Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

"If you’re going to get to grips with conspiracy theory in general, the assassination of Kennedy is the Big Daddy of American conspiracy theories. More than 50% of the American population have always believed that there was a conspiracy behind Kennedy’s murder. So this is a case where conspiracy theory has really gone mainstream. And if you look at a lot of subsequent conspiracy theories, they really borrow from the techniques that the Kennedy conspiracy theorists used to keep their myths alive. If you can understand how conspiracy theorists have distorted history about the JFK case, you can apply the lessons that you learn to other more contemporary conspiracy theories. The book that I’ve chosen is Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History , which is a monumental book. It’s about 1600 pages long, and it comes with a CD-ROM that contains about a thousand additional pages of endnotes. (A shorter book called Four Days in November , about 600 pages long, is essentially the first section of Bugliosi’s book, which tells you in meticulous detail what happened minute by minute on those four days in November, starting on the day of Kennedy’s assassination and finishing on the day after the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby.) It’s by far the most comprehensive book that’s been written on the Kennedy assassination. And it’s one of the most remarkable books I’ve ever read on any subject. So if I was to recommend just one book to people to read about the Kennedy assassination, Bugliosi’s book is the one to read because, in a sense, it contains all the other books and answers the questions many of those books have raised. The other thing I like about Bugliosi’s book is it’s divided into two sections. The first is called Matters of Fact, What Really Happened? And the second is called Delusions of Conspiracy, What Didn’t Happen? Bugliosi, for the first half of his book, meticulously tells us the story of what did happen in Dallas, and he tells us how we know what happened. One of the things I find remarkable about the Kennedy assassination is people will say even today that we still don’t know what happened in Dallas. Bugliosi demonstrates that we do know what happened. It’s lavishly documented. And if you want to know what happened, you can read a book like Bugliosi’s and it will tell you almost down to the second what the movements of all the principal people were on the day of Kennedy’s assassination and then in the days following it. And then in the second section, Delusions of Conspiracy, What Didn’t Happen, he takes on all of the conspiracy theories that have been raised about the assassination – some of them quite plausible and deserving of attention – and he does give them thorough attention. Others are quite preposterous as he points out. So with almost any objection that you’ve heard raised by a conspiracy theorist about this case, if you go to Bugliosi’s book, somewhere in the text, Bugliosi addresses all of those conspiratorial complaints and questions and theories, and he demonstrates that there’s simply no grounds for believing in a conspiracy on that basis. There is. People say about the Kennedy case, there’s no smoke without fire. And there certainly has been a tremendous amount of smoke about this case. DeLillo picked up on that and his book, Libra , is a great work of fiction. But I think that in the case of conspiracy theory, there is such a thing as smoke without fire. And that’s what the conspiracy theories about this case have been. They are smoke without fire. They’ve been going on for 60 years and conspiracy theorists have never managed to construct an alternative explanation of what happened in Dallas. They’ve never come up with a conspiracy theory that stands up to scrutiny. But what they have done is created this smoke without fire that’s confused people and left the public with the impression that there’s no way people would have carried on with these conspiracy theories for 60 years unless there was something genuinely fishy about the Kennedy assassination. “The assassination of Kennedy is the Big Daddy of American conspiracy theories” We should recognise that it was legitimate at first to have doubts about what had happened because Oswald was shot in police custody by Jack Ruby, within 48 hours of his assassination of Kennedy. It was very legitimate for the American public to be concerned about how on earth the president’s assassin had been allowed to be murdered in custody by this guy who appeared to be a fairly shady, perhaps mob-connected character, Jack Ruby. It was rational for people to suspect that there may have been a conspiracy. And what Bugliosi demonstrates is that the rational suspicion that there had been a conspiracy was gradually corrected. People began to find out through investigation why Ruby had murdered Oswald and all of the conspiratorial suspicions about Ruby being a mob hitman eventually evaporated. Where conspiracy theory broke away from rational inquiry was that the conspiracy theorists clung to their theories even when the facts had demonstrated that there was no basis for their theories. My favorite definition of “conspiracy theory” comes from the writer Daniel Pipes who said that a conspiracy theory is “the fear of a non-existent conspiracy.” I think the word “non-existent” is important there because real conspiracies do happen in the real world. What we call “conspiracy theory” is that body of thought which imagines conspiracies and sees conspiracies everywhere, even when they’re not really there. It clings to myths, it finds ways to sustain these myths, and the techniques that the Kennedy conspiracy theorists have used to sustain their myths keep recurring. You saw them again after 9-11, in the theories that arose after that. Time and again, you see this same style of thought applied to each new public tragedy or scandal that occurs. Something like Watergate was indeed a real conspiracy, but the way that it was uncovered was by reporters using old-school techniques and they didn’t let their theories get ahead of the evidence; they unearthed the evidence and let the evidence speak for itself. One of the fascinating subplots that Bugliosi talks about is the fact that the reason Oswald bought his rifle in the first place was that in April, 1963, just six months before the Kennedy assassination, Oswald planned to shoot a man called General Edwin Walker, who was a former military general who’d become a rabble-rousing right winger in Dallas. Oswald’s original plan for glory was that he would become famous as a left-wing folk hero for shooting this right-wing bigot. He mail ordered the rifle, staked out Walker’s house, and in April 1963, he took up a position one night out the back of Walker’s house, aimed at Walker’s head and pulled the trigger. The bullet just missed Walker’s head by an inch – it ricocheted off a window frame and penetrated the wall behind Walker. At the time, that was a big story in Dallas – someone took a shot at General Walker in his house and the gunman got away. They never found out who it was. In fact, only after the murder of John F. Kennedy was it revealed that the attempted assassin of General Walker in April 1963, six months before the Kennedy assassination, was Oswald. His wife Marina testified to this effect. As Bugliosi demonstrates, history could have been completely different if that bullet had been an inch the other way. It would have hit Walker, Walker would have died and Oswald would have either fled to Cuba as he was planning to do or more likely would have been apprehended before that and there never would have been a Kennedy assassination. Once you understand the Oswald story in sequence, going back even earlier than the Walker incident, you understand that Oswald had this hunger to assassinate public figures considerably before he decided that he was going to assassinate Kennedy. One of the reasons conspiracy theorists started talking about this case is because they thought that this sort of pipsqueak lone gunman, nut communist was not a sufficient assassin for such a powerful figure as Kennedy. What Bugliosi does by telling you the full rich story of Oswald is he fills out that story and makes you realise that the story of Oswald is enough once you understand all of its details. Funnily enough, if I was allowed to choose six books today, I would have chosen Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale because it’s a tremendous book. Mailer changed his mind in the course of writing it. He began by believing that there had to be an explanation that was larger than Oswald. There had to be a conspiracy. And by the time he finished researching Oswald’s life, he realized that Oswald did have the capacity and the motive to kill Kennedy by himself. When he was describing his state of mind to begin with, Mailer wrote, “If such a non-entity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us and we live in a universe that is absurd.” I think many conspiracy theorists thought that way. They thought that it was just simply too absurd that this nobody with a cheap $20 rifle could have killed the most powerful man in the world and they set about constructing explanations that seemed to them less absurd."