whelming sense of the legitimacy of our government and institutions." Like the Warren Commission, it attached far more importance to legitimacy than to democracy.

The Commission on Violence recognized the need to remove the "root causes of social unrest and perceived injustice" and disavowed any "short cut to political tranquillity"; but it also disavowed the possibility that social injustices could be corrected through popular action. It deplored social tensions and "perceived injustice," not injustice itself. It deplored the rise of "two warring camps of white racists and black militants," without examining the issues that had brought those camps into being. It denounced the "extremism" of left and right, claiming that the "tactics of the New Left are virtually identical with those used at an early stage by the Nazis." By innuendo and implication, it defined popular agitation as the principal threat to "political tranquillity."

The authors of Assassination and Political Violence were puzzled by the popularity of conspiratorial explanations of assassinations. They argued that presidential assassinations, because of their overtones of patricide, exposed the vulnerability of cherished symbols of permanence and continuity. Conspiracy theories, however preposterous, cushioned the shock by providing a "more intelligible explanation" than random violence. "It seems incredible that the man who commands the largest power in the world can be destroyed in seconds by the attack of a nonentity." Instead of admitting that a single "isolated, unstable individual" can threaten the fragile structure of governmental authority, people took refuge in farfetched fantasies of conspiracy. Here again, the commission emphasized the contrast between the vulnerability of legitimate authority and the violence of popular irrationality and emotionalism, which threatened to undermine the imposing but fragile structure of representative institutions. Popular hatred and irrationality came to the surface not only in the action of the deranged assassin himself but in the hardly less deranged response to it: the "psychic need" for conspiracy theories, the refusal to listen to the "seemingly overwhelming evidence" against them, and the vindictive demand for the assassin's head, even among those who doubted his sole responsibility for the crime. Polls showing that only a third of those interviewed thought Oswald should have a fair trial disturbed right-thinking people almost as much as the polls showing a widespread belief in conspiracy. "The American public in these circumstances is

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