Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce

on throughout the brief history of the Kennedy administration. It was a fertile time for conspiracy, since so many things seemed to be changing all at once. The issue of civil rights had moved swiftly past the hope of easy compromise; there were murderous plots planned under the Spanish moss in Mississippi, and the people involved in them believed they were arming themselves against a conspiracy from the North that dated back to Lincoln. Elsewhere, there were off-the-books efforts to kill Fidel Castro in Cuba, and covert wranglings in (among other places) Iraq, where a young officer named Saddam Hussein backed the right side in a CIA-sponsored coup. A rat’s nest was growing in Southeast Asia that already seemed beyond untangling.
    The Joint Chiefs were barely under civilian control; Fletcher Knebel did not pluck the plot for
Seven Days in May
out of the air. Knebel was a veteran Washington journalist who knew what he heard around town. The intelligence services vanished into the dark blue evening distance of the frontier in which John Kennedy had declared could be found the nation’s best new hope. These were actual conspiracies, many of which have come to light in the years since the assassination, just as the conspiracy theories about the president’s murder have hit high tide, but they have had less historical resonance in that context than the notion, completely unsubstantiated by anything resembling a fact, that Kennedy was shot from a storm drain beneath the street in the plaza.
    Back in 1991, shrewd old Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw clearly what would happen. In an essay prompted by the release of Oliver Stone’s film
JFK
, Moynihan argued that the Warren Commission’s capital mistake from the start was the failure to recognize that Americans were not predisposed to believe it.
    “I was convinced that the American people would sooner or later come to believe that there had been [a conspiracy],” Moynihan wrote, “unless we investigated the event with exactly that presumption in mind.”
    By the time Moynihan published his essay, a solid 70 percent of the American people did not believe the conclusion of the Warren Commission that, acting alone and from ambush, Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy. This percentage has not changed substantially since the day in 1964 when the commission first published its findings, even though both the journalist Gerald Posner and the former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi have published lengthy and detailed defenses of the Warren Commission’s conclusions. To this day, the official U.S. government report into the public murder in broad daylight of the president ofthe United States has rather less credibility with the American people than does the
Epic of Gilgamesh.
    No matter what the polls indicate, the reality is that we have kept the Kennedy assassination as a conspiracy theory, rather than accepting it as an actual conspiracy. Once we believe in the latter, it becomes a deadening weight on the conscience. It loses its charm. Accepting it as a reality means we probably are obligated to do something about it, and that we have chosen, en masse, not to.
    The revelation of an actual conspiracy—the Iran-Contra matter, say—has come to have a rather deadening effect on American politics and culture. It runs through stages. There is disbelief. Then the whole thing dies in banality. It’s too hard to understand, and it’s Just One More Damn Thing that proves not that something called “government” is controlled by a secret conspiracy, but that “government” itself is the conspiracy. This is commonplace and boring, and it leads to distrust and to apathy, and not, as it is supposed to do, to public outrage and reform. There is no “Us.” There is only a “Them.” There’s no game if there’s only the other team playing.
    In fact, Iran-Contra was a remarkable piece of extraconstitutional theater, far beyond anything the Watergate burglars could’ve dreamed up. Arming