Sixty years on, has JFK conspiracy theory run out of steam?

Sixty years ago this week, a nasty loner with a cheap rifle changed the course of history. At 12.30pm on November 22, 1963, president John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas as his open-topped limousine moved through an echoey, wedge-shaped city park called Dealey Plaza.

Most witnesses heard three shots. One witness saw a gunman aim and fire the third from an upper window of the Texas School Book Depository. Before police could seal the building off, a 24-year-old depository employee – an ex-marine named Lee Harvey Oswald – left via the front door. Police found his abandoned rifle on the sixth floor. Near the corner window, in a sniper’s nest made of book cartons, they found three spent shells.

Out on the street, Oswald took a cab to his suburban apartment, where he changed clothes and grabbed his revolver. Leaving on foot, he encountered a police officer named J. D. Tippit. Oswald shot him dead in cold blood.

Minutes later, looking breathless and dishevelled, he entered a nearby theatre, slipping mid-session into a movie called War Is Hell. Police were called. The film stopped and the lights went up. Police moved into the aisle. Oswald stood up and said, “Well, it’s all over now.” He punched a police officer in the face and drew his pistol, but was pummelled to the floor before he could commit his third murder of the day. “I protest this police brutality!” he cried, while being hauled to his feet.

Two days later Oswald was murdered in custody, during a botched transfer from police headquarters to the county jail. On live TV, in black and white, he was led by police into a crowded parking garage. A Dallas strip-club owner named Jack Ruby lunged into frame with a loaded revolver and shot Oswald fatally in the stomach.

Ruby thought he would become an American hero when he knocked Oswald off. But, far from doing his nation a favour, Ruby condemned it to a nightmare future of denialism and conspiracy thinking. Given time, Americans might have accepted the fact a lone nut had shot their president. But two lone nuts within two days was hard to swallow, even in America, even in Dallas.

In the six decades since Kennedy’s murder, opinion polls have consistently shown that more than 50 per cent of Americans believe there was a conspiracy behind it. Sometimes the figure has climbed above 80 per cent. Don DeLillo, in his tremendous novel Libra (1988), called the assassination “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century”. The crime “consumed the culture”, DeLillo has said; it ushered in America’s “age of paranoia”.

We’re all still living in that age. In May 2016 Donald Trump set the tone for his impending presidency by offering his own hot take on the Kennedy assassination. At the time Trump had one last rival for the Republican nomination: Ted Cruz. Appearing on Fox News, Trump ludicrously implied that Cruz’s father had been involved in Kennedy’s death. “I mean, what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the shooting?” Trump said. “It’s horrible!”

American conspiracy theory didn’t start with Kennedy’s assassination. There had been outbreaks of it before. After Pearl Harbour, assorted crackpots claimed the Japanese attack had been an American inside job. But the Kennedy assassination was something else. It produced an unending torrent of books, documentaries, feature films and official inquiries. In Libra, DeLillo called it “the data spew … an incredible haul of human utterance”.

Somewhere at the bottom of the data spew lies the still unfalsified verdict of the Warren Commission, the presidential inquiry established by Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s successor. Chaired by Earl Warren, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the commission concluded that Oswald alone had murdered Kennedy and Tippit, finding “no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy”.

But why did Oswald do it? The answer was elusive, concealed in the murk of his secretive and resentful personality. A self-styled Marxist and “student of philosophy”, Oswald defected to the Soviet Union at the age of 20. Three years later, having found the workers’ paradise to be a drab hellhole, he returned to America, bringing back a Russian-born wife, Marina, and a baby daughter named June.

Settling in Dallas, Oswald hatched a plan to assassinate an infamous local reactionary named Edwin Walker. He mail-ordered a $20 rifle. One night in April 1963, he stood in an alley behind Walker’s house and fired a shot at his head through a lit-up window. The bullet glanced off the sill and missed Walker by inches. The case was still unsolved seven months later when Oswald used the same rifle to kill Kennedy.

“Had it not been for the prominence of the victim,” Warren wrote in his memoirs, “the case against Oswald could have been tried in two or three days with little likelihood of any but one result.” Factually, the case against Oswald was open and shut. Spiritually, it felt less convincing. For many people, Oswald just wasn’t a big-enough answer.

“If such a nonentity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth,” as Norman Mailer wrote in his masterly book Oswald’s Tale (1995), “then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd.”

In 1966 the first conspiratorial bestsellers about Kennedy’s murder appeared: books with titles like Rush to Judgment, Whitewash and Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? Their authors were bloggers before their time – citizen researchers armed with typewriters rather than keyboards. Seeking an answer less absurd than Oswald, they only succeeded in imagining greater absurdities of their own.

But if their arguments were flimsy, their timing was excellent. When the first wave of Kennedy conspiracism broke, public discontent with the Vietnam War was peaking. The government’s lies about Vietnam had popularised the concept of the “credibility gap”. In that climate of distrust the early conspiracy books thrived.

A generation later, a feature film broke new ground in the obfuscation of Kennedy’s murder. Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) did more than any other work in the conspiratorial canon to convert the historical truth about the assassination into a paranoid cartoon.

The movie’s key speech was delivered by Joe Pesci, playing a jittery hoodlum who supposedly has the inside word on the assassination. When he’s asked the money question – who killed Kennedy? – Pesci scoffs, as if the question were laughably naive. “It’s a mystery!” he yodels. “It’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! The f—ing shooters don’t even know!”

That’s what conspiracy theory had to offer after 30 years on the case. In the world of fact, the question of who killed Kennedy was as answered as a question can be. Stone had no better answer, but he didn’t like the established one, so he plugged his ears and threw a three-hour tantrum about it. His film turned the most thoroughly documented case of guilt in human history into a pseudo-riddle, a non-mystery wrapped in a choking cloud of piffle. The ultimate hedunnit had somehow become the ultimate whodunnit.

Besides being factually slapdash, Stone’s film was morally deranged. It made a cinematic hero out of Jim Garrison, the real-life New Orleans DA who had in 1969 orchestrated what The New York Times called “one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of American jurisprudence”.

In Stone’s film Kevin Costner plays Garrison as if he were the nicer twin brother of Jesus Christ. In reality Garrison was a sinister demagogue who prosecuted an innocent man for conspiring to murder Kennedy, based on evidence that barely qualified as negligible.

The innocent man was a New Orleans civic leader named Clay Shaw. Shaw was a closeted gay man – and that, for Garrison, was reason enough to make him the scapegoat in a Kennedy show trial. In Garrison’s demented view Kennedy’s murder had been “a homosexual thrill-killing”, a gay conspiracy involving Shaw, Oswald and Ruby.

The jury rejected Garrison’s homophobic conspiracy theories, taking less than an hour to find Shaw not guilty. But Shaw never recovered from the trial. His life and reputation were destroyed.

Not all the books and films inspired by Kennedy’s assassination have been bad. There have been good books, too, even great ones. The best of them have demystified the crime in the only sane way it can be demystified, by clarifying our picture of the man who committed it.

Priscilla McMillan’s Marina and Lee (1977), written with input from Oswald’s widow, showed how Oswald’s itch to gun down public figures was prefigured in his violent abuse of Marina. Jean Davison’s Oswald’s Game (1983) made a similar effort to ground Oswald’s crimes in his personal history.

Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale drew on both those works but added the x-factor of Mailer’s manic literary flair. Part of the book’s greatness lay in the fact that writing it made Mailer change his mind. To begin with, he believed the conspiracy theories. Having studied Oswald’s life, he was forced to conclude “that Lee had the character to kill Kennedy, and that he probably did it alone”.

Along with DeLillo’s Libra, Mailer’s book ranks as the finest literary work about Kennedy’s murder. Both writers brought their A-games to the case. They understood that the assassination, when intelligently approached, is one of the richest subjects in American history.

The greatest assassination book of all, though, is a book with few literary virtues, but huge value as a repository of fact. Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History (2007) is 1600 pages long, weighs almost three kilos and comes with a PDF containing 1000 pages of end notes. Bugliosi’s obsessive masterwork embodies the weird inexhaustibility of the assassination – the open-and-shut story that nobody has ever quite got to the end of.

As the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s death approached I expected a deluge of tie-in books and documentaries pushing bold new theories about the case. That has always happened before, on all the big anniversaries. This time the anniversary will be marked by some solid historical documentaries, including JFK: One Day in America (Disney+) and Kennedy (History Channel). But the only significant piece of conspiratorial product on offer is JFK: What the Doctors Saw (Paramount+), which rehashes material that students of the case have known about for decades.

Otherwise, the conspiracy industry has fallen unusually silent this time around. The silence is telling. It suggests that JFK conspiracy theory is finally running out of steam.

On the internet hardier assassinologists continue the fight, like soldiers who haven’t heard the war is over. But in mainstream culture the heyday of Kennedy conspiracism ended long ago. The great wave has receded, leaving behind nothing worthwhile. Its main achievement was to erode the culture’s sense of reality, helping to create a political climate in which contempt for objective fact has become dangerously routine.

It’s been said that the existence of a JFK conspiracy is the one thing all Americans agree on. There’s an alarming core of truth in that wisecrack. At least half of America believes something for which no good evidence has ever materialised. You can see why this belief persists, given all the noise the case has generated. Where there has been so much smoke, there must surely be some fire. But that’s what conspiracy theory is: smoke without fire.

David Free hosts a podcast about the Kennedy assassination called Ghosts of Dallas.

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