The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of JFK

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

It’s America’s greatest unsolved murder: who shot JFK? On the 60th anniversary of the Warren Commission, we debate who was really behind the assassination of the 35th President of the United States. One one side of this debate is the lone gunman theory, the U.S. government’s official statement supported by the Warren Commission's findings. Proponents of this theory argue that shooter Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, without any assistance or interference from outside actors. On the other side are the impassioned theorists who point to doctored evidence and eyewitness accounts as proof that there is more to the story. Whether it was a second gunman on the grassy knoll, the mob avenging an unsuccessful coup in Cuba, or an inside job by the CIA, too many suspicious coincidences lead to only one conclusion: Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone on that fateful day. Arguing in favour of the resolution is Gerald Posner. He’s an investigative journalist and the author of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Arguing against the resolution is Dick Russell, author of On the Trail of the JFK Assassins: A Groundbreaking Look at America's Most Infamous Conspiracy. You can vote on who you think won this debate. Go to our website www.munkdebates.com to become a free member and cast your vote. The host of this podcast episode is Ricki Gurwitz. To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a paid Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran Lynch    Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We tried socialism all through the 20th century, and it failed every time. We should restore dignity to the working class and stop saying you need a credential in order to achieve the most basic, modest version of the American dream. Netanyahu is the worst leader the Jewish people ever had. He should be impeached. Genocide is the latest modern blood liable that anti-Semites use to justify their anti-Zionism. We should prioritize making sure that no more Ukrainians die that this war is brought to an end. All parents want to help children with their feelings, but I argue that not every feeling is worth paying attention to.

Why are these students covering their faces? I think it says something about their movement, about their ideology, and also simply the fact that they're also cowards. Welcome to the Monk Debates. Every episode, we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of JFK. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

You'll excuse the fact that I'm out of breath, but about 10 or 15 minutes ago, a tragic thing from all indications at this point has happened in the city of Dallas. President Kennedy was shot as he drove from Dallas airport to downtown Dallas. Governor Connolly of Texas in the car with him was also shot. From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time. There's don't have much of it. Well, it's America's greatest unsolved murder. Who shot JFK? On the 60th anniversary of the Warren Commission, we debate who was really behind the assassination of a beloved U.S. president.

On one side of this debate is the lone gunman theory, the U.S. government's official statements supported by the Warren Commission's findings. Proponents of this theory argue that the shooter Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone without any assistance or interference from outside actors. On the other side of this debate are the impassioned theorists who point to doctored evidence and eyewitness accounts as proof that there is much more to the story, whether it was a second gunman on the grassy knoll, the mob agending an unsuccessful coup in Cuba, or a an inside job by the CIA, too many suspicious coincidences lead to only one conclusion. Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone on that fateful day of November 22, 1963.

On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenged the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of JFK. arguing in favor of the resolution is Gerald Posner. He's an investigative journalist and author of Case Closed, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the assassination of JFK. Arguing against the resolution is Dick Russell, the author of On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, a groundbreaking look at America's most infamous conspiracy. Gerald, Dick, welcome to the Monk Debates. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Thanks, Ricky. Good to be here. So when I first started researching this debate a year ago, everyone I spoke to pointed me in your directions. And I'm so excited that we can finally have this conversation with two, shall we say, authoritative experts on this conspiracy theory that has lasted over 60 years. So with that in mind, we I'm going to go to opening statements. Gerald, you are arguing in favor of our resolution today. I'm going to put three minutes on the show clock. Let's have your opening statement. Okay, thank you. When I began studying the JFK assassination,

I thought it was a conspiracy. Only after I finished my investigation, did I conclude that while plenty of people wanted JFK did, Lee Harvey Oswald carried out the murder of the president on its own. A murder, because that's what it is. requires reviewing the credible evidence to determine what happened. The crime scene, by the time I began my work in the early 90s, there had been advances in ballistics that produced a study to prove conclusively where the assassin had to be to inflict those wounds on the president and the

governor. And the cone for those shots centers almost exactly on the sixth floor of the Texas school book depository where 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald had landed a job five weeks earlier. And the six floors where Oswald had been left alone by half a dozen of his co-workers only 30 minutes before the assassination. The same Oswald, who a psychiatrist had diagnosed correctly as a teenager, as having a, quote, vivid fantasy life turning around the topics of omnipotence and power, an emotionally quite disturbed youngster with definite traits of dangerousness and a potential for explosive, aggressive assault of acting out.

What did the police find on the sixth floor after this shooting? A rifle belonging to Oswald, the same rifle he used six months earlier to try to assassinate a retired Army general, Edwin Walker, The same rifle he had posed with in pictures as a hunter of fascist. The same rifle he had brought into the Texas schoolbook depository that morning hidden in a long-ground paper bag telling a coworker who drove him to work that he was carrying curtain rods. The only bullets had hit the president and Texas governor that day were matched ballisticly to that rifle to the exclusion of every other gun in the world.

Oswald's palm prints and index fingers found on the boxes used to assemble a sniper's nest in front of the southeast corner window with an open view of the motorcade. Oswald's palm print on the rifle stock, his right middle and index prints on the trigger guard. Oswald's index finger and palm print on the brown paper bag used to smuggle on the gun. And where's Oswald? He's the only one of the employees who left after the assassination. He went to his rooming house to retrieve his 38 caliber revolver. While he was doing that, an all points bulletin went out on the police radio, only 15 minutes after the assassination.

It was based on an eyewitness who had seen Oswald in the sixth floor window. Quote, it described the suspected of a suspect. Anassanist unknown white male, approximately 30, slender built, five feet, 10 inches, 165 pounds. That description had been broadcast four times when Dallas policeman J.D. Tippett saw Oswald looking furtive and walking briskly in Dallas's Oak Cliff neighborhood. It's only 45 minutes since the assassination. When Tippett stepped out of a patrol car and pulled Oswald over, Oswald pulled out his 38 caliber of Auburn, killed Tippett on the spot.

Ten, ten eyewitnesses. The gun tied ballistically to that murder, Oswald fled and was followed by a witness who saw him slip into a movie theater where he was soon arrested. The facts are incontrovertible. The latest advances in science, ballistics, and film analysis, combined with millions of pages of release government files, confirms that despite all the feverish conspiracy speculation, the simple truth to the question of who killed JFK is Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. Thank you, Gerald, for that excellent opening statement. Dick, you are arguing against our resolution today. Be it resolved, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of JFK. Let's have your opening statement. Yes, well, there are a number of things that Mr. Posner said that I would disagree with, which we'll get to in the rebuttal part. But, you know, in my view, and I've been studying this for many, many years, almost 50 years. actually, the assassination of President Kennedy remains unresolved. I mean, for one thing, and I hope this is resolved soon, the government's still withholding thousands of files from the

CIA and the FBI, and that's seven years past the deadline when they were supposed to be released under the JFK Records Act that was passed by Congress in the 1990s. So the question is, what are they still hiding? A lot of classified records have been destroyed over the years. They've been shredded or incinerated, and that includes an early conversation between President Johnson, who came in after President Kennedy was assassinated, NJ. Edgar Hoover of the FBI about Oswald, the first version of the autopsy notes, the CIA's files on Oswald in New Orleans, a whole slew of records that were kept by the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Secret Service, and military intelligence have all been wiped out. So we don't know what was in

them, and we never will. Now, my own background is that I spent about two years in the 1970s, I guess I was the first journalist really out on the trail to track down living witnesses for what became, over time, three published books and many, many articles at that point in time. And many of these people I met with spoke of a conspiracy that they were cognizant of. And some claims I couldn't corroborate or dismiss, but others I pursued and came to feel were quite credible. And this continued with the recent podcast series that I did with Rob Reiner and Soledad O'Brien, where I was the expert on the assassination. You know, it is not clear to this day who Oswald might have been working for or what he thought his role was on that fateful day.

He wasn't some innocent bystander, I certainly agree. His prior history included an alleged affection to the Soviet Union and a role in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee that indicates he was either a sincere leftist or he was somebody's agent. But the Warren Commission cover-up was blatant, and I will detail that. And it's quite likely to have occurred after, I think, Lyndon Johnson warned that exposing the truth could spark World War III. And that was by someone's design, because I believe Oswald was manipulated by others seeking to blame him for the assassination as a tool of the Russians and the Cubans. The CIA had a lot to hide, which wouldn't start to be exposed until the mid-1970s. They were plotting with gangsters to overthrow Castro and other governments. They were running operations using drugs and hypnosis to control human behavior,

and they were keeping not just tabs but clandestine meetings with Lee Harvey Oswald, secrets that remain hidden to this day. In 1979, the House Assassinations Committee concluded from a newly discovered acoustics analysis of a policeman's motorcycle radio that there'd been a shot from the front and the president was therefore killed by a conspiracy. So that contradicts what the Warren Commission had to say, And in the course of this discussion today, I hope to expand on that. Thank you, Dick, for that opening statement.

Gerald, now is your turn to respond to anything you just heard in Dick's opening statement. Well, I think that we just found one of the areas of agreement between Mr. Russell and me, and that is that we both believe that the JFK assassination files, all of them that have been sealed over the years, is one of the worst things the government did. It makes people think that there's something to hide. Those files I've been on the record, I've written op-eds about it should have been released long ago, and it's greatly disappointing that both former President Trump and President Biden did not release them when they had the full ability to do so. Dick Russell also spoke about the fact that documents had been destroyed, and one of the things I've said many, many times is it was a cover-up after the assassination.

It wasn't the cover-up that he sees, a cover-up of a murder. It was the cover-up by the CIA and the FBI of their own bureaucratic representation. They did destroy evidence. The CIA was petrified. The Warren Commission would find out that it was in league with the mafia to kill a head of state, not Kennedy, but Castro. And that didn't come out until the 1970s. So they hid that information. And one of the things, though, that I think is absolutely critical on this. And Dick Russell says that Lee Harvey Oswald was used as sort of this pawn or agent or the CIA had used him. You have to remember that in only literally, we're talking a couple of months before the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald on September 25th and 26th of 1963 gets on a bus to go to Mexico City. He has to transfer on four different buses. It takes him over 27 hours. The reason that's critical, he wants to get to Cuba. He believes that's the real revolution.

And that's where he's going to fight for the new revolution he's founded, because he doesn't like what he saw in the Soviet Union when he defected. He hates capitalism. He's going on to Cuba. And it turns out that he's rejected by the Soviets and the Cubans in Mexico City and has to come back to Dallas after 10 days. But why do I mention those dates when he's on the bus? Because that's the first time the White House ever released the information to the public

that John Kennedy was going to Dallas in November. They didn't even say Dallas. They said it's going on a political trip to Texas. So that means that everything that happened in Oswald's life before September, the 25th, and 26th of 1963 happened without the conspirators knowing a time and place for the assassination. And if Oswald had been given a visa by the Cubans, he would have been in Havana on November 22nd, 1963. It's only because the Soviets and the Cuban said no to him. And he returned to Dallas. That's the period in which if there's a conspiracy, you have to show

me how it happened. And that's where the evidence is lacking. You can't do it by telepathy. You can't do it by secret intuition. There's no text messages. Somebody has to talk to Oswald. That's the seven-week period in which there's just no contact with anybody. There are people that tried to insert themselves in the story. Dick Russell knows that, but there's no credible evidence there was anybody but Oswald. Dick, would you like to respond? Yeah, I would. So, first of all, let me go back to what Mr. Posner said in the opening statement about the psychiatrist,

because it's very interesting that Dr. Renatus Hartogs, who was indeed the psychiatrist at the youth house, who had briefly met Oswald in 1953, 10 years earlier, was not just your normal psychiatrist. He made sure he would be the one to testify before the Warren Commission, and he was definitely involved with the CIA in M.K. Ultra projects, which is an attempt to figure out how to control human behavior using hypnosis and drugs. He was an expert hypnotist. I mean, I talked to him on the phone,

and I talked to someone who knew him well and revealed this fact about Dr. Hartog's background. So that makes me a little suspicious. Of course, we're going to get into the forensics of this, and there's a lot to talk about. And I almost say I'm an expert on forensics and how all these things work. I don't think I've studied this as much as Mr. Posner has, but still I've come to some things and have some questions about it. For one thing, you know, maybe you can answer this, Gerald. First of all, what happened to the Mouser? It was a 7.65 Mouser that was first identified as the murder weapon.

The police were holding it up. Two policemen, Walter Cronkite first said it was a Mouser. The Dallas D.A. said it was a Mouser. And then the Mouser disappears. And we've got the Manlaker Carcano rifle that Oswald ordered. And then, you know, I wonder how you explain the lack of fingerprints on the manlaker rifle or the shell casings? Because the Warren Commission's chief counsel, J. Lee Rankin, himself, raised a serious question about whether the palm print that became a crucial piece of evidence was genuinely lifted from the rifle or it came from. another source. And I would like you to address this, that the mortician, Paul Grudy, who was with

Oswald's body after Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby. And the next day, he said that several quote agents, as he called them, came to his funeral home, asking for time alone with the body. And after they left, Grudy had to remove fingerprint ink from Oswald's fingers and hands. So I think that starts to raise some big questions. And I'll stop at that for the moment and I guess we can move on to our main discussion. Fair enough. Richard, I think one of the things is, by the way, you jump back for a second on that I answered the questions you just raised. You would also mention the House Select Committee on Assassinations with that headline that said conspiracy, a fourth shot.

You know, they had a sound tape. And I will tell you, the National Academies of Sciences, and you know I've dealt with this extensively over time, that was a headline. And then, of course, typical of headlines like that that later turned out to be an error, they thought that they had a sound tape from a policeman's radio interview at the time of the assassination. It turns out, we now know it's about a minute off of where they thought it was. It wasn't recording the assassination at all. But the key is the retraction for that goes on page 32 of the paper. So people forget about that over time. But that aside, the Mouser is very interesting. There are always on every instance of what I call an immediate traumatic event, whether it's the attempted assassination

of Donald Trump, the assassination of a president, 9-11, the Challenger Discovered, you have eyewitnesses that report things that later turn out to be incorrect. I know this is a lawyer. If you have a car wreck on the streets, six witnesses, somebody thinks the car is green, somebody else thinks it was running a red light, somebody else says no, it was moving slowly. So I'm not surprised that they got it wrong. The real question is there's a lot of conflicting evidence in the Kennedy assassination. The question isn't accepting all of it, is figuring out what is better.

So there wasn't only the issue of the Mouser, the original police report that went out for an eyewitness report, there was broadcast four times, said he had a 30 caliber rifle. So, you know, differences on that. But the question is, what did he have? And then you say, well, okay, Oswald's rifle that he bought by mail order was found on that floor and was tied ballistically to the killing of the president to the exclusion of any other gun. And there were fingerprints, two of Oswald's fingerprints on the trigger guard and one fingerprint on the woodstock, but why not more? You know, that's like saying, you know, we have evidence that he was the criminal, but I wish

we had all 10 fingerprints. I wish we had his fingerprint on all of the casings. Well, that would be fantastic if so, but those fingerprints, those that were found absolutely critical. And then you find something very interesting. And this is what Mr. Russell does, which is try to then put into people's mind the question of, well, even if those are Oswald's fingerprints on the gun, maybe some mysterious agents went into the home.

They were somehow able to change his fingerprints or do something with them. And that report from the person in the funeral home, Nobody else supports, no evidence of it, no confirmation anywhere else. Nothing different on Oswald's fingerprints from the prints that he already had on his passport, from the prints that the Russians already had, which they made available in the 1990s, from the prints that he had on his Cuban counsel's permits when he tried to get. So it's the same fingerprints over a period of literally six years. No change fingerprints, no swap fingerprints, nothing unusual about those.

Well, you know, all I've ever read about is the palm print that became this crucial piece of evidence in lieu of fingerprints, and then what the mortician said, yes, there's nobody to back it up, but why would he make that up? I mean, it doesn't make any sense. How do you explain this, then, the unanimity of the doctors at Parkland Hospital, the first ones to obviously be with the president's body when he was taken there, that the wounds on his head and throat indicated that the fatal shot had come from the front, not the rear. That was almost unanimous among them, and the Warren Commission completely ignored them, and they weren't alone. I mean, Of 216 eyewitnesses that got identified,

52 of them said they heard shots coming from the front, 48 from the Texas School Book Depository, okay? So just, Dick, while you talk about that second gunman, for our listeners who don't necessarily know about this theory, it has to do with the grassy knoll, which I think everyone has heard about. Yes, right. So I believe that the evidence shows that the president and the governor were struck by bullets, fired from a shooter, who I happen to think was Oswald,

from behind the motorcade from behind. But there are many people who said, well, gee, and when you first watch the Zupruder film, the whole movie of the assassination in real time, and you see the president's head go backwards at the fatal headshot. My first reaction was the same as almost everybody else. Gee, that looks like a shot from the front.

That's how we see it in movies. Somebody gets shot from the front and they go backwards. Then you get into the forensics and the detail and medical examiners, you understand how that explosive bullet that enters his head from the rear blew out a big section of his brain, blood matter from the front, and his head went back into the left. But Dick Rakesh is a very important

point. The doctors at Parkland, who were the treating physicians in the emergency room, said, by the way, we think there was an entrance wound on his neck, so that would have been from the front. They then did a tracheotomy over that wound, so it was obliterated, and we could never see it again. We had to go on their memory of it. I interviewed all of the doctors. It's in my book in 1992. who were in emergency room one, who treated Jack Kennedy, and they say exactly the same thing. Yes, we did think that was an entrance wound. And guess what?

We never turned the body over. The body was rolled in on a stretcher from the car into the emergency room. Mrs. Kennedy was there. We were frenetically trying to get some sign of a pulse. He had this massive bloody wound on his head. We never flipped or picked the body up or moved him up. If we had, we would have seen the even smaller,

entrance wound of the bullet on his high neck, rear shoulder, that this was then an exit wound. But we saw the small wound here and thought it was an entrance wound. We never saw the wound on the back. We never examined the head wound. And they're clear on that across the board. Well, I did not interview those doctors, and so I can't speak to that. But I can certainly speak to the fact that 11 out of 13 employees of the railroad, who were among those closest to the grassy knoll, said that they were sure that's where the sniper was firing for. from, and none of them mentioned the Texas School Book Depository. Now, yes, those are witnesses who are not professionals, doctors, and so on, but they were there on the scene. And then, you know,

the single bullet theory, which I'm sure we will talk about for a minute, the one thing that really disturbed me about that when I looked deeper into it was, okay, there's a man named Gerald Ford who eventually became president of the United States, and he was on the Warren Commission when he was a congressman from Michigan. He's the guy who brought Arlen Specter in to change the language of the first draft of the Warren report to match Spector's theory, which was that seven wounds in the president and Governor Connolly passed through both men, which contradicted a lot of medical reports that confirmed a wound in the back, not the neck. And Gerald Ford went in there. He was also reporting to the FBI. Maybe you'll want to discuss that for a minute if you know about it, Gerald.

But, you know, that the, he was telling the, Jake or Hoover everything was going on in the commission. And, you know, he was, he was, uh, he was, uh, In fact, an FBI agent named Seabird said of Specter, who he brought in, I think he got his orders from above, wherever that was. But anyway, Gerald Ford changed the language of the first draft to match the theory that instead of, originally the first draft said that the president's, the shot was in the president's back, and Ford changed it to the back of the neck, slightly to the right of the spine. I found that pretty damn disturbing. And there were a lot of procedural errors that happened in the autopsy. We can get to that in a minute. I want to talk a bit more about this magic bullet, which you'd mentioned.

Now, it is said to have passed through both JFK and Texas Governor John Connolly. It was said to have caused seven wounds during that assassination. Gerald, how do you explain one bullet causing seven wounds? I couldn't explain it, but ballistics experts have been able to explain it since. And I think Dick Russell is absolutely right. The initial feeling when you hear about that is to be skeptical. And when I started my examination of the case, I knew one thing. If the so-called single bullet was not physically possible, we had a conspiracy because the shooter,

let's say the shooter and won't call him Oswald to make Dick Russell upset. The shooter from behind only had the chance to get off three shots. By the way, the Warren Commission got it wrong. They thought that the first shot hit President Kennedy and the governor, the so-called single bullet. And the third shot, we know where it is on the home movie of the assassination, the Supruder film. that's the stopwatch for the assassination, 18.3 frames to a second. So you can time it. Oswald would have had about five and a half to six seconds.

In fact, he has eight and a half to nine seconds. The first bullet's the one that missed. We have the evidence of that on the Supruder film itself, of people reacting to that first shot around frame 160. And then the so-called single bullet, what Oliver Stone would like to call a magic bullet, at frames 224 and 225. Now, since we see where it happens,

the reason we see where it happens, by the way, I say is Governor Coney's right suit lapel in a digital copy of the Supruder film flies up at frame 224. And when you examine his suit jacket, there's a bullet hole through it. That is the bullet striking the governor. So we know where the two men were at that moment. You recreate in the size and weight of the governor and the president. At the moment they were in that car, do they line up in a straight trajectory? And I must tell you, you can examine this all day long.

ballistic experts have done it. It's no turn to the right, turn to the left, hesitation. It's a straight shot. It hits Kennedy in the high right rear portion. It doesn't hit any bone coming out of Kennedy. It's fired at 2,000 feet a second from Oswald's gun that hits Kennedy about 1,800 feet, leaves his neck at 1,500 feet and goes straight into Conley. And by the way, it's tumbling at that point, meaning it's turning because it's hit Kennedy. How do we know it's tumbling? The entrance wound into the back of Kami is an inch and a quarter long, the exact size of the bullet. It then strikes his rib at about 900 to 1,100 feet a second, enough to break the rib and presses the bullet down a little bit. It's not pristine. It's flat on that one side. And by the time it exits underneath

his nipple and hits his wrist, the biggest bone, it's traveling in about 900 feet a second, enough to break the wrist, not to damage the bullet. And this isn't a theory. This was redone by failure analysis associates, a firm that did it for the American Bar Association on both sides of the issue, and then ballistics experts have retested it. I print in my book copies of the bullets that have been fired in reconstruction since that look almost exactly like the single bullet. Whether you want to say 10 assassins were at Dili Plaza that day is another question. If you say Oswald was part of a conspiracy, but one thing we can say today in 2024 is the single bullet happened as Arlen Spector and Gerald Ford guessed that.

They weren't sure. They didn't have the science to prove it, but now we do. Well, I'm going to just, you know, I can't refute all of those points on where the bullet went and didn't. And I'm not even going to try. But I know that, you know, the president's brain, the photos of the president's brain that the assassination records review board looked at, Doug Horn, and pointed out that the photos show a perfectly intact head, but all the doctors saw a wound so massive that There was hardly any brain matter left, which definitely, again, indicates that he was shot from the front. And the fact, maybe you can address this, Gerald, that the president's brain somehow went missing. When Cyril Wecht went to the National Archives to look for it, it was gone.

Now, you know, there's all kinds of theories about that. Oh, well, the Kennedy family didn't want people to see it and so on. But it seems very weird that in something as huge as this event was, that that would be the case. Dick Rostell, I was just going to say something very interesting. The front shooter, the so-called grassy-nall shooter, if there was one, was to the right front of the president. So a bullet fired from that direction that would have hit the president in the front, would have blown out the rear portion of his head, which is right in front of Jackie Kennedy. She was sitting there.

We see her on the Supruder film. She is reaching out to her husband, who's in a back brace, trying to bring down his arm after he shot the first time, a non-fatal wound. there is no blast of blood and brain material, as gruesome as that may sound, on the face and all over the First Lady, because the exit wound isn't in the rear of the head. The interesting part of it is the bullet that enters the rear, and again, you could say it was fired by a world-class assassin from another building or it was fired by somebody else, but the bullet that hissed the president on the rear of the head blows out the front of the head. And something Dick Russell said that almost all the brain was missing in the pictures at the autopsy. You have to look at the notes to see how much of the brain was left. About a third of that brain was blown out of the front in this massive wound. And there's something very interesting.

I encourage anybody who has it to put into a Google frame 313 Zapruder film. You'll see the actual moment a still frame of the headshot. What you will see is a red mist cloud coming out at the front of the president's head going up and to the right as this wound takes place. People used to say in the past, there were two motorcycle policemen on the rear of the motorcade, on the rear of the car, and they were splattered with blood and brain material. So they said, oh, it must have been a shot from the front because they were hit by this blood and brain material. You can see on the Supruder film, as you go frame by frame, they drive right into the mist. It's not a shot that comes the other way. So the real mystery shot,

The real magic bullet of the Kennedy assassination is if there is a front grassy knoll shooter who fires a shot that day. That's the world-class assassin, supposedly, because you can't trust Oswald to hit anything from behind. And that grassy-null shooter misses everybody, misses the president, misses Mrs. Kennedy, misses the governor, Mrs. Conley, misses the two secret service agents in the car, doesn't hit anybody on the other side of the street who's standing there to watch the motorcade. the grassy knoll shooter, that bullet just disappears.

Well, it doesn't disappear. It just wasn't one. Okay. Yeah. Go ahead. No, no. Dickie responded, then I'll come in with the question. Yeah.

Well, I'd like to get to Oswald himself in a minute and whether he was involved in this. But let me just by way of refuting what you say. How come so many people, and maybe you can answer this, Gerald? Senator Russell, who was on my namesake, I guess, but he was on Richard Russell, who was on the Warren Commission. He was a very close friend to Lyndon Johnson's, and they have a conversation about this single bullet. And Russell says to him, I don't believe it. And Johnson says to him, this is on tape from the Johnson Library. I don't either. Then you got this other commission member, John Sherman Cooper, Senator, saying clearly there were at least two separate shooters. So that's

two people on the Warren Commission refuting what the Warren Commission is actually is saying in its report. Then you've got in the motorcade. You've got Kenneth O'Donnell and Dave Powers, who were presidential aides to Kennedy. And they said initially they were sure that shots came from the front. John Connolly said, because his governor, he was sure different bullets struck him and the president, which means there had to have been a second government. Now, Powers and O'Donnell, under pressure from the FBI, changed their stories. They then said, no, okay, the shots must, we didn't hear shots from the front. But they then changed that again when they spoke to Tip O'Neill, which Tip O'Neill writes about in his biography, the former House speaker, that they said they were pressured into doing that. So to me, this is all very weird what's going on and indicating that somebody is covering up something pretty big about what actually happened that day in terms of the shooting.

So, Dick, I think you have some interesting things you point out. There's absolutely no question that the eyewitness and ear witness testimony conflicted. It was all over the place. I have separate sections in my book about the ear witnesses and the eyewitnesses. And even though the bulk of them say the shots came from behind and the D.D. Plaza is an echo chamber. So I'm not surprised we have conflicting evidence. And two people on, you know, the Warren Commission were skeptical about the single bullet. I'm surprised it wasn't more than that because they couldn't prove it at the time.

As a matter of fact, the FBI did their own ballistics test. They didn't know how to do it. They shot a bullet at full speed into a pig carcass. and it came out all mangled up. So people said, well, if it hits one pig carcass and it's all mangled up, how can that single bullet be in such good condition? The FBI didn't understand how the bullets slowed as it went through the two men. We didn't know that for 29 years.

So the skepticism about the single bullet early on makes perfect sense. The people in the motorcade and on the Warren Commission who said, I'm not so sure it's Rudy Oswald or maybe the Soviets or maybe it was the Cubans. That makes perfect sense. This wasn't a monolithic decision. But as an investigator, as you have been for decades on this, as an investigator as I try to do, what I do is I take the ear witness and eyewitness testimony and then I ask myself, what's the best evidence? And the best evidence in the case of where the shooter was, at least the shooter who hit somebody that day, are the autopsy x-rays and photos.

Now, were those faked? There are some people believe they were. But the House Select Committee looked at them and found no evidence of it. One writer, David Lifton, came up with a very, very large book that said, you know, maybe he was hit from the rear, but that's because they stole the body and did surgery on it. People go through convoluted explanations to explain away the forensics and medical evidence on this. And I tend to say that unless you can debunk the science, the ballistics, and the medical examiner's evidence, you're still stuck with a shooter from behind. If you're enjoying the Monk Debates podcast, come over to our website at wwwwmunkdebates.com. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com and check out our free monk membership.

As a complimentary monk member, you get all kinds of great perks and benefits, access to our weekly email, summarizing our best debates, and ticketing privileges at our main stage debates, special news, information, and offers all courtesy of the Monk Debates. You can grab your complimentary monk membership again right now at TripleW Moncdebates.com. Simply look to the top navigation on the website and follow the links.

Thanks in advance for joining our community. Let's talk a little bit about motives. So those who claim that Oswald was just a passy say that just because he was a Marxist does not give him enough motivation. to assassinate a sitting U.S. president. Gerald, what's your response to that? I agree with that.

There are a lot of people who are Marxists who didn't assassinate, try to assassinate the president. There were a lot of anti-Castro Cubans who thought that John Kennedy was a traitor because he had failed them at the Bay of Pigs and they weren't out trying to assassinate him. Fidel Castro knew that the Kennedys were trying to kill him together with the mob.

So he had a good reason to strike back, Khrushchev had been humiliated at the Cuban missile crisis. So there are a lot of suspects. There's no question. The mob. So I have no doubt that you could have had conspiracies brewing against the president. My point is that you need to tie Oswald, who I'm convinced the evidence shows as a shooter, into those conspiracies.

And something absolutely critical on this. And Dick disagrees with much of what I say. He may really disagree with this. But I view Oswald as almost an equivocal assessment. I've said that before about him. Now, what I mean by that is the Oswald that I came to understand from studying him. And a third of my books, a biography of Oswald, he could have been on the sixth floor of a building in downtown Moscow that day shooting at Nikita Khrushchev. It wasn't a hatred for Kennedy, per se. He was somebody who had committed himself to political assassination. He tried to kill this right-wing army general who he thought was going to be the up-and-coming Hitler had failed at that.

And Kennedy was almost presented to him on a silver platter because it turned. turns out where he was working, is where the motorcade was going in front of, and he only learned that a couple of days beforehand. The night before the assassination, he goes out to retrieve his rifle from where his wife is staying outside of Dallas in a suburb, and he makes a plea with her to come back together. They're estranged at that point. They had a very abusive relationship. He beat her a lot over time.

And he says, come back. Let's get back together. I'll buy you a washing machine. That's a big deal for them. They had very little money. And she said later, I rebuffed him. I turned him away everything. That night when they went to sleep.

sleep, she put her leg onto his, at one point her foot, and he pushed it away with a ferocity that she said, my, he's in a mean mood. When she woke up the next morning, she saw that he had left his wedding ring in a Demitask cup, which he'd never taken off before. She didn't see right away that he left their life savings. It's like $195. The point is this, what if Marina had said yes the night before? What if she said, yes, I'll come back with you? Was it a fake request he was making? Was he just pretending he wanted to get back together? Or is it possible? that instead of being so committed to kill Kennedy as a passion and obsession, it was a motive of opportunity throwing a cog into the machinery of government,

but that if things had gone the other way, he might not have done it. That's how I see Oswald. Yeah, you know, I think that there's a lot of ways to see Oswald. And he intentionally liked it that way. He had since he was a kid. He certainly was not some innocent bystander. I mean, you know, he was, as Robert Blakey said, not too long ago, who was in charge of the House Committee's investigation

after Richard Sprague was fired because he was trying to look into the CIA. But anyway, Blakey said, you know, I think Oswald was developed as a false flag assassin. And I think it's quite likely that he, of course, knew he was involved in something. He was looking to get away. I mean, he was, you know,

looking for a contact in the theater sitting next to all these different people. But that doesn't mean that he was actually the assassin. And his history, is replete with, as Senator Schweiker once told me from Pennsylvania, when he was starting with his investigation, he said the fingerprints of intelligence are all over Oswald. And, you know, I have been studying this for many, many years. And, you know, from the time he entered the Marines, if not before, he was recruited into an intelligence operation. And that's,

he wanted to Russia as a false defector to supposedly give radar secrets to the Soviets. So, Dick, you're saying that Oswald was a CIA agent that defected to Russia as a CIA agent just to collect Intel. And that when he came back, he was still working for the CIA. The CIA had motive to assassinate JFK and they used him to achieve that goal. I don't know if I would go quite that far. I don't know who actually assassinated JFK. I don't think any of us do. But I believe it was definitely a far right, if you want to put it that way, conspiracy that involved Cuban exiles, anti-Castro Cubans, who posed as Castro agents.

I believe there was a man named Charles Willoughby. That's a whole other story. I'd too long to get into here. But who was probably the mastermind behind this. He had been in military intelligence and was a brilliant strategist and was close to. Alan Dulles. So I think there were elements of the CIA and of the mafia and of Cuban exiles who were involved in this and who used Oswald as a Patsy, as he said he was, and as part of their plan to get rid of Kennedy. And they hated Kennedy. I mean, they, you know, they believed he

was a traitor to this country for the deals he was making with Castro. So, yeah, I want to expand a bit about the possible motivations aside from Castro because there's four separate theories on who would be behind this. Who would been motivated to kill Kennedy? The CIA, after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy vowed that he would, quote, splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds. So they had a kind of desire to see him ousted. The military, because JFK was preparing to withdraw troops from Vietnam and wind down, that

kind of limited engagement or what he saw it as a limited engagement. The mob, because Kennedy was unsuccessful in overthrowing Castro in Cuba, which meant that their casinos in Cuba had to remain shut down. And also, RFK was cracking down on the mob as his role as attorney general. And then Fidel Castro himself for the botched coup. So out of those kind of four theories, which one do you think holds the most water? Don't forget the KGB. Okay, let's add the KGB to that list. What was their motivation, Gerald?

That they've been humiliated by Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Something that Dick says, though, that's very important. He places, if you listen to him, and, you know, he comes over, he's very good in his presentation. You would think that if you heard this and you haven't done any studying, that Oswald was definitely working for the CIA. And how could this guy Posner possibly think he pulled off the... the assassination on his own if he was a CIA agent. But Dick says things as facts that have never been proven. So, you know, people have looked for that for years.

The best that has come up recently is that the CIA read one of his letters to his mother when it first went over, and they knew about the fact that he'd gone over there. But guess who doesn't think he worked for the CIA? The KGB. And this wasn't just an opinion of theirs. That's from two years of having followed him. That's after Oswald tried to kill himself when he first went into the country when they told me to get lost because they gave him a psychiatrist test and thought he was mentally unstable.

And then they moved him out to the provincial capital of Minsk, where they watched him on audio tapes and cameras for nearly two years, and he had nothing to do with American intelligence. And how do we know that? Because the Soviets provided all of those materials to Norman Maylor, and they're now available to the public. And I interviewed Uri No Senko, the Russian defector, who came to the U.S. who was responsible for the Oswald file,

and he couldn't stop laughing when I told him that Oswald worked for U.S. intelligence. So Oswald had an instability that made it impossible for him to do that, but let's assume for a second that Dick Russell's right and he was working for the CIA. They had this master plan to kill Kennedy because for whatever reason they had to get rid of him. Then the question is, what about Oswald's trip to Mexico City in late September? With the Cuban mission and the Soviet mission in on the plot, were they told, by the way, when Oswald comes to get his visa to go to Havana, we need them in Dallas, as part of this plot, we're going to kill the president in a few weeks. So make sure that you say no to him. Were they in on the plot?

I don't think anybody's ever suggested that. So Oswald would have even been in America then. That's a good point. I mean, Dick, if he had gone into Cuba, then, you know, that whole conspiracy theory falls flat. Well, yeah, if he'd have gone into Cuba. I mean, but, you know, it's not even clear that it's never been officially, well, officially, I guess they've said Oswald was definitely in Mexico City. But it's not clear it was him. There was a photo that the CIA took of somebody they said was Oswald that surfaced right after the assassination. It wasn't him. It could have been

an impersonator going into those embassies. And so that's one thing. But, you know, it's, I'm not saying Oswald was a, maybe he wasn't an agent per se. I mean, he, you know, there's different definitions of the term agent. I think he was sent in by Naval Intelligence and or the CIA. into Russia on a mission and continued. The KGBB was very interested in him. I mean, they were trying to figure out who this guy was. There were all these defectors going over there in those days. A lot of them all at the same time, and they all came back, kind of the same MO as Oswald.

They all returned and saying they'd become disaffected and came back to the U.S. So there was some kind of big program going on with all these guys. A lot of things we still don't know. And the CIA was keeping really James Angleton of counterintelligence had, a vast file on Oswald that we've never seen. He started it in 1959 when Oswald defected to Russia, and they continued to keep tabs on him one way or another all the way up to the November 22nd. So maybe we'll find out more about that in the release of files. I hope so. We might find out more about that release of the files. But Dick, something very interesting.

You know, we talk about the last, there are 2,600 files that have been redacted in part, and 501 files we've never seen anything of. So everybody wants to know what's in the files, right? We want to know that. You know what's in those files, but the 501 files we've never seen anything of, the American public's been waiting 61 years to see. 499 of them are tax files. Yeah, Lee Harvey Oswald's tax files, Jack Ruby's tax files, because tax files can't be released. How ridiculous is that? William Manchester, the historian, his conversations with Jackie Kennedy, the Kennedy family asked them to be sealed, they're still contained in there. There's material in there that should never have been in. But, one of the things that Dick Russell does, he does it very, very well is he throws out a suggestion and then it sort of sticks as a fact, which is maybe it was an imposter of Oswald who went into the Mexico City Council for the Soviets or the Cubans. I will tell you, that might have been possible before 1994 and 1995 to figure that that could be the case. But since then, the Cubans and the Soviets have provided information. Oleg Nefneroperenko, who was the KGB

agent inside the Soviet mission, described how they had pictures. of the person who came in, how they saw his passport, they took a copy of it. He said, I had been living in Moscow. I had defected over there. They sent a cable back to the Soviet Union to the desk of the chief of the Oswald file. And he said, Oswald, you've got to be kidding. He's crazy. Get him out of there. So there's no question that the real Oswald was in those embassies that day and being told to leave by the KGB agents and by Cuban intelligence. Okay, we're reaching the end of the debate, but before we go to closing statements, we can't end without mentioning Alan Dulles.

Because he is a big part of the argument that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK. Now, he was director of the CIA and was fired by JFK in 1961 following the Bay of Pigs, the disastrous invasion of Cuba. And then he was put on the Warren Commission to study the assassination of JFK, which I think we can all agree was a huge conflict of interest. So, Dick, can you explain me a bit more about how Alan Dulles plays into your argument? Yeah, I mean, Alan Dulles, by the way, there's a great book by David Talbot, a biography of Dulles that reaches the conclusion that Dulles was part of a conspiracy to assassinate the president. Surely he couldn't stand him. I mean, he got fired, as you say, for their disaster after the Bay of Pigs. And then once on the Warren Commission, Dulles did everything he could to cover up CIA involvement with Oswald or this event.

He even spoke one day, and it was classified for many years, but finally released that he was talking about – he was asked by Senator Russell, you know, would you deny that Oswald was an agent if I asked you that question directly or would the FBI? And he said, yes, you know, we would deny it. We would deny this fact, you know, because that's the way things work. And Oswald had, he communicated regularly, I mean, Oswald, Delas communicated regularly with James Angleton, who was the head of counterintelligence. I mean, I interviewed Angleton on three occasions. He tried to point the blame at the Russians and the Cubans. He was a fanatic looking for so-called moles penetrators of the CIA,

that he was sure that were Russian agents. He was one of the strangest people, I remember. met, but that's a whole other story. So, yeah, I mean, I think there was, there was liaison between the FBI, between Angleton and William Sullivan or the FBI, making sure they told the same story as they went through this. So I'm very, I'm not ready to say Dulles was the mastermind behind this plot, but I think he was put on the Warren Commission as part of the Warren Commission to keep what the CIA might know about Oswald and other matters, like their plots with the mafia to kill foreign leaders from becoming public.

And the last thing that Dick Russell just said is the key, because that's actually the key of the answer. By the way, a sideline, one of the holy grails of the assassination from the point of view of those who believe it's a conspiracy is establishing a link between James Jesus Angleton and Oswald, the CIA counterintelligence chief in Oswald. It said all the time there is a link. All that's missing is the evidence. But that aside, why was Alan Dulles on the Warren Commission?

Guess who put him there? Guess who suggested that he go on? Bobby Kennedy, the surviving brother of the deceased president. And why did Bobby want Alan Dulleson, you would ask? Because Bobby was in a very small group of people, together with his brother, Jack, who knew about the plots to kill Castro. And he wanted to make sure that that information did not come out to Earl Warren and the rest of the Warren Commission. So you're right, Dick.

he was put on there to guard the secrets, not of the murder of an assassination and conspiracy, but to make sure that the Warren Commission did not stumble onto the fact that they were still actively trying. They didn't stop at that point. We're still actively trying to kill a head of state. And Bobby Kennedy stayed in his position as Attorney General. So Dulles was the gatekeeper for Bobby to make sure that the Warren Commission never stumbled into the fact that Kennedy's were trying to kill. I'd like to know your source on that because I'm. I have looked into this for years, and I have never heard it said, that Bobby Kennedy asked for

Ellen Dollis to be appointed to the Warren Commission. But, you know, I mean, Bobby Kennedy had been involved early in the discussions to kill Castro with the CIA. But then that stopped. I mean, in fact, the continuing efforts to get rid of Castro that the CIA was making, the Kennedys didn't even know about them. I mean, they didn't know that the very day of the assassination, there was Desmond Fitzgerald the CIA was in Paris with Rolanda Cabela talking about getting rid of Castro. The Kennedy's

had no idea about that. And, you know, one of the things you just mentioned is why LBJ never believed, always thought that it was Castro behind the assassination, because he thought that the Kennedys were trying to get to Castro, and Castro got to him first. And I understand that. There are a lot of people that did not like the Kennedys without a doubt. But the Allen Dulles on the, look, I know today, and I'll say this, I'll talk about this a little bit before. maybe we're finished. The idea of a blue ribbon panel of seven men with long government careers determining what happened in the assassination of a president, boy, that seems like another century ago, much less 60 years ago. The American public would never give much credence to that

today. It's surprising that anybody thought they would give it credence or much credence back then. Well, I think we can all agree on that. We can all agree on that. And on that note, I think we're going to go to a closing statement. I think we could we could probably keep this conversation going for hours, but we are running up. We're just getting warmed up. Yeah. Dick Russell and I are just getting warmed up. That's right. Well, if Trump makes good on his promise to release the JFK assassination files, we'll have to reconvene this debate and as part two. That's a deal. Okay. So for the closing arguments, we are going to reverse the order. The resolution be it resolved, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of JFK.

Dick, you are arguing against the resolution today. Let's hear your short closing statement. There's so much evidence that Oswald was connected to some kind of intelligence operations. And in terms of the assassination itself, I don't know how you explain the testimony of Dallas policeman, Marion Baker, and the superintendent or the book depository, Roy Trulley, that encountered Oswald a very calm Oswald, not out of breath, in a second floor lunchroom 90 seconds after the shooting. Because that would have meant Oswald had to run down four flights of stairs, after wiping the fingerprints off the rifle and the casings and hiding the rifle. And suddenly, you know, these guys went into him and he's having a Coke.

He said he was having a Coke in the lunchroom and later said he was a Patsy, which he was. and there was a woman that was testimony given to the Warren Commission that from several women who witnessed, they were on the fourth floor and they came down the stairs within 60 seconds of the assassination, never saw or heard anyone on the stairwell coming down, which would have had to have been Oswald if he was up there. So that's just kind of the basics behind where he was. I mean, he might have, you know, then there's, of course, there was a lot of strange movements. He went to his rooming house. there was the police motorcycle.

Somebody outside, the police honked twice. There was all kinds of weird things went on. But without getting into all that, and the 21 medical witness statement saying the president's wounds did not match the conclusions that the fatal shot came from the rear of the motorcade, you know, I'm hopeful that the pledge that President Trump was made, which he once rescinded,

he made this pledge back in 2017 as well and then backed off on it. But hopefully that will provide, researchers and the American people with new insights into who Oswald was and what's been hidden, you know, and I don't know. I'd like to see this lead to something like South Africa had, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that it'd give us maybe further clues into a lot of the tragic events of the 1960s because I don't know, you know, I mean, without getting into all of it, but I think the murders of President Kennedy, later his brother, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, they weren't isolated events and they weren't all resulting from the same group of people

or individuals, but the same destructive force. And that force was out to stop leaders who had shown above all, in my view, the courage and the willingness to grow and change as they've aged and learned from misjudgments and mistakes, and that we'd have a different world if they had lived, and we need to know why they didn't. Thank you, Dick, for that excellent closing statement. Gerald, you're arguing that Lee Harvey Oswald did act alone. Let's hear your closing statement. I do have a graphic in my book called The Escape. It's Oswald's three minutes out of the book depository where he was second by second and how he got down to the ground floor. I know Dick raised some questions about that in his closing statement. I hope people might get a chance to look at that. Look, we live in a world in. which people do love conspiracy theories. Lots of people think the X-Files was a documentary or that Oliver Stone's JFK was real history. And it's understandable because there are real conspiracies.

And the American public in particular has lost faith in government, beginning with the Kennedy's assassination. Not only what we talked about a moment ago that we would never remotely accept a conclusion from a blue ribbon panel of seven middle-aged men with long government careers, about who killed the president. But since then, we've had the lies over Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, the deceit over non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, combined with the government making the error of sealing the assassination files, which we talked about today, which we both agree on, often in deference to the desires of the Kennedy family, by the way.

It's little wonder that many people suspect there's more to the assassination than the official explanation. There's also a psychological hurdle to accepting that Oswald alone killed JFK. William Manchester, I think the historian, put it best in the death of a president. He compared it to the Holocaust. He said, you know, on one side of a scale, you have six million dead Jewish victims, and on the other side of the Nazis, the most evil criminals, there's a balance to that. But in the JFK assassination, on one side of the scale, there's JFK, this young charismatic president who turned America into technicolor after eight years of black and white Eisenhower presidency, He had Jacqueline and the best and the brightest advisors.

It was Camelot. The country was filled with great hopes and expectations. It's all cut short on that fateful day in Dallas. And putting a just-turned-24-year-old sociopath on the assassin side of the scale doesn't seem very weighty or substantial. If a conspiracy does that very nicely, if JFK had to be killed because of what we talked about before, he was going to pull us out of Vietnam or dismantle the CIA, the KGB or Castro one of him did, or the mob thought he was trying to bust them up, it means he was killed

for a larger cause, it gives some structure to the world instead of the chaos that one sociopath for his own warp motivations could change history with a single bullet. But unfortunately, students of history will know all too well. That is precisely what has happened too many times in the past. And it is unfortunately exactly what happened in the murder of John F. Kennedy. Thank you. Well, I want to thank you both. This has been a really eye-opening discussion. I know I've learned a ton And I can speak for our listeners, as I'm sure they've also learned a lot from listening to you both today. The conversation is not over. I am sure more information will continue to come out, especially if those files are released.

So to more discoveries and more discussions in the future. And thank you both for joining us for this debate today. Thank you. Thank you, Ricky. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Gerald Posner and Dick Russell. You've certainly given us a lot to think about. A reminder that if you are a free Monk Debates member, you can vote on who you think won today's debate on our website, www.munkdebates.com. And if you have any feedback or reflections on what you've just heard,

please send us an email at podcast at monkdebates.com. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate and dialogue, one conversation at a time. I'm Ricky Gerwitz sitting in for Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gurwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.