I’m not in the conspiracy theorist crowd, but the “doesn’t matter anymore” crowd is disappointing.
History is extremely important. It can help us make predictions about the future and understand circumstances in the past.
This specific incident has been researched to death. There is very little we will be able to understand about the sociopolitics of the past that we don't already know if the hand on the trigger changes. Every hypothetical scenario has been gamed to exhaustion, and which one reflects the reality we happen to be living in isn't going to change modern sociopolitics very much. What would change in a relationship with Russia if we found out a USSR plot killed Kennedy? The USSR is gone. What would change in people's trust in the FBI if we found out they killed Kennedy? That institution's reputation is already tarnished, and the people who would have made the decision to have him killed no longer work there. What would it matter if there was a conspiracy of a few people working with Oswald? We already know that it doesn't take more than one actor to kill a President from other assassination attempts.
Similarly, there is little to be gained studying this topic to exhaustion in terms of future predictions. Kennedy was a singular President existing in a singular time. A series of fairly unique circumstances led him to be universally hated and loved at the same time... Immensely popular, but his combination of willingness to challenge entrenched power and brash indifference to consequences made him dozens of enemies who would have had the resources to eliminate him.
Whether he was killed by a secret FBI project or a lone, angry man with firearm training changes none of those facts.
Your opinion on JFK as a president is moot. The fact he could not continue being president is what changed the world. LBJ succeeded him and the rest is “history”. It doesn’t need to play out in todays politics but as I said, why study history at all if the only point is to gain insight into how it effects us directly today??
I guess I'm just personally burnt out on this topic because I've been watching people bandy conspiracy theories back and forth my entire life, and the odds of this changing the understanding of the day's events in any meaningful way aren't larger than the other "revelations" I've seen in my time. I guess upon further reflection, I do have some concern that people will take the stuff too seriously and do something foolish.
To give an analogy, the Titanic disaster is extremely well understood, but the disproportionate obsession with it has recently led to people getting killed again. One could certainly argue that they were free people making free choices and I would agree. But similar obsession in the political spectrum seems to have a nasty tendency to end up with somebody showing up in a pizza parlor with a firearm demanding to see the basement that doesn't exist. So it makes me twitchy.
It's true that it doesn't have a huge impact on modern life but it matters a lot to anyone who is interested in having an accurate view of history.
