Conspiracy Theory

Memorial Colloquium for John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and C. S. Lewis

21 November 2003

I shouted out, “Who killed the Kennedys?” When after all it was you and me.

Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil” 1968

At 12:30 in the afternoon on the 22nd of November, a Friday in 1963, the President of the United States was shot and killed on Elm Street in Dallas, Texas. Some of the facts as to what occurred are undisputed: At least three shots were fired. President Kennedy sustained a non-fatal wound from the rear and a fatal wound to the head. John Connelly, the Governor of Texas riding in the limousine with Kennedy, was seriously, but non-fatally wounded and a bystander, James Tague, was grazed by a bullet fragment. Of the two hundred or more witnesses there in Dealey Plaza, many reported shots coming from above and behind the president, many reported shots coming from in front of him, and many from both directions. Estimates ranged from two to as many as a half dozen shots. Some of those who thought shots came from the rear identified the Texas School Book Depository as the source. Those who reported shots from in front of the president described them as coming from behind a wooden fence on what has become known as the “grassy knoll.” Later that afternoon, Lee Oswald, an employee of the Book Depository, was arrested in another part of Dallas in connection with the murder of a police officer and charged, late Friday night, with the killing of the President. In the course of hours of interrogation Oswald insisted on his innocence and proclaimed “I’m just a patsy!” On Sunday morning, while he was being transferred to another prison, Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub operator with connections to organized crime. Oswald, an ex-Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and returned to the U.S. in 1962, disillusioned with the Soviet state but still, apparently, a communist, was quickly and all but universally regarded as guilty and as having acted alone.

Later that year the new president Lyndon Johnson appointed a commission, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, to report on the crime. The Warren Commission Report, completed in the fall of 1964, confirmed the widely accepted view that Oswald was the lone assassin. However, public confidence in this conclusion waned steadily through the 1960’s and into the 1970’s. Mounting skepticism, engendered in part by revelations about the role of U. S. intelligence services in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, led to the House Select Committee on Assassinations and a new investigation. The House committee in 1978 concluded that President Kennedy probably had been assassinated by a conspiracy and recommended that the Justice Department open a criminal investigation. No such investigation has been forthcoming.

The evidence that the Warren Commission assembled against Oswald as “lone gunman,” as well as that for conspiracy, is almost entirely circumstantial. But sometimes the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. I’m going to proceed on the assumption that there are certain crucial facts that are knowable, despite their being vehemently denied in certain official and other elite circles. I realize that not everyone here will agree and as much as I’d like to drag you all on a lengthy tour of the evidential warrant for these facts, I won’t do so, but instead solicit your indulgence so as to consider, for the sake of argument at least, how things look from a certain point of view forty years after the first Kennedy assassination. I believe that a fair appraisal of the evidence available in the public record puts it beyond reasonable doubt that John Kennedy was shot from the front, as well as from the back, and that more shots were fired at him than Oswald conceivably could have fired in the time available. Oswald probably did not fire his rifle at Kennedy but might have been involved in some way with the conspirators, wittingly or unwittingly. Lee Oswald was in some capacity on the payroll of intelligence agencies of the United States. Jack Ruby killed him at the behest of those who wanted him silenced. Powerful officials in the government of the United States intentionally covered up the conspiracy after the fact, sought to pin the blame on Lee Oswald as a “lone nut,” and actively interfered in attempts to get at the truth.

These things are not hidden; they’re not esoterica that come into view only by way of some subtle analysis of the data. Plain common sense focused on the public evidence compels the conspiracy conclusion. The Warren Commission’s case for there having been no conspiracy simply disintegrates on examination. This is not a matter of a generally adequate account that has a few outlying anomalies exploited by a competing explanation. That’s the way of most conspiracy theories. They are properly rejected. They trade on the mistaken assumption that a true account should leave no loose ends, no unexplained data, no anomalies. True explanations never account for all the data for the obvious reason that some of the data are always false. No, this is a case where the official account fails at virtually every point. Its “Oswald, Oswald alone, and nothing but Oswald” conclusion is systemically dependent on false information, spurious data, coerced, confused, and contradictory witnesses, crudely fallacious inferences, physical absurdities, speculative fancy, and outright lies.

We read the world through the stories we find ourselves capable of accepting. If a theory is implausible, then it is entirely reasonable to reject it, even when there is evidence for it. If a theory is implausible, one should accept it only on the basis of high quality evidence, and lots of it. Indeed, if a theory is sufficiently implausible it is reasonable simply to ignore the alleged evidence in its favor. Crackpot theories like black helicopters and alien abduction, or that the United States government engineered the 9-11 attacks, could be true, but finite creatures like us shouldn’t waste our time investigating the evidence for them. In certain circles, particularly in the mainstream media, the story that John Kennedy was murdered by conspirators is treated as having this sort of antecedent implausibility, and thus dismissed without serious recourse to the evidence. However, this implausibility is an illusion. Once that illusion is dispelled the evidence can speak for itself.

Consider a hypothetical: suppose, that in the fall of 1963, not John Kennedy but Fidel Castro had been gunned down. Suppose that the theory was floated that this was the act of a conspiracy, one involving anti-communist Cuban exiles living in the United States, as well as elements of United States intelligence agencies and organized crime (assuming those were fully distinct categories at that time). Given what we know of the murderous hatred individuals in these groups had toward Castro the theory is not implausible. Add the fact that by 1963 these groups had already attempted to murder Castro. Our conspiracy theory might, of course, be false, but surely it would be unreasonable to dismiss it out of hand. Were a great deal of evidence to accumulate in favor of it, and if evidence for competing explanations proved to be bogus, it would be unreasonable not to believe it.

I submit that the actual history is analogous to this hypothetical history and warrants a similar conclusion. We know that in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco the Cuban exiles who had plotted against Castro came to see Kennedy as a traitor to their cause and personally to blame for the deaths of their comrades. Their bitter hatred for the Cuban dictator turned toward the American President. These sentiments were shared by some of their allies in United States intelligence agencies and by organized crime figures, though in the latter case for different reasons. What does it take to motivate murder? Sheer hatred, a desire for revenge, suffices. There is no doubt that this motive was present among those already in the business of political assassination. Those possessed of the means for this kind of murder also had this motive, at least. Another motive for murder is fear, and the events of the early 60’s inspired this too. The Cuban missile crisis of October 1961 brought the United States to the brink of war with the Soviet Union. This was widely portrayed as a victory for Kennedy who had faced down the Soviets and forced them to withdraw their missiles from Cuba. But dedicated cold warriors in the American military and intelligence services saw Kennedy as having backed down, as having capitulated to the Soviets when he agreed to remove American missiles from Turkey, to terminate support for the Cuban exiles’ terrorist campaign against Castro’s regime, and not to invade Cuba. Kennedy’s performance during the crisis, following on the heels of the Bay of Pigs, where in their view he also chickened out, generated genuine, even if paranoid, fear.

Consider for a moment the fact that Allen Dulles (Director of Central Intelligence), Richard Bissell (the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans) and General Charles Cabell (Deputy Director of the CIA) were fired by Kennedy because of their role in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion. There can be no doubt that these men saw themselves as publicly humiliated and having their careers ruined by the man whose irresolution and betrayal was the real cause of the disaster. If we were looking for those with the means, motive and opportunity to have Kennedy killed, as well as the capacity to cover it up by shaping the investigation, it would be hard to imagine a more likely crew. (Note, in connection to this, two interesting facts: President Johnson appointed Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission, where he coordinated all inquiries related to the intelligence community. And in November 1963 the mayor of Dallas was Earle Cabell, General Cabell’s brother.) This does not of course imply these individuals had something to do with the crime, either antecedently or in covering it up, but it does imply that any hint of evidence that they did cannot reasonably be dismissed without examination.

Given all this, I think it’s clear that, prior to any specific evidence being brought forward, this conspiracy theory, unlike most, has enough plausibility to be taken seriously. The question is why, with the facts I’ve just cited beyond question, the judgment that conspiracy is too implausible to take seriously was formed almost immediately and persists to this day. Significant resources were devoted to establishing and defending the view that the case for conspiracy is beyond the pale. The aim was not to dispute the evidence, but to render it invisible. We know, from classified documents pried loose by later official investigation and the Freedom of Information Act, that Director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson insisted, prior to any actual investigation, that the government conclude there was no conspiracy. Indeed, it’s hard to think of any significant piece of evidence, even that used by the Warren Commission to frame Oswald, that was actually in the authorities’ possession before Oswald was declared guilty. The Warren Commission brazenly ignored, distorted and denied evidence that tended to exculpate Oswald or that indicated conspiracy. We also know that the CIA set itself the task of defending the Warren Report and marginalizing its critics. An April 1967 CIA directive instructs Agency personnel to utilize “elite contacts especially politicians and editors” to defend the Warren Report and “to employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics.”

Whatever the motivation, and whatever the efficacy, of these efforts, I think the more important part of the explanation lies in the mainstream media itself, not in any nefarious influence brought to bear upon it by the CIA or other Federal agencies. The story that the killer was Oswald, the maladjusted communist defector, was propagated by Dallas and federal agencies almost instantaneously. Behind the scenes, the view that a serious investigation might uncover a foreign communist conspiracy, precipitate a confrontation with the Soviets, and perhaps lead to nuclear war, was offered–sincerely or otherwise–as a reason to go along with the official account that Oswald acted alone. There is, for example, good reason to believe that Johnson used this story to persuade Earl Warren to chair the commission that later bore his name. Perhaps Johnson was told this by others and believed it; perhaps he cynically manipulated Warren with it.

Journalists might have been fed this account, the “inside story,” early on, and gone along with it, committing themselves to playing along for the sake of peace. The terrifying events of the previous October were still fresh in everyone’s mind.

Journalistic reputations were made or broken in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. There is the case of Dan Rather, a young correspondent at a CBS affiliate in Texas. Shortly after the assassination the existence of Abraham Zapruder’s amateur movie became public knowledge, and the authorities refused to release it to the media, but they invited Rather to a private screening, which he then recounted on national television. In his account the president’s head, at the fatal shot, was thrust violently forward. This cohered with the already developed official story, later to be enshrined in the Warren Report, of a fatal shot from the rear. However, anyone who has seen the Zapruder film, which all too clearly shows Kennedy’s head being thrust violently backwards, must wonder if Rather’s ability accurately to report on what he saw could have been quite so poor, or if he had acquired reasons to support the government’s story of a fatal shot from behind Kennedy. Also, I wonder whether journalists, then as now generally aligned with the left, realized the devastating impact news that leftist conspirators, still at large, murdered the popular president would have on the American left, and on the whole liberal side of the political spectrum. It’s easy to imagine an anti-communist witch hunt surpassing in viciousness what was only then winding down from its height in the 1950’s. It’s a reasonable conjecture that when the evidence for conspiracy came unambiguously to point toward the radical right, not the radical left, it was too late for journalists to backpedal without looking like dupes.

In the ensuing four decades, this issue has been unique insofar as this country’s elite media have manifest an unshakeable implicit trust in the deliverances of the state, an almost heroic lack of curiosity, a readiness to ignore, trash or minimize any finding that further undermines the creaking “lone gunman” theory, to belittle researchers critical of the official story as “assassination buffs,” and to lionize any ill-informed rehash of the old falsehoods as the brilliant “last word” on the assassination; Posner’s egregious Case Closed is a salient case in point. On major anniversaries the long-since refuted story is dusted off, packaged in snazzy computer graphics, dressed up with psychobabble, and ceremoniously paraded. Why? Surely, the CIA is long since done with suborning journalists and paying off publishers. Do the senior statesmen of journalism still enforce an implicit embargo on the truth? Do we see something as mundane as the effects of intellectual laziness? Of institutional inertia? Or a simple aversion to being associated with the whackos who populate the shadowy realm where conspiracy theories enjoy rampant plausibility? I don’t know. In any event it is ironic that John Kennedy, whose advent to the presidency signaled a new vigor and hope for American political life, and whose brief time upon history’s stage was taken up with the great issues of freedom and tyranny, war and peace, discrimination and justice, has left a legacy that is at best a sobering lesson in practical epistemology, and at worst a sordid tale of credulity and perfidy.