Fourth Reich Archaeology - The Warren Commission Decided 2: Building a Commission

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

As promised, we are digging into the surprising story of the formation of the Warren Commission over the week succeeding Lee Oswald's murder by Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963. Most observers assume that the idea originated with President Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose name was on the Executive Order creating the Commission on November 29, but that is far from the case. In fact, Johnson - and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover - initially opposed the creation of a presidential commission, preferring to leave the investigation up to the FBI in collaboration with Texas state and local authorities. So what changed? As it were, there was a plot of sorts. Indeed, a conspiracy. Individuals close to the CIA and the patrician Georgetown Set, with its swashbuckling imperialist cohort of OSS veterans, launched an intense pincer movement before Oswald's blood had stopped flowing. They swarmed LBJ and his closest aides and pressured them into creating a commission independent from Hoover's FBI. First, Eugene V. Debs Rostow - Yale Law dean and brother of JFK's hawkish advisor (and CIA asset) Walt Whitman Rostow - placed a flurry of calls to the trustworthy blue-blooded Deputy Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbch, who promptly hit the phones in favor of a commission in turn. Rostow also connected with LBJ advisor Bill Moyers to ensure the message reached the new President. Meanwhile, CIA-linked American aristocrat Joe Alsop made the pitch to Johnson directly, issuing veiled threats about forthcoming Washington Post OpEds and promising that the media Mockingbird would sing for LBJ if he followed Alsop's lead. The fix was in, and the coverup was underway. By November 25, Katzenbach submitted a now infamous memo calling for a report designed to achieve a very discrete goal, rather removed from solving the case of the Kennedy assassination: "The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial." Buckle up!

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. where you were 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 science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are. 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 mouse. He knows so long as a die. Freedom could never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers.

Why you think our country's so innocent? This is a day. I'm not going to see. This is coming. This is Fort Reich. Archaeology. This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Dick.

And I'm Don. Welcome back to our series. within a series, the Warren Commission decided. Thank you so much for the positive feedback, a reminder to write us at 4thrikepod at gmail.com, or reach out on Twitter and Instagram at Fourth Reichpod. If you're feeling generous, feel free to subscribe to our cause on Patreon. And wherever you get our podcast, please rate, review, subscribe, turn on notifications, all that stuff helps us to reach a wider audience, as does your word of mouth to family, friends, loved ones, colleagues, teachers, and students. Especially as the Thanksgiving holiday comes out on the horizon,

please grease the skids to those awkward family conversations by recommending Fourth Reich Archaeology to the whole family. This week we're picking up where we left off. We'll start out with a accepted consensus view of the happenings on 1122, 1962, 1963, and the day shortly thereafter, as well as the accepted view of the genesis and formation of the Warren Commission. We'll then tear that consensus to shreds. makes you small and the ones

that mother gives you don't do anything at all go ask Alice when she's 10 feet tall Yeah this is really one of I think

I've been looking at JFK assassination material for years now, but really not until preparing for this series have I appreciated just how spooky and how utterly suss the formation of the Warren Commission really was. I mean, the story, get up and tell you where to go. I mean, I think we were just talking before we started recording Dick, and I mean, the story that we're telling in this episode, it's really the story of a CIA sci-up targeting no less a figure than the president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, immediately upon. his ascent into the highest office, right? And there is a lot to tell him this story.

So I think we might as well just go ahead, get the shovels out, put the hard hats on, because this one's going deep. Okay, so I think one thing we're not going to get tired of saying in this mini series is that the JFK assassination and the investigation into the assassination at this point in history has taken a life of its own. And the mythology of it all has grown so big. And to that end, not many people today really understand how the idea of the commission

came into being. So we wanted to dig into that a bit before we talk about what they actually concluded and what we all know, right, that their conclusions are utter bullshit. But, you know, I don't know about you, dear listener, but I always sort of figured that it was LBJ, who was the prime mover behind the Warren Commission. Famously, he gave life to the commission when he executed Executive Order 11130, establishing the commission, which he signed on November 29, 1963, less than a week after Jack Ruby killed Oswald.

Well, that's not the case at all, right? The true story of the commission's establishment began to come to light only in the 1990s when LBJ's White House phone call transcripts were declassified, these transcripts paint a very different picture of LBJ's role. That's right. Yeah, it's important to unpack the record on this, because like you said, I was under that same impression myself,

even after researching aspects of the JFK assassination, It just is kind of an untested assumption. Certainly, you think about, oh, well, how did Alan Dulles make it on? Or, you know, certain suspicious aspects of the formation of the commission. But the formation of the commission itself is something that I had always just taken for granted. But once you start to chip away at that, and once you start to look at the actual documentary record of the commission's formation, it becomes clear as day that, sorry to burst your bubble listener, but yes, it was the CIA that was sort of pulling the strings behind the scene and instigating and

shaping the formation of the commission. And when I say the CIA, no, I don't mean that there's a documentary record of agents and officers of the CIA, you know, executing this operation, this goes back to a sort of upper echelon of the CIA, which transcends the employee role of the CIA itself into that Georgetown set that we've talked about several times on the show, right? this group of American elites quasi-aristocratic with deep roots in the establishment dating in cases of many of these families all the way back to before the American Revolution. You know, to set the stage immediately after JFK gets hit on November 22nd, the Texas state police the Dallas local police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation immediately set to work in some degree of

collaboration to investigate the assassination as they would really any other murder, right? There's one line in one of these phone calls where I believe LBJ refers to it as it's a violation of a state statute, right? The Texas law against murder. That's right. And just a quick refresher, Oswald worked in the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, from which at least one witness purports to have seen shots fired at Kennedy. But Oswald was not arrested in or around the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. He wasn't anywhere near that building, and he was found in a movie theater almost on the other side of town in Dallas's Oak Cliff neighborhood. And when he was found, he was arrested not on suspicion of killing the

president, but of killing officer Jefferson Davis Tippett. After his arrest, Oswald is taken into custody and interrogated. There's no immediate call to handle this case in a fundamentally different way than any other murder. And it's just assumed that prosecutors will need to try Oswald before a jury in order to convict and punish him for the alleged crime. Yeah, before we move on with the narrative, I want to just point out, because we have talked a little bit about the study of names and the significance of names in this podcast. And I just happen to think that it's a tasty little detail of the case, right? J.D. Tippett. It stands for Jefferson Day. Tippet, and Lee Harvey Oswald, it's known that he was named after Robert E. Lee. So they both,

both of these guys have names that honor the two most important figures of the American Confederacy. Just a little symbolic detail for the listener to chew over as you listen to the rest of the story. So this plan, that Dick that you just set up, right, the plan to investigate the murder, to prosecute Oswald in Dallas, the plan is obviously irreversibly scrapped just two days later on November 24th when Dallas strip club owner and known mafia associate Jack Ruby, nay Jacob Rubenstein, kills Lee Harvey Oswald with a single shot fired at point-blank range in the basement of the Dallas police building. As President Kennedy's accused assassin is shot down himself during a jail transfer. There's an ominous symbol in Lee Harvey Oswald's murder weapon as he is taken to the city jail basement where an armored car is to move him to a maximum security cell. Oswald walks his last mile. His assailant moves in from the right. There is Lee Oswald.

He's been shot. He's been shot. Ray Oswald has been shot. Oswald's official time of death, which will become relevant here, was 2.07 p.m. And the whole thing was caught on camera because the press was there. to film and shout questions as Oswald was being transported. And there's that famous still photo of Oswald grimacing right as the shot is fired. And having been caught on the news cameras,

the word of Oswald's murder by Ruby spreads almost instantly across the, entire nation less than two hours later the campaign to sway LBJ to create a presidential commission commences we are building a religion we are building we are widening the corridors and adding more lanes we are building a religion a limited edition we are now accepting callers for these Yeah, and it happens to resist it is useless, it is useless to resist it. His cigarette is burning, but he never seems to ash. He is grooming his pool.

Yeah, and it happens in a series of phone calls. The first key call to the freshly sworn in president comes from Eugene Rostow to LBJ's aide, Bill Moyers. Moyers, of course, goes on to become a famous TV journalist on PBS. Rostow tells Moyers that he's already spoken not once, not twice, but thrice. Earlier that day to Deputy Attorney General Nick Katzenbach about forming a presidential commission to investigate the assassination, consisting of seven to nine trusted Americans. I'll take you. Thank you, boy.

If I can help in any way, I will. I'm calling with a suggestion. I've just talked to Nick Katzenbeck. Yes. And the poor fellow, he has so much of a burden on him. Yes. I talked to him about three times today. And he just decided to tell groggy,

and I thought I'd pass this short along to you. And, of course, I realized how tough it must be now for the president. In this situation with this bastard killed, my suggestion is that a presidential commission be appointed, a very distinguished citizen from the very near future. And he says it's got to be bipartisan. It's got to be impartial. Absolutely no Supreme Court justices, which is interesting, given what ultimately ends up happening, of course. But basically the idea is it's, you know, the public perception. of what has happened has gotten so shaken that the president needs to step in and do something.

And an interesting part about this is that he acknowledges full well that the public doesn't trust the government, doesn't trust the Supreme Court at least. And so he suggests that the commission consists of people that are well known and sort of like the ordinary people in the public eye. some familiar names. People like Tom Dewey and, you know, Bill Story from Texas, so on. Right. The commission of seven or nine people, maybe Nixon, I don't know.

Right. To look into the whole affair of the murder of the president. I love that detail so much. Imagine what a world we'd live in if Nixon had been on the Warren Commission. Good God. I know. talk about really a terrible hire for that commission we need we need to instill the public trust back into the government let's have nixon be our mouthpiece well well we found no evidence of a

conspiracy foreign or domestic i certainly had nothing to do with it and had no knowledge whatsoever about So when Rostow calls, he purports to be calling on behalf of a like-minded group. At one point, he tells Moyers, I've got a party here. I've been pursuing the policy, you know, that people need to come together at this time. I've got a party here. I've been pursuing the policy, you know, that people need to come together at this time. Yes, I've got a party here. remember those words so a lot of this we want to give a little shout out to some of the sources that we've relied on and we'll name more sources as the course of the episode continues but a key one

the listener can find this article online it's posted on kennedy's and king which is a website run by researcher Jim de Eugenio, and it's an article by researcher Donald Gibson, and it was from sometime in the 90s after these tapes had been declassified, and it was published in now defunct probe magazine. And Gibson puts together a version of the timeline of the Warren Commission's creation based on the available evidence. And he discusses this Rostow phone call. and states that even though it's not identified with a specific time, that it definitely took place before 4.40 p.m., and it probably took place before 4 o'clock p.m.,

based on other records in Moyer's book and in the White House logs for the day. And so what that means is that only between one and a half and three hours had passed after Oswald's killing in which Rostow has these three conversations with Katzenbach and then finally connects with the president. And we also know that at 4 o'clock p.m., J. Edgar Hoover was on the phone with a different White House aide

and Hoover, likewise, reports having spoken with Katzenbach that day already. And Hoover describes his conversation with Katzenbach as having covered the possibility of forming a presidential commission. In other words, this guy, Rostow hits the phones immediately after Oswald's shooting. He's pressing Katzenbach to take action. he's pressing Moyers in parallel and Katzenbach meanwhile is eager following up and pushing the message to Edgar Hoover

but wait we haven't even told you who Eugene Rostow is who is he is does he even work for the government at this time he does not at this time Eugene Rostow was the dean of Yale

law school That's right, Gerald Ford's alma mater and the den of upper class thieves and rogues that we covered so thoroughly way back in Jerry World episode three. And as we previewed back then, Yale Law alumni would go on to populate much of the American Imperial Establishment. One of my favorite facts about Eugene Rostow and indeed his brother, who we'll get to in a second, is ironically, they were born to Jewish immigrant parents who were staunch socialists. Like real, died in the wool left-wingers, right? And that was not uncommon.

among Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century. In fact, Eugene's full name was, get this, Eugene V. Debs Rostow, after, of course, the socialist presidential candidate who was jailed for his opposition to American militarism and involvement in World War I. His brother, who is equally as important to this narrative as Eugene, was named Walt Whitman Rostow, of course for the poet, known as Walt. And as it happened, both Eugene and Walt fell

rather far from the old family tree of their socialist parents and their namesakes and their namesake yeah I was just to say they have another they had another brother yeah

Ralph Emerson Rostow um yeah they fell far from the tree neither socialist nor poets nor essayists were they no instead they were guys that could get on the phone with the president from a perch

in Yale law. And so once again, we have a pair of brothers like the Kennedys and the Dulles's and the Bundys who have a meeting of the minds. And they move through life like a pair of bonded oxygen atoms making up sweet, breathable air. Yeah. You want to tell them about Eugene a little bit? Yeah. So Eugene was the elder of the two.

three years and he was a real brainiac he was a double Yaleie though I've not seen any indication that he was inducted to any of the secret societies as an undergrad at Yale um yeah they weren't huge on Jews right and we'll get to that later when we talk about these other guys but yeah at this point and even today I would say it's a strict club and unfortunately even the Catholics didn't make the cut yeah exactly it was it was the wasps yeah and rostow would have been on jerry ford's radar at yale law although they didn't overlap as students uh from 1936 to 37 eugene was the editor-in-chief of the yale law journal which is pretty big deal uh and so he'd be known on campus And remember, at this time, Jerry was working as a coach at Yale in the athletic department.

So, you know, he was orbiting the periphery of the law school trying to gain admission. He was not quite there yet. Yeah, and at this time, it was not a huge school. Like, the whole graduating class fits onto like three rows of guys, no women at this time. What started as a tiny law school by necessity remains small by design to this day. So you could imagine that Jerry, being the coach, being the real observer and student of social networks, and a guy with an eye always to what steps he could take to advance his own star, he would have known the editor-in-chief of the Law Journal probably each year in his successive work at Yale.

And so Rostow, you know, being kind of one of the brilliant lights on campus, he would have been just a known commodity. But I think the more interesting question, and one that we don't know the answer to is whether Eugene would have known about Jerry, right? I don't know. What do you think, Dick? It's definitely possible. As you say, it's a small school at the time.

Yeah, and then I think the point in Eugene Rostow's trajectory more so than his role as a law student while Jerry is a coach is the fact that, that upon graduation in 1937, Eugene Rostow goes directly on to the faculty at Yale, which I don't think that's super common in this day and age today. But back then, that was something that happened. Remember, Dickie Bissell, who we've talked about extensively. He also graduated from Yale with his, Ph.D. and immediately joined the faculty there. And likewise, Eugene Rostow graduates, and in

37, he is teaching law and economics at Yale. Infinite possibility. Infinite possibility is what makes your law school so special. And so in that capacity, Eugene was also on the faculty while Jerry Ford was a law student. And I don't know if we mentioned this way back when we were talking about Jerry's undergrad years, but Jerry had been an econ major in undergrad. And so, you know, to the extent that Rostow is there straddling the line between law and economics, it is possible that Jerry could have taken a class with him, could have interacted with him. I think it's a possibility warranting further investigation.

Let's just put it that way. The school's interdisciplinary approach emphasizes that the law is the language of change. And it's under the hood of every innovative organization making a difference. Right. And for no other reason than the sole reason that time is a flat circle. And this guy,

rostow has essentially lit the fuse ultimately putting jerry ford on the commission um so uh i don't know what to make of that at the at the very least it's a synchronicity right turning to his brother walt rostow Walt was a a CIA asset at the time is that not right yeah yeah i mean Walt rostow got his start just like, you know, the likes of Alan Dulles, Frank Wisner, Jim Angleton, Bill Casey, all of these super spook cold warrior guys. Walt Rostow started off in intelligence during World War II, in which capacity he served in the CIA's predecessor agency, the office, of Strategic Services, aka the OSS, right, the outfit that was famously run by Wild Bill Donovan that was largely modeled on the British MI6 and would eventually provide the model and much of the personnel for the CIA.

Right. And we could do a whole episode on the guy easily. And maybe he'll come up later when we get into talking about Vietnam. But suffice to say that for now, he is considered one of these great intellectual architects of Cold War anti-communist foreign policy alongside guys like Paul Nizzi, George Keenan, Dean Acheson, and John Foster Dulles. In other words, sociopaths. Right. People who view, you know, the millions of human beings as so many pawns on a chessboard, right? The guys that would just as soon push a button and incinerate a million people because they think there's a chance it might get their team a win.

Right, because they think that they are right about something. Yeah, they're right about something. Because their worldview is correct. Yeah, yeah. You've never done nothing, but build to destroy. You play with my world, like it's your little toy. Mr. Rostom, you've had time now to have some hindsight on it. Would you give the same counsel now that you did then about the war?

Essentially, yes. My only regret is, as I say, that we did not use our full power. Aside from that, I think historians will debate whether more American power should have been used more decisively. A world war can be won. You want me to believe. And I think that's a legitimate question. The reasons why more power was not used, was that the presidents felt a great responsibility to civilization to avoid any legitimate occasion for a larger war and possibly a nuclear war. The dangers of nuclear war rests very heavily on American presidents. But essentially, I would not alter the advice that I gave at that time.

A couple last points about Walt, so, you know, he's in, he's in the shit, right? He's working closely with McGeorge Bundy, whom we've talked about on JFK, who was on JFK's National Security Council, and was always sort of the hawkish voice in the room. And so Walt will come up again, I'm sure, but for our purposes in this episode, it's that you have Eugene, who through Washington. Walt has this access to the deep state. Yeah, exactly. And they represent the both of them, right? These are guys who are cut from the same cloth. They're brothers.

I would almost be surprised if Walt was not in the room with Eugene when they made that call. And indeed, I would venture a guess that Walt, Eugene and whoever else was with them in the quote unquote party that Eugene described to Bill Moyers, they chose Eugene to make the call and to be the bearer of the message precisely because he lacked the inside foot, right? He was perceived to be independent from the government and with some distance from all of these guys because he's up in Yale, he's up in New Haven, he's not in Georgetown the way that Walt is, the way that Dulles, Kennan, Acheson, et cetera are.

Right. They're using him as their mouthpiece, right? Way up in his ivory tower at Yale, almost as if the voice of a cleric, right, to implant this idea into LBJ that the country needs a blue ribbon commission to set things straight. Yeah, and I think at this point it's worth noting, too, that with the exception of Dulles in this group, a lot of these guys were lifelong Democrats, right? Ross Dow, you just mentioned he was a staffer on Kennedy's National Security Council, right? He worked closely with McGeorge Bundy. Dean Acheson had been Harry Truman's Secretary of State, right?

So these are democratic eminence Greece. that nevertheless, you know, today, well, maybe we shouldn't even talk about today. But, well, let's situate it this way, right? We talked about the Eisenhower-Dulles agenda for sort of capitalist American imperial world domination that ran rampant in the 1950s, in foreign policy, there was not a ton of daylight with the incoming Kennedy administration, right? We even talked about that in the carousel episode of Jerry World, where we recounted how JFK himself, when he came in to the presidency, was essentially kind of carrying water for the politics of his father, Joe Kennedy, who in turn, at least according to

Richard Nixon, even went so far as to tell Nixon, if Jack fucks this up, we'll go with you. So there's a consensus among this bipartisan group, which actually does echo in today's Democrat Party, as we talked about Kamala Harris's sidling up to Dick Cheney, etc., that America needs to run the world and shape it in America's image. But as I tend to do, getting us a little far afield from the Warren Commission, can you bring us back on track, Dick? Yeah. So I guess the way to bring it back is that first the big takeaway is that these two brothers they're viewing this as dogma right they're looking at it not from any sort of economic or personal benefit they're thinking of it much more abstractly than i think the you know the average listener can maybe even grasp uh the amount

the commitment that they have to this cause the big takeaway is that the people here we're talking about these brothers their view about all this stuff it's dogma they believe it in their bones they have no person it's not a personal thing for them it's beyond the self it's like this view of the of the country in the world as it should be in their eyes right they're they're trying to build the world as they think is best and but they're not the only ones like this right Walt, Eugene, the Rostows, they're not the only people pushing LBJ to start the ball rolling on an assassination commission. There's another familiar name that's come up a few times here in the mix, too.

And that's Joseph Alsup. That's right. Thank you for merging us back onto the Warren Commission Highway. As we continue on our journey, we're back seeing road sign after road sign marking the events that succeed the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby. So after these afternoon calls between Rostow and Moyers, after the calls between Rostow and Moyers, after the calls between, Hoover and Katzenbach, LBJ himself gets into the mix taking calls on the issue of an assassination commission. So we're now the following day, November 25th, and it's 10.30 in the morning. Phone rings. It's J. Edgar Hoover on the line. And he's calling President Johnson.

and himself. And this time, surprise, surprise, Hoover expresses a very firm stance against the creation of a presidential commission. That's right. Hoover,

as of the morning of the 25th, is anti-commission. Apparently, some lawyer and justice is lobby. of the post because that's where the suggestion came from to this presidential commission, which we think would be very bad. It put it right in the White House, and we can't be checking up on every shooting straight in the country. Listener, I'd like you to take note that LBJ in that clip just said the idea for a presidential commission came from the post

and was passed to a lawyer in justice, Katsimbach, who's lobbying for the commission. Johnson also says, I think it would be very bad. And then Hoover responds, it's audible, but you have to listen really closely. He says, I do too. Why do you think that is? Well, he wants his little FBI sausage fingers all over the thing. thing, right? If the commission doesn't happen, right, who has the jurisdiction for the case? It would be the feds, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Dallas.

We believe that the way to handle this is, as we said yesterday, your suggestion that you whatever facilitate your command and make a full report to the Attorney General, and then they make it available to the country in whatever form may seem desirable. Second, the state, it's a state matter, too, and the state attorney general is young and able and prudent and very cooperative with you. He's going to run a court of inquiry, which is provided for by state law, and he's going to have associated with him the most outstanding juries in the country. But he's a good conservative fellow.

He's not a guy who likes to be second-guessed. I think if there's one thing you can say about Hoover, it's that he likes to have the final word on everything. But the word had gotten to him, right? we had said, yes, you know, the 24th, Hoover had spoken to Katzenbach, who had told Hoover about the idea for a commission. And, you know, I think it can be reasonably assumed that this was after Katzenbach had had one of his three conversations with Eugene Rostow in the two hours following Oswald's murder and Hoover funnily enough he attributes the idea for a commission to the

Washington Post and this is very funny Hoover had a very low opinion of the Washington Post he even describes it as being like the daily worker oh that frankly don't read it like the daily You don't know that long before. But I just want your people to know the facts and your people can say that, and that kind of negates it. You say, yes. We'll take care of that. Thank you, Mr. President.

This points to Hoover's bad blood with the elites that we were just talking about, right? Hoover is not one of them by any means. He's a rough and tumble FBI guy, and he considered the Georgetown set to be. a bunch of communist adjacent homosexuals essentially yeah this is sort of your generic trope of the FBI so the tension between the FBI and the CIA right boils down to Hoover being a rough and tumble FBI man and he's not down with what he would consider the establishment elites over at the CIA and their communist ideas right yeah i remember that the georgetown set those guys had actually been close with

alger hiss whom richard nixon much to the amusement and enthusiasm of j edgar hoover had raked over the coals in the 1940s when the red scare was just getting off the ground So, you know, LBJ gets off the phone with Jay Edgar, and just as he gets off the phone, wouldn't you know it minutes after hanging up, he gets another call from another fellow. This time, a guy who's got close ties to the CIA, Washington Post recorder Joe Alsop. Should we tell them a little bit about ALSEP? I mean, I feel like we've danced around the ALSUP tree a few times on the podcast. I think it's time for a provisional deep dive into this shady character.

Yeah, for sure. And we've talked in this episode and in past episodes about the George Johnson. You know, that elitist Washington, D.C. dinner club of high society and Hollywood and the deep state. They all get together and eat terrapin soup. Well, when they were doing that, Joe Alsup was at the head of the table. His home was the location for many of these shady Sunday night dinners where the elite would get together and plot of the table. about the future of the world. Yeah, and that's really no exaggeration.

I mean, we're talking about Joe Alsup running the table. You've got Frank Wisner in there. You've got George Kennan in there. You've got Dickie Bissell coming through, right? These guys flock around Alsup's Sunday night dinner parties, and he was the head of the table for good reason. Joe Alsop was the great grandson of James Monroe. No, not that James Monroe, not the president.

That was actually his uncle, James Monroe's uncle. In other words. It's dizzying. Yeah, James Monroe, not the president. That's his uncle. Yeah, exactly. So President James Monroe has a nephew named James Monroe, and nephew James Monroe was great-grandfather of Joe Alsup.

That was one branch of the family tree. Another branch of the family tree, his great-grandfather on his mother's side, was a fellow by the name of Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., father of another president, Teddy Roosevelt. Right? Teddy Roosevelt was the brother of Alsep's maternal grandmother, who was kind of the matriarch of his family. And so when he would go to her estate for summers, you know, she would be setting the example that Joe would go on to follow, right? This woman who grew up at the side of one of the original imperialist presidents, right? Teddy Roosevelt

famously storming San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War. Yeah, I think Al-Sup's mother was close with Eleanor Roosevelt too, which will come into play in a bit. But all is this

to say that Al-Sup had that deep American heritage that the likes of Dorothy Gardner and Hortense Bloomer fond over him. And for those listeners who have not yet had the pleasure of enjoying all episodes of Jerry World that precede the Warren Commission, Dorothy Gardner was the name of Gerald Ford's well-bred mother,

and Hortense Bloomer was the name of Betty Ford's well-bred mother. Just to put those names into context, that the whole big picture here is, a picture of a longing for aristocracy and Al-Sup embodied it. Boy, would they have loved to have dinner in Al-Sup's house in Georgetown. Although they might have been actually scant. I mean, they were more of the Midwestern breed, and they might have actually been scandalized by the alcoholic shenanigans and rough housing. Oh, for sure.

but gee i wonder don maybe if you could tell me uh where did alsup go to school oh yeah that's right it's the groton school uh whose alumni include the likes of averil herriman and a fella that's his name came up even in this episode already it seems like we can't get too far away from him dicky bissell grotton was, of course, a literal bastion of privilege and a prime, prime recruitment ground for the deep state apparatus, a real feeder school for the entire Ivy League, Harvard, Yale, right? I actually, if you don't mind, Dick, I would like to read a little anecdote from this book The Georgetown Set

by Greg Hurkin Oh, please do So he's talking about the friendship between Joe Alsup and Dickie Bissell while the two were classmates at the Groton school. This listener

mind you is a boarding school right? It's similar to the public schools in England that the British aristocracy is famously schooled and formed in, right, like Eaton and those other famous British boarding schools. Unknown if the American brand is as sort of well known for sexual abuse and misdeeds with the students as the English brand, but it was

wouldn't be surprising, let's say, at least not to me, if similar conduct was going on at Groton. And Joe Alsop's biography actually bears that out in a sort of a dark way, which we might talk about later. So the anecdote goes like this, right? Dick Bissell had been Joe Alsop's classmate and only friend at Groton, where the two managed to duck the athletic contest. that were mandatory for the other boys. I was shy.

I wasn't a good athlete, and I was scared of them, Bissell recalled in a memoir. Instead, the pair took long walks around the bucolic Massachusetts campus. Another famous Grotty, Averill Harriman, believed that, like sports at Eaton, unhappiness at Groton was a prerequisite for later success

among WASP families. But their friendship was tested when Bissell set off a stink bomb in Alsup's study, which drove the furious Joe out into the February snow. While the duo eventually reconciled, a certain good-natured combativeness remained. Bissle, acting as prosecutor, bested Alsup in the school's mock trial debate.

Resolved, Napoleon Bonaparte was a war criminal. Bissell stole Joe's notes, making copies, and returned only fragments of the originals to the defense. Joe would later claim that he chose to go to Harvard instead of Yale because he didn't want Dickie running his life. Wow. Right, so Al-Sup goes off to Harvard. And afterwards, this is where I think the Al-Sup trajectory sort of deviates from his classmates and those in his sort of his rank in his echelon in society. whereas they go off to be bankers and work in the government and things like that. And lawyers, Dick. Come on. And lawyers.

Alcip pursues a career as a journalist. And because of his connections and his family ties, namely to the Roosevelt's, he is a major player during FDR's tenure in the White House. So he begins a successful column first through the North American newspaper. Alliance and then moves over to the New York Herald Tribune and at this point is a columnist doing quite well for himself and that's when World War II breaks out and like many of the men in his generation he answers the call and joins like many men of his generation joins the Navy and fights in the war this is a I love this Alcib story so he's it he's fighting in the war

he's in the Pacific theater and he is captured And when he surrenders and, you know, through the commotion, he is basically a bit able to conceal his status as a soldier and is basically released as a journalist using, you know, subterfuge. Not unlike how maybe someone who knows the art of espionage. For sure. And you noted that he was in the Pacific theater. it's also worth noting that after his release, Alsup really gloms on to what is later known as the China hands, right? The China lobby, the likes of General Claire Chenow and Henry Luce and others who get very close to Generalissimo Chang Kai Sheck, who get very close to all the, his drive.

drug-dealing cohorts in Asia, and Alsup is a mouthpiece for that set during the war. I was just looking the other day at one of the earlier books of Sterling Seagraves, the Soong Dynasty, that Alsup was, like, ousting American generals who disliked Chiang Kai Sheck. he was making his influence felt in favor of, and this will bring us back to the Kennedy assassination in a sort of a roundabout way, but in favor of the Asian forces with a vested financial interest in both stamping out the Communist Party and concomitantly in ramping up and expanding and securing the dominance of the opium trade. And indeed, Joe Alsop's brother Stuart, who shared his column with him for many years, is even on the record stating that the Alsop family fortunes were traceable back both to Cuba and the Caribbean rum and molasses.

trade, i.e. slave plantations of sugar cane, and the Chinese opium trade. So it's beyond the perfect person to embody the forces that take out the one possible impediment to their realization of their grand designs. So bringing it all back to the focus of this episode, it's hours after Oswald's death, in the day after Oswald's death, let's say just in the hours, right? We're talking about a period of 30 hours or something after Oswald's death. LBJ gets key phone calls from individuals who, as far as I can tell, are not affiliated with the government um you know you should clarify lbj and his key aids right like the rostow call was to moyers right katzenbach is kind of in the background right but alsup the alsup call and we will

play some snippets from this because it is incredible the way that alsup spins lbj around his little finger over the course of this phone call i mean the listener It's unbelievable. I have to leave Miss Kennedy's side at the White House and call and ask the Secret Service at the FBI to proceed immediately. I spent most of my day on this thing yesterday. I had the Attorney General in Texas fly in there. I spent an hour and a half with him yesterday. I talked to the Justice Department lawyers and to the FBI.

The FBI is of the opinion. The wisest, quickest, ablest, most effective way to go about it, so then thoroughly studied and bring in a written report to the Attorney General at the earliest possible date, which they've been working on since 1230 yesterday. Go ahead. Just let me make one suggestion, because I think this covers, I think, I think this bridges the gap, which I believe, and Dean Atchison believes, still exist. Dean and Bill Moyers are the only people I've talked to about it,

and Friendly is going to come out tomorrow morning with a big thing about a Blue Ribbon Commission, which he thought of independently. It isn't just the Department of Lawyers who are preparing on this, Just things happen to thought of a lot of people, and you've thought of more of the details than anyone else. And I'm sure you're right. Except there's one missing piece. I suggest that you announce that, as you do not want the Attorney General

to have the painful responsibility of reporting on his own brother assassination that you have authorized three jurists and I would suggest a Texas jurist and two non-Texist jurists to review all the evidence by the FBI and produce a report to the nation for the nation so that the country will have the story the judicially reviewed outside Texas. And if you tell Bill Moyers to call up friendly, and if you get out such an announcement this afternoon, you're going to make a marvel when you've already made a marvelous start.

You haven't put a damn foot one quarter of an inch wrong. And I've never seen anything like it. You've been simply marvelous in the most painful circumstances. But I do feel that there is that much of a gap. And I'm sure that if Moyer is called Friendly, you'll have a terrific support from the Washington Post and from the whole of the rest of the press instantly. I was trying both changes we've got, though.

No, you won't. No, you won't. Just use the procedures you've got and add to those procedures a statement saying that When the FBI has completed its work, when it has completed its work, as you do not wish to inflict on the Attorney General the painful task of reviewing the evidence concerning his own brother's assassination, you have asked two or three individuals beyond any possible sufficientness of their independence and impartiality to draw up a written report And we'll just be that little extra added to the admirable machinery you've already got

that will carry complete conviction. Mind you, mind you, Mr. President, I'm not talking about an investigative body. I am talking about a body which will take all the evidence that the FBI has amassed when they have completed their inquiry and produce a public. report on the death of the president that I think you see that is not an interference in Texas that is a wait a second now that is a way to transmit to the public why can't the FBI transmit because no one again on the left they won't believe the FBI and and the FBI doesn't write very well if you want to carry if you want to carry absolutely

conviction, this very small addition of the admirable machinery that you already set up will help you, and I believe that it will strike the imagination of the country and be a very useful, happy thing, happy thing. You know, his office, the office of the president, is getting these calls, and they're not from high-ranking government officials. It's from, you know, a renowned columnist, journalist, and the dean of Yale law. Why do you think they're calling them? What's going on? What's the connection here? There may be a certain inevitability to a commission, but I think we can name a few reasons, right? One, the ostensible reason, which is one that Alsup actually checks in his call,

is the American people are not going to trust the FBI to come away with an objective picture of the assassination. I don't buy it. You? No, I don't buy that either. Really, I think it's, they want to populate this commission. And, I mean, just start from the, the, what, there's that old statement, right? Judge a system by what it produces. The purpose of the system is the output. The output of the Warren Commission is a cover up. And then you kind of work backwards from there that.

Right. It's orchestrated by the likes of Alan Dulles. I mean... Okay, so the outcome of the Warren Commission is that Oswald was the lone assassin. There was no conspiracy. So what's left is what would be the alternatives? There was a conspiracy and what the Soviets were involved. That can't play to the American public.

God forbid, that gets out. Dick, it might behoove us right now to introduce the figure of Nick Katzenbach and to recount to the listener some highlights of what he put in writing to justify the creation of the Warren Commission. Yeah, for sure. So Katzenbach is not really unlike Joe Alsup in having this incredible American pedigree. He descended from the French doctor, Nicola de Belleville, who actually accompanied Casimir Pulaski to America way back in the 18th century.

And his ancestor settled the town of Trenton, New Jersey. So you could imagine that he's got the same depth of roots. and, you know, cut from the same cloth, instead of Groton, he attended Phillips Exeter Academy, another one of these East Coast Yankee Doodle boarding schools. From Phillips Exeter, he went to Princeton, and just like everybody else, right, he enlisted in World War II in the middle of his college career. He took a couple years off, and then after the war, went to Yale Law School. So it's, it's just like one after another. And hey, guess what? He also became the editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal exactly 10 years after Eugene Rostow.

I mean, it's, it's too good. It's like a checklist. It's too fucking good. Road Scholar, married into another aristocratic family. His wife, Lydia King Phelps Stokes. And if you got that many last names, you know. You know you are what Jimmy Fallingong used to call fire wasps, right? Yeah, it's how the rich stay rich. You got to keep it in the family. Exactly.

And wouldn't you guess that his father-in-law was a cabinet secretary of President Herbert Hoover. I mean, it's almost an afterthought, the background on Katzenbach. I've not dug that deep into him, but just the surface, I think, tells you all you need to know, he's a trustworthy guy. He is one of us, us being, you know, this imbred,

Inbred class of elite psychos. So the Katzenbach memo is one of these well-known pieces of the Kennedy puzzle. And what is salient about the Katzenbach memo is it essentially puts into writing all of what we've been talking about in this episode, namely that. quote, the public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin, that he did not have Confederates who are still at large, and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial. So there you have it, right? I mean, the conclusion of the Warren Commission was written on the page on November 25th when Lee Harvey Oswald

gut was still bleeding on a slab somewhere in Parkland Hospital. And this is actually my point was, what conclusions were they trying to avoid? They were trying to avoid a conspiracy of any kind. That includes in conspiracy not only that this was some communist plot, but even worse, that this was some sort of right-wing domestic conspiracy that was framed up as a communist plot to take the life of the president that's in like those are like actual words on the page in the gotsenbach memo right like he is basically saying we need to have a commission basically find that it was just oswald to stop all of this speculation and rumor and talk about all these

alternatives to how the president was killed yeah i mean to read a few more passages he writes quote, speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a communist conspiracy, or, as the Iron Curtain Press is saying, a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the communists. Unfortunately, the facts on Oswald seem about too pat, too obvious, Marxist, Cuba, Russian-white, etc the Dallas police have put out statements on the communist conspiracy theory and it was they who were in charge when he was shot and thus silenced so you have it right there they want to shut up the fact finders yeah move on yep oh man yeah and so

yeah there you have it it's like the conclusions preceded the fact findings yeah I mean we could honestly end the whole the whole series right there, right? I know. I was going to say this is probably we're getting at the hour and it's probably time to start wrapping things up, but we're at the point with the Kennedy assassination where I think it's like really all the evidence that you want is there. There can be no real doubt that there was some sort of cover up. Yeah, the cover up betrays the conspiracy. Exactly. And what we've talked about here, just to recap a little bit, is the way in which LBJ starts out opposed, in a generic way to any interference with control of the investigation from the FBI, right?

That will permit the, what he calls the quote-unquote state's rights. problem from blowing up, you know, LBJ talks about not wanting to create a precedent for federal interference in the local investigation and prosecution of a violation of a state statute in a murder case. And he takes a 180 after BIA. being subjected to what you and I have talked about is a pincer movement, right? You've got Rostow acting behind the scenes.

He's going to Katzenbach. He's going to Moyers. He's going to who knows who else in a room with the likes of his brother Walt, and other high-ups within the CIA and the National Security Establishment. And then on the other side of the Pinser, you've got Joe Alsup and the kind of CIA Mockingbird Mighty Wurlitzer Media Cohort from the Washington Post saying,

well, we're going to publish a recommendation that you do this anyways, and the best thing you could do is get out ahead of, it and just go along with the plan it's you know it keeps coming back to me it's not it's so insane that it's literally like the head of the academy the guy in the ivory tower as the voice of certainly not like clergy but something close to that yeah this guy from Yale law on one side and then on the other side is like the voice of the people the fifth estate at least right the the the media right the media and he's also coming in from the other side So it's kind of wild that the membrane of like, is this really an executive office decision

or where's the influence for making this decision coming from? And so the aftermath of the Katzenbach memo is the recommendations are essentially adopted. Both LBJ and Hoover come around and in their egotomaniacal way. Both of them sort of emerge from the entire process as having thought that they came up with the idea in the first place, essentially. LBJ more so than Hoover, I think. And LBJ sells it to others, including to Hoover, as, oh, this is just going to be basically a rubber stamp job on whatever the FBI comes up with. You know, we just want to give a little bipartisan seal of approval for the FBI's conclusions so that nobody thinks that there's any funny business.

here, that there's any sort of bias or partisan influence, and, you know, kind of balancing the desire to plan this all out with the belief, at least the subjective belief, that none of this stuff would actually become part of the public record. And I think you should speak on that a little bit because it is kind of, we are attempted to think anachronistically about these events through our sort of present frame of mind. Put yourself in that time, and when you do remember that the information asymmetry that's going on amongst these people, right? It's honestly like you could think of it as Veep or there's the movie that the same creator made, Death of Stalin, where it's like everyone's lying to everybody.

Nobody knows like the full story behind, you know, anyone's sort of point of view. Everyone's sort of looking out to get their own, make sure their ass is covered and they're just going at it and they're manipulating and they're lying. It goes to this point of like, these guys don't really know anything about what the other is sort of plotting or scheming behind the scenes. And for us, when we're looking back, we need to think not just what's going on in these guys in like the sort of the acute sense, but also more globally in terms of the public. What does the public know at this point, days after the Kennedy assassination next to nothing beyond speculation? Right. You know, you think of some of the lies that make it in. to the public discourse, I'm thinking famously of the Dan Rather clip where he describes Kennedy's

head going forward the opposite of what actually happened. And this is before the Zapruder film is a matter of public record. Just the shit that they thought they could get away with. And then you think, and this is something that will keep track of as the series goes on. But I do think that the informational asymmetry. At this point in time, we're talking the week of the assassination itself and the immediate aftermath. Definitely, definitely the Georgetown set, this Wasp elite cohort who are very, very close among themselves. We're talking Wisner, Alsup, Rostow brothers, the Bundys, you know, to varying degrees, and I'm not saying that all of them knew what happened or who got Jack, right? According to Joe Alsup, I think it's important to say he reports having sobbed for hours after he found out that Jack had been shot.

He was, I think, enamored of John Kennedy in a lot of ways. he fawned on John Kennedy. He relished the opportunity to kind of have an ear of John Kennedy. And so I don't think that we want to give the impression that Joe Alsup was deliberately working to protect his friends in the CIA from exposure as part of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. and I don't know that he would have suspected them. But I guess that he probably would have at least given the idea some thought because he was privy to a lot of information.

And his boss at the Washington Post, Phil Graham, who was also a part of the Georgetown set, in August of 1963, he moved from the above-ground portion of the Georgetown set to the six feet below ground. He blew off his head with a shotgun and was buried in the very luxurious cemetery across the street from his mance. Why? Well, that's a conversation for another day. But the suspicion, the paranoia, the uncertainty surely reigned supreme among that same crowd. And meanwhile, Hoover was already suspicious of all these guys. Yeah, Hoover, who had files on everybody and tried to make It was his business to know as much about everyone who he was dealing with.

And both Hoover and Joe Alsup, incidentally, were closeted homosexuals, both of whom had compromising photos on good information, right? And many, many, many people have reported seeing the J. Edgar Hoover oral sex photos. and Joe Alsup was, it's a matter of public record that he was honey potted by the Soviets with what was described as a young, blonde agent, quote unquote, of the KGB in sexually compromising positions. And for Alsup, it's actually funny because after he was caught by the Soviets, the state, story goes that they brought him in, the Russians did, and tried to flip him to work for them. And he was so deeply dyed in the wool as an American capitalist cold warrior that he told

them to go fuck themselves and went that very day or very shortly thereafter to his good friend, and actually a cousin, by the way, Frank Wisner, okay, and spilled all of the beans. And Wisner helped Alsup to write up a report of, by way of a sort of confession. And that became part of an obviously very closely held and secret. file on Alsup, but you could imagine, listener, that that file and those secrets could be held over Joe Alsop's head to persuade him, to act in a way that's consistent with the desires and the wishes of the people who held that secret, even to the extent of participating in the cover-up of a president

who he had considered to be a dear, dear, beloved friend. I'm sick and tired of hearing things. You're uptight, short-sighted, now I'm running hypocritics. All I want is the truth. Just give me so true. Next week, we're going to continue this conversation and dig into the actual members of the Warren Commission. We'll talk about their backgrounds and, in some cases, discuss a little bit about how they got onto the radar for selection, including our boy, right? Gerald R. Ford, Jr. For now, I'm Dick. And I'm Don. Saying farewell.

And keep digging. Thank you.