critical thinking about conspiracy theories

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CRITICAL THINKING ABOUT CONSPIRACY THEORIES

1. Introduction

Conspiracy theories play a major part in popular thinking about the way the world, especially the

political world, operates. And yet they have received curiously little attention from philosophers and

others with a professional interest in reasoning.[1] Though this situation is now starting to change, it is

the purpose of this paper to approach this topic from the viewpoint of critical thinking, to ask if there

are particular absences or deformities of critical thinking skills which are symptomatic of conspiracy

theorising, and whether better teaching of reasoning may guard against them.

That conspiracy thinking is widespread can be seen from any cursory examination of a bookshop or

magazine stand. There are not only large amounts of blatant conspiracy work, often dealing with

American political assassinations and other events or with the alleged presence of extraterrestrial

spacecraft, but also large amounts of writing where a certain degree of conspiracy thinking is more or

less implicit. Thus many alternative works of medicine, history, archaeology, technology, etc. often

depend upon claims, explicit or otherwise, that an establishment or orthodoxy conspires to suppress

alternative views. Orthodox medicine in cahoots with the multinational drug companies conspires to

suppress the claims of homeopathy, orthodox archaeologists through malice or blindness conspire to

suppress the truth about the construction of the Pyramids, and so on. It certainly seems to the

jaundiced observer that there is more of this stuff about then ever before.

However, conspiracy theorising is now coming to the attention of philosophers. That it has taken this

long may be because, as Brian Keeley says in a recent paper, most academics simply find the

conspiracy theories of popular culture to be silly and without merit. (1999: 109n) But I agree with

Keeleys further remark that it is incumbent upon philosophers to provide analysis of the errors

involved with common delusions, if that is indeed what they are. If a kind of academic snobbishness

underlies our previous refusal to get involved here, there may be another reason. Conspiracy

theorising, in political philosophy at least, has been identified with irrationality of the worst

sorthere the locus classicus may be some dismissive remarks made by Karl Popper in The Open

Society and its Enemies (Popper 1996, Vol.2: 94-9). Pigden (1993) shows convincingly that Poppers

remarks cannot be taken to support a rational presumption against conspiracy theories in history and

politics.

But certainly such a presumption exists, particularly amongst political commentators. It tends to

CRITICAL THINKING ABOUT CONSPIRACY THEORIES http://www.uea.ac.uk/~j097/CONSP01

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manifest itself in a noisy preference for what is termed the cock-up theory of historyan

unfortunate term that tends to assume that history is composed entirely of errors, accidents and

unforeseen consequences. If such a dismal state of affairs were indeed to be the case, then there would

seem to be no point in anybody trying to do anything. The cock-up theory, then, is agreeable to all

forms of quietism. But we have no reason to believe that there is such a coherent theory, and even less

reason to believe that every event must fall neatly into one or other category here; indeed, thisinsistence on black and white reasoning is, as we shall see, one of the features of conspiracy

theorising itself!

And what makes the self-satisfied cock-up stance even less acceptable is that it ignores the fact that

conspiracies are a very real part of our world. No serious historian denies that a somewhat amateurish

conspiracy lay behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, or that a more professional but sadly less

successful conspiracy attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the summer of 1944. Yet such is the

presumption behind the cock-up stance that the existence or frequency of genuine conspiracies is

often significantly downplayed. (How many people, taking at face value the cock-up theorists claim

that conspiracies are a real rarity in the modern history of democracies, do not know that a mere 13

years before President Kennedys assassination a serious terrorist conspiracy to murder Harry S.

Truman led to a fatal gunfight on the streets of Washington? [2] The cock-up presumption seems to

generate a kind of amnesia here.)

We require, then, some view of events that allows for the accidental and the planned, the deliberate

and the contingent: history as a tapestry of conspiracies and cock-ups and much intentional action that

is neither. Pigden (op.cit) satisfactorily demonstrates the unlikelihood of there being any adequate a

priori exclusion principle here, in the face of the reality of at least some real conspiracies. Keeleys

paper attempts a more rigorous definition of the phenomenon, hoping to separate what he terms

Unwarranted Conspiracy Theories (UCTs) from rational or warranted conspiratorial explanations:

It is thought that this class of explanation [UCTs] can be distinguished analytically from

those theories which deserve our assent. The idea is that we can do with conspiracy

theories what David Hume (1748) did with miracles: show that there is a class of

explanations to which we should not assent, by definition. (Keeley: 111)

and it is part of his conclusion that this task is not as simple as we might have heretofore imagined.(ibid.)

Keeley concludes that much of the intuitive problem with conspiracy theories is a problem with the

theorists themselves, and not a feature of the theories they produce (Ibid: 126) and it is this point I

want to take up in this paper. What sort of thinking goes on in arriving at UCTs and what sort of


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things go wrong? If we say that conspiracy theorists are irrational, do we mean only that they are

illogical in their reasoning? Or are there particular critical thinking skills missing or being misused?

2. Definitions

Keeleys use of the term Unwarranted Conspiracy Theory should not mislead us into thinking that allconspiracy theories fall into one or other category here. Warrant is a matter of degree, and so is

conspiracy. There are cases where a conspiratorial explanation is plainly rational; take, for instance,

the aforementioned July Bomb Plot to kill Hitler, where there is an abundance of historical evidence

about the conspirators and their aims. There are cases where such an explanation is clearly irrational: I

shall argue later in the paper that this is most probably the case for the assassination of President

Kennedy. And there are cases where some conspiratorial explanation may be warranted but it is hard

to know how far the warrant should extend.

Take, for instance, the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. There was

plainly a conspiracy to bring this about: some minutes before Gavril Princips shot the archduke, a

co-conspirator was arrested after throwing a bomb (which failed to explode) at the archdukes car.

Princips and his fellow students were Serbian nationalists, acting together to demonstrate against the

presence of Habsburg influence in the Balkans. But there remains the possibility that they had been

infiltrated and manipulated by Yugoslav intelligence elements seeking to provoke a crisis against

Austro-Hungary. And there are more extreme claims that the ultimate manipulators here were agents

of a world-wide conspiracy, of international Jewry or freemasonry seeking to bring about war. We are

fully warranted in adopting the first conspiratorial explanation, but perhaps only partially warranted in

thinking there is anything in the second claim[3], while the extreme claims seem to me to be as

unwarranted as anything could be.

What we require, then, is some definition which will mark off the kind of features which ought to lead

us to suspect the warrant of any particular conspiratorial explanation. Keeley lays out a series of these,

which I shall list and comment upon. But first he offers his definition of conspiracy theories in

general:

A conspiracy theory is a proposed explanation of some historical event (or events) in termsof the significant causal agency of a relatively small group of personsthe conspirators

acting in secret a conspiracy theory deserves the appellation theory because it

proffers an explanation of the event in question. It proposes reasons why the event

occurred [it] need not propose that the conspirators are all powerful, only that they have

played some pivotal role in bringing about the event indeed, it is because the


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conspirators are not omnipotent that they must act in secret, for if they acted in public,

others would move to obstruct them [and] the group of conspirators must be small,

although the upper bounds are necessarily vague.(116)

Keeleys definition here differs significantly from the kind of conspiracy at which Popper was aiming

in The Open Society, crude Marxist explanations of events in terms of capitalist manipulation. For one

can assume that in capitalist societies capitalists are very nearly all-powerful and not generallyhindered by the necessity for secrecy.

A greater problem for Keeleys definition, though, is that it seems to include much of the work of

central government. Indeed, it seems to define exactly the operations of cabinet governmentmore so

in countries like Britain with no great tradition of governmental openness than in many other

democracies. What is clearly lacking here is some additional feature, that the conspirators be acting

against the law or against the public interest, or both. This doesnt entirely free government from

accusations of conspiracydoes a secret cabinet decision to upgrade a countrys nuclear armaments

which appears prima facie within the bounds of the law of that country but may breach international

laws and agreements count? Is it lawful? In the public interest?

A further difficulty with some kind of illegality constraint is that it might tend to rule out what we

might otherwise clearly recognise as conspiracy theories. Take, for instance, the widely held belief

amongst ufologists that the US government (and others) has acted to conceal the existence on earth of

extra-terrestrial creatures, crashed flying saucers at Roswell, and so on. It doesnt seem obvious that

governments would be acting illegally in this casenational security legislation is often open to very

wide interpretationand it could be argued that they are acting in the public interest, to avoid panicand so on. (Unless, of course, as some ufologists seem to believe, the government is conspiring with

the aliens in order to organise the slavery of the human race!) So we have here what would appear to

be a conspiracy theory, and one which has some of the features of Keeleys UCTs, but which is

excluded by the illegality constraint. Perhaps the best we can do here is to assert that conspiracy

theories are necessarily somewhat vague in this regard; Ill return to this point later.

If this gives us a rough idea of what counts as a conspiracy theory, we can then build upon it and

Keeley goes on to list five features which he regards as characteristic of Unwarranted Conspiracy

Theories:

(1) A UCT is an explanation that runs counter to some received, official, or obvious

account. (116-7) This is nothing like a sufficient condition, for the history of even democratic

governments is full of post facto surprises that cause us to revise previous official explanations. For


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instance, for many years the official explanation for Britains military success in the Second World

War was made in terms of superior generalship, better troops, occasional good luck, and so on. The

revelation in the 1970s of the successful Enigma programme to break German service codes

necessitated wholesale revision of military histories of this period. This was an entirely beneficial

outcome, but others were more dubious. The growth of nuclear power in Britain in the 1950s was

officially explained in terms of the benefit of cheaper and less polluting sources of electricity. It wasonly much later that it became clear that these claims were exaggerated and that the true motivation

for the construction of these reactors was to provide fissile material for Britains independent nuclear

weapons. Whether such behaviour was either legal or in the public interest is an interesting thought.

(1A) Central to any UCT is an official story that the conspiracy theory must undermine and

cast doubt upon. Furthermore, the presence of a cover story is often seen as the most damning piece

of evidence for any given conspiracy. This is an interesting epistemological point to which I shall

return.

(2) The true intentions behind the conspiracy are invariably nefarious. I agree with this as a

general feature, particularly of non-governmental conspiracies, though as pointed out above it is

possible for governmental conspiracies to be motivated or justified in terms of preventing public

alarm, which may be seen as an essentially beneficial aim.

(3) UCTs typically seek to tie together seemingly unrelated events. This is certainly true of

the more extreme conspiracy theory, one which seeks a grand unified explanation of everything. We

have here a progression from the individual CT, seeking to explain one event, to the more general.Carl Oglesby (1976), for instance, seeks to reinterpret many of the key events in post-war American

history in terms of a more or less secret war between opposing factions within American capital, an

explanation which sees Watergate and the removal of Richard Nixon from office as one sides revenge

for the assassination of John Kennedy. At the extreme we have those theories which seek to explain

all the key events of western history in terms of a single secret motivating force, something like

international freemasonry or the great Jewish conspiracy.[4] It may be taken as a useful rule of thumb

here that the greater the explanatory range of the CT, the more likely it is to be untrue. (A point to

which Popper himself would be sympathetic!)

Finally, one might want to query here Keeleys point about seemingly unrelated events. Many CTs

seem to have their origin in a desire to relate events that one might feel ought to go together. Thus

many Americans, on hearing of the assassination of Robert Kennedy (itself coming very shortly after

that of Martin Luther King) thought these events obviously related in some way, and sought to


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generate theories linking them in terms of some malevolent force bent on eliminating apparently

liberal influences in American politics. They seem prima facie more likely to be related than, say, the

deaths of the Kennedy brothers and those of John Lennon or Elvis Presley: any CT linking these does

indeed fulfil Keeleys (3).

(4) the truths behind events explained by conspiracy theories are typically well-guardedsecrets, even if the ultimate perpetrators are sometimes well-known public figures. This is certainly

the original belief of proponents of UCTs but it does lead to a somewhat paradoxical situation

whereby the alleged secret can become something of an orthodoxy. Thus opinion polls seem to

indicate that something in excess of 80% of Americans believe that a conspiracy led to the death of

President Kennedy, though it seems wildly unlikely that they all believe in the same conspiracy. It

becomes increasingly hard to believe in a well-guarded secret that has been so thoroughly aired in 35

years of books, magazine articles and even Hollywood movies.

Pretty much the same percentage of Americans seem to believe in the presence on earth of extra-

terrestrials, though whether this tells us more about Americans or about opinion-polls is hard to say.

But these facts, if facts they be, would tend to undercut the benevolent government UCTs. For there

is really no point in them keeping the truth from us to avoid panic if most of us already believe this

truth. The revelation of cast-iron evidence of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy or of the reality of alien

visits to Earth would be unlikely to generate more than a ripple of public interest, these events having

been so thoroughly rehearsed.

(5) The chief tool of the conspiracy theorist is what I shall call errant data. By which Keeleymeans data which is unaccounted for by official explanations, or data which if true would tend to

contradict official explanations.

These are the marks of the UCT. As Keeley goes on to say (118) there is no criterion or set of criteria

that provide a priori grounds for distinguishing warranted conspiracy theories from UCTs. One might

perhaps like to insist here that UCTs ought to be false, and this is why we are not warranted in

believing them, but it is in the nature of many CTs that they cannot be falsified. The best we may do is

show why the warrant for believing them is so poor. And one way of approaching this is by way of

examining where the thinking that leads to UCTs goes awry.

3. Where CT thinking goes wrong

It is my belief that one reason why we should not accept UCTs is because they are irrational. But by


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this I do not necessarily mean that they are illogical in the sense that they commit logical fallacies or

use invalid argument formsthough this does indeed sometimes happenbut rather that they misuse

or fail to use a range of critical thinking skills and principles of reasoning. In this section I want to

provide a list of what I regard as the key weaknesses of CT thinking, and then in the next section I

will examine a case study of (what I regard to be) a UCT and show how these weaknesses operate.

My list of points is not necessarily in order of importance.

(A) An inability to weigh evidence properly. Different sorts of evidence are generally worthy

of different amounts of weight. Of crucial importance here is eye-witness testimony. Considerable

psychological research has been done into the strengths and weaknesses of such testimony, and this

has been distilled into one of the key critical thinking texts, Norris & Kings (1983) Test on

Appraising Observations whose Manual provides a detailed set of principles for judging the

believability of observation statements. I suspect that no single factor contributes more, especially to

assassination and UFO UCTs, than a failure to absorb and apply these principles.

(B) An inability to assess evidence corruption and contamination. This is a particular problem

with eyewitness testimony about an event that is subsequently the subject of considerable media

coverage. And it is not helped by conventions or media events which bring such witnesses together to

discuss their experiencesit is not for nothing that most court systems insist that witnesses do not

discuss their testimony with each other or other people until after it has been given in court. There is a

particular problem with American UCTs since the mass media there are not governed by sub judice

constraints, and so conspiratorial theories can be widely aired in advance of any court proceedings.

Again Norris & Kings principles (particularly IV. 10 & 12) should warn against this.[5] But we do not

need considerable delay for such corruption to occur: it may happen as part of the original act of

perception. For instance, in reading accounts where a group of witnesses claim to have identified

some phenomenon in the sky as a spaceship or other unknown form of craft, I often wonder if this

judgement occurred to all of them simultaneously, or if a claim by one witness that this was a

spaceship could not act to corrupt the judgmental powers of other witnesses, so that they started to see

this phenomenon as a spacecraft in preference to some more mundane explanation.

(C) Misuse or outright reversal of a principle of charity: wherever the evidence is insufficientto decide between a mundane explanation and a suspicious one, UCTs tend to pick the latter. The

critical thinker should never be prejudiced against occupying a position of principled neutrality when

the evidence is more or less equally balanced between two competing hypotheses. And I would argue

that there is much to be said for operating some principle of charity here, of always picking the less

suspicious hypothesis of two equally supported by the evidence. My suspicion is that in the long run


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this would lead to a generally more economical belief structure, that reversing the principle of charity

ultimately tends to blunt Occams Razor, but I cannot hope to prove this.

(D) The demonisation of persons and organisations. This may be regarded as either following

from or being a special case of (C). Broadly, this amounts to moving from the accepted fact that X

once lied to the belief that nothing X says is trustworthy, or taking the fact that X once performedsome misdeed as particular evidence of guilt on other occasions. In the former case, adopting (D)

would demonise us all, since we have lied on some occasion or other. This is especially problematic

for UCTs involving government organisations or personnel, since all governments reserve the right to

lie or mislead if they feel it is in the national interest to do so. But proof that any agency lied about

one event ought not to be taken as significant proof that they lied on some other occasion. It goes

against the character of the witness, as lawyers are wont to say, but then no sensible person should

believe that governments are perfectly truthful.

The second case is more difficult. It is a standard feature of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence that the fact

that X has a previous conviction should not be given in evidence against them, nor revealed to the jury

until after a verdict is arrived at. The reasoning here is that generally evidence of Xs previous guilt is

not specific evidence for his guilt on the present occasion; it is possible for it to be the case that X was

guilty then and is innocent now, and so the court should not be prejudiced against him. But there is an

exception to this, at least in English law, where there are significant individual features shared

between Xs previous proven modus operandi and that of the present offence under consideration;

evidence of a consistent pattern may be introduced into court. But, the rigid standards of courtroom

proof aside, it is not unreasonable for the police to suspect X on the basis of his earlier conviction.This may not be fair to X (if he is trying to go straight) but it is epistemologically reasonable. The

trouble for UCTs, as we shall see, is that most governments have a long record of previous

convictions, and the true UC theorist may regard this not just as grounds for a reasonable suspicion

but as itself evidence of present guilt.

(E) The canonisation of persons or (more rarely) organisations. This may be regarded as the

mirror-image of (D). Here those who are regarded as the victims of some set of events being

explained conspiratorially tend to be presented, for the purpose of justifying the explanation, as being

without sin, or being more heroic or more threatening to some alleged set of private interests than the

evidence might reasonably support.

(F) An inability to make rational or proportional means-end judgements. This is perhaps the

greatest affront to Occams Razor that one finds in UCTs. Such theories are often propounded with the


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explanation that some group of conspirators have been acting in furtherance of some aim or in order

to prevent some action taking place. But one ought to ask whether such a group of conspirators were

in a position to further their aim in some easier or less expensive or less risky fashion. Our assumption

here is not the principle of charity mentioned in (C) above, that our alleged conspirators are too nice

or moral to resort to nefarious activities. We should assume only that our conspirators are rational

people capable of working out the best means to a particular end. This is a defeasible assumptionstupidity is not totally unknown in the political worldbut it is nevertheless an assumption that

ought to guide us unless we have evidence to the contrary.

A difficulty that should be mentioned here is that of establishing the end at which the conspiracy is

aimed, made more difficult for conspiracies that never subsequently announce these things. For the

state of affairs brought about by the conspirators may, despite their best efforts, not be that at which

they aimed. If this is what happens then making a rational means-end judgement to the actual result of

the conspiracy may be a very different matter from doing the same thing to the intended results.

(G) Evidence againsta UCT is always evidencefor. This is perhaps the point that would most

have irritated Karl Popper with his insistence that valid theories must always be capable of

falsification. But it is an essential feature of UCTs; they do not just argue that on the evidence

available a different conclusion should be drawn from that officially sanctioned or popular. Rather, the

claim is that the evidence supporting the official verdict is suspect, fraudulent, faked or coerced. And

this belief is used to support the nature of the conspiracy, which must be one powerful or competent

enough to fake all this evidence. What we have here is a difference between critically assessing

evidencesomething I support under (A) aboveand the universal acid of hypercritical doubt. For ifwe start with the position that any piece of evidence may be false then it is open to us to support any

hypothesis whatsoever. Holocaust revisionists would have us believe that vast amounts of evidence

supporting the hypothesis of a German plot to exterminate Europes Jews are fake. As Robert Anton

Wilson (1989: 172) says, a conspiracy that can deceive us about 6,000,000 deaths can deceive us

about anything, and that it takes a great leap of faith for Holocaust Revisionists to believe that World

War II happened at all. Quite so. What is needed here is that I might term meta-evidence, evidence

about the evidence. My claim would be that the only way to keep Occams Razor shiny here is to

insist on two different levels of critical analysis of evidence. Evidence may be rejectedif it doesnt fit

a plausible hypothesisthis is what everyone must do in cases where there is apparently

contradictory evidence, and there can be no prima facie guidelines for rejection here apart from

overall epistemological economy. But evidence may only be impeachedaccused of being

deliberately faked, forged, coerced, etc.if we have further evidence of this forgery: that a piece of

evidence does not fit our present hypothesis is not by itself any warrant for believing that the evidence


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is fake.

(H) We should put no trust in what I here term the fallacy of the spiders web. That A knows B

and that B knows C is no evidence at all that A has even heard of C. But all too often UCTs proceed in

this fashion, weaving together a web of conspirators on the basis of who knows who. But personal

acquaintance is not necessarily a transitive relation. The falsity of this belief in the epistemologicalimportance of webs of relationships can be demonstrated with reference to the show-business party

game known sometimes as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The object of the game is to select the

name of an actor or actress and then link them to the film-actor Kevin Bacon through no more than six

shared appearances. (E.g. A appeared with B in film X, B appeared with C in film Y, C appeared with

D in film Z, and D appears in Kevin Bacons latest movie: thus we link A to Bacon in four moves.)

The plain fact is that most of us know many people, and important people in public office tend to have

dealings with a huge number of people, so just about anybody in the world can be linked to somebody

else in a reasonably small number of such links.

I can demonstrate the truth of this proposition with reference to my own case, that of a dull and

unworldly person who doesnt get out much. For I am separated by only two degrees from Her

Majesty The Queen (for I once very briefly met the then Poet Laureate, who must himself have met

the Queen if only at his inauguration) which means I am separated by only three degrees from all the

many important political figures that the Queen herself has met, including names like Churchill and

De Gaulle. Which further means that only four degrees separate me from Josef Stalin (met by

Churchill at Yalta) and just five degrees from Adolf Hitler (who never met Churchill but did meet

prewar Conservative politicians like Chamberlain and Halifax who were known to Churchill). Giventhe increasing amounts of travel and communication that have taken place in this century, it should be

possible to connect me with just about anybody in the world in the requisite six stages. But so what?

Connections like these offer thepossibility of communication and influence, but offer no evidence for

its actuality.

(I) The classic logical fallacy ofpost hoc ergo propter hoc. This is the most common strictly

logical fallacy to be found in political conspiracy theories, especially those dealing with assassinations

and suspicious deaths. And broadly it takes the shape of claiming that since event X happened after

the death of A, As death was brought about in order to cause or facilitate the occurrence of X. The

First World War happened after the death of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and there is clearly a

sense in which it happened because of his death: there is a causal chain leading from the death to

Austrian outrage, to a series of Austrian demands upon Serbia, culminating in Austrias declaration of

war against Serbia, Russias declaration against Austria, and, via a series of interlinked treaty


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obligations, most of the nations of Europe ending up at war with one another. Though these effects of

the assassination may now appear obvious, one problem for the CT proponent is that hindsight

clarifies these matters enormously: such a progression may not have been at all obvious to the people

involved in these events at the time. And it is even harder to believe that bringing about such an

outcome was in any of their interests. (Austria plainly had an interest in shoring up its authority in the

Balkans but not, given its many structural weaknesses, in engaging in a long and destructive war. Theoutcome, which anyone might have predicted as likely, was the economic ruin and subsequent

political dissolution of the entire Austro-Hungarian empire.)

Attempting to judge the rationality of a proposed CT here as an explanation for some such set of

events runs into two problems. Firstly, though an outcome may now seem obvious to us, it may not

have appeared so obvious to people at the time, either in its nature or in its expensiveness. Thus there

may well have been people who thought that assassinating Franz Ferdinand in order to trigger a crisis

in relations between Austria and Serbia was a sensible policy move, precisely because they did not

anticipate a general world war occurring as a result and may have thought a less expensive conflict, a

limited war of independence between Serbia and Austria, worth the possible outcome of freeing more

of the Balkans from Austrian domination. And secondly, if we cannot attribute hindsight to the actors

in such events, neither can we ascribe to them a perfect level of rationality: it is always possible for

people engaged in such actions to possess a poor standard of means-end judgement.

But, bearing these caveats in mind, one might still wish to propound two broad principles here for

distinguishing whether an event is a genuine possible motive for an earlier conspiracy or just an

instance ofpost hoc ergo propter hoc. Firstly, could any possible conspirators, with the knowledgethey possessed at the time, have reasonably foreseen such an outcome? And secondly, granted that

such an outcome could have been desired, are the proposed conspiratorial events a rational method of

bringing about such an outcome? That a proposed CT passes these tests is, of course, no guarantee

that we are dealing here with a genuine conspiracy; but a failure to pass them is a significant indicator

of an unwarranted CT.

4. A case-study of CT thinkingthe assassination of President Kennedy

With these diagnostic indicators of poor critical thinking in place, I would now like to apply them to a

typical instance of CT (and, to my mind, unwarranted CT) thinking.[6] On 22 November, 1963

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Two days later, the man accused of his

murder, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself murdered in the basement of the Dallas Police

Headquarters. These two events (and perhaps particularly the second, coming as it did so rapidly after


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the first) led to a number of accusations that Kennedys death had been the result of a conspiracy of

which Oswald may or not have been a part. Books propounding such theories emerged even before

the Warren Commission issued its report on the assassination in August 1964. Writing at this time in

his essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics the political scientist Richard Hofstadter could

say; Conspiratorial explanations of Kennedys assassination have a far wider currency in Europe than

they do in the United States. (Hofstadter 1964: 9) Hofstadters view of the American paranoid stylewas one of small cults of a right-wing or racist or anti-Catholic or anti-Freemason bent whose

descendants are still to be found in the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, the Michigan Militia,

etc.. But within a couple of years of the emergence of the Warren Report and, more importantly, its 26

volumes of evidence, a new style of conspiratorial thinking emerged. While some right-wing

conspiratorial theories remained[7], the bulk of the conspiracy theories propounded to explain the

assassination adopted a position from the left of centre, accusing or assuming that some conspiracy of

right-wing elements and/or some part of the US Government itself had been responsible for the

assassination.

A complete classification of such CTs is not necessary here [8], but I ought perhaps to point to a

philosophically interesting development in the case. As a result of public pressure resulting from the

first wave of CT literature, a congressional committee was established in 1977 to investigate

Kennedys assassination; it instituted a thorough examination of the available evidence and was on the

verge of producing a report endorsing the Warren Commissions conclusions when it discovered what

was alleged to be a sound recording of the actual assassination. Almost solely on the basis of this

evidencewhich was subsequently discredited by a scientific panel put together by the Department of

Justicethe Congressional committee decided that there had probably been a conspiracy, asserting on

the basis of very little evidence that the Mafia was the most probable source of this conspiracy. What

was significant about this congressional investigation was the effect its thorough investigation of the

forensic and photographic evidence in the case had. Many of the alleged discrepancies in this

evidence, which had formed the basis for the many calls to establish such an investigation, were

shown to be erroneous. This did not lead to the refutation of CTs but rather to a new development: the

balance of CT claims now went from arguing that there existed evidence supporting a conspiratorial

explanation to arguing that all or most of the evidence supporting the lone-assassin hypothesis had

been faked, a new level of epistemological complexity.

A representative CT of this type was propounded in Oliver Stones hit 1992 Hollywood filmJFK.[9] It

asserts that a coalition of interests within the US governmental structure, including senior members of

the armed forces, FBI, CIA, Secret Service and various Texas law-enforcement agencies, together

with the assistance of members of organised crime, conspired to arrange the assassination of President


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Kennedy and the subsequent framing of an unwitting or entirely innocent Oswald for the crime.

Motives for the assassination vary but most such CTs now agree on such motives as (a) preventing

Kennedy after his supposed re-election from reversing US involvement in Vietnam, (b) protecting

right-wing industrial interests, especially Texan oil interests, from what were regarded as possible

depredations by the Kennedy administration, (c) instigating another and more successful US invasion

of Cuba, and (d) halting the judicial assault waged by the Kennedy administration under AttorneyGeneral Robert Kennedy against the interests of organised crime.

Such a CT scores highly on Keeleys five characteristic features of Unwarranted Conspiracy Theories

outlined above. It runs counter to the official explanation of the assassination, though it has now itself

become something of a popular orthodoxy, one apparently subscribed to by a majority of the

American population. The alleged intentions behind the conspiracy are indeed nefarious, using the

murder of a democratically-elected leader to further the interests of a private cabal. And it does seem

to seek to tie together seemingly unrelated events. The most obvious of these is in terms of the

assassinations alleged motive: it seeks to link the assassination with the subsequent history of

Americas involvement in Vietnam. But a number of other connections are made at other levels of

explanation. For instance, the deaths of various people connected in one way or another with the

assassination are linked together as being in some way related to the continuing cover-up by the

conspirators. Keeleys fourth claim, that the truth behind an event being explained by a UCT be a

typically well-guarded secret is, as I pointed out above, much harder to justify now in a climate where

most people apparently believe in the existence of such a conspiracy. But Keeleys fifth claim, that the

chief tool here is errant data, remains true. The vast body of published evidence on the assassination

has been picked over with remarkable care for signs of discrepancy and contradiction, signs which areregarded as providing the strongest evidence for such a conspiracy. What now seems to me to be an

interesting development in these more paranoid UCTs, as I mention above, is the extent to which

unerrant data is now regarded as a major feature of such conspiracy theories.

But how do these Kennedy assassination CTs rate against my own list of what I regard as critical

thinking weaknesses?

(A)An inability to weigh evidence properly. Here they score highly. Of particular importance

is the inability to judge the reliability or lack thereof of eyewitness testimony, and an unwillingness or

inability to discard evidence which does not fit.

On the first point, most Kennedy CTs place high reliance on the small number of people who claimed

at the time (and the somewhat larger number who claim nowsee point (B) below) that they heard


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more than three shots fired in Dealey Plaza or that they heard shots fired from some other location

than the Book Depository, both claims that if true would rule out the possibility of Oswalds acting

alone. Since the overwhelming number of witnesses whose opinions have been registered did nothear

more than three shots, and tended to locate the origin of these shots in the general direction of the

Depository (which, in an acoustically misleadingly arena like Dealey Plaza is perhaps the best that

could be hoped for), the economical explanation is to assume, unless further evidence arises, that theminority here are mistaken. Since the assassination was an unexpected, rapid and emotionally laden

eventall key features for weakening the reliability of observation, according to the Principles of

Appraising Observations in Norris & King (1983), it is only to be expected that there would be a

significant portion of inconsistent testimony. The wonder here is that there is such a high degree of

agreement over the basic facts.

We find a similar misuse of observational principles in conspiratorial interpretations of the subsequent

murder of Police Officer Tippit, where the majority of witnesses who clearly identified Oswald as the

killer are downplayed in favour of the minority of witnessessome at a considerable distance and all

considerably surprised by the events unfolding in front of themwho gave descriptions of the

assailant which did not match Oswald. Experienced police officers are used to eye-witness testimony

of sudden and dramatic events varying considerably and, like all researchers faced with a large body

of evidence containing discrepancies, must discard some evidence as worthless. Since Oswald was

tracked almost continuously from the scene of Tippits shooting to the site of his own arrest, and since

forensic evidence linked the revolver found on Oswald to the shooting, the most economical

explanation again is that the majority of witnesses were right in their identification of Oswald and the

minority were mistaken.

This problem of being unable to discard errant data is central to the creation of CTs since, as Keeley

says:

The role of errant data in UCTs is critical. The typical logic of a UCT goes something like

this: begin with errant facts.... The official story all but ignores this data. What can explain

the intransigence of the official story tellers in the face of this and other contravening

evidence? Could they be so stupid and blind? Of course not; they must be intentionally

ignoring it. The best explanation is some kind of conspiracy, an intentional attempt to hide

the truth of the matter from the public eye. (Keeley 1999: 199)

Such a view in the Kennedy case ignores the fact that the overwhelming amount of errant data on

which CTs have been constructed, far from being hidden, was openly published in the 26 volumes of

Warren Commission evidence. This has led to accusations that it was hidden in plain view, but one

cant help feeling that a more efficient conspiracy would have suppressed such inconvenient data in

the first place.


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The standard position that errant data is likely to be false, that eye-witness testimony and memory is

sometimes unreliable, that persisting pieces of physical evidence are preferable, etc., in short that

Occams Razor will insist on cutting and throwing away some of the data is constantly rejected in

Kennedy CT literature. Perhaps the most extravagant example of this, amounting almost to a Hegelian

synthesis of assassination conspiracy theories, is Lifton (1980). Seeking to reconcile the major bodyof testimony that Kennedy was shot from behind with a small body of errant data that he possessed a

wound in the front of his body, the author dedicates over 600 pages to the construction of the most

baroque conspiracy theory imaginable. In Liftons thesis, Kennedy was shot solely from the front, and

then the conspirators gained access to his body during its journey back to Washington and were able

to doctor it so that at the subsequent post mortem examination it showed signs of being shot only from

the rear. Thus the official medical finding that Kennedy was only shot from the rear can be reconciled

with the general CT belief that he was shot from the front (too) in a theory that seems to show that

everybody is right.

Apart from the massive complication of such a planclearly going against my point (F)and its

medical implausibility, such a thesis actually reverses Occams Razor by creating more errant data

than there was to start with. For if Kennedy was shot only from the front, we now need some

explanation for why the great majority of over 400 witnesses at the scene believed that the shots were

coming from behind him! And this challenge is one that is ducked by the great majority of CTs: if

minority errant data is to be preferred as reliable, then we require some explanation for the presence

of the majority data now being rejected.

But Lifton at least got one thing right. In accounting for the title of his book he writes:

The best evidence concept, impressed on all law students, is that when you seek to

determine a fact from conflicting data, you must arrange the data according to a hierarchy

of reliability. All data are not equal. Some evidence (e.g. physical evidence, or a scientific

report) is more inherently error-free, and hence more reliable, than other evidence (e.g. an

eye-witness account). The best evidence rules the conclusion, whatever volume of

contrary evidence there may be in the lower categories.[10]

Unfortunately Lifton takes this to mean that conspirators who were able to decide the nature of the

autopsy evidence would thereby lay down a standard for judging or rejecting as incompatible the

accompanying eye-witness testimony. But given the high degree of unanimity among eye-witnesses

on this occasion, and given the existence of corroborating physical evidence (a rifle and cartridges

forensically linked to the assassination were found in the Depository behind Kennedy, the registered

owner of the rifle was a Depository employee, etc.), all that the alleged body-tampering could hope to

achieve is make the overall body of evidence more suspicious because more contradictory. Only if the


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body of reliable evidence was more or less balanced between a conspiratorial and non-conspiratorial

explanation could this difficulty be avoided. But it is surely over-estimating the powers, predictive and

practical, of such a conspiracy that they could hope to guarantee this situation beforehand.

(B)An inability to assess evidence corruption and contamination. Though, as I note above,

such contamination of eye-witness testimony may occur contemporaneously, it is a particular problemfor the more long-standing CTs. In the Kennedy case, many witnesses of the assassination who at the

time gave accounts broadly consistent with the explanation have subsequently amended or extended

their accounts to include material that isnt so consistent. Witnesses, for instance, who at the time

located all the shots as coming from the Book Depository subsequently gave accounts in which they

located shots from other directions, most notably the notorious grassy knoll, or later told of activity

on the knoll which they never mentioned in their original statements. (Posner (1993) charts a number

of these changes in testimony.)

What is interesting about many of these accounts is that mundane explanations for these changesI

later remembered that..., I forgot to mention that...tend to be eschewed in favour of more

conspiratorial explanations. Such witnesses may deny that the signed statements made at the time

accurately reflect what they told the authorities, or may say that the person interviewing them wasnt

interested in writing down anything that didnt cohere with the official explanation of the

assassination, and so on. Such explanations face serious difficulties. For one thing, since many of

these statements were taken on the day of the assassination or very shortly afterwards, it would have

to be assumed that putative conspirators already knew which facts would cohere with an official

explanation and which wouldnt, which may imply an implausible degree of foreknowledge. A moreserious problem is that these statements were taken by low-level members of the various investigatory

bodies, police, FBI, Secret Service, etc.; to assert that such statements were manipulated by these

people entails that they were members of the conspiracy. And this runs up against a practical problem

for mounting conspiracies, that the more people who are in a conspiracy, the harder it is going to be to

enforce security.

A more plausible explanation for these changes in testimony might be that witnesses who provided

testimony broadly supportive of the official non-conspiratorial explanation subsequently came into

contact with some of the enormous quantity of media coverage suggesting less orthodox explanations

and, consciously or unconsciously, have adjusted their recollections accordingly. The likelihood of

such things happening after a sufficiently thorough exposure to alternative explanations may underlie

Norris & Kings principle II.1:

An observation statement tends to be believable to the extent that the observer was not

exposed, after the event, to further information relevant to describing it. (If the observer


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was exposed to such information, the statement is believable to the extent that the exposure

took place close to the time of the event described.)[11]

Their parenthesised time principle clearly renders a good deal of more recent Kennedy eye-witness

testimony dubious after three and a half decades of exposure to vast amounts of further information in

the mass media, not helped by assassination conferences where eye-witnesses have met and spoken

with each other.

One outcome of these two points is that, in the unlikely event of some living person being seriously

suspected of involvement in the assassination, a criminal trial would be rendered difficult if not

impossible. Such are the published discrepancies now within and between witnesses testimonies that

there would be enormous difficulties in attempting to render a plausibly consistent defence or

prosecution narrative on their basis.

(C)Misuse or outright reversal of a principle of charity. Where an event may have either a

suspicious or an innocent explanation, and there is no significant evidence to decide between them,

CTs invariably opt for the suspicious explanation. In part this is due to a feature deriving from

Keeleys point (3) above, about CTs seeking to tie together seemingly unrelated events, but perhaps

taken to a new level. Major CTs seek a maximally explanatory hypothesis, one which accounts for all

of the events within its domain, and so they leave no room for the out of the ordinary event, the

unlikely, the accident, which has no connection whatsoever with the conspiratorial events being

hypothesised. The various Kennedy conspiracy narratives contain a large number of these events

dragooned into action on the assumption that no odd event could have an innocent explanation. There

is no better example of this than the Umbrella Man, a character whose forcible inclusion inconspiratorial explanations demonstrates well how a determined attempt to maintain this reversed

principle of charity may lead to the most remarkable deformities of rational explanation.

When pictorial coverage of the assassination entered the public domain, in newspaper photographs

within the next few days, and more prominently in still from the Zapruder movie film of the events

subsequently published in LIFEmagazine, it became clear that one of the closest bystanders to the

presidential limousine was a man holding a raised umbrella, and this at a time when it was clearly not

raining. This odd figure rapidly became the focus of a number of conspiratorial hypotheses. Perhaps

the most extreme of these originates with Robert Cutler (1975). According to Cutler, the Umbrella

Man had a weapon concealed with the umbrella enabling him to fire a dart or flechette, perhaps

drugged, into the presidents neck, possibly for the purpose of immobilising him while the other

assassins did their work. The only actual evidence to support this hypothesis is that the front of

Kennedys neck did indeed possess a small punctate wound, described by the medical team treating

him as probably a wound of entrance but clearly explainable in the light of the full body of forensic


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evidence as a wound of exit for a bullet fired from above and behind the presidential motorcade.

Consistent, in other words, with being the work of Oswald.

There is no other supportive evidence for Cutlers hypothesis. (Cutler, of course, explains this in

terms of the conspirators being able to control the subsequent autopsy and so conceal any awkward

evidence; he thus complies with my principle (G) below.) More importantly, it seems inherentlyunlikely on other grounds. Since the Umbrella Man was standing on the public sidewalk, right next to

a number of ordinary members of the public and in plain view of hundreds of witnesses, many of

whom would have been looking at him precisely because he was so close to the president, its seems

unlikely that a conspiracy could guarantee that he could get away with his lethal behaviour without

being noticed by someone. And the proposed explanation for all this rigmarole, the stunning of the

target, is entirely unnecessary: most firearms experts agree that the president was a pretty easy target

unstunned.

If Cutlers explanation hasnt found general favour with the conspiracy community, another has, but

this too has equally strange effects upon reasoning clearly. The first version of this theory has the

Umbrella Man signalling the presence of the targetmovie-film of the assassination clearly shows

that the raised umbrella is being waved or shaken. This hypothesis seems to indicate that the

conspiracy had hired assassins who couldnt be relied upon to recognise the President of the United

States when they saw him seated in his presidential limousinethe one with the presidents flag

onnext to the most recognisable first lady in American history.

An apparently more plausible hypothesis is that it is the Umbrella Man who gives the signal for theteam of assassins to open fire. (A version of this hypothesis can still be seen as late as 1992 in the

movieJFK.) What I find remarkable here is that nobody seems to have thought this theory through at

all. Firstly, the Umbrella Man is clearly on the sidewalk a few feet from the president while our

alleged assassins are located high up in the Book Depository, in neighbouring buildings, or on top of

the grassy knoll way to the front of the president. How, then, can he know what they can see from

their different positions? How can he tell from his location that they now have clear shots at the

target? (Dealey Plaza is full of trees, road signs and other obstructions, not to mention large numbers

of police officers and members of the public who might be expected to get in the way of a clear view

here.) And secondly, such an explanation actually weakens the efficiency of the alleged assassination

conspiracy. (Here my limited boyhood experience of firing an air-rifle with telescopic sights finally

comes in handy!) In order to make sense of the Umbrella Man as signaller, something like the

following sequence of events must occur. Each rifleman focuses upon the presidential target through

his telescopic sight, tracking the target as it moves at some ten to twelve miles per hour. Given the


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very narrow focus of such sights, he cannot see the Umbrella Man. To witness the signal, he must

keep taking his eye away from the telescopic sight, refocussing it until he can see the distant figure on

the sidewalk, and when the signal is given, put his eye back to the sight, re-focus again, re-adjust the

position of the rifle since the target has continued to move while he was not looking at it, and then

fire. This is not an efficient recipe for accurate target-shooting.

Oliver Stone eliminates some of these problems in the version he depicts in the movie JFK. Here each

of his three snipers is accompanied by a spotter, equipped with walkie-talkie and binoculars. While

the sniper focuses on the target, the spotter looks out for the signal from the Umbrella Man and then

orally communicates the order to open fire. But now, given what I have already said about the

problem with the Umbrella Mans location, it is hard to see what purpose he serves that could not be

better served by the spotters. He drops out of the equation. He is, as Wittgenstein says somewhere, a

wheel that spins freely because it is not connected to the rest of the machinery. Occams Razor would

cut him from the picture, but Occam is no firm favourite of UCT proponents.

In 1978, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations held public hearings on the Kennedy

case, a Mr. Louis de Witt came forward to confess to being the Umbrella Man. He claimed that he

came to Dealey Plaza in order to barrack the president as he went past, and that he was carrying a

raised umbrella because he had heard that, perhaps for some obscure reason connected with the

presidents fathers stay in London as US Ambassador during the war, the Kennedy family has a thing

about umbrellas. De Witt hadnt come forward in the 15 years since the assassination since he had had

no idea about the proposed role of the Umbrella man in the case. This part of his explanation seems to

me to be eminently plausible: those of us with an obsessive interest in current affairs find it hard tograsp just how many people never read the papers or watch TV news. There is something almost

endearing about de Witt, an odd character whose moment of public eccentricity seems to have

enmired him in decades of conspiratorial hypotheses without his realising it.

Needless to say, conspiracy theorists did not accept de Witts testimony at face value. Some argued

that he was a stooge put forward by the authorities to head off investigation into the real Umbrella

Man, others that de Witt himself must be lying to conceal a more sinister role in these events, though I

know of no evidence to support either of these conclusions. What this story makes clear is that an

unwillingness to abandon discrepant events as unrelated, an unwillingness to abandon this reverse

principle of charity here whereby all such events are conspiratorial unless clearly proven otherwise,

rapidly leads to remarkable mental gymnastics, to hypotheses that are excessively complex and even

internally inconsistent, (The Umbrella Man as signaller makes the assassination harder to perform.)

But, such are the ways of human psychology, once such an event has been firmly embedded within a


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sufficiently complex hypothesis, no amount of contradictory evidence would seem to be able to shift

it. The Umbrella Man has by now been invested with such importance as to become one of the great

myths of the assassination, against which mere evidentiary matters can have no effect.

(D) The demonisation of persons and organisations. This weakness takes a number of forms

in the Kennedy case, which I shall treat separately.

(i) Guilt by reputation. The move from the fact that some bodythe FBI, the CIA, the mafia, the

KGBhas a proven record of wrong-doing in the past to the claim that they were capable of

wrong-doing in the present case doesnt seem unreasonable. But the stronger claim that past

wrong-doing is in some sense evidence for present guilt is much more problematic, particularly when

differences between the situations are overlooked. This is especially true of the role of the CIA in

Kennedy CTs.

Senator Churchs 1976 congressional investigation into the activities of US intelligence agencies

provided clear evidence that in the period 1960-63 elements of the CIA, probably under the

instructions of or at least with the knowledge of the White House, had conspired with Cuban exiles

and members of organised crime to attempt the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Evidence

also emerged of CIA involvement in the deaths of other foreign leadersTrujillo in the Dominican

Republic, Lumumba in the Congo, etc.. These findings were incorporated in Kennedy CTs as

evidence to support the probability that the CIA, or at least certain members of it, were also

responsible for the death of Kennedy. Once an assassin, always an assassin? Such an argument

neglects the fact that the CIA could reasonably believe that they were acting in US interests, possiblylawfully since they were acting under the guidance or instruction of the White House. This belief is

not open to them in the case of killing their own president, a manifestly unlawful act and one hard to

square with forwarding US interests. (Evidence that Soldier X willingly shoots at the soldiers of other

countries when ordered to do so is no evidence that he would shoot at soldiers of his own country,

with or without orders. The situations are plainly different.) At best the Church Committee evidence

indicated that the CIA had the capacity to organise assassinations, not that it had either the willingness

or the reason to assassinate its own leader.

(ii) Guilt by association. This takes the form of impeaching the credibility of any member of a guilty

organisation. Since both the FBI and the CIA (not to mention, of course, the KGB or the mafia) had

proven track records of serious misbehaviour in this period, it is assumed that all members of these

organisations, and all their activities, are equally guilty. Thus the testimony of an FBI agent can be

impeached solely on the grounds that he is an FBI agent, any activity of the CIA can be characterised


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as nefarious solely because it is being carried out by the CIA. Such a position ignores the fact that

such organisations have many thousands of employees and carry out a wide range of mundane duties.

It is perfectly possible for a member of such an organisation to be an honest and patriotic citizen

whose testimony is as believable as anyone elses. Indeed, given my previous point that for security

reasons the smaller the conspiratorial team the more likely it is to be successful, it would seem likely

that the great majority of members of such organisations would be innocent of any involvement insuch a plot. (I would hazard a guess that the same holds true of the KGB and the mafia, both

organisations with a strong interest in security.)

(iii) Exaggerating the power and nature of organisations. Repeatedly in such CTs we find the

assumption that organisations like the CIA or the mafia are all-powerful, all-pervasive. capable of

extraordinary foreknowledge and planning.[12] This assumption has difficulty in explaining the many

recorded instances of inefficiency or lack of knowledge that these organisations constantly

demonstrate. (There is a remarkable belief in conspiratorial circles, combining political andparanormal conspiracies, that the CIA has or had access to a circle of so-called remote viewers,

people with extra-sensory powers who were able through paranormal means to provide them with

information about the activities of Americas enemies that couldnt be discovered in any other way.

Such a belief has trouble in easily accommodating the fact that the CIA was woefully unprepared for

the sudden break-up of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, or for the fact that Americas intelligence

organisations first learned of the start of the Gulf War when Kuwaiti embassy employees looked out

of the window and saw Iraqi tanks coming down the road! Sadly, it appears to be true that people

calling themselves remote viewers took very substantial fees from the CIA though whether this tells

us more about the gullibility of people in paranoid institutions or their carefree attitude towards

spending public money I should not care to say.) The more extreme conspiracy theories may argue

that such organisations are only pretending to be inefficient, in order to fool the public about the true

level of their efficiency. Such a position is, as Popper would no doubt have pointed out, not open to

refutation.

(iv) Demonising individuals. As with organisations, so with people. Once plausible candidates for

roles in an assassination conspiracy are identified, they are granted remarkable powers and properties,

their wickedness clearly magnified. In Kennedy CTs there is no better example of this than MeyerLansky, the mafias financial wizard. Lansky was a close associate of Americas premier gangster of

the 1940s, Charles Lucky Luciano. Not actually a gangster himself (and, technically, not actually a

member of the mafia either, since Lanskyas a Jewcould not join an exclusively Sicilian

brotherhood) Lansky acted as a financial adviser. He organised gambling activities for Luciano and

probably played a significant role in the mafia involvement in the development of Las Vegas, and in


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subsequent investments of the Luciano familys money, including those in pre-revolutionary Cuba,

after Lucianos deportation to Sicily.

So much is agreed. But Lansky in CT writing looms ever larger, as a man of remarkable power and

influence, ever ready to use it for malign purposes, a vast and evil spider at the centre of an enormous

international web, maintaining his influence with the aid of the huge sums of money which organised

crime was reaping from its empire.[13] Thus there is no nefarious deed concerning the assassination or

its cover-up with which Lansky cannot be linked. This picture wasnt dented in the least by Robert

Laceys detailed biography of Lansky published in 1991. Lacey, drawing upon a considerable body of

publicly available evidencenot least the substantial body generated by Lanskys lawsuit to enable

him, as a Jew, to emigrate to Israel, was able to show that Lansky, far from being the mobs eminence

grise, was little more than a superannuated book-keeper. The arch manipulator, supposedly

empowered by the mafias millions, led a seedy retirement in poverty and was on record as being

unable to afford healthcare for his relatives. The effect of reading Laceys substantially documentedbiography is rather like that scene in The Wizard of Oz when the curtain is drawn back and the

all-powerful wizard is revealed to be a very ordinary little man.

The 1990s saw the publication of a remarkable amount of material about the workings of American

organised crime, much of it gleaned from FBI and police surveillance during the successful campaign

to imprison most of its leaders. This material reveals that mafia bosses tend to be characterised by a

very limited vocabulary, a remarkable propensity for brutality and a considerable professional cunning

often mixed with truly breath-taking stupidity. That they could organise a large-scale assassination

conspiracy, and keep quiet about it for more than thirty-five years, seemed even less likely. As I point

out below, they would almost certainly not have wanted to.

(E) The canonisation of persons or (more rarely) organisations. In the Kennedy case, this has

taken the form of idealising the President himself. In order to make a conspiratorial hypothesis look

more plausible under (F) below, it is necessary to make the victim look as much as possible like a

significant threat to the interests of the putative conspirators. In this case, Kennedy is depicted as a

liberal politician, one who was a threat to established economic interests, one who took a lead in the

contemporary campaign to end institutionalised discrimination against black people, and, perhapsmost importantly, one who was or became something of a foreign policy dove, supporting less

confrontational policies in the Cold War to the extent of being prepared to terminate US involvement

in South Vietnam.

This canonisation initially derives from the period immediately after the assassination, a period


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marked by the emergence of a number of works about the Kennedy administration from White House

insiders like Theodore Sorensen, Pierre Salinger and the Camelot house historian, Arthur Schlesinger,

works which tended to confirm the idealisation of the recently dead president, particularly when

implicitly compared with the difficulties faced by the increasingly unpopular Lyndon Johnson.

From the mid 1970s Kennedys personal character came under considerable criticism, partly resultingfrom the publication of biographies covering his marriage and sexual life, and the personal lives of the

Kennedy family. More importantly, for our purposes, were the stream of revelations which emerged

from the congressional investigations of this time which indicated the depth of feeling in the Kennedy

White House about Cuba; most important here were the Church Committees revelations that the CIA

had conspired with members of organised crime to bring about the assassination of Fidel Castro.

These, coming hard on the heels of the revelations of various criminal conspiracies within the Nixon

White House, stoked up the production of CTs. (And provided a new motivation for the Kennedy

assassination: that Castro or his sympathisers had found out about these attempts and had Kennedy

killed in revenge.) But they also indicated that the Kennedy brothers were much harder cold war

warriors than had perhaps previously been thought.

The changing climate of the 1980s brought a new range of biographies and memoirsReeves,

Parmet, Wofford, etc.which situated Kennedy more firmly in the political mainstream. It became

that he was not by any means an economic or social liberalon the question of racial segregation he

had to be pushed a lot since he tended to regard the activities of Martin Luther King and others as

obstructing his more important social policies. And Kennedy adopted a much more orthodox stance

on the cold war than many had allowed: this was, after all, the candidate who got himself elected in1960 by managing in the famous missile gap affair to appear tougher on communism than Richard

Nixon, no mean feat. Famously, Kennedy adopted a more moderate policy during the Cuban missile

crisis than some of those recommended by his military advisers, but this can be explained more in

terms of Kennedy having a better grasp of the pragmatics of the situation than in terms of his being a

foreign policy liberal of some sort.

This changing characterisation of Kennedy, this firm re-situating of his administration within the

central mainstream of American politicsa mainstream which appears considerably to the right in

European termshas been broadly rejected by proponents of Kennedy assassination CTs (some of

whom also reject the critical characterisation of his personal life). The reason for this is that it plainly

undercuts any motivation for some part of the American political establishment to have Kennedy

removed. It is unlikely that any of Kennedys reforming policies, economic or social, could seriously

have been considered such a threat to establishment interests. It is even more unlikely when one


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considers that much of Kennedys legislative programme was seriously bogged down in Congress and

was unlikely to be passed in anything but a heavily watered-down form during his term. Much of this

legislation was forced through after the assassination by Kennedys successor, Lyndon Johnson being

a much more astute and experienced parliamentarian. The price for this social reform, though, was

Johnsons continued adherence to the verities of cold war foreign policy over Vietnam. I leave

consideration of Kennedys Vietnam policy to the next section.

(F)An inability to make rational or proportional means-end judgements. The major problem

here for any Kennedy assassination CT is to come up with a motive. Such a motive must not only be

of major importance to putative conspirators, it must also rationally justify a risky, expensiveand

often astonishingly complicatedillegal conspiracy. Which is to say that such conspirators must see

the assassination as the only or best way of bringing about their aim. The alleged motives can be

broadly divided into two categories.

Firstly, revenge. Kennedy was assassinated in revenge for the humiliation he inflicted upon Premier

Khrushchev over the Cuban missile crisis, or for plotting the assassination of Fidel Castro, or for

double-crossing organised crime over alleged agreements made during his election campaign. The

problem with each of these explanations is that the penalties likely to be suffered if one is detected far

outweigh any rational benefits. Had Castros hand been detected behind the assassinationsomething

which Johnson apparently thought all too likelythis would inevitably have swung American public

opinion behind a US military invasion of Cuba and overthrow of Castros rule. If Khrushchev has

been identified as the ultimate source of the assassination, the international crisis would have been

even worse, and could well have edged the world considerably closer towards nuclear war thanhappened in the Cuban missile crisis. One can only make sense of such explanations on the basis of an

assumption that the key conspirators are seriously irrational in this respect, and this is an assumption

that we should not make without some clear evidence to support it.

The second category of explanations for the assassination are instrumental: Kennedy was assassinated

in order to further some specific policy or to prevent him from furthering some policy which the

conspirators found anathema. Here candidates include: to protect Texas oil-barons economic

interests, to frustrate the Kennedy administrations judicial assault upon organised crime, to bring

about a more anti-Castro presidency, andthe one that plays the strongest role in contemporary

Kennedy CTs such as Oliver Stonesto prevent an American withdrawal from Vietnam.

A proper response to the suggestion of any of these as a rational motive for the assassination should

be to embark upon a brief cost-benefit analysis. We have to factor in not only the actual costs of


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organising such a conspiracy (and, in the case of the more extreme Kennedy CTs, of maintaining it for

several decades afterwards to engage in what has been by any standards a pretty inefficient cover-up)

but also the potential costs to be faced if the conspiracy is discovered, the assassination fails, etc..

Criminals by and large tend to be rather poor at estimating their chances of being caught; murder and

armed robbery have very high clear-up rates compared to, say, burglary of unoccupied premises. The

continued existence of professional armed robbers would seem to indicate that they underestimatetheir chances of being caught or dont fully appreciate the comparative benefits of other lines of

criminal activity.

But though assassination conspirators are by definition criminals, we are to assume here that they are

figures in the establishment, professional men in the intelligence, military and political communities,

and so likely to be more rational in their outlook than ordinary street criminals. (Though this is a

defeasible assumption, since the post-war history of western intelligence agencies has indicated a

degree of internal paranoia sometimes bordering on the insane. A substantial part of British

intelligence, for instance, spent almost two decades trying to prove that the then head of MI5 was a

Soviet agent, a claim that appears to have no credibility at all.) If we assume that the Mafia played

such a role in an assassination conspiracy, it is still plausible to believe that they would consider the

risks of failure. In fact, we have some evidence to support this belief since, though organised crime is

by and large a very brutal institution, in the USas opposed to the very different conditions

prevailing in Italyit maintains a policy ofnotattacking dangerous judges or politicians. When in the

1940s senior Mafia boss Albert Anastasia proposed murdering Thomas Dewey, then a highly effective

anti-crime prosecutor in New York and subsequently a republican presidential candidate in 1948, the

response was to have Anastasia murdered rather than risk the troubles that Deweys assassinationwould have brought down upon the heads of organised crime. An even more effective prosecutor,

Rudolph Giuliani, remained unscathed throughout his career.

Against the risks of being caught, we have to balance the costs of trying to achieve ones goal by

some other less dramatic and probably more legal path. The plain fact is that there are a large number

of legal and effective ways of changing a presidents mind or moderating his behaviour. One can

organise public campaigns, plant stories in the press, stimulate critical debate in congress, assess or

manipulate public opinion through polls etc. When the health care industry in the US wanted to defeat

the Clinton administrations reform proposals, for instance, they didnt opt for assassination but went

instead for a highly successful campaign to bring congress and substantial parts of public opinion

against the proposals, which soon became dead in the water.

On the specific case of American withdrawal from Vietnam, all of the above applies. In the first case,


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following on from (E) above, it can be plausibly argued that Kennedy had no such intention. He

certainly on occasion floated the idea, sounding out people around him, but this is something that

politicians do all the time as part of the process of weighing policy options and shouldnt be taken as

evidencefor such an option. But to see Kennedy as seriously considering such an option is to see him

as a figure considerably out of the Democratic mainstream. He would certainly have been aware of the

effects that an Asian policy can have upon domestic matters; as a young congressman he would havebeen intimately aware of the effect that the fall of China to communism in 1949 had upon the last

Democratic administration, severely weakening Harry Trumans effectiveness. For years afterwards

the Democrats were regarded as the people who lost China despite the fact that there was nothing

they could have doneshort of an all-out war, like that occurring in Korea shortly afterwards, which

couldnt possibly be won without the use of nuclear weapons and all that entails. Kennedys

administration had a much stronger presence in South Vietnam and it can reasonably be asked

whether he would have wanted to run the risk of becoming the president who lost Vietnam. He

would also have been aware of the problem that ultimately faced Lyndon Johnson, that one could only

maintain a forceful policy of domestic reform by mollifying congress over matters of foreign policy.

The price for Johnsons Great Society reforms was a continued adherence to a policy of involvement

in Vietnam, long after Johnson himselffully aware of this binddoubted the wisdom of this policy.

Kennedys domestic reforms were already in legislative difficulties; to believe that he was prepared to

withdraw from Vietnam, then, is to believe that he was effectively abandoning his domestic

programmes. (That Kennedy was alleged to be considering such an action in his second term, if

re-elected, doesnt affect this point. He would still have been a lame-duck president, and would also

have weakened the chances of any possible Democratic successor, something that would certainly

have been of interest to other members of his party.)

It thus appears unlikely that Kennedy would have seriously considered withdrawing completely from

Vietnam. But if he had, a number of options were available to opponents of such a policy. Firstly, as

noted above, they could have encouraged opposition to such a policy in congress and other important

institutions, and among the American public. There was certainly a strongly sympathetic Republican

and conservative Democrat presence in congress to form the foundations of such an opposition, as

well as among newspaper publishers and other media outlets. If Kennedy had underestimated the

domestic problems that withdrawal would cause him, such a campaign would concentrate his mind

upon them.

And secondly, opponents could work to change Kennedys mind. They could do this by controlling

the information available for Kennedy and his advisers. In particular, military sources could

manipulate the information flowing from Vietnam itself. (That Kennedy thought something like this


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was happening may be indicated by his insistence on sending civilian advisers to Vietnam to report

back to him personally.) This policy worked well in Johnsons timethe control of information over

the trivial events in the Bay of Tonkin in 1965 was manipulated to indicate a serious crisis which thus

forced Johnson into inserting a heavy military presence into South Vietnam in response. There is no

reason to believe that such a policy would not have worked if Kennedy had still been in office. At the

very least, it would be rational to adopt such a policy first, to try cheap, legal and probably efficientmethods of bringing about ones goal before even contemplating such a dramati

critical thinking about conspiracy theories

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