Dr Simon Willmetts: Secrecy at heart of Kennedy conspiracy fears

And then? The deluge: Vietnam, Kent State, Watergate – a history of American beneficence turned violently on its head. After Kennedy things had to have changed, because if they didn’t, our convenient alibi of Kennedy as the fallen king would no longer make sense. History is altogether easier to grasp when it comes in the form of conspiracy. These events were not the product of our democracy, of our history, but the malign fulfilment of a secret coup d’état at the highest levels of American government – or so Oliver Stone would have us believe.

But it is not my intention here to separate fact from fiction. After Kennedy this becomes increasingly difficult anyway; his death heralded a post-modern rupture where mythology and history begin to coalesce in a Babel of conflicting theories and accusations. But this sense of loose ends is not for want of trying.

The Warren Commission, established by President Johnson to investigate the assassination, produced an 889-page report with 6,700 footnotes based on 26 volumes of supporting documentation and 26,500 interviews. But it wasn’t enough. Norman Mailer described it as “a species of Talmudic text begging for commentary and further elucidation”. In the last half-century, Kennedy’s death has inspired at least 2,000 books (a conservative estimate), four major motion pictures, hundreds of novels and 4.5 million pages of declassified documents.

We’re still no closer, of course, to definitive answers. Our fascination is akin to Daniel Branch in Don DeLillo’s Libra, a CIA archivist tasked with writing a secret history of the assassination, only to be left frustrated after thirty years of trying by the insurmountable morass of conflicting evidence.

So why don’t we just give up? If all we are left with is the vertigo of competing interpretations, why do people continue to trawl through endless pages of documentation? For some, I’m sure, it has become something akin to the pathological pursuit of an ever-receding horizon. But for the rest of us (roughly two-thirds of Americans doubt the Warren Commission’s findings), I suspect the uncertainties surrounding Kennedy’s death are redolent of a wider unease: a suspicion that what we know is not all that is known – that although the Warren Commission report might not have lied, it certainly didn’t provide us with all of the truth.

History deplores a vacuum. Having operated with impunity since the earliest days of the Cold War, the CIA and FBI suddenly faced a series of uncomfortable questions: what did you already know about Lee Harvey Oswald? Has the US government ever conducted or planned assassinations? What about Castro? All questions, which, with hindsight, would seem crucial to the investigation, but thanks to a reticent intelligence community and a compliant commission, were wilfully avoided. If one is looking for a conspiracy, it might just be found in the American government’s desire to stop these questions from being asked. The buried smoking guns didn’t point to Kennedy’s killer(s), but they did lead to the sinister conduct of a secret state hitherto untroubled by public enquiry.

Kennedy, of course, was no innocent here. After backing the botched CIA-led coup against Castro at the Bay of Pigs, he authorised the planning of a series of aggressive, and at times outlandish covert operations and assassination plots against the Cuban dictator (we’ve all heard of the exploding cigar).

The Warren Commission’s neglect of these subjects protected Kennedy’s reputation as much as the CIA’s. But if our collective cognitive dissonance over the intimacy of Kennedy with the secret state compels us to ascribe to him the status of martyr, it is perhaps because it is a useful myth.

Kennedy’s death inspired an unprecedented degree of scepticism towards government secrecy that ushered in a new era of public and congressional enquiry and an increasingly combative fourth estate. Crackpots and conspiracy nuts may have come too, but without the reasonable suspicion that Kennedy’s death inspired, we would have remained more certain, but infinitely less aware of the activities of our secret state. It is this confused awareness – that inverse correlation between certainty and knowledge, which is the greatest legacy of Kennedy’s death.

* Dr Simon Willmetts is a lecturer in American Studies at the University of Hull which is hosting public lectures on JFK’s legacy on Wednesday and Friday. Further details on the university’s website.