We want to believe theories that contradict the idea that young, iconic people died senselessly. If a story takes away the accidental from their death, it gives them agency. After the JFK assassination, it was unbearable to many people that they could live in a country where a lone gunman could kill a president.

This familiar trope has a general psychological cogency–yes, we all turn to History for meaning–but, in the particular case of Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, it lacks a specific historical foundation. Aaronovitch is touting a book about conspiratorial thinking, with the appealing tag line “When smart people believe dumb things.” Yet his pitch neglects the disconcerting fact that there were plenty of smart people who concluded that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy of his political enemies–and they did so rationally.

First Lady Jackie and First Brother Bobby Kennedy, JFK’s successor Lyndon Johnson, and his canny antagonist Fidel Castro hardly qualify as “dumb.” They all concluded that that JFK had been ambushed by opponents of his policies, as David Talbot noted in Brothers,  a 2008 revisionist portrait of the Kennedy administration. (Full disclosure: Talbot is a personal friend and my reporting is referenced favorably in the book.)  Jackie, Bobby & Co. were not deluded populists. They were not unacquainted with the real inner workings of American power or the CIA. And they didn’t believe the reassuring story of a “lone nut.”

They privately thought what a lot of knowledgeable people came to believe: that the Warren Commission report didn’t get  to the truth. (A “hoax,” the paranoid-realist Richard Nixon once called its report.)  Complacent historians and the Anglo-American pundits who rely on them don’t write much about it but the suspicions of a JFK conspiracy fairly permeated the upper levels of the U.S. government after the Dallas tragedy.

“Now we’ll never know,” cried Desmond Fitzgerald, a top CIA official, when chief suspect Oswald was killed in police custody.

Lt. Col. Fletcher Prouty, chief of Pentagon special operations in 1963, became an outspoken conspiracy advocate. Decades later, Prouty, a cranky political right-winger, advised combative left-leaning director Oliver Stone on crafting the dark cinematic mythology of  “JFK.”

Win Scott, the CIA’s ultraconservative Mexico City station chief (and subject of my 2008 biography “Our Man in Mexico,”) was more discrete. Scott knew the Warren Commission’s account of Oswald’s  visit to Mexico City before the assassination was false. He wrote a memoir, immediately suppressed, saying so. Scott too concluded JFK was the victim of a conspiracy. Aronovitch impugns the judgment of these power players at his own risk. He certainly must scant credible insider testimony in order to flog his bigger theme.

Which is his right. JFK’s assassination was a most enigmatic crime about which reasonable people can differ. In general, Aaronovitch’s case against the contemporary conspiratorial mindset is well taken. Yes, there was a 9/11 conspiracy and we know who organized it: Khalid Sheik Muhammed and Osama bin Laden. The estimable Van Jones notwithstanding, there is no reasonable doubt about that fact.I would merely note that we have no comparable clarity about Dallas.

The unpleasant fact, with which Aaronovitch is mercifully unacquainted, is that, four decades after the crime, we still don’t know the full story of pre-assassination CIA intelligence gathering operations around Oswald.  Indeed, as the New York Times reported last fall on my FOIA lawsuit against the Agency,  the Agency  has spent seven years erecting an increasingly dense and elaborate veil of official secrecy around a batch of at least 295 still-secret JFK assassination-related records. Unfortunately, the Obama Justice Department has ratified this legalized cover-up.

If the CIA, like Aaronovitch, wanted to dispel JFK conspiracy fantasies, it would comply with the JFK Records Act and release all of these records posthaste. It seems to have no such interest. Instead, the Agency still sends taxpayer-funded lawyers to federal court to make extreme claims of secrecy in the name of national security in order to keep its Oswald secrets. You can interpret the CIA’s ongoing defiance of the law  conspiratorially. Or you can interpret it innocently.

What you can’t do, 46 years after JFK’s violent demise, is look at all of the CIA’s records on the subject.