An effective conspiracy attains its ends and goes unproven, even if there is evidence of the conspiracy.
The most effective conspiracy in America’s history is probably the assassination of John F. Kennedy. There is more than reasonable doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, or even that he fired a shot when JFK was killed. There is good reason to suspect that persons who had an interest in the removal of JFK (and thus the neutering of Bobby Kennedy as attorney general) were behind the murder of president:
LBJ, the failed candidate of 1960, who had been demeaned by the Kennedys, was probably going to be removed from the ballot in 1964, and was on the verge of having his massive graft and murderous exploits exposed, with resulting disgrace and jail time.
J. Edgar Hoover, who was demeaned and shunted aside by the Kennedys.
Elements of the CIA, which was about to be shredded for its sins: including but not limited to the mis-conceived Bay of Pigs operation and collaboration with the Mafia in schemes to assassinate Castro.
Leading figures of organized crime who felt double-crossed because Bobby was pursuing them avidly despite their having poured money into JFK’s presidential campaign at the behest of Joe Kennedy.
Texas oilmen who feared the loss of the oil-depletion allowance that made them rich, who also loathed the Kennedys’ politics, and who were LBJ’s allies and benefactors.
Cuban exiles who felt betrayed because JFK didn’t authorize air support for the Bay of Pigs operation and thus — in their mistaken view — caused it to fail.
Putting it all together:
LBJ set the assassination in motion.
Key officials of the CIA and FBI set it up, with some assists by LBJ (e.g., the scheduling of the trip to Dallas).
Lee Harvey Oswald was brought into the plot by the CIA as the unwitting fall guy.
Jack Ruby, known to LBJ and mob-connected, silenced Oswald after his contrived arrest.
The orchestrators and actors of the assassination — aside from LBJ and key officials of the CIA and FBI — included the Mafia; Cuban exiles; Mac Wallace, LBJ’s personal hit man; and a large cast obedient if not fully clued-in members of various institutions: CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and Dallas Police Department. (George H.W. Bush, then a CIA asset may have been involved in the recruitment of Oswald.)
The report of the Warren Commission became the official story, regardless of its many omissions and evidentiary failings. (Gerald Ford played a key role in ensuring that the “lone gunman” theory became the official story.)
None of this is new to anyone who had done much reading about the assassination of JFK and the various investigations into it and theories about it. I am more open to the possibility of a conspiracy to kill JFK than I was eight years ago, when I concluded that Oswald acted alone:
I recently watched the NOVA production, Cold Case JFK, which documents the application of current forensic technology to the 50-year-old case. The investigators’ give a convincing explanation of the shooting in Dallas. The explanation supports the original “verdict” of the Warren Report: Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone shooter. He, and only he, fired the shots that killed JFK and wounded John Connally, then governor of Texas. The NOVA program moves me from “reasonable doubt” to “beyond a reasonable doubt,” with respect to who shot JFK and how.
Even then, there was a reasonable doubt in my mind:
The only conspiracy theory that might still be worth considering is the idea that Oswald was gunning for JFK because he was somehow maneuvered into doing so by LBJ, the CIA, Fidel Castro, the Mafia, or the Russians. (See, for example, Philip Shenon’s “‘Maybe We Missed Something’: Warren Commission Insider Publicly Concedes That JFK Assassination Was Likely a Conspiracy,” The Washington Post, September 22, 2014, republished in The National Post.) The murder of Oswald by Ruby conveniently plays into that theory. But I say that the burden of proof is on conspiracy theorists, for whom the obvious is not titillating enough. The obvious is Oswald — a leftist loser and less-than-honorably discharged Marine with a chip on his shoulder, a domineering mother, an unhappy home life, and a menial job. In other words, the kind of loser with a gun who now appears almost daily in the news, having slaughtered family members, former co-workers, or random strangers.
Thinking back on the PBS show, I am chagrined by my readiness to accept a story advanced by what Elon Musk rightly calls a state-run media outlet. The same chagrin applies to the final sentence of the preceding quotation, which have nothing to do with the physical evidence for or against Oswald’s role in the assassination.
Nor is the burden of proof on the conspiracy theorists. The Warren Commission’s report has been shown to contain as many holes as a sieve. The real burden of proof is — or should be — on the defenders of the official (Warren Commission) story.
The official story conveniently places the blame for the murder of JFK on one dead man. He is long beyond the reach of the justice. But even if he had been brought to trial, that trial would have been contrived to convict him and send him to the electric chair. Appeals would have been of no avail, because appellate judges would have been eager to support the government’s case and discredit talk of a conspiracy involving high officials of the government.
Why would judges (and other officials with no part in the conspiracy) support the government’s case? The groundwork for incuriosity was laid in the hours after the assassination. LBJ himself instigated the idea that there might be an international conspiracy of some kind, involving Cubans and Russians. It wasn’t in the “national interest” to poke too deeply into the assassination because revealing the role of the Russians/Cubans would lead to a heightening of already tense relations with the USSR (of which Cuba was a protectorate), possibly leading to nuclear war.
It was (and still is) the credo of government officials (not just cops) that their authority must not be challenged or questioned. (This has been demonstrated amply in recent years, with government officials striving to suppress dissenting views about COVID masking, COVID vaccinations, the nature of the January 6 riot, the long-standing plot against Trump, and the Biden influence-peddling scheme.)
To allow the official story to be challenged is to allow the legitimacy of government and its institutions to be challenged. Blind institutional loyalty runs especially deep in the CIA and FBI, both of which are like secret societies with much to hide from public view.
All of that is baked inside the paternalistic-fearful attitude of government officials toward the citizenry: We know what’s best for you, so we try to shield you from the “ugly facts”, which might frighten you and cause you to act rashly. Besides, if you know too much you’ll understand how corrupt and incompetent we really are, and then we’ll lose our grip on power — and possibly our wealth and freedom.
And so it goes, unto the present day.
Related: Obamagate and Beyond