Life-Changing Books - Part Two

Posner's Case Closed on Oswald and the assassination of JFK

"Stencil of Lee Harvey Oswald" by Max Sparber is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Part one is available here

Conspiracy theories about the murder of John F. Kennedy were very close to becoming mainstream in the mid-1990s. Oliver Stone had released his bombastic film JFK in 1991. The 30th anniversary of Kennedy’s death fell in 1993. Meanwhile, dark comedy star Bill Hicks had died in 1994 and his comedy CDs were spreading fast by word of mouth. Speculation about Kennedy’s murder was a running theme to his act. Polls showed (and continue to show) widespread distrust of the official investigation into the murder.

I trained as a journalist in 1995 and managed to break into the industry the same year, specializing as a financial journalist at the beginning of 1996. A friend of mine from journalism school was very obsessed by Hicks and JFK conspiracy theories. I caught the bug and decided to look into it. I remember being very agnostic about the speculation. As a philosophy graduate, suspending judgement seemed an obvious attitude to take at the beginning.

Luckily, American history professor Eric Homberger is a family friend. I asked his advice about good books on the subject. He said I should start with Case Closed by Gerald Posner. It was a great choice and became one of the few books that I can say has genuinely changed my life. (Thanks, Eric!)

Posner is an investigative journalist with a legal background and a ruthless attention to detail. Case Closed, first published in 1993, works largely as a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald. A juvenile delinquent, he was diagnosed as being emotionally disturbed. He later joined the US Marines, where he was court-martialled twice. He then defected to the Soviet Union, but didn’t get on and returned to the US, where he moved to Dallas. He tried and failed to kill retired U.S. Major General Edwin Walker in 1963, but got away with the attempt. Later that year, he got a job at the Texas School Book Depositary. Within a couple of months, several newspapers said that Kennedy’s motorcade would pass by the building. He hid a rifle on the sixth floor. We know the rest.

Posner’s book keeps the focus entirely on Oswald. He piles detail onto detail. By the end of it, the reader is left with a strong sense that the emotionally disturbed former Marine really was guilty. Posner introduces the JFK conspiracy theorists towards the end. After his detailed investigation of Oswald, their flakiness and poor methodology is breath-taking. Their speculation only works by taking Oswald’s claim to be a “patsy” at face value and then quickly changing the subject. Years later, we would see the same sleight of hand with 9-11 conspiracy theorists, who are often very reluctant to talk about Al Qaeda or Islamist extremism.

Why do so many of us find Oswald’s probable guilt emotionally unsatisfying? Many years later, when I was researching the Sharpen Your Axe project, I found an interesting answer in a good book called Suspicious Minds. The author, psychologist Rob Brotherton, suggests that a quirk of our brains involves proportionality bias. This suggests that we expect momentous events to have momentous causes. It isn’t a bad rule of thumb, he suggests. For example, the development of the first nuclear bomb really was the result of the Manhattan Project, with 130,000 people spending billions of government dollars during seven years. Sometimes, however, someone who might seem insignificant to many really can change the course of history.

It is worth contrasting Case Closed with All the President’s Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. The authors were the news reporters at the Washington Post, who broke many key stories in the Watergate affair. US President Richard Nixon was forced to resign after it emerged that he had been spying on his rivals in the Democratic Party. The difference between the reporters, who really did reveal a conspiracy, and the theorists, who failed to do so in the case of JFK, hinges on one key element: Methodology.

The theorists start with a big, sweeping narrative, cherry-pick evidence or pseudo-evidence that seems to fit and disregard any inconvenient facts. Meanwhile, Bernstein and Woodward did the opposite in their historic investigation. They started off cultivating mutiple sources of information. They slowly built a case, without knowing where it would end. Their stories ended up having an impact in the real world.

To finish off, I would like to mention two further books on conspiracy theories for anyone looking to do a deep dive into the material. One is A Culture of Conspiracy by Michael Barkun, a political scientist. He explores the links between conspiracy theories and fringe views in great detail. Finally, I mentioned The Origins of Totalitarianism by political theorist Hannah Arendt last week, but it is worth mentioning again in the new context. She shows, in painstaking detail, how a conspiratorial mindset can lead to very poor results. See you next week!

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the critical-thinking rabbit hole.

[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.