A left-wing conspiracy theory migrates right.
A left-wing conspiracy theory migrates right.
A ll we need to know about the Deep State, we supposedly learned when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, Sean Davis of the Federalist wrote on X that we needed investigations “to see who in the Biden regime knew about this and either allowed it to happen . . . or made it happen. They did it to Kennedy, and his brother, and they just tried to do it to Trump.”
In a conversation with Donald Trump Jr. after Trump’s conviction in the Alvin Bragg case, Tucker Carlson casually referred to the system having been broken “for at least 61 years . . . since they killed a president in an election year.”
“Exactly,” Trump Jr. responded. “Exactly.”
Tucker & Donald Trump, Jr.
Tucker: “It’s almost like you get kidnapped & the kidnapper has a mask on..once he shows you his face, he’s gotta kill you, & they’ve shown their face.”
DT Jr.: “I don’t think there’s anything they wouldn’t do.”pic.twitter.com/UuD2GlFIrf
— Info Battle Maiden (@info_maiden) July 2, 2024
In an interview with Ron Paul, Carlson said, “I don’t think it’s a controversial statement anymore” to say that the CIA — especially former director Allen Dulles — was involved in the assassination.
Paul said there “was a coup” and “we lost our government” on November 22, 1963. He believes the plot within “the establishment” — among “the planners,” “the FBI and CIA” — kicked into high gear to kill JFK after he spoke soaringly of peace in June 1963.
The JFK conspiracy theories originally emanated from the Left. As the Right has come to hate and distrust the Deep State, though, the theories have seeped over, without the Left giving them up.
Rob Reiner has a podcast series co-hosted by Soledad O’Brien in which he makes the case for his own convoluted theory. “It’s not a very simple answer,” he maintains, “but there was a confluence of rogue elements of the CIA, the Cuban exile community and the mob.”
Also, representing the Left or “radical middle,” RFK Jr. points the finger at the CIA, too. “The evidence is overwhelming that the CIA was involved in the murder and in the cover-up,” according to RFK.
That such conspiracy theories have so long endured, and, in fact, found new converts on another part of the political spectrum, is a stunning victory of paranoia over reason and fiction over fact.
For all its consequence, the JFK assassination is an uncomplicated murder case. In fact, the simplicity of the case is inversely related to the complex mental gymnastics necessary to implicate anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald. There’s a reason that the Dallas police almost instantly solved it.
It doesn’t matter to the conspiracy theorists that, despite all the effort devoted to the attempt, they’ve come up with no evidence for their claims, while they reject the massive evidence pointing to Oswald acting alone. They recycle the same old misunderstandings of the facts, not knowing or caring that they’ve been debunked long ago.
Yes, Oswald Did It
Two excellent books counter the tsunami of conspiracy material over the decades, Gerald Posner’s classic Case Closed and the famous, late prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s truly epic Reclaiming History. I rely on them extensively in what follows.
There were only three shots that day, and they were all fired from the Texas School Book Depository. Almost all the witnesses thought the shots came from the direction of the depository. Multiple witnesses saw a man with a rifle in the sixth-floor window. A couple of Oswald’s fellow employees were on the floor beneath him and saw cement loosened by the shots fall from the ceiling; one of them heard the sounds of the bolt-action rifle above and shells hitting the floor.
All of this is why the police had an accurate description of the gunman within minutes and why an officer immediately rushed to the depository and found Oswald right after the assassination; he let him go when Oswald’s supervisor said he was employed there.
The idea that Oswald couldn’t have hit Kennedy or that there were more than three shots is based on a series of misconceptions. It is said that Oswald didn’t have time to get off the shots, often based on a fallacious reading of the Zapruder tape. But the real timing of the shots has been duplicated, or improved upon, many times in tests.
It is alleged that it would have been impossible for Oswald to hit Kennedy because he was allegedly a poor shot. Actually, he was a good shot during his stint in the Marine Corps, exceeding the score needed to be a sharpshooter, and he practiced once he procured his rifle. The longest shot, the third, which killed Kennedy, was from only 88 yards away — considerably closer than Thomas Crooks was to Trump in Butler, Pa.
That mail-order rifle, we’re told, was no good. Tests afterward showed it was accurate, in fact as accurate as the M-14 that was used by the military at the time.
Of course, there supposedly was no way the “magic bullet” — the second shot — could have wounded two different men, JFK and his fellow passenger in the car, Governor John Connally, in multiple places. In reality, that’s what a bullet traveling in that direction would do, passing through Kennedy’s neck and then through Connally’s chest. As Bugliosi points out, it would have taken a real magic bullet to hit Kennedy on the neck and then disappear, not hitting Connally or embedding somewhere in the car. Instead, it did what you’d expect of a bullet passing through the soft tissue of one man and then hitting the man sitting in front of him. This, too, has been confirmed by various studies and tests.
There was no one on the famous “grassy knoll.” It was an unpropitious spot — not behind the motorcade where Oswald was but in front of it for everyone to see. There is zero evidence — none — of additional shots. No bullets lodged in any cars or were found in the vicinity. No spent casings showed up on the grassy knoll itself. It’s all made up. (The House Select Committee on Assassinations did conclude there was an additional shot, but based on a recording that was grossly misinterpreted and has since been exposed as a clear mistake.)
Moreover, Kennedy’s two entrance wounds were from behind — where Oswald was shooting from.
Oswald was caught dead to rights. The murder weapon was his, and it was found where he worked and where people saw and heard a gunman. He was the only employee who fled the depository. He was obviously a desperate man, killing a cop as he tried to get away and fighting the cops when they found him hiding in a movie theater. Under interrogation, he told lie upon lie. (The rifle? He ludicrously maintained he never owned one.)
No one who knew anything about Oswald could be surprised. In fact, his wife Marina knew he was guilty as soon as she realized that his rifle wasn’t in the spot in the garage where he’d kept it.
Oswald had a truly awful upbringing in a broken home. As a teenager, Oswald was diagnosed with “personality pattern disturbance.” A judge ordered that he be sent to a home for disturbed boys. As he grew older, he never fit in anywhere — either the Marines or the USSR, where he defected for a while — and people who knew him thought he was unstable. He tried to kill himself in the Soviet Union.
He was violent. He hit his mother when he was younger and beat Marina. He planned at one point to hijack a plane to Cuba. When he eventually traveled to Mexico City, and visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies to try to get a visa to Cuba, he was denied — and sobbed and waved a revolver around.
This all fits the profile of someone who would be an assassin, and sure enough, before he killed JFK, all the evidence suggests that he tried to shoot and kill the right-wing figure General Edwin Walker. Once you’ve attempted one assassination, you’ve shown who you are.
The Ridiculous CIA Angle
Since everything meant to absolve Oswald and establish another shooter or other shooters at the scene has been so thoroughly debunked, conspiracy theorists have tended to resort to the idea that the CIA or some other shadowy force was behind the killing.
The case against the CIA begins with the supposition that the agency hated Kennedy. The president was indeed furious at the CIA over the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs. He forced out Allen Dulles as director, and he was replaced by John McCone. The president reportedly said after the fiasco that he wanted “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.“
Whatever animus existed, though, seems to have been transitory. As Bugliosi points out, we can’t be certain that Kennedy really talked of destroying the CIA, since it obviously wasn’t in public and we don’t know to whom he supposedly said it. Regardless, before the assassination, two and half years after the “splintering” statement, the CIA was robustly intact.
William Colby, an important CIA official at the time of the assassination and eventually the director, wrote in his memoir, “The fact of the matter is that the CIA could not have had a better friend in a President than John F. Kennedy. He understood the Agency and used it effectively, exploiting its intellectual abilities to help him analyze a complex world, and its para–military and covert political talents to react to it in a low key way.”
In the mid-1990s, a CIA official undertook a long study of how the agency worked with presidents during the Cold War era and concluded that “the [CIA’s] relationship with Kennedy was not only a distinctive improvement over the more formal relationship with Eisenhower, but would only rarely be matched in future administrations.”
The study further noted, “In the early part of this period, McCone succeeded in rebuilding the Agency’s relationship with Kennedy. McCone saw Kennedy frequently, and the President — more than any other before or since — would telephone even the lower level Agency officers for information or assistance.”
Unbeknownst to everyone, though, we are asked to believe that during these seemingly fruitful and productive interactions, the CIA was really plotting to kill JFK.
Would the CIA have recruited Oswald to do its dirty work? Remember, Oswald was a pro-Castro Marxist and small-time left-wing agitator. Why would he join forces with the agency that tried to topple his hero?
Maybe Oswald was faking his Marxism? If so, he started the act as a teenager, blighted his life prospects with the charade (by, among other things, defecting to the Soviet Union), and fooled everyone around him, including his wife.
Presumably the CIA would have had to pay him, even if he was serving the American intelligence apparatus out of deeply disguised conviction. But Oswald didn’t have any income beyond his meager pay from his employment in low-level jobs.
Besides, everything about Oswald’s personality and background, as noted above, made him unsuitable to carry out the single most sensitive and treacherous operation in American history, one that might have meant the electric chair for its perpetrators, if they hadn’t been lynched.
Bugliosi quotes the sworn testimony of John Scelso (a pseudonym) before the HSCA. Scelso was the chief of clandestine operations for the CIA in the Western Hemisphere at the time of the assassination. He told the committee, “Oswald was a person of a type who would never have been recruited by the Agency.” He noted, “His personality and background completely disqualified him for clandestine work or for work as an agent to carry out the instructions of the Agency,” and he, “by virtue of his background and so on, would miserably fail to meet our minimum qualifications.”
Even the KGB realized as much. The head of the KGB at the time of Oswald’s defection, Vladimir Semichastny, said Soviet intelligence quickly determined that Oswald was a “mediocre, uninteresting, useless man.” He had too much regard for the CIA to believe it would have recruited him: “I had always respected the CIA and FBI, and we knew their work and what they were capable of. It was clear that Oswald was not an agent, couldn’t be an agent, for the CIA or FBI.”
As Bugliosi points out, none of the commissions that probed the assassination found any evidence of a CIA connection, not the Warren Commission, the HSCA, the Rockefeller Commission, or the Church Committee. Nor have any of the conspiracy theorists who have obsessed over this angle for decades and pored over every document available and every lead.
Putting all of this aside, if Oswald was a tool in the CIA’s plot against Kennedy, how would it have worked exactly?
Did the CIA get him to pretend to need a job and get one at the book depository, after he spent years of having trouble actually holding down jobs, hoping that someone in the future might route the president’s motorcade past the building? Additionally, did it put the friend of a friend of Marina up to mentioning that there might be an open job at the depository when he was unemployed? Then, did it use its influence to ensure that the president’s motorcade route, finalized roughly a month after Oswald got the job, would go right by the depository? (The route was first reported by the Dallas Morning News on November 19.)
Why, if the CIA is omnicompetent enough to pull off such an operation, did it not deploy a super-sniper who could get in and out of Dallas with no issue? At the very least, it should have secured some sort of getaway vehicle or plan for Oswald. Instead, it allowed him only to narrowly escape the depository as a matter of sheer luck, and then to careen through the streets of Dallas, a clearly desperate man. Then, it permitted him to be interrogated by the police for days, when he could have unraveled the entire plot instead of acting like a guilty-as-hell lone gunman.
Ruby Wasn’t a CIA Plant
Ah, but they didn’t need to rely on Oswald’s discretion because they had a hit on him planned via an emotionally erratic strip-club owner, Jack Ruby.
It’s certainly understandable that Ruby’s wild, brazen assassination of Oswald stoked suspicions. First, the assassination of a president, then this? Unless Ruby also faked his entire life and additionally faked his overwrought reaction to the assassination, though he was truly an emotional man with poor impulse control distraught over the events of November 22.
Like Oswald, Ruby had a troubled childhood. Like Oswald, he was emotionally unstable — at one point talking of killing a business partner or taking his own life. Like Oswald, he was violent. Like Oswald, people around him thought he was disturbed. Like Oswald, he never succeeded at anything, although he did make a go at the nightclub business in Dallas, finally making a little something of his strip club, the Carousel.
He was genuinely distressed by the assassination, crying and striking some as being close to some kind of breakdown. A talker who liked being at the center of the action, he hung out at the police station after Oswald’s arrest; he was a known quantity, since cops frequented his club. Ruby wasn’t exactly acting like a secret agent. He was voluble and brought sandwiches to cops and reporters and handed out passes to his club.
His murderous act was an extremely near-run thing. He had agreed to wire one of his strippers $25. He went to a Western Union a block from the police headquarters. He didn’t strike the clerk as being in any particular hurry. As it turned out, a transfer of Oswald from the police to the county jail had been delayed earlier that morning. Ruby had assumed it already happened, but a final minutes-long delay — Oswald wanted a change of clothes — meant Oswald was in the basement just as Ruby arrived.
“If it had been three seconds later I would have missed this person,” Ruby noted later.
When Ruby was tackled by the police after he shot Oswald on impulse, he said, “I am Jack Ruby. You all know me.”
Immediately afterward, he bragged about his crime to the police. He thought he’d be considered a hero for taking out the killer of the president. It seemed possible he’d only get convicted of “murder without malice,” carrying a maximum penalty of five years. Instead, he got convicted of premeditated murder, and sentenced to death.
He began to truly lose his mind and died in custody, suffering from cancer, three years after he had shot Oswald.
No organization that valued loyalty, discretion, or discipline ever would have trusted Ruby, any more than Oswald, with anything — not the CIA, and not even the Mafia. Again, like with Oswald, if the CIA was behind his crime, it presumably wouldn’t have left him alive to blab after he completed his task.
Ruby steadfastly denied, by the way, that he was part of a conspiracy. He demanded a polygraph when he testified to the Warren Commission, and it showed he told the truth when he said he acted alone.
Can We Handle the Truth?
The fact is that two untrustworthy, marginal, serial failures happened to meet at the very center of American history in November 1963.
That’s the truth, even if some people can’t handle it.
Would it be any better if larger forces were at play? Maybe if you can’t abide the idea that a nobody like Oswald had such an impact, and that if a few little things had been altered — say, if it had still been raining and the bubble top had been on JFK’s limo — history would have been different.
On the other hand, it’d be a profound indictment of America if its own national-security apparatus had indeed, as Ron Paul put it, staged a coup and had managed to cover it up for decades, with the complicity of an untold number of officials. This is how our worst enemies think we operate. It made sense that the anti-American Left gravitated to this point of view long ago. But now some on the right are so disaffected from contemporary America that they, too, think that our history is a tale of the nightmarish scheming of shadowy forces, so secretive and all-powerful that no one will ever be able to prove their responsibility for that hideous crime on November 22, 1963.
We thought we were citizens of a decent, open society, when the truth, or so they believe, is that we live in the plot of an Oliver Stone movie.