Johnson, lay behind the assassination is preposterous. Yet to believe – as 20% of Americans supposedly did according to a 2003 poll – that Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon B. Conspiracy theorists share with historians the assumption that to understand power we need to look beneath the surface conspiracies themselves can be very real. When we are bombarded by dodgy dossiers, Wikileaks, and the Snowden revelations, mistrust in government is rife. A recent poll found 61% of Americans believe he did not kill Kennedy alone. Before long, the list of suspects exceeded even The Onion’s fantastical list, and thanks to books, film, and the interstices of the internet, doubts about Oswald’s sole guilt have spread. Incapable of accepting the findings of the government’s Warren Commission, which had concluded a lone gunman – Lee Harvey Oswald – fired the fatal shots – sceptics strove to illuminate the shadowy network that they were convinced had orchestrated the assassination. The death of a president breathed life into conspiracy theory. Sandwiched somewhere in-between the sinking of the Titanic (‘ World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-berg’) and misadventures in the Middle East (‘ Iran Has the Car Bomb’) stands the headline for November 22, 1963: ‘ Kennedy slain by CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemasons.’ JFK was shot, the subheading declared, ‘129 Times from 43 Different Angles.’ A few years ago, the publishers of the leading satirical newspaper in the U.S., The Onion, brought out a collection of historic front pages from the twentieth century.
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