One of Bernard Bailyn's many signal contributions to historical scholarship was his legitimation of conspiracy theory as a subject for professional historical study. Written in an era when scholars were prone to dismiss conspiratorial fears as part of a pathological "paranoid style" or as mere propaganda, Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Origins of American Politics insisted that the seemingly paranoid rantings of various revolutionary and anti-revolutionary writers be taken seriously, as though the writers actually meant what they said. While we might still question the factual basis of some of the revolutionaries' conspiratorial beliefs, Bailyn taught us, we need to pay close attention to them because of the invaluable window they provide into the mindset of 18th-century Americans and for their real role in motivating mass political action and shaping political values. (1)
In a presumably unrelated development (though in conspiracy theory, of course, there is no such thing as an "unrelated development") Bailyn's two "origins" books were published at roughly the point in American cultural history (the mid-1960s) when conspiracy theory began to go mainstream. The Warren Commission's hasty and heavy-handed efforts to allay public fears about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy ended up having the opposite effect; in the ensuing years, event after event and trend after trend served to deepen public distrust of major institutions. Eventually, this reached the point where millions of Americans, often majorities, claim to believe conspiratorial explanations of recent history that were once regarded as outlandish. Kennedy's killing -- by the CIA, the Mafia, Jimmy Hoffa, international drug cartels, Texas oil men, the military-industrial complex, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, or some coalition thereof -- is only the beginning of these beliefs. Other views finding significant support in polls include government conspiracies to kill Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, the invention of AIDS in a government laboratory (possibly as a biological weapon for use against the black population), and a longstanding government cover-up of extraterrestrial visits to Earth. (2) This last conspiracy allegedly began after a spaceship crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 and has continued through numerous cases of aliens supposedly abducting humans for scientific study. Some conspiracy theorists even claim that the key technological advances of the postwar period, including microcircuits, lasers, fiber optics and microwave ovens, were only achieved through "reverse engineering" of alien technology recovered at Roswell. In the 1990s, conspiracy theory became a form of mass entertainment, used in countless popular books, films, and television shows. The Roswell aliens have their own series now, and long before that the actual town of Roswell began marketing itself to conspiracy theory and extraterrestrial believing tourists. Bailyn alerted us to a central theme of American culture that not only remains with us, but seems to be getting stronger. (3)
Bailyn and the other scholars who extended or elaborated on his approach explained the origins of conspiracy theory's centrality to our culture. Building on their work, what I would like to do is sketch the possible thematic outlines for the history of conspiracy theory in American political culture since the Revolution. By suggesting some of the political and ideological functions that conspiracy theory has served and how they have and have not changed over the centuries, I hope to shed some light on one question that Bailyn and the others did not address: why has conspiracy-mindedness hung on as long as it has? (4)
As a baseline, let us begin with the interpretation of conspiracy theory that emerges from the scholarly literature. Most often conspiracy theory has been depicted as a form of radical dissent, a habit of suspicion toward national (or imperial) elites, the values they espoused, and the institutions they controlled. This description can apply no matter what the particular authors' evaluation of the theorists in question. Thus it was applied to both Richard Hofstadter's anti-Semitic Populist bumpkins and Pauline Maier's orderly gentlemen revolutionaries, and, more recently, in both an appreciative work on the supposedly healthy "oppositional culture" practiced by alien abduction believers and in an alarmist account of white supremacist terrorism in the hinterlands. (5) Whether seen as psychological projections of social discomfort or the processing of ordinary political events through a particular ideological filter, conspiracy theories are depicted as leading their believers to a stance of implacable opposition to major elements of the polities or societies in which they found themselves. Bailyn and other scholars of early America have emphasized the fact that colonial American protesters had no monopoly on paranoia: the British spun their conspiracy theories, too. To some extent, they based their military strategy on a conspiratorial interpretation of the Revolution as the work of a cabal of Boston troublemakers. (6) Yet outside the Revolutionary era, dissident conspiracy theorists have always gotten the most attention from scholars.
Bailyn and those who followed him in taking conspiracy theory seriously have added an element to this standard image, and that can be most succinctly described in one word: rationality. Easily the most brilliant version of this idea appeared in a 1982 William and Mary Quarterly article by Gordon Wood. Criticizing Hofstadter's "paranoid style" thesis and psychological interpretations of the origins of the American Revolution more generally, Wood argued that the near-universality of conspiracy theories in the 18th century was not a psychological malady but instead a by-product of Enlightenment rationalism. It grew out of the contradiction between an increasingly complex and unpredictable political, social, and economic world and a new conviction that everything that happened in the world could and should be rationally and naturally explained. "The belief in plots was not a symptom of disturbed minds," Wood wrote, "but a rational attempt to explain human phenomena in terms of human intentions and to maintain moral coherence in the affairs of men." Conspiracy theory thus represented "an enlightened stage in Western man's long struggle to comprehend his social reality." (7)
Wood's interpretation was applied very specifically to conspiracy theory among 18th-century politicians and intellectuals, but perhaps unintentionally it was part of a trend toward defending the reasonableness of conspiratorial fears held by many different groups in many different times. The Antimasons of the mid-19th century have received especially extensive and respectful treatment despite being heir to such patent fables as the Illuminati conspiracy, and despite counting among their leaders persons who believed that "if the government of France was revolutionized in three days," the "government of these United States" might be "changed to Monarchy in one day by the Mystic Power of Masonic Stratagem." (8)
On one level, I find the notion of conspiracy theory as rational explanation or principled radical dissent extremely convincing. A conspiracy theory is nothing if not an attempt to impose some order on the chaos of information floating out there in the world, to make sense of things that seem to make no sense. Even Hofstadter agreed that his political paranoids were "intensely rationalistic" and almost scholarly in their "careful accumulation of facts, or at least what appear to be facts . . . toward an overwhelming 'proof' of the particular conspiracy to be established." Indeed, when it comes to pedantry, hyperspecialization, and documentary overkill, we academics have nothing on the conspiracy theorists, whose books and pamphlets often feature massive scholarly apparatuses, complete with argumentative footnotes that few academic publishers would allow. (9) Like young assistant professors, Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists debate each other over evidentiary minutiae and now tend to specialize in particular areas of the evidence such as ballistics, medicine, photography, and sound, or on particular elements or angles, such as the Mafia, Jack Ruby, or Oswald's pre-assassination visit to Mexico, to name only a few examples. Oliver Stone's screenplay for his conspiracy film JFK was published as 600+-page book, with extensive historical annotations, commentaries, and source documents reprinted verbatim. (10)
Yet this respectful, "rationalizing" view of conspiracy theory fails to explain something important: the frequency of its recurrence in American history and the peculiar nature of that frequency. While conspiracy theories have multiplied like rabbits in American culture, since the Revolution they have (unlike rabbits) become curiously sterile in terms of their political results. Most of the conspiracy theory-based movements we can name lived and died quickly, and left little of their substantive agenda behind them. Freemasonry still lives, despite the Antimasons' best efforts. The Know-Nothings could not stop or even slow the tide of immigration or the rise of Catholic immigrants in American society. Massachusetts was one of the Know-Nothings' strongest states and yet Boston still became one of the most Irish (and later Italian) Catholic cities in America.
How has a political phenomenon so politically ineffectual nevertheless remained so common? The reason, I would argue, is that ideologically conspiracy theory has often been immensely useful, but more to dominant political ideas and myths than to the dissident ones we might expect. Far from fundamentally challenging the basic structures of American culture, conspiracy theory in the United States has frequently functioned to preserve a sense of basic ideological consensus and ultimate social harmony. In particular, it has often protected what scholars have termed "American exceptionalism," the widespread conviction that North America has been exempted by Providence (or some other force) from such chronic Old World problems as inequality, scarcity, revolution, or, indeed, of any deep, inherent, or irreconcilable sociopolitical divisions. This idea has been rather unpopular with historians in recent decades, but still retains a significant following in some quarters of the social sciences. (11) More importantly, it seems to have not only survived but grown stronger than ever in the larger culture, being invoked by presidents and constituting a major element of the ongoing public backlash against the so-called revisionist histories that modern museums and academic historians have often served up in a pesky devotion to historical veracity and professional scholarship. (12)
I think that the rationalism of conspiracy theory also needs to be qualified. Conspiracy theories tend to retain strong mystical elements even at their most rationalistic. Wood admitted that there were some religious roots to even American revolutionary conspiracy theories: Christians had long cast Satan or the Antichrist as dark and implacable plotters against humanity's hopes, and diabolical imagery easily crept into Revolutionary sermons, newspaper essays, and particularly into more visual forms of politics such as cartoons, transparencies, and parades. I would nominate the witchcraft fears of 17th-century New England as the very first American conspiracy theories. (13)
Conspiracy theories do seek to rationally explain disturbing and seemingly inexplicable events, but they almost always provide a particular type of explanation: bad things happen because evil men cause them, and this evil is typically regarded as pure and nearly unmotivated, a lust for power and/or wealth that reduces any other apparent causes or motives to mere pretexts or propaganda. In other words, conspiracy theories personalize history and serve as substitutes for explanations that might make the objectionable actions or persons or developments easier to understand, if not actually sympathize with. For me, this helps explain a certain flattening I have noticed in not only conspiratorial thought, but in early American political thought more generally. "The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years," Bailyn writes in opening chapter 3 of Ideological Origins, "rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power." This power was imagined as almost a living organism, Bailyn argues, a growing thing with an "endlessly propulsive tendency to expand itself beyond legitimate boundaries." Thinkers had to use biological metaphors like a hand, jaws, or cancer to describe it. I do not dispute Bailyn's description of the American theory of power. Indeed, it leaps out from American political texts of many different times and persuasions. It is as obvious in the films of Oliver Stone as it is in the pamphlets of the American Revolution. My question, however, is power for what? Why do people seize power, and constantly try to expand their power? These are basic questions, it seems to me, in any convincing view of historical or political causation; yet in the American political tradition described by Bailyn, they do not even need to be raised. Power seeks to expand because that is its nature, period. This is a rational view, but also a rather narrow and limited one. (14)
This brings us to "American exceptionalism." Gordon Wood points out that, in the 18th century, it was quite enlightened and advanced to personalize historical events, moving history from the unknowable realm of Providence into the more accessible regions of human agency. Unfortunately, the habit of conspiracy theory long outlived the 18th century, and has helped arrest the development of popular historical thought somewhere near the point it reached two or three hundred years ago. In other words, conspiracy theory has tended to forestall or crowd out analytical or historical or sociological thinking that might force Americans to face certain fundamental conflicts within their society. In this freest, most prosperous, egalitarian, and idyllic of world societies, the thinking has gone, the existence of serious problems or injustices must be the work of evildoers, and if they could just be stopped, all would be right again. Thus the basic soundness of American institutions and American society, and the existence of a consensual set of American values, could be validated by compartmentalizing the blame for any indicators to the contrary.
Examples of this process abound, and I will deal very briefly with a only few of them in this essay. Some of the most obvious examples can be found in the various Revolutionary-era documents that sought to settle the blame for the rupture solely on the British, and particularly in Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence. By my reckoning, something like two-thirds of that document is devoted to establishing a conspiracy theory, the king's secret "design" to "reduce [the Americans] under an absolute despotism." Jefferson seeks to prove the theory by reviewing the king's "history of unremitting injuries and usurpations, among which appears no solitary fact to contradict the uniform tenor of the rest." While many items on the list were merely tendentious accounts of things that the British government had actually done, others were rather stunning efforts to blame the British for internal American social problems, particularly its racial problems. Most famously, Jefferson charged the king with waging "cruel war against human nature itself" by "obtruding" African slave labor upon his innocent colonists and then scheming to preserve this unjust and "piratical" system from all efforts to restrain it. The king had further compounded these crimes, Jefferson argued, by inciting the slaves to "rise in arms" against their masters and endeavoring "to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages." In fact, African and Native Americans were joining the British cause out of well-informed conviction, that millions of American slaveholders and settlers were much greater threats to them than a few thousand British officials and soldiers. Jefferson was following and promoting a long American tradition here by converting rebellious racial minorities into mindless pawns of an external conspiracy. The king became just one in a long line of "outside agitators." A chief Indian grievance, the colonists' lust for new western lands, Jefferson mentioned in a passage many lines away from the "merciless savages" remark, and there he attacked the king for limiting "new appropriations of lands." (15)
The process can also be seen at work in the most of the classic conspiracy theories of the antebellum years. The sweeping economic changes of the period brought many disturbing changes, including the rise of economic inequalities and social disruptions from which America was supposed to be immune. Efforts to grapple with these changes quickly spun off into a whole panoply of conspiracy theory-driven crusades. The idea of secret networks of Masons protecting and promoting each other, infuriated those who believed that an emerging market society would provide them with a level playing field on which to compete. And for all their harsh class rhetoric about making "the rich richer and the potent more powerful," the Jacksonian attack on the "Monster" Bank of the United States, that "hydra of corruption," contained the thesis that there really would not be significant economic injustices in the country if the "few" could be stopped, as Andrew Jackson put it, from "bend[ing] the acts of government to their selfish purposes." (16)
Likewise the Jacksonians constantly used conspiracy theory to discount the origins of, or shift the blame for, the various forms of social unrest and political violence that swept the nation during the 1830s, much of which was directly attributable to the Jacksonian Democrats' aggressive style and divisive rhetoric, and some of which (such as the attacks on abolitionists in the North) was actually instigated by them. Jackson's famous veto message managed to blame this problem on the Monster Bank and its co-conspirators. In "attempting to gratify their desires," the president said, "we have . . . arrayed section against section, interest against interest, man against man, in a fearful commotion that threatens to shake the foundations of our Union." When an unemployed housepainter named Richard Lawrence tried to assassinate Jackson in 1835, after a long year studded with violent eruptions, it was only natural for Jacksonians to blame the crime on a conspiracy of the president's enemies. (17)
But the Jacksonians should not have all the fun. The ethnic and racial diversity resulting from the rapid economic development and massive immigration of the period gave rise to conspiracy theories in various quarters about the Catholic Church, the abolitionists, and the Slave Power, to name a few, theories that were much more widely accepted (in the particular regions where they were centered) than concurrent efforts to ameliorate racial and ethnic prejudice that might have had deeper and more beneficial effects than the foiling of conspiracies. Opposition to the Slave Power Conspiracy was much easier for northerners to embrace than radical abolitionism and racial equality, and this fact rather predicted the complacency about Southern social conditions into which Northerners quickly lapsed after the Civil War. With the villains defeated, sweetness and light could reign over the chosen land once again. (18)
In the last part of my time today, I would like to speed ahead and make some comments on conspiracy theory in recent times. This is necessary because, since the 1960s, conspiracy theory might seem to have deviated from the pattern that I have described. The Roswell legend and other alien conspiracy theories about coverups of alien contacts actually fits quite well. One senses in these beliefs, which have often taken far wilder forms than Roswell and developed into alternative religions, a deep dissatisfaction with many aspects of modern life and, in particular, a suspicion of the rapid changes being wrought by technology. Conspiracy theory may have helped deflect these believers away from more fundamental and political expressions of their dissatisfaction.
Some other more prominent forms of conspiracy theory are more problematic for my argument. Modern conspiracists from the Michigan Militia on the right to Oliver Stone on the left style themselves as enemies of established authority who have pierced the veil of our official history and uncovered the tissue of crime and conspiracy underneath. They see themselves as rejecting or trying to unsettle the cow-like assumptions of the majority of Americans. This style of thought seems to trace its recent lineage back to the New Left and counterculture of the 1960s, which showed a marked affinity for conspiracy theories that seemed to document their belief in the rottenness of modern "Amerikan" society.
Yet even in these putatively radical critiques one can see conspiracy theory performing its familiar ideological functions, as serious concerns over U.S. imperialism abroad and the threats to democracy posed by a giant and secretive defense establishment were siphoned off into fantasies about hero politicians struck down by all-powerful spy organizations, to name only one branch of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. It is almost as if American conspiratorial thinking goes through a life cycle, a swift one beginning with relatively reasonable ideologically coherent concerns that flower luxuriantly into a full-blown, numbingly complex conspiracy theories. Finally, unchecked growth leaves the theories so tangled, matted, and choked with ideological weeds and random elaborations that they can only decay into something much less politically actionable: fear of conspiracy as a dark, omnipresent, unstoppable, almost mystical force. This places the theorist and believer in the exceptionalist stance of outraged innocents trying to restore or defend America rather than challenge it.
This life cycle can be most easily in seen in the progress or regress of conspiratorial thinking about the murder of President Kennedy, the centerpiece and template of modern American conspiracy theories.
In the beginning, the JFK theories were relatively simple and ideologically clear-cut. Anticommunists feared that Castro had taken his revenge, and a right-leaning overreaction along these lines was among the chief fears of the liberals on the Warren Commission. On the left, the early conspiracy theorizing came from European intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell and his colleagues on the "Who Killed Kennedy Committee," who compared the blaming of Lee Harvey Oswald alone to the Dreyfus Affair and thus linked the United States to the Old World traditions of corrupt state power and authoritarianism from which it was supposed to be immune. (19) Both sets of theories explicitly took the assassination as disproving American exceptionalism: coups d'etat could happen here, justice and democracy could be thwarted by the kinds of court intrigue and military reaction that were thought to plague only less fortunate nations. The student radical version of the JFK conspiracy theory contained a similar anti-exceptionalist thrust. Carl Oglesby, a former president of the Students for a Democratic Society, wrote a Kennedy conspiracy book in the 1970s. He stated the purpose of his work as helping his own and later generations deal "with the fact that there is no more frontier" and that the only differences in the world now were the more or less accidental political boundaries among "only modern people like ourselves in a single modern world." (20)
If this relative ideological clarity is where the Kennedy conspiracy theories began, it is not where they remained. As conspiracist pedants rummaged through the evidence, other theories championing different villains with contradictory or less clearly political motives emerged. Many of the radicals (including Oglesby) eventually reached a kind of ideological funhouse in which all the unpleasant events of the Cold War era, including the Vietnam War, the Kennedy, King, and Malcolm X assassinations, and Watergate (understood as a plot against Nixon rather than by him) were linked together as part of one huge all-purpose conspiracy. This omnibus theory worked squarely in the exceptionalist mode, casting the American people as innocents yearning for a transparently democratic government and egalitarian society that are held to be possible if only the conspiracy could be stopped. The poignancy of this theme came from a sense of wasted potential, from a conviction that America is still exceptional in its people and their political ideals, but that the American people's mission to realize these ideals in history had been continually and tragically thwarted by the conspiracy. This would-be radical conspiracy theory upheld the most antinomian and ineffectual kind of political individualism, in which the restoration of American democracy depended not on the marshalling of groups, but on the exposures of the lone truth-seeker. This stance is embedded within both the activities of real conspiracy theorists and the plots of most popular culture narratives based on their theories.
Thus conspiracy theory has been a pathway allowing committed radicals and citizens with radical leanings to return, through the thickets of recent history, to their deepest childhood faiths in American innocence and uniqueness. "Ordinary people all over the map, Northeast by Southwest, have a deep, simple and common need to oppose all these intrigues and intriguers," wrote Oglesby, in a vein that would not have been uncomfortable for Andrew Jackson. "The comprehension of these covert political actions is the absolute precondition of self-government," the former student radical continued, "the first step in the restoration of the legitimate state." Unfortunately for Oglesby's hopes, the general political conditions of the time since he wrote reveal the basically conservative and exceptionalist results of post-1960s conspiracy theory. Americans have widely achieved "comprehension" of government conspiracy, while at same time disengaging from radical and most other forms of organized politics and eagerly embracing consumerism and bumptious patriotism. The restoration and self-government we have achieved, if any, seem more psychological and individual than political. (21)
The political decay of the Kennedy assassination theories is most graphically illustrated in the work of America's most prominent conspiracy theorist, the film director Oliver Stone. While cramming elements of numerous competing theories into its cinematic blender, Stone's JFK actually attempts to be clearer than most theories as to both motive and perpetrator. "The most important question," Donald Sutherland's secret military source tells Kevin Costner's District Attorney Garrison, is "Why? Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefitted? Who has the power to cover it up?" We learn in the course of Sutherland's 16-minute monologue that Kennedy was murdered by the intelligence community and the military-industrial complex, because he intended to pull out of Vietnam and scale back the Cold War national security establishment. Vice President Lyndon Johnson is shown, after Kennedy's death, telling some representatives of these groups: "Just get me elected. I'll give you your damn war." The apparent challenge of this scenario to American exceptionalism is addressed directly when Costner's character, reeling from this news, asks how "in our time--in our country" a politician could be killed just "because he wanted to change things." "Kings are killed, Mr. Garrison," the Sutherland character fires back, employing an equation of presidents with royalty that is used throughout the film and serves (perhaps unintentionally) to link the United States to the European political traditions that we supposedly have rejected and avoided. While I do not endorse this interpretation, and particularly not its central premise of Kennedy as liberal hero, it does have the virtue some political coherence and self-consistency. (22)
At the same time, however, Stone's JFK partakes of the ideological flattening and creeping mysticism that I find typical of conspiracy theory. Sutherland's character explains his "kings are killed" remark with the bald statement that "Politics is power, nothing more." The film never attempts to present the anticommunist principles of its villains beyond the occasional snarled remark. Kevin Costner's soliloquy at the end of the film returns to the president-as-king metaphor, but also shifts it into the realm of myth and archetype. "We have become Hamlets in this country," Costner-Garrison intones, "children of a slain father-leader whose killers still possess the throne."
A bit later, just before looking into the camera to tell the audience, "It's up to you," Costner's character borrows a Tennyson quotation that the real Jim Garrison used in his closing arguments, "Authority forgets a dying king," then, voice cracking, implores the jury, "Do not forget your dying king." (23)
This move into more mythic and mystical notions of conspiracy, and the citizens' relation to it, became even more explicit in Nixon, Stone's follow-up to JFK. There is probably no more convincing evidence of conspiracy theory's mind-clouding power than the fact that it led Oliver Stone, the maker of a trilogy of movies attacking the Vietnam War and an uncritical worshiper of John F. Kennedy, to create the most sympathetic portrait of Kennedy's nemesis Richard Nixon that Hollywood is ever likely to produce. Stone's Nixon, as played by Anthony Hopkins, is awkward, blustering, and nakedly ambitious, but also well-meaning, introspective, and tortured with guilt over the Kennedy assassination. (24)
The home video version's jacket blurb sums up Stone's thesis nicely: "Greatness within his grasp . . . shattered by a dangerous web of conspiracy, betrayal, and intrigue!" Nixon finds himself threatened and eventually brought down, with the Watergate scandal partly engineered, by the same forces that killed Kennedy, for similar (though more obliquely stated reasons): he threatened to curtail the power and funding of the national security state and phase out the Cold War. This idea of casting America's most successful Cold Warrior politician as a martyr to the fight against the Cold War is one of breathtaking ideological confusion, and it gives the film fits, since any Nixon biography must also show him in his red-baiting, Cambodia-bombing glory. Stone's answer is that Nixon was duped by a conspiracy, the conspiracy, realizing too late that he was nothing but a pawn of forces he had thought he was exploiting. The particular nature of the conspiracy is important. Nixon contains little of the specific evidence with which Stone bombarded the viewer in JFK, nothing like the endless explanatory monologues and clearly identified culprits of the earlier film. While the CIA and the military and the defense contractors are still involved, in Nixon the conspiracy is a living thing, a supernatural force, "the Beast," as both the script directions and the dialogue term it. This Beast's aims, like the Antichrist after which it is named, appear to be nothing less than evil itself, the reign of darkness. (25)
In a key scene, the president visits some protesting students at the Lincoln Memorial and is stopped short when, having asserted that he wants to end the war as much as the students do, a young woman accuses him of not being able to stop it, "because it's not you. It's the system. And the system won't let you stop it. . . . You're powerless." As the published script describes it, "The girl transfixes him with her eyes, Nixon feels it. The nausea of the Beast makes him reel. The students press on him from all sides." Yet he tries to defend himself: "No, no, I'm not powerless. Because, because I understand the system. I believe I can control it. Maybe not control it totally. But . . . tame it enough to make it do some good."
"You sound like you're talking about a wild animal," replies the young woman.
"Maybe I am," Nixon concedes, and, on the way back to the limousine, he tells a confused H.R. Haldeman (played by James Woods) that "She got it, Bob. A 19-year-old college kid . . . something it's taken me 25 [expletive deleted] years in politics to understand. The CIA, the Mafia, the Wall Street bastards."
"Sir?"
"'The Beast.' . . . She understood the nature of the Beast." (26)
The point is made even clearer in a long scene set at CIA headquarters that Stone deleted from the theatrical release of Nixon but included on the home video version. Seeking to retrieve some damning documents, Stone's Nixon comes nearly unraveled during an audience with Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, played by Sam Waterston as a kind of Yankee patrician Satan. Waterston's Helms all but admits that the intelligence community killed Kennedy, and elegantly threatens Nixon with "terrible consequences" if, among other things, he carries out his plans to reestablish relations with China. In the terms that echo Bernard Bailyn's revolutionary pamphleteers, Helms explains that the covert campaign against communism that began under Nixon's oversight in the 1950s was "not so much an operation as . . . an organic phenomenon. It grew, it changed shape, it developed . . . appetites." Never one to make a point subtly, Stone ends the scene with Helms and Nixon discussing death. Nixon opines that there are "worse things than death. There is such a thing as evil," and Stone cuts immediately to a reaction shot of Helms sniffing one of his prize orchids (which "smell like death," Nixon has just said). Then, in a special effect typically seen in horror movies, for a long moment we see only black in Helms's eye sockets, the eyes of a being without a soul, a demon. Just in case the audience does not get Stone's message, he then has Helms recite to Nixon his "favorite poem," Yeats's "The Second Coming," pausing with approval before the "beautifully ominous" ending, "What rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" (27)
Nixon thus ends up presenting conspiracy theory more as an artistic or religious exercise than as politics in any usable sense, and that places Stone in the present mainstream of conspiratorial thought. The most straightforwardly political conspiracy theories are being generated from the explicitly religious perspective of the Christian right, and mix together their religious fears of the Antichrist and with their more secular ones of a New World Order, typically seeing one as the agent of the other. Moreover, some of the most intense Christian conspiracy fears have been directed away from politics as such, into theories about, for example, secret Satanist networks recruiting and abusing children at day-care centers and Halloween celebrations. (28) The world of full-time conspiracy theorists is devoted to automatic reversal of all official statements (regardless of political content) and to connecting bits of information seemingly at random to form new conspiracies. A very popular document in this world is something called The Skeleton Key into the Gemstone Files, a 1975 compilation of notes purporting to prove that the prime mover of modern world history was . . . the Greek shipping magnate and husband of presidential widows Aristotle Onassis. Present-day conspiracists also no longer limit themselves to politics, and expend their energies on such celebrity news topics as the death of Princess Diana. In literature and literary theory, conspiracy themes have grown in popularity (especially through the work of such novelists as Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo) not because conspiracy theories explain everything, but instead (as one scholar puts it) because they help "subvert the formal structures of the classical narrative" and prove that nothing can explain anything. (29)
Hence, contrary to what I regard as the general tenor of the scholarly literature, I think we may now need to be a little less respectful of conspiratorial fears. Without psychologizing them in the manner of Hofstadter, we should recognize that the American conspiracy theory tradition ran off the track sometime after the Revolution and has contributed in recent times to the utter failure of our popular political culture. The continued prevalence of conspiracy theory reveals and promotes a profound discomfort with analytical or historical thinking that might explain events in terms of forces or causes rather than heroes, villains and little green men. It engenders public suspicion and cynicism toward our political institutions, while effectively paralyzing the public's ability to think critically or substantively about them and the economic and social structures on which they rest. Instead of questioning basic assumptions, people assign blame. Where conspiracy beliefs once helped launch great political movements like the American Revolution, they now seem able to inspire nothing more than mass political disengagement and increased tourism in the New Mexico desert.