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That, at least, is the hope and a major part of her appeal. In the course of eleven months she changed from single girl to engaged woman to bride and Princess to wife and mother-to-be of an heir to the throne: a fresh, enchanting face pledged to the long future of happily ever after. She brought youth and beauty and class to a year that needed them all. Most important, she came to stay.
Wounding Society's Sense of Order
Assassination: no other crime so thoroughly wrenches the world to attention. The killer squeezes a trigger (the gunfire always surprising bystanders with its weightless pop! pop!), and civilization itself seems to scramble hysterically before him. For an instant, the assassin's life of brooding impotence is stood on its head: he has at last obliged the powerful to take him into account.
The year's attacks on world leaders came with almost seasonal regularity: before time had diminished the shock of one shooting, another occurred. First, on a mild spring afternoon in Washington, John Hinckley fired his pipsqueak's .22 at Ronald Reagan for reasons meaningful only to himself; then, in the sun of St. Peter's Square, Mehmet Ali Agca, forging a new category of hatefulness, gunned down Pope John Paul II; finally, during an autumn celebration of Egypt's military might, four Islamic fanatics ran from out of the orderly pomp toward President Anwar Sadat, grenades and automatic fire flying.
Those three shocking assaults had an almost theatrically pat iconography: Reagan in a business suit, the very picture of the political order; John Paul in his papal robes of immaculate white; Sadat, the erect warrior, in a field marshal's gold-braided blue uniform. All the victims were over 60; each was attacked by a man in his 20s. Raised in suburban ease, Hinckley had just drifted away, aimless and alone, gorging on fast food in rented rooms and fantasizing a love affair with a teenage movie star. It was to command this dream girl's attention that he shot the President. Awaiting trial early this year, at which his lawyers will plead insanity, Hinckley, alone in a Maryland stockade cell, now has only himself to hurt; twice he has attempted suicide. Agca, after a boyhood of rural Turkish poverty, attended two universities and eventually joined a gang of young fascist thugs in Istanbul. In their thrall he became a practiced assassin two years before his descent on Rome. Agca's motive was nominally political ("A protest against imperialism," he claimed) but had only the hermetic coherence of the demented. Said the Italian prosecutor of Agca, who is now serving a life sentence in a provincial prison: "We peered into his heart for a sign of humanity, but found none."
The four killers of Sadat were fanatics, but not loners. Twenty other Muslim fundamentalists went on trial with them, and possibly hundreds more conspired. The West grieved, perhaps more than his countrymen did, for the loss of Sadat's vision and will. Yet the peace process he began, with an act of statesmanlike courage, struggles on under his discreet, cautious successor.
That telling fact appears to justify Benjamin Disraeli's seemingly callous judgment that "assassination has never changed the history of the world." Yet even the unsuccessful killer wounds society's sense of reason and order.