Fourth Reich Archaeology - You Don't Know Jack (Ruby) pt. 4--Side A

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

We are thrilled to be back with our friend from across the pond, researcher Max Arvo, for another installment of our excavation into the man who killed Lee Oswald, Jack Ruby. It's another split episode that you can find in all its 2+ hour glory on Patreon, or wait until Side B comes up here in the future.We start off by recapping and taking stock of our speculative findings thus far, from the motivating force behind Jack's desperate spate of phone calls to old mob pals, to whether and how he was brought into a larger conspiracy, to what was going through his mind as he took the fatal shot and surrendered his body to his friends on the Dallas Police Department.Then we pick up with our factual narrative where we left off in Part 3, including a deep rumination on the spectacular implications of this being the first-ever murder caught on live TV. To really drive the point home, we have condensed some of the best tidbits of ABC News's live coverage of the events of November 24, 1963 in one of our best Fourth Reich Archaeology mashups yet. Remember, that Sunday, Americans were glued to their TV sets to watch the president's casket carted from the White House to the Capitol, and Ruby's killing of Oswald interrupted the broadcast. Side B will cover the formation of Jack's legal and psychiatric team. Again, you can access the full episode today at patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology. Otherwise you will have to wait.As a reminder, Max's series of articles on Ruby can be found here: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jack-ruby-a-review-and-reassessment-part-1

The following passage is read from Jean-Baudriard's influential essay, Simulacra, and Simulations. Never again will the real have to be produced. This is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, which no longer leaves any chance. even in the event of death. A hyper-reel henceforth sheltered from the imaginary from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models

and the simulated generation of difference. 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 conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission, the science.

I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information which showed that there were Two wars kind of. 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. For example, we're the CIA. Now he has a mile. He knows so long as to die.

Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? our country's so innocent?

This is fourth Reich archaeology. I'm Dick. And I'm done. Welcome back, everybody, to our ongoing series within a series, within a series, within a series, You Don't Know Jack, Ruby. We're joined again by the wonderful Max Arvo. Max, thank you very much for joining us again. Thank you. Pleasure.

Great to be with you guys. And I think we should just get right on into it. I think in our last episode, Don, you and I sort of brought things together, sort of synthesized or started to synthesize the moments leading up to the day of the deed, and I think it makes sense to maybe distill that even further and start by posing a question for Max. What do you think? Yeah, we thought we would run by a little bit of a speculative recap. You know, we presented a lot of narratives, and as anybody that's

looked at the Jack Ruby case knows, a lot of these narratives. conflict with one another and branch off in all sorts of different directions. So what we thought we'd do is to kind of put our speculative take on the actual facts leading up to and including the shooting of Oswald and run a bimax to see if, you know, you have anything to add or any other color or maybe if you disagree. So, sound good, Max? Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Let's go for it.

Okay, I'll take this first one. The first area that we covered, and we covered this altogether, was this lead-up to November 22nd and November 24th, the pivotal days in the narrative. And over the several months leading up to November, Jack Ruby was making a lot of phone calls to his mob pal. So our sort of take on this is that, yeah, Ruby was initially reaching out to his mob buddies with the concerns that he stated in his testimony and that other people on the other side of some of these calls corroborated, namely that he was in big financial trouble and was having issues with the union of dancers, the Agva, the American Guild of Variety Actors. And so he started hitting the phones and trying to get some help with his debts.

And that was his motivation and put him back in touch with a lot of these shady characters. he was remember in debt equivalent to almost half a million dollars so what do you think max yeah i mean the debt is you pointed out how um converted for inflation it's that it's an insane amount and um i always yeah it's always helpful to just convert these numbers when we're looking at this kind of history because the difference they can seem not big but manageable and then in today's terms, it's overwhelming. And yeah, I mean, the debt seems to have been a part of it. That would be something you could use to motivate him. And we know from that documentary, the sopranos, but in general we know the ways that organized crime can leverage people's

financial insecurity to bleed him even drier, I guess. So for sure. I mean, I think one of the questions for me is, I guess overall, and this might lead into your other points, but to what extent that he knew what might have been about to happen, to what extent there was planning and for knowledge and things like that, I think a lot of it comes down to what was the scale and the extent and the seniority of his involvement in the syndicate and in the stuff related to Cuba. And I think kind of the more senior he is in that whole world, probably the less the debt would be as significant a part

and I'm still unclear for myself exactly exactly how I think of Ruby in those kind of ways like I think feels to me my gut sense is when I've been looking into this stuff is there's more still to be dug up and to get kind of more settled about all his ties to the Cuba stuff and this stuff and this same whole crowd, because, you know, there's a chance he was just operating in Dallas as a syndicate guy, or there's a chance that he was very, very, very deeply, with some kind of Cuba stuff in the late 50s, things like that, or there is a chance, depending on which sources

you kind of put more weight to, that he was pretty closely tied in with that whole Cuba CIA mob. Well, mob in the sense of group, but also, I guess, mob in another sense. So anyway, yeah, that's what I think it all kind of hinges on. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, I think he certainly had contacts that were well known to be very senior figures like Jimmy Hoffa's main 370-pound enforcer, Barney Baker, and Dave Yaris, who was a hitman that did murders for Sam Giancana. regardless of whether Ruby himself was considered to be at their level, he had access to them

and could call on them for a favor, or perhaps in other circumstances he would call on them for permission from the bosses. You know, you hear about people from the Keefeffer Committee that investigated organized crime in the 50s and 60s. And they're very clear that the structure was very rigid within the syndicate and that at the periphery in cities like Dallas, in order to do something major, you would need permission from the higher ups. And so, you know, I think Ruby wanted to maybe run his little business empire independently and in a way that was beneficial to him. and his family, but did so at the benefit, at the pleasure of the higher-ups within the syndicate hierarchy. Yeah, exactly.

And yeah, there's questions also. I think there's one source or some information about him potentially being, I may have mentioned it in a previous one, potentially needing to be the guy who would give the sign-off and things like drug traffic in the southwest across the Mexican border. things like that. And if that's the case, then these are all things where if he has this deeper connection to that whole milieu that kind of runs at that time across the south, you know, with Louisiana and Florida and everything where you've got mob and CIA and the anti-Castro Cuban exiles and all that. I guess what I'm thinking is what's unclear to me is

if he was that tied into that crowd, if he was. then he may have also personally known more about a certain plot. But yet, these are all still, I think, open questions. Yeah. Well, the next point that is related to this larger question is sort of where I see the line, based on the currently available evidence, at a minimum, Ruby's outreach to his mob,

contacts put up a red flag like you were kind of describing it signaled him as a mark to be leveraged in a way that would be kind of require an extreme sacrifice befitting the debt that he owed at that time which was not going to be given for free from the mafia obviously right So we know that Barney Baker and Dave Yaris knew each other. We know that not only did both of them talk to Ruby, but they talked to each other in the lead-up to November 22nd. So my speculation is that most probably these guys who certainly were higher up the latter or were extremely adjacent to major boss figures gassed up Jack Ruby.

on these calls and you know took the opportunity of desperate jack begging for help to identify him as a potential arm right to carry out this hit yeah for sure i mean i think the most kind of damning incidence of those connections or reconnections with you know big mob guys are i think it's like November 11th, 12th, you've got Paul Roland Jones, Al Gruber, and Ruby all meeting up in Dallas. I think it's something like the 17th. He drives overnight to, Las Vegas, to Thunderbird, to meet McWillie. And then he's got the whole thing with the, I think his lawyer or accountant with something like power of attorney and saying that he's going to, you know, he's going to be all right financially. And then you've got his calls to, you know, all those individuals around the country.

senior mob positions so that seems like a perfect window and that is really clearly like concentrated with over i mean just a few days you know a week really and also it seems like it kind of builds like the the scale of it builds like there's that meeting in person then he goes to see him up really you know then there's all this stuff so i think i could totally see that yeah and for my part at least and dick i wonder if you have a different point of view but as I view the factual record, I kind of think that each one of these escalating steps that you laid out there was not necessarily fully transparent from Jack Ruby's point of view. In other words, I don't think that necessarily Gruber and Jones said, hey, they're going to kill the

president and then you've got to kill the guy that killed the president. Or not even McWilli necessarily saying that. I think that there's a more subtle way to go about it that is kind of captured in the Libra passages that we read and in other Jack Ruby passages in the novel as well. And it also, it's reminiscent of movies like Casino or other mob movies that, like Scorsese movies or the godfather or whatever where you have people involved in a plot only receiving the information that's necessary at a given stage in the proceedings and then later getting more information right like you be in this place at this time and somebody's going to tell you what you got to do sort of a thing and so my speculation is that that was how ruby was

handled by these fellas. And the reason why I think that his knowledge was not complete as of that time, for example, in his November 19th meeting with his lawyer, his lawyer describes his mood as very positive. And meanwhile, his behavior in the aftermath of November 22nd, which we described in detail was neurotic to say the very least. I mean, he was acting pretty manic and pretty crazy. And, you know, his sister testified that he was throwing up constantly. He was in a real state. And to me, that suggests that it just was dawning on him after the president's murder that his job that he was being primed to complete was involved in the plot. So that's my POV on that.

Yeah, so the idea that he like wasn't in on the plot to kill the president, right? Yeah. He didn't know, like when he was at the Thunderbird on the 17th or even, you know, up until the moment the president is killed, he didn't know what it was. he was going to be doing, but he knew that, you know, he would have to go and do it. Or else, yeah. Or else, or if you wanted to get the payoff or whatever. One more allegation just to quickly address, which a listener flagged for us, shout out to

that listener, thanks for the email, it involves the Julia Ann Mercer story. And Julia Ann Mercer was a young woman who was driving down Elmstreet. towards the underpass and claims that she saw there a car, in fact, a pickup truck parked on the side of the road that forced her to slow down to get around it, and she saw a young man take what looked like a gun case out of the back of the pickup truck and walk up the grassy knoll. And she also said that the man behind the wheel was none other than Jack Ruby.

Now, there are a lot of wrinkles around this case. I don't have time to get into those now. I'd recommend listeners interested. Can check out Jeff Crudell's coverage on JFK, the Enduring Secret podcast. But suffice it to say, there are a few things that do not permit me to hang solid speculation on Julia Mercer's identification of. Ruby in particular. For one, this version of her story didn't come out until she told it to Jim Garrison some years later. Her contemporaneous statement given to investigators on the day of the assassination didn't mention Jack Ruby. It didn't mention a gun case. And there was a different

description of the pickup truck, and only later did she repudiate that contemporaneous statement and say that her signature must have been forged and that essentially her testimony was changed by the investigators to get rid of these incriminating facts. But it was only recorded in a written statement in Garrison's handwriting, which she signed. And she did not make any public statements about it. She did not testify in the Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans. And she was not interviewed by the Warren Commission. So while it does reflect yet another instance of the Warren Commission assiduously sweeping under the rug any evidence that would undermine the lone gunman hypothesis, I do not think that it rises to the level

of implicating Jack Ruby on the day of the assassination. And I also base that on the fact that I just don't think that Ruby could be trusted with multiple jobs or that anybody who was handling Ruby would want to give him more than the bare minimum that he could do while still remaining basically disposable. But if he's there driving gunmen around, then he's going to know a lot more about the plot that he could potentially tell the authorities or otherwise screw up somehow. So not going to speculate that Ruby was involved in the JFK assassination. based on Ms. Mercer's testimony, although it's too bad that nothing ever became of the testimony. It wasn't really tested or further investigated.

Yeah, just quickly on the Ruby side of things that we're just talking about. I mean, as you're saying that, it also reminds me of Oswald, you know, where I do think that whatever the other details may have been, I think that was a guy who probably instantly realized that what he knew about what he was involved with was a fraction of what the actual plan had always been and that, you know, I guess he realized that he was being hung out to dry and that he'd been probably, you know, set up, used in various ways. And I think there's that with Ruby where it's kind of, he kind of knows, but also it's a lot bigger. And it was, I mean, so much bigger. And then I think it just gets more severe, that sense of, I think after the conviction

as well, maybe he went into the trial thinking he had people at his back. And then by the time of the conviction, I think he realized, oh, I don't even have them. Like, I am completely out on the limb here. Yeah. And the stakes were much higher than not just getting that loan to pay off his debts. Yes. Like, once you have a glimpse of this plan, he would have known given his mob ties that you don't get out of something like that alive unless you pull through yeah and even then you might not get out alive yeah yeah i mean i think he assumed he was going to get out at some point maybe even on appeal or even on bail who knows but anyway that's getting further on down the line but um yeah and i think also you know the way things

get compartmentalized in intelligence and it's a similar kind of thing you know you don't like I think in the other day there's that Angleton quote that I think is enough to give give one some chills when you really process what he's saying but

like with most things he says but when he said a mansion has many rooms I'm not privy to who shot John I think there might that it's possible that perhaps probable that there's truth in that he didn't know specifically who pulled a trigger

but he knew the higher level side of things. I mean, he knew enough to cover it up. And I think it's, you know, those kind of things where, like, knowledge of who's doing that will be kept compartmentalized from the people higher up. And similarly, yeah, the person on the ground will have no insight into why they even need to do it or what else is a part of it. Yeah. I just wanted to, on the Angleton quote, give, an even more chilling context for that quote.

So it actually, it's drawn from John 14 versus two to three in the New Testament. My father's house has many rooms. If that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? and this was what Angleton said to Gary Hart, who was a senator on the church committee when he asked him about the assassination of Kennedy, and he used this Bible quote to let Hart know that he had looked into Hart's background, and I guess Hart had gone to divinity school or something before, you know, abandoning it to become a lawyer and pursue a political career.

And of course, famously, Hart was also a bit of a philanderer. And so I think that wrapped up in the entire thing, Angleton is not only indicating that the CIA is God. He's also telling Gary Hart in a very subtle mind-fuck way that he knows about his immoral deeds. and he is insinuating that in fact he does believe that the CIA was involved in the assassination so it's a real a real triple whammy at least from the old orchid master himself god he's sinister he only gets more sinister I feel like it's impressive in a like Jesus anyway yeah thank you for that that's fascinating I did not know any that. For 30 years, James Angleton was one of the top men in United States intelligence. When he

retired at the end of 1974, he was head of counter espionage at the CIA. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. All right, Dick, you want to take us back to Dallas? Yeah, so I think you laid it nicely. So it's like, in the lead up to the assassination, like, if we're just speculating here, right, it's like the mob ties, they're telling him, you know, there's going to be something big that happens in Dallas. you're going to need to be the cleanup guy or something like that, right? Like they won't say, we're going to kill the president necessarily, but there might be some loose ends that you need to tie up.

And then after it happens, he's probably getting his intel from the actual police, right? Whether intentionally or through the subtle, so he's sort of feeling out the Dallas police, he's like thinking, okay, well, this is obviously the job is to kill this guy. And so let me see how I can tackle. into my network of Dallas police officers, the connections I've cultivated, and, you know, how I can get to my opening, so to speak. Yeah, I think it's something like the mob guys tell Jack, you'll get the instructions from our boys in blue, something like that, because Jack was well aware and was involved in putting cops.

onto the mob payroll in order to facilitate any number of rackets. Like that is well known. That is part of Jack's role in Dallas. And so I think that the DPD played this messenger role and obviously also helped to set everything up for the day of. And I think speculating here, I would agree with what Joe Tonehill, Jack Ruby's lawyer, told Seth Cantor, which Cantor reported in his book, the Ruby cover-up, which is that the conversation that Jack Ruby had, which lasted several hours on the night of November 22nd with Officer Olson, who was married. to one of Jack Ruby's strippers, they all got into Ruby's car the night of the killing after the press conference in the lockup that Ruby attended to see Oswald in person. And I think that meeting was kind of the setup.

And there's even testimony on the record that in that conversation, Ruby was getting gassed up and Olson was saying to him that this guy is a cop killer and he doesn't even deserve a trial and in fact he should be cut to ribbons and that Ruby agreed with that sentiment. And so it's right out there in the record, but scratching at that surface level version of it, you can see that it's operational within the bigger picture. So that's our kind of take on the instructions. It's hard to, it's like hard to read it any other way, right? Yeah. How else can you interpret the series of events? Yeah, that sounds, I was going to say plausible, but it sounds like, just you could almost say it sounds like the truth.

I mean, it's hard to say any of this is, in fact, really the truth or whatever, but... And interestingly, Tana Hill, after he had made that statement orally to Cantor, sent Canter a letter that said, just to be clear, I'm not saying that there was any conspiracy involving the Dallas police. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right, right, right. No, no, no, no. Yeah, I mean, that's what with so much of this stuff, it's that's exactly it it's like you lay out the details and it you know it's exactly as you said

it's like how can you read it any other way but we are told that that's not the way to read it and so that's simply the basis on which we're supposed to not read these things in the way that they seem it seems like there's only one way you can read them it gets absurd but yeah great well said I think it's the only way to read it it's like even crazier than that too right it's like they make it so that if you are reading it in the way in which we do read it you're a kook of some kind right like you're you're paranoid or you're crazy yeah it's not enough the facts don't hold up yeah i mean it's like with ruby himself that uh his claims that there was a conspiracy to assassinate the president and that um the people around him he couldn't trust um were used to use that he was a conspiracy to assassinate the president and that um the people around him he couldn't trust um were used to signs of his insanity um so it's the same kind of thing where it's like if you i mean it's it's like textbook uh toxic gaslighting kind of stuff it totally it's it really is it's like that's how to do it you know um but uh yeah it's the same thing consistent and i think you teed up

nicely the very last point to make before we get into the meat of today's episode picking up after ruby is placed under arrest and that is kind of what was ruby's mentality what were his subjective beliefs at the time that he pulled the trigger and i would posit that he subjectively believed he had to kill oswald or else if he didn't everything that he owned would be taken away from him, either through government enforcement of his IRS debt, mob enforcement of other debts, or just getting rubbed out for knowing too much about the plot that he was called to participate in. Second, that his family, I think, he felt that his family was in danger of death or a fate worse than death based, again, on his knowledge of just how

the mob was working at that time. I mean, they had a real respectable body count racked up, and he was well aware of that. And then finally, and this gets into the nexus with what will become his deepening psychotic spiral, But I think that even at the time that he killed Oswald, I think that he believed that there was a larger conspiracy around the assassination of JFK, that extremely powerful forces were behind it, and that part of the potential cover-up of the assassination conducted by these powerful forces would be some kind of a false flag blame cast on the Jews sparking pogromes in America.

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, certainly as to the mob's body count, I mean, this is a, I say, a milieu of lethality. You know, there's a hell of a lot of fancy way of saying they killed and it was easy for him and it happened often. I mean, and I think, you know, in the 40s in Chicago, he'd been in the room witnessing the murder of Leon Cook. And, you know, he and his friends were all, you know, a lot of childhood friends became, you know, hit men and stuff. So he knew the threat or the pressure put on him, you know, it could be financial, it could be family, it could be anything, could be his beloved dachshunds, you know, it could be, and it could just be, you know, he'd know that the bottom line was it could also go to death. And the side of it that's part of the conspiracy would be pinning the blame on the Jews is, I think it's fascinating that side of it. And there's a hell of a lot there. I mean, you know, I think maybe we discussed him,

but Ruby's rabbi was someone I'd overlooked until a few months back, and he was, I think, the guy who saw Ruby most once he was in prison right after the shooting. And Ruby told Tonnerhill later on that Howard had told him to say it was to, it was for Jackie and the kids. And I think it says rabbi who says that, Ruby was, that he, I think it's the rabbi who says that Ruby said he did it for the Jews and contributes to that kind of that side of it. And Peter Dale Scott, there's a paper that

he read at a recent gathering in California that I actually went to. And in that paper, he references some far right guys in Dallas who, there was one guy who was accurately predicted before the assassination, that there would be something about, you know, I can't remember the exact predictions, but it was something about, you know, rifle shots and I think may have predicted the book depository, something like that. So he was right about those, and then the third prediction was that it would be blamed on the Jews. And that whole side of it kind of gets overlooked in the story.

You know, it's one of the real deeper things that hasn't really come down to us in the popular history of all this, but it's there, and it's, it's something you don't encounter at first and that guy who predicted all that was, I think, a Minuteman. I still don't know what to make of that whole side of it, but something I've wondered about is that after Wes sees him, kind of the central part of his psychosis, at least as West describes it,

is that he's got these visions of these pogroms happening in that moment, you know, that he could hear him outside his cell. And that seems, I mean, this is skipping ahead, but that seems to come kind of out of nowhere. There's no reference to him having any kind of thoughts like that before, and then suddenly they're all at once. So there's some, that came from somewhere. And, yeah, that does seem to have been part of the picture. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was in his mind earlier on.

Like there was testimony from, it was Sam. Yeah, it was Sam Ruby. Yeah. who talks about some concern that Jack expressed about the assassination resulting in some American Holocaust against the Jews. But I think it definitely blew up out of proportion from the moment that Jolly West gets involved into these very vivid visual hallucinations that go well above and beyond the type of behavior that Sam Ruby described and also that is consistent with the trip that he took with George Senator

and with Larry Crayfard to investigate this ad that was signed by Bernard Weissman because he thought that that was like a John Birch society setup of to pin the blame on the Jews. Mm-hmm. Right. So that Weissman piece was probably the first thing that would have tipped him off to it, and it just kind of gets bigger and bigger in his mind to the point of exploding when Jolly gets involved. And we're going to talk a lot about that later on, but things. that's good place to leave it for now. Any other thoughts just kind of on the speculation about the

events up to and including the hit? The third point about like the larger conspiracy and you know the plot against the Jews and pinning the assassination of Jews and all that it's like for me that angle it's something that was easy i think like for someone like jack and you got to think like the holocaust was not it was within his lifetime right i mean less than 20 years i guess when you think of it yeah yeah i think that sort the horrors of that was so close to him and then of course like anti-semsism didn't go away after that and in america and like in the south i'm sure he was confronted with that a lot yeah and you know this is a guy that isn't a hardened killer and he knows he's got to kill this guy

and I'm thinking he's sort of coming to more of a spiritual sort of justification of why he has to do this and then once the shrinks get involved I think the shrinks sort of exploit that right they're like okay well this is one of the ways this is an angle we can work this guy right like yeah

that's my hunch yeah because it appears yeah exactly that But we'll get, I mean, we'll get into all of this. He'll be taken immediately to a booking room, and a very historic booking would be made. And then representatives of the press will have their first opportunity for a real front-to-front confrontation.

Now, our big television cameras can't fit in that room, we'll shoot that on sound film, and just as soon as that process, you'll be able to. able to see it. Then he'll be brought to a cell. There's a possibility, only a possibility, that that cell may have a window giving out on the assassination site.

This is Paul Good returning you to WFAA. And we are still standing by, awaiting on the movement of the prisoner Oswald. We still have ABC's bill. have ABC's Bill Lord on the phone from City Hall. So once again, Bill Lord, what is the situation at ABC's at the City Hall? Well, Bob, we are waiting and waiting. It is anticipated that he will be moved because extreme precautions have been taken. As I said before, the police are worried. They are so worried they've talked about the possibility of moving him in an armored

vehicle, not just the normal sheriff's vehicle. And when this arrives, we'll know that But this is the cue for Mr. Oswald to be brought downstairs and transferred to the car. A short report now on the activities of the new president. Before leaving his home this morning, President Lyndon Johnson met with Central Intelligence Agency Director John McCone and with Kennedy, Senator President Kennedy's chief advisor, McGeorge Bundy. And then Mrs. Kennedy and the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, the President's brother, will leave the mourners behind the case on carrying the President's father. The body of the late President will rest tonight in the rotunda of the Capitol, and now for a report from the Capitol, we go there, John Rawson recording. There on the Capitol Plaza, where the president's body and Cortez will arrive in less than two hours, many thousands of people are gathering, waiting, some have been here all night, some have arrived proudly of four dawn this morning.

There will be a 21 gun salute, and at the same time, the band will sound ruffles and flourishes, followed by hail to the chief. Inside, there will be a ceremony to which something has been added this morning. There will be three speakers. Short eulogies will be delivered by the Chief Justice of the United States, Earl Warren. By Senator Mike Mansfield, the Democratic leader of the Senate. And by John McCormick, the Speaker of the House. When the funeral service is held tomorrow, a military tradition that began a millennium ago will carry on into that service.

The black horse, riderless, and entrapping to black, will trail the seven horse casan bearing the body of the president. Military historians believe the custom of the riderless horse in the funeral of a warrior began as far back as the time of Genghis Khan. It is based in the primitive belief that if the horse written by the fallen leader were sacrificed, the spirit of the horse

would follow its master to the hereafter. And now to Dallas This next part is one of my The pieces I'm really fascinated with is because it's like, you know, this trial and this event, it's like coming in a time where TV is becoming very popular and everyone's got a TV in their house for the first time and everything is now national

and everyone gets their news simultaneously and how that plays in with how the events of the like next couple of months in this story how that that all comes together i think that's very interesting it is like the first i think televised murder but also like the trial being televised You know, I don't know if like the actual trial was on TV, but like the coverage of the trial being televised. Yeah, yeah. They tried to get cameras in the courtroom, I think, but they didn't. Yeah. But it was.

Yeah. Yeah, no. I think the fact that first live murder, it's nuts, you know. And I think Mad Men actually has some, there's an episode where it all happens. And it's just worth a watch on you. issue was something, not that I was there, but it feels like it catches it kind of well, like everyone's reeling, and then suddenly they're all watching TV, and to see that happen. The kind of, I think it catches the sense that I've always got to be careful not to do this

too much, I think, you know, to say that everything changed exactly on this, in this moment, you know, but I have a lot did it on that weekend, I think, in a lot of ways, and I think it's another aspect of it. Yeah. Yeah, talking about spectacle as well. You guys have, yeah, right. That's exactly right. Like, we really like to pull on that thread of the spectacle.

And I don't know, Don, for my money, an actual murder on TV. That's, I mean, that's spectacle. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it's like, not only was it on TV, I think that the funeral procession of JFK in Washington, D.C. was being aired live on TV and they interrupted the programming on the live feed to cut to Oswald's transfer that was you know the cameras were there at the ready and that was therefore like inserted right into the sadness of Kennedy's funeral with his wife and the little kids walking right

they didn't drive in the car they walked down Pennsylvania Avenue and with the coffin and it's just the drama of the moment and it bears recalling something that we've covered on the podcast a bit but when it comes to stage managing world shaking events the CIA by this point had a lot of experience under its belt and that's something that we really should keep in mind with this whole thing because like think about 1954 this coup in Guatemala Operation P.B. success that many of the same

names that were involved in that coup come up in the Kennedy assassination as well, people like E. Howard Hunt, David Atley Phillips, George Joannidis. These guys used in 1954 the media largely and the radio and the newspapers and the broadcast technology of the time to convince the government to step down and flee the capital of Guatemala, despite the fact that the coup force itself consisted of only a couple hundred men. And it's another thing that DeLillo talks about in Libra, too, that the way that they were able to pull off this coup was thanks as much, if not more so, to their manipulation of reality in real time as it was to any use of.

force or violence and you know this has just innumerable parallels to it yeah i mean yeah like atlie phillips was a psychological operations guy um on the cuba stuff and things like that and it was the quote i think attributed to frank wiesner that the media american media was uh his mighty whorlitzer um that he could you know press any key and it would play the tune he wanted and Yeah, also psychological operations. It's this big term that, you know, Psiops, I feel like, in recent years, got down to, like, some Gen Z kind of TikTok level of things. Like, people will just throw out, like, Sciop and stuff. And, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and, like, what that really is, is got a hell of a long history. And it's this, I never expected to end up spending any time reading, like, military documents recently. They're theoretical things. but I've found myself reading some about sciops and it's it's just a given that it will be used and as a part of the you know the arsenal and what that means is is not like again not like getting in your head and brainwashing you and rewiring you it's just um it's like psychologically making pressure kind of overwhelming confusing you you know making you afraid making you unsure what to think or what to believe you know it's at that level it's kind

It's simple, and it's always been a part since early 20th century, first half of it, you know, that it's part of these operations. You know, it softens up the opposition, I guess you can say. For sure. Yeah. And it also, you know, looking back on the events, all these decades hence, it gives us an extremely muddy record to work with because in real time, they're just throwing so much misinformation and disinformation, and they've got assets on the ground that are operating at all cylinders. The name Hugh Ainsworth comes up an incredible amount in connection with the coverage of

the events in Dallas, who's a reporter at the Dallas Morning News, and he was an asset of the CIA like so it's everywhere obviously Life magazine and Henry Luce and C.D. Jackson were also CIA assets and played a massive role in the dissemination of information about the events in Dallas as well. So it's like these guys are a funnel and a filter. We talked in our 4th Reich Geopolitic 5 episode about this sort of process in detail. So encourage people to check that out if you haven't already. But it makes for an always interesting, never completely conclusive exercise in trying to untangle the web.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. showing how aware they were of the importance of not just evidence documentation you know obviously but like there was clearly this instant effort by at least people presenting themselves as I think Secret Service in the moments after to secure all photo and video that had been recorded or film that had been recorded by anyone there and obviously that includes a Pruder and then that gets suppressed by loose and everything for a long time but um well as I think we found Zupruda, you know, that something like that gets out of the bag, it's hard to put it back in again

and it says more than a lot of things, you know, details can say. So I think, yeah, very, very aware of exactly what you've been saying how the importance of crafting the information people have access to and therefore how people will perceive it or the extent to which they won't even know what to think I think is also the bottom line a lot of it just as you said interference just you know filling the um airwaves with as much BS as possible contradictory stuff yeah it's not just the muddying of the waters that's happening or like you know the controlling of the narrative and all of that but also the like organic let's say frothing of the waters that happens because this is all really high profile stuff and it's like national headlines and people

come out of the woodwork wanting to make a name for themselves and wanting to get the limelight and there's there was no shortage of like opportunists and you know just sort of this organic race of people coming into the picture which ultimately I think adds to the chaos yeah I was going to read just a couple of sentences from Friend of the Pod, Guy Debord, from his notes on the Society of the Spectacle. This was his second work, the follow-up work from the late 80s. And in that, he wrote, when almost every aspect of international political life and ever more important aspects of internal politics are conducted and displayed in the style of the secret services with decoys, disinformation, and double explanations, one may conceal another, or may only

seem to, the spectacle confines itself to revealing a wearisome world of necessary incomprehensibility. When television has shown a fine picture and explained it with a brazen lie, idiots believe that everything is clear. From Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, the American Broadcasting Company joins with the nation in observing the memorial service for the late president of the United States John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The Reverend Dr. J.B. Allen,

minister of the church, will officiate. Have mercy on me, old God, according to thy steadfast love. According to thy abundant mercy, blot out my transgression. wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin created me a clean heart

or God and renew a right spirit within me the sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit a broken and a contrite heart O God

thou wilt not despise Rob Walker WFA TV Dallas, Texas interrupting has been a shooting at Dallas police station as Oswald was being transferred for details Bill Moore at ABC at City Hall Bill Just one minute ago they were bringing Oswald out He had apparently changed clothes He was just going out the door heading towards the armored car

And there was a bang we believe it was a shot And apparently What has happened to it? We do not know at the present time let thy special blessing abide upon the family of the slain president and grant old god that in a time of national crisis and emergency that the vision of thy people's eyes may be so clarified that they may distinguish the blessing which can come out of any situation. He is surrounded by

he is surrounded by sheriffs, by plainclosemen, detectives, by policemen of every description reserve officers. What was feared might happen actually apparently has happened near Dallas.

Possible. Walt is shot, according to a police policeman. There had been so much preparation on this. And if they feared anything, they certainly didn't fear there would happen here in the police station. It happened in the police station in the basement. They were afraid of the route,

taking him one mile from here to the county courthouse. Yes, yes, because you were saying earlier, Bill, that they were talking about putting him in a garbage car for that route. Yes. they were worried, so worried about it that they were going to take an armored car and transfer him, and the armored car

had apparently been brought out, I saw him come down, the elevator, there were sheriffs with the sheriffs where he got Texas, 10 gala hats, they were walking fast feet. They were ready to do everything in their power to guard this man because this was the one thing that did not want

to happen. Here is a man charged with murder of the President of the United States and now he himself has been shot. We do not know his condition. We do know that the shooting occurred inside the city jail of Dallas before he could be placed in a car and transported to the county jail. The report we have from Bill Lord was that the shooting was probably done by an elderly man, a short, dodgy man. The horses and the caisson are now awaiting the pallbearers who will bring the casket out and place it on the caisson for the funeral procession up the historic route that a little less than three years ago John Kennedy took to be inaugurated present.

And as we await further reports, it might be interesting to do a resume on the evidence that law enforcement officers had gathered against Lee Harvey Oswald. Some of the physical evidence, Oswald's wife, says he owns a rifle. Furthermore, Oswald was employed in the building where the sniper hid for the attack, and police have established that he was in the building at the time of the assassination. There is more evidence enough for local law enforcement officers in Dallas to make the statement that we feel, quote, we have a cinch, end quote. Yesterday this portico was wet and the sky was dark. Today the sky is frightened and Washington was dried. We feel, quote, we have a cinch in fact.

That does it for this week's free preview. If you want the whole episode where we get deep into the formation of Jack Ruby's law and psychology team, you'll have to go over to patreon.com slash forthrightke archaeology, or wait till it comes up on the free feed, a little bit down the line. Meanwhile, for Dick and for Max Arvo, I'm Don, saying farewell and keep digging. Thank you.