JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories Will Decline

But not because of the government's release of JFK assassination files

The release of the last batch of the federal government’s previously classified files on the JFK assassination conspiracy contained no “smoking gun” or even just a tantalizing hint suggesting a larger conspiracy. Instead, while the files contain a few tidbits of interesting material on the CIA’s larger activities, they don’t suggest anything about the JFK assassination that we didn’t already know.

So, will this finally put the JFK assassination conspiracies to rest?

I suspect that in itself, this release will not deter conspiracy theorists. After all, conspiracy theories are rarely stopped through a release of information discrediting the theory. (If they were, the conspiracy that the moon landing was a hoax would never have gotten very far).

But there may be other reasons to expect that the JFK assassination conspiracies have already passed their heyday and will gradually start to attract less interest.

For years, the JFK assassination was America’s most popular subject for conspiracy theories. Speculation that the assassination was not the work of Lee Harvey Oswald alone began immediately after the assassination, and was barely interrupted by the Warren Commission’s report insisting that Oswald had been the lone gunman. Over the next few decades, hundreds of books were published giving reasons why the JFK assassination had to have been a conspiracy. By one estimate, at least 1,400 books on the JFK assassination had been written by the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination in November 2013.

Conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination differed widely in the details, but beyond the basic agreement that Oswald could not have acted alone, they also generally agreed that the federal government was an instigator of the coverup and perhaps even of the assassination itself. This narrative fit the pattern of late twentieth-century American conspiracy theories and helps to explain, I think, why JFK assassination conspiracy theories became so widely believed.

Americans have always believed in conspiracy theories, but the identities of the supposed conspirators whom they are most likely to suspect have changed over time. When I taught a class on the history of American conspiracy theories a couple years ago, I started with the seventeenth century, when American colonists, following the lead of Christians in Europe, were likely to believe in conspiracy theories with supernatural agents – namely, the devil.

The Salem witch trials were based on a widely believed conspiracy theory that attributed strange phenomena and difficult setbacks for the community to Satan’s alleged collusion with members of the community who were willing to sell their soul to the devil.

By the late eighteenth century, Americans were less likely to believe in conspiracy theories that featured the devil as a prime conspirator, but they were now more likely to suspect alien subversives of plotting against the republic. The prime suspects for these plots now included the pope (who repeatedly resurfaced as a nefarious agent in conspiracy theories for the next century or more) and the Bavarian Illuminati.

From the 1790s until the 1940s, most American conspiracy theories fit the pattern of blaming alien subversives for the conspiracy. And in most cases, the same cast of villains kept resurfacing in the conspiracy theories. Samuel F. B. Morse and other Protestants of the 1830s imagined a popish plot to capture America. Henry Ford and other anti-Semites of the early twentieth century believed that a cabal of Jews were planning to take over both the nation and the world. And occasionally, people imagined religious skeptics plotting to destroy churches and Christianity, as the conspiracy theory about the Bavarian Illuminati suggested. In each case, the narrative was similar: There were alien forces threatening to destroy the religion and political order of the republic.

This is also how most Americans explained presidential assassinations. In 1901, when President William McKinley was assassinated by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist and second-generation Polish-American, the assassin fit Americans’ stereotype of an alien subversive. They didn’t need a larger conspiracy theory to explain the assassination, because Czolgosz was the conspiracy.

But after the early 1960s, the leading conspiracy theories were a bit different. While one could still find plenty of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (and maybe even an occasional anti-Catholic conspiracy theory) if one looked hard enough, the most popular conspiracy theories of the late twentieth century began featuring the government as the prime agent of conspiracy, as Kathryn S. Olmsted’s Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (OUP, 2009) argues.

As late as the 1950s and early 1960s, during the early years of the Cold War, Americans still trusted their government, and they imagined that if the government turned against the American people, it would only come about because of Communist subversives – the latest version of conspiracy theories involving alien subversive elements. But after the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers, and Watergate, Americans knew that top government officials were perfectly capable of lying to them. And if they lied about Vietnam and Watergate, what other falsehoods were they telling? Most likely, they were covering up a lot of other information that citizens needed to know.

In 1976, 81 percent of Americans believed that more than one person was responsible for John F. Kennedy’s assassination. At the beginning of the 21st century, when Gallup asked this question again, 81 percent still believed that Lee Harvey Oswald had not acted alone. The Warren Report, in other words, was wrong. Maybe it was even part of the government’s coverup.

One could easily imagine a conspiracy theory about the JFK assassination that did not involve the US government and that instead fit the older conspiracy theory pattern of blaming tragedies on suspected subversives. Oswald, after all, had connections with several Communist countries. It would be easy to label him a suspected alien subversive and to say that international Communists were responsible for killing Kennedy. But most conspiracy theorists did not take that approach. When Gallup asked Americans in 2013 who was responsible for the conspiracy to kill JFK, one-third of those who had an opinion on the matter said that it was either the federal government or the CIA – a much larger percentage than attributed the conspiracy to any other group. And this doesn’t even count the additional people who attributed the assassination to Lyndon Johnson (3 percent), J. Edgar Hoover or the FBI (1 percent), the Secret Service (1 percent), or the military-industrial complex (1 percent).

By contrast, only 5 percent said that Cuba or Fidel Castro was responsible, only 3 percent attributed Kennedy’s death to the Soviet Union or “Communists,” and only 2 percent said that another foreign government was responsible. Collectively, then, only half as many Americans attributed the conspiracy to Communists or a foreign government as blamed their own government for plotting to kill the president.

Before the early 1970s, the willingness of so many millions of Americans to believe that their own government would assassinate a president would have been unimaginable. But after Vietnam and Watergate, millions of Americans could not only imagine the government doing this but could be certain that it did.

That so many millions did so was an indication, I think, not only of their disillusionment with the federal government after Vietnam and Watergate but of their belief that JFK represented the antithesis of what had happened in those scandals. Many of the conspiracy theorists believed that JFK would have handled the Vietnam War far better than Lyndon Johnson did. Even if their imagined picture of JFK had little basis in reality, they viewed him as an enemy of the CIA and its nefarious activities. It was not too much of a stretch for them to imagine that either the CIA or Johnson had gone so far as to orchestrate Kennedy’s death.

But in recent years, the percentage of Americans who believe in a JFK assassination conspiracy has started to drop. In 2023, the date of the last Gallup poll on the question, only 65 percent of respondents said they believed that more than one person was involved in the assassination. Those with more education are less likely to believe in a JFK assassination conspiracy theory, but so are those who are younger. Belief that more than one person was involved in the assassination was highest among Americans age 55 or older and lowest among Gen-Zers (those born after 1996).

Gen-Zers are notorious for believing in conspiracy theories, especially those that circulate widely online. One 2023 survey showed that 60 percent of 14-17 year-olds believe in at least four conspiracy theories, compared to only 49 percent of adults. Among Gen Zers over age 18, conspiracy theory beliefs are almost equally widespread. A 2021 survey showed that 35 percent of Gen Zers believed that COVID vaccines implanted microchips in people’s brains or were “unsure” whether this was true – compared to only 5 percent of Americans born before 1946 who said the same. About 12 percent of Gen Zers believed the earth was flat and another 15 percent were “unsure.” Nearly 50 percent either believed that “NASA did not land on the moon” or were “unsure” whether they did. By contrast, only 5 percent of the oldest generation of Americans (and only about 11 percent of Baby Boomers) expressed skepticism about the moon landing.

Why, then, does a generation that is far more likely than older Americans to believe in conspiracy theories in general find conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination less persuasive than older generations do?

I think there are probably two reasons. The first is that Gen Zers are far removed in time from the events that gave rise to JFK assassination conspiracies. They never experienced the excitement about Kennedy’s election. They never experienced the shock of the assassination. And they never experienced the deep disillusionment that came from the Vietnam War and Watergate. If they were born in the early 2000s, they are about as far removed from JFK’s assassination as early Baby Boomers were from William McKinley’s death. Most Baby Boomers didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about who shot McKinley and why. And maybe most Gen Zers don’t spend much time thinking about Kennedy either. Conspiracy theories about 9/11 and COVID – events that are more closely connected to their own lives or at least their parents’ experiences – seem more interesting.

But there’s another reason, I think. Just as the Baby Boom generation was strongly attracted to conspiracy theories involving the US government, so the Gen Z generation is attracted to conspiracy theories regarding the scientific establishment.

This is a new development. Even in the early 2000s, the most popular conspiracy theories were those that involved the alleged coverups of a nefarious government bureaucracy – as the widespread conspiracy theories about 9/11 demonstrated. But for Gen Zers, the leading conspiracy theories mostly involve the claim that the scientific establishment is lying to us – as the vaccine conspiracy theories and the revival of claims that the moon landing was a hoax demonstrate. This anti-science is not religiously based; Gen Zers are no more likely than any other generation to doubt the age of the earth, as we might expect if they were influenced by young-earth creationism. But it is clearly rooted very deeply in their own experiences and presuppositions, if more than a quarter are willing to say that they’re not even sure that the earth is round.

So, I expect that the JFK assassination conspiracy theories will gradually start to fade. They were a product of a particular moment in time – a time when Americans were becoming deeply cynical about their government, but were still hoping for better things and were still idealistic enough to imagine the young president who was slain in Dallas as an enemy of the CIA or of the government bureaucracy.

The youngest generation of adults is now far removed from this world. They have moved on from questioning government and are now questioning even the most basic claims of science.

I’m not sure this is a comforting thought. Some of the JFK assassination conspiracy theories were far-fetched, but somehow even the most outlandish ones seem tame in comparison to the anti-science conspiracy theories that are now circulating on the internet. But such is the world we now live in. The era of JFK conspiracy theories is coming to an end – but the speculations that will replace it may make us nostalgic for the days when a plot orchestrated by the CIA against the president was the worst thing we could imagine.