Age of Assassins by Michael Newton: review Arthur Bremer was a loser. In March 1972, he wanted to impress a former girlfriend, who had recently dumped him. In his warped mind, shooting Richard Nixon seemed just the ticket. He bought two pistols and flew to New York in search of the President, but then stupidly left his weapons on the plane. Since these were still innocent times, the captain kindly returned them. To his great regret, he couldn't get close to Nixon. Settling for second best, on May 15 he shot Governor George Wallace instead. His ex-girlfriend wasn't impressed. Michael Newton thinks that Bremer is emblematic of "the decline of the American assassination." The murders of Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley, he contends, were driven by politics, but that's no longer the case. Sounding almost nostalgic, he contends that, more recently, "ideology would cease to be anyone's motive; nor would anyone be shot out of idealism." Oh, for the good old days when killers killed with purpose. Newton's thesis has more holes than an assassin's target. The problem lies with the cases he chooses to study. His first few - Lincoln, James Garfield, Archduke Franz Ferdinand - suggest a sober approach. Yet the book ends with excessive attention to celebrity murders or attempted murders - Lennon, Warhol, the Manson killings. Newton doesn't really explain how these qualify as assassinations, other than to argue that they prove his point about killers without causes. This might have been an opportunity to explore the nature of celebrity, in particular how politicians, having become media stars, are now more susceptible to lunatics like John Hinckley Jr, whose obsession with Jodie Foster led him to shoot Ronald Reagan. That rich vein of inquiry is, however, left alone. While this book is supposed to be about assassination in Europe and the United States, the focus narrows to America in the final sections, which consequently limits the insights drawn. There's nothing on the assassinations of Airey Neave, Aldo Moro, or the Spanish admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. The murders of Olaf Palme and the Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh fall outside the scope of the book's timeline: how strange and arbitrary was the decision to stop in 1981. Since all these neglected assassinations appear to have had a political motive, that might explain Newton's decision to ignore them. Anecdotal evidence suggests that European leaders are still killed for political purpose, while American ones aren't. If that is true, it deserves exploration. In actual fact, Americans have not given up on politically motivated assassination. The tactic is alive and well on Capitol Hill, and has been since at least the Sixties. Back then, the US came to the conclusion that communism could be defeated by assassinating its perpetrators. Thus, the CIA plotted to kill Fidel Castro with exploding cigars and Patrice Lumumba with a poisoned toothbrush. It also encouraged the murder of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem because he seemed soft on commies. What we have here is a disturbing trend that Newton refuses to explore. He includes a brief chapter in which the Castro and Lumumba plots are mentioned, but does not probe their implications. The freelance assassin operates under the assumption that a political evil can be eradicated simply by removing its figurehead. This is the Wizard of Oz approach: killing the Wicked Witch of the West suddenly made the Winkies Dorothy's new best friends, when they previously wanted to kill her. Governments used to recognise the flaws in that logic - the British, for instance, steered clear of plots to kill Hitler, reasoning that assassination would only make the German people more determined to fight. Yet, of late, that wisdom seems in short supply; governments prefer the assassin's shortcut to political solutions. Such simplistic logic inspired the killing of Osama bin Laden. In the current election campaign, Barack Obama has been boasting that he's killed more terrorist leaders than the previous four presidents combined, as if to suggest that that's the same thing as solving terrorism. All this might have provided an interesting line of inquiry, but, sadly, Newton ignores it. This is a strange book, particularly in the weight given to certain topics and the neglect of others. There are 42 pages on the attempted assassination of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, but just nine on the killing of Martin Luther King. Newton strays into a long discussion of the definition of insanity in criminal law and includes a gratuitous account of Manson's escapades (why?) yet fails completely to discuss the popularity of assassination in Seventies Europe. He eschews conspiracies at the beginning of the book, yet kindles them by the end. What results is a book loaded with lost opportunity. Newton has the ability to be a good writer and he is a dedicated researcher - at least on the topics he chooses to cover. The book, however, fails to satisfy because it refuses to ask (and answer) the probing questions that the topic demands. Amid all the confusing detail, convoluted argument and scholarly posturing, some useful lessons do emerge. The most striking is that assassination seldom achieves what the assassin wants. Killing Lincoln did not erase the North's victory in the Civil War. The murder of Franz Ferdinand by a Serb nationalist led to untold suffering by Serbs in the Great War. Kennedy's death brought Lyndon Johnson - the same policies in a less attractive package. As Iain Crichton Smith once wrote: "He has simplified the world like an assassin. Where his barrel points is where evil is. Politics is never that simple. Obama take note. Age of Assassins: A History of Assassination in Europe and America, 1865-1981 Michael Newton Faber, £25, 736pp 1 Assassination: A History of Political Murder by Lindsay Porter (2010). 2 Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell (2005). 3 Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK by Gerald Posner (1993).