Stuff You Should Know - Who killed JFK?

Episode Date: November 21, 2013

For the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Josh and Chuck delve into the killing, the investigations and the conspiracy theories to get to the bottom of an enduring national question. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and very appropriately for this one, we have our buddy Matt, who's guest producing because he knows how to do that kind of thing. In addition to his awesome show Stuff They Don't Want You to Know, which he does with our other friend, Ben. And it covers conspiracy theories and we are podcasting on Who Killed JFK the day before the anniversary of that fateful day.

Fiftyth anniversary, right? Fiftyth anniversary, November 22nd, 1963 in Dallas. And so you made a joke that Matt was just going to be over there the whole time going hmm. Yeah. Really? Uh-huh. Yeah, it wasn't the mob.

Yeah, three tramps, whatever. I like the three tramps one. It's ridiculous, but it's my favorite one. Yeah, I got some good stuff on that. Oh, so do I. In 2003, Josh, an ABC News poll came out 10 years ago, 70% of Americans believe the assassination of John F. Kennedy was part of a broader plot. What percentage?

70% believe that and only 32% believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Well, so it's the thing. It will not die. No, it won't. It never will, I don't think. Well, it's very much entrenched in popular culture as well, too, like even it's become a parody of itself as well. Yeah.

You know, just the idea that there's this outstanding question that will never be put to rest. Yeah. The JFK lone gunman and grassy Noel, like all these are almost like buzz terms now. Yeah. The lone gunman, they made an appearance in the X files. They were recurring characters, trio of guys and the misfits have a song about the JFK assassination.

Yeah. Magic bullet. I bet there's a band called Magic Bullet. Sure. There's all sorts of stuff. Yeah. Well, let's get into this because I think our colleague Jonathan Strickland of Techstuff did a really good job of like handling what could have easily been like a 50 page quagmire.

And he basically says like, here's all the facts and this is why the what's on the surface is probably the likeliest thing to happen. Yeah. And happened. We should see away a little bit here. There are hundreds of books written about various conspiracies, conspiracy theories on the JFK assassination. And we are, we don't have like 18 episodes dedicated to this.

Yeah. So this will be a skimming of the topic. I don't want anyone to be like, oh, Josh and Chuck are going to get down the bottom of this. Right. Like that's some people's life's work, you know, dedicated to this. Yeah. I mean, if we're anything, we're dilatants.

That's right. So every week we go from one subject to the next. That is true. So I guess let's begin at the beginning just to get it all out on the table. Okay. All right. Okay. So Chuck.

Yes. On November 8th, 1963, the Secret Service found the proposed route for the presidential motorcade visit to Dallas. And there was a reason the president was coming to Dallas. It was a very good reason. And this is why he was in Texas. Why? He was trying to basically sort of unite the Democratic Party.

He was meeting with, with his vice president and the governor of Texas. And there was some bickering going on within the party and he basically wanted to, he's trying to get reelected is what he was doing. Right. Well, that was a big part of it, but it is true. Senator Connolly and Senator Richard Yarborough were publicly feuding and they're both Democrats. So basically their great father was going to come and make peace with them among them publicly tour the state of Texas to help himself get reelected.

But also to show Texas like, hey, the Texas Democrats are all family here. Family fights sometimes, but we're still all family and we still have the same grand vision. I know I'm a Catholic from New England, but we're all the same. So, okay, where are we? They find out the route from Lovefield to Dealey Plaza. They publicize that in the newspapers. So everyone knew about it because, you know, they wanted people to come out and wave like they did.

On November 19th, the route was published in the papers and then on the 18th published on the 19th. Yes. Right. On the 22nd, 1963, that fateful day, Air Force One lands at Lovefield. The president gets in his presidential limousine and they start making their way toward Dealey Plaza. Yeah.

Along with Governor Connolly and his wife, and of course, Jackie, and then a couple of secret service dudes. That's in the one car. Yeah. In a car behind them is LBJ, Senator Yarborough, and some other secret service guys. Right? That's right. So apparently as they were headed toward Dealey Plaza, they got delayed because Kennedy

stopped and kind of soaked up the people waving and cheering and all that and gave some back to them. Little fist bumping. Yeah. And so they were a little bit delayed getting to Dealey Plaza. But when they did, at about 1230, as they were riding in the presidential motorcade, a shot rang out and then there was two more shots. At least.

Yeah. And with the second shot, they think, the president hit through his hands up to his neck. Yeah. And Jackie leaned over to kind of like, say, what's going on? And then all of a sudden, the back right side of the president's head blew off. Yes. It is very graphic.

If you see the slow down enhanced Zapruder film on YouTube today. It's very affecting too. It's really sad. Yeah. It is terribly sad. And this was not even a part of our generation. Like this kind of stuff still makes people like our parents break down sometimes. Yeah.

Right. So that was 1230 within about anywhere between four and eight seconds. At least three shots were fired. One missed probably the second and third one hit the president first in the back of the neck exited his throat and the third one blew his head off. Yeah. So that magic bullet, since we should go ahead and just clear that up. It hit, I guess this is the second bullet that passed through his throat.

It went on to hit governor Connelly in the back. In his armpit, I think. Yeah. Below the right armpit exited below the right nipple, then hit his wrist that was in his lap and then continued through the wrist through his left thigh. And that's why they call it the magic bullet. And if you've seen Oliver Stone's movie, they kind of, you know, make fun of it in court. Like that is one magic bullet.

That's where it got the name. Back and to the left. Yeah. Back and to the left. Remember the Seinfeld thing. Yeah. With the spit. With Keith Hernandez.

Yeah. But, and I remember my brother-in-law, the Marine explaining to me years ago that bullets tumble and can do some really crazy things. Sure. Like he's seen it happen on firing ranges and. Plus also, this is a very, very powerful bullet. Yeah. It was a 6.5 millimeter bullet, which is basically like a little howitzer shell.

Yeah. It's huge and it travels very quickly. Yeah. And they have done tests that even though it seems unlikely that show that it is possible that a bullet can change directions and do kind of crazy things once it starts hitting bone. Yeah. And other things.

Yeah. And this is like you said, the second bullet most likely. Yeah. Within just a few seconds after the first shot, Kennedy is lying there motionless. Jackie's like reaching back across the trunk of the car. Yeah. Trying to get help from a secret service agent who I believe jumps into the car. Yeah.

Well, actually they think that she was picked up part of his brain tissue. Okay. I heard that before too. Yeah. I looked into that today. It was a pruder film and it looks, it looked to me like she was reaching back like help, but I've heard that before as well. Well, apparently she was quoted by I think Connelly's wife and one other person at the

time is saying he's dead and look, I have, I have his brain in my hand. She I read her testimony for the Warren commission and she says she doesn't even remember any of that. I'm sure. But yeah, whether or not that's true, it's awful. She was trying to hold his head together on the way to the hospital. Yeah. So in the car behind them, a secret service agent pounces on LBJ and like throws him onto

the seat and lays on top of him. I think his name is Rufus Youngblood, the C.I. or the secret service agent. The motor kid just takes off to the hospital Park Memorial Parkland Parkland Memorial. And again, the the motorcade inter-dealy Plaza at 1230 by 1pm. The president has been pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Yeah, it was just a few miles away. So that was 1pm. That was 1pm.

I guess we should talk about the grassy knoll real quick because a lot of people have said, you know, a shot have there were a lot of misleading and conflicting accounts, which is where a lot of the trouble started. Eyewitnesses, not cooperating stories. The acoustics at Dealey Plaza were funky because of all the buildings and it's three side buildings and then one side like a grassy knoll basically. Yeah. So like where did the shot come from?

I thought it came from over here from the sounds. It was basically pretty tough to pinpoint. And the grassy knoll, there was a police officer named Clyde, hey good, that there are pictures of him, you know, running toward the grassy knoll and a lot of folks thought, hey, he's running like toward a suspect when in fact he was running toward another police officer to, you know, say, hey, what should we do, I guess. So the, I guess the way it's been explained away over the years is the acoustics and the fact that that cop was running toward the grassy knoll has made some people think

that there was more than one shooter and another shooter was on the grassy knoll. The official line is that that is not the case though. So 1pm, the president's pronounced dead at 2.38, Johnson, Jackie Kennedy, Johnson's staff, pretty much everybody was back on Air Force One. And they called Bobby Kennedy to ask what to do and to tell him what had happened. And Bobby Kennedy said, you need to swear Johnson before you guys leave the ground. So they found a judge, brought her on board and she swore Johnson in as president and then they took off and flew back to Washington.

Very famous photo. Yeah. With him being sworn in on board Air Force One. Right, with Jackie's, oh, NASA's or Jackie Kennedy's face just like. Yeah. The fact that she was able to stand is pretty amazing. Yeah. Apparently they turned her in such a way so that the blood stains weren't apparent in

the photograph. Oh, man. I don't know if it was Air Force One yet. It was, I looked. Oh, was it? Okay. All right. So where are we?

Four minutes after the shooting, Dallas police looked at the Texas School Book Depository Building and said, hey, that might have been where this came from. It's a pretty prime location for a sniper. And there was an eyewitness named Howard Brennan who saw a figure in the window and gave a description which fit Lee Harvey Oswald. So this is one dude actually saw him in the window. So on the sixth floor, pretty believable that you could see someone from that range. Right.

And I said, I knew it was Oswald all along. So there was a cop that was in the book depository within two minutes of the shooting. Yeah. Marion Baker was kind of took the initiative to go ahead and get in there. So he went in there and he met up with the superintendent of the building, a guy named Truly. And they started walking up the steps and at the second floor, they came upon Lee Harvey Oswald.

Who was leaving? He was leaving. Yeah. Truly vouched for Oswald. And Oswald was allowed to leave and the reason truly vouch for Oswald is because just a couple weeks before, about a month before Oswald had gotten a job at that book depository. So yeah, he checked out as far as truly was concerned. The officer who was with Truly said, well, okay, and they kept looking.

And a few minutes after that, Lieutenant showed up and took over the crime scene and they started scouring the building. And on the sixth floor, they found the sniper's nest. That's right, with three empty cartridges and the gun, a telescopic rifle, a telescopic sight and a bolt action rifle. And it was pretty much a no-brainer at that point, or at least on the surface, this is where it came from. Right.

So after Oswald left the book depository, he went to the place where he was running a room, the house where he was running a room and grabbed a pistol. And as he's walking along, and this is about the same time that Kennedy's being pronounced dead, he's walking along the street. He encountered a cop named JD Tippet. And apparently Oswald just opened fire on this cop, shot him four times, killed him instantly. Yeah.

Well, he was investigating Oswald because the APB had already come through with a description of Oswald. And he was like, well, this guy fits that description. Let me talk to him. And it didn't take long though. I don't think there was much of a discussion before Oswald shot him and killed him. And actually when Oswald was finally apprehended, it was for the murder of the cop. They didn't know he had anything to do with Kennedy at the time.

Oh, yeah? Yeah, at the time. He ducked into a theater, the Texas Theater, into the movie War as Hell. And I think he snuck in, and that's why they called the cops, because they were like, hey, someone snuck in the theater. So if he had bought a ticket, he might not have ever been caught, you never know. You know what's interesting about that? There's all these parallels between the Lincoln assassination and the Kennedy assassination.

Some are untrue. Some are just ridiculous. But one of them was that John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln in a theater and went and hit out in a warehouse. And Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy from the warehouse and went and hit out in a theater where he was caught. That's a pretty good one. I like that one.

So he was apprehended in the theater and reportedly said, well, it's all over now. But he also said something interesting. At one point, to the media, I'm a patsy. Which has fueled speculation over the years that we'll get into the different theories. Before we go any further, get this, the president of the United States of America has just been shot in front of a crowd in Dallas. That's right. That's huge.

That's enormous. That's what's going on right now. And there's a manhunt for this guy who's just been caught for killing a cop. So people don't know that the president's killer has just been caught as well. So it's a pretty emotional time. Let's talk about Oswald himself. But first, let's do a message break and we'll talk about Oswald when we come back. Agreed.

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So here's a little bit about Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a mixed up guy. He was sort of an outcast sort of didn't really fit in. He was born in 1939. His father died two months before he was born, which I think, you know, probably has a lot to do with emotional scarring later on and maybe being a mixed up kid. He was in an orphanage for a little while with an older brother and half brother, but his mother was able to get him back out of that orphanage and raise them by age five.

Yeah. What was five when he got taken out of the orphanage, which was enough years to also do some damage psychologically. I think that probably set the theme because I read a little bit about what, you know, contemporary reports of him growing up concluded his problem was and that it was one social worker said that he believes his mother doesn't give a damn about him. So and that somebody else said that they've never met a kid more emotionally starved in this guy.

So I'm quite sure that being left it in an orphanage, even being picked back up after a while was probably did have a pretty big effect on him on his development and how he viewed his mother. Well, yeah. And when you look at what he did for the rest of his life, it seems like he was always looking for a new family quote unquote, whether it was the Marxist or the communists or Cuba or Russia. Like it seems like he never, I mean, it's kind of a psych one on one, you know, he was

looking to fit in somehow somewhere with somebody. But at the same time, it was always on the fringe of wherever he was at. Yeah. You know, like it was never happy with where he was. He wanted to fit into whatever was counter what he was doing or with the status quo of where he was. So at 16, he drops out of school and tries to join the Marine Corps. He was too young.

So they said, come back later. He wrote the Socialist Party when he was Socialist Party of America, when he was 17 to say, hey, I'm way into Marxism and like, can I come join your club? I guess at the very least we send me a free button. Yeah. And then at 17, he reapplied to the Marine Corps and he was old enough at that point. And turns out he had quite an act for shooting guns. He's a sharpshooter during boot camp, but then during the actual ranking testing only

rated as a marksman, which is still really good. Yeah. He's a sharpshooter. Sharpshooter the highest. Or is that? Yeah. Dead eyes, the highest level. I think sharpshooter size.

But at the same time, even while he was a Marine, a Marine marksman, he taught himself Russian. He studied about the Soviet Union and communism. And this is during the Cold War. This is like during the most paranoid finger pointy part of the Cold War. But Oswald's in the Marines, like teaching himself Russian and everything. See what I mean by a confused guy? Yeah, but even still like it's just, it's so strange to me learning about his experience that he was relatively left alone while expressing pretty publicly this interest in the Soviet

Union and communism. Yeah. During the peak of the Cold War, it's just, I thought if you had, if you even wore the color red, people like communists get them. But apparently you could just hide in plain sight or admire the Soviet Union plain sight. Well he eventually would find himself on a watch list because he went to Russia under, he obtained a passport falsely with an application to a college in Switzerland and applied, got to Moscow, applied for citizenship there and they were like, nyet.

And so he goes, oh yeah, if you don't let me in, I'm going to kill myself. He basically did. The same day he was rejected by Russia, he slit his wrist. And the warm hearted Soviets were like, well okay, you can stay young man. I thought that was interesting. That's what allowed him to stay. Yeah. Yeah.

That's just weird. Yeah it is. So he said, I don't want to be, well he did not officially announce his citizenship in America although he expressed interest in doing so. Yeah, he kind of mouthed off about it but never actually did it. That's right. In Russia, he fell in love with a lady named Marina Prusakova and… You're not going to try her real name?

Nikolovna. Nice. Nikolovna. Yeah. I think that's right. And basically he was like, you know, we should probably go back to the United States because it turns out Russia sucks. These bread lines, I weren't expecting them to be so long.

Yeah, it said he'd become disenchanted. I think that's the nice way of saying that Russia sucked. Right. And he says, hey, I know a place where you're going to love, it's called Texas. Let's move back there. Just forget the fact that you don't speak any English, you don't know anybody in Texas. Everybody back in America thinks I'm a weirdo and I'm your husband. Yeah.

Just let's go to move to Texas. And she's like, she said, what did you say in Russian? Yeah. He's like, nothing in Russian. And so they moved to Texas and she apparently very quickly became just… She felt isolated. She didn't have any friends. And a woman named Ruth Payne felt bad for her and took her under her wing and they became

kind of friends and Ruth Payne will come into play a little later on. Yeah. And this is where he was finally sort of on the radar of the FBI. Yeah. When you move back. Yeah. You can't move to Russia and then come back and they just, you know, don't even bother talking to you.

No, but they did talk to him and they said, okay, well listen, if the USSR gets in touch with you and wants you to do espionage, just let us know. And he went, sure. Okay. They're like, all right, we'll have a great day. Thanks for the coffee, ma'am. She's like, what did you say in Russian? That's pretty remarkable.

So on April 10th, 1963, another interesting thing happened. A few days after losing his job, he tried to assassinate Major General Edwin Walker. Yeah, this guy was a piece of work himself. Yeah. He was a hardcore right-wing conservative, possibly gay man. Oh, I hadn't heard that. Yeah. Later in life in the 70s, he was arrested twice for fondling men in public.

I wonder if he was the model for the dad in American beauty. Oh, maybe I could see that then. Yeah. I mean, he never married and they, I don't think they ever came right out and said he was gay, but he was arrested twice for fondling police officers. Well, Alan Ball, if that's the case, email and let us know, okay? Yeah, which is neither here nor there, but it's interesting. No, but he was, like you said, extreme, a right-wing extremist in the very definition

of the word. He was very well-respected, decorated, military leader. Like he was commanding all of the troops in West Germany at one point. Yeah. No, he hated the Kennedys. He called Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt pink, which means that they were communist sympathizers, which is a big deal. He was temporarily relieved of his post while he was investigated for that.

And he said, you know what? I'm not even going to, I'm not going back because the U.S. has given up its sovereignty to the United Nations and I can't fight for it any longer. And this guy was so convinced by his own convictions that he refused a military pension for years afterward because he didn't want to have anything to do with it. Well, apparently he refused it, but then kind of quietly tried to get it. Right. Well, then they gave it to him.

Yeah. Yeah. And he was celebrated as a great soldier later on in life and after his death. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So another example, though, of Oswald is sort of a confused guy. Like he tries to assassinate this right-wing conservative general. He also was a Marine.

He also killed Kennedy. He was just sort of like, it didn't seem like he knew what he believed. Well, he believed that, what is the general's name? Walker was like Hitler in the making. Yeah. Basically that he was an extremist who needed to be taken up, but he missed. Yeah. From about a hundred feet away, he shot into his dining room from the street where he was

sitting at a desk and hit the window pane and it, you know, made the bullet go a different direction. So he missed. So Lee Harvey Oswald is basically doing anything he can to insinuate himself in international global politics. Yeah. But he got away with it. Like they never, it was a cold case until they finally caught him and put the, you know,

Kennedy. I think his wife was the one who fingered him later on. Oh, really? Yeah. Because he comes home and says, hey, we're moving to New Orleans. And she's like, what'd you just say? And so they moved to New Orleans. And while they're there, she's like, I've had enough.

You're shooting at public figures now. We're moving from Texas to New Orleans. I'm moving back and she moved in with her friend Ruth Payne. And that surely had an effect, an impact on Oswald. There's no way it couldn't because he already had abandonment issues from his mother. Yeah. Now his wife leaves him because he's just crazy. And he's like, well, you know what, fine, I'm going to stay here and I'm going to start

a chapter of a pro-Cuba, pro-Castro sympathizer club and I'm going to be the one and only member, but I'm going to be a loudmouth member. Well, I think you wanted more than one member, but it was another example of like nobody was interested in this guy. Nobody. Russia didn't want him. No one joined his club. His wife left him.

Cuba didn't want him. No. He went down to Mexico and visited the Cuban and Russian embassies trying to basically get in with them. And they were like, that's okay, thanks man. Yeah. Like nobody was, I think the words Strickland used was no one was ever very impressed with Oswald.

They were unimpressed Soviet and Cuban officials. I mean, if this guy was a Patsy, he was the perfect Patsy. Oh yeah. But you can also take all of this evidence and say, well, this is what made him do this. Yeah. If he was a Patsy, you imagine how easy it would have been for like one of the theories is the mafia for them to put their arm around and be like, you're a pretty great guy. Right.

You know what you should do? You should kill the president. Yeah. Yeah. He would have been very easy to manipulate, I imagine. Because he's also just 24 when he shot Kennedy. Yeah. He was just a kid, which is crazy.

So he left New Orleans, went back to Dallas, got a job and about a month later at the school book depository, shot and killed John F. Kennedy. Yes. So Oswald's done his shooting. He's caught. They've started to investigate his background. And Lyndon Johnson ordered an investigation, a full investigation into the Kennedy assassination. What happened?

What happened? Lessons learned, all that stuff. And this commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren was called the Warren Commission and the report they compiled, several hundred page reports called the Warren Report. And in addition to the several hundred page report, they also released 26 volumes of transcripts of the hearings that they conducted. So it was this exhaustive investigation that was very transparent supposedly. I mean, there's so many documents that to try to censor them, really censor them, it

would be virtually impossible. So a lot of people point to the very fact that the Warren Report is so voluminous that it is like in fact correct and it's not part of a larger cover up at least. Yeah. And I sent you that article. Did you read the one from the New York Times that some people think they're still documents to CIA won't release? Well they won't.

Well, but the one anti-conspiracy guy that they interviewed said, people that don't know how the CIA works that believe this stuff, there would be no documents, period. They wouldn't be hiding things, they wouldn't exist. Operation killed President Kennedy. Yeah. I mean, he's sort of like a little pat on the head, like you think there are documents, you sweet little conspiracy theorists. Yeah.

All right. So the Warren Commission comes out and immediately conspiracy theorists start to suggest different things like one theory was that it was an outside job by the KGB and or Cuba. Right. We should say the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy on his own volition by himself without acting at the behest or at the benefit of anybody else. Yeah.

Just a lone singular crazed gunman. Right. So the conspiracy theories are everybody else saying, no, that's not the case. And so we gave the example of the grassy knoll, the acoustics and Dealey Plaza, the fact that a cop was running toward the grassy knoll and conflicting eyewitness accounts. Like from the literal beginning of this event in history, there have been all sorts of hay that people have been able to make conspiracy theories out of. Sure.

Like there's been no shortage of all sorts of different weird things that you can start to piece together with other things and come up with these very interesting, some sound conspiracy theories. Oh, sure. But that when you really get down to them, they're not supported by evidence. Exactly. I'm glad you said that. The KGB or Cuba theory that maybe their governments were acting out and trying to kill Kennedy

had some legs because the bad pigs had just happened. They were certainly no friends of Kennedy at the height of the Cold War. There was definitely a motive there. But there was no evidence to tie Oswald in any substantive way to either of these countries. No, they looked at his finances over. They went back a year and a half and looked at his finances to see if there are any weird payments or whatever. And apparently the only amount total that they couldn't account for came to like $160.

Yeah. Could have been cash and diamonds though. I guess it could have been. That's how they liked the deal. Yeah. One of the other popular theories I mentioned was the mob and that Jack Ruby was working with the mob. And the second Oswald said, I'm a Patsy.

They're like, we need to go take care of this like right now. Yeah. We haven't mentioned Jack Ruby. Two days after Kennedy was killed, they were transporting Lee Harvey Oswald. And a guy named Jack Ruby, who was a Dallas nightclub owner, came up and shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the chest and killed him. Lee Harvey Oswald actually died in Parkland Memorial, the same hospital that Kennedy had two days before.

Yeah. A very famous photo, which has since been made into a very funny photo. Have you seen the band one? No. You never saw that? No. It was, you know, the photo of Ruby killing Kennedy and someone went in and photoshopped in musical instruments because they're all like, have different, you know, pain expressions

and Jack Ruby's at the keys and I think Lee Harvey Oswald has a guitar and it looks like that. I haven't seen that one. Yeah. It's pretty funny. Check it out. How about another moment here for a message break, Josh? 2023 is already well underway, everybody, so don't wait any longer to level up your

small business. And the way you can do that is by joining up with stamps.com. That's right. Because with stamps.com, you're going to be able to print your own postage and shipping labels right there from your home or office or home office. And you know, it's ready to go in minutes. You can get back to running your business sooner than later. Yep.

So stamps.com is like the post office elevated. They have rates you literally can't find anywhere else, which comes in handy because postage rates just increased again, like up to 84% off of USPS and UPS plus stamps.com automatically tells you your cheapest and fastest shipping options. So use stamps.com to print postage wherever you do business. All you need is that computer and printer. Set your business up for success. When you get started with stamps.com today, just use our promo code stuff for a special

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river cruises and right now through January 30th use promo code heart 20 to receive 20% off your tour. That's promo code heart 20 through January 30th. Visit gate one travel.com for more information or to book your tour. That's gate the number one travel.com. Once again, use promo code heart 20 through January 30th to receive 20% off your 2023 trip. All right, let's get back to it.

So we were talking about the mafia. Yeah. Because Jack Ruby owned a nightclub, everybody's just like well, he's with down with the mob. What's more, Lee Harvey Oswald probably was acting on behalf of the mob because he had an uncle in New Orleans who was mafia connected mobbed up as they say. Is that what they say? Yeah. But apparently there's no evidence that Oswald and his uncle communicated at all and these

connections are fairly tenuous at best. Yes. Lee Harvey himself said that the reason he did it was because he wanted to spare Jacqueline and Carolyn the heartbreak of having to come back to Dallas to testify against Lee Harvey Oswald. Oh, really? That's what he officially said and apparently there is a transcript of and it is just hearsay. But it's Oswald talking with his lawyer saying that he's saying like this whole charade we're

doing that he shot Oswald while he was blacked out and he can't be held responsible that it's all just stupid and they should go with the truth that he did this because he wanted to spare Jackie. Interesting. That's supposedly it. But then apparently also supposedly he said that that was a charade as well. So who knows? Well, another theory is that it was the CIA and it was an inside job.

Kennedy had criticized their practices and was trying to scale down Vietnam and those weren't very popular things to do at the time if you were in the government. And so a lot of people say, you know what, Lyndon Johnson might have orchestrated this whole thing and it was an inside job with the CIA. They're like he barely ever wore pants for God's sake. I don't know if this remained true to her death. But both Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy at one point believed that quote he was felled by domestic opponents and of course Bobby died not too long after no five years.

But I don't know if Jackie held that opinion her entire life. I'm not sure about that. I'm curious. It seems to ring a bell that like she was suspicious of LBJ. Yeah. I know since 2000 there have been five legit tenured historians that have published studies and four of the five concluded that there was probably some larger conspiracy at work, but none of them agreed on what it was.

So it's hard to get a consensus. So ultimately what it came down to the official line was that there was a rifle that had Oswald's fingerprints on it that was found at the crime scene. That there is a picture in existence of Oswald holding that exact same rifle before the crime was committed. He had already tried to kill a general. Yeah. And the fact that he said well it's all over now when he was apprehended.

You take all this together everybody who a lot of people think it was Oswald. That's the official line, right? Yeah, and the Zapruder film has been used to that, you know, hey how can you shoot someone from this direction and they had go that direction. There are other films of the incident, but the Zapruder is the most complete. I did look at some of the others. I'd never seen any of those before. It's weird to see it from different angles if you're used to seeing just the Zapruder

film. So the Warren Commission did not put this issue to bed at all, even back then. There was another commission that took place in 1976, the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And they investigated both JFK and Martin Luther King's assassinations. And this is a group of House representatives who, you know, it's true are known for being the rabble-rousers of the government, that branch of government. But they basically investigated this, carried out a full investigation and found that, you know what, we actually think that JFK did die as a result of a conspiracy.

We don't think it was the mob. We don't think it was the CIA. We don't think it was the FBI. We don't think it was the Cubans. But we do believe that it was a conspiracy and that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. This is the House of Representatives saying that. Yeah. Well, they initially said that there were four shots, but they were actually wrong.

And then later we candid that with acoustic evidence and said, you know what, we were wrong on that. And they did never find any, like, hard evidence. But was there, did they remain true to that statement? Yeah, that was in their final report. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, that it was part of a conspiracy.

So that definitely didn't quell any rumors. No. As a matter of fact, it's like, oh, well, the House of Representatives just said that Kennedy was killed as part of a conspiracy. Like if it was dying down before, it flared right back up. And there was another one almost at the same time, a Rockefeller commission by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. And a lot of people think that the Rockefeller commission was basically just like a fact-finding

committee that was there to basically cover up and derail any other investigations. Oh, really? Yeah. Kind of like, we got this. Right. You know, it didn't work, though, because of the House Select Committee. Well, they invalidated one of our favorite little parts of the theory, the three-tramps theory.

At the time, there were these three vagrants that were detained by police that had been traveling by boxcar, supposedly. And that's how they travel often? That is how they travel. And two of the men for a while were believed to have been E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, who were the dudes who broke into Watergate, which would be a nice little coincidence. Yeah. Well, there's a whole side-by-side photographic comparison of the two, and I mean, it looks

a lot like them. Well, it does. The FBI got experts to do the same thing, though, that said, no, it's not them. And the third guy... And if you're a conspiracy theorist, you're like, oh, okay, well, thanks, FBI. Appreciate that. I believe you. And the third guy was rumored to be Woody Harrelson's dad.

Yeah. Charles Harrison. He was a hit man, and they were estranged, by the way. Woody Harrelson is not like he doesn't talk about this much. It's not one of his favorite topics. Yeah. Sorry, Woody. I know.

We got to talk about it. But he killed a federal judge, and then when he was caught in a standoff in 1980, high on cocaine, he said, I killed Kennedy, too. And then later on, recanted that and said, I just said that to... Because I was high on cocaine. Yeah. And I was trying to elongate my life, and I don't think they would have killed me if I had information.

Oh, is that what it was? That's what he said in an interview from prison. But conspiracy theorists latched on to this and said, he's the third tramp. He was the youngest one of the three. Yeah, and the pictures kind of look alike. Yeah. Woody Harrelson's dad was one of a trio of men who killed JFK. Well, all of this could have been put to bed if the dudes looked nothing like the other

guys, but they all kind of did. So another thing to add fuel to the fire, for sure. And we should say, also, there's even more, like you were saying, the CIA still will not declassify documents that they have about the JFK assassination. That's not helping things. Something did come to light, though, from investigations into the CIA. They had a guy named George Joannadies, he was a CIA agent who was basically in charge of a group of anti-Cuban student dissidents, or anti-Castro Cuban student dissidents.

And he was running their operation in Miami and New Orleans. They actually beat up Lee Harvey Oswald while he was in New Orleans handing out pamphlets that were pro-Cuban and pro-Castro, like a few months before the assassination. So George Joannadies ran that operation. And then later on, in 1976, when the House Select Committee was investigating it again, he was the liaison for the CIA, but no one told the House Select Committee the involvement he'd had before. Interesting.

Yeah. Well, with Woody's dad, he actually had a co-conspiracer that said, you know what? He's confessed this before to me and even drew maps about where he was hiding the day it happened. But in 1989, arrest records were released and identified the three tramps as Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle, and John Gedney. Those all sound like suspicious names. And they, I think they interviewed a couple of these guys later in life, and they were

like, yeah, we were the guys, and we were just boxcar dudes, even though we had suits on and we're clean shaven. Oh, well, everybody back then was, like even if you were like just a total complete hobo, you still wore a suit and a fedora usually. So again, people point to that and say these clearly weren't, you know, these guys were paid or, you know, and then a lot of other hinky things happened. People disappeared. Witnesses disappeared.

It's never going to die. I don't think, I don't think anyone will ever let this go. No, but that's, that's what makes a great conspiracy theory, right? There's just too many facts outstanding that just can't be put to bed. So you got anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to learn more about this or if this piqued your interest, you should definitely check out our buddies over at Stuff They Don't Want You To Know.

For sure. They have a huge, awesome body of work that they've put together over the years and continue to do so. And you can also read this article on howstuffworks.com by typing JFK into the search bar and see what comes up. And since I said search bar, it means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Chinese Zombies from Sam LaRusa. Hey guys, don't know if you're aware of this, but you have a bit of a cult here in Wuhan,

China. Awesome. A whole two people. My girlfriend and I. Still, it's pretty great. Yeah. We listen to you all the time. As you tell us about Stuff We Should Know.

We're both English teachers and outside of with each other. The Stuff You Should Know podcast is just about the only English speaking we get on a day-to-day basis. I have an incident though to write you about where Stuff You Should Know saved my butt and it just happened yesterday. Wuhan schools have a three hour siesta to avoid the hottest part of the day. And I usually use the time to plan lessons or take a nap. Today I decided to forego planning lessons and just snap and woke up a mere 20 minutes

before my afternoon 120 minute lesson. Completely unprepared. Geez. I started to panic, but then remembered, do zombies really exist? Stuff You Should Know podcast, I listened to just earlier that day. My students are well aware of the zombie apocalypse theory at the end of the world, but neither I nor they knew anything about the history of zombies. And I had been shockingly irresponsible regarding zombie apocalypse survival strategies.

Oh yeah. So I jumped online, ran off 22 copies of How Zombies Work from HowStuffWorks.com, highlighted some very good vocabulary, and some grammar patterns, and had a two hour lesson ready to go in 20 minutes. All thanks to you guys. So there you have it, how you saved my butt and turned an otherwise really awkward two hours of nothingness into a kick butt zombie survival lesson. Hopefully your cult falling will grow to five, maybe even six people.

Who is that be something? And Sam LaRusse, thank you for being lazy and napping on the job and then using our work to do your job. But not really though, because it could have just been like, oh well, I guess they're just going to sit there quietly for two hours. He like really hustled. That's true. He took initiative.

Way to go Sam. And thanks to you and your wife, right, your girlfriend. Thanks to girlfriend. Thanks to both of you for holding things down for us in Wuhan. We appreciate that. If you are located at some remote outpost of the world or in some bustling, cosmopolous, whatever we want to hear from you, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at discovery.com. And as always, you can join us at stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. You're ready to travel in 2023 and since 1981, Gate One Travel has been providing more of the world for less. Let Gate One handle the planning for you with affordable escorted tours and European Riffer Cruises.

And right now, through January 30th, use promo code HEART20 to receive 20% off your tour. That's promo code HEART20 through January 30th. Visit gateonetravel.com for more information or to book your tour. That's gatethenumberonetravel.com. Once again, use promo code HEART20 through January 30th to receive 20% off your 2023 trip. Wondering about the state of the world, the economy, or climate change? Wonder how you can reduce stress, feel happier, or sleep better?

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