Ben Macintyre.
‘‘WHERE were you when Kennedy was shot?’’ For three out of every five Americans today, the answer is: ‘‘Not yet born.’’
Yet the killing of John F Kennedy, half a century ago this month, remains the defining trauma of modern America, a source of mourning, drama, dispute and, above all, suspicion. After 50 years, Kennedy himself remains a peculiarly enigmatic figure.
As Jill Abramson, editor of the New York Times, observed recently, despite the millions of words written about him, there is no single, great, defining book about JFK. Martyr, celebrity, visionary, philanderer; a great president, a might-have-been great president, a flawed president.
For all his glamour and tragedy JFK remains indistinct and mysterious because there is still no consensus on how and why he died and therefore what his death meant.
It is impossible to see JFK clearly through the fog of conspiracy and speculation that swirls around him. And he will continue to confound historical definition unless, and until, the US Government finally makes public all the evidence surrounding the events in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
A year after the Warren Com- mission report, 87 per cent of Americans believed its findings that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Today that figure has reversed, with the overwhelming majority convinced that there was some sort of conspiracy to kill the president. So far from ebbing with time, distrust of the ‘‘lone gunman’’ conclusion seems to be accelerating, particularly among the young.
Those who have been accused of killing Kennedy include the Mafia, the CIA, Fidel Castro, the military industrial complex, J. Edgar Hoover, the KGB, Lyndon Johnson, Cuban exiles enraged by JFK’s failure to provide air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the FBI – or any combination of the above.
The theorists cite bullet trajectories, autopsy reports, suspicions that the brain photographs in the National Archives are not those of the president, tampered film footage, a change in the motorcade route and a small army of people claiming to have taken part in a conspiracy to kill JFK.
That is before even venturing into the realm of dart-umbrellas, the gunman-in-the-sewer theory and the safety-catch theory, which holds that he was accidentally shot by a secret service agent. More than 40,000 books have been written about JFK, of which 95 per cent posit some sort of plot. Many more are on the way to mark this year’s anniversary.
The great deluge of doubt, an entire industry stoked by suspicion, can be ascribed to the cynicism ingrained by Watergate and Vietnam, a second congressional investigation that concluded that JFK was ‘‘probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy’’ and the ease with which any quarterbaked conjecture gains traction on the internet.
But in essence the greatest outpouring of scepticism in history is the consequence of simple, old- fashioned, official dishonesty.
For decades, conspiracy was allowed to bloom in a vacuum because evidence was kept from the public, including the astonishingly lax security surrounding the president that day.
THE turning point came with Oliver Stone’s egregiously anti-historical 1991 film JFK, a weird potpourri of unfocused suspicion involving both the CIA and Cuba. The intellectual pollution represented by that film prompted Congress to pass the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, ordering the release of all relevant evidence. It was the most liberal and wideranging disclosure of files yet enacted by Congress. Since then, more than five million pages of documents have been given to the US National Archives.
Some of the wilder conspiracy theories died off as a result, proving that genuine, verifiable information swiftly destroys amateur speculation. But the process remains incomplete. The act gave officials wriggle room to retain material that might affect ‘‘military