Why Assassinations Shaped the 1960s and Haunt Us Again
The David Frum Show
The Atlantic
4.6 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2025
⏱️ ? minutes
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| 0:00.0 | 11 Labs powers AI voices that don't sound like AI voices, like this one. |
| 0:05.1 | Eleven Labs voice agents are used to handle everything from customer support queries to appointment scheduling. |
| 0:10.8 | Get started for free at 11 Labs.io slash Atlantic. |
| 0:15.0 | Music Hello, and welcome to the David Fromm show. |
| 0:29.1 | I'm David Frum, a staff writer at the Atlantic. |
| 0:31.8 | My guest this week will be Jeffrey Cabas Service, a great historian of American life in the 1960s and 1970s. |
| 0:39.5 | And we'll talk about how the shocking recent events in American life, the tumults and the threats of violence, |
| 0:45.3 | compare and contrast with America's experience of polarization and violence in the 1960s and |
| 0:50.5 | 1970s. In the space of the years from 1968 to 1972, we saw the assassinations |
| 0:55.6 | of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and attempted assassination against George Wallace. How does |
| 1:00.7 | our time compare to theirs what is different in what is done and how people react? Before my |
| 1:06.8 | conversation with Jeffrey Kaviservis, I want to offer some few preliminary thoughts, |
| 1:12.0 | but a way to feel about the dangers that everyone who cares about free institutions |
| 1:16.4 | must be feeling during this Trump era. Every week, it seems, brings some new outrage, |
| 1:21.2 | some new attack on the essential institutions of a free society by the president and his supporters. |
| 1:26.4 | And it's easy and maybe even natural to succumb to some kind of feeling of despair, |
| 1:32.0 | hopelessness. |
| 1:32.9 | What can be done? |
| 1:33.8 | What if anything will matter? |
| 1:35.5 | So I'm not here exactly with a message, an action plan. |
| 1:38.6 | That's not my topic this week. |
| 1:40.1 | I want to instead talk a little bit about the psychological mood we should bring to the crisis of our times. |
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