Example of a Point 2 Failure: Soviet Partners

I haven’t talked much about failures of link #2 in argument structure. In part that’s because they are a bit fungible with #3 errors, depending on how you model. But here’s a good #2: Kennedy saying maybe we could cooperate with the Soviets to get to the moon two months before shot, presented as evidence he was killed by — not sure here, but guessing the CIA? We could sketch this out like this:

One note about these diagrams — they are quick drafts. The idea of doing this is not to capture this perfectly, but to represent one way of thinking about it in a way that allows discussion. To some extent the point here is not whether the diagram is “right” but whether it is useful. In a perfect world you would have multiple people critiquing the diagram and trying to capture the argument here fairly. But this is good enough for now.

So let’s go through it. I haven’t added the video here, but it is real, it really shows JFK talking about a joint Soviet-U.S. space program. I looked it up and it is two months before his assassination. So link #1, video to reality is fine.

In my estimation the linking of the evidence to the claim they killed JFK (or perhaps more narrowly that there was good motive for killing JFK) rests on two points here, signaled by the language. First is the idea that collaboration with the Soviets — even raising it — was beyond the pale. But that’s not really the case. As this article points out, both Khrushchev and Kennedy had to do a delicate dance for their different publics. First, the public had to see the country as strong in relation to their geopolitical opponent. But with the threat of nuclear war, publics also wanted to see signs of collaboration and peacemaking. Both leaders would vacillate between intense rhetoric and cool-off periods, never staying too long in one place. So talk of collaboration is not a rock solid motive.

The second idea here is that the proximal nature of this to the assassination gives it some kind of special significance. In this telling the line is crossed and actions are taken to contain a Kennedy spiraling towards resolving the Cold War.

But does the closeness of this to the assassination give it a special status? What if he had given the speech a year before? The argument then would be that Kennedy had long been a worry to the CIA, and they had ample time to plan.

The only way that the warrant here makes sense is if Kennedy was on the verge of closing some sort of deal that supposedly required immediate action. But that was not in the hands of Kennedy — that was in the hands of Khrushchev. And the U.S. intelligence services would know more than anyone that Khrushchev — who was winning the space race at the time — was not inclined to make a deal.

We could choose to see this as a link #3 error — the evidence just doesn’t support the warrant here. But I think it’s more productive to see it as a link #2 error, because the overall premise that immediate proximal causes are more credible causes is just problematic in general in this context.

It’s not that it isn’t true, but the time scale for “proximate” in geopolitics is not always weeks. Looking at what happened a few weeks before a person allegedly assaulted someone or vandalized property is meaningful — proximal causes are very related to those sorts of actions. But the context here is much slower. There’s no reason that something that happened a few weeks before would have more impact than something ten times older.

I should say there are many ways to go after point 2 here — this is not evidence that Kennedy was going to end the Cold War. If anything, once you know the full story, it was evidence that Kennedy was rightfully worried the Soviets would get to the moon before the U.S. and that the public’s patience with NASA spending was wearing thin. Kennedy was trying to thread the needle with a fickle public, which wanted delivery on Kennedy’s space program goals but was not supportive of the cost. This is quite common, that an argument like this will fail in multiple ways. But it was one case where I think the warrant fails pretty obviously, so I thought I’d share.