Last week’s release of surviving documents on the assassination of John F. Kennedy was not the first time the federal government has made a clean breast of things on the subject, or attempted to do so. There were plenty of leaks when the Warren Commission was deliberating, back in the Bronze Age (1963-64), and its final report consisted of a staggering 26 clothbound volumes. The House Select Committee on Assassinations was a virtual sieve to the press corps during its long and turbulent existence (1976-78). But if President Trump believes that this latest gesture in the service of transparency will succeed in settling the issue—or in his words, “put any and all conspiracy theories to rest”—he’s in for a surprise.
After all, the aforementioned congressional committee concluded, in its final report, that while Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray, respectively, both crimes were “in all probability” the result of conspiracies. The committee, chaired by Rep. Louis Stokes (D-Ohio), was careful to hedge its bets with such qualified phrases—”there is a likelihood,” etc.—but gave an official imprimatur to successive generations of cranks. Indeed, the very legislation which mandated last week’s document dump, the 25-year-old John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, was itself a product of the most successful expression of Kennedy conspiracy theories, Oliver Stone’s JFK (1992).
So a few thousand letters and memoranda have now been released, although some 30,000 reportedly remain classified, and partly redacted, for national-security or privacy reasons.
The numbers that intrigue me, however, have nothing to do with documents. In a few weeks it will have been 54 years since Kennedy was shot by Oswald. We are now nearly as distant from that infamous weekend in Dallas as the Kennedy assassination (1963) was from the assassination of William McKinley in Buffalo (1901). And yet, as one who recalls the Kennedy assassination with perfect clarity, I can testify that no conspiracy theories clouded reckoning, whether in public memories or historic accounts, of the tragedy a half-century earlier. Why?
One obvious reason is that, unlike McKinley’s assassin, Kennedy’s killer was, himself, murdered a few days later, thereby adding mystery and melodrama to national tragedy, and thwarting a judicial accounting. A criminal trial and verdict for Oswald might well have brought closure, as we would now say; but perhaps not. Then again, the three previous presidential assassinations (McKinley, James A. Garfield, and Abraham Lincoln) involved a gunman standing inches away from his victim while Oswald opened fire out of sight from the window of a high-rise building—like the recent Las Vegas sniper, whose death at the scene has, inevitably, spawned its own conspiracy theories.
For that matter, it’s unfair to McKinley, as well as untrue, to suggest that the telegenic Kennedy was a more beloved figure, with a closer emotional connection to the electorate, than the Victorian president. The romance of Camelot is largely a postmortem phenomenon while the national mourning for McKinley was intense and heartfelt. And unlike the immediate post-McKinley era, presided over by a popular successor, the post-Kennedy era was clouded by the most divisive national conflict since the Civil War and, in the following decade, political scandal.
The irony is that while Kennedy, McKinley, and Garfield were killed by lone gunmen with clear political motives, Lincoln’s assassination really was the product of a conspiracy—a small and forlorn plot, to be sure, but one that succeeded in its most deadly aim. The Lincoln conspirators were tried and dispatched, for the most part, and it could be argued that some of the harsher Reconstruction policies were grounded in vengeance against those Confederate sympathizers.
Yet the opposite is true in Kennedy’s case. While Oswald was self-evidently a man of the left—a recent defector to the Soviet Union, no less, and head of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans—the right seems to take the blame, in public remembrance, for Oswald’s crime. Indeed, very nearly everything other than the ideas in the gunman’s brain are routinely invoked: The CIA, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the conservative political climate in Dallas, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the oilmen in Lyndon Johnson’s address book—you name it.
Is it possible that the curious disconnect between the reality of Lee Harvey Oswald, and the folklore surrounding John F. Kennedy’s death, explains our national failure to acknowledge the obvious? It certainly tells us more than a memo from one federal official to another, making panicky sense of a shock to the system.
Philip Terzian, is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard.
