The Release of the JFK Files, Conspiracy Theories, and the “Deep State”

My Interest in the Kennedy Assassination

I was nine years old on Friday, November 22, 1963. I was in class with my chums at the local elementary school when our winded and red-faced principal rushed in and pulled the teacher aside. When he whispered in her ear, she turned ashen. What had happened? The principal hurried out, and soon returned with a huge, clunky TV and awkwardly rolled it to the front of the class. By the time the TV was on and the antenna properly adjusted, Walter Cronkite had just announced that JFK died in Dallas from an assassin’s bullet. Our teacher huddled outside the classroom with the principal and other teachers—many of whom were openly crying. The sight of teachers crying was a shock to elementary school kids. The school’s parking lot and the curb along the street were filling up with distraught parents arriving to pick up their confused and frightened children. My parents both were at work (they ran our family business), but the school was close to home so I quickly made my way there and turned on the TV. I’ve always been a news junky—even at age nine.

Not long after, my dad arrived and I was completely taken aback by his reaction. The Riddlebargers did not like, nor support the Kennedys. The Kennedys were Roman Catholic and democrats. My dad had a comedy record mocking Jackie Kennedy’s famous 1961 tour of the White House—he played it frequently and laughed uproariously. I didn’t know what to expect since the President was usually the object of criticism and scorn in our house. How would my dad feel about all of this? He had been an FBI agent during World War Two, and was a Nixon fan, more so after Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election to JFK. Nixon was a local boy and very supportive of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

My dad was very calm and stoic by nature, but when he came through the door, he too was red-faced and alarmed by what had happened. He was appalled that JFK’s security had failed. He worried about foreign involvement and the possibility that this might lead to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. To my surprise, I noticed his eyes welling up with tears as he blurted out, “no one has the right to take the life of our president.” And so the Riddlebargers grieved JFK’s death like most Americans. The TV was on constantly that weekend and we watched it all unfold in real time. I had not seen my parents react like this before—with such sadness and concern for the Kennedy family. That made a huge impression on me. This was a national and not a partisan trauma.

Live TV was new and still an experimental thing at the time. We watched JFK’s flag-draped coffin on a Civil War era gun caisson proceed to the Capitol and then to Arlington National Cemetery. The “dead man’s march” drum cadence echoed through the streets of Washington. Mourners lined the streets in the thousands, all somber and grief stricken. I’ll never forget the very tall Charles de Gaulle walking next to the diminutive Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia. Funny, the things you remember from childhood events.

At some point, the news coverage switched back to Dallas when Lee Harvey Oswald (with his shiner, courtesy of the Dallas PD) was to be transported from the Dallas City jail to the county jail with better media facilities and security. Suddenly, Jack Ruby lunged forward from the crowd and shot Oswald mid-gut. Oswald’s face contorted and he slumped to the ground in mortal pain. The poor Dallas detective handcuffed to Oswald looked at Ruby, as if to say, “don’t shoot me!” Chaos ensued and Oswald’s body accompanied by far too many cops was chucked into the back of an ambulance to take Oswald to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Ironically, the assassin ended up in the same emergency suite at Parkland where JFK had died three days prior.

For what should be now obvious reasons, the JFK assassination was burned into my memory during my formative years. It became a subject of life-long interest. That interest was only piqued when my parents let me stay up late (after 11:00 p.m. on Friday night) to watch the Joe Pine show. Pine was the first late night shock jock. He had all the initial conspiracy theorists appear on his program (Mark Lane, Jim Garrison, and Josiah Thompson). Their various theories were contrary to what the Warren Commission was telling us, so my interest with JFK conspiracy theories grew from there. I’ve read nearly fifty books on the Kennedy assassination, some blaming the CIA, Castro and the Cubans, the Mob, LBJ, the Bushes, and even those who claimed to be in on the plot, or who boast about participating in the assassination.

These conspiracy theories were fascinating, but lacked one thing—compelling evidence that a prosecutor could bring into a court of law and get a conviction of Oswald without suffering the embarrassing debacle of Jim Garrison’s New Orleans faux trial of Clay Shaw, made infamous in Oliver Stone’s film JFK.

Was There a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK?

The simple answer is “no.” All the evidence points to the fact that Oswald shot JFK on his own initiative without the aid, support, or the planning of others. Why then is there so much talk of a conspiracy? Why is it so widely accepted? That answer is also simple if unpalatable back in 1963, during the height of the Cold War. The two agencies (the CIA and the FBI) responsible for gathering information (both foreign—the CIA, and domestic—the FBI) on threats to America and its leaders, failed to warn the Secret Service and the local Dallas police that Lee Harvey Oswald was a known threat, that he had bragged he would kill JFK to both Cuban and Russian officials in their respective embassies in Mexico City, a mere six weeks before JFK visited Dallas, and well before JFK’s route past the Texas School Book Depository was even planned.

When Oswald actually pulled off what he had threatened to do, and it was announced that the Warren Commission was to be established to investigate Oswald and the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the president, both the CIA and the FBI did what such government agencies always do when they fail—they attempt to cover up their failures. This was a CYA effort of the first order. Key figures in both the CIA and FBI hid information from investigators, failed to disclose what they knew about Oswald’s threats, and did not come clean that their agency’s failures likely made it much easier for Oswald to assassinate JFK. Such failure and the subsequent efforts at collective CYA, looks, smells, and feels like a conspiracy.

Indeed there was a conspiracy—not one involving Oswald—but a conspiracy by station chiefs in the CIA and regional FBI offices to hide what they knew about Oswald and his trip to Mexico City from the Warren Commission investigators (as recounted in Phil Shenon’s book A Cruel and Shocking Act). On the one hand, telling all to the investigators amounted to exposing their malfeasance by not warning the Secret Service of the threat to JFK Oswald posed. On the other hand, from the CIA’s perspective, an investigation like the one the Warren Commission was conducting raised the possibility that America’s enemies at the time, Cuba and the Soviet Union, would learn of the carefully guarded CIA sources and methods used to spy on potential threats in places like Mexico City. The CIA and FBI would not allow that to happen. The Warren Commission became a threat on both accounts and was never given the whole story. So much of what the CIA and FBI knew about Oswald’s visit to Mexico City did not see the light of day until quite recently—the last batch of assassination records released in July of 2023.

Why All the Conspiracy Theories Then?

One reason people embrace JFK conspiracy theories is that they know little to nothing about the actual facts and circumstances of the case. They only know what they’ve heard in the pop culture echo chamber where conspiracy theories are a common method of explanation. This essay is not the place to debate the details of the assassination, but I will say I pay scant attention to those who pontificate about the JFK assassination but have not read the likes of Gerald Posner’s Case Closed or Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History. Both books make a compelling case that Oswald was the lone gunman and that the various conspiracy theories are by and large unsubstantiated fiction. Posner and Bugliosi are compelling to the point that after reading them, I had no doubt whatsoever that Oswald acted alone. So did Jack Ruby. Case closed, indeed.

However interesting they may be, JFK conspiracy theory books are devoid of factual evidence, but filled with hearsay, conjecture, and speculation. The vast majority of those who believe there was a conspiracy to assassinate the president have probably not considered that those pushing conspiracy theories have ulterior motives. Books on the Kennedy assassination sell. JFK conspiracy theories are a cottage industry. Every time something about the investigation into the assassination makes the news, another book (or two, or three) soon appears. The more sensational and outlandish the theory, it seems, the bigger the royalties and greater the media coverage. Wild and factually challenged rants about JFK’s death on social media get clicks. Follow the money . . .

But why are people so prone to default to conspiracy theories? The answer is obvious when you think about it. Catechesis into conspiracy theorizing as a means of coping with troubling events is a reality in American life. From the advent of the James Bond franchise, to Keifer Sutherland’s 24 and CTU, to the Jason Bourne movies (and countless other films and TV shows) Americans are repeatedly confronted by powerful and ruthless villains, tipped off to the existence of shadowy government agencies, and taught to distrust all government institutions because of corrupt politicians, scheming and greedy bureaucrats. As a consequence, Americans learn to cope with traumatic events by defaulting to conspiracy theories as explanatory cause—so we invent the “deep state,” and think of it as doing those malicious things pop culture and social media hacks tell us it does. Although none of these deep state elements and power are real, we’ve been taught to ask, “what is the government not telling us?” “What are they hiding?” It actually makes more sense to us to believe that JFK was killed by as yet unknown conspirators than by a lone gunman with a mail order Italian surplus Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, for which he paid $19.95 plus a buck and a half for shipping and handling.

Yet, by their very nature, conspiracies rarely accomplish what the conspirators set out to accomplish. Why? People have a very hard time keeping secrets. The greater the number of conspirators involved, the more likely someone within the conspiracy will break confidence and talk to an outsider, exposing the conspiracy. There’s much truth in the old saying that conspiracies fail “because somebody talks, somebody always talks.” Watergate conspirator Chuck Colson confirmed this eagerness to “tell someone on the outside” in an essay on why the disciples did not concoct the resurrection of Jesus. His involvement in the Watergate break-in provided the obvious reason why conspiracies fail. He recounted how his co-conspirators (who were all highly-educated professional government officials, several with law degrees and PhDs), could not keep silent for more than a few days, even though they knew they’d face serious jail time if they got caught because of their yapping. Colson concluded that there was no way the uneducated fishermen who followed Jesus could form a conspiracy to fake the resurrection. If those among America’s political elite couldn't keep silent, neither could the disciples.

A conspiracy large enough to pull off the assassination of American’s president and cover it up so thoroughly that two congressional investigations and countless investigators and researchers could not expose the identity of the conspirators, would require a huge number of individuals to do the deed. And yet, all of those conspirators have remained silent for sixty years. Nigh on impossible. Somebody talks, someone always talks. So, when no one talks, there’s probably no conspiracy.

Release the Remaining Files?

Yes and no.

The case for not releasing all the files should be disclosed by the keepers of the files. There are no deep dark secrets which remain hidden in them which prove a conspiracy and would cause terrible damage to government agencies (like the CIA and FBI) if released. That has already been done in the two most recent file releases. But those human CIA assets who reported what Oswald actually said in the Cuban and Russian embassies are either still alive (and now quite elderly), or the disclosure of their identities would put their families in jeopardy (any still alive in Cuba or Mexico). Both Trump (45) and Biden (46) promised to release all the remaining flies, but were talked out of doing so by those familiar with what remains classified in those files (Mike Pompeo for example). The danger from Trump’s release of the files now is retaliation upon those who were CIA assets (spies) in Mexico City, working in the Cuban and Russian embassies as civilian employees, or as contractors who placed listening devices, tapped phones, etc., in the embassies, or those who planted cameras and listening devices near-by. Releasing the files could possibly endanger lives, a good reason not to release them.

But the case for releasing all the files has grown much stronger over time. Releasing all of them would finally put an end to the persistant rumors and wild speculation about what might be in them. Once they are released, then we’ll know that nothing significant remains hidden. We’ll finally get to see Oswald’s and Jack Ruby’s federal tax returns! That should (but won’t) put an end to a very dark chapter in American history—a lone gunman could actually shoot and kill the president and change the course of history, and this at a time when the year before, the USA and the Soviet Union had a tense showdown over nuclear weapons based in Cuba. The recent attempts on Trump’s life should make this point very clear. What if the assassin in Butler PA had succeeded? Our lives and world would be greatly impacted, and we’d never forget it. There would be countless investigations and assassination theories. But that is what did happen when Oswald shot and killed JFK. I remember it like it was yesterday, even sixty years later. I am so very thankful our nation doesn’t have to face this sort of national trauma again because of a lone, troubled young man on a roof with a rifle.

So, the argument for releasing all the files is now the stronger of the two. It is indeed time to put an end to all of this wild and often irresponsible speculation.

A final thought about the “deep state.” Those prone to conspiracy theories often see them as the consequence of dark and secretive forces manipulating American life to destructive ends. Social media does this in tribal terms. “Our guy is against the deep state.” “Your guy (or gal) is a tool of the deep state.” But the reality is the deep state does not exist as imagined, although, of course, there are rogue elements and secret agencies in government. The deep state does not have the power nor the assets which our contemporaries think it does, especially when our understanding of how it operates grows out of the conspiracy catechesis we’ve received over the generations from pop culture. If books on the Kennedy assassination make piles of money, just think of how our fascination with the deep state does the same, but only to the Nth power. We love this “deep state” stuff. It is highly entertaining, often thrilling and spooky, but plays to our deepest fears. Better yet, it can be used as s social media cudgel against political opponents. “What are they hiding?”

But if the deep state is largely mythological, the real and more threatening enemy is right in front of us—the “bureaucratic state” (or “the swamp”). This multi-government agency beast sucks up billions of dollars annually, has countless public and visible operatives, has a massive footprint, and intrudes upon every area of American life. Political tribalism is largely a fight over who and which party gets to control it. But there is nothing secret or “deep” about it. Yet it is every bit as nefarious as the imaginary “deep state.”

And whenever caught doing what it shouldn’t do, or not doing what it should do, the bureaucratic state awakens and will do everything in its power to protect itself from scrutiny or blame. Just ask the Warren Commission.