Who Killed JFK?Was there a coverup? The Warren Commission published a report in 1964 that claimed Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman. But over a decade later, the House Select Committee on Assassinations claimed that President Kennedy was killed as the result of a ‘conspiracy.’ Why the conflicting results? With revelations over the last 60 years, flaws in both investigations are exposed.
It's November twenty ninth, nineteen sixty three, seven days after the assassination of President Kennedy. The White House is in chaos. Lyndon Johnson is now president, having been sworn in on Air Force one while it was still on the ground at Dallas Love Field.
That moment's become memorialized in an iconic photo that shows Jackie Kennedy standing at his side with the blood of her dead husband splattered on her pink suit.
A week into his job, President Johnson is sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office. He's fielding calls from world leaders who want to know what's going on. He's holding the hands of politicians, assuring everyone that it will not throw off the global balance of power, that World War III is not imminent. The country needs to know that they're in safe hands.
They need answers. The man suspected of murdering the president has just been murdered too.
On live TV, by a two bit nightclub owner named Jack Ruby. Everyone wants to know who is responsible for all this. President Johnson is concerned about the attention that a public investigation would bring. He gets a call from the head of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, who will be leading the initial investigation. Hoover wants to keep it contained. Of course, we're saying that it would be bad to have a rash of investigations, but that's exactly what started to happen. There were rumblings in the House and Senate about forming committees to expand on the FBI's investigation. Johnson wants to shut it down.
Tehouse to go ahead with an investigation.
Yes, a bunch of televisions going, and I ought they see that to be a three ring circuit.
So Rob, what's at stake here?
Well, if it's discovered that Kennedy's assassination was somehow connected to the Soviets or the Cubans, it could trigger a nuclear holocaust. Another reason they want to keep a tight lid on the investigation is because they're afraid that a broad investigation would expose the CIA and the FBI. In another attempt to limit the investigation, this document I'm holding is considered by many to be a smoking gun. I'm going to let Dick Russell explain.
This memo was hidden from the public for a decade after the assassination. It's referred to as the Katzenbach Memo. Nicholas Katzenbach was the Deputy Attorney General. He wrote the memo to Hoover just a few days after the murder.
So here's what the document says, quote, 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. Speculation about Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off.
It says that the goal of the investigation is to convince people of a specific, predetermined result. Two days after the assassination. These are marching orders from the official investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy. If Oswald had been allowed to stand trial, his lawyers would have had a field day with a statement like that, this was not an investigation, It was a fate, a compleat.
This is who killed JFK. Sixty years later, What can we uncover about the greatest murder mystery in American history? Why does it still matter today? I'm your host, Solidad O'Brien.
To recap JFK reputedly threatens to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces, then fires Dulles and his top two lieutenants. He completely goes around the military industrial complex to avoid World War three during the Cuban missile crisis, and then he starts a back channel with Khrushchev and Fidel Castro. Then at American University, he publicly proclaims that he wants to forge a new path towards peaceful coexistence. He's alienating a lot of incredibly powerful and determined people.
And then he's murdered.
And then he's murdered.
We're deep into the murder mystery. And now rob has just handed me this letter where j Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, is basically advising that they make sure to pinned it all on Oswald.
Of course, President Johnson sent a completely different message to the country.
He put out an executive order in nineteen sixty three that said the Commission would quote evaluate all the facts and circumstances surrounding such assassination. President Johnson called on Earl Warren, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, to head up the investigation. Warren initially said no, but Johnson then bullied him into it, telling him the nuclear war was hanging in the balance Warren eventually said yes. Years later he said he regretted it.
President Johnson and j Edgar Hoover came up with a strategy on how to handle the investigation.
Here's President Johnson.
The only way would stop on it put somebody into it, pretty good on.
It, that I could select out of the government.
He's saying, the only way to stop them is to put somebody that's pretty good on it that I can select out of the government.
What do you think about Alec dun I think he would be a good.
Man, Johnson suggests Alan Dulles. Hoover says he'd be a good man. They figure they can make it work for them if they appoint someone they can trust.
He suggested. Alan Dulls the man Kennedy fired after the Bay of Pigs. He's known as the godfather of the CIA.
Alan Dellson's role on the Warren Commission was not to find the truth, was to cover up the truth.
That's David Talbot. Rob says that if we're going to talk about Alan Dallas, you have to speak to David Talbot. He's the founder of Salon magazine. He literally wrote the book on Dalles. It's called The Devil's chessboard.
Do you think that it's an accident that Alan Dulles was put in charge of being the gatekeeper to the Warren Commission.
No, I believe that he lawed to be put on that commission. There is no better figure, from a cover up point of view, to have on that commission.
The now a Dalls.
He leaks up to the press, to the CIA. He essentially led them down. The Primrose Path said that Lee Harvey Oswold act alone.
So after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy fires him, why is he on the commission?
That what was surprising there was no discussion in the media. There's no controversy around the appointment. The media herald of Dallen Dalls as a very respected figure above politics. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This was a moment in history when the general public didn't question the government in the same way we do today. In nineteen sixty four, seventy seven percent of Americans said they trusted the government to quote do the right thing. In twenty twenty three that numbers sixteen percent. American exceptionalism was in full force, and the media was not intent on bringing that down. And you can't help, but wonder what they could have uncovered if they'd just been looking.
So the Warrant Commission publishes its report in nineteen sixty four, and they do essentially what they set out to do. They pinned all on Oswald case closed. There were a few journalists who started poking around at the Warren Report just because they thought it was odd, but some came into it accidentally, like Gayton Phonsie.
There's quite a bit about Fonsie in the archives, thanks in part to his wife Marie, who continues to tell his story today. In the nineteen sixties, Gaydon Fonsie was an investigative journalist for Philadelphia Magazine. Phonsie, like most Americans, was shocked and saddened the loss of Kennedy, but it wasn't something that was on his radar as a journalist.
A year after the report was published, Arl Inspector, who had made a name for himself as a member of the Warren Commission, returned to Philadelphia. He ran for District attorney and he won, and Phonsie thought it would be a good piece to be written Amonspector. Returning home after his time on the Warren Commission, Arl Inspector is largely known for creating something called the single bullet theory.
Yeah, I know all about the single bullet theory, right, and we will dig into the science and the forensics of that later on, But for now, all you need to know is that the single bullet theory is the backbone of the Warren Commission report.
Without the single bullet theory, you cannot pin the crime on Oswald alone. Now, just to give you an idea of what this is, the Commission made a contention that only three shots were fired. The first one missed. That left two shots hitting President Kennedy. The third shot was the fatal shot.
To his head.
The second shot that was the single bullet. And because Governor Connolly, who was sitting in front of Kennedy, was also shot, that single bullet had to travel through Kennedy's neck, then hit Connelly in the back, go through to his wrist, and wind up in his thigh.
So Gayton Fonsie is preparing for his interview, he comes across Spector's single bullet theory. He starts looking into it and as you can imagine, he finds several discrepancies and then a confront Spector in a series of interviews.
The interviews are hard to follow without getting too deep into the weeds of the single bullet theory, but just know this. When Phonsie presses Specter about whether he factored eyewitness accounts into the construction of his theory, Specter responded by saying, quote, that's a good question. You're the first person to ask me that question, and I have to think about it for a minute. Phonsie publishes his article in Greater Philadelphia Magazine on August first, nineteen sixty six.
He wrote, quote, Arlen Spector knows it is difficult to believe some of the fundamental conclusions of the war On Commission report. Well, it came out years later. At Specter, the man responsible for investigating the source and path of the bullets, did not directly speak to the Secret Service agents riding in the car behind Kennedy, who had a clear view of the shots, and he ignored the statements of several eye witnesses that he never looked at photos of the autopsy or woods.
He only looked at sketches.
And then he pieced his incomplete evidence together by manipulating the path of one single bullet into something that made absolutely no sense. The things he ignored or twisted to make his theory work is legendary. But it wasn't just Specter.
The whole investigation was a mess. They didn't interview Jack Ruby for nearly a year. Ruby even said that he would tell them everything if they moved him from Dallas to Washington, d C.
And they declined.
They also didn't interview JFK's personal doctor, who was with Kennedy within minutes of him arriving at Parkland Hospital, and then when a witness approached with new information two months before they were supposed to publish, General Counsel Jay Lee Rankin said quote, at this stage, we are supposed to be closing doors, not opening them. A Secret Service agent even offered a lead, and then that agent was thrown in jail. Investigators uncovered the Dulles had this habit of briefing the members of the Warren Commission on what questions to ask the CIA witnesses, and he would brief the CIA witnesses and tell them what questions were coming and what to say. John mccoon, who was director of the CIA at the time, even admitted that he lied to protect the agency during the Warren Commission's investigation.
In twenty fifteen, Politico reported that a declassified CIA report showed that mcohne and other senior CIA officials were quote complicit in keeping quote incendiary information from the Warren Commission. The report says that macoone was at the heart of a quote benign cover up at the spy agency. Didn't any of these things come out?
They almost did.
A few weeks before the Warren Commission report came out, one of the staffers wrote a memo to the lead investigator. The author was Wesley Leebler, and his memo was twenty six pages long. It detailed the reasons he was uncomfortable with the way evidence was being used selectively to make sure Oswald was proven guilty. Well, the lead investigator refuse to accept the memo. Well, clearly, this was not a serious investigation. And in the end they found out exactly what they wanted to find out, and they thought that the public was just going to buy it, that we would just accept the report because it was from people like Warren and Dulles, and that we would just move on with our lives.
When the Warren report came out, that was fall of nineteen sixty four, polls showed that fifty six percent of Americans agreed with that lone gunman theory, and then only two years later a new poll showed that that number dropped a thirty six percent, So only a third of Americans believed that Oswald acted alone. That's a huge drop in a very short period of time.
Yeah, but that doesn't surprise me. By then, the report was met with a lot of scrutiny. People started to talk about it publicly. In nineteen sixty six, Mark Lane published his book Rush to Judgment, and he was critiquing the Warren Commission. It kicks started public suspicion, which bubbled beneath the surface for ten years until finally in nineteen seventy five, the story broke through. In nineteen seventy five, the Church Committee, headed up by Idaho Senator Frank Church, had just released a trove of documents exposing the CIA and other government officials of some very horrific abuses of power throughout the sixties.
The Church Committee hearings of nineteen seventy five revealed that there were at least three foreign assassination operations mounted by CIA officials in the nineteen sixties against the leaders of Cuba, the Dominican Republican, the CONGO.
That's Jefferson Morley again, former Washington Post reporter and creator of jfkfax dot org.
So the exists of an organized CIA capacity for political assassinations was revealed and convincingly, without any doubt, well documented. So that was the first time that the CIA was really called to account for these types of activities. It was the first time that the public ever knew that that's what the CIA was doing.
And then on March fifth, nineteen seventy five, thanks to a stand up comedian who appeared on an evening talk show, everything changed.
How Are You?
Dick Gregory is one of America's foremost comedians. His comedy doesn't just make people laugh, it makes them think as well.
Please welcome Dick Gregory.
In nineteen seventy five, Heraldo Rivera hosted a monthly show on ABC called good Night America.
Now, if you can remember back and be honest to when all these theories about conspiracies first came out in the mid sixties, then we treated the researchers and the people doing this investigation is kind of paranoid coups. I mean, let's be honest, that's.
The way it was. But now we've all lived through the.
Pentagon papers, Watergate, dirty tricks, and even the allegations. And I stressed the point that there are only allegations that the CIA and the FBI institutions that are so solid in American history, in the fabric of American society, have engaged in illegal operations against American citizens. Well, because of all that, I think that most people are now more willing to listen to opposing points of view. And I think one thing is certain. There are just too many loose ends. John Kennedy was murdered, and we at least owe him the duty of doing everything possible to find out who all was involved. Now, possibly, just possibly, the Warrant Commission was right, but what if it wasn't.
As I started meeting various people that was looking for something else, I found out that there was a whole like a cult out here that didn't believe it. But we just kept looking and kept waiting for the press.
That's comedian Dick Gregory. He was also suspicious of the Warren Report, so in the early seventies he started going to these gatherings kind of like conferences where other doubters brought all their independent research in an attempt to piece it all together. In nineteen seventy five, at one of these early conferences, Dick Gregory meets a young guy named Robert Groden. Groden is sitting on something incredible. He's got an original copy of the Subruder film.
The Zubruder film is famously an eight millimeter film shot by a local dressmaker named Abraham Zabruder. He just happened to be set up at Dealey Plaza with his camera and captured the whole thing on film.
In the film, you see everything that happens, from when the motorcade turns onto Elm Street to the President getting shot, and then the car speating away down the underpass. There were a few other people filming that day, but nobody captured it quite as clearly as Zapruter. The Secret Service promised Suppruter that the film would only be used for an official investigation. It was quickly taken to a Kodak film processing facility in Dallas, where it was developed and three copies were made. Two of the copies were handed off to the Secret Service and sent to Washington. The third copy of the film was given back to Zapruter.
The media caught wind and immediately there was a bidding war for the rights to Zubruder's film. He eventually sold it to Life Magazine for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, a lot of money at the time. Life printed several still frames in their magazine, and after the Warren Commission used the film for their investigation, they also published black and white stills, but the moving image was never shared with the public.
Then, one day Life Magazine reached out to a film lab for a standard contract job.
We blew up eight millimeter home movies up to thirty five millimeters so that we had a professional grade that could be transferred to final print, and nobody else did the work we did. Five Magazine found out about it, and they wanted to see if the Zabruder film would hold a resolution and clarity blowing up from eight to thirty five.
That's Robert Groden at the time in nineteen seventy one. He was a twenty six year old staff technician in the film lab. That day the Zabruder film landed on his desk.
Well, they brought it to us. We did it and sufficed to say an extra copy was made they didn't know about.
Roden was shot by what he saw, and he made his own personal copy of the Zapruder film.
That's what I released on the TV show Good Night America back in nineteen seventy five.
And I want to introduce another guest. We have Robert Groden, who was celebrating his eighteenth birthday on the twenty second of November in nineteen sixty three. Robert, welcome, and I wish you could set up the Zapruta film a bit for us, and we'll get right into it.
Okay.
Abraham Supruter was a Dallas dress manufacturer and it was pure accident that he brought the camera with him that day. He got what his frame for frame, the most valuable historical document of all time.
I was scared of him, out of my wits because I wasn't supposed to have the film in the first place.
I was afraid to release it.
You became a whistleblower.
Really, yeah, that's exactly what I was.
I'm telling you right straight out that if you are at all sensitive, if you're at all queasy, then don't watch this film. It's the execution of President Kennedy. Okay, so the cars are coming along now into d Lee Plaza.
He is shot. Then Governor Connolly is shot.
Now Jackie doesn't realize what's happened yet, she goes to his aid.
And now that's a live audience reacting to the fatal shot.
That's the shot that blew up his head. That's an Austin horrifying thing I've ever seen.
Now, the Warree Commission said that all of the shots were fired from behind by Lee Harvey Oswald alone assassin firing out the president. And as you could see clearly, the head is thrown violently backwards, completely consistent with the shot from the front.
The President's head goes back and to the left. There is no way that could happen if he was shot from behind.
And this is the very first time the American public is seeing this footage correct.
And then Dick Gregory closes the show with an incredible call to action.
I'm outraised over the fact that the American press should be doing what we are doing today. I would like to see the American press, even the press that say everything we have is not true, to come out and do the research and let the American people know.
Was it a trick?
Was it a conspiracy? And let's open up the Warren report, let's talk about a new investigation. If we don't, I think this country's going to be in a lot of trouble.
All right.
And amazingly, that's exactly what happened. In nineteen seventy six, after the Zappruder film aired on Good Night America, a new congressional committee, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, officially reopened the case.
Gaydon Phonsie was appointed to the committee. You'll remember him as the journalist who questioned Specter on the single bullet theory. The commission also appointed Robert Grodin to the investigation team.
I was more than half mean to do it. I was very proud to be able to do it. And there's a history to the House Committee, and.
That history starts with a man named Richard Sprague.
Richard Sprague was the original chief counsel, and he wanted to treat the assassination conspiracy as an unsolved murder. He was just started from not assuming I was was waskilled, but going from beginning to end with what actually did exist.
Dick Russell interviewed Richard Sprague in nineteen seventy eight, did.
You ever have the feeling that what you were dealing with as far as investigating the assassination of President Kennedy went beyond the assassination itself and into very sensitive areas of intelligent skit In what way.
I was raising questions concerning the connections of any between Oswood and the CIA. I was raising questions as to whether the information at the CIA had presented the fact was reliable information. Making it clear at this same time that I would not sign any of the agreements with the CIA, FBI, Justice Department that other committees had.
Sawn Sprague not only had to sign a non disclosure agreement, but he also had to give some control of his investigation over to the CIA and FBI.
I took the view that for this to be a thorough, hard hitting, impartial investigation, they could not control the staff. Secondly, they cannot control that which gets disclosed. The purpose of the investigation is ultimate disclosure. So I was refusing to sign that kind of agreement.
And so they fired Sprague because he wouldn't let the CIA and FBI determine what he was able to see and who he was able to talk to.
I am absolutely convinced that the Congress of the United States has not the slightest interest in a thorough, in depth investigation into the assassination of President.
That wasn't the end of the HSCA. The head of the committee called someone else to take Sprague's place, a man named Robert Blakey.
He said he word in a professional investigation. I said, I would give him one.
Blakey was an attorney and law professor who'd got national attention for his work on what's known as the Rico Laws, which targeted organized crime in the nineteen seventies.
And that is important here.
There was a clear relationship between the mafia and the CIA in the sixties. Organized crime was tree did like another weapon in the CIA's arsenal.
It's interesting because when you search the Warren Report for the terms mafia or organized crime, they're rarely mentioned, and when they are it's just to say, yeah, they were around, but they weren't responsible for any part of the murder.
We called in the senior people from the war In Commission and asked them whether the CIA mafia plots were ever revealed to them, and they said no. In fact, it was withheld from them and whether the presence of that would have changed the nature of their investigation.
And they said, yes, there you go.
What we did is we set up before again an investigation that was open to a single assassin and was also open to a conspiracy, and we went down the usual suspects.
Did the Russians do it, Did the Cubans do it?
Did a particular agency of the United States do it?
Clearly, this is a much different approach than the Warrant Commission.
THEIRS was a shooter investigation. Ours was a full investigation. We entered into formal agreements as to how we would have access to the most secret materials, including the super secrets, from both the FBI and the CIA. I dealt with the director of the FBI and the admiral that was running the CIA, and we got a statement from them both saying, you were being interviewed by a legitimate congressional committee. You were not authorized to lie to these people to save sensitive sources and methods. In other words, give it up.
They were given a directive that said you're not allowed to lie to protect classified information. You must tell the truth. And that directive was written out in a document when.
We interviewed FBI or CIA people. We showed them these documents.
And do you think they lived up to that agreement?
I did until the joann Edes scandal broke. I uncovered this story in two thousand and one.
That's Jefferson Morley again, creator of jfkfax dot org.
The CIA sent a man named George Joannedes to serve as the liaison to the House slect Committee on Assassinations. And a liaison position in this type of investigation, your job is to help the investigators get access to executive branch material.
Joe Needs had supervision over the relationship between the CIA and the group.
Guess what the CIA failed to tell Blakey about joann Edes That he was.
He's a supervisor of the relationship between the agency and in particular group of Cubans.
In his self published two thousand and one expose, Morley uncovered that during the Kennedy administration, George Joanedes was chief of the Psychological Warfare branch of the CIA's Cuban Exile group in Miami.
The anti Castro exiles were plotting covert ways to remove Castro from power. What's important to understand here is that joann Edes was supporting and financing this group, and now this guy is the CIA laison to the House Committee.
Even when he was asked direct questions by the HSCA Council Bob Blakey and by the HSCA investigators. They asked him who was in charge of this Cuban student director in nineteen sixty three, and Joanniti said he didn't know. He in fact, was the answer to their question. They were looking at the answer to their question in the face.
Morley published his expose about Joe and Edies in two thousand and one, and when Blakey read it, he was shocked.
If I had known that he was a supervisor of the relationship between the agency and a particular roupe of Cubans, I would have put him into hearings, and I would have had him under oath, and I would not have hired him as a facilitator. I would have subpoened him as a witness.
Blakey and the rest of the HSCA published their report in January of nineteen seventy nine, completely oblivious at that time to how Joe and Edes obstructed the investigation.
So this is where they put out their vague statement that deemed that President Kennedy was killed as a result of a quote conspiracy. They disagreed with the Warren Report, which fifteen years early. Yer said Oswald acted alone. Here's exactly what they say, quote President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunmen or the extent of the conspiracy.
They also said that the FBI and the CIA were definitely not involved. So they made some progress. They followed Leeds. The Warrent Commission didn't. But Joe and Needes was basically a goalie protecting the CIA.
Were you mad?
Furious? He was the.
Perfect person to derail the committee, and when you drilled down on his backstory, you're going to find a big clue in this case, Dick, can you explain.
As we mentioned, Joan Needes was the head of the CIA program they supported a group of anti Castro Cuban exiles. Well, there were a couple of officers who managed that group, and it turns out in the months leading up to the assassination those CIA officers, the same ones established contact with an ex marine in New Orleans, a guy who didn't know it yet, but his days would be numbered.
The contact they made, you guessed it Lee Harvey Oswald.
So let's sum it up.
A CIA group led by George Joanedes establishes contact with Oswald weeks before the President's murder. Then the head of that group goes on to block the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the very group that was tasked with revisiting the warr report which penned it all on Oswald.
Okay, so I am fully open to hear what you think happened on that day. Where does this investigation start?
At the scene of the crime, the bullets, the wounds, the forensic evidence will show a clear path towards conspiracy.
Next episode on Who Killed JFK?
Missus Kennedy stop right behind where she had been sitting, there was a pristine board.
We tackled the infamous single bullet theory through the eyes of a secret Service agent who was there.
When I saw a picture of the baller. My immediate reaction, Hey, that's my ball.
And then it gets really unhinged.
The government had a serious problem, and the problem was called The Dallas Doctor.
Who Killed JFK? Is hosted by Rob Reiner and me Solidad O'Brien and Our executive producers are Rob Reiner, Michelle Reiner, Matt George, Jason English, David Hoffman, and Me Solidad O'Brien. Our writer is David Hoffman, with research by Dick Russell. Our story editors are Rob Reiner and Julie Pigner. Our senior producer is Julie Pineto. Our producers are Tristan Nash, Dick Russell, Michelle Goldfein and Amari Lee. Our editors are Tristan Nash, Julie Pineto, and Marcus de Lauro. Our project manager is Carol Klein. Our associate producer is emilse Kiros. Mixing, mastering and sound design by Ben La Julie and archival audio in this episode thanks to Heraldo Rivera and Dick Russell. Research and fact checking by Girl Friday and emilse Kiros. Our consulting producer is Rozanne Galliini. Business affairs by Hennan Naea and Jonathan Furman. Recorded in part at CDM Studio and Fourth Street Recording Studio. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Production assistants by Rocco Del Prior and Grace Barron. Special thanks to Johonig Rose Arse and Dan Storper. If you are enjoying the show, leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. Who Killed j f K as a production of Solidad O'Brien Productions and iHeart Podcasts.
