JFK: Conspiracy theories live on

Fifty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 61 percent of Americans still believe the killing was the work of a conspiracy. “I was once among them,” said Fred Kaplan in Slate.com. As a teenager in the 1970s, I devoured books “that argued the case for a dark plot” involving multiple shooters, the Mafia, the CIA, or the military industrial complex. But as I dug ever deeper, I saw the holes in all those theories. Take the claim that only two gunmen firing almost simultaneously—with one on the “grassy knoll”—could have hit both JFK and Texas Gov. John Connally as their car drove through Dallas. Not true. Kennedy’s seat was three inches higher than Connally’s, so a single bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald was able to travel in a perfectly straight line through Kennedy and into the governor’s rib cage. Scientific analysis also debunked acoustical evidence of a second shooter. “The most persuasive theory I’ve read” is that Oswald killed JFK in order to impress Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. “But who knows?”

Maybe Fidel does, said Mary Anastasia O’Grady in The Wall Street Journal. Just seven weeks before the assassination, Oswald, an avowed communist who lived in the Soviet Union from 1959 to 1962, visited the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City and loudly “threatened to kill the U.S. president.” Brian Latell, a former CIA Cuba analyst, suspects that Cuban intelligence officers encouraged Oswald to follow through on his threats, as a way to revenge Kennedy’s repeated attempts to remove Castro from power. Six weeks before the assassination, Castro put American leaders on notice that because of their support of his enemies, “they themselves will not be safe.” It’s “the one conspiracy theory that might be true,” said Thom Patterson in CNN.com. Castro certainly had motive, and Oswald openly admired him.

We’ll never know for sure, said Patrik Jonsson in CSMonitor.com. But that won’t end the attempts to prove that Oswald was part of a larger, international plot. Such paranoid -narratives—like the claim that 9/11 was an inside job—give the world a sense of structure that it often lacks in real life. It’s far more troubling to think that a man as insignificant as Oswald, a frustrated loser who was “a failure at everything he ever tried,” could alone change the course of history.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up