I do remember that, not long after John F. Kennedy was assasinated, there were radio programs broadcast based on Mark Lane's book "Rush to Judgement" which noted that people heard shots coming from a "grassy knoll" near the fatal motorcade, and that when the bullet hit JFK, his head was pushed in the wrong direction for having been hit by a bullet from the Book Depository building window.
I'm not going to try delving into questions of this nature here.
Indeed, a lot of very strange and contradictory conspiracy theories have grown around the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, blaming everyone from the CIA to his vice-Presicent, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Tragically, a computer pioneer's falling for a conspiracy theory involving the CIA as the culprit led to the loss of the magazine Computers and Automation.
So, in general, I'm not inclined to give much credence to "conspiracy theories". Especially those that are bizarre and Byzantine in their nature. However, I have now come to suspect that there was a - relatively simple - conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK, one that was hiding in plain sight.
I don't really know if this fact even qualifies as "little-known".
But I didn't learn it until years after the assassination, as it wasn't prominently featured in newspaper accounts at the time.
Lee Harvey Oswald had actually gotten his name into the newspapers years before the Kennedy assassination. In October 1959. after having been a United States Marine, he defected to the Uniion of Soviet Socialist Republics.
After he grew discontented with life there, they let him return to the United States - with his Russian wife Marina.
It's obvious in hindsight why the newspapers didn't remind people of that in 1963. Given the raw emotions of the moment, there was the risk that people would blame the USSR for the assassination - to such an extent, and with such a clamor, that it could even lead to a nuclear war.
I picked up a remaindered copy, cheap, of the book "Marina and Lee", among many other books I had bought that way (such as "Faster than Thought", by B. V. Bowden, or "Optical Aberration Coefficients", by H. A. Buchdahl)... and in it, I read that, shortly before the assassination, Marina Oswald saw her husband sit down and have a chat with... Jack Ruby... at a table in a nightclub.
All right, this just screams "conspiracy". So instead of Jack Ruby shooting Oswald because he was disgusted with him having killed Kennedy... he did it to shut him up.
Jack Ruby didn't live long afterwards; he died of a heart attack in jail. So the direct trail runs cold.
What more can be said?
Well, from another account I've read, at least one associate warned Kennedy against going to Dallas because his life would be in danger there. Why? Because this was a very conservative part of the country, and many people there were very angry about JFK's support of Civil Rights legislation.
At this point, it seems to me that the pieces all fall into place for a very simple "conspiracy theory" which doesn't require accepting too many implausible things.
Some eccentric right-wing millionaire decided to orchestrate a plot which involved killing JFK. Given the people helping with the January 6, 2021 invasion of the Capitol building, or the people trying to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci in the present day, that doesn't seem like much of a stretch at all.
Having Lee Harvey Oswald involved would make sense from that point of view; pinning the blame on the USSR would divert suspicion from a right-wing conspiracy, and it would also promote a shift to public opinion conducive to a political move to the right.
So if it was felt that a new McCarthy era would provide the perfect opportunity to suppress the Civil Rights movement, thus maintaining the inequality of black people... that would seem a fairly straightforward line of reasoning.
And given that Lyndon Baines Johnson took advantage of the fact that he was himself a Southerner to get the Civil Rights legislation JFK had been working for actually passed in Congress... I'd say that this eliminates him as a suspect.
And, indeed, one could even think of it as his way of taking revenge on those behind the assassination of JFK, even if they could not be found, or were somehow too powerful to bring to justice.
This conspiracy theory of mine, I felt, could not have been entirely new. So I did a web search, to find out if any Texas millionaires were known to have been associated with Jack Ruby.
I found one - H. L. Hunt. Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr., said to have been the inspiration for J. R. Ewing in the T. V. series Dallas!
He does not appear to have been a close relative of E. Howard Hunt, of Watergate infamy; but both of them have indeed been previously accused of having some involvement in the Kennedy assassination. An article about a Dutch television journalist, Willem Oltmans, implicating H. L. Hunt before the Warren Commission appeared in the April 2, 1977 edition of The New York Times.
In the case of H. L. Hunt, one of his suspicious activities was that one of his sons, Nelson Hunt, took out a full-page advertisement in one or more Dallas newspapers, by the "American fact-finding committee", which was highly critical of Kennedy's policies.
If anything, though, that would tend to point away from guilt on his part; if someone is indeed plotting a murder, such a one would, one would think, try to keep a low profile, rather than engage in activities that would make him an obvious suspect. Even so, it would indeed seem that placing the contacts between H. L. Hunt and Jack Ruby under close scrutiny would be a sensible place to start. And if Jack Ruby happened to have fallen under the eye of some other Texas millionaire through his contact with H. L. Hunt, so much the better.