* Even as Kennedy and Oswald were laid to rest, conspiracy theories about the assassination were beginning to circulate. They would do so for half a century, going nowhere, to finally slowly fade towards oblivion. In hindsight, the question is not if there really was a conspiracy to kill JFK, there was never any convincing reason to believe so; the question is how the matter could have been belabored for so long, to so little result.
* The report of the Warren Commission was a monumental document, demonstrating a massive investment of effort and, some flaws aside, a high standard of work. It was a goldmine of information on the assassination of JFK, with much of the material, most significantly interviews of hundreds of witnesses, produced directly by the commission. It should have laid concerns over the assassination to rest -- but that wasn't how it turned out. The Warren Report was blasted by conspiracists as superficial, riddled with errors, biased, a coverup exercise. Of course it was denounced, since it concluded there was no conspiracy; to conspiracists, that made it a fraud on the face of it.
Conspiracy theories had gone into circulation immediately after the assassination. Suspicion had partly been provoked by Ruby's murder of Oswald, but was also fueled by the fact that Oswald was a Red and had lived in the USSR. Ironically, US intelligence showed that the Soviets and the Cubans were just as surprised by the assassination as everyone else, and there was no reason to believe they were behind it. It wasn't consistent with other actions of either of them -- neither the USSR nor the Cubans conducted any campaign of terror in the USA, nor was it easy to figure out what reasons they would have to do so that could have come close to balancing the retribution that would have inevitably followed.
However, Reds felt compelled to refute the charges that one of their own had murdered JFK; more broadly, liberals were inclined to see Oswald as a convenient "patsy" for covering up an evil plot of the Right. Early on, it was a common assertion, completely unsupported by evidence, that Oswald really wasn't a Communist, he was a closet Nazi -- a notion that came as a great surprise to anyone who knew him at all well.
Obscure conspiracy books appeared even before the Warren Report hit the streets. Earl Warren thought the conspiracy tales would eventually fade out, but they just continued to build, driving the public rumor mill -- though conspiracy stories made little impression on the authorities, since nobody ever found credible evidence for the conspiracy case.
And then, conspiracists got what sounded, at first, like a breakthrough. In 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison claimed he had uncovered a conspiracy to kill JFK. Initially Garrison focused on a New Orleans private investigator and pilot named David Ferrie -- a shady character, but whose only connection to the assassination was that he had been with the New Orleans Civil Air Patrol (CAP) organization in 1955, when Oswald had indifferently attended CAP sessions for a few months, to then lose interest and drop out. Garrison concocted an assassination theory in which Ferrie, who was gay, and his accomplices killed JFK as a "homosexual thrill kill".
Following Ferrie's death from an aneurysm, Garrison then targeted a prominent New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw. Shaw had the dubious honor of being the only person ever indicted for conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Although Shaw was also gay, as the investigation drew more public attention, Garrison gave up his "homosexual thrill kill" theory and claimed the CIA was behind the assassination. The investigation proved highly controversial, with Garrison accused of intimidating and bribing witnesses; he claimed that powerful figures in the government were trying to obstruct his efforts, but refused to say who they were when queried by reporters.
Garrison went public to defend his case, with an extended interview in PLAYBOY magazine, in which he claimed Oswald was a closet Nazi, and that there had been seven snipers in Dealey Plaza on 22 November 1963. He was also interviewed by late-night NBC TV host Johnny Carson on Carson's TONIGHT SHOW, telling Carson much the same story, and claiming: "There is no question ... that an element of the Central Intelligence Agency of our country killed Kennedy, and that the present administration is concealing the facts. There is no question about it at all."
It is not clear that Garrison came up with the idea that the CIA had assassinated the president, though he certainly popularized the notion. Some who worked for Garrison reported that he blamed the CIA because, being a covert organization and unable to let out secrets, the agency could dare say nothing in response. In any case, Carson was not at all patient with Garrison, snapping back at his, Garrison's, declarations of "facts" with: "What makes it a fact? Because you say so?" -- and in the end acidly dressing down Garrison:
BEGIN QUOTE:
You are asking us and the American public to believe that a team of seven gunmen carried this out with precision, firing from various points that day in Dallas, which is a remarkable feat in itself, and disappeared into thin air, with no witnesses who ever saw any other gunmen or getaway vehicles ... and a gigantic conspiracy in which nobody seems to have yet proved anything ... you ask us to believe that ... I find that a much larger fairy tale than to accept the findings of the Warren Report.
END QUOTE
When Shaw was brought to trial in 1969, Garrison was unable to bring anything more than implausible testimony of dubious witnesses against him. A jury acquitted Shaw without hesitation, concluding that Garrison had simply been looking for someone, anyone, to victimize. One of the jurors wondered about Shaw: "How did his name get in the hat to be pulled out?"
Garrison continued to legally harass Shaw, bankrupting him, and only giving up when Shaw died of cancer in 1974. In their determination to track down a sinister government plot, conspiracists ended up endorsing the persecution of a citizen who had given no real cause for suspicion of any wrongdoing, by a capricious government official engaged in a gross abuse of authority.
* Although it might have been thought that the implosion of Garrison's investigation would have undermined the JFK conspiracy movement, it didn't slow it down, with more plots attributed to the Mob, the CIA, the FBI, Cubans, and many others. The often conflicting conspiracy theories were created using "cherry picking" of evidence, fussing over discrepancies in records, testimonies of dubious witnesses, red herrings, exaggerations, and sometimes outright fabrications, with inconvenient evidence ignored or dismissed as "faked by the conspiracy", all presented in a tone of noisy hysteria.
None of the theories could give honest evidence of an association between Oswald and any of the various groups supposedly linked to the assassination, and none of the groups accused in the killing had a history of assassinating American public officials. The Mob, for instance, was angry because the Kennedy Administration was coming down on organized crime very hard, but they had no habit of killing politicians, since it would have brought the full fury of the law down on them. An HSCA delegation went to Cuba to talk with Castro about the assassination, with Fidel pointing out the evident facts that he would stand little to gain by killing JFK, while risking the total destruction of his regime in doing so.
The Mob was the "prime suspect" in the 1980s, but later it was the CIA. One motive attributed to the CIA for the assassination was that JFK was planning to break up the agency after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961; however, no such thing had happened by 1963, and there was no indication it was going to happen then. Another motive, with the CIA as part of a "military-industrial complex" conspiracy, suggested JFK was killed because he intended to pull out of Vietnam -- Lyndon Johnson, supposedly at the center of the "plot", wanted to escalate the war instead. Actually, both JFK and LBJ had the same advisers and were under the same political pressures; a close examination of their attitudes towards the war in Vietnam makes it hard to judge that the two had any real difference of opinion on the matter. Besides, if the conspiracy killed JFK for wanting to pull out of Vietnam, why wasn't President Richard Nixon killed when he decided to pull out later in the decade?
Over the years, conspiracy theories kept on piling up, to mutate increasingly into the bizarre. One conspiracist named William Cooper, later killed in a shootout with the law, claimed the Zapruder video showed Bill Greer, the limousine driver on 22 November 1963, turning around and shooting JFK in the head with a pistol. A closer examination of the video shows the "pistol" to be light reflecting off the hair of Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman in the passenger seat alongside Greer, and that Greer's hand was still on the steering wheel, not wielding a weapon. Other conspiracy theories proposed Jackie did it; that the "plot" was orchestrated by the Federal Reserve Bank, or a committee named MAJESTIC-12 that directed US relations with aliens; or even that JFK faked his own death. "Who killed JFK? Who DIDN'T?"
BACK_TO_TOP* Although conspiracy theories can linger for a long time, few could rival the JFK assassination conspiracy circus for long and active life. Over a period of decades, the assassination conspiracy theories piled up to the point where there seemed no bottom to them.
One element of the JFK conspiracy theories was dodgy forensics. Arguably, the biggest single item of "evidence" cited by conspiracists was the fact that the Zapruder movie shows JFK's head snapping backward after being hit by the third bullet. To conspiracists, that intuitively demonstrated he had been hit from the front.
The problem is that none of them had real experience with observing what happens to people when they're hit by bullets. Those who did could only reply that intuition was wrong. Dr. Alfred Olivier -- a veterinarian who worked for the US Army, having the unorthodox job of evaluating the effects of wounds on animal test subjects -- testified to an investigation in 1975 that the direction of the "head snap" said nothing about the direction of the bullet impact:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Q: Have you done firings into other portions of animals, live animals, other than the head?
AO: Oh, yes ... for years we used to document the direction in which an animal fell -- and the number was something like 2,000 animals, and it ended up, as many fell away from the gun as fell toward the gun, and a goodly number fell straight down ...
Q: Have you ever seen an instance in which an animal body, from the impact of the bullet itself, thrust violently in the direction away from the gunner?
AO: Never.
Q. Do you have an opinion, then, based upon your work in this field over the years, as to whether President Kennedy's body would have moved in the fashion that it did after the fatal shot in the head, that movement being a consequence of the impact of the bullet?
AO: ... No, it wouldn't ... The President weights a lot more than a 100-pound goat, and if a bullet wouldn't move a 100 pound goat, it isn't going to move the President. This just doesn't happen.
END QUOTE
Ballistic experiments showed that the "head snap" was at least in part due to the bursting effect of JFK's head from the exit of the bullet. More significantly, Army videos of a goat shot through the head showed that it suffered a massive spasm at the moment of death, arching its back, throwing its legs up fore and aft. When a conspiracist cited the "head snap" as evidence of a frontal shot to Vincent DiMaio -- a forensics professional with specific background in wound ballistics -- DiMaio was contemptuous: "No. That's make-believe. That's Arnold Schwarzenegger movies."
In old-time Western movies, when the Black Hats got shot, they simply groaned and fell over: "Yuh got me, pardner!" Hollywood eventually decided that wasn't theatrical enough, and decided to attach a rope to the back of a stuntman to jerk him flying backwards for a more spectacular effect.
None of the other forensic arguments of conspiracists ever fared any better. A stream of arguments was made over the origins and capabilities of the Carcano rifle, but all honest evidence shows Oswald obtained that weapon, and that it was perfectly adequate to do the job. There were claims that the bullet that hit both JFK and Connally had to have taken some "magic" zigzag path to have struck both of them, but that conclusion was based on making false assumptions about the positioning of the two men.
There was particular fuss by conspiracists over the results of the presidential autopsy, even though multiple re-examinations of them by professionals showed they were, in all significant aspects, correct -- that JFK had been hit by two bullets from above and behind. The biggest problem with the Warren Commission was that the autopsy results were kept secret, at the request of the Kennedy family, with access to them in the National Archives only through their permission. This act of graciousness helped fuel conspiracy theories.
* Another element of the JFK conspiracy theories was dubious witnesses. One of the best-known was James Sutton AKA James Files, who was sent to prison in Illinois for 50 years in 1991 for the attempted murder of two police officers. Files claimed to have been the "grassy knoll shooter", embedding the claim in an elaborate conspiracy tale.
The only link of Files to the assassination of JFK was his own say-so; had he said nothing, nobody would have ever had cause to make the connection. Files could provide no information of significance about the assassination that wasn't already known, and could be validated. Files' story also changed and grew in the telling, with the interesting feature that all the people he cited as involved in the assassination happened to be dead. According to Files, they were "silenced by the conspiracy", which for some reason allowed him to roam free for several decades.
The question of course came up as to why Files would have wanted to make up a story that implicated himself in the crime of the century. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the answer: Files made it clear that if he were set free, he would be able to provide "solid proof" of all his claims. As farfetched as his story was, since he had no chance of outliving his prison sentence, he had nothing much to lose by telling tall tales. In 1994, the NEW YORK POST summed up File's claims with a story titled: "Call This JFK Tale Knoll And Void".
There were other "assassination witnesses" that came forward with conspiracy tales -- some more plausible than those told by Files, some much less. Their stories had much in common with Files': the authors had no demonstrable connection to the conspiracy other than their own say-so, and there was no way to convincingly corroborate their stories. All the significant witnesses to their claims were dead, while the conspiracy allowed them to live to tell the story.
* Other components of the JFK conspiracy theories went into the absurd. There were many tales of "Oswald doubles", in which casual spottings of people who resembled Oswald were represented, not as cases of mistaken identities, but as evidence of some convoluted plot. In some cases, there were even claims of encounters with "Oswald doubles" who didn't actually look like him. The "Oswald doubles" were, in any case, prime examples of how discrepancies in records or recollections -- or what to the sufficiently imaginative seemed like discrepancies -- were taken by conspiracists as "evidence" of a sinister conspiracy.
At least as absurd were the "mysterious deaths", the notion that way too many people connected to the JFK assassination met untimely deaths. The idea began early on, most notably represented by a 1967 LONDON SUNDAY TIMES article with an early "mysterious deaths" list accompanied by a claim that an actuary had calculated the odds to be "a hundred thousand trillion to one".
The HSCA found this citation of odds a little hard to believe. The list of people who could be connected to the JFK assassination was long, easily running to thousands, and the idea that a portion of them might have died over some period of years hardly seemed that improbable. The HSCA contacted the TIMES and got back a sheepish answer, that the paper had made a "careless journalistic mistake". It turned out that the question the paper had asked of an actuary was effectively:
The odds are not at all good. Assume that adults in a population have, on the average, a 1 in 10 probability of dying in some given number of years. If 15 adults are selected at random from that population, the odds of all 15 dying to that time would be 1 in 10^15, a thousand trillion to one. However, anybody with even a simple understanding of probability would know that was asking the wrong question. The right question was obviously:
The answer was that one could bet on it, and easily win. Given 1 in 10 odds of an adult in a population dying in some given number of years, we would expect in that time that, duh, roughly a tenth of the population would be dead. The HSCA accepted the answer from the TIMES, but doublechecked with actuaries just to be thorough. The answer was the same, the HSCA concluding that finding "any meaningful implications about the existence or absence of a conspiracy" was indeed an "impossibility".
That should have put the "mysterious deaths" lists to bed, the error in the question posed by the TIMES being so evident that further explanation was neither asked for by the HSCA nor seen as necessary by the TIMES to give. To no surprise, conspiracists were unfazed -- replying that, though a certain number of deaths from a substantial population would not be surprising, the population in question was actually very small, and the proportion of unnatural deaths very large, resulting once again in "trillion to one" odds.
"After the fact" probability calculations invite suspicion, since they tend towards backwards reasoning -- starting from a conclusion, and then contriving an argument to brace it up. In reality, the lists of "mysterious deaths" were blatantly cooked, including anyone with the remotest, sometimes all but invisible, connection to the JFK assassination, and claiming their deaths as "mysterious", even when they were due to heart attacks and other obviously natural causes. It was also odd that the lists didn't include prominent conspiracists who claimed to be "hot on the trail" of the conspiracy. It would have been just as easy to compile a long list of "mysterious deaths" associated with, say, Santa Claus, and that list could be taken every bit as seriously as the lists produced by assassination conspiracists.
* One of the promoters of the "mysterious deaths" was Jim Marrs, author of the 1989 book CROSSFIRE: THE PLOT THAT KILLED KENNEDY, which made the best-seller lists. Marrs became one of the most prominent conspiracists, due to his prolific output, including titles such as:
And so on. Marrs, it seemed, never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like. On reading Marrs' work, it is apparent that he consciously operated on the principle that if he grabbed onto every story he could find, even if he knew some seemed unlikely to stand up to reasonable scrutiny, there would still be bits of truth in the matrix, and the sum of all of them would reveal a pattern. Marrs never made any effort to sort through the evidence to determine the facts, he simply threw the evidence into the mixer along with rumors and misinformation, yielding a mismosh from which almost any conclusion might be selectively drawn, the hard facts having been muddied into oblivion. His writing suggested thinking processes with a strong resemblance to the operation of a trash compactor.
CROSSFIRE did, however, impress movie producer Oliver Stone, who used it as one of the inspirations for his 1991 movie "JFK" -- an homage to Jim Garrison's investigation, incorporating a compacted mass of conspiracy tales somewhat in the style of Marrs. "JFK" was a box-office hit, with many who watched it saying they had little doubt it was the entire truth, and nothing but the truth. Those with stronger sense of skepticism were not so impressed, one saying that the only thing that Stone had managed to get right in the movie was the fact that JFK had been assassinated in Dallas.
In any case, the movie had its 15 minutes of fame, inspiring a new wave of conspiracy books, and doing much to reinforce the popular perception of a conspiracy to kill JFK, at a time when it should have been dying of boredom and its irrelevance. However, it was effectively the high tide of the JFK assassination conspiracy circus. Partly in response to the excitement raised by Stone's movie, in 1992 journalist Gerald Posner published CASE CLOSED, a debunking of JFK conspiracy claims. Though it was glib and thin in places, CASE CLOSED made a persuasive case for Oswald as a "lone gunman", while also inspiring doubts about conspiracy theories by throwing light on their many blatant misrepresentations of fact. CASE CLOSED was the first skeptical book on the JFK assassination conspiracies to make the best-seller lists.
More significantly, the movie led to the of the "Assassinations Record Review Board (ARRB)" via the "President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992", signed into law by President George H.W. Bush on 26 October 1992. The board, consisting of five historians, finally got to work in 1994, completing the effort in 1998.
The ARRB was not an investigation as such, being instead a review of classified information. According to John Tunheim, the chairman of the AARB, at the end of the board's work, "99.9%" of all assassination-related documents were available to the public, though some had "redacted" sections, for example concealing the names of CIA agents to protect their cover. Although the board found items of interest, "tantalizing hints", in CIA investigation of Cuba and the USSR, as well as FBI investigations of the Mob, the ARRB found "nothing to shake the foundations" of the Warren Report. There were no "smoking guns" in the released materials; Tunheim said that was nothing of significance to the assassination in the documents still classified that wasn't available in the documents that had been released.
With the 1998 release of the ARRB report, having released all relevant documents that could be released and cleared the small remainder, the US Federal government had officially washed its hands, and for good, of any further activity relative to the JFK assassination. The conspiracy movement, with no realistic hope of any further action being taken on the matter, could only lose altitude from then on. The government had moved on, and there were fewer people every year who had any recollection of JFK and the assassination; the issue persisting only as a hobby, with nobody engaged in it able or even making much effort to claim it amounted to anything more.
In 2007, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi published the hefty book RECLAIMING HISTORY, likely the definitive work on the JFK assassination, taking apart conspiracy claims in detail. However, it amounted to no more than the tombstone for the JFK conspiracy circus, since it had already been running out of steam. In 2013, the 50th anniversary of the assassination, the city of Dallas performed a commemoration of the event -- from which conspiracists were pointedly excluded.
The conspiracy circus, after half a century of going nowhere, had finally dropped below the radar. In 2017, the last classified files in the JFK assassination were finally released; the matter was noted in the media, and then forgotten. Legitimate researchers had already inspected the files, having obtained clearance to do so, and found nothing earth-shaking. It was impossible to think they would: if there had been a sinister conspiracy that had destroyed all the evidence, why would the conspirators have allowed incriminating evidence to be saved, instead of destroying it like the rest?
BACK_TO_TOP* Although public interest in JFK assassination conspiracy theories has now faded to negligible levels, conspiracists continue to belabor the matter, oblivious to the difficulties posed by their claims: How could anyone believe such a thing on such thin evidence? Who could believe such a conspiracy could be kept secret? Wouldn't credible witnesses have come forward by now? What government scandal hasn't had its loud whistle-blowers?
Conspiracists like to postulate that the "plot" was really only known to a handful of "insiders", with the actions delegated to people who had no idea of the real significance of what they were doing. The problem here is that, following the assassination, a good number of these people would then realize that actions they had performed that didn't quite make sense at the time would suddenly fall into place in a shocking fashion, and they would have a strong inclination to tell the Warren Commission what they knew -- not merely from outrage, but because they might end up being accused of complicity themselves, or even silenced.
Conspiracists still claim that it would have been possible to conceal the conspiracy, pointing to various government plots that actually did take place and were concealed. One brought up on occasion is the Manhattan Project, the US effort to develop the atom bomb during World War II, but it's hardly a very good example. People knew there was a facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, that was doing something very secret; what it was doing was kept secret for less than four years, and the secret was only kept because of the widespread, unconcealed, and generally accepted censorship in place during the war years. When Missouri Senator Harry Truman, in charge of a Senate committee to monitor war contracts, started to check into the money trail of the project, he was told it was a deep black secret, and he shouldn't pry into it. He didn't. Truman was elected as Franklin Roosevelt's vice-president in 1944, and when Roosevelt died in 1945, Truman knew effectively nothing about the atomic bomb project.
In other words, the Manhattan Project was only kept a secret because no Americans were in a position or inclined to play snoop and make any serious effort to find out what was going on at Los Alamos -- and once the atom bomb was dropped on Japan in August 1945, everyone knew what had been going on there, if not in specific detail. The Soviets even had the details; in 1945, President Truman told Soviet dictator Josef Stalin that the Americans had a new and powerful weapon, to find Stalin puzzlingly uninterested. That was because Stalin knew all about the project, there being at least three Red spies at Los Alamos. The first Soviet atom bomb, detonated in 1949, was a copy of the US "Fat Man" bomb. Some secrecy.
Conspiracists are more fond of pointing to a CIA program codenamed MKULTRA, established by the agency in the 1950s to investigate "mind control" using drugs, hypnosis, and other means, not necessarily with the consent or knowledge of the experimental subjects. The results were sometimes disastrous; in the most notorious case, in 1953 a CIA employee named Frank Olson committed suicide after being given LSD. Incidentally, some conspiracists have suggested MKULTRA produced tools that allowed the CIA to "brainwash" Oswald into shooting JFK, though the details of when and how this was done remain unclear.
MKULTRA came to light during the investigations of a Senate committee headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church in 1975, and was thoroughly investigated by the Senate in 1977. MKULTRA remains controversial, with the agency's critics saying the CIA deliberately destroyed records and never admitted the full extent of the program. Even if all the accusations are true, however, the MKULTRA conspiracy is a weak model for a "military-industrial complex" conspiracy to kill JFK. MKULTRA was conducted in secrecy by the agency and did not involve other organizations. There was never much of a "conspiracy theory" about MKULTRA; outsiders weren't aware of the program and were not trying to investigate it, and when they did become aware of it, they quickly turned up piles of dirt.
Indeed, it's hard to think that a detailed investigation of any organization, or for that matter any individual, wouldn't turn up some dirt. That is certainly the case for, say, presidential candidates, who are guaranteed to have all their sins, even the most trivial, played up to the public in bright lights by their opponents.
* Conspiracists like to run lists of verified conspiracies such as MKULTRA -- but an examination of the items on such lists shows they are, if not molehills, certainly not towering mountains that would be very hard to conceal. A better model of an assassination conspiracy, more approximating a mountain, would be the "Iran-Contra" scandal that embarrassed the Reagan Administration -- in which the US sold weapons under the table to the Islamic Republic of Iran, in defiance of America's own arms embargo against the country, in hopes of obtaining the release of American hostages held in Lebanon. The funds obtained were then covertly funneled to the "Contra" rebels fighting the Leftist Nicaraguan government.
The Iran-Contra affair had very much the sound of a classic conspiracy tale -- a complicated plot spanning the world and conducted in secret by the authorities in deliberate disregard of their own rules. However, the Iran-Contra trickery was caught in the act, and as the details unfolded in the course of investigation, it came across as about as devious as a chimpanzee piling up boxes to reach a bunch of bananas, with the prime movers appearing more clueless than clever under testimony.
Anybody reviewing the Iran-Contra plot would conclude it was so slipshod that it was certain to be busted; the government, supposedly so efficient at covering the tracks of its conspiracies, dropped the ball in keeping that one under wraps. Even worse, government investigation of the matter, instead of covering things up, worked energetically to get to the dirty truth of the matter, though Reagan was able to disavow knowledge -- probably legitimately, presidents having some good reason to take a distant management approach to secret actions conducted on their watch: "Don't bother me about the details."
The obvious bumbling of the Iran-Contra plot highlights the puzzling mindset of conspiracists, in that they see a world where accidents, mixups, misunderstandings, bureaucracy, bungling, laziness, and sheer stupidity don't exist. Conspiracists often accuse doubters of conspiracy claims of complacency, of refusing to consider the possibility of conspiracy, of mindless acceptance of the government line. In reality, nobody with any sense trusts the government without condition. The difference of opinion between conspiracists and doubters is not over whether the government is entirely trustworthy -- but over the assertion that the government could be competent enough to pull off a grand conspiracy, and not get caught sooner rather than later. Most people who work for the government would the last to believe any such thing.
A "military-industrial complex" plot to kill JFK would have been much harder to pull off than the Iran-Contra scheme, since it would have involved so many more players -- and worse for the conspiracy, the assassination of a president would necessarily receive the full glare of public scrutiny, with legions of snoops looking into the matter from day one. They've been looking for decades, and have found nothing of substance.
In fact, the conspiracy community cannot point to a single one of the long list of JFK assassination conspiracy theories they've been peddling that has led to any evidence of substance. While there have been hidden conspiracies and there have been revealed conspiracies, conspiracy theories start out on the wrong foot from the outset. If there are things going on, as conspiracists insist, that we don't know anything about, then we can't say anything about them. People do build conspiracy theories on sheer guesswork, but it's along the lines of shooting aimlessly in the dark, claiming as valid targets anyone who gets hit.
There's also no theory once the conspiracy's cover is blown, the evidence piling up rapidly after that happens. A conspiracy theory necessarily exists in a phantom domain of inconclusive evidence -- but credibly establishing the existence of a far-reaching conspiracy demands a high level of proof. The longer the evidence remains inconclusive, the less plausible the theory becomes. Eventually the authorities stop paying attention to it, the news media loses interest in it except as an item of curiosity or mockery, and it ends up doing nothing more than circulating through the conspiracy sphere -- until everyone who actually remembers the relevant incident passes away, with the conspiracy theory then filed away in the dead rumor office.
The difficulty with conspiracy theories is not that they claim there's a giant elephant in the room, that a conspiracy exists -- but that the elephant is invisible. Everyone believes in elephants, it's invisible elephants that are the difficulty, elephants being a little hard to miss. Criminals generally leave traces of their actions, and a big gang of them leaves elephant-sized footprints.
If it is claimed the conspiracy was covered up, that is effectively admitting the invisibility of the elephant, that people really can't see it, and the evidence isn't very convincing. Worse, the alleged coverup only implies a bigger conspiracy that would be even harder to keep invisible. In its limit, such extension of conspiracy postulates an all-powerful secret authoritarian government pulling the strings from behind the scenes. The problem is that people who live under blatantly authoritarian regimes are painfully aware of the fact, being given continuous reminders by the security apparatus, and it's nothing that resembles a secret. If there is a tyrannical order actually running everything, why would it be so unwilling to visibly exercise its power? If it had the power, it would not be constrained from using it, and if it was, it is very hard to understand how everyone would fail to notice.
* As an instructional tale of what the conspiracy community has actually accomplished, consider the case of a British lad named Gary McKinnon, a UFO enthusiast who decided in the mid-1990s that the US government was "covering up" information about UFO technologies that, if disclosed by McKinnon, would solve the energy crisis and many of the world's other problems. McKinnon heroically decided to start hacking into US government computer systems. As detailed by reporter Jon Ronson of THE GUARDIAN newspaper in 2009:
BEGIN QUOTE:
With a joint in the ashtray and a can of Foster's [Ale] next to the mousepad, he hacked NASA, the Pentagon, and every US military installation he could get into. It was, he says, incredibly easy. He wrote a script that searched for network administrators who'd been too lazy to change their user names from "user name" and their passwords from "password". And when he found one he was in ...
He spent between five and seven years roaming the corridors of power like the Invisible Man, wandering into Pentagon offices, rifling through files, and he found no particular smoking gun about anything. He unearthed nothing to suggest a US involvement in 9/11, nothing to suggest a UFO cover-up. Nothing ... except two things.
"I found a list of officers' names ... under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'. I looked it up and it's nowhere. I don't think it means little green men. What I think it means is not Earth-based. What I saw made me believe that they have some kind of spaceship, off planet ... I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect."
The other thing he said he saw towards the end of his hacking adventures ... was a photograph of a smooth, spherical object in a file at the [NASA] Johnson Space Centre that "might have been a UFO but was probably a satellite".
END QUOTE
McKinnon got cocky, leaving taunts behind in his raids on computer systems, and was busted in 2002, leading to a lengthy trans-Atlantic squabble over his legal status. In 2012, the British government finally decided not to extradite him to the US, and had no intent of trying him in the UK; the controversy then ended. The lessons of the matter here, of course, are that government secrecy is nowhere near as bullet-proof as conspiracists claim it is, and that there may be much less to be found behind the barrier than conspiracists think there is.
Some might suggest that the conspiracy would make sure records weren't left behind where people like McKinnon could ever get at them. However, that leads to the circular game of basing arguments not on evidence, but on absence of evidence. The straightforward explanation for why nothing has been found is because there is nothing there to find.
* If there is still an insistence that there are facts in the case of the JFK assassination that remain unknown, then why draw the line there? It is an historical fact that on 14 April 1865, John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head with a 0.44 caliber Philadelphia deringer, which was recovered and is now on display at Ford's Theater in Washington DC.
But wait -- how can we be so sure that Booth owned the deringer, and that it was used for the assassination? Was such a puny, highly inaccurate and, by modern standards, crude weapon capable of doing the job? Booth was an actor; where did he acquire the skills to handle a firearm? Can we prove how Booth obtained the deringer? Do we know where he bought the ammunition?
Nobody investigating Lincoln's assassination could fail to notice how many unanswered questions it raises. Did Booth actually buy a different model of deringer? Were there other deringers with the same serial number? Did somebody alter the serial numbers on Booth's deringer? What about the chain of custody of the deringer? Was a different weapon actually used, and the deringer swapped later? Could the data from Lincoln's autopsy have been faked to cover up the use of another weapon? How many shots were really fired? Did anyone actually see Booth go into the theater with the deringer? Could it have been a "Booth double" and not really Booth who pulled the trigger? What about Booth's shadowy contacts with Confederate agents? Could he have been mesmerized into killing the president?
Given such uncertainties about the case against Booth, it is obvious that if he had been captured alive, his case would have never gone to trial. It must be regarded as extremely suspicious that the soldiers pursuing him shot and killed him; it would have been very inconvenient for him to have lived to take the witness stand. The coverup continues even today; we'll never really know the truth about the Lincoln assassination.
BACK_TO_TOP* I wrote a long document, with 35 chapters, on the JFK assassination, but it ended up being way too much for many readers, and so I built this short document in 2012 to give the basic facts of the case. In 2015, I was working on an update of the long parent document, to then realize it was a waste of effort: Nobody sane is worried about the JFK assassination today, nobody reads this document, and it's a useless bore to wade through.
I decided to file away the long document, and extend this simple document with a quick tour of the conspiracy game -- working on a "three strikes you're out" basis, dismantling some of the most prominent claims, and pointing out the rest have no better basis in facts. I've had all I can take of the JFK assassination; the best thing I can do for readers is to show the sensible that they don't need to get lost in the swamp like I did. The whole thing's dead and buried -- fade to black.
* The primary sources for this document were Gerald Posner's CASE CLOSED and Bugliosi's RECLAIMING HISTORY. Other useful sources included:
* Illustrations details:
* Revision history:
v1.0.0 / 01 feb 12 / Originally THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION IN BRIEF. v1.0.1 / 01 mar 13 / Review & polish. v1.0.1 / 01 nov 13 / Review & polish. v1.0.2 / 01 oct 15 / Review & polish. v2.0.0 / 01 aug 15 / Went to two chapters. v3.0.0 / 01 jul 17 / Changed title to THE RISE & FALL OF JFK TRUTH. v3.0.1 / 01 jun 19 / Review & polish. v3.0.2 / 01 apr 21 / Review & polish.BACK_TO_TOP
