Among the Truthers (6 page)

McCarthy's career was brief: He would flame out into political disgrace, alcoholism, and an early death in the space of just a few years. But his impact on American politics was immense. With his theatrics and accusations, he turned populist conspiracism into a major force within conservative politics, something no politician had managed to do in generations. “He was the conservatives' first insurrectionist,” Sam Tanenhaus wrote in his 2009 book
The Death of Conservatism
. “His cry of ‘20 years of treason' drew on the banked passions of the Right, America First isolationists, small-business men, Catholic organizations.” (Though one should not overlook the grain of truth in his assertions—despite the mendacity of his trumped-up charges, there were in fact Communist agents in the U.S. government, as later revelations would confirm.) This insurrectionist flame would dim during the latter part of the twentieth century. But like a pilot light in the gas oven of American politics, it never died out completely. Fifty years later, fed by the raw fuel of Barack Obama, the health care debate, a major recession, and the war on terror, conservative insurrectionists roared back to life in the form of Birthers, the Tea Party movement, and a rageaholic blogosphere.

McCarthy had help, however. If he was the insurrectionists' martyred Jesus, a retired candy manufacturer named Robert Welch was their Paul.

In December of 1958, a year after McCarthy's death, Welch invited eleven of his like-minded friends to a two-day meeting in Indianapolis, where he set out his vision for a new organization that would arrest the world's slide into “darkness, slavery and terror.” Within two years, the group had a membership approaching one hundred thousand Americans, most of them the sort of suburban types who might otherwise spend their evenings at bridge clubs and bowling leagues. Welch named his group after John Birch, a Baptist missionary killed by Chinese communists in August 1945—a man widely claimed to be the first American victim of the Cold War.

In fairness to Welch and his John Birch Society (which is still around today, albeit in diminished form), the communist menace was very real in the late 1950s—and the Soviets truly
were
seeking to conquer the world with their totalitarian ideology. But as with McCarthy, fear turned into paranoid hallucination. “This octopus is so large that its tentacles now reach into all of the legislative halls, all of the union labor meetings, a majority of the religious gatherings, and most of the schools
of the whole world
,” Welch wrote in
The Blue Book of The John Birch Society
, a volume given to all new JBS members. “It has a central nervous system which can make its tentacles in the labor unions of Bolivia, in the farmers' cooperatives of Saskatchewan, in the caucuses of the Social Democrats of West Germany, and in the class rooms of the Yale Law School, all retract or reach forward simultaneously. It can make all of these creeping tentacles turn either right or left, or a given percentage turn right while the others turn left at the same time, in accordance with the intentions of a central brain in Moscow or Ust' Kamenogorsk.”

More than two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, much of the material in Welch's
Blue Book
reads like dated Cold War propaganda—a trip down memory lane to a time when groups like the Committee to Investigate Communist Influences at Vassar College, and Women Against Labor Union Hoodlumism were still going concerns. Yet great swathes of it easily could be copied and pasted into modern conspiracist tracts, or used word for word as Glenn Beck talking points, without seeming in any way out of place. Multilateralism, for instance, is denounced in Welch's book as a plot “to induce the gradual surrender of American sovereignty, piece by piece and step by step, to various international organizations—of which the United Nations is the outstanding but far from the only example . . . until one day we shall gradually realize that we are already just a part of a world-wide government.”

Over time, Welch's views became increasingly bizarre. He accused Dwight Eisenhower's brother Milton, for instance, of being the president's secret communist overlord—and came to believe that communism itself was just a front group for an even more sinister Master Conspiracy involving the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Bilderbergers, and (of course) the Illuminati. But by that time, right-wing conspiracism already had attained a perch in respectable middle-class civil society—a significant achievement for the insurrectionists at a time before cable television and deregulated talk radio had opened up the airwaves to political radicals.

D
uring the 1950s, the paranoid style Hofstadter described was most evident on the right side of the American political spectrum—a combined manifestation of Cold War hysteria, Americans' traditional fear of big government, and a lingering conservative backlash against the massive expansion of Washington's powers that had begun with the income tax amendment of 1913 and then crested with FDR's New Deal. The main focus of conspiracists was Soviet communism—though some right-wing groups, such as the John Birch Society, found innovative ways to graft on old crusades against freemasons, Illuminati, and “international bankers.”

This would change in the space of seconds on November 22, 1963. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, in the succinct description of author Thomas Powers, was likely “the greatest single traumatic event” America had ever experienced. More than one million Americans were moved to write condolence letters to Jacqueline Kennedy in the months after the assassination. “Twenty-six years of escaping from Hitler—growing up in wartime China fleeing from communism—watching my father's futile struggle against cancer—seeing my roommate killed in an automobile accident—all these I deemed adequate preparation for some of life's bitter moments,” wrote a typical letter writer named Gabriele Gidion. “Yet NEVER, until last Friday, have I felt such a desperate sense of loss and loneliness.”

It was also the single-most-studied nonreligious instant in human history. By one estimate made in the early 1990s, two thousand books had been written about the killing. And to this day, new offerings still appear on bookshelves—including, most spectacularly, a 1,648-page doorstopper from former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi that was more than two decades in the making. As James Piereson wrote in his 2007 book
Camelot and the Cultural Revolution
:
How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism
, Americans' enduring obsession with the event, their speculation about how history might have played out had JFK survived, and the mind-boggling array of theories put forward to explain the murder all serve to demonstrate that “the assassination was never fully digested by the generation that lived through it.”

Given that JFK's killer was a Marxist and a vocal supporter of Fidel Castro, one might have expected that the president's assassination would have generated a backlash against socialism, and the Left more generally. But as Piereson notes, the opposite happened: “In the aftermath of the assassination, left-wing ideas and revolutionary leaders—Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Castro foremost among them—enjoyed a greater vogue in the United States than at any other time in our history . . . It is one of the ironies of recent history that many of those young people who filed in shocked grief past the president's coffin in 1963 would just a few years later embrace as political activists the very doctrines that drove Oswald to assassinate him.”

In effect, many American leftists dealt with the emotional agony of JFK's murder—exacerbated as it was by the killings of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy five years later—by convincing themselves that, in some cosmic sense, it wasn't actually a fellow traveler who was responsible, but rather some fundamental defect in the United States itself. The
New York Times
editorial board, for instance, wrote of “the shame all America must bear for the spirit of madness and hate that struck down President John F. Kennedy.” According to this strain of thinking, Oswald, though nominally a communist, was somehow channeling the spirit of bigotry, violence, and hatred of change typically harbored by the reactionary
Right
. New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, for instance, declared that “Oswald would have been more at home with
Mein Kampf
than
Das Kapital
.”

Or was Oswald even the assassin? From the notion that the man was a spiritual stand-in for the conservative forces arrayed against liberalism, it was but a short jump to the notion that the assassination was just the last act of a conspiracy hatched by the CIA, big business, the U.S. military, or hawkish Cuban exiles—“an attempted coup d'état by the forces of political reaction, racism, and unbridled militarism” in the words of one Marxist quoted in the
New York Times
. And when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated five years later, the radicalized Left viewed the events through the same distorted lens: Both murders generated their own elaborate conspiracist mythology—as did the attempted assassination of George Wallace in 1972, and the killing of Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969. Many Americans came to believe that these events had all been set in motion by the same group of people. As Allard Lowenstein wrote in the classic 1976 conspiracist anthology
Government by Gunplay
(coedited by one-time Bill Clinton aide Sid Blumenthal), “The last three presidential elections were distorted by bullets. If somewhere there are groups and organizations that have aborted the electoral process for political purposes—and could do so again—the rest of us may be characters in a charade.”

Naturally, these same murderous conspirators were assumed to be powerful enough to cover their tracks: Just as the 9/11 Commission Report has been dismissed by Truthers as a corrupt cover-up, so was the report of the Warren Commission denounced following its publication in 1964. By Bugliosi's estimate, 95 percent of the books about JFK's assassination that have appeared since his death allege some form of conspiracy to kill the president. Most of these also assumed the existence of a
second
conspiracy—to cover up the first one.

It is thanks to this second imagined conspiracy, as much as the first, that America's mania for conspiracism took off in the 1960s. For it is one thing to suppose that Oswald had help in killing JFK: Even the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded as much (based primarily on a dubious analysis of a police audio recording, which suggested that a coconspirator had fired a gun from the grassy knoll). But it is another completely to suggest that some of the most influential and accomplished figures in America would conspire to sweep this epic crime under the carpet. In this theory, as Bugliosi writes, “such distinguished Americans as Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senator John Sherman Cooper and Richard B. Russell, Representatives Gerald Ford and Hale Boggs, former CIA director Allen Dulles and former president of the World Bank John J. McCloy . . . as well as the Commission's general counsel, J. Lee Rankin, a former solicitor general of the United States, and 14 prominent members of the American Bar . . . people of impeccable honor and reputation, got together in some smoky backroom and
all
of them agreed, for some ungodly reason, to do the most dishonorable deed imaginable—give [the assassins] a free pass in the murder of the president of the United States. And in the process, not only risk destroying everything they had worked for—their reputation and legacy to their families—but expose themselves to prosecution for the crime of accessory after the fact to murder.”

Told in this way, it seems preposterous. And yet millions of Americans came to believe it—mostly for the simple reason that the idea of a lone extremist single-handedly bringing down the most powerful man in the world and changing the face of Cold War geopolitics was simply too astonishing to contemplate. Moreover, as with virtually all conspiracy theories, there was a grain of truth lodged within the dissidents' arguments: The shooting attributed to Oswald truly was a fantastic feat of marksmanship—even if not, strictly speaking, impossible. The single-bullet theory provided by the Warren Commission—according to which a single, serially deflected round from Oswald's rifle caused all the various wounds to Texas Governor John Connally, plus the nonfatal wounds to JFK—also seems odd. Both anomalies explain why surveys of ordinary Americans taken from the 1960s onward have showed that about two-thirds believe the killing was “part of a larger conspiracy.”

It is impossible to overstate how influential the legacy of JFK's murder has been in the formation of the flourishing and variegated conspiracist subcultures of later decades: If government officials weren't going to tell us the truth about something as important as the assassination of JFK, what
wouldn't
they lie about?

JFK conspiracism, unlike many of its main historical precursors, was no mob phenomenon: It came to pervade the West's educated classes. In 1964, for example, no less acclaimed a philosopher and logician than Bertrand Russell, radicalized by his years of railing against nuclear weapons and American policy in Southeast Asia, published
16 Questions On the Assassination
, in which he asked the following:

  1. Why were all the members of the Warren Commission closely connected with the U.S. Government?

  2. If, as we are told, Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?

  3. If the Government is so certain of its case, why has it conducted all its inquiries in the strictest secrecy?

  4. Why did the Warren Commission not establish a panel to deal with the question of who killed President John F. Kennedy?

  5. Why have so many liberals abandoned their own responsibility to a Commission whose circumstances they refuse to examine?