Dawn of the Age of Conspiracy: The Assassination of JFK

On 22 November 1963, US president John F. Kennedy was mortally wounded as he rode in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. At the time, the forty-six-year-old Democrat was campaigning to win a second term as president in the 1964 election. Sixty years on, and another US election looms. Today, candidates receive protection from US security forces — but perhaps it is the voters who need looking out for.

lone gunman

After the assassination, Kennedy’s accused killer was quickly arrested, though he never reached trial: Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US marine with a history of psychiatric illness who had defected for a time to the Soviet Union, was shot dead within days by Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner with mafia connections. In 1964, US president Lyndon B. Johnson set up the Warren Commission to investigate Kennedy’s killing. It concluded that Oswald had acted alone.

RUMOURS

However, rumours were already circulating of a conspiracy to kill the president. Among the more prevalent theories were that a second shooter aimed from a nearby grassy knoll; that a man with an umbrella signalled to the killer or shot a poisoned dart; that the US government, the mafia or the Soviet state police, the KGB, were involved; or that Cuban leader Fidel Castro ordered the shooting.

INVESTIGATION

In 1976, a US House of Representatives committee was formed to reexamine the case. After conducting some 25,000 interviews and chasing down tens of thousands of leads, all suspicions of a conspiracy were dismissed. This did nothing to stop the rumours: then, in the 1990s, Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, followed by the expansion of the internet, helped theories which were decades old and decades disproved become even more entrenched.

CONSPIRACY NATION

In the immediate aftermath of the 1963 assassination, 87 per cent of Americans asked said they believed that there was only one shooter. Today, around 60 per cent are convinced that more than one person was involved. In 2022, US president Joe Biden ordered the disclosure of all releasable records, around 3,600 items, on the assassination. By June 2023, 99 per cent of all materials were made public — but there were no revelations.