The Rest Is History - 397. JFK: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 6)

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

“We can’t accept very comfortably that two nobodies, two nothings - Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby - were able to change the course of world history.” The murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s apparent assassin, by the night club owner Jack Ruby on 24th November 1963 changed everything. Right from the start, rumours had circulated that Oswald had not been acting alone, building on the deep anxieties of American society in the 1950s and 1960s. Some blamed Communist states such as Cuba or the Soviet Union; others anti-Castro exiles, or the Ku Klux Klan. As the years passed, the CIA and FBI came under suspicion. Did Lyndon Johnson know more about the conspiracy than he pretended? Just what was Richard Nixon doing on that fateful day? And how did Frank Sinatra’s drummer fit in? Join Tom and Dominic as they explore the background to the Kennedy conspiracy theories, from umbrella men to grassy knolls, discussing the wider context and investigating every last clue in their tireless search for the truth. *Dominic’s book The Fall of the Aztecs is available now from bookshops across the UK - the perfect Christmas present!* Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory. just scenery for the public. Oswald, Ruby, Cooper, the Mafia. Keeps them guessing like some kind of parlor game. Prevents them from asking the most important question, why? Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefited?

Who has the power to cover it up? Who? The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war. The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers. Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War in his second term. He wanted to call off the Moon Race, cooperate with the Soviets. He signed a treaty to ban nuclear testing. He refused to invade Cuba in 1962. He set out to withdraw from Vietnam. But all that ended on the 22nd of November, 1963. So that, Dominic, was Mr. X, played by Donald sutherland in oliver stone's jfk yeah which

came out in 1991 and it's a very serious and sober documentary on the jfk assassination i mean of course it isn't is it it's an absolute melange of assassination related theories and conspiracy concoctions it is so i saw I saw JFK at the Cinematon when I was a teenager and it was actually the film that got me interested in American history. And were you convinced

when you watched it? No, I sort of knew it was controversial because I'd read articles in Empire magazine and in the newspapers about the controversies because people had criticised it.

Historians had criticised it. I didn't really think about whether or not it was true. What I loved was the idea that the assassination opened up a kind of bigger story, which was the Cold War, the military-industrial complex, the Vietnam War, all of this stuff. Bi-services, FBI, CIA. Yeah, I loved that idea.

So I wrote an incredibly boring A-level research essay about Kennedy's domestic policies. And it was at that point that I started to doubt Oliver Stone's film, because it struck me that he hadn't been sufficiently radical to explain this vast conspiracy. Because the mafia are in it as well aren't they the mafia anti-castro exiles the cia the fbi the secret service we will talk about oliver stone's film a little bit later in this podcast but in a weird way the oliver stone film it is like a sort of the history of post-war america and microcosm isn't it because it has all these anxieties but i was about to say packed into it's not packed into because it's a sprawling incredibly long film uh we we watched it a couple of days ago

actually at home and i couldn't believe how long it was we had to divide it over multiple days because i kept falling asleep but do you think that's because your attention span has faded due to the impact of tiktok yes i spent so much time on TikTok, Tom, that I can no longer watch half an hour. Well, five minutes. Yeah, exactly. Obviously, the Stone film is merely an example of this enormous industry because the Kennedy conspiracy theory industry is, I suppose, bigger than today, even the Freemasons conspiracy theory, to mention one that we've already done. Sure. I mean, it's up there with Atlantis and indeed aliens. And aliens may feature in this episode, may they not?

Because today we are talking about the conspiracy theories, how credible any of them may be. And you are going to give your judgment. My verdict. Oh, my word. As a distinguished historian in modern America. What pressure. What pressure.

Never have I entered a podcast time under such enormous pressure. Sure you'll cope. So one thing I will just say before we start, I enjoyed your Donald Sutherland. He's of course Canadian. I don't know whether you tried to incorporate that in there. Yes, I did. Yeah. Very nice. Very nice. So he would say oot instead of out. That's what Canadians apparently do. Well, unless he's playing an American. Which is what he was doing, of course. Yes. Hence the complexity of the accent. It's an incredibly sophisticated accent because I'm playing a Canadian playing an American. I know that we've been getting some grief from Canadians for not doing any episodes on Canada. So this is one. This counts. So I want to do an homage to the Canadian accent to reassure all our Canadian listeners that we love and value you very, very much.

Oh, that is kind. All right. Let's get back to the Kennedy assassination. So we talked last time, didn't we, about the Dallas Police Department investigation, which I think we both agree was pretty thorough, actually. Yeah. They made mistakes. They obviously made one horrendous mistake in allowing jack ruby into the basement when they were bringing oswald out but i mean as we explained last time they had gone to

tremendous efforts to try to stop that happening hadn't they yeah but otherwise they actually i think did did reasonably well and they think absolutely that they have got their man don't they so captain fritz the guy who's basically conducting the interrogation of Oswald, at two o'clock on the day after the assassination, he comes out and he speaks to a television reporter. And he says, I can tell you that this case is cinched, that this man killed the president. There's no question in my mind about it. Apparently he had a very gravelly accent. He assumes it is absolutely done. It's a done deal. But presumably it's Ruby's murder that changes that. It does in the long run. Everybody thinks it's done,

I would say, by the 23rd of November. So that's the day after the assassination. On the evening of the murder itself, so the 22nd, President Johnson, as he had suddenly become, spoke to J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and said, obviously, I want you to look into this. Federal law enforcement agencies, not just the Dallas law enforcement agencies, should look into this. And the following day, so the same day that Fritz is talking to the press, Hoover sent Johnson the FBI's preliminary findings. They list all the evidence and they say, yeah, we completely agree with the Dallas Police Department. There's absolutely no doubt in our minds. Everything points to Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt. But as you say, the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby changes everything. Because now Oswald cannot be put on

the stand. There will be no trial. There will be no resolution. It looks as if he's been silenced. Yes, exactly. Even at that point, people are already talking actually about should we have some form of resolution anyway? Because we need to put to rest public doubts. They know that there will be conspiracy theories. Well, there already are, aren't there? In Paris and London, we talked about that in the previous episode. Yes, that people are already saying, is it a conspiracy? At that point, people are saying, is it either a communist conspiracy or is it something like the Ku Klux Klan? So actually Lyndon Johnson at Love Field waiting to fly off, to be inaugurated, he had said, should we go back to Washington? Is this a communist conspiracy? I mean, that's a reasonable

supposition to make. So on the afternoon of the 24th, that is the day that Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby, the Dean of Yale Law School, a guy called Eugene Rostow, whose brother Walt ended up becoming Lyndon Johnson's national security advisor. Ooh, very suspicious. So the Rostows are a Russian Jewish family who become very, very fierce anti-communists. Or so they say well their fame walt rostow is famously associated with getting johnson into vietnam and being the ultra the ultra hawk on vietnam anyway that's by the by or is it eugene rostow calls um well maybe yes he calls um one of johnson's aides and he says i think we should have a presidential commission johnson gets the message hoover also thinks that

they should do something, have something public. Hoover, that Sunday afternoon, the 24th of November, actually calls a Johnson aide we know from kind of recordings and transcripts and so on. And he says, we should have something done so that we can, and I quote, convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin. Now, for conspiracy theorists, that is a kind of smoking gun. That is absolute evidence that Jared Gohover and the Johnson White House were plotting to implicate Oswald. Because Oswald had said, I'm a patsy.

I'm a patsy. Yeah. That they're talking to frame him. Of course, there is another way of interpreting that conversation, which is that Jared Gohover genuinely thinks Lee Harvey Oswald is the assassin, that he is worried about a swirl of rumors and allegations. And he says, listen, we have to get our case out there and show the public that he was the assassin, which he was. So there are two ways that you can interpret that. One thing that they're all very worried about is the influence of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union weaponizing the conspiracy theories. So the very next day, actually, the Soviet news agency TASS

prints a report and it says, all the circumstances of President Kennedy's tragic death allow us to assume that this murder was planned and carried out by the ultra right-wing fascist and racist circles by those who cannot stomach any step aimed at the easing of international tensions and the improvement of Soviet-American relations. So in other words, the Russians are saying, this is America, there's a hotbed of fascism and racism in America, and this is what's claimed the life of the president. So the Soviets are interpreting it through the prism of their relationships with America. But the idea that it's the kind of right-wing racist people opposed to Kennedy's policies on civil rights, I mean, that is

something that if LBJ thinks it, you can kind of understand why the Soviets would think it as well. Yes. Although it obviously plays into existing Soviet propaganda. So the Soviets, especially in the developing world, have been saying, look at the scenes in Birmingham, Alabama. Look at all this stuff. The Americans are so racist. They stand for fascism. We, however, stand for racial equality and liberation. And so you can see why this is very sensitive for American kind of Cold War hawks because it's embarrassing for them.

They're also very conscious that in the 19th century, in 1865, there had been all kinds of conspiracy theories about the death of Abraham Lincoln. The Washington Post on the same day, energetic steps must be taken to prevent a repetition of the dreadful era of rumor and gossip that followed the assassination of President Lincoln. So in other words, the drive to set up a presidential commission, you know, it comes from the context. They're going to do it at some point. And what Johnson does is he sets up this thing called the Warren Commission. He gets the Chief Justice of the United States at the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, to run it. He is an ultra-liberal. He is a hate figure for many people on the right. And is that deliberate? I think the head of the Supreme Court is basically the most prestigious possible person you could have running this. Can I ask you, at this point, is there an assumption that if you get the great and the good to investigate it and to issue a report, that people will accept it? That is a really good

question. I mean, in the context of the kind of the degree of paranoia that emerges over the late 60s and 70s, it seems an incredibly naive idea that you just get a Supreme Court judge to sit there. But in the context of the early 60s? So I think what's so interesting about that question is that the early 60s probably are a transitional moment in the sense that there has always been distrust of authority in American history. And we'll get onto this when we talk about conspiracy theories. So obviously, the McCarthyism of the 1950s was the idea that in government, your J. Robert Oppenheimers, to go back to one of our previous podcasts, that people like that were communist agents.

So there are lots of people who would distrust such a thing. But I think in 1963, there is enough residual confidence in institutions for them to think, you know, a critical mass of Americans will be persuaded by this. Now, in 1973, 10 years later, maybe they would be saying, oh, God, everyone distrusts government. What's the point? I mean, they would have done it anyway, but of course. But in 1963, I think there's enough of them to think, well, the great and the good. There's enough confidence in the system. So they get a whole range of Democrats and Republicans. Actually, there are more Republicans than Democrats.

People from the House of Representatives like Gerald Ford. Yeah, of course, the great golfer. Ends up becoming president, of course. If you're a conspiracy theory-minded person, you would say, aha, no coincidence. And actually, if you're a conspiracy theory-minded person, distrustful of government, and you believe there is a deep state and all these things, and you would look at these names, you would look at the former president of the World Bank, John McCloy, the ultimate Washington insider, the former CIA chief, Alan Dulles, US Senator Richard Russell from Georgia, and so on and so forth, and you would say, oh, come on, you can't expect us to believe

that these people are not implicated in the conspiracy. But Russell is very reluctant, isn't he? He kind of has to be strong-armed. Nobody really wants to do it, to be completely honest with you. They just think, God, what a massive hassle. I'll get a lot of grief. I don't want to be staring at ballistics reports for the next few months. Yeah. And it's a painful and unsettling thing to have to investigate, I imagine. I mean, lots of them must have known Kennedy personally. It is. Richard Russell, for example, he's a segregationist democratic senator, but he's also one of these people who's been in the Senate since the 14th century.

And he is, you know, a very institutionalized kind of character. He doesn't want to do it. And Johnson actually says to him, well, I've told everyone you're doing it. It's too late. You have to do it to serve the nation. And he very grumpily says, OK, fine, I'll do it. Hoover is always a bit, you know, I mean, not ambivalent. He's actually extremely anxious about the Warren Commission because he is worried that it will embarrass the FBI, that it will come out that the FBI had been aware of Oswald and they hadn't really done enough about it. And he thinks, oh, we'll just look like idiots. And he doesn't really massively cooperate with the commission. So the commission doesn't depend on the FBI to do its work for it.

They do their own work independently. So conspiracy theorists sometimes say the FBI were actually controlling the Warren Commission. They weren't. Hoover is very jealous of his institutional position. And so there's no way he would cooperate very enthusiastically with a different kind of organization. And they do all this work for the next year. Their report is almost 900 pages long.

The supporting volumes of testimony, there's 26 volumes, Tom, 3,000 different documents, 550 witness statements. I mean, it is a monumental undertaking. So Don DeLillo, in his novel Libra about Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination, he makes the famous comment that this is the kind of thing that James Joyce, if he'd lived to be 100 and moved to Iowa City, would have written. The point being that it contains within it a complete and total portrait of America in the late 50s and early 60s. A bit like Ulysses' portrait of Dublin. I imagine as a resource for future historians, unbelievably

useful. Yeah, absolutely, Tom. Because if you think about those 500 witnesses and people they interview, they're everybody from policemen, doctors, drifters who happened to be in the streets of Dallas that day. You know, people who worked at the Texas Book Depository, the Oswald family, government people, the people in the motorcade. I mean, just this colossal range. And the conclusion of the Warren Commission is unequivocal. The Harvey Oswald acted alone. He fired the crucial shots from the sixth floor window of the Texas Book Depository. He went on to kill the Dallas policeman J.D. Tippett. Jack Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald. They say that Ruby and Oswald were not connected in any way. No evidence, they say, can be found that Os Oswald's motive will never truly be known because he's dead. However, we can reasonably surmise that he was a loser and a loner who had a very troubled life. He'd found some sort of meaning in Marxism, and it was this that motivated him to try to cement his place in history by murdering the president. End of story.

But they would say that, wouldn't they, Dominic? Well, that is the thing. Because of course, when this comes out, there are a lot of people who distrust it. And maybe before we get into the conspiracy theories themselves, there is something about America, isn't there, Tom, that means that I think it is peculiarly vulnerable, if vulnerable is not too loaded a word, to conspiracy theories. Because, for example, distrust of government is built into America's sense of itself. Yeah, well, the Constitution and the right to bear arms. The Declaration of Independence. Yeah.

We did a series of podcasts about the American Revolution. The American revolutionaries undoubtedly have perfectly reasonable, I'm not going to say legitimate because obviously I regard it as utter treachery. They have understandable and rational reasons for distrusting George III and being frightened about British intervention in the colonies. But Dominic, you say George III, I mean, it's not George III, is it? It's his ministers and the government. But the idea that George III is this kind of malign figure, a spider at the centre of a web coordinating things. I mean, that is a paranoid understanding of what's happening

that I guess does feed into American history. Yes. The idea that the people at the top are plotting against the people at the bottom. Because for a conspiracy to work, you need a Mr. Big. Yes. And George III is the Mr. Big of the Declaration of Independence, having previously not really featured in all the discourse around taxes and stuff when it was colonists versus parliament. The other thing, of course, is that we talked about in American Revolution podcasts,

there is a very rich, if that's the right word, strain of anti-Catholicism in the years leading up to the American Revolution. An idea that there is a sinister conspiracy to subvert American religion, subvert American morals, all of that sort of thing. The incorporation of Quebec, very disturbing to a lot of American colonists. And that anti-Catholicism, for example, and various conspiracy theories like it, so it might be Catholics, it might be the Freemasons, it might be Jews, it might be the East Coast elite, they run through American political history, as they do in various degrees, of course, in lots of other countries as well. But I think America is founded on a kind of conspiracy theory. Don't you think, Tom? Yeah. Just on the point that Catholics are

conspiring against good, honest American Protestants. I mean, that is a dog that doesn't bark in this issue, does it? Kennedy is the first Catholic president, the first Catholic mess to be celebrated in the White House follows his murder. But as far as I'm aware, the idea that it's the Vatican. I believe there are very niche conspiracy theorists who make this claim. I'm sure there are, but I mean, it wouldn't be the Vatican, would it?

It would be, I don't know, Protestants trying to kill him or something. It would be Lambeth Palace, Archbishop of Canterbury. Yes. That doesn't actually, that wouldn't be the Vatican, would it? It would be, I don't know, Protestants trying to kill him or something. It would be Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Yes. That doesn't actually, that doesn't kick in. No, it doesn't. But of course, when Kennedy went to Dallas, people were giving out pamphlets in the streets of Dallas that said John F. Kennedy is a traitor. And when Adlai Stevenson, his ambassador to the UN, had been to Dallas, he had been jostled and jeered and attacked by people who thought he was selling out to the communists. So there is a ready audience for this kind of thing. And a year later, in 1964, a very well-known historian called Richard Hofstadter published a book called The Paranoid Style in American Politics. And it seems so perfectly timed because Hofstadter was a historian of things like populism and anti-intellectualism and the sort of status

anxieties that drove people into having all these resentments and fears. And America in the early 60s, there's a lot of this stuff around. First of all, there's the legacy of McCarthyism. McCarthyism is only 10 years old. So people who thought they were communists at the top of government. Then there is the resistance of the South, federal intervention in the cause of civil rights. So they say an overreaching, overweening government. And then the third element is in places like California or the Southwest, you have the growth of this new kind of Barry Goldwater conservatism, libertarian conservatism, which says big government, big business, big institutions have basically eroded a lot of our freedom since the

1930s, since the New Deal. This is the sort of stuff that Ronald Reagan is reading in the Reader's Digest, Tom. To go back to another of our previous podcasts, we need to fight to get this freedom back. Can I just ask, when are the first conspiracy theories specifically relating to Kennedy published? Because there's no internet. Presumably people are talking about this in bars and whatever. When does it start to be published? About a month after the assassination. So the first iteration, Vincent Barclay has gone through all these conspiracy theories

in his book Reclaiming History. A guy called Mark Lane, he publishes it in a kind of libertarian weekly. He has an article called Defense Brief for Oswald. That's December 1963. Mark Lane then, a few years later, goes on to write a book, which is the key book in really igniting the conspiracy theory stuff called Rush to Judgment. Mark Lane is a communist.

He's a very keen advocate for left-wing causes. Now you can see why he would be disposed to say, Oswald, who said he was being framed, I'm just a patsy, and is being accused of being a communist and was a communist and a Marxist, he's been set up and I really need to put this right. So Mark Lane's stuff is absolutely crucial. There are other communists. So for example, there's a guy called Thomas Buchanan, who is living in Paris, who publishes a book called Who Killed Kennedy in London in May 1964. And who does he think killed Kennedy?

He says there are two gunmen. And I think almost all these communists or left-leaning authors tend to say, this is a right-wing conspiracy. Now, sometimes they will say within the US government, but often they will say right-wing nutters, oil men, the Ku Klux Klan, you know, cold warriors, all these people kind of working together. And what about Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Costner in JFK? Kevin Costner, yes. Kevin Costner enters the story in 1967. Now, at this point, the conspiracy theory industry is gathering momentum, and you can see why, because this is the era of Vietnam. America has now got tens and tens of thousands of young men fighting and dying in Vietnam. The whole temperature of American life has changed. Riots on campuses, riots in the cities,

the economy beginning to take a sort of turn for the worse. Johnson embattled this real, it's that classic moment in a documentary, Tom, when the music changes from kind of, please, please me. And then suddenly it's the Grateful Dead or something, you know, or Jimi Hendrix. The Doors. The Doors, exactly. We're at that moment in the story. Jim Garrison is the New Orleans district attorney. And in 1967, he says, I'm actually going to solve the case myself. And he charges this bloke called Clay Shaw, who's a local businessman and kind of philanthropist

who's very well known a society figure but i think not coincidentally is gay he charges him with being part of this huge conspiracy that involves anti-castro exiles local right-wing businessmen the central intelligence agency and a kind of secret gay underworld ring of people hanging around in gay brothels and things plotting to assassinate presidents right he says this guy clay shaw is the man and subsequently almost everybody who followed the trial said it was the most appalling travesty of justice and circus the clay shaw was totally innocent and he'd been dragged into court and forced to go through this incredibly demeaning thing. The garrison just got to be in his bonnet about him.

The jury took just an hour to acquit Clayshaw. And actually garrison then, you know, everybody wrote him off as a bit of a sort of attention seeker and an eccentric. And he would, there he would have remained had not his story come to the attention of Oliver Stone. Because actually, this is one thing that struck me about watching JFK back. JFK would not be made today because it is homophobic.

Actually, I was hesitating to say it's homophobic, but most people today would think it was homophobic because the idea is that rent boys, gay businessmen are all part of this conspiracy. I mean, it's pretty dodgy. Well, the idea that there are conspiracies, that high circles are conspiring to break the law and then to conceal law breaking, of course, then gets turbocharged by the Watergate conspiracy, right? I mean, this presumably is what really gives the whole industry a massive shot of adrenaline. I think two things. I think one, we mentioned Vietnam earlier. The sense the government has lied to you about Vietnam, that the government knew Vietnam wasn't going well, but it continued to throw more and more men into the kind of the more. The meat grinder. Yeah. So there's that. And then of course,

as you say, Watergate. I mean, actually actually if you want to think about the jfk assassination conspiracies and you look at them alongside watergate you would say the lesson of watergate is that all this stuff is an absolute laughable shambles yeah because when we did our watergate podcasts the only really way the way to do that especially if you're not american so you don't have a dog in the fight it's just this ludicrous farce stupid schemes to lure people onto houseboats things go wrong i. I mean, basically, that's the implication. Things go wrong. And so, with the conspiracy theories, would it be fair to say that the key focus for conspiracy theories is the grassy knoll? Yeah, it is.

So, this is the place where supposedly other shooters are either joining in with Lee Harvey Oswald or are shooting Kennedy to make Oswald look guilty, even though Oswald hasn't actually done it. I mean, that kind of riffs on those two themes, really. By the mid-70s, you have the Grassy Knoll established as the focus of all the conspiracy theories. By the way, the Grassy Knoll is seconds, seconds walk, not minutes walk, seconds walk from the Texas Book Depository. Because as we said before, it's such a small space. And we know that when people people are asked where do you think the shots came from where did you hear the shots some say the texas book depository some say the grassy knoll which is right next to it so actually it's not that different but also isn't the key to people

obsessing about the grassy knoll that there is video footage of it. So Abraham Zapruder's film and lots of photographs and people by a decade on from it have had time to pour over every little grainy pixel of every photo. And they come up with kind of very sinister, so a bit like Deep Throat, obviously immediately glamorizes the whole Watergate conspiracy. They have the umbrella man who actually turns out to be someone who was protesting. He's protesting at Joseph Kennedy's links to the Chamberlain government. We mentioned him. And then there's the Badge Man, the Black Dog Man, and there are three tramps, aren't there?

Yeah, the tramps who are supposedly very suspicious. I believe they are just tramps. But they look very smart. They're very well-dressed tramps. They're too well-dressed by all accounts. Yeah, because they're later rounded up, aren't they? And people have done enormous work on their shoes and stuff and said, oh, their shoes are far too unscuffed for homeless people's shoes. But with the Zapruder film, it has the moment where Kennedy's brains literally get shot out.

And it does look as though it's not coming from the rear of the head, which you would expect if it's coming from the book depository. Yeah. And also Kennedy's reaction. People said that the way he lifted up his elbows and he looked very peculiar. They look at John Connelly's reaction and they say, I mean, the trouble is you can analyse this frame by frame and you see in it what you want to see, Tom.

But just to say, I do think that just looking at the Zapruder film film it does look as though the shot is coming from in front of kennedy rather than from the rear i'll just put that out there well tom is now a grassy knoll truther yeah you're a grassy knoll truther and i'm glad to hear it because i don't think we should be singing from the same hymn sheet just before we go to the break which theo has been begging us to do the final thing in the 70s that gives a massive boost to the um conspiracy stuff is the house select committee on assassination so this is a committee of the house of representatives that is convened in late 1976 the 70s post-watergate is awash with conspiracy theories and self-flagellation about abuses of power there's already been a thing called the church committee into the cia into sort of cia

abuses and this committee meets in the late 70s, and it reports in 1979, so it's members of the House of Representatives. It's a very confusing and mixed picture. So usually when you read accounts of this, they say that there was actually a conspiracy after all. Their evidence for that is they rely on a kind of dictabelt from a Dallas motorcycle police officer. Acoustic evidence of the shots on the Dictabelt seems to suggest multiple shots, more shots, possibly fired from different directions. And so on the recommendation of their experts,

they said, well, maybe there were more shots, maybe there were more shooters. However, very confusingly, they said that all the possible groups that could have been part of the conspiracy, so the CIA, the kgb the mafia whatever were not complicit in it they don't think and they also say by the way the warren commission did a brilliant job we really approve of the warren commission's report we just have this

extra evidence now that extra dictabelt evidence has subsequently been debunked by other acoustic experts i mean this is as with all the forensic evidence you know you ask a different expert five years later for a channel five documentary and they give you a different answer, Tom. Yeah, well, it's very like analysts looking at photographs of this monster taken in the 1930s, then 2010, suddenly announcing they're all fake. But yeah, this is on the record that perhaps there is a conspiracy. And so that then begs the question of, well, if there is a conspiracy, who is behind it? And perhaps we should take a break now. And when we come back, Dominic, we will go through the list of potential conspirators. Brilliant.

And I will get your opinion on each of the various range of suspects. So we will see you very soon. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com hello welcome back to the rest is history. We have finally reached the stage where Dominic is going to take us through all the potential conspirators. Even in the first half, we have listed an awful lot of various organisations who could be involved. There's a wonderful

comment by Bugliosi, who we've been quoting quite a lot, who says, with at least 82 gunmen shooting at Kennedy in Dealey Plaza that day, it's remarkable that his body was sufficiently intact to make it to the autopsy table. So could we kick off with your choice of what the least likely conspiracy theory is? Because I should tell you, I have actually asked ChatGBT to nominate its selection of the least plausible conspiracy theory. So I'll be interested to see whether yours matches up with the mighty depths of AI. No pressure then. sweep of the conspiracy theories. Vincent Berglioci lists 44 different organizations, Tom, that have been accused, including the Nazis, the Teamsters, the French OAS, so the people that are trying to assassinate de Gaulle,

and so on and so forth. 214 different individuals, usual suspects such as Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, but there are also more exciting figures like my fellow old Malvernian, James Jesus Angleton. I'm glad to mention him again. Abraham Zapruder. Yes, the guy who shoots the film. Conceivably, John Connolly, the governor of Texas injured in the...

Who gets shot himself. He was offering himself up, I think, Tom. So what, the idea there is that he shoots himself through his chest and the bullet goes back and blows off Kennedy's head. Well, the list of gunmen, I love this, the list of gunmen. So not Lee Harvey Oswald, but Jack Ruby, Lyndon Johnson, firing from two cars well he is a texan and they couldn't fire guns in texas you would think that would be noticed

and the two most interesting ones are jd tippett the policeman who later died and the driver of kennedy's car bill greer shot kennedy again i think that would have been noticed you would see that in the zapruder footage so are these these the most implausible, in your opinion? No. So the two most implausible, there's a guy called George Thompson who says that 22 shots were fired in Dealey Plaza that day and five people were killed. Five people, but none of them was John F. Kennedy.

Okay. So he says, the man you see in the footage who seems to be John F. Kennedy, he is Officer Tippett. Wow. Okay, that's brilliant. He was impersonating Kennedy. So where's Kennedy? Kennedy was later seen, he says, in New York a year later at a private birthday party for the writer Truman Capote.

Okay. And then went on to live a life maybe in the Hamptons or something in seclusion. With Elvis. Yeah, presumably. And Marilyn. So there's another, maybe in the Hamptons or something in seclusion. With Elvis. Yeah, presumably. And Marilyn. So there's another, that's not the most outlandish theory. The most outlandish theory is from a guy called Milton William Cooper. I will read you the summary.

America and the world are controlled by the American Council on Foreign Relations, controlled by Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller and so on, and the International Trilateral Commission. These people are in league with aliens who invaded the United States, established a lunar base. One of the people who did the deal was George Bush senior, who obviously was involved in the oil business, but he was also actually trafficking in drugs with the CIA. Kennedy found out about Bush, the CIA and the drugs. And he said, if you do not clean up the drug problem,

which is undermining the morals of our youth, I will tell the world about your deal with the aliens and the Moonbase. The Moonbase, by the way, was built in collaboration with the Soviet Union. And so Bush and his colleagues, Kissinger and so on, they were not going to give in to Kennedy's blackmail. So they arranged for the driver of his car, Bill Greer, to shoot him and Dallas and framed Oswald for the murder. That's the patsy. Yeah. Okay.

So chat GPT, it nominates aliens, that it's actually the aliens who conspire to kill Kennedy. Right. And that's because they don't want Kennedy to develop the moon project and discover the alien moon base on the moon. Right. And there is one intriguing piece of circumstantial evidence that I think backs this up. Go on. Which is that Captain Fritz, the gravel voice interrogator of Lee Harvey Oswald, was actually brought up very near Roswell, where the Flying Saucer, of course, crashed in 1947.

Oh, that's very good. I mean, it kind of ties. Well, it's no more implausible than some of the others, Tom, I think it's fair to say. So I think probably we can park those. But Dominic, if I now, a bit like a baseball pitcher, hurl some of the conspiracies at you and you see whether you can hit them for a homer. Sure. So you've talked about this idea that the Soviet Union was behind it. Yeah.

This is quite popular right from the beginning. Plausible? No, and also not very popular. So people who are interested in conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination don't like the Soviet theory because it's unsatisfying. Too geopolitical. It's too geopolitical and it doesn't satisfy your need to have a secret cabal who are controlling American politics. Right, but aside from that, is it plausible? Yes, it is plausible. I mean, countries do assassinate people, but it didn't happen. We know that the reaction in the Soviet Union, they were at pains not to be seen to take

advantage of it. But they could put up a show of public grief while secretly rubbing their hands. But we know from KGB internal files that were released in the 1990s, that the KGB themselves speculated about fascist and racist organizations in the American South. Okay, so that's what they genuinely thought. The relationship between Kennedy and Khrushchev actually isn't that bad. At the end of 1963, they're through the Cuban Missile Crisis. They have concluded the test ban treaty on nuclear tests. Kennedy's Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, an anti-communist, he told the Warren Commission,

said, I cannot see what conceivable interest the Soviet Union would have in killing President Kennedy. Because the Soviet Union leadership from Stalin onwards, but particularly after Stalin, what they really want is stability. They fear instability in the global system. They fear an attack by the Americans. Killing the American president would be a bonkers gamble. It wouldn't gain them anything because it would just mean that somebody else of the same political persuasion followed him. If they were caught, they'd be in real trouble. There could be a nuclear war. Why would they do it? What about Castro, who is Kennedy's kind of a great opponent in the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Again, superficially plausible. Again, unsatisfying for genuine conspiracy theorists, because if it's just a baddie, an offshore baddie, again, that doesn't satisfy your desire to have the key that explains all history and all politics. Oswald clearly was very interested in Cuba. He's obsessed with Cuba. But US investigations, I mean, they have a vested interest in seeing if it is Cuba, of course. So they properly investigate this, do they? They properly investigate it. There's no evidence whatsoever. We know from people who were with Castro on the day, so a French journalist called Jean

Daniel, that Castro was shocked and worried on the day of Kennedy's assassination. He was worried that he would be framed for it. National Security Agency intercepts of Cuban communications show that the Cuban leadership were actually talking to each other and saying, oh gosh, the next president will be even worse than Kennedy was. Right, because presumably they don't know much about LBJ. No, they don't at all. And Castro and his men are going around asking people, what's LBJ like? You know, will he be hard on us? And Castro was actually interviewed, Tom. This is an amazing fact. Castro was interviewed by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s. They went to Cuba to interview him about it.

I didn't know that. That's amazing. And he said, why would we have done that? He said it would be insane. If we were caught, they would attack us and they would kill me and they would destroy our revolution. Why would we do it? So here's a twist. What if it's the Cuban exiles who are thinking exactly that? Very, very popular now. There is a woman called Sylvia Odio, who was a Cuban exile, and she claimed that in September 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald was one of three men who had come to her apartment to raise money for Cuban exiles,

and that Oswald had said, oh, exiles don't have any guts because we should have killed Kennedy after the failure of the Bay of Pigs. One slightly weird thing about this is, of course, why would Oswald be hanging around with Cuban exiles? He hates the Cuban exiles because he loves Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. Now, it is true that Kennedy had not given the Bay of Pigs invasion air support and that some exiles blamed him for this. On the other hand, there are three important counterpoints to this. Number one is that after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy went out of his way to give more aid to Cuban exile groups and to sort of butter them up a bit to show that he was still on their side. Number two is that the leaders of those exile groups, contrary to what people think, are not kind of hardened criminals

and plotters. They are the people who had been kicked out by Castro, who had fled Castro because of a Marxist revolution. They are the professional classes of Cuba. They are professors, intellectuals, businessmen. They are not people who are accustomed to ordering murders and arranging murders. And number three is that actually, Kennedy, by the end of his life, actually gets on better with the Cuban exiles than probably any point before. There's an example at the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He and Jackie had gone to Miami and done a whole big thing where they'd welcomed returning prisoners from the Bay of Pigs. There had been tens of thousands of people there who had been chanting liberty, liberty. And Kennedy had said one day, they'd given him a flag and he had said one day this flag will be returned to a free Havana and everybody had cheered and been in tears. So the idea that he is just hated is not quite right. And the other thing, of course, there's no single piece of evidence. There's no piece of evidence that proves that a Cuban XL

did it. Right. Those are presumably the leading external agents. Yeah. What about internal agents? So probably the most popular theory is that it's the CIA, right? Yes. Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs, had said he wanted to smash the CIA up and destroy it. To splinter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.

But did he say that? It is commonly thought that he did say it. You'll see that quoted many times, but people have tried to find the source of the quotation and they've never really been able to the winds. But did he say that? It is commonly thought that he did say it. You'll see that quoted many times, but people have tried to find the source of the quotation, and they've never really been able to find it. But he doesn't need to have said it. All it needs is for the CIA to think he said it. But his relationship with the CIA is not as bad as it's thought. He didn't smash it up. He gets a new guy in to run it called John McCone, who he has lunch with, I think, once a week or something. He gets on pretty well with

McCone. Some of the CIA people are bitter about the Bay of Pigs. Some of them aren't. The CIA do have a history of being complicit in the assassinations of foreign leaders, but they have no history of intervention on American soil. Are they employing Oswald? Some people say Oswald was actually working for the CIA. Why, if Oswald is a loser, a loner, and a Marxist, would the CIA employ such a man? Unless he's just pretending to be a loser. It's a hell of a deep cover that goes back to his childhood. Well, it might be. I mean, fine, if you believe that.

They're fiendishly clever, aren't they, in the CIA? Well, if you believe that. But everything we know of the CIA suggests that the CIA has many clever people working for it, but they don't have supernatural powers to suborn people from the age of five or six or something. The other issue with the CIA is why Kennedy? Because one of the reasons that we spent so much time talking about Kennedy's early life, his service in the Second World War, his time in politics and all of that, to talk about the murder victim, I think was to show, I think personally, without any shred of doubt, that there was nothing radical about Kennedy that would be a threat to the CIA's interests. He's keen on the Cold War. He doesn't like communism. He's a moderate domestically. Why would the CIA want to target him specifically? What threat does he represent to them?

Maybe he'd reveal the existence of aliens in roswell i don't know that's well that this is the thing one would have to reach for implausible um explanations i would say okay well another very popular one i think it's what powers james elroy's novel american tabloid yes guy who lurks behind it is jay gahoover and the fbi and am i not right in thinking that lee harveywald's mother, two years before, had said, she'd complained to newspapers in New York, that her son was working for the FBI, and that the FBI weren't working to get him out of Russia when he was in the Soviet Union? Yeah. Bonkers. Why would the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, tasked with solving federal crimes within the United States, why would they send a

man to Russia? It's not in their remit. They have no history of sending people undercover to foreign capitals. He's not an FBI informant. They have him under suspicion because he's been to Russia and all of that stuff. The FBI have no history, again, of assassinating American political figures. The FBI would not have worked with the CIA because they have a deep institutional rivalry with the CIA. J. Edgar Hoover is an extremely, when I say conservative, I don't just mean politically conservative. He is a cautious man who hoards information and power. But isn't it said that he hates John F. Kennedy is very unclear. He regularly meets John F. Kennedy. They work together and have done for almost three years. He has a huge file on John F. Kennedy with all of his affairs, going right back to Inga Arvad in the Second World War. Marilyn and everything.

Yeah. Is it plausible that if, for example, John F. Kennedy was going to move him aside at his mandatory retirement age in 1965 when Hoover turned 70. Is it plausible that Hoover would arrange for Lee Harvey Osspirited kind of people, well-educated, who are working for the FBI and the CIA, would do their boss's bidding and that none of them would ever talk to the press about it or that it wouldn't fall apart like Watergate did? To me, it seems utterly implausible. Okay, so on the principle of Cui Bono, who benefits from the assassination, one obvious person who benefits because he becomes president as a result of it is Lyndon Johnson. So what about LBJ? You mentioned that the theory that he shot JFK in the motorcade. Presumably that's an insane idea, but is there any remotest shred of

evidence that LBJ was involved? I mean, I have to say that he was very clearly, it seems to me, upset and distraught and shocked. But maybe he's a brilliant actor. I don't know. So people say, oh, my goodness, it happened in Texas. That's no coincidence. In Johnson's home state, which he kind of controls, Johnson doesn't control Texas. But also, lunacy to imagine that Johnson, who spends all this time in Washington, would think, oh, I'll have him murdered in broad daylight in my home state,

thus bringing suspicion on myself rather than maybe have him poisoned when we're having dinner in Washington. Okay. Why would Johnson do it? Why would he set up the Warren Commission to investigate it with many of his own political opponents? Some people have said, well, it's because he wanted to go into Vietnam and Kennedy didn't. The reality is much more complicated.

And, of course, Johnson is, in lots of ways, the results of his policies are more liberal than the results of I mean, Johnson is the great society in the war on poverty. All right. But he does go in deeper into Vietnam and the idea that it's the military-industrial complex. That's what Mr. X is alleging in the passage from JFK that we began this episode with. And it's the famous quotation from Eisenhower. Oliver Stone opens the film with that. He does. He does. Why Kennedy? Why is Kennedy a threat to the military-industrial complex in a way no other president is? Because he wants to take America out of Vietnam War. Well, first of all, historians disagree about whether Kennedy would have stayed in Vietnam

or come out, because the evidence, as we talked about before, is so unclear because he's still making his mind up, actually. Kennedy has stood up to the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He is supporting anti-communist forces abroad. He's not soft on communism. And the thing is, Tom, let's imagine that for some reason, the CIA, the FBI, military industrial complex, whoever it is, think that Kennedy is a sufficient threat to them. He's such a radical. I mean, they completely misread him. And they think he is so dangerous that he must be assassinated. Why do they not do that to Lyndon Johnson, who passes sweeping civil rights reforms, who passes the Great Society domestic reforms, who tilts American politics farther to

the left. Because Dominic LBJ is behind it all, obviously. Right. In that case, fine. Why do they then not assassinate Richard Nixon? Nixon, who goes to Beijing, who goes to Moscow, who signs arms control agreements for the Soviet Union, and who does end the Vietnam War, why wouldn't you kill Nixon? And also, why wouldn't you kill Donald Trump? Trump, who has an incredibly hostile relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency and with most American institutions. Trump, who effectively withdraws from Afghanistan. Trump, who criticizes NATO. Why would these groups not move against him if they were prepared to move against Kennedy? The idea makes no sense, of course, because we know that American institutions generally do not kill politicians.

All right. So setting American institutions to one side,, all these kind of people. What about them? right wing businessmen have just had a bloody big tax cut on f kennedy so it's simply not in their interest to do it the clan are ultimately a very crude and unsophisticated organization first of all why would they be working with lee harvey oswald why would he be involved in any any way okay because he's a commie because he's a communist and secondly law enforcement agencies would have immediately i mean who are cracking down onlan, they would have immediately unearthed this. It's implausible that the Klan, such a shambolic, in many ways incompetent organisation, would have been able to get away with this incredibly sophisticated conspiracy. And the FBI and the Dallas Police Department and the Warren Commission and the House of

Representatives simply not notice. I mean, it beggars belief that they would do this. Okay, so one last extra government american institution is the mafia okay so the mafia is a very popular i mean almost every conspiracy theory involves the mafia doesn't it so just to give you a bit of context on the mafia because we're in the last few moments of the podcast now but i think it's important to do this the mafia in america originated in the late 19th century become supercharged in the 1920s and 1930s by prohibition. So that's the point at which it's becoming

enshrined culturally in all these films and things. And then the Mafia is in the headlines a lot in the 1950s because congressional committees are leading a big crackdown on racketeering, on corruption in the trade unions, all these kinds of things. And actually Robert Kennedy was a key figure in all this, which is

one of the things that has got people excited. And then, of course, in the 70s, the great age of conspiracy theories, you have the Godfather films. So the Mafia are in people's minds. Now, it's possible, well, it's not just possible, it is well known that the Mafia loathed Robert Kennedy because as Attorney General, he was orchestrating a crackdown on organized crime. The question you have to ask yourself is, if they loathed Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, he was orchestrating a crackdown on organised crime. The question you have to ask yourself is, if they loathed Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, would their way of getting rid of him, or trying to blunt his investigation, be to murder his brother? To whack him, I believe is the technical term. To whack his brother, but to leave Robert Kennedy himself in post. Robert Kennedy might well have

continued to be Attorney General for years. He, of course, might have become president, as he tried to do, campaigned to do, in 1968. Now, we know, again, FBI wiretaps, we know that mobsters, when they discussed the murder, were quite amused and quite gleeful that President Kennedy had died. But at no point do any of them ever say to each other yeah and we did it yeah lucky luciano's guy did it or something like this they actually at one point a big mafia chief called sam jinkana is talking one of his henchmen is talking to him and they're talking about who killed kennedy and they say it was a marxist guy a mark he was a he was a marxist and one of them jokes yeah he wasn't just a marxist he was a marxman who knew to shoot. Then actually, we also know from an FBI wiretap that at a meeting in Philadelphia of mobsters

in 1962, they had joked about, wouldn't it be brilliant if somebody got rid of both of the Kennedys? And the Philadelphia mafia boss, Angelo Bruno, had actually said to everybody, he told them a story. I'm going to tell you an old Italian story. And he'd said, you know, there's a king and everyone thinks he's a terrible king, but actually, you know what? He's a good king because his son who comes afterwards is even worse. And that's what would happen to us if the Kennedys ever disappeared. Vincent Bugliosi makes the point. He says, in the mafia's history in America, it is not the Sicilian mafia. So the Sicilian mafia targets judges, local politicians, and so on, I guess, in its way.

The American mafia has always gone out of its way to avoid doing that because it doesn't want attention of the federal government. So even local officials, by and large, have been able to campaign against the mafia and to call for crackdowns on crime without then being shot by a mafia guise. And he says, are we really to believe that the mafia, which considered it too risky to kill even a police officer, would find the risk acceptable if the victim were the president of the United States?

So first of all, that's that issue. The mafia has this studied, deliberate policy of not drawing attention to itself by targeting public officials? And number two, why would the mafia, which is, after all, a professional criminal organization, why would they have a hit in a public place in such a risky way? I mean, you could easily miss. And why would they involve a man like lee harvey oswald who in every respect runs completely contrary to what you would expect of a mafia hitman he's not accomplished he's not reliable he's not he doesn't even have a getaway car is it plausible actually tom that any organization with a degree of competence, the CIA, the Mafia, the Secret Service, the KGB,

whoever, would have Oswald firing from the sixth floor and then allow him to walk out of the building, to get on a bus, to get off the bus, to get a taxi, to go into a cinema, to shoot a policeman. That would seem peculiar operating procedures, wouldn't it? Just on the Mafia, though, there is the figure of Jack Ruby. And I know that you said that he wasn't involved in organized crime but he's definitely organized crime adjacent i mean he's running street clubs he must be yes um and i know also that he denies that he was part of any conspiracy but then he would have done wouldn't he of all these organizations jack ruby seems to be closest

to the mafia i suppose so yes i mean does that in any way possibly lend credibility to the theory? So you need to silence Lee Harvey Oswald. Why would you employ a nightclub owner from Dallas who wanders up a ramp in the one moment when the police are distracted, who seconds earlier has been in a queue at the Western Union sending money to a stripper. Maybe there's someone in the police involved. I mean, you know, this is what happens. And the Western Union to make sure that Ruby is... I accept that the moment you start tugging on a thread of, you know, the whole thing

comes to pieces. And then, Tom, and then, right, you have to silence Oswald. Ruby, however, does not die. Ruby goes to prison. Well, he does in the long run. He dies in prison. Yeah, but everybody dies, Tom. I mean, this is the thing about the conspiracy theorists. They will point to witnesses

and they'll say, he died in 1982, he died in 1984, died in a car crash in 1967. Yeah, of course they all died. Everybody dies. All right, Mr. Cynic. All right, all right. So basically, none of those conspiracy theories you feel

measures up, which then leaves the question, well, who did kill Kennedy? Who and why? And I think that we should finish this episode. And in our final episode of this immense epic sweep through the JFK assassination, we will look at your analysis of who was responsible for JFK's assassination and find out whether you agree with the Warren Commission. But if people simply cannot wait to find out the ultimate Dominic Sandbrook-approved solution to who killed JFK, you can, of course, join our chat community, as we love to call it. you can do that at therestishistory.com and we will welcome you with open arms however if you don't want to do that if you want to wallow in conspiracy theories and not have them all put to the sword then you'll have to wait till thursday but either way we will see you very soon. Thanks very much for listening. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.