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David Hume: Welcome back to part two of our debate on the Kennedy assassination and the conspiracy theories surrounding it. I am David Hume, Scottish philosopher and author of A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In part one we examined and disposed of the CIA, Soviet, Cuban, and Mafia theories. Today we complete our review of the remaining theories from Max Nussenbaum’s excellent analysis in his Candy for Breakfast newsletter, and we reach our final conclusions.
Jean-Paul Marat: And I am Jean-Paul Marat, Friend of the People and author of The Chains of Slavery. Viewers who missed part one should know that my opponent spent that entire episode arguing that a man who built his reputation on doubting everything from the existence of the self to the reliability of cause and effect has now found one thing he will not doubt: a government report. We continue by examining Lyndon Johnson, the military-industrial complex, and several other suspects Mr. Nussenbaum reviews with his characteristic wit.
David Hume: Lyndon Baines Johnson. Mr. Nussenbaum’s portrait of this man is genuinely extraordinary. He apparently stole the 1948 Texas Senate election outright. He demanded his staff take dictation while he sat on the toilet. The Kennedy aides called him Huckleberry Capone and Uncle Cornhole. When Kennedy died, a corruption investigation moving directly toward Johnson personally evaporated overnight because Congress lacked the stomach to pursue a new president during national mourning. Lyndon Johnson was, without serious competition, the single largest beneficiary of Kennedy’s death. The Romans asked who benefits, and Johnson is so obvious an answer that it embarrasses everyone in the room.
Jean-Paul Marat: I am gratified to hear you say this so clearly, Hume, though I suspect I will not enjoy what follows.
David Hume: Your suspicion is correct. The Johnson theory rests entirely on a deathbed statement by E. Howard Hunt, a Watergate burglar and established perjurer who had previously, publicly, and actively supported the Warren Commission and mocked conspiracy theorists. That is the entire direct evidentiary foundation. One known liar, near death, contradicting his own previous public positions. And Mr. Nussenbaum makes the observation I find most devastating: Robert Caro spent decades excavating every corner of Johnson’s life and produced thousands of pages documenting his corruption, cruelty, and ruthlessness in relentless detail. He did not find this. If Johnson had orchestrated the murder of an American president, Robert Caro would have found it.
Jean-Paul Marat: The military-industrial complex theory is less satisfying as a specific accusation, though more compelling as a structural explanation. Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam. He signed the nuclear test ban treaty. He was pursuing back-channel communications with Castro and Khrushchev. Those who profit from permanent military mobilization had genuine reasons to fear his second term. Oliver Stone made this argument most famously, and while Stone is not a rigorous historian, he is asking a legitimate question about who benefits from permanent war.
David Hume: Too broad to function as a theory. It names no actors, proposes no mechanism, and produces no verifiable prediction. As Mr. Nussenbaum correctly observes, it is the conspiracy equivalent of blaming society. The bankers theory is weaker still. Kennedy was the second-wealthiest president in American history, from a family of powerful financiers. His treasury secretary was a Republican investment banker. The executive order supposedly threatening Federal Reserve power was routine administrative business that attracted no attention whatsoever at the time. The antisemitic variants blaming Israel or world Jewry I will not dignify with extended analysis. Mr. Nussenbaum dismisses them accurately and efficiently. They tell us considerably more about their authors than about the assassination.
Jean-Paul Marat: The theory involving Charles Harrelson, the father of the actor Woody Harrelson, who was a genuine convicted contract killer, deserves at least brief acknowledgment. During a six-hour standoff with police, while injecting cocaine and apparently shooting at his own muffler with a handgun, Harrelson claimed to have killed Kennedy. He recanted later, explaining that he had been substantially out of his mind at the time. Very few serious researchers believe this. But he did briefly say it was him, and he was an actual professional murderer, which earns him, as Mr. Nussenbaum rightly grants, an honorable mention.
David Hume: The aliens did not kill Kennedy. I say this quickly and without further elaboration because the theory genuinely requires a mention in any complete review, and that mention is now complete. The most philosophically interesting theory, as Mr. Nussenbaum celebrates with evident personal delight, is the Secret Service accidental discharge hypothesis: that an agent in the follow-up vehicle accidentally fired the fatal shot while reacting to Oswald’s shots. This is not technically a conspiracy theory. It requires no organized plot. It enrages conspiracy theorists because it offers no dark purpose and enrages Warren Commission defenders because it rejects Oswald as the source of the fatal shot. It is the only theory that manages to anger absolutely everyone simultaneously, which gives it a certain artistic distinction.
Jean-Paul Marat: These individual theories matter less than the underlying structural argument, which Mr. Nussenbaum gestures toward in his conclusion without fully embracing. In 1964, when the Warren Commission reported, seventy-seven percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. That was the highest recorded level of public trust in American history. Today that number is twenty-two percent. We lost that trust because the government lied to us about Vietnam, about surveillance, about weapons of mass destruction, about torture. Asking us now to trust this particular report from this particular commission assembled by this particular beneficiary is asking rather a great deal of a public that has learned its lessons.
David Hume: I will now steelman your overall position with genuine honesty, not because I believe it, but because destroying your argument at its strongest is more valuable than attacking it at its weakest. The case for conspiracy rests not on any single theory but on the aggregate strangeness of the official account. A repeatedly failed, mentally unstable man executes the most consequential political murder of the twentieth century. He is killed two days later before testifying publicly by a man with documented organized crime connections. The commission investigating the murder is created by its prime beneficiary. The CIA admits it lied to that commission. Three commissioners privately reject their own report. The percentage of Americans accepting the official story has never reached fifty percent in sixty years. As Mr. Nussenbaum concedes with visible discomfort, the Warren Commission’s conclusion is actually the minority position among the American public. That is the most powerful form of your argument, and I present it honestly.
Jean-Paul Marat: You have stated my case more clearly than most of my allies manage.
David Hume: And now I explain precisely why it still fails. The fatal problem at the center of every conspiracy theory is Lee Harvey Oswald himself. No competent conspirators select Lee Harvey Oswald. This man attempted to defect to the Soviet Union and executed the process so badly that even the KGB found him unreliable. After the assassination, instead of disappearing, he shot a police officer in broad daylight. He then attended a cinema near the scene of the crime and was arrested not for murdering a president but for sneaking in without paying. And Mr. Nussenbaum records that Kennedy himself said that very morning that killing a president was not particularly difficult. All it required was a tall building and a powerful rifle. Sometimes history is precisely that cruel and that senseless, and no amount of narrative satisfaction changes that fact.
Jean-Paul Marat: OSWALD WAS SILENCED BEFORE HE COULD SPEAK! THAT IS NOT COINCIDENCE!
David Hume: USING A MURDERED MAN’S SILENCE AS PROOF OF WHY HE WAS MURDERED IS CIRCULAR REASONING AND YOU KNOW IT!
Jean-Paul Marat: THE COMMISSION WAS ASSEMBLED BY ITS PRIME SUSPECT! THAT IS NOT AN INVESTIGATION! THAT IS A PERFORMANCE!
David Hume: A FLAWED INVESTIGATION CAN STILL REACH A CORRECT CENTRAL CONCLUSION! IMPERFECT PROCESS DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY INVERT THE RESULT!
Jean-Paul Marat: THE CIA LIED! THREE COMMISSIONERS DISAGREED! JOHNSON HIMSELF DOUBTED IT PRIVATELY! AT WHAT POINT DOES DOUBT BECOME EVIDENCE?
David Hume: DOUBT IS NOT EVIDENCE! DOUBT IS DOUBT! SIXTY YEARS! EVERY ARCHIVE OPENED! EVERY WITNESS DEAD! ZERO DIRECT EVIDENCE OF ANY CONSPIRACY! ZERO!
Jean-Paul Marat: THEY DESTROYED THE EVIDENCE! COMPETENT CONSPIRATORS DESTROY THE EVIDENCE! THAT IS PRECISELY THE POINT!
David Hume: YOU CANNOT CITE THE ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE AS YOUR EVIDENCE! THAT IS NOT PHILOSOPHY! THAT IS A CIRCULAR TRAP YOU HAVE BUILT TO MAKE YOUR THEORY UNFALSIFIABLE!
Jean-Paul Marat: POWER DOES NOT LEAVE CONVENIENT EVIDENCE FOR COMFORTABLE PHILOSOPHERS! I DOCUMENTED THIS FOR YEARS UNTIL THEY CAME FOR ME!
David Hume: ONE WOMAN! ONE KNIFE! ONE BATHTUB! AND YOU HAVE NEVER ACCEPTED THAT SIMPLE EXPLANATION EITHER, HAVE YOU!
Jean-Paul Marat: THAT IS AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT MATTER AND YOU ARE BEING DELIBERATELY OFFENSIVE!
David Hume: I AM BEING PRECISELY AS CONSISTENT AS THE EVIDENCE DEMANDS!
Jean-Paul Marat: YOU ARE A SERVANT OF POWER WEARING THE COSTUME OF REASON AND I FIND YOU PROFESSIONALLY AND PERSONALLY CONTEMPTIBLE!
David Hume: AND YOU ARE A DEMAGOGUE WEARING THE COSTUME OF THE PEOPLE AND I FIND YOUR EPISTEMOLOGY EMBARRASSING AND YOUR ENTIRE METHODOLOGY A DANGER TO HONEST INQUIRY!
Jean-Paul Marat: HISTORY WILL VINDICATE ME!
David Hume: HISTORY ALREADY VINDICATED THE WARREN COMMISSION AND YOU HAVE SIMPLY REFUSED TO READ THE RESULTS!
Jean-Paul Marat: Please like and subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com, where you can watch David Hume, a man who wrote an entire philosophical treatise arguing that we cannot trust our own perceptions, our own memories, or the principle of causation itself, perform the astonishing intellectual feat of asking you to trust a government document assembled by its prime beneficiary, certified by an agency that admitted lying, and privately disowned by three of its own seven authors. And subscribe to Candy for Breakfast at candyforbreakfast.email, where Max Nussenbaum reaches the wrong conclusion with considerably more charm and footnotes than my opponent here ever manages. Subscribe and marvel at what happens when a famous skeptic runs out of things to doubt except the powerful.
David Hume: And please do like and subscribe so you may continue watching Jean-Paul Marat, who documented governmental murder conspiracies with such sustained inflammatory enthusiasm that he eventually attracted the personal interest of one Charlotte Corday, a single individual acting entirely alone with a kitchen knife and a resolved sense of civic purpose, an event whose straightforward official explanation Citizen Marat has presumably spent the entirety of the intervening centuries refusing to accept on principle. Subscribe to PhilosophersTalk.com, where at least one of us follows the evidence to wherever it actually leads. And subscribe to Candy for Breakfast at candyforbreakfast.email, where Mr. Nussenbaum’s original analysis inspired this debate and where, unlike my opponent, the correct conclusions are eventually reached, regardless of whether the destination is sufficiently dramatic for the conspiratorially inclined.
