 1809, had filed repeated
claims against the British government for compensation, all denied. At trial,
Judge James Mansfield dismissed purported evidence of Bellinghams insanity
and condemned him to die.

Bellingham was hanged before
a large crowd in London, on
May 18, 1812.
The seventh son of an Irish
earl, Spencer Perceval was born
in London on November 1,
1762. His fatherJohn Perceval,
2nd Earl of Egmontserved
for 18 years in the Irish House
of Commons, and in 1748 was
named Lord of the Bedchamber
for Frederick, Prince of Wales.
John died in December 1770,
and Spencer spent the next five
years at Harrow School, run by
the Anglican Church, before
matriculating to Trinity College, Cambridge, and graduated in 1782. Choosing the
Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, shot in Britains
law as his profession, he next House of Commons. (Getty Images)
studied at Lincolns Inn and
was called to the London bar in 1786, assigned to the Midland Circuit. When
his private practice flagged, family connections helped him to secure various
positions including deputy recorder of Northampton and commissioner of
bankrupts (1790), surveyor of the maltings and clerk of the irons in the Mint
(1791), and counsel to the Board of Admiralty (1794). Between those postings,
he also served as junior prosecution counsel in the 1792 libel trial of Thomas
Paine (convicted in absentia) and the 1794 trial of politician John Horne Tooke
for high treason (acquitted).
Spencers career in politics began with a series of pamphlets condemning sedition and calling for the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Britains governorgeneral of India. Though published anonymously, the pamphlets were traced
back to Spencer by Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger in 1795, prompting Pitt to offer Spencer a posting as chief secretary for Ireland. Spencer declined
on economic grounds, but subsequently accepted a job as kings counsel, for
1,000 a year, in 1796. In May of that same year, he won election to a seat
in the House of Commons recently vacated by one of his cousins, representing
Northampton. Voters from that district reelected him, without opposition, 1802,
1806, and 1807, serving until his death.
Because members of parliament received no salary, Perceval continued his
legal practice, including service as senior Crown counsel at the 1797 sedition
413
414
trial of Irish journalist John Binns. Although acquitted in that case, Binns spent
two years in prison for supporting the Society of United Irishmen, and emigrated to the United States upon release from custody. Known as a dynamic
speaker in the House of Commons, Perceval was appointed to serve as solicitor general in 1801 and as attorney general from 1802 through 1805, notably
prosecuting seven revolutionaries led by Colonel Edward Despard for conspiring to assassinate King George III. All were convicted, sentenced to be hanged,
drawn, and quartered, commuted to simple hanging and beheading before
their execution in February 1803. On a less draconian note, Perceval relaxed
some restrictions on British trade unions and improved conditions for convicts
deported to Australia.
Perceval resigned as attorney general in January 1806, unwilling to serve
under Prime Minister William Grenville, and became the opposition leader in
the House of Commons. Over the next 12 months, he successfully defended
Princess Caroline of Brunswick against charges of bearing an illegitimate child
(found to be adopted). Grenvilles government fell in March 1807, in a dispute
with George III over Catholic emancipation, whereupon Perceval emerged as
Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons under
successor William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland. Percevals preference had been appointment as home secretarygiven instead to Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpoolbut he accepted the Exchequer posting when
the Duchy of Lancaster offered to supplement his salary, making it equal to the
home secretarys.
Failing health and a public duel between two of his cabinet ministers drove
Prime Minister Cavendish-Bentinck from office on October 4, 1809, and he
died three weeks later, succeeded by Perceval. Percevals administration got off
to a rocky start, with a parliamentary investigation in January 1810 of a bungled military attempt to seize Antwerp, in Belgium. Next came the mental collapse of George III, prompting Perceval to promulgate the Regency Act 1811,
pushed through parliament despite opposition to some of its terms from the
Prince of Wales. Many expected the prince to dismiss Perceval while he served
as regent, but they were surprised when Perceval kept both his post and his
cabinet. Meanwhile, Percevals opponents in parliament launched an investigation of various Orders in Council that had strained British relations with the
United States. On the day of his assassination, Perceval was on his way to hearings on that matterwhich, in fact, would spark the War of 1812 five weeks
later.
At his death, Perceval left his widow Jane and 12 children, the youngest three
years old, with only 106 5s 1d in the bank. Before the end of May, parliament
voted 50,000 for his children, plus annuities for his widow and eldest son.
Jane Perceval remarried in 1815, and was widowed once more in 1821. Nicholas Vansittart, 1st Baron Bexley, succeeded Perceval as prime minister, serving
PETER III OF RUSSIA
until 1823. Henry Bellingham, a distant relative of Precevals killer, also served
in parliament from 1983 to 1997. Perceval remains today the only British
prime minister to die by assassination.
Further Reading
Hanrahan, David. The Assassination of the Prime Minister: John Bellingham and the Murder of Spencer Perceval. Stroud, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom: Sutton Publishing, 2008.
Gray, Denis. Spencer Perceval: The Evangelical Prime Minister, 17621812. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1963.
Linklater, Andro. Why Spencer Perceval Had To Die: The Assassination of a British Prime
Minister. New York: Walker & Company, 2012.
Treherne, Philip. The Right Honourable Spencer Perceval. Charleston, SC: BiblioLife,
2009.
Williams, Charles. The Life and Administration of the Right Hon. Spencer Perceval: Including . . . a Detail of His Assassination, &c. &c. . . . . Dublin: Ulan Press, 2011.
PETER III OF RUSSIA (17281762)

On June 28, 1762, royal guards staged a coup dtat against Emperor Peter III
in Oranienbaum, Russia, placing him under arrest and forcing him to abdicate
in favor of his wife, Empress Catherin IIalso known as Catherine the Great.
The coups leader, Count Alexei Grigoryevich Orlova brother of Catherines
lover, Count Grigory Grigoryevich Orlovsubsequently transported Peter to
Ropsha Palace, 30 miles southwest of St. Petersburg, originally built and occupied by Prince Fyodor Romodanovsky, the chief of Tsar Peter the Greats
notorious secret police. There, on July 17, Peter III died under circumstances
still unclear, widely presumed to be assassination at the hands of Alexei Orlov
or his guards.
Peter was born at Kiel, in the Duchy of Holstein-Gottorp (part of Germany,
then ruled by Denmark), on February 21, 1728. His father, Duke Charles
Frederick, was a nephew of Swedens King Charles XII, and his mother was
a daughter of Russias emperor Peter I and Empress Catherine I. Peter lost his
mother three months after he was born, and his father died in June 1739,
whereupon Peter became Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, styled Charles Peter Ulrich,
at age 11. When his maternal aunt Elizabeth ascended to the Russian throne in
December 1741, she summoned Peter from Germany and declared him her heir
presumptive in autumn 1742. Soon afterward, and unaware of that decision,
Swedens parliament named Peter as the heir presumptive to that nations throne
by Swedens parliament, a vote rescinded in November.
In August 1745, Empress Elizabeth arranged Peters marriage to a second
cousin, Sophia Augusta Frederica, who converted to Russian Orthodoxy and
became Ekaterina Alexeievna, later Empress Catherine the Great. Their union
415
416
PETER III OF RUSSIA
was unhappy from the start, with both parties taking numerous lovers, but it
still apparently produced two children, future Emperor Paul I and daughter
Anna Petrovna (who died before her second birthday). We say apparently,
because Catherine later intimated that the marriage was never consummated,
naming Pauls father as Count Sergei Vasilievich Saltykov. Anna was allegedly
sired by future King Stanisaw II of Poland, and two subsequent children
Elizabeth Alexandrovna Alexeeva and Aleksey Grigorievich Bobrinskywere
fathered by Grigory Orlov.
That strange marital arrangement may have contributed to Peters heavy
drinking and reputed mental instability. Catherines memoirs reviled him as
good-for-nothing, an idiot, and a drunkard from Holstein, a view accepted
by the Encyclopdia Britannicas 11th edition in 19101911, saying of Peter
that Nature had made him mean, the smallpox had made him hideous, and
his degraded habits made him loathsome. German historian Elena Palmer
strongly disagrees, portraying Peter as a courageous liberalat least by Russian standardswho expanded religious freedom, abolished the countrys secret police (revived upon Catherines accession), criminalized the killing of
serfs by landowners, required education for the children of aristocrats (with
proof submitted to the senate), established technical schools for middle- and
lower-class children, and exempted nobles from obligatory state and military
service established under Peter the Great. The latter move alone prompted parliament to propose erecting a solid-gold stature of Peter III, but he demurred
with the observation that Russia had better uses for its gold.
Peters greatest sin, in Russian eyes, may finally have been an enduring
attachment to his German roots in Holstein and his habit of surrounding
himself with friends from that region. Upon his ascension to the throne in
January 1762, Peter instantly withdrew Russian troops from the Seven Years
War and concluded a separate peace with Frederick II of Prussia, hailed in
Germany as the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg. Worse yet, in the
eyes of some European rulers, Peter offered 12,000 soldiers to Frederick for
his ongoing battle with Austria, permitting Prussia to capture Silesia and negotiate the final Treaty of Hubertusburg in February 1763. Meanwhile, Peter
planned a new war against Denmark, massing 40,000 troops at Pomerania
in June 1762, but that campaign was aborted by his overthrow at the end of
that month.
Historians still debate Catherines role in Peters forced abdication and subsequent death. Certainly, the Orlov brothers prospered under her reign, and
Grigory Orlov continued sharing her bed. Grigory also received the alleged
murder site, Ropsha Palace, as a gift from Catherine, conditional upon her
order that its name was not to be mentioned again. (Orlov soon ceded the
property to Admiral Ivan Chernyshyov, who in turn sold it for 12,000 roubles
PETER III OF RUSSIA
to an Armenian jeweler, Ivan Lazarev. Alexei Orlov was given command of a

Mediterranean expedition during the Russo-Turkish War of 17681774, destroying the Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Chesma (July 57, 1770). From
that triumph, Alexi proceeded to instigate the Orlov Revolt in the Turkish-held
Peloponnese, a precursor to the 1821 Greek War of Independence. Finally, in
Tuscany, Alexei kidnapped Yelizaveta Alekseyevnaa pretender to the Russian
throne as Princess Tarakanoff, alleged daughter of Empress Elizabeth and
Count Alexey Razumovskytransporting her to Russia, where she was imprisoned and died from tuberculosis in December 1775.
Meanwhile, Grigory Orlov had been replaced in Catherines estimation and
in her bedroom by Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin-Tavricheski. Despite an attempt to rekindle their flame with a gift of the 189.62-carat Orlov
Diamond, he was shunned at court and vanished into self-imposed exile, returning to Russia a few months before his death in 1783. Brother Alexei lost
his grip on power with Catherines death in November 1796. Her son and successor, Paul I, ordered his father exhumed and reburied with great ceremony,
compelling Alexei to walk before the casket bearing the Great Imperial Crown.
Alexei left Russia soon thereafter, but returned with the advent of Tsar Alexander I in March 1801, commanding a militia regiment during the War of the
Fourth Coalition (18061807). Alexei died in Moscow on January 5, 1808,
leaving an estate valued at 5 million roubles, with 30,000 serfs.
A curious footnote to Peters story, as with Tsar Alexander I, is the persistent rumor that he did not die in 1762. Five individuals claiming to be the
late emperor subsequently led peasant revolts around Russia, the most famous being Cossack peasant Yemelyan Pugachev in 1774. Catherine the Great
crushed all those uprisings, yet the legend persists. An extension of that myth
credits Peter III, in spirit, with breaking the Nazi siege of Leningrad in January 1944. In cinematic portrayals of Catherines reign, Peter III has been portrayed by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (The Rise of Catherine the Great, 1934), by Sam
Jaffe (The Scarlet Empress, 1934), and by Reece Dinsdale (in the 1991 television
miniseries Young Catherine).
See also: Paul I of Russia (17541801).
Further Reading
Bain, Robert. Peter III, Emperor of Russia: The Story of a Crisis and a Crime. New York:
E. P. Dutton & Co., 1902.
Julicher, Peter. Renegades, Rebels and Rogues under the Tsars. Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2003.
Leonard, Carol. Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Palmer, Elena. Peter III: Der Prinz von Holstein. Erfurt, Germany: Sutton Verlag, 2005.
417
418
P E T L I U R A , S Y M O N VA S Y LY O V Y C H
PETLIURA, SYMON VASYLYOVYCH

(18791926)
On the afternoon of May 25, 1926, former Ukrainian president Symon Petliura
was walking through the Latin Quarter of Paris, France, when a stranger approached him on rue Racine, near Boulevard Saint-Michel. According to witnesses, the man addressed Petliura in Ukrainian, asking his name, whereupon
Petliura raised his cane without replying. The manSholem-Shmuel Schwarzbard, a Ukrainian poet of Jewish descentthen drew a pistol and shot Petliura seven times, killing him instantly. His pistol jammed on the eighth shot,
as a policeman arrived on the scene. At trial in October 1927, Schwarzbard
admitted killing Petliura for his role in anti-Semitic pogroms that had claimed
some 50,000 lives, including 15 members of Schwarzbards immediate family.
Prosecutors countered that defense by arguing that Petliura was innocent of
involvement in the pogroms, and that Schwarzbard was an agent of the Soviet
Unions Joint State Political Directorate. Jurors acquitted Schwarzbard of all
charges on October 26. He left France for Palestine, in 1928, then moved on to
South Africa in 1937 and died there the following year.
Symon Petliura was born in a suburb of Poltava, Ukrainethen called Little
Russiaon May 10, 1879, a descendant of Cossacks who enjoyed privileged
status in the Russian Empire with regard to education, taxes, and ownership
of land. He enrolled at Poltavas Russian Orthodox Seminary in 1895, planning to become a priest, but was expelled in 1901 after administrators discovered his membership in the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP), founded
the previous year. Petliura then relocated to Yekaterinodar (now Krasnodar),
where he taught school for two years, then worked as an archivist for the
Kuban Cossack Host. Agents of the Russian secret police jailed him in December 1903, for organizing a local RUP chapter and publishing anti-tsarist
literature, then released him in March 1904 on condition that he leave Little
Russia and settle in Lviv, western Ukraine, ruled at that time by the AustroHungarian Empire.
In Lviv, calling himself Sviatoslav Tagon, Petliura edited and wrote for
various Ukrainian periodicals and journals, including publications of the
Shevchenko Scientific Society. Early in 1905, an amnesty permitted his return
to Russia and resumption of his true identity as publisher of the democratic
socialist magazine Vilna Ukrayina (Free Ukraine) in St. Petersburg. Tsarist censors closed that publications office in July 1905, whereupon Petliura moved
to Kiev, first working as a staff writer for the magazine Rada (Council), then editing the magazine Slovo (Word) and Ukrayina (Ukraine). Censors shut down
those magazines in 1909, prompting Petliura to seek employment as an accountant in Moscow. With publications in Ukrainian banned by law, he returned to journalism as editor of the Russian-language journal Ukrainskaya
zhizn (Ukrainian Life) from 1912 to May 1917.
P E T L I U R A , S Y M O N VA S Y LY O V Y C H
That same month, Petliura attended the first All-Ukrainian Army Congress
in Kiev, where he was elected to lead the Ukrainian General Army Committee.
The creation of Ukraines first Central Rada (Council) found Petliura named
to serve as First Secretary for military matters, but he soon quarreled with
Volodymyr Vynnychenko, first chairman of Ukraines ruling Directorate, and
left his government post to lead the rival Haydamatskyj Kish paramilitary
movement based in Kharkiv. A see-saw struggle for control ensued, climaxed
with Petliuras arrest on April 28, 1918. He spent four months in custody
at Bila Tserkva, but emerged to continue his opposition against the Vynnychenko regime, finally capturing Kiev and driving Vynnychenko into exile in
February 1919. Petliura then assumed command of the Directorate, fielding
troops against both Bolshevik and anticommunist White Guard forces primacy in Ukraine.
The ensuing UkrainianSoviet War resulted in defeat of the White Guards
army in autumn 1919, but the more numerous Red Bolsheviks finally prevailed, forcing Petliura to seek refuge in Poland on December 5, 1919. Recognized there as head of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic, Petliura forged an
alliance with Poland, launching an attack on Kiev with mixed forces, on
May 7, 1920. Bolsheviks repulsed that movement, leaving Petliura to declare
himself the leader of a government in exile, initially based in Tarnw, then Warsaw. After Bolshevik forces secured control of Russia and proclaimed the Soviet
Union, in December 1922, Petliura embarked upon a European odyssey, living
successively in Budapest, Vienna, Geneva, and finally settling in Paris by 1924,
where he established the Ukrainian language newspaper Tryzub (Trident).
Although separated from his homeland, Petliura could not escape the onus
of events that had occurred there during World War I and afterward. Specifically, between 1918 and 1921, a total of 1,236 violent attacks on Jews had
been recorded in 524 towns throughout Ukraine, with 493 of those carried
out by Petliuras soldiers. Various estimates of the Jewish death toll ranged
from 35,000 to 60,000. This, despite broad expansion of civil rights for
Jews under Petliuras government, with a May 1919 declaration from Jewish
cabinet minister Arnold Margolin that his coreligionists enjoyed more freedom in Ukraine than in any other European state. Some latter-day historians
suggest that Petliura permitted local military commanders to pursue antiSemitic campaigns as a means of broadening their peasant base, whereas
others assert that he simply lost control of army units in the hinterlands.
On April 12, 1922, the communist All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee publicly named Petliura as one of seven fierce perpetrators against
the liberty of the Ukrainian toiling people, irreconcilable enemies of workers
and peasants of Ukraine. That move, as some historians today suggest, may
have arisen chiefly from Moscows fear of Petliuras influence among ardent
Ukrainian nationalists.
419
420
P H I L I P O F S WA B I A
Peter Deriabin, a Russian KGB agent who defected to the United States in
1953, testified before Congress six years later that Petliuras assassination was a
Soviet-sponsored event. Triggerman Schwartzbard allegedly received his orders
from Christian Rakovsky, a former chairman of the Soviet Ukrainian government, then Soviet ambassador to France. Logistical support, it was said, came
from Russian intelligence agent Mikhail Volodin. Far from defusing Ukrainian
nationalism, however, news of Petliuras murder sparked spontaneous rebellions in more than a dozen cities across Ukraine. Petliuras two sisters, both
Russian Orthodox nuns who remained in Ukraine, were arrested and executed
by the Soviet secret police in 1928.
Although historians continue to debate Petliuras role in Ukrainian pogroms,
his reputation was substantially rehabilitated inside Ukraine following the
Soviet Unions collapse in 1991. Several cities, including Kiev, now display
monuments erected in his honor, and a 12-volume edition of his writings was
released in 2006, on the 80th anniversary of his murder. In June 2009, Kievs
city council renamed Kominterns Street as Symon Petliura Street, in honor of
his 130th birthday.
Further Reading
Friedman, Saul. Pogromchik: The Assassination of Simon Petliura. New York: Hart Publishing, 1976.
Gerwath, Robert, and John Horne. War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after
the Great War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Hunczak, Taras. Symon Petliura and the Jews: A Reappraisal. Barrington, IL: Ukrainian
Historical Association, 1985.
Klier, John, and Shlomo Lamroza, eds. Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian
History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Marples, David. Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine.
Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008.
PHILIP OF SWABIA (11771208)

On June 21, 1208, Count Otto VIII of Wittelsbach murdered German king
Philip of Swabia at Bamberg, in Bavaria. The slaying occurred after Duke
Henry I the Bearded of Silesia terminated his young daughters betrothal to
Otto, apparently after hearing tales of Ottos cruel and erratic behavior. Although King Philip played no part in that event, he had previously rejected
Ottos offer of marriage to his own daughter, Beatrice, at a very young age
(some reports say five years old). Ottos disordered mind apparently connected the events, prompting him to stab Philip in the throat. Otto escaped
after the regicide, but was finally run to ground in Kelheim, on March 7,
1209. Arresting officers summarily beheaded him and tossed his head into
the Danube River. Reports claim that his headless corpse was kept for a time
in a barrel, later taken and burned by monks from a local monastery.
P H I L I P O F S WA B I A
Philip was born in August

1177, in Swabia, the former
German state of Wrttemberg
(now western Bavaria). He was
the fifth and youngest son of
Holy Roman emperor Frederick I, last in line to inherit the
throne. He joined the Catholic
clergy, first as provost of Aachen
in North Rhine-Westphalia,
then advanced to serve as bishop
of Wrzburg at the young age
of 14. Four years later, shifting from the church to secular
pursuits, he became the Duke
of Tuscany in 1195. The death
of older brother Conrad II, in
August 1196, permitted Philip King Philip of Swabia, killed by a deranged assasto advance once more, named sin in 1208. (Bettmann/Corbis)
to replace Conrad as Duke of
Swabia.
In May 1197, Philip married Irene Angelina, the dowager queen of Sicily
(widow of King Roger III) and daughter of late Byzantine emperor Isaac II
Angelos. Their union produced four daughters: Beatrice, later Holy Roman
Empress, in 1198 Kunigunde, later queen of Bohemia, in 1200; Maria, later
Duchess of Brabant and Lothier, in 1201; and Elisabeth, later queen of Castille
and Len, in 1203.
Upon the death of Frederick I in June 1190, Philips older brother Henry
already king of the Romans since August 1169ascended to the throne as
Holy Roman emperor Henry VI. Four years later, with the birth of Henrys son
Frederick (later Holy Roman emperor Frederick II), Henry entrusted Philip
with primary care of the boy, in the event of his (Henrys) untimely death. And
in fact, Henry died from malaria (some say poison) on September 28, 1197,
while leading troops to suppress a rebellion in southern Sicily. Philip went
to young Fredericks aid and saw him coroneted as king of Sicily before his
fourth birthday, on September 3, 1198, but German hostility to rule by a childking spread swiftly. Powerful voices at court persuaded Philipif he needed
persuasionto accept election as king of Germany on March 8, 1198, crowned
at Mainz on September of that year.
Philips accession to the throne was not unopposed. Hostile princes led
by Adolf of Altena, archbishop of Cologne, chose their own king, Otto IV of
Brunswick, Duke of Saxony and son of Henry the Lion, in July 1198. Civil
war ensued, widening as Philip drew support from King Philip II Augustus of
421
422
PHILIP II OF M ACEDON
France, and Englands King Richard I and successor King John backed Otto.
Pope Innocent III threw the Vaticans influence behind Otto, exerting influence
to retire France from the struggle in March 1201. More setbacks followed for
Philip, as King Ottokar I of Bohemia joined the fight on Ottos side, but the
tide turned in his favor during 1204, prompting Adolf of Altena to defect and
join him, soon followed by Henry I, Duke of Brabant. On January 6, 1205,
Philip was crowned anew at Aachen, this time by former foe Adolf of Altena.
Pope Innocent III retaliated by excommunicating Adolf in July 1205, and the
war continued for another two years, until Philip captured Cologne in 1207.
The final treaty was signed in March 1208, when Pope Innocent agreed to perform a marriage ceremony between Otto IV of Brunswick and Philips daughter
Beatrice.
Queen Irene Angelina was pregnant with a fifth daughter at the time of
Philips assassination. She gave birth to the girl, named Beatrice Postuma, on
August 27, 1208, but both mother and child died soon afterwards. Otto IV
succeeded his former rival, then father-in-law, as king of the Germans in October 1209, but was excommunicated by Innocent III in November 1210 and
ceded his throne to Philips nephew, Frederick II, in December 1212.
Further Reading
Arnold, Benjamin. Medieval Germany, 5001300: A Political Interpretation. New York:
Fuhrmann, Horst. Germany in the High Middle Ages: c.10501200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Haverkamp, Alfred. Medieval Germany 10561273. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992.
Jeep, John, ed. Medieval Germany: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing,
2001.
Lewis, Brenda. A Dark History: The Kings and Queens of Europe from Medieval Tyrants to
Mad Monarchs. New York: Metro Books, 2008.
Wiler, Bjrn, and Simon Maclean, eds. Representations of Power in Medieval Germany:
8001500. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2006.
PHILIP II OF MACEDON (359 BCE336 BCE)

In October 336 BCE, King Philip II of Macedon prepared to celebrate the marriage of Cleopatrahis 21-year-old daughter by fourth wife, Olympiasto
Cleopatras uncle, King Alexander I of Epirus. The ceremony was held in
Aigai (now Vergina), then capital of Macedon on the northeastern Greek
peninsula. After the ceremony, as Philip entered the towns theater to greet
assembled celebrants, he was attacked and fatally stabbed by one of his
seven personal bodyguards, Pausanias of Orestis. While attempting to flee,
Pausanias reportedly tripped on a vine and was overtaken by three other
guards, one of whom skewered

him with a spear. Two alleged
conspiratorsbrothers Arrhabaeus and Heromenes, sons
of exiled military commander
Aeropus of Lyncestiswere
subsequently executed by Philips son, Alexander the Great.
Philip was born at Pella, in
Macedon, sometime during
382 BCE. The youngest son of
King Amyntas III and Queen Eurydice I, Philip was taken hostage by Theban troops at age 14
and remained in captivity for the
better part of three years, until
365 BCE. Captivity was someKing Philip II of Macedon, stabbed to death by
thing less than arduous, howone of his own bodyguards in 336 BCE. (Ken Welsh/
ever, as he received diplomatic Design Pics/Corbis)
and military training from General Epaminondas, became the homosexual lover (ermenos) of another general,
Pelopidas, and lived for a time with yet another general, Pammenes of Thebes.
Pammenes, in turn, was an officer of the Sacred Band of Thebes, an elite military
force organized by Gorgidas in 378 BCE, comprising 150 pairs of gay lovers.
Back in Macedon by early 364 BCE, Philip found the Macedonian kingdom
in flux. With his fathers death in 370 BCE, son Alexander II had claimed the
throne, but he had died in 369, succeeded by brother Perdiccas III. Perdiccas
died in battle with Illyrian opponents in 359, succeeded by six-year-old son
Amyntas IV, whom Philip served as regent. Philip was not content to see his
nephew rule, however, and before years end he had usurped the throne, installing himself as the monarch.
His kingdom was then under siegeby the Illyrians who had killed his
brother; by Paeonian and Thracian raiders on its eastern boundary; by Athenian invaders at Methoni, on the Thermaic Gulf of the Aegean Sea; and from
within by soldiers under Argeus, a contestant for the throne. Philip bought off
the Paeonians and Thracians with tribute, annihilated a force of 3,000 Athenian soldiers in 359 BCE, and struck against the Illyrians a year later, killing
King Bardyllis and at least 4,000 of his soldiers (some accounts say 7,000).
Newly allied with the Chalkidian League of Olynthus by 356 BCE, Philip used
his enhanced forces to conquer Potidaea and Crenides, changing the latter
citys name to Philippi. Philip laid siege to Methone in 355 and captured it the
following year, after losing his right eye in battle.
423
424
Undeterred by that handicap, in 353 Philip joined in the Third Sacred

War, ongoing for the past three years between Phocis and the Amphictyonic League, an association of Greek tribes dominated by Thebes. At the
Battle of Crocus Field, Philips army killed 6,000 Phocians and captured
3,000 more, who were subsequently executed by drowning. Four years later,
in 349, Philip turned against the Chalkidian League, laying siege to Olynthus, which he razed to the ground (with other Chalkidian settlements) in
348 BCE. Flush with victory, in 347 he invaded the Odrysian kingdom (spanning northern Greece and present-day Bulgaria), forcing the submission of
Princes Amadocus II and Cersobleptes. In 345, while at war with King Pluratus of the Illyrian Ardiaei tribe, Philip suffered another serious wound, this
time in his left leg.
Upon recovering from that injury, Philip attacked the Scythians in 342 BCE,
capturing the city of Eumolpia and naming it Philippopolis (now Plovdiv, Bulgaria). In 340, he laid siege to Perinthus, followed by another siege at Bysantium in 339, but both campaigns failed. Philip recouped some of his damaged
reputation in 338, first defeating a combination of Athenians and Thebans in
the Battle of Chaeronea, then destroying Amfissa because its Phocian inhabitants had cultivated territory claimed by Delphi. In 337, Philip founded and led
the League of Corinthalso known as the Hellenic Leagueunder which all
Greek states except Sparta agreed to abstain from battling one another. Thus
pacified, Greece turned its eyes upon the Persian Empire, choosing Philip to
lead the invasion in 336, but his assassination left completion of that task to
his son, Alexander the Great.
The only contemporary account of Philips murder comes from Aristotle, claiming that the assassin, Pausanias, nursed a grudge over insults from
friends of Attalus, Philips father-in-law. Historian Diodorus Siculus, writing
some 280 years after the event, elaborated on that tale and added a homosexual twist. According to Diodorus, Philip and Pausanias were lovers until
Philip began an affair with a male friend of Attalus, coincidentally also named
Pausanias. The jilted Pausanias insulted his new rival publically, whereupon
Philips new paramour committed suicide. Attalus then allegedly retaliated
against the first Pausanias by getting him drunk and arranging for him to be
raped. Philip reportedly declined pleas from the violated man to punish Attalus, though he did promote Pausanias to serve as a royal bodyguardwhich
proved to be a fatal mistake.
Roman historian Marcus Junianus Justinus, writing in the third century CE,
was the first to claim that Alexander and his mother had advance knowledge
of Philips assassination and may have instigated it. Olympias was suspect, in
particular, based on her unhappy marriage to the king. Alexander crucified
the corpse of Pausanias, but Olympias had the assassin buried in a tumulus as
soon as her son left Macedon, ordering yearly animal sacrifices in his memory
PHOENIX PROGRAM
thereafter. Before years end, Alexander executed Attalus, and Olympias murdered a nephew of Attalus whom Attalus preferred over Alexander as Philips
successor.
Further Reading
Ashley, James. The Macedonian Empire: The Era of Warfare Under Philip II and Alexander
the Great, 359323 BCE. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004.
Bradford, Alfred. Philip II of Macedon: A Life from the Ancient Sources. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1992.
Carney, Elizabeth, and Daniel Ogden, eds. Philip II and Alexander the Great: Father and
Son, Lives and Afterlives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Gabriel, Richard. Philip II of Macedonia: Greater than Alexander. Dulles, VA: Potomac
Books, 2010.
Worthington, Ian. Philip II of Macedonia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.
PHOENIX PROGRAM (19651972)

Persistentand perhaps deliberateconfusion surrounds the birth of the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agencys (CIA) Phoenix Program in South Vietnam. Created to neutralize suspected Viet Cong (VC) operatives, informants, and supporters, the program assassinated thousands of Vietnamese, while imprisoning
and often torturing thousands more. Some sources claim that the operation
was launched in 1954, as soon as Vietnam was temporarily divided along the
17th parallel by the Geneva Accords, pending reunification through a general
election in July 1956. That version says that CIA agents organized secret police
units in South Vietnam, operating as virtual death squads. Although that may
be true, it now appears that the VC insurgency was not organized until December 1956, with its first campaign beginning in April 1957.
Other sources maintain that the Phoenix Program debuted in 1965, with the
beginning of Americas ground war in Vietnam. Its primary components were
provincial reconnaissance units (PRUs) that carried out assassinations and
abductions, with surviving captives delivered to regional interrogation centers (RICs). South Vietnamese law permitted detention of VC suspects pending
trial, with a two-year sentence upon conviction of membership in a communist organization, renewable at the governments pleasure up to six years total.
While incarcerated, prisoners were routinely subjected to torture including
Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by
murder; electric shock (the Bell Telephone Hour) rendered by attaching wires
to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the water
treatment; the airplane in which the prisoners arms were tied behind the
back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner
in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and
whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners (McCoy, p. 63).
425
426
PHOENIX PROGR AM
Australian military intelligence officer Milton Osborne, first dispatched to

Southeast Asia during 1959, described other acts of CIA-sponsored torture, including The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of
my detainees ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being
part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages. . . . The
use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to . . . both the womens vaginas and mens testicles [to] shock them into submission (Allen and
Pilger, p. 164).
Such activities were justified in terms of collecting intelligencespecifically,
the identity of VC members or supporterswhich could then be used to draw
up lists of future Phoenix targets. Lieutenant Vincent Okamoto, assigned to the
Phoenix Program in 1968, described that process in action.
The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? Its not like you
had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go
into a village and just grab someone and say, Wheres Nguyen so-and-so? Half
the time the people were so afraid they would not say anything. Then a Phoenix
team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes
so he could see, put common wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk
him through the village and say, When we go by Nguyens house scratch your
head. Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say,
April Fool, motherfucker. Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As
far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes theyd come back to camp with ears to prove that they
killed people. (Appy, p. 361)
In 1967, authority for Phoenix operations fell under a new umbrella organization called Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support
(CORDS), which included creation and maintenance of a 500,000-member
peasant militia to fight the VC in conjunction with regular U.S. and South Vietnamese military forces. Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Herbert, fated to become
the wars most decorated U.S. soldier, found the Phoenix Program operating at
high gear when he reached Saigon in 1968. Five years later, in his autobiography Soldier, Herbert recalled that in his first meeting with CIA agents, They
wanted me to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and
tried to make it look as though the VC themselves had done the killing. Although the VC themselves certainly perpetrated numerous atrocities, that revelation raises doubts concerning some allegations made against them.
The Tet Offensive of 1968 convinced CIA and U.S. Army leaders that the
Phoenix Program should be broadened in a bid to decimate the VC infrastructure (VCI in military shorthand). Directive 38141, issued by the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), specified that Phoenix operators
PIZARRO GONZLEZ, FRANCISCO
would attack communist rebels with a rifle shot rather than a shotgun approach to target key political leaders, command/control elements and activists
in the VCI. Although statistics concerning covert operations are notoriously
unreliable, one official estimate cites 81,740 suspected VC members and supporters neutralized by Phoenix teams, of whom 26,369 were assassinated.
The latter figure, presumably, does not include detainees killed in custody or
others who simply disappeared. In addition to murdering Vietnamese nationals, some accounts maintain that Phoenix agents also killed U.S. and South
Vietnamese military personnel who were deemed to be security risksa
theme fictionalized in the 1979 motion picture Apocalypse Now.
Most accounts claim the Phoenix Program was disbanded in 1972, due in
large part to negative publicity generated by returning veterans such as former
army counterintelligence agent Ed Murphy, who exposed the program publicly
in April 1970, and Barton Osborn, whose 1971 congressional testimony described the Phoenix campaign as a sterile depersonalized murder program.
In fact, however, it appears that the programor something very similar
continued in South Vietnam under the code name F-6, following the 1972
Easter Offensive, and may have endured until the on April 30, 1975.
Further Reading
Allen, Joe, and John Pilger. Vietnam: The (Last) War the U.S. Lost. Chicago: Haymarket
Books, 2008.
Andrad, Dale. Ashes to Ashes: The Phoenix Program and the Vietnam War. Lexington,
MA: Lexington Books, 1990.
Appy, Christian. Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Herbert, Anthony. Soldier. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973.
Herrington, Stuart. Silence Was a Weapon. New York: Presidio Press, 1982.
McCoy, Alfred. A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on
Terror. New York: Macmillan, 2006.
Moyar, Mark. Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIAs Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet
Cong. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997.
Valentine, Douglas. The Phoenix Program. New York: William Morrow, 1990.

(14711541)
On June 26, 1541, a group of heavily armed Spaniards led by Diego de Almagro II, stormed the palace occupied by Francisco Pizarro Gonzlez, governor of New Castille, in Lima, Peru. Almagro held a deadly grudge against
Pizarro for executing Almagros fathera one-time ally turned military rival
in July 1538. During the palace raid, most of Pizarros houseguests escaped,
but a handful, including his half-brother Alcntara, fought and died while the
427
428
PIZARRO GONZLEZ, FR ANCISCO
70-year-old Pizarro struggled into his armor. Once confronted by his enemies,
Pizarro reportedly killed two invaders, then was fatally stabbed when his sword
became lodged in a third opponents torso. Initially buried in the courtyard
of Limas cathedral, Pizarro was later exhumed and beheaded, his skull and
body reburied in separate caskets under the cathedrals floor. Young Almagro,
also known as El Mozo (the lad), fought on against Pizarros successor for the
right to rule Peru. Defeated in battle and captured at Chupas on September 16,
1542, Almagro was executed the same day.
Francisco Pizarro Gonzlez was born in Trujillo, Spain. Most histories place
that event sometime during 1471, though some opt for 1476. The illegitimate son of infantry colonel Gonzalo Pizarro and a peasant mother, Francisca
Gonzlez, Pizarro was a distant cousin of another future Spanish conquistador,
Hernn Corts de Monroy y Pizarro, who toppled Mexicos Aztec Empire in 1520.
Eleven years before that familial triumph, in November 1509, Pizarro sailed
with Alonso de Ojeda to Venezuela, and from there joined the fleet of explorer
Martn Fernndez de Enciso, probing Colombias Guajira Peninsula. In 1513,
Pizarro accompanied Vasco Nez de Balboas expedition to the Pacific Ocean.
Six years later, acting on behalf of Governor Pedro Arias Dvila, Pizarro arrested
Balboa on charges of usurping
the governors authority. Balboa
and four alleged accomplices
were executed, and Dvila installed Pizarro as mayor and
magistrate of Panama City.
Pizarro held that post
through 1523, then embarked
on his first attempt to conquer the rich Inca Empire. Native resistance and inclement
weather defeated him in 1524,
and again in 1526, but Pizarro
persevered in his quest to rival
Corts. Panamas governor,
Pedro de los Ros, sought to
recall Pizarro after the second
abortive invasion, but Pizarro
ignored his orders, finally penetrating northern Peru in April
1528. The wealth of precious
Francisco Pizarro, Spanish governor of Peru, was metals he discovered there enassassinated by rebels in June 1541. (Michael couraged him, but Governor
Nicholson/Corbis)
Ros refused to fund a third
expedition. Going over the governors head, Pizarro sailed back to Spain and
secured backing from King Charles I, who granted approval and offered Pizarro
control over any new lands that he conquered for the Spanish crown. Pizarros
new status as Adelantado (military governor) of New Castille gave him virtually
unlimited authority within 200 leagues (600 miles) of South Americas newly
discovered Pacific Coast. Thus encouraged, Pizarro rallied family and friends,
sailed back to Panama, and pushed off for Peru in January 1530.
Participants in the new invasion of Peru included Pizarros brothers
(Gonzalo, Hernando and Juan), a cousin (Pedro Pizarro), Francisco de Orellana (who would later discover and explore the Amazon River), and Diego de
Almagro, a partner of Pizarro in his Peruvian adventures since 1524. Their
military force included 180 men70 below the minimum number demanded
by King Charlesand 27 horses. At risk of arrest for failure to meet his enlistment quota, Pizarro sailed clandestinely with three ships, first to the Canary
Islands, then to Panama. His third and final expedition to Peru embarked
from Panama on December 15, 1530, reaching the coast of present-day Ecuador after 13 days at sea. There, Pizarro obtained some gold, silver and emeralds, shipping the booty back to Panama, where Diego de Almagro had
remained to recruit more soldiers.
April of 1531 brought Pizarros force to the Inca city of Tumbes, in northwestern Peru, where the Spaniards met resistance from Chief Chilimaza in
the Battle of the Manglares. Victorious, Pizarro planted a cross and claimed
the area for Spain, then moved on to kill 400 warriors under Chief Tumbala
in the Battle of Pun, against Spanish losses of three dead and 26 wounded.
Joined by Hernando de Soto with another band of soldiers, Pizarro pressed
forward, founding the first Spanish settlement in Peruonly the third in
South Americain July 1532, at the site of present-day Piura.
As Pizarro advanced, Incan emperor Atahualpa was briefly distracted by
a civil war against his brother Huscar, which concluded with Huscars defeat at the Battle of Quipaipan in April 1532. Resting at Cajamarca with some
80,000 soldiers, Atahualpa was initially contemptuous of the small force led
by Pizarro and de Soto, but he decided to crush them as an object lesson to
future invaders. Pizarro, though vastly outnumbered, conspired to achieve
by guile what he could not secure by brute force. On November 15, 1532,
Pizarro invited Atahualpa to a meeting at Cajamarca. The emperor arrived
on November 16 with 2,000 bodyguards, unwisely divested of armor and all
weapons aside from small ceremonial knives used to sacrifice llamas. Pizarro
promptly staged an ambush, complete with a cavalry charge and volleys from
four cannons, killing an estimated 2,000 Incas, capturing Atahualpa and
some 5,000 more as they rampaged through the stricken city.
While looting Cajamarca of gold and other treasures worth billions of dollars today, Pizarro held Atahualpa hostage to forestall retaliation by the Incan
429
430
PIZARRO GONZLEZ, FR ANCISCO
general Rumiahui. After nine months in captivity, however, the Spaniards

came to regard Atahualpa as more of a liability than an asset. In a ludicrous
show trial, Pizarro convicted Atahualpa of rebelling against Spain, practicing
idolatry, and murdering his brother Huscar. Sentenced to death by fire, Atahualpa bargained for relative leniency, publicly converted to Catholicism, and
was strangled with a garrote on August 29, 1533.
From there, the conquest of Peru and decimation of the Incas proceeded
apace, assisted by smallpox. Pizarro vanquished Inca forces in battle at Vilcaconga (August to November 1533), Cuzco (November 15, 1533), Maraycalla (early 1534), Mount Chimborazo (1534), Cuzco again (May 1536 to
March 1537), Ollantaytambo (January 1537), and Abancay (July 12, 1537).
During that march of slaughter, in January 1535, Pizarro founded the city
of Lima, proclaiming it his greatest achievement in the New World. Three
years later, escalating conflict between the Pizarro brothers and longtime
ally Diego de Almagro culminated in the Battle of Las Salinas, fought on
April 26, 1538. Gonzalo and Hernando Pizarro led the troops that killed
Almagro and 150 of his men, thereby sowing the seeds of their brothers
assassination in June 1541.
Francisco Pizarro remains, with Spains other conquistadors, a controversial figure in world history. Whereas somemostly Spaniardsregard him as
a hero from the Age of Exploration, many Peruvians (and Native Americans at
large) brand his conquest of the Incan empire an exercise in genocide. Even
King Charles I, sponsor and primary beneficiary of Pizarros expedition, wrote
to Pizarro, We have been displeased by the death of Atahualpa, since he was a
monarch, and particularly as it was done in the name of justice.
Pizarro remains a popular figure in fiction, portrayed both as her and villain. German dramatist August von Kotzebue penned Die Spanier in Peru in
1788, adapted by Irish author Richard Brinsley Sheridan as Pizarro in 1799.
An animated television series, The Mysterious Cities of Gold (19821983), casts
Pizarro as a ruthless villain, and an episode of History Bites (To Boldly Go,
first aired on July 17, 2004) portrays Pizarro as a parody of William Shatners
spaceship captain James T. Kirk on Star Trek. Pizarro and Atahualpa hold center stage in Peter Schaffers play The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), filmed under
the same title in 1969 with Robert Shaw as Pizarro and Christopher Plummer
as the Incan emperor. Pizarro has even conquered the realm of science fiction,
in David Gordons novella Despoilers of the Golden Empire (1959) and in the Anthony Horowitz novel Evil Star (2006).
In 1892, while preparing for preparing for a Christopher Columbus quincentennial celebration, workmen in Lima exhumed a corpse believed to be
Pizarros and displayed it publicly in a glass casket. They were proved wrong
in 1977, when excavation of the Lima cathedrals foundation revealed Pizarros actual remains in a lead coffin labeled Here is the head of Don Francisco
P O M P E Y T H E G R E AT
Pizarro Demarkes, Don Francisco Pizarro who discovered Peru and presented
it to the crown of Castile. Forensic pathologists examined both bodies, reporting that the latters skull bore multiple sword wounds, thereby confirming it as
Pizarros.
Further Reading
Gabai, Rafael. Francisco Pizarro and His Brothers: The Illusion of Power in SixteenthCentury Peru. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.
Hemming, John. The Conquest of the Incas. San Diego: Harvest Books, 2003.
Koch, Peter. The Spanish Conquest of the Inca Empire. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007.
MacQuarrie, Kim. The Last Days of the Incas. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.
POMPEY THE GREAT (106 BCE48 BCE)

On September 30, 48 BCE, the dreams of Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius
Magnusbetter known to history as Pompey the Greatlay in ruins. After a
confident beginning, his war against upstart would-be emperor Julius Caesar
had gone badly, ending for Pompey with the loss of 2,000 men in the Battle
of Pharsalus (central Greece), on August 8, 48 BCE. Fleeing to Egypt with his
wife and son, Pompey was betrayed on arrival by Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII Theos
Philopator. With Caesar en route to Egypt, pursuing his foe, Ptolemyor his
chief eunuch Pothinus, in some accountsdecided to kill Pompey and thereby
avert a war with Caesar. Landing at Alexandria one day after his 59th birthday,
Pompey was surrounded and stabbed to death by two of Ptolemys guards,
Achillas and Salvius, joined by Lucius Septimius, chief of Roman soldiers serving in the Egyptian army. According to Greek historian Plutarch, Pompey was
then beheaded, with his corpse cremated on the beach, and his head and royal
seal were presented to Caesar. Caesar, reportedly mourning his former friends
fate, executed Pothinus and Achillas, then returned Pompeys ashes to his widow,
Cornelia.
Pompey was born in Picenum, on the Adriatic Sea, on September 29, 106 BCE.
His father, Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, was a wealthy landowner, shady politician, and a ruthless military leader, described by Cicero as worthy of hatred
on account of his cruelty, avarice, and perfidy. When he died during a siege
of Romeeither struck by lightning or killed by plague in 87 BCEStrabos
soldiers celebrated the event by hauling his corpse from its bier and dragging
it through the streets. Pompey, then 20 years old, inherited his fathers estates
and took command of his legion. He also faced trial for embezzling plunder
seized during the recent war, but secured prompt acquittal by announcing his
engagement to the judges daughter Antistia.
In 83 BCE, Pompey raised three legions to join his fathers old ally, Lucius
Cornelius Sulla, in a successful bid to unseat Roman consul Gnaeus Papirius
431
432
Carbo. Sulla, once installed as dictator, expressed his gratitude by offering his
stepdaughter Aemilia Scaura to Pompey as his bride. Undeterred by the fact
that both were marriedand Aemilia was pregnant by her current husband
Pompey arranged a double divorce followed by his second hasty marriage. Aemilia subsequently died in childbirth, and Pompey remained firmly ensconced
in Sullas good graces.
In 82 BCE, Pompey conquered Sicily on Sullas behalf, thereby securing
Romes source of grain, executing rival Gnaeus Papirius Carbo and many
of his supporters in a slaughter that earned Pompey the nickname adulescens carnifex (adolescent butcher). A year later, he secured Romes Provincia
Africa (part of present-day Tunisia) by defeating Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus and Nubian king Hiarbas at Utica. In the wake of those victories,
Pompey returned to Rome and was greeted by Sulla as Magnus (The Great),
although he remained a private citizen with no political rank. At the same
time, Sulla denied Pompeys request for a triumpha civil ceremony and religious rite celebrating achievement of a military commander in wartime
and ordered Pompey to disband his legions. Pompey refused, rallying his
soldiers at the gates of Rome, whereupon Sulla relented after a fashion. The
dictator granted Pompey his triumph, but only after lavish ceremonies for
himself and General Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius.
Pompey began his maneuvers for political power in 78 BCE, backing Marcus Aemilius Lepidus over Sullas objections in that years consular election.
Sulla died before years end, and when Lepidus sought to seize Rome by force,
Pompey turned against him, driving him to exile in Sardinia, where he died in
78 BCE. Next, he sought appointment as proconsul of Hispania (the Iberian
Peninsula), where General Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius had thus far failed
to suppress rebel forces led by Quintus Sertorius. Granted joint command over
Hispania with Metellus, Pompey arrived on the scene in 76 BCE, facing stiff
guerrilla warfare until Sertorius was assassinated in 72 BCE. Hispania was fully
secured for Rome by the following year, when Pompey returned to Italy.
He arrived in time to join yet another conflict, the Third Servile War, pitting General Marcus Licinius Crassus against an army of 120,000 rebellious
slaves led by Spartacus. Crassus had fared poorly in the wars first two years,
but Pompeys reinforcements tipped the balance in Romes favor, killing
12,300 rebels and capturing 5,000 more in battle near present-day Strongoli,
in Bruttium (now Calabria). Latecomer Pompey claimed full credit for suppressing the three-year revolt and received his second formal triumph, for victory in Hispania, December 31, 71 BCE. Swathed in glory, he won election as
co-consul, serving with Crassus, at the unprecedented age of 35.
Pompeys next famous campaign was waged against Mediterranean pirates,
under terms of the Lex Gabinia, passed in 67 BCE, granting him vast military
power over all Roman territory within 50 miles of the coastline. (See sidebar.)
Mounting a rapid and ruthless campaign, Pompey killed thousands of pirates,
sank hundreds of ships, and razed scores of seaports, driving those buccaneers
who survived far inland to pursue their trade as landlocked bandits, reducing
Mediterranean piracy to scattered incidents for the next four centuries.
Before Pompey could return to Rome from that sweeping victory, Tribune
Gaius Manilius nominated him to succeed Lucius Licinius Lucullus as commander in the Third Mithridatic War, ongoing in the region of present-day
Armenia since 73 BCE. Lucullus resented Pompeys appointment, calling him
a vulture who fed on the hard work of other commanders, but the senate
confirmed his replacement. True to form, Pompey arranged a treaty with King
Tigranes the Great in 67 BCE, then pursued Mithridates VI of Pontus to his defeat and ultimate assassination four years later. In the process, Pompey secured
Roman supremacy in Phoenicia and Coele-Syria, while laying siege to Jerusalem and killing 12,000 Jews under King Aristobulus II, restoring Hyrcanus II
to the throne.
Returning to Rome as a near-legendary figure, worshipped by a cult at
Delos, Pompey celebrated his third triumph on his 45th birthday in 61 BCE,
claiming conquests that exceeded those of Alexander the Great. For the first
time in 21 years, Pompey dismissed his legions with land grants to surviving
veterans, settling into an uneasy political alliance with Marcus Licinius Crassus
and Gaius Julius Caesar, known as the First Triumvirate. Although lacking any
official status, the arrangement served all three men, electing Caesar as consul
in 61 BCE with a promise to promote various claims from Pompey and Crassus.
(Again, in familiar style, Pompey helped cement the alliance by marrying Caesars daughter Julia.) Caesar named Pompey governor of Hispania in absentia,
supervising transportation of grain to Rome, and then moved on to serve as
proconsul in Gaul (now France).
The First Triumvirate was showing signs of strain by 56 BCE, as Caesar
surpassed his colleagues in popularity and military glory. At the same time,
rumors spread that Crassus had conspired to murder Pompey. At a secret
meeting in Lucca, Caesar suggested that Pompey and Crassus should seek reelection as joint consuls in 55 BCE, a goal accomplished at some cost through
a campaign of bribery, intimidation, and violence. Once in office, they agreed
to extend Caesars rule over Gaul for five years. Their own rewards, upon retirement from office, would be continued control over Hispania (for Pompey)
and governorship of Syria for Crassus (desired as a launching pad for invading Parthia). The Triumvirate finally dissolved after Julias death during childbirth, in 54 BCE, and the Parthian defeat of Crassus a year later, which killed
20,000 Romans (Crassus among them) and led to the capture of 10,000 more
at the Battle of Carrhae.
Rome was humiliated by that defeat, which cost the Pathians only 100 soldiers. Pompey assuaged his grief at losing Julia and their infant child by wedding the newly widowed daughter of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio
Nasica, an archenemy of Julius Caesar. Again, marriage advanced Pompey,
433
434
LEX GABINIA
Enacted in 67 BCE, ancient Romes Lex Gabinia (Gabinian Law) granted
Pompey the Great extraordinary proconsular powers over any province lying within 50 miles of the Mediterranean Sea. Named after its
author, Tribune Aulus Gabinius, the law granted Pompey a command of
500 warships, 120,000 infantry, and 5,000 cavalry, with orders to suppress rampant piracy on the Mediterranean within three years time.
In fact, he accomplished that goal within 40 days. Roman senators approved the law with considerable trepidation, fearing that the power
placed in Pompeys hands might establish him as a new dictator. A year
later, passage of the Lex Manilia (named for Tribune Gaius Manilius)
further expanded Pompeys authority, granting him supreme command
in the war against King Mithridates VI of Pontus, in place of predecessor Lucius Licinius Lucullus. Today, historians regard passage of the Lex
Gabinia as a major step toward the senates collapse as Romes ruling
body, marking a point of no return in that legislatures ability to block
concentration of power in the hands of powerful generals such as Pompey and Julius Caesar, a prelude to civil war that was, in turn, a precursor to the Roman Republics dissolution.
when he teamed with his father-in-law as consul of Rome in 52 BCE. Caesar

began the long march back from Gaul, crossing the Rubicon River into Italy on
January 10, 49 BCE, to initiate full-scale civil war. Pompey initially boasted that
he could defeat Caesar by stamping his feet and raising legions from the soil
of Italy, but instead, he wound up fleeing Rome, retreating toward Brundisium
(now Brindisi) on the Adriatic Sea. Successive defeats drove him farther and
farther from Rome, and to his ultimate death in Egypt.
See also: Caesar, Gaius Julius (100 BCE44 BCE).
Further Reading
Greenhalgh, Peter. Pompey: The Republican Prince. London: George Weidenfeld and
Nicolson Ltd, 1981.
Leach, John. Pompey the Great. London: Routledge, 1986.
Rawson, Beryl. The Politics of Friendship: Pompey and Cicero. Sydney: Sydney University
Press, 1978.
Seager, Robin. Pompey the Great: A Political Biography. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2002.
Southern, Pat. Pompey the Great: Caesars Friend and Foe. Stroud, Gloucestershire,
United Kingdom: Tempus Publishing, 2002.
PREMADASA, RANASINGHE
PREMADASA, RANASINGHE (19241993)

On May 1, 1993, President Ranasinghe Premadasa attended a May Day rally
in downtown Colombo, Sri Lanka. During the festivities, a suicide bomber
linked to a militant separatist organization, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE), detonated an explosive charge strapped to his body. The blast
killed President Premadasa and 23 bystanders. Only nine days earlier, also in
Colombo, an alleged LTTE gunman had assassinated Premadasas political rival Lalith Athulathmudali, then apparently had killed himself with cyanide.
Further investigation, conducted by a special presidential commission, subsequently blamed Premadasa himself for Athulathmudalis murder, charging
that the gunmanif he even fired the shotswas murdered by conspirators to
ensure his future silence. Thus far, no one has been charged with Premadasas
slaying or the other May Day deaths.
Ranasinghe Premadasa was born to family of limited means in Colombo,
then British Ceylon, on June 23, 1924. He attended Colombos St. Josephs
College, studying journalism and Asian languages, later translating various foreign works into the Sinhala language of his homeland. In his 20s, he joined
the Ceylon Labour Party, founded in 1928 by Alexander Ekanayake Goonesinha, who later served as mayor of Colombo, a cabinet minister, and as a Sri
Lankan ambassador abroad. Discouraged by the Labour Partys prospects in
Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa, killed by a terrorist bomb in 1993. (Time &
Life Pictures/Getty Images)
435
436
PREM ADASA, R ANASINGHE
the 1950s, Premadasa shifted his allegiance to the center-right United National
Party (UNP), founded in September 1946. Ceylon, meanwhile, had achieved
its independence from Great Britain in February 1948, with Don Stephen
Senanayake elected as the nations first prime minister. Senanayakes son Dudley succeeded him in March 1952, and named Premadasa to serve as minister
of broadcasting, in charge of Radio Ceylon.
Premadasa bided his time through successive administrations, while Ceylon
underwent dramatic changes. In 1972, it became the Free, Sovereign and Independent Republic of Sri Lanka, with a new constitution. Five years later, with
an 80-percent majority in parliament, the UNP amended that document to
create an executive presidency, first occupied in February 1978 by then prime
minister Junius Richard Jayewardene. In September 1978, a new constitution
scrapped the bicameral legislature in favor of a single house, and established
the presidents term as six years. Premadasa, chosen as prime minister in February 1978, found himself with less power than his predecessors in that office,
but was determined to make the best of it.
Premadasa retained the prime ministers office until January 2, 1989,
when he succeeded fellow UNP member Junius Jayewardene as president
of Sri Lanka. He found himself presiding over a nation in rebellion, with
LTTE guerrillas battling members of an Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF)
in the north, and members of the MarxistLeninist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (Peoples Liberation Front) wreaking havoc in the south. Indias
intrusion on Sri Lanka was unwelcome, and when the IPKF refused to withdraw, Premadasa reportedly brokered a secret agreement to arm the LTTE.
That effort backfired when 774 Sri Lankan policemen surrendered to the
LTTE at Premadasas request, then were slaughtered en masse. A presidential commission also determined, years later, that President Premadasa and
members of the Sri Lankan army were directly responsible for the death of
Lieutenant General Denzil Kobbekaduwa, killed by a land mine in August
1992, after he announced Operation Final Countdown, aimed at wiping
out the LTTE.
Another thorn in Premadasas side was Lalith Athulathmudali, his leading
rival in the 1988 presidential election. Defeated in that contest, Athulathmudali joined third-place contender Lionel Gamini Dissanayake to create a new
political party, the Democratic United National Front (DUNF), in 1991. The
DUNF moved to impeach Premadasa that autumn, charging that the president had circumvented legal procedures in naming cronies to high political
positions, and blocking Athulathmudali and Dissanayake from influential positions. A more serious accusation blamed Premadasa for the disappearance of
Luxman Perera, a Sri Lankan playwright and close ally of Athulathmudali. Parliament rejected the impeachment petition in October 1991, but tension escalated nationwide, soon flaring into violence.
PREMADASA, RANASINGHE
Between November 1991 and August 1992, DUNF leaders reported four
mob attacks on their rallies: at Pannala on November 2, at Madapatha on
April 23, at Colombos Fort Railway Station on August 7, and at Dehiwala on
August 29. On March 16, 1993, Premadasas regime dissolved the countrys
seven provincial councils and announced elections for new members to be
held on May 17. Lalith Athulathmudali promptly announced his attention to
seek the chief ministership of the Western Province Council, but he was shot
dead on April 23. One day later, police produced the corpse of a Tamil youth
and supposed LTTE member named Ragunathan, branding him the assassin
and claiming that he had killed himself with a cyanide capsule. Detectives
from Scotland Yard were investigating those claims when a bomb killed President Premadasa on May 1.
British detectives eventually filed their report, confirming the original verdict
on Athulathmudalis death and finding no evidence, direct or circumstantial, to
support allegations that Athulathmudali was slain by government agents. Still,
controversy persisted, contributing to a 1994 electoral victory for the Peoples
Alliance, an amalgam of the DUNF and six other leftist parties, which installed
Chandrika Kumaratunga as president. In 1995, Kumaratunga appointed a
three-member commission to investigate Athulathmudalis murder. The commissions final report, submitted in October 1997, exonerated Ragunathan as
the killer, finding that he had been shot, then force-fed cyanide by persons unknown, presumed to be Athulathmudalis actual assassins. The report named
Colombo underworld godfather Arambawalage Don Ranjith Upali de Silva
as Ragunathans probable slayer, and tagging gang member Janaka Priyanka
Jayamanna as Athulathmudalis killer. Other syndicate members implicated in
the plot, and in prior attacks on DUNF rallies, included Wathudula Bandulage
Somaratne, Nandasiri Karunatilake, and Bulathsinhalage Ajith Coorey (son of
Sri Lankas minister of housing and construction, Bulathsinhalage Srisena Cooray). The report also charged Uswatte Liyanage Senivaratne, a UNP provincial councilor for the Western Province, of leading attacks on DUNF members.
Finally, Sri Lankan police faced accusations of negligence and tampering with
evidence in their investigation.
Based on that report, in September 1998, prosecutors charged five police
officersincluding Inspector Devasundara, chief of the Terrorism Investigation Departmentwith framing and murdering suspect Ragunathan. Unknown gunmen killed three of those defendants prior to trial, apparently
to silence them. Janaka Jayamanna was also slain, gangland-style, before he
could be tried for Athulathmudalis murder, as was Arambawalage Upali. Several other suspects spent up to four years in prison awaiting trial, then were
apparently released. On December 18, 1999, President Kumaratunga was
partially blinded in an LTTE attack in Colombo, during a campaign rally, but
she survived to win reelection and served until November 2005.
437
438
P R I M Y P R AT S, J UA N
Further Reading
Clarence, William. Ethnic Warfare in Sri Lanka and the UN Crisis. London: Pluto Press,
2006.
Jeganathan, Pradeep, and Qadri Ismail, eds. Unmaking the Nation: The Politics of Identity
& History in Modern Sri Lanka. Colombo, Sri Lanka: Social Scientists Association,
2009.
Little, David. Sri Lanka: The Invention of Enmity. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1994.
Pratap, Anita. Island of Blood. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Richardson, John. Paradise Poisoned: Learning about Conflict, Terrorism and Development
from Sri Lankas Civil Wars. Kandy, Sri Lanka: International Center for Ethnic Studies, 2005.
Uyangoda, Jayadeva. Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka: Changing Dynamics. Washington, DC:
East-West Center Washington, 2007.
Weiss, Gordon. The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers.
New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2012.
PRIM Y PRATS, JUAN (18141870)

On December 28, 1870, General Juan Prim y Pratspresident of Spains Council of Ministerswas ambushed by a group of unidentified gunmen outside
the Chamber of Deputies on Calle del Turco, in downtown Madrid. Fatally
wounded, Prim hung on until December 30, then died without identifying his
assassins. No one was ever charged with the murder, though various suspects
were named. A leading candidate for chief triggerman was Jos Pal y Angulo,
an ex-friend of Prims who had recently threatened his life in the newspaper
El Combate (Combat), and who vanished from Madrid on the day of the shooting. From exile in France, Pal denied the charge and accused Felipe Sols y
Campuzanoan aide to Antoine dOrlans, Duke of Montpensierwith instigating the assassination. Other proposed suspects include former Prim allies
Francisco Serrano Domnguez Cuenca y Prez de Vargas and Prxedes Mariano
Mateo Sagasta y Escolar (both of whom served as Spanish prime ministers),
along with Cuban slave traders and agents of Queen Isabella II.
Juan Prim y Prats was born in Reus, Spain, on December 12, 1814, the son
of Lieutenant Colonel Pablo Prim. At age 20, he joined a volunteer battalion
supporting Queen Regent Maria Christina, widow of the late King Ferdinand
VII, and her infant daughter Isabella II against supporters of Carlos V, brother of
Ferdinand VII and pretender to the Spanish throne. That first of three Carlist
Wars continued until 1839, ending in victory for Isabellas side. Prim emerged
from the conflict as a lieutenant colonel with two knighthoods, but he opposed
the regime of Prime Minister Joaqun Baldomero Fernndez-Espartero y Alvarez
de Toro, commencing in October 1840, and was driven into exile. Prim joined
General Francisco Serrano in rebellion against Esparteros de facto dictatorship,
P R I M Y P R AT S , J U A N
and Espartero in turn departed

for England in July 1843, when
Isabella II was finally declared
of age to occupy the throne. As
a reward for Prims support, he
was promoted to the rank of
major general, with additional
titles as Count of Reus and Viscount of El Bruc (a municipality in Catalonia).
Ramn Mara Narvez succeeded Espartero as prime
minister, but his administration likewise failed to meet
Prims standard of democratic
process, and for his renewed
opposition, Prim was sentenced to six years imprisonment in the Philippines. Rather The 1870 assassination of Spanish general Juan
Prim y Prats remains unsolved. (Getty Images)
than serve that time, Prim fled
Spain for exile in England and
France, returning to his homeland after Narvez resigned in October 1847 and
an amnesty for exiles was declared. Once again he was promoted, this time to
the rank of field marshal, assigned to serve as captain-general (governor) of
Puerto Rico.
Returning to Spain after a year in the Caribbean, Prim was ready to serve
in the Crimean War at its outbreak in October 1853. This time, however,
he would be a noncombatant, posted as a military representative to Sultan
Abdlmecid I of the Ottoman Empire, allied with Britain, France, and the
kingdom of Sardinia against Russia. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in
1854, Prim threw his support to Prime Minister Leopoldo ODonnell y Jorris two years later, and was promptly elevated to the rank of lieutenant general. Outstanding service in the Hispano-Moroccan War of 18591860 saw
Prim honored with more titles, as Grandee of Spain and 1st Marquis of los
Castillejos.
His next assignment took Prim to Mexico, leading Spanish troops in support
of Maximilian I, an Austrian naval officer chosen by Napoleon III of France
to rule Mexico as a puppet emperor. Despite Prims best efforts, French rule
of Mexico was a lost cause, climaxed in June 1867 when rebels led by Benito
Jurez captured and executed Maximilian. Before that final act, Prim had returned to Spain, once again striking an oppositionist pose. He led a Catalonian
rebellion against Prime Minister ODonnell, and although ODonnell prevailed,
439
440
P R I M Y P R AT S, J UA N
the brutality of his methods prompted Queen Isabella to demand his resignation in July 1866. ODonnells successor, Ramn Mara Narvez, fought on
against Prim until his death in April 1868. Five months later, Prim and ally
Francisco Serrano defeated royal troops at the Battle of Alcolea, thereby concluding the Glorious Revolution and driving Isabella herself into exile.
Serrano was appointed Regent in October 1868, doubling as prime minister
from February 1869, and Prim became president of the Council of Ministers.
The Chamber of Deputies thereafter moved to restore Spains monarchy under
a new dynasty, electing the Duke of Aosta as King Amadeo I on November 16,
1870. Prim considered it a personal triumph, but he would not live to help
Amadeo rule Spain under its new constitution. Two days after Prim expired
from his gunshot wounds, Amadeo vowed to support the constitution, granting election of parliament by universal male suffrage. That agreement survived
until Amadeos abdication on February 11, 1873, with Spains First Republic
proclaimed that same night.
Spanish author Benito Prez Galds (18431920) offered a quasi-fictional
solution to the mystery of Prims assassination in his 1909 novel Espaa trgica
(Spanish Tragedy). Starting with events from his adolescence in Madrid, Galds
spun a tale of evil omens leading up to Prims murder, creating an almost surrealistic view of the crime. After personally naming Jos Pal y Angulo as a prime
suspect during the 1870s, based on published claims that Prim had recognized
Pals voice during the shooting, Galds changed his tune three decades later,
presenting an alternate cast of culprits via a list compiled by fictional character
Segismundo Garca. As noted by University of Alabama scholar Brian Dendle
in 1969, Galds ultimately blames the assassination on a mixed cast of characters including surviving rebels from the Carlist Wars and offering what Dendle
calls a red herring in the person of Antoine dOrlans. Jos Pal y Angulo,
meanwhile, is reduced to the status of a peripheral player, branded a deranged
epileptic incapable of plotting or carrying out the murder. The case remains officially unsolved.
Further Reading
Barker, Nancy. The French Experience in Mexico, 18211861: A History of Constant Misunderstanding. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Dendle, Brian. Galds and the Death of Prim. Bibliotecha Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.
http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/anales-galdosianos3/html/0254d158
82b211df-acc7002185ce6064_42.html.
Holt, Edgar. The Carlist Wars in Spain. Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 1967.
Pierson, Peter. The History of Spain. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Thomson, Guy. The Birth of Modern Politics in Spain: Democracy, Association and Revolution, 185475. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Williams, Mark. The Story of Spain: The Dramatic History of Europes Most Fascinating
Country. Rancho Mirage, CA: Golden Era Books, 2009.
Famous
Assassinations
in World History
Famous
Assassinations
in World History
An Encyclopedia
Volume 2: QZ
MICHAEL NEWTON
Copyright 2014 by ABC-CLIO, LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations
in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Newton, Michael, 1951
Famous assassinations in world history : an encyclopedia / Michael Newton.
volumes cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-61069-285-4 (hard copy : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61069-286-1
(ebook) 1. AssassinationHistoryEncyclopedias. I. Title.
HV6278.N49 2014
364.152'403dc23
2013031554
ISBN: 978-1-61069-285-4
EISBN: 978-1-61069-286-1
18
17
16
15
14
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.

Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.
ABC-CLIO, LLC
130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911
Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911
This book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Preface
xv
Introduction
xvii
The Encyclopedia
Volume 1
Abdallah Abderemane, Ahmed (19191989)
Aguiyi-Ironsi, Johnson Thomas Umunnakwe (19241966)
al-Banna, Sheikh Hasan Ahmed Abdel Rahman Muhammed
(19061949)
Albert I of Habsburg (12551308)
al-Din Shah Qajar, Nasser (18311896)
Alexander I of Serbia (18761903)
Alexander I of Yugoslavia (18881934)
Alexander II of Russia (18181881)
Ali, Muhammad Mansur (19191975)
Amin, Hafizullah (19291979)
Aquino, Benigno Simeon, Jr. (19321983)
Araujo, Manuel Enrique (18651913)
Argaa Ferraro, Luis Mara del Corazn de Jess Dionisio
(19321999)
Assassins Cult (ca. 10921275)
Bahonar, Mohammad-Javad (19331981)
Balbinus (165 CE238 CE)
Balewa, Abubakar Tafawa (19121966)
Bandaranaike, Solomon West Ridgeway Dias (18991959)
Bautista Gill Garca del Barrio, Juan (18401877)
Becket, Thomas (11181170)
Belzu Humerez, Manuel Isidoro (18081865)
Bearan Ordeana, Jos Miguel (19491978)
1
2
3
6
7
9
10
12
14
15
17
20
21
23
27
28
30
32
34
35
38
40
vi
CONTENTS
Bent, Charles (17991847)

Bhutto, Benazir (19532007)
bin Laden, Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad (19572011)
Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev (19452001)
Bishop, Maurice Rupert (19441983)
Bobrikov, Nikolay Ivanovich (18391904)
Bolles, Don (19281976)
Borgia, Giovanni (14761497)
Borsellino, Paolo (19401992)
Boudiaf, Mohamed (19191992)
Buback, Siegfried (19201977)
Bush, George Walker (1946 )Attempted
Caesar, Gaius Julius (100 BCE44 BCE)
Caligula (12 CE41 CE)
Calinescu, Armand (18931939)
Canalejas y Mndez, Jos (18541912)
Cnovas del Castillo, Antonio (18281897)
Carlos I of Portugal (18631908)
Carranza de la Garza, Venustiano (18591920)
Carrero Blanco, Luis (19041973)
Castillo Armas, Carlos (19141957)
Castro Ruz, Fidel Alejandro (1926 )Attempted
Catargiu, Barbu (18071862)
Cermak, Anton Joseph (18731933)
Chain Murders (Iran) (19791998)
Charles VII of Sweden (11301167)
Chillingworth, Curtis Eugene (18961955)
Chinnici, Rocco (19251983)
Chitunda, Jeremias Kalandula (19421992)
Clinton, William Jefferson (1946 )Attempted
Collins, Michael, Jr. (18901922)
Danilo I, Prince of Montenegro (18261860)
Daoud Khan, Mohammed (19091978)
Delgado Chalbaud Gmez, Carlos (19091950)
Deligiannis, Theodoros (18201905)
Dessalines, Jean-Jacques (17581806)
42
43
45
48
49
51
52
54
56
57
59
61
65
67
69
71
72
73
75
76
78
80
83
84
87
92
93
94
96
97
99
103
104
106
108
109
CONTENTS
Devi, Phoolan (19632001)

indic, Zoran (19522003)
Doe, Samuel Kanyon (19511990)
Dollfuss, Engelbert (18921934)
Dubs, Adolph (19201979)
Duca, Ion Gheorghe (18791933)
Dudayev, Dzhokhar Musayevich (19441996)
Earp, Morgan Seth (18511882)
Edmund I (922946)
Edward the Martyr (962978)
Eisner, Kurt (18671919)
Elisabeth of Austria (18371898)
Eric V of Denmark (12491286)
Eric XIV of Sweden (15331577)
Erim, Ismail Nihat (19121980)
Evers, Medgar Wiley (19251963)
Ewart-Biggs, Christopher Thomas (19211976)
Faisal bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud (19061975)
Faisal II of Iraq (19351958)
Falcn, Ramn Lorenzo (18551909)
Ferreira do Amaral, Joo Maria (18031849)
Ford, Gerald Rudolph, Jr. (19132006)Attempted
Foster, Marcus Albert (19231973)
Franz Ferdinand (18631914)
Gaddafi, Muammar (19422011)
Gandhi, Indira Priyadarshini (19171984)
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (18691948)
Gandhi, Rajiv Ratna (19441991)
Garca y Moreno y Morn de Buitrn, Gabriel Gregorio
Fernando Jos Mara (18211875)
Garfield, James Abram (18311881)
Gaulle, Charles Andr Joseph Marie de (18901970)Attempted
Gaviria Correa, Guillermo (19622003)
Gegeen Khan, Emperor Yingzong of Yuan (13031323)
George I of Greece (18451913)
111
113
115
117
118
120
121
125
128
129
131
132
135
136
138
140
142
145
146
148
150
152
155
156
161
164
165
167
169
171
173
176
177
179
vii
viii
CONTENTS
Goebel, William Justus (18561900)

Gonzlez Dubn, Eduardo Epaminondas (19451993)
Goulart, Joo Belchior Marques (19191976)
Guerin, Veronica (19581996)
Guevara, Ernesto Che (19281967)
Guinness, Walter Edward (18801944)
Gunn, David (19461993)
Gustav III of Sweden (17461792)
Habyarimana, Juvnal (19371994)
Hamidaddin, Yahya Muhammad (18691948)
Hammarskjld, Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl (19051961)
Hampton, Fred (19481969)
Hani, Martin Thembisile Chris (19421993)
Harald IV of Norway (ca. 11021136)
Harrison, Carter Henry, Sr. (18251893)
Hennessy, David C., Jr. (18581890)
Henriot, Philippe (18891944)
Henry III of France (15511589)
Henry IV of France (15531610)
Heureaux Lebert, Ulises (18451899)
Heydrich, Reinhard Tristan Eugen (19041942)
Hitler, Adolf (18891945)Attempted
Idiarte Borda, Juan Bautista (18441897)
Ige, James Ajibola Idowu (19302001)
Inejiro Asanuma (18981960)
Jackson, Andrew (17671845)Attempted
Jackson, Wharlest, Sr. (19301967)
James I, King of Scots (13941437)
John Paul II (19202005)Attempted
Kabila, Laurent-Dsir (19392001)
Kadyrov, Akhmad Abdulkhamidovich (19512004)
Kahane, Meir (19321990)
Kapodistrias, Ioannis Antonios (17761831)
Kapuuo, Clemens (19231978)
Karume, Sheikh Abeid Amani (19051972)
181
183
184
186
188
190
193
195
199
201
202
205
208
209
211
213
215
217
219
220
222
225
231
232
234
237
239
240
241
245
247
249
252
254
255
CONTENTS
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald (19171963)

Kennedy, Robert Francis (19251968)
Khoyski Isgender oglu, Fatali Khan (18751920)
King, Martin Luther, Jr. (19291968)
Ku Klux Klan (1866 )
Lambrakis, Grigoris (19121963)
Laporte, Pierre (19211970)
Lennon, John Winston (19401980)
Letelier del Solar, Marcos Orlando (19321976)
Lincoln, Abraham (18091865)
Litvinenko, Alexander Valterovich (19622006)
Liu, Henry (19321984)
Long, Huey Pierce, Jr. (18931935)
Lumumba, Patrice mery (19251961)
Luwum, Janani Jakaliya (19221977)
Madero Gonzlez, Francisco Ignacio (18731913)
Maher Pasha, Ahmed (18881945)
Manassara, Ibrahim Bar (19491999)
Malcolm X (19251965)
Marat, Jean-Paul (17431793)
Maskhadov, Aslan Aliyevich (19512005)
McGlinchey, Dominic (19541994)
McKinley, William, Jr. (18431901)
Medici, Giuliano de (14531478)
Mitrione, Daniel Anthony (19201970)
Moawad, Ren (19251989)
Mohammed, Murtala Ramat (19381976)
Mondlane, Eduardo Chivambo (19201969)
Moore, Harry Tyson (19051951)
Moro, Aldo (19161978)
Moscone, George Richard (19291978)
Mosharraf, Khaled (19381975)
Mountbatten, Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas George
(19001979)
Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea (18831945)
257
264
269
271
277
281
282
285
288
291
295
298
299
302
305
307
309
311
312
317
320
321
323
326
328
330
331
333
335
336
339
341
342
344
ix
CONTENTS
Nader Shah Afshar (16881747)

Nadir Shah, Mohammed (18831933)
Narutowicz, Gabriel (18651922)
Ndadaye, Melchior (19531993)
Ngo Dinh Diem (19011963)
Ngouabi, Marien (19381977)
Nicholas II (18681918)
Obama, Barack Hussein, II (1961 )Attempted/Threatened
Obregn Salido, lvaro (18801928)
Olympio, Sylvanus Epiphanio (19021963)
Operation Wrath of God (19721992)
Osman II (16041622)
Ouko, John Robert (19311990)
Palme, Sven Olof Joachim (19271986)
Pardo Leal, Jaime (19411987)
Park Chung-hee (19171979)
Patterson, Albert Leon (18941954)
Paul I of Russia (17541801)
Perceval, Spencer (17621812)
Peter III of Russia (17281762)
Petliura, Symon Vasylyovych (18791926)
Philip of Swabia (11771208)
Philip II of Macedon (359 BCE336 BCE)
Phoenix Program (19651972)
Pizarro Gonzlez, Francisco (14711541)
Pompey the Great (106 BCE48 BCE)
Premadasa, Ranasinghe (19241993)
Prim y Prats, Juan (18141870)
351
353
355
358
361
366
369
375
381
384
386
391
393
397
401
403
406
409
412
415
418
420
422
425
427
431
435
438
Volume 2
Qadir, Haji Abdul (19512002)
Qutuz, Saif ad-Din (?1260)
Rabin, Yitzhak (19221995)
Radama II (18291863)
Rahman, Ziaur (19361981)
Rasputin, Grigori Yefimovich (18691916)
441
444
447
451
453
456
CONTENTS
Rathenau, Walther (18671922)

Ratsimandrava, Richard (19311975)
Razmara, Sepahbod Haj Ali (19011951)
Reagan, Ronald Wilson (19112004)Attempted
Reina Barrios, Jos Mara (18541898)
Remeliik, Haruo Ignacio (19331985)
Remn Cantera, Jos Antonio (19081955)
Ritavuori, Heikki (18801922)
Rockwell, George Lincoln (19181967)
Rhm, Ernst Julius Gnther (18871934)
Romero y Galdmez, scar Arnulfo (19171980)
Roosevelt, Theodore (18581919)Attempted
Ryan, Leo Joseph, Jr. (19251978)
Rzayev Gurbanoglu, Rail (19452009)
S Carneiro, Francisco Manuel Lumbrales de (19341980)
Sadat, Anwar El (19181981)
Sadulayev, Abdul-Halim Abu-Salamovich (19662006)
Salim, Ezzedine (19432004)
Snchez Cerro, Luis Miguel (18891933)
Sandino, Augusto Nicols Caldern (18951934)
Sankara, Thomas Isidore Nol (19491987)
Sargsyan, Vazgen (19591999)
Schneider Chereau, Ren (19131970)
Seleucus I (350s BCE281 BCE)
September, Dulcie Evonne (19351988)
Shaka kaSenzangakhona (1781/871828)
Sharples, Richard Christopher (19161973)
Shermarke, Abdirashid Ali (19191969)
Shevket Pasha, Mahmud (18561913)
Smith, Joseph, Jr. (18051844)
Sogdianus (?423 BCE)
Somoza Debayle, Anastasio (19251980)
Somoza Garca, Anastasio (18961956)
Stamboliyski, Aleksandar (18791923)
Stambolov, Stefan Nikolov (18541895)
460
462
464
465
470
471
473
475
476
481
483
486
491
494
497
499
502
504
505
507
511
513
515
517
520
522
525
526
528
530
534
535
538
541
543
xi
xii
CONTENTS
Steunenberg, Frank (18611905)

Stewart, James, Earl of Moray (15311570)
Strang, James Jesse (18131856)
Sverker I (?1156)
Takahashi Korekiyo (18541936)
Taraki, Nur Muhammad (19171979)
Taseer, Salmaan (19442011)
Tisza de Borosjeno et Szeged, Istvn (18611918)
Tjibaou, Jean-Marie (19361989)
Tolbert, William Richard, Jr. (19131980)
Tombalbaye, Franois (19181975)
Trotsky, Leon (18791940)
Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leonidas (18911961)
Truman, Harry S. (18841972)Attempted
Umar ibn Al-Khattab (586/590644)
Umberto I (18441900)
Uwilingiyimana, Agathe (19531994)
Valko, Ernest (19532010)
Vance, Robert Smith (19311989)
Verwoerd, Hendrik Frensch (19011966)
Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom
(18191901)Attempted
Vieira, Joo Nino Bernardo (19392009)
Villa, Francisco Pancho (18781923)
Villarroel Lpez, Gualberto (19081946)
Vom Rath, Ernst Eduard (19091938)
Wallace, George Corley, Jr. (19191998)Attempted
Welch, Richard Skeffington (19291975)
Wenceslaus I (907935)
William I, Prince of Orange (15331584)
William II of England (10561100)
Wood, John Howland, Jr. (19161979)
Xerxes I of Persia (519 BCE465 BCE)
Yuldashev, Tohir Abduhalilovich (19672009)
Zapata Salazar, Emiliano (18791919)
544
548
550
552
555
558
559
562
564
567
569
572
576
580
585
588
591
595
597
600
604
606
610
614
616
621
625
628
630
634
637
641
645
649
CONTENTS
Zhang Zuolin (18751928)
652
Zorig, Sanjaasuren (19621998)
655
Primary Documents
1. Assassination of Pompey the Great (48 BCE)
Plutarchs Description of the Murder of Pompey in Egypt
661
2. Assassination of Julius Caesar (44 BCE)

Letter of Brutus to Cicero on Caesars Assassination (43 BCE)
664
3. Assassination of the Roman Emperor Caligula (41 CE)

Suetoniuss Account of the Murder
668
4. Death of William II, King of England (1100)

Description of Williams Death by Chronicler Peter of Blois
671
5. Murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket (1170)

The Eyewitness Account of Edward Grim
672
6. Assassination of Albert I of Habsburg (1308)

Act V, Scene 2 of the Play Wilhelm Tell
by Friedrich Schiller (1804)
675
7. Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1865)Official

Messages and Correspondence Relating to the
Shooting of President Lincoln (April 15, 1865)
680
8. Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1865)

General Court-Martial Orders No. 356 for
Trial of the Lincoln Assassination Conspirators
683
9. Assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia (1881)

Prince Peter Kropotkins Account of the Murder
688
10. Assassination of James A. Garfield (1881)

Address of Vice President Chester A. Arthur
upon Assuming the Presidency
691
11. Assassination of Morgan Earp (1882)

Tombstone Epitaph Account of the Murder
693
12. Assassination of William McKinley (1901)

Newspaper Accounts of the Shooting and
Death of the President
694

Austrian Official Report on the Assassination
700

Excerpts from American Newspaper Accounts of the
Murder of the Archduke and His Wife
703
xiii
xiv
CONTENTS
15. Assassination of Emiliano Zapata (1919)

Three Accounts of the Ambush
16. Assassination of Senator Huey P. Long (1935)
Senator Longs Share the Wealth Program (1934)
17. Assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem (1963)
State Department Cables Concerning the Coup That
Overthrew President Diem of South Vietnam
18. Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1963)Excerpts
from the Warren Commission Report (1964)
19. Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968)
Excerpts from the Department of Justice Report on
Allegations of Conspiracy in the Death of Dr. King (2000)
20. Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (1968)Edward M.
Kennedys Eulogy for His Brother Robert F. Kennedy
21. Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (1968)Excerpts from
the Report of Special Counsel Thomas F. Kranz on His
Reinvestigation of the Murder of Robert Kennedy (1977)
22. Attempted Assassination of Ronald Reagan (1981)
Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (1993)
23. Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (1995)
Last Speech of Israeli Prime Minister Rabin
709
715
720
727
780
797
800
808
812
Appendix: World Timeline of Assassinations
815
835
Index
837
Preface
Famous Assassinations in World History: An Encyclopedia aims to fill a gap in

scholarship concerning political murder, as practiced worldwide, throughout
recorded history. It is intended to serve both a general audience and the more
specific needs of professional, scholarly researchers active in the study of criminology, terrorism, and related fields. At the time of writing, no comparable
source was available in print.
The work in hand defines assassination as the murder of a prominent public figure: heads of state and other government officials, religious leaders,
spokespersons for political parties and social movements, journalists active in
molding public opinion, and so on. Professional criminals slain during internecine gang wars are excluded, regardless of their national or global notoriety,
on grounds that their murders accomplish nothing but installment of a new
boss or godfather for a particular syndicate. Likewise, celebrities killed by
obsessive stalkers are ignored, with one exception, since their deaths have no
impact on society at large beyond the transient grief of fans. The lone exception, musician John Lennon, is included here because of his sociopolitical
activities in later life, and the persistent claims of government conspiracy behind his death.
The encyclopedias two volumes include 266 main entries, arranged alphabetically, selected on the basis of their prominence in history and impact on
events of their respective eras. Four entries chart the histories of specific organizations involved in multiple assassinations spanning centuries, and the
remainder describe specific assassinations (or attempted assassinations) occurring between 465 BCE and 2012. Entries describing a particular assassination
include details of the event, a brief biography of the victim(s), and the aftermath of each slaying, including its political and societal impact, plus pertinent
depictions in popular culture. Entries are cross-referenced as necessary. To facilitate additional research, each entry includes suggested sources for further
reading, and a selected bibliography of general works on assassination is also
included.
As supplements to the main entries, 54 shorter sidebar articles enhance the
text with information on groups, movements, persons, or events related to
a particular assassination or to assassinations in general. These sidebars help
to place specific murders in context, further illuminate the motives and the
xvi
P R E FA C E
backgrounds of participants, and describe events that sprang from violence directed against public figures.
The section of entries is followed by a selection of 23 primary documents.
Arranged chronologically, these documents comprise accounts of assassinations
and reports of investigations, as well as speeches and statutes that preceded or
resulted from the murders. The documents included range from Plutarchs description of the murder of Pompey the Great in Egypt in 48 BCE, through the
last speech of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, delivered moments before
his murder in 1995.
Finally, to ensure complete coverage of the subject, an appendix provides a
timeline of other prominent assassinations omitted from the main text entries
due to space constraints. That list includes 486 cases, spanning the globe and
the years from 748 BCE to 2012. In that timeline, continents and their countries
are arranged alphabetically, with assassinations and attempts for each specific
country listed chronologically. A detailed subject index will help users find important figures, events, and ideas in the main entries.
Every effort has been made to present timely, complete, and accurate information throughout Famous Assassinations in World History. That said, available
sourcesparticularly those concerned with ancient crimes and modern, controversial casesfrequently provide conflicting dates, names, and descriptions
of events. In each case, I have chosen what appears to be the best and most
substantive information currently available. Readers wishing to suggest corrections for perceived inaccuracies, or to offer further data on the cases here
described, may contact the author through ABC-CLIO, or directly through his
Web site at www.michaelnewton.homestead.com.
Introduction
Assassination may be viewed as the ultimate expression of protestagainst

a government regime or its opponents, a religious or sociopolitical movement, even against an idea deemed hateful by the assassin. Whether the act is
committed by a disaffected individual, a gang of conspirators, or an official
government agency, whether its result is mourned or cheered by millions, an
assassinationsimple murder elevated to a noteworthy event by the selection of its victimshas the potential to change history.
We often hear it said that violence accomplishes nothing. Sociologists may
quarrel with historians over that hoary adage, parsing the impact of mayhem
ranging from petty street crimes to acts of terrorism and genocide, but with
regard to assassination, the record is indisputable: selective murders have
changed history, for good or ill, and sometimes on an epic scale.
A few examples should suffice.
Abraham Lincolns assassination in 1865 doomed any hope of peaceful reconciliation between the victorious North and defeated South after Americas
Civil War, plunging the former Confederacy into the decade of turmoil and terrorism knownat least in the minds of white supremacists affected by the loss
of their former slavesas Radical Reconstruction.
Archduke Franz Ferdinands slaying in 1914 triggered the global tragedy
of World War Iperhaps inevitable, in the climate of the times, but waiting
for a trigger incident to light the fuse. That four-year struggle claimed at least
9,407,136 lives on three continents, and while publicly billed as the War to
End All War, World War I in fact set the stage for an even more devastating
conflict, beginning only 20 years later.
The mass execution of Russias royal family in 1918 climaxed one of the
worlds great revolutions, setting the stage for seven decades of hot and cold
war between Moscow and the reputed free world. The final death toll for that
worldwide war of shadows, police actions, and counterrevolutions may only
be vaguely estimated, but it certainly ran into millions.
The murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 prompted many
African American leaders to abandon nonviolent protest against racial inequity, igniting ghetto fires from coast to coast and hastening the rise of militant
groups fixed on a dead-end collision course with hostile authorities. The slaying of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, one month after King, clearly contributed to
xviii
INTRODUCTION
the outcome of that years presidential election, an outcome leading inexorably

to U.S. military escalation, then defeat, in Southeast Asia, climaxed by the national shame of Watergate.
Speculation and debate persist, surrounding other assassinations and bungled attempts. Few deny that killing Adolf Hitler in 1944 might have saved
lives in the hundreds of thousands, at least. Recorded statements from President John F. Kennedy ( JFK) suggest that, had he lived beyond November 22,
1963, the long nightmare of Vietnam may not have devoured 58,000 U.S.
lives. What might have transpired, had would-be assassins been successful in
their attempts on the lives of Presidents Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, George W.
Bush, or Barack Obama?
Selection of main entries for Famous Assassinations in World History was, admittedly, subjective. Why does the murder of American Nazi Party founder
George Lincoln Rockwell rate inclusion, while antiapartheid activist Stephen
Biko is relegated to the concluding appendix/timeline? Such choices were determined by multiple factors.
First, no comprehensive, detailed accounting of every known assassination
or attempt throughout history could ever be contained within the covers of
one volumeor, in this case, two. Decisions based on word count and economy determine the final scope of every published reference work.
Second, some entries were selected (or omitted) based on the authors personal interest, and/or preexisting coverage in other published works. Although
hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been published describing
the JFK assassination, for instance, its exclusion here would have been a grievous oversight. In Rockwells case, mentioned earlier, although he was primarily
a nuisance on the fringes of society, largely forgotten and ignored by readers
born since 1967, he remains a central touchstone for the far-right, neo-Nazi/
white nationalist movement (with 29 competing factions active in 44 states
during 2012).
The United States most famous assassinations, aside from those of President Lincoln and Malcolm X, stand officially solved with assignment of blame
to lone gunmen. Nonetheless, conspiracy theories persist in those cases, with
proffered evidence ranging from persuasive to the bizarre. Even in the cases of
Lincoln and Malcolm X, where multiple plotters were tried and convicted,
broader conspiracy claims suggest the involvement of powerful, shadowy forces.
Some researchers still blame the Roman Catholic Church, or its Society of Jesus,
for Lincolns murder in 1865. A century later, citing statements from Malcolm X
and government files released under the Freedom of Information Act, other students point accusing fingers at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central
Intelligence Agency, or rogue agents of both acting in collaboration.
Famous Assassinations in World History explores those conspiracy claims, with
the evidence presented to support them, while permitting readers to determine
INTRODUCTION
whether they have any credence. In cases where facts are disputed, witnesses
contradicted, or evidence has vanished, further detailed information may be
found within the sources suggested for further readingand, in turn, through
their bibliographies. Although the author has opinions in most cases, they are
not presented here. Critics of the official verdictsand their detractors, in
turnare permitted to speak for themselves.
There can be no last word on assassinations, as long as discontent and violence persist on Earth. If anything, our world appears to be a more chaotic, violent place today than during many eras of the past. Between 2006 and 2012,
Mexicos drug war claimed at least 54,927 lives, with another 10,000 victims
disappeared; some estimates of the seven-year death toll top 99,000. Narcoterrorism in Central America is equally lethal: Honduras, El Salvador, Belize,
Guatemala, and Panama all had higher per-capita murder rates than Mexico in
2010. La Violencia (The Violence) engulfed Colombia in 1946, resulting in
300,000 homicides by 1958. Today, that nations plague of narcoterrorism produced 13,520 murders in 2011hailed by Colombias National Police as the
lowest violent death toll since 1984. Reports from Iraq, Afghanistan, and parts
of Africa are equally dismal.
Famous Assassinations in World History presents a chronicle of malice and
mistakes, in hope that something may be learned, at least, from the mistakes.
Whether those lessons are absorbed depends in equal part on public leaders,
law enforcement, and an educated populace.
xix
Q
QADIR, HAJI ABDUL (19512002)
Shortly after noon on July 6, 2002, Haji Abdul Qadir completed his days duties
as Afghanistans minister of public works and one of five vice presidents. Leaving his office in downtown Kabul, he started for home in a Toyota Land Cruiser
driven by his son-in-law. At 12:30, two men armed with automatic weapons
ambushed Qadirs vehicle, riddling it with bullets and killing both occupants,
before escaping in a taxi that waited nearby. A report from the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees, published in September 2005, asserts that
one man was condemned to die for the murders in June 2004, with two accomplices sentenced to prison, but no further details were available as this volume
went to press.
Haji Abdul Qadir was born in Jalalabad, the capital of eastern Afghanistans
Nangarhar Province, sometime in 1951. He was a member of the Pashtun
people, Afghanistans largest ethnic group, which has produced nearly all the
countrys native leaders for the past 250 years. Involved in politics before the
December 1979 Soviet invasion of his homeland, Qadir joined a mujahideen
resistance faction led by Mohammad Yunus Khalis. That nine-year struggle
ended with Russias withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989, and the
pro-Soviet Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan dissolved in March 1992,
whereupon Qadir was named to serve as governor of Nangarhar Province.
He held that post until September 1996, when Taliban forcessupported
from Pakistan and Saudi Arabiaseized control of Afghanistan. Qadir fled into
Pakistan, but found exile there untenable when leaders of the Islamic Republic
recognized his opposition to the Taliban. Over the next three years, Qadir divided his time between Germany and Dubai, where he prospered as the leader
of a successful trading company. In 1999, Qadir returned home to join Ahmad
Shah Massouds United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, an antiTaliban movement better known in the West as the Northern Alliance. The
group joined Pashtuns with ethnic Hazaras, Tajiks, and Uzbeks in opposition
to the Talibans ultra-fundamentalist version of Islam, waging armed resistance
against the ruling regime, and the Taliban received assistance from Pakistan
and Osama bin Ladens al-Qaeda terrorist network.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, brought the United States into
Afghanistans chaotic civil war. Qadirs younger brother, Abdul Haqhimself a
442
QADIR, HAJI ABDUL
veteran of the anti-Soviet resistance, lately returned from Pakistan to fight the Talibanwas
captured and executed by Taliban members on October 26,
2001, shortly after meeting
with agents of the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) to coordinate strikes on the enemy.
(An alternate version blames
the CIA for his death, citing an
interview in which Haq reportedly said, We cannot be Americas puppets.) Soon afterward,
on November 13, Haji Qadir
emerged as a leader of the
Eastern Shura, a regional antiTaliban unit operating in Nangarhar and Khost Provinces. In
December 2001, Qadir traveled
to Bonn, Germany, as a delegate
Afghani politician Haji Abdul Qadir, killed in an
to the International Conference
ambush in July 2002. (Reuters/Corbis)
on Afghanistan, where he endorsed selection of Hamid Karzai as president of the Afghan Transitional Administration (still in power as this
volume went to press). Karzai, in turn, rewarded Qadir for his support with appointment to serve as a vice president and minister of public works, the post he
held until his murder.
Upon learning of Qadirs assassination, U.S. president George W. Bush told
reporters, Theres all kinds of scenarios as to who killed him. It could be drug
lords. It could be rivals. Who knows? All we know is that a good man is dead,
and we mourn his loss. Some observers questioned his designation of Qadir
as a good man, citing persistent allegations of his ties to Afghanistans burgeoning opium trade. Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar had collaborated with the United Nations to eradicate heroin production in Afghanistan,
slashing production by 91 percent in 2000. No opium production was found
the following year, a circumstance that earned the Taliban a $43 million reward payment prior to 9/11, but U.S. liberation of Afghanistan reversed that
trend dramatically. By November 2001, the United Nations Office on Drugs
and Crime found 1,300 square kilometers under opium cultivation, with the
illicit trade expanding until Afghanistan produced 92 percent of the worlds
nonpharmaceutical-grade opiates by November 2007.
QADIR, HAJI ABDUL
Peter Symonds, writing for the World Socialist Web Site in July 2002,
branded Qadi a thug and smuggler, calling him notorious for his association with the regions lucrative smuggling operations and opium trade,
further contending that Qadirs sordid past is well known in Washington.
His trading company during the latter part of the 1990s, Symonds wrote,
was actually a large-scale smuggling racket that operated from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Symonds further claimed that Qadir stood accused of
manipulating the countrys Western-financed drug eradication program to
siphon off money and narcotics for his private benefit. Although Symonds
cited no specific evidence, the CIAs collaboration with narcotics traffickers
worldwide is well established, dating from the first year of the agencys creation in France, extending through the Vietnam War and the Iran-Contra
scandal under President Ronald Reagan.
Qadir received a full state funeral in Kabul, attended by some 10,000
mourners, and government spokesman Sayed Fazl Akbar told reporters that
President Karzai had asked the NATO-led International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) to help ensure a completely neutral, fair, quick and professional investigation into Qadirs assassination. Turkish major general Hilmi
Akin Zorlu, in charge of that force, readily agreed, declaring, It is vital to
bring the perpetrators of this crime to justice as soon as possible and ISAF
will donate every resource required to achieve it. Even so, two years elapsed
before a trial was held, and details of its result remain elusive.
A month after the conviction of three alleged conspirators in Qadirs slaying,
on July 29, 2004, a crowd gathered to commemorate his death at the Kabul
site where he was slain. Authorities averted a catastrophe with the discovery of
an explosive charge, concealed inside a cart near the memorial gathering. Defused before it detonated, the bomb was clearly meant to kill attending cabinet ministers and other prominent public figures still loyal to Qadirs memory.
Qadirs son, Zahir Qadirformerly a Taliban prisoner, then a general in Afghanistans Border Guard, serves today in the nations parliament.
Further Reading
Dorronsoro, Gilles. Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005.
Refugee Review Tribunal Report on Afghanistan. September 16, 2005. United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees. http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/pdfid/4b6fe117d.pdf.
Rubin, Barnett. The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
Saikal, Amin. Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.
Symonds, Peter. Afghan Vice-President Murdered in Broad Daylight. World Socialist Web Site. July 9, 2002. http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/07/afgh-j09.html.
443
444
QUTUZ, SAIF AD -DIN
Tanner, Stephen. Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War
against the Taliban. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2009.
Failures of Great Powers. New York: Public Affairs, 2011.
QUTUZ, SAIF AD-DIN (?1260)

On October 24, 1260, seven weeks after defeating a Mongol army at the Battle of Ain Jalut, Mamluk sultan Saif ad-Din Qutuz was assassinated during a
hunting expedition at Al-Salihiyya, in northern Palestine. Most historians today
blame one of Qutuzs commanders in that pivotal battle, Baibarsfull name
al-Malik al-Zahir Rukn al-Din Baibars al-Bunduqdarifor plotting the murder,
although Egyptian historian Al-Maqrizi (13641442) named the actual assassins as Emir Badr ad-Din Baktut, Emir Ons, and Emir Bahadir al-Muizzi. One
motive suggested for the plot against Qutuz is that the sultan promised Baibars
authority over Aleppo, in northwestern Syria, then gave control of the city
instead to al-Malik al-Said Alaa ad-Din, the emir of Mosul. Another version
claims that Baibars sought revenge for the death of a friend, Emir Faris ad-Din
Aktai al-Jemdar, killed under Sultan Izz al-Din Aybak in 1254, allegedly with
Qutuzs complicity. Whatever the truth of those claims, Baibars did succeed
Qutuz as sultan of Egypt and held that post until his death, from drinking
poison, in July 1277.
Little is known of Saif ad-Din Qutuzs early life. Some accounts peg his
birth date as November 2, but provide no year. In later year, he claimed descent from Ala ad-Din Muhammad II, shah of the Khwarazmian Empire from
1200 to 1220, but that tie to Persian royalty remains unproven. Captured by
Mongols as a youth, Qutuz was sold into slavery, first in Syria, then in Egypt,
where slave trader sold him to Sultan Aybak in Cairo. By 1253, Qutuz had
risen on his merits from a servants rank to stand beside Ayak as vice sultan,
a post he retained under Ayaks son Al-Mansur Ali, aged 11 when Aybak was
assassinated in 1257.
While serving Sultan Al-Mansur Alinow styled al-Malik al-Mansur Nour
ad-Din AliQutuz faced military threats from rival Bahriyya Mamluks, Shahrzuri Kurds, and Mongols. In November 1257, Qutuz defeated a Mamluk army
led by King al-Malik al-Mughith of Al Karak, in Jordan. Three months later, a
Mongol horde sacked Baghdad, killing Caliph Al-Mustasim and thousands of
his subjects (some accounts claim two million), before advancing into Syria
and threatening King an-Nasir Yusuf. After crushing another Mamluk invasion
in April 1258, Qutuz turned his full attention to Syria. Deposing Al-Mansur
Ali on November 12, 1259, Qutuz proclaimed himself sultan with a promise
to local emirs that they could choose a ruler of their own after he halted the
Mongol incursion.
QUTUZ, SAIF AD-DIN
He accomplished that at the Battle of Ain Jalut, on September 3, 1260. Fielding 20,000 troops against a Mongol force of equal size, led by Kitbuqa Noyan,
Qutuz suffered heavy losses but succeeded in annihilating his opponents. His
determination, doubtless, was encouraged by a warning sent to him before the
battle from Hulagu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan who ruled the Mongol
Empire from 1256 to 1265. That message read:
From the King of Kings of the East and West, the Great Khan. To Qutuz the
Mamluk, who fled to escape our swords. You should think of what happened to
other countries and submit to us. You have heard how we have conquered a vast
empire and have purified the earth of the disorders that tainted it. We have conquered vast areas, massacring all the people. You cannot escape from the terror of
our armies. Where can you flee? What road will you use to escape us? Our horses
are swift, our arrows sharp, our swords like thunderbolts, our hearts as hard as
the mountains, our soldiers as numerous as the sand. Fortresses will not detain
us, nor armies stop us. Your prayers to God will not avail against us. We are not
moved by tears nor touched by lamentations. Only those who beg our protection
will be safe. Hasten your reply before the fire of war is kindled. Resist and you
will suffer the most terrible catastrophes. We will shatter your mosques and reveal
the weakness of your God and then will kill your children and your old men together. At present you are the only enemy against whom we have to march.
In the midst of battle, Qutuz was heard to shout, Oh, Islam! Oh God, grant
your servant Qutuz a victory against the Mongols! Kitbuqa died at the head of
his troops and was decapitated, his head shipped back to Cairo as a trophy. At
the battles end, Qutuz reportedly kissed the earth and prayed, and his surviving troops engaged in looting of the Mongol dead.
As a result of their loss at Ain Jalut, Mongol forces abandoned Damascus,
occupied in March 1560, and soon withdrew from the northern Levant entirely. Meanwhile, Baibarsone of Qutuzs leading field commanders in the
climactic battlebrooded over his perceived mistreatment by the sultan and
schemed for revenge, resulting in Qutuzs murder on October 24.
Qutuz was buried first at Al-Qusair, later exhumed and reburied in Cairo,
where a mosque in the Heliopolis today commemorates his name. Baibars
succeeded him as sultan, defeated another Mongol invasion of Syria at the
First Battle of Homs (December 10, 1260), and enjoyed repeated victories
over Christian Crusaders. He invaded Cicilian Armenia in 1266, captured Antioch and enslaved its population in May 1268, and lay siege to Tripoli in
May 1271. In that same year, during the Ninth Crusade, Baibars failed in an
attempt to poison Prince Edward I of England. In 1277, Baibars invaded the
Mongol-occupied Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, but failed to conquer the territory despite several significant victories. Historians report that Baibars died in
Damascus on July 1, 1277, from drinking poisoned kumis (fermented mares
445
446
QUTUZ, SAIF AD -DIN
milk), but they disagree as to whether his poisoning was murder or a clumsy
accident.
Further Reading
Amitai-Preiss, Reuven. Mongols and Mamluks: The Mamluk-Ilkhanid War, 12601281.
Armstrong, Karen. Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Todays World. New York:
Anchor Books, 2001.
Asbridge, Thomas. The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land.
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The Oxford History of the Crusades. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002.
Tyerman, Christopher. Gods War: A New History of the Crusades. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.
R
RABIN, YITZHAK (19221995)
On November 4, 1995, a rally heralding ratification of the Oslo I Accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was staged in
Tel Avivs Kings of Israel Square. The rally began to break up, at 9:30 P.M., and
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was leaving for home when he was approached
by Yigal Amir, a right-wing law student at Tel Avivs Bar-Ilan University who
bitterly opposed the Oslo Accords concessions to Palestinian Arabs. Acting
on a personal interpretation of din rodefa traditional Jewish law of the
pursuerfired three pistol shots at Rabin, striking the prime minister twice.
His third shot wounded a security guard, Yoram Rubin, before others subdued
and disarmed him. Rabin survived to reach Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center,
but he died during surgery, 40 minutes after the shooting. Investigators learned
that Yigal Amir had been under surveillance by Shin Bet, Israels internal security service, but the agent in charge of his case had declared that Amir posed
no threat to Rabin. Convicted at trial in March 1996, Amir received a life sentence plus six years for wounding Yoram Rubin. Although such sentences are
normally commuted to a 30-year maximum, President Moshe Katsav refused
clemency, stating that Amir deserved no forgiveness, no absolution and no
pardon.
Yitzhak Rabin was born in Jerusalem, to European immigrant parents, on
March 1, 1922. His father, Nehemiah Rubitzov, had come to the British Mandate of Palestine from Ukraine, as a member of the British armys Jewish Legion,
in 1917. Rabins parents moved to Tel Aviv in 1923, where he graduated with
honors from Kadoorie Agricultural High School, hoping to become an irrigation engineer. He abandoned that goal at age 19, in May 1941, joining the Palmach (strike force) of the paramilitary Haganah (The Defense, in Hebrew).
British military officers initially trained the Palmach in guerrilla tactics, but in
1943 attempted to disarm them. Operating as terrorists or freedom fighters,
depending on ones point of view, members of the Haganah carried out numerous assassinations and bombings directed at British diplomats and military
personnel in Palestine. Wholesale civil war erupted in November 1947, ending
in May 1948 when the independent State of Israel was established.
That move brought no peace to the region, as the first Arab-Israeli War began
one day later, on May 15. By that time, Rabin had risen through the Palmach
448
R ABIN, YITZHAK
A right-wing Israeli killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995. (Bettmann/
Corbis)
ranks to serve as its chief operations officer. The Haganah, meanwhile, emerged
as the core of the new Israel Defense Forces (IDF). During a truce, in June 1948,
Rabin was involved in the Altalena Affair, in which IDF forces seized a cargo
ship loaded with weapons earmarked for the Irgun, self-styled National Military Organization in the Land of Israel, which had split off from the Haganah
in 1937. When the Arab War resumed, Rabin served as deputy commander of
Operation Danny, seizing territory east of Tel Aviv in July 1948. Another promotion established him as chief of operations for the Southern Front during
Operation Yoav (October 1948) and Operation Horev (December 1948 to
January 1949). In January 1949, on the island of Rhodes, Rabin participated in
negotiations that produced an armistice between Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.
At wars end, Rabin was the oldest Palmach veteran remaining in the IDF.
In 1964, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol named Rabin to serve as the IDFs chief of
staff, and Rabin reached the pinnacle of his martial career in June 1967, defeating Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the Six-Day War. He then retired from military
service to become Israels ambassador to the United States (19681973). Prime
RABIN, YITZHAK
Minister Golda Meir appointed Rabin as minister of labor in March 1974, but
her resignation on April 11 of that year left him briefly unemployed. Before the
month was out, Rabin defeated rival Shimon Peres in a bid for leadership of the
Alignment Party, which named him to succeed Golda Meir as prime minister
on June 3, 1974.
Rabins first term as prime minister was distinguished by the Sinai Interim
Agreement on September 1975, in which Israel and Egypt vowed to resolve
disputes between them without resorting to military force, and by Operation
Entebbe (October 1976), wherein IDF commandos liberated 102 passengers
from an Air France flight hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, parked at Ugandas Entebbe Airport under the protection
of dictator Idi Amin. The raiders killed seven hijackers and 45 Ugandan soldiers, also destroying 31 Soviet-built warplanes, against one IDF soldier killed
and five wounded. Three hostages also died in the raid, and oneseparated
from the others for hospitalizationwas subsequently executed on Amins orders. Amin also ordered the slayings of several doctors and nurses who tried to
prevent that execution, and hundreds of Kenyans living in Uganda, whom he
blamed for their homeland supporting the IDF strike.
Later in 1976, Rabins political alliance faced a vote of no confidence from
the Agudat Yisrael party, alleging violation of the Sabbath when four fighter
planes were delivered to an Israeli air force on Saturday. Further trouble arose
in March 1977, when Rabin and U.S. president Jimmy Carter publicly disagreed on the extent of Israels legitimate defensible borders. Rabin dissolved
his government on April 22, 1977, with new elections scheduled for May 17.
Menachem Begin, representing the Likud (Consolidation) Party, carried that
vote by a landslide and succeeded Rabin on June 21.
Rabin did not leave politics upon resigning as prime minister. Rather, he
filled a seat in the Knesset, Israels unicameral national legislature, until September 13, 1984, when he replaced Moshe Arens as minister of defense under
Prime Minister Shimon Peres. He retained that cabinet post under Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir until March 1990, when Moshe Arens resumed the office
and Rabin returned to his Knesset seat, as a member of Israels Foreign Affairs
and Defense Committee. In 1992, Rabin was elected as chairman of the Labor
Party, replacing Yitzhak Shamir as prime minister on July 13.
After a lifetime as a leader in Israels wars, Rabin spent his second term as
prime minister pursuing peace. The Oslo Accords created a Palestinian National Authority with partial control over the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip and
West Bank of the Jordan River, followed on September 9, 1993, by Israels formal recognition of PLO leader Yasser Arafat as the Palestinian National Authoritys president. In October 1994, Rabin joined King Hussein of Jordan in
signing the IsraelJordan Treaty of Peace, which made Jordan the second Arab
country (after Egypt) to normalize relations with Israel. In 1994, with Arafat
449
450
R ABIN, YITZHAK
and Shimon Peres, Rabin was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. During the same
year, Rabin also received the Ronald Reagan Freedom Award, reserved for
those who have made monumental and lasting contributions to the cause of
freedom worldwide.
Right-wing Israelisand many U.S. Jewsbitterly protested Rabins peace
overtures toward nations they regarded as mortal enemies. Likud party leader
(and current prime minister) Benjamin Netanyahu condemned Rabins administration as being removed from Jewish tradition . . . and Jewish values. More
extreme critics marched with posters depicting Rabin in a Nazi uniform and
with the cross-hairs of a snipers telescopic sight superimposed on his face.
Rabin either ignored those protests or publicly condemned them as chutzpah
(insolence or audacity). Although Netanyahu denied any intent to provoke
violence, Yigal Amirs post-assassination statements clearly demonstrate that he
viewed Rabin as a danger to Israel.
Despite the seemingly open-and-shut case against Amir, buttressed by the
gunmans public statements, conspiracy theories flourished in the wake of
Rabins assassination. An official commission of inquiry, convened in November
1995, published its report on the crime in March 1996. That document named
Amir as the lone assassin, but criticized Shin Bet for putting Rabin at risk and
ignoring extremist threats to his life. Shin Bet director Carmi Gillon resigned
in the wake of that accusation, subsequently facing allegations (but no formal
charges) of human rights violations during his tenure. Nonetheless, he was later
named as Israels ambassador to Denmark, serving from 2001 to 2003.
Suggestions of conspiracy arose from the forensic evidence in Rabins case,
including a police report of gunpowder found on his body and clothing (Amir
fired from a distance that precluded powder stippling). Surgical reports also
described an entry wound in Rabins chest, inconsistent with eyewitness accounts and a video recording of the murder indicating that Amir fired at the
prime ministers back. Three police escorts testified that Rabin displayed no
visible wounds when then prepared to move him from the shooting scene.
Stranger still, Dr. Mordechai Gutman, one of the surgeons who worked on
Rabin, declared that the first two wounds, to the chest and abdomen occurred
before Rabins arrival. The third, frontal chest wound, had to have been inflicted after he entered the hospital. Concerning Amir, reports circulated that
cartridge cases found at the shooting scene failed to match his semiautomatic
pistol, and that no gunshot residue was found on his hands or clothinga circumstance which, if true, suggests that he fired blank cartridges. Several police
officers and Shin Bet agents at the scene were also overheard suggesting that
the shots were blanks.
The implication of those claimsa second gunman, possibly one of Rabins
bodyguardsfollow a trend of conspiracy theories from various high-profile
assassinations in the United States and elsewhere. Lone-gunman proponents
RADAMA II
regard any implication of a government conspiracy as a bid to offload guilt

from Israels far-right. Yigal Amir officially remains the one and only slayer, reviled by some Israelis, hailed by others as a national hero. Curiously, however,
an eight-year sentence for conspiracy to kill Rabin was later added to his term
of life plus six years for the actual shootings. Still incarcerated at the time of
this writing, Amir married Larisa Trembovler, a Russian-born holder of a PhD
in philosophy, in July 2005. In March 2006, the Israeli Prison Service approved
the couples petition to produce a child via in vitro fertilization. Their son was
born on October 28, 2007.
Further Reading
Chamish, Barry. Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin? Northampton, MA: Brookline Books,
2000.
Karpin, Michael, and Ina Friedman. Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak
Rabin. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998.
Milstein, Uri. The Rabin File: An Unauthorized Expose. Jerusalem: Gefen Books, 1999.
Morrison, David. Lies: The Israeli Secret Service and the Rabin Assassination. Jerusalem:
Gefen Books, 2000.
Peri, Yoram. The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2000.
RADAMA II (18291863)
On May 7, 1863, over objections from his key advisors, King Radama II of
Madagascarthen known as the Merina Kingdomannounced a plan to legalize dueling. Fearing that the kings scheme would result in anarchy, Prime Minister Rainivoninahitriniony blocked traditional announcement of the new law at
the Zoma (Friday) market gathering on May 8. On Saturday, May 9, the prime
ministers younger brotherRainilaiarivony, commander of the royal army
led troops to arrest members of Radamas menamaso (red-eyes) personal entourage. Eleven were caught and executed before soldiers laid siege to Radamas
royal palace, the Rova of Antananarivo. On May 10, Radama surrendered the
remaining menamaso, based on Rainivoninahitrinionys promise that their lives
would be spared, but they were speared to death en masse on May 11. Finally,
on May 12, a band of soldiers stormed the palace and strangled Radama with
a silk sash, to avoid the taboo of spilling royal blood. His wife, Rabodo, was
spared and permitted to rule as Queen Rasoherina on condition that she grant
certain reforms, including freedom of religion and abolition of capital punishment based on royal decrees alone. A public announcement declared that Radama had committed suicide, whereupon his name was stricken from the list of
Madagascars kings, and mourning of his death was banned by law.
Radama was born Prince Rakotosehenondradama on September 23, 1829,
the only son and heir of widowed Queen Ranavalona I, who ruled Madagascar
451
452
R ADA M A II
autocratically from August

1828 until her death in August
1861. Officially, he was the son
of King Radama I, but because
that monarch died 14 months
before his birth (on July 27,
1828), historians today traced
the princes lineage to the
queens lover, an army officer
named Andriamihaja, who was
later executed by her order.
Prior to Queen Ranavalonas
death, contending factions at
court favored different successors. Conservatives backed
Ranavalonas nephew, Ramboasalama, and progressives
led by Prime Minister Rainilaiarivony supported Radama.
The latter faction triumphed,
compelling Ramboasalama to
swear an oath of allegiance to
his cousin before he was banKing Radama II of Madagascar, strangled by rebelished to exile in the highland
lious soldiers in 1863. (Chris Hellier/Corbis)
village of Ambohimirimo.
Whereas his mother had
pursued a strict regime of isolationism, fending off incursions from Britain and
France, Radama II opened his island nation to European traders. In fact, he
had begun that process half a dozen years before her death, signing a charter in
June 1855 that granted French adventurer Joseph-Franois Lambert the exclusive right to exploit all minerals, forests, and unoccupied land in Madagascar
in exchange for a 10-percent royalty payment to the monarchy. Bridling even
at that paltry payoff, Lambert tried to foment a coup dtat in 1857, deposing
Ranavalona in favor of Radama, but the effort failed and Ranavalona executed
the natives involved, while deporting Lambert and his cohorts, Jean Laborde
and Ida Laura Pfeiffer.
As king, Radamas radical changes in traditional policies alienated many
citizens of Madagascar. The threat of losing land and natural resources to
European intruders was particularly troublesome, and the proposed legalization of dueling offered an excuse for the coup that deposed him. The move
came too late to save Madagascar, however. Prime Minister Rainilaiarivony
abrogated the Lambert Charter in 1863, taking steps thereafter to end slavery
RAHMAN, ZIAUR
(1877), establish a new legal system (1878), and promulgate a new constitution (1881). Napoleon III belatedly used the Lambert Charters revocation
as a pretext for invading Madagascar in May 1883, compelling recognition
of French property principles and an indemnity of 1,500,000 francs in May
1885. A second invasion, in December 1894, reduced Madagascar to the status of a French protectorate (called Malagasy) by September 1895. A wave of
antiforeign, anti-Christian rioting ensued, prompting France to annex Madagascar as a colony in 1896.
Despite the muddled circumstances of his death, murder described as suicide, rumors circulated that his strangling in May 1863 had only rendered
him unconscious, reviving unexpectedly as his corpse was carried toward
Ilafy for burial. In that scenario, the frightened bearers fled and Radama escaped, living to a ripe old age in anonymity near Lake Kinkony, in northwestern Madagascar. That story was apparently believed by certain prominent
foreigners including Jean Laborde and William Ellis, a representative of the
London Missionary Society, but no evidence of Radamas survival was ever
produced.
Further Reading
Diouf, Sylvianne. Kings and Queens of East Africa. New York: Grolier Publishing, 2000.
Laidler, Keith. Female Caligula: Ranavalona, the Mad Queen of Madagascar. Chichester,
West Sussex, United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
Oliver, Samuel. Madagascar: An Historical Descriptive Account of the Island and Its Former Dependencies, Volume 1. New York: Macmillan and Co., 1886.
Prout, Ebenezer. Madagascar: Its Mission and Its Martyrs. London: London Missionary
Society, 1863.
RAHMAN, ZIAUR (19361981)

On May 29, 1981, President Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh traveled from Dhaka
to the southeastern seaport of Chittagong, to arbitrate a feud between local
leaders of the far-right Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). Arriving at the local seat of government, Chittagong Circuit House, Rahman and his entourage
settled in to rest before a long day of negotiations. At 4:00 A.M. on May 30, a
group of 14 commissioned offices from the Bangladesh army stormed Circuit
House, firing rocket launchers and automatic weapons. Several members of
Rahmans party were killed before the invaders found him, whereupon Colonel Matiur Rahman (no relation) shot the president with a submachine gun.
Colonel Rahman and two other raiders were killed by guards while fleeing the
scene. Two more escaped to India and were never apprehended. Authorities
arrested 18 more alleged conspirators in June 1981, executing 13 and sentencing 5 to varying prison terms. An additional 20 officers were dismissed from
service for failing to detect and avert the conspiracy.
453
454
R AHM AN, ZIAUR
Ziaur Rahmancommonly
known as Ziawas born at
Bagbari, in the Bogra district
of Bengal, British-ruled India,
on January 19, 1936. His father, a chemist, worked for the
government in Calcutta (now
Kolkata) when Rahman was
a child. In July 1947, passage
of the Indian Independence
Act sparked sectarian violence
between Hindus and Muslims, both of whom wanted to
rule the new nation. Instead,
a month later, the Muslimcontrolled Dominion of Pakistan was created in two segments, widely divided by the
bulk of northern India. East
Pakistan achieved its own
quasi-independence in 1955,
with its capital at Dhaka, and
West Pakistan (today simply
Rebel soldiers assassinated President Ziaur Rah- Pakistan) formally ruled both
man of Bangladesh, in May 1981. (Associated
regions from Islamabad.
Press)
While those changes altered
his homelands geography and
politics, Ziaur Rahman pursued a military career. While rising through the armys
ranks to serve as a major with the 8th East Bengal Regiment in Chittagong, he
bridled at institutional discrimination practiced against Bengali-born officers by
their superiors from West Pakistan. Diplomatic tension reached a head in 1970,
when East Pakistans dominant political partythe Awami League, led by Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman (known as Mujib, again, no relation to Ziaur Rahman)won
all but two of 169 seats allotted to East Pakistan in the Majlis-e-Shoora (Parliament of Pakistan). Alarmed by the growing trend toward independence for East
Pakistan, President General Yahya Khan attempted to forge a coalition of the
Awami League and the Pakistan Peoples Party, dominated by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto first threatened to break the legs of any party member
who participated in negotiations, then struck a secret deal with Mujib, agreeing
to create a coalition with himself as president and Mujib as prime minister.
At that point, Yahya Khans military police arrested Bhutto and Mujib, and
Khan launched Operation Searchlight, invading East Pakistan on March 26,
RAHMAN, ZIAUR
1971. A parallel naval assault, Operation Barisal, began on April 25. Major
Zia read Mujibs Declaration of Independence for East Pakistanhenceforth
known as Bangladeshthen plunged into action as war enveloped his homeland. The resultant conflict, including Indian intervention against West Pakistan in December 1971, ultimately claimed at least 200,000 lives (some
published estimates exceed 3 million). Bangladesh secured its independence
via the Simla Agreement, signed by India and Pakistan in July 1972, and joined
the United Nations in 1974.
Ziaur Rahman was recognized as a hero of the war for independence, his
brigade dubbed Z Force, after his first initial. He retired from military service as a lieutenant general with a Bir Uttom (Better among Braves in Bengali),
the nations second-highest award for valor. Sadly, peace was not forthcoming for the war-torn fledgling nation. Sheikh Mujib sought financial aid from
the Soviet Union in 1972, which prompted U.S. president Richard Nixon to
ban grain imports to Bangladesh. The ensuing famine claimed 70,000 lives,
and leftist elements began agitation against Mujibs Awami League regime. In
January 1975, Mujib declared a state of emergency, renamed his party the Bangladesh Farmers and Workers Awami League, and banned all other parties.
Dissident army officers slaughtered Mujib and his family on August 15, 1975,
installing conspirator Khondaker Mostaq Ahmad as president. He, in turn, appointed Ziaur Rahman as a major general and the armys new chief of staff.
Unhappy with that result, Brigadier Khaled Mosharraf and Colonel Shafat
Jamil staged a countercoup on November 3, 1975, arresting Ziaur and compelling him to resign. Four days later, Lieutenant Colonel Abu Taher and a group
of leftist officers from the Jatiyo Samajtantrik Dal (National Socialist Party, unrelated to Adolf Hitlers Nazis), killed Mosharraf and imprisoned Jamil, while liberating Ziaur Rahman and reinstating him as chief of staff. The rebels formed
an interim government led by Chief Justice Abu Sadat Mohammad Sayem, with
Zia, Air Vice Marshal Muhammad Ghulam Tawab, and Rear Admiral Musharraf Hussain Khan as his chief deputies. In addition to his role as army chief of
staff, Zia also served the new government as minister of home affairs, finance,
industry, and information. Fearing future coups against the new regime, Ziaur
convened a secret court-martial for his savior, Abu Taher, and had Taher executed on July 21, 1976. Officers who protested that action soon found themselves dispatched to diplomatic missions abroad.
President Sayem resigned on April 21, 1977, citing poor health as he passed
his office to Ziaur Rahman. Whether Sayem was truly illhe lived another
20 yearsor he was pushed aside in what amounted to a bloodless coup, remains a matter of continuing debate. In either case, Ziaur proceeded to rule
as a dictator, restoring martial law and banning political parties, censoring the
media and jailing dissidents, ruthlessly crushing grassroots insurrections such
as the Bogra mutiny of September 30October 2, 1977. His 19-point program
455
456
R ASPUTIN, GRIGORI YEFIMOVICH
for curing Bangladeshs domestic ills sidestepped socialism, emphasizing selfreliance, population control, and decentralization of government, buoyed by
lectures on the politics of hope. In foreign policy, he retreated from ties to the
Soviet Union, seeking closer bonds with the United States and Western Europe.
In 1978, he founded the BNP, an ultraconservative bloc based on Islamic fundamentalism and militant nationalism. After the BNP swept national elections
in 1979, it passed the Indemnity Act, retroactively immunizing Sheikh Mujibs
assassins against future prosecution.
That legitimization of military coups, subsequently enshrined as the Fifth
Amendment to the Bangladesh Constitution, rebounded against President
Ziaur with his own assassination. The coup that killed him ultimately failed,
thanks to Army Chief of Staff (later president) Hussain Muhammad Ershad.
Justice Abdus Sattar succeeded Ziaur as president, winning popular election to
the office in December 1981, then was deposed by Hussain Ershad in another
coup, on March 24, 1982.
Following Ziaurs assassination, an 18-day court-martial delivered death
sentences to 12 alleged conspirators; a 13th, wounded during the attack on
Ziaur, was hanged on September 30, 1983, after recovering from his injuries.
Some observers suspected that Major General Abul Manzooronce an ally of
Ziaurs in the war for independence, later a jealous rivalmay have been the
assassinations ringleader, but he was never charged. For all his faults, Ziaur
Rahman is widely known today in Bangladesh as Shaheed (Martyred) Zia.
Further Reading
Choudhury, Ziaudddin. Assassination of Ziaur Rahman and the Aftermath. Dhaka, Bangladesh: The University Press Ltd., 2009.
Franda, Marcus. Ziaur Rahmans Bangladesh. Hanover, NH: AUFS, 1979.
Hossain, Golam. General Ziaur Rahman and the BNP: Political Transformation of a Military Regime. Dhaka, Bangladesh: Mohiuddin Ahmed University Press, 1988.
Lifschultz, Lawrence. Bangladesh: The Unfinished Revolution. London: Zed Books, 1979.
Mascarenhas, Anthony. Bangladesh: A Legacy of Blood. London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1986.
RASPUTIN, GRIGORI YEFIMOVICH

(18691916)
On December 16, 1916, Grigori Rasputina self-styled Russian Orthodox
mystic, seer, and healerreceived an invitation to dine with Prince Felix Yusupov at Moika Palace in Saint Petersburg. He accepted after being told that
Yusupovs wife, Princess Irina, would be present, entertaining wealthy friends.
In fact, however, she was traveling in Ukraine. Prince Yusupov, with accomplices Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and Black Hundreds militia leader Vladimir Purishkevich, planned to kill Rasputin for exerting a corrupting influence
over Russias royal family. Meeting in the castles basement, the trio reportedly
fed Rasputin cakes and wine spiked with cyanide, but he showed no reaction
to the poison. Frustrated, Yusupov then shot Rasputin with a pistol, leaving
him to die, but when the plotters returned some time later, the monk lunged
at Yusupov, trying to strangle him. Shot three more times by Pavlovich and
Purishkevich, Rasputin still survived, struggling to rise and fight. The wouldbe killers bludgeoned him next, then wrapped his presumed corpse in a carpet
and dumped it into the Neva River. Found three days later, minus the carpet,
Rasputin was finally deadfrom drowning, according to his autopsy.
Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was born in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoye, Tyumen Oblast, on January 22, 1869. A son of peasants, his siblings included an epileptic sister, Maria, who drowned in a local river. Brother Dmitri
nearly suffered the same fate, but Grigori rescued him, only to see Dmitri die
from pneumonia. Legends credit Rasputin with quasi-psychic powers from an
early age, though none of the purported events can be substantiated. At age
18, he was consigned for three months to a monastery at Verkhoturye, on Tura
River, as punishment for theft. While there, Rasputin claimed a vision of the
Virgin Mary that diverted him to the life of a strannik (wandering pilgrim). Detractors later linked him to a banned Christian sect, the Khlysty (flagellants),
who flogged themselves into fits of orgiastic ecstasy, though Rasputin denied
the association.
Although generally labeled a monk, Rasputin rarely denied himself pleasures of the flesh. He married Praskovia Dubrovina in 1889, siring three children with her, and later fathered at least one more child with a second partner,
out of wedlock. In 1901, he deserted his family, traveling for two years through
Greece and the Middle East, including a stop in Jerusalem. Rasputin reached
Saint Petersburg in 1903, building a reputation as a prophet and faith healer
that subsequently reached the ears of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. Her
son, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, suffered from hemophilia that frustrated
royal physicians. Hearing of Rasputin from her best friend and lady-in-waiting,
Anna Vyrubova, the empress arranged for Rasputin to heal her son in 1905.
Accounts of Alexeis treatment by Rasputin vary radically, though most agree
that the royal heirs health seemed to improve. Some historians credit the calming effects of hypnosis, Rasputins interdiction of Alexeis treatment with aspirin
(itself an anticoagulant), or application of leeches (unlikely, because their saliva
facilitates bleeding). Whatever the actual method, Alexeis apparent recovery
earned Rasputin the eternal gratitude of Empress Alexandra and her husband,
Tsar Nicholas II. Nicholas described Rasputin to acquaintances as a holy man
and our friend, thereby ensuring his welcome at the royal court in Saint Petersburg. Despite that endorsement, however, the Holy Synod of the Eastern
Orthodox Church shunned Rasputin, accusing him of various corrupt and immoral actions.
457
458
R ASPUTIN, GRIGORI YEFIMOVICH
Rasputins new status placed him under round-the-clock surveillance by

Russias secret police, the Okhrana, whose agents kept Tsar Nicholas informed
of the monks eccentric behaviorand also leaked details to Russian newspapers. Rumors of his ties to the outlawed Khlysty were revived, but Nicholas
ignored them, dismissing his minister of the interior for lack of control over
the press. Other reports described Rasputins heavy drinking, sexual promiscuity, even allegations that he had raped a nun. Rather than deny those charges,
Rasputin maintained that sin and subsequent repentance were both mandatory
for salvation, thus his lapses into drunken fornication were truly steps closer to
God. To critics of Rasputin, it was no coincidence that he preached that gospel
chiefly to young, wealthy women.
At the outbreak of World War I, new accusations focused on Rasputin, these
accusing him hampering the war effort. He initially opposed the war on moral
grounds, and as a threat to the Russian monarchy, then expressed a desire to
bless royal troops. Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, commander in chief of
Russias armed forces, threatened to hang Rasputin if he approached the front
lines, whereupon Rasputin announced his vision that Russia would lose the
war unless Tsar Nicholas assumed personal command of the army. The tsar
obligedand in his absence, Empress Alexandra fell increasingly under Rasputins influence.
Author Greg King reports an attempt to kill Rasputin one month before the
war officially began, on June 29, 1914, while Rasputin was visiting his wife and
children in Pokrovskoye. According to King, Rasputin was attacked and stabbed
on the street by Khionia Guzeva, a prostitute turned acolyte of Sergei Trufanov,
a sometime monk and former friend of Rasputin who had turned against him.
Nearly disemboweled in the attack, Rasputin survived extensive surgery, but lost
much of his former energy and developed opium addiction due to chronic pain.
The prelude to Rasputins murder came from Vladimir Purishkevich. Addressing the State Duma (an advisory council to Tsar Nicholas) on November
19, 1916, he said, The tsars ministers who have been turned into marionettes,
marionettes whose threads have been taken firmly in hand by Rasputin and
the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovnathe evil genius of Russia and the Tsarina,
who has remained a German on the Russian throne and alien to the country
and its people. After witnessing that speech, Felix Yusupov met with Purishkevich and hatched the plot to kill Rasputin, ostensibly in a bid to save the
Russian monarchy from ruin.
Following Rasputins autopsy, Empress Alexandra had his body interred at
Tsarskoye Selo (the tsars village), 15 miles south of Saint Petersburg. During
the February Revolution of 1917, local peasants exhumed Rasputins body and
burned it in the woods nearby, reportedly frightened when the lifeless body
appeared to lurch upright. Modern pathologists attribute that reactionif, in
fact, it happenedto contraction of his bodys tendons as they burned.
Much remains mysterious about Rasputins death. His autopsy report vanished during the Stalin era (though some photographs survived), as did those
attendants who had witnessed the postmortem. Details of the slaying offered
publicly by Felix Yusupov on various occasions between 1917 and 1965 cast
doubt on now-legendary portrayals of the assassination. Some reports now
claim that pathologists found no poison in Rasputins corpse, and Professor
Derrick Pounder, head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at the University of Dundee (Scotland), claimed in 2006 that Rasputin died from a gunshot
to the forehead, rather than from drowning. Naming the murder weapon as a
British-made Webley .455-caliber revolver, Pounder suggested that Rasputin
may have received his coup de grce from a British Secret Intelligence Service
(SIS) agent, one Lieutenant Oswald Rayner, identified as a longtime friend of
Yusupov from their days as classmates at Oxford University. Michael Smith, hi
his history of the SIS, claims that agency boss Mansfield Cumming personally
ordered Rasputins elimination.
Today, even the mad monks notorious sexual escapades have been called
into doubt. Rasputin biographer Edvard Radzinsky, working from Russian archives, suggests that the clerics pursuit of women was, if not entirely fabricated, at least grossly exaggerated. True or not, film portrayals of Rasputin
general hew to the traditional form. Two silent films depicting Rasputin, The
Fall of the Romanovs and Rasputin, the Black Monk, were released in September
1917. Conrad Veidt took the title role in Rasputin, Demon with Women (1932),
and the same year saw Lionel Barrymore case at the libidinous pilgrim in
Rasputin and the Empress. Christopher Lee played Rasputin: The Mad Monkom
(1966), followed by Gert Frbe (of Goldfinger fame) a year later, in I Killed
Rasputin. Tom Baker kept Rasputin in the classic mold for Nicholas and Alexandra (1971). Alan Rickman was suitably sinister in HBOs Rasputin, first aired
in 1996. The following year, Rasputin sold his soul for magical powers in
the animated film Anastasia. In Hellboy (2004), Karl Roden played the resurrected fiend, invoking Lovecraftian demons to conquer Earth. Most recently,
in 2011, French actor Grard Depardieu portrayed Rasputin in the eponymous film Rasputin.
See also: Nicholas II (18681918).
Further Reading
Colin Wilson. Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs. London: Arthur Baker Limited,
1964.
Cook, Andrew. To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin. Stroud, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom: Tempus Publishing, 2006.
Fuhrmann, Joseph. Rasputin: The Untold Story. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2013.
King, Greg. The Man Who Killed Rasputin: Prince Felix Youssoupov and the Murder That
Helped Bring Down the Russian Empire. New York: Carol Publishing, 1995.
459
460
R AT H E N AU, WA LT H E R
Moe, Richard. Prelude to the Revolution: The Murder of Rasputin. Chula Vista, CA: Aventine Press, 2011.
Moynahan, Brian. Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned. New York: Random House, 1997.
Radzinsky, Edvard. The Rasputin File. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
Smith, Michael. Six: A History of Britains Secret Intelligence Service. London: Biteback,
2010.
RATHENAU, WALTHER (18671922)

On June 24, 1922, German foreign minister Walther Rathenau left his home
in the Berlin district of Grunewald, bound for his office on Wilhelmstrasse in
a chauffeured convertible car. Midway through the drive, his vehicle was overtaken by another, occupied by three members of the Organisation Consul (OC),
an ultranationalist group formed in 1921 by remnants of the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt, after that organizations abortive coup failed to topple the Weimar Republic. OC radicals had murdered Minister of Finance Matthias Erzberger on August
26, 1921, and Rathenau was their next target, marked for signing the Treaty of
Rapallo in April 1922, thereby renouncing all of Germanys territorial and financial claims against Russia from World War I. Ernst Werner Techow drove the
pursuing car, with Erwin Kern and Hermann Fischer in the backseat. As they
passed Rathenaus vehicle, Kern fired a submachine gun, and Fischer lobbed a
hand grenade. Rathenau died instantly, and his killers fled the scene. Relatives
betrayed Techow to police on June 29, and officers tracked his accomplices to
Thuringia on July 17, killing Kern in a shootout, and Fischer committed suicide.
Convicted as an accessory to murder in October 1922, Techow served six years
of a 15-year sentence and was released in 1928, promptly joining the Nazi Party.
A friend of Techows brother, Ernst von Salomon, received a five-year term for
providing the vehicle that was used during the murder.
Walther Rathenau was born in Berlin on September 29, 1867, into a wealthy
German-Jewish family. His father, Emil Rathenau, was a pioneer in early European electrification, founder of the Allgemeine Elektricitts-Gesellschaft (General
Electricity Company, or AEG) in 1883. Walthers maternal grandfather was Benjamin Liebermann, a prominent Berlin textile manufacturer. Trained as an engineer, Rathenau joined AEGs board of directors at age 32 and became a leading
industrialist during the late German Empire and early Weimar Republic eras.
Austrian modernist author Robert Musil reportedly used Rathenau as the model
for Count Paul Arnheim, a rapacious German entrepreneur in his novel Der
Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities).
That work would not be published until eight years after Rathenaus assassination. Meanwhile, his success and Jewish heritage made him an easy target for
German extremists of the proto-Nazi movement. Perhaps ironically, Rathenau
was himself an ardent German nationalist, urging his fellow Jews to shun both
socialism and Zionism, seeking instead seamless assimilation into mainstream
R AT H E N A U , WA L T H E R
society. He viewed that course

as the best means of eliminating anti-Semitism, but in that
he underestimated the abiding
hatred of far-right factions such
as the Pan-German League and
the German Fatherland Party.
During World War I, Rathenau succeeded his father
as chairman of AEG and held
a senior position in the war
ministrys raw materials department, attempting to maintain
war industries despite a naval
blockade that starved German
factories of raw materials. In
1921, with Germanys imperial
ambitions shattered for the moment, Rathenau was named to
serve as minister of reconstruction for the Weimar Repub- Nazis murdered German foreign minister Walther
Rathenau in 1922. (Associated Press)
lic, under President Friedrich
Ebert. On February 1, 1922,
Ebert promoted him to foreign minister, a post from which Rathenau insisted
that Germany should fulfill its obligations under the Treaty of Versailles, including payment of war reparations, surrender of foreign colonies, and reduction of military forces. That alone was enough to infuriate proto-Nazis of the
OC, but Rathenau sealed his own fate in April, when he signed the Treaty of
Rapallo with the Soviet Union.
The OC was organized specifically to topple the Weimar Republic by fomenting violence, hoping to provoke a civil war in which the newly formed
the Vorlufige Reichswehr (Provisional National Defense) would theoretically
seek reinforcements from the ranks of far-right vigilantes. According to a December 27, 1922, article in the Mnchener Post, the OCs secret handbook included the following mission statement:
Spiritual aims: The cultivation and dissemination of nationalist thinking; warfare
against all anti-nationalists and internationalists; warfare against Jewry, Social
Democracy and Leftist-radicalism; fomentation of internal unrest in order to attain the overthrow of the anti-nationalist Weimar constitution.
Material aims: The organization of determined, nationalist-minded
men . . . local shock troops for breaking up meetings of an anti-nationalist
461
462
R A T S I M A N D R AVA , R I C H A R D
nature; maintenance of arms and the preservation of military ability; the education of youth in the use of arms.
Notice: Only those men who have determination, who obey unconditionally
and who are without scruples . . . will be accepted. . . . The organization is a secret organization.
To those ends, OC terrorists murdered dozens of victims during

19211922. After Rathenaus assassination, the group morphed into a new
formation, the Viking Bund, still led by OC founder Hermann Ehrhardt,
loosely affiliated with the Nazi Partys Sturmabteilung (SA) storm troopers.
Ehrhardt, however, resented Adolf Hitlers rise to power and, with deputy
commander Eberhard Kautter, declined to aid Hitler in the abortive Munich
Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, which sent Hitler to prison. That year,
prominent Nazi Hermann Gring wrote that Ehrhardt and the Viking Bund
had declared war against the party and the SA, but no direct action resulted. Despite that rift, most Viking Bund members later joined the Nazi
Party. Once Hitler was released from custody and rose to power as Germanys
chancellor, he erected a monument to Rathenau assassin Hermann Fischer,
in October 1933, but tension with Ehrhardt continued. Ehrhardt was one
of those marked for extermination during Hitlers 1934 Night of the Long
Knives, but he escaped the purge and was later forgiven. Invited back to
Germany from exile in Austria, Ehrhardt survived World War II and died at
age 89, in September 1971.
Further Reading
Felix, David. Walther Rathenau and the Weimar Republic: The Politics of Reparations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971.
Kessler, Henry. Walter Rathenau: His Life and Work. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1930.
Smith, Gene. The Ends of Greatness: Haig, Petain, Rathenau, and Eden: Victims of History.
New York: Crown Publishing, 1990.
Volkov, Shulamit. Walter Rathenau: Weimars Fallen Statesman. New Haven, CT: Yale
RATSIMANDRAVA, RICHARD (19311975)

At 8:00 P.M. on February 11, 1975, President Richard Ratsimandrava left his
presidential palace in Antananarivo, capital of Madagascar, proceeding toward
his private residence. It was his sixth day in officeand his last. While en
route, his car was ambushed by ex-members of the Groupe Mobile de Police (Mobile Police Group), a counterinsurgency unit earlier disbanded by President/
Prime Minister Gabriel Ramanantsoa. The gunmen riddled Ratsimandravas
car with bullets and escaped, leaving him dead in the wreckage. Vice Admiral
Didier Ratsiraka, head of Madagascars navy, succeeded Ratsimandrava, first as
R AT S I M A N D R AVA , R I C H A R D
chairman of a Supreme Military Council, then as president, ruling the nation

until March of 1993.
Richard Ratsimandrava was born in Antananarivo on March 21, 1931, when
Madagascar was still a French colony. He graduated from the Ecole Spciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr in Brittany, and served in various posts throughout
French Africa before his homeland won independence in 1960. Thereafter, he
remained in uniform, advancing to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Madagascars first president, Philibert Tsiranana, although hailed as the Father of Independence, sparked protests from his people by maintaining many aspects
of French culture and failing to cure the islands economic woes. After brutally
crushing popular demonstrations, Tsiranana ceded power to Prime Minister
Ramanantsoa in October 1972. Keeping his current title while doubling as
president, Ramanantsoa named Richard Ratsimandrava as minister of the interior, then imposed military rule so harsh that he regime was nearly overthrown
by rebels in December 1974. He resigned on February 5, 1975, and was
succeededalbeit brieflyby Ratsimandrava.
President Ratsiraka steered Madagascar toward socialism, endorsed by a referendum that established a Second Republic in December 1975. Confirmed
in office that month for a seven-year term, Ratsiraka founded a new party, the
Vanguard of the Malagasy Revolution, renamed in 1989 as the Association for
the Rebirth of Madagascar. He faced his own waves of violent demonstrations
from 1989 through 1991, when dissent forced his resignation in favor of successor Albert Zafy. Two more decades of disturbances climaxed with a coup
that forced President Marc Ravalomanana to flee the country in March 2009.
Thereafter, government fell to a High Transitional Authority, led since October 2011 by Prime Minister Jean Omer Beriziky.
Meanwhile, yearly gatherings were held in Antananarivo, on the anniversary
of Ratsimandravas assassination. In February 2006, a conference was held,
calling for renewed investigation of the still-unsolved crime. That dragged on
for six years later, until February 12, 2012, when General Randrianazary, secretary of state at the National Gendarmerie, declared, We are going to abandon
the investigation from now on. He offered no explanation for that unpopular
decision, but international press reports noted that persons prone to discussing the case have died in mysterious circumstances. There seems to be no
further prospect for solution of the case.
Further Reading
Jackson, Jennifer. Political Oratory and Cartooning: An Ethnography of Democratic Process
in Madagascar. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
Jolly, Alison. Lords and Lemurs: Mad Scientists, Kings with Spears, and the Survival of
Diversity in Madagascar. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
Randrianja, Solofo, and Stephanie Ellis. Madagascar: A Short History. London: Hurst
Publishers, 2009.
463
464
R A Z M A R A , S E PA H B O D H A J A L I
RAZMARA, SEPAHBOD HAJ ALI (19011951)

On March 7, 1951, Prime Minister Haj Ali Razmara attended a memorial service at a mosque in Tehran, Iran. As police cleared a path for Razmara through
the mosques inner courtyard, 26-year-old carpenter Khalil Tahmasebi fired
three close-range pistol shots, fatally wounding the prime minister. Arrested
at the scene, Tahmasebi was identified as a member of the militant Fadaiyan-e
Islam (Crusaders of Islam) organization. Despite his red-handed capture and
free admission of guilt, Tahmasebi was pardoned and released from custody,
welcomed home as a brave son of Islam by Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh,
leader of the ultra-fundamentalist National Front, who had succeeded Razmara
as Irans prime minister.
Sepahbod Haj Ali Razmara was born in Tehran, sometime during 1901,
under the reign of Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar. He studied at the Lycemilitaire
de Saint-Cyr, in France, then returned to Iran and began his rise through the
royal armys ranks. On June 26, 1950, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlav named
Razmara to serve as prime minister, succeeding Ali Mansur. He maintained and
expanded Mansurs close ties to Great Britain, more specifically to the AngloIranian Oil Company (today British Petroleum, or BP). He supported ratification
of a Supplemental Oil Agreement between that firm and Iran, despite strong opposition from members of the National Consultative Assembly and a majority of
grassroots Iranians, including complaints that the agreement denied Iranian officials any right to audit the British companys books. Mohammed Mossadeghs
National Front called for nationalization of Irans oil fields, and author Stephen
Kinzer writes that the British Foreign Office agreed with Razmaras elevation to
prime minister, noting that Only a man with his fierce determination, they believed, would be strong enough to face down Mossadegh and the National Front.
During his brief term in office, Razmara promoted a scheme for decentralizing government, establishing local councils in Irans 84 districts to deal with
matters such as education, health care, and agricultural improvements. At the
same time, he slashed government payrolls, dismissing some 400 top-ranking
officials and proceeding from there to weed out employees in lower positions.
His working alliance with the Tudeh Party (Party of the Masses of Iran) troubled wealthy land owners, even as his opposition to expropriation of AngloIranian Oil Company property angered Muslim nationalists. The Fadaiyan-e
Islam, organized four years before Razmaras elevation to prime minister, had
already claimed their first victim with the murder of anti-clerical author Ahmad
Kasravi in March 1946. Three years later, its gunmen assassinated Court Minister Abdul-Hussein Hazhir. At a public demonstration the day after Razmaras
murder, Fadaiyan-e Islam distributed leaflets threatening death to the shah if
Khalil Tahmasebi was not liberated. Three weeks later, they made good on that
vow, killing Minister of Education and Culture Abdul Ahmad Zangeneh, Dean
of Law at Tehran University.
REAGAN, RONALD WILSON
Razmaras murder achieved the goal desired by his assassin. On March 12,
1951 the National Consultative Assembly voted to nationalize Irans oil fields,
followed by another vote to expropriate Anglo-Iranian Oils property on March
28. A month later, on April 28, Mohammad Mossadegh was confirmed as prime
minister. In August 1953, British and U.S. troops staged Operation Ajax,
forcibly deposing Mossadegh and placing Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlav in
charge of a military junta with General Fazlollah Zahedi as his chief enforcer.
The brutal tactics of that dictatorship eventually spawned the Iranian Revolution of 1979, deposing the shah and establishing extreme fundamentalist Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the nations new ruler.
Conspiracy theories persist in Razmaras assassination. Although Khalil Tahmasebi supported and publicly praised the National Front, no member of that
group was ever linked to the prime ministers slaying. An alternative theory,
raised by several Iranian authors, claims that the shah and one of his top aides,
Assadullah Alam, sought to eliminate Razmara for murky reasons of their own.
In that scenario, Tahmasebi tried to kill Razmara but missed his target, whereupon an army sergeant fired the fatal shots.
Further Reading
Abrahamian, Ervand. The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations. New York: The New Press, 2013.
De Ballaique, Christopher. Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic AngloAmerican Coup. New York: HarperCollins, 2012.
Heiss, Mary. Empire and Nationhood: The United States, Great Britain, and Iranian Oil,
19501954. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Kinzer, Stephen. All the Shahs Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003.

(19112004)ATTEMPTED
On March 21, 1981, newly inaugurated President Ronald Reagan visited Fords
Theatre in Washington, D.C., for a fundraising event. Later, he recalled a curious sensation as he viewed the box where President Abraham Lincoln was
shot in April 1865, musing that even with all the Secret Service protection we
now had, it was probably still possible for someone who had enough determination to get close enough to a president to shoot him. Nine days later, after
addressing labor union representatives at the Washington Hilton Hotel, Reagan
was shot by 25-year-old John Warnock Hinckley Jr. Hinckley fired six shots
from a .22-caliber revolver, striking Reagan with one bullet, also wounding a
Secret Service agent, a policeman, and White House Press Secretary James
Brady. While police and bystanders disarmed Hinckley, Reagan was transported
to George Washington University Hospital, where surgeons removed the bullet
465
466
REAGAN, RONALD WIL SON
from his chest. Luckily, although Hinckley had loaded his pistol with Devastator rounds designed to explode on impact, the round that penetrated Reagans
body proved to be a dud. James Brady was less fortunate, left paralyzed and
permanently disabled after his slug shattered inside his skull.
Ronald Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, on February 6, 1911. He
earned a BA in economics and sociology from Eureka College, a private institution affiliated with the Disciples of Christ, then moved to Iowa and entered
show business as a radio broadcaster in 1937. Later that year, he moved again,
this time to Hollywood, for his first role in a feature film, Love is on the Air. Another 33 films followed before the United States entered into World War II,
with titles ranging from the obscure (Swing Your Lady, Cowboys over Brooklyn,
Girls on Probation) to acknowledged cinema classics (Dark Victory and Knute
Rockne, All American).
Reagan joined the U.S. Army Reserve in 1937 and was ordered up for active duty in April 1942, but nearsightedness barred him from combat and he
spent most of the war in Culver City, California, as a member of First Motion
Picture Unit (officially, the 18th Army Air Force Base Unit), composed entirely
of film-making professionals. Before wars end, Reagan worked on 13 more features and short films, including five where he provided voice-overs for army productions. Even so, he found time to appear in Kings Row (nominated for three
Academy Awards in 1942), along with the forgettable Juke Girl (also 1942).
Reagans career in Hollywood continued after V-J Day, with another 19 films
between 1947 and 1954. His star seemed to be waning through the latter part
of the 1950s and early 1960sa total of three big-screen appearances between
1955 and 1964, the last as a decidedly unsympathetic felon in The Killers. At
the same time Reagan switched to television, appearing in a dozen episodes of
programs such as Lux Video Theatre and Schlitz Playhouse of Stars between 1950
and 1954. In the latter year, he landed an eight-year stint as host of General
Electric Theater, introducing 235 teleplays and acting in 35. Occasional appearances on Dick Powells Zane Grey Theater, Wagon Train, and similar TV shows
kept Reagan in the public eye through 1964, but many critics were ready to
write him off when politics intervened.
Originally a self-styled liberal Democrat, Reagan had been drifting toward
the political right since becoming disillusioned with President Franklin Roosevelts New Deal. Elected to his first term as president of the Screen Actors
Guild in 1941 (with later terms following in 19461952 and 1959), Reagan
collaborated with the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities in
striving to rid Hollywood of alleged communists. He participated in compiling
blacklists of subversive actors and writers, purging radical union members
while collaborating in some cases with underworld infiltration of the film industry. For a time, he also served the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as
secret informer T-10, reporting on perceived un-American behavior by his

colleagues and competitors in Hollywood.
Reagan was thus well placed in 1964, when ultraconservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater launched his presidential race with a proclamation that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and . . . moderation in the pursuit of
justice is no virtue. That philosophy drew support from groups including the
John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan (the latter rejected by Goldwater, a Jew
whose running mate was Catholic). Incumbent Lyndon Johnson crushed Goldwater in November, carrying 43 states to Goldwaters six, but Reagan emerged
as a star of the disastrous campaign, delivering a half-hour televised endorsement of Goldwater, titled A Time for Choosing, on October 27, 1964. It failed
to turn the tide, but that address raised $1 million for Goldwater on election eve
and marked Reagan as a political force to be reckoned with.
In 1966, California Republicans chose Reagan as their gubernatorial candidate. He defeated two-term incumbent Edmund Pat Brown, and was subsequently reelected to a second term in 1970. Between those campaigns, Reagan
tested presidential waters for the first time with a short-lived Stop Nixon
in 1968, but he failed to garner significant backing at that years Republican
National Convention. Back in California, his eight years as governor featured
constant conflict with campus protesters and militant minorities, opposition
to the states proposed Therapeutic Abortion Act, and various environmental
gaffes, as when he appointed the head of a logging company to supervise state
conservation efforts, telling reporters, If youve seen one redwood youve seen
them all.
In 1976, Reagan made a stronger presidential showing, but incumbent Gerald Ford secured the nomination with 1,187 convention delegates to Reagans
1,070. By 1980, Reagan was finally ready, combining the October surprise of
freedom for U.S. hostages held in Iran with a Southern strategy that finished
the conversion of white Dixie voters from their traditional Democratic Party
alliance, begun under Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond in 1948 and furthered by
predecessor Richard Nixon in his two successful White House campaigns.
Today, the Reagan presidential years are fondly remembered by many U.S.
citizensand ostensibly revered by conservative Republicansdespite his
many shortcomings: the Iran-Contra scandal, widespread looting of savings
and loan institutions, illegal wars in Central America, and the evident failure
of trickle-down economics. All that still lay ahead when Reagan faced John
Hinckley in March 1981 and nearly lost his life.
Two hours before the shooting in Washington, Hinckley wrote but did not
mail a letter to his idol, Jodie Foster, saying, among other things, that he would
abandon the idea of getting Reagan in a second if I could only win your heart
and live out the rest of my life with you. The futility of that 11th-hour plea,
467
468
REAGAN, RONALD WIL SON
never communicated, left him no alternative but to proceed, and in the final
act he failed. At trial, Hinckley faced 13 felony charges, but jurors found him
not guilty by reason of insanity on June 21, 1982. That verdict prompted
near-universal dismay and outrage. As a result, four statesIdaho, Kansas,
Montana, and Utahabolished the insanity defense entirely, and other states
revised their statutes and Congress ultimately passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, restricting psychiatric expert testimony on ultimate legal issues and placing the burden of proof on a defendant to establish insanity by
clear and convincing evidence.
John Hinckley apparently suffered from erotomania, the delusional that a total
strangercommonly a public figure or celebrityshared his one-sided obsessive love. Fueled by 15 viewings of the Taxi Driver (see sidebar), he became convinced that only murder of a president could seal their illusory romantic bargain.
First, he stalked Reagan predecessor Jimmy Carter, and was arrested in October 1980 with a gun at Nashville International Airport, but FBI agents made no
connection to Carters simultaneous visit and thus failed to notify Secret Service
agents of Hinckleys behavior. Briefly consigned to psychiatric treatment by his
parents after that arrest, Hinckley shifted his attention to the president-elect after
Novembers election, and carried on with his plan. In custody, Hinckley wrote
that shooting Reagan the greatest love offering in the history of the world.
TAXI DRIVER
Written by Paul Schrader and directed by Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver is a
psychological thriller starring Robert De Niro as mentally unstable Manhattan cabbie Travis Bickle. Suffering from depression and insomnia, disgusted
with the citys corruption, Bickle becomes infatuated with an adolescent
prostitute portrayed by Jodie Foster. After botching an attempt to kill a
U.S. presidential candidate, Bickle redirects his rage at Fosters pimp for a
climactic massacre of underworld lowlifes, which, ironically, makes him
a hero with the media. Nominated for four Academy Awards, including
Best Picture, the film lost out on those but won a Palme dOr, the highest
prize awarded at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival. John Hinckley Jr. cited
his obsession with Jodie Foster as his motive for shooting President Reagan in 1981, claiming that he hoped it would impress the actress. In 1994,
the U.S. Library of Congress selected Taxi Driver as a film worthy of preservation in the National Film Registry as being culturally, historically, or
aesthetically significant. In 1998, the American Film Institute listed Taxi
Driver at No. 47 in its AFIs 100 Years . . . 100 Movies. Ten years later, in the
10th-anniversary edition, the film was demoted to No. 52 on the list.
After trial, from his hospital room, Hinckley sent letters to condemned
Florida serial killer Theodore Bundy and tried to obtain an address for California killer-cult leader Charles Manson, but was blocked from further correspondence with notorious slayers. On December 30, 2005, a federal judge
approved visits to Hinckleys family home in Virginia, supervised by his parents, after various psychologists deemed his depression and psychotic disorder to be in full remission. Month-long visits to his parents were denied in
June 2007, then a series of 10-day visits were approved in June 2009. Legal
debates over his ultimate release from custody continued as this volume went
to press.
Predictably, conspiracy theories arose from the shooting of President
Reagan. Reporters discovered that Hinckleys father had contributed money
to the 1980 Republican primary campaigns of George H. W. Bush, Reagans
top competitor and later running mate. Furthermore, brother Scott Hinckley had a dinner date scheduled at the home of Bushs son, Silverado Savings & Loan board member Neil Bush, on the very day Reagan was shot.
Neils wife at the time, Sharon Bush, told journalists that Scott Hinckley
was invited to her home as a date for one of her friends, describing the
Hinckley clan as a very nice family, whose members had given a lot of
money to the Bush campaign. She denied ever meeting John, but knew
him vaguely as the renegade brother in the family. From those connections, some theorists contrived a Bush family plot to eliminate Reagan and
propel the senior Bush into the presidency, but no supporting evidence has
been forthcoming.
Further Reading
Allen, Richard. The Day Reagan Was Shot. Hoover Institution. http://www.hoover
.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/6281.
Assassination Attempt of Ronald Reagan. Video. Maniac World. http://www.maniac
world.com/Assassination-Attempt-President-Ronald-Reagan.html.
Bonnie, Richard, John Jeffries, and Peter Low. A Case Study in the Insanity Defense: The
Trial of John W. Hinckley, Jr. New York: Foundation Press, 2008.
Cannon, Lou. President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. New York: Public Affairs Books,
2000.
Caplan, Lincoln. The Insanity Defense and the Trial of John W. Hinckley, Jr. New York:
Laurel Publishing, 1987.
Clarke, James. On Being Mad or Merely Angry: John W. Hinckley, Jr., and Other Dangerous
People. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Moldea, Dan. Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob. New York: Viking Penguin, 1987.
Wilbur, Del. Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan. New York: Henry
Holt, 2011.
469
470
REINA BARRIOS, JOS M ARA
REINA BARRIOS, JOS MARA (18541898)

On February 8, 1898, while walking near his palace in Guatemala City with
two army officers, President Jos Reina Barrios was shot and killed instantly
by Edgar Zollinger, a British subject. Reinas companions shot Zollinger as he
attempted to flee from the scene. First Vice President Manuel Estrada Cabrera
succeeded Reina in an otherwise peaceful transition of power. Zollinger, also
known on occasion as James Edgar August, had been employed as a property manager for Juan Aparicio Merida, a rebel leader executed with others
on September 13, 1897, for joining in an abortive coup dtat against Reinas
regime. Although the slain gunman could not speak for himself, reporters suggested that his motive for killing the president seems to have been
personal.
Jos Reina Barrios was born in San Marcos, Guatemala, on December 24,
1854. Weeks shy of his 14th birthday, in 1867, Reina joined a group of patriotic volunteers led by his uncle, Justo Rufino Barrios, in an abortive coup
against President Vicente Cerna Sandoval. Defeated in that attempt to seize
power, the rebels scattered, with Reina landing in Mexico. While still a teenager, he made several more forays into Guatemala, returning for good after his
uncle and other officers finally deposed Cerna in June 1871. Miguel Garca
Granados served as president for the next two years, with Justo Rufino Barrios as his commander of armed forces, then ceded his office to Rufino in June
1873. A new constitution, ratified in 1879, permitted Rufinos reelection for a
seven-year term in 1880.
While declaring his intent to revive the defunct United Provinces of Central America, presumably under his own leadership, Rufino sent his nephew
to Guatemalas military academy, then off for further tactical studies in
Europe. Upon returning home, Reina was elevated to the rank of general
commanding artillery. With his uncles death in April 1885, the National
Assembly elevated him to division general, followed shortly by promotion
to vice president under Manuel Lisandro Barillas Bercin. Reinas popularity
soon sparked jealousy within President Barillas, and he briefly imprisoned
Reina, then released him into exile under pressure from his own Supreme
Council of War.
Fleeing his homeland for the second time, Reina wound up in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he met and married a U.S. citizen, Algerie Benton.
Soon afterward, a seemingly conciliatory President Barillas named Reina as
his consul to Hamburg, Germany. Reina arrived to find that no such post
existed, leaving him embarrassed and enraged. He soon returned to Guatemala, where he found Barillas under fire for economic problems and a
recent unpopular war. Reina challenged Barillas in the next national election and defeated him, assuming the presidency for a six-year term on
March 15, 1892.
REMELIIK, HARUO IGNACIO
Reinas tenure in the presidential palace was as troubled as his predecessors. While attempting to solidify some modest reforms instituted
by his uncles regime, Reina increased the power of the landowners over
rural peasants, thereby making enemies. While promoting the first Central American Exposition in 1897, he printed money to cover its cost, thus
causing runaway inflation. In the process, Reina banked a personal fortune
of some $8 million, while asking the National Assembly for permission to
seek a loan of 3 million from Great Britain. Threats from various enemies
drove Reina to a series of mass arrests, and 200 soldiers guarded his palace around the clock. After his murder, the New York Times reported that
two or three attempts were made to kill him more than a year ago. In fact,
the Times editorialized, the fate of Barrios, who has of late been sending
a good many of his enemies to the executioner, can excite neither surprise
nor very much pity.
Successor Manuel Estrada Cabrera would rule Guatemala until public antipathy and rumors of senility drove him from office at age 67, in April 1920.
During his tenure, he laid the groundwork for more tragic history by opening
Guatemala to wholesale exploitation by the U.S.-based United Fruit Company.
Estrada was also strongly suspected of ordering predecessor Manuel Barillass
assassination in Mexico City, during 1907. The quirkiest aspect of Estradas
tenure was his institution of a cult dedicated to Minerva, the ancient Roman
goddess of wisdom, music, and poetry, with temples erected to her glory in cities throughout Guatemala.
Further Reading
Adams, Richard. Accustomed to Be Obedient. In The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Grandin, Greg. The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2000.
REMELIIK, HARUO IGNACIO (19331985)

In the early morning hours of June 30, 1985, President Haruo Remeliik of Palau returned from a social engagement to his home in Ngerulmud, the island
nations capital. As he stepped from his car, a sniper tried to shoot him from
a pickup truck parked across the street, but the weapon jammed. Remeliik
ran to confront his assailant, scuffling with the gunman before three bullets
struck Remeliik in the head and neck, killing him instantly. The killer (or killers) escaped, leaving behind an unfired .30-caliber cartridge that had briefly
jammed the murder weapon. Three defendants were subsequently arrested and
convicted of Remeliiks murder, but that verdict was overturned on appeal in
July 1987, leaving the crime officially unsolved.
471
472
REMELIIK, HARUO IGNACIO
President Haruo Remeliik of Palau, slain by unknown gunmen in June 1985. (Corbis)
Haruo Remeliik was born at Kloulklubed, on the island of Peleliu, on June 1,

1933. A Pacific archipelago also known as the Black Islands, for its shortstatured Negrito natives, Palau was claimed by Spain in the 19th century, ceded
to Japan in 1914, and finally occupied by U.S. troops after bitter fighting in
World War II. From 1947, it was administered by the United States as a United
Nations Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, finally liberated under a Compact
of Free Association with the United States in 1982. Before that agreement was
ratified, Haruo Remeliika native of mixed Japanese and Palauan descent
was elected as Palaus first president, assuming office on March 2, 1981.
Theories abounded in the wake of Remeliiks assassination. Newsweek magazine noted the victims reputation as a high-living womanizer, suggesting that
the husband of an unnamed presidential mistress might have hired killers to
settle a personal vendetta unrelated to politics. When that notion failed to
pan out, suspicion focused on Masanori Sugiyama, a convicted two-time murderer from Guam who allegedly had threatened Remeliik. A manhunt ensued,
but Masanori eluded policewho then admitted that they had no evidence
against him, after all.
In December 1985, prosecutors filed murder and conspiracy charges
against three new suspects. Those accused were Melwert Tmetuchl, son of
REMN CANTERA, JOS ANTONIO
former governor and wartime Japanese collaborator Roman Tmetuchl; Leslie

Tewid, the governors nephew; and Anghenio Sabino, an employee of Melwert
Tmetuchl. Francisco Gibbons, said to be the actual triggerman, was listed as an
unindicted coconspirator. A panel of three judges heard the case in February
1986 (Palau permits no jury trials), including testimony from former suspect
Masanori Sugiyama that he sold Melwert Tmetuchl a .30-caliber carbine and
ammunition several weeks before Remeliiks murder. Another witness, who
later recanted her testimony, told the court that she had seen Sabino and Melwert Tmetuchl parked near Remeliiks home, in a pickup owned by Melwerts
brother, on the night of the shooting. All three defendants were convicted. By
November 1986, as their appeal wound its way through the courts, spokesmen
for the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups had lodged protests
against the verdict, citing dubious evidence admitted by the trial court. The
verdicts were reversed on July 20, 1987.
An alternative theory of Remeliiks assassination, presented on ABC televisions 20/20 news program, suggested involvement by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as part of a scheme to keep Palau militarily dependent on the
United States. No evidence supporting that allegation was ever produced.
Vice President Alfonso Oiterong briefly succeeded Remeliik, and was in turn
replaced by Palaus second elected president, Lazarus Salii, on October 25,
1985. Salii held the office until August 20, 1988, when he shot himself in the
midst of a bribery scandal.
Further Reading
Leibowitz, Arnold. Embattled Island: Palaus Struggle for Independence. Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1996.
Robie, David. Blood on Their Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific. London:
Zed Books, 1989.
Shuster, Donald. Palau. In Elections in Asia and the Pacific: A Data Handbook: South
East Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Smith, Roy. The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement: After Mururoa. London:
Tauris Academic Studies, 1997.
REMN CANTERA, JOS ANTONIO

(19081955)
On January 2, 1955, an assassin armed with a submachine gun shot and killed
President Jos Remn Cantera at the Hipdromo Juan Franco, a racetrack in
Panama City (now Hipdromo Presidente Remon). The gunman escaped,
and Vice President Jos Valds Guizador requested international aid with the
murder investigation. U.S. suspect Martin Irving Lipstein was arrested, then
released upon providing an iron-clad alibi. On January 12, Panamanian attorney Rubn O. Mir confessed to shooting Remn and named then-president
473
474
REMN CANTER A, JOS ANTONIO
Guizado as the plots mastermind. Mir recanted his statement at trial, claiming coercion,
and was subsequently acquitted. Guizado remained in
custody, pending a trial that
never materialized, until his final release in December 1957.
Remns murder remains officially unsolved today.
Jos Remn Cantera was
born in Panama City, to a politically prominent family, on
April 11, 1908. He graduated
from the Military Academy
in 1931, then joined the National Police, rising to serve as
Panamanian president Jos Antonio Remn died its chief by 1947. Two years
on January 2, 1955 shortly after he was shot with later, Panama entered a period
a machine gun at a racetrack in Panama. (Associ- of political turmoil, with four
ated Press)
presidents holding office between July 1949 and October
1952. Some historians regard Remn as a prime mover in the coup dtat
that deposed President Arnulfo Arias Madrid in May 1951, although Remn
would not claim the presidencyfrom Alcibades Arosemena Quinzada
until October 1, 1952.
He brought a measure of stability to Panama at last, as leader of a conservative National Patriotic Coalition. His pro-U.S. stance, including suppression of various communist groups, pleased Washington, and in 1953 Remn
began negotiation of the RemnEisenhower Treaty (formally ratified after his
death) that raised Panamas annual annuity for the international canal from
$430,000 to $1.9 million, while transferring $20 million in property from the
U.S.-owned Panama Canal Company to Panama. Although an authoritarian
figure, Remn is perhaps best remembered for his motto Neither millions nor
almswe want justice.
Documents from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), declassified
in the early 21st century, suggest that Remn may have been killed on orders
from exiled U.S. mafioso Salvatore Lucania, alias Charles Lucky Luciano,
after Remns police seized a shipment of heroin passing though Panama on
its way to the United States. Spanish author Gloria Guardia elaborates on that
theme in her novel Lobos al Anochecer (Wolves at Dusk), published in 2006 and
currently offered only in Spanish. That tale implicates both the Mafia and the
R I TAV U O R I , H E I K K I
CIAwell-documented partners in drug trafficking from Europe, later from

Southeast Asia and Central Americain Remns assassination. A subplot involves conspiracy by Remns political opponents in Panama City, jealous of
the presidents power and resentful of certain terms in the treaty he negotiated
with President Dwight Eisenhowers State Department.
Further Reading
Guardia, Gloria. Lobos al anochecer. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2010.
Koster, R. M., and Guillermo Snchez. In the Time of Tyrants: Panama, 19681990. New
York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
Maurer, Noel, and Carlos Yu. The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran, and Ultimately
Gave Away the Panama Canal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Murillo, Luis. The Noriega Mess: The Drugs, the Canal, and Why America Invaded. Berkeley, CA: Video Books, 1995.
Pearcy, Thomas. The History of Central America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2005.
RITAVUORI, HEIKKI (18801922)

On February 14, 1922, Finnish nobleman Knut Ernst Robert Tandefelt shot
Minister of the Interior Heikki Ritavuori at Ritavuoris home in the Etu-Tl
district of Helsinki. In custody, Tandefelt declared that he was influenced by
articles in the right-wing press, particularly the Swedish-language newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet, condemning Ritavuori as a danger to the country who
must be eliminated. That belief focused primarily on Finlands latest heimosodat
(kinship war) with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, sparked
by a separatist rebellion in East Karelia. Initially sentenced to life imprisonment, Tandefelt was later judged partially insane and won reduction of his
sentence to 12 years at hard labor. He died in an asylum at Nikkil on May 3,
1948. Ritavuoris murder remains the only political assassination in independent Finlands history to date.
Heikki Ritavuori, n Rydman, was born in Turku, Finland, on March 23,
1880. He studied law and changed his surname from its Swedish form to the
Finnish equivalenta process known as fennicizationin 1906, one year
his appointment as secretary of the Foundation Board of the Parliament of
Finland. (He was not alone: some 70,000 Finns changed their names during 19061907.) In his private legal practice, Ritavuori favored clients from
the poorer classes, often working on behalf of peasants found in conflict with
their landlords. Voters in Turku Province sent him to parliament in 1914, and
reelected him in 1919, after the Finnish Civil War of 1918 had claimed more
than 36,000 lives. During that five-month war between Red Guards and White
Guards, the latter finally victorious, Ritavuori defended Red prisoners of war
and worked to see them pardoned at wars end.
475
476
ROCKWELL, GEORGE LINCOLN
An early member of the National Progressive Party, founded in December 1918, Ritavuori served briefly as deputy minister of justice under Finlands first president, Kaarlo Juho Sthlberg, then returned as minister of
defense under Prime Minister Juho Heikki Vennolain August 1919, holding
that post until his murder 526 days later. Right-wing extremists labeled him
a red minister for his legal defense work during the late civil war, and they
were further angered by his support for the liberal Sthlberg over Baron Carl
Gustaf Emil Mannerheim in the 1919 presidential campaign. The crowning
insult, to proto-fascist circles, came when Ritavuori blocked independent action by their paramilitary protection guard units during the East Karelia
uprising of 19211922.
With so much agitation against him, some observers suspected that Ritavuori was slain by members of a right-wing conspiracy. Knut Tandefelt initially
said that he acted alone, but later implicated several accomplices, including
Helsinki mayor General Paul von Gerich and a local pharmacist, Oskar Jansson. A belated investigation, undertaken from 1927 to 1930, failed to produce
any evidence against those named by Tandefelt as plotters. Baron Mannerheim
served as commander in chief of Finlands defense forces during World War II,
and as president from August 1944 to June 1946. In June 1942, he welcomed
Adolf Hitler to Finland, ostensibly to celebrate Mannerheims 75th birthday,
but in fact to discuss German defense of Finland in the event of a Russian
invasion.
Heikki Ritavuoris younger brother, Eero Rydman, kept the original family name as a member of the Progressive Party, serving as Helsinkis mayor
for 12 years (19441956), and running unsuccessfully for president in 1956,
Ritavuoris grandson, Pekka Tarjanne, also entered politics, serving in parliament, as chairman of the Liberal Peoples Party, as a government minister, as
chairman of the board of the Post and Telephone Bureau, and as chairman
of the board of the United Nations International Telecommunication Union.
Further Reading
Bidwell, Robin. Bidwells Guide to Government Ministers: The Major Powers and Western
Europe 19001971. New York: Routledge, 1973.
Kirby, David. A Concise History of Finland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006.
Singleton, Fred. A Short History of Finland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998.
ROCKWELL, GEORGE LINCOLN (19181967)

On August 25, 1967, George Lincoln Rockwellfounder and leader of the
American Nazi Partydrove his dirty clothes to a strip-mall laundromat near
party headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. He loaded two machines, then went
back to his car, telling a laundromat attendant, I forgot

something. He started the car,
then recoiled as two bullets
slammed through the windshield. One slug penetrated
Rockwells chest; the other
missed and pierced the seat
beside him. Rockwell lurched
out of the car, then collapsed,
bleeding internally. The operators of a nearby barbershop responded to the shots and saw
a man running across the strip
malls roof, leaping down, then
scaling a wall to vanish in a
wooded park next door. Ambulance attendants found Rockwell dead on the scene, while
police swarmed the neighborhood. They found the snipers An American Nazi Party defector shot party
guna broomhandle Mauser founder George Lincoln Rockwell in 1967. (Assopistol, last manufactured in ciated Press)
1937and then caught suspect John Patler, expelled from the party by Rockwell five months earlier, a
half-mile from the murder site. Jurors convicted Patler of murder in December
1967, resulting in a 20-year prison term.
George Rockwell was born in Bloomington, Illinois, on March 9, 1918. His
parents, vaudeville comedians with many celebrity friends, divorced in 1924,
sharing custody of George between the fathers home in Maine and his mothers residence in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Rockwell completed high school in
Atlantic City and applied to Harvard University at 17, but was rejected. His
second choice was Rhode Islands Brown University, where he enrolled in August 1938. Notorious on campus for criticizing the concept of human equality,
Rockwell left Brown without graduating, in March 1941, to join the U.S. Navy
as an aviation cadet.
In World War II, Rockwell flew combat missions in the Pacific Theater, then
was transferred to Brazil, where the sight of mixed-race natives aggravated his increasing bigotry. Discharged from service as a lieutenant commander in September 1945, he enrolled in art courses at Brooklyns Pratt Institute and supported
himself as a commercial artist until September 1950, when he was recalled to active naval duty during the Korean War, rising to the rank of commander. Upon
477
478
his second discharge from active service, in October 1954, Rockwell remained
in the U.S. Navy Reserve, but his political extremism soon marked him as not
deployable in the eyes of his superiors. He was discharged for good in February
1960, later writing that he had basically been thrown out of the Navy.
For that, he blamed the Jews.
Rockwells progression to the far-right fringe was aided by the onset of the
Cold War, personified in Red-hunting senator Joseph McCarthy and ex-general
Douglas MacArthur, who impressed Rockwell so much that Rockwell bought
a corncob pipe to match MacArthurs. Other influences included Gerald L. K.
Smith, founder of the anti-Semitic Christian Nationalist Crusade, and Conde
McGinley, founder of the equally racist Christian Educational Association.
Rockwells enlightenment was finally completed via study of Adolf Hitlers
Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The latter publication, posing as a blueprint for Jewish world domination, had been exposed as a forgery
by Russias secret police soon after its initial publication in 1903, but Rockwell
appeared to accept it as genuine.
Rockwells odyssey through the radical right included flirtation with various groups, ranging from the respectable John Birch Society to the notoriously violent National States Rights Party. In March 1959, he created his own
World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists, renamed the American
Nazi Party in December of that year, with ramshackle headquarters in Arlington, five miles from downtown Washington, D.C. The partys first public
outing occurred at the National Mall in Washington, where Rockwell regaled
spectators with a two-hour speech on April 3, 1960. At the next, at Manhattans Union Square on June 22, Rockwell faced a crowd of Holocaust survivors and Jewish war veterans. Asked how he would deal with Jews if given
power in the United States, Rockwell replied that traitors of all races and religious should be executed. Press to estimate how many Jews that might involve, he said, Eighty percent.
The partys third rally, back at the National Mall on July 4, 1960, sparked a
riot that resulted in Rockwells detention for court-ordered psychiatric evaluation. Released after two weeks, he promptly wrote and published a pamphlet
titled How to Get Out or Stay Out of the Insane Asylum. Already well attuned to
the value of publicitywhether negative or otherwiseRockwell set out to
capitalize on the growing black civil rights movement. In 1961, he procured a
Volkswagen van and sent it through the South as his Hate Bus, trailing teams
of integrated freedom riders. Two years later, he led counterprotests against
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In 1964, he sought the U.S. presidency as a write-in candidate, receiving 212 popular votes (and none in the Electoral College). A year later, he did
slightly better in Virginias gubernatorial contest, polling 5,730 votes to place
fourth in a field of four candidates.
Throughout the troubled 1960s, Rockwell searched for allies in the murky
world of extremism. Dominant Ku Klux Klan leader Robert Shelton denounced
Rockwells party, but several of Sheltons grand dragons in Northern states
were active membersincluding Daniel Burros of New York, who killed himself in 1965, after the New York Times revealed his Jewish ancestry. Rockwell
joined Klansmen to protest Dr. Kings open-housing marches in Cicero, Illinois, in 1966, but also sought alliances among black nationalists. As early as
1962, Rockwell met with Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Black Muslims, and
emerged to praise Muhammad as the Black peoples Hitler. In 1966, after debating Black Panther Party spokesman Stokely Carmichael, Rockwell adopted
Carmichaels black power slogan and used its oppositeWhite Poweras the
title of his final manifesto, published in 1967.
Aside from overt racism and anti-Semitism, Rockwell ranked among the
earliest proponents of historical revisionism on the Holocaust, essentially
denying Adolf Hitlers genocide of Jews and other so-called undesirables.
Interviewed for Playboy magazine in April 1966, he said, I dont believe for
one minute that any 6,000,000 Jews were exterminated by Hitler. It never
happened. Meanwhile, during a covert visit to England and Ireland, he
joined in founding a World Union of National Socialists, publishing a newsletter, National Socialist World, edited by ex-physics professor William Luther
Pierce. On January 1, 1967, Rockwell changed his partys name one more,
this time calling it the National Socialist White Peoples Party (NSWPP).
The first attempt on Rockwells life came six months later, on June 28, 1967.
As he returned to party headquarters from shopping, he found the driveway
blocked by a fallen tree and piles of brush. While Rockwell attempted to clear
it, two shots rang out, one narrowly missing his head before striking his car.
Rockwell pursued the gunman, but failed to catch or identify him. His application for a gun permit, filed two days later, was still pending in August, when
he was assassinated.
Even in death, Rockwell continued to incite controversy. Matthias Koehl
Jr., second in command at NSWPP headquarters, assumed control of the
party and its estimated 300 members, claiming legal control over Rockwells
corpse and the groups meager assets. On August 27, 1967, Koehl announced
that federal officials had approved Rockwells burial as an honorably discharged military veteran, at Virginias Culpeper National Cemetery, but military and civilian police barred mourners dressed in Nazi uniforms from the
graveyard on August 29. A day-long standoff ensued, before Koehl withdrew
and had Rockwell cremated on August 30. His remains were still in limbo
when Koehl filed litigation, in February 1968, to secure internment in any
national cemetery. The following month, a federal court supported the armys
refusal to bury Rockwell with military honors. Today his ashes rest at party
headquarters in Wisconsin.
479
480
MODERN NEO-NAZI GROUPS

Neo-Nazi groups in the United States and worldwide generally combine
adoration for Adolf Hitlers Third Reich with hatred of Jews and other minorities. Beyond that, they are frequently at odds with one another, quarreling over points of fascist doctrine and competing for members on the
far right. In 2012, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified 29 active
neo-Nazi groups across the United States, with 171 chapters operating in
44 states. The National Alliance has lost ground since leader William Pierce
died in 2002, replaced as the countrys dominant faction by the Detroitbased National Socialist Movement, founded in 1974. At press time for this
book, the National Socialist Movement claimed 55 chapters in 39 states.
Despite his death and the subsequent decline of his National Alliance (with
nine chapters surviving in 2012), William Pierce remains notorious for his
novel The Turner Diaries, penned under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. Critics credit The Turner Diaries with inspiring the creation of the
Order, a neo-Nazi group that declared war on the federal government in
1983, and for prompting Timothy McVeigh to bomb Oklahoma Citys Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in April 1995. Another novel, Hunter, extolled the crimes of racist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin.
Koehls ascension to leadership of the NSWPP split the party, which he renamed the New Order, cast as a quasi-religious group merging esoteric Nazism with elements of Hinduism. More traditional neo-fascists followed
William Pierce into a new National Alliance, subsequently regarded as the
dominant neo-Nazi group of the 1980s and 1990s. Dissension on the fringe
continues today, with new groups forming and dissolving constantly.
Virginias Supreme Court upheld John Patlers murder conviction in November
1970 and ordered him to begin serving his 20-year sentence. After a failed appeal
to the U.S. Supreme Court, rejected unanimously in May 1972, Patler was paroled
with support from his trial judge in August 1975. A year later, he violated terms
of his release and was returned to prison for another six years. In December 1977,
Patlera son of Greek immigrantspetitioned a Virginia court to restore his birth
surname of Patsalos. The court agreed, and Patsalos was released once more
upon completion of his sentence, reportedly settling somewhere in New York City.
Further Reading
Federal Bureau of Investigation. The American Nazi Party. FBI Records: The Vault.
http://vault.fbi.gov/American%20Nazi%20Party%20/American%20Nazi%20
Party%20Part%201%20of%202/view.
Rockwell, George. White Power. Dallas: Ragnarok Press, 1967.
RHM, ERNST JULIUS GNTHER
Rosenthal, A. M., and Arthur Gelb. One More Victim. New York: New American Library, 1967.
Schmaltz, William. Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Washington, DC: Brasseys, 2001.
Simonelli, Frederick. American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi
Party. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
RHM, ERNST JULIUS GNTHER (18871934)

In April 1934, Adolf Hitler and other leaders of his German Nazi Party became
convinced that longtime ally Ernst Rhmcommander of the partys brownshirted militia, the Sturmabteilung (Storm Battalion, or SA)was plotting to
seize control of the party and Germany. Whether this idea derived from Rhms
public criticism of Hitler or private jealousy within the movement still remains
unclear. By June 24, Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and Schutzstaffel (SS)
Security Service Reinhard Heydrich had prepared a dossier of false evidence indicating that French agents had bribed Rhm to overthrow Hitler, including a
fabricated SA death list of top Nazi leaders. On June 28, Hitler phoned Rhm
with an order to assemble all SA leaders at a resort in Bad Wiessee, Bavaria, two
days later. They were arrested there on June 30, with other SA officers swept
up in dragnets continuing through July 2, and confined together at Stadelheim
Prison in Munich. On July 2, SS-Brigadefhrer Theodor Eicke offered Rhm
a pistol and a chance to kill himself, but Rhm refused, saying, If I am to be
killed, let Adolf do it himself. Eicke returned 10 minutes later and shot Rhm.
Estimates of other SA members killed during that Night of the Long Knives
range from 77 to 1,000 or more. In a speech on July 13, Hitler branded the
dead as traitors and alluded to claims that Rhm was a homosexual.
Ernst Rhm was born in Munich on November 28, 1887, the youngest child
of a railroad worker known for his domestic violence. At age 18, in July 1906,
Rhm chose a military career for himself, joining the Royal Bavarian 10th Infantry Regiment as a cadet. Commissioned in March 1908, he had risen to
command the 10th Regiments 1st Battalion by the time World War I began
in August 1914. Barely one month later, he suffered a serious face wound in
France, emerging scarred for life. Promoted to second lieutenant in April 1915,
Rhm was wounded againthis time in the chestat Verdun, in June 1916.
Another promotion, to captain, followed in April 1917, but Rhms latest injury kept him out of battle, serving as a staff officer. Spanish influenza nearly
claimed his life in October 1918, but he survived once more, to serve as an adjutant in the postwar Reichswehr after Germanys humiliating defeat.
Like many other German veterans, Rhm loathed the terms imposed on
Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, seeking scapegoats to blame for his Fatherlands loss of the war. In April 1919, he joined a newly formed paramilitary
group, the Bayerisches Freikorpsfr den Grenzschutz Ost (Bavarian Free Corps
of the Eastern Border), led by Colonel Franz Ritter von Epp, which toppled
481
482
RHM, ERNST JULIUS GNTHER
Munichs short-lived Red Republic on May 3, 1919. Soon afterward, Rhm

shifted his allegiance to the German Workers Party, which dissolved in February 1920 to become National Socialist German Workers Party (shortened to
Nazis). Rhm soon became a close friend and ally of Adolf Hitler, joining in
the abortive Munich Beer Hall Putsch of November 9, 1923, and was convicted of treason three months later, though his 15-month prison term was
suspended.
In April 1924, Rhm was elected to the Reichstag as a Nazi representative,
but voters declined to grant him a second term the following year. Meanwhile, with the SA banned by law, he organized the Frontbann as a thinly
veiled replacement, claiming 30,000 members by April 1925. A quarrel with
Hitler over the Frontbanns future prompted Rhm to resign from the party
on May 1, 1925, and he lived in seclusion until 1928, when he accepted a
commission as lieutenant colonel in the Bolivian army, under President Hernando Siles Reyes. That position lasted until May 1930, when rebels deposed
Siles and Rhm sought sanctuary in the German embassy. Hitler reached him
there, by telephone, in September 1930, reporting Nazi victories in the latest federal election, and persuaded Rhm to rejoin the party as leader of the
newly revived SA.
When Rhm assumed that office in January 1931, the SA had more the
a million members nationwide, serving as escorts for Nazi leaders, harassing Jews, and engaging in street fights with leftist opponents. Under Rhm,
the group expanded its activities to include intimidation of unfriendly politicians, journalists, civic leaders, and entrepreneurs. Curiously, despite growing
Nazi alliances with industry, Rhm often sent his Brownshirts to defend striking workers and assault nonunion scabs. During that same hectic period, an
anti-Nazi newspaper, the Munich Post, obtained and published a letter from
Rhm to a friend, in which he admitted multiple homosexual affairs. Hitler, although despising gays nearly as much as he hated Jews, ignored those indiscretions for the moment, but began compiling secret files on Rhm and other gay
SA officers, including Rhms chief deputy, Edmund Heines.
When Hitler became Germanys chancellor in January 1933, the SA assumed
a new role auxiliary police, ousting anti-Nazi officials from power in various
cities. By that time, however, Hitler had begun deemphasizing the socialist
aspect of National Socialism, cementing alliances with major German industrialists at the expense of Rhms desire for radical change in the countrys social
structure. Working-class SA members disdained capitalism as a Jewish system,
calling for nationalization of industry, and Rhm predicted a second revolution against conservative entrepreneurs. Critics within the Nazi Party began
comparing the SA to beefsteak, brown on the outside and red on the inside,
thereby linking them implicitly to communism. Seemingly deaf to those rumblings, in February 1934 Rhm called for a merger of the Reichswehr (restricted
ROMERO Y GALDMEZ, SCAR ARNULFO
to 100,000 men under the Treaty of Versailles) with the SA, which he would
command as minister of defense. Days later, Hitler told Anthony Edensoon
to be Britains foreign secretary, later prime ministerthat he planned to reduce the SAs ranks by two-thirds.
Further impetus for the SA purge came in April 1934, when Hitler learned
that Paul von Hindenburg, president of the Weimar Republic, was terminally
ill and not expected to live out the year. While still in power, though, Hindenburg remained determined to suppress political mayhem in Germany. Early
June brought a warning from Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg, advising Hitler that failure to curb SA violence would result in martial law, handing the reins of government to the Reichswehr. Hitler then struck a bargain
with army leaders to eliminate the SA via Operation Hummingbird. Others killed with Rhm in the ensuing purge included ex-chancellor Kurt von
Schleicher, former Bavarian minister president Gustav Ritter von Kahr (who
suppressed the Munich putsch in 1923), and Gregor Strasser (leader of a relatively left-wing faction of the Nazi Party). With President Hindenburgs death
in August 1934, Adolf Hitler effectively seized absolute control of the German
government.
See also: Heydrich, Reinhard Tristan Eugen (19041942); Hitler, Adolf (18891945)
Attempted.
Further Reading
Atcherly, Tony, and Mark Carey. Hitlers Gay Traitor: The Story of Ernst Rhm, Chief of
Staff of the S.A. Bloomington, IN: Trafford Publishing, 2007.
Gallo, Max. The Night of the Long Knives: June 2930, 1934. New York: Da Capo Press,
1997.
Hancock, Eleanor. Ernst Rhm: Hitlers SA Chief of Staff. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Hatch, Nicholas. The Brown Battalions: Hitlers SA in Word and Deed. Nashville, TN:
Turner Publishing, 2000.
Jablonsky, David. Rohm and Hitler: The Continuity of Political-Military Discord.
Journal of Contemporary History 23 (July 1988): 36786.
Maracin, Paul. The Night of the Long Knives: Forty-eight Hours that Changed the History of
the World. New York: The Lyons Press, 2004.

(19171980)
On March 24, 1980, moments after performing a requiem mass at a hospital
in San Salvador, Archbishop scar Romero was shot at close range by a gunman posing as a newspaper photographer. A declassified memo from the U.S.
Department of Defense reports that a single .22-caliber bullet struck Romero in
the chest, killing him instantly. The gunman escaped and remains unidentified
483
484
ROMERO Y GALD MEZ, SCAR ARNULFO
today. Romeros murder came one day after he delivered a sermon calling upon
El Salvadors soldiers, as Christians, to obey Gods law and cease brutal repression of their fellow Salvadorans. Romero was the seventh Roman Catholic
priest to be slain by death squads since March 1977.
scar Romero y Galdmez was born on August 15, 1917, at Ciudad Barrios in El Salvadors San Miguel Department. At that time, the country was
run by the Melendez-Quinonez dynasty, with 13 wealthy families controlling
40 percent of El Salvadors land. Despite parental training as a carpenter,
Romero was drawn to the Catholic Church, being ordained in Rome on April 4,
1942. His plans to remain in Italy and earn a doctorate in theology were interrupted by Allied invaders a year later, prompting Romero to return home by
way of Spain and Cuba. At the latter stop, he was detained for several months
as a suspected fascist fugitive, the finally released to Mexico, and one from
there toward home.
Upon returning to El Salvador, Romero served as a parish priest in Anamors
and San Miguel, remaining in the latter post until 1966, when he was named
as secretary of the Bishop Conference for El Salvador, doubling as director of
the archdiocesan newspaper Orientacin. His relatively conservative outlook
irritated more progressive priests, committed to liberation theologys quasiMarxist focus on helping the poor, but it pleased Romeros superiors. In 1970,
he was named auxiliary bishop to San Salvador archbishop Luis Chvez y
Gonzlez, then promoted to bishop of the Diocese of Santiago de Mara in December 1975. On February 23, 1977, Romero reached the pinnacle of his career with appointment as archbishop of San Salvador.
Seventeen days after Romeros last promotion, death squad gunmen murdered a personal friend, progressive Jesuit Father Rutilio Grande Garca,
and two companions near El Paisnal, in the parish of Aguilares. The triple
murder radically changed Romeros outlook, prompting him to say, When
I looked at Rutilio lying there dead I thought, If they have killed him for
doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path. After newspapers blamed the murders on common criminal activity, Romero published
a rebuttal reading:
The true reason for [Grandes] death was his prophetic and pastoral efforts to
raise the consciousness of the people throughout his parish. Father Grande,
without offending and forcing himself upon his flock in the practice of their religion, was only slowly forming a genuine community of faith, hope and love
among them, he was making them aware of their dignity as individuals, of their
basic rights as words, his was an effort toward comprehensive human development. This post-Vatican Council ecclesiastical effort is certainly not agreeable to
everyone, because it awakens the consciousness of the people. It is work that
disturbs many; and to end it, it was necessary to liquidate its proponent.
President Arturo Armando Molina ignored Romeros demand for a full investigation, and the slaughter of clergy continued. On May 11, 1977, Father
Alfonso Navarro Oviedo was gunned down on the outskirts of San Salvador.
Father Ernesto Barrera died in an ambush at Mejicanos, on November 28,
1978. On January 20, 1979, government troops stormed a Catholic retreat
for young workers, killing Father Octavio Ortiz Luna and four other victims,
crushing the priests head beneath a military vehicle to prevent an open-casket
funeral. Six months later to the day, on June 20, gunmen killed Father Rafael
Palacios at Suchitoto. Father Alirio Napolen Macas was the last to die before
Romero, murdered on August 4, 1979.
Two months later, a five-man revolutionary junta deposed Salvadoran president Carlos Humberto Romero, initiating a program of land reform coupled
with nationalization of El Salvadors the banking, coffee, and sugar industries. Dissension within the junta frustrated further progress, however, and
violence against the church persisted, culminating with Archbishop Romeros assassination in March 1980. On January 10, 1981, the leftist Farabundo
Mart National Liberation Front launched a guerrilla war against the government, prompting U.S. support for the ruling junta in the civil war continuing
until January 1992. In the midst of that mayhem, government troops massacred six more Jesuit priests at San Salvadors Central American University
on November 16, 1989. Victims included Fathers Ignacio Ellacura, Amando
Lpez, Joaqun Lpez y Lpez, Ignacio Martn-Baro, Segundo Montes, and
Juan Ramn Moreno.
Archbishop Romero was buried in San Salvador, following a mass attended
by 250,000 mourners. At that ceremony, Cardinal Corripio Ahumada declared
Romero a beloved, peacemaking man of God, predicting that his blood will
give fruit to brotherhood, love and peace. That did not prove to be the case,
in fact, as gunfire and explosions rocked the capital, leaving an estimated 30 to
50 persons dead by days end.
Romeros assassination remains officially unsolved today, despite a 1986 statement from former U.S. ambassador Robert White that there was sufficient evidence to convict Roberto DAubuisson, ex-mayor of San Salvador, on charges
of ordering the murder. DAubuissons chief of security, Salvadoran air force
captain lvaro Rafael Saravia, allegedly directed the assassination. In 2003, the
U.S.-based Center for Justice and Accountability filed a federal lawsuit against
Saravia under the Alien Tort Claims Act, on charges of aiding, conspiring, and
participating in Romeros murder. The court found him responsible and imposed a $10 million fine on Saravia, then a resident of California. On the 30th
anniversary of Romeros death, President Mauricio Funes officially apologized
for the crime, noting admitting that those responsible unfortunately acted with
the protection, collaboration or participation of state agents.
485
486
R O O S E V E L T, T H E O D O R E
In 1997, Romero was named as a candidate for beatification and canonization as a saint. Pope John Paul II graced him that year, with the title Servant
of God, but progress toward sainthood has been held in abeyance pending
further investigation of Romeros heroism and martyrdom. Under canonical
law, if he is found to be a hero without martyrdom, he must then be attributed
with performing a verified miracle. The Church of England, meanwhile, recognizes Romero as one of ten 20th-century martyrs depicted in statuary above
the Great West Door of Londons Westminster Abbey. In 2008, the European
magazine A Different View listed Romero among its 15 Champions of World
Democracy. On December 21, 2010, the United Nations General Assembly
cited Romero by name in proclaiming March 24 as the International Day for
the Right to the Truth concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the
Dignity of Victims.
Romeros life and death have also inspired multiple Hollywood productions.
Ren Enrquez portrayed Romero in a 1983 made-for-television film, Choices
of the Heart, focused on the rape-murders of four U.S. nuns in El Salvador.
Director Oliver Stone cast Jos Carlos Ruiz as Romero in Salvador (1986), and
Raul Julia claimed the title role in Romero (1989). Another made-for-TV movie,
Have No Fear: The Life of Pope John Paul II (2005), cast Joaquim de Almeida as
Romero. A year later, Carlos Kaniowsky tackled the part in the Italian biopic
Karol, una papa rimastouomo (also charting the life of John Paul II). Most recently, in 2010, file footage of Romero in life was compiled for Monseor, the
Last Journey of scar Romero.
Further Reading
Americas Watch. El Salvadors Decade of Terror: Human Rights Since the Assassination of
Archbishop Romero. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.
Dada, Carlos. How we killed Archbishop Romero. El Faro. http://www.elfaro.net/
es/201003/noticias/1416.
Doyle, Kate, and Emily Willard. Learn from History: 31st Anniversary of the Assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. The National Security Archive. http://www
.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB339/index.htm.
Erdozain, Placido. Archbishop Romero: Martyr of Salvador. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
1981.
Wright, Scott. Oscar Romero and the Communion of the Saints. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books, 2010.
ROOSEVELT, THEODORE (18581919)

ATTEMPTED
On October 14, 1912, while campaigning for a third term as president of the
United States, Theodore Roosevelt attended a banquet at the Gilpatrick Hotel
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After the meal, while departing for a speech at the
Milwaukee Auditorium, Roosevelt was accosted by John Flammang Schrank,

a German-born saloon keeper from New York City, who shot him with a .38
caliber revolver. The bullet passed through Roosevelts metal eyeglass case and
his 50-page speech, folded in his coats breast pocket, before penetrating his
chest. Bystanders seized Schrank at the scene, and Roosevelt went on to deliver
his speech as scheduled, before proceeding to a hospital. Police found a diary
in Schranks pocket, with entries claiming the ghost of murdered President William McKinley told him to kill Roosevelt as an act of revenge. Judged legally
insane by court-appointed psychiatrists, Schrank was committed to Waupun,
Wisconsins Central State Mental Hospital, where he remained until bronchial
pneumonia claimed his life in September 1943.
Theodore Teddy Roosevelt was born to a wealthy New York City family
on October 27, 1858. Plagued with asthma and other ailments during childhood, he was home-schooled by tutors, developing a lifelong fascination with
zoology and taxidermy. Aided by an eidetic memory, he matriculated to Harvard University in 1876, with a major in biology. He also compensated for his
early childhood weakness by boxing and rowing at Harvard, graduating magna
cum laude in 1880. He then enrolled at Columbia Law School, but showed no
real interest in litigation, and
dropped out in 1881 to campaign for a seat in New Yorks
State Assembly, declaring his
new lifes goal to be one of the
governing class. Victory in that
campaign launched Roosevelts
long political career, interrupted periodically by wideranging travels, establishment
of ranches on the West, and
publication of several memoirs
on big-game hunting.
Roosevelt married Alice Hathaway Lee in October 1880,
then lost her to kidney disease
in February 1884, on the fourth
anniversary of their engagement. Typhoid fever killed his
mother that same day, whereupon Roosevelt scrawled an
X in his diary and wrote, The President Roosevelt was shot by John Flammang
light has gone out of my life. Schrank while leaving a banquet at Gilpatrick HoLosing himself for two years as tel in Milwaukee, in 1912. (Library of Congress)
487
488
a rancher in the Dakota Badlands, he returned to run for mayor of New York
City in 1886, placing third in a field of three candidates.
Roosevelt revived his political career in 1888, campaigning for victorious
presidential hopeful William Henry Harrison. Rewarded with an appointment to the U.S. Civil Service Commission, he served there until 1895, then
accepted appointment as New York Citys police commissioner. The departments official history describes Roosevelt as an iron-willed leader of unimpeachable honesty, possessed a reforming zeal. As commissioner, he
established new disciplinary rules, created a bicycle squad to enforce traffic ordinances, issued standardized firearms to all officers, mandated annual
physical examinations for his officers, punished corruption, and shunned
political cronyism, appointing 1,600 recruits based solely on physical and
mental qualifications.
Roosevelt left the police force in April 1897, when President William McKinley appointed him to serve as assistant secretary of the navy. That job proved
short-lived, as the outbreak of war with Spain led Roosevelt to form the 1st
United States Volunteer Cavalry, commonly nicknamed Rough Riders. Leading that unit as a lieutenant colonel, Roosevelt engaged in several battles, most
famously at San Juan Hill on July 1, 1898 (where his cavalry fought as dismounted infantry). Roosevelt dubbed the four-month conflict with Spain a
splendid little war, emerging with his political future assured.
Elected as New Yorks governor in November 1898, Roosevelt brought
the same reforming zeal to that office as he had to the New York Police Department. In fact, he proved such an ardent foe of political corruption that
Republican Party boss Thomas Collier Platt persuaded President McKinley
to draft Roosevelt as his second-term running mate, thereby removing Roosevelt from the governors mansion two years ahead of schedule. Other party
bosses, including Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio, opposed Roosevelts vicepresidential nomination, regarding him as a loose cannon beyond their
control. Those fears proved accurate in September 1901, when McKinleys
assassination elevated Roosevelt to the White House. Hanna, enraged, told
colleagues, Now look! That damned cowboy is president of the United
States!
It was worse than that for Roosevelts political enemies, as he inaugurated
the United States Progressive Era, establishing himself as an ardent conservationist and zealousif selectivetrust buster, curbing the power of monopolistic corporations. (U.S. Steel was exempt under Roosevelts tenure, labeled
a good trust.) He also violated precedent by negotiating with labor unions,
as when he intervened in a May 1902 strike to obtain higher pay and shorter
hours for members of the United Mine Workers. Influenced by the work of
muckraking journalists, in 1906, Roosevelt promoted the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act to protect U.S. consumers. From
1907 to 1908, Roosevelt served as president of the American School Hygiene
Association, and in 1909 he convened the first White House Conference on

the Care of Dependent Children.
In foreign policy, Roosevelt proved more conservative. His corollary to the
Monroe Doctrine, issued in 1905, proclaimed the United States right to exercise international policy power through armed intervention, ostensibly to
keep small countries independent from their larger neighbors or European
imperialists (while asserting U.S. primacy over their natural resources). Two
years later, a Gentlemans Agreement with Japan banned segregation of Japanese students in U.S. schools, and essentially eliminated emigration from Japan
to California. In December 1907, Roosevelt dispatched the U.S. Great White
Fleet16 battleships and various escort vesselsa 14-month world cruise,
stopping at 20 ports of call on every continent except Antarctica. Although
ostensibly a training exercise, this flaunting of U.S. naval power was widely
regarded as an extension of Roosevelts big stick diplomacy, and more specifically designed to teach Japan a lesson in polite behavior.
Roosevelts crowning diplomatic achievement occurred on September 5,
1905, when representatives from Japan and Russia met at the Portsmouth Naval
Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, to sign a treaty ending the 19-month Russo-Japanese
War for control over Korea and Manchuria. Roosevelt was a prime mover
in those negotiations, and for his efforts received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.
Roosevelt declined to seek another term in 1908, bypassing Vice President Charles Fairbanks to endorse Secretary of War William Taft as his preferred successor. Buoyed by Roosevelts popularity, Taft defeated Democratic
rival William Jennings Bryan by a margin of 1.2 million votes that November.
Ironically, Taft soon proved more progressive in some respects than his mentor, filing 90 antitrust lawsuits in four years, compared to 54 filed by trustbusting Roosevelts Justice Department in eight. His final break with Roosevelt
occurred when Taft filed suit against U.S. SteelRoosevelts good trust
for a Tennessee company during Roosevelts White House tenure. Meanwhile,
though he supported labor unions publicly, Taft also created the conservative
U.S. Chamber of Commerce to lobby against union advances.
Furious, Roosevelt announced his candidacy for an unprecedented third
term in 1912, challenging incumbent Taft. Between March and May, Roosevelt swept Republican primaries, winning 1,183,238 popular votes against
800,441 for Taft and 327,357 for Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette Sr.
Approaching the partys national convention in June, Roosevelt claimed 571
delegates, versus 439 for Taft (with 540 required for nomination). Taft, however, had a stranglehold on the Republican political machine. After a bitter
fight over the rules for nomination, Taft carried the day with 556 delegate
votes, while 349 Roosevelt delegates abstained and only 109 cast votes for the
ex-president.
Undaunted, Roosevelt bolted to create a new Progressive Party, chaired
by California Governor Hiram Johnson. Funded chiefly by U.S. Steel
489
490
and International Harvesteranother good trust sued by Tafts Justice

Departmentthe party nominated Roosevelt for president in August 1912,
with Johnson as his running mate. The partys platform included womens
suffrage; a National Health Service; social insurance for the elderly, unemployed, and disabled; a minimum wage law for women; an eight-hour work
day; limited injunctions against strikers; direct election of U.S. senators;
recall elections; strict limits on campaign contributions with disclosure of
donors; registration of lobbyists; and other measures deemed radical at
the time.
After his near-death experience in Wisconsin, Rooseveltperhaps recalling President McKinleys death in the care of physiciansdeclined surgery to
remove Schranks bullet, but reluctantly accepted an injection of tetanus antitoxin. (The slug was never removed, and caused no lasting physical impairment.) Both Taft and Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson suspended their
campaigns until Roosevelt let the hospital on October 23, two weeks before the
general election. On November 5, Wilson led the field with 6,296,284 votes,
against 4,122,721 for Roosevelt, 3,486,242 for Taft, and 901,551 for Socialist
Party candidate Eugene Debs.
Back in private life for good, Roosevelt continued his pattern of strenuous
behavior. In December 1913, with son Kermit, he embarked on a grueling
expedition to explore an uncharted tributary of the Amazon River, the Rio da
Duvida (River of Doubt). That epic 625-mile journey nearly killed the aging
Rough Rider, trimming 50 pounds from his starting weight of 220, leaving him
delirious with raging malarial fever, but he survived to see the Rio da Duvida renamed as Rio Roosevelt. Finally stricken with inflammatory rheumatism in October 1918, Roosevelt died in his sleep, from coronary thrombosis, on January
6, 1919. Eight-two years later, in January 2001, President Bill Clinton awarded
Roosevelt a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions at San
Juan Hill, in the Spanish-American War. Roosevelt remains the only U.S. president to receive that medal, and the only person in history to receive both the
Medal of Honor and the Nobel Peace Prize.
See also: McKinley, William, Jr. (18431901).
Further Reading
Brinkley, Douglas. The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.
Foley, W. J. A Bullet and a Bull Moose. JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association 209 (1969): 203538.
Gores, Stan. The Attempted Assassination of Teddy Roosevelt. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, 1977.
Gould, Lewis. Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Random House, 1979.
R YA N , L E O J O S E P H , J R .
RYAN, LEO JOSEPH, JR. (19251978)

On November 14, 1978, California congressman Leo Ryan flew from Washington, D.C., to Guyana with a delegation of government officials, media representatives, and relatives of persons living at Jonestown, a rural community
populated by members of a controversial sect, the Peoples Temple. Three days
later, after failed attempts to reach sect leader James Warren Jones via radio,
Ryan proceeded from Georgetown to Jonestown with a party including Peoples
Temple attorneys Mark Lane and Charles Garry, U.S. embassy official Richard
Dwyer, a Guyanese ministry of information officer, nine journalists, and four
members of the concerned relatives committee. Despite an initial warm welcome, the visitors were barred from spending that night in Jonestown, sent to
sleep instead at nearby Port Kaituma airfield. After a second day in Jonestown,
Ryans party prepared to leave with 14 Temple defectors who wished to leave
Guyana. As Ryans plane arrived at 5:10 P.M., Temple escorts opened fire on
his party with automatic weapons, killing Ryan and four others, wounding
nine more. Guyanese soldiers reached Jonestown on November 16, finding
909 cultists dead, many from apparent suicide by poison, and Jones and some
others were shot.
Leo Ryan was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on May 5,
1925. His family moved often
during his childhood, spending time in five other states.
Ryan graduated from a Wisconsin high school in 1943, then
briefly attended Bates College
in Lewiston, Maine, where he
participated in the V-12 Navy
College Training Program prior
to serving on a U.S. Navy submarine from 1943 to 1946.
Upon discharge from the navy,
he enrolled at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska,
earning a BA in 1949 and an
MS two years later.
Fresh from college, Ryan
taught history at Capuchino
High School in San Bruno,
California, while doubling as a Congressman Leo Ryan was killed along with othcity councilman from 1956. In ers in his party in an ambush at a landing strip
January 1961, he chaperoned while leaving Jonestown. (Bettmann/Corbis)
491
492
Capuchino Highs marching band when it joined in President John Kennedys

(JFK) inaugural parade. Inspired by JFKs call to public serviceAsk not what
your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your countryRyan
decided to pursue a full-time career in politics.
In 1962, Ryan was elected mayor of South San Francisco, then moved up
to a seat in the California State Assembly the following year, holding that post
through 1972. Following the Watts riots of August 1965, Ryan worked as a
substitute teacher in that Los Angeles ghetto, collecting first-hand information
on local living conditions. Five years later, he arranged his own arrest under a
pseudonym and spent 10 days in notorious Folsom Prison, afterward reporting on its bleak conditions to a state committee supervising prison reform.
In 1973, voters in Californias 11th congressional district sent Ryan to the
House of Representatives. During his tenure in Washington, he visited Newfoundland to observe and report on the annual slaughter of seals, then turned
his attention to lapses in congressional oversight of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1974, with Iowa senator Harold Hughes, Ryan coauthored the HughesRyan Act, requiring the U.S. president to report all covert
CIA operations to six congressional committees within a set time limit.
With that accomplished, Ryan focused next on the detrimental aspects of
fringe religions and cults. He was an early critic of Scientology, founded by
science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard with headquarters in San Bernardino,
California, and of the Korean-based Unification Church, founded and led by
Sun Myung Moon (described by multiple sources as a CIA asset in South
Korea). In letters to constituents, Ryan called cult leaders jackals who feed on
children and young adults who are too emotionally weak to stand by themselves when they reach the age of consent.
Ryans involvement with the Peoples Temple began in 1977, after Jones
moved his headquarters and most of his flock from San Francisco to Guyana,
cutting off communications with relatives left behind in the United States. Reports of physical and sexual abuse began to filter out of Jonestown, prompting
Ryan and 90 other congressmen to contact Guyanese prime minister Forbes
Burnham, seeking intervention on behalf of U.S. citizens in Jonestown. At the
same time, Ryan accused the U.S. State Department of repeatedly stonewalling his inquiries, assuring him that everything was fine in Jonestown. Ryan
countered those assertions by calling Jonestown a gulag and vowing aid to
free the captives. Decades later, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Ryan
had bucked the local Democratic establishment and the Jimmy Carter administrations State Department to conduct his own on-site investigation of the
cult, thus leading to his death.
Whereas most members of the Peoples Temple died with Ryan, one aid to
James Jones, Lawrence John Layton, was convicted by a federal court, in 1986,
on charges including conspiracy to murder Ryan and Richard Dwyer, late
MARK LANE
Mark Lane (born on February 24, 1927) is a U.S. attorney, author, and former New York state legislator, most commonly associated with criticism of
the Warren Commissions report on the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy. His books on that subject include Rush to Judgment (1966),
A Citizens Dissent (1968), Plausible Denial (1991), and Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK (2011). The 1973 conspiracy thriller
Executive Action was reportedly based in large part on Lanes earlier writings. Before that films release, in 1970, Lane joined several committees
investigating alleged U.S. war crimes in Vietnam and published his findings in Conversations with Americans: Testimony from 32 Vietnam Veterans.
Another of Lanes books, Arcadia (1970), helped secure the release of a
defendant wrongfully convicted of mass murder in Florida. In his legal capacity, Lane has represented James Earl Ray, convicted assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and also the Peoples Temple, emerging as a survivor
of the 1978 Guyana massacre. He published books on both cases: Code
Name Zorro (1978, coauthored with activist-comedian Dick Gregory) suggests a government conspiracy against Dr. King, and The Strongest Poison
(1980), claims involvement by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the
Jonestown tragedy.
deputy chief of mission for the United States in Guyana. On March 3, 1987,
Layton received concurrent life prison terms for aiding and abetting Ryans
murder, and for conspiracy to murder an internationally protected person
(Dwyer), plus 15 additional years on lesser counts. He was paroled in April
2002.
Leo Ryans death at Jonestown proved irresistible to Hollywood. Actor Gene
Barry was cast as Ryan in the feature film Guyana: Crime of the Century (1979),
and Ned Beatty took over the role a year later, for the television miniseries Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones. On November 18, 1983, Ryan was posthumously awarded a Congressional Gold Medal, marking his status as the only
member of Congress ever killed in the line of duty.
Further Reading
Hall, John. Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1987.
Lane, Mark. The Strongest Poison. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1980.
Nugent, John. White Night: The Untold Story of What Happened BeforeAnd After
Jonestown. New York: Rawson, Wade Publishers, 1979.
493
494
R Z AY E V G U R B A N O G L U , R A I L
Reiterman, Tim, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His
People. New York: Dutton, 1982.
U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs. The Assassination of Representative Leo J. Ryan and the Jonestown, Guyana Tragedy (May 15, 1979). http://
www.rickross.com/reference/jonestown/jonestown2.html.
RZAYEV GURBANOGLU, RAIL (19452009)

On February 11, 2009, an unknown gunman ambushed Lieutenant General
Rail Rzayev, commander of the Azerbaijani air force, outside his home in Baku,
the nations capital. Shot once in the head, Rzayev survived to reach a local
hospital, but died soon after arriving. Nijmedin Sadykhov, head of the Azeri
military general staff, told reporters that security cameras mounted outside
Rzayevs house might solve the crime. According to preliminary information,
he announced, Rzayevs car had been under surveillance for several days.
Eight months later, with no arrests in sight, General Prosecutor Zakir Garalov
said that the investigation continues and it is under the control of President
[Ilham Heydaroglu] Aliyev. Garalov also said that several peopleincluding
Rafiyev assistant, Major Aydin Rafiyev, and his aide-de-camp, Captain Anar
Gashimovwere under investigation as possible conspirators. Both men had
been arrested on lesser charges of stealing some items, never specified, from
Rzayevs office after the shooting. As this book went to press, the crime remained officially unsolved.
Rail Rzayev Gurbanoglu was born at Salyan, in eastern Azerbaijan, on
March 10, 1945. After completing his secondary education in Sumgayit, in
1962, he enrolled at Moscows National Research University of Aviation, Missile and Aerospace Systems, in that institutions Aircraft Electronics and Communication Systems program. Graduating there in 1966, he was posted to
Bakus Airforce District as a senior technician, later promoted to deputy division commander. In 1975, he entered Kalinins Marshal Georgy Zhukov Military Command Academy of Air Defense, a center dedicated to research on
problems of operational art and tactics, command, communications, and control in air-defense matters. From 1980 to 1992, Rzayev held various highranking posts in the Soviet air force.
The collapse of Russian communism liberated Azerbaijan from Soviet control in 1992, and Rzayev returned to serve as department chief of the newly
created Azerbaijani Air and Air Defense Force. In 1993, President Heydar
Alirzaoglu Aliyev issued a decree naming Rzayev deputy minister of defense
and commander of the Azerbaijani Air and Air Defense Force. In 1994, Rzayev
was promoted to major general, and then again to lieutenant general in 2002.
His military awards included the Azerbaijani Flag Order (created by President
Abulfaz Elchibey in November 1992), and the Veten Ughrunda (In the Name
of Motherland) Medal.
R Z AY E V G U R B A N O G L U , R A I L
Despite a short list of possible suspects, no cogent motive for Rzayevs murder
has yet been suggested. An Azeri criminal lawyer, speaking anonymously, suggested that the triggerman was a foreign contract killer, saying, He came to Baku,
fulfilled the order, and managed to leave Azerbaijan the same day or shortly after
that. Another attorney in Baku, Eyyub Kerimovalso the editor in chief of the
legal newspaper Femida (Justice) 007, noted in October 2005 that the states
failure to produce a motive or suspect shows the lack of any real progress in the
investigation.
Further Reading
Abbasov, Shahin. Azerbaijan: Air Force Commanders Assassination May Have Been an
Inside JobBaku Prosecutor. Eurasianet (October 4, 2009). http://www.eurasianet
.org/departments/insightb/articles/eav100509a.shtml.
Azerbaijan air force head killed. BBC News, February 11, 2009. http://news.bbc
.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7882911.stm.
De Waal, Thomas. Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War. New
York: New York University Press, 2013.
495
S
S CARNEIRO, FRANCISCO MANUEL
LUMBRALES DE (19341980)
On December 4, 1980, Portuguese prime minister S Carneiro, left Lisbon,
traveling with Defense Minister Adelino Amaro da Costa, their wives, and two
pilots to a presidential election rally in Porto, Portugals second-largest city.
On takeoff from Lisbon Portela Airport, witnesses reported seeing pieces falling off the prime ministers light twin-engine Cessna 421. Moments later, the
plane crashed into a building in Camarate, a Lisbon suburb, killing all six
persons aboard. Twenty-four years later, Nuno Melo, president of the fourth
parliamentary commission to investigate the crash, told journalists, We have
evidence of an explosive device placed under the floor of the pilots cabin,
which had sufficient strength to damage control cables and injure the pilots. It
seems sufficiently clear to me that the Cessna 421A crashed at Camarate during the night of December 4, 1980 due to sabotage. Thus far, no suspects have
been charged with the crime.
Francisco de S Carneiro was born in Porto, Portugal, the son of a successful
attorney and a mother descended from Spanish royalty, on July 19, 1934. He followed in his fathers footsteps as a lawyer, then turned to politics as a National
Assembly member, working toward gradual dissolution of Prime Minister Antnio de Oliveira Salazars quasi-fascist dictatorship. Salazar retired in September
1968, after 36 years in charge, but successor Marcelo Caetano proved no more
tolerant of dissent. In April 1974, a nearly bloodless military coupthe Carnation Revolutiondeposed Caetano and restored democracy in Portugal.
One month later, S Carneiro founded the Popular Democratic Party (later
the Social Democratic Party) with a group of like-minded liberals, serving as
its first secretary general. He served as minister without portfolio under the
National Salvation Junta and Prime Minister Vasco Gonalves, then won election as a deputy to the new Constitutional Assembly in 1975. The following
year, in another government shuffle, S Carneiro was elected to the Assembly
of the Republic, doubling as president of his party. He resigned the latter post
in 1977, but was called back by acclamation to reclaim it in 1978. In 1979, S
Carneiro forged the Democratic Alliancea coalition of his Social Democrats,
the right-wing Democratic and Social Centre Party, and two small groups
to win 128 of 250 seats in parliament. In January 1980, President Antnio
498
S C A R N E I R O, F R A N C I S C O M A N U E L L U M B R A L E S D E
Ramalho Eanes called on S Carneiro to form Portugals first majority government since the revolution, leading it as prime minister. At the time of his death,
S Carneiro was campaigning for Democratic Alliance presidential candidate
Antnio Soares Carneiro (no relation).
According to investigator Nuno Melo, the plot that claimed S Carneiros
life had its roots in the United Statesspecifically, the so-called October Surprise related to the recent U.S. presidential elections. Incumbent president
Jimmy Carter had failed to rescue or negotiate release of U.S. hostages held in
Iran since November 1979, while aides to opponent Ronald Reagan worked
secretly to free the captives on or around Election Day in November 1980. To
that end, they arranged illegal shipments of weapons (labeled as farm machinery) to Iran, with some passing through Portugal. Defense Minister Costa reportedly seized one of those shipments, angering two Portuguese collaborators
in the scheme: General Francisco da Costa Gomes (president of Portugal from
September 1974 to July 1976) and Admiral Jos Baptista Pinheiro de Azevedo
(prime minister from September 1975 to June 1976). With S Carneiro and
Costa silenced, another arms shipment cleared Lisbon for Tehran on January 22,
1981two days after President Reagan announced release of the hostages in
his inauguration speech.
Two former members of the now-defunct far-right terrorist group Commandos para a Defesa da Civilizao OcidentalCommandos for Defense of Western Civilization, or CODECOhave admitted knowledge of the S Carneiro
bombing. Fernando Farinha Simes, imprisoned on unrelated charges, waited
for Portugals 25-year statute of limitations to expire before telling his story to
journalist Jos Esteves in April 2012. That 18-page statement implicates the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger,
and convicted Iran-Contra conspirator Oliver North, whoSimes says
participated in advance discussions of the bombing. No charges have been
filed in relation to the case, nor does it seem likely that any shall be.
Further Reading
Anderson, James. The History of Portugal. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
How They Killed Mr. Francisco S Carneiro and Mr. Adelino Amaro de Costa.
Scribd. http://www.scribd.com/doc/90035961/How-they-killed-Mr-Sa-Carneiro-andMr-Amaro-da-Costa.
Magone, Jose. European Portugal: The Difficult Road to Sustainable Democracy. New York:
St. Martins Press, 1997.
Maxwell, Kenneth. The Making of Portuguese Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Mitchell, Paul. Portugal: Inquiry Concludes Bomb Killed Prime Minister Carneiro
in 1980. World Socialist Web Site (January 10, 2005). http://www.wsws.org/en/ar
ticles/2005/01/port-j10.html.
Wiarda, Howard, and Margaret Mott. Catholic Roots and Democratic Flowers: Political
Systems in Spain and Portugal. Westport, CT: Praeger: 2001.
S A D AT, A N WA R E L
SADAT, ANWAR EL (19181981)

On October 6, 1981, President Anwar El Sadat attended Egypts annual victory
parade in Cairo, staged each year to celebrate Operation Badr, Egypts crossing of the Suez Canal to support Syrian forces at the onset of the brief Yom Kippur War (October 625, 1973). Unknown to Sadat at the time, Muslim cleric
Omar Abdel-Rahman had declared a fatwa against the president over Sadats
role in negotiating peace with Israel two years earlier, and members of Egyptian
Islamic Jihad had accepted the challenge to kill him. Led by an army lieutenant,
Khalid Ahmed Showky Al-Islambouli, the hit team boarded a military truck
and joined the parade past Sadats reviewing stand, where they leapt from the
vehicle and rushed the presidential party. Islambouli hurled three grenades at
Sadat, two of them duds, while his accomplices strafed the stands with automatic rifles, killing Sadat and 11 others, Cubas ambassador to Egypt among
them. Vice President Hosni Mubarak was injured, with 27 other victims. Despite the best efforts of 11 physicians, Sadat died hours later at a Cairo hospital.
Security officers killed one attacker and captured three more at the scene, later
arresting 20 more. At trial, Islambouli and three defendants were convicted and
condemned, all executed by a firing squad on April 15, 1982.
Anwar El Sadat was born into a poor family at Mit Abu al-Kum, in the Egyptian Nile Delta, on Christmas Day 1918. His parents found the cost of feeding
Egyptian president Anwar El Sadat and 11 others died in a 1981 military uprising. (Alain
Keler/Sygma/Corbis)
499
500
S A D A T, A N W A R E L
13 children prohibitive, and Sadat spent his early childhood with his paternal
grandmother, raised to venerate a cast of heroes including Indias Mohandas
Gandhi, Turkish nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, and Egyptian villagers who battled British soldiers in the Denshawai Incident of June 1906.
Committed to Egyptian nationalism, Sadat graduated from Cairos Royal Military Academy in 1938 and joined the army as a second lieutenant posted in
Sudan (then part of Egypt). After meeting future president Gamal Abdel Nasser
there, Sadat joined the Free Officers Movement, dedicated to toppling Egypts
monarchy and expelling its British supporters.
That goal was naturally deemed subversive, and Sadat was jailed in World
War II on charges of collaborating with Axis forcesItaly and Germany
against Britain and Egypts king Farouk I. Seven years after V-E Day (Victory
in Europe Day), Sadat joined in the military coup led by Nasser and General
Muhammad Naguib, which deposed Farouk and established the Republic of
Egypt on July 23, 1952. Naguib took office as Egypts first president five days
later, succeeded by Nasser in November 1954. Nasser chose Sadat to serve as
minister of state in 1954, and promoted him five years later to secretary to the
National Union (at the time, Egypts only political party). From 1960 through
1968, Sadat served as president of the National Assembly, doubling in 1964
as a member of Egypts Presidential Council and as one of two vice presidents
in February of that year. December 1969 saw his return as vice president, that
time serving until October 14, 1970.
At the time of Gamal Nassers death on September 28, 1970, he served
both as president of Egypt and of the larger United Arab Republic (UAR),
formed by a merger with Syria in February 1958. Sadat inherited both offices on October 15, 1970, then dissolved the UAR in September 1971. At
home, meanwhile, in May 1971, he declared a Corrective Revolution to
purge Nasser supporters whom he viewed as being too inclined toward collaboration with the Soviet Union. At the same time, he imprisoned various
liberals and Muslims, particularly members of Takfir wal-Hijra (Excommunication and Exodus), a radical offshoot of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt during the 1960s. That move, along with Sadats
peace overtures toward Israel, would ultimately rebound against him with
fatal consequences.
Israel had dealt a humiliating defeat to Egypt and its alliesJordan and
Syria, with expeditionary forces from eight other nationsin the Six Day
War of June 1967. Four years later, a war of attrition persisted along the
Suez Canal, characterized by air raids, border skirmishes, and acts of terrorism claiming at least 5,753 lives (some estimates exceed 15,000). Sadat and
President Hafez al-Assad of Syria sought to break that stalemate in October
1973, with a surprise attack on Israeli forces occupying the Egyptian Sinai
Peninsula and Syrias Golan Heights. The result, after 19 days of combat, was
S A D AT, A N WA R E L
another Israeli triumph, with some 18,500 attackers slain, 35,000 wounded,
and 8,783 captured, against Israeli losses of 2,800 killed and 8,800 wounded.
Nonetheless, Sadat was hailed in Egypt as Hero of the [Suez] Crossing, and
the first day of the Yom Kippur War became a holiday marked by national
celebration.
In realistic terms, the latest war forced Sadat to pursue peace negotiations
with Israel, initially geared toward reopening the Suez Canal as a safe passage for merchant vessels. Agreements signed in January 1974 and September
1975 secured that goal, winning Sadat the praise of Western diplomatsand
Evangelical minister Billy Grahamwhen Sadat visited the United States in
October 1975. April 1976 saw Sadat invited to the Vatican, where Pope Paul
VI shared his opinions on the Middle East, including a fair settlement for displaced Palestinian Arabs. In November 1977, Sadat broke new ground as the
first Arab leader to visit Israel, addressing the Knesset in Jerusalem after a private meeting with Prime Minister Menachem Begin. There, he called for implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, withdrawing all
Israeli troops from territory seized in October 1967.
Israel would not agree to those terms, but Prime Minister Begin did join
Sadat in the United States 10 months later, to negotiate the Camp David Accords with President Jimmy Carter. Their agreement, accompanied by various
side letters, paved the way for signing of the EgyptIsrael Peace Treaty on
March 26, 1979, a momentous event that earned both Sadat and Begin a Nobel
Peace Prize. That treaty, coupled with Sadats close ties to Shah Mohammad
Reza Pahlavi of Iran (deposed by radical Islamic fundamentalists one month
before the treaty was signed between Israel and Egypt), left Sadat a marked
man among Muslim extremists.
Egyptian public opinion was far from unanimous in ascribing blame for Sadats assassination. Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, author of the fatwa condemning Sadat, spent three years in Egyptian jails before a court acquitted him and
ordered his expulsion from the country. Granted a tourist visa to the United
States in July 1990, despite his inclusion on a State Department terrorist watch
list, Rahman received a life prison term in October 1995, for his role in the February 1993 car-bombing of New York Citys World Trade Centers.
Meanwhile, conspiracy theories surround Sadats presidential successor,
Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak, who escaped the 1981 fusillade of bullets and grenade shrapnel with only a sprained thumb, while sitting at Sadats
right hand. Defense Minister Abu Ghazala, seated to Sadats immediate left,
also came through the storm of fire with only a bullet hole drilled through his
uniform cap. Named by one of Sadats daughters as the probable prime mover
behind her fathers assassination, Mubarak would rule Egypt as a de facto dictator until a revolution deposed him in February 2011. Six months later, he
faced trial on charges of negligence for not giving orders to stop the killing
501
502
S A D U L AY E V, A B D U L - H A L I M A B U - S A L A M O V I C H
of peaceful protestors during the revolution. Conviction in that case earned

Mubarak a life prison term in June 2012.
Perhaps ironically, in September 2010, Egyptian journalist and former Sadat
aide Mohamed Hassanein Heikal accused Sadat of assassinating Gamal Nasser
to obtain the presidency, back in 1970. According to that 40-year bombshell,
Nasser died three days after Sadat brought him a cup of coffee in a meeting
with Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Heikal further alleged that Sadat drove Nassers personal cook from the kitchen and made
the coffee himself, implying the use of some slow-acting poison. Sadats daughter filed a lawsuit against Heikal, while renewing accusations of murder against
Mubarak. No report on disposition of that litigation was available as this work
went to press.
Further Reading
Beattie, Kirk. Egypt during the Sadat Years. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Haykal, Muhammad. Autumn of Fury: The Assassination of Sadat. New York: Random
House, 1983.
Hirst, David, and Irene Beeson. Sadat. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
Israeli, Raphael. Man of Defiance: A Political Biography of Anwar Sadat. Totowa, NJ:
Barnes & Noble Books, 1985.
Kays, Doreen. Frogs and Scorpions: Egypt, Sadat and the Media. London: Frederick
Muller Ltd., 1983.
Quandt, William. Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics. Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution Press, 1986.
SADULAYEV, ABDUL-HALIM ABUSALAMOVICH (19662006)

On June 17, 2006, agents of Russias Federal Security Service (FSB) and Kadyrovite soldiersmilitia units founded by first Chechen Republic president
Akhmad Kadyrovsurrounded a small group led by Abdul-Halim Sadulayev,
president of the break-away Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, in the Chechen
town of Argun. A firefight ensued, leaving Sadulayev and at least three others dead. Spokesmen for pro-Russian president Alu Alkhanov proclaimed that
Sadulayev was planning a big terrorist attack in St. Petersburg when he was
killed. They called Sadulayevs death a decapitating blow, from which rebel
forces will never recover. In fact, one day later, Sadulayev was succeeded
by the vice president and guerrilla leader Dokka Umarov, widely known as
Russias Osama bin Laden, who continued armed attacks on Russia and its
Chechen allies until February 2012.
Abdul-Halim Sadulayev (the most common of at eight variant spellings) was
born at Argun, east of Grozny, on June 2, 1966. After completing his basic
education in Argun, Sadulayev enrolled at Grozny (now Chechen State) University to study Chechen and Russian linguistics. That plan was terminated by
S A D U L AY E V, A B D U L - H A L I M A B U - S A L A M O V I C H
eruption of the First Chechen War in December 1994, when military forces
of the Russian Federation moved to crush the secessionist Chechen Republic
of Ichkeria, founded three years earlier by Dzhokhar Dudayev. Abandoning
his studies, Sadulayev joined a militia unit based at Argun and participated in
various battles until the Khasavyurt Accord of August 1996 temporarily halted
hostilities.
The First Chechen War killed at least 25,000 combatants and 35,000 civilians (some tabulations top 100,000). It also changed Sadulayevs life forever, diverting him from academia to full-time Muslim zealotry. Between
August 1996 and the outbreak of renewed fighting three years later, he made
the obligatory Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and returned to become a fixture
on Chechen television, lecturing on the tenets of Islam. In Argun, he led his
hometowns jamia, an Islamic education center that combined missionary activity with community policing and militia drills. In 1998, Sadulayev clashed
with Khabib Abdurrakhman, a Jordanian cleric living in Chechnya whose
followers attacked Russians and non-Muslim Chechens alike. Victorious in
that brief conflict, Sadulayev saw Abdurrakhman stripped of Chechen citizenship and expelled from the country.
A year later, President Aslan Maskhadov offered Sadulayev the chairmanship
of Chechnyas Supreme Sharia Court, but Sadulayev declined, citing a lack of
desire to judge others. That choice was taken from his hands in August 1999,
when members of the Chechnya-based Islamic International Brigade invaded
Dagestan, thus touching off the Second Chechen War. Some Chechens later
claimed the raid was planned by Russia, to justify its invasion of Chechnya
on October 1. In any case, the latest war would formally continue until May
2000, then settle into a decade-long war of insurgency and terrorism, claiming
at least 75,000 lives.
Abdul-Halim Sadulayev was in the thick of it, supporting Aslan Maskhadov
and being designated as his heir apparent to the separatist presidency in
2002. A year later, FSB agents kidnapped Sadulayevs wife and executed her,
after failed ransom negotiations. Members of the same agency assassinated
President Maskhadov at Tolstoy-Yurt, on March 8, 2005, and the Chechen
rebel council confirmed Sadulayev as Maskhadovs successor. Once installed,
Sadulayev called for decolonization of Muslim-dominated regions adjoining Chechnya and urged promulgation of a constitution based on Sharia law,
allowing for democratic election of the next president at wars end.
Despite his dedication to the struggleand his bitterness over the murder of his wifeSadulayev did his best to conduct the ongoing war on civilized lines. He discouraged hostage-taking and terrorist attacks on civilians,
urging Chechen warlords to focus on legitimate targets including federal
troops, police, government officials. Sadulayevs successor, Dokka Umarov, proved less discriminating as he carried the battle to Russia, with incidents such as the 2010 Moscow Metro bombings (40 dead, 100 injured)
503
504
SALIM, EZZEDINE
and the 2011 Domodedovo International Airport bombing (37 dead, 173
wounded).
There are two conflicting versions of Sadulayevs death. In the first, Kadyrovite militia leader (and future president) Ramzan Kadyrov claimed that his
men hoped to capture Sadulayev alive, but were forced to kill him and one of
his bodyguards when they resisted arrest. In June 2006, Memoriala human
rights organization active in post-Soviet statesdeclared that Sadulayevs death
was accidental, resulting from a grenade blast when FSB agents stormed a
rebel safe house without knowing that Sadulayev was inside.
Further Reading
Bodansky, Yossef. Chechen Jihad: Al Qaedas Training Ground and the Next Wave of Terror.
New York: Harper, 2007.
Russias Tactics Make Chechen War Spread across Caucasus. Kavkaz Center. http://
www.kavkaz.org.uk/eng/content/2005/09/16/4074.shtml.
Schaefer, Robert. The Insurgency in Chechnya and the North Caucasus: From Gazavat to
Jihad. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011.
Terrorist Leader Sadulayev Killed in Chechnya Was Planning Big Terrorist Act. Pravda.
http://english.pravda.ru/news/hotspots/terror/18062006/82150-sadulayev-0.
SALIM, EZZEDINE (19432004)

On May 1, 2004, Ezzedine Salima teacher, Muslim scholar, prolific author,
and leader of Iraqs Islamic Dawa Partywas elected president of the Iraqi
Governing Council. His tenure was expected to be limited, with the governing council scheduled for replacement by an elected government on June
1. In fact, he would not live to finish out his one-month term. On May 17,
near Baghdads Green Zone, a suicide car bomb killed Salim and several
other victims. In the wake of that explosion, a previously unknown group,
calling itself the Arab Resistance Movement al-Rashid Brigades, posted an
Internet message claiming credit for the blast, described as a qualitative heroic operation, which led to the killing of the traitor and mercenary Ezzedine
Salim. U.S. spokesmen challenged that claim, blaming the assassination on
Jordanian-born al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Ezzedine Salim was born in Basra, Iraq, probably in 1943. (Some sources
cited the year as 1940 or 1944.) At age 19 he joined the Dawa Party, a Shiite
movement organized in 1957 to combat secularism and promote creation of
an Islamic state in Iraq. Suppression by the dominant Baath Party drove Salim
into exile during his early 20s, passing through Kuwait before he settled in
Iran, there serving as a newspaper editor for the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. During his exile, he authored many bookssome
accounts say over 50, others over 100on religious and political topics.
SNCHEZ CERRO, LUIS MIGUEL
His best-known work is Fatima Bint Muhammad, a biography of the Muslim

prophet Mohammeds daughter.
From Iran, Salim coordinated and encouraged opposition to the regime
of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. That stance made him unpopular with the
United States during the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan supported
Husseins war against Iran, then earned him Washingtons favor a decade later,
during the first Gulf War. Living and traveling under assumed names while
he dodged Iraqi hit squads, Salim was ready to ally himself with the United
States when its troops occupied Iraq in March 2003. Four months later, he was
picked to join the Iraqi Governing Council.
Five days before his elevation to the presidency of that body, on April 25,
2004, Salim held a press conference in Baghdad. When asked whether his
homeland could retain its Arab identity under a democracy, he replied, Iraq
is a member of the Arab League, but all are represented here now, including
Turkmen, Kurds and Christians for example. Iraq is full of diversity. That pronouncement undoubtedly sealed his fate in the minds of Islamic extremists.
Sheikh Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawar succeeded Salim as president of the governing council, then served as acting president of the Iraqi Interim Government
(20042005) and as vice president under the Iraqi Transitional Government
(20052006). Determined not to appear as a lackey of U.S.-led Coalition
forces, he told reporters, We blame the United States 100 percent for the [lack
of] security in Iraq. They occupied the country, disbanded the security agencies and for 10 months left Iraqs borders open for anyone to come in without
a visa or even a passport. The Coalitions handling of the crisis is wrong. Its like
someone who fired bullets at his horses head just because a fly landed on it;
the horse died and the fly went away.
Further Reading
Ajami, Fouad. The Foreigners Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq. New
York: Free Press, 2006.
Baghdad Blast Kills Iraq Leader. BBC News (May 17, 2004). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/
hi/middle_east/3720161.stm.
Naylor, David. Al Qaeda in Iraq. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2009.
Profile: Ezzedine Salim. BBC News (May 17, 2004). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/mid
dle_east/3721755.stm.
SNCHEZ CERRO, LUIS MIGUEL

(18891933)
In April 1933, Peru stood on the brink of war with neighboring Colombia, over the town of Leticia, in Colombias Amazonas Department. Seven
months earlier, a patriotic band of Peruvians had seized the town, expelled
505
506
S N C H E Z C E R R O, L U I S M I G U E L
its elected officials, then demanded their governments support for the invasion. Although opposed to the move, President Luis Snchez Cerro could not
resist the groundswell of strident nationalism. On April 30, he visited Limas
Hipdromo de Santa Beatriz racetrack (now El Campo de Marte) to review
20,000 new army recruits. As he completed the inspection, gunman Abelardo
de Mendoza, a member of the banned American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), shot Snchez with a pistol at close range, killing him instantly.
Presidential guards returned fire, slaying Mendoza. Parliament selected Field
Marshal and former president scar Raymundo Benavides Larrea to succeed
Snchez.
Luis Miguel Snchez Cerro was born at Piura, in northwestern Peru, on August 12, 1889, to parents of the Malagasy ethnic group from Madagascar. After
completing basic education in his hometown, he enrolled at Limas Chorrillos Military School in 1906, graduating as a lieutenant in 1910. In February
1914, Snchez joined in a coup dtat against unpopular President Guillermo
Enrique Billingshurst Angulo, suffering wounds that included the loss of two
fingers on his right hand. Promoted to captain by the victors, Snchez was sent
to Washington, D.C., as a military attach, then returned to Peru in 1915 as a
member of the Army Geographical Service.
More promotions followed for Snchez, but his career hit a snag when he
joined in another coup, this one meant to depose dictator Augusto Bernardino
Legua y Salcedo in August 1922. Wounded once again, Snchez was drummed
out of the service and spent two years in exile before Legua granted amnesty
to the failed rebels. Appointed to a post at the ministry of war in 1924, Snchez
was promoted to serve as chief of Cajatambo Province the following year, then
departed for Europe in August 1925, on a military fact-finding mission that
kept him abroad until January 1929.
Despite mending his fences with Augusto Legua, Snchez still despised the
autocratic president. On August 22, 1930, he led the Arequipa garrison in revolt and marched on Lima, forcing Leguas resignation three days later. A junta
led by Snchez ran Perus government from August 27, 1930, to March 1, 1931,
when David Samanez Ocampo and Sobrino assumed the interim presidency,
pending national elections. Snchez carried that campaign as a candidate for
the newly founded Revolutionary Union party, and was inaugurated as Perus 27th constitutional presidentthe first of indigenous Peruvian ancestry
on December 8. 1931.
The APRA contested that election, and member Jos Melgar Marquez made
the partys first attempt to kill Snchez on March 6, 1932, outside Limas
Church in Miraflores. Snchez drew his own pistol and was about to shoot
Melgar when guards subdued the gunman. At trial, Melgar claimed his actions
were entirely personal, without political motivation. He was condemned, but
Snchez commuted the sentence to 25 years in prison. Three months after
SANDINO, AUGUSTO NICOLS CALDERN
the botched murder attempt, a clearly political uprising occurred in Huaraz,

prompting Snchez to close Perus National College and National University as
hotbeds of revolution. He also requested private donations for an air force to
combat future rebellions.
The final crisis of his life took Snchez by surprise. Unknown to most Peruvians, President Legua had signed the SalomnLozano Treaty with Colombia in July 1922, creating a Corridor to the Amazon between the two
nations, with Leticia at its western terminus. Intended as a final settlement
of long-running border disputes, the treaty was kept secret by Legua for
reasons yet unclear, and Snchez personally dismissed it as null and void.
Still it ultimately prompted the raid on Leticia that propelled Peru toward
war with its neighbor, bearing Snchez along on a tide of martial hysteria to
his death.
Successor scar Benavides banned the APRA as an international party
supported by Russian communists, negotiated a new truce with Ecuador in
March 1934, and ruled as president until December 1939 under the motto
Order, Peace, and Work. He later served as Peruvian ambassador to Spain
(1940) and Argentina (19411944), before founding the National Democratic Front, ironically allied with the APRA and the Communist Party,
in 1945.
Further Reading
Drinot, Paulo. The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race, and the Making of the Peruvian State.
Garcia Mrquez, Gabriel. Living to Tell the Tale. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.
Klaren, Peter. Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000.
Masterson, Daniel. Militarism and Politics in Latin America: Peru from Sanchez Cerro to
Sendero Luminoso. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991.
SANDINO, AUGUSTO NICOLS

CALDERN (18951934)
On February 21, 1934, after a meeting with Nicaraguan president Juan Bautista
Sacasa in Managua, rebel leader Augusto Sandino and five companions were
surrounded by National Guardsmen at the gate of the presidential palace. Arrested with Sandino, despite Bautistas promise of safe passage, were Sandinos
father, brother, two generals from his peasant army, and poet Sofonas Salvatierra (who doubled as Bautistas minister of agriculture). Acting on orders from
National Guard commander Anastasio Somoza Garca, the soldiers executed
Sandino, brother Socrates, and the two generals. Some reports claim that Sandinos corpse was also decapitated and dismembered, with the head presented
to U.S. Marines who were battling Sandinos forces. Allies of Sandino later
507
508
S A N D I N O, AU G U S T O N I C O L S C A L D E R N
exhumed his remains and reburied them at another location,

still undisclosed to this day.
Augusto Caldern Sandino
was born out of wedlock at Niquinohomo, Nicaragua, on May
18, 1895. His mother, Margarita Caldern, was a servant in
the home of wealthy landowner
Gregorio Sandino, who impregnated her. Augusto resided
with his mother until age nine,
then moved into his fathers
home. In 1921, after a failed
attempt to kill a wealthy man
who insulted his mother, fled
to Mexico and found work at
a Standard Oil refinery. He absorbed the messages of Mexicos
recent revolution, cultivating an
anti-imperialist attitude even as
he dabbled in spiritualism and
Seventh Day Adventism. When
Nicaraguas five-year statute of
limitations on attempted murder ran out in 1926, Sandino
Government troops killed Nicaraguan rebel leader
went home to work in a gold
Augusto Sandino in 1934. (Bettmann/Corbis)
mine near the Honduran border.
In March of that year, Emiliano Chamorro Vargas led a coup against President Carlos Jos Solrzano Gutirrez and seized control of the country.
Pressure from the United States doomed Chamorros regime, forcing his resignation in November 1926, and ex-president Adolfo Daz Recinos reclaimed
his former office. A month later, exiled Vice President Juan Bautista Sacasa
returned from Mexico to declare himself the rightful president, supported by
General Jos Mara Moncada Tapia. Sandino joined the BautistaMoncada revolt, leading a guerrilla force of fellow gold miners, but Moncada disdained
Sandinos ragtag army and refused to support them. Undeterred, Sandino
gathered weapons from defeated federal troops and pursued his own parallel
war against the Diaz regime, recruiting peasant soldiers as he progressed from
one victory to the next.
In 1927, as Moncada prepared to capture Managua, Washington intervened
with a threat to occupy Nicaragua. That May, spokesmen for Diaz and Bautista
SANDINO, AUGUSTO NICOLS CALDERN
met with White House emissary Henry Stimson to negotiate the Pact of Espino
Negro, whereby President Diaz agreed to finish out his term, then guarantee a
fair election for his successor in 1928. Both the government and rebels agreed
to disarm, leaving matters of Nicaraguan security to a new nonpartisan National Guard. Sandino and Bautista both refused to sign the pact; Bautista fled
to Mexico, and Sandino effectively declared war on both the National Guard
and its supporting force of U.S. Marines, led by General Logan Feland. General
Moncada signed the pact, thereby ensuring his election as president in 1928,
and Sandino branded him a vendepatria (country-seller) and condemned the
Colossus of the North as the enemy of our race.
During the seven-year conflict that followed, Sandinos Army in Defense
of the National Sovereignty of Nicaragua, armed only with obsolete firearms
and simple machetes, claimed the lives of at least 3,000 soldiers. Despite initial
losses and the ever-growing odds against him, Sandino fought some 500 engagements against Marines and the National Guard, winning more often than
he lost. Buoyed by frequent (if minor) victories, Sandino changed his name
to Augusto Csar Sandino, as a symbol of his confidence and defiance. Sandinos attitude was summarized in a letter published in Mexico City, which
read in part:
I will not abandon my resistance until the . . . pirate invaders . . . assassins of
weak peoples . . . are expelled from my country. . . . I will make them realize
that their crimes will cost them dear. . . . There will be bloody combat. . . .
Nicaragua shall not be the patrimony of Imperialists. I will fight for my cause as
long as my heart beats. . . . If through destiny I should lose, there are in my arsenal five tons of dynamite which I will explode with my own hand. The noise
of the cataclysm will be heard 250 miles. All who hear will be witness that Sandino is dead. Let it not be permitted that the hands of traitors or invaders shall
profane his remains.
Pursuit of Sandino proved fruitless, and a letter from his mother, forced by
Marines to plead for his surrender, failed to move him. In April 1928, Sandinos troops destroyed equipment at the Bonanza and La Luz gold mines,
owned by brothers of Harry Fletcher, the U.S. ambassador to Italy. Marines
hunted Sandino from airplanes and canoes, all in vain, while dissatisfaction
with their failure mounted at home. Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana
railed in Congress that if U.S. troops were needed stamp out banditry, lets
send them to Chicago to stamp it out there. . . . I wouldnt sacrifice . . . one
American boy for all the damn Nicaraguans. Sandino, meanwhile, stuck
to his demands: President Diazs resignation, withdrawal of U.S. forces, repeal of the 1914 BryanChamorro Treaty (granting the United States exclusive rights to dig a canal across Nicaragua), and free elections supervised by
Latin American statesmen. American paranoia spiked as the U.S. Communist
509
510
S A N D I N O, AU G U S T O N I C O L S C A L D E R N
Party endorsed Sandino, followed by the Soviet Unions Pan-American AntiImperialist League.
Mexican president Emilio Portes Gil offered sanctuary to Sandino in June
1929, and Sandino accepted, dividing his time in exile between discussions
with communist leaders and further dabbling in fringe religions, this time the
Magnetic-Spiritualist School of the Universal Commune, promoting a hybrid
form of communism based on spiritism of Light and Truth. Founded in Brazil by an expatriate Basque electrician, the sect believed that all humans would
eventually be Hispanic, sharing Spanish as their common language. Sandino
named sect founder Joaqun Trincado as one of his official advisors, while severing most of his links to traditional communist parties.
In January 1931, Henry Stimsonnow U.S. secretary of stateannounced
that U.S. troops would withdraw from Nicaragua after the countrys next election, in 1932, leaving only officers to advise the National Guard. Sandino returned from Mexico in the summer of 1931, launching a new offensive against
federal and foreign troops, seizing various small towns along principal railway
lines. Juan Bautista Sacasa won the 1932 presidential election, and U.S. Marines departed as promised after his inauguration. In February 1933, Sandino
met with Bautista and promised to disarm his guerrillas by May, if they were
granted squatters rights in the Ro Coco Valley bordering Honduras. Bautista
stalled, and the war continued for another year, until Sandinos betrayal and
murder in February 1934.
For decades after his assassination, Sandinos name remained a rallying cry
for opponents of Nicaraguas brutal Somoza dynasty, which seized control
of the country in January 1937. The Sandinista National Liberation Front,
founded in 1961, finally deposed the last Somoza in July 1979 and established its own duly elected government. Still unwilling to relinquish control
over Central America, the White House inaugurated a brutal (and illegal)
guerrilla war to destabilize the Sandinista regime in 1981, nearly bankrupting Nicaragua by 1990. Still, Sandinistas name and his message endure, resuscitated as the Sandinista Renovation Movement in 2006, under President
Daniel Ortega.
See also: Somoza Debayle, Anastasio (19251980); Somoza Garca, Anastasio (18961956).
Further Reading
Hodges, Donald. Sandinos Communism: Spiritual Politics for the Twenty-First Century.
Austin: University of Texas Press. 1992.
Ibarra Grijalva, Domingo. The Last Night of General Augusto C. Sandino. New York: Vantage Press, 1973.
Macaulay, Neil. The Sandino Affair. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967.
Navarro-Gnie, Marco. Augusto Csar Sandino: Messiah of Light and Truth. Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002.
SANKARA, THOMAS ISIDORE NOL
The Sandino Rebellion: A Documentary History. http://www.sandinorebellion.com.

Selser, Gregorio. Sandino. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982.
Walker, Thomas. Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 2003.
SANKARA, THOMAS ISIDORE NOL

(19491987)
On October 15, 1987, Blaise Compaorfounder of Burkina Fasos Congress
for Democracy and Progressstaged a coup dtat against President Thomas
Sankara. After shooting him to death, with a dozen other government officials,
the assassins dismembered Sankaras corpse and buried the remains in in an unmarked grave. Sankaras widow and two children fled the country, and Compaor
installed himself as president, holding that office to the present day. Observer
Ulises Estrada, former colleague of South American revolutionary Che Guevara,
expressed his conviction that the hand of [Sankaras] assassins was guided by imperialism, which could not allow a man with the ideas and actions of Sankara to
lead a country on a continent so exploited for hundreds of years by international
imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonial governments that do their bidding.
Thomas Sankara was born on December 21, 1949, at Yako, French Upper
Volta, a colony of French West Africa. His parents were Roman Catholics of
the Silmi-Mossi ethnic group, considered lower-class members of the tribal
caste system, chiefly farmers, smiths, and leatherworkers. Sankaras father, a
gendarme who fought with the Free French in World War II and was captured
by Nazis, urged his son to train for the priesthood after graduating from high
school in Bobo-Dioulasso, but Thomas joined the army instead, enlisting at age
19. A year later, he was dispatched for officers training at Antisrabe, Madagascar. There, Sankara witnessed mass demonstrations against the state, forcing
President Philibert Tsirananas resignation in October 1972. At the same time,
Sankara was exposed for the first time to works by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
and Vladimir Lenin.
Their message sank in, but Sankara still required further impetus to break
with the establishment of his homeland. Upper Volta had achieved autonomy as a self-governing colony within the French Community in December
1958, followed by full independence from France in August 1960. Soon after
Sankara returned from training in Madagascar, he was thrown into a border
war with the neighboring Republic of Mali, formerly part of French Sudan.
Though decorated for his valor in that conflict, Sankara regarded the war as
useless and unjust. Still, he remained in uniform, rising by 1976 to direct
the elite Commando Training Center at P, in Nahouri Province. That same
year, during advanced training in Morocco, he met and befriended another
native officer, 25-year-old Blaise Compaor.
511
512
SANK ARA, THOMAS ISIDORE NOL
Politics at home remained unstable. Major General Aboubakar Sangoul

Lamizana claimed the presidency of Upper Volta in January 1966, after mass
strikes and demonstrations unseated predecessor Maurice Yamogo. Lamizana
led a provisional military government until a new constitution was ratified in
June 1970, then served as president until November 25, 1980, when Colonel
Saye Zerbo ousted him at gunpoint, suspended the constitution, and ruled in
the name of a Military Committee of Recovery for National Progress. Quickly
dissatisfied with Zerbo and his junta, Sankara and Compaor organized a cover
Regroupement des officiers communistes (Communist Officers Group) within the
army, plotting the dictators downfall.
Before they could strike at Zerbo, he was replaced by Major Jean-Baptiste
Oudraogo, in November 1982. Their coup dtat proceeded, with a new target, on August 4, 1983, unseating Oudraogo and installing Sankara as president at age 33. His stated goal was to eradicate corruption and to cast aside the
remnants of French colonial domination. To symbolize that sweeping change,
he renamed Upper Volta as Burkina Faso (Land of Upright Men) on August
4, 1984. The new nation shunned foreign aid, nationalized all land and mineral wealth, vaccinated 2.5 million children against deadly diseases, planted
more than 10 million trees to halt the spread of the Sahara Desert, while severing connections to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Expanding into social issues, Sankara outlawed forced marriage, polygamy,
and female circumcision, appointed women to government posts, and encouraged them to stay in school if pregnant. Sankaras reformscoupled with his
penchant for guitar playing and motorcycle ridingsoon earned him the nickname of Africas Che Guevara.
Inevitably, Sankaras new programs made enemies. They included quasifeudal landlords stripped of property, tribal chiefs deprived of tribute payments and obligatory labor, corrupt officials driven from their public offices,
and lazy workers held for trial before local revolutionary tribunals. An admirer of both Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, Sankara also challenged established military authority by creating and arming Cuban-style Committees for
the Defense of the Revolution. Conscious of his adversaries, Sankara gave a
public address six days before his slayingon the 20th anniversary of Che
Guevaras assassinationdeclaring that while revolutionaries as individuals
can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.
It was all too much for Blaise Compaor, who justified his October 1987
coup as a bid to rectify Burkina Fasos revolution. Compaor instantly reversed the nationalization of land and natural resources, welcomed new investment from the IMF and World Bank to assist the countrys shattered
economy, and generally scrapped the bulk of Sankaras reforms. Compaor
initially ruled as one of a triumvirate including cohorts Henri Zongo and JeanBaptiste Boukary Lingani, then had both arrested and shot in September 1989,
S A R G S YA N , VA Z G E N
on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government. Subsequently, Compaor was elected president in 1991 (with only 25 percent of the electorate
voting), then won reelection in 1998. A constitutional amendment, passed in
2000, limited the president to five-year term, but Compaor was exempted
from the rule on grounds of his incumbency. Reelected once again in November 2005, Compaor survived an army mutiny in April 2011 and shows no inclination to surrender his office.
See also: Castro Ruz, Fidel Alejandro (1926 )Attempted; Guevara, Ernesto Che
(19281967).
Further Reading
Cudjoe, Alfred. Who Killed Sankara? Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Dembl, Demba. Sankara 20 years later: A Tribute to Integrity. Pambazuka News
(October 10, 2008). http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/51193/print.
Manson, Katrina, and James Knight. Burkina Faso. Guilford, CT: Pequot Press, 2006.
Sankara, Thomas. Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution: 198387. New
York: Pathfinder, 2007.
SARGSYAN, VAZGEN (19591999)

At 5:15 P.M. on October 27, 1999, Nairi Hunanyan and four other members
of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation invaded the National Assembly
building in Yerevan, Armenia. Interrupting a question-and-answer session,
they shot and killed Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan, Parliamentary Speaker
Karen Demirchyan, Deputy Speakers Yuri Bakhshyan and Ruben Miroyan,
Emergencies Minister Leonard Petrosyan, and three other victims, taking 40
hostages at gunpoint. In a statement to the media, Hunanyan announced that
he was staging a coup dtat to save Armenia from economic and political
ruin. Prime Minister Sargsyan had been his sole intended victim, he declared;
the other shootings were mistakes. The raiders surrendered on October 28,
after President Robert Kocharian promised them safe passage and a fair trial.
All five were later convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Vazgen Sargsyan was born on March 5, 1959, at Ararat, in the Armenian
Soviet Socialist Republic. He studied at Yerevans Armenian State Institute of
Physical Culture, a school for athletic trainers, sports journalists, and specialists in adaptive physical therapy, graduating in 1979. From there, he returned
to Ararat, teaching physical education in a local school and leading the Communist Youth Leagues chapter at a cement plant from 1983 through 1986.
Next, he turned a flair for writing into a second career, heading the publicity
department of Garun (Spring), a literary monthly published in Yerevan.
Thus far, Sargsyans life had been almost idyllic, but Armenia was changing. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachevs introduction of Perestroika
513
514
S A R G S YA N , VA Z G E N
(restructuring) and Glasnost (openness) during 19861988 sparked political stirrings in Armenia, including demands for reunion with NagornoKarabakh, a region occupied by many Armenians and promised to Armenia
by Vladimir Lenins Bolsheviks in 1920, then made part of Azerbaijan instead. On February 20, 1988, supported by mass demonstrations in Yerevan,
the Supreme Soviet of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast voted to
unify with Armenia. A harsh reaction by Azerbaijani authorities ignited ethnic rioting between Armenians and Azeris, quickly escalating into full-scale
war. On May 5, 1990, a New Armenian army was created, operating independently of Russian occupation troops, and the two units were locked in
battle by May 27.
Sargsyan, fired with a sudden enthusiasm for politics, took his first
step in 1990, winning a National Assembly seat in Armenias first semi-free
elections. Upon arrival in parliament, Sargsyan was appointed to the Internal Affairs and State Defense Committee. On September 21, 1991, Armenia declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Sargsyan traveled to
Nagorno-Karabakh, commanding guerrilla units that defended rural villages
from the Azerbaijani army. Before that conflict ended in May 1994, Sargsyan was recalled to Yerevan, named as Armenias new minister of defense. In
1996, Sargsyan crushed street demonstrations protesting the rigged reelection of incumbent President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, but a year later switched
his support to former president of Nagorno-Karabakh Robert Kocharyan,
named as prime minister in March 1997.
Kocharyan was on his way up, succeeding Ter-Petrosyan as president in April
1998. His first prime minister, Armen Darbinyan, resigned on June 11, 1999,
allowing Kocharyan to promote Vazgen Sargsyan. Sargsyans tenure would be
briefonly 138 daysbut he left a deep impression on his homeland, receiving posthumous awards as a Hero of Artsakh (highest decoration from the selfproclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic) and as a National Hero of Armenia
(again, the countrys ultimate award). Various streets and schools in Karabakh
bear his name today.
At trial, Nairi Hunanyan claimed that he led the fatal National Assembly raid to
save the Armenian people from perishing and restore their rights. Soviet defector
Alexander Litvinenko told a different story, asserting that the Main Intelligence
Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces planned and supported the attack. The alleged motive: to derail ongoing peace negotiations over the
Nagorno-Karabakh territorial dispute that, despite cessation of open hostilities in
1994, is unresolved today. Russias embassy in Yerevan denied Litvinenkos charge,
and no evidence of conspiracy was forthcoming. As for Litvinenko himself, he was
murdered in 2006, perhaps by Russian intelligence agents.
See also: Litvinenko, Alexander Valterovich (19622006).
SCHNEIDER CHEREAU, REN
Further Reading
Marsden, Chris. Shooting Death of Armenian Prime Minister Heightens Crisis in
the Caucasus. World Socialist Web Site (October 29, 1999). http://www.wsws
.org/articles/1999/oct1999/arme-o29.shtml.
Melkonian, Markar. My Brothers Road: An Americans Fateful Journey to Armenia. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007.
Payaslian, Simon. The History of Armenia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Payaslian, Simon. The Political Economy of Human Rights in Armenia: Authoritarianism
and Democracy in a Former Soviet Republic. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011.
SCHNEIDER CHEREAU, REN (19131970)

On September 4, 1970, despite concerted opposition from the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), Salvador Allende Gossens won a narrow plurality
in Chiles presidential election. Having failed to prevent Allendes election, the
CIA next moved to eliminate his strongest supporter, General Ren Schneider,
the Chilean armys commander in chief. On October 22, a group of soldiers
loyal to General Roberto Viaux Marambioleader of the quasi-fascist Fatherland and Liberty organizationambushed Schneiders car in Santiago. They
planned to abduct him, but Schneider drew a pistol and was shot repeatedly
at point-blank range instead. He lived to reach a military hospital, but died
there from his wounds on October 25. Ironically, the shooting prompted
Chiles congress to confirm President Allendes election one day before
Schneider died.
Ren Schneider Chereau was born on December 31, 1913, to GermanFrench immigrant parents, in Concepcin, Chile. After studying at Santiagos Liceo Jose Victorino Lastarria, he enrolled as a cadet at Chiles Bernardo
OHiggins Military Academy in February 1929. Rapid promotions elevated
him to ensign (1932), second lieutenant (1935), and lieutenant (1937). From
1941 to 1944, he served as an instructor at the military academy, advancing
to a captains rank in 1945, and major in 1951. Two years later, Schneider
joined Chiles military mission in Washington, D.C. In 1955, he was appointed
secretary of studies at the cole Militaire in Paris, France. More promotions
followed, to lieutenant colonel (1957), to colonel and attach to the Chilean
embassy in Paraguay (1963), to director of the military academy (1967), and
to brigadier general (1968). In October 1969, Schneider suppressed an abortive coup against President Eduardo Frei Montalva and was rewarded with appointment as the armys commander in chief.
General Schneider was a stumbling block to American plans for Chile in
1970 because of his personal dedication to the constitutional process. On the
eve of Allendes election, at a General Staff meeting, he declared that the armed
forces are not a road to political power nor an alternative to that power. They
515
516
S C H N E I D E R C H E R E AU, R E N
exist to guarantee the regular work of the political system and the use of force
for any other purpose than its defense constitute high treason. With those
words and his determination to enforce them, Schneider frustrated would-be
putschists and ultimately sealed his own fate.
Armed with sterilized CIA weapons, conspirators made multiple attempts to neutralize Schneider by kidnapping him. The first, on October
16, 1970, failed because an anonymous tip to his whereabouts proved false.
Three days later, plotters waited to snatch him after an official dinner, but
Schneider eluded them by leaving in a private car, rather than his normal
chauffeured limousine. On October 20, CIA headquarters authorized payment of $50,000 each to Viaux and his chief accomplice for speedy resolution of the problem. Following the botched kidnapping-cum-assassination,
outgoing President Frei Montalva named General Carlos Prats Gonzlez as
Schneiders successor.
President Allendes prosecutors undertook investigation of Schneiders murder, placing equal blame on General Viauxs clique and another led by General
Camilo Valenzuela. Declassified CIA memos demonstrate direct payments of
cash to Viaux, plus a promised $250,000 life insurance policy for the benefit
of his family, should he die in the attempt. In separate trials, Viaux was convicted of organizing Schneiders abduction, and Valenzuela was convicted on
the lesser charge of plotting a coup. Both were released from custody in August
1973, after a U.S.-sponsored coup dtat deposed and killed President Allende,
replacing him with a neo-fascist military junta under dictator Augusto Jos
Ramn Pinochet Ugarte.
Pinochet left office at long last, in March 1990. More time elapsed before
the role of the United States in destabilizing Chiles government was documented, and Schneiders family filed a lawsuit against former U.S. secretary
of state Henry Kissinger on September 10, 2001, charging him with conspiracy in General Viauxs murder of Schneider. A federal court in Washington, D.C., dismissed that case in June 2005, on grounds that the case posed
a political question and the court could not proceed without expressing a
lack of respect to coordinate branches of government. The Supreme Court
later declined to review that judgment.
Further Reading
Cames, Nat. Chile-New York: The Eleventh of September. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse,
2004.
Chile and the United States: Declassified Documents Relating to the Military
Coup, September 11, 1973. The National Security Archive. http://www.gwu
.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm.
Collier, Simon. A History of Chile, 18082002. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004.
Davis, Nathaniel. The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende. London: I.B. Tauris, 1985.
SELEUCUS I
SELEUCUS I (350S BCE281 BCE)

By September 281 BCE, Macedonian general Seleucus was the last surviving field commander of Alexander the Greats League of Corinth, one of the
Diadochi (successors) who laid claim to Alexanders mantle as ruler of the thenknown world. He had established the eponymous Seleucid Empire, sprawling
over central Anatolia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and present-day Pakistan. Egypt remained beyond his grasp, but he was
more concerned with claiming Macedonia and Thraxe, after the recent death
of rival Lysimachus in the Battle of Corupedium. Seleucus never had a chance
to capitalize on that victory, however. Soon after crossing the Thracian Chersonese (now the Gallipoli Peninsula), he was assassinated by Egyptian Ptolemy Keraunos (Thunder) near Lysimachia. Ptolemyeldest son of Pharaoh
Ptolemy I Soterthen claimed the Macedonian throne, holding it until he was
captured and killed by Gauls in 279 BCE.
Macedonian general Seleucus I, killed by Egyptian rivals in 281 B.C.E. (Bettmann/Corbis)
517
518
SELEUCUS I
Seleucus was born in Europa, northern Macedonia, sometime between

358 and 354 BCE. His father, Antiochus, served as a general under Philip II
of Macedon (382336 BCE), father of Alexander the Great. As a teenager,
Seleucus served as a page for Philip II, then joined Alexanders army for its
Asian campaign in 334 BCE. Seven years later, as the force invaded India,
Seleucus had risen to command its elite Hypaspistai (shield-bearers).
When Alexander crossed northern Indias Hydaspes River by boat, in
326 BCE, he was accompanied by Seleucus, Ptolemy I Soter, Lysimachus, and Perdiccas, all of whom would later claim to be his rightful successors. At the Battle of the Hydaspes, they defeated King Porus of the
Hindu Paurava kingdom, but the seven-foot-tall monarchs courage so impressed Alexander that he was allowed to remain as satrap (governor) in
Alexanders name.
Alexander died suddenly in June 323 BCE, at age 32, in the palace of Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II. Perdiccas succeeded him as regent of a conquered empire, naming Seleucus as his chiliarchos (viceroy). In theory, power
would eventually fall in equal parts to Philip III of Macedon (Alexanders older,
epileptic half-brother) and to the yet-unborn son of Alexanders wife Roxana.
Meleager, an infantry commander, contested that plan, seeking to install Philip
III as sole ruler by force, until he (Meleager) was arrested and killed on orders
from Perdiccas. Thereafter, Perdiccas proceeded to divide Alexanders realm
among regional governors: Antipater ruling Macedon, Greece, and Illyria; Lysimachus governing Thrace; Antigonus supervising Greater Phrygia; Leonnatus
ruling Lesser Phrygia; Eumenes of Cardia governing Cappadocia and Paphlagonia; Menander ruling Lydia; Philotas in charge of Cilicia; Ptolemy I Soter ruling Egypt, Libya and Arabia; Laomedon of Mytilene managing Syria; Arcesilaus
reigning in Mesopotamia; Peucestas serving as satrap of Persia; Tlepolemus
overseeing Carmania, and so on.
That intricate arrangement was too fragile to withstand the test of powerful opposing personalities. Soldiers from Athens and other Greek city states
besieged Antigonus at Lamia in 322 BCE, and were defeated at the Battle
of Crannon on September 5. Ptolemy stole Alexanders corpse in December
322 BCE, prompting Perdiccas to launch two failed invasions of Europe before two of his officers, Peithon and Antigenes, assassinated him in 321 BCE.
Seleucus succeeded Perdiccas as satrap of Babylonia, but soon found himself
in conflict with Antigonus, who sought to build an empire from his base in
Greater Phrygia. Defeated on that front and forced to seek refuge in Egypt
by 316 BCE.
Reduced to serving Ptolemy as a naval commander, Seleucus ultimately
turned that setback to his advantage, plundering the coastline held by Antigonus, capturing Crete, and teaming with Ptolemy to crush Demetrius, son
of Antigonus, at Gaza in 312 BCE. A truce the following year left Seleucus in
SELEUCUS I
charge of most Asian provinces formerly conquered by Alexander, except

for Palestine and Phoenicia (annexed by Ptolemy while Seleucus was fighting at sea).
Still, Antigonus survived to pose a constant threat. In 305 BCE, incensed by
his old rivals royal pretensions, Seleucus assumed the title basileus (king) to
place them on equal footing. Four years later, he joined Lysimachus to defeat
Antigonus in the Battle of Ipsus, winning control of Syria and the eastern provinces of Asia Minor. In celebration, he shifted his capital city from Seleucia on
the Tigris River to Antioch, built in 293 BCE and named after his father, on the
Orontes River in northwestern Syria. Son Antiochus remained in Seleucia to
rule the eastern provinces on his fathers behalf.
All was well until 282 BCE, when Seleucus unwisely let himself be drawn
into a family feud between Lysimachus and his wife Arsino. Acting from
jealousy, Arsino trumped up charges of treason against Agathocles, Lysimachuss son with former wife Nicaea, and convinced Lysimachus to have him
executed. Lysandra, widow of Agathocles, sought refuge with Seleucus and
persuaded him to invade Macedonia in a quest for justice. Seleucus and Lysimachus, both septuagenarians by that time, met in battle at Corupedium
and Lysimachus was slain, allegedly by Seleucus himself. Newly energized by
that late-life victory, Seleucus then planned an epic invasion and conquest
of Europe, foiled at the eleventh hour with Ptolemy Keraunos, a guest in his
camp, assassinated him. At the time, Keraunos was in exile, banished y his
brother Ptolemy II Philadelphus, and no motive was discovered for his murder of Seleucus.
Antiochus I Soter succeeded his father as king of the Seleucid Empire, ruling until 261 BCE, fighting a series of wars with neighbors that left his domain
smaller than he found it on ascension to the throne. His last futile campaign,
in 262 BCE, was an effort to contain expansion of Greek rivals from Pergamon.
The Greeks defeated him near years end at Sardis, in present-day Turkeys
Manisa Province, and Antiochus died soon afterward, leaving his shrunken
empire to son Antiochus II Theos.
Further Reading
Ager, Sheila. An Uneasy Balance: from the Death of Seleukos to the Battle of Raphia. In A Companion to the Hellenistic World. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing,
2005.
Bugh, Glenn. The Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Grainger, John. Seleukos Nikator: Constructing a Hellenistic Kingdom. London: Routledge, 1990.
Shipley, Graham. The Greek World after Alexander 32330 BC. London: Routledge,
2000.
519
520
SEPTEMBER, DULCIE EVONNE
SEPTEMBER, DULCIE EVONNE (19351988)

On March 29, 1988, while opening the African National Congresss (ANC)
office in Paris, France, South African attorney Dulcie September was shot five
times in the back with a .22-caliber weapon. Based on the reactions and testimony of neighbors, it appears that the firearm was equipped with a silencer.
The crime remains officially unsolved, but has been linked to Septembers
ongoing investigation into arms traffickingreportedly including nuclear
materialsbetween France and South Africas white-supremacist apartheid regime. In August 2009, Cape Towns National Prosecuting Authority announced
that it would consider reopening the case, but no further information has yet
been released.
Dulcie September was born at Athlone, a suburb of Cape Town, on August 20,
1935. She attended Athlone High School until her father forced her to withdraw in her sophomore year, but she persevered to complete her exams independently at age 17. Two years later, she enrolled at Wesley Training School,
obtaining her teachers certificate in 1955. Classroom assignments followed
in Maitland, Bridgetown, and Athlonee, before September joined the fledgling Cape Peninsula Students Union (CPSU), an affiliate of the antiapartheid
Unity Movement of South Africa, in 1957. Three years later, she moved further into activism when she joined the African Peoples Democratic Union of
Southern Africa, serving on that groups finance committee. By January 1963,
she was a member of the militant National Liberation Front.
That affiliation led police to raid and search Septembers home on July 12,
1963. Three months later, on October 7, she was arrested under the Criminal
Procedure Act, charged with conspiracy to commit acts of sabotage, and incite
acts of politically motivated violence. Convicted on April 15, 1964, September received a five-year prison term. Upon release in April 1969, she still faced
a banning order, which barred her from teaching or joining any further political activity, while requiring her to check in with local police on a daily basis.
After completing that draconian probation period, September obtained a permanent departure permitin effect, lifetime exileand left South Africa for
Englands Madeley College of Education in December 1973.
September found a colony of exiled South Africans waiting to welcome her
in England, many associated with the ANC. Organized in 1912, the ANC had
tried for decades to unite black Africans against minority white overlords,
using methods that ranged from education and civil disobedience to labor
strikes and paramilitary action. In London, Dulcie September joined the ANCs
protests against apartheid, and became a full-time staff member in 1976. In
1979, proclaimed the International Year of the Child by Secretary General of
the United Nations Kurt Waldheim, September was picked to chair a committee of the ANCs Womens Section, preparing a special report titled Children under Apartheid. She presented her findings that September, in Paris, at a
SEPTEMBER, DULCIE EVONNE
meeting of the United Nations Unit against Apartheid. Further activities across
Europe culminated in 1983, with Septembers appointment as the ANCs chief
representative in France, Switzerland, and Luxembourg.
September did not limit her activities entirely to antiapartheid issues, nor
was she strictly committed to nonviolent protest. In 1984, she underwent brief
military training in the Soviet Union, and in the following year, she supported
both the Communist and Socialist Parties in French electoral contests. Between
October 1986 and September 1987, she was also immersed in the Albertini
Affair, campaigning for the release of French language instructor Pierre Albertini, detained in South Africa for his affiliation with the ANC. Prior to his release, September petitioned French president Franois Mitterand to reject the
credentials of South Africas new ambassador.
Such activities caused South African police and intelligence agencies to
focus on ANC representatives abroad. Godfrey Motsepe, an ANC colleague of
September in Belgium, narrowly escaped death when a 35-pound bomb was
defused at his office in Brussels, on March 27, 1988. Dulcie September reportedly sought police protection the same dayFrench police later denied it
but she was unguarded when assassins overtook her two days later. A decade
after her murder, a city square in Paris was named in her honor.
APARTHEIDS PRIME EVIL

One of apartheids most malevolent defenders, nicknamed Prime Evil
by South African journalists, Eugene Alexander de Kock was responsible
for kidnapping, torturing, and killing hundreds of activists opposed to his
homelands white-supremacist regime between 1979 and 1993. Barred
from various military units because of poor eyesight and a speech impediment, de Kock founded the counterinsurgency unit Koevoet in 1979,
graduating to command the C1 death squad of the South African Police
in 1983. Multiple executions occurred at Vlakplaas, C1s rural base, and
de Kock participated in other crimes such as the 1991 bombing murder
of Catherine Mlangeni, an attorney for the African National Congress.
In 1994, South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission denied de
Kocks plea for amnesty. Tried in 1996 on 89 felony counts, including six
murder charges, he received a 212-year prison term. His pleas for release
and forgiveness continue with mixed results. Some victims families have
publicly forgiven him, but he remains in prison. In July 2007, de Kock
declared that ex-president Frederik Willem de Klerk had hands soaked
in blood from ordering numerous extra-judicial killings between 1989
and 1994. De Kock is eligible for parole at some uncertain future date.
521
522
SHAK A K ASENZ ANGAKHONA
Further Reading
The Case of Dulcie September. Truth Commission Files. http://www.withmalicean
dforethought.com/pdf/dulcie_september.pdf.
Forde, Fiona. Unsolved murder of activist is reopened. Independent Online News
(August 23, 2009). http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/unsolved-murder-of-activistis-reopened-1.456016.
Holland, Heidi. The Struggle: A History of the African National Congress. New York:
George Braziller, 1990.
Who killed Dulcie September? Cape Times (May 18, 2012). http://www.iol.co.za/
capetimes/who-killed-dulcie-september-1.1299720.
SHAKA KASENZANGAKHONA (1781/871828)

In September 1828, near-legendary Chief Shaka of the Nguni people sent
most of his warriors on a broad sweep through northern Zululand (presently
KwaZulu-Natal in Southern Africa). That order left the royal kraal (village) lightly
guarded at a critical time for Shaka, who had alarmed his subjects with erratic
and deadly behavior since the death of his mother in October 1827. Mourning
had been enforced by execution of some 7,000 people who appeared insufficiently sad, and cattle were also slaughtered on Shakas order, to teach calves the
pain of losing a mother. Shaka further ordered that no crops be planted the following year, nor milk gathered, and that any woman found pregnant should be
executed with her husband. In that atmosphere, Shakas half-brothers, Dingane
and Mhlangana, plotted to kill him with help from a tribesman named Mbopa.
On September 28, while Mbopa created a diversion in the kraal, Dingane and
Mhlangana killed Shaka with their assegai war spears and hid his corpse in an
empty grain pit filled with mud and rocks. Soon afterward, Dingane murdered
Mhlangana and succeeded Shaka as king.
Shaka kaSenzangakhona, also called Shaka Zulu, was born near presentday Melmoth, KwaZulu-Natal, sometime between 1781 and 1787 (accounts
differ). He was the illegitimate son of Zulu chief Senzangakhona kaJama and
wife Nandi, daughter of Lengeni tribal chief Bhebhe. After Shakas birth, Nandi
spent years shuttling back and forth between the Zulu tribe and her own, while
Senzangakhona took nine other wives. Much of her time and energy were devoted to protecting Shaka from cyclical famine, murder attempts by jealous rivals, and the danger of his own explosive temper.
Among the Mthethwa people, under chief Dingiswayo, Shaka was initiated into an impi (military unit) of the Izichwe regiment, serving with courage and distinction for a decade. Dingiswayo had seized power by killing
his brother, a method common among African tribes, as with some European royal families. Neighboring tribes were frequently at war in the early
1800s, and Shaka led Dingiswayos troops against Amangwane in 1812,
driving them across the Buffalo River, where they in turn displaced other
SHAKA KASENZANGAKHONA
tribes. Shakas father died four years later, and his heir apparentson
Sigujanawas found dead soon after, in murky circumstances. Supported
by Dingiswayo, Shaka proclaimed himself king of the Zulus, forging alliances
with other nearby tribes against a common enemy, the Ndwandwe people
dwelling north of Zululand.
As chief, Shaka still recognized Dingiswayo as his overlord, continuing traditional tribute payments to the Mthethwa Paramountcy. That changed in
1817, when King Zwide kaLanga of the Ndwandwe clan led an invasion of
Zululand and killed Dingiswayo, scattering his army. Shaka rallied the stragglers and sought revenge for his mentor, igniting the NdwandweZulu War
with heavy odds against himhis troops outnumbered roughly six to one.
Even so, Shakas tactical skillemploying diversions and combat formations
reminiscent of the Roman phalanxproved superior to Zwides. At the Battle
of Gqokli Hill, in May 1818, Shaka killed 7,500 Ndwandwe against Zulu losses
of 2,000. Soon afterward, Shaka captured Zwides mother, Queen Ntombazi,
and executed her by locking her inside a hut with hungry hyenas. Zwide tried
to emulate Shakas tactics in 1819, at the Battle of Mhlatuze River, but Shaka
switched to guerrilla warfare and Zwide barely escaped with his life. The war
officially ended that year, but Shakas hatred of Zwide endured, culminating
with Zwides death in a final battle at Pongola, in 1825.
By that time, Shaka ruled a Zulu empire sprawling over thousands of square
miles. He was suspicious of European encroachment, but allowed some whites
to enter Zululand after British trader Henry Francis Fynn furnished Shaka
with medical aid, in the wake of a murder attempt by Ndwandwe assassins.
One beneficiary of Shakas flexible attitude was Nathaniel Isaacs, another Brit
whom Shaka named as his InDuna (advisor), granting him a large tract of
land where Durban stands today. Shaka also interceded in disputes between
tribes in his Zulu alliance, appointing sub-chiefssuch as Nqetho in Qwabe
to do his bidding.
As a military leader for his place and time, Shaka was unrivaled. In addition to refining battle strategy, he introduced large shields made from cow hide
and shortened traditional assegai spears for use as stabbing weapons, rather
than throwing them at enemies and leaving his warriors unarmed. His troops
marched barefoot to toughen their feet, and those who objected to losing
their sandals were killed. Fifty-mile forced marches were routine, with stragglers severely punished. Traveling battalions marched with herds of cattle, and
were thus spared carrying provisions on their backs. Troops were placed in
regiments by age, with different groups assigned to combat, cattle herding,
guarding kraals, and so on. For major battles, Shaka devised the bull horn
formation, wherein one unit (the chest) confronted enemies directly, while
two others (the horns) encircled the target from its flanks, with other troops
(the loins) held in reserve as reinforcements.
523
524
SHAK A K ASENZ ANGAKHONA
ZULU WAR
A half-century after Shakas assassination, the British high commissioner
Sir Henry Bartle Frere issued an ultimatum for evacuation of South Africa
to Zulu king Cetshwayo kaMpande. Fully aware that the Zulus would
refuse to leave their homeland, Frere proceeded to invade Zululand in
January 1879, and thus provoked the tribes last great war against white
encroachment. The first thrust was halted at Isandlwana on January 22,
in an epic battle that left 1,000 Zulus and 1,300 white invaders dead on
the field, with thousands more wounded. Later the same day, a small
British garrison at Rorkes Drift repulsed attacks by some 4,000 Zulus
and held their position. Heavy Zulu losses continued through successive
engagements until the Battle of Ulundi, on July 4, when British troops
captured the capital of Zululand using artillery and Gatling guns against
warriors armed with spears and a few captured rifles. King Cetshwayo
was captured in August and held prisoner until Frere partitioned Zululand, then restored him as nominal king in January 1883. Feuds within
the tribe further decimated Zulu numbers prior to Cetshwayos death on
February 8, 1884. His son Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo replaced him as king
three months later.
Dingane kaSenzangakhona, Shakas assassin and successor, did not share his late
half-brothers tolerance for white settlers in Zululand. Dinganes hostility toward
Europeans drove Nathaniel Isaacs from the territory in 1831 and sparked repeated
conflicts with Dutch Voortrekkers (pioneers) intruding on Zulu lands from the
Cape Colony (founded by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, but occupied
and ruled by Britain since 1795). Dingane suffered a stunning defeat at the Battle
of Blood River, in December 1838, when 470 Voortrekkers faced 10,000 Zulus,
killing at least 2,000 tribesmen against losses of three wounded on their side. In
the wake of that debacle, Dingane personally strangled field commander Ndlela
kaSompisi, but Dinganes reputation had suffered irreparable harm. Supported
by the Dutch, another of Shakas half-brothersMpande kaSenzangakhona, son
of Senzangakhonas ninth wiferebelled against Dingane and assassinated him
in January 1840. Mpande ruled Zululand until his death in 1873, then was succeeded by his son Cetshwayo kaMpande, last great war chief of the nation.
Further Reading
Chanaiwa, David Shingirai. The Zulu Revolution: State Formation in a Pastoralist Society. African Studies Review 23 (December 1980): 120.
Hamilton, Carolyn. Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical
Invention. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
SHARPLES, RICHARD CHRISTOPHER
Morris, Donald. The Washing of the Spears: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.
Omer-Cooper, J. D. The Zulu Aftermath. London: Longman, 1965.
Ritter, E. A. Shaka Zulu: The Biography of the Founder of the Zulu Nation. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
Wylie, Dan. Myth of Iron: Shaka in History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008.
SHARPLES, RICHARD CHRISTOPHER

(19161973)
On March 10, 1973, following a dinner party at Bermudas Government
House, Governor Sir Richard Sharples left to walk his dog, accompanied by
Captain Hugh Sayers of the Welsh Guards, who served as his aide-de-camp. A
short distance from home, around midnight, both men and the dog were shot
dead in an ambush. Seven months later, police arrested two members of the
militant Black Beret Cadre (BBC), Erskine Durrant Buck Burrows and Larry
Tacklyn. Two guns seized from Burrows were identified as the SharplesSayers
murder weapons. Prosecutors subsequently indicted the pair for three additional slayingsof Bermuda police commissioner George Duckett (shot on
September 9, 1972), and of two victims shot in an April 1973 supermarket
robbery. At trial, Burrows was convicted on all counts; Tacklyn was acquitted
of the March double slaying, but convicted of the holdup murders. Both defendants were hanged at Casemates Prison on December 2, 1977.
Richard Sharples was born in England, to an affluent and influential family,
on August 6, 1916. He graduated from the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in 1936, and was commissioned as an officer of the Welsh Guards, serving with that unit in the European Theater of World War II. His close friendship
with Edward Heath, Chief Whip of the House of Commons and Parliamentary
Secretary of the Treasury, aided Sharples in getting elected to parliament as
a member of the Conservative Party, in 1954. He held that post, representing Sutton and Cheam, until 1970, when Heathby then, prime minister
named him to serve as minister of state for the Home Office. Sharples resigned
that office in 1972, to take up his final post as governor of Bermuda.
At the time, Britains island paradise was in the midst of a racial upheaval, influenced by Black Power movements in the United States. True-crime author
Mel Ayton specifically blames the U.S.-based Black Panther Party for inspiring
creation of Bermudas BBC, founded by 22-year-old John Hilton Bassett 1969.
The group was small, never claiming more than 100 members by Aytons estimate, but its doctrine of pursuing freedom by any means necessaryan
echo from former Black Muslim minister Malcolm Xfired the imagination of
many young blacks in Bermuda. By 1972, Ayton says, the BBC had compiled
a hit-list of Bermuda pigs marked for execution and had begun to stockpile
weapons.
525
526
SHERMARKE, ABDIR ASHID ALI
Police commissioner George Duckett was the first to die, in September 1972,
described by the BBC as a mercenary and a killer who has virtually a free
hand in suppressing black people. He was shot at home, in an attack that also
wounded his daughter. Following the SharplesSayers ambush, shopkeepers
Mark Doe and Victor Rigo were slain at their store in Hamilton, the islands
capital city. Erskine Burrows was arrested after being identified as the bandit
who stole $28,000 from the Bank of Bermuda at gunpoint, in September 1973.
In his confession to the SharplesSayers murders, Burrows said, The motive
for killing the Governor was to seek to make the people, black people in particular, become aware of the evilness and wickedness of the colonialist system
in this island. Secondly, the motive was to show that these colonialists were
just ordinary people like ourselves who eat, sleep and die just like anybody
else and that we need not stand in fear and awe of them.
Unconfirmed reports suggest involvement of a third man in the March 1973
assassinationsor, perhaps, a second, because jurors acquitted Larry Tacklyn
of killing Sharples and Sayers. According to those stories, the elusive suspect
escaped from Bermuda disguised as a woman, then returned to visit his prominent family in Bermuda during the 1990s. Mel Ayton, after examining files from
the British Foreign Office in 2005, implicates other members of the BBC in the
various murders, but no additional charges have been filed thus far.
Burrows and Tacklyn were the first persons hanged in Bermuda since World
War II, and the last executed anywhere under British law. Their deaths sparked
rioting in Bermuda, with property damage estimated at $2 million. Soldiers
from the 1st Battalion Royal Regiment of Fusiliers were deployed to suppress
that outbreak, when authorities on Bermuda proved unequal to the task. No
further violence by the BBC was reported from Bermuda or elsewhere. Founder
John Bassett died in 1998, at age 49.
Further Reading
Assassination of Sir Richard Sharples. Bernews. http://bernews.com/bermuda-facts/
government/assassination-of-sir-richard-sharples.
Ayton, Mel. Assault on Law and Order in Bermuda, 19721973: The Assassination of Governor Sir Richard Sharples and the Related Killings. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010.
Ayton, Mel. Justice Denied: Bermudas Black Militants, the Third Man, and the Assassinations of a Police Chief and Governor. Rock Hill, SC: Strategic Media Books, 2013.
Darrell, Neville. Aceldama: The Untold Story of the Murder of the Governor of Bermuda,
Sir Richard Sharples. Surrey, BC: Coastline Mountain Press, 2004.
SHERMARKE, ABDIRASHID ALI (19191969)

On October 15, 1969, while visiting Las Anod in the Sool region of northern Somalia, Prime Minister Abdirashid Ali Shermarke was assassinated by
one of his own bodyguards. The gunman, standing watch outside a guest
SHERMARKE, ABDIRASHID ALI
house occupied by Shermarke, shot his boss at close

range with an automatic rifle,
killing Shermarke instantly. The
murder was widely attributed
to a personal grudge, rather
than political conspiracy, but
on October 21one day after
Shermarkes
funeralMajor
General Mohamed Siad Barre
led a military coup that seized
control of the government, installing himself as president
with dictatorial powers. Barre
ruled Somalia until another
coup deposed him, in January
1991, and drove him into exile.
Abdirashid Ali Shermarke
was born at Harardhere, in the
Mudug Province of central Somalia, on October 16, 1919. A Somalian prime minister Abdirashid Ali Shermarke,
member of the Majeerteen clan slain by his own bodyguard. (AFP/Getty Images)
that spawned Somali sultans
prior to independence in 1960, he was raised in Mogadishu and studied at madrassas (Islamic schools) until age 17. Employed first as a trader, Shermarke subsequently shifted to the civil service, then ruled from Rome as part of Italian East
Africa. In 1943, with fascist Italy reeling from Allied attacks, Shermarke joined
the newly formed Somali Youth League (SYL), his homelands first recognized
political party. A year later, British troops drove Italian forces out of Somalia, and
Shermarke remained at his government post, serving new European masters. In
November 1949, at the Potsdam conference, Somalia was divided into British
Somaliland and Italian Somaliland, and the SYL pressed for full independence.
In 1953, with that goal still unrealized, Shermarke earned a scholarship to
the Sapienza University of Rome, where he received a PhD in political science.
Returning to Somalia in 1959, he was elected to the countrys legislative assembly. With the advent of full independence on July 1, 1960, President Aden
Abdullah Osman Daar chose Shermarke to serve as prime minister, holding
that post until June 14, 1964. Voters returned him to a seat in parliament
that year, where Shermarke remained for three years, then defeated incumbent
President Daar, becoming Somalias second president on June 10, 1967.
Then, as now, conditions in Somalia remained unsettled, with political
opponents prone to violent action. In 1968, a hand grenade exploded near
527
528
S H E V K E T PA S H A , M A H M U D
the vehicle transporting Shermarke home from Mogadishus airport, but he

escaped injury. Still, he remained at odds with military elements that would
eventually rally to depose his government. President Barres Somali Democratic
Republic, built on Marxist lines, survived for 21 years, before Somalia plunged
into civil war that continues to the present day despite United Nations intervention. The central government, effectively defunct, has been replaced in
large part by tribal rule or control by regional warlords in states designated as
Puntland, Somaliland, and Xeer. Shermarkes son, Omar Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, assumed office as prime minister of a hopeful transitional government
in February 2009, then resigned in September 2010 after a long-running stalemate with parliament. Today, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency describes
Somalia as in the process of building a federated parliamentary republic without political parties, while famine, piracy and civil war continue to plague the
nation.
Further Reading
Coyne, Christopher. After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy. Stanford,
CA: Stanford Economics and Finance, 2007.
Lewis, Ioan. Understanding Somalia and Somaliland: Culture, History, Society. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008.
Schraeder, Peter. African Politics and Society: A Mosaic in Transformation. Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth Publishing, 2003.
Woodward, Peter. Crisis in the Horn of Africa: Politics, Piracy and the Threat of Terror.
London: I.B. Tauris, 2013.
SHEVKET PASHA, MAHMUD (18561913)

On June 11, 1913, gunmen ambushed Turkish Grand Vizier and Minister
of War Mahmud Shevket Pasha as he rode through Constantinople (now Istanbul) in a chauffeured car. The assassins, riding in another vehicle, fired
10 pistol shots at Shevket, fatally wounding him and an aide-de-camp, Ibrahim
Bey. The shooterspresumed to be enemies of the 1908 Young Turk revolution and/or admirers of Ottoman minister of war Hussein Nazim Pasha, killed
by Young Turks on January 27, 1913escaped after the drive-by killing. On
June 13, police cornered five suspects at a house in Constantinople, killing one
and arresting the others in a battle that also left one officer dead. Those captured included a Captain Kiazim, a Lieutenant Ali, and a member of the citys
fire brigade. On June 15, police arrested more alleged conspirators, including
a son of ex-Grand Vizier Kmil Pasha, while claiming that the plots ringleader
had escaped on an Italian steamship. Contemporary media reports disagree on
the number of suspects finally convicted, one claiming that 12 conspirators
were hanged on June 24, whereas another cites the number as 20.
S H E V K E T PA S H A , M A H M U D
Mahmud Shevket Pasha was born in Baghdad, probably in 1856. (One

source claims 1855, another 1858.) After completing his primary education,
he attended Constantinoples Military Academy, joining the Ottoman Empires army as a lieutenant in 1882. Further training in France was followed
by a posting to Crete, before Shevket returned to the academy as an instructor.
During that period, he met and was influenced by Wilhelm Leopold Colmar
Freiherr von der Goltz, a Prussian field marshal recruited to modernize the
Ottoman army after Turkeys defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 18771878.
Goltzsometimes known as Goltz Pasha during his Turkish servicetaught
an early version of the German blitzkrieg (lighting war) that enabled Turkey
to defeat Greece in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897.
From his post at the Military Academy, Shevket was promoted to serve as
governor of Kosovo (held by the Ottoman Empire since the 15th century),
where he commanded the 3rd Army. An strong advocate of modernization,
credited with introducing the first automobiles to Constantinople, Shevket
was one of the Young Turks who rebelled against Sultan Abdul Hamid II in
June 1908, restoring the parliament Abdul Hamid had suspended 30 years
earlier and thus inaugurating Turkeys Second Constitutional Era. The sultan,
who retained office as a symbolic figurehead, tried a countercoup against the
Young Turks on April 13, 1909, but Shevkets 3rd Army crushed the reactionary forces and drove Abdul Hamid into exile, succeeded by his brother,
Mehmed V Reshad.
Mehmed V, like his brother in the months since June 1908, ruled the Ottoman Empire in name only, and parliament was controlled by two parties, the
Young Turks Committee of Union and Progress and the rival Liberal Union. A
revised constitution of August 1909 banned secret societies, while promoting
orderly reform under a strong central government and excluding foreign influence. Government sought to modernize the empires communications and
transportation networks, and Shevket helped that effort by promoting military aviation. Ethnic dissent among lawmakers, coupled with preparation for
the First Balkan War, arrested that progress when parliament was close on August 5, 1912.
War finally erupted two months later, pitting the Ottoman Empire against
the Balkan League of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Serbia. Midway
through that seven-month conflict, on January 23, 1913, a leader of the
Young Turk movement, Deputy Commander in Chief Enver Pasha, led a coup
against Minister of War Nazim Pasha, killing him and claiming his office.
Mahmud Shevket joined in that rebellion, replacing Kmil Pasha as Grand
Vizier to Sultan Mehmet V. Henceforth, effective control of the Ottoman Empire reside in the Three Pashas: Enver, Minister of the Navy Djemal Pasha
(doubling as mayor of Istanbul), and Minister of the Interior Mehmed Talaat
Pasha. Shevket, although cast in a somewhat subordinate role, maintained a
529
530
SMITH, JOSEPH, JR.
position of influenceand was widely blamed for killing Nazim Pasha, ultimately leading to his own assassination.
Said Halim Pasha succeeded Shevket as Grand Vizier, in time for Turkeys
entry into World War I, signing the OttomanGerman Alliance. That move rebounded against him in February 1917, forcing his resignation and later sending him to prison on a charge of treason. Mehmed Talaat Pasha was next in line
as Grand Vizier, tarnished by his passage of the Tehcir (Displacement) Law of
May 1915 that initiated Turkish genocide of some 1.8 million ethnic Armenians. Turkeys defeat at wars end doomed the Ottoman Empire and the Three
Pashas. Mehmed Talaat fled into exile and was assassinated by agents of the
Armenian Revolutionary Federation in Berlin, on March 15, 1921. Members
of the same group killed Djemal Pasha in Tbilisi, Georgia, on July 25, 1922.
Enver Pasha survived until August 4, 1922, when he was slain in battle with
Red Army cavalry near Dushanbe, in present-day Tajikistan.
Further Reading
Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and Americas Response. New
York: HarperCollins, 2003.
Finkel, Caroline. Osmans Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire. New York: Basic
Books, 2007.
Hanioglu, M. Skr. Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 19021908. Oxford:
Quataert, Donald. The Ottoman Empire, 17001922. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005.
SMITH, JOSEPH, JR. (18051844)

On June 10, 1844, Joseph Smiththe mayor of Nauvoo, Illinois, and president
of the Mormon Churchordered a town marshal to demolish the presses of
a local newspaper, the weekly Nauvoo Expositor, which had criticized Smith
in its first and only issue, three days earlier. Supported by a mob, the marshal obeyed. Two days later, an anti-Mormon paper, the Warsaw Signal, editorialized that War and extermination is inevitable! Citizens ARISE, ONE and
ALL!!!Can you stand by, and suffer such INFERNAL DEVILS! To ROB men
of their property and RIGHTS, without avenging them. We have no time for
comment, every man will make his own. LET IT BE MADE WITH POWDER
AND BALL!!! State authorities charged Smith, his brother Hyrum, and
20-odd others with rioting. The defendants surrendered in Carthage on June
25, with all but the Smith brothers soon free on bond. A judge ordered Joseph
and Hyrum held over on new charges of treason, a capital crime, but they never
faced trial. On June 27, a mob of 200 vigilantes stormed the jail, riddling both
brothers with bullets.
SMITH, JOSEPH, JR.
Joseph Smith Jr. was born in Sharon, Vermont, on December 23, 1805. By age
12, his family had settled in western New Yorks burned-over district, so called
because incessant religious proselytization had left no human fuel for new conversion. There, Smiths family tried to supplement their meager farm income by
digging (in vain) for buried treasure. Joseph put a new twist on the enterprise
by claiming possession of seer stones that let him spy gold underground and
selling the coordinates to neighbors. Years later, a local newspaperthe Wayne
Democratic Pressclaimed that:
As early as 1820, Joe Smith, at the age of about 19 years, began to assume the gift of
supernatural endowments, and became the leader of a small party of shiftless men
and boys like himself who engaged in nocturnal money-digging operations upon the
hills in and about Palmyra. . . . Numbers of men and women, as was understood,
were found credulous enough to believe there might be something in it, who were
induced by their confidence and cupidity to contribute privately towards the cost of
carrying on the imposture, under the promise of sharing in the expected gains; and
in this way the loaferly but cunning Smith, who was too lazy to work for his living,
(his deluded followers did all the digging) was enabled to obtain a scanty subsistence
for himself without pursuing any useful employment.
Alleged swindling aside, Smiths parents were ardent believers in religious

visions, and Joseph claimed his first encounter with an angel called Moroni
in September 1823. Four years later, after much discussion of sacred golden
plates inscribed by ancient prophets, Moroni allegedly led Smith to the priceless relics in Wayne County. Affidavits from 11 witnesses purported to confirm
existence of the plates, inscribed in what Smith called reformed Egyptian,
which only he could interpret. In April 1830, Smith published his translation
of the Book of Mormon, using it as the foundation for his new Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints (commonly called the Mormon or LDS Church).
In 1831, Smith and his followers left New York for Kirtland, Ohio, with
a second Mormon outpost established at Zion, near Independence, Missouri. Unbelievers in the Show-Me State expelled Zions inhabitants two years
later, with Smith himself tarred and feathered. From Independence, Smith embarked on a search for buried treasure at Salem, Massachusetts, but returned
empty-handed to Kirtland. His next venture, with other church leaders, was
the Kirtland Safety Society, a quasi-bank organized in January 1837, with loyal
Mormons urged to buy shares as part of their religious duty. The enterprise
failed within a month, and creditors spent the rest of that year clamoring for
reimbursement that was not forthcoming. Finally indicted on a charge of banking fraud, Smith fled Ohio on January 12, 1838, to establish a new Mormon
enclave in Jackson County, Missouri.
Their reception by non-Mormons, dubbed Gentiles in LDS parlance, was
no better than at Independence, five years earlier. If anything, the response
531
532
SMITH, JOSEPH, JR.
proved more hostile since Smiths revelation supporting polygamy. (Smith had
three wives by 1838, and a total of 34 by November 1843.) Anti-Mormon agitation grew so militant, in fact, that Smith organized a covert force of Danites
to combat enemies of the churchand, some said, to weed out dissenting Mormons. Thus began the first of several Mormon Wars (see sidebar), in which
Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs ordered that Mormons be exterminated or
driven from the state. Gentile raiders complied, killing at least 17 Mormons at
Hauns Mill on October 30, 1838. Two days later, surviving Mormons surrendered to state troops, with an agreement to forfeit their property and leave Missouri. Smith was charged with treason, but escaped from custody on April 6,
1839, while awaiting trial.
Illinois accepted the LDS refugees, and Smith established a new community
called Nauvoo (from Hebrew, to be beautiful). A recent convert, Dr. John Cook
Bennett, used his influence as quartermaster general of Illinois to obtain Nauvoos municipal charter, approving formation of an LDS militia led by Lieutenant General Smith and Major General Bennett. Smith simultaneously named
Bennett as Nauvoos first mayor and assistant president of the church, but had
cause to regret it when Bennetts sexual relations with various women in town
were revealed. Other rumors circulated charging Nauvoos Mormons with adultery, homosexuality, and performing illegal abortions. Smith replaced Bennett as
mayor, and his former ally went on to write lurid exposs of Mormon life. One
controversial doctrine that he did not have to fabricate was baptizing the dead,
introduced by Smith in 1840. In the summer of 1842, Smith proclaimed a new
revelation for establishment of a theocracy spanning the globe.
Hostility against Mormons escalated in May 1842, after a botched attempt to
kill ex-governor Boggs in Missouri. Smith had predicted Boggss death, and reputed Danite gunman Owen Porter Rockwell was charged with attempted murder, then acquitted at trial. (The crime remains officially unsolved.) Missouri
sought to extradite Smith, but federal authorities deemed the writ unconstitutional. Prosecutors tried again in June 1843, demanding Smiths extradition on
the 1838 treason charge, but Smith obtained a writ of habeas corpus that foiled
the arrest. Six months later, he petitioned Congress to make Nauvoo an independent territory. Failing that, he announced his third-party candidacy for the
presidency in early 1844.
By then, Smiths relationship with several of his top advisors had soured,
prompting them to criticize him in their newly founded Nauvoo Expositor.
Smiths intemperate response led to his death, and left successor Brigham
Young in charge of the LDS Church. Prosecutors charged five menMark Aldrich, Jacob Davis, William Grover, Thomas Sharp, and Levi Williamswith
murdering the Smith brothers, but jurors acquitted all five at trial. Mormons
suspected Illinois governor Thomas Ford of complicity in the murders, and although he denied it, Ford later expressed satisfaction with the Mormon exodus
SMITH, JOSEPH, JR.
MORMON WARS
Three separate conflicts in American history are commonly referred to as
Mormon Wars. The first, in 1838, pitted Latter-day Saints (LDS) Church
members against hostile neighbors in northwestern Missouri, claiming 22
lives. All but one of those killed were Mormons, including 17 summarily
executed at the Hauns Mill massacre on October 30. A second war in Illinois, between church members and state militia during 18441845, followed the murders of Joseph Smith and his brother and claimed another
10 Mormon lives. The final Mormon War, in 18571858, arose from conflicts between the U.S. government and Brigham Youngs regime in Utah
Territory, chiefly over the issue of polygamy. That war had no battles
per se, but troops were mobilized on both sides in May 1857 and a group
of Mormon guerrillas led by John Doyle Lee massacred 120 members of
a westward-bound wagon train at Mountain Meadows on September 11,
1857. Seventeen surviving children were spared and adopted by Mormon
families. State authorities indicted Lee and three other militia leaders on
murder charges in 1874, but only Lee was punished, being executed by a
firing squad on March 23, 1877. Meanwhile, Congress banned polygamy
in U.S. territories with the Morrill Act of July 1862.
from Illinois, calling Joseph Smith the most successful impostor in modern
times. With regard to the double lynching, Ford wrote that some persons expect more protection from the laws than the laws are able to furnish in the face
of popular excitement.
See also: Strang, James Jesse (18131856).
Further Reading
Brodie, Fawn. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith. New York: Knopf,
1971.
Fullmer, John. The Assassination of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, the Prophet and the Patriarch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. London: Latter-day Saints Book
Depot, 1855.
Hill, Marvin. Carthage Conspiracy Reconsidered: A Second Look at the Murder of
Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 97 (Summer
2004): 10734.
Nickerson, Freeman. Death of the Prophets Joseph and Hyram [sic] Smith. Boston: John
Gooch, 1944.
Wicks, Robert, and Fred Foister. Junius and Joseph: Presidential Politics and the Assassination of the First Mormon Prophet. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2005.
533
534
SOGDIANUS
SOGDIANUS (?423 BCE)

On January 10, 423 BCE, in his seventh month as Persias monarch, King Sogdianus was assassinated by Arbarios, a cavalry commander acting on orders from
Ochus, the kings younger half-brother. Sogdianus should not have been surprised, because he had gained the throne by sending assassins named Menostanes and Pharnacyas to slay his elder half-brother, Xerxes II. After Sogdianus
was eliminated, Ochussubsequently crowned as King Darius IIexecuted
Pharnacyas, and Menostanes committed suicide.
The life and abbreviated reign of Sogdianus is known today from only
one source, Greek historian Ctesias of Cnidus (404397 BCE), who described them in the 18th book of his History of the Persians (4651). However, as we shall see, that accounts chronology is clearly incorrect, leaving
an air of mystery around the various events related. According to Ctesias,
Artaxerxes I, fifth king of the Achaemenid Empire, ascended to the throne
in 465 BCE and sired three sons before his death on December 24, 424 BCE.
The first, Crown Prince Xerxes II, was his only legitimate heir, borne by
Queen Damaspia. Sogdianus came next, from concubine Alogyne or Babylon, and Ochus was third in line, borne by another concubine, Cosmartidene of Babylon.
At the death of Artaxerxes, Xerxes II succeeded him, ruling Persia (by Ctesiass calculation) for a grand total of 45 days. Sogdianus and his cohorts reportedly found Xerxes drunk and murdered him, whereupon Sogdianus became
king, allegedly reigning for six months and 15 days. The date of his murder by
Arbarios, cited by Ctesias as January 10, 423 BCE, must therefore be inaccurate unless his reign was only 17 days long, but no other fifth-century reports
exist to contradict it. Some modern historians resolve the riddle by suggesting
that all three sons of Artaxerxes I declared themselves the rightful kings of Persia upon learning of their fathers death, Xerxes II being recognized in Persia
proper, while Sogdianus may have been recognized in Elam (now Irans Ilam
Province) and Ochus was recognized in Hyrcania (now Gorgan, in Golestan
Province).
With the death of his last contentious sibling, Darius IIknown in Greece
as Darius Nothos (Bastard) ruled the Persian Empire with Queen Parysatis, his wife and half-sister (also half-sister of Xerxes II and Sogdianus). At
his death in 405 BCE, he was succeeded by his eldest son, Artaxerxes II.
Parysatis, however, favored her second-born, Cyrus the Younger, who rebelled against his brother and the Achaemenid Empire at large in 401 BCE.
On September 3 of that year, Artaxerxes II defeated Cyrus at the Battle of
Cunaxa, near present-day Baghdad, Iraq. Hopelessly outnumbered14,500
men against 106,000Cyrus was slain on the field and his army defeated.
Queen Parysatis blamed Tissaphernes, commander of Persian forces in Asia
Minor, for her favorite sons death and sent an assassin named Tithraustes to
S O M O Z A D E B AY L E , A N A S TA S I O
kill him at Colossae, in 359 BCE. The bitter queen is commemorated by asteroid 888 Parysatis, discovered by German astronomer Maximillian Wolf in
February 1918.
Further Reading
Allen, Lindsay. The Persian Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Olmstead, A. T. History of the Persian Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1948.
Van de Mieroop, Marc. History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000323 BC. Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
Wiesehofer, Josef. Ancient Persia. London: I.B. Tauris, 2001.
SOMOZA DEBAYLE, ANASTASIO

(19251980)
On September 17, 1980, a seven-member assassination team carried out the
final act of Operation Reptile, targeting exiled Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in Asuncin, Paraguay. The Nicaraguan commandos
four men and three womenhad stalked Somoza for six months prior to
staging their final attack. At 10:10 A.M. on that Monday, a lookout disguised
as a newspaper vendor reported Somozas departure from home with financial advisor Jou Baittiner and chauffeur Csar Gallardo. As Somozas car
approached the ambush site, Hugo Irurzun tried to stop it with an RPG-7
rocket launcher, but the weapon misfired. Reloading quickly, he struck the
Mercedes Benz with a second projectile, the other killers opened fire with automatic weapons, killing all three of the vehicles occupants. Subsequent reports claimed that Somozas corpse was mangled and burned almost beyond
recognition, finally identified from his feet. All the assassins escaped, except
Irurzun, whose distinctive reddish-blond beard betrayed him. Cornered by
police on September 18, Irurzun died in the ensuing firefight. Team leader
Enrique Gorriarn Merlo explained Somozas murder by saying, We cannot tolerate the existence of millionaire playboys whilst thousands of Latin
Americans are dying of hunger.
Anastasio Somoza Debayle was born in Len, Nicaragua, on December 5,
1925, the third son of Anastasio Somoza Garca and Salvadora Debayle. At age
10, after three years in a school run by the Catholic Church, he was sent to
study in the United States, following older brother Luis Somoza Debayle in attending Floridas Saint Leo University and La Salle Military Academy on Long
Island, New York. While he was thus engaged, in January 1937, his father was
installed as Nicaraguas president. Somoza Debayle entered the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point, New York, in July 1943, and graduated three years
later. Returning home, he was appointed by his father as chief of staff for the
535
536
S O M O Z A D E B AY L E , A N A S T A S I O
Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, killed in exile, in September 1980. (Shepard Sherbell/CORBIS SABA)
National Guard, commanding Nicaraguas army nationwide. That post made

him the second-most powerful official in his homeland.
Anastasio Somoza Garcas assassination in September 1956, son Luis ascended to the presidency, leaving brother Anastasio in charge of the army and
secret police. During his tenure, the Sandinista National Liberation Front
named for 1930s rebel leader Augusto Csar Sandinobegan its long struggle
to rid Nicaragua of the corrupt and brutal Somoza dynasty. Luis died from natural causes in Managua, on April 13, 1967, and was succeeded by ex-foreign
minister Ren Schick Gutirrez, widely regarded as a puppet of the Somozas.
Schick also died in office, in August 1966, succeeded in turn by Orlando Montenegro Medrano and Vice President Lorenzo Guerrero Gutirrez. Another
pliable servant of the dynasty, Guerrero ceded the presidency to Anastasio Somoza Debayle on May 1, 1967, and was rewarded with appointment as foreign
minister.
Somoza Debayle ruled Nicaragua with an iron hand, crushing dissent by any
means at his disposal. The countrys constitution required him to step down
in May 1972, but Somoza prepared himself working out a bargain. He agreed
to leave office as planned, while retaining command of the National Guard,
if allowed to seek reelection in 1974. During the two-year hiatus, Nicaragua
would be ruled (in theory) by a Government Triumvirate consisting of liberals Alfonso Lovo Cordero and Roberto Martnez Lacayo, with conservative
S O M O Z A D E B AY L E , A N A S TA S I O
Fernando Bernab Agero Rocha. In fact, however, Somoza Debayle continued

to manipulate the temporary regime, and resumed the presidency on December 1, 1974.
Throughout his reign, both in and out of office, Somoza Debayle enriched
himself through flagrant corruption. When a catastrophic earthquake struck
Managua, killing some 5,000 people on December 23, 1972, Somoza declared martial law and claimed effective control of the country as head of a
new National Emergency Committee. In the process, he embezzled much of
the money donated for humanitarian relief by charities around the world, and
allegedly turned an extra profit by selling Nicaraguan blood plasma abroad,
when it was desperately needed at home. Aside from national emergencies,
bribery and nepotism were the earmarks of his rule, as they had been under
his father and brother before him. By the late 1970s, various human rights organizations condemned Somozas repressive measures, and support for Sandinista rebels flourished. After U.S. president Jimmy Carter terminated military
aid to Nicaragua, Israel remained as Somozas sole source of foreign arms and
ammunition.
With the Sandinistas closing in, Somoza Debayle resigned as president on
July 17, 1979, and flew to Miami, Floridawhere he was denied entry to
the United States on orders from the Carter White House. Thus rebuffed, he
turned to Paraguay, welcomed by dictator Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda as were
many fugitives before him, including Auschwitz Angel of Death Dr. Josef
Mengele. Somoza invested some of his ill-gotten wealth in a gated estate on
Avenida de Espaa, in Asuncin, and settled down to a life of luxury while it
lasted. After his assassination, he was finally admitted to Miami, for internment
at Woodlawn Park Cemetery and Mausoleum. Somozas memoirs, Nicaragua
Betrayed, were published posthumously, blaming the Carter administration for
his familys downfall.
Soon after his January 1981 inauguration, U.S. president Ronald Reagan
launched a covert war against the Sandinista regime that replaced Somozas
dictatorship, branding it as an outpost of Cuba-style communism in Central
America. To that end, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employed former officers of Somozas National Guardpopularly known as Contrasto
destabilize the government. Perhaps predictably, the Contras employed tactics reminiscent of their prior behavior, sparking new international protests
against atrocities and violations of human rights. Supporting themselves in
large part through cocaine sales, the insurgentscompared by Reagan to
the founding fathers of the United Stateswreaked such havoc that Congress banned further financial support for their cause in 1982. Reagans
aides then developed a convoluted (and illegal) scheme to fund the Contras
through arms sales to Iran, ultimately leading to the Iran-Contra scandal of
19861987. That episode produced a dozen indictments, with defendants
537
538
S O M OZ A GA RC A , A N A S TA S I O
including Reagans secretary of defense, an assistant secretary of state, and

a former CIA director. Seven defendants were convicted, most pardoned by
President George H. W. Bush shortly before he left office in 1993.
Enrique Gorriarn Merlo continued his career as a freedom fighter after
Somozas assassination. A native of Argentina, he returned home in 1987, and
two years later led an attack on the La Tablada Regimental barracks, killing
39 persons and wounding another 60. Arrested in Mexico, in 1995, he was
extradited for trial and convicted with 11 associates, including his ex-wife,
receiving a life prison term. President Eduardo Duhalde pardoned Gorriarn
in May 2003, five months after Gorriarn published his memoirs. Gorriarn
died from cardiac arrest in Buenos Aires, in September 2006, while attempting to rally support for a 2007 presidential campaign.
See also: Reagan, Ronald Wilson (19112004)Attempted; Sandino, Augusto Nicols
Caldern (18951934); Somoza Garca, Anastasio (18961956).
Further Reading
Alegria, Claribel, and Darwin Flakoll. Death of Somoza. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone
Press, 1996.
Berman, Karl. Under the Big Stick: Nicaragua and the United States Since 1848. Boston:
South End Press, 1986.
Crawley, Eduardo. Dictators Never Die: A Portrait of Nicaragua and the Somoza Dynasty.
Diederich, Bernard. Somoza and the Legacy of U.S. Involvement in Central America. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007.
Morley, Morris. Washington, Somoza and the Sandinistas: State and Regime in US Policy toward Nicaragua 19691981. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Towell, Larry. Somozas Last Stand: Testimonies from Nicaragua. Trenton, NJ: Red Sea
Press, 1990.
SOMOZA GARCA, ANASTASIO

(18961956)
On September 21, 1956, longtime Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza
Garca attended a party at the Club Social de Obreros de Len. Also present,
though without an invitation, was Rigoberto Lpez Prez, a 27-year-old artist,
poet, and composer who despised the corruption and brutality of Somozas regime. Approaching Somoza, Lpez shot him in the chest and was immediately
cut down by return fire from presidential bodyguards. Evacuated by air to a
hospital in the Panama Canal Zone, Somoza lingered until September 29, then
expired from his wounds.
Anastasio Somoza Garca was born in San Marcos, Nicaragua, on February 1, 1896, the son of a wealthy coffee planter. He spent his teens with
relatives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he attended the Pierce School
S O M O Z A G A R C A , A N A S TA S I O
of Business Administration (established in 1865 as Union Business College,

now simply Pierce College). While there, he also met his future wife, Salvadora Debayle Sacasa, granddaughter of Nicaraguan president Roberto Sacasa
Sarria and a member of a clan whose wealth exceeded Somozas.
Despite his education at Pierce, Somoza floundered as a businessman
upon returning to his homeland. In 1926, he joined a rebellion seeking to
depose President Emiliano Chamorro Vargas and replace him with Somozas
uncle-in-law, Juan Bautista Sacasa, but he fared no better as a field commander than he had in business. Somozas raid on an army garrison at San
Marcos failed, but his fluency in English permitted Somoza to serve as an
interpreter when U.S. diplomats led peace negotiations between the opposing sides. Somoza finally advanced in January 1929, when the inauguration
of a distant relative, President Jos Mara Moncada Tapia, saw him named to
serve as governor of Len.
Juan Bautista Sacasa succeeded Moncada as president, placing Somoza in
charge of the National Guard as his first act in office. His next move was an amnesty offer to rebel leader Augusto Sandino, an agrarian reformer and bitter adversary of Somoza. Somoza eliminated that threat by assassinating Sandino on
February 1934, moving on to purge various local officials whom he believed
might oppose his next grab for power. On June 9, 1936, Somoza staged a coup
and forced Bautista to resign, filling the office briefly with hand-picked puppet
Carlos Alberto Brenes until Somoza officially claimed the presidency on January 1, 1937.
Thus began the long rule of Nicaragua by the Somoza dynasty, an era
marked by flagrant corruption, nepotism, and brutal suppression of any dissent. Somoza Garcas first election as president, by an improbable landslide
of 107,201 votes to 100, set the tone for all that followed. In short order, he
amended Nicaraguas constitution to concentrate power in his own hands,
while filling top government offices with relatives and loyal supporters. Multiple parties existed on paper, but election fraud and brazen intimidation
placed Somozas Nationalist Liberal Party in firm control of the state, and Somoza himself skimmed the profits from agricultural exports and government
contracts. By 1944, President Somoza was the countrys largest landowner,
claiming 51 cattle ranches, 46 coffee plantations, plus various sugar mills
and rum distilleries. Property confiscated from German immigrants during
World War II provided another source of wealth, and Somoza earned still
more from presidential commissions charged to U.S. firms for access to Nicaraguas natural resources. As if that were not enough, he collaborated with
underworld elements to protect illegal gambling and prostitution, compiling
a fortune estimated at $400 million by 1950 ($3.8 billion today).
President Franklin Roosevelt tolerated Somozas dictatorship, telling friends,
He may be a son of a bitch, but hes our son of a bitch. White House successor President Harry Truman felt differently pressuring Somoza to decline
539
540
S O M OZ A GA RC A , A N A S TA S I O
reelection in 1947. Somoza obliged, directing his party to nominate 69-yeaarold Dr. Leonardo Argello Barreto as his latest front man. Inaugurated on May 1,
Dr. Argello suddenly displayed a startling independent streak, declaring,
I will not be, by the way, a simple figurehead. Somozas National Guard deposed Argello on May 26, replacing him with Benjamn Lacayo Sacasa, another of Somozas uncles by marriage. Lacayo, in turn, lasted less than three
months, ceding the presidency to Vctor Manuel Romn y Reyes (yet another
Somoza uncle). Reyes died on May 6, 1950, and Manuel Fernando Zurita followed as acting president, surrendering the pretense and his office to Somoza
on May 21.
Tired of playing games with the United States, Somoza amended the Nicaraguan constitution once again, in 1955, permitting himself to seek another presidential term without employing stand-ins. By that time, he had also
founded a merchant marine company and Lneas Areas de Nicaragua, Nicaraguas national airline. While milking profits from those enterprises, he built
a new container port near Managua, predictably named after himself. His assassination failed to break the dynasty Somoza had established, as he was succeeded first by son Luis Somoza Debayle, and later by son Anastasio Somoza
Debayle, maintaining control of the country (with various puppet rulers) until
July 1979.
Once the family was finally expunged from Nicaragua, supplanted by a
leftist government named in honor of murdered Augusto Sandino, assassin
Rigoberto Lpez Prez was officially rehabilitated. The Sandinista Liberation
Front named one of its regional commands after Lpez in April 1979; three
months later, with the movements triumph, Managuas national stadium was
named after Lpez. (President Arnoldo Alemn changed the stadiums name
once again, in November 1998, to name it after Major League Baseball player
Dennis Martinez.) On the 25th anniversary of his death in Len, the government issued Decree No. 825, naming Lpez as a National Hero. In 2006, a
monument dedicated to Lpez was erected in Managua. Somozas name, meanwhile, has been removed from sundry landmarks nationwide.
See also: Sandino, Augusto Nicols Caldern (18951934); Somoza Debayle, Anastasio
(19251980).
Further Reading
Berman, Karl. Under the Big Stick: Nicaragua and the United States Since 1848. Boston:
South End Press, 1986.
Diederich, Bernard. Somoza and the Legacy of U.S. Involvement in Central America. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007.
Lake, Anthony. Somoza Falling: A Case Study of Washington at Work. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.
S TA M B O L I Y S K I , A L E K S A N D A R
Millett, Richard. Guardians of the Dynasty. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1977.
Schmitz, David. Thank God Theyre On Our Side: The United States & Right-Wing Dictatorships. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
Walter, Knut. The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, 19361956. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1993.
STAMBOLIYSKI, ALEKSANDAR (18791923)

On June 9, 1923, Bulgarian fascist leader Aleksandar Tsolov Tsankov led a
coup dtat against Prime Minister Aleksandar Stamboliyskis Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU). The Bulgarian Communist Party refused to take
sides, regarding the upheaval as a struggle for power between the urban and
rural bourgeoisie. Stamboliyski escaped from the capital at Sofia, hoping to
rally support in his native village of Slivnitsa, but rebels captured him there on
June 14, torturing him before he was finally shot. In a crowning act of contempt,
the assassins severed Stamboliyskis right hand, with which he had signed the
Treaty of Ni three months earlier, vowing to suppress the far-right Internal
Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO). The killers also decapitated
Stamboliyski, sending his head back to Sofia in a box of biscuits.
Aleksandar Stamboliyski was a farmers son, born at Slivnitsa on March 1,
1879. He joined the BANU at its formation, in 1899, initially conceived as a
peasants professional organization rather than a political party. That quickly
changed, as Tsar Ferdinand I resisted any movement toward agrarian reform,
and by 1911, Stamboliyski was the BANUs leader, marked by Bulgarian authorities as the countrys leading antimonarchist in parliament. He opposed
Bulgarias entry to World War I in 1914, prompting other members of parliament to challenge his patriotism. When asked if he was a loyal Bulgarian,
Stamboliyski replied, I am a Yugoslav! He subsequently confronted Tsar Ferdinand personally to protest the war, an action that earned him a court-martial
and a life prison term on September 18, 1915.
Two weeks later, Bulgaria entered the war on the side of the Central Powers
German, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. Three years later, with unrest epidemic in the ranks of Bulgarian soldiers, Tsar Ferdinand released Stamboliyski in the vain hope that he might quell an impending mutiny. Instead, on
September 27, 1918, Stamboliyski issued a declaration condemning Ferdinand
and announcing a new Bulgarian republic, with himself in charge of its provisional government. Some historians believe that declaration was released under
his name without Stamboliyskis knowledge or approval, but it hardly mattered.
His supporters rose in a rebellion at Radomir, briefly battling tsarist troops before
they were crushed, with many executions, on October 2. Stamboliyski escaped
the ensuing round-up, and witnessed a surprise victory on October 3, 1918, as
Tsar Ferdinand fled Bulgaria, abdicating in favor of son Boris III the Unifier.
541
542
S TA M B O L I YS K I, A L E KSA N DA R
In the parliamentary elections of August 1919, the BANU won 27 of 236

available seats, one held by Stamboliyski. Two months later, on October 14, he
was named to serve as prime minister. He retained that post in March 1920,
when national elections gave the BANU 120 parliamentary seats. By April
1923, his party seemed unstoppable, with 212 seats in parliament. His tenure
as prime ministerdescribed by some observers as a virtual dictatorshipwas
not untroubled, however. Far-right extremists from the IMRO and the Internal
Thracian Revolutionary Organization (ITRO) waged guerrilla actions both in
Bulgaria and Greece, prompting the Greek government to expel large numbers
of Bulgarians by 1922. Stamboliyski also faced pressure from the left, while
coping with food shortages and an influenza epidemic that claimed thousands
of lives.
To defend his regime and carry out his agrarian reforms, Stamboliyski raised
a peasant army known as the Orange Guard, which skirmished with the IMRO
and ITRO. On November 27, 1919, he increased right-wing antipathy by signing the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine, which ceded western Thrace, southern Dobruja, and other Bulgarian lands to victors of the late World War; reduced
Bulgarias standing army to 20,000 men; and promised payment of 100 million in reparations. The Treaty of Ni was seen by his enemies as a further
capitulation, with its specific promise to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia that Stamboliyski would suppress the IMRO in Bulgaria.
The resultant fascist coup of June 1923 ensconced Aleksandar Tsankov as
prime minister, leading Bulgarias ironically named Democratic Alliance. Communists failed to unseat him with an uprising in September 1923, then tried
again with a series of bombings in April 1925. Tsankov declared martial law
and banned the Bulgarian Communist Party, earning condemnation both from
the Communist International and the League of Nations. Tsankov left office in
January 1926, moving on to form a National Social Movement patterned on
Adolf Hitlers Nazi Party in 1932. Bulgarias army seized control of the country in May 1934, and was in turn deposed by communists in September 1944.
Tsankov staged a comeback of sorts that same month, named by Hitler as
prime minister of a Bulgarian government-in-exile, but wars end found him
hiding in Argentina, where he died on July 27, 1959.
Further Reading
Bell, John. Peasants in Power: Alexander Stamboliski and the Bulgarian Agrarian National
Union, 18991923. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Berend, Ivan. Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II. Berkeley:
Chary, Frederick. The History of Bulgaria. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2011.
Frucht, Richard. Encyclopedia of Eastern Europe: From the Congress of Vienna to the Fall
of Communism. London: Routledge, 2000.
S TA M B O L O V, S T E FA N N I K O L O V
STAMBOLOV, STEFAN NIKOLOV

(18541895)
On July 3, 1895, ex-prime minister Stefan Stambolov rode through Sofia,
the Bulgarian capital, with a bodyguard and another companion. Thirteen
months had elapsed since his resignation from office, but Stambolov still felt
himself endangered by Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. As Stambolovs carriage neared home, a man armed with a revolver stepped into the
road and fired at the vehicle. Stambolov drew his own pistol and leapt from
the carriage, suddenly confronted by three more assassins brandishing daggers. He shot one, before the others tackled him and threw him to the ground.
Apparently forewarned that Stambolov wore a bulletproof vest, the assailants
hacked at his head before Stambolovs companions drove them away. Carried
home with a fractured skull, hands mutilated by defensive wounds, Stambolov survived until 2:00 A.M. on July 6, blaming Ferdinand for the assault.
His last recorded words were a confession of failure: Bulgarias people will
forgive me everything. But they will not forgive that it was I who brought
Ferdinand here.
Stefan Stambolov was born on January 31, 1854, at Veliko Tarnovo on the
Yantra River. His father was a veteran of an abortive 1835 rebellion against
Turkish rule of Bulgaria. Educated first in his hometown, Stambolov proceeded
to a seminary in Odessa in 18701872, then abandoned his religious studied
for membership in the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee (BRCC).
Founded by Lyuben Karavelov in 1869 and lately merged with Vasil Levskis equally militant Internal Revolutionary Organization, the BRCC pursued
armed struggle against the Ottoman Turkish Empire that had ruled Bulgaria
since 1396. The Turks hanged Levski in February 1873, prompting a schism
in the BRCC. One faction chose Stambolov as its leader, and the other followed
rival revolutionary Hristo Botev. Both led unsuccessful uprisings: Stambolov
evaded capture after his effort at Stara Zagora in 1875, and Botev died in battle
near Kozloduy in 1876.
Those uprisings, and their brutal suppression, led to the Constantinople
Conference of 18761877, where the Great PowersBritain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italymapped a plan for Bulgarian independence. Turkeys refusal to agree encouraged Russias declaration of war on the
Ottoman Empire, in April 1877, liberating much of present-day Bulgaria by
March 1878. Prince Alexander of Battenberg served as the first head of state,
appointed in April 1879. Stefan Stambolov helped organize the first Bulgarian parliament that same year, serving as vice chairman in 1880, then rising
to the post of chairman. In November 1885, the two-week Serbo-Bulgarian
War completed unification of the territory, with the acquisition of Eastern Rumelia and Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II recognized Prince Alexander as
governor-general.
543
544
S T E U N E N B E RG, FR A N K
That arrangement angered some Serbian military officers, who craved a

chance to run the country by themselves. Encouraged by Russia, they staged
a coup dtat that deposed Alexander on August 20, 1886. Stambolov led his
own countercoup eight days later, toppling the military junta and assuming
the post of regent, pending restoration of the monarchy. Russian antipathy to
Alexander threatened war if he resumed the throne, and he formally resigned
on September 8, retiring to private life. It was Stambolov, to his later sorrow,
who found a successor in Prince Ferdinand. Crowned as Bulgarias monarch
on August 14, 1887, Ferdinand named Stambolov as prime minister on September 1.
Bulgarias two leaders clashed almost immediately. Stambolovs nationalism
drove him to oppose Ferdinands bid for ever-expanding power, while behaving himself in a manner many Bulgarians viewed as despotic. In 1890, the
New York Times described Stambolov as the only Prime Minister in Europe
who receives his visitors with a revolver lying next to the ink-stand on his
desk. In March of that year, Stambolov arrested 15 army officers for plotting to depose Ferdinand; they were tried in May and shot in June. Four of
Stambolovs political adversaries were hanged at Sofia in 1891, with a fifth
sentenced to prison. Assassins, perhaps dispatched from Russia, retaliated by
killing two of Stambolovs ministers and narrowly missing him. At last, he resigned the prime ministers post on May 31, 1894, succeeded by Konstantin
Stoilov.
Resignation came too late to save Stambolov. Authorities made no visible
effort to arrest his killers, and violence erupted at his funeral, with rioters attempting to seize the corpse. Ferdinand sought to improve relations with Russia, while laying claim to Macedonias largely Bulgarian population. Turkey,
Serbia, and Greece contested that claim, with tensions escalating over time into
the cataclysm that was World War I.
Further Reading
Crampton, R. J. Bulgaria. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Daskalov, Roumen. Debating the Past: Modern Bulgarian History from Stambolov to
Zhivkov. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011.
Perry, Duncan. Stefan Stambolov and the Emergence of Modern Bulgaria, 18701895. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
STEUNENBERG, FRANK (18611905)

On the evening of December 30, 1905, ex-governor Frank Steunenberg approached his home in the small town of Caldwell, Idaho. As he opened his
front gate, a bomb exploded, killing him instantly. Suspicion fell on Harry
Orchardn Albert Edward Horsley, alias Tom Hoganthat same night,
STEUNENBERG, FRANK
when he visited the murder scene with hotel clerk Clinton Wood, stating his
view that Idaho mine owners had paid Steunenberg a big wad of money for
suppressing strikes during his second term as governor. Detained by private
Pinkerton detectives and promised leniency, Orchard confessed to the bombing
and implicated leaders of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM), who were
also arrested. Jurors acquitted the alleged conspirators in 1907, and Orchard
later pled guilty and was sentenced to hang. That sentence was later commuted
to life imprisonment.
Frank Steunenberg was born in Keokuk, Iowa, on August 8, 1861. He attended Iowa State College, and upon graduation found work as a printers apprentice. He worked at the Des Moines Register in 1881, then moved on to
publish a newspaper in tiny Knoxville, Iowa, remaining there until 1886. During that year, he moved west to join his brother in Caldwell, in Idaho Territory,
and published the Caldwell Tribune.
While engaged in that pursuit over the next six years, Steunenberg also
tried his hand at politics. In 1889, the year before Idaho achieved statehood,
he was a delegate to the state constitutional convention. From 1890 to 1893,
he was a member of the state legislature. In 1896, running as a fusion candidate with support from both the Democratic and Populist Parties, Steunenberg won election as Idahos fourth governor. After a relatively uneventful
two-year term, Steunenberg was reelected by the same coalition in November 1898.
By then, unrest was common among minters in Idaho and other nearby
states. The WFM pushed for higher wages and safer working conditions,
whereas stubborn mine owners resisted. In Idaho, fearing that Governor
Steunenberg would support strikers in the event of a walkout, most mine owners
reluctantly granted higher pay, but the Bunker Hill Mining Company refused
to cooperate. Its miners earned 50 cents less per hour than those employed by
other companies, whereas Bunker Hill shareholders received $600,000 in dividends. Mine superintendent Albert Burch fired 17 suspected WFM members,
while declaring that Bunker Hill would rather shut down and remain closed
twenty years than recognize the union. In April 1899, strikers bombed the
companys mill at Wardner, in the Silver Valley, sparking a battle that left two
men dead.
Governor Steunenberg responded to that violence by declaring martial law,
but found himself without troops, because Idahos National Guard had been
sent to the Philippines, fighting native insurgents in the wake of the SpanishAmerican War. Accordingly, he asked President William McKinley for federal
troops, a move viewed as rank betrayal by his union and Populist supporters. Soldiers arrested hundreds of miners, cramming them into open-air bull
pens with minimal sanitary facilities. Martial law remained in effect for the
545
546
S T E U N E N B E RG, FR A N K
remainder of Steunenbergs second term as governor, and he declined to seek a

third. By 1900, the WFM strike had been crushed and the Bunker Hill mines
were operating with 10-hour shifts, seven days per week.
In a manner common for the time, Steunenbergs assassination was investigated by James McParland, a private operative of the Pinkerton National
Detective Agency who had played a key role in prosecuting Molly Maguire terrorists from Pennsylvanias coal fields during 18761878. Focusing
on Harry Orchardrecently a paid antiunion informer for the Cripple Creek
Mine Owners AssociationMcParland procured a confession naming WFM
president Charles Moyer and General Secretary William Big Bill Haywood
as conspirators. Orchard also fingered George Pettibone, an Idaho miner and
labor activist, earlier convicted on charges related to violence around Coeur
dAlene in 1899 (see sidebar). No evidence existed beyond Orchards confession, but McParland arrested the others in February 1906 and they were held
for trial in Boise the following year.
Bill Haywood was the first to face a jury, with Idaho senator William
Borah prosecuting and flamboyant attorney Clarence Darrow speaking for
the defense. In a move to buttress Orchards confession, Borah presented a
second witness obtained by McParland, miner Steve Adams, described in
the press as possessing heavy, drooping eyelids and a booze-blotched complexion. Implicated by Orchard in various crimes, Adams had been jailed
with Orchard prior to trial (thus coordinating their stories), and his wife
and children were arrested by McParland for their own protection. Threatened with prosecution in an unrelated murder case, Adams agreed to testify, then promptly recanted when Darrow offered to defend him. In court,
he testified that [w]hen the confession was made, McParland led me on a
step-by-step and showed me all they wanted me to say. . . . He wanted the
names of the officers of the Federation used as much as possible all through
the confession. Jurors acquitted Haywood, and a separate panel likewise
acquitted George Pettibone. Charges against Charles Moyer were dismissed.
Steve Adams faced trial twice in Idaho, resulting in hung juries, then was
tried and finally acquitted on a separate murder charge in Colorado, liberated after three years in prison.
That left Harry Orchard to plead guilty as Steunenbergs sole killer in
March 1908, receiving a death sentence, later commuted to life in prison.
Soon after sentencing, Orchard converted to Seventh-Day Adventism and
spent the rest of his life in custody, dying at age 88, on April 13, 1954.
Author Melvyn Dubofsky suggests that Orchard may have suffered from
a psychotic personality disorder, but no formal diagnosis supports that
supposition.
Big Bill Haywood, while escaping conviction for Steunenbergs murder, continued his involvement in radical labor activity. He was a founder and leader
STEUNENBERG, FRANK
COEUR DALENE DYNAMITE EXPRESS

On April 29, 1899, in the midst of an ongoing strike, some 250 members of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) hijacked a train at
Burke, Idaho, proceeding to other stops on the line in Shoshone County.
Another 100 miners boarded the train at Mace, 150 at Gem, and 200
at Wallace. Along the way, at Frisco, the hijackers loaded 80 crates of
dynamite4,000 pounds in alland proceeded to Wardner, where they
blasted the Bunker Hill Mining Companys $250,000 mill into ruins. Two
men died at the scene, a nonunion scab and a WFM member accidentally shot by fellow strikers. Reboarding their Dynamite Express,
the raiders rolled on through Kellog and Wallace, greeted by prounion crowds along the track, who cheered as they passed. That incident prompted Governor Steunenbergs declaration of martial law, with
a request for federal troops. State Auditor Bartlett Sinclair set the tone
for what followed, declaring that all residents of Canyon Creek had a
criminal history, and that the entire community, or the male portion
of it, ought to be arrested. Soldiers ransacked every home, packing hundreds of menincluding a doctor, a minister, the postmaster, and school
superintendentinto bull pens resembling concentration camps.
of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), frequently linked to strikes

marked by violence. In 1918, he was convicted with 100 other IWW members
on charges of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, for criticizing U.S. involvement in World War I. While free on bond pending appeal of that conviction,
Haywood fled to the Soviet Union, where he spent the remainder of his life.
Haywood died in a Moscow hospital on May 18, 1928, from a stroke caused by
alcoholism and diabetes.
Further Reading
Carlson, Peter. Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood. New York: W. W.
Norton, 1983.
Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. New
York: Quadrangle Books, 1969.
Famous American Trials: Bill Haywood Trial, 1907. University of Missouri-Kansas
City. http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/haywood/HAYWOOD.HTM.
Farrell, John. Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned. New York: Doubleday,
2011.
Lukas, J. Anthony. Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for
the Soul of America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
547
548
S T E W A R T, J A M E S , E A R L O F M O R AY
STEWART, JAMES, EARL OF MORAY

(15311570)
On January 19, 1570, James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray, dined with Sir Henry
Gate, Marshal of Berwick, and Sir William Drury at Stirling Castle in Scotland. They discussed the Catholic rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I of England, ongoing since November 1569 by partisans supporting Mary, Queen of
Scots (Elizabeths first cousin, once removed). The diners discussed a meeting
with Scottish nobles, to be held in Edinburgh the following week, and Stewart proceeded toward Edinburgh on January 23. That day, entering the town
of Linlithgow on horseback, Steward passed the home of John Hamilton, archbishop of St. Andrews and treasurer of Scotland. A nephew of the archbishop,
James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh and Woodhouselee, fired a rifle from an
upstairs window of his uncles home, wounding Stewart in the abdomen and
killing an escorts horse. Stewart dismounted and walked to the house where
he was scheduled to spend the night, and died there shortly before midnight.
Most historians consider his murder the first assassination performed with a
firearm.
James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray, was born in 1531, one of many illegitimate children sired by King James V of Scotland. His mother, Lady Margaret
Erskine, was said to be the kings favorite mistress, undeterred by her existing marriage to Sir Robert Douglas of Lochleven. King James favored the lad
with a grant of lands around
Tantallon Castle, east of North
Berwick, in August 1536, and
two years later named the
seven-year-old Commendator of St. Andrews, a quasiecclesiastical post that supported
Stewart for the remainder of
his life.
James V died on December 14, 1542, succeeded by his
only legitimate child, six-dayold daughter Mary. She spent
most of her childhood in France
while regents ruled Scotland,
then returned to Scotland to
wed her first cousin, Henry
Stewart. Their short, unhappy
marriage ended six months
James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray, killed by Catholic later, when an explosion derebels in 1570. (Getty Images)
molished Stewarts home and
S T E W A R T, J A M E S , E A R L O F M O R AY
servants found him murdered in the garden. Prime suspect James Hepburn was
acquitted in that case and married Queen Mary in May 1567, but their joint
reign was brief. In July of that year, rebels imprisoned Mary and forced her to
abdicate in favor of James, her one-year-old son by Henry Stewart, and James
Hamilton, Duke of Chtellerault, served as regent.
James Stewart was not idle in the meantime. In August 1557, he led raids
against the English in Northumbria, and two years later supported the Scottish
Reformation, a rift with the Papacy that would create the Church of Scotland.
Queen Mary, Stewarts half-sister, clung to the Catholic faith, thereby sowing the seeds of rebellion that would later unseat her. In June 1559, Stewart
led a Protestant march against Perth, where he removed icons from Catholic
churches and defeated French forces rallied in Marys support.
Mary escaped to France that time, but would return in 1561 to settle her
differences with James Stewart. Despite their separate and hostile religions,
she named Stewart Earl of Moray in 1562, a post that included title to Darnaway Castle, southwest of Forres. In October 1562, when George Gordon,
4th Earl of Huntly, led a revolt against Mary, Stewart defeated him at the Battle of Corrichie, near Aberdeen. He opposed Marys marriage to Henry Stewart in July 1565, and the following month led an ill-conceived rebellion later
dubbed the Chaseabout Raid, because opposing forces pursued each other
without making contact. Declared an outlaw, James fled to England, then to
France, missing the murder of Marys husband, her hasty marriage to James
Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, and her subsequent abdication. Returning to
Scotland on August 11, 1567, Stewart was named to serve as regent for young
James VI eleven days later.
When Mary escaped from prison on May 2, 1568, she raised an army of
6,000 men, clashing with Stewarts troops near Glasgow, in the Battle of Langside, on May 13. Although outnumbered, Stewart swept the field, forcing
Marys flight to England. There, she was taken into protective custody while
her Scottish supporters waged the five-year Marian Civil War. Her supporters
allegedly planned to assassinate Stewart during a diplomatic visit to York, in
September 1568, but cancelled their plans at the eleventh hour. Back in Scotland, during 1569, Stewart celebrated successive victories, capturing the rural
home of John Fleming, 5th Lord Fleming, along with other Marian strongholds
at Crawford, Hoddom, Annan, Skirling, Kenmuir, and Sanquhar.
After Stewart was shot in Linlithgow, both Hamiltons fled from the scene.
The archbishop sought refuge at Dumbarton Castle, a stronghold of Queen
Marys supporters, but Captain Thomas Crawford led a nocturnal raid that
captured him on April 2, 1571. Quickly tried and convicted of aiding in
Stewarts murderand in the slaying of Henry Stewart, 1st Duke of Albany,
with his valet in February 1567John Hamilton was hanged at Stirling on
April 6, 1571.
549
550
S T R A N G, JA M E S J E S S E
Triggerman James Hamilton was more fortunate. He outran mounted pursuers and escaped to France, where he found sanctuary with kinsmen of Queen
Mary. They asked him to assassinate Gaspard II de Coligny, a Huguenot leader
in the French Wars of Religion, but Hamilton refused on grounds that an honorable man should slay his own enemies, but not kill on behalf of others.
Hamilton remained in France and died there, unpunished, in 1581. Meanwhile, four of his relatives were jailed in Scotland as accomplices in Stewarts
assassination, and Scotlands parliament declared the entire family rebels in
October 1579. A year after Hamiltons death, in June 1582, George Hume of
Spott faced Scottish charges of aiding James and John Hamilton in their flight
from Linlithgow. Humes acquittal marked the final closing of the case.
Queen Mary ultimately found that protective custody in England offered
no protection at all. Still confined in August 1586, she was implicated in a
Catholic plot to depose Elizabeth I, and faced trial with 14 accomplices on
charges of conspiracy and treason. All were convicted and executed, with Mary
publicly beheaded on February 8, 1587.
Further Reading
Cadell, Patrick. Sudden Slaughter: The Murder of the Regent Moray. Glasgow: West Lothian History and Amenity Society, 1975.
Ives, Edward. The Bonny Earl of Murray: The Man, the Murder, the Ballad. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Lawson, John. Life of the Celebrated Regent Moray, Patron of Scottish Reformation, Who
Was Assassinated 23d Jan. 1570: Including an Account of the Contention between the
Queen Regent and the Lords of the Congregation. Glasgow: John Lothia, 1828.
Lee, Maurice. James Stewart, Earl of Moray: A Political Study of the Reformation in Scotland. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971.
STRANG, JAMES JESSE (18131856)

On the evening of June 16, 1856, James Strangthe self-proclaimed king
of Beaver Island, in Lake Michiganpassed by the docks at St. James, the islands principal settlement. As ruler of the island and its religious colony, a splinter movement of the Mormon Church, Strang knew that he had enemies who
wished him dead, but he had written in his newspaper, the Northern Islander,
We laugh with bitter scorn at all these threats. Unarmed, without a bodyguard,
he was defenseless when ambushed by church members Thomas Bedford and
Alexander Wentworth, shot three times at close range, then pistol-whipped for
good measure. The gunmen, acting in full view of naval officers aboard the USS
Michigan, ran to the ship and received sanctuary from Captain Charles McBlair.
Friends transported Strang to nearby Voree, Wisconsin, headquarters of his sect,
where he died from his wounds on July 9. Captain McBlair refused demands
from Charlevoix Countys sheriff that he surrender Bedford and McCulloch. Instead, he carried them aboard the Michigan to Mackinac Island, where they were
STRANG, JAMES JESSE
fined $1.25 after a mock trial, then treated to a celebratory banquet. Neither the
gunmen nor two presumed conspirators, Alexander Wentworth and Doctor
J. Atkyn, were ever punished for Strangs assassination.
James Strang was born on a farm near Scipio, New York, on March 21,
1813. Given to flights of fancy in his youth, at age 19 he penned an entry in his
diary complaining that he ought to have been a member of the Assembly or a
Brigadier General before this time if I am ever to rival Cesar [sic] or Napoleon
which I have sworn to. Another entry from the same year declared: I have
spent the day in trying to contrive some plan of obtaining in marriage the heir
to the English Crownthe future Queen Victoria, then 12 years old. Instead,
he married a Baptist ministers daughter, moving from New York to Burlington,
Vermont, with his wife and first child in 1843.
In Vermont, after dabbling in journalism and lectures on temperance, Strang
turned to practicing law, apparently without formal training. That winter, he
converted to Mormonism and traveled to Nauvoo, Illinois, where he was baptized as an elder by church president Joseph Smith Jr. Back in Burlington,
Strang began converting others, building up a congregation of his own. When
an Illinois lynch mob killed Smith and his brother, leaving the parent church
leaderless in June 1844, Strang saw no reason why he should not fill the martyred prophets shoes. Brigham Young had other ideas, rallying support in Nauvoo and leading the Mormon Exodus westward to Utah, whereupon Strang
defected to form his own Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Strangite), casting himself as the sole legitimate heir to Smiths legacy. A letter of appointment, allegedly signed by Smith the week before his murder, supported
Strangs case. Serving as prophet, seer, and revelator of his church was not
enough for Strang, however. Subtly altering Smiths message to include a divine grant of royalty, he declared himself a king. In 1845, Stranglike Smith
before himannounced that an angel had led him to buried gold plates which
he alone could translate from lost Levantine languages, producing a Book of
the Law of the Lord to rival Smiths Book of Mormon.
All he lacked now was a kingdom, secured when Strang led his own mini exodus
from Burlington to Beaver Island in 1847. A man of many parts, when not leading
his flock of some 12,000 acolytes, Strang served in Michigans state legislature and
penned a natural history of Beaver Island that was published by the Smithsonian
Institution. In 1849, after years of opposing polygamy, Strang abruptly changed
his view, accumulating four more wives. That turnabout caused some defections
from his sect, whereas others were occasioned by his strictsometimes selective
discipline. One of Strangs slayers, Thomas Bedford, had been flogged for adultery;
the other, Alexander Wentworth, professed outrage over Strangs recent order that
female church members must dress in bloomers. An accomplice in the murder
plot, Dr. Hezekiah McCulloch, was excommunicated for his heavy drinking and
assorted other sins. The other, Doctor Atkyn, was a swindler and blackmailer
Strang had threatened to ban from his island.
551
552
SVERKER I
Strangs murder doomed his church. While he lay dying at Voree, on July
5, a mob from Mackinac stormed Beaver Island, robbing and evicting its
2,600 inhabitants. The power vacuum left by Strangs assassination proved
particularly difficult to fill, because he had claimed angels must hand-pick
his successor. Lorenzo Dow Hickey eventually filled the post, until his death
in 1900, succeeded until 1922 by High Priest Wingfield Watson. Neither
claimed to be a prophet of the Lord, however, and most of Strangs flock
subsequently joined the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, known since 2001 as the Community of Christ. Remnants of Strangs
original sect persist today as the Church of Jesus Christ (Drewite), founded
by Thomas Drew in 1965, and the Holy Church of Jesus Christ, founded by
Alexandre Caffiaux in 1978.
See also: Smith, Joseph, Jr. (18051844).
Further Reading
Fitzpatrick, Doyle. The King Strang Story: A Vindication of James J, Strang, the Beaver Island Mormon King. Lansing, MI: National Heritage, 1970.
Foster, Lawrence. James J. Strang: The Prophet Who Failed. Church History 50
(1981): 18292.
Russell, William. King James Strang: Joseph Smiths Successor? In Mormon Mavericks: Essays on Dissenters. Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2002.
The Society for Strang Studies. http://www.strangstudies.org/James_Jesse_Strang.
Speek, Vickie. God Has Made Us a Kingdom: James Strang and the Midwest Mormons. Salt
Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2006.
van Noord, Roger. King of Beaver Island: The Life and Assassination of James Jesse Strang.
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Weeks, Robert. For His Was the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory . . . Briefly.
American Heritage 21 (June 1970): 47, 7886.
SVERKER I (?1156)
On December 25, 1156, King Sverker I of Sweden set out from deshg, in
stergtland, to attend Christmas services at nearby Alvastra Abbey. Sverker
had donated land for construction of the Cistercian Orders edifice, and would
have been an honored guestif he had reached the church. Along the way,
however, as coach crossed the Alebck Bridge, he was attacked and stabbed
to death by one of his own escorts. Two pretenders to the Swedish throne,
Magnus Henriksson and Erik Jedvardsson, were suspected conspirators in
Sverkers assassination, and Erik in fact succeeded him, as King Erik IX.
Little is known of Sverkers early. Life, and what remains is mixed with legend. His birth date is unknown, surviving accounts disagree on the name of
his father. The Vstgtalagen (Westgothic law), Swedens oldest text in Latin,
SVERKER I
includes an appendix by a priest called Laurentius listing Christian Swedish kings, which names Sverkers father as Cornube. Another documentthe
Skldatal (Catalogue of Poets), in Old Norsedisagrees, naming his sire as Kol.
In any case, tradition identifies Sverker as a wealthy landowner in stergtland by 1113, when he was chosen as king of Gothiscandza, settled by an East
Germanic tribe of Goths in the first century CE.
His rival for control of Sweden at that time was King Inge the Younger, of the
House of Stenkil, whose death in 1125possibly poisoned by his queen and
her clandestine lovereffectively extinguished the dynasty. Sverker later married Inges widow, Ulvhild Hkansdotter, but not before she spent four years
married to King Niels of Denmark. Niels died in battle Fotevik, in June 1134,
supporting son Magnus Nilssonkilled in the same engagementagainst
rival Canute Lavard, thus freeing Ulvhild to take her third husband.
In the meantime, Sverker had ascended to the Swedish throne, in 1130.
Twelve years later, he successfully defended Swedens borders against forces
from the Novgorod Republic. Queen Ulvhild died in 1148, and Sverker soon
remarried to Riquilda (or Riclitza) or Poland, daughter of Polish king Boleslao
III and widow of the aforementioned Magnus Nilsson. Their union was brief,
ending with Riquildas death in 1150. Before years end, Sverker found himself challenged as king by Erik Jedvardsson of Vstergtland. Another rival,
deemed less dangerous perhaps, was Danish lord Magnus Henriksson, greatgrandson of Inge I and an illegitimate grandson of late Danish king Sweyn II
Estridsson.
Whichever adversary planned Sverkers assassination, Erik claimed the
Swedish throne in 1156, thereafter known as King Eric IX, Eric the Lawgiver,
Erik the Saint, and/or Eric the Holy. If he did kill Sverker, Eriks own fate presents a lesson in irony. On May 18, 1160, he was ambushed and slain by agents
of Magnus Henriksson outside a church in Uppsala, reportedly tortured by
his killers before he was finally beheaded. Magnus II then claimed the throne,
but only briefly. In 1161, he was slain by Karl Sverkersson, son of Sverker I,
who then assumed the throne as Charles VIIand was himself assassinated on
April 12, 1167, by supporters of rival Knut Eriksson.
Further Reading
DuBois, Thomas. Sanctity in the North: Saints, Lives, and Cults in Medieval Scandinavia.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.
Kent, Neil. A Concise History of Sweden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Morby, John. Dynasties of the World: A Chronological and Genealogical Handbook. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Svanstrom, Ragnar. A Short History of Sweden. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934.
553
T
TAKAHASHI KOREKIYO (18541936)
On February 26, 1936, pursuing the ideal of a Showa Restoration proposed by author Kita Ikki, some 1,500 soldiers of the Imperial Japanese
Army attempted a coup dtat to purge destroying the deadly spirit that was
poisoning Japan. Their targets in Tokyo included Prime Minister Okada
Keisuke, Grand Chamberlain Suzuki Kantaro, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal
Saito Makoto, former Keeper of the Privy Seal Makino Nobuaki, Inspector General of Military Education Watanabe Jotaro, and Finance Minister
Takahashi Korekiyo. Before loyal troops suppressed the uprising on February 29, Saito, Takahashi, and Watanabe were dead. The prime minister
escaped through a fluke of mistaken identity, when the rebels shot his brotherin-law, Captain Matsuo Denzo. Following a round-up of the insurrectionists,
two coup leaders committed suicide, 18 were executed for mutiny, seven
received life prison terms, and 28 received lesser sentences, ranging from
one to 15 years.
Takahashi Korekiyo was born out of wedlock in Edo (now Tokyo), the capital of Japans Tokugawa shogunate, on July 27, 1854. Adopted by Takahashi
Kakuji, a samurai warrior of the clan led by Date Kunishige, he learned English
and studied American culture at a missionary school, then was sent to London
in 1866, as a servant for the son of Count Katsu Kaishu. In 1867, Takahashi
traveled to Oakland, California, and spent a year as a common laborer, refining
his skill in English before he returned to Japan in 1868.
Despite his menial employment overseas, Takahashis fluency in English
permitted him to teach the language upon his return to Tokyo, established
that same year as Japans imperial capital. Soon, he was first master at Kyoritsu
Gakko (now Kasei) High School, progressing from there to serve in the ministry of education, then the ministry of agriculture and commerce. Within the
latter department, he was soon promoted to First Chief of the Bureau of Patents, overhauling Japans antiquated patent system. A private business venture
in Peru proved disappointing, but Takahashi was back in Tokyo by 1892, now
working at the Bank of Japan. Finding his mtier in the realm of finance, he
assumed vice presidency of the bank by 1898, and won national recognition
for securing $200 million in critical loans for Japan during the Russo-Japanese
War of 19041905.
556
TA K A H A S H I KO R E K I YO
Japanese finance minister Takahashi Korekiyo, assassinated in 1936. (Getty Images)
That wartime effort earned Takahashi appointment to the National Diets

House of Peers in 1905, followed by appointment as president of the Yokohama Specie Bank (now the Bank of Tokyo, Ltd.) in 1906. A year later, Emperor Meiji made Takahashi a danshaku (baron) under the kazoku (illustrious
heritage) system. Continuing his rise through the financial world, Takahashi
served as governor of the Bank of Japan from June 1, 1911, until February 20,
1913, when Prime Minister Yamamoto Gonnohyoe chose him as minister of finance from the Rikken Seiyukai (Friends of Constitutional Government) Party.
Takahashi left that post when Yamamotos term expired, in April 1914, but was
reappointed to the same position in September 1918, by Prime Minister Hara
Takashi.
In 1920, Takahashis royal title was elevated to shishaku (viscount). Following Prime Minister Haras assassination in Tokyo, in November 1921, Takahashi filled the vacant office while doubling as president of the Rikken Seiyukai.
He served as prime minister for only seven months, hampered by the lack of
a personal power base and by the fact that he was a Christian, whereas most
Japanese were Buddhists or Shintoists. Resigning on June 12, 1922, Takahashi
still retained his party presidency. In 1924, he left his seat in the House of
Peers and won election to the Diets House of Representatives. That June, new
Prime Minister Kato Takaaki chose Takahashi as his minister of agriculture and
TA K A H A S H I K O R E K I Y O
commerce. Before leaving officeand the Rikken Seiyukaiin 1925, Takahashi

split his department into a ministry of agriculture and forestry, and a ministry
of commerce and industry.
His retirement from public life was short lived. As Japan grappled with an
economic depression, Takahashi returned to serve as minister of finance under
Prime Ministers Tanaka Giichi (April 1927 to July 1929), Inukai Tsuyoshi (December 1931 to May 1932), Saito Makoto (May 1932 to July 1934), and Okada
Keisuke (elected July 8, 1934). Throughout that period, Takahashis efforts to
salvage the Japanese economy focused on reduction of military spendinga
policy that marked him among army and naval officers as one of the elements
poisoning Japan.
Prior to the fatal upheaval in February 1936, reactionary forces in the military had attempted other coups. Eleven naval officers assassinated Prime Minister Inukai on May 15, 1932, receiving 15-year prison terms after 350,000
citizens signed a leniency petition with their own blood. In November 1934,
two army offices and five cadets from the Imperial Military Academy tried another coup. Sparse evidence prevented criminal convictions, but the leaders
were suspended, and the cadets were expelled. Nine months later, Lieutenant
Colonel Aizawa Saburo assassinated Major Nagata Tetsuzan, bureau chief of
Military Affairs of the Army, and was executed by a firing squad. Within that
atmosphere, the February Incident of 1936 seemed almost inevitable.
Following his murder, Takahashi received a posthumous elevation in
rank to Dai-kuni kikka-sho (Grand Cordon of the Supreme Order of the
Chrysanthemum), comparable to Britains Order of the Garter. He was succeeded as minister of finance by Machida Chuji, former minister of commerce and industry. A monument to the victims of February 1936 presently
stands in Tokyos Shibuya district, at the site where the condemned rebels
were executed.
Further Reading
Harries, Meirion, and Susie Harries. Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial
Japanese Army. New York: Random House, 1991.
Myung Soo Cha, Did Takahashi Korekiyo Rescue Japan from the Great Depression?
Journal of Economic History 63 (March 2003): 12744.
Nanto, Dick, and Shinji Takagi. Korekiyo Takahashi and Japans Recovery from the
Great Depression. American Economic Review 75 (May 1985): 36974.
Shillony, Ben-Ami. Revolt in Japan: The Young Officers and the February 26, 1936 Incident.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Smethurst, Richard. From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo, Japans
Keynes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Toland, John. The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 19361945.
557
558
TA R A K I, N U R M U H A M M A D
TARAKI, NUR MUHAMMAD (19171979)

On September 14, 1979, Afghani chief of state Nur Muhammad Taraki returned
to Kabul from Havana, Cuba, where he had attended a conference international
conference meant to ensure the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries in their struggle against
imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against
great power and bloc politics. Hafizullah Amin, Tarakis nominal second in
command, met Taraki at Kabuls airport, where they quarreled over Tarakis
proposal that Amin leave Afghanistan to serve as an ambassador abroad. The
next day, Taraki invited Amin to the presidential palace for a conciliatory lunch
with Tarakis Gang of Four: General Mohammad Aslam Watanjar, Major General Sayed Mohammad Gulabzoy, Captain Sherjan Mazdoryar, and Air Force
Commander Assadullah Sarwari. Amin arrived with Major Sayed Daoud Tarum, chief of Afghanistans security police, and an intelligence officer, Nawab
Ali. Tarakis men opened fire on the guests, killing Tarum, but Amin escaped,
rallied troops, and returned to arrest Taraki. After a telephone conversation
with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, Amin ordered Tarakis execution, then reported that he had died from illness.
Nur Muhammad Taraki was born at Ghazni, Afghanistan, to a Pashtun peasant family, on July 15, 1917. He left home at 15, to work in Bombay, India
(now Mumbai), as a clerk for the Pashtun Trading Company. There, for the first
time, Taraki discovered communism through contact with the Surkh Posh (Red
Shirt) movement led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Home again by 1937,
Taraki went to work for Minister of Finance Abdul Majid Zabuli, founder of
the Afghan National Bank. Taraki subsequently studied at Kabul University
and worked as a journalist before cofounding the Peoples Democratic Party
of Afghanistan (PDPA) in January 1965. Delegates to the PDPAs first congress
chose Taraki as their general secretary, but the party lacked sufficient numbers to secure him a parliamentary seat in that years election. In 1966, Taraki
launched the partys newspaper, Khalq (Masses), but it was soon suppressed
by King Mohammed Zahir Shah.
Abolition of the monarchy in August 1973 placed President Mohammed
Daoud Khan in charge of the nation, but his harsh repression of dissent and his
regimes pervasive nepotism failed to satisfy PDPA activists. On April 17, 1978,
suspected government agents assassinated party leader Mir Akbar Khyber. Fifteen thousand angry mourners staged a demonstration at his funeral, prompting a crackdown by President Daoud on PDPA leaders. On April 28, Taraki
and Hafizullah Amin led a coup dtatcommonly called the Saur Revolution, after the second month in the Persian calendarand killed Daoud, with
most of his family. Minister of Defense Abdul Qadir Dagarwal served as interim
chairman of the Revolutionary Council of the Armed Forcesequivalent to
presidentthen ceded that office to Taraki on April 30.
TA S E E R , S A L M A A N
Tarakis presidency was fraught with controversy from its beginning, marked
by a purge of PDPA officers whom he regarded as prospective rivals. His program of agrarian reform, launched on January 1, 1979, generated anger when
family holdings were restricted, any excess acreage seized by the state without
compensation. Further implementation of Marxist programs clashed with traditional Afghan-Islamic values and threatened the power of local leaders, thus
breeding more enemies for the regime. In education, Taraki scrapped a 20-year
plan to wipe out illiteracy, created under President Daoud by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, declaring its curriculum rubbish and replacing textbooks with PDPA leaflets. At the same time,
Taraki signed a Twenty-Year Treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union that
expanded Russian aid to Afghanistan. Even so, Moscow found Tarakis domestic programs too radical, rejecting his plea for practical and technical assistance with men and armament. Leonid Brezhnev personally warned Taraki
that arming Afghanistan would only play into the hands of our enemies, both
yours and ours.
Thus rebuffed, in September 1979 Taraki turned to Cubas Fidel Castro and
the growing Non-Aligned Movement, established in 1961 as the Conference
of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries. Stopping briefly
in Moscow, on his return flight from Havana, Taraki met with Brezhnev and
other Soviet officials who, unknown to him, supported Hafizullah Amins plan
to depose Taraki. Once that object was achieved, however, matters quickly
went from bad to worse. Amin reportedly slaughtered dissidents by the tens of
thousandssome 27,000 at Kabuls Pul-e-Charkhi Prison alone, and Soviet
troops intervened on December 24, 1979, eliminating Amin at the outset of a
nine-year occupation.
See also: Amin, Hafizullah (19291979).
Further Reading
Adamec, Ludwig. Historical Dictionary of Afghanistan. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,
2011.
Dorronsoro, Gilles. Revolution Unending: Afghanistan, 1979 to the Present. London:
C. Hurst & Co., 2005.
Misdaq, Nabi. Afghanistan: Political Frailty and External Interference. New York: Taylor &
Francis, 2006.
Reddy, L. R. Inside Afghanistan: End of the Taliban Era? New Delhi: APH Publishing,
2002.
TASEER, SALMAAN (19442011)

On January 4, 2011, Punjab Province governor Salmaan Taseer met a friend
for lunch at the Koshar Market in Islamabad, Pakistan. He traveled with a
bodyguard, following threats from Muslim clerics, but the precaution did not
559
560
TA S E E R , SA L M A A N
save him. As Taseer returned to his car, one of those bodyguardsMalik

Mumtaz Qadri, an officer of the Elite Punjab Policeopened fire on Taseer
with his submachine gun, striking the governor 27 times. Qadri then dropped
his weapon and surrendered to colleagues at the scene, declaring that he shot
Taseer over the governors opposition to Pakistans criminal statute on blasphemy. Investigators linked Qadri to Dawat-i-Islami, described in media reports as the worlds largest nonpolitical Muslim organization with members in
more than 150 countries. Admirers of Qadri rallied outside Rawalpindis AntiTerrorism Court before his trial, showering the gunman with rose petals. Despite that outpouring of public support, and continuing attacks on Taseer from
fundamentalist spokesmen, the court convicted Qadri and sentenced him to
death on October 1, 2011.
Salmaan Taseer was born on May 31, 1944, at Simla, in then-British India.
His parents came from Amritsar, in the state of Punjab, which became a part
of Pakistan with Indias partition in 1947. Taseers grandparents were peasants, but his father had earned a PhD in Englandthe first native of India to
do soand taught as a professor at Amritsars Aligarh Muslim University. Taseers father died in 1950, leaving his wife and three children relatively well off.
Taseer studied at Lahores Saint Anthony School, where he was a classmate of
future prime minister Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, and later studied accounting in London.
Upon returning home, he joined the center-left Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP)
when it was formed by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in November 1967. Taseer was active in the party for the remainder of his life, serving as its information secretary and as a close aide to future prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Opposition
to dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq was hazardous, landing Taseer in jail on
16 separate occasions. One arrest placed him in solitary confinement for six
months, shackled in a cell with meager rations, losing 40 pounds in custody.
Still, he persevered in defense of democratic socialism, challenging his homelands rock-ribbed conservatism.
Taseers liberalism extended into his personal life. Twice married, with three
children from each union, he also enjoyed romantic affairs with Indian journalist Tavleen Singh (who bore his son out of wedlock in 1980), and Bollywood
actress/director Simi Garewal. Despite those entanglements, in February 1981
Taseer found time to join Pakistans Movement for the Restoration of Democracy,
a coalition aimed at deposing dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. That campaign
culminated in August 1988 with Zia-ul-Haqs death in a plane crash, believed by
some to have been an assassination. Before years end, Taseer won election to Punjabs Assembly as Deputy Opposition Leader. He subsequently sought a seat in the
National Assembly, but was defeated three times, in 1990, 1993, and 1997.
Never satisfied with politics alone, Taseer also built a successful business career. In 1994, he founded First Capital Securities Corporation, a full-service
TA S E E R , S A L M A A N
brokerage house, which Taseer ran as chief executive officer. Two years later,
he filled the same position with a new firm, WorldCall, first operating a network of public pay telephones, later expanding into a major media company
with broadband wireless, cable television, and other services. Oman Telecommunications Company purchased a majority share of WorldCall in May 2008.
Meanwhile, Taseer also operated Business Plus (Pakistans first English-language
news channel), Wikkid Plus (the first TV channel for children), and an Englishlanguage newspaper, Lahores Daily Times.
In November 2007, caretaker Prime Minister Muhammad Mian Soomro
chose Taseer to serve as his interim federal minister for industries, production,
and special initiatives. Six months later, on May 15, 2008, a voters coalition
dominated by the PPP elected him as governor of Punjab, succeeding Lieutenant General Khalid Maqbool Vohra. Already unpopular with conservative
Muslims, Taseer sparked controversy in June 2009, when Asia Bibia Christian woman living in the Sheikhupura Districtwas sentenced to death for
blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammed. Taseer joined Minister for Minorities Affairs Clement Shahbaz Bhatti in condemning that sentence and the statute itself, passed by the National Assembly in 1986. Both men received death
threats, and Taseer reportedly left Pakistan briefly in December 2010, prompting Punjab Assembly Speaker Rana Muhammad Iqbal Khan to call for his removal as governor under constitutional provision that barred a governor from
leaving the province.
That petition was still pending at the time of Taseers assassination in January 2011. Eight hours before his murder, Taseer posted a message on Twitter,
quoting a couplet from Urdu poet Shakeel Badayuni: My resolve is so strong
that I do not fear the flames from without, I fear only the radiance of the flowers, that it might burn my garden down. Two months after Taseers murder,
on March 2, Shahbaz Bhatti also was slain by gunmen in Islamabad, outside
his mothers home. On August 26, 2011, Taliban members kidnapped Shahbaz
Taseer, son of the murdered governor. Conflicting reports of his fate include an
announcement of his execution in June 2012, and a government claim from
January 2013 that negotiations for his safe release had reached an advanced
stage.
See also: Bhutto, Benazir (19532007).
Further Reading
Asghar, Mohammed. Assassin Linked to Dawat-i-Islami. Dawn ( January 5, 2011).
http://dawn.com/2011/01/05/assassin-linked-with-dawat-i-islami.
Bruillard, Karin. Salman [sic] Taseer Assassination Points to Pakistani Extremists
Mounting Power. Washington Post ( January 5, 2011). http://www.washingtonpost
.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/04/AR2011010400955.html.
561
562
T I S Z A D E B O R O S J E N O E T S Z E G E D, I S T V N
Hanif, Mohammed. How Pakistan Responded to Salmaan Taseers Assassination.

The Guardian (January 5, 2011). http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/06/
pakistan-salman-taseer-assassination.
Hashim, Asad. Deadly Warning to Pakistan Liberals. Aljazeera ( January 7, 2011).
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/01/2011141762235392.html.
Salman [sic] Taseer Murder: Mumatz Qadri Sentenced to Death. BBC (October 1,
2011). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-15135502.
ET SZEGED, ISTVN
TISZA DE BOROSJENO
(18611918)
On October 31, 1918, a gang of drunken deserters from the Hungarian army
stormed the home of ex-prime minister Istvn Tisza, planning to arrest him on
a charge of starting World War I. When Tisza confronted the invaders, one of
them shot him at close range, wounding him fatally. Tiszas assassinationthe
fourth attempt on his life in six yearssparked the Aster (or Chrysanthemum)
Revolution, led by socialist Count Mihly Krolyi, which founded the shortlived Hungarian Democratic Republic, placing the nation under communist
rule until March 1, 1920.
Istvn Tisza de Borosjeno et Szeged was born in Pest, Hungary (the eastern
part of present-day Budapest), on April 22, 1861. His father, Count Klmn
Tisza de Borosjeno,
founded Hungarys Liberal Party in 1875 and served as prime
minister from 1875 to 1890 (still a record for the countrys longest-serving head
of state). Istvn studied law in Budapest, Berlin, and Heidelberg, before earning
a PhD in political science at Englands Oxford University in 1881. He spent the
next five years managing family estates at Geszt and Hajd-Bihar, before winning election to Hungarys parliament as a Liberal Party member in 1886.
Tisza received the title of count in 1897, while serving as president of the
Hungarian Industrial and Commercial Bank and sitting on the directorial
boards of various corporations. Not surprisingly, in business and in politics
he favored right-wing policies, opposing agrarian reform movements and supporting restriction of suffrage to the wealthiest 10 percent of Hungarys population. His first term as prime minister, from November 3, 1903, to June 18,
1905, was notable for Tiszas suppression of a railroad workers strike and a
police assault on a Socialist Party gathering in Bihar, which left 33 persons
dead and several hundred injured. His defeat in 1905 sprang from an illadvised attempt to muzzle opposition spokesmen by amending rules of parliamentary procedure, an overreaching that prompted high-level defections from
the Liberal Party.
Still a member of parliament, Tisza founded a new Nemzeti Munkaprt (National Party of Work) in February 1910, which carried the years parliamentary
elections. His elevation to serve as Speaker of the House of Representatives
on May 22, 1912, sparked Socialist protest demonstrations memorialized as
T I S Z A D E B O R O S J E N O E T S Z E G E D , I S T V N
Blood Red Thursday for the harsh police response that left six dead and 300
incarcerated. Sixteen days later, on June 7, opposition party member Gyula
Kovcs tried to kill Tisza in parliament, missing him with three pistol shots,
then failing in an attempt to commit suicide. At trial, Kovcs was acquitted on
grounds of insanity. Despite such animosity, Tisza was elected to a second term
as prime minister in June 1913, retaining that post for four years.
His second term in office coincided with the assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and the outbreak of World War I. Prior to Ferdinands murder, Tisza had opposed Serbian demands for independence from
Austria-Hungary, but after the slaying he argued against military action, fearing that war would doom the Hungarian monarchy. Once battle was joined,
Tisza passed new laws restricting freedom of speech and association, further
obstructing moves toward universal suffrage proposed by the apostolic king
of Hungary and emperor of Austria, Charles I. During the war, Tisza was also
dogged by charges of forced Magyarization against Hungarys ethnic minorities. Ongoing conflict with King Charles forced Tiszas resignation as prime
minister on May 23, 1917.
A short time later, he visited the nearest battlefront and nearly lost his life,
when a disaffected soldier fired a rifle shot at him and missed. The third attempt on Tiszas life occurred on October 16, 1918, when Jnos Lkaia
member of the antiwar Galilei Circle led by communist Ott Korvinlay in
wait for Tisza outside parliament. Lkais revolver misfired and he was arrested,
sentenced to prison, then freed two weeks later during the Aster Revolution.
President Mihly Krolyis government pretended to investigate Tiszas assassination, but professed itself unable to identify the killers. Tiszas family encountered no such difficulty once the communist regime collapsed, naming
the men responsible as Sndor Httner, Pl Kri, Jzsef Pogny, Tivadar Horvth Sanovics, and Tibor Sztanykovszky. Sanovics fled the country after Tiszas
murder and was never apprehended. Httner, Kri, and Sztanykovszky were
convicted of murder at trial in October 1921, receiving 18-year prison terms.
Kri was subsequently freed in a prisoner exchange with the Soviet Union;
Httner died in custody, in 1923; and Sztanykovszky was paroled in 1938.
Jzsef Pogny enjoyed a life of intrigue and adventure after Tiszas assassination, emerging as a leader of the Budapest Soldiers Soviet. In March 1919,
he supported Bla Kuns rise to lead a new Hungarian Soviet Republic and was
named to serve as the Peoples Commissar of War. Internal dissension within
the Communist Party saw Pogny demoted in April 1919 to Deputy Peoples
Commissar of Foreign Affairs, then moved once more, to become Peoples
Commissar of Education. A proponent of Red Terror in Hungary, Pogny
fled to Austria when Admiral Mikls Horthy deposed the communist regime
and reestablished Hungarys monarchy in March 1920. A year later, he tried to
foment revolution in Germany, then traveled to the United States as an agent
563
564
TJ I BAO U, J E A N - M A R I E
of the Communist International (Comintern) in July 1922, under the name

John Pepper. Conflict with party leader William Foster prompted Peppers
recall to Moscow in 1925, where he chaired the Cominterns Information Department. In July 1927, Pepper was elected to head the Presidium of the Cominterns Executive Committee, but he ran afoul of dictator Josef Stalin two
years and was removed from office. Stalins secret police arrested him in July
1937, on charges of participation in a counter-revolutionary organization,
and he was executed on February 8, 1938. The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court posthumously rehabilitated Pepper in May 1956, during the
Soviet Unions process of de-Stalinization.
See also: Franz Ferdinand (18631914).
Further Reading
Deak, Istvan. The Decline and Fall of Habsburg Hungary, 191418. In Hungary in
Revolution. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
Kann, Robert. A History of the Habsburg Empire, 15261918. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1974.
Menczer, Bela. Bela Kun and the Hungarian Revolution of 1919. History Today 19
(May 1969): 299309.
Vermes, Gabor. The October Revolution in Hungary. In Hungary in Revolution. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
TJIBAOU, JEAN-MARIE (19361989)

On May 4, 1989, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, leader of New Caledonias Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), visited Ouva with his chief lieutenant, Yeiwn Yeiwn. A Kanak tribal extremist, Djubelly Wa, killed both men
with close-range gunfire and was instantly gunned down by one of Tjibaous
bodyguards. The shooting capped a 13-year period of sporadic violence by
Kanaks who sought independence from French rule over New Caledonia, first
imposed in 1853.
Jean-Marie Tjibaou was born on January 30, 1936, at Tiendanite, on New
Caledonia. His father a chief of the Kanak (formerly Canaque) tribe, indigenous Melanesian inhabitants of an archipelago east of Australia, including
Grand Terre, Belep, the Isle of Pines, and the six Loyalty Islands. After education in Catholic schools and seminaries from age nine, Tjibaou was ordained as
a priest in 1965 and sent to work as an army chaplain at Bourail, in New Caledonias South Province. From there, in 1966, he was promoted to second vicar
at St. Josephs Cathedral in Noumea. The cathedrals first vicar, Jacob Kapta,
doubled as chaplain for the Caledonian Union, a party seeking independence
from France, who involved Tjibaou in the groups political work.
TJIBAOU, JEAN-MARIE
New Caledonian politician Jean-Marie Tjibaou, shot by tribal extremists in 1989. (AFP/
Getty Images)
Motivated by that experience, and his ongoing work with poor tribesmen,
Tjibaou left New Caledonia in 1968, to study sociology at the Catholic University of Lyon, then pursued courses in ethnology in 1970, under anthropologist
Jean Guiart at the Practical School of Higher Studies, also in Lyon. His father
died that year, while Tjibaou was writing his thesis on adaptation of traditional
Kanak society in the modern world, and Tjibaou subsequently renounced his
religious vocation, choosing social activism instead with the comment that it
is impossible for a priest in this area to take a position, for example in favor of
the restitution of land to the Kanak people.
In that same year, 1971, Tjibaou joined New Caledonias Territorial Administration as a teacher, there encountering his future wife, Marie-Claude Wetta.
Two years later, he also joined the Union of Native Caledonian Friends of
Liberty and Order, created by the Catholic Church in 1946 to eliminate discrimination against indigenous natives as a means of frustrating communist
agitation among them. In September 1975, Tjibaou organized the first Melanesian arts festival, dubbed Melanesia 2000, despite opposition from the Frenchdominated Caledonian Union and the newly created radical separatist Kanak
Liberation Party. Taking the final step from advocacy to political candidacy in
Mach 1977, Tjibaou won election as mayor of Hienghne, running a separatist
campaign under the slogan Maxha Hienghen (Raise Your Head). Two months
565
566
TJ I BAO U, J E A N - M A R I E
later, at the Caledonian Unions congress in Bourail, Tjibaou was elected as the
partys vice president.
In June 1979, on the eve of territorial elections, Tjibaou helped organize
a new Independence Front (FI), forging a tenuous alliance of five competing
nationalist groups. Together, they led the field with 63 percent of the popular
votes, winning five of seven available parliamentary seats. Three years later,
the FI coalition outnumbered opposition members in the Territorial Assembly,
with Tjibaou elected as vice president of New Caledonias Governing Council,
but the islands French masters still resisted any substantive move toward independence. In September 1984, with Tjibaous blessing, the FI transformed
itself into the more radical FLNKS.
Tjibaou still favored a peaceful road to independence, including a boycott
of territorial elections scheduled for November 1984, but others in the FLNKS
disagreed. A militant faction led by Yann Cln Uregei sought aid from Libyan
dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Violence erupted for the first time on December 5,
1984, when a party of Caldoches (New Caledonians of European ancestry) fired
on a party of Kanaks at Hienghne, killing 10 persons. Trial of the gunmen took
three years, resulting in acquittal by an all-white jury on October 27, 1987.
Before that case was concluded, FLNKS militants retaliated, killing young
Caldoche Yves Tual on January 11, 1985. That, in turn, sparked anti-independence
riots in Noumea, and French antiterrorist troops killed FLNKS member Eloi
Machoro near La Foa. Tjibaou still persisted in calls for nonviolence, petitioning the United Nations for help. In December 1986, three-fifths of the
UNs General Assembly supported a resolution affirming the inalienable right
of the people of New Caledonia to self-determination and independence,
adding New Caledonia to a list of nonautonomous territories deserving full
recognition.
Still, the UN took no further action and Kanak impatience simmered on
the island. On April 22, 1988, in the midst of a French presidential election,
FLNKS stormed a police station at Fayou, on the island of Ouvea, killing four
officers and taking 27 hostages. Elite troops were dispatched from France, and
after questioningsome say torturingrelatives of the hostage-takers, staged
a rescue attempt on May 5, killing 19 FLNKS members and losing two of their
own. Witnesses later claimed that some prisoners were either summarily executed after the assault.
A month later, Tjibaou proposed a referendum to decide the issue of independence, but no action had been taken at the time of his assassination. One
day after Tjibaou was killed, French prime minister Lionel Jospin signed the
Noumea Accord, providing for a referendum on the independence issue to
be held sometime between 2014 and 2019, while granting additional autonomy to the island. Under terms of the accord, if the president of New Caledonias Governing Council was a person who was opposed to independence from
T O L B E R T, W I L L I A M R I C H A R D , J R .
France, the vice president must be an activist in favor of independence. As this

work went to press, the referendum had not been held.
Further Reading
Spencer, Michael, and Alan Ward. New Caledonia: Essays in Nationalism and Dependency. Brisbane, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1989.
Tjibaou, Jean-Marie. Jean-Marie Tjibaou: Kanaky. Canberra, Australia: Pandanus
Books, 2007.
Waddell, Eric. Jean-Marie Tjibaou, Kanak Witness to the World: An Intellectual Biography. Honolulu, HI: Center for Pacific Islands Studies, 2008.
T OL B E R T , W ILLIAM R IC H ARD, JR. (19131 9 8 0 )

On April 12, 1980, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe led 17 soldiers of the Liberian
army in a coup dtat against President William Tolbert Jr. Storming the presidential palace in Monrovia, the rebels killed Tolbert and 27 others, dumping
their corpses together in a mass grave nearby. Mobs of angry Liberians gathered to curse and hurl stones at the bodies before they were finally covered.
Conflicting reports of Tolberts death agree that he was caught sleeping by the
attackers; some reports claiming he was shot in his office, and others say he was
surprised in bed and killed there, perhaps disemboweled by Samuel Doe personally. In any case, the first days violence, followed by successive roundups
and executions expunged the leadership of Tolberts unpopular regime.
William Tolbert was born in Bensonville, Liberia, on May 13, 1913, the grandson of former slave Daniel Frank Tolbert, who joined 205 others in the April
1878 Liberian exodus from South Carolina. Founded in 1821 by the American
Colonization Society, Liberia was conceived as a haven for liberated slavesand
hailed after the Civil War, by white supremacists, as a destination for American freedmen going back to Africa. Transplanted African Americans produced
their own Declaration of Independence and constitution in July 1847, banning
foreign trade with inland tribes in 1865 and refusing citizenship to indigenous
Africans until 1904.
Tolbert enjoyed a privileged existence as a member of one of Liberias largest Americo-Liberian families. He attended elementary school and high school
in Bensonville, then graduated summa cum laude from the University of Liberia
in 1934. Ordained as a Baptist minister, he entered politics in 1943, winning
election to the House of Representatives. Nine years later, he took office as
vice president under President William Tubmanhimself a Methodist minister and relative of American Underground Railway heroine Harriet Tubman.
In 1965, Tolbert became the first African to serve as president of the Baptist World Alliance. President Tubman died in a London hospital on July 23,
1971, whereupon Tolbert succeeded him.
567
568
T O L B E R T, W I L L I A M R I C H A R D, J R .
Many world leaders viewed the peaceful transition of power with relief, failing to recognize Liberia as a de facto one-party state. Likewise, its
constitutionwritten with the U.S. model in mindfailed to prevent the
governments executive branch from dominating the legislative and judicial branches in a virtual dictatorship. President Tolbert did permit creation
of the countrys first opposition party since 1878, but he still won reelection easily in 1975, although his claims of liberal reform left indigenous
ethnic groups economically subjugated to a minority of Americo-Liberians.
Nepotism determined many of his cabinet appointments, and half-hearted
efforts to include indigenous people in the governing process evoked protests against radical change from Americo-Liberians. It came as a surprise
to some, therefore, when Tolbert promulgated a constitutional amendment
limiting himself and future presidents to eight years in office.
In foreign policy, Tolbert also reversed his predecessors stolid alliance with
the West. Although supporting the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, he paradoxically forged trade agreements with Cuba, the Peoples Republic of China, the
Soviet Union, and other Warsaw Pact nations. During the October 1973 Yom
Kippur War, Tolbert severed diplomatic relations with Israel and called for recognition of an Arab state in Palestine. That relatively independent status played
well in Africa at the time, as did Tolberts May 1975 signing of a treaty creating
the Economic Community of West African States. Such efforts led to Tolberts
election as chairman of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in July 1979,
a post he held until he was assassinated nine months later.
Despite Tolberts best efforts, Liberias economy still suffered in the face of
depressed rubber prices worldwide. New problems arose in April 1979, when
Minister of Agriculture Florence Chenoweth proposed an increase in government subsidies to rice farmers. Critics quickly noted that the $4 increase
per 100 pounds of rice would personally enrich the Tolbert clanand
Chenowethvia their own huge rice farms. The Progressive Alliance of Liberia (PAL) scheduled peaceful protests in Monrovia for April 14, but the 2,000
party marchers found themselves outnumbered five to one by local hooligans,
resulting in a riot that left 40 persons dead, more than 500 injured, with property damage exceeding $40 million. Eleven months later, Tolbert banned the
PAL, arresting leader Gabriel Baccus Matthews and most of his fellow officers
on charges of treason. They would be liberated following the April coup, with
Matthews chosen to serve as foreign minister under President Samuel Doe.
Following Tolberts murder on April 12, 1980, most his cabinet members
were held for trial by a military court and sentenced to death; they were executed by a firing squad in Monrovia 10 days after the coup. One who survived
was Minister of Finance Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who would be elected president
of Liberia in 2005, and again in 2011. In 2011, Sirleaf also received a Nobel
Peace Prizeshared with Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and Tawakkol Karman of
T O M B A L B AY E , F R A N O I S
Yemenfor their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for womens rights to full participation in peace-building work.
See also: Doe, Samuel Kanyon (19511990).
Further Reading
Gray, Beverly. Liberia during the Tolbert Era: A Guide. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Library, 1983.
Hlophe, Stephen. Class Ethnicity and Politics in Liberia: A Class Analysis of Power Struggles in the Tubman and Tolbert Administrations From, 19441975. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1979.
Levitt, Jeremy. The Evolution of Deadly Conflict in Liberia: From Paternaltarianism to
State Collapse. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005.
Olukoju, Ayodeji. Culture and Customs of Liberia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2006.
Sankawulo, Wilton. Tolbert of Liberia. Denver: Ardon Press, 1979.
Williams, Gabriel. Liberia: The Heart of Darkness. Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2002.
TOMBALBAYE, FRANOIS (19181975)

On March 23, 1975, Chadian president Franois Tombalbaye launched his
third purge of the nations military, ordering the arrest of General Negue
Djogo, the armys chief of staff, and several lower-ranking officers. On April 2,
Tombalbaye went further, striking at the national gendarmeries Chadian Security Company, with the arrests of its commander, Colonel Djimet, and his
second in command, Major Alphonse Kotiga. Both officers were charged with
permitting captured members of the National Liberation Front of Chad (FROLINAT) to escape from their custody. On April 13, a band of gendarmerie soldiers led by a Lieutenant Dimtolaum, drove 35 miles from their barracks in
Boraho to the capital at NDjamena, to storm the presidential palace. President
Tombalbaye was fatally wounded in the ensuing battle and died later that day,
after a ceasefire was achieved. Journalists on the scene reported thousands of
Chadians thronging the capitals streets, dancing and cheering, Tombalbaye
is dead!
Franois Tombalbaye was born near Koumara, in the Moyen-Chari Prefecture of southern Chad, on June 15, 1918. He was a member of the Sara (or kameeni) people, Chads largest ethnic group. At the time of Tombalbayes birth,
Chad was part of French Equatorial Africa, viewed chiefly as a source of cotton
and unskilled labor for more productive colonies to the south. French administrators made no effort to unify or modernize the territory, seemingly satisfied
to a vague semblance of law and order. By the time Chadian lieutenant governor Flix bou led the rest of French Equatorial Africa to support Free French
troops in World War II, Tombalbaye was employed as a teacher. After the war,
569
570
he emerged as a trade union activist and member of the Chadian Progressive

Party (PPT), founded in February 1947.
After initial opposition from France, PPT founder Gabriel Lisette led the
party to victory in 1957s Territorial Assembly elections, rising to become vice
president of the Governing Council in May 1957, then president in July 1958.
On February 11, 1959, after a parliamentary vote of no confidence, Lisette resigned, succeeded by Franois Tombalbaye on March 26. When Chad achieved
full independence from France on August 11, 1960, Tombalbaye remained as
head of state. At the same time, while Lisette was traveling abroad, Tombalbaye
expelled him from the PPT, declared him a noncitizen, and forbade him from
returning to the country.
Thus began the regime characterized by autocratic rule and distrust of democratic institutions, coupled with political isolation of Muslims in Chad. Tombalbaye banned all parties but the PPT in January 1962, then used Muslim
riots in NDjamena as an excuse for dissolving the National Assembly in September 1963. At the same time, he created a special court to try real and imagined political opponents, filling Chadian prisons with those he suspected of
plotting against him. A new National Assembly, convened in June 1964, gave
Tombalbaye total control over all appointments to the PPTs Political Bureau,
recognized as the sole source of political authority nationwide. Tombalbaye
also nationalized the civil service, replacing French administrators with native Chadians loyal to his party, funded by increased taxes under a scheme a
dubbed the National Loan.
The rationale behind those moves, as Tombalbaye explained it, was Africanization of Chad. In fact, however, he ignored the large Muslim population
of northern and southern Chad, while favoring his fellow Sara tribesmen of
the south, of whom 6 percent were Christians and 94 percent traditional animists. Riots in Gura Prefecture, populated chiefly by Arabs and related Hadjerai peoples, claimed 500 lives in November 1965, spreading to other districts
with encouragement from Chads Islamic neighbors, Libya and Sudan. By June
1966, guerrillas from the FROLINAT were staging regular assaults on Chad
from their bases in Sudan, prompting Tombalbaye to request French military
intervention in 1968. France agreed in 1969, after Tombalbaye agreed to various reforms, including liberation of political prisoners, repeal of various arbitrary laws and taxes, and restoration of tax-collecting privileges to regional
sultans (who kept 10 percent of the monies collected).
Despite those changes, Tombalbaye still ran unopposed for reelection in
1969, and liberalization ground to a halt in August 1971, after Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi sponsored an abortive coup dtat against Tombalbaye.
Tombalbaye retaliated by severing diplomatic relations with Libya, jailing some
of his top army officers, and granting anti-Gaddafi insurgents permission to
operate inside Chad. Gaddafi, in turn, formally recognized FROLINAT, and
the cross-border raiding continued. At home, facing a catastrophic drought

and student protests, Tombalbaye rescinded his amnesty for political prisoners, jailing some 1,000 dissidents in 1972. When Army Chief of Staff Jacques
Doumro proved unequal to that task, Tombalbaye replaced him with General
Cliix Malloum.
None of those measures made Tombalbaye feel secure. In June 1973, he
jailed General Malloum and other officers in a round-up dubbed the Black
Sheep Plot (see sidebar). Two months later, Tombalbaye dissolved the PPT, replacing it with a new party called the National Movement for the Cultural and
Social Revolution. The motto of that new movement was authenticit, derisively
labeled Chaditude by some observers, which accelerated Tombalbayes bid to
Africanize Chad. The regime denounced Christianity, expelled Western missionaries, and required all non-Muslim males between the ages of 16 and 50
to undergo traditional animist initiation rites (yondo) before obtaining promotion in the army or civil service. Outside of Tombalbayes own Sara clan, most
Chadians viewed those rituals as oppressive, and they were further angered
by compulsory volunteer service in cotton production, striving to rescue exports in the face of a worsening drought.
BLACK SHEEP PLOT

In June 1973, President Franois Tombalbaye ordered the arrest of some
two dozen political opponents, accused of plotting a coup dtat against
the government of Chad. The alleged conspiracy was dubbed the Black
Sheep Plot, because suspects were charged with practicing political sorcery against Tombalbaye by means of animal sacrifices. Chief among
those jailed was Colonel Flix Malloum Ngakoutou Bey-Ndi, chief of
staff for the Chadian army and a high-ranking member of the dominant
Chadian Progressive Party (PPT). No proof of the supposed plot was ever
produced, but Colonel Malloum remained in custody until April 1975,
when an actual coup deposed and killed Tombalbaye. Malloum subsequently served as president of Chad, from August 1978 to March 1979,
then resigned and spend the next 23 years in exile, in Nigeria. Returning
to Chad in May 2002, Malloum was granted various benefits as an expresident, including a home, two chauffeured cars, and a monthly stipend of 3 million Central African CFA (Communaut Financire Africaine
[African Financial Community]) francs ($6,134). (The two currencies
used in Africa, guaranteed by the French treasury, are Central African
CFA francs and West African CFA francs.) Malloum died from cardiac arrest on June 12, 2009, at the American Hospital in Paris, France.
571
572
T R O T S K Y, L E O N
Following the fatal coup of April 13, 1975, victorious rebels announced that
they had exercised their responsibilities before God and the nation. General
Malloum emerged from prison to lead a nine-man military junta on April 15,
jailing most of Tombalbayes men, dissolving all political parties and the National Assembly. Ironically, because Malloum was also a member of the Sara
ethnic group, his ascension changed little in terms of Tombalbayes governing policies. Discontent among Muslims continued, as did the FROLINAT
rebellion.
See also: Gaddafi, Muammar (19422011).
Further Reading
Azevedo, Mario. The Roots of Violence: A History of War in Chad. London: Routledge,
1998.
Burr, J. Millard, and Robert Collins. Africas Thirty Years War: Chad, Libya, and the
Sudan, 19631993. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.
Decalo, Samuel. Africa: The Lost Decades. Gainesville: Florida Academic Press, 2012.
Decalo, Samuel. Historical Dictionary of Chad. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997.
Powell, Nathaniel. The Claustre Affair: A Hostage Crisis, France, and Civil War in
Chad, 19741977. In An International History of Terrorism: Western and Non-Western
Experiences. London: Routledge, 2013.
Reyna, S. P. A Cold War Story: The Barbarization of Chad (196691). In The State,
Identity and Violence: Political Disintegration in the Post-Cold War World. London:
Routledge, 2003.
TROTSKY, LEON (18791940)

On August 20, 1940, Spanish communist Jaime Ramn Mercader del Ro visited exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky at his home in the Coyoacn
borough of Mexico City. Posing as a Canadian called Frank Jackson, Mercader had befriended Trotsky while serving as an agent of the Soviet secret
police, acting on orders from dictator Josef Stalin to kill Trotsky within a year.
That Tuesday, Mercader carried an ice axe under his coat, striking Trotsky on
the head, but the blow failed to kill Trotsky outright. A struggle ensued, with
Trotskys loyal bodyguards nearly killing Mercader before Trotsky restrained
them. Trotsky died at a local hospital on August 21, his last words reported as,
Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before.
Mercader was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, the fifth son of affluent
Jewish-Ukrainian farmers, on November 7, 1879. At age nine, his parents sent
him to school in Odessa, where he learned French in addition to Ukrainian
and Russian. He discovered Marxism at 17, after moving to Nikolayev (now
Mykolaiv), in southern Ukraine, where he studied mathematics and helped
organize the South Russian

Workers Union. Arrested with
200 other members in January 1898, Bronshtein spent two
years in custody awaiting trial,
but was not idle in the meantime. In jail, he studied philosophy, married fellow Marxist
Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, and
joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP).
At trial in 1900, Bronshtein was
sentenced to four years exile in
Siberia.
Bronshtein escaped from Siberia in the summer of 1902,
traveling as Leon Trotsky,
a name lifted from one of his
Odessa jailers. He fled Russia
for London, where he joined Soviet assassins murdered exiled revolutionary
the staff of the Russian-language Leon Trotsky in Mexico City. (Getty Images)
newspaper, Iskra (The Spark).
Iskras editors, at the time, were divided between old guard revolutionaries
led by Georgi Plekhanov (exiled since 1880 and opposed to terrorism), and a
new guard led by younger, more radical Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Trotsky initially sided with Lenin, but a rift developed after the second RSDLP congress,
held between July 30 and August 23, 1903. Over the course of that protracted
meeting, the party split between Lenins Bolsheviks (majority) and the Mensheviks (minority) led by Julius Martov. Trotsky first sided with Martov, then
switched to the Bolshevik side in September 1904 and spent the next 13 years
striving to reunite the party.
Trotsky returned to Russia in February 1905, shortly after tsarist troops
massacred 96 striking workers (some reports say 1,000) in Saint Petersburg.
His publications proved no more popular with the tsar than they had in 1898,
and Trotsky fled to Finland in May 1905, one step ahead of the secret police.
In hiding for the next five months, until he surfaced in Moscow to publish the
Russian Gazette and launch Nachalo (The Beginning) with the Mensheviks,
Trotsky developed his philosophy of permanent revolution beyond the scope
of Marxism, in countries that had not achieved advanced capitalism.
In December 1905, as chairman of the first Soviet (Council) of Workers,
Trotsky published a statement that Russias monarchy was never granted any
authority by the people and was, in fact, openly engaged in a war with the
573
574
entire people. Arrested the following day, Trotsky was convicted in 1906 of
supporting armed rebellion, and was sentenced once again to Siberian exile.
This time, he escaped before reaching his destination, in January 1907, and
returned briefly to London before settling in Vienna, where he joined the Social Democratic Party of Austria and made occasional forays into neighboring
Germany. Between October 1908 and April 1912, with fellow revolutionaries, Trotsky published the newspaper Pravda (Truth), primarily for Russian
workers.
Tension between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks escalated during the years
before World War I, as Lenins group participated in expropriationsarmed
robberiesto finance their cause. A unification meeting chaired by Trotsky
in January 1912 failed to bridge the divide, and Trotsky departed for the Balkans as a war correspondent nine months later. Back in Vienna by August
1914, when Austria-Hungary went to war with Russia, Trotsky fled to Switzerland, fearing arrest as an enemy alien. November found him in France as a
war correspondent for Nashe Slovo (Our Word), promoting the slogan peace
without indemnities or annexations, peace without conquerors or conquered.
Lenin, meanwhile, called for Russias defeat as a means of unseating the tsar.
French authorities deported Trotsky to Spain in March 1916, for his opposition to the war; Spain in turn deported him to the United States on Christmas Day. Arriving in New York City on January 13, 1917, Trotsky spent three
months writing for Novy Mir (New World) and Des Forverts (The Forward),
thereby missing the February Revolution that finally deposed Tsar Nicholas II.
Attempting to reach Russia in March, Trotsky was detained for a month in Canada, then released on April 29. June saw him elected to the first All-Russian
Central Executive Committee of the new Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, but he was arrested in Petrograd (formerly Saint Petersburg) on August 7
and spent 40 days in jail after General Lavr Kornilov, commander in chief of
the Russian army, led an abortive rebellion against the Russian Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky, in turn, was unseated by Lenins Bolsheviks on November 7, with Trotsky ranked as second in command of
Russias latest revolution.
Lenin rewarded Trotskys service by appointing him as Peoples Commissar for Foreign Affairs, in which post Trotsky joined in peace negotiations at
Brest-Litovsk, marking Russias exit from the war in February 1918. Trotsky
then resigned his diplomatic post to serve as Peoples Commissar of Army and
Navy Affairs, commanding Russias new Red Army during the Russian Civil War
against the anticommunist White Guard led by Alexander Kolchak. Jealous
rival Josef Stalin rallied opposition against Trotskys leadership but failed to oust
him from command. Upon defeat of the White Guard, Trotsky received the
Order of the Red Banner, then moved on to rebuilding Russias war-ravaged
economy and railroad network. Once again, tension flared between Lenin and
Trotsky over Trotskys plan to create a new regime of militant trade unions, climaxed by victory for Lenins faction at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921.
By then, however, Lenin was in poor health, plagued by a series of strokes
that sidelined him from May 1922 onward, finally killing him in January 1924.
Trotsky was expected to succeed him, but Stalin subverted his election by the
Politburo through political maneuvers and rumors that Trotsky suffered from
epilepsy. Publicly declaring that the Party is always right, Trotsky retreated
from active political life to focus on writing until 1926, when he joined in a
New Opposition to Stalins increasingly dictatorial rule. At the end of January
1928, Trotsky was exiled to Kazakhstan, then deported to Turkey in February
1929. France granted him asylum in 1933, then expelled him two years later,
whereupon Trotsky settled briefly in Norway, then moved on to Mexico City.
He might have survived in exile, but for his continued prolific writings, including a History of the Russian Revolution (1930) and a critique of Stalin titled
The Revolution Betrayed (1936). Of Stalins party purges in the Great Depression,
Trotsky said, The Moscow trials are perpetuated under the banner of socialism. We will not concede this banner to the masters of falsehood! . . . Neither
threats nor persecutions nor violations can stop us! Be it even over our bleaching
bones the future will triumph! We will blaze the trail for it. It will conquer! In
1939, Trotsky visited the United States as a witness before the Dies Committee, forerunner of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, describing
Soviet secret police harassment of his family and friends. The American Communist Party retaliated by branding him an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and wealthy oil interests.
Trotskys long-distance criticism was more than Stalin could bear. In March
1939, Stalin reportedly gave orders that Trotsky should be eliminated within
a year. The first attempt missed that deadline, occurring on May 24, when
would-be assassins Iosif Grigulevich, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Vittorio Vidale staged a raid on Trotskys home, shooting his grandson in the foot and
abducting a bodyguard, Robert Harte, whom they murdered. The second attempt, by Jaime Mercader del Ro three months later, proved successful.
Stalin was grateful, awarding Mercaders mother the Order of Lenin for her
part in the plot against Trotsky. Paroled from prison in May 1960, Mercader
was welcomed in Cuba by Fidel Castro, then moved to Russia in 1961, receiving the countrys highest decoration, Hero of the Soviet Union. He spent the
rest of his life traveling between Russia and Cuba. Mercader died in Havana on
October 18, 1978, and was buried at Moscows Kuntsevo Cemetery. He is honored by a plaque at the Museum of Security Services, on Moscows Lubyanka
Square. Trotskys former home in Coyoacn is today preserved as a museum.
Publication of his writings was forbidden in the Soviet Union until 1989. He
was formally rehabilitated by order of the Russian General Prosecutors Office
on June 16, 2001.
575
576
T R U J I L L O M O L I N A , R A FA E L L E O N I DA S
See also: Nicholas II (18681918).
Further Reading
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 18791921. London: Oxford University
Press, 1954.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 19291940. London: Oxford University
Press, 1963.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 19211929. London: Oxford University
Press, 1959.
Patenaude, Bertrand. Downfall of a Revolutionary. New York City: HarperCollins, 2009.
Service, Robert. Trotsky: A Biography. New York: Macmillan, 2009.
Wistrich, Robert. Trotsky: Fate of a Revolutionary. New York: Stein & Day, 1982.
TRUJILLO MOLINA, RAFAEL LEONIDAS

(18911961)
On May 30, 1961, dictator Rafael Trujillo was ambushed by rebels on San
Cristbal Highway in Ciudad Trujillo, capital of the Dominican Republic (now
Santo Domingo). Shots from several weapons, including three M1 carbines
later traced back to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, killed Trujillo instantly, ending his reign of three decades. One member of the ambush party,
Antonio de la Maza, accidentally dropped a pistol belonging to a friend, Juan
Toms Daz, which was traced by agents of Trujillos Military Intelligence Service, permitting officers to locate and kill both men on June 4. Two days earlier,
in a separate raid, agents killed conspirator Amado Garca Guerrero, an army
officer who tipped Trujillos executioners to his itinerary. Other participants in
Trujillos assassination included Luis Amiama Ti, Luis Manuel Cceres Michel,
Pedro Livio Cedeo Herrera, Modesto Daz Quezada, Salvador Estrella Sadhal, Antonio Imbert Barrera Manuel de Ovn Filpo, Roberto Pastoriza Neret,
and Huscar Antonio Tejeda Pimentel. All except Imbert and Amiama were
subsequently captured and executed on November 18, 1961, in the so-called
Hacienda Maria Massacre.
Rafael Trujillo Molina was born in San Cristbal on October 24, 1891. His
early education was enlivened by membership in a gang called The 42, until
Trujillo found work as a telegraph operator at 16, later spending two years
as a guard at a paper company. He got married at 21 to Aminta Ledesma,
then divorced her in 1925 and later expunged all mention of their marriage
from official biographies. (At the same time, Trujillo suppressed information
concerning his mothers ancestry, because his government pursued a policy of
ethnic cleansing against Afro-Dominicans and Haitians.) He would get married twice more, to Bienvenida Ricardo in 1927 (divorced 1935), then to Mara
de los Angeles Martnez Alba, siring a total of six children. A mistress, Lina
Lovatn Pittaluga, also bore Trujillo two children, in 1939 and 1943.
T R U J I L L O M O L I N A , R A FA E L L E O N I D A S
Amidst those romantic entanglements, in 1919, Trujillo joined the National

Guard, training with U.S. Marines who then occupied the Dominican Republic. Displaying a rare talent for office politics, he rose to the rank of general by
1928, and was ideally placed when rebels led by Rafael Estrella Urea deposed
President Felipe Horacio Vsquez Lajara in March 1930. By advance agreement with Estrella, General Trujillo allowed the revolution to proceed, then
replaced Estrella as president on August 16, 1930. He would maintain control,
ruling with an iron hand until his death in 1961, killing some 50,000 persons
(by conservative estimates) across three decades.
On the first anniversary of his inauguration, Trujillo banned all political parties except his own, the Dominican Party. Adult citizens were strong-armed
into joining the party, made subject to immediate arrest for vagrancy if they appeared in public without a membership card. Government employees, meanwhile, were expected to donate 10 percent of their salaries to the national
treasurythat is, to Trujillo. Unopposed when he stood for reelection in 1934,
Trujillo pursued a campaign of self-aggrandizement, renaming the capital for
himself, dubbing San Cristobal Province Trujilo, even placing his name onto
the countrys tallest mountain. Cars sprouted license tags reading Viva Trujillo! and Ao Del Benefactor De La Patria (Year of the Benefactor of the
Nation), and churches were required to post signs reading God in Heaven,
Trujillo on Earth.
Finally, it seemed too much of a good thing. Though constitutionally eligible
for a third term in 1938, Trujillo declared, I voluntarily, and against the wishes
of my people, refuse reelection to the high office. His hand-picked successor, 71-year-old Vice President Jacinto Bienvenido Peynado, served as Trujillos
puppet until February 1940, succeeded in turn by Vice President Manuel de
Jess Troncoso de la Concha. Finally tired of the pretense, Trujillo resumed his
role as president in May 1942. After two more termslengthened by law to
five years in his absencebrother Hctor Trujillo, remaining as presidentin-name until Rafael reorganized the government and once again assumed
control in August 1960.
Such maneuvers were fairly routine in Third World nations, but Trujillos
brutality set his regime apart. Johnny Abbes Garca, chief of the Military Intelligence Service, routinely tortured and disappeared those who protested
against Trujillos one-man rule, and wider violence sometimes made media
headlines outside the country. In October 1937, Trujillos Parsley Massacre
of Haitian immigrants (see sidebar) sparked sufficient outrage to scuttle a third
presidential term the following year. Other notorious cases included the presumed assassination of Spanish writer Jess Galndez Surez by Trujillo goons
in New York City, in March 1956, and the murders of three dissident sisters
Antonia, Maria, and Patricia Mirabalwith a companion, Rufino de la Cruz,
in November 1960. Although Trujillos killers concealed Galndezs body and
577
578
T R U J I L L O M O L I N A , R A FA E L L E O N I DA S
staged the Mirabal slaughter to resemble a traffic accident, such incidents severely strained the presidents relations with the United States and the Catholic
Church.
In terms of foreign policy, Trujillo supported Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in his futile war against rebels led by Fidel Castro, and pursued a relentless
campaign of Antihaitianismo against immigrants from Haiti (which occupies
the western part of the island formerly known as Hispaniola). Batista landed in
the Dominican Republic after Castro ousted him in January 1959, then found
himself a virtual prisoner of Trujillo until payment of some $3 million secured him passage to Portugal. Castro retaliated by landing several small raiding parties on the Dominican coast in June 1959, and Trujillo fumbled his own
attempt to infiltrate Cuba two months later.
Trujillos brutality and corruptioncontrolling at least 111 companies, collecting 2,000 suits and 10,000 neckties, cavorting with rotating shifts of very
young females who dubbed him el chivo (the goat)increasingly caused
U.S. diplomats to view him as a grave embarrassment. CIA involvement in Trujillos death remains a subject of debate, but three of the assassins rifles traced
back to the agency, and internal CIA memorandum submitted to the Office
of Inspector General, later declassified, conceded quite extensive Agency involvement with the plotters.
Even so, Trujillos slayers had their own motives. Aside from opposition to
his brutal style of governance, some of the reasons were personal. Antonio de
la Maza ran a sawmill owned by Trujillo near Restauracion until his brother,
Octavio, was framed as a scapegoat in the December 1956 murder of American
airline pilot Gerald Lester Murphy near Ciudad Trujillo. Octavio de la Maza allegedly hanged himself in jail on January 7, 1957, but analysts from the Federal Bureau of Investigation later declared his suicide note a forgery. Murphy,
they surmised, had flown kidnapped writer Jess Galndez Surez from New
York to the Dominican Republic in November 1956, then was killed to ensure
his silence.
Conspirator Amado Garca Guerrero harbored an equally personal grudge
against Trujillo, who had forbidden him to marry the woman he lovedsister
of a dangerous communist rebelwhile Garca served Trujillo as a military
aide. Going further still, Trujillo ordered Garca to personally execute a prisoner held in army custody, later identified as Ren Gil, his fiances rebellious
brother. His life thus blighted, Garca took a vow with like-minded friends to
eliminate Trujillo.
One of the surviving plotters, Antonio Imbert Barrera, hated Trujillo for removing him as governor of Puerto Plata in 1940. Nursing that grudge for two
decades, he joined in the plot to kill Trujillo and managed to escape the ensuing manhunt, later earning recognition as a National Hero. In the subsequent
Dominican Civil War of 1965, Imbert led one faction battling the regime of
T R U J I L L O M O L I N A , R A FA E L L E O N I D A S
PARSLEY MASSACRE
On October 2, 1937, President Rafael Trujillo ordered the eradication of
Haitian immigrants living in districts of the Dominican Republic that bordered Haiti. To explain the order, Trujillo said, I have traveled and traversed the border in every sense of the word. I have seen, investigated,
and inquired about the needs of the population. To the Dominicans who
were complaining of the depredations by Haitians living among them,
thefts of cattle, provisions, fruits, etc., and were thus prevented from enjoying in peace the products of their labor, I have responded, I will fix
this. The fix was mass execution of at least 20,000 persons, with some
estimates placing the total at 30,000. The five-day slaughter earned its
nickname from sprigs of parsley carried by the murder teams. Suspected
Haitians were required to pronounce its Spanish name (perejil), then executed if their accents indicated they spoke French or Haitian Creole.
Trujillo tried to blame the murders on Dominican civilians, but U.S. observers reported that most victims were shot with Krag-Jrgensen rifles
carried exclusively by soldiers of the Dominican army. Trujillo later paid
$525,000 in reparations to Haiti$30 per victim, of which the corrupt
Haitian government kept $29.70.
Colonel Francisco Alberto Caamao De, with U.S. support. Caamao was
defeated in his effort to restore ex-president Juan Bosch Gavio, and the presidency passed instead to Joaqun Balaguer. Presumed Trujillo loyalists shot Imbert in an ambush in Santo Domingo, on March 21, 1967, but he survived the
attack and drove himself to a hospital.
Further Reading
Crassweller, Robert. Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator. New York: Macmillan, 1966.
Derby, Lauren. The Dictator s Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of
Trujillo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
Diederich, Bernard. Trujillo: The Death of the Dictator. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener
Publishers, 2000.
Interview with General Rafael Trujillo (1961). National Archives. http://archive.org/
details/gov.archives.arc.647563.
Lpez-Calvo, Ignacio. God and Trujillo: Literary and Cultural Representations of the
Dominican Dictator. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.
Roorda, Eric. The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime
in the Dominican Republic, 19301945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
579
580
TRUM AN, HARRY S.
Turits, Richard. Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in
Dominican History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Wiarda, Howard. Dictatorship and Development: The Methods of Control in Trujillos
Dominican Republic. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1968.
TRUMAN, HARRY S. (18841972)

ATTEMPTED
President Harry Truman survived two assassination attempts during his first
term in office. Details of the first attempt are vague, but public records indicate that militant Zionists affiliated with Lohamei Herut Israel (Fighters for the
Freedom of IsraelLehi, commonly known as the Stern Gang, after leader
Avraham Stern), sent several mail bombs to the White House, addressed to
Truman and various staffers, during the summer of 1947. All were intercepted
by alert mailroom personnel, and none exploded. The attempts were motivated
by Trumans early opposition to establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine,
although he later shifted to support for Israel and officially recognized its new
government in May 1948.
Harry S. Truman survived two assassination attempts during his first term in office.
(Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division)
TRUMAN, HARRY S.
Ironically, Trumans would-be killers were likely unaware of his personal

anti-Semitism, as revealed in a 1947 diary entry published decades later.
There, Truman complained about a call received from Secretary of the Treasury
Henry Morgenthau, writing: Hed no business, whatever to call me. The Jews
have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement [sic] on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary
basis and they stayed. . . . The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. On other occasions, Truman referred to New York City as kike town and the U.S. capital
of Israel. In 1953, when talk-radio pioneer David Susskind asked why he had
never been invited to Trumans home, Truman replied, Youre a Jew, David,
and no Jew has ever been in the house. Bess runs it, and theres never been a
Jew inside the house in her or her mothers lifetime.
Three years elapsed between the abortive White House mail-bombing and
the second attempt on Trumans life. The latter attempt sprang from Puerto
Ricos independence movement, carried out by militant nationalists Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola. On October 28, 1950, they received news that
the latest popular uprising in Puerto Rico had been crushed by military force,
with Torresolas sister wounded and his brother arrested. Because their homelands Law 53 of 1948better known as the Gag Lawbanned any public
mention of the independence movement, Collazo and Torresola decided to
publicize their cause by killing President Truman. As Collazo later explained,
Truman was chosen as a symbol of the system. You dont attack the man, you
attack the system.
Arriving in Washington, D.C., on October 31, Collazo and Torresola registered at the Harris Hotel to finalize their plan. The next day, armed with pistols,
they sought to enter Blair House, on Pennsylvania Avenue, where Truman and
his wife were living during renovation of the White House. Intercepted by Officer Leslie Coffelt of the White House Police Force (now the Uniformed Division of the U.S. Secret Service), they opened fire prematurely, fatally wounding
Coffelt. Before he collapsed, Coffelt returned fire, killing Torresola with a shot to
the head. Other officers and Secret Service agents rallied to the sounds of gunfire, joining in the battle. Before Collazo fell wounded by a shot to the chest,
two other policemen also suffered bullet wounds. Collazo survived to face trial
and was sentenced to death, later commuted by Truman to life imprisonment.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter commuted that term to time served and Collazo returned to Puerto Rico, where he died at age 80, in February 1994.
Harry Truman was born on May 8, 1884, in Lamar, Missouri, the son of
a farmer and livestock dealer. He had no middle name: the S was a parental compromise to please grandfathers Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon
Young. Drawn to politics early, Truman served as a page at the 1900 Democratic National Convention in Kansas City, a year before he graduated from
high school. Poor eyesight foiled his childhood dream of attending West Point,
581
582
TRUM AN, HARRY S.
and Truman never obtained a college degree. He joined Missouris National

Guard in 1905reportedly memorizing the eye chart to pass inspectionand
served until 1911, then rejoined when the United States entered World War I
in 1917. He was deployed to France as an artillery officer, discharged as a captain at wars end.
In boot camp, prior to shipping overseas, Truman met a nephew of Missouri
political boss Tom Pendergast, who would later pave the way for Trumans political career. Returning to civilian life, Truman ran a haberdashery in Kansas
City but went bankrupt in 1921. The following year, as a member in good
standing of the Pendergast machine, Truman won election as a Jackson County
judge. It was around this time, historians and his biographers agree, that Truman joined the rising Ku Klux Klan. Some say he paid his $10 membership
fee, then resigned before initiation, whereas others suggest he went through
with oath. Truman later claimed he left the Klan when its leaders ordered him
not to hire Jews or Catholics, but his own prejudice can scarcely be doubted in
light of correspondence revealed since his death. One example comes from a
letter penned to his then-fiance in 1911. In it, Truman wrote:
I think one man is just as good as another so long as hes honest and decent and
not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will [Young] says that the Lord made a white
man from dust, a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came
down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice,
I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow
men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.
Decades later, as a U.S. senator, Truman wrote to his daughter, describing

White House waiters as an army of coons. In a 1939 letter to his wife, he
made reference to a nigger picnic day. Obviously, Trumans falling out with
fellow Klansmen in the 1920s was not based on revulsion toward their racism.
Voters turned Truman out of his judgeship in 1924, leaving him to sell cars
for two years, until the Pendergast organization found him a new bench to
rule from in 1926, reelected in 1930. Three years later, he was picked as Missouris director for a New Deal reemployment program. In 1934, after several
candidates refused Pendergasts offer of a U.S. Senate seat, he reluctantly promoted Truman for that post and ensured electoral victory. Truman reciprocated
by leaving all his patronage appointments to Pendergast, and was derided by
some Washington observers as the senator from Pendergast. Tax-evasion
charges sent Pendergast to prison in 1939, and Truman nearly lost his Senate
seat the following year, defeating Republican rival Manvel Davis by a narrow
margin of 51 to 49 percent.
Trumans owed his next move up the political ladder to Vice President
Henry Wallace, an ultraliberal (some said communist) who had worn out
TRUMAN, HARRY S.
his welcome with Democratic Party leaders as the 1944 presidential election
approached. Seeking his third vice president since 1933, President Franklin
Roosevelt preferred Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, but state and
local leaders weighed in for Truman and Roosevelt agreed, in what some called
the Second Missouri Compromise. Their ticket won easily, and Truman was
sworn in as vice president in January 1945.
The first weeks of his term were uneventfulin fact, he was virtually ignored,
not even informed of Americas race to build an atomic bombbut Roosevelts
death on April 12 changed all that. After 82 days in office, he was suddenly
commander in chief of a nation at war worldwide, with the Manhattan Project
nearing completion. Soon after taking the oath as president, Truman told reporters, Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I dont know if you fellas ever
had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me what happened yesterday,
I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.
He had been dropped into a maelstrom: Germanys surrender, the Potsdam
Conference with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin, the decision to use atomic
bombs against the Japs he had hated from his youth. Debate still rages over
his employment of nuclear weapons against Japan, with some historians insisting that Truman saved at least 250,000 U.S. lives, and others brand the bombings an immoral racist act. Truman himself would later write, I knew what
I was doing when I stopped the war. . . . I have no regrets and, under the same
circumstances, I would do it again.
Wars end confronted Truman with a host of new problems: labor upheavals, a new postwar Red Scare with critics who branded him soft on communism, exposure of corruption among his closest aides, threats of Red
revolution in Europe and Asia. Seeking reelection to the White House in 1948,
he found the Democratic Party split three ways, as the left followed Henry Wallace into a new Progressive Party, and Southern racists defected to Strom Thurmans Dixiecrat movement. Pundits predicted Trumans defeat by Republican
contender Thomas Deweyand the Chicago Tribune famously printed electioneve headlines reading Dewey Defeats Trumanbut he stunned detractors
with a surprise victory, establishing a Democratic Partys majority that endured
for another two decades.
Trumans second term produced more crises. Aside from the Puerto Rican
attempt on his life, he promoted the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, confronted the Korean War and rebellious General Douglas MacArthur, fended
off attacks Senator Joseph McCarthy and other congressional Red hunters, endured criticism of losing China to Mao Zedongs communists, and haphazardly defended basic civil rights for African Americans, and still found time
to threaten music critic Paul Hume for criticizing daughter Margaret Trumans
concert style: Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens youll need
a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!
583
584
TRUM AN, HARRY S.
The Twenty-Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1947,

prevented Truman from seeking a third White House term in 1952. Retired
to private life, he traveled through Europe and received an honorary degree
in Civic Law from Oxford University in 1956. He campaigned for Democratic
candidates through 1964, when a fall from a horse began a long decline in Trumans health. He died on December 26, 1972, after three weeks hospitalization for pneumonia.
Further Reading
Benson, Michael, ed. Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel. Westport, CT: Praeger
Publishers, 1997.
Beschlosss, Michael. Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America
17891989. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
Burnes, Brian. Harry S. Truman: His Life and Times. Kansas City, MO: Kansas City Star
Books, 2003.
Dallek, Robert. Harry S. Truman. New York: Times Books, 2008.
Ferrell, Robert. Harry S. Truman: A Life. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press,
1994.
Hamby, Alonzo. Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Hunter, Stephen, and John Bainbridge Jr. American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry
Trumanand the Shoot-Out That Stopped It. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.
McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
U
B (586/590644)
UMAR IBN AL-KHATTA
In October 644, Umar ibn Al-Khattabthe second caliph of Sunni Islam
received a visit from Pirouz Nahavandi, a Persian soldier captured and enslaved
eight years earlier, now employed as a carpenter at Medina, in the Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia. Nahavandi, also known as Abu Lulu, complained to Umar of
the wages held back from him by his master, Mughira ibn Shuba. Umar rejected Nahavandis plea for intervention, leaving the supplicant embittered. On
November 3, as Umar led morning prayers at his mosque, Nahavandi sprang
from hiding, stabbing the caliph five times with a dagger. Fleeing the scene,
Nahavandi stabbed another dozen people who tried to subdue him, fatally
wounding six (or nine, in some accounts), then killed himself when cornered
by Umars bodyguards. Umar survived until November 7, issuing various religious pronouncements before he succumbed to his wounds.
Umar ibn Al-Khattab was born in Mecca, a member of the Banu Adi clan
from the Quraish tribe that sometimes served as arbiters of disputes between
other rival tribes. His birth date is uncertain, placed sometime between 586
and 590 CE by different historians. Various accounts describe Umars father,
Khattab ibn Nufayl, as a middle-class merchant of exceptional intelligence, and
as an abusive father. Umar himself later wrote of frequent beatings and being
worked to the point of exhaustion. On the other hand, he was taught to read
and write in a society where few were literate, developing a passion for literature and poetry that rivaled his skill in the manly arts of horseback riding and
combat. He followed in his fathers footsteps as a merchant, traveling as far as
Rome in pursuit of commerce.
Umar and his father were contemporaries of Muhammad, the founder of
Islam, but Khattab ibn Nufayl despised the new religion and Umar initially
joined Khattab in persecuting Muslims. Umar reportedly hatched a plot to kill
Muhammad, but Muhammad foiled the conspiracy by ordering his hundredodd disciples to migrate southward, finding sanctuary in the kingdom of
Aksum (now Eritrea and northern Ethiopia) in 615. Muslim historian Ibn
Ishaq (704770) described Umar following the fugitives, intent on killing Muhammad, but a chance encounter with a friend along the way brought news
that Umars sister and her husband, Saeed bin Zaid, had converted to Islam and
joined the migration. After a tense meeting with the couple, Umar accepted the
586
B
U M A R I B N A L- K H AT TA
new faith in 616 and began to preach its tenets around Mecca, in defiance of
his hostile tribal chief, Amr ibn Hisham.
Umars conversion is regarded in Islamic history as a crucial breakthrough
for the young religion. In 622, on orders from Muhammad, he led a migration
of Muslims to Medina, soon recognized as the capital of Islam. Other members
of Umars Quraish tribe still remained hostile to the point of homicide, and
Umar fought against them repeatedly, in the Battle of Badr (March 13, 624),
the Battle of Uhud (March 9, 625), the Battle of the Trench (April 627), and
forged a 10-year truce in March 628, with the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah. In the
midst of those conflicts that spread Islam throughout Arabia, Umars widowed
20-year-old daughter, Hafsah, became the fourth of Muhammads 13 wives.
Meanwhile, the Quraish were not alone in opposing Islams advance. In 629,
he joined in a campaign against Jews inhabiting the Khaybar Oasis, 95 miles
north of Medina, who agitated other Arab tribes against Islam. Once again,
Muhammads forces were victorious, moving on to the conquest of Mecca in
December 629. That proved to be a nearly bloodless victory, with 12 Quraish
slain, against two Muslim fatalities. The following year, Umar fought Bedouins
at the Battle of Hunayn, clashed with soldiers of the Byzantine Empire in the
Battle of Tabouk, and participated in the unsuccessful Siege of Taif.
Muhammads death in June 632 left Umar grieving and dismayed that the
Messenger of God was actually mortal. To preserve and further spread the
faith, he joined in founding the Rashidun (Rightly Guided) Caliphate, with
Abu BakrMuhammads senior companion and, like Umar, his father-inlawchosen as the first caliph (Muslim chief of state). A rift at once developed, as some Muslims claimed Muhammads cousin/son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi
Talib, had been hand-picked to succeed the Prophet, but Abu Bakr prevailed,
with Umar designated as his chief secretary and advisor. During the Ridda wars
of 632633, also known as the Wars of Apostasy, Umar advised Abu Bakr on
his campaigns against rival prophets Tulayha ibn Khuwaylid (defeated at the
Battle of Buzakha, in September 632), Musaylimah (killed at the Battle of Yamamah, in December 632), and Sajah (who returned to mainstream Islam after
Musaylimahs defeat).
At Abu Bakrs death, in August 634, Umar succeeded him as Islams second
caliph. A final self-styled prophet, Tulayha ibn Khuwaylid, returned to the fold
out of personal loyalty to Umar, and went on to fight for the cause against Persias Sassanid Empire, including the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah (November 636),
the Battle of Jalula (April 637), and the Battle of Nahavand (in 642). Known
during his tenure as Farooq the Greatfrom Al-Farooq, one who distinguishes
right from wrongUmar expanded the Islamic realm to encompass all of Persias Sassanid Empire and some two-thirds of the Byzantine Empire. At the
same time, despite his earlier conflicts with Jews, he lifted the ban formerly imposed by Christians that prevented Jews from entering Jerusalem.
B
U M A R I B N A L - K H AT TA
Under Umars administration, Arabia was divided into the provinces of

Mecca and Medina; Syria was a single province; the province of Jazira spanned
the Upper Tigris and Euphrates River valleys; Palestine was split into Aylya and
Ramlah Provinces; Iraq was divided between Basra and Kufa; Upper and Lower
Egypt were formally designated; and occupied Persia was carved into thirds:
Azerbaijan, Fars, and Khorasan. Each province had a governor, appointed by
Umar, who was in turn served by offices including a Katib (chief secretary),
Katib-ud-Diwan (military secretary), Sahib-ul-Ahdath (chief of police), SahibBait-ul-Mal (treasurer), Sahib-ul-Kharaj (tax collector), and Qadi (chief justice).
Umar demanded strict honesty from all officials, and further created a special
investigative branch to probe complaints against them, led by Muhammad ibn
Maslamah. Among the rules imposed on government officials were a ban on
fine clothes and food made from sifted flour, a prohibition against riding
Turkic horses or employing a doorman, and a demand that each officers door
should always be open to the public. Judges, in addition to intelligence and
knowledge of Sharia (Islamic law), were expected to maintain reputations for
modesty and morality.
In dealings with non-Muslims, members of the faith relied on the Pact (or
Covenant) of Umarregarded by some modern historians as apocryphal, yet
subsequently granted canonical status in Muslim law. Traditionally, the pact is
regarded as a treaty between Muslims and Christians, which also covered Jews
living in or traveling through Muslim lands. In exchange for personal safety
and religious freedom of a sort, non-Muslims were prohibited from building
or repairing churches and monasteries, public processions or funerals, or display of crosses or religious books. Within Jerusalem, Christians were expected
to wear a distinctive girdle (zunnar), and abstain from wearing Muslim clothes
or placing saddles on their horses. Christians who converted to Islam were
banned from proselytizing Muslims, learning Arabic, orrather curiously
from studying the Quran.
On his deathbed, Umar appointed a six-man committee to choose the next
caliph from among their number. Meeting in Medina, at a house surrounded
by 50 soldiers, the panel elected Uthman ibn Affan as Umars successor. Uthman ruled the caliphate until 1656, when a band of armed rebels laid siege to
his palace and killed him on June 23.
Further Reading
Abdul-Rauf, Muhammad. Umar Al Faruq. Alexandria, VA: Al-Saadawi Publications,
1998.
Busool, Assad. The Role of Opposition in Islam: A Case Study of the Life of Umar Ibn alKhattab. Skokie, IL: The Quran Society, 1999.
Madelung, Wilferd. The Succession to Muhammad. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997.
587
588
UMBERTO I
Majdalawi, Farouk. Islamic Administration Under Omar Ibn Al-Khattab. Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 2003.
Numani, Shibli. Umar: Makers of Islamic Civilization. London: I.B. Tauris, 2004.
Sallabi, Ali. Umar bin Al-Khattab: His Life and Times. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: International Islamic Publishing House, 2007.
UMBERTO I (18441900)
On July 29, 1900, King Umberto I of Italy visited Monza, nine miles northeast
of Milan in Lombardy, to present medals to the winners of a local athletic competition. The ceremony was completed, and Umberto had returned to his open
coach when Gaetano Bresci, a 30-year-old Italian-American anarchist, fired four
shots from a revolver, striking the king three times in his chest. Umberto died
at the scene, and Bresci was disarmed and arrested while shouting, I have not
shot Umberto. I have killed the king, I have killed a principle! At trial, in late
August, Bresci said he killed
Umberto to avenge the deaths
of striking workers slain by soldiers in Milan, during the BavaBeccaris massacre of May 1898.
Sentenced to life imprisonment,
Bresci was the first European
regicide to escape execution.
Italy had abolished capital punishment in 1889, but it hardly
mattered. On May 22, 1901,
Bresci was found dead in his
prison cell under circumstances
still unclear.
Future king Umberto Ranieri Carlo Emanuele Giovanni
Maria Ferdinando Eugenio di
Savoia was born in Turin, then
the capital of the kingdom of
Sardinia, on March 14, 1844. At
the time, his fatherVictor Emmanuel IIwas the king of Sardina, married to Archduchess
Adelaide of Austria. As a child,
Umberto was educated by tuKing Umberto I of Italy, slain by an anarchist gun- tors, including lawyerjournalist
man in 1900. (Mondadori via Getty Images)
Pasquale Stanislao Mancini and
UMBERTO I
statesmannovelist Massimo Taparelli, marquis dAzeglio. At the tender age of 14,

Umberto joined the Sardinian army as a captain, fighting in the Second Italian
War of Independence (April 29 to July 11, 1859).
Victor Emmanuel II was crowned king of Italy on March 17, 1861, but
his country was still not entirely united. Another war would be required to
complete that task, in the summer of 1866, with Umberto commanding the
XVI Division against Austrian occupation forces at Villafranca, on June 24. Although Italy lost that battle, it regained control of Venetia in October, leaving
only Rome and its Patrimony of St. Peter (now Lazio) outside the kingdom of
Italy. Rome, in turn, was finally secured in September 1870. That victory, however, failed to reverse Victor Emmanuels excommunication from the Catholic
Church, pronounced in 1861 after he drove Pope Pius IX from Rome into the
smaller confines of Vatican City.
The final years of Victor Emmanuels reign were more peaceful. He died in
Rome on January 9, 1878, and Umberto ascended to the throne. He styled himself Umberto I of Italy, while ignoring three ancestral namesakesUmberto I,
Umberto II, and Umberto IIIwho had ruled as counts of Savoy at various
times between 1003 and 1189.
Umberto survived the first attempt on his life while touring his kingdom with
queen consort Margherita. During a parade in Naples, on November 17, 1878,
29-year-old anarchist Giovanni Passannante tried to stab the king with a dagger.
Umberto deflected the blade with his saber, receiving a small cut on his arm, and
Prime Minister Benedetto Cairoli was stabbed in one thigh. At trial, Passannante
was condemned, despite the fact that Italian law permitted execution only if the
king was actually killed. Umberto generously commuted that sentence to life
imprisonment, served in solitary confinement, wearing 40 pounds of chains in a
tiny cell with no sanitary facilities. That punishment drove Passannante insane,
described by witnesses as eating his own feces. Removed to the asylum at Montelupo Fiorentino in 1899, he survived there until February 1910.
Passannantes attack on Umberto was no aberration. In both foreign and domestic policy, the king seemed to do everything within his power to alienate
and inflame left-of-center opponents. In 1882, ignoring the sentiments of Italians who resented Austrian claims to parts of their nation, he forged the Triple
Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, which would help drag Europe
into World War I in 1914. Umberto was also an ardent colonialist, sending
troops to occupy Massawa (on the Red Sea coast of Eritrea) in 1885, transforming it into Italian Eritrea. Further African expansion ended with Italys defeat at
the Battle of Adwa, in Ethiopia, on March 1, 1896, but Umberto rebounded to
join the Eight-Nation Alliance that challenged Chinas Boxer Rebellion in 1899.
He would not live to witness victory in that instance, or to profit from his kingdoms trading concession at Tientsin (now Tianjin), granted by the Chinese
government in September 1901.
589
590
UMBERTO I
At home, Umberto presided over an era of social turmoil, fired in equal

part by his suppression of civil liberties, the rapid spread of socialist and anarchist ideas, opposition to Italian colonialism, and labor agitation by the Sicilian
Workers Leagues that prompted imposition of martial law in 1894. A second
attempt on the kings life occurred in Rome, on April 22, 1897, when 26-yearold unemployed ironsmith Pietro Acciarito tried to stab Umberto at a horse
race held in honor of the monarchs 29th wedding anniversary. In custody, Acciarito voiced disgust that Umberto was willing to offer a prize of 24,000 lira to
the winning horse, but would give nothing to the poor. Tortured to identify accomplices, Acciarito named six alleged conspirators. One, Romeo Frezzi, died
under interrogation, and five others were later acquitted. Acciarito received a
life prison term and, like Giovanni Passannante, ended his life in the Montelupo Fiorentino.
An extreme example of Umbertos repressive measures occurred in May 1898,
when Milanese workers struck against the rising cost of bread, occasioned by
Italys colonial wars in Africa. After the hungry people raided several bakeries, Umberto declared martial law in Milan, assigning General Fiorenzo BavaBeccaris to deal with protesters as he saw fit. The resulting massacre, including
artillery fire, officially claimed 118 lives while leaving 450 wounded. Other accounts list 400 dead and more than 2,000 injured. In either case, Umberto was
pleased, decorating General Bava-Beccaris with the Military Order of Savoy and
telling him, You have rendered a great service to the King and to the country.
Emigrant Gaetano Bresci read accounts of the massacre in Paterson, New
Jersey, where he worked as a weaver and had founded an Italian-language anarchist newspaper, La Questione Sociale (The Social Issue). His anger simmered
until May 1900, when he collected sufficient funds for passage back to Europe.
He landed at La Havre, then made his way to Paris, and finally to Castel San
Pietro near Bologna, where relatives owned a small inn. There, he purchased a
revolver and practiced with it in their yard until he felt proficient. Bresci traveled to Monza on July 26 and spent three days surveying Umbertos royal party
before he struck on July 29. Fourteen months later, fellow anarchist Leon Czolgosz claimed that Brescis murder of Umberto had inspired his own assassination of U.S. president William McKinley.
Umberto was succeeded by his son, Victor Emmanuel III, who proved to
be Italys last significant king. Victor initially supported fascist dictator Benito
Mussolinis rise to power, as a means to save the monarchy, but later staged a
coup against Mussolini in July 1943 and signed an armistice with the Allied
Powers two months later. Victor Emmanuel abdicated his throne in May 1946,
briefly succeeded by son Umberto II, before the monarchy was formally abolished on June 12, 1946.
See also: McKinley, William Jr. (18431901); Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea
(18831945).
U W I L I N G I Y I M A N A , A G AT H E
Further Reading
Bencivenni, Marcela. Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in
the United States, 18901940. New York: New York University Press, 2011.
Cannistraro, Philip, and Gerald Meyer, eds. The Lost World of Italian-American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
Ciancabilla, Giuesppe. Fired by the Ideal: Italian-American Anarchist Responses to Czolgoszs Killing of McKinley. London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2002.
Duggan, Christopher. The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796. London: Allen
Lane, 2007.
Khuri-Makdisi, Ilham. The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism,
18601914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Levy, Carl. The Anarchist Assassin and Italian History, 1870s to 1930s. In Assassinations and Murder in Modern Italy: Transformations in Society and Culture. New York:
UWILINGIYIMANA, AGATHE (19531994)

With the assassination of President Juvnal Habyarimana on April 6, 1994,
Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana assumed temporary command of
Rwandas government. Speaking to Radio France, shortly after the presidents
death, she reported that her home was under siege. Her last recorded words
were: There is shooting, people are being terrorized, people are inside their
homes lying on the floor. We are suffering the consequences of the death of
the head of state, I believe. We, the civilians, are in no way responsible for
the death of our head of state. Ten Belgian members of a United Nations
(UN) peacekeeping force reached Uwilingiyimanas home around 3:00 A.M. on
April 7, intending to escort the prime minister to Radio Rwanda for a morning broadcast, but members of the presidential guard refused to let them enter
the property bearing weapons. After a tense stand-off, the UN soldiers surrendered their arms, then were killed, their bodies grossly mutilated. Uwilingiyimanas supposed guards then entered her compound, killing the prime
minister and her husband, while her children managed to escape unseen. In
September 2006, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted
Major Bernard Ntuyahaga of killing the peacekeepers and an unknown number of Rwandan civilians, but acquitted him of Uwilingiyimanas murder, imposing a 20-year sentence. Colonel Theoneste Bagosora was also convicted in
the peacekeepers slayings, in December 2008, receiving a life prison term.
The court found Bagosora responsible for Uwilingiyimanas death, but did
not formally convict him of it.
Agathe Uwilingiyimana was born in the village of Nyaruhengeri, in southern Rwandas Butare Province, on May 23, 1953. Soon afterward, her family
emigrated to the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo),
seeking work, but they returned to Butare, the provincial capital, in 1957.
591
592
U W I L I N G I Y I M A N A , AGAT H E
Uwilingiyimana graduated from Notre Dame des Citeaux High School, and
in 1973 received her certificate to teach humanities. Three years later, after
graduate studies in mathematics and chemistry, she was hired as a mathematics
teacher in in Butare. That same year, she married former high school classmate
Ignace Barahira, keeping her maiden name, and in 1977 bore the first of their
five children.
Their growing family prospered through education. By 1983, Uwilingiyimana was teaching chemistry at Butares National University of Rwanda,
and Ignace held a lucrative post at the universitys laboratory. Two years later,
Uwilingiyimana completed studies for her BSc and spent the next four years
teaching chemistry at various schools in Butare Province. Although some traditionalists criticized her, both for studying science and sharing her knowledge
with female students, Uwilingiyimana persevered and broadened her activities
to include support for fellow teachers, creating a Sorority and Credit Cooperative Society for school staffers in Butare. In 1989, official recognition of her
efforts led to Uwilingiyimanas appointment as minister of commerce under
President Habyarimana.
Six years later, after opposition parties were legitimized, Uwilingiyimana
left President Habyarimanas National Republican Movement for Democracy
and Development to join the Republican and Democratic Movement (MDR).
That partys leader, Dismas Nsengiyaremye, was elected as prime minister
in April 1992 and named Uwilingiyimana to serve as his minister of education. Although a member of the dominant Hutu ethnic group, Uwilingiyimana
abolished Rwandas academic ethnic quota system that gave Hutus an edge
on higher education, instead using a merit system for awarding public school
placement and scholarships. That move, coming as it did in the midst of Rwandas civil war between Hutus and Tutsis, marked Uwilingiyimana as a target for
extremists within her own tribe.
Even as war divided the nation, so politics created turmoil in the capital,
with five opposition parties challenging President Habyarimana. After a contentious meeting between rival party leaders, Uwilingiyimana was chosen
as Rwandas next prime minister on July 17, 1993. Dismas Nsengiyaremye,
disgruntled at being replaced, immediately suspended Uwilingiyimana membership in the MDR. Just over two weeks later, on August 4, Habyarimana
and Uwilingiyimana reached a tentative agreement with their enemies from
the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), signing the Arusha Accords at a meeting in Tanzania. Under that agreement, a new government
would be formed, with Habyarimana holding the transitional presidency and
five of 21 cabinet posts, the MDR would hold four posts and name the prime
minister, and three other parties would divide the remaining cabinet seats.
The Arusha Accords posed a problem for Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana, due to her suspension from the MDR. Party leaders named Faustin
U W I L I N G I Y I M A N A , A G AT H E
Twagiramungu to succeed her, and although President Habyarimana officially

terminated Uwilingiyimanas role as prime minister on August 4, 1993, he kept
her on as a de facto caretaker in the same post for the remaining eight months
of her life. Hutu opponents railed against that move and Twagiramungu
marked time in waiting, denouncing Uwilingiyimana as a political trickster.
The formal hand over of authority was scheduled for March 25, 1994, but RPF
rebels foiled Twagiramungu by failure to attend the launch of Rwandas new
Broad Based Transitional Government. Before another meeting was arranged,
Habyarimana and Uwilingiyimana were assassinated on successive days, and
Rwanda plunged into bloody chaos.
Jean Kambanda, vice president of the MDR, trumped Faustin Twagiramungu on April 9, 1994, when he was sworn in as prime minister of
Rwanda. He held that post until July 19, then fled the country, whereupon
Twagiramungu finally claimed the office he had sought for so long. Twagiramungu, in turn, resigned in August 1995 and fled to Belgium, remaining
there for eight years. He returned to Rwanda in 2003, as a candidate for
president, running second in a field of three contenders with 3.6 percent of
the popular vote.
RWANDAN GENOCIDE
Over the course of roughly 100 days, between April and July 1994, more
than 500,000 peoplemostly members of the Tutsi ethnic groupwere
slaughtered by Hutu enemies in Rwanda. Some estimates double that
death toll, accounting for 20 percent of the African countrys population.
Rwandas Hutu majority harbored centuries of animosity against their former rulers from the Tutsi minority, exacerbated by the Rwandan Patriotic
Fronts 1990 invasion from Uganda and the resulting civil war. The assassinations of April 6, 1994, sparked a furious homicidal reaction in the name
of Hutu Power, carried out in well-organized fashion by the Rwandan
military and mobs of sympathetic civilians. Machetesincluding 581,000
imported from Chinawere often employed as cheaper methods of killing than firearms. An International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established in November 1994, heard testimony from Rwandan prime minister
Jean Kambanda that mass murder of Tutsis was openly discussed in cabinet meetings, then carried out by high-ranking army officers. Scheduled to
complete its work in December 2014, the tribunal had 50 trials and convicted 29 defendants as this volume went to press, with 11 more trials in
progress, 14 defendants awaiting trial, and 13 others still at large.
593
594
U W I L I N G I Y I M A N A , AGAT H E
See also: Habyarimana, Juvnal (19371994).
Further Reading
Bartrop, Paul. A Biographical Encyclopedia of Contemporary Genocide: Portraits of Evil and
Good. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010.
Hill, Kevin. Agathe Uwilingiyimana. In Women and the Law: A Bio-Bibliographical
Sourcebook. Edited by Kevin Hill. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Melvern, Linda. A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwandas Genocide. London:
Zed Books, 2000.
Nyankanzi, Edward. Genocide: Rwanda and Burundi. Rochester, VT: Schenkman Books,
1998.
Prunier, Grard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Scherrer, Christian. Genocide and Crisis in Central Africa: Conflict Roots, Mass Violence,
and Regional War. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
V
VALKO, ERNEST (19532010)
On November 8, 2010, visitors found prominent Slovak attorney Ernest Valko,
former chief of the Czechoslovak Constitutional Court, shot to death at his
home in Limbach, near Bratislava, capital of the Slovak Republic. The motive
for his murder is unknown. As this work went to press, the crime remained officially unsolved, still under active investigation by agents of Zsahov skupina
radu boja proti organizovanej kriminalite Prezdia Policajnho zboru (the Engagement Group of the Office for Combating Organized Crime of the Presidium of
the Police Force).
Ernest Valko was born on August 10, 1953, at Spisk Nov Ves, in the
Koice region of Czechoslovakia. He enrolled at Bratislavas Comenius University in 1973, receiving his MA from that institutions faculty of law in 1977.
Two years later, Valko received his doctoral degree in law from Comenius, then
entered private practice in Bratislava.
By then, he had already witnessed momentous events, beginning with Alexander Dubceks attempt to reform the nations communist government in the
Prague Spring of 1968, crushed by a Soviet invasion that August which left
Czechoslovakia occupied by Russian troops until the so-called Velvet Revolution of November 16 to December 10, 1989. On the last day of that bloodless
rebellion, President Gustv Husk swore in the first government since 1948
not dominated by the Communist Party. By December 29, dissident poet and
playwright Vclav Havel had been installed as president of the new republic,
his government legitimized by free elections in June 1990. Running unopposed for a second term in July 1992, Havel was defeated by lack of support
from Slovak delegates in the Federal Parliament. On January 1, 1993, Czechoslovakia peacefully dissolved in a Velvet Divorce, with Havel chosen as president of the new Czech Republic, and voters in the Slovak Republic elected
President Michal Kovc.
Ernest Valko continued his practice of law while the face of his homeland
evolved, rising to become one of the countrys best-known attorneys. He also
tried his hand at politics, winning election to the Federal Assembly in 1990,
where he was instrumental in revising national laws related to labor, trade, civil
liberties, and the conduct of referendums. He served as Speaker for the lower
house of parliament in 19901991, and was chairman of the Constitutional
596
VA L K O , E R N E S T
Court of Czechoslovakia from

January 31 to December 31,
1992. From 1993 onward, his
private firm specialized in constitutional law. In 2000, Valko
began studies for his PhD at the
Slovak Academy of Sciences
Institute of State and Law,
achieving his degree in 2004.
Two years later, he sought a
seat in the National Council of
the Slovak Republic, but lost at
the polls.
Meanwhile, Valkos legal
cases dominated headlines in
Slovakia. In 1992, he defended
poet Lubomr Feldek against a
libel action filed by Minister of
Culture Duan Slobodnk after
Feldek accused Slobodnk of
being a Nazi collaborator during World War II. Valko fought
Slovak attorney Ernest Valko, killed by unidenti- that case all the way to the Eufied gunmen in 2010. (Getty Images)
ropean Court of Human Rights
in Strasbourg, France, where a
2001 judgment in his favor won Feldek an award of 500,000 Slovak koruna
($22,482 today). In another libel action, Valko filed suit against Prime Minister
Robert Fico, on behalf of Finance Minister Ivan Miklo, winning another lucrative victory. Valko s other clients included Jn Duck, director of Slovensk
plynrensk priemysel (Slovak Gas Industry), whose murder in January 1999
remains unsolved today; and Tipos, the Slovak national lottery, which he
representedprior to his own deathin a lawsuit filed by the Cypriot company Lemikon Limited, seeking a payout of 66 million euros ($88.5 million).
Aside from private litigation, Valko also served as an arbiter at the Arbitration Court of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Slovak Republic
(19972010); as a trustee in bankruptcy proceedings (1998); as member of the
supervisory board of the commercial bank Istrobanka (19992002); as a member of the supervisory board of the Slovak Insurance Company (19992002);
as a member of the European Law and Policy Advisory Groups project to harmonize Slovakian law with other states in the European Union (20002001);
as a member of the Slovak Board for Radio and Television Broadcasting and
Retransmission (19992004); and as a member of the supervisory board of
VA N C E , R O B E R T S M I T H
Slovak Electric Power (20032010). Somewhere within Valkos public or private connections, presumably, lay the roots of his murder.
Investigators noted that in November 2006, police charged Valko and financier Ladislav Rehk with attempting to extort $2 million from owners of the
firm Ravi Slovakia, a manufacturer of doors and windows in Zhorie, claiming
that Rehk had been cheated on a business deal. Those charges were dropped
blamed Valkos death on an
without trial, in 2008. The newspaper Nov Cas
unnamed crime syndicate in Bratislava, and other theories involved the Tipos
lawsuit and the similar slaying of Valko client Jn Duck in 1999 (gunned
down in the lobby of his apartment house). In that case, police charged Ukrainian suspect Oleg T., said to reside and work for underworld boss Ivan Miskov, but the charge was dismissed in in 2000. Bratislava police officially closed
that case, leaving it unsolved, in July 2007.
Another Slovakian newspaper, the tabloid SME, raised alternative theories
for Valkos murder. One was a straightforward robbery gone wrong, based
on prior burglaries at his home. Another suggestion involved a case in which
Valko represented Tobi Loyka, owner of a lucrative peat bog operation, in a
lawsuit filed against Slovak Information Service (SIS) agents Michal Hrbcek
and Martin Lieskovsk. The SIS is a Slovakian intelligence agency, established
in January 1993 as a descendant of Czechoslovakias defunct Federal Security Information Service. In 1995, its agents kidnapped and lightly tortured
the son of President Michal Kovc, then allegedly killed prosecution witness
Rbert Remi, a Bratislava policeman, in April 1996.
Further Reading
Leff, Carol. The Czech and Slovak Republics: Nation versus State. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1996.
Schwartz, Herman. The Struggle for Constitutional Justice in Post-Communist Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Shepherd, Robin. Czechoslovakia: The Velvet Revolution and Beyond. New York: St. Martins Press, 2000.
Wheaton, Bernard, and Zdene k Kavan. The Velvet Revolution: Czechoslovakia,
19881991. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.
Whipple, Tim. After the Velvet Revolution: Vaclav Havel and the New Leaders of Czechoslovakia Speak Out. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991.
VANCE, ROBERT SMITH (19311989)

On December 16, 1989, Judge Robert Vance of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit opened a package at his home in Mountain Brook
Alabama. A bomb inside the parcel detonated, killing Vance and gravely injuring his wife. Two days later, a similar mail bomb killed Robert E. Robinson, an
African American civil rights lawyer, in Savannah, Georgia. Within days, two
597
598
more bombs were intercepted and defused by authoritiesone at the Eleventh

Circuit Courts headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, the other at a Jacksonville,
Florida, office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP). The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched an investigation tagged VANPACfor Vance and packagein an effort to identify
the bomber, with results that some regard as controversial to this day.
Robert Vance was born in Talladega, Alabama, on May 10, 1931. Raised in
nearby Birmingham, he received a BS degree from the University of Alabama
in 1950, while serving as president of the Student Government Association,
and earned his JD from the universitys school of law two years later. Vance
then entered military service as an attorney for the U.S. Army Judge Advocate
Generals Corps, where he assisted in defending the army against charges of
communist infiltration raised by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Back in civilian life,
Vance earned his master of laws degree from George Washington University
Law School in 1955, then served as a law clerk for Alabama Supreme Court
Justice James Mayfield. He subsequently spent one year as an attorney with the
U.S. Department of Labor, then returned to private practice in Birmingham.
Vances return to Alabama coincided with the rise of the black civil rights
movement. Despite his education in segregated schools, immersed in Alabamas culture of white supremacy, Vance found himself in sympathy with African Americans. In court, he balked at automatically eliminating blacks from
jury pools, and joined as an intervening plaintiff in the case of Reynolds v. Sims,
producing a 1964 decision from the U.S. Supreme Court that state legislature districts must be roughly equal in population to avoid racial bias. Despite
that stance, unpopular with many Alabama whites, Vance was elected chairman of the states Democratic Party in 1966 and held that post for the next
11 years, restricting control of the party by overtly racist Governor George
Wallace. Aside from politics and his legal practice, Vance also served as a lecturer at Samford Universitys Cumberland School of Law, in Birmingham, from
1967 through 1969.
On November 4, 1977, President Jimmy Carter nominated Vance for a seat
on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, covering portions of portions
of six Southern states. Confirmed by the U.S. Senate on December 15, 1977,
Vance received his commission the same day and continued in that post until
October 1981, when the Fifth Circuit was divided to create a new Eleventh
Circuit Court of Appeals. Vance transferred to that court, hearing cases from
Alabama, Florida, and Georgia for the remainder of his life. In 1990, Congress
passed a bill renaming Birminghams federal building in honor of Vance.
FBI agents began their VANPAC investigation with the assumption of a racist motive, based on the targets selected. That premise shifted in January 1990,
when bureau spokesmen said that suspect Robert Wayne OFerrell, owner
of an army surplus store in Enterprise, Alabama, had failed a polygraph test.
While denying that OFerrell was their chief suspect, agents noted that he
had filed a lawsuit against his former employer, the Gulf Life Insurance Company of Jacksonville, and Judge Vance had dismissed OFerrells claim.
While OFerrell was still under scrutiny, the case moved in yet another direction. An agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who
had defused the recent Atlanta bomb, told investigators that its construction
reminded him of another incident dating from 1972. In that case, Georgia resident Walter Leroy Moody Jr. had been arrested after a homemade bomb exploded in his house, injuring his wife. Moody had received a four-year prison
term in that case, which prosecutors linked to an abortive extortion scheme,
subsequently filing an unsuccessful motion with the Eleventh Circuit Court
to have his criminal record expunged. Judge Vance was not a member of the
panel that rejected Moodys plea, but federal prosecutors still cited revenge as
his motive, claiming that the three subsequent bombings were red herrings
designed to focus attention on Southern racists.
Arrested on July 11, 1990, Moody faced a slate of federal charges that included 72 felony counts by January 1991. Defense attorneys obtained an order
recusing all federal judges within the Eleventh Circuit, whereupon Moodys
trial was moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, in June 1991. In that proceeding,
Moody took the stand against advice from his lawyers, denying any role in the
bombing and suggesting that the mail bombs could have been sent by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Jurors rejected that notion, convicting Moody on 71
of the counts filed against him, on June 28. Two months later, on August 21,
Judge Edward J. Devitt imposed a sentence of seven life terms plus 400 years
without possibility of parole. Triumphant prosecutor Louis Freeh was subsequently named director of the FBI, filling that post in September 1993.
Walter Moodys legal troubles were not all behind him, meanwhile. Indicted
by Alabama state authorities for Judge Vances murder, he was convicted once
again, and received a death sentence on February 10, 1997. Alabamas Supreme Court rejected Moodys appeal of that sentence on May 18, 2012. At this
writing, he remains on death row at the Holman Correctional Facility, outside
Atmore, Alabama. Some observers, however, still question his guilt in the 1989
bombings.
A year after Moodys state murder conviction, scandal engulfed the FBI
Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, a chemist and Supervisory Special Agent at the lab from 1986 to 1998, emerged in 1999 as a
whistleblower detailing perceived mishandling of evidence and violations of
established FBI investigative procedures in many notorious cases, including
VANPAC and the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma Citys Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building. In Moodys case, Whitehurst alleged that agents J. Thomas Thurman
of the Explosives Unit and Roger Martz of the Chemistry-Toxicology Unit circumvented standard procedures, specifically bypassing mandatory analysis of
599
600
V E R W O E R D, H E N D R I K F R E N S C H
explosives residue by the labs Materials Analysis Unit. He further charged that
Martz reached a flawed opinion in concluding that the mail bombs contained
a particular smokeless powder, traced to Moody; that Thurman improperly
based his opinions on the flawed residue analysis performed by Martz; that
Thurman improperly testified outside his field of expertise on various matters;
and that Thurman lacked a factual basis for certain testimony about the explosives used in the bombs. Whitehurst also accused Thurman and Martz of fabricating evidence, perjuring themselves, and obstructing justice in the VANPAC
case, while suggesting that prosecutors Freeh and Howard Shapiro may have
committed misconduct by offering testimony from Martz and Thurman.
An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector
General subsequently dismissed all of Whitehursts claims against the FBI Laboratory, as well as Thurman, Martz, Freeh, and Shapiro, but conspiracy theorists persist in suggesting that Moody may be an innocent patsy. Supporting
that case, they point to a mail-bombing that wounded Maryland judge John P.
Corderman on December 22, 1989, later deemed dissimilar from the explosive parcels in the VANPAC case. Supporters of Moodys innocence contend
that both judges were targeted for their involvement in federal narcotics cases.
Meanwhile, Robert OFerrell sued the FBI, seeking $50 million for damage to
his reputation from their abortive investigation of him, but U.S. District Judge
Harold Albritton of Birmingham dismissed that claim in November 1998.
See also: Ku Klux Klan (1866 ); Wallace, George Corley, Jr. (19191998)Attempted.
Further Reading
A Byte Out of History: The Mail Bomb Murders. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2006/december/vanpac_122606.
Jenkins, Ray. Blind Vengeance: The Roy Moody Mail Bomb Murders. Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1997.
Kelly, John, and Phillip Weaver. Tainting Evidence: Inside the Scandals at the FBI Crime
Lab. New York: The Free Press, 2002.
Winne, Mark. Priority Mail. New York: Scribner, 1995.
VERWOERD, HENDRIK FRENSCH (19011966)

On September 6, 1966, South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd was
scheduled to deliver a report on his recent meeting with Chief Leabua Johnathon, prime minister of Lesotho, at the House of Assembly in Cape Town. He
entered the chamber at 2:15 P.M., and was attacked moments later by Dimitri
Tsafendas, a uniformed parliamentary messenger. Tsafendas stabbed Verwoerd
four times in the neck and chest before he was disarmed by Assembly members. Other legislators administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation to Verwoerd before an ambulance arrived, but he was declared dead on arrival at Groote
VERWOERD, HENDRIK FRENSCH
Schuur Hospital. In custody, Tsafendas told police that he killed Verwoerd because he was so disgusted with the racial policy of apartheid that Verwoerd
and other South African leaders had crafted since 1948. He also claimed that a
giant tapeworm inside his body regularly spoke to him. At trial, Judge Andries
Beyers declared Tsafendas not guilty of murder by reason of insanity. Diagnosed
as schizophrenic, Tsafendas spent the remainder of his life in various prisons
and psychiatric hospitals, dying in October 1999, at age 81.
Hendrik Verwoerd was born in Amsterdam on September 8, 1901, the son
of a Dutch merchant who favored the Afrikaner side in the Second Boer War
(18991902). In 1913, Verwoerds family emigrated to Bulawayo, Southern
Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where his father served as an evangelist for the
Dutch Reformed Church. Verwoerd attended Milton High School and received a Beit Trust Scholarship, but had to decline it when his father moved
the clan again, this time to Brandfort in South Africas Orange Free State. He
subsequently enrolled at Stellenbosch University, with a theology major, then
switched to psychology, receiving both a masters and a doctorate cum laude. He
declined an Abe Bailey scholarship to Oxford University, preferring study in
Germany during 19251927, when Adolf Hitlers Nazi Party was on the rise.
That movements influence on Verwoerds racial attitudes remains a subject of
speculation by South African historians today.
Back in South Africa by
1928, Verwoerd was appointed
to chair the Department of Applied Psychology at his alma
mater, Stellenbosch University,
advancing professor of sociology and social work in 1934.
Two years later, he led a deputation of six professors opposing
admission of German-Jewish
refugees from Nazism to South
Africa. By 1937, Verwoerd
was an active member of the
far-right National Party in the
Transvaal and editor of its racist newspaper, Die Transvaler. A
Supreme Court judgment subsequently found as fact that
Die Transvaler, with Verwoerds
knowledge and collaboration, An opponent of apartheid assassinated South Afoperated as an organ of the Ger- rican prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd. (Getty
man Nazi Party in South Africa. Images)
601
602
V E R W O E R D, H E N D R I K F R E N S C H
Whereas Hitlers Third Reich lay in ruins after World War II, the National
Party grew stronger under Verwoerds leadership, sweeping to power in the
South African general election of May 1948. Its platform hinged on apartheid
(the status of being apart)that is, white minority rule over a strictly segregated society. Step one was passage of the 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages
Act. A year later, with Verwoerds appointment as minister of native affairs
under Prime Minister Daniel Malan, more restrictive legislation followed. In
1950, came the Immorality Amendment Act (banning interracial adultery and
extramarital sex), the Population Registration Act (creating a national registry
of every citizens race), the Group Areas Act (imposing residential segregation),
and the Suppression of Communism Act (banning the Communist Party and
any form of radical change). In 1951, legislators passed the Bantu Building Workers Act (banning black artisans from work in white urban areas), the
Separate Representation of Voters Act (removing coloreds from the common
voters roll), the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act (moving blacks from public lands to resettlement camps), and the Bantu Authorities Act (establishing
black homelands with illusory self-government).
The onslaught of racist legislation continued throughout Verwoerds tenure as minister of native affairs and accelerated in September 1958, when he
succeeded Johannes Strijdom as South Africas prime minister. By early 1960,
apartheid had been formally condemned by British prime minister Harold
Macmillan. On March 21 of that year, black protests against discrimination and
police brutality culminated in the Sharpeville massacre (see sidebar). Less than
three weeks later, Verwoerd survived his first assassination attempt.
That attack came on April 9, 1960, when Verwoerd opened the Union Exposition on the Witwatersrand, a large sedimentary range of rocky hills that
forms a continental divide in South Africa. David Pratt, a farmer from Natal,
fired two shots at Verwoerd from a .22-caliber pistol, at point-blank range,
striking the prime minister in his right cheek and right ear. Surgeons at Pretoria Hospital called Verwoerds survival absolutely miraculous, resulting from
Pratts selection of a small-caliber weapon. Disarmed and arrested at the scene,
Pratt faced trial in Johannesburg Magistrates Court on April 11, where he was
judged to be mentally disordered and epileptic. Sentenced to indefinite detention pending indication of the Governor Generals pleasure, Pratt hanged
himself at Bloemfontein Mental Hospital on October 1, 1961.
Seemingly unfazed by his near miss with death, Verwoerd pressed on with
ever-tightening restrictions on South Africas racially divided society. United
Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjld failed to negotiate more liberal
terms with Verwoerd in 1961, and the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 1761 on November 6, 1962, formally condemning apartheid and asking
all UN member states to sever diplomatic relations with Pretoria. A second UN
resolution, passed on August 7, 1963, called for a voluntary international arms
VERWOERD, HENDRIK FRENSCH
SHARPEVILLE MASSACRE
On March 21, 1960, an estimated 19,000 black residents of Sharpeville,
in the Transvaal, rallied at a local police station to protest laws requiring
colored citizens to carry special pass books whenever they ventured
outside of segregated black homelands. The demonstrators left their
pass books at home, offering themselves for mass arrest to highlight the
laws inequity. When overflights by jet fighters failed to discourage the
crowd, 150 police officers supported by armored vehicles opened fire on
the protesters with rifles and automatic weapons, killing at least 69 persons and wounding 180 more. Those gunned downmany shot in the
back as they fledincluded 39 women and 29 children. Police subsequently blamed the shooting on panic among young and inexperienced
officers, but testimony offered before South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998 suggested a degree of deliberation in the
decision to open fire. The massacre sparked international outrage and
prompted the African National Congress to organize a paramilitary wing,
Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), to carry out guerrilla actions
against the white-supremacist state.
embargo against South Africa. A year later, the United States and Britain suspended arms sales to Verwoerds racist state.
Despite international condemnation, the National Party remained in control
of South Africa, winning the 1966 general elections. Throughout the 1960s,
South Africa developed its own militaryindustrial complex, producing military hardware ranging from small arms to nuclear and biological weapons.
Even after Verwoerds murder, the National Party would remain intransigent,
defending apartheid by any and all means available until 1994.
Some 250,000 white mourners attended Verwoerds funeral, at the Heros
Acre in Pretoria. Countless public facilities, roads, and other locations were
named in his honor, though most have been renamed since 1994. Pretorias
H. F. Verwoerd Hospital, as an example, today bears the name of martyred
black activist Steve Biko. The last vestige of Verwoerds regimethe bloodstained carpet where his body lay in parliament after his stabbingwas finally
removed in 2004.
Further Reading
Ainslie, Rosalynde. The Unholy Alliance: Salazar, Verwoerd, Welensky. London: M. W.
Books, 1962.
Attempted Assassination of Dr. Verwoerd 1960. British Path. http://www.britishpathe
.com/video/attempted-assassination-of-dr-verwoerd.
603
604
VICTORIA, QUEEN OF THE UNITED KINGDOM
Bunting, Brian. The Rise of the South African Reich. New York: Penguin African Library,
1969.
Hepple, Alexander. Verwoerd. New York: Pelican/Penguin Books, 1967.
Kenny, Henry. Architect of Apartheid: H. F. Verwoerd, an Appraisal. London: J. Ball, 1980.
Welsh, David. The Rise and Fall of Apartheid. Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2010.
VICTORIA, QUEEN OF THE UNITED

KINGDOM (18191901)ATTEMPTED
Great Britains longest-serving monarch (thus far) made many enemies during
her 63 years and seven months on the throne. Between 1840 and 1887, Queen
Victoria survived at least eight assassination attempts that are documented in
public records.
The first attempt occurred on June 10, 1840, in the third year of Victorias
reign, when she was 21 years old and four months pregnant with the first of
her nine children. The would-be assassin, 18-year-old Edward Oxford, fired
two pistol shots at the queen as she rode through London in an open carriage,
with husband Prince Albert. Neither shot struck anyone, and some historians
theorize that Oxford forgot to put bullets in his muzzle-loading weapon. No
motive for the bungled shooting was suggested. Charged with high treason,
Oxford was acquitted on grounds of insanity and spent the next 27 years in lunatic asylums. Released in 1867, he emigrated to Australia and lived an apparently normal life there until his death, in April 1900.
The first attempt on Victorias life produced an outpouring of public support in Britain and throughout Europe, but its failure did not dissuade other
hopeful assassins. On May 29, 1842, cabinetmaker John Francis waited for
Victoria on The Mall, in London, but his pistol misfired and he escaped in
the ensuing confusion. Surmising that the then-unknown gunman might try
again, Victoria rode along the same route on May 30, and Francis repeated his
attempt to kill her. His pistol worked that time, but Francis missed his target
and was seized by a plainclothes policeman. Convicted of high treason at trial,
he was sentenced to hang, but that sentence was commuted in July and Francis was transported to Australia.
Two days after Francis heard his death sentence commutedon July 3,
1842John William Bean, described as a deformed and deranged 17-year
old, joined the list of would-be regicides. Strangely, his pistol was loaded with
paper and tobacco rather than a bullet, and he used too little gunpowder to
send the odd projectile very far. Considering his situation and ineptitude, the
court was lenient, imposing only an 18-month prison term.
Nearly seven years passed before the next known attempt on Victorias life.
The assailant this time was William Hamilton, an unemployed farm laborer
from Adare, Ireland. On May 19, 1849, Hamilton carried his poorly loaded
VICTORIA, QUEEN OF THE UNITED KINGDOM
pistol to Londons Constitution Hill and fired a cloud of smoke at the queens
passing carriage. Whether he included a projectile is unclear, but the shooting
produced no casualties. At trial, on June 14, Hamilton pled guilty to attempted
regicide and was transported to Australia for a term of seven years.
Next in line to stalk the queen was Robert Francis Pate Jr., a 31-year-old
lieutenant in the 10th Light Dragoons (now the 10th Royal Hussars), who
began to exhibit strange behavior in 1844, after his favorite horse and dog
were euthanized for rabies during a tour of duty in Ireland. On the evening of
June 27, 1850, after Victoria had visited a dying uncle at Cambridge House in
Picadilly, Pate attacked her with cane, inflicting a scar on the queens forehead
that remained visible for years afterward. At trial, while shunning a plea of insanity, Pate sought leniency by claiming he had suffered a momentary lapse
caused by a weak mind. Convicted and transported to Tasmania for a sevenyear term, he later returned to London and died there in 1895.
Britains Irish troubles prompted the next attack on Queen Victoria, on February 29, 1872. The assailant, 17-year-old youth Arthur OConnor, accosted
Victoria outside Buckingham Palace, brandishing a pistol and demanding freedom for Fenian prisoners incarcerated over their struggle for Irish freedom
from England. A servant, John Brown, tackled and disarmed OConnor, only
then discovering that the teenagers gun was both defective and unloaded.
A court sentenced OConnor to one years imprisonment and 20 lashes with a
birch whip, but Victoria waived the public beating.
Victorias next would-be slayer was Roderick MacLean, a London poet who
had mailed some of his verses to the queen and received a curt response that
he deemed insulting. On March 2, 1882, MacLean fired a pistol at Victorias
carriage outside Windsor Station, wounding no one. Two students from Eton
College attacked MacLean with their umbrellas, beating him until a constable
arrived to seize him. Charged with high treason, MacLean was deemed not
guilty, but insane on April 20. That verdict reportedly enraged Victoria, but
she took consolation from another outpouring of public support, remarking
that it was worth being shot at, to see how much one is loved.
Five years later, on June 20, 1887, Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee,
marking half a century as Britains queen. Irish nationalists found the temptation
to disrupt that ceremony irresistible, allegedly plotting to blow up Westminster
Abbey with Victoria and half her cabinet inside. We say allegedly today, because the mastermind of the conspiracyFrancis Millen, a member of Clan
na Gael, a successor to the defunct Fenian Brotherhoodhad been employed
since 1885 as a spy for the British Home Office. According to later reports,
Scotland Yard officer Edward Jenkinson encouraged the plot, with approval
from Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, as a means of arresting militant nationalists
and embarrassing the Irish Parliamentary Party, created in 1882 to seek home
rule for Ireland. British newspapers exposed the plot in June 1887, when
605
606
VIEIR A, JOO NINO BERNARDO
two Irish-American suspectsThomas Callan and Michael Harkinswere arrested for smuggling dynamite into London. Jurors convicted both in February
1888 and sentenced to 15-year terms, and ringleader Millen slipped through
police hands and escaped to the United States. The Times of London named deceased American James Monro as a financier of the plot, and although he could
not defend himself, Irish politician Charles Stewart Parnell sued the paper for
linking him to nationalist violence, winning a judgment of 5,000 for libel.
Future queen Alexandrina Victoria was born on May 24, 1819, granddaughter of King George III and daughter of heir apparent Prince Edward, Duke of
Kent and Strathearn. George and Edward died within six days of one another,
in January 1820, leaving Victoria to inherit the British throne at age 18. Three
years later, she married a first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha,
producing the first of their nine children in November 1840. Albert died in
December 1861, after a protracted illness, and Victoria then entered a long
period of mourning, avoiding public appearances for several years. Momentous events of her long reign include the Irish potato famine (1844), establishment of Britains first public libraries (1850), the Crimean War (18531856),
transfer of government in India from a private trading company to the Crown
(1858), extension of suffrage to tax-paying men of the urban working class
(1867), institution of compulsory primary education to age 11 (1870), expanding property rights of married women (1883), extension of suffrage to
agricultural workers (1884), and still-unsolved serial murders by Jack the
Ripper (1888), believed by some historians to be Victorias grandson, Prince
Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale. At her death in 1901, Victoria
was succeeded by her son, Edward VII.
Further Reading
Campbell, Christy. Fenian Fire: The British Government Plot to Assassinate Queen Victoria.
London: HarperCollins. 2002.
Charles, Barrie. Kill the Queen! The Eight Assassination Attempts on Queen Victoria.
Stroud, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom: Amberley Publishing, 2012.
Marshall, Dorothy. The Life and Times of Queen Victoria. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972.
St. Aubyn, Giles. Queen Victoria: A Portrait. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991.
Strachey, Lytton. Queen Victoria. London: Chatto and Windus, 1921.
Woodham-Smith, Cecil. Queen Victoria: Her Life and Times 18191861. London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1972.
VIEIRA, JOO NINO BERNARDO

(19392009)
On March 1, 2009, a bomb exploded at army headquarters in Bissau, the capital
of Guinea-Bissau, killing Chief of Staff Batista Tagme Na Waie. In the predawn
hours of March 2, soldiers raided the home of General Na Waies bitter rival,
President Joo Nino Vieira, killing him as he attempted to flee. Reports differ as
to the cause of Vieiras death. European media reports quoted a pathologist who
performed his autopsy as saying the president was savagely beaten before being
finished off with several bullets. Best-selling novelist Frederick Forsyth, visiting
Guinea-Bissau at the time of the assassination, later claimed that the pathologist, over dinner, told him that Vieira survived an explosion at the presidential
villa, then was captured and carried to his mother-in-laws home, where soldiers
hacked him to death with machetes. Thousands attended Vieiras funeral at the
National Peoples Assembly, but foreign world leaders shunned the event.
Joo Vieira was born in Bissau, then the capital of Portuguese Guinea, on
April 27, 1939. Details of his early life are vague, beyond the fact that he belonged to the minority Papel ethnic group and trained to work as an electrician.
In 1960, Vieira joined the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and
Cape Verde (PAIGC), led by nationalist spokesman Amlcar Lopes da Costa Cabral, rising to serve as the partys political commissioner and military chief for
the Tombali region by 1961. In January 1963, Cabral declared all-out guerrilla
war against Portugal, launching a 10-year struggle for independence. Vieira
rose swiftly through the PAIGCs ranks, serving as military commander of its
southern front in 1964, as a member of its Political Bureau in 19641965, as
vice president of its War Council from 1965 to 1967, as a southern front political bureau delegate from 1967 to 1970, and as a member of the War Council
Executive Committee during 19701971.
In 1972, Amlcar Cabral began to organize a Peoples Assembly, meant to
govern his homeland when it achieved independence. Based in Conakry, in
neighboring Guinea, the Peoples Assembly served as a government in exile for
what would become Guinea-Bissau. Assassins murdered Cabral in Conakry on
January 23, 1973, but his half-brother Luis Cabral assumed command of the
PAIGC. Joo Vieira, at the time, was both the partys deputy secretary general
and a member of its Permanent Secretariat. The PAIGC declared Guinea-Bissau
independent on September 24, 1973, but Portuguese resistance continued
until Portugals Carnation Revolution of April 1974 deposed dictator Marcelo
Caetano. Guinea-Bissau officially achieved its independence on September 10,
1974, with Luis as its first president.
Joo Vieira, meanwhile, had advanced to serve as president of the Peoples
National Assembly in 1973, a post he held for the next five years. On September 28, 1978, President Cabral named Vieira to serve as prime minister. He
held that post for two years, while Guinea-Bissaus economy declined, then led
a bloodless coup against Cabral on November 14, 1980, driving Cabral into
exile. That move, exacerbated by racial tension within the PAIGC, split the
partys Guinea-Bissau faction from its apparatus in Cape Verde. Vieira ruled
the roost in Guinea-Bissau, as chairman of the Council of the Revolution, and
607
608
VIEIR A, JOO NINO BERNARDO
the partys Cape Verdean branch was reborn as the African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde.
In May of 1984, Guinea-Bissau adopted a new constitution. To preserve an
image of propriety, Vieira ceded his office to acting president Carmen Pereira
on May 14, then resumed it two days later, with his title changed from chairman of the Council of the Revolution to chairman of the Council of State. Already fond of calling himself Gods gift to Guinea-Bissau, Vieira banned rival
political parties until 1991, then bowed to pressure from the Democratic Front
led by Aristide Menezes, scheduling the countrys first presidential election
for July 3, 1994. Running as one of seven candidates, Vieira led the field with
46 percent of the popular vote, but his failure to achieve a clear majority forced
a run-off with second-place contender Kumba Ial on August 7. In that contest,
Vieira emerged with 52 percent of the vote, against Ials 48 percent. He was
inaugurated as Guinea-Bissaus first elected president on September 29, 1994.
By then, more was at stake than command of the country. Guinea-Bissau,
since the 1980s, had emerged as West Africas hub of trafficking in Colombian cocaine. Outside observers recognized the well-known secret that Vieira stood as the Biggest Man in the cocaine trade, dealing ruthlessly with his
competitors. Reelected to a second term as president in May 1998, Vieira dismissed Army Chief of Staff Ansumane Man on June 6, based on allegations
that Man had smuggled weapons to rebel separatists in Senegal. Mans supporters retaliated with a bungled coup against Vieira on June 7, sparking a civil
war that continued until May 1999, claiming thousands of lives and displacing
some 350,000 persons. Finally outmatched, Vieira resigned as president on
May 7, 1999, sought refuge in the Portuguese embassy, then fled to Portugal.
Man invited ex-president Cabral home from exile, and although Cabral briefly
returned to Guinea-Bissau, he declined the presidency.
Seven days after Vieiras expulsion, Man named Malam Bacai Sanh as acting president. In September 1999, a PAIGC party congress expelled Vieira for
what it called treasonable offences, support and incitement to warfare, and
practices incompatible with the statutes of the party. Kumba Ial defeated
President Sanhs reelection bid in February 2000, serving until a coup led
by General Verssimo Correia Seabra deposed him in mid-September 2003.
Seabra ruled for two weeks, then appointed acting president Henrique Rosa.
Vieira returned from Portugal on April 7, 2005, met by 5,000 cheering admirers when his helicopter landed at Bissaus National Stadium. Buoyed by a
petition with 30,000 signatures urging him to run for president again, Vieira
announced his candidacy on April 16.
Some opponents considered Vieira ineligible for election, based on his years
in exile and still-pending charges of killing suspected coup leaders 20 years
earlier, but in May 2005 the nations Supreme Court approved his participation in a field of 13 candidates. As before, the first round of voting on June 19
produced no clear winner. Incumbent Sanh polled 35 percent of the vote, to

Vieiras 29 percent and Kumba Ials 25 percent. An August run-off found Vieira leading with 216,167 votes to Sanhs 196,759, and Vieira began another
term as president on October 1.
According to outside observers, Vieira also resumedif, in fact, he had ever
relinquishedhis role as the primary smuggler of cocaine through GuineaBissau. The perils of drug trafficking aside, his final presidential term was
fraught with conflict. On October 25, 2005, Vieira dismissed hostile Prime
Minister Carlos Domingos Gomes Jnior, replacing him with ally Aristides
Gomes. In March 2007, the PAIGC formed an alliance with two smaller parties
to force Gomess resignation. Vieira then appointed Martinho Ndafa Kabi as
prime minister, then dissolved the National Peoples Assembly in August 2008.
Three months later, shortly after the PAIGC won a majority in Guinea-Bissaus
parliamentary elections, rebellious soldiers attacked Vieiras home on November 26, 2008, but failed in their attempt to kill him. That remained for the final
coup, on March 2, which spawned an enduring mystery.
Vieiras murder was condemned by the African Union, the European Union,
the United States, and the Socialist International, and investigation of the assassination began. Agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation arrived
in April 2009, but never published results of their findings. Three months
later, the United Nations approved an investigation by the Economic Union of
West African States, apparently without reaching definitive conclusions. August 2009 brought speculation from South America that Colombias Medelln
cocaine cartel, then led by Pedro Juan Morena Villa, had orchestrated the murders of both Vieira and General Na Waie, through a Senegalese terrorist group
called the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance. Thus far, no one has
been charged with either crime.
Further Reading
Azikiwe, Ifeoha. Africa: Conflict Resolution and International Diplomacy. Milton Keynes,
United Kingdom: AuthorHouse UK Ltd., 2009.
Barry, Boubacar-Sid, and Quentin Wodon. Conflict, Growth, and Poverty in GuineaBissau. In Growth and Poverty Reduction: Case Studies from West Africa. Washington,
D.C.: The World Bank, 2007.
Chabal, Patrick, David Birmingham, Joshua Forrest, and Malyn Newitt. A History of
Postcolonial Lusophone Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
Jessup, John. An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Conflict and Conflict Resolution, 19451996.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.
Levitt, Jeremy. Illegal Peace in Africa: An Inquiry into the Legality of Power Sharing with
Warlords, Rebels, and Junta. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Vigh, Henry. Critical States and Cocaine Connections. In African Conflicts and Informal Power: Big Men and Networks. London: Zed Books, 2012.
609
610
V I L L A , F R A N C I S C O PA N C H O
VILLA, FRANCISCO PANCHO (18781923)

On July 20, 1923, longtime revolutionary leader Francisco Pancho Villa traveled to Hidalgo del Parral, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Villa owned a
ranch nearby, and frequently stopped there to deal with personal business. On
this particular Friday, he was bound for the local bank, to collect the payroll
for his ranch hands. Contrary to custom, Villa left most of his armed bodyguards at the ranch, taking only threeRamon Contreras, Claro Huertado,
and Rafael Madrenowith him in his four-year-old Dodge roadster. An aide to
Villa, Colonel Miguel Trillo, drove the car, and Villa was also accompanied by
his secretary, Daniel Tamayo. As the party passed a school, a roadside pumpkinseed vendor shouted, Viva Villa! Responding to that prearranged signal,
seven snipers fired on the Dodge, killing everyone inside the car except Contreras, who killed one of the ambush party then escaped, gravely wounded. Villas
men soon fanned out from the ranch, capturing the other six assassins, and
delivered them to state authorities. Two were sentenced to short jail terms, and
the other four were rewarded with army commissions, effectively confirming
suspicion that Villa was killed on orders from President lvaro Obregn Salido.
Pancho Villa was born Jos Doroteo Arango Armbula on June 5, 1878,
at a ranch in the state of Durango where his parents labored as sharecropping peasants. The eldest of
five children, he received some
education from a local Catholic school, then dropped out
to support his family after his
father died. Although details
of his early life are sparse and
controversial, Arango later
claimed that he left Durango
for Chihuahua at age 16, then
returned to track down and kill
a man who had raped his sister.
Following that episode, he stole
a horse and fled into the Sierra
Madre Occidental mountains,
using the name Orango when
he joined a bandit gang led by
Ignacio Parra.
Police nabbed Arango in
1902, on charges of assault
Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa, and stealing mules, a capital ofshot in an ambush in July 1923. (Hulton-Deutsch fense. Luckily, the fence who
bought his rustled livestock
Collection/CORBIS)
was rich and influential enough to spare Arangos life, on the condition that
he join Mexicos army. Arango agreed, then deserted in 1903, killing an officer and fleeing on the dead mans horse. Thereafter, he assumed the name
Francisco Pancho Villa, in honor of his paternal grandfather. Over the next
seven years, Villa waffled between legitimate odd jobs and robbery, until the
outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Revolutionary leader Francisco
Madero Gonzlez soon persuaded Villa to forsake a life of banditry for the
crusade against dictator Porfirio Daz. Villa soon proved himself a skilled field
commander, helping Maderos forces triumph in the month-long Battle of Ciudad Jurez (AprilMay 1911). As a result, Daz fled into exile, ceding the
presidency to Madero.
Thus ended the first state of the Mexican Revolution, but not Pancho Villas
long war. Villa despised Venustiano Carranza, a former Daz loyalist selected by
Madero as his minister of war. Despite that disappointment, Villa balked at joining Pascual Orozcos rebellion against Madero in March 1912, joining General
Victoriano Huerta to suppress the uprising. In the process, Huerta recognized
Villa as an ambitious potential rival, trumping up charges of insubordination
and horse theft to justify Villas execution. President Madero intervened at the
eleventh hour, commuting Villas death sentence to life imprisonment, but Villa
soon escaped from custody. He was on the run in February 1913, when Huerta,
conspiring with U.S. ambassador Henry Wilson and Flix Daz (a nephew of the
exiled former president), deposed and murdered Madero.
With Huertas installation as president, Villa swallowed his dislike for Venustiano Carranza, joining lvaro Obregn, Emiliano Zapata, and Pablo Gonzlez
Garza as leaders of a new Constitutional Army, pledged to Huertas defeat.
Villa supervised the armys operation in northern Mexico, redoubling his efforts in March 1913, after Huerta executed a close friend of Villas, Chihuahua
governor Abraham Gonzlez Casavantes. Four months later, U.S. president
Woodrow Wilson dismissed Ambassador Wilson (no relation) and threw U.S.
support behind Carranza. Huerta fought on for another year, then resigned in
July 1914 and fled into exile. By that time, Carranza had named Villa to serve
as provisional governor of Chihuahua, financing his army through selective
robberies and coercive assessments on hostile ranchers such as those who had
held his parents in peonage.
Villa had not been President Carranzas first choice as governor of Chihuahua, but local military officers demanded his appointment over Carranzas
preferred candidate, Manuel Chao. Once in office, Villa prepared for a move
against Carranza, supplementing his income from holdups and hacienda taxation with reams of paper currency he printed himself, compelling its acceptance on an equal basis with standard gold pesos. In Texas, Brigadier General
John Pershing was impressed enough with Villa to invite him for a visit at Fort
Bliss, outside El Paso.
611
612
On October 1, 1914, Carranza summoned a Great Convention of Commanding Military Chiefs and State Governors, meeting first in Mexico City,
then relocating to Aguascalientes for sessions lasting through November 9.
Designed to settle differences between Carranza, Villa, Zapata, and Obregn,
the convention surprised Carranza by picking General Eulalio Gutirrez Ortiz
as president of the new Mexican Republic, and Villa emerged as commander
of the Conventionalist Army. That force entered Mexico City on December 6,
1914, driving Carranza and his troops to seek sanctuary in Veracruz. Carranza
established his new capital there, controlling Mexicos primary seaport, as lvaro Obregn came to Carranzas defense.
Battle was joined between Villa and Obregn at Celaya, Guanajuato, on
April 13, 1915. Obregn lost 600 men in that fight, but still defeated Villa,
killing 4,000 Conventionalist soldiers and capturing 6,000 more (of whom
120 were executed). Retreating to Trinidad Garca de la Cadena, in Zacatecas, Villa fought Obregn again on June 1, fielding 25,500 men against Obregns 23,900. Obregn lost his right arm in that battle, but still crushed
Villas army, inflicting some 8,000 casualties. Another defeat followed on
November 1, 1915, at Agua Prieta, Sonora, where 15,000 Villistas were unable to conquer 6,500 troops led by General Plutarco Elas Calles. In the wake
of that loss, 1,500 survivors deserted Villas ranks. He tried to recoup morale
by attacking Hermosillo on November 21, but lack of discipline produced yet
another defeat.
Next, Villa turned his eyes toward the border. On January 11, 1916, Villas
men stopped a Mexico North Western Railway train near Santa Isabel, Chihuahua, executing 16 U.S. employees of the American Smelting and Refining Company. Villa admitted ordering the raid, presumably in response to
Washingtons support for President Carranza, but he denied authorizing the
executions. While General Pershing marshaled troops along the southwestern border, Villa sent 100 men to raid Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9.
The Villistas killed eight members of the 13th Cavalry Regiment and 10 civilians, torching the town before they fled with stolen weapons, ammunition, and
horses, but it was pyrrhic victory, with 67 raiders dead on the field.
Six days later, Pershing led 4,800 troops into Mexico, pursuing Villa. Their
first clash, at a ranch near Guerrero, Chihuahua, on March 29, drove Villa from
that town with 75 men dead or wounded. Other battles followed, with Lieutenant George Pattons 8th Cavalry joining the hunt in May. Most were fought
on Mexican soil, but Villistas still crossed the border as well, striking a ranch
in Texas on Christmas Day 1917 and another in March 1918. By the time Pershing concluded his Mexican Punitive Expedition, 8 U.S. soldiers were dead,
against 171 Villistas and (ironically) 24 of Carranzas federal troops.
Villa, although hunted and harried, continued his war against Carranza.
In June 1919, he nearly captured Ciudad Jurez from Carranzas army, then
retreated when U.S. troops from El Paso intervened. From there, he attempted
a siege of Durango, but was once again defeated. Another bitter loss occurred
near years end, when Carranza captured Villas best-surviving ally, General Felipe ngeles Ramirez, and executed him on November 26. A break came for
Villa in May 1920, when supporters of lvaro Obregn assassinated Carranza,
replacing him with interim President Adolfo de la Huerta. Villa negotiated
peace terms with de la Huerta, whereby Villa received a 25,000-acre hacienda
near Hidalgo del Parral, plus a pension of 500,000 gold pesos, in return for a
cessation of hostilities. Those terms were still in force when Obregn became
president in December 1920, but Villas fate was effectively sealed.
Whereas some historians blame President Obregn for Villas assassination,
two alternate theories exist. One is that Plutarco Elas Calles, frontrunner for
the Mexican presidency in 1924, who may have feared Villas announced intent to contest that election, may have been responsible. The other holds Jess
Herrera, last surviving son of former Villista General Jose de la Luz Herrera,
who had shifted to Carranzas side in 1914, responsible for the assassination.
Subsequently, son Malclovia Herrera died in battle against Villistas in 1915,
and another sonLuis Herrerawas captured and executed in 1916. Finally,
in 1919, General de la Luz Herrera was captured with two more sons and likewise put to death. Thereafter, Jess Herrera allegedly spent the remainder of
his familys fortune in a long vendetta against Villa.
PANCHO VILLA ON FILM

In life and death, Pancho Villa remains the most famoussome say
romanticfigure of the Mexican Revolution. He portrayed himself in four
documentary films, between 1912 and 1916, and the century between
1912 and 2012 saw 37 actors cast as Villa in various films and television
series. Wallace Beery played Villa twice, in Patria (1917) and Viva Villa!
(1934), the latter movie nominated for four Academy Awards, including
Best Picture. Others cast as Villa for the big screen include Raoul Walsh,
Alan Reed, Leo Carillo, Pedro Armendriz and son Pedro Armendriz Jr.,
Yul Brynner, Telly Savalas, Freddy Fender, and Antonio Banderas. On
television, Villa featured in episodes of Have Gun Will Travel, The Young
Indiana Jones Chronicles, and a made-for-TV movie, Wanted: The Sundance
Woman. Villa, played by Anglo actor Peter Butler, also appears briefly opposite vampires in a 2000 horror film, From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangmans Daughter. In the third season of Spike TVs Deadliest Warrior series,
Villa was pitted against Sioux war chief Crazy Horse, emerging triumphant in hand-to-hand combat.
613
614
VILL ARROEL LPEZ, GUALBERTO
See also: Carranza de la Garza, Venustiano (18591920); Madero Gonzlez, Francisco

Ignacio (18731913); Obregn Salido, lvaro (18801928); Zapata Salazar, Emiliano
(18791919).
Further Reading
Katz, Friedrich. The Life and Times of Pancho Villa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1998.
McLynn, Frank. Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution. New York: Basic
Books, 2002.
Orellana, Margarita de. Filming Pancho Villa: How Hollywood Shaped the Mexican Revolution. London: Verso, 2009.
Tuck, Jim. Pancho Villa and John Reed: Two Faces of Romantic Revolution. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984.
Welsome, Eileen. The General and the Jaguar: Pershings Hunt for Pancho Villa: A True
Story of Revolution and Revenge. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006.
Williams, Ben Jr. Pancho Villa: A Lifetime of Vengeance. Tucson, AZ: Smokin Z Press,
2010.
VILLARROEL LPEZ, GUALBERTO

(19081946)
On July 18, 1946, after months of simmering unrest, Bolivian troops crushed
a student protest rally in La Paz, Bolivia, with brutal force. Two days later,
President Gualberto Villarroel Lpez announced creation of a military cabinet
selected to suppress reactionary counter-revolution and ensure public order
and the constitutional regime. On July 21, thousands of protesters swarmed
the Plaza Murillo in downtown La Paz, breaking into the government arsenal to
arm themselves, then storming the Palacio Quemado (Palace of Government)
occupied by the president. After some 30 minutes of fighting with bodyguards,
the raiders killed President Villarroel and several of his aides, dragging Villarroels corpse outside and hanging it from a lamp post in a scene reminiscent of
Italian dictator Benito Mussolinis death three years earlier.
Gualberto Villarroel Lpez was born at Villa Rivero, in central Bolivias Cochabamba Department, on December 15, 1908. Little is known of his early
life, but he chose a military career and participated in Bolivias Chaco War
with Paraguay, also known as La Guerra de la Sed (Spanish for The War of the
Thirst). Both countries laid claim to the semi-arid Gran Chaco region, believed erroneously to be rich in oil. The three-year struggle, lasting from June
1932 to June 1935, resulted in Bolivias defeat and left Paraguay holding twothirds of the disputed territory, with historians reporting that three Bolivians
and two Paraguayans and died for each of Gran Chacos 20,000 square miles.
Villarroel emerged as a hero of sorts from that debacle, committed to reforms within Bolivian society, part of the Generacin del Chaco that rejected his
VILLARROEL LPEZ, GUALBERTO
nations traditional order. To that end, he supported the military coup dtat
that deposed President Jos Tejada Sorzano on May 16, 1936, replacing him
with Colonel Jos Toro Ruilova. As president, Toro instituted a regime of Military Socialism aimed at lifting Bolivia out of its postwar economic depression.
A primary target was Standard Oil, accused of smuggling Bolivian oil into Argentina for sale. In March 1937, Toros regime nationalized the companys Bolivian holdings, and although that move was popular with Bolivias workers,
they were less pleased by Toros adoption of trapping resembling fascist governments then on the rise in Italy, Spain, and Germany. Four months after his
move against Standard Oil, Toro was deposed and driven into exile by fellow
army officer Germn Busch Becerra.
Gualberto Villarroel supported the Busch regime as he had Toros, pleased
when Busch restored the constitution Toro had suspended in 1936. Two years
later, Bolivias Constituent Assembly proclaimed Busch the countrys constitutional president, but he soon tired of political wrangling with opponents and
reverted to the role of dictator, pledged to deepening the Military Socialism
inaugurated by his predecessor. That claim of reformist zeal was undercut by
Buschs employment of German advisors to train his soldiers, particularly when
Chaco War veteran Major Achim von Kries formed the Landesgruppe-Bolivie as
a branch of the German Nazi Partys Auslands-Organisation (Foreign Organization) in La Paz. Busch himself tooled around the capital in a Mercedes Benz
he received as a gift from Adolf Hitler, while insisting that his government was
uniquely Bolivian. A greater problem, perhaps, was Buschs erratic temper,
displayed in 1938 when he personally beat up prominent author Alcides Arguedas in retaliation for a critical newspaper column. Finally, on August 23,
1939, Busch shot himself in the Palacio Quemado.
With the constitution once again suspended, Gualberto Villarroel and other
military leaders chose General Carlos Quintanilla Quiroga as president. Frightened by Bolivian extremists on both political wings, Quintanilla held office
for barely eight months, ceding the presidency to General Enrique Pearanda
del Castillo. Increasingly repressive and corrupt, influenced heavily by Bolivias large mining interests, President Pearanda soon saw his popularity wane
with both the nations lower classes and among military officers led by Villarroel, who wished to broaden the scope of ToroBusch Military Socialism. On
December 20, 1943, Villarroel led a coup dtat and seized the presidency for
himself, in the name of Razon de Patria (Reason for the Fatherland), and Pearanda decamped for Spain.
Within his limits as a Latin American military officer, Villarroel was committed to reform. He recognized labor unions and supported pensions for retired workers, while abolishing the system of pongueaje that bound Bolivias
Indians in de facto slavery as unpaid domestic servants. Collaborating with
the countrys Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist
615
616
VO M R AT H, E R N S T E D UA R D
Movement, or MNR), created in June 1942, Villarroel called a National Assembly and promulgated a new constitution that established him as president
for a six-year term, beginning in August 1944, while bucking opposition from
Washington based on Bolivias long-running flirtation with European fascists.
By the end of World War II, Villarroels regime was caught in a tug-of-war between conservative interests financed by rich mine owners, and workers inclined to take their newly granted freedoms seriously. He ultimately proved
unable to resist harsh military measures against labor and certain prominent
intellectuals, who were executed with their bodies tossed from a 3,000-foot
cliff. The revolt that claimed Villarroels life in 1946 was seemingly inevitable.
In the wake of that rebellion, Major Jorge Eguinoformer chief of Villarroels national policewas captured on July 26, attempting to flee the country
disguised as an Indian. In custody, he confessed to kidnapping Mauricio Hochschild, a wealthy Argentine industrialist held for ransom in Bolivia during August 1944. On August 3, interim President Nstor Guilln Olmos announced a
purge of 41 army officers from the Villarroel regime, while members of Bolivias
largest tin miners union pledged support to the new administration. Twelve days
later, Guilln ceded the presidency to Toms Monje Gutierrz, chief justice of
the La Paz Court of Appeals. He, in turn, stepped down when voters elected
successor Enrique Hertzog Garaizabal in March 1947. Two more presidents
followed in turn, before deterioration of the national economy sparked another
revolution in 1952.
Today, despite his unpopularity in later life and his death at the hands of
a howling mob, Gualberto Villarroel Lpez is revered by many Bolivians as a
martyr, El Presidente Colgado (The Hanged President). In hindsight, his admirers regard him as a national hero ahead of his time, lynched by a populace
that failed to grasp his vision of reform.
Further Reading
Dorn, Glenn. The Truman Administration and Bolivia: Making the World Safe for Liberal
Constitutional Oligarchy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.
Farcau, Bruce. The Chaco War: Bolivia and Paraguay, 19321935. Westport, CT: Praeger,
1996.
Gotkowitz, Laura. A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in
Bolivia, 18801952. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Scheina, Robert. Latin Americas Wars Volume I: The Age of the Professional Soldier,
19002001. Washington, D.C.: Brasseys, Inc., 2003.
Smale, Robert. I Sweat the Flavor of Tin: Labor Activism in Early Twentieth-Century Bolivia. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.
VOM RATH, ERNST EDUARD (19091938)

On November 7, 1938, Herschel Feibel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew whose family had fled from Nazi Germany to France, purchased a pistol in Paris went to
V O M R AT H , E R N S T E D U A R D
the German embassy, where he met Ambassador Graf Welczeck on the street.
Claiming that he had to deliver an unspecified document, Grynszpan gained
admittance to the embassy and to the office of Ernst vom Rath, a secretary on
Welczecks consular staff. Moments later, a clerk heard cries for helpbut no
gunshotsand found vom Rath wounded. He died two days later, at a local
hospital. Legal arguments stalled Grynszpans trial for 19 months, by which
time Germany had conquered France. In June 1940, the Gestapo transported
him to Berlin. Testimony at the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann indicated that
Grynszpan was still alive, in Nazi custody, as late as 1943, but no further record
of his fate exists today.
Ernst vom Rath was born in Frankfurt, Germany, on June 3, 1909, the son
of a local politician. He studied law at the University of Knigsberg, receiving
his degree in 1932, and joined the Nazi Party that same year. By April 1933, he
was a member of the partys paramilitary Sturmabteilung (Storm Detachment,
or SA), which specialized in guarding Nazi rallies, disrupting opposition parties, and intimidating Jews with random acts of violence. He survived Adolf
Hitlers bloody purge of the SA in June and July 1934, transferring to the German Foreign Office. Posted first to Bucharest, then Paris, he was shipped out
to Calcutta in 1935. There, vom Rath contracted a bowel disorder, reportedly
diagnosed by a German specialist in sexually transmitted disease as resulting
from anal intercourse. Upon recovering, vom Rath returned to Paris in July
1936, and was promoted to legation secretary three months later.
By 1938, Hitlers government had begun stripping German Jews of their financial resources, aryanizing formerly Jewish businesses in an effort to force
Jews out of Germany. Registration of all Jewish property was scheduled for
completion by September 30, followed by deportation orders and spontaneous riots against Jews in various cities. Against that background, vom Raths
murder by a Jew provided Nazis with a prime excuse for escalating violence.
Soon after the announcement of vom Raths death, on November 9, antiJewish riots erupted across Germany and parts of Austria (annexed by Germany in March 1938). By sunrise on November 10the end of Kristallnacht
(Crystal Night), the Night of Broken Glassat least 91 Jews had died in
mob violence, with some estimates topping 600. More than 1,000 synagogues
were torched (95 in Vienna alone), along with some 7,500 Jewish businesses.
Further draconian laws were enacted, including a November 12 decree banning Jews from attending theaters, cinemas, concerts, or public exhibitions.
Today, few historians doubt that the Kristallnacht was planned in advance by
top-ranking Nazi leaders.
The orchestration of events in Germany and Austria fueled conspiracy theories surrounding Ernst vom Raths assassination. Police could not explain
why Grynszpan passed on killing Ambassador Welczeck outside the embassy,
where he might have escaped, rather than shooting a secretary inside, where
he was sure to be captured. Embassy witnesses insisted that Grynszpan did not
617
618
VO M R AT H, E R N S T E D UA R D
ask for any particular person by name, simply requesting time with any staff
member. His admission to the embassy raised further questions, because no
one recalled asking Grynszpan for any identification papers, and a French policeman claimed that he had found Grynszpan five-shot revolver unfired on the
floor of vom Raths office after the attack.
In custody, before he was seized by Gestapo agents, Grynszpan claimed that
he had killed vom Rath for seducing him into a homosexual tryst. Although
Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels branded that claim an insolent
argument and a shameless lie, it raised the specter of vom Raths rumored
homosexuality, with allegations that he had been treated for rectal gonorrhea
at the Berlin Institute of Radiology, after his return from Calcutta. Grynszpans
gay-sex defense is regarded by some as the reason why Nazi prosecutors bypassed their normal tactic of staging a public show trial, consigning Grynszpan
to obscurity in a concentration camp where he presumably died before the end
of World War II.
Other conspiracy allegations surround vom Raths medical treatment in the
wake of his shooting. Ambassador Welczecks physician, a Dr. Claas, listed the
patients condition as serious, whirs the ambassador told reporters that treatment up until this point . . . gives us hope that he [vom Rath] will make further
progress. Dissatisfied with that prognosis, Hitler sent his personal physician
Dr. Karl Brandt, a high-ranking officer in the elite SSto Paris aboard Hitlers
private plane on the night of November 7, accompanied by a Professor Magnus. The pair spent half an hour alone with vom Rath on November 8 and pronounced his condition grave, including signs of weak circulation. When vom
Raths mother arrived to visit him, shortly before his death on November 9,
she was forbidden from seeing her son. Back in Berlin, meanwhile, a journalist asked Dr. Heinrich Muehsam if he expected vom Rath to die. Although
Muehsam had never met vom Rath, he replied, Of course he will die. If not,
the whole thing is worthless. The greater the mourning, the more fanatical the
hatred will be.
Could Dr. Brandt have guaranteed vom Raths death, for the partys benefit? Vom Raths father, also a Third Reich diplomat, apparently had doubts
about his sons assassination, reportedly telling a friend that he blamed
a creature hired by the Nazis [rather] than a Jewish assassin. The senior vom
Rath opined that his son knew too much, but declined to elaborate. As for
Dr. Brandt, he went on to plan and participate in mass murder of Jews under
Hitlers euthanasia program, targeting defective humans characterized as life
unworthy of life. He also coordinated and joined in various medical experiments conducted on prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, which ultimately
placed him on trial for his life in December 1946, charged with 22 codefendants in the case titled United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al. That doctors trial concluded in April 1947, with Brandt and six others condemned for
V O M R AT H , E R N S T E D U A R D
crimes against humanity; nine more defendants were sentenced to prison, and
seven were acquitted. Before he was hanged, on June 2, 1948, Dr. Brandt defended his actions by saying that any personal code of ethics must give way to
the total character of the war.
Further Reading
Gilbert, Martin. Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction. London: HarperCollins, 2006.
Kirsch, Jonathan. The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi
Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2013.
Pehle, Walter. November 1938: From Kristallnacht to Genocide. London: Berg Publishers, 1990.
Read, Anthony, and Dawn Fisher. Kristallnacht: The Nazi Night of Terror. New York:
Crown Publishing, 1990.
Schwab, Gerald. The Day the Holocaust Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Grynszpan. New
York: Praeger, 1990.
Schwarz, Meier. The Mysterious Murder of Ernst vom Rath. Ashkenaz House. http://
www.ashkenazhouse.org/vomrath.htm.
619
W
W A L L A C E , G E O R G E C O R L E Y, J R .
(19191998)ATTEMPTED
On May 15, 1972, in the midst of his second independent campaign for the
U.S. presidency, Alabama governor George Wallace staged a campaign rally at
a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland. After his speech, as he passed through
the crowd, 21-year-old Arthur Herman Bremer opened fire with a revolver,
wounding Wallace and three bystanders. All four victims survived, though a
bullet lodged in his spinal column left Wallace paralyzed from the waist down
for the remainder of his life. Investigators found that Bremer had been seen at
two prior Wallace rallies: one in Dearborn, Michigan, on May 13, and another
at Wheaton, Maryland, earlier on May 15. His diary, later published, indicated
that the shooting was inspired by a desire for notoriety. At trial, in August 1972,
Bremer received a 63-year sentence, later reduced by a decade. Bremer was
paroled from custody on November 9, 2007.
George Wallace Jr. was born in Clio, Alabama, on August 25, 1919. Although Wallace was named after his father and grandfather, his parents disliked the suffix Junior and distinguished him from his forebears by calling
him George C. In time, his own sontechnically named George Corley Wallace IIIwould be commonly known as George Jr.
Wallaces father, a physician like his father before him, abandoned medicine
to try his hand at farming after World War I. It was a failed attempt, his death
in 1937 forcing wife Mozell to sell the property in settlement of the outstanding mortgage. Entranced by politics from childhood, George C. won a contest
at age 16 to serve as a page in Alabamas state senate. Two years later, with his
fathers death, he bypassed conventional college study to enroll at the University of Alabamas School of Law, earning his LLB in 1942. From law school,
Wallace joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, failed at training as a pilot, but became a bomber crewman in the Pacific Theater. There, he suffered a near-fatal
case of spinal meningitis, emerging from the war partially deaf, with a medical
disability pension.
That handicap did not keep Wallace out of politics, beginning with his
1945 appointment as an assistant to Alabama attorney general William McQueen. May 1946 saw Wallace elected to the lower house of the state legislature, where he was viewed as a moderate on racial matters by Alabama
622
Alabama governor George Wallace survived a near-fatal shooting in 1972. (Associated

Press)
standards. Selected as a delegate to the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Wallace refused to join in the Dixiecrat walkout protesting President
Harry Trumans. Later, following appointment as a judge for Alabamas Third
Judicial Circuit in 1952, Wallace straddled the fence on matters of race. He
treated African Americans fairly in court, referring to black attorneys as Mister, but blocked federal attempts to review his countys mostly white voter
rolls and issued an injunction barring segregation signs from local railroad
depots.
Running for governor in 1958, Wallace cast himself as a relative liberal,
courting endorsement from the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People and criticizing rival John Pattersons alliance with the Ku
Klux Klan (KKK). Patterson crushed Wallace at the polls, prompting Wallace to complain that They outniggered me. Ill never be outniggered again.
True to his word, Wallace actively recruited Klan support for his next gubernatorial bid, in 1962, employing former KKK wizard Asa Earl Carter as
his chief speech writer and tactician. Victorious in that campaign, Wallace
relied on Carter for a combative inauguration speech in January 1963, telling a crowd of cheering racists, In the name of the greatest people that have
ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before
the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!
WA L L A C E , G E O R G E C O R L E Y, J R .
Under Wallace, from 1963 to 1966, the Klan had a virtual free hand against
blacks and civil rights workers in Alabama. Robert Shelton, leader of the states
largest KKK faction, landed a million-dollar contract for his then employer,
Goodyear Tire and Rubber, to supply tires for all state vehicles; a publishing
company that produced the Klans Fiery Cross newsletter was hired to print all
state textbooks; and Wallace cronies in the legislature killed a bill designed
to restrict access to dynamite. When Klansmen were accused of murder, Albert Lingoa self-described good friend of the KKK, named by Wallace to
head the state policeobstructed criminal investigations and provided bail for
those arrested. Wallace even called for the impeachment of Attorney General
Richmond Flowers after Flowers launched his own investigation of the Klan.
The charge: collaborating with the federal government.
Despite such antics, Wallace failed to halt desegregation in the Cotton State,
meekly surrendering after a brief stand in the schoolhouse door to bar black
students from the state university. During the 1965 civil rights march from
Selma to Montgomery, Wallace hid inside the governors mansion, peering at
the crowd with binoculars, from behind Venetian blinds. Despite such failures, though, he was a champion of racists and far-right radicals nationwide,
a fact that spurred him into presidential politics in early 1964. That February,
in Wisconsins Democratic primary, Wallace logged 266,000 votes, one-third
of all the ballots cast. Three months later, in Indiana, he secured 30 percent
of the Democratic primary vote, then landed 47 percent of the Maryland primary vote, reaching the Democratic National Convention with 672,984 electors pledged to support him. He could not unseat incumbent Lyndon Johnson,
but the heady campaign convinced Wallace to try again in 1968.
Meanwhile, state law barred him from a second consecutive term as governor. Wallace dodged that legal obstruction by securing the nomination for
his wife, Lurleen, who won election handily (and once again with public
KKK support). Effectively running the state as Alabamas First Gentleman,
Wallace focused on 1968 but suffered a setback in May of that year, when
cancer left him a widower, costing Wallace both his wife and much of his in
the state capital. Undeterred by grief, he forged ahead with his presidential
race as standard-bearer for the American Independent Party (AIP), an alliance of far-right and racist groups founded in July 1967, ostensibly directed
by segregationist attorney Tom Turnipseed. Drawing its members from the
Klan, White Citizens Council, John Birch Society, and other fringe groups
even more extreme, the AIP nominated Wallace in August 1968, with retired Air Force General Curtis LeMay as his running mate. (Wallace had first
considered ex-Kentucky governor Albert Happy Chandler for vice president, but dropped him when reminded that Chandler, while commissioner
of baseball, had integrated the Major League by hiring black player Jackie
Robinson in 1946.)
623
624
Given Wallaces recent record and the AIPs constituency, the partys program was predictable. It favored segregation in the name of states rights,
condemned foreign aid as money poured down a rat-hole, and promised U.S.
withdrawal from Vietnam if that war proved unwinnable within 90 days of
Wallaces inauguration. (General Lemays prescription: Bomb North Vietnam
back to the Stone Age.) Law and order proved a catch-all slogan, chiefly
targeting ghetto upheavals from the long hot summers of 19641967, and
was eagerly adopted from the AIP by Republican candidate Richard Nixon.
All-white audiences cheered Wallaces promise to run down any demonstrators who blocked his campaign limousine, and laughed uproariously when he
declared that the only four-letter words unknown to hippies were soap and
work. Closer to home, in Alabama, a reporter who photographed Wallace
shaking hands with Klansman Robert Shelton was roughed up, and his camera
smashed. Ultimately, Wallace had no chance, but he polled nearly 10 million
popular votes and won 46 votes in the Electoral Collegeenough to guarantee
that he would try again.
Meanwhile, he moved to recaptured Alabamas governorship in 1970, running a blatantly racist campaign with ads declaring, Wake Up! Blacks vow
to take over Alabama. Incumbent Albert Brewer fought back with pleas that
Alabama needs a full-time governor, leading Wallace to promise (falsely) that
he would not mount another presidential race. Easily elected to his second
term, Wallace flew to Wisconsin the very next day, to kick off his next White
House race. He officially declared himself a Democratic candidate on January
13, 1972, but this time his road to Washington was cut short by gunfire. Even
crippled, he won primaries in Maryland and Michigan, but had to settle for
delivering a speech before the national convention that nominated George McGovern in July.
Wallace soon resumed his gubernatorial duties, and easily won reelection in
1974 (the state constitution having been amended, at his urging, to permit it).
Wallace announced his fourth presidential bid in November 1975, then lost
several Southern primaries to ex-Georgia governor Jimmy Carter before quitting the race in June 1976. Elected to a final term as governor in 1982, Wallace
renounced his former dedication to segregation, declaring I was wrong. Those
days are over, and they ought to be over. Such statements prompted one Klan
leader to complain that Wallace was not as white as he used to be. Wallace
rejected intimations of a fifth term in 1986, and died from a bacterial infection
on September 13, 1998.
Arthur Bremers attempt on Wallaces life inspired two feature films: Nashville, directed by David Hayward in 1975, and Taxi Driver, directed by Martin
Scorsese the following year. Ironically, the latter film inspired an attempt on the
life of President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley Jr. in March 1981.
WELCH, RICHARD SKEFFINGTON
See also: Ku Klux Klan (1866 ); Patterson, Albert Leon (18941954); Reagan, Ronald
Wilson (19112004)Attempted.
Further Reading
Bremer, Arthur. An Assassins Diary. New York: Pocket Books, 1973.
Carter, Dan. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and
the Transformation of American Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Frady, Marshall. Wallace. New York: Random House, 1996.
Governor George C. Wallaces Schoolhouse Door Speech. Alabama Department of
Archives and History. http://www.archives.state.al.us/govs_list/schooldoor.html.
Healey, Thomas. The Two Deaths of George Wallace: The Question of Forgiveness. Montgomery, AL: River City Publishing, 1996.
Lesher, Stephan. George Wallace: American Populist. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley,
1994.
Stang, Alan. Arthur Bremer: The Communist Plot to Kill George Wallace. Appleton, WI:
American Opinion, 1972.
WELCH, RICHARD SKEFFINGTON (19291975)

On December 23, 1975, members of the Marxist group 17Nfull name the
Revolutionary Organization 17 Novemberlaid an ambush for Richard Welch,
Greek station chief of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), at his home
in Athens. A month earlier, Welchs name and address had been published
in the Athens News and another newspaper, Eleftherotypia (Freedom of the
Press), obtained through leaks from ongoing congressional investigations of
the CIA in Washington, DC. As Welch and his wife returned from a Christmas
party that night, three gunmen rushed their chauffeur-driven car. Two held
Mrs. Welch and the driver at gunpoint, while the third shot Welch twice at
close range with a .45-caliber pistol, killing him instantly. The killers escaped
and remained at large until the summer of 2002.
Richard Skeffington Welch was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on December 14, 1929. Educated at Harvard University, Welch was recruited by the CIA
upon graduation, in 1951. His first post was in Athens, where he operated in
the guise of a civilian employed by the U.S. Army from 1952 to 1959. Assignments followed in Cyprus (19601964) and Guatemala (19651967), before
he was promoted to serve as chief of station in Guyana (19671969) and Peru
(19721975). Welch returned to Athens as chief of station in July 1975, moving into a house occupied by several of his CIA predecessors.
Welchs second posting to Athens coincided with a dramatic shift in Greek
politics, known as the Metapolitefsi (regime change). From April 1967 to July
1974, Greece had suffered in the grip of a military junta so brutal that its actions sparked protests before the European Commission of Human Rights from
625
626
Denmark, the Netherland, Norway, and Sweden. However, because the junta
was rigidly anticommunist and promoted a high rate of economic growth, it
enjoyed both diplomatic and financial support from the United States under
Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. On November 17, 1973, the
regime used tanks and troops to crush a student rebellion National Technical University of Athens, thus inspiring the 17N group to name itself for that
date. The junta collapsed in 1974, and 20 of its leaders were awaiting trial on
charges of mutiny and high treason when Richard Welch arrived for the second
time in Athens.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the Watergate scandal exposed President
Nixons extensive abuses of power, including misuse of both the CIA and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation to persecute his political enemies. Beginning
in 1975, the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations
with Respect to Intelligence Activitiesbetter known as the Church Committee, after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idahoheld extensive hearings on both agencies, including allegations of CIA involvement in foreign
assassinations, mind-control experiments, and illegal operations on U.S. soil
(specifically banned by the agencys 1947 charter). Information from those
hearings, contained in a series of reports published during 1975 and 1976,
supported many charges of CIA misconduct in foreign nations, deeply embarrassing the agency and then-director William Colby. Some observers cite the
Welch assassination as a first step toward regaining public sympathy for the
CIA and its covert role in protecting U.S. national security. Welchs death also
contributed to passage of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982,
making it a federal crime to intentionally reveal the identity of U.S. intelligence
agents.
Welch was the first of 23 known victims murdered by 17N, in a series of
103 attacks targeting Greek, American, British, and Turkish adversaries of the
group. Other crimes included 11 bank robberies netting some $3.5 million,
several kidnappings, four bombings, 24 rocket attacks, and various symbolic
assaults on government and corporate offices. Aside from Welch, 17Ns murder
victims included five Greek policemen, two prosecutors, four industrialists,
one newspaper editor, three Greek politicians, two Turkish diplomats, British
military attach Stephen Saunders, U.S. Navy Captains William Nordeen and
George Tsantes, U.S. Air Force Sergeant Ronald Stewart, and U.S. Army Master
Sergeant Robert Judd.
Between June and September 2002, Greek police arrested 19 members of
17N, charging them with a total of 2,500 crimes. Three of those defendants
Nikos Papanastasiou, Pavlos Seriffs, and Alexandros Yiotopouloswere
named as participants in Richard Welchs slaying. They could not be charged
with that crime since the 20-year statute of limitation had elapsed, but trial
commenced in more recent cases on March 3, 2003. Nine months later, on
December 8, jurors convicted 15 of those charged, while acquitting four others

on all counts. Prison terms were imposed on the 15 convicted, and an appellate court upheld those verdicts on May 3, 2007.
A twist was added to the case in December 2005, by the Greek Sunday
newspaper To Proto Thema (The First Issue). Reporter Kleanthis Grivas accused a shadowy group called Sheepskinthe Greek branch of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organizations paramilitary Operation Gladiowith killing
Welch and British military attach Stephen Saunders (assassinated on June 8,
2000). Among other sources, Grivas cited U.S. Army Field Manual 3031B,
describing counterinsurgency tactics including deliberate creation of a strategy of tension, accomplished by framing leftist groups for crimes they did not
commit. Although acknowledging the existence of Operation Gladio, a staybehind group designed to wage guerrilla warfare if Europe was overrun by
Soviet troops, the U.S. State Department denied any knowledge of Sheepskin
and dismissed the army manual in question as a Russian forgery.
Despite his murder in 1975, Richard Welch lives on in fiction as a character
in the shared universe anthology series Heroes in Hell, published between 1986
and 2012. Welch appears in several stories as an intelligence agent for Satan,
VALERIE PLAME AFFAIR

In his January 28, 2003, State of the Union Address, President George W.
Bush claimed that the British government had proof of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein buying weapons-grade uranium from Niger. Two months
later, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, journalist Joseph C. Wilson wrote
an article for the New York Times, debunking that false claim. On July 14,
2003, reporter Robert Novak published a piece in the Washington Post,
criticizing Wilson and identifying Wilsons wifeValerie Plame Wilson
as a CIA agent. That revelation violated terms of the 1982 Intelligence
Identities Protection Act, prompting a federal investigation. Suspects
in the leak included Vice President Dick Cheney, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and Cheneys chief of staff, Lewis Scooter
Libby. A special grand jury investigated the case, and although no one
was charged with leaking Plames identity, the panel indicted Libby one
count of perjury, one count of obstructing justice, and three counts of
lying to investigators. In March 2007, jurors convicted Libby on four of
five counts. He received a 30-month prison term and a $250,000 fine.
President Bush commuted Libbys jail term on July 2, 2007, to two years
of supervised probation and leaving intact the fine.
627
628
WENCESL AUS I
sharing adventures and amorous interludes with Tamara Bunke, a colleague of

Che Guevara in the Bolivian Insurgency of 19661967, killed in an ambush by
CIA-assisted Bolivian army rangers on August 31, 1967.
Further Reading
Kessler, Ronald. Inside the CIA: Revealing the Secrets of the Worlds Most Powerful Spy
Agency. New York: Pocket Books, 1992.
Olmstead, Kathryn. Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations
of the CIA and FBI. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Smith, W. Thomas. The Encyclopedia of the CIA. New York: Checkmark Books, 2003.
Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. New York: Anchor Books, 2007.
WENCESLAUS I (907935)
In September 935, Prince Boleslaus (or Boleslav) invited his elder brother,
Duke Wenceslaus I of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) to celebrate the feast
of Saints Cosmas and Damian, scheduled to be held in Brands nad LabemStar Boleslav on September 28. Unknown to Wenceslaus, Boleslaus had conspired with other Bohemian nobles to assassinate his brother at the banquet.
The deed was carried out by three accomplices remembered only as Csta,
Hnevsa,
and Tira, who set upon the duke and stabbed him to death. Tradition has it that
one of Wenceslauss servants, named Podevin, killed one of the assassins and
was subsequently hanged on orders from Boleslaus, who succeeded his brother
as planned. Ironically, a son was born to Boleslaus on the day of the murder,
saddled with the name Strachkvas, which translates to English as a dreadful
feast.
Born in 907, Wenceslaus was the son of Vratislaus I, third duke of Bohemia under the Premyslid dynasty. Vratislaus died in battle against Hungarian
Magyar invaders, in 921, succeeded by Wenceslaus, but the new dukes youth
precluded him from ruling directly. His staunchly Christian grandmother,
Ludmila of Bohemia, served as regent, inspiring jealously from Wenceslauss
mother, Drahomra. A former princess of the pagan Hevelli tribe, Drahomra
had been baptized prior to marrying Vratislaus, but she was not prepared to
take a backseat in her sons education. She persuaded two noblemen to murder
Ludmila on September 15, 921, then assumed Ludmilas place as regent until
924, when Wenceslaus attained his majority. Little more is known about Drahomra, and whereas some accounts claim she tried to lure Wenceslaus from
Christianity back to paganism, most histories describe the new duke as an ardent and pious Christian. Claims of the pagan conversion are undermined by
the fact that Wenceslaus exiled Drahomra when he came of age.
As duke in his own right, Wenceslaus faced continuous incursions by the
Magyars, and threats from Henry the Fowler, Duke of Sazony and first king
WENCESLAUS I
of East Francia (now Germany), who launched multiple invasions of territory

occupied by the Polabian Slavs, ancestors of Wenceslauss mother. Vratislaus
I had resisted Henrys attacks in collaboration with Arnulf, Duke of Bavaria,
but Wenceslaus lost that valuable alliance with his fathers death in 921, when
Arnulf and Henry signed a peace treaty at Regensburg, in Bavaria. Eight years
later, the combined forces of Arnulf and Henry marched on Prague, forcing
Wenceslaus to resume tribute payments imposed on Duke Borivoj I by East
Frankish king Arnulf of Carinthia three decades earlier.
Despite that drain on his resources, Wenceslaus managed to maintain order
at home, defeating a rebellion at Kourim and building a rotunda consecrated to
Saint Vitue in Prague, which survives to this day as St. Vitus, St. Wenceslaus,
and St. Adalbert Cathedral. Regarded as a martyr at his death, and the subject
of four laudatory biographies, posthumously honored as a king by Holy Roman
emperor Otto I, Wenceslaus was subsequently canonized, with his feast day
falling on the date of his assassination. Grandmother Ludmila had preceded
him in sainthood, honored with feasting on September 15. Aside from beatification, Wenceslaus was also honored in songfirst by the Saint Wenceslas
Chorale, one of the oldest known Czech songs, then by John Mason Neals
Good King Wenceslas, published in 1853. Since 2000, the date of Wenceslauss murder has been celebrated in the Czech Republic as Czech Statehood
Day, a public holiday.
Boleslaus I, also widely known as Boleslaus the Cruel, reined as Duke of Bohemia for at least 32 years after his brothers murder. (Modern scholars disagree
as to whether he died in 967 or 972.) Despite his common nickname and the
stigma of slaying his brother, most Czech historians hold Boleslaus in fairly high
esteem for his support of Christianity and his expansion of Bohemia territory.
Soon after killing Wenceslaus, in 936, Boleslaus halted tribute payments to East
Francia, sparking a war with the same Emperor Otto I who had elevated Wenceslaus to posthumous kingship. Rather than await invasion, Boleslaus launched
his own offensive, defeating two of Ottos armies from Merseburg and Thuringia.
The long war ultimately went against him, leading Boleslaus to resume paying
tribute in 950. Three years later, he joined forces with Otto to crush an uprising
of Slavic dukes at Mecklenburg, and supported Otto once more, against Magyar
enemies, at the Battle of Lechfeld (August 10, 955). That victory ended Hungarys threat to Moravia, and expanded Boleslauss control to Malopolska and
Silesia. Boleslauss daughter Dobrawa married pagan Duke Mieszko I of Poland
in 965, and played a key role in spreading Christianity to Poland. At his death,
Boleslaus the Cruel was succeeded by his eldest son, Boleslaus the Pious.
Further Reading
Agnew, Hugh. The Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown. Stanford, CA: Hoover
Institution Press, 2004.
629
630
WILLIAM I, PRINCE OF OR ANGE
Collins, Ace. Stories behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001.
Panek, Jaroslav, and Oldrich Tuma, eds. A History of the Czech Lands. Chicago: Karolinum Press, 2009.
Schulman, Jana. The Rise of the Medieval World 5001300: A Biographical Dictionary.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.
Wolverton, Lisa. Hastening Toward Prague: Power and Society in the Medieval Czech
Lands. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
WILLIAM I, PRINCE OF ORANGE (15331584)

In 1584, Prince William of Orange was a man with a price on his head. King
Philip II of Spain blamed him in large part for the Dutch revolt that had cost
Spain control of the Netherlands, branding William an outlaw in March 1580
and offering a bounty of 25,000 crowns to anyone who killed him. Balthasar
Grard, a 27-year-old Frenchman, accepted the challenge in March 1584, conspiring with Christopher dAssonleville (an opponent of Williams in the Spanish
Netherlands) and Jesuit priests who deemed William an enemy of the Catholic
Church. Upon learning Grards plan, dAssonleville reportedly told him, Go
forth, my son, and if you succeed in your enterprise, the King will fulfill all
his promises, and you will gain an immortal name besides. On July 10, 1584,
Grard ambushed William at
his home in Delft, shooting
him at close range with a pistol purchased two days earlier.
Captured at the scene, Grard
was tortured prior to trial, then
sentenced to death by torture
on July 13. Under orders from
the court, his right hand was
burned off with a red-hot iron,
flesh was ripped from various
parts of his body with pincers,
then he was disemboweled and
quartered while alive, his heart
removed and flung in his face
before he was finally beheaded.
William of Orange was born
in Dillenburg, into the wealthy
House of Orange-Nassau, on
April 24, 1533. At birth, he
Prince William of Orange, killed by a Jesuit assas- was the Count of Nassausin in 1584. (Getty Images)
Dillengurg, becoming Prince of
WILLIAM I, PRINCE OF ORANGE
Orange at age 11, inheriting the large estates of his late, childless cousin, Ren
of Chlon. Deemed too young to rule his newly acquired lands, William was
dispatched by his regent, Holy Roman emperor Charles V, to complete his education in Brussels. William further expanded his holdings in 1551 by marriage
to Dutch heiress Anna van Egmont, thus gaining new titles as Lord of Egmond
and Count of Buren. Anna bore William three children before her death in
March 1558, and he soon produced a fourth child (and his second son) with
mistress Eva Elincx. In August 1561, William remarried Anna of Saxony. That
union produced five more children, though some observers believed Williams
primary interest lay in expanding his influence over Germany.
Meanwhile, Charles V had abdicated in August 1556, in favor of his son,
Philip II. Still friendly with Philip at that point, William won appointment in
1559 as stadtholder (governor) of the Dutch provinces of Holland, Utrecht,
and Zeeland. Two years later, Philip named William as stadtholder of FrancheComt, in Burgundy. Although Williams relationship with Philip seemed outwardly cordial, and he never directly attacked the king, William gradually
allied himself with Dutch nationalist spokesmen including Philip de Montmorency, Count of Horn, and Lamoral, Count of Egmont. Raised first as a
Lutheran, then as a Catholic, William advocated freedom of religion and resented persecution of Dutch Protestants under Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de
Granvelle, who doubled as prime minister under Philips half-sister and governor
of the Netherlands, Margaret of Parma. In 1565, addressing the Dutch Council
of State, William affirmed his Catholic faith, but simultaneously disavowed monarchs who sought to rule their subjects souls by dictating religious faith.
In April of that year, Williams younger brother Louis joined other Dutch
nobles to form a Compromise of Nobles, presenting Margaret of Parma with a
petition urging religious freedom for Protestants. Between August and October
1566, angry Protestants throughout the Low Countries engaged in a Beeldenstorm (statue storm), invading Catholic churches and monasteries, defacing
religious icons. Margaret initially agreed to demands from the Compromise of
Nobles, then reneged under pressure from Philip, who dispatched The Iron
DukeGeneral Fernando lvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Albato restore
order in the Netherlands.
Arriving in Alba established a Council of Troubles to judge the Beeldenstorm rebels. William of Orange was among some 10,000 summoned to testify before that tribunal, but he declined to appear, whereupon Alba declared
him an outlaw and confiscated his Dutch estates. That action propelled William into armed resistance, bankrolling the Watergeuzen (sea beggars), a
fleet of Protestant privateers who ranged along the Dutch coast, raiding ports,
sometimes killing Spaniards. William also funded battalions on land, including French Huguenots and German mercenaries who engaged Albas forces in
combat. Brother Louis was a leader of the latter army, invading the northern
631
632
WILLIAM I, PRINCE OF OR ANGE
Netherlands in 1568. He defeated Spanish troops at the Battle of Heiligerlee,

on May 23, killing opponent Jean de Ligne, Duke of Arenberg, while losing another brother, Adolf, in the same engagement. Alba retaliated by executing the
Counts of Egmont and Hoorn on June 6, 1568, and slaughtered Louiss army
at the Battle of Jemmingen, on July 21. Today, historians treat those battles as
the opening engagements of the ensuing Eighty Years War, also known as the
Dutch War of Independence.
William of Orange would not survive to see his homeland triumph in that
struggle, but he did his part, leading an army to Brabant against General Alba.
Alba ducked a confrontation, expecting Williams force to fall apart, and his expectations were fulfilled as rioting disrupted Williams force and the advance
of winter found him short of funds to pay the troops who still remained. By
that time, Margaret and Alba had executed 1,000 rebels, driving many more
into exile. William was among those fleeing, plotting new campaigns from his
hideout in Dillenburg, Germany. Even in the midst of all-out war, William
maintained that he was not opposing King Philip, whom he acknowledged as
sovereign, but only the misrule of foreign governors and their use of foreign
groups on Dutch soil.
After nearly four years of conspiring in vain, the tide of battle shifted in
Williams favor on April 1, 1572, when his Watergeuzen captured the seaport
of Brielle and raised Williams flag over the city. That victory prompted other
towns in Holland and Zeeland to welcome rebel forces, joining to convene an
unauthorized States-General of the Netherlands that restored Williams title as
stadtholder in those two provinces. Encouraged, William led his army southward, toward Leuven and Roermond, but Philips larger force repulsed them,
rolling on to capture and sack the rebel cities of Mechelen and Zutphen. The
Spanish advance captured Haarlem in July 1573, but only at a cost of seven
months and some 8,000 soldiers slain. Alkmaar proved even more resistant,
forcing General Alba to withdraw in October 1573 and providing rebel forces
with a new slogan: Victory begins at Alkmaar.
Those victories continued in 1574. William, having formally renounced Catholicism to join the Calvinist Church, defeated Albas replacement, Don Luis
de Requesens y Ziga, at the Battle of Mookerheyde on April 14, 1574, but
lost brothers Henry and Louis on the field. Next, in May, Requesens laid siege
to Leiden, but withdrew in October, when Dutch defenders breached local
dikes, permitting ships to resupply the flooded city. William celebrated that
triumph by founding Leiden University in 1575, as the first university in the
northern provinces.
On the domestic front, William married his third wife, ex-nun Charlotte of
Bourbon, in April 1575. (His marriage to Anna had been annulled four years
earlier, after William claimed she was insane.) Unlike his second marriage, this
one proved to be happy, producing six more daughters while the war with
WILLIAM I, PRINCE OF ORANGE
Spain dragged on. Peace negotiations failed in 1575, but rebel prospects improved when Don Requesens died suddenly in Brussels, on March 5, 1576.
Spanish soldiers, short-changed on their pay by King Philip since the previous
September, mutinied and ran amok in Antwerp on November 4, 1876, scoring
a propaganda coup for Dutch insurgents with the slaughter of 7,000 townsfolk. Four days later, William secured the Pacification of Ghent, an alliance of
provinces in the Habsburg Netherlands to drive Spanish forces from Holland
and Zeeland.
Don John of Austria, Spanish governor-general of the Habsburg Netherlands,
made that alliance perpetual with the Edict of 1577, signed in February, then
reneged five months later and prepared a fresh invasion of the Netherlands.
William was ready with a new ally, Queen Elizabeth I of England, who pledged
troops and 100,000 in cash to resist John if he pressed the attack. Despite that
aid, John captured Namur, in southern Belgium, and entered Brussels on September 24, 1577. At the time, William was preoccupied with trouble from his
fellow Calvinists, campaigning to eliminate Catholicism from the regions they
controlled. That persecution sparked a backlash in the southern Netherlands,
embodied in the Union of Arras, signed on January 6, 1579, wherein the district pledged loyalty to King Philip and Governor-General Don John. Philip, in
return, agreed to withdraw his troops from Dutch soil.
Seventeen days later, leaders of five northern provinces signed the Union
of Utrecht, opposing Philips rule. William of Orange, still hoping to unite
all provinces of the Netherlands, withheld endorsement of the Union until
May 3, 1579, when he reluctantly signed on. On September 29, 1580, most
of the Staten Generaal (except Holland and Zeeland) agreed to the Treaty of
Plessis-les-Tours, accepting Francis, Duke of Anjou (brother of French king
Henry III), as Protector of the Liberty of the Netherlands. Ten months later,
the Staten Generaal passed an Act of Abjuration, formally declaring independence of the Dutch Low Countries from Spain. William welcomed the Duke
of Anjou to Vlissingen in February 1582, and Spanish gunman Juan de Juregui tried to assassinate William in Antwerp on March 18, leaving William with
bullet fragments in his neck and jaw. Guards killed Juregui on the spot, and
two conspiratorsAntonio de Venero and Antonio Timmerman, a Dominican
monkwere executed on March 28.
The Dutch alliance with France caused more trouble for William, peaking
when the Duke of Anjou marched to seize Antwerp on January 17, 1583. He
was surprised when townsfolk mobbed his troops, killing more than 1,500 soldiers. The duke survived to suffer scathing reprimands from Queen Elizabeth,
and fled the Netherlands six months later, leaving William largely discredited.
Widowed the previous May, William increased Catholic alienation in April
1583, with his marriage to a French Huguenot, Louise de Coligny, who bore
his fourth and last legitimate son in January 1584. Williams eldest son, Philip
633
634
WILLIAM II OF ENGLAND
William, succeeded him as Prince of Orange, and the fight for Dutch independence continued until October 1648, with the Peace of Westphalia.
British historian Lisa Jardine names William of Orange as the first national
head of state assassinated with a pistol. His was not the first assassination with
a firearm, however, since James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray and regent of Scotland for his infant nephew, King James VI of Scotland, had been shot by a
sniper on January 23, 1570.
Further Reading
Blok, Petrus. History of the People of the Netherlands. New York: G. P. Putnams Sons,
1898.
Jardine, Lisa. The Awful End of William the Silent: The First Assassination of a Head of State
with a Handgun. London: HarperCollins, 2005.
Motley, John. History of the United Netherlands from the Death of William the Silent to the
Synod of Dort. London: John Murray, 1860.
Motley, John. The Rise of the Dutch Republic. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855.
Rowen, Herbert. The Princes of Orange: The Stadholders in the Dutch Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
WILLIAM II OF ENGLAND (10561100)

On August 2, 1100, while hunting in southern Englands New Forest, near
Southampton in Hampshire County, King William II was struck in the chest
by an arrow. The shaft pierced his lung, reportedly producing almost instant
death. The first report of his slaying, contained in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
says simply that William was shot by one of his own men. Later accounts
named the archer as Walter Tirel III, an Anglo-Norman nobleman. English historian William of Malmesbury, in his Chronicle of the Kings of England, written
circa 1128, offers the following account of Williams deathdisputed as fanciful by some modern scholars.
The day before the king died he dreamt that he went to hell and the Devil said to
him I cant wait for tomorrow because we can finally meet in person!. He suddenly awoke. He commanded a light to be brought, and forbade his attendants
to leave him. The next day he went into the forest. . . . He was attended by a few
persons . . . Walter Thurold remained with him, while the others, were on the
chase. The sun was now declining, when the king, drawing his bow and letting
fly an arrow, slightly wounded a stag which passed before him. . . . The stag was
still running. . . . The king, followed it a long time with his eyes, holding up his
hand to keep off the power of the suns rays. At this instant Walter decided to kill
another stag. Oh, gracious God! the arrow pierced the kings breast.
On receiving the wound the king uttered not a word; but breaking off the
shaft of the arrow where it projected from his body . . . This accelerated his
death. Walter immediately ran up, but as he found him senseless, he leapt upon
his horse, and escaped with the utmost speed. Indeed there were none to pursue
him: some helped his flight; others felt sorry for him.
The kings body was placed on a cart and conveyed to the cathedral at Winchester . . . blood dripped from the body all the way. Here he was buried
within the tower. The next year, the tower fell down. William Rufus died in
1100 . . . aged forty years. He was a man much pitied by the clergy . . . he had
a soul which they could not save. . . . He was loved by his soldiers but hated by
the people because he caused them to be plundered.
Some current historians describe Williams death as a simple hunting accident, and othersnotably Emma Mason, former Senior Lecturer in History
at Birkbeck College, author of two books on William II and various others on
British royaltyconfidently treat the incident as an assassination.
William IIcommonly known as William Rufus for his ruddy complexionwas the third son of King William I, also known as William the Conqueror (and to some as William the Bastard). His birth date is uncertain, with
various histories offering a four-year spread, between 1056 and 1060. William
Is second son, Richard of Normandy, also died in an apparent hunting accident
in the New Forest, and details of his passing are similarly vague, dated between
1069 and 1075 by different historians. Equal confusion surrounds the number of Williams sisters, with the existence of four confirmed, and two others
Adeliza and Matildaare dismissed by some scholars as mythical.
Elder brother Robert Curthose might have been expected to succeed William the Conqueror as king, but familial conflict hurt his case. English chronicler Orderic Vitalis (10751142), in his Historia Ecclesiastica, described an
incident occurring in 1077 or 1078, when William and younger brother Henry
dumped a chamber pot over Roberts head, sparking a brawl that forced their
fathers intervention to forestall serious injury. Angered when his brothers went
unpunished for that insult, Robert laid siege to King Williams castle at Rouen,
the capital of Normandy. That ill-conceived campaign nearly resulted in Roberts arrest, but he escaped to Rmalard, and then to Flanders. The estranged
father and son met in battle, in January 1079, at which time Robert wounded
King William. They reconciled in 1080, through the persistent efforts of Queen
Matilda of Flanders, but her death in November 1083 left them at odds once
more. When a riding accident killed William I in September 1087, William II
ascended to the English throne, and brother Robert was relegated to service as
the Duke of Normandy.
William II proved to be a ruthless and unpopular king, described in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as hateful to almost all his people and odious to God.
The latter charge involved his frequent conflicts with the Anglican Church,
including his appointment of Ranulf Flambard, from Normandy, as bishop
of Durham in 1099. He also engaged in long-running disputes with Anselmo
dAosta, archbishop of Canterbury, whom William appointed in 1093, then
635
636
almost instantly regretted his selection as they wrangled over Anselmos support for reforms initiated by Pope Gregory VII. By 1097, when he finally drove
Anselmo into exile, William had been heard to say, Yesterday I hated him
with great hatred, today I hate him with yet greater hatred and he can be certain that tomorrow and thereafter I shall hate him continually with ever fiercer
and more bitter hatred.
William II also proved unconventional in his refusal to marry, and by failing
to sire any children, legitimate or otherwise. His father had conquered England
in 1066, and William still faced uprisings from rebellious nobles in his own
time. In 1095, when Robert de Mowbray, the Earl of Northumbria, supported
Stephen of Aumales attempt to seize the English throne, William led troops to
crush the rebels. Mowbray was captured and imprisoned for life, accomplice
William of Aldrie was executed, and another, William of Eu, was castrated and
blinded. Stephen was also sentenced to prison, but escaped from England, and
his French father, Count Odo of Champagne, was stripped of his English estates for joining in the conspiracy.
In France, William asserted himself aggressively, invading Normandy in
1091 to defeat brother Robert and claim portions of his inherited territory.
They later made peace, and Robert joined William in defeating Elias I, Count
of Maine, when he laid claim to that province, supported by Fulk IV, Count
of Anjou. During the same period, William beat back an invasion of England
by King Malcolm III of Scotland, in May of 1091. The following year, William erected Carlisle Castle in Cumbria, frustrating Scottish claims to Cumberland and Westmorland. Malcolm retaliated by invading Northumbria, but
that campaign proved fatal. Both Malcolm and his eldest son, Edward, suffered fatal wounds at the Battle of Alnwick, on November 13, 1093. Malcolms brother Donald claimed the Scottish throne, and William backed the
late kings son Edgar in a campaign to unseat Donald, finally achieving success
in 1097.
Following Williams death in the New Forest, brother Henry rushed first
to Winchester, seizing the royal treasury, then on to London, where he was
crowned as King Henry I on August 5, 1100. He reigned until December 1,
1135, when he died during a visit to Normandy. His death was attributed to
food poisoning, allegedly from consuming a surfeit of lampreys.
Further Reading
Barlow, Frank. William Rufus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Grinnell-Milne, Duncan. The Killing of William Rufus: An Investigation in the New Forest.
Newton Abbot, United Kingdom: David & Charles, 1968.
Hart, Ray. William Rufus: The Second Norman King. Far Hills, NJ: New Horizon, 1984.
Hollister, C. Warren. The Strange Death of William Rufus. Speculum 48 (1973):
63753.
WOOD, JOHN HOWLAND, JR.
Mason, Emma. King Rufus: The Life & Murder of William II of England. Stroud, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom: The History Press, 2008.
Mason, Emma. William II: Rufus, the Red King. Stroud, United Kingdom: Tempus, 2005.
WOOD, JOHN HOWLAND, JR. (19161979)

On May 29, 1979, a single shot from a high-powered rifle killed U.S. District Judge John Wood Jr. outside his home in San Antonio, Texas. The first
of three federal judges assassinated in the 20th century, Wood was known as
Maximum John for the harsh sentences he dealt out in narcotics cases. Before
the first indictments were returned in Woods murder, agents from the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted more than 30,000 interviews and collected more than 500,000 pieces of evidence. That investigation, with its trials
and appeals, ultimately cost taxpayers more than $11 millionand still left
some critics protesting that justice had not been fully served.
John Wood Jr. was born to a prominent family at Rockport, Texas, on March
31, 1916, the great-great-grandson of a participant in the 1836 Texas Revolution against Mexico, founder of both Rockport and the town of Woodsboro. A
second-generation lawyer, Wood received a bachelor of business administration degree in 1935, from St. Marys University in San Antonio, and earned
his LLB from Austins University of Texas School of Law three years later. He
joined the San Antonio law firm Beckmann, Stanard & Olson after graduation,
in 1938, and remained there until 1970, with a brief hiatus for wartime service
as a U.S. Navy ensign during 19441945.
President Richard Nixon nominated Wood to the federal bench on October 7,
1970, after Congress created a new seat, the United States District Court, for
the Western District of Texas. The U.S. Senate confirmed his appointment on
November 25, 1970, and Wood was formally commissioned six days later.
Between Woods nomination and his confirmation, on October 27, Congress
passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, including
the Controlled Substances Act, which established five schedules (categories)
of regulated drugs based on their medicinal value and potential for addiction.
Six months after Woods confirmation to the bench, on June 17, 1971, President Nixon formally declared a federal War on Drugs, branding drug abuse
public enemy number one in the United States.
As a federal judge in Texas, with its long Mexican border, Wood saw more
than his share of narcotics cases. One defendant facing trial before Maximum John was Lebanese-American drug trafficker Jamiel Alexander Jimmy
Chagra, described by one observer as the undisputed marijuana kingpin of
the Western world. Arrested in 1978 for shipping tons of pot from El Paso,
Texas, to Las Vegas, Nevada, Chagra faced a maximum sentence of life imprisonment without parole if convicted at trial. One of Woods law clerks allegedly
637
638
W O O D, J O H N H O W L A N D, J R .
told Chagras attorney/brother, Joe Chagra, that Jimmy could expect the worst
if found guilty. After an alleged $10 million bribe failed to soften Woods attitude, Chagra reportedly decided to kill Wood, instead.
Authorities did not immediately link Jamiel Chagra to Woods assassination. His drug case proceeded to trial with a new judge, and upon conviction,
Chagra received a 30-year sentence rather than life. In 1981, FBI microphones
eavesdropped on conversations between Chagra and his brother Joe, in a visiting room at Leavenworth Federal Prison. (Although Joe Chagra was a lawyer,
he was not his brothers attorney, and a court found that recording conversations between blood relatives did not violate attorneyclient privilege.) Despite those tapes, jurors at his murder trial acquitted Jimmy Chagra of ordering
Woods assassination when brother Joe refused to testify against him. A separate panel convicted Joe Chagra of conspiracy, resulting in a 10-year prison
term. Joes relatively lenient sentence came in exchange for his testimony
against brother Jimmys wife, convicted at trial for paying off Woods killer. She
received a 30-year sentence and died in prison, from cancer.
The triggerman in Woods assassination was contract killer Charles Voyde
Harrelsonfather of film and television actor Woody Harrelsonparoled in
September 1978 after serving barely three years of a 15-year sentence imposed
for the 1968 murder-for-hire of Texas victim Sam Degelia Jr. Indicted on the
basis of the Chagra Prison tapes, Harrelson denied killing Wood, insisting that
he only claimed credit for the murder to collect Chagras $250,000 bounty on
the judge. Jurors disbelieved that tale, convicting Harrelson of on his second
count of murder for hire, resulting in a double life sentence. Harrelsons wife,
who purchased the murder weapon using false identification, was also convicted on five counts of perjury, receiving a 20-year sentence (later reduced on
appeal).
Jimmy Chagra subsequently confessed his part in conspiring to murder
Judge Wood and an abortive plot to kill Assistant U.S. Attorney James Kerr of
San Antonio in 1978, in a futile legal maneuver designed to free his incarcerated wife. The court imposed a life sentence on those charges, but declining
health resulted in Chagras release from custody December 9, 2003. Some accounts suggest that he entered the Federal Witness Security Program, but no
official confirmation of that story is available today. Chagra married his third
wife in Las Vegas, on November 22, 2005, using the name the name James
Madrid. They were living in Mesa, Arizona, when cancer claimed Chagras life
on July 25, 2008.
Charles Harrelson remains a somewhat enigmatic figure. At Harrelsons murder trial, Joe Chagra testified that Harrelson had boasted of assassinating President John F. Kennedy ( JFK) in November 1963, supporting his statement with
hand-drawn diagrams of the murder scene at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.
WOOD, JOHN HOWLAND, JR.
In 1989, conspiracy author Jim Marrs suggested that Harrelson was one of
three unidentified tramps arrested by Dallas police near Dealey Plaza moments after the Kennedy shooting. Marrs also alleged that Harrelson was acquainted with gangster Jack Rubyslayer of accused JFK assassin Lee Harvey
Oswaldand with other criminals connected to intelligence agencies and the
military.
Harrelson and two other inmates, Michael Rivers and Garhy Settle, tried to
escape from the federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 4, 1995, but surrendered after a guard fired a warning shot over their heads. Transferred thereafter to a federal supermax at Florence, Colorado, Harrelson penned letters to
friends describing his enjoyment of the new facility, where, he said, the silence
is wonderful. Guards found Harrelson dead in his cell on March 15, 2007. An
autopsy attributed his passing to coronary artery disease.
Further Reading
Cartwright, Gary. Dirty Dealing: Drug Smuggling on the Mexican Border and the Assassination of a Federal Judge. New York: Atheneum, 1984.
Denton, Sally. The Bluegrass Conspiracy: An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs and Murder. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 1999.
Marrs, Jim. Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1989.
United States of America v. Jo Ann Harrelson. United States Court of Appeals, Fifth
Circuit, 754 F.2d 1182 (February 15, 1985). http://openjurist.org/754/f2d/1182/
united-states-v-harrelson.
Varhola, Michael. Texas Confidential: Sex, Scandal, Murder, and Mayhem in the Lone Star
State. Cincinnati: Clerisy Press, 2011.
639
X
XERXES I OF PERSIA (519 BCE465 BCE)
In August 465 BCE, Xerxes I, fourth king of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, was
assassinated in Persepolis (43 miles northeast of present-day Shiraz, Iran) by a
palace eunuch called Aspamitres, acting under orders from Artabanus the
Hyrcanian, commander of the kings bodyguards. Prior to the assassination,
Artabanus had placed his seven sons in key positions at the royal court, all
serving his plan to topple the Achaemenid dynasty. Xerxess eldest son, Crown
Prince Darius, was also slain in the abortive coup dtat, though ancient Greek
historians differ on the order of the murders. Aristotle wrote that Artabanus
killed Darius before Xerxes, whereas Ctesias claimed that Artabanus accused
Darius of killing Xerxes, then persuaded younger brother Artaxerxes to avenge
their fathers death by executing Darius. In either event, Artaxerxes soon learned
the truth, personally killing Artabanus and ordering the execution of his sons
in by 464 BCE.
Xerxes was born sometime in 519 BCE, the eldest son of King Darius I and
Atossa, daughter of Achaemenid Empire founder Cyrus the Great. Darius
claimed the imperial throne in 522 BCE, after killing the assassins of predecessor Bardia, son of Cyrus the Great and his brother-in-law. In 487 BCE, prior to
launching a military campaign against Athens, Darius complied with Persian
law by naming Xerxes as his successor, in the event of his death. That choice
proved timely when a rebellion in Egypt sidetracked the Persian army, and
Darius died from natural causes in October 486 BCE. Artobarzanes, an older
son of Darius with his commoner first wife, briefly contested Xerxess right to
claim the throne, they wisely abandoned his bid, thus sparing his family from
annihilation.
Soon after his coronation, Xerxes completed his fathers unfinished work
of suppressing the Egyptian revolt, naming his brother Achaemenes as satrap
(provincial governor) over that region. In 484 BCE, Xerxes provoked a new uprising in Babylon, when he seized and melted down a golden statue of Marduk,
the sun god. Babylonian tradition required each rightful king to lay hands on
the statute each New Years Day, and its destruction was regarded as an act of
sacrilege. Xerxes suppressed the rebellion by 482 BCE, in the process renouncing his fathers title of king of Babylon, to call himself instead the King of Persia
and Media, Great King, King of Kings, and King of Nations.
642
XER XES I OF PERSIA
Such a grandiose title required further conquests, so Xerxes picked up where

his father had left off, planning Persias second invasion of Greece. Launched
in spring 480 BCE, after three years of preparation, that campaign carried Xerxes across the Dardanelles, through Thrace, Macedon, and Thessaly, until a
small force of defenders under King Leonidas I of Sparta at Thermopylae. (In
fact, the famous 300 Spartans were actually part of a larger force, totaling some
7,000 men, facing a Persian army variously estimated as including 60,000 to
500,000 warriors.) After three brutal days, Xerxes routed the defenders with
aid from a Greek traitor, Ephialte, then pushed on to capture Athens, driving
the Greeks back to Isthmus of Corinth. In September 480 BCE, Greek naval
forces defeated Xerxes Battle of Salamis. His army then went into winter camp,
and victory eluded him when a new rebellion in Babylon forced Xerxes to retreat from Greece.
Aside from making warand allegedly burning Athens, an act disputed
by some modern historians who blame the Greeks themselves for pursuing a
scorched-earth policy in retreat after ThermopylaeXerxes I is best known for
his domestic construction projects. He finished building the imperial capital
at Persepolis, still unfinished at his fathers death, with its Gate of all Nations
and the Hall of a Hundred Columns, the Apadana (a large meeting hall), the
Palace of Darius and the Treasury. He also completed the city of Susa, another
project of his fathers, located in the Zagros Mountains, 160 miles east of the
Tigris River.
Artaxerxes I ruled the Achaemenid Persian Empire for 41 years after his fathers assassination, until his death in 424 BCE. During those four decades, he
renewed hostilities with Greece, then agreed to the Peace of Callias in 449 BCE,
bringing an end to conflict between Persia and the Delian League dominated
by Athens. He also commissioned a Jewish historian, Ezra the Scribe, to produce a document that survives today as the Old Testaments Book of Ezra, including a decree from Artaxerxes dictating the course of ecclesiastical and civil
affairs for the Jewish nation. Nehemiah, royal cupbearer for Artaxerxes, also
penned his own chapter of the Old Testament circa 444 BCE. At his death, Artaxerxes was succeeded by his son, Xerxes II, who was assassinated after only
45 days on the throne.
Depictions of Xerxes I in popular fiction begin with Francesco Cavallis opera
Xerse, first performed in Venice on January 12, 1564. Giovanni Battista Bononcini cribbed from that performance in 1694, proceeding in that vein until
plagiarism of a madrigal by Antonio Lotti saw Bononcini effectively banished
from London in 1732. George Frideric Handel was next to adapt the opera, as
Serse, performed for the first time in London on April 15, 1738. Mercilessly
panned by critics, Serse was not performed again until July 1924, in a version
revised by Oscar Hagen. Over the next two years, it played in 15 German cities, to widespread critical acclaim. Serse was produced for the stage in Milan,
in January 1962, with a live recording made of the performance.
XERXES I OF PERSIA
More recently, popular fascination with the Battle of Thermopylae has carried Xerxes into fiction and film, typically portrayed as a villain and megalomaniac. British actor David Farrar first struck that tone in The 300 Spartans
(1962), opposite Richard Eagan as King Leonidas. Author/artist Frank Miller
followed that trend in his graphic novel 300 (1999), and in production of its
2007 film adaptation, casting Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro as Xerxes, complete with piercings and gold body paint. A year later, Meet the Spartans spoofed
that feature for slapstick laughs, with Kevin Davitian portraying the comically
grotesque opposite of Santoros seven-foot-tall God-king.
Further Reading
Abbott, Jacob. Xerxes. North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2012.
Allen, Lindsay. The Persian Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Holland, Tom. Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West. London:
Little, Brown, 2005.
Martin, Thomas. Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times. New Haven, CT:
Olmstead, A. T. History of the Persian Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1959.
643
Y
YULDASHEV, TOHIR ABDUHALILOVICH
(19672009)
On September 30, 2009, a Pakistani English-language newspaper, The News International, reported that Tohir Yuldashev, cofounder of the Islamic Movement
of Uzbekistan (IMU) and an ally of al-Qaeda terrorists, had been killed by a
rocket fired from a U.S. drone aircraft. According to that article, Yuldashev lost
an arm and a leg in the blast on August 27, but survived to reach a hospital at
Zhob, in the Pakistani province of Balochistan, where he died on August 28.
IMU headquarters in Tajikistan subsequently confirmed that account, naming
Abu Usman Adil as Yuldashevs successor on August 17, 2010.
Tohir Yuldashev, widely known in later life as Tohir Yoldosh, was born in
the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) on October 2, 1967. Little is known
of his life under communist rule, when the Uzbek SSR was commanded by
Sharof Rashidov (19591983) and his successors. Despite official suppression of religion and closing of mosques throughout Central Asia, Yuldashev
was raised in a strict Muslim home and remained a committed ideologue until
his death. By the time Uzbekistan declared independence from Russia, in August 1991, Yuldashev had joined a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan,
Jumaboi Ahmadzhanovich Khojayev (alias Jummah Khan Namangani and/or
Jumma Kasimov), to found the IMU. That groups immediate objective was to
overthrow authoritarian President Islam Karimov and establish a Muslim state
ruled by Sharia religious law.
Official retaliation for that campaign soon drove Yuldashev and Khojayev
into exile, operating from Tajikistan, where, where civil war erupted during
1992, between the regime of President Emomalii Rahmon and United Tajik
Opposition (UTO), as Islamic group led by Sayid Abdulloh Nuri, founder of
the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan. Jumaboi Khojayev soon established
himself as a UTO field commander, while Yuldashev traveled through the Middle East, forging alliances with like-minded Islamic militant groups. By 1995,
he had settled in Peshawar, Pakistan, working closely with al-Qaeda founder
Osama bin Laden. He also forged close ties with the Taliban, which seized effective control of neighboring Afghanistan in September 1996.
A year later, after President Rahmon agreed to peace terms with the UTO
in Tajikistan, Yuldashev and Jumaboi Khojayev turned their full attention
646
Y U L D A S H E V, T O H I R A B D U H A L I L O V I C H
back to destabilizing the Karimov administration in Uzbekistan. Financed and

armed by Pakistans Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligencealso linked to
frequent terrorist actions in Indiathey established a base in Tajikistans Tavildara Valley and launched a campaign of guerrilla warfare. On February 16,
1999, the IMU detonated six car bombs in Tashkent over the course of an hour
and a half, targeting government buildings. Sixteen persons died in the explosions, with at least 120 injured. President Karimovs security forces responded
by detaining some 5,000 persons, in move that sparked protests from human
rights groups.
Later in 1999, IMU guerrillas launched an invasion of southern Kyrgyzstan, where ethnic Uzbeks comprised a majority of the population. Gunmen
kidnapped the mayor of Osh, extorting a cash ransom from the Kyrgyz government, together with a helicopter that transported them into Afghanistan. A
second raid resulted in abduction of some Japanese geologists, subsequently
released after payment of a large but unspecified ransom (still denied by the
Japanese government). International pressure on Uzbekistan ultimately forced
the IMU out of its Tavildara Valley, relocating to Afghanistan in early 2000.
There, Yuldashev and Jumaboi Khojayev joined their Taliban allies in battle
against their primary rival, Ahmad Shah Massouds United Islamic Front for
the Salvation of Afghanistan, better known in the West as the Afghan Northern
Alliance.
IMU collaboration with the Taliban and al-Qaeda continued through 2000
and into 2001, by no means limited to Afghanistan. In August 2000, the group
kidnapped four U.S. mountaineers in Kyrgyzstans Kara-Su Valley, holding
them hostage until the four escaped on August 12. During that same month, a
member of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, met with Osama bin Laden in Kabul, where bin Laden claimed the IMU
had given him enough fissile material from Soviet stockpiles to construct a
functional nuclear bomb. As a result of those events, the U.S. State Department
formally branded the IMU a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 2001. Jumaboi
Khojayev was reportedly killed in Afghanistan before years end, and although
his corpse was never found, Yuldashev assumed full command of the IMU.
The year 2001 also produced a curious reportaired by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) a year after the factlinking Yuldashev to the terrorist skyjackings of September 11. According to the BBC, Yuldashev learned of
Osama bin Ladens plans in advance and feared that the action would prompt
an invasion of Afghanistan (which, in fact, it did). Yuldashev allegedly alerted
Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil to the forthcoming raids,
with a plea to warn Washington of the impending attacks. What happened
next, if anything, remains unclear. Muttawakil surfaced in Pakistan, in October
2001, supposedly asking General Ehsan ul Haq, chairman of Pakistans Joint
Chiefs of Staff, to negotiate a ceasefire in Afghanistan with U.S. secretary of
Y U L D A S H E V, T O H I R A B D U H A L I L O V I C H
state Colin Powell. If true, that effort clearly failed, and Muttawakil next turned
up in the United Arab Emirates, on October 15, announcing his defection from
the Taliban.
Since 2001, some sources have deemed IMU has been declared operationally inactive in Uzbekistan, whereas others strongly disagree. In 2003, U.S.
assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia A. Elizabeth Jones told Congress that the group is still active in the regionparticularly in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstanand it represents a serious threat to the
region and therefore to our interests. Russias government banned the IMU in
2006, under an alternative label, the Islamic Party of Turkestan. Kyrgyzs special forces killed an alleged IMU field commander at Kara-Suu in August 2006,
and two months later, the head of organized crime investigations in Tajikistan
told reporters that the Islamic Movement of Turkestan is the Islamic Movement
of Uzbekistan, operating under a cover name created by Uzbek intelligence
agencies. Yuldashev ostensibly controlled the whole network from hiding, in Afghanistan, until the drone attack claimed his life in September 2009.
His death did not destroy the IMU, nor did the killing of successor Abu
Usman Adil by another U.S. drone aircraft in in April 2012. Deputy Usman
Ghazi succeeded Adil, and 10 alleged IMU members faced trial in Paris, on December 3, 2012, for collecting millions of euros from mosques in French cities,
sending the cash to finance terrorist operations between 2003 and 2008.
Further Reading
Akbarzadeh, Shahram. Uzbekistan and the United States: Authoritarianism, Islamism and
Washingtons New Security Agenda. London: Zed Books, 2005.
Carlisle, Donald. Uzbekistan Under Russian Rule: Communism, Nationalism and Islam in
Central Asia. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Marat, Erica. The Military and the State in Central Asia: From Red Army to Independence.
New York: Routledge, 2009.
Melvin, Neil. Uzbekistan: Transition to Authoritarianism on the Silk Road. Amsterdam:
Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000.
Rasanayagam, Johan. Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
647
Z
ZAPATA SALAZAR, EMILIANO (18791919)
In April 1919, Colonel Jess Maria Guajardo of the Mexican army issued a
surprise invitation to Emiliano Zapata Salazar, commander of the revolutionary
Southern Liberation Army. After pursuing Zapata for the past six years, on behalf
of General Pablo Gonzlez Garza and President Venustiano Carranza, Guajardo
now suggested that he might be ready to defect and join Zapata in opposing the
Carranza government. To prove it, he had recently attacked an army column,
killing 57 soldiers as a sign of dedication to the revolution. Zapata kept their
appointment on April 10, at the Hacienda de San Juan in Chinameca, in the
state of Morelos. On arrival, Zapata was greeted by an honor guard presenting
armsuntil a bugle blared and the soldiers fired on Zapata from point-blank
range, killing him instantly. Guajardo then delivered Zapatas corpse to General
Gonzlez at Cuautla, expecting a reward, but reportedly received only half the
amount originally promised.
Emiliano Zapata was born at Anenecuilco, Morelos, on August 8, 1879, the
ninth of ten children in an impoverished family. Mexicos quasi-feudal system,
established by President Porfirio Daz in 1876, bound peasants to the land and
generally crushed any hope of upward mobility. Zapata received a limited education, and worked full time to support his family after his father died in 1895.
Marriage to the daughter of a middle-class family spared him from abject peonage, but Zapata remained unsatisfied, dabbling in revolutionary politics from
1906 onward. A brief stint in military service, during 1908, failed to curb his
inbred opposition to Mexicos ruling elite, and in 1909 Zapata won election
as council president of Anenecuilco with a program of agrarian reform. When
Governor Pablo Escandn y Barrn resisted those reforms, Zapata began to expropriate land at gunpoint.
In 1910, Zapata supported Francisco Maderos electoral challenge to President Daz. Daz responded by imprisoning Madero, but Madero escaped from
custody and fled to Texas, where he drafted the Plan of St. Luis Potosi, calling for rebellion against the ruling regime. The Mexican Revolution formally
began in November 1910, with Madero directing field commanders Pascual
Orozco and Francisco Pancho Villa from his provisional capital in El Paso.
After losing Juarez to his opposition in May 1911, Daz fled to exile in France,
and Madero won election as his successor. The new president carried out
some land reforms, but Zapata was dissatisfied and recognized Orozco as the
650
Z A PATA S A L A Z A R , E M I L I A N O
revolutions rightful leader in November 1911. His own Plan of Ayala, drafted
at the same time, demanded return of all land seized under Daz to its rightful peasant owners, a condition that Madero could not bring himself to meet.
Allied with Orozco and Emiliano Vzquez Gmez, Zapata led his Liberation
Army of the South in pursuit of Reforma, Libertad, Ley y JusticiaReform,
Freedom, Law and Justice. He branded President Madero a counterrevolutionary, skirmishing with federal troops in southern Mexico, as far north as
Mexico City. Madero assigned Panch Villa and Jos Victoriano Huerta Mrquez
to defeat Zapata, who, by early 1912, had been proclaimed Supreme Chief of
the Revolutionary Movement of the South. Fighting under the motto Its better to die on your feet than to live on your knees, Zapata continued his efforts
to topple Madero, but General Huerta staged a preemptive strike in February
1913, conspiring with U.S. ambassador Henry Lane Wilson and a nephew of
Porfirio Daz to seize the presidency and execute Madero. That move officially
ended Mexicos civil warwhile leaving Huerta branded as El Chacal (The
Jackal) or El Usurpador (The Usurper)but it brought no peace.
Huerta had barely occupied the presidents office when Venustiano Carranza
announced his Plan of Guadalupe, calling for creation of a Constitutional Army
to depose Huertas dictatorship. Zapata supported that movement, joined by
Pancho Villa and lvaro Obregn Salido, defeating Huertas forces at the Battle
of Zacatecas in June 1914, forcing his resignation and departure for Jamaica
in July. Francisco Carvajal y Gual briefly succeeded Huerta, handing power to
Carranza on August 20, then departed for New Orleans.
Still, peace remained elusive. Neither Zapata nor Villa had signed Carranzas
Plan of Guadalupe, and Villa in particular despised the new presidenta feeling returned in full measure by Carranza. Villa continued his guerrilla raids,
in defiance of orders from Carranza, while lvaro Obregn backed the new
president and Zapata watched from the southern sidelines, generally more
supportive of Villa than Carranza. In October 1914, Carranza summoned his
opponents to the Convention of Aguascalientes, seeking to resolve their differences, but the effort quickly went awry. Neither Zapata nor Villa attended in
person, but their supporters hijacked the convention, declared themselves sovereign, and elected Eulalio Gutirrez Ortiz as president of republic, while naming Villa to command a new Conventionalist Army, battling against Carranzas
Constitutionalists. President Gutirrez fled from Mexico City in January 1915
and formally resigned six months later, after branding both Carranza and Villa
traitors to Mexicos revolutionary spirit.
So the chaotic war continued, with General Obregn hunting Pancho
Villa in northern Mexico, joined by U.S. troops staged cross-border raids
in early 1916, while General Pablo Gonzlez stalked Zapata in the south.
In that pursuit, Gonzlez adopted a policy of scorched earth and mass executions, capturing Zapatista headquarters at Tlaltizapan in June 1916.
Z A PATA S A L A Z A R , E M I L I A N O
ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION

Founded on November 17, 1983, in a merger between indigenous rebels of eastern Chiapas and guerrillas from Mexicos urban north, the
Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional (EZLN) made its first public
appearance on January 1, 1994, when the North American Free Trade
Agreement between Mexico, Canada, and the United States became operational. Typically disguised by ski masks or red bandanas, the new Zapatistas declared war against the Mexican state. Its philosophy reflects
a mixture of anarchism and libertarian Marxism, incorporating elements
of Roman Catholic liberation theology and stressing alter-globalization,
broadly defined as resisting the disestablishment of local economies
and disastrous humanitarian consequences. President Vicente Fox Quesada, elected in 2000, once claimed he could end the Chiapas rebellion
in fifteen minutes, yet it continues, with Zapatistas led by anonymous
Subcomandante Marcos presenting human rights petitions in all 31
Mexican states during January 2006. Three years later, in January 2009,
Marcos broadened the groups field of interest, declaring Zapatista support for Palestinian Arabs against the Israeli governments march of death
and destruction.
Undeterred, Zapata rebounded to threaten Mexico City in September 1916,

to bomb a train and kill 400 passengers in November, and to seize Cuernavaca in January 1917. Even after losing Morelos to Gonzlez in October
1917, seeing his ranks thinned by deadly Spanish influenza, Zapata fought
on from a retreat in the mountains. Only treachery would finally cut short
his struggle and his life.
Without its charismatic leader, the Liberation Army of the South dissolved,
watching the dream of comprehensive agrarian reform slip beyond recall. Even
so, Zapatas elected successorGeneral Gildardo Magaa Cerdaand others
pursued their mentors ideals through more conventional political channels.
President Carranza survived an assassination attempt in April 1920, then was
killed by rebel soldiers the following month. Much of the land redistribution
advocated by Zapata was finally achieved under President Lzaro Crdenas del
Ro between 1935 and 1940. Zapata, meanwhile, has been memorialized on
Mexican currency, and in the naming of various streets and towns. His depictions on film include portrayals by Marlon Brando (Viva Zapata!, 1952) and
Alejandro Fernndez (Zapata: A Heros Dream, 2004).
See also: Carranza de la Garza, Venustiano (18591920); Villa, Francisco Pancho
(18781923).
651
652
ZHANG ZUOLIN
Further Reading
Brunk, Samuel. Emiliano Zapata! Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.
Mclynn, Frank. Villa and Zapata. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Parrkinson, Roger. Zapata: A Biography. New York: Stein & Day, 1975.
Womack, John. Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1970.
ZHANG ZUOLIN (18751928)

On June 3, 1928, Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin (sometimes rendered as
Chang Tso-lin) left Beijing by train, retreating from the advance of enemy General Chiang Kai-sheks Nationalist Army. Chiang had defeated Zhang in battle
the previous month, and Zhang was fleeing to Shenyang (Mukden in the Manchu language), capital of Fengtian (now Liaoning) Province. Zhang traveled on
the Jingfeng (now BeijingHarbin) Railway, amply guarded by his troops, but he
was not prepared for treachery by the Japanese Guandong Army that supported
him. Colonel Komoto Daisaku,
furious at Zhangs failure to
stop the Nationalist advance,
had planted a bomb on the outskirts of Shenyang, where the
Jingfeng line passed beneath
the South Manchuria Railroad.
At 5:23 A.M. on June 4, as
Zhangs train passed beneath
the booby-trapped trellis, Sapper 1st Lieutenant Fujii Sadatoshi triggered the explosion,
demolishing Zhangs train.
Several passengers, including Governor Wu Junsheng of
Heilongjiang Province, died
instantly. Zhang was mortally
wounded, but survived the
short trip to Shenyang and died
there, several hours later. Guandong Army leaders concealed
Zhangs death until June 21, by
Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin, killed in a 1928 which time they had installed
railroad bombing. (Gamma-Keystone via Getty his eldest son, Zhang Xueliang,
Images)
as the late warlords successor.
ZHANG ZUOLIN
Zhang Zuolin was born at Haicheng, in southern Fengtian Province, sometime in 1875. His family was poor, and Zhangnicknamed Pimple in his
youthacquired little formal education, though he did achieve a smattering
of amateur veterinary skill while hunting and working in stables. A brawler by
nature, he became affiliated with one of Manchurias numerous outlaw gangs,
and by his 20s led his own band of armed brigands on horseback. During the
so-called Boxer Rebellion of 18981901, Zhang and his bandits joined the
Qing Dynastys imperial army in a futile attempt to expel Western elements
from China, earning a reputation as the Mukden Tiger in the process. Three
years later, in the Russo-Japanese War of 19041905, Zhang and his men
served Japan as mercenaries, battling Russian troops in Manchuria and along
the Russo-Chinese border.
In October 1911, republican forces led by the Tongmenghui (Chinese United
League) and Gelaohui (Elder Brothers Society) rebelled against Emperor Puyi,
toppling the Qing Dynasty in February 1912. Zhang and his troops resisted the
new order, intimidating would-be rebels as the head of a Manchurian Peoples
Peacekeeping Council. When revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen declared himself president of a new Chinese republic, based in Nanking (now Nanjing),
monarchist Yuan Shikai reached out to Zhang from Beijing, seeking support for
the resistance. Meanwhile, Yuan struck a bargain with Sun Yat-sen, arranging
Emperor Puyis abdication in exchange for Suns support in a presidential election scheduled for March 1912. Within a year, Yuan moved to suppress Suns
Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party), and in December 1915 he declared
himself the new emperor of China.
Zhang supported the new imperial regime, defeating an attempt by the
Kuomintang and Japans Kwantung Army to expel him from Manchuria. Chastened by that experience, Beijing named Zhang the superintendent of military
affairs for Fengtian Province, promoting him to serve as both the civil and
military governor after Yuan Shikais death in June 1916. Still a Qing loyalist at heart, Zhang conspired with like-minded General Zhang Xun to restore
Emperor Puyi to his throne. At the last moment, however, while Zhang Xun
marched to Beijing on July 1, 1917, Zhang Zuolin withheld his critical support, thereby dooming the rebellion, which collapsed 12 days later. In fact, he
used the debacle to increase his own power, first seizing Heilongjiang Province
for himself, then captured Jilin Province, securing control over all of Manchuria except for the southeastern quadrant occupied by Japan.
By 1918, Zhang Zuolin ranked among Chinas most powerful warlords. His
nearest rival, the Beiyang (North Ocean) Army, was fragmented after Yuan
Shikais death, distracted by internecine conflict while Zhang consolidated his
power. After two wars with a rival force commanded by Cao Kun, warlord of
Zhili Province (now Hebei), in 1922 and 1924, Zhang joined in a provisional
653
654
ZHANG ZUOLIN
triumvirate with Feng Yuxiang, commander of the Kuomintangs Guominjun

(Northwest Army), and Duan Qirui, warlord of Anhui Province. At the same
time, Zhang forged an alliance with the Kwantung Army, which patrolled the
South Manchurian Railway.
With an army of 100,000 men in 1920, nearly tripling in size over the next
eight years, Zhang was a force to reckon with. He used that power for Manchurias benefit, as well as personal enrichment, importing temporary workers
during spring and summer, as labor in forestry, mining, and agriculture. With
regard to farming alone, Manchurian acreage under active cultivation increased
from 20 million in 1920 to 35 million by 1929. Indeed, Manchurias economy prospered so dramatically in comparison to the rest of China that it was
coveted both by Japan and by the Kuomintang, now led by Chiang Kai-shek.
In July 1926, Chiang launched his First Northern Expedition, defeating Cao
Kuns Zhili clique, then paused to purge the Kuomintangs left wing of communists in the Shanghai massacre of April 1927. That diversion gave Zhang
Zuolin time to regroup with new Zhili Province warlord Sun Chuanfang, who
invaded China proper in July 1927 but was defeated in the Battle of Longtan, on
August 25. Chiang Kai-shek rebuilt his forces through the winter, then began
his Second Northern Expedition in April 1928. Rather than face the enemy,
Zhang began his retreat toward Shenyang, thereby prompting officers of the
Kwantung Army to plot his murder.
Zhang Xueliang, hand-picked by local Japanese commanders to succeed his
father, did not accuse them of his murder, but he did declare support for Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, emerging from the momentary chaos as a
Nationalist general. In January 1929, Zhang Xueliang executed two Chinese
officials known for their pro-Japanese viewpoints, before the assembled guests
at a state banquet. Nine months later, Emperor Hirohito dismissed Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi with scathing criticism for his failure to prosecute Zhang
Zuolins killers. Japan would not secure its goal of capturing Manchuria until
September 1931, when the Kwantung Army occupied the region and established the puppet state of Manchuoko under former Qing emperor Puyi.
Further Reading
Beasley, William. Japanese Imperialism 18941945. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991.
Gordon, Andrew. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present. Oxford:
Jiang, Arnold. The United States and China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
McCormack, Gavan. Chang Tso-Lin in Northeast China, 19111928: China, Japan, and
the Manchurian Idea. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977.
Paine, S.C.M. The Wars for Asia, 19111949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012.
ZORIG, SANJAASUREN
Shai, Aron. Zhang Xueliang: The General Who Never Fought. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Spence, Johnathan. The Search for Modern China. New York: Norton & Sons, 1991.
ZORIG, SANJAASUREN (19621998)

On October 2, 1998, two unidentified persons invaded the apartment occupied by prominent politician Sanjaasuren Zorig in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. After
overpowering and tying up Zorigs wife, the intruders waited for him to return
home, then attacked him with knives, tabbing him 16 times. Three wounds
pierced his heart, killing Zorig within minutes. Before fleeing, in a move still
unexplained, the assassins paused to steal bottles of vinegar and soy sauce from
their victims refrigerator. The murder prevented Zorigs anticipated appointment to serve as Mongolias prime minister, a post claimed two months later
by Mayor Janlavyn Narantsatsralt of Ulan Bator. Police briefly detained Zorigs
wife on suspicion of instigating his murder, then released her without charges,
leaving the crime officially unsolved today.
Sanjaasuren Zorig was born on April 20, 1962, the grandson of a Russian geographer who joined
Pyotr Kuzmich Kozlov to explore Mongolia in 19231926
and remained to marry a native woman. In the mid-1930s,
Zorigs grandparents fell prey to
the Stalinist purges carried out
by Marshal Khorloogiin Choibalsan on orders from Moscow,
claiming at least 22,000 lives
(some estimates claim 100,000).
Zorigs mother, Dorjpalam, was
left orphaned and subsequently
married a medical professor
named Sanjaasren, bearing him
three children.
Zorig, their second child,
attended a Russian-language
school in Ulan Bator, beginning
at age eight, then enrolled at
Lomonosov Moscow State University, where he studied phi- Sanjaasuren Zorig, head of the Mongolian Demolosophy from 1980 to 1985. cratic Association was attacked in his home and
Upon graduation, he returned stabbed 16 times. (Associated Press)
655
656
ZO R I G, S A N JA A S U R E N
to Ulan Bator as a teacher for the Mongolian Revolutionary Youth League, then
lectured on scientific communism at the National University of Mongolia. His
family history, meanwhile, undermined commitment to doctrinaire tenets prescribed from Moscow. In 1988, he founded a New Generation movement of
college-age dissidents pledged to spread democracy throughout Mongolia. On
December 10, 1989, Zorig led a demonstration by 200 protesters seeking free
elections and a free-market economy. A month later, as a member of the Democratic Party of Mongolia, he began staging regular weekend protests in Ulan Bators Skhbaatar Square, growing in size through February 1990.
Mongolias communist regime, led by Jambyn Batmnkh since 1984, initially resisted any democratic reforms, but Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev influenced Russias client state with his policies of perestroika (reconstruction)
and glasnost (openness). In March 1990, the Mongolian Politburo resigned
en masse, thereby ending one-party rule nationwide. Three months later, Zorig
was elected to a seat in the Peoples Great Khural (national assembly). That
body, in turn, was reconstituted in 1992 as the unicameral State Great Khural,
with Zorig first elected as a minority member, then reelected in 1996 as a leading spokesman for the dominant Democratic Union Coalition, defeating the
now ex-communist Mongolian Peoples Party.
In April 1998, Prime Minister Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj named Zorig to
serve as his minister for infrastructure, but the new government soon foundered on an unexpected crisis. Shortly after taking office as Prime Minister,
Elbegdorj sold the state-owned Reconstruction Bank to Mongolias largest
privately owned banking firm, the Golomt Bank, controlled by members
of the Democratic Union Coalition. Furious members of the Mongolian
Peoples Party staged a walkout from the State Great Khural, thereby forcing Elbegdorjs resignation. An urgent conference between rival party leaders settled on Zorig as a compromise successor to Elbegdorj, with public
announcement of his selection scheduled for October 5. His murder, three
days prior to that declaration, foiled the plan.
In place of Zorig, Janlavyn Narantsatsralt became Mongolias new prime
minister, in December 1998. He held the post until July 1999, when a furor
over the wording of a letter to Russias first deputy prime minister on the subject of copper-mining rights forced his resignation in turn. Soon after Zorigs
murder, voters sent his sister Sanjaasrengiin Oyuun to the State Great Khural,
and she later served as Mongolias minister of foreign affairs. Well known for
her belief that Zorig was slain to prevent him from interfering with government
corruption, Oyuun founded the Civil Will Party (now the Civil Will-Green
Party) in March 2000, pursuing liberal policies with an emphasis on environmentalism. In Mongolian, the new partys nameIrgenii Zorig Namincluded
her martyred brothers name.
ZORIG, SANJAASUREN
Further Reading
Batbayar, Tsedenambyn and Sharad Soni. Modern Mongolia: A Concise History.
New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2007.
Bawden, Charles. Modern History of Mongolia. London: Routledge, 2002.
Bosson, James. Modern Mongolia. Richmond, Surrey, United Kingdom: Curzon Press,
1997.
Rossabi, Morris. Modern Mongolia: From Khans to Commissars to Capitalists. Berkeley:
Sabloff, Paula, ed. Modern Mongolia: Reclaiming Genghis Khan. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2001.
657
PRIMARY DOCUMENTS
Document 1
ASSASSINATION OF POMPEY THE GREAT
(48 BCE)PLUTARCHS DESCRIPTION OF
THE MURDER OF POMPEY IN EGYPT
On August 9, 48 BCE, the Battle of Pharsalus, a decisive encounter of the Roman
civil war, was fought in central Greece between the forces of Julius Caesar and those
of the Roman senate commanded by Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeius). Caesars victory
forced the senatorial leaders to flee, with Pompey deciding to go to Egypt. As Pompey approached, the advisors of the young Egyptian ruler, Ptolemy XIII, debated
the advisability of offering Pompey refuge. Believing such a decision would offend
Caesar, who was known to also be sailing to Egypt, the kings eunuch Pothinus successfully argued that Pompey should be killed. Accordingly, when Pompey landed
in Egypt on September 28, 48 BCE, he was met and murdered on the shore by a
party that included Achillas, one of the guardians of Ptolemy XIII, and Septimius,
the commander of Roman troops serving in the Egyptian army. Pompeys body was
cremated where it fell by his servant Philip, and his head and seal were presented
to Caesar upon the latters arrival in Egypt. Angered rather than pleased by the
treacherous murder of his former friend and son-in-law, Caesar ordered the executions of both Pothinus and Achillas.
So when it was decided that he should fly to Egypt, he set sail from Cyprus on a Seleucian trireme with his wife (of the rest, some sailed along with
him in ships of war like his own, and others in merchant vessels), and crossed
the sea in safety; but on learning that Ptolemy was posted at Pelusium with
an army, making war upon his sister, he put in there, and sent on a messenger to announce his arrival to the king and to ask his aid. Now, Ptolemy was
quite young; but Potheinus, who managed all his affairs, assembled a council
of the most influential men (and those were most influential whom he wished
to be so), and bade each one give his opinion. It was certainly a dreadful thing
that the fate of Pompey the Great was to be decided by Potheinus the eunuch,
and Theodotus of Chios, who was a hired teacher of rhetoric, and Achillas the
Egyptian; for these were the chief counsellors of the king among the chamberlains and tutors also gathered there. And it was such a tribunals verdict which
Pompey, tossing at anchor some distance of the shore, was waiting for, a man
who would not deign to be under obligations to Caesar for his life.
The opinions of the other counsellors were so far divergent that some advised to drive Pompey away, and others to invite him in and receive him. But
Theodotus, making a display of his powerful speech and rhetorical art, set
forth that neither course was safe for them, but that if they received Pompey,
they would have Caesar for an enemy and Pompey for a master; while if they
662
A S SA S S I N AT I O N O F P O M P E Y T H E G R E AT
rejected him, Pompey would blame them for casting him off, and Caesar for
making him continue his pursuit; the best course, therefore, was to send for
the man and put him to death, for by doing so they would gratify Caesar and
have nothing to fear from Pompey. To this he smilingly added, we are told,
A dead man does not bite.
Having determined upon this plan, they entrusted the execution of it to
Achillas. So he took with him a certain Septimius, who had once been a
tribune of Pompeys, and Salvius besides, a centurion, with three or four
servants, and put out towards the ship of Pompey. Now, all the most distinguished of Pompeys fellow-voyagers had come aboard of her to see what was
going on. Accordingly, when they saw a reception that was not royal, nor
splendid, nor in accordance with the hopes of Theophanes, but a few men
sailing up in a single fishing-boat, they viewed this lack of respect with suspicion, and advised Pompey to have his ship rowed back into the open sea,
while they were beyond reach of missiles. But meanwhile the boat drew near,
and first Septimius rose up and addressed Pompey in the Roman tongue as
Imperator. Then Achillas saluted him in Greek, and invited him to come
aboard the boat, telling him that the shallows were extensive, and that the
sea, which had a sandy bottom, was not deep enough to float a trireme. At
the same time some of the royal ships were seen to be taking their crews
aboard, and men-at-arms were occupying the shore, so that there seemed to
be no escape even if they changed their minds; and besides, this very lack of
confidence might give the murderers an excuse for their crime. Accordingly,
after embracing Cornelia, who was bewailing his approaching death, he ordered two centurions to go into the boat before him, besides Philip, one of
his freedmen, and a servant named Scythes, and while Achillas was already
stretching out his hand to him from the boat, turned towards his wife and
son and repeated the verses of Sophocles:
Whatever man upon a tyrant takes his way,
His slave he is, even though a freeman when he goes.
After these last words to his friends, he went into the boat. And since it was
a long distance from the trireme to the land, and none of his companions in
the boat had any friendly word for him, turning his eyes upon Septimius he
said: Surely I am not mistaken, and you are an old comrade of mine! Septimius nodded merely, without saying anything to him or showing any friendliness. So then, as there was profound silence again, Pompey took a little roll
containing a speech written by him in Greek, which he had prepared for his
use in addressing Ptolemy, and began to read in it. Then, as they drew near the
shore, Cornelia, together with his friends, stood on the trireme watching with
A S SA S S I N AT I O N O F P O M P E Y T H E G R E AT
great anxiety for the outcome, and began to take heart when she saw many
of the kings people assembling at the landing as if to give him an honourable
welcome. But at this point, while Pompey was clasping the hand of Philip that
he might rise to his feet more easily, Septimius, from behind, ran him through
the body with his sword, then Salvius next, and then Achillas, drew their daggers and stabbed him. And Pompey, drawing his toga down over his face with
both hands, without an act or a word that was unworthy of himself, but with
a groan merely, submitted to their blows, being sixty years of age less one, and
ending his life only one day after his birth-day.
When the people on the ships beheld the murder, they uttered a wailing cry
that could be heard as far as the shore, and weighing anchor quickly, took to
flight. And a strong wind came to their aid as they ran out to sea, so that the
Egyptians, though desirous of pursuing, turned back. But they cut off Pompeys
head, and threw the rest of his body unclothed out of the boat, and left it for
those who craved so pitiful a sight. Philip, however, stayed by the body, until
such had taken their fill of gazing; then he washed it in sea-water, wrapped it
in a tunic of his own, and since he had no other supply, sought along the coast
until he found the remnants of a small fishing-boat, old stuff, indeed, but sufficient to furnish a funeral pyre that would answer for an unclothed corpse, and
that too not entire. As he was gathering the wood and building the pyre, there
came up a Roman who was now an old man, but who in his youth had served
his first campaigns with Pompey, and said: Who art thou, my man, that thinkest to give burial rites to Pompey the Great? And when Philip said that he was
his freedman, the man said: But thou shalt not have this honour all to thyself;
let me too share in a pious privilege thus offered, that I may not altogether regret my sojourn in a foreign land, if in requital for many hardships I find this
happiness at least, to touch with my hands and array for burial the greatest of
Roman imperators. Such were the obsequies of Pompey. And on the following day Lucius Lentulus, as he came sailing from Cyprus and coasted along the
shore not knowing what had happened, saw a funeral pyre and Philip standing
besides it, and before he had been seen himself exclaimed: Who, pray, rests
here at the end of his allotted days? Then, after a slight pause and with a groan
he said: But perhaps it is thou, Pompey the Great! And after a little he went
ashore, was seized, and put to death.
This was the end of Pompey. But not long afterwards Caesar came to Egypt,
and found it filled with this great deed of abomination. From the man who
brought him Pompeys head he turned away with loathing, as from an assassin;
and on receiving Pompeys seal-ring, he burst into tears; the device was a lion
holding a sword in his paws. But Achillas and Potheinus he put to death. The
king himself, moreover, was defeated in battle along the river, and disappeared.
Theodotus the sophist, however, escaped the vengeance of Caesar; for he fled
663
664
A S SA S S I N AT I O N O F J U L I US C A E SA R
out of Egypt and wandered about in wretchedness and hated of all men. But
Marcus Brutus, after he had slain Caesar and come into power, discovered him
in Asia, and put him to death with every possible torture. The remains of Pompey were taken to Cornelia, who gave them burial at his Alban villa.
Source: Plutarch Lives: Agesilaus and Pompey. Pelopidas and Marcellus. Translated
by Bernadotte Perrin. Vol. 5. Loeb Classical Library 87. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917, 31829.
Document 2
ASSASSINATION OF JULIUS CAESAR (44 BCE)
LETTER OF BRUTUS TO CICERO ON CAESARS
ASSASSINATION (43 BCE)
Marcus Tullius Cicero, considered one of the greatest Roman orators, was also a lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and author of works on legal, rhetorical, and philosophical subjects. He was also a prolific writer of letters to various professional colleagues,
friends, and family members; these letters provide insight into the social, cultural,
and intellectual life in Rome during the late Republican period. Moreover, because
Cicero was so deeply involved in the complex and competitive political situation of his
day, his letters often contain valuable first-hand observations of many of the influential events, powerful men, and personal rivalries that marked the Roman Republics
tumultuous last decades.
Marcus Junius Brutus, one of the leading conspirators in Julius Caesars assassination in 44 BCE, wrote this letter to Cicero in 43 BCE. Because he was no longer safe at
Rome, where Caesars heir, the young Octavian (the future emperor Augustus, here
called Octavius), was gaining support, Brutus was then living in Crete. In the letter,
he urges Cicero not to underestimate the ambition of Octavian (often called a boy
in the letter), who Brutus sees as a second Caesarthat is, another dictator in the
making. He also asks Cicero to reevaluate his animosity toward Mark Antony, whom
Brutus considers less dangerous than Octavian. Throughout the letter, Brutus appeals
to Ciceros republican idealism and hopes of reviving Roman liberty. Ciceros attempts
to play Octavian against Antony ultimately failed, and he was murdered on Antonys
orders in December 43 BCE. Brutus, defeated in October 42 BCE by the forces of Octavian and Antony at the Battle of Philippi, committed suicide.
I have read a small part of your letter to Octavius, transmitted to me by Atticus. Your zeal and concern for my safety gave me no new pleasure, for it is
not only our common, but our daily news to hear something which you have
said or done with your usual fidelity in support of my honour and dignity. Yet
that same part of your letter affected me with the most sensible grief which
my mind could possibly receive. For you compliment him so highly for his
services to the republic, and in a strain so suppliant and abject that what shall
I say? I am ashamed of the wretched state to which we are reduced; yet it must
be said, you recommend my safety to him, (to which what death is not preferable?) and thus make it manifest that our servitude is not yet abolished, but
our master only changed. Recollect your words, and deny them, if you dare,
to be the prayers of a subject to his king. There is one thing, you say, which is
required and expected from him that he would allow those citizens to live in
safety, of whom all honest men and the people of Rome think well. But what if
he will not allow it? Shall we be the less safe for that? It is better not to be safe,
than to be saved by him. For my part, I can never think all the gods so averse
to the preservation of the Roman people, that Octavius must be entreated for
the life of any one citizen; not to say for the deliverers of the world. These are
the lofty terms in which I have a pleasure in declaring myself, and it becomes
me to use this language to those who know not what to fear from, or what to
ask of, any one.
Can you allow Octavius to possess this power, and yet be his friend? Or if
you have any value for me, would you wish to see me at Rome; when it behoves me first to be recommended to this boy, that he would permit me to be
there? What reason can you have to thank him, if you think it necessary to beg
of him that he would suffer us to live in safety? Or is it to be considered a kindness that he chooses to see himself rather than Antony, in the condition to have
such petitions presented to him? One may supplicate, indeed, the successor,
but what need is there to supplicate the abolisher of a tyranny, that those who
have deserved well of the republic may be safe? It was this weakness and despair, not more blameable, indeed, in you than in all, which first incited Caesar
to the ambition of reigning; and after his death encouraged Antony to think of
seizing his place; and which has now raised this boy so high, that you judge
it necessary to address your supplications to him for the preservation of men
such as we are; and that we are to be saved only by the mercy of one, scarcely
yet a man, and by no other means. But if we had remembered ourselves to be
Romans, these infamous men would not be more daring to aim at dominion
than we to repel it; nor would Antony be more encouraged by Caesars reign,
than deterred by his fate. How can you, a consular senator, and the avenger of
so many treasons, (by suppressing which, you have but postponed our ruin,
I fear, for a time) reflect on what you have done, and yet approve these things,
or bear them so tamely, as to seem to approve them?
For what particular quarrel had you with Antony? No other, but that he assumed all this to himself; that our lives should be begged of him; that we from
whom he had received liberty, should hold our safety in precarious dependence upon his will; that the republic should be at his disposal. You thought
665
666
it necessary to take arms to arrest his tyranny. But was this done only, that a
stop being put to him, we might carry our submission to another, who might
condescend to be put in his place; or was it that the republic might be its own
mistress: unless after all, our quarrel was not with slavery, but with the conditions of it. No doubt, we might have had an easy master in Antony, and whatever share with him we pleased, could we have been content with such a state
of things: for what could he have denied to those whose tolerance would have
been the best support of his domination. But nothing was of such value to us
as to be worth the sacrifice of our fidelity and liberty. This very boy, whom the
name of Caesar seems to stimulate against the slayers of Caesar, how would he
value (if there were really room to treat with him,) our help towards the attainment of his objects; we being content to live, and to be rich, and to be called
consulars. But Caesar would then have perished in vain. For what reason have
we to rejoice at his death, if still our lot is to be slaves? Let others be as unconcerned as they will; but may the powers of heaven sooner take all from
me, than the determination not to allow to the heir of the man I killed what
I would not allow to the man himself. No, nor would I suffer my father, were
he living, to possess a power above the laws and the senate.
Can you persuade yourself, that any one can be free under him, without
whose leave there is no place for us in that city? Or how is it possible for you,
after all, to obtain what you ask? You ask that he would allow us to be safe.
Shall we then receive safety when we receive life? But how can we receive it,
if we first part with our honour and our liberty? Do you fancy that to live at
Rome is to be safe? It is the thing, and not the place, which must secure that
to me; for I was never safe, while Caesar lived, till I had resolved on that attempt: nor can I be an exile any where as long as I continue to abhor slavery
and contumely beyond all other evils. Is it not to fall back into the same state
of darkness in which we were, when he who has taken upon him the name of
the tyrant must be entreated that the avengers of tyranny may be safe, while
in the cities of Greece the punishment of tyrants is extended to their children?
Can I ever wish to see that city or think it a city, which would not accept liberty when offered, and even forced upon it, but has more dread of the name
of their late king in the person of a boy, than reliance on itself, though it has
seen that very king taken off in the plenitude of his power by the virtue of a
few? If you listen to me, you will no more after this recommend either me or
yourself to this your Caesar. You set a high value on the few years that remain
to you at your age, if for their sake you can become a supplicant to that boy.
Henceforth have a care, lest what you have done and are doing with respect to
Antony, instead of being praised as the effect of magnanimity, be imputed to
fear: for if you are so pleased with Octavius as to petition him for our safety,
you will be thought not to have disliked a master, but to have wanted only a
more friendly one.
As to your praising him for the things that he has hitherto done, I approve
of it; they deserve to be praised, provided he did them to repel the power of
others, not to advance his own. But when you adjudge him not only to have
this power, but think you ought to submit to it so far as to entreat him that he
would not destroy us, you make him too great a recompense; you give to him
what the republic seemed to enjoy through him. Nor does it seem to occur
to you, that if Octavius deserves any honours, because he makes war against
Antony, that those who extirpated the very evil of which these are but the relics, can never be sufficiently requited by the Roman people, though they were
to heap upon them everything in their power to bestow; but see how much
stronger peoples fears are than their memories; because Antony still lives, and
is in arms.
As to Caesar, all that could and ought to have been done has been done,
and cannot be undone, to be done again in any other manner. Is then Octavius so great a man, that the people of Rome are to wait in suspense his judgment upon us? Or are we so little, that any one man is to be entreated for our
safety? As for me, that I may return to Rome, not only will I not supplicate any
man, but I will restrain those from doing it who are disposed to do it for themselves: or I will remove to a distance from all such who can be slaves, and will
think myself at Rome wherever I can live free, and shall pity you whose fond
desire of life neither age, nor honours, nor the example of other mens virtue
can reduce. For my own part, I shall ever think myself happy, solaced with
the constant and perpetual conviction, that my piety to my country has met
its reward; for what condition can be better than for a man supported by the
recollection of noble actions, and in full content with his liberty, to look with
indifference on all human things. Never will I yield to those who suffer themselves to be trampled upon by others, nor be conquered by those who submit
to be conquered. I will make experiment of all things, and try every resource,
nor will ever desist from dragging our state out of slavery. If that fortune attends me which ought to attend me, we shall all rejoice; if not, still I shall rejoice myself. For how can this life be better spent than in acts and thoughts
which tend to make my countrymen free.
I beseech you, Cicero, not to desert the cause through weariness or want of
confidence. In repelling present evils have your eyes always on the future, lest
it steal upon you before you are aware. Consider that the fortitude and courage with which you delivered the republic, when consul, and again a consular,
are nothing without constancy and perseverance. The case of tried, is, I own,
harder than of untried virtue. We exact services as debts in the former case,
and if disappointed, we feel especially resentful, as persons deceived. Wherefore, for Cicero to withstand Antony, though very commendable, yet because
such a consul promised such a consular, nobody wondered at it: but if the
same Cicero in the case of others should waver at last in that resolution, which
667
668
A S SA S S I N AT I O N O F T H E RO M A N E M P E RO R C A L I G U L A
he exerted with such firmness and greatness of mind against Antony, he would
deprive himself not only of the hopes of future glory, but make even his glory
past to disappear. Nothing is great in itself but that in which a determination
of the judgment is apparent. Nor is it the duty of any man more than of you to
shew attachment and devotion to the republic, and to be a patron of liberty;
called upon as you are by your abilities, by the things you have performed, by
the regard and expectation of all men. Wherefore, I hold, that Octavius ought
not to be asked to permit us to live in safety. Rather encourage yourself to think
the city, in which you have done such great things, to be free and honourable,
only so long as there are in it leaders of the people to oppose the designs of the
profligate.
Source: William Roberts. History of Letter-Writing, from the Earliest Period to the
Fifth Century. London: W. Pickering, 1843.
Document 3
ASSASSINATION OF THE ROMAN EMPEROR CALIGULA
(41 CE)SUETONIUSS ACCOUNT OF THE MURDER
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, known to history as Caligula, became
emperor of Rome in 37 CE upon the death of his great uncle Tiberius. Sources for
the reign of Caligula depict him as cruel, extravagant, sexually perverse, and even
insane. In 41 CE, Cassius Chaerea, commander of the Praetorian Guard, headed
a plot to kill the emperor. Although the actual murder was carried out by Chaerea
and a few others, the conspiracy was supposedly known and approved by many in
the senate and the military command. Chaerea and his colleges are said to have
stabbed Caligula as he passed through an underground passage at the imperial
palace on his way to address a troupe of actors. Hoping to restore the republic, the
conspirators also murdered Caligulas wife Caesonia and his young daughter Julia
Drusilla. The solders of the Praetorian Guard, whose privileged position depended
upon the existence of an emperor, elevated Caligulas uncle Claudius to the imperial
throne, and Claudius ordered the executions of Chaerea and the other assassins.
Reproduced below is the account of Caligulas death written by the Roman historian
Suetonius in about 121 CE.
During this frantic and riotous career several thought of attempting his life.
But when one or two conspiracies had been detected and the rest were waiting
for a favourable opportunity, two men made common cause and succeeded,
with the connivance of his most influential freedmen and the officers of the
praetorian guard; for although the charge that these last were privy to one of
the former conspiracies was false, they realised that Caligula hated and feared
them. In fact, he exposed them to great odium by at once taking them aside
and declaring, drawn sword in hand, that he would kill himself, if they too
thought he deserved death; and from that time on he never ceased accusing
them one to the other and setting them all at odds.
When they had decided to attempt his life at the exhibition of the Palatine games, as he went out at noon, Cassius Chaerea, tribune of a cohort of
the praetorian guard, claimed for himself the principal part; for Gaius used to
taunt him, a man already well on in years, with voluptuousness and effeminacy by every form of insult. When he asked for the watchword Gaius would
give him Priapus or Venus, and when Chaerea had occasion to thank him
for anything, he would hold out his hand to kiss, forming and moving it in an
obscene fashion.
His approaching murder was foretold by many prodigies. The statue of
Jupiter at Olympia, which he had ordered to be taken to pieces and moved
to Rome, suddenly uttered such a peal of laughter that the scaffoldings collapsed and the workmen took to their heels; and at once a man called Cassius turned up, who declared that he had been bidden in a dream to sacrifice
a bull to Jupiter. The Capitol at Capua was struck by lightning on the Ides
of March, and also the room of the doorkeeper of the Palace at Rome. Some
inferred from the latter omen that danger was threatened to the owner at
the hands of his guards; and from the former, the murder of a second distinguished personage, such as had taken place long before on that same day.
The soothsayer Sulla too, when Gaius consulted him about his horoscope,
declared that inevitable death was close at hand. The lots of Fortune at Antium warned him to beware of Cassius, and he accordingly ordered the death
of Cassius Longinus, who was at the time proconsul of Asia, forgetting that
the family name of Chaerea was Cassius. The day before he was killed he
dreamt that he stood in heaven beside the throne of Jupiter and that the
god struck him with the toe of his right foot and hurled him to earth. Some
things which had happened on that very day shortly before he was killed
were also regarded as portents. As he was sacrificing, he was sprinkled with
the blood of a flamingo, and the pantomimic actor Mnester danced a tragedy
which the tragedian Neoptolemus had acted years before during the games
at which Philip king of the Macedonians was assassinated. In a farce called
Laureolus, in which the chief actor falls as he is making his escape and
vomits blood, several understudies so vied with one another in giving evidence of their proficiency that the stage swam in blood. A nocturnal performance besides was rehearsing, in which scenes from the lower world were
represented by Egyptians and Aethiopians.
On the ninth day before the Kalends of February at about the seventh hour
he hesitated whether or not to get up for luncheon, since his stomach was still
669
670
disordered from excess of food on the day before, but at length he came out
at the persuasion of his friends. In the covered passage through which he had
to pass, some boys of good birth, who had been summoned from Asia to appear on the stage, were rehearsing their parts, and he stopped to watch and to
encourage them; and had not the leader of the troop complained that he had
a chill, he would have returned and had the performance given at once. From
this point there are two versions of the story: some say that as he was talking
with the boys, Chaerea came up behind, and gave him a deep cut in the neck,
having first cried, Take that, and that then the tribune Cornelius Sabinus,
who was the other conspirator and faced Gaius, stabbed him in the breast.
Others say that Sabinus, after getting rid of the crowd through centurions who
were in the plot, asked for the watchword, as soldiers do, and that when Gaius
gave him Jupiter, he cried So be it, and as Gaius looked around, he split
his jawbone with a blow of his sword. As he lay upon the ground and with
writhing limbs called out that he still lived, the others dispatched him with
thirty wounds; for the general signal was Strike again. Some even thrust their
swords through his privates. At the beginning of the disturbance his bearers
ran to his aid with their poles, and presently the Germans of his body-guard,
and they slew several of his assassins, as well as some inoffensive senators.
He lived twenty-nine years and ruled three years, ten months and eight days.
His body was conveyed secretly to the gardens of the Lamian family, where it
was partly consumed on a hastily erected pyre and buried beneath a light covering of turf; later his sisters on their return from exile dug it up, cremated
it, and consigned it to the tomb. Before this was done, it is well known that
the caretakers of the gardens were disturbed by ghosts, and that in the house
where he was slain not a night passed without some fearsome apparition, until
at last the house itself was destroyed by fire. With him died his wife Caesonia,
stabbed with a sword by a centurion, while his daughters brains were dashed
out against a wall.
One may form an idea of the state of those times by what followed. Not even
after the murder was made known was it at once believed that he was dead,
but it was suspected that Gaius himself had made up and circulated the report,
to find out by that means how men felt towards him. The conspirators too had
not agreed on a successor, and the senate was so unanimously in favour of reestablishing the republic that the consuls called the first meeting, not in the
senate house, because it had the name Julia, but in the Capitol; while some in
expressing their views proposed that the memory of the Caesars be done away
with and their temples destroyed. Men further observed and commented on
the fact that all the Caesars whose forename was Gaius perished by the sword,
beginning with the one who was slain in the times of Cinna.
Source: Suetonius. The Lives of the Twelve Caesars. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. London, 191314, 5660.
D E AT H O F W I L L I A M I I , K I N G O F E N G L A N D
Document 4
DEATH OF WILLIAM II, KING OF ENGLAND
(1100)DESCRIPTION OF WILLIAMS DEATH
BY CHRONICLER PETER OF BLOIS
On August 2, 1100, King William II (known as William Rufus), the son of William I,
the Conqueror, was killed by an arrow while hunting in the New Forest. The arrow
was supposedly shot by Walter Tirel, a member of the hunting party who was later
described as a skilled bowman. Although initial accounts seemed to indicate that the
kings death was an accident, an act of God that brought down divine retribution on
a cruel and wicked king, later historians have seen the death as an assassinated,
perhaps plotted by Williams brother Henry, who in the hunting party that day
and who succeeded his brother on the throne as Henry I. Whereas the assassination
theory is accepted by many modern historians, the death of William II is still controversial. Reproduced below is an account of the kings death written by Peter of Blois
(1070c. 1117), who was a continuator of the possibly spurious chronicle of Ingulf.
Peter, like many chroniclers of the time, viewed William II as a tyrant.
William Rufus reigning over the land, and having with a powerful arm conquered all his adversaries, so much so as to have brought all his foes beneath
the yoke, while there was no one who dared in any way to murmur against
his sway, Ranulph, the bishop of Durham, was his especial adviser in affairs of
state. This Ranulph proved a most cruel extortioner, and being the most avaricious and most abandoned of all men in the land, woefully oppressed the
whole kingdom, and wrung it even to the drawing of blood; while at the same
time Anselm, the most holy archbishop of Canterbury who had succeeded
Lanfranc, dragging out a weary existence in exile beyond sea, mercy and truth
with him had taken to flight from out of the land, and justice and peace had
been banished therefrom. Confession and the fair graces of repentance fell into
disesteem, holiness and chastity utterly sickened away, sin stalked in the streets
with open and undaunted front, and facing the law with haughty eye, daily triumphed, exulting in her abominable success.
Wherefore, the heavens did abominate the land, and, fighting against sinners, the sun and the moon stood still in their abode, and spurning the earth
with the greatest noise and fury, caused all nations to be amazed at their numerous portents. For there were thunders terrifying the earth, lightnings and thunderbolts most frequent, deluging showers without number, winds of the most
astonishing violence, and whirlwinds that shook the towers of churches and
levelled them with the ground. On the earth there were fountains flowing with
blood, and mighty earthquakes, while the sea, overflowing its shores, wrought
infinite calamities to the maritime places. There were murders and dreadful seditions; the Devil himself was seen bodily appearing in many woods; there was
671
672
MURDER OF ARCHBISHOP THOMAS BECKET
a most shocking famine, and a pestilence so great among men, as well as beasts
of burden, that agriculture was almost totally neglected as well as all care of the
living, all sepulture of the dead.
The limit and termination at last of so many woes, was the death of the king,
a cause, to every person of Christian feelings, of extreme grief. For there had
come from Normandy, to visit king William, a very powerful baron, Walter
Tirel by name. The king received him with the most lavish hospitality, and
having honored him with a seat at his table, was pleased, after the banquet
was concluded, to give him an invitation to join him in the sport of hunting.
After the king had pointed out to each person his fixed station, and the deer,
alarmed at the barking of the dogs and the cries of the huntsmen, were swiftly
flying towards the summits of the hills, the said Walter incautiously aimed an
arrow at a stag, which missed the stag, and pierced the king in the breast.
The king fell to the earth, and instantly died; upon which, the body being
laid by a few countrymen in a cart, was carried back to the palace, and on the
morrow was buried, with but few manifestations of grief, and in an humble
tomb; for all his servants were busily attending to their own interests, and few
or none cared for the royal funeral. The said Walter, the author of his death,
though unwittingly so, escaped from the midst of them, crossed the sea, and
arrived safe home in Normandy.
Source: Ingulfs Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland with the Continuation of Peter
of Blois. Translated by Henry T. Riley. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854, 22930.
Document 5
MURDER OF ARCHBISHOP THOMAS BECKET (1170)
THE EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF EDWARD GRIM
On December 29, 1170, four knights entered Canterbury Cathedral and murdered
Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as he prepared to say Mass. The murder was the culmination of a long quarrel between Becket and his former friend, King
Henry II of England. At contention was the right of royal courts to try clergymen; the
king maintained this right, whereas Becket denounced it as an infringement of the
rights and privileges of the English Church. According to tradition, Henry, exasperated by Beckets excommunication of three English bishops, cried out Will no one rid
me of this turbulent priest? What Henry actually said is uncertain, but, whatever
his words, they were interpreted as a call to action by Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de
Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton. The four knights left France,
where Henry was holding court, and returned to England, where they confronted and
killed Becket in his cathedral. After the murder, Becket was held to be a saint and
Canterbury Cathedral became an important pilgrimage site until the Becket shrine
was dismantled in 1538 by order of Henry VIII. Reproduced below is an account
of the murder written by Edward Grim, who was present in the cathedral on December 29, and who was himself injured in an attempt to assist the archbishop.
After the monks took [Thomas] through the doors of the church, the four
aforementioned knights followed behind with a rapid pace. A certain subdeacon, Hugh the Evil-clerk, named for his wicked offense and armed with their
malice, went with themshowing no reverence for either God or the saints
because by following them he condoned their deed. When the holy archbishop entered the cathedral the monks who were glorifying God abandoned
vesperswhich they had begun to celebrate for Godand ran to their father
whom they had heard was dead but they saw alive and unharmed. They hastened to close the doors of the church in order to bar the enemies from slaughtering the bishop, but the wondrous athlete turned toward them and ordered
that the doors be opened. It is not proper, he said, that a house of prayer, a
church of Christ, be made a fortress since although it is not shut up, it serves
as a fortification for his people; we will triumph over the enemy through suffering rather than by fightingand we come to suffer, not to resist. Without
delay the sacrilegious men entered the house of peace and reconciliation with
swords drawn; indeed the sight alone as well as the rattle of arms inflicted not
a small amount of horror on those who watched. And those knights who approached the confused and disordered people who had been observing vespers
but, by now, had run toward the lethal spectacle exclaimed in a rage: Where
is Thomas Becket, traitor of the king and kingdom? No one responded and
instantly they cried out more loudly, Where is the archbishop? Unshaken he
replied to this voice as it is written, The righteous will be like a bold lion and
free from fear, he descended from the steps to which he had been taken by the
monks who were fearful of the knights and said in an adequately audible voice,
Here I am, not a traitor of the king but a priest; why do you seek me? And
[Thomas], who had previously told them that he had no fear of them added,
Here I am ready to suffer in the name of He who redeemed me with His blood;
God forbid that I should flee on account of your swords or that I should depart
from righteousness. With these wordsat the foot of a pillarhe turned to
the right. On one side was the altar of the blessed mother of God, on the other
the altar of the holy confessor Benedictthrough whose example and prayers
he had been crucified to the world and his lusts; he endured whatever the
murderers did to him with such constancy of the soul that he seemed as if he
were not of flesh. The murderers pursued him and asked, Absolve and restore
to communion those you have excommunicated and return to office those who
have been suspended. To these words [Thomas] replied, No penance has
been made, so I will not absolve them. Then you, they said, will now die
673
674
and will suffer what you have earned. And I, he said, am prepared to die
for my Lord, so that in my blood the church will attain liberty and peace; but
in the name of Almighty God I forbid that you hurt my men, either cleric or
layman, in any way. The glorious martyr acted conscientiously with foresight
for his men and prudently on his own behalf, so that no one near him would
be hurt as he hastened toward Christ. It was fitting that the soldier of the Lord
and the martyr of the Savior adhered to His words when he was sought by the
impious, If it is me you seek, let them leave.
With rapid motion they laid sacrilegious hands on him, handling and dragging him roughly outside of the walls of the church so that there they would
slay him or carry him from there as a prisoner, as they later confessed. But when
it was not possible to easily move him from the column, he bravely pushed one
[of the knights] who was pursuing and drawing near to him; he called him
a panderer saying, Dont touch me, Rainaldus, you who owes me faith and
obedience, you who foolishly follow your accomplices. On account of the
rebuff the knight was suddenly set on fire with a terrible rage and, wielding
a sword against the sacred crown said, I dont owe faith or obedience to you
that is in opposition to the fealty I owe my lord king. The invincible martyr
seeing that the hour which would bring the end to his miserable mortal life
was at hand and already promised by God to be the next to receive the crown
of immortalitywith his neck bent as if he were in prayer and with his joined
hands elevated abovecommended himself and the cause of the Church to
God, St. Mary, and the blessed martyr St. Denis.
He had barely finished speaking when the impious knight, fearing that
[Thomas] would be saved by the people and escape alive, suddenly set upon
him and, shaving off the summit of his crown which the sacred chrism consecrated to God, he wounded the sacrificial lamb of God in the head; the lower
arm of the writer was cut by the same blow. Indeed [the writer] stood firmly
with the holy archbishop, holding him in his armswhile all the clerics and
monks fleduntil the one he had raised in opposition to the blow was severed. Behold the simplicity of the dove, behold the wisdom of the serpent in
this martyr who presented his body to the killers so that he might keep his
head, in other words his soul and the church, safe; nor would he devise a trick
or a snare against the slayers of the flesh so that he might preserve himself because it was better that he be free from this nature! O worthy shepherd who
so boldly set himself against the attacks of wolves so that the sheep might not
be torn to pieces! and because he abandoned the world, the worldwanting
to overpower himunknowingly elevated him. Then, with another blow received on the head, he remained firm. But with the third the stricken martyr
bent his knees and elbows, offering himself as a living sacrifice, saying in a low
voice, For the name of Jesus and the protection of the church I am ready to
embrace death. But the third knight inflicted a grave wound on the fallen one;
A S SA S S I N AT I O N O F A L B E R T I O F H A B S B U RG
with this blow he shattered the sword on the stone and his crown, which was
large, separated from his head so that the blood turned white from the brain
yet no less did the brain turn red from the blood; it purpled the appearance of
the church with the colors of the lily and the rose, the colors of the Virgin and
Mother and the life and death of the confessor and martyr. The fourth knight
drove away those who were gathering so that the others could finish the murder more freely and boldly. The fifthnot a knight but a cleric who entered
with the knightsso that a fifth blow might not be spared him who had imitated Christ in other things, placed his foot on the neck of the holy priest and
precious martyr and (it is horrible to say) scattered the brains with the blood
across the floor, exclaiming to the rest, We can leave this place, knights, he
will not get up again.
But during all these incredible things the martyr displayed the virtue of perseverance. Neither his hand nor clothes indicated that he had opposed a murdereras is often the case in human weakness; nor when stricken did he utter
a word, nor did he let out a cry or a sigh, or a sign signaling any kind of pain;
instead he held still the head that he had bent toward the unsheathed swords.
As his bodywhich had been mingled with blood and brainlaid on the
ground as if in prayer, he placed his soul in Abrahams bosom. Having risen
above himself, without doubt, out of love for the Creator and wholly striving
for celestial sweetness, he easily received whatever pain, whatever malice, the
bloody murderer was able to inflict. And how intrepidlyhow devotedly and
courageouslyhe offered himself for the murder when it was made clear that
for his salvation and faith this martyr should fight for the protection of others
so that the affairs of the church might be managed according to its paternal traditions and decrees.
Source: Edward Grim. Vita S. Thomae, Cantuariensis Archepiscopi et Martyris. In
James Robertson, ed., Materials for the Life of Thomas Becket. Vol. II. London:
Rolls Series, 187585.
Document 6
ASSASSINATION OF ALBERT I OF
HABSBURG (1308)ACT V, SCENE 2 OF THE PLAY
WILHELM TELL BY FRIEDRICH SCHILLER (1804)
On May 1, 1308, Albert I, the first king of Germany from the House of Habsburg,
was murdered as he crossed the Reuss River near Windisch. The assassin was Alberts nephew, Duke John of Swabia, who was henceforth known as John the Parricide or John Parricida. Albert had become separated from his attendants, when a
675
676
small party on horseback led by John attacked the German king. John, without any
warning, supposedly charged his uncle and split his skull with a sword. The murder
apparently stemmed from Johns belief that he had been deprived of his inheritance
by Albert, who had forced his younger brother, Johns father, to waive his rights to
the duchies of Austria and Styria. John virtually disappears from the historical record after 1308. Reproduced here is Act V, Scene 2 of Friedrich Schillers 1804 play
Wilhem Tell, in which Tell encounters Duke John, who is on the run after murdering his uncle. John begs for Tells help, saying that, like Tell, he had taken proper
vengeance on an enemy. Tell rejects the dukes arguments and advises him to seek
papal absolution for his crime.
TELL (to the Monk).
You are the Duke Of AustriaI know it.
You have slain The Emperor, your uncle and liege lord.
JOHN.
He robbd me of my patrimony.
TELL.
How! Slain himyour king, your uncle! And the earth
Still bears you! And the sun still shines on you!
JOHN.
Tell, hear me; are you
TELL.
Reeking, with the blood
Of him that was your Emperor, your kinsman,
Dare you set foot within my spotless house,
Dare to an honest man to show your face,
And claim the rights of hospitality?
JOHN.
I hoped to find compassion at your hands.
You took, like me, revenge upon your foe!
TELL.
Unhappy man! Dare you confound the crime
Of blood-imbrued ambition with the act
Forced on a father in mere self-defence?
Had you to shield your childrens darling heads,
To guard your firesides sanctuaryward off
The last, the direst doom from all you loved?
To Heaven I raise my unpolluted hands,
To curse your act and you! I have avenged
That holy nature which you have profaned.
I have no part with you. You murdered, I
Have shielded all that was most dear to me.
JOHN.
You cast me off to comfortless despair!
TELL.
I shrink with horror while I talk with you.
Hence, on the dread career you have begun!
Cease to pollute the home of innocence!
[John turns to depart.]
JOHN.
I cannot and I will not live this life!
TELL.
And yet my soul bleeds for you. Gracious Heaven,
So young, of such a noble line, the grandson
Of Rudolph, once my lord and Emperor,
An outcastmurdererstanding at my door,
The poor mans doora suppliant, in despair!
[Covers his face.]
JOHN.
If you have power to weep, oh let my fate
Move your compassionit is horrible!
I amsay, rather wasa prince. I might
Have been most happy, had I only curbd
The impatience of my passionate desires:
But envy gnawd my heartI saw the youth
Of mine own cousin Leopold endowd
With honour, and enrichd with broad domains,
The while myself, of equal age with him,
In abject slavish nonage was kept back.
TELL.
Unhappy man, your uncle knew you well,
When from you land and subjects he withheld!
You, by your mad and desperate act have set
A fearful seal upon his wise resolve.
Where are the bloody partners of your crime?
JOHN.
Whereer the avenging furies may have borne them;
I have not seen them since the luckless deed.
TELL.
Know you the Empires ban is out,that you
Are interdicted to your friends, and given
An outlawd victim to your enemies!
JOHN.
Therefore I shun all public thoroughfares,
677
678
And venture not to knock at any door

I turn my footsteps to the wilds, and through
The mountains roam, a terror to myself!
From mine own self I shrink with horror back,
If in a brook I see my ill-starrd form!
If you have pity or a human heart
[Falls down before him.]
TELL.
Stand up, stand up! I say.
JOHN.
Not till you give
Your hand in promise of assistance to me.
TELL.
Can I assist you? Can a sinful man?
Yet get ye uphow black soeer your crime
You are a man. I, too, am one. From Tell
Shall no one part uncomforted. I will
Do all that lies within my power.
JOHN (springs up and grasps him ardently by the hand).
Oh, Tell,
You save me from the terrors of despair.
TELL.
Let go my hand! You must away. You can not
Remain here undiscoverd, and, discoverd,
You cannot count on succour. Which way, then,
Would you be going? Where do you hope to find
A place of rest?
JOHN.
Alas! I know not where.
TELL.
Hear, then, what Heaven unto my heart suggests.
You must to Italy,to Saint Peters City
There cast yourself at the Popes feet,confess
Your guilt to him, and ease your laden soul!
JOHN.
Will he not to the avengers yield me up?
TELL.
Whateer he does, accept it as from God.
JOHN.
But how am I to reach that unknown land?
I have no knowledge of the way, and dare not
Attach myself to other travellers.
TELL.
I will describe the road, so mark me well!
You must ascend, keeping along the Reuss,
Which from the mountains dashes wildly down.
JOHN (in alarm).
What! See the Reuss? The witness of my deed!
TELL. The road you take lies through the rivers gorge,
And many a cross proclaims where travellers
Have been by avalanches done to death.
JOHN.
I have no fear for natures terrors, so
I can appease the torments of my soul.
TELL.
At every cross, kneel down and expiate
Your crime with burning penitential tears
And if you scape the perils of the pass,
And are not whelmd beneath the drifted snows,
That from the frozen peaks come sweeping down,
Youll reach the bridge thats drenchd with drizzling spray.
Then if it give not way beneath your guilt,
When you have left it safely in your rear,
Before you frowns the gloomy Gate of Rocks,
Where never sun did shine. Proceed through this,
And you will reach a bright and gladsome vale.
Yet must you hurry on with hasty steps,
You must not linger in the haunts of peace.
JOHN.
O, Rudolph, Rudolph, royal grandsire! Thus
Thy grandson first sets foot within thy realms!
TELL.
Ascending still, you gain the Gotthardts heights,
Where are the tarns, the everlasting tarns,
That from the streams of Heaven itself are fed,
There to the German soil you bid farewell;
And thence, with swift descent, another stream
Leads you to Italy, your promised land.
[Ranz des Vaches sounded on Alp-horns is heard without.]
But I hear voices! Hence!
HEDW. (hurrying in).
Where art thou, Tell?
My father comes, and in exulting bands
All the confederates approach.
679
680
A S SA S S I N AT I O N O F A B R A H A M L I N CO L N
DUKE JOHN (covering himself).

Woes me! I dare not tarry mong these happy men!
TELL.
Go, dearest wife, and give this man to eat.
Spare not your bounty; for his road is long.
And one where shelter will be hard to find.
Quickthey approach!
HEDW.
Who is he?
TELL.
Do not ask!
And when he quits you, turn your eyes away,
So that you do not see which way he goes.
[Duke John advances hastily towards Tell, but he beckons him aside and
exit. When both have left the stage, the scene changes.]
Source: Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2782/pg2782
.html.
Document 7
ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM
LINCOLN (1865)OFFICIAL MESSAGES AND
CORRESPONDENCE RELATING TO THE SHOOTING
OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN (APRIL 15, 1865)
Reproduced below are a series of telegrams and messages that passed between various government and military officers during the early morning hours of April 15,
1865, as President Abraham Lincoln lay dying of the gunshot would he suffered the
night before at Fords Theater in Washington. The messages report the presidents
condition and his death, trace the early stages of the investigation into his murder,
and indicate the growing certainty that John Wilkes Booth was at the head of a
conspiracy to murder not only Lincoln, but also other government officials, such
as Secretary of State William Seward. Among the correspondents are Secretary of
War Edwin M. Stanton; Major-General John Adams Dix, department commander
in New York City; General John Potts Slough, military governor of Alexandria, Virginia; Major-General Christopher Columbus Augur, commander of the Department
of Washington; Brigadier-General John Reese Kenly, commander of the District
of Eastern Shore, Maryland; Samuel B. Lawrence, the assistant adjutant-general;
Major-General George Gordon Meade, the commander of the Army of the Potomac; and Thomas T. Eckert, chief of the War Department telegraph staff.
Secretary Stanton to General Dix

WASHINGTON CITY,
No. 458 Tenth Street,
April 15, 1865
3 A.M. (Sent 3.20 A.M.)
Major-General Dix:
(Care Horner, New York.)
The President still breathes, but is quite insensible, as he has been ever since he
was shot. He evidently did not see the person who shot him, but was looking
on the stage as he was approached behind.
Mr. Seward has rallied, and it is hoped he may live. Frederick Sewards condition is very critical. The attendant who was present was stabbed through the
lungs, and is not expected to live. The wounds of Major Seward are not serious. Investigation strongly indicates J. Wilkes Booth as the assassin of the President. Whether it was the same or a different person that attempted to murder
Mr. Seward remains in doubt. Chief Justice Cartter is engaged in taking the
evidence. Every exertion has been made to prevent the escape of the murderer.
His horse has been found on the road, near Washington.
EDWIN M. STANTON,
Secretary of War.
General Augur to General Slough
HEADQUARTERS DEPARTMENT OF WASHINGTON,
TWENTY-SECOND ARMY CORPS,
Washington, D.C.,
April 15, 18654 A.M.
General SLOUGH, Military Governor:
The murderer of the President is undoubtedly J. Wilkes Booth, the actor. The
other party is a smooth-faced man, quite stout. You had better have a squad
of cavalry sent down toward the Occoquan to intercept anything crossing
the river. The fishermen along the river should be notified and kept on the
lookout.
C. C. AUGUR,
Major-General.
681
682
Adjutant-General Lawrence to General Kenly

BALTIMORE, MD.,
April 15, 18654.20 A.M.
Brig. Gen. J. R. KENLY, Commanding Officer, Wilmington, Del.:
In consequence of the assassination of the President and Secretary of State the most
vigorous measures will be taken in this department to suppress any outbreak.
J. Wilkes Booth, tragedian, is the murderer of Mr. Lincoln. No trains will be
permitted to leave this city. Do your utmost to preserve order and keep a sharp
lookout for Booth. Report your action.
By order:
SAML. B. LAWRENCE,
Assistant Adjutant-General.
Thomas Eckert to General Meade
WASHINGTON,
April 16, 1865.
Major-General MEADE:
The President died at 7.22 yesterday morning. J. Wilkes Booth was the assassin of the President. Secretary Seward passed a bad night, but is much better
this morning and probably out of danger. His son Frederick will not live, although he still lingers with wonderful tenacity.
THOS. T. ECKERT.
(Same to General Sheridan.)
Secretary Stanton to General Dix
WAR DEPARTMENT,
Washington,
April 27, 18659.35 A.M.
Major-General DIX, New York:
J. Wilkes Booth and Herold were chased from the swamp in Saint Marys
County, Md.; pursued yesterday morning to Garretts farm, near Port Royal,
on the Rappahannock, by Colonel Bakers force. The barn in which they
A S S A S S I N AT I O N O F A B R A H A M L I N C O L N
took refuge was fired. Booth, in making his escape, was shot through the head
and killed, lingering about three hours, and Herold captured. Booths body and
Herold are now here.
EDWIN M. STANTON,
Secretary of War.
Source: U.S. War Department. War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official
Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Ser. I, Vol. XLVI/3.
Document 8
ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM
LINCOLN (1865)GENERAL COURT-MARTIAL
ORDERS NO. 356 FOR TRIAL OF THE LINCOLN
ASSASSINATION CONSPIRATORS
Reproduced here are the list of charges and specifications brought against the defendants accused of taking part in the conspiracy to murder President Abraham Lincoln
and other high government officials. John Wilkes Booth, who shot President Lincoln on
April 14, had been killed by federal troops on April 26, but the rest of the conspirators
were brought to trial before a military commission on May 9, 1865.
WAR DEPARTMENT, ADJUTANT-GENERALS OFFICE, Washington,
July 5, 1865.
I. Before a military commission which convened at Washington, D.C., May 9,
1865, pursuant to paragraph 4 of Special Orders, No. 211, dated May 6, 1865,
and paragraph 91 of Special Orders, No. 216, dated May 9, 1865, War Department, Adjutant Generals Office, Washington, and of which Maj. Gen. David
Hunter, U.S. Volunteers, is president, were arraigned and tried
David E. Herold, G. A. Atzerodt, Lewis Payne, Mary E. Surratt, Michael
OLaughlin, Edward Spangler, Samuel Arnold, and Samuel A. Mudd.
CHARGE I: For maliciously, unlawfully, and traitorously, and in aid of the existing armed rebellion against the United States of America, on or before the 6th day
of March, A.D. 1865, and on divers other days between that day and the 15th day
of April, A.D. 1865, combining, confederating, and conspiring, together with one
John H. Surratt, John Wilkes Booth, Jefferson Davis, George N. Sanders, Beverly
Tucker, Jacob Thompson, William C. Cleary, Clement C. Clay, George Harper,
George Young, and others unknown, to kill and murder, within the Military
Department of Washington, and within the fortified and intrenched lines
thereof, Abraham Lincoln, late, and at the time of said combining, confederating,
683
684
and conspiring, President of the United States of America and Commander-inChief of the Army and Navy thereof; Andrew Johnson, now Vice-President of
the United States aforesaid; William H. Seward, Secretary of State of the United
States aforesaid, and Ulysses S. Grant, lieutenant-general of the Army of the
United States aforesaid, then in command of the Armies of the United States,
under the direction of the said Abraham Lincoln; and in pursuance of and in
prosecuting said malicious, unlawful, and traitorous conspiracy aforesaid, and
in aid of said rebellion, afterward, to wit, on the 14th day of April, A.D. 1865,
within the Military Department of Washington aforesaid, and within the fortified and intrenched lines of said military department, together with said John
Wilkes Booth and John H. Surratt, maliciously, unlawfully, and traitorously
murdering the said Abraham Lincoln, then President of the United States and
Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, as aforesaid;
and maliciously, unlawfully, and traitorously assaulting, with intent to kill and
murder, the said William H. Seward, then Secretary of State of the United States,
as aforesaid; and lying in wait, with intent maliciously, unlawfully, and traitorously, to kill and murder the said Andrew Johnson, then being Vice-President
of the United States; and the said Ulysses S. Grant, then being lieutenantgeneral and in command of the Armies of the United States, as aforesaid.
Specification 1.In this, that they, the said David E. Herold, Edward
Spangler, Lewis Payne, Michael OLaughlin, Samuel Arnold, Mary E. Surratt,
George A. Atzerodt, and Samuel A. Mudd, together with the said John H.
Surratt and John Wilkes Booth, incited and encouraged thereunto by Jefferson Davis, George N. Sanders, Beverly Tucker, Jacob Thompson, William C.
Cleary, Clement C. Clay, George Harper, George Young, and others unknown,
citizens of the United States aforesaid, and who were then engaged in armed
rebellion against the United States of America, within the limits thereof, did,
in aid of said armed rebellion, on or before the 6th day of March, A.D. 1865,
and on divers other days and times between that day and the 15th day of
April, A.D. 1865, combine, confederate, and conspire together at Washington City, within the Military Department of Washington, and within the intrenched fortifications and military lines of the said United States, there being,
unlawfully, maliciously, and traitorously to kill and murder Abraham Lincoln,
then President of the United States aforesaid, and Commander-in-Chief of the
Army and Navy thereof; and unlawfully, maliciously, and traitorously to kill
and murder Andrew Johnson, now Vice-President of the said United States,
upon whom, on the death of said Abraham Lincoln, after the 4th day of March,
A.D. 1865, the office of President of the said United States and Commanderin-Chief of the Army and Navy thereof would devolve; and to unlawfully, maliciously, and traitorously kill and murder Ulysses S. Grant, then lieutenant-general,
and, under the direction of the said Abraham Lincoln, in command of the Armies
of the United States aforesaid; and unlawfully, maliciously, and traitorously to
kill and murder William H. Seward, then Secretary of State of the United States
aforesaid, whose duty it was by law, upon the death of said President and VicePresident of the United States aforesaid, to cause an election to be held for electors of President of the United Statesthe conspirators aforesaid designing
and intending by the killing and murder of the said Abraham Lincoln, Andrew
Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, and William H. Seward, as aforesaid, to deprive
the Army and Navy of the said United States of a constitutional commanderin-chief; and to deprive the Armies of the United States of their lawful commander; and to prevent a lawful election of President and Vice-President of
the United States aforesaid; and by the means aforesaid to aid and comfort the
insurgents engaged in armed rebellion against the said United States, as aforesaid, and thereby to aid in the subversion and overthrow of the Constitution
and laws of the said United States.
And being so combined, confederated, and conspiring together in the prosecution of said unlawful and traitorous conspiracy on the night of the 14th
day of April, A.D. 1865, at the hour of about 10 oclock and 15 minutes P.M.,
at Fords Theater, on Tenth street, in the city of Washington, and within the
military department and military lines aforesaid, John Wilkes Booth, one of the
conspirators aforesaid, in pursuance of said unlawful and traitorous conspiracy,
did, then and there, unlawfully, maliciously, and traitorously, and with intent to
kill and murder the said Abraham Lincoln, discharge a pistol, then held in the
hands of him, the said Booth, the same being then loaded with powder and a
leaden ball, against and upon the left and posterior side of the head of the said
Abraham Lincoln; and did thereby, then and there, inflict upon him, the said
Abraham Lincoln, then President of the said United States and Commanderin-Chief of the Army and Navy thereof, a mortal wound, whereof afterward, to
wit, on the 15th day of April, A.D. 1865, at Washington City aforesaid, the said
Abraham Lincoln died; and thereby, then and there, and in pursuance of said
conspiracy, the said defendants and the said John Wilkes Booth and John H.
Surratt did, unlawfully, traitorously, and maliciously, and with the intent to aid
the rebellion as aforesaid, kill and murder the said Abraham Lincoln, President
of the United States, as aforesaid.
And in further prosecution of the unlawful and traitorous conspiracy aforesaid, and of the murderous and traitorous intent of said conspiracy, the said
Edward Spangler, on said 14th day of April, A.D. 1865, at about the same hour
of that day, as aforesaid, within said military department and the military lines
aforesaid, did aid and assist the said John Wilkes Booth to obtain entrance to
the box in said theater in which said Abraham Lincoln was sitting at the time
he was assaulted and shot, as aforesaid, by John Wilkes Booth; and also did
then and there aid said Booth in barring and obstructing the door of the box of
said theater so as to hinder and prevent any assistance to or rescue of the said
Abraham Lincoln against the murderous assault of the said John Wilkes Booth,
685
686
and did aid and abet him in making his escape after the said Abraham Lincoln
had been murdered in manner aforesaid.
And in further prosecution of said unlawful, murderous, and traitorous
conspiracy, and in pursuance thereof and with the intent, as aforesaid, the
said David E. Herold did, on the night of the 14th of April, A.D. 1865, within
the military department and military lines aforesaid, aid, abet and assist the
said John Wilkes Booth in the killing and murder of the said Abraham Lincoln,
and did then and there aid and abet and assist him, the said John Wilkes
Booth, in attempting to escape through the military lines aforesaid, and did
accompany and assist the said John Wilkes Booth in attempting to conceal
himself and escape from justice after killing and murdering said Abraham
Lincoln, as aforesaid.
And in further prosecution of said unlawful and traitorous conspiracy, and
of the intent thereof, as aforesaid, the said Lewis Payne did, on the same
night of the 14th day of April, A.D. 1865, about the same hour of 10 oclock
and 15 minutes P.M., at the city of Washington, and within the military department and the military lines aforesaid, unlawfully and maliciously make
an assault upon the said William H. Seward, Secretary of State, as aforesaid,
in the dwelling-house and bedchamber of him, the said William H. Seward,
and the said Payne did then and there, with a large knife, held in his hand,
unlawfully, traitorously, and in pursuance of said conspiracy, strike, stab, cut,
and attempt to kill and murder the said William H. Seward, and did thereby,
then and there, and with the intent aforesaid, with said knife inflict upon the
face and throat of the said William H. Seward divers grievous wounds. And
the said Lewis Payne, in further prosecution of said conspiracy, at the same
time and place last aforesaid, did attempt, with the knife aforesaid, and a pistol held in his hand, to kill and murder Frederick W. Seward, Augustus H.
Seward, Emrick W. Hansell, and George F. Robinson, who were then striving
to protect and rescue the said William H. Seward from murder by the said
Lewis Payne, and did then and there, with said knife and pistol held in his
hands, inflict upon the head of said Frederick W. Seward, and upon the persons of said Augustus H. Seward, Emrick W. Hansell, and George F. Robinson,
divers grievous and dangerous wounds with intent, then and there, to kill
and murder the said Frederick W. Seward, Augustus H. Seward, Emrick W.
Hansell, and George F. Robinson.
And in further prosecution of said conspiracy and its traitorous and murderous designs, the said George A. Atzerodt did, on the night of the 14th
of April, A.D. 1865, and about the same hour of the night aforesaid, within
the military department and the military lines aforesaid, lie in wait for Andrew Johnson, then Vice-President of the United States aforesaid, with the
intent unlawfully and maliciously to kill and murder him, the said Andrew
Johnson.
And in the further prosecution of the conspiracy aforesaid, and of its murderous and treasonable purposes aforesaid, on the nights of the 13th and
14th of April, A.D. 1865, at Washington City, and within the military department and military lines aforesaid, the said Michael OLaughlin did then and
there lie in wait for Ulysses S. Grant, then lieutenant-general and commander
of the Armies of the United States, as aforesaid, with intent then and there to
kill and murder the said Ulysses S. Grant.
And in further prosecution of said conspiracy, the said Samuel Arnold did,
within the military department and military lines aforesaid, on or before the
6th day of March, A.D. 1865, and on divers other days and times between that
day and the 15th day of April, A.D. 1865, combine, conspire with, and aid,
counsel, abet, comfort, and support, the said John Wilkes Booth, Lewis Payne,
George A. Atzerodt, Michael OLaughlin, and their confederates, in said unlawful, murderous, and traitorous conspiracy and in the execution thereof, as
aforesaid.
And in further prosecution of the said conspiracy, Mary E. Surratt did,
at Washington City, and within the military department and military lines
aforesaid, on or before the 6th day of March, A.D. 1865, and on divers other
days and times between that day and the 20th day of April, A.D. 1865. receive, entertain, harbor and conceal, aid and assist the said John Wilkes
Booth, David E. Herold, Lewis Payne, John H. Surratt, Michael OLanghlin,
George A. Atzerodt, Samuel Arnold, and their confederates, with knowledge
of the murderous and traitorous conspiracy aforesaid, and with intent to aid,
abet, and assist them in the execution thereof, and in escaping from justice
after the murder of the said Abraham Lincoln, as aforesaid.
And in further prosecution of said conspiracy, the said Samuel A. Mudd
did, at Washington City, and within the military department and military
lines aforesaid, on or before the 6th day of March, A.D. 1865, and on divers
other days and times between that day and the 20th day of April, A.D. 1865,
advise, encourage, receive, entertain, harbor and conceal, aid and assist the
said John Wilkes Booth, David E. Herold, Lewis Payne, John H. Surratt, Michael OLaughlin, George A. Atzerodt, Mary E. Surratt, and Samuel Arnold,
and their confederates, with knowledge of the murderous and traitorous
conspiracy aforesaid, and with intent to aid, abet, and assist them in the execution thereof, and in escaping from justice after the murder of said Abraham Lincoln, in pursuance of said conspiracy in manner aforesaid.
To which charge and specification the accused, David E. Herold, G. A. Atzerodt, Lewis Payne, Mary E. Surratt, Michael OLaughlin, Edward Spangler,
Samuel Arnold, and Samuel A. Mudd, pleaded not guilty.
Source: U.S. War Department. War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official
Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Ser. II, Vol. VIII.
687
688
A S SA S S I N AT I O N O F C Z A R A L E X A N D E R I I O F RUS S I A
Document 9
ASSASSINATION OF CZAR ALEXANDER II
OF RUSSIA (1881)PRINCE PETER KROPOTKINS
ACCOUNT OF THE MURDER
On March 13, 1881, Czar Alexander II traveled by carriage to the Mikhailovsky
Mange, an architectural monument in central St. Petersburg. The czar was known
to attend the military roll-call held at the monument every Sunday. On this Sunday,
three members of the Russian terrorist organization Narodnaya Volya (The Peoples
Will) lay in wait for the czar along the route he always took. The first, Nikolai
Rysakov, threw a small bomb wrapped in a handkerchief under the carriage. The
explosion injured the driver and several in the crowd, but the carriage, being bulletproof, was only slightly damaged and Alexander emerged unhurt. Urged on by
Rysakov, who was immediately arrested, the second terrorist, Ignaty Grinevitsky,
tossed a bomb at Alexanders feet, where it exploded, horribly mutilating the czar and
killing or wounding some 20 others. Alexander died shortly thereafter at the imperial
palace. Reproduced below is an account of Alexanders assassination, as well as of attempts on the life of his son, Alexander III, written by Prince Peter Kropotkin, a noted
philosopher, writer, and socialist revolutionary.
For some time before March 13, 1881, Gen. Count Loris Melikoff, the officer responsible for the safety of Czar Alexander II, had received disquieting reports which gave him the greatest anxiety. On the 10th of the month Jelaboff,
the ringleader of the conspiracy, was arrested by accident, and the direction
of the attempt on the Czars life was accordingly left to Sophie Perowskaia, a
young, pretty and highly educated noblewoman, who had left everything to
join the Nihilists. It is said that on the morning of the 13th Melikoff begged the
Czar to forego his purpose of reviewing the Marine Corps, and keep within the
palace. The Emperor laughed at him, and declared there was no danger. There
was no incident until after the review. As the Emperor drove back beside
the Ekaterinofsky Canal, just opposite the imperial stables, a young woman on
the other side of the canal fluttered a handkerchief, and immediately a man
started out from the crowd that was watching the passing of the Czar, and threw
a bomb under the closed carriage. There was a roaring explosion, a cloud of
smoke. The rear of the vehicle was blown away, and the horror-stricken multitude saw the Czar standing unhurt, staring about him. On the ground were
several members of the Life Guard, groaning and writhing in pain. The assassin
had pulled out a revolver to complete his work, but he was at once mobbed by
the people. Col. Dvorjitsky and Captains Kock and Kulebiekan, of the guards,
rushed up to their master and asked him if he was hurt.
Thank God! no, said the Czar. Come, let us look after the wounded.
And he started toward one of the Cossacks.

It is too soon to thank God yet, Alexander Nicolaivitch, said a clear, threatening voice in the crowd, and before any one could stop him, a young man
bounded forward, lifted tip both arms above his head, and brought them down
with a swing. There was a crash of dynamite, a blaze, a smoke, and the autocrat
of all the Russias was lying on the bloody snow, with his murderer also dying
in front of him. Col. Dvorjitsky lifted tip the Czar, who whispered:
I am cold, my friend, so cold, -take me to the Winter Palace to die.
The desperate Nihilist had thrown his bomb right between the Czars feet,
and had sacrificed his own life to kill the Emperor.
Alexander was shockingly mutilated. Both of his legs were broken, and the
lower part of his body was frightfully torn and mangled. The assassinhis name
was Nicholas Elnikoff, of Wilnawas even more badly hurt. He died at once.
The Czar was taken into an open sled, and although it was claimed he received the last sacrament at the Winter Palace, most of those who know believe
that he died on the way there.
In the meantime the police, with the utmost difficulty, rescued the first bombthrower from the maddened mob. The man, whose name proved to be Risakoff,
coolly thanked the officers for preserving him, and then tried to swallow some
poison which he had ready. In this he was foiled, and he was taken to prison.
I said above that Jelaboff, the real leader of the conspiracy, had been arrested
on the 10th. He was merely a suspect, and it was some time before the police
realized what an important arrest had been made. Only two hours before the
murder of the Emperor, Jelaboffs house was searched, and there was found a
great quantity of black dynamite, India rubber tubes, fuses and other articles.
Jelaboff had been living here with a woman who was called Lidia Voinoff. This
Lidia Voinoff was arrested on the Newsky Prospect, on March 22nd, and almost immediately identified as Sophia Perowskaja, the young woman who had
given the handkerchief signal to the bomb-throwers, and who was wanted besides for the Moscow railway mine case. On the prisoner were found papers
which led to the search of a house on Telejewskaia Street, where a man named
Sablin committed suicide immediately on the appearance of the police, and
a woman named Hessy Helfmann was arrested. A regular Nihilist arsenal of
black jelly, fuses, maps of different districts of St. Petersburg, with the Czars
usual routes marked upon them, copies of papers from the secret press, etc.,
were found. While the police were still engaged in the search of the premises Timothy Mikhaeloff came in by accident. He was taken, and on him was
found a copy of the new Czars proclamation, and penciled on the back were
the names of three shops with three different hours in the afternoon. The officers descended on these places and gathered in customers, shop-keepers and
everybody else about the place,a process which brought in Kibaltchik, the
Nihilist chemist and bomb-maker.
689
690
The evidence was soon got in shape, and early in April the trial began. It was
shown that Jelaboff was agent in the third degree of the Revolutionary Executive Committeethat he had issued the call for volunteers for the killing of the
Czar, and that forty-seven persons had offered themselves, out of whom Risakoff, Mikhaeloff, Hessy Helfmann, Kibaltchik, Sophia Perowskaja and Thilkoff
had been accepted. Elnikoff was dead, but the others, with Jelaboff, were put
in the dock. They all confessed except Hessy Helfmann, and upon April iith all
were condemned to death, with the proviso needed under the Russian law that
the sentence of Sophia Perowskaja should be approved by the Czar, as she was a
member of the class of nobles, and a noble may not be put to death without the
Emperors concurrence. The Czar concurred, and on April 15th, at 9 A.M., all the
prisoners save Hessy Helfmann were hung. This woman was reprieved because
she was about to become a mother. The execution was a most brutal one.
The present Czar [Alexander III] has had several narrow escapes, none of
them more nearly fatal than the conspiracy of the book-bomb in March last.
On the 13th of March, 1888, the anniversary of his fathers terrible death, the
Czar made the usual visit to the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul, where the
body of Alexander II is buried. For some time before the ceremony St. Petersburg was full of rumors that a catastrophe was impending, and, although the
police took the most careful precautions, the Czar himself paid no attention
to the warnings of the Third Section, and would permit no alteration in the
preparations for the requiem.
In Christmas week of 1887, the Russian agents at Geneva, in Switzerland,
reported the presence in that city of two revolutionary agents who, seemed to
have the closest relations with the committee of the discontents in London and
Paris. They were shadowed for a time, but lost. In February they reappeared in
Berlin. They were known to be in communication with the St. Petersburg Nihilists. Before facts enough had accumulated to justify their arrest they disappeared
once more and were believed to have gone to the Russian capital. The facts were
reported to the Czar, but he laughed at Chief Gresser of the capital police.
In solemnizing the requiem of the late Czar a public progress was made
to the Cathedral, amid a dense throng of citizens, among whom were all the
detectives that Chief Gresser could get together. In a small cafe in one of the
side streets of the Morokaya two of the detectives ran across a couple of uniformed university studentsin Russia the students have a peculiar costume
who were acting suspiciously. They were conversing in a most excited manner
with a man dressed as a peasant. The trio were watched. At the cafe door they
separated, but all three made by different routes for the Nevsky Prospect, the
chief drive of the capital and the one along which the Czar was to return. The
peasant was lost by the detectives, but the other two were kept in sight, and
the suspicions of the police were made all the more keen by the fact that the
young men passed each other in the crowd several times with an elaborate
A S S A S S I N AT I O N O F J A M E S A . G A R F I E L D
appearance of not knowing each other. One of them had a law-book in his
hand; the other had a traveling bag over his shoulder.
A few moments before the Czar was to pass on his return from the Cathedral
the students came together and whispered, and the two were immediately and
quietly arrested. Their names were given as Andreleff sky and Petroff, university students, and this was proven to be the truth.
A thrilling discovery was made, however, at once. The innocent-looking
law-book was really a most dangerous infernal machine-sufficiently powerful
not alone to kill everybody in the Czars carriage, but many in the crowd. . . .
Hardly had the arrest been made when the Czar was notified at the Cathedral.
He ordered that the news should be withheld from the Empress, although he was
himself visibly affected. He sprang into his sleigh with the Czarowitz, and drove by
an unused route to the railway station. The Czarina followed shortly after in a carriage, greatly agitated by a presentiment of evil. Not until the train had started was
she informed of the occurrence. She burst into tears, and was inconsolable for the
rest of the journey. Once safe in his Gatschina Palace, the Czar is said to have given
vent to his feelings in the strongest language, heaping anathemas upon the heads
of the, Nihilists, and threatening dire revenge.
Less than two hours after the arrest of Andreleff sky and Petroff their companion peasant fell into the hands of the police. His name was Genezeraloff, a
native of Jaroslav, South Russia. He had been actively engaged in the Nihilist
propaganda for some time past. He also carried bombs on his person.
These arrests were supplemented by numerous others. The lodgings of the
prisoners in the suburbs of St. Petersburg known as the Peski (the Sands) were
searched, and other explosives as well as documents incriminating other persons were found. As a result the procession of prisoners to the Peter and Pauls
Fortress for a time was almost unremitting, and no one felt safe against police
intrusion. All three of the prisoners were subsequently executed.
Source: James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard, eds. Readings in Modern
European History. Vol. 2. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1908, 36263.
Document 10
ASSASSINATION OF JAMES A. GARFIELD (1881)
ADDRESS OF VICE PRESIDENT CHESTER A. ARTHUR
UPON ASSUMING THE PRESIDENCY
On July 2, 1881, President James A. Garfield was shot twice from behind as he walked
through a railway station in Washington. The shooter was Charles J. Guiteau, a
disappointed federal office seeker who was mentally unstable. Believing God was
691
692
A S S A S S I N AT I O N O F J A M E S A . G A R F I E L D
telling him to eliminate Garfield, Guiteau stalked the president for weeks armed
with a .44 caliber revolver. Garfield survived until September 19, when he died from
his wounds. Upon Garfields death, Vice President Chester A. Arthur assumed the
presidency. Arthur never delivered an official inaugural address, but instead
gave the following short speech on September 22. In the speech, Arthur focused
upon Garfields death, the stability of the republic, and the peaceful transfer of
power. He promised to continue to focus on the issues that Garfield had begun to
address.
For the fourth time in the history of the Republic its Chief Magistrate has
been removed by death. All hearts are filled with grief and horror at the hideous crime which has darkened our land, and the memory of the murdered
President, his protracted sufferings, his unyielding fortitude, the example and
achievements of his life, and the pathos of his death will forever illumine the
pages of our history.
For the fourth time the officer elected by the people and ordained by the
Constitution to fill a vacancy so created is called to assume the Executive chair.
The wisdom of our fathers, foreseeing even the most dire possibilities, made
sure that the Government should never be imperiled because of the uncertainty of human life. Men may die, but the fabrics of our free institutions remain unshaken. No higher or more assuring proof could exist of the strength
and permanence of popular government than the fact that though the chosen
of the people be struck down his constitutional successor is peacefully installed
without shock or strain except the sorrow which mourns the bereavement. All
the noble aspirations of my lamented predecessor which found expression in
his life, the measures devised and suggested during his brief Administration to
correct abuses, to enforce economy, to advance prosperity, and to promote the
general welfare, to Insure domestic security and maintain friendly and honorable relations with the nations of the earth, will be garnered in the hearts of the
people; and it will be my earnest endeavor to profit, and to see that the nation
shall profit, by his example and experience.
Prosperity blesses our country. Our fiscal policy is fixed by law, is well
grounded and generally approved. No threatening issue mars our foreign intercourse, and the wisdom, integrity, and thrift of our people may be trusted to
continue undisturbed the present assured career of peace, tranquilly, and welfare. The gloom and anxiety which have enshrouded the country must make
repose especially welcome now. No demand for speedy legislation has been
heard; no adequate occasion is apparent for an unusual session of Congress.
The Constitution defines the functions and powers of the executive as clearly as
those of either of the other two departments of the Government, and he must
answer for the just exercise of the discretion it permits and the performance
of the duties it imposes. Summoned to these high duties and responsibilities
A S S A S S I N AT I O N O F M O R G A N E A R P
and profoundly conscious of their magnitude and gravity, I assume the trust
imposed by the Constitution, relying for aid on divine guidance and the virtue,
patriotism, and intelligence of the American people.
Source: James D. Richardson, ed. A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of
the Presidents. Vol.8, Part 2. New York: Bureau of National Literature, Inc.,
1902.
Document 11
ASSASSINATION OF MORGAN EARP (1882)
TOMBSTONE EPITAPH ACCOUNT OF THE MURDER
On March 18, 1882, less than five months after the notorious gunfight at the O.K.
Corral, Morgan Earp, the younger brother of lawman Wyatt Earp, was gunned
down while playing billiards in a Tombstone, Arizona, billiard parlor. Morgan died
less than an hour after being shot. Although several members of the Cowboys outlaw organization, who had been threatening the Earps since some of their associates
had died at the O.K. Corral, were arrested for the crime, the judge eventually dismissed the charges for lack of evidence. Taking the law into his own hands, Wyatt
Earp led a heavily armed posse into the countryside surrounding Tombstone, where,
over a two-week period, the party killed at least four members of the Cowboys who
were thought to have been involved in Morgan Earps murder. Reproduced below is
a report of Morgans death that appeared in the Tombstone Epitaph newspaper
two days after the attack.
The Assassin at Last Successful in His Devilish Mission
Morgan Earp Shot Down and Killed While Playing Billiards
At 10:00 Saturday night while engaged in playing a game of billiards in Campbell & Hatchs Billiard parlor, on Allen between Fourth and Fifth, Morgan Earp
was shot through the body by an unknown assassin. At the time the shot was
fired he was playing a game with Bob Hatch, one of the proprietors of the house
and was standing with his back to the glass door in the rear of the room that
opens out upon the alley that leads straight through the block along the west
side of A.D. Otis & Co.s store to Fremont Street. This door is the ordinary
glass door with four panes in the top in place of panels. The two lower panes
are painted, the upper ones being clear. Anyone standing outside can look
over the painted glass and see anything going on in the room just as well as
though standing in the open door. At the time the shot was fired the deceased
must have been standing within ten feet of the door, and the assassin standing
693
694
A S SA S S I N AT I O N O F W I L L I A M M C K I N L E Y
near enough to see his position, took aim for about the middle of his person,
shooting through the upper portion of the whitened glass. The bullet entered
the right side of the abdomen, passing through the spinal column, completely
shattering it, emerging on the left side, passing the length of the room and lodging in the thigh of Geo. A.B. Berry, who was standing by the stove, inflicting a
painful flesh wound. Instantly after the first shot a second was fired through
the top of the upper glass which passed across the room and lodged in the
wall near the ceiling over the head of Wyatt Earp, who was sitting as a spectator of the game. Morgan fell instantly upon the first fire and lived only about
one hour. His brother Wyatt, Tipton, and McMasters rushed to the side of the
wounded man and tenderly picked him up and moved him some ten feet away
near the door of the card room, where Drs. Matthews, Goodfellow and Millar,
who were called, examined him and, after a brief consultation, pronounced
the wound mortal. He was then moved into the card room and placed on the
lounge where in a few brief moments he breathed his last, surrounded by his
brothers, Wyatt, Virgil, James and Warren with the wives of Virgil and James
and a few of his most intimate friends. Notwithstanding the intensity of his
mortal agony, not a word of complaint escaped his lips, and all that were heard,
except those whispered into the ear of his brother and known only to him
were, Dont, I cant stand it. This is the last game of pool Ill ever play. The first
part of the sentence being wrung from him by an attempt to place him upon
his feet.
The funeral cortege started away from the Cosmopolitan hotel about
12:30 yesterday with the fire bell tolling its solemn peals of Earth to earth,
dust to dust.
Source: The Tombstone Epitaph, The Deadly Bullet, March 20, 1882.
Document 12
ASSASSINATION OF WILLIAM MCKINLEY (1901)
NEWSPAPER ACCOUNTS OF THE SHOOTING
AND DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT
On September 6, 1901, anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley
while he was visiting the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinely
lingered for over a week, dying of his wounds on September 14. Reproduced here are
various newspaper accounts of the shooting and its aftermath. The first article is an
account of the shooting that appeared in the New York Times on September 7. The
article is remarkably detached and adopts the unemotional tone and language of the
physicians reporting on the presidents condition, complete with reports of his vital
statistics. This tone can be interpreted as an example of the ages supreme confidence
in the triumph of reason and science over chaos, or, as the Timess attempt to reassure
the public that despite the attack, all was under control.
In the second article, an editorial from September 8, the New York Times continued in this moderate tone. The editorial describes the assassination attempt as an
act hearkening back to the Old World and that has no place in a modern democratic
nation. The Times assured its readers that the individual violent act of an individual
against the government had no lasting effect when the government was chosen democratically, organized rationally, and secured in stability.
In the third article, also from September 8, the Chicago Tribune used the tragedy
to make comparisons between disorder and order. The Tribune celebrated the publics
restraint in the heat of the moment and the American legal system that would ensure
the assassin got his just deserts. This was much in keeping with the Tribunes general
attitude toward mob violence, for it had been conducting a vigorous campaign against
the lynching of blacks in the South for the past decade. For the Tribune, Czolgoszs
orderly arrestdespite the enormity of his crimewas a vindication of Americas
form of government and the rule of law.
The fourth article, from the San Francisco Chronicle, describes the presidents death
on September 14. The Chronicles description of a peaceful and forgiving McKinley
at the hour of his death might be trite or even a complete fabrication, but it does succeed in promoting a certain confidence that all would be well.
New York Times, September 7
PRESIDENT SHOT AT BUFFALO FAIR
Wounded in the Breast and Abdomen
HE IS RESTING EASILY
One Bullet Extracted, Other Cannot Be Found Assassin is Leon Czolgosz of Cleveland, Who Says He is an Anarchist and Follower of Emma
Goldman
Buffalo, Sept. 6President McKinley, while holding a reception in the
Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition at 4 oclock this afternoon,
was shot and twice wounded by Leon Czolgosz, an Anarchist, who lives in
Cleveland.
One bullet entered the Presidents breast, struck the breast bone, glanced
and was later easily extracted. The other bullet entered the abdomen, penetrated the stomach, and has not been found, although the wounds have been
closed.
The physicians in attendance upon the President at 10:40 oclock to-night
issued the following bulletin:
The President is rallying satisfactorily and resting comfortably. 10:15 P.M.,
temperature, 100.4 degrees; pulse 124; respiration 24.
695
696
P.M. rixey,
m.b. mann,
r.e. parke,
h. mynter
eugene wanbin
Signed by George B. Cortelyou, Secretary to the President.
This condition was maintained until 1 oclock A.M. when the physicians
issued the following bulletin:
The President is free from pain and resting well. Temperature, 100.2; pulse,
120; respiration 24.
The assassin was immediately overpowered and taken to a police station on
the Exposition grounds, but not before a number of the throng had tried to
lynch him. Later he was taken to police headquarters.
The exact nature of the Presidents injuries is described in the following bulletin issued by Secretary Cortelyou for the physicians who were called:
The President was shot about 4 oclock. One bullet struck him on the upper
portion of the breast bone. . . .
Leon Czolgosz, the assassin, has signed a confession, covering six pages
of foolscap, in which he states that he is an Anarchist and that he became an enthusiastic member of that body through the influence of Emma
Goldman, whose writings he had read and whose lectures he had listened
to. He denies having any confederate, and says he decided on the act three
days ago and bought the revolver with which the act was committed in
Buffalo.
He has seven brothers and sisters in Cleveland, and the Cleveland Directory has the names of about that number living in Hosmer Street and Ackland
Avenue, which adjoin. Some of them are butchers and others are in other
trades.
Czolgosz is now detained at Police Headquarters pending the result of the
Presidents injuries. He does not appear in the least degree uneasy or penitent
for his action. He says he was induced by his attention to Emma Goldmans
lectures and writing to decide that the present form of government in this
country was all wrong, and he thought the best way to end it was by the killing of the President. He showed no sign of insanity, but is very reticent about
much of his career.
While acknowledging himself an Anarchist, he does not state to which
branch of the organization he belongs.
Source: New York Times, September 7, 1901.
New York Times, September 8

The Crime and Its Effect
It is one of the elements of wanton atrocity in the crime attempted upon the
President that, had it been successful, it would and could have made no change
of importance in the course of the national life. Had the desire of the assailant
been to secure a change in the Government, it would have been absolutely futile, and must have been known to be so to any person of even low intelligence.
While this fact makes the crime more inexplicable, it is one of immense significance for the American people. It makes plainer than ever the essential stability
of our Government and the degree of completeness with which it serves its
original purpose.
The President may die, and the land will mourn with deep and sincere grief,
but any vacancy in the office, however it may occur, whether it be temporary
or final, is provided for. The Vice President is chosen for precisely that emergency. Whatever may be the opinion of a critical minority as to the excellence
of the choice made last Fall, it was the choice of the legal majority of the voters,
made with full knowledge of the ultimate purpose of the Vice Presidency, and
of the fact, that for seventeen Presidents who have served out the term of their
election there have been four Vice Presidents who have succeeded to the office
of President. The election of Vice President is definitely a contingent election to
the Presidency. If the possible contingency occurs, the incumbent enters on his
duties and powers with the full and explicit authorizations of the popular will
duly expressed. There can be no serious interruption. And the law has taken
care that no interruption shall exist even if the Vice President is also disabled.
The head of each of the important departments is designated to assume in turn
the office that may be left vacant.
Nor does the admirable stability of our Government depend solely on the
forethought with which possible accidents have been provided for. It rests on
deeper foundations. Its peculiar basis is the representative character of the
Government itself. The power lodged therein is not an inheritance, and follows
no line of personal succession. It is derived from the popular will, and it is distributed between the Legislature and the Executive. The share of the latter is
great, but it is substantially subordinate and delegated. The immediate repository of the National will is the Legislature. Both together are but the temporary
agents of the real principal, the people. Year by year, sometimes blindly and
foolishly, but always in the stern school of experience and responsible freedom, the people live their own life, develop their own character, find their way
through the complex conditions of National growth. The passing of the greatest of their servants, even by atrocious violence, cannot deeply disturb, cannot
at all disable their vigorous and steady institutions . . .
697
698
Another feature in the effect of the crime attempted on the President is to

be noted. The feeling that has found universal expression among all classes is,
to a remarkable degree, as much personal as patriotic. It is not the possible vacancy in the office of the Chief Executive that is in the general mind. There has
been hardly a trace of apprehension as to consequences. There has been a deep
sense of sorrow over the suffering and danger of a brave and blameless citizen.
There has been an outpouring of affection for the public servant who had endeared himself to the people and was so unaffectedly one of them in heart and
thought. But the calm, sustained confidence of the Nation in itself has not for a
moment been shaken. Nor, even, if the worst should come, need it be!
Source: New York Times, September 8, 1901.
Chicago Tribune, September 8
Punishing the Assassin
The feeling among law-abiding people everywhereafter the moment of blind
sorrow and angerwill be one of satisfaction that the man who attempted to
assassinate President McKinley was not killed by the excited crowds at Buffalo.
The first and natural impulse in such a case is to slay the offender as summarily as one would crush a venomous insect. If the mob had leaped upon the
assassin and taken his worthless life on the scene of his deed the first impulse
of the nation would have been to exclaim that he deserved it. But this would
have been followed almost instantly by a sober second thought of regret. It is
best that the law should punish lawbreakers. The greater the crime the more
necessary is it that the proper punishment shall be inflicted in accordance with
the dignity and majesty of the law.
If the President should die of his wounds the assassin will be tried according
to the just forms of law and will be put to death as he deserves. If the President
recovers, as the whole nation devoutly hopes, then the criminal will suffer a
corresponding punishment in the form of a prison sentence. In either case, the
law will be vindicated and justice will be done. The dignity and self-restraint
of this orderly procedure in a trying crisis are in themselves a vindication of
the splendid system of government whose Chief Executive has been stricken
down. President McKinley himself would have been the first to deplore the
lynching of his assailant. One of his first thoughts amid the confusion that followed the shooting was to ask that no violence be done to the assassin.
The moral effect of the orderly trial and deliberate punishment of such a
criminal is worth infinitely more than the momentary gratification of the savage instinct of self-preservation which suggests that he be killed on the spot.
Lynching at best is the avenging of one crime by another. It tends to multiply
lawbreakers rather than to decrease their number. For the mob to have torn
the assassin limb from limb would not have undone any of the harm inflicted
by his bullets, but would simply have added a new cause for regret. It would
have been a temporary lapse into the anarchy which this criminal stands for
and which is the enemy of all government except that of brute force. Even the
excited crowds that called for the assassins death realized this fact the moment
their reason had a chance to assert itself.
Source: Chicago Tribune, September 8, 1901.
San Francisco Chronicle, September 14, 1901
Death Stills the Heart of President Mkinley in the Early Morning Hours
Mrs. McKinley with Him during His Last Conscious Moments
Touching Incidents at the Deathbed
BUFFALO, September 14President McKinley died at 2:15 this morning. His
last breath passed calmly and almost imperceptibly. Peace and forgiveness were
written on his white face. He had been unconscious for several hours before the
end came, and his death was free from pain.
Secretary Cortelyou made the announcement. He came out of the Milburn
house and walked slowly down to the newspaper men, who were congregated
behind the rope barrier.
The President died at 2:15 oclock, said he, in an even address.
He then turned and walked back to the house, maintaining even after all was
over, the calm demeanor which has characterized all his actions during the anxious days and the sleepless nights which have passed since the President was shot.
All night the President battled with death. At 10 oclock he was alone in the
combat. Science, skill, infinite tenderness, were beaten and hopeless. Surgeons
and physicians measured his brief span by moments. They had no hope and
offered none. Mystified, baffled and defeated, they stood aside and left William
McKinley alone to face the inevitable.
Meanwhile the nationthe worldstood watching for the final word. Buffalo, where the President was assassinated, stood agape with horror and rage.
Doctors of known and heralded cunning were summoned from all available
quarters. They came by special trains, and were rushed into the presence of
death and its unyielding victim. The wires were hot with summonses for the
Vice-President, for the Cabinet, for the friends nearest to the dying man, and
they came.
From all quarters men who have known the dying man as a man first and
then as a leader of his people came rushing, pale with sad-eyed and hopeless
grief. . . .
Source: San Francisco Chronicle, September 14, 1901.
699
700
A S SA S S I N AT I O N O F A RC H D U K E FR A N Z FE R D I N A N D
Document 13
ASSASSINATION OF ARCHDUKE FRANZ
FERDINAND (1914)AUSTRIAN OFFICIAL
REPORT ON THE ASSASSINATION
The event that triggered World War I was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his morganatic wife, Duchess Sophie, on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, the capital of the Austrian province of Bosnia. The archduke was the nephew
and heir of Emperor Franz Josef II of Austria. The assassin was Gavrilo Princip, a
Bosnian political activist and member of the Black Hand, a Serbian terrorist organization that supported the incorporation of Bosnia into Serbia. Princip shot the imperial couple in the hope of precipitating a crisis within the Austrian Empire that would
facilitate this objective. Black Hand received weapons and assistance from elements
within the Serbian army and secret police, but the extent of Serbian government
involvement in the assassination plot is unclear. The Austrian government, however,
sought to use the assassination as a pretext for taking military action against Serbia. Thus, the Austrian court at Sarajevo that produced the following report on the
murder slanted the report to throw maximum suspicion on the Serbian government.
Record of the District Court at Sarajevo, touching the proceedings there
instituted against Gavrilo Princip and confederates on account of the crime
of assassination perpetrated on June 28, 1914, on His Imperial and Royal
Highness the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este and Her Highness
the Duchess Sophie of Hohenberg.
Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, Trifko Grabez, Vaso Cubrilovic and
Cetres Popovic confess that in common with the fugitive Mehemed Mehmedbasic they contrived a plot for the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand
and, armed with bombs and in the case of some of them with Browning pistols,
laid in wait for him on June 28, 1914, on his progress through Sarajevo for the
purpose of carrying out the planned attack.
Nedeljko Cabrinovic confesses that he was the first of the conspirators to
hurl a bomb against the Archdukes carriage, which missed its mark and which
on exploding injured only the occupants of the carriage following the Archducal motor car.
Gavrilo Princip confesses that he fired two shots from a Browning pistol
against the Archducal motor car, by which the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and
the Duchess Sophie of Hohenberg received fatal wounds.
Both perpetrators confess that the act was done with intent to murder.
These confessions have been fully verified by means of the investigations
which have taken place, and it is established that the deceased Archduke Franz
Ferdinand and the deceased Duchess Sophie of Hohenberg died as a result of
the revolver shots fired at them by Gavrilo Princip.
The accused have made the following declarations, which are essentially
consistent, before the examining magistrate:
In April, 1914, Princip, during his stay at Belgrade, where he associated
with a number of Serbian students in the cafs of the town, conceived the plan
for the execution of an attempt on the life of the late Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He communicated this intention to his acquaintance, Cabrinovic, who
also was in Belgrade at the time. The latter had already conceived a similar idea
and was ready at once to participate in the attempt. The execution of an attempt on the Archdukes life was a frequent topic of conversation in the circle
in which Princip and Cabrinovic moved, because the Archduke was considered to be a dangerous enemy of the Serbian people.
Princip and Cabrinovic desired at first to procure the bombs and weapons
necessary for the execution of the deed from the Serbian Major Milan Pribicevic or from the Narodna Odbrana [Defense of the People, a Serbian independence group founded in 1908], as they themselves did not possess the
means for their purchase. As, however, Major Pribicevic and the authoritative
member of the said association, Zivojin Dacic, were absent from Belgrade at
that time, they decided to try to obtain the weapons from their acquaintance
Milan Ciganovic, who had formerly been a Komitadji [brigand or guerrilla
fighter] and was at that time in the employment of the State railways.
Princip, through the instrumentality of an intimate friend of Ciganovic, now
got into communication with the latter. Thereupon Ciganovic called on Princip and discussed the planned attempt with him. He entirely approved it, and
thereupon declared that he would like to consider further whether he should
provide the weapons for the attempt. Cabrinovic also talked with Ciganovic on
the subject of the weapons.
At Easter Princip took Trifko Grabez, who also was in Belgrade, into his confidence. The latter is also shown by his own confession to have declared himself ready to take part in the attempt.
In the following weeks Princip had repeated conversations with Ciganovic
about the execution of the attempt.
Meanwhile Ciganovic had reached an understanding on the subject of
the planned attack with the Serbian Major Voja Tankosic, who was a close
friend of his and who then placed at his disposal for this object the Browning
pistols.
Grabez confesses in conformity with the depositions of Princip and Cabrinovic that on the 24th of May he, accompanied by Ciganovic, visited Major
Tankosic at the latters request at his rooms. He says that after he had been
introduced Tankosic said to him: Are you the man? Are you determined?
Whereupon Grabez answered: I am. Tankosic next asked: Do you know
how to shoot with a revolver? and when Grabez answered in the negative
Tankosic said to Ciganovic: I will give you a revolver, go and teach them how
to shoot.
701
702
Hereupon Ciganovic conducted Princip and Grabez to the military rifle

range at Topcider and instructed them in a wood adjoining the range in shooting with a Browning pistol at a target. Princip provided himself the better shot
of the two. Ciganovic also familiarized Princip, Grabez and Cabrinovic with
the use of bombs which were given them.
On the 27th of May, 1914, Ciganovic handed over to Princip, Cabrinovic
and Grabez, as their confessions agree in stating, six bombs, four Browning revolvers and a sufficient quantity of ammunition as well as a glass tube of cyanide of potassium with which to poison themselves after the accomplishment
of the deed in order that the secret might be kept. Moreover, Ciganovic gave
them some money.
Princip had previously informed Danilo Ilic, at Easter, of his plan of assassination. He now begged the latter on his return to Sarajevo to enlist certain
additional persons, in order to ensure the success of the attempt. Hereupon Ilic
according to his confession enlisted Jaso Cubrilovic, Cetro Popovic, and Mehemed Mehmedbasic in the plot.
Only one of the bombs was made use of in the execution of the attempt. The
remaining five bombs came later into the possession of the police at Sarajevo.
In the opinion of the judicial experts these bombs are Serbian handgrenades which were factory-made and intended for military purposes. They
are identical with the 21 bombs which were found in the Save at Brcko in the
year 1913 and which were partly in their original packing, which proved without a doubt that they came from the Serbian arsenal of Kragujevatz.
It is thus proved that the grenades which were used in the attempt against
the Archduke Franz Ferdinand also came from the stores of the Army Depot at
Kragujevatz. . . . It is clear how far the criminal agitation of the Narodna Odbrana and those who shared in its views, has of late been primarily directed
against the person of the hereditary Archduke. From these facts, the conclusion may be drawn that the Narodna Odbrana, as well as the associations hostile to the Monarchy in Serbia, which were grouped round it, recently decided
that the hour had struck to translate theory into practice.
It is noteworthy, however, that the Narodna limits itself in this way to inciting, and where the incitement has fallen on fertile soil to providing means of
material assistance for the realization of its plans, but that it has confided the
only dangerous part of this propaganda of action to the youth of the [Hapsburg]
Monarchy, which it has excited and corrupted, and which alone has to bear the
burden of this miserable heroism.
All the characteristics of this procedure are found in men who have been
poisoned from their school days by the doctrines of the Narodna Odbrana. . . .
But however far this plot may have prospered, and however determined the
conspirators may have been to carry out the attempt, it would never have been
effected, if people had not been found, as in the case of Jukic, to provide the
A S S A S S I N AT I O N O F A R C H D U K E F R A N Z F E R D I N A N D
accomplices with means of committing their crime. For, as Princip and Cabrinovic have expressly admitted, they lacked the necessary arms, as well as the
money to purchase them.
It is interesting to see where the accomplices tried to procure their arms.
Milan Pribicevic and Zivojin Dacie, the two principal men in the Narodna Odbrana, were the first accomplices thought of as a sure source of help in their
need, doubtless because it had already become a tradition amongst those ready
to commit crimes that they could obtain instruments for murder from these
representatives of the Narodna Odbrana. The accidental circumstance that
these two men were not at Belgrade at the critical moment doubtless balked
this plan. However, Princip and Cabrinovic were not at a loss in finding other
help, that of Milan Ciganovic, an ex-komitadji, and now a railway official at
Belgrade, and at the same time an active member of the Narodna Odbrana,
who, in 1909, first appeared as a pupil at the school at Cuprija. Princip and
Cabrinovic were not deceived in their expectations, as they at once received
the necessary help from Ciganovic.
Source: Charles F. Horne, ed. Source Records of the Great War. Vol. 1. Indianapolis: National Alumni, 1923, 24751.
Document 14
ASSASSINATION OF ARCHDUKE FRANZ
FERDINAND (1914)EXCERPTS FROM AMERICAN
NEWSPAPER ACCOUNTS OF THE MURDER OF
THE ARCHDUKE AND HIS WIFE
On June 28, 1914, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip, a member of Black Hand, a
Serbian terrorist organization, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the
Austrian throne, and his wife, Duchess Sophie. The murder, which occurred in the
Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, precipitated the outbreak of World War I in August 1914.
Nineteen at the time of the assassination, Princip was instructed, with other wouldbe assassins in the plot, to commit suicide so as to avoid having to divulge the plotters ties to high Serbian military officers. Princip apparently agreed because he had
tuberculosis and expected to die shortly anyway. However, after the assassination,
a bystander stopped Princip before he was able to turn the gun on himself. He was
convicted of murder, but because Austro-Hungarian law allowed capital punishment
only for adults over 20, Princip was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. He died
in prison of tuberculosis in 1918. Reproduced here are accounts of the assassination
that appeared in various American newspapers in the days immediately following
the murder.
703
704
Washington Post, June 29, 1914

Vienna, June 28It is feared that the Sarayevo tragedy will still further embitter the none too friendly relations existing between Austria and Servia. Both the
youth who fired the fatal shots and the bomb thrower are Servians, with close
associations with Belgrade. The bombs also came from Belgrade.
It is likewise remarkable that the first news of the assassination received at
Budapest came from the Servian capital.
Rumors Blame Servia
Many vague rumors are in circulation regarding Servian complicity in the
assassination of the archduke, but it is difficult at the present moment to estimate their accuracy. The two chief criminals are intense Servian chauvinists,
but there is no satisfactory evidence regarding their accomplices or the originator of what is declared to have been a widespread and completely organized
conspiracy.
Ever since the archdukes journey to Bosnia was first announced the authorities have received warnings from various quarters that it was inadvisable for
him to visit Bosnia at the present time. It is said that even the Servian Minister
at Vienna made private representations to this effect, as there were many indications of a recrudescence of pan-Servian agitation in that territory.
Balked Servias Plan
Ever since the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 Servian hatred of
Austria-Hungary has been steadily increasing. The events of the last Balkan
war, when Austria-Hungary stood in the way of Servias ardent desire to secure
an Adriatic port and openly sided with Bulgaria against her former allies, still
further estranged the Servian people.
The Servians were disinclined to believe that the emperor at his advanced
age was initiating any anti-Servian policy, and attributed it mainly to the archduke. The archduke also was believed to be a foe to the pan-Servian movement, and it is thought probable some such motives as these may have inspired
the plot which culminated so tragically at Sarayevo.
Source: Washington Post, June 29, 1914.
Washington Post, June 29, 1914
Possible Consequences of Archdukes Assassination
The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and his wife will strike
terror to the heart of every crowned head in Europe. The act stands as an
appalling reminder of the peril in which kings and princes live and move,
whether they are hated and hunted, or whether they have gained the loyalty
and love of their subjects, as had the Archduke Ferdinand. There was no
apparent reason for his taking off; but the absence of political or personal
motive more sharply emphasizes the danger of assassination at the hands of
lunatics and anarchists.
The empire of Austria-Hungary may be profoundly affected by Ferdinands
death. Emperor Franz Joseph is near his end, and the prospect of a transfer of
power to Ferdinand was acceptable to the people. He had proved himself a
good soldier and an able statesman, devoted to the empire, ambitious for its
aggrandizement, and strong-willed enough to defend its interests in the midst
of the tangled politics of western and southeastern Europe. He was credited
with being the controlling mind in Austrian policies with respect to the Balkans and Italy.
The extinction of Ferdinand as a factor in the Balkan situation may have farreaching consequences, when it is borne in mind that the kingdom of Servia is
rent with internal strife, and that Greece and Turkey are bent upon a renewal
of hostilities. The map of the Balkans, radically altered within the last three
years, seems to be subject to further alterations as a result of the weakening of
Austria-Hungarys influence.
Source: Washington Post, June 29, 1914.
Atlanta Journal & Constitution, June 29, 1914
Heir to Austro-Hungarian Throne and Wife Murdered in Serbia
The archduke and his wife were victims of the second attempt in the same day
against their lives. First a bomb was thrown at the automobile in which they
were driving to the town hall. Forewarned, however, of a possible attempt
against his life, the archduke was watchful and struck the missile aside with
his arm. It fell under the automobile following which carried members of the
archdukes suite, wounding count Von Boos-Waldeck and Colonel Merizzo.
Darted at Car and Fired
On their return from the town hall the archduke and the duchess were driving to the hospital when Gavrio Prinzip darted at the car and fired a volley at
the occupants. His aim was true and the archduke and his wife were mortally
wounded. With them at the time was the governor of the city, who escaped
injury. The bodies of his murdered companions collapsed across him and protected him from stray bullets.
The governor shouted to the chauffeur to rush to the palace. Physicians
were in prompt attendance, but their services were useless, as the archduke
and his wife were dead before the palace was reached.
705
706
Weeping Women Seen in Groups

Until the emperors wishes are known the bodies will lie in state at the palace
here. They will doubtless be interred in the Hapsburg vaults in the Capuchin
church at Vienna.
In Sarajevo there is mourning everywhere with black draped flags and
streamers on all public buildings. Throughout the day weeping women were
to be seen in groups, while great crowds surrounded the spots where the fatal
shots were fired. The bomb was filled with nails and lead filings, and the explosion was violent. The iron shutters on many shops were pierced by flying
fragments and iron railings were shattered. About a score of persons were injured, several of them women and children.
Source: Atlanta Journal & Constitution, June 29, 1914.
New York Times, June 29, 1914
Archduke Ignored Warning Not to Go to Bosnia
Servian Minister Feared Trouble If Heir Went to Bosnia
VIENNA, June 28When the news of the assassination of the Archduke
Francis Ferdinand and the Duchess was broken to the aged Emperor Francis
Joseph he said: Horrible, horrible! No sorrow is spared me.
The Emperor, who yesterday left here for Ischl, his favorite summer resort,
amid acclamations of the people, will return to Vienna at once, in spite of the
hardships of the journey in the terrible heat.
The Archduke, who was created head of the army, went to Bosnia to represent the Emperor at the grand manoeuveres there. This was the first time the
Archduke had paid an official visit to Bosnia. The Emperor visited the provinces immediately after their annexation, in 1908, and the manner in which
he mixed freely with the people was much criticised at the time, as those in
his party were always afraid lest some Slave or Mohammedan fanatic might attempt the monarchs life. The emperors popularity, however, saved him from
all danger of this kind.
Before the Archduke went to Bosnia last Wednesday the Servian Minister
here expressed doubt as to the wisdom of the journey, saying the country was
in a very turbulent condition and the Servian part of the population might organize a demonstration against the Archduke. The Minister said if the Archduke went himself he certainly ought to leave his wife at home, because Bosnia
was no place for a woman in its present disturbed state.
The Ministers word proved correct. The people of Sarajevo welcomed the
Archduke with a display of Servian flags, and the authorities had some difficulty removing them before the Archduke made his state entry into the city
yesterday, after the conclusion of the manoeuvres. . . .
The boy must have been carefully instructed in his part, for it was a wellguarded secret that the Archduke always wore a coat of silk strands which were
woven obliquely, so that no weapon or bullet could pierce it. I once saw a strip
of this fabric used for a motor-car tire, and it was puncture-proof. This new invention enabled the Archduke to brave attempts on his life, but his head naturally was uncovered.
The Duchess was shot in the body. The boy fired several times, but only two
shots took effect. The Archduke and his wife were carried to the Konak, or palace, in a dying condition.
Later details show that the assassin darted forth from his hiding place behind a house and actually got on the motor car in which the Archduke and
his wife were sitting. He took close aim first at the Archduke, and then at the
Duchess. The fact that no one stopped him and that he was allowed to perpetrate the dastardly act indicate that the conspiracy was carefully planned and
that the Archduke fell a victim to a political plot. The aspiration of the Servian
population in Bosnia to join with Servia and form a great Servian kingdom is
well known. No doubt todays assassination was regarded as a means of forwarding this plan.
Break News to Children
The Archdukes children are at Glumex, in Bohemia, and relatives already have
left Vienna to break the news to them. The Duke of Cumberland motored to
Ischl immediately upon receipt of the news and was received by the Emperor,
who will arrive in Vienna at 6 oclock tomorrow. The bodies of the Archduke
and his wife will not be brought to Vienna until tomorrow a week.
The Archduke Charles Francis Joseph, the new heir to the throne, is at
Reichenau, near Vienna, with his wife, Princess Zita of Parma, and their little
son and daughter. He is expected in Vienna tonight.
When the first news of the assassination became known in Vienna, early this
afternoon, crowds collected in solemn silence and discussed the report, which
was not credited at first. Everyone connected with the press was stormed by
crowds asking whether confirmation had been received, and on hearing the
truth they said, How awful! and then dispersed, to go about their ordinary
business or pleasure.
Source: New York Times, June 29, 1914.
Christian Science Monitor, June 29, 1914
Assassination Is Another Test for Austria-Hungary
Few men have experienced greater sorrows than the Emperor Franz Josef and
none have borne them with more serene fortitude. The latest, however, of these
707
708
misfortunes extends far beyond the interest of his private life. It raises questions not only of national but of European importance. . . . What all this will
mean no man can tell.
Source: Christian Science Monitor, June 29, 1914.
New York Times, June 29, 1914
Assassinations Exact Brutal Revenge for Austria
Hungarys Seizure of Bosnia
Some weeks since, when the life of the emperor Francis Joseph was daily despaired of, the whole world, in spite of its sympathy with the courageous old
ruler of Austria-Hungary, felt that there would be compensation for his loss in
the likelihood that his successor, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, would be
able to hold together the various States united under Austrian rule. He was accounted a popular Prince, a sagacious and resourceful man, and he was known
throughout the empire. Today the situation is changed. The heir to the throne is
dead, the chief victim of one of the most horrible assassinations ever shamefully
associated with the sacred cause of liberty. The old Emperors failing health is
rendered still more precarious by the shock of this murder, and the prospect that
the tremendous responsibilities of his kingship may shortly fall upon a young
man whose capacity for rule has never been proved must disturb all Europe.
For the present, however, the unutterable brutality of the slaughter of the
Archduke and the wife for whose sake he risked all his kingly prospects, and
the wounding of some members of their escort, absorbs the attention. No political murder was ever more deliberately performed. It was a festal day in Sarajevo, and there was no suspicion that the heir to the throne and the lady who
has been looked upon throughout all Austria and its dependences as a popular
idol were in any danger. The event proves that the successor to Francis Josephs
throne will have a task set before him which might bewilder the most heroic
mind. This murder was inspired not by the spirit of anarchy, but by revenge.
The seizure by Austria of Bosnia and Herzegovina was high-handed and in defiance of the concert of Europe. The act has been punished in a manner which
reflects no credit on Bosnia.
Source: New York Times, June 29, 1914.
Atlanta Journal & Constitution, June 30, 1914
Assassination Will Only Increase Instability in Balkans
Abhorrent as is assassination under any conditions, it is doubly sinister in the
cases of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne,
A S S A S S I N AT I O N O F E M I L I A N O Z A PATA
and his wife. The bloody deed climaxes the fatalities that have followed the
House of Hapsburg with the relentlessness of Nemesis.
While the assassination seems to have been of Servian origin, the circumstances under which it transpired simply illustrate the loose manner in which
the Austria-Hungarian empire is hung together. In this respect, the domain
over which Francis Joseph has held sway is one of the most complicated, if not
the most complicated, in all Europe.
Austrias insatiable land lust has led her to absorb peoples of totally dissimilar birth, breeding and traditions. The tragedy at Sarajevo is the tragedy of inherited hatreds, of racial antipathies, religious and tribal feuds reaching back
many years for their origins.
In its personal aspects, the affair is sorrowful enough. Ferdinand seems to
have been a rather forceful character, gallant and fearless of danger. His marriage to the Bohemian countess, Sophie Chotek, illustrates his independence.
Francis Joseph and the Austrian politicians generally opposed the marriage
since, under the Hapsburg laws, any children born of such a union were ineligible to royal rank or succession. But Ferdinand stubbornly rejected any efforts to enter into a typical royal marriage of convenience, and instead made
a marriage in which he served his affections rather than political interests. The
marriage was, of course, a morganatic one, and bars his wife and children from
any of the royal prerogatives of husband and father.
The principal menaces of the assassination are in the intensification of bitterness between Servia and Austria, and the unrest that is bound to follow in
the other heterogeneous elements of the empire.
Source: Atlanta Journal & Constitution, June 30, 1914.
Document 15
ASSASSINATION OF EMILIANO ZAPATA (1919)
THREE ACCOUNTS OF THE AMBUSH
On April 10, 1919, the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata was killed, the victim
of an act of betrayal and assassination that shocked not only his followers, known as
Zapatistas, but even high members of the Constitutionalist government then in power.
The plot was hatched by General Pablo Gonzlez, some believe in collaboration with
Venustiano Carranza, the president of the Mexican Republic. In March, Zapata discovered that Gonzlez was embroiled in a conflict with one of his subordinates, Colonel
Jess Guajardo. As had happened often during the Mexican Revolution, Zapata hoped
to suborn Guajardo and convince him to switch sides; he therefore proposed this in
a letter to the colonel. Gonzlez instructed Guajardo to play along, in the hopes of
709
710
trapping and killing Zapata. Guajardo lured Zapata to the Chinameca Hacienda on
April 10, where an ambush killed Zapata and a small number of his personal escorts.
Leadership of the Zapatistas passed to Gildardo Magaa, but the death of Zapata
demoralized his movement and prompted efforts to find the way out of the civil war
without losing everything that Zapatas peasant rebels had achieved in their state of
Morelos. As it turned out, the exit from the labyrinth appeared in the form of an Obregonista rebellion against Carranza one year later, in April 1920.
The three documents reproduced below address the killing of Zapata. The first two
are the earliest known reports of the ambush. The first is by Salvador Reyes, Zapatas
personal secretary, who survived the ambush and sent his account to Magaa later
that day. The second is Guajardos version, sent to Pablo Gonzlez five days after the
fact. The final document is from a Mexican American newspaper, El Heraldo Mexicano (The Mexican Herald) published in Los Angeles, California, which expresses
the grief and shock felt by many Mexicans abroad. The author of the article, Ramn
Puente, blames Carranza for the killing and compares him to Shakespeares Macbeth,
who was prepared to commit murder in pursuit of his political ambitions.
Zapata Was Treacherously Murdered
Salvador Reyes Avils,
April 10, 1919
It is with profound sorrow that I must inform you that today, at half past
one P.M., Citizen General-in-Chief, Emiliano Zapata was treacherously murdered by the troops of Colonel Jess Guajardo. They carried out this premeditated and cowardly act at the Hacienda of San Juan Chinameca. So that you are
properly informed about this tragic event I will recount the following details:
As you know, we had learned about the deep discord between Pablo
Gonzlez and Jess Guajardo. As a result, General Zapata wrote to the latter
with an invitation to join the revolutionary movement.
Guajardo replied to this letter: I am ready to work alongside you, as long
as you give sufficient guarantees for me and my soldiers. Citizen General-inChief Zapata immediately answered Guajardo and offered every kind of assurances and congratulated him for being a man of his word and a gentleman,
who will honour his promises to the letter. The negotiations continued in this
way, by correspondence.
That very day, in order to definitively arrange things, the Citizen General-inChief sent Citizen Colonel Feliciano Palacios to Guajardos camp in San Juan
Chinameca. He remained with Guajardo until yesterday at four in the morning, when Guajardo headed to Jonacatepec. Palacios wrote two letters to the
Chief, copies of which are attached to this. Here I must mention a fact that
made Citizen General-in-Chief Zapata confident in the sincerity of Guajardo.
The rumours were circulating publicly that Guajardo was negotiating to join
with Citizen General Zapata. These rumours were so widespread that some
villagers asked the Citizen General-in-Chief to punish some traitors who were
responsible for looting, rapes, murders and robberies. These were committed
by Victoriano Brcenes and his men who were then under the command of
Guajardo.
In view of this justified request Citizen General Zapata ordered Guajardo
to arrest Brcenes and 59 of his soldiers, under the command of General Margarito Ocampo and Colonel Guillermo Lpez. They were all disarmed by
Guajardo at a place called Mancornadero. This was yesterday while Guajardo
was in Jonacatepec.
Upon learning this we went to Pastor Station, and from there Palacios wrote
to Guajardo, by order of the Chief, to say that we would meet in Tepalcingo.
General Zapata planned go with thirty men and asked Guajardo to do likewise.
The Chief ordered the rest of his men to withdraw and headed to Tepalcingo
with thirty men, where we waited for Guajardo. Guajardo arrived at four pm,
but not with thirty soldiers. He had sixty cavalry and a machine gun.
It was there that we saw for the first time the man who, the next day, would
be the murderer of our General-in-Chief, who with all the nobility of his soul
received him with opened arms. He smiled and said: My Colonel Guajardo,
I congratulate you with all my heart! At 10 PM, we left Tepalcingo and headed
for Chinameca, where Guajardo arrived with his column. It was nearly eight in
the morning at Chinameca.
The Chief then ordered his people (150 men had joined us in Tepalcingo)
to wait in the courtyard. Meanwhile he, Guajardo, Colonels Castrejn, Casals
y Camano, and Colonel Palacios, went to discuss the coming campaign. A few
moments later rumours began to spread that the enemy was approaching. So
the Chief ordered Colonel Jos Rodrguez of his escort to take some men and
scout towards Santa Rita. Then Guajardo said to the Chief: General, if you
head towards Piedras Encimada, I will head towards the plain. The Chief
agreed and took thirty men to the point indicated. Getting ready to march,
Guajardo mustered his men, and returned saying: My General, I am at you orders. Will you take Infantry or Cavalry?
The plain has a lot of fences; you take the infantry replied General Zapata. At
Piedras Encimadas we explored the countryside but, seeing no enemy movement, we returned to Chinameca. It was approximately half past twelve. The
Chief sent Colonel Palacios to Guajardo, to ask about the promised delivery of
five thousand cartridges.
Then Captain Ignacio Castillo and a sergeant presented themselves, and
in the name of Guajardo invited the Chief to enter the Hacienda, where Guajardo and Palacios were arranging things. We waited another half an hour
with Castillo, and after repeated invitations, the Chief agreed. Were going to
711
712
see the Colonel; no more than ten men are going with me, he ordered, mounting the sorrel horse that Guajardo had given him the previous day.
He approached the door of the house of the Hacienda. As ordered, we ten
men followed, leaving the others to rest confidently under the shade of the
trees with their carbines at rest. The guard formed and seemed ready to do our
Chief honours. The bugle sounded the call of honour three times, and as it
played the last note our General-in-Chief arrived at the threshold of the door.
Then in the most perfidious, most cowardly, and most villainous manner, at
point blank range, and without giving him time to draw his pistols, the soldiers who were presenting arms fired their rifles twice and our unforgettable
General Zapata fell, never to rise again!
His faithful assistant Agustn Cortes died at the same time. Palacios also
must have been killed inside the Hacienda. The surprise was terrible. Soldiers
of the traitor Guajardo were high up in the parapets, in the plain, in the gully,
and everywhere (about a thousand men) and they discharged their weapons
against us. Very soon resistance was futile. On the one hand, we were a handful of men shocked by the loss of our Chief, and on the other hand, the enemy
soldiers took advantage of our natural confusion to attack us fiercely. That was
the tragedy. So it happened. Guajardo betrayed the nobility of our General-inChief. So Emiliano Zapata died.
Official Report on the Assassination of Zapata
Colonel Jess Guajardo,
April 15, 1919
Commander:
I am honoured to report on the operations carried out during April 8 to 10 of
this month.
April 8: Having received instructions from Citizen General-in-Chief of the
Army Corps of Operations in the South, Pablo Gonzalez, I left with my escort
heading towards Chinameca at 8:15 AM, arriving at Moyotepec at 11 AM the
same day. There I waited for an escort of fifty men commanded by a second
captain. I left that point and reached Chinameca at 3 PM. I then proceeded to
communicate with Emiliano Zapata through the so-called General Feliciano
Palacios, secretary of the aforementioned Zapata, who spent a few days with
our detachment, finalizing arrangements to incorporate me and my men, unknown to the Supreme Government, receiving later instructions.
April 9: At one oclock this morning, leading my men, mounted, fully armed
and well-supplied with ammunition, we left the Chinameca Hacienda heading to Huichila Station, arriving there at 7 am, where we foddered the horses
and received instructions for the attack on Jonacatepec. We headed there at
9 AM and arrived within a kilometre of that place at 12:45 PM, where, as agreed,
I met the men waiting for me, led by Citizen Captain Salgado, of the 66th Regiment. We then proceeded to attack and capture the plaza, fighting for half an
hour, losing two men of the troop who died in the battle.
At 4 PM, I left Jonacatepec to meet Emiliano Zapata for the first time in front
of the Pastor Station, bringing approximately 600 men. I was well received by
the southern ringleader, who expressed his desire to meet my officers. This was
done immediately. I was invited to move out to Tepalcingo, where Zapata accepted my forces. We spent the night there, where there was a force of Zapatistas of close to 1300.
At 8 AM, Zapata, with a force of approximately four hundred men, came to
inform me that Constitutionalist forces numbering three thousand were advancing to attack us. He gave orders to some of his forces to fight them and ordered to me to stay in my place. Meanwhile Emiliano and his escort occupied
Piedra Encimada in order to repel an attack.
At this time the so-called Generals Castrejn, Zeferino Ortega, Lucio Bastida,
Gil Muoz and Jess Capistrn arrived, bringing with them forces close to
2500 men.
At 1:30 PM, I was at the Hacienda with Castrejn, Palacios, Bastida and another general whose name I do not remember, who came to call for Emiliano
Zapata. Citizen Captain Salgado also arrived at this time.
At 2 PM, Zapata arrived with 100 to enter the Hacienda. I had arranged in
advance to have the guard at the entrance give him honours, with orders to fire
on the ringleader at the second call of honour, while the rest of the force was organized and ready to fight his men. The result was that at 2:10 PM he appeared
before the guard who opened fire and killed Emiliano Zapata himself, Zeferino
Ortega, and Gil Muoz as well as other generals and troops who could not be
identified. The casualties, dead and wounded, were approximately 30 men.
At the same time, I personally shot Palacios, while Castrejn y Bastida was
also killed on the spot. I note that Citizen Captain Salgado, who had been at
my side left at the precise time of discharge, returning moments later. There
was already a mounted force that pursued the enemy in different directions to
completely disperse them, leaving large numbers of dead and wounded, including the so-called General Capistrn.
An hour later, the bugler sounded Bota Silla with the aim delivering the
corpse of Zapata. Half an hour later, at 4 PM, I left the Hacienda with my
force, heading towards Cuautla, where we arrived at 9:10 PM, delivering the
corpse to Citizen General-in-Chief of the Army Corps of Operations in the
South, Pablo Gonzlez, as proof that I fulfilled the order I was given 60 hours
earlier.
This day, we lost 16 men.
I am honoured, my General, to present my obedience and respect.
713
714
The Death of Zapata

Dr. Ramn Puente,
May 19, 1919
Carranza must be content, for killing Zapata must mean to him, more or less,
what it meant for Huerta to have murdered Madero. It is the eternal mistake of
all tyrants who believe that their enemies are men, not the ideas that these men
embody. Zapata, much more than a man, represented and will continue to represent the unstoppable strength of an idea.
The death of this fighter does mean the disappearance of a great enemy of
Carranza, an enemy who was as much his rival as Francisco Madero and Francisco Villa. But Zapatismo is not finished, and will yet rise from the ashes of
its apostle and martyr. A new champion will appear before Carranza, like the
shadow of Banquo at Macbeths banquet, the character in Shakespeares tragedy
who symbolizes the homicidal madness of political ambition.
Carranza, with a cold heart, but with a conscience dripping in bloodand
which cannot be cleaned with oceans of waterhas seen many revolutionaries fall, men who dreamed of a better Mexico in good faith and without political ambitionsuch men as Calixto Contreras the good, Orestes Pereyra the
honest, and Zapata the visionary. They were simple men who took to heart the
cause of the humble classes to which they belonged and who were ready to
sacrifice their lives for a moral and transcendental ideal.
The revolution was of the people and for the people, but Carranza, when
he came to the revolution, never understood this. He wanted the Presidency
of the Republic, with such a voracious ambition that he used every means to
achieve it. He has tolerated the excesses of revolutionaries, and has pretended
to be a reformer with principles that he has never had, either in his mind or in
his soul. He has only managed to be a dagger wielded against many good men
and the source of hatreds that have divided those who should be brothers.
Zapata is deadand the deaths of giants are always a joy to dwarvesbut
his blood is rich with the demand for justice. The time of redemption for the
proletarians is approaching, for those who yearn for land usurped by large
landowners. Zapata was one [of] the first to struggle for this ideal and everyone
heard his call. Villa also may disappear, but his revolutionary strength is also
great and tenacious, and he will not be forgotten either. On the other hand,
Carranza will go to his grave stained with blood, and History will one day ask
in anger, just as God asked the son of Adam: Cain, Cain! What have you done
to your brother?
Source: Reprinted from Chris Frazer, ed. Competing Voices from the Mexican
Revolution. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009.
A S S A S S I N AT I O N O F S E N AT O R H U E Y P. L O N G
Document 16
ASSASSINATION OF SENATOR HUEY P. LONG
(1935)SENATOR LONGS SHARE
THE WEALTH PROGRAM (1934)
Senator Huey P. Long was a flamboyant, populist politician who dominated the politics of his home state of Louisiana, where he was wildly popular. In February 1934, in
the following statement that Long had read into the congressional record, he laid out
his Share the Wealth program for lifting the country out of the Great Depression.
The plan contained some elements in common with President Franklin D. Roosevelts
New Deal, such as old-age pensions for persons over 60 and public works projects
to provide employment. However, it also proposed caps on how much net worth an
individual could accumulate and limits on annual incomes and inheritances as well
as higher taxes on the wealthy. Many viewed the Share the Wealth Society that Long
founded to promote the program as merely a vehicle for a possible third party challenge to Roosevelt in 1936. When this was true or not, Longs ambition was stilled on
September 8, 1935, when he was shot in the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge
by Dr. Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of a long-time political opponent. Weiss was shot
and killed by Longs bodyguards and Long, who was wounded in the abdomen, died
two days later.
Mr. Long: Mr. President, I send to the desk and ask to have printed in the
RECORD not a speech but what is more in the nature of an appeal to the people of America.
There being no objection, the paper entitled Carry Out the Command of
the Lord was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
By Huey P. Long, United States Senator
People of America: In every community get together at once and organize a
share-our-wealth societyMotto: Every man a king
Principles and platform:
1. To limit poverty by providing that every deserving family shall share in
the wealth of America for not less than one third of the average wealth,
thereby to possess not less than $5,000 free of debt.
2. To limit fortunes to such a few million dollars as will allow the balance of
the American people to share in the wealth and profits of the land.
3. Old-age pensions of $30 per month to persons over 60 years of age
who do not earn as much as $1,000 per year or who possess less than
$10,000 in cash or property, thereby to remove from the field of labor in
times of unemployment those who have contributed their share to the
public service.
715
716
4. To limit the hours of work to such an extent as to prevent overproduction and to give the workers of America some share in the recreations,
conveniences, and luxuries of life.
5. To balance agricultural production with what can be sold and consumed
according to the laws of God, which have never failed.
6. To care for the veterans of our wars.
7. Taxation to run the Government to be supported, first, by reducing big
fortunes from the top, thereby to improve the country and provide employment in public works whenever agricultural surplus is such as to
render unnecessary, in whole or in part, any particular crop.
Simple and ConcreteNot an Experiment
To share our wealth by providing for every deserving family to have one third
of the average wealth would mean that, at the worst, such a family could have
a fairly comfortable home, an automobile, and a radio, with other reasonable
home conveniences, and a place to educate their children. Through sharing
the work, that is, by limiting the hours of toil so that all would share in what
is made and produced in the land, every family would have enough coming in
every year to feed, clothe, and provide a fair share of the luxuries of life to its
members. Such is the result to a family, at the worst.
From the worst to the best there would be no limit to opportunity. One
might become a millionaire or more. There would be a chance for talent to
make a man big, because enough would be floating in the land to give brains
its chance to be used. As it is, no matter how smart a man may be, everything
is tied up in so few hands that no amount of energy or talent has a chance to
gain any of it.
Would it break up big concerns? No. It would simply mean that, instead of
one man getting all the one concern made, that there might be 1,000 or 10,000
persons sharing in such excess fortune, any one of whom, or all of whom,
might be millionaires and over.
I ask somebody in every city, town, village, and farm community of America
to take this as my personal request to call a meeting of as many neighbors and
friends as will come to it to start a share-our-wealth society. Elect a president
and a secretary and charge no dues. The meeting can be held at a courthouse,
in some town hall or public building, or in the home of someone.
It does not matter how many will come to the first meeting. Get a society
organized, if it has only two members. Then let us get to work quick, quick,
quick to put an end by law to people starving and going naked in this land of
too much to eat and too much to wear. The case is all with us. It is the word
and work of the Lord. The Gideons had but two men when they organized.
Three tailors of Tooley Street drew the Magna Carta of England. The Lord says:
For where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the
midst of them.
We propose to help our people into the place where the Lord said was their
rightful own and no more.
We have waited long enough for these financial masters to do these things.
They have promised and promised. Now we find our country $10 billion further in debt on account of the depression, and big lenders even propose to
get 90 percent of that out of the hides of the common people in the form of a
sales tax.
There is nothing wrong with the United States. We have more food than we
can eat. We have more clothes and things out of which to make clothes than
we can wear. We have more houses and lands than the whole 120 million can
use if they all had good homes. So what is the trouble? Nothing except that a
handful of men have everything and the balance of the people have nothing if
their debts were paid. There should be every man a king in this land flowing
with milk and honey instead of the lords of finance at the top and slaves and
peasants at the bottom.
Now be prepared for the slurs and snickers of some high-ups when you start
your local spread-our-wealth society. Also when you call your meeting be on
your guard for some smart-aleck tool of the interests to come in and ask questions. Refer such to me for an answer to any question, and I will send you a
copy. Spend your time getting the people to work to save their children and to
save their homes, or to get a home for those who have already lost their own.
To explain the title, motto, and principles of such a society I give the full information, viz:
Title: Share-our-wealth society is simply to mean that Gods creatures on this
lovely American continent have a right to share in the wealth they have created
in this country. They have the right to a living, with the conveniences and some
of the luxuries of this life, so long as there are too many or enough for all. They
have a right to raise their children in a healthy, wholesome atmosphere and to
educate them, rather than to face the dread of their under-nourishment and
sadness by being denied a real life.
Motto: Every man a king conveys the great plan of God and of the Declaration of Independence, which said: All men are created equal. It conveys that
no one man is the lord of another, but that from the head to the foot of every
man is carried his sovereignty.
Now to cover the principles of the share-our-wealth society, I give them in
order:
1. To limit poverty:
We propose that a deserving family shall share in our wealth of America at least for one third the average. An average family is slightly less
717
718
than five persons. The number has become less during depression. The
United States total wealth in normal times is about $400 billion or about
$15,000 to a family. If there were fair distribution of our things in America, our national wealth would be three or four or five times the $400
billion, because a free, circulating wealth is worth many times more than
wealth congested and frozen into a few hands as is Americas wealth. But,
figuring only on the basis of wealth as valued when frozen into a few
hands, there is the average of $15,000 to the family. We say that we will
limit poverty of the deserving people. One third of the average wealth to
the family, or $5,000, is a fair limit to the depths we will allow any one
mans family to fall. None too poor, none too rich.
2. To limit fortunes:
The wealth of this land is tied up in a few hands. It makes no difference
how many years the laborer has worked, nor does it make any difference
how many dreary rows the farmer has plowed, the wealth he has created
is in the hands of manipulators. They have not worked any more than
many other people who have nothing. Now we do not propose to hurt
these very rich persons. We simply say that when they reach the place
of millionaires they have everything they can use and they ought to let
somebody else have something. As it is, 0.1 of 1 percent of the bank depositors nearly half of the money in the banks, leaving 99.9 of bank depositors owning the balance. Then two thirds of the people do not even
have a bank account. The lowest estimate is that 4 percent of the people
own 85 percent of our wealth. The people cannot ever come to light unless we share our wealth, hence the society to do it.
3. Old-age pensions:
Everyone has begun to realize something must be done for our old people who work out their lives, feed and clothe children and are left penniless in their declining years. They should be made to look forward to
their mature years for comfort rather than fear. We propose that, at the
age of 60, every person should begin to draw a pension from our Government of $30 per month, unless the person of 60 or over has an income of over $1,000 per year or is worth $10,000, which is two thirds of
the average wealth in America, even figured on a basis of it being frozen
into a few hands. Such a pension would retire from labor those persons
who keep the rising generations from finding employment.
4. To limit the hours of work:
This applies to all industry. The longer hours the human family can rest
from work, the more it can consume. It makes no difference how many
labor-saving devices we may invent, just as long as we keep cutting
down the hours and sharing what those machines produce, the better we
become. Machines can never produce too much if everybody is allowed

his share, and if it ever got to the point that the human family could
work only 15 hours per week and still produce enough for everybody,
then praised be the name of the Lord. Heaven would be coming nearer to
earth. All of us could return to school a few months every year to learn
some things they have found out since we were there: All could be gentlemen: Every man a king.
5. To balance agricultural production with consumption:
About the easiest of all things to do when financial masters and market
manipulators step aside and let work the law of the Lord. When we have
a supply of anything that is more than we can use for a year or two, just
stop planting that particular crop for a year either in all the country or in
a part of it. Let the Government take over and store the surplus for the
next year. If there is not something else for the farmers to plant or some
other work for them to do to live on for the year when the crop is banned,
then let that be the year for the public works to be done in the section
where the farmers need work. There is plenty of it to do and taxes of the
big fortunes at the top will supply plenty of money without hurting anybody. In time we would have the people not struggling to raise so much
when all were well fed and clothed. Distribution of wealth almost solves
the whole problem without further trouble.
6. To care for the veterans of our wars:
A restoration of all rights taken from them by recent laws and further, a
complete care of any disabled veteran for any ailment, who has no means
of support.
7. Taxation:
Taxation is to be levied first at the top for the Governments support and
expenses. Swollen fortunes should be reduced principally through taxation. The Government should be run through revenues it derives after
allowing persons to become well above millionaires and no more. In this
manner the fortunes will be kept down to reasonable size and at the same
time all the works of the Government kept on a sound basis, without
debts.
Things cannot continue as they now are. America must take one of three
choices, viz:
1. A monarchy ruled by financial mastersa modern feudalism.
2. Communism.
3. Sharing of the wealth and income of the land among all the people by
limiting the hours of toil and limiting the size of fortunes.
719
720
A S SA S S I N AT I O N O F N G O D I N H D I E M
The Lord prescribed the last form. It would preserve all our gains, share
them among our population, guarantee a greater country and a happy people.
The need for such share-our-wealth society is to spread the truth among the
people and to convey their sentiment to their Members of Congress.
Whenever such a local society has been organized, please send me notice of
the same, so that I may send statistics and data which such local society can
give out in their community, either through word of mouth in meetings, by circulars, or, when possible, in local newspapers.
Please understand that the Wall Street controlled public press will give you
as little mention as possible and will condemn and ridicule your efforts. Such
makes necessary the organizations to share the wealth of this land among the
people, which the financial masters are determined they will not allow to be
done. Where possible, I hope those organizing a society in one community will
get in touch with their friends in other communities and get them to organize
societies in them. Anyone can have copies of this article reprinted in circular
form to distribute wherever they may desire, or, if they want me to have them
printed for them, I can do so and mail them to any address for 60 cents per
hundred or $4 per thousand copies.
I introduced in Congress and supported other measures to bring about the
sharing of our wealth when I first reached the United States Senate in January
1932. The main efforts to that effect polled about six votes in the Senate at first.
Last spring my plan polled the votes of nearly twenty United States Senators,
becoming dangerous in proportions to the financial lords. Since then I have
been abused in the newspapers and over the radio for everything under the
sun. Now that I am pressing this program, the lies and abuse in the big newspapers and over the radio are a matter of daily occurrence. It will all become
greater with this effort. Expect that. Meantime go ahead with the work to organize a share-our-wealth society.
Source: Social Security Administration. Official Social Security Website. http://
www.ssa.gov/history/longsen.html.
Document 17
ASSASSINATION OF NGO DINH DIEM (1963)STATE
DEPARTMENT CABLES CONCERNING THE COUP THAT
OVERTHREW PRESIDENT DIEM OF SOUTH VIETNAM
Reproduced below is a series of cables involving U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, Henry
Cabot Lodge Jr., just before the coup that overthrew Ngo Dinh Diems regime in the
Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam, on November 1, 1963. Lodge sent the first
cable on October 25, 1963, to the special assistant to the president for national security affairs, McGeorge Bundy, regarding Ngo Dinh Diems oppressive regime in South
Vietnam. Lodge stated, It is vital that we neither thwart a coup nor that we are even
in a position where we do not know what is going on, although the United States had
unofficially agreed to support the generals planning the coup in the establishment of
a superior government.
The second cable, from Bundy to Lodge, expressed reservations, stating that the coup
needed to be delayed, that Bundy did not believe victory was possible, and that prolonged fighting might incur. The third document is a transcript of a phone conversation
between Ngo Dinh Diem and Lodge on November 1, 1963, in which Lodge denies any
U.S. involvement in the insurgency. The fourth document is a November 2 cable from
Lodge describing what was known of the circumstances surrounding the death of Diem.
Cable from Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge
to National Security Adviser McGeorge
Bundy (October 25, 1963)
1. I appreciate the concern expressed by you in ref. a relative to the Gen.
Don/Conein relationship, and also the present lack of firm intelligence
on the details of the generals plot. I hope that ref. b will assist in clearing
up some of the doubts relative to generals plans, and I am hopeful that
the detailed plans promised for two days before the coup attempt will
clear up any remaining doubts.
2. CAS [Classified American Source-refers to CIA] has been punctilious in
carrying out my instructions. I have personally approved each meeting
between Gen. Don and Conein who has carried out my orders in each
instance explicitly. While I share your concern about the continued involvement of Conein in this matter, a suitable substitute for Conein as
the principal contact is not presently available. Conein, as you know, is a
friend of some eighteen years standing with Gen. Don, and General Don
has expressed extreme reluctance to deal with anyone else. I do not believe the involvement of another American in close contact with the generals would be productive. We are, however, considering the feasibility of
a plan for the introduction of an additional officer as a cut-out between
Conein and a designee of Gen. Don for communication purposes only.
This officer is completely unwitting of any details of past or present coup
activities and will remain so.
3. With reference to Gen Harkins comment to Gen. Don which Don reports
to have referred to a presidential directive and the proposal for a meeting
with me, this may have served the useful purpose of allaying the Generals fears as to our interest. If this were a provocation, the GVN could
have assumed and manufactured any variations of the same theme. As a
721
722
precautionary measure, however, I of course refused to see Gen. Don. As

to the lack of information as to General Dons real backing, and the lack
of evidence that any real capabilities for action have been developed, ref.
b provides only part of the answer. I feel sure that the reluctance of the
generals to provide the U.S. with full details of their plans at this time, is
a reflection of their own sense of security and a lack of confidence that in
the large American community present in Saigon their plans will not be
prematurely revealed.
4. The best evidence available to the Embassy, which I grant you is not as
complete as we would like it, is that Gen. Don and the other generals involved with him are seriously attempting to effect a change in the government. I do not believe that this is a provocation by Ngo Dinh Nhu,
although we shall continue to assess the planning as well as possible.
In the event that the coup aborts, or in the event that Nhu has masterminded a provocation, I believe that our involvement to date through
Conein is still within the realm of plausible denial. CAS is perfectly prepared to have me disavow Conein at any time it may serve the national
interest.
5. I welcome your reaffirming instructions contained in CAS Washington
[cable] 74228. It is vital that we neither thwart a coup nor that we are
even in a position where we do not know what is going on.
6. We should not thwart a coup for two reasons. First, it seems at least an
even bet that the next government would not bungle and stumble as
much as the present one has. Secondly, it is extremely unwise in the long
range for us to pour cold water on attempts at a coup, particularly when
they are just in their beginning stages. We should remember that this is
the only way in which the people in Vietnam can possibly get a change
of government. Whenever we thwart attempts at a coup, as we have done
in the past, we are incurring very long lasting resentments, we are assuming an undue responsibility for keeping the incumbents in office, and
in general are setting ourselves in judgment over the affairs of Vietnam.
Merely to keep in touch with this situation and a policy merely limited
to not thwarting are courses both of which entail some risks but these
are lesser risks than either thwarting all coups while they are stillborn or
our not being informed of what is happening. All the above is totally distinct from not wanting U.S. military advisors to be distracted by matters
which are not in their domain, with which I heartily agree. But obviously
this does not conflict with a policy of not thwarting. In judging proposed
coups, we must consider the effect on the war effort. Certainly a succession of fights for control of the Government of Vietnam would interfere with the war effort. It must also be said that the war effort has been
interfered with already by the incompetence of the present government

and the uproar which this has caused.
7. Gen. Dons intention to have no religious discrimination in a future government is commendable and I applaud his desire not to be a vassal of
the U.S. But I do not think his promise of a democratic election is realistic. This country simply is not ready for that procedure. I would add two
other requirements. First, that there be no wholesale purges of personnel in the government. Individuals who were particularly reprehensible
could be dealt with later by the regular legal process. Then I would be
impractical, but I am thinking of a government which might include Tri
Quang and which certainly should include men of the stature of Mr. Buu,
the labor leader.
8. Copy to Gen. Harkins.
Cable from National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy to
Ambassador Lodge (October 30, 1963)
1. Your [cables] 2023, 2040, 2041 and 2043 examined with care at highest levels here. You should promptly discuss this reply and associated
messages with Harkins whose responsibilities toward any coup are very
heavy especially after you leave (see para. 7 below). They give much
clearer picture groups alleged plans and also indicate chances of action
with or without our approval now so significant that we should urgently
consider our attitude and contingency plans. We note particularly Dons
curiosity your departure and his insistence Conein be available from
Wednesday night on, which suggests date might be as early as Thursday.
2. Believe our attitude to coup group can still have decisive effect on its
decisions. We believe that what we say to coup group can produce
delay of coup and that betrayal of coup plans to Diem is not repeat not
our only way of stopping coup. We therefore need urgently your combined assessment with Harkins and CAS (including their separate comments if they desire). We concerned that our line-up of forces in Saigon
(being cabled in next message) indicates approximately equal balance
of forces, with substantial possibility serious and prolonged fighting or
even defeat. Either of these could be serious or even disastrous for U.S.
interests, so that we must have assurance balance of forces clearly
favorable.
3. With your assessment in hand, we might feel that we should convey
message to Don, whether or not he gives 4 or 48 hours notice that would
(A) continue explicit hands-off policy, (B) positively encourage coup, or
(C) discourage.
723
724
4. In any case, believe Conein should find earliest opportunity express to

Don that we do not find presently revealed plans give clear prospect of
quick results. This conversation should call attention important Saigon
units still apparently loyal to Diem and raise serious issue as to what
means coup group has to deal with them.
5. From operational standpoint, we also deeply concerned Don only spokesman for group and possibility cannot be discounted he may not be in good
faith. We badly need some corroborative evidence whether Minh and others directly and completely involved. In view Dons claim he doesnt handle military planning could not Conein tell Don that we need better
military picture and that Big Minh could communicate this most naturally
and easily to [General Richard] Stilwell [Harkins Chief of Staff]? We recognize desirability involving MACV [U.S. Military Assistance Command,
Vietnam] to minimum, but believe Stilwell far more desirable this purpose than using Conein both ways.
6. Complexity above actions raises question whether you should adhere to
present Thursday schedule. Concur you and other U.S. elements should
take no action that could indicate U.S. awareness coup possibility. However, DOD [Department of Defense] is sending berth-equipped military
aircraft that will arrive Saigon Thursday and could take you out thereafter as late as Saturday afternoon in time to meet your presently proposed
arrival Washington Sunday. You could explain this being done as convenience and that your Washington arrival is same. A further advantage
such aircraft is that it would permit your prompt return from any point
en route if necessary. To reduce time in transit, you should use this plane,
but we recognize delaying your departure may involve greater risk that
you personally would appear involved if any action took place. However,
advantages your having extra two days in Saigon may outweigh this and
we leave timing of flight to your judgment.
7. Whether you leave Thursday or later, believe it essential that prior your
departure there be fullest consultation Harkins and CAS and that there
be clear arrangements for handling (A) normal activity, (B) continued
coup contacts, (C) action in event a coup starts. We assume you will wish
Truehart as charge to be head of country team in normal situation, but
highest authority desires it clearly understood that after your departure
Harkins should participate in supervision of all coup contacts and that
in event a coup begins, he become head of country team and direct representative of President, with [William] Truehart [Deputy Chief of Mission] in effect acting as POLAD [Political Adviser]. On coup contacts we
will maintain continuous guidance and will expect equally continuous
reporting with prompt account of any important divergences in assessments of Harkins and Smith.
8. If coup should start, question of protecting U.S. nationals at once arises.
We can move Marine Battalion into Saigon by air from Okinawa within
24 hoursif available. We are sending instructions to CINCPAC to arrange orderly movement of seaborne Marine Battalion to waters adjacent to South Vietnam in position to close Saigon within approximately
24 hours.
9. We are now examining post-coup contingencies here and request
your immediate recommendations on position to be adopted after
coup begins, especially with respect to requests for assistance of different sorts from one side or the other also request you forward contingency recommendations for action if coup (A) succeeds, (B) fails,
(C) is indecisive.
10. We reiterate burden of proof must be on coup group to show a substantial possibility of quick success; otherwise, we should discourage
them from proceeding since a miscalculation could result in jeopardizing U.S. position in Southeast Asia.
Phone Conversation between Ngo Dinh Diem and
Henry Cabot Lodge (November 1, 1963)
DIEM:
Some Units have made a rebellion and I want to know, what is

the attitude of the U.S.?
LODGE: I do not feel well enough informed to be able to tell you. I have
heard the shootings but with all the facts. Also, it is 4: 30 A.M.
in Washington and the U.S. Government cannot possibly have
a view.
DIEM: But you must have some general ideas. After all, I am Chief of
State. I have tried to do my duty. I want to do now what duty and
good sense require. I believe in duty above all.
LODGE: You have certainly done your duty. As I told you only this morning, I admire your courage and your great contribution to your
country. No one can take away from you the credit for all you
have done. Now I am worried about your physical safety. I have
a report that those in charge of the current activity offer you and
your brother safe conduct out of the country if you resign. Had
you heard this?
DIEM: No. (pause) You have my phone number.
LODGE: Yes. If I can do anything for your physical safety, please call me.
DIEM: I am trying to re-establish order. (hangs up)
725
726
Cable from Ambassador Lodge to the

State Department (November 2, 1963)
Saigon, November 2, 1963, 8 P.M.
888. 1. Very reliable source gives following story about death of Diem
and Nhu:
They left the Palace on Friday evening of November 1 accompanied by Chinese
businessman who was the organizer of the Republican Youth in the Chinese
town of Cholon. This man had engaged in this work not because he believed in
it but in the interests of avoiding trouble for the Chinese community.
This Chinese took Diem and Nhu to a clubhouse which he owned where
they arrived at about nine oclock. Diem and Nhu, through this Chinese businessman, made a strong effort to have ChiNat Embassy give them asylum, did
not succeed.
After spending the night in the clubhouse they, at eight oclock in the morning went to church and about 10 minutes after that were picked up by the
Army and were forced to enter an Army vehicle into which they were locked.
This source does not know what happened after that-whether they are alive or
murdered or suicides.
2. Luong, Finance Minister in Diem government, together with Thuan and
former Economic Minister Thanh, spent Saturday afternoon at Generals headquarters. General Big Minh told him that Diem and Nhu had been found in a
church in Cholon at about 8 A.M. this morning and were locked up inside an
Army vehicle. Due to an inadvertence there was a gun inside the vehicle. It was
with this gun, said Big Minh, that they committed suicide.
3. Other versions received from CAS sources:
A. According one CAS report, Col. Pham Ngoc Thao said at 1130 November 2,
that he, with his forces, had entered Gia Long Palace in early morning hours
for purpose of escorting Diem and Nhu to JGS Hqs after their unconditional
surrender. Following search, it was determined that Diem and Nhu were not at
Gia Long and had not been there during course of coup. Thao returned to JGS
with this information. There followed check of villas in Saigon/Cholon known
to be used by Ngo family.
Detail, under personal direction of Gen Mai Huu Xuan, located Diem and
Nhu at villa on Phung Hung St., Cholon. Xuan returned to JGS with bodies of
Diem and Nhu. Nothing is known about actual cause of their demise.
B. Another CAS report indicates that Lt. Nguyen Ngoc Linh, Special Assistant to General Nguyen Khanh, CG, II Corps, and at present in Saigon, said he
had personally viewed at 1330 November 2, bodies of Diem and Nhu at JGS
Hqs and there was no possibility of mistaken identities. Linh said it was clear
that Diem and Nhu had been assassinated, if not by Xuan personally, at least
at his direction.
A S S A S S I N AT I O N O F J O H N F. K E N N E D Y
While above apparently confirmed information, it should be remembered

that current situation in Saigon is made to order for any speculation surrounding Diem and Nhu.
According to Thao and Linh, Diem and Nhu could have maintained telephone communications from Cholon villa throughout coup since lines run
from Gia Long Palace to Thu Duc, and from Thu Duc to Cholon villa.
C. Still another CAS report indicates reliable source at JGS was told by
Generals Big Minh and Little Minh and other officers that Diem and Nhu escaped from Gia Long Palace shortly after 0700 hours, November 2, by third
tunnel which was unknown to Generals. Diem and Nhu left tunnel in dock area
and then went to Don Thanh Chinese Catholic Church in Cholon, where they
took poison. Diem and Nhu were found at church at 1030 furs. Usually reliable
source was offered opportunity to see remains of Diem and Nhu, offer which he
declined. CAS source has strong impression that Diem and Nhu are dead and
bodies are at JGS.
D. Finally, another CAS officer was informed by officer of J-2, JGS, that
President Diem, and his brother and one presidential orderly were caught and
killed by personnel under direction of Gen Mai Huu Xuan at church in Cho
Quan, Cholon. Also captured with them was Capt Do Hai, nephew of Do Mau,
Chief of Military Security Service.
Source: U.S. Department of State. Office of the Historian. http://history.state
.gov/historicaldocuments/frus196163v04/ch3.
Document 18
ASSASSINATION OF JOHN F. KENNEDY
(1963)EXCERPTS FROM THE WARREN
COMMISSION REPORT (1964)
In a report issued on September 27, 1964, the Warren Commission presented its
findings to the American people regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy on
November 22, 1963. Headed by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, and
comprising many leading congressional and government figures of the day, including
future president Gerald R. Ford, the commission held that Lee Harvey Oswald had
acted alone in killing Kennedy and had not been part of a larger conspiracy. Officials
hoped that the report would put to rest a wide range of conspiracy theories regarding
the assassination, but, if anything, the report actually stirred more controversy. Many
Americans continue to believe that a conspiracy of one sort or another was behind
the assassination. The following excerpts from the report of the Warren Commission
include a narrative of the assassination and the commissions conclusions.
727
728
THE ASSASSINATION of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963,

was a cruel and shocking act of violence directed against a man, a family, a nation, and against all mankind. A young and vigorous leader whose years of
public and private life stretched before him was the victim of the fourth Presidential assassination in the history of a country dedicated to the concepts of
reasoned argument and peaceful political change. This Commission was created on November 29, 1963, in recognition of the right of people everywhere
to full and truthful knowledge concerning these events. This report endeavors
to fulfill that right and to appraise this tragedy by the light of reason and the
standard of fairness. It has been prepared with a deep awareness of the Commissions responsibility to present to the American people an objective report
of the facts relating to the assassination.
Narrative of Events
At 11:40 A.M., c.s.t., on Friday, November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy,
Mrs. Kennedy, and their party arrived at Love Field, Dallas, Tex. Behind them
was the first day of a Texas trip planned 5 months before by the President, Vice
President Lyndon B. Johnson, and John B. Connally, Jr., Governor of Texas.
After leaving the White House on Thursday morning, the President had flown
initially to San Antonio where Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson joined the
party and the President dedicated new research facilities at the U.S. Air Force
School of Aerospace Medicine. Following a testimonial dinner in Houston for
U.S. Representative Albert Thomas, the President flew to Fort Worth where he
spent the night and spoke at a large breakfast gathering on Friday.
Planned for later that day were a motorcade through downtown Dallas, a
luncheon speech at the Trade Mart, and a flight to Austin where the President
would attend a reception and speak at a Democratic fundraising dinner. From
Austin he would proceed to the Texas ranch of the Vice President. Evident on
this trip were the varied roles which an American President performsHead
of State, Chief Executive, party leader, and, in this instance, prospective candidate for reelection.
The Dallas motorcade, it was hoped, would evoke a demonstration of the
Presidents personal popularity in a city which he had lost in the 1960 election.
Once it had been decided that the trip to Texas would span 2 days, those responsible for planning, primarily Governor Connally and Kenneth ODonnell,
a special assistant to the President, agreed that a motorcade through Dallas
would be desirable. The Secret Service was told on November 8 that 45 minutes had been allotted to a motorcade procession from Love Field to the site of
a luncheon planned by Dallas business and civic leaders in honor of the President. After considering the facilities and security problems of several buildings, the Trade Mart was chosen as the luncheon site. Given this selection, and
in accordance with the customary practice of affording the greatest number

of people an opportunity to see the President, the motorcade route selected
was a natural one. The route was approved by the local host committee and
White House representatives on November 18 and publicized in the local papers starting on November 19. This advance publicity made it clear that the
motorcade would leave Main Street and pass the intersection of Elm and Houston Streets as it proceeded to the Trade Mart by way of the Stemmons Freeway.
By midmorning of November 22, clearing skies in Dallas dispelled the threat
of rain and the President greeted the crowds from his open limousine without
the bubbletop, which was at that time a plastic shield furnishing protection
only against inclement weather. To the left of the President in the rear seat was
Mrs. Kennedy. In the jump seats were Governor Connally, who was in front of
the President, and Mrs. Connally at the Governors left. Agent William R. Greer
of the Secret Service was driving, and Agent Roy H. Kellerman was sitting to
his right.
Directly behind the Presidential limousine was an open follow-up car with
eight Secret Service agents, two in the front seat, two in the rear, and two on
each running board. These agents, in accordance with normal Secret Service
procedures, were instructed to scan the crowds, the roofs, and windows of
buildings, overpasses, and crossings for signs of trouble. Behind the follow-up
car was the Vice-Presidential car carrying the Vice President and Mrs. Johnson
and Senator Ralph W. Yarborough. Next were a Vice-Presidential follow-up
car and several cars and buses for additional dignitaries, press representatives,
and others.
The motorcade left Love Field shortly after 11:50 A.M., and proceeded
through residential neighborhoods, stopping twice at the Presidents request
to greet well-wishers among the friendly crowds. Each time the Presidents car
halted, Secret Service agents from the follow-up car moved forward to assume a protective stance near the President and Mrs. Kennedy. As the motorcade reached Main Street, a principal east-west artery in downtown Dallas,
the welcome became tumultuous. At the extreme west end of Main Street the
motorcade turned right on Houston Street and proceeded north for one block
in order to make a left turn on Elm Street, the most direct and convenient approach to the Stemmons Freeway and the Trade Mart. As the Presidents car approached the intersection of Houston and Elm Streets, there loomed directly
ahead on the intersections northwest corner a seven-story, orange brick warehouse and office building, the Texas School Book Depository. Riding in the
Vice Presidents car, Agent Rufus W. Youngblood of the Secret Service noticed
that the clock atop the building indicated 12:30 P.M., the scheduled arrival
time at the Trade Mart.
The Presidents car which had been going north made a sharp turn toward
the southwest onto Elm Street. At a speed of about 11 miles per hour, it started
729
730
down the gradual descent toward a railroad overpass under which the motorcade would proceed before reaching the Stemmons Freeway. The front of the
Texas School Book Depository was now on the Presidents right, and he waved
to the crowd assembled there as he passed the building. Dealey Plazaan
open, landscaped area marking the western end of downtown Dallas stretched
out to the Presidents left. A Secret Service agent riding in the motorcade radioed the Trade Mart that the President would arrive in 5 minutes.
Seconds later shots resounded in rapid succession. The Presidents hands
moved to his neck. He appeared to stiffen momentarily and lurch slightly forward in his seat. A bullet had entered the base of the back of his neck slightly
to the right of the spine. It traveled downward and exited from the front of
the neck, causing a nick in the left lower portion of the knot in the Presidents
necktie. Before the shooting started, Governor Connally had been facing toward the crowd on the right. He started to turn toward the left and suddenly
felt a blow on his back. The Governor had been hit by a bullet which entered at
the extreme right side of his back at a point below his right armpit. The bullet
traveled through his chest in a downward and forward direction, exited below
his right nipple, passed through his right wrist which had been in his lap, and
then caused a wound to his left thigh. The force of the bullets impact appeared
to spin the Governor to his right, and Mrs. Connally pulled him down into her
lap. Another bullet then struck President Kennedy in the rear portion of his
head, causing a massive and fatal wound. The President fell to the left into Mrs.
Kennedys lap.
Secret Service Agent Clinton J. Hill, riding on the left running board of the
follow-up car, heard a noise which sounded like a firecracker and saw the
President suddenly lean forward and to the left. Hill jumped off the car and
raced toward the Presidents limousine. In the front seat of the Vice-Presidential
car, Agent Youngblood heard an explosion and noticed unusual movements in
the crowd. He vaulted into the rear seat and sat on the Vice President in order
to protect him. At the same time Agent Kellerman in the front seat of the Presidential limousine turned to observe the President. Seeing that the President
was struck, Kellerman instructed the driver, Lets get out of here; we are hit.
He radioed ahead to the lead car, Get us to the hospital immediately. Agent
Greer immediately accelerated the Presidential car. As it gained speed, Agent
Hill managed to pull himself onto the back of the car where Mrs. Kennedy
had climbed. Hill pushed her back into the rear seat and shielded the stricken
President and Mrs. Kennedy as the Presidents car proceeded at high speed to
Parkland Memorial Hospital, 4 miles away.
At Parkland, the President was immediately treated by a team of physicians
who had been alerted for the Presidents arrival by the Dallas Police Department
as the result of a radio message from the motorcade after the shooting. The doctors noted irregular breathing movements and a possible heartbeat, although
they could not detect a pulsebeat. They observed the extensive wound in the
Presidents head and a small wound approximately one-fourth inch in diameter
in the lower third of his neck. In act effort to facilitate breathing, the physicians
performed a tracheotomy by enlarging the throat wound and inserting a tube.
Totally absorbed in the immediate task of trying to preserve the Presidents life,
the attending doctors never turned the president over for an examination of
his back. At l P.M., after all heart activity ceased and the Last Rites were administered by a priest, President Kennedy was pronounced dead. Governor Connally underwent surgery and ultimately recovered from his serious wounds.
Upon learning of the Presidents death, Vice President Johnson left Parkland Hospital under close guard and proceeded to the Presidential plane at
Love Field. Mrs. Kennedy, accompanying her husbands body, boarded the
plane shortly thereafter. At 2:38 P.M., in the central compartment of the plane,
Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States
by Federal District Court Judge Sarah T. Hughes. The plane left immediately
for Washington, D.C., arriving at Andrews AFB, Md., at 5:58 P.M., e.s.t. The
Presidents body was taken to the National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda,
Md., where it was given a complete pathological examination. The autopsy disclosed the large head wound observed at Parkland and the wound in the front
of the neck which had been enlarged by the Parkland doctors when they performed the tracheotomy. Both of these wounds were described in the autopsy
report as being presumably of exit. In addition the autopsy revealed a small
wound of entry in the rear of the Presidents skull and another wound of entry
near the base of the back of the neck. The autopsy report stated the cause of
death as Gunshot wound, head and the bullets which struck the President
were described as having been fired from a point behind and somewhat above
the level of the deceased.
At the scene of the shooting, there was evident confusion at the outset concerning the point of origin of the shots. Witnesses differed in their accounts
of the direction from which the sound of the shots emanated. Within a few
minutes, however, attention centered on the Texas School Book Depository
Building as the source of the shots. The building was occupied by a private
corporation, the Texas School Book Depository Co., which distributed school
textbooks of several publishers and leased space to representatives of the publishers. Most of the employees in the building worked for these publishers. The
balance, including a 15-man warehousing crew, were employees of the Texas
School Book Depository Co. itself.
Several eyewitnesses in front of the building reported that they saw a rifle
being fired from the southeast corner window on the sixth floor of the Texas
School Book Depository. One eyewitness, Howard L. Brennan, had been watching the parade from a point on Elm Street directly opposite and facing the
building. He promptly told a policeman that he had seen a slender man, about
731
732
5 feet 10 inches, in his early thirties, take deliberate aim from the sixth-floor
corner window and fire a rifle in the direction of the Presidents car. Brennan
thought he might be able to identify the man since he had noticed him in the
window a few minutes before the motorcade made the turn onto Elm Street.
At 12:34 P.M., the Dallas police radio mentioned the Depository Building as a
possible source of the shots, and at 12:45 P.M., the police radio broadcast a description of the suspected assassin based primarily on Brennans observations.
When the shots were fired, a Dallas motorcycle patrolman, Marrion L. Baker,
was riding in the motorcade at a point several cars behind the President. He
had turned right from Main Street onto Houston Street and was about 200 feet
south of Elm Street when he heard a shot. Baker, having recently returned from
a week of deer hunting, was certain the shot came from a high-powered rifle.
He looked up and saw pigeons scattering in the air from their perches on the
Texas School Book Depository Building. He raced his motorcycle to the building, dismounted, scanned the area to the west and pushed his way through the
spectators toward the entrance. There he encountered Roy Truly, the building
superintendent, who offered Baker his help. They entered the building, and
ran toward the two elevators in the rear. Finding that both elevators were on an
upper floor, they dashed up the stairs. Not more than 2 minutes had elapsed
since the shooting.
When they reached the second-floor landing on their way up to the top
of the building, Patrolman Baker thought he caught a glimpse of someone
through the small glass window in the door separating the hall area near the
stairs from the small vestibule leading into the lunchroom. Gun in hand, he
rushed to the door and saw a man about 20 feet away walking toward the other
end of the lunchroom. The man was empty handed. At Bakers command, the
man turned and approached him. Truly, who had started up the stairs to the
third floor ahead of Baker, returned to see what had delayed the patrolman.
Baker asked Truly whether he knew the man in the lunchroom. Truly replied
that the man worked in the building, whereupon Baker turned from the man
and proceeded, with Truly, up the stairs. The man they encountered had started
working in the Texas School Book Depository Building on October 16, 1963.
His fellow workers described him as very quieta loner. His name was Lee
Harvey Oswald.
Within about 1 minute after his encounter with Baker and Truly, Oswald was
seen passing through the second-floor offices. In his hand was a full Coke
bottle which he had purchased from a vending machine in the lunchroom. He
was walking toward the front of the building where a passenger elevator and
a short flight of stairs provided access to the main entrance of the building
on the first floor. Approximately 7 minutes later, at about 12:40 P.M., Oswald
boarded a bus at a point on Elm Street seven short blocks east of the Depository Building. The bus was traveling west toward the very building from which
Oswald had come. Its route lay through the Oak Cliff section in southwest
Dallas, where it would pass seven blocks east of the roominghouse in which
Oswald was living, at 1026 North Beckley Avenue. On the bus was Mrs. Mary
Bledsoe, one of Oswalds former landladies who immediately recognized him.
Oswald stayed on the bus approximately 3 or 4 minutes, during which time it
proceeded only two blocks because of the traffic jam created by the motorcade
and the assassination. Oswald then left the bus. A few minutes later he entered
a vacant taxi four blocks away and asked the driver to take him to a point on
North Beckley Avenue several blocks beyond his roominghouse. The trip required 5 or 6 minutes. At about 1 P.M. Oswald arrived at the roominghouse.
The housekeeper, Mrs. Earlene Roberts, was surprised to see Oswald at midday and remarked to him that he seemed to be in quite a hurry. He made no
reply. A few minutes later Oswald emerged from his room zipping up his jacket
and rushed out of the house.
Approximately 14 minutes later, and just 45 minutes after the assassination, another violent shooting occurred in Dallas. The victim was Patrolman
J. D. Tippit of the Dallas police, an officer with a good record during his more
than 11 years with the police force. He was shot near the intersection of 10th
Street and Patton Avenue, about nine-tenths of a mile from Oswalds roominghouse. At the time of the assassination, Tippit was alone in his patrol car, the
routine practice for most police patrol officers at this time of day. He had been
ordered by radio at 12:45 P.M. to proceed to the central Oak Cliff area as part
of a concentration of patrol car activity around the center of the city following
the assassination. At 12:54 Tippit radioed that he had moved as directed and
would be available for any emergency. By this time the police radio had broadcast several messages alerting the police to the suspect described by Brennan at
the scene of the assassinationslender white male, about 30 years old, 5 feet
10 inches and weighing about 165 pounds.
At approximately 1:15 P.M., Tippit was driving slowly in an easterly direction on East 10th Street in Oak Cliff. About 100 feet past the intersection of
10th Street and Patton Avenue, Tippit pulled up alongside a man walking in
the same direction. The man met the general description of the suspect wanted
in connection with the assassination. He walked over to Tippits car, rested his
arms on the door on the right-hand side of the car, and apparently exchanged
words with Tippit through the window. Tippit opened the door on the left side
and started to walk around the front of his car. As he reached the front wheel
on the drivers side, the man on the sidewalk drew a revolver and fired several
shots in rapid succession, hitting Tippit four times and killing him instantly.
An automobile repairman, Domingo Benavides, heard the shots and stopped
his pickup truck on the opposite side of the street about 25 feet in front of Tippits car. He observed the gunman start back toward Patton Avenue, removing
the empty cartridge cases from the gun as he went. Benavides rushed to Tippits
733
734
side. The patrolman, apparently dead, was lying on his revolver, which was out
of its holster. Benavides promptly reported the shooting to police headquarters
over the radio in Tippits car. The message was received shortly after 1:16 P.M.
As the gunman left the scene, he walked hurriedly back toward Patton Avenue and turned left, heading south. Standing on the northwest corner of 10th
Street and Patton Avenue was Helen Markham, who had been walking south
on Patton Avenue and had seen both the killer and Tippit cross the intersection in front of her as she waited on the curb for traffic to pass. She witnessed
the shooting and then saw the man with a gun in his hand walk back toward
the corner and cut across the lawn of the corner house as he started south on
Patton Avenue.
In the corner house itself, Mrs. Barbara Jeanette Davis and her sister-in-law,
Mrs. Virginia Davis, heard the shots and rushed to the door in time to see the
man walk rapidly across the lawn shaking a revolver as if he were emptying it
of cartridge cases. Later that day each woman found a cartridge case near the
home. As the gunman turned the corner he passed alongside a taxicab which
was parked on Patton Avenue a few feet from 10th Street. The driver, William W.
Scoggins, had seen the slaying and was now crouched behind his cab on the
street side. As the gunman cut through the shrubbery on the lawn, Scoggins
looked up and saw the man approximately 12 feet away. In his hand was a pistol and he muttered words which sounded to Scoggins like poor dumb cop
or poor damn cop.
After passing Scoggins, the gunman crossed to the west side of Patton Avenue and ran south toward Jefferson Boulevard, a main Oak Cliff thoroughfare.
On the east side of Patton, between l0th Street and Jefferson Boulevard, Ted
Callaway, a used car salesman, heard the shots and ran to the sidewalk. As the
man with the gun rushed past, Callaway shouted Whats going on? The man
merely shrugged, ran on to Jefferson Boulevard and turned right. On the next
corner was a gas station with a parking lot in the rear. The assailant ran into the
lot, discarded his jacket and then continued his flight west on Jefferson.
In a shoe store a few blocks farther west on Jefferson, the manager, Johnny
Calvin Brewer, heard the siren of a police car moments after the radio in his
store announced the shooting of the police officer in Oak Cliff. Brewer saw a
man step quickly into the entranceway of the store and stand there with his
back toward the street. When the police car made a U-turn and headed back
in the direction of the Tippit shooting, the man left and Brewer followed him.
He saw the man enter the Texas Theatre, a motion picture house about 60 feet
away, without buying a ticket. Brewer pointed this out to the cashier, Mrs. Julia
Postal, who called the police. The time was shortly after 1:40 P.M.
At 1:29 P.M., the police radio had noted the similarity in the descriptions
of the suspects in the Tippit shooting and the assassination. At 1:45 P.M.,
in response to Mrs. Postals call, the police radio sounded the alarm: Have
information a suspect just went in the Texas Theatre on West Jefferson. Within
minutes the theater was surrounded. The house lights were then turned up.
Patrolman M. N. McDonald and several other policemen approached the man,
who had been pointed out to them by Brewer.
McDonald ordered the man to his feet and heard him say, Well, its all over
now. The man drew a gun from his waist with one hand and struck the officer
with the other. McDonald struck out with his right hand and grabbed the gun
with his left hand. After a brief struggle McDonald and several other police officers disarmed and handcuffed the suspect and drove him to police headquarters, arriving at approximately 2 P.M.
Following the assassination, police cars had rushed to the Texas School
Book Depository in response to the many radio messages reporting that the
shots had been fired from the Depository Building. Inspector J. Herbert Sawyer
of the Dallas Police Department arrived at the scene shortly after hearing the
first of these police radio messages at 12:34 P.M. Some of the officers who had
been assigned to the area of Elm and Houston Streets for the motorcade were
talking to witnesses and watching the building when Sawyer arrived. Sawyer
entered the building and rode a passenger elevator to the fourth floor, which
was the top floor for this elevator. He conducted a quick search, returned to
the main floor and, between approximately 12:37 and 12:40 P.M., ordered that
no one be permitted to leave the building.
Shortly before 1 P.M. Capt. J. Will Fritz, chief of the homicide and robbery
bureau of the Dallas Police Department, arrived to take charge of the investigation. Searching the sixth floor, Deputy Sheriff Luke Mooney noticed a pile of
cartons in the southeast corner. He squeezed through the boxes and realized
immediately that he had discovered the point from which the shots had been
fired. On the floor were three empty cartridge cases. A carton had apparently
been placed on the floor at the side of the window so that a person sitting on
the carton could look down Elm Street toward the overpass and scarcely be
noticed from the outside. Between this carton and the half-open window were
three additional cartons arranged at such an angle that a rifle resting on the
top carton would be aimed directly at the motorcade as it moved away from
the building. The high stack of boxes, which first attracted Mooneys attention
effectively screened a person at the window from the view of anyone else on
the floor.
Mooneys discovery intensified the search for additional evidence on the
sixth floor, and at 1:22 P.M. approximately 10 minutes after the cartridge cases
were found, Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone turned his flashlight in the direction
of two rows of boxes in the northwest corner near the staircase. Stuffed between the two rows was a bolt-action rifle with a telescopic sight. The rifle was
not touched until it could be photographed. When Lt. J. C. Day of the police
identification bureau decided that the wooden stock and the metal knob at the
735
736
end of the bolt contained no prints, he held the rifle by the stock while Captain Fritz ejected a live shell by operating the bolt. Lieutenant Day promptly
noted that stamped on the rifle itself was the serial number C2766 as well
as the markings 1940 MADE ITALY and CAL. 6.5. The rifle was about
40 inches long and when disassembled it could fit into a handmade paper sack
which after the assassination, was found in the southeast corner of the building
within a few feet of the cartridge cases.
As Fritz and Day were completing their examination of this rifle on the sixth
floor, Roy Truly, the building superintendent, approached with information
which he felt should be brought to the attention of the police. Earlier, while
the police were questioning the employees, Truly had observed that Lee Harvey Oswald, 1 of the 15 men who worked in the warehouse, was missing.
After Truly provided Oswalds name, address, and general description, Fritz
left for police headquarters. He arrived at headquarters shortly after 2 P.M. and
asked two detectives to pick up the employee who was missing from the Texas
School Book Depository. Standing nearby were the police officers who had just
arrived with the man arrested in the Texas Theatre. When Fritz mentioned the
name of the missing employee, he learned that the man was already in the interrogation room. The missing School Book Depository employee and the suspect
who had been apprehended in the Texas Theatre were one and the sameLee
Harvey Oswald.
The suspect Fritz was about to question in connection with the assassination
of the President and the murder of a policeman was born in New Orleans on
October 18, 1939, 2 months after the death of his father. His mother, Marguerite Claverie Oswald, had two older children. One, John Pic, was a half-brother
to Lee from an earlier marriage which had ended in divorce. The other was
Robert Oswald, a full brother to Lee and 5 years older. When Lee Oswald was
3, Mrs. Oswald placed him in an orphanage where his brother and half-brother
were already living, primarily because she had to work.
In January 1944, when Lee was 4, he was taken out of the orphanage, and
shortly thereafter his mother moved with him to Dallas, Tex., where the older
boys joined them at the end of the school year. In May of 1945 Marguerite Oswald married her third husband, Edwin A. Ekdahl. While the two older boys
attended a military boarding school, Lee lived at home and developed a warm
attachment to Ekdahl, occasionally accompanying his mother and stepfather
on business trips around the country. Lee started school in Benbrook, Tex., but
in the fall of 1946, after a separation from Ekdahl, Marguerite Oswald reentered Lee in the first grade in Covington, La. In January 1947, while Lee was
still in the first grade, the family moved to Fort Worth, Tex., as the result of an
attempted reconciliation between Ekdahl and Lees mother. A year and a half
later, before Lee was 9, his mother was divorced from her third husband as the
result of a divorce action instituted by Ekdahl. Lees school record during the
next 5 and a half years in Fort Worth was average, although generally it grew
poorer each year. The comments of teachers and others who knew him at that
time do not reveal any unusual personality traits or characteristics.
Another change for Lee Oswald occurred in August 1952, a few months
after he completed the sixth grade. Marguerite Oswald and her 12-year-old
son moved to New York City where Marguerites oldest son, John Pic, was stationed with the Coast Guard. The ensuing year and one-half in New York was
marked by Lees refusals to attend school and by emotional and psychological problems of a seemingly serious nature. Because he had become a chronic
school truant, Lee underwent psychiatric study at Youth House, an institution
in New York for juveniles who have had truancy problems or difficulties with
the law, and who appear to require psychiatric observation, or other types of
guidance. The social worker assigned to his case described him as seriously
detached and withdrawn and noted a rather pleasant, appealing quality
about this emotionally starved, affectionless youngster. Lee expressed the feeling to the social worker that his mother did not care for him and regarded
him as a burden. He experienced fantasies about being all powerful and hurting people, but during his stay at Youth House he was apparently not a behavior problem. He appeared withdrawn and evasive, a boy who preferred to
spend his time alone, reading and watching television. His tests indicated that
he was above average in intelligence for his age group. The chief psychiatrist
of Youth House diagnosed Lees problem as a personality pattern disturbance
with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies. He concluded that
the boy was an emotionally, quite disturbed youngster and recommended
psychiatric treatment.
In May 1953, after having been at Youth House for 3 weeks, Lee Oswald returned to school where his attendance and grades temporarily improved. By
the following fall, however, the probation officer reported that virtually every
teacher complained about the boys behavior. His mother insisted that he did
not need psychiatric assistance. Although there was apparently some improvement in Lees behavior during the next few months, the court recommended
further treatment. In January 1954, while Lees case was still pending, Marguerite and Lee left for New Orleans, the city of Lees birth.
Upon his return to New Orleans, Lee maintained mediocre grades but had
no obvious behavior problems. Neighbors and others who knew him outside
of school remembered him as a quiet, solitary and introverted boy who read
a great deal and whose vocabulary made him quite articulate. About l month
after he started the l0th grade and 11 days before his 16th birthday in October
1955, he brought to school a note purportedly written by his mother, stating
that the family was moving to California. The note was written by Lee. A few
days later he dropped out of school and almost immediately tried to join the
Marine Corps. Because he was only 16, he was rejected. After leaving school
737
738
Lee worked for the next 10 months at several jobs in New Orleans as an office
messenger or clerk. It was during this period that he started to read communist
literature. Occasionally, in conversations with others, he praised communism
and expressed to his fellow employees a desire to join the Communist Party.
At about this time, when he was not yet 17, he wrote to the Socialist Party of
America, professing his belief in Marxism.
Another move followed in July 1956 when Lee and his mother returned to
Fort Worth. He reentered high school but again dropped out after a few weeks
and enlisted in the Marine Corps on October 1956, 6 days after his 17th birthday. On December 21, 1956, during boot camp in San Diego, Oswald fired a
score of 212 for record with the M-1 rifle2 points over the minimum for a
rating of sharpshooter on a marksman/sharpshooter/expert scale. After his
basic training, Oswald received training in aviation fundamentals and then in
radar scanning.
Most people who knew Oswald in the Marines described him as loner who
resented the exercise of authority by others. He spent much of his free time
reading. He was court-martialed once for possessing an unregistered privately
owned weapon and, on another occasion, for using provocative language to a
noncommissioned officer. He was, however, generally able to comply with Marine discipline, even though his experiences in the Marine Corps did not live
up to his expectations.
Oswald served 15 months overseas until November 1958, most of it in
Japan. During his final year in the Marine Corps he was stationed for the most
part in Santa Ana, Calif., where he showed marked interest in the Soviet Union
and sometimes expressed politically radical views with dogmatic conviction.
Oswald again fired the M-1 rifle for record on May 6, 1959, and this time
he shot a score of 191 on a shorter course than before, only 1 point over the
minimum required to be a marksman. According to one of his fellow marines, Oswald was not particularly interested in his rifle performance, and his
unit was not expected to exhibit the usual rifle proficiency. During this period
he expressed strong admiration for Fidel Castro and an interest in joining the
Cuban army. He tried to impress those around him as an intellectual, but his
thinking appeared to some as shallow and rigid.
Oswalds Marine service terminated on September 11, 1959, when at his
own request he was released from active service a few months ahead of his
scheduled release. He offered as the reason for his release the ill health and
economic plight of his mother. He returned to Fort Worth, remained with his
mother only 3 days and left for New Orleans, telling his mother he planned to
get work there in the shipping or import-export business. In New Orleans he
booked passage on the freighter SS Marion Lykes, which sailed from New Orleans to Le Havre, France, on September 20, 1959.
Lee Harvey Oswald had presumably planned this step in his life for quite
some time. In March of 1959 he had applied to the Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland for admission to the Spring 1960 term. His letter of application contained many blatant falsehoods concerning his qualifications and
background. A few weeks before his discharge he had applied for and obtained
a passport, listing the Soviet Union as one of the countries which he planned
to visit. During his service in the Marines he had saved a comparatively large
sum of money, possibly as much as $1,500, which would appear to have been
accomplished by considerable frugality and apparently for a specific purpose.
The purpose of the accumulated fund soon became known. On October 16,
1959, Oswald arrived in Moscow by train after crossing the border from Finland, where he had secured a visa for a 6-day stay in the Soviet Union. He
immediately applied for Soviet citizenship. On the afternoon of October 21,
1959, Oswald was ordered to leave the Soviet Union by 8 P.M. that evening.
That same afternoon in his hotel room Oswald, in an apparent suicide attempt, slashed his left wrist. He was hospitalized immediately. On October 31,
3 days after his release from the hospital, Oswald appeared at the American
Embassy, announced that he wished to renounce his U.S. citizenship and become a Russian citizen, and handed the Embassy officer a written statement he
had prepared for the occasion. When asked his reasons, Oswald replied, I am
a Marxist. Oswald never formally complied with the legal steps necessary to
renounce his American citizenship. The Soviet Government did not grant his
request for citizenship, but in January 1960 he was given permission to remain
in the Soviet Union on a year-to-year basis. At the same time Oswald was sent
to Minsk where he worked in radio factory as an unskilled laborer. In January
1961 his permission to remain in the Soviet Union was extended for another
year. A few weeks later, in February 1961, he wrote to the American Embassy
in Moscow expressing a desire to return to the United States.
The following month Oswald met a 19-year-old Russian girl, Marina Nikolaevna Prusakova, a pharmacist, who had been brought up in Leningrad but was
then living with an aunt and uncle in Minsk. They were married on April 30,
1961. Throughout the following year he carried on a correspondence with
American and Soviet authorities seeking approval for the departure of himself and his wife to the United States. In the course of this effort, Oswald and
his wife visited the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in July of 1961. Primarily on the
basis of an interview and questionnaire completed there, the Embassy concluded that Oswald had not lost his citizenship, a decision subsequently ratified by the Department of State in Washington, D.C. Upon their return to
Minsk, Oswald and his wife filed with the Soviet authorities for permission to
leave together. Their formal application was made in July 1961, and on December 25, 1961, Marina Oswald was advised it would be granted.
739
740
A daughter was born to the Oswalds in February 1962. In the months that
followed they prepared for their return to the United States. On May 9, 1962
the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, at the request of the Department of State, agreed to waive a restriction under the law which would have
prevented the issuance of a United States visa to Oswalds Russian wife until
she had left the Soviet Union. They finally left Moscow on June 1, 1962, and
were assisted in meeting their travel expenses by a loan of $435.71 from the
U.S. Department of State. Two weeks later they arrived in Fort Worth, Tex.
For a few weeks Oswald, his wife and child lived with Oswalds brother
Robert. After a similar stay with Oswalds mother, they moved into their own
apartment in early August. Oswald obtained a job on July 16 as a sheet metal
worker. During this period in Fort Worth, Oswald was interviewed twice by
agents of the FBI. The report of the first interview, which occurred on June 26,
described him as arrogant and unwilling to discuss the reasons why he had
gone to the Soviet Union. Oswald denied that he was involved in Soviet intelligence activities and promised to advise the FBI if Soviet representatives ever
communicated with him. He was interviewed again on August 16, when he
displayed a less belligerent attitude and once again agreed to inform the FBI of
any attempt to enlist him in intelligence activities.
In early October 1962 Oswald quit his job at the sheet metal plant and moved
to Dallas. While living in Forth Worth the Oswalds had been introduced to a
group of Russian-speaking people in the Dallas Fort Worth area. Many of them
assisted the Oswalds by providing small amounts of food, clothing, and household items. Oswald himself was disliked by almost all of this group whose help
to the family was prompted primarily by sympathy for Marina Oswald and the
child. Despite the fact that he had left the Soviet Union, disillusioned with its
Government, Oswald seemed more firmly committed than ever to his concepts
of Marxism. He showed disdain for democracy, capitalism, and American society in general. He was highly critical of the Russian-speaking group because
they seemed devoted to American concepts of democracy and capitalism and
were ambitious to improve themselves economically.
In February 1963 the Oswalds met Ruth Paine at a social gathering. Ruth
Paine was temporarily separated from her husband and living with her two
children in their home in Irving, Tex., a suburb of Dallas because of an interest
in the Russian language and sympathy for Marina Oswald, who spoke no English and had little funds, Ruth Paine befriended Marina and, during the next
2 months, visited her on several occasions.
On April 6, 1963, Oswald lost his job with a photography firm. A few days
later, on April 10, he attempted to kill Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker (Retired,
U.S. Army), using a rifle which he had ordered by mail 1 month previously
under an assumed name. Marina Oswald learned of her husbands act when
she confronted him with a note which he had left, giving her instructions in
the event he did not return. That incident, and their general economic difficulties impelled Marina Oswald to suggest that her husband leave Dallas and go to
New Orleans to look for work.
Oswald left for New Orleans on April 24, 1963. Ruth Paine, who knew
nothing of the Walker shooting, invited Marina Oswald and the baby to stay
with her in the Paines modest home while Oswald sought work in New Orleans. Early in May, upon receiving word from Oswald that he had found a
job, Ruth Paine drove Marina Oswald and the baby to New Orleans to rejoin
Oswald.
During the stay in New Orleans, Oswald formed a fictitious New Orleans
Chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He posed as secretary of this organization and represented that the president was A. J. Hidell. In reality, Hidell
was a completely fictitious person created by Oswald, the organizations only
member. Oswald was arrested on August 9 in connection with a scuffle which
occurred while he was distributing pro-Castro leaflets. The next day, while at
the police station, he was interviewed by an FBI agent after Oswald requested
the police to arrange such an interview. Oswald gave the agent false information about his own background and was evasive in his replies concerning Fair
Play for Cuba activities. During the next 2 weeks Oswald appeared on radio
programs twice, claiming to be the spokesman for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans.
On July 19, 1963, Oswald lost his job as a greaser of coffee processing machinery. In September, after an exchange of correspondence with Marina Oswald,
Ruth Paine drove to New Orleans and on September 23, transported Marina,
the child, and the family belongings to Irving, Tex. Ruth Paine suggested that
Marina Oswald, who was expecting her second child in October, live at the
Paine house until after the baby was born. Oswald remained behind, ostensibly to find work either in Houston or some other city. Instead, he departed by
bus for Mexico, arriving in Mexico City on September 27, where he promptly
visited the Cuban and Russian Embassies. His stated objective was to obtain
official permission to visit Cuba, on his way to the Soviet Union. The Cuban
Government would not grant his visa unless the Soviet Government would also
issue a visa permitting his entry into Russia. Oswalds efforts to secure these
visas failed, and he left for Dallas, where he arrived on October 3, 1963.
When he saw his wife the next day, it was decided that Oswald would rent a
room in Dallas and visit his family on weekends. For 1 week he rented a room
from Mrs. Bledsoe, the woman who later saw him on the bus shortly after the
assassination. On October 14, 1963, he rented the Beckley Avenue room and
listed his name as O. H. Lee. On the same day, at the suggestion of a neighbor,
Mrs. Paine phoned the Texas School Book Depository and was told that there
was a job opening. She informed Oswald who was interviewed the following
day at the Depository and started to work there on October 16, 1963.
741
742
On October 20 the Oswalds second daughter was born. During October

and November Oswald established a general pattern of weekend visits to Irving, arriving on Friday afternoon and returning to Dallas Monday morning
with a fellow employee, Buell Wesley Frazier, who lived near the Paines. On
Friday, November 15, Oswald remained in Dallas at the suggestion of his wife
who told him that the house would be crowded because of a birthday party
for Ruth Paines daughter. On Monday, November 18, Oswald and his wife
quarreled bitterly during a telephone conversation, because she learned for
the first time that he was living at the roominghouse under an assumed name.
On Thursday, November 21, Oswald told Frazier that he would like to drive
to Irving to pick up some curtain rods for an apartment in Dallas. His wife and
Mrs. Paine were quite surprised to see him since it was a Thursday night. They
thought he had returned to make up after Mondays quarrel. He was conciliatory, but Marina Oswald was still angry.
Later that evening, when Mrs. Paine had finished cleaning the kitchen, she
went into the garage and noticed that the light was burning. She was certain
that she had not left it on, although the incident appeared unimportant at the
time. In the garage were most of the Oswalds personal possessions. The following morning Oswald left while his wife was still in bed feeding the baby.
She did not see him leave the house, nor did Ruth Paine. On the dresser in
their room he left his wedding ring which he had never done before. His wallet
containing $170 was left intact in a dresser-drawer.
Oswald walked to Fraziers house about half a block away and placed a long
bulky package, made out of wrapping paper and tape, into the rear seat of
the car. He told Frazier that the package contained curtain rods. When they
reached the Depository parking lot, Oswald walked quickly ahead. Frazier followed and saw Oswald enter the Depository Building carrying the long bulky
package with him.
During the morning of November 22, Marina Oswald followed President
Kennedys activities on television. She and Ruth Paine cried when they heard
that the President had been shot. Ruth Paine translated the news of the shooting to Marina Oswald as it came over television, including the report that the
shots were probably fired from the building where Oswald worked. When Marina Oswald heard this, she recalled the Walker episode and the fact that her
husband still owned the rifle. She went quietly to the Paines garage where
the rifle had been concealed in a blanket among their other belongings. It appeared to her that the rifle was still there, although she did not actually open
the blanket.
At about 3 P.M. the police arrived at the Paine house and asked Marina Oswald whether her husband owned a rifle. She said that he did and then led them
into the garage and pointed to the rolled up blanket. As a police officer lifted
it, the blanket hung limply over either side of his arm. The rifle was not there.
Meanwhile, at police headquarters Captain Fritz had begun questioning Oswald. Soon after the start of the first interrogation, agents of the FBI and the
U.S. Secret Service arrived and participated in the questioning. Oswald denied
having anything to do with the assassination of President Kennedy or the murder of Patrolman Tippit. He claimed that he was eating lunch at the time of
the assassination, and that he then spoke with his foreman for 5 to 10 minutes
before going home. He denied that he owned a rifle and when confronted, in
a subsequent interview, with a picture showing him holding a rifle and pistol,
he claimed that his face had been superimposed on someone elses body. He
refused to answer any questions about the presence in his wallet of a selective
service card with his picture and the name Alek J. Hidell.
During the questioning of Oswald on the third floor of the police department, more than 100 representatives of the press, radio, and television were
crowded into the hallway through which Oswald had to pass when being
taken from his cell to Captain Fritz office for interrogation. Reporters tried to
interview Oswald during these trips. Between Friday afternoon and Sunday
morning he appeared in the hallway at least 16 times. The generally confused
conditions outside and inside Captain Fritz office increased the difficulty of
police questioning. Advised by the police that he could communicate with
an attorney, Oswald made several telephone calls on Saturday in an effort to
procure representation of his own choice and discussed the matter with the
president of the local bar association, who offered to obtain counsel Oswald
declined the offer saying that he would first try to obtain counsel by himself.
By Sunday morning he had not yet engaged an attorney.
At 7:10 P.M. on November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was formally advised that he had been charged with the murder of Patrolman J. D. Tippit. Several witnesses to the Tippit slaying and to the subsequent flight of the gunman
had positively identified Oswald in police lineups. While positive firearm identification evidence was not available at the time, the revolver in Oswalds possession at the time of his arrest was of a type which could have fired the shots
that killed Tippit.
The formal charge against Oswald for the assassination of President Kennedy
was lodged shortly after 1:30 A.M., on Saturday, November 23. By 10 P.M. of the
day of the assassination, the FBI had traced the rifle found on the sixth floor
of the Texas School Book Depository to a mail order house in Chicago which
had purchased it from a distributor in New York. Approximately 6 hours later
the Chicago firm advised that this rifle had been ordered in March 1963 by an
A. Hidel for shipment to post office box 2915, in Dallas, Tex., box rented by
Oswald. Payment for the rifle was remitted by a money order signed by A. Hidell.
By 6:45 P.M. on November 23, the FBI was able to advise the Dallas police
that, as a result of handwriting analysis of the documents used to purchase the
rifle, it had concluded that the rifle had been ordered by Lee Harvey Oswald.
743
744
Throughout Friday and Saturday, the Dallas police released to the public many of the details concerning the alleged evidence against Oswald. Police
officials discussed important aspects of the case, usually in the course of impromptu and confused press conferences in the third-floor corridor. Some of
the information divulged was erroneous. Efforts by the news media representatives to reconstruct the crime and promptly report details frequently led to erroneous and often conflicting reports. At the urgings of the newsmen, Chief of
Police Jesse E. Curry, brought Oswald to a press conference in the police assembly room shortly after midnight of the day Oswald was arrested. The assembly
room was crowded with newsmen who had come to Dallas from all over the
country. They shouted questions at Oswald and flashed cameras at him. Among
this group was a 52-year-old Dallas nightclub operatorJack Ruby.
On Sunday morning, November 24, arrangements were made for Oswalds
transfer from the city jail to the Dallas County jail, about 1 mile away. The
news media had been informed on Saturday night that the transfer of Oswald
would not take place until after 10 A.M. on Sunday. Earlier on Sunday, between
2:30 and 3 A.M., anonymous telephone calls threatening Oswalds life had been
received by the Dallas office of the FBI and by the office of the county sheriff.
Nevertheless, on Sunday morning, television, radio, and newspaper representatives crowded into the basement to record the transfer. As viewed through
television cameras, Oswald would emerge from a door in front of the cameras
and proceed to the transfer vehicle. To the right of the cameras was a down
ramp from Main Street on the north. To the left was an up ramp leading to
Commerce Street on the south.
The armored truck in which Oswald was to be transferred arrived shortly
after 11 A.M. Police officials then decided, however, that an unmarked police
car would be preferable for the trip because of its greater speed and maneuverability. At approximately 11:20 A.M. Oswald emerged from the basement jail
office flanked by detectives on either side and at his rear. He took a few steps
toward the car and was in the glaring light of the television cameras when a
man suddenly darted out from an area on the right of the cameras where newsmen had been assembled. The man was carrying a Colt .38 revolver in his right
hand and, while millions watched on television, he moved quickly to within a
few feet of Oswald and fired one shot into Oswalds abdomen. Oswald groaned
with pain as he fell to the ground and quickly lost consciousness. Within
7 minutes Oswald was at Parkland Hospital where, without having regained
consciousness, he was pronounced dead at 1:07 P.M.
The man who killed Oswald was Jack Ruby. He was instantly arrested and,
minutes later, confined in a cell on the fifth floor of the Dallas police jail. Under
interrogation, he denied that the killing of Oswald was in any way connected
with a conspiracy involving the assassination of President Kennedy. He maintained that he had killed Oswald in a temporary fit of depression and rage over
the Presidents death. Ruby was transferred the following day to the county jail
without notice to the press or to police officers not directly involved in the transfer. Indicted for the murder of Oswald by the State of Texas on November 26,
1963, Ruby was found guilty on March 14, 1964, and sentenced to death. As
of September 1964, his case was pending on appeal.
Conclusions
This Commission was created to ascertain the facts relating to the preceding
summary of events and to consider the important questions which they raised.
The Commission has addressed itself to this task and has reached certain conclusions based on all the available evidence. No limitations have been placed
on the Commissions inquiry; it has conducted its own investigation, and all
Government agencies have fully discharged their responsibility to cooperate
with the Commission in its investigation. These conclusions represent the reasoned judgment of all members of the Commission and are presented after an
investigation which has satisfied the Commission that it: has ascertained the
truth concerning the assassination of President Kennedy to the extent that a
prolonged and thorough search makes this possible.
1. The shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally were fired from the sixth floor window at the southeast corner of
the Texas School Book Depository. This determination is based upon the
following:
(a) Witnesses at the scene of the assassination saw a rifle being fired
from the sixth floor window of the Depository Building, and some
witnesses saw a rifle in the window immediately after the shots were
fired.
(b) The nearly whole bullet found on Governor Connallys stretcher at
Parkland Memorial Hospital and the two bullet fragments found
in the front seat of the Presidential limousine were fired from the
6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found on the sixth floor of
the Depository Building to the exclusion of all other weapons.
(c) The three used cartridge cases found near the window on the sixth
floor at the southeast corner of the building were fired from the same
rifle which fired the above-described bullet and fragments, to the exclusion of all other weapons.
(d) The windshield in the Presidential limousine was struck by a bullet
fragment on the inside surface of the glass, but was not penetrated.
(e) The nature of the bullet wounds suffered by President Kennedy and
Governor Connally and the location of the car at the time of the
745
746
shots establish that the bullets were fired from above and behind the
Presidential limousine, striking the President and the Governor as
follows:
1. President Kennedy was first struck by a bullet which entered at
the back of his neck and exited through the lower front portion of
his neck, causing a wound which would not necessarily have been
lethal. The President was struck a second time by a bullet which
entered the right-rear portion of his head, causing a massive and
fatal wound.
2. Governor Connally was struck by a bullet which entered on the
right side of his back and traveled downward through the right
side of his chest, exiting below his right nipple. This bullet then
passed through his right wrist and entered his left thigh where it
caused a superficial wound.
(f) There is no credible evidence that the shots were fired from the Triple
Underpass, ahead of the motorcade, or from any other location.
3. The weight of the evidence indicates that there were three shots fired.
4. Although it is not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission to determine just which shot hit Governor Connally, there is very
persuasive evidence from the experts to indicate that the same bullet
which pierced the Presidents throat also caused Governor Connallys
wounds. However, Governor Connallys testimony and certain other
factors have given rise to some difference of opinion as to this probability but there is no question in the mind of any member of the Commission that all the shots which caused the Presidents and Governor
Connallys wounds were fired from the sixth floor window of the Texas
School Book Depository.
5. The shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. This conclusion is based upon
the following:
(a) The Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5-millimeter Italian rifle from which the
shots were fired was owned by and in the possession of Oswald.
(b) Oswald carried this rifle into the Depository Building on the morning of November 22, 1963.
(c) Oswald, at the time of the assassination, was present at the window
from which the shots were fired.
(d) Shortly after the assassination, the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle belonging to Oswald was found partially hidden between some cartons
on the sixth floor and the improvised paper bag in which Oswald
brought the rifle to the Depository was found dose by the window
from which the shots were fired.
(e) Based on testimony of the experts and their analysis of films of the
assassination, the Commission has concluded that a rifleman of Lee
Harvey Oswalds capabilities could have fired the shots from the rifle
used in the assassination within the elapsed time of the shooting. The
Commission has concluded further that Oswald possessed the capability with a rifle which enabled him to commit the assassination.
(f) Oswald lied to the police after his arrest concerning important substantive matters.
(g) Oswald had attempted to kill Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker (Retired,
U.S. Army) on April 10, 1963, thereby demonstrating his disposition
to take human life.
6. Oswald killed Dallas Police Patrolman J. D. Tippit approximately 45 minutes after the assassination. This conclusion upholds the finding that
Oswald fired the shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded
Governor Connally and is supported by the following:
(a) Two eyewitnesses saw the Tippit shooting and seven eyewitnesses
heard the shots and saw the gunman leave the scene with revolver in
hand. These nine eyewitnesses positively identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the man they saw.
(b) The cartridge cases found at the scene of the shooting were fired
from the revolver in the possession of Oswald at the time of his arrest to the exclusion of all other weapons.
(c) The revolver in Oswalds possession at the time of his arrest was purchased by and belonged to Oswald.
(d) Oswalds jacket was found along the path of flight taken by the gunman as he fled from the scene of the killing.
7. Within 80 minutes of the assassination and 35 minutes of the Tippit killing Oswald resisted arrest at the theatre by attempting to shoot another
Dallas police officer.
8. The Commission has reached the following conclusions concerning Oswalds interrogation and detention by the Dallas police:
(a) Except for the force required to effect his arrest, Oswald was not subjected to any physical coercion by any law enforcement officials. He
was advised that he could not be compelled to give any information and that any statements made by him might be used against
him in court. He was advised of his right to counsel. He was given
747
748
the opportunity to obtain counsel of his own choice and was offered
legal assistance by the Dallas Bar Association, which he rejected at
that time.
(b) Newspaper, radio, and television reporters were allowed uninhibited
access to the area through which Oswald had to pass when he was
moved from his cell to the interrogation room and other sections of
the building, thereby subjecting Oswald to harassment and creating
chaotic conditions which were not conducive to orderly interrogation or the protection of the rights of the prisoner.
(c) The numerous statements, sometimes erroneous, made to the press
by various local law enforcement officials, during this period of confusion and disorder in the police station, would have presented serious obstacles to the obtaining of a fair trial for Oswald. To the extent
that the information was erroneous or misleading, it helped to create doubts, speculations, and fears in the mind of the public which
might otherwise not have arisen.
8. The Commission has reached the following conclusions concerning the
killing of Oswald by Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963:
(a) Ruby entered the basement of the Dallas Police Department shortly
after 11:17 A.M. and killed Lee Harvey Oswald at 11:21 A.M.
(b) Although the evidence on Rubys means of entry is not conclusive,
the weight of the evidence indicates that he walked down the ramp
leading from Main Street to the basement of the police department.
(c) There is no evidence to support the rumor that Ruby may have been
assisted by any members of the Dallas Police Department in the killing of Oswald.
(d) The Dallas Police Departments decision to transfer Oswald to the
county jail in full public view was unsound. The arrangements made
by the police department on Sunday morning, only a few hours before the attempted transfer, were inadequate. Of critical importance
was the fact that news media representatives and others were not
excluded from the basement even after the police were notified of
threats to Oswalds life. These deficiencies contributed to the death
of Lee Harvey Oswald.
9. The Commission has found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald
or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy. The reasons for this conclusion are:
(a) The Commission has found no evidence that anyone assisted Oswald
in planning or carrying out the assassination. In this connection it
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
(f)
has thoroughly investigated, among other factors, the circumstances

surrounding the planning of the motorcade route through Dallas, the
hiring of Oswald by the Texas School Book Depository Co. on October 15, 1963, the method by which the rifle was brought into the
building, the placing of cartons of books at the window, Oswalds
escape from the building, and the testimony of eyewitnesses to the
shooting.
The Commission has found no evidence that Oswald was involved
with any person or group in a conspiracy to assassinate the President, although it has thoroughly investigated, in addition to other
possible leads, all facets of Oswalds associations, finances, and personal habits, particularly during the period following his return from
the Soviet Union in June 1962.
The Commission has found no evidence to show that Oswald was
employed, persuaded, or encouraged by any foreign government to
assassinate President Kennedy or that he was an agent of any foreign
government, although the Commission has reviewed the circumstances surrounding Oswalds defection to the Soviet Union, his life
there from October of 1959 to June of 1962 so far as it can be reconstructed, his known contacts with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee
and his visits to the Cuban and Soviet Embassies in Mexico City during his trip to Mexico from September 26 to October 3, 1963, and
his known contacts with the Soviet Embassy in the United States.
The Commission has explored all attempts of Oswald to identify himself with various political groups, including the Communist Party,
U.S.A., the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and the Socialist Workers Party, and has been unable to find any evidence that the contacts
which he initiated were related to Oswalds subsequent assassination
of the President.
All of the evidence before the Commission established that there was
nothing to support the speculation that Oswald was an agent, employee, or informant of the FBI, the CIA, or any other governmental
agency. It has thoroughly investigated Oswalds relationships prior to
the assassination with all agencies of the U.S. Government. All contacts with Oswald by any of these agencies were made in the regular
exercise of their different responsibilities.
No direct or indirect relationship between Lee Harvey Oswald and
Jack Ruby has been discovered by the Commission, nor has it been
able to find any credible evidence that either knew the other, although a thorough investigation was made of the many rumors and
speculations of such a relationship.
749
750
(g) The Commission has found no evidence that Jack Ruby acted with
any other person in the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald.
(h) After careful investigation the Commission has found no credible
evidence either that Ruby and Officer Tippit, who was killed by Oswald, knew each other or that Oswald and Tippit knew each other.
10. Because of the difficulty of proving negatives to a certainty the possibility of others being involved with either Oswald or Ruby cannot be
established categorically, but if there is any such evidence it has been
beyond the reach of all the investigative agencies and resources of the
United States and has not come to the attention of this Commission.
11. In its entire investigation the Commission has found no evidence of
conspiracy, subversion, or disloyalty to the U.S. Government by any
Federal, State, or local official.
12. On the basis of the evidence before the Commission it concludes that
Oswald acted alone. Therefore, to determine the motives for the assassination of President Kennedy, one must look to the assassin himself. Clues to Oswalds motives can be found in his family history, his
education or lack of it, his acts, his writings, and the recollections of
those who had close contacts with him throughout his life. The Commission has presented with this report all of the background information bearing on motivation which it could discover. Thus, others may
study Lee Oswalds life and arrive at their own conclusions as to his
possible motives.
The Commission could not make any definitive determination of Oswalds motives. It has endeavored to isolate factors which contributed
to his character and which might have influenced his decision to assassinate President Kennedy. These factors were:
(a) His deep-rooted resentment of all authority which was expressed in
a hostility toward every society in which he lived;
(b) His inability to enter into meaningful relationships with people,
and a continuous pattern of rejecting his environment favor of new
surrounding;
(c) His urge to try to find a place in history and despair at times over
failures in his various undertakings;
(d) His capacity for violence as evidenced by his attempt to kill General
Walker;
(e) His avowed commitment to Marxism and communism, as he understood the terms and developed his own interpretation of them;
this was expressed by his antagonism toward the United States, by
his defection to the Soviet Union, by his failure to be reconciled
with life in the United States even after his disenchantment with the
Soviet Union, and by his efforts, though frustrated, to go to Cuba.
Each of these contributed to his capacity to risk all in cruel and irresponsible actions.
13. The Commission recognizes that the varied responsibilities of the President require that he make frequent trips to all parts of the United States
and abroad. Consistent with their high responsibilities Presidents can
never be protected from every potential threat. The Secret Services difficulty in meeting its protective responsibility varies with the activities and the nature of the occupant of the Office of President and his
willingness to conform to plans for his safety. In appraising the performance of the Secret Service it should be understood that it has to do its
work within such limitations. Nevertheless, the Commission believes
that recommendations for improvements in Presidential protection are
compelled by the facts disclosed in this investigation.
(a) The complexities of the Presidency have increased so rapidly in recent years that the Secret Service has not been able to develop or
to secure adequate resources of personnel and facilities to fulfill its
important assignment. This situation should be promptly remedied.
(b) The Commission has concluded that the criteria and procedures of
the Secret Service designed to identify and protect against persons
considered threats to the president, were not adequate prior to the
assassination.
1. The Protective Research Section of the Secret Service, which
is responsible for its preventive work, lacked sufficient trained
personnel and the mechanical and technical assistance needed
to fulfill its responsibility.
2. Prior to the assassination the Secret Services criteria dealt with
direct threats against the President. Although the Secret Service treated the direct threats against the President adequately,
it failed to recognize the necessity of identifying other potential sources of danger to his security. The Secret Service did not
develop adequate and specific criteria defining those persons
or groups who might present a danger to the President. In effect, the Secret Service largely relied upon other Federal or State
agencies to supply the information necessary for it to fulfill its
preventive responsibilities, although it did ask for information
about direct threats to the President.
(c) The Commission has concluded that there was insufficient liaison
and coordination of information between the Secret Service and other
Federal agencies necessarily concerned with Presidential protection.
751
752
Although the FBI, in the normal exercise of its responsibility, had

secured considerable information about Lee Harvey Oswald, it had
no official responsibility, under the Secret Service criteria existing
at the time of the Presidents trip to Dallas, to refer to the Secret
Service the information it had about Oswald. The Commission has
concluded, however, that the FBI took an unduly restrictive view
of its role in preventive intelligence work prior to the assassination.
A more carefully coordinated treatment of the Oswald case by the
FBI might well have resulted in bringing Oswalds activities to the
attention of the Secret Service.
(d) The Commission has concluded that some of the advance preparations in Dallas made by the Secret Service, such as the detailed
security measures taken at Love Field and the Trade Mart, were
thorough and well executed. In other respects, however, the Commission has concluded that the advance preparations for the Presidents trip were deficient.
2. Although the Secret Service is compelled to rely to a great extent
on local law enforcement officials, its procedures at the time of
the Dallas trip did not call for well-defined instructions as to the
respective responsibilities of the police officials and others assisting in the protection of the President.
3. The procedures relied upon by the Secret Service for detecting the
presence of an assassin located in a building along a motorcade
route were inadequate. At the time of the trip to Dallas, the Secret Service as a matter of practice did not investigate, or cause
to be checked, any building located along the motorcade route to
be taken by the President. The responsibility for observing windows in these buildings during the motorcade was divided between local police personnel stationed on the streets to regulate
crowds and Secret Service agents riding in the motorcade. Based
on its investigation the Commission has concluded that these arrangements during the trip to Dallas were clearly not sufficient.
(e) The configuration of the Presidential car and the seating arrangements of the Secret Service agents in the car did not afford the Secret Service agents the opportunity they should have had to be of
immediate assistance to the President at the first sign of danger.
(f) Within these limitations, however, the Commission finds that the
agents most immediately responsible for the Presidents safety reacted promptly at the time the shots were fired from the Texas
School Book Depository Building.
Recommendations
Prompted by the assassination of President Kennedy, the Secret Service has
initiated a comprehensive and critical review of its total operations. As a result
of studies conducted during the past several months, and in cooperation with
this Commission, the Secret Service has prepared a planning document dated
August 27, 1964, which recommends various programs considered necessary
by the Service to improve its techniques and enlarge its resources. The Commission is encouraged by the efforts taken by the Secret Service since the assassination and suggests the following recommendations.
1. A committee of Cabinet members including the Secretary of the Treasury
and the Attorney General, or the National Security Council, should be
assigned the responsibility of reviewing and overseeing the protective activities of the Secret Service and the other Federal agencies that assist in
safeguarding the President. Once given this responsibility, such a committee would insure that the maximum resources of the Federal Government are fully engaged in the task of protecting the President, and would
provide guidance in defining the general nature of domestic and foreign
dangers to Presidential security.
2. Suggestions have been advanced to the Commission for the transfer of
all or parts of the Presidential protective responsibilities of the Secret Service to some other department or agency. The Commission believes that
if there is to be any determination of whether or not to relocate these responsibilities and functions, it ought to be made by the Executive and
the Congress, perhaps upon recommendations based on studies by the
previously suggested committee.
3. Meanwhile, in order to improve daily supervision of the Secret Service
within the Department of the Treasury, the Commission recommends
that the Secretary of the Treasury appoint a special assistant with the
responsibility of supervising the Secret Service. This special assistant
should have sufficient stature and experience in law enforcement, intelligence, and allied fields to provide effective continuing supervision, and
to keep the Secretary fully informed regarding the performance of the Secret Service. One of the initial assignments of this special assistant should
be the supervision of the current effort by the Secret Service to revise and
modernize its basic operating procedures.
4. The Commission recommends that the Secret Service completely overhaul its facilities devoted to the advance detection of potential threats
against the President. The Commission suggests the following measures.
(a) The Secret Service should develop as quickly as possible more useful
and precise criteria defining those potential threats to the President
753
754
which should be brought to its attention by other agencies. The criteria should, among other additions, provide for prompt notice to
the Secret Service of all returned defectors.
(b) The Secret Service should expedite its current plans to utilize the
most efficient data-processing techniques.
(c) Once the Secret Service has formulated new criteria delineating the
information it desires, it should enter into agreements with each
Federal agency to insure its receipt of such information.
5. The Commission recommends that the Secret Service improve the protective measures followed in the planning, and conducting of Presidential motorcades. In particular the Secret Service should continue its
current efforts to increase the precautionary attention given to buildings
along the motorcade route.
6. The Commission recommends that the Secret Service continue its recent efforts to improve and formalize its relationships with local police
departments in areas to be visited by the President.
7. The Commission believes that when the new criteria and procedures
are established, the Secret Service will not have sufficient personnel or
adequate facilities. The Commission recommends that the Secret Service be provided with the personnel and resources which the Service
and the Department of the Treasury may be able to demonstrate are
needed to fulfill its important mission.
8. Even with an increase in Secret Service personnel, the protection of
the President will continue to require the resources and cooperation
of many Federal agencies. The Commission recommends that these
agencies, specifically the FBI, continue the practice as it has developed, particularly since the assassination, of assisting the Secret Service
upon request by providing personnel or other aid, and that there be a
closer association and liaison between the Secret Service and all Federal
agencies.
9. The Commission recommends that the Presidents physician always accompany him during his travels and occupy a position near the President where he can be immediately available in case of any emergency.
10. The Commission recommends to Congress that it adopt legislation
which would make the assassination of the President and Vice President a Federal crime. A state of affairs where U.S. authorities have no
clearly defined jurisdiction to investigate the assassination of a President is anomalous.
11. The Commission has examined the Department of States handling
of the Oswald matters and finds that it followed the law throughout.
However, the Commission believes that the Department in accordance with its own regulations should in all cases exercise great care
in the return to this country of defectors who have evidenced disloyalty or hostility to this country or who have expressed a desire to renounce their American citizenship and that when such persons are so
returned, procedures should be adopted for the better dissemination
of information concerning them to the intelligence agencies of the
Government.
12. The Commission recommends that the representatives of the bar, law
enforcement associations, and the news media work together to establish ethical standards concerning the collection and presentation
of information to the public so that there will be no interference with
pending criminal investigations, court proceedings, or the right of individuals to a fair trial.
THIS CHAPTER describes President Kennedys trip to Dallas, from its origin
through its tragic conclusion. The narrative of these events is based largely on
the recollections of the participants, although in many instances documentary
or other evidence has also been used by the Commission. Beginning with the
advance plans and Secret Service preparations for the trip, this chapter reviews
the motorcade through Dallas, the fleeting moments of the assassination, the
activities at Parkland Memorial Hospital, and the return of the Presidential
party to Washington. An evaluation of the procedures employed to safeguard
the President, with recommendations for improving these procedures, appears
in Chapter VIII of the report.
Planning the Texas Trip
President Kennedys visit to Texas in November 1963 had been under consideration for almost a year before it occurred. He had made only a few brief visits
to the State since the 1960 Presidential campaign and in 1962 he began to consider a formal visit. During 1963, the reasons for making the trip became more
persuasive. As a political leader, the President wished to resolve the factional
controversy within the Democratic Party in Texas before the election of 1964.
The party itself saw an opportunity to raise funds by having the President speak
at a political dinner eventually planned for Austin. As Chief of State, the President always welcomed the opportunity to learn, firsthand, about the problems
which concerned the American people. Moreover, he looked forward to the
public appearances which he personally enjoyed.
The basic decision on the November trip to Texas was made at a meeting of
President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, and Governor Connally on June 5,
1963, at the Cortez Hotel in El Paso, Tex. The President had spoken earlier that
755
756
day at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., and had stopped in
El Paso to discuss the proposed visit and other matters with the Vice President
and the Governor. The three agreed that the President would come to Texas in
late November 1963. The original plan called for the President to spend only
1 day in the State, making whirlwind visits to Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio,
and Houston. In September, the White House decided to permit further visits
by the President and extended the trip to run from the afternoon of November 21 through the evening of Friday, November 22. When Governor Connally
called at the White House on October 4 to discuss the details of the visit, it was
agreed that the planning of events in Texas would be left largely to the Governor. At the White House, Kenneth ODonnell, special assistant to the President, acted as coordinator for the trip.
Everyone agreed that, if there was sufficient time, a motorcade through
downtown Dallas would be the best way for the people to see their President.
When the trip was planned for only 1 day, Governor Connally had opposed
the motorcade because there was not enough time. The Governor stated, however, that once we got San Antonio moved from Friday to Thursday afternoon,
where that was his initial stop in Texas, then we had the time, and I withdrew
my objections to a motorcade. According to ODonnell, we had a motorcade
wherever we went, particularly in large cities where the purpose was to let the
President be seen by as many people as possible. In his experience, it would
be automatic for the Secret Service to arrange a route which would, within the
time allotted, bring the President through an area which exposes him to the
greatest number of people.
Advance Preparations for the Dallas Trip
Advance preparations for President Kennedys visit to Dallas were primarily the
responsibility of two Secret Service agents: Special Agent Winston G. Lawson, a
member of the White House detail who acted as the advance agent, and Forrest V.
Sorrels, special agent in charge of the Dallas office. Both agents were advised
of the trip on November 4. Lawson received a tentative schedule of the Texas
trip on November 8 from Roy H. Kellerman, assistant special agent in charge of
the White House detail, who was the Secret Service official responsible for the
entire Texas journey. As advance agent working closely with Sorrels, Lawson
had responsibility for arranging the timetable for the Presidents visit to Dallas
and coordinating local activities with the White House staff, the organizations
directly concerned with the visit, and local law enforcement officials. Lawsons
most important responsibilities were to take preventive action against anyone
in Dallas considered a threat to the President, to select the luncheon site and
motorcade route, and to plan security measures for the luncheon and the
motorcade.
Preventive Intelligence Activities

The Protective Research Section (PRS) of the Secret Service maintains records
of people who have threatened the President or so conducted themselves as to
be deemed a potential danger to him. On November 8, 1963, after undertaking
the responsibility for advance preparations for the visit to Dallas, Agent Lawson
went to the PRS offices in Washington. A check of the geographic indexes there
revealed no listing for any individual deemed to be a potential danger to the
President in the territory of the Secret Service regional office which includes
Dallas and Fort Worth.
To supplement the PRS files, the Secret Service depends largely on local police departments and local offices of other Federal agencies which advise it of
potential threats immediately before the visit of the President to their community. Upon his arrival in Dallas on November 12 Lawson conferred with the
local police and the local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation about
potential dangers to the President. Although there was no mention in PRS files
of the demonstration in Dallas against Ambassador Adlai Stevenson on October 24, 1963, Lawson inquired about the incident and obtained through the
local police photographs of some of the persons involved. On November 22 a
Secret Service agent stood at the entrance to the Trade Mart, where the President was scheduled to speak, with copies of these photographs. Dallas detectives in the lobby of the Trade Mart and in the luncheon area also had copies
of these photographs. A number of people who resembled some of those in the
photographs were placed under surveillance at the Trade Mart.
The FBI office in Dallas gave the local Secret Service representatives the
name of a possibly dangerous individual in the Dallas area who was investigated. It also advised the Secret Service of the circulation on November 21
of a handbill sharply critical of President Kennedy, discussed in chapter VI of
this report. Shortly before, the Dallas police had reported to the Secret Service
that the handbill had appeared on the streets of Dallas. Neither the Dallas police nor the FBI had yet learned the source of the handbill. No one else was
identified to the Secret Service through local inquiry as potentially dangerous,
nor did PRS develop any additional information between November 12, when
Lawson left Washington, and November 22. The adequacy of the intelligence
system maintained by the Secret Service at the time of the assassination, including a detailed description of the available data on Lee Harvey Oswald and
the reasons why his name had not been furnished to the Secret Service, is discussed in chapter VIII.
The Luncheon Site
An important purpose of the Presidents visit to Dallas was to speak at a luncheon given by business and civic leaders. The White House staff informed
757
758
the Secret Service that the President would arrive and depart from Dallas Love
Field; that a motorcade through the downtown area of Dallas to the luncheon
site should be arranged; and that following the luncheon the President would
return to the airport by the most direct route. Accordingly, it was important to
determine the luncheon site as quickly as possible, so that security could be
established at the site and the motorcade route selected.
On November 4, Gerald A. Behn, agent in charge of the White House detail, asked Sorrels to examine three potential sites for the luncheon. One building, Market Hall, was unavailable for November 22. The second, the Womens
Building at the State Fair Grounds, was a one-story building with few entrances and easy to make secure, but it lacked necessary food-handling facilities and had certain unattractive features, including a low ceiling with exposed
conduits and beams. The third possibility, the Trade Mart, a handsome new
building with all the necessary facilities, presented security problems. It had
numerous entrances, several tiers of balconies surrounding the central court
where the luncheon would be held, and several catwalks crossing the court
at each level. On November 4, Sorrels told Behn he believed security difficulties at the Trade Mart could be overcome by special precautions. Lawson also
evaluated the security hazards at the Trade Mart on November 13. Kenneth
ODonnell made the final decision to hold the luncheon at the Trade Mart;
Behn so notified Lawson on November 14.
Once the Trade Mart had been selected, Sorrels and Lawson worked out detailed arrangements for security at the building. In addition to the preventive
measures already mentioned, they provided for controlling access to the building, closing off and policing areas around it, securing the roof and insuring
the presence of numerous police officers inside and around the building. Ultimately more than 200 law enforcement officers, mainly Dallas police but including 8 Secret Service agents, were deployed in and around the Trade Mart.
The Motorcade Route
On November 8, when Lawson was briefed on the itinerary for the trip to Dallas, he was told that 45 minutes had been allotted for a motorcade procession
from Love Field to the luncheon site. Lawson was not specifically instructed to
select the parade route, but he understood that this was one of his functions.
Even before the Trade Mart had been definitely selected, Lawson and Sorrels
began to consider the best motorcade route from Love Field to the Trade Mart.
On November 14, Lawson and Sorrels attended a meeting at Love Field and on
their return to Dallas drove over the route which Sorrels believed best suited
for the proposed motorcade. This route, eventually selected for the motorcade
from the airport to the Trade Mart, measured 10 miles and could be driven easily within the allotted 45 minutes. From Love Field the route passed through
a portion of suburban Dallas, through the downtown area along Main Street
and then to the Trade Mart via Stemmons Freeway. For the Presidents return
to Love Field following the luncheon, the agents selected the most direct route,
which was approximately 4 miles.
After the selection of the Trade Mart as the luncheon site, Lawson and Sorrels met with Dallas Chief of Police Jesse E. Curry, Assistant Chief Charles
Batchelor, Deputy Chief N. T. Fisher, and several other command officers to
discuss details of the motorcade and possible routes. The route was further reviewed by Lawson and Sorrels with Assistant Chief Batchelor and members of
the local host committee on November 15. The police officials agreed that the
route recommended by Sorrels was the proper one and did not express a belief that any other route might be better. On November 18, Sorrels and Lawson
drove over the selected route with Batchelor and other police officers, verifying
that it could be traversed within 45 minutes. Representatives of the local host
committee and the White House staff were advised by the Secret Service of the
actual route on the afternoon of November 18.
The route impressed the agents as a natural and desirable one. Sorrels, who
had participated in Presidential protection assignments in Dallas since a visit
by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, as testified that the traditional parade route in Dallas was along Main Street, since the tall buildings along the
street gave more people an opportunity to participate. The route chosen from
the airport to Main Street was the normal one, except where Harwood Street
was selected as the means of access to Main Street in preference to a short
stretch of the Central Expressway, which presented a minor safety hazard and
could not accommodate spectators as conveniently as Harwood Street. According to Lawson, the chosen route seemed to be the best.
It afforded us wide streets most of the way, because of the buses that were in
the motorcade. It afforded us a chance to have alternative routes if something
happened on the motorcade route. It was the type of suburban area a good part
of the way where the crowds would be able to be controlled for a great distance, and we figured that the largest crowds would be downtown, which they
were, and that the wide streets that we would use downtown would be of sufficient width to keep the public out of our way.
Elm Street, parallel to Main Street and one block north, was not used for the
main portion of the downtown part of the motorcade because Main Street offered better vantage points for spectators.
To reach the Trade Mart from Main Street the agents decided to use the
Stemmons Freeway (Route No. 77), the most direct route. The only practical
way for westbound traffic on Main Street to reach the northbound lanes of the
Stemmons Freeway is via Elm Street, which Route No. 77 traffic is instructed
to follow in this part of the city. (See Commission Exhibit No. 2113, p. 34.)
Elm Street was to be reached from Main by turning right at Houston, going one
759
760
block north and then turning left onto Elm. On this last portion of the journey,
only 5 minutes from the Trade Mart, the Presidents motorcade would pass the
Texas School Book Depository Building on the northwest corner of Houston
and Elm Streets. The building overlooks Dealey Plaza, an attractively landscaped triangle of 3 acres. . . .
From Houston Street, which forms the base of the triangle, three streets
Commerce, Main, and Elmtrisect the plaza, converging at the apex of the
triangle to form a triple underpass beneath a multiple railroad bridge almost
500 feet from Houston Street. Elm Street, the northernmost of the three, after
intersecting Houston curves in a southwesterly arc through the underpass and
leads into an access road, which branches off to the right and is used by traffic
going to the Stemmons Freeway and the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike. . . .
The Elm Street approach to the Stemmons Freeway is necessary in order to
avoid the traffic hazards which would otherwise exist if right turns were permitted from both Main and Elm into the freeway. To create this traffic pattern,
a concrete barrier between Main and Elm Streets presents an obstacle to a right
turn from Main across Elm to the access road to Stemmons Freeway and the
Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike. This concrete barrier extends far enough beyond
the access road to make it impracticable for vehicles to turn right from Main
directly to the access road. A sign located on this barrier instructs Main Street
traffic not to make any turns. . . . In conformity with these arrangements, traffic proceeding west on Main is directed to turn right at Houston in order to
reach the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike, which has the same access road from
Elm Street as does the Stemmons Freeway. . . .
The planning for the motorcade also included advance preparations for security arrangements along the route. Sorrels and Lawson reviewed the route in
cooperation with Assistant Chief Bachelor and other Dallas police officials who
took notes on the requirements for controlling the crowds and traffic, watching
the overpasses, and providing motorcycle escort. To control traffic, arrangements were made for the deployment of foot patrolmen and motorcycle police
at various positions along the route. Police were assigned to each overpass on
the route and instructed to keep them clear of unauthorized persons. No arrangements were made for police or building custodians to inspect buildings
along the motorcade route since the Secret Service did not normally request or
make such a check? Under standard procedures, the responsibility for watching the windows of buildings was shared by local police stationed along the
route and Secret Service agents riding in the motorcade.
As the date for the Presidents visit approached, the two Dallas newspapers carried several reports of his motorcade route. The selection of the Trade
Mart as the possible site for the luncheon first appeared in the Dallas TimesHerald.on November 15, 1963. The following day, the newspaper reported
that the Presidential party apparently will loop through the downtown area,
probably on Main Street, en route from Dallas Love Field on its way to the
Trade Mart. On November 19, the Times-Herald afternoon paper detailed the
precise route: From the airport, the Presidents party will proceed to Mockingbird Lane to Lemmon and then to Turtle Creek, turning south to Cedar
Springs. The motorcade will then pass through downtown on Harwood and
then west on Main, turning back to Elm at Houston and then out Stemmons
Freeway to the Trade Mart.
Also on November 19, the Morning News reported that the Presidents
motorcade would travel from Love Field along specified streets, then Harwood to Main, Main to Houston, Houston to Elm, Elm under the Triple Underpass to Stemmons Freeway, and on to the Trade Mart. On November 20 a
front page story reported that the streets on which the Presidential motorcade
would travel included Main and Stemmons Freeway. On the morning of the
Presidents arrival, the Morning News noted that the motorcade would travel
through downtown Dallas onto the Stemmons Freeway, and reported that the
motorcade will move slowly so that crowds can get a good view of President
Kennedy and his wife.
Dallas before the Visit
The Presidents intention to pay a visit to Texas in the fall of 1963 aroused
interest throughout the State. The two Dallas newspapers provided their readers with a steady stream of information and speculation about the trip, beginning on September 13, when the Times-Herald announced in a front page
article that President Kennedy was planning a brief l-day tour of four Texas
citiesDallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Houston. Both Dallas papers
cited White House sources on September 26 as confirming the Presidents
intention to visit Texas on November 21 and 22, with Dallas scheduled as one
of the stops.
Articles, editorials, and letters to the editor in the Dallas Morning News and
the Dallas Times-Herald after September 13 reflected the feeling in the community toward the forthcoming Presidential visit. Although there were critical
editorials and letters to the editors, the news stories reflected the desire of Dallas officials to welcome the President with dignity and courtesy. An editorial in
the Times-Herald of September 17 called on the people of Dallas to be congenial hosts even though Dallas didnt vote for Mr. Kennedy in 1960, may
not endorse him in 64. On October 3 the Dallas Morning News quoted U.S.
Representative Joe Pools hope that President Kennedy would receive a good
welcome and would not face demonstrations like those encountered by Vice
President Johnson during the 1960 campaign.
Increased concern about the Presidents visit was aroused by the incident
involving the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai E. Stevenson. On
761
762
the evening of October 24, 1963, after addressing a meeting in Dallas, Stevenson was jeered, jostled, and spat upon by hostile demonstrators outside the
Dallas Memorial Auditorium Theater. The local, national, and international
reaction to this incident evoked from Dallas officials and newspapers strong
condemnations of the demonstrators. Mayor Earle Cabell called on the city
to redeem itself during President Kennedys visit. He asserted that Dallas had
shed its reputation of the twenties as the Southwest hate capital of Dixie.
On October 26 the press reported Chief of Police Currys plans to call in 100
extra off-duty officers to help protect President Kennedy. Any thought that
the President might cancel his visit to Dallas was ended when Governor Connally confirmed on November 8 that the President would come to Texas on
November 2122, and that he would visit San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth,
Dallas, and Austin.
During November the Dallas papers reported frequently on the plans for
protecting the President, stressing the thoroughness of the preparations. They
conveyed the pleas of Dallas leaders that citizens not demonstrate or create disturbances during the Presidents visit. On November 18 the Dallas City Council
adopted a new city ordinance prohibiting interference with attendance at lawful assemblies. Two days before the Presidents arrival Chief Curry warned that
the Dallas police would not permit improper conduct during the Presidents
visit.
Meanwhile, on November 17 the president of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce referred to the citys reputation for being the friendliest town in America
and asserted that citizens would greet the President of the United States with
the warmth and pride that keep the Dallas spirit famous the world over. Two
days later, a local Republican leader called for a civilized nonpartisan welcome for President Kennedy, stating that in many respects Dallas County has
isolated itself from the main stream of life in the world in this decade.
Another reaction to the impending visithostile to the Presidentcame
to a head shortly before his arrival. On November 21 there appeared on the
streets of Dallas the anonymous handbill mentioned above. It was fashioned
after the wanted circulars issued by law enforcement agencies. Beneath two
photographs of President Kennedy, one full-face and one profile, appeared the
caption, Wanted for Treason, followed by a scurrilous bill of particulars that
constituted a vilification of the President. And on the morning of the Presidents
arrival, there appeared in the Morning News a full, black-bordered advertisement headed Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas, sponsored by the American
Fact-finding Committee, which the sponsor later testified was an ad hoc committee formed strictly for the purpose of having a name to put in the paper.
The welcome consisted of a series of statements and questions critical of the
President and his administration. . . .
Visits to Other Texas Cities

The trip to Texas began with the departure of President and Mrs. Kennedy from
the White House by helicopter at 10:45 A.M., e.s.t., on November 21, 1963,
for Andrews AFB. They took off in the Presidential plane, Air Force One, at
11 A.M., arriving at San Antonio at 1:30 P.M., e.s.t. They were greeted by Vice
President Johnson and Governor Connally, who joined the Presidential party
in a motorcade through San Antonio. During the afternoon, President Kennedy
dedicated the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks AFB. Late
in the afternoon he flew to Houston where he rode through the city in a motorcade, spoke at the Rice University Stadium, and attended a dinner in honor of
U.S. Representative Albert Thomas.
At Rice Stadium a very large, enthusiastic crowd greeted the President. In
Houston, as elsewhere during the trip, the crowds showed much interest in
Mrs. Kennedy. David F. Powers of the Presidents staff later stated that when the
President asked for his assessment of the days activities, Powers replied that
the crowd was about the same as the one which came to see him before but
there were 100,000 extra people on hand who came to see Mrs. Kennedy. Late
in the evening, the Presidential party flew to Fort Worth where they spent the
night at the Texas Hotel.
On the morning of November 22, President Kennedy attended a breakfast at
the hotel and afterward addressed a crowd at an open parking lot. The President liked outdoor appearances because more people could see and hear him.
Before leaving the hotel, the President, Mrs. Kennedy, and Kenneth ODonnell
talked about the risks inherent in Presidential public appearances. According
to ODonnell, the President commented that if anybody really wanted to shoot
the President of the United States, it was not a very difficult joball one had to
do was get a high building someday with a telescopic rifle, and there was nothing anybody could do to defend against such an attempt. Upon concluding
the conversation, the President prepared to depart for Dallas.
Arrival at Love Field
In Dallas the rain had stopped, and by midmorning a gloomy overcast sky had
given way to the bright. sunshine that greeted the Presidential party when Air
Force One touched down at Love Field at 11:40 A.M., e.s.t. Governor and Mrs.
Connally and Senator Ralph W. Yarborough had come with the President from
Fort Worth. Vice President Johnsons airplane, Air Force Two, had arrived at
Love Field at approximately 11:35 A.M., and the Vice President and Mrs. Johnson
were in the receiving line to greet President and Mrs. Kennedy.
After a welcome from the Dallas reception committee, President and Mrs.
Kennedy walked along a chain-link fence at the reception area greeting a large
763
764
crowd of spectators that had gathered behind it. Secret Service agents formed a
cordon to keep the press and photographers from impeding their passage and
scanned the crowd for threatening movements. Dallas police stood at intervals
along the fence and Dallas plain clothes men mixed in the crowd. Vice President and Mrs. Johnson followed along the fence, guarded by four members of
the Vice-Presidential detail. Approximately 10 minutes after the arrival at Love
Field, the President and Mrs. Kennedy went to the Presidential automobile to
begin the motorcade.
Organization of the Motorcade
Secret Service arrangements for Presidential trips, which were followed in the
Dallas motorcade, are designed to provide protection while permitting large
numbers of people to see the President. Every effort is made to prevent unscheduled stops, although the President may, and in Dallas did, order stops in
order to greet the public. Men the motorcade slows or stops, agents take positions between the President and the crowd. The order of vehicles in the Dallas
motorcade was as follows:
Motorcycles.Dallas police motorcycles preceded the pilot car.
The pilot car.Manned by officers of the Dallas Police Department, this automobile preceded the main party by approximately quarter of a mile. Its
function was to alert police along the route that the motorcade was approaching and to check for signs of trouble.
Motorcycles.Next came four to six motorcycle policemen whose main
purpose was to keep the crowd back.
The lead car.Described as a rolling command car, this was an unmarked
Dallas police car, driven by Chief of Police Curry and occupied by Secret Service Agents Sorrels and Lawson and by Dallas County Sheriff J. E.
Decker. The occupants scanned the crowd and the buildings along the
route. Their main function was to spot trouble in advance and to direct
any necessary steps to meet the trouble. Following normal practice, the
lead automobile stayed proximately four to five car lengths ahead of the
Presidents limousine.
The Presidential limousine.The Presidents automobile was specially designed 1961 Lincoln convertible with two collapsible jump seats between
the front and rear seats. . . . It was outfitted with a clear plastic bubbletop which was neither bulletproof nor bullet resistant. Because the skies
had cleared in Dallas, Lawson directed that the top not be used for the
days activities. He acted on instructions he had received earlier from Assistant Special Agent in Charge Roy H. Kellerman, who was in Fort Worth
with the President. Kellerman had discussed the matter with ODonnell,
whose instructions were, If the weather is clear and it is not raining, have
that bubbletop off. Elevated approximately 15 inches above the back
of the front seat was a metallic frame with four handholds that riders in
the car could grip while standing in the rear seat during parades. At the
rear on each side of the automobile were small running boards, each designed to hold a Secret Service agent, with a metallic handle for the rider
to grasp. The President had frequently stated that he did not want agents
to ride on these steps during a motorcade except when necessary. He had
repeated this wish only a few days before, during his visit to Tampa, Fla.
President Kennedy rode on the right-hand side of the rear seat with Mrs.
Kennedy on his left. Governor Connally occupied the right jump seat, Mrs.
Connally the left. Driving the Presidential limousine was Special Agent William
R. Greer of the Secret Service; on his right sat Kellerman. Kellermans responsibilities included maintaining radio communications with the lead and followup cars, scanning the route, and getting out and standing near the President
when the cars stopped.
Motorcycles.Four motorcycles, two on each side, flanked the rear of the
Presidential car. They provided some cover for the President, but their
main purpose was to keep back the crowd. On previous occasions, the
President had requested that, to the extent possible, these flanking motorcycles keep back from the sides of his car.
Presidential follow-up car.This vehicle, a 1955 Cadillac eight-passenger
convertible especially outfitted for the Secret Service, followed closely behind the Presidents automobile. It carried eight Secret Service agents
two in the front seat, two in the rear, and two on each of the right and
left running boards. Each agent carried a .38-caliber pistol, and a shotgun and automatic rifle were also available. Presidential Assistants David
F. Powers and Kenneth ODonnell sat in the right and left jump seats,
respectively.
The agents in this car, under established procedure, had instructions to
watch the route for signs of trouble, scanning not only the crowds but the windows and roofs of buildings, overpasses, and crossings. They were instructed
to watch particularly for thrown objects, sudden actions in the crowd, and any
movements toward the Presidential car. The agents on the front of the running
boards had directions to move immediately to positions just to the rear of the
President and Mrs. Kennedy when the Presidents car slowed to a walking pace
or stopped, or when the press of the crowd made it impossible for the escort
motorcycles to stay in position on the cars rear flanks. The two agents on the
rear of the running boards were to advance toward the front of the Presidents
car whenever it stopped or slowed down sufficiently for them to do so.
765
766
Vice-Presidential car.The Vice-Presidential automobile, a four-door Lincoln convertible obtained locally for use in the motor-cade, proceeded
approximately two to three car lengths behind the Presidents follow-up
car. This distance was maintained so that spectators would normally turn
their gaze from the Presidents automobile by the time the Vice President
came into view. Vice President Johnson sat on the right-hand side of the
rear seat, Mrs. Johnson in the center, and Senator Yarborough on the left.
Rufus W. Youngblood, special agent in charge of the Vice Presidents detail, occupied the right-hand side of the front seat, and Hurchel Jacks of
the Texas State Highway patrol was the driver.
Vice-Presidential follow-up car.Driven by an officer of the Dallas Police
Department, this vehicle was occupied by three Secret Service agents and
Clifton C. Garter, assistant to the Vice President. These agents performed
for the Vice President the same functions that the agents in the Presidential follow-up car performed for the President.
Remainder of motorcade.The remainder of the motorcade consisted of
five cars for other dignitaries, including the mayor of Dallas and Texas
Congressmen, telephone and Western Union vehicles, a White House
communications car, three cars for press photographers, an official party
bus for White House staff members and others, and two press buses. Admiral George G. Burkley, physician to the President, was in a car following those containing the local and national representatives.
Police car and motorcycles.A Dallas police car and several motorcycles at
the rear kept the motorcade together and prevented unauthorized vehicles from joining the motorcade.
Communications in the motorcade.A base station at a fixed location in
Dallas operated a radio network which linked together the lead car, Presidential car, Presidential follow-up car, White House communications
car, Trade Mart, Love Field, and the Presidential and Vice-Presidential
airplanes. The Vice-Presidential car and Vice-Presidential follow-up car
used portable sets with a separate frequency for their own car-to-car
communication.
The Drive through Dallas
The motorcade left Love Field shortly after 11:50 A.M. and drove at speeds up
to 25 to 30 miles an hour through thinly populated areas on the outskirts of
Dallas. At the Presidents direction, his automobile stopped twice, the first time
to permit him to respond to a sign asking him to shake hands. During this brief
stop, agents in the front positions on the running boards of the Presidential
follow-up car came forward and stood beside the Presidents car, looking out
toward the crowd, and Special Agent Kellerman assumed his position next to
the car. On the other occasion, the President halted the motorcade to speak to
a Catholic nun and a group of small children.
In the downtown area, large crowds of spectators gave the President a tremendous reception. The crowds were so dense that Special Agent Clinton J.
Hill had to leave the left front running board of the Presidents follow-up car
four times to ride on the rear of the Presidents limousine. (See Commission
Exhibit No. 698, p. 47.) Several times Special Agent John D. Ready came forward from the right front running board of the Presidential follow-up car to
the right side of the Presidents car. Special Agent Glen A. Bennett once left his
place inside the follow-up car to help keep the crowd away from the Presidents
car. When a teenage boy ran toward the rear of the Presidents car, Ready left
the running board to chase the boy back into the crowd. On several occasions
when the Vice Presidents car was slowed down by the throng, Special Agent
Youngblood stepped out to hold the crowd back.
According to plan, the Presidents motorcade proceeded west through
downtown Dallas on Main Street to the intersection of Houston Street, which
marks the beginning of Dealey Plaza. From Main Street the motorcade turned
right and went north on Houston Street, passing tall buildings on the right,
and headed toward the Texas School Book Depository Building. The spectators
were still thickly congregated in front of the buildings which lined the east side
of Houston Street, but the crowd thinned abruptly along Elm Street, which
curves in a southwesterly direction as it proceeds downgrade toward the Triple
Underpass and the Stemmons Freeway.
As the motorcade approached the intersection of Houston and Elm Streets,
there was general gratification in the Presidential party about the enthusiastic reception. Evaluating the political overtones, Kenneth ODonnell was
especially pleased because it convinced him that the average Dallas resident
was like other American citizens in respecting and admiring the President.
Mrs. Connally, elated by the reception, turned to President Kennedy and said,
Mr. President, you cant say Dallas doesnt love you. The President replied,
That is very obvious.
The Assassination
At 12:30 P.M., e.s.t., as the Presidents open limousine proceeded at approximately 11 miles per hour along Elm Street toward the Triple Underpass, shots
fired from a rifle mortally wounded President Kennedy and seriously injured
Governor Connally. One bullet passed through the Presidents neck; a subsequent bullet, which was lethal, shattered the right side of his skull. Governor
Connally sustained bullet wounds in his back, the right side of his chest, right
wrist, and left thigh.
767
768
The Time
The exact time of the assassination was fixed by the testimony of four witnesses.
Special Agent Rufus W. Youngblood observed that the large electric sign clock
atop the Texas School Book Depository Building showed the numerals 12:30
as the Vice-Presidential automobile proceeded north on Houston Street, a few
seconds before the shots were fired. Just prior to the shooting, David F. Powers,
riding in the Secret Service follow-up car, remarked to Kenneth ODonnell that
it was 12:30 P.M., the time they were due at the Trade Mart. Seconds after the
shooting, Roy Kellerman, riding in the front seat of the Presidential limousine,
looked at his watch and said 12:30 to the driver, Special Agent Greer. The
Dallas police radio log reflects that Chief of Police Curry reported the shooting
of the President and issued his initial orders at 12:30 P.M.
Speed of the Limousine
William Greer, operator of the Presidential limousine, estimated the cars speed
at the time of the first shot as 12 to 15 miles per hour. 144 Other witnesses
in the motorcade estimated the speed of the Presidents limousine from 7 to
22 miles per hour. A more precise determination has been made from motion
pictures taken on the scene by an amateur photographer, Abraham Zapruder.
Based on these films, the speed of the Presidents automobile is computed at an
average speed of 11.2 miles per hour. The car maintained this average speed
over a distance of approximately 186 feet immediately preceding the shot
which struck the President in the head. While the car traveled this distance,
the Zapruder camera ran 152 frames. Since the camera operates at a speed of
18.3 frames per second, it was calculated that the car required 8.3 seconds to
cover the 136 feet. This represents a speed of 11.2 miles per hour.
In the Presidential Limousine
Mrs. John F. Kennedy, on the left of the rear seat of the limousine, looked toward her left and waved to the crowds along the route. Soon after the motorcade turned onto Elm Street., she heard a sound similar to a motorcycle noise
and a cry from Governor Connally, which caused her to look to her right. On
turning she saw a quizzical look on her husbands face as he raised his left hand
to his throat. Mrs. Kennedy then heard a second shot and saw the Presidents
skull torn open under the impact of the bullet. As she cradled her mortally
wounded husband, Mrs. Kennedy cried, Oh, my God, they have shot my husband. I love you, Jack.
Governor Connally testified that he recognized the first noise as a rifle shot
and the thought immediately crossed his mind that it was an assassination attempt. From his position in the right jump seat immediately in front of the
President, he instinctively turned to his right because the shot appeared to
come from over his right shoulder. Unable to see the President as he turned to
the right, the Governor started to look back over his left shoulder, but he never
completed the turn because he felt something strike him in the back. In his testimony before the Commission, Governor Connally was certain that he was hit
by the second shot, which he stated he did not hear.
Mrs. Connally, too, heard a frightening noise from her right. Looking over
her right shoulder, she saw that the President had both hands at his neck but
she observed no blood and heard nothing. She watched as he slumped down
with an empty expression on his face. Roy Kellerman, in the right front seat
of the limousine, heard a report like a firecracker pop. Turning to his right in
the direction of the noise, Kellerman heard the President say My God, I am
hit, and saw both of the Presidents hands move up toward his neck. As he
told the driver, Lets get out of here; we are hit, Kellerman grabbed his microphone and radioed ahead to the lead car, We are hit. Get us to the hospital
immediately.
The driver, William Greer, heard a noise which he took to be a backfire from
one of the motorcycles flanking the Presidential car. When he heard the same
noise again, Greer glanced over his shoulder and saw Governor Connally fall.
At the-sound of the second shot he realized that something was wrong, and he
pressed down on the accelerator as Kellerman said, Get out of here fast. As he
issued his instructions to Greer and to the lead car, Kellerman heard a flurry
of shots Within 5 seconds of the first noise. According to Kellerman, Mrs.
Kennedy then cried out: What are they doing to you! Looking back from
the front seat, Kellerman saw Governor Connally in his wifes lap and Special
Agent Clinton J. Hill lying across the trunk of the car.
Mrs. Connally heard a second shot fired and pulled her husband down into
her lap. Observing his blood-covered chest as he was pulled into his wifes lap,
Governor Connally believed himself mortally wounded. He cried out, Oh, no,
no, no. My God, they are going to kill us all. At first Mrs. Connally thought
that her husband had been killed, but then she noticed an almost imperceptible movement and knew that he was still alive. She said, Its all right. Be still.
The Governor was lying with his head on his wifes lap when he heard a shot
hit the President. At that point, both Governor and Mrs. Connally observed
brain tissue splattered over the interior of the car. According to Governor and
Mrs. Connally, it was after this shot that Kellerman issued his emergency instructions and the car accelerated.
Reaction by Secret Service Agents
From the left front running board of the Presidents follow-up car, Special Agent
Hill was scanning the few people standing on the south side of Elm Street after
the motorcade had turned off Houston Street. He estimated that the motorcade
769
770
had slowed down to approximately 9 or 10 miles per hour on the turn at the
intersection of Houston and Elm Streets and then proceeded at a rate of 12 to
15 miles per hour with the follow-up car trailing the Presidents automobile by
approximately 5 feet. Hill heard a noise, which seemed to be a firecracker, coming from his right rear. He immediately looked to his right, and, in so doing,
my eyes had to cross the Presidential limousine and I saw President Kennedy
grab at himself and lurch forward and to the left. Hill jumped from the followup car and ran to the Presidents automobile. At about the time he reached the
Presidents automobile, Hill heard a second shot, approximately 5 seconds after
the first, which removed a portion of the Presidents head.
At the instant that Hill stepped onto the left rear step of the Presidents automobile and grasped the handhold, the car lurched forward, causing him to
lose his footing. He ran three or four steps, regained his position and mounted
the car. Between the time he originally seized the handhold and the time he
mounted the car, Hill recalled: Mrs. Kennedy had jumped up from the seat and
was, it appeared to me, reaching for something coming off the fight rear bumper of the car, the right rear tail, when she noticed that I was trying to climb on
the car. She turned toward me and I grabbed her and put her back in the back
seat, crawled up on top of the back seat and lay there.
David Powers, who witnessed the scene from the Presidents follow-up car,
stated that Mrs. Kennedy would probably have fallen off the rear end of the car
and been killed if Hill had not pushed her back into the Presidential automobile. Mrs. Kennedy had no recollection of climbing onto the back of the car.
Special Agent Ready, on the right front running board of the Presidential
follow-up car, heard noises that sounded like firecrackers and ran toward the
Presidents limousine. But he was immediately called back by Special Agent
Emory P. Roberts, in charge of the follow-up car, who did not believe that he
could reach, the Presidents car at the speed it was then traveling. Special Agent
George W. Hickey, Jr., in the rear seat of the Presidential follow-up car, picked
up and cocked an automatic rifle as he heard the last shot. At this point the
cars were speeding through the underpass and had left the scene of the shooting, but Hickey kept the automatic weapon ready as the car raced to the hospital. Most of the other Secret Service agents in the motorcade had drawn their
sidearms. Roberts noticed that the Vice Presidents car was approximately onehalf block behind the Presidential follow-up car at the time of the shooting and
signaled for it to move in closer.
Directing the security detail for the Vice President from the right front seat
of the Vice-Presidential car, Special Agent Youngblood recalled: As we were beginning to go down this incline, all of a sudden there was an explosive noise.
I quickly observed unnatural movement of crowds, like ducking or scattering,
and quick movements in the Presidential follow-up car. So I turned around
and hit the Vice President on the shoulder and hollered, get down, and then
looked around again and saw more of this movement, and so I proceeded to go
to the back seat and get on top of him.
Youngblood was not positive that he was in the rear seat before the second shot, but thought it probable because of President Johnsons statement to
that effect immediately after the assassination. President Johnson emphasized
Youngbloods instantaneous reaction after the first shot: I was startled by the
sharp report or explosion, but I had no time to speculate as to its origin because Agent Youngblood turned in a flash, immediately after the first explosion, hitting me on the shoulder, and shouted to all of us in the back seat to
get down. I was pushed down by Agent Youngblood. Almost in the same moment in which he hit or pushed me, he vaulted over the back seat and sat on
me. I was bent over under the weight of Agent Youngbloods body, toward
Mrs. Johnson and Senator Yarborough.
Clifton C. Carter, riding in the Vice Presidents follow-up car a short distance
behind, reported that Youngblood was in the rear seat using his body to shield
the Vice President before the second and third shots were fired.
Other Secret Service agents assigned to the motorcade remained at their
posts during the race to the hospital. None stayed at the scene of the shooting, and none entered the Texas School Book Depository Building at or immediately after the shooting. Secret Service procedure requires that each agent
stay with the person being protected and not be diverted unless it is necessary
to accomplish the protective assignment. Forrest V. Sorrels, special agent in
charge of the Dallas office, was the first Secret Service agent to return to the
scene of the assassination, approximately 20 or 25 minutes after the shots were
fired.
Parkland Memorial Hospital
The Race to the Hospital
In the final instant of the assassination, the Presidential motorcade began a race
to Parkland Memorial Hospital, approximately 4 miles from the Texas School
Book Depository Building. On receipt of the radio message from Kellerman to
the lead car that the President had been hit, Chief of Police Curry and police
motorcyclists at the head of the motorcade led the way to the hospital. Meanwhile, Chief Curry ordered the police base station to notify Parkland Hospital
that the wounded President was en route. The radio log of the Dallas Police Department shows that at 12:30 P.M. on November 22 Chief Curry radioed, Go to
the hospitalParkland Hospital. Have them stand by. A moment later Curry
added, Looks like the President has been hit. Have Parkland stand by. The
base station replied, They have been notified. Traveling at speeds estimated
at times to be up to 70 or 80 miles per hour down the Stemmons Freeway and
Harry Hines Boulevard, the Presidential limousine arrived at the emergency
771
772
entrance of the Parkland Hospital at about 12:35 P.M. Arriving almost simultaneously were the Presidents follow-up car, the Vice Presidents automobile, and
the Vice Presidents follow-up car. Admiral Burkley, the Presidents physician,
arrived at the hospital between 3 and 5 minutes following the arrival of the
President, since the riders in his car were not exactly aware what had happened and the car went on to the Trade Mart first.
When Parkland Hospital received the notification, the staff in the emergency
area was alerted and trauma rooms 1 and 2 were prepared. These rooms were
for the emergency treatment of acutely ill or injured patients. Although the first
message mentioned an injury only to President Kennedy, two rooms were prepared. As the Presidents limousine sped toward the hospital, 12 doctors to the
emergency area: surgeons, Drs. Malcolm O. Perry, Charles R. Baxter, Robert N.
McClelland, Ronald C. Jones; the chief neurologist, Dr. William Kemp Clark;
4 anesthesiologists, Drs. Marion T. Jenkins, Adolph H. Giesecke, Jr., Jackie H.
Hunt, Gene C. Akin; urological surgeon, Dr Paul C. Peters; an oral surgeon,
Dr. Don T. Curtis; and a heart specialist, Dr. Fouad A. Bashour.
Upon arriving at Parkland Hospital, Lawson jumped from the lead car and
rushed into the emergency entrance, where he was met by hospital staff members wheeling stretchers out to the automobile. Special Agent Hill removed
his suit jacket and covered the Presidents head and upper chest to prevent
the taking of photographs. Governor Connally, who had lost consciousness on
the ride to the hospital, regained consciousness when the limousine stopped
abruptly at the emergency entrance. Despite his serious wounds, Governor
Connally tried to get out of the way so that medical help could reach the President. Although he was reclining in his wifes arms, he lurched forward in an
effort to stand upright and get out of the car, but he collapsed again. Then he
experienced his first sensation of pain, which became excruciating. The Governor was lifted onto a stretcher and taken into trauma room 2. For a moment,
Mrs. Kennedy refused to release the President, whom she held in her lap, but
then Kellerman, Greer, and Lawson lifted the President onto a stretcher and
pushed it into trauma room 1.
Treatment of President Kennedy
The first physician to see the President at Parkland Hospital was Dr. Charles J.
Carrico, a resident in general surgery. Dr. Carrico was in the emergency area,
examining another patient, when he was notified that President Kennedy was
en route to the hospital. Approximately 2 minutes later, Dr. Carrico saw the
President on his back, being wheeled into the emergency area. He noted that
the President was blue-white or ashen in color; had slow, spasmodic, agonal
respiration without any coordination; made no voluntary movements; had his
eyes open with the pupils dilated without any reaction to light; evidenced no
palpable pulse; and had a few chest sounds which were thought to be heart beats.
On the basis of these findings, Dr. Carrico concluded that President Kennedy
was still alive.
Dr. Carrico noted two wounds: a small bullet wound in the front lower
neck, and an extensive wound in the Presidents head where a sizable portion
of the skull was missing. He observed shredded brain tissue and considerable
slow oozing from the latter wound, followed by more profuse bleeding after
some circulation was established. Dr. Carrico felt the Presidents back and determined that there was no large wound there which would be an immediate
threat to life. Observing the serious problems presented by the head wound
and inadequate respiration, Dr. Carrico directed his attention to improving the
Presidents breathing. He noted contusions, hematoma to the right of the larynx, which was deviated slightly to the left, and also ragged tissue which indicated a tracheal injury. Dr. Carrico inserted a cuffed endotracheal tube past
the injury, inflated the cuff, and connected it to a Bennett machine to assist in
respiration.
At that point, direction of the Presidents treatment was undertaken by
Dr. Malcolm O. Perry, who arrived at trauma room 1 a few moments after the
President. Dr. Perry noted the Presidents back brace as he felt for a femoral
pulse, which he did not find. Observing that an effective airway had to be established if treatment was to be effective, Dr. Perry performed a tracheotomy,
which required 3 to 5 minutes. While Dr. Perry was performing the tracheotomy, Drs. Carrico and Ronald Jones made cutdowns on the Presidents right
leg and left arm, respectively, to infuse blood and fluids into the circulatory
system. Dr. Carrico treated the Presidents known ad-renal insufficiency by administering hydrocortisone. Dr. Robert N. McClelland entered at that point
and assisted Dr. Perry with the tracheotomy.
Dr. Fouad Bashour, chief of cardiology, Dr. M. T. Jenkins, chief of anesthesiology, and Dr. A. H. Giesecke, Jr., then joined in the effort to revive the President. When Dr. Perry noted free air and blood in the Presidents chest cavity,
he asked that chest tubes be inserted to allow for drainage of blood and air.
Drs. Paul C. Peters and Charles R. Baxter initiated these procedures. As a result
of the infusion of liquids through the cutdowns, the cardiac massage, and the
airway, the doctors were able to maintain peripheral circulation as monitored
at the neck (carotid) artery and at the wrist (radial) pulse. A femoral pulse was
also detected in the Presidents leg. While these medical efforts were in progress, Dr. Clark noted some electrical activity on the cardiotachyscope attached
to monitor the Presidents heart responses. Dr. Clark, who most closely observed the head wound, described a large, gaping wound in the right rear part
of the head, with substantial damage and exposure of brain tissue, and a considerable loss of blood. Dr. Clark did not see any other hole or wound on the
Presidents head. According to Dr. Clark, the small bullet hole on the right rear
773
774
of the Presidents head discovered during the subsequent autopsy could have
easily been hidden in the blood and hair.
In the absence of any neurological, muscular, or heart response, the doctors
concluded that efforts to revive the President were hopeless. This was verified
by Admiral Burkley, the Presidents physician, who arrived at the hospital after
emergency treatment was underway and concluded that my direct services to
him at that moment would have interfered with the action of the team which
was in progress. At approximately 1 P.M., after last rites were administered to
the President by Father Oscar L. Huber, Dr. Clark pronounced the President
dead. He made the official determination because the ultimate cause of death,
the severe head injury, was within his sphere of specialization. The time was
fixed at 1 P.M., as an approximation, since it was impossible to determine the
precise moment when life left the President. President Kennedy could have
survived the neck injury, but the head wound was fatal. From a medical viewpoint, President Kennedy was alive when he arrived at Parkland Hospital; the
doctors observed that he had a heart beat and was making some respiratory efforts. But his condition was hopeless, and the extraordinary efforts of the doctors to save him could not help but to have been unavailing.
Since the Dallas doctors directed all their efforts to controlling the massive
bleeding caused by the head wound, and to reconstructing an airway to his
lungs, the President remained on his back throughout his medical treatment
at Parkland. When asked why he did not turn the President over, Dr. Carrico
testified as follows:
A. This man was in obvious extreme distress and any more thorough inspection would have involved several minuteswell, severalconsiderable time
which at this juncture was not available. A thorough inspection would have
involved washing and cleansing the back, and this is not practical in treating
an acutely injured patient. You have to determine which things, which are immediately life threatening and cope with them, before attempting to evaluate
the full extent of the injuries.
Q. Did you ever have occasion to look at the Presidents back?
A. No, sir. Beforewell, in trying to treat an acutely injured patient, you
have to establish an airway, adequate ventilation and you have to establish adequate circulation. Before this was accomplished the Presidents
cardiac activity had ceased and closed cardiac massage was instituted,
which made it impossible to inspect his back.
Q. Was any effort made to inspect the Presidents back after he had expired?
A. No, sir.
Q. And why was no effort made at that time to inspect his back?
A. I suppose nobody really had the heart to do it.
Moreover, the Parkland doctors took no further action after the President
had expired because they concluded that it was beyond the scope of their permissible duties.
Treatment of Governor Connally
While one medical team tried to revive President Kennedy, a second performed
a series of operations on the bullet wounds sustained by Governor Connally.
Governor Connally was originally seen by Dr. Carrico and Dr. Richard Dulany.
While Dr. Carrico went on to attend the President, Dr. Dulany stayed with
the Governor and was soon joined by several other doctors. At approximately
12: 45 P.M., Dr. Robert Shaw, chief of thoracic surgery, arrived at trauma room 2,
to take charge of the care of Governor Connally, whose major wound fell within
Dr. Shaws area of specialization.
Governor Connally had a large sucking wound in the front of the right chest
which caused extreme pain and difficulty in breathing. Rubber tubes were inserted between the second and third ribs to reexpand the right lung, which
had collapsed because of the opening in the chest wall. At 1: 35 P.M., after Governor Connally had been moved to the operating room, Dr. Shaw started the
first operation by cutting away the edges of the wound on the front of the Governors chest and suturing the damaged lung and lacerated muscles. The elliptical wound in the Governors back, located slightly to the left of the Governors
right armpit approximately five-eighths inch (a centimeter and a half) in its
greatest diameter, was treated by cutting away the damaged skin and suturing
the back muscle and skin. This operation was concluded at 3:20 P.M.
Two additional operations were performed on Governor Connally for wounds
which he had not realized he had sustained until he regained consciousness
the following day. From approximately 4 P.M. to 4:50 P.M. on November 22,
Dr. Charles F. Gregory, chief of orthopedic surgery, operated on the wounds of Governor Connallys right wrist, assisted by Drs. William Osborne and John Parker.
The wound on the back of the wrist was left partially open for draining, and the
wound on the palm side was enlarged, cleansed, and closed. The fracture was
set, and a cast was applied with some traction utilized. While the second operation was in progress, Dr. George T. Shires, assisted by Drs. Robert McClelland,
Charles Baxter, and Ralph Don Patman, treated the gunshot wound in the left
thigh. This punctuate missile wound, about two-fifths inch in diameter (1 centimeter) and located approximately 5 inches above the left knee, was cleansed and
closed with sutures; but a small metallic fragment remained in the Governors leg.
Vice President Johnson at Parkland
As President Kennedy and Governor Connally were being removed from the
limousine onto stretchers, a protective circle of Secret Service agents surrounded
775
776
Vice President and Mrs. Johnson and escorted them into Parkland Hospital
through the emergency entrance. The agents moved a nurse and patient out of
a nearby room, lowered the shades, and took emergency security measures to
protect the Vice President. Two men from the Presidents follow-up car were detailed to help protect the Vice President. An agent was stationed at the entrance
to stop anyone who was not a member of the Presidential party. U.S. Representatives Henry B. Gonzalez, Jack Brooks, Homer Thornberry, and Albert Thomas
joined Clifton C. Carter and the group of special agents protecting the Vice
President. On one occasion Mrs. Johnson, accompanied by two Secret Service
agents, left the room to see Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Connally.
Concern that the Vice President might also be a target for assassination
prompted the Secret Service agents to urge him to leave the hospital and return
to Washington immediately. The Vice President decided to wait until he received definitive word of the Presidents condition. At approximately 1:20 P.M.,
Vice President Johnson was notified by ODonnell that President Kennedy was
dead. Special Agent Youngblood learned from Mrs. Johnson the location of her
two daughters and made arrangements through Secret Service headquarters in
Washington to provide them with protection immediately.
When consulted by the Vice President, ODonnell advised him to go
to the airfield immediately and return to Washington. It was decided that
the Vice President should return on the Presidential plane rather than on the
Vice-Presidential plane because it had better communication equipment. The
Vice President conferred with White House Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm
Kilduff and decided that there would be no release of the news of the Presidents death until the Vice President had left the hospital. When told that
Mrs. Kennedy refused to leave without the Presidents body, the Vice President said that he would not leave Dallas without her. On the recommendation of the Secret Service agents, Vice President Johnson decided to board
the Presidential airplane, Air Force One, and wait for Mrs. Kennedy and the
Presidents body.
Secret Service Emergency Security Arrangements
Immediately after President Kennedys stretcher was wheeled into trauma
room 1, Secret Service agents took positions at the door of the small emergency
room. A nurse was asked to identify hospital personnel and to tell everyone,
except necessary medical staff members, to leave the emergency room. Other
Secret Service agents posted themselves in the corridors and other areas near
the emergency room. Special Agent Lawson made certain that the Dallas police
kept the public and press away from the immediate area of the hospital. Agents
Kellerman and Hill telephoned the head of the White House detail, Gerald A.
Behn, to advise him of the assassination. The telephone line to Washington was
kept open throughout the remainder of the stay at the hospital.
Secret Service agents stationed at later stops on the Presidents itinerary of
November 22 were redeployed. Men at the Trade Mart were driven to Parkland
Hospital in Dallas police cars. The Secret Service group awaiting the President
in Austin were instructed to return to Washington. Meanwhile, the Secret Service agents in charge of security at Love Field started to make arrangements
for departure. As soon as one of the agents learned of the shooting, he asked
the officer in charge of the police detail at the airport to institute strict security
measures for the Presidential aircraft, the airport terminal, and the surrounding area. The police were cautioned to prevent picture taking. Secret Service
agents working with police cleared the areas adjacent to the aircraft, including
warehouses, other terminal buildings and the neighboring parking lots, of all
people. The agents decided not to shift the Presidential aircraft to the far side
of the airport because the original landing area was secure and a move would
require new measures.
When security arrangements at the airport were complete, the Secret Service made the necessary arrangements for the Vice President to leave the hospital. Unmarked police cars took the Vice President and Mrs. Johnson from
Parkland Hospital to Love Field. Chief Curry drove one automobile occupied
by Vice President Johnson, U.S. Representatives Thomas and Thornberry,
and Special Agent Youngblood. In another car Mrs. Johnson was driven
to the airport accompanied by Secret Service agents and Representative
Brooks. Motorcade policemen who escorted the automobiles were requested
by the Vice President and Agent Youngblood not to use sirens. During the
drive Vice President Johnson, at Youngbloods instruction, kept below window level.
Removal of the Presidents Body
While the team of doctors at Parkland Hospital tried desperately to save the life
of President Kennedy, Mrs. Kennedy alternated between watching them and
waiting outside. After the President was pronounced dead, ODonnell tried to
persuade Mrs. Kennedy to leave the area, but she refused. She said that she
intended to stay with her husband. A casket was obtained and the Presidents
body was prepared for removal. Before the body could be taken from the hospital, two Dallas officials informed members of the Presidents staff that the
body could not be removed from the city until an autopsy was performed. Despite the protests of these officials, the casket was wheeled out of the hospital,
placed in an ambulance, and transported to the airport shortly after 2 P.M. At
approximately 2:15 P.M. the casket was loaded, with some difficulty because of
777
778
the narrow airplane door, onto the rear of the Presidential plane where seats
had been removed to make room. Concerned that the local officials might try
to prevent the planes departure, ODonnell asked that the pilot take off immediately. He was informed that takeoff would be delayed until Vice President
Johnson was sworn in.
The End of the Trip
Swearing in of the New President
From the Presidential airplane, the Vice President telephoned Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy, who advised that Mr. Johnson take the Presidential oath of
office before the plane left Dallas. Federal Judge Sarah T. Hughes hastened to the
plane to administer the oath. Members of the Presidential and Vice-Presidential
parties filled the central compartment of the plane to witness the swearing in.
At 2:38 P.M., e.s.t., Lyndon Baines Johnson took the oath of office as the 36th
President of the United States. Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Johnson stood at the
side of the new President as he took the oath of office. Nine minutes later, the
Presidential airplane departed for Washington, D.C.
Return to Washington, D.C.
On the return flight, Mrs. Kennedy sat with David Powers, Kenneth ODonnell,
and Lawrence OBrien. At 5:58 P.M., e.s.t., Air Force One landed at Andrews
AFB, where President Kennedy had begun his last trip only 31 hours before.
Detailed security arrangements had been made by radio from the Presidents
plane on the return flight. The public had been excluded from the base, and
only Government officials and the press were permitted near the landing area.
Upon arrival, President Johnson made a brief statement over television and radio. President and Mrs. Johnson were flown by helicopter to the White House,
from where Mrs. Johnson was driven to her residence under Secret Service
escort. The President then walked to the Executive Office Building, where he
worked until 9 P.M.
The Autopsy
Given a choice between the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Md.,
and the Armys Walter Reed Hospital, Mrs. Kennedy chose the hospital in
Bethesda for the autopsy because the President had served in the Navy. Mrs.
Kennedy and the Attorney General, with three Secret Service agents, accompanied President Kennedys body on the 45-minute automobile trip from Andrews AFB to the Hospital. On the 17th floor of the Hospital, Mrs. Kennedy
and the Attorney General joined other members of the Kennedy family to await
the conclusion of the autopsy. Mrs. Kennedy was guarded by Secret Service
agents in quarters assigned to her in the naval hospital. The Secret Service
established a communication system with the White House and screened all
telephone calls and visitors.
The hospital received the Presidents body for autopsy at approximately
7:35 P.M. X-rays and photographs were taken preliminarily and the pathological examination began at about 8 P.M. The autopsy report noted that President
Kennedy was 46 years of age, 721/2 inches tall, weighed 170 pounds, had
blue eyes and reddish-brown hair. The body was muscular and well developed
with no gross skeletal abnormalities except for those caused by the gunshot
wounds. Under Pathological Diagnosis the cause of death was set forth as
Gunshot wound, head.. . .
The autopsy examination revealed two wounds in the Presidents head.
One wound, approximately one-fourth of an inch by five-eighths of an inch
(6 by 15 millimeters), was located about an inch (2.5 centimeters) to the right
and slightly above the large bony protrusion (external occipital protuberance)
which juts out at the center of the lower part of the back of the skull. The
second head wound measured approximately 5 inches (13 centimeters) in its
greatest diameter, but it was difficult to measure accurately because multiple
crisscross fractures radiated from the large defect. During the autopsy examination, Federal agents brought the surgeons three pieces of bone recovered
from Elm Street and the Presidential automobile. When put together, these
fragments accounted for approximately three-quarters of the missing portion
of the skull. The surgeons observed, through X-ray analysis, 30 or 40 tiny
dustlike fragments of metal running in a line from the wound in the rear of the
Presidents head toward the front part of the skull, with a sizable metal fragment lying just above the right eye. From this head wound two small irregularly shaped fragments of metal were recovered and turned over to the FBI.
The autopsy also disclosed a wound near the base of the back of President
Kennedys neck slightly to the right of his spine. The doctors traced the course
of the bullet through the body and, as information was received from Parkland
Hospital, concluded that the bullet had emerged from the front portion of the
Presidents neck that had been cut away by the tracheotomy at Parkland. The
nature and characteristics of this neck wound and the two head wounds are
discussed fully in the next chapter.
After the autopsy was concluded at approximately 11 P.M., the Presidents
body was prepared for burial. This was finished at approximately 4 A.M. Shortly
thereafter, the Presidents wife, family and aides left Bethesda Naval Hospital.
The Presidents body was taken to the East Room of the White House where it
was placed under ceremonial military guard.
Source: National Archives. JFK Assassination Records. http://www.archives
.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/.
779
780
A S SA S S I N AT I O N O F M A R T I N LU T H E R K I N G J R .
Document 19
ASSASSINATION OF MARTIN LUTHER
KING JR. (1968)EXCERPTS FROM THE DEPARTMENT
OF JUSTICE REPORT ON ALLEGATIONS OF
CONSPIRACY IN THE DEATH OF DR. KING (2000)
In December 1993, Loyd Jowers appeared on the ABC program Prime Time Live
to relate details of a conspiracy to kill Martin Luther King that involved both the
U.S. government and the Mafia. Jowers was the owner of a restaurant located near
the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. Jowers
claimed that convicted King assassin James Earl Ray was merely a scapegoat, and
that Dr. King was actually killed by a Memphis police officer named Earl Clark. In
1999, the King family initiated a wrongful death suit to bring before a jury evidence
of the conspiracy theory, which the family believed. The jury found that King had
been the victim of a conspiracy that involved both the federal government and the
Memphis Police Department. In June 2000, the Justice Department, after investigating the Jowers allegations, issued the report excerpted below. The report found
no good evidence to support Jowerss allegations and much evidence to refute them,
including numerous contradictions in Jowerss own statements. The report concluded
that no further investigation of the King assassination was warranted unless new
evidence surfaced.
VII. King v. Jowers Conspiracy Allegations
A. The King v. Jowers Trial
In November 1999, trial commenced in King v. Jowers, a wrongful death civil
action filed by Dr. Pepper on behalf of Dr. Kings wife and children. Jowers
was the only defendant and thus the only other party to the lawsuit. At the
conclusion of the nearly four week trial, the jury adopted a verdict offered by
the parties finding that Jowers and others, including government agencies
participated in a conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King.
We reviewed the trials evidence in connection with our ongoing investigation of the Jowers and Wilson allegations. We also conducted additional witness interviews and searched for and reviewed records as warranted by the
evidence.
In Sections IV and VI of this report, we discussed the evidence presented
in King v. Jowers related to the Jowers allegation, as well as the relevant, additional investigation we initiated. Much of the information we considered in
those sections was not presented to the jury. For instance, the parties did not
introduce Jowers many inconsistent claims, the inconsistent statements of
several critical witnesses, or information that contradicted and undermined
the trial evidence. As to the Wilson allegations, no evidence, other than newspaper articles recounting Wilsons claims, was offered. Accordingly, after considering the trial evidence in light of all available, relevant information, we
still conclude that the Jowers and Wilson allegations are not credible and that
there is no Raoul.
We also considered evidence from King v. Jowers suggesting the existence
of various conspiracies broader than the one claimed by Jowers. These conspiracies purportedly included government agents and two African American
ministers who were associates of Dr. King. The evidence never linked Jowers
or his alleged co-conspirators to any federal agency or the United States
military, even though the plaintiffs maintained that Dr. Kings assassination
was the result of a government-directed conspiracy and Jowers was the only
party sued.
Nonetheless, we examined the trial evidence relating to these far-ranging
conspiracy claims. We found that it was both contradictory and based on
uncorroborated secondhand and thirdhand hearsay accounts. Nor did we
find any credible, concrete facts to substantiate any of the conspiracy allegations. Because there was no reliable evidence presented at trial relating to a
conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King involving either Jowers, the government,
African American ministers, or anyone else, and because we know of no information to support such allegations, we find no justification for further
investigation.
To explain our conclusion, we have summarized the trial evidence relating
the purported conspiracies and analyzed that evidence in view of the results
of our investigation and other relevant information that was not presented in
King v. Jowers.
B. Evidence Alleging the Involvement of the Federal Government
1. Hearsay Evidence
Most of the witnesses and writings offered to support the various governmentdirected conspiracy claims relied exclusively on secondhand and thirdhand
hearsay and speculation. Additionally, none of these allegations were ever linked
together. Rather, the hearsay evidence alleged that various government agencies
participated in assorted assassination plots that are actually contradictory.
One allegation came from an acquaintance of Jowers who testified regarding
a double hearsay account of an alleged conversation in a barbershop in which
a supposed FBI agent remarked that the CIA was responsible for the assassination. Unrelated to this allegation, other hearsay evidence presented a different
conspiracy, one to silence Ray after he pled guilty. One of Rays former attorneys
related a double hearsay account from two deceased inmates suggesting that,
ten years after the assassination, Ray was the target of a government-directed
781
782
murder contract. A former government official further testified that he heard

an unconfirmed rumor that FBI snipers were dispatched when Ray escaped
from prison.
The deposition of a person identified only as John Doe related yet another
conspiracy claim. The unknown deponent recounted his alleged participation
in a Mafia-assisted plot initiated by the President and Vice President of the
United States. Finally, several authors, a newspaper article, and notes of alleged witness interviews offered various hearsay allegations that the United
States military was somehow involved in the assassination. These allegations
included a claim by an unidentified source that, while conducting military surveillance of Dr. King, his military team witnessed the assassination and even
photographed a man with a rifle leaving the scene.
2. Eyewitness Testimony
In contrast to the several, disparate hearsay accounts presented at trial, only
three witnesses provided firsthand information relating to any of the conspiracy allegations. Significantly, these witnesses did not directly support any of
the hearsay claims that the government participated in the assassination, but
merely recounted their observations of conduct suggesting that Dr. King may
have been under government surveillance.
James Smith, formerly a Memphis police officer, testified that he understood
that Dr. King was under government surveillance during the sanitation workers strike in Memphis in March 1968, two weeks before the assassination.
Smith reported that he observed a van filled with radio equipment outside the
Rivermont Hotel where Dr. King was staying. Smith said that he heard from
unidentified sources that the occupants of the van were federal agents conducting electronic surveillance.
Eli Arkin, a former Memphis police intelligence officer, answered questions
about the presence of military personnel in Memphis. Arkin testified, consistent with what he previously related to us, that in March or April 1968, Army
intelligence agents worked in his office while he was gathering information
about the sanitation strike. According to Arkin, the agents never explained
what they were doing and merely observed and took notes.
Finally, Carthel Weeden, then the captain of Fire Station No. 2 across from
the Lorraine, testified that on the morning of the assassination, two men who
identified themselves as Army personnel said they wanted to conduct photographic surveillance. He reported that he showed them to the fire stations roof.
When we spoke to him after the trial, Weeden advised that, while he was sure
he took military personnel to the roof, it was possible that he did so on a day
beforenot on the day ofthe assassination. He also told us that he did not
know how long the men remained on the roof.
3. Analysis of the Evidence Alleging the Involvement

of the Federal Government
When critically analyzed and considered in light of other relevant information,
the trial evidence does not establish that federal agents were involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Dr. King. Rather, it consists of speculation or secondhand
and thirdhand hearsay accounts that remain totally unsubstantiated or contradicted. After considering all available information, including numerous facts
not presented to the King v. Jowers jury, we have concluded that none of the
assorted conspiracy allegations warrant any further investigation.
a. Allegations of CIA and FBI involvement in a conspiracy
William Hamblin, a former cab driver who knew both Jowers and his friend
James McCraw, testified regarding a double hearsay account that the CIA was
responsible for the assassination. Hamblin reported that while he was a barber
in Memphis in 1968, his boss, Vernon Jones, now deceased, told him about a
comment made by a long-standing customer, referred to only as Mr. Purdy.
Hamblin testified that Jones said that in response to Jones questionwho do
you think did it?Mr. Purdy answeredthe CIA. Hamblin also maintained,
without explaining the basis for his knowledge, that Mr. Purdy was an FBI
agent.
Hamblin did not claim to have heard the alleged conversation between
Jones and Purdy. There was no evidence presented that the conversation actually occurred or that Hamblins unexplained belief that Mr. Purdy was an FBI
agent was correct. Nor was any evidence offered to show that Mr. Purdys alleged opinion was based upon fact rather than conjecture. Accordingly, Hamblins testimony is nothing more than an unconfirmed report of idle barbershop
speculation.
A limited amount of other trial evidence was offered in an attempt to suggest
that the FBI and the CIA were involved in the assassination. Several witnesses
made vague accusations that the FBI failed to investigate thoroughly or suppressed evidence related to the murder and that its leadership wanted Dr. King
killed. No specific trial evidence, however, supported these accusations and we
found nothing to confirm the speculation.
As to the CIA, a witness testified that an undercover officer, who at the time
of the assassination worked for the Memphis Police Department, was hired by
that federal agency several years later. Thus, it was implied that the CIA may
have been involved in a conspiracy. Additionally, an unidentified source, who
was not credited by the newspaper reporter who heard his story, alleged that
his National Guard reconnaissance team was met in Memphis on the day of the
murder by someone who smelled like a CIA agent. After reviewing the historical record, including CIA records, some of which were classified, we found
783
784
nothing to substantiate the speculative claims that the CIA was involved in a
conspiracy.
b. Allegations of a government conspiracy to silence Ray
Reverend Walter Fauntroy, former delegate to the United States House of Representatives, testified regarding a rumor. Fauntroy, who headed the HSCA probe
of the King assassination, stated that at the time of Rays escape from prison in
1977, he heard that FBI snipers had been sent to Tennessee. Fauntroy emphasized, I dont know that. I have no evidence, but thats what we heard and
that alarmed us.
Attorney April Ferguson, who assisted Mark Lane in representing Ray during the HSCA hearings, testified about a related, double hearsay account from
two inmates regarding an alleged contract to kill Ray. According to Ferguson,
in January 1979, she met a now deceased, incarcerated extortionist, William
Kirk, who told her that another now deceased inmate, Arthur Baldwin, advised
him of a supposed $5000 contract to murder Ray. Ferguson added that Kirk
told her, without providing any specifics or sources for his information, that he
got the impression that * * * Baldwin was working as an agent or informer for
the federal government.
We did not find anything to confirm either hearsay allegation about the
plots to kill Ray. Reverend Fauntroy correctly cautioned in his testimony that
he knew of no evidence to support the rumor he had heard. In fact, Ray was
in the custody of the government for over 30 years and died of liver disease
in 1998.
We did determine that Baldwin assisted the government in federal investigations that were unrelated to the assassination in return for a reduced sentence for his own criminal activity. We are aware, however, of no information
to substantiate the inference that Baldwin was thus involved in a governmentdirected plot to kill Ray. The former United States Attorney, who used Baldwin
as an informant, advised that, because of Baldwins poor credibility, he relied
on Baldwins information only when it could be independently corroborated.
We found nothing to corroborate the hearsay account of Kirks allegation of
Baldwins claim. Moreover, it is not uncommon for inmates to make false accusations with some hope of personal gain.
c. Allegation of a conspiracy involving the
President and Vice President
During the trial, Garrison, on behalf of Jowers, presented a John Doe deposition outlining a conspiracy involving the Mafia and implicating both the President and Vice President of the United States. The unidentified deponent, whose
name was withheld for unexplained security reasons, claimed to have worked
for the Houston Post in 1968. His deposition provides that he was contacted by
a former treasurer of the United Auto Workers at the request of a bookmaker
acquaintance and offered $400,000, allegedly to be supplied by the union, to
satisfy Mr. [Hubert] Humphrey and Mr. [Lyndon] Johnson by making Martin
Luther King * * * shut up about the Vietnam War * * * by just taking him
out. According to the deposition, the deponent accepted the offer, and along
with the assistance of several others, including Raoul and Mafia figure, Carlos
Marcello, assassinated Dr. King.
The deposition provides details as to how the murder was allegedly accomplished. It states that on April 4, 1968, the deponent and others flew to Memphis from a secret airstrip owned by Marcello. Upon arrival, a woman from
Belize, South America, now deceased, drove them to downtown Memphis and
dropped off Raoul near Mulberry Street. Raoul then went into a building and
left a bag outside. Afterwards, Raoul drove to New Orleans, picked up Ray in
Atlanta, and flew with him to Canada. The deposition also alleges that after the
actual shooting of King took place [from] behind * * * a brushy little wall, the
woman from Belize c[a]me around and pick[ed] up the shooter in a Chevrolet
Corvair. The shooter, along with the deponent, flew back to the Mafia airstrip
and, while passing over the Mississippi River, threw the rifle into the river.
While the John Doe deposition presented the most detailed evidence alleging a government-directed conspiracy, no live witness testimony or documentary or physical evidence corroborated any part of its allegations. Conveniently,
Doe remained unidentified for security reasons and virtually all of his alleged
co-conspirators are supposedly dead. Moreover, many of Does claims are contradicted by otherwise established facts. For example, none of the many witnesses
at the Lorraine, nor the police who immediately responded, saw a woman drive
by and pick up the shooter, and Ray never claimed that he flew to Canada with
Raoul. Thus, this far-fetched, anonymous story has no indicia of reliability and
is not credible.
d. Allegations of military involvement in a conspiracy
The King v. Jowers trial included evidence relating allegations of United States
military involvement in the assassination. Although no evidence specifically alleged that military personnel killed Dr. King, hearsay accounts and speculation
suggested that military personnel were somehow connected to the assassination and actually witnessed it.
Dr. Pepper introduced redacted copies of notes purporting to document interviews with unidentified military sources who claimed to have observed the
assassination. One set of notes records allegations by an unidentified source,
claiming that he was one of two soldiers with the 902d Military Intelligence
Group who was on the rooftop of Fire Station No. 2 conducting surveillance of
785
786
Dr. King at the time of the assassination. This source reported that he observed
and his partner photographed the assassination and a white man with a rifle
on the ground leaving the scene. According to the notes, the source offered to
approach his partner to attempt to obtain the alleged photographs for $2,000.
Another set of notes purported to document the allegations of a different
unnamed source that he was one of two guardsmen with an Alabama National
Guard unit, the 20th Special Forces Group (SFG), who was watching Dr. King
and Ambassador Young from another rooftop near the Lorraine and observed
the assassination. That source also claimed that his team coordinated with the
Memphis police and someone he assumed to be with the CIA.
In a 1993 newspaper article from the Memphis Commercial Appeal, which
was also introduced, reporter Stephen Tompkins asserts, without citing sources
for the specific claims, that in the late 1960s, the 20th SFG conducted military
intelligence surveillance of Dr. King and others from the civil rights movement.
The article further provides that, on the day before the assassination, the 111th
Military Intelligence Group (MIG) shadowed [Dr. Kings] movements and
monitored radio traffic from a sedan crammed with electronic equipment and
that [e]ight Green Berets from an Operation Detachment Alpha 184 Team
were also in Memphis carrying out an unknown mission.
Douglas Valentine, who authored a book about CIA intelligence operations
during the Vietnam war, presented hearsay testimony from another unidentified source. He related that while writing his book, he learned that a single unnamed source allegedly involved in the militarys anti-war surveillance heard
a rumor that the 111th MIG was conducting surveillance of Dr. King in Memphis on April 4, 1968, and took photographs of the assassination. Valentine
advised us after the trial that he could not recall the identity of the person who
told him the rumor but thought it was a former military enlisted man.
Another writer, Jack Terrell, who claimed to have worked with a CIAdirected group supplying arms and military software to the Contra rebels in
Honduras in the 1980s, offered a hearsay opinion of a deceased source. Terrell testified that in the 1970s, as a private businessman, one of his employees,
J.D. Hill, now deceased, claimed to have been with the 20th SFG in the 1960s.
According to Terrell, Hill, who was a strange person with a drinking problem, expressed the view that in 1968 he had been trained specifically to participate in a military sniper mission to assassinate Dr. King that was canceled
without explanation.
(1) Allegations regarding the military that
are relevant to Jowers claim
Although none of the King v. Jowers conspiracy allegations were directly linked
to Jowers allegations, some of the evidence relating to claims of military
involvement suggests the existence of witnesses and/or physical evidence that

could support Jowers contention that the assassin fired from behind Jims Grill.
As a result, we searched for witnesses from the military and physical evidence
that might confirm Jowers allegation.
We found no evidenceno witness, document or photographto confirm
the hearsay allegations that military personnel witnessed or photographed the
assassination. Rather, we found evidence to establish that those allegations are
not credible.
Initially, we obtained an un-redacted copy of the interview notes that were
introduced at trial. It named the man who claimed that he and another soldier
witnessed and photographed the assassination. We also learned that former
Memphis Commercial Appeal reporter Stephen Tompkins, who did not testify
in King v. Jowers, authored the interview notes. Accordingly, we interviewed
Tompkins.
Tompkins confirmed that he prepared the notes based on his interview of
a source whose identity he was unable to substantiate. He emphasized that he
did not believe the account related by the source and that, had he been called
as a witness at the trial, he would have stated his belief to the jury.
Tompkins explained that he was unable to corroborate any information
provided by the source, who identified himself as Jacob Brenner, including
whether that was the mans real name. In addition, Tompkins said he found no
evidence to substantiate that the 902d Military Intelligence Group (Brenners
alleged unit) ever conducted surveillance of Dr. King or was in Memphis.
Rather, he determined that the 902d MIGs mission did not include domestic
intelligence work. Tompkins also advised that he never interviewed Brenners
alleged partner, who purportedly photographed both the assassination and the
man with a rifle, because Brenner never named him. Nor did he ever speak
to Colonel John Downie, the commander of the 902d MIG to whom Brenner
claimed the photographs were given, because Downie was no longer alive.
Tompkins said that he was skeptical about Brenners story based upon more
than his inability to corroborate it. Brenner asked for increasing amounts of
money for the photographs that he claimed would substantiate his story. According to Tompkins, when initially meeting Brenner in Chicago, he wanted
$2,000 for the photographs; later in Miami, he escalated the demand to at least
$10,000. Concluding Brenner did not have any photographs, Tompkins said
he advised Dr. Pepper not to pay. In the end, Tompkins described Brenner as
a slimeball whose story was no different than numerous false stories he had
heard from conspiracy buffs asking for money.
Notwithstanding Tompkins assessment of Brenners credibility and story,
we investigated whether military personnel from the 902d MIG or from some
other unit were on the roof of Fire Station No. 2, observed the assassination, or
photographed a man with a rifle after the shooting.
787
788
Official records reflect that the 111th MIG and the Tennessee National
Guard were the only military units which had personnel in Memphis on the
day of the assassination. We found no record to indicate that any other military
unit, including the 902d MIG, had personnel in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
The Department of Defense also confirmed Tompkins understanding that the
902d MIG did not conduct domestic intelligence work. Finally, we found no
written record of any surveillance of Dr. King at the Lorraine Motel by military
personnel from any unit.
In addition to reviewing records, we located and interviewed five surviving
members of the 111th MIG who were in Memphis on April 4, 1968. They all
claimed they were not aware that military personnel from any other unit, including the 902d MIG, were in Memphis around the time of the assassination.
Jimmie Locke, then a Major and the 111th MIGs ranking officer in Memphis
at the time of the assassination, advised that under the militarys standing operating procedures he would have been advised if personnel from another unit
were in his area. He specifically stated that, even if the other units operation
was covert, he would have been advised of the personnels presence, if not their
mission.
Additionally, no one from the 111th MIG had firsthand knowledge that any
military personnel were in the vicinity of the Lorraine on the day of the assassination or that military personnel ever conducted surveillance of Dr. King.
Steve McCall, then a Sergeant and investigator with the 111th MIG, did remember, however, somehow hearing that agents from his unit were being dispatched to the Lorraine on the day of the assassination to watch Dr. King and
his party. McCall could not recall the source for this information or any other
details, including whether anyone actually went to the Lorraine and, if they
did, who they were, when they went, or what they did.
Significantly, one witness from the 111th MIG also told us that he was on
the roof of Fire Station No. 2 beforebut not on the day ofthe assassination.
James Green, then a Sergeant and investigator, recalled going to the fire station
on the day that Dr. Kings advance party arrived in Memphis, perhaps March
31st. He claims he went with another agent from his unit, whom he could
not now recall, to scout for locations to take photographs of persons visiting
the King party at the Lorraine Motel at a later time, if necessary. According to
Green, someone from the station may have shown them to the roof, where he
and the other agent remained for 30 to 45 minutes before determining it was
too exposed a location from which to take photographs. Green stated he never
returned to the roof or the vicinity of the Lorraine and never conducted surveillance of or photographed Dr. King. He also advised that he never heard that
any other military personnel were in the area of the Lorraine on the day of the
assassination or conducted surveillance of Dr. King.
We also interviewed all surviving firemen who worked at Fire Station No. 2
at the time of the assassination. No fireman, other than Weeden, had any
knowledge about the presence of military personnel at the fire station.
While we found no reason to disbelieve Captain Weedens recollection that
he led two Army agents to the stations roof or Greens account to support it, we
found nothing to confirm that military personnel were in fact at that location
on the day of the assassination. Further, when we interviewed Weeden after
the trial, he acknowledged that his memory of an event 30 years ago might be
inexact, and, thus, it was possible that he took the military personnel to the
roof sometime beforenot the day ofthe assassination. He added that he
had never spoken with anyone about his recollection until Dr. Pepper interviewed him before [Pepper] wrote his book in 1995. Accordingly, Greens
recollection that military personnel went to the roof on a different day than the
assassination appears accurate.
We likewise found physical evidence to contradict Jacob Brenners story that
he or anyone else was on the fire stations roof at the time of the assassination. Attachments 4a and 4b, photographs taken by television producer Joseph
Louw of the police responding to the shooting, clearly depict the fire stations
roof most probably within a minute of the shooting. The photographs were
taken through the window of Louws balcony room, which was two doors from
where Dr. King lay mortally wounded. Had Brenner or someone else been on
the roof photographing the assassination when Louw was taking his photographs, they would necessarily appear in them. Louws photographs, however,
show no one on the roof.
After examining all relevant information, we have concluded that the King v.
Jowers hearsay evidence that military personnel witnessed and photographed
both the assassination and a man with a rifle as he left the scene is not credible.
We found no evidence to support the allegation. Rather, we discovered information to contradict it, including Louws photographs and the assessment of
the only person who heard the story, Tompkins, that it is not worthy of belief.
(2) Other allegations regarding the military
We have also concluded that allegations in a second set of interview notes relating to military personnel also authored by Tompkins and introduced at trial
are not credible. Those notes reflect the claims of two men, who alleged that
they were sent to Memphis with the 20th Special Forces Group of the Alabama
National Guard, met a Memphis police officer and someone appearing to be
a CIA agent, and witnessed the assassination. Although Tompkins declined
to provide the names of the guardsmen, asserting that they are news sources
whose identities he is obliged to protect, he nonetheless advised that he was
unable to corroborate their story and doubted their credibility.
789
790
Tompkins recounted that, during his investigation for the Memphis Commercial Appeal in the early 1990s, he received information that the 20th SFG had
been in Memphis at the time of the assassination. His inquiry led to a man then
living in Mexico, who claimed to have been a guardsman with that unit and on
the roof of a building (not the fire station) watching Dr. King at the time of the
assassination. Tompkins said that the guardsman introduced him to another
man in Mexico who allegedly was the teams observer. Tompkins emphasized
that the guardsman claimed that he was only conducting reconnaissance and
not deployed as a sniper to shoot Dr. King.
Tompkins told us that he never found anything to corroborate the allegations of the guardsman and his observer and no longer believes them. He
stated that the guardsman, like Brenner, wanted money in exchange for documents that he claimed would substantiate his story. Because Tompkins and
his newspaper did not credit the story, they did not attempt to purchase the
alleged documents or publish the account. Later, according to Tompkins, he
gave money from Dr. Pepper to the guardsman for the documents (he did not
recall the amount), but the guardsman never provided them. Tompkins explained that he did not think the guardsman was on the level and that what
he related may have been just bullshit and made up. Tompkins summed
up his evaluation of the guardsman by saying that he would not testify under
oath that [the guardsman] was truthful, and, in his view, it would be a waste
of taxpayers dollars to travel to Mexico to speak with him.
We found no evidence to corroborate the allegations of the guardsman or
his purported observer. We could find no record or witness to confirm that the
20th SFG or any other military unit besides the 111th MIG and the Tennessee
National Guard was in Memphis at the time of the assassination or anything
else alleged. Moreover, according to the National Guard Bureau of the Department of Defense, the 20th SFG was never authorized to engage in surveillance
or any other activities against civil rights leaders.
Additionally, one critical fact mentioned by the guardsman that was subject
to verification proved to be false. According to Tompkins, the guardsman said
his team leader, an officer whom he named, accompanied the team to Memphis. Tompkins interview notes also make several references to the team leaders activities in Memphis on the day of the assassination. In 1997, the team
leader, who was supposedly dead, came forward to contest the accusations. He
denied both being in Memphis on April 4, 1968, and knowing that other personnel from the 20th SFG were there, and provided an account of his whereabouts on the day of the assassination. We are aware of nothing to contradict
the team leaders denial.
We also considered both Tompkins claim in his 1993 article that the 111th
MIG monitored Dr. King in Memphis on the day before the assassination with
a sedan crammed with electronic equipment and police officer James Smiths
alleged March 1968 observations of a van, which he heard was involved in

surveillance. Tompkins advised that, while witnesses told him they had heard
electronic surveillance occurred, no one claimed to have actually observed it.
Nor did we find any record or witness to support the allegation that the 111th
MIG even had such electronic surveillance equipment. Additionally, 111th
MIG Sergeant James Green, who admitted being on the fire stations roof, acknowledged that approximately two weeks after the assassination he was operating a sedan in Memphis crammed with communication, not surveillance,
equipment. According to Green, local law enforcement officers were aware of
his presence and the radio equipment.
Finally, we assessed the testimony of both author Douglas Valentine that an
unidentified source heard a rumor that the 111th MIG photographed the assassination and writer Jack Terrell that his now deceased employee talked about
a canceled 20th SFG mission to kill Dr. King. We found neither witnesses testimony significant in view of its hearsay nature and in light of the information
discussed above. According to Valentine, an unidentified source conveyed a
rumor and, according to Terrell, another source, who was unreliable and is
now deceased, expressed an unsubstantiated opinion. As with many hearsay
accounts, after critical examination of the relevant facts, these secondhand accounts proved inaccurate.
In conclusion, we found no evidence that military personnel saw, photographed, or were even present at the time of the assassination. Neither the
guardsmens allegation nor Jacob Brenners story is credible. At the same time,
we were unable to determine definitively whether the military conducted surveillance of Dr. King on the day of the assassination. We found no conclusive
evidence that they did. Other information, however, establishes that the military did carry out surveillance of Dr. King and many other civilians participating
in civil disobedience in the 1960s. Because such surveillance, which Congress
later condemned, was so pervasive, the mere possibility that the military may
have spied on Dr. King on the day of the assassination does not suggest its
complicity in the murder. In fact, we found nothing to indicate that surveillance
at any time had any connection with the assassination.
C. Evidence Alleging the Involvement of Dr. Kings Associates
Dr. Pepper also introduced evidence during the trial to suggest that two African American ministers, who were associates of Dr. King, conspired to kill him.
Testimony was presented to imply that Dr. Kings associates facilitated the assassination by luring Dr. King to the Lorraine Motel where he had never stayed,
changing his room assignment from an interior to an exposed balcony room, dismissing a portion of his security, leading him to the balcony at exactly 6:00 P.M.,
and leaving him alone and exposed to allow the assassin an unobstructed shot.
791
792
We reviewed the trial testimony relating to these claims. Based on an analysis of all relevant information, including numerous facts not presented to the
jury, we have concluded that the allegation that two of Dr. Kings associates
conspired to kill him is not credible and does not warrant further investigation.
1. Dr. King and the Lorraine Motel
During the trial, evidence suggested that Dr. Kings stay at the Lorraine was out
of the ordinary and intentionally directed by insiders to assist the assassination. For example, Jerry Williams, a former Memphis police officer, one of the
African American officers who provided security for Dr. Kings previous visits to
Memphis, testified that Dr. King had never stayed overnight at the Lorraine because of security concerns. Reverend James Lawson, an associate of Dr. Kings,
also testified that Dr. King mostly stayed at white motels, rather than the
motels patronized by African Americans, like the Lorraine.
Supporting the theory that one of Dr. Kings associates deliberately moved
him to a balcony room to facilitate the assassination, Leon Cohen testified that
on the day after the assassination he heard that Dr. Kings room assignment
at the Lorraine had been changed by someone within his own organization.
Cohen, who claimed to be a friend of the Lorraines owner, Walter Bailey, testified that Bailey told him that a male member of Dr. Kings group called from
Atlanta the day prior to Dr. Kings arrival to change his interior courtyard
room to an exposed, balcony room. According to Cohens hearsay account,
Bailey was adamantly against the move because of his concerns for Dr. Kings
security.
The historical record contradicts the trial testimony that Dr. Kings final stay
at the Lorraine was unusual. The motel owner, Walter Bailey, now deceased,
told investigators on several occasions that Dr. King was a frequent overnight
guest at the Lorraine. For example, on the day of the assassination, Bailey told
the FBI that Dr. King had stayed at his motel on approximately 12 occasions
since 1958. In 1969, Bailey similarly told investigators for James Earl Ray that
Dr. King had stayed at the Lorraine on and off for the past 15 years.
Others corroborate Baileys official statements about Dr. Kings frequent patronage of the Lorraine. Baileys daughter Caroline Champion, who worked at
the motel, advised our investigators that Dr. King stayed there many times.
Dr. Kings close friend and colleague, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, told the
HSCA under oath that he and Dr. King stayed in room 306 at the Lorraine so
often that it was referred to as the King-Abernathy suite. Memphis police officer Edward Redditt, who also provided security for Dr. King during an earlier
visit, corroborated the recollections of Bailey, Champion, and Abernathy that
Dr. King had previously stayed at the Lorraine. Accordingly, contrary to the
trial testimony, other information from several reliable sources demonstrates
that Dr. King was a frequent overnight guest at the Lorraine. Thus, there is
nothing suspicious about his being at the Lorraine on April 4, 1968.
The suggestion that one of Dr. Kings associates moved him to Room 306
on the balcony level to make him a target for the assassin is also contradicted
by well-documented accounts. When interviewed by the FBI the day of the
assassination, Bailey said that he had no knowledge that anyone had acted in
a suspicious manner and absolutely no information or thoughts on the assassination. He likewise expressed no concern about Dr. Kings room assignment
in statements to Rays investigators and specifically told them that there was
no advance registration for Dr. King, who was not registered until Reverend
Lawsons arrival on April 3, 1968. Had Bailey actually received instructions,
with which he disagreed, to change Dr. Kings room, it is inconceivable that he
would have related that fact only to Cohen and not to any of the several investigators, including those representing Ray, who interviewed him.
Moreover, Reverend Abernathys testimony to the HSCA about the KingAbernathy suite (balcony Room 306) completely contradicts Cohens testimony. Reverend Abernathy further testified that during the April 34, 1968
visit, he and Dr. King were moved to Room 306 at their own request as soon
as it was vacated by another guest. Accordingly, we found nothing to support
a conclusion that some unidentified associate of Dr. King deliberately moved
him to a balcony room to facilitate his assassination.
2. Dr. Kings Security
Evidence was also presented to suggest a plot to facilitate the removal of
Dr. Kings security. We discussed most of this trial evidence, along with other
related information not presented in the trial, when we considered general accusations that security was removed in Section IV.D.2.b.(1) above. However,
two additional pieces of evidence were presented in King v. Jowers in an effort to
suggest that Dr. Kings associates assisted the alleged plot to remove his security.
Philip Mellanson, a professor and author, testified that Memphis Police Inspector Sam Evans, now deceased, told him that he ordered tactical units away
from the Lorraine at the request of a specific Memphis Minister associated
with Dr. King, whom he named. In addition, other witnesses testified about
their belief that the eviction of the Invaders, a group of young Memphis, African American activists, from their room at the Lorraine minutes before the
shooting facilitated the assassination. One former Invader, Charles Cabbage,
testified that he was told that another minister, the SCLC Minister, a ranking member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, ordered that his
group be immediately ejected.
We found nothing to support Mellansons hearsay account that the Memphis Minister was the specific source of the request to remove tactical units.
When we interviewed the Memphis Minister, he denied ever making such a
793
794
request. Moreover, the fact that TACT Unit 10 remained in the vicinity across
the street at the fire station undermines the inference that the Memphis Minister conspired with law enforcement.
Likewise, nothing supports a conclusion that the eviction of the Invaders
from the Lorraine, allegedly at the direction of the SCLC Minister, is related
to the assassination. We found no evidence that the Invaders had anything to
do with Dr. Kings security. Rather, according to associates of Dr. King and former Memphis police officers, the Invaders were young, African American activists who were attempting to associate with Dr. King. Accordingly, even if the
Invaders were evicted from the Lorraine by the SCLC Minister or some other
SCLC staff person, such action would not have diminished Dr. Kings security.
Moreover, Charles Cabbages recent trial testimony is inconsistent with his
testimony to the HSCA. Twenty years ago, Cabbage testified that did not recollect the specific sequence of events leading to the Invaders departure from the
Lorraine but that they decided to leave on their own because the SCLC would
not pay their room bill. Cabbage told the HSCA that one of the [SCLC] staffers, whose name he did not provide, somehow advised him that they [the
SCLC] were no longer going to pay for the room, and we [the Invaders] were
already overdue and that left no alternative but for us to check out.
Cabbages recent testimony is also uncorroborated and contrary to the recollections of others. Significantly, in Cabbages recent testimony in King v. Jowers,
he claimed that it was Reverend James Orange who evicted the Invaders, telling him that the SCLC Minister wanted them to leave immediately. When we
spoke with Orange after the trial, he told us he did not recall receiving that instruction from the SCLC Minister or anyone else. Also, when we interviewed
the SCLC Minister, a friend and associate of Dr. Kings, who has led a life of
public service, he denied the accusation and claimed that he did not recall
that the Invaders were even staying at the Lorraine. We are aware of nothing
to contradict his denial. Accordingly, the record does not support the inference
presented at trial that African American ministers associated with Dr. King facilitated the assassination by removing his security.
3. Dr. Kings Presence on the Balcony
During the trial, the Memphis Minister was also called as a witness and questioned so as to create the impression that he had deliberately lured Dr. King
to the balcony of the Lorraine at precisely 6:00 P.M. and left him exposed and
alone so that he could be shot. This claim is consistent with the view expressed
to us by Dr. Pepper and Dexter King prior to trial. To support this contention,
the plaintiffs attorney questioned the Memphis Minister regarding his conduct before the shooting and confronted him with words from his speech at
ceremonies commemorating an anniversary of the assassination. In the speech,
as he described the events of the assassination, the Memphis Minister recounted that just before the shot he moved away [from Dr. King] so he [the
assassin] could have a clear shot.
According to a number of witnesses interviewed by our investigation and
previous investigations, Dr. King walked out of Room 306 onto the balcony of
the Lorraine just before 6:00 P.M. in the company of the Memphis Minister.
Dr. King conversed with several of his other associates, who were assembled in
the parking lot below as they all were preparing to go to dinner. When the Memphis Minister walked a few steps away from Dr. King, the assassin fired. As discussed in Section IV.D.1.a.(1) above, we determined that Dr. Kings appearance
on the balcony at 6:00 P.M. for a 5:00 P.M. dinner engagement could not have
been anticipated with enough certainty to plan the time of the assassination.
The notion that the Memphis Minister was involved in the assassination
and inadvertently revealed his participation during a public speech is far-fetched.
The ministers comment, I moved away so he could have a clear shot, considered in the context of his speech, appears nothing more than an inartful
attempt to explain the sequence of events and the fact that Dr. King was shot
when he moved away from the speakers side. It hardly amounts to an inadvertent confession.
In any event, we are aware of no information to support the accusation that
the Memphis Minister led Dr. King to the balcony and moved away to allow
the assassin to shoot. We confronted the Memphis Minister with the accusation and he denied it. We are also aware of nothing that would have motivated
him to assist a conspiracy to murder a friend and associate, while his public life
demonstrates his integrity and dedication to non-violence.
D. Conclusions Regarding the King v. Jowers Conspiracy Claims
The evidence introduced in King v. Jowers to support various conspiracy allegations consisted of either inaccurate and incomplete information or unsubstantiated conjecture, supplied most often by sources, many unnamed, who did not
testify. Important information from the historical record and our investigation
contradicts and undermines it. When considered in light of all other available
relevant facts, the trials evidence fails to establish the existence of any conspiracy to kill Dr. King. The verdict presented by the parties and adopted by
the jury is incompatible with the weight of all relevant information, much of
which the jury never heard. Accordingly, the conspiracy allegations presented
at the trial warrant no further investigation.
VIII. Conclusion and Recommendation
After reviewing all available materials from prior official investigations and
other sources, including the evidence from King v. Jowers, and after conducting
795
796
a year and a half of original investigation, we have concluded that the allegations originating with Loyd Jowers and Donald Wilson are not credible.
We found no reliable evidence to support Jowers allegations that he conspired with others to shoot Dr. King from behind Jims Grill. In fact, credible
evidence contradicting his allegations, as well as material inconsistencies among
his accounts and his own repudiations of them, demonstrate that Jowers has
not been truthful. Rather, it appears that Jowers contrived and promoted a
sensational story of a plot to kill Dr. King.
Likewise, we do not credit Donald Wilsons claim that he took papers from
Rays abandoned car. Wilson has made significant contradictory statements
and otherwise behaved in a duplicitous manner, inconsistent with his professed interest in seeking the truth. Important evidence contradicting Wilsons
claims, including the failure of James Earl Ray to support Wilsons revelation,
further undermines his account. Although we were unable to determine the
true origin of the Wilson documents, his inconsistent statements, his conduct,
and substantial evidence refuting his claims all demonstrate that his implausible account is not worthy of belief. Accordingly, we have concluded that the
documents do not constitute evidence relevant to the King assassination.
The weight of the evidence available to our investigation also establishes
that Raoul is merely the creation of James Earl Ray. We found no evidence to
support the claims that a Raoul participated in the assassination. Rather, a review of 30 years of speculation about his identity presents a convincing case
that no Raoul was involved in a conspiracy to kill Dr. King.
In accordance with our mandate, we confined our investigation to the Jowers
and the Wilson allegations and logical investigative leads suggested by them,
including those concerning Raoul, who is central to both allegations. We however considered other allegations, including the unsubstantiated claims made
during the trial of King v. Jowers that government agencies and African American ministers associated with Dr. King conspired to kill him. Where warranted,
we conducted limited additional investigation. Thus, we evaluated all additional allegations brought to our attention to determine whether any reliable
substantiation exists to credit them or warrant further inquiry. We found none.
Similarly, we considered the suggestion of the House Select Committee on
Assassinations and the Shelby County District Attorney General to investigate
whether James Earl Rays surviving brothers may have been his co-conspirators.
We found insufficient evidentiary leads remaining after 30 years to justify further investigation. Finally, while we conducted no original investigation specifically directed at determining whether James Earl Ray killed Dr. King, we
found no credible evidence to disturb past judicial determinations that he did.
Questions and speculation may always surround the assassination of Dr. King
and other national tragedies. Our investigation of these most recent allegations, as well as several exhaustive previous official investigations, found no
A S S A S S I N AT I O N O F R O B E R T F. K E N N E D Y
reliable evidence that Dr. King was killed by conspirators who framed James
Earl Ray. Nor have any of the conspiracy theories advanced in the last 30 years,
including the Jowers and the Wilson allegations, survived critical examination.
We recommend no further federal investigation of the Jowers allegations,
the Wilson allegations, or any other allegations related to the assassination unless and until reliable substantiating facts are presented. At this time, we are
aware of no information to warrant any further investigation of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice Website. http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/
crm/mlk/part1.php.
Document 20
ASSASSINATION OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY
(1968)EDWARD M. KENNEDYS EULOGY FOR
HIS BROTHER ROBERT F. KENNEDY
Senator Edward M. Kennedy delivered the eulogy reproduced below at the funeral
of his slain brother Robert Kennedy at St. Patricks Cathedral in New York City on
June 8, 1968. The text below is not a transcript of the recording of Senator Kennedys
eulogy. It is instead based on the version released to the press, which differs in a few
particulars. Because of its wide distribution, the press version has at least as strong a
claim on the historical record as the spoken version.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy
St. Patricks Cathedral
New York City
June 8, 1968
On behalf of Mrs. Robert Kennedy, her children and the parents and sisters
of Robert Kennedy, I want to express what we feel to those who mourn with
us today in this Cathedral and around the world. We loved him as a brother and
father and son. From his parents, and from his older brothers and sistersJoe,
Kathleen and Jackhe received inspiration which he passed on to all of us. He
gave us strength in time of trouble, wisdom in time of uncertainty, and sharing
in time of happiness. He was always by our side.
Love is not an easy feeling to put into words. Nor is loyalty, or trust or joy.
But he was all of these. He loved life completely and lived it intensely.
A few years back, Robert Kennedy wrote some words about his own father
and they expressed the way we in his family feel about him. He said of what
his father meant to him: What it really all adds up to is lovenot love as it is
797
798
described with such facility in popular magazines, but the kind of love that is affection and respect, order, encouragement, and support. Our awareness of this
was an incalculable source of strength, and because real love is something unselfish and involves sacrifice and giving, we could not help but profit from it.
Beneath it all, he has tried to engender a social conscience. There were
wrongs which needed attention. There were people who were poor and who
needed help. And we have a responsibility to them and to this country. Through
no virtues and accomplishments of our own, we have been fortunate enough
to be born in the United States under the most comfortable conditions. We,
therefore, have a responsibility to others who are less well off.
This is what Robert Kennedy was given. What he leaves us is what he said,
what he did and what he stood for. A speech he made to the young people
of South Africa on their Day of Affirmation in 1966 sums it up the best, and
I would read it now:
There is a discrimination in this world and slavery and slaughter and starvation. Governments repress their people; and millions are trapped in poverty
while the nation grows rich; and wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere.
These are differing evils, but they are common works of man. They reflect
the imperfection of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, our
lack of sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows.
But we can perhaps remembereven if only for a time that those who live
with us are our brothers; that they share with us the same short moment of
life; that they seekas we donothing but the chance to live out their lives
in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.
Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to
teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us
as fellow men. And surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the
wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen
once again.
Our answer is to rely on youthnot a time of life but a state of mind, a
temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over
timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. The cruelties and
obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and
outworn slogans. They cannot be moved by those who cling to a present that is
already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger
that come with even the most peaceful progress. It is a revolutionary world we
live in; and this generation at home and around the world, has had thrust upon
it a greater burden of responsibility than any generation that has ever lived.
Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the
enormous array of the worlds ills. Yet many of the worlds great movements, of
thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk
began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from
Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World,
and the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are
created equal.
These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of
events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human
history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve
the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of
hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and
daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls
of oppression and resistance.
Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of
their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity
than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.
And I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral
conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the globe.
For the fortunate among us, there is the temptation to follow the easy and
familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education. But that is not the road history
has marked out for us. Like it or not, we live in times of danger and uncertainty.
But they are also more open to the creative energy of men than any other time
in history. All of us will ultimately be judged and as the years pass we will surely
judge ourselves, on the effort we have contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which our ideals and goals have shaped that effort.
The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic
toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the
face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can
blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and
great enterprises of American Society.
Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our
control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor
the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even
arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only
way we can live.
This is the way he lived. My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in
death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal
it, saw war and tried to stop it.
799
800
Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that
what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass
for all the world.
As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and
who sought to touch him:
Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not.
Source: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum Website. http://

www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/EMK-Speeches/
Tribute-to-Senator-Robert-F-Kennedy.aspx.
Document 21
ASSASSINATION OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY (1968)
EXCERPTS FROM THE REPORT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL
THOMAS F. KRANZ ON HIS REINVESTIGATION OF
THE MURDER OF ROBERT KENNEDY (1977)
On August 12, 1975, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors appointed attorney Thomas F. Kranz as special counsel to conduct an independent investigation of
the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, which occurred in Los Angeles in June
1968. The need for a reinvestigation of the murder was justified by the growing support for various theories that alleged a conspiracy to murder Kennedy, which involved
more shooters than just convicted assassin Sirhan Sirhan. The most persistent theory
was that a second gunman actually fired the fatal shot because Kennedys orientation to Sirhan as described by witnesses did not match the placement and direction
of wounds described by Coroner Thomas Noguchi during Kennedys autopsy. In his
report, which was released in 1977, Kranz concluded that the overwhelming weight of
the evidence pointed to Sirhan acting alone, without the presence of a second gunman.
Reproduced below are excerpts from the report describing the murder on June 5 and
the main evidence uncovered against Sirhan in the following days.
Evidence Presented at Trial
On the evening of June 2, 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy had given a speech
at the Palm Terrace Room of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Prior to the
Senators speech on the evening of June 2, William Blume, who had worked
as a stock boy in a liquor store located next door to the organic health food
store where defendant Sirhan had worked the few months previous to that
date, observed Sirhan in the lobby area adjacent to the Palm Terrace Room.
Mrs. Miriam Davis, a hostess for the Kennedy event that night, was walking
around the hotel twenty minutes after the speech when she observed Sirhan
seated in the kitchen area. After the Senators speech on June 2, Kennedy had
passed through the kitchen area.
On the morning of June 4, 1968, election day, Sirhan signed in at the San
Gabriel Valley Gun Club located Fish Canyon road in Duarte. Her wrote
Sirhan Sirhan and the address of 696 East Howard Street, Pasadena, on the
roster. After Sirhan had fired awhile on the shooting range, he told the range
master, Edward Buckner, I want the best box of shells you have, and I want
some that will not misfire. I got to have some that will not misfire. Buckner
then sold defendant Sirhan a box of shells, and Sirhan resumed shooting, engaging in rapid fire shooting, using a .22 revolver and remaining on the range
till 5:00 P.M.
Five other witnesses at the trial testified that they observed Sirhan engage in
rapid fire at the range. One witness, Harry Carreon, noticed 3004000 empty
casings where Sirhan was shooting. Sirhan told another witness, Mrs. Ronald
Williams, that his mini-mag bullets were superior to the bullets that she was
using, and when asked by witness Michael Saccoman if it was against the law
to use a pistol for hunting, Sirhan answered Well, I dont know about that. It
could kill a dog.
Earlier in the year, Sirhan had had a conversation with Alvin Clark, a trash
collector employed by the city of Pasadena, in which Sirhan had expressed
his concern about how the assassination of Martin Luther King would effect
Negro people and how the Negroes would vote in the coming election. Clark
testified at the trial that he told Sirhan he was going to vote for Senator Kennedy
and Sirhan responded by saying, What do you want to vote for that son-ofa-b for? Because Im planning on shooting him. Clark then told Sirhan that
Senator Kennedy had paid the expenses of bringing Martin Luther Kings body
back from Tennessee and that you will be killing one of the best men in the
country. Clark remembered that Sirhan stated that Senator Kennedy had done
this merely for the publicity involved, and that this conversation had occurred
in mid-April 1968.
On the evening of the election, June 4, an hour or two prior to Senator
Kennedys speech in the Embassy ballroom, a member of the Senators staff, Judy
Royer, observed Sirhan in the area to the rear of the Embassy ballroom stage.
Because Sirhan was not wearing a press badge or staff badge he was asked to
leave, and he turned and walked toward the doors leading out to the Embassy
ballroom. Shortly before midnight, as Senator Kennedy took the service elevator down to the pantry area in the rear of the Embassy ballroom, Jesus Perez,
a kitchen helper at the Ambassador, and Martin Petrusky, a waiter, observed
Senator Kennedy as he passed through the pantry on the way to the Embassy
801
802
ballroom where about 500 people awaited his speech. Both kitchen personnel
observed defendant Sirhan in the pantry at this time. Sirhan inquired whether
Senator Kennedy would be coming back through this way. Both hotel employees replied that they did not know, but testified that Sirhan remained in
the area of the pantry close to Perez at the corner of a serving table.
Upon concluding his address at approximately 12:15 A.M. (June 5) Senator
Kennedy was escorted off the platform toward the Colonial Room where he
was to meet the press. Karl Uecker, assistant Maitred at the Ambassador Hotel,
led the Senator through the pantry area behind the Embassy ballroom.
In the pantry area, Senator Kennedy stopped and shook hands with some of
the kitchen help, including Perez and Petrusky. At that time Sirhan appeared,
smirking, as testified by Perez and Petrusky, and began to fire his .22 caliber revolver at Senator Kennedy. Several shots were fired in rapid succession.
Uecker attempted to grab the weapon from Sirhan, and Senator Kennedy fell
to the floor of the pantry.
A struggle ensued as those present attempted to immobilize and disarm
Sirhan. Roosevelt Grier, Rafer Johnson, George Plimpton, Jess Unruh, and other
members of Kennedys entourage arrived seconds later. Later that night Rafer
Johnson turned the weapon over to the L.A.P.D., and it was booked into the
property division.
While Sirhan was being held in the pantry awaiting the arrival of the
L.A.P.D., Rafer Johnson asked Sirhan repeatedly, Why did you do it? Sirhan
replied, Let me explain or I can explain. At this time Sirhan also remarked
in answer to Jess Unruhs question Why him?, I did it for my country, and a
few seconds later, It is too late.
Two L.A.P. D. officers on patrol duty, Arthur Placentia and Travis White, answered the 12:20 A.M. all units call, Ambassador shooting, 3400 Wilshire,
and when the officers arrived they took Sirhan off the serving table where he
had been restrained and placed him in custody and handcuffed him. Sirhan
was transported through a hostile crowd, which was chanting Kill him, kill
him to the officers police car. Jess Unruh also entered the vehicle and the
officers drown toward Rampart station. Officer Placentia several times asked
Sirhan his name, but Sirhan did not reply. Sirhan was advised of his constitutional rights, and Sirhan replied that he understood his rights. Although the
officers did not address any further questions to Sirhan during the trip to the
station, Unruh asked Sirhan, Why did you shoot him?, and Sirhan replied,
Do you think Im crazy, so you can use it in evidence against me.
Both upon arrest, and later at the Rampart station, L.A.P.D. officers attempted
to examine Sirhans eyes, but did not form an opinion whether Sirhan was
under the influence of alcohol or drugs. He did not smell of any Odor of alcohol nor did Sirhan appear to Mr. Unruh to be under the influence of intoxicating liquor.
At the Rampart station, Sirhans eyes were subjected to a light test, and on
the basis of that test, as well as Sirhans appearance and movements, Officer
White formed the opinion that Sirhan was not under the influence of alcohol
or drugs.
Sirhans pockets were emptied and the following items were taken from his
possession: an automobile key, two live .22 caliber bullets and an expended
bullet, two newspaper clippings (one from the Pasadena Independent Star
News dated May 26, 1968, a story by columnist David Lawrence which in part
noted that in a recent speech Senator Kennedy had favored aid to Israel with
arms if necessary; the other newspaper clipping, an advertisement from an
unidentified newspaper inviting the public to come and see and hear Senator
Robert Kennedy on Sunday, June 2, 1968, at 8:00 P.M., Coconut Grove, Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles). Also removed from Sirhans pockets was $410.66
in cash, including four one hundred dollar bills. No wallet, identification, or
information indicating Sirhans identity was obtained from the examination of
Sirhans person. Sergeant William Jordon, who was watch commander at Rampart
detectives that night, assumed custody over petitioner around 12:45 A.M., and
asked Sirhan his name. Receiving no response, the officer informed Sirhan of
his constitutional rights. Sirhan asked some questions about his rights and requested the admonition be repeated which was done. Sirhan indicated that he
wished to remain silent.
At this time Sirhan was able to identify an absent officer to Sergeant Jordon
by the officers badge number, 3949. Sergeant Jordon formed the opinion at
this time that Sirhan was not under the influence of either alcohol or drugs.
Sirhan was not given an intoxication test because Jordon concluded there was
no objective symptoms of intoxication and no reason to administer such a test.
When Sergeant Jordon offered Sirhan a cup of coffee, Sirhan asked the officer
to drink from the cup first, and the officer did so.
For security reasons, Sirhan was transported to police headquarters at Parker
Center, arriving at the homicide squad room around 1:40 A.M. Sirhan requested
some water and again, at his request, Sergeant Jordon tasted it before passing
the cup to him. Shortly before 2:00 A.M., a Doctor Lanz examined Sirhan in
those areas where Sirhan complained of pain. Sirhan refused to tell the physician his name, and the physician told the officers present that Sirhan was not
in need of any immediate medical treatment but that Sirhan should keep as
much weight as possible off his left ankle as it was possibly sprained.
At this time Chief Deputy District Attorney Lynn Compton and Deputy District Attorney John Howard arrived, as did members of the District Attorneys
investigative staff. In an interrogation room, Howard asked Sirhan his name
and Sirhan did not answer and at that time Sirhan was advised by Howard of
his constitutional rights. Sirhan nodded in the direction of Sergeant Jordon and
stated I will stand by my original decision to remain silent.
803
804
During Sergeant Jordons various contacts with Sirhan, including the four to
five hours he spent with Sirhan at the arraignment and immediately prior and
subsequent thereto, Sirhan never appeared irrational. While refusing to identify himself by name or place of origin, Sirhan engaged in banter with Sergeant
Jordon. Jordon formed the opinion that Sirhan had a very quick mind, and
that Sirhan was one of the most alert and intelligent persons the officer had
ever interrogated or attempted to interrogate during his 15 years experience on
the police force.
About the same time that Sirhan was being taken to the police station, Senator
Kennedy was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. Surgery was
performed, but Senator Kennedy died at 1:44 A.M., on June 6, 1968. Dr. Thomas
Noguchi, Coroner and Chief Medical Examiner of Los Angeles County and two
deputy medical examiners, performed an autopsy on Senator Kennedys body
between 3:00 A.M. and 9:15 A.M., on June 6. It was disclosed that the gunshot
wound to the head, in the tight mastoid, had penetrated the brain and was the
cause of death. The bullet had fractured the skull and had itself been shattered.
According to Dr. Noguchi, powder burns on the right ear indicated that the
muzzle distance between the weapon and the ear at the time of the firing was
1 to 11/2 inches. The only other two gunshot wounds were in the area of the
right armpit and the right side. These shots were fired at very close range. The
location, alignment, and direction of the three wounds, in conjunction with
the clothing worn, indicated to Dr. Noguchi that the three shots in question
were fired in rapid succession.
L.A.P.D. criminologist DeWayne Wolfer testified at trial (and previously
before the Grand Jury in 1968) that a bullet taken from the base of Senator
Kennedys neck (Peoples exhibit 47) and bullets taken from victims Goldstein
and Weisel (Peoples exhibit 52 and 54) were fired from Sirhans gun and no
other gun in the world.
Additionally, Wolfer testified that he had test fired eight bullets from the
Sirhan weapon into a water tank, obtaining seven test bullets. Wolfer had
taken one of the seven test bullets and compared it to an evidence bullet and
determined that the bullets in question had come from the Sirhan weapon. . . .
Wolfer was unable to positively identify the bullet that actually killed Senator Kennedy, Peoples 48, as having been fired from the Sirhan gun due to the
fragmentation of the bullet. But Wolfer testified that it had been mini-mag ammunition, and had the same rifling specifications as the other bullets fired from
the Sirhan weapon.
Wolfer then described the trajectory of the bullets.
a. The first bullet entered Senator Kennedys head behind the right ear and
was later recovered from the victims head and booked as evidence
b. The second bullet passed through the right shoulder pad of Senator Kennedys suit coat (Never entering his body) and traveled upward striking
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
victim Schrade in the center of his forehead. The bullet was recovered
from his head and booked into evidence.
The third bullet entered Senator Kennedys right rear shoulder approximately 7" below the top of the shoulder. This bullet was recovered by the
Coroner from the sixth cervical vertebra and booked as evidence.
The fourth bullet entered Senator Kennedys right rear back approximately 1" to the right of bullet #3. This bullet traveled upward and forward and exited the victims body in the right front chest. The bullet
passed through the ceiling tile, striking the second plastered ceiling and
was lost somewhere in the ceiling interspace.
The fifth bullet struck victim Goldstein in the left rear buttock. This bullet was recovered from the victim and booked as evidence.
The sixth bullet passed through victim Goldsteins left pants leg (never
entering his body) and struck the cement floor and entered victim Strolls
left leg. The bullet was later recovered and booked as evidence.
The seventh bullet struck victim Weisel in the left abdomen and was
recovered and booked as evidence.
The eighth bullet struck the plaster ceiling and then struck victim Evans
in the head. This bullet was recovered from the victims head and booked
as evidence.
Finally, an envelope containing three of the test bullets fired by Wolfer (and
having a serial number of another gunnot the Sirhan weaponon the coin
envelop) was stipulated into evidence by defense counsel. This introduction of
the mismarked bullet envelope passed without comment by defense, prosecution, or the trial court.
At approximately 9:30 A.M. on June 5, (after the shooting of Senator Kennedy,
but before his death) Sergeant William Brandt of the L.A.P.D. met with Adel
Sirhan, one of the defendants brothers, at the Pasadena Police Station. Adel
stated that he lived with his two younger brothers, Munir and Sirhan, and their
mother at 696 Howard Street, Pasadena. Adel, Sergeant Brandt, Sergeant James
Evans of the Homicide Division L.A.P.D., and agent Sullivan of the F.B.I. were
admitted to the Sirhan home by Adel at 10:30 A.M. Adel, whom the officers
knew to be the oldest male resident of the household, gave the officers permission to search the defendants bedroom. The officers did not have a search warrant and had not made an attempt to secure the consent of Sirhan to enter and
search, but their purpose in going to the Sirhan residence was to determine
whether or not there was anyone else involved in the shooting and to determine whether or not there were any things that would be relative to the crime.
Sergeant Brandt knew that there was a continuing investigation to determine
if there were other suspects.
805
806
Three notebooks were recovered from Sirhans bedroom. One was observed
on a corner of a dressing table in plain view from the entrance to the room.
A second notebook was observed by Sergeant Evans in plain view on the
floor at the foot of the bed next to a cardboard box filled with clothes. Both
of these notebooks were put in evidence (the third notebook was never put
in evidence by either party). The prosecution put in evidence (trial reporters
transcript, page 4364), eight pages (4 sheets) of the diary-notebook found
on the top of Sirhans dresser, which Mr. Laurence Sloan, employed in the
District Attorneys Office as specialist in handwriting and questioned documents, identified as having been written by Sirhan. These pages read in part
as follows:
May 18, 9:45 A.M./68My determination to eliminate R.F.K. is becoming
more and more of an unshakable obsession . . . R.F.K. must die . . . R.F.K. must
be killed . . . R.F.K. must be assassinated before 5 June 68 . . .
Other quotes taken from these pages were the following:
Ambassador Goldberg must die . . . Ambassador Goldberg must be eliminated . . . Sirhan is an Arab Kennedy must fall, Kennedy must fall . . . Senator
R. Kennedy must be disposed of. We believe that Robert F. Kennedy must be
sacrificed for the cause of the poor exploited people . . .
On the evening of June 5, Lieutenant Alvin Hegge of the L.A.P.D. used the
automobile key, which had been taken from Sirhans pocket at the Rampart
station, in a successful attempt to operate the lock on a door of a 1956 DeSoto
parked in the vicinity of the Ambassador Hotel. On the basis of this successful
entry, Hegge applied for and obtained the issuance of a warrant to search the
vehicle at approximately 12:30 A.M., ( June 6), and the following items were
recovered:
1. From inside the glove compart6ment, a wallet containing among other
items, current membership card in Sirhans name in the Ancient Mystical
Order of Rosacrucian, as well as other cards identifying Sirhan by name
and address;
2. From inside the gove compartment, a business card from the Lock, Stock
and Barrel gun Shop in San Gabriel and a receipt dated June 1, 1968,
from that gun shop for the purchase of mini-mag hollow point .22 caliber ammunition, and two boxes of Super X .22 caliber ammunition
(a total of 200 bullets);
3. From inside the glove compartment one live round of .22 caliber ammunition and an empty carton labeled .22 caliber mini-mag;
4. And on the right front seat two spent bullets.
Documents obtained from the California Department of Motor Vehicles established that Sirhan was the registered owner of the DeSoto searched in the
vicinity of the Ambassador Hotel.
Evidence introduced at trial established that at 8:00 A.M. on the morning of
June 6, Officer Thomas Young of the Pasadena Police Department arrived at
the Sirhan residence, having been assigned to security at the rear of the residence to guard the premises from unauthorized persons. At approximately
11:00 A.M., upon discarding a paper cup of coffee into the trash which lay inside several boxes and cans of trash on the Sirhan property, he observed an
envelope which bore on its face the return address of the Argonaut Insurance
Company. Mr. Laurence Sloan, handwriting specialist of the Los Angeles District Attorneys Office, testified that the writing on the back of the envelope
was that of Sirhan. The following words, repeated several times, were written
on the reverse side of the envelope, which had been put in evidence by the
prosecution:
R.F.K. must be . . . disposed of properly. Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy must
soon die.
Other trial evidence introduced was testimony of Mr. and Mrs. John
Weidner, the owners of a health food store in Pasadena, who had employed
Sirhan as a box boy and delivery boy. The Weidners had discussions with
Sirhan on the subject of politics in which Sirhan asserted that violence was the
only means by which American Negroes would achieve their goals, and that
the state of Israel had taken his home, and that the Jewish people were on top
and directing the events in America. When Sirhan stated to the Weidners that
there was more freedom in Russia and China than in America, Mr. Weidner
had inquired, Why dont you go there yourself? Sirhan replied, Maybe one
day I will go.
Witnesses Enrique Rabago and Humphrey Cordero testified that they went
to the Ambassador Hotel on primary election night, June 4, and observed
Sirhan at approximately 9:30 or 9:45 P.M. at the election night headquarters of
Max Rafferty, candidate for the U.S. Senate. The two men stated that Sirhan,
who had a mixed drink in his hand, remarked, Dont worry if Senator Kennedy doesnt win. That son-of-a bitch is a millionaire. Even if he wins he is not
going to win it for you or for me or for the poor people. When Sirhan paid for
a drink, he gave the waitress a $20 dollar bill and told her to keep the change
to show them. Sirhan also stated Its the money youve got that counts, not
the way you look.
Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation Website. http://vault.fbi.gov/Robert%20

F%20Kennedy%20(Assassination)%20/Robert%20F%20Kennedy%20
(Assassination)%20Part%201%20of%203.
807
808
AT T E M P T E D A S SA S S I N AT I O N O F RO N A L D R E AGA N
Document 22
ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF RONALD
REAGAN (1981)BRADY HANDGUN
VIOLENCE PREVENTION ACT (1993)
On March 30, 1981, only 69 days into his presidency, President Ronald Reagan was
shot by John Hinckley Jr., as the president emerged from the Washington Hilton Hotel
after a speaking engagement. Reagan suffered a punctured lung and internal bleeding, but received prompt medical attention and recovered. Also wounded by Hinckley
was Reagans press secretary James Brady, who survived but was left permanently
paralyzed. With his wife Sarah, Brady later served as chair of the Brady Campaign
to Prevent Gun Violence, which lobbied Congress from stricter handgun control and
more restrictions on assault weapons. Reproduced below is the Brady Handgun
Violence Prevention Act, known as the Brady Bill, which was enacted by Congress
in 1993.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States
of America in Congress assembled,
Sec. 1. Short Title.
This Act may be cited as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.
Sec. 2. Waiting Period Required before Purchase of Handgun.
(a) IN GENERALSection 922 of title 18, United States Code, is amended
by adding at the end the following:
(1) It shall be unlawful for any licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, or licensed dealer to sell, deliver, or transfer a handgun to an
individual who is not licensed under section 923, unless
(A) after the most recent proposal of such transfer by the
transferee
(i) the transferor has
(I) received from the transferee a statement of the transferee
containing the information described in paragraph (3);
(II) verified the identification of the transferee by examining the
identification document presented; and
(III) within one day after the transferee furnishes the statement,
provided a copy of the statement to the chief law enforcement officer of the place of residence of the transferee; and
(ii)
(I) 7 days have elapsed from the date the transferee furnished
the statement, and the transferor has not received information from the chief law enforcement officer that receipt or
possession of the handgun by the transferee would be in
violation of Federal, State, or local law; or
(II) the transferor has received notice from the chief law enforcement officer that the officer has no information indicating that receipt or possession of the handgun by the
transferee would violate Federal, State, or local law;
(B) the transferee has presented to the transferor a written statement, issued by the chief law enforcement officer of the place
of residence of the transferee during the 10-day period ending
on the date of the most recent proposal of such transfer by the
transferee, which states that the transferee requires access to a
handgun because of a threat to the life of the transferee or of
any member of the household of the transferee;
(C)
(i) the transferee has presented to the transferor a permit
which
(I) allows the transferee to possess a handgun; and
(II) was issued not more than 5 years earlier by the State in
which the transfer is to take place; and
(ii) the law of the State provides that such a permit is to be issued only after an authorized government official has verified that the information available to such official does not
indicate that possession of a handgun by the transferee
would be in violation of law;
(D) the law of the State
(i) prohibits any licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, or
licensed dealer from transferring a handgun to an individual who is not licensed under section 923, before at least
7 days have elapsed from the date the transferee proposes
such transfer; or
(ii) requires that, before any licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, or licensed dealer completes the transfer of a
handgun to an individual who is not licensed under section 923, an authorized government official verifies that the
information available to such official does not indicate that
809
810
possession of a handgun by the transferee would be in violation of law; or

(E) the transferor has received a report from any system of felon
identification established by the Attorney General pursuant to
section 6213(a) of the Anti-Drug Abuse Amendments Act of
1988, that available information does not indicate that possession or receipt of a handgun by the transferee would violate
Federal, State, or local law.
(2) Paragraph (1) shall not be interpreted to require any action by a
chief law enforcement officer which is not otherwise required.
(3) The statement referred to in paragraph (1)(A)(i)(I) shall contain
only
(A) the name, address, and date of birth appearing on a valid identification document (as defined in section 1028(d)(1)) of the
transferee containing a photograph of the transferee and a description of the identification used;
(B) a statement that the transferee
(i) is not under indictment for, and has not been convicted
in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a
term exceeding one year;
(ii) is not a fugitive from justice;
(iii) is not an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled
substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act);
(iv) has not been adjudicated as a mental defective or been
committed to a mental institution;
(v) is not an alien who is illegally or unlawfully in the United
States;
(vi) has not been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions; and
(vii) is not a person who, having been a citizen of the United
States, has renounced such citizenship;
(C) the date the statement is made; and
(D) notice that the transferee intends to obtain a handgun from the
transferor.
(4) Any transferor of a handgun who, after such transfer, receives a report from a chief law enforcement officer containing information
that receipt or possession of the handgun by the transferee violates

Federal, State, or local law shall immediately communicate all information the transferor has about the transfer and the transferee to
(A) the chief law enforcement officer of the place of business of the
transferor; and
(B) the chief law enforcement officer of the place of residence of the
transferee.
(5) Any transferor who receives information, not otherwise available to
the public, in a report under this subsection shall not disclose such
information except to the transferee, to law enforcement authorities, or pursuant to the direction of a court of law.
(6)
(A) Any transferor who sells, delivers, or otherwise transfers a handgun to a transferee shall retain the copy of the statement of the
transferee with respect to the handgun transaction, and shall
retain evidence that the transferor has complied with paragraph
(1)(A)(i)(III) with respect to the statement.
(B) Unless the chief law enforcement officer to whom a copy of
the statement is sent determines that a transaction would violate Federal, State, or local law, the officer shall, within 30 days
after the date the transferee made the statement, destroy the
copy and any record containing information derived from the
statement.
(7) For purposes of this subsection, the term chief law enforcement officer means the chief of police, the sheriff, or an equivalent officer,
or the designee of any such individual.
(8) This subsection shall not apply to the sale of a firearm in the circumstances described in subsection (c).
(9) The Secretary shall take necessary actions to assure that the provisions of this subsection are published and disseminated to dealers
and to the public.
(b) HANDGUN DEFINEDSection 921(a) of such title is amended by
adding at the end the following:
(29) The term handgun means
(A) a firearm which has a short stock and is designed to be held
and fired by the use of a single hand; and
(B) any combination of parts from which a firearm described in
subparagraph (A) can be assembled.
811
812
A S SA S S I N AT I O N O F Y I T ZH A K R A B I N
(c) PENALTYSection 924(a) of such title is amended

(1) in paragraph (1), by striking paragraph (2) or (3) of ; and
(2) by adding at the end the following:
(5) Whoever knowingly violates section 922(s) shall be fined not more
than $1,000, imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.
(d) EFFECTIVE DATEThe amendments made by this Act shall apply to
conduct engaged in 90 or more days after the date of the enactment of
this Act.
Source: Government Printing Office Website. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/
BILLS-103hr1025rh/pdf/BILLS-103hr1025rh.pdf.
Document 23
ASSASSINATION OF YITZHAK RABIN (1995)
LAST SPEECH OF ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER RABIN
On November 4, 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin delivered a speech, reproduced below, at a peace rally held at Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv. The rally
had been called to serve as a reaffirmation of the commitment of the Israeli government and people to the ongoing Middle East peace process. Acts of violence committed
with increasing frequency in the mid-1990s by both Israelis and Palestinians provided
motivation for the rally. Shortly after completing his speech, Prime Minister Rabin
was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a fanatical right-wing religious settler, who hoped
that by killing Rabin he could derail the peace process.
The Last SpeechNovember 4, 1995
Allow me to say, I am also moved. I want to thank each and every one of you
who stood up here against violence and for peace. This government, which
I have the privilege to lead, together with my friend Shimon Peres, decided to
give peace a chance. A peace that will solve most of the problems of the State
of Israel. I was a military man for twenty-seven years. I fought as long as there
were no prospects for peace. Today I believe that there are prospects for peace,
great prospects. We must take advantage of it for the sake of those standing
here, and for the sake of those who do not stand here. And they are many
among our people.
I have always believed that the majority of the people want peace, are prepared to take risks for peace. And you here, by showing up at this rally, prove
it, along with the many who did not make it here, that the people truly want
A S SA S S I N AT I O N O F Y I T ZH A K R A B I N
peace and oppose violence. Violence is undermining the very foundations of

Israeli democracy. It must be condemned, denounced, and isolated. This is not
the way of the State of Israel. Controversies may arise in a democracy, but the
decision must be reached through democratic elections, just as it happened in
1992, when we were given the mandate to do what we are doing, and to continue to do it.
I want to thank from here the President of Egypt, the King of Jordan, and
the King of Morocco, whose representatives are present here, conveying their
partnership with us on the march toward peace. But above allthe people of
Israel, who have proven, in the three years this government has been in office,
that peace is attainable, a peace that will provide an opportunity for a progressive society and economy. Peace exists first and foremost in our prayers, but
not only in prayers. Peace is what the Jewish People aspire to, a true aspiration.
Peace entails difficulties, even pain. Israel knows no path devoid of pain.
But the path of peace is preferable to the path of war. I say this to you as one
who was a military man and minister of defense, and who saw the pain of the
families of IDF soldiers. It is for their sake, and for the sake of our children and
grandchildren, that I want this government to exert every effort, exhaust every
opportunity, to promote and to reach a comprehensive peace.
This rally must send a message to the Israeli public, to the Jewish community throughout the world, to many, many in the Arab world and in the entire
world, that the people of Israel want peace, support peace, and for that, I thank
you very much.
Source: Mideast Web. http://www.mideastweb.org/rabin1995.htm.
813
Appendix: World Timeline of

Assassinations
The following list includes assassinations not covered in main entries of the
foregoing text, organized alphabetically by continents and their respective
countries, with the incidents listed chronologically.
Africa
Algeria
117 BCE:
King Hiempsal I of Numidia
December 24, 1942:
Franois Darlan, French prime minister
June 21, 1957:
Maurice Audin, Communist Party leader
April 11, 1963:
Foreign Minister Mohamed Khemisti
February 3, 1987:
Mustafa Bouyali, Algerian Islamic Armed Movement leader
August 22, 1993:
Kasdi Merbah, ex-prime minister
November 22, 1999:
Abdelkader Hachani, Islamic Salvation Front founder
February 25, 2010:
Ali Tounsi, Gendarmerie Nationale chief
Botswana
May 21, 1985:
Vernon Nkadimeng, African National Congress member
Burundi
October 13, 1961:
Prime Minister Louis Rwagasore
January 15, 1965:
Prime Minister Pierre Ngendandumwe
September 30, 1965:
Prime Minister Joseph Bamina
Cameroon
September 13, 1958:
Ruben Um Nyob, anti-imperialist leader
Chad
August 26, 1973:
Dr. Outel Bono, presidential candidate
Comoros
May 29, 1978:
Ali Soilih Mtsashiwa, ex-president
June 13, 2010:
Colonel Combo Ayouba, head of state
816
APPENDIX
Egypt
December 11, 1121:
Vizier Al-Afdal Shahanshah
October 7, 1130:
Caliph Al-Amir bi-Ahkami I-Lah
June 14, 1800:
General Jean Baptiste Klber
February 20, 1910:
Prime Minister Boutros Ghali
November 19, 1924:
Lee Stack, governor-general of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan
December 28, 1948:
Prime Minister Mahmoud an-Nukrashi Pasha
November 28, 1971:
Wasfi al-Tal, prime minister of Jordan
October 12, 1990:
Rifaat el-Mahgoub, speaker of Parliament
Guinea Bissau
March 1, 2009:
Batista Na Waie, army chief of staff
June 5, 2009:
Major Baciro Dab, presidential candidate
June 5, 2009:
Helder Proena, ex-minister of defense
Kenya
July 5, 1969:
Minister of Economic Planning Thomas Mboya
May 16, 1998:
Seth Sendashonga, ex-Rwandan minister of the interior
Libya
September 11, 2012:
Christopher Stevens, U.S. ambassador
Nigeria
January 15, 1966:
Premier Samuel Akntl
July 29, 1966:
Francis Fajuyi, military governor
April 14, 2007:
Onyema Ugochukwu, governor-elect of Abia
October 16, 2011:
Modu Bintube, state legislator
Rwanda
December 27, 1985:
Dian Fossey, primatologist/conservationist
Senegal
February 3, 1967:
Minister of Youth and Sport Demba Diop
Somalia
July 28, 2006:
Minister of Constitutional Affairs Abdallah Deerow
June 18, 2009:
Security Minister Omar Aden
June 10, 2011:
Minister for Internal Affairs and Security Abdi Hassan
APPENDIX
South Africa
January 22, 2009:
Mbongeleni Zondi, Zulu chief
April 3, 2010:
Eugne TerreBlanche, Afrikaner Resistance Movement

founder
Sudan
March 2, 1973:
Cleo Noel Jr., U.S. ambassador
March 2, 1973:
Guy Eid, Belgian charg daffaires
January 1, 2008:
John Granville, U.S. diplomat
February 9, 2011:
Minister for Co-operatives and Rural Development Jimmy

Milla,
Swaziland
April 1, 2008:
Dr. Gabriel Mkhumane, Peoples United Democratic

Movement deputy president
Togo
July 29, 1992:
Octave Amorin, Pan-African Socialist Party leader
Uganda
September 22, 1972:
Chief Justice Benedicto Kiwanuka
Western Sahara
June 18, 1970:
Muhammad Basir, Sahrawi nationalist leader
Zambia
March 18, 1975:
Herbert Chitepo, Zimbabwe African National Union

leader
Zimbabwe
March 24, 1983:
Attati Mpakati, Socialist League of Malawi leader
Asia
Afghanistan
February 20, 1919:
Emir Habibullah Khan
September 14, 1979:
President Nur Taraki
September 28, 1996:
President Mohammad Ahmadzai
September 9, 2001:
Vice President Ahmad Massoud
February 14, 2002:
Minister for Civil Aviation and Tourism Abdul Rahman
817
818
APPENDIX
July 6, 2002:
Vice President Abdul Arsala
May 3, 2007:
Abdul Kohistani, ex-prime minister
September 20, 2011:
Burhanuddin Rabbani, ex-president
Armenia
October 27, 1999:
Deputy Prime Minister Leonard Petrosyan
Bangladesh
August 15, 1975:
President Mujibur Rahman
November 3, 1975:
Tajuddin Ahmad, ex-prime minister
November 3, 1975:
Syed Islam, ex-president
Bhutan
April 6, 1964:
Prime Minister Jigme Dorji
Burma/Myanmar
1167:
King Alaungsithu
April 30, 1550:
King Tabinshwehti
July 9, 1628:
King Anaukpetlun
August 2, 1866:
Crown Prince Kanaung Mintha
July 19, 1947:
Minister of Trade Ba Win
Cambodia
January 14, 1950:
Ieu Koeus, ex-prime minister
China
July 13, 815:
Chancellor Wu Yuanheng
August 22, 1870:
Ma Xinyi, viceroy of Liangjiang
October 26, 1909:
Prince Ito Hirobumi, Japanese governor-general of Korea
July 15, 1946:
Wen Yiduo, China Democratic League spokesman
September 23, 2008:
Li Shiming, Communist Party chief
Georgia
July 21, 1922:
Djemal Pasha, mayor of Istanbul
December 3, 1994:
Giorgi Chanturia, National Democratic Party leader
India
180 BCE:
Emperor Ashoka Maurya
August 12, 1602:
Vizier Abul-Fazl ibn Mubarak
APPENDIX
August 10, 1986:
General Arun Vaidya
August 31, 1995:
Beant Singh, chief minister of Punjab
May 21, 2002:
Abdul Lone, Kashmiri separatist leader
Indonesia
November 22, 1965:
Dipa Aidit, Communist Party leader
Iran
October 10, 1092:
Vizier Khwaja Tusi
June 19, 1747:
Emperor Nader Afshar
May 1, 1896:
Emperor Naser Qajar
September 3, 1933:
Minister of Court Abdolhosein Teymurtash
April 1937:
Prince Firouz Farmaian III
January 27, 1965:
Prime Minister Hasan-ali Mansur
June 28, 1981:
Seyyed Beheshti, Islamic Republic Party secretary general
August 30, 1981:
President Mohammad-Ali Rajai and Prime Minister

Mohammad-Javad Bahonar
Iraq
February 11, 244:
Gordian III, Roman emperor
February 19, 1999:
Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr
August 29, 2003:
Ayatollah Mohammad al-Hakim
September 25, 2003:
Aqila al-Hashimi, Governing Council member
November 1, 2004:
Deputy Governor Hatem Fatah
May 17, 2004:
Ezzedine Salim, president of Governing Council
July 6, 2005:
Ihab el-Sherif, Egyptian ambassador
December 23, 2009:
Brigadier General Riad Majid
Israel
February 135 BCE:
King Simon Thassi
October 1174:
Miles of Plancy, regent for King Baldwin IV
April 28, 1192:
King Conrad of Montferrat
June 16, 1933:
Haim Arlosoroff, Zionist leader
May 23, 1948:
Thomas Campbell Wasson, U.S. consul general
September 17, 1948:
Folke Bernadotte, United Nations mediator
January 12, 1981:
Hamad Rabia, Knesset member
December 31, 2000:
Binyamin Kahane, son of Meir Kahane
October 17, 2001:
Rehavam Zeevi, Moledet Party founder
819
820
APPENDIX
Japan
592:
Emperor Sushun
February 13, 1219:
Shogun Minamoto no Sanetomo
July 12, 1441:
Shogun Ashikaga Yoshinori
August 1, 1507:
Deputy Shogun Hosokawa Masamoto
June 17, 1565:
Shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru
January 30, 1703:
Kira Yoshinaka, royal master of ceremonies
October 30, 1863:

December 7, 1869:
Serizawa Kamo, chief of Shinsengumi police

Omura Masujiro, military leader
May 14, 1878:
Home Minister Okubo Toshimichi
February 12, 1889:
Education Minister Mori Arinori
October 26, 1909:
Prime Minister Io Hirobumi
November 4, 1921:
Prime Minister Hara Takashi
August 26, 1931:
Prime Minister Osachi Hamaguchi
May 15, 1932:
Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi
February 26, 1936:
Prime Minister Takahashi Korekiyo and
Admiral Saito Makoto

April 18, 2007:
Iccho Itoh, mayor of Nagasaki
Jordan
July 20, 1951:
King Abdullah I
August 29, 1960:
Prime Minister Hazza al-Majali
October 28, 2002:
Laurence Foley, U.S. diplomat
Korea
304:
King Bunseo of Baekje
October 8, 1895:
Empress Myeongseong
July 19, 1947:
Yuh Woon-Hyung, Peoples Party of Korea founder
August 14, 1974:
First Lady Yuk Yeong-su
Kuwait
March 30, 1971:
Hardan al-Tikriti, ex-Iraqi vice president
Laos
April 1, 1963:
Foreign Minister Quinim Pholsena
Lebanon
1152:
Count Raymond II
APPENDIX
March 17, 1270:
Lord Philip of Montfort
October 31, 1950:
Colonel Sami al-Hinnawi, head of state
June 16, 1976:
Francis Meloy and Robert Waring, U.S. diplomats
September 14, 1982:
President-elect Bachir Gemayel
June 1, 1987:
Prime Minister Rashid Karami
October 21, 1990:
Dany Chamoun, presidential candidate
February 14, 2005:
Rafic Al-Hariri, ex-prime minister
April 18, 2005:
Minister of Economy and Commerce Bassel Fleihan
November 21, 2006:
Minister of Industry Pierre Gemayel
December 12, 2007:
General Franois al-Hajj
Malaysia
November 2, 1875:
James Birch, British diplomat
December 3, 1949:
Sir Duncan Stewart, governor of Sarawak
October 6, 1951:
Sir Henry Gurney, British High Commissioner
Pakistan
October 16, 1951:
Prime Minister Liaquat Khan
February 8, 1975:
Hayat Sherpao, governor of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
August 17, 1988:
President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq
October 3, 1991:
Lieutenant General Fazle Haq, ex-governor of Khyber

Pakhtunkhwa
September 29, 1993:
Ghulam Wyne, ex-chief minister of Punjab
October 17, 1998:
Hakim Said, ex-governor of Sindh Province
July 28, 2001:
Siddiq Kanju, ex-minister of state for foreign affairs
March 2, 2011:
Minister of Minorities Affairs Clement Bhatti
Philippines
October 11, 1719:
Governor-General Fernando Bustamante y Rueda
June 5, 1899:
General Antonio Luna
April 28, 1949:
First Lady Aurora Quezon and Ponciano Bernardo,

mayor of Quezon City
December 16, 1980:
Jose Lingad, ex-governor of Pampanga
November 14, 1984:
Cesar Climaco, mayor of Zamboanga City
February 11, 1986:
Evelio Javier, ex-governor of Antique
January 17, 1988:
Roy Padilla Sr., governor of Camarines Norte
April 21, 1989:
Lieutenant Colonal James Rowe, U.S. military advisor
February 6, 2001:
Filemon Lagman, Solidarity of Filipino Workers founder
821
822
APPENDIX
Qatar
February 13, 2004:
Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, ex-Chechen president
Saudi Arabia
November 7, 644:
Caliph Umar bin al-Khattab
July 17, 656:
Caliph Uthman ibn Affan
Sri Lanka
July 27, 1975:
Alfred Duraiappah, mayor of Jaffna
November 13, 1989:
Rohana Wijeweera, Peoples Liberation Front founder
March 2, 1991:
Ranjan Wijeratne, ex-minister of foreign affairs
April 23, 1993:
Lalith Athulathmudali, ex-minister of national security
May 17, 1998:
Sarojini Yogeswaran, mayor of Jaffna
September 11, 1998:
Pon Sivapalan, mayor of Jaffna
June 7, 2000:
Minister of Industries Development Clement Gunaratne
August 12, 2005:
Minister of Foreign Affairs Lakshman Kadirgamar
June 26, 2006:
General Parami Kulatunga
Syria
246 BCE:
King Antiochus II Theos
223 BCE:
King Seleucus III Ceraunus
175 BCE:
King Seleucus IV Philopator
146 BCE:
King Alexander Balas
138 BCE:
King Antiochus VI Dionysus
November 284:
Numeriam, Roman emperor
September 14, 1146:
Imad ad-Din Zengi, Turkish nobleman
July 7, 1940:
Abdul Shahbandar, nationalist leader
August 1, 2008:
General Muhammad Suleiman
Thailand
1548:
King Worawongsathirat
June 9, 1946:
King Rama VIII
August 29, 1961:
Princess Laksamilawan
February 16, 1977:
Princess Vibhavadi Rangsit
Turkey
June 11, 1913:
Grand Vizier Mahmud Shevket Pasha
January 29, 1921:
Mustafa Suphi, Congress of Turkish Left Socialists founder
APPENDIX
February 23, 1979:
Metin Yksel, Muslim nationalist
July 19, 1980:
Nihat Erim, ex-prime minister
July 22, 1980:
Kemal Trkler, Metal Workers Union president
January 31, 1990:
Muammer Aksoy, Atatrk Thought Association cofounder
September 20, 1992:
Musa Anter, Kurdish activist
October 21, 1999:
Ahmet Taner Ks lali, ex-minister of culture
May 17, 2006:
Mustafa zbilgin, Supreme Court judge
Yemen
17 February 1948:
King Yahya Hamidaddin
October 11, 1977:
President Ibrahim al-Hamdi
June 24, 1978:
President Ahmad al-Ghashmi
December 28, 2002:
Jarallah Omar, Marxist politician
Australia and Oceania
Australia
February 12, 1894:
William Paisley, mayor of Burwood, NSW
December 17, 1980:
Sarik Ariyak, Turkish consul general
January 10, 1989:
Colin Winchester, assistant commissioner of the Australia

Federal Police
New Caledonia
May 4, 1989:
Jean-Marie Tjibaou, Kanak independence leader
Samoa
July 16, 1999:
Minister of Public Works Luagalau Levaula Kamu
Europe
Austria
October 21, 1916:
Minister-President Karl von Strgkh
July 13, 1989:
Abdul Ghassemlou, Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan

secretary general
Belgium
August 18, 1950:
Julien Lahaut, Communist Party chairman
May 23, 1971:
Maximiliano Gmez, exiled Dominican rebel
March 22, 1990:
Gerald Bull, Canadian artillery engineer
July 18, 1991:
Andr Cools, ex-minister of state
823
824
APPENDIX
Bosnia and Herzegovina

May 28, 1995:
Dr. Irfan Ljubijankic,

ex-foreign minister
March 21, 1999:
Deputy Interior Minister Jozo Leutar
Bulgaria
July 6, 1895:
Stefan Stambolov, ex-prime minister
March 11, 1907:
Prime Minister Dimitar Petkov
October 2, 1996:
Andrey Lukanov, ex-prime minister
Croatia
June 22, 480:
Julius Nepos, Roman emperor
Czech Republic
September 15, 921:
Saint Ludmilla, wife of Duke Bor ivoj I
August 4, 1306:
King Wenceslaus III
February 25, 1634:
General Albrecht von Wallenstein
February 18, 1923:
Minister of Finance Alois Ran
Finland
January 20, 1156:
Henry, bishop of Uppsala
February 6, 1905:
Chancellor of Justice Eliel Soisalon-Soininen
France
January 8, 1354:
Charles de La Cerda, Count of Angoulme
November 23, 1407:
Louis I, Duke of Orlans
September 10, 1419:
John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy
August 24, 1572:
Admiral Gaspard de Coligny
July 14, 1789:
Jacques de Flesselles, Provost of Paris
February 13, 1820:
Charles Ferdinand, Duke of Berry
June 25, 1894:
President Marie Sadi Carnot
July 30, 1914:
Jean Jaurs, Socialist leader
May 6, 1932:
President Paul Doumer
January 17, 1944:
Eugne Deloncle, Fascist leader
March 23, 1944:
Constant Chevillon, Freemasonry Grand Master
July 7, 1944:
Georges Mandel, French Resistance leader
October 29, 1965:
Mehdi Ben Barka, Moroccan socialist leader
February 2, 1980:
Joseph Fontanet, ex-cabinet minister
July 21, 1980:
Salah al-Din al-Bitar, Baath Party founder
APPENDIX
August 6, 1991:
Shapour Bakhtiar, ex-Iranian prime minister
July 11, 1995:
Abdelbaki Sahraoui, Islamic Salvation Front cofounder
February 6, 1998:
Claude rignac, Prefect of Corsica
Germany
March 18/19, 235:
Emperor Alexander Severus
June 21, 1208:
Emperor Philip of Swabia
November 7, 1225:
Engelbert I, archbishop of Cologne
January 15, 1919:
Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Socialist leaders
March 15, 1921:
Talaat Pasha, ex-Ottoman minister of interior affairs
August 26, 1921:
Matthias Erzberger, Centre Party leader
June 30, 1934:
Kurt von Schleicher, ex-Chancellor
October 15, 1959:
Stepan Bandera, Ukrainian nationalist
October 18, 1970:
Krim Belkacem, Algerian revolutionary
Greece
514 BCE:
Hipparchus, tyrant of Athens
461 BCE:
Ephialtes, democratic leader
404 BCE:
General Alcidiades
358 BCE:
Alexander of Pherae, despot
251 BCE:
Abantidas, tyrant of Sicyon
October 9, 1831:
President Ioannis Kapodistrias
March 8, 1907:
Marinos Antypas, Socialist leader
April 28, 1988:
Hagop Hagopian, Armenian revolutionary
June 28, 1988:
William Nordeen, U.S. military attach
September 26, 1989:
Pavlos Bakoyannis, New Democracy leader
June 8, 2000:
Stephen Saunders, British military attach
Iceland
September 23, 1241:
Snorri Sturlson, Lawspeaker of Parliament
Ireland
April 23, 1014:
King Brian Boru
May 6, 1882:
Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, British

officials
March 20, 1920:
Toms Mac Curtain, Lord Mayor of Cork
July 10, 1927:
Minister of Justice Kevin OHiggins
March 24, 1936:
Henry Somerville, Secret Service Bureau chief
825
826
APPENDIX
Italy and Roman Empire

748 BCE:
King Titus Tatius
579 BCE:
King Tarquin I
534 BCE:
King Servius Tullius
133 BCE:
General Tiberius Gracchus
December 7, 43 BCE:
Cicero, philosopher/politician
October 13, 54:
Emperor Claudius
January 15, 69:
Emperor Galba
December 22, 69:
Emperor Vitellius
September 18, 96:
Emperor Domitian
December 31, 192:
Emperor Commodus
March 28, 193:
Emperor Pertinax
June 1, 193:
Emperor Didius Julianus
December 19, 211:
Emperor Geta
April 8, 217:
Emperor Caracalla
March 11, 222:
Emperor Elagabalus
April 238:
Emperor Maximinus Thrax
August 253:
Emperors Trebonianus Gallus and Volusianus
September 275:
Emperor Aurelian
September 276:
Emperor Florianus
May 16, 1412:
Duke Gian Maria Visconti
November 15, 1848:
Minister of Justice Pellegrino Rossi
December 6, 1921:
Said Halim Pasha, ex-Ottoman Grand Vizier
June 10, 1924:
Giacomo Matteotti, Socialist leader
March 2, 1925:
Luigj Gurakuqi, Albanian independence leader
October 27, 1962:
Enrico Mattei, public administrator
September 25, 1979:
Cesare Terranova, magistrate
September 3, 1982:
Carlo Dalla Chiesa, carabinieri general
March 12, 1992:
Salvatore Lima, ex-Palermo mayor
May 23, 1992:
Giovanni Falcone, magistrate
March 19, 2002:
Mario Biagi, jurist
Netherlands
June 5, 754:
Saint Boniface
April 14, 1099:
Conrad, bishop of Utrecht
June 27, 1296:
Count Floris V
July 10, 1584:
William of Orange, revolutionary
APPENDIX
August 20, 1672:
Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt
May 6, 2002:
Pim Fortuyn, Livable Netherlands party leader
Ottoman Empire
October 11, 1579:
Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha
July 21, 1922:
General Djemal Pasha
Poland
April 11, 1079:
Bishop Stanislaus Szczepanw
June 15, 1934:
Minister of the Interior Bronisaw Pieracki
February 1, 1944:
SS General Franz Kutschera
October 19, 1984:
Jerzy Popieuszko, priest active in Solidarity
Portugal
138 BCE:
Viriathus, Lusitanian ruler
January 7, 1355:
Ins de Castro, queen consort
February 1, 1908:
Crown Prince Luiz Filipe
December 14, 1918:
President Sidnio Pais
February 13, 1965:
General Humberto Delgado
December 4, 1980:
Prime Minister Francisco S Carneiro and Minister of

Defense Adelino da Costa
Romania
November 27, 1940:
Nicolae Iorga, ex-prime minister
Russia /Soviet Union

December 27, 1825:
Mikhail Miloradovich, governor of St. Petersburg
August 4, 1878:
Nikolay Mezentsov, secret police director
March 25, 1893:
Nikolay Alekseyev, mayor of Moscow
April 8, 1902:
Interior Minister Dmitry Sipyagin
July 28, 1904:
Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve
February 17, 1905:
Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich
September 14, 1911:
Prime Minister Peter Stolypin
July 6, 1918:
Wilhelm von Mirbach, German ambassador
December 1, 1934:
Sergei Kirov, Bolshevik leader
January 12/13, 1948:
Solomon Mikhoels, Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

chairman
May 31, 1998:
Valeriy Hubulov, defense minister of South Ossetia
827
828
APPENDIX
November 20, 1998:
Galina Starovoytova, Duma member
May 9, 2004:
Akhmad Kadyrov, ex-Chechen president
April 10, 2005:
Anatoly Trofimov, FSB deputy director
February 2, 2005:
Magomed Omarov, deputy interior minister of Dagestan
February 13, 2006:
Altynbek Sarsenbayuly, Kazakh opposition leader
November 26, 2008:
Vitaly Karayev, mayor of Vladikavkaz
December 17, 2008:
Nina Varlamova, mayor of Kandalaksha
December 31, 2008:
Kazbek Pagiyev, ex-mayor of Vladikavkaz
June 5, 2009:
Adilgerei Magomedtagirov, interior minister of Dagestan
June 10, 2009:
Aza Gazgireyeva, deputy chief justice of Supreme Court

of Ingushetia
June 13, 2009:
Bashir Aushev, ex-deputy prime minister of Ingushetia
Serbia
July 24, 1817:
orde
Petrovic, ex-president
June 10, 1868:
Prince Mihailo Obrenovic
June 11, 1903:
King Alexander I
Spain
March 8, 1921:
Prime Minister Eduardo Dato e Iradier
July 12, 1936:
Jos Castillo, anti-fascist leader
July 13, 1936:
Jos Calvo Sotelo, ex-minister of finance
January 4, 1967:
Mohamed Khider, exiled Algerian politician
July 13, 1997:
Miguel Blanco, Councillor for Ermua
November 21, 2000:
Ernest Lluch, ex-minister of health and consumption
Sweden
May 18, 1160:
King Eric IX
June 20, 1810:
Count Axel von Fersen
September 11, 2003:
Anna Lindh, minister of foreign affairs
Switzerland
January 24, 1639:
Jrg Jenatsch, political leader
February 4, 1936:
Wilhelm Gustloff, Nazi Party leader
November 3, 1960:
Flix-Roland Moumi, exiled Cameroonian leader
April 24, 1990:
Kazem Rajavi, exiled Iranian activist
Turkey
June 11, 1913:
Prime Minister Mahmud Shevket Pasha
APPENDIX
January 29, 1921:
Mustafa Suphi, Communist Party leader
February 23, 1979:
Metin Yksel, Kurdish Islamic leader
July 19, 1980:
Nihat Erim, ex-prime minister
October 21, 1999:
Ahmet Taner Kslal, ex-minister of culture
May 17, 2006:
Mustafa Ycel zbilgin, Council of State magistrate
Ukraine
May 23, 1938:
Yevhen Konovalets, nationalist leader
October 15, 1957:
Lev Rebet, anticommunist leader
November 29, 2005:
Stepan Senchuk, ex-governor of Lviv
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

293:
Emperor Carausius
February 22, 1452:
William Douglas, 8th Earl of Douglas
May 21, 1471:
King Henry VI
February 10, 1567:
Henry Stuart, king consort of Scotland
August 23, 1628:
George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham
May 3, 1679:
Archbishop James Sharp
June 22, 1922:
Field Marshal Henry Wilson
March 13, 1940:
Michael ODwyer, ex-lieutenant governor of the

Punjab
June 25/26, 1973:
Paddy Wilson, Social Democratic and Labour Party

founder
April 10, 1977:
Kadhi al-Hagri, ex-Yemeni prime minister
July 9, 1978:
Abul al-Naif, ex-Iraqi prime minister
January 21, 1981:
Norman Stronge, Speaker of Northern Ireland House

of Commons
December 3, 1987:
George Seawright, Belfast City councillor
September 16, 2010:
Imran Farooq, exiled Pakistani politician
Yugoslavia
268:
Emperor Gallienus
282:
Emperor Probus
285:
Emperor Carinus
January 15, 2000:
eljko Ranatovic, Serb warlord
February 7, 2000:
Defense Minister Pavle Bulatovic
August 25, 2000:
Ivan Stambolic, ex-president
829
830
APPENDIX
North America
Canada
April 7, 1868:
Thomas DArcy McGee, Irish Catholic Father of the

Canadian Confederation
May 9, 1880:
Senator George Brown
August 23, 1982:
Atilla Altkat, Turkish military attach
Mexico
June 29, 1550:
Emperor Moctezuma II
March 7, 1913:
Abraham Gonzlez Casavantes, governor of Chihuahua
January 3, 1924:
Felipe Carrillo Puerto, governor of Yucatn
January 10, 1929:
Julio Mella, founder of the Cuban Communist Party
February 7, 1986:
Carlos de Mola Mediz, governor of Yucatn
May 24, 1993:
Cardinal Juan Posadas Ocampo
March 23, 1994:
Luis Colosio Murrieta, presidential candidate
September 28, 1994:
Jos Ruiz Massieu, Institutional Revolutionary Party

secretary general
June 8, 2005:
Alejandro Domnguez Coello, police chief of Nuevo

Laredo
May 8, 2008:
dgar Milln Gmez, commissioner of Federal Preventive

Police
May 9, 2008:
Esteban Robles Espinosa, commander of Mexico Citys
June 19, 2010:
Jess Lara Rodrguez, mayor of Guadalupe
June 28, 2010:
Dr. Rodolfo Torre Cant, Tamaulipas gubernatorial

candidate
United States of America

November 7, 1837:
Elijah Lovejoy, abolitionist
March 28, 1868:
George Ashburn, Georgia politician supporting black civil

rights
January 11, 1943:
Carlo Tresca, Italian anti-fascist
May 7, 1955:
Rev. George Lee, Mississippi civil rights activist
June 21, 1964:
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, civil rights activists
June 2, 1965:
Oneal Moore, first black policeman in Washington Parish,

Los Angeles
January 10, 1966:
Vernon Dahmer, Mississippi civil rights activist
February 14, 1976:
Anna Aquash, American Indian Movement activist
APPENDIX
June 18, 1984:
Alan Berg, radio talk-show host
October 11, 1985:
Alex Odeh, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination

Committee activist
May 19, 1988:
Richard Daronco, federal judge
July 29, 1994:
Dr. John Britton, abortion provider
October 23, 1998:
Dr. Barnett Slepian, abortion provider
October 11, 2001:
Thomas Wales, federal prosecutor
March 11, 2005:
Rowland Barnes, superior court judge in Georgia
May 31, 2009:
Dr. George Tiller, abortion provider
January 8, 2011:
John Roll, federal judge
North America / The Caribbean
Antigua and Barbuda

December 7, 1710:
Daniel Parke, governor of the Leeward Islands
Dominican Republic
February 16, 1973:
Colonel Francisco Caamao De, ex-president
Haiti
October 14, 1993:
Minister of Justice Guy Malary
Puerto Rico
July 25, 1978:
Arnaldo Rosado Torres and Carlos Soto Arriv,

independence activists
April 29, 1986:
Alejandro Gonzlez Malav, secret police agent
North America/Central America
El Salvador
February 1, 1932:
Agustn Mart Rodrguez, revolutionary leader
March 24, 1980:
scar Romero y Galdmez, archbishop of San Salvador
November 27, 1980:
Enrique lvarez Crdova, leader of the Democratic

Revolutionary Front
May 25, 1983:
Albert Schaufelberger, U.S. Navy lieutenant commander
October 26, 1987:
Herbert Anaya Sanabria, president of Human Rights

Commission
Guatemala
April 5, 1970:
Count Karl von Spreti, West German ambassador
January 25, 1979:
Alberto Fuentes Mohr, Social Democratic Party founder
831
832
APPENDIX
March 22, 1979:
Manuel Colom Argueta, mayor of Guatemala City
July 3, 1993:
Jorge Carpio Nicolle, founder of the National Centrist

Union
January 13, 2012:
Oscar Leal Caal, former governor of Alta Verapaz

Department
Honduras
May 15, 1966:
Maximiliano Hernndez Martnez, ex-president
November 22, 2008:
Mario Fernando Hernndez, deputy speaker of Congress
Nicaragua
February 21, 1934:
Augusto Caldern Sandino, revolutionary leader
February 16, 1991:
Enrique Bermdez Varela, founder/commander of Contra

guerrilla army
Panama
January 2, 1955:
President Jos Remn Cantera
South America
Argentina
April 11, 1870:
Justo de Urquiza, ex-president
May 29, 1970:
Pedro Aramburu Silveti, ex-de facto president
September 30, 1974:
Carlos Prats Gonzlez, ex-commander-in-chief of the

Chilean Army
May 20, 1976:
Hctor Gutirrez Ruiz, ex-speaker of the Uruguayan

House of Representatives
May 20, 1976:
Zelmar Michelini, exiled Uruguayan senator
June 2, 1976:
Juan Torres Gonzlez, ex-Bolivian president
Bolivia
January 1, 1829:
President Pedro Blanco Soto
January 15, 1871:
President Manuel Melgarejo Valencia
April 27, 1969:
President Ren Barrientos Ortuo
Brazil
September 8, 1915:
Jos Pinheiro Machado, senator for Rio Grande do Sul
July 26, 1930:
Joo Cavalcnti de Albuquerque, vice presidential

candidate
September 27, 1964:
Adib ibn Hasan Shishakli, exiled Syrian president
APPENDIX
July 21, 1980:
Wilson Pinheiro, president of the Brasilia Rural Workers

Union
June 23, 1996:
Paulo Farias, campaign treasurer of President Fernando

Collor de Mello
September 10, 2001:
Antonio da Costa Santos, mayor of Campinas
Chile
October 25, 1970:
General Ren Schneider Chereau, army commander in

chief
June 8, 1971:
Edmundo Prez Zujovic, ex-secretary of Interior Affairs
January 22, 1982:
Eduardo Frei Montalva, ex-president
February 25, 1982:
Tucapel Jimnez Alfaro, trade union leader
April 1, 1991:
Jaime Guzmn Errzuriz, Independent Democratic Union

founder
Colombia
June 4, 1830:
Antonio de Sucre y Alcal, ex-president
October 15, 1914:
Rafael Uribe Uribe, revolutionary socialist
April 9, 1948:
Jorge Gaitn Ayala, ex-minister of labor
April 30, 1984:
Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, minister of justice
July 23, 1985:
Judge Tulio Castro Gil
November 6, 1985:
17 Supreme Court justices
July 31, 1986:
Hernando Baquero Borda, Supreme Court justice
November 17, 1986:
Colonel Jaime Ramrez, national chief of narcotics

enforcement
October 11, 1987:
Jaime Pardo Leal, presidential candidate
January 25, 1988:
Attorney General Carlos Mauro Hoyos
July 5, 1989:
Antonio Roldan Betancur, governor of Antioquia

Department
August 18, 1989:
Luis Carlos Galn, presidential candidate
August 19, 1989:
Judge Carlos Valencia
August 19, 1989:
Waldemar Franklin Quintero, police commander of

Antioquia Department
March 22, 1990:
Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa, presidential candidate
April 26, 1990:
Carlos Pizarro Leongmez, presidential candidate
April 30, 1991:
Enrique Low Murtra, ex-ambassador to Switzerland
September 19, 1992:
Judge Myrio Rocio Velez
August 9, 1994:
Senator Manuel Cepeda Vargas
833
834
APPENDIX
November 2, 1995:
lvaro Gmez Hurtado, ex-presidential candidate
February 27, 2000:
General Romero Quiones Quiones
May 5, 2003:
Guillermo Gaviria Correa, governor of Antioquia

Department
Ecuador
February 17, 1999:
Jaime Hurtado Gonzlez, presidential candidate
Guyana
November 18, 1978:
Leo Joseph Ryan Jr., California congressman
April 22, 2006:
Agriculture Minister Satyadeow Sawh
Peru
July 26, 1872:
President Jos Balta y Montero
Uruguay
February 19, 1868:
Bernardo Prudencio Berro and Venancio Flores Barrios,

ex-presidents
Venezuela
November 18, 2004:
Danilo Baltasar Anderson, state prosecutor of

environmental offenses
Assassination. New York: Time-Life Education, 1994.

Badrawi, Malak. Political Violence in Egypt 19101925: Secret Societies, Plots and Assassinations. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000.
Belfield, Richard. The Assassination Business: A History of State-Sponsored Murder. New York:
Carroll & Graf, 2005.
Belfield, Richard. A Brief History of Hitmen and Assassinations. London: Constable &
Robinson, 2011.
Belfield, Richard. The Secret History of Assassination: The Killers and Their Paymasters
Revealed. London: Magpie Books, 2008.
Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. Political Assassinations by Jews: A Rhetorical Device for Justice.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.
Blumenthal, Sid, and Harvey Yazijian, eds. Government by Gunplay: Assassination Conspiracy Theories from Dallas to Today. New York: Signet, 1976.
Castleden, Rodney. Assassinations and Conspiracies. New York: Little Brown, 2007.
Cooper, H.H.A. On Assassination. Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 1984.
Davis, Lee. Assassination: 20 Assassinations That Changed History. Emmaus, PA: JG Press,
1997.
DEncausse, Helene. The Russian Syndrome: One Thousand Years of Political Murder.
Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier, 1993.
Derogy, Jacques. Resistance & Revenge: The Armenian Assassination of Turkish Leaders
Responsible for the 1915 Massacres and Deportations. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 1990.
Donnelly, Paul. Assassins and Assassinations: Historys Most Famous Plots. London: New
Holland Publishers, 2008.
Fetherling, George. The Book of Assassins: A Biographical Dictionary from Ancient Times
to the Present. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 2006.
Ford, Franklin. Political Murder: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Grant, R. G. Assassinations: Historys Most Shocking Moments of Murder, Betrayal, and
Madness. New York: Readers Digest, 2004.
Greig, Charlotte. Cold Blooded Killings: Hits, Assassinations, and Near Misses that Shook
the World. Edison, NJ: Chartwell Books, 2009.
Gross, Michael. Moral Dilemmas of Modern War: Torture, Assassination, and Blackmail in
an Age of Asymmetric Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Gundle, Stephen, and Lucia Rinaldi, eds. Assassination and Murder in Modern Italy.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
836
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hancock, Larry. Nexus: The CIA and Political Assassination. Southlake, TX: JFK Lancer
Productions, 2011.
Heaps, Willard. Assassination: A Special Kind of Murder. Des Moines, IA: Meredith Press,
1969.
Hernon, Ian. Assassin! 200 Years of British Political Murder. London: Pluto Press, 2007.
Hudson, Miles. Assassination. Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen and Sword, 2011.
Hurwood, Bernhardt. Society and the Assassin. New York: Macmillan, 1970.
Hyams, Edward. Killing No Murder: A Study of Assassination as a Political Means.
Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1969.
Johnson, Francis. Famous Assassinations of History from Philip of Macedon 336 BC to
Alexander of Serbia AD 1903. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.
Kirkham, James, Sheldon Levy, and William Crotty. Assassination and Political Violence.
New York: Bantam, 1970.
Kulczyk, David. California Justice: Shootouts, Lynchings and Assassinations in the Golden
State. Sanger, CA: Quill Driver Books, 2007.
Laucella, Linda. Assassination: The Politics of Murder. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999.
Lentz, Harris. Assassinations and Executions: An Encyclopedia of Political Violence, 18651986.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988.
McConnell, Brian. The History of Assassination. Torrance, CA: Aurora, 1970.
McGovern, Glenn. Targeted Violence: A Statistical and Tactical Analysis of Assassinations,
Contract Killings, and Kidnappings. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2010.
McKinley, James. Assassination in America. New York: HarperCollins, 1977.
Miller, Tom. The Assassination Please Almanac. Washington, DC: Regnery, 1977.
Oliver, Willard, and Nancy Marion. Killing the President: Assassinations, Attempts, and
Rumored Attempts on U.S. Commanders-in-Chief. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010.
Porter, Lindsay. Assassination: A History of Political Murder. New York: Overlook Press,
2010.
Sanello, Frank. To Kill a King: A History of Royal Murders and Assassinations from Ancient
Egypt to the Present. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2011.
Scott, Peter, Paul Hoch, and Russell Stetler, eds. The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond.
Sifakis, Carl. Encyclopedia of Assassinations. New York: Facts on File, 2001.
Spignesi, Stephen. In the Crosshairs: Famous Assassinations & Attempts from Julius Caesar
to John Lennon. Darby, PA: Diane Publishing, 2003.
Urwin, John. The Sixteen: The Sensational Story of Britains Top Secret Assassination Squad.
London: John Blake, 2004.
Index
Note: Page numbers in boldface reflect main entries in the book.

Abancay, Battle of, 430
Abdallah Abdermane, Ahmen, 12
Abdel-Rahman, Omar, 252, 499, 501
Abdollahi, Fattah, 90
Abu Bakr, 586
Acciarito, Pietro, 588
Achillas, 431
Acosta, Carlos, 249
Action Group (AG; Nigeria),
232233
Adamson, John Harvey, 53
Adelphon, Kuklos, 277
Adolph, Shawn Robert, 376
Adwa, Battle of, 588
Adwan, Kamal, 387
Aemilianus, 67
African National Congress (ANC), 208,
400, 520521, 603
African Party for the Independence of
Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC),
607609
Agirre, Julen, 7778
Aguigui, Isaac, 379
Aguiyi-Ironsi, Johnson Thomas Umunnakwe, 23, 30, 32
Ahmad, Khondaker Mostaq, 14
Ahmad, Tajuddin, 14
Ahmed, A.K.M. Mohiuddin, 15
Ahmed, Mohiuddin, 342
Ain Jalut, Battle of, 445
Aizawa Saburo, 557
Akinsehinwa, Akintunde, 331
Akintola, Ladoke, 30
Alaei, Ahmad Mir, 90
Alamut (Bartol), 24
al-Banna, Sheikh Hasan Ahmed Abdel

Rahman Muhammed, 35
Albert I of Habsburg, 67, 6 (portrait),
9, 675
al-Din Shah Qajar, Nasser, 79, 8
(photo)
Alexander I of Serbia, 910, 159
Alexander I of Yugoslavia, 1012, 11
(photo)
Alexander II of Russia, 1214, 12
(photo), 103, 325, 369, 423, 688,
690
Alexander III (Pope), 36, 37
Alexander III of Russia, 13, 51, 370,
688, 690
Alexander Severus, 67
Alexander the Great, 423 424, 433,
517519
Alexander VI (Pope), 55
Alexius II, 67
Alfonso XIII (Spanish King), 72
lgars, Battle of, 93
Algerian Peoples Party (APP), 58
Algerian War of Independence, 58
Algranati, Rita, 338
Ali, Muhammad Mansur, 1415
Alien Tort Claims Act, 485
Alizadeh, Ghazaleh, 91
All the Kings Men (film), 409
Allende, Salvador, 288289,
515516
Almagro, Diego de, II, 427 430
al-Masri, Saeed, 45
al-Mulk, Nizam, 2324
Alnwick, Battle of, 635
838
INDEX
al-Qaeda terrorist group, 46 47, 62, 98,

304, 378, 441, 504, 645646
Alumni, Conrad, 337
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),
287, 473
American Colonization Society (ACS),
116 (sidebar), 567
American Independent Party (AIP),
623624
American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), 506507
Amin, Hafizullah, 1517, 106, 119,
558559
Amin, Idi, 16, 256, 305306, 449
Amir, Yigal, 447
Amiztab, Ali, 88
Amnesty International, 401
anarchism, 134, 325 (sidebar), 345, 651
Anastasia (film), 459
Anckarstrm, Jacob Johan, 196
Andone, Radu, 69
Andriamihaja, 452
Angelina, Irene, 420
Angiolillo, Michele, 73
Anglo-Iraqi Treaty (1948), 147
Anglo-Persian War (1857), 8
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (newspaper), 634
Anouilh, Jean, 38
Antequera, Jose, 402
anti-Semitism, 13, 131, 142, 149, 192,
216, 223, 225, 250251, 418 419,
461, 479
Antonescu, Ion, 70
Apartheids Prime Evil, 521 (sidebar)
Apocalypse Now (film), 427
Aqa, Ahad, 89
Aquino, Benigno Simeon, Jr., 1719
Arab Resistance Movement, 504
Arab Socialist Baath Party, 148
Arafat, Yasser, 449, 502
Araujo, Manuel Enrique, 2021
Arbarios, 534
Arcadia (Lane), 493
Archer, Jeffrey, 86
Ardalan, Homayoun, 90
Argaa Ferraro, Luis Mara del Corazon

de Jess Dionisio, 2122
Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, 78
Argentine Regional Workers Federation
(FORA), 149
Aristotle, 424, 641
Armenian Genocide, 269270
Armenian Revolutionary Federation
(ARF), 269270, 513
Armistice of Mudros (1918), 201202
Army in Defense of the National Sovereignty of Nicaragua, 508509
Army of God (AOG), 194195 (sidebar)
Arnold, Samuel, 292
Arredondo, Avelino, 231
Artabanus, 641
Artaxerxes, 642
Arusha Accords, 592
Arutyunian, Vladimir, 62
Aspamitres, 641
Assassins Cult, 2325
Aster (Chrysanthemum) Revolution,
562
Atahualpa, 429 430
Athemius, 67
Athens News (newspaper), 625
Athulathmudali, Lalith, 435 436
Atthoumani, Said, 12
Atzerodt, George, 291293
Audisio, Walter, 344
Aurelian, 67
Auschwitz extermination camp, 224
Awami League (East Pakistan), 14, 15,
454 455
Azadifar, Bahram, 90
Azikiwe, Benjamin Nnamdi, 31
Aziz Khan, Sirdar Mohammed, 353354
Azizi, Taher, 91
Baader, Andreas, 59
BaaderMeinhof Group, 59
Baath Party, 148
Bbism religion, 8
Badr, Battle of, 586
Baghdad Pact (1955), 147
INDEX
Bagheri, Behrouz, 88
Bah faith, 8
Bahonar, Mohammad-Javad, 2728
Baibars, 444 445
BAK International, 395
Bakhtiar, Shapour, 89
Balbinus, 2830, 29 (portrait), 67
Balboa, Vasco Nez de, 428
Balewa, Abubakar Tafawa, 3, 3032, 31
(photo)
Balkan Wars (19121913), 10
Ballivin, Jos, 39
Balouch Khan, Hadj, 89
Balzerani, Barbara, 338
Bandaranaike, Solomon West Ridgeway
Dias, 3234, 33 (photo)
Bandi, Bernardo, 326
Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP),
453, 456
Bantu Authorities Act, 602
Bantu Building Workers Act, 602
Bao Dai, 362364
Baptist World Alliance, 567
Barazandeh, Hossein, 90
Barbie, Klaus, 229
Barrera, Ernesto, 485
Barrientos Ortuo, Ren, 188
Barrire, Pierrfe, 220
Bartlett, Asa, 278279
Bartol, Vladimir, 24
Bartolotta, Salvatore, 94
Bastien-Thiry, Jean-Marie, 174175
Batalln Vasco Espaol (Basque Spanish
Battalion) terrorist group, 40 41
Batista, Fulgencio, 578
Bautista Gill Garca del Barrio, Juan,
3435
Bautista Sacasa, Juan, 508510, 539
Bava-Beccaris massacre, 588
Bavaud, Maurice, 227
Bay of Pigs invasion (Cuba), 189, 261,
262, 366, 408
Bayahmadi, Ataollah, 88
BBC History magazine, 38
Bean, John William, 604
Beatles, 154, 286

Becerra, Busch, 615
Becker, Verena, 6061
Becket, Thomas, 3538, 36 (portrait)
Becket play (Anouilh), 38
Beckwith, Byron De La, 140, 142
Bedford, Thomas, 550551
Beg, Baba Ali, 351352
Begin, Menachem, 388, 449, 501
Belimace, Doru, 120
Bellingham, Henry, 415
Bellingham, John, 412
Bello, Ahmadu, 30, 31
Belvin, Tillman, 336
Belzec extermination camp, 224
Belzu Humerez, Manuel Isidoro, 3839
Bearan Ordeana, Jos Miguel, 40 41,
78
Bengliu, Ioan, 121
Bent, Charles, 42 43
Berezovsky, Boris, 296
Berg, Alab, 279
Berling, Peter, 24
Berlusconi, Silvio, 57
Bet-Zuri, Eliyahu, 190, 192
Bey, Ibrahim, 528
Bhatti, Shahbaz, 561
Bhutto, Benazir, 43 45, 44 (photo),
562
Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 43, 106, 454 455,
560
Biayenda, mile, 368
Bien Xuyen crime syndicate, 364
Biko, Steve, 603
bin Laden, Osama bin Mohammed bin
Awad, 45 47, 98, 252, 441, 502,
645646, 649
bin Laden, Shafig, 46 47
Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, 48 49
Bishop, Maurice Rupert, 4950, 81
Biwott, Nicholas, 393
Black Beret Cadre (BBC), 525526
The Black Hand (Serbian secret society),
10, 158 (sidebar), 159
Black Hand society (Serbia), 10
839
840
INDEX
Black Muslims, 312, 314, 479

Black Panther Party (BPP), 205, 207
(sidebar), 273, 284, 479, 525
Black September Organization (BSO),
386390
Black Sheep Plot, 571 (sidebar)
Blackburn, Robert, 155
Blanchard, Jerry M., 375
Blood River, Battle of, 524
Bobrikov, Nikolay Ivanovich, 5152
Bodjoll, Emmanuel, 384385
Boleslaus, 628, 629
Bolles, Don, 5254, 52 (photo)
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 412, 439, 453,
551
Boniface VIII (Pope), 7
Boock, Peter-Jrgen, 6061
Book of Mormon (Smith), 531, 551
Book of the Law of the Lord (Strang), 551
Booth, John Wilkes, 291296
Borgia, Giovanni, 5455
Borgia, Lucrezia, 55
The Borgias (Showtime series), 55
Boroumand, Abdolrahman, 89
Borsellino, Paolo, 5657, 56 (photo)
Boudiaf, Mohamed, 5759, 58 (photo)
Boumarafi, Lembarek, 58, 59
Boxer Rebellion, 588, 653
Bradley, William, 316
Brady, James, 465 466
Brandt, Karl, 618619
Breitenbuch, Eberhard von, 228
Bremer, Arthur Herman, 621, 624
Bresci, Gaetano, 588, 590
Bresler, Fenton, 287
Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, 372
Brezhnev, Leonid, 17, 558559
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC),
525526, 646
Britton, John, 195
Broken Sword (role-playing game), 25
Brooklyn, Earl, 336
Brusca, Giovanni, 57
BryanChamorro Treaty (1914), 509
Buback, Siegfried, 5961, 60 (photo)
Buddharakkitha. Mapitigama, 3334

Bulgarian Agrarian National Union
(BANU), 541542
Bulgarian Revolutionary Central
Committee (BRCC), 534
Bundy, Theodore, 469
Burnett, Michael, 379
Burrows, Erskine Durrant, 525526
Burundi Civil War, 360 (sidebar)
Burundi Workers Party (UBU), 358
Bush, George H. W., 46, 47, 62, 99
Bush, George Walker, 46 47, 6163,
99, 375377, 394, 442, 469, 538,
627
Butcher of Prague. See Heydrich, Reinhard Tristan Eugen
Butler, Norman 3X, 312, 317
Buzakha, Battle of, 586
Cceres Vasquez, Ramn Arturo, 220,
222
Caesar, Gaius Julius, 6567, 66 (portrait), 431, 433 434
The Caesars (TV series), 69
Cahill, Martin The General, 187
Caldwell Tribune (newspaper), 545
Calhoun, John C., 238
Caligula, 6769
Caligula (movie), 69
Caligula play (Camus), 69
Clinescu, Armand, 6970, 121
Camus, Albert, 69
Canalejas y Mndez, Jos, 71
Cnovas del Castillo, Antonio, 7273,
325
Capone (movie), 86
Caracalla, 67
Caranica, Ion, 120
Carbonria (Portuguese conspiratorial
revolutionary society), 7475
Carbonneau, Marc, 285
Carinus, 67
Carlist Wars, 438
Carlos I of Portugal, 7375, 74 (photo),
325
INDEX
Carnation Revolution (Portugal), 334, 607

Carranza de la Garza, Venustiano,
7576, 310, 382383, 611,
614616, 652654
Carrero Blanco, Luis, 40, 71, 7678, 77
(photo)
Carson, Christopher Kit, 42
Carter, Asa Earl, 622
Carter, Jimmy, 154, 294, 304, 449, 468,
492, 498, 501, 537, 581, 598, 624
Carthage, Battle of, 29
Casimirri, Alessio, 337
Cassar, Antonino, 57
Castillo Armas, Carlos, 7880, 79
(photo)
Castro, Raul, 189
Castro Ruz, Fidel Alejandro, 8082,
189, 262263, 268, 304305, 314,
512, 514, 559, 575, 578
Catalano, Agostino, 56
Catargiu, Barbu, 83, 121
Catherine the Great, 410 411, 415 417
Catholic League of France, 218220
Cedergren, Sigvard, 399
Celaya, Battle of, 382
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 46,
7981, 146, 189, 242, 259,
261262, 267269, 286290,
302305, 328, 338, 361368,
400, 406, 425 426, 472 475,
492 493, 515516, 537, 578,
625628, 721, 749, 783784,
789
Cermak, Anton Joseph, 8486, 84
(photo), 212, 301
Cesar, Thane Eugene, 267
Cha Jicheol, 403
Chaco War (La Guerra de la Sed) (The
War of the Thirst), 614615
Chadian Progressive Party (PPT), 570,
571
Chaeronea, Battle of, 424
Chagra, Jamiel Alexander, 637638
Chagra, Joe, 638
Chain Murders (Iran), 8791
Challe, Maurice, 173174

Chapman, David, 285, 287
Charles VII of Sweden, 9293, 553
Chartrand, Michel, 285
Chtel, Jean, 220
Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet
Socialist Republic (ASSR), 247248
Chechnya. See First Chechen War; Second Chechen War
Chelmno extermination camp, 224
Chen Chi-li, 298299
Chernozemski, Vlado, 10
Chiang Kai-shek, 652654
Chicago Tribune (newspaper), 583
The Children of the Grail (Berling), 24
Children under Apartheid (September),
520
Chillingworth, Curtis Eugene, 9394
Chinese-American Red Guard Party,
206
Chinnici, Rocco, 57, 9496, 95 (photo)
Chitunda, Jeremias Kalandula, 9697
Choices of the Heart (film), 486
Christian Democracy party (Italy),
336338
Chronicle of the Kings of England (William
of Malmesbury), 634
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints (Mormon, LDS Church),
531, 551
Churchill, Winston, 173, 191192, 310,
343, 583
CIA Executive Action, 304 (sidebar),
493
A Citizens Dissent (Lane), 493
Ciudad Jurez, Battle of, 611
Clark, Mark, 205
Claudius, 67
Clay, Henry, 116, 238
Clement VII (Pope), 326, 327 (sidebar)
Cleopatra, 422
Clinton, Bill, 63, 9799, 113, 304.
See also bin Laden, Osama bin
Mohammed bin Awad
Code Name Zorro (Lane), 493
841
842
INDEX
Coeur dAlene Dynamite Express, 547

(sidebar)
COINTELPRO (FBI), 206, 284
Collazo, Oscar, 581
Collins, Max Allan, 86
Collins, Michael, Jr., 99102
Columbus, Christopher, 430
Commodus, 67
Communist International (Comintern),
564
Communist Party of Sri Lanka, 33
Comoros Democratic Union (UDC), 1
Compaor, Blaise, 511513
Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention
and Control Act, 637
Conan the Barbarian, 24
Congo Crisis (19601966), 23, 31
Congolese Labour Party, 366, 368
Connally, John, 257260
Conseil National de la Rsistance (the
National Council of Resistance)
(France), 215
Constans I, 67
Constans II, 67
Constantinescu, Nicolae, 120
Constantinople Conference of
18761877, 543
Contreras, Manuel, 289
Controlled Substances Act, 637
Convention of Aguascalientes, 650
Conversations with Americans: Testimony
from 32 Vietnam Veterans (Lane),
493
Cooke, Judith, 143
Coptic Christians (Egypt), 5
Corbett, Boston, 293, 295
Corday, Charlotte, 317, 318
Corder, Frank Eugene, 98
Corupedium, Battle of, 517
Cosina, Walter, 56
Costello, Frank, 300
Council of Troubles, 631
Cowart, Daniel, 376377
Cox, Joseph Neville, 336
Crannon, Battle of, 518
Crimean War, 13, 103, 439, 606

Criminal Procedure Act, 520
Cristero War (Mexico), 381, 383
Croatian Peasant Party (CPP), 11
Crocus Field, Battle of, 424
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), 81, 189
Cubas Grau, Ral, 21
Cubela, Rolando, 8182
Cuffaro, Salvatore Tot, 57
Curry, Izola Ware, 271
Cuzco, Battle of, 430
Czolgosz, Leon, 323324
Daam, Treaty of (1913), 201
Daily Times (newspaper), 561
Danilo I, Prince of Montenegro,
103104
Daoud Khan, Mohammed, 16,
104106, 105 (photo), 558
Darius, 641
Darrow, Clarence, 546
DAubuisson, Roberto, 485
Davis, Leon, 316
Davis, Ossie, 315
The Day of the Jackal (Forsyth), 174175
(sidebar)
Dayan, Moshe, 387
de Kock, Eugene Alexander, 399 400,
521
De Niro, Robert, 468
The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs.
Starr (Gormley), 98
DeFreeze, David, 155156
Dehkordi, Nouri, 90
Delgado Chalbaud Gmez, Carlos,
106107
Deligiannis, Theodoros, 108109
Demetrius and the Gladiators (movie), 69
Democratic National Convention, 375,
408, 581, 622624
Democratic United National Front
(DUNF), 436
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
(The Man without Qualities)
(Arnheim), 460
INDEX
Derby-Lewis, Clive, 208209

Des Moines Register (newspaper), 545
Despard, Edward, 414
Despoilers of the Golden Empire (film),
430
Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 109110
Devi, Phoolan, 111113, 111
(photo)
Di Maggio, Baldassare, 57
Diadumenian, 67
Diary of a Kidnapped Colombian
Governor (Gaviria), 176177
Diawara, Ange, 368
Daz, Juan Toms, 576
Daz Recinos, Adolfo, 508509
Didius Julianus, 67
Different View (magazine), 486
Dimka, Buka Suka, 331
Dimtolaum, Lt., 569
indi, Zoran, 113114
Dingane, 522
Dingiswayo, 522523
Dinulescu, Iosif, 121
Dipendra (Nepalese Prince), 48 49
Direccin de Inteligencia Nacional
(DINA) (National Intelligence
DIrectorate; Chile), 289290, 290
(sidebar)
Djohar, Said, 2
Doe, Samuel Kanyon, 115116,
567568. See also Tolbert, William
Richard, Jr.
Dollfuss., Engelbert, 117118, 117
(photo)
Dominican Civil War (1965), 578
Domitian, 67
Donald, Michael, 279
Doniphan, Alexander, 42
Douglas, William, 241
Downey, Laurence James, 243
Draga Main (Serbian Queen), 9
Dubs, Adolph Spike, 17, 118119
Duca, Ion Gheorghe, 69, 120121,
120 (photo)
Duckett, George, 525526
Dudayev, Dzhokhar Musayevich,

121123
Duhring, Louis, 318319, 319 (sidebar)
Duhrings Disease, 318319, 319
(sidebar)
Duke, David, 279
Dulles, Allen, 81, 259, 303
Dungeons & Dragons (role-playing
game), 25
Dunlap, Max, 53
Duran, Francisco Martin, 98
Dutch East India Company, 524
Dutch War of Independence, 632
Dwyer, Richard, 492
Earp, James, 125
Earp, Morgan Seth, 125127
Earp, Virgil, 125126
Earp, Wyatt, 125127
Ebrahimzadeh, Hassan, 91
Edict of Beaulieu (France), 218
Edict of Nantes (France), 220
Edict of Poitiers (France), 218
Edmund I (of England), 128129, 128
(portrait)
Edward the Martyr, 129130
Edwards, Joe, 239
EgyptIsrael Peace Treaty, 501
Ehrhardt, Hermann, 462
Eichmann, Adolf, 224, 229, 617
Eicke, Theodor, 481
Eighty Years War, 632
Eisenhower, Dwight, 303, 385, 475
Eisner, Kurt, 131132, 131 (photo)
El Combate (newspaper), 438
Elagabulus, 67
Elahi, Cyrus, 89
The Elder Scrolls (video game), 69
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Final Fantasty
(role-playing game), 25
Eleftherotypia (Freedom of the Press)
(newspaper), 625
Eliot, T. S., 38
Elisabeth of Austria, 132135, 133
(photo)
843
844
INDEX
Elser, Johann Georg, 227

Emannouilides, Emannouel, 281
Emelyanov, Ivan, 12
Emprise Corporation, 54
Engels, Friedrich, 511
Eric IX (of Sweden), 92, 553
Eric V (of Denmark), 135136
Eric XIV (of Sweden), 136137
Erim, Ismail Nihat, 138140, 138
(photo)
Erlander, Tage, 397398
Erzberger, Matthias, 460
Escobar, Pablo, 401 402
Esfandiari, Fereshteh, 90
Espaa trgica (Spanish Tragedy)
(Galds), 440
Espinoza Bravo, Pedro, 289
Espionage Act of 1917, 547
Essawy, Mustafa, 309310
ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Basque
Homeland and Freedom), 4041,
7677
Evers, Medgar Wiley, 140142, 279. See
also Ku Klux Klan
Evil Star (Horowitz), 430
Ewart-Biggs, Christopher Thomas,
142144
Executive Action (CIA), 304 (sidebar),
493
Executive Action (Lane), 493
extermination camps (World War II),
224
Fadaiyan-e Islam (Crusaders of Islam),
464
Faisal bin Abdul-Aziz Saud, 145146
Faisal II of Iraq, 146148, 147 (photo)
Falcn, Ramn Lorenzo, 148150
Falcone, Giovanni, 56, 57
The Fall of the Romanovs and Rasputin,
the Black Monk (film), 459
The Family (Puzo), 55
Faranda, Adriana, 337
FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia), 176177, 401 402
Frlev, Battle of, 210

Farrakhan, Louis, 315316
Farrokhzad, Fereydoun, 90
fascism, 348 (sidebar)
Fatima Bint Muhammad (Salim), 505
FBI Counterintelligence programs
(COINTELPRO), 206, 284
FBI War on the Black Panther Party
(BPP), 207 (sidebar)
February Incident (1936), 557
February Manifesto (Finland), 51
February Revolution (1917; Russia),
270, 458
Federal Meat Inspection Act and the
Pure Food and Drug Act, 488
Federal Security Service (FSB) (Russia),
297, 320321, 503504
Federazione Anarchica Italiana, 325
Feodorovna, Alexandra, 370, 457 458
Feodorovna, Maria, 411
Ferdinand, Franz, 264, 563
Fernndez y Krohn, Juan Mara, 242
Ferreira do Amaral, Joao Maria, 150151
Ferrell, Arch, 408
Ferrer i Gurdia. Francesc, 71
Fiery Cross (newsletter), 623
Filipe, Luis, 73
Finnish Civil War of 1918, 475
Firouzi, Shahpour, 89
First Chechen War, 122, 249, 321,
503
First Gulf War, 505
First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance
Groups (GRAPO) (Spain), 41
The First Templar (role-playing game),
25
1st United States Volunteer Cavalry
(Rough Riders), 488
Fischer, Hermann, 460, 462
Florianus, 67
Folkerts, Knut, 60
Follet, Ken, 38
Foote, Alexander, 227
Ford, Gerald Rudolph, Jr., 152154,
152 (photo), 259, 260, 304
INDEX
Ford, Thomas, 532

Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 278
Forsyth, Frederick, 174175
Des Forverts (The Forward) (newspaper), 574
Foster, Jodie, 467
Foster, Marcus Albert, 155156
Four Nights in Knaresborough (Webb), 38
Francis, John, 604
Frankfurter, David, 226
Franklin, Joseph Paul, 480
Franz Ferdinand, 156159, 157
(photo), 263
Free Patriotic Movement (Lebanon), 331
Freedom and Justice Party (Egypt), 5
Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances
Act (1994; U.S.), 195
Freedom of Information Act (U.S.), 287
FRELIMO (Liberation Front of Mozambique), 333334
French Fdration Anarchiste, 325
French Wars of Religion, 219220, 250
Fromme, Lynette Squeaky, 152153
Front de libration du Qubec (FLQ:
Liberation Front of Quebec),
282284, 284 (sidebar)
Front for Democracy in Burundi
(FRODEBU), 358359
Fuller, Albert, 408
Gacha, Rodrguez, 401
Gaddafi, Muammar, 161163, 162
(photo), 204, 566, 570571
Gagnon, Charles, 285
Galba, 67
Gallic Wars (5852 BCE), 66
Gallienus, 67
Gallinari, Prospero, 337
Gallus, 67
Galman, Rolando, 18
Gamarra, Agustn, 39
Gandhi, Indira Priyadarshini, 164165
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand,
165167, 166 (photo), 176, 272
Gandhi, Rajiv Ratna, 167169, 400
Garalov, Zakir, 494

Garca, Rutilio Grande, 484
Garca y Moreno y Morn de Buitrn,
Gabriel Gregorio Fernando Jos
Mara, 169171
Garfield, James Abram, 171173, 172
(photo)
Garrett, Silas, III, 408
Gartrell, Tharin, 376
Garun (Spring) (periodical), 513
Garvey, Marcus, 313
Gashimov, Anar, 494
Gat, Julien, 303
Gaulle, Charles Andr Joseph Marie de,
40, 143, 173175, 216
Gaviria Correa, Guillermo, 176177
Gavras, Constantinos, 282 (sidebar)
Geegan Khan, Emperor Yingzong of
Yuan, 177178
Geisel, Raymond H., 375376
Gelfman, Gesia, 13
General Electric Theater (TV show), 466
Geneva Accords, 425
Genghis Khan, 352, 445
Genoa Conference, 357
George I of Greece, 179180, 179
(photo), 325
Grard, Balthasar, 630
Gersdorff, Rudolf von, 228
Gerstenmaier, Eugen, 227
Gestapo (secret state police of Germany), 41, 6970, 222, 223,
226227, 481, 617618
Geta, 67
Ghaderi, Abdollah, 88
Ghaderi, Mohammad, 90
Ghassemlou, Abdulrahman, 88
Ghent, Treaty of, 238
Ghorbani, Ali-Akbar, 90
Gibbons, Francisco, 473
Gibson, Violet, 345346
Gilligan, John, 186188
Glasnost (openness), 514, 656
Glorious Revolution (1688), 72, 440
Gnassingb, tienne Eyadma, 384, 386
845
846
INDEX
Gbel, Wolfgang, 59
Godoi, Don Juan Silvano, 35
Godse, Nathuram Vinayak, 165, 167
Goebbels, Joseph, 216, 347, 618
Goebel, William Justus, 181182
Golden Voice of Africa. See Balewa,
Abubakar Tafawa
Golizadeh, Abbas, 90
Gllheim, Battle of, 7
Gonzlez, Pablo, 650
Gonzlez Dubn, Eduardo Epaminondas, 183184
Gonzlez Martin, Yolanda, 40 41
Good Friday Agreement (Ireland; 1988),
344
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 513, 656
Gore, Al, 63
Gring, Hermann, 223, 227228, 462
Gormley, Ken, 98
Gorriarn Merlo, Enrique, 535, 538
Gothic 3 (role-playing game), 25
Gotzamanis, Sypryo, 281
Goulart, Joo Belchior Marques,
184186
Gowon, Yakuba Jack Dan-Yumma,
233, 331332
Gqokli Hill, Battle of, 523
Graciano, Fabian, 20
Grahovac, Battle of, 103
GRAPO (First of October Anti-Fascist
Resistance Groups) (Spain), 41
Gratians, 67
Graves, Robert, 69
The Great Star of the East. See Amin,
Hafizullah
Greco, Giuseppe Pino, 9596
Greco-Turkish War (1897), 179, 529
Greek Civil War (19461949), 281
Greek War of Independence, 417
The Green Book (Gaddafi), 162
Grey Wolves organization, 242
Griffin, Michael Frederick, 193195
Group Areas Act, 602
Grynszpan, Herschel Feibel, 616618
Guajardo, Jess Maria, 649
Guerin, Veronica, 186188, 187

(photo)
Guevara, Ernesto Che, 81, 188190,
245, 511512, 628
Guinness, Walter Edward, 190192,
191 (photo)
Guiteau, Charles Julius, 171, 172
Gulnabad, Battle of, 352
The Gun of Zangara (movie), 86
Gunn, David, 193195, 193 (photo)
Gunnarsson, Victor, 399
Gustav III of Sweden, 195197
Gustloff, Wilhelm, 226
Guyana: Crime of the Century (film), 493
Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones
(film), 493
Guzeva, Khionia, 458
Ha Minh Tri, 364
Habyarimana, Juvnal, 199201, 200
(photo), 591593
Hacienda Maria Massacre, 576
Haddad, Effat, 90
Hadzhimuradov, Viskhan, 320
Haeri, Javad, 88
Hague Peace Conference (1899), 370
Haider, A.T.M., 341
Hajizadeh, Hamid, 91
Hakim, Eliyahu, 190, 192
Halem, Nikolaus von, 228
Halloween Massacre (Angola), 9697
Hamidaddin, Yahya Muhammad,
201202
Hamilton, James, 548, 550
Hamilton, William, 604605
Hammarskjld, Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl,
202204, 203 (photo), 602. See
also Lumumba, Patrice mery
Hampton, Fred, 205207, 205 (photo)
Hamshari, Mahmoud, 387
Hani, Martin Thembisile Chris,
208209
Hanrahan, Edward, 205, 206207
Haq, Abdul, 441 442
Harald IV of Norway, 209210
INDEX
Harrelson, Charles Voyde, 638

Harrelson, Woody, 638
Harris, Emily Yolanda, 156
Harrison, Carter Henry, Sr., 211212
Harrison, George, 286
Hassan Mansouri, Mohammad, 88
Hassanpour Sharifzadeh, Alireza, 88
Have No Fear: The Life of Pope John
Paul II (TV movie), 486
Hayer, Talmadge (aka Thomas Hagan),
312, 316, 317
Haymarket Riot, 211, 212 (sidebar)
Hazara, Abdul Khaliq, 354
Hearst, Patricia, 155
Heiligerlee, Battle of, 632
Heinz, F. W., 227
Hellboy (film), 459
Hennessy, David C., Jr., 213215
Henriksson, Magnus, 552553
Henriot, Philippe, 215216
Henry I of France, 218
Henry II of England, 3637
Henry III of France, 217218, 217
(portrait), 219, 633
Henry IV of France, 218, 219220
Henry the Young (King of England),
35, 37
Hernandez, Hank, 267
Herold, David, 292293
Herrhausen, Alfred, 61
Herri Batasuna (Unity of the People)
organization (Spain), 41
Heureaux Lebert, Ulises, 220222
Heydrich, Reinhard Tristan Eugen,
222225, 223 (photo), 481
Hill, A. W., 24
Hill, Paul Jennings, 195
Himmler, Heinrich, 223, 226, 228, 481
Hinckley, John Warnock, Jr., 465 469,
624
Hirsch, Helmut, 226227
Hispanic Brown Berets, 206
Hispano-Moroccan War, 439
History Bites (To Boldly Go) (TV show),
430
History of the Empire from the Death of

Marcus (Herodian), 28
History of the Persians (Ctesias), 534
History of the Russian Revolution
(Trotsky), 575
Hitler, Adolf, 4, 59, 69, 118,
132, 223224, 225229,
226 (photo), 301, 346347,
376, 462, 475, 479, 481 483,
542, 615, 618
Ho Chi Minh, 363364
Holliday, John Doc, 125127
Holocaust (World War II), 70
Holzapfel, Floyd Lucky, 9394
Hoover, J. Edgar, 81, 207, 258259,
313
Horn, Claes Fredrik, 196
Hossein Naghdi, Mohammad, 90
Hosseinpour, Khaled, 89
House Committee on Un-American
Activities (HUAC), 575
House of Karaorevi (Serbian Ruling
House), 10
House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), 275276
Household, Geoffrey, 225
How to Get Out or Stay Out of the Insane
Asylum (Rockwell), 478
Hryniewiecki, Ignacy, 12
Hubertusburg, Treaty of, 416
Huda, Mohammad Bazlul, 15
Huda, Najmul, 341
Hudaybiyyah, Treaty of, 586
Huerta, Victoriano, 7576, 307309,
308309, 381382,
381383, 611, 650
Hufvudstadsbladet (newspaper), 475
HughesRyan Act, 492
Hunanyan, Nairi, 513514
Hunayn, Battle of, 586
Hunter (Pierce), 480
Hurst, Randolph, 153154
Hussain Ershad, Muhammad, 456
Hussein (Jordanian King),
147
847
848
INDEX
Hussein, Saddam, 27, 28, 63, 149, 321,

349, 505
Hydaspes, Battle of, 518
I, Claudius novel (Graves), 69
I Killed Rasputin (film), 459
Iamandi, Victor, 121
Ibn al-Khashshb, Abul-Fadl, 24
Idiarte Borda, Juan Bautista, 231232
Ige, James Ajibola Idowu, 232233
Immorality Amendment Act, 602
Imperial Military Academy, 557
Imperium Nerone (TV series), 69
Indemnity Act, 455
Independence Front (FI), 566
Indian Independence Act, 454
Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), 436
Inejiro Asanuma, 234235
Infamous Weapons, 263 (sidebar)
Infante, William, 401
Infinity (role-playing game), 25
Ingavi, Battle of, 39
Innocent III (Pope), 422
Insalaco, Giuseppe, 57
Insanity Defense Reform Act (1984),
468
Intelligence Identities Protection Act,
626627
Internal Macedonian Revolutionary
Organization (IMRO), 11, 541542
International Committee of the Red
Cross (ICRC), 72, 108, 370
International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda (UNICTR), 591, 593
International Monetary Fund (IMF),
512
Iranian Revolutionary Guard, 89
Irish National Liberation Army (INLA),
321323
Irish Republican Army, 100, 101 (sidebar), 143
Irish War of Independence, 101
Iron Guard (Romanian political movement), 70, 120121
Irrintzi terrorist group (Spain), 41
Irurzun, Hugo, 535

Iskra (The Spark) (newspaper), 573
Islam, Syed Nazrul, 14
Islamic International Brigade, 321, 503
Islamic Jihad (Egypt), 499
Islamic Movement of Turkestan (IMT),
647
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU),
645646
Islamic Republican Party (IRP), 27
Islamic Revolution (19781979), 27,
504
Islamic Salvation Front (ISF), 5859
Israel Defense Forces (IDF), 387, 448
Ita Ybat, Battle of, 34
Italian War (14991504), 55
Ivan the Terrible, 400
Jack the Ripper, 38, 606
Jackson, Andrew, 237238
Jackson, Wharlest, Sr., 239
Jail Killing Day (Nov. 3; Bangladesh), 15
Jalula, Battle of, 586
James I, King of Scots, 240241, 240
(portrait)
James II, King of Scots, 241
Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (Peoples
Liberation Front), 436
January 6th Dictatorship. See Alexander
I of Yugoslavia
January Events (Lithuania), 320
January Uprising (18631864), 13
Jatiyo Samajtantrik Dal (National Socialist Party), 455
Javadi, Bahman, 88
Jayamanna, Janaka Priyanka, 437
Jayawardena, H. P., 34
Jedvardsson, Erik, 552
Jemmingen, Battle of, 632
Jewish Defense League (JDL), 250, 251
(sidebar)
Jim Crow era (U.S.), 141, 155, 293,
335
John Birch Society (JBS), 467, 623
John Paul II, 241243, 486
INDEX
Johnson, Lyndon, 82, 141, 257258,

262, 265, 272, 275, 467, 623, 626
Johnson, Nathan, 376
Johnson, Thomas 15X, 312
Jones, James, 492
Jonestown Massacre, 491
Judge Dredd (comic strip), 69
Julius Nepos, 67
Justinian II, 67
Kabarebe, James, 247
Kabila, Laurent-Dsir, 245247. See
also Lumumba, Patrice mery
Kadyrov, Akhmad Abdulkhamidovich,
122123, 247249, 248 (photo),
502
Kahane, Meir, 46, 249252, 250
(photo)
Kalantari, Firouzeh, 91
Kamangar, Sadiq, 89
kaMpande, Cetshwayo, 524, 526
Kanak and Socialist National Liberation
Front (FLNKS), 564, 566
Kanak Liberation Party, 565
Kane and Abel novel (Archer), 86
Kapend, Eddy, 245
Kapodistrias, Ioannis Antonios,
252253
Kapuuo, Clemens, 254255
Karakozov, Dmitry, 13
Karnal, Battle of, 353
Karol, una papa rimastouomo (film),
486
Karume, Sheikh Abeid Amani, 255256
kaSenzangakhona, Dingane, 524
Kasereka, Rashidi, 245
Kashefpour, Ali, 89
Kazemi, Abdolaziz, 91
Kazemi, Gholam-Hossein, 90
Kelly, Terence Edward, 378
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 82, 153,
257263, 257 (photo), 275276,
366, 380, 385, 492 493, 638639
Kennedy, Robert Francis, 81, 264269,
325
Keraunos, Ptolemy, 517519

Kermani, Mirza Reza, 89
Kern, Erwin, 460
Keshavarz, Faramarz, 91
Keshavarz, Gholam, 88
Khalq (Masses) (newspaper), 558
Khalturin, Stepan, 13
Khan, Ayub, 15
Khan, Hulagu, 24
Khan, Shahriar Rashid, 15
Khasavyurt Accord (1996), 122, 248,
321, 503
Khlysty (flagellants), 457 458
Khomeini, Ahmad, 90
Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 27, 90,
465
Khotyn, Battle of, 392
Khoyski Isgender oglu, Fatali Khan,
269271
Khyber, Mir Akbar, 558
Kibalchich, Nikolai, 13
Kikadidi, Barthlemy, 367368
Kiley, Richard, 409
Kim Jaegyu, 403, 406
Kimathi, Dedan, 396
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 176, 207, 261,
263, 271277, 279, 314, 315, 478,
493
Kissinger, Henry, 288, 498, 516
Klar, Christian, 6061
Kleist-Schmenzins, Eward-Heinrich
von, 228
Knatchbull, Doreen, 342
Knights of the Temple (role-playing
game), 25
Knute Rockne, All American (film), 466
Kmoto Daisaku, 652
Korean Central Intelligence Agency
(KCIA), 403 405
Korean Peoples Army (KPA), 405
Korean War, 18, 52, 203, 239, 406,
477, 583
Kovcs, Gyula, 563
Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 140141, 194,
239, 261, 271, 275, 277279,
849
850
INDEX
293294, 313, 316, 336, 408, 467,

479, 582, 599, 622623
Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran
(KDPI), 88
Kvlividze, Zurab, 62
La Guardia, FIorello, 300
Ladislaus IV (Hungarian King), 6
Lambrakis, Grigoris, 281282
LAmour, Louis, 24
Lane, Mark, 493 (sidebar)
Language Manifesto (Finland), 51
Lansky, Meyer, 300, 301
Lanz, Karl Hubert, 228
Laporte, Pierre, 282285, 283 (photo)
Lara, Jacobito, 220
Larue-Langlois, Jacques, 285
Law 53 of 1948 (Gag Law), 581
Lawrence, Richard, 237
League of Free Social Constructors
(Korea), 325
Lechfeld, Battle of, 629
Lee, John Doyle, 533
Legend of the Burning Sands (role-playing
game), 25
Lkai, Jnos, 563
Lemieux, Robert, 285
Lena, Battle of, 93
Lenin, Vladimir, 372, 511, 573575
Lennon, John Winston, 285287, 286
(photo)
Leo V, 67
Leontios, 67
Letelier Del Solar, Marcos Orlando,
288291
Lex Gabinia, 434 (sidebar)
Libby, Lewis, 627
Liberal Regenerator Party (Portugal), 74
Liberation Front of Mozambique
(FRELIMO), 333
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
(LTTE), 168, 435 437
Lima, Salvo, 57
Lincoln, Abraham, 291295
Little, Malcolm. See Malcolm X
Little, Russell, 155156

Litvinenko, Alexander Valterovich,
295298, 514
Liu, Henry, 298299
Livatino, Rosario, 57
Lobos al Anochecer (Wolves at Dusk)
(Guardia), 474
Lohamei Herut Israel (Fighters for the
Freedom of Israel), 580
Loi, Emanuela, 56
Lojacono, Alvaro, 337
London Times (newspaper), 606
Long, Huey Pierce, Jr., 299301, 300
(photo)
Longtan, Battle of, 654
Lopetegui Carrasco, Juan, 40
Lortie, Bernard, 285
Louis VII (of England), 36
Louis VII (of France), 36
Lucania, Salvatore, 474
Lucetti, Gino, 346
Lucka, Battle of, 7
Lugovoi, Andrei, 296
Lumumba, Patrice mery, 204, 245,
302305
Luna, Octavio Ortiz, 485
Luwum, Janani Jakaliya, 16, 16 (photo),
305306 (photo)
Lynch, Cynthia, 279
MacArthur, Douglas, 478, 583
MacLaine, Shirley, 399
MacLean, Roderick, 605
Macoveanu, Aristide, 121
Macrinus, 67
Madame Nhu, 365 (sidebar)
Madani, Ahmad, 88
Madero Gonzlez, Francisco Ignacio,
307309
Mafia crime organization, 5657, 81,
9495, 213215, 262263, 268,
339
Magnus II (of Sweden), 92
Maher Pasha, Ahmed, 309310
Manassara, Ibrahim Bar, 311312
INDEX
Majdanek extermination camp, 224

Mala, Fadal, 88
Malcolm X, 312317, 312 (photo), 525
Malloum, Flix, 571572
Manglares, Battle of, 429
Manhattan Project, 583
Manson, Charles, 152, 154, 469
Manson Family, 154 (sidebar)
Mansour Moqadam, Kamran, 89
Manzanas Gonzlez, Melitn, 41
Manzoor, Abul, 456
Marambio, Roberto Viaux, 515
Marat, Jean-Paul, 317320, 318 (portrait)
Maraycalla, Battle of, 430
Marcos, Ferdinand, 1718
Marcos, Imelda, 19
Marian Civil War, 549
Marinebrigade Ehrhardt (Free Corps),
460
Marinescu, Gabriel, 121
Marx, Karl, 511
Main, Nikodije, 910
Main, Nikola, 10
Maskhadov, Aslan Aliyevich, 248249,
320321, 503
Mason-MacFarlane, Noel, 227
Massamba-Dbat, Alphonse, 367
Matiauda, Alfredo Stroessner, 22
Mau Mau Rebellion, 396 (sidebar)
Maurice I, 67
Mavromichalis, Konstantinos,
252, 253
Maxha Hienghen (Raise Your Head), 565
Maximinus Thrax (Maximus I), 2829,
67
Maxwell, Paul, 342
May Laws (1882; Russia), 13
May Overthrow (of Albert I), 9
Mazlouman, Reza, 91
McCall, William, 336
McCarthy, Joseph, 478, 598
McCartney, Paul, 286
McGlinchey, Dominic, 321323
McGovern, George, 624
McKinley, William, Jr., 72, 182, 316,

323326, 324 (photo), 487 488,
490, 545, 590
McMahon, Thomas, 344
McParland, James, 546
McVeigh, Timothy, 279, 480
McVey, Joseph Sean, 378
Medelln Cartel, 401 402,
402 (sidebar)
Medici, Giuliano de, 326328
Medici, Lorenzo de, 327
Medieval II: Total War (role-playing
game), 25
Meehan, Brian, 186
Mein Kampf (Hitler), 478
Meinhof, Ulrike, 59
Meir, Golda, 386388, 390, 449
Melndez, Carlos, 21
Melgar Marquez, Jos, 506
Mengele, Josef (Angel of Death), 22,
229
Menostanes, 534
Mercader del Ro, Jaime Ramn, 572,
575
Metcalfe, George, 239
Mexican Anarchist Federation, 325
Mexican Revolution, 611
Mhlangana, 522
Mhlatuze River, Battle of, 523
MI5 (Great Britains Security Service),
163, 204
Michael III, 67
Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar
(Verne), 14
Mikhaylov, Timofey, 13
Milan I (of Serbia), 9
Milk, Harvey, 339
Millen, Francis, 605606
Miller, Brian Dean, 378
Milonia Caesonia, 68
Miloevic, Slobodan, 113114
Missaqi, Shahrokh, 87
Mississippi Freedom Summer, 141
(sidebar)
Mithridates VI of Pontus, 433 434
851
852
INDEX
Mitrione, Daniel Anthony, 267,

328330
Mlangeni, Catherine, 521
Moawad, Ren, 330331
Mobinzadeh, Jalal, 90
Modern Neo-Nazi groups, 480
(sidebar)
Moffitt, Ronni, 288
Mohammad, Vali, 88
Mohammadi, Ali Akbhar, 88
Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh, 242
Mohammed, Murtala Ramat, 331333,
332 (photo)
Mohnhaupt, Brigitte, 60
Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution
Organization (MIRO), 87, 90, 91
Mollahzadeh, Molavi Abdul-Malek, 91
Monavat, Mir, 87
Mondlane, Eduardo Chivambo,
333334
Monfared, Ahmadhamed, 88
Mongoose Gang (Grenada), 49
Monroe Doctrine, 489
Monseor, the Last Journey of scar
Romero (film), 486
Moody, Walter Leroy, Jr., 599600
Mookerheyde, Battle of, 632
Moore, Harry Tyson, 279, 335336.
See also Ku Klux Klan
Moradi, Aziz, 87
Moretti, Mario, 338
Mormon Wars, 533 (sidebar)
Moro, Aldo, 336339, 337 (photo)
Morrill Act of July 1862, 533
Morris, Frank, 239
Morsi Isa El-Ayyat, Mohamed, 5
Morucci, Valerio, 337338
Moruzov, Mihail, 121
Moscone, George Richard, 339341
Mosharraf, Khaled, 15, 341342, 457
The Motorcycle Diaries (Guevara), 189
Mount Chimborazo, Battle of, 430
Mountbatten, Louis Francis Albert
Victor Nicholas George,
342344
Mouvement National Congolais (MNC;

Congolese National Movement),
302303
Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario
(Revolutionary Nationalist Movement) (MNR), 615616
Mpolo, Maurice, 302
Mubarak, Hosni, 5
Mudd, Samuel, 292293, 294 (sidebar)
Muerte a Secuestradores (Death to Kidnappers), 402
Muhammad, Elijah, 313315, 479
mujahideen uprisings (Afghanistan),
1617, 46, 441
Muli, Vincenzo Li, 56
Mun Segwang, 405
Mnchener Post (secret handbook), 461
Munich (film), 390
Munich Olympics massacre, 388
Munich Post (newspaper), 482
Muradi, Abdul-Ali, 91
Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot), 38
Musharraf, Pervez, 44 45
Muslim Brotherhood, 4, 5, 310, 500
Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea, 11,
118, 344348, 345 (photo), 590,
614
Muttahida Qaumi Movement (Pakistan),
44
The Mysterious Cities of Gold (TV series),
430
Nabavi Tavakoli, Ali, 88
Nabavi Tavakoli, Noureddin, 88
Nder Shh Ahshr, 351353
Nadir Shah, Mohammed, 353355
Nahvand, Battle of, 586
Nahavandi, Pirouz, 585
Narodnaya Volya (Peoples Will),
Russian Revolutionary Group, 12
Naroui, Delaviz, 90
Naroui, Heybatollah, 90
Narutowicz, Gabriel, 355357
Nashe Slovo (Our Word) (newspaper),
574
INDEX
Nashville (film), 624

Nasi, Joseph, 192
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 5, 148, 500, 502
Nasser, Kamal, 387
Nation of Islam (NOI), religious sect,
207, 312317, 316 (sidebar)
National Assembly (Armenia),
513514
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),
140141, 206, 239, 279, 335, 598,
622
National Committee of Defense against
Communism (NCDAC) (Guatemala), 79
National Council of Nigeria and the
Cameroons (NCNC), 31
National Council of Resistance of Iran,
90
National Democratic Party (El Salvador),
21
National Guard (Nicaragua), 535536
National Liberation Front (NLF; Algeria), 58
National Liberation Front of Chad
(FROLINAT), 569570, 572
National Movement for the Cultural and
Social Revolution (MNRCS), 571
National Renaissance Front (Romania),
69
National Resistance Movement of Iran,
89
National Revolutionary Council (Russia), 367
National Socialist White Peoples Party
(NSWPP), 479 480
National States Rights Party (NSRP),
262, 275, 478
National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), 9697,
247
National Union of Ethical Citizens
(Paraguay), 22
National Vanguard (Italy), 78
Nauvoo Expositor (newspaper), 530
Nazi Party (Germany), 59, 70, 118, 132,

191, 216, 346
Ndadaye, Melchior, 357361
NdwandweZulu War, 523
Nemzeti Munkaprt (National Party of
Work), 562
Nepalese Congress Party, 48
Netanyahu, Benjamin, 450
New Democratic Party (NDP), 405
New Jewel (Marxist) Movement
(Grenada), 49
New Nation-Populist (Erim), 139
New Orleans, Battle of, 238
New York Times (newspaper), 73, 98,
148, 214, 222, 315, 409, 471, 479,
544, 627, 694696,
706708
News International (newspaper), 645
Newsweek (magazine), 472
Ngo Dinh Diem, 361366, 362 (photo).
See also Kennedy, John F.
Ngouabi, Marien, 366368
Nhu, Madame, 365 (sidebar)
Nicaragua Betrayed (Somoza), 537
Nicephoros II, 67
Nicholas and Alexandra (film), 459
Nicholas II, 51, 369373, 369
(photo), 457 458, 574. See also
Alexander II of Russia
Nicholas II (Russian Czar), 51
Nicolau de Mesquita, Vicente, 151
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 24
Niewiadomski, Eligiusz, 356357
Nigerian Civil War, 333 (sidebar)
Nikolaevich, Alexei, 457
Nile, Battle of, 66
Ni, Treaty of, 541542
Nitti, Frank The Enforcer, 8586
Nitti: The Enforcer (movie), 86
Nixon, Richard, 80, 152153, 159,
269, 275, 286288, 455, 467,
624, 626, 637
Nobel Peace Prize, 177, 333, 370, 450,
489 490, 501, 568
North, Oliver, 498
853
854
INDEX
North Atlantic Treaty Organization

(NATO), 113, 161, 443, 583
Northern Islander (newspaper), 550
Nosair, El Sayyid, 46, 252
Noumazalayewas, Ambroise, 367
Nov as (newspaper), 597
Novy Mir (New World) (newspaper),
574
Nowhere-Land (Hill), 24
Ntaryamira, Cyprien, 360
Ntuyahaga, Bernard, 591
Nzeogwu, Chukwuma Kaduna, 3
OAAU (Organization of Afro-American
Unity), 312, 314, 317
Obama, Barack Hussein, II, 5, 304,
375380
Obasanjo, Olusegun, 233
Obregn Salido, lvaro, 381383,
612613. See also Villa, Francisco
Pancho
OConnor, Arthur, 605
October Crisis (1970; Canada), 284
October Revolution (1917), 51
OFerrell, Robert Wayne, 598600
Ofumbi, Charles Oboth, 305
Okamoto, Vincent, 426
Okito, Joseph, 302
Okotie-Eboh, Festus, 30
OLaughlen, Michael, 292, 293
Old Testaments Book of Ezra (Ezra), 642
Oliveira, Juscelino Kubitschek de, 184
Ollantaytambo, Battle of, 430
Olympio, Sylvanus Epiphanio,
384386, 384 (photo)
On the Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche),
24
On the Waterfront (film), 409
Ono, Yoko, 285286
Ons, Emir, 444
Operation Ajax (Britain/USA), 464
Operation AM/BLOOD (CIA), 81
Operation Badr (Egypt), 499
Operation Barisal (Pakistan), 455
Operation Bayonet (Israel), 387
Operation Blue Star (India), 164

Operation Cactus (India), 168
Operation Chaos (CIA), 287
Operation Gladio (NATO), 242243,
338, 627
Operation Hummingbird (Germany),
482
Operation Lentil (Russia), 320
Operation Mongoose (CIA), 81
Operation Nemesis (Armenia), 269270
Operation Neptune Spear, 45
Operation Ogre (Spain), 40
Operation PBFORTUNE
(U.S.-Guatemala), 79
Operation PBHISTORY
(U.S.-Guatemala), 79
Operation Punishment (1941; Yugoslavia), 12
Operation Reptile (Nicaragua), 535
Operation Searchlight (Pakistan), 454
Operation Southern Watch (Iraq), 63
Operation Storm-333 (1979; Afghanistan), 1516
Operation Urgent Fury (Grenada), 50
Operation Wrath of God (Israel),
386390
Operation ZR/RIFLE (CIA), 81
Orchard, Harry, 544, 546
Organisation de larme secrte (OAS;
Secret Army Organization)
(France), 173175
Organization of African Unity (OAU),
31, 306, 332, 568
Organization of Afro-American Unity
(OAAU), 312, 314, 317
Orientacin (newspaper), 484
Orlov, Alexei Grigoryevich, 415 416
Ortega-Hernandez, Oscar Ramiro,
378379
Oryema, Erinayo Wilson, 305
Osborne, Milton, 426
Oslo Accords, 447, 449
Osman II, 391392
Oswald, Lee Harvey, 257259,
261262, 639
INDEX
Ouko, John Robert, 393396

Oveissi, Gholam-Ali, 87
Oviedo, Alfonso Navarro, 485
Oviedo Silva, Lino Csar, 22
Oxford, Edward, 604
Oyugi, Hezekiah, 393
Pact of Espino Negro, 509
Pact of Umar, 587
Pahlen, Peter Alekseyevich, 411
Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), 43 44,
560
Pakistans Movement for the Restoration
of Democracy (MRD), 560
Palacios, Rafael, 485
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO),
386, 447, 502
Palme, Mrten, 399
Palme, Sven Olof Joachim, 397 400,
398 (photo)
Pardo Leal, Jaime, 401 402
Park Chung-hee, 403 406, 403 (photo)
Parsley Massacre, 579 (sidebar)
Parti Congolais du Travail (Congolese
Party of Labour) (PCT), 367
Party of Socialist Revolution (Algeria),
58
Pasha, Djemal, 530
Pasha, Nazim, 529530
Passannante, Giovanni, 588
Pate, Robert Francis, Jr., 605
Patler, John, 477
Patria (film), 613
Patriotic Alliance for Change (Paraguay),
22
Patterson, Albert Leon, 406 409
Patton, George, 407, 612
Paul I of Russia, 409 412, 410 (portrait)
Paul VI (Pope), 336, 390, 501
Pausanias of Orestis, 422
Pavlovich, Dmitri, 456 457
Pazzi, Francesco de, 326
Pazzi, Jacopo de, 327
Peden, Anthony, 379
Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), 1617, 558

Peoples Movement for the Liberation of
Angola (MPLA), 9697
Peoples Mujahedin of Iran (MEK),
2728
Peoples Republic of the Congo (PRC),
367368
Peoples Revolutionary Government
(Grenada), 50
Peoples Temple (Guyana), 491 493
Perceval, Spencer, 412 415, 413
(portrait)
perestroika (restructuring), 513514,
656
Perez, Fermin, 20
Prez, Rigoberto Lpez, 538, 540
Pern, Juan, 150, 185186
Perovskaya, Sophia, 13
Peru-Bolivian Confederation, 39
Peter II Karaorevi, 1112
Peter III of Russia, 415 417. See also
Paul I of Russia
Peter the Great (Peter I), 411, 415 416
Petliura, Symon Vasylyovych,
418 420
Petronius Maximus, 67
Pettersson, Carl Gustaf Christer, 397
Pham Phu Quoc, 364
Pharnacyas, 534
Pharsalus, Battle of, 431
The Phenix City Story (film), 408 409,
409 (sidebar)
Philip II (of Spain), 630633
Philip of Swabia, 420 422, 421 (portrait)
Philip II of Macedon, 422 425, 423
(portrait), 518
Phillip the Arab, 67
Phocas, 67
Phoenix Program, 425 427
Pickett, Robert W., 61
The Pillars of the Earth (Follet), 38
Pinkerton National Detective Agency,
214, 545546
855
856
INDEX
Pinochet, Augusto, 50, 288290,

289290, 516
Pitt, William, 413
Pius IX (Pope), 170171, 294, 589
Pius XII (Pope), 363
Pizarro (Sheridan), 430
Pizarro Gonzlez, Francisco, 427 431,
428 (portrait)
Plan of Ayala, 649
Plan of Guadalupe, 650
Plan of St. Luis Potosi, 649
Plausible Denial (Lane), 493
Plessis-les-Tours, Treaty of, 633
Pogny, Jzsef, 563
Politkovskaya, Anna, 295
La Pologne et la Guerre (Poland and War)
relief group, 356
Pompey the Great, 66, 431 434. See
also Caesar, Gaius Julius
Poor Peoples March (Washington,
D.C.), 272
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), 387, 449
Population Registration Act, 602
Porsuki, Emir, 24
Portsmouth, Treaty of, 371
Potsdam Conference, 583
Powell, Colin, 647
Powell, Lewis, 291292, 293
Pratt, David, 602
Pravda (newspaper), 574
Premadasa, Ranasinghe, 435 437, 435
(photo)
Prendergast, Patrick, 211
Prevention of Illegal Squatting
Act, 602
Prevost, Buisines, 175
Price, Sterling, 42 43
Prim y Prats, Juan, 438 440, 439
(portrait)
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (feature film), 25
Probus, 67
Progressive Alliance of Liberia (PAL),
568
Progressive Dissidence party (Portugal),

74
Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, 602
Project MKUltra (CIA), 287
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Hitler),
478
Provisional Irish Republican Army
(PIRA), 101, 142143, 323,
343344
Ptolemy XIII (Egyptian King), 66
Public Enemies (movie), 86
Pun, Battle of, 429
Pupienus Maximus, 67
Purishkevich, Vladimir, 456 458
Putin, Vladimir, 249
Puzo, Mario, 55
Qadir, Haji Abdul, 441 443, 442
(photo)
Qadri, Malik Mumtaz, 559
Qamaruzzaman, Abul Hasnat Muhammad, 14
Qasim, Abd al-Karim, 147148
Qazi, Effat, 89
Quipaipan, Battle of, 429
Qutuz, Saif ad-Din, 444 446
Rabecca, John A., 231232
Rabiei, Molla Mohammad, 91
Rabin, Yitzhak, 175, 447 451, 448
(photo)
Rai, Punia, 11
Rada (Council) (magazine), 418
Radama II, 451 453, 452 (portrait)
Radowitzky, Simn, 148150
Rafiyev, Aydin, 494
Rafizadeh, Nareh, 89
Rafsanjani, Ali Akbar Hashemi, 88
Ragunathan, 437
Rahdar, Abdol-Amir, 87
Rahimi, Osman, 91
Rahimi Taqanaki, Esfandiar, 87
Rahman, Matiur, 453
Rahman, Mujibur, 14, 341342
Rahman, Syed Faruque, 15
INDEX
Rahman, Ziaur, 453 456, 454 (photo)

Rajabi, Zahra, 91
Rajai, Mohammad-Ali, 2728
Rajaratnam, Thenmozhi Gayatri,
167168
Rajavi, Kazem, 89
Ramanantsoa, Gabriel, 461 462
Rana, Sher Singh, 111112
Rapallo, Treaty of, 460 461
Rasputin (film), 459
Rasputin, Demon with Women (film), 459
Rasputin, Grigori Yefimovich, 371372,
456 459. See also Nicholas II
Rasputin and the Empress (film), 459
Rasputin: The Mad Monkom (film), 459
Rassoul, Mamoud, 88
Rathbone, Henry, 291
Rathenau, Walther, 460 462, 461
(photo)
Ratsimandrava, Richard, 462 463
Ravaillac, Franois, 219, 220
Ray, James Earl, 263, 271, 273277, 493
Rayo, Faustino, 169170
Razmara, Sepahbod Haj Ali, 464465
Reagan, Ronald Wilson, 28, 50, 97,
294, 304, 443, 450, 465 469,
498, 505, 537, 624
Red Army Faction (RAF), 5961
Red Beret Special Operations Unit
(Serbia), 113114
Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse), 336339,
338 (sidebar)
Reforma, Libertad, Ley y Justicia (Reform,
Freedom, Law and Justice), 650
Regional Interrogation Centers (RICs),
425
Regroupement des officiers communistes
(Communist Officers Group), 512
Reina Barrios, Jos Mara, 470 471
Remeliik, Haruo Ignacio, 471 473, 472
(photo)
Remiro, Joseph, 155156
Remn Cantera, Jos Antonio,
473 475, 474 (photo)
RemnEisenhower Treaty, 474
Republican and Democratic Movement

(MDR), 592
Revolt of 11731174, 37 (sidebar)
The Revolution Betrayed (1936) (Trotsky),
575
Revolution of 1917 (Russia), 370372
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), 176177, 401 402
Revolutionary Committee of Unity and
Action (Algeria), 58
Revolutionary Left (militant Turkish
organization), 138
Revolutionary Organization 17 November (17N), 625626
Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP),
418
Reza Chitgar, Hamid, 88
Reza Nakhai, Gholam, 89
Reza Rahmani, Hamed, 91
Rhodesian Bush War (19641979), 208
Ribbing, Adolph Ludwig, 196
Riina, Salvatore Tot (aka The
Beast), 57
Rikken Seiykai Party (Friends of Constitutional Government), 556557
Rio da Duvida (River of Doubt), 490
The Rise of Catherine the Great (film),
417
Ritavuori, Heikki, 475 476
Road to Perdition (movie), 86
The Robe (movie), 69
Robinson, Robert E., 597
Rockwell, George Lincoln, 476 480,
477 (photo)
Rockwell, Owen Porter, 532
Rogue Male (Household), 225
Rhm, Ernst Julius Gnther, 226,
481 483. See also Heydrich, Reinhard Tristan Eugen; Hitler, Adolf
Rohwedder, Detlev Karsten, 61
role-playing games, 25
Roman Emperors, assassinations of,
67
Romanus, 67
Rmer, Josef Beppo, 226
857
858
INDEX
Romero (film), 486

Romero y Galdmez, scar Arnulfo,
483 486
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR), 84,
258, 300, 310, 375, 380, 466
Roosevelt, Theodore, 324325,
486 490, 487 (photo). See also
McKinley, William, Jr.
Rose, Jacques, 285
Rose, Paul, 283, 285
Roshia, Kristy Lee, 377
Rosselli, John, 8182, 269
The Royal Hunt of the Sun (film), 430
Rubin, Yoram, 447
Ruby, Jack, 242, 257, 259, 261, 263
Ruilova, Jos Toro, 615
Rumsfeld, Donald, 28
Rush to Judgment (Lane), 493
Russian Civil War, 574
Russian Mafia, 29 (sidebar), 296
Russian Social Democratic Labor Party
(RSDLP), 573
Russo-Japanese War (19041905),
370371, 489, 555, 653
Russo-Persian War (18041813), 270
Russo-Turkish War (17681774),
417
Russo-Turkish War (18771878), 180,
529
Rwandan Genocide, 200201, 593
(sidebar)
Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), 592
Rwandan Revolution (1959), 199
Ryan, Leo Joseph, Jr., 491 493, 491
(photo)
Rysakov, Nikolai, 13
Rzayev Gurbanoglu, Rail, 494 495
S Carneiro, Francisco Manuel Lumbrales de, 497 498
Sabbah, Hassan-i, 2324
Sabs Ption, Alexandre, 109
Sabino, Anghenio, 473
Sablin, Nikolai, 13
Sacchi, Li, 94
Sadat, Anwar El, 499502, 499 (photo)

Sadulayev, Abdul-Halim AbuSalamovich, 502504
Saffar, Javad, 90
Saint-tienne, Battle of, 407
Salamis, Battle of, 642
Salan, Raoul, 173174
Salazar Lpez, Mario, 184
Salido, lvaro Obregn, 610
Salim, Ezzedine, 504505
Salmon, Christopher, 379
SalomnLozano Treaty, 506
Salvador (film), 486
Salviati, Francesco, 327
Salvius, 431
Samper, Ernesto, 402
San Francisco Chronicle (newspaper),
492
Snchez Cerro, Luis Miguel, 505507
Sandinista National Liberation Front,
510, 536, 540
Sandino, Augusto Nicols Caldern,
507510, 508 (photo). See also
Somoza Debayle, Anastasio;
Somoza Garca, Anastasio
Sanei, Manouchehr, 91
Sangar, David, 98
Sankara, Thomas Isidore Nol,
511513. See also Castro Ruz,
Fidel Alejandro; Guevara,
Ernesto Che
Sargsyan, Vazgen, 513515. See also
Litvinenko, Alexander
Valterovich
Sarshar, Hossein, 91
Saudi-Yemeni War (1934), 202
Saur Revolution, 16, 119, 558
Sayem, Abu Sadat Mohammad, 15
Sayyad, Ahmad, 91
The Scarlet Empress (film), 417
Schauman, Eugen, 51
Schinas, Alexandros, 179
Schirru, Michele, 346
Schlesselman, Paul, 376377
Schleyer, Hanns-Martin, 61
INDEX
Schneider Chereau, Ren, 515516

School of the Americas (SOA), 329
(sidebar)
Schrank, John Flammang, 487
Schwarzbard, Sholem-Shmuel, 418
Scopelliti, Antonio, 57
Screen Actors Guild (SAG), 466
Second Boer War, 601
Second Chechen War, 248249, 321,
503
Second Congo War, 246 (sidebar)
Second Italian War of Independence, 588
Second Sino-Japanese War, 404
Secondhand Lions (feature film), 25
Seimanpour, Seifollah, 89
Seleucus I, 517519, 517 (portrait)
Separate Representation of Voters Act,
602
September, Dulcie Evonne, 520521
September 11, 2001 terrorist attack
(9/11), 5, 46, 62, 63, 134, 139,
304, 441, 646
Septimius, Lucius, 431
Serav, Treaty of, 391
Serbian Campaign (World War I), 10
Serbo-Bulgarian War, 543
Serrano, Germain, 35
Serse (opera), 642
Seven Years War, 416
Seward. William, 291292
Shafiq, Shahryar, 87
Shahvardilou, Behrouz, 87
Shaka kaSenzangakhona, 522524, 526
Sharafkandi, Sadeq, 90
Sharia (Islamic law), 587
Sharpeville Massacre, 31, 603 (sidebar)
Sharples, Richard Christopher, 525526
Shermarke, Abdirashid Ali, 526528,
527 (photo)
Shevchenko Scientific Society (publication), 418
Shevket Pasha, Mahmud, 528530
Shpigun, Gennady, 248
Sicilian Mafia Commission, 95
Silvano Godoi, Don Juan, 35
Silvano Godoi, Nicanor, 34

Silver Dollar Group (KKK faction), 239
Simard, Francis, 285
Simla Agreement, 455
Simmons, William Joseph, 278
Sinan, Rashid ad-Din, 24
Singh, Beant, 164
Singh, Satwant, 164
Sinhala Maha Sabha organization (Sri
Lanka), 3233
Sinn Fin (Workers Party of Ireland),
101
Sirhan, Sirhan Bishara, 264266,
268269, 287
Sirte, Battle of, 161
Sista kontraktet (The Last Contact), 400
Six Day War of June 1967, 500
638 Ways to Kill (Fidel) Castro (TV documentary), 80
Six Point Movement (1959; East Pakistan), 15
Sixtus IV (Pope), 326, 327328
Slovensk plynrensk priemysel (Slovak
Gas Industry), 596
Slovo (Word) (magazine), 418
Smith, Joseph, Jr., 530533. See also
Strang, James Jesse
Sobibor extermination camp, 224
Socialist Party of the Workers (Spain),
40 41
Society of Muslim Brothers. See Muslim
Brotherhood
Sogdianus, 534535
Soilih Mtsashiwa, Ali, 1
Soldier (Herbert), 426
Soloviev, Alexander, 13
Soltysik, Patricia Monique, 156
Somarama, Talduwe, 34
Somoza Debayle, Anastasio, 535538,
536 (photo). See also Reagan,
Ronald Wilson; Sandino, Augusto
Nicols Caldern; Somoza Garca,
Anastasio
Somoza Garca, Anastasio, 79, 507,
535536, 538540. See also
859
860
INDEX
Sandino, Augusto Nicols Caldern; Somoza Debayle, Anastasio

Sonnenberg, Gnter, 60
South African Communist Party, 208
South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 204, 209, 399,
521.603
South Atlantic Petroleum Limited, 3
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 141, 207, 272
Soviet Peoples Democratic Party of
Afghanistan, 441
Spangler, Edmund, 293
Die Spanier in Peru (von Kotzebue), 430
Spanish-American War, 490
Spartacus, 432
Speer, Albert, 228229
Spellman, Cardinal Francis, 363
Spencer, Johnny Logan, 377378
Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SFLP), 33
St. Bartholomews Day massacre
(France), 217, 219
The St. Valentines Day Massacre
(movie), 86
Stalin, Josef, 122, 297, 320, 459, 564,
572, 574575, 583
Stamboliyski, Aleksandar, 541542
Stambolov, Stefan Stambolov,
543544
Stngebro, Battle of, 137
Starr, Ringo, 286
Stauffenberg, Claus von, 228
Stelescu, Mihai, 121
Stern Gang, 190192, 580
Steunenberg, Frank, 544547
Stewart, James, Earl of Moray,
548550, 548 (portrait)
Stewart, Murdoch, 241
Stimson, Henry, 509510
Strang, James Jesse, 550552. See also
Smith, Joseph, Jr.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC), 141, 272
Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS), 206
Surez, Jess Galndez, 577

Sugiyama, Masanori, 472
suicide bombings, 47
Sun Yat-sen, 653
SuperFerry bombing (2004) (Philippines), 47
Suppression of Communism
Act, 602
Surratt, John, 292, 293, 294
Surratt, Mary, 292, 293
Susskind, David, 581
Sverker I, 552553
Sverker the Elder (Swedish King), 92
Sword of Gideon (film), 390
Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA),
152153, 155
Tabatabaei, Ali Akbar, 87
Tabouk, Battle of, 586
Tacitus, 67
Tacklyn, Larry, 525526
Taft, William Howard, 308, 325,
489490
Tahmasebi, Khalil, 464
Taif, Siege of, 586
Taif, Treaty of (1934), 202
Takahashi Korekiyo, 555557, 556
(photo)
Talebi, Ahmad, 88
Taliban, 4546, 62, 119, 441443, 561,
645647
Tandefelt, Knut Ernst Robert, 475
Taraki, Nur Muhammad, 558559. See
also Amin, Hafizullah
Taseer, Salmaan, 559561. See also
Bhutto, Benazir
Taxi Driver (film), 468, 468 (sidebar),
624
Ten Years War (18681878), 72
Tet Offensive (1968), 426
Tewid, Leslie, 473
The Strongest Poison (Lane), 493
The Turner Diaries (Pierce), 480
Therapeutic Abortion Act, 467
Thermopylae, Battle of, 643
INDEX
Thich Quang Duc, 365

Third Anglo-Afghan War, 354
Third Mithridatic War, 433
Third Reich (Germany), 5960, 119,
132, 216, 223, 224, 225, 480, 602,
618
Third Sacred War, 424
Third Secret of Fatima (Pope John
Paul II), 243
Third Servile War, 432
Thomas, Benjamin, 316
Thomas, Josef, 227
300 Spartans (film), 643
Tiberius III, 67
Tippit, J. D., 263
Tirel, Walter, III, 634
Tisza de Borosjen et Szeged, Istvn,
562564. See also Franz Ferdinand
Tjibaou, Jean-Marie, 564567, 565
(photo)
Tmetuchl, Melwert, 472
Tmetuchl, Roman, 473
To Proto Thema (newspaper), 627
Tocnaye, Alain de La, 175
Tolbert, William Richard, Jr., 567569.
See also Doe, Samuel Kanyon
Tombalbaye, Franois, 569572. See
also Gaddafi, Muammar
Tongmenghui (Chinese United League),
653
Torresola, Griselio, 581
Townley, Michael Vernon, 289
Trabanino Vargas, Antonio, 184
Trade School Act, 407
Traina, Claudio, 56
Tran Le Xuan, 365
Die Transvaler (newspaper), 601
Trapassi, Mario, 94
Traynor, John The Coach, 187
Treblinka extermination camp, 224
Trench, Battle of, 586
Triple Entente (France, Britain, Russia),
157158, 371
Trotsky, Leon, 572575, 573 (photo).
See also Nicholas II
Trotskyite Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Sri

Lanka), 33
Trudeau, Pierre, 283
True Detective novel (Collins), 86
Trujillo Molina, Rafael Leonidas,
576579
Truman, Harry S., 173, 279, 363,
539, 580584, 580 (photo),
622
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(South Africa), 204, 209, 399, 521,
521.603
Tryzub (Trident) (newspaper), 419
Tsafendas, Dimitri, 600601
Tsankov, Aleksandar Tsolov, 541, 542
Tung Kuei-sen, 299
Tupamaros National Liberation Movement (Uruguay), 328
Turner, William, 267
Turnpaugh, John, 377
Tutu, Desmond, 204
20/20 (TV news program), 473
Twenty-Year Treaty of Friendship, 559
Uhl, Julius, 226
Uhud, Battle of, 586
UkrainianSoviet War, 419
Ukrainskayazhizn (Ukrainian Life)
(magazine), 418
Ulundi, Battle of, 524
Umar ibn Al-Khattab, 585587
Umberto I, 325, 588590, 588 (photo).
See also McKinley, William, Jr.;
Mussolini, Benito Amilcare
Andrea
Unification of Death society (Serbia), 10
Unified Communist Party of Nepal
(Maoist), 48
Union for National Progress (UPRONA)
(Burundi), 358
United Bamboo Gang (Taiwan), 298
United National Party (UNP; Sri Lanka),
33
United Nations Childrens Fund
(UNICEF), 144
861
862
INDEX
United Nations Commission of Investigation, 203

United Nations Commission on Human
Rights, 306
United Nations Emergency Force, 203
United Nations General Assembly, 50,
203, 602
United Nations International Law Commission, 139
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, 500
United Nations Truth Commission,
329
United Party of Nigeria (UPN), 233
United Tajik Opposition (UTO), 645
The Untouchables (movie), 86
U.S. Military Assistance Command,
Vietnam (MACV), 426
U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development
Group, 45
USS Cole, 46
Uwilingiyimana, Agathe, 591593. See
also Habyarimana, Juvnal
Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR),
645
Valente, Henrique da Silva, 73
Valentinian III, 67
Valerie Plame Affair, 627 (sidebar)
Valko, Ernest, 595597, 596 (photo)
Vallires, Pierre, 285
Vampire: The Masquerade (role-playing
game), 25
Vance, Robert Smith, 597600. See also
Ku Klux Klan; Wallace, George
Corley, Jr.
VANPAC (FBI Investigation), 598600
Vargas, Manuel Cepeda, 402
Vasquez Sanchez, Romeo, 78
Vassilikos, Vassilis, 282 (sidebar)
Vstgtalagen (Westgothic law),
552553
Velvet Revolution, 595
Verne, Jules, 14
Versailles, Treaty of, 385, 461, 481
Verwoerd, Hendrik Frensch, 600603,

601 (photo)
Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom,
604606
Victoriano Huerta Mrquez, Jos,
7576, 307309, 381382, 611
Vieira, Joo Nino Bernardo, 606609
Viet Cong (VC), 364365, 425427
Vietnam War, 272, 286, 405, 443
Vilcaconga, Battle of, 430
Villa, Francisco Pancho, 76, 308, 382,
610613, 610 (photo), 649650.
See also Carranza de la Garza,
Venustiano; Madero Gonzlez,
Francisco Ignacio; Obregn Salido,
lvaro; Zapata Salazar, Emiliano
Villarroel Lpez, Gualberto, 614616
Vilna Ukrayina (Free Ukraine) (magazine), 418
Virgilio, Mulatilo, 20
Vitellius, 67
Viva Caligula (video game), 69
Viva Villa! (film), 613
Viva Zapata! (film), 651
Volusianus, 67
vom Rath, Ernst Eduard, 616619
von der Schulenburg, Fritz-Dietlof Graf,
227
von Hindenburg, Paul, 483
Vorlufi ge Reichswehr (Provisional
National Defense), 461
Vratislaus, 628629
Waie, Na, 606609
The Walking Drum (LAmour), 24
Wallace, George Corley, Jr., 598,
621624, 622 (photo). See also
Ku Klux Klan
WallaceCater Act, 407
Wallenberg, Raoul, 132
Walus, Janusz, 208209
Wang Hsi-ling, 298299
Wannsee Conference, 224 (sidebar)
War Measures Act (1914), 283,
284285
INDEX
War of 1812, 238, 414

War of the Fourth Coalition, 417
War of the Triple Alliance (Paraguay;
18641870), 34
War on Drugs, 637
Ward, Paul Hippo, 186
Warren Commission, 153, 258, 261,
263, 493
Wars of Apostasy, 586
Wars of Religion (France), 219220,
250
Warsaw Signal (newspaper), 530
Watergate scandal (U.S.), 269, 286, 626
Wa, Djubelly, 564
Webb, Paul, 38
Welch, Richard Skeffington, 625628
Wenceslaus I, 628629
Wentworth, Alexander, 550551
Western Federation of Miners (WFM),
545
Westminster Abbey, 486
White, Daniel James, 339341
White Citizens Council, 261
White Citizens Council, 623
White Night Riots (San Francisco;
1979), 339
Wicked City (Atkins), 408
Wilkinson, Bill, 279
William I, Prince of Orange, 630634,
630 (portrait)
William II of England, 634636
Williamson, Craig, 400
Wilson, Henry Lane, 308309
Wilson, Woodrow, 490, 611
Windsor, Treaty of (1386), 74
Wisniewski, Stefan, 60
Witzleben, Erwin von, 227
Wood, John Howland, Jr., 637639
Worker-Communism Unity Party of
Iran, 88
World Bank and International Monetary
Fund (IMF), 512
World Trade Center bombings, 5, 46
World War I, 10, 93, 117, 120, 131,
156158, 166, 181, 190, 201, 223,
225, 325, 343345, 348, 356358,

371372, 385, 392, 407, 419,
458, 460461, 481, 530, 541547,
562563, 574, 582, 589, 621,
700703
World War II, 4, 11, 18, 59, 69, 93,
99, 101, 119, 140, 143, 146147,
167, 191, 216, 224225, 234, 247,
258, 264, 279, 282, 301, 313, 343,
346348, 358, 404407, 462, 466,
472, 476477, 500, 511, 525526,
539, 569, 596, 602, 616618
Wright, Billy, 323
Wu Tun, 298299
Xerxes I of Persia, 641643
Yamaguchi, Otoya, 234235
Yamamah, Battle of, 586
Yazdanpanah, Saeed, 89
Year of the Six Emperors (Rome;
238 CE), 2829
Yom Kippur War, 568
Young, Brigham, 551
Young Catherine (film), 417
Young Mens Muslim Association
(Egypt), 34
Yousef, Ramzi, 242
Yuldashev, Tohir Abduhalilovich,
645647
Yulyevich, Sergei, 371
Yurovsky, Yakov, 369, 372
Yusupov, Felix, 456459
Z (Vassilikos), 282 (sidebar)
Zabala Suinaga, Lorenzo, 40
Zacatecas, Battle of, 650
Zamboni, Anteo, 346
Zangeneh, Abdul Ahmad, 464
Zapata Salazar, Emiliano, 76, 308, 382,
611612, 649651. See also Carranza, Venustiano; Villa, Francisco
Pancho
Zapatista Army of National Liberation,
651 (sidebar)
863
864
INDEX
Zeciu, Vasile, 121

Zeller, Andr, 173174
Zepita, Battle of, 38
Zhang Zuolin, 652654, 652 (photo)
Zhelyabov, Andrei, 13
Zia-ul-Haq, Muhammad, 17, 4344
Zionism, 192 (sidebar), 249, 460
Zolanvar, Ahmad, 87
Zollinger, Edgar, 470

Zongo, Henri, 512
Zoni, Marina, 337
Zorig, Sanjaasuren, 655656, 655
(photo)
Zuhab, Treaty of, 392
Zulu War, 524 (sidebar)
Zwaiter, Wael, 387
About the Author
Michael Newton is a full-time freelance writer with 266 books published since
1977 and 15 more scheduled for release from various houses through 2014.
Newtons 74 nonfiction books include 27 reference books, among them the
best-selling Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (2nd edition, 2005). In 2002, Newtons
history of the Florida Ku Klux Klan, The Invisible Empire, received the Florida
Historical Societys Rembert Patrick Award as Best Book in Florida History.
Four years later, the American Library Association ranked his Encyclopedia of
Cryptozoology (hidden or undiscovered animals) among its 12 Outstanding
Reference Books in 2006. Newton has also published 186 novels under his
own name and various pseudonyms. In 2010, one of his WesternsManhunt,
written as Lyle Brandtreceived the Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award
as Best Western Novel of the year. For a full list of Newtons work see his Web
site at http://www.michaelnewton.homestead.com.

Famous Assassinations in World History An Encyclopedia

Încărcat de

Informații document

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Famous Assassinations in World History An Encyclopedia

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Famous

This page intentionally left blank

Copyright 2014 by ABC-CLIO, LLC.

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.

Bent, Charles (17991847)

Devi, Phoolan (19632001)

Goebel, William Justus (18561900)

Kennedy, John Fitzgerald (19171963)

Nader Shah Afshar (16881747)

Rathenau, Walther (18671922)

Steunenberg, Frank (18611905)

Zhang Zuolin (18751928)

Zorig, Sanjaasuren (19621998)

2. Assassination of Julius Caesar (44 BCE)

3. Assassination of the Roman Emperor Caligula (41 CE)

4. Death of William II, King of England (1100)

5. Murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket (1170)

6. Assassination of Albert I of Habsburg (1308)

7. Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1865)Official

8. Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (1865)

9. Assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia (1881)

10. Assassination of James A. Garfield (1881)

11. Assassination of Morgan Earp (1882)

12. Assassination of William McKinley (1901)

13. Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1914)

14. Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1914)

15. Assassination of Emiliano Zapata (1919)

Appendix: World Timeline of Assassinations

Famous Assassinations in World History: An Encyclopedia aims to fill a gap in

Assassination may be viewed as the ultimate expression of protestagainst

the outcome of that years presidential election, an outcome leading inexorably

This page intentionally left blank

AGUIYI-IRONSI, JOHNSON THOM AS UMUNNAK WE

A G U IY I-IRONSI, J OH NSON THOMAS

AL-BANNA, SHEIKH HASAN AHMED ABDEL RAHMAN MUHAMMED

replaced British major general Welby-Everard as commander of the Nigerian

A L - B A N N A , S H E IKH H ASAN AHMED ABDEL

AL-BANNA, SHEIKH HASAN AHMED ABDEL RAHMAN MUHAMMED

AL-BANNA, SHEIKH HASAN AHMED ABDEL RAHMAN MUHAMMED

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

ALBERT I OF HABSBURG (12551308)

AL-DIN SHAH QAJAR, NASSER

AL-DIN SHAH QAJAR, NASSER (18311896)

dictatorially. Encouraged by his

ALEXANDER I OF SERBIA (18761903)

ALEXANDER I OF YUGOSLAVIA (18881934)

Alexanders reign was marked

ALEX ANDER II OF RUSSIA

antifascist advisors, Paul announced Yugoslavias alliance with Germany and

ALEXANDER II OF RUSSIA (18181881)

born in Moscow on April 29, 1818. He was a liberal by Russian standards

ALI, MUHAMMAD MANSUR

A curious footnote to Alexanders reign is his appearance in the opening

ALI, MUHAMMAD MANSUR (19191975)

AMIN, HAFIZULLAH (19291979)

named Operation Storm-333. On December 27, 1979, 170 Soviet soldiers

AQUINO, BENIGNO SIMEON, JR.

AQUINO, BENIGNO SIMEON, JR.

AQUINO, BENIGNO SIMEON, JR.

by flagrant fraud. Still theoretically awaiting execution, Aquino suffered a

ARAUJO, MANUEL ENRIQUE (18651913)

ARGAA FERRARO, LUIS MARA DEL CORAZN DE JESS DIONISIO

elimination of export duties. Dissatisfaction was compounded by reports that