Original subtitles

Afterward, it didn't ring true. But at the time...

...we were so pressed for time.

All Secret Servicemen in Dallas are accounted for.

None were on foot in Dealey Plaza before or after the shooting...

...till the Dallas Secret Service chief returned at 12:55.

The Dallas police took at least 12 people into custody.

No record of their arrest.

Men acting like hoboes were pulled off trains...

...marched through Dealey Plaza, photographed.

Yet there's no record of their arrest.

Men identifying themselves as Secret Service agents were everywhere.

But who was impersonating them?

Where was Oswald?

Around 12: 15, leaving the building to see the motorcade...

...Carolyn Arnold sees Oswald in the second-floor snack room...

...where he said he went for a Coke.

He was in a booth on the right side of the room.

He was by himself as usual, appeared to be having lunch.

I didn't speak to him, but I recognized him clearly.

At the same time, Bonnie Ray Williams is supposedly eating lunch in the sixth floor.

He's there until 12: 15, maybe 12:20.

He sees nobody.

Arnold Rowlands, on the street, looks up, sees two men in the sixth-floor windows...

...presumably after Williams finished his lunch and left.

John Powell, a prisoner on the sixth floor of the county jail, sees them.

Many of us saw them.

Everyone was hollering and yelling. We thought they was security guys.

If Oswald was the assassin, he was nonchalant about moving into position.

Later, he told police he was in the second-floor snack room.

Probably told to wait there by his handler for a call.

But the phone call never came.

Maximum 90 seconds after Kennedy is shot...

...Patrolman Marrion Baker sees Oswald in that second-floor lunchroom.

Is this man an employee?

Yes. The President's been shot.

The Commission would have us believe...

...that after firing three bolt-action shots in 5.6 seconds...

...Oswald then leaves three cartridges neatly side-by-side in the firing nest...

...wipes fingerprints off the rifle, stashes it on the other side of the loft...

...sprints down five flights of stairs...

...past Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles who never see him...

...then shows up, cool and calm, on the second floor in front of Patrolman Baker.

All this within a maximum of 90 seconds of the shooting.

Is this man an employee?

Yes. The President's been shot.

Is he out of breath?

According to Baker, absolutely not.

Assuming he is the sole assassin, Oswald is free to leave the building.

The longer he delays, the more chance the building will be sealed by police.

Is he guilty? Does he walk out the nearest staircase?

He buys a Coke...

...and at a slow pace, spotted by Mrs. Reid on the second floor...

...he strolls out the more distant front exit...

...where cops have gathered.

Odd, since three shots were fired from there...

...nobody seals the Depository for ten more minutes.

Oswald slips out, as do several other employees.

When he realized something had gone wrong and Kennedy had been killed...

...he knew there was a problem. Maybe even that he was the patsy.

An intuition, maybe. The President killed in spite of his warning.

The phone call that never came.

Perhaps fear now came to Oswald for the very first time.

Oswald returns to his rooming house around 1:00 p. M...

...a half hour after the assassination.

A man shot the President!

He puts on his jacket, grabs his.38 revolver...

...and leaves at 1:04.

Earlene Roberts, the housekeeper, heard two beeps on a car horn.

Two uniformed cops pulled up while Oswald was in his room.

Like it was a signal.

Officer Tippit is shot between 1: 10 and 1: 15, a mile away.

And though no one saw him walking...

...the government says Oswald covered that distance.

Giving the government the benefit of the doubt...

...Oswald would've had to jog a mile in six to eleven minutes...

...then commit the murder, reverse his direction...

...and walk three-fifths of a mile to the Texas Theater...

...and arrive sometime before 1:30.

It's also a useful conclusion.

After all, why would Oswald kill Officer Tippit...

...unless he just shot the President and feared arrest?

Domingo Benevides...

...the closest witness to the shooting...

...refused to identify Oswald as the killer and was never taken to a lineup.

Acquilla Clemons...

...saw the killer and another man go off in separate directions.

Mrs. Clemons was never taken to a lineup or to the Warren Commission.

At the scene, Officer Poe marks his initials on the shells...

...to record the chain of evidence.

Those initials are not on the three cartridge cases...

...which the Warren Commission show him.

As early as 12:44, only 14 minutes after the assassination...

...the police put out a description matching Oswald's size and build.

Oswald is next seen by a shoe salesman, Johnny Brewer, on Jefferson Avenue.

Oswald is scared. He begins to realize the full implications of this thing.

He goes to the Texas Theater, possibly a prearranged meeting point.

Though he has $14 in his pocket, he doesn't buy the $0.75 ticket.

Brewer has the cashier call the police.

In response to that call...

...at least 30 officers in patrol cars descend on the movie theater.

This is the most remarkable example of police intuition...

...since the Reichstag fire.

I don't buy it!

They knew. Someone knew Oswald would be there.

Brewer leads the cops into the theater...

...and from the stage, points Oswald out.

There he is.

Sir, can I get you to stand up?

I am not resisting arrest! I am not resisting arrest!

They have their man.

It's already been decided in Washington.

When he is brought from the theater...

...a crowd is waiting to scream at him.

Lee Oswald must have felt like Joseph K. In Kafka's The Trial.

He's never given reasons for his arrest.

He doesn't know the unseen forces ranging against him.

At police headquarters, he was booked for murdering Tippit.

No legal counsel was provided.

No record made of the questioning.

When the sun rises the next morning...

...he is booked for murdering the President.

The whole country, fueled by the media, assumes he is guilty.

Under the guise of a patriotic club owner...

...out to spare Jackie Kennedy from testifying at a trial...

...Jack Ruby is let into a garage...

...by one of his inside men on the police force.

Oswald is brought out like a sacrificial lamb...

...and nicely disposed of as an enemy of the people.

Who grieves for Lee Harvey Oswald...

...buried in a cheap grave under the name Oswald?

Nobody.

False statements and press leaks about Oswald circulate the globe.

The official legend is created and the media takes it from there.

The glitter of official lies and the epic splendor of JFK's funeral...

...confuse the eye and confound the understanding.

Hitler said:

"The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it."

Lee Harvey Oswald, a crazed, lonely man who wanted attention...

...and got it by killing a President was only the first in a long line of patsies.

In later years, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King...

...men whose commitment to change and peace...

...made them dangerous to men committed to war, would follow...

...also killed by such lonely, crazed men.

Men who remove all guilt by making murder a meaningless act of a loner.

We've all become Hamlets in our country, children of a slain father-leader...

...whose killers still possess the throne.

The ghost of John F. Kennedy confronts us with the secret murder...

...at the heart of the American Dream.

He forces on us the appalling questions: Of what is our Constitution made?

What are our lives worth?

What is the future of a democracy...

...where a President can be assassinated under suspicious circumstances...

...while the machinery of legal action scarcely trembles?

How many more political murders disguised as heart attacks...

...suicides, cancers, drug overdoses?

How many plane and car crashes will occur...

...before they are exposed for what they are?

"Treason doth never prosper," wrote an English poet.

"What's the reason?

"For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."

The American public has yet to see the Zapruder film.

Why?

The American public has yet to see the real X-rays and autopsy photographs.

Why?

Hundreds of documents could help prove this conspiracy.

Why are they being withheld or burned by the government?

When my office or you, the people, asked those questions, demanded evidence...

...the answer from on high has always been: National security.

What kind of national security do we have when we're robbed of our leaders?

What national security permits the removal...

...of fundamental power from the people...

...and validates the ascendancy of an invisible government in the US?

That kind of national security is...

...when it smells like it, feels like it, and looks like it...

...you call it what it is:

Fascism!

I submit to you that what took place on November 22, 1963...

...was a coup d'騁at.

Its most direct and tragic result...

...was the reversal of Kennedy's decision to withdraw from Vietnam.

The war is the biggest business in America...

...worth $80 billion a year.

President Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy...

...planned at the highest levels of our government...

...carried out by fanatical and disciplined cold warriors...

...in the Pentagon and CIA's covert-operation apparatus.

Among them, Clay Shaw, here before you.

It was a public execution, and it was covered up by...

...like-minded people in the Dallas Police...

...the Secret Service, the FBI, and the White House...

...up to and including J. Edgar Hoover, and Lyndon Johnson...

...who were accomplices after the fact.

The assassination reduced the President to a transient official.

His job is to speak as often as possible of the nation's desire for peace...

...while he acts as a business agent in the Congress...

...for the military and their contractors.

Some people say I'm crazy.

Southern caricature seeking higher office.

There's a simple way to determine if I am paranoid.

Ask the two men who profited most from the assassination...

...former President Johnson and your new President, Nixon...

...to release the 51 CIA documents pertaining to Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby.

Or the secret CIA memo...

...on Oswald's activities in Russia that was destroyed while being photocopied.

These documents are yours.

The people's property. You pay for it.

But as the government sees you as children...

...who might be too disturbed to face this reality...

...or because you might lynch those involved...

...you cannot see these documents for another 75 years.

I'm in my 40s...

...so I'll have "shuffled off this mortal coil" by then.

But I'm telling my eight-year-old son to keep himself physically fit...

...so that one glorious September morning, in 2038...

...he can go to the National Archives and learn what the CIA and FBI knew.

They may push it back then.

It may become a generational affair. Questions passed from parent to child.

But someday, somewhere, someone may find out the damn truth.

We better.

Or we might just as well build ourselves another government...

...like the Declaration of Independence says to, when the old one don't work.

Just a bit farther out West.

An American naturalist wrote:

"A patriot must always be ready to defend his country...

"...against its government."

I'd hate to be in your shoes today.

You have a lot to think about. You've seen evidence the public hasn't seen.

Going back to when we were children...

...I think most of us in this courtroom thought justice came automatically.

That virtue was its own reward.

That good triumphs over evil.

But as we get older we know this isn't true.

Individual human beings have to create justice, and this is not easy...

...because the truth often poses a threat to power...

...and one often has to fight power at great risk to themselves.

People like S.M. Holland...

...Lee Bowers...

...Jean Hill, Willie O'Keefe...

...have all taken that risk and they've all come forward.

I have here some $8,000 in these letters...

...sent from all over the country.

Quarters, dimes, dollars from housewives...

...plumbers, car salesmen, teachers, invalids.

These are people who cannot afford to send money but do.

People who drive cabs...

...who nurse in hospitals...

...who see their kids go to Vietnam.

Why?

Because they care.

Because they want to know the truth.

Because they want their country back.

Because it still belongs to us...

...as long as the people have the guts to fight for what they believe in.

The truth is the most important value we have, because if it doesn't endure...

...if the government murders truth...

...if we cannot respect these people...

...then this is not the country I was born in, or the country I want to die in.

Tennyson wrote:

"Authority forgets a dying king."

This was never more true than for John F. Kennedy...

...whose murder was probably one of the most terrible moments...

...in the history of our country.

We, the people, the jury system sitting in judgment on Clay Shaw...

...represent the hope...

...of humanity against government power.

In discharging your duty...

...to bring a first conviction in this house of cards...

...against Clay Shaw...

"...ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country."

Do not forget...

...your dying king.

Show this world...

...this is still a government "of the people, for the people and by the people."

Nothing as long as you live...

...will ever be more important.

It's up to you.

Has the jury reached a verdict?

We have, Your Honor.

Please hand the verdict to the clerk.

Will the defendant please rise?

The clerk will now read the verdict.

"New Orleans, Louisiana. March 1, 1969.

"We, the jury, find the defendant, Clay Shaw, not guilty."

We believe there was a conspiracy.

Whether Shaw was a part of it is another kettle of fish.

There's Jim!

Do you agree that this is a full vindication of the Warren Commission?

It only proves you cannot run an investigation...

...questioning the intelligence operations of the US government.

People claim you're unfit to hold office...

...that you've ruined Clay Shaw's reputation.

Are you going to resign?

Hell, no! I'm going to run again, and I'm going to win!

Who will you persecute next?

If it takes me 30 years to nail every one of the assassins...

...then I will continue for 30 years!

I owe that to Jack Kennedy and the country.

There's Clay! There's Clay Shaw!

- How does it feel to be acquitted? - It's been exhausting.

What'll you do now?

I'm going home and cook some 騁ouff馥.

Were you confident about the outcome?

- Do you think Garrison will be back? - I'm sure he will.

Subtitled by Anafal