The Kennedy Assassination And The Persistence Of Conspiracy Theories -- Part I

A few days ago, pursuant to an order from President Trump, the National Archives finally released some 76,000 pages of documents that were previously withheld as classified from what they call their President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection. Many voices — not the least of them Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services and nephew of the slain President — have been calling for the release of these documents for years, even decades. Surely today, more than 60 years after the event, the secrets that justified withholding these documents from the public for decades can’t be all that significant any more. So let the truth be known!

A big reason given by those advocating for the release of the documents has been that it might put an end to the so-called “conspiracy theories” that have long swirled around the assassination of President Kennedy. Since immediately after the assassination, the official government story has been that Kennedy was killed by a single lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, who acted entirely on his own. That version of the facts got the ultimate official stamp of government approval with the issuance of the Warren Commission Report on September 24, 1964, about 10 months after the assassination. President Lyndon Johnson had appointed the blue ribbon Warren Commission specifically (supposedly) to get to the bottom of what had happened. The Commission was headed by Earl Warren, then the sitting Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and included as members such luminaries as future President Gerald Ford and then-recently-retired head of the CIA Allen Dulles. The Commission’s Report is long, detailed, and seemingly definitive. Since the issuance of the Report in 1964, the government’s official story has never changed.

And yet, when polls are taken of the American people even today, the large majority don’t believe it. Here is a report from Gallup from November 2023, the 60th anniversary of the assassination. Excerpt:

Sixty years after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, a broad majority of Americans continue to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone but rather, that others were involved in a conspiracy to kill the president. The 65% of U.S. adults who think Oswald worked in concert with others and the 29% who say he was solely responsible are roughly in line with the previous readings from 10 years ago.

It’s not just a few doubters out there. The doubters outnumber those who accept the official version by more than 2 to 1, and that has been the case for the entire six plus decades since the event.

So what is it about this particular event that leaves the large majority of Americans doubting the official story? I plan to explore the answer to that question in a series of posts over the next several days.

As brief background, I should mention my own interest in this subject. Although I am old enough to have been alive at the time of the assassination, and to remember where I was when I learned about it (8th grade English class), I never took any particular interest in the assassination until recently. A few years ago, two friends of mine (who do not know each other) independently told me that they had gotten interested in the subject, and that the “conspiracy theories” were not trivial. Each of the two recommended some books for me to read, and by this time I have read about half a dozen.

Having read these books, I agree that the conspiracy theories are not trivial. However, I don’t have any clear belief for myself as to whether the official version of the events is correct or whether there was a conspiracy. I am agnostic. There may never be an answer to the question that will satisfy me as definitive. But I do have a view that the support given for the official version is deficient in obvious ways. Thus I am not surprised at all that most people remain skeptical. The people are not stupid.

What I find most interesting is how this set of circumstances reflects on the question of how we know what we think we know, and how we use facts and evidence to get to the truth. So that is the question that I will be exploring in this series of posts.

From a long career of trying to prove a version of the truth in a way that will be convincing to a neutral party, here is the most important lesson I learned: The facts that are the most important are not the ones that are consistent with your version of the truth, but rather the ones that are inconsistent with your adversary’s version of the truth. The corollary of this proposition is that the advocate who wins the toss-up argument is the one who has the best answer to his opponent’s most telling points. (The opponent’s most telling points being the things he points to that he says are inconsistent with your version of the truth.). You can’t win by failing to address points that your opponent says are inconsistent with your version of the truth and therefore would indicate that you must be wrong.

Whenever the Kennedy assassination comes back into the news for whatever reason, pieces appear in various outlets reiterating the official version of events. To whet your appetite for this series, let me start then by providing a couple of examples of this phenomenon from the past couple of days. At PowerLine, Scott Johnson on March 21 republished a piece by Edward Jay Epstein from 1983 that lays out the official case. On the same date, David Harsanyi published a piece in the Jewish World Review with the title “Sorry, Conspiracy Theorists -- Lee Harvey Oswald Acted Alone.” Both seek to convince the undecided; but both suffer from ubiquitous problem of failing to deal with the best points of the other side, the ones that are inconsistent with theory of Oswald acting alone.

I’ll leave you for today with some key excerpts from the Epstein piece as republished at PowerLine:

The endless tangle of questions about bullets, trajectories, wounds, time sequences and inconsistent testimony that has surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and has obsessively fascinated, if not entirely blinded, a generation of assassination buffs-probably never will be resolved. Within this morass of facts, however, there is a central actor, Lee Harvey Oswald. His rifle, which fired the fatal bullet into the president, was found in the sniper’s nest. His cartridge cases were also found near the body of a murdered policeman on the route his flight. He was captured resisting arrest with the loaded murder revolver in his hand. . . .

While still in the early stages of his flirtation with political causes, 0swald joined the Marine Corps. In October 1959, after a two-year stint as a radar operator, Oswald became the first Marine to defect to the Soviet Union, In Moscow, he delivered a letter stating: “I affirm that my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” . . .

He then had his wife photograph him, dressed entirely in black, with his revolver strapped on a holster on his hip, his sniper’s rifle in his right hand, and two newspapers — The Workerand The Militant — in his left hand. He made three copies of the photograph — one of which he inscribed, dated “5–IV-63” and sent to a Dallas acquaintance, George De Mohrenschildt. . . .

In the final analysis, the Warren Commission turned out to be right: Oswald was the assassin. He had brought his rifle to work on November 22, carefully prepared a concealed sniper’s position at a sixth floor window, and, waiting in ambush for almost an hour, shot the President as the motorcade passed below. The possibility that he had assistance — for example, someone setting off a firecracker as a diversion — can never be precluded. But the real question is not how but why Oswald assassinated the President. . . .

As I will discuss in the subsequent posts, that version of the facts leaves all the most important issues unaddressed. More to come.