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Describing someone as a “conspiracy theorist” is usually meant as an insult, suggesting tin-foil hats and babbling rants on late-night radio talk shows. But when it comes to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, the list of important, seemingly credible public figures who count themselves as conspiracy theorists is long and impressive.

Fifty years ago this coming week, the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the panel led by Chief Justice Earl Warren and better known as the Warren Commission, published an 888-page final report that identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole gunman in Dealey Plaza and said there was no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic.

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Those findings were meant to put an end to the swirling conspiracy theories about the president’s murder. Yet the theories persisted. Americans had difficulty accepting that the most powerful man in the world could be brought down by a troubled young man wielding a $21 mail-order rifle. And in the wake of the Vietnam War, Watergate and so many other scandals and national tragedies that followed the assassination, people grew increasingly skeptical that the government could be expected to tell them the truth. By the late 1960s, opinion polls showed that most Americans had rejected the findings of the Warren Commission’s report. An April 2013 poll by the Associated Press found that 59% of Americans believed there was a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death.