The Rumors of Plots Thicken

This was a hearing about JFK assassination documents, and I knew what kind of hearing it was going to be as soon as I saw the man with the death grip on his umbrella. The weatherman had predicted 80 and clear, but those meteorological forecasts and satellite cloud pictures all come from the same source--the government.

And then the woman sitting behind me leaned forward and pointed to a tall man sitting off to one side in Board of Education public hearing room H-160. She whispered:

“Is that G. Gordon Liddy down there in the corner?”

I looked. No, ma’am. That’s Jerry Zellinger. He’s a sound engineer at KCET-TV. But you know, now that you mention it, I have never seen Jerry and Gordon Liddy together.

Coincidence?

The federally empowered Assassination Records Review Board brought its caravan to Los Angeles on Tuesday, for its fourth public hearing. Its mission is to be a vacuum cleaner, a paper magnet, a dowsing rod to suss out every last telegram and photograph and diary entry and cocktail napkin that could be considered assassination-relevant, to lay before a skeptical public and allay its suspicions at last.

Whoa, get this: Not long before the assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald was living in CLINTON, Louisiana! And not two weeks ago, I was in Terni--the same Italian city where Oswald’s mail order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was manufactured. Now, here I am, covering this hearing. Mere irony?

The panelists are academics, mostly, and patient with even those witnesses who will go to their reward accusing St. Peter of holding out on them. No matter how many times the panel repeats that “it is not the mandate of the review board to reinvestigate the assassination,” merely to find and release documents, the Cuban/Mafia/CIA/FBI theories, the one-gun, two-gun, three-gun scenarios up to and, heck, maybe even including suicide, still elbow their way in.

Now, conspiracy theories have been especially thick on the ground these days:

* O.J. Simpson’s attorneys have been told to come up with some actual evidence of a frame-up before they can try to sell it to a jury.

* A federal judge in San Diego orders government attorneys to prove that the CIA did not have a hand in giving Nicaraguan Contras the green light to raise cash by peddling coke to L.A.’s ghettos, as a drug defendant contends.

* In the absence of satisfactory evidence of a bomb, rumors persist that friendly fire took down TWA Flight 800.

* Declassified papers show that the United States knew that North Korea still held more than 900 POWs at the Korean War’s end.

* And just who shot Tupac Shakur?

It was Ross Perot, I think, with his adenoidal natterings about Black Panthers in his frontyard and Republicans threatening to sabotage his daughter’s wedding with lesbian photos, who pushed the wobbly reputation of conspiracy theorists into the orbit of Pluto.

But orbits change. Ronald Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild and also Agent T-10, FBI informant. Anti-Castro Cubans were caught tiptoeing through the Watergate, so why not in Dallas too?

Nearly 30 years ago, Barbara Garson wrote “MacBird!,” the stinging political sendup of “Macbeth,” hinting that LBJ was in on the JFK assassination. On Tuesday, the review board released a once-top-secret FBI document, heavily edited until now, showing that a KGB source said Moscow had information indicating LBJ was responsible for JFK’s assassination.

A former journalist friend remembers reporting in South-Central in the 1980s, talking to crack dealers who kept referring to “Ollie’s coke”--as in Oliver North, guardian angel of the Contras. My friend wrote them off then as street thugs feeding him a line. Now, a decade later, he’s uneasy; maybe he was too cynical. Maybe they were right.

But oh, political bedfellows make for a sleepless coupling, as Gov. Pete Wilson found this month when he squirmed and screamed to find himself on the same side of Proposition 209 as ex-Klansman and Kommentator David Duke.

The problem with the slippery slope of conspiracy theorizing is that the high ground is one step away from the bottom, which is inhabited by folks who stretch out like buzzard bait along the edge of that highway in Nevada, hoping to be abducted by aliens.

*

We’re a species that wants explanations, and if we don’t get them, we make them up. Ancients looked at the random scatterings of stars and saw heroes and goddesses.

But there’s this reassuring Freud thing that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

(Say, what about this stogie revival, anyway? Isn’t it really just a Castro-backed bid to convert celebrity American smokers as a way to get a foothold into America?)