Lunatic had a good idea once supposedly

I have never read a more irresponsible piece of journalism by a fancy academic in a prestige venue than the bit of RFK Jr. sanewashing by Daniel Immerwahr in the New Yorker that Cheryl discussed yesterday.

The thesis that experts are sometimes mistaken for both good and bad reasons, and that skepticism is the hallmark of the scientific method is, at this level of generality, both true and banal. Immerwahr himself recognizes this:

Drawing a line is necessary: at some point, you have to declare that the Holocaust happened, that vaccines don’t cause autism, and that climate change is real. The philosopher Bernard Williams noted that science isn’t a free market of ideas but a managed one; without filters against cranks, trolls, and merchants of doubt, knowledge production “would grind to a halt.” But in science, and in intellectual inquiry more broadly, where you draw the line matters enormously.

Um . . . .333. is a good batting average in baseball. In the game of “what percentage of completely insane conspiracy theories does this high government official accept?” it’s a real bad one, and that’s assuming RFK Jr. isn’t a Holocaust or climate change denialist, which is giving him the benefit of the doubt. Also too, this is a cherry picked sample of completely insane conspiracy theories, in that RFK Jr. embraces lots and lots of them beyond vaccines cause autism, which Immerwahr — a professor of history at Northwestern! — ALSO acknowledges:

 Since becoming a pariah himself, after his vaccine-safety crusade, Kennedy has warmed to other spurned beliefs, no matter their plausibility. He has publicly contemplated whether cellphones cause cancer, tainted tap water leads to “sexual dysphoria,” and the white trails behind airplanes contain toxic chemicals. Although claiming not to be a doubter himself, Kennedy devoted two chapters of one of his books to airing “legitimate queries” about whether H.I.V. causes AIDS.

“Vaccine-safety crusade” is a very prettified way of describing Kennedy’s incredibly destructive nonsense about vaccines, which is decades old at this point, and which not surprisingly, as our Northwestern chaired history professor notes, has produced a crank magnetism effect in regard to Kennedy. It’s worth noting in this context that Kennedy has held a lot of other wack beliefs for decades as well, so they’re not just a product of how awfully mean people were to him when he engaged in a little intellectual mis-step like spending many years promoting an utterly debunked piece of mendacious and venal bullshit like the vaccines cause autism grift.

Another part of Immerwahr’s argument that should be shocking to other historians is his discussion of the assassination of JFK:

The man arrested, Lee Harvey Oswald, had defected to the Soviet Union and then, oddly, re-defected back to the United States. Oswald professed innocence—“I’m just a patsy,” he told the press—but was himself murdered before he could further explain. Was some larger plot afoot? “I thought it was a conspiracy and I raised that question,” Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, recalled. “Nearly everyone that was with me raised it.”

But a full, public airing threatened to reveal the C.I.A.’s machinations and the F.B.I.’s incompetence. Worse, intimations of foreign involvement might trigger a nuclear war, Johnson warned. He convened an investigatory body, the Warren Commission, to defeat these dangerous speculations. (He told one commissioner that forty million might die if accusations against Cuba and the U.S.S.R. weren’t refuted.) The point of the investigation, for Johnson, wasn’t to uncover new facts but to shore up the official story, which was that Oswald alone was guilty.

Oswald might indeed have acted alone. But the commission’s march to that conclusion reassured few. Johnson himself didn’t believe it, and, by 1967, nearly two-thirds of the country shared his doubts. (As two-thirds do today.) This wasn’t an idle disagreement: to suspect a conspiracy was to suspect a coverup. The government’s determination to wrap the matter up neatly relegated the bulk of voters to the paranoid fringe. Ensuing events vindicated their suspicions. In 1967, amid revelations of napalmed villages, C.I.A. misdeeds, and official mendacity, Noam Chomsky influentially declared that the true responsibility of intellectuals wasn’t to advise policymakers but to “expose the lies of government”—lies he associated particularly with the Kennedy Administration’s experts.

Even the establishment distrusted the establishment. Shortly after the assassination, Robert F. Kennedy—the Attorney General and the brother of the President—asked Allen Dulles, the former director of Central Intelligence, if the C.I.A. was behind it. (It wasn’t, Dulles assured him.) A month later, R.F.K. shared with the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., his concern that Fidel Castro or the Mob was involved. Still, R.F.K. was hesitant to probe. Schlesinger felt that he feared the psychological toll of walking down that unlit path. Whatever the reason, R.F.K. held his tongue. And, five years after his brother, he, too, was gunned down.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was nine when his uncle was murdered and fourteen when his father was. Even in his youth, he recalled, he doubted that Oswald had acted alone. But, where his father had hesitated, he charged ahead. He came to see evidence of C.I.A. involvement as “so insurmountable” that it lay “beyond any reasonable doubt.”

This is just a farrago of total nonsense. Immerwahr is going on record here with the claim that the Warren Commission was a sham investigation, because LBJ didn’t want a real one to take place, because of what it might find. I recognize this was and maybe still is a very common belief in lefty circles, which is why it’s so crucial to Immerwahr larger claim that leftists used to question authority do why did they stop just because Donald Trump appointed some people who were Just Asking Reasonable Questions About Covid.

But the level of incoherence here is off the charts.

(1) Lee Harvey Oswald’s return to the US was not in any way mysterious, and implying that hey maybe it’s evidence that the CIA murdered JFK is wildly irresponsible bullshit.

(2) Implying that Jack Ruby was possibly — we’re just asking questions here! — part of a CIA plot to murder JFK is wildly irresponsible bullshit.

(3) “But a full, public airing threatened to reveal the C.I.A.’s machinations and the F.B.I.’s incompetence.” What does this even mean? Apparently it means that since the CIA was doing a bunch of dubious and illegal stuff in re Vietnam and Castro that means that it may well — Just Asking Questions again! — been involved in the assassination of JFK, although there remains not a single shred of actual evidence for this, after 60+ years of people doing their own research.

(4) LBJ’s concerns about a possible conspiracy are understandable, given that he would be the #1 suspect if such a thing existed, but note the complete incoherence here of mashing together LBJ’s eagerness to make sure that wacky theories about Soviet or Cuban involvement got shot down with the claim — that again Immerwahr actually makes or at the very least strongly insinuates — that LBJ rigged the Warren Commission to hide the possible fact that it was really the CIA all along.

(5) There was no “official story” about the JFK assassination prior to the Warren Commission’s conclusions, so claiming that the point of the commission was to “shore up” that story is again incoherent and wrong.

(6) The insinuation that RFK Sr.’s [!!] assassination might somehow all be related to this larger plot is an especially nice touch from Immerwahr, especially since this barking mad “theory” is one that — surprise! — his son also accepts (RFK Jr. is certain that Sirhan Sirhan is actually innocent).

(7) That RFK Jr. sees — again, totally non-existent — evidence of CIA involvement in the murder of his uncle as having been proven beyond a reasonable doubt might suggest to a more cautious historian than Immerwahl that maybe he shouldn’t make JFK assassination conspiracy theories the centerpiece of his argument for how good liberals and leftists should Question Authority.

Good grief.