The Rest Is History - 398. JFK: The Mystery is Solved (Part 7)

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

In this landmark edition of The Rest is History, Dominic and Tom reveal the astonishing solution to the mystery that has fascinated so many people for the last sixty years. In thrillingly definitive detail, they explain just who killed President Kennedy and why he did it.  Step by step, they trace his journey to the killing ground, and delve into the psychology of a murderer. They unmask his fellow conspirators, and explain just how his crime reflects the chilling political secrets of American life in the 1950s and 1960s. And they discuss how the conspiracy echoes through the pages of American history, and continues to influence American politics to this day. Join Dominic and Tom for this unforgettable journey into the dark heart of American history - an episode that will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about the Kennedy assassination. 📱Protect your tech valuables with our exclusive 20% off discount at http://uk.mous.co/RestHistory 🎒 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.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. He kept the Marxist books in his room, took them to the library for renewal, carried them back home. The books themselves were secret, forbidden and hard to read. They altered the room, charged it with meaning. The drabness of his surroundings, his own shabby clothes, were explained and transformed by these books. He saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history. He and his mother locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished

their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow." So that, Dominic, is Don DeLillo, the great American novelist, writing about Lee Harvey Oswald in his tremendous novel Libra, which he published in 1988. And it's actually a while since I read it. But as I recall, the conspiracy theory in that it's a kind of an alliance of the CIA and Cuban exiles. That's right. They've created a plot because it's a book not just about the Kennedy assassination, but it's about plotting and narrative, isn't it? It is. And it's kind of about the unknowability, isn't it? Because essentially,

Don DeLillo, who's a brilliantly sophisticated novelist and very aware of the porous borders between fiction and nonfiction, is essentially casting the Warren Commission as another work of fiction. Yeah. So the assassination almost begins as a work of fiction that then comes true, doesn't it? The CIA create their conspiracy, they implot it, and then they cast Oswald. It becomes true, and then the Warren Commission itself is a kind of narrative. So a little bit like Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco's novel, where a conspiracy theory is constructed and then the conspirators find it's actually true. Exactly. And you can see why novelists have always been fascinated. James Elroy,

you mentioned in the last episode, Norman Mailer, have been fascinated by the Kennedys and the Kennedy assassination. Because if you're interested in narrative, in plotting, as you say, in the relationship between fact and fiction, this is a gift to you as a writer, isn't it? Absolutely. But Don DeLillo places Lee Harvey Oswald, despite all the wrapping of conspiracy and so on, he places Lee Harvey Oswald at the center of the story, rather than the way that actually the Warren Commission does. I mean, the Warren Commission says Lee Harvey Oswald did it, and he acted alone, and there was no conspiracy, and Lee Harvey Oswald did not know Jack Ruby, and Jack Ruby likewise was not part of a conspiracy. And we are now, we've done six

episodes. I want to know what you think. And I'm guessing from pretty much everything that you said beforehand, that you would agree with the Warren Commission, which is great news for the Warren Commission to say. It validates them. What a wonderful endorsement for them. So I think the keys to this crime are in the personality of the victim and of the killer. So we spent a lot of time talking about John F. Kennedy because I think understanding his personalities was so important to understanding why it's, to me, inherently implausible that powerful government agencies would wish to murder him in broad daylight. Because I think understanding the essential kind of small C conservatism of Kennedy, his involvement in the Second World War,

his devotion to America, his devotion to America's role in the world, when you understand all that, and you understand what kind of president he was, I think that allows you to eliminate some of these suspects, because it's obvious they would not have any meaningful motive. But now we come to the man who was seen walking away from the Texas Book Depository and was later involved in shooting the police from J.D. Tippett. And I think if we understand Lee Harvey Oswald, Tom, we will understand this crime and we will have the answer to the mystery. So you think that Captain Fritz, the man who interrogated him, and who in a sense, I suppose, has a better understanding of what might have motivated him, and who says that he definitely did it. You agree with him that it is Lee Harvey Oswald? I do, Tom. I do

think Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy. And I think when we go into his life and we discuss his movements, it will become clear why he is such a plausible suspect. And then when we list some of the evidence, you will see that no other explanation carries so much evidentiary weight. But let's start with Oswald himself. Oswald was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, September 1939, the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. And he is born to Robert Oswald and Margaret Clavery. It's his mother's second marriage. His father, Robert, died of a heart attack two months before he was born. He is born to a single mother. His mother is a very,

very rackety person. She ends up moving to Dallas and he goes to school in Fort Worth initially. He is a shy, withdrawn, difficult boy, troubled boy. And this is completely understandable because his mother has married for a third time a guy called Erwin Ekdal, and she has a very tempestuous relationship with this guy Ekdal. She is a very troubled woman herself, Marguerite. And Lee, you know, like so many children, so many towns across the world,

he is affected by that. And the reports of him that we have at school when he's a little boy are that he is a sullen little boy. He's aggressive. He likes reading. I mean, the reading is... We started with books, Tom. And I think the books are important. I think they're really important, actually. People tend to underestimate the importance of his Marxism and his politics. So his mother, you said that she's a difficult woman, but one of the keys to her character, it seems, is that she feels that her life has not measured up to her expectation of what it should have been. Do you think that Lee Harvey Oswald has that same sense, a sense of his own talents and the fact that his circumstances are not adequate to those talents? Undoubtedly. Undoubtedly, Tom. So already we have a couple of things that a lot of assassins have in common. So your John Hinckley's, your Arthur Bremer's, the people who have tried to shoot public figures in American history. It is very common that they will

be boys who have had troubled childhoods, who have had very difficult relationships with their parents, who have been lonely, withdrawn, sullen, but who also have been dreamers. In the same way that somebody like Adolf Hitler was a dreamer. I mean, if you want to take a much more benevolent, we've mentioned this comparison many times between Hitler and Churchill. Churchill was also, of course, a dreamer. Boys tend to be dreamers. I mean, Churchill's life did measure up to his dreams.

Hitler made his dreams a reality. Assassins are often boys who continue to have these dreams, but they are constantly disappointed. Fate and life is against them. The odds are against them from the start, and they react to that by being bitter and resentful. And that's definitely the case with Lee. And so in a sense, they become conspiracy theorists because they come to feel that life, some malevolent force, whether it's supernatural or not, is acting against them.

Undoubtedly, Tom. Undoubtedly. Lee moves to New York when he's 12 with his mother. She's moving around, so it's a very unstable life they lead. Don DeLillo's book that you quoted from at the beginning, that begins with him in New York riding the subway trains, overwhelmed by the light and the darkness and the kind of sensory overload of being in New York in the 1950s. Lee goes to school in the Bronx. He plays truant from school. He is at this point identified as a very difficult

and troubled boy. He's sent to a reformatory for psychiatric assessment. And we have a report on him from a caseworker at Columbia University. She says he's detached, he's withdrawn. She quite likes him. She says there's a rather pleasant, appealing quality about this emotionally starved, affectionless youngster, which grows as one speaks to him and it seems clear that he's detached himself from the world around him because no one in it ever met any of his needs for love you know his mother is totally self-absorbed crazy affairs and relationships very difficult and she doesn't take any interest in lee do we also have the report of the psychiatrist from the reformatory, Dr. Hartogs, a tense and withdrawn and evasive boy.

He likes to give the impression he didn't care about others. Difficult to penetrate the emotional wall behind which this boy hides, his feelings of awkwardness and insecurity. He diagnoses him as having personality pattern disturbance with schizoid features and passive-aggressive tendencies.

The reason I say all this is do you remember captain fritz's interrogation of oswald and the reaction of all the dallas pd who said they found oswald oddly sometimes detached robotic like he wasn't really there this is precisely the description that is given by these people when um lee harvey oswald is in his mid-teens in New York. I mean, it's uncanny how similar they are. He still has problems at school in 1953. There's talk of him being put into a home away from his mother. So she's that bad a parent?

That bad a parent, exactly. Let's not underestimate how bad. This isn't just that he's from a poor family or a single parent family or one in which his mother has a complicated love life. She's a sufficiently bad parent. Well, because the weird thing that is often said about her when her son is in police custody, that she seems almost to be enjoying it. At last, she's a center of attention. At last, she's not a nobody. Yes, exactly.

And you can see how if his mother thinks like that, that Lee himself, the fear of being a nobody, the sense that we all have come across people like this or heard of people like this, people who feel life has not treated them properly. And it is a conspiracy. The high-ups, the rich, teachers, social workers, they're all in it. He becomes a socialist very early on and then in due course, a Marxist. Yes. I mean, I don't want to engage in cold psychology, but I'm going to engage in cod psychology.

We love it. As living in New York, the great engine room of capitalism, this great giddy, gilded, golden city full of wealth and power, do you think the sense of being alienated from that is what is feeding into his, what ultimately comes to seem a hatred for capitalism, but more specifically for America itself. Undoubtedly. He definitely becomes a socialist or identifies himself as a socialist by 16, 17. He writes to the Socialist Party of America. So we have a letter in which he says he's been studying socialist principles for well over 15 months. Lee is not an immensely bright boy. I mean, he is a reader and he's interested in ideas, but he's not Ludwig Wittgenstein. He's an autodidact and he stumbles across

socialism and Marxism and it gives him the answers. And a dignity as well, right? Because if he's the alienated proletariat, then he's destined to inherit the world. Undoubtedly. I mean, if it hadn't been Marxism, it might well have been something else, a religion of some kind and a militant version of some religion or some other political creed. If he'd been in Germany in the 1920s, it could have been communism, could have been Nazism, that kind of thing. I think Marxism, the interesting thing about Marxism is that Marxism, like so many militant creeds, you could argue is itself a conspiracy

theory, right? That there are the good guys and the bad guys. There are, yeah. That this will explain the workings. And also that you have a duty to, Marx never puts it like this, but it's very evident in his writings, you have a moral duty to overthrow the evil. I mean, that's why I think that reading that you began with, the Dalila reading, is so suggestive. The books that he reads gives him the sense that he is part of something meaningful, a sweeping history. He has his part to play. He has his dignity. Right, because by dissolving his agency as an individual, it gives becomes a US Marine. Why a US Marine if you're a Marxist? Well, you can kind of see why, can't you? It gives him a sense of belonging.

It doesn't quite fit with his Marxism, but he will see the world. He goes to Mississippi. He's in California. He's in Japan. He's in the Philippines. And Dominic, in the Marines, is he trained to shoot? Well, you're asking because you know the answer to that. Of course he is.

Of course he is. Of course he is. Now, it is so often said that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have shot John F. Kennedy because he was not a good shot. And this is just wrong. He was a good shot. In December 1956, he did a test and he scored 212.

I don't actually know what that's out of or what it means, but apparently this is a good enough score to qualify you as a sharpshooter. Three years later, he does, well, two and a half years later, May 1959, he does another test. He scores worse.

He scores 191, and that means he's no longer rated sharpshooter. He's rated as marksman. But by that point, actually, he's already lost interest in the Marines, and he's getting ready to leave. So some people say, is he really trying anymore? Either way, he's already lost interest in the marines and he's getting ready to leave so some people say is he that is he really trying anymore either way he's a better shooter than tom dick and harry on

the street yeah the three hobos right three hobos exactly man he's a better shooter than jack ruby i mean jack ruby's shot oswald from a distance of about two inches um oswald you know he can do this. At this point, he's fixated weirdly on Russia. So we know that he used to read a Russian dictionary, that he would study Russian. And it's sometimes said, well, the CIA put him up to this. I mean, he was an unusual figure because they didn't normally get Marines to read Russian. So he must have been singled out as an agent. Actually, we know that his fellow marines thought it was amusing. Red Lee. Yeah. They would say Red Lee. It made him a character. It's a bit like if you were a royal marine today, well, and you were reading Russian. The other marines, they wouldn't say, my God,

the man must be a traitor and an agent. They would probably think it was a funny quirk, like a joke. Something distinctive. Something distinctive, a bit wacky. And that's how they think of Lee Harvey Oswald. He goes around saying, you know, I'm a communist, I'm a Marxist. He's insubordinate sometimes to his superiors. He will, you know, we've talked so many times in the rest of his history about Ronald Reagan and his love of the Reader's Digest.

Lee Harvey Oswald is reading similar periodicals, but from more sort of extreme periodicals, from a left-wing perspective. He'll read some nonsense about China, and then he'll be asking his superiors about it. They don't know anything about it. Difficult questions about tractor production in Changi or whatever. Exactly. And then he'll sort of smirk to himself that he knows more than they do. That must have made him popular with his commanding officers. Exactly. He's very unpopular because he doesn't shine his shoes.

He gets up late. He wears his hat too low so that he doesn't have to look his officers in the eye. And he's generally... It's all very teenage behaviour. He's very teen. Well, I mean, how old is he at this point? 20. He's a very young man who is behaving as young men sometimes do.

That summer, 1959, he asks if he can leave the Marines because he says his mother is ill, she isn't, and he's discharged. And he has dreamed up this scheme of going to the Soviet Union. Just a mad thing to do, but a sign of what an eccentric, troubled... Because this is the teeth of the Cold War. I mean, we've got the Berlin Walls being built and the Cuban Missile Crisis is hoving into view and he's off to the Soviet Union.

But this is his chance to become a somebody, isn't it, Tom? To do something, have an adventure. But just to say, I mean, this is really very, very odd. And so you can see why this has served to germinate all kinds of conspiracy theories. Of course. Because it is very, very unusual. But again, I suppose you could stand it on its head and say, it's the fact that he's such an unusual person that explains why he ends up doing such an unusual

and horrific crime. I think that's right, Tom. He gets a ship to France, then he travels via London and Switzerland to Helsinki, and then he takes a train to Moscow. And when he arrives in Moscow on 16th of October, 1959... And just to ask, you can just turn up, can you, if you're an American? Because it seems improbable. Do you need a visa? I mean, how does it work? Well, this is the thing. He gets on the train, and the train from Helsinki arrives. This is the age of Finlandization. So Finland is kind of in a weird grey area halfway between the West and the East. So it's appeasing both sides. So Finland is this kind of in a weird grey area halfway between the west and the east.

So it's appeasing both sides. So Finland is this kind of grey zone. And you can literally get on a train. And you don't need a visa at all. Well, if you haven't got a visa, you'll be thrown out. But why would they allow a US Marine in? I genuinely don't understand that. Well, they don't know he's coming.

I mean, they haven't been told he's coming. He turns up and they're absolutely astounded. So he is in touch with Intourist, which is the tourist board. Basically, everything has to be done when you go to the communist bloc through the state-approved tourist boards. He arrives in Moscow and he says to the tourist people, I want to become a Soviet citizen. And they don't know what to do with him. They're completely baffled. This does not happen all the time. He's not saying he's being persecuted in America or anything? He says he doesn't like America and and he wants to become russian and they i mean he obviously hasn't been

persecuted tom so he can't claim asylum realistically and actually the soviet and kgb officials are just utterly bewildered by him the kgb ask the obvious question is he a spy they think well he can't be a spy because cia spies don't get a train and pitch up and say, I'd like to become Russian. It's too obvious. Maybe it's a cunning double bluff. So actually, five days after he's arrived, they say to him, listen, you know, you can't stay. Completely understandably and reasonably, because they think this is weird. This doesn't happen.

This is kind of against the rules. So what he does is he tries to kill himself in his hotel. He cuts his wrist. They take him to a hospital. They send him to a psychiatric hospital. And they say, well, all right. Well, they basically say, you can stay while we have a think, while we think what to do.

While they're thinking what to do, he goes to the US embassy and he says, I would like to give up my American citizenship. And soon afterwards, a little story appeared in the American press. Mad man goes to Russia, basically, and says he no longer wants to be America. But it's not a big story. Nobody in America really thinks that much of it. It's just he's a wacky, eccentric person who has done something very eccentric. The Soviet authorities eventually decide, well, okay, he can't be a spy because

he's such an incompetent, inept person. The CIA would never employ such a person. I mean, this is KGB when the archives were open in the 1990s. They said, we looked into Oswald, but we concluded we knew how the CIA worked. They were pretty good. They would never employ such a person. Unless, as you say, it's's fiendishly cunning double bluff well here's the thing he's sent off to to minsk in belarus and he works in this electronics factory making radios and stuff and he works as a lathe operator now again if he's there as a spy what's he spying on soviet lathe technique i mean it's laughable so he's very miserable he spends the next year or so in minsk it obviously he dreamt that the grass was greener you know he thought this was the communist paradise and it turns out to be rubbish but also perhaps he thought that he would be

welcomed as uh of course he thought he he would go on this adventure and he would be a hero he would be somebody yeah and he's a nobody again i mean he's he's a nobody with no friends in minsk uh he writes to this u.s embassy and actually said and says i've changed my mind actually and the kgb intercept the letter interestingly and then they forget to send it this is your classic cock up rather than conspiracy the kgb intercepted the letter and forgot to forward it to the american embassy so So then he wrote again to the American embassy, why have you not answered my letter? I want to come home and all this. Now, just in the middle of all this, he meets a girl,

a pharmacology student called Marina Prusakova, who's from Archangel. She's only 19. Lee is still only 21. They're very young. They have a whirlwind romance, insofar as Lee Harvey Oswald is capable of a whirlwind romance, because he's not exactly the most glamorous and romantic character and after six weeks in april 1961 they get married and they have a very tempestuous relationship you astonish me the kgb are always their wiretaps because they're obviously spying on him the whole time they still don't trust him and the kgb wire

taps find that they're always rowing and arguing and, you know, threatened to walk out and stuff. But their first child, June, is born in February 1962. And at this point, Oswald is still very, very keen on going home to the United States. The KGB have now totally looked into him, you know, because they wouldn't let him go if they thought there was any possibility that he was, you know for the cia or the fbi or whoever it might be the thing is what information could he possibly have well as you said kind of information on lathes in minsk yeah i mean there's nothing lathes production the kgb who are the world's most suspicious people

have decided okay this guy is just a complete freak and a loner let him go and marina as well is given permission yeah i mean they're happy to go too because marina is kind of a nobody marina is a 19 year old nobody she's not a dissident or anything no she's not a dissident she's not on anything they just think who cares let him go so may 62 oswald and marina go to the u.s embassy he reclaims his american, gets documents that allow her to come with him because she's his wife. The American embassy, this is a great thing for conspiracy theorists. The American embassy give him a loan to help his repatriation expenses of $435.

I mean, I don't know. Again, is it against the American law to renounce your citizenship and then? No. These things happen. You're a young man, early 20s. You've gone on a backpacking trip that's got totally out of hand. You go to your embassy and you say, please, can you help me back home? And the consular official gives you a severe withering look and says, did you not try to give up your citizenship two years ago? Have you not behaved in a ludicrous manner? Very well. Listen, don't do this again. Here's $400. Back you go. All right. But again, just to play devil's advocate, I mean, I suppose it's not on the same scale because the Islamic State committed terrible crimes,

but there were Americans who went to the Islamic State, gave up their American citizenship, and then kind of slightly repented of it and wished that it could go back. But Lee Hovild has not committed any crimes. It's not a crime to go to Russia. But they must be thinking maybe he's a spy. Well, obviously he comes to people's attention after he returns. So the FBI are interested in him because he's just come back from, he's a former Marine who has been in the Soviet Union.

So they would not be doing their job if they didn't raise an eyebrow at him. But everybody who comes into contact with Oswald says, he's a loser, he's a fantasist, he's clearly not an enemy agent because he's so unreliable, so insubordinate, so difficult, he's not intelligent enough to be a useful gatherer of information. So people discount him and they just say, fine, let it... I mean, that's the attitude. It's so interesting that it's the attitude of both the Russians and the Americans. Oh God, let him go. And so they come back to the United States with their infant daughter, June. This is the middle of 1962. And Lee is looking forward to this exciting

reception when he'll be somebody and everyone will say what a tremendous person he's been on this great adventure and nobody cares and yet again he he's heading into obscurity okay so he comes back and when he returns to the united states he settles in the dallas fort worth area where his mother has moved to so we are the middle of 1962 and lee harvey oswald is now in dallas and when we come back we will look at the final stages of this grim story. We'll see you in a few minutes. Bye bye. 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.

Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are entering the final segment of this great epic sweep through the story of JSK and his murder. And Dominic, Lee Javios is now in situ in Dallas with his Russian wife Marina, their daughter June. What's going on? So we're in the middle of 1962. Lee, his great adventure to the Soviet Union has not worked out as he thought. He works as a sheet metal worker initially in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He throws that job up pretty quickly, doesn't like it, leaves. He works in a photo print company as a trainee. He's fired from that for being insubordinate and difficult. He is now a very aggressive, sullen, troubled, and truculent young man. He's always getting into fights.

He beats his wife, who often has bruises and black eyes. He's still interested in his communism. He has not lost that faith. But his real passion, which I probably should have mentioned earlier, but his real passion is for Cuba. It is Cuba that he romanticizes. Tom, we know people have done that for decades afterwards. They romanticize Cuba, the Cuban revolution. They see it as exotic, as the underdog story. And does his fascination with Cuba succeed his fascination with Russia? Goes to Russia and it's all miserable and lathes and cold and whatever, empty supermarkets. And then he starts thinking of Cuba because it's romantic, and beards, and all that kind of thing.

Beards, exactly. I do wonder whether it's exactly that. He was obviously interested in Cuba from 1959 onwards when the Cuban Revolution happened. But Cuba looms so large in the American consciousness now. You've had the Bay of Pigs invasion. You've had the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fidel Castro is always in the news.

Cuba is lovely and warm, palm trees, rum. As you say, it's romantic guerrillas in combat fatigues. You can absolutely see why a troubled young man who has completely bought into the Marxist theory of history would romanticize Cuba. And who is still being dumped on by American capitalism. Yeah, because his life is still rubbish, actually. It still hasn't really worked out. We get into 1963. Here is what we know. Now, people have absolutely poured over the details of Oswald's life. But these are some of the things that we do know for sure. We know, I think, beyond any reasonable doubt that on the 12th of March, 1963, he bought this mail order rifle under a false name, A.J. Heidel. Now, why is Lee Harvey Oswald using a false name, you might say, if he's just an ordinary person and not a secret agent? It's because he hates authority. So almost instinctively, he doesn't want to give his real name. But also, he's a fantasist who thinks he's living in a world of espionage and dark deeds.

But presumably also, I mean, if he is thinking about actually using this gun on someone, then he wants to cover his tracks as well, right? Possibly. But I don't think he's thinking about using it on Kennedy because he can have no reasonable expectation that he and Kennedy will ever be in the same place at the same time. But doesn't he, before Kennedy, he tries to assassinate this guy, Major General Edwin Walker, who's a segregationist living in Dallas. Yeah.

So do you think he gets the gun with that in mind? Could well do. Could well do, Tom. Edwin Walker. So we've said many times in this series about how in the early 1960s, there is this sort of seething, it's more than an undercurrent, it is a stream.

It is a babbling brook of discontent. It's not a babbling brook. Surely it's a turbid torrent. A turbid torrent. Very good. It's a turbid torrent. Yeah, babbling brook was totally wrong. Babbling brook is like, you know,

when we do a podcast about poetry in Edwardian England. Wordsworth. But it's a turbid torrent of right-wing discontent and kind of conspiracy theories and stuff. And one of the people stirring this up is this guy, Major General Edwin Walker, who says, Kennedy is in bed with communists and black activists and all this stuff. He's very against civil rights.

And Oswald has clearly read up on him in all his kind of journals and decides he's going to kill him. Goes to his house in Dallas. He shoots Edwin Walker and the bullet hits the, it's the windowsill or something like that, or the window frame. He had left a note for Marina to say,

you know, goodbye. You'll probably never see me again. Thinking he would either be killed or he'll be arrested. But actually, he comes home very sheepish and kind of shamefaced because he's tried and failed to shoot Major General Edwin Walker. Now, if you believe this story, and there's no reason to doubt it whatsoever, then you have to accept that Lee Harvey Oswald is somebody who is already thinking about assassinating

public figures and is capable of taking the shot. And worth mentioning in that context that, of course, when he, on the 22nd of November, 1963, he takes off his wedding ring and he leaves all his money for Marina, doesn't he? Which he does. Yes, exactly right. Exactly right. The Edwin Walker thing hasn't worked out. Dominic, can I just ask you on the Edwin Walker thing? Presumably he doesn't get, I mean, nobody fingers him for this because otherwise he wouldn't. No. And actually Theo is asking exactly the same question.

How could he try to shoot a member of the armed forces and try to get away with it? So it's at Walker's home. Walker is a former member of the armed forces and it's in the dark. It's at night. He shoots from an alley or something into the house, through the yard, and then he kind of scuttles off. So actually, how would you catch him? He's gone.

And he didn't kill him. So there's not a huge investigation into it or anything like that. So how do they know that he did it? He tells Marina. I think it's Marina who tells people that this is what Lee said he'd done. So anyway, he moves to New Orleans for a bit where he'd been born. He forms a local branch there of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which is a kind of left-wing, you know, let's stick up for Cuba kind of group. He's briefly arrested in New Orleans for scuffling with anti-Castro activists.

And then in September, there's this very peculiar incident when he takes a bus to Mexico City across the border border and he goes to the consulates of both Cuba and the USSR to try to get a visa for Cuba. Okay so you can't you can't just turn up in Cuba then? No you need a visa well you need a visa because how are you going to get there? Yeah how are you going to get there? No ferry. And actually everybody drags their feet it doesn't happen and eventually he gives up and he comes back home to Dallas. At that point, he has no connection whatsoever with the Texas Book Depository. But on the 14th of October, 12 days after his return to Dallas, so his wife has been

in Irving living with this Quaker woman called Ruth Payne, rooming with her basically. And Ruth Payne says to Lee when he comes to call, oh, there's a job going at the book depository. Just taking school books to an elevator, basically. Not a very exciting job, but the kind of job that Lee could do. But also, Dom, just to say that if you see yourself as an intellectual, I mean, that must be very humiliating to be carting textbooks around. So maybe that's further incentivizing him with hostility to the system that has failed to recognize his talents and give him the opportunities that perhaps it should have done.

That's perfectly plausible, Tom. By that point, by the way, the FBI in Dallas are well aware of him. He has come to their attention. This is a source of great embarrassment to them after the assassination. They've actually gone and spoken to his wife, Marina, and to this couple of panes, the Quakers, about him and are kind of looking into him. But of course, they don't think he's any big threat. They don't take him terribly seriously. When he finds out they've been doing this and people have been asking questions, he becomes inflamed, furious. He hates the idea of the authorities checking up on him. But anyway, he's got this

job at the books depository. And for the first few weeks, at least, it kind of goes okay. He hasn't yet been fired. On about the 7th and 8th of November, these are the dates, the Dallas papers start to announce that John F. Kennedy and his wife will come to the city. There is no way Lee Harvey Oswald could have known this before this point okay so everything before this point in a way is kind of irrelevant because up to this point there was no way that lee harvey oswald could ever expect to have an opportunity to kill kennedy so all this idea that the trip to mexico and the Gedwin Walker were all part of this long laid plan. That cannot be true because there was no way they could know that the stars would be aligned.

Yeah. It's entirely opportunistic. Entirely opportunistic. On the 15th of November. So that is what? Seven days before the assassination. The Dallas papers actually said there probably won't be a motorcade through the city but then four days later the dallas papers report there will be a motorcade and this is the route and the route is going to go

past the depository that is the 19th of november and it is on that day that i think the idea must first have occurred to lee harvey oswald that the guy who is the personification of American capitalism, the personification of its policy towards Cuba, an enemy of revolution, a patrician, rich, handsome, successful, everything he despises, that this man will be driven right past the building in which he works in an open car at a very slow pace with the world looking on. Is it plausible that at that point, Lee Harvey Oswald thought, this is my chance to write my name into the history books and to have people doing podcasts about me in 2023? I think eminently plausible, Tom. Okay. Psychologically, it makes total sense. There is nothing in this story that

I think would make you think, well, he wouldn't have done that. Well, that wouldn't have happened. I think it all fits. So could we just recap the circumstances in that story now that you've given us this brilliant psychological portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald and the account of his life, how that would then fit, basically what the evidence is that had led the Dallas police to conclude it's a cinch. So, I mean, I think there are something like 50 to 60 individual pieces of evidence that they compiled that led them, you know, created this jigsaw puzzle. And we can't go through all of those.

We know that on the Thursday night, the night before the murder, he did something he had never done before, which is on a weeknight to go out to Irving to visit Marina and to collect a package, which he later described as curtain rods. Right. So this is the gun. Which is the gun. We know that the following day, Lee Harvey Oswald was at the Texas Book Depository that he arrived that morning we know that multiple witnesses saw what they thought was an assassin on the sixth floor of that building and we know that later on the police found a sniper's nest there and they found a gun now it's true people made competing claims

about men running on grassy knolls shots coming from different areas but there are a heck of a lot of witnesses who say they see somebody in the texas book depository and the fact of the murder weapon being found there and the fact that at least some if not most forensic experts say the shots did come from that direction and could have come from that direction, that suggests a reasonably plausible case. We know that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only employee of the Texas Book Depository who at any point said he'd been on the sixth floor. He contradicted himself in the interviews, but at one point he does put himself on the sixth floor. We also know, I think very revealingly, he's the only employee of the building who leaves the building.

Everybody else stays. He leaves immediately after the shooting. We know that he then behaves very weirdly. He gets on a bus. He waits on the bus. The bus is stuck in traffic. He then gets off the bus and gets a taxi, which is something that somebody with very little money, he never, ever, ever did. And then we know he goes

home to get his revolver. A policeman kind of flags him down, J.D. Tippett. He shoots and kills Tippett, which is something that innocent people don't tend to do. I mean, if a policeman flags you down this afternoon, Tom, I find it implausible that you will shoot him. Well, unless I suppose just assassinated someone, which hopefully I won't have done. But just to ask, I mean, what's his plan? If he has shot Kennedy and he's leaving the book depository, I mean, where is he going? What does he think he's going to do? Why is he getting the revolver?

He's getting the revolver because he thinks something may happen this afternoon. Maybe they'll come for me. But where do you think he's planning to go? Perhaps he's going to go back to Mexico City, make another attempt to get to Cuba. Right. Okay. Yeah, that's plausible. Who knows?

I don't think he thinks... The interesting thing is I don't think he wants to go unrecognized. So there is a kind of tension there, isn't there? He kind of wants to be called in a way. That must be the case with almost all assassins. I mean, the case with John Hinckley, who shot Ronald Reagan, with Arthur Bramer, who shot George Wallace in 1972. Mark David Chapman, who shot John Reagan, with Arthur Bramer, who shot George Wallace in 1972. Mark David Chapman, who shot John Lennon, of course. John Lennon, with Sahan Sahan, who shot Robert Kennedy.

There must be an element, I think, in all those cases of wanting to be caught because you want your story to be told, I would say, because there's such an element of fantasy and being the character in the drama about about all of these incidents anyway go back to oswald when he's arrested in the cinema the movie theater he violently resists arrest and tries to pull the gun again an unlikely thing for an innocent man to do when he's led into the dallas police headquarters he gives a clenched fist salute the salute of a marxist seems an unlikely thing again for somebody totally falsely accused to do as it similarly unlikely is his detached sullen demeanor under interrogation and indeed joke not joking but kind of making offhand remarks what's he say i hear they

fry for murder or something like that would you do that tom if you were falsely accused i hope never to find out i hope never to find out he told lies under interrogation very rare for people who are falsely accused to do this he lied about fetching the curtain rods he lied about buying the rifle he lied about the photo of himself with the rifle which i think most experts think not all but most experts think is completely authentic finally i think for me, very persuasive, his own wife Marina thinks he did it when she comes to see him, as does his brother Robert. They are both shocked by his demeanor and extremely worried right from the beginning

because they think he is behaving as he would if he had done it. He is not behaving as he would if he was innocent, if he was framed. The big quibble is whether he could have fired so many shots in so short a time. But he's been trained as a Marine, as a sharpshooter. You said that.

He has been trained as a Marine and contrary to what is the scene, because I only recently saw the scene in the film JFK, Kevin Costner is up on the sixth floor with his pal and they're practicing taking the shots, and they're just saying, it couldn't be done, it couldn't be done.

But it has been done. It has been duplicated many times by different marksmen, who have not merely duplicated, by the way, but improved on the assassin's performance with a similar rifle. The other quibble is about this so-called magic bullet. The Oliver Stone film suggests that the bullet could not have passed through Kennedy's throat and into John Connolly's back. Again, there are many experts who say actually it perfectly well could have done. Connolly was not sitting directly in front of Kennedy. He was slightly below him and six inches

to the left, and he had turned to wave to the crowds. So it is possible. And wasn't there something also about Kennedy's jacket gets bunched up, so the bullet hole through the jacket or something like that? I can't remember. Yes, exactly. The thing is that with any crime of this kind, you can pour over every detail and find inconsistencies because such is the nature of history and human affairs, Tom. Right. The question then is why did Lee Harvey Oswald do it? I have poured scorn on the idea that the CIA did it, for example, because I don't think it's plausible that the CIA acts in such a way on American soil. And I don't think they have an obvious motive. Lee Harvey Oswald is precisely

the kind of person who does act this way. He's already tried to kill somebody else. And he killed Tippett. And he pulled his revolver in the movie theatre. He is a violent man. And do you think, again, we've been talking about his feelings of resentment, his feelings that he should have a status in society that he's been denied. Do you think the fact that Kennedy is so famously charismatic, so famously handsome, he's been born with this silver spoon in his mouth, maybe that makes him even more appealing as a target oh he's such a satisfying target for us all doesn't he i mean there would be people listening to the the first episodes of this series who would probably say oh they were very soft on kennedy you know they were very because i think a lot of people have an automatic

resentment of kennedy because he's so apart from his horrendous health, it seems the fate has given him every blessing. He's handsome. He's rich. He has a relatively, I mean, his father's carrying on with all his actresses, but he has a fairly stable family. He's clever. But what's worse? I mean, the thing that always inflames people, he's very funny. He's very graceful. You can imagine at Harvard, there must have been so many people who hated him because he just seemed so spoiled by fate to have all these qualities. Lee Harvey Oswald, it must have driven him mad. The archetype of this is Herastratus, the Greek who burned down, supposedly, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, purely so that he would be remembered. Do you think there's an element of that?

Yeah. Political assassinations, there's always a copycat thing. The Lee Harvey Oswald one, of course, is the first, and then lots of people copy him. But the people who copy him are very like him. The Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro and taxi driver kind of archetype, people who are losers, who feel disappointed that things have gone against them. His profile, going right back to those first profiles that were written about him as a teenager, fits the kind of person that we know these killers are. People who do this are likely Javier Oswald. If you were looking for somebody to fit the profile, he would be the man. But even if it didn't, I think just on the principle of Occam's razor, that you don't overcomplicate solutions. That the simplest, clearest solution

is likely to be the correct one. It really does point to Lee Harvey Oswald. Because conspiracies complicate things, don't they? They do. They do. And people love it for that reason. They love to overcomplicate. They love to believe that they are in possession of secret knowledge that other people don't have. And secret knowledge that not just explains this crime, Tom, because if this is done by the CIA working with the mafia, this unlocks all American political history. Because you realize that actually a shadowy group of people have been controlling the whole thing, and you know this, and your neighbor doesn't. So emotionally satisfying. That's why it fascinates so much. That's why there've been so many films, so many

TV episodes, so many novels yeah but i think it fascinates for another reason as well the kennedy assassination happens at precisely the point when the the optimism of the 60s is just about to turn so whether it contributes to that well it obviously does contribute to it because of course what happens in just a few years and this is why i think the fact that the garrison case and the um the jim garrison investigation into clay shaw in new orleans and then the wave of assassination books but the fact they happen in 1966 67 68 i think it's no coincidence they happen then because that's the point at which america is engulfed in the vietnam war the civil rights movement. It has been overtaken by kind of stories about law and order and rioting and so on. So it's going a little bit Malcolm X.

Yes. And the soundtrack is now The Doors rather than, you know, The Beach Boys or whatever. And the Kennedy assassination has come to serve as this kind of punctuation point. That's why it attracts so much attention. And it's also said there have been a number of novels in which people time travel and stop the assassination. So Stephen King did one. Yes, yeah. 11, 22, 63.

That very weird American way that they organise their dates. Apologies to American listeners, but it is odd. But it is poor. I mean, that should be the takeaway from this. They need to sort their dating system out. But in that one, I think Kennedy's saved and then there's a nuclear war in 1974 or something as a result so and there's there's there are kind of various other ones as well that sense that it's the key turning point which of course it isn't though tom because had kennedy lived he would have faced this dilemma

in his second term about whether to stay in vietnam to actually commit more troops to vietnam or whether to leave either way he would have been criticized. Whether he would have left office with his reputation as high seems very unlikely, but would he have been able to fix all these problems, civil rights, the economy entering the downturn of the late 60s, early 70s, all of those things, the law and order issue, anxieties about drugs and college campuses and all that stuff. Would the presence of this one man have fixed that? Obviously not. Obviously not.

So, Dominic, what you're saying is that after seven episodes, it wasn't really very important. No, I think it's hugely important, actually. I think it's because it's a sensational subject and a lot of bonkers people who are interested in it. Academic historians tend to fight shy of it. They don't write books about it for utterly understandable reasons. But I think the Kennedy conspiracy stuff has played a pretty big part in the rise of populism and in this kind of paranoid conspiracy theory politics that you have in America. So the idea of a deep state, the idea that anybody who challenges it will be kind of rubbed out. The idea that there's this sinister, shadowy cabal, an establishment cabal with links to

the military industrial complex, to business, to organized crime, to government agencies. That, in the last 10 years or so so has become more and more embedded in the American political mainstream, hasn't it? The QAnon stuff. Despite the fact that, as you said, if there was a deep state, you think it would have stepped in by now to sort things out. Exactly, exactly, exactly. But as we approach the next American presidential election next year, there'll be lots of people talking about the deep state more vigorously and kind of fervently than ever. So the legacy, I mean, this would have happened even without the Kennedy assassination, Lots of people talking about the deep state more vigorously and kind of fervently than ever.

So the legacy, I mean, this would have happened even without the Kennedy assassination, as we said in the last episode. This kind of populist paranoia is deeply embedded in the American political tradition. But the Kennedy conspiracy stuff seemed to take it to its kind of apotheosis, I think. Okay. So well worth having done seven episodes on. And thank you, Dominic. It's been absolutely fascinating. I, like everyone, I kind of had a vague sense of the details, but I've really, really enjoyed the opportunity to get to grips

with it and to kind of get on top of just the process of what happened and all the various theories about it. So thank you so much for guiding me and for guiding everyone else through this extraordinary story. Tom, you've been very tolerant in allowing me to do so much on it. No, not at all. I have found it completely fascinating and I entirely understand

why people are obsessed by it. It is an extraordinary story. Well, what you're not telling people is that you yourself have fallen down this rabbit hole, haven't you? Because you've been watching all kinds of terrible documentaries about it.

I have, but I'm reassured that I haven't been convinced by any of them because having, first of all, I'd kind of immersed myself in the details

of what had actually happened and so I can kind of spot where things don't entirely fit. Theo, we've seen who Theo thinks it is. Theo still thinks

it's LBJ. So he is a grassy knoll truther. And on that bombshell, thank you all very much for listening. Thank you, Dominic. And we will be back. Thanks very much. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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