Still haunted by the ghost of JFK

This phenomenon is related, of course, to the 50th anniversary of his assassination, which was marked on Friday. But revisiting that traumatic event is hardly a recent trend. And part of the reason why Americans haven’t been able to get over it is that the murder is still shrouded in mystery. With the passage of years, conspiracy theories have only grown in number.

An opinion poll earlier this year suggested that barely a quarter of Americans buy the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in pointing a creaky old rifle at his presidential quarry and letting off three shots – two of which hit their moving target from a tricky angle.

Disbelieving the official story is hardly a novelty. Just a day after the event, rumours began swirling that vice-president Lyndon Johnson was behind the hit – not least because Texas was his home ground.

Intriguingly, among the piles of recently published material is an account by an aide to Richard Nixon. He says Nixon was convinced that Johnson, his predecessor as president, was involved somehow in the assassination.

Shamed by the Watergate scandal, Nixon apparently liked to say he was at least superior to Johnson because he didn’t murder anyone to reach the White House.

But Nixon’s version has competition from allegations of CIA, FBI or mafia involvement, plus the idea that Oswald had Soviet or Cuban assistance.

The Soviet/Cuban angle is supported by Oswald’s life as an ex-marine who defected to the then-USSR, but was allowed to return to the US with a Russian wife, and was a known propagandist for the Castro cause. On the other hand, the KGB reportedly found him too unstable to be of any use while the Cubans refused him a visa.

Besides, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had managed to establish a rapport with Kennedy. And a Western journalist who happened to be interviewing Fidel Castro at the time the first report of the assassination came through noted he was visibly disturbed by the development, saying, “this is very bad news” over and over.

It is not inconceivable, of course, that Castro was play-acting, or that the KGB had gone behind Khrushchev’s back – he was, after all, forced out the following year, at least in part because he had backed down during the Cuban missile crisis.

In fact, the peaceful resolution of that crisis was arguably Khrushchev’s finest hour, and Kennedy’s too. With fingers supposedly poised above the “red button”, Khrushchev agreed to pull nuclear missiles out of Cuba, but only in return for Kennedy’s assurance that the US would not invade the island and would withdraw its nuclear warheads from Turkey.

In the preceding weeks, Kennedy had stood up to American generals who were bent on launching a third world war. Khrushchev probably faced similar pressure from Soviet hardliners.

It has nonetheless long been alleged that a primary reason behind the Warren Commission cover-up was that the unvarnished truth would inevitably have entailed a superpower confrontation. On the other hand, it has also been claimed that circumstantial evidence pointing to the Soviets and/or Cuba was, in fact, part of the CIA/FBI/mafia conspiracy.

The fact that the official narrative is discounted even by the US secretary of state, John Kerry, tends to reinforce the impression that there will always be theories but perhaps never a universally accepted conclusion. Who killed Kennedy is not the only bone of contention, though. Even the question of who exactly was JFK remains disputed territory.

Was the first US president to be born in the 20th century a deep-rooted conservative, an inveterate Cold Warrior who stumbled on to a missile crisis solution more by accident than design?

Or was he a visionary who saw the logic in balanced relations with Moscow and Havana, and who was convinced that no good would ultimately flow from the American involvement in Vietnam – even though it had grown dramatically during his presidency – to the extent that he was determined to end it by 1965?

Filmmaker Oliver Stone and academic Peter Kuznick tend to the latter view in the documentary “The Untold History of the United States”. It’s equally possible, though, on the basis of the available evidence, to see the hopes invested in the Kennedy presidency as a precursor of sorts to the Barack Obama phenomenon.

In a similar vein, Kennedy is credited with putting in place the architecture for the civil rights legislation that, at least in theory, transformed the American socio-political landscape within two years of his assassination. He can also be seen, though, as a go-slow advocate who resented the momentum generated by the movement led by Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

The Camelot myth has been substantially dented in recent decades, and the fascination with Kennedy may taper off once most of the baby boomers to whom he meant so much have shuffled off the mortal coil. But I wouldn’t bet on it just yet.