[PROMOS]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I’m Brooke Gladstone.
[1963 CLIP]:
GORDON McLENDON, DALLAS REPORTER: Here the scene is of wild pandemonium, as 2,000 guests waited anxiously for President Kennedy, Governor Connally and the vice president. Now, rumors run rampant. No one here knows when it happened but the rumors continue to circulate that the president and Governor Connally both have been shot.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Fifty years on, the rumors reverberate. On Thursday, the National Archives was set to release the last
trove of some 3,000 documents about the murder of JFK, but President Trump held hundreds back for national security review over the next six months. Reportedly, CIA Director Mike Pompeo pushed for the delay. It’s just the latest chapter in the mystery of why Lee Harvey Oswald did what he did and whether he did it alone. An early chapter was penned just a year after the shooting, publication of the findings of a presidential commission known as The Warren Report.
[CLIP]:
SPOKESMAN: There was no evidence found by the Commission that proved a conspiracy, either foreign or domestic. Oswald acted alone, based on what evidence we found.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Commission’s methods were flawed, hence, the enduring effort of determined investigators, amateurs and cranks to fill in the blanks, to generate conspiracy theories and to quash them. The documents set for release this week had represented that last one percent of the government's record. Might those have settled the issue for those who’ve spent decades focused on the facets of the murder, from the grassy knoll, to the magic bullet, to Cuba? Nah, not just because some documents are still being withheld but because it's unlikely anything can ever lay to rest the suspicions surrounding that day in November, 1963.
Among those long captivated by the case is the journalist, essayist and author, Ron Rosenbaum.
RON ROSENBAUM: I actually attended a lecture by notorious Warren Commission critic Mark Lane the summer after my high school graduation.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: He was the granddaddy of JFK assassination conspiracy theorists.
RON ROSENBAUM: I would say the extreme wing, you know.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Yeah.
RON ROSENBAUM: And he did this kind of PowerPoint slideshow with arrows pointing in many directions, trying to show that the pictures of Oswald were early Photoshops.
[CLIP]:
MARK LANE: Now, the question is, if the bullet hit the president from the back of the neck and ripped through his Adam's apple, how is it possible for him to say clearly and distinctly, in that New England accent, “My God, I am hit”?
[END CLIP]
RON ROSENBAUM: Lane pointed out genuine flaws and absences in the Warren Commission. However, he soon jumped to conclusions that it was the military-industrial complex, it was right-wing oil millionaires. There were so many people wanting to kill Kennedy, there might have been a traffic jam at Dealey Plaza.
[BROOKE LAUGHS]
I think everyone agrees that the Warren Report was deeply flawed, at this point. The members of the Commission, who included the head of the CIA, were trying to cover up the intelligence agency’s involvement and, of course, the spectacular, sensational news that the US president had plotted assassinations of Castro and other people in the Caribbean or, as LBJ said, “The Kennedys were running a god-damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean.”
As it turned out, many of the critics, the crazies and the serious ones, were vindicated when the US Senate Church Committee revealed, in testimony from CIA people, how they had plotted assassinations and how Oswald might have known it.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Just quickly, you mentioned the Church Committee, which was convened after Watergate and it explored a history of abuse by intelligence agencies, both domestic and foreign.
RON ROSENBAUM: The Church Committee revealed all this and ripped off an entire cover of a seamy side of American undercover policy that involved murder.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is really important because I also want to examine the appeal of conspiracy theories, in general, and the particular appeal of this one, and I think it has a lot to do with timing.
RON ROSENBAUM: Well, even before the Church Committee --
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.
RON ROSENBAUM: -- there was an extremely momentous event that I believe is at least as responsible for the kind of PTSD that conspiracy theory represents.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm.
RON ROSENBAUM: And that was the revelation on a television network of the Zapruder film that showed Kennedy being shot. Seeing the president of the United States slaughtered, seeing the blog fly out from him -- and you can watch it on YouTube now.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We’re talking, what, a dozen years after the assassination.
RON ROSENBAUM: It was about 1975, the Zapruder film was first broadcast.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is that when this conspiracy really took off, was in the mid-‘70s?
RON ROSENBAUM: I think the number of Americans who saw the Zapruder film were then prepared to believe explanations that said there was a gunman who shot from the front when Oswald was in back -- Oswald may have shot, as well -- but if there was a gunman who shot from the front, that meant there was a conspiracy.
Then the Church Committee revealed to us that the US was planning to assassinate Castro. That, long before Oliver Stone’s movie, prepared people. And then, once it got on YouTube, the Zapruder film, everyone in America saw their president shot, his blood flying out of a limousine; it’s something you don't get over easily, it's something that leaves you with the feeling, I don’t want to leave this unsolved. My world is shaken if I don't think, even if it's an evil conspiracy, there was a conspiracy, we know the answer.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You mentioned the 1991 Oliver Stone movie. Let's talk about how cinema can shape memory. You recalled how a few years back a young panelist on Chris Matthews’ Hardball said that her first memory of the assassination was the magic bullet theory explained by Kevin Costner in the Stone film, JFK.
[CLIP]:
KEVIN COSTNER AS JIM GARRISON: A magic bullet enters the president’s back, headed downward at an angle of 17 degrees. It then moves upwards in order to leave Kennedy’s body from the front of his neck, where it waits 1.6 seconds, presumably in midair, where it turns right, then left, right, then left…
[END CLIP]
RON ROSENBAUM: If you don’t believe this magic bullet could have done that, then you have to believe there was another shot and perhaps another gunman.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Can’t an effective movie scene imprint a false memory on top of actual history and distort it forever in the public imagination?
RON ROSENBAUM: Yes, I agree that’s happened, in that all too many people believe the foolish extrapolations in Oliver Stone’s film. I don’t think they should be taken seriously, that some military-industrial complex, Mr. X, told Jim Garrison/Kevin Costner, we did it. But, on the other hand, Oliver Stone’s film, one can’t deny, was responsible for the JFK Records Act.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yeah, this is so interesting. The JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, which was passed a year after the film, enables countless documents to be released this week.
RON ROSENBAUM: It crystallized a lot of underlying doubt, and by then members of both houses of Congress were doubtful enough about the official story that they thought it was important, transparency rather than secrecy.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In 2007, in a piece for Slate, you wrote, you could make the case that JFK conspiracy theory culture has, in its own way, been responsible for changing the landscape of the American mind.
RON ROSENBAUM: Well, look at how many people believe that real news is fake news. I think JFK conspiracy culture has done its part to destabilize the belief that there is such a thing as genuine truth, 9/11 truthers, birthers, people who, without evidence, will just assert something or deny something, Holocaust deniers. We no longer live in a world in which it's possible, even with a mountain of evidence, to convince some people that the news is not fake.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what do you hope this new release may shed light on?
RON ROSENBAUM: I'm fairly pessimistic that there’s going to be any genuine smoking gun. I do feel they may fill out the picture of one aspect of the assassination, hidden for a long time, which is the dalliance of the CIA and other intelligence agencies with Oswald. They may have known more about him, about his motives. They may have even run him as an agent, for all we know. And his connection to other perhaps Fidelistas in Mexico City is an important, not widely explored aspect of the case. It’s not an entirely closed case, but one can hope that incrementally we’re approaching something closer to the truth.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: In 1983, you wrote a piece called, “Oswald's Ghost” in which you follow some of these conspiracy theorists or “buff buffs,” as you called them. [LAUGHS] And you wrote, “It is then that I realize that these people are not buffs, they are mourners. Their investigation of the assassination is their way of mourning, a continuation of his last rites that they can’t abandon. Unlike the rest of us, they haven't stopped grieving.” RON ROSENBAUM: I'm glad you singled that out. I was speaking then of a group of people around a guy named Penn Jones, Jr. who thought there were about 24 gunmen. He had a newsletter recording the deaths of every single person remotely connected to the assassination, like the hairdresser for one of Oswald’s stripper friends. And he titled it, “Forgive My Grief,” and I asked him where he got that title, and he said it was from a Tennyson poem, which he recited to me. And it suddenly made sense to me that, in some way, conspiracy theory is a metaphorm of grieving.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you think then that that’s why we still care so much after all these years and that it may take another generation for us to get over it?
RON ROSENBAUM: I don't know if we'll ever get over it. If you see that film of Kennedy's head being blown off --
BROOKE GLADSTONE: That is the fourth time [LAUGHS] you’ve described it.
RON ROSENBAUM: Well, I’m sorry. It’s perhaps the most dramatic, sensational media moment in the case. And I think that it might well have an ever-renewing interest in this social media age, in which all such things are seen by everybody.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Mm-hmm. I just wonder if it endures; the power of repetition will turn it from an iconic image to a meme to wallpaper.
RON ROSENBAUM: You’ve got me there. I have no comment on that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Ron, thank you so much.
RON ROSENBAUM: Oh, thank you.
[MUSIC UP & UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ron Rosenbaum is the author of, among other things, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil. His excellent essay, “Oswald’s Ghost,” about following JFK conspiracy buffs, can be found in The Secret Parts Of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms.
