We don’t have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle, and never did. Jesse Curry, chief of the Dallas Police Department at the time of the event, would later write: Public sentiment in most opinion polls leans that way too, and there are enough books and movies making the case to fill a small library. Even a governmental body, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, declared in its final report, released 16 years after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, that it looked like a probable conspiracy. He’s saying it happened before our very eyes, and that Dylan’s generation - the cohort he supposedly represented in the 1960s, when the press dubbed him “the voice of a generation” - couldn’t or wouldn’t see it.ĭylan is hardly alone in making the claim. In this song, Dylan is clearly saying Kennedy was killed by a group of conspirators so that they could seize power. “Like most honest chroniclers of the assassination,” writes Michael Hogan, “Dylan invokes the conspiracies without attempting to either confirm or deny their validity.” Vanity Fair’s take, on the other hand, is based on a conclusion that is flat-out wrong. But even these interpretations head off into the weeds, making the Kennedy assassination a jumping-off point for other observations - in Hampton’s words, that Dylan is ruminating “about what constitutes an event, and about how an event takes on meaning beyond itself.” Music journalist Tim Sommer gets it right: “Bob Dylan … is sadly but firmly stating that his generation were so easily distracted by the shiny objects of pop culture that they ignored a coup.” But even Sommer leaves that statement there, without explication. This is an intriguing topic, but most commentary on the newly released track came from writers who were either ill-informed about its controversial subject or felt more comfortable in some safe corner (competing to catalog the song’s many cultural references, while skirting the big picture).Ī few writers, like Berkeley professor Timothy Hampton, come close to the heart of the song. And one that reshaped and misdirected his own generation and those that followed.

Kennedy was killed, not by the “lone nut” Lee Harvey Oswald, but as part of a plot that was tantamount to a coup d’etat. In the rash of hot takes that followed Bob Dylan’s release of a previously unknown track, most commentators tiptoed around the true news value: a major cultural icon has boldly given voice to a widely held, but professionally radioactive belief: that John F.

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