Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

by David Aaronovitch

  For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, Secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson and Dulles, justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.49

  In one sense, however, those under suspicion conformed to the enemy of American populist folklore. They were East Coasters or Hollywooders; they were educated; they were city dwellers; they liked art and fancy music; they were separate from—and unsympathetic to—the daily travails of the American little man. And the American little man might be wealthier than before, but he was also facing greater change than ever before. One feature of Hollywood movies of the period is ambivalence about the transformation of small-town life. In Frank Capra’s 1946 iconic It’s a Wonderful Life, the hero battles against a monopolistic banker and his attempts to destroy small enterprise and thus the true values of the community. James Stewart is the champion of organic society, and as the sociologist Raymond Williams wrote, “the only sure fact about the organic society is that it has always gone.”50 To which the critic Lawrence Levine added another sure fact: “that almost invariably the organic society has barely just gone, leaving many nostalgic survivors in its wake.”51

  During the 1940s, small-town Americans had had direct experience of the strong state. They or their families had served in the armed forces, had been mobilized by the government and sent abroad. Young men, in particular, had met—often for the first time—other Americans from all the states of the Union. Mental and physical borders had been breached. Nothing would be the same. It is hardly too fanciful to suggest that the Communist menace was in some ways an externalization of internal fears about alterations to the passing world.

  The originators and spreaders of the conspiracy theories of the 1950s were in the main the defeated of the 1930s and 1940s. Hofstadter’s paranoid American of the postwar period was someone who “believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics in the past twenty years (1943-1963). He hates the very thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt.”52 The description perfectly fits men like John T. Flynn, who had battled against the “conspiracy” to take America into war, found themselves worsted by Roosevelt and history, and wondered how on earth it had happened. Their answer was to ascribe to Roosevelt the powers of a dark messiah. McCarthyism was in one sense a fightback by these politically defeated men, and their posthumous revenge on the dead president.

  Passing the Baton: The Legacy of Harry Elmer Barnes

  Within a decade of McCarthy’s ascendancy, the strength of right-wing conspiracism had ebbed, partially because, with Eisenhower’s victory in 1952, the more Establishment part of the insurgency had been co-opted (Richard M. Nixon, after all, was vice president) and partially because the Cold War had eased. Organizations such as the John Birch Society attempted to keep alive the flame of collective paranoia, but were limited to addressing a declining fringe of aging eccentrics. The new conspiracism was to be found elsewhere.

  Toward the end of his life, Harry Elmer Barnes surveyed the terrain around him and understood that the right-wing isolationist impulse had faded. But he was not without optimism. In 1967, he wrote:

  About the only rays of light and hope on the horizon for the moment are by-products of the Vietnam War. For the first time in all American history, except for the Mexican War land-grab, the liberals are not the shock troops of the warmongers, and many are preponderantly “doves,” notably the younger liberals or the “new left.” This has encouraged many of them who, as a group, have been less subject to the World War II brainwashing, to look back over their shoulder at liberal bellicosity in the past and examine its validity more rationally.53

  It was the young, liberal doves, wrote Barnes, who were now questioning the “impeccable soundness of interventionist propaganda and the historical blackout relative to the two world wars of this century.” This skeptical and inquiring attitude, he thought, might grow. In fact, though he may not have realized it, the event that prompted a new liberal revisionism had already taken place. On November 22, 1963, a president had been shot.

  4. DEAD DEITIES

  I shouted out,

  “Who killed the Kennedys? ”

  When after all,

  It was you and me.

  —ROLLING STONES, “SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL”

  The entry in my late mother’s diary for Saturday, November 23, 1963, begins: “Everyone abuzz with Kennedy assassination. Man called Lee Oswald arrested.” Then she adds, “Wonder if it is a frame-up, he is billed as having comm[unist] associations.” My mother, a member of the British Communist Party, was wary of any piece of reporting that sought to blame something as reprehensible as political murder on an unknown comrade. The next day she felt her suspicions had been justified: “Kennedy’s alleged assassin now assassinated. More and more looks like a frame-up.”

  A few hours before Mrs. Aaronovitch took up her pen, the president of the United States of America, John F. Kennedy, traveling in a slow-moving motorcade through the city of Dallas in Texas, had been hit by two shots, and had died soon after. Although subsequent mythology attached a kind of contemporary sainthood to the dead leader, there had been much about Kennedy that, while he lived, had irritated many and enraged a few. He had presided over the resolution of the terrifying missile crisis of 1962, but he had also allowed support for an abortive invasion of Cuba—the Bay of Pigs fiasco—shortly after taking office, and superintended the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam. Domestically, his administration had become increasingly associated with civil rights for African-Americans in the Southern states and with the battle against organized crime. In short, not everyone loved him. Even so, the murder of this young and dynamic president was felt as a huge, almost personal shock by tens of millions of people around the world.

  One conventional wisdom runs that it wasn’t until September 1964, when the Warren Commission released its official report on the assassination in Dallas, that people began to question the official version of events that day. In this scenario, brave researchers then spent their nights sleeplessly sifting through the twenty-six volumes of proceedings and evidence, discovering, as they did so, how riddled with errors and evasions the commission’s work had been. Only then, the wisdom continues, did faith in the idea that a lone gunman had carried out the assassination begin to crumble.

  In fact, a substantial majority of Americans had hardly waited any longer than my mother before declaring for conspiracy. One week after Kennedy’s murder, a major U.S. poll showed that less than a third (29 percent) of those asked believed that Oswald had acted alone.1 And within four weeks such doubts were being theorized. The December 19 edition of the weekly National Guardian carried an article by a young lawyer, Mark Lane. In the tones of a Zola, Lane castigated the dash to blame one troubled young man—a young man himself conveniently eliminated before coming to trial—for the killing of the world’s most powerful leader.

  The magazine quickly sold out, and a complete extra press run also disappeared from the newsstands. As the pamphlet version of the article claimed, all too many heard the heavy echoes of past injustices: “The doubts and confusion in the aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy have brought to mind the situation that was created by the Sacco- Vanzetti case and the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.” Within a month of his death, Lee Harvey Oswald was being listed in the honor scroll of left martyrology. (An irony here is that the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were very probably guilty of murder and the Rosenbergs certainly were guilty of treason.) Lane
concluded:

  You are the jury. You are the only jury that Lee Harvey Oswald will ever have. A terrible crime has been committed. A young, vital and energetic leader of perhaps the world’s most powerful nation has been killed by the cowardly act of a hidden assassin. The murderer or murderers were motivated by diseased minds or by such depths of malice as to approach that state. We will perhaps never know their motives. We must, however, know and approve of our own conduct and our own motives . . . We begin with a return to an old American tradition—the presumption of innocence. We begin with you.2

  In the United States, Lane established the Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry into the death of the president. Lane’s call was also heard across the Atlantic by the great philosopher and peace campaigner Bertrand Russell. He believed the lawyer’s evidence to be “so startling and so impressive” that another committee was needed, mirroring the American effort. The Who Killed Kennedy Committee (WKKC) soon comprised many of Britain’s finest and most sensitive minds. The writers J. B. Priestley and Sir Compton Mackenzie, the Bishop of Southwark, Michael Foot MP (later leader of the Labour Party), the critic Kenneth Tynan, the publishers Victor Gollancz and John Calder, and the historian Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper all sat on it. Running the committee was a young American, Ralph Schoenman.

  Russell and his committee were not to be mollified by the eventual publication of the Warren Commission Report. Even without reading it for himself, Russell knew (for Lane had told him so) that there had “never been a more subversive, conspiratorial, unpatriotic or endangering course for the security of the United States and the world than the attempt by the U.S. Government to hide the murderers of its recent President.”3

  The skepticism was catching. Throughout the mid-1960s, article followed article, theory was laid on top of theory, book followed book. By the 1970s, the conspiracy to kill Kennedy was an established “fact” of intellectual life in America and Europe, and the default view among the young and educated. Its purchase on popular culture is demonstrated by its incorporation into the routines of stand-up comedians. Woody Allen would tell audiences that he had just been working on a new movie script, which was “a nonfiction version of the Warren Report.”

  In the movie Annie Hall (1977), Allen even satirized his own preoccupation with the Kennedy conspiracy. A flashback bedroom scene involving the ineffectual Alvy (Allen) and his first wife has the hero breaking away from an embrace and pacing the room. She tries to talk him out of his obsession.

  ALLISON: Okay. All right, so whatta ya saying, now? That everybody on the Warren Commission is in on this conspiracy, right?

  ALVY: Well, why not?

  ALLISON: Yeah, Earl Warren?

  ALVY: Hey . . . honey, I don’t know Earl Warren.

  ALLISON : Lyndon Johnson?

  ALVY: Lyndon Johnson is a politician. You know the ethics those guys have? It’s like—a notch underneath child molester.

  ALLISON: Then everybody’s in the conspiracy?

  ALVY: Tsch.

  ALLISON: The FBI, and the CIA, and J. Edgar Hoover and oil companies and the Pentagon and the men’s-room attendant at the White House?

  ALVY: I would leave out the men’s-room attendant.

  ALLISON: You’re using this conspiracy theory as an excuse to avoid sex with me.4

  Nearly two decades later, the comedian Bill Hicks was running a much angrier routine to another generation of young Americans.

  I have this feeling that whoever’s elected president, like Clinton was, no matter what promises you make on the campaign trail—blah, blah, blah—when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialist, capitalist scumfucks that got you in there, and this little screen comes down . . . and it’s a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you’ve never seen before, which looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll . . . And then the screen comes up, the lights come on, and they say to the new president, “Any questions? ”

  “Just what my agenda is.”5

  Early on, as the desire to solve the Kennedy case burgeoned, housewives turned themselves into assiduous researchers, journalists turned geostrategists, and professors in humanities became experts in ballistics and forensic pathology. As Todd Gitlin, the writer and former political activist, put it, “Serious journals like the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and Ramparts . . . regaled their readers with tale after tale about exit wounds, gunshots from the grassy knoll, missing frames of the Zapruder film, the accuracy of Mannlicher-Carcano rifles, exotic Cuban émigrés, mysteriously murdered witnesses, double agents, double Oswalds.”6 Among the most influential books on the subject were Lane’s own Rush to Judgment, Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash, Leo Sauvage’s The Oswald Affair, and The Second Oswald by Richard H. Popkin.

  Popkin was a professor at the University of California at La Jolla and previously best known for his History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Descartes , published in 1960. But in 1966, he glanced down from the study of Jewish and Christian millenarianism, put down The Outlines of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus, and considered instead the murder of the president. His ideas, which were given extensive play in that journal of liberal American intellectuals, the New York Review of Books, proved to be both similar to, and different from, the very many other books and articles being produced on an almost industrial basis elsewhere. The similarity lay in his objections to the conclusions of the Warren Commission. The difference lay in his particular thesis about what had happened.

  Descartes to Doppelgängers

  If one reads the Warren Report, the circumstantial evidence that Oswald was the lone gunman seems overwhelming. He worked at the Texas School Book Depository, where, on the sixth floor, after the shooting, his rifle was discovered inside an improvised sniper’s nest. People had seen a man at the sixth-floor window, had seen the rifle barrel, had heard the shots. Oswald was the only employee unaccounted for after the shooting, and he was picked up shortly afterward in a cinema, having just shot a policeman looking for someone of his description. The words “slam dunk” come to mind. One might wonder whether someone unknown had put the ex-marine and former defector to the Soviet Union up to the crime, but no one could seriously dispute that he had carried it out on his own.

  But from the start, conspiracy theorists did exactly this: they challenged the notion that he acted alone. According to Popkin, the problem with the evidence was not that it “suggests that the ‘official theory’ is implausible, or improbable, or that it is not legally convincing, but that by reasonable standards accepted by thoughtful men, it is impossible.”7 The impossibility rested, in many people’s minds, on the alleged physical unfeasibility of Oswald’s achievement. As Popkin summarized it: “All of the Commission’s obfuscation notwithstanding, Oswald was a poor shot and his rifle was inaccurate. Experts could not duplicate the alleged feat of two hits out of three shots in 5.6 seconds, even though they were given stationary targets and ample time to aim the first shot.”8 In addition, for the Warren findings to work, the first bullet to hit Kennedy must also have been the one that—having passed through the president—also transited Governor John Connally of Texas in the front seat and exited his wrist. Popkin, like many another unqualified American, looked at the ballistic evidence and the report on the autopsy, and made his decision.

  The professor, however, recognized what many of his fellows didn’t. Objections to the Warren version weren’t enough. “All of this [criticism] usually builds up to a big ‘So what?’ ” he wrote, “since the critics still have not been able to present a reasonably plausible counterexplanation of what could have happened. Why, for example, should Oswald have tried to implicate himself as the assassin?”9 Popkin then went on to provide the answer. What followed was the theory that there were, in fact, two entirely separate Oswalds. One was the real, hapless Oswald, Oswald-Jekyll, if you like; and the other was the murderous Oswald (Oswald-Hyde), who might well have been an intelligence operative. “Second Oswald,” theorized Popkin, “was an excellent shot, real
Oswald was not. Real Oswald’s role was to be the prime suspect chased by the police, while second Oswald, one of the assassins, could vanish . . . If the crime is reconstructed in this way, most of the puzzles and discrepancies can be more plausibly explained.”10

  Popkin agreed that his hypothesis was “tentative and conjectural,” but that, even so, it was a more realistic explanation than that offered by Warren. He concluded his major piece in the NYRB with a call to action: “Many of us in this country are afraid to face reality, and part of our reality is living with our history. Can we continue to live a lie about what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963, or has the time come to face what it means and what it involves for all of us? The public must cry out for a real examination and understanding of the events of that day.”11

  Whether the public cried out sufficiently to satisfy Professor Popkin or not, it is obvious that since 1966, examination at least has been plentiful. Understanding has been another matter. An industry of fluctuating intensity and volume of output has operated for four decades. Thousands of conspiracy enthusiasts continue to exchange theories, arcane pieces of information, and supposed expertise. The detail is overwhelming. Was Kennedy’s brain stolen? Was his body swapped? Who were the tramps by the Dallas railway tracks? What was recorded on the walkie-talkie of a Texan patrolman? Was the smoke seen on the grassy knoll a sign of rifle fire or from a motorcycle’s exhaust? Was Oswald’s assassin, Jack Ruby, a Mafia hit man? Had someone tried to kill Kennedy earlier in Miami? Was Oswald a CIA agent? A KGB agent? Authors and documentarists, mostly of the political left, insisted, variously, that their unique work and extensive research showed that the CIA, the FBI, right-wing freelancers, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, the Russians, the Cubans, the military-industrial complex, the military-industrial-intelligence complex, or the Jews were behind the assassination. As I began this chapter, a heavily marketed nine-hundred-page hardcover appeared in the bookstores, claiming that JFK was killed by the Mafia because of a failed plan to organize a coup in Cuba.