Can history help us understand political violence against elected officials? : NPR

SCOTT DETROW, HOST:

The nation is still trying to make sense of an assassination attempt against former President Trump. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies are currently investigating the alleged perpetrator, who was shot by the Secret Service, looking at his background and motivations and associations. And there’s a lot of speculation from politicians, from people on social media and elsewhere, about what this all means for the November election.

Like with any other major news event, there is a lot of value in taking a step back and seeing how history can help us make sense of this moment because this is not the first time an assassination attempt has been made at a U.S. campaign event. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is with us now. She has written biographies of numerous U.S. presidents, including Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon B. Johnson. Her latest book is “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History Of The 1960s.” Doris Kearns Goodwin, thank you so much for joining us.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Oh, I’m glad to be with you today, Scott.

DETROW: I want to start with just what you were thinking when you saw what happened Saturday night.

GOODWIN: You know, I guess what was going through my mind is just – what can history help us in learning about other times when candidates were running for the presidency and were shot? And somehow, I always go back to – can we find perspective? Can we find lessons? Are there some things to learn from the past?

DETROW: Yeah.

GOODWIN: And my mind went back initially to Teddy Roosevelt. I’m always going back to the past somehow to find solace in the present, I think. And, you know, as you know, he was running as a third-party candidate on the Bull Moose ticket, and he was about to go to a big speech event, and a would-be assassin right in front of the crowd fired directly into his chest. He collapsed on the seat of the car. He ordered the car, against the doctor’s advice, go to the auditorium; I’m not going to go to the hospital until this is over. So he went before the crowd, and he assured them, as he said, it takes more than that to kill a bull moose. He finished 84 minutes in the speech, and then he finally agreed to go to the hospital.

And what’s interesting in relation to today is that the Democratic opponent, Wilson, offered to suspend his campaign as long as Teddy was in the hospital. He declined. He said the fight should go on. And then, what’s really relevant for today, the dramatic attack kindled the nation’s empathy, and one Democratic official articulated the worst fears of the Democrats – that the bullet that rests in Roosevelt’s chest has killed Wilson for the presidency. But in the end, the fundamentals of the election prevailed. So all those things just have echoes for today as I was putting myself back in that period of time of 1912.

DETROW: Yeah, and there are some really interesting parallels. You know, it’s a former president trying to return to the White House. It’s a New Yorker. Donald Trump did not deliver a speech for more than an hour, but he did pump his fist to the crowd several times from the stage, again, getting into the SUV. And that moment in 1912 really shows that there can be a lot of momentum, a lot of sympathy for a candidate after a moment like this.

GOODWIN: Absolutely. And I think that’s true. I mean, that picture of Donald Trump with his fist in the air and saying to the people, fight, fight, fight, and looking courageous and looking strong and resilient was what Teddy Roosevelt was able to accomplish at the same time. And those are moments when the whole country is absorbed in watching how somebody reacts in that moment. So I think there is a similarity between the two of them in that sense.

DETROW: Another shooting that several people were immediately talking about is that of George Wallace in 1972. There have been a lot of comparisons to George Wallace over the years, between George Wallace and Donald Trump, in terms of the rhetoric, in terms of the anger that motivates the candidate and the candidate’s base. And now there’s another similarity, an assassination attempt. Of course, Wallace was much more seriously injured than Trump. But what do you think we can learn from that moment?

GOODWIN: You know, what interested me when I started thinking about that assassination attempt – Martin Luther King had labeled him the most dangerous racist in America. Now suddenly, things changed. He was shot five times in the stomach, and he survived but was paralyzed from the waist down and left in chronic pain, and something changed in his life. Somehow, he became a born-again Christian. He sought forgiveness from the Black community. He acknowledged that he had been wrong to stand for segregation.

And then he ran for governor again with his whole changed philosophy, and he won with 90% of the African American vote. And his term really doubled Black registration, and he appointed hundreds of African Americans to posts. Then John Lewis, when Wallace died, publicly forgave him. He wrote an op-ed in The New York Times saying he had become a changed man. He’d assumed responsibility for the harm that he had caused and that somehow, he could never forget, but he could forgive. So that’s a really interesting question, as to whether such a near-death experience like this can change a person. Will it change – not only Trump’s rhetoric, will it change who he is? This is what these days and weeks and months ahead are going to show.

DETROW: And Trump, in his initial statement so far, has been, for him, relatively restrained. But many other Republicans, including people who seem to be on the shortlist of contenders of Trump’s vice presidential nominee, a decision he’s going to make within the next few days, have been very quick to lay the blame on this shooting on the political left for the way that they’ve talked about their concerns about a Trump presidency. How important is it to you the way this is talked about and campaigned on in the coming weeks in terms of what this will do to the trajectory of the political mood here?

GOODWIN: I mean, my own sense is that the political rhetoric, everybody’s going to want it to be toned down. And it’ll be interesting to see whether those vice presidential potential candidates who spoke most quickly about laying the blame on the political left – whether that will be a scar for Trump or whether he’ll just continue to say, well, that’s OK. They said it then, but they won’t say it now. I mean, words matter at a time like this. Words matter always in moments like this.

DETROW: You mentioned that you look to the past to feel hopeful at times about the future, and I think not many people listening right now feel particularly hopeful about the trajectory of the country and the path that our politics is on. In your mind, is there anything to be hopeful, to be optimistic about when you look at the state of things in the United States and the presidential campaign and the political climate?

GOODWIN: It’s not so much that the moments right now give us a sense of optimism, but if we look at the past, we have been through really, really rough times before, worse than this time in my judgment – not worse in my lifetime, but certainly the Civil War, the early days of the Great Depression, the early days of World War II. And each one of those events ended with America coming through with greater strength.

You know, when Reagan was shot, and people started talking then about we had a sick society, and what he said, which I think was so hopeful and so right on tone, was he said, sick societies don’t have young men like the Secret Service agent who had saved him, or Jim Brady. Sick societies don’t make people like us proud to be Americans. Everybody is saying we have a sick society. We also have a great society.

And I think we’ve got to remember that these people acted with courage, the Secret Service agents did, the people themselves did, and somehow, we’re going to have to see the other side of this. Certainly, what Lyndon Johnson did after John Kennedy’s assassination – he was able to bring the Congress together to pass the Civil Rights Bill in memoriam for John Kennedy. He was able to say that we have to fight extremism and come together, and he was a bipartisan leader for those first couple of years. There are moments that can be used in a positive way, and I think we’ve just got to hope we did that before, and we can do that again.

DETROW: That’s presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Thank you so much for joining us and thank you for your perspective.

GOODWIN: You’re welcome, Scott. Thank you for letting history take so much time. I love it so much.

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