My thinking on conspiracies has been evolving. I started out not paying a lot of attention to "conspiracies" as most of them were obviously bunk. So my original position, if I had articulated it, was "I don't believe in vast secret conspiracies". But they have been a staple of modern culture for a long time now. So my position evolved. For a long time my position was "I believe in conspiracies, just not secret conspiracies". Now my thinking has evolved further. But, to begin at the beginning . . .
The "patient zero" of modern conspiracies is the Kennedy Assassination. I vividly remember when news of this event came over the PA system at my school when I was a kid. Initially it wasn't even clear that Kennedy was dead. Everyone was in shock. And needless to say everyone was glued to the radio or the TV for the next few days. This was the first time the TV networks went to "wall to wall" coverage. They took this so seriously that they went commercial free for days. We have now been through enough of these events that we still get wall to wall coverage. But now it's on cable channels and it includes commercials.
Anyhow, like everyone else, I quickly found out that a guy named Lee Harvey Oswald was the suspect and that he was captured and in custody within hours. Then a sleazy nightclub operator named Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald while he was in police custody. There was a vast thirst for knowledge about how this all came to be. So President Johnson created the Warren Commission to investigate and report, which they did. Then the conspiracy theories started surfacing. Initially they were ignored by most people. After all, the events had been thoroughly investigated by the Warren commission. Earl Warren, the chairman, was Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Furthermore, he was a prominent Republican appointed by a Democratic President. The Warren Commission was bipartisan and completely above board, or so responsible people opined. But the Kennedy Conspiracy books kept coming anyhow and they sold well.
We are now coming up on the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination. If you polled people you would find a large number of people, perhaps even a majority, supporting the idea that there was some kind of conspiracy involving secret actors in the Kennedy Assassination. But is this really possible? Let's look at the undisputed facts:
- Lee Harvey Oswald had a complex and troubled past. He was married to a Russian woman, for instance. He was not anybodies idea of a "stone cold professional assassin".
- Oswald bought a bolt action rifle by mail order several months before the assassination.
- The Oswald gun fired at least some of the bullets that hit Kennedy.
- Oswald worked at the Texas Book Depository, from which at least some of the shots were fired.
- Oswald was at the Depository on the fatal day.
- Jack Ruby was reputed to have mob ties and was also someone who was not anybodies idea of a "stone cold professional assassin".
Most of the conspiracy theories concern the number of shots fired and the rate at which they were fired. The basic idea is that Oswald could not have fired the number of shots required with the necessary accuracy. The conspiracies then go on to spin dozens of variations on how the assassination was pulled off and by whom. Many allege massive cover ups which have held for the entire time since the assassination. I am not going to troll the minutiae of the "discrepancies" that various conspiracy theorists have come up with. I am going to take a step back and ask a more general version of "who" and "how".
I have seen about a million movies and TV shows about some secretive group pulling off the "perfect crime". I enjoy them but I don't confuse them with reality. In fiction land it is actually pretty easy to get away with the crime and in many cases the crime is an assassination. But a lot depends on the investigators not doing a thorough and proper job of investigating the crime. Now this happens a lot in the real world. Lots of "perfect crimes", in the sense that the perpetrator is never caught, happen every day. And in a lot of cases the authorities either never know a crime was committed or the crime is poorly investigated. But before the Kennedy Assassination there was a notorious crime called the "Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping". The FBI went to extraordinary lengths and eventually caught the perpetrators. Anyone contemplating assassinating a President would have to expect a "Lindbergh" investigation and act accordingly.
Let's say Castro decided to kill Kennedy in an effort to get the CIA to stop trying to assassinate him. This motive is one of the more credible ones. Kennedy had directed the CIA to try to assassinate Castro. And the whole "assassinate Castro" program was shut down after Kennedy died. But what would have happened if credible evidence emerged that Castro was behind the Kennedy assassination? We would have invaded Cuba and Castro would have been a bad bet for a life insurance policy. So the whole thing would backfire, big time. The same is true for the other possible scenarios I have listed and many many more. They all depend on no one figuring out that there had been a secret conspiracy.
Many of the alternate scenarios involve, for instance, other shots from other guns. There is no credible evidence of any other shots from other guns. But what if you were planning the Kennedy assassination and your plan involved an additional shot from an additional gun? How could you guarantee that the investigation would turn up no proof of that shot from the other gun? You couldn't. Even if you had a great plan, something could go wrong. And if that something went wrong the secret organization behind your plan would be exposed. And what if someone talked and was believed? And would you pick Oswald and/or Ruby? Not in a million years. When viewed from the planning stage it is impossible to come up with a plan that guarantee your secret organization would stay secret. All Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories fall down as a result of these kinds of practical issues. If there was a Kennedy assassination conspiracy we'd know it by now. So there isn't.
Now let's move on to a more modern conspiracy: Whitewater. Whitewater is just one of several "conspiracies" that grew up starting even before Bill Clinton moved into the White House. Besides Whitewater, there was Travel-gate, Vince Foster-gate, file-gate and others. I am not going to go into all of them. Like the Kennedy assassination, there are at least a shelf's worth of books devoted to the subject. But let me say a little more about the Whitewater part of "Whitewater" in particular.
Whitewater was about "influence peddling". The idea was that the Clintons got a sweetheart deal and in exchange for this they were supposed to deal out favors. The problem with Whitewater is that the Clintons lost $29,000 on the deal. If I lost $29,000 on a deal I would be less rather than more inclined to grant favors. But Whitewater lived on for years anyhow. One of the truly strange aspects of this is that there was another deal that was a better case for influence peddling. Hillary Clinton invested in some cattle futures. She only did it once and the transaction netted a very nice profit. So here we have an actual case that smells of influence peddling. The cattle futures story was a three day wonder with no traction. Go figure.
The media including the mainstream media spent years promoting Whitewater and other Clinton "scandals". It turns out that there was little or no evidence to back up the scandals I have listed and they all turned out to be bogus in the end. However, there was a kernel of truth buried in all the mud. Bill Clinton had been accused of stepping out with a number of ladies over the years. Clinton denied the specifics while admitting to being a sinner. And the ladies, when their names came out, backed him up. But then came Monica Lewinski. Illegal recordings came out and the infamous "blue dress" was revealed. After all that it turned out that Clinton has stepped out on a number of occasions over the years. So where's the conspiracy?
The conspiracy involves the media's years long infatuation with all of the various "Whitewater" allegations, most of which turned out to be false. Most of the media interest was fomented by leaks and allegations fed to the media by "confidential informants". It later turned out that much of this information was wrong and many of the "confidential informants" were associated with Republican and Conservative political groups. And much of the funding to support these operatives came from Richard Mellon Scaife, a well know conservative publisher and billionaire. All this eventually came out but was dismissed by the mainstream media even though the proof came from dispositions taken under oath and court testimony in various legal actions. Why?
Well in this case the mainstream media was actively involved in promoting these conspiracies. They were good for selling newspapers or attracting eyeballs. So admitting that there had, in fact, been a "vast right wing conspiracy" would have made them look bad. As a result, large sections of the media continue to pretend that Whitewater consisted solely of Monica Lewinsky and that the rest never happened. And this is not the first time this has happened.
In the late '40s and all through the '50s something called the "red scare" was going on. The headliner was a Wisconsin Republican Senator named Joe McCarthy. He alleged that the U.S. government was riddled with hundreds of spies for the USSR (what is now Russia). Again, the mainstream media went along with him because he was "good copy". Here too there was some truth in with all the mud. The USSR did have an extensive spy program that, among other things, stole the plans for making an Atomic Bomb. But almost all of those accused by McCarthy were completely innocent. And as a result of "witch hunts", thousands of innocents lost their jobs and their reputations. McCarthy was finally brought down because the ABC TV network broadcast the "Army McCarthy hearings" live and people got to see McCarthy in action for themselves without the sanitization the media had been applying. Edward R. Murrow's reputation as a great journalist stands in part on his rejection of McCarthyism. But lost in the mists of time is the fact that Murrow was almost alone in his condemnation of McCarthy's actions at the time even though his misbehavior was well known to many in the media at the time. Again, admitting they misbehaved would have been bad for the media's image. So the modern version of the era as spun by the media is "we were all with Murrow all along".
The mainstream media for whatever reasons never went along with the Kennedy assassination conspiracies. But they were actively involved in the "red scare" and the "Whitewater" conspiracies. The "red scare" was pushed heavily by the William Randolph Hearst media organization. Richard Mellon Scaife owns an extensive media operation. Both Hearst and Scaife were well known supporters of Republican and Conservative agendas. I guess no Republican/conservative saw any benefit to getting on the Kennedy assassination conspiracy bandwagon.
In all these cases the conspiracy, or lack thereof, became readily apparent with time. That's why I used to say "I believe in vast conspiracies, I just don't believe in secret conspiracies". But then I was talking with my brother about the New Orleans levies and the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps is a kind of conspiracy.
The Corps is noted for its engineering expertise. And 150 years ago this was justified. Military campaigns required vast fortifications and other substantial engineering endeavors. Back then there were no engineering schools and, for the most part things like Mechanical Engineers or Civil engineers did not exist. So the military, seeing an unmet need, created the Corps. With the building of the railroads and other great industrial enterprises there came to be a need to have engineering expertise in civil society. So engineering evolved to no longer be the exclusive domain of the military. If you needed to do a large engineering project, Hoover Dan, for instance, it was no longer necessary to go to the Corps. But the government still needed the capability to do large engineering projects like the levies along the Mississippi. But big projects cost big money. And that means, since it's a government project, that politics and politicians are involved. And that has been bad for the Corps.
Whether a big government project gets built or not depends on whether politicians come up with the money and not on need. And the quality of the engineering is also influenced by political concerns. Everyone in the Corps figures this out sooner or later. If you have a problem with this you either get out voluntarily or you are squeezed out. So the Corps still retains its mission of performing large engineering projects. But it also has a mission to provide political cover to politicians so that they can claim the pork barrel project in their district is not pork. It's a necessary project blessed by the Corps. This "doing engineering in a heavily politicized environment" goes a long way to explain the levy problems in New Orleans.
And this is not a secret. Anyone who looks around can see that is so. There are dozens of highly scored projects that are not being done because they lack political support while many low priority projects are done because the politicians have found the money. So where's the conspiracy?
My brother was recently writing about the New Orleans levies. I asked him why he just didn't come out and say "It's because of politics" instead of quoting a bunch of organizations about their concerns. He said "I can't write that". Why not? (I didn't actually ask him that). It's because modern journalism is not about the truth. If you are going to write something it's not just about whether it's true or not. Many things will get push back. You have to decide whether the story is going to get "inconvenient" push back. If it is, you (and your editors) have to decide whether it's worth it to go ahead anyhow. Often it is not. In this modern world most journalism is done from within the confines of a for profit organization. With them, it's not about truth, it's about what is a good business proposition. Cheap sensationalism is good for the bottom line so we get a lot of it. Telling the truth is sometime sensational and therefore good for business. But much of the time it is just plain inconvenient. So we get much less of it.
The fact that the that one of the primary missions of the Corps is to turn a lot of pork into "needed nonpartisan engineering projects" is not well known is a kind of conspiracy. And the fact that it is hard to say that in a story means that it could be considered a secret conspiracy. And the fact is that this particular development is long standing makes the whole thing a "long standing vast secret conspiracy". And it's not just the Corps. There are a lot of situations where it is inconvenient for the media to say something even though it is true. The fact that there are "long standing vast secret conspiracies" out there is where my thinking has evolved to. I am on thin ice in that these conspiracies are not really very secret. But no one talks about them so I am going to stick with my "secret" characterization.
"And that's the way it is", as Walter Cronkite used to say at the end of his news shows.
