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IT has lately been all but impossible to peruse more or less any American news website without encountering some sort of reference to the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
This phenomenon is related, of course, to Friday’s 50th anniversary of his demise. But revisiting that traumatic event is hardly a recent trend. And part of the reason why Americans haven’t been able to get over it is that the murder is still shrouded in mystery. The passage of years has barely diminished the attraction of conspiracy theories.
An opinion poll earlier this year suggested that barely a quarter of Americans buy the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in pointing a relatively obsolete rifle at his presidential quarry and pulling off three shots, two of which ostensibly found their mark, at a moving target from a tricky angle.
Disbelieving the official narrative is hardly a novelty. As soon as a day after the event, the concept of cui bono (who benefits?) was already implicitly being cited in suspicions that vice-president Lyndon Baines Johnson was behind the hit — not least because Texas was his home ground.
Intriguingly, among the plethora of recently published material is an account by a man who became a post-presidential aide to Richard M. Nixon, who says that LBJ’s successor — who happened to be the losing candidate in the closely fought electoral battle of 1960 — evidently was convinced of Johnson’s involvement.
Notwithstanding his own moral lapses, Nixon was apparently prone to saying he was at least superior to Johnson because he didn’t murder anyone to reach the White House.
Which is certainly interesting, if true. And, in turn, the same could be said about almost every theory surrounding the assassination, from allegations of CIA, FBI or mafia involvement, through the widely disputed findings of the Warren Commission, to the idea that Oswald had Soviet or Cuban assistance.
In the case of the Soviet/Cuban context, it is obviously notable that Oswald was an ex-marine who had defected to the USSR, but was allowed to return to the US with a Russian wife, and was a known propagandist for the Castroist cause. On the other hand, the KGB reportedly found him too unstable to be of any use and the Cubans refused him a visa to Havana.
Besides, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had managed to establish a rapport with Kennedy. And a Western journalist who happened to be interviewing Fidel Castro at the time the first report of the assassination came through noted that he was visibly perturbed by the development and kept saying “this is very bad news”.
It is not inconceivable, of course, that Castro was play-acting, or that the KGB had gone behind Khrushchev’s back — he was, after all, forced out the following year, at least in part because he had evidently backed down during the Cuban missile crisis.
In fact, the peaceful resolution of that crisis was arguably Khrushchev’s finest hour, as it was Kennedy’s. The two leaders, as legend has it, were eyeball to eyeball.
It wasn’t just the Soviet apparatchik who blinked, though. Khrushchev agreed to pull nuclear missiles out of Cuba, but only in return for Kennedy’s assurance that the US would not invade the island and, furthermore, would withdraw its nuclear warheads from Turkey — although the latter part of the deal was not immediately to be made public.
In the preceding weeks, Kennedy had stood up to American generals who were bent upon inaugurating a third world war. Khrushchev quite possibly did the same vis-à-vis Soviet hardliners.
It has nonetheless long been alleged that a primary reason behind the Warren Commission cover-up was that the unvarnished truth would inevitably have entailed a superpower confrontation. On the other hand, it has also been claimed that circumstantial evidence pointing to the Soviets and/or Cuba was in fact part of the CIA/FBI/mafia conspiracy.
The fact that the official narrative is discounted even by the US secretary of state, John Kerry, tends to reinforce the impression that there will always be theories but perhaps never a universally accepted conclusion. Who killed Kennedy is not the only bone of contention, though. Even the question of who exactly was JFK remains disputed territory.
Was the first US president to be born in the 20th century a deep-rooted conservative, an inveterate Cold Warrior who stumbled on to a missile crisis solution more by accident than design?
Or was he a visionary who saw the logic in balanced relations with Moscow and Havana, and who was convinced that no good would ultimately flow from the American involvement in Vietnam — even though it had grown dramatically during his presidency — to the extent that he was determined to end it by 1965?
Filmmaker Oliver Stone and academic Peter Kuznick tend to the latter view in the broadly fascinating documentary The Untold History of the United States. It’s equally possible, though, on the basis of the available evidence, to see the hopes invested in the Kennedy presidency as a precursor of sorts to the Barack Obama phenomenon.
In a similar vein, Kennedy is credited with putting in place the architecture for the civil rights legislation that, at least in theory, transformed the American socio-political landscape within two years of his assassination. He can also be seen, though, as a go-slow advocate who resented the momentum generated by the movement led by Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
The Camelot myth has been substantially dented in recent decades, and the fascination with Kennedy may taper off once most of the baby boomers to whom he meant so much have shuffled off the mortal coil. But I wouldn’t bet on it just yet.
