By A.O. Scott
On his third day in office in January, President Donald Trump ordered the release of documents from the National Archives related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. As Trump declared on the campaign trail, “It’s been 60 years, time for the American people to know the truth.”
The truth is that nothing in the archives is going to dispel the fog of hypothesis, rumor and speculation that swirls around these killings. The assassinations of the 1960s — John F. Kennedy’s in particular — remain the source and paradigm of modern conspiratorial thinking, a style of argument to which the current president is passionately committed. Whatever details emerge now are unlikely to settle the ongoing debates, which are less about what happened in Dallas in 1963 (or Memphis, Tennessee, and Los Angeles five years later) than about the character of the American state and the nature of reality itself.
Was Kennedy killed by the Mafia? By the CIA? Was he an early, liberal victim of what modern conservatism has come to call the deep state? A lot of people think so, and there may be unanswered questions hovering around his death. But there’s a thin line between skepticism and paranoia, between reasonable guesses and wild invention. The American imagination often gravitates to the far side of that line, and the Kennedy assassination was one of the shocks that pushed us over it.
Kennedy’s killing was almost immediately folded into a narrative structure that had already surfaced in popular culture as well as in politics, a mode of storytelling that treated public events as the expressions of secret plots. Richard Condon’s Cold War thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” (published in 1959 and adapted by Hollywood in 1962) and Thomas Pynchon’s shaggy-dog experimental whodunit “V.” are among the best-known preassassination examples of this paranoid style in American fiction. (The phrase “paranoid style” comes from an influential essay on political conspiratorialism by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, originally delivered as a lecture shortly before the assassination and published in Harper’s in 1964.)
That same year, the Warren Commission Report emphatically concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole shooter and the only party responsible for Kennedy’s killing. Yet the report did anything but close the case. Through the years that followed, the commission was subjected to a steady stream of revisionism and rebuttal, carried out first by journalists and politicians and later, perhaps more decisively, by novelists and filmmakers.
The disasters of Vietnam and Watergate, along with revelations about the covert activities of the CIA and FBI, fed a distrust of the state that would fester on the left and the right. The assassination was seen from both sides as a central event in the secret history of our times, a loose thread that, when pulled, would unravel a skein of sinister plots involving intelligence agencies, the Mafia, Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon B. Johnson and various clandestine organizations and shadowy actors. The cumulative moral of these stories was that nothing was ever what it seemed, and that American institutions were warrens of treachery and deceit.
In the 1988 baseball comedy “Bull Durham,” Kevin Costner’s Crash Davis, in a character-defining monologue, declares: “I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.” That’s what a smart, sexy, grown-up romantic lead played by an up-and-coming movie star would say. Three years later, Costner starred in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” as Jim Garrison, the real-life New Orleans district attorney pursuing a case that implicated a vast web of conspirators, including Kennedy’s successor, Johnson. “We’re through the looking glass here, people,” he said. “White is black and black is white.” In 1991, that was what a righteous warrior for truth played by a double Oscar winner would say.
The conspiracy zeitgeist was shifting. Between “Bull Durham” and “JFK,” Don DeLillo published “Libra,” his novel about Oswald; Norman Mailer published his 1,300-page “Harlot’s Ghost,” intended as the first volume in a chronicle of modern American espionage that would stitch the Kennedy assassination into a larger history of covert operations and double-crosses; the Soviet Union collapsed.
Now everything was an inside job. The Kennedy assassination would continue to be a source of fascination in its own right — it anchors James Ellroy’s synoptic “Underworld USA” trilogy and figures as a plot point in numerous fictions about espionage and organized crime — and it would also become a template, a model for explaining everything.
At the end of the ’90s, the internet blossomed, “The Matrix” opened in theaters and the normalization of conspiratorial thinking accelerated. The online, post-9/11 world is teeming with “truthers,” free-range skeptics who reflexively doubt what seems to be the obvious account of events. That, say, al-Qaida operatives flew hijacked planes into the World Trade Center; that a gunman slaughtered teachers and children at a school in Connecticut; that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square; that followers of Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Elaborate, preposterous alternative scenarios — involving false flags, black ops, hacked voting machines and deep state machinations — proliferate on social media, where they become the basis for algorithmically fueled pseudo-research.
Spurious theories can be refuted over and over again — in the news media, in sworn congressional testimony, in the civil and criminal courts — but such fact-checking often has the effect of amplifying the falsehoods. It isn’t just that we disagree on the facts or what they mean; we lack a common definition of what a fact even is. Generalized mistrust of authority and expertise turns us into epistemological free agents, making up the world as we blunder through it. We’re just asking questions, doing our own search engine-optimized investigations, huddling in ad hoc Warren Commissions of our own devising.
Occam’s razor, the venerable philosophical principle that the truest explanation is likely to be the simplest, has been thrown away. We’re living in the age of Occam’s chain saw, when the preferred answer is the one that makes the loudest noise and generates the most debris.
Hofstadter warned that “there is a great difference between locating conspiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy.” Recent history includes a lot of people saying exactly that, in ways that make the old paranoid style look downright sensible.
To change the metaphor, it can seem as if the civic landscape is nothing but rabbit holes. The rabbits will never go back into the hats. Paranoia, in Hofstadter’s definition — in a phrase he borrowed from British historian L.B. Namier — involved the lack of “an intuitive sense of how things do not happen,” a sense that history unspools within knowable parameters. That grounding in reality has been grievously undermined, and no cache of documents is going to restore it.
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