This week, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration released tens of thousands of documents related to the assassinations of former President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King Jr.
And, as expected, everything immediately got unbelievably stupid.
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Now, I’m one of those naïve Americans who believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in 1963 when he assassinated Kennedy in Dallas. If the Warren Commission had found a smoking gun, we would have heard about it in 1964. The notion that hundreds of staffers, politicians, and conspirers could keep such a secret is ridiculous.
Still, conspiracies surrounding Kennedy’s assassination are by far the most popular in the country. Thousands of books have been written on the topic, and millions of theories spawned. A 2023 YouGov poll found that 54% of the public believed it was “definitely or probably” true that Oswald “did not act alone in assassinating John F. Kennedy in 1963.” Another 24% were unsure. This means only 23% of my fellow citizens accept the fact that a bitter loser and communist with violent tendencies grabbed a rifle and shot Kennedy on his own.
Don’t get me wrong, the release of documents regarding the assassination was long overdue. Overclassification only engenders public suspicion. Reading about the unfolding investigation, the panic and discussions, and the reaction of agencies and foreign governments offers us invaluable historical perspectives. There are lots of fascinating tidbits in those files.
However, it’s also obvious why officials wouldn’t want them to be released. The Kennedy files contain instances of phone tapping and spying within friendly nations. They offer details on intelligence-gathering methods that may still be used. Mostly, though, it’s a massive cache of documents composed of scraps of evidence, theories, and random unsourced allegations that are sure to be misread and misrepresented by amateur sleuths and conspiracists.
Indeed, the hardcore social media conspiracy theorists and influencers immediately figured out who did it (spoiler: the Jews.) But even the casually conspiratorial right-wing influencer showed how easy it is to jump to conclusions when you don’t have historical context.
One file shared widely on social media, for instance, contained a copy of a Ramparts article from 1967 that casts suspicion on the death of a man named Gary Underhill, a CIA functionary who committed suicide soon after the assassination.
None of the big influencer accounts spreading this document seemed to be aware that Ramparts was a radical left-wing pro-Soviet publication in the 1960s and 1970s that blamed literally every modern atrocity on the CIA. Someone just threw it into a file.
It should be noted that most of these documents had apparently been made public with a few redactions. The Underhill suicide has long been in the public record, lumped in with other supposedly untimely deaths connected to the Kennedy assassination. In his excellent book Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, investigative journalist Gerald Posner does his best to debunk the connection between these deaths and the assassination.
Many Americans seem better versed in the paranoiac mythology that’s arisen around the Kennedy assassination than any genuine history. Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, which pinned the assassination on the “military-industrial complex,” the CIA, the FBI, former President Lyndon B. Johnson, the mafia, anti-Castro Cubans, and big business, among others, wasn’t a documentary.
Another document that got the crowd’s attention was a communique between Cuban diplomats who suspected the CIA had killed Kennedy so they could get revenge for the Bay of Pigs invasion. “If the Yankees or CIA assassinated Kennedy to resume the assault on Cuba, then a third world war would start,” one allegedly contends.
Need it be said that Cuban diplomats had zero knowledge of any CIA operations? Then again, Kennedy was assassinated. Why didn’t his successor, Johnson, invade Cuba? It seems like a waste of time to plan and execute a seditious scheme to eliminate the president of the United States and then not follow through on your nefarious plans. I’m sure there are theories. There always are.
And that’s the thing: You can never debate conspiracists.
Conspiracy theories are organisms forever undergoing mitosis, morphing into new “questions” and conjectures. In that sense, it doesn’t really matter what the Kennedy documents say. If none of them corroborate the conspiracist’s priors, they will simply contend that pertinent documents were removed by the CIA or the Free Masons. Conspiracists feel no obligation to prove anything. They act like it’s your job to debunk their never-ending, unfalsifiable fantasies.
For some, a healthy skepticism of government has mutated into a psychological need to blame everything on the government. Sometimes, it seems that every historical incident is now framed in the context of contemporary political antagonisms. Intelligence services went after Donald Trump, so they must be behind every despicable act ever perpetrated.
On top of that, over the decades, we have been bombarded with cultural depictions of intelligence agencies as hypercompetent organizations pulling the strings of history. Everything we don’t want to hear is a “psyop” these days. This version of the intelligence services only exists in the minds of thriller novelists and X influencers.
Traditionally, it’s the dispossessed or those who think of themselves as powerless who are most prone to believing and promoting conspiracy theories. Nowadays, everyone is seemingly invested in these fictions, which are propelled by a never-ending string of disparate events and half-truths.
Take 9/11. In 1993, Islamists attempted to blow up the Twin Towers and failed. For years after, Islamic terrorist groups contemplated ways to destroy the World Trade Center, the heart of Western power, wealth, and decadence. We know Khalid Sheikh Mohammed pitched the idea of flying planes into the WTC to Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s. Then in 2001, 19 terrorists — we know all of their names, biographies, and connections to Jihadi groups — flew aircraft into the towers. Some of us even watched the second plane hit on live television. Then again, the “moon landing” was also supposedly on television, right?
Still, millions of Americans refuse to believe it was so simple. In the mid-2000s, polls showed that significant minorities of Democrats believed that former President George W. Bush had something to do with the attack. These days, it seems that the hard Right has taken up the call, blaming Mossad and the Jews. What else is new?
It’s only going to get worse.
Clickbait social media accounts with millions of followers chum the waters with misleading snippets of documents and harebrained theories. And because so many of our institutions, including intelligence agencies, have lost our trust, millions will be seduced into conspiratorial thinking. The media, once tasked with tempering the public’s paranoia, have also lost all credibility. As it happens, they are often participants in spreading conspiracies, most notably with the Russia collusion hoax, perhaps the most politically consequential one in American history.
Along with Kennedy, I still believe a lone Palestinian terrorist killed Robert F. Kennedy, and a lone racist murdered Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Now, if tomorrow a batch of documents appeared that indisputably showed Allen Dulles, John McCone, Johnson, Joe Colombo, or whoever else was conspiring to assassinate the president, I would accept the truth. But conspiracy theorists are never swayed by the preponderance of evidence or the complete lack of it. They are not looking for truth; they are looking for more questions. And no document dump is ever going to change that.