I have loved hearing reactions to this slightly odd and undeniably epic song from all my friends and family who are really into Dylan.

I can't answer all your questions, but my History major girlfriend, who is a huge Kennedy nerd, will help me out later.

For now:

1. Because he knows everyone is way more likely to listen to all 17 minutes now that they're stuck at home. Otherwise there's no way people would have the attention span.

Also, he released it on March 26th, which is the same day that Walt Whitman died. It is widely known that John F. Kennedy was the reincarnation of Walt Whitman. And it is also well known that Keira Knightly is the reincarnation of JFK. She was born on March 26th. These things go in cycles.

Ok, that second part might not be true.

2. He's trying to branch out from the Folk crowd to the Prog Rock, Doom Metal, Experimental Jazz, and Classical crowd. That's where all the money is these days.

3. My girlfriend will have more well thought out things to say about this but... I think some who see progress as a threat to their ideals can be quick to violence. The Kennedys, especially Bobby, represented both the sweeping societal progress of the 60s as well as the old-money establishment, both of which can make you a lot of enemies. If there was more to it, well, old money or new ideas was probably the root cause.

GF's thoughts:

People have a lot of ideas about why John F. Kennedy was killed. He sat in office from 1961-1963, during which he commanded some of the most fraught and complex foreign affairs endeavours in American history. Just a few examples of this are: his increase in American advisors in Vietnam (this was part of the ‘Americanization period of the Vietnam War, which would be subsequently vastly increased by Lyndon B. Johnson), the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Domestically, the sixties were arguably one of the most tumultuous periods of civil unrest. During his time in office he attempted to champion civil rights bills, but had little success in passing his New Frontier policies, and worked to further the Space Race. Americans were divided at the time, many of whom held deeply anti-Catholic attitudes towards him. While his approval rating was generally very high, I think part of this stemmed from some of his showings of brinkmanship, most notably his leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Ultimately, we’ll never know why John F. Kennedy was killed, because his shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, was killed just a few days after killing President Kennedy. The investigation found that Mr. Oswald had acted alone, and was not part of a conspiracy, but a huge percentage of the American public does not believe that, and thinks that there are deeper conspiracies here (I just read that in 1976, a Gallup pole showed that 81% of Americans believed that ‘others were involved’ besides Oswald). My historical knowledge ends at the conspiracy theories, but it’s a serious rabbit hole you can dive into. The Kennedy family’s involvement with the mafia, as well as the CIA (probably because of the Bay of Pigs invasion) are often cited as potential suspects. It’s easy to go down this hole of conspiracy theories, but ultimately who knows. There are a lot of reasons why JFK’s assassination is so iconic in American history, but I think the most lasting is that it signified the end of a very measurable time of growth, affluence, and discovery in American history. Following the Second World War, the things we think of as making up this ‘era of affluence’ seemed to exist up until this point: white flight to suburbia, the Space Race, candy-pink fridges, the baby boom, etc. I think people see JFK’s assassination as a turning point, out of which a period of even greater civil unrest grew, ultimately unleashing things like the anti-Vietnam War protests, Kent State, and the Berkeley Free Speech movement. In other words, because he embodied such a Camelot-esque image (heterosexual, white family with children running around in Nantucket), there’s an idea of ‘what if.’ And the same goes for Bobby: it is widely believed that, because of his political position at is death, he would have won the Democratic primary and gone on to hold office. When such an iconic figure dies and a country is rapidly thrown into social and cultural upheaval, maybe we look to that figure as an embodiment of a comfortable past that is now gone, too.