Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (22 page)

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.

The Dead Left

It was I. F. Stone, one of the most prominent progressive U.S. journalists, who warned the left that they were falling prey to the same paranoias as the American right. Following Russell’s denunciation of the U.S. government, Stone observed that, having lived through the McCarthy era, he had fought all his adult life “against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology,” but now he saw the left “using these same tactics in the controversy over the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission Report.” To Stone, it all seemed too improbable, and he voiced the instinctive objections of anti-conspiracists through the years. Were Lane and Russell and the others really arguing, he asked, that “the whole commission, from Chief Justice Warren down, and its whole staff, and the vast network of the police, the FBI, and CIA and the Secret Service all conspired to keep this secret? Not one man felt impelled by conscience to break out and tell the truth?” If so, then this was regrettable, because “people who believe such things belong in the booby-hatch.”
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Unfortunately, there were many, besides Woody Allen’s Alvy, ready for the booby-hatch. Take, for example, Sidney Blumenthal, White House spin doctor and confidant to President Bill Clinton, part of whose job in the 1990s was to trash the various conspiracy theories attaching themselves to the former governor of Arkansas. In 1976, as Sid Blumenthal the left-wing journalist, he had edited a book of essays titled
Government by Gunplay: Assassination Conspiracy Theories from Dallas to Today
, in which various skulduggeries were discussed, from the Kennedy assassination to the alleged murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., by the authorities. Hedging his bets slightly, Blumenthal exalted a new skepticism in the United States, and noted that “the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of President Kennedy runs against the grain of the new [suspicious, skeptical] American Character.”

According to Blumenthal, the motor force behind such theorizing was a form of sublimated politics “based, in part, on the decline of the student radicalism of the sixties.” On one level, conspiracy theory was, he suggested, “the doctrine of those still holding on to their faith; it is an attempt to defend the past.”
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Lest this leave the impression with the reader that Blumenthal himself might not quite buy the notion of the Mafia or the CIA organizing a gigantic cover-up, he went on to discuss the case of Sarah Jane Moore, the woman who tried to shoot President Gerald Ford in September 1975. Moore subsequently attempted to claim that she had been working for the government but had gone off the rails. She and Oswald were, wrote Blumenthal, malfunctioning operatives, “the epiphenomena of the politics of domestic destabilization.”
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Here, then, was yet another theory: conspiracy by accident.

Not all contributors to the book were so coy. Controversial chronicler of the CIA Philip Agee wrote an introduction in which he summed up the lesson to be learned from
Government by Gunplay
: “The ruling class conspiracy—whether acting through the CIA, government commissions, or a big business junta . . . can be stopped only by a countervailing grass-roots movement of the American people.” Some believed this ruling-class conspiracy had by 1976 taken the lives of the best and most popular leaders of the American left and center-left. And if you thought that JFK had been killed by “them,” then why not his brother, gunned down in California in 1968? Or Martin Luther King, Jr., shot dead in Memphis in the same year? Or go back to 1965 and the New York slaying of black leader Malcolm X? Or even, to assist Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972, the shooting and wounding of the former segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, whose candidacy threatened to split the right-wing vote? All supposedly the work of lone gunmen or radical factions, but all conveniently removed from the political stage.

To Carl Oglesby, a former president of the Students for Democratic Society, what was going on was essentially gang warfare, complete with hits, between the old East Coast establishment and new southwestern entrepreneurs:

The facts surrounding the assassination conspiracies behind Dallas, Memphis, Los Angeles and Laurel, Maryland are like a storm of incomprehensible lightning. It changes everything, it changes colors, familiar components of the political landscape, it turns political parties that once we thought were strong and forceful into pawns and manipulated counters on a stage controlled by hidden forces. And the act of government is turned most fundamentally into an act of murder.
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Other, later writers discovered the true pattern of the murders. In
The Assassinations
, a comprehensive 2003 compilation of conspiracy theories, the authors claimed that “the cumulative effect of these assassinations is quite clear. They resulted in the death of the old Democratic Party and the birth of the new Jimmy Carter-Bill Clinton-Al Gore Democratic Party. And there is a huge difference between the two.”
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The authors then embarked upon a retrospective political wish list thwarted by old bullets. “If Robert Kennedy had lived he very likely would have won that nomination and defeated Richard Nixon. He would have gotten us out of Vietnam, and saved us from Watergate. This, of course, would have saved the rest of us from Carter, Strauss and Clinton.”
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Had Robert Kennedy and JFK and MLK and Malcolm X survived, they would have energized the Democratic base and re-created the New Deal coalition of FDR; the left would have been in and the right would have been out. As it was, the authors concluded, despondently, “what had once been a huge street movement now plays to small crowds with the likes of Noam Chomsky at small college auditoriums. What had been a large and growing majority is now a tiny minority.”
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This book will have to park its sympathy for the undervalued Noam Chomsky alongside any attempt to detail each and every objection to the idea of a lone gunman. It is worth noting, however, that there are those who don’t appear in the list of dead or wounded heroes. President Ronald Reagan was shot and injured in 1981, and Lincoln Rockwell was shot and killed by a sniper in 1967. But what theory of ruling-class malfeasance could possibly fit the attempt on Reagan? And Rockwell was, inconveniently, the führer of the American Nazi Party.

Lone Assassins

Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, the twenty-five-year-old son of an oil executive, who was trying to impress the actress Jodie Foster. Rockwell was killed by the editor of his Nazi newspaper, with whom he’d fallen out. Both events took place after the publication of the Warren Report, but the careers of the shooters wouldn’t have surprised the report’s authors. In 1881, they pointed out, President Garfield was assassinated by a man who wanted someone else to be president; in 1901, President McKinley was killed by an anarchist.

Both Roosevelts had been fired at: Teddy in 1912 by a deranged shop-keeper, and President-elect Franklin Delano in 1933 in Miami by another anarchist, Giuseppe Zangara. Zangara, who hit and fatally wounded the mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, was in Miami, according to reports, only “because it was warm and he was out of work, and he had lost $200 on the dog races.” The FBI recorded that he had wanted to kill kings and presidents of wealthy governments since he was a teenager.

Two years later, the populist governor of Louisiana, Huey Long (known as the “Kingfish”), was shot and killed in the state capitol building in Baton Rouge by a Dr. Carl Weiss, whose father-in-law, a judge, had been gerrymandered out of office by the ruthless governor.

The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were ascribed to an attention-seeking Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan and a white racist petty criminal James Earl Ray, respectively. Arthur Bremer, George Wallace’s would-be assassin, was said by his defense to be schizophrenic, and in any case had left a journal, described by himself as a “diary of my personal plot to kill by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace.” (Some, including Gore Vidal, have described this diary as a forgery.) Plots seemed to be rare. Malcolm X was the victim of an organized hit by gunmen angry at his opposition to the Nation of Islam, and, in the autumn of 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, had attempted to murder President Harry Truman. So, in the run of presidents from Roosevelt to Kennedy, spanning 1933 to 1963, only Eisenhower was
not
the target of assassins.

It is fairly obvious from this list that lone gunmen were not a new phenomenon in American history when Kennedy’s open limousine rounded the bend in the road below the Texas Schoolbook Depository. The question, of course, is whether Oswald was one of them. If there were a credible profile for a man who might want on his own account to kill a world statesman, would Oswald fit it?

The most startling, incontrovertible, and often overlooked fact about Lee Harvey Oswald is that seven months before the Kennedy assassination he had used the same rifle to try and assassinate another prominent American, Major General Edwin A. Walker.

Lee’s Russian wife, Marina, maintained that on the evening of April 10, 1963, her husband had left home after dinner, and when he had failed to return by ten or ten-thirty, she had gone into his room and discovered a note addressed to her. The note, which survived, contained practical advice to Marina in the eventuality of Lee’s not coming back, but also included, as point 2, “Send the information as to what has happened to me to the Embassy and include newspaper clippings (should there be anything about me in the newspapers),” and as point 11, “If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is located at the end of the bridge through which we always passed on going to the city (right in the beginning of the city after crossing the bridge).”
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Marina testified under oath that when Oswald finally returned home he was very pale. He told her that he had shot at General Walker, but didn’t know whether he had hit him. Next day, when newspaper and radio reports revealed that an attempt had been made on Walker’s life but that the assassin had missed his target, Oswald told his wife that he “was very sorry that he had not hit him.” Later that week Oswald showed Marina a notebook containing a map of the area where Walker lived and some photographs of the Walker residence. Though the notebook was subsequently destroyed, three of the photographs were discovered after Oswald’s arrest. But what about the rifle used to shoot at Walker? Marina testified that Oswald had told her that he had hidden it in some rough ground. Several days later, she said, he recovered it and brought it back home. A later analysis of the bullet fired at Walker showed that it was “probably” from a Mannlicher-Carcano, the same make as Oswald’s gun.

Since no one has credibly suggested that Oswald was involved with others to kill Walker, it’s clear that he was already a would-be lone assassin long before anyone decided that Kennedy should visit Dallas or fixed the route that he would travel. And Oswald’s capacity for independent mayhem is further proved by the again incontrovertible fact that, less than an hour after the president was shot, he fired four bullets into Patrolman J. D. Tippit. He was seen shooting the officer, and his progress, followed by a number of eyewitnesses, culminated in his arrest in a Dallas movie theater, while he was still holding the gun that had fired the bullets that killed Tippit.

Even so, what was Oswald’s motive? A clue lies in his own writings. A troubled child and adolescent, Oswald defected to Russia in 1961, hoping to discover a better form of society—and discovered instead the Soviet Union. On his journey back to America in the summer of 1962, he jotted down some of his thoughts about politics. He was disillusioned with what he understood of all political movements, writing, “I have offen wondered why it is that the Communist, capitalist and even the fasist and anarchist elements in America, allways profess patriotistism toward the land and the people, if not the government; although their movements must surly lead to the bitter destruction of all and everything [all
sic
].” The only solution, Oswald thought, was the destruction of all authority. “As history has shown time again the state remains and grows whereas true democracy can be practiced only at the local level, while the centralized state, administrative, political or supervisual remains their can be no real democracy a loose confederation of communitys at a national level with out any centralized state what so ever [all
sic
].”
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