Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History

by David Aaronovitch

  Wagging the Dog

  When it was all over, and Clinton had left the White House and the second Bush had entered it, a few people had a little time to analyze what had happened. Clinton’s aide Sidney Blumenthal, himself once a youthful conspiracist, reflected on how the “pseudoscandal” of Whitewater had come to dominate the presidency despite the fact that “there never was anything to it, in the beginning, middle and end.” And yet it led to perpetual investigation of the president, numerous stories together hinting at massive personal corruption, and a soured memory of an entire decade. Blumenthal concluded that the origins of the Whitewater pathology lay in Old South opponents of his New South boss, who had been active in campaigns to unseat segregationist Democrats, and that the scandal “was traceable to conflicts in Southern history over race and power.”35

  But to Gene Lyons, who had watched appalled as his state was traduced as a kind of Haiti without the compensating beaches, there were much more mainstream culprits than the manipulative leftovers of bad-old-days Jim Crow politics. He was aghast at “how the right-wing sleaze campaign eventually succeeded in dictating mainstream news coverage.” Mainstream media had, in his view, latched on to chronically unreliable sources and, in its story lust, lost sight of any notion of fairness. Lyons cited cases of respected reporters passing on salacious gossip to other journalists that their own editors wouldn’t print, and noted a determination to create a story out of Whitewater, which led to a lack of discrimination about the sources and a willingness to run stories that were speculative.

  In some cases, well-respected editors or columnists had allowed themselves to engage in or recycle innuendo that strengthened the view that there were conspiracies brewed up at the White House. In the New York Times, William Safire wrote a series of pieces in 1993 and 1994 that certainly hinted that all was not what it seemed when it came to Vincent Foster’s “apparent suicide.” On August 2, 1993, the famous conservative columnist pointed out that “the discoverer of the body remains unknown and no gun license has been found,” but that “assuming no crime, the question remains: Was Vincent Foster irrationally morose because of criticism of his office’s abuse of the F.B.I. in ‘Travelgate’—or was the President’s closest legal confidant dreading the exposure of malfeasance yet unknown?”36 Safire offered no evidence for this speculation.

  Ten days later the columnist was asking about the Foster note, and particularly “the missing 28th piece, a triangular piece of the puzzle where the signature would have been” (in fact there is no reason why there should have been a signature on this note, and no reason to believe that there was one), before asking yet again, “Was dread of further scandal a triggering cause of the apparent suicide? Was there anything else Foster was working on, in Arkansas business dealings involving Clinton friends or in intelligence matters, that bears on his state of mind?”37 Again there was no basis for such a contention. Yet for some reason, when it came to Clinton, such stuff was all right. The crazy tail had managed to wag the sober dog. Arguably, a decade and a half later, as CNN’s Lou Dobbs championed the case for President Obama to present his long-form birth certificate to the world to establish that he was born where the Honolulu Advertiser in 1961 had said he was born, something similar was happening. The fringe had, temporarily, taken over the show.

  Back After a Long Vacation

  What is noticeable when comparing the Clinton conspiracies with the Birther movement is how many of the same people and organizations are involved. True, there are some like Philip Berg, the Truther and Birther who discerned conspiracies from all points on the political spectrum. But the Birther charge has been led by Joseph Farah at WND, Christopher Ruddy at NewsMax, and by Accuracy In Media, making use of the Internet and right-wing radio and cable television shows. It is as though they had been on vacation through the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, only to rediscover, on arriving home, that there was yet another slippery liar in the White House.

  It would be easy to dismiss Farah and company as cynical pols, who are interested only in dragging down Democrats. But they seem rather to belong to the old populist tradition in American politics, ever vigilant, almost pathologically sensitive, to the possibility that the true Republic is in danger from those who wish to change and undermine it. In different ways, both Clinton, the flower-power-generation president with the feminist wife, and the cosmopolitan and black Obama have represented unwanted change from their imagined paradisaical United States.

  In 1996, a former FBI man in the White House, Gary Aldrich, published a book outlining what a chamber of horrors the place had become under Clinton. Aldrich’s work is a classic example of a book that reveals far more about its author than its subject, as the former agent devotes page after page to his horrified reaction to the new generation of staffers. On page 30, Aldrich observes that “there was a unisex quality to the Clinton staff that set it far apart from the [George H. W.] Bush administration. It was the shape of their bodies. In the Clinton administration, the broad-shouldered, pants-wearing women and the pear-shaped, bowling-pin men blurred distinctions between the sexes. I was used to athletic types, physically fit persons who took pride in body image and good health.” And later: “Hillary . . . had an affirmative action program that favored tough, minority, and lesbian women, as well as weak, minority, and gay men. . . . If you compared the staffers of the Bush administration with those of the Clinton administration, the difference was shocking. It was Norman Rockwell on the one hand and Berkeley, California, with an Appalachian twist on the other.”38 Aldrich’s book sold 150,000 copies, mostly, one suspects, to people who shared his sense of disgust at such gender-bending. To Aldrich, the Clinton White House was truly an abomination.

  Evans-Pritchard ended his 1997 book on Clinton with an Aldrichian aesthetic. “The American elite, I am afraid to say,” he wasn’t afraid to say, “is almost beyond redemption. Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong.”39

  This is a conservative’s lament in a changing world. So it is interesting that the latest poster boy of the conservative media, Glenn Beck, has sold his book Glenn Beck’s Common Sense on the argument that his fellow countrymen “know that something just doesn’t feel right.” The something is change, and that is also how Farah thinks of Obama, now that the changers are back in power.

  Strange Symmetry: Birthers and Truthers

  It occurred to some pollsters and analysts in 2009, as they pondered the figures showing how many Republicans believed that Barack Obama was in fact a secret foreigner, that they had seen these statistics before, but in a different context. In some polls, up to 58 percent of Republicans were skeptical about Obama’s right to be president. And in a 2006 Scripps Survey Research Center poll (see page 234), 54 percent of Democrats had agreed with the proposition that people in the federal government had either assisted the 9/11 attacks or taken no action to stop them because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East. In other words, people were quite likely to believe conspiracy theories supposedly involving the other side—when that side was in power—but disinclined to accept those aimed at their own side.

  Just as the implications of this were being digested by those who think about such things, one of President Obama’s main advisors, the Harvard law professor and author Cass R. Sunstein, produced a book that seemed to speak to this precise condition. Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide is a series of observations based on studies carried out by Sunstein and associates on group polarization—the phenomenon by which people become more extreme in the company of the like-minded. Two Colorado groups, for example—one in liberal Boulder and the other in conservative Colorado Springs—were given the same information about certain topics and then asked to discuss them. Among other findings: “Mildly favorable toward affirmative action before discussion, liberals became strongly favorable toward affirmative action after discussion. Firmly negative about affirmative action befor
e discussion, conservatives became even more negative about affirmative action after discussion.”40 Sunstein found that a predisposition in a particular direction would be exaggerated, sometimes substantially, when people were in a group with others who shared the predisposition. And this would be as true for a group of judges as for a group of plumbers. One could add that such groups might easily exist in disembodied form as an Internet forum, the users of and posters to interlinked websites and news sites, the listeners to Web radio and watchers of YouTube. Once you decide what your predisposition is—Birther, Truther, or indeed, skeptic, there are myriad places to have it confirmed and then enhanced.

  CONCLUSION: BEDTIME STORY

  We’re academics and we’re rational, and we really believe Congress or someone should investigate this. But there are a lot of crazies out there who purport that UFOs were involved. We don’t want to be lumped in with those folks.

  —DAVID GABBARD, EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION PROFESSOR AND 9/11 SCHOLAR1

  Kevin began this book and Jim can end it. Jim is a man I first met when we were both school governors in North London. He has an inquiring mind, an irascible look, and has never encountered a politician he doesn’t suspect of lying. And yet his is an interesting sort of skepticism, as demonstrated by our conversation over lunch one day. I was writing chapter 6 of this book and immersed in materials about the Templars and the bloodline of Christ. I told him briefly what I was doing, and he leaned forward and began to speak in what for Jim constituted a confiding tone. “You know,” he reminded me, “that I am a skeptic by nature. But I tell you, there’s something to all this Da Vinci Code business.”

  The “something” was this. A year earlier, Jim and his wife had visited the Louvre in Paris and had gone to the room where the Poussin painting of the shepherds in Arcadia—the one mentioned in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail—was supposed to hang. But it wasn’t there. Intrigued, Jim sought out an attendant and asked where exactly the picture had gone. The inquiry, for some reason, became an altercation, and as a result of the argument, Jim was asked to leave the Louvre. “I obviously hit a nerve,” said Jim, adding reasonably, “You don’t get thrown out of a museum just for asking a question!” The conclusion he drew was that the curators had had some kind of secret to hide, and what could that be other than some link to the controversy about the bloodline of Jesus?

  I didn’t tell Jim that an alternative explanation might well center around a Louvre attendant, whose mood we don’t know, finding himself aroused from torpor by an irate Englishman bellowing at him in questionable French about a picture that had already been the subject of several dozen inquires that day, and simply deciding that he’d had enough. In early 2007, six months after our conversation, staff at the Louvre went on strike in protest against the stress brought on by dealing with what they called “aggressive” or even “dangerous” visitors. But this rather less sinister and slightly more comic possibility wasn’t likely to appeal to Jim, who seemed happy with his accidental role in discovering the Greatest Conspiracy in History.

  RFK Must Die

  Such is the pleasure of those who find themselves in on a secret that even the producers of reputable news programs get drawn in. The BBC’s TV news flagship, Newsnight, is regarded by many of its audience as a model of impartiality and journalistic probity, yet in late November 2006 the program screened a twelve-minute taster documentary made by an Irish filmmaker, Shane O’Sullivan, about the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

  The killing of John Kennedy’s younger brother at a crucial moment in the 1968 presidential race was always going to be a fodder for conspiracy theories. Conspiracists have been largely thwarted, however, by the open-and-shut nature of the case. The assassin, a Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, was seen firing his gun by dozens of people in the Ambassador Hotel that night, before he was overpowered. His gun matched the bullets taken from Kennedy and wounded bystanders, and a search revealed notebooks written before the shooting, in which Sirhan had written over and over again, “RFK must die.” Attempts to construct a conspiracy theory from the killing centered, rather desperately, either on the idea that Sirhan was “programmed” by some unknown force to commit the murder or on supposed discrepancies between the number of bullet holes in the pantry area where the shooting took place and the number of shots fired by Sirhan. Doubts were also raised about whether Sirhan ever got close enough to Kennedy to cause the most serious wound (as several eyewitnesses say he certainly did), and about the sighting of a woman in a polka-dot dress who supposedly said, “We killed him.”

  So far, so (by November 2006) old hat. But O’Sullivan now added something extra to the mix, and it was this novel element that persuaded the editor and senior producers at Newsnight to run with his film. As O’Sullivan put it in a newspaper article that appeared on the same day as his program, in the course of researching a fictional screenplay based on the brainwashing theory, he had “uncovered new video and photographic evidence suggesting that three senior CIA operatives were behind the killing.”2 The video was a sequence of high-lit characters, once anonymous but now prominent, moving around the Amabassador Hotel in the moments before and after the shooting, spliced together with a sequence of contemporary interviewees identifying them. It was like something out of a cold-case TV show.

  First, O’Sullivan thought he had pictures of a secret-service operative, David Morales: “Fifteen minutes in, there he was, standing at the back of the ballroom, in the moments between the end of Kennedy’s speech and the shooting. Thirty minutes later, there he was again, casually floating around the darkened ballroom while an associate with a pencil mustache took notes.” But who was the balding man with Morales? Various men who claimed either to have been involved with the CIA or to have been present at the hotel said that it was a Gordon Campbell, who had worked for the CIA in Miami. And if that was so, then who was the third chap talking to Campbell? O’Sullivan thought he knew.

  He looked Greek, and I suspected he might be George Joannides, chief of psychological warfare operations at JM-Wave. Joannides was called out of retirement in 1978 to act as the CIA liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigating the death of John F. Kennedy . . . Ed Lopez, now a respected lawyer at Cornell University, came into close contact with Joannides when he was a young law student working for the committee. We visit him and show him the photograph and he is 99 percent sure it is Joannides. When I tell him where it was taken, he is not surprised: “If these guys decided you were bad, they acted on it.”3

  O’Sullivan finished his article in the same vein as he finished his film, with this peroration:

  Given the positive identifications we have gathered on these three, the CIA and the Los Angeles Police Department need to explain what they were doing there . . . Today would have been Robert Kennedy’s 81st birthday. The world is crying out for a compassionate leader like him. If dark forces were behind his elimination, it needs to be investigated.4

  After the broadcast of his mini-documentary, O’Sullivan went on to complete a five-hundred-page book on the killing of RFK, and to put the finishing touches to a two-and-a-quarter-hour documentary, RFK Must Die. But as he headed back to the cutting room, his entire thesis was beginning to collapse.

  Three other researchers, two American and one British, who had also been looking at the RFK assassination, began to chase down O’Sullivan’s supposed trio of CIA men. Jefferson Morley and David Talbot—ironically, pursuing their own conspiracy theory about the Dallas murder—soon discovered that Gordon Campbell, far from being in Los Angeles that night in 1968, had died rather publicly of a heart attack in 1962. The two Americans communicated this to Shane O’Sullivan, whose response was to suggest “that the man caught on camera might have expropriated the dead man’s name as an alias, since taking false names was a common practice among CIA covert operatives.”5

  It got worse. Several people who had known Morales, including his family, were adamant that the man picked out in O’Sull
ivan’s film was not him. O’Sullivan, as he himself recounts in his documentary, now took his identifications to the LAPD. The files showed “Campbell” and the Greek-looking “Joannides” to be Michael Roman and Frank Owens, respectively, both sales managers with the Bulova watch company, which happened to be holding a convention at the Ambassador on that day.

  So the “positive identifications” were erroneous, and it seems a fair guess that had Newsnight known that there were not three supposedly identifiable CIA agents wandering unaccountably around the Ambassador but two watch salesmen and A. N. Other, they would never have given air-time to O’Sullivan’s original movie. This being so, the way the Irishman dealt with this disappointment must be considered a classic of insouciance in adversity.

  First, he suggested it didn’t really matter. As he told one British conspiracist website (whose members were, at this point, unaware of the collapse of the original theory), “The heart of the film is a thorough reexamination of the other controversies in the case . . . There’s rare archive footage from the hotel that night, with more clips of ‘Morales’ and ‘Campbell.’ ”6 Second, he implied that the watch convention might have been suspicious. The Bulova company, he told his viewers, had been chaired by former U.S. Army general and Johnson adviser Omar Bradley, and did a significant proportion of its business with the Department of Defense. An anonymous source had told O’Sullivan that Bulova was a “well-known CIA cover.” The notion that the CIA sent watch salesmen to superintend its most sensitive assassinations was such a breathtaking example of making the best of a bad job that it led British author Mel Ayton to speculate wryly that perhaps O’Sullivan had made this connection because Bulova used to advertise its Accutron watch in the 1960s spy drama series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. 7