JFK’s death fascinates, poisons faith in politics

As the latest load of Kennedy assassination documents are being studied — understaffed newsrooms internationally are asking readers with a bit of free time to pitch in — it is increasingly a struggle to explain why the event retains such interest.

Kennedy was shot by that most American of figures, the skinny white rat. This particular one, Lee Harvey Oswald, got his gun by mail order. The U.S. is thick with these sullen losers who beat their mothers and then their wives. They still shoot down from high windows, just as Oswald did on Nov. 22, 1963.

Yes, there are still remnants of conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination, although Gerald Posner’s crisply written Case Closed more or less put an end to that. In the same month that Kennedy was killed, historian Richard Hofstadter gave a speech about “the paranoid style in American politics,” the first version of his classic book on how postwar rightwing extremism was part of the national bloodstream.

It is a distemper, historian Sean Wilentz’s foreword explains, part of what Hofstadter called status politics, meaning the clash of “projected rationalizations arising from status aspirations and other personal motives” born of the “social rootlessness and insecurity of American life.” That’s the skinny white rat right there.

There’s a despair in the quest to solve the killing when there used to be hope, as if finishing it off would get one started on a more important contemporary investigation: how and why Donald Trump was elected. JFK doesn’t matter now. It’s done.

There was a soup of conspiracy theories involving the mob, the CIA, the FBI, Cuba, Mexico, the Kremlin, Sen. Ted Cruz’s dad, actor Woody Harrelson’s dad, President Lyndon Johnson, the far-right John Birch Society, Kennedy’s autopsy physicians, and who knows, Mary Surratt, the landlady who sheltered Abraham Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth. She was hanged in 1865, but still.

At 71, Trump remains gripped by this — he was an impressionable 17 at the time — claiming to be delaying the release of the final few papers until spring because of CIA and FBI begging. As if Trump has the faintest interest in the norms of the national security establishment.

His decision only spurs a new conspiracy theory: what does Putin not want revealed?

Never attribute to conspiracy what can be adequately explained by stupidity. The papers so far reinforce that the CIA and the FBI knew about Oswald and what a danger he posed to JFK, who could have been saved. Even now they conceal this.

Every public institution has a culture, and it can rarely be altered. Institutional secrecy is fatal. The inept Warren Commission and subsequent secrecy about the Kennedy killing destroyed much American faith in government. No wonder they are so wretched now.

But the core explanation is this: people are good and kind. The murder was extremely violent and took place before their unbelieving eyes. If there had been only photos rather than film, we wouldn’t be interested now.

Humans are morbid. They can’t help it. The deeper draw of the event is that Jack was handsome and Jackie was pretty and it was all on film. Foreshadowing is a terrible thing. The killing is not the worst part of that day.

Online, you can watch Kennedy giving a breakfast speech in Fort Worth with his wife sitting beside him in her pink suit and pillbox hat, smiling happily, though she was not happy.

Then you can watch them arriving at Love Field in Dallas, minutes away from death. Jackie is handed red roses — she thought this odd at the time — that would later match the blood in the back of the limousine.

You watch a couple brimming with life, greeting people warmly as the death clock ticks down. At Love Field, JFK had maybe half an hour before his life ended.

Now we know that he was a chronic abuser of women in an era when that was acceptable (though not to the Secret Service who deplored it), an election cheat, his health a sham and his Oval Office brain trust a failure that would birth the Vietnam War.

Yet it was so sad. The cruelty of that day is always a click away, the vulnerability of those two being driven towards death, our gaze still on them in 2017 and long after.