Interview: Lindsay Porter

Over the centuries these brutal killings have become benchmarks in history and have inspired generations of playwrights, historians and film-makers.

Assassination, whether it's the removal of tyrants or the so-called state-sanctioned "decapitation strikes", has always been part of man's struggle for power. But do high-profile murders of political leaders change history, and what is their legacy?

These are just two of the questions explored in Lindsay Porter's new book Assassination – A History of Political Murder, which examines the different ways that murder has been used as a political tool.

Porter, an author and historian researching the conspiracies of the French Revolution at York University, focuses on famous cases including Caesar, Thomas Becket and JFK, as well as revolutionaries like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa.

The murder of political leaders is, by its very nature, a brutal and Machiavellian business. Some, like Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat who was stabbed in his bathtub, are overtly political, while others, such as Kennedy's become mired in conspiracy.

So what was Porter's interest in events that have been raked over many times before? "I'm particularly interested in how people get ideas and how they act on them and assassination is basically an extreme version of that," she explains. "I started with America and why the US has had so many assassination attempts on its presidents and that got me thinking about what political motives there are for murdering political leaders. I started with Caesar and began hopping through history all the way up to Kennedy, because I wanted to see if there were any connections and if so, what they can tell us about these moments in history and society."

She believes that public perceptions of assassins have changed. "In the 19th-century, the assassin was often portrayed as a political hero, the idea of getting rid of an unjust ruler was seen as something heroic and that view still persists. Although it depends what side of the political divide you're on, because the opposite view is that assassins are nothing more than terrorists."

If the image of assassins has changed then so, too, have their methods. "Right up until the introduction of dynamite, assassins had to get close to their victims which meant they usually had to use knives. But the invention of guns and explosives meant they could target their victim without facing them."

While assassins gain instant notoriety, their victims often become sanctified. Porter believes that assassination can sometimes prove to be a good career move for the person killed. "Thomas Becket was a controversial figure during his lifetime and in many ways wasn't very likeable, but he was canonised after his death and became this saint-like figure. And when President Kennedy died, you had this myth of Camelot and his reputation was almost totally re-invented."

Assassinations often occur during times of political uncertainty and social upheaval, as the deaths of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King showed in America during the 60s. For many people, the "what if" school of thought – the idea that the world would be a different place had the numerous attempts to kill Hitler been successful and the Kennedy assassination failed – is an enticing one.

But Porter believes it is misleading. Although the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand triggered a series of events that led to the First World War, it was a case of when, not if, there was going to be a war.

Another fallacy, she says, is the belief that assassins have the power to change the course of history.

"I wanted to explore this, why someone chooses to assassinate a head of state and the idea that by removing one person you can bring about change. And I kept coming back to Benjamin Disraeli's quote after Abraham Lincoln's death that 'assassination has never changed the history of the world' and he was absolutely right, because when the head of state dies, the state inexorably rumbles on. The death of a president doesn't bring about the downfall of the government."

Assassination – A History of Political Murder, by Lindsay Porter, is published on February 22, by Thames & Hudson, priced 19.95.