Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  8. Why has the medical evidence concerning the President’s death been altered out of recognition?

  9. What is the evidence to substantiate the allegation that the President was shot from behind?

  10. Why has the FBI refused to publish what could be the most reliable piece of evidence in the whole case [photographs taken of JFK’s vehicle just before and during the shooting]?

  11. How is it that millions of people have been misled by complete forgeries [of photos of the murder weapon] in the press?

  12. Why was the result of the paraffin test [on Oswald’s face and hands] altered before being announced by the authorities?

  13. Why was the only description of [Patrolman] Tippitt’s killer deliberately omitted by the police from the affidavit of the sole eyewitness?

  14. Why was Oswald’s description in connection with the murder of Patrolman Tippitt broadcast over Dallas police radio at 12:43 p.m. on November 22, when Tippitt was not shot until 1:06 p.m.?

  15. How was it possible for Earl Warren to forecast that [wife] Marina Oswald’s evidence would be exactly the reverse of what she had previously testified?

  16. How does a District Attorney of [Henry] Wade’s great experience account for all the extraordinary changes in evidence and testimony which he has announced during the Oswald case?

  Russell’s JFK conspiracism reflected many of the broad intellectual trends that took flight in the 1960s—anti-Americanism fed by the war in Vietnam, distrust in government, and the merging of academia with left-wing activism. But it also reflects an important strain of delusional thinking that persistently has asserted itself following the demise2 of celebrities and national leaders—particularly those who, like the slain American president, were cast in the popular imagination as the quasi-deific embodiment of some larger-than-life idea. “There’s [an] instinctive notion that a king cannot be struck down by a peasant,” Bugliosi writes. “Many Americans found it hard to accept that President Kennedy, the most powerful man in the free world—someone they perceived to occupy a position akin to a king—could be eliminated in a matter of seconds by someone they considered a nobody.”

  This same psychological reflex is at the root of most conspiracy theories involving public figures—even self-destructive celebrities whose manner of death is perfectly obvious. Something in the human mind rebels at the notion that famous people can be felled by lone assassins, accidents, a drug overdose, or suicide.

  Surely, the death of Princess Diana could not be blamed on the drunk chauffeur who slammed Dodi Fayed’s Mercedes into a concrete pillar; the act must have been orchestrated by MI6 in order to prevent the People’s Princess from marrying a Muslim. Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain, pill-popping grunge hero to a generation of music fans, could not have died from a self-inflicted shotgun blast to his head—he must have been murdered by a jealous, Brutus-like Courtney Love. Marilyn Monroe could not have died from barbiturate poisoning—she must have been murdered by Robert Kennedy and the CIA. U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone couldn’t have died in an accidental 2002 plane crash: Several prominent 9/11 Truthers have written essays arguing that the U.S. government murdered him (according to one theory, with an “electromagnetic pulse weapon”) to advance their right-wing agenda. Michael Jackson’s death in June 2009 elicited similar theories: His sister La Toya told reporters, “I believe Michael was murdered, I felt that from the start. Not just one person was involved, rather it was a conspiracy of people.” As for Yasser Arafat, it goes without saying that Palestinian leaders reject the notion that his 2004 death could be attributed to natural medical causes: At a 2009 Fatah conference, delegates unanimously decreed that their former leader somehow was secretly murdered by Israel.

  (As a sidebar, it should be noted that the psychic need to protect a revered figure from the indignity of meaningless death also often serves to convince followers that the fallen icon isn’t actually dead at all. For decades, millions of Elvis fans clung to the belief that the King is still alive and occasionally popping up at convenience stores. Aging Nazis maintain the hope that Hitler made it to Latin America to fight again. A subcult of Lady Di conspiracy theorists believe that she faked her own death so that she and Dodi could resume a private life outside of the public eye. Even Dan Brown’s Christian mythology—based on notion that Christ’s bloodline did not perish on the Cross, but took root in France, where it survives to the present day—owes something to this reflex.)

  This same species of magical thinking applies to 9/11 conspiracy theorists, even if the Twin Towers were made of steel and concrete instead of flesh and bone. These buildings were no ordinary structures. They were miracles of American engineering—embodiments of the wealth, ambition, and grandeur of the free world. The video footage of their collapse, which remains shocking to this day, seems to show a pair of Olympian gods being brought to their knees. “My feelings about the World Trade Center and just about everyone else’s all became the same: the buildings became our first skyscraper martyrs,” wrote New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger in his 2009 book Why Architecture Matters. “If you doubt it, think of how . . . sidewalk vendors all over New York were selling pictures of the twin towers for years after September 11, the way they used to sell pictures of Malcolm X and John F. Kennedy.”

  The more one studies the Left’s reaction to the JFK assassination, the more striking is the similitude with the 9/11 Truth movement: In both cases, the actual crimes were committed by radical terrorists who pledged loyalty to totalitarian movements, and who were clearly motivated by their hatred of the United States and everything it stood for. Yet both acts were perversely reinvented in the minds of millions of conspiracy theorists as an indictment of the nation’s own democratically accountable establishment.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that so many of the Truthers I interviewed also turned out to be avid JKF conspiracy buffs—and sometimes even interlaced the two subjects in bizarre ways. Ken Jenkins, the Bay Area flower child who is profiled in Chapter 3, segued from our interview about the 9/11 Truth movement to make the case that JFK’s assassination was part of a larger conspiracy involving three separate shooters. Pilots for 9/11 Truth leader Rob Balsamo suggested to me in our interview that JFK might have been assassinated because of his refusal to implement Operation Northwoods. During my interview with Pennsylvania-based Truther Paul Thorns, he declared that 9/11 had been perpetrated by “Israel and the neocons”—and then casually mentioned, as an afterthought, that “the whole Muslim angle is just a Lee Harvey Oswald thing.” When I asked him to elaborate about who killed JFK, he told me, “It was a lot of different factions working together—the Mob, the CIA, the money people, and the Israelis.”

  David Ray Griffin—probably the most influential Truther alive—was also full of elaborate notions about JFK’s assassination. During our three-hour interview at his seaside California home, he told me, for instance, that Lee Harvey Oswald was in fact two people—one named “Lee,” and the other named “Harvey”—both of them well-groomed CIA assets since youth. Influential California-based conspiracy theorist Michael Ruppert wrote in his Truther opus Crossing the Rubicon that his 9/11 theories were influenced by his investigations into the murder of JFK, as well as his “verifiable knowledge that the murder of John’s brother Robert was a CIA operation.” Pasadena, California–based Truther James Fetzer published three books on JFK’s assassination. His current theory, described in his 2000 book Murder in Dealey Plaza, has it that the conspirators who killed the former president not only altered JFK’s x-rays and doctored the Zapruder film, but also substituted another man’s brain prior to autopsy.

  In fact, the death of JFK acts as a sort of universal hinge point for conspiracy theorists everywhere—even those who aren’t American. As part of a bizarre JFK-themed non sequitur inserted into his 2009 speech to the United Nations General Assembly, for instance, Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi asserted that Jack Ruby was “an Israeli,” and declared, “The whole world should know that Kenn
edy wanted to investigate the nuclear reactor of the Israeli demon.”

  Then there is Paul Zarembka, a sixtysomething Marxist economics professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In his widely distributed 2006 Truther anthology, The Hidden History of 9–11, Zarembka includes Bertrand Russell’s above-listed 16 Questions On the Assassination—along with David Ray Griffin’s Sixteen Reasons to Question the Official Story About 9–11. The anthology also includes a bizarre3 contribution by Arizona-based freelance writer Jay Kolar titled What We Know About the Alleged 9–11 Hijackers, in which the author alleges that most of the 9/11 terrorists had “doubles.” Hijacker Ziad Jarrah, a subject of special interest to Kolar, is described as having many doubles—Kolar isn’t quite sure how many. In any event, he backs up his theory of clone CIA terrorists by casually arguing that the trick was borrowed from the JFK era: “If there was a ‘Lee Harvey Oswald Award’ for 9–11, it would certainly go to Ziad Jarrah (and his doubles(s)).”

  When I interviewed Zarembka in his SUNY Buffalo office in mid–2009, one of my first questions was whether he gave any credence to Kolar’s doubles theory.

  “Yes, I do,” Zarembka told me. “Remember—the same kind of doubles issue came up with Oswald being in Mexico City. In fact, I’m reading a new book about the Bush family right now—it’s called Family of Secrets [by Russ Baker]. And there is a mention of that very issue in the book . . . For instance, here’s a question: What was [George H. W.] Bush doing on the day Kennedy was assassinated? If you ask him, he can’t remember . . .”

  Following that, Zarembka sketched out a detailed plot involving a confidante of the Bouvier family who would eventually become entangled with Oswald and then befriend the owner of the Texas School Book Depository. “Is it really possible that someone who knew Jackie Kennedy’s family so intimately—who had Jackie sit on his lap like he was her uncle—that he would go on to become connected like that in Dallas, and we’re supposed to believe this was a coincidence? What’s the chance of that?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that question. But I did drive away from the interview with one lesson solidly in hand: Scratch the surface of a middle-aged 9/11 Truther, and you are almost guaranteed to find a JFK conspiracist.

  The Men in Black: How Technology Shaped American Conspiracism

  Outside of Russian-language literary circles, the name Yevgeny Zamyatin is little known. That’s unfortunate, because his 1922 novel We may be the most influential novel in the history of the science-fiction genre. Without We, there would have been no Brave New World, no Anthem, no Nineteen Eighty-Four. George Orwell’s dystopic masterpiece in particular hews so closely to We that parts of it descend almost into outright plagiarism. Orwell was the more gifted and accessible writer—which is why “Orwellian” appears in the dictionary instead of “Zamyatinian.” But it was the Russian who first sketched the nightmarish implications of modern technology in the harness of totalitarian ideology. And amazingly, he did it while the Ford Model T was still on the production line.

  The plot of We revolves around a scientist in the One State, a totalitarian society governed by a white-robed Big Brother–like figure known as the Benefactor. Citizens live in glass houses, their every movement visible to government observers. They are permitted to draw the shades only during lovemaking—which can be conducted only on state-approved days, with state-approved partners. The weather is controlled by “Accumulator Towers.” Food is synthesized from petroleum. Music is confined to government-approved tunes, such as The March of the One State and The Hymn of the One State. Dreams are treated as a form of psychosis—as is ownership of a soul. The only forms of approved literature are tables of numbers. The only human right is the right to be executed by the Benefactor. The (Orwellian) state creed is that freedom is misery, slavery the ultimate joy. Or, in the Benefactor’s words: “What did people—from their very infancy—pray for, dream about, long for? They longed for someone to tell them, once and for all, the meaning of happiness, and then to bind them to it with a chain.”

  As the melodramatic plot of We unfolds, the protagonist’s faith in the Benefactor’s totalitarian order begins to break down: He falls in love with a fellow citizen and has nonstate-approved sex. He ventures out behind the walls of the One State, and meets the happy savages who lie beyond. In time, he even develops a soul, and joins with others in conspiring to bring down the One State. They are on the brink of success when the Benefactor suddenly orders all citizens to report for brain cauterization, a surgery that leaves them “cured of imagination.”

  The result is an army of perfect robot citizens, stripped of the ability to think independently. In a scene that could have been ripped from any modern-day New World Order–themed conspiracist website, Zamyatin writes: “A slow, heavy column of some fifty people emerges. ‘People’? No, that does not describe them. These are not feet—they are stiff, heavy wheels, moved by some invisible transmission belt. These are not people—they are humanoid tractors.”

  We was directly inspired by Zamyatin’s experience under Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But as the totalitarian virus spread to Nazi Germany and other parts of the West in the 1920s and 1930s, so did the fears he expressed. While Orwell and Aldous Huxley wrote their novels from democratic England, they shared Zamyatin’s vision of a coming age in which every aspect of human existence—including the basic chemistry of our bodies, and the inner workings of our minds—would be subordinated to a power-hungry elite armed with frightening new technologies.

  In Western high schools, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World are presented as cautionary political tales. But they also document an important shift in the human condition that transcends mere politics. For the entirety of man’s existence leading up to the twentieth century, what humans feared most wasn’t the dictatorship of Zamyatin’s One State—it was the blood-soaked anarchy of the jungle beyond its walls. Reality was, as Thucydides put it, “a human race that escaped chaos and barbarism by preserving with difficulty a thin layer of civilization.” It was only with the rise of totalitarian ideologies, and their enabling technologies, that this fear was flipped on its head. The noble savages who live outside our gate are no longer the enemy—they are the salvation. The greatest threat to society is no longer that the flesh will be exterminated by war, disease, tribal warfare, or natural disaster; but that our minds will be lobotomized through state terror, propaganda, soma, or outright surgery. The publication of We marks the moment that basic fear switch was being toggled.

  Because of their geographical isolation, Americans were insulated from these emerging fears to a certain extent. But as the century wore on, the rapid march of technology, the increasing bureaucratization of America’s postwar society, and the rise to power of an anonymous, professional managerial class all conspired to create a generalized climate of anxiety. By the 1960s, Americans were confronted with a welter of agencies, think tanks, and international organizations that had popped into existence within the space of a generation—including, at the highest level, NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the United Nations. Spies from both sides of the Iron Curtain—armed with hidden microphones and secret cameras—were believed to be everywhere. In 1958, the same year that the John Birch Society came into existence, J. Edgar Hoover was warning Americans that the communist “is in the market places of America: in organizations, on street corners, even at your front door. He is trying to influence and control your thoughts.”

  The resulting paranoia produced a collective vision drawn straight out of the brain-surgery scene in We. Miami University scholar Timothy Melley calls it “agency panic”—“the conviction that one’s actions are being controlled by someone else, that one has been ‘constructed’ by powerful external agents . . . This fear sometimes manifests itself in a belief that the world is full of ‘programmed’ or ‘brainwashed’ subjects, addicts, automatons, or ‘mass-produced’ persons.”

  The CIA in particular, an organization whose MK-ULTRA mind-control and chemical-interrogation experi
ments truly were something out of a conspiracist’s nightmare, seemed to symbolize a world in which average citizens were targeted by their own government. In 1974, the New York Times published a blockbuster story by Seymour Hersh under the headline “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces,” claiming that the agency had generated surveillance files on at least ten thousand Americans. As author Arthur Herman wrote in the pages of Commentary magazine, describing the frenzied intellectual climate that resulted: “Once the process of blame and suspicion got underway, it was impossible to stop. If the CIA had killed Vietnamese citizens with impunity and without leaving a trace, then perhaps it had done the same to American citizens. If the CIA had been willing to plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, why not JFK? . . . For the New Left culture at its most feverish, there was no crime too heinous, no bugging too minor, no assassination too unjust, no Spanish Inquisition–style interrogation of some hapless prisoner too appalling that the CIA wasn’t prepared to carry out at the behest of its corporate masters.”

  In the realm of science, meanwhile, the postwar period witnessed a bewildering proliferation of groundbreaking technologies. New public-health innovations, such as compulsory vaccination, psychiatric treatment, and water fluoridation seemed especially threatening—since they transferred control of a citizen’s own bodily integrity to strangers. Like USAF Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, the Dr. Strangelove character who attacks the Soviet Union out of fear that enemies were trying to contaminate Americans’ “precious bodily fluids,” millions of Americans reflexively connected such technological apprehensions to the Red menace. According to Dr. Charles Betts, president of the Anti-Cancer Club of America, fluoridation was “better than using the atom bomb [for the purposes of Communists] because the atom bomb has to be made, has to be transported to the place it is to be set off, while poisonous fluorine has been placed right beside the water supplies by the Americans themselves ready to be dumped into the water mains whenever a Communist desires!” (Antifluoridation activists no longer cite the communist menace, yet in municipal politics, they remain a force to be reckoned with in many North American jurisdictions. In late 2010, as this book was in its final edits, the Canadian city of Waterloo, Ontario, voted to end its water fluoridation program. When I criticized this decision in the National Post, I was met with a storm of email that was extraordinary, even by the standards I had come to expect from writing about the 9/11 Truth movement. Many correspondents passionately advocated the same discredited theories that sprang to life in the days of Charles Betts, such as the idea that water fluoridation had been invented by the aluminum industry as a means to dispose of its toxic, fluorine-containing waste products.)