The upcoming

50th anniversary

of the murder of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald already has produced, in addition to thoughtful commemorations, all-too-familiar attempts by some to smear the city in which the crime happened to take place. Not since

Archduke Ferdinand

was killed in Sarajevo have so many people persisted in trying to treat the scene of a crime as though it were somehow a culprit. Dallas, Texas, has spent generations trying to live down its reputation as "the city that killed Kennedy."

The crude version of the Dallas-killed-Kennedy thesis was popularized in Oliver Stone's 1995 movie


(which built upon a conspiracy theory Stone had promoted in his earlier film


). In one scene, Nixon visits Dallas shortly before the assassination and receives ominous hints from a mysterious Cuban and a right-wing Dallas businessman. The businessman was portrayed by my distant relative the late actor

Larry Hagman

, of "

J.R. Ewing

" fame. Now I understand, Oliver Stone. Lee Harvey Oswald didn't kill Kennedy. J. R. Ewing did! (But who shot J.R.?)

From the moment of Kennedy's death, many on the left suspected he had been the victim of a conspiracy of the radical right. But Kennedy was killed by a


who had once defected to the Soviet Union — a Marxist who murdered the liberal president for the same reason he had earlier tried, but failed, to murder a conservative retired general in Dallas,

Edwin Walker

. Both




were prominent anticommunists.

For those who were sympathetic to Marxism, though, it was embarrassing to acknowledge the motivation of Kennedy's killer. As William Manchester reported in his 1967 book

Death of a President

, even Jacqueline Kennedy found the explanation hard to accept. "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights," Jacqueline reportedly told her mother. "It's—it had to be some silly little Communist." A substantial minority on the political left retreated into the fantasy that Kennedy had been assassinated by the CIA or FBI or somebody else in the government, in order to install the Texan Lyndon Johnson in the White House.

The New Yorker magazine recently has run not one but two essays that dance around the Dallas-killed-JFK theme. The first, a review by

Adam Gopnik

of a new book, Dallas 1963, noted how "clotted Dallas was with right-wing types in the period before Kennedy's fatal visit" and compared the John Birch Society to today's Tea Party. The second, an essay by

George Packer

, offered a masterpiece of innuendo in the following sentences:

Kennedy had warned his wife, "We're heading into nut country."

Oswald was an avowed Marxist, which might seem to absolve the city's right wing of any responsibility. But Dallas 1963 places the assassin in context as a malleable, unstable figure breathing the city's extraordinarily feverish air.

The air quality of Dallas must have been extraordinary indeed. After all, Oswald had spent the years


as a defector in the Soviet Union, breathing in the air of Minsk, while his stint in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, starting in June 1962, had lasted only a third as long.

In June 1968,

Robert F. Kennedy

was murdered in Los Angeles by a Palestinian-American man, Sirhan Sirhan, who was angry at Kennedy's support of Israel. Sirhan


the date to commemorate the Six-Day War of 1967. Using George Packer's wording, though, we can blame RFK's assassination on California's left:

Sirhan was an avowed Palestinian radical, which might seem to absolve the California left of any responsibility. But the assassin must be seen in context as a malleable, unstable figure breathing the extraordinarily feverish air of a state agitated by the

Berkeley Free Speech Movement

and the

Summer of Love.

As George Will has pointed out, the theme that Kennedy was killed by a culture rather than an individual terrorist dates back to the assassination. In the first two days after Kennedy's murder, Chief Justice Earl Warren blamed it on "the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots," while the journalist James Reston used the front page of the New York Times to condemn "the violence of the extremists on the right."

As a frequent critic of the Texan right, I have accused it of many things. But right-wingers in Dallas and the South didn't kill Kennedy, and neither did mysterious forces in the U.S. government. The responsibility for the murder of John F. Kennedy lies solely with his murderer, who was described all too accurately by the president's widow as "some silly little communist."

Michael Lind is co-founder of the New America Foundation and author of Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Conservative Takeover of American Politics. He wrote this for Zocalo Public Square.