JFK and the Left's Legacy of Conspiracy

Today marks the 48^th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and with it, 48 years of conspiracy theories.

The Left has promulgated nearly all of these theories since the day of the assassination in 1963. Kennedy was killed by a communist — someone to the left of him — but yet we’re still told this was some grand conspiracy, involving what would necessarily be dozens or even hundreds of people who orchestrated and executed it (and then kept the secret!) with right wing forces at the center.

Various suspects have included military industrialists, the CIA, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, pro-Israeli groups, oil magnates aligned with Lyndon Johnson, right-wing racists, E. Howard Hunt, and J. Edgar Hoover.

Even at the time, the Kennedys and the mediacouldn’t accept that a lone deranged leftist was responsible. Kennedy, after all, was in Dallas, a hotbed of rightwing extremism as they saw it. Even as the shooting was taking place, Connally yelled out “They’re going to kill us all!” Jacqueline Kennedy didn’t change her clothes until she got back to Washington, stating to Lady Bird Johnson she wanted “them to see what they did to Jack.” (Emphasis mine.) This was the liberal mindset, from the people in the car on out.

Gerald Posner’s 1993 book “Case Closed” makes a strong and convincing argument that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and for it he’s been demonized as a right wing stooge, a Kennedy-hater, or enforcer of the establishment line, obviously on the payroll of some nefarious right wing phantom.

But Posner did what most of the conspiracy theorists don’t do: look at the actual evidence that exists, and at the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. Why do all these conspiracy theorists typically ignore all that’s known about Oswald? Because there’s a clear trajectory in his activities that led to the assassination.

Oswald was a loser, and was attracted to the ideology for losers: communism. He tried to move to Russia, but was so much of a loser that he even failed there and quickly returned to the U.S. He continued to get further and further involved in communist politics in the States, including stops in New Orleans and Mexico City, where he was denied a travel visa to Cuba. Oswald was not a trained operative — he was too much of a loser even for communist organizers.

Oswald had already tried to kill General Edwin Walker, firing a rifle bullet through his home window. Walker was a staunch anti-communist and member of the Birch Society. Oswald failed at this as well when the bullet nicked the wooden window frame and changed its course.

Oswald deliberately set out to kill Kennedy that November day in 1963, and his behavior before and after the shooting, including the killing of Officer J.D. Tippit, testifies to that.

There are eyewitnesses who looked up at the Depository window and saw the rifle as it was being fired. Two men on the floor directly below even heard the rifle’s bolt action. Why do the conspiracy theorists rarely, if ever, refer to those people?

Evidence has been misused by conspiracy theorists, such as in the case of the “magic bullet theory”. The famous diagram illustrating the zig-zagging course the second bullet had to take had Oswald alone really fired three shots was drawn according to the wrong specifications.

When the correct specs are used, changing Kennedy’s position relative to Connally’s, the single bullet lines up to the wounds it inflicted. This diagram was corrected years ago, but yet the “magic bullet theory” is still lampooned and proliferates as evidence of more than three total shots.

As for Jack Ruby: another loser. Ruby was an insecure, publicity-seeking egomaniac (and a Democrat) who thought Jacqueline Kennedy would thank him and also thought he’d be a hero to the entire nation for killing the assassin of his beloved president. It simply didn’t occur to Ruby he’d be remembered more as a villain for depriving the nation of a trial and the evidence it would produce, nor that he’d now become the center of conspiracy theories, theories where he would be complicit in the death of the president he had so much affection for.

There were likely some cover-ups as far as the medical and autopsy issues are concerned, but the evidence points to the Kennedy family, specifically Bobby Kennedy, for hiding and manipulating information. There’s evidence to suggest that an extremely distraught Bobby Kennedy initially thought he was to blame for his brother’s death due to his aggressive actions toward Cuba, specifically assassination attempts on Castro that he wanted to keep secret for obvious reasons.There’s also evidence to suggest he didn’t want some of John’s medical history to become public,possibly John’s Addison’s disease, and was also simply being a protective family member. Bobby Kennedy was a ruthless and manipulative man who did whatever he had to do and broke whatever rule or law he had to, and this all fits with his personal history.

Most of the conspiracy theories have woven things together that have either been disproven, lack evidence, or are simply examples of mistakes made under very difficult circumstances. Many of these theories attempt to lay the blame at some kind of right wing group, crystalized in Oliver Stone’s military industrial complex: sinister forces in the military working with the C.I.A., who were powerful enough to create this entire web of dozens or even hundreds of people, including the Secret Service, Dallas Police, and likely entire branches of the government, or even Lyndon Johnson (not a right-winger of course, but a Texan supposedly in bed with oil and military interests, and one who the Left still despises over Vietnam.)To follow the logic, military industrialists knew Kennedy was going to pull out of Vietnam rather than escalate it, so they had him knocked off and replaced with Johnson, who they could count on to keep us in Southeast Asia, continuing to buy their wares.

When the perpetrator is Castro or the mafia, Republican politicians in the government and on the Warren Commission are said to have engaged in cover-ups because they were directing the mafia’s plots to kill Castro (separate from Kennedy’s attempts) and needed to keep this secret from the Kennedys, who had been going after the mafia. Either way, right-wingers did it, or they knew about it and covered it up.

Later on the day of the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy summed up the sentiments of Democrats then and now when she reportedly said to her mother, “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights… it had to be some silly little Communist.”

The Left has never been able to accept that Kennedy was killed by a single man who was to his political left. Ultimately, the Warren Commission made some mistakes but basically had it right. They actually looked at the evidence that existed and concluded the communist Oswald acted alone. The resulting conspiracy theories around the JFK assassination are just further examples of the Left doing what it does: blamingthe Right for something that was in fact perpetrated by someone closer to their own ideology.