Air Force One was a scene of utter devastation on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. In its front compartment, just behind the cockpit, women sat weeping and secret service agents struggled to remain composed. One reporter recalled, “You’ve heard of strong men crying; well, we had it there that day.” In the plane’s rear compartment sat the bloodstained widow of the dead president alongside his coffin and in the centre was his newly sworn-in successor.
This week marks 50 years since John Fitzgerald Kennedy – otherwise known as JFK – was gunned-down in his open-topped car as he travelled in a motorcade through the streets of Dallas, Texas.
His death not only paved the way for Lyndon B Johnson, JFK's vice-president, to unexpectedly become the 36th commander-in-chief of the United States, but also sparked a litany of conspiracy theories that continue to resonate half a century later.
While the anniversary of JFK’s death will cause many in the west to again question and obsess over the true nature of his demise – was the perpetrator really the lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald or was there a wider conspiracy? – many in the Middle East will be entitled to look on with no little sense of bemusement.
In the US, four presidents have suffered the grave misfortune of being slain while in office; the Middle East, on the other hand, is a graveyard to many of those who dared to assume the reins of power. Scores of the region’s presidents, prime ministers, kings, prominent parliamentarians and sundry other politicians have been sent to an early grave as a result of premeditated murder.
Further still, the deaths of many caused enormous political ramifications that far outweigh the repercussions of the otherwise shocking assassination of a US president who, while charismatic and inspirational, had a scandalous private life and was something of a political disaster.
So, where to start in the bloody realms of the Middle East’s most infamous assassinations?
Riad Al Solh was a dedicated Arab nationalist who developed into a bona fide statesman, on Lebanon’s independence from the French in 1943. He became the country’s first prime minister and is forever the “father of the nation”.
Al Solh was not afraid to get involved in the rough and tumble of the Arab political scene – and was even briefly exiled for his troubles in his time before assuming the premiership as Lebanon made its way from colonial territory to sovereign nation-state.
This celebrated alliance-forger met his end in Amman on July 16, 1951, when he was gunned down in his car in a revenge-attack two-years in the making after meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan. In a strange quirk of fate, and just days later, King Abdullah himself was shot and killed at the foot of the stairs of the Al Aqsa Mosque by a Palestinian opposed to Jordan’s tolerance of Israel.
Anwar Sadat is another political figure whose death shook the very foundations of a region he himself had shaken just two years earlier.
A part of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egyptian revolution, Sadat took over from the fabled leader of the Arabs upon his death in 1970 and made history as the first Arab leader to sign a peace deal with Israel in 1979. No mean feat when, more than three decades on, Jordan is the only other Middle Eastern country to have followed suit.
Sadat was sensationally shot dead in October 1981 during a military parade and Hosni Mubarak succeeded him as head of state. Mubarak, who was standing next to Sadat at the time of the attack in Cairo and who was eventually unseated in 2011, sustained injuries to his left hand.
But for me, and if one were to look for a regional comparator to JFK's assassination, then it has surely to be Lebanon's Rafik Hariri.
Like JFK, Hariri was charismatic. Like Kennedy, Hariri was the face of his nation and just like the former US president’s demise, Hariri’s death (in a terrible car bomb attack on Valentine’s Day 2005), will forever remain clouded in theory and supposition.
But Hariri’s murder was substantially more profound – this in spite of the fact that he was no longer prime minister at the time of his death – both in terms of the political earthquake that followed and his own personal legacy.
Hariri was not only a giant of Lebanese politics, but also of the region. A man who, as a self-made billionaire, rebuilt Lebanon from the ashes of its 15-year civil war. Of the former, his death led to the Cedar Revolution that was successful – if ever there was a welcome by-product of such a brutal act – in ending Syria’s decades-long hegemony over Lebanon.
The list of political dead in the Middle East is almost endless – and in these uncertain times, the region’s politicos will need no lecturing on the perils of statesmanship.
While Americans look back at the slaying of Kennedy with a sense of intrigue in their vast stable land, many in the likes of Lebanon might be forgiven for lamenting a terrible trend in their own state that has done little to throw off the Middle East’s label as a region in perennial crisis.
Alasdair Soussi is a freelance journalist, covering the Middle East and Scottish politics
On Twitter: @AlasdairSoussi
