Death Of President Research Articles

REACTIONS TO THE PRESIDENT'S ASSASSINATION AND CHANGES IN PHILOSOPHIES OF HUMAN NATURE.

30 college students who had answered the Philosophies of Human Nature Scale 14 mo. earlier retook the scale, along with a questionnaire assessing reactions to the President's death. Those Ss who agreed with Kennedy's policies and who felt a “great personal loss” showed less favorable views of human nature at the time of the post-assassination testing. Those less in agreement and less concerned showed no such change. Followup testing 3 mo. after the first retesting indicated that the disillusionment with human nature was apparently a temporary one.

The Objectivity-Subjectivity Trap

* news swept through my university that President Kennedy had been shot and lay critically wounded in a Dallas hospital, one professor reacted with a lame attempt at a joke. Well, he said, the assailant must have been a Republican. believe professor was moved but could not find words to express his emotion. hour later, after President had died, three of my freshman students came up hall with leaden faces and asked whether was going to hold class. said not if they didn't feel like it, and they nodded their heads solemnly, one boy saying I'll put an announcement on board for you. A few minutes later a young professor, with whom had earlier arranged to play handball, came into my office saying, I don't feel like playing. understood his feeling and accepted it, although felt like smashing something against a wall and would have preferred to play. As we sat there, noted that flag outside had been lowered to half mast, fifteen minutes after announcement of President's death. The young professor said, An empty ritual. said thought it was a good thingit spoke a feeling truly active at moment, that needed public expression. Looks ghoulish, he said. He could not admit perfection of that symbol, flag flying at wrong height, grotesquely. With bitterness he said: When Roosevelt died, was playing tennis. This time was lecturing on A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Death of President Beneš

BY the passing of Dr. Eduard Beneš on September 3 at the age of sixty-four, Czechoslovakia loses its former president, and the world loses a cultured and learned man who had striven for the welfare of all mankind during the past forty years. Born in the Bohemian village of Kožlany on May 28, 1884, Beneš studied philosophy, philology and sociology at Prague and later at Dijon, where his thesis was "Le probleme autrichien et la question tcheque". Beneš then spent a short time in London and Berlin before returning to Prague, where he attracted T. G. Masaryk's attention. In 1915 Beneš escaped to Geneva, and with Masaryk and Stefánik (a Slovak astronomer who became an air force general and Czechoslovak War Minister) organised Czech resistance to the Central Powers. Beneš became Czechoslovak Foreign Minister of the first provisional Government, and after the republic was established in October 1918, he retained that post in successive administrations until he succeeded Masaryk as president in 1935. His work became more arduous with the rise of Nazism in Germany, and Beneš had soon to face another exile. Returning in 1945 as president of liberated Czechoslovakia, he was confronted with greater problems than before, since war and occupation had brought more distress than the First World War. The strain of post-war anxieties, the events of February last and Jan Masaryk's suicide, deeply affected him. President Beneš, who had always maintained an interest in learning and culture (especially in the social sciences) made his last public speech on April 7, at the sexcentenary celebrations of the University of Prague (see Nature, May 1, p. 670). Among the exhibits in connexion with these celebrations were several items associated with Benes' academic life, including the original Dijon thesis. Since February, President and Mme. Beneš had lived in their country house at Ústi Sezimovo in south Bohemia and had taken no part in public affairs, although he did not resign from the presidency until June 7. Like the Masaryks, Benes was a 'great European' with wide vision, and though his work for greater understanding among peoples seems recently to have been in vain, he has shown mankind the way.