After every assassination, the same questions seem to follow. How did this happen? Why wasn't it prevented? What warning signs did people miss?

From William McKinley in 1901 to John F. Kennedy in 1963, Ronald Reagan in 1981, and Shinzo Abe in 2022, each attack exposed vulnerabilities that suddenly seemed obvious in hindsight. Security systems changed. Procedures evolved. New lessons were learned.

But what if the deeper story isn't about the attacks themselves?

In this episode, we explore how societies learn from catastrophe, why institutions often become experts at preventing the last disaster, and what psychologists call the availability heuristic: our tendency to focus on the risks we can easily imagine while overlooking the ones we can't.

Because the future rarely arrives in the form we expect.

And sometimes the most important blind spots are hiding inside assumptions that feel perfectly reasonable today.

Attribution Notes:

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This, Again is written, produced, and hosted by Mallory Faust. 

Sources and Further Reading:

William McKinley

Merry, Robert W. President McKinley: Architect of the American Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Library of Congress – William McKinley Papers

Miller, Scott. The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century. New York: Random House, 2011.

John F. Kennedy

Blaine, Gerald, and Lisa McCubbin. The Kennedy Detail: JFK's Secret Service Agents Break Their Silence. New York: Gallery Books, 2010.

President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964.

National Archives:

Ronald Reagan

Wilber, Del Quentin. Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan. New York: Henry Holt, 2011.

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum

Shinzo Abe

BBC News – Shinzo Abe assassination coverage

https://www.bbc.com/news/62095447

National Police Agency of Japan

Psychology, Risk & Organizational Learning

Availability Heuristic

Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. "Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability." Cognitive Psychology 5, no. 2 (1973): 207–232.

https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9

High Reliability Organizations

Weick, Karl E., and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. Managing the Unexpected: Sustained Performance in a Complex World. 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015.

Publisher:

Normal Accident Theory

Perrow, Charles. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7srgf

Organizational Failure & Challenger

Vaughan, Diane. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo22781921.html

Horizon Scanning & Future Risk

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Enhancing Horizon Scanning and Foresight Capacity of the Federal Government. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2020.

Free Full Report:

Black Swan Events

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. 2nd ed. New York: Random House, 2010.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/176226/the-black-swan-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb/