Fourth Reich Archaeology - The Warren Commission Decided 10: Jenner-al Dynamics

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

This episode marks the beginning of the end of our exposition on the boots on the ground on the Warren Commission - the staff lawyers. One of the most persuasive anti-conspiracy lines deployed against Warren Commission critics is, “how could all of those staffers on the Commission really be in on a coverup? They’re independent-minded guys with no political bag to carry!” Building on the work we did with Specter and others, this episode digs deep for a solid answer to that line of argument, and we zero in on probably the single most important lawyer on the whole staff, Albert E. Jenner, Jr. He’s another guy who, like Arlen Specter (and pretty much everyone else for that matter), came into the Commission with great ambition, contributed materially to bolstering the Commission’s reputation after the fact, and were rewarded for their loyalty to the lie.Jenner was the senior staff lawyer in charge of the portion of the Commission’s investigation and report focused on profiling Lee Harvey Oswald.  We’ve picked Jenner because of his area of expertise on the Commission plus the fact that he has all the biomarkers of a tried-and-true Reichsman.  Jenner is a Chicago trial lawyer. A rainmaker. A lawyer’s lawyer. His most telling connection to the American Empire is his extremely close relationship with Chicago industrialist and financier Henry Crown, who rose to prominence as the controlling shareholder of the arms manufacturing giant General Dynamics.  You see, the Yale law trained Jenner was consiglieri to the Crown family—and lead outside counsel for General Dynamics—at the flashpoint in the 20th century when airpower became THE decisive factor in warfare, giving rise to the era of massive military contracts.Well wouldn’t you know that a decisive moment in the history of aeronautic defense contracting was in the making right at the time of JFK’s assassination that put Jenner at the center of the action?  In the months leading up to Kennedy’s death, the administration was laser focused on achieving military superiority over the Soviet Union by harnessing the awesome power of long-range supersonic jets.  Enter General Dynamics.  With the advice and counsel of Jenner, General Dynamics won a record-breaking $7 billion government contract to build the next generation of flying death machines, the Tactical Fighter Experimental, or TFX. This episode spirals into deep and dark territory involving bribery, silk-topper lawyers with Pynchonesque names (ahem, “Roswell Gilpatrick”), synchornicities, and of course, plenty of Family History.Keep your Fourth Reich field guide handy for this one, as there are many familiar artifacts we will encounter and identify.

Colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of the science.

I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. He has a mile. He knows so long as a die.

Afraid of we never be secure. It usually takes the national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. A lot of killers. You've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? This is the CIA. And I'm dead.

And I'm Dick, Fort Reich is coming. welcome back listener for another installment of our long-running series within a series The Warren Commission Decided. We hope you've enjoyed our last episode's foray into current events. We received some truly touching feedback, and we love to hear from you. It really puts wind in our sails and presses us onward in this project of ours. So thank you. And for those of you who've not yet reached out, you are more than welcome. In fact, you're invited and encouraged to do so at forthrightepod at gmail.com. We are also on Twitter and Instagram at Forth Reich Pod, and again, for those of you who feel strongly enough about our work here

to encourage us monetarily to keep the trains running, and indeed to add cars to these trains and to add coal to the engines, well, you may consider giving us a donation on Patreon. com slash forthright archaeology. We very much appreciate all the support we've gotten, and please understand that we do this out of a sense of collective solidarity with our listening audience and really with humanity at large. And on that score, before we get into the subject matter of this week's episode, historical as it is, we do have one word to say about current events that are happening right now as we record on March 9th, 2025. This is the day, perhaps it's been a couple of days, but the saga is

unfolding of the fascistic arrest and intended deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, the graduate student from Columbia University, who is a legal permanent resident of the United States, a.k.a.a. a green card holder, who has not been charged with any crime, who has been implicated in protesting against the Israeli genocide of his people, the Palestinians, and who is the father to a about-to-be-born baby, his wife, an American citizen, is eight months pregnant. And if you haven't seen this in the news listener, it is a story that really brings home this thesis of ours that we are living in the Fourth Reich, that fascism is not on the horizon, but is boiling around us like so much hot water around a frog placed in the pot

before the water had reached that roiling boil. And ICE, an agency with a short history born out of the Bush administration's global war on terror in the wake of 9-11 is shaping up to once again Don its longtime role as American Gestapo, rounding people up for political protest of a peaceful sort and threatening people with dire consequences for exercising their First Amendment rights. Now, the legal case for deportation here is highly dubious. And I'm sure, Dick, you'll agree with me that we hope the courts will not follow this administration's lead in bending the law around their goals because if you're in the country on a green card, you know, technically, as far as I understand it, you should not be deportable. without an underlying criminal conviction.

And here there's not even a criminal charge. And the First Amendment of the Constitution technically applies to anybody present in the United States. It is not conditioned on American citizenship. And so if, indeed, this country's legal system has any semblance of fairness and justice for all, well, Mahmoud Khalil will be promptly released and permitted to remain in the country to see the birth of his child in the next month or so. of course that's a big if and we hope listener that you'll be as outraged about this as we are

and you know it's all connected to the type of historical analysis that we are engaging in on this podcast to excavate the roots of our current fascist reality and to find within the respectable veneer of democratic accountability and fairness, the underbelly of oppression, capriciousness, and, you know, genocidal white supremacy. So best wishes for Mr. Khalil, but more importantly, we are concerned that there's an outpouring of outrage about this intolerable escalation of thought control and of the clampdown on free speech all while. Trump, Musk, and their ilk purport to be the most pro-free speech administration and history. Yeah, and what's particularly heinous with the case of Mahmoud Khalil is it's now Sunday, March 9th. I think he was taken on Friday, and neither is lawyer or his wife know where he is right now.

They were told that he was in a detention center in New Jersey, but as of tonight, at least, they still have not been able to locate him. So just another little point about how particularly heinous this situation is. And keep looking for our episodes. Hopefully we won't be next to be disappeared. And hopefully you won't be next to be disappeared either, listener. And only by keeping the names of the disappeared on our tongues, can we ensure that that list stays short, at least for now. We're Palestinian, you, he'd be it, make you lachma.

Okay. Okay, what do you say we're talking to the warrington decision decided. Let's do it. Let's start off with a little bit of a recap because it's been a while since we've revisited. Okay, what do you say? We turn to the Warren Commission decided. Let's do it. Let's start off with a little bit of a recap because it's been a while since we've revisited this series within a series about that great coup in Dallas and the great cover-up thereafter. Now, after we laid out the formation of the commission, the inception, the idea of having a blue-ribbon commission, we also went into the background of the commissioners, the seven commissioners that ultimately served on the Warren Commission, and after that we've largely been focusing on the staff. We did deep dives on commission counsel, J. Lee Rankin, who we've called the 8th Commissioner, and Mr. Magic Bullet Theory himself, Arlen Specter.

If you haven't already, please do go back and get caught up before proceeding in this episode. As we've been saying all along, we're sort of building a case here, and we really think you'll... get the most out of the experience if you follow it in a linear fashion. Yeah, and I would just chime in real quickly to say that the interview with Jeff Kay about the mind control consultants, the psychiatrists that contributed to the commission's work also figures into this linear progression and it will be foundational to some of what we're talking about later on in this episode today. Right. And in this episode today and in our next episode, what we're going to do is round out our discussion of the commission by sort of doing

deep dives into particular members of the staff, just like we were looking into Jaley Rankin and Arlen Spector. We're going to now look at some of the lower level attorneys, the staff attorneys, on the commission. So as we've mentioned before, there were 26 total lawyers on the staff of the Warren Commission, 14 assistant counsel and 12 staff attorneys.

We have been framing up the commission as sort of a law firm, right? And we were characterizing the staff lawyers and the assistant counsel as the associates of that firm. Now, we could do a whole series on the staff itself, as there are plenty of interesting characters and stories to be told there, but that would take us probably the better part of a year to get through. So instead, what we're going to do is just pick a handful of the staff lawyers who we think best embody the Warren Commission's role in the covert destruction of American democracy and the. consolidation of the Fourth Reich. These are the guys who, you know, like Spector, they tapped

in one way or another to the cover-up and embraced their role. And by embracing their role, and by being a part of the cover-up, they were rewarded with accolades and career opportunities. And I think at this point, it would be useful if we just reiterate the thesis of this entire series within a series, which is, you know, the Warren Commission, it was conceived as a cover-up, and that cover-up put a nail in the coffin of anything that would even remotely resemble democracy in America. And the way we've sort of built this case is by establishing these pillars to support our thesis. And Don, I wonder if you could walk us through the the pillars. Sure. So I think the first pillar on which this thesis is based was developed through

our discussion of the formation of the Warren Commission. Remember, the leading voices that were whispering in LBJ's ear, or perhaps not so much a whisper as a shout in some instances, These were people who came from what we've referred to as the Georgetown set, and not just us. I mean, it is a recognized social grouping that lived in close geographic proximity to one another. They worked closely together. They represented similar class interests, and they either were from the establishment. American elite tracing its roots way back to the foundation of the country or were aspirational entrance into that group. So we're talking about people like Joe Alsup, who was a member of the

Roosevelt family remember, people like Nick Katzenbach, who one of his ancestors was the founder of, I think it was, what was it, Newark, New Jersey, we also had the Rostow brothers who fall into this category of entrance into the establishment, guys that were on the National Security Council and who were using Cold War hawkishness as a way to sidle in to that establishment. and they all shared a group of acquaintances at the core of the CIA's founding fathers. These were people who had been in the OSS during World War II and who were at the ground floor of the CIA when it was established by the National Security Act of 1947. So you're Frank Wisner's, your Dickie Bistles, you're Alan Dulles, and your James Jesus Angleton's. And these were not people who were aligned with LBJ.

They certainly had use for LBJ. Remember Joe Alsup and his boss, Washington Post publisher, and Georgetown set staple Phil Graham, took credit for getting LBJ on the ticket with Kennedy in the first place. But LB.J, at least on the personal level, was closer to the likes of J. Edgar Hoover. The two of them actually lived close together on the other side of town in Southeast D.C. So they, both Hoover and L.B.J. were initially very reluctant and even opposed to the idea of a Warren Commission, but with threats of unfavorable coverage in the

Washington Post, of moves being made by Katzenbach within the Justice Department, well, LBJ found himself without much of a choice. And so hereupon is built this first pillar. And closely related to that, I think the second pillar of our thesis finds its support in the biographies of the commissioners themselves and were especially concerned with the likes of Alan Dulles, who asked more substantive questions during the commission's work than even Chief Justice Warren. And, you know, many have called it the Dulles Commission as kind of a joke for that reason, that he was so active. Remember, whereas all the other commissioners were full-time employed during the 1963 to 64 period that they were

conducting the commission's work, Dulles was not. In fact, he was was the only commissioner with no day job. So he had plenty of time to dedicate to the commission and to steering the ship. Similarly, John J. McCloy was a close Dulles ally and a long-time establishment insider, the chairman of the establishment as he was affectionately called by other establishmentarians and their willing stooge the somewhat younger and highly ambitious congressman from Michigan, our boy, Jerry Ford. And so this brings us to our third pillar, which we are going to be discussing next. So now our focus is going to be on the staff attorneys who actually did the bulk of the grunt work, you know, whether that was reviewing investigative documents,

whether, you know, reviewing reports generated by the police, the FBI, the Secret Service, whether it was, you know, questioning witnesses, drafting the report itself, the boots on the ground, so to speak, the folks in the trenches. Given the number and qualifications of the staff lawyers one of the best arguments in favor of the commission's conclusions is that it's unbelievable that all these guys were willingly in on it right this is a classic sort of rebuttal to the idea of conspiracy that there's no way that all these guys were in on it now to be clear we're not necessarily saying that all these guys were in on it either right We talked about how J. Lee Rankin actually reversed course in the 1970s at the time the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Investigations came up in how he called the Warren report into serious question after becoming aware of the degree to which the CIA and FBI misled the commission. when we turn to our episode on Arlen Specter we first of all revealed how you know what a massive impact this young staffer had on the on the Warren reports conclusions right he's the guy who came up with this infamous single bullet theory without supervision too right his supposed supervisor Frank Adams just disappeared and didn't participate in the commission really at all, leaving Spector to do the whole piece on the forensic and medical evidence all by himself. Absolutely. And I think Spector's a great example of how you don't need a totally nefarious motive to come up with these conclusions, right? For Spector, his manipulation of the evidence sort of to advance.

the single bullet theory that was rooted in his sort of masterful prosecutorial skills right this idea of fitting the facts to a theory and he was highly ambitious he wanted to make a name for himself he had a political career he had his eyes on right so he wanted to serve the commission in a way that the commissioners would find useful and picking up you know, his cues from the likes of Alan Dulles himself. Right. And it's interesting, too, that Spector, you know, more than average, certainly, was in the room for these deliberations.

He made himself indispensable. That's something that young lawyers hear an awful lot. You want to advance in your career. You want to get recognized. Make yourself indispensable. grab an area and own that area, whether it's of the case, an area of law, whatever, grab onto it, and that will be your stepping stone. And so even without, like, clearly, we covered some bad behavior by Arlen Specter,

whether it's his sexist berating of witnesses, whether it's his making threats, or whether it's his outright manipulation of witness testimony from the actual words that they say into what he put in his chapter of the report. We're not giving him a clean bill here, but we are saying that all of that misbehavior, all of that legally and ethically questionable conduct on Spector's part is explainable without needing to say, oh, he was trying to cover up the CIA's fingerprints on the assassination of JFK, right? His ambition and his finding himself in this critical position were enough to explain what he did once he was in that position, which is to come up with a bogus theory that using facts to, you know, serve persuasively your side of the case, right?

That's what he, and it wasn't coming from any sort of a nefarious background. It was just he was at that point a well-oiled machine to take whatever facts were available and structuring them in a manner that was most persuasive for his side. Yeah, and a guy whose work that we are, will cite it as a source for today's episode and more generally speaking as kind of a heuristic is Peter Dale Scott's book, Deep Politics and the Assassination of JFK, where he very explicitly eschews focusing on the individuals and on you know, who knew what and lied about what in favor of a systemic analysis. And seeing as how this is, at the end of the day, a podcast by two lawyers, well, a lot of our focus has also been on drawing out and attempting to explain to a non-legal audience some of the prototypical types of lawyers that pepper the legal profession in the course of our excavation, right?

So I think, Dick, you just talked about Spector kind of representing the prosecutorial prototype. But even earlier than that, we talked about your deal makers. your Dulles and your McCloys, who operate at a level above the courts, really, in terms of practicing law. You know, these are guys, like, when the Dulles brothers were at Sullivan and Cromwell, you know, they were making up the law kind of as they went along. No wonder that the great book about that firm is tight. a law unto itself and so these are not people who feel constrained by the law as it's written on paper because they understand the nature of the relationship between the law and power They shape the law to meet the needs of the powerful, the owners of capital,

their multinational clients that kind of make up a who's who of the American establishment. We also talked about your classic judicious type of attorney, the what I call the point dexter's in the group. Those are the likes of Earl Warren or Lee Rankin. Now, these lawyers, these are lawyers with a more academic disposition. They're not the quick talkers, but the consensus builders. While there is a certain liberal idealism reflected in this type of lawyer, I think there's also some naivete or pretense depending on how,

cynical you want to be so this lot at least purports to believe in constitutionalism and the rule of law and the march of progress and an involving society and even as that belief is belied by reality time and again and then we this is my favorite type we also talked about the Casper the friendly ghost type of lawyer, right? The likes of Frank Adams. These are the lawyers who are sort of no-shows for the job, but they like the title and sort of the clout. And the great thing about these guys is that their absence is what allows others to shine, right?

So in the case of Frank Adams, he serendipitously abandoned his post, where he was sort of the senior to the junior Arlen Specter which allowed Arlen Specter to sort of shine but all the while nevertheless continuing to sign memos with Frank Adams' name even though Spector was the one who actually wrote them.

That's right. And this episode is really going to focus on a different type of senior lawyer, but this is the rainmaker. We'll call it the rainmaker prototype. And what that means is a guy who just is almost magnetic. He's got charisma. He's got talent.

He's got legal ability. But where the line is between legal ability and performance and connections is often blurred. So it's a person who's larger than life, a person whose reputation precedes them, and their myth and the reality kind of snowball into this persona that drives their their legacy and their life's work even while they're alive. And the real embodiment of the Rainmaker on the Warren Commission, there's only one, really. And that is Albert Jenner.

I believe that he went by Bert during his life. And you can't. talk about the rainmaker without also covering the toady and like any rainmaker bert jenner had his toady in the person of wesley j jim lebler they were a team like Frank Adams and Arlen Specter were a team. And if not of equal importance to the overall picture of the Warren report as the forensic and medical and ballistics evidence that Spector wrote up, their part of the report was a close second.

And it was certainly of paramount importance. to the overall report because it occupied such a massive, massive amount of not only the pages in the written report, but the number of witnesses called the investigative resources employed and the focus in the press and in the national discourse of, about the Warren Commission's findings. What we're talking about is the investigation into and the chapter on the life and times of Lee Harvey Oswald. And I think that we really should eschew any further ado.

Let's get digging. Out on the east side of Chicago, back in the USA, back in the bad old days. In the heat of a summer night, in the land of the dollar bill, when the town of Chicago died. So let's begin with Bert Jenner of Chicago, Illinois. Jenner was the son of a Chicago cop and grew up on the city's south side. He was born in 1907, which is the same year as Lee Rankin, making him older than Commissioner's Ford and Boggs. Now apparently, in his college days, Bert made money participating in boxing matches for $50 a pop. By all accounts,

Jenner was a tall, charismatic, ambitious, and brilliant man. He is the namesake of the major Chicago-based law firm, Jenner and Block. Shout out to any of our listeners who may be employed by Jenner and Block. It's a big firm. It's a huge, yeah, it's massive. international firm now. But Jenner, as you mentioned, he represents another type of lawyer, right? Sometimes referred to as the lawyer's lawyer.

He was reportedly a masterful litigator in the courtroom. One of his friends who was a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals said he looked nine feet tall when he was presenting in court. this is the guy who's you know he is a courtroom lawyer he masters the facts and the law maintains total composure and never gave anything away to the other side the utter embodiment of discretion and decorum a dying breed in fact there's not many like that anymore you said it tell me about it but he was a great courtroom lawyer but he wasn't just a courtroom lawyer, right? He was also a dealmaker and an advisor and a civic leader.

You'd find his name on just about any membership list around the legal profession. The American Bar Association, the Illinois State Bar Association, where he did a stint as president, the American College of Trial Lawyers, where he also did a term as president. And he was also involved in the committees that write, and update the federal rules of civil procedure, which are the rules that govern court procedure in the U.S. federal courts, and the uniform commercial code, which is a model

set of codes that are adopted by the states to handle sort of commercial dealing, commercial transactions, contracts, things like that. All of the civic participation may gener something of a gatekeeper or a kingmaker. So, for example, as part of the ABA, he was a member of the ABA's committee on the federal judiciary, which is the group responsible for reporting to the Senate on the fitness of candidates for federal judgeships. Now, this is a cush spot, right? You're essentially the body that the private body that is going to make or break someone's chances of becoming a federal judge. judge. Jenner also served on the Board of Governors of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which allowed

him to keep tabs on and steer the efforts of the country's largest civil rights advocacy. So now, remember, this is the group, you'll recall from one of our earlier episodes, this is the group that Thurgood Marshall worked for, which litigated the Brown versus Board of Education. lawsuit right he's the classic white liberal in the 50s who's on the board who's helping decide which cases to pick up which cases not to pick up and in the context of the cold war this often meant ensuring the liberal anti-communist bona fides of any civil rights group so don i mean so far this jenner seems like a great guy right i mean what's the i i don't know uh sounds like um an okay dude to me yeah well you know beneath the surface of every great man

And if you're talking about post-war America, the chances are the more you dig, the worse the smell is going to be that emanates from below. I think the case of Bert Jenner is no different. And a warning to our listeners, please bear with us here because this shit's about to get a little bit weird. We're going to turn over what looks like the solid rock of Bert Jenner. And underneath that solid rock, we're going to find a lot of little creepy, crawly insects that emerge from the soft underbelly below. die.

Brother want a night the people saw. Brother want to fight the people saw. Yes, indeed. And the sound of the battle rang. So like you said, Dick, in light of his legendary legal talents, Jenner was unsurprisingly very sought after. In the 1940s, he became the leading earner. at his Chicago law firm, where, you know, he had just entered this firm as an associate.

By the 50s, he became a named partner. We've talked about this phenomenon before. In fact, it just pops into my mind. Remember, listener, back in Jerry World, a long time ago, we were talking about Jerry's time practicing law in Grand Rapids, and he worked for the Butterfield Keeney and Amberg law firm. We talked a lot about Julius Amberg as one of these lawyer's lawyer type guys. You could think of Jenner in a similar mold, albeit on a much larger stage given Chicago's prominence as the second city in America.

And so if you are one of the prime legal talents in the country's second city, which is home to no shortage of major industrial fortunes, of a massive criminal underworld in the Chicago outfit, you are inevitably going to represent some unsafery characters. who have fat wallets, right? And Jenner was no exception. And the first and the most important one of these unsavory Jenner associations is the horse to which he hitched up his wagon. You know, all of those committee positions, all of his astronomical national profile, a lot of it is thanks to his biggest single client, and that is the Chicago industrialist, financier,

and eventually massive arms merchant, Henry Crown. Henry Crown, of course, rose to prominence as the controlling shareholder and president of the arms manufacturing giant general dynamics, and we're not going to go deep into it here, But general dynamics should really be a household name to anyone, even remotely familiar with the military industrial complex and its history over the course of the 20th century, right? As air power became the decisive factor in post-World War II arms manufacturing and battlefield importance, general dynamics. was right there in it. Here this morning, it is my pleasure to introduce Mr. Marion L. Hicks,

Vice President of the Chamber of Commerce, and General Dynamics. This is a personal pleasure for me to present the most gallant, able text, them all, one who has done so much for Texas and America, the distinguished vice president of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson.

Ladies and gentlemen, I proudly present the president of the United States. Three years ago, last September, I came here on Vice President, spoke at Burnt-Bernett Park. I called in that speech for a national security policy and a national security system which was second to none, a position which said not first but if, when, and how, but first. And I want to say a word about that pledge here in Fort Worth, which understands national defense,

and its importance to the security of the United States. During the days of the Indian War, this city was a fort. During the days of World War II, the great liberator bombers in which my brother flew with his co-pilot from this city were produced here. First non-stop flight around the world took off and returned here in a plane building factories here. The Iroquois helicopter from Fort Worth is a mainstay in our fight against the guerrillas in South Vietnam.

So wherever the confrontation may occur, and in the last three years it's occurred at least three occasions, in Laos, Berlin, in Cuba, and it will again. Wherever it occurs, the products of Fort Worth, and the men of Fort Worth provide us with a sense of security. and in the not too distant future. They are on the same plane as your Lockheed's, as your Bowings, right? They're similarly situated to compete on that turf.

And it just so happens that a decisive moment in the history of air. aeronautics defense contracting was in the making and was in fact reaching a boiling point at the precise moment of John F. Kennedy's assassination. By now, by the time of this event that we're about to discuss, Bert Jenner had risen to become the lead outside lawyer for General Dynamics. He was, to use the old mob term, again, the consiglieri to Henry Crown. He was in every room where the decisions were being made and the details were being hammered out. And with this, I think, Dick, you want to start us off in talking about the T-F-X saga?

I guess we'll start in the twilight of the Eisenhower Delis administration. Everyone remembers Ike's farewell address criticizing the military industrial complex. Notwithstanding that farewell address, the future looked pretty bright for the military industrial complex. Both majority party candidates in 1960, Nixon and Kennedy took hard line stands against global communism, and both campaigned especially hard on the promise of American military predominance, especially Kennedy who had this emphasis on closing the mythical missile gap now one piece of hardware the military brass wanted to use to achieve that goal was an aircraft called the tactical fighter experimental or tfx which both the air force and the navy

wanted to build for long-range supersonic heavy transport missions, aerial surveillance, and, of course, bombing, including, of course, nuclear bombing. The F-11 tactical fighter, one new aircraft for two services being developed by the United States Air Force. The F-11A for the United States Air Force. the F11B for the United States Navy it's a twin engine mock two two place side by side fighter aircraft designed to perform an air force tactical mission

and a naval fleet air superiority mission and I think the like actual TFX jet the supersonic jet it's like iconic right I think everybody sort of at least if you're a boy growing up in this country you sort of know what it looks like Yeah, I mean, it was the eventual plane was, was it called, I want to say it was called the Ardvark? That sounds right.

Yeah, the General Dynamics F11 Ardvark. It's called the Ardvark. You may be familiar with the animal, the long snouted animal. In Spanish, it's called Cerdo Armigero, the ant eating pig. which I always have found to be a very apt descriptor of an ardvark and the plane it has this long nose it's pretty iconic it was in circulation for quite a while globally right it wasn't just the US that had the yard bark yeah that's right Australia bought a bunch of them anyways yeah exactly this is it was around forever this is not a military history podcast and a lot a lot

Yeah, the last time I was into this stuff where I was like 10 or 11 years old. But I was into it. I mean, when I was a kid, I was really into like this kind of stuff. And in the not too distant future, a new Fort Worth product. And I'm glad that there was a table separating Mr. Hicks and myself, a new Fort Worth product. The TFX, tactical fighter experimental. Nobody knows what those words mean, but that's what they mean. Tactical fighter experimental will serve the forces of freedom

and will be the number one airplane in the world today. There's been a good deal of discussion of the long and hard fought competition to win the TFX contract. But very little discussion about what this plane will do. The F-111 will have approximately 90% mission reliability. A combat ceiling of more than 60,000 feet, sustained speed of approximately Mach 2 at altitude, and a ferry range of approximately 4,000 miles

on internal fuel alone. With airborne refueling or external tanks, the range can be greatly extended. enormously increasing the Air Force's ability to participate in limited wars. In all these ways, the success of our national defense depends upon this city in the western United States, 10,000 miles from Vietnam, 5,000 or 6,000 miles from Berlin, thousands of miles from troubled spots in Latin America and Africa of the Middle East. And yet, Fort Worth, and what it does, and what it does, and what? it produces, participates in all these great historic events.

Texas as a whole, and Fort Worth bear particular responsibility for this national defense effort, for military procurement in this state totals nearly one and a quarter billion dollars. There are more military personnel on active duty in this state than any in the nation, save one. And it's not Massachusetts. any in the nation say one and i will also say that in preparation for this i did read and rely on this book the defender the story of general dynamics by roger franklin which does provide quite a good background in military technology written for the lay reader. So if you're interested in more of this stuff,

it's another resource that you can check out for more about the rise of General Dynamics. But let's get back to... Yeah, let's get back to it. General Dynamics, I don't think it's the biggest contractor anymore. I think it's like, you know, Lockheed or Boeing or whatever. now, but at the time, what we'll see is would be the biggest contractor, right? Prime contractor for the F-11 program is General Dynamics Fort Worth. The contract is being

managed by the Aeronautical Systems Division of the Air Force Systems Command. First flight of the F-11A is scheduled for early 1965. The first Navy flight will follow within a year. early inventory deployment can be expected following accelerated flight tests so yeah at the time there was this call for proposals as you would ordinarily have if you're looking for a new thing right the government puts out a call for proposals and the major manufacturers who are equipped to actually build the thing they put together their specs and submit for consideration by the Pentagon. And in the case of the TFX, the major contenders here were basically down to Boeing and General Dynamics. And Boeing's proposal won the recommendation from the Pentagon panel that initially reviewed all of the bids.

however when it went to the newly sworn in secretary of defense in the Kennedy administration Robert McNamara and remember he came to the government from the presidency of Ford Motors well McNamara overruled the panel's recommendation and he wanted to give the contract to general dynamics and like you were suggesting dick this contract was game-changing so before the f tx bidding war commenced general dynamics was a little bit in trouble you know it wasn't on the verge of bankruptcy or anything like that but it was in danger of needing to shutter one of its two major manufacturing sites. Now, those two sites, one of them, was in Fort Worth, Texas, and that site was the one known as the Convair plant on the chopping block. So this became

sort of mission critical for general dynamics, because the contract was worth $7 billion, dollars. That's equivalent today to more than $70 billion. And at the time, it was the largest single military contract ever. There's nothing bigger. And so, of course, behind the scenes here, right, there's always politics at play. Boeing is from the great state of Washington. And General Dynamics has its corporate shop in Illinois, but its real heart and soul is Texas. And so when McNamara comes and he says that, sorry Boeing, we're actually going to give it to General Dynamics, the senator from Boeing, as he was fondly known, talking, of course, about Henry Scoop, Jackson, the political mentor of Donald Rumsfeld, and one of the real godfathers of the neo-conservative movement, albeit a member of the Democrat Party, well, he called foul,

right? He did not want his state to lose out on that fat old hog of pork. And he launched a Senate investigation into the FTX contracting process. And it was assigned to the standing Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, which was chaired then by Senator John McClellan. This was a senator whose name you might have heard from the McClellan Commission, the famous investigation into the mafia, which was spearheaded by a young Bobby Kennedy. So this is the milieu in which this contest is taking place, and what Scoop Jackson assigned McClellan to investigate was whether General Dynamics had earned itself the contract for the TFX by illicit means, right? did general dynamics somehow influence the Kennedy administration or Bob McNamara or the people in the

Defense Department in the ultimate decision to overturn the initial Pentagon panel and give the award to general dynamics. So this is where we get back to Bert Jenner in the picture. Right, because Jenner was the one. of course, representing Henry Crown and General Dynamics through this whole process, which it started in 1962 and was just picking up momentum in the autumn of 1963. But wouldn't you know it, Jenner's client was not exactly in the hot seat. Even if all signs pointed to Crown and general dynamics in the end,

as of fall 1963, the main focus of the, the Senate investigation was on two Kennedy administration defense department appointees, Roswell, Gilpatrick, and Fred Korth. Let's talk about Gilpatrick first and then Korth, but let's do a little detour here. Why don't you tell us a little about Gilpatrick? Yeah, I will be delighted to do that because you know me and my fondness for these New England Yankees with names taken straight off the pages of Thomas Pinchon. So, as you might guess, Roswell Gilpatrick went to the Hotchkiss School, another one of these

New England prep school boarding schools on the level of a Groton or of a Lawrenceville or what have you. And then where did he go for undergrad? I mean, by this point, listener, I hope you'll guess. It's Yale. And he also went to Yale Law School. And while he was at Yale, who was his sort of mentor and big brother figure, none other than friend of the pod, Robert Lovett. This, of course, to refresh your memory listener,

was the investment banker from Brown Brothers Haram. who was the other one alongside John J. McCloy of Henry L. Stimson's Imps of Satan in the War Department during World War II. So this is the milieu from which Roswell Gilpatrick emerges, and he had, after graduating from Yale, worked extensively. as an attorney at the law firm of Cravath, Swain, and Moore. Remember, McCloy also worked at Cravath. He, in fact, had been managing partner there at some point in time, so the overlaps here are extensive, and one of Cravath's clients was unsurprisingly general dynamics.

Now, Gilpatrick's connections, to General Dynamics for whom he had performed this legal work, well, that raised some eyebrows in the Senate Investigative Committee. And it put eyes on Gilpatrick as a potential conflict of interest because, you know, before he enters government, he's working for General Dynamics, he comes into the government, and then General Dynamics comes away with this big prize. So putting those pieces together, it's not surprising as to why he came under suspicion.

And he was called repeatedly before the Senate subcommittee to testify about his connections to general dynamics. And this process was no small embarrassment for Gilpatrick, and it ultimately led to his resignation from the Defense Department in January 1964. But, Dick, this detail I just love, do you want to know when Gilpatrick's very last testimony was taken on Capitol Hill in this investigation? Why don't you go ahead and say it? Because it's pretty crazy. The date was November 19th, 1963. And, yeah, so he's getting grilled on this stuff.

Now, Gilpatrick was not the only member of the Kennedy administration under the gun for the TFX scandal. And if Gilpatrick represented the Yankee faction of the American ruling class to import old Carl Oglesby's Yankee cowboy dichotomy here, Korth represented the cowboys. There was a noble ranger, his name was Mustang Ray. He left his song with butter, you went ranging for a word, with ranging for a word He never sleep within a pit no comforts would he know

But like a brave old taxi and arranging he would go Or ranging he would go A Mustang was the hero of his day No more the Indians will he fight For he's heard his last poor room Having joined another two where they haven't any enemies to fight. So, Korth was a native Texas boy,

and he was appointed by President Kennedy as Secretary of the Navy. And just because we are in such a small world, Dick, I want you to tell them who vacated the Secretary of the Navy seat that Korth came to fill? That would be none other than John Connolly, who left the Navy in 1962 to become the governor of Texas. It's such a small world. Incidentally, another little detail that I'll just throw in here, probably coincidental, but before Connolly had left the Secretary of the Navy, for some bizarre reason, Lee Harvey O'Brien,

Oswald had written a letter to John Connolly asking him to change Oswald's discharge status from dishonorable and remove that smirk, that smudge on Oswald's military record, which I never really got why because Oswald was a Marine and not in the Navy, but I don't know, maybe the Secretary of the Navy has some authority over the Marines as well. back to corth so like connolly his texan predecessor in the role corth was obviously politically connected to linden baines johnson the texas democrat of all texas democrats right and if you're connected to Lyndon Johnson, that means that you're connected to the money in Texas. And the money in Texas largely comes from that black goo that sometimes bubbles up under the ground known as black gold,

oil, baby. Courth's hometown was Fort Worth, Texas, and he made his name as a lawyer and a anchor there in Fort Worth. Like we said before, General Dynamics was sort of one of the biggest businesses in town in Fort Worth. And so a guy like Fred Korth was obviously trying to get a little piece of that as well. Part of the money to support the Fort Worth manufacturing operations that I mentioned a couple minutes ago, the Convair plant. Part of that came from loans that were signed off on by the Continental National Bank of Fort Worth and Dick, who was the president of the Continental National Bank of Fort Worth. No way.

It was Fred Korth. So we've got ourselves a little knot here, right? a knot that we are endeavoring to untangle whereby Fred Korth is loaning money to general dynamics to keep the doors open at their biggest manufacturing facility in Fort Worth, Texas. And wouldn't you know it shortly after signing that big old loan, which General Dynamics be not fooled, no less. a legal mind, then Roswell Gilpatrick himself on behalf of the Kravath firm had told General Dynamics that they could even default on this loan in the event that they lose the TFX bid. And so, you know, it wouldn't exactly be a destruction of Fred Korth's livelihood.

He's in the government now, right? It doesn't really matter to him. if General Dynamics pays off that loan or not, but certainly his friends and his former colleagues will have a real doozy of a situation on their hands. You know, they'll be on the wrong side of a longhorn to just make up a non-existent Texas phrase. Anyways, Korth...

predictably comes under the microscope of the same Senate subcommittee investigating the TFX scandal. And Korth didn't even last as long as Gilpatrick. He resigned from his post at the top of the Navy Department on October 14, 1963, and he returned back to Fort Worth. and you said it was a small world well it's about to get so much smaller because in another insane synchronicity that seems to like swirl around

the JFK assassination as a young lawyer in 1948 Korth represented a man by the name of Edwin Eckahl and his divorce from his wife Marguerite

Marguerite had come into her marriage to Actaul with sons from a previous marriage, two boys one of those boys was named Lee Harvey Oswald and the other was

Robert Oswald. Robert would eventually also work for general dynamics for several years in their fourth work conver plant before being laid off around 1957 and yeah there's even more there's even more insane synchronicities around this i told you was

going to get weird listener but after corth resigned from the government well he was ready to start midlife and he got a little goofy with it started having some romantic affairs one of which was particularly torrid and long-lasting, and might we say, admirable in the level of love that they found. And that was with a woman by the name of Marjorie Merryweather Post. And you might know, if you're an animal collective fan, that name from the Maryweather Post pavilion. the concert venue and namesake of the Animal Collective album. But that's not really the importance of Marjorie Maryweather Post. The importance of Marjorie Maryweather Post,

the heiress to the serial fortune of the Post name brand, was the owner of a sprawling, palatial Palm Beach, Florida estate. What was that one called again? Huh, sounds like Mar-a-Lago. It was. That sounds a lot like Mar-Lago. Yeah. Fred Korth came into ownership of Mar-a-Lago.

Marjorie died in 1998. Korth was made the trustee of her estate, and he sold her property to a young businessman from Queens who... Unfortunately, happens to have the nuclear codes next to the bag of McDonald's hamburgers, next to the remote control, next to his corpulent ophish living corpse sprawled out on a bed somewhere at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as we record but there's one more core thing you want to get you want to get this one i can't believe how many of these there are but we just listener please bear with us we couldn't leave these out and you know if you complain about it in the comments but this is critical information here yeah it keeps

going right so just last one court not only would he live long enough to see his property sold to President Donald J. Trump, Gorth would also live to see his step-grandson return to Texas after spending his 20s touring as a punk rock Gen X hacker musician to prepare the grounds for a political career. His step-grandson's name is, of course, Robert O'Rourke, though you might know and better as dido. Okay, you're ready for this part because this is the best part ever ever. The Warren Commission. Ah, yes.

Okay, let's get back on task. So, okay. So, Jenner was extremely close to the Crown family and General Dynamics. He was nominated by Henry Crown to General Dynamics' board of directors. When Crown's son, Lester, got into trouble for bribery in the 80s, Jenner told the New York Times that the Crown children always went to him, not their father, to get them out of trouble. So as such, right, Jenner would have been all over the TFX scandal. Right, he's the first guy that Henry Crown picks up the phone to call about anything.

Right, so he would have had these longstanding business relationships with the likes of Gilpatrick. and Korth, and he would have understood a thing or two about the Texas defense contractor slash oil baron milieu that gave rise to the ultimate boss of the Warren Commission, Lyndon Baines Johnson. This story is about Bert Jenner, a man of gravitas and probably the most important member of the staff existing at the dark and dirty intersection between state and corporate power. Yeah, and we paint this whole picture, you know, especially focused on what you just said about the closeness between Jenner and the Crown family and their family business general

dynamics because, you know, as a lawyer, and I'm sure you have the same experience, Dick, but it kind of grates me a little bit to hear otherwise very good and well-researched analyses of conspiracies talk about, well, so-and-so their law firm represented this company and somehow imputing a relationship there. I think there's a lot more specific specificity that needs to support any inference of a lawyer having knowledge or much less responsibility for a firm client or even that lawyer's client's conduct in any given activity, right? Like even the Dulles brothers, you know, we can impute to them a whole lot of dirty business

deals that were conducted by like united fruit they were named to the board of united fruit due to the closeness of that relationship and this is kind of analogous the general dynamics relationship where it's not just that his law firm or even him personally is representing general dynamics as a client for some discreet purpose, it's much more than that, such that the conduct and the dealings of general dynamics to a considerable degree are actually traceable to Bert Jenner, given the central role that he played in securing their affairs. yeah and i think it's good at this point to just say like to be clear it would be going too far to say that jenner was put on the commission staff as a bagman for general dynamics right and i think

in that same vein it's worth mentioning that the whole tfx scandal that was brought about by senator scoop jackson and bowing it may have been nothing more than corporate maneuvering, right, to sling mud at a competitor. The great Kennedy researcher Jim D. Eugenio has argued that the record really actually supports McNamara's decision to award the contract to General Dynamics and that Gilpatrick in court did nothing wrong. Now, I don't think it really matters what the merits of the bidding war were. And it's certainly not unreasonable to belt and suspenders the whole operation

by supporting even a legitimate winning bid with some bribes on the side. Right, right, exactly. Like the sort of inside baseball on whether or not Korth and or Gilpatrick acted corruptly or even influenced McNamara, I think that was one of the points that DiGenio makes is, that they weren't even the key people in the decision-making. But there's more to it than just Korth and Gilpatrick, like according to Bobby Baker, a name that might be familiar to some listeners.

This was a guy known as Little Lyndon. He was Johnson's very long-time political, Fixer and Bagman, and he worked with a guy named Don Reynolds, and those two guys were caught up in a whole other corruption scandal that was also being investigated in parallel to the TFX investigation. And so I think that it bears mentioning just a little bit of what came out of that parallel investigation because it weighs on the bigger picture here because Don Reynolds testified in a closed-door session of the Senate Rules Committee. That was the body that was doing this separate Bobby Baker investigation. Reynolds said that LBJ accepted a $100,000 bribe, in return

for help in securing the general dynamics contract. And once again, this world is tiny that we are building here. Dick, what date was that testimony? Because if I say it out loud, my head is going to explode. It's actually, it's funny, it's the title of that Stephen King book, 1122, 1963. yeah holy shit and it gets even better because bobby baker's it couldn't get better than that i mean you're going to say abe fortis was baker's lawyer that is what i was going to say yes abe fortis Lyndon Johnson's friend and the guy who told L.B.J. that John J. McCloy belongs on the commission.

Needless to say, Fortis was at the hearing representing Baker, and he told Lyndon exactly what had come out about this bribery from General Dynamics. And I think according to Don Reynolds, the testimony lasted up until about about one o'clock in the afternoon. So when everybody got out of that closed-door session, this is obviously before smartphones, they all heard the news of the president's assassination. And this investigation sort of evasperation. evaporated into thin air on both fronts, both the TFX investigation and the Bobby Baker investigation both concluded quietly underneath the cover of the spectacular dominance of the Kennedy the assassination and went out really without even so much as a whimper.

You know, when Roswell Gilpatrick makes his way out the door in early 64, nobody even cares at that point, right? They're just assembling the Warren Commission at that point. They are just getting Burt Jenner into the room at the old veterans building where the commission made its headquarters. Now, we know for a fact that the stench of the scandal hit JFK's nostrils. According to his longtime personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln, JFK told her on November 19 that he was going to replace LBJ on the ticket in 1964 with a better ally.

Nevertheless, LBJ personally and the Kennedy administration, more generally, were all in on general dynamics. And in fact, JFK's speech to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce boasted of the TFX deal. That's right. And that's the speech that we've been clipping from throughout this episode. that speech and the surrounding events, which, of course, like Don Reynolds' fateful testimony in Washington, D.C., took place on the morning of November 22, 1963, just hours before JFK would get capped making that the last long-form speech that President Kennedy ever delivered in his life. And we now are going to have the pleasure of hearing from Fort Worth's finest, the Texas Boys' Choir.

The eyes of Texas are upon you all the live-on-day. You cannot get away. Do not think you can escape him? At my journey in the Lord, God, Father of these United States of America, we as a nation are grateful for our noble destiny. The audience is wearing a pick outfit trimmed in black. It looks like a nubby material, a wool of some type.

And with the chilly weather outside today, this is probably very appropriate. There had been plans for him to leave from here in an open car. A convertible is parked outside, but with the rain falling the way it is, it's fairly certain that the top will be up. And for Dallas viewers, the motorcade downtown will go Lemon to Turtle Creek, then down Cedar Springs to Harwood, down Maine, circled the courthouse, then out Stemmond's freeway to the trademark. When the president appeared out in the parking lot, he broke one of the cardinal rules of security. No one expects that our life will be easy.

Certainly not in this decade. and perhaps not in this century. So whenever the president does move out into a crowd for handshaking and back-slapping and changing, exchanging pleasantries, he is always at the mercy of the crowd and the secret services at its least effective position. And, oh God, may we with him

be thine instruments in establishing the divine harmony throughout the world. On September 6th, 1901, those two rules were broken and it ended in tragedy. That was the day that President William McKinney was appearing at the Pan American Exposition

in Buffalo, New York. Secret Service also allowed persons to have handkerchiefs in their hands to wipe their perspiring brows. It just so happened that one of the thousands of handkerchiefs in that large hall covered a revolver in the hand of 28-year-old Leon Cholgos.

He was an unemployed mill worker. He said he was an anarchist. He was also was a man with a long history of mental illness. And there was a quiet boxinata being played in the background when the two fatal shots rang out. It's strange how in situations like this a relatively minor character can become so important.

It couldn't let you leave Fort Worth without providing you with some protection against the rain. against the rain. I'll put it on in the White House on Monday. If you'll come up there, you'll have a chance to see a door. To protect you against local enemies in the manner that you are protecting this nation against our foreign enemies.

And to keep the rattlesnakes on Vice President Johnson's Ranch, strike in you who are to present this poor boots. The Lord bless our president and all in places of responsibility with wisdom and with health equal to their tasks. I think we'll continue to do as we have done in our past, our duty, and the people of Texas will be in the lead. So I'm glad to come. So to So to So to sum it all up here, and I'm not yet, and I'm going to find.

So to sum it all up here, As of the time of Kennedy's assassination, shortly before Bert Jenner takes on a leading role as really one of the star members of the staff of lawyers hired to investigate the assassination, Bert Jenner had been working tirelessly, one can expect, on and around this huge scandal involving bribes to Lyndon Johnson from his client General Dynamics to secure the largest military contract up to that point that had ever been. doled out to a company. That company's operations were based in Fort Worth, Texas, and had such a footprint in Fort Worth that there were multiple points of intersection between General Dynamics and the alleged lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald and his family.

So that's kind of to make a very long story, very short. short, some of the baggage that Bert Jenner came into the Warren Commission carrying. And zooming out a little bit, I think what we're leading up to is a further deconstruction of this lawyer's lawyer prototype, this rainmaker prototype that Albert Jenner really personified. Behind all of his civic engagement, all of the awards, the presidencies, the accolades, the credentials, and the respectability, Jenner was at base a guy who was keenly aware of the blurred lines between business, crime, and politics. and he brought that awareness with him to the commission. And so when people say,

how can a commission staffed by some of the most successful, the most respected, the most credentialed lawyers in the country have possibly participated in a cover-up, well, I think our peak behind the curtains on Burrower, Jenner gives a hint as to the answer to that question. And again, this is not to say that we suspect that Jenner, or even Henry Crown, for that matter, had any foreknowledge of or involvement in the assassination.

But we do submit to you that the type of exposure that Jenner had, to the operations of power in this, you know, very fraught world of military contractors, million-dollar deals and, you know, political corruption, that he would have been strongly predisposed to steer the investigation away from this really putrid and stinking swamp. You know, interestingly, I was reading the memoir of George de Moran Schilt, and he described the drive between Dallas and Fort Worth back in those days as one that, was disgusting like the stench was horrible is right the mudflats exactly exactly and the cattle yeah but so okay Jenner's work for general dynamics it wasn't really the only red flag on his

resume believe it or not another super sus credential for the guy comes after his stint on the Warren Commission when he became the long-time lawyer and confidant for Chicago mob fixer, Alan Dorfman. Alan Dorfman's stepdad, Paul, was a Chicago union boss and close friend and associate of figures like Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa

and Chicago Mafia boss, Sam MoMo Giancana. Before he relocated to Dallas and changed his name to Jack Ruby, a young Jacob Rubenstein worked for the same union that Paul Dorfman ran. So Jenner's client, Alan Dorfman, was basically groomed from childhood into the Chicago outfit and came to run money laundering operations at the intersection of the Chicago outfit and the Teamsters. now much of that mob money had mingled with jenner client henry crowns budding fortune finding its way into real estate and into the coffers of the democrat party machine politicians like the daily family oh yeah and one of my favorite things about allendorfman is that his nominal profession his you know his day job was insurance executive. So there's sus insurance rearing its ugly head once more. Yeah, no one's going to ask any questions.

As soon as you say insurance, people's eyes glaze over. Yeah, exactly. Okay. But I guess, you know, why do we mention Jenner's representation of Dorfman? Again, we're not saying that

there's somehow a Jenner Ruby connection because of of this Chicago milieu, you know, we don't have any reason to suspect even that Alan Dorfman necessarily interacted with Jack Ruby, but we do pull this thread in order to lead back, you know, just tracing back, like not every person, not every lawyer, not even every prestigious lawyer will have so many threads leading back to the Kennedy assassination, but as we see with Jenner, he's just a couple degrees of separation, both from the Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, who is in his own right implicated in the JFK assassination, and to Jack Ruby.

and to, again, Chicago, and there's so much that you could say about the Chicago Underworld. And I'd recommend the Ghost Stories for the End of the World podcast has done some of the best podcasting work out there on various mafia outfits, including the Chicago outfit. So check that out for more. But the mafia is not just a criminal organization. It's also a bridge between the criminal underworld and the corporate overworld. And so when we talk about Henry Crown, right, Henry Crown himself was a poor Jewish immigrant who grew up poor in Chicago. streets and like some other poor immigrants from whether it's the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe or the Italians from Italy from southern Europe these ethnic enclaves gave

rise to these criminal networks which as they rose in prestige and in wealth started to mingle their proceeds together and just to give one example that is also a favorite of mine that I came across in the Henry Crown stuff that Henry Crown would pool his money up with other mobsters from Chicago into for example investments for Hilton Hotel expansion and anybody that knows about Hilton hotels in the Cold War. They were also very adjacent to the CIA, very adjacent to covert operations. And Conrad Hilton was another one of these magnates

who really threw his weight behind the global crusade against communism. So it's all part of the scenery that, the Kennedy assassination really takes place within. I think now that we have a sense of who Jenner was, it's easy to see how his role as the senior lawyer in charge of the investigation into life background and motive of Leah Harvey Oswald. So this means that Jenner led the questioning

of some of the most key and the most suss Dallas witnesses. Right? These are people like George and Jean the Morhenchild. People like Ruth and Michael Payne and the rest of the right-wing anti-communist white Russians

that made up the alleged Marxist Oswald social circles in Dallas. Right. And he also interviewed a lot of the witnesses in new orleans as well and the witnesses who had interacted with oswald in the marines right remember the warrant commission focused an inordinate amount of attention on oswald's biography it did not purport to have determined a motive for Oswald, but that was not for lack of trying.

And the result of all of Jenner's best efforts was really just breadcrumbs about the motive, which guys like Gerald Ford in their post-Warrant commission remarks and publications, sort of wove together into a motive, whether it's this spurned, cuckled motive that the shrinks came up with, which I discuss with Jeff Kay, or whether it's the Marxist who hates America motive that Gerald Ford kind of conflates into one super mega motive in his. book that we'll talk about in a future episode, all of the puzzle pieces that subsequent writers could put together to form that motive were laid out by really the work of Bert Jenner and his junior associate, Jim Liebler. Okay, so I think we're at the hour and a half mark. seems like a good time to wrap things up on this week's episode

and follow up next week on sort of the antics that Liebler and Jenner got into. For now, I'm Dick, and I'm Don, saying farewell, and keep digging. I wonder what it's like to know that I made the ring I'd store it in boxes with little yellow tags on everyone and you can come and see that while I'm done when I'm done Straight up, what did you hope to learn about here? If I was someone else, will this all fall apart?

Strange, where were you, when we started this game? I wish the real world would you stop hassling me? Thank you. You. Thank you.