The Free Press
The government just posted another tranche of documents that the conspiracy theorists hope will tell us who really killed John F. Kennedy. Even though we are unlikely to learn anything important about that, we are learning a great deal about us.
There are 2,200 documents in this latest data dump, comprising about 63,400 pages of official memoranda and handwritten notes and blurry photographs, and they were released without anyone apparently having given much thought to organization.
It will take months or longer before historians sift through all of them.
So far, the most vivid details appear to be those about Yuri Nosenko—the KGB spy who defected to the United States in 1964, before his CIA overlords turned on him, believing that he was still spying for the Soviets. Eventually, his CIA overlords’ overlords turned on them, and Nosenko was returned to good standing. Officially.
There’s lots of great color here—about the Soviets’ monitoring of Lee Harvey Oswald while he was in Minsk, from 1959 to 1962; their methodology; their internal deliberations; CIA agents’ interactions with Nosenko; and so forth.
And if you want to believe that Oswald was not the lone shooter, that he was part of some massive, labyrinthine plot, you can certainly extract lots of intriguing tidbits—circumstantial pieces that, with the right soundtrack, the right lens, can be made to sound very unsettling.
Take, for example, the House Select Committee on Assassinations questioning of Nosenko in June 1978 at CIA headquarters, in Langley, Virginia. Committee members kept pushing Nosenko to confirm the theory that the Kremlin was involved in JFK’s killing.
But in these newly released documents, Nosenko reports that the KGB found Oswald to be not “interesting,” and that was why they didn’t recruit him. Nosenko’s questioners were unpersuaded. They continued to theorize aloud that the Soviets must have been secretly steering Oswald.
“He might have been a cryptographer in the Marine Corps,” Congressman Harold Sawyer said to Nosenko. “He might have been, as an enlisted man, he might have been a cryptographer and know all our codes and code methodology that might help break codes and that sort of thing, but nobody ever asked him. That is what I don’t understand. And I can’t believe it, very frankly.”
Nor can the growing horde of conspiracy theorists and their many adherents.
I spent a good bit of time at the National Archives when I was researching my book, The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union. It was there that I met the Kennedy obsessives—the small tribe of people who would pore over troves of documents—there are over six million pages of documents in the Kennedy Archive—believing that they could find (or did find) a smoking gun.
They tended to have a certain look: a little disheveled, schlubby, often armed with a highlighter to block out incriminating words and paragraphs. They were always tired. It was hard work doing battle with the all-powerful state.
Those people are no longer on the fringe. The conspiracy theorists are, increasingly, the power. The president of the United States, the new secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (RFK Jr., JFK’s nephew), Joe Rogan (whose audience is bigger than that of every legacy media outfit in the country), a growing constellation of influencers on the MAGA right—they’re all promulgators of, or believers in, alternative explanations, to put it charitably, of the assassination of the 35th president of the United States.
We imagine the conspiracy theorists being on the outside looking in. But these people are on the inside.
It’s not just that many, even most, Americans don’t believe the truth about the Kennedy assassination. That’s been the case from the beginning. It’s that this mode of thinking is metastasizing.
If we can’t be sure about who killed Kennedy, can we really be sure about September 11 or January 6 or Sandy Hook or whatever election we don’t like?
But no, there’s nothing in all the new JFK documents—at least, nothing that has been unearthed so far—that should cause anyone to rethink the conventional wisdom, which is that, on November 22, 1963, at around 12:30 p.m. Central Time, in Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, Texas, Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, fired two bullets at the convertible in which President Kennedy was sitting, and that the first bullet hit his upper back and the second one pierced his skull, ultimately killing him.
The question we should be asking is why we are so determined to believe that we are being lied to, why we cling to this faith, or anti-faith, with such tenacity.
At some point, perhaps in the near future, the people in charge will run out of documents to share with us. But our desire to remain in the dark will not be extinguished.
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The story of the JFK conspiracy theory isn’t just about a few hucksters red-pilling traumatized boomers. No. It’s also about how the government squandered its most precious asset: the trust of the American people. This week on Breaking History, Eli Lake examines the chain of events that led Donald Trump to declassify the remaining files on JFK’s assassination.