On the competing interpretations of the president’s assassination.
Last week the U.S. National Archives released some 13,000 documents connected to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. These documents are unlikely to contain new information that would disclose who might or might not have been involved in the assassination, or whether JFK was killed as part of a wider conspiracy against the United States. After all, anyone in government involved in such a conspiracy would not permit documentary evidence to be saved in agency files. In addition, it is certain that all such files would have been reviewed and (if necessary) cleansed on the day Kennedy was shot.
Nevertheless, the release of the files has revived popular and irrepressible theories that the president was the victim of a plot engineered by right-wingers in Dallas or by anti-Kennedy groups in the cia or fbi. Tucker Carlson has advanced such a theory in a recent television broadcast, suggesting that, in view of the latest interventions by the cia into national politics, the intelligence agency may have been involved as well in the assassination of JFK. Carlson pointed skeptically to the many coincidences in the assassination and the curious involvement of a cia-related psychiatrist in evaluating Jack Ruby while he (Ruby) was being held for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Others on both the right and left have joined in to support these claims, none of which is supported by the available evidence that demonstrates that Lee Harvey Oswald shot the president, and probably did so on his own.
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James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in The New Criterion