The Kennedy Assassination

"This event has spawned something like 3,000 books and is a never-ending industry of its own. It all began with people questioning the initial reports. Because no one could believe that a loser like Lee Harvey Oswald could have done it alone. Most people suspected that it was a Communist plot, or the work of a right-wing nut. Jackie Kennedy herself expressed dismay that Kennedy hadn’t been killed over civil rights, but by some ‘silly little Communist’. There was a huge disconnect in the public mind between the paragon that was Kennedy and the nobody that was Oswald. “There was a huge disconnect in the public mind between the paragon that was Kennedy and the nobody that was Oswald.” Interestingly, with the publication of the Warren Commission, nearly a year after the assassination, the vast majority of the American public believed the official report. That changed by the time the Zapruder film footage was televised. Many people think it was televised at the time of the assassination, but it wasn’t shown until 1975. The Zapruder film is a very unreadable bit of footage – the editor of Life magazine, who published a few carefully selected stills from the film at the time of the assassination, says of it: ‘Depending on your point of view, it proves almost anything you want it to prove.’ Yes, that’s such a harrowing detail. She said she had no recollection of doing it, yet she was trying to retrieve a piece of his skull. She was obviously in a state of extreme trauma. When the film was shown on television the presenters described what was being shown, and when someone tells you what to see you see it. This was a time, around Watergate, when trust in the government was at an all-time low so that people believed that any official line must be untrue. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes, most people. People thought Lee Harvey Oswald was a Communist and, if not a lone gunman, then acting as part of a greater group of Communists. The idea of a huge government conspiracy hadn’t entered people’s minds. I think when the Warren Commission Report appeared after a year it had almost too much information in it – it is 26 volumes long and almost inevitably peppered with contradictions. After Watergate everyone had begun to pick holes in things. Knight talks, for example, about the conspiracy theories around the autopsy report and points out that this procedure was carried out under great duress, that human error rather than cover-up produced discrepancies. Nowadays if you look at the material and at the minutiae – it’s such a parallel universe. But this is a very readable and clear-headed book about how the assassination has been represented and incorporated into other things. Popular opinion today has 75 per cent of people believing that there was a cover-up – that’s phenomenally high. I don’t subscribe to most of those conspiracy theory beliefs, no. I think Oswald probably acted alone and if he didn’t it wasn’t a massive thing that takes in the Mafia and Castro. More interesting is the question of why the assassination has so captured the American imagination, from Andy Warhol to Oliver Stone."