Opinion | The Epstein and Kennedy Files and the Age of Conspiracy Theory
Like the so-called Epstein files, which were first handed to a small band of briefly jubilant right-wingers several weeks ago, the John F. Kennedy files released last week by the National Archives turned out to be, by the standards of conspiracy hype, a total dud. President Trump promised 80,000 pages, then delivered nearly 64,000, none of which contained any electric revelations about the ground zero event of modern American political paranoia. In fact, so much of what was released was already public that the document dump produced its own meta-conspiracy theory: How could so much hype and anticipation yield only this?
Probably the most interesting newly unredacted document had nothing directly to do with the Kennedy assassination at all. That was a 1961 memo from the historian-turned-Camelot-whisperer Arthur Schlesinger Jr., warning Kennedy that the C.I.A. had so grown in reach and influence abroad that in many parts of the world it was a much more significant diplomatic player than the State Department, which the C.I.A. had also infiltrated pervasively. Not long after President Dwight Eisenhower lamented the rise of a military-industrial complex, Schlesinger wrote, American foreign policy was being conducted at least as much in secret as in public.
Schlesinger’s evaluation wouldn’t surprise a Cold War scholar or, for that matter, anyone raised on the spy novels and paranoid thrillers of the era. Even so, not that long ago it would have raised a fair number of eyebrows — an unambiguous real-time acknowledgment, from an unmistakable voice of the midcentury establishment, that the ascendant American empire was infested with secrecy and intrigue through and through.
Today it’s old news — and not just because it’s a distant artifact or because it pales in comparison with hoped-for revelations about the assassination. Over six decades and especially in recent years, the country has grown much more paranoid in its thinking, so much that it is now almost a cliché to run through it in shorthand — “deep state,” QAnon, Russiagate — and say we are living in a golden age for conspiracy theory. At the same time, revelations about the clandestine workings of power no longer seem to deliver the lasting shock they once might have. This is perhaps because, in recent years, reality has taken an explicit paranoid turn, too.
It is now perfectly reasonable, for instance, to believe that a novel virus that killed more than 20 million people worldwide and upended for years the daily life of billions was engineered by scientists and then released by accident, with a global cover-up improvised in the months that followed. To me, it is probably fair to call this a campaign of information suppression, but it does not appear to have been especially effective, since as early as May 2020, at roughly the peak of that censorship, nearly half of Americans believed the Covid virus had come out of a lab. But over time, the lab-leak theory of pandemic origins has grown even closer to consensus, and not just in America; the German spy agency, for instance, now believes that the virus probably came out of a lab — a view broadly in line with the views of American intelligence.
Other conspiracy theories hang so much in plain sight, they look like wallpaper. The biggest story of the new presidential term, for instance, has been that the world’s richest man, anointed rather than elected to government, has spent the administration’s first two months trying to resize and reprogram the functioning of the entire federal bureaucracy — relying on a team of shadowy operatives devoted enough to secrecy and anonymity that those identifying them have been accused by Musk of criminal harassment.
