BOOKSHELF: Assassination handbookA History of Political Murder

Review of Michael Burleigh, Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder (2021)

“In times like these we have to rue that Britain has only a paltry tradition of political assassination,” Jonathan Meades writes in Literary Review. “This, I’d propose, is not a mark of civilisation but of timidity and the eschewal of realpolitik.”

To overcome our squeamishness, we might gainfully study this breathless race through two thousand years of special pollarding, which might have been more aptly named ‘Assassination: A Handbook’, for it is, among much else, an inventory of means and methods: blades, blunt objects, poisons and toxins, guns and ammo, shots from motorcycles, bombs, defenestration and plump cushions.

Meades notes that Burleigh is dubious about the beneficial effects of governmentally sanctioned killing.

However, a perhaps unforeseen outcome of his relentlessly sanguinary book is the implication that the planet, far from being sullied by opérations ponctuelles, might be a happier place were a few more tyrants to be treated to well-aimed headshots.

Assassinations are tactical instruments and tools – if not also proxies – of war. They are, equally, evasions of war and bulwarks against tyranny.

Hitler was a frequent target for would-be assassins. A German communist names Georg Elser’s failed in his attempt on Hitler’s life in November 1939, ten weeks after war had been declared. Five years later, in July 1944, a bomb nearly killed Hitler in Berchtesgaden. The late Joachim Fest, the editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and a Hitler Biographer, estimated that in the ten months between the failed 1944 plot and the Nazi surrender in May 1945, 4.8 million Germans died. Burleigh goes further, suggesting that had Elser’s 1939 bomb succeeded, “there might not have been a lengthy war at all; none of Hitler’s peers possessed his charisma or oratorical skills, and the army high command might have swept them aside.”

Burleigh explores the many facets of political assassination, explaining why it is more frequent in certain types of society than others and asking whether assassination can either bring about change or prevent it, and whether, like a contagious disease, political murder can be catching.

Burleigh’s book consists of much more than commentary and context. Every page is weighted with names of operatives in the death business: victims and culprits, executants and collaterals, backroom technicians, black-ops tacticians, the pseudonymous and the disguised whose trade demands not merely cold blood but the ability to cover their tracks.

In his afterword, Burleigh, eager to put a lid on the topic in which he has immersed himself to the point of satiety, writes of assassins that ‘in most cases what they did on their big day had no real consequences other than to temporarily discombobulate a society with an act bound up with their own life stories and personalities’. This is surely an underestimation of both the assassin’s power and the dire litany of killings that fills this harshly excellent book. Certain eras have been defined by assassinations, and others by those that failed or were not attempted. Mossad could have wasted Ayatollah Khomeini when he was hiding in plain sight at Neauphle-le-Château outside Paris, and so might France’s DST. But the Shah advised President Giscard d’Estaing’s right-hand man Michel Poniatowski against such an action, with the results that we see today.