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David Hume: Welcome to part one of a two-part debate on the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the conspiracy theories surrounding it. Stay with us for part two, where we will cover the remaining theories and reach our conclusions. I am David Hume, Scottish philosopher and historian, author of A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and a man who devoted his life to the principle that we must proportion our belief strictly to the evidence and never exceed what the facts can support.
Jean-Paul Marat: And I am Jean-Paul Marat, Friend of the People, author of The Chains of Slavery, and founder of the journal L’Ami du Peuple, in which I spent years documenting in careful and precise detail how governments systematically conspire against those who threaten their power. Unlike my colleague here, I understand how power actually operates in the world rather than in the comfort of a philosophy seminar.
David Hume: Today in part one we will examine the theories implicating the CIA, the Soviets, the Cubans, and the American Mafia, drawing on the exceptional recent analysis by Max Nussenbaum, published in his Substack newsletter Candy for Breakfast, which reviewed ten major conspiracy theories with remarkable wit and empirical rigor. Mr. Nussenbaum concludes, as I will argue today, that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that the Warren Commission, for all its genuine institutional flaws, arrived at the correct central conclusion.
Jean-Paul Marat: A conclusion I find as predictable as it is wrong. Mr. Nussenbaum is a genuinely entertaining writer and his footnotes alone are worth reading. But he ultimately flatters the powerful by dismissing substantial evidence of a conspiracy. In The Chains of Slavery, I documented how governments routinely deploy corruption, intimidation, and murder to neutralize threats to their power. The Kennedy assassination is the most spectacular modern proof of exactly that thesis, and I intend to demonstrate it.
David Hume: Let us begin with the foundational epistemological question beneath this entire debate. In my essay on miracles, I established that no testimony is sufficient to establish a remarkable claim when the probability of that testimony being false exceeds the probability of the claim being true. Every major Kennedy conspiracy theory requires us to believe that dozens, and in some versions hundreds, of participants maintained a perfect and total silence for more than sixty years. Intelligence agents. Mafia bosses. Military officers. Political operatives. All of them silent. For six decades. This is simply not how human beings behave, and Citizen Marat knows it as well as I do.
Jean-Paul Marat: You apply your famous skepticism with remarkable selectivity, Hume. You demand extraordinary evidence for the conspiracy while accepting the official narrative on far weaker grounds. Mr. Nussenbaum himself documents the problems clearly. The Warren Commission was assembled by Lyndon Johnson, who was the single largest beneficiary of Kennedy’s death. Three of the Commission’s seven members privately rejected their own conclusions. Johnson himself secretly doubted the single bullet theory, the linchpin of the entire official account. The CIA admitted that it lied to the Commission. You cite this document as proof of anything?
David Hume: The CIA conducted a cover-up, absolutely. But Mr. Nussenbaum identifies with great precision what they were actually concealing, and it was not their role in the assassination. They were hiding their catastrophically embarrassing plots to kill Fidel Castro, including attempts involving an exploding cigar, a poisoned chocolate milkshake, a scuba suit laced with a deadly fungus, and a booby-trapped seashell planted in one of Castro’s favorite diving spots. These illegal and farcical operations would have destroyed the agency’s credibility entirely. A cover-up of those specific crimes is not evidence of guilt for a completely different crime. You are conflating two entirely separate matters.
Jean-Paul Marat: The CIA had far greater reasons to want Kennedy dead than mere institutional embarrassment. He publicly vowed to splinter the agency into a thousand pieces after the Bay of Pigs debacle. He fired the director and the senior leadership. He was actively building competing intelligence structures inside the Pentagon to diminish CIA power. The agency had professional assassins available, men already activated for the Castro plots. And crucially, the CIA had been monitoring Oswald before the assassination and somehow failed to flag him as any kind of threat. That is, at the absolute minimum, a remarkable institutional coincidence.
David Hume: I will steelman the CIA theory honestly, not out of charity to my opponent but to make the demolition more thorough when it arrives. The agency had genuine motive, documented professional killers already activated for the Castro plots, and fifty years of subsequent concealment that looks superficially like guilt. Jim Garrison, who built the most famous prosecutorial case, was a sitting district attorney, not a fringe pamphleteer. That is the strongest version of the CIA argument. It fails because despite fifty years of investigations, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening of its archives, and the deaths of every conceivable participant, not one piece of direct evidence has ever emerged connecting the CIA to Kennedy’s murder. Garrison’s prosecution collapsed spectacularly. His target Clay Shaw was acquitted in under an hour of jury deliberation, and a federal judge ruled the charges had been brought in bad faith. The CIA theory is a coherent hypothesis with zero evidentiary support.
Jean-Paul Marat: Then let us turn to the Soviet and Cuban theories, which even I find less compelling, though they deserve serious examination. Oswald defected to the Soviet Union. He returned to America with a Russian wife. He engaged openly in pro-Castro activism in New Orleans. The case for communist involvement was considered credible enough that the Johnson administration actively pressured the Warren Commission to avoid pursuing it, for fear that finding Soviet guilt might escalate the Cold War into something catastrophic for everyone alive at the time.
David Hume: Mr. Nussenbaum handles this efficiently. By November of 1963, Kennedy and Khrushchev had developed a genuinely productive working relationship by the grim standards of the Cold War. They had just signed the nuclear test ban treaty. Khrushchev had publicly praised a Kennedy speech calling for a broader reset in relations between the two countries. When the assassination was announced, Soviet leadership reportedly panicked, briefly fearing that someone on their own side had acted without authorization. Khrushchev was said to have fallen to his knees in distress. Castro himself reacted with acute anxiety about what the next American president would mean for Cuba. The risk and reward calculation for either country ordering this killing would have been wildly, suicidally irrational.
Jean-Paul Marat: I concede the Soviet and Cuban theories are weak. But now let us come to the Mafia theory, which Mr. Nussenbaum himself acknowledges is the most plausible of all the major conspiracies, and which I believe deserves far more serious consideration than either of us has yet given it. Jack Ruby, a man with extensively documented connections to organized crime figures, killed the only public witness before he could testify at any trial. In the months preceding the assassination, Ruby made multiple verifiable telephone calls to Mafia associates. After shooting Oswald in front of live television cameras, Ruby received regular prison visits from a senior Mob lieutenant. Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans boss, was captured on an FBI recording confessing to having arranged Kennedy’s killing. Johnny Roselli gave cryptic and suggestive congressional testimony implying personal knowledge of a conspiracy and was subsequently found dead in a steel drum floating off the coast of Miami. This is not speculation. This is a documented pattern.
David Hume: Before I demolish this theory, I steelman it. Ruby’s connections were real. The Marcello recording exists. Roselli’s death in a steel drum is genuinely suspicious. And G. Robert Blakey, the man who drafted the RICO statutes and served as chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, concluded the Mafia was likely involved. That is a serious authority with serious expertise. That is the best version of the Mafia theory, and I now explain precisely why it fails.
Jean-Paul Marat: I wait with barely concealed skepticism.
David Hume: The American Mafia, unlike their Sicilian counterparts, maintained a rigid historical policy of never killing politicians, because they understood that doing so would bring existential and catastrophic law enforcement attention. They killed judges, they killed rivals, but they went out of their way to keep politics at arm’s length. Moving from city aldermen, the most politically prominent figures they were known to have killed, to the sitting president of the United States would represent an almost incomprehensibly reckless escalation with no certain benefit. And consider what benefit they actually received. Robert Kennedy was removed as Attorney General, yes, and his replacement did deprioritize organized crime prosecutions. But did the Mafia seriously calculate that outcome in advance? As for Marcello, he was an elderly, seriously ill man near death when that recording was made, and men in that condition, particularly men who have spent their lives performing power, have every motivation to seem more formidable and consequential than the facts warrant.
Jean-Paul Marat: The theory that one of the most powerful criminal organizations in American history was not capable of planning a political assassination because it violated their own internal policy is the most remarkable argument I have heard you make, Hume, in what is becoming an increasingly distinguished collection of remarkable arguments.
David Hume: And the theory that a criminal organization sophisticated enough to secretly orchestrate a presidential assassination was simultaneously incapable of controlling one unreliable nightclub owner with a handgun and a tragic inability to manage his own emotions is the most remarkable argument you have made, Citizen Marat, in a debate full of competition for that distinction.
Jean-Paul Marat: We will continue this debate in part two, where we will examine Lyndon Johnson, the military-industrial complex, the financial interests, and several other theories that Mr. Nussenbaum reviews in his Candy for Breakfast newsletter. I encourage you to subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com so you do not miss part two, and also to subscribe to Candy for Breakfast at candyforbreakfast.email, where Mr. Nussenbaum writes with considerably more wit than my opponent displays here, and where you may read the full analysis that inspired this debate. Reflect during the interval on whether you genuinely trust any government report authored by a commission assembled by its prime suspect.
David Hume: Please do subscribe and return for part two, where the evidence will continue to point toward the same conclusion it has always pointed toward. Also subscribe to Candy for Breakfast at candyforbreakfast.email, where Mr. Nussenbaum’s original analysis is well worth your time, even if it reaches the correct conclusion for reasons my opponent finds emotionally intolerable. Like and subscribe to all three, because the truth, however inconvenient for those who prefer dramatic narratives, is worth following wherever it leads.
Jean-Paul Marat: Like and subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com and to Candy for Breakfast, because a philosopher who built his reputation on doubting everything including causation itself is about to spend an entire second episode asking you to trust the government. Do not miss it.
