Donald Morrison: JFK’s assassination, the mother of all conspiracy theories, haunts us still

If you were alive 60 years ago next Wednesday, you no doubt remember exactly what you were doing at 12:30 p.m. Central Time, 1:30 p.m. Eastern. That’s the moment John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas.

The event did not just imprint itself on the soul of a nation. It also inspired more books, movies and conspiracy theories than perhaps any assassination plot in history, from Julius Caesar’s through Abraham Lincoln’s and beyond. Yet this one has never really been resolved.

In a new book, Paul Landis — a Secret Service officer in Kennedy’s motorcade — discloses that he inspected the presidential limousine that day and found the famous “third bullet” that ultimately killed JFK. Landis said he placed it on Kennedy’s stretcher at Parkland Hospital.

But in the emergency room hubbub, it somehow ended up on the stretcher of Texas Gov. John Connally, who was wounded while riding the front seat. The bullet was then assumed to have passed through both men.

Impossible, says Landis. He found the slug embedded in the limo’s back-seat upholstery. Which suggests the shot came from in front of the car, not behind, and couldn’t have been the same one that wounded Connally. In that case, there must have been at least two gunmen, not one. All this contradicts the official Warren Commission report, which said Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Landis’ disclosure has not received much attention — probably because there was another death that day in Dallas: Americans’ faith in government, civil servants and facts.

JFK’s murder is the mother of all conspiracy theories, and its children are many. Since 1963, we’ve had eruptions of moon-landing doubters, 9/11 truthers, anti-vaxxers and, lately, election deniers.

None of those mysteries feeds our paranoia quite like the Kennedy affair. A 2013 Gallup poll found that 61 percent of Americans distrusted the Warren Commission’s findings. Indeed, that panel — led by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren — ignored some evidence, avoided some witnesses and seemed determined to blame Oswald alone.

The commission also ruled out more obvious suspects — including Cuba (angry over the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion two years earlier), the Soviet Union (angry over the Cuban Missile Crisis a year before) and wealthy right-wing segregationists (angry perpetually over Kennedy’s economic and civil rights leanings).

Nonetheless, a more thorough 1976-79 congressional investigation didn’t do much better in nailing down those loose ends. The Warren verdict persists, with no official plans to revisit it.

And yet, suspicions nag. Presidents from Lyndon Johnson onward have declined to make public the 13,000 or so pages of assassination-related documents kept secret in the National Archives. Over the past two years, President Biden finally has finally released nearly all of them.

The trove includes tantalizing nuggets — like transcripts of phone calls between LBJ and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover discussing a possible second shooter — but nothing definitive. You can judge for yourself at archives.gov/research/jfk/release2023.

One conclusion, I believe, is gathering credibility: JFK would be appalled at how sloppy our thinking has become.

He was a president who read a lot. Speed-read, actually. And not just briefing papers, but also newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals. Plus, piles of books — thick ones, about history, politics and diplomacy. The president especially liked murder mysteries, in which evidence is the key to understanding. He would question aides with the forensic tenacity of a Sherlock Holmes or a Hercule Poirot.

That mastery of fact and logic was reflected in his decision-making style. If the evidence before him contradicted his hunches, or the situation on the ground shifted, he would change his mind. As he did over détente with Moscow after the missile crisis and accommodation with Havana after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, favoring both.

Maybe it’s time we changed our minds as well — started reading more, avoiding the brain-poison of social media and mastering Occam’s Razor. That method of analysis, named for a 14th century English thinker, posits that the most straightforward explanation is usually the correct one.

We could also honor JFK’s memory by holding conspiracy theories to higher standards of plausibility and not believing something just because it fits our expectations. Or our politics.

The golden days of Camelot and the New Frontier died forever on Nov. 22, 1963. But if there is one gift, one lesson we can claim from the all-too-brief life of our most intellectually rigorous modern president, it is this: Greatness requires the ability to think straight.