Six decades after the Kennedy assassination, let’s pay attention to a real conspiracy
Tuesday marks the 59th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the reverberations of lethal shots fired in Dallas still ring in America’s ears.
The assassination had obvious and immediate political ramifications: President Lyndon Johnson’s ascendancy led to the disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War, which altered an entire generation. But Kennedy’s profoundly shocking death also changed the way Americans think about conspiracies.
Let’s be clear: Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy. His precise motivations will forever be unknown, but it’s clear that he pulled the trigger, and no one has proven any connection to another person or group.
Despite this, JFK conspiracy theories flourished.
For example, the most mysterious aspect of Oswald’s short life was his visit to Mexico City several weeks before the Kennedy assassination. The best account of this is in Philip Shenon’s 2013 book, “A Cruel and Shocking Act.”
“Only hours after shots rang out in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963, U.S. Ambassador Thomas C. Mann told colleagues in the American embassy in Mexico that he was certain Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone in killing JFK,” Shenon wrote in a 2015 essay for Politico.
“Mann, a veteran diplomat, suspected that a plot to kill Kennedy had been hatched on Mexican soil, during Oswald’s encounters there with Cuban diplomats. How did Mann know about those meetings? It turned out the CIA had Oswald under surveillance in the Mexican capital after he had showed up at both the Cuban and Soviet embassies there.”
In 2017, the Gallup Poll found that 61 percent of Americans believed that Oswald didn’t act alone. The polling analysis site FiveThirtyEight found the same result.
What are we to make of this 59 years later?
For one thing, conspiracy-minded thinking was a primary driver of the presidency of Donald Trump.
During the 2016 primary campaign, Trump blatantly suggested that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was with Oswald in New Orleans shortly before the assassination. He wasn’t.
Trump’s kissing-cousin status with the absurd “QAnon” theory, if you can call it that, led millions to fall for this silly and dangerous nonsense. It postulated that John F. Kennedy Jr. was the secret president in waiting, a sick and tragic punctuation of his father’s assassination.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon nutjob, can now be seen grinning behind Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in photo ops. This really says it all about McCarthy, whose craven pursuit of the speakership is no joke.
QAnon’s conspiracy theories also posited that Hillary Clinton and leading Democrats were operating a pedophilia ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizza shop. On Dec. 4, 2016, Edgar M. Welch, a 28-year-old from North Carolina, arrived at the pizza place with a loaded AR-15 and a handgun. He fired one shot, though fortunately no one was hurt. He was sentenced to four years in prison.
Trump’s embrace of the madness has also inspired violent groups such as the Proud Boys, an equally delusional collection of the insane. Trump’s lead henchman, the unstable-to-say-the-least Roger Stone, used members of the group as bodyguards at the culmination of a real conspiracy: the Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt.
If more of Trump’s conspiracy-minded followers examined the former president’s actual conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government, his seeming approval of the assassination of his own vice president and his countless other baseless, paranoid droolings, we would be better off.
Don’t worry about Oswald. Worry about Trump and his deluded monomaniacs. Fifty-nine years after Kennedy died, there is a legally provable conspiracy worthy of the country’s attention.
This story was originally published November 22, 2022 at 5:00 AM.