The case for Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. By Matthew Yglesias

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The case for Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. By Matthew Yglesias

11 - 13 minutes

There’s a deep connection between conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and the Russian government that goes back to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and reverberates to the present day.

It’s an interesting nexus, because while there are many strands of ethnic hatred in the world, there’s something distinctive about the tendency of antisemitism to take on a conspiratorial form. Recently, for example, Stew Peters claimed that the OceanGate submarine was deliberately sunk in order to prevent people from visiting the wreck of the Titanic. Peters was expanding on an older conspiracy (which went viral on Facebook back in 2021) that John Pierpont Morgan didn’t sail on the maiden voyage of the Titanic despite owning the ship because he deliberately sank it in order to murder several prominent businessmen who, allegedly, would have stopped the creation of the Federal Reserve (which he favored). Peters and his guest, Zach Vorhies, updated the theory by arguing that there’s a Rothschild connection to the sub.

I think of this whole genre of conspiracy theory as kind of like a slime mold. It starts with something that catches people’s interest and spreads tendrils until it can “connect the dots” to some cabal of Jewish bankers — classically the Rothschilds, more recently George Soros — manipulating events behind the scenes.

What we have here, fundamentally, is antisemitism as the socialism of fools, a way to try to convince people that their discontents with actually existing market capitalism are due to the manipulations of bad actors. That’s why even though Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have any personal problem with Jewish people, his movement is shot-through with antisemites — when you try to square the circle of populist politics with an agenda of tax cuts and deregulation, something needs to provide the connective tissue. Charles Maurras, the founder of the far-right Action Française, said that antisemitism “enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over and simplified.”

That’s one reason I’m sincerely sad to see Robert Kennedy Jr. and his circle showing up more frequently on these shows and associating with QAnon types. It’s easy to see, biographically, how a guy who starts out interested in conspiracies about the assassinations of his father and uncle could end up adjacent to all kinds of other conspiracies. But I’ve always had a warm place in my heart for Kennedy conspiracy theories, precisely because they don’t typically take on an antisemitic form and instead have an almost constructive, pro-social aspect to them.

Oliver Stone’s “JFK” is probably the most well-known Kennedy conspiracy text in the contemporary United States. It was a hit movie and remains well-regarded — they featured it on The Rewatchables with Brian Koppelman as a special guest. The movie has the thesis, more or less, that a nefarious military-industrial cabal assassinated Kennedy in order to prevent the removal of American troops from Vietnam.

I am sincerely not read up on the literature regarding the Warren Commission or other related matters, but I think the political project here is really easy to understand. Lyndon Johnson is one of the giants of American political history — he signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and created Medicare and Medicaid. He’s second only to Lincoln in his record on racial justice, arguably outdoes even FDR in terms of the development of the welfare state, and almost as an afterthought, he laid the groundwork for the entire modern edifice of gender discrimination law. But he also largely oversaw America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

Kennedy’s enduring popularity with people of a certain age is just impossible to process on the basis of his actual meager accomplishments in office. But if you dissect the history of 1961–1968 and attribute the good parts to the martyred Kennedy and the bad parts to LBJ, then you can tell a nice, clean story. Positing that Kennedy had a plan to end the war that was deliberately sabotaged by a conspiracy “enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over and simplified.” And it’s not even an antisemitic conspiracy theory! On the contrary, the canonical paranoid view of the CIA posits the conspirators — as in this clip from “The Good Shepard” — as the pinnacle of WASP-dom looking down on the midcentury liberal coalition of Jews, Catholics, and African Americans.

In the lesser-known sequel “Nixon,” Stone extends the story. His version of Nixon is haunted by the suspicion that a special group he set up to take down Fidel Castro while serving as vice president is behind a lot of bad stuff. He thinks they killed JFK, and Bobby, too. He thinks they killed Martin Luther King, Jr, and probably other people as well. He thinks they might even kill him.

I doubt that this is true, but it’s a way of making sense of a big question for Boomer liberals — what went wrong in the 1970s? — that delivers a satisfying answer.

A non-trivial number of older liberals I’ve known in my life have genuinely believed that American history would have played out very differently had RFK and MLK survived 1968. They believe that Kennedy would have secured the Democratic Party nomination, defeated Nixon, ended the Vietnam War, and leveraged the booming economy into re-election. That would have had ramifications for the Supreme Court and the ongoing expansion of the welfare state. But it also would have meant the “Southern Strategy” didn’t triumph and racial backlash politics didn’t set in.

Which relates, of course, to the MLK strand of this theory. Without King’s assassination, the 1968 riots don’t happen, which further lessens the backlash.

Indeed, Omar Wasow’s research — which is not a conspiracy theory — does say that King’s assassination, which was followed by riots and then an anti-riot backlash, was responsible for Nixon’s electoral victory. On this view, if King survives then so does the Great Society political coalition, whether headed by Kennedy or Hubert Humphrey. But more broadly, with King alive, the civil rights movement retains his late-in-life strong focus on class issues, which, in conjunction with Kennedy’s presence in the White House, makes concrete progress on specific legislation possible. It’s not like Republicans never win an election again in this world, but you probably avoid the turn we saw in the real world, where the left spent the ’70s and ’80s largely detached from electoral politics and instead focused on winning on-campus cultural struggles.

If you go back to the 1990s and read thinkers like Richard Rorty (“Achieving Our Country”) or Michael Tomasky (“Left for Dead”), there was this conviction that the whole progressive movement went astray somehow after ’68, losing its focus on concrete questions of justice in favor of academic squabbling. Academics themselves, of course, strongly favor structural explanations for big turns of events, but among people more inclined to see contingency in the world, it’s just tragic that several key charismatic leaders were murdered. Among people inclined to see human agency in the world, though, it looks awfully convenient that murdering these guys helped entrench the forces of conservatism. Maybe a little too convenient. Is it really credible that so much of consequence swung on a handful of lone gunmen?

Rorty and his works are pretty well known today, but because Tomasky was my first boss and I have a lot of affection for his book, I’m going to quote its 1997 jacket copy to give you a view of history that’s fallen out of fashion:

    There was once a familiar American left. Progressive unions, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, campaigns against poverty, war and other ills - all were recently a part of our national scene. Today all are faded or gone. Now, from Michael Tomasky, one of the most intelligent voices to emerge from the American left in years, comes a stirring challenge to our nation's progressive tradition. Left for Dead examines the troubling recent history and tenuous future of our nations' once-significant progressive movements, and makes an uncompromising study of how the left has been destroyed by its own contradictions and ills - and what must be done if there are any hopes for revival. With penetrating insight Tomasky uses revealing "case studies" to explore how today's left lost control of crucial issues such as welfare, immigration, affirmative action, and health care. It would be all too easy to blame the forces of the right for the left's slippage; but Tomasky explores how today's left has found its own way of “making enemies of everyone” — narrowly representing eccentrics, academic specialists and malcontents above the vast expanse of working-class Americans, whom it has come to regard with near-contempt. 

Something Michael Hobbes and others to my left like to say is that contemporary disputes about “wokeness” just recapitulate 1990s arguments about “political correctness,” which I don’t think is totally true. But as you can see from the Tomasky text, it’s not totally false either. The difference between me and Hobbes is that I think Tomasky’s diagnosis in the 1990s was basically correct, not an overhyped moral panic. And if you read the book, you’ll see many tropes that I echo today — including the emphasis on King’s economic vision, the view of affirmative action as politically toxic, self-serving academic politics, and the critique of insider jargon as a language of politics.

And while he’s not super-explicit about it, I think the book argues that the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and especially King had a substantive (and bad) causal impact on the trajectory of American politics.

As it happens, I think that’s true. I do not think it’s true that the death of John Kennedy had an important causal impact on the course of the war in Vietnam. But you can easily see why a person would want to believe that. In essence, you can construct a counterfactual history in which, absent the deaths of martyred leaders, we avoid the disaster of Vietnam, avoid the riots of 1968, avoid Nixon’s backlash politics, avoid the Watergate-induced collapse of faith in the American state, avoid the turn toward identity politics and academic obscurantism, and see a triumph of American social democracy.

This is where I think it’s useful to distinguish between the literal claims of a conspiracy theory and its larger meaning.

I don’t think it’s true that J.P. Morgan deliberately killed anyone over the creation of the Federal Reserve. But beyond that, the meaning of this conspiracy theory is that creating a central bank was a bad idea undertaken for nefarious reasons. And I don’t believe that at all. Even if convincing evidence emerged that the Titanic really was sunk to create the Fed, I wouldn’t change my mind about the idea of a central bank. Which is to say, I reject the conspiracy theory root and branch. By contrast, the larger meaning of the assassination conspiracies — that the Vietnam War was a mistake and that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. had an approach to politics that was far superior to that of their successors — is something that I agree with, so I’m almost always in sympathy with their proponents.