more concerned with retribution than with ... the rule of law," wrote the authors of Assassination and Political Violence. The confusion of justice with vengeance—which diminished, they noted, among the more affluent and highly educated classes—provided another indication of the immaturity and emotionalism of the popular mind.

The assumptions underlying the report of the Commission on Violence reappeared even in the writings of observers farther removed from the official view of things. Garry Wills and Ovid Demaris offered a similar explanation of the popular need for conspiracy theories. The bullet that killed Kennedy, they argued, evoked a fear of "dangers more disintegrative than any conspiracy." It evoked a "panicky feeling that chaos had broken loose." Drawing on a study of popular reactions to the assassination conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, Wills and Demaris attributed the need for conspiracy theories to the fear of the unknown and the desire to deny the existential horror of Kennedy's death by reducing it to a plot. Horrified by the radical evil embodied in Oswald, the American people had to get rid of Oswald, "to 'shoot' him with words, talk, theory, proof." Jack Ruby's murder of Oswald vicariously satisfied not only the public's primitive need for retribution but the need to remove the assassin altogether and thus to deny the "obliterative irresponsibility of death."

Even some of those who questioned the Warren Report decried the popular need for conspiracy theories and the psychological needs behind them. In 1968, Edward Jay Epstein, one of the earliest critics of the Warren Commission, published an attack on Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who claimed to have unraveled a right-wing plot leading to Kennedy's murder. According to Epstein, Garrison exemplified "what Richard Hofstadter has classified as 'the paranoid style in American politics,' to which 'the feeling of persecution is central,' and which is 'systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy.' " Admitting that Garrison's "paranoid style" did not "of itself rule out the possibility that there is substance to his claims," Epstein nevertheless shifted the burden of proof, in effect, from the government to its critics. ^*

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*	It was easy, of course, even before Garrison's case collapsed in court, to ridicule his rhetorical attacks on the "Eastern establishment" and his irresponsible, unsubstan-

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