At one point, almost all Americans remembered exactly where they were when President John F. Kennedy was shot Nov. 22, 1963, 60 years ago today. There are now diminishingly few people who remember that day directly. But it turns out that the phenomenon of a “flashbulb memory” is not that reliable, anyway.
Like all traumatic events, the Kennedy assassination is surrounded by false memories. Many Americans claimed that they distinctly remember watching the shooting live on television, but the Zapruder footage — the shaky home movie that captured the shocking event — was not shown on prime-time American TV until 1975. Thus, the Kennedy assassination might not have changed history, but it changed how we experience it. Ultimately, the real significance of the event may be less the mushrooming of conspiracy beliefs and more the effects that endlessly rewatching the violent deaths of Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald have had on the American psyche at large.
The Kennedy assassination might not have changed history, but it changed how we experience it.
Conspiracy theorists inserted the event into an entire alternate history, while journalists and those in the Kennedy circle created a mythical account of his presidency as Camelot. A generation of writers, artists and filmmakers — from Thomas Pynchon to Stephen King, Andy Warhol to Oliver Stone — were haunted by the atmosphere of celebrity, violence and secrecy surrounding the event. The collective effect was a crisis in “our trust in a coherent reality,” as the novelist Don DeLillo put it. Even if few people today are well versed in the arcane details of the case, the shooting seeped into everyday consciousness and language, from the “magic bullet” to the grassy knoll.
With hindsight, it is tempting to think that the assassination immediately opened the floodgates of popular modern conspiracism. In the first few years following the event, a handful of amateur detectives — an unlikely mixture of housewives,…
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