Original subtitles

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[suspenseful music]

[tense music]

[gunshot]

[dramatic music]

[Richard Schweiker] This report documents

the failures of the US intelligence establishment

in their investigation

of President Kennedy's assassination,

and their cover up to the Warren Commission.

During the 1975 Church Committee investigation

of US intelligence activities,

Committee Member Richard Schweiker,

in an interview at the time, remarked about Oswald that

"everywhere you looked with him,

there are fingerprints of intelligence."

Those fingerprints extended back to 1959

when Oswald defected to the Soviet Union.

State Department intelligence officer, Otto Otepka,

had noted the marked increase in the number of Americans

defecting to Russia at that time.

He also noted that some of them came from the military.

He therefore suspected that some of these men

were fake defectors.

They had been assigned by the CIA

to garner intelligence behind the Iron Curtain.

He sent a letter to the CIA asking which ones were real,

and which were their agents.

Oswald was one of the names

on Otepka's list.

Otepka's request was forwarded to James Angleton,

Chief of Counterintelligence.

He instructed that there be no research done on Oswald,

but Otepka continued to work on the Oswald case.

[Lisa Pease] The only thing of significance

was that he was really interested

in Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination.

And he actually had a study of these defectors in his safe.

Well, things got worse. His office was not only bugged,

they planted people in his office, to spy on him.

They started putting confidential documents

in his burn bag, and then trying to blame him

and saying he's burning confidential documents.

The guy's gone, you know, wacko.

[Whoopi Goldberg] As a result, he was formally removed

from the State Department on November the 5th, 1963,

just 17 days before the assassination.

So you will not see Otepka's name in the Warren Report,

and he was not called as a witness before that body.

And in fact, James Angleton, the man who had access

to all the Oswald files at the CIA,

coordinated the agency's response

to the Warren Commission's requests.

-Can you describe the setting up

of the Oswald file at the CIA?

-It could be opened after a few documents

arrived at the CIA from other intelligence agencies,

and that would be enough to trigger the opening

of a 201 file. Sometimes they call it a personality file.

And another thing that could trigger

the opening of a 201 file would be an American citizen

defecting to a communist bloc country.

Well, the interesting thing is,

Oswald met both of those criteria

within nine days of his defection.

And they didn't open a 201 file on him for 13 or 14 months.

Immediately after the defection,

Oswald's threat to commit an act of espionage,

which his words were

"something special about my Marine Corps experience-

which could only be

the U-2, which is a program he'd worked on,

a very secret CIA program-- that threat caused him to be put

on the mail-intercept program and not opening a 201,

at the same time,

which is a very, very unusual combination,

and can only be explained by Oswald being part of

a very covert, very sensitive ongoing operation,

which was the hunt for a mole.

The history of the KGB and the CIA, their wars, uh,

are not actually shooting each other

so much as trying to penetrate each other.

And so we-- we call them moles, or penetrations.

And so, it was an ongoing war; very, very, complicated.

But that's what the mole hunters were doing for Angleton

is looking for KGB moles inside of the CIA.

So, 351 164 was the-- the file in the security office

that was opened up right after his defection.

And that was shared only with Angleton's mole hunting office,

but not with any of the other components of the CIA.

The CIA and the FBI knew

what the KGB would figure out very quickly

was because of his assignment in Atsugi, Japan,

where he tracked the super-secret U-2s at the time.

So once you've established the lure,

the place where you trap the animal

isn't in the Moscow embassy, it's back at Langley

where they thought the mole was.

You want the KGB to contact their mole to ask questions.

The moment that the mole asks a question, it's over.

He or she is-- is exposed.

This program, which did not work, years later,

was put in front of probably our most celebrated

and capable counterintelligence officer

in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.

His name was "Pete" Tennent Bagley.

He began searching for the mole,

he was the key person leading it for years with Angleton.

Well, after he was retired,

he attended a meeting of former CIA officers

down in the Carolinas.

And a British researcher happened to be down there,

his name is Malcolm Blunt, and they met and got along well.

And fortunately for history,

a couple of years before Pete Bagley died,

Malcolm sat down with him one day

and showed him all those first documents

that had come into the CIA on Oswald

from the State Department

and the Navy components at the embassy.

And Pete Bagley looks at Malcolm and he says,

"Was he witting?"

And Malcolm didn't really know how to respond.

And so Bagley raised his voice and insisted,

"He had to be witting! He had to be witting!"

That was a telling, seminal moment

in the history of CIA/KGB spy wars,

in the history of Lee Harvey Oswald.

His early use by the CIA was just a very, very important one

because finally, after all these years,

a very senior CIA officer had just told Malcolm and us

that Lee Harvey Oswald was a witting false defector

when he went to Moscow.

[Goldberg] There was another unusual event

that took place at the time of Oswald's defection--

the source of his income changed.

-Oswald's last quarter of earnings

in the United States, before he defected to the Soviet Union,

should have been paid by the United States Marine Corps.

And they weren't.

Because we asked to see his Marine Corps earnings records

that the Marine Corps deposits

with the Social Security Administration.

They did not pay him any money the last quarter

he was in the United States before his defection.

But no income from the Marine Corps,

when he should have had.

[Goldberg] Could this all be coincidence,

or was Otto Otepka correct in suspecting

Oswald was not a legitimate defector?

And is this why Angleton told his secretary

to withhold information from Otepka?

-The line that the CIA fed the Warren Commission,

we didn't, really didn't know anything about this guy.

We now know that that was complete nonsense.

Oswald was a figure of intense interest

for four years before the assassination,

and a dozen senior CIA officers

were very well acquainted with him.

Everything he did, where he went,

what his politics were, his family life.

I mean, remember, they were reading his mother's mail.

That's how closely they were watching him,

right up until Kennedy was killed.

And then, Kennedy was killed, Oswald's arrested,

and they say, ah, we know nothing about this man.

[Goldberg] In fact, ARRB records show

that James Angleton and the CIA were receiving reports on Oswald

up until one week before the assassination.

The Warren Commission pushed the idea

that Oswald was a staunch communist,

citing evidence of his distributing pro-Castro leaflets

in New Orleans,

and by his supposed defection to Russia in 1959.

But records show that Oswald was working with

fiercely anti-communist elements.

And not surprisingly, many of these groups were known,

and in some cases supported, by the US government.

In the spring of 1963,

Oswald moved from Dallas back to his hometown of New Orleans,

where he began associating with men who,

it would be revealed, had clear connections

with these government efforts.

One of these men, David Ferrie, had been with Oswald

in the Civil Air Patrol back in 1955,

and was known as an extreme anti-communist.

He was also a trainer and a pilot for the CIA

in its secret war against Cuba.

Oswald was involved in these Cuban exile training activities

with Ferrie.

Another person Oswald was seen with in New Orleans in 1963

was Guy Bannister.

Bannister was an extreme right-winger

who was close to the FBI, the CIA,

and the American Nazi Party.

Bannister gave Oswald his own office

at 544 Camp Street.

Oswald now began to use his office

to print up and stamp pro-Castro literature,

much of it associated with the Fair Play

for Cuba Committee centered in New York.

Against their advice, he began a chapter of the FPCC

in New Orleans, of which he was the only member.

-The Fair Play for Cuba committee was created

in April of 1960,

at exactly the same time that President Eisenhower

ordered the creation of a program to overthrow Castro.

Very interesting, the coincidence of those two events.

Oswald had another job working with Guy Bannister

to develop adverse information on political leftists,

or communists or communist sympathizers.

He did this at the universities like Tulane.

So all this stuff in New Orleans that he's doing,

that includes FPCC propaganda and other things, are done to,

very publicly on television, on the radio,

in the streets, uh, of New Orleans

to develop this profile, to establish his bona fides

as a hot-headed pro-Castro supporter.

At some point, the FBI,

I think probably after the assassination,

decided they didn't--

they wanted to disconnect Oswald from the FBI.

And of course, that Bannister, who's associated with the FBI,

would have to be disconnected as well.

The problem with that, many of those handbills

had the 544 Camp Street address on them.

There was a message from New Orleans to the Bureau

written by Special Agent Maynor, who actually mentioned

pamphlets that had the 544 Camp Street address on it.

And before that message was sent,

it was scratched out.

[Goldberg] After the assassination,

when the FBI questioned Bannister,

a former FBI agent himself,

they did not ask him about Oswald.

One of the places Oswald leafleted in front of

was Clay Shaw's International Trade Mart.

Shaw, who was arrested by New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison

on charges that he was part of the conspiracy

to kill President Kennedy,

always denied he was associated with the CIA.

[interviewer] "You have never, yourself,

had any CIA connection?"

-"None whatsoever."

[interviewer] "Any association with the organization?"

-"No, none."

[Goldberg] The Review Board has shown

these denials to be false.

Shaw was both a highly valued contract agent

and had a covert security clearance

for a project codename QKENCHANT.

New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews

had worked with Oswald in May of '63 in an attempt

to upgrade his military

discharge from its undesirable status.

After the assassination,

a man calling himself Clay Bertrand phoned Andrews

and asked him to consider going to Dallas to defend Oswald.

Under oath, Clay Shaw denied that he was Clay Bertrand.

And Andrews claimed that because of medication he was on,

he had only imagined the phone call.

But today, because of the work

of the Assassination Records Review Board, we now have

evidence and 12 people who confirm

that Shaw used this name as an alias.

Andrews later admitted that Shaw was Bertrand

to author Harold Weisberg, but made him promise

not to reveal this until after Andrews' death.

Evidence of another aspect of Oswald's time in New Orleans

is supported by Robert Tanenbaum,

the Deputy Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee,

and others who have seen film of Oswald, David Ferrie,

and CIA director of Cuban Operations David Atlee Phillips

at anti-Castro training camps.

Phillips was a propaganda specialist,

and his tactics to neutralize the Fair Play for Cuba Committee

included infiltration, surveillance,

and recruitment of other agent provocateurs.

David Phillips also created an anti-Castro Cuban exile group.

The Student Revolutionary Directorate, or DRE,

was based in Miami, and had a chapter in New Orleans

led by Carlos Bringuier.

Records released by the ARRB

show the CIA was funding this group

and helped plan activities, including the attack

on a Cuban hotel which housed Soviet advisers.

[Jefferson Morley] AMSPELL was the CIA's code name

for the Cuban Student Directorate.

The name doesn't appear

in the final report of the Warren Commission.

They certainly did not know that the group was receiving

51,000 dollars a month from the CIA in 1963,

and they didn't know that the group was being run from Miami

by George Joannides,

a psychological warfare officer,

who reported directly to Dick Helms.

The DRE published the first JFK conspiracy theory

saying that Oswald and Castro were the presumed assassins.

and that publication was paid for by the CIA

under the auspices of George Joannides.

The Joannides story tells us

that Dick Helms' hand-picked man in Miami

was controlling the group that had the most to do with Oswald

before and after the assassination.

I found out Joannides' identity many years later,

and I went to Bob Blakey,

the head of the HSCA investigation,

and I said, "Bob, did you ever know this guy Joannides?"

And he said, "Yeah, you know, we dealt with him a lot,

he was the liaison."

And I said, "Did you know what he was doing in 1963?"

And he said, "He wasn't doing anything in 1963.

We had an agreement with the CIA

that nobody who was operational at the time of the assassination

would be involved in the investigation."

And I said, "Bob, think again.

Joannides was running those Cubans

who were in touch with Oswald.

He was running the Cubans who were blaming Castro

for the assassination.

And then he came along, and he stonewalled you."

The reason why they brought Joannides in to do it

was to hide the connection to Oswald.

He was definitely shocked

because he saw just how clever they had been.

They had gone right to the heart of his investigation,

and figured out how to paralyze it.

[Dan Hardway] I no longer trust anything

that the agency has told us in regard to the assassination.

It lied to the Warren Commission.

It lied to the ARRB.

It lied to the HSCA in admitting that Joannides was employed

in a covert capacity as liaison to the HSCA.

It has admitted that it violated its charter,

and ran a domestic covert operation

aimed at subverting the HSCA and its investigation.

[Jefferson Morley] On the night of the assassination,

the spokesman for the DRE in Miami got on the phone

and started telling reporters,

"We know all about the guy who killed the president."

And they talked to 10 or 15 reporters that night.

So the CIA's propaganda assets shaped the story

from the first hours after Kennedy was dead.

[Goldberg] Even the Assassination

Records Review Board

had trouble getting documents from government agencies.

In late 1992, a month after the Records Act

was passed, the Secret Service

began its compliance plan, but by January

of 1995, it had begun destroying important documents.

-And they destroyed a group of records

which involved threats to President Kennedy

in the fall of 1963.

They have what are called threat sheets.

And there were many threats made to President Kennedy's life

during the year 1963.

They fought us on release of those records,

they even enlisted Vice President Gore's wife

to help them because she had a very legitimate concern

for mental health records.

And the idea was that this might disclose

the names of people who had mental health problems.

In the end, when we required agencies to disclose,

to swear under oath that they had located

all assassination records,

and had turned everything over to us,

the Secret Service refused to sign the document under oath.

I think that was telling.

-The destruction of records is actually referenced in the,

uh, Assassination Records Review Board final report.

A very, um, very disappointing.

They were records that related to trips

that President Kennedy had taken in the fall of 1963

prior to him going to Dallas.

In the FBI, uh, a stop or flash was placed on Oswald's files,

which meant that no one could ask for a document

in those files, or no one could even

add a document to those files, without going through

the FBI's espionage division.

And that lasted for four years.

It was essentially a blinking red light

on Oswald's files at FBI.

On 8 October 1963,

an FBI agent whose name was Marvin Gheesling

took that status off of Oswald's files.

He dropped the flag on Oswald's files.

What that action did was to lower Oswald's threat profile

at the FBI just weeks before the Kennedy assassination.

And what that would mean is there was no reason

to put Oswald's name on the security index.

One thing about the security index is

when you have a presidential motorcade

going through a particular route,

anybody who's on that index

has to be removed from where they are.

They cannot be on the parade route.

That action at the FBI didn't happen in isolation.

The same thing happened at CIA at exactly the same time.

And of course, it exposes the president

to a dangerous situation that he shouldn't have been.

[Goldberg] Few people knew that there had been

at least two prior plots to kill President Kennedy in 1963.

One was in Chicago on November 2nd.

The second one was in Tampa on November 18th.

-Kennedy ended up not going to Chicago.

Tell us about that plot.

-An informant, on October 31,

an informant named Lee,

who could have been Lee Harvey Oswald,

gave a warning to the FBI stating that four Cubans

were headed to Chicago to shoot Kennedy.

The following day, a landlady reported to the Chicago police

that she had rented a room to four people

that had rifles with telescopic sights,

and a sketch of the motorcade.

The FBI passed that on to the Secret Service.

And the Secret Service botched the surveillance

of these four individuals.

Two of them escaped, but they actually picked up

two of the snipers, and they detained them.

They were stonewalled by the snipers.

They didn't get any information out of them.

While this was goin' on,

there was another threat coming in from

another alternate patsy named Thomas Arthur Vallee,

who was making open and loud threats

that he would assassinate Kennedy.

They only picked him up when Kennedy canceled

his trip on November 2nd at 10 in the morning.

One day before the trip,

the Diem brothers had been assassinated.

And that was the stated reason

for the cancellation of the trip to Chicago.

What you found in Vallee, and the whole Chicago plot,

is so many similarities to what eventually happened in Dallas

that it-- it can't be considered coincidental.

Vallee, if we compare him to Oswald, is an ex-Marine.

He had been posted like Oswald in the

Far East on a station that was linked to the CIA

because there were U-2 surveillance planes on it.

It was easy to portray him as disgruntled, anti-Kennedy,

a loner, armed.

He had another intelligence link that he shared with

Oswald in that he trained Cuban exiles for combat, which was

a CIA responsibility.

And Oswald, we know, at least offered to do that.

He most likely did train Cuban exiles,

but we know he tried to. Oswald, as we know,

was moved from New Orleans to Dallas in October

to be there just at the right time for the motorcade.

And he's placed in a tall building

where he gets a job,

he's adjacent to the perfect kill zone.

Now, if we look at what happened to, uh, Vallee,

he's moved like a pawn in August from Long Island to Chicago

to be in there in time for the motorcade.

And where does he get a job?

In a tall building adjacent to the motorcade

with a perfect view of a, uh, kill zone.

It would have forced Kennedy's motorcade to do a sharp turn,

slow down and be in a point

where you could have had perfect triangulation of fire.

-And what about the trip to Florida?

-On November 18th, Kennedy was scheduled to do

a 27 mile-long motorcade in Tampa.

The Secret Service was very nervous

about the Floridian Hotel

where the motorcade would have gone by.

It would have forced a sharp turn.

Nobody fired away at him.

But in this case, the alternate patsy

would have been a Gilbert Policarpo Lopez.

He was a Cuban exile.

He, uh, attended

Fair Play for Cuba Committee meetings.

One day after the assassination, on November 23rd,

he makes his way to Mexico City.

The Fair Play for Cuba Committee loaned him money for his travel,

and he ends up being the lone passenger

on an airplane to Cuba.

The CIA, they found out

about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee,

the weird trip to Mexico City, the fact that he was

a lone passenger on a plane to, uh, Cuba.

And they didn't pass on the information

to the Warren Commission.

So when the HSCA found out about this lead

that wasn't pursued, even they called it egregious.

-And what do you think was the relevance of it?

-Well, if he had been assassinated in Tampa, Lopez,

he would have been the potential patsy.

If they had to admit to a front shot,

because Oswald was behind, there were rumors

that he had assisted Oswald in the assassination in Dallas.

-Had anyone, anyone tried to speak to

the Warren Commission about these incidents?

[Paul Bleau] Abraham Bolden was the first Black

Secret Service agent assigned to the White House detail,

and he was handpicked by Kennedy.

He was in Chicago, uh, when this plot went down.

So he was there when the Secret Service

was briefed about the four snipers,

and he witnessed how much the security was lax for Chicago.

And he also witnessed, after the assassination,

the steps that were taken

to keep the Chicago plot completely secret.

No paper trail, compartmentalized,

agents ordered to keep silent about it.

This information did not make its way to Secret Service agents

that were protecting Kennedy for future motorcades,

including Dallas.

[Goldberg] Secret Service Agent Elmer Moore

was aware of Agent Bolden and the Chicago plot.

-I met with Elmer three times face-to-face.

Several phone calls, very short. One very long one.

I first asked him, "Did you ever interview

Thomas Arthur Vallee?"

And he said, "Oh, Washington wouldn't

let me see the files on that."

I said, "Oh, well, what about a man,

a Secret Service agent by the name of Abraham Bolden?"

His demeanor completely changed.

He stood up from his chair.

He pulled out his revolver and he put it on the table,

right in front of me.

He leaned over the table, and he says,

"Jim, tell me right now, who are you working for?"

I said, "I'm an independent researcher."

He told me

in a very loud voice,

and with a very stern look on his face,

"That goddamned lying nigger. We finally got him."

I said, "You got him?" He says, "No."

He said, "Kelley and the chief got him."

I think that, uh,

Moore and the rest of his crew

were scared speechless that Bolden knew somethin'.

[Paul Bleau] Abraham Bolden was one person

who did try to say what he knew to the Warren Commission,

but they blocked him. He was blocked from talking

and eventually railroaded into some phony crime

and put into jail for a number of years.

[Jim Gochenaur] Moore leaned back in his big

comfortable leather chair,

and he said, "Who killed Jack Kennedy?"

Then he said, "Well, I'll tell you who didn't.

With 100 percent certainty. It wasn't the Russians."

And my head is starting to swim.

I wanted to break in right at that point, but then he said,

"I'll tell you why--

JFK was the Russians' boy.

He was giving away everything he could.

That the man, for all intents and purposes," he says,

"Dare I say it?

Jim, I will say it, JFK was a traitor."

[Oliver Stone] The ghost of John Kennedy

would turn over in his grave

at these cruel words. But the truth is,

the competing narrative of his life and death,

as told us by Allen Dulles and his ilk--

of a leftist assassin killing a president

with three shots from a sixth-floor window--

has won the day

and continues as the official story.

But, the ghost will not be appeased.

[Donald Sutherland] After the Bay of Pigs debacle,

JFK began to use his brother Bobby

as a foreign policy advisor.

Bobby was influential in the decision to fire Allen Dulles.

He then figured as an important advisor

during the Berlin confrontation, on Vietnam,

in both 1961 and '63, and during the Missile Crisis.

-Uh, after the Cuban Missile Crisis,

wasn't President Kennedy attempting a back channel

with Russia and Cuba, and your father was aware of it?

-Jack had an intense interest in Cuban history

and all the history of Latin America.

And he-- he believed that Castro had a point,

in fact he sent a message to Castro

that he read and admired Castro's declaration

at the Sierra Maestra

about the liberation of Cuba and the--

the right of the Cuban people to exercise sovereignty

over their nation, and over their island.

The message that he sent through Lisa Howard and Attwood

was a message that

"We don't care if you're communists.

We don't care if you're Marxists.

We don't care what kind of government

that you experiment with.

The only thing we care about is that you don't make your island

a platform for Soviet aggression in the hemisphere.

And that you stop your campaign

against the Alliance for Progress nations,

against the Social Democrats,

Betancourt in Venezuela, Lleras Camargo in Colombia,

people who really were trying to democratize their country

and develop fair systems for the poor.

By '62, President Kennedy was actively engaged

with Khrushchev, and they had a secret

exchange of 26 letters with each other.

And they were operating through back channels,

because both of them found themselves

in identical positions, um, surrounded by war hawks,

surrounded by a bellicose intelligence

military establishment, and all of them viewing

all-out thermonuclear war, not only as inevitable,

but in some cases, desirable.

The first of those letters was smuggled by Khrushchev

through a KGB spy named Georgi Bolshakov.

Georgi was a friend of my parents.

My uncle wrote the first of his from Cape Cod,

and he talked about how his children and their cousins,

which meant us, were playing in the yard,

and that these two leaders had no right to bring the world

to a crisis that would destroy children like us

who had no political involvement.

And the millions of other people around the world

who would be destroyed.

And that it would be their failure and their sin

if they allowed that to happen.

And they proceeded along a course

that ended up with them really talking very seriously

about complete demobilization.

And Khrushchev's career was,

um, it was ended by that as well.

-Among the many traits

the peoples of our two countries have in common,

none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war.

Almost unique among the major world powers,

we have never been at war with each other.

[Lisa Pease] Norman Cousins,

who was then the editor of the Saturday Review,

had gotten a meeting with Khrushchev.

And so Norman Cousins goes to Kennedy, and he said,

"Let's talk about antinuclear plans.

Let's see if we can, you know,

go for some sort of form of disarmament."

He's like, "What can I say as to your level of commitment?"

And Kennedy's like, "I'm 100 percent committed

to disarming our nukes."

And that was very difficult because, again,

there are hardliners on both sides.

And so, they ended up with the Limited Test Ban Treaty

where they banned all above-ground testing.

But that's what came of that meeting,

is that conversation. But when he came back,

he also said, "Khrushchev's gonna need a real sign from you

that you're really committed to this."

-And of course, this became very eloquently real

in June of 1963, when Kennedy gives the famous "peace speech"

as it came to be known, at American University.

-I realize the pursuit of peace

is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war.

And every graduate of this school,

every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war,

and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward,

by examining his own attitude

towards the possibilities of peace,

towards the Soviet Union,

towards the course of the Cold War,

and towards freedom and peace here at home.

First, examine our attitude towards peace itself.

Too many of us think it is impossible,

too many think it is unreal.

But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief.

It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable.

That mankind is doomed.

That we are gripped by forces we cannot control.

-I think Mr. Kennedy has done some significant things

in civil rights, and I would include the attorney general.

I think, uh, both of these men are men of genuine good will.

And, uh, I think there is a necessity now to

seize the urgency of the moment.

[Oliver Stone] Although we've focused

primarily on foreign policy,

we cannot overlook Kennedy's battles in the South

with Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi

and, in that June of '63,

with Governor George Wallace of Alabama.

[George Wallace] And I'm asking from you

an unequivocal assurance

that you will not bar entry to these students.

And that you will step aside, peacefully,

do your constitutional duty.

[Oliver Stone] In both showdowns,

using federal troops,

the Kennedy Administration won admission of Black students

to the last public colleges in the South.

George Wallace made it clear that this fight was not over.

-And-- and-- and-- and the-- the South this year,

next year, will decide who the next president is.

Whoever the South votes for is the president.

And you're gonna see that the South is wanting

to be against some folks.

[Oliver Stone] That night, Kennedy addressed the nation

in what many consider the finest presidential speech

on civil rights since Abraham Lincoln.

-And that the rights of every man are diminished,

when the rights of one man are threatened.

Even America, because his skin is dark,

cannot enjoy the full and free life,

which all of us want.

Then who among us would be content to have

the color of his skin changed?

One hundred years of delay have passed

since President Lincoln freed the slaves,

yet their heirs, their grandsons,

are not fully free.

And this nation, for all its hopes,

and all its folks, will not be fully free,

until all its citizens are free.

We face, therefore, a moral crisis,

as a country and a people.

And this is a matter which concerns this country,

and what it stands for.

And in meeting it,

I ask the support of all of our citizens.

Thank you very much.

[Sutherland] By the fall of 1963,

Kennedy had made many enemies.

He was working on an American withdrawal from Vietnam,

an upcoming state visit to Indonesia in '64,

an independent, unified democracy in the Congo.

Through Nasser, a balanced policy in the Middle East.

Normalization of relations with Cuba.

And a detente with Russia--

even going so far as to offer them

a joint mission to the moon.

But on November 22nd,

another face of America asserted itself.

[reporter] Several thousand enthusiastic Texans are on hand

to give the President and Mrs. Kennedy a warm welcome.

[Sutherland] On that day the world changed.

Lyndon Johnson did not have the understanding

of Third World countries,

nor did he have the anti-colonial sympathies

that President Kennedy had.

Therefore, numerous changes in foreign policy took place

within a short period of time after the assassination.

-President Johnson did a 180-degree turn

in terms of Congo policy.

The US, which under Kennedy,

was a champion of African nationalism

and the lead peacekeeper in the Congo,

becomes the agent of white reactionary nationalism

and imperialism led by

the Belgians and the South Africans,

and of all things, the anti-Castro Cubans.

[rapid gunfire]

[Sutherland] The CIA now began

to furnish planes and Cuban exile pilots

to fly sorties to stamp out the rebellion.

According to one pilot, the CIA manned the embassy,

and brought members of a secret operation

from the Bay of Pigs codenamed Operation 40.

-All of whom mount this operation

to return a reactionary government to power

under Joseph Mobutu, and to bring Moise Tshombe,

who was the secessionist leader of Katanga

back in as prime minister.

And it was as if the United States had never really had,

you know, this deep association with African nationalism

under President Kennedy.

[Sutherland] Joseph Mobutu became

the front man for imperial forces,

profiting in the billions from the riches of the Congo.

The Congo never recovered from the assassination of Lumumba.

And today, despite its natural resources,

it is considered a failed state

where 80 percent of the population

live in abject poverty.

Like Foster Dulles,

Johnson now favored Saudi Arabia over Egypt,

and greatly favored Israel in the Middle East.

The fairness and even-handedness Kennedy was building was lost.

In 1968, when Johnson learned Israel had acquired

atomic weapons, he made the decision

to order CIA director Richard Helms

not to tell the Pentagon or the State Department.

In 1973, while Egyptian tanks

were crossing the Sinai

during the Yom Kippur War, Commander Moshe Dayan

proposed the use of nuclear weapons.

Kennedy's goals of peace through alliances with moderates,

and a solution for

the Palestinian refugee problem,

were abandoned.

In Latin America, JFK's Alliance for Progress,

a program promoting economic development,

suffered as well under Johnson.

In 1964, Johnson said,

you could take all the gold in Fort Knox,

and it would just go down the drain in Latin America

unless the private investor could have some confidence

that he could make his investment,

and it would not be confiscated.

Johnson's private investment idea

broke with Kennedy's policy, which was to make

most of the loans out of the United States Treasury,

thereby charging little or

no interest.

Under Johnson's leadership,

the future allotments for '67 to '69 were reduced

and much of it was shifted to military programs.

By 1973, it was eliminated.

Under Secretary of State George Ball referred to

the island archipelago of Indonesia

as the true breaking point in Asia--

more important to the United States than Vietnam.

-What were some of Kennedy's plans for Indonesia after 1964?

-Three days before Kennedy was killed,

he signed an 11-million dollar aid package that included,

you know, not just military weapons--

because that's something they hadn't been willing

to provide before Kennedy, and Kennedy knew, look,

if we don't give them the weapons,

they're just gonna go get them from the Soviets.

So he did agree to that.

But Kennedy wanted to emphasize roads, infrastructure,

education, you know, money for food,

money to help levee places and create rice paddies.

Kennedy wanted to help Indonesia become self-sufficient.

[Bradley Simpson] President Johnson

had a visceral dislike of Sukarno

that led him to conclude that he didn't want to spend

any political capital attempting to appeal to a leader

that he viewed as a regional bully.

So Sukarno bitterly criticized the US war in Vietnam.

He signaled that he was going to pursue

a radical, anti-colonial foreign policy

that the Johnson administration saw as a direct threat

to American interests,

and something that had to be stopped.

The US State Department signaled to the Indonesian army

that overthrowing Sukarno

and killing lots and lots of communists

would produce a political payoff.

[Sutherland] September 30th, 1965.

Following rumors of a suspected military coup against Sukarno,

leftist officers tried to bring the disloyal generals to trial.

Their plan quickly descended into chaos,

and General Suharto took control.

The Indonesian army, with CIA support,

blamed the killing of the generals on the communist party.

General Suharto then used this as a pretext

to turn the army on the communists,

and eventually neutralized President Sukarno,

taking his place as president.

-Five hundred thousand, at least, were killed,

people that were identified as communists,

whether they were or not,

whether they even knew what communism was or not.

If their name was on a list, they were killed.

-And this is the most consequential legacy

of President Kennedy's assassination.

The coming to power of a president

who not only didn't care about Indonesia,

but who surrounded himself with officials,

who had a stake in a far more confrontational approach

towards Indonesia that ultimately resulted in

a spasm of mass killing in which nearly half a million

unarmed civilians were killed by the Indonesian army.

[Sutherland] Regarding Vietnam,

a review of the declassified record

shows that Kennedy continuously pushed back against the Pentagon

by refusing every request to commit combat troops there.

This conflict is reflected

in a National Security Action Memorandum-NSAM 273.

Drafted in the days before his death, in its final form,

it allowed for direct American involvement in Vietnam.

[John Newman] McGeorge Bundy,

who's the national security adviser,

puts together a memo, uh, based upon the--

the truth about the war, which is it's going terribly.

And he does it in a way to try and make sure

that Kennedy would be able to go along with it.

So the way he writes the first draft of 273

is to say, look, we need to intensify the war effort

against the communists. But the way we're gonna do it

is to increase South Vietnamese forces.

There's not a word about American forces

or Americanizing the war.

[Sutherland] In fact, after much maneuvering,

Kennedy, Bundy,

and Secretary of Defense McNamara

had already settled on a plan to withdraw 1,000 US troops

by 1963, with the goal of having South Vietnam

responsible for its own combat operations.

[John Newman] While Kennedy's body is still in the casket

in the rotunda over on the Capitol building

is when Johnson changes NSAM 273 to a new version.

It's Sunday, and McGeorge Bundy has to take the old version

around town, and show it to Rusk

and show it to all the principals and get their input.

And when it comes to the key paragraph, paragraph 7,

which talks about how we're going to intensify the war,

all of a sudden, the restrictions

that McGeorge Bundy had put on that,

instead of changing a few words,

there's two big hash marks through that paragraph,

and it's completely rewritten.

And I asked Bundy in an interview, I said,

"Who told you to do that?" He said, "Johnson did."

[Sutherland] In the Review Board's declassifications,

there is evidence that Johnson was fully aware

of Kennedy's Vietnam withdrawal plans,

disagreed with them, and worked on Robert McNamara

to make him renounce them.

-McNamara came into this, um, the decision

to withdraw US forces, and in my view,

he implemented it faithfully

until the time that Kennedy was killed.

[Sutherland] These changes allowed the US

to unilaterally engage in combat in Vietnam,

rather than simply supporting and advising

South Vietnamese troops,

which led to serious consequences.

-And within days, we're talking about

sending out the De Soto missions, these--

these naval excursions along the coastline of North Vietnam.

That ends up with the Maddox and--

and the so-called Tonkin,

Gulf, uh, attacks and then the resolution in Congress

opening the door to intervention in Vietnam.

-In retaliation for this unprovoked attack

on the high seas,

our forces have struck the bases

used by the North Vietnamese patrol craft.

-But the new news there is,

it wasn't Johnson who first figured out, you know,

the day after Kennedy was shot,

that he needed to change this NSAM.

He just rubber stamped what

Taylor had been doing covertly ever since NSAM 263.

[Sutherland] And, as declassified memos

have revealed, by autumn of 1964,

during his campaign against Barry Goldwater,

Johnson had already decided

that he was going to escalate the Vietnam War.

In fact, the directive

that would become the Tonkin Gulf Resolution

had been written before the Tonkin Gulf incident itself.

-We are not about to send American boys

nine or 10,000 miles away from home

to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

[Sutherland] On August 7th,

three months before the election,

Johnson had already planned for an extensive air war.

It was to begin after his inauguration.

[Lyndon Johnson] We intend to convince the communists

that we cannot be defeated by force of arms,

or by superior power.

-And no nation in the history of battle

ever suffered more than the Soviet Union

in the Second World War.

At least 20 million lost their lives.

Countless millions of homes and families

were burned or sacked.

A third of the nation's territory,

including two thirds of its industrial base,

was turned into a wasteland.

A loss equivalent to the destruction of this country

east of Chicago.

[Sutherland] After his brother's death,

Robert Kennedy knew

that relations with the Soviet Union

hung in the balance.

-On November 29th, he--

which is one week after the assassination,

my father, he had a meeting with Bill Walton,

who was a friend of the family and was on a--

it was a cultural trip to the Soviet Union.

And he asked Walton to convey a message through Georgi Bolshakov

to Premier Khrushchev,

saying that our family knew that the Soviets

were not involved in the assassination,

that it was a right wing plot from our own country.

-In other words, the CIA, or forces aligned with the CIA.

They said they also believed that Bobby Kennedy

intended to run for office, and that eventually

he would get back to the White House.

And when he did, he planned to resume his brother's policies

of detente and peace with the Soviet Union.

But they had to bide their time,

and wait for that political opportunity.

This is a stunning message to be delivering to Bolshakov,

because, of course,

Bolshakov is going to take this right to the Kremlin.

[Sutherland] When Khrushchev paid his respects

to President Kennedy at the American Embassy,

he was reportedly holding back tears.

Castro got the news of Kennedy's death

while discussing detente

with the French journalist, Jean Daniel.

He then exclaimed, "This is bad news.

Everything is now going to change."

Like Bobby Kennedy, neither man

believed the conclusions of the Warren Report.

[Lisa Pease] When news came of Kennedy's death,

all over the planet, people were mourning and crying

and going to embassies.

In Latin America, people just lit candles

because they didn't even have electrical power.

But they wanted to honor his killing.

In the Yucatan Peninsula, peasants cleared an area

and planted a peace garden.

[Philip Muehlenbeck] Nasser learned of Kennedy's death

in the middle of the night.

He got up, dressed,

went down to his office and then realized,

well, there's nothing I can do about this.

According to his son, Nasser went into, uh, a great,

uh, state of depression after Kennedy's death.

Uh, relations with Egypt gradually deteriorated,

and they increasingly shifted their allegiance

towards the Soviet Union as well.

-A mass was held in the leading

Catholic Church in Cairo, which has a capacity of 600.

They somehow fit 4,000 people into that church.

Algeria, which had a special feeling for Kennedy,

declared a state of mourning for a week.

Flags were flown at half-mast.

The US ambassador to Egypt said

that he thought the Egyptians had seen in Kennedy

the best of what they saw in Americans,

that Kennedy had represented a kind of ideal of America

to ordinary Egyptians.

-They polled historians, they polled the American people

to say who are the most popular presidents.

One metric that you can use to, objectively at least,

judge their foreign policy is how many boulevards

are named after that president

in foreign countries,

how many hospitals, how many colleges,

how many schools,

how many statues are-- are standing of that president

in capitols all over the world?

And in that sense, President Kennedy

beats every other president hands-down.

[Sutherland] That feeling is not held only abroad.

Many people at home felt that after Kennedy's death,

a period of depression and cynicism overtook the country,

and that America was somehow changed forever.

Our overwhelming disbelief

in the Warren Commission's findings

contributed to increased skepticism

of all our foundational beliefs about government.

-I think there's a direct thread between the events of 1963,

and the kind of horror show

that America is having to endure right now.

And I think once you kill a president in broad daylight

on the streets of an American city,

and everyone knows that powerful forces did it,

and it can never be solved, that crime,

that sends a signal, not only to the American people,

but to the American media, to American future leaders.

And if America really wants a democratic society,

then we should get to the bottom of this traumatic crime

that continues to reverberate throughout American history.

[Sutherland] The Assassination

Records Review Board made many startling discoveries

in the four years of its existence.

In October of 2017, in compliance with

the JFK Records Act 25-year deadline,

President Trump said

unless he was in receipt of further information,

he would not block declassification

of the last of the files.

Six months later,

he postponed releasing the last batch,

which the Review Board

had previously delayed from 1998.

This means that 56 years later,

the US government is still maintaining secrets

about the JFK case.

Can a democracy survive if it does not know

its deepest secrets about the darkest days of its past?

-Do you think there was any connection

between your father's assassination and your uncle's?

-I don't think anybody has connected all the dots.

There are dots there.

There are dots that look like certainly, um, that are,

uh, that we should be investigating.

And my father's death has never been investigated properly.

[cheering]

[Robert Kennedy] Because I think we can do better.

And I think we can do better around the rest of the globe.

I'm not going to be satisfied until that war is over,

and American soldiers are brought back in.

[cheering]

-I have therefore chosen this time and place

to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds,

and the truth too rarely perceived,

and that is the most important topic on Earth: Peace.

What kind of a peace do I mean,

and what kind of a peace do we seek?

Not a Pax Americana,

enforced on the world by American weapons of war,

not the peace of the grave,

or the security of the slave.

I am talking about genuine peace,

the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living,

and the kind that enables men and nations to grow

and to hope

and build a better life for their children,

not merely peace for Americans,

but peace for all men and women.

Not merely peace in our time, but peace in all time.

[♪♪♪]