JFK, Peruvian aliens, life on other planets
And the power of story
Who killed JFK, part 102,327
In the days when I was doing literary festivals to talk about my book on conspiracy theories Voodoo Histories, one question would invariably be asked by someone in the audience, and usually in a hopeful tone: “are there any conspiracy theories that you looked into and discovered were actually true?” There was one – the Lavon Affair of 1954, where Israeli agents planted bombs in US and British owned civilian targets in Egypt (timed to explode when the buildings were empty), in the hope that these would be blamed on Egyptian nationalists.
But otherwise the boot was on the other foot. There were several I had thought were true, that I realised were simply not. One was the accusation (often still taught as fact in schools) that the 1933 Reichstag fire was actually the work of the Nazis, who committed the act so it could be used as an excuse for the wholesale destruction of civil liberties. And also, like just about anyone else of my generation, I had believed that the assassination of JFK, sixty years ago next month was the work of a complex conspiracy and Lee Harvey Oswald was (in my mother’s words) “a patsy”. Working on the book it became obvious to me that this wasn’t the case. Oswald did it in his own.
There is virtually no organisation or nation that was around at the time that has not been accused by someone of complicity in the Kennedy murder. And, naturally, this being a big anniversary, there is a new book out whose publication led to the headline in the magazine Vanity Fair, A New JFK Assassination Revelation Could Upend the Long-Held “Lone Gunman” Theory. Again.
In the New York Times this became J.F.K. Assassination Witness Breaks His Silence and Raises New Questions. “Now, 60 years later,” wrote Peter Baker, the illustrious chief White House correspondent for the NYT “Paul Landis, one of the Secret Service agents just feet away from President John F. Kennedy on that fateful day in Dallas, is telling his story in full for the first time.” Or was he? Because as Baker himself wrote further down the piece:
As with all things related to the assassination, of course, his account raises questions of its own. Mr. Landis remained silent for 60 years, which has fueled doubts even for his former Secret Service partner, and memories are tricky even for those sincerely certain of their recollections. A couple elements of his account contradict the official statements he filed with authorities immediately after the shooting, and some of the implications of his version cannot be easily reconciled to the existing record.
But he was there, a firsthand witness, and it is rare for new testimony to emerge six decades after the fact. He has never subscribed to the conspiracy theories and stresses that he is not promoting one now. At age 88, he said, all he wants is to tell what he saw and what he did. He will leave it to everyone else to draw conclusions.
That “but” at the start of par two is doing some mighty work. There is a very good argument for reversing those two paragraphs altogether and positioning Baker’s but so as to read, “but as with all things related”. Because, to be clear about it, Landis now claims to recall things he didn’t recall at the time in his contemporary statements or at any point subsequently, and in one case contradicts those statements. And even if the main new claim he makes were true – that he was the finder of the so-called “magic bullet” then, as the author and historian Gerald Posner points out, it doesn’t shed new light on the assassination itself. Posner’s assessment of Landis‘s new claims is here:
Frankly, we don’t need a conspiracy
The assassination literature is so vast that summarising it seems impossible, but my extended moment of enlightenment came when I realised that there didn’t need to be another theory of who shot JFK. I thank Posner’s Case Closed and Vincent Bugliosi’s immense 2007 work, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Bugliosi prosecuted Charles Manson after the Tate murders in 1969 and wrote the subsequent account of the Manson “family” Helter Skelter) in the main for this insight.