Neptunus Lex

Forty-four years ago last week, Sarajevo came to Dallas and the boy king of Camelot stood in the footsteps of Archduke Ferdinand. Rather than igniting a world-wide conflagration, when Lee Harvey Oswald fired those three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolhouse Depository he ignited what was to become the American culture war - a war whose volleys echo to this day.

Partisans of the handsome young president and his glamorous bride saw in him the manifestation of all their aspirations and prayers. His murder on the streets of Dallas sent them searching for an enemy to blame. They found it in Oliver Stone-style conspiratorial visions of an America divided by race and class, gender and age. They found in it a reason to hate themselves - or at least, to hate those among them who did not share their vision of the America-that-ought-to-be.

The truth was, as ever, hiding in plain view - effectively, as it turns out. As James Piereson, author of “Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism” points out in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal (subscription only) the dominant narrative coming out of the Kennedy assassination - which, like 9/11, briefly united Americans before tearing them asunder again - was that he had been murdered by reactionary forces because of his support for sweeping civil rights reform.

Oswald makes an ill-fitting foil to that narrative. But as Piereson points out, and conspiracy theorists notwithstanding, Oswald’s solitary guilt cannot plausibly be denied by those still tethered to reality:

His rifle fired the shots that killed the president; spent shells from the rifle were found in the building where he worked; he was seen in that area before the shooting; witnesses on the street saw a man firing from a sixth floor window. Based on a description, a policeman stopped Oswald while he was walking in another section of the city. Oswald shot the policeman and then fled to a nearby movie theater, where he was captured. For those who weigh the actual evidence, there can be little doubt that Oswald was the assassin.

And yet, with the evidence in plain sight, why do two-thirds of those polled today continue to believe that JFK was “cut down by a conspiracy engineered by organized crime, the CIA or FBI, or right-wing groups upset by Kennedy’s liberal policies”? (This is a number, by the way, which is charmingly similar to those who today believe that the federal government ignored specific warnings about 9/11.)

We might as well ask why people believe in conspiracy theories generally: The world can be a hideously complex place, and believing in conspiracies - shadowy groups that move behind the scenes, pulling the strings - tends to simplify the picture. And conspiracies can lend drama - even melodrama - to otherwise gray and uninteresting lives. Many of those who howl the loudest at the theoretical depredations of the NSA or Google must in their heart of hearts be secretly pleased to know that perhaps somewhere, somebody actually cares enough about what they’re privately saying to listen in. Finally, in the Oswald case, and as in the 9/11 attacks, some people believe in conspiracies because reality ill-comports with their their personal preferences:

Oswald was a dedicated communist who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 out of disgust with American capitalism. After becoming disillusioned with Soviet life, he returned to the U.S. in 1962. In early 1963, he bought a scoped rifle through the mail and soon used it to fire a shot (which missed) at retired general Edwin Walker, the head of the John Birch Society in Dallas. In the summer of 1963, Oswald was active in street demonstrations in support of Castro. In September 1963, he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City seeking a travel visa that would allow him to travel to Cuba.

Oswald was among the radicals of the time who saw Third World revolutionaries like Castro as the wave of the communist future. He was well aware of Kennedy’s efforts to overthrow Castro’s regime. As a Senate investigative committee suggested in 1975, Oswald shot Kennedy to interrupt his administration’s plans to assassinate Castro or to overthrow his regime in Cuba.

Not much to do with the heroic advance of civil rights, but far more with heroic defense against communist tyranny. An uncongenial reality happily ignored by those who saw more to loathe at home than fear overseas - and the same moment when the much-derided neocons got off the left/liberal bus to forge their own way forward.

When Kennedy was shot a part of our polis unmoored itself from reality and invested itself in the belief that the United States and its government - a government elected from among their own kind - was the chief source of the world’s evil rather that what most people had theretofore shared as a consensus view: That the US was at least a potential and often necessary power for great good in a world all too often beset by darkness and tyranny.

All of us can lament the increasingly degree of incivility in our public discourse, where policy decisions are no longer contested as merely unwise or wrong-headed but are accounted by those who disagree with them as actually illegal. But perversely, even as our public men embroil themselves in overheated rhetoric, our civic culture slouches towards an increasingly apathetic “who am I to judge” moral relativism - a poison that saps us of our will to draw distinctions between good and evil in the world abroad. To deny, in effect, that such distinctions exist - or if not, then to deny that we are qualified to make them.

There may have been times in the world when such a general and deliberate flight from reality and the moral confusion it generates could be safely and sensibly embraced. I just do not know that I myself have ever lived through any of them.