In response to the comment from Dr. McDaniel I have looked a little bit into other Presidential assassinations in order to compare the reactions of the nation to the loss of a President.
In American history we have lost four Presidents to assassination– Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1881), and William McKinley (1901), as well as John F. Kennedy (1963).
Lincoln was killed, as most know, by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, after the end of the Civil War; he was shot in the head at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.
Garfield was shot in the back by religious fanatic Charles J. Guiteau after he denied Guiteau’s requests to hold office in D.C.
President William McKinley was shot and killed by factory worker and anarchist Leon F. Czolgosz while at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
According to the introduction of “Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives”, which is part of the JFK Assassination Records in the National Archives, conspiracy theories appeared after two of those three murders.
After Lincoln’s assassination, there was a major anti-Catholic movement known as the “Know-Nothing Movement” because many of Booth’s co-conspirators were Catholic. They believed that the whole thing was a Papist plot against the United States. It was ultimately dismissed, but other theories that had to be dismissed popped up as well, one that even included the Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. There were two separate investigations into Lincoln’s death, but “Neither finally laid to rest the suspicions around the death of President Lincoln”.
Garfield’s murderer, Guiteau, plead insanity but was found guilty and hanged. For some reason, no conspiracies were concocted concerning his death.
McKinley’s assassination, since it was surrounded by Czolgosz’s anarchist beliefs, was full of conspiracy theories. He insisted that he had acted alone, but that didn’t stop America from pointing the finger at anarchists as a group, and anarchist leaders were arrested and their groups had restrictive measures placed upon them. Yet after all this, “the theories appeared to collapse shortly after the execution of Czolgosz”.
So it seems that three of the four assassinations in the United States’ history were surrounded by conspiracy theories shortly after they occurred, but Kennedy’s is the only one that has lasted so thoroughly and for this long.
Or is it? The paper I was reading from mentioned that the Lincoln conspiracy theories were never proved or disproved, but not how long rumor persisted among the people about what might have happened. So perhaps some research into that is necessary. Because if the theories lasted as long as there were people who were alive when Lincoln was, then it makes sense that people still wonder about what happened to Kennedy. Kennedy’s murder mystery of an assassination hasn’t had time to fade into history like the conspiracies surrounding Booth might have.
So I think that’s my focus for next week, finding what I can about Lincoln’s assassination in order to compare it to Kennedy’s.
http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report/findings.html#assassinations