People often emotionally reject the grim truth that tragedies can just happen. Many people can't face the reality that utterly reasonless, unpreditable tragedy may be waiting around every corner. They cast about for a MEANINGFUL explanation, something that will make sense of senseless tragedy.

Many people need someone to blame. They want to believe that tragedies are caused not by the "fickle finger of fate," but by evil people they can hate. Millions fantasized that the Depression had been foisted on them by "Wall Street" -- some remote, set of greedy manipulators who benefitted from nefarious schemes which impoverished everyone else. Intellectually unsophisticated people particularly are susceptible to seeing great events as being orchestrated by insidious secret forces.

These tendencies are maximized when sudden, totally unexpected national calamities occur. The resulting confusion, ineptitude and mismanagement provide dark questions for those inclined to see evil forces at work. What happend, they ask, to the other man on the train platform when Garfield was shot? Why did the police allow him to slip away unidentified and unquestioned? How can we believe the Stalwarts played no part when they gained so much by Garfield's death?

Alone among presidential assassinations, Lincoln's did involve a conspiracy: During the War, Booth's gang had been encouraged by Confederate intelligence agents in a hare-brained scheme to kidnap Lincoln to exchange for a general release of Confederate prisoners. The surrender having vitiated that, Booth, and a follower who attacked Seward, struck in revenge, self-consciously imitating the classical tyrannicides. But 19th century true believers had other explanations.

One was the familiar international "Jew-bankers" scenario: they killed Lincoln, an economic protectionist, to facilitate their taking over the American economy. Even more popular, given contemporary American paranoias, was the Catholic conspiracy explanation: supposedly the Church of Rome had supported secession to weaken the U.S. (out of the Church's supposed perpetual hostility to free institutions) and so murdered Lincoln. Supposedly the conspirators were all Catholics. (Actually only Mudd, who was innocent, and the Surratts were.) Moreover, a la the movie "JFK," it was "proved" that Catholic priests a thousand miles away knew of the assassination before it occurred thus showing that the Church was behind it.

It does not faze true believers that their ideas are rejected by those technically and intellectually qualified to evaluate them. JFK conspiracy believers don't care that the technical elements of their arguments are derisively rejected by almost all pathologists, criminalists, forensic scientists, ballistics experts and historians who examine them. True believers' intellectual attainments may not allow them to follow technical analyses or methods of proof. And the fact that those intellectually qualified to evaluate those claims reject them may actually promote false claims among believers. True believers may hold deep grudges against technically qualified people. To accept conspiracy theories assuages the true believers' egos: they congratulate themselves on understanding the world while those who have always excelled them are blind; conspiracy theory reassuringly explains those persons' successes as a product not of superior attainments but of inclusion in the conspiracy.

A further characteristic of true believers is fundamental historical ignorance or obliviousness. By this I do not mean that conspiracy believers are just woefully ignorant of mere historical fact so that they can swallow such ahistorical fantasies as right wingers murdering that ardent Cold Warrior JFK for fear that he was becoming George McGovern. True believers' ignorance of historical fact is but a symptom of their lack of what the British historian Namier called a "sense of how things do NOT happen."

THE DREYFUSS CASE

To illustrate this lack I want to compare Oliver Stone's paranoid fantasies to a real conspiracy, the Dreyfuss Affair. In 1894 a Jewish officer of the French General Staff was wrongly convicted of treason. Unlike the hideous traitors of JFK conspiracy fantasies the Dreyfuss conspirators were patriotic officers. They knew a spy was selling secrets to the Germans and honestly believed it was Dreyfuss. There belief was reasonable for the chief investigator, Major Henry, under tremendous pressure to produce evidence when he could not get Dreyfuss to confess, forged a legally inadmissible document implicating Dreyfuss -- whom he sincerely believed was guilty. But when it looked like the court martial might acquit, the Minister of War ordered Henry to secretly provide the judges w/ the inadmissible investigation file which included this inadmissible document. And Henry complied rather than confessing that he had fabricated a document he assumed could not be used, but would get the pressure off him.

This then was all the wrong-doing involved: a conspiracy by a few generals to conceal a procedural wrong (unknowingly) magnified by a single fabrication. NOT dozens of traitors conspiring to murder a president; NOT a cover-up with scores more murders and hundreds more fabrications carried out by hundreds more traitors.

Dreyfuss is convicted and sent to Devil's Island. His family begins a decade-long struggle to clear him. Having first rallied France's comparatively weak Jewish community, this unimportant Jewish family rouses French liberalism generally to a struggle eventually dividing France more tumultuously than the Rosenberg case did this country. This would surprise JFK conspiracy believers except it never occurs to them to wonder why neither the Kennedys, the most powerful family in American politics, nor any member of JFK's administration, will be associated with them.

Before the Dreyfuss controversy began gathering steam, the General Staff assigned the new head of military intelligence, the anti-semitic Col. Picquart, to review the secret file in order to perfect new and better security procedures. He discovers that the file was illegally given to the judges. He urges that the generals annul the verdict themselves before the Dreyfuses find out. When his superiors reply that no one will know if he doesn't tell, he bursts out "This is abominable! You would DISHONOR me."

That is how an anti-semitic officer reacts to being invited to conspire against a Jew. Yet true believers really think DOZENS of army, Secret Service, FBI and CIA officials happily conspired to kill a President and then hundreds more ran around covering it up. True believers get their ideas about how government operates from the movies, the same place they get their ideas about wound ballistics.

True believers actually claim scores of potential witnesses "died mysteriously" during the cover-up. The list includes Oswald's mother and J. Edgar Hoover, both of whom died of natural causes -- the mother dying 17 years after JFK, Hoover dying 8 years after. If they knew of the Dreyfuss affair it would astound true believers to find that the conspirators didn't order the Devil's Island garrison to murder Dreyfuss once the scope of the controversy became clear. After all, that would have ended the matter and the danger to their their careers.

It would never occur to generals to try such a thing for, unlike true believers, they know how things don't happen. They know government officials lie and connive to cover their asses, but do not order murders -- for subordinants do not care enough about protecting them to carry such orders out. Even if the conspirators had ever imagined giving such an order, they knew not only that it would have been disobeyed but that word would have leaked out and ruined them more swiftly and surely than the controversy would.

It would further astound true believers to find that the generals didn't even kill Picquardt whom they could personally hve murdered. They browbeat him into temporary silence instead and isolated him in French North Africa. But he found he could not live with the secret even to save his career -- unlike those faithful traitors whom the true believers claim have kept covering up the truth in the Kennedy case secret for 30 years without even one deathbed confession. Picquardt's account of the matter eventually reached Mrs. Dreyfuss. He was thereafter arrested and imprisoned for breaching security procedures. But a new Minister of War (unaware of any problems and convinced of Dreyfuss' guilt) initiated a new Army inquiry to confirm it. The new investigator discovered the fabricated document. Astoundingly, at least to true believers, he didn't cover for the generals either. Instead, he reported to the Minister of War who promptly had Major Henry arrested and he promptly killed himself.

The Affair dragged on for several more years, ending in the disgrace of the conspirators. Col. Picquart became Minister of War and Dreyfuss as a Colonel served heroically in WWI.

JFK's POLITICS

The claim that the "military-industrial complex" had JFK assassinated to prevent him from turning into George McGovern is absurd. So pathetically ignorant of modern American history are true believers that they really can't distinguish the politics of John (who was, among other things, a life member of the National Rifle Association) from the politics his brother Teddy began espousing a decade after John's death.

JFK latest biographer's summary is "Ideologically, Kennedy was at best a sort of centrist Democrat.... He was militantly anti-Communist and committed to an aggressive foreign policy. An earlier biographer compares JFK to Nelson Rockefeller: by accident of birth Rockefeller was a Republican and JFK a Democrat -- yet, by inclination, each belonged in the other's party.

Ike's speech against the military-industrial complex was actually a warning against JFK, it's patron. It was JFK who resumed nuclear testing which Eisenhower had stopped. It was JFK who called on every American family to build a fall-out shelter. He campaigned for President on the phony "missile gap," charging Eisenhower with inadequate military spending that had allowed the Russians to leap ahead. As president he vastly increased spending on missiles and every sort of high-tech weaponry along with the greatest expansion of conventional military forces and weapons systems since the end of WWII.

As to Cuba, what the CIA stonewalled about for years after JFK's death was the campaign of military sabotage and assassination he personally ordered when the Bay of Pigs showed the futility of overt invasion. His latest biographer says: JFK "approved Operation Mongoose, the clandestine exercise in terrorism and murder. Determined to win in Cuba at any cost, Jack had secret dealings w/ one of the top mobsters involved in the assassination attempts."

After World War II JFK had been one of those who pilloried Truman for having "lost China to the Communists." So he was deeply concerned not to provoke a similar campaign of vilification against himself by losing in Vietnam. From the 1950s he had been espoused the domino theory, saying "that a Communist takeover in Indo-China would imperil Burma, Thailand and other independent states." Privately he told Dean Rusk, "'If we have to fight in SEAsia, lets fight in Vietnam. The Vietnamese, at least, are committed and will fight. There are a million refugees from Communism in S. Vietnam. Vietnam is the place.'" On many occasions JFK publicly rejected withdrawal, announcing his determination to stay in South Vietnam to defeat the "Communist aggression" against it because "For us to withdraw from this effort would begin a collapse not only of South Vietnam but of Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there." This theme was emphatically reiterated in the speech he was going to give in Dallas the day he was killed.

Many 18th century Americans actually thought witches had afflicted Salem. Many 19th century Americans actually thought the Catholic Church murdered Lincoln. Many 1930s Americans thought the munitions makers had conspired to cause WWI. The idea that JFK was murdered by a right-wing conspiracy to stop his supposed plans to disengage in Vietnam or Cuba is modern America's contribution to this comic record of unreason.