Fifty years on, the shot that killed John F. Kennedy reverberates

FIFTY years on, the question of who shot JFK lingers, despite all reasonable evidence pointing to Lee Harvey Oswald.

President John F. Kennedy's motorcade travels through Dallas on that fateful day.

FIFTY years on, the question of who shot John Kennedy lingers. Despite all reasonable evidence pointing to Lee Harvey Oswald - ex-Marine, disaffected loner, Castro sympathiser and one-time Soviet defector - as the sole culprit, the Kennedy assassination remains the thinking person's conspiracy theory, a game of chess to the chequers of 9/11 trutherism.

Theories abound, many containing at least a grain of plausibility and based on a healthy scepticism of official explanations. The mafia was said to have it in for the president because his brother Bobby, serving as attorney-general, was running hard against organised crime. More prosaically, JFK was also said to be sleeping with Judith Exner, then-mistress of mob boss Sam Giancana.

The CIA was said to be angered by its reorganisation and lack of support during and following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, one of Kennedy's many futile attempts to overthrow Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Even LBJ has been rumoured to be the man behind the murder, worried as he was about being dropped from the ticket in the next election and ongoing investigations into how someone who came from abject poverty grew to be a very rich man on a mere Congressman's salary.

But the most powerful conspiracy theory - the one that simply will not die, because it is utterly non-falsifiable - is the one that holds that Kennedy's death was not so much the work of a lone gunman as a sick culture in which Dallas, the state of Texas, and indeed the entire US was culpable.

This theory solves, for its proponents on the so-called progressive Left, two dilemmas: It is a magician's distraction that calls the eye away from Oswald's left-wing sympathies, and it is a bill of indictment on a society the theory's advocates hold themselves apart from and wish to continually remake in their own image. Remember that for all the mid-century worries about Soviet domination, in the US (and Australia) then as now, much of the media and the progressive cultural left had a hard time believing communism was actually the enemy. Some, such as NSW Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon, still do.

To this line of thinking, everyone knew about Russia's domination of Eastern Europe after the war and facts were beginning to be known about Stalin's crimes - but hey, weren't they just trying to build a fairer society that avoided the inequalities and depredations of capitalism?

For such sorts the idea that someone who had once defected to the Soviet Union, lived there for three years, and who had only the week earlier taken an unsuccessful pot shot at a local right-wing shock jock, would shoot a president (a Democrat president, no less) literally does not compute.

Almost immediately after the assassination the media, encouraged by JFK's widow and other members of the clan, pointed the finger of collective blame at a ''sick society".

A young American newscaster named Dan Rather, whose later career would be pock-marked by allegations of dodgy reporting, went on the air and falsely claimed that a classroom of Dallas school children erupted in cheers when they heard the news.

Fifty years later the collective guilt theory is still being pushed.

The idea of Texas as "the state that killed a president" continues to be retailed, unthinkingly, in news outlets in America and around the world, including on the ABC.

But the best, most fevered example of this was seen in the New York Times which earlier this week gave 1200 words to a young Texan named James McAuley to work through his own issues around his own family and home state, through the prism of the Kennedy assassination and without once mentioning Oswald. Example line: "In a photograph taken not long after the assassination, my grandmother smiles a porcelain smile, poised and lovely in psychedelic purple Pucci, coiffure stacked high in what can only be described as a hairway to heaven. Her eyes, however, are fixed on a target - liberalism, gender equality, gays."

This is psychoanalysis by way of history, and lame history at that.

Anyone familiar with the civil rights struggles in America's south of the 1960s understands that gay rights were pretty far down the list of agenda items, and well below ensuring that blacks could vote or use a water fountain without falling afoul of the Klan.

It is also pernicious, because it creates an undeserved moral platform which elevates those who push it while putting the rest of society on the back foot.

Not for nothing did Mick Jagger have the character of Satan sing, "I shouted out who killed the Kennedys/When after all it was you and me."