Original subtitles

It was impossible to believe.

How did this happen? It had to be something bigger. It really was the

conspiracy theory of the modern age.

To me, it's a much bigger story than the Kennedy murder.

It is the ultimate detective story, one that will never be fully resolved. From

the very beginning, at the highest levels of government, those involved

there might be a conspiracy.

An act of Congress and an executive order, and we're still struggling to get

last of the documents out. Why?

That's a big question.

This isn't a fantasy conspiracy theory. This is your story doesn't make sense.

We want a better version. You have to start with the how to get to the why.

It seems like it was a rushed investigation that was just trying to

case quickly rather than really get to the truth of the matter.

Do you think it was a conspiracy or a lone gunman?

People wanted to get to the truth. They were angry because they were given a

bunch of lies and they knew it at the time.

This is all my stuff organized after 50 years of research.

There's absolutely no evidence that supports a shot from the grassy knoll.

The mafia, the CIA, the FBI, they all had this motive.

The thing with the John F. Kennedy assassination is that there are a lot of

real plot holes that just don't make sense. There's something about it that

still feels unsolved, even if you feel like you know who did it.

Is this mystery ever going to get solved?

Americans love celebrities.

We like attractive, charismatic performers.

When we have a president who is a star, it makes us feel a little bit better

about ourselves as a people.

John F. Kennedy was the first celebrity president.

His quick -wittedness and his confidence, the thing he seemed to

very, very appealing.

And he had the spectacular First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, and the two of them

were like a magical couple.

Two years ago, I said that I introduced myself in Paris by saying that I was the

man who had accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris.

I'm getting somewhat that same sensation as I travel around Texas.

You have a young president. He's only 46 years old. He knew

that he was kind of born.

to do something ask not what your country can do for you ask

what you can do for your country it was this burst of youth and hope and

optimism and of course he was gone like that with a bullet the

jfk assassination is important to understanding conspiracy thinking in

it really was the First conspiracy theory of the modern age. It was kind of

original one.

Whether you consider it the death of hope, the death of a kind of innocence,

act that introduces the era of terrorism, or knowledge of the duplicity

intelligence agencies, the Kennedy assassination was a hugely dislocating

And there's something about it that still feels unsolved, even if you feel

you know who did it.

The why.

eludes you.

November 22nd, 1963 begins around 1142 in the morning

when the Air Force One lands at Love Field in Dallas.

It all began so beautifully.

After a drizzle in the morning,

the sun came out bright and beautiful.

Texas was a hugely important state then as it is now, and he had barely won

it. It was now 1963, he was going to be running for re -election.

He brings along Jacqueline Kennedy.

He wants her obviously sitting next to him in a motorcade, and he wants the top

off so that everybody can see her.

as well as him. He wanted integration of the schools.

And boy, a lot of parents there and leaders in the Dallas area, they were

resisting. So he was kind of going into very difficult territory.

The streets are lined with people, lots and lots of children all smiling.

Blacker, confetti, people waving from windows.

They're also riding in the car with Governor John Connolly and his wife,

The crowds are much greater than the Dallas police have anticipated.

Ordinarily, there is a huge plastic bubble, which allows the public a view

the president and those in the car with him, but gives those inside the

limousine protection from the weather. But because of the rapid, beautiful turn

in today's weather... The bubble has been removed.

Imagine today that they would allow a president in an open top, in an area

where a lot of people were very anti -civil rights, very anti -change, and he

was a change agent.

Nellie Connolly, the Texas governor's wife, says to the president, well, Mr.

President, you can't say that Dallas doesn't love you.

That's the last sentence the president ever hears.

That's the location now.

Just made the turn out of the field on Cedar Springs.

The motorcade slows down dramatically as he makes that turn. They're passing to

the right of a building called the Texas School Book Depository. And people

report seeing what looked like a young man in the window six floors up, holding

like a pipe or something out that window.

12 -18.

It's now turning onto Elm Street, and it will be only a matter of minutes before

he arrives at the trademark.

Then as they turn the corner, boom.

It appears as though something has happened in the motorcade route.

repeat, has happened in the motorcade route.

There's numerous people running up the hill alongside Elm Street, there by the

Simmons Freeway.

Several police officers.

The first shot missed the car, and the next shot hits Kennedy and Conley.

When that first shot goes off, there's controversy about what the first shot

did. They hit by two bullets, and all of a sudden, all kinds of questions come

up. Clint Hill jumped out of his car and ran and caught up to the president's

limo and saved Jacqueline Kennedy's life by getting her back in the car.

chaotic. And then you have Jackie crawling over him. And it was impossible

believe.

Members of the Secret Service seem to have a moment of indecision. And the

crucial one is the driver.

He is supposed to hit the accelerator and go.

He doesn't. He does not take evasive action. He seems to take his foot off

accelerator, making the president an easier target.

He will never forgive himself.

And the third shot is the head shot.

Jacqueline Kennedy would blame herself.

Had she been looking at her husband, she would have seen immediately the first

shot that went through his neck and would have pulled him down.

So if you look at these two shots, these are taken.

Actually, the first shot has hit the president. You can see his wife has

He has his hands up. So clearly something has happened.

Abraham Zapruder was a man in his late 50s. He worked in women's wear, and he

had a handheld camera.

And his footage of the motorcade coming into Dealey Plaza would probably become

the best -known.

and most carefully examined piece of film in American history. The fact that

was out there kind of allowed people to sort of wonder, well, what are we seeing

here? It is physically impossible for there to have been one assassin.

There's an overall probability of 95 % or better that there were four shots

fired in the Alib Shaza.

The point is that there were two shooters. It was a conspiracy.

It was a cover -up. You could watch that tape over and over again and still go,

what? It was one bullet that went here and there, and it was impossible to

believe. And somehow, even having the tape made it even more impossible.

A lot of Americans believed that their charming president had to have been

killed by a cabal, by a conspiracy.

The FBI didn't like the Kennedys. The CIA had all kinds of problems with

Kennedy.

The Soviets certainly did. The Cubans did.

You know, and even the mob did.

People wanted to get to the truth. They were angry because they were given a

bunch of lies, and they knew it at the time. The John F. Kennedy assassination

is really the tipping point that sparked the conspiracy theory culture that we

have here in America.

That's one of the first events that people look at and say, I don't think

official record is correct because there are all these holes in the story.

An assassin has killed the president. Where is he? We don't know. Who is he?

don't know. It's much like watching a crime drama because it's like, In front

you.

Dallas police have taken into custody a white male armed with a weapon. He is

now en route to the central police station.

On November 22, 1963, I was eight years old. I remember exactly.

When we heard the news, I went to a parochial school. I was sitting in the

against the windows, third seat from the rear, and all of a sudden the public

address system came on, and it was the sound of an AM radio.

We're hearing this announcer saying something, and then finally he said,

repeating, the president has been shot in Dallas, Texas. It was very upsetting

for a lot of people and for our family as well.

And it wasn't until years later that I realized there was a lot more to it than

what. I remembered from that weekend.

There are two witnesses who were near the president's car at the time of the

explosions who say that shots were fired from which upper window we do not know.

There's a massive manhunt.

They've got to find this guy.

So the police are in every building. They're trying to figure out where did

shot come from.

After the gunshots are fired, a 54 -year -old steam fitter.

named Howard Brennan looks up and he sees a young man in the window of the

School Book Depository with a gun.

The man he sees dashes downstairs.

On the second floor, he's met by a Texas police officer with his gun drawn.

Who are you?

Building manager vouches for him. He works here. He's okay.

So he's allowed to go.

But there are other witnesses who claim that they saw... Someone on the grassy

knoll, possibly a shooter, possibly someone creating a diversion.

People that don't know what they're talking about are making claims. Look at

this fuzzy picture. And then they come up with the entire theory of you've got

hidden gunman over here firing the fatal shot.

It's like any other eyewitness account.

You can have three people in the room see the same exact thing, and then you

them what they saw, and you're going to get three versions of it.

We have information that the shots came from the...

In the chaos of Dealey Plaza, one of the police authorities comes up to Howard

Brennan and he gives a description of the man that he saw on the sixth floor.

And that description,

15 minutes after the shooting, goes out to everybody in Dallas.

We were shaking the building down. The window that the shots were fired from,

the spent cartridges were found on the sixth floor on the southeast window.

The Dallas police are being quoted now as saying that the rifle was of high

power and approximately .25 caliber with a scope on it. And the remains of fried

chicken and the paper have been found on the fifth floor of a warehouse along

the presidential route.

and from which the bullets apparently were fired.

My name is Brad Garrett.

I'm a retired FBI agent. I've investigated single homicide,

serial homicide, and mass casualty homicide for a better part of 20 years.

So Lee Harvey Oswald had set up sort of his own sniper's nest on the sixth floor

of a building he worked in. Oswald exits the Texas Book School Depository where

the shooting occurred.

He goes up the street. He gets on a bus.

travels a brief distance on a bus, then gets in a cab, and then goes

approximately two miles to his residence.

He goes inside the rooming house, changes his clothes slightly, and he

pistol.

And then he leaves.

So the police find the shell casing in the book depository.

And five minutes later, a call comes in that someone's been shot.

That description of Lee Harvey Oswald has gone out all over.

Dallas. So when a policeman in a cruiser spots him, he pulls the car over and

wants to talk to him. Oswald pulls out his revolver and shoots him.

Shoots him in the chest first and shoots him in the head.

Kills him.

Right in the middle of the street.

So that shows the desperation that Oswald had. He's doing something that's

betraying his own guilt.

In the Kennedy assassination,

why else do you shoot a cop in broad daylight?

I notify one that the officer involved in the shooting, which is Officer J .D.

Tippett, we believe, was pronounced DOA at Methodist 128.

So after Dallas police officer J .D. Tippett was shot dead,

Lee Harvey Oswald ran into a Dallas theater, and the police were everywhere.

They were swarming the city because of this manhunt, and they surrounded the

theater.

And within minutes, they had him.

Dallas police have taken into custody a white male found in the next to last row

of the Texas theater, still armed with a weapon.

The fact that Lee Harvey Oswald is picked up and accused within less than

hours of the assassination happening really fuels the conspiracy theories.

As he was dragged out to a waiting police car, he was yelling, I protest

police brutality.

No further information is immediately available.

The country was just in shock.

Like, wait a minute. One 24 -year -old mystery man shot the most powerful

man on earth? What? It was...

Chaotic. It was impossible to believe.

Man has not been formally charged with anything. They're still holding him,

still questioning him. They have nobody else in custody.

We have nothing but rumors and a wild scene of chaos.

Here he is, a slight fellow with some scratches and marks around his face.

I really don't know what the situation is about. Nobody has told me anything

except that I'm accused of murdering a police man.

I know nothing more than that.

He denies everything.

I didn't shoot anybody, no.

Oswald's brought back to police headquarters, and they do a lineup.

Howard Brennan, who gave the description of him, is asked to pick out Oswald

from a police line. He won't do it.

He sees that it's Oswald, he recognizes him, and he says, I can't tell. Why?

Because he is afraid that a conspiracy...

was responsible for Kennedy's murder.

And he's afraid that if he picks out Oswald, they'll come for him next.

President Kennedy is now in the emergency room of Parkland Hospital in

We do not know what his condition is.

So to make a contribution to the cause of freedom.

People of the Soviet Union are on Cuba's side. It's been a crazy year, 1963, and

the end of 1963 has been as crazy as any of you could imagine.

You know, there's enormous fear in the country because of the constant strife

with the Soviet Union.

It was Russia and communism against Washington and capitalism.

And it was tense, especially when Russia sent missiles to Cuba.

Says Castro, the Cuban revolutionary government has no reason to offer

explanations to America or to anyone except the people of Cuba.

The greatest fear in America at that time was some type of nuclear conflict

breaking out. Schools used to train, children used to have to go under their

desks to prepare for a possible attack, and it was a very scary time period.

We had the prospect of An attack by the Soviets, for which we would have only

a few minutes warning, which really created a sense that Armageddon was much

closer to being a real possibility.

Three shots were fired at the president's motorcade as it passed out

downtown area of Dallas.

I heard over the radio system, let's get out of here.

An ISS man who was with us and said, get down.

The cars accelerated terrifically fast, faster and faster.

They're approaching the entrance now to Parkland Hospital, traveling at a high

rate of speed. There's already a cordon of police officers running from their

cars.

Official party, as I can see it, pulling around toward the emergency room of

Parkland Hospital.

President Kennedy is now in the emergency room of Parkland Hospital in

Mrs. Kennedy was not injured but was said to be in a state of shock and is

stunned. She was heard to cry out, oh, no, as the bullets rang out and the

president slumped into her lap with, it is reported, a bullet wound in the head.

As the car arrived at Parkland Hospital, Jacqueline Kennedy still had her

husband in his lap.

Secret Service men began to hustle us out.

I cast one last look back over my shoulder, saw a bundle of

pink lying in the back seat.

I think it was Mrs. Kennedy lying over the president's body.

The first lady passed and brushed her arm. She said nothing, but her eyes were

full of tears.

You always think of her, of somebody like her, as being insulated,

protected.

She was quite alone.

I don't think I ever saw anybody so much alone in my life.

When they get him inside, there's still a pulse. They never flip him over.

You know, they take him in, he's on his back. They're trying to treat him just

as they've got him right there.

We thought he had only been shot one time.

We didn't know that he was shot in the back.

I'm Dr. Ronald C. Jones. I was chief of surgery at Park Memorial Hospital in

November 1963.

He was on the gurney.

And his eyes were open. I never saw any evidence of life or breathing.

I saw a small wound right in the middle of the neck, and I thought it was an

entrance wound. My initial impression was that he'd been shot here, perhaps

a pistol, and there was an exit wound in the back of the head.

First thing they do is that they give him a tracheotomy so that they can help

him breathe.

This is significant because there will be a big issue as to whether there's an

exit wound from the first bullet. This is where that whole thing took off from.

He shot from the front. That was the doctor's impression.

It just fueled more controversies about how the president had died and whether

there had been more than one shooter.

President Kennedy is on the inside of Parkland Hospital, and two priests have

just been sent in to the room with the president.

He's had a traumatic brain injury, and nobody who has seen what he looks like

thinks he can survive.

And he does not.

President's wife took her wedding band off of her finger and put it on the

president's and kissed his hand.

And at 1 p .m.

Dallas time, he's declared dead.

John F. Kennedy.

Approximately 1 o 'clock Central Standard Time today here in

Dallas.

He died of a gunshot wound in the brain.

Johnson immediately thought that a foreign power might have been involved

assassination. Apparently just within minutes of the assassination, LBJ tells

aides that he believes World War III is starting and that Soviet missiles might

be incoming.

and that he, LBJ, was now the next target of the assassins.

Everyone in Washington was wondering, is this the end?

Is this like the apocalypse?

Would we launch our nuclear weapons and destroy Cuba? Would Moscow then launch

their nuclear weapons and destroy Washington?

That was the kind of apocalypse that people thought about in the early 60s.

a 24 -year -old Schmendrick killing the president of the United States.

No, there's got to be something else going on.

He is 24 -year -old Lee Oswald of Dallas, a former Marine who spent some

Russia, who at one time had applied for Soviet citizenship.

There's been no explanation yet of what he was doing in Dallas today, whether he

came here specifically for whatever he had in mind.

When I first learned about Oswald, I said, this is a guy like typical mass

shooters that don't really have a plan beyond the shooting. He planned it, he

pulled it off.

But then when he leaves, he doesn't kind of know where to go. And as he reached

for his pistol, I grabbed him along with two or three other officers.

He fought with us like a wild man, and we finally subdued him and took him on

out, put him in a police car and brought him into the Homicide Bureau.

And he just said, this is it.

It's all over with now.

They are bringing the weapon that was allegedly used in the assassination of

President John F. Kennedy this afternoon at 1230 here in Dallas.

The line about Lee Harvey Oswald would always be that he was somebody who

desperately wanted to become a figure of great attention.

Some people like to say, well, he wanted to be famous. No, that's not quite it.

It's more like, all right, I'm somebody to be reckoned with, and I'm going to

show you that I am.

I think Oswald felt elated. It's a spotlight where even if I say nothing,

the cameras are on me, the rest of the world knows who I am. I'm now important.

Oswald still insists that he had nothing to do with the assassination.

He's been taken back upstairs.

Oswald is interrogated by police.

For 12 hours, the Dallas Police Department did not own a tape recorder.

He leaves a hallway where there's nothing but cameras and recorders to go

room to be interrogated by the police, and there's nothing recording his voice.

It just seemed sloppy, and it seemed irresponsible, at least, at the very

least. The fact that a simple murder could end what people thought of as

Camelot? Seemed impossible.

It wasn't the right answer. It had to be something bigger.

And that launches conspiracy theories like you can't believe.

Patsy suggests that you're taking the fall for somebody else.

That you're a tool of somebody else.

Was he a Patsy?

This is one of the phrases that really sparks a lot of the initial conspiracy

theories about the Kennedy assassination.

Because a patsy is a fall guy.

Wow. I mean, of course, that meant for whom?

I'm just a patsy.

That sentence rings in my head a lot.

And it really challenges in the minds of a lot of people as to whether or not he

did this. The combination of Oswald saying the patsy comment, and you add to

that... The CIA component to this, the FBI component to this, the Russian

component to this. And I think the people want to latch on to conspiracy

They then go down whatever rabbit hole they go down.

President Kennedy has been assassinated. It's official now. The president is

dead. So the president is dead. And it is the belief of the Dallas coroner.

that the president's body cannot leave Dallas.

The laws are very clear. The state has control over the person that was killed,

at least as far as an autopsy.

But the Secret Service said, we absolutely have to take the president's

back to Washington.

Why would they do that? A normal autopsy, you would have a coroner, you

have an ME to do the autopsy prior to any type of... Secret Service taking

control of the body. So that's one of the first big moments that when the

kind of finds that out, they're like, that doesn't make any sense to us.

They've gotten a casket from a local funeral home, and they're literally

to push it to get it out the door past this coroner.

Getting out of that hospital, into the cars, was one of the swiftest walks I

ever made.

We drove along as fast as we could.

I looked up at a building, and there already was a flag

at half -mast.

I think that was when the enormity of what had happened first

struck me.

Here comes a white hearse and one last motorcycle.

There are people weeping, but this is one of the quietest crowds that will

assemble.

but this was the day that the president of the united states died from an

assassin's bullet in dallas texas the body was taken immediately to dallas's

love field where it was put aboard the presidential plane presidential one here

is this is the plane carrying the body of president kennedy from dallas to

washington mrs kennedy's caked in blood and brain matter

She hadn't cleaned up herself at all. She hadn't changed any portion of her

clothing. Jackie Kennedy would later say that people told her she should

take that suit off. And she said, no, I want people to see what happened. I want

them to see.

For reasons of security, I cannot discuss the whereabouts or travel plans

vice president.

President Johnson, immediately after the assassination, apparently is convinced

he is about to be killed, that he will be the next target of the assassins.

Lyndon Johnson does not want to leave Dallas until he is given the oath of

office. He will not allow the plane to take off until he is sworn in on the

plane. At the time of the assassination, there's no certainty about who did it.

Is it an attempt to not only eliminate the president, but the vice president,

who is now the new president?

It was decided that he should be sworn in there in Dallas as quickly

as possible because of international implications.

Lyndon Johnson was fearful that there was an international conspiracy.

behind the killing of the president. It's why he wanted the world to know

he was president, that he had taken the oath of office. He wanted to send a

signal to the world that the United States has a president.

When there is chaos, right, there's an opening for an enemy, especially in this

very tense time of the Cold War.

And so everyone saw them.

LBJ raises his hand and gets sworn in with Jackie Kennedy beside him.

The body of President Kennedy.

It's back in Washington.

Mrs. Kennedy is now coming down following the casket with her, other

the Kennedy family.

The Attorney General can be seen.

The Kennedy administration symbolized the fleeting, optimistic time

when people were doing the right thing, and it was just gone.

Talk about disbelief.

John F. Kennedy's autopsy is one of the first events that people look at and

say, I don't think the official record is correct because there are all these

holes in the story.

Why would the pathologist destroy the original notes from the autopsy?

I'm convinced beyond any doubt.

that I was not struck by the first bullet.

I know that I heard the first shot, that I turned to my right to see what was

happening. Seeing nothing, I was in the process of turning to my left, and I was

struck by a second shot.

The third shot struck the president, but did not strike me.

Everyone aboard Air Force One, with the exception of the body,

will be choppered into the south ground.

The body will be choppered to the Naval Medical Center at Bethesda. So after the

president is declared dead at Parkland Hospital, the Secret Service, they want

to get out of there.

They don't want Jackie Kennedy hanging around for an autopsy, and so they're

going to take the body, they're going to take it back to Air Force One, and

they're going to fly out.

And, of course, the Texas law at the time is, no, this is a homicide.

This is very unusual for the Secret Service to, you know, seize his body

this. Why would they do that? Were they trying to manipulate something?

The Secret Service, the Dallas police, the doctors, the physicians are all

acting under severe stress.

And so things might have been skipped or things that should have been done

weren't done. This would also fuel conspiracy theories because there was so

chaos around the autopsy, where to do it and how it was done.

I think the big pivotal movement was Oliver Stone's movie.

He's made a lot of great films. Even JFK is a great film.

It's not a historic film.

But then the body was illegally moved to Washington for the autopsy because when

a coup d 'etat occurred, there's a big difference between an autopsy that is

performed by civilian doctors and one that is performed by military doctors

under order.

I understand that conspiracy theorists like to claim that the autopsy was

completely botched, that nobody knew what they were doing. You had amateurs

their hand on the till, but none of that is true.

I pointed out some of the anomalies that were bothering, should bother anybody.

Because, first of all, the three people who did the autopsy had not been

homicide experts at all. And there were others who had done professional

autopsies on hundreds of murders.

And this is a very complicated autopsy, very.

Subsequent investigations of the Kennedy assassination went back and reviewed

the autopsy and found that it had been bungled in a variety of ways. This was

carried out by Navy doctors who'd never really seen a gunshot wound before.

Initially, there was some confusion about the entrance versus the exit one.

It's usually quite easy to tell entrance from exit if you have that experience.

an entrance gunshot wound looks so clean and clear. An exit wound is quite

different because once that bullet hits something, the nose of that bullet is

usually deformed and the exit wound is much, much larger.

My name is Michelle Dupree. I'm actually a forensic pathologist. In my career,

I've probably done a little over 3 ,000 autopsies. I'm actually looking at the

pathological examination report or the autopsy report of John F. Kennedy.

So when I look at this autopsy report, it tells us that they were basically

correct. The gunshots came from behind. One of the bullets entered the back of

the neck and came out where a tracheotomy was done.

The tracheotomy had caused issues around the bullet wound, so the determination

of whether the bullet entered from the rear or from the front in a way

that evidence.

It only led to people not believing results of the autopsy.

The injury to the head was absolutely devastating.

Basically where my hand is, all of these bones were actually affected by that

gunshot wound.

Therefore, they conclude he shot from behind, two shots, one high in the back,

and then one in the back of the head.

This is a fascinating thing about bullets, because sometimes they hit

obviously they fragment.

This looks like it really hasn't.

It's so completely intact.

My guess would have been that it would have been more fragmented by the time it

ended up in Governor Connolly's thigh.

It's an interesting aspect of this case.

And there was a lot of confusion about whether or not one bullet could have hit

both President Kennedy and Governor Connolly.

And the autopsy report didn't clarify that in any useful way.

They are rushing.

They are rushing for lots of reasons. They're rushing because Bobby Kennedy

Jackie Kennedy want this to be over.

It was amazing for me to discover that potential evidence about the

assassination disappeared almost immediately.

They're not doing that much photography, and the photography is going to stay

secret.

There's already been a secret pact between the president's physician and

people doing the autopsy.

And that is, you must not mention that the president had Addison's disease,

which was the disease of the adrenal glands, because they had constantly

it. Then one guy went home and tried to write it all up. And then when he's

done, he looks at all of his notes, and they've got bloodstains on them. It's

the president's blood.

So he takes those notes, puts them in his fireplace, and he sets fire to them.

Dr. Humes was horrified to think that one day his notes were going to go on

display, and so he didn't want that to happen.

Why would the pathologist destroy the original notes from the autopsy?

The thing with the John F. Kennedy assassination is that there are a lot of

real gaps. There are a lot of very real plot holes, if you will, that just don't

make sense. You know, where there's smoke, there's fire. There's a lot there

that makes you believe that the government just isn't telling us the

this situation.

The greatest leader of our time has been struck down

by the foulest deed of our time.

Today, John Fitzgerald Kennedy lives on in the immortal words and

works that he left behind.

He lives on in the mind and memories of mankind.

There was ineptitude, there was malfeasance on so many levels, as we

learned. But nothing about the assassination admitted to more possible

interpretations.

Then it's a pruder film.

It is, in many respects, the most terrifying piece of film in American

It was a conspiracy. It was a cover -up. It was impossible to believe. How did

this happen?

It really was the first conspiracy theory of the modern age.

To me, it's a much bigger story than the Kennedy murder.

The supportive film is really the beginning of a lot of the conspiracy

Why did the president's hands go up like this?

People analyze it frame by frame by frame.

Do you think it was a conspiracy or a lone gunman? I didn't shoot anybody, no.

A one -time defector to the Soviet Union who wanted to be a celebrity had the

opportunity to kill a celebrity president.

Who had the motive?

How did this happen?

From the very beginning, at the highest levels of government, those involved

thought there might be a conspiracy.

Now that the JFK assassination files released overnight, more than 60 ,000

pages. It seems like it was a rushed investigation.

Why? That's a big question. I think we have to reexamine everything that

happened in the case.

There was so much about John Kennedy that we did not know at that time. So

things going on with him that we did not know, from his health to his private

life. As a man, he had faults.

Most humans do, and his fault was womanizing.

He had whims and impulses, and he wanted to act on them. Was that seen as being

more evidence of his strength, of his presidential quality?

Or was it a fatal kind of recklessness?

I think people thought Jack Kennedy had great luck.

He survived World War II.

He met Jackie, this young, gorgeous woman.

It was like a fairy tale.

He makes what some people would say reckless decisions. I can do this. I can

to Dallas. I know they don't love me, but... Let's do open top. He wanted to

show confidence, the power of the president, and maybe he did feel a

invincible.

And then you have this messed up guy who had failed in life and had slithered

around and was trying to make his mark on history.

It was sort of the ultimate mismatch of history that this delusional young man

with a $21 mail -order rifle

can bring down the most important, most powerful, most glamorous man on

earth. It just didn't make any sense.

From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy

p .m. Central Standard Time, 2 o 'clock Eastern Standard Time, some 38

minutes ago.

Police took paraffin tests of Oswald's hands, test proving he had fired a

the day of the assassination.

Furthermore, Oswald was employed in the building where the sniper hid for the

attack, and police have established that he was in the building at the time of

the assassination.

They know it's Oswald. His rifle, he bought it back in March of 63, sent it

post office box that he rented.

Bought it under an assumed name. He had the identification of that name in his

wallet. Absolutely no question that they had the right guy.

The interesting thing about Lee Harvey Oswald is that we just can't really pin

down what his true philosophies are. Is he trying to be an important person? Did

he see himself as something that he wasn't? Was he suffering from some sort

delusions or something like that? We just really don't know a lot about what

motivations were.

That has remained the greatest enigma.

over more than 60 years of the Kennedy assassination.

So these are photographs of a young Lee Harvey Oswald.

He had a very troubled, in my view, sad childhood that I think laid the

groundwork for the troubles that he had as an adult.

He was a person of no particular account.

He was put in an orphanage when he was three years old by his mother.

He moved 21 times before his 17th birthday, went to more than a dozen

If you look at his entire life from beginning to end, he lived within

He was a lonely boy, needing attention but not getting it. He did not have

any close friends to really speak of.

He never did.

He disliked everybody, and he got in fights.

He could not get along with anybody.

I think we can agree that your son had a stormy childhood at best, and according

to... No, I do not agree with you there.

And that's why I wanted him to stop examining.

There's been a lot of public statements made that I can contradict.

He wanted to be somebody that he wasn't. He loved the program I Lived Three

Lives. It basically was about a man that was a family man.

Hi, Daddy.

What do you do at home?

An FBI agent.

He'll be working in Charlie on your own.

It's nice to know.

And an undercover agent at the same time.

Oswald loved that show. You know, he wanted to be a spy.

He was very good at keeping secrets.

This is at the height of the Red Scare.

And so there's this enormous fear of Russia.

And Lee Harvey Oswald decides as a high school student that he's a communist.

His politics to Lee, as far as I'm concerned, was the key to getting

that he wanted. It was to stand out so somebody would say, aha, he's different,

you know, and I'm going to give him some attention.

What he wants to do as of his 17th birthday is to join the Marine Corps,

his older brother.

If it hadn't been for his defection to Russia, he would have had an honorable

discharge. And this bothered him. It really hurt him.

Oswald, in a letter to then -Navy Secretary John Connolly, now Texas

threatened to use any means to get even for Connolly's refusal to change

Oswald's dishonorable discharge from the Marines.

Denies killing President Kennedy. Says he is being held because he was in

Russia. At 19 years of age, Oswald attempts to defect to the Soviet Union.

goes to Moscow.

And he does remain there for a few years. There were very few Americans who

defected to the Soviet side in the Cold War.

And Oswald happens to be one of them.

I was a captain in the Soviet intelligence service, KGB.

The initial reaction to any foreigner in the old USSR was to view them as CIA or

some other intelligence agents.

But after some research, we found out that Mosvog was not a CIA.

So we thought maybe we'll turn him into a Soviet agent eventually, but he was no

good either. So we gave up completely.

He marries a woman named Marina.

I don't know why she married him. He was an abusive husband.

He beat her.

He now has a wife and a child.

He moves to Minsk, works in a factory there.

He quickly grew disenchanted with the Soviet Union.

He was appalled by apparently all the petty corruption of Soviet life.

And he and Marina decide to give the United States another chance.

Oswald, to us, looked like a misfit, an unhappy man, the man who did not know

what to do, the man who was looking for something, and he did not know himself

what he was looking for.

By the age of 24, he'd come back from the Soviet Union with his pretty young

Russian wife to live in Dallas.

And he, you know, settles into this life of sort of dire poverty.

The FBI knew he had a military record.

They knew that he had all kinds of mental health problems. Very

they knew during this, you know, Cold War tension time that he had been in

Russia. Well, doesn't that seem that...

Maybe he was the shooter for a bigger plot that the communists wanted?

He

saw

himself as an important figure in history, a great man.

And when he got back to Texas, he was expecting he was this... would be this

famous defector who would come back to America.

And he says to his brother, his first words to his brother are, where's the

press?

Where's the media?

Because he thinks he's an international celebrity.

But he was a misfit everywhere he went.

He was a figure of no account no matter where he went.

No matter what he did, nobody seemed to care.

What would he have to do in order for the universe to acknowledge his

That was the essence of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Oswald goes to Mexico City to get a visa to get to Havana. We now know from

declassified files, Oswald spoke openly during this Mexico City trip about his

plans to kill Kennedy.

It's fascinating about how a moment can change history.

You have this messed up guy who had failed in life and he was trying to make

mark on history.

And then in that moment, everything was different.

Lee was about eight or nine years old when he started learning how to use a

rifle. We would borrow.

Somebody has a .22 rifle and you could be out there popping rabbits or you're

shooting a tin can, whatever you want to do.

I think he was a good, basic, proficient shooter.

So the report I'm looking at is a copy of a target from 200 yards.

Now, this is a good grouping. It's very tight.

He scores well on this chart. The president's shot was 88 yards.

So if he's this good a shot at 200 yards.

I can totally understand why he was accurate in shooting the president and

Governor Conley. He talked about shooting people all the time and almost

out and tried to shoot Vice President Nixon.

And he talked about shooting President Eisenhower. They didn't know at the time

that he had taken a shot at General Walker.

This is a photograph of General Edwin Walker, who Oswald attempted to kill in

April before he ultimately killed the president in November of 1963.

Edwin Walker was a segregationist and John Birch Society supporter.

He'd been forced to retire by President Kennedy because he'd passed out John

Birch literature to people who he was working with.

But he was still a figure of considerable attention and kind of a

far -right movement.

Well, there's an enemy within this country, and of course these are the,

might say, the anti -Americans as far as our traditions, heritage, and

constitution are concerned.

So in April of 1963,

Oswald basically was in his backyard and was able to see General Walker

through the window.

And he drew a bead on him and fired. And the only thing that appears to have

saved the general was that it hit the frame of the window.

The rifle shot was fired into the house, fired through the west window, and hit

the cell and hit the wall across the room and went through the wall over the

desk at which I was sitting. And so...

General Walker is unharmed. But I guess it's the thing that makes him decide he

could do it again.

So we're talking about a period when the quote -unquote Red Scare was going on.

And obviously, Oswald is a pro -communist person.

And at that particular time, the United States believed in something called the

domino theory, that if one country, you know, falls to communism, then another

will and another will.

And then eventually all of those countries will come under the influence

Soviet Union, who was, you know, America's greatest enemy at that time.

Oswald's next real hero was Fidel Castro.

Fidel Castro takes power in Cuba, and he's a communist. And, of course, this

puts Cuba in line with the Soviet Union.

The CIA had been involved in, you know, several wild plots to kill Castro,

including working with American mobsters to do it. Or trying to take out Castro

with things like exploding cigars. We went to war against Cuba. We didn't

announce anything, but every dirty trick we could pull. We tried to kill him.

We brought economic damage and a blockade to his country. Robert Kennedy

about the efforts to undermine Castro, to kill Castro.

And so when his brother gets killed, he wonders whether Castro got to his

brother first.

I mean, there was a lot of people in Cuba who wanted Kennedy dead.

To Oswald, Castro was a hero, and there's reason to believe that may have

motivate his decision to kill President Kennedy.

He winds up essentially creating a group called Fair Play for Cuba and hands out

leaflets in New Orleans with a couple of people he's hired off the unemployment

line.

Oswald, I think, was the only one. The only member in New Orleans, yeah. He was

picking up a lot of publicity in New Orleans. You know, there was film crews

in front of the International Trademark.

It's those films.

And those pictures which get injected into the mainstream media the night,

the very night of the Kennedy assassination.

Is he a KGB operative?

Is he a CIA spy?

Is he just a nut?

Lee Harvey Oswald is sort of a likely suspect in all of this because he does

spend a significant amount of time in the Soviet Union. It seems like he has

communist sympathies. But at the same time, there's really nothing specific

about Oswald that makes us believe that he had some type of personal vendetta

against John F. Kennedy himself.

In 1963, he would take a highly fateful trip to Mexico.

Now, just before he went to Mexico City, he ends up separating from Marina.

Something happened in Mexico City that we still don't understand.

He would go down to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City and attempt to get a visa

to go to Havana.

They turned him down.

Then he went to the Russian embassy and tried to get them to help, and they

turned him down.

It would take a long time before it was learned that the CIA had him under

surveillance and had picked him up on wiretaps in Mexico, which was kind of a

listening post for the CIA for Cuban -Soviet activity.

There was reason to believe that Oswald spoke openly during this Mexico City

trip about killing Kennedy, that he had boasted in Mexico City about his plans

to kill Kennedy.

From the moment he lands to the moment he goes.

They are following him everywhere.

They are tracking his phone calls. They're tracking his movements.

They're making sure they know where he is. They tell the Secret Service none of

this. It was a horrible mistake made by the CIA, and this is the beginning of

doubts about the American government, and then, therefore, doubts about who

actually killed Kennedy.

If you were going to ask, who should the Secret Service maybe have known about?

Oswald would be right at the top of the list when it came to Dallas.

Oswald never made it on that list.

Even after all the tensions with the communist world, nobody paid any

at the moment when they needed to.

And if my son had been on the surveillance, then President Kennedy

alive today, and I still have my son.

We are now switching to Dallas where they are about to move Lee Oswald and

there's a scuffle in the police station.

Oswald has been shot.

Lee Oswald.

New trend that's taking over the Internet. A version of it has recently

viral on social media. 12 million views.

Today, people can become famous just by doing a video and putting it online and

going viral on social media.

He's the most watched person on YouTube, more than 360 million subscribers.

But 50, 60 years ago, the only way a person could become famous is either

through the movies. Hollywood turns out in force to hail UI's new film

spectacle. Or by doing something really big that caught the attention of the

news media and the general public.

And unfortunately,

assassinating a president is an event that would capture a lot of people's

imaginations and capture a lot of public attention.

a one -time defector to the Soviet Union, an unstable individual who wanted

out of life, who wanted to be famous, who wanted to be a celebrity, has the

opportunity to kill a celebrity president.

And seeking everlasting glory, he takes that opportunity and deprives us

of our leader.

From Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.

The American Broadcasting Company joins with the nation in observing a memorial

service for the late President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

And we are still standing by, waiting on the movement of the prisoner Oswald.

We're going to transfer him from a city jail, which is inside the police

department, to a county jail that can accommodate people long term.

But we're waiting and waiting.

We're only talking a couple days after.

The president gets killed. The police are worried. They are so worried they've

talked about the possibility of moving him in an armored vehicle.

Now this is the armored truck that will carry Lee Harold Oswald.

Now it's also very interesting that they announce to the public when and where

they're going to transport Lee Harvey Oswald. You expect that he will be

down this corridor to see it.

Strict security precautions have been exercised and have been even increased

this morning.

As fear arises that someone may attempt to take the life of the man accused of

murdering the President of the United States.

All right, we got a little activity down there. I don't know what it is.

They bring Oswald out, but they do it in a very public way. They bring him out

the open area where they are walking him.

There are literally a gazillion reporters.

In today's time, they probably would have given him a bulletproof vest or

sort of protection.

This is the basement floor of the Dallas City Hall.

Bob Walker, WFA TV, Dallas, Texas, interrupting. There's been a shooting at

Dallas Police Station as Oswald was being transferred. For details, Bill

ABC at City Hall. Bill.

Oswald has been shot.

Oswald.

Oswald has been shot.

I got literally walked.

up to Oswald and at close range shoots him. There's a man with a gun. He's in

absolute panic. Do you know this subject? Do you know him? Have you seen

before? Yes, I did.

Is he from Dallas?

Let's look at a kinescope slow motion replay of the murder.

That is Oswald on the floor and disappearing now over to the right, the

murderer. Dying Oswald is rushed to the same hospital where President Kennedy

died. And the phone rang, and a nurse answered it, and she turned to me and

said, Dr. Jones, Oswald's been shot and they're bringing him to the emergency

room.

He ended up living about an hour and ten minutes and was

pronounced at 1 .07 p .m. that Sunday afternoon.

It was a live...

A TV event that gripped the nation, that had the nation with their televisions

on nonstop from the announcement of the assassination through the funeral.

We watched all of it live on TV. I saw Oswald get shot to death on live

television. Police Lieutenant George Butler has identified the man that did

shooting as Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.

I think the Jack Ruby connection is one of the main factors that fuels a lot of

the initial conspiracy theories about Kennedy's assassination.

Jack Ruby is another one of these, you know, marginal characters.

He runs a nightclub in Dallas.

He was friends with a lot of cops.

And he had some mob connections, as anybody at the time would have, but he

not thought of as being a person of particular account.

Jack was always the type that wanted to be someone of big shot.

He always wanted to be the main man, but he never was.

He was a two -bit hood, but he was a lot of fun, he had a great sense of humor,

and that's what I liked about him, he was a character.

Jack Ruby happened to be a member.

of my congregation when I visited him the next day in prison.

And the first thing I said was, Jack, why?

He said, I did it for the people of America.

He was my president.

Whether he felt remorse about it, I can't say.

Because in his mind, he was a hero.

He was a martyr.

This is Texas.

This is what you do in Texas. You shoot a gun.

I'm the only person that knows the truth pertaining to everything relating to my

husband.

He knew that what happened on that Friday afternoon was something that will

never be forgotten in American history.

And being Jack Ruby, he wanted to be part of it. He said, I didn't want

Jacqueline Kennedy to have to come back to Dallas and testify in a murder trial.

That's why I killed Oswald.

We are bound to feel shattered and helpless in the face of our loss.

There were these unbelievably powerful images.

This young, vital president with this wonderful wife and these two wonderful

children has been murdered in broad daylight.

Everybody remembers John Jr.'s salute to the casket. And now here is the widow

and her mantilla walking down.

the street behind the riderless horse.

And then amid all that, people had also seen Lee Harvey Oswald executed on live

television. Like, have we gone mad?

Have we lost our minds?

At the time, it was a lot to absorb that this president was dead.

Now we have Oswald who's dead.

forever sealed his lips and may have prevented police from ever getting the

story of what was behind the assassination of the President of the

States.

The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motive.

Do you think it'll ever come out? No, because the people that had so much to

gain and had such a material motive for putting me in a position I'm in.

We'll never let the troops that come aboard to the world.

Why did Jack Ruby do what he did? Now, Jack Ruby had told the police that he

very upset about the death of John F. Kennedy.

But there is another connection. Jack Ruby is allegedly connected to the

-American mafia.

There have been persistent and logical conspiracy theories about mob

in Kennedy's death.

Traditionally, action against the racket, mainly the province of local

authorities. In some areas, racketeers have corrupted the authorities.

Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, perhaps his brother's closest advisor,

took on a campaign at the Justice Department to destroy the mob.

And mobsters felt very much under threat from Robert Kennedy.

And one way to end that war might be to kill the president who is leading it.

I was on part of a big political conspiracy.

How is it possible that the president's assassin could himself be assassinated

just 48 hours after the president's death?

Who had the motive?

How did this happen?

You have the film in your camera? Yes, I brought it on.

It was quite shocking to see the whole thing. The Zapruder film is really the

beginning of a lot of the conspiracy theories.

His footage would probably become the most carefully examined piece of film in

American history.

People analyze it frame by frame by frame.

I've always been interested in the crime itself, how it happened, how it was

investigated.

It's like any good science.

You hypothesize, here's what I think might have happened. Let's see where the

facts lead us.

And all they were trying to do was answer a very simple question.

What happened to the bullet that hit Kennedy in the back?

So I went to the local library, and I was looking for a book that talked

hopefully, the Zapruder film.

I read it, and I realized, wow.

There's a lot more to this than I remember.

So I went back and I got another book.

And I went back and got another book. And got another book.

There's anybody that's gotten into this knows you're off and running.

So that's how I got started.

The Zapruder film is really the beginning of a lot of the conspiracy

I had a shot.

And he slumped to the side like this.

Abraham Zapruder ran a dressmaking company in Dallas, right downtown across

street from the Texas School Book Depository building.

And he was a bit of an amateur photographer and movie maker.

And he thought that he would go out on the street and take some videos of the

president's motorcade.

But it had been raining in Dallas that morning, so he thought, oh, I don't

I want to bring my camera. But his secretary said, no, no, go home and get

camera. It's clearing up downtown.

And Mr. Zapruder climbed up on one of those abutments because he thought, I'll

have the best view of when the president's motorcade comes for its last

His footage of the motorcade coming into Dealey Plaza would probably become the

best known.

and most carefully examined piece of film in American history.

People analyze it frame by frame by frame, and they reach different

interpretations of what's happening in individual scenes.

Zapruder was standing on the concrete abutment, so he thought it's possible

there was a shot that came from the side. That would have indicated a second

shooter. Why did the president's hands go up like this?

Can you tell that president and...

Governor Connolly were shot by the same bullet. The film, the best it can do is

add controversy, and that's exactly what it's done.

I'm a computer animator who studied the JFK assassination for the better part of

50 years.

I built a three -dimensional model and then took the Zapruder film, brought it

into the computer, and frame by frame lined that up.

The contention that one bullet cause injuries both to President Kennedy and

John Connolly will become known as the single bullet theory.

And it's very controversial.

Okay, so here's a rendering of the single bullet. Here's Kennedy and

the positions they were just before the bullet strikes.

The single bullet strikes the president in the back and exits the throat just

below the Adam's apple.

Conley himself is turned and positioned about six inches to the left of the

midline of the president. So any bullet that enters Kennedy's back and exits his

throat and moving on a downward trajectory has got to hit Conley.

Strikes him at basically the level of the fifth rib.

The bullet emerges from Conley's just below the right nipple, and he's

apparently got his hand holding the brim of his hat. So the bullet enters the

rear. of his wrist and ends up embedding itself as it becomes spent into the

left thigh.

What we want to do is take the back wound and connect it to the exit wound

Kennedy's throat and then just project that rearward and let it fall where it

falls. And it turns out that that line goes right back through the sniper's

window of the Texas School Book Depository.

That's simply based on the geometry of the scene.

And of course that backs up all the medical evidence and the forensic

The idea that one single bullet was able to go through John F. Kennedy's neck,

go through Governor Connolly's body, and then land completely, perfectly intact

at the bottom of this car.

It just, it doesn't really make sense.

This was all fodder for Oliver Stone, who...

believed that there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, could do a whole

movie about that. President Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy that was

planned in advance at the highest levels of our government, and it was carried

out by fanatical and disciplined cold warriors in the Pentagon and CIA's

operation apparatus.

Oliver Stone movie, JFK. This is kaleidoscope.

This visual, spectacular creation that's based around the rogue investigation

of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison into the assassination, which

caused enormous amounts of publicity.

Listen, I went along with a consensus story for many years. I wasn't a radical

and I wasn't a dissident, but...

This bothered me. At the same time, Kennedy meant something as a president

me.

Oliver Stone had served in Vietnam, and his belief was that if JFK had survived,

we would not have gotten involved in Vietnam.

And so that was why Kennedy had been assassinated.

He saw the fallacy in anti -communism way before anybody else did in our

country. And he saw where this was going, and he really wanted to diffuse

situation. There were just these ideas that the FBI and the CIA and the NSA and

all the rest of it worked on their own behalf and didn't share what they knew

how they knew it, even with the president.

Are we ready in the newsroom now?

Grab that cable over there. We're on the air, Burton. Let's talk to you. There

were a lot of witnesses on the day of the assassination who claimed that they

saw things differently from the official record.

Well, Jay, I was standing at the trademark waiting his arrival there.

All of a sudden, the blast.

And the president looked like that he right jumped up in his seat.

My husband said, quick, get down. And I grabbed the baby and we ran and laid

down in the grass. Do you have any idea which direction the shots came from?

I felt they both come from directly behind where we were standing.

It came from that picket fence.

Most of the people there that day thought it came from the grass, you

It makes sense. That's the place. That's a kill shot. If you stand there, you

can see it.

We're looking at our reenactment in JFK, the film of Dealey Plaza and the murder

of John Kennedy.

We're showing the shooters from behind the grassy knoll, and we're showing

two assassins, two assassination locations, and a third one, I

think, is coming up now.

There was a tree, of course, in place between the sixth floor and the car.

Here's a good shot of the fence and the shot, good angle on the president, which

shows him in the Zapruder film with his head hit by the shot going back into the

left. Back and to the left.

Back and to the left.

Jim Garrison says over and over again, back into the left, back into the left.

It appears to some people like the president's body after being shot from.

You know, in the back of the head, he's going back into the left, which suggests

in their mind that there must have been a second shooter somewhere to the right

on the grassy knoll that fired the shot that did that.

Grassy knoll theory basically states that there was someone on the grassy

possibly an agent, possibly someone else involved in the assassination who was

basically taking part in the assassination.

I think the shot from the grassy knoll does not work. Here is a computer

rendering of my reconstruction. This is the exact moment of the headshot.

Let's zoom in here just a little bit.

This yellow area represents any trajectory coming from anywhere on the

knoll. What most people understand is Kennedy is facing the left side of the

car. But you can see that if that happens, the bullet has to pass.

into the left hemisphere of the brain, and there is no evidence of that. And

there's no bullet hole that exits on the left side of the skull.

Whatever you think of Oliver Stone's movie, it changed the history of the

Kennedy assassination.

Because of the movie, this national furor...

Millions and millions of pages of once declassified documents were made

available to the public.

Now that the JFK assassination files released overnight, more than 60 ,000

pages. New details include previously unreleased names and addresses of

investigative sources and tactics used by the CIA.

An act of Congress and an executive order, and we're still struggling to get

last of the documents out. Why?

Why? You know, that's a big question. Stand by on this bulletin.

To me, everybody's got to make their own journey.

Look, I started out as a conspiracy theorist. I went all the way around the

barn.

It took me about five years from the time I started thinking, maybe I'm wrong

about this, to actually become convinced, okay, I am wrong about this.

no conspiracy.

So I don't expect others to, because I say something, to suddenly change their

mind.

So all the testimony, and then the exhibit.

Back up what was said in the Warren Commission report.

The new president, Lyndon Johnson, appointed a commission of seven

Americans to investigate the whole affair.

The Warren Commission was essentially an investigation into what happened to

John F. Kennedy.

They wanted to conclusively prove, did Lee Harvey Oswald commit this murder?

Was he working with anyone?

It just wanted to know all of the details surrounding the Kennedy

To the White House in Washington comes the final verdict on the fateful tragedy

which engulfed the nation ten months ago.

The commission has found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack

was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President

Kennedy. The Warren Report's conclusion that Oswald did all the shooting. Jack

Ruby said once again that he was involved in no conspiracy concerning the

assassination. When the results came out,

No one was really satisfied.

Quickly, people said, but did you really look at this angle? And did you

interview this witness?

And what about, it just didn't seem that all of the questions were addressed.

Newly released files about the Kennedy assassination.

Thousands of documents shedding new light on the investigation into the

assassination. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November

1963 remains one of the most defining and haunting events in our nation's

history.

My name is Congresswoman Ana Paulina Luna, and I am the chairman of the

declassification of federal secrets on House oversight.

It is important for history to reflect the truth of actually what happened on

that day for the American people to see the information and decide for

themselves.

We wanted to bring in the witnesses that felt that they weren't being given

credibility and or their stories weren't being heard. What did the CIA know

about Lee Harvey Oswald and when did they know it? The Dallas police arrested

Lee Harvey Oswald.

I have a copy here of the CIA's pre -assassination file on Lee Harvey

Three senior CIA officials lied under oath to investigators about what they

about Oswald before the assassination.

This is what we've learned, and it's not open to dispute.

The American people deserve to know the truth, and ultimately I think will

reflect our own mistakes.

as the government and how we handled it, but also to what changes need to be

brought forward in the future in regards to reigning in these intelligence

agencies. And I think Kennedy would have wanted that. Thousands of newly

released government documents surrounding the JFK assassination.

Scholars say the files that President Trump ordered to be released showed

nothing undercutting the conclusion that a lone gunman killed Kennedy.

The Kennedy assassination did not have to happen.

Both the CIA and the FBI had plenty of evidence before the assassination that

Lee Harvey Oswald was a threat.

And if they had just acted on the information in their own files, Lee

Oswald would have been dealt with before John F. Kennedy arrived in Dallas.

I think every few years, a new generation will always rediscover this

kind of ask that question, well, what exactly happened there? When you look at

all the people who had motives to kill him,

it sure is easy to understand why this is the original conspiracy theory and

that is just not going to die.

Basically, the waters have become quite muddy over time, and it's almost like

you have too much information.

It actually has made it more difficult for people to grasp the case, and so

still cling.

to this notion of conspiracy, and they will 200 years from now.

I think the most fascinating thing about this story to me is the fact that we

really don't know. I mean, we have the Warren report. I think there's roughly

percent of Americans today don't believe in it. They believe that, you know,

there's something else at play here. The fact that the government didn't release

material until many years later regarding the Kennedy assassination only

more conspiracy theories and the beginning of the people of the United

believing that the government was lying to it.

picked up in the very contemporary era of the concept of fake news and the deep

state. The deep state is lying to the American people. It's actually running

government, not the people.

The public now is into conspiracies everywhere, everywhere across the board.

mean, you can't believe anything anymore.

President Kennedy's assassination is the ultimate detective story, one that will

never be fully resolved.

And that's what makes these hidden secrets.

of the Kennedy years.

So tantalizing.

Every time I look at the Zapruder film, I'm hoping it comes out different.

I can't help it.

Every time I look at it, I just, some part of you hopes that nothing happens.

And it's the shot of a motorcade coming by, the president and Mrs. Kennedy

waving, and off they go to the trademark.

And so we look at these images of him so vibrant and full of life, and we ask

ourselves, what if?

But then what if inevitably turns to why?

And that's when we find ourselves back in this turbulent, this ominous world of

questions that never seem to get answered.