an orgy of national soul-searching. Conducted for the most part in the sociological and psychiatric mode, this pseudo-introspection did not address the questions left unanswered by the Warren Report: the number and location of the shots that killed Kennedy, the nature of his wounds, and the specific circumstances that might have led to the shooting. Doubts about the Warren Report were dismissed as evidence of a "conspiracy mentality," part of the same climate of hatred that bred psychopaths like Oswald. The assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, a wave of urban riots, and the increasingly violent clashes between radical students and police gave extra urgency to the demand for socio-psychiatric explanations of the American malaise. In 1969, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence reported that all these events could be traced to the country's tradition of random, apolitical violence. ^* Cross-cultural comparisons indicated that "traditional" and "modern" societies had low rates of violence, whereas violence flourished in "transitional" societies "awakened to a desire for a new way of life but only beginning to achieve it." Since the United States did not conform to expectations about the civilizing effects of modernization, the commission searched for conditions peculiar to American society and found them (as Gunnar Myrdal had found them) in the nation's history of racial conflict, in the vigilante tradition, and in the misguided notions of individualism and popular sovereignty that helped to sustain it. "The vigilante tradition lives on. It has become a permanent part of the American heritage." It received cultural support from such well-established democratic doctrines as freedom of conscience, the right to bear arms, and the right of revolution. Nervous about democracy, the commission stressed the "critical importance" of maintaining an "over-

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Like the Warren Report, Assassination and Political Violence began by assuming Oswald's guilt and went on to build an elaborate structure of speculation on this shaky premise. In a section on the "psychology of presidential assassins," the authors (James F. Kirkham, Sheldon G. Levy, and William J. Crotty) found a common pattern of familial disruption and alienation, to which Oswald closely conformed: "absence or disruption of the normal family relationship between parent and child," "hostility towards their mother redirected against authority symbols," "difficulty [in] making friends of either sex, especially in establishing lasting relationships with women."

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