Word: public
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Cases of mysterious disappearances and controversial verdicts, of marvelous disasters and battlefield riddles, of private scandals and public tragedies - all can live on and on. They offer fields for debate long after the studies, investigations, decisions and acts that ostensibly closed them...
Footnote-minded historians, to be sure, try to keep alive even the most obscure human misadventures. Yet certain cases thrive quite apart from the historical impulse that might keep them stirring in the public imagination. It is not mere fascination with history that has kept the British forever trying to solve the murders by Jack the Ripper in 1888, or Americans perennially intrigued with the fate of Amelia Earhart, the aviation heroine whose plane disappeared in the Pacific in 1937. Various speculations have made butcherous Jack out to be a perverted prince of British royalty or a deranged midwife...
Apparently when a personality possesses certain compelling traits, when an event carries some content of morality or ideology or suspense or horror or romance, some ambiguity, even an engaging murkiness, he, she or it is claimed by the public and used as a source of everything from mythmaking to sheer entertainment. The phenomenon provides glimpses of the subtle human chemistries from which folklore is manufactured. To know how such mythmaking works is to be freed of all surprise when dramatic events evoke numberless theories to account for them or produce songs, plays and novels to celebrate, rehash and elaborate them...
Assassinations of high public figures almost automatically become cases that are never closed. There was no way that the Warren Commission report could have put to rest the John F. Kennedy murder case, or that the conviction of James Earl Ray could have concluded the case of Martin Luther King Jr. As Jimmy Carter's action in the Mudd case shows, even the assassination of Lincoln was not a closed case...
...sheer public craving for romance has kept alive the case of Anastasia, daughter of Czar Nicholas II, who may or may not have escaped the Bolshevik assassins in 1918; undying interest has given wide hearings to several claimants to the identity of Anastasia. The divergent ideological fevers of mid-century America guaranteed that the Alger Hiss perjury case would stay effectively open right along with the case of the executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The arguments in both trials are still thundering forth in such books as Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case by Allen Weinstein (against Hiss...