The Joe Rogan Experience - #1759 - Oliver Stone

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

Oliver Stone is a film director, producer, and screenwriter whose credits include "Platoon," "JFK," and "Wall Street." His new documentary, "JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass," is currently available on SHOWTIME.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day uh so thank you oliver thanks for being here man i really appreciate it and i really enjoyed your documentary i like you well not as much as you but i am a conspiracy freak when it comes to the JFK assassination and I I've been fascinated by it for decades and but no one is I don't think anybody is as fascinated by as you and well I get the impression that you have the impression I'm a full-timer but no no not a full-time career well I know you do listen I'm a huge fan of yours. But it's kind of fascinating that your film, the JFK film, was approximately 30 years after the assassination. Yeah.

And then this is approximately 30 years after that. We're still going through this. And they're still withholding documents. Yeah. It's really kind of amazing, isn't it? No, it's not. It's,'s not. Everybody's dead from that era. But it's all the more important that we understand our history because it's fading. But the reason we're in this kind of disbalanced situation in the United States, where we have no less and less trust is because of the past. And if we go to this particular incident in 63,

it's a demarcation point. It's a turning point for the country. And that's what's fascinating to me because I have a historical interest. I've written and made The Untold History of the United States. Yes. I'm very interested in history

and I just think we have to pay attention because the roots of our problem are here. And do you want me to talk about that or do you want me to- Sure. Yeah, please. I have to generalize because from the time he was killed in 63, that November, think about it. Not one American president, not one, and you can name them all, have ever challenged the military or the national security state or the intelligence agencies.

Not one. They haven't been successful. They've cut the budgets occasionally, but not by much. But essentially, they keep going up. The Defense Department has a record year this year of $760 billion. Who says you can't to the military or to the intelligence agencies? They seem to have an inordinate amount of power. Kennedy was the last one who was trying to curb it. Who says you can't to the military or to the intelligence agencies? They seem to have an inordinate amount of power.

Kennedy was the last one who was trying to curb it. And he meant a serious effort towards peace. He was the last president to talk about peace very nobly. And people have said, oh, he just talks. But no, he was doing things. And we can talk about that too. That's why it's important. It's crucially important. This country has gone the wrong way since the national security state has gotten bigger,

stronger, more money, more paranoid, less trust, in every which way. The cynical amongst us would say that that's inevitable, that whenever you have these situations of power, especially when you have what people like to call the deep state, but what's essentially this group of people that never leave office. And they have incredible amounts of power, the people that are in the intelligence agencies, the people that are in the Pentagon, the people that are in all of these positions of immense power, but they don't get elected in and out. They don't have four-year terms. And these are the people that the president, when a newly elected president, has to check in with. It's a very dangerous situation because it's a frozen bureaucracy.

Yeah. And they die off, but they're replaced by the insiders. And as a result, we're the biggest bully on the block around the world, no question. We have the most power militarily, supposedly, and nuclear in every which way. We tell other countries we intervene. We often tell our allies what to do or we make them do it. We declare ourselves to have enemies and we keep insisting on it. have enemies and we keep insisting on it. We talk about China, we talk about Russia, Iran, Korea, North Vietnam, I mean North...

Trevor Burrus North Korea. Richard Wagner Excuse me, Cuba. Trevor Burrus Oh, okay. Richard Wagner Yeah, North Korea, Cuba, and don't forget Venezuela. Trevor Burrus Wow. Richard Wagner It's considered a major threat. Although these threats are inflated, overinflated. and we can talk about each one of these individually, but that's what I've done in my spare time in documentaries.

I've done Ukraine. I've done Russia with Putin, and I'm very interested in what we call enemies. And I keep seeing this overinflation of it because why? Think about Orwell. Remember the old George Orwell in 1984? The state exists to fight a perpetual war or prepare for war. That's what we've been doing since 1945, six. After World War II, we didn't stop World War II. We stopped moving into World War III. We said that our allies in World War II, the Russians, were a great threat to our country,

although they were depleted. Their energy was depleted. Their money, they were broke, broke, broke. We had promised them money. We cut off the payment. The moment Roosevelt died, Truman cut off the aid payment that we were sending to them, some $10 billion. And since that time, we just keep – we push the Cold War. And we have to – we can discuss the whole Cold War if you want.

But it was really – think about life before 1945. Think about we were in a war with Hitler, right? It was a war that was forced upon us. We went in very late. Think about the 1930s and the 20s. The Roosevelt – Franklin Delano Roosevelt was recognized the Soviet Union. He was one of the first. He was the first.

He had a vision for post-World War II, which is beautiful. You have to understand that there was a vision of a world dominated by the great powers. It would be United States, Britain, China, and USSR at that time. That was the four powers he envisaged that would control and he believed in the United Nations. It's a shame he didn't see his vision come true. He died in April of 45. Truman took over and it was a different – the moment Truman took over with his group, the Soviets were seen as the enemy right away. Right away. There was no going back on it.

Speaking of this idea that the United States is the biggest bully, have you seen this video that was recently released from China where a Chinese representative is talking about Julian Assange? Assange and the Chinese representative is saying that the United States has no moral high ground to stand on when they talk about what is going on in other countries, particularly in China, when what they're doing to prosecute and to force Julian Assange to be extradited to the United States and the way they're going after him for what's essentially just being a journalist and exposing what many people believe is war crimes. And that speaks to what you're saying is that like we have rules for the rest of the world and we don't follow them ourselves. That's correct.

The Assange case is a very typical of what happens when the state becomes scared of its position. Its dissidents become enemies of the state. And the same thing has happened to some degree in China, yes. And they are paranoid about it. And you could say, but to draw an equation between our power and their power is wrong. Because, you know, a bully, he goes around, he scares the neighborhood, right? It works for a certain period of time,

but he's a hated individual. There's fear because he's there, right? Yeah. I've seen your movie. I've seen your, you know, you talk about martial arts. You think about it as a movie. The guy is always kicking ass

in the neighborhood and until the new hero comes along and deals with it. Generally, he wins. The new hero wins. until the new hero comes along and deals with it. Generally, he wins. The new hero wins. But the new hero wins by not enforcing that kind of fear on the rest of the people. You've got to have modification of behavior. There's nothing wrong with our power. I think the United States has power to defend itself, no question.

But we have to modify our behavior to behave in a humane way with people and recognize people's differences. But that seems to be less the case as we become more disciplined, more ironed about how people have to behave. We tell them, in your country, you can't do this, you can't do that. Now, some countries are different. They have different customs, different cultures. They don't have to agree with the way we run business.

We call it democracy, although a lot of people question the democracy inside this country. I mean, you know what the elections are like here. It's become very suspect, elections itself. And the money behind the elections, I mean, it takes a fortune to get elected. You go to Washington, I mean, I think it's hard to get an audience with a congressman. I do think you have to pay money in order to get the ear of a congressman. So it's, you know, our democracy is not functioning in the way it was meant to function. And other countries, and we want other countries to restore their democracies, but their democracies, it works better in Europe to a certain degree

because they don't have long election periods. They have short election periods controlled, and the money is well controlled. They don't allow the private sector to take over the elections as we did here in this country with the Supreme Court's decision allowing corporations to exist as individuals. Yeah, that was a tremendous mistake. Supreme Court's decision allowing corporations to exist as individuals. Yeah, that was a tremendous mistake. And if you go back and look at where this country took a bad turn, I would agree with you that it seems like it was during this time period where JFK was assassinated, that JFK had these ideas, getting rid of the CIA. He wanted to pull us out of Vietnam. He only wanted to send – I mean you talk about this really in detail in your documentary, the new documentary that's available right now on Showtime.

Yes. JFK Revisited. Yes. Which is – it's so thorough. How long did it take you to make that? A year and a half. It's on Showtime now. It's limited. They have a 90-day hold on it. End of February, it becomes available widely and we will get it out widely in the

United States. But it's available in foreign countries. It's in about 15 foreign countries. But still, the United States is... Listen, we're lucky to have gotten Showtime to do this because they're a good company. They've given me a platform in the past with my Putin documentary, as well as my untold history of the United States. Yeah, kudos to them because it's a controversial subject. It's a very complex subject. And for you to be able to cover it in such incredible detail the way you did. From the beginning, you could tell from your documentary, you can tell from the beginning there was a concerted effort to pin the blame on Lee Harvey Oswald

and to, without a doubt, remove any evidence to the contrary. Yes. You're jumping around. So, I mean, I was going to just finish the Kennedy thing. Remember that he resisted war. Yes. People get this confused because they say, oh, he went into Vietnam. But no, you have to look at the whole thing the way it was.

He avoided war twice in Cuba. And this is very important to remember. The Bay of Pigs was a setup. The CIA controlled that operation. They went in. They expected. They knew that operation would not work unless the United States came in militarily to back up that invasion of Cuban exiles. They expected it because Eisenhower would have done it in the past.

They got used to it in the 1950s that the United States went back to CIA. Kennedy made it very clear that he would not put US combat troops into Cuba. Made that clear. Or give it air support unless they were established a beachhead. He was willing to meet them halfway. He was saying, okay, we'll go if you succeed. But it didn't succeed. It was fucked from the beginning because Castro knew it them halfway. He was saying, okay, we'll go if you succeed. But it didn't succeed. It was fucked from the beginning because Castro knew it was coming. He knew about this seven days, eight days before, maybe more. And they were stranded on the beach. As a result, that was a few days after he became president in April, right? He had very little experience,

but he was shocked at what happened. And he took full responsibility for the debacle. He said, I'm the responsible officer of government, which is a very good thing to do. He established a hierarchy. But he really wasn't in charge, and he knew it. He told de Gaulle, and he also told other people, I'm not sure I'm in charge of this government because they have a secret branch, the CIA that does what it does. The military definitely is not controllable. All the chiefs of staff were wildly against him, including Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief. They saw him as an inexperienced young man, although he had been in war and he'd actually been heroic and had a heroic

situation there where he really earned his, he was in the Navy, PT boat. And he saved a lot of men during that horrible experience he had in the South Pacific. But aside from that, he wasn't scared of the generals because he'd been in war. I guess that was what I'm trying to say. And the second thing he did was a year later, and this is crucial. People don't quite get it, is that when the missile crisis happened in October of 62, this was a key moment for Kennedy. This is what signed his death warrant, I believe.

He didn't go in. He didn't invade. Everybody in the Pentagon, including Eisenhower, including his senior civilians experienced and said, go into Cuba. Take them out because the Russians had put nuclear missiles into Cuba. And this was against all America. You couldn't do this 90 miles from American shores. It was against all...

Violated the concept of America as a sovereign country. It was no question that he had to go in and he didn't. This is very important to understand. If he had done it, we've now found out that the Soviets, yeah, they had not only a lot of troops there, they had 100,000 troops roughly. It would have been – it would have led to one – it would have built up into a nuclear explosion out of Cuba, somewhere else, somewhere else in the ocean. The blockade, ships would have blown up one thing after another. Khrushchev, the Russians would have reacted. We would have reacted. And then step by step, we would have been into possibly an Armageddon with Russia, although we had way, way far more nuclear weapons than Russia did.

That's what the reason the Pentagon wanted the war then. They wanted to wipe out the Soviet Union. This is very much in the back of their minds. So they wanted to do it the same way we had done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yes. It was beyond that too. I mean, way beyond that. I'm saying this, it's important to realize their thinking. Their thinking was that now we have a tremendous advantage. In a few years, we won't. The Soviets are going to build up, and they did in the 1970s. They got practically to parity. That's what Reagan was talking about. He said we have to take on the Soviet Union, the same thing.

But in the 1962 period, it was possible in their minds to win. First strike, blow them up. We take a limited amount of casualties, 20, 30 million people. Do you remember Dr. Strangelo? Yes. I was just going to talk about that. It's the same kind of thinking. And Kubrick got it right. That was their thinking. We can win now, wipe them out, get rid of this threat. And just lose a couple cities. Communism will be dead. Although there was China, of course, in the background. But they were willing to take out China too. They had plans for that. When it got to its worst point in that crisis in those 13 days,

they had plans for China off of Okinawa. Wow. It was going to be a real conflagration. And they would have won that war, so to speak. I mean, hopefully a male and a female would survive it. Hopefully a male and a female. And that's what Kennedy was up against, him and his brother, Robert. It's a tremendous story.

And it's been told to some degree, but I don't think people understand the passion of what was happening in that moment. And I think he saved him and Khrushchev because Khrushchev was very much on his side in that regard. Khrushchev also had seen a lot of war, of course, at Stalingrad. So those two and Robert and various people around them saved this situation, pulled it out at the last second basically. It was very close to going over. And that was the end. The military never trusted them again. They said this guy is weak.

He's a weak sister. And they said this is going to end. He's emasculated us. This was the whole idea. And what led in the following months of this, all his planning around him was to basically end his reign because he was definitely on the road of changing the American way of peace. He wanted peace more than war. And he talked about it. And of course, there's a huge complex out there, like Eisenhower talked about, that would have been out of business. I mean, he really wanted to cut back on the concept of going to war. You have to understand that. So if he doesn't go to war twice in Cuba, think about this. Why would he go to war in Vietnam? And he said this 6,000 miles away. Why, if you're not going to defend the United States against Cuba,

would you go to war in Vietnam? To defend what? To defend the United States from Vietnam? This was a thinking. They didn't understand that. I have to say also, he didn't go to war in Laos, which Eisenhower advised him to before that. So he avoided war. It's amazing that Eisenhower was the one that was doing this when Eisenhower is the one who had that speech. At the end of his – yes. Yeah. It's a great speech. I love it.

Do you want some coffee? No, no, just water. Please, I'm just kidding. That speech is what everyone points to as being the moment in time where the military industrial complex is recognized but the fact that eisenhower wanted him to go into cuba eisenhower wanted him to go into laos that eisenhower wanted war yes well you didn't want war why he thought he thought it was the right thing to do he thought it was the right thing to do because we could pressure the soviets down that's what he felt and uh that's what john foster dulles and and Alan Dulles, CIA chief, also felt that very strongly that we have to push the Soviets hard to make them back down.

And that was not the right reading of the Soviets. The Soviets were paranoid beyond belief about us. Their hardliners are the ones who threw out Khrushchev a year later. He got thrown out of office too. So hardliners in the United States, hardliners in Russia are the people who got rid of Khrushchev and Kennedy. That was their payback for being peace warriors. The great speech, by the way, was Kennedy's speech in 1963 in June, the peace speech. That's the most important speech you ever gave. Which one is that? He called for peace. I'm talking about a concept of peace where everyone,

our children, our mortality, the very air we breathe, we have in common with the Soviet Union, which took so many casualties in World War II. You should reread that speech. Yeah, I will. I put it into the documentary, a piece of it. When you look back at when the military-industrial complex started to take hold, is this a function of what was built up during World War II? Because, yeah? Yes. After World War II, the United States had employed all these men, millions of men,

and they came back to this country. There was this tremendous fear of another depression starting again. And Vandenberg, the Senate Majority Leader, told Truman, he said, you've got to scare the American people into reacting. That's the only way you're going to get money to keep this military going. It's going to demobilize, which it did to some degree, but we have to keep spending, we have to keep building weapons of war to prepare for, I suppose they all thought the Russians were coming. What was the reaction at the time to Eisenhower's speech?

When Eisenhower had that speech about warning about the military industrial complex? I think it was regarded with, like, this is a nice old man. He's on his way out. Yeah. And, you know, he's wishing, I think, personally, I think Eisenhower had guilt for it. He had the biggest buildup of nuclear missiles, nuclear weapons in that time period. I think we went up to 25,000 nuclear weapons from 2000, 3000. It was a tremendous buildup and it continued into Kennedy's time because of the budget, the way it worked.

Kennedy was shocked when he came into office. He was relatively, he had to be a realist to get elected. He wanted, he talked a harder line than Nixon. Yes, that's what people get this confused. In 1960 election, he was calling for, he was saying there was a missile gap between us and the Russians, which was pure bullshit. He based that on faulty information. The truth was the moment he got into office, he sent a secretary of defense, McNamara, over to the Pentagon to check this out. A few weeks later, McNamara came back with the information that, no, we're way ahead of the Soviets in our missile capacity. That was never

true. So in other words, Kennedy ran on a platform of being a coal warrior. He had to be. He couldn't be elected in 1960 against Richard Nixon. Just because of the climate of the country at the time. The climate of the country. And that's the way it was. And that's why 1962 happened, I believe. I think the people were different than the people in Washington. I think the people had different feelings.

They were scared. There was a lot of nuclear fallout stuff. There was talk of nuclear war, strange love. On the Beach, don't forget, was a very important movie. It went around the world. People were scared of nuclear war. So there was a desire for peace, and I think the people expressed it in their love for Kennedy because he was starting to change. The polls all showed that.

However, he did have a very tough election coming up in 64 with Barry Goldwater from the conservative side growing in power. Goldwater was a significant speaker, a threat, and very much a hardliner. Kennedy was in a very precarious position when, for example, he didn't want to go any further with Vietnam. He put advisors in. He put advisors into Vietnam when he came in. Yes, because Eisenhower had started the policy of helping Vietnam. He put advisors in. He put advisors into Vietnam when he came in. Yes, because Eisenhower started the policy of helping Vietnam. We cannot lose Vietnam. The domino theory will lose Asia, all that stuff. Kennedy didn't quite see it that way because he'd been to Vietnam in 1950s as a young senator with his brother, actually. And he had talked to some seasoned diplomats out there

who were more of his thinking than the Pentagon thinking. And they had told him that the French are screwed in Vietnam. They're never going to get out of this mess. And they didn't. It was a war like the war we had years later where they were undone by the guerrilla and the desire for independence and the guerrilla forces they were fighting. It's such – I mean I'm listening to you lay this out and it's just occurring to me and what an immense task it is to get into office not knowing all this information. That's right.

Not having real access to what the actual data is. You get into office and then you have to deal with a multitude of world-changing events and world-changing positions, and you're dealing with it all as you're catching up. I know. It's amazing. It's a crazy job. Berlin. Yeah.

Berlin was right away. Right, don't forget Berlin. And then don't forget the ongoing threat of Cuba. Cuba, Vietnam, Vietnam. Yeah. Dulles had launched the CIA chief, Alan Dulles, had launched the Cuban expedition. They decided to do on Bay of Pigs before he came into office. And on top of it, don't forget also, he comes into office.

He didn't even know that we'd participated in the Patrice Lumumba coup in the Congo. Now, Kennedy was very interested in Africa, and people don't know all this story, but he really got involved heavily with Dag Hammarskjöld, who was a UN president, in Africa. When Lumumba was killed, because of our machinations over there, we wanted to get rid of him. We had a plan to get rid of him. Whether we were the ones who pulled the trigger, no, I'm not sure, because the South Africans and other people were involved. Belgians were involved. But still, he was killed.

No one told him for three weeks. Then he got the call from the CIA, and they told him that he was shocked. And his face, we have a photograph of him in the film when he hears about Lumumba's death. So all these problems come on his plate, right? It's a very difficult situation for him. That's why I'm saying he had to be very careful in running for re-election. He knew the problems. As a very seasoned politician, he'd been around for a few years and he didn't want to sound like a, what do you call it, a peacenik. No, definitely that was out of the, he had to keep saying things like we are going to help the Vietnamese, South Vietnamese. But in truth was that he had no desire to help them if they were

losing. And he made that very clear. And that's in the film too, because we found a declassified file from the sec def meeting of April or May of 63, right before his death. And in that meeting, McNamara, who represents him, says, we got to speed up this withdrawal of troops, speed up this withdrawal of troops. And at that point, McNamara knew they were losing in the South Vietnamese. He knew it. So what I'm saying is that Kennedy and McNamara together were willing to pull out of Vietnam, win or lose. And he couldn't say that publicly. Right. Because of the re-election. The National Security Action Memorandum 263 calls for the withdrawal of the first 1,000 troops.

Serious withdrawal. But there was an appendix where all troops out by 65, but he didn't put that in writing. And this we know about now, but we didn't know about it then. I got a lot of flack when I made my movie in 91, the original. He says it's about withdrawing from Vietnam. Kennedy never intended to withdraw from Vietnam. That's bullshit.

It's clear as bell because McNamara not only wrote it up after my movie came out, he wrote a book called, I forgot the name of it. He said the same thing. He said, Kennedy, it was pulling out. So did McGeorge Bundy, his national security advisor. Excuse me, I got to pee. You made me drink water. You got to pee already? Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Can I get a second? Oh, geez. We'll be right back with Oliver Stone. How aware was Kennedy that he was in danger? Was he at all aware? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. In fact, he had that Irish sense of tragedy. He went to Ireland before he died and he kind of knew it.

You think he knew that they were going to try to assassinate him? Oh, he knew about that because there were several attempts already. Were there other attempts? Oh, yeah. I didn't know about it. In the documentary, we go into Chicago. That's right. And Tampa.

Can you just give us a brief outline of those? Okay. There's a lot of information there. In Chicago, early November of 63, a landlady complained about four Cubans with arms in an apartment that they rented briefly. And two of them were busted. Two of them disappeared. And the two that were busted were interrogated and let go, which is strange. There was also a Patsy that was similar to Oswald, same profile as Oswald. He'd been a Marine.

He'd been in Japan at an airbase. He had expressed his dissatisfaction. Another airbase, not the same one, not at Sugi. And he expressed his dissatisfaction with the United States. He defected to Russia. Now, this program, this defector program to Russia seems to have been institutionalized by the CIA. And they sent a certain number of people there to get information about Russia. Now, why do you ask? I always wondered that question. Because back in the 50s, they didn't have land-based information, very good land-based information. They had to get it from sending people there because they could watch the the USSR from U-2s, which is what they did, and satellite photography. But the guy that was,

Vallee was his name, he was also stopped but he disappears. Don't ask me what happened. The point is that- Kennedy was aware. Kennedy, yes. But he didn't really get the whole picture. So it brings in the story of this black secret service guy who became his friend. His name was Abraham Bolden, who he himself had appointed. He looked around on his inauguration day in 61.

He said, how come there's no black agents here protecting me? It's a very interesting question. Bolden became his choice to go in. And, of course, he ended up in trouble because he is the one who pointed out the details of how badly handled the Secret Service did the use the information. And he was busted on false fake charges, went to jail. It's a whole story. That's another story. This murder has so many mysteries.

I mean, Sherlock Holmes would love it. You need a microscope to get into this thing. You have to go into all the details because it goes in so many directions. There was a plot in Tampa where same setup, a motorcade, go past a tall building where you have to make a sharp turn. And in that building, they went crazy. They searched the whole building, but there'd been a tip off, couldn't find anything. And Kennedy went ahead with the Tampa trip. He cancelled the Chicago trip. He went ahead with the Tampa trip but the same kind of profile. The guy was a Cuban who was going to take the fall and he was a member of the the the DRE, the

students against Castro. There was a lot of anti-Castro anti-Castro protests in Cuba, New Orleans, everywhere, Texas, all the South, wherever the Cubans were. And they were,

a lot of it was anti-Kennedy because he had been, twice he had not gone in on Cuba so they felt like he'd betrayed them. Right. There was a seething

hatred for him. How much of a shock was it for him when he got a hold of the Operation Northwoods papers when he found out that the joint chiefs... Yeah, that's another... He laughed. I mean, he thought that was a horrible idea.

Well, it's so crazy to read. Well, it's not so crazy, but when you think about it, it's the realistic... That's the way they operate. Once they put something in writing like that, it becomes more and more feasible. Well, also, you know, when I talk to people about conspiracies and I bring up Operation Northwoods, I say, you know, no one went to jail for that. You understand that those people, the Joint Chiefs of Staff that signed that, like they stayed in office. And if you understand how anything works, things evolve. If this is how government was run in the 1960s, you can bet your ass that there's some sort of similar but more complex version of it in play in 2022.

Well, obviously, people who are talking about 2001 would point to Northwoods as a father, the grandfather of this operation, because it required, among other things, plan to invade Cuba. That was the whole idea. We need another justification. Could you please lay out Operation Northwood so people don't know what it was? Yeah, it was a series of papers that came out because of the Assassination Records Review Board, the result of my film.

They found so much. I mean, but basically that operation called for an invasion of Cuba through provocation, like things like having Cubans killed in the air, domestic airliner blow up and going down over Guantanamo Bay yelling, we're under fire, we're under fire and people would die and be blamed on Cuba. Everything would be blamed on Cuba.

There'd be sabotage operations in the United States. It would be blamed on Cuba, that kind of thing. And it was all done to get people enthusiastic about going to war with Cuba. This is very important. This is crucial to understand. This is very crucial because I do believe that was the motivation for the assassination. The Cuba thing was really the thing that set them off. Forget about Berlin. Forget about the detente with Russia. Forget about the nuclear peace treaty, nuclear atmospheric treaty that Kennedy signed with Khrushchev. That was a big treaty. Forget all these things. Forget Vietnam. Twice he'd failed in Cuba. This created a tremendous wave of expectation

from Cubans who hated him. So this is where the CIA and Cuba kind of intersect. They use the Cubans very well because there's a handler in Florida called George Joannidis gets involved with them. Very interesting character. We'll come back to him if you want. The Cubans are used everywhere on the map, in Texas, Florida, New Orleans.

Oswald is soaked in them. He comes back to the United States. It's a crazy story. He's soaked in them. He becomes a member of the Fair Play for Cuba committee, which is, by the way, started by the CIA. It's not really a legitimate organization. He becomes a member of that. And the CIA started both sides.

They started the student movement against Castro, and they started the Fair Play for Cuba, both sides of the equation. That's typical of what they do. Can I go back one second? Because it's a complex situation and people have a field day with going after JFK here because JFK had nothing to do with the assassination planning on Castro. How do we know this? There's an Inspector General report. Inspector General of the CIA did a report back in 66, 67 for Helms was asked. Richard Helms was the head of the CIA, LBJ. There had been this whole scandal thing. Jack Anderson was a very famous columnist. He raised these issues and had said that the CIA was involved with

Cuban groups to assassinate Castro using mob figures. And this whole thing started to stir up in the 60s. After Kennedy had been killed, we started to hear about it. Of course, the Warren Commission wouldn't allow anything like that to come out because Alan Dulles was on the commission. They never heard a word about any of this stuff. It started to come out. Johnson, who was president at that point, wanted to have a full report. And he asked, he made Helms, Richard Helms, give it to him. Helms is a character that is slimy. It goes way back. But well, that's another story. It's another story. You need to be Sherlock Holmes here. It goes way back. But, well, that's another story.

That's another story. You need to be Sherlock Holmes here. LBJ writes, says, write me the fucking report. The guy writes, the IG guy who's supposed to be honest, inspector general, writes the report. And it's the whole story, the whole bananas, everything. And he says in the report, there is no evidence of any president. That means Eisenhower or Kennedy knowing, approving of any assassination attempt against Castro. Crucial to understand that. And that's Robert Kennedy included, because there's no evidence that we have found in all the research community that says that Robert Kennedy knew

anything. Although the CIA, after the assassination, made a best effort to plant them as assassination people. In other words, this guy, Seymour Hersh wrote a book and Halpern, who was the number one assistant to Helms, Halpern, was his main source and put out all these stories about Camelot really being planning the murder of Castro. That's why you hear this over and over again. Noam Chomsky, of all people, picked up on it and keeps repeating it. This is just not true. We can't find evidence of it. And the IG report points to it. Helms didn't want to give the report. He had one copy he gave to LBJ. That's it. LBJ read it. It disappears into the files.

And the Assassination Records Review Board gets the IG report finally open. What is it, 2000? What is it, 20 now, 21? You realize that that report – and the historians keep – the historians – actually it was available in the 1990s. I mean I don't know if the historians have a responsibility to read these papers. They didn't. And they keep, some of these historians keep making the mistake of saying Kennedy was behind getting rid of Castro. Kennedy was in a tough position on Cuba. Yes, he had to move against Cuba.

At the same time, he wanted to save his Alliance for Progress. Alliance for Progress was a huge social experiment. He started in Latin America, very important, $10 billion. And they really, he didn't want to do military, he didn't want military, the military governments of South America to be putting the money into military stuff. So he put it into education, agriculture, everything he could. He made this tremendous effort. And it's a wonderful story. Of course, Johnson closed it down and put back the money back into the military regimes. Brazil followed the coup and Brazil followed. But where was I? I'm

just trying to say, on Cuba, Kennedy had to give the notion that he was doing something the whole time in these years at 62, 63. So he started Operation Mongoose. Now, Mongoose is very disputed. Mongoose was run by Edward Lansdale, an operative who was in and out of the Philippines. There's a whole story with Lansdale. But CIA never believed Operation Mongoose would work. They thought it was PR.

Meanwhile, the CIA is doing its own thing with gangsters. People like Johnny Roselli, people like William Harvey. Can you explain Operation Mongoose? Mongoose was another operation to subvert the Cuban regime, to blow up things, but not kill Castro, to blow up things, to destabilize the regime, like Northwoods. All these plans are coming in from different departments to derail the Cuban Revolution. Why? Cuban Revolution is very influential all through Latin America.

That's why Kennedy wanted his alliance for progress. So he wanted, and he made, his thinking was that if I can get Castro to back off any kind, don't fuck with my Alliance for Progress. We'll let you be. We're not going to come after you. You can have your regime, but we're going to prove to you that the Alliance for Progress can work. all the intelligence agencies and the deception and these using agent provocateurs and establishing these false flag events do you think he was

aware of this before he got into office was this so this is probably very shocked he was shocked by the Bay of Pigs shocked him his brother he was at this he said they lied they lied to me and he thought he was in charge of the government because the narrative I always heard about the Bay of Pigs is that he fucked them by not bringing in air support. That's of course, that's the right wing narrative. Yeah, that's all you ever hear. Yes. In those terms, yes. He failed. The man got stranded on the beach and he failed to send in air cover. Yes. Because he said so. He wouldn't do that.

And if they had done it, it would have looked like America's being the bully all over again. They're bombing Cuba, which was what was expected of America. He didn't do it. He was announcing a new kind of America. Crucial to understand. And I think the Bay of Pigs is a fine moment for Kennedy. And he had to take the fall for it. But he was furious behind the scenes at Dulles and his group.

The more he found out about it. And this is right after he's got into office as well. April. Yeah. So he's just... He's waking up. Yeah. He's waking up through 61.

And that was a rough year. Do you think that he was aware that it was the CIA that was trying to assassinate him, or was it unspecified forces? Unspecified. He knew... I don't think... First of all, he fired Dulles. That was a huge bonanza. I think that was a great move. He fired Dulles, Bissell, Richard Bissell, who was a schemer, planner, and Cabell. He fired them, but he didn't clean house. Richard Helms steps in as

the major domo there. McCone, he appoints McCone, John McCone, who's an establishment guy, to run the CIA. His first choice is too liberal and they destroy that possibility. Adlai Stevenson liked the guy in this and that. So McCone goes in. Helms really runs the show. McCone is a figurehead. He's sent overseas to visit the stations. Helms is the guy who runs the CIA. Now, what's fascinating –

And by the way, he's the guy we need files on, you know, a lot of files. He's another one of these operatives who knows a lot, who's never really pushed. He was questioned finally by the church committee. was questioned finally by the church committee. Now, these documents that were recently resealed, they were supposed to be released, and then the Biden administration decided to keep them under wraps till when? It's some very long distance in the future now, right? Which ones? No, I think they're finally coming around, but they have to clean the files. I think they were surprised by the amount of work we got, the amount of information we got out of the files. Not we, I mean the whole community of researchers. These people are experts. They know the technical language. They go into these files like ants. Yeah. No, the community of people that are obsessed with the JFK assassination is pretty

thorough. It's amazing. There are a lot of nutcases, too, out there, but those serious people are really good, and they're the ones that kept this case alive. Well, it's a thing that a conspiracy theorist really looks to. I don't use that word. I think truth seeker is much more... Okay, well, forget about that word, but someone who's interested in uncovering

the truth about this assassination, the type of person that has that mindset that's interested in uncovering the truth about any historical event, this is one of the best ones. Because there's significant evidence, and there's significant evidence that there is a conspiracy. Significant evidence. Significance. I mean-

I would say from the beginning, there was, yes, where you have a shot from the rear and a shot from the front. Yes, well, I was going to get into that. So when you detail so brilliantly in this documentary, all of the people that were involved in manipulating evidence, whether it's autopsy photos, whether it's the evidence about the actual shots, where they were fired from, the impact, like where the exit wounds was,

all these various people that were involved. How many people knew what had actually happened? Because it seems like there was a concentration of people that was not small. And one of the things that people who like to use the pejorative term conspiracy theorists, they always want to point to people can't keep a secret. Well, the fuck they can't. They had to. It's a giant maze.

It's so confusing. Yes. That no one would be believed if they... Right. Think of it as departments of this. Somebody pops up and says, I know this. So he disappears in the maze. It's another piece of information.

There's been no attempt by government to follow up on this at all. They dismissed, they had the HSCA in 1978, right? That came about because of pressure. And a lot of that was classified still and disappeared for a while. We got it out, all that stuff. They decided that there was a probable conspiracy based on the acoustic evidence of the motorcycles. But we don't want to go into that because that's a whole other story. Acoustic evidence? From sound?

From the recording? In the front, yes. Yeah. Well- The shots, the shots. The physical evidence of the impact on the body is- That's more important. Way more important and way more obvious.

First of all, the establishment of the magic bullet was one of the most preposterous things that the United States public has ever accepted. And I think we did a great service by driving a stake through that heart of that vampire because it's been around forever. Well, you detailed it in so many different ways, too. You detailed all the various ways that they had tried to establish it. Once they found the wound in the back, they tried to establish it. Don't confuse it. First of all, the magic bullet. There's no chain of custody on it.

The FBI lied and we proved it in the film. Yes, you did. Because the times don't match. So the FBI down and out lied. Now, Hoover, of course, had to believe, wanted to believe that Oswald did it alone. He had to because they put themselves in a straitjacket. They said three shots. There were not three shots.

It was probably four or five shots. Three shots, one assassin who, why? What's his motive? He was a perfectly reasonable young man. He was in the corridor being yelled at. And he said, I need a lawyer. I'm a patsy. Yes, yes.

You know, the guy didn't behave like he was proud of what he had done. No. Which is what they said. He was a communist, an assassin. They had this background of visiting Russia. Of course, we found out. We found out. The community found out that it wasn't everything that didn't meet the eye.

It was a whole other story going on. What about the – That Oswald had been associated with the eye. It was a whole other story going on. What about the Oswald had been an associated with the CIA? Yes. Not that he'd been an agent, but he'd been watched by the CIA for four years. That we know without a doubt now because of what we declassified. Angleton, James Angleton, the counterterrorist chief had a file on Oswald since before Russia. They knew him. They knew what he was doing up until the week. Well, apparently, they disappeared his flash warning about a week before the assassination, which means to say, you don't need to check Oswald if you are Secret Service. You see him somewhere on

a parade route. You'd have to clear out those type of people. Secret Service is very aware of people who have backgrounds who could be dangerous. They took that off the signal on Oswald. The other thing is that Oswald was working both sides clearly that he was working with a pro Castro and the anti-Cuban movement. But the CIA set up both. The CIA set up the pro and the – Right. So it's very clear that they were well aware of him.

Dip him in the Cuban poison. Sheep dip him. Make him look like a commie who loves Castro. That was the intention, I believe. I believe the CIA was so upset about these two near invasions of Cuba that this was a chance by killing Kennedy to get the United States to move against Castro. to get the United States to move against Castro. And this is what Johnson, this is where Johnson is not, you can't blame Johnson because he felt that there was this pressure right away.

And he said to the Warren Commission guys, he said, look, there's a lot of pressure to point the finger at Russia and Cuba. We don't want to do that because we're going to have a nuclear war if we do that. Like 40 million people are going to be dying. That's what he told Warren. Warren went white, In those days, it was very serious. 40 million people, my God. He had all the weight of the country on his shoulders. And that's why he accepted this lousy job as the chief commissioner. So Johnson used that story, but Johnson believed it. I think he believed it. I think he believed in some way. I'm not sure. Let me put something. This is very important. Marvin Watson was his aide to Johnson. He testified that Johnson, after he read the IG report that we talked about earlier, which said that there were no assassinations, President Kennedy or Robert had never approved, authorized any assassination attempt on Castro, right?

He read that report and he told Watson, according to Watson, he said, I now believe the CIA was probably involved in the assassination. That's what he said. Wow. In 67, when he read the report. Wow. It comes out at the church committee, which is classified, disappears for some reason. We find it. We find it again because of this ARB. So he was probably left in the dark as well. I do believe so. I think he's definitely involved in the cover-up because he doesn't want to have a war. But he changes the whole policy of Kennedy right away. We have that declassified call between him and Robert McNamara. What does Johnson say in that call? Do you remember? It's in the film. He says, you know, I was never in agreement with you and the president about withdrawing from Vietnam. I thought you were wrong. He says that proudly because he's going in. Why he wants to go into Vietnam and not Cuba is another issue.

But think about that. Just think about the implications of that. Johnson is moving towards war in Vietnam. Why was it so important for them to get into Vietnam? It's a good question. You know, it was a, oh boy, this way, in a way we got linked in with the French because we supported the French war financially. We offered them, apparently, we offered them nuclear weapons when they were losing at Dien Bien Phu. And there was a whole connection going back through. Our interest in Vietnam was the domino theory that if Vietnam fell, Thailand would be next, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan. All these fears, the hyperinflation, overinflation, threat, threat inflation they call it. That was always the American way, threat inflation.

Everywhere you look, all over the world, Ukraine, threat inflation. They build things up to this paranoid point like a bully who say there's another bully that's gonna take over who's worse than me. You have to think about it as how we think. And it didn't work, the domino theory didn't work. Vietnam fell, did Thailand, nothing moved right in that area the important thing to remember I think we too much to tell you I'm sorry it's

awesome don't worry about Kennedy had a terrific relationship for the first time with Sukarno of Indonesia Sukarno was an independence hero like Ho Chi Minh in Indonesia which has gigantic resources, much bigger than Vietnam. That's the treasure chest in Southeast Asia was Indonesia. And actually Rostow, I think, has said, I don't understand why we went into Vietnam when Indonesia was the big number. And we won Indonesia in 1965 when the CIA pulled their coup off and they killed about a million communists. If you remember, we put Suharto in, who was our guy.

We got rid of Sukarno. He was moved aside and he ran Indonesia for the next 30, 40 years until he made a fortune, all his cronies. And it was like Mobutu in the Congo. These are all our guys. We were very happy with Indonesia. That was our biggest coup. We couldn't talk about it because it was covert. We gave lists to the Indonesian military, lists of people who were communists. We said we're communists or no one sympathizes. Just like in Vietnam when we went after Operation Phoenix when we killed all those people. How much weight do you put into the speculation that something about Vietnam had to do with moving heroin? It's a side effect. It's a side effect. Do you think that it was also some sort of a money project that was? No, no, I don't think so. I think that's, that's really

conspiratorial. You think so? I do, but there may be there that I don't know about. But we know that the CIA has done this, right? We know that they moved drugs through South Central Los Angeles to fund the Contras versus the Sandinistas, right? I believe that. I believe the Gary Webb accusations, although I'm not an expert on it. Yeah, well, Rick Ross, the guy who actually did it and sold the drugs,

I've had him on a couple times. Oh, and we know from Air America, we know all these America, we know all these things happened from Laos shipping stuff. I imagine, but I don't know enough about it, but that we know about the Nguyen Han Bank. That was a whole story, the bank that was used. Yeah. The CIA is up to its neck in dirt. Always has been been it's crazy and why we tolerate him I mean, you know, I went up to speak at the delegate National Congress election delegate at

During Jerry Brown was running for office. He asked me to talk and I called that Madison Square Garden I called for the abolition of the CIA. Oh Jesus and it was in the papers and they said I was nuts for the abolition of the CIA. Oh, Jesus. And it was in the papers, and they said I was nuts. We have to start over. We made a huge mistake in allowing that agency to exist because we gave them covert operational abilities. In other words, we cut them off from being...

Allow them to be secretive. Allow them to be secretive. Yeah. And how would one do that and still, I mean, obviously the CIA has some positive function. How would one disband the CIA but still maintain this positive function, the intelligence gathering aspect of it? How do you know? I mean, we'd like to know. What is positive about killing a million people in Indonesia?

What is positive about their so-called successes in Guatemala or Iran? I'm trying to be optimistic. They put us in shit in Iran. If we had sorted out the Iran situation back in 1954 with the Muzadegh, we wouldn't be in this mess. We would have allies. There's no reason we can't be at peace with the whole world, Joe. There's no reason. Maybe I sound like a crazy optimist to you, but I've lived long enough to tell you that there's no need to make enemies. You can have friends if you work at it. That means modify your behavior, talk, understand your so-called enemy's points of view. It's the only way.

See, I would form another agency, call it intelligence agency or whatever you want, but no covert ability. And you got to take away the money. The money is what drives, they have secret money everywhere in the world. But ultimately, they always needed, they needed military hardware to achieve this. And that's what they got from the Pentagon. That's where my friend Fletcher Prouty, who gave me a lot of information on JFK, came in. He was a focus point officer providing hardware to the CIA for all these coups. They tried to do it in Tibet. They tried to do it in Ukraine back then in the 40s. They tried to do it. There are several countries they tried and failed. I don't know if the CIA has ever had a real success that was positive for the world. But do you think that there's any function or

any need to gather intelligence about foreign operatives and dangerous countries and regimes and terrorist cells? And don't you think that there is something that they do? Yes, there are people who are dangerous, but in the whole mill of mankind, how many are there? How often? Don't you think the terrorists who exist, don't you think they have a gripe with us? I mean, don't you think there's reasons after what happened in the Middle East over all these years where we tried to control the situation? Isn't it a matter of control? America trying to tell other countries what to do. If we let things go, just if we let things take a natural course, let's see where it goes. We wouldn't be threatened. Still,

we have plenty of defense. I think it's always under the auspices of protecting us. But of course it is. Keeping the threat from ever reaching our shores. Of course. Yeah, that's why I went to Vietnam because it would come here, right? Vietnam is going to come to America. That's the sell. It's never true. Never true. Think it through.

And communism itself, was it really ever a threat? Once it competes economically, as Kennedy said, it's going to have its problems. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. Socialism, to some degree, won't work either. I remain a capitalist. Maybe I'm the bad guy, but I really think my father was in the stock market. I believe in economic competition, but a healthy one, not a controlled or a manipulated one. Yeah, or a corrupt one. When Kennedy was aware very quickly of the entanglements with the intelligence agencies and how much bullshit was going on when he was in office, when did he start speaking about getting rid of the CIA? And how long was it in that he fired those top three guys?

His problem was he didn't clean house. Right. He didn't clean house because everybody at the CIA was basically a Dulles fan. Most of those people were Dulles people that he left them behind. That's why we think Dulles was involved in the assassination because he had tremendous power still, influence. And this is the same Dulles that they named the airport after? Yes. It's kind of funny. I believe it's Alan Dulles. If it's his brother, it's just as bad.

John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State and did a lot of harm. The CIA was a beehive of activity in this Cuba situation. I mean, all these people had to be managed. There's five undercover officers. We'd like to have the files on them, people like David Attlee Phillips, William Harvey, for Christ's sake, what a character he was. He ran an operation with Roselli. This is that parallel operation. This is what you have to understand. We have Mongoose, which is operational, not that long a time, nine months or something. It doesn't work. It's all PR bullshit like the CIA says. Lansdale leaves and they let it go.

Mongoose dies. Meanwhile, there are secret plots from the CIA. Even Henry Luce, for Christ's sake, he was a publisher, Time Life, one of the most influential. He was always pressing Kennedy to go to war on Cuba. Even he said he was mounting an operation privately, privately, capitalizing it to attack Cuba. In other words, private citizens were getting involved. But essentially, the CIA never let up. They were planning to assassinate him on the day of Kennedy's death.

There was a plot, ZR Rifle, one of those plots. There's a lot of plots against Castro. Remember, I met him. I went down to see him. Very interesting man. I mean, he told me about some of these plots and how crazy the Americans could get to try to- Do you speak Spanish? No. So you had to go through a translator? Yes. But he was eloquent in both languages. He understood what I was saying in English. I didn't have time to learn Spanish.

I should have. It's just such a whirlwind of a term, the years that Kennedy is alive while he's a president before he's assassinated. The amount of events that were happening concurrently, it's pretty stunning. And so he makes this decision. How deep in that he was looking to do something to weaken the grip of the CIA, not just get rid of those three guys, but he also wanted to diminish the CIA's influence.

Yeah, but that wasn't his only thought. He had a hundred things to deal with. Right. That's the problem, right? Around the world. And newly in office. Well, yeah, by 60. He said statements about the generals.

He said, you know, they're not worth a bucket of piss or whatever it was. You know, they're not. Generals think they know everything. They always want to go to war. They want the parades, but they don't want the casualties. They don't want the result. And that's true for the United States. We go to war with a lot of hoopla and we come out

and we leave our people who go over there mostly in very difficult states, either suicide or in veterans hospitals with limbs blown off. It's not fun, the war. And we treat it like, I think the United States has never experienced a war. I think that's a problem. On our shores. Yeah. And when we do, we're shocked. I think that's a problem. On our shores. Yeah. And when we do, we're shocked. So we have a distorted perception of what war is. I think the Russians are much more realistic because every Russian is related to somebody who was killed in World War II.

It's in their hearts. It's seared in. And I can't speak for the Chinese, but they lost like a couple of million men in Korea. So there must have been a lot of family pain there. Have you ever tried to calculate how many people were involved in the cover-up of the assassination? Because when you break down all the various people that you document, everyone from Arlen Specter to everyone that's on the Warren Commission's report, it's very clear that those folks had to know that what they were doing was bullshit. From what you said about the FBI chain of custody for the magic bullet to the alteration

of the autopsy photos and the difference between- And the autopsy itself. Yes, the autopsy itself. The difference between the Dallas autopsy and the way they looked at it at Bethesda, Maryland. There was no autopsy in Dallas. It was just an examination of the body. It was very quick, the tracheotomy. Yeah, the tracheotomy and also the description of the exit wound in his head.

Well, yeah, that comes out later. Yeah. Although some people didn't see it. head well that yeah that comes out later yeah although some people didn't see it but 40 people what the arb did thank god was collect all the people who saw the rear exit wound and it was huge we showed the film in the film we showed the 40 people who saw it what's really crazy document in the film was the fact that it wasn't really his brain that yeah i was going to go to that yeah please the brain that they had used as a piece of evidence that this was Kennedy's brain had clearly been in formaldehyde for at least two weeks.

Yeah. Well, I'm so glad our documentary and this is James DiEugenio who wrote it. You know, he's really the guy who reads everything, remembers everything through all these years and there's a million documents. We drove a stake through the magic bullet. That's clear. There's no chain of custody. The FBI lied.

They also in the matter of the autopsy, the brain is intact and it was photographed as such. It was a clean, the whole area was still there. Whereas it's impossible because the brain was seen. You see it spraying out in the car when there's a Pruder film. You see it. The nurse, Audrey Bell, is talking about it's the, I can't remember the medical term, whatever it's called. It's spilling out on the floor of Parkland.

Yeah. And when they weigh the brain as they do in an autopsy, it comes out normal. Well, not just normal, but extra large, right? A little bit, yeah. Larger than average. It's impossible. And what's more important is,

and this drives a stake again through the heart of it, the photographer of the autopsy, John Stringer, the autopsy photographer, he's a straight guy. He's pro-war and commissioned all that stuff. They bring him back. The ARB brings him back. And they show him the photos that we now have that are in the National Archives. And he says, I never photographed that.

He took an up view of the brain. He never took a basilar view from below. He said, I never photographed that. And that's very important. There's also some evidence that they had drawn hair in to cover up the exit wound. Yes. I don't know about the evidence, but definitely the photograph shows that the hair had been pulled in. The shot is bizarre. It's bizarre shots. So the autopsy is off. The brain is off. Photos are off. Then you go, you know, the Garrison trial revealed that one of the autopsists, Peter Fink, saying that they were not in charge of the autopsy. The military was. They wouldn't let him put his finger in the back

hole. They told them what to do. And they were very bullying. In fact, can you imagine doing an autopsy on the president and having 20 or 30 people looking at you from a gallery and they were telling him what he was able to do and not able to do so the autopsy was being directed yeah I showed that in the movie don't touch that right don't do that which is you so you have to think that they have if they have the best autopsy people in the world, civilian, all around Washington. Why wouldn't they call them in? No.

There's no desire. So they had a predetermined ending that they wanted to achieve or a result that they wanted to achieve. Three bullets. Three bullets. One assassin. But this is what's crazy. It's like you've got to think, okay, well, then you have at least those 30 people that are in the the audience watching that autopsy how i mean what do they know i don't know that but isn't that crazy though we have all 30 of

them know that lee harvey oswald didn't act alone no we don't know that we don't know right i mean we don't know some of them but they there's there's obviously a directive well there again that we don't know i shouldn't say say obviously directive, but they're doing something to influence the way this autopsy is being done. At least some of the people are giving direction, giving instruction. And you've got to wonder, why would they do that? Like, what motivation would they have unless they knew that there was a predetermined result that they need to achieve? You have, of course, the Johnson fear that it would become hysteria, Russia or Cuba being accused of killing him, and it would be a

situation that they could no longer control. That's a legitimate excuse to cover up. You know, one interesting story, it's in the four-hour version, not in this two-hour version. That's coming out in the end of February. We show a moment in the autopsy where one of the technicians, when the doctor looks up, he says, there's cigar smoke blurring this thing. It was just cigar smoke smells, covers up the air and stuff. You don't smoke a cigar in an autopsy. In an autopsy, crazy.

He says, who's doing that? Find out. Tell them to put it out. He goes over to the gallery, and guess who's smoking the fucking cigar? Who? General Curtis LeMay, the figure from Strange Love that Kubrick was satirizing. That's hilarious. And he says, can you put it out?

LeMay simply looks at him, blows smoke in his face. And the guy wrote, he was a technician. He just wanted, he's telling the truth, walks back, couldn't get him to put the cigar on. Wow. That's pretty interesting. LeMay also was not, that day, all his movements on the plane were not, did not correspond to what he was supposed to be. He was in Canada or something. It's a crazy little story. So LeMay was no friend of

Kennedy because they'd had several battles. If you're in a position like LeMay, I mean, just imagine that this is his big moment of success. If he hated Kennedy and he's got his big moment of success, I mean, he probably felt completely untouchable. I mean, they just assassinated the president. He's there smoking a cigar, celebrating. Looking down at your naked enemy in front of you. A naked enemy with a giant fucking hole in his head, and you're smoking a cigar. Like, what a creep. Holy shit. Just the fact that people like that exist, and that is, that's the top of the food chain, right?

I mean, if you're in that position and you are a general and you are at the autopsy smoking a cigar, I mean, you want to talk about unchecked power. That's not evidence, but it's interesting. It's interesting. It's interesting. It's definitely not evidence. And then, of course, in the film, we go into, this is very important, the Oswald alibi. It's probable that he was not on the sixth floor. We know this because of the three

secretaries, women who were at the fourth floor window and they were looking at the parade. They saw him shot. They freaked out. Two of the women immediately ran down the stairs to see what was going on in the street. They went down the street. One of them stayed up on the third floor. That was the supervisor, Dorothy Garner. This we only know because of the Stroud document, which came out in the ARRB again years later. This was in 1997. Mary Jo Stroud was a DA in Dallas. She interviewed the Dorothy Garner who told her the story.

And she verified it to the Warren Commission. They ignored it because they changed the story on the three women, the two women actually because the first woman they said had taken longer

to get down the stairs which would have given Oswald time to get off the sixth floor down. I don't know how he would have done that because he had to stash the rifle. He had to do all this shit and there was all these boxes

in the way and he had to go down these stairs at full speed and be on the second floor to be stash the rifle. He had to do all this shit and there was all these boxes in the way and he had to go down these stairs at full speed and be on the second floor to be seen by the cop. And there was no evidence on the rifle as far as... None at all. The rifle doesn't have any chain of custody at all. Nor the bullets for that matter.

Nor the bullets. And was there evidence... And fingerprints. No. Was there something that they were trying to attribute to oswald that was fingerprints but that didn't work because it was a partial and the guy who really knew fingerprints said it didn't it wasn't true really yeah no nothing not not one piece of evidence that day so there was an there was an entry wound in his back yes so

is there any speculation as to where that was fired from? Yeah, I would say the rear. Right, obviously. But like where? Well, it could have been Daltex. I don't know. But was there any eyewitness testimony of hearing gunshots from the rear? Yeah.

There was. Well, they heard shots. Right, they heard shots. It was hard because it's echoing too, right? There's a lot of World War II vets in that crowd, you know, like Kenny McDonald was in the car right behind Kennedy. He'd experienced infantry warfare. He said it was a volley. It's all, you know, a volley.

How many shots did he describe? I don't remember if he's saying, but I think you have to say four or five, maybe six, but we don't know. So they're coming from, there's a crossfire. Well, never quite, though. Right. Because we have the guy on the curb, James, who gets bit in the cheek by a fragment. There's a Harper fragment, which is found in the street the next day. The Harper fragment's the right size. Oh, it's a different fragment. Harper fragment, because the guy found it was a kid, Harper. It fits right into the area that they think was blown out on their skull.

And they had that, and it disappears. The Harper fragment. I'm sure you've read Best Evidence by James Lifton. You mean about lifting the body? Was it David Lifton? David Lifton, yeah. David Lifton, sorry. Yeah.

You mean about lifting the body being- Was it David Lifton? David Lifton, yeah. David Lifton, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. D. Eugenio doesn't believe it, but I'm not going to get into that because it's a whole other theory that he was- they'd worked on his body before it was autopsied. I don't think so.

I'm not sure because they would have fixed the brain at that point. I don't know enough about Lifton's theory, but I trust D. Eugenio. Well, Lifton's theory is not just that. Lifton was an accountant and he was hired to go over the Warren Commission report. And in his meticulous reading of the Warren Commission report, he found massive inconsistencies. And he started to think that there was some sort of a cover up and that Kennedy probably was assassinated by someone other than just Lee Harvey Oswald and just it's a it's a stunning book But my point being another thing that's very disturbing is how many eyewitnesses wound up dying of mysterious causes Yeah, quite a few quite a few. They cleaned up the all of the the possible loose ends

Not all not all but all shitload shitload of them. Strange stuff happened. Yeah. Absolutely. It was scary for the witnesses. Yes. Garrison ran into that problem, you know. His witnesses kept vanishing on him. Yeah.

Including David Ferry, who died during the process. And for that matter, Guy Bannister, who was the kingpin of the right-wing group that was managing Oswald in New Orleans. So if Lee Harvey Oswald was not on the sixth floor of the book depository. That's what we're saying, yeah. Yeah. Somebody had to have taken a shot from somewhere, at least one shot that hit the back.

Could have been the Daltex. I'm doubtful now. As you know, in my film in 91, I dramatized it perhaps too much, I think, having a team of shooters up there, because I don't know how they got out. I just don't understand it. With the testimony of these three women being revealed in the 90s, I'm talking about Vicki Stiles, Sandra, whatever, and Dorothy Garner. These are secretaries. They pay attention to details. They know when they left that window. They got downstairs in less than a minute.

The Warren Commission changed it to more than a minute. And they didn't even interview the other woman who ran down the stairs. They just didn't want to. They didn't want to hear stuff. Because it was inconsistent. So they discredited single witnesses they were able to discredit, but they're not able to discredit three witnesses, including a supervisor, Dorothy Garner, who saw these women run down the stairs right away. Wasn't Woody Harrelson's dad supposedly- I don't know about that.

Yeah. I keep getting asked that question. Well, let me explain. The rumor was that Woody Harrelson's dad was a part of the assassination crew that was on the grassy knoll. I don't know. You don't know? Yeah.

It was somebody on the grass, you know, for sure. That's water. Do you want coffee or water? I want water. Okay. I got to pee again. Again? Again.

Hey, listen. Don't worry about it. I'm an older man. I understand. Wait till you're to my age. Okay, I'll wait. Are we missing anything? Oh, many things.

Many things. I'm just trying to make judicious. Okay. Very important, these three women, the Stroud document. Very important. They ignored it. Right. This is the district attorney in Dallas. I mean- These are the secretaries that- Takes her statement.

Right. That because of their testimony, it's pretty clear that Oswald was not on the 6-4, the depository. Absolutely. Because there's only one exit, the stairs. What about the officer- This is in 63, by the way. Right. What about the officer that- 64, excuse me.

That Lee Harvey Oswald was accused of shooting? Oh, tip it. Yes. That's a strange story too because physically it doesn't work, the geography.

The distance traveled, the shots, no one saw it. I mean, the bullets. Why do you think they attributed that to- Oh, that's the red herring. You go down that path, you end up speculating. Right. saw it. I mean, the bullets. Why do you think they attributed that to? Oh, that's the red herring. You know, you go down that path, you end up speculating.

Right. Tip it. No, I don't go there because I feel like he went right. I think he went, as Roger Craig said, the policeman, he got in a rambler or whatever. It was a rambler. He got picked up by two Cuban-looking guys and driven away. So he was at the scene, but where was he? Second floor.

He was on the second floor. Because he was spotted there by Marion Baker within 90 seconds of the assassination, and truly, Roy Truly, the supervisor. So we know he was on the second floor, which makes sense because he was having lunch. Right, but if he was spotted there within 90 seconds, 90 seconds is an easy way to get down four flights of stairs.

Six. Six flights. Six floor. Six floor to the down four flights of stairs. Six. Six flights. Stash a rifle. The sixth floor. Six, four to the second floor. Stash a rifle. Right, but the sixth floor to the second floor. That's five flights.

Six to five, five to four, four to three, three to two. Okay. That's five. Anyway, if you're right, four stars. Anyway, the women did not see him. Okay, you got to stash the rifle, right? The bullets he leaves in this bizarre pattern right there, puts the rifle away. Fingerprints apparently are all over it, but he doesn't care.

He runs down the stairs and there's boxes in the way. He has to move past them. And of course, get down there and be out of, and not out of breath, quite normal, without very calm. When truly. On the second floor. And this is all just eyewitness testimony. And do you think that happened? It was a little screwy. Do you think that happened before the women got there?

No, no, I don't think that. Because how long did it take the women to run from the window on the fourth floor to the stairs? It's a quick run. So they saw him in the second floor when he realizes that the president's been shot, and he realizes that shots ring out. That's when he flees the scene?

Well, I don't know if he heard the shots, but certainly he— Well, he had to hear the shots, right? If he's on the second floor— Yeah, but he's unsigned, so we don't know. Okay. Well, as you know from my film, he walks out, calm as a cucumber, says goodbye. Yeah. And then, of course, he disappears into this, I i believe this rambler do you think that

he takes him to his boarding house where he gets a pistol right because he knows something's up and he knows i think i believe he had a rendezvous at the theater with he needed help he knew he was he had handlers people who he might have been able to wanted to see so he made that phone call to was it south carolina couldn't get the guy he was trying to get a hold of. So he had some kind of connection to it. Do you think he was involved in the assassination? Like he knew it was going down? No, no.

You don't? I don't think so because his wife, who I interviewed, just tell me. He had good feelings about Kennedy. If anything, he would have, if he'd heard this was afoot, he wanted to help. And there is that mention in the Chicago story that an informant called Lee called the FBI to tell them that this thing was afoot in Chicago. We don't know if it's the same Lee. It seems to me he cared about the president. And obviously, if he had gone on trial and he had told his side of the story, it would have thrown a gigantic monkey wrench into the gears. Forget it.

Forget it. Yeah. So they have him killed. But the way they have him killed is so strange. They have this mob-connected guy, Jack Ruby, run up to him while he's being detained by the police. And they're holding onto his arms, just steps to him and shoots him yeah kind of crazy yeah well it was a last chance you see because he was going to another security place it wouldn't have been possible to get but just crazy that they get Jack

Ruby to do it like why Jack Ruby he expendable. They used the mob when they needed to for low-level stuff. It's a low-level hit in the sense that, you know, the 38, it wasn't a 38 he used. Boy, he blew out his insides. It was very painful for Oswald those last few minutes before he died. It was a gut shot, you know. Yeah. No, I think that Ruby was an interesting case. Of course, he goes on to change his story.

He says, I know everything. I know a lot. Yeah. And then he gets cancer. Now, cancer is an interesting thing, too, because how do you develop cancer so quickly and die? There is ways to do that. They were experimenting on killing Castro that way. Ochsner, Alton Ochsner was the leader of the experiment in New Orleans,

who actually, and Oswald crossed paths with Ochsner. So they were working on toxins that could kill people as quickly as possible. They tried it with Lumumba. They were going to try it with Castro. Are you aware of the connection between Jack Ruby and Jolly West, and Jolly West, the CIA, and Operation MKUltra, and all the LSD experiments that they were involved with I don't know the details well

there's a story there's a great book called chaos by a guy named Tom O'Neill spent 20 years detailing the Manson murders and and going yeah yeah he got obsessed with it and found out that there's a deep connection between the CIA and these LSD experiments they were doing. They had done them to Manson while he was in prison and that they had supplied him with acid and also given him techniques as far as mind control techniques, sophisticated programming techniques and how to program the family. And they know that jolly west visited jack ruby in jail and after he visited jack ruby in jail immediately afterwards jack ruby's in the fetal position having horrible visions of jews burning alive and all kinds of horrific assassination

visions and and ranting and screaming like a madman and it's detailed in chaos and they're making this sort of connection between what we know jolly west was involved with which was unquestionably they were doing operation midnight climax where they were giving um unsuspecting johns in brothels they were giving themSD. Yeah. And they were involved with the Manson family. And this guy went to visit Jack Ruby in jail. And then immediately afterwards, Jack Ruby's like a raving maniac. I don't know that. I have to check that out.

You should check it out. It's pretty interesting. But I do know that Ruby did testify to the Warren Commission. People came there, and he talked to them. And it's a scene in my film. He said, I can tell you a lot if you bring me to Washington where I am assured of safe conduct. He was scared shitless and they wouldn't do that. I can't believe it, why not?

I wonder why. Because who knows, these things are so bureaucratic the way they're done, the way they handled Lee Harvey Oswald during all those hours, that testimony is priceless what did he say we have no clue really no clue and except for what he said in the corridor and there's no there's no transcript of the no transcript they didn't keep the transcript which is crazy they didn't even how do you do that they didn't tape it how do you do that when you have a guy

who supposedly just shot the president and you don't record that? It was so – the whole thing is so amateur. How can these people defend the Warren Commission? It was such a joke. Yeah. Not the basic first step of any homicide investigation was followed. Now, the cops on the scene, they did try. They did label things. They tried to establish chain of custody right away.

But it broke down as it was going through the stages because, you know, FBI gives this to the Secret Service. Secret Service gives that. And that's what we found out when we followed this chain of custody. That doesn't follow. Nothing. Nothing makes sense. And what makes even less sense is people that want to pretend that it makes sense. That's right.

That bothers me to no end. And they dismiss our arguments. Yes. They ridicule me as a messenger of, who's loony. Yeah. A loony leftist bullshit.

Right. And they keep saying it and they don't even look at the new evidence that we've presented. We've worked very hard to gather all this evidence in this new documentary

and I haven't seen one critique of actually what we said in the film. No, it's, when you watch Revisited, it's undeniable. I mean, the fuckery is well laid out. There's no question whatsoever that there has to be deception involved in this. Deception?

From the coordinated effort to describe this magic bullet theory. I've seen people try to justify the magic bullet theory, which anybody who's ever shot anything with a rifle... Don't even go there. It's silly. It's silly. You get involved in nuclear physics. It's ridiculous. And it's just common sense.

Yeah. And people knew it, I think, at the time. They knew something was up. Most of the people ran towards the grassy knoll and they didn't run to the sixth floor. Most of them heard the shots from the... And don't they... Didn't they... The magic bullet was not the them, we heard their shots from there. And don't they, didn't they, they, was,

the magic bullet was not the only bullet that they retrieved from the scene. Well, that's a, no, and now here we go into a whole, don't go there either, because there's strange bullets show up. There's another bullet that shows up. We showed, we discussed that in the film. Yeah.

It's another bullet. Right. And there was one found on that stretcher. That's the magic bullet. And then there's another bullet that disappears. There is another bullet. Look there was one found on that stretcher. That's the magic bullet. And then there's another bullet that disappears. There is another bullet. Look at the documentary again. And there is a chain of custody on it through, I think, three people. And then it disappears at the Secret Service, I believe. Somewhere it disappears. So we don't know what's in him.

We know about the guy at the sidewalk, Tague, who gets a fragment. Yes. Did they recover that bullet? No. No. It was fragmented. But the fragment was, it hits the curb. That's what they said. And then something, either it's a piece of the curb or a piece of the bullet hits him in the face.

He gets hospitalized. And that's the reason why they have to account for another bullet because this bullet clearly missed. Yeah. But the other bullets disappear. I mean, where's the Connolly bullet? That's the magic bullet, they say. Right. That's what they say.

But Connolly probably was hit separately from Kennedy in the back. Not only that, isn't there fragments of bullets inside Connolly's body that are not missing from the bullet? We called for the DNA test on him, but they wouldn't allow it. Nellie, when he died, Nellie Connelly would not allow us to request a DNA trace on his wrists. What would that have done? Might have shown a trace of the bullet.

Right. I'm not an expert on that. The metal fragments. But aren't there images of metal fragments that are available from the autopsy photos? Isn't there an X, not autopsy, excuse me, the X-ray photos? Wasn't there- Joe, you tell me, excuse me, the x-ray photos? Wasn't there? Joe, you tell me. Those are details

I cannot answer. Okay. But as to the bullets, it's a very good question. Where's the tracheotomy bullet? Where'd that go? Right. Where'd that go?

If that was, it should have gone out the back, right? Right, and there is no exit wound out the back of his neck. So whatever that entry wound was,

it was probably stopped by the spine. Yeah. And then- Maybe. Something. I mean, it makes sense. The fact that that bullet was so pristine and that that was sold by people who are soldiers,

you know- Which bullet? The magic bullet. Oh, yeah. I thought you meant the tracking. I don't mean- No, no, no, no. Okay.

The magic bullet was so pristine. Yeah. Like the idea that this had gone through two people and shattered all these bones and then it came out looking like that. Well, we know that it's not, it doesn't fit the chain of custody. No. They lied about it. Well, that's clear. It's clear that it doesn't fit the chain of custody.

It's also clear that it doesn't match the characteristics of bullets that have shattered bones. No, of course not. But then it's also clear that if those two things are true, that there's some manipulation. There's something going on. The chain of custody is completely off. The magic bullet showing up on the gurney is ridiculous. Yes. There's so many things about it that are preposterous.

Yes. But yet there's people that are going, oh, no, no. Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I mean, that to me is one of the more fascinating aspects of the Kennedy assassination is the willingness that so many folks have to believe the official narrative, despite the fact that it fucking stinks. It stinks at every single step of the way. The media stinks.

Since that moment, I mean, can you really believe our American media would just walk away from this? It's like their laziness or they're just ashamed that they didn't do their job on that day. They just went along because they were scared. Now, maybe Johnson fed them the same story that, listen, he called the New York Times. He says, we got Cuba. We're going to have a war here if we don't shut this down. We got to, Oswald did it alone. Maybe that was enough justification for them. Oh, president says we're going to war. Right, maybe. Jesus Christ.

But in the years since then, why haven't they been responsive? They've ridiculed everything we've done, everything the assassination community has proven. Isn't that just a human nature characteristic, though? You're always going to have contrarians and you're always going to have people that want the official narrative to be true. They'll defend it and do mental gymnastics

in order to make it a lot of Germans who believed in Hitler. It's true. You know, it's easy to go when you have to believe the majority. It's easy to believe the majority. Yeah. I want to bring just mentioned two books that really crucial to understanding the foreign policy of Kennedy. First of all, there's been a whole slew of them from historians like Richard Mahoney, Ordeal in Africa. David Talbot wrote a beautiful book, two beautiful books. One is called Brothers. It's not the one that – there's another Brothers, but Brothers. It's about Robert and Jack.

And it's a very detailed story of what happened in these last two, three years. And then there's Douglas' book, James Douglas's book, JFK and the Unspeakable. Those three are just crucially necessary to understand Kennedy's policies. Do you anticipate more documents coming out where more of this is going to be clear, where we're going to get a better understanding of- You're a good question. This is all personal. I don't know. If they see the experience, if they understand the expertise that the assassination community has brought to these documents, if I had done something illegal, I would feel like I have to be really careful. These people are not stupid. We're not back in 1963 now. These people

are really checking us out. And we have a lot of information. It's in the documentary and you see it. So what are you going to do? You have to really go back over any files if you're seriously thinking of brushing them and think about what can come out. I'm curious, but I doubt that there'll be something that we can use. However, I've been wrong. I mean, before, you don't know it. These people are very smart and they go through stuff. You can't believe the detail. It's just stunning that there's this concerted effort to try to.

They won't even cover all this. They won't even. Yeah. Listen, we couldn't get financed in this country. We had to get financed from England. It was an independent company. Really? We couldn't get distribution. We went to Cannes. We had tremendous reception at Cannes,

at Rome Festival, and at Deauville. We sold European countries, but nothing from the US. It was only at the last second here when Showtime came in. Thank God for them. But no company would touch it. Well, kudos to Showtime because it really is extraordinary. And the reviews, we don't see reviews. Of course. Except for a few nasty attacks in Rolling Stone and this and that. Rolling Stone attacked it? Yes.

Oh, how cute. Well, they're no longer. That's how you know you're doing well. They're no longer serious. No, it's no longer Rolling Stone. It was a CIA guy who covers the CIA who reviewed it. And he didn't review any of the things we were talking about. He reviewed me. Really? Yeah. What was the Rolling Stones, what was the gist of their article?

That I had fallen for Russian disinformation. That's a great narrative these days. What a good one. Yeah, though they tied me to the Russian, because I defended Russia, and I never believed in the Russiagate stuff. I never believed it. Well, it turns out you were right. Yeah. Look at that. I know, but –

Boy, we fucking swallowed that for three or four years. Exactly. We wasted so much time. But they tied me to this QAnon now. They said that I'm – What? I'm the guy who – the conspiracy guy who put out, who inspired these people from QAnon who love. What the fuck happened to Rolling Stone?

Rolling Stone, when Hunter Thompson was writing for them, Rolling Stone was the shit. It was amazing. It was a fantastic magazine. New owners. But it's stunning how bad it's gotten. You know, Rolling Stone also had that article about the, in Oklahoma, how there's people that were waiting in line with gunshot wounds and they couldn't get into the emergency room because so many people had overdosed on ivermectin. They were overdosed on horse dewormer.

It's a hundred percent fiction story. It doesn't, it doesn't even make sense. And the photo they used was a stock photo from the winter with a bunch of people that were waiting in line to get vaccinated. It's a complete fabricated story. And this is Rolling Stone, which to me is so disappointing. Yeah. Yeah. It's just and also Washington Post has been attacking the editorials, but they don't, again, deal with anything which we bring up in the documentary. Right. It's not substantial. It's not, you can't refute the way you detail it. It's so brilliant.

This guy in rolling, the guy in Washington Post says Stone ignores Kennedy's inclinations towards war. And he says his speech at the Fort Worth the day he died. Well, we will look at the speech. The speech is very interesting. First of all, he's got to get elected in 64. That's the reason he went to Texas. Johnson didn't really want him to go because he was worried. Actually, that's the truth. But Kennedy wanted to go and he needed the South because the South had turned against him.

George Wallace in Alabama and Mississippi, he had sent troops to Mississippi. He was hardcore about getting these students into those colleges and he won both cases, Mississippi and Alabama. And as a result, he lost the South. He knew it. So he needed the votes in Texas. So he had to change his narrative. He had to change the way he would- Well, he didn't change. No, he actually gave a lot of peaceful statements. But there was four contractors, major arms contractors there in Fort Worth, General Dynamics among them. And he had to appeal to them. But he didn't call for war.

But he was trying to get their support. Yes. So, I mean, they'll use anything, any scrap of little evidence to point out, including this Russian disinformation thing. You see, they attack the messenger. They don't attack the messenger. Well, the problem with attacking the message is there's no holes. Like when you lay out the chain of command

with the chain of custody, rather, with the bullet, when you lay out the whole magic bullet theory, when you show all the various pieces that are in motion, like the way the whole thing was laid out, it's the most obvious conspiracy ever. Yeah. It really is. There's so much information.

These are smart people, but they're really turning the blind eye. Purposefully. I mean, it's clear that there's a direction that they're either being told to go in or they think is beneficial for them to go in. Well, that raises a very important question, you know, as to what degree of penetration the government has had in the media. Right. And it was raised in the 70s, as you know, heavily,

because we found that there was a lot of CIA assets in the media. Yeah. They existed, and it goes back to the 50s. Again, the United States changed after World War II. Kennedy was almost like a throwback trying to say, let's go back to the vision of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This man wanted world peace. I want world peace. And we can have it.

And the problem was that the security state had established itself. And here was a state that was saying we need to be emergency preparation at all times. We have to spend like a war economy. So there will be no more depression. That was the idea. And they had a lot of defenders there. They had the famous Paul Nitsi who was telling me this story because I interviewed him for Nixon. He interviewed me, told me the story of how they got this thing going, this whole lobby going to keep the money rolling, big-time money.

Wall Street people were going, Forrestal, James Forrestal, all these people were there at the beginning. Keep the money rolling. That was the key. So this is an interregnum that existed from 1945, or you can say 47, to 1963. It's an interregnum.

And Kennedy was about to end that interregnum. Why not? Why can't we go back to being the United States of America? Right. Back to where we were in the 30s. He remembers. Is there a path to get back to that now? Well, that's a good question because nothing is – think about all the presidents.

Right. Who has done anything to really challenge these motherfuckers? Right. What could be done at this point? I mean, could – when we were talking about Kennedy getting into office and so many issues that he has to deal with and just playing catch-up and he's essentially new on the job yeah that's what someone would have to deal with while stepping into office while trying to sort of remap this influence that the military industrial complex has over society and you also have to deal with the media the media would they allow it you know

this media of ours is a joke they're in cahoahoots. I was watching TV last night in my hotel room here in, where am I? In Austin, Texas. You know, you have Fox News and you have CNN. They're both nuts. Right. You know, they give you the news before it even happens. Right. Biden is going to do is soft on Russia or soft on Iran, blah, blah, blah. And they make it in the news. We don't know what they're really saying. You can't say anything. Right.

You can't even have a phone call with the president of any country without it being reported, misreported often. Right. This is a crazy time where the media is making up sensationalism to keep it going, to keep the cycle going. Right. Because that's their business now. Their business model- They don't take it seriously. No, what just seems like they don't think that that's imperative, that the clickbait

aspect of keeping their business alive is more, that's the front line. That's what they're really doing. I admire politicians, and you may not believe it, but good ones are crucial to our survival. Right. And when they talk, they have to have secrecy. They have to have diplomacy. They have to have secrecy, they have to have diplomacy, they have to have a sense that I can trust you, but I don't want you to walk out of this meeting

and all of a sudden the media breaks with another story. That's always the fear. Same thing was true in the film business, I found, to the same degree. The media had some aspect control of what we had to do. We didn't want breaks, leaks to happen, but it happens now all the time.

So would maybe the rise of some independent journalists, and we're seeing that now with Substack and a lot of these online journalists, these YouTube journalists and people that are doing really good work and really honest, objective work, but they're doing it outside of these enormous corporations. I was interviewed by Matt Taibbi on this one with his partner. I was invited. Matt Taibbi is fantastic. Breaking Promises or Breaking...

Breaking Points, Crystal and Sager. Both very good. Amazing. They were amazing. Grey Zone, She's Great, Anya, and Bloomberg. I'm not aware of them. Oh, Max Bloomberg. Sure, sure. I mean, you have to find those people who are honest.

Yes. I think the young people, the Internet has given us that ability to freedom. We have to keep it now. It's also made it very attractive to be honest and to be as objective as possible because it's such it's so unusual in the world of mainstream media it literally is non-existent it doesn't exist everything is a biased everything has a there's a narrative they're pushing from every single network that's corporate controlled and because of that it's incredibly

unattractive to people that are paying attention so they look at the the trust in mainstream media is at an all-time low but the good thing about that is it gives rise to these people like Glenn Glenn Greenwald like Matt Taibbi like these people that can just say what the actual facts of the story are yeah I like Glenn I saw him in Rio. I was in Rio de Janeiro with Lula. And he has really broke that story in Brazil. He saved Lula's, you know, he saved his noodle. That was a great, great revelation.

He exposed what his enemies were doing. And Lula got sprung from jail. Yes, extraordinary. And he's going to run for president. That was a tremendous public service. But he's also very open to the Kennedy killing. He's not. And I saw him recently. He goes on Tucker Carlson, who's apparently the declared enemy of the establishment. That's a giant problem that they have in not allowing people to go on someone's show because

you think that someone represents something evil. Here's what you have to look at. This is what I'd say to my fellow left-wing people. Tucker Carlson's one of the rare people that lets these guys on and lets them talk about whatever the issue is, whether it's guys like Brett Weinstein or whoever it is that he's having on. These people, they demonize the folks that are guests on his show because they're willing to talk to him. And they'll say all these things about Tucker Carlson, that he's a white supremacist and a racist and a separatist. But you're just trying to dismiss this opportunity these people have to reach millions and millions of people in a format that's rare in that he lets these people talk.

Format that's rare in that he lets these people talk where you can't get that format on CNN or MSNBC or any of these other places where you can't talk about controversial stories that are outside of what's this pushed narrative. And he allows that. And they're trying so hard to minimize his impact and minimize the impact of any guest that's willing to participate in this platform yeah they completely dismiss whatever the story is the context of the story what's important about what they're trying to relay about the information they're trying to give out and all they want to say is why are you on Tucker Carlson show well that's why you play a huge role here Joe well it's bizarre you have to keep going oh okay you have an obligation now oh boy you've entered the mainstream in your own. You have to keep going. Oh, okay. You have an obligation now. Oh, boy.

You've entered the mainstream in your own way. You have to keep working now. Well, that sucks. And on that note, I have to leave you because I got a plane. I have to catch up. Oliver, I appreciate you very, very much. I've been a gigantic fan. It's always an honor to have you on. I'm a huge fan of your films.

I'm a huge fan of your work. And I'm a huge fan of this fantastic documentary that you have. It's available right now. JFK Revisited. It is on Showtime. And then again, as you said, in February. Late February. Late February, the four-hour version will be released, which you sent me as well.

Thank you very much for that. And the two-hour will be more available, too. And the four-hour, will it be on iTunes? The four-hour will be wherever around. Two-hour will be, I hope, on all major channels. You'll be able to have access to it. It'll be, and it's available now on Showtime. Yeah?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want some of that? I don't want to smoke this Curtis LeMay cigar. Those are JRE cigars, actually. Do you smoke cigars? No. Oh, well, there you go. I used to.

Just pull that sucker down. There you go. No. Oh, well there you go. I used to. Just pull that sucker down. There you go. I always want to tell my kids I smoked weed with Oliver Stone. Oh man, I smoked a lot in my time.

I bet you have, fella. Oh boy. I got fucked up on cannabis the other day. Boy, edibles, you know. Oh yeah. I stopped smoking in order to do edibles, but I took too much and it really knocked the shit out of me. I was on Christmas Day or something.

Well, a guy who's done it as many times as you who still gets fucked up, that gives me hope. Yeah, there are some brands that are pretty tough. Oh, my goodness, yes. Dude, edibles don't play around with you. Well, you know, the whole story of edibles. Like when you're eating it, it's a completely different psychoactive drug. Yeah, you get hungry. Well, it's 11-hydroxy metabolite.

That's what's produced by the liver. Do you do shows on this stuff? How do I? I'm sure you do. Oh, yeah, all the time. I like cookies, but, you know, they're not the Oreos from my youth. Well, I think it hits different people different ways. And for me, it's very beneficial. I find it lets me relax. I'm a bogey then. I'm the guest.

Bogey. Listen, I'll give you some on the way out. I have some freshies for you. Thank you. My pleasure. It's an honor. It really is an honor. I appreciate you very much. And I'm very, very glad you're out there because I don't think there's a lot of people that would be willing to put the amount of time and effort and focus into a documentary. Well, this is crucial. Yeah. This is history, this is history. One day, 200 years from now, somebody will see it

and they'll wake up. This is why we fell apart as a country. I agree. As an empire. This is why. I agree. Watch it, folks. Go watch it. It's fantastic. That's Travis Walton.

He's the guy that was abducted by UFOs, apparently. Allegedly. I see. He gave me the bobblehead. I'm glad you moved to Austin. It's fun. I'm glad I moved too. I love it here. Oliver, thank you very much. Bye, everybody. Thank you.