J.F.K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?

On his third day in office in January, President Trump ordered the release of documents from the National Archives related to the assassinations of John F.Kennedy, his brother Robert and the Rev.

Dr.Martin Luther King Jr.

As Trump declared on the campaign trail, “It’s been 60 years, time for the American people to know the TRUTH.”The truth is that nothing in the archives is going to dispel the fog of hypothesis, rumor and speculation that swirls around these killings.The assassinations of the 1960s — President Kennedy’s in particular — remain the source and paradigm of modern conspiratorial thinking, a style of argument to which the current president is passionately committed.

Whatever details emerge now are unlikely to settle the ongoing debates, which are less about what happened in Dallas in 1963 (or Memphis and Los Angeles five years later) than about the character of the American state and the nature of reality itself.Was Kennedy killed by the Mafia? By the C.I.A.? Was he an early, liberal victim of what modern conservatism has come to call the Deep State? A lot of people think so, and there may be unanswered questions hovering around his death.But there’s a thin line between skepticism and paranoia, between reasonable guesses and wild invention.

The American imagination often gravitates to the far side of that line, and the Kennedy assassination was one of the shocks that pushed us over it.By 1963, we were already headed in that direction.Suspicion was part of the atmosphere of the Cold War years, when what Kennedy himself called the “twilight struggle” between the United States and the Soviet Union was accompanied by the rapid growth of the American security state, which rested equally on paperwork and secrecy.

Through the years of McCarthy, Sputnik and the quiz show scandals, paranoia was in the air.Kennedy’s killing was almost immediately folded into a narrative structure that had already surfaced in popular culture as well as polit...