General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Nov. 22, 1963: 50 years, and still no conspiracy|Op Ed LA Times [View all]BootinUp
(47,141 posts)Seen in its proper historical contextamid the height of the Cold Warthe investigation into Kennedys assassination looks much more impressive and its shortcomings much more understandable
Max Holland
November 1995 | Volume 46, Issue 7
In September 1994, after doggedly repeating a white lie for forty-seven years, the Air Force finally admitted the truth about a mysterious 1947 crash in the New Mexico desert. The debris was not a weather balloon after all but wreckage from Project Mogul, a top-secret high-altitude balloon system for detecting the first Soviet nuclear blasts halfway across the globe.
During the half-century interim, flying-saucer buffs and conspiracy theorists had adorned the incident with mythic significance, weaving wisps of evidence and contradictions in the Air Forces account into fantastic theories: Bodies of extra-terrestrial beings had been recovered by the Air Force; the government was hiding live aliens; death threats had been issued to keep knowledgeable people from talking. Such fictions had provided grist for scores of books, articles, and television shows.
In retrospect the Air Force had obviously thought the Cold War prevented it from revealing a project that remained sensitive long after the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. And such surreptitiousness was certainly not isolated. Might it provide a model even for understanding that greatest alleged government cover-up, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? Indeed our understanding of the assassination and its aftermath may, like so much else, have been clouded by Cold War exigencies. It may be that the suppression of a few embarrassing but not central truths encouraged the spread of myriad farfetched theories.
Admittedly there are Americans who prefer to believe in conspiracies and cover-ups in any situation. H. L. Mencken noted the virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation in 1917, and more than a century after the Lincoln assassination skeptics were still seeking to exhume John Wilkes Booths remains. The Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter definitively described this syndrome in his classic 1963 lecture The Paranoid Style in American Politics, later published as an essay. Heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy are almost as old as the Republic, Hofstadter observed, as evinced by the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s, the anti-Catholicism of the 1850s, claims about an international banking cartel in the early 1900s, and Sen. Joe McCarthys immense conspiracy of the 1950s. But a recurring syndrome is not to be confused with a constant one, Hofstadter argued. Paranoia fluctuates according to the rate of change sweeping through society, and varies with affluence and education.
Link to American Heritage article