Forty years after his death, nowhere is the memory of John F. Kennedy more alive than in the ongoing drama over who killed him and why. A 1998 CBS News poll showed that 75 percent of Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill JFK; only 10 percent believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. It is the stuff of countless books and speeches. "I'm going to give a talk to about 1,000 students who could not be more interested in what went on," Kermit Hall, Utah State University president, said recently. "What interests them is, they want to know how the conspiracy worked." But whose conspiracy was it - the mob, the Cubans or even members of Kennedy's own government? Believers have suggested everyone from Lyndon Johnson and former FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover to agents of the Soviet Union's KGB intelligence service. There's no consensus among theorists on how a conspiracy worked, but Hall, who served in the 1990s on the congressionally mandated JFK Assassination Records Review Board, is sure of one thing: Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories continue to proliferate because officials have kept too much of the assassination data under wraps. Another academic expert said the persistence of assassination conspiracy theories is simply part of a longstanding American tradition. "People will believe forever, no matter the reliability of the evidence," said Charles Stewart, a Purdue University communications professor who studies and teaches how conspiracy theorists make their conspiracies believable.

"We love conspiracies in this country. Even back to the colonists, Americans always have been suspicious about their government and have rallied around conspiracies." Others blame people like film director Oliver Stone, whose 1992 film, "JFK" traced the president's death to conspirators. Authors Robert S. Robins and Jerrold M. Post argue that "JFK" contributed to the "intellectual pollution" conspiracies that play to the nation's paranoia.

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