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40 years of doubts: Conspiracy theories still grip public

By Knight-Ridder Newspapers and The Associated Press

	AP President Kennedy is seen riding in a motorcade before he was shot in Dallas in this Nov. 22, 1963, photo. Also in the car are Jacqueline Kennedy and Gov. and Mrs. John Connally of Texas.
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Forty years after his death, nowhere is the memory of John F. Kennedy more alive than in the ongoing drama over who killed him and why.

An overwhelming majority of Americans do not believe the official conclusion that a loser named Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed the president with a cheap, mail-order rifle fired from the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.

Oswald, arrested shortly after the assassination, was silenced two days later when nightclub owner Jack Ruby gunned him down as police transferred him from a jail. Answering the question of who was behind the shooting was left to the government-appointed Warren Commission, which after a 10-month investigation concluded in 1964 that Oswald acted alone, firing from the book depository's sixth floor.

Yet today only 32 percent of American adults accept that Oswald was the lone gunman, according to an ABC News poll conducted earlier this month. Fifty-one percent believe there was a second shooter.

In other questions the poll asked, 70 percent said they thought the assassination was part of a broader plot, and more than two-thirds believed there was a government cover-up.

But whose conspiracy was it?

'Cult of secrecy'

There's no consensus among theorists, but Utah State University President Kermit Hall, who served in the 1990s on the congressionally mandated JFK Assassination Records Review Board, is sure of one thing: Theories continue to proliferate because officials have kept too much of the assassination data under wraps.

"The opportunity for full disclosure didn't occur because the evidentiary base was for years kept from the public," Hall said. "The result was, in an evidentiary vacuum, the idea of conspiracy was allowed to grow almost unabated.

"I was surprised by the volume of material the government had secured as 'classified,' " said Hall, who with his fellow review-board members issued a final report in 1998 after poring over thousands of documents, photos and other assassination evidence. "But see, that's what the cult of secrecy does."

Others contend the persistence of conspiracy theories is simply part of a long-standing American tradition.

"People will believe forever, no matter the reliability of the evidence," said Charles Stewart, a Purdue University communications professor who studies and teaches how conspiracy theorists make their ideas believable. "We love conspiracies in this country. Even back to the colonists, Americans always have been suspicious about their government and have rallied around conspiracies."

The Hollywood connection

Still others blame people like film director Oliver Stone, whose film "JFK" traced the president's death to conspirators. Authors Robert S. Robins and Jerrold M. Post argue that "JFK" contributed to the "intellectual pollution" conspiracies that play to the nation's paranoia.

In 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison asserted that the assassination was a CIA-led coup. Garrison's theories went to court — and eventually to Stone's 1991 movie — but Clay Shaw, the alleged "evil genius" behind the assassination, was acquitted in less than an hour.

Temple University English professor Joan Mellen is completing a book on Garrison's attempts to find the truth.

Garrison came close to connecting links in New Orleans to the assassination, Mellen believes, but she said none of the investigative boards and commissions has uncovered the truth. In her opinion, the Central Intelligence Agency pulled the strings.

"He was challenging their power, their authority," Mellen said of Kennedy. "He hated the agency and they hated him.

"They never forgave him" for failing to support the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, she said. "The evidence is overwhelming that there was a conspiracy."

The fact that influential media outlets followed the government's lead in putting a lid on information has only inflamed conspiracy theorists. Life magazine, for example, purchased the 8-mm Abraham Zapruder film of the motorcade slaying within hours of the act and closely guarded it until 1975, when ABC-TV finally aired it in its entirety, according to the Village Voice.

"The New York Times, Time-Life, CBS and NBC have striven mightily to protect the single-assassin hypothesis, even when that has involved the suppression of information, the coercion of testimony and the misrepresentation of key evidence," the Village Voice wrote.

Depending on whom you believe, President Kennedy was killed by Oswald, the Cosa Nostra, the CIA, the KGB, or maybe Fidel Castro's hit men. Texas Monthly magazine compiled a helpful primer of leading JFK assassination conspiracy theories a few years ago. Here are the highlights:

• The Shadow Government Theory: A secret government within our government ordered Kennedy's slaying. The group included crooks, rich industrialists, right-wing politicians and others. Believers include film director Stone.

• The Vietnam Theory: The family of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem ordered the hit on JFK in revenge for a U.S.-backed coup in which Diem was gunned down at point-blank range. Believers initially included Lyndon Johnson.

• Friendly Fire Theory: Secret Service agents gave Kennedy's assassin(s) a clear shot when they provided lax security and/or hijacked the body to alter the corpse, scuttle the autopsy and cover up the entire affair. Believers: "Best Evidence" author David Lifton and "Mortal Error" author Bonar Menninger.

• Cuban Exiles Theory: Oswald was the patsy or agent for a group of Cuban exiles who wanted revenge after President Kennedy's failure to support the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Kennedy withheld air support for the mission, leaving 1,500 Cuban soldiers at the mercy of Fidel Castro's troops. Believers: investigator Gaeton Fonzi, authors Bernard Fensterwald ("Coincidence or Conspiracy?") and Sylvia Meagher ("Accessories After the Fact"), and CBS newsman Peter Noyes.

• The Castro Theory: The Cuban dictator ordered Kennedy killed after one too many U.S.-commissioned bazooka attacks and exploding cigars. Believers: Lyndon Johnson (eventually) and anti-Castro activist Carlos Bringuier.

• The FBI Theory: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover knew JFK would replace him when Hoover reached his 70th birthday. He also knew that Lyndon Johnson would exempt him from the mandatory retirement. So, Hoover either (1) knew of assassination plans and did nothing to stop them, or (2) ordered Oswald to kill him. A third possibility is that Oswald warned the FBI of plots to kill Kennedy, only to find himself framed, then silenced by fellow informant Jack Ruby. Believers: authors Mark North ("Act of Treason") and George O'Toole ("The Assassination Tapes").

• The KGB Theory: Humiliated by Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev punished him. Scenario 1: Oswald was trained in espionage in the Soviet Union and made the hit. Scenario 2: Oswald was Khrushchev's game, set up by an Oswald double and KGB operatives who fired the shots at Dealey Plaza. Scenario 3: Oswald returned home from the Soviet Union after being programmed a la "The Manchurian Candidate" to carry out his Iron Curtain orders. Believers: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton and author Michael Eddowes ("Khrushchev Killed Kennedy").

• The LBJ Theory: LBJ cooked up the coup amid rumors that his boss was going to drop him from the 1964 Democratic ticket. Other plotters: Texas oilmen who feared losing the oil-depletion allowance, and Vietnam hawks. An angry Oswald was their trigger man. Believers: authors David Lifton ("The Texas Connection") and Edward Livingstone ("Killing Kennedy").

• The Mafia Connection: Oswald was either the mob's hit man or patsy in a killing that was payback for Attorney General Robert Kennedy's organized-crime crackdown. Adding insult to injury: The mob had helped deliver the 1960 election for JFK. This theory also says Jack Ruby carried out a mob hit on Oswald. Believers: authors John H. Davis ("The Kennedy Contract") and David Scheim ("Contract on America") as well as veteran journalist Jack Anderson.

• The CIA Theory: Kennedy threatened to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds," after the disastrous CIA-orchestrated 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Fearing that Kennedy would deliver on his promise, the agency either put shooters in Dealey Plaza or enlisted Oswald to carry out the killing. Believers: authors Mark Lane ("Plausible Deniability"), John Newman ("Oswald and the CIA"), Anthony Summers ("Conspiracy") and Mellen of Temple University.

Connecticut author Patrick Nolan is shopping his book on the conspiracy surrounding the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy.

His premise: Rogue CIA agents working for Richard Helms, who in 1966 became the agency's director, directed Robert Kennedy's fatal shooting. He believes the same cabal that killed Robert Kennedy killed his older brother.

As for Oswald, Nolan said he believes he was simply the fall guy in the president's assassination.

Some experts have suggested that the subsequent Vietnam War and Watergate scandal deepened Americans' cynicism and eroded trust in government.

"Many people look at the Kennedy assassination as a turning point, when people started realizing and thinking and believing their government would lie to them and lie to them repeatedly," said Gary Mack, curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas.

The 'magic bullet'

Perhaps the most persistently questioned finding of the Warren Commission is the "magic bullet" theory.

The theory assumes that Oswald alone fired three shots and that one bullet zigzagged through both Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally. The bullet is said to have gone through Kennedy's throat, then into Connally, puncturing his lung, hitting his rib and wrist and then exiting relatively unscathed.

Some historians, forensic experts and conspiracy theorists do not buy it.

James Fetzer, author of "Assassination Science: Experts Speak Out on the Death of JFK," says the Kennedy X-rays and the film of the assassination by bystander Zapruder were fabricated and that there were actually six or so people firing at the president that day.

High-tech or hype?

Technology has only solidified positions.

Conspiracy theorists now use the Internet to bounce their ideas around the globe, build databases and convert a new generation of believers.

ABC and Court TV both ran sophisticated computer simulations this month of the crime scene and an analysis of a police audiotape, asserting that the Warren Commission got it right — Oswald alone killed Kennedy.

The now-digitized Zapruder film shows exact moments — such as the second when Connally's lapel flew up — that indicate precisely when he was shot and his position relative to the president. Their conclusion: Connally, who sat in front of Kennedy, was turning when he was shot, making the bullet's path plausible.

Many Americans nevertheless find it difficult to believe that a nobody like Oswald — a former Marine who went to live in Russia, became disenchanted with life under communism and took a dead-end job in Texas — could have single-handedly killed the leader of the free world.

Some 6 million documents have been released by the Assassination Records Review Board, but Hall said he doubts any revelations will come from them.

"The lesson of American history is, by and large, unhappy, small-time people, if you will, make more of their life by shooting or killing better-known people," Hall said.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company