Real Enemies by Olmsted Kathryn S.;

Author:Olmsted, Kathryn S.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2009-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

PIKE’S EXPLANATION was rather simplistic. Many Americans concluded that some covert actions—the Castro plots, the bugging of King, or the overthrow of democratically elected governments—were morally wrong. But it was hardly fair to call the whole country evil. Clearly, these actions had been undertaken without public knowledge.

But if Pike’s thesis was too easy, many Americans embraced an equally simple alternative. Why had their government done these shocking things? For many, the answer was obvious: the country itself was not evil, but it was ruled by an evil cabal.

After learning that Hoover’s FBI had tried to persuade Martin Luther King to kill himself and that the CIA consorted with the mob to kill Castro, some Americans began to suspect government conspiracies behind every recent murder or scandal. As the journalist Rod MacLeish concluded, “American society has gone buggy on conspiracy theories of late because so many nasty demonstrations of the real thing have turned up.”58 Alger Hiss became a popular lecturer on college campuses as many Americans came to believe his conspiracy theory that the FBI had framed him.59 Journalists considered possible CIA involvement in everything from the Watergate break-in to the slaying of Giancana as he scrambled eggs in his suburban Chicago kitchen before he was to testify to the Church Committee about the Castro plots.60 “I suggest that two and two makes four,” wrote the conservative columnist William Safire, “that Sam Giancana took seven .22-caliber slugs in his body … to keep him from telling all he knew.”61

Some of Nixon’s aides continued their campaign to spread conspiracy theories as a way to persuade the public that the former president was somehow a victim of Watergate. Charles Colson, who had first raised the possibility of pinning the Watergate break-in on the CIA in June 1972, seized the opportunity provided by the intelligence investigations to go on television to declare that the real villain behind the Watergate and Ellsberg burglaries was, in fact, the CIA.62 Subsequent conspiracist books by journalists would suggest that the “real story” of the Watergate break-in involved professional spies and prostitution rings.63

Frank Church’s mailbag overflowed with letters from concerned Americans who wanted him to look into CIA involvement in everything from the JFK assassination to New York City’s financial problems. A Yale University professor urged the senator to investigate a power outage that abruptly silenced a televised speech by Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter. In 1978, citizens asked Church to probe possible agency involvement in the mass murder-suicide of People’s Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana.64 Over at Langley, CIA officers responded to the new theories with glum resignation. “They’re going to pin the crucifixion on us next,” one said.65

Above all, the Church investigation breathed new life into conspiracy theories about the murders of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Besides the Castro plots, congressional investigators revealed that the FBI had destroyed a threatening note from Oswald, the “Hosty note,” days after the assassination, and that both the CIA and the FBI had withheld key evidence from the Warren Commission.

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