From JFK to Trump, how U.S. conservatives came to embrace conspiracy theories

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Saint John Hunt was only a child when John F. Kennedy died. He was a teen when the Watergate scandal tore down the Richard Nixon presidency.

But those torrents of history swept up Mr. Hunt like few others. His father was E. Howard Hunt, an author, spy and Watergate burglar who, shortly before he died, scribbled down allegations that the John F. Kennedy assassination had been orchestrated by the highest levels of the U.S. government. It was the same father who had previously enlisted his son to help dispose of equipment used in Watergate espionage.

Mr. Hunt’s unusual life has made him an intimate observer of some of the most important political convulsions in recent U.S. history and their reverberations into modern-day America, a country where anti-establishment politics has flourished amid a prolonged fracturing of public faith in the institutions of government.

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As Mr. Hunt looks back, he is struck by something his father, whom he calls Papa, once mentioned.

“He told me the biggest issue hasn’t arrived yet as far as Watergate,” Mr. Hunt recalled in a recent interview. “I said, ‘What do you mean, Papa?’ He said, ‘The loss of trust in government is going to play heavily on the country in years to come.’”

“And he was right.”

E. Howard Hunt died in 2007. But his son is still trying to understand the events his father helped to create, and the world he helped to shape.

Nearly 60 years after Mr. Kennedy’s death and a half-century after Watergate, the shadows cast by those events remain visible in the deep institutional antipathy that has propelled the rise to power, and continued support for, Donald Trump. Pew Research Center polling that began in 1958 shows the heights of U.S. public trust in government were reached shortly after the assassination, at 77 per cent, and have generally trended downward since, falling into the teens for much of the past decade.

Even before the election that brought Mr. Trump to power, scholars had teased out evidence that he was riding a wave of animus toward government, with “distruster” voters 20 to 25 percentage points more likely to support Mr. Trump than other Republican candidates in 2016.

Among Mr. Trump’s key backers are Republican political operative Roger Stone and Alex Jones, the broadcaster who was ordered by a judge in mid-October to pay US$965-million in compensatory damages to families and a first responder involved in the Sandy Hook shooting, which the radio host had called a hoax. Both men have long promoted conspiracy theories about the assassination of JFK.

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The conspiracies that brought those men national influence also connected them with Mr. Hunt, who found a kindred spirit in Mr. Jones after his father’s death and ghostwrote for Mr. Stone in recent years. Today, Mr. Hunt is more closely connected to Kris Millegan, a publisher of conspiracy books who has printed Mr. Hunt’s work.

The interweaving of his life with those people has made Mr. Hunt a participant in the manufacture of misinformation, which has taken a pernicious hold on U.S. political discourse. But Mr. Hunt’s own life has demonstrated the toll that distrust and conspiracy can exact.

The tumult of American politics “has destroyed my family,” Mr. Hunt said. It is all “quite painful.”

Fifteen years after his father died, he remains burdened by the past. His upbringing was afflicted by an inability to live up to the expectations of a father keen for a high-flying first-born son. “I just let all that down. I was a horrible student. A poor athlete. I stuttered. I had to wear glasses for a while and have eye training,” Mr. Hunt said. “Everything I did seemed to be the opposite of what he would have wanted.”

It’s part of the reason he jumped at the chance to help his dad wipe fingerprints off radios, cameras and other electronics in the early morning hours of June 17, 1972, the day the Watergate burglars were arrested. He wouldn’t know why until later, when his father’s actions became public, eventually leading to 33 months in prison.

But that night 50 years ago, Mr. Hunt was eager to help. “This was my opportunity to really step up. I would have done anything for him.” He joined his father as they tossed the equipment in a canal at daybreak.

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The tumult from Watergate bruised the U.S. and tore apart Mr. Hunt’s family. He recalls his mother telling his father he was making a big mistake. After the spying was exposed, his mother died in a plane crash under circumstances Mr. Hunt considers suspicious – she was carrying cash ostensibly for a business investment, but which he believes was hush money related to Watergate – and he began a lengthy period of drug use. He moved from LSD to cocaine to meth. He dealt and manufactured narcotics. He participated in wild sex orgies.

He has gone clean now, and is in a long-term relationship.

But he is still trying to understand his past, and that of his father.

In the twilight of his life, E. Howard Hunt scribbled out several handwritten notes for his son, one describing a chain of command from LBJ – Lyndon B. Johnson, the vice-president who became president after Mr. Kennedy’s death – to the “grassy knoll,” a spot in Dallas near the place of the assassination that has long raised suspicion about a second shooter. The other note was an account of a meeting with CIA-connected operatives before the assassination in which “killing JFK” was openly discussed.

The elder Mr. Hunt was a novelist and onetime CIA operative, at ease with dissembling and hesitant to reveal his personal secrets without a considerable payday. Mr. Hunt believes his father was showing a moment of candour when he drafted those notes for his son.

The official conclusion of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination, concluded that all of the shots came from a single gun fired by one man, Lee Harvey Oswald. But the commission’s promise to provide “full and truthful knowledge concerning these events” – a bid to relegate the assassination to settled history – has failed, as the flames of skepticism and disbelief have flickered to the present day.

In the wake of the commission’s report, “more conspiracies started coming out,” and public faith in government plummeted, said Dave Perry, a former insurance claims adjuster whose personal interest in what happened to JFK has turned him into one of the world’s leading investigators of those events. “I really believe Kennedy was the beginning of it,” he said. “As it expanded and more people got involved, the conspiracy theories in general got more outrageous.”

Mr. Perry has spent 46 years researching and debunking misconceptions and outright lies around Mr. Kennedy’s death. His bookshelf contains 240 titles on JFK conspiracies alone. It is “impossible” that Mr. Johnson directed the assassination, he said. (He believes the CIA’s reluctance to share information is an effort to prevent exposure of a mistake it made in losing track of Mr. Oswald before the fateful events in Dallas. It’s “a screw-up, not a cover-up,” he said. )

Those still asking questions about the assassination of Mr. Kennedy, however, often make a seamless leap to the modern day. “I want my country back; we need transparency from our elected officials, not cover up,” Jesse Ventura, the wrestler who became governor of Minnesota, writes in a foreword to Mr. Hunt’s book, Bond of Secrecy, which documents his relationship with his father, and his attempts to learn Papa’s secrets. The assassination was a “defining moment” when shadowy forces asserted control over the U.S. government, Mr. Hunt writes. “They got away with murder. After that, the rest was easy.”

Mr. Hunt’s attempts to learn more information about the assassination from his father were only partly successful. His father was reluctant to discuss that past, and other family members obstructed Mr. Hunt’s quest for further details.

Still, his background won him the attentions of both Mr. Jones, who invited him onto his show, and Mr. Stone, whom he met at a JFK assassination conference. Both men had written books about Mr. Kennedy’s death. “We just hit it off. He got me a job writing for him,” Mr. Hunt said.

Mr. Hunt was working as a car valet attendant in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., when the two men met, and Mr. Stone offered to pay him $2,000 a month to work for him, more than he had ever earned. The high pace of managing cars “was killing me,” Mr. Hunt said. Writing for Mr. Stone “basically saved my life.”

He wrote opinion articles and book chapters under Mr. Stone’s name, savaging Hillary Clinton as a criminal. He also wrote in support of his boss, whom others have called a “sleazeball” and “a rat,” but whom he described as “a passionate romantic who sees this country slipping into the hands of greedy self-serving politicians and corporate entities.”

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He was on his way to Mr. Stone’s Florida home in early 2019, riding gas-powered scooters with his girlfriend, when they saw a crowd of federal agents who had come to conduct a search and take Mr. Stone into custody. The search was related to allegations that Mr. Stone sought damaging information on the Hillary Clinton campaign, amid broader concern about collusion with Russia. He was later pardoned by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Hunt has no regrets about working for Mr. Stone. “He was a very good friend” and “helped my life a lot at the time,” he says.

After Mr. Stone’s arrest, Mr. Hunt moved to southwest Oregon, where he now lives in a small town outside Eugene. He can no longer vote, after two felony drug convictions. But he’s not sure he would cast a ballot, even if he had that right. “It just supports the false idea that we make a difference by voting. I think that’s a theory that’s put forth to continue having Americans believe in the system – and the system has failed us,” he says.

He has not met Mr. Trump, who entered the political arena at a time the U.S. electorate had reached new depths of distrust.

“Trump’s accomplishment was to take these inchoate feelings of decline and marginalization and to provide a perspective that not only made sense of them but also provided a solution,” psychologists Stephen D. Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam wrote in 2016. Mr. Trump offered himself as a panacea.

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The links between the former president and Mr. Jones pass directly through the decades-old echoes of past conspiracies. It was at a conference organized to mark the 50th anniversary of Mr. Kennedy’s death that Mr. Stone and Mr. Jones met. The two hit it off, and Mr. Stone connected the podcast host with the man who would become president.

Mr. Stone “was going around the country yelling and hollering through bullhorns with Alex – and then he got Trump to start listening to Alex, too, so Trump was saying all these outlandish things,” Mr. Hunt said.

In “United States of Conspiracy,” a Frontline documentary, former InfoWars staffer Rob Jacobson expresses astonishment about Mr. Trump’s willingness to repeat Mr. Stone’s rhetoric. “I mean, sometimes it was, like, verbatim – like, really, Trump, really? You’re taking his word for it?” Mr. Jacobson said.

Mr. Trump, who is widely expected to run again for president in 2024, has followed in a long tradition of U.S. conservatives, whose “weaponization of distrust” dates back to the era of Barry Goldwater – who unsuccessfully ran for president against Mr. Johnson after the assassination of Mr. Kennedy – and subsequently “propelled Reaganism, stopped health care reform under Bill Clinton, undermined Barack Obama’s presidency, and reached crisis proportions in the age of Trump,” Amy Fried and Douglas B. Harris write in At War with Government.

Mr. Hunt says his skepticism of the U.S. government is rooted in part in what his country has done abroad. “We’re not innocent babies. We spent billions influencing foreign countries in their elections,” he said. He is also reluctant to criticize those he has stood alongside. He initially hoped Mr. Trump would return greatness to the U.S. But, he says, Mr. Trump began “saying all these outlandish things” after meeting with Mr. Jones. “It just didn’t do any good for him, obviously.” He now feels the way Mr. Trump conducts himself is “not honest.”

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Mr. Hunt wants to write a book about the children of assassins, documenting the lives of those whose parents worked in intelligence, particularly in covert service. What was it like discovering that their childhood had been built on a foundation of lies – or, worse, that parents “may have been involved in horrible things”?

“How did it affect them growing up? How did they turn out as an adult?” Mr. Hunt says. “Because I know it affected me and my brother.”

He believes his father was in Dallas the day of Mr. Kennedy’s assassination, based on a photograph that shows a person whose hat and raincoat resemble those E. Howard Hunt wore. Mr. Hunt snorts at the suggestion, once made by his father in court testimony, that on the day of the assassination he had shopped at a Chinese grocery store for a homemade meal. His father despised the Kennedys. Could his father have been involved?

Mr. Perry, the retired insurance worker who debunks theories, says in his experience those peddling JFK conspiracies are often seeking fame and fortune. Mr. Hunt has little of either. Today, he tends an orchard, paints fibreglass wonder horses and helps care for an aging relative of Mr. Millegan, his publisher.

He says he remains driven by unresolved questions. Why, as a child, did his father take the family to Japan, Mexico, Uruguay and France, he asks. What exactly did his dad, whom he describes as “an American James Bond,” do in Guatemala? Were they in Spain so Papa could recruit a team to assassinate Fidel Castro?

For Mr. Hunt, the quest for answers is deeply personal.

“Once you realize your whole life was built on lies,” he says, “it’s very disconcerting.”