Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 1969:
We are today the most frightening people on this planet. The ghastly things we do to our own people, the ghastly things we do to other people, these must at least compel us to look searchingly at ourselves and our society before hatred and violence rushes on to more evil, and finally tear our nation apart...We cannot blame the epidemic or murder at home on deranged and solitary individuals, separate from the rest of us. For these individuals are plainly weak and suggestible men stamped by our society with a birth rite of hatred and a compulsion toward violence.We must recognize, I believe, that the evil is in us, that it springs from some dark intolerable tension in our history and our institutions. It is almost as though some primal curse had been fixed on our nation. We are a violent people with a violent history, and the instinct for violence has seeped into the bloodstream of our national life.
In the Second Sunday series produced for NBC Radio, March 3, 1969
Assassination in the United States: An Operational Study of Recent Assassins, Attackers, and Near-Lethal Approachers (.pdf), American Academy of Forensic Sciences, 1999
