Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

by Charles P. Pierce

  “Thanks for Chicago and West Virginia,” it said. “Sincerely, Sam Giancana.”

  In his study of the Kennedy presidency, the political writer Richard Reeves quotes Kennedy describing himself as the center of a spoked wheel and, in doing so, inadvertently posing an insoluble riddle to what would become, after his murder, a nation of his biographers. By the time he touched down in Dallas, Kennedy had grown comfortable living in the plural.

  “It was instinctive,” Kennedy said. “I had different identities, and this was a useful way of expressing each without compromising the other.” Consider what we have come to know about him in the decades since he was killed: that he was an icon of vigor—vigah!—who was deathly ill and gobbling steroids and shooting speed just to function daily; that he was the golden child of a golden family with a sex life that can properly be called baroque; that he was a public intellectual whose books were ghostwritten; that he bought West Virginia in 1960, probably with the mob’s money, in a deal brokered by his good friend Frank Sinatra.

  After all, every frontier is a New Frontier, landscape and dreamscape at once, a horizon but also an architecture of belief. But frontiers are also wild and uncivilized places where people struggle to survive, where people die over private grudges, and where people, a lot of them, carry guns. John Kennedy needed every identity he’d crafted for himself to survive on the New Frontier he proclaimed. In 1960, he got up in Los Angeles and promised to make all things new. In his murder, three years later, he managed to do it for the ages.

  Consider Dallas, the nexus of distrust that became the template for modern political paranoia, and consider that, while Kennedy was president, the executive branch was a writhing ball of snakes. A memo has survived in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff seriously suggest blowing up John Glenn on the launch-pad in order to concoct a casus belli for invading Cuba again. Consider that this lunacy made it all the way up the chain of command to the secretary of defense before someone finally turned it off. Consider Dallas when you consider how quickly theories sprang up about who might have known what before the airplanes were flown into the buildings in Washington and New York.

  It turns out there were actual conspiracies going on throughout the brief history of the Kennedy administration. It was a fertile time for conspiracy, since so many things seemed to be changing all at once. The issue of civil rights had moved swiftly past the hope of easy compromise; there were murderous plots planned under the Spanish moss in Mississippi, and the people involved in them believed they were arming themselves against a conspiracy from the North that dated back to Lincoln. Elsewhere, there were off-the-books efforts to kill Fidel Castro in Cuba, and covert wranglings in (among other places) Iraq, where a young officer named Saddam Hussein backed the right side in a CIA-sponsored coup. A rat’s nest was growing in Southeast Asia that already seemed beyond untangling.

  The Joint Chiefs were barely under civilian control; Fletcher Knebel did not pluck the plot for Seven Days in May out of the air. Knebel was a veteran Washington journalist who knew what he heard around town. The intelligence services vanished into the dark blue evening distance of the frontier in which John Kennedy had declared could be found the nation’s best new hope. These were actual conspiracies, many of which have come to light in the years since the assassination, just as the conspiracy theories about the president’s murder have hit high tide, but they have had less historical resonance in that context than the notion, completely unsubstantiated by anything resembling a fact, that Kennedy was shot from a storm drain beneath the street in the plaza.

  Back in 1991, shrewd old Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw clearly what would happen. In an essay prompted by the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, Moynihan argued that the Warren Commission’s capital mistake from the start was the failure to recognize that Americans were not predisposed to believe it.

  “I was convinced that the American people would sooner or later come to believe that there had been [a conspiracy],” Moynihan wrote, “unless we investigated the event with exactly that presumption in mind.”

  By the time Moynihan published his essay, a solid 70 percent of the American people did not believe the conclusion of the Warren Commission that, acting alone and from ambush, Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy. This percentage has not changed substantially since the day in 1964 when the commission first published its findings, even though both the journalist Gerald Posner and the former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi have published lengthy and detailed defenses of the Warren Commission’s conclusions. To this day, the official U.S. government report into the public murder in broad daylight of the president of the United States has rather less credibility with the American people than does the Epic of Gilgamesh.

  No matter what the polls indicate, the reality is that we have kept the Kennedy assassination as a conspiracy theory, rather than accepting it as an actual conspiracy. Once we believe in the latter, it becomes a deadening weight on the conscience. It loses its charm. Accepting it as a reality means we probably are obligated to do something about it, and that we have chosen, en masse, not to.

  The revelation of an actual conspiracy—the Iran-Contra matter, say—has come to have a rather deadening effect on American politics and culture. It runs through stages. There is disbelief. Then the whole thing dies in banality. It’s too hard to understand, and it’s Just One More Damn Thing that proves not that something called “government” is controlled by a secret conspiracy, but that “government” itself is the conspiracy. This is commonplace and boring, and it leads to distrust and to apathy, and not, as it is supposed to do, to public outrage and reform. There is no “Us.” There is only a “Them.” There’s no game if there’s only the other team playing.

  In fact, Iran-Contra was a remarkable piece of extraconstitutional theater, far beyond anything the Watergate burglars could’ve dreamed up. Arming terrorist states? Using the money to fund a vicious war of dubious legality elsewhere in the world? Government officials flying off to Teheran with a Bible and a cake in the shape of a key? A president whose main defenses against the charge of complicity were neglect and incipient Alzheimer’s disease? Who could make this up? Iran-Contra was a great criminal saga, even up to the fact that it was first revealed not by the lions of the elite American press, but by a tiny newspaper in Beirut.

  Iran-Contra should have immunized the American public forever against wishful fact-free adventurism in the Middle East. It would have, too, if the country had been able to bring to this actual conspiracy the fervor that it readily brings to conspiracy theories. As has become sadly plain over the past seven years, the Iran-Contra affair had no immunizing effect. (Remarkably, several of its architects even returned from think-tank limbo in 2001, eager to reassert their fantastical visions.) People pronounced themselves baffled by the plot, and the production closed out of town. It is little more than a footnote in history. It sells no books. It moves no units. Mark Hertsgaard, in his study of how the press functioned during the Reagan administration, describes in detail how interest dried up. “Editors were convinced that, after months of heavy play, readers and viewers were tired of Iran-Contra.”

  Consider Dallas when you consider Watergate and Iran-Contra, in which we learned that the Nixon and Reagan White Houses were not the Kennedy White House primarily because we found out about the covert wiretapping and the crackpot foreign policy moves. Consider Dallas when you consider the Monica Lewinsky affair, through which we learned that the Clinton White House was not the Kennedy White House primarily because we found out about the sex. Consider Dallas when you consider poor Vincent Foster, dead by his own hand, and the speculation hovering over his body almost before the cops were. Consider Dallas when you consider a White House set up almost as a living diorama of the Kennedy White House, one beset by real political enemies acting in secret concert, a White House in which the nickname of presidential aide Sidney Blumenthal closed the circle for good: “Grassy Knoll.”

  A country that so readily rejects the offici
al story about how its president was killed should not have taken almost three years to fully believe the truth about Watergate. It shouldn’t have taken the White House tapes—on the most damning of which, it should be recalled, President Richard Nixon tells his aide H. R. Haldeman to have the CIA turn off an FBI investigation into the break-in with a cover story about how this will open up “that whole Bay of Pigs thing”—to seal the deal. A country that readily puts shooters almost everywhere in Dealey Plaza should not have found Iran-Contra to be so “complicated” that the criminals got away simply because the country got too bored to pursue them.

  Logic dictates that a people who believe that their president was gunned down in broad daylight as the result of a conspiracy made up in part of dark forces within their own government would become aggressively skeptical, rather than passively cynical. They would be more difficult to govern, in the sense that they would become harder to fool. For example, you wouldn’t think of trying to scare them by floating stories that a tinpot tyrant in the Middle East could launch a fleet of drone aircraft, and that these puppet airplanes, having eluded a multibillion-dollar air-defense system, would then blithely cruise up and down the East Coast, spraying anthrax as they go. We entertain ourselves with skepticism or, at worst, cynicism. But we govern ourselves with apathy or, at worst, credulity.

  The JFK conspiracy sells, so it remains nothing more than mass entertainment. Dealey Plaza functions as a performance venue. Considering Dallas means accepting that, for more than forty years, we have believed the unthinkable and gone right on with our lives. Because John Kennedy led plural lives, Dealey Plaza freezes us in the plural. If you make that bafflingly tight turn from Houston onto down-sloping Elm, a turn that still doesn’t make any sense if you’re trying to protect a president riding in an open car, hair in the breeze, if you enter in the first-person plural—“we lost our innocence”—then you must leave in the third:

  They killed him.

  But it ends there, in Dealey Plaza, where there is an X on the roadway and where German tourists cool themselves in the shade of the trees atop the grassy knoll. It wasn’t always so. The country once managed to make actual conspiracies, and the theories that attend them, work in concert in such a way that our appetite for the grotesque was satisfied, our appetite for hidden knowledge sated, and, most important of all, our appetite for freedom was sharpened. And, yes, the Masons were behind it all. Or so some people believed.

  ON an October day in 1827, people in the small town of Lewiston in western New York state, hard by Lake Ontario, fished a body out of Oak Orchard Creek. The body was badly decomposed. Townsfolk, however, were sure they knew who it was. It was a man who had been snatched from the jail in Canandaigua a year earlier—kidnapped and murdered, the townsfolk believed, because of what he knew. This unpleasant-looking lump of recent fish food, they said, was William Morgan, and it was the Masons who killed him.

  Morgan had come to New York from Virginia, a tramp bricklayer and stonemason, and a full-time pain in the ass. He joined one Masonic lodge, moved, and was denied admission to another, upscale lodge, probably because its membership looked upon Morgan as something of a bum. In retaliation, Morgan wrote and distributed a pamphlet describing in lurid detail Masonic rituals and ancient legends. The local Masons fought back, repeatedly having Morgan tossed into various local hoosegows as a habitual debtor and, eventually, even trying to burn down the shop of the fellow who’d printed up the pamphlet. The second time Morgan was incarcerated, two mysterious men showed up at the jail, paid his debt, and took him away. Nobody ever saw him again, unless it actually was William Morgan who was pulled out of the creek.

  (Morgan’s wife and his dentist both said the body was his. It was disinterred several times and, amid charges that someone had tampered with the corpse to make it look like Morgan, the local coroner just gave up entirely, declining to identify the corpse. The historian Sean Wilentz writes that a positive identification eventually became unnecessary: a local anti-Masonic leader admitted that the corpse was “a good enough Morgan” for the purposes of local political agitation.)

  Western New York exploded with the controversy. Local Masons were hauled before grand juries. The jailer in Canandaigua, who was a Mason and who had released Morgan to his two abductors, was indicted. When some Masons were brought to trial, other Masons refused to testify against them. Charges often were swiftly dismissed—because, people said, of Masonic influences on the judges and the juries.

  The Masons had been central to early American conspiracy theories, most of which connected them not to the Templars but to the Bavarian Illuminati, an obscure group founded in 1776 by a wandering academic named Adam Weishaupt and suppressed by the elector of Saxony eight years later. As Sean Wilentz points out, anti-Masonry had its beginnings in America not as a populist revolt against a mysterious, monied elite, but as the reaction of high-toned Protestant preachers in Federalist New England, who saw the hidden hand of Weishaupt’s group behind everything they considered politically inconvenient.

  The Illuminati were a constant, stubborn presence in the emerging underground American counternarrative. By 1789, in addition to being blamed for the Jacobin excesses in France, and accused of attempting to import those excesses, the group also had been linked to the hidden secrets of the Templars and, therefore, to the Masons. At one point, they were charged by the Catholic Church with engineering a Masonic plot to overthrow the papacy while, simultaneously being accused elsewhere of being central to a conspiracy between the Masons and the Jesuits to take over the world. The Illuminati were enormously useful.

  (Theories about the Illuminati have never really gone away. They were blamed for the Russian Revolution. In the 1950s, the John Birch Society saw the hand of the group behind a movement toward one-world government based in the United Nations. A writer named Jim Marrs, whose book Crossfire was one of the primary texts Oliver Stone used to concoct the plot of JFK, puts the Illuminati not only in those places, but in Dealey Plaza as well, and also in prehistory. Marrs makes them the keepers of the knowledge that came to earth with our alien ancestors, a group of space wanderers called the Annunaki. And, before hitting it big with The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown used the Illuminati as the villains in Angels and Demons, the novel in which he introduced the Harvard symbologist Robert Lang-don. The plot is kicked off when a priest is found murdered in a church with “Illuminati” carved backward into his chest.)

  Even in 1827, then, there was a history on which the anti-Masonic movement in New York State could build. However, the fervor was fueled by rising political and social tension between the local farmers and rural landowners, and the expanding commercial class that had grown up in the area since the opening of the Erie Canal.

  Class tensions were exacerbated when justice seemed thwarted in every venue that attempted to parcel out guilt in the murder of the person believed to be William Morgan. Less moneyed citizens saw the rise of Masonry as the rise of an unaccountable elite—an idea that still had fearsome power only fifty years after the revolution. For all the conspiratorial filigree attending the movement, and for all the lurid speculation about what went on behind the doors of Masonic temples, there was a powerful class-based political opportunity here, and there also were people more than ready to grab it.

  At the time, national politics was locked in a struggle between President John Quincy Adams, the son of a president himself, and the populist enthusiasm for General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee—who was, it should be noted, a Mason. In 1824, when the tangled and messy four-way presidential election was thrown into the House of Representatives, Adams managed to defeat Jackson, partly because he cut a deal with Representative Henry Clay—who was, it should be noted, a Mason—that made Clay secretary of state in exchange for throwing his support to Adams.

  The “corrupt bargain”—a boiling stewpot of conspiracies and conspiracy theories in its own right—set off a raging brawl in national politics. Jackson never accepted his defeat. By the time somebody wh
o might have been William Morgan was fished out of Oak Orchard Creek, it was clear that the old general had become an even more formidable political power. Those lining up behind President John Quincy Adams needed something just as formidable to match Jackson.

  In Rochester, New York, not far from the hot zone of anti-Masonic fervor, a publisher named Thurlow Weed bought a local newspaper. When the Masons refused to produce Morgan’s murderers, Weed put his publication behind the anti-Masonic cause. However, he did so in such a purely pragmatic way that the anti-Masons soon became a legitimate political force. Gradually, talk of secret rituals gave way. In its place, Weed—and his eventual ally William Seward—brilliantly exploited legitimate grievances of class, and the inevitable issues that were arising from the growth of the country.

  Neither Weed nor Seward had any use for Jackson, and both men did believe in a Masonic elite that endangered democratic institutions; Wilentz points out that they called for a “Second Independence” from the elite. But they grafted anti-Masonry onto their National Republicanism by tempering the more outré elements of the conspiracy theory, and by channeling the emotions raised by that theory into pragmatic, even liberalizing, politics. By 1832, Weed and Seward had helped build a political party so big that it held the first national nominating convention in U.S. history. The anti-Masons now held the balance of power in the political opposition to Andrew Jackson, and the party’s most surprising convert was a retired politician from Massachusetts named John Quincy Adams.

  Stewing in Massachusetts, the aristocratic Adams had soured on politics generally and on political parties in particular. He was not overfond of his countrymen, either, and at first he considered the conspiratorial basis for anti-Masonic politics to be an unpleasant inflammation of distant hayshakers. However, Adams found in the evolving movement a new constituency. It was rougher than he might have liked it to be, but its enthusiasm revived the old man. In 1830, he was elected to a seat in the House of Representatives.