First Voodoo Science, Now Voodoo History

In The Kennedys: The Conspiracy to Destroy a Dynasty (2005), Mr. Aaronovitch writes, “Smith constructs an overarching theory that connects the deaths of Marilyn, J. F. K., R. F. K. and Mary Jo Kopechne, the girl who died in Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick in 1969. It was all — all of it — the work of elements within the C.I.A. They saw J. F. K. as being too left-wing and bumped Marilyn off to discredit the Kennedys, both of whom were having affairs with the star at her bugged bungalow in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, that didn’t work, so they killed J. F. K. the next year, and then, for some reason, waited another five years before getting rid of Bobby. The next year they arranged for Ted to drive his car, complete with a young woman, off a bridge, thus destroying his chances of the presidency.”

So why do conspiracy theories flourish?
Though some of the conspiracy-mongers described here appear to be simple crackpots or people out to make a fast buck with one of those laughably titled books that aspire to clutter up the best-seller lists (“Henry Kissinger: Soviet Agent,” “Diana: The Killing of a Princess,” “Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons and the Great Pyramid”), Mr. Aaronovitch tries to provide the reader with a carefully reasoned anatomy of the phenomenon in these pages.

He not only notes the appeal of narrative and causality in a frighteningly random world — something readers of Thomas Pynchon’s novels well know — but also argues that overarching theories tend to be “formulated by the politically defeated and taken up by the socially defeated.”

These losers “left behind by modernity,” he writes, “can be identified in the beached remnants of vanished European empires; the doomed bureaucrats, the White Russians and the patriotic German petit bourgeois. They are the America firsters, who got the war they didn’t want; the Midwest populists watching their small farmers go out of business; the opponents of the New Deal; the McGovern liberals in the era of Richard Nixon; British socialists and pacifists in the decade of Margaret Thatcher; the irreconcilable American right during the Clinton administration; the shattered American left in the time of the second Bush.