JFK conspiracy theories won’t be killed off

One of the most controversial things that can happen at any American table is to start talking about the JFK assassination and then say: “I think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.”

Thanks to decades of theories, counter-theories and Hollywood movies, a majority of the American public have for many years believed that there was a conspiracy to kill the 35th president. In their view, even if Lee Harvey Oswald was the gunman (which some dispute) then he must have been acting as part of a larger plot involving the CIA, FBI, LBJ, KGB, KKK or KFC.

OK, I threw in the last one to check you were still with me.

President Donald Trump’s decision to release the remaining classified US government files on the 1963 killing was always going to cause interest. But the results of the publication have so far been a lesson for conspiracy theorists everywhere – although it’s a lesson they are unlikely to take.

Because conspiracy theories never fully go away. Even now there are claims of redactions, withheld documents and more. Trump’s data dump appears to have been slightly hasty, because some of the details which were redacted in previous releases (such as people’s Social Security numbers) have unwisely been released to the public. Lawsuits against the government by some of those affected will inevitably follow.

Even this unredacted document dump does not include anything you might call “a smoking gun.” Unless it relates to the gun that was known about within minutes of its being fired in November 1963: that is, the gun which belonged to Lee Harvey Oswald, was fired by Lee Harvey Oswald, and which Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife noticed was missing that morning.

Oswald fired three shots at the president’s motorcade from the Texas School Book Depository. He fired them from the sixth-floor window – where multiple people in the crowd saw the gunman. A colleague of Oswald’s on the fifth floor heard his shell cases hitting the floor after Oswald fired and before Oswald hastily fled the building, leaving his gun behind.

The parts of the files which the US government appear to have wanted to protect do not reveal a nefarious plot within the deep state. They mainly seem to have been part of an effort by the authorities to withhold specific operational information, especially regarding the extent to which the CIA and others had been monitoring Oswald’s activities. Oswald – a self-declared communist – had tried to defect to the USSR while in Moscow (where he also tried to kill himself) and tried to claim political asylum in Cuba. The fact that he was on the radar of US intelligence does not seem that surprising.

It’s also not surprising that the CIA would want to cover over the methods by which they tracked this Marine Corps-trained sharp-shooter. But that secrecy gave rise to a whole industry that believes the CIA itself must have been behind the assassination.

The belief always required some mental gymnastics. After all, the CIA is either super-competent, can kill an elected US president and everybody involved keeps his mouth shut for more than half a century; or it is wildly lucky, and got away with using a mentally unbalanced loner to shoot a president and then arranging for a mentally unbalanced strip-club owner, Jack Ruby, to kill him in turn. If you were an intelligence agency planning to kill the president, is that the team you would put together?

It turns out that the facts that we know in 2025 are almost exactly the ones that the Dallas police discerned within hours of the assassination in 1963. But this will not satisfy some people. JFK’s nephew – RFK Jr. – is among the high-profile figures in America who have previously claimed that evidence of CIA involvement is “overwhelming.” With all due respect to the new US health secretary, I have never quite understood how he can believe that his father and uncle were killed by the Deep State: if I believed that two family members had been knocked off by the government of the country I lived in, I would be inclined to get out of there pretty sharpish.

Conspiracy theories are certainly spread when mainstream voices play with them, and in some cases literally profit off them. But they also metastasize when an era learns that some conspiracies are actually true.

For instance, we have recently learned that as early as March 2020 a former head of MI6 told the British government that it was “beyond reasonable doubt” that the Covid-19 virus “was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Some readers will remember that back in those same days the US and UK governments continued to insist that the virus came from a Chinese wet-market and that the lab-leak theory was not only racist but also a conspiracy theory.

What are the consequences when things that have been called conspiracy theories turn out to be true? It is almost guaranteed that you will see a growing expectation that a whole set of other “facts” will fall apart next. All this raises the question of what happens to a society in which conspiracy theories run rife. The online world is often blamed for the current spread of conspiracy- thinking. In truth, that is just a procedural explanation for a deep human instinct: the need to find patterns and reason in a uni- verse which may have neither.

Princess Diana’s death gave rise to conspiracy theories because some people could not reconcile themselves with the idea that even the most famous person in the world could die in a car crash. It seems equally difficult for some people to reconcile themselves to the idea that even the most protected person on the planet could be killed by a crazed loner.

We know it is hard to understand complex explanations in life. The JFK conspiracies show that many people find it equally hard to accept the straightforward ones.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2025 World edition.