Sixty years later, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy still reverberates through American culture and politics. For example, the matter of conspiracies.
Apparently the first "conspiracy theories"that were applied to a presidential assassination, followed the 1881 shooting of President James Garfield and his subsequent death. What befuddles me is that hardly anyone mentions the documented conspiracy to commit the first presidential assassination, of Abraham Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth conspired with at least two others to also kill the vice-president and secretary of state on the same night. They were angry white supremacists and ardent supporters of the defeated Confederacy. But our histories tend to ignore this, and focus on Booth as a deranged lone gunman with mysterious motives.
Still, the contemporary pattern of conspiracy theories really began a few years after JFK's death in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The Warren Commission Report in 1964, published in a fat tome that a lot of people bought (including me) and almost no one read, repeated the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. But talk of conspiracy began almost immediately: it was the Mafia, it was the Pentagon, it was the CIA, it was Cuba, it was LBJ, it was none or all of the above, mix and match. There was so much of it that Barbara Garson wrote a Shakespearian parody called MacBird! that pinned it on LBJ, and it ran for several years in various theatres on the West and East coasts beginning in 1966.
At first the receptivity to these possible conspiracies was fed by the sense of loss--not only of JFK himself but of his promise--of the kind of presidency and country he embodied. LBJ was a lesser usurper in every way; JFK's differences with some military leaders during the Cuban Missile Crisis and perhaps the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty fed other (or contributing) scenarios. That LBJ and the military and "Intelligence" establishment swiftly escalated the war in Vietnam that JFK was winding down, only added credibility to these impressions and suspicions.
And then the evidence started coming in--not of actual conspiracies, but of the implausible single gunman/"magic bullet" official explanation. The same debates are renewed today as they basically were formed over the past half century. A conspiracy in which nobody talked remains as implausible as the magic bullet single assassin explanation. Now nearly everyone who might have been involved is dead, and pretty clearly, we will never know.
Just to entertain the idea of some dark plot among the powerful was further encouraged by the revelations of the conspiracies of lies that supported the Vietnam war. That systematic lies and secret wars and assassinations have been used by US government agents since at least the start of the Cold War if not much earlier, is documented.
With those shocking revelations and speculations as background, all kinds of conspiracy theories are now available for those who need them. Perhaps only a small number of Americans believe the transparently absurd conspiracies pushed by Qanon and other extremists, but apparently a lot of Republicans believe federal and state governments conspired to steal the 2020 presidential election (though they seem less willing to concede that the Republican Supreme Court actually did steal the 2000 election.)
The link specifically to the JFK assassination is strong, as in the QAnon announcement two years ago that its anniversary in Dallas would be marked by the return of John F. Kennedy, Jr., to stand beside Donald Trump as they triumphantly expose the usual suspects, and return to the White House. For just as tabloids for years "revealed" that JFK was still alive and hidden on an island, his son's death in a plane crash also didn't happen. These wish fulfillments have apparently become part of today's extremist fever dreams, complete with a MAGA conversion. (See this Guardian piece by Steve Rose for more.)
This 60th anniversary also marks the first year in which a Kennedy not of JFK's generation is ostensibly running for President, though not nominated by either major party. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s candidacy has been linked with a number of what are called conspiracy theories. I don't know all that much about him, but he does seem a puzzling and paradoxical character. He was a persistent and effective environmental advocate (and still supports efforts to address climate distortion), and his foreign policy speech earlier in his campaign put his finger on the change that JFK brought, from a policy of war to a policy of peace, and of the return since to what RFK jr. called "the forever war," and the attitudes it reflects and engenders applied to every area of foreign policy. His distrust of Big Pharma is well-earned, since he represented its victims in many successful lawsuits. But even though some nuances in his positions do get ignored, he does go to extremes, which we identify with the extreme right, along with playing fast and loose with facts.
A piece this summer in Slate reviews his positions and troubling tendencies, and relates them to the characteristics of conspiracy theories and those who adhere to them. But it never mentions what is very likely their origin in his life: the assassinations of his uncle and his father in the 1960s. Reputable sources have suggested that RFK senior did not much believe in the Warren Report explanation. Others suggest the killing of RFK was not necessarily as simple as reported. When I was the editor of an alternative weekly called Washington Newsworks in 1975 and much of 76, we covered the forthcoming congressional hearings that seriously examined alternative explanations to the lone lunatic orthodoxy of the killing of Martin Luther King, Jr. In fact, Coretta Scott King (we learned exclusively) was coming to Washington to be part of it.
It now seems likely that there will never be explanations of any of these monumental and world-changing events that convince everyone, or perhaps even a majority. But there are distinctions to be made between credible conspiracy "theories," and insane explanations promoted as fact.
I reinterate: I don't know Robert Kennedy, Jr. But it's not hard to imagine the residual suspicions and perhaps the psychological damage that might come with the burdens of uncertainty with such high stakes, for a nephew of JFK and the eldest son of RFK. A very long book about Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign by Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson and Bruce Page was titled An American Melodrama. I think of RFK Jr.'s campaign as an American tragedy, a further ramification of that day in Dallas sixty year ago.
But there is another 60th anniversary this week that is of course related but too often gets overlooked as it is conflated with the assassination itself: the funeral of John F. Kennedy, and what that was like for America and the world. Which is my subject next time.
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