Dec. 6, 1963 - Congressional Republicans deplored today what they called attempts to blame “hatred” in this country for the assassination of President Kennedy. They suggested that if any belief was responsible, it was communism. A statement issued by the House Republican Policy Committee criticized “efforts to make Americans generally feel guilty.” The committee’s 36 members include the GOP leadership. “We are told that hate was the assassin that struck down the President,” the statement said. “If it was hatred that moved the assassin, that hatred was bred by the teachings of communism. All the evidence so far presented affirms this.” Sen. Milward Simpson (R-Wy.) said on the floor that persons seeking “political advantage from warping the uncontestable truth” were trying to blame “rightists and conservatives.” “Unless the protagonists of the hate and collective guilt theories have a different set of facts than have been made available to me,” Sen. Simpson said, “it was not a right-wing fanatic who killed John F. Kennedy. It was a single kill-crazy Communist who was acting to the dictates of his own unexplainable left-wing dementia.” The man who was accused of the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a self-declared Marxist. Government officials who have viewed the available information say there is every reason to think that Oswald acted on his own, not in any conspiracy or on behalf of any movement. The House GOP statement today warned against letting guilt and doubt become a “device of political debate.” “There is guilt,” the committee said, “but it is not American guilt. It is the guilt of the murderer. There is hatred, fanaticism, and bigotry in the world, but America is not its source nor loyal Americans its practitioners.”
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