WHO SHOT JFK?
On November 22, 2019, I wandered around Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, underneath a dull gray sky. It was the 56th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I walked up to the corner of Elm and Houston, where you can look up and see the window where Lee Harvey Oswald fired shots from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository in 1963. The building is now home to the Sixth Floor Museum, a collection of artifacts related to the life of President Kennedy and his murder. Peering out the windows of the museum, you can see the vantage Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, had when he pulled off three shots from a Carcano M91/38 bolt-action rifle before ditching the weapon among the piles of boxes of books and making a meandering escape.
That is, of course, if you believe what conspiracy researchers refer to as the “official story.”
While walking through the displays of the Sixth Floor Museum, an enlarged photo of the presidential motorcade that fateful day caught my eye. President Kennedy is grinning and leaning on the car door, smiling at the crowd of Texans who have shown up to catch a glimpse of him. First Lady Jacqueline, in her pink pillbox hat and matching coat, is smiling to the crowd on the other side of the car. Texas Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie are seated in front of them. A stern-looking motorcycle cop floats to the side of the vehicle. Nellie Connally is about to turn around and say, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.” President Kennedy answers, “No, you certainly can’t.” Those would be his last words.
Shortly after this picture hanging on the museum wall was taken, the world would be forever changed and the course of history altered.
The JFK motorcade in Dallas, November 22, 1963.
The belief in conspiracy in America goes back to the founding of the nation, and a paranoia of conspiracy, treason, and distrust of authority is deeply embedded in our country’s DNA.
“Those who now dismiss conspiracy theories as groundless paranoia have apparently forgotten that the United States was founded on a conspiracy theory,” Lance deHaven-Smith writes in his book Conspiracy Theory in America [emphasis his]. The founding fathers cited King George’s plan for “an absolute tyranny” in the Declaration of Independence. In this case, deHaven-Smith writes, the founders’ ability to use conspiracy thinking to read the writing on the wall and look ahead was an important political awakening. George Washington was also a Freemason, a fraternal organization that would evolve into conspiracy lore as the unseen hand that controls all aspects of government.
November 22, 1963, is not only the date that Kennedy is assassinated, but part of the American psyche is too. Kennedy dies, and modern American conspiracy theory is born.
After shooting the president, Oswald walked down a rear stairwell. He was confronted by a Dallas police officer who had rushed to the building and was in the second-floor lunchroom, but Oswald was let go as he was an employee of the Texas Book Depository. He walked out the front door, shortly before it was sealed, got on a bus which he rode for two blocks (getting off because of heavy traffic), then took a taxi to the rooming house he was staying at. He stopped in for a few minutes, then left.
At 1:15 p.m., 45 minutes after the shooting, Oswald was confronted on the street by Dallas patrolman J.D. Tippit. Oswald shot him four times with a pistol, killing him, then snuck into the nearby Texas Theatre, where a movie titled Cry of Battle was showing. Witnesses called police, and he was arrested at the theater. On the morning of November 24, less than 48 hours after Kennedy was shot, police were escorting Oswald to a truck that would transport him from city to county jail when a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby walked up to Oswald and shot him in the abdomen. He died of his injuries a couple of hours later.
The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, commonly referred to as the Warren Commission (after its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren), investigated and determined that Oswald was the lone gunman.
Almost immediately, this finding was disputed as being fishy. Critics began compiling a list of things about the Warren Commission Report that didn’t add up. Lee Harvey Oswald could not have pulled off all three shots in six seconds, they said, and the bullet trajectory didn’t make sense.
Another conspiracy talking point is the handling of Kennedy’s corpse and evidence immediately following the assassination. The Secret Service basically stole Kennedy’s body from Parkland Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 1 p.m. Before the hospital could perform an autopsy, which the law required, the Secret Service absconded with the body, brandishing their guns and shoving those that stood in their way. Evidence, like the suit President Kennedy was wearing, and the car he was shot in, was scrubbed clean. President Kennedy’s body was shoved onto Air Force One, where Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president in flight to Washington, D.C. At the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, a haphazard and confusing autopsy took place, with members of several intelligence agencies—the Secret Service, FBI, and CIA, all present and making demands.
The assassination had enough unanswered questions that possible conspiracies should have been thoroughly examined by the Warren Commission. Their conclusion was met with derision from the public (almost immediately, over half of Americans polled believed there was “some group or element” responsible for the assassination) and private researchers. Soon, books on the topic, speculating what really happened that day in Dallas, were hitting the shelves on a regular basis.
Mark Lane, a lawyer hired by Oswald’s mother, wrote a New York Times bestseller, Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit, and Lee Harvey Oswald, published in 1966, that criticized the Warren Commission and suggested conspiracy. Edward Jay Epstein, an investigative journalist and political science professor, wrote a book critical of the Warren Commission the same year titled Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth. Another book, Six Seconds in Dallas, by Josiah Thompson, followed in 1967. It was the first to explore technical faults with the assassination such as bullet trajectory, and suggested President Kennedy was shot from multiple angles. Since then, hundreds of articles and books have followed, and are still written on a regular basis.
The CIA stepped in and decided they needed to combat this war of words on the “official story.” They decided they needed to derail these accusatory accounts of shady behavior by the government. They needed a term to discredit these people and chose “conspiracy theory.” Although the term had been used before, the CIA are the ones who entered it into the popular lexicon.
Just mentioning those two words will usually get a knee-jerk reaction from someone, the classic stereotype of a tinfoil-hat-wearing, highly paranoid and delusional individual, a “moonbat,” a “wingnut,” a “nutjob,” a “crackpot,” a “bug-eyed weirdo.” And that’s exactly what the CIA wanted.
CIA dispatch 1035-960, dated January 1967, reads in part:
There seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination.
Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries.
The CIA recommended using media “assets” to help push against the conspiracy theory books on the JFK assassination by writing reviews and other articles that argued that the theorists were politically or financially motivated or “infatuated with their own theories.”
“The CIA propaganda program was designed to interject a new group into the pantheon of political groups Americans employ to pigeonhole political candidates, issues, movements, and so on,” deHaven-Smith writes in Conspiracy Theory in America. “In this case, the group was called ‘conspiracy theorists’ and its beliefs were described abstractly as conspiracy theories about the assassination of President Kennedy. However, like other group labels in American politics, the conspiracy theory label was (and is) sufficiently vague and general to be applied to many other events, issues, and individuals in addition to the assassination of President Kennedy.”
IT’S IMPORTANT TO NOTE that conspiracies or things that seem like conspiracy do happen. One example of a horrifying true American conspiracy is Project MKUltra. Along with predecessors like Project ARTICHOKE and related programs like MKSEARCH, the clandestine CIA program existed to find ways to control other people’s minds, ideally to find a situation like a “Manchurian Candidate,” a way to brainwash someone into killing a target without being able to be cognizant of the mission.
MKUltra ran for 11 years, with the CIA contracting work out to about 80 other institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, 15 research facilities, 12 hospitals, and three penal institutes, all to the tune of an estimated $10 million (close to $80 million in today’s money).
The CIA administered drugs like LSD, hallucinogenic mushrooms, alcohol enhancers, marijuana oil, and many other drugs to subjects, some of whom were aware they were being dosed with a drug, and others who did not. The goal was to see how the drugs affected the subjects’ ability to stand interrogation and torture, their ability to follow orders, and to see if any of the drugs would be useful as a “truth serum.” Besides drugs, some of the other studies called for techniques like hypnosis, electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture. In one particularly disturbing study, MKUltra kept patients high on LSD for 77 straight days. In another experiment, Dr. Frank Olson was unknowingly dosed with LSD by his colleagues, which led to him to descend quickly into madness over the next few days. The CIA sent him to see a specialist in New York City, but Olson ended up jumping out the window of his thirteenth-floor room in Manhattan’s Hotel Statler.
Special CIA “safe houses” lured in marginal elements of society like drug addicts, prostitutes, criminals, and suspected spies or double agents. These people would unknowingly be dosed, and their behavior monitored by hidden cameras, audio recorders and people behind two-way mirrors.
A 1955 MKUltra document includes a wish list of 17 drugs effects they’d like to come up with, including “materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use” and “substances which alter personality structure in such a way that the tendency of the recipient to become dependent on another person is enhanced.”
This is not something made up by a science fiction writer or a conspiracy theory nutjob wearing a tinfoil hat. The story came to light in the late 1970s. In 1973, panicked by the Watergate proceedings, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered that all documents related to MKUltra be quickly destroyed. However, about 16,000 documents relating to the program had been incorrectly filed in the financial records and were discovered with a 1977 Freedom of Information Act request by author John Marks, who pored over the documents with research assistants for his book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences. Although Marks pieced a lot of the program together, the full scope of MKUltra will never be known, since the bulk of documents related to it were shredded.
THE ZAPRUDER MICROCOSM
AS PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE cruised through Dealey Plaza, Abraham Zapruder, who owned a dress manufacturing company on the plaza, stood outside his building and filmed the motorcade with his 8mm home movie camera.
The Zapruder Film is probably the most scrutinized piece of film footage in human history. There is an entire cast of characters that live in this microcosm of 26 seconds of footage in the film (as well as other film and photos taken during those moments). These Zapruder Film residents include Umbrella Man, a man seen opening his umbrella shortly before the assassination. For years conspiracy theorists said he was signaling the assassin to fire or was potentially one of the assassins himself, shooting the president with a special trick umbrella with a gun in it. Why else would he be flaunting the umbrella on a sunny day? Umbrella Man was later identified as Louie Steven Witt, who had not been aware of his controversy. In 1978 he explained his umbrella had been an odd form of protest. Kennedy’s father Joseph had been a supporter of Nazi-appeasing prime minister Neville Chamberlain, and Witt decided to heckle JFK about this legacy by flaunting Chamberlain’s favorite accessory, an umbrella. As Witt admitted, he was in the wrong place doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Other Dealey Plaza characters include the Babushka Lady, an unknown woman wearing a headscarf and taking pictures; the Badge Man, a person possibly wearing a badge standing near the “grassy knoll,” who conspiracists say is a second shooter in the assassination; and the Three Tramps, a trio of hobos arrested near the Texas Book Depository shortly after the assassination, to whom conspiracy theorists have assigned a wide range of identities and involvement in the shooting.
The list of possible suspects of who really killed Kennedy is a long one: the CIA, Secret Service, Vice President Johnson, the mafia, the Cubans, the Russians, or any combination thereof.
JFK ASSASSINATION CONVENTION
TO TRY TO UNDERSTAND the world of JFK assassination devotees better, I traveled to Dallas in November 2019. A couple of days after I visited the Sixth Floor Museum, I was just around the corner near the famous grassy knoll. There was a gathering of people having a memorial service on the date of the assassination. Although it attracted some random passersby, the majority of the people there were attendees of the seventh annual JFK Assassination Conference. This group, sometimes called “Assassinologists” or the “Assassination Community,” doesn’t believe the story outlined in the Sixth Floor Museum and history textbooks.
Most Assassinologists believe that Oswald was, as he claimed after he was arrested, “a patsy.” Assassinologists believe the fatal shots came from a variety of locations, depending on their theories, but the most commonly accepted story is that there was a shooter in the Texas Book Depository and a second shooter hiding behind a picket fence in the grassy knoll area. Other theories suggest a shooter on the overpass bridge, or in an area known as the “south knoll,” or from within the presidential motorcade itself.
At the memorial, there was an observed 56 seconds of silence at 12:30 p.m., the time when shots rang out in Dealey Plaza. A Marine captain played “Taps” on a bugle, and a woman named Beverly Oliver sang “Amazing Grace” and “God Bless America.” Oliver says that 56 years ago, she was here in Dallas and is the person spotted on the Zapruder film known as the “Babushka Lady.” Oliver claims she shot footage of the assassination on a Super 8 camera, but that the FBI confiscated it.
As Oliver sang, a woman next to me dabbed tears from her eyes. Judging by her age, she, like most people of her generation, probably remembers vividly where she was when she heard the news of Kennedy’s death and the shock she felt. A woman named Judyth Vary Baker, organizer of the JFK Assassination Conference, distributed flowers to attendees. We lined up to lay them at a memorial marker on the side of Elm Street. Two Xs on the road marked the exact spots where the two shots hit Kennedy (a third shot missed). In between bursts of traffic, a few people ventured out to the road to lay flowers on one of the Xs, which were soon smashed and dragged by cars into a rainbow smear.
The memorial also featured short speeches. One of them was by Hubert Clark, who was a U.S. Navy Ceremonial Guard and one of Kennedy’s pallbearers. He wrote a book titled Betrayal: A JFK Honor Guard Speaks, in which he claims that the casket the honor guard delivered to be buried was empty, known as the Kennedy Casket Conspiracy. Clark’s speech prompted an angry older man to pace back and forth on the sidewalk near the memorial to chastise the audience, shouting that Clark’s suggestion was “disgusting” and that the collective audience should “go find jobs” and “get a life” as he shook his cane in their direction until he tired himself out. A man in an Army uniform, carrying an American flag over his shoulder, recorded everything with a phone mounted on a selfie stick.
The short memorial speeches continued.
“People want to know the truth. They’re not going to get it from the city. They’re not going to get it up there,” Robert Groden said, pointing toward the Sixth Floor Museum. Groden, along with his associate Marshal Evans, are familiar faces in Dealey Plaza. Groden has been an Assassinologist since 1963, one of the first, and sets up a display of articles and assassination photos in the plaza every weekend to talk with tourists and other visitors about the plot to kill Kennedy. Evans sometimes joins him, and they sell DVDs and books from their table. Groden has written books like JFK: The Case for Conspiracy (1976) and High Treason (1989), and was a consultant for Oliver Stone’s JFK movie. Evans is the author of JFK: The Reckoning.
Groden met his future wife while tabling in Dealey Plaza, and then, after he popped the question, he married her there just a couple days before the 2019 conference began on November 18. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon at the conference, selling DVDs and books. His wedding is a happy Dealey Plaza moment for Groden, but being ticketed and arrested there 82 times by the Dallas Police Department probably is not.
With a Super Bowl happening in Dallas in 2010, Dealey Plaza had become overrun with people who would act as “tour guides” that would approach people and panhandle in exchange for pointing out spots like the grassy knoll and the places where Kennedy was shot. There was a crackdown on ticketing these people and Groden was included. The other people left, but Groden refused to budge and continued to be ticketed and harassed by the city for seven years. The DPD repeatedly cited Groden for “erecting an illegal sign,” citing a banner Groden had made that reads “GRASSY KNOLL” with arrows pointing up the hill to the location. They’ve also cited him for selling in a park without a permit, but Dealey Plaza is not a park, and the city offers no such license. At one point, Groden was placed in jail and denied access to his medication, he says.
All 82 of the charges against Groden were dropped, and finally, a judge, tired of having the court’s time wasted, told Groden he should file a civil rights suit against the city, and that’s what he did. A judge ordered the city to stop harassing Groden while the lawsuit was pending, but instead of staying away from Dealey Plaza, the DPD began ticketing Marshal Evans instead of Groden, even though Groden told them it was his sign and materials.
In 2017, Groden settled for $25,000 from the city to drop his suit against them. He still has a lawsuit against the Sixth Floor Museum, in which he says he has e-mails that show museum executives conspired with Dallas police and park officials to find ways to get Groden and his conspiracy-peddling out of the plaza.
After Groden and a couple of other speakers, the memorial service began to wrap up. A musician named David Neal sang a conspiracy folk song titled “November ’63,” a Bob Dylan-like folk tune that outlines the assassination plot.
A HIGH HOCH RATIO
ASSASSINOLOGISTS HAVE PRODUCED hundreds, if not thousands, of books, articles, documentaries, and websites, and a subculture surrounding it. The annual JFK Assassination Conference takes place in Dallas every year, timed with the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. A rival symposium, called the November in Dallas Conference, also takes place around the same time frame. When I attended in 2019, they had expanded to a four-day event in a ballroom at the DoubleTree hotel on Market Center Boulevard, a corridor of chain hotels and restaurants. The single-room setup had a stage at one end of the ballroom and tables of vendors with books and DVDs lining the perimeter.
Attendance was about a hundred people, mostly an older crowd (more than one speaker stressed the importance of trying to reach young people with “the truth”) who were alive when Kennedy was killed. The talks and panels started around 8 a.m. and rolled on to 9 or 10 p.m. each day.
Every angle about the JFK shooting imaginable was discussed. The Assassination Community doesn’t waste time with Kennedy Theories 101—everyone here knows that, so they head straight to the deep cuts. Speaker David Knight gave a talk titled “New Weapon, New Theory,” in which he examined President Kennedy’s mortal wounds and came to the conclusion that the gun probably used in the shooting was an ArmaLite AR-5 or AR-7 and not the rifle found in the book depository. A lot of theories revolve around the weapon used, the number of shots fired, and Oswald’s ability as a marksman (“he couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a bazooka,” one speaker claimed). Single-bullet (or as Assassinologists dismissively refer to it, “magic-bullet”) theory says that it’s unlikely one of the three shots fired made it through Kennedy’s neck and into Governor Connally’s back.
Other speakers included Ryan M. Jones, the official historian of the National Civil Rights Museum, who spoke on similarities between the Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. murders, including theories of multiple shooters. Pat Hall is the granddaughter of the woman who owned the boarding house that Oswald lived at the time of the shooting and spoke to his character, saying he was a good person that was kind to her family.
The conference is organized by a woman named Judyth Vary Baker, who first got attention in the Assassination Community when she shared her story for the History Channel documentary series The Men Who Killed Kennedy. Her story was dramatic and sensational—she said she was Lee Harvey Oswald’s secret lover and that they had worked together on a secret government bioweapons program to kill Fidel Castro in 1963. She was a witness to Oswald stepping into an unraveling plot to frame him as JFK’s killer, which she chronicles in her autobiography, Me & Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald.
Me & Lee was published in 2010 by a small press from Oregon called Trine-Day, which specializes in conspiracy books, and in particular, a focus on Kennedy assassination theories. Many of the conference speakers had a TrineDay book. TrineDay’s publisher, Kris Millegan, had a gray mustache and ponytail and was sporting a tan suit with elbow pads and a bolo tie. He gave a talk titled “Life as the Publisher of Banned Books.” Millegan pointed out that he doesn’t believe his books have been banned so much as they’ve been “suppressed,” and started his talk by proudly pointing out that his home, Portland, is a city that has rejected fluoridating their water supply. This classic conspiracy suggests that fluoride is used by the government to keep people brainwashed and docile.
In Baker’s book, she details how she excelled in science in high school and hoped to follow a career researching cures for cancer. After a scientist who was also a CIA asset met her at a science fair, 19-year-old Baker was recruited to move to New Orleans in the summer of 1963 to work on a secret CIA project, which would develop a super cancer “cocktail” that could stealthily be administered to Castro.
It’s well documented that there were hundreds of attempts by the CIA to kill Castro over the decades he was in power, as seen in the documentary 638 Ways to Kill Castro. Under Operation Mongoose, the CIA hired hitmen and came up with ideas that were more outlandish than injecting him with a super cancer. Plans to covertly kill the Cuban leader bordered on being cartoonish, including operations to sneak him an exploding cigar; to rig a conch shell with explosives that Castro would encounter while scuba diving (one of his favorite pastimes); or to infect him with thallium salts, which would cause him to lose his famous beard and make the once-proud leader a laughingstock. One of the last attempts on Castro’s life was in 2000 when explosives attached to a podium he was going to deliver a speech in Panama were discovered.
Baker says she randomly bumped into Oswald at a post office, and after some small talk, they found they were both working on the same secret project. Despite being recently married to Robert Baker, who was studying to be a geologist, Judyth says she began a passionate affair with Oswald (who was married to Marina Prusakova, a pharmacology student he met in Russia). The program they worked for provided Oswald and Baker with cover jobs at the Reily Coffee Company. Oswald worked in the coffee production plant while Baker did company paperwork. After punching out, they would shuttle between the apartments of scientists working on the super cancer program, conducting tests on lab mice. The entire plan goes sideways, and the group was told that they had a new target they were supposed to kill instead of Castro—President Kennedy. Baker says Oswald was an unwilling participant and was trying to save Kennedy’s life, but ended up getting framed for the murder, while his real killers escaped.
Those who accepted have Baker’s story and participate in her JFK Assassination Conference are, as her critic John C. McAdams, a Marquette University associate professor of political science and author of JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy, calls them, “Team Judyth.” McAdams and other critics point to multiple holes and contradictory information in Baker’s story. She has little proof to back up her claims, saying evidence she has was either accidentally discarded or stolen over the years.
McAdams notes that a flaw in Baker’s account is the dramatic ending. In an early draft of a book (before the project became Me & Lee) that was, she says, leaked, Baker writes about her last phone conversation with Oswald. They talked about him being aware that he is somehow going to be set up, but he told her that he loved her and that if he somehow made it through, he wanted the two of them to meet in Cancún, where the lovebirds would “stay at a fine hotel.”
The problem with this story is that in 1963 there was no Cancún. At that time, it was just a coconut plantation, with the future tourist trap’s first hotels not being built until 1974. Rather than trying to pass this off as a typo or a mixed-up recollection (it’s known that Oswald had a trip to Mexico City, and Acapulco was a popular tourist destination in the ’50s and ’60s) Baker decided to dig deeper, saying that she loved to study maps with Oswald, and they had seen the land marked Cancún and that Oswald’s probable plan was to rendezvous there so they could go for a long hike through the Yucatán Peninsula.
Another of the things that makes Baker’s story seemed far-fetched is what McAdams calls the “Hoch Ratio Test.” That theory says the more characters known to Assassinologists involved in the tale, the less likely it is to be true. Researcher Paul Hoch stated in a talk:
“I suspect that the useful measure of the plausibility of an allegation could be derived from the percentage of well-known names. If a source claims to have met with David Ferrie, Allen Dulles, and Fidel Castro in Jack Ruby’s nightclub, I’ll go on to the next document.”
David Ferrie, who also appears in Baker’s story, is a pilot who was in the New Orleans Civil Air Patrol with Oswald and alleged by some Assassinologists to be the person who hypnotized Oswald to set him up as Kennedy’s assassin. Ferrie was found dead by suicide in 1967. Allen Dulles was the head of the CIA and was forced to resign after the Bay of Pigs incident. He was later on the Warren Commission and is seen as one of the hands behind Kennedy’s murder.
Baker’s story tips the Hoch Ratio Test heavily. Her account says that she met figures of JFK assassination lore like David Ferrie, Jack Ruby, as well as CIA scientists Dr. Alton Oschner and Dr. Mary Sherman. All of these people, along with others mentioned in Baker’s book, were long-established by Assassinologists to be part of the conspiracy by the time she wrote the manuscript. The connections between Dr. Mary Sherman, David Ferrie, and their science experiments (which led to the mysterious death of Dr. Sherman) were outlined in a book by Edward T. Haslam titled Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus in 1997. (TrineDay published an updated version of the story, titled Dr. Mary’s Monkey, in 2015.) Haslam went on to be TrineDay’s editor for Me & Lee.
Baker is not the only one who is perhaps telling a tall tale. McAdams also dissects the story of Beverly Oliver, the self-proclaimed “Babushka Lady,” who had sung at the conference’s grassy knoll memorial. Like Baker, a lot of dates and details of her story don’t add up, and she also sets off a Hoch Ratio Test warning light.
True or not, the dramatic nature of Baker’s story caught the attention of musical producer Jason Trachtenburg, who developed Me & Lee into an off-Broadway musical of the same name. A live performance of a scene and one of the songs from the Me & Lee musical were performed as part of the Friday night conference dinner entertainment, followed by a full screening of a DVD of the production. Trachtenburg played Oswald, while others portrayed Baker, Dr. Mary Sherman, and others. It was a surreal experience to see a portrayal of Lee Harvey Oswald declaring his innocence in songs like “Believe You Me” to a room full of smiling people.
The next day Baker took the stage for her talk, “Lee’s Secrets: His Last Days.” The room was filled, as the audience listened with rapt attention. Throughout the weekend, I had spotted Baker giving hugs and having deep conversations with Assassinologists. She had developed a community, and here she was an essential and historical person. Baker’s speech wandered, filling in odd details about Oswald’s life. She spent several long minutes talking about Oswald’s great love for milk, saying he’d order it in bars, just like his hero Hopalong Cassidy did. Oswald, Baker said, was a hero like Hopalong, and not the villain who had shot President Kennedy in the head that terrible day. He was a good guy, and we had all been deceived.
THE HOUR Of THE TIME
AS MISTRUST OF GOVERNMENT and conspiracy theories grew, some key terms came into use to describe the sinister cabal bent on world domination. These words, often nebulous about whom they refer to, include “globalist” (anyone helping orchestrate a one-world government), “New World Order” (made famous from a speech by George H.W. Bush, this term is seen as referring to a totalitarian government), and the “Deep State” (the people who secretly call the shots).
The idea of a Globalist New World Order, in which all nations and cultures assimilate into a one-world government, and which forces all citizens into a regimented lifestyle void of free will, is a driving force of many conspiracy theories. The United Nations and the European Union are seen by conspiracists as a starter kit for this concept, and you can find the fear of it resonating in “Make America Great Again” and Brexit.
Most conspiracy theorists do not label themselves as such and view the term as offensive or condescending. They prefer terms like “Patriots,” “Truthers,” “Truth Seekers,” “Investigators,” or “Citizen Journalists.”
Since the JFK assassination, a growing number of players had been attributed to the “super-conspiracy,” as multiple-tiered conspiracies are known. These groups, conspiracists say, are all connected to each other. Far-flung groups—the Catholic Church, the country music industry, Satanists, NASA—are all part of this conspiracy conglomerate.
The super-conspiracy also includes not only clandestine groups like the CIA, NSA, FBI, and ATF, but other agencies like FEMA and the CDC. More layers add groups said to be helping a globalist agenda like the Bilderberg Group (a group of political leaders and industry experts that has a private annual meeting, a tradition since the ’50s) and the Trilateral Commission (founded by David Rockefeller in the ’70s to improve cooperation between North America, Europe, and Japan).
Other historic groups said to be in on the conspiracy are the Illuminati, a secret society founded in 1776 that had dissipated by the end of the century, though conspiracy theorists say they still exist and are pulling strings today. Similarly, the Freemasons or Masons are fraternal organizations that still exist. They’ve long been thought to be part of conspiracies hatched in meetings at their lodges.
The Freemasons’ infamy as a secret society can be traced to the story of disgruntled Mason Captain William Morgan, who said he was going to publish an exposé on the group’s secrets, titled Illustrations of Masonry. In 1826 Morgan disappeared and was presumed to be murdered by the Masons, though mystery surrounds his last days as his body was never properly identified. Following the incident, a briefly lived Anti-Masonic Party formed, the country’s first third party. Anti-Masonic Party presidential candidate William Wirt ran against Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay in the 1832 election. Most of the party’s members merged to become the Whig Party.
CONSPIRACIES STRETCHED OUT OVER the years, and by the 1990s, mistrust in government exploded. Conspiracy theories proliferated, and militia groups grew, expanding into the 2000s (the number then decreased until Obama became president, when militia membership shot up again).
Several events added to the rising ’90s disdain for government institutions. The Ruby Ridge siege, an 11-day standoff between the FBI and the Weaver family in 1992, started when Randy Weaver didn’t respond to a bench warrant for illegally selling firearms. When he went to investigate intruders on his property, FBI agents shot his dog and his 14-year-old son, Sammy. An FBI sniper also shot and killed his wife, Vicki. Deputy U.S. Marshal William Francis Degan, Jr. also died in the shootout. Weaver eventually surrendered to save his daughters.
The following year, the Waco, Texas, incident started with the ATF trying to raid David Koresh and his Branch Davidians’ compound to seize illegal weapons, leaving several agents and Branch Davidians dead. It turned into a terrifying 51-day standoff with the ATF and FBI that ended with the Branch Davidians’ compound going up in flames. The government agencies say the Branch Davidians started the fires themselves, but conspiracy theorists say the FBI started the fire to burn the Branch Davidians alive.
During the ’90s, two conspiracy theorists gained a level of popularity and made a major impact on conspiracy culture. They talked about similar themes but were stylistically different.
One was Jim Marrs (died 2017), who looked like an eccentric college professor. He had a neatly trimmed white beard, an Indiana Jones-style fedora, and was well-spoken, getting his start as a reporter in Fort Worth, Texas. His 1989 book Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy was adapted into Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK and became a bestseller. He went on to write books on UFOs, like the popular 1997 book Alien Agenda, as well as alleged secret government programs.
The other prototype, Milton William Cooper (died 2001), a former Navy officer, got his start on UFO conspiracy, but moved to government conspiracy and became a voice of the militia or patriot (as they call themselves) movement. He authored the classic conspiracy bible Behold a Pale Horse, first published in 1991, which examined everything from the JFK assassination (he was killed by the driver, armed with a special gun that fired a shellfish toxin, Cooper wrote), as well as AIDS being a government made epidemic to kill minorities and gays, and the history of the secret societies. Behold a Pale Horse appealed to a wide range of people who disliked and distrusted the government, ranging from rural militias to the Nation of Islam, both of whom ordered copies of the book in bulk.
Cooper also developed a following (he claimed it was in the tens of millions, but probably smaller) for his shortwave radio show The Hour of the Time, which broadcast from 1993–2001. His personal style, talking about his family and their life in a reclusive home on top of a mountain in Eagar, Arizona, which he called Cooper Hill, endeared him to listeners and he fired them up with his diatribes about government corruption.
In the type of incident that would be repeated over and over, Cooper found out how influential he was and how seriously individuals might take his calls to action. In his Cooper biography Pale Horse Rider, author Mark Jacobson recalls how Cooper was working at an office on his patriot newspaper Veritas when two men who said they were fans dropped in for a visit. They chatted with him for a while, with one of them asking Cooper a strange question—did Cooper think he should shoot a cop if he was pulled over? A confused Cooper told him no. The men offered Cooper a copy of The Turner Diaries, which they had a large supply of, a 1978 novel by William Pierce (writing as Andrew Macdonald) that became an underground hit with white supremacists. In the dystopian book, a radical group overthrows a tyrannical government and starts a race war. The book had been part of the inspiration for a white supremacist group who named themselves The Order, taking their name from a fictional group in the book. After a string of armed robberies, the group murdered Jewish attorney and talk show host Alan Berg in Denver. One scene includes the bombing of an FBI headquarters.
Those two men visiting Cooper were Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building April 19, 1995, killing 168 people and injuring almost seven hundred more.
McVeigh and Nichols said they were inspired for the attack by the Waco incident, reading The Turner Diaries, and by listening to Cooper on The Hour of the Time. After the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton called Cooper “the most dangerous man on radio,” which Cooper took as a badge of honor.
In 1998 Cooper was issued an arrest warrant for tax evasion. He avoided multiple attempts to be served with paperwork, as law enforcement didn’t want another situation like Ruby Ridge or Waco. But finally, after several complaints from neighbors (Cooper angrily chased one family off Cooper’s Hill, stuck a gun in the father’s face and accused him of being a spy), the Apache County Sheriff’s Department attempted to arrest Cooper on November 5, 2001. When they entered his property, a plan to quietly arrest him fell apart. A shootout started just before midnight, and Cooper shot one of the deputies in the head. An officer fired back and killed him at his front door. Conspiracists say the shootout happened because the powers that be determined Cooper’s voice needed to be silenced.
Cooper died at the same time a young radio and cable access host named Alex Jones was rising to become a conspiracy star in Austin, and Cooper’s heir apparent. Cooper himself believed Jones had ripped off his act. Like Cooper, Jones was loud, angry, and paranoid. And like Cooper, he would be influential on people who would take dangerous, violent action, inspired by his words.