Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

[suspenseful music]

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

[muffled chat]

[man] Ladies and gentlemen,

we have a press report over the wires

that the president of the United States has been the victim

-of an assassination. -[crowd gasps]

We will play the funeral march

from Beethoven's Third Symphony.

[crowd loudly speaking]

["Symphony No. 3, Funeral March" by Beethoven]

For my generation, everyone remembers where he was on the day

that President Kennedy was assassinated.

President Kennedy was a hero for our generation.

The Kennedy assassination is the most important murder case in world history.

It's quite understandable, I think, that, uh,

there should be, uh,

it should be so hard to accept

the assassination as the work

of one mixed-up, limited-power,

strange young man.

It's not Shakespearean. It doesn't fit.

-[man 1] Did you fire that rifle? -[Lee] Just the facts

as you people have been given, but I emphatically deny these charges.

[Vincent] There are two realities in this case.

One reality is that, at its core,

this is a simple case.

But there's another reality here.

Because of the unceasing and fanatical obsession

of thousands of Warren Commission critics,

the conspiracy theorists,

it's now the most complex murder case

by far in world history.

Nothing even remotely comes close.

-[muffled chat] -[man 1] Do you have anything to say in your defense?

[gunshot fires]

[man 2] There was a shot.

Oswald has been shot. Holy mackerel.

[Lloyd] The man whom the commission concluded killed the President

was himself killed in the Dallas Police Station.

Now, that must strike people as impossible.

[somber instrumental music]

Hi, my name is Brendan Sheehan.

I'm a judge in Cuyahoga County

Common Pleas Court, in Cleveland Ohio.

I've always been interested in the Kennedy assassination,

even though I wasn't born when it happened.

My parents emigrated from Ireland around the time he was elected,

and as the first Irish Catholic President,

Kennedy was, of course, revered.

On my 15th birthday, in 1982,

my father was brutally murdered

by a Nazi serial killer, Frank Spisak.

Spisak had been targeting African Americans

on the campus of Cleveland State University,

and for some unknown reason, he killed my father,

who supervised the Physical Plant Department at that school.

It seemed like a random crime.

That experience inspired me to go to law school.

As a young lawyer, I tried cases in front of Judge Burt Griffin.

He had been a staff lawyer on the commission

that investigated President Kennedy's murder,

known as the Warren Commission.

I often asked Judge Griffin about his experiences,

which we then turned into a seminar

that we present in schools.

When your teachers asked us to come out here,

I thought, "What a great opportunity it is

for you to actually be with someone

who investigated the assassination of President Kennedy."

It's something that you studied. So, I wanted to start off

by asking you guys a couple questions.

How many of you think that Lee Harvey Oswald

was the only person involved in the assassination?

Raise your hands, come on.

None, a couple. How many of you think there's a--

more people involved than just Lee Harvey Oswald?

Wow! Alright.

[Brendan] In the face of decades of conspiracy theories

swirling around this murder,

Judge Griffin had always been adamant

that the Warren Commission got it right.

Yet, today, many people don't believe it.

What are the real facts of this case?

How can we determine the difference

between fact and fiction?

Along with Judge Griffin,

I sought out other investigators and figures

involved in the events

to get the real story.

[Howard] I think you have to try to recapture, uh,

the enormous enthusiasm that there was in Washington,

uh, with the Kennedy Administration,

the young, liberal, charismatic candidate

winning a close election

a-- and coming into a, an administration

with a commitment to talent, meritocracy,

meeting the needs of the country,

whether they be foreign or domestic.

[crowd cheering]

We shall pay any price,

bear any burden,

meet any hardship,

support any friend,

oppose any foe,

to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

[crowd clapping and cheering]

There was tremendous optimism at the time

of President Kennedy's inauguration,

but it was the height of the Cold War,

and the threat of nuclear war was very high.

In 1959, off the coast of Miami, Florida,

on the island of Cuba, Fidel Castro overthrew

Cuban President Fulgencio Batista.

When Castro formed a relationship with the Soviet Union,

tensions reached a high point.

Both President Eisenhower and the newly elected President Kennedy

supported a CIA plan

to aid a dissident militia of anti-Castro Cubans

to invade the island and overthrow Castro.

Known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion,

it was a disaster for the dissidents

and an embarrassment for the United States.

And only a year and half later, when Soviet missiles

were discovered being assembled on the island,

the Cuban Missile Crisis brought us to the brink

of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

It shall be the policy of this nation

to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba

against any nation in the Western Hemisphere

as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States,

requiring a full retaliatory response

upon the Soviet Union.

[C. Ellen] At the same time,

tensions around demands for civil rights

for African Americans were at a point of boiling over.

This was the environment surrounding

President Kennedy's murder.

[Burt] The country was aware that this--

this, this was a national disaster

that we were facing here.

If there was a conspiracy, ev-- we had--

everybody had to find that out.

When a major political assassination occurs,

it's almost automatic that people think

about a political motivation for it.

[man on radio] Here is a bulletin.

President Kennedy has been shot

and seriously wounded.

[Burt] Let me kind of give you my first reaction when I heard

that the President had been shot,

which was that this was a southern segregationist,

uh, that was the shooter.

And then, of course, it very quickly turned out

that it wasn't a southern segregationist.

It wa-- in fact, it was somebody

from the completely opposite end

of the political spectrum,

a Marxist.

And then I thought this was a cov-- this was a frame-up.

This was the FBI framing somebody that they,

as a part of a group, that they had been out to get for decades.

So, uh,

when I got to Washington, I certainly came

with a lot of skepticism.

There was a concern,

after the assassination, immediately after the assassination,

both in the federal government

and in the Soviet Union

as to whether Johnson would think they did it,

that all of a sudden we would exchange nuclear weapons

and the whole world would end

in the World War III

with bombings everywhere, nuclear weapons.

And so, to the degree

that the question was,

"Did the Soviet Union have a hand

in what Oswald did in Dallas?"

That is scary,

and Johnson was scared after the assassination.

He was afraid that there were going to be additional shootings,

and he was going to be one of them, with good reason.

Uh, so, what an effort was made to do

is to settle that down.

There were bombers in the air, literally,

SAC bombers in the air

waiting to be told whether to go to Russia or not,

and that's not a good thing.

So, "Let's settle it all down." And they did settle it all down.

We didn't have World War III.

[suspenseful music]

[Howard] There is, uh, something about the community interest in this

that bespeaks that affection and lost,

uh, aspirations of the early 1960s,

and it comes from people,

for the most part, who've been disappointed time and time again

by the Federal government's, uh,

addressing social or economic,

uh, ills in, in our society

as they've emerged time over time.

[Brendan] Suspicions of a possible conspiracy

and speculation about the culprits began

even before the Commission began its work.

It became the lasting impression

of the assassination since then.

Former Charles Manson prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi,

first studied this case when preparing

for an unscripted mock trial of Oswald in 1986.

In the brief time I have to address you,

address you in this historic trial,

I want to point out what must already be obvious to you.

That Lee Harvey Oswald and Lee Harvey Oswald alone

was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

[Vincent] Most Americans believe that the Kennedy assassination

is still unsolved.

The reality is that this case was solved

by the Warren Commission when they issued their report

on September 24th, 1964.

And their findings were that Oswald killed Kennedy

and acted alone. And since that time,

over 50 years ago,

no credible evidence has surfaced

which would alter the fundamental findings of the Warren Commission.

We thought there would be a great deal of appraisals

of the Warren Commission's work,

but nobody foresaw the extent to which,

um, the criticisms and conspiracy theories,

uh, would, uh, would arise.

People seem to glom onto any inconsistent facts

without taking, uh, account of the, the whole picture.

Over the past 50 years, at one time or another,

one or more conspiracy theories have accused 42 groups,

82 assassins,

and 214 people by name

of being involved in the conspiracy.

I told the jury one time, I said, "You know, folks,

I'll agree with you, I'll stipulate that three people can keep a secret,

but only if two are dead."

We all know, uh, piling con--

you know, unsupportable conspiracies on,

on, on a volume of conspiracies doesn't lend credibility

to any of them. In fact, the more conspiracy theories you have,

uh, the more you come to believe that none of them are likely to be true,

uh, because certainly all of them cannot be right.

I personally am unaware

of any major event in world history

that has been shrouded

in so much intentional misrepresentation.

Also, there are about a thousand books

on the assassination. 95% of them are pro-conspiracy.

And I have to tell you, when I got on this case

and started learning about it, I became very disturbed

with the conspiracy community.

They accused the Warren Commission of bias,

distorting the evidence and suppressing the truth

from the American people.

And I found out that it was they who were guilty

of these precise things.

[suspenseful music]

[Eugene] If I can help in anyway, I will. I'm calling with a suggestion.

-I've just talked to Nick Katzenbach. -[Bill] Yes.

[Brendan] This phone call between Yale Law School Dean, Eugene Rostow, and Bill Moyers,

Special Assistant to now President Lyndon Johnson,

appears to be the first mention of a Presidential Commission.

It occurred on Sunday afternoon after Ruby killed Oswald.

The call refers to Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.

Katzenbach had been recently involved in an effort

to desegregate the University of Alabama.

[Brendan] On Monday, November 25th,

the day of Kennedy's funeral,

Nicholas Katzenbach sent a memo

along those lines to Bill Moyers.

Two paragraphs have been fathered for conspiracy theorists since that time.

The second paragraph says,

"The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin.

That he did not have confederates who are still at large.

And that the evidence was such

that he would have been convicted at trial."

Katzenbach goes on to state in a succeeding paragraph,

"Speculation about Oswald's motivation

ought to be cut off,

and we should have some basis for rebutting the thought

that this was a Communist conspiracy

or, as the Iron Curtain press is saying,

a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists."

Often ignored is the introductory paragraph.

"It is important that all of the facts

surrounding President Kennedy's assassination

be made public in a way which will satisfy people

in the United States and abroad

that all the facts have been told

and that a statement to this effect be made now."

Well, what is the role of the Justice Department going to be?

Uh, because if we didn't know, then we learned shortly

that there was, in fact, no federal law

that made shooting the President

or killing him on the streets of Dallas a federal crime.

But Robert Kennedy made it, uh, immediately known

that he did not want to play any role whatsoever

in the investigation of his brother's assassination.

And, of course, after Ruby killed Oswald,

it was clear there was not going to be a trial,

uh, of Oswald, but the State of Texas

and the District Attorney within the Dallas County

were eager to conduct further investigations.

Two congressional committees were anxious to unleash their talent.

So it was a, a very complicated political, legal,

uh, situation with great national and international repercussions.

[Brendan] The establishment of this Presidential Commission

was intended to resolve potential conflicts

between many different investigations.

As a result, President Johnson appointed four members of Congress,

Representative Hale Boggs, Representative Gerald Ford,

Senator John Sherman Cooper, and Senator Richard Russell,

two members of the establishment,

former CIA Director Allen Dulles, and John McCloy,

who had been head of the World Bank

and the governor of Post-War West Germany.

And he named the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,

Earl Warren, as Chairman.

[Stephen] It was particularly important

to have someone who would be above the fray,

whom the country would trust.

And I suppose that President Johnson

was concerned they wouldn't trust him enough.

There is no one, I think, in the country who could bring

the prestige, both personal and of the institution,

uh, to the task of finding out what actually happened.

[Howard] The Commission's task was broadly defined

in the Executive Order,

to develop all the relevant facts

and to report them, uh, to the President

and to the, the people of the United States.

They were subsequently given the, uh,

the subpoena power and the ability to grant immunity by Congress,

uh, shortly after they became operational,

uh, and, uh, their, uh, first duties, of course,

were to appoint a General Counsel.

They decided on J. Lee Rankin,

uh, who was a, a, Republican from Nebraska

who had been, uh, brought into the Eisenhower administration in 1953.

He was well known to Chief Justice Warren

and largely respected.

[Murray] I had a great deal of respect for Mr. Rankin.

He had argued-- uh, as Solicitor General,

he had argued the case of Brown against Board of Education.

You know, possibly the most important case of the last century.

Uh, and he had done it with integrity and with honor.

[Howard] The Chief Justice was very, uh, clear that his goal was

to investigate and determine the truth, whatever it might be,

and lastly that he did not want to have anyone on the staff

who was with a government agency.

He didn't want-- not want anyone to come in to the, uh...

[stutters] into the effort

with any preconceived commitment to a particular agency or outcome.

The jobs that Rankin wanted me to direct attention to immediately

were one, recruiting.

And two, organizing, uh,

helping organize the scope of the investigation.

[Brendan] Since it was the staff attorneys who would have the task

of performing the actual investigation,

it was imperative to have skilled lawyers

of unimpeachable character.

Organized like a law firm,

the staff was to be made up of teams

of senior and junior attorneys from around the country

and across the political spectrum.

I was interesting in getting some diversity. Uh,

all males, of course.

Uh, you could never get away with such a commission today,

uh, as my wife reminds me.

Uh, and, uh, but I wanted to have

re-- representatives of both parties,

I wanted to have some geographical mix,

and, uh, so I then looked for recommendations from others.

[Brendan] The senior members recruited were Frank Adams,

former New York City Police Commissioner,

Joe Ball, a distinguished lawyer from Los Angeles,

Bill Coleman, who had been the first African American clerk

on the Supreme Court,

Leon Hubert, from New Orleans,

and Bert Jenner, a name partner in a major Chicago firm.

The junior members were David Belin,

a Republican in civil practice in Iowa,

Burt Griffin, a Cleveland lawyer,

Jim Liebeler, who was leaving his job with a Wall Street firm,

David Slawson,

who was then practicing law in Colorado,

Arlen Specter, who was serving

in the District Attorney's office in Philadelphia,

and Sam Stern, a former Warren clerk.

While all the named members of the Warren Commission

and many of its staff attorneys have passed away,

I had the rare opportunity to interview Howard Willens,

David Slawson, Burt Griffin, and Sam Stern.

I also had the opportunity to interview Alfred Goldberg,

a historian with the Department of Defense

who was brought in by Earl Warren

with the goal of having the final report read

more like a historical chronology

and less like a legal brief.

Rankin brought in New York Law Professor Norman Redlich

as a special assistant to the Commission.

And Norman then brought in Mel Eisenberg,

who was an associate for a New York firm.

Finally, additional young staff attorneys were brought in.

Richard Mosk,

Stuart Pollak, Murray Laulicht, and Lloyd Weinreb.

And in the final months,

a young law clerk for the Supreme Court Justice,

Arthur Goldberg, joined as a fact checker.

His name, Stephen Breyer.

Justice Breyer now serves as an Associate Justice

of the Supreme Court of the United States.

[Howard] Uh, this was an extremely talented group,

each of whom has succeeded at everything

he had attempted during the course of his life,

from grammar school through the practice of law.

Here you had people from the outside deliberately chosen

because they did not have to take orders from the Commission

or from J. Lee Rankin.

If they didn't like

what this Commission was doing,

or if there was a conclusion reached that they disagreed with,

they were free to go public

with their disagreement

and thereby impeach the credibility of the entire report.

Uh, and so, it was important to not repress

the enthusiasms and the investigative inquiries

of some of the more, uh, talented and aggressive investigative lawyers.

They recognized the limitations of the FBI work,

they recognized its achievements,

but also the fact that it was only a starting point

and much more work needed to be done

in order to deal not only with ascertaining the facts

with precision and completeness, but also to, uh,

answer this rumors that were constantly circulating.

[Alfred] The commission had to undertake its own investigation.

It couldn't simply rubber stamp the FBI report,

and there were reasons for believing the FBI didn't look good in these things.

So, there was, from the beginning,

there was a certain amount of suspicion and distrust

between the commission and the FBI.

When the Commission decided to conduct its own investigation,

it was the decision by lawyers

that they wanted to develop a body of sworn testimony

on the basis of which they could have more o-- uh,

confidence in the, uh, accuracy and the integrity

of... [stutters] the testimony.

Uh, and they then could base their judgement

o-- on that body of testimony.

[Brendan] The weight of the fact-finding and initial thinking

fell on the staff.

It was these lawyers

that would investigate

the case from the ground up.

[Howard] In middle January, the, uh,

Rankin arranged for the Chief Justice

to come in, uh, a-- and meet with the staff for the first time.

And, and the Chief Justice, uh,

after the amenities, told the staff,

as he had told me in his chambers,

how he had reluctantly accepted this responsibility,

and why he was determined, uh, to ascertain the truth.

I must say that they, in the main,

the lawyers who were there were first rate.

They were independent people and nobody was going to tell them

what to do or how to do it.

You know, what I recall most vividly

from the-- that meeting with the Chief Justice

was that the Chief Justice said to us,

"Your only client is the truth."

And that set the tone of what we did.

And, uh,

I wish the public could know that.

There were no restrictions placed on the scope of our,

uh, our investigation.

I mean, to the contrary, I mean, we were,

uh, given carte blanche.

Uh, we, we were encouraged to follow our inclinations,

follow our leads and go as far as we thought was necessary.

I would say that all of us, at least certainly myself

and everybody that I associated with,

uh, we would love to have been the one

to find a conspiracy

or something that wasn't known.

[Burt] The evidence was overwhelming

that Oswald had killed President Kennedy.

We worked as hard as we could

to find evidence that would refute that

and evidence that would show that there was a conspiracy.

For, for one thing, not only was the public concerned about that,

but frankly, if we could find a conspiracy,

we'd all be national heroes.

We also knew

that this wasn't an ordinary murder investigation.

This, this was an event that was going to be examined for centuries.

[Stuart] That report was written by members of the, of the staff.

Members of the Commission, uh, reviewed what we did,

there was input in terms of things that should be investigated,

but the members... [stutters] of the Commission did not write this report.

Uh, which is, of course, not surprising,

uh, that's why you have a staff for

and you wouldn't have expected them,

uh, you wouldn't expect the Chief Justice

or Senator Russell or anybody else

to be sitting down, writing the report.

They didn't write it. That was the product

of the staff and all of the staff were trying to,

you know, accurately depict what the investigation had disclosed.

My job was checking the citations,

that is to say, looking at the underground-- underlying material,

the FBI reports and so forth,

which were referred to in the report

or the 20-some-odd volumes of appendix.

And I was pretty amazed at the degree

to which there had been an investigation.

Uh, I think that just-- I was doing,

I think, a part of a year of, uh, Lee Harvey Oswald's life.

And they've knew, virtually, where he was

at almost every second.

Ninety four witnesses appeared before the Commission,

395 depositions were taken by staff lawyers

in half a dozen or more cities around the United States.

There were 61 sworn affidavits

and there were two written statements,

the latter two being by President Johnson and Mrs. Johnson.

A total of 552,

uh, witnesses who, through one means or another,

provided, uh, their view of facts

that-- on which the Commission based its conclusions.

[suspenseful music]

Three shots were fired at the President.

The first shot missed.

The second shot entered his upper right back,

exited the front of his throat.

The third shot entered the upper right back

of the President's head,

exited the right frontal portion of the head.

[music continues]

I did all scientific work, which means fingerprint identification,

handwriting identification,

fabric identification and so forth.

The FBI had done reports on all these things.

And then I went out and commissioned a,

an independent, uh, scientist,

that was true for all the, all the tasks I, I had.

And I would depose both the FBI person

and the independent person in front of the Commission.

Well, I crosschecked the FBI work because there were,

uh, suspicions about the FBI.

Um, and so, I wanted to make sure I had an independent confirmation.

I also, at the end, made sure that everything we did was published.

So all the depositions, all the testimony,

all the photographs we had, they were all published.

And they all pointed in just one direction, Oswald.

[light tense music]

[Vincent] Oswald's rifle, a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle

was determined by firearms experts

to be the murder weapon.

So the weapon that killed John F. Kennedy

was owned and possessed by Lee Harvey Oswald.

[Melvin] Oswald had ordered a, um, a rifle by mail.

There were, uh, fingerprints on the rifle.

The leading fingerprint expert outside the FBI confirmed

that these were Oswald's prints.

There was also a palm print.

And so, Oswald's palm print was on the rifle

as well as the fingerprints.

[Howard] So we have the rifle on the scene,

and so-- and we have the three cartridges,

uh, that were used to fire the three shots.

Now, there were witnesses in Dealey Plaza that day, uh,

they heard anywhere from two to eight shots.

Uh, the consensus seemed to be three shots.

The Commission concluded there were three shots,

based in part on the, um, plurality of the views

and also the fact that there were three cartridges.

The thing that people don't understand,

those of us who are in the, the legal process,

is that in every, uh,

case, whether it be an accident case

or a, uh, any type of dispute,

there are always facts which are inconsistent

with what ultimately is the assessment of what occurred.

Uh, for example, in this instance, uh,

some people heard two shots,

some people heard four shots, some people heard five shots.

So there is, there is various evidence that is inconsistent

with the, um, the overwhelming evidence,

including scientific evidence that there were three shots.

[suspenseful music]

[Howard] So, the question is, uh, where had the rifle been,

and how did it get to the Depository,

and the evidence developed that the rifle

had been kept wrapped in a blanket in the garage

at the Paine household in Irving, Texas.

On Thursday 21st, he went out to the garage,

uh, and he got the rifle and he put it in a brown bag,

he broke it down into pieces and put it in a brown bag.

The package was found on the sixth floor of the Depository

and inside the package were found remnants of the carpet

in which it was kept at the Paine garage.

After the shooting in Dealey Plaza,

Oswald was the only worker

at the seven story Book Depository building

who fled the building.

These are very, very incriminating things.

Forty-five minutes later,

Oswald shot and killed Officer J. D. Tippit

of the Dallas Police Department

when Tippit stopped him on the street

for questioning.

[Howard] This murder and,

and Oswald's subsequent flight

was witnessed by at least 12 people.

They traced him into the theater,

the Texas Theater, uh, at which point

the police were called and they apprehended him in the theater.

[Vincent] When Oswald was interrogated for 12 hours

over a three day period by the Dallas Police Department,

he told one provable,

let's underline the word provable,

one provable lie after another,

all of which, of course, show a consciousness of guilt.

So in my mind, uh, there's no question about Oswald's guilt.

I'm satisfied, not just beyond a reasonable doubt,

but beyond all doubts. It's not even an open question.

[suspenseful music]

[Brendan] One of the unusual aspects of Oswald's life

was when, in 1959,

the former Marine defected to the Soviet Union.

Moscow-based American journalist Priscilla McMillan,

who by coincidence had previously worked for Senator John Kennedy,

was asked by an official at the consulate

to speak to a new defector residing in her hotel.

[Priscilla] So that afternoon, I went back to my hotel,

the Metropol, and asked him if I could talk to him.

He claimed he was a Marxist.

And I'd not seen any Russian

for quite a while who claimed that they were a Marxist

and that they believed in. And, and he said he'd read Marx.

He believed in Marx's Leninism.

I could see that he was pretty an angry person.

[Vincent] Oswald was a complex individual.

He was a dyslexic,

but he voraciously read serious books,

mostly biographies of world leaders.

I think he was intelligent,

slightly on the intellectual side,

but very, very unstable,

and an emotionally unhinged, malcontent,

uh, whose wife, Marina, said, "He'd only be happy on the moon."

His life was left-wing politics,

and he viewed himself as a militant soldier of action

in the, uh, Marxist class struggle.

[light somber music]

[Priscilla] He thought he was coming to a revolutionary country

where everything would be simple.

But it was not simple.

He didn't like the bureaucracy.

Everything you did, you had to,

uh, go to some bureau and apply and wait for hours for an answer.

He didn't like the food.

He didn't like his job.

People were cautious about getting to know him.

Um, probably...

they didn't like him much.

He certainly didn't distinguish himself as a hard worker.

He slacked off all the time at the factory,

but they let him get away with it.

They treated him very, very well,

much better than they would've ever treated a soviet citizen,

but, uh, he didn't appreciate that.

He thought he was special.

And ev-- everywhere he lived he felt he was special.

One thing we know is that Lee Harvey Oswald

had delusions of grandeur.

Uh, he viewed himself in a very historical light.

In fact, his diary, he called, "The Historic Diary."

A squad member of Oswald's in the Marines

said that Oswald wanted to do something

that 10,000 years from now

people would know about.

Uh, his wife, Marina,

said that he compared himself

with the great figures of history.

So certainly we know that Oswald was someone

who didn't just want to create a ripple,

but wanted to change the tide of history.

[Brendan] Lee Oswald met Marina Prusakova

while living in Minsk, in the Soviet Union.

Priscilla McMillan later got to know Marina

and learn about her relationship with Lee

when researching her book, Marina and Lee.

[Priscilla] Well, the relationship between him and Marina went very fast.

Very, very fast. And it makes you think

that Marina sort of set her cap for him

and aimed to, um, marry him.

[gentle music]

When they were on the ship

coming back to the United States,

Lee was writing the whole time.

He was writing about his life in the Soviet Union.

He ignored Marina completely.

And it was very, very hard for her,

because she was coming to a new country with a baby,

and, um,

he paid no attention to her at all.

He would hit her across the face,

and her face would get very red.

Sometimes her eyes-- had a black eye.

She was ashamed, you know, to let people see

that he beat her.

[Ruth] I first met Lee and Marina

in February 1963, February 22nd,

um, at the home of a friend.

And, uh, he had invited me because he knew

I was trying to learn Russian and that he was going to have

a couple of Russian speakers there and thought I might be interested.

At the party itself, uh,

Marina would spent a good bit of the time in the bedroom

trying to get her young daughter to sleep.

Uh, but sh-- also, she really--

she couldn't understand the conversation,

she really didn't have any English skills at that point.

And, uh, so I went into the bedroom

and tried to talk to her. I was...

not real strong in Russian, but I did make an effort

to talk and we did talk.

And they were living in the, the Oak Cliff section of Dallas at that point.

I guess it was the second time I went down to visit her

in Oak Cliff during the time of--

Lee would've been at work at that time.

And we went out to a park and she was telling me that, uh,

she was expecting another baby,

but also that Lee wanted her to go back to the Soviet Union.

And, um, and I gathered she was seeing this as a separation,

and that that would be the end of the marriage.

And here she is, one child and another on the way,

and she loved America, she really wanted to stay.

So I was upset that that was what Lee seemed to want for her.

I came another time to see her and, uh, discovered that Lee

was all packed up,

ready to go on a bus to New Orleans.

And, uh, in fact, he wanted a ride to the station

with his things and I did that.

Uh, and he was expecting-- he got a ticket for Marina

and was expecting her to get on the bus

with the baby and all the paraphernalia that goes with that

and go down to New Orleans when he had a place for them to stay.

So I said, "How about if Marina stays at my house?

I have a phone. You can call and I can bring her down

to New Orleans when you have a place."

[Brendan] What Ruth didn't know was that Oswald needed

to leave town for a very specific reason.

[Vincent] How many people know

that six and a half months before Oswald killed Kennedy,

he attempted to murder another public figure,

Major-General Edwin Walker.

He became very popular

uh, in the United States among the ultra-right-wing,

because it was discovered that he was indoctrinating his troops in Germany

with literature from the John Birch Society.

[Burt] And for that reason,

he was relieved of his command by Kennedy.

But, um, Walker had come back to Dallas

to actually be a hero

of the ultra-conservative community,

many of whom wanted him to run for president.

[light tense music]

[Priscilla] Well, Lee began sighting

the house of General Walker.

Marina knew nothing of this.

He also began practicing shooting

once he got, he got both a pistol and a rifle

through a mail order.

[Burt] One of the things he learned

was that there was a way that you could shoot at Walker

while he was in the house from behind a fence,

that picket fence, uh, that was behind his house.

A few nights before his income taxes were returned,

uh, Walker was in a back room study

on the first floor of his house.

Oswald was, uh, behind the picket fence.

And Oswald shot at Walker with his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.

[Priscilla] He buried the rifle.

He ran home and came home breathless.

And he told Marina he had shot Walker,

and Marina didn't know who that was.

And he laid down on the bed

very red and breathing heavily.

But eventually he told her who Walker was.

And then he listened that night and especially the next morning

to the radio.

And he said, "I missed."

He said, "He moved his head at the last minute,

and it's only because he moved his head that I missed."

[somber music]

I think what brought Walker within the crosshairs of, uh,

of Oswald's Carcano rifle

is that, uh, Walker, like Kennedy, was a bitter enemy

of Oswald's beloved Fidel Castro.

To stand in ovations around the country,

Walker was demanding that the United States invade Cuba

and remove Castro from power.

I heard later, much later,

that, um, Marina had recommended that he move to New Orleans.

Part of why she was saying that

was because she knew he had made an attempt to kill somebody,

and felt that that was the very--

she was very worried about it and didn't know what to do, I'm sure.

But thought maybe leaving town would be a good idea.

[Brendan] Before Oswald left the Dallas area,

he had Marina snap a picture of him holding the rifle

used in the attempt on Walker.

In the photo, Oswald had a pistol in his pocket

and two left-wing newspapers,

The Militant andThe Worker.

The authenticity of this photo has been challenged

by conspiracy theorists.

[suspenseful music]

Marina, Oswald's wife,

told the Warren Commission, told me personally,

that she took the backyard photo

of Oswald holding the Carcano rifle, the murder weapon.

You know what their position is on that?

"Well, it's Oswald's head, but it's been super imposed

upon someone else's body."

[Brendan] In the mid-1970s,

The House Select Committee on Assassinations

was able to take advantage

of modern technological advances and methods

to prove that the photo was, in fact, genuine.

Lee calls on the phone as agreed,

he calls my house and, uh, she, she's elated, really,

that he's called and says to her daughter,

[speaks in Russian] "Father loves us."

And she was eager then to go down

to join him in New Orleans.

So we... [laughs] piled in my station wagon,

uh, two mothers and three kids,

went on down to New Orleans.

Over the summer, I, um, wrote Marina,

a good practice for somebody trying to learn Russian.

And then I'd learned from what she wrote that, uh,

Lee had lost his job again.

Lee said he was going to go look for work at other places.

And...

it just seemed that, that he didn't have plans for her.

And I suggested that she could come back with me

and stay at my house, like, until he got a job

and that he would have saved enough money

to have an apartment for them again.

I think he was really quite grateful

to have a chance for her to be with somebody.

[Brendan] While living in New Orleans, Oswald participated

in activities in support of Fidel Castro.

He joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee

and passed out literature, deliberately,

in the vicinity of an anti-Castro group,

provoking a fight.

He was arrested but subsequently released.

Both Oswald and the Anti-Castro groups

participated in radio and television debates,

where Oswald continually voiced his support of Fidel Castro.

[interviewer] In your work with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee,

uh, what are you advocating?

We advocate restoration of diplomatic,

trade, and tourist relations with Cuba.

[Brendan] Marina's explanation to the Warren Commission

was that Oswald was trying to assemble a dossier

demonstrating his devotion to the Castro regime.

His real goal was to leave the United States

and go to Cuba and be part of the insurrection

that Castro was hoping to lead in Latin America.

Meanwhile, Ruth thinks, Ruth Paine thinks

that Oswald's looking for a job... [softly chuckles]

...uh, in-- and-- uh,

and not knowing where in the country he's going to look for a job.

[Brendan] In truth, Oswald was headed to Mexico City.

At the Cuban embassy there,

he attempted to get a transit visa

through Cuba back to the Soviet Union.

He was denied because it would require approval from the Soviets.

At the Soviet embassy, he was told such a visa

would take months and require approval from Moscow.

Oswald left Mexico City discouraged.

Oswald is very unhappy, very frustrated,

feels he's been,

uh, rebuffed, if not rejected, in Cuba,

and has to go back to the United States.

[somber music]

[Brendan] After Oswald returned from Mexico City,

again without a job, he moved into a boarding house in Dallas.

Marina remained at Ruth Paine's home in Irving, Texas.

I didn't really know where Lee was living, but, uh,

he gave us a phone number as to where he was.

Marina and I were visiting a next-door neighbor

and talking with, uh, a further neighbor who came around

to coffee klatch to the women and their children in the morning.

And, um, I mentioned that he was looking for a work

and not doing too well getting anything.

And, uh, the neighbor, Linnie Mae Randle,

mentioned that her brother

was working at the School Book Depository

and at-- early in the fall year,

and they were still filling school book's orders,

and she thought there might be an opening there.

So I translated that--

when we got home, I translated that to Marina,

who asked me to call the School Book Depository

and see if, in fact, they were hiring.

And so I called and talked to someone

who didn't say whether they were hiring,

but I described this young man with a wife

and two little girls.

And, uh, they--

Roy Truly, the guy who was the personnel person,

said, "Well, just let him come by."

So, he didn't say there was an opening,

but he suggested that he could come by.

[Burt] Oswald's normal practice was to go

to spend the weekend at Ruth Paine's house with Marina.

But on Thursday, November 14th,

Marina suggests to Lee

that he should not come out that weekend

because he'd spent three days there the previous weekend,

the holiday weekend, and maybe the family,

the Paine family needed some time for themselves without him.

So he accepts that.

[Ruth] By Sunday, she was lonely

and I suggested I'd call

using this number that we had,

and, uh, so she could talk to him.

So I dialed the number and, uh, someone answered

and I asked for Lee Oswald and she says,

"There's nobody here by that name."

And also I checked the number, that was the right number,

um, and I hang up in confusion

and, and told Marina what had happened.

Well, the next day,

when Lee called as he usually did

after work on workdays,

uh, Marina said th-- that we had tried to call him

and he bawled her out

for trying to reach him and asking for him by name.

He says he's using a different name.

He's living as O. H. Lee,

which is the reverse initials of his name.

And Marina asks him why,

and he said, "Well,"

he doesn't want the FBI to be able to find him.

"Because," and part of this, as he explains it to her,

is that the FBI is going to cause him to lose his job.

She's very angry

and stops talking to him.

And probably what she said to him was,

"You and your aliases."

She knew that when he was going under an alias,

something bad was cooking.

Because he had gone under the name Hidell for a long time,

and she figured out that that was really Fidel.

And now he was O. H. Lee.

She thought that meant he was up to something,

she just didn't know what.

And she scolded him.

[Burt] He tries to call her back the next day,

which is Monday before the Friday of the assassination.

She won't answer the phone.

I think it happens again, also, on Tuesday.

So, uh,

all we know is that here is this man who's being rejected

by his wife, who's living alone,

and there's a long history of other bad relationships between them.

And, uh, and it's on the 19th

that the route that's going to take

the presidential motorcade past the School Book Depository

is first published in the press.

It's reasonable, certainly, to conclude that it was

after that rejection that he began to think about...

shooting the President.

[Priscilla] So he went to work Thursday,

and he asked Wesley Frazier,

the Paine's neighbor, if he could have a ride out

to the Paine's house that night.

And he said he needed to get curtain rods

for a place he was going to rent in Dallas.

Frazier said, "Of course, fine."

Gave him a ride.

On the 21st, uh,

uh, I had been grocery shopping,

I bought a lot of groceries those days.

And I came home in the car,

and Lee was on the front lawn

with Marina and their little girl.

And, uh, I was surprised to see him

because he didn't usually come out,

he had not come out any time except the weekend.

He'd never come out without asking for an invitation

to see if he could come out.

Uh, and Marina, I think, was very apologetic

about his just showing up.

Uh, and we both-- I thought that,

that he was kind of trying to make up

over the argument they'd had on the phone.

But, uh, anyway, he helped carry groceries into the house.

[Priscilla] Marina realized that Lee had come to make up with her

after their blowup over his having an alias,

and he tried to kiss her

when he got there, and she turned her head away.

And I think he tried to kiss her three different times,

and she turned her head away every time.

And he also said to her, um,

"Come live with me in Dallas,

and I'll find an apartment tomorrow."

He said that three times.

But she didn't answer.

It was after that, after her not answering,

that he went into the garage and got his gun.

I mean, she un-- he unwrapped it,

he located it,

made sure it was where he thought it was.

If she'd behave differently toward him

that Thursday night,

maybe he wouldn't have gotten the rifle.

Maybe he, he wouldn't.

The evidence is rather powerful

that, on Thursday night,

Oswald had gone to re-- try to rebuild

his relationship with Marina.

And we can certainly speculate that if...

that relationship had been rebuilt,

if she had said, "Yes,

I'll come back with you,"

that his actions might have been different.

[Ruth] We had dinner as usual and he went to bed very early.

After I had put my kids to bed with a couple of songs and stories,

I, um, went to finish up

painting some, some children's large blocks

that I was making and, and they were in the garage.

I went in and I found the light was on.

I thought that was kind of strange because,

uh, Marina didn't go in the garage much at all

and she was very much careful about taking care

of turning off lights.

And I thought maybe Lee had been in there,

but I didn't know why or...

what. But I did seem--

this is another hint that he was distracted

or not quite put together,

that he didn't turn the light out.

Marina noticed in the night that he wasn't asleep,

that his legs were sticking up,

and when she kicked him,

he kicked back, that he wasn't sleeping.

Um...

But she was sleeping in the morning

when he got up, and he said,

"I'm leaving $170 on the bureau for you.

Get, get some shoes for Junie."

And she was asleep. She didn't wake up.

She didn't get up yet. He just went out,

but his voice sounded nice, sort of tender.

Whether he kissed her good-bye, I don't remember.

Later in the day, she found his wedding ring

in her grandmother's little porcelain cup on the bureau.

But she only found that later.

She didn't find it when she got up.

And we got to think about this in terms of real people.

It's-- it's a lot of fun to think about this

in terms of grand conspirators.

But these are real people living together.

Uh, his wife had just had a baby a month before.

He saw that, at that point,

his relationship with her had ended.

He had a job that was going nowhere,

he hadn't been able to establish a political role

for himself in the United States.

In fact, he had no political future

in the United States and he hadn't got admitted to Cuba.

And he didn't want to go to Russia.

H-- his life was over.

And this was a way to go out in a blaze of fame.

He didn't need any conspirator

to put him up to this.

[gentle melancholic music]

[Ruth] The next morning, on the 22nd,

when I got up, Lee had already gotten up

and been gone to get his ride into town.

I turned on the TV to watch the Kennedy's

in, in Fort Worth and watch the whole day. And,

uh, I had an appointment for my daughter with the dentist.

So, I was getting ready to leave for that

and I decided to leave the TV on

in case Marina wouldn't think about turning it on when she got up.

And when I came back, she was-- she thanked me

for leaving it on, she was, was watching.

And by this time, the Kennedy's were already in the motorcade coming, uh,

from the airport.

[sighs]

It's a terrible time.

Terrible memories.

We were watching television and we heard

that the President... [softly gasps] had been shot.

[sighs] And one of the reporters said

he saw a pink spray come up from the President's head,

and I thought, "Oh, my God, it's fatal."

[softly cries]

And I got out some candles

to, to light a candle, a-- and Marina said,

"Is that a way of praying?" I said, "Yeah."

[deeply inhales]

Uh, we just sat and waited

to hear wh-- what was next.

It was, you know, another-- almost an hour

before it was confirmed that he was dead.

Somewhere on, on the newscast,

it said that they thought the shot had been fired

from the School Book Depository.

I went out to tell Marina that, she was busy hanging up diapers.

We did a lot of diapers.

And, uh, I said that they thought the shot

had been fired from the School Book Depository.

And I didn't notice it,

didn't realize until later, but she went into the house

and apparently, from her testimony later,

she said she had looked to see

if the blanket was there that she knew the gun was in.

And she thought it was there.

But then it, you know, it's like four plus in the afternoon that, uh,

many officers from Dallas County

and the Police Department came to the door.

I know they said, "We have Lee Oswald in custody

for shooting an officer."

And, "May we come in?" And I said,

"Well, do you have a warrant?"

"No, but we could get one right away."

And I thought, "Oh, God. We're all upset."

So I said, "Well, okay, you can come in. It's all right."

So they came in. [chuckles] Oh!

You have to understand

how naive I was.

I thought we'd sit on the sofa and talk about it.

And the policemen sort of fanned out

looking over the entire house right away and,

uh, one of them asked whether, uh, Oswald had a gun and,

and I said, "No."

And translated to Marina, who said that he did have a gun

and led them to the garage and pointed to this,

uh, place on the floor where there was a blanket roll on.

Um...

[softly sighs]

The officer picked it up and it folded over his arm.

It was clearly an empty blanket.

And that was the point at which I thought it could've been Lee.

[sharply gasps]

And I'd help these officers in whatever way they need.

[somber music]

Marina didn't come back after that Saturday morning,

and, um, but she called and she needed some clothes for the baby

and, and some, uh, items that I sent her.

Uh, a mail began to come...

[stutters] sympathetic mail

and maybe a little donation towards Marina.

Then I would put those things together

and the Irving Police had a squad car out in front of my house.

And so, I'd take it out to them and say,

"Could you get this to Marina?"

And they did, I guess.

And one day, it included a,

a book that she had been reading to me from in Russian.

And, uh, I thought she might want it.

And I-- it was a housekeeping advice and information.

A couple of days later,

two men came out from Secret Service

and one of them was a Russian speaking person.

He was the one that interviewed me.

He said, "Mrs.--" he showed me this note.

He said, "Have you ever seen this note?"

"No, I haven't seen it."

"Do you recognize the handwriting?"

No, didn't recognize the handwriting.

"Mrs. Paine, you sent this note to Marina."

And I said, "No, I don't think so."

Um, and we went back and forth.

This was the first and thankfully the only time

somebody accused me of being... nefarious.

And he said, "Well, it was in a book."

I said, "Oh, I sent a book,

but I didn't realize this note had been in it."

And what I've learned from news accounts

and from testimonies later was that this was a note

that Oswald had written for Marina

at the time in, uh, April 1963,

that he took his rifle and tried to kill General Edwin A. Walker.

And it-- it was very incriminating.

"If I'm taken, this is where the jail is,

don't keep my clothes, but you should keep my papers."

It was very telling to me

that this was authentically written

by Oswald to give to Marina.

[Brendan] After Oswald was killed,

Marina was living under the protection of the Secret Service.

The relationship was not the same.

Um, she was very embarrassed

that this had happened to me.

And, you know,

um,

and it-- this has been such a terrible event in both our lives

that it loomed when we've met together.

There it was, so huge.

We-- we shared such a terrible grief.

[suspenseful music]

[Brendan] Everything was pointing to Oswald as the killer.

What clues were there that he was the lone gunman?

Abraham Zapruder was an amateur film buff

who happened to be filming the motorcade.

This film became a key piece of evidence

for all of the investigations to follow.

[Howard] Four or five members of the staff,

supplemented by FBI and Secret Service Agents,

sat down with the Zapruder film repeatedly

and tried to analyze exactly, uh, which bullets had hit whom,

uh, in the vehicle and in what order.

Eventually, the consensus of the group was that,

making rough judgements as to when the President

first began to exhibit signs that he had been wounded,

uh, and examining Connally's first evidence of being wounded,

uh, that it is unlikely

that there was time within that interval

for a separate shot to be fired

by Oswald from the same weapon.

And that produced early on a hypothesis that, uh,

a single bullet, uh, had, uh, wounded both the President in his back

and exiting from his throat

and then, uh, entering, uh, Connally's, uh, body

to create his injuries in his back,

his wrist, and his thigh.

So, from that examination and debate, uh...

[stuttering] emerged a growing conviction

that the FBI conclusion in both the first and secondary reports

uh, as to the wounds

and the impact of the bullets was incorrect,

uh, and it led eventually to a reenactment

o-- of the, uh, motorcade and, and the assassination,

uh, that the staff recommended

and-- to Rankin and it was opposed

by both the FBI and the Secret Service.

And so, what one did during the, uh,

the reenactment was to line up, uh,

agents who pretended to be sitting

in the identical position as the President,

with the Governor Connally sitting in a jump seat

below and slightly to the left of the President.

And from Oswald's perspective,

uh, there was no way for the bullet

to go after exiting from the President's neck

other than into Connolly.

If it had not hit Connally, then-- there is no evidence

that it hit any other part of the car.

That was more or less verified

because, you know, the answer is,

to the single bullet theory is,

well, how else can you explain

the bullet that exited from the President's throat?

An-- and the fact is that there is no logical answer

and that the early description of, of the single bullet

wounding both people being a magic bullet

is, in fact, quite-- in the contrary point is true,

that that bullet, uh, didn't change its mind where it was going.

Uh, it exited from the President's throat

on a, on a downward trajectory

a-- and wounded Governor Connally.

Governor Connally insisted then and until his death

that he had not been hit by the same bullet

that hit the President.

Uh, as I have said,

he was the Governor of Texas,

he wanted his own bullet.

The conspiracy theorists claim that the second bullet

was the magic bullet, but there was no magic bullet.

That's just a myth, an invention of the conspiracy theorists.

What they do in their sketches,

they place Governor Connally

directly in front of President Kennedy

in the presidential limousine, which he was not.

And then they argue that a shot fired

from right to left on a downward trajectory

towards the President

and passing on a straight line through the president's body.

Once it exited the front of the president's body,

to hit Connally, they say, it would've had to make a right turn in midair

and then make a left turn in midair.

Well, of course, if you start out with an erroneous premise,

everything that follows makes a heck of a lot of sense.

The only problem is that it's wrong.

Uh, the reality is that Connally

was not seated directly in front of the president.

He was seated in a jump seat

to the President's, uh, left front.

So the orientation of Connally's body

vis-à-vis Kennedy's was such

that a bullet passing on a straight line through the president's body

would've had to go on and hit Connally

for the simple reason it had nowhere else to go.

[Brendan] The House Select Committee on Assassinations also looked

into this during their investigation

in the mid-1970s.

So, the question is, what's the nature of the wound

in th-- in John Connally's back?

And I can testify to this.

I asked John Connally in my office,

who's standing there with his wife,

"Would you take your shirt off?"

So, I got him to take his shirt off

and he still has the wound,

not anymore, and the wound is not an entry wound

in a sense that the bullet is coming

with not having hit anything else.

When a bullet hits something,

it-- the-- it's called tumbling.

And the bullet that hit Kennedy's, I mean,

John Connally's back had tumbled

and actually came in to hit it this way.

And so the wound in his back is oval,

indicating that the bullet that hit him was not coming straight,

which is an indication that it hit something else.

So, our conclusion, unequivocally,

two shots from behind,

uh, Depository.

And one shot went through President Kennedy

and struck Governor Connally?

Correct. And so that the Warren Commission's posit

of a single bullet theory was correct.

-Now... -Now we proved it.

We didn't hypothesize it, we proved it.

Now, there's another reason why the conspiracy theorists

alleged that this was a magic bullet.

They claimed that when it was recovered,

it was in pristine condition.

And they said, "How could that be? It went through two bodies,

Connally's body and the President's.

It couldn't be in pristine condition."

Uh, well, the point is it was not in pristine condition.

The base of the bullet,

which the conspiracy theorists never show in their books,

was badly damaged,

2.4 grains lost in weight,

so it was not a pristine bullet.

Secondly, this bullet was a, uh, fully metal jacketed,

military-type bullet designed to cause a lot of damage

to anything it hits without causing too much damage to itself.

Uh, firearms experts for the, uh, Warren Commission

and the House Select Committee both agree that that bullet

could have caused all the damage it did

without becoming more deformed itself.

And the thing here,

something-- interesting thing here and the irony

is that those conspiracy theorists have wrapped

that magic bullet tag around the neck

of the Warren Commission

for 50 years, successfully, I might add.

It turns out it was only they who had a magic bullet.

[Brendan] Another popular theory that has swirled continuously

is the idea that President Kennedy

was in fact struck by a bullet fired from in front,

from the so called Grassy Knoll.

This was fueled, in part, when the Zapruder film

was finally shown to the public.

[Vincent] The first time the American people saw this

was on the evening of March 6th, 1975,

network TV, ABC.

Millions of Americans seeing the President's head

snapped to the rear concluded and understandably saw

on the simple law of physics,

the shot must have come from the,

uh, right front where the Grassy Knoll was,

not the right rear where Oswald was

in the Book Depository building.

We have photographs of Kennedy's brain

and the brain has two hemispheres.

This is the hemisphere that faced the Grassy Knoll.

This is the hemisphere that faced the plaza.

This hemisphere was destroyed

by the bullet that came in the back of his head

and exited the front of his head.

Just totally destroyed.

This hemisphere is fine.

If the bullet had shot him from this direction,

it would've had to have dissipated

before it got halfway across his brain.

So there's no evidence in his brain

that the shot from the Grassy Knoll hit him.

Now, the people say, "Well,

what about the evidence of the head apparently snapping back like this?

Isn't that the head

being snapped back by a bullet hitting?"

And my answer is no,

because I've looked at the President's brain

and I've looked at the President's skull

and there's no evidence from a bullet from the front right.

"Well, professor, what about the snap back?

Do you have an explanation for that?"

Uh, when Kennedy's brain was hit,

it released electrical stimulus

to all of his muscles simultaneously.

And the strongest muscle in his body would be his back muscle.

And when all the muscles tighten up,

which one wins?

The back muscle, and that's what snaps him back.

Whatever the reason his head snapped back,

was he shot from the front right?

And the answer to that is no.

I know what his skull looks like,

I know what his brain looks like.

No evidence of shot from the front right.

So if one occurred, it didn't hit him.

[Brendan] My own research took me to look at the Zapruder film itself.

I wanted to see what I could learn

from closely watching some of the key frames.

So, can we play the, uh, film through?

We see the President's motorcade coming down the street

with the President,

the limousine,

the crowd cheering.

The President holds his hands to his neck, and you see the shot,

see the First Lady going on the back of the limousine,

and then, out of sight.

So why don't we, if we could, let's go to the fatal shot,

which is, I think, right before the fatal shot,

-frame 312 first. Alright. -[Chris] Ok, here's 312.

So at 312, we have the President holding his hands on his neck,

looking at the First Lady and the First Lady is reaching over,

looking at him as his shoulders are turned towards her.

And then, if we can go to the next frame

which is frame 313, which is the fatal shot, if you will.

And then, just so you know,

if you back it up again to 312...

-Here is 312. -...and then, before you get to 312, 313,

if you look at the line,

if you draw a line on Jackie's head or hat

and you see the back of his head,

it's all intact, and we see the frame right there,

so that clearly there is nothing missing between 312 and 313.

And then, the shot.

We see the President's head moving forward,

we see the President's back moving forward,

and we see the brain matter,

all moving forward to the front of the car.

Now, if we can...

move forward from frame 313

to frame 318,

you see the President's body jerking backward

from a neuromuscular reaction

as a result of the right hemisphere

of the President's brain being blown out from the shot.

Clearly, there is no evidence

of anything striking the President from the front.

[suspenseful music]

[Brendan] Further evidence could have been offered

in the autopsy photographs and X-rays.

But during the Commission's investigation,

Chief Justice Warren was so horrified by these images

that he refused to allow this material to be released

to the Commission, it's staff and to the public.

The Chief Justice testifi-- testified

and has written that he did in fact see the materials,

which were delivered by custodian to his Supreme Court chambers,

and he looked at the pictures,

uh, found them horrific and gave them back to the custodian.

And he felt that he could not let the documents be seen by a witness

without necessarily making them public.

And that's the mistake that I feel was made,

because the controversy about the single bullet conclusion,

uh, was also wide spread and it had direct relationship

to the autopsy materials, which were absent.

Uh, the combination of the lack of those materials and the inherent, uh,

uh, the questions raised by the single bullet theory,

uh, fostered a greater and stronger, uh, um,

body of criticism to the Commission report

that might otherwise have developed.

Uh, eventually, when those materials

were made available over the years,

21 pathologists had looked at the materials

supporting the single bullet finding

and 20 out of 21 agreed with that finding.

[Brendan] The House Select Committee spent significant resources

on modern technology for their analysis,

which they used to re-examine all of the evidence of the assassination,

including forensic pathologists to look at the autopsy.

[Robert] They took all of the evidence.

They took the autopsy photographs.

The doctors looked at them

and they determined,

from the bullet holes in the President,

that both shots came from behind him and up.

And they did that based on... [softly sighs]

...a principle called,

um, abrasion collars.

If a bullet goes down through my skin like this,

it will burn my skin in a circle.

And if the bullet went straight in,

it burns a circle straight.

The bullet comes in from the side,

it burns the ci-- the circle with an oblong,

so, you can determine direction

of bullets by looking at the hole that goes in

and the same process occurs on the other side, going out.

This is an anatomically correct drawing

of the President as if he was standing up.

And we have one entry wound here in the back,

and one entry wound here.

This is an abrasion collar with an entry wound

and there's an exit wound on Kennedy's neck about here.

And-- remember, this is anatomically correct,

the President was in a different position when the bullets hit him,

and that's the one that hit him in the head.

This is an anatomically correct...

drawing from the Zapruder film.

And a-- it's a combination of that

and the photographs of the skull.

You have an entry wound here,

and an exit wound here.

And in fact, you could see

the beveling on this exit wound,

it's a small hole on the inside

and a large hole on the outside.

[Brendan] So the analysis of these pieces of evidence

by the Warren Commission and later confirmed

by the House Select Committee concluded that,

of the three shots fired by Oswald,

only two hit the President and Governor Connally.

However, at the end of the House Committee's reexamination,

additional acoustic evidence came to light

of a possible fourth gunshot,

which would indicate that there was a second shooter.

What was revealed was that one of the motorcycle police officers

had his microphone stuck in the transmit mode

and the Dallas Police Dictabelt recording of that microphone

seemed to contain a sound wave of an additional shot.

We made an effort to find, uh,

the top acoustics people in the country.

We said, "Would you look at the tape

and see what you can determine?"

And they did that, and they came back

and they said, "Uh,

we have some inconvenient news." [chuckles]

"There were indeed three shots in the Plaza

that probably came from the Depository.

But there's evidence on the tape

of a shot right before Oswald's third shot,

and it's from the Grassy Knoll."

So we asked them, "How confident are you

that there was a shot from the Grassy Knoll?"

And they said, "For that one, 50/50."

They said for the other three,

they were up in the 80s and 90s.

Uh, and,

"You mean, the fact of conspiracy in the assassination

is a flip of the coin?"

And he said, "Basically, yes."

And then we had two experts who looked at what,

uh, Bolt, Beranek and Newman did.

And then we tried to figure out is,

was there any way to extend this

and increase our degree of confidence

for the shot from the Grassy Knoll?

And they did it.

And they got up-- the confidence up to about 95%

that there was a shot from the Grassy Knoll.

[Brendan] This conclusion was controversial

and prompted dissents by Committee Members.

Their conclusions hinged on determining

which motorcycle had the stuck microphone.

Using photos and film of the motorcade,

they determined that it had to belong to motorcycle officer

H. B. McLain for their theory to work.

McLain testified about his actions in the motorcade

before the House Select Committee

and later recalled his experiences

in a 2003 interview.

I asked them if I could listen to the tape.

"Well, you don't need to listen to that."

So, I just said everything was possible.

And when I got back to town,

I went back to work the next day,

J. C. Bowles called me over to his office.

He said "Mac, have you heard them, have you heard those tapes

before you went up there?" I said, "No, Sir.

And they wouldn't let me listen to them up there."

So he sent me in--

took me into one of the other rooms in there,

sat me down and said, "I want you to listen to these."

So I sat down and listened to them.

When I got through, I came back out

and said, "No, it wasn't mine.

Couldn't be."

Because you can tell the difference in the sound

of a three wheeler running and a solo motorcycle running.

And it was not mine.

[upbeat music]

[Brendan] Steve Barber,

a rock drummer from Shelby, Ohio,

believed conspiracy theories

and was excited to learn in 1979

that the recordings were going to be published

in an upcoming issue of Gallery Magazine.

I got my copy,

I put this record on,

and I'm listening intently to this thing.

I mean, just earphones,

anything I can get my hands on.

I want to hear every little sound.

No gunshots, you can't hear any gunshots.

So I'm like, "Wh-- where are they?"

And I just, you know, I figure,

"Well, they're in there somewhere,

because there's a lot of different little sounds."

[Brendan] What Barber discovered was known as crosstalk.

That occurs when one transmission from one channel

is picked up on another.

The Dallas Police Department was using two channels

during this event.

Channel One was the regular police channel,

which recorded the stuck open microphone.

Channel Two was reserved for motorcade communications.

He was surprised to hear,

barely audibly on the Channel One recording,

the same words he also heard on Channel Two.

That was the crosstalk.

[crackly recordings]

[muffled chat]

There's a voice that's buried

within all that motorcycle noise and so forth, and I thought,

"I want to-- I'm going to figure out what's going on here,

see if I can figure out what this guy is saying."

[Brendan] The words Barber heard were Dallas County Sheriff Decker

ordering his men to, "Hold everything secure

until the investigators get there."

This transmission on both recordings provide a timeline

for when the Channel One recording was made.

So then, when I discovered this Sheriff Decker transmission,

it proved that section of the tape is actually 90 seconds

after the, the shooting.

There are no gunshots on that recording.

We are right back to square one. The Warren Commission stands,

"Three gunshots from Lee Harvey Oswald,

nobody else."

[Brendan] In 1980, The National Academy of Sciences

reexamined the acoustic evidence.

Barber sent them his conclusions.

On May 14th, 1982,

the National Academy of Sciences

released their report agreeing with Barber's assessment.

In October 2013,

a new study commissioned by Professor Larry Sabato

of the University of Virginia

and conducted by a private firm, Sonalysts,

concluded that the motorcycle with an open microphone

was traveling at a high rate speed,

indicating that it was not in the presidential motorcade.

Sadly, once Barber concluded

that the Warren Commission was correct,

his friends in the conspiracy community began attacking him

and those attacks continue to this day.

This was the only scientific proof

of a conspiracy that existed.

And...

you know, I came along and I guess I killed that.

Searching for the truth, and I f--

found something I didn't expect, and it...

Here we are, so--

-50-what, 53 years later? -[Brendan] Right. Right.

-Right. -Man...

[suspenseful music]

[Brendan] Could there still have been more people connected to the murder?

How did Jack Ruby fit in?

Although both the Warren Commission

and the House Select Committee ruled out Cuba,

the Soviet Union, the FBI and the CIA,

Robert Blakey believes a conspiracy involving a noted underworld figure was possible.

Do you think that Oswald was involved in a mafia/organized crime conspiracy?

No. Not knowingly organized crime.

My posit, and you have to bring two things together,

you've got to bring Oswald together and Ruby together.

Well, the general rule is that you can only conspire

with other people that you know or associated with.

So if you want to find out if there's a conspiracy,

what you do is a link analysis of the individual.

All the leads that run out from Oswald

run to Communist groups of some kind.

All the things that run out from Ruby

are crime connected.

So why did Oswald kill the President?

If it was part of a conspiracy,

it was Communist,

and we've already decided the Communists had no stake in that.

If you take Ruby and say, "Who are Ruby's connections?

Uh, who are they connected to?"

[Brendan] Blakey believes that the connections between Ruby

and Oswald flow through New Orleans' crime boss, Carlos Marcello,

who had a well-publicized grudge against the Kennedys.

The Kennedys were trying to deport Marcello.

Ruby was certainly exposed to crime figures

in his business dealings.

For Oswald, it was less clear.

When Oswald was 16,

he served in the Civil Air Patrol

under Captain David Ferrie,

who would, by 1963,

be an investigator for Carlos Marcello's legal team.

Another connection to Marcello was Oswald's uncle Dutz Murret,

a New Orleans bookmaker.

For me, the critical problem between anybody in New Orleans

and Oswald in Dallas is that,

uh, when Oswald left New Orleans,

uh, he went to Mexico City.

He didn't even have the knowledge himself

that he was going to go to Dallas.

He was hoping to get to Cuba,

uh, and, uh, he told,

uh, his wife and he told Ruth Paine

that he would go to either Houston or Philadelphia looking for a job.

How does somebody have communication with Oswald

between October 4th,

when he returned from Mexico City,

and November 22nd, when he shot the President?

Even his wife didn't know where he was living.

The FBI didn't know where he was living.

-We don't know. -But-- We don't!

-We don't know about the connections... -But--

...but what we're trying to say is,

if Oswald did it

and it was conspiratorial,

what's the nature of his conspiracy?

-Well, tell me. -So what you have is,

the technical phrase for it is False Flag Recruitment,

meaning the anti-Castro Cubans

pretend to be pro-Castro Cubans,

and they go to Oswald and say,

"We want you to kill the President

on behalf of Castro."

Would Oswald take that assignment?

I think of this as a jigsaw puzzle.

And we're putting pieces in.

And we know that there were--

"Oswald killed the president," that's a big section

-of the jigsaw puzzle. -Right.

Carlos Marcello said he was going to kill the President

and he was going to use, he said, "a nut,"

uh, use a patsy to do it, for it.

So that everybody would think the patsy was involved.

And now Oswald fits that definition.

And that's one of the reasons they had to kill him

-right afterwards. -Okay.

And that's...

How would they have killed him? Well, Jack Ruby killed him.

Now the question is,

can Jack Ruby be connected to...

Mar-- Marcello and the whole mob connection?

And the answer is "Yes," like, overwhelmingly.

Did Jack Ruby act at that time?

Well, he never admitted it.

He said that he did it, but, a-- as you put it,

is to prove that Jews had guts.

Your story is not inconsistent

with him having done it for the mob.

They both could be true.

[Brendan] While I have the deepest respect for Professor Blakey,

I strongly disagree with his theory.

My reason? The history behind Jack Ruby.

When asked if Ruby was a part of the, part of organized crime,

the detective who was a specialist

in organized crime in Dallas

during that earlier time period,

his remark was that, "If Ruby was a part of organized crime,

organized crime needs a new Human Resources Director."

Here Oswald had been in custody for,

uh, a day and a half, since Friday afternoon

until Sunday morning.

So Oswald was not breaking.

Uh, and Oswald was not that talkative a person.

Almost the last person that I would want

to make sure that the conspiracy stays a secret

is Jack Ruby, because he was a talker.

The mafia is not crazy, and they would not have wanted

this talkative fellow, uncontrolled fellow,

unstable fellow, uh, in prison

rather than Lee Harvey Oswald.

[Burt] Ruby had some pretty knowledgeable lawyers

representing him at his trial.

Uh, if Ruby had some kind of information

that the mafia was involved in this,

uh, don't you think his lawyers--

he would've told his lawyers, and his lawyers would've tried

to have made a deal of some sort for him?

He got the death penalty at one point.

Uh, it was a real deal that he could've made.

[Brendan] So who was Jack Ruby?

Why did he murder Oswald and how did he happen to be

in the position to do it?

The Warren Commission staff began their investigation of him,

beginning with the date in late September

when it was first announced the President was coming to Texas.

Where was Ruby? What had he done?

Who had he talked to up until the time he shot, uh, Oswald?

So we were trying to develop a chronology of his activities.

I felt that Ruby might well have been assisted in some way

to do this kind of thing, or somebody had tolerated him.

Jack Ruby had been born in Chicago

of Jewish immigrant parents.

When he came to Dallas after the Second World War,

at the very same time, he and his two brothers

changed their name from Rubenstein to Ruby.

Uh, it wasn't an uncommon thing to do

if you were going to live in Dallas,

which, uh, was a community,

uh, that had a high level of antisemitism.

His entrepreneu-- primary entrepreneurial activity

was to run striptease clubs.

He knew people who were involved

in organized crime from his childhood,

and he knew them from the striptease clubs he ran,

because the people that he dealt with,

the Union people,

uh, also had those connections.

So I started to read the transcript of the Ruby trial,

he had been tried and then, as I recall, convicted by March or so.

Uh, and-- so I was reading through the transcript,

uh, and it was really a very interesting, uh, journey for me,

uh, because, uh, the issue of Ruby's Jewishness,

uh, had been raised a number of different ways,

uh, partly by Ruby himself,

who had been incensed by an ad that appeared in the Dallas Morning News

on the morning of November 22nd, 1963,

uh, with a black border

saying "Welcome to Dallas, Mr. President."

And, uh, signed Bernard Weissman.

And Ruby assumed that Bernard Weissman was Jewish,

although he had never heard of him.

He felt that it was all prob--

unlikely probable that whoever had placed that ad in the newspaper

was somehow linked to the assassination.

And that a Jewish name had been put on this ad

by people who were somehow involved in the assassination,

so that the Jews would be blamed

for the assassination of President Kennedy

and would feed right into the anti-Semitism

that he felt so strongly existed in Dallas.

So, you know, Ruby, at that point became

the first conspiracy investigator.

So, with his high class investigative techniques,

he set out to find Weissman.

He looked in the telephone directory.

He couldn't find Weissman's name in the telephone directory.

He looked in a street directory.

He couldn't find Weissman's name in the street directory.

That night, Friday night,

he went to re-- religious services at his temple

and he asked his rabbi if he'd ever heard of Bernard Weissman

and Rabbi Silverman had never heard of Bernard Weissman.

I was not happy with the politics in the US,

though not that interested to where I would do something about it.

[Brendan] As a young soldier stationed in postwar Germany in 1961,

Weismann got to know Larry Schmidt,

who was active in conservative politics.

Together with a few others, they formed an organization

called CUSA, Conservative USA.

By November 1963,

Schmidt had become a right wing activist

in the Dallas area when Weissman joined him there.

Learning of the President's impending visit,

they decided to place the newspaper ad

in theDallas Morning News.

Tell us about the concoction of the ad

and what that ad was going to be.

Okay. Larry presented a preliminary heading,

and we looked at it and talked about it, uh,

and then discussed what-- "Well, let's change this and let's put this in.

Let's put that in." And then, ten items.

-We wanted ten questions... -To President Kennedy.

...to President Kennedy.

So we concoct the ad and I'm, I'm taking it

-to the fellow at the Dallas Morning News... -Yeah.

...uh, the layout guy.

And we're going to have it laid out.

And, uh, I'm eliminating this and eliminating that,

all the little mistakes they've made, and I said,

"Uh, just to put the ad in, that's not going to do it.

Uh, put a, put a black border around it.

Just, yeah, put a black border."

And so, I come back in the, in the day,

the next day and he's got the layout, and I said,

"Uh, make it a little wider."

So I said, "No, a little wider than that."

-That's th-- that's the black border. -And the wider-- that's,

-That's the black border. -Okay.

I said, "Because that will attract the attention."

Then, as far as the name goes...

-Right. -...we invented a name.

"American Fact-Finding Committee."

"Oh, that's good enough. It's good enough for the ad,

and we'll rent a box."

But, but look, the Committee has to have

-some name on-- somebody's name on it, doesn't it? -Well,

I or we came up with the idea, "Well, look,

most of the Jews in Dallas are liberal."

-Yeah. -"Pretty strongly liberal."

And I said, "If I put my-- if we put my name in that,

-yeah, that-- that'll be helpful." -It would show--

-it would show that not every-- -it would show that not every,

not every Jewish guy is, uh, liberal,

that there are conservative Jews.

-Right. -You know?

And fearlessly conservative Jews

-at that particular point. -Right.

And so, that's-- that's how the name came about.

What did you hope to accomplish by placing that ad?

Putting us up front, notoriety.

But most of it was adjusting our point of view out

and to create a stir. We thought the questions were provocative enough

that it would promote a lot of conversation,

positive, negative, didn't matter,

as long as we had the publicity.

Had any of you ever heard

of Lee Harvey Oswald

-up to that point? -No. Never.

And had any of you ever heard

-of Jack Ruby up to that point? -Never.

Ruby really was obsessed over the whole weekend

with the assassination, period.

Uh, I still remember the description of his apartment

when the police came in there, I mean, the whole place

was full of newspaper articles about the assassination.

And that was all he talked about

to many people over that weekend.

After he went to services on Friday night,

he decided he would try to,

uh, get into the police station,

where incidentally, uh,

Oswald was being held and questioned,

and it was mobbed with newspaper

and news media people, television, radio, everybody.

And I remember sitting in the, uh,

in the room in the VFW Building where the Commission was housed,

where they showed videos and there was this video

of Oswald being presented,

and the camera panned around the room,

and wait a minute, can it be? It was Jack Ruby.

How the h-- how did he get in there?

What was he doing there?

Ruby was there, we have a picture of Ruby

standing on a table with a piece of--

a pad of paper in his hand and a pencil in the other hand.

And he told the police that he was there

as an interviewer for the Israeli Press.

Incidentally, Ruby later told us

he actually had a gun in his pocket at that time.

If he really wanted to kill Oswald and that was a premeditated plan,

why didn't he do it then and there?

When he got home, he found that he had a telephone call

from one of his strippers who lived in Fort Worth,

whose name was Little-- no, her stage name was Little Lynn.

And because he closed his nightclubs that night,

Little Lynn didn't get paid,

so she wanted Ruby to give her some money.

So, Ruby told

uh, she made-- this gal had made--

again, we didn't have cell phones in those days.

She, she had made a phone call from a parking garage.

And Ruby told the parking garage attendant

to give her ten dollars and Ruby would pa-- pay for this.

But the next morning, Little Lynn called him again

at about 9:30 in the morning.

Incidentally, at this point,

the media had announced that Oswald was going to be transferred

at ten o'clock in the morning.

Ruby's not-- is scarcely up at 9:30.

He gets a phone-- another phone call from Little Lynn.

Little Lynn needs $25

to take care of food and pay her landlord.

So, Ruby says he'll go downtown.

He leaves his apartment after ten o'clock,

after the time when Oswald was supposed to have been moved,

and takes with him his favorite dog, Sheba.

[Murray] So Ruby goes down to Downtown Dallas.

As it turns out, the Western Union office,

uh, was a few hundred feet from the jail.

And, uh, he's there, and I think it was like 11:16

or 11:17 in the morning, and we know that

because there were three copies of the money order.

Four minutes later, he's in the basement shooting Oswald.

And, you know, if he-- if he had a plan to shoot Oswald,

I mean, that was the most fortuitous way to do it,

uh, to be called by, by a stripper,

and, of course, we questioned, uh, the stripper at length about what happened.

We knew that the, uh, w-- we went to Western Union,

they certified that the money order was, uh, was genuine.

And then it happened, you know, that, uh, one of the policemen

who was standing watch by one of the driveways,

when the decoy car that was supposed to take Oswald came out,

that policeman went to the car,

giving R-- uh, Ruby the opportunity to go down the driveway.

So, I mean, just so many things that happened,

uh, that to me made it absolutely clear,

and to Burt it's absolutely clear,

uh, that this couldn't have been premeditated.

He couldn't have really planned to go and kill Oswald,

certainly not at that time.

-[shotgun fires] -[men yells]

[crowd shouts]

[Burt] When Ruby was wrestled to the ground

and taken upstairs in the police department

to be questioned by Homicide Captain Fritz,

when Fritz asked him, "Jack, why did you do it?"

Ruby's answer was, "I had to show the world a Jew had guts."

My feeling really was that he did it as,

in an emo-- that Ruby killed Oswald as an emotional outburst.

He was so emotionally upset by the assassination,

and he didn't think.

He saw Oswald in front of him,

uh, he had a gun in his pocket,

which he typically carried with him. So he shot him.

[Brendan] Since the Warren Commission report was released,

no one has been able to show concrete evidence

of any contacts between Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald

before the assassination.

[suspenseful music]

We decided early on that it would be useful to explore,

uh, Oswald's sources of income.

The, the very simple minded theory is that,

if he was an informant for the FBI or other agency,

or was a member of a well-to-do conspiracy,

he would be receiving some income,

uh, to help make him live more comfortably

while he planned with his fellow conspirators

to assassinate the President.

We asked IRS to lend us,

uh, an IRS agent to conduct an investigation along these lines,

both his sources of incomes and his expenditures

during the period from which he returned

to the United States in June 1962

until November 22nd, 1963.

At the time of his arrest, he had approximately $183.87.

I may be mistaken on the cents.

It seemed, you know, thoroughly rebut any suggestion

that he was receiving money from any source

other than what we were able to document,

um, and certainly he lived an austere life, uh, to be sure.

Assume that one of these groups decided

that they were going to kill the President,

an assumption I find prodigiously unlikely.

Oswald obviously would've been one of the last people in the face of this Earth

whom they would have gone to to do their bidding for them.

Uh, not, not an expert shot.

He was a good shot, but not an expert shot.

He had a $12 mailed order rifle.

Uh, notoriously unreliable, unstable.

I mean, here's a guy

that defects to Russia pre Gorbachev.

Even today, who in the heck defects to Russia?

He gets over there, wants to become a Soviet citizen very desperately.

They turned him down. What does he do?

He slashes his wrist,

tries to commit suicide, ends up in a hospital.

Just the type of guy that the CIA or mob

would want to rely upon

to commit the biggest murder in American history.

If I was going to hire somebody to be an assassin,

Oswald was-- Lee Harvey Oswald was probably the last person on my list.

[suspenseful music]

Even before I investigated, uh,

uh, I realized that you can't draw a distinction

between foreign and domestic, uh, conspiracies.

Uh, the real and best example would be the anti-Castro Cubans,

who I suspected at the beginning.

They were-- anti-Castro Cubans were largely in Florida.

And of course, uh, they were Cubans. [chuckles]

And, uh, they had relatives and friends still in Cuba.

And they themselves had been there just until a few years ago.

Uh, but this was basically true with all of them,

with Cuba, there was-- any conspiracy had to have,

uh, agents, at least, in the United States.

So that much, uh, we just forgot the foreign,

just give us the conspiracy, period.

The anti-Castro Cubans,

originally, this is my just personal opinion,

was that they were the prime suspect,

uh, because they hated Kennedy

because he had aborted the Bay of Pigs, uh, Invasion.

And they thought they could gain by having Oswald do it.

This is my theory at the time.

Uh, and then blame it on Cuba.

And so that would trigger a real invasion.

Well, we found zero evidence of this.

And so it boiled down to Cuba,

and the reason it boiled down to them

was because of Oswald's trip to Mexico City,

where he dealt with, uh, both the Cuban Embassy

and the Russian Embassy in ways that, uh,

that even to this day were not entirely clear,

uh,

except that the CIA t--

did not tell us a lot that they knew.

[Brendan] During the Warren Commission's investigation,

the CIA was being led by Kennedy family friend, John McCone.

[David] When McCone testified before the Warren Commission,

uh, he didn't mention anything about Oswald

being in Mexico City, or at least what we knew about it.

The principle reason there is that we had

some very sensitive, uh, surveillance operations underway,

both audio and, uh, visual.

And he didn't want, in a public setting,

to disclose that sensitive, uh, source.

[light tense music]

[Brendan] Also kept hidden from the Warren Commission

was that the CIA, prior to the assassination,

had plans to kill Fidel Castro

with the full knowledge of Attorney General Robert Kennedy

and, presumably, President Kennedy.

Some of these plots involved the use of members of organized crime

who had a vested interest in reclaiming their casinos,

which they'd lost under Castro.

If that was the case, could the assassination

of President Kennedy have been a retaliation by Castro?

In other words, did Castro get Kennedy first?

The CIA didn't want the Warren Commission

to know about their plot to kill Castro.

They didn't want anyone to know that they got in bed

with the mob to do so.

When it was exposed in the 1970s

that the agency had been trying to kill Castro

through intermediaries like, uh, members of the underworld

and Cuban proxies and such,

uh, this became a big point of contention

about why the agency had not disclosed this to the Warren Commission.

The logic being that, if Castro knew we had been trying to kill him,

then maybe he'd used his own proxy, Lee Harvey Oswald,

to take out the President, who had been trying to kill him.

Well, we concluded very early on in our own investigation of the assassination,

and this is roughly mid-December,

I would pinpoint it, it's hard to,

that no foreign hand was behind the assassination,

that Lee Harvey Oswald, for whatever motives,

had done it on his own.

[Burt] We did know back in 1964

that Castro had claimed that we were trying to assassinate him.

But frankly, we were all stunned to find out

that the CIA was attempting to assassinate Castro.

The agency's interaction with the Warren Commission

I think can best be characterized

as passive and reactive.

The record is pretty clear that the CIA only gave up

what it was asked to give up,

it did not volunteer information,

it did not provide the Warren Commission with leads.

It simply responded to dozens and dozens of questions

as fully as it could.

But this was part of, I think,

the conscious effort to make sure

the Warren Commission, from CIA's light, stayed on track

looking at Oswald as the assassin

and not running down these blind alleys

looking at possible conspiracies involving the Soviets,

the Cubans, the underworld, uh, whomever.

And that, later on, came to be seen

as bit of a cover-up.

And the agency did suffer some,

uh, public, uh, recriminations because of that.

[Howard] It raises, you know, the broader question

that people have raised over the years

as whether people like Allen Dulles,

uh, and Robert Kennedy and others at CIA

who knew of CIA agency plans to assassinate Castro

should have affirmatively come forward

and told the Commission

that they knew of such planning by the CIA,

so as to permit the Commission to investigate

whether those plans and the people they may have involved

suggested any lines of investigation

that should have been explored.

And most of the staff would say, "Yes,

it should have been disclosed,

uh, and yes, we would've conducted a somewhat

more thorough investigation."

Uh, but lastly, it would not have changed the ultimate findings,

because, in fact, the House Select Committee,

uh, did know of these facts, did conduct a more thorough investigation

and came up with the same findings that we had,

namely the lack of any involvement,

uh, by Cuba in the assassination of President Kennedy.

[Brendan] The details about these CIA plots

only came to light in 1975

during an investigation by the Rockefeller Commission

into CIA activities.

There was no foreign conspiracy including, in particular, Cuba.

Uh, why I'm so firm on this, even though,

uh, I know lot about that was blocked from u-- us finding out?

Uh, one, we were able to find out a lot,

and it was all negative in that respect.

The other thing is the CIA hated Castro. Absolutely hated.

Uh, when I was talking with, uh, Ray Rocca once,

just as an illustration,

I suggested something that slightly ameliorated

what he migh-- the evilness of what he had done.

And Ray got up, we were talking, we were sitting at a table,

he banged the table with his fists, he says,

"Castro is a devil! A devil!" [chuckles]

And I just laughed like this.

I mean, those guys, if they could've pinned it on Castro,

would have done it, no doubt.

So despite everything they hid from me,

in th-- that they knew,

in their own eyes, despite their fervent wishes,

they couldn't pin it on Castro.

[suspenseful music]

[Vincent] Oswald revered Fidel Castro

and was a very strong supporter of the Cuban Revolution.

He obviously was opposed

to the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961,

which Kennedy supported.

[Kennedy] I can assure you

that this flag will be returned

to this brigade in a free Havana.

[crowd cheering]

[Vincent] Five days before the assassination,

Kennedy gave a foreign policy speech

in, uh, Miami,

in which he all but invited the Cuban people to rise up

against Castro, promising prompt US aid if they did.

Uh, the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee

both believe, and I agree with them,

that Oswald's love for Castro and Cuba played a part

in his motive for killing Kennedy,

We also have every reason to believe now

that Oswald believed that we were trying

to assassinate Castro.

Uh, Castro blamed the United States

for trying to do that in September 1963,

when Oswald was still living in New Orleans.

And it was published in the New Orleans, uh, Times Picayune,

and Oswald was a devoted, inveterate newspaper reader.

Moreover, Oswald had a shortwave radio that--

which he listened to and which he had with him

in this tiny little room that he lived in, uh, in Dallas,

in this rooming house when he lived alone

after he came back from Cuba.

And Havana radio was filled with accusations

that the United States was trying to assassinate

Castro and other people.

So my own feeling was that,

one, Oswald saw that there was nothing immoral

about assassinating the President of the United States.

And moreover, that maybe he could protect...

Castro, if the right-wing got blamed.

Murder is the most personal of all crimes.

Unless money is involved,

usually the main passion and motive for murder is hatred.

[Brendan] As part of his preparation for the unscripted mock trial,

Bugliosi felt he needed to find a motive for Oswald's action.

It was his experience prosecuting Charles Manson

that made it clear to him.

[Vincent] Manson never knew the precise identity

of the people whom he ordered his minions to kill,

but he knew they were members of the establishment,

and he hated the establishment.

So, in a sense, the Manson murders were representative murders.

The victims represented the establishment to Charles Manson.

Oswald had this kind of a curious, uh, entry,

a very important entry to me.

He said, "I've lived under capitalism and communism

and I despise..."

there is that hatred that I was looking for,

"...I despise the representatives

of both systems."

He certainly must have looked upon Kennedy

as the ultimate quintessential representative

of a society for which he had a grinding contempt.

And when he fired at Kennedy,

in his addled mind he may have been firing

at the United States of America.

[Brendan] In 1975,

it was another previously hidden bit of information

that added to the conviction that Oswald acted alone.

It involved Dallas FBI agent James Hosty.

[light suspenseful music]

[Burt] James Hosty is an FBI agent

whose duty was to keep track of Oswald.

And he then goes to the only address--

residential address that he has for Oswald

in a-- with the intention of talking to Marina

and finding out where-- well, thinking, actually, that,

that that's where Oswald lived,

but later finding out that he wasn't there,

but he doesn't get an address because Marina and Ruth

don't have an address for him either.

[gentle suspenseful piano music]

[Priscilla] Oswald had moved around so much

that the FBI didn't really know where he was yet.

[Burt] When Oswald found out that Hosty had been there,

he was very concerned, asked Marina not to tell,

uh, Hosty anything,

uh, and, um,

and asked Marina to take down,

uh, the license plate and the description of any car

that Hosty might have if he came back

to interview him. And he did come back.

He finds out that Hosty has come back a second time.

So he's really upset about this.

The FBI Office is not too far from the Texas School Book Depository,

so it would be an easy walk for Oswald to go to the FBI Office.

Oswald goes there and leaves

an angry note to Hosty.

And the note contained the information

that the secretary at the FBI Office says it contained.

It was a threat to blow up the FBI Office... [chuckles]

...if, if Hosty didn't stop pestering his wife.

Now, come on.

Is someone who is planning

to assassinate the President on November 12th

going to go to the FBI and leave that kind of a note?

It's very likely that he's going to get arrested

within a few days.

Because it's quite clear that a threatening note of that kind

should have forced Hosty or persuaded him

to attach a higher urgency to interviewing, uh, Oswald

than he presently was exhibiting.

And it is my view, of course, that if he had gone to interview...

[stutters] Oswald within the week following receipt of this threatening note,

that interview in itself would probably have deterred Oswald

from any assassination attempt.

[tense music]

Hosty is very upset and distressed when he finds out

that the man he's supposed to be keeping tabs on

is the one who's been arrested

for the shooting of President Kennedy.

Hosty then goes to discuss the note and shows the note

to his supervisor, Gordon Shanklin.

And Shanklin is terrified by this.

And his fear of what will happen if J. Edgar Hoover

finds out about this note

and that Hosty never did anything about it

is petrifying to him.

When Oswald is killed,

uh, Shanklin then, according to Hosty,

tells Hosty to destroy the note,

which Hosty does. And the Warren Commission is never told about this.

If we had known about that note,

we would've known two things.

One, we would've been reinforced in our belief

that there was no evidence that Oswald was involved

in a conspiracy, certainly not before he left the note.

Second of all,

it would-- it would've shown in a very clear way

that the FBI had failed to protect the President.

Because here's a guy who is threatening the FBI,

surely you got to have somebody looking at this guy

when he's right along the route of the motorcade.

Oswald was a very strange fellow.

Uh, that was another evidence of his strangeness.

The text of that letter, obviously, was never known.

I'm not sure that it would've raised the level of concern

in the areas that, uh,

relate to the FBI's, uh,

accomplishment of its duty to communicate

with the Secret Service.

There was no evidence of Oswald's

engaging in any violent activity,

no one at the time knew about his attack on General Walker.

Uh, he had a, uh,

bizarre history.

I think it took some hindsight to, uh,

clearly determine that Oswald was within the standards

that they were, uh, looking for for a potential threat.

The two main cover-ups by the CIA and the FBI

had nothing to do with the Warren Commission.

Both agencies were trying to protect themselves.

[David Slawson] Clarence Kelley, who later became FBI Director

after Hoover, says almost literally in his,

uh, in fact he does say it literally in his memoirs,

is that if the Dallas Office of the FBI had known

what was known elsewhere in the FBI's files,

the President would not have died

in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963.

And, uh, that's my opinion, too, now.

[suspenseful music]

[Brendan] In 1991, Oliver Stone's filmJFK was released.

The film dramatized the idea

that President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy.

To make matters worse, a study guide was sent to educators

in conjunction with the film's release,

reinforcing the idea of conspiracy.

Many educators now teach the assassination

as an unsolved, controversial crime,

exactly what Judge Griffin and I try to combat

when we go into schools.

The film did, however, spur the release

of assassination records that had been sealed.

99.9% of the Warren Commission records

and the House Select Committee, uh, records

have been released for review by the American people.

Now what about the one tenth of one percent

that still have not been, uh, released?

I spoke to G. Robert Blakey,

the Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee,

and also to Judge John Tunheim,

the Chief Counsel for the Assassination Records Review Board.

They both assured me that their staff saw 100%

of the records in their unredacted form,

100%.

And there was no smoking gun.

["Symphony No. 3, Funeral March" by Beethoven]

If we think it takes some really extraordinary person

or extraordinary circumstances to kill a president,

then we're not able to protect the president.

The tremendous irony here is that most of these people

love and revere JFK,

and yet they've devoted a good part of their life

desperately trying to exonerate Lee Harvey Oswald,

the very person who brutally murdered their hero JFK.

For some people, being told, "This is the evidence we have.

This is our conclusion," um, is sufficient,

um, knowing that there are lots of coincidences

that are nothing but coincidence.

There are a lot of other people for whom the notion that huge events

like a presidential assassination can occur, um,

really as a circumstantial coincidental matter,

Oswald happening to be in the Depository,

the path of the parade happening to go that way,

all the other things that combine to produce an event,

to lots of people, that's very disturbing.

Um, they find it much more acceptable

to believe that there's a conspiracy,

because if there's a conspiracy, at least someone planned it.

It wasn't a random coincidence.

They say the only real predictor of future behavior

is past behavior.

And no one but Marina knew that his past behavior

included trying to shoot somebody.

[shakily] Too bad we didn't know.

when I read, as I do,

that there were certain facts

that were not given to the Commission,

that they didn't find out about this or that

or the other thing, I read those with interest.

But I ask myself this question.

I say, "Alright. Now you have new information,

uh, that was not there.

Does that information make it more likely

that there was someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald

and the others named in the-- th-- at the report,

does it make the report likely,

in its overall conclusions, to be false?

Or, if you had this balancing, which you have to have,

would you say you still believe that it is true?"

Yes, it is true. Because with all that information,

adding it altogether,

it does not show, in my opinion,

that it is more likely that something else happened

of significance than what they say happened.

And if anything had come out

in intervening period, which would, in my opinion,

have caused anyone of us to have said,

"No, Oswald didn't do it."

Uh, or, "Oswald was involved in a conspiracy."

Or, uh, that someone else was involved in the conspiracy,

but not Oswald, similarly for Ruby...

Everybody I knew who worked on that staff

would've stood up at this point, not just me,

but everybody I knew that would've-- woul-- wo-- stood up on the--

stood up today and said, "This was a mistake

and we've got to go and correct it."

what more can you do to convince them?

And the fact is that there're people

that will never be convinced.

And it-- and that's true,

uh, whether we're talking about the assassination

or we're talking about climate weather,

or we're talking about, uh,

measles vaccinations or, or whatever.

And it's, it's frustrating,

because it does strike me at least

as being completely irrational.

Ironically, the agency's, I think, legitimate decision

not to tell the Warren Commission

about its anti-Castro activities

possibly did more to harm the Warren Commission's credibility

than any other thing the agency did

or, in this case, didn't do.

The concealment of evidence from the Commission

by the FBI and by the CIA

inescapably causes people

to distrust the Commission itself.

Once you have...

uh, employees of the federal government

lying in an investigation,

you undermine that investigation in a major way.

So it was terrible what they did,

and if there's any lesson to be learned out of this,

you know, you got to tell the truth

and then got to deal with-- i-- if it's going to hurt you in some way,

you got to deal with it.

[suspenseful instrumental music]

Th-- the Warren Commission report became

more and more, uh, challenged,

uh, through the decade and subsequently,

as we lived in a life of the Vietnam War,

assassinations of Reverend King and the, uh,

Senator Kennedy, civil strife,

more presidential commissions

looking at these issues, Watergate,

uh, I-- I think there is an underlying distrust

of government institutions and I think people, the--

I have to reconcile myself to the fact that that distrust

applied to the Warren Commission

at the beginning of this tumultuous decade

and, uh, and that distrust remains today.

So this is one of the real tragedies in this country,

the loss of trust and faith in the government.

The belief that "Can we really trust the government?"

When the trust and confidence of the American people

in their government is undermined to the extent

that they believe that the government

is an accessory after the fact to the President's murder

in the sense that they're concealing the truth,

uh, from them, this has to have had

a deleterious effect upon the nation's psyche.

For me, that is the lasting tragedy of the assassination.

It's become a signpost for the end of trust in our government.

Yet, when you think about it,

our system persevered and moved forward

in spite of the cover-ups and destroyed evidence.

The legacy of President Kennedy is not failed idealism,

but a strong harvest of seeds that took root and grew.

In fact, Progressivism thrived.

Less than one year after President Kennedy's death,

Congress passed sweeping civil rights legislation

and soon life changing domestic policies,

such as The Great Society,

including Medicare and Medicaid.

In 1967, Thurgood Marshall became

the first African American Supreme Court Justice.

Within six years of the assassination,

we landed on the moon.

By the 1970s,

key facts concealed from the Warren Commission

by the CIA and FBI became public.

So the system worked.

The danger of adhering to endless conspiracy theories

is that it makes people apathetic

and leads them to poor decision making.

Maybe it's time to view the history of the assassination with a critical eye

and to separate facts from speculation.

And maybe it's time to pause

and honor a group of young men

for which truth was the only client.

["Symphony No. 3, Funeral March" by Beethoven]

It's a strange feeling. The life goes on and,

you know, in another 20, 30 years, uh,

you know, we'll, we'll all be gone.

And we wonder, as Burt was saying,

you know, how people are going to look back on it then.

We're very satisfied that we had done what we were asked to do

and that we had pursued it, we had come up with a credible,

uh, reliable explanation.

And, uh,

I-- I still take a pride in what we did

and think that despite all the criticism and other theories,

uh, a-- as Warren himself said,

history will remember us as having been right.

I certainly am just as certain now as I-- as I was then,

that, uh, both those things are true.

Ho-- Oswald was the only shooter

and there's no conspiracy.

The facts that have been disclosed since our investigation

that should have been disclosed to me,

uh, have shown nothing about that there was a conspiracy,

and most of it have showed affirmatively that there was not.

This was not a trial, this was not a court proceeding.

This was a quest for the truth.

That, that-- and, and I raise this

when I talk to lawyers and I said,

"You know, trials are not a quest for the truth,

the-- they're a battle of who's going to win."

And, uh, and one of the things that lawyers try to do

is conceal anything that might harm their side of the case.

But we were engaged in something that I think

was better than a trial.

There's also the personal CYA factor.

And, uh, that's ingrained in human nature.

Uh, certainly an element when we see what the FBI withheld from us,

when you see, uh, the testimony of the director of the FBI,

who just absolutely out and out,

unquestionably lied to the Commission,

uh, to protect himself, protect his agency.

And, uh, that's a human factor,

human frailty,

that, uh, has got to be recognized

and we, we deal with it as best we can,

but it's, it's not something that's going to go away.

Belief in conspiracies is exciting,

far more exciting than the truth could be.

What they want to hear is attacks,

that's where the excitement is.

That's what they like.

That's what feeds their paranoia.

I am grateful to those of you who have devoted

so much of the post-report time to defending it.

Uh, I haven't, and, uh,

uh, I'm glad you did.

["Symphony No. 3, Funeral March" by Beethoven]