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The Return of the Magic BulletTwo new JFK books clash over conspiracy theory.

By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Friday, June 1, 2007, at 5:29 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

So, conspiracies exist, but Woodward and Bernstein didn't solve the Watergate break-in by assuming there was a conspiracy without discovering evidentiary connections. If they had, they may never have proven there was a conspiracy. They painstakingly worked their way up the ladder of evidence and testimony from the lower rungs to the higher until the shape of the conspiracy became apparent.

Can the concept of conspiracy be rescued from the often shoddy work of conspiracy theorists?

I think it can if we're talking about maintaining a skepticism about official truth—government pronouncements, corporate releases. If that skepticism then leads to scrupulous investigation rather than unfounded theorizing. Doubt is good and stops being good only when it becomes unearned certainty about unproven alternate conclusions that are not subjected to the same skeptical inquiry as the official story.

The three developments that have revived debate over the key contemporary crux of conspiracy theory, JFK's murder, are the publication of Reclaiming History, Vincent Bugliosi's massive, 1,500-page attempt to prove all JFK conspiracies are wrong (Bugliosi is the L.A. prosecutor who convicted Charles Manson), and (almost simultaneously) the appearance of Salon founder David Talbot's Brothers, which reflects Talbot's attempt—less massive but no less impassioned—to persuade us that at least one conspiracy did kill JFK (although he can't say for sure which one).

These two books arrived at almost the same time as the third development: the release of a study by Texas A&M scientists who claimed to prove that previous studies of bullet fragments found in JFK's limo were flawed. Not that they were wrong necessarily, not that there was a conspiracy necessarily, but that the methodology of studies previously conducted that supposedly proved all the bullet fragments found in the limo came from Lee Harvey Oswald's gun were not adequate—needed to be done again, with no guarantee even then that they will offer definitive proof of anything.

So, we're back to doubt again, to clashes between conspiracists and anti-conspiracists. We're back to re-examining the magic of the magic bullet. At the time I had my hands on that bullet—before I abandoned JFK conspiracy-theory mindset—it had almost become a religious relic, with something of the aura of a nail from the True Cross. (In Talbot's book, JFK is virtually a Christlike figure, if you don't count all the illicit sex.)

The only other time I've felt that way about an inanimate object was in the underground command post of a Minuteman missile silo where one of the two missile crewmen in the capsule allowed me to handle one of the launch keys, one of the two keys that—turned simultaneously by each independent crewman—could launch a flight of several Minutemen carrying enough megatons of nuclear destructive power to kill tens of millions of people. (Actually, the crewmen showed me a way to rig up a spoon and a string so that a psychopathic Minutemen crewman could murder his crewmate and then twist both launch keys simultaneously.)

The launch key—brass-colored, like the magic bullet, as I remember it, the key to kingdom come—somehow made the Minuteman missiles' mission of mass death less abstract, more real. Just as the cold metal of the magic bullet did for the death of JFK.

In a way, they were both—the bullet and the key—objective correlatives, shiny hard objects that embodied in a compressed way the shadowy subterranean mentalities of the late 20th century: nuclear terror and conspiracy theory.

Let me outline the convoluted trajectory of my thoughts on JFK conspiracy theory. I was reminded of its starting point by a tiny error in Vincent Bugliosi's massive and largely convincing book. When I say largely convincing, I mean that he reinforces my belief that Oswald was the only one firing shots at Kennedy that day in Dallas. Where Bugliosi fails to completely convince me is in his claim that he has completely quashed the notion that Oswald might have had connections, confederates, non-gun firing co-conspirators.

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Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.
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