Many said we would never learn the truth about who killed JFK. Now it appears we will. The FBI just announced 2,400 undisclosed records. "This is huge," said @jeffersonmorley. " It shows the FBI is taking this seriously." Listen to Morley explain its context and significance: https://t.co/saZeVq6FeT
Video Transcript AI Summary
President Kennedy's assassination remains a hotly debated topic. While the official Warren Commission concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, evidence suggests a more complex narrative. Many eyewitnesses reported shots coming from the front, contradicting Oswald's position. The rushed investigation and immediate pronouncements by President Johnson and FBI Director Hoover to quell any notion of conspiracy raise serious questions. The CIA actively discredited those questioning the official story, labeling them "conspiracy theorists." Kennedy's shifting stance on the Cold War and his growing conflict with the military and intelligence agencies further fuel ongoing debate about his death. The lack of accountability for those behind Kennedy's murder casts a long shadow over US foreign policy.
Speaker 0: Jefferson Morley, welcome to Public.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me, Michael. I'm looking forward to this.
Speaker 0: We're talking today about the hottest one of the hottest topics in the world of government secrecy, which is the JFK assassination and president Trump's promise to release all of the JFK files.
Speaker 1: It's really good news that a president has not only made this commitment, but put it into writing. You know, presidents have promised to, you know, reform the classification system before, and, you know, president Obama talked a good game on this. Nothing happened. So but Trump's statement as on JFK and MLK and RFK records is particularly welcome because he's not just talking about the general secrecy problem, but these ones where the secrecy is the most problematic and the most incompatible with the public interest. So that's really welcome.
But, you know, the devil's in the detail. Implementation is everything. And there's sure to be I'm sure that the pushback is going on right now. So, you know, will we get all of the JFK files? I'm I'm I'm still skeptical about that.
I mean, I'll believe it when I see it. I grew up in Saint Louis, so I'm a little bit of the show me state.
Speaker 0: Janible too with this issue. I mean
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. No. And and yeah. And, you know, I mean, think of it.
Two very different presidents, Trump and Biden, felt obliged to go along with the CIA on this one, at least initially. And, you know, that's because a president needs the CIA and needs the CIA in ways that the CIA doesn't need the president. So so they have that kind of institutional power in the Washington structure to just say, look, guys, it's gotta be this way. And at the end of the day, the president say, you know, I'd rather not piss off those guys, so, you know, give them what they want. You know?
Speaker 0: But let's set the table a little bit for listeners. I mean
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: Some of us I mean, I'm probably I've only had, like, the introductory course in JFK assassination history, mostly just watching Oliver Stones. Start from the very beginning and tell us Yeah. Yeah. Let's How do people yeah. How do what's the what is the mainstream conventional wisdom on the assassination of president John F.
Kennedy Jr. And and and just lay that out first in some detail, if you don't mind, and then then share with us kind of your view or where are we at with what the evidence actually shows?
Speaker 1: Yeah. So John f Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected president and 43 years old, wins election in 1960. You know, not a dis he had been a senator from Massachusetts, kind of a slightly liberal, but not very liberal Democrat, comes to office very eloquent first president who has kind of a certain star power. We're used to charismatic presidents now because of Obama and Reagan and Trump. But, you know, Kennedy was really the first who was kind of a star in the way that those guys are.
So it really ignited, you know, a lot of hope in especially in young people and a time of, you know, change in The United States. The Americas had won World War two self satisfied country, but, you know, ten or fifteen years later, people were saying, well, that's not enough. That's in the past. And Kennedy created this sense. America was gonna do great things.
Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country you know, that kind of thing. Very, very eloquent. And his presidency, he had a con a hostile Congress controlled by Southern Democrats who were very against the civil rights movement, which was pressing Kennedy from the left, you know, for to end Jim Crow. So Kennedy was dealing with domestic tensions and then managing the, you know, the cold war with the Soviet Union, where The United States and The Soviet Union are two ambitious, you know, globally ambitious powers, nuclear armed, think that, you know, their vision of society is what's gonna prevail and should prevail in the world. And what was notable about Kennedy's presidency was by 1963, third year of his term, Kennedy begins talking about ending the Cold War.
And his experience during his presidency changed him from a kind of conventional cold warrior into something very different, especially in the last year of his presidency. Kennedy was really shaped by the Cuban Missile Crisis of nineteen sixty two. And understanding how the Cuba issue figured in the Kennedy years is very important. It's not an issue anymore in American politics. But, you know, this would be like Ukraine today or, you know, Al Qaeda in the nineties.
This was, you know, kind of the front burner, front page story, a new communist government in Cuba. And it it was, you know, the first time there'd been a communist government in the Western Hemisphere. And Kennedy's presidency started with the CIA's effort to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba, which failed in 1961. And that was a kind of David and Goliath moment where this Cuba, this little tiny country repelled the American invaders, where, you know, America always had its way in Latin America. If we wanted a government to go away, it did.
And and so that was very embarrassing to Kennedy and to the CIA. And it also created this alienation between Kennedy and the CIA. Kennedy didn't trust the CIA after that because he felt they had set him up. They gave him a lousy plan. And when it didn't work, they expected him to just order an invasion and bail them out.
JFK wasn't interested in that. He didn't wanna have a war in Cuba. Then a year later, the Soviet Union puts missiles into Cuba secretly, nuclear missiles, to try and prevent The US from invading. Well, this was created the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Kennedy exposed these missiles, which had been spotted by US satellite or US surveillance planes. And he went public and he demanded that the Soviet Union remove these missiles or else The United States would destroy them.
And this was the missile crisis because now the two nuclear superpowers were eyeball to eyeball, as one person put it. You know, this was a direct confrontation. Kennedy was telling them, you have to get these missiles out of there. And the Soviet Union was saying, you have we have your missiles are very close to our borders, so this is nothing new. You can't object.
Well, it was, it was the time in the world. And this is why it's important to people today because we're also in a similar period where nuclear war was a real possibility. I mean, a massive nuclear war, not one city getting hit by a bomb, but many cities in both countries. You know, millions, we're talking about millions of people being incinerated and a very scary situation. Kennedy negotiates and eventually the Soviet Union backs down and withdraws the missiles.
That experience of two weeks where Kennedy was close to having to order a nuclear attack, that changed him. And he said I mean, he he didn't say this publicly, but, I mean, not so specifically. But he began he said, we we can't live this way on a hair trigger. Like, we came close to having a war that neither country wanted. The Soviet Union didn't want a war.
The United States didn't want a war. Cuba didn't want a war, and yet we almost had one. So that experience changed Kennedy. And, you know, in Rob Reiner's very excellent podcast about the JFK story, and if people are interested in educating themselves, that's a good way to do kind of the details of of of the story, the who killed JFK podcast, which came out a couple years ago. You know?
And and in there, they this is where you get the basic background of how the, you know, how the the events that led to the assassination unfolded. But
Speaker 0: That's great. Well, Jeff Jeff Jeff, if Jeff, if I can just ask a question, because I appreciate that actually. Like, I was just asking about the assassination, but you've set the context even wider, which is sort of the importance of the Kennedy presidency. In other words, why should we care about Kennedy at all? And it reminds me that, like, when I first started reading you, and also I think it was the critique of Oliver Stone, there was sort of this argument on the radical left from people like Alexander Coburn and Noam Chomsky, which were sort of like they would sort of say, oh, Kennedy was just a terrible warmonger, you know Yeah.
Military guy. Just as and there's all these sort of soft eyed, overly idealistic, not sufficiently rigorous leftist like Jefferson Morley or and and Oliver Stone who have a kind of wishful fantasy about Kennedy. And I just wonder if you could speak to that controversy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No. For me,
Speaker 0: I remember that, and I think it was one I think even George Will and others would sort of join in from the right on some of that stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, the idea is, well, Kennedy was just another cold warrior, and he there was no difference from him. I mean, first of all, all due respect to Noam Chomsky, he didn't know what he's talking about. He's never looked at the JFK record.
He figured out a long time ago what he believed. And since he's a genius, he's never gonna change his mind, and he doesn't need to look at the the evidence because he's smarter than the evidence. Okay? But if you go and look at the evidence, Kennedy definitely changed in 1963. And in that podcast, Rob Reiner's podcast, John Meacham, a very mainstream historian, makes an important point.
The Kennedy of 1961 was not the Kennedy of 1962, and the Kennedy of 1962 was not the Kennedy of 1963. This man changed during his presidency. And in 1963, he says several things that are not just incompatible with being just another cold warrior like Noam Chomsky says, but deeply disturbing to the national security bureaucracy. And there's a bunch of them in 1968. And so, you know, these are the events that that lead up to Kennedy's assassination is he doesn't after after refusing to go to war in Cuba during the missile crisis, he eventually negotiates a peaceful settlement.
The joint chiefs of staff are enraged, something that Noam Chomsky a little detail he can't be bothered with and are very disturbed by what he's done. And then Kennedy makes things worse in their eyes. In 1963, he cuts off support for Cuban exiles launching raids on Castro's Cuba. So by 1963, Castro's been in power for four years. He's still fairly popular.
He's got a good security force. The US has no ability to overthrow him. And the Pentagon is like, we have to overthrow this guy, and we don't care. You know? We just gotta get rid of him.
So and Kennedy is saying, no. You know? We're not gonna do anything. We're not gonna we're not gonna pursue that. So that was a flash point between the Pentagon, the CIA, and the White House at that time.
They felt Kennedy was way too passive on Cuba. They were afraid Kennedy was gonna restore diplomatic relations with Cuba instead of overthrowing Castro, which is they were right to suspect that Kennedy was privately considering that possibility throughout 1963. So
Speaker 0: But none of this is and I think part of the point is that none of this, what you're saying now, is controversial. I mean No. No. You know, at this point that you have, you know, people you know, mainstream historians, people on the right, people on the left kinda have a basic understanding, and everything you've said just so far about the Kennedy presidency is is pretty pretty mainstream.
Speaker 1: Yeah. When when you talk about the historiography of of of JFK's presidency and assassination, you know, another mainstream historian, Robert Dallek, did a pretty good article for the Atlantic, which I recommend to Noam Chomsky about Kennedy's war with the military. And he talks about how profound the tensions were between Kennedy and the military in 1963. He doesn't connect it to the assassination. He has a conventional view of the assassination.
But this idea that Kennedy was in profound conflict with his national security establishment in 1963, that would have been controversial in the seventies. I don't think it's controversial anymore, especially with what we've learned from with the files released, you know, the JFK files released in the last twenty years. They have confirmed that picture of Kennedy as a man who was trying to break out of the cold war. And this is why people will say, well, Jeff, Michael, you know, like baby boomers, please. You know, that happened a long time ago.
It has nothing to do with our world today. You know? So just go back to your hobby wars. No, not so fast. And here's why it matters today because Kennedy said the next thing that he did in 1963 was he gave a speech at American University here in Washington in which he talked about in June 1963, in which he talked about a strategy for peace.
And he said in there, he said something in in that speech that I don't think any American presidential candidate would say now. And Kennedy said it openly in a to a bunch of college students. He said, we do not seek a Pax Americana. K. We're not trying to impose America's version of peace on the world.
That's a very radical statement in American politics today. No. But that's what that's where Kennedy was trying to go. He was trying to say, we don't have to make this an existential struggle between two systems. The Russian people are like us.
He says in another memorable passage in the speech, we're all mortal. You know, we would all die in a nuclear war. It doesn't have we have to figure out a way to get along despite ideology. Well, this was kind of an asthma, this the idea of peaceful coexistence. It was actually, you know, a kind of communist propaganda theme, and it seemed like the president was endorsing it.
Speaker 0: And it's very similar to I mean, the idea the the right wing nationalism that we have now. I mean, and I wanna talk about the left and right stuff. I don't wanna derail it now, but later we can talk about it. I mean, here you have a kind of right wing national populism and Trump and the MAGA movement that basically is saying the same thing that we don't wanna be police officer to the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No. And I think I think we can talk about this. You know, this the tension, the contradiction, the con between the the hawkish traditional national security conservatives and the people who are more, you know, I don't like the term isolationist, non interventionist. You know, that's gonna be a theme of the of the Trump presidency is the struggle over that over that exact question, which brings us back to Kennedy because in this so if we think of Kennedy as in a struggle with his national security establishment about kind of the fundamental direction of security policy, the definition of national security.
What happened with Kennedy's assassination is that that path towards a different towards winding down the cold war and entering into a kind of different relationship, especially with third world nationalist movements and, you know, countries that didn't want to be communist or capitalist, but we're trying to do something different. You know, that vision died with on November 22, and it didn't really it never came back. Kennedy never had a chance to implement it. But that's what he was aiming for in his second term and what that meant because there was no accountability in Kennedy's assassination, there was an investigation which was really superficial and controlled, and now we know is not credible. The people who were behind the president's murder had impunity.
And that faction of the US government, the most aggressive faction, the most aggressive national security strain of American thinking, was not held accountable. And those people have had the upper hand in US foreign policy debates ever since.
Speaker 0: Okay. Okay. But now you're now we're seamlessly moving from the main what is the mainstream conventional thing where you agree with everybody and the stuff that's more controversial, which I I definitely wanna get to. But first, do for do for explain to us the mainstream conventional wisdom as it's been in the official books and whatever. Yeah.
And then tell us and then tell us why what's wrong with that story.
Speaker 1: Okay. So so so so so that's the larger part. So president Kennedy goes to Texas on 11/21/1963 to tour the state. Texas is obviously a key political state in a presidential election. His Johnson his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, is from the state, and they need to win Texas to win reelection in 1964.
So Kennedy is gonna come to Texas and visit five cities and kind of rally the troops and get ready for the sixty four election. So he flies into Fort Worth, and the next morning, he flies from Fort Worth to Dallas where he has a parade through the city. Now Dallas was the most conservative city in the country and very anti Kennedy, and some of his advisers warned him not to go there. But Kennedy was had been a soldier and was very, you know, was not one to to to cringe at security concerns. He was very confident, man.
And so he wanted to go to Dallas for this political trip. So he goes, he and Jackie arrive at the airport in the morning, and they go on a motorcade through the city. And and it's remarkably friendly for a city that was supposedly hostile. Big crowds, no demonstrators, a few confederate flags here and there, but not you know, nothing noisy, you know, and in general, very friendly. So we through 10 miles goes through Downtown Dallas.
And at the end of the motorcade, they pass through Downtown Dallas, and they reach an area called Dealey Plaza, which is a kind of big park like area on the edge of of of of Downtown Dallas. And that's the end of the motorcade. And so Kennedy's car comes around a turn, and that's when shots ring out. So how many shots is a subject of debate? At least three.
I mean, at least three and and probably more. And Texas governor John Connally, who's riding with Kennedy in the motorcade, is struck by a bullet. Kennedy is struck by a bullet, and Kennedy is hit by a bullet in the head. The motorcade rushes off to a nearby hospital. Kennedy is treated, but the the head wound is so terrible that he dies within half an hour.
So ninety minutes later, the Dallas police arrest a man named Lee Harvey Oswald and take him into custody. And they don't charge him with assassinating the president, but they suspect him, of being the of firing a gun from the an office building overlooking the motorcade route. Oswald's in detention. He asked for a lawyer. He doesn't get it.
He goes on t he's taken out for a press conference, and somebody asked him why did you kill the president. He says, I didn't kill the president. I don't know why I'm here. I'm just a patsy. Oswald is in jail and
Speaker 0: on By the way, define as I said, I have I might have some 17 and 18 year olds. Define patsy.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So once a patsy is a fall guy. It's somebody who's been framed for a crime that they didn't commit. So they're the patsy of the people who actually committed the crime. So it's a very striking phrase for somebody.
Oswald didn't say I didn't do it. By saying I'm a patsy, he's saying I'm taking the blame for somebody else. It's a different kind of denial.
Speaker 0: Well, not only that, but he's also saying, yeah, he's not saying I'm I'm an innocent man. He's not using a synonym for I'm an innocent man. The word patsy actually implies that there is some broader kind of setup or conspiracy that is going on, and he's using that. I mean, is that a mob word? I mean, what where what is is the word pat Patsy in 1963 a kind of popular vernacular word?
What is it? Because we don't hear much of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It was it it it was kind of street slang. And, yeah, it was, you know, it was a it was a term you'd use in the underworld, you know, for for people who are operating, you know, on the windy side of the law, as somebody once said, you know. And so, yeah, it was kind of a it does imply it absolutely implies something else is going on and, you know, there's something else is at foot.
Speaker 0: So he's so we we already have with this amazing character who bursts onto the scene. Nobody's heard of him before outside of well, you'll get to it. But as you have somebody that kinda goes out and goes, here's who I am in this plot, they're sort of defining themselves as a character. They have some sense of something going on and and identified. I mean, it's an amazing moment.
I mean, what what you're about to describe what happens next is even more amazing, but go ahead.
Speaker 1: And and so the police questioned Oswald about where he's been. One of the amazing things about it is there were no recordings despite it was standard procedure to record, interrogation of criminal defendants. Nobody turned on a tape recorder, at least not that that anybody knows. And Oswald denied shooting the president. He he was asked about a lot of things.
He he told some lies. He told things. He was a 24 year old ex marine. He had been a leftist. He had as a he dropped out of the marines and went to the Soviet Union because he admired communism.
He admired the socialist system. He thought it was more fair. He was a smart guy, not not college educated, but self taught. This is a guy who read Marx as a teenager. Wow.
Speaker 0: So yeah. So And, again, this is all this is all con not everything you're telling us still is not controversial.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 0: Okay. So all mainstream stuff. Okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So so so Oswald is is in custody, denies what he's done. They find a rifle, in his house. They that matches the bullets that hit the president. People start saying right away, you know, this is a slam dunk case and all that.
And Oswald so people are saying in the press within a day of the assassination, yes. We have you know, we know this guy did it. Oswald saying, I didn't do it. I'm just a patsy. And then the next day when he's brought out to be transferred to another jail on national TV, the country is in shock.
The president's just been this popular young president's just been gunned down in public. It's kind of unbelievable. People are, like, glued to their TVs. The suspect is brought out on national TV, and a man steps out of the crowd and shoots the suspected assassin dead on national TV. It's never happened before.
So you have the shock of the president's assassination and then the shock that the assassin himself has been assassinated. Well, who was that? Jack Ruby was the guy who killed Oswald. He was the owner of a local strip club. And though it wasn't known at the time and wouldn't be known really and wouldn't become totally clear for about ten years, he was a kind of organized crime figure.
He he he wasn't a made man in, you know, in a criminal syndicate, but he he aspired to be that kind of guy. He admired the big mob bosses in from Vegas and the big mob boss of of Dallas. So he was and he was a tough guy. He owned a bar. You know, he beat the crap out of his customers regularly.
He, you know, gave drinks to the cops. So he was kind of a underworld lowlife type himself. So these shocking two events, which happened less than forty eight hours, you know, are just totally discombobulate the country. And this is where the official story that we now hear, this is when it began to take place. In fact, it began to take place before the whole crime had been investigated.
And this is important for people to understand. What you're hearing today when people say, oh, one crazy guy did it alone and unaided, that was this the solution to the crime that the new president, Lyndon Johnson, and the longtime FBI director, J Edgar Hoover, came up with on the day Oswald was killed. And we have this in writing. Johnson talks to his assistant attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach and says, we have to convince the public that Oswald acted alone and has no confederates at large. Okay?
The president has not even been buried. The FBI is still gathering the evidence. Oswald is dead and has not been buried, and Johnson has already reached the conclusion that one man alone was responsible.
Speaker 0: Wow. And and I had no idea. I had no idea that that was true. Yeah. When and when did that come out?
That
Speaker 1: that came out in the that came out in the seventies when when Congress reopened the investigation. So at that same that same day, November 25, November '20 fourth '19 j Edgar Hoover says the same thing to his aids, which is we have to convince the public that Oswald was the real assassin and nobody else was involved. So when people say that today, they are repeating the talking points of the president and the FBI director before the investigation even began. And what those people are doing is they're saying, we're not interested in any evidence that would contradict what J Edgar Hoover and LBJ said forty eight hours after Kennedy was killed. Because if you start considering that evidence, you know why Johnson and Hoover said that, because they did not want an investigation of who was behind Oswald.
So
Speaker 0: Wow.
Speaker 1: So so so but let me continue. I mean,
Speaker 0: that right there is amazing. So, I mean and the other thing that's amazing well, I don't wanna I don't wanna jump to it. I mean, just me yeah. Go ahead. A little I have a question about your
Speaker 1: history just so so so so people who don't know the story can get more context. So because that wasn't known at the time. What was known at the time was president Johnson said this is a great national tragedy. We must have a a thorough investigation. And what he doesn't want is he tells the Dallas authorities the Dallas authorities were gonna say, we're gonna this is a communist conspiracy, and we're gonna issue indictments.
And Johnson, who was very powerful in Texas, called him up and said, no. You guys are not doing that. Stop that. And they shut that down right away. Congress, the House of Un American Activities Committee said, we want to investigate.
Johnson wanted to head that off. He didn't want congressional hearings. What he wanted was one investigation at a high level of people who he trusted to reach the conclusion he had already reached. That one man alone did this for no reason and he had no help. And so he cajoled a series of high ranking establishment, very conservative figures in general, to be part of this investigative commission headed by the chief justice of The United States, Earl Warren, who was really one of the most prominent liberals in the country at the time.
He was the chief justice. He was the, you know, he presided over the Supreme Court that issued Brown versus Board of Education mandating, you know, racial desegregation, Miranda rights, you know, a very liberal chief justice. And so and and Earl Warren didn't wanna do it because he said it's a violation of the separation of powers, the judiciary and the should not be part of the the exemplary, but Johnson leans on him and gets him to do it. So the Warren Commission, as it was called, begins to investigate. So first they take the findings of the FBI.
The FBI investigated very quickly and came to the conclusion that J Edgar Hoover demanded and the FBI agents had no choice but to come to that conclusion because if anybody said anything different to J Edgar Hoover, their career was over. So everybody fell in line at the FBI. And three weeks later, the FBI issues a report and says the president was shot by Oswald from behind. He had no confederates. He was a loner and that's all there is to it.
Well, at that time, J Edgar Hoover was already a very controversial figure, liberal half of the population because he was very anti civil rights and that he couldn't just rely on the FBI and the Warren Commission knew that too. And so the Warren Commission did their own investigation, although they really didn't have much capacity to investigate, they were heavily reliant on the FBI, even if they didn't totally trust Hoover. So they investigated through 1964 and found no evidence that Oswald had worked with anybody. But and here's the important thing. They really avoided any evidence that would contradict what the the conclusion that they had already been ordered to come up with.
So, for example, where did the gunfire come from that that struck the president and governor Connolly? If there were lots of eyewitnesses, and I I should I should tell people this is who maybe don't appreciate it or haven't seen the the president was in front of hundreds of people when he was shot, hundreds of people witnesses, and some of them were standing quite close to the car when it was struck by the gunfire 10 or 15 feet away. A lot of those people who were close to the car said that the gunfire came from in front of the motorcade. Well, Oswald worked in a office building behind the motorcade, so he couldn't have fired a shot from the front. All of those witnesses who said gunfire came from the front were ignored, including and and not just like, oh, you could say, well, you know, what do bystanders know?
Law enforcement officers at the scene. The Dallas Police Chief was riding in the motorcade. And when the gunfire erupted, he said, get somebody up there pointing to an area in front of the motorcade and and see if anybody's up there. So right away, a lot a lot of people at the scene, and I'm talking probably three dozen people, four 30 to 40 people who were there said that they thought the shot came from the front. And there was an, an area that's called The Grassy Knoll and people who follow this will hear that phrase a lot.
The Grassy Knoll was this area in Dewey Plaza in front of the motorcade where people said a shot came from, and there was a a stockade fence, a wooden fence up on that area where somebody could have been hiding. And some people said they did see somebody up there. So where did the shots come from? A lot of people thought they came from the front, but the Warren Commission never considered that. The Warren Commission also did something that was really unfair, which was Mark Lane was a left wing lawyer from New York.
He went to the Warren Commission a cup and when it just got formed, and he said, look, Oswald's dead, but, you know, if if this was a criminal proceeding, he'd be entitled to legal representation. So could I be could I represent his interests before the commission, which basic fairness to a dead man would have required? Right? That would have been just like just like a court proceeding. You're allowed to have a lawyer.
No. The Warren Commission wouldn't do that. And and they never really took Oswald's rights as a criminal defendant into account. They said this guy is guilty. They look for evidence to prove it.
They concocted some other evidence and they wound up nine months later in September 1964 coming to the conclusion that Johnson and Hoover had demanded that this one guy did it alone. And and so that was the finding. It came out right before the sixty four presidential election. And it was like, well, I mean, you know, these are the Earl Warren, he's a great liberal hero. Alan Dulles, the former director of the CIA is on the commission.
These various senators, John Sherman Cooper, a Democratic congressman Hale Boggs. You know, these are the epitome of the Washington establishment. Surely, they got to the bottom of this matter. And that was it. And and but then people began to read the Warren Commission report.
And they the Warren Commission put out a a report about 800 pages, 900 pages, seemingly very detailed, and then they put out 26 volumes of their evidence that they had looked at. These were the FBI reports, the interviews with witnesses, the interviews with the doctors. And as people began to read that, they said the evidence doesn't support the conclusion. There's lots of evidence that Idaho didn't do this. And so in 1965 and '66, you started seeing these books came out.
Mark Lane, the the lawyer from New York, wrote one of them called rush to judgment. But there were others, and they called into question this finding. And these books were convincing. I mean, the the the Warren Commission's case was not strong when you looked at it, even just looked at the evidence that they themselves cited, much less the evidence that they didn't consider. And right away I mean, right away, within a couple years, nineteen sixty five, sixty six, a lot of people Mark Lane's book becomes a runaway bestseller.
It's a bestseller for twenty six weeks. And another book called called Whitewash, which reached the same conclusion that the Warren Commission was a whitewash, comes out. And this is not these aren't crazy crackpot people. Mark Lane was left wing, but he was a smart guy. He was a capable lawyer.
Harold Weisberg, who wrote white whitewash had been a on a congressional committee for years. He was very experienced in the ways of Washington. And, you know, in 1966, the editors of Life Magazine, one of the most popular publications in the country, a weekly photo magazine, came out in favor of reopening the investigation and Look magazine, another popular weekly publication. So this was very much in the mainstream media was, hey, maybe we should take another look at this thing. So that was when and this is where now we're kind of getting into how do we think about the assassination and and into sort of more covert aspects of it.
In 1967, the CIA writes a memo, which is will not become public for about another ten years, called countering critics of the Warren Commission. And they write up a strategy for for impugning and denouncing and discrediting people like Mark Lane and Harold Weisberg and other people who are calling for an investigation or opening reopening the investigation. And this is where the CIA starts calling people conspiracy theorists. These crazy people, they're making this stuff up. They don't trust the government.
They're kinda anti American. They're stupid. You know, you can't trust them. And what the CIA memo says is it's not public. It says to CIA personnel all over the world and in Washington, you know, here's how to deal with this type of criticism.
So they're putting out a a kind of company line. We've reached the end of this episode of the free version of Publix podcast. To access the full version, become a paying subscriber at public.substack.com.
