Now that spring break is over, I’ve got some time to get caught up with the [checks feedback tab] two pieces of non-spam letters that are in the mailbag. Tonight I’ll tackle the lighter of the two.

“Paranoid Lunatic” (name changed to protect identity) asks, “What do you think about the JFK assassination files?”

A long time ago I had a coworker who was a little too interested in the JFK assassination. Not “too interested” as in “I reported him to the feds and got his house bugged because he was too close to the truth,” but rather in the sense that his interest seemed to make him unnecessarily frustrated with the world. Like Jim Garrison if he’d never managed to sell his story and show up in a blockbuster hagiography about himself.

One day I asked him, and I hope he took it to heart, if George W. Bush [President at the time and son of one of the hundreds of alleged conspirators] gave you all the info the government had on the JFK assassination, right now, would you trust that he told you everything and that it was true?

He said he wouldn’t.

I asked if there was anything our government could do at this point, 40-some years after the assassination, to make him believe that they were telling him everything?

He said probably not.

And then I said, “You’ve basically acknowledged that you’ll never be content with any files the government gives you, because they’ve had so long to destroy and redact and tamper with them. And they’ve been so untrustworthy over so many things for so long, before and after JFK died, that even if they told the truth, you’d think they were crying wolf. So why worry so much about it, except to drive yourself nuts?”

All of that is to say, “I don’t care about the JFK files because they’ve had so long to destroy and redact and tamper with them. I’ll drive myself nuts over other stuff.”

With that out of the way, here are my two JFK conspiracy theories.

1. Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone. This made many people in our government look incompetent and stupid. The people who should have been following more leads on Oswald, or scouting the parade route a lot better, or overriding Kennedy’s decision to leave the top down were actually doing other stuff and wanted to cover that up. The “other stuff” may have been legitimate or not. It could have been getting info on Castro or Vietnam, or it could have been getting liquored up and gambling away expense accounts during “investigations” into family-owned casinos. Whatever it was, it wasn’t “keeping some communist loser from blowing JFK’s brains out.” People want to keep their jobs, thus the coverups and the appearance of conspiracy.
2. Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone. He did it because he was a communist and JFK was an anticommunist. But our government realized very early on that if they put too much emphasis on the actual reason Oswald did it, then the American people would start blaming Khrushchev or Castro, and the war drums soon would sound. Everybody remembered the Cuban Missile Crisis, nobody was in the mood for another run at nuclear Armageddon, so there was a semi-concerted effort to downplay the communist angle and allow people to let their imaginations run wild. Could the Cubans or Soviets have done it? Sure. But so could the mob. Or the Freemasons. Or the Klan. Or the Cigarette-Smoking Man. Or the limo driver. Or the aliens. Or Mysterious Organization X. Or just the city of Dallas in general, given its reputation as a “city of hate.” Or some bizarre alliance between LBJ, Nixon, and Bush 41 (Yale grad), who were all in Dallas that day. Does it matter that none of these angles pan out? No. It matters that nobody’s calling for a retaliatory nuclear war against the Soviets.

TL/DR: it looks like there was a conspiracy because everyone went into CYA mode and because the government didn’t want a nuclear war.

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Very tired. Will edit later and address the rest of the mailbag.