Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Noel.
Speaker 3: They call me Ben. We're joined with our guest super producer.
Speaker 3: Back to the freight train, Williams. Most importantly, you are here.
Speaker 3: That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 3: As you are listening to this on the day this
Speaker 3: podcast publishes, it is an infamous anniversary in the United States.
Speaker 3: Sixty years ago, the President of the US John Fitzgerald Kennedy,
Speaker 3: was assassinated November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, in a
Speaker 3: presidential motorcade in Dallas, Texas. The tragedy of this day
Speaker 3: fundamentally altered the course of American and indeed global history.
Speaker 3: Decades later, the world entire still has questions about what
Speaker 3: led to this murder and how it occurred. We've asked
Speaker 3: these questions previously in Stuff they Don't Want you to Know,
Speaker 3: But tonight we are immensely fortunate to be joined with
Speaker 3: the legendary director, the actor, the activist the writer now
Speaker 3: podcaster Rob Reiner, creator and co host of Who Killed JFK?
Speaker 3: Thank you for joining us, Rob, It is a profound honor.
Speaker 4: Oh thank you, Ben, this is so sweet to you.
Speaker 4: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 5: Can I just get my fanboy thing out of the
Speaker 5: way really quick? But this is Spinal Tap is my
Speaker 5: favorite movie of all time and that force everyone in
Speaker 5: my life to watch it while I literally tear up
Speaker 5: because it's very nice and hilarious and it's just everything
Speaker 5: I love about rock and roll.
Speaker 4: It's so good. Well, I hear you're work it. It'll
Speaker 4: make you feel good that we're now engaged in the
Speaker 4: filming a sequel. We're going to do it. It's the
Speaker 4: first time in forty years we came up with an
Speaker 4: it and the four of us are going to get
Speaker 4: out there and and make a sequel to Spinal Tap.
Speaker 3: Yeah, take it.
Speaker 2: The three of us are musicians and uh we we've
Speaker 2: you know, got video degrees and everything. So we we
Speaker 2: just are right in that exact place where this is
Speaker 2: spinal like where Spinal Tap just is like I don't know,
Speaker 2: it's a mecha.
Speaker 5: It looms large and I just wrapped up a podcast
Speaker 5: documentary about the Stones in seventy two, and I had
Speaker 5: a lot of tape I was working with from them
Speaker 5: from those days, and I realized, I think you were
Speaker 5: doing their voices. I think the spinal tap guys are
Speaker 5: the Stones circa seventy two, with their soft spoken, little
Speaker 5: British littlets something to it. Maybe I'm wrong, but.
Speaker 4: In the film, there's a fine line between stupid and
Speaker 4: clever and try there, We try to hit that line,
Speaker 4: and isn't that?
Speaker 3: Isn't that also in some ways part of the discourse
Speaker 3: that has surrounded uh, the allegations of conspiracy in the
Speaker 3: JFK assassination.
Speaker 4: You know, look at that. Wow, I gotta I gotta
Speaker 4: put a neck brace on uh and call my insurance
Speaker 4: agent because.
Speaker 5: He's got a point, though, Rob stupid and clever, that
Speaker 5: that's something that we see a lot with conspiracy stuff,
Speaker 5: because yeah, that's true. Maybe clever is a bit of
Speaker 5: a misnomer, but it's all about like how close are
Speaker 5: there facts involved? Is there some logical reasoning behind it?
Speaker 5: Or are people just passing the time right?
Speaker 4: Right? No, you're you're exactly right. Because the name, the
Speaker 4: words conspiracy theory have gotten a weird take now because everybody, uh,
Speaker 4: you know, who's aspiring to you know, QAnon or disinformation
Speaker 4: or they're going on wacky websites and things. Anybody who
Speaker 4: talks about conspiracy theory has got a tinfoil hat and
Speaker 4: you know is running around, you know, spotting UFOs all
Speaker 4: over the place. But there are actual conspiracies that actually happened,
Speaker 4: and this is one of them. And the podcast that
Speaker 4: we do Who Killed JFK? That I do with Solo
Speaker 4: Dad O'Brien is the deepest dive and the most comprehensive
Speaker 4: look at that conspiracy and how it happened. And you know,
Speaker 4: as we say in the podcast, it's the greatest murder
Speaker 4: mystery in the history of America. Nothing like it has
Speaker 4: ever happened before. And the America was traumatized. There was
Speaker 4: a concentrated trauma put at the heart of America at
Speaker 4: that point, and people who were alive at the time
Speaker 4: will never get over it. It was a colective trauma that
Speaker 4: gripped the entire country and we're still feeling the effects
Speaker 4: of it today.
Speaker 3: And that note about never getting over it, there's something
Speaker 3: there's something poetic with the beginning of episode one. I
Speaker 3: think maybe we Also, before we start with the first
Speaker 3: episode of Who Killed JFK, let's travel back, if it's
Speaker 3: all right, to your experience to the moment the day
Speaker 3: of the assassination. Again, it's November twenty second, nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 3: just a few days before Thanksgiving.
Speaker 4: You are, I.
Speaker 3: Believe, sixteen years old, right. Could you paint the picture
Speaker 3: for us and for our listeners of that experience.
Speaker 4: Yes, I mean anybody who was alive at that time
Speaker 4: and was aware knows exactly where they were when they
Speaker 4: heard that news. You can talk to anybody, they'll tell
Speaker 4: you exactly where they were what was happening. I was sixteen,
Speaker 4: as you said, I was in high school. I was
Speaker 4: in my physics class, and I'll never forget a student
Speaker 4: walked in whispered into the teacher's ear, and he turned
Speaker 4: to us and he said, I have some terrible news,
Speaker 4: and he related to us what had happened to the president,
Speaker 4: and we were all just stunned and shocked. We were
Speaker 4: sent home from school. Everybody was sent home, and we
Speaker 4: turned on our televisions and we watched none stop a
Speaker 4: television on the reports up until and I was one
Speaker 4: of the people who watched the person who was accused
Speaker 4: of killing President Kennedy Lee Harvey Oswald. I watched him
Speaker 4: get assassinated on live television. I mean it actually happened.
Speaker 4: I watched this man. We found out his name was
Speaker 4: Jack Ruby, who's a local nightclub owner of a place
Speaker 4: called the Carousel Nightclub. He went into the Dallas police station,
Speaker 4: drew a gun, and stood right in front of Lee
Speaker 4: Harvey Oswald then shot him to death. And for many
Speaker 4: of us, that was the moment at which we said,
Speaker 4: what the heck is going on here? The man who
Speaker 4: has supposedly killed the president is now being murdered himself.
Speaker 4: Why is that happening? Who's doing this? Who's behind all this?
Speaker 2: You're talking to three guys who were born in the eighties,
Speaker 2: so you know, when we first encounter this, we get
Speaker 2: to an age where, you know, our parents decide we
Speaker 2: can learn about the JFK assassination, or our schools decide
Speaker 2: we are allowed to learn about it. We have all
Speaker 2: of this information already built in, right, but in going
Speaker 2: back and listening to Who Killed JFK this podcast, we're
Speaker 2: being presented with this information as it was happening, right,
Speaker 2: So we get that experience that you're sharing with us now, Rob.
Speaker 2: And one of the things you mentioned early on is
Speaker 2: how comedians like Mort Sahl and Dick Gregory were kind
Speaker 2: of they're using their material as a way for America
Speaker 2: to begin to process this information, right, Yes, Yes, And
Speaker 2: what's interesting about that is these guys were both brilliant
Speaker 2: social and political satirists.
Speaker 4: These were the most incisive, well observed type people who
Speaker 4: looked at American life and observed it in the most
Speaker 4: intelligent and fine way. And when they diverged from their
Speaker 4: normal routines. In the case of Mortsaul, I was nineteen
Speaker 4: when I watched him go. I was opening for The
Speaker 4: Hungry Eye for a singer named Carmen McCrae, who's a
Speaker 4: great jazz singer. And when I would finish my set
Speaker 4: with my partner Larry Bishop, we'd go into this smaller
Speaker 4: room where Dick where mort Saul was not doing his
Speaker 4: normal routine. He was only talking about the Kennedy assassination
Speaker 4: and the Warren Commission report on the assassination had come
Speaker 4: out and he was attacking it, saying it's full of lies,
Speaker 4: it doesn't make any sense. And that and people like
Speaker 4: Dick Gregory, who went on Geraldo Rivera's show, and for
Speaker 4: the first time they exposed the Zapruder film, which was
Speaker 4: the film that the only film that really captures the
Speaker 4: assassination by a guy named Abraham Zapruder, was a local dressmaker.
Speaker 4: Those people, those two comedians, really started the conversation moving forward.
Speaker 4: People started getting engaged, and those people could draw your attention.
Speaker 4: They were great speakers, They were great incisive commentators on
Speaker 4: the times. When I saw Mark Saul, I started really
Speaker 4: getting into it. I read a book called Rush to
Speaker 4: Judgment by a writer named Mark Lane, and he completely
Speaker 4: disbanded the Warren Commission and pointed out the inconsistencies, the
Speaker 4: things that were left out, the lies. When you started
Speaker 4: getting into realizing that this was not only a cover
Speaker 4: up by the government of what had happened, but it
Speaker 4: uncovered as you track it over the years, this conspiracy
Speaker 4: that American forces got together to kill an American president
Speaker 4: in broad daylight on an American street. And the more
Speaker 4: you look into it, the more disturbing it is. And
Speaker 4: you know, I was saying that, you know, you look
Speaker 4: at something like this and that sixty years has gone
Speaker 4: by and unless you're following it closely. There are revelations
Speaker 4: that come out in drips and drabs, and when they
Speaker 4: come out, unless you're following it all, you don't know
Speaker 4: what that has to do with anything else. So this
Speaker 4: podcast what it does is it takes sixty years of revelations,
Speaker 4: puts it all in one place and hopefully makes it
Speaker 4: understandable to people and completely you know, fills in the
Speaker 4: puzzle of what actually happened on that desk.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is something that I think is key
Speaker 3: the contextualization. We were talking a little bit off air rup.
Speaker 3: People who are somewhat familiar with the JFK assassination and
Speaker 3: the ins and outs of it may be surprised to
Speaker 3: learn that documents pertaining to it were classified until quite
Speaker 3: recently and new information begins to emerge. Who killed JFK?
Speaker 3: Does a phenomenal job of connecting some of these puzzle pieces.
Speaker 3: And already you've mentioned some very bright points about this
Speaker 3: that remain controversial, especially the Warren Commission, which I think
Speaker 3: you do a supreme and scrupulous job of pointing out
Speaker 3: some possible conflicts of interest possible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Okay, well, guys, I'm going to rob Here's what's
Speaker 4: interesting about this Yeah, there were huge conflicts of interests.
Speaker 4: First of all, there's still almost five thousand documents that
Speaker 4: have not been released to the public, and you know,
Speaker 4: we may never see those documents. But the conflict of
Speaker 4: inters that you're talking about, and there were two investigations.
Speaker 4: People have to understand. There are two official government investigation
Speaker 4: of the assassination of JFK. The first was the Warren Commission,
Speaker 4: which came out in nineteen sixty four. The second one
Speaker 4: was done by a group called the House Select Committee
Speaker 4: on Assassinations, and now it came out in the mid seventies.
Speaker 4: It came out to actually the report came out in
Speaker 4: the late seventies. Both of those investigations were compromised. And
Speaker 4: the way in which that happened is in the first investigation,
Speaker 4: the Warren Commission, Lyndon Johnson was very concerned about things
Speaker 4: getting out that might implicate the Russians or the Cubans
Speaker 4: in a way that might ultimately cause a nuclear war,
Speaker 4: and he wanted to avoid that. He didn't want any
Speaker 4: information to come into the investigation that would do anything
Speaker 4: but point to Lee Harvey Oswald as a loan gunman.
Speaker 4: So what he did is they put together This commission
Speaker 4: headed up by Chief Justice Earl Warren, but his name
Speaker 4: was mostly titular. In this they put in charge of
Speaker 4: the gatekeeper sense of all information coming from the CIA,
Speaker 4: into the hands of a man named Alan Dulles. Alan
Speaker 4: Dulles was the first civilian head of the CIA in
Speaker 4: the nineteen forties. Now, Alan Dulles was one of the
Speaker 4: architects of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The Bay of
Speaker 4: Pigs invasion was an attempt by the to train Cuban
Speaker 4: exiles to go into Cuba and overthrow Castro, who had
Speaker 4: overthrown Battista just a few years prior. Now, Alan Dulles
Speaker 4: had this plan with the CIA, working with these Cuban exiles,
Speaker 4: they went into the Bay of They went into Cuba,
Speaker 4: and they did invade, and they thought that Kennedy would
Speaker 4: offer air support, that once the troops got in there,
Speaker 4: they would send American planes and they would take back Cuba.
Speaker 4: Kennedy told them before the and by the way, Kennedy
Speaker 4: inherited this plan from Eisenhower and Nixon. He was only
Speaker 4: in office for two or three months when they when
Speaker 4: they did this, he told them ahead of time, I
Speaker 4: will not send American airplanes because I don't want the
Speaker 4: United States footprint. I don't want any fingerprints on to
Speaker 4: be tracked back to the United States. He told them that,
Speaker 4: and Dulles said, there's no way, don't worry about it.
Speaker 4: Once we get in there, he's going to see this
Speaker 4: and he's gonna want to send those those airplanes. He
Speaker 4: never did, and what happened was all the Cuban Xes.
Speaker 4: They were slaughtered on the beaches in Cuba, and it
Speaker 4: was a complete and utter disaster. Months later, Kennedy fires
Speaker 4: Alan Dulles, and very you know, is known to have said,
Speaker 4: I want to take the CIA and break it up
Speaker 4: into a thousand pieces. He was furious at the CIA
Speaker 4: because they were doing these covert activities without presidential approvals.
Speaker 4: I mean, they were doing them separately and then you know,
Speaker 4: then reporting back to the president. So he wanted to
Speaker 4: get rid of it. He puts Johnson puts Alan Dulles
Speaker 4: in charge of any information coming from the CIA into
Speaker 4: the Warrant Commission, and you know, obviously nothing got in. No, No,
Speaker 4: we didn't know. We didn't know about the CIA's connection
Speaker 4: to the mafia. We didn't know about the CIA's extra
Speaker 4: judicial killings. Of heads of state, which they did many
Speaker 4: of We didn't know about a lot of the involvement
Speaker 4: with the Cubans in Cuba. We didn't know any of
Speaker 4: this stuff. So Alan Dalles is compromising that. Now. The
Speaker 4: big revelation, the big, big, big revelation was in the
Speaker 4: second investigation that was for the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
Speaker 4: And we bring this up in the podcast as well.
Speaker 4: And this didn't come out, This didn't come out until
Speaker 4: years after the investigation. But the man put in charge
Speaker 4: of being the liaison between the House Investigation and the
Speaker 4: CIA was a man named George Joannedes. You've never heard
Speaker 4: of his name, you don't know who he is, but
Speaker 4: I can. What I'll tell you is George joaned was
Speaker 4: a former CIA agent and he was the head of
Speaker 4: a counter intelligence program that developed assets, one of which
Speaker 4: was Lee Harvey Oswalal. So the guy who was the
Speaker 4: gatekeeper again to the CIA was a very guy who
Speaker 4: they wanted to who they should have questioned. We interviewed
Speaker 4: Robert Blakey, who was the counsel to the House Select Committee.
Speaker 4: He had no idea that this is what Joe and
Speaker 4: Edes did. And when he found out many years later
Speaker 4: he was furious. He said, if I had known then
Speaker 4: what I knew now, I would have put Joe and
Speaker 4: Edes on the stand. He was the answer to many
Speaker 4: of our questions of how the CIA was involved in
Speaker 4: the assassination. So you know, there you have two big
Speaker 4: pieces of information there, separated by men many many years,
Speaker 4: and we try to put it all together in one place.
Speaker 3: And uh, there's also the question a lot of our
Speaker 3: fellow listeners will be asking, which is is there such
Speaker 3: thing as a former CIA agent?
Speaker 4: It makes you think, right, no, there's there's no such thing.
Speaker 4: I mean a CIA agent. You you you you may
Speaker 4: not be active in the way you were when you
Speaker 4: were being paid by the agency, but you have security
Speaker 4: clearance and uh, you have it for your life. And
Speaker 4: you you know, it was an interesting thing recently with
Speaker 4: a Trump I think try to strip uh And did
Speaker 4: I think strip John Brennan of his security clearance because
Speaker 4: you didn't like what John Brennan was saying about him
Speaker 4: and about his uh, you know, his involvement in January sixth.
Speaker 4: So yes, you're you're always connected once you once you're there.
Speaker 5: Even about the clearances, I mean the relationships, these lifelong
Speaker 5: relationships and attacks that you can leverage even minus the
Speaker 5: security clearances. Correct, I mean I think that stuff is
Speaker 5: money in the bank.
Speaker 4: Yeah, No, that's true power.
Speaker 2: Just a real quick insert here for anybody that wants
Speaker 2: to go deep down the rabbit hole. I'm looking at
Speaker 2: a declassified document here that describes mister Johanned's work from
Speaker 2: December nineteen sixty two to April nineteen sixty four, and
Speaker 2: it describes him as the case officer for the Cuban
Speaker 2: Exile Group Directorio Revolutionnarios. Studient Teal is known as Student.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a student directed anti Castro group.
Speaker 3: And there's there's something else too, And I know people
Speaker 3: are yelling at their phones right now, or however you
Speaker 3: listen to shows the House Select Committee, you have this,
Speaker 3: you have this terrifying observation rob in who killed JFK?
Speaker 3: Where you say, look, these are two fundament only flawed
Speaker 3: investigations and they reach two very different conclusions. And one thing,
Speaker 3: one thing that I think stands out for people were
Speaker 3: who were born after the assassination is to is to
Speaker 3: read the conclusions of the House Select Committee and see
Speaker 3: that they have dropped the C word. They have said
Speaker 3: the assassination seemed to be the result of a I
Speaker 3: believe the quote is probable conspiracy, but.
Speaker 4: Then yes, I mean the the Warrant Commission basically said
Speaker 4: that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman, did it
Speaker 4: all by himself. The House Select Committee said it was
Speaker 4: probably a conspiracy based on all the investigation they had done,
Speaker 4: but they didn't say who was involved in the conspiracy.
Speaker 4: They never could get that far because of this guy,
Speaker 4: George Joanniedes. They they didn't They didn't name the mob,
Speaker 4: they didn't name the CIA, they didn't talk about the
Speaker 4: Cuban exilese. They just said, based on the information they had,
Speaker 4: it was probably a conspiracy. So you have two diametrically
Speaker 4: opposed conclusions, and that those are the two government records now.
Speaker 2: And Warren Commission is nineteen sixty four, so very soon
Speaker 2: after the assassination, and the House Select Committee isn't until
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy six. So just imagine, like again, already we've
Speaker 2: got decades separating, a decade separating these two things. And
Speaker 2: you wonder why Americans in general, you're talking about drips
Speaker 2: and drabs information coming out from the very beginning. It's
Speaker 2: like we're getting little bits and pieces, right, and I
Speaker 2: swear it feels like it's designed that way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I don't know design, but if you think
Speaker 4: about you mentioned Dick Gregory. The House Select Committee was
Speaker 4: born out of an investigation by Idaho Senator Frank Church.
Speaker 4: They had a committee there set up in the Senate
Speaker 4: and that was based on information that was coming out
Speaker 4: that the CIA was doing all kinds of things that
Speaker 4: they were not aware of. And it came out as
Speaker 4: a you know, a revelation during that that they were
Speaker 4: doing these extra judicial killings, that other things were going on.
Speaker 4: And then Dick Gregory went on The Heraldo Show and
Speaker 4: they showed the Zapruder film for the first time. Now,
Speaker 4: the Zapruder film was you know, the Warrant Commission saw it.
Speaker 4: The public had not seen it. Nobody still need photographs,
Speaker 4: just some still photographs, but we didn't have a context
Speaker 4: and we didn't see it. When that came out and
Speaker 4: the Church Committee started revealing what they knew, that gave
Speaker 4: birth to the House Select Committee. And that was, like
Speaker 4: you say, well over ten years after the Warren Commission
Speaker 4: came out. So now all of a sudden, you have
Speaker 4: another flashpoint. Now when Oliver Stone made his film a
Speaker 4: JFK in nineteen ninety two or ninety one. I believe
Speaker 4: it was that also triggered the JFK Records Act and
Speaker 4: the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board, which was
Speaker 4: another investigation. So these things are separated by many, many years,
Speaker 4: and during each of these investigations, more and more and
Speaker 4: more information came out. So, like I say, it's very
Speaker 4: tough to follow. And unless you're tracking all this stuff
Speaker 4: when it comes out, you wouldn't. You wouldn't know how
Speaker 4: to put those pieces together. That's what we try to
Speaker 4: do in this podcast.
Speaker 2: And you do it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say accomplished so far. And folks, full
Speaker 3: disclosure here we are in media arrests. We are listening
Speaker 3: along with you all. We do not know how this
Speaker 3: story concludes yet. I do want to throw one thing here.
Speaker 3: That's an interesting note, Rob.
Speaker 4: That I before you say that, before you put a
Speaker 4: pin in it, I want to hear the interesting note.
Speaker 4: But by the end of it, by the tenth episode,
Speaker 4: you will hear what we believe happened that day, and
Speaker 4: we will name the shooters that we believe for shooting,
Speaker 4: and we will name the positions that we believe those
Speaker 4: shooters were in So I'm just.
Speaker 3: Will you come back on the show?
Speaker 4: Sure? Sure, absolutely, Okay.
Speaker 2: So it'll be later than this, early in the morning,
Speaker 2: we promised you.
Speaker 4: Yes, I agree.
Speaker 3: So there's something interesting in speaking of contextualization. There is
Speaker 3: a there is a deep temptation often that pulls us
Speaker 3: away from objectivity when we start connecting dots, right, because
Speaker 3: humans identify patterns. And I noticed that of the seven
Speaker 3: official members of the Warren Commission, one died under it
Speaker 3: or disappeared under extremely mysterious circumstances before the House Select Committee,
Speaker 3: uh and the Church Committee got their crack at this,
Speaker 3: and would be Hail Boggs right, disappeared over over the hinterlands.
Speaker 4: Of Alaska, and there was a plane crash that you know,
Speaker 4: we can't say for sure what happened there. We don't know,
Speaker 4: and we're not going to, you know, be some conjecture
Speaker 4: over this. It happened. And but there are a lot
Speaker 4: of mysterious deaths that occurred right after the Warren Commission
Speaker 4: came out. There was a very famous woman who was
Speaker 4: married to a CIA agent. Her name is Mary Meyer,
Speaker 4: and her sister was having an affair with Jack Kennedy
Speaker 4: and she at the minute the And this is one
Speaker 4: of the reasons I wanted Sola Dad O'Brien to to
Speaker 4: do this with me, because she did a podcast about
Speaker 4: this called Murder on the Towpath in which this woman
Speaker 4: was assassinated walking in Georgetown. And day that she was killed,
Speaker 4: James Angleton, who was the head of counterintelligence for the CIA,
Speaker 4: along with Ben Bradley, who was editor of The Washington Post,
Speaker 4: they arrived at Mary Meyer's art studio and confiscated a
Speaker 4: diary that she kept. So there's that. And you know
Speaker 4: Dorothy kill Gallan, who was killed shortly after attending the
Speaker 4: Jack Ruby trial and was the only one to have
Speaker 4: actual interviews with Jack Ruby. She was killed. And there
Speaker 4: was a number of people that we did a study
Speaker 4: and there were about I think eighteen critical key witnesses
Speaker 4: who died of either a heart attack or suicide or
Speaker 4: accident or jump out of a window something within two
Speaker 4: years of the assassination. And they ran some numbers on
Speaker 4: it and it's like seven hundred trillion, I mean, some
Speaker 4: crazy number the odds of all of those people dying
Speaker 4: in that way. But you know, we don't get into
Speaker 4: any of that stuff, because we can't prove why these
Speaker 4: people died, I mean, and so what we've tried to
Speaker 4: do in the podcast is just stick with what we know.
Speaker 4: These are things we know, and then you know, we
Speaker 4: do our best guess as to put together based on
Speaker 4: everything we know, what actually happened.
Speaker 3: And we'll pause here for a word from our sponsor
Speaker 3: before we return and ask Rob Ryder who killed JFK.
Speaker 4: And we have returned.
Speaker 5: You know, we talked a little bit off Mike before
Speaker 5: we started rolling, just about this event being sort of
Speaker 5: the beginning of this massive polarization of the American people,
Speaker 5: and it being you described it as sort of an
Speaker 5: end of innocence, and I think in Ben you wrote
Speaker 5: in the outline here this really was a moment that
Speaker 5: you could trace back to when distrust in our government
Speaker 5: really kind of began as much more of a mainstream thing. Rob,
Speaker 5: can you kind of couple all those ideas together into
Speaker 5: sort of your thoughts on what that end of innocence means?
Speaker 4: And well, I mean, we you know, after the Second
Speaker 4: World War, we were the heroes, We were the good guys,
Speaker 4: and we could do nothing wrong. I mean, we you know,
Speaker 4: we had prosperity and people, you know, the gi Bill
Speaker 4: and people were living in you know, the suburbs, and
Speaker 4: they were, you know, things were doing, you know, better
Speaker 4: for a lot of people, not for not for black people,
Speaker 4: but for a lot of Americans. And then you have
Speaker 4: this moment happened in nineteen sixty three where it's like
Speaker 4: your father was taking I mean, you know, the leader
Speaker 4: of the country was just killed like that. And we
Speaker 4: knew at the time, I mean, which came out that
Speaker 4: Kennedy was trying to make a forge your path to peace.
Speaker 4: He gave a very famous speech at American University where
Speaker 4: he talked about we cannot go down this road of
Speaker 4: nuclear holocaust. We have to find a way to forge
Speaker 4: a path to peace. Well, in the context of that,
Speaker 4: he wrote a memo which is on file that he
Speaker 4: was going to call for the removal of a thousand
Speaker 4: troops out of Vietnam that year and the removal of
Speaker 4: all military out of Vietnam by the end of nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty five. Now we don't know would he have done that,
Speaker 4: would he not have done that. What we do know
Speaker 4: is that he wrote the memo, and certainly the hardliners
Speaker 4: in the CIA and the military knew that, and they
Speaker 4: were worried that that was going to happen. So what happens.
Speaker 4: Kennedy gets assassinated, Johnson becomes president, and the next thing
Speaker 4: you know, we're stepping up the war in Vietnam. And
Speaker 4: that to me was the beginning of a huge divide
Speaker 4: in America.
Speaker 5: Benefit though staying in Vietnam, Like I think I understand,
Speaker 5: but just from your respective like the hardliners, as you mentioned,
Speaker 5: like who is benefiting from US maintaining a presence in Vietnam?
Speaker 5: And it was such a disastrous you know conflicts.
Speaker 4: Well, first of all, ideologically, the hardliners are thinking, and
Speaker 4: that was certainly the thoughts of the day, there was
Speaker 4: a better dead than red. They believed that there was
Speaker 4: this domino theory and that if one country went fell communists,
Speaker 4: that there would be a domino theory and the rest
Speaker 4: of the world would go communists. They were actually afraid
Speaker 4: that the world was going to turn into a communistic world.
Speaker 4: So ideologically that's what they thought. Now on a purely
Speaker 4: economic standpoint, you know it, you make money, you go
Speaker 4: to war. And in the military industrial complex, which by
Speaker 4: the way, Eisenhower warned us beware, in the military industrial complex.
Speaker 4: They want they want to be able to do that
Speaker 4: because it's good business. So those two things are happening there.
Speaker 4: And for young people, they're being sent off to war
Speaker 4: to die in a war that they don't believe is
Speaker 4: just they don't believe is legal. And if you remember,
Speaker 4: I mean people who want to study their history, there
Speaker 4: was a thing called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which
Speaker 4: was all about the fact that we were told that
Speaker 4: our ship was fired on in Vietnam in this Tonkin
Speaker 4: ship was fired on and so I mean in the
Speaker 4: Gulf of Tonkin, and that was the pretext for why
Speaker 4: we went to war in Vietnam. So you had a
Speaker 4: lot of distrust going on and the country started to divide.
Speaker 4: There were protests all over the country, and we divided
Speaker 4: as a nation. And I believe that it was the
Speaker 4: beginning of the divide that you see now. This country
Speaker 4: couldn't be more divided than they are now. And I
Speaker 4: would point back to what happened and going into Vietnam
Speaker 4: that was the beginning of that divide.
Speaker 2: Well, and there's so many things to talk about here
Speaker 2: that branch from that. But we learn in your podcast
Speaker 2: that JFK was maintaining maybe off the books, we would say,
Speaker 2: contact with Soviet officials, like the highest Soviet officials and
Speaker 2: Cuban officials, and attempting to smooth things out directly rather
Speaker 2: than through the mechanisms that would normally you'd need to
Speaker 2: go through.
Speaker 4: To have vice conversation. Back channeling. He was back channeling
Speaker 4: with Kruse Jeff. He was back channeling with Castro directly
Speaker 4: with Kruse Jeff and Castro to make sure that and
Speaker 4: this is on the heels of the Cuban missile crisis,
Speaker 4: which happened a year after the Bay of Pigs. The
Speaker 4: Cuban missile crisis, as people know, or you know, maybe
Speaker 4: they're learning for the first time, was we were on
Speaker 4: the brink of a nuclear war, and those of us
Speaker 4: who were alive at the time will never ever forget it.
Speaker 4: We found out that there were nuclear weapons in Cuba
Speaker 4: that were put there by the Russians ninety miles away
Speaker 4: from America, and they could reach Washington in twenty minutes.
Speaker 4: So we were doing drills in school. Now they have
Speaker 4: active shooter drills. In my time, they had a duck
Speaker 4: and covered drill that you under the desk. You'd get
Speaker 4: under a desk in case of a nuclear Now. I
Speaker 4: used to make a joke about it, which is, you know,
Speaker 4: it was a known fact that the material that they
Speaker 4: made school desks out of could actually repel a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 4: But it's of course it's ridiculous.
Speaker 5: It's optics though, right, it's this idea.
Speaker 4: No, that's with safety, you know, yeah, that we better
Speaker 4: you know, keep ourselves safe. So we were all believing
Speaker 4: that that's what we were a minute away from a
Speaker 4: nuclear holocaust, and that was that was the basis fun,
Speaker 4: you know, which we lived. So uh, he started to
Speaker 4: back channel. He said, you know, we can't let this happen.
Speaker 4: What can we do? They you know, he settled the
Speaker 4: Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy did. He He made a deal
Speaker 4: with kruse Chef. We had missiles in Turkey. He said
Speaker 4: to kruse Chef, will take those missiles out of Turkey
Speaker 4: if you take these missiles out of Cuba, which happened.
Speaker 4: But then he said, from there on we got to
Speaker 4: make sure that nothing like this happens again, because we
Speaker 4: the whole world. We're going to blow up the whole
Speaker 4: world if we do this. And so he started back
Speaker 4: channeling to Castro to kruse Chef, and the CIA was
Speaker 4: well aware of that. They became well aware of that,
Speaker 4: and that added to their distrust of Kennedy in terms
Speaker 4: of his fight against communism.
Speaker 3: And also there seems to be this it was a
Speaker 3: thing that the American public was largely unaware of, but
Speaker 3: there was internal descent escalating into chaos at the same
Speaker 3: time this there was this move for de escalation.
Speaker 4: Yes, right during the Cuban missile crisis, the hardliners in
Speaker 4: both the CIA and the military were pushing Kennedy like crazy,
Speaker 4: make a strike, take them out, take those missiles out,
Speaker 4: go after them. And they were very upset with him
Speaker 4: when he chose this this other path. It was it
Speaker 4: was contentious. There was a lot of screaming, yelling going
Speaker 4: on in the White It's thirteen days, very famous time,
Speaker 4: thirteen days where we all lived on the edge of
Speaker 4: are we going to be blown up?
Speaker 3: Do you feel rob that there was a somewhat of
Speaker 3: a like lack of respect amid the unelected power structures
Speaker 3: of US governance, because from what we've been reading, it
Speaker 3: seems as though when Kennedy enters office, you know, the
Speaker 3: the CIA still still high off the oss World War
Speaker 3: two actions. They're kind of coming in with this attitude that, yes,
Speaker 3: you will be a figurehead and you will do what
Speaker 3: we the adults say is.
Speaker 4: Well, not only that, yeah, not only that. But Kennedy
Speaker 4: campaigned in nineteen sixty as a anti communist, you know,
Speaker 4: strong against communism. There was a big debate, you know,
Speaker 4: with with Nixon. It was on television. I think it
Speaker 4: was one of the first televised debates, and he had
Speaker 4: to show that he had real bona fides in fighting communism.
Speaker 4: He ran as a anti communist, strong willed, a guy
Speaker 4: who would stand you know, in his inaugural desk, We'll
Speaker 4: stand up to any foe. We'll fight anybody to do this.
Speaker 4: And he knew in order to win he had to
Speaker 4: show his strength against communism. But as the realities presented himself,
Speaker 4: he realizes that that strength that he showed could lead
Speaker 4: to world hundreds and hundreds of millions of people being killed.
Speaker 4: And so the reality set in and he said, no,
Speaker 4: I got to go a different, a different direction here.
Speaker 4: And they were mad. They were angry at him because
Speaker 4: they assumed that he was going to be a you know,
Speaker 4: a real, real, you know as an extension of the
Speaker 4: McCarthy days, where go after the comedy, get him out
Speaker 4: of government, get you know, anybody could be a comedy.
Speaker 4: They're lurking, you know, get get rid of them. Uh,
Speaker 4: they thought he was going to be one of those guys.
Speaker 5: That's a proper witch hunt, though not the way it's
Speaker 5: kind of been dog whistleified by the Trump administration. You know,
Speaker 5: that was people actually being persecuted who did not have
Speaker 5: any affiliation.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, a lot of them were.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And it makes me wonder about the just
Speaker 3: real quick, the concept of greater good, which seems to
Speaker 3: be you know, both an ideological motivating force for a
Speaker 3: lot of the more hawkish factors here. And I have
Speaker 3: to say it, one of the things that I went
Speaker 3: back and rewatched after listening to the first several episodes
Speaker 3: of Who Killed JFK? Was a few good men and
Speaker 3: there's you know, there's there's something there that reminds me
Speaker 3: and probably a lot of our listeners too, reminds me
Speaker 3: so viscerally of that rationalization where where we have characters
Speaker 3: who are saying, look, did I do something quote unquote wrong? Maybe,
Speaker 3: but I did it for the right reasons. Do you feel.
Speaker 3: Do you feel that that was sort of a common
Speaker 3: mentality in the operations.
Speaker 4: I mean that is, you know, the military is there
Speaker 4: to protect us, and that's good, we want that. But
Speaker 4: the question is how far do you go to protect us?
Speaker 4: Are you willing to commit war crimes? In the case
Speaker 4: of Nazi Germany? Are you willing to do anything? And
Speaker 4: that's what the character that Jack Nicholson plays in Few
Speaker 4: Good Men. He says, you want me on that wall,
Speaker 4: you need me on that wall. I'm doing what you
Speaker 4: can't do. And so the question always is how far
Speaker 4: are you willing to go in order to protect people?
Speaker 4: Are you willing to blow up the world? I mean,
Speaker 4: who wins? Nobody wins in that situation. You're not protecting anybody.
Speaker 5: And unfortunately, as just mere mortal voters, we don't get
Speaker 5: to decide how far that line is.
Speaker 4: No, we don't, no, no. But what we're hoping is
Speaker 4: that we, as normal voters, are electing people who have
Speaker 4: the good sense to know where that line is, and
Speaker 4: that that's where we are now. I mean, we're we
Speaker 4: couldn't be more divided. You've got one guy who's willing
Speaker 4: to do anything, you know, Donald Trump is willing to
Speaker 4: do anything to keep power. And that means he even
Speaker 4: said it. I'm not making it it up. He said it.
Speaker 4: We'll put the vermin you know, we'll take and we'll
Speaker 4: put them in in in camps, and we'll make sure
Speaker 4: we're familiar with We'll get the blood, you know, the disgusting,
Speaker 4: the thing that's poisoning the American bloodstream, will put him
Speaker 4: in camps. That's he said that.
Speaker 3: But he's also plagiarizing Adolf Hitler too.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, because he can't make that stuff up. He's
Speaker 4: not smart enough. But I mean, and I always heard
Speaker 4: that he had mine kamf on his ben stand. Well,
Speaker 4: he probably had it on his best name. He didn't
Speaker 4: read it. I mean, I don't know how much of
Speaker 4: you bred who knows. I don't know what he does
Speaker 4: with reading.
Speaker 5: Mine from the Bible, and he didn't read either of them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, he probably held mine comp He held my
Speaker 4: comp up the wrong way too. But guys, but we're
Speaker 4: getting too far a field here. But the truth is,
Speaker 4: we want to elect people who know where that line
Speaker 4: is and not to cross it, because when you cross it,
Speaker 4: you're not protecting people.
Speaker 3: You're also not electing a lot of the decision makers
Speaker 3: to your point, directly and representative democracy. There's no one,
Speaker 3: No average voter votes for a Supreme Court nominee, No
Speaker 3: average voter votes for the people in charge of the
Speaker 3: NSA or the CIA.
Speaker 4: No. But what you are voting for is you're voting
Speaker 4: for a president who nominates Supreme Court justices, who nominates
Speaker 4: a secretary of Defense, you know, any of the positions.
Speaker 4: You're nominating somebody, or you're voting for somebody who has
Speaker 4: the power to nominate people who are sensible, who know
Speaker 4: where the line is. That's representative government, and that's what
Speaker 4: you want. You want somebody who's reasoned, who's intelligent, and
Speaker 4: who can make the right decisions.
Speaker 5: Hey, let's take a quick pause here for a word
Speaker 5: from our sponsor, and then we'll return with more from
Speaker 5: Rob Ryner.
Speaker 4: And we're back.
Speaker 5: Let's jump right into our conversation with Rob Reiner already
Speaker 5: in progress.
Speaker 2: Let's take it back to nineteen seventy five, to the
Speaker 2: Church Committee again, because it's directly related to this. That's
Speaker 2: when the American public learned about a couple things that
Speaker 2: you might be familiar with if you're listening to this show.
Speaker 2: Mk Ultra and Cointelpro specifically when it comes to assassinations.
Speaker 2: I'm thinking about Cointelpro. If you jump five years after
Speaker 2: JFK's assassination and you look at Martin Luther King Junior,
Speaker 2: you look at JFK's brother RFK, So it's like, again
Speaker 2: not directly perhaps related to Cointelpro, but it is a
Speaker 2: secret it is a secret thing that we didn't know about,
Speaker 2: that the FBI was doing to investigate people that they
Speaker 2: thought would be counter to the vision of the world
Speaker 2: that they had, Right.
Speaker 4: That's right, that's right. And you mentioned it's counterintelligence program.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's what they're doing. They're trying to root
Speaker 4: out anybody that goes against their ideaology. You mentioned kut
Speaker 4: mk Ultra was a program that was designed at the CIA,
Speaker 4: and this was during the Cold War where there was
Speaker 4: a lot of concern about moles infiltrating our intelligence community
Speaker 4: and getting information, and we wanted to try to see
Speaker 4: if we could get our people inside the you know,
Speaker 4: the Soviet Union, inside the KGB. There was this big
Speaker 4: cat and mouse game going on, headed up by this
Speaker 4: head of counter intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, who was a
Speaker 4: brilliant guy. Genius but also paranoid beyond belief that he
Speaker 4: thought there was, you know, a mole everywhere you look.
Speaker 4: So this mk Ultra program was designed to try to
Speaker 4: create spies, people who would look like, you know, dissidents
Speaker 4: or whatever. And there was a program set up at
Speaker 4: a place called Nag's Head, and we'll get you'll get
Speaker 4: into this. You'll hear this in the other episodes. It
Speaker 4: was in North Carolina where they took disaffected youths, Oswald
Speaker 4: being one of them. He was part of that program.
Speaker 4: And we have somebody on the podcast who knew Oswald
Speaker 4: in that program, who was there at Nagshead. And what
Speaker 4: they did was they used LSD. They used all kinds
Speaker 4: of uh techniques of torture and things to try to uh,
Speaker 4: you know, get inside somebody's mind. This was like in
Speaker 4: the days of the Manchurian candidate, that you could create
Speaker 4: this elusive illusion of somebody who was not who they
Speaker 4: appeared to be. Now, it didn't really work, they didn't
Speaker 4: really were able to be successful. But the fact is
Speaker 4: they were uh uh training people to be assets, assets
Speaker 4: for them that somewhere down the line they could could use.
Speaker 4: And Oswald was part of that Oswald was part of that.
Speaker 4: He also went and learned Russian. He learned Russian, and
Speaker 4: he was sent to the Soviet unions as part of
Speaker 4: an operation to see if they could infiltrate somebody into
Speaker 4: the you know, to the Soviet Union. It was a failure.
Speaker 4: He didn't get anything. But we know that that happened
Speaker 4: because he was stationed in Japan during you know, when
Speaker 4: he was a marine. He was you know, a radar
Speaker 4: operator for the U two spy plane. And there was
Speaker 4: a guy who was also in military intelligence that was
Speaker 4: teamed up with Oswald on an operation to try to
Speaker 4: flip a Soviet colonel to come into the CIA. So
Speaker 4: Oswald was part of an intelligence community. We knew that
Speaker 4: that and once he went to Russia in nineteen fifty
Speaker 4: nine sixty, around sixty to fifty on sixty they opened
Speaker 4: a file on Oswald, but they call it two h
Speaker 4: one file, And for four years they had reams and
Speaker 4: realm of documents connecting the CIA with Oswald, and none
Speaker 4: of that came out in the Warrant Commission report that
Speaker 4: Warren said, there's no there's no connection. We don't know
Speaker 4: anything about Oswald. And there were thousands of documents that
Speaker 4: showed that they did.
Speaker 5: That's what I was going to ask, because there's no
Speaker 5: acknowledgement that he was an asset or a reference to
Speaker 5: who his handlers might have been, or he was just
Speaker 5: a lone wolf. He was treated like a civilian who
Speaker 5: just went nuts and did this thing of his own volition.
Speaker 4: Well, it's interesting, you know you said he said I
Speaker 4: was just a patsy. I was a patsy. Now, you know,
Speaker 4: if you're accused of murder, the first thing you're saying
Speaker 4: is I didn't do it. I don't know, I didn't
Speaker 4: do it. You're not saying I'm a patsy. A patsy
Speaker 4: is a guy who knows that something else is going on,
Speaker 4: that he's being set up for. And then when you
Speaker 4: had people ask well, well didn't he want to you know,
Speaker 4: he was a lone wolf and didn't he want to
Speaker 4: make a name for himself. Well, if you want to
Speaker 4: make a name for yourself, you say what you did.
Speaker 4: You don't say I'm a patsy. You say I did
Speaker 4: it because I believe America. You know you do, you
Speaker 4: know you do that. It's the exact opposite.
Speaker 2: Okay, I've read some things and I've heard some things
Speaker 2: that Oswald was potentially meeting with a group of Cuban
Speaker 2: exiles in Dallas right before the assassination. Did you find
Speaker 2: anything that may corroborate that.
Speaker 4: No, we didn't find that he was meeting with a
Speaker 4: group of Cuban exiles. What we did find was that
Speaker 4: it's known, this is on record that he went to
Speaker 4: New Orleans a few months in April May. He went
Speaker 4: to New Orleans and he joined what they call the
Speaker 4: fair Play for Cuba Committee. Now that was a legitimate organization.
Speaker 4: They had chapters around the country, but when he went
Speaker 4: to New Orleans, he started his own chapter. And he
Speaker 4: was the only member of the fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Speaker 4: There was no other members. He was the only one,
Speaker 4: and he handed out leaflets. And if this is something
Speaker 4: we know because we we have photographs. In one of
Speaker 4: the pictures he's handing out leafless and there's a CIA
Speaker 4: operative in the background of one of those photographs. Now,
Speaker 4: the other thing is when he handed out these photographs,
Speaker 4: it was done at a place where there were uh
Speaker 4: anti Castro people. He was supposed to be procaster a
Speaker 4: lot of anti Castro and there was a big fight.
Speaker 4: They took his leafless, they threw up in the air.
Speaker 4: There was a scuffle, there was a melee, and was
Speaker 4: all caught on film. I mean they they they and
Speaker 4: it went on the news. So who's you know, who's
Speaker 4: filming this, who's doing this? I mean, you have to
Speaker 4: make it so that you're you know, setting up this
Speaker 4: guy that he's a pro castro guy and uh, you know,
Speaker 4: otherwise he's just a lone guy sitting on the corner
Speaker 4: handing out leafless. You know who go who films the
Speaker 4: guy handing out leafless at any corner anywhere?
Speaker 2: No narrative, somebody making a movie.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a bit of a there's there's this emphasis
Speaker 3: kind of on narrative. And even in the even in
Speaker 3: the internal conversations which are now public knowledge regarding the
Speaker 3: Warren Commission, we see that there is this strong drive
Speaker 3: from people who are kind of driving the commission, even
Speaker 3: though they're not official members. I believe it was jagg
Speaker 3: Or Hoover, famous dude who said, look, we're going to
Speaker 3: make this look like this story.
Speaker 6: Uh and yeah, you had not only Jay go Hoover,
Speaker 6: but you know, we have audio tapes of Hoover talking
Speaker 6: to to Johnson saying, we can't let this thing get
Speaker 6: out of hand.
Speaker 4: The House wants to investigated, the Senate wants to investigated,
Speaker 4: but we got to keep a lid on this thing
Speaker 4: because it's it's going to go crazy, so we have
Speaker 4: to control it. And then there's a very famous memo
Speaker 4: by a Nicholaszenbach. He was the deputy Attorney General under
Speaker 4: Robert Kennedy, and he released a memo saying, we have
Speaker 4: to convince the public that Lee Harvey Oswell was the
Speaker 4: lone assassin. Now this came out three days or a
Speaker 4: few days right after the assassination, and they were already
Speaker 4: saying this is Oswal and we got to make the
Speaker 4: public believe this. So everything was designed to create that narrative,
Speaker 4: like you said, and we get into it in the
Speaker 4: third episode when we get into the forensics of how
Speaker 4: the narrative really starts to fall apart. It really falls
Speaker 4: apart because we get into the famous single bullet theory
Speaker 4: and they had a big problem. I mean, people who
Speaker 4: study this stuff, no, it's impossible to do what this
Speaker 4: one bullet was supposed to have done. And you know,
Speaker 4: for your you know, listeners who don't know about it,
Speaker 4: the Warrant Commission said that three three shots were fired
Speaker 4: from the sixth floor of the Texas school Book Depository building,
Speaker 4: which overlooked the Presidential Modecade on Elm Street. Three shots.
Speaker 4: Initially they said the first shot hit Kennedy and in
Speaker 4: the back the second shot. They had a problem because
Speaker 4: they said all three shots hit. The problem they had
Speaker 4: was the first shot missed. And they found out that
Speaker 4: the first shot missed because it hit a curb and
Speaker 4: a piece of concrete flicked into a bystander's cheek and
Speaker 4: he started to bleed. So now they were left with
Speaker 4: two shots, and that two shots had to do all
Speaker 4: the damage. One of the shots we know was a
Speaker 4: shot to his head. That was the fatal head wound,
Speaker 4: the shot that killed Kennedy. Then they have one bullet
Speaker 4: left to say that a bullet went into from the
Speaker 4: sixth floor. From the sixth floor, the bullet went into
Speaker 4: the Kennedy's back right six to eight inches blow's neck,
Speaker 4: then traveled up and came out his neck. Then made
Speaker 4: a turn to the Magic Connolly. Hit Connolly in the
Speaker 4: in the ribs, breaks some ribs, then makes another turn,
Speaker 4: hits them in the wrists, breaks the wrist bones, then
Speaker 4: makes another turn and and it winds up in his thigh.
Speaker 4: That's what they had to make you believe. And the
Speaker 4: guy who came up with that was a fellow named
Speaker 4: Marlin Spector who became a senator at the time, he
Speaker 4: was just a lawyer who was, you know, representing the committee,
Speaker 4: and he came up with this single bullet theory, this
Speaker 4: magic bullet that did all that damage. And they said, well,
Speaker 4: that's what. And by the way, you can see that bullet.
Speaker 4: It's on file in the in the archives and in
Speaker 4: the Warrant Commission, and it's limited as evidence number three
Speaker 4: ninety nine, and it's pristine. It didn't just looks like
Speaker 4: it didn't hit anything.
Speaker 5: You know, rub should should we maybe take this as
Speaker 5: an opportunity to address the elephant in the room That
Speaker 5: seems to me it should be a larger elephant. But
Speaker 5: it's seems to have also been glossed over by the
Speaker 5: media a bit. Paul Landis, Oh yeah, wells, yeah.
Speaker 4: See that's interesting you bring up Paul Landis, because again
Speaker 4: it goes back to drips and drabs things coming out
Speaker 4: over a time. If people Paul Landers came out with
Speaker 4: a report about I don't know, a couple of months
Speaker 4: ago whatever, and we interviewed him for the for the
Speaker 4: podcast Oh cool, Yeah, he's on there. And and this
Speaker 4: guy was on the trail car. He was a secret
Speaker 4: service aation who was in the trail car. He's riding
Speaker 4: on the running board behind Kennedy when the head shot came.
Speaker 4: He talks about how brain matter and the skull matter
Speaker 4: flew in his direction and he had a duck to
Speaker 4: get out of the way of getting hit by brain matter.
Speaker 4: And he talked about how when they got to Parkland Hospital,
Speaker 4: which is where they're going to take care of Kennedy,
Speaker 4: that when he helped Jackie Kennedy up out of the seat,
Speaker 4: it was a blood pool of blood on the seat
Speaker 4: where they were sitting, and he looked in the back
Speaker 4: on the top of the seat resting there was a
Speaker 4: bullet and it was this bullet and he didn't know
Speaker 4: what to do because he thought, oh, this is a
Speaker 4: piece of evidence. And he knew the bullet had been
Speaker 4: fired because it had striation marks on it, but it
Speaker 4: was essentially pristeine. There was no other damage to it.
Speaker 4: And he picked it up because he thought, you know,
Speaker 4: it's a piece of evidence. What if somebody takes it
Speaker 4: and you know, and then he went into the hospital
Speaker 4: and didn't know what to do, and he put it
Speaker 4: on the Kennedy's by Kennedy's leg when he was being
Speaker 4: worked on. And so when you hear this and you
Speaker 4: take it not in context, you go, well, so what
Speaker 4: there was another bullet there? But what you have to
Speaker 4: know is that this is the bullet that Arl Inspector
Speaker 4: claimed to have gone through two people. Now, if that happened,
Speaker 4: then how out of the bullet wind up in the
Speaker 4: back but it bounce back after it wounded, you know
Speaker 4: what I mean? Of course, is so crazy that unless
Speaker 4: you can put all these pieces together, you go, well,
Speaker 4: so the guy found a bullet, big deal.
Speaker 3: And what would the American public have done? There's another
Speaker 3: question we can't answer. What would the American public have
Speaker 3: done in the sixties had they known these and other discrepancies?
Speaker 3: You know, Rob entering into this, we knew there was
Speaker 3: a lot of stuff that we wouldn't get to in
Speaker 3: our conversation, like the autopsy reports, Uh, the one that
Speaker 3: got birds. Yeah, the fact that Texas Governor Condoley also said,
Speaker 3: I don't think that was the same bullet.
Speaker 4: No, he said that he died. He said the bullet
Speaker 4: that Kennedy did not hit me. What would the public
Speaker 4: have done. I think they were worried what the public
Speaker 4: would have done, because it would have put I mean,
Speaker 4: as it is, we have distrust in government now. They
Speaker 4: the trust level and government is so low now that
Speaker 4: I think that at that time, it would have, you know,
Speaker 4: just blown the lid off of any trust of the
Speaker 4: Justice Department, the intelligence community, the military. You know, they
Speaker 4: were trying to keep a lid on that so that
Speaker 4: they you know, that trust remained in government. But my
Speaker 4: contention is you trust when you know, and if you
Speaker 4: know the truth and you're open and telling the truth,
Speaker 4: you can say, hey, we made a mistake, we did
Speaker 4: something wrong, we should not have done that. And if
Speaker 4: you do that, you gain trust, you don't lose trust.
Speaker 4: And then that's what we need the basis of all democracy.
Speaker 4: And that's why I've stuck with this for so long.
Speaker 4: I believe that the that the foundation of a strong
Speaker 4: democracy is that the American people trust in the institutions
Speaker 4: of government. We have to trust and by the way,
Speaker 4: people desputs know the best way to gain power is
Speaker 4: to fomote foment distrust, and that's what trusts. I've been
Speaker 4: doing it. It's right out of the authoritarian playbook. You
Speaker 4: just make people distrust things and then you say I
Speaker 4: can fix it. I'm the only one that can fix it.
Speaker 3: This goes to one of the I think the big questions.
Speaker 3: And I can't speak for everyone, but this is after
Speaker 3: after listening to the show and just the caliber the
Speaker 3: level of research and investigation that you have done here.
Speaker 3: One of my one of my big questions is why now,
Speaker 3: like why this moment in time do we get the
Speaker 3: answer for who killed JFK.
Speaker 4: Well, I think again, it goes back to right now
Speaker 4: we're seeing the potential end of American democracy and if
Speaker 4: people don't think that that could happen, we're seeing it
Speaker 4: right now and fold in front of our very eyes.
Speaker 4: And what we need to do is be honest and
Speaker 4: truthful with the American public. We have a lot of
Speaker 4: things that we've done wrong in this country, you know,
Speaker 4: starting with what we did to Native Americans, then what
Speaker 4: we did to black people who were slaves for so
Speaker 4: many hundreds of years, and we have to come to
Speaker 4: grips with all this stuff in order to make a
Speaker 4: more perfect union. The people who started this country there
Speaker 4: weren't you know, they didn't know everything. They you know,
Speaker 4: Jefferson had slave, they had slaves, but they did provide
Speaker 4: us with a working document that could make us better,
Speaker 4: that we could keep doing what we need to do
Speaker 4: to make us better to form a more perfect union.
Speaker 4: So we have this opportunity, and the only way we're
Speaker 4: going to forge a more perfect union is to level
Speaker 4: with people to say this is the truth, this is true,
Speaker 4: and this is not true. And we're living at a
Speaker 4: time where it's very, very hard to get the truth
Speaker 4: out because we're loaded with the information. You know, you
Speaker 4: see on TikTok they come out with all of a sudden.
Speaker 4: Ben Laden is saying something and it's amplified on TikTok,
Speaker 4: and then everybody jumps on that, and you go, no,
Speaker 4: that's not right. You don't kill people because you don't
Speaker 4: believe in their ideology, or you don't like Jews, or
Speaker 4: you don't like Muslims, or you don't like black people whatever.
Speaker 4: That's not making it a more perfect union. So that's
Speaker 4: why we want to do this. We we want to
Speaker 4: put try to keep putting us back on the right track.
Speaker 5: You know, it's funny Rob that, like, my kid is
Speaker 5: fifteen and just an absolute product of the Internet, much
Speaker 5: more than any other generation, where it was a fully
Speaker 5: formed thing by the time they, you know, were of
Speaker 5: age and just using it from as early as they
Speaker 5: can remember. But my kid very much understands the idea
Speaker 5: of vetting information that they're presented with, you know, the
Speaker 5: idea of being the arbiter of good information well time people.
Speaker 4: True, hats off to your kid, man, because most kids,
Speaker 4: from what I understand, and I just was at the
Speaker 4: symposium where they talked about the dangers of AI and
Speaker 4: and and the genius or are working on AI, they
Speaker 4: don't know how to control it. They don't have the
Speaker 4: single foggiest idea of how to regulate it. And what
Speaker 4: they say is a lot of young people will look
Speaker 4: at something informationally on on social media. They'll read the
Speaker 4: headline and then they'll go to the comments.
Speaker 5: I was hoping of the generation. Yeah, maybe it's maybe
Speaker 5: it's not. Maybe my kid is no similar their peers,
Speaker 5: but well, I.
Speaker 4: Mean thinking, you know, like I say, hats off to
Speaker 4: your kid, because I mean, if he's really you know,
Speaker 4: studying this and figuring in trying to figure out what's
Speaker 4: true and what's not true. Then hats off to them.
Speaker 5: I was just hoping that it was maybe indicative of
Speaker 5: the generation, but your research seems to say otherwise. But
Speaker 5: who knows, you know, every individual is different, So yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Hey guys, I just want to articulate to everybody listening
Speaker 2: into you, Rob, why I am so excited that you
Speaker 2: are one of the minds behind this project. And it
Speaker 2: has to do with how your brain functions because of
Speaker 2: what because of the way it's functioned in the past,
Speaker 2: simultaneously focused on the macro and the micro. Just see
Speaker 2: if I can get this out so I can ask
Speaker 2: you the question. So, if you go back to the
Speaker 2: fall of nineteen ninety one and you put yourself on
Speaker 2: that bridge when you began filming a few good men.
Speaker 2: If you're you are overseeing the creative vision of this project,
Speaker 2: so that means like having that overview feel right while
Speaker 2: micro not micromanaging, but keeping yourself focused on the micro
Speaker 2: thousands of decisions that go into getting one shot right.
Speaker 2: But you're also a producer on that project, which means
Speaker 2: you are getting to see kind of the stuff that
Speaker 2: happens behind the scenes that allows the filming to begin.
Speaker 2: Even how do you think those experiences over all of
Speaker 2: these years shape the way that you've looked at this
Speaker 2: assassination as some kind of set of machinations potentially, You.
Speaker 4: Know, that's a perfect summation of how I approach things.
Speaker 4: It's exactly how I do it. You know, as a director,
Speaker 4: I do have to see the overall big picture. I
Speaker 4: have to see what that looks like. And at the
Speaker 4: same time, I know that these little specific details are
Speaker 4: what make up that big picture. So you look at
Speaker 4: it and you say, does that make sense? Does that
Speaker 4: not make sense? I'm somebody who I love puzzles. I
Speaker 4: like to do puzzles. I like to figure out how
Speaker 4: does something work, how do those pieces fit together. I'm
Speaker 4: not just jigsaw puzzles with crosswords and Sudoku and all
Speaker 4: of those kinds of things. So I do look at
Speaker 4: things in a macro way, but then I also look
Speaker 4: to individual little fine points and does that make sense?
Speaker 4: Does that fit? Does that piece fit into that puzzle?
Speaker 4: Or is that and maybe it does and maybe the
Speaker 4: puzzle goes in a different direction. A lot of times
Speaker 4: you look at something and you have a certain predisposed
Speaker 4: idea as to what something will be. But then all
Speaker 4: of a sudden, the thing will tell you that it isn't,
Speaker 4: that it's something else. And then you have to be
Speaker 4: open minded enough to go down the road of where
Speaker 4: that's leading you. And so you go down all these
Speaker 4: rabbit trails to find out what and then eventually the
Speaker 4: puzzle comes into shape and you see what it really is.
Speaker 4: And I've been at this particular puzzle for sixty years,
Speaker 4: and it wasn't until I met a number of different
Speaker 4: people who started filling in pieces and certain things that
Speaker 4: I thought, hmmm, that's not maybe true. But then when
Speaker 4: I started putting it all together with all the information
Speaker 4: that I had, I went, Okay, I get this now
Speaker 4: when we lay it out at the end of this podcast,
Speaker 4: I can't tell you one hundred percent for sure that
Speaker 4: these were the four shooters and that these were the
Speaker 4: four positions we're in. I just gave something away spoil
Speaker 4: or alert. But I can tell you the best educated guests,
Speaker 4: based on all the information that's been provided, the one
Speaker 4: thing I know one hundred percent for sure it was
Speaker 4: a conspiracy. There's no question about that. There is no
Speaker 4: question about that. This man Learvy Oswell did not do
Speaker 4: what they said he did. Did not happen that I
Speaker 4: know for a fact. Other than that exactly how it
Speaker 4: was put together. I can offer you what I think happened,
Speaker 4: and then you know, we hopefully it'll spawn more discussion.
Speaker 3: And that I think is our button, that is that
Speaker 3: is leading us to the rest of the story of rob.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for your time. We're not blowing
Speaker 3: smoke when we say that this truly is, at least
Speaker 3: in my opinion, a top notch, top caliber investigation, connecting
Speaker 3: things in a way that they have not been connected before,
Speaker 3: to the point about puzzles. And you're taking on this
Speaker 3: herculean task right of unraveling an official narrative that was
Speaker 3: forced upon the American and global public for more than
Speaker 3: half a century, interrogating claims that have for so often
Speaker 3: and for so long not been given the scrutiny that
Speaker 3: they deserve. We are, as we said earlier, right there
Speaker 3: with everybody listening. We're tuning in as you answer the
Speaker 3: question who killed JFK. And you know, usually at the
Speaker 3: end of these conversations we ask a question that feels
Speaker 3: kind of odd to ask a creator of your stature,
Speaker 3: but where.
Speaker 4: What's your favorite color? What's your favorite color? What are
Speaker 4: I is there?
Speaker 3: I guess the way to to make this a little
Speaker 3: more bespoke is, sir, is there a way for people
Speaker 3: to reach out to you and your team if they,
Speaker 3: like Paul Landis, have additional information that might help us out.
Speaker 4: I mean we you know, it came out through it's
Speaker 4: being released through iHeartRadio, and there's a team there that
Speaker 4: can field information. Listen. By the way, I'm seventy six
Speaker 4: years old, and you know, I'm the last, maybe the
Speaker 4: last generation alive that will present this, and I'm sure
Speaker 4: that there's going to be a lot more information down
Speaker 4: the road that's going to come out. Like I say,
Speaker 4: almost five thousand documents are still being witheld, so we
Speaker 4: I'm hoping that we can keep this alive long enough
Speaker 4: for all of us to find out the exact truth.
Speaker 5: I gotta add really quickly, it looks like you're the
Speaker 5: exact same age as Stephen King. This obviously loomed very
Speaker 5: large for him as well. Yeah, eleven twenty two sixty three.
Speaker 5: You know, we talked about comedians and satirists and science
Speaker 5: fiction and stuff. So many amazing ways that folks like
Speaker 5: that who maybe you wouldn't immediately think can really shed
Speaker 5: light on this stuff. I learned a lot of this
Speaker 5: stuff from that book, and a lot of it is
Speaker 5: historically accurate. Of course it's a work of fiction, but
Speaker 5: you know the yeah, same exact date, So no wonder
Speaker 5: this is something that has been on his mind in
Speaker 5: the same way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, maybe you're ourginary if you were eleven, but you
Speaker 4: never ever, ever will forget that where you that moment
Speaker 4: and how it affected you. It won't.
Speaker 5: It doesn't stand by me too, didn't you didn't direct
Speaker 5: stand by me?
Speaker 4: Well? I did direct stand by me. I also directed misery,
Speaker 4: which was a standard, and you're so buried in your output.
Speaker 5: I got heet sometimes your castle Rock.
Speaker 4: We did seven Stephen King books. Yep.
Speaker 2: If we didn't even talk about LBJ from twenty sixteen
Speaker 2: and incredible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we also talk about oh, so many things, the
Speaker 3: conversations LBJ had in the wake of things Hoover. The
Speaker 3: list goes on and on, and we're telling you, folks,
Speaker 3: the best way to get these answers. Anytime you are
Speaker 3: hearing this conversation and you think, oh, Robin, the guys
Speaker 3: didn't get to this point. We promise you tune in
Speaker 3: to Who Killed JFK? And let's keep to your point,
Speaker 3: mister Reiner. Let's keep the story alive every Wednesday. You
Speaker 3: know what a time, folks. We are super excited about
Speaker 3: Who Killed JFK. It really is as I said earlier,
Speaker 3: it really is a top notch investigation. And my only
Speaker 3: regret is that we didn't get to everything. But I
Speaker 3: am pretty confident that Robin Solidad are going to get
Speaker 3: to most things in this one.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the level of detail in that show is astounding.
Speaker 2: You know, it's a weird line. Sometimes when we do
Speaker 2: an episode like this, we're promoted, like in a way
Speaker 2: promoting a show, right, but we're just having a conversation
Speaker 2: with someone talking about these topics. But just this show man,
Speaker 2: it's intense.
Speaker 5: And also just to have someone who's as much of
Speaker 5: a legend as Rob is, and I think we're all
Speaker 5: fans of various facets of his work, and you know,
Speaker 5: it's one person who can truly say is a gentleman
Speaker 5: and a scholar and a legendary director and humanitarian and just.
Speaker 4: An overall good guy.
Speaker 5: I think we were all blown away by his candor
Speaker 5: and generosity and just Wow, I'm still kind of reeling
Speaker 5: from that.
Speaker 3: And as Rob would say, the puzzle continues, the mystery unfolds.
Speaker 3: He gave us some light spoilers. We would like to
Speaker 3: hear your thoughts, folks on what they rightly call the
Speaker 3: greatest murder mystery in the history of the United States.
Speaker 3: Let us know. We try to be easy to find online.
Speaker 4: It's right.
Speaker 5: You can find this at the handle conspiracy Stuff on
Speaker 5: x FKA, Twitter, YouTube, and also on Facebook where we
Speaker 5: have our Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy on
Speaker 5: the conversation there. If you wish, on TikTok and Instagram,
Speaker 5: you can find us at the handle conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 5: But wait, there's more.
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