Rob Attar investigates the enduring power of conspiracy theories
In March 2020, just as Covid-19 was turning the world upside down, I found myself in Dallas, Texas, in the room where Lee Harvey Oswald had shot and killed President Kennedy almost 60 years earlier. The former Texas School Book Depository has been turned into a museum about Kennedy’s life and death, offering a sober, measured account of the events of November 1963.
On the quiet streets outside the museum, however, I encountered a few street stalls, whose occupants were peddling a very different view of the assassination. Here all manner of conspiracies were given full voice, ones that I’m sure you’ll all be familiar with: the FBI, or the CIA, or the mafia, or the Soviets, or the Cubans, or some combination of them had undoubtedly orchestrated the killing of the 35th president of the United States.
It might seem that the museum is offering the mainstream view, but according to opinion polls, more Americans believe in some form of conspiracy surrounding the killing of JFK than the official version (as stated by the 1964 Warren Commission) that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. For my new HistoryExtra podcast series Conspiracy, I’ve been exploring this and a number of other conspiracy theories about the past, to try to establish why they are so pervasive in our modern world and whether any of them might actually be true.
- Read more | The assassination of JFK: an eyewitness account
One man who wanted to keep an open mind on the Kennedy assassination was the investigative journalist Gerald Posner, whose 1993 book Case Closed remains a definitive work in support of the argument that Lee Harvey Oswald did indeed act alone. When I spoke to him, he explained that this was far from his original intention. “Sometimes people will say to me that I must have wanted to just say it was Oswald alone to be a contrarian or whatever else and that I already had my mind made up. And I feel like saying, ‘You know nothing at all about journalism.’ The greatest story to return with is the story that proves, with credible evidence, that there was a conspiracy in the murder of the president. You want the biggest possible story if you’re the journalist. You don’t want to come back and say: ‘Oh by the way, I think the Warren Commission got some things wrong, but in the end they got the right conclusion.’”
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Notorious knoll
As Posner admitted to me, his initial hunch had been that there was some kind of mafia involvement, but over the course of two years of research and hundreds of interviews, he found himself increasingly convinced that there was a single shooter and no conspiracy.
Case Closed lays out Posner’s argument in significant detail. But one aspect I was particularly keen to discuss with him was the so-called ‘magic bullet’ that is beloved of many conspiracy theorists. For Oswald to have been the sole shooter, then one of the three bullets he is known to have fired must have been responsible for two wounds on President Kennedy and one on Texas governor John Connally, who was travelling in the same car (and survived). If not, then there must have been a second shooter, perhaps on the notorious grassy knoll.
“Oliver Stone, in his film JFK, mocked this ‘magic bullet’ better than anyone,” said Posner. “You know, it goes through Kennedy and then hesitates for half a second, then does a couple of somersaults and then makes a left turn and a right turn and goes on to Connally and emerges in very good condition. “So the question I had when I went to ballistics people in 1992 was: ‘Can you do anything that the FBI couldn’t do?’ And it turns out they could do a lot. If they could disprove the single bullet, if they could prove at that point that it was impossible, then, fantastic, as a journalist, you’ve got the evidence that there was a conspiracy. You don’t know how it happened. You don’t know who shot him. You don’t know anything else, but if the single bullet didn’t happen, there had to be another shooter involved because there are four shots and Oswald didn’t have the time for that. So my starting point in essence was that bullet.
“And the ballistics people said to me: ‘We’ll tell you why the Warren Commission couldn’t figure it out. They had to guess at it and didn’t understand how the bullet slowed over a period of time.’ They now know the speed at which it was hitting Kennedy and how it tumbled into Connally. And it’s not just a theory because they take cadavers the size and weight of Kennedy and Connally and fire bullets at those speeds through them, creating the same wounds. And all day long, they produce equivalent results to the so-called magic bullet. So there is ballistic evidence that that bullet wasn’t so magical. It did in fact happen.”
As Posner was at pains to explain to me, the ballistics evidence does not discount the possibility of a conspiracy. It only means that there didn’t need to be a conspiracy to explain the wounds on the president. And ultimately, he accepts that despite the title of his book, this is one debate that’s unlikely to ever be settled.
Real-world consequences
But while some conspiracy theories might never be disproven, others remain stubbornly persistent, despite being repeatedly shown to be false. A case in point is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. First serialised in a St Petersburg newspaper in 1903, it purported to be the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders, revealing their plans to rule the world by duplicitous means.
In fact, the text was partially an adaptation of an 1864 French satirical novel, that originally had nothing to do with Jews. The Protocols were debunked by The Times in the 1920s, and in 1935 a Swiss judge ruled that they were a fake after the distributors in Switzerland had been sued by the Jewish community in the country. And yet the conspiracy theories have persisted.
“Even when they have proven to be an outright forgery, a fiction, the Protocols continue to circulate widely today,” says Professor Pamela S Nadell of the American University in Washington, DC. “There is no evidence that the Jews do the things that they say in the Protocols but somehow that doesn’t gain any traction.”
This is a conspiracy theory that has had serious real-world consequences. “Hitler’s writings were definitely drawn from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” says Nadell. “He’s blaming the Jews. He’s talking about international Jewish world finance. This is a conspiracy theory that helped to fuel the Holocaust.” And in more recent times the Protocols have retained their invidious power, as Nadell explained to me.
“They have proliferated around the world so much,” she says. “They were published in Japan in 2004. They certainly made their way across the Arab world and in 2002 Egyptian satellite television developed a 41-part miniseries that was based on the Protocols. Then, in March 2021 an officer of the Capitol Police at the United States Capitol in Washington, DC was found with a copy of the Protocols near his security post. So the text remains. It’s potent today, widely available and still used.”
Even conspiracy theories that seem much less serious can have negative consequences today. One example is the bizarre case of the Bisley boy. According to this theory, in around 1542 the future Queen Elizabeth I was staying in the Cotswolds village of Bisley where she fell ill and died. Rather than reveal this tragedy, her panicked attendants searched for a local lookalike who could be substituted for the deceased princess. As it transpired the closest match was a young boy who then spent the rest of his life masquerading as Elizabeth, providing a handy explanation as to why the queen never married or had children.
It’s a deeply strange story that quickly fades under scrutiny – Henry VIII would surely have noticed if his daughter had returned from the Cotswolds as a small boy – but has had many adherents, notably Dracula author Bram Stoker who included it in his 1910 book Famous Impostors. And as Tudor historian Tracy Borman explained to me, it points to sexist attitudes that dogged Elizabeth’s age and more recent times.
“I think it takes to extremes the misogyny that Elizabeth herself had had to deal with. This idea that she was ‘just a woman’ and yet was mistress of a kingdom and of an empire. The theory provides a perfect explanation as to how there was a highly competent woman outfoxing her male contemporaries.
“Bram Stoker was writing at the crossover between the reigns of Edward VII and George V, so we’re talking about the early 20th century – and it’s still being spouted and repeated now. I still get asked about it. People are talking about it to this day.”
But are all conspiracy theories intrinsically harmful? Not according to Dr David Clarke of Sheffield Hallam University, who I interviewed about the infamous Roswell incident. Several opinion polls have shown that a large proportion of Americans believe their own government is hiding evidence of extra-terrestrial life from them, and by far the best-known ‘evidence’ for this is the craft (actually a military balloon) that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, fuelling stories of a downed UFO and even autopsies being carried out on alien life-forms.
“There have been various studies done of conspiracy theories and a recent one said that of all of the ones they looked at, Roswell is actually the most harmless,” Clarke told me. For him, the theory acts as a kind of modern folklore. “It’s a modern myth in the same way that the Greeks had their myths. This is a technological myth for the Cold War era. And I don’t think it’s a bad myth; it’s a good one, unlike some of the other, nasty, conspiracy theories. People are looking for salvation from somewhere and it’s a comforting thought that out there in the cold dead universe there is someone who is interested in us and that we’re not alone. So out of all the conspiracy theories and myths, this is probably the most positive one of all.”
Hollywood material
One question I kept returning to was ‘Why?’ Despite all the evidence against them and the cohorts of historians lining up in opposition, why are these conspiracy theories so hard to dislodge? Popular culture seems to have a lot to answer for. Conspiracy theories are beloved of authors and filmmakers, from Oliver Stone’s JFK and The X-Files, to Bram Stoker’s Famous Impostors and the hundreds of books by less-illustrious writers dedicated to one theory or another.
Of course, in more recent times, the internet and social media have added enormous fuel to this fire, enabling conspiracy theories to be disseminated quickly and easily and like-minded people to form networks across the globe.
Medieval historian Steve Tibble believes that all this goes a long way to explain the popularity of the many conspiracy theories surrounding the Knights Templar, which range from them hiding the Holy Grail to discovering America.
“Templar conspiracies are fun and people love prurient stories,” he says. “The Templars and their conspiracy theories were the tabloid material of the Middle Ages and they gained a life of their own. More recently we had the growth of the internet and also low budget TV documentaries and podcasts so there’s a lot more scope to build up content about them. But this is not just a 21st-century phenomenon. Pretty much the same thing happened in the early 19th century with the invention of the cheap novel. Walter Scott has a lot to answer for because of the way he positioned the Templars as larger than life pantomime villains in his book [1819’s Ivanhoe].”
While some conspiracy theories have entertained the masses, others have helped people to make sense of seemingly unfathomable events. That’s the contention of Steve Twomey, an expert on the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, which is often alleged to have been deliberately engineered by President Roosevelt as a way to sneak the US into the war against Nazi Germany.
“The American people had been told again and again that their navy was the best in the world and that Pearl Harbor was an incredible fortress,” he told me. “Meanwhile, the Japanese had been repeatedly described to the American public as an inferior military power, and yet suddenly here were these supposedly inferior people surprising the best navy in the world at Pearl Harbor. How could that have happened? Well, it was a conspiracy – that’s how. The only explanation that made sense for what happened was some sort of plot.”
Climate of suspicion
Of course, as events such as Watergate show, conspiracies can happen, and the misbehaviour of governments and other organisations has undoubtedly added to the climate of suspicion in which conspiracy theories flourish. As Twomey says, scepticism is not a bad thing in itself, “it’s just unhealthy when it goes to an unreasonable level”.
This idea of explaining the unexplainable was also cited by Gerald Posner in the story of the JFK conspiracy theories. At the end of our interview, he highlighted a point made by the historian William Manchester in his book Death of a President, that helped him to understand the mindset of a Kennedy conspiracy theorist. “Manchester looked back at the Second World War and he said if you think about the Holocaust you’ve got 6 million Jewish victims as well as millions of political victims and those who were killed because they were gay or prisoners of war etc. At the other side of the equation you have the Nazis and they sort of balance each other out: worst crime, worst criminals.
“But in the Kennedy assassination you have this young charismatic president with so much potential for the future. We were literally living in Technicolor and it was cut down in Dallas by a bullet from a sniper – this 24-year-old sociopathic loser, Lee Harvey Oswald. It doesn’t balance out. You want to instinctively put something heavier on the Oswald side. Kennedy was killed because the CIA had to stop him from disbanding the agency, or the military had to stop him so he didn’t pull out of Vietnam, or the Cubans because he was going to kill Fidel Castro.
“It doesn’t make you feel better that he’s dead but it gives some meaning to his death. People want to believe that there has to be a more elaborate, complex and hidden truth behind the simpler explanation.”
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