[2.0] The Rise & Fall of the JFK Conspiracy

* Jack Ruby's murder of Oswald did much to stoke conspiracy stories about the JFK assassination. The stories went on for decades, into the 21st century, until they finally more or less faded out. In hindsight, the question is not if there really was a conspiracy to kill JFK, there was never any persuasive reason to believe so; the question is how the matter could have been belabored for so long, to so little result.

[2.1] JACK RUBY

* Jack Ruby was born as "Jacob Leon Rubenstein" in Chicago in 1911, the fifth of eight children of Joseph and Fannie Rubenstein, both Orthodox Jews. The parents separated when Jacob was ten. Jack was an unruly youngster, with a hot temper, inclined to get into fights, and very good at fighting. He always had a scheme to bring in a fast buck or two, but he never had any serious problems with the law. Nobody who knew him ever thought of him as very bright.

Rubenstein went to California for a while; then came back to Chicago; did a hitch Stateside in the Army Air Forces during the war; and finally moved down to Dallas, Texas in 1947, where he legally changed his name to "Jack Ruby". After many hustles and unsuccessful deals, he helped run two nightclubs, the "Carousel Club" and the "Vegas Club", working with his sister Eva Ruby Grant -- he spent most of his time running the Carousel Club, while Eva ran the Vegas Club.

Success eluded Ruby. He always had troubles staying afloat financially, and he was a Yankee in Texas, also Jewish; he didn't fit in. People who worked for him found him volatile, capable of wild mood swings, from fun-loving to violent. He was still inclined to get into fights -- sometimes with good reason, sometimes not. He often carried large sums of money around to pay off his workers and bills, and so he sometimes packed a revolver.

Ruby was something of a "gate crasher" and liked to draw attention to himself, putting on obnoxious displays of self-importance. He was friendly with the local cops, Dallas police saying he was known to about half the force. Ruby was also friendly to local gangsters, who sometimes came in and threw money around in his club, and had a few shady friends. Ruby's ties with such characters would lead to rumors that he was involved in drug dealing and prostitution, but he was never arrested or even investigated for such things.

Gangsters didn't trust Ruby. He was too friendly with the police, and he talked too much. There were tales that he had been sent to Dallas by the Chicago Mob, but the FBI checked up on his background in both locales and found nothing. Wiretaps of gangsters never mentioned Ruby; gangland informants had never heard of him. Ruby liked to hint that he had Mob connections, that he "knew all the Boys", but nobody thought there was anything to it other than Ruby trying to inflate his importance. A Dallas police detective named Jack Revill told the HSCA: "Jack Ruby was a buffoon. He liked the limelight. He was highly volatile. He liked to be recognized with people, and I would say this to the committee: if Jack Ruby was a member of organized crime, then the personnel director of organized crime should be replaced."

His rabbi, Hillel Silverman, had a similar read on him: "Jack Ruby would be the last one that I could ever trust to do anything." Those who knew Ruby also found him generally apolitical. He did like JFK and his wife Jackie, however; they had "star quality", they had "class" -- something Ruby desperately wanted, but never could remotely have.

* Some conspiracy tales had Ruby out of town or working for a conspiracy on Thursday, 21 November 1963, the day before the assassination, but he was seen around Dallas, working on his usual hustles. The next day, Friday, started out like any other for Ruby. At 11:00 AM that morning, he went to the offices of THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS to place ads for the nightclubs. Workers there saw Ruby around; when the news came that JFK had been shot, one of the newspaper staffers who was dealing with Ruby described his reaction as one of "stunned disbelief", adding that Ruby became "emotionally upset". He left the offices of THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS about 1:30 PM, clearly in a distraught frame of mind.

Reports of Ruby's movements that afternoon are confused, but he did end up at the Carousel Club, where all there found him a wreck, weeping freely -- something not at all normal for a tough guy like Ruby. He left in mid-afternoon, going to Eva's apartment, staying there until the evening. When he finally left, Eva said: "He looked pretty bad ... a broken man ..." He told her: "Someone tore my heart out."

Ruby went to a memorial service for the president at his synagogue, and then to City Hall, where he saw Oswald make a statement, and schmoozed with the reporters there. Late that night, he ran into one of his strippers, out on a date with a Dallas cop; they described Ruby as "kind of wild-eyed", fuming at that "little rat" Oswald. Ruby spent the rest of the night running around, not getting to bed until sometime around sunup on Saturday. He stayed in the apartment until noon, to then spend much of the day in incoherent drifting around town.

That evening, when he was back in his apartment, he got a call from one of his strippers, Karen Carlin, who needed a little cash -- but he didn't feel very agreeable, getting snappish with her. After further drifting around, he went to bed about 1:40 AM, early by his standards. Ruby got up at midmorning on Sunday, 24 November, to get another call from Karen Carlin, hitting him up for money again. He agreed to go to Western Union and send her a "moneygram" for $25 USD. Ruby left the apartment at about 11:00 AM and drove downtown.

Ruby went to Western Union, where he obtained the moneygram for Carlin, being given a receipt timestamped 11:17 AM. The Western Union office was only a short distance from City Hall; Ruby walked over there and at 11:20 slipped into the Main Street ramp as a police vehicle was leaving, with the vehicle providing concealment for Ruby as he went inside. Apparently someone shouted: "HEY YOU!" -- at him, but he just walked faster. At 11:21, Ruby was walking up to the crowd of reporters inside just as Oswald was being brought out. Ruby drew his pistol and rushed in, shouting: "You killed my president, you rat!" -- putting a slug through Oswald. Oswald fell, the police tackled Ruby and dragged him off as others called an ambulance for Oswald. Oswald's wound was mortal.

* Police could not get a coherent explanation out of Ruby for why he killed Oswald; they concluded he had simply done it as an enraged impulse. Rabbi Silverman commented later: "I entered his cell. I knew him very well ... He was a very volatile, a very emotional, unbalanced person. He thought he was doing the right thing. He loved Kennedy. [Oswald] killed Kennedy. [Ruby] happened to be there ... He was impetuous, he pulled the trigger."

One of Ruby's strippers gave a similar and very perceptive read on his impulsiveness: "I think he came around there just to see what was going on. And when he saw that sneer on Oswald's face -- that's all it would take to snap Jack."

Jack's brother Earl, hoping to get the best possible deal for Jack in his murder trial, managed to get superstar lawyer Melvin Belli to take the case. It actually wasn't that challenging a case, since many Texans didn't have a big problem with Ruby killing Oswald, and the general expectation was that Ruby would get a five-year sentence.

Hiring on Belli, however, was a big mistake. Belli was a pro in torts, civil suits, and had little background in criminal cases; he was also arrogant, publicly calling Dallas folk "yokels". Belli did an overblown job on the defense that simply annoyed the jury and humiliated his client; on 14 March 1964, the jury found Jack Ruby guilty of premeditated murder, and he was then sentenced to death. Ruby's mental stability, not very good when he was arrested, continued to deteriorate during the trial and afterward. He had fantasies of Jews being slaughtered, with the guards reporting that he would put his ear to the wall and say: "Shh! Do you hear the screams? They're torturing the Jews again down in the basement!"

Since Ruby was behind bars, the Warren Commission decided to visit him in Dallas, for the sake of security: taking Ruby to Washington DC would create too many opportunities for someone to kill him. Warren himself was part of the group that talked to Ruby on 7 June 1964. Conspiracy paranoids make much of Ruby's declaration of a conspiracy to kill JFK during the interview; they particularly play up the fact that Ruby said he had to go to Washington DC to tell his story.

Anyone who would say such things has made a very selective reading of the transcript of the interview. The first conclusion of anyone giving a serious reading to the 7 June interview is that Ruby was a disturbed individual. As far as Ruby's statements that a conspiracy had killed JFK went, Ruby made it very clear he had no involvement with it, simply saying the John Birch Society was behind it, that the "conspiracy" was torturing and murdering Jews, trying to pin JFK's assassination on Jews. How did Ruby know this? "It's just a feeling of it." He had no more specific information on the "conspiracy" than anyone else did.

Ruby was explicit in saying that he couldn't tell his story unless he went to Washington DC, but his testimony showed he meant that he didn't believe his testimony would be accurately passed on, that he needed to tell LBJ the truth in person, and believed the "conspiracy" would kill him to prevent that from happening: "It may not be too late, whatever happens, if our president, Lyndon Johnson, knew the truth from me. But if I am eliminated, there won't be any way of knowing."

Ruby's death sentence was appealed, with his defense arguing that he couldn't get a fair trial in Dallas. The courts granted the retrial, but by the time came, Ruby was terminally ill with cancer. He died on 3 January 1967.

* Ruby looms large in conspiracy stories -- in fact, if there was any one element in the story that gave the conspiracy stories momentum, it was Ruby's murder of Oswald. It was much too convenient, as if somebody wanted to shut Oswald up. However, there was nothing surprising about someone wanting to shoot Oswald; threatening phone calls received by the police and the widespread outrage against Oswald made it clear that any hothead who wanted to kill him would have had to get in line.

It was vicious and stupid to do so, of course. Ruby had taken justice into his own hands as judge, jury, and executioner when he had absolutely no way of knowing at the time that Oswald hadn't been arrested by mistake. By preventing a trial from taking place, Ruby also denied the world the opportunity to see Oswald in the witness stand, which would have likely done Oswald no good, and even prevented conspiracy stories from ever taking off.

The popular "Ruby silenced Oswald for the Mob (or somebody)" scenario tends to fall down when the details of Ruby's assault on Oswald are considered. The timing of Ruby's entry to the garage is particularly revealing. The moneygram Ruby obtained from Western Union was stamped 11:17 AM, as was the receipt he had on him for the moneygram; the call for an ambulance for Oswald was logged at 11:21 AM. It had been publicly announced to the crowd of newsmen around City Hall that the transfer of Oswald would be at 10:00 AM; it was delayed by unpredicted events.

Ruby only crossed paths with Oswald by a freak of chance; if the line at Western Union had been longer, Oswald would have been gone before Ruby went into the garage. Indeed, if Ruby hadn't needed to buy a moneygram, it is unlikely he would have been anywhere near City Hall. In addition, Ruby had a "family" of dachshunds of which he was extremely fond, and had left his favorite, Sheba, in the car when he went into Western Union, as if he were expecting to come right back.

The idea that Ruby was a hit man for the Mob doesn't hold water. If the Mob wanted to shut up a loose cannon before he could talk, why hand the law another loose cannon in his place? Had Oswald been killed in a slick professional hit job, that would have been far more suspicious than sending in an unstable loudmouth to do the job. In fact, simply exchanging one loose cannon for another would have made matters more difficult for the conspiracy by multiplying the connections back to it. Nobody who knew Ruby well could imagine anyone wanting to recruit him as an agent. Neither the Warren Commission nor the HSCA found any credible connection between Ruby and the Mob, or any other potential group of conspirators; they also examined tales of associations between Ruby and Oswald before the assassination, and came up zeroes.

A high-ranking Mob boss named Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratiano, who became a government informant, recollected a chat he had in 1976 with fellow gangster Johnny Roselli. Roselli had just testified to a Senate investigation, and told Fratiano that he would have liked to have announced that "the Mob did it, just to see the expression on their stoopid faces. Y'know, we're supposed to be idiots? Right? We hire a psycho like Oswald to kill the president, and then we get a blabbermouth, two-bit punk like Ruby to shut him up. We wouldn't trust those jerks to hit a fucking dog."

[2.2] ORIGINS OF A CONSPIRACY STORY

* 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 conspiracy paranoids as superficial, riddled with errors, biased, a coverup exercise. Of course it was denounced, since it concluded there was no conspiracy; to them, that made it a fraud on the face of it.

Conspiracy stories 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, conspiracy paranoids 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 story 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" story and upped the ante, claiming 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:

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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, conspiracy paranoids 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 stories 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 tales kept on piling up, to mutate increasingly into the bizarre. One conspiracy paranoid 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 stories proposed Jackie did it; that the "plot" was orchestrated by the Federal Reserve Bank, or a committee named MAJESTIC-12 that, so it was claimed, directed US relations with aliens; or even that JFK faked his own death. "Who killed JFK? Who DIDN'T?"

[2.3] DECLINE & FALL

* Although conspiracy stories 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 tales piled up to the point where there seemed no bottom to them.

One element of the JFK conspiracy stories was dodgy forensics. Arguably, the biggest single item of "evidence" cited by conspiracy paranoids was the fact that the Zapruder movie shows JFK's head snapping backward after being hit by the third bullet. To the paranoids, 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:

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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 conspiracy paranoid 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 the paranoids 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 conspiracy paranoids 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 tales.

* Another element of the JFK conspiracy stories 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 stories 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 conspiracy paranoids 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:

• Name 15 specific adults selected at random from the population of the USA. What are the odds that all 15 of these named people will be dead within a few years?

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:

• Given a group of several thousand people, what are the odds that at least 15 unspecified members of that group will be dead in a few years?

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, conspiracy paranoids 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 conspiracy paranoids 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 conspiracy paranoids.

* 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 conspiracy authors, due to his prolific output, including titles such as:

• ALIEN AGENDA, from 2000: "Investigating The Alien Presence Among Us"
  
  
• RULE BY SECRECY, from 2001: "The Hidden History That Connects The Trilateral Commission, The Freemasons, And The Great Pyramid"
  
  
• THE TRILLION-DOLLAR CONSPIRACY, from 2010: "How The New World Order, Man-Made Diseases, And Zombie Banks Are Destroying America"
  
  
• OUR OCCULTED HISTORY, from 2013: "Do The Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens?"

And so on. Marrs, it seemed, never met a conspiracy story 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 a 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 stores 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 persisted 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 conspiracy paranoids 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?