The truth about John F Kennedy

'Telling the truth can be a scary thing sometimes." So says Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, in Oliver Stone's JFK. In the film, Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, is the archetypal underdog, a hero who sacrifices everything in search of truth. In real life, he was a paranoid fantasist, a publicity hound and a crooked DA. Truth can be scary, but it's never as frightening as the power of a good lie.

I had occasion to recall Garrison a few weeks ago when a box of books was delivered to my door. That box was physical proof of the desire by publishers to cash in on the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy's assassination on November 22 1963. It contained 12 books, five of which question the official version of what happened in Dealey Plaza. It gave off an odour of dirty macs and overflowing ashtrays. What, I wondered, was the total weight of truth in that box?

The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, who fired three bullets from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Conspiracy theorists insist that the Commission was a cover-up and that at least one more gunman was involved. They also argue that Oswald was hired by the CIA, the Mafia, Fidel Castro or another clandestine group - including aliens.

Every year, I ask my students to find the most bizarre assassination theory on the internet. The best so far maintains that Elvis, racked by jealousy over Marilyn Monroe, shot Kennedy. Once a conspiracy theory starts it never stops. This explains the reissue of Crossfire by Jim Marrs (Basic), a book that was "the basis" for JFK. That seems reason enough not to reissue it. Stone's fantasy was once mildly intriguing because we knew almost nothing about the characters he introduced, including Garrison and Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the assassination.

Now we know more and can see how preposterous JFK is. But publishers understand that there are gullible people hungry for assassination porn. Matthew Smith claims that Who Killed Kennedy? (Mainstream) is the "definitive account". That's slightly ironic, since definitive usually means big, and this was the smallest book. Smith's tawdry volume never answers the question posed by its title, except to suggest that the villain was someone in the CIA.

Wow, that's a revelation. The CIA are often the culprits of choice. The agency is a synonym for secrecy and deceit - and blaming the CIA means you don't have to name a perpetrator. Smith quotes Earl Warren, who once told reporters: "you may never get the truth in your lifetime".

For conspiracy theorists that's proof of a plot. That quote also inspires the title of Not in Your Lifetime (Headline) by Anthony Summers, another "definitive" account. His book, first published in 1980, has been revised four times. The latest edition is "the most definitive", a grammatical impossibility.

I'd be more patient with conspiracy theorists if they didn't murder the English language. Alex Cox offers what looks the most intriguing of the assassination chronicles. His book, The President and the Provocateur (Oldcastle), is billed as the "parallel lives" of Kennedy and Oswald. That's an exciting idea. Unfortunately, the book's a Trojan Horse. Lurking inside is another conspiracy yarn.

The same holds for Philip Shenon's A Cruel and Shocking Act (Little, Brown). It aims for the respectable market - it's sombre and short on hyperbole. But that's where the book fails, since this subject is attractive precisely because it's sordid. Assassination books should make one feel a little dirty. This one aims to be clean, but ends up being dull.

At the end of 500 pages, we're told that the CIA probably lied about their involvement in the assassination. Ho-hum. Imagine if a cast-iron explanation for Kennedy's assassination could be found. And imagine if it involved a lone gunman firing three bullets from the Texas School Book Depository. Overnight, the huge market for conspiracy books would disappear.

That's the irony of the new books on the assassination: each depends on the mystery never being solved. Conspiracy theories thrive because the truth is often boring. Take John Kennedy. A life so large requires a death of equal magnitude - he was too important to be eliminated by a mediocrity. Oswald was a pathetic loser, a point demonstrated superbly in Peter Savodnik's The Interloper (Basic), which recounts the three years the assassin spent in the Soviet Union.

Fed up with America, Oswald embraced communism and tried to sell himself as a spy. The Russians, however, rightly judged him a nutter. Like Savodnik, James Swanson's End of Days (William Morrow) takes a restrained approach to the assassination, concluding that Oswald acted alone. Both books are carefully researched and elegantly written, but both will probably suffer on account of their sobriety. It's reassuring that, amid the lunacy, publishers still give sanity a voice. Opinion polls regularly find that Kennedy was the most popular president in American history.

Yet strip away the myths and his achievements seem thin. Now it's virtually impossible to separate myth from man. Kennedy, in life and death, was adept at fooling people. Behind the image of youthful vigour walked a man of poor health. His famous suntan, supposedly the result of yachting, was caused by steroids taken for Addison's disease. He presented himself as a family man, but was in fact a womaniser. Millions would come to love Kennedy not for what he was but for what he seemed.

The obsession with Kennedy has inspired an insatiable need to know. That's demonstrated by Those Few Precious Days (Simon & Schuster), by Christopher Andersen, a wonderful book for voyeurs. It examines, in painful detail, the last year of John and Jackie's marriage. Andersen's account of the death of their son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, on April 9 1963, after 39 hours of life, made me feel like an intruder at a stranger's deathbed. Apparently Jackie hoped that Patrick would cure Jack of his addiction to other women. Obsession forces open windows that should remain shut.

Larry Sabato examines that obsession in The Kennedy Half Century (Bloomsbury). Of all the JFK books, this one will endure. It's certainly the most original. Sabato examines how the Kennedy legacy has been manipulated, marketed and abused in the 50 years since Dallas. In the process, he reveals a great deal about Kennedy, but even more about the generations of Americans whose lives have been shaped by his death.

It's nice to see that while small men debate the minute detail of Dallas, a genuine scholar has the vision to recognise an issue that really matters: the grip that Kennedy continues to exert on us all. As Sabato shows, Kennedy's assassination was so painful because the myth was so perfect. Something almost divine was taken from the American people in Dealey Plaza.

That divinity is perfectly evoked in My Kennedy Years (Thames & Hudson) a posthumous publication by Jacques Lowe, the president's personal photographer. The images accurately convey a golden time when the American president was young, handsome, intelligent and heroic. Yet they are just images, carefully chosen to sell a mythical leader to a credulous public. The desire to sanitise the Kennedy image remains strong.

This is demonstrated by The Letters of John F Kennedy (Bloomsbury) edited by Martin Sandler. It's interesting and beautifully presented, but the correspondence is censored. Sandler did not include the lurid notes the young Kennedy wrote to his friends, boasting of sexual conquests. In any case, letters, do not adequately reveal the man. The best revelations lately are from the Oval Office recordings, which demonstrate just how cynical Kennedy could be. "Sometimes you get the feeling nothing has gone right since John Kennedy died," one American remarked around the time of Watergate. That sad refrain has echoed across the decades since November 1963. Because so much importance was invested in his life, so much magnitude has been assigned to his death.

It became, inevitably, a watershed. The Kennedy assassination has often been called the end of American innocence, a statement no less accurate for being trite. Innocence died not just because a promising president had been murdered, but also because it would become apparent just how much the myth depended upon gullibility. Real or imagined, truth or lie, there's never been another man like Kennedy. That's because the assassination destroyed the credulity essential for a similar hero to emerge.

As the years passed, Americans would cling desperately to their hero, while they were battered by evidence of his shortcomings. This latest conspiracy of Kennedy books reveals how, since 1963, both the truth and the lies have corroded the American spirit. 

(Gerard DeGroot is a professor of modern history at St Andrews.)