Opinion | The true legacy of JFK’s assassination conspiracy theories

At one point, almost all Americans remembered exactly where they were when President John F. Kennedy was shot Nov. 22, 1963, 60 years ago today. There are now diminishingly few people who remember that day directly. But it turns out that the phenomenon of a “flashbulb memory” is not that reliable, anyway.

Like all traumatic events, the Kennedy assassination is surrounded by false memories. Many Americans claimed that they distinctly remember watching the shooting live on television, but the Zapruder footage — the shaky home movie that captured the shocking event — was not shown on prime-time American TV until 1975. Thus, the Kennedy assassination might not have changed history, but it changed how we experience it. Ultimately, the real significance of the event may be less the mushrooming of conspiracy beliefs and more the effects that endlessly rewatching the violent deaths of Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald have had on the American psyche at large.

Conspiracy theorists inserted the event into an entire alternate history, while journalists and those in the Kennedy circle created a mythical account of his presidency as Camelot. A generation of writers, artists and filmmakers — from Thomas Pynchon to Stephen King, Andy Warhol to Oliver Stone — were haunted by the atmosphere of celebrity, violence and secrecy surrounding the event. The collective effect was a crisis in “our trust in a coherent reality,” as the novelist Don DeLillo put it. Even if few people today are well versed in the arcane details of the case, the shooting seeped into everyday consciousness and language, from the “magic bullet” to the grassy knoll.

With hindsight, it is tempting to think that the assassination immediately opened the floodgates of popular modern conspiracism. In the first few years following the event, a handful of amateur detectives — an unlikely mixture of housewives, small-town lawyers, graduate students and other concerned citizens — began to pick holes in the Warren Commission report, the official inquiry that was released in 1964. Given what they saw as a failure of the authorities, assassination researchers felt it their duty to create an alternative CIA — a Committee to Investigate Assassinations. And the Warren Commission was indeed flawed. Although it provided a mountain of evidence to support its conclusion that Oswald alone had killed the president, it glossed over the fact that Oswald was already on the radar of the FBI and the CIA. It also failed to engage with the larger context of the Cold War and assassination attempts by U.S. intelligence agencies on foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro. 

The first wave of Kennedy assassination buffs insisted they were “just asking questions,” laying the groundwork for the mantra of conspiracy theorists today. However, what began with finding inconsistencies in the official version quickly developed into an alternative grand unified theory of recent history. People began to feel that everything was unravelling, and the event created an infinite regress of suspicion as the nation was rocked by the Pentagon Papers, COINTELPRO, and the Church Committee. Congress opened a new enquiry into the assassination in the mid-1970s, coming to the conclusion that there was indeed more than one gunman and hence a conspiracy. But these findings, too, were quickly undermined by flaws in the supposedly key piece of acoustic evidence. Believing in conspiracy theories understandably became a sign not of paranoia, but of sanity.

After the assassination, the American government went from seemingly under threat to seemingly being the threat. While opinion polls showed that three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government in the early 1960s, today three-quarters distrust the government. By the 1990s, as many as 80% of Americans didn’t buy the official lone gunman version of the Kennedy assassination, and today the figure is around 65%.

The assassination became a symbolically necessary moment of origin for a sense that things don’t add up. 

In the wake of the revelations of the 1970s, a sense that the government was lying to you became an item of faith for the counterculture. Many of those old-school conspiracy theorists are now alarmed to find that their edgy stance has been adopted and weaponized by conservatives. And in fairness, there are differences. 

As the political scientists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum have argued, former President Donald Trump’s dog-whistling conspiracy tweets and Alex Jones’ knee-jerk claims about crisis actors amount to a “new conspiracism.” The kind of painstaking research carried out by Kennedy assassination buffs has been replaced by mere assertion and unfounded speculation. Most assassination researchers were motivated by a sense of civic duty, but conspiracy theory in the age of the internet is increasingly a money-spinner, both for online entrepreneurs like Jones and the social media platforms that rely on moral outrage, which juices engagement and, in turn, ad revenue. The aim of the “new conspiracism” is not to convince you of an alternative truth, but (in the words of Steve Bannon) to “flood the zone with s—-” and undermine the very idea of objective truth.

The more we have learned, the less we seem to know. There is not too little evidence, but too much.

The Warren Report, with its 26 volumes of accompanying evidence, drowns the reader in details that are both potentially significant but also mind-numbingly trivial. What are we to make, for example, of commission exhibits 121 and 122, two photos of “various medical items” found in Oswald’s medicine cabinet? In the photos, the items are laid out in a pleasingly symmetrical design, turning raw forensic evidence into an Andy Warhol painting. With good reason, in his novel “Libra,” DeLillo called the Warren Report “the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.” And after six decades, the report feels like a poignant museum of a lost America, full of marginal voices and secular relics.

The JFK Assassination Records Act, passed in 1992 in the wake of Oliver Stone’s film “JFK,” has led to the release of (to date) five million pages of official documents relating to the assassination. And yet, some records are still being withheld by the government. It’s possible that amid that avalanche of information, there is the smoking gun. It’s also possible that yet another “new” piece of evidence or death-bed confession will finally crack the case.

In September, Secret Service agent Paul Landis claimed in a new book that he was the one who found the so-called “magic bullet” that some conspiracy theories believe prove Oswald could not have acted alone. But with all the contradictory facts and rumors, it’s much more likely that there will never be a conclusive answer. There will always be pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that refuse to fit. Where, for example, was future president Richard Nixon on the day of the assassination? Attending a Pepsi-Cola convention in Dallas.

What is clear is that since the events in Dealey Plaza 60 years ago, we’ve been primed to look for plots everywhere. And the only thing scarier than the possibility that everything is part of a vast conspiracy is the nagging fear that everything is random.