Just after noon on November 22, 1963, fourteen-year-old Jenyce Gush was standing on the curb with a friend on Lemmon Avenue in Dallas, Texas, as President John F. Kennedy’s black limousine glided past cheering crowds. “I could have reached out and touched the car,” Gush told me. “We seen him, with his real bushy eyebrows, seen Jackie, in her gorgeous pink and navy suit. I remember thinking how her lipstick matched the pink perfectly … I had these big pink plastic rollers in my hair, and I remember he looked at me and kind of raised his eyebrows.”
The motorcade passed and the girls headed home—they’d skipped school. Gush’s mother worked as a waitress at Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club. An hour later, the girls went to the drugstore. A woman was sitting in a parked car, crying hysterically, slapping the steering wheel, saying over and over: “I can’t believe this happened in Dallas!” Gush asked if she could help, and the tear-stained woman turned to her. “Haven’t you heard? They’ve shot the president!” Gush was in disbelief. “I just saw them!”
The girls found a TV in a nearby pharmacy. Walter Cronkite was announcing the news: John F. Kennedy was dead. “You could feel it,” Gush told me. “Darkness descended on Dallas.” Two days later, Lee Harvey Oswald was shot to death at the police station by her mother’s employer while the TV cameras rolled.
In the decades since Dallas, the ‘Kennedy Curse’ has become American mythology. Robert F. Kennedy followed his brother into the political pantheon of those doomed to die five years later in the Ambassador Hotel, gunned down on the eve of winning the California presidential primary. Senator Teddy Kennedy, who died an old man in 2009, was the only brother who did not perish violently. The Kennedy brothers became America’s great ‘what-if,’ and a fascination with their murders began almost immediately.
I was obsessed with the JFK assassination for years. I pored over the books—Mark Lane’s Best Evidence, detailing the weird deaths of witnesses, being the most jarring. I watched the documentaries, bought the 1964 edition of the Warren Commission, and debated other history buffs about the Grassy Knoll, the CIA, and the mafia. We speculated on what the long-classified JFK files might contain and if they’d be released. Then, on January 23, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to declassify 80,000 JFK assassination documents, the first of which were unceremoniously dumped online earlier this month.
It was Christmas for conspiracy theorists. At least, at first. As it turns out, there wasn’t much under the tree. Nothing in the documents released undercuts the historical conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone sniper who killed Kennedy (although the next document dump could change that). Historians have been gruntled to find new details on Oswald’s prior activities (and what U.S. intelligence operatives knew about them), CIA covert operations, and Castro’s Cuba. Indeed, one historian noted that some details were clearly kept classified because they highlight CIA incompetence leading up to the assassination. This new information has shed light on a key period of the Cold War, and historians are hoping that the next tranche of documents provides more.
Unsurprisingly, many of the ‘truth-seekers’ obsessed with the JFK assassination turned out to be narrative-seekers with their own very specific ideas about the JFK assassination that function as part of their broader, already existing worldviews. They aren’t ‘following the evidence’ so much as counting on the evidence to plug holes in their own view of how the world works. These theories—the CIA did it, Lyndon B. Johnson did it, Israel did it—are constructed to support the theorist’s view of the CIA (and American history writ large), LBJ, or Israel. (Some have decided to err on the side of caution and insist that it was all three.)
Thus, when the JFK documents came online, the narrative-seekers went hunting. Ian Carroll promptly claimed that although we still don’t know who killed JFK, “we’ve definitely seen enough in the document to indicate that Israel was involved in some way, and that there were efforts by the CIA to cover that up.” Australian politician George Christensen pinpointed the intelligence services of his own country, announcing that: “The official story is DEAD. Declassified docs prove JFK wasn’t killed by a lone gunman—it was a coup, covered up by intelligence agencies. And guess what? [The] Australian Security Intelligence Organization was in on it.” Thousands of similar claims proliferated on social media to massive audiences.
The files released thus far reveal no such thing. The documents do reference various intelligence agencies, most of which had been previously redacted to protect operational details. But they do not establish any link between Israeli, Australian, or indeed any other foreign intelligence agency and the JFK assassination. Carroll had the chutzpah to claim that those declining to “notice” his fact-free assertions were, in fact, revealing something about their own bias. Candace Owens, on the other hand, didn’t even bother to examine the files, instead simply asserting: “the conspiracy theorists were right about JFK.”
The reaction of these ‘truth-seekers’ is revealing. No JFK file dump—unless it explicitly confirms their pet theories—is going to provide closure for them. Where cherry-picking fails, they insist that the files proving that it was the CIA, or Israel, or LBJ were likely destroyed, and paradoxically claim that while we can never know what happened, they really do know. They need the JFK assassination to buttress their own narratives. If the evidence doesn’t do what they need it to, the search continues, and the JFK files are merely proof, in their minds, that the conspiracy goes even deeper than they originally thought.
