I have a
book entitled Who Killed John F. Kennedy?,
the first of the two Lose your own
adventure books. As you can probably guess, it’s (1) a parody of Choose your own adventure and (2) you
always lose. You play as the Dallas police chief’s son, who has a reputation
for being a kid detective and has to put those skills to use to solve the JFK
assassination. Various paths let you investigate various theories of who did
it. You can go along with the police and search for incriminating evidence
against Lee Harvey Oswald. You can go undercover and get David Ferrie to
confess to having planned it (although you die before telling anyone).
And, as explained in the endnotes,
every conspiracy theory in it is believed by someone and every piece of
evidence is real. There really was a bullet hole in Kennedy’s limousine’s windshield.
There really was a mysterious bullet, shot but totally pristine, on Kennedy’s
stretcher. There were two people in Dealy Plaza, two days before the
assassination, who were aiming rifles over the fence at silhouettes in a car at
the spot Kennedy would be shot.
Everything in the book screams at
you to not go along with the Warren Commission’s “Oswald acted alone” story. You
first meet Oswald in a lineup where he’s handcuffed to men who look nothing
like him, hardly an impartial way of doing it. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of
the FBI, personally calls you to go along with his story. If you do, the FBI
rewards you with a cushy desk job (where you later oversee the cover-up of the
Robert F. Kennedy assassination) and YOU LOSE. Dan Rather, CBS journalist, gets
to see the Zapruder film, but after a meeting with FBI agents his report bears
no resemblance to the actual film. The truth is a vast conspiracy led by the
CIA but with help from the Mafia, the Freemasons, and Castro, the exact
opposite of the Warren Report.
But no one besides you ever finds
out the truth since you immediately die. You can never let the truth be known. My favorite joke in the whole book is a page in the middle that has President Robert Kennedy giving you the Presidential Medal of Freedom for solving the mystery, ending in YOU WIN – but no page tells you to go there, so it's unreachable. That might be the most provocative
aspect. It’s possible that there was a vast conspiracy but those who found out
about it were eliminated. As Nicholas Branch muses in Libra, it looks a lot like that happened. The spine of Who Killed John F. Kennedy calls itself “Nonfiction,”
which is probably a joke but could also refer to the historical research that
went into it. But like Libra, a very
compelling aspect of it is the possibility that it actually is nonfiction.
