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

Kennedy’s killing was almost immediately folded into a narrative structure that had already surfaced in popular culture as well as politics, a mode of storytelling that treated public events as the expressions of secret plots. Richard Condon’s Cold War thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” (published in 1959 and adapted by Hollywood in 1962) and Thomas Pynchon’s shaggy-dog experimental whodunit “V.” are among the best-known pre-assassination examples of this paranoid style in American fiction. (The phrase “paranoid style” comes from an influential essay on political conspiratorialism by the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, originally delivered as a lecture shortly before the assassination and published in Harper’s in 1964.)

That same year, the Warren Commission Report emphatically concluded that Oswald was the sole shooter and the only party responsible for Kennedy’s killing. Yet the report did anything but close the case. Through the years that followed, the commission was subjected to a steady stream of revisionism and rebuttal, carried out first by journalists and politicians and later, perhaps more decisively, by novelists and filmmakers.

Versions of the counternarrative percolate through novels and movies from the late ’60s on, picking up steam in the ’80s and ’90s. Alan J. Pakula’s “The Parallax View” (1974), while not explicitly about J.F.K., paints a bleak, cynical picture of an American elite devouring its own, devoted to nothing beyond the preservation of power and the weaponization of deceit. Condon’s “Winter Kills,” published in 1974 and made into a movie five years later, runs a darkly comic variation on this theme, ascribing a Kennedy-like figure’s death to the moral rot and congenital dishonesty of a ruling class he had both embodied and betrayed.

The disasters of Vietnam and Watergate, along with revelations about the covert activities of the C.I.A. and F.B.I., fed a distrust of the state that would fester on the left and the right. The assassination was seen from both sides as central event in the secret history of our times, a loose thread that, when pulled, would unravel a skein of sinister plots involving intelligence agencies, the Mafia, Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon B. Johnson and various clandestine organizations and shadowy actors. The cumulative moral of these stories was that nothing was ever what it seemed, and that American institutions were warrens of treachery and deceit.

In the 1988 baseball comedy “Bull Durham,” Kevin Costner’s Crash Davis, in a character-defining monologue, declares: “I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.” That’s what a smart, sexy, grown-up romantic lead played by an up-and-coming movie star would say. Three years later, Costner starred in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” as Jim Garrison, the real-life New Orleans district attorney pursuing a case that implicated a vast web of conspirators, including Kennedy’s successor, Johnson. “We’re through the looking glass here, people,” he said. “White is black and black is white.” In 1991, that was what a righteous warrior for truth played by a double Oscar winner would say.