For conspiracy theorists, it is the great white whale. It has spawned hundreds of books, thousands of newspaper articles and a slew of feature films and documentaries. This week fuel was added to an almost 62-year-old fire when 2,200 files consisting of more than 63,000 pages about the assassination of president John F Kennedy in Dallas on November 22nd 1963 were posted on the US National Archives and Records Administration’s website.
The release was ordered by Kennedy’s successor, Donald Trump, who is himself no stranger to conspiratorial thinking or assassination attempts. A year after Dallas, the Warren Commission of investigation concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a disaffected former defector to the Soviet Union, had fired the shot from the Texas Book Depository that killed Kennedy, and that he had acted alone.
That failed to satisfy those who believed that there must have been a broader cabal pulling the strings behind the scenes. Among the suspects they identified were the KGB, the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia and right-wing Cuban exiles. Baroque networks of plotters were conjured up, based on little more than conjecture and rumours.
Nothing has yet emerged from the files to support such claims, although historians say they provide some insights into American politics at the height of the Cold War. But there is no evidence for the widespread belief that Oswald was not the only gunman that day.
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No matter what emerges, though, the need to believe in a wider conspiracy will almost certainly endure. That is due in part to the natural human desire to find meaning in a shocking and apparently unexplainable act of violence. But also to the fact that the events on that fateful day marked a turning point in US history, a loss of innocence and the beginning of a long collapse of public trust in institutions. It is fitting, therefore, that Trump, the prime beneficiary of that trend, should be the president to order this week’s action. And it will be appropriate if the final revelation is that there is no revelation at all.
