The event that inspired the most enduring ‘conspiracy theory’ of modern times turns 60 tomorrow.
On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, the United States’ 35th president, was assassinated while riding in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.
The official version of events, per the Warren Commission conclusions in 1964, is that Kennedy was fatally shot from the nearby Texas School Book Depository by former US Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, who acted alone – echoing the finding of the preliminary report FBI Director Hoover sent President Johnson within 24 hours of the assassination.
Oswald was arrested 70 minutes after the shooting, only to be fatally shot himself two days later by Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby as he was being moved through the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters.
Ruby – whose guilty verdict in Oswald’s murder was overturned on appeal, and who died of a pulmonary embolism while awaiting a retrial – was also acting alone, the Warren Commission concluded.
Of course, this was far from the end of investigations into the matter. Some of these were official, like the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, and the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations. Others were decidedly unofficial, like the case New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison brought in 1969 against businessman Clay Shaw for Kennedy’s murder [Shaw was acquitted in the court of law but suffered something of a posthumous reversal of fortune in the court of public opinion when Oliver Stone released ‘JFK’, his fictionalised film account of Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins, in 1991].
While none of these investigations have definitively disproven the official lone gunman account of the Kennedy assassination, they have tended to turn up more material that’s proven to be rich pickings for further speculation.
For example, the 1976 Church Committee was prompted by revelations of CIA misconduct by journalist Seymour Hersh [whose legendary career includes his 1969 exposure of the My Lai massacre of unarmed civilians during the Vietnam War and alleging earlier this year that the US and not Russia was ultimately behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream Pipeline]. Because of persisting theories about CIA and FBI involvement in the killing of Kennedy, a sub-committee was set up to investigate these claims. It ultimately concluded that, while there was no evidence of a CIA- or FBI-led conspiracy, the original assassination investigation was “deficient” and the FBI and CIA withheld information from the Warren Commission about the CIA having conspired with the Mafia in plots against Cuba’s Fidel Castro – which fuelled further scrutiny.
Now here we are, almost exactly 60 years since the events in Dealey Plaza and, despite all the contempt poured on the idea of ‘conspiracies’ in general [which, lest we forget, are simply plots that involve two or more people] and this one in particular, the fascination with – and suspicions about – JFK’s assassination persists.
A just-released Gallup poll indicates that 65 per cent of Americans believe the assassination involved a conspiracy. This year has also seen an ex-Secret Service agent who was just feet away from the president when he was shot break his decades-old silence to cast doubt on the official story. And previously unseen footage that features doctors who operated on Kennedy insisting his wounds showed there must have been a second shooter is set to be released in a new documentary.
Which just goes to show you can’t keep a good conspiracy down. Or perhaps it indicates something else …
