JFK’s Assassination — A Pandora’s Box of Conspiracy Theories?

Sixty years later suspicions still remain

In October, former Secret Service agent Paul Landis published a book claiming to refute the official version of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which attributes Kennedy’s death and Gov. John Connaly’s wounding to a single “magic bullet. But Landis, a Secret Service agent that day, now claims there was another — an intact bullet he spotted on the ledge of a seat in the back of the presidential limousine, and then pocketed it to ensure its safety. Once inside the hospital, he found himself next to the president’s stretcher, he says.

“It was chaos. At that moment, I thought, ‘Well, this is the perfect place to leave the bullet. It should be with the president’s body. It’s an important piece of evidence,’” Landis told CNN’s Jake Tapper. But then, as the Smithsonian put it, “he all but forgot about the bullet for the next 50 years.”

“Some scholars are skeptical of Landis’ account, which differs from two written statements he provided to authorities shortly after the shooting,” the Smithsonian notes — presciently the kind of evidence historians find most credible. “There are too many contradictions for this account to be credible,” Steve Gillon, author of a 2010 book on the assassination, said.

And so it goes. Another major anniversary of the JFK assassination, another conspiracy theory floated, another conspiracy theory shot down. A decade ago, author and legendary LA prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, who published his own exhaustive investigation in 2007, said that lone gunman theory doubters “have accused 42 groups, 82 assassins and 214 people of being involved in the assassination.” None have panned out. But the sheer volume of theories and those pushing them says something profoundly important about the impact of Kennedy’s assassination and the deep skepticism it triggered, which has played a role in the broader spread of conspiracist thinking in the six decades since.

This isn’t just to blame the sea of conspiracy theories we’re drowning in today on the JFK assassination and the reaction it spawned. That sort of monocausal thinking is part of the problem with conspiracism. Multiple different factors have played a role — not least the substantial erosion of public trust since that time, and the emergence of new media (first the internet, then social media) enabling the spread of conspiracist ideas. But Landis’ book is the latest reminder that you just can’t ignore JFK assassination conspiracy theories, no matter how hard you try.

Making Sense Of The Shocking

Kennedy’s assassination shocked the world in a way that it never fully recovered from, and the spread of conspiracist thinking, once confined to the margins of American public life, is perhaps the most pervasive evidence of that. The Camelot myth the Kennedys cultivated — not just a political, but a cultural myth — was shattered by the assassination, and countless people sought out countless different ways to try to make sense of things afterwards. (A similar pattern played out with the death of Lady Diana decades later.)

That, at least, is the explanation a recently-published paper, “Insight in the conspiracist’s mind” suggests. “We have curiosity that urges us to actively seek out particular pieces of information, and such epistemic quests are often marked by ‘aha’ experiences, when we suddenly get an insight that ‘clicks’ together pieces of already existing beliefs and new information,” the lead author, Sander Van de Cruys explained to me. “When this happens, beliefs seem to be reinforced and they take on new confidence, as empirical research on ‘aha’ experiences shows.” This is true for everyone — scientists as well as conspiracy theorists. What happens later is where differences occur.

The paper also hypothesizes that this need for autonomous discovery is “universal but increases as people experience more uncertainty and/or feel epistemically excluded in society, hence linking it to existing literature on explaining conspiracy theories.” Different people may feel excluded for very different reasons — a point we’ll return to below.

Of course, there’s more to the story than individual sense-making efforts. But this explanation helps us grasp something essential about the origins of conspiracist thinking in general, and JFK assassination conspiracism in particular: the personal motivational needs shared in common, on the one hand — a lot of people trying to make sense of a shocking, discordant event — and the diversity of forms that result because different background assumptions —“already existing beliefs” — make different “aha!” realizations click. Many of the more popular theories — that it was Lyndon B. Johnson, the “military industrial complex,” “the mob,” or the CIA — easily make sense this way.

Once this initial process takes place, many other factors can — and did — enter the picture as well. Which is how you end up with Bugliosi’s long lists of accusations. What’s more, these conspiracy theories — individually and collectively — become part of the cultural background that in turn can contribute to other conspiratorial “aha!” moments, whether in similar, or very different contexts.

Making Sense Of Conspiracism

It’s more common to see conspiracist thinking as misguided, observing forms of reasoning used, for example. A decade ago, cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky analyzed how an online community of conspiracists responded to research on conspiracism (the mindset of conspiracy theory believers), testing ideas from the existing literature. He found strong evidence of six characteristics, which I then recognized could be organized into three pairs. In a 2017 Salon article, I explained:

The first two establish a morally self-justifying framework — hidden conspirators are bad (“nefarious intention”), but conspiracy theorists are good (“persecution-victimization”) — which subverts the conspiracists’ purported interest in truth-seeking.

The second pair does this by managing unwanted information: first by ignoring or denying contradictory evidence (“nihilistic skepticism”) and then by building an elaborate fantasy edifice, incorporating random evidence (“nothing happens by accident”).

The last pair subverts truth-seeking by fending off sounder explanations, either by dogmatically insisting there’s a conspiracy even if no coherent account of it can be given (and, in the extreme, when conspiracists hold self-contradictory beliefs), or by insisting that evidence against the conspiracy is actually evidence in favor of it — proof of how badly the conspirators want to hide the truth (“self-sealing”).

The combination of a sound, sane beginning that Van de Cruys describes and the systemic distortions Lewandowsky identified give a sense of how challenging understanding conspiracy theories can be. Studying them historically can help, as Michael Butter does in his 2020 book, The Nature of Conspiracy Theories. Butter begins his book with a short 1920 speech by Winston Churchill that’s a classic example of conspiracism, not to denigrate Churchill, but to drive home the point that such thinking used to be seen as perfectly normal, not a fringe phenomena at all. Conspiracy theories were part of civic culture in ancient Greece and Rome, with their dense urban politically-engaged publics, but virtually disappeared until “the invention of the printing press contributed to the emergence of conspiracist allegations in the modern sense.” For most of modern history, “It was the elites who were articulating conspiracy theories, and they were concerned with alleged conspirators that were challenging their powers,” Butter told me in a 2021 Salon interview. it’s only more recently that elites have been targeted from below. Similarly, conspiracies were mostly seen as having foreign roots in the 18th and 19th centuries, “who are plotting, maybe with the help of some people within the country, against that nation,” he said. “In the second half of the 20th century, the dominant feature that we find in the Western world is that there is an enemy within — your own elite, your own government — that is in league with the conspirators.”

There are, of course, exceptions, but this is how the dominant tendencies have shifted over time. It’s worth noting how antisemitic conspiracy theories reflected these shifts. Elites used them first as Butter described, with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery created by Tzar’s police, as a classic example. A century later, there was an echo — the “cultural Marxism ” conspiracy theory — with a similar central claim, but advanced through rightwing populist networks attacking existing elites.

In addition to those shifts, Butter adds two more: First, World War II and McCarthyism led to a stigmatization of conspiracy theories, especially in the United States, which is how things stood when Kennedy was assassinated. Second, first the internet and then social media created a much more fertile environment for conspiracy theories to spread. From this perspective, we can see JFK conspiracy theories flourishing in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s as helping to destigmatize conspiracy theories and build whole communities of researchers and readers, setting the stage for the internet age growth of conspiracist culture we’re now in the middle of.

One further wrinkle is worth noting. The combination of social media and the rise of the global far right has given rise to what Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum call “conspiracy without theory” in their book, A Lot of People Are Saying. In contrast to classic conspiracism’s focus on explanation, this new conspiracism thrives off ‘innuendo, accusation, speculation, plausible deniability, and plain assertion’, and ‘traffics in sound bites, flow[ing] here and there through the capillaries of public culture.’ In place of evidence, it draws its power from repetition. It’s no longer a quest for knowledge. It’s visceral, rather than cognitive. “It offers the gratification of a kind of bare assertion,” Rosenblum told me in 2019. “It offers an opportunity for people to assent … to the aggressiveness and the targeted-ness of the conspiracists’ claim.” In short, it’s become an almost pure political tool — a far cry from the innocent origins Van de Cruys describes.

Five Assassinations Reveal A Telling Pattern

JFK’s wasn’t the only noteworthy political assassination in the 1960s. But there’s a deeply telling pattern. His brother, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination has also been the subject of considerable conspiracy theories, as has the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to a lesser extent. In the case of King, we know that J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, wanted him dead, and there’s a great deal of evidence making it seem plausible that the government had a role in his assassination. In 1999, a mixed-race jury at a Memphis civil suit reached a unanimous verdict that King was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy involving the U.S. government and a person named Raoul, among others. But a Department of Justice investigation found “nothing…to confirm that Raoul or anyone else” aside from King’s convicted assassin “participated in the assassination,” while offering substantial evidence to undermine the jury’s findings.

But the story is quite different when it comes to the fourth and fifth noteworthy political assassinations of the 1960s, which white America, in particular, tends to forget — those of Malcolm X and Fred Hampton. Hampton — a young Chicago Black Panther leader, who founded the anti-racist, anti-classist Rainbow Coalition, which also included Young Patriots (organizing poor whites), and the Young Lords (organizing Hispanics) — was killed in a police raid on Dec. 4, 1969. There was never any doubt who did it: the Chicago police. But the police story of why and how — that it was a shoot-out started by the Panthers — was immediately challenged by eyewitness and documentary evidence, and eventually collapsed.

A civil lawsuit filed on behalf of Hampton’s survivors and the relatives, and those of another Panther, Mark Clark, was resolved in 1982 with a settlement of $1.85 million involving the federal government, Cook County and the City of Chicago. To anyone outside the police-industrial complex, there was never any doubt that a conspiracy was involved in Fred Hampton’s murder. But there was little in the way of conspiracy theories as we know them. There was too much real evidence to rely on.

Things were much murkier with the assassination of Malcolm X. The admitted assassin, Thomas Hagan stated he’d planned the shooting to seek revenge for Malcolm X’s public criticism of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, of which he was a member. But who else higher up might have had a hand? The FBI and local New York City law enforcement were suspects as well. And arguably for good reason. After decades of research by historian Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, two men convicted with Hagan — Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam, who each spent more than 20 years in prison — were completely exonerated by the Manhattan DA in November 2021.

So there was a conspiracy involved in Malcolm X’s assassination — at least after the fact. But there’s evidence of it before the fact, as well, which has yet to be tested in a court of law. And that could change, as Malcolm X’s family filed suit in February of this year, with attorney Benjamin Crump saying, “It’s not just about the triggermen. It’s about those who conspired with the triggermen to do this dastardly deed.”

The Pattern Explained

The pattern here is clear: the assassination where there most clearly was a conspiracy is the least subject to conspiracy theories, while the assassination with far and away the most conspiracy theories has seen virtually all of them debunked. Experts can provide two explanations for this pattern.

The first is proportionality, Rosenblum explained. “The JFK conspiracy theories, like those of  9/11, are built on two elements of classic conspiracism. One is proportionality,” Rosenblum told Random Lengths. “The assassination of the most closely guarded man in the world, and the surprise attack on the twin towers and Pentagon, could not possibly be the work of a lone gunman or of a dozen plus men hiding out in the sands of Afghanistan. They must be the result of sophisticated enemies, of sophisticated plotting — whether enemies domestic or foreign. Proportionality is key. This search for ‘deep’ causes of a spectacular event is what led to the observation that at bottom conspiracism is unsophisticated social science,” she said.

The second element Rosenblum cites — suspicion of government — ties back to Butter’s characterization of late 20th century conspiracy theories. But these only explain part of the pattern — the focus on JFK’s assassination. To appreciate the pattern, we first need to state the obvious: white America saw Malcolm X and Fred Hampton as disposable people, at best, if not outright enemies. Even King was largely seen that way at the time of his death. An early 1968 Harris poll registered 74% disapproval of him. So the white-dominated print media world in which JFK assassination conspiracy theories spread was distinctly inhospitable to the spread of similar ideas about their assassinations.

But there’s another wrinkle to the pattern as well, going back to Van de Cruys’ hypothesis that the need for autonomous discovery “increases as people experience more uncertainty and/or feel epistemically excluded in society.” No one’s been epistemically excluded from American society more than Black people have. For generations it was illegal to even teach them to read. So it’s not surprising that conspiracy theories circulate in the Black community, but … the Black community also has far more real experiences of being conspired against than anyone else as well. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which 399 men with syphilis went untreated for decades after penicillin became available as a treatment is a well-known classic example. It sounds just like a conspiracy theory, but it was 100% real. So the dividing line between conspiracy theories and lived common history is pretty damn thin in the Black community. Which puts the conspiracy claims surrounding King, X and Hampton in a very different light, so far as the Black community is concerned — even if such claims were largely excluded from white society.

Things were strikingly different with the white supremacist/white nationalist community, where a handful of real incidents involving questionable judgment — most famously the Ruby Ridge siege — have been woven into a vast conspiracists tapestry, most commonly in the antisemitic form of “ZOG” the Zionist Occupied Government as they imagine America to be. Recall that Van de Cruys said nothing about why “people experience more uncertainty and/or feel epistemically excluded in society.” White nationalists in the aftermath of the 1950s/60s civil rights revolution might share this experience with the Black community on a fundamentally psychological basis, while still retaining significant privilege and power. Both groups might have similar potential for embracing conspiracy theories, but the lack of real-world support for their experience gives white supremacists a much greater need to propagate them. Indeed, history shows that it’s key to the spread of their movement. And is now being spread by Donald Trump today.

So what does all this tell us about the legacy of JFK assassination theories? It’s very simple: it’s complicated. Incredibly complicated. Because real life is like that. There are no simple answers or explanations to everything. There’s only making sense as best we can, one step at a time. There will be “aha!” moments to be sure. Some will pan out. Some won’t. One step at a time.

The question still remains after all these years, was Lee Harvey Oswald the lone gunman?