Terry Prone: While laying a conspiracy theory to rest, let’s bring back media impartiality

Eye-scanning the spines is enough. 

They capture the writer names from a specific time: Nevil Shute, Paul Gallico, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Compton Mackenzie, Somerset Maugham, John Steinbeck. They are enough to demonstrate that these are the remains of an abandoned library, stuffed into a black plastic bag by a bereaved son or daughter and handed over to be sold piecemeal at a euro a go.

Sometimes, the books are non-fiction. Old blue Pelicans about the sociology of the 1960s. Vance Packard on the manufacturing/marketing culture of that time. Or a collection from various authors about the investigation into the assassination of US president John F Kennedy. The official report of the Warren Commission, its pages yellowed and crisped with age, alongside paperback alternative theories around the event. And then, the definitive hardback conspiracy-theory-squelcher, Gerald Posner’s Case Closed.

Those books, perhaps even more than the fiction of the time, sum up a sentinel event that replays forever in the visual memory of people who were in their early teens in 1963. 

They can close their eyes and see the happy colour shot of the vast presidential car just before the shots. Then the Secret Service man leaping onto the great flat boot of the car to push Jackie Kennedy back down into her seat. Then the new widow standing beside Lyndon Johnson as he takes the oath of office, her pink suit stained with her husband’s blood. They’ve been joined by later generations.

It has never ceased to fascinate and frustrate, that assassination, and one man, on Thursday, played to that audience in his classic knowing way.

Donald Trump was barely back in office before holding a press conference to announce that he’s releasing thousands of documents, not just about the JFK assassination, but also about the killings of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy. 

“Everything will be revealed,” he told the journalists present, signing an executive order and then handing the pen to an aide with the instruction: “Give that to Robert F Kennedy Jr.”

Now, at first glance, this move would seem to give the final answers to lingering questions, and lay conspiracy theories definitively to rest, bearing in mind that, just two years ago, 65% of Americans queried in a Gallup poll told the pollsters they didn’t accept the Warren Commission finding that the former Marine, Lee Harvey Oswald, had done the killing on his own. 

One of the most public Warren Commission dissenters, the man who on Thursday gained a fountain pen — RFK Jr, Trump’s selection to run the US Department of Health and Human Services — claims that Oswald was working for the Central Intelligence Agency when he killed Kennedy’s uncle.

Roughly 16% of the folk responding in the Gallup Poll are with him, all the way, on that claim.

The significance of the document release was queried by Al Jazeera, which pointed out that “the administration of former US president Joe Biden ordered the release of approximately 17,000 more documents, leaving fewer than 4,700 withheld in part or in full”.

Bottom line: More than 99% of the relevant documentation has gone into the public domain already, according to figures from the US National Archives. Trump had planned to release more, first time around, but was persuaded by the CIA and FBI not to.

Two related implications there. 

The first is that, either because of the merit of the argument presented to him or his short attention span, Trump lets some stated objectives go.

The second is that he comes back to them, which in this case is not a bad thing. The general assumption is that neither state agency, even after more than half a century, wanted less than stellar management of the before, during, and after of the event revealed and feared the pentimento of that management would be evident in some released documents.

The laying to rest of conspiracy theories is an appealing notion unsupported by what followed Biden’s release of many more documents than indicated by Trump, which didn’t amount to anything.

The man who claimed to have closed the conspiracy theorists down, Gerald Posner, has seen his reputation somewhat tarnished in the years since his breathtakingly detailed book appeared in 1993. Posner resigned from his post as chief investigative reporter at The Daily Beast 15 years ago, having been accused of plagiarism. 

The appearance in his work of material dangerously close to that of other writers was, he claimed, an inadvertent result of high-tech cut-and-paste under pressure.

Be that as it may, his reaction, as an authoritative analyst of the JFK killing, was sufficiently muted as to suggest that he sees no immediate threat/promise that the newly-released documents will change his 30-year-old thesis. He welcomed the release, describing it as overdue.

RFK Jr may believe the documents will confirm his thus-far unsupportable notions that state agencies were complicit in the killing of his uncle, and that Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of his own father, didn’t do the deed on his own. The Secret Service guy who jumped onto the boot of the presidential limousine on that day, and is still alive, wants facts to be seen as facts and conspiracy theories to be seen as what they are.

The problem is that we live in a post-truth world, a black-and-white condemnatory world where neither side attributes nuance to the other.

Witness the silence in mainstream media about RFK’s trenchant opposition to ultra-processed foods, which gets ignored in the shock/horror reaction to his worrying views on vaccination. Mainstream media might usefully renew its commitment to impartial coverage, even in the face of politicians who wouldn’t know truth if it bit them in presumably sensitive portions of their anatomy.

Arguably the worst response to Trump’s planned release of the assassination documents came from John F Kennedy’s grandson. 

Jack Schlossberg, the only son of Caroline Kennedy, who is being glanced at by Democrats suffering from a wistful memory of the Camelot years, and who said Trump’s executive order had “nothing heroic” about it. Another instance, this, of Democrats creating a straw man to attack. Nobody had suggested the release was heroic.

“Declassification is using JFK as a political prop, when he’s not here to punch back,” went on his grandson. A political prop for what, pray? And how, precisely, would the dead president “punch back” at the release of documentation which might — just might — finally lay to rest the dangerous myths that have accreted around it over 60 years?