The Weekly Defrost #16

(Gonna roll together the non-fiction and fiction categories today.)

The Weekly Defrost is changing from always responding to current events to just becoming my takes channel, which is fine by me. Today’s fare, following on last week’s theme of history class: of all the subjects to conjure conspiracy theories about, JFK should be so far down the list it’s not even funny.

The cheap way to do this would be to say his shooting was over six decades ago. On one level, any conspiracy involving that killing would have to be so engrossingly elaborate and enduring that you might as well give up and take the blue pill (which would be a perfectly reasonable metaphor, but some people had to get weird (itself a good turn of phrase in this context now sadly sustaining heavy “un-hip” usage over in the States) about a certain great 1999 film). 

On the other level, it’s six decades ago. Credence aside, how is this interesting? The world right now has all kinds of weird rabbit holes from technology to society that you can Alice down, compared to what nears “Elvis faked his death to run the Moon colony” in terms of its present day zestiness. 

But, of course, JFK conspiracy theories didn’t originate today; they were a steady accumulation from the day JFK ignored advice and went into Dallas. You can see why people clung to a totem, a comforting alternate reality, compared to chaos in the 60s and 70s from Vietnam to Watergate (and, unfortunately, for some, to them desegregation probably came under chaos - JFK was a classic Democrat of the times in largely letting segregation persist!). 

However, most people don’t live in the United States, making the appeal of this a bit baffling compared to, say, Princess Diana, who explicitly and substantively represented positive things like the AIDS pandemic response, and by proxy gay rights. The simple truth is JFK just had a really good PR department, the politician’s knack for being something to everyone, and, the most inexplicable criteria of all for public assessment, was conventionally handsome. The rule of thumb remains where if you think a politician wasn’t like the rest and truly cared, even odds says they were the best of the rest at tricking you. 

Also, the incentive to grift wasn’t nearly as strong: all the political powers that be either benefited from or were neutral on the official story on Kennedy (eg Lyndon, Barry). You can’t find a property that really blew up based on Kennedy conspiracy theories until JFK (1991), and I think one would be hard pressed to argue that that effort doesn’t come from a genuine belief. By three decades later, new priorities had moved up the list, soon to be dwarfed by 9/11 as the new popular thing where so many people believe there was some malign influence or another in the process. (Besides, uh, al-Qaeda. Pretty - pretty malign, those ones.)

JFK is an accidental case study for why being a conspiracy theorist is bad: the main character drives away the people he cares about, lets down his true responsibilities and life, and risks ever greater censure, but because he’s the hero all that is presented as brave conflict and sacrifice. Like, no, he just let obsession take over his mind. (And the movie tweaks a few things to try give him credence.) I found it quite a funny film, by the by, particularly in the surprising amount of gay…representation isn’t quite the right word. And some of the actors that made it into this one.

Getting side tracked. My point is that there's a simple and most fundamental truth underlying the JFK conspiracy theories, one that both proponents and detractors seem to have missed. (Yeah, this is my shtick.) One ably illustrated through the convoluted web of lies and bananas courtroom monologuing shown in the film.

Why is nobody talking about the obvious suspects?

Okay, let’s be fair: six decades of paranoia have run the whole gamut of theories. Obviously some people have. But if you put an ear out for this stuff, you tend to encounter, individually or in some combination:

1. The mafia. Reason: Jack Ruby had alleged connections. Why else would the assassin get whacked?

2. Anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Reason: Kennedy betrayed the Bay of Pigs, time to get him back for that (and install a more favourable regime.)

3. The CIA. Reason: honestly pretty similar, but chuck JFK mulling over a withdrawal from Vietnam in there.

4. The military-industrial complex. Reason: Vietnam again, but more about making money mass producing M-16s that jam for government order rather than the struggle against communism.

5. The deep state aliens. Reason: what the hell was in these brownies?

These can all pretty easily be dispensed with:

1. History is littered with unfortunate and pointless murders of aggression - there are, in fact, not many well thought out or justified murders. It just so happens that, rolling the dice many millions of times over human history, some will happen to come at the worst possible times. You don’t encounter much Franz Ferdinand conspiracism, do you? Even though there’d surely be just as sound a basis to argue Princip was an agent of a conspiracy to trigger a world war then silenced in his cell. Lots of people connected to organised crime commit crimes that aren’t sanctioned by or even related to organised crime - you think when the Mob go beat up homeless guys in McDonalds it’s part of the master plan? Why give 60s mafia bosses much more credit than that? And if you wouldn’t trust their judgement, why on earth would co-conspirators?

2. I think if you don’t get your way about reclaiming some of your wealth from a communist, whacking a capitalist president who tried to launch a war of overthrow against that communist wouldn’t be a very smart way to go about it. Clearly they also didn’t get value for money, seeing as no successive US President has done anything as tough on Cuba as JFK. Accepting that actors are irrational and stupid sometimes, though, you’re left wondering how on earth simply being a bunch of rich emigres equals a tight enough net to organise a militarised conspiracy out of without any leaks. The mafia or the CIA have their codes of silence and methods of control. Anybody who knows the first thing about those who fled communist regimes knows plenty of them vent those grievances daily for the next half century; it wouldn’t be hard to find the braggart proudly announcing what they did because of the justness of their cause.

3. The CIA very quickly realised that they could simply…ignore the president and do their own thing, or lie to the president, or get the president’s carte blanche, or any of another hundred methods simpler than killing the president. This is, like, what they do for a living. This was in a time where they were way freer and less restrained than in the 70s, whose exposures of abuses fuelled fear in retrospect.

4. Not clear why Vietnam at the time was such a touchstone - or was already regarded as important to America’s Asia strategy, sure, but only in hindsight does it become clear that an industrial scale war could and would be fought there. another case where the retrospective overpowers a rational assessment at the time, which is that risking everything for your company by killing your President just to expand profit margins in the third quarter is probably a bit excessive compared to normal means to get rich. 

5. As always, these conspiracy theories require an incredible amount of tightness, intelligence, and thoughtfulness at every level to carry out something which is fundamentally very stupid to do. If these actors did exist, they would simply puppeteer and corrupt presidents more than already do, and if JFK was obstinate about not toeing the line or “exposing the truth” they’d just have him drown in the pool on meds - or, better yet, expose his affairs, because a) there was an election in a year so why bother (and it wasn’t obvious yet that the unelectable Barry Goldwater would snatch the nomination - nobody would’ve bothered assassinating Trump in late 2015) b) impeachment exists. And if you think getting impeached over an affair is ridiculous, i) Bill ii) remember this was a time of such restrictive social mores in Congress that a large part of why Nixon had to resign was because he was caught on tape constantly cussing. Unserious country

Goodness, all this exasperation is fun! (Which is why JFK ticks me off a little - I want better material to destroy! It’s the silliest kind of problem solving.) So who do I think are the patently obvious suspects the movie, and most of the other conspiracy theorists, are missing? And it’s not just conspiracy theorists - laymen will often express some sentiment about the mafia, for instance, even if they don’t believe there was a world shattering conspiracy behind it all, eg the official story is all true except Ruby had added motives to kill Oswald. Who should you conspiracy theory about? In ascending order of obviousness: 

1. JFK. Okay, kidding, kidding. But he had the means…

2. The extreme right. People love to politicise things - why not the killing of a centre-left political leader? More than that, though, as I mentioned earlier, he was advised not to go into Dallas because the South was humming with aggression against civil rights plus general crankiness. Didn’t he just go there and get what people expected? This theory loses obviousness points because Oswald would have to be ridiculously deep cover or not a shooter at all, but if you’re going to do a conspiracy theory…

3. The Soviets and friends. It was a Cold War?? He was killed by an avowed communist?? Cuba’s right there?? The Russians don’t need much of a motive to sow chaos, especially given the Byzantine ways the KGB ended up working, like the CIA (who, just a few years prior, had offed the head of the DRC for very pointless and petty reasons). This might not even be under central oversight: they had a ridiculously specific asset fall into their lap and they used that. Can be discounted because the risk of consequences was too high. Especially funny to note how Castro had to go on the radio shortly after the killing and say “I despise the American capitalist elite pigs. However, I’m not so bloody stupid I would give the superpower 90 miles from my shores an excuse to invade.” But all of these are merely appetisers, leading to the most plausible implausible conspiracy theory…

4. Lyndon Johnson.

HELLO?

ANYBODY?

We know Lyndon was an unreasonably ruthless operator - he stole elections down in Texas, an enterprise which stretched all the way to contracting gangsters with Tommyguns threatening investigators to butt out of it or else end up like folks who’d been shot in the area before over elections. Also, he did a Vietnam War. Pretty big points on the pointless bloodshed scales (and ties in nicely with the subsidiary theories from earlier).

We know he was getting old, chainsmoked and had health issues, and was haunted by a long heritage in his family of men dying young from heart attacks. He was stuck in the useless, awful role of Vice-President after his years of dominance in the Senate, and while he knew about Kennedy’s own health issues, Kennedy could very likely hack it at the top level for the next five years with room to spare - especially because LBJ had personally known FDR, who had held an uninterruptable stranglehold on the presidency despite a more visible disability. 

Basically, LBJ was probably never going to achieve his lifelong aspiration of the presidency if Kennedy lived for the next five years, and we know LBJ had ridiculously burning and unreasonable passions about these things. The only way to rectify this, failing some impeachable shortcoming of Kennedy’s (and leaking any would simply invite the same back at him from the Kennedy camp) would be to ensure he was killed, or severely injured enough to be able to go on. The conspiracy sets in motion?

Do I think this is true? No. Too risky, too likely to taint his presidency and legacy, lacked the connections to attempt something this bold without getting reported, plenty of people with burning passions watch their lives pass by and prefer to sit there ruminating about how undeserved all this is instead of pulling a Macbeth. 

Also, he created the Warren Commission. Call it the cover story all you like, but if you wanted one you’d appoint cronies and co-conspirators, not credible independent investigators with strong incentives to report any malfeasance. 

The simplest story remains the truest. Lee Harvey Oswald was no different than most of the American rogue shooters we see today, who already have an ax to grind and have the line that holds most people back from murder eroded by untreated ailments like  depression or (as in his case) megalomania. 

He was a nasty piece of work, a prime example of somebody tossed aside by the system, and a former Marine. Nobody wanted to reckon with the fact that any of those things could be part of the president’s killer. All countries have plenty of Oswalds; he just happened to get the chance to hit an important target. The story, in the end, has no satisfying conclusion; merely the truth.