A taste for gunmen on the grassy knoll

February 07, 2010|Michael Washburn, Globe Correspondent

In late 2006 I was thrust headlong into one of the most infamous episodes in American history: the conspiracy to commit and cover up the assassination of John F. Kennedy. For several decades Arthur Schlesinger Jr. taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. After retirement Schlesinger retained his office, just down the hall from mine. Hastily tearing through my mail one day, I inadvertently opened a letter intended for Schlesinger. Within lay three-paragraphs of madness, speculation, and baroque innuendo purporting to be a ballistics analysis that obliterated the Warren Commission’s jejune findings.

The letter bought into the persistent fantasy that the CIA, or the mob, or that anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy. Despite the absurdity of its claims, for a brief moment, it was thrilling. What if there was something to this?

Given the popularity of conspiracy theories, not to mention the success of books and shows based on them, one could be forgiven for thinking half the country has received, and been ensorcelled by, such epistolary revelations. According to journalist David Aaronovitch, author of “Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History,’’ we are suffering through a long age of “fashionable conspiracism” in which nearly any event of note, from the moon landing to President Obama’s birth, is subject to conspiracy theorizing.

“Voodoo Histories’’ lucidly reveals the weaknesses of several popular conspiracy theories, including the JFK-RFK-MLK assassination trifecta, the origin of the “Da Vinci Code,’’and Marilyn Monroe’s death. The book endeavors to explain why “the counterintuitive, the unlikely, and the implausible . . . have a better purchase on our imagination and beliefs than the real.”

At their most basic, Aaronovitch writes, conspiracy theories are, “the attribution of a secret action to one party that might far more reasonably be explained as the less covert and less complicated action of another.” Here’s a typical either/or. Which is more likely: that the US government has successfully orchestrated a four-decade hoax requiring the absolute silence of thousands of people, or that NASA successfully sent people to the moon?