Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (23 page)

On November 22, 1963, chance routed the motorcade of the leader of the most powerful state in the world past Oswald’s window.

It is suggestive that one of the eminent Americans who initially advocated the notion of a conspiracy changed his mind when he began to study Oswald the man. When
Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery
came out in 1995, the novelist Norman Mailer had, he said, moved away from his own “prejudice in favor of conspiracy theories” to the belief that Oswald was a “prime mover . . . a figure larger than others would credit him for being.” If he blamed anybody, Mailer blamed the influence of Oswald’s mother.

The “Magic Bullet”

Such a change of mind, apostasy almost, had to be accounted for in what is sometimes called the assassination community. One theory was that Mailer was somehow got at by his editor at Random House, Bob Loomis. It was pointed out that Loomis had also edited work by Gerald Posner, author of one of the best debunkings of Kennedy conspiracy theories,
Case Closed
.
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The scale of Mailer’s work and his own prickliness, however, would seem to make any such interference most unlikely.

Nevertheless, any discussion of Oswald’s character would be academic if, as Professor Popkin claimed, Oswald could not plausibly have fired all the shots. In most conspiracy theories, there is a deal-breaker: the impossible fact that proves that the official version must be wrong and that some other, more ostensibly improbable or unspecified truth must be right. With Oswald, the impossible facts were the time taken to fire three shots and the course of the second shot, the so-called magic bullet. If Oswald could not have been the origin of all the shots, then someone else must have been firing on that day, and therefore there must have been a conspiracy. Furthermore, the conspiracy must have been covered up, not least through the assassination of the alleged assassin.

If, however, it was quite possible for Oswald to have fired all the shots in Dallas, and for the bullets he fired to cause the wounds that the president and Governor Connally suffered, the need for another theory more or less disappears. This is why the most arresting scene in
JFK
, Oliver Stone’s celebrated movie of one man’s investigation of the Kennedy conspiracy, is that in which the questing attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) runs through the sequence of shots and effects. The movie generates growing excitement as the full inconceivability of the Warren case is exposed.

But Oliver Stone was—as in just about every aspect of his film—wrong. For over a decade, using forensic techniques that were not available to Warren, we have known that Oswald’s feat was by no means improbable.
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In the first place, and contrary to Popkin’s assertions, Oswald was a decent enough marksman in possession of a serviceable rifle with telescopic sights, firing at a target moving slowly along his line of vision, not across it. And the time that Oswald took between firing the first shot and the third was not the 5.6 seconds that Warren believed it to be (though this is quite doable, as Stone unwittingly demonstrated in
JFK
) but 7.1 seconds. Of these shots, the first missed, probably deflected by a twig or small branch on an intervening tree, the second was the magic bullet that hit Kennedy in the back and then wounded Governor Connally, and the third was the bullet that blew the president’s brains out.

The literature on the magic bullet is voluminous, and over the years has dealt with trajectories, entrance and exit wounds, and the final condition of the bullet itself. But computer reconstructions based on the Zapruder film and other pictures, placing the victims in the same relative position that they occupied at the time, have allowed us to see that a bullet passing downward through the president’s back and throat would indeed have struck the governor. Experiments carried out by Dr. John K. Lattimer in the early 1990s confirmed this, with his test bullet arriving in much the same condition as the one actually found on Connally’s stretcher at the hospital in Dallas.
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The Disorder of the City

With this information, the last requirement for a conspiracy to be attached to Oswald’s own obvious actions disappears. Yet most people who constitute part of that long-standing majority supporting a conspiratorial explanation have not read very much about the bullets or the timings. In other words, regardless of the facts, there has been a predisposition to believe that America’s glamorous young president could not have been the victim of a lone gunman.

Some sociologists seem almost to believe that the underlying truth doesn’t really matter. In his book
Conspiracy Culture
, Dr. Peter Knight of the University of Manchester argues, “The accusation levelled against conspiracy theories—that in trying to explain everything they explain nothing—could be turned back against lone gunman theories, which by contrast explain the assassination by declaring Oswald’s motive inexplicable.”
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That is, one explanation is as good as another; what is important is what the belief tells us about the believer. Indeed Knight, while dismissing the Warren Commission’s attempt to explain the “inexplicable” as “amateur psychobiography,” feels confident enough in his grasp of history to speculate that “it is far from clear whether a lone gunman or a conspiracy theory is a priori the more politically naïve view.”
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There is, of course, a confusion here. Oswald’s motivations are not inexplicable at all, as we have seen, but they are unknowable. And if by “a priori” Knight means “before knowing any of the facts,” then he would have a limited point if it weren’t for all the other lone gunmen and deranged would-be assassins who crowd the historical stage. There is a good reason why the single shooter often succeeds where the corporate conspirator might fail, and that is because he is not only unafraid of being caught, he probably wants to be caught. Knight’s analysis therefore fails to register just how far ordinary people are prepared to go in preferring to believe the improbable as opposed to the likely, and therefore risks underestimating the strength of the desire in society for the “higher” explanation.

Sections of the left, of course, looking back on how the promise of the Vietnam protests became first the Nixon years and then the Reagan era, had an interest in creating an account which somehow mitigated any sense of their own failure, or the failure of their ideas. But it should be remembered that for less partisan people, intellectual or otherwise, the Kennedy assassination was a genuinely appalling moment. The literary critic Irving Howe, writing a fortnight or so after Dallas, wailed his despair. It had been hard, he wrote, “these last two weeks, to feel much pride in being an American.” Oswald was, according to Howe, “a man who embodies the disorder of the city, an utterly displaced creature, totally and (what is more important) proudly alienated, without roots in nation, region, class.
He cannot stand it
, but what it is he cannot stand he does not know.”
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Oswald was an unbearable manifestation of an unbearable society. The writer and critic Dwight MacDonald wrote that the sniper had created “a wound to our consciousness of ourselves as American . . . Now we see we are more in the class of Guatemala or the Congo.”
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A lone shooter, far from suggesting an isolated act of homicidal madness, actually suggested a sick and chaotic society in which sudden and irrational violence could overtake anyone. That the target should have been young and one of the most famous men on the planet can only have made the feeling of dislocation and paranoia worse. Conspiracy theory, with its promise that the world was ruled by some kind of order, even if it was hidden, offered not the connection with reality that Popkin wanted but a flight from it.

Exit Marilyn

A rather more starry flight from reality surrounds the suicide of Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe. The question is, whose flight was it? Hers, or those who believe she was murdered?

Marilyn died sometime during the night of August 4, 1962, fifteen months before the murder of President John Kennedy, her onetime lover. The Los Angeles coroner recorded a verdict of “probable suicide” by drug overdose, and the moviegoing world mourned the passing of the industry’s most glamorous star.

That Monroe should die of barbiturate poisoning was not the greatest surprise for many who knew her. She was a chronic insomniac who needed pills to sleep and—eventually—to wake. In his famous essay on Monroe, “A Beautiful Child,” Truman Capote paints a picture of Monroe in 1955, happily consuming pills, and she would sometimes have to be made up for performance while in a barbiturate-induced stupor. Monroe was famously afflicted by stage fright on set, maintained relationships with great difficulty, suffered from depression (in February 1961, she was briefly committed to a psychiatric hospital in New York), and at the time of her death was alone though contemplating her forthcoming remarriage to Joe DiMaggio. Some biographers also see significance in the fact that her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, was away at the time of her death. Greenson himself had confided in Anna Freud (Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalyst daughter, who practiced in London) that he was concerned that Monroe might kill herself.

The early debates, then, were not about whether Marilyn died by her own hand but whether her death was intentional and who should bear the greatest measure of blame. Had Hollywood killed her? Or her shrinks? Or her men? Or all of us?

It took nearly two years for a revisionist version of Monroe’s death to appear.
The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe
, self-published in 1964 by Frank Capell, was more of a pamphlet than a book. Capell’s orientation may be illustrated by the fact that his previous work was titled
The Threat from Within: The Truth About the Conspiracy to Destroy America
, to be followed a few years later by
Henry Kissinger: Soviet Agent.
Capell, in conformity with his general worldview, was of the opinion that Monroe had been murdered by Communist agents possibly in the pay of Robert F. Kennedy.

The “impossible fact” in Marilyn’s death is supposed to be the body’s incapacity to ingest as much barbiturate as was found in Monroe’s bloodstream. Over the years this has given rise to two main thoughts: either that she was forcibly injected or—given the complete absence of any marks of injection—that she was treated to a barbiturate enema. Donald Spoto (
Marilyn Monroe: The Biography,
1993) abjured vulgar murder theories and hypothesized that it was all a terrible mistake. He has Dr. Greenson instructing Monroe’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray, to give her employer an enema of chloral hydrate, not realizing that it would react with the Nembutal that he had also prescribed. In this account, Greenson emerges as a kind of negligent Svengali, hugely influential over his patient and almost entirely stupid. Spoto, by positing an enema by consent, at least avoided the image created by Chuck and Sam Giancana, respectively brother and godson of the Mafia boss of the same name, in their 1993 book
Double Cross
. This had Mafia hit men, who had been spying on the star, going to Monroe’s bedroom, where she was lying on the bed facedown, and forcibly administering a Nembutal enema.

In Joyce Carol Oates’s best-selling fact-novel
Blonde
(2000), someone known only as the “Sharpshooter”—sent by an agency that wants Marilyn dead because her views are a bit progressive—gives her a lethal injection. Donald Wolfe’s
The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe
(1998) has several men—including RFK, Rat-Packster Peter Lawford, and Greenson—visit Monroe on the night of August 4 in what one critic called “the conspiracy sub-genre’s reductio ad absurdum: Bobby Kennedy and Sam Giancana and Marilyn’s psychotherapist tripping over each other in an effort to commit the great pointless homicide.”
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Though Marilyn theories have taken longer to emerge and have less purchase on the popular consciousness than their JFK counterparts, they have become every bit as diverse in their demonology. The mob did it to implicate the Kennedys; the mob did it at the behest of the Kennedys; Jimmy Hoffa did it; the Russians did it; the FBI or the CIA did it. Somehow the film star’s death succeeded in linking together those four great arenas for popular culture—politics, crime, sex, and show business—and, once the parade started, the floats kept on coming.

Secret Marriages, Hidden Tapes, Duped Reporters

Marilyn-themed conspiracy theories were always going to be lucrative. The seven hundred or so biographies of Monroe bear witness not just to authors’ fascination with the subject but also to the calculation on the part of publishers that such books will sell. But each book, each documentary, each major magazine article required something new—a twist, a revelation, a unique selling point. In such circumstances, the incentive to produce novel information and evidence is obvious. And so, too, is the desire to use it.

In 1974, a certain Robert Slatzer published
The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe
, in which he claimed to have been secretly married to the star—albeit briefly—in 1952 and to have been her lifelong confidant. In this capacity, he discovered her “affair” with Robert Kennedy and saw her little red diary, in which she mentioned “Murder Incorporated.” This, she explained to Slatzer, was in the context of Bobby telling her “that he was powerful enough to have people taken care of if they got in his way.” At least one other biographer has proved that on the day Slatzer was supposed to be marrying Marilyn in Mexico the star was actually shopping in Hollywood, yet Slatzer’s version of Monroe’s demise has been used as the basis for many more biographies and articles since.