John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories
of John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, on November 22, 1963, has spawned numerous conspiracy theories. These theories allege the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Mafia, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro, the KGB, or some combination of these individuals and entities.
Some conspiracy theories have alleged a coverup by parts of the American federal government, such as the original investigators within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Warren Commission, or the CIA. The lawyer and author Vincent Bugliosi estimated that a total of 42 groups, 82 assassins, and 214 individuals had been accused at one time or another in various conspiracy scenarios.
Background
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while traveling in a motorcade in an open-top limousine in Dallas, Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the murder of a Dallas policeman named J. D. Tippit and arraigned for both murders. On November 24, a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald.Immediately after Kennedy was shot, many people suspected that the assassination was part of a larger plot, and broadcasters speculated that Dallas right-wingers were involved. Ruby's murder of Oswald compounded initial suspicions. The author Mark Lane has been described as firing "the first literary shot" with his article "Defense Brief for Oswald" in the National Guardians December 19, 1963, issue. Thomas Buchanan's book Who Killed Kennedy?, published in May 1964, has been credited as the first book to allege a conspiracy.
In 1964, after being appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald had acted alone and that no credible evidence supported the contention that he was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the president. The Commission indicated that Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, CIA director John A. McCone, and Secret Service chief James J. Rowley each individually reached the same conclusion on the basis of information available to them. During the trial of Clay Shaw in 1969, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison challenged the single-bullet theory, claiming that the Zapruder film indicated that the fatal shot to Kennedy's head was fired from the "grassy knoll", a small hill that featured prominently in later conspiracy theories.
In 1979, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations agreed with the Warren Commission that Oswald killed Kennedy but concluded that the commission's report and the original FBI investigation were seriously flawed. The HSCA concluded that at least four shots were fired, with a "high probability" that two gunmen fired at Kennedy, and that a conspiracy was probable. The HSCA stated that the Warren Commission had "failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President".
Documents under Section 5 of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 were required to be released within 25 years of October 26, 1992. Most of the documents were released on October 26, 2017. A provision of the 1992 act allows a President to extend the deadline, and President Donald Trump set a new deadline of October 26, 2021, for the remaining documents to be released. In October 2021, President Joe Biden further extended the deadline to December 15, 2022, citing delays related to the COVID-19 pandemic. On December 15, 2022, NARA released an additional 13,173 documents as ordered by President Biden. In June 2023, it was reported that NARA had completed the review of the documents with 99% of all documents having been made public. Following his return to office on January 23, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order directing the further release of documents related to the assassination, as well as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, with documents expected to be released later in 2025 and afterward.
Public opinion
According to John C. McAdams, "The greatest and grandest of all conspiracy theories is the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory." Others have referred to it as "the mother of all conspiracies". Author David Krajicek describes Kennedy assassination enthusiasts as people belonging to "conspiracy theorists" on one side and "debunkers" on the other. The great amount of controversy surrounding the event has resulted in bitter disputes between those who support the conclusion of the Warren Commission and those who reject it or are critical of the official explanation, with each side leveling accusations toward the other of "naivete, cynicism, and selective interpretation of the evidence".The number of books written about the assassination of Kennedy has been estimated to be between 1,000 and 2,000. According to Vincent Bugliosi, 95 percent of those books are "pro-conspiracy and anti-Warren Commission". Very few of the books and articles published about the assassination have been written by historians. Calvin Trillin's article, "The Buffs" in the June 1967 edition of The New Yorker, has been credited as the first addressing the "conspiracy phenomenon".
Trillin described those who criticized the Warren Report: "They tend to refer to themselves as 'investigators' or 'researchers' or, most often, 'critics'. They are also known as 'assassination buffs'." Professor of History Colin Kidd also described amateur historians of the assassination as "buffs". Kidd said: "The study of Kennedy's assassination is now best known to academics as a counterculture, which grossly caricatures the best practices of the academy and where extravagant theories tend to trump sound scholarship, plausibility, and common sense."
Public opinion polls have consistently shown that most Americans believe that there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. These same polls show no agreement on who else may have been involved in the shooting. The National Opinion Research Center, conducted 1,384 in-person interviews between November 26, 1963, and December 3, 1963, and found that 62 percent believed that others were involved in the assassination, compared with 24 percent who believed that only one person was involved.
In ten polls conducted from 1963 through 2023, Gallup found that the percentage of U.S. adults that did not believe that Oswald had acted alone increased from 52% in 1963 and 50% in 1966 to between 74% and 81% from 1976 through 2003 and then declined to 61% in 2013 and 65% in 2023. Arthur Lehman Goodhart dismissed the relevance of the polls in a 1968 article for the Alberta Law Review: "such a Gallup poll cannot prove anything except that the people often believe nonsense."
In 2003, an ABC News poll found that 70 percent of respondents suspected that the assassination involved more than one person. In 2009, 76 percent of people polled for CBS News said that they believed that Kennedy had been killed as the result of a conspiracy. In 2023, a YouGov poll found that 54% of U.S. adults surveyed believed Oswald definitely or probably did not act alone in the assassination.
Views of those close to Kennedy
Kennedy's youngest brother, Ted Kennedy, wrote that he had been fully briefed by Chief Justice Earl Warren during the initial investigation, and was "satisfied that the Warren Commission got it right". He stated that their middle brother Robert F. Kennedy was a "strong advocate for the accuracy of the report" and that it was his belief upon all of their discussions that he too accepted the Commission's findings. Kennedy's nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes that his uncle was killed in a conspiracy, and he endorsed the James W. Douglass book JFK and the Unspeakable whose central thesis is that Kennedy was a Cold Warrior who turned to peacemaking and that he was killed by his own security apparatus as a result. He said that his father publicly supported the Warren Commission but privately called it a "shoddy piece of craftsmanship", and was "fairly convinced" that others were involved in his brother's death besides Oswald.Circumstantial evidence of a cover-up
Background
After Oswald's death, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo detailing that the Dallas Police would not have had enough evidence against Oswald without the FBI's information. He then wrote: "The thing I am concerned about, and so is Mr. Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin." Top government and intelligence officials were also finding that, according to CIA intercepts, someone had impersonated Oswald in phone calls and visits made to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City several weeks before the assassination. Over the next 40 years, this became one of the CIA's most closely guarded secrets on the Oswald case. A CIA career agency officer, Anne Goodpasture, admitted in sworn testimony that she had disseminated the tapes of these phone calls herself. She had earlier denied to congressional investigators in 1970 that she had any knowledge of recordings of Oswald's phone calls.On November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination, Hoover's preliminary analysis of the assassination included the following:
That same day, Hoover had this conversation with President Johnson:
President Lyndon B. Johnson expressed concern that the public might come to believe that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and/or Cuban leader Fidel Castro was implicated in the assassination—a situation that Johnson said might lead to "a war that kill 40 million Americans in an hour". Johnson relayed his concern to both Chief Justice Earl Warren and Senator Richard Russell Jr., telling them that they could "serve America" by joining the commission Johnson had established to investigate the assassination, which would later become known unofficially as the Warren Commission.
Katzenbach wrote a memorandum to Lyndon Johnson aide Bill Moyers that said, among other things, that the results of the FBI's investigation should be made public. Katzenbach suggested that a commission be formed, composed of people with "impeccable integrity", to conduct a complete investigation of the assassination. Katzenbach wrote: "Speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or a right–wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists.... The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial." Four days after Katzenbach's memo, Johnson formed the Warren Commission with Warren as chairman and Russell as a member.