Of Assassinations, Faith and Intrigue

“President Kennedy was shot by two CIA agents, one in the Texas School Book Depository and the other on the grassy knoll.  I believe that Jack Ruby was acting under the misinformation that the Mafia was behind the assassination and that he received help from Dallas police officers.  I believe that the CIA wanted Kennedy dead because they blamed him for not backing up the anti-Castro Cuban rebels.”

Thus concluded my ten page school project on the assassination of JFK.  For a while when I was fifteen I was more than a little obsessed with Kennedy’s death, reading and watching everything available and convincing myself that the whole thing was a massive conspiracy on the part of the US government.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s death, there has been a litany of articles, blogs and documentaries dissecting the unanswered questions about that fateful day in Dallas.  How many shots were fired?  Where were they fired from?  Who was the man on the grassy knoll?  Why was the open-topped presidential motorcade travelling below the prescribed speed?  Was Kennedy’s brain removed from his body before it was buried, and if so, where is it now?  Why were there frames removed from the Zapruder home movie?  What motivation would a nightclub owner with ties to the mob have to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald before he could stand trial?  Why did the 500-plus page Warren Commission report have no index?

As a historian, a lot of my research has, both willingly and grudgingly, involved debunking popular intrigue about historical events.  There is no evidence that Margaret Thatcher ordered the sinking of the retreating General Belgrano during the Falklands War.  The moon landing wasn’t faked.  And it would seem overwhelmingly likely that one troubled young man on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The confluence of circumstances on 22 November 1963 make a compelling case for conspiracy – a young Democratic president, who had defused the Cuban Missile Crisis but had blundered in the Bay of Pigs, who was pushing forward Civil Rights legislation and cracking down on organised crime, who had a beautiful wife and a young family, had been gunned down in his prime.  Though he had his enemies, Kennedy was a popular President, at home and abroad, emblematic of a new era of hope in global politics, and to many it was impossible to believe that one man acting alone could end his life so suddenly.  How could one ordinary citizen with a mail-order rifle be responsible for killing the most powerful politician in the world?  Rather than accept this sobering fact, it has become easier, more comforting even, to imagine that it was all the work of a web of shadowy characters behind the scenes of power.  To accept this theory is to refute the unpredictable nature of the assassin’s bullet.

Human beings love conspiracies.  They fill the pages of airport thrillers, pack the television schedules and make fantastic films.  JFK’s assassination was itself given the Hollywood makeover by Oliver Stone in 1991, which only fanned the conspiracist flames.  We have a particular predilection to deny the existence of random acts of madness or, even more so, tragic accidents.  It’s the reason why so many people cling to the idea that Princess Diana’s death was orchestrated by the British Royal family.  When coupled with the legends that develop around them, bound up with the mysterious draw of ‘what might have been’, the deaths of popular figures come to be seen as momentous events which can only have happened for a reason.

The majority of humans love to embrace faith – “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” - whether it be in religion, conspiracy theories or in the unshakeable dependability of our heroes.  The alternative is to accept that there is no more to life than that which we see in front of us.  For me, it’s the existence of extra-terrestrial life.  I’m fairly convinced that aliens haven’t made contact with Earth (though open to persuasion!), but like Fox Mulder, I want to believe they exist out there somewhere, and that we aren’t alone in the universe.

We feed on stories like Snowden’s NSA leaks because we like to think that our governments are hiding things from us.  They must be, because there has to be a reason why our lives aren’t quite as good as we’d like them to be.  There has to be someone to blame; someone pulling the strings, keeping us in the dark.  Hey, if we’re living in the Matrix, that would explain why we don’t feel as fulfilled or happy or earn as much money as we’d like.  Unfortunately, this theory discounts another significant human trait – our inability to keep secrets.  As we have daily evidence, secrets leak.  To quote The West Wing’s CJ Cregg, “there is no group of people this large in the world that can keep a secret.  I find it comforting.  It's how I know for sure that the government isn't covering up aliens in New Mexico.”  Disappointingly, what may appear to be mysterious anomalies that could only be the result of a complex plot just waiting to be exposed by a plucky maverick can almost always be attributed to miscalculations, misinterpretation and, sometimes, simple, foolish mistakes.  Never underestimate the ability of your government to bungle.

Even when the archives are opened and we have definitive answers about the Kennedy assassination, there are people who won’t believe them.  It’s harder than you’d think to shake a person’s faith.  And what about me?  Have I outgrown my teenage notions of CIA cover-ups and double agents?  The rational part of my brain would like to think so, but there’s a bit of my fifteen-year-old self inside who still clings onto the hope that the conspiracy will one day be revealed.

Bridging the Divide

By early afternoon the hordes were already gathering on the bridge.  One diver strutted back and forth along the parapet, flexing and posing, while another worked the crowd, taking BAM, Euros and even Kuna from the tourists who had flocked to Mostar on day trips from the Dalmatian coast. They hadn’t timed it right this time.  They'd waited too long and the crowds had become bored, dispersing off into the old town to search for coffee pots and ice cream, post cards and paintings.  Or perhaps they’d timed it perfectly, returning to the club house on the turret of the bridge with a wodge of notes.

Two hours later we return to the bridge and the diver is back.  This time he jumps, arms outstretched before pulling himself pencil thin to plunge feet first into the fast-flowing bright green waters of the River Neretva below.  Young men have been diving off the Stari Most for centuries to impress the local girls and during the summer months the divers of the Mostar Diving Club earn a fair trade from tourists who pay to photograph them making the iconic 22-metre jump.

Twenty years ago today, on 9 November 1993, the 427-year-old Stari Most was destroyed by Bosnian Croat forces during the Bosnian war.  Its destruction served no strategic military purpose – there were other modern bridges across the river – but was instead an act of cultural vandalism.  The bridge was demolished for the Ottoman heritage it represented and the place it held in the hearts of the city’s inhabitants.

Footage of the bridge’s destruction was shown around the world and for some reason, as the shelling of Dubrovnik’s old town had done during the Croatian War in 1991, stirred feelings of outrage with westerners.  The war had been morally unambiguous when Bosnian Serbs, sponsored by Serbia, launched an offensive against the dream of an independent multi-ethnic Bosnia, but when fighting broke out between the Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks, it transformed the conflict into one far more complex, as western politicians never tired of telling reporters.  How could they possibly be expected to intervene in such a complicated civil war, where all sides were attacking one another?

Mostar served as the frontline between the Bosnian Croat forces (HVO) and the Bosnian government forces (ARBiH) during the early years of the war and was the scene of fierce fighting.  The fragile alliance between the HVO and ARBiH in the latter half of the war did nothing but paper thinly over the fissures in Mostar’s society.  

When the rebuilt bridge opened in July 2004 it was hoped that, in the ultimate act of symbolism, it would reunite a city that had been torn apart during the war.  Nine years on, the divisions are as evident as they ever were.  Mostar truly is a tale of two cities, divided by the Neretva, with the Bosniak population on the east bank and the Croats on the west.  The city duplicates all its municipal services – two central post offices, two water suppliers, even two fire services.  Infighting between Croat and Bosniak politicians brought the local government to a standstill earlier this year.  The western half of the city is noticeably more affluent, with Croatian flags flying and Croatian nationalist graffiti scrawled on the buildings.  Try finding a Sarajevska on this side of the river.

This uneasy coexistence is mirrored across Bosnia.  The recent debacle over ID numbers in the Parliament has only enflamed tensions between the Republika Srpska and the Bosnian Federation.  Bosnia-Herzegovina qualified for their first World Cup in October – it was celebrated in Sarajevo; less so in Banja Luka and Mostar.  What comes across strongest in eyewitness accounts of the war is a certainty that the majority of Bosnians were good, peace-loving people, that they all got along exceptionally well before the war, and that the fighting was perpetrated by outsiders.[1]  Yet a war was fought there and for many the memories are still raw.

Today the shell-marked bombed-out buildings interspersed amongst the renovated ones along the old frontline are a stark reminder of the fighting that devastated Mostar just twenty years ago.  The words “don’t forget” are painted on a stone in the old town so unobtrusively small that many miss it.  But it turns out that many of Mostar’s citizens have not forgotten.  And whilst the tourists queue up to take photos of the local divers, browse for trinkets in the cobbled streets of the old town and then get back on their coaches for a whistle stop tour of Medjugorje before heading back to Croatia, it is painfully obvious that it will take a lot more than rebuilding a bridge to bring many Bosnians back together.

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[1] Svetlana Broz, Good People in an Evil Time: Portraits of Complicity and Resistance in the Bosnian War (New York: Other Press, 2004).