American History Hit - JFK Assassination: A Witness Remembers

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

On November 22nd 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot dead. The ensuing years have been filled with questions and conspiracy about the events of that day, and the weeks, months and years leading to it.In the second of our special series, Don meets Paul Landis, a former secret service agent who was feet from the presidential limousine when the assassination happened. He tells us his recollection of the event itself, the direction of the bullets and the experience of accompanying First Lady Jackie Kennedy into the Emergency Room alongside her husband.Don is also joined by Jefferson Morley and Thomas Whalen to explore why we have so many unanswered questions despite the Warren Commission report of 1964 and the many other reports that have followed.Jefferson Morley is a journalist and editor who has worked in Washington journalism for over thirty years. He has been researching the CIA files of the assassination since their release 3 decades ago, is the editor of the JFK Facts blog, and his books include 'Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA' and 'Scorpions' Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate.'Thomas J. Whalen is an associate professor of social science at Boston University. His books on JFK include 'JFK and His Enemies: A Portrait of Power' and 'Kennedy Versus Lodge: The 1952 Massachusetts Senate Race'.Produced and edited by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.This podcast contains archive from NBC, 22 November 1963, and music and SFX from Epidemic Sound.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORYHIT1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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I was right there. I was right in the middle, right behind President's car. I was looking right at him when the assassin's bullet struck him in the head. I saw the whole thing. His head had kind of exploded in just the mist of blood. flesh and brain matter. And I even ducked. I was so close that I just wanted to avoid getting splattered. It has been 60 years since the gunshots in Dallas found their target and then would echo over the generations to come. In the last episode, I spoke to Professor Frederick Logovall about JFK's politics and personality, the origins of his outlook on American society and our role in the world. Unfortunately, today, so many people first hear about JFK through the appalling tale of

his assassination, the perplexing questions and doubts, the speculations on a brutal killing. It was an argument supposedly settled just 10 months after the shooting in Dallas, when on September 24th, President Lyndon B. Johnson was presented with the findings of the official inquiry into the event. Three days later, the 888-page report from the Warren Commission was made available to the American public. Its conclusions? The shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connolly were fired from the six-floor window at the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository. The shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connolly were fired from the six-floor window. were fired by Lee Harvey Oswald.

There is no credible evidence that the shots were fired from the triple underpass, ahead of the motorcade, or from any other location. The commission has found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic, or foreign to assassinate President Kennedy. So there we have it. Shortest episode yet. Oh, except for one thing. At no point since the assassination, over the six decades so far, has a majority of the American population believed conclusively in this version of events. So why are so many of us still all these years later, more inclined toward the prospect of a conspiracy? In this episode, we look at the assassination and its aftermath, the Warren Commission report and the perceived holes in the account,

the theories of multiple gunmen and inside jobs that have filled the gaps for so many ever since. To try and untangle the knots of these still stunning events, we're joined by Paul Landis, a man who was present on the day, as a Secret Service agent assigned to the Kennedys, responsible for the First Lady. Then we have the expert opinions of journalist Jefferson Morley and Professor Thomas Whelan, two men who've spent large swaths of their careers studying JFK, the events of the assassination and the many, many files and reports concerning it.

White House Press Secretary Malcolm Kilda has just announced that President Kennedy died at approximately 1 o'clock central standard time, which is about 35 minutes ago. After being shot. By an unknown assailant. During a motorcade drive through downtown Dallas. On November 22nd, 1963, Paul Landis was a 28-year-old Secret Service. agent. I'm Paul Landis. I'm a suburb of Cleveland, Shaker Heights, Ohio. That day in Dallas, I was officially assigned to the right rear running board of Halfbat, which was a secret service follow-up

car right behind the limousine carrying President Kennedy. President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jackie Kennedy were in Dallas as part of a five-city two-day tour of Texas. The party had been San Antonio the day before. And before flying to Dallas on the Friday in question, JFK had already spoken at a breakfast in Fort Worth. The president, his staff, and the press landed at Lovefield, Dallas at 1140 a.m. and commenced the motorcade through downtown Dallas towards the trademark, hoping to demonstrate the popularity the president had in this city that he had lost in the 1960 election. Paul was just a short distance from the president's modified 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible. I had the distance from where I was on the right rear running board to the front of

our vehicle, probably three feet between the vehicle, half back and the president's limousine, and then another, what, maybe five feet to the president. We came off of Main Street, made a right-hand turn on Houston, and then it is really a very short block later. We made a right-hand. turn. And it was like a hairpin turn. It was very tight. The way I had to really slow down quite a bit to make that turn. And the car straighted out. I was right there. I was right in the middle, right behind the president's car. I was looking right at him when the assassin's bullet struck him in the head. For 60 years, people have disputed the direction of the bullets, where the shots were fired. And it's one of the

the reasons why so many are unconvinced by the Warren report's conclusions. But from memory, Paul agrees with the commission. He thinks that the bullets came from one direction. First shot came from behind me over my right shoulder. Second shot that I heard came from the rear. Third shot sounded at the time like it came from the right towards the front. But I'm convinced that it came from behind, same place the first two shots came from. I think our location, we were just ready to go under the underpass,

and we were like at the end of the sound. We were on the receiving end at that point. The fact that they found three cartridge cases in this school book depository, later in Oswald's rifle, I just attributed the sound of the third shot, like being in an echo chamber where we were. I just need to ask you, Paul, and this is just a personal question, because this is such a traumatic and upsetting thing to talk about. Even today, 60 years later, I was two years old at the time. I have no memory.

I cannot imagine living with this memory as you have for your entire life. How has it felt for you? How have you processed that? I was a memory that that is so hard to explain. The fact that I was able to bury it, and it took me a few years. I don't remember exactly when all of a sudden the nightmares I had of the president's head exploding

kept playing over and over. like a video loop. And just one day it was gone. And I just managed, I never talked about it. I did talk about, you know, pleasant experiences that I had earlier with the Eisenhower's and what the kid detail was like. But has not every single person in your life asked you for your version of events? Has it not, I would imagine that that's been relentless.

What usually happened was people, when they learned I'd been in the Secret Service, and they'd asked me, oh, the question would come up, well, were you at the Kennedys? And I would say yes. And then if you were you in Dallas, and I would say yes. And nobody ever pressed me at that. And I never said anything further. It was just something that I avoided talking about. Right. I can understand that because even now I have my own shyness about talking about it with you.

It's incredible. It's just a human nature factor. Knowing that you went through that is a very difficult thing to even talk about. For an overview of the events that followed, let's get some expert help from Jefferson. My name is Jefferson Morley. I am a journalist and investigative reporter in Washington, where I've worked most of my professional career at the Washington Post, among other places. Governor Connolly struck in the back. President Kennedy struck in the back. President Kennedy struck in the head. A bystander is struck by a missed shot. The Secret Service driver immediately takes the car to the nearest hospital, Parkland Hospital, with the press car in hot pursuit. They pull up at Parkland. They've called ahead. The trauma team is ready. The orderlies take the president alive but badly wounded, out, put him on a gurney and take him into trauma room one in Parkland Hospital. Governor Connolly also wounded is taken into trauma room two.

In trauma room one, doctors converge and try and save Kennedy's life. He is still alive. He has a heartbeat, but he can't speak, and he suffered a massive wound in the bag of his head. The press car follows, and Merriman Smith was in the press car. He was a veteran reporter for United Press International, followed the president wherever he went. He was a soldier. He recognized the sounds of the shots, and he was the first one to call. call in the story. He calls his editors in New York, says three shots were fired at the presidential

motorcade in Dallas today. And by 12, 30, 1 o'clock, that news is already beginning to hit the air. People, you know, radio announcers and TV announcers put that on the air. Shots were fired at the president's limousine. Dr. Robert McClellan was one of the doctors who examined and was trying to save Kennedy's life, one of the senior doctors on the scene. He stood at the head the gurney, and he observed Kennedy's head wound, which was so severe, he knew that he was not going to survive. It was indeed a fatal shot, and within half an hour, his vital signs had ceased, and he was dead. And that announcement went off at about 1 o'clock central time on November 22nd, 1963. So about 90 minutes later, Dallas police arrested a man, Lee Oswald, in the Texas

theater. He had been seen sneaking into the theater, and they rushed. and arrested him and took him down. And he was charged with assassinating the president. Oswald, a 24-year-old ex-marine, denied that, denied it vociferously. He said, I didn't shoot anybody. He said it repeatedly. And he said, I'm a patsy. I'm a patsy, meaning he's the fall guy for somebody else. Okay. So this is a shocking event. The president is dead. the country's in shock that next day. Vice President Johnson is sworn in as president. And on Sunday morning, Oswald is taken from the Dallas jail

where he's being held and questioned by the FBI and Dallas police and taken to a more secure jail on national TV. And as this happens, as Oswald is brought out, a man steps out of the crowd and shoots him and kills him. And that man was Jack Ruby, the owner of a Dallas nightclub and a man with aspirations to join organized. crime. So you have the astonishing assassination of the president, followed 36 hours later by the assassination on live television of the supposed assassin. So a completely surreal set of events.

Jefferson has been working on the JFK story since the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 was passed 31 years ago. The JFK Records Act of 1992 was passed in the wake of the success of Oliver Stone's movie, JFK, which came out in late 1991, and immediately created controversy, both because it was a very slick and effective piece of cinema and also because it stated a bold thesis that President Kennedy was killed by enemies high in his own government.

Very controversial. The success of the movie prompted a lot of criticism of Stone for taking liberties with the historical record, furious debate in the press, whether Stone was right, whether the Warren Commission was right, what Stone had done was he put a little trailer at the end of the movie and he said, by the way, 90% of the government's records related to the assassination are still secret, which was true in 1991.

And so Congress was inundated with mail after the movie from people saying, you've got to make all these records public. So Congress was kind of shamed into doing the right thing. And they actually did the right thing in a big way. They wrote a very strong open records law. Yeah. And the key thing was that they created an independent review board that took the final decision about making records public

out of the hands of an individual agency. And the board itself was unable to decide what should be made public. And so lots and lots of records, several million pages of once secret records become public, starting in 1992. The collection of records is immense. It has more than five million pages. But still the questions about the causes of the assassination, persist. Jefferson believes it's because some records are still kept from the public. But why?

Why are they still secret? You know, that's a good question, because when Congress wrote this law in 1992, it had a 25-year sunset provision, which said, we want to make all these records public, but if some of the agency wants to withhold something for national security or privacy or whatever, they can do it for up to 25 years, but after 25 years, everything should be made public, except in the rarest of cases. That's what Congress said. Well, 25 years after 1992 in 2017, the question comes to President Trump, and the CIA and the FBI go to Trump and say, we can't release all of these records. We have 15,000 different records that we need to keep redactions in. And so the secrecy has continued under both President Trump and President Biden. So we still have a large body of records that are still secret.

I think the important thing to understand about the JFK records collection, as it has emerged since the 1990s is, you know, what does it tell us about the event of November 22nd when the President of the United States was shot and killed and nobody was ever brought to justice for the crime? So this body of records tells us a lot about that. And I think it's an underappreciated story, really, that what this body of records tells us.

Now, people say, well, there's no smoking gun proof of conspiracy. That is certainly true. smoking gun proof of conspiracy in all the records that have been made public. That doesn't mean that the official story is true. And in fact, if we look at the body of records that have become public, there's several very striking things that stand out that give us more and more cause to doubt the official story. So that's kind of where the JFK story is now, you know, going on 60 years. Your work as a journalist was primarily back then in Central America with CIA down there, right? That is how I got into writing about the JFK assassination.

It was not through the literature of conspiracy. It was through reporting on the role of the CIA in Central America in the 1980s when these civil wars were of huge political issue in the United States and literally fought in Congress. And when I was covering El Salvador and Nicaragua, I came to the United States. to understand that I could not write about these subjects knowledgeably unless I understood the role that the CIA was playing. And of course, nobody would talk about that. So I had to figure out a way to make myself knowledgeable about the CIA in order to write about those things. And by interviewing and reading, I did that. And I came to understand the role of the CIA in Central America, the role of

Cuba, the war between the United States and Cuba, Bay of Pigs operation. And so began to understand the larger context of the CIA in Central America. And through that, I brought that perspective to when JFK records became available after the JFK Records Act, that was the perspective I brought to the new records. I knew a lot about CIA operations in Central America and Cuba. And that gave me an understanding of CIA operations around in 1963. Central America plays a large role in this story, especially in connection with our so-called lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. As Jefferson mentioned, Oswald was a 24-year-old ex-Marine,

an employee at the Texas Book Depository Building in Dallas. He'd had a disjointed youth, having been born two months after his father's death. He had been court-martialed twice in the Marines before being discharged and defecting to the Soviet Union. He had returned to the United States in 1962, and he arrived at work carrying a long package, which he told his colleague, Buell Wesley Frazier was curtain rods. Jefferson has been looking into how much the CIA knew about Oswald prior to the assassination. Oswald goes to Mexico City and visits the Cuban consulate and the Soviet embassy in early October, 1963, about seven weeks before the assassination. And so my book, Our Man in Mexico, tells the story of what that event looked like through the man who was in

charge of the surveillance there, the chief of station, Wynn Scott. So yes, Oswald's movements in Mexico City and what the CIA knew about them, that's a key part of understanding the role of the CIA in the events leading up to the assassination. Yeah, like every American, I'm as confused as the rest, but when you talk about that particular moment, it's just screams of conspiracy. You know, it's the strangest idea that this man has come from. I mean, ostensibly, what was he doing in Mexico City? He went to the Cuban consulate and said he wanted to get a visa to travel to Cuba, and then he was going to go from Cuba back to the Soviet Union. That was what his visit was understood by the people he talked to to be about. Now, he was walking into a situation that was highly surveilled. Two cameras on the

entrance to the Soviet embassy, one on the entrance to the Cuban consulate. He was coming and going, so, you know, Oswald walks into a series of very sophisticated CIA surveillance operations, both photographic and audio. So the notion that was peddled to the people by the CIA, to Warren Commission and to the American people was the CIA didn't know anything about this guy, okay? And that was a lie. And it's really key. This is one of the things that we really understand now much better than we did even at the time of Oliver Stone's movie, which is just how well-known Lee Harvey Oswald was to very senior CIA operations officers.

The story that the CIA told the Warren Commission was we had minimal information about these people. That was nonsense. That was a cover story for the fact that Oswald had walked into. these very sophisticated surveillance operations in Mexico City. Now, what was going on there? You know, that's another question. Has nothing ever been published about that? No, this is, I mean, my book, Our Man in Mexico,

has a very detailed reconstruction of what happened there, and there's been a lot of scholarship around it. Because of secrecy and probably destroyed records, we don't have a super complete picture of what was going on. But I think that it's pretty clear that there were CIA offers, you know, manipulating Oswald, looking over his shoulder. There's good evidence that he was impersonated on the telephone. And what they were trying to figure out was, at the time, the CIA counterintelligence concern was this.

Could American supporters of Castro travel to Cuba through Mexico City without detection by U.S. intelligence? And what it seems like is Oswald was watched to see what the answer to that question. question was. Right? An American comes in there and he's seeking to travel. Now, it was the Russians who turned him down and said, you can't get a visa here as an American. You have to go to Washington to get a visa. So Oswald was shut down in his ostensible purpose, but it has the feel of a kind of faint or a kind of probe by CIA looking over Oswald's shoulder, knowing he's there, you know, keeping close track of him. Right. And we have to keep in mind that there's always the possibility of the simple and mundane situation here. I mean,

I mean, this is a man who is married to a Russian woman. They've lived together in Moscow. Something could be going on here that he's trying to rescue his marriage. Who knows? You know, there could be very simple explanations. That's the problem is that everything seems to have a counter. Yeah, I mean, but to keep your eye on the ball and to understand, what are we talking about here? We're talking about what motivated Oswald if he shot the president, okay?

Or if he didn't shoot the president who was manipulating him into that role. Where does the FBI fall into this? The FBI is supposed to do domestic counterintelligence. So when Oswald returned from the Soviet Union, he really should have been properly turned over to the FBI entirely. He wasn't. The CIA stays right on top of Oswald and receives all sorts of information about him from the FBI. So the FBI is kind of flying blind. Oswald's a guy, he's kind of surly and obnoxious when he talks to the FBI after his return.

but the FBI says they have no further interest in him. They do keep track of his wife because she's a Russian national. And, you know, they're worried about, is she going to be a spy or something like that. So the FBI is very passive, but they're also in this case taking second place to the CIA. So, for example, when Oswald goes to Mexico City and Wynn Scott, the station chief picks up on his presence there,

he sends a cable to Washington. They've heard his name on the audio on the wiretap. And they say there's an American named Oswald here in Mexico City. You know, who is he? And so the counterintelligence staff, senior officers working for counterintelligence chief James Angleton, pulled the Oswald file and they write a cable about him. And they sent it back because when Scott had said, you know, he'd been in touch with the Soviet embassy, that's where they picked him up on the wiretap.

So they sent a message back and they say, this fellow Oswald, you know, he went to the Soviet Union, and he came back, he's maturing. And, you know, basically don't worry about it. And so you see the makings of the security failure in Daly Plaza starting to take shape. There's a lot more CIA fingerprints on Oswald than FBI fingerprints. A failure or an operation. That's the question. Amazing. I spoke to Thomas Wayland, author of two books on JFK, to find out more about the role of the FBI in all this. He was on American soil. So it was really the FBI's ball to carry. And this is where

it also explains the Warren Commission, why they were so kind of like abrupt, kind of like, let's get this out of the way we have to investigate. Jay Edgar Hoover was furious that all the lapses in security regarding the Kennedy assassination, because as he saw it, how could we let Oswald get so close to the president of the United States? You know, Oswald, a few weeks before the assassination, entered the Dallas FBI office and threatened to blow up the building. Because I guess they had been questioning his wife, Marina. And he says, if you do this, you know, I'm going to blow this building up. And the officer in charge of Oswald, they're James Hosty, he just kind of fluffed it off

as kind of like he's kind of a not, you can't take him seriously. And, you know, he just filed, he wrote a memo, filed it away, which was later destroyed because of how embarrassing with Hosty. formerly reprimanded by the Bureau and was transferred later to Kansas City. And I think about a number of other agents were disciplined. And, you know, at the time, there was this list called the Security Index for, you know, potential troublesome figures, you know, affecting national security. Oswald's name wasn't even on there. And Hoover was really upset. Well, why wasn't his name on there? I mean, this guy was a defectors of the Soviet Union and came back,

you know, he was a troublemaker, he was a staunch Castro supporter. Now, how could we let this thing lapse? So Hoover was motivated. We have to cover up the FBI's basic incompetence. And so his hand is all over the Warren Commission report because they didn't go in various areas to find out what happened. In all those, I mean, there's 27 volumes of the Warren Commission. They do not cover Lee Harvey Oswald's movements in Russia. so forth. Well, they go into, he went to Russia, but, you know, when he comes back here,

they weren't closely following his movements. And, you know, the CIA knew he went into the embassies, the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City. But what did he say there? We don't know. I mean, that was all kind of like, not important. But again, you can understand why the stakes were so high. World War III was always in the background of their thoughts. I see. And that's really the theme of what you're saying here is that we haven't paid enough attention to the fact that there would have been an enormous motive to tamp this down for geopolitical reasons, never mind professional embarrassments. Right. And I totally understand that. I think in retrospect, it was probably the right move to make. Wow. Because, I mean, we would have blown up the world.

With all the people that I've spoken to about JFK, this appears to be a running theme, that whether JFK's assassination was the work of a lone gunman or of a conspirator. there was only one conclusion that would prevent the outbreak of World War II. Back to Jefferson. I think it's very important to understand the motivation of people like Earl Warren and the liberal icon. You know, for sure he would have investigated the president's assassination. He would have left no stone and turn.

That's a misreading of what happened, right? There was this feeling. We have to bury this for the good of the country, for the safety of the country. You know, that's how LBJ talked Earl Warren into. heading the Warren Commission. Earl Warren said, no, Mr. President, I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that. And Johnson said, Mr. Chief Justice, if you don't do this, we're going to have a war and 40 million people are going to die. Right? So Warren's agenda was put to rest the notion of conspiracy. It wasn't to find the truth.

It was to create a version of events that would not create a crisis in the American government. This sense of a rush to conclude questions about the assassination in the Warren Commission is one that is shared by Thomas. It took about, I think, less than a year come to think about it. Basically, it was a rushed job. I think Robert Kennedy thought it was a botched job. He was probably accurate in that way. It was kind of thrown together by Lyndon Johnson because of all the doubts regarding the Kennedy assassination, all the questions. And he wanted to nip this in the bud as soon as possible.

And Lyndon Johnson had a very good reason to fear these doubts. and also the kind of rumors that were circulating in Washington, D.C. and abroad, because, you know, there were rumors that it might have had some sort of foreign entanglements. And, you know, Fidel Castro in September of 1963 issued an infamous warning that, you know, if you try to kill me or launch a war against Cuba, you know, U.S. officials and leaders are not safe themselves. And of course, we know now that there were several attempts going back to the Eisenhower administration on Castro's life. So, I mean, Fido Castro had, you know, a real motive to kill President Kennedy here. And, you know, why is that important?

Why would Lyndon Johnson, who, by the way, later said in an interview with Walter Kronkite in the early 1970s after he left the presidency, it was never broadcast on CBS that he thought Castro was responsible for JFK's assassination. Wow. I never heard that before. The fear was, you know, and this cannot be discounted. The fear was this was a situation reminiscent of August of 1914 when the crown prince or the heir apparent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated along with his wife

on the streets of Sarajevo, Bosnia, in the Balkans, a Tinderbox for the world at that time. And the feeling was, well, if this Lee Harvey Oswald character, you know, he was staunchly communist, he had defected to the Soviet Union for a time, and came back on a Russian wife, he expressed sympathy for Fidel Castro. If he hadn't in any way been connected with Cuba or Castro, you know, in a real tangible way regarding the assassination, this could lead all sorts of a ramifications similar to what happened in the summer of 1914.

Because if the American public found out, yes, there was a real link to Castro, they would have demanded a military intervention in Cuba. And what would that mean? Well, to resolve the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, still the gravest nuclear crisis of the Cold War and in American history, the United States agreed not to, invade Cuba. But we would have then had to have broken that pledge, and that would have led the Soviet Union to respond, perhaps in Berlin, seizing West Berlin or elsewhere in the world. And that would have slowly escalated, perhaps, to a situation not unlike what happened in Europe

on that fateful summer of 14. Or not gradually. My goodness, that could have all happened inside of a few weeks. Johnson, the administration, you see it in the memo. This is frantic sense. we have to tamp this down. Bobby Kennedy's own assistant attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, he writes this memo saying, like, we have to agree right now. Lee Harvey Oswald is the lone assassin. They did not want to know if he had ties to, you know, Castro or perhaps the Soviet Union. And, you know, the other troublesome detail that quickly came out right after the assassination was that, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald had visited the Cuban embassy and the Soviet embassy in the Soviet embassy in, in Mexico City, not long before the assassination.

So the irony here is that JFK himself, he had read Barbara Tuckman's famous account of the events of the summer of 1914, the guns of August. And he read it in the summer of 62. And he basically ordered that a copy of it be given to officers in the U.S. military. Because he was very much aware that, you know, things like this can lead to bigger tragedies. So much of this post-assassassination is about Bobby Kennedy, isn't it? I mean, he really does drive this whole show. Well, he had a lot to hide because the president had basically put him in charge of a anti-Castro operation, and it was called Operation Mongoose, which was waging, you know, covert war to

destabilize the Cuban government using kind of other means to, you know, spread propaganda and to destabilize the Cuban economy. And apparently, it also involved assassination attempts connected to organized crime figures who were actively recruited to kill Castro. And this went back to the Eisenhower administration itself. So, I mean, there was a lot of real, you know, sketchy characters involved in this affair.

And, you know, Robert Kennedy feared that this all might come out in a real look at the Kennedy assassination. You know, who did it in a war? why, you know, that we were basically plotting to kill a foreign leader. And as we learned from the 1960s congressional investigations, or I should say the Senate investigations, that we were also probably involved in several other, you know, assassinations around the world during the Cold War. And the CIA was basically, until the 1970s, when it was seriously probed by the legislative branch, was a rogue element. There was no checks on it.

And so Robert Kennedy felt, okay, we can't go there. So the Kennedys were very quiet on the assassination. He kind of publicly made a statement. He agrees with the Warren Commission findings. I don't think he did. Because there was a lot of upset people, again, stemming back to the Bay of Pigs that, you know, they were portrayed. It was a CIA operation that went bad.

And they thought, you know, when it went bad, Kennedy would intervene full guns with the U.S. military. And, you know, the CIA was also, you know, had strong ties to the anti-Castro Cubans in Florida. And they were upset that Kennedy, you know, he had made kind of noises that, you know, oh, don't worry about it. We're going to follow. We're going to get rid of Castro. And it never happened. So we have possible motivators for a cover-up, possible motivators for a conspiracy.

But so far it seems that all of the possible resources have been fed into dissipating the lone shooter theory. So why have so many people in America never bought into it? All of this stuff is so much circumstantial evidence, but it's so rich. I mean, my God, you're just lost in it. The moment you start to poke around, you end up so boggled by so many ideas and so many possibilities that you end up coming back to the simplest one, which is this lone gunman. And that really was the, I guess, brilliance of it, if indeed it was a cooked-up thing, that ultimately there's so many theories and so much confusion that the public will

at least be satisfied to a point with this idea. That's a minority position in public opinion and has been pretty much for the last 60 years, right? Skepticism about, I mean, the very first polls taken after the assassination of President Kennedy within a week, there were two polls done. And in both those polls, 60 to 70 percent of people said that they thought there was more than one person involved. So at that point, there were no conspiracy theorists, right? In fact, the Dallas Police Department, the White House, Secret Service, FBI, we're all saying, that guy did it, nobody else is about, don't worry about it.

And it was the circumstances of the crime, not conspiracy theories, that prompted people to say, hey, there was something else going on. And the fact that the suspected assassin who denied killing Kennedy is killed before it can explain himself. Ah, Jack Ruby. a 52-year-old nightclub owner from Chicago and former U.S. Air Force aircraft mechanic. Unmarried, with no children,

this is the man who shot Oswald in the camera-lit garage on November 24th. Thomas has thoughts on this. I think the event that really changed everything wasn't necessarily involved with the assassination directly. It was, you know, Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald. That just did not add up. And, you know, there was,

kind of a nebulous reason, Ruby said he wanted to spear Jackie Kennedy, you know, the pain of having to sit through a trial, you know, of Oswald. And, you know, we find out Ruby had ties to mob figures in Chicago and he ran a strip club in Dallas. It's just pretty weird stuff. People just would not accept that. And as the 60s moved on, particularly at the end, when, you know, with the Vietnam period, the massive demonstrations, the protest, other assassinations, you know, people kind of look back to November 22nd as, okay, that's when it all went wrong, that it was part of some larger, sinister design. So I think really from the get-go in the popular imagination, this just did not sound right, the official explanation. And Jefferson. Jack Ruby's motivation was, he said, at the time,

to spare Jackie Kennedy the pain of a trial of Oswald. It's a patently preposterous story. Jack Ruby ran a strip club. He was a pimp. He was a bruiser. He was a pal with cops. His best friend was a dog.

The notion that he had some respect or cared about Jackie Kennedy's feelings and acted out of them, that was ludicrous. And yet that is what passed as the explanation for what he had done. The guy who did it was convening dead. There was no implications. Nobody lost their job. Nobody had to be brought to justice. There was no problem if Oswald alone did it. And so everybody was just going along with that.

So Ruby never talked. Now, why would Ruby kill Oswald? Well, first of all, it's important to understand that Oswald said he was a patsy before he was killed the day before he was brought out at a press conference. Yeah. And reporters shouted at him, so why'd you shoot the president? He said, I didn't shoot anybody. I'm just a patsy. Okay. Now, what does that mean? That means I'm saying somebody else did it and they're making me take the blame, right? So who the somebody else was in Oswald's mind, or maybe he was making the whole thing up, we never know because he was killed before he could explain himself. So why would Ruby do this? Well, in my website, JFK Facts, people come up to me and they approach me and they say, oh, I got a story to tell you about

JFK's assassination. So I get a lot of information that way. Sometimes it's completely nuts and not worth pursuing. A lot of times. But a lot of times it's quite interesting. And so a woman approached me and she said my mother was friends with Jack Ruby. Do you want to talk to her? And I said, yeah, I definitely want to talk to her. So her name was Gail Raven, or that was her stage name, and she was one of the burlesque dancers in Ruby's Club. There would be a troop of girls and they would do like a show in, you know, they'd go to Dallas for 10 days and Chrys up for 10 days. And they rode this circuit. And so they were in Dallas, you know, once a year or twice a year or something like that. And so this woman answered questions through her daughter. And I said,

how did you get to know Jack Ruby? And she said, you know, when we came there, he was very sweet on me. He had a big crush on me and he wanted me to marry him. And she said, I said, no, you know, he was like 40 and I was 20. I wasn't going to marry the guy. But, you know, he was nice. He was very nice to her and she appreciated that. So they were friendly in that way.

And so I said, well, why did Jack kill Oswald? And she said, well, I don't know. She said, but I went down to see him after he was in jail after he killed Oswald. And she saw him and she talked to him there. and she said he couldn't talk about it, you know, with her right there. And I said, well, what did you think? And she said, I'll tell you the one thing that I believe. I don't think he had a choice.

She said, you know, Jack worked for people. Everybody works for somebody. And I don't think Jack had a choice. And I thought that was a very interesting comment. And she also said he, she didn't know what he thought about President Kennedy, but he hated and despised Bobby Kennedy. She said there was no doubt about that. So the man was not animated.

by love for Jackie. He was more likely animated by hatred for Bobby. It's such a bizarre situation because all the news knew that he was making this move. And so they lit this whole scene with these Kleege lights and correspondents were there. And it was a whole television situation. That's why we have such an incredibly well lit. Almost looks like a TV show, really, when Ruby comes up and shoots him. It's an incredible scene. It's so strange that someone could walk into this situation, extraordinary or not. You know, maybe it's just really loose security and this sort of thing happens. But you literally walk down that ramp with his, you know, gun in his pocket and walks into this very set up situation and then shoots him right there. Jack Ruby knew every cop in Dallas.

So he had, he would have no problem, you know, walking in there. Nobody would have stopped him. He was one of them. So he had entree to do that. Now, you know, it's interesting that. You know, some people say, he was around the corner, you know, buying a lottery ticket and, you know, he could have missed it. He wasn't really planning on it. He just snapped at the last second. But really, if you look at it, what you see is a man dragging his feet. Yeah. Right. He doesn't want to go do it and he knows that he has to. So, you know, the silencing of Oswald by Ruby, you know, people say, was it an organized crime? Well, the fact that Ruby did that, he was an organized crime wannabe. So there's an organized crime complied. to the events of November 1963 for sure. I do not believe that the mafia were the intellectual authors of the assassination. If you follow this trail, you're basically suggesting that there is the intellectual

authorship with the CIA, but that the trigger man is Jack Ruby, which would have been acquired through their connections to organize crime. Am I basically getting down there? I would say not necessarily CIA. This could have been done under the auspices of the military. with CIA involvement, but it might have been motivated primarily from military people. We can't tell that for sure. But yeah, U.S. intelligence operatives manipulating Oswald with access to Ruby.

If Jack Ruby sowed the seeds of doubt, the Church Committee and the House Select Committee gave them root. The Church Committee of 1975 was introduced by Senator John Pestory to investigate federal intelligence operations and determined, quote, the extent, if any, to which illegal, improper, or unethical activities were engaged in by any agency of the federal government. The committee returned a conclusion that, quote, intelligence excesses at home and abroad were not the product of any single party, administration, or man, but had developed as America rose to become a superpower during a global Cold War. So is it possible that this confirmed a motive, either for the assassinations,

or for the cover-up. Let's go back to Thomas to hear about this increasingly official chain of disbelief. They were under constraints. Frank Church was a Democrat. He was a friend of John F. Kennedy's. And they didn't want to go after a while too far into it. I think Gary Hart, who was on the committee as an investigator for Church, one to go full-borne to the Kennedy assassination,

but they held back because of, I believe, you know, the assassination plots against, Castro, the organized crime figure is involved, and, you know, Operation Mines Goose, that also would have brought Robert Kennedy into it. And it would have kind of destroyed at that time in the early 70s, you know, the Kennedy administration was kind of still viewed in the, with that in the haze of Camelot. So on the Democratic side, we don't want to sully that, and we don't want to go there. So they focused on other matters. And believe me, there was plenty to go into, given the CIA, you know, going back to the plot in Iran, for example,

Guatemala, there was a lot of stuff. And really, what's interesting, ironically, is that the church committee came about as a result of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. And they're all kind of related to one up. First, it was the Pentagon Papers. And that led to Nixon creating the White House plumbers to stop the leaks. And that led to the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Wattagate, building, that led to the church committee. So it's kind of one long historic chain here. People wonder why people of our age don't want to talk about the 70s. Well, but the church committee was very important because for the first time, light was

shine brightly on what the government, the covert intelligence agencies were actually doing. And it led to legislation that at least tried to curtail or at least put in place some oversight. There was no oversight before. So I think the church committee probably did a great service to our country. They particularly approached the whole CIA rogue agent kind of assassination theory, right? That was their focus. Because of so much distrust about the CIA with Vietnam, et cetera, that's where they were going. Well, you know, why are we in the business of overturning governments we don't think are friendly to our interest? And why are we involved in assassination plots? You know, that was some questions that needed to be answered.

And they had a limited scope. You know, ironically, you know, what happened was it was shut down in later in the 70s. You know, Frank Church thought, you know, they should look a lot closer, but he was running for president, but he could have passed it off to someone else in Congress. But, you know, there was just too much dirty laundry there. All these careers segue into one and to another. And there's all this dirty laundry that doesn't want to come out. That segues into the House Select Committee on Assassinations, 76 to 79.

Really, all the way through the 70s, there's a whole lot of examination or re-examination being done. The United States House Select Committee on Assassinations was established in 1976 to investigate not only JFK's assassination, but also that of Martin Luther King Jr. That was a very strange committee because they come to conclusion, okay, there was a conspiracy because of, you know, I guess they. cited the acoustical evidence, the forensic evidence, which was later disputed. But I guess there was some Dallas police officers, I think his motorcycle cop, he had left his calm on and it captured, you know, the sounds of Dealey Plaza, you know, the shots fired. And I guess they, it was more than the accepted number of shots. And there was someone later said, well, that was because it was like an echo effect given the acoustics, how it was set up. I talked to someone far more expert on,

sound than me, but that was later disputed. But, I mean, at the time, they said, okay, there was a conspiracy, but we're not going to look into it. They don't mention who's part of that conspiracy, what the conspiracy about, what would be a possible motive. They just kind of like, yeah, it's a conspiracy and left it that way. It's just really a bizarre report. So as Jefferson and Thomas have both mentioned, even 60 years later, we are waiting for more information to fill in the gaps. On top of this, Paul's testimony has renewed debates about the bullet. Let's go back to him now. The evidence that you cite that confuses the story a bit is the existence of a bullet that you found in the car after you had helped Mrs. Kennedy out of the car. Can you take us through that experience

finding that bullet? When we arrived at Parkland Memorial Hospital, I jumped out of half-backed Secret Service follow-up car. Agents and people were kind of in front of the car. So I ran behind the follow-up car and back up to the president's limousine. Mrs. Kennedy was sitting there. She had the president's head in her lap. I reached over to try to help her up, and she refused. She wanted to stay there with him.

About that time, Clint Hill came around from behind me. He opened the door, walked into the rear front. portion of the back seat. I followed him in. The whole scene I noticed a kind of cracked in the windshield of the car when we were getting in and I immediately spotted a pool of blood right to Mrs. Kennedy's left. It was on the seat. There were two bullet fragments in there. I picked one of the two up, looked at it. It was about the size of the tip of my peasant. pinky finger. I put it back where I found it. And about that time, Clint Hill had covered the president's head with his suit coat, and Mrs. Kennedy released the president's head. They were

starting to get up. And as she stood up, I noticed on the back seat right next to the chrome strip that meets the trunk. There was a bullet in the seam there. And I picked it up, looked at it, started to put it back. And then I was looking around. I saw no agents to secure the car. There was nobody in behind. Everybody was paying attention to the president and removing his body. And I was worried that this bullet was going to get lost.

Souvener, hunter photographers were going to show up. And so I just, it was a snap decision. to put the bullet in my pocket and keep it. It was an important piece of evidence. I didn't want it to get lost. And from there, we raced into the hospital. If I may review there for a moment. So you initially found bullet fragments from his head, I suppose, to her left.

But this other bullet was from the right, and it was not so much a fragment, but the full shape of the thick, right? It was a fully intact bullet, and it had been right behind her. and the only thing visible on the bullet or damage to me at the time it had rifle striations so those were the only markings on that particular bullet.

When you took the first lady and the president into the hospital, you placed that bullet onto a stretcher. What was the story behind that? Well, we got, we raced through the entrance. Mrs. Kennedy was right behind the gurney that we were, had the president's body. I was right to her left. And we raced through just kind of an open area

into the emergency room, down a short hallway, came to trauma room one. The gurney had to be switched, turned to a 90-degree angle to enter. By them, people were joining the parade, and I just got pushed. into the trauma room by the crowd. When we turned to go in, I slipped behind Mrs. Kennedy

to help keep her from getting bumped. We entered the trauma room. She kind of stepped to the left just inside the doorway. I was shoved right up against the table where they were removing the president's body from the gurney and placing him on to the examination table. And I just got pushed up against the table right by his feet. During that time, I mean, people were shouting, screaming.

It was really utter chaos. The gurney that the president had been on was pushed aside and his body was placed on the table. Were you aware at that moment that you had this bullet in your possession? Were you thinking about that at all? Yes, I was. I slipped my hand into my pocket, and I was kind of fumbling with the bullet. And when I had taken it from the limo, my first thought was,

I'll give this to S-AIC Kellerman and tell them what I did later. But I've got it in the trauma room, and I'm thinking, well, I've got this perfect, piece of evidence and this is a place where it should be with the president's body. They will find it during their autopsy there and it will help help in some way. So everything was happening so quickly. I just took my hand out with the bullet and I reached over and I placed it on the, it was like a cotton blanket that the president's body was on. And it started to roll off. And I stopped it and reached over and twisted it so that it wouldn't roll.

And by then everybody was starting to exit the room. I have no idea how long we were in there. But then when we walked out, I felt this huge relief and felt, you know, I had placed the bullet. I'd done an important job or whatever. And I was relieved thinking they'd find. the bullet during the autopsy. But they never did, right? That's the mystery. Well, the mystery is, yeah, they did not find it there. I think everybody was rushing,

everybody was in a hurry, and there was a discussion about leaving the hospital, and there was a secret service, decided they wanted to take the body back to Washington. That was the best place to be. And I did not really witnessed the major part of the confrontation, because I had been assigned to Mrs. Kennedy, and I was kind of overwatching closer to her than whatever else was going on, you know, in the hallway. Eventually, the story of the bullet becomes about Connolly. Am I correct in saying that? There seems to be a mix-up. Well, that's what I eventually, I was hearing that. When I left and after the assassination, It was like nobody to really question me.

I was never interviewed. I'm just hearing what was happening. I never read anything about it. I buried all those things somewhere in a locker and a basement of my mind. And I was not there. I had left the Secret Service before they had finished the Warren report.

So when they were, came out with all their information. I was not aware of for up to almost 45 years that this bullet was supposedly on Connolly's stretcher. I never read the Warren report and blocked that all out. It's been 60 years and 11 presidencies. I asked Jefferson and Thomas how they think the assassination of John F. Kennedy changed America. First Jefferson. The official story can't be true. It doesn't hang together forensically. The evidence isn't there. So what we've learned since the JFK movie, since the JFK Review Board released all of these documents over the past 20 years, what we've learned undermines the story of the lone gunman

fatally. The story of the lone gunman cannot be true based on the preponderance of evidence forensically, photographically, medically. And so we're left with a situation where we don't have a good explanation of who killed Kennedy, but we know the official story is not true. I think that the most likely explanation is that the president was killed by enemies in his own government, who had the ability to make the crime look like something else. This is not an eccentric point of view. Harry Truman thought this. Lyndon Johnson thought this.

Richard Nixon thought this. So it's just something that's been buried very. deeply for the sake of the security of the country. That was the justification. The failure to establish accountability around President Kennedy's assassination irrevocably harmed confidence in government. And its legacy is felt today

and is voiced in skepticism about the official story that is given. And so if you look at confidence in the U.S. government, that peaks in public opinion polls in September, 1964. And it has declined steadily ever since. That was the peak of the American people's confidence in the government. There were lots of reasons for that besides the Kennedy assassination,

the Vietnam War and Watergate and things like that. But the Kennedy assassination is a driver of that, the unresolved nature of it. And Thomas? Well, I guess is this the legacy here of, you know, compounded by Watergate that, you know, the United States, if you took a poll in the early 60s and I think there were polls, you know, there was strong faith in our institutions, in our government. And now we fast forward to 2023, you know, there is like well under, I think, under 30% now. People believe in the government.

And they believe in all sorts of wild conspiracy theories. Finally, I asked Jefferson about the ongoing disclosures. There's a memo that was released in its entirety for the first time last December. And it describes an internal. investigation of JFK's assassination conducted by the Miami station. And we've never seen the results of that investigation. Well, you're the records man. When will this all be out there? Or will it ever, in your opinion? The JFK Records Act of 1992 has effectively been gutted. And so the documents that are still secret, and there's some 4,400 JFK records that still contain some redactions, those records

will remain secret indefinitely. It is December, 1963. In a cold, biting wind, tucked into hats and gloves and warming layers, we approach a corner magazine stand busily populated by periodicals and newspapers, covered in handsome portraits of our now deceased president, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy's face has been ubiquitously advertised in the media. In the papers and on television, Time magazine has produced a glossy memorial edition, 50 cents an issue.

While events from last month remain a fresh and painful memory, Kennedy is quickly being elevated to icon status. If they weren't already famous while he lived, in death the initials JFK are known in every corner of the

globe. They will remain so. He will remain so. His politics, his charisma, his handsome visage, his tragic demise. It all contributes to the legend. Kennedy's approval ratings were higher than average during his presidency,

but his wave only grows in the years that follow. In 2003, his ratings are at 90%, the highest of any former president. But who could know any of this in 1963, facing a winter of discontent America had never experienced before? Back then, standing at that magazine stand, all we could do was stare at that man's smiling face, now staring back at us. For a moment more, we shiver off the feelings of fear and trepidation. Take a deep, cold breath, and move on.

Thanks to Paul Landis, Jefferson Morley, and Thomas Whelan for their contributions to this episode. Perhaps one day, more records will bring more proper closure to the question of what happened to President John F. Kennedy. But for now, for today, I'm Don Wildman. Thanks for listening to American History Hit.