Conspiracy's End

I love conspiracy theories. They are a form of gnostic knowledge about our political universe. Conspiracy theories are not disturbing; they are re-assuring, making sense of what doesn't. You can almost say that conspiracy theories are symptoms of our thirst for meaning. The reason our political hopes and dreams are thwarted is because there are larger forces and entities controlled by sinister personalities who really control the world and manipulate reality to their wants. You could even develop computer programs to generate conspiracies. I confess I subscribe to conspiracy theories, I like them. But this week has been a deflating one for all of us.

The assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Robert and Dr. Martin Luther King,Jr. shaped my generation and ushered in an age of upheaval in our politics. Shortly after the assasination of her husband, Mrs Jackie Kennedy opined," How awful is it that Jack was killed by some little Communist shit?" And we have all dutifully fell in line trying to make it that he wasn't. The killing of the President has produced whole libraries of alternative theories, films and pieces of good to great literature. We have Oliver Stone's JFK, which posits the assassination was an inside job by the shadowy world of the spooks and military because President Kennedy wanted to end the Vietnam War, which we now know he did. Charles McCarry wrote a wonderful spy novel Tears of Autumn, which posits the Kennedy assassination was the product of Indochinese heroin dealers linked to the Diem family, who hired a French assassin. James Ellroy in Ten Thousand Cold Men writes with his full amp style of a complex plot involving Howard Hughes, CIA personnel and the mafia. Non-fiction books link the Gambino family, Jimmy Hoffa and the New Orleans mob into a fantastic, yet plausible plot of revenge for a series of perceived slights and wrongs. Conservatives speculate about the role of Fidel Castro and cite LBJ's dark interview near the end of his life, saying "We were running Murder,Inc. down there (in Cuba), anything could have happened". Much to my dismay, Norman Mailer, whom we could trust in these dark matters, wrote Oswald near the end of his life, basically confirming Jackie's original statement. But I thought Mailer had sold out to the spooks so he could finish the next volume of Harlot's Ghost, his epic novel about the CIA.

I think we now have an answer. Ted Kennedy's memoir True Compass has finally been published. If you grew up by the ocean, the passages that are most poignant concern his love of sailing on the sea, his memories of fleeing land after Bobby was killed and sailing from the Cape to Maine to be together with the sea and sky, as well as some of his last journeys out in his sailboat. In Washington, we have always heard that Ted knew about Jack's assassination and that before he died the truth would come out. I take it his account in the memoir was his truth. Chosen by the Kennedy family to meet with Earl Warren, since Bobby was engulfed with grief, he met with Chief Justice Warren. The debriefing took over five hours and Earl Warren filled Ted on all the details of the Commission's work including a critique of its shortcoming. In the end,writes Ted Kennedy the Commissions got it right. Later LBJ collared him and said it was the FBI's fault. They have interviewed Oswald and had him under surveillance but they failed to prevent the assassination. Unfortunately, the words as he wrote them ring true as the deaths of his brothers haunt the first half of the book and I think, knowing of his own impending death, he would have left another "truth" if he knew it.

The other event of my generation was Watergate, an episode in our history,along with the "secret invasion" of Cambodia, which broke the faith of a generation in the institutions of government. Another library has grown up around this third-rate burglary. Richard Nixon feared that DNC chairman Larry O'Brien, a lobbyist for Howard Hughes, knew about Hughes' on-going financial support of the President and would spill the beans and Nixon had to find out what O'Brien knew. The CIA and the military knew that Nixon wanted to re-organize the entire executive branch (see Dick Cheney) and they feared what he was up to with all the back channel negotiations going on with Moscow, the Vietnam Peace Talks and China so they got a bunch of former CIA hands to botch the operation to frame Nixon. Ted Kennedy himself plotted the overthrow of Nixon by planting Archibald Cox at the Justice Department so as to provoke the firings of the Special Prosecutor and set up a firestorm that would lead to Nixon's impeachment. Gordan Liddy speculated that Nixon had nothing to do with any of this. It was all John Dean's fault. Dean was dating Maureen, his soon-to-be wife, who Liddy speculates was working for an escot service. Dean knowing that Spencer Oliver, whose office was actually bugged, procured women for visiting Democratic officials to Washington, would have records about these transactions. So Dean ordered the break-in to destroy records that would be damaging to his wife's reputation and then snicked on President Nixon. After a ten-year lawsuit, this line of the Watergate story proved false and Liddy lost in court to Dean. So we are left the questions: Did Nixon order the break-in?--he said for years he didn't; what were they trying to find?; and what's on the 18 and half minute erasure of the tape?

And now we know and it's a bummer. John Dean in revising his old book Blind Ambition uncovered what people were looking for. Richard Nixon had just returned from China, which he considered his greatest triumph, only to be confronted with allegations by Democrats that the anti-trust suit against ITT had been dismissed because of bribery. Nixon furious that his greatest moment had been upstaged heard that there were allegations about kickbacks involved in the Democratic convention scheduled to take place in Miami. He loudly complained he wanted this information so the White House could use it against the Democrats. Hence the political arm of the White House went to work and bugged the wrong guy's office. They were supposed to bug Larry O'Brien's office and get papers documenting the kickback scheme. But then they were blown and Watergate for all its metaphorical power over all these years really was a third-rate burglary and Richard Nixon really didn't order the break-in. And the whole iss of bribes over ITT is false, also. And there were no kickbacks involved in the Democratic Convention either. And George McGovern did not receive campaign funds from Fidel Castro as one of the Watergate burglars claimed.

In the next two years with the advance of technology, acoustic scientists believe we will be able to reconstruct the erased 18 and a half minutes. I'm sure they will be disappointing.

Now the conspracies lack the panache of those in the past. We are left now with Orly Taitz and her band of wingnuts and 9/11 truthers arguing that our President was born in Mombassa, Kenya (the city was then in Zanzibar) despite his mother never having been in that country. The court rejected her latest lawsuit and threatens to fine her $10,000 and a lawyer in Ohio is suing to have her disbarred. Conspiracies are not what they were.

Conspiracies do exist, of course. But the most dreadful thing is that inexplicable and horror events happen, which are deprived of any serious meaning because of the basic ineptitude of human beings. We are much more the objects of chance, whimsy and fate than we want to believe.