1. What are the major claims/conclusions? Where can you find them stated?
To begin, Olmsted claims that at the time of the Kennedy assassination “76 percent of the public trusted the government to “do what is right most of the time.”(p.672) She then claims that researches of the Kennedy assassination “not only believed that government officials had conspired, lied, and covered up aspects of the murder; they also believed that they could expose this conspiracy on their own”(p.672) These “researches’ were made up amateurs, who questioned the government role in the assassination. Olmsted then states that historian have paid little attention to the “grassroots network of amateurs who raised the first doubts.” Olmsted believes these people are responsible for our cultures current outlook on the government (p.672) Then, the author claims that the government deliberately avoided further investigation of the …show more content…
Because the government was lying to the public, skeptics gathered together to find the truth of not just the assassination, but other government secrets they believed they were hiding (p.679) Because of the critics constant battle to find the truth, President Johnson signed the law of Freedom of Information act, allowing public access to government documents. (p.682 third paragraph) The governmental conspiracies made its way to pop culture in Film and television, in shown such as the “X-Files.”(p.689) Even the president was unsure of the truth regarding many conspiracies. Olmsted ends his paper by saying that “The culture of suspicion does sometimes invigorate the democratic system. Skeptics’ relentless efforts to expose the crimes of the national security state