Kennedy Assassination

The images are remarkably familiar. The convertible limousine winds its way through Dallas crowds; John F. Kennedy, America's youngest president, smiles and waves in the backseat; gunfire, three jerks, the limousine slows and then accelerates; Jackie Kennedy shrieks and covers her husband; an emotional Walter Cronkite tells the nation that its president has died, removes his glasses, and wipes his eyes.

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot as he paraded through Dallas, Texas. That same afternoon, Dallas police arrested their suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, an itinerant, self-described "Marxist-Leninist" who had lived in the Soviet Union. Within days, Oswald was also dead, shot by club-owner Jack Ruby on national television in the basement of a Dallas police station.

Kennedy's election to office marked, for some commentators, a new age in American political culture. "History with a capital H had come down to earth, either interfering with life or making it possible; and that within History, or threaded through it, people were living with a supercharged density: lives were bound up within one another, making claims on one another, drawing one another into the common project," Todd Gitlin explained, capturing the sense of immediacy that televised politics had brought to the American social sphere in the early 1960s. Americans knew Kennedy as "the television president," and their relationship with the man and his politics was infused with this sense of immediacy.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Kennedy's violent and sudden death moved the American public so dramatically. Kennedy's funeral rites were a profoundly public affair, broadcast on each of the nation's television networks, and witnessed in 93 percent of the country's television-viewing households. "America wept," New York Times columnist James Reston wrote, "not alone for its dead young President, but for itself. The grief was general, for somehow the worst in the nation had prevailed over the best."

What is surprising, however, is the range of responses the Kennedy assassination has elicited in the decades following. The official body convened to investigate the assassination, the Warren Commission, issued a report confirming that Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed the murderer and asserting that Oswald had acted alone. Almost immediately, critics began to contend that the scenario reconstructed in the Warren Report seemed unlikely at best, dismissing in particular the infamous "single bullet theory," which proposes that one bullet was responsible for multiple injuries to Texas governor John Connally, who was riding in the front seat of the car, and to the president. For many, Kennedy's death revealed a dark, conspiratorial underside to American politics. It was a loss of American innocence and a prototype for the turbulent decade that lied ahead. From them have come hundreds of conspiracy theories that attempt to account for Kennedy's killing.

Initially, these theories came largely from Europe. Soon, however, conspiracy theorizing on the Kennedy assassination became a cottage industry in America, with leftists charging that a pact involving American security forces, the Mafia, and even Kennedy's vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, killed the president, and rightists uncovering plots that involved the Soviet Union, the Civil Rights movement, and American Communists.

By no means the first, one of the most prominent of the Kennedy conspiracy theorists was New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison. Garrison charged New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw with conspiracy to kill the president and, in 1967, Garrison brought him to trial. Shaw was acquitted, but in 1991, filmmaker Oliver Stone gave Garrison's theory a second hearing before the American movie-going public. Stone's JFK is a fast-paced, paranoid film that mixes Abraham Zapruder's 8 millimeter amateur film of the Dallas shooting and other pieces of historical footage with staged material and describes the assassination plot as "a riddle wrapped in an enigma inside a riddle." It brought crankish conspiracy theorizing into the American spotlight, rekindled the debate over Kennedy's death (and generated a new debate of its own about the popular media's cultural authority and responsibility), and was a booming commercial success. Fifty million people saw JFK in movie theaters, and the film brought Stone two Academy Awards.

The spread of conspiracy theorizing about the Kennedy assassination may be due, in part, to what Richard Hofstadter has called "the paranoid style in American politics." Largely, however, it seems to stem from a more innocent source. Television beamed the drama of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath directly into the homes of millions of Americans. It made the Kennedy funeral the most widely watched television event in American history. Every American who was alive at the time, it seems, knows where they were when Kennedy was shot. And that is because, in a sense, every American was there, in Dallas, with the President as he died.

—Thurston Domina

Further Reading:

Brown, Thomas. JFK: History of an Image. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1988.

Garrison, Jim. On the Trail of the Assassins. New York, Sheridan Square Press, 1988.

Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York, Bantam, 1987.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and other Essays. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1964, 1996.

Manchester, William. The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972. Boston, Little, Brown, and Company, 1973.

Zelizer, Barbie. Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992.