Fifty years ago this week, John F. Kennedy was assassinated by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. Or was he? Since that fateful day, conspiracy theorists have pointed to any number of players who wanted the president dead. Fifty years later, are we any closer to the truth?
“This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that when it is finally exposed its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.”
Those words were spoken not by some inflamed purveyor of paranoia about the assassination of John F. Kennedy but over a decade earlier in 1951 by Senator Joseph McCarthy ofWisconsin referring to an international Communist conspiracy that he claimed was subverting American policymaking.
McCarthy’s accusation is telling if only because it demonstrates that conspiracy theorizing did not begin with the Kennedy assassination. Rather the event occurred in a society already steeped in paranoia from the Cold War between theUnited Statesand theSoviet Union. Indeed Cold War tensions reached their most perilous height in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis whenKennedy America’s 35th president faced down Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in a confrontation that nearly ended in nuclear catastrophe.
The trip to Texas a year later which had been planned to organize support for the upcoming 1964 reelection campaign had seen signs of trouble ahead. Kennedy himself was well aware of the existence of extremist elements inDallas.
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