On his third day in office in January, President Trump ordered the release of documents from the National Archives related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As Trump declared on the campaign trail, “It’s been 60 years, time for the American people to know the TRUTH.”
The truth is that nothing in the archives is going to dispel the fog of hypothesis, rumor and speculation that swirls around these killings. The assassinations of the 1960s — President Kennedy’s in particular — remain the source and paradigm of modern conspiratorial thinking, a style of argument to which the current president is passionately committed. Whatever details emerge now are unlikely to settle the ongoing debates, which are less about what happened in Dallas in 1963 (or Memphis and Los Angeles five years later) than about the character of the American state and the nature of reality itself.
Was Kennedy killed by the Mafia? By the C.I.A.? Was he an early, liberal victim of what modern conservatism has come to call the Deep State? A lot of people think so, and there may be unanswered questions hovering around his death. But there’s a thin line between skepticism and paranoia, between reasonable guesses and wild invention. The American imagination often gravitates to the far side of that line, and the Kennedy assassination was one of the shocks that pushed us over it.
By 1963, we were already headed in that direction. Suspicion was part of the atmosphere of the Cold War years, when what Kennedy himself called the “twilight struggle” between the United States and the Soviet Union was accompanied by the rapid growth of the American security state, which rested equally on paperwork and secrecy. Through the years of McCarthy, Sputnik and the quiz show scandals, paranoia was in the air.
Kennedy’s killing was almost immediately folded into a narrative structure that had already surfaced in popular culture as well as politics, a mode of storytelling that treated public events as the expressions of secret plots. Richard Condon’s Cold War thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” (published in 1959 and adapted by Hollywood in 1962) and Thomas Pynchon’s shaggy-dog experimental whodunit “V.” are among the best-known pre-assassination examples of this paranoid style in American fiction. (The phrase “paranoid style” comes from an influential essay on political conspiratorialism by the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, originally delivered as a lecture shortly before the assassination and published in Harper’s in 1964.)
That same year, the Warren Commission Report emphatically concluded that Oswald was the sole shooter and the only party responsible for Kennedy’s killing. Yet the report did anything but close the case. Through the years that followed, the commission was subjected to a steady stream of revisionism and rebuttal, carried out first by journalists and politicians and later, perhaps more decisively, by novelists and filmmakers.
Versions of the counternarrative percolate through novels and movies from the late ’60s on, picking up steam in the ’80s and ’90s. Alan J. Pakula’s “The Parallax View” (1974), while not explicitly about J.F.K., paints a bleak, cynical picture of an American elite devouring its own, devoted to nothing beyond the preservation of power and the weaponization of deceit. Condon’s “Winter Kills,” published in 1974 and made into a movie five years later, runs a darkly comic variation on this theme, ascribing a Kennedy-like figure’s death to the moral rot and congenital dishonesty of a ruling class he had both embodied and betrayed.
The disasters of Vietnam and Watergate, along with revelations about the covert activities of the C.I.A. and F.B.I., fed a distrust of the state that would fester on the left and the right. The assassination was seen from both sides as central event in the secret history of our times, a loose thread that, when pulled, would unravel a skein of sinister plots involving intelligence agencies, the Mafia, Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon B. Johnson and various clandestine organizations and shadowy actors. The cumulative moral of these stories was that nothing was ever what it seemed, and that American institutions were warrens of treachery and deceit.
In the 1988 baseball comedy “Bull Durham,” Kevin Costner’s Crash Davis, in a character-defining monologue, declares: “I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.” That’s what a smart, sexy, grown-up romantic lead played by an up-and-coming movie star would say. Three years later, Costner starred in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” as Jim Garrison, the real-life New Orleans district attorney pursuing a case that implicated a vast web of conspirators, including Kennedy’s successor, Johnson. “We’re through the looking glass here, people,” he said. “White is black and black is white.” In 1991, that was what a righteous warrior for truth played by a double Oscar winner would say.
The conspiracy zeitgeist was shifting. Between “Bull Durham” and “JFK,” Don DeLillo published “Libra,” his novel about Lee Harvey Oswald; Norman Mailer published his 1300-page “Harlot’s Ghost,” intended as the first volume in a chronicle of modern American espionage that would stitch the Kennedy assassination into a larger history of covert operations and double-crosses; the Soviet Union collapsed.
Now everything was an inside job. The Kennedy assassination would continue to be a source of fascination in its own right — it anchors James Ellroy’s synoptic Underworld U.S.A. trilogy and figures as a plot point in numerous fictions about espionage and organized crime — and it would also become a template, a model for explaining everything.
At the end of the ’90s, the internet blossomed, “The Matrix” opened in theaters and the normalization of conspiratorial thinking accelerated. The online, post-9/11 world is teeming with “truthers,” free-range skeptics who reflexively doubt what seems to be the obvious account of events. That, say, Al Qaeda operatives flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center; that a gunman slaughtered teachers and children at a school in Connecticut; that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square; that followers of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Elaborate, preposterous alternative scenarios — involving false flags, black ops, hacked voting machines and Deep State machinations — proliferate on social media where they become the basis for algorithmically fueled pseudo-research.
Spurious theories can be refuted over and over again — in the news media, in sworn congressional testimony, in the civil and criminal courts — but such fact-checking often has the effect of amplifying the falsehoods. It isn’t just that we disagree on the facts or what they mean; we lack a common definition of what a fact even is. Generalized mistrust of authority and expertise turns us into epistemological free agents, making up the world as we blunder through it. We’re just asking questions, doing our own search engine-optimized investigations, huddling in ad hoc Warren Commissions of our own devising.
Occam’s razor, the venerable philosophical principle that the truest explanation is likely to be the simplest, has been thrown away. We’re living in the age of Occam’s chain saw, when the preferred answer is the one that makes the loudest noise and generates the most debris.
Richard Hofstadter warned that “there is a great difference between locating conspiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy.” Recent history includes a lot of people saying exactly that, in ways that make the old paranoid style look downright sensible.
To change the metaphor, it can seem as if the civic landscape is nothing but rabbit holes. The rabbits will never go back into the hats. Paranoia, in Hofstadter’s definition — in a phrase he borrowed from the British historian L.B. Namier — involved the lack of “an intuitive sense of how things do not happen,” a sense that history unspools within knowable parameters. That grounding in reality has been grievously undermined, and no cache of documents is going to restore it.
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