Word: madman
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...Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., such arguments are anything but new. He can imagine similar criticism in Spain in the 1490s: "Why in hell are Ferdinand and Isabella giving all that money to that madman Columbus when they could build a good nunnery or a hostel or something?" The present answer to that question is a matter of hard political reality-which is another way of saying, national will. Space has seized the nation's imagination; other causes so far, have not. Dollars not saved in space would not automatically be allocated to poverty, or cities, or air-pollution control...
Ruby himself said that the moment of the killing was a "blur," and he gave a madman's mixture of reasons for the murder: because of his grief at the loss of the President ("I loved that man"), because he did not want Jackie Kennedy to be forced to return to Dallas for Oswald's trial, because he had read a "heartbreaking letter" to Caroline Kennedy in a newspaper that morning. At one point he blurted to cops and federal agents after his arrest: "I guess I just had to show the world a Jew has guts...
There are no such guarantees for CB arms, Meselson maintains. Although they are not cheap now, they will be once the pioneering stage is completed. The result, he suggests, could be disastrous. "Today, a madman in America might climb to the top of a tower for a shooting spree, or put a bomb in an airplane. But if CB weaponry were conventional, maniacs would constitute an enormous threat. An insane man could wipe out New York City...
...murderers in history ever spread so much terror as the madman who roved the Boston area from June 1962 to January 1964. The headlines called him the Boston Strangler, but the killer did not garrote all of his 13 victims. One 85-year-old woman became so frightened when he manhandled her that she died of a heart attack; he killed a 23-year-old Boston University graduate student by stabbing her 22 times, carefully spacing 18 of the wounds into a perfect bull's-eye design on her left breast...
...Madman in the Tower" explores the forces at work in the life of the killer, pieces together the significant details of his hours leading up to the rampage, reconstructs the multiple crime, and notes the strange role of capricious fate in placing victims within range...