Did the assassination of JFK kickstart the conspiracy theory movement?

This is The Guardian.

60 years ago. This week, John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie were travelling in an open-top car as part of a presidential motorcade through Dallas, Texas.

From that point on, my life changed.

This is Clint Hill, a former Secret Service agent, who was in the car behind the president on November 22, 1963.

All of a sudden, I heard this explosive noise over my right shoulder, and I saw the president grab at his throat and start to fall to his left.

As he explains to my colleague David Smith here, Clint jumped out of the car he was travelling in and ran towards the president.

Mrs Kennedy then started to get up on the truck. I grabbed a hold of her when I got up on top of the car and helped her get back into the back seat.

As they sped off to rush President Kennedy to hospital, Clint gestured to fellow Secret Service agents with a thumbs-down motion that the situation was grave.

One o'clock, the doctor, who I guess was his most senior, said The president's dead and there's nothing more we can do.

It was years before Clint felt ready to speak about what he remembered of that day, but he now believes he has an obligation to do it.

I know what happened and they could say whatever they want to say, they'd have to prove it to me with factual information. Nobody so far has done that.

The 91-year-old is worried that when he and the others who were there that day die. The numerous alternative explanations surrounding the death of the president will become accepted truth.

Are they going to just accept what has been said and all this theoretical stuff?

Why did the assassination of J.F.K. spawn dozens of conspiracy theories that have lasted decades? Is there a reason why Americans are quick to believe their government is covering something up? And, despite multiple examples of conspiracies, turning dangerous, are politicians today, including John F. Kennedy's own nephew, using conspiracy theories for political gain? I'm Jonathan Friedland, columnist at The Guardian, and this is Politics Weekly America.

Yes, well, there have been conspiracy theories in the United States, or really in North America, even before there was a United States.

Katherine Olmsted is a professor of history at the University of California at Davis. She's also an author who wrote a book called Real Enemies, where she explores why the connection between conspiracy theories and American politics grew stronger in the 20th century.

The conspiracy theories before the 20th century tended to be focused more on marginalized communities, on Catholics or on African Americans or Mormons, and, of course, Jews. What happens in the 20th century is there start to be more and more conspiracy theories about the U.S government. And that the U.S government itself is out to undermine the will of the people. And so in my book, I trace the starting right after World War I, where there are these theories that it was arms manufacturers and bankers who tricked the United States into entering World War I.

And plenty of material for that epilogue, I can imagine, no shortage, but I'm very struck by you saying that. This goes back even to the days when there was not yet a United States of America, that in the early colonies, that would form the United States. You can find the conspiracy theory and that way of thinking, and I remember the and. It's a book that's often quoted The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter, which sort of touches on some of this. A sort of bit of a classic. What is it about America that goes back even to before the founding of the Republic, that makes conspiracy thinking an American way of thinking?

Hofstadter's theory, and I think it's a good one, was that American conspiracy theories reflect the fact that the United States is a country of immigrants. And that there was a lot of migration, there was a lot of immigration, people moving around and changes in status from generation to generation. And so that this uncertainty about whether you are going to keep your financial security, about whether your family would move away. And also just the general uncertainty about what makes an American led to anxiety in even before the United States was formed. And then afterwards, about who should we let in, have we let in enemies? Are they really and truly people like us? So that that particular kind of paranoid style in America led to these, particularly American conspiracy theories?

Let's go, though, to the conspiracy that is in a way, 60 years old this week, because it begins, and its origins are the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently. Official. President Kennedy died at 1pm central standard time.

Our colleague on The Guardian, Steve Rose, recently wrote about the consequences of that killing and said the assassination of J.F.K was probably the genesis of the post-truth fake news. Don't trust the experts. Do your own research brand of media skepticism an alternative information Ecosystems. Would you agree with that assessment?

I would, actually. I think that's a very good assessment. There were conspiracy theorists before the JFK assassination, but the JFK assassination really mainstreams conspiracy theories and inspires many ordinary people, including, for the first time, large numbers of women, to start doing their own research. To distrust the government's explanation and instead study all of the government reports, ironically, they distrust the government, but they study the government reports. Sometimes to travel to Dallas, to Dealey Plaza, where the assassination occurred, themselves, to investigate the assassination and come up with their own theory because they find the government's theory so unsatisfactory.

Fascinating, you say it was women in particular.

Yes, this is the first time in U.S. history where there are these large numbers of women, and this is obviously before the internet. But they're able to find each other by having forums in the local libraries, by writing letters to the editor. Setting up these informal study groups, they don't like to be called conspiracy theorists, they call themselves assassination researchers. They set up these study groups in each other's homes and study.

This week in November, 60 years ago, in 1963, was the week of the assassination. Obviously, America was absolutely reeling from the shock. But how quickly did people start to question what they were being told then, on the news and in the newspapers, rather than in history books about the assassination? How quickly did conspiracy theorizing around this?

Assassination begin well. It happened right after the accused assassin was himself murdered on television.

I can't honestly say that I've ever been completely relieved of the fact that.

There might've been international connections, possibly Fidel Castro of Cuba, possibly the Soviets. And he was worried about being forced into some situation that would lead to World War III. So he appointed a commission to immediately come up with an investigation. A report that he hoped from the beginning would say there was one gunman, so that then the country could move on. And that report did, to some degree, lead fewer people to believe in conspiracy theories.

And just be, it's fascinating to hear you saying that. Lyndon Johnson, himself, in a way, was wondering what the truth of the assassination was, and wondering if there was Communist involvement. As if he, too, is one of those people who is doubting the official version.

I don't think that they are me or anyone else. Is always absolutely sure of every thing that might have motivated Oswald or others that could have been involved.

But for regular people, and because this famously did involve regular people who started speculating, theorizing, what was it that didn't add up? Exactly? About the assassination? You've said that it's, you know, the assassination, the murder by Jack Ruby of the suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. That gets people wondering, is there something being covered up here? But what else about the assassination? Had people thinking this doesn't look right?

Well, I think on a broad level, a lot of people believed that you couldn't have some 24-year-old loser like Lee Harvey Oswald assassinate the president of the United States. It just didn't add up, it was not. He was not an important enough person, it wasn't a big enough plot, and they wanted they believed there must be somebody else.

And was it also just a sign of the times that the culture, the society was changing in that period? And I'm thinking of these numbers from the Pew Research Center, showing that during Kennedy's presidency, public trust in the federal government was very high. At about 75. Most people, three quarters of Americans trusted the federal government. But by the middle of the 70s, obviously, that's now 10 years on. After the assassination, the number had gone below 40. And I'm just thinking that this would have been the period of the Vietnam war.

Well, I think you're right, I think that's. The bigger issue is the general loss of trust in government. When Kennedy took office, as you say, three out of four Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing. Most of the time he was able, and then Lyndon Johnson was able to use that trust to pass a lot of transformative legislation in the United States. But the Vietnam war and the U.S. government's deceptions about the war then started to erode that trust.

The American people cannot and should not be asked to support a policy which involves the overriding issues of war and peace unless they know the truth about that policy.

It's hard to pull out, though, how much of that is cause and effect. Did the doubts about the Kennedy assassination lead to more distrust, or did the distrust lead to more doubts about the Kennedy assassination? But they're both definitely happening at the same time.

I'm thinking about the government and politicians attempts to manage these theories as they went. You've mentioned that. Lyndon Johnson set up the commission of inquiry into what had happened under the then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren.

This committee laboured ten months, took testimony from hundreds of witnesses, then brought forth a document close to a thousand pages.

And yet that actually, far from putting to bed, some of the questions actually seemed to raise more than, you know, standard comedians at the time were joking that, you know, the Warren Commission report was a, you know, best-selling work of fiction. Then, ten years on, or thirteen years on, a fresh inquiry was set up by the House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations, responding to all this conspiracy talk. And it then concluded in 1979 that Oswald was probably not the only culprit, and that the assassination again, probably was a conspiracy. I mean, it doesn't seem as if Washington, broadly defined, handled this problem either very consistently or very effectively.

No, not at all. And in fact, that House Assassinations Committee report was soon discredited because they relied on a piece of information that turned out to be not what they thought it was. They thought they had uncovered audio recording of the actual assassination, and it turned out not to be the case. So there were at the least conflicting messages from the U.S government over the years.

I mean, you might think, OK, that's the 60s and 70s. The 70s was just the immediate period after the assassination. But this continues and continued, and continues in America, with almost every decade bringing a new set of questions or a new expression of the doubts. Often in the culture. And so famously, Oliver Stone's movie JFK in 1991. What's wrong with it?

Boss The president's been shot in Dallas five minutes ago. Oh, no.

Where Kevin Costner starred, I mean, it's a fiction, Oliver Stone wrote it as a script, but he draws on real people and real events. And many people thought, OK, well, that's now the truth. And it prompts the J.F.K. Records Act in 1992, where the government then ordered the U.S.

Yes, I suppose you could say that, I mean, that's. One of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that it helps build community. It's still true, even with some of the most bizarre right wing theories in America today. Like the Qanon conspiracy theory, that there's this, you know, gang of satanic pedophiles who control the Democratic Party. Part of the appeal of QAnon, as with the JFK assassination, is that. You can create this community with other people who believe that, and it makes you feel like you belong.

It's great you mentioned Qanon because that does bring us right up to now and a big difference, because obviously Donald Trump has slightly indulged, at the very least Qanon. He's referred to it and said, Well, they seem to like me, and therefore that's good, and it does suggest a change. Because the kind of early Kennedy assassination theories were suggesting that they were sort of speaking truth to power, that they the conspiracy theorists were monitoring those with authority and holding them to account. And now it seems as if something's flipped. That you actually have campaigners and politicians who are using the doubt that conspiracy theory traffics in as a means of winning support, building a base holding on.

Or winning power, that's quite a switch. Yes, it is. I mean, there are precedents. There would be Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s who used conspiracy theories about communists in the.

There is that small, closely knit group of administration Democrats who are now the complete prisoners. And under the complete domination of the bureaucratic, communistic Frankenstein which they themselves have created.

To gain power. But certainly today, there are far more examples of that in the U.S Congress.

And, of course, former President Trump, This is a fraud on the American public, this is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. frankly, we did win.

This election examples of people who are running for office and holding office, in part by encouraging their followers to believe in conspiracy theories.

Yeah, I mean, that has to be the cue for a mention of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing criticism for spreading.

False claims about Covid-19.

Nephew to the slain John F. Kennedy and son of the again slain Robert Kennedy, assassinated in 1968. Who's running for the 2024 presidential election, initially positioned himself as a Democrat, now talking about being an independent. He's run a whole lot of conspiracy theories about Covid and so on. But also reviving yet again the theory that the played some part in the assassination of his uncle. And that Lee Harvey Oswald was a kind of asset or agent of the CIA. I mean, in some ways, this thing, it feels like it's come full circle. And one does imagine what JFK would make of what's happened, or what is happening with his nephew.

There's a 60-year cover up. The Warren Commission was run by Alan Dulles, who was the head of the.

CIA who my uncle fired? Yes, I can't imagine that JFK would view this as a positive development. But certainly, the theory that the CIA killed Kennedy is one of the most popular and enduring of the many conspiracy theories about his death. And the notion that Covid was sort of cooked up.

As some kind of plot, I mean, that would fit with all the conspiracy theories that you chant.

Going back over the century in your book, right? Well, that's an example of a conspiracy theory that can have deadly consequences by encouraging people not to get vaccinated.

So we heard at the start Catherine at the podcast from Clint Hill, who was one of the Secret Service agents who tried to protect John and Jackie Kennedy on November the 22nd, 1963.

I started researching for my book, Real Enemies during the administration of George W. Bush, and though I did not at all believe the 9-11 conspiracy theories, I could understand why some people would be attracted to them, and I found that to make them more interesting as a subject of study. But I have to say, as the years have gone on, I have found it to be more and more depressing. To study conspiracy theories. Because they do seem to be more widespread and more damaging, and potentially deadly every year.

Thanks so much for joining me on Politics Weekly America, thank you for having me. You can find a link to both Catherine's book, Real Enemies, and Clint Hill's new book, Five Days in November. As well as a link to Clint's interview with our colleague David Smith on today's episode description on the Guardian website. But for now, it's goodbye. The producer is Danielle Stevens, the executive producer, Maz Ebtehaj.

This is The Guardian.