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Peter Rhodes: Fifty years of conspiracy theories on JFK anniversary

Columnist Peter Rhodes writes on the fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination and asks what does a bank chairman actually do?

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I KNOW what a bank clerk does. I know what a bank manager does. I think I know what a bank chief executive does. But what on earth is the job description of a bank chairman, like the oversexed, coke-snorting Methodist minister and local councillor Paul Flowers of the Co-Op Bank? Is there such a job? Or is it just a cosy non-job, awarded to some jolly, distinguished local celeb who looks a bit like Father Christmas, in order to give the bank a folksy sort of image? Certainly the Rev. Flowers didn't seem terribly clued up when he appeared before a Commons committee and seemed not to know how much money his bank had. Maybe his duties included nothing more than hosting parties and checking the ink in the cash-machine printout. Anyway, Father Christmas turns out to be Father Crystalmeth and my dear old Co-Op Bank looks very stupid.

HOWEVER, the Co-Op is not the only organisation looking stupid. Every national newspaper and financial magazine, every big radio station and TV company have their share of financial experts. This is an arcane little corner of journalism populated by business correspondents and City editors who are well paid in the belief that they have an intimate inside knowledge of the business and financial world. And yet Paul Flowers was caught out not by these high-flying insiders but by a classic Sunday tabloid sting with a hidden camera. I wonder how many City correspondents have been slapped around the editor's office this week.

FIFTY years ago tomorrow President Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Over the following five decades, like so many of my generation, I have read endless conspiracy theories and watched a succession of reconstructions, documentaries and movies. Only one came close to persuading me there was more to this killing than a single assassin in the Dallas book depository. This was Bonar Menninger's book Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK, which I reviewed when it was published 21 years ago. Menninger believes Lee Harvey Oswald fired only two of the three shots heard that day in Dallas. The third and fatal shot, he suggests, was fired accidentally by secret service agent George Hickey in the car behind Kennedy's who stood up in alarm when he heard Oswald's shots. It is an elegant theory. It explains not only why the three shots happened so quickly but why several witnesses said they smelt gunpowder in the air at street level. Above all, it is a theory which relies not on a conspiracy, which would surely have unravelled by now, but on a good, old-fashioned cock-up.

THE obvious question is how a single unaimed shot, fired in error by a government agent losing his footing in an open car, managed to hit and kill the President of the United States. The answer, as anyone familiar with guns will tell you, is that this is the very essence, the sod's law nature of what soldiers call ND – negligent discharge. If something terrible can go wrong, it will.

THE weakness in Menninger's case is that Hickey later sued the publishers for "false and misleading defamatory statements and innuendoes". Although Hickey's action failed, the publishers paid him what Menninger described a few days ago as "an undisclosed, but I don't think hugely significant, sum." Hickey died two years ago.

I WAS 12 was Kennedy was murdered. It was an event which, for a while, united people in horror and grief. But not the whole world. In China the People's Daily newspaper published a cartoon showing the slain president lying in a pool of blood, his tie covered in dollar signs with the caption: "Kennedy Bites the Dust." We often forget what a thoroughly nasty time the Cold War was.

OKAY, then. Just a couple more definitions shamelessly pilfered from the radio quiz I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue: Marinade (soft drink for wedding), Microbe (tiny dressing gown).