SIGHTINGS



JFK Assassination
Named US Crime
Of The Century

By Arthur Spiegelman
Link
12-15-99
 
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Forget Watergate, the Lindbergh kidnapping or the O.J. Simpson case.
 
Americans think the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy was the crime that had the most impact on the country in the last 100 years, according to a new poll by Zogby International, released Tuesday.
 
The JFK assassination was ranked as the crime of the century by 36.5 percent of 1,006 adults interviewed by Zogby for the on-line service <http://APBNews.comAPBNews.com, a Web site devoted to crime news.
 
Twenty-four percent said the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in which 168 people died in the worst act of terrorism ever committed on American soil was the most important crime of the century, giving it second place in the survey.
 
The 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr -- an event that triggered riots as well as profound soul searching -- was in third place with 11.2 percent of the vote.
 
The 1994-95 O.J. Simpson murder case, which raised questions about the fairness of the American judicial system, was a surprising fourth with 9.7 percent of those surveyed saying the sensational case that was televised live across the country had the most impact. (In a controversial decision, the former football star was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife and her friend.)
 
Meanwhile, 5.3 percent gave fifth place to the Watergate break-in of 1972 the crime that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation, the first time in American history that a sitting president had ever resigned.
 
With 1.6 percent of those surveyed saying it was the most important crime, the atomic secrets spy trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 was ranked sixth.
 
Meanwhile, the crime that was actually dubbed ``The Crime of the Century,'' the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby in 1932, ranked seventh with 1.3 percent of the vote.
 
The St. Valentine's Day massacre of gangsters in Chicago in 1929 ranked eighth with one per cent of the vote. In ninth place with .7 percent was serial killer Ted Bundy's murder spree starting in 1973; and in 10th place, with .6 percent of the vote, was the assassination of President William McKinley, who was killed in 1901.
 
Marshall Davidson, the chairman and CEO of APB Multimedia, said the poll reflected ``the profound impact that crime has had on the collective memoryof the American public. The assassination of JFK and the tragedy in Oklahoma City, although separated by 30 years, have profoundly affected the lives of countless Americans.''


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