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Legacy of Lunacy
Forget hanging chads, 9/11, and those missing W.M.D.’s. A massive new conspiracy book proves that the original unanswerable question is still the juiciest: who shot J.F.K.?
by Rob Sheffield WEB EXCLUSIVE November 21, 2008
For conspiracy-theory devotees, there are some forever-young dead icons who live larger every year. The longer they stay dead, the more mythic juice they possess. Like Bob Marley, allegedly killed by a radioactive boot supplied by the C.I.A. in Jamaica, or Jimi Hendrix, bumped off with a bottle of red wine poured down his throat in London. There’s Tupac, who’s secretly still alive, and Jim Morrison, who used to be secretly still alive, but who probably just died. But John F. Kennedy? Still No. 1 on the charts. Whether you believe he was murdered by a lone nut, the mob, J. Edgar Hoover, or Tupac, he’s the point where all conspiracies meet. If he didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him, and then shoot him.
The J.F.K.-conspiracy world is a funny place. Since the crime is already done, there’s no sense of moral urgency, as there is with other fanatical conspiracy worlds—it’s almost like crunching baseball statistics. The Kennedy assassination is an event that everybody agrees really happened, unlike the moon landing or Roswell; not even the crankiest crank argues that J.F.K. is hiding out in a Boca pad with Jimmy Hoffa and D. B. Cooper. But there’s no official version of the story, unless you count the Warren Report, which isn’t all that official, or the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations, which decided bullets were definitely involved. So there’s just an endless flow of unofficial versions, each one hinting that someday we’re all going to get a giant truth-gasmic payoff. When, Lord, when?
That would be about 2017, according to Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination, the cinder-block-sized new volume from longtime Kennedy researcher Lamar Waldron and Air America radio host Thom Hartmann. They point out that the federal government is sitting on “well over one million CIA records” relating to the Kennedy assassination that have yet to be declassified, and will remain in the vault for another nine years. The book is 848 pages, and it’s as convoluted as its title, but for those of us who obsess over these things, it’s nowhere near long enough. The authors point the finger at mob bosses Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, and Johnny Rosselli, raising many provocative questions about November 22, 1963—but the biggest question of all may be why, after 45 years, J.F.K. remains the world’s favorite murder mystery, kept alive by intrigue and sex and youth. Nothing has come along to replace him, or even come close.
Legacy of Secrecy is for the kind of conspiracy buff who does not give a toss who is or isn’t a Freemason. (Allen Dulles? The debate rages on!) Waldron and Hartmann blame the mob, and they have some explosive new material, related to a secret C.I.A. plot (is there any other kind?) to eliminate Castro and replace him with General Juan Almeida—who remains a top military figure in Cuba today—on December 1, 1963 (“C-Day”). J.F.K.’s murder, they argue, was planned by Louisiana mob boss Marcello in retaliation for R.F.K’s organized-crime prosecutions. Marcello figured he could get away with such a risky hit because Hoover and Lyndon Johnson would rather cover up the assassination plot than risk revealing the C-Day plan. (For those keeping score at home, Marcello is a familiar suspect, but the C-Day angle is original to Waldron and Hartmann, who first raised it in their 2005 book, Ultimate Sacrifice.)
Marcello may have given himself away on the 1985 tapes from his bugged prison cell in Texarkana. (He didn’t realize there was a mic in his cellmate’s transistor radio.) On December 17, 1985, Marcello recalled something he’d been told by a priest from the old country: “ ‘My son,’ he said, ‘if your enemies get in your way, you bury them in the ground, the grass grows over them, and you go on about your business.’ ” Two days earlier, unaware that his cellmate was an F.B.I. informant, he’d said in the prison yard, “Yeah, I had the little son of a bitch killed. I’m sorry I didn’t do it myself.” Since the son of a bitch in question was John Kennedy, these words beg a few questions. An idle boast from an aging blowhard? The delusion of a prisoner in the early stages of Alzheimer’s? A tall tale reported by a prison stoolie under pressure to deliver the goods? Or a credible confession?
The book gets infinitely more chaotic when it moves on to the Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, trying to make all the pieces fit together into a theory of everything. In this account, Marcello was hired to kill King by a group of obscure Atlanta white supremacists, despite the fact he was already under indictment for punching an F.B.I. agent at the New Orleans airport. James Earl Ray was a drug mule for Marcello, smuggling heroin across the Canadian border, but it’s still unclear how he fits into the plot, since he was unqualified for the role of a hit man (he had no experience with guns) or a fall guy (he went on the lam for two months, then claimed he was the pawn of a conspiracy, which is poor fall-guy form). Why would Marcello jeopardize his J.F.K. cover-up by taking on two more risky high-profile hits? Why did Marcello get away with it for so long, getting described by the top New Orleans F.B.I. agent as nothing but a “tomato salesman,” after decades as a drug lord? (He’d been busted with 23 lbs. of pot in 1938.) Why did Hoover let the L.A.P.D. burn the physical evidence in the R.F.K. killing, including the wall with the bullet holes?
We don’t know the answers yet, and there are a lot of other things we would need to know before there could be any kind of certainty. But the J.F.K.-conspiracy world is not a place to hope for certainty; in a way, that’s part of its eternal attraction. Since the federal government closed the investigation, the whole case has basically been outsourced to freelancers and amateurs, independent researchers, journalists, or just paranoid eccentrics, all puzzling the story together one clue at a time, with countless false leads and shadows along the way.
J.F.K.’s longevity is especially impressive when you consider that the 2000s have been the steroid era of conspiracy theories. Sure, back in the 70s, people got feverish over the idea that Nixon, Kissinger, and Brezhnev were hired agents of David Rockefeller, but that was also when baseball sluggers could lead the league with 30-plus homers. Standards are higher now. In 2001, the year Barry Bonds set a new record by hitting 73 dingers, conspiracy culture got a similar cow-hormone shot, as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft assumed power. The big moment wasn’t so much 9/11 as 12/12—the day in 2000 when the Supreme Court blocked Florida from counting its votes. Since then, every day is Christmas for paranoids. Cue the Patriot Act, the Iraqi W.M.D.’s, the “Homeland Security Since 1492” T-shirts with Apaches holding rifles, Obama voting for phone taps, the 2004 Ohio votes, the Red Sox winning the Series, the R.I.A.A. suing music fans who download, and billboards on buses urging passengers, “If You See Something, Say Something.” It makes those old-school black helicopters look a little quaint.
But through it all, J.F.K. remains the unchallenged king of the conspiracy narratives, the rising tide who lifts all the other boats. It was the J.F.K. case that took crackpot history mainstream. In 1991, you could go see the indie film Slacker, and hear the entire audience lose it during the scene in the bookstore with a “Conspiracy” section. Just a few years later, this was no longer recognizable as a joke. The X-Files was huge, the Wu-Tang Clan were dropping Illuminati science on platinum albums, and pitcher Steve Carlton celebrated his election to the Baseball Hall of Fame by announcing that Bill Clinton had a secret black son. The Internet (a domestic-surveillance network originally proposed by Watergate conspirator John Ehrlichman) made it possible to circulate all sorts of unpublishable (and libelous) (and stupid) (but often kind of awesome) claims. The freakazoids had a place to kick around theories the mainstream media (not yet the “M.S.M.”) wouldn’t touch. And over the years, J.F.K. adepts got more and more hard-core. Once upon a time, it was fairly esoteric to reference the grassy knoll or the magic bullet, but now it’s no sweat to drop “westward headsnap” into everyday conversation.
The whole idea of conspiracy as we know it comes from this case—it was in the immediate wake of J.F.K. that we got Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (a secret postal service using trash cans), John Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason (Ike’s presidency was a Soviet occupation), and David Noebel’s Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles (Ringo has come for your children), along with everything that has followed. For all its hateful and delusional aspects, it can be a surprisingly tender world—one where conspiracy is a kind of communion.
As for the truth about J.F.K.? Those documents get declassified in 2017, when we’ll know everything, the debate will be settled, and we can all move on with our lives. And if you believe that, Tupac would like to offer you a great deal on this pad in Boca.
Rob Sheffield is a writer for Blender and the author of Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time.
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