‘It splintered our sense of reality’: how JFK’s assassination spawned 60 years of conspiracy theories
On 22 November 2021, a crowd of 100 or so people gathered in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, the site of John F Kennedy’s assassination 58 years before. They were convinced that JFK’s son, John F Kennedy Jr, was about to return, to take his place as vice-president alongside a reinstated Donald Trump, to battle the satanic paedophile cabal that had taken over Washington. Some even waved “Trump-Kennedy 2024” banners. Never mind that JFK Jr died in a plane crash in 1999: these people were credulous enough to believe the QAnon conspiracy theory.
When JFK Jr failed to materialise, they promised he would appear at the Rolling Stones’ concert in Dallas that night. Some also reckoned JFK Jr would be accompanied by other not-really-dead figures, including Robin Williams, Michael Jackson and a 104-year-old JFK.
Inevitably, none of this came to pass. But if you wanted to trace the origins of our conspiracy-addled times, Dealey Plaza on 22 November 1963 might well be ground zero. The assassination of JFK was probably the genesis of the post-truth, fake-news, “don’t trust the experts”, “do your own research” brand of media scepticism and alternative information ecosystems.
Of course, conspiracy theories existed before the assassination of JFK. But it was one of the first events to unfold in real time in the age of mass media. The public heard about it as it happened, via live news and radio broadcasts. They followed its immediate aftermath, from the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby on live television two days later, to the non-stop television coverage of Kennedy’s funeral, to the commemorative magazines.
It wasn’t just the death of a president: JFK’s assassination 60 years ago also represents the death of a whole postwar worldview of security, stability and certainty. To some, it was a moment that “splintered our sense of reality”, says Clare Birchall, a professor of contemporary culture at King’s College London, who has written extensively on conspiracy culture. She cites the postmodern theorist Fredric Jameson, who wrote about how the event represented the “coming of age of the whole media culture”, and the novelist Don DeLillo, who once said it had led to “a much more deeply unsettled feeling about our grip on reality”.
Part of the reason the assassination was so different – so disturbing, so conspiracy-theory-friendly – was that, on the face of it, events just didn’t add up. How could it be possible that Oswald, an apparent nobody with an old sniper rifle, had pulled off such a crime single-handedly? The Warren commission, investigating the assassination, ruled out other possibilities in 1964, but rather than putting the issue to bed it only fuelled more questions. Why did Oswald claim he was a “patsy”? Why did Ruby really kill Oswald? Who else wanted Kennedy dead? The mafia? The communists? The military-industrial complex? The CIA? Lyndon Johnson, JFK’s vice-president and successor? All of them?
It was the beginning of a move in the US “away from conspiracy theories about the external threats of communist Russia and towards a more inward-looking suspicion about one’s own government”, says Birchall. As the 1960s and 70s unfolded, there were further reasons to distrust official narratives: the Vietnam war, Watergate and the US’s shady interventions in foreign countries from Chile to Indonesia, not to mention the assassinations of Martin Luther King and JFK’s brother Bobby. As it happened, many of these did involve conspiracies.
“On the campus cultural left, it became an item of faith that your government is lying to you,” says Peter Knight, a professor of American studies at the University of Manchester and an expert on Kennedy conspiracy culture. To be paranoid was to be sane. “People were concerned about the military-industrial complex, the overreach of the security state and, of course, the basic sense that, after all those assassinations in the 1960s, there was something really fishy going on.” According to the Pew Research Centre, public trust in the federal government during Kennedy’s presidency was about 75%; by the middle of the 1970s, it was below 40%. Knight says: “My argument is that the assassination of Kennedy comes to function as a kind of misremembered primal scene, that everything is, in retrospect, pinned back on to the assassination as the moment when it all went horribly wrong.”
The 1970s was when the real Kennedy conspiracy theorising began, Knight says. The infamous Zapruder film, a bystander’s 26-second home movie that caught the assassination in gory detail, was first shown on public television in March 1975. That year, the US Senate opened a new inquiry into cover-ups within the CIA, the FBI and other government agencies, including their conduct in the Kennedy assassination and the Warren commission. That led, in 1976, to a fresh inquiry, the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, which concluded, in 1979, that Oswald was probably not the only culprit and that the assassination probably was a conspiracy. However, it failed to name any accomplices and sealed many of its findings for 50 years, which didn’t exactly put an end to the speculation.
Indeed, conjecture about the assassination became a national pastime. The elements of the mystery became part of the language: the grassy knoll, the magic bullet, the second shooter. Everyone became an armchair expert on ballistics and exit wounds; everyone got the gag in Annie Hall, released in 1977, when Woody Allen breaks off from a sexual conquest because he can’t get the assassination off his mind: “But it doesn’t make any sense; he drove past the book depository …”
As well as the birthplace of modern conspiracy, the Kennedy assassination can be seen as the birthplace of the conspiracy theory industry. Within three years of the event, Mark Lane – a lifelong assassination investigator – had published Rush to Judgment, which questioned the Warren commission’s findings. It stayed on the bestseller lists for two years. More than 1,000 books on the subject have been published since. It soon became apparent that there was more money to be made arguing in favour of a conspiracy than the opposite.
We have had a fresh instalment this month. Paul Landis, one of Kennedy’s bodyguards in the motorcade that day, is “breaking his silence” with a memoir: The Final Witness. Landis adds another breadcrumb to the conspiracy trail, contending that he removed a bullet from the back seat of Kennedy’s limousine – possibly the “magic bullet” that killed JFK and wounded the Texas governor, John Connally Jr – and later put it on a stretcher in the hospital, where it was found. Why Landis has waited so long and whether or not his memory is accurate are yet more questions that muddy the waters.
The event has also occupied the minds of novelists and film-makers. It fed into the golden age of 70s conspiracy movies such as The Conversation, The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. It has been tackled by heavyweight writers including DeLillo, Norman Mailer, JG Ballard, James Ellroy and Thomas Pynchon. DeLillo’s 1988 novel, Libra, is particularly insightful on the nature of conspiracism and postmodern narratives. As well as a speculative character study of Oswald, it imagines a CIA agent going through the archives decades later, trying to make sense of the reams of information.
This is the conspiracist instinct in a nutshell, DeLillo suggests: conjuring meaning out of what would otherwise be a chaotic, random world as a bulwark against despair. It is also, he implies, the function of artists. “It’s possible I wouldn’t have become the kind of writer I am if it weren’t for the assassination,” he once told an interviewer.
These currents combined in 1991 to give us a pop-culture moment that turbocharged the conspiracism: Oliver Stone’s JFK. Stone was one of those 60s kids for whom the Kennedy assassination was “where it all went wrong”. He didn’t so much do his own research as turn to the dubious research of the investigative reporter Jim Marrs and the New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison. At the climax of the three-hour movie, Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, presents his findings in a courtroom, detailing an elaborate conspiracy plot and replaying the Zapruder footage of Kennedy’s head being torn open again and again, to prove that there was a second shooter.
It is powerful, compelling cinema – and total nonsense. Garrison’s attempt to prosecute Clay Shaw, whom he accused of being part of the conspiracy, had failed to stick in 1969. Stone altered the facts and added fictional characters to make his own story hold together – but it has been widely, conclusively debunked.
Nevertheless, the public lapped it up. JFK became a hit, earning more than $200m worldwide and winning several awards, including two Oscars. Its impact prompted the 1992 JFK Records Act, which directed the US’s national archive office to collect all official records of the assassination and release them to the public, although some documents were not revealed until last year.
By this time, a whole JFK community had established itself. “They thought of themselves not as conspiracy theorists, but as serious assassination researchers,” says Birchall. At what point the latter tipped into the former is difficult to pinpoint, but they gradually evolved into a subculture. Knight recalls attending JFK assassination conferences in the early 1990s: “Sociologically, it was weirdly like academia, in the worst way: people endlessly debating ever-more-detailed specialisms and it making no difference to the real world.”
As it became more of a fringe concern, the JFK conspiracy began to be merged with others: government cover-ups about UFOs; secret military programmes; paranormal phenomena. The movement went mainstream in 1993 with The X-Files, in which David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson investigated all manner of paranormal phenomena and official shadiness, making the enterprise look serious-minded, heroic and cool.
In the 21st century, though, everything began to flip. The internet hastened the rise of a new breed of conspiracist – and of conspiracist enterprise. Chatrooms and social media helped people spread and monetise their content, while rejection by the mainstream media became a badge of honour. There were fresh conspiracies to examine, from 9/11, to renewed claims that the moon landings were faked, to endless speculation about the “murder” of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Alex Jones’s website Infowars alleged on the day of the 9/11 attacks that they were a government-instigated “false flag” operation, just as Jones would claim were many other atrocities, from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, in which 26 people, 20 of them children, were killed. That last lie led to some of the victims’ parents successfully suing him for $1.5bn in 2022.
By this time, most left-leaning conspiracists and X-Files fans had got off the bus. Like many 21st-century conspiracists, Jones also embraced homophobia, xenophobia, white supremacism and racism – such as the “Obama wasn’t born in the US” conspiracy theory. Conspiracism had become predominantly a rightwing concern. In the Kennedy era, the left was suspicious of an “invisible government” secretly tipping the scales against them; now, the right denounces the “deep state” for doing the same to them.
Then came the Covid pandemic, which brought together what the author Naomi Klein calls “the far out and the far right”. Anti‑vaccination movements bled into other conspiracies: lockdown mandates, 5G signals, vaguely antisemitic “globalists” and “elites”, all of whom were supposedly part of the “great reset”.
It has been a parallel story with QAnon. Despite its far‑fetched theories and string of failed predictions, QAnon, which originated on online message boards, has prevailed by absorbing other conspiracy theories, including the second coming of JFK Jr.
Covid prompted what the journalist Anna Merlan describes as “conspiracy singularity”. “All of a sudden, these conspiracy movements that seemed pretty disparate had a common cause,” she says. “A lot of people saw an opportunity to make money and to get attention by rowing in the same direction. That’s proved remarkably durable; they have been able to jump to new topics as a group much more frequently.” Whereas, in the past, conspiracy communities might have been discrete, in the internet era “they’re all in the bathtub together floating around”, says Merlan. “You’re much more likely to grab someone else’s cool toy as it floats by and give it a try.”
“The idea that conspiracy theories can be read as a challenge to power is no longer salient,” Birchall adds. “They might still gesture to genuine grievances or injustices, but they are ultimately emptied out of any critical force today. They have become a weapon within proxy wars – culture wars – often repeated by those in power.”
Rather than holding politicians to account, conspiracism has become a political tool. Witness “the big lie” – Donald Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Even though Trump’s allegations of voter fraud and foul play have been proved baseless, 63% of Republicans polled in March still believed in the big lie. Other election losers have attempted a similar ploy, from Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to the Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
All of which brings us wearily full circle to the latest politician to weaponise conspiracy theories: Robert F Kennedy Jr, a nephew of JFK and a son of Bobby. In his recent presidential campaign, RFK Jr has gone even further than other conspiracists, claiming, for example, that Covid “is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese”. In interviews, he has run the gamut of false conspiracies: 5G technology posing health risks, vaccines causing autism, antidepressants causing mass shootings. It is as if Kennedy’s surname confers not only brand recognition but also some authority on the subject of conspiracies.
Needless to say, he has also weighed in on his uncle’s assassination. In May, RFK Jr told Fox News there had been “a 60-year cover-up” and that he had “strong evidence” that the CIA was involved in JFK’s murder. He alleged that his father, who was the US attorney general at the time, even called the CIA and asked: “Did you do this?” “It was my father’s first instinct that the agency had killed his brother,” he said.
Even if he is wrong about everything else, he could well be correct about this. But who would believe him? Who would believe anyone, whatever evidence they presented? Whoever killed Kennedy can’t have imagined how the event would reverberate through history, or the extent of the collateral damage.
