“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.
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