Blame this MASSIVE conspiracy theory on the feds

I collect historical documents. One of my personal favorites is a 1963 LIFE magazine published days after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, featuring stills from the infamous “Zapruder film” for the first time ever (the film itself premiered several years later). For 60 years, this film and an assortment of conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy’s death have tantalized the nation. The Warren Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate Kennedy’s death, should have assuaged the traumatized country’s chronic misgivings about the conventional assassination narrative. Instead, it made the problem worse. Today, after former president Donald Trump was nearly killed in an assassination attempt on July 13, the federal government appears poised to make the same mistake it made after the 1963 shooting.

On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was shot and killed as he rode through downtown Dallas, Texas, waving charmingly, in an open motorcade with his wife, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and Texas Governor John Connally. The most basic, generally accepted version of what followed is that Kennedy was slain by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, who fired three shots at the president from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald, who was apprehended later that day, claiming to be a “patsy” (fall guy), never stood for trial as he himself was murdered two days later by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrived at the crime scene within hours. Director J. Edgar Hoover, perhaps too quickly, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and fired only three shots. He insisted that this account be accepted as fact despite his concern that the public might remain skeptical. “The thing I am concerned about… is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin,” he worried two days after the assassination. The next day, he doubled down. “[T]he public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin,” he wrote, “that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial” [emphasis added].

Critics have argued that Hoover’s premature adjudication may have tainted the objectivity of the investigation process. Moreover, his narrow and unbudging presumption about the shooter having only fired three bullets forces one of the bullets, known as “Warren Commission Exhibit 399” or the “magic bullet,” to account for seven injuries on two victims (Kennedy and Connally). Specifically, “The Warren Commission decided that one of the bullets fired that day struck the president from behind, exited from the front of his throat and continued on to hit Mr. Connally, somehow managing to injure his back, chest, wrist and thigh.” Data analysts, the doctors who treated Kennedy at Parkland Hospital, and even a Secret Service agent who rode in the president’s motorcade have all claimed that the bullet’s alleged route is impossible, suggesting that another shooter must have been involved.

Six decades later, though, no credible suspects have come to light. Questions and conspiracies continue to arise, but answers and facts remain elusive. Lee Harvey Oswald, it seems, really may have acted alone.

We have only the government to blame for the persistent skepticism surrounding JFK’s death. At a crucial moment, when the nation desperately needed all the evidence, all the data, the federal government dropped the ball, opening Pandora’s Box of alternate theories by their own incompetence (or seeming culpability). From Hoover’s rigid insistence that Oswald acted alone with just three bullets, to Johnson pressuring members to join the commission and appointing Allen Dulles, whom Kennedy had previously dismissed from the CIA, to the commission’s obstruction of key evidence (for example, “Of the ninety witnesses who were asked by the commission where the shots came from, fifty-eight said they thought the shots came from the grassy knoll and not the Texas School Depository, like the commission determined”), the federal government, at the very least, mishandled a crucial effort to reassure the nation that Kennedy's assassination was not part of a broader conspiracy.

The same unsettling spectacle is unfolding before us today. Thankfully, President Trump survived, but given the close call, it’s entirely reasonable for the American people to seek answers. Why did the Secret Service reject the use of drone technology at the event? Why were agents reportedly texting about and taking pictures of the would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, hours before the event started? If federal authorities fail to address these and other pressing questions, we risk fueling another surge of Kennedy-style conspiracy theories, and such cynicism would be entirely justified.

In the end, we may never know if Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. But we do know this: the federal government is wildly incompetent and untrustworthy to unravel the riddle. Confronted with a similar mystery in our lifetimes, We, the People, demand answers, but we should not hold our breaths. Instead, we ought to seek to check the federal government, making it accountable to the public again.

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