On One of America’s Great Conspiracy Theorists (and His Yankees vs. Cowboys Theory of History)

On November 22, 1963, the day on which President Kennedy arrived in Dallas to lay the groundwork for his 1964 reelection campaign and Richard Hofstadter set off from Oxford to attend a dinner party in Cambridge, having introduced a lecture audience on the previous night to an eccentric strand of American political discourse he described as the “paranoid style”, Carl Oglesby undertook his usual five-mile commute to the Aerospace Systems Division of the Bendix Corporation on the outskirts of Ann Arbor, Michigan. This particular workday began like any other.

However, as it unfolded, it became apparent that there would be a delayed start to the weekend. The pressure was on for his department to complete a tender for contract work with the United States Air Force, and so Oglesby called to let his wife Beth know that he would be getting back late. It was from Beth that he then heard about the shooting in Dallas. As colleagues received the same news from other sources, a ripple of murmurs spread through the office. Joining the staff that was converging from different directions upon the radio in the arts department, Oglesby arrived in time to hear the broadcast confirming the President’s death.

In subsequent years, Oglesby had repeated opportunity to relate what happened next. Distracted by thoughts about the assassination, he looked outside and noticed the American flag in front of the office still flying at full mast. Acting out of a vague sense of offended decorum, Oglesby set out to correct the oversight. His first port of call was Julio, the security guard who numbered among the many Cubans who had fled to the United States after Fidel Castro and his guerilla forces took over the island in 1959. Julio felt, however, that the decision to lower the flag was above his pay grade. Undaunted, Oglesby continued his mission until he finally arrived at the manager’s office. The door was slightly ajar, and, peering through, Oglesby caught a glimpse of the company’s executives pouring Chivas Regal and celebrating the news from Dallas. Sensing how awkward his intrusion would be, he retreated to his desk.

Not only had the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s cast Oglesby adrift but that the years thereafter had also denied him a secure mooring.

With the benefit of hindsight, Oglesby could recognize in such reactions to Kennedy’s assassination the first visibly loose threads that precipitated the great unravelling of the postwar American consensus. In an interview given in 1978 as part of an oral history project, Oglesby related the sense of trauma still gnawing at him a decade and a half later. November 22, 1963, he confessed, “was a deep experience for a lot of us, and that assassination is very much with us all, still today…I can see the chagrin and uneasiness shaping up in me after Kennedy got assassinated.” Yet at first he also “had no reason to doubt the Warren Commission verdict on the thing.” As he later recalled, “for a long time I accepted it, and looked down my nose at critics.” His attitude started to change as the decade progressed, or, rather, spiraled out of control, but it was only under the influence of an escalated war and ugly scandals in the following decade that Oglesby began to promote an explanation of Kennedy’s assassination that aligned with his memory of clinking glasses and boardroom levity furtively glimpsed at the Ann Arbor branch of Bendix Systems Division on the day of the crime.

In many ways, Bendix typified the American Cold War economy. For the home front, it manufactured the televisions and other devices that had become part of the standard inventory of the postwar American household, while at the same time it purported to defend this prosperity by supplying the bombs to be dropped far away on America’s enemies. In the course of time, the diverse range of products gave rise to psychological strains within the customer base; television brought the war into the living room and revealed to Americans what asymmetric warfare actually looked like.

In 1966, Oglesby noted that “no semi-literate American with a television set can now be unaware of the effects of saturation bombing.” Although Kennedy had initially stepped up the American presence in Vietnam, some later commentators became convinced that second thoughts were beginning to prevail upon him at the time that he made his trip to Dallas. For those like Oglesby who subscribed to this view, the crime at Dealey Plaza effectively removed the all-important obstacle holding back a full-scale militarized offensive against the Communist threat in Southeast Asia. Escalation garnered Bendix new government contracts, including the contract for Agent Orange, a herbicide developed to strip the jungle of the foliage that otherwise gave such unnervingly effective cover to the guerilla soldiers of the pro-Communist Viet Cong.

By the time Agent Orange was defoliating the Vietnamese jungle, Oglesby had severed his ties to Bendix and thrown in his lot with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the leftist student organization that over the course of the 1960s became a major vehicle for protest specifically against the war but also more generally against the society that was willing to permit such a war waged on its behalf. In a certain sense, SDS had crept up on Oglesby and taken him by surprise. Preoccupied in the early years of the decade with his job, his family, and his plays, Oglesby had failed to register how on his doorstep in Ann Arbor there were stirrings of a leftist rebellion that rejected the mindless conformity of Sunnyside Street. After a long hibernation stretching over the first postwar decade and a half, an old tradition of American dissent was showing new signs of life. Those taking on the mantle of this tradition were students who were scornful of the stupor of postwar consumerism, alert to the energies unleashed by the civil rights movement, and increasingly attentive to the struggles for emancipation and self-determination in more distant lands.

The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor served as one of the incubator units for this New Left, as became evident when in June 1962 SDS delegates convened in the nearby lakeside town of Port Huron, where, with SDS staff member Tom Hayden as chief penman, they drafted The Port Huron Statement. A manifesto expressing a sense of alienation from mainstream American society, it paired this disenchantment with a conviction that such criticism was itself deeply American and then leavened these sentiments with an ardent hope for authenticity. In particular, the delegates put enormous stock in direct involvement in the decisions affecting communal life. Such hopes were bundled together in the notion of participatory democracy, an ideal that Oglesby would often invoke in subsequent years and whose antecedents harked back to Jefferson and a long republican tradition that emphasized autonomy, egalitarianism, and civic duty and that disdained official secrecy.

By broaching issues ranging from disarmament to discrimination, The Port Huron Statement guided SDS in the positions it subsequently took, but by late 1964 there was a need to address more directly the American attempt to manage the post-colonial fallout in Southeast Asia and to stem the spread of Communism. It was then that an open letter Oglesby had published in Generation, the literary journal run out of the University of Michigan, came to the attention of the local SDS chapter. Contact was made, and soon Oglesby and his wife were persuaded to exchange the comforts of suburbia for a life on the frontlines of a burgeoning protest movement. Rising rapidly in prominence to assume the office of president for the 1965-1966 academic year, Oglesby established himself within SDS as the in-house expert on and critic of American foreign policy.

While in the first part of the decade SDS activists had put their principles into action through community organizing among the disadvantaged and disenfranchised in the United States, the Vietnam War and the subsequent conscription of young men into military service generated the gale-force winds that caused SDS and the protest it spearheaded to spread like wildfire from campus to campus. Yet in some corners of the movement, dissent morphed into a delusional demand for revolution. Even if American society hardly seemed ripe for drastic transformation, those who embraced this position became convinced that violent acts of terrorism would supply a sure way to jump-start this process and that the catalytic function of such acts could justify the potential trauma and loss of life.

Oglesby’s fate in this regard mirrors that which has befallen all those “moderate” revolutionaries throughout history who have found themselves outflanked by the radicalization that their own earlier action has set in motion. Seeking a truce with the past and hoping on this basis to achieve constructive change, to “Build, not Burn!”, the voice of moderation soon comes to embody tepid compromise. In the confrontation with the far purer principle of violent negation, such a position stands little chance as soon as the desire to reform and improve the status quo begins to reek of complicity in its sins and defects.

As Marx observed in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), once a party “has brought the revolution far enough to be unable to follow it further, still less to go ahead of it, it is thrust aside by the bolder ally that stands behind it and sent to the guillotine.” For Oglesby, the “guillotine” fell in the form of denunciations leveled at him at the SDS Convention held in Austin in March 1969. In the eyes of the ideological purists who dominated the convention and set the agenda, Oglesby had become a prisoner “trapped” in an earlier “bourgeois stage” of the movement; as such, it was imperative to secure his eviction. He defended himself with an appeal to participatory democracy and The Port Huron Statement, but that had all become ancient history for those who now looked to Marxist Leninism for the ideological detonations that would spark the revolution and bring down the present system with all its injustices and inequities.

The radicalization of SDS culminated in the pipe bombs of the Weather Underground, a militant internal faction determined to make good on its slogan to “Bring the War Home.” Fearful of both the FBI and the Weather Underground, mentally burned out, and adrift since the breakup with his wife and the breakdown of his family life, Oglesby retreated to a farm in Vermont to decompress after the frenzied activity of the previous five years. In early 1970, student leader Tom Hayden managed to coax him briefly out of his self-chosen exile and lure him to Chicago, where Oglesby then served as a friendly witness to Hayden and six other defendants charged with conspiring to bring about the violence that had disrupted the Democratic National Convention in late August 1968.

A coda of sorts to the years of student activism, the trial of the Chicago Seven assigned Oglesby a brief walk-on part in a legal drama revolving around the charge of conspiracy, and reinforced his sense that in the “conspiracy to create violence” the actual conspirators were not the defendants corralled into the dock of the Chicago courtroom but rather the Chicago police and the city authorities. Even if the experience failed to leave any discernible imprint upon his own thinking about the role conspiracy played in American politics, it is worth mentioning how much of Oglesby’s short time on the witness stand was taken up with attempts to answer questions about an incendiary speech given by one protester named Tom Neumann. Neumann was in fact the son of Franz Neumann, a political scientist who had sketched in 1954 the socio-psychological underpinnings of the “conspiracy theory of history.” Although no more than a coincidence, it can serve as a token reminding us of the curiously interspliced nature of conspiracy theory, with one strand weaving its way through courts of law and newspapers and the other strand unspooled from reels of religious fervor and apocalyptic expectation. The challenge of disentangling the resulting knot and thereby determining exactly what role conspiracy played in American politics would become a preoccupation that absorbed much of Oglesby’s energies in the following decade.

Oglesby remained somewhat in the public eye through a column titled “Through Politics” that he wrote from 1973 for the Boston Phoenix, an alternative newsweekly that set itself apart from the more respectable Boston Globe by offering readers a street-smart take on the Boston scene and the world beyond. It was also around this time that Oglesby began consorting with aficionados of political intrigue who were drawn to the mystery of the Kennedy assassination. The unfolding drama of Watergate created an auspicious atmosphere in which to engage in such speculation. As Oglesby later observed, “the discovery of Nixon in impeachable offenses destroyed, or at least neutralized for a while, the common assumption of journalists and academics of the period that conspiracies of any real scale and significance do not happen here.”

His relegation to the sidelines of American public life mirrored in a way the liminal status that this society had come to assign to conspiracy theory as a form of interpretation.

“The Politics of Conspiracy” conference held at Boston University in early 1975 marked a milestone of sorts in the process by which this informal socializing was (semi-)professionalized into the Assassination Information Bureau (AIB). Oglesby’s own presentation stood out from the others in its simultaneous mastery of two registers: one the register of fine-grained forensic work that probed into specific political crimes, the other that of broad sociological contextualization from which it was possible to surmise the deeper historical meaning of each crime. The Boston Globe reported how “AIB member Carl Oglesby held an audience of 200 spellbound for three hours with his analysis of the competing power structures in the United States.” At one point, Oglesby apologized to the audience for “straying too far into a thicket of facts and losing sight of his over-arching conception.” The audience responded with shouts of “No! No! More! More!”

In fact, Oglesby had already found names for the two “competing power structures” that framed his “over-arching conception”; American history since the Civil War was to be understood as an escalating conflict between the Yankee and the Cowboys. First presented in 1968 and then elaborated as Oglesby used it to track the unfolding political dramas of the Watergate era, the Yankee-and-Cowboy theory sought to expose how these two elite factions had engaged in a vicious contest that intermittently erupted in violence and scandal. The Yankees sat atop the Eastern Establishment and represented the old money tied up in trade and banking. The Cowboys were the brash, new-money upstarts from the Sunbelt whose investments lay in resource extraction and defense contracts.

For much of American history, the different orientations of the two factions made coexistence possible: the Yankees looked back across the Atlantic, while the Cowboys, products of the frontier experience, continued to face westward even after the advancing frontier had run up against the Pacific coast. However, under the increasingly cramped geopolitical conditions created by the Cold War, coexistence ceded to conflict. This was because the anti-Communist belligerence of the Cowboys in Asia was proving increasingly incompatible with Yankee commitments to trans-Atlantic détente. Oglesby was convinced that this conflict was key to understanding America’s recent troubled history. By registering how these factions had traded blows since the end of the Second World War, and how, in doing so, they had made a mockery of America’s creed of popular, open, democratic self-governance, one could decipher all the surface confusion of American politics.

The enthusiasm for Oglesby’s speech at the “Politics of Conspiracy” conference augured well for the book-length treatment of the thesis that Oglesby had been working on. When Oglesby published The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate in 1976, the response was, however, underwhelming. Appearing first with Sheeds, Andrews and McMeel, a publisher operating out of Kansas City, the first edition sported a prim and proper cover befitting a school textbook, with its portraits of Kennedy and Nixon in interlocking oval frames hovering above the White House. Letters from Oglesby’s literary agent hint at the disappointment Oglesby felt when the book failed to make any real waves. The 1977 relaunch, this time under the Berkley Medallion imprint, adopted a more no-holds-barred approach, evident in a new cover resembling a lurid B-grade movie poster. Under a sales pitch promising readers insights into the “astonishing link between the assassination of JFK and the deposing of Nixon,” the United States was depicted in the process of being bloodily torn apart. A plaudit from Oglesby’s friend Norman Mailer promised readers a work that was “stimulating…lucid and exciting.”

Mailer, who shared Oglesby’s interest in the subterranean currents of American politics, later affirmed his appraisal in a recommendation he submitted to support Oglesby’s (unsuccessful) application in 1978 for a journalism grant: “I think The Yankee and Cowboy War is the best single all-around work on the Kennedy assassination and the available evidence for conspiracy”; it was “lucid, agreeably written, trenchant, and one of the very few partisan works I’ve come across on the subject that performs a skillful work of intellection.”

If Mailer’s endorsement failed, however, to inspire much popular interest, Oglesby could take heart from the congressional decision in September 1976 to convene the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). The AIB opened a Washington office to follow the deliberations at close quarters and reported on them in its bi-monthly newsletter Clandestine America, which sported the AIB’s distinctive logo, a circle framing the group’s acronym and quadrisected by the crosshairs of a rifle scope. Understandably, the AIB felt vindicated two years later when the HSCA conceded in its findings that the available evidence did indeed suggest that a conspiracy was behind President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

Yet if this result seemed to foreshadow a dramatic overturning of the official narrative that had been established by the Warren Commission and that ascribed to Lee Harvey Oswald the role of lone assassin, it failed to become the great watershed moment for which the skeptics had so long been yearning. There was something deflatingly perfunctory about a finding that merely affirmed the likelihood of multiple perpetrators while refraining from any speculation about their identity. As the New York Times editorial expressed it, the problem was with the concept of conspiracy: “It is technically correct….But as students of assassination learn quickly, ‘conspiracy’ means much more to the lay public. The word is freighted with dark connotations of malevolence perpetrated by enemies, foreign or political.” The HSCA fell far short of doing justice to such connotations in limiting its findings to the stark statement that Lee Harvey Oswald had most probably not been the only shooter firing at the presidential motorcade as it had crossed Dealey Plaza.

Left bereft of purpose by this anticlimax, Oglesby receded largely from public view in the decades remaining until his death in 2011. Yet he had not been completely forgotten, and Hillary Clinton found time to meet with him when as First Lady she was visiting Boston in 1994. In earlier days while still a student attending Wellesley College, the then Hillary Rodham had come across an essay that Oglesby had published in the Methodist monthly motive and that had opened her eyes to an entirely different way of viewing the war in Vietnam. The experience caused her to call into question the Goldwater Republican loyalties in which she had been reared. By 1972, she had redefined herself politically as a Democrat supporting the presidential candidacy of George McGovern. Presumably because over two decades later she was anxious about how the right-wing media machine would relish the disclosure that the First Lady was keeping company with (former) radicals such as Oglesby, the meeting was kept off the record.

Of course, by the time of the Clinton Presidency many of those who had decades earlier thrown themselves into their generation’s protest against the malaise of stultifying consumerism at home and unconscionable war and exploitation overseas had made their peace with society and settled into respected and successful careers. Some of the former extremists in the movement had even ascended into high posts in academia, politics, and the law. By contrast, when one collects the scattered references here and there to short-term teaching gigs, adjunct positions, fellowship applications, and freelance work, it is hard to escape the impression that not only had the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s cast Oglesby adrift but that the years thereafter had also denied him a secure mooring.

Half a generation older than the student protesters and therefore rattled by the Kennedy assassination in a more profound way than they had been, Oglesby had admittedly already once enjoyed a taste of the perks that come with suburban conformity. It was as if the “powers that be” can forgive a season of youthful rebellion but not the apostasy that he committed by turning his back on a career in the military-industrial complex and saying goodbye to Sunnyside Street. Indeed, his relegation to the sidelines of American public life mirrored in a way the liminal status that this society had come to assign to conspiracy theory as a form of interpretation in which he himself had become heavily invested in the 1970s.

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From The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory by Andrew McKenzie-McHarg. Copyright © 2026. Available from Princeton University Press.