Conspiracy A-Go-Go

The assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, is a defining event of the twentieth century. People who were alive at the time like to recount where they were when they heard. It shook the nation to its core: a young, charismatic, and popular president who was on the brink of some major policy advances in civil rights to be killed so suddenly, so violently, and so publicly. Even if it were as straightforward a case as the official record still insists—Lee Harvey Oswald acting completely on his own initiative, to make a dramatic statement in support of Fidel Castro—the event would have loomed large, even in the assassination-heavy 1960s (which included the subsequent public killings of Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, all of which followed JFK). It is obviously an event of enormous historical importance—a rupture in American democracy at a very sensitive time, globally and domestically.

But skepticism about the official account of the case arose almost immediately, and it has grown exponentially since. At this point, something like 10 percent of Americans believe the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald acted alone, and a thriving cottage industry of conspiracy theorists—professional and amateur—has scrutinized and re-scrutinized every aspect of every marginal character connected to this case, and a startling number of narratives have emerged, implicating everyone from Lyndon Johnson to Fidel Castro to the CIA to the Soviets to the American mafia in various combinations and collusions. The JFK assassination marks the beginning of conspiracy thinking as a major subtheme of American cultural life. We explored this idea a bit in Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (written less than a decade after JFK, his “theory” that Harding was assassinated clearly reflects this same kind of paranoia toward official records). It has become increasingly thinkable for Americans to assume that pretty much nothing is as it seems in government statements or mainstream media coverage (a tendency that has reached an absurd apotheosis with the current president denouncing all news media except his preferred source of propaganda to be inherently “fake”—what does it mean for the government to view itself as the target of a conspiracy by journalists?). Plots are unearthed around the assassinations of King and Malcolm X and John Lennon; more recently, the same kind of thinking has raised serious questions about the murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (The Notorious BIG). The July 2024 assassination attempt against Donald Trump immediately spawned a number of conspiracy theories, and you can find extensive documentation of all the ways the campaign allegedly "staged" this event online. The assassination of Charlie Kirk (a postmodern General Walker) by a disaffected online groyper (a postmodern Oswald) was being viewed skeptically within a few minutes of the news. The official narrative of September 11, 2001, is so full of gaps that an organized movement of survivors, victims’ families, and professional skeptics has coalesced under the “9/11 Truth” banner—not all of them supporting any particular conspiracy narrative, but at least raising questions about what the Bush administration knew and failed to act upon in the months leading up to the attacks. Within hours of the announcement, in May 2011, of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden by Navy SEALs, vocal skepticism had the Pentagon seriously considering releasing photographs of his corpse, simply to quiet suspicion surrounding the alleged “burial at sea.” (Whenever a body or a suspect is dispensed with so quickly, the familiar set of questions will arise.) And the penchant for conspiracy thinking has recently shifted from the Left to the Right: on January 6, 2021, as supporters of Trump stormed the Capitol, the narrative of the insurrection as a "false flag event," with the rioters as somehow both "Antifa" and FBI, started to emerge--and members of Congress continue to treat this conspiracy narrative seriously to this day. 

It has become reflexive for us to assume that there’s always at least one other level of reality that we are not privy to. We’re almost comfortable in the view that we don’t really have any idea what’s actually going on at the highest levels of power and influence, and the popularization of this mindset is traceable back to JFK.

This general state of paranoia and skepticism has obvious implications for how we understand history—in terms of its specific content, but also in terms of its truth claims. As DeLillo makes clear through the fictional Nicholas Branch, “official CIA historian,” trying to bring some kind of narrative order to the deluge of facts and data that have been compiled by the Warren Commission and the CIA itself, the more we know about the sequence of events and overlapping coincidences and cross-references leading up to the shooting of Kennedy (and the killing of Oswald soon after by Jack Ruby, and the not-statistically-anomalous deaths of so many people even tangentially related to the story in the years after), the less confident we become that we will ever have any idea what happened. But it’s clear that something happened, and for many people it's clear that it was something more than the official story lets on. We know there’s a history to be reconstructed, but an authoritative and fully satisfying reconstruction will never emerge. The same set of facts are interpreted and reinterpreted to suggest a dizzying range of possibilities. Plots are either drawn out of these facts, or imposed on them—and we can’t tell the difference. And any imposition of plot on a collection of disparate facts means engaging in an act of fictional imagination, as Hayden White would say. Any discussion of the topic necessarily merges fact and fiction; DeLillo simply makes this explicit in his “Author’s Note” at the conclusion of Libra: “This is a work of imagination. While drawing from the historical record, I’ve made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination.” The fascination and continued uncertainty, even after sixty years, surrounding the JFK assassination perfectly frames the theoretical concerns that are at the heart of this course.