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JFK Again (Back to the Conspiracy)
54 Plays1 year ago
We're taking another look at the conspiracy theories around the assassination of JFK, just like it was 2014 all over again. Or possibly just like it was 1963 all over again. Time travel is involved, definitely. Also, squid penises for some reason.
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Transcript
The Legacy of JFK: Lyrics and Conspiracies
00:00:00
Speaker
So, I guess you're just gonna cheap out and make us recite parts of Shona Lang's Glad I'm Not a Kennedy? Well, it is a rule without a remedy. To watch your family die, the world loves a sacrifice. Oh, I'm glad I'm not responsible for writing this intro. Spoken like a Kennedy, living on through politics, bodyguarded, heart in bits, a blue-white honesty, indigo, injury.
00:00:25
Speaker
Yeah, indigo though, I'm assuming that's a reference to the blood spurting from his magic bullet wounds, but blood is red, right? Ah, but you see, when she sings, prophets longing for the three, honouring the tragedy, they hunger for the crime, the privilege to take a life. I'm fairly sure that A, she's referring to the Catholic Church. Damn trinitarians. And B, hinting at royal bloodlines.
00:00:51
Speaker
Eight bloodlines. Do you mean? Yes. Actually, what do you mean? Lizards, Josh. Lizards. And Lee Harvey Oswald. The lizard liberator. And Jack Ruby. A lizard lover.
00:01:10
Speaker
And this means what exactly? I have no idea, but I do know that I love the look in your eyes. I can see your soul sometimes and we laugh. When we try too hard, we stop and start. Imagine being at Kennedy. I'm glad I'm not at Kennedy. Ashes in my mouth. The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dinteth.
Introducing the Podcast and Setup
00:01:44
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. In Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Addison, and not sitting directly next to me. This, in this particular instance, is Dr. M. R. Xtentith. We're doing the remote thing again, but that's okay. Now, Josh, why are we doing the remote thing? We're doing the remote thing because I have no commitments. You made a tragic choice.
00:02:10
Speaker
I made the choice to- Oh, a long time ago. I did, I made the choice to have children. I was coming home to reap. Schools have parent-teacher evenings, and I'm required to- Surely with your partner being a teacher, you can just shortcut the whole parent-teacher thing by just doing it at home.
00:02:28
Speaker
Well, yeah, as it happens, my partner being a teacher also had her school's parent teacher things this evening, so I was off doing that, so I had no choice. This sounds treatfully inefficient, treatfully inefficient. Well, there's nothing we can do about it now. I'm here, you're there. There's nothing else we can say. Let's make some magic. Well, for a given value of magic, I suppose, we're going back in time again. Time travel, that's like magic, sort of.
00:02:58
Speaker
Well, I mean, it depends on the kind of genre that you're working with. Sometimes it's magical. Sometimes it's just science. Sometimes it's soft science. Sometimes it's hard science. It's hard to know. But the point is we're going back to the conspiracy.
Revisiting JFK and Moon Landing Theories
00:03:14
Speaker
And we have a time for that. We do. I'm going to put it in somewhere around about... Wait for it.
00:03:26
Speaker
Buckle up, we're going back to the conspiracy. Well worth the wait, I'm sure you'll agree. So, last time we did a back to the conspiracy, it was Em's choice and Em chose the moon landings. And this week it was my choice and I thought well. I chose the alleged moon landings. I thought if we're going for the classics, then why not go for the other one? Why not do JFK again? Yeah, let's put the JFK.
00:03:55
Speaker
JFK again. JFK again? There's something there. We really should have workshopped this before the podcast, not during the podcast. No, people love to see how the sausage is made. Well, they like to see how your sausage is made. Let's move on. So, JFK, as you probably imagine, is dead and still dead, allegedly, unless of course you're watching a Bruce Campbell film.
00:04:25
Speaker
Ah, we must get into that. Actually, we already have, so that's okay. JFK, as you probably imagine, being a podcast that deals in conspiracy theories, the JFK assassination was one of the earlier things we talked about. Episode 24, as it happens, November 2014 is when we first gave JFK the once-over. That was back when we were really into doing anniversary
00:04:51
Speaker
episodes, you know, do a 9-11 episode around about 9-11, do a JFK episode around about the death of JFK. Did we ever do an episode on 7-7? I actually don't think we did. I don't think we did, no. Not as much to say about that one, really. No, fewer conspiracy theories can be made to say 9-11 or in this episode's case, JFK.
JFK Assassination: A Historical Pivot
00:05:15
Speaker
Yes, now at the time, now I should point out, so 2014 was before a lot of stuff happened. Like in 2014, when we first started the podcast, you were still very much a niche academic. You didn't have... So you make it sound as if I'm not a niche academic now. You've had a lot more attention since then. I guess what I've done...
00:05:37
Speaker
I've carved my niche out. My niche used to be a grotto, now it's more like a cathedral, but it's still a niche. It's just a Cavendish niche as opposed to a small niche.
00:05:48
Speaker
But back then, conspiracy theories were a lot less talked about than they are now, and it was only really the big ones that got much attention. And JFK was about the biggest one there was. For a long time, I think it would be fair to say, the JFK assassination, like it was JFK and the moon landings were the two big ones. And then 9-11 came along, and that sort of took the top spot, really. And then JFK and moon landings were after that. But then,
00:06:17
Speaker
So, at the time, we basically said what, in fact, why have our notes from last time, we said, after 9-11, JFK is probably the most written upon and analyzed conspiracy theory of all time. And given that part of these back to the conspiracy theory episodes is seeing whether or not things have changed in the interim, I think that's something that's going to turn out to have changed when we start to look at it.
00:06:42
Speaker
Here, I don't think there's been much advance in research into the death of JFK. Whilst there's been an awful lot of words written on 9-11, and continues to be written on 9-11, and there
Rise of Modern Conspiracy Theories
00:07:01
Speaker
is possibly...
00:07:03
Speaker
be able to see whether this is true or not. There might even be more words on QAnon than there is about 911 now. QAnon has been an absolute growth industry for a particular kind of person who's interested in unwarranted conspiracy theories. Every single journalist
00:07:20
Speaker
and their dog and their dog's journalist seems to have an opinion on QAnon, and as a consequence has an opinion on the state of conspiracy theories in society. QAnon, and to an extent also the rise of Donald Trump in the US, so for Western political leanings, has really led to a massive growth
00:07:45
Speaker
in discussion of conspiracy theories, which is why my niche has grown. Because when we did our original JFK episode, when QAnon was not even a twinkle in anybody's eyes, conspiracy theories were the kind of thing that if you're interested in that kind of thing, maybe you might read about them.
00:08:06
Speaker
And now, as I say, everybody seems to have an opinion. And also, notably, everybody seems to have a really bad opinion on conspiracy theories, QAnon, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I guess it's kind of impressive. QAnon's been around for not much more than five years. We didn't talk about it in this podcast until 2018.
00:08:26
Speaker
Whereas the Kennedy assassination this year in November will be the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.
Overview of JFK's Assassination
00:08:33
Speaker
I was actually thinking at the start, like, we take it as a given that everybody knows the deal with the Kennedy assassination and the conspiracy theories around it. But I mean, it happened before you or I were born. It happened when my parents were
00:08:46
Speaker
I don't think there were even teenagers when Kennedy was killed. So people a generation or two younger than us could probably be forgiven for not actually knowing much about the JFK assassination at all. Or what they might know is simply the version of it in the Oliver Sohn film. Mm, exactly. Well, I mean, even then, was that 90s? That's getting on, getting a little long in the 2000s. Josh, it couldn't have been the 90s. That film was released about 10 or 12 years ago.
00:09:14
Speaker
But the 90s were 10 or 12 years ago is what my brain tells me. Calendars might disagree, but what do they know? I mean, it's like time zones. No one's entirely sure how they work. And we're pretty sure that someone's hoodwinking us somewhere in the system. Yeah. So anyway, I thought maybe just for the benefit of our younger listeners who might not actually know the full deal,
00:09:41
Speaker
of the JFK assassination. It might be good to give it a little a little pricey at the start. So I mean you probably know that. Josh, can you do an old timey news voice in 1963? The president's motorcade is going through Dealey Plaza. And look, there's wonderful John Fitzgerald Kennedy waving from his car. And who's that beside him? It would be his wife, Jackie Onassis.
00:10:07
Speaker
For some reason, I'm a time travelling journalist who happens to know who she's going to get married to next. Oh look, he's waving to the crowd and there's a crack in the crowd. And oh no, the president's leaning forward, spurting blood over the local governor. Oh, Jackie's very disturbed by what's going on here. The Secret Service are running about. We'll be coming back to the studio after this ad for cigarettes. I mean, I could have done that, but then you did, so I won't.
00:10:36
Speaker
I actually was reading something about why that was the standard radio voice, the so-called transatlantic accent from basically the 30s up until the 60s. And apparently it's entirely due to the way that microphones worked at the time. Yes, pitched your voice up a little bit, didn't I?
00:10:54
Speaker
Yeah, and that way you got a clear recording.
Role of the Zapruder Film
00:10:58
Speaker
If you spoke normally, you got a very muddied sound. And so basically, recording technology dictated how radio stars and movie stars had to talk in order to make sure you got a clean take.
00:11:13
Speaker
Interesting, but irrelevant. Because, yes, I mean, that's a JFK was on a, what do you call it? It was like a... A junket. Or like a junket. He was basically just going around waving at the people. He was driving through Deli Plaza in Texas when he was... Well, he was being driven through Deli Plaza. Sorry, that's true. He was not out of the wheel. That'll be important. He was on an elevated platform in his car.
00:11:38
Speaker
He was shot twice. One shot went through his, hit him sort of between the shoulders and came out his throat inflicting potentially life-threatening but not immediately fatal wounds. The second shot, however, hit him right in the head and killed him instantly.
00:11:57
Speaker
So for a fairly quick soon afterwards, there were sort of conspiracy theories about what really went on. But of course, the official story is that the man who fired those two shots and indeed a third one that also missed the car completely was one Lee Harvey Oswald firing from the window of a nearby books depository. I always want to say books depository, which is quite a different thing.
00:12:22
Speaker
Quite a different thing. Got an ass like a clown's pocket. Firing from the depository window, he was picked up by police sometime afterwards. There was an official inquiry into it, the Warring Commission. And the findings of the Warring Commission was that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating John F. Kennedy. But pretty much straight away and ever since then, there have been lots of people who think that no, that can't have been what really happened.
00:12:52
Speaker
And part of this is the classic big event seem to require big explanations. So it isn't usual for presidents to get assassinated, although read something somewhere America actually
00:13:08
Speaker
When you actually start running the numbers about attempted assassinations of presidents and presidential candidates, it is one of the worst countries to be a politician at. But I think when it comes to gun crime, America is one of the worst countries to be in full stop. Yes, I mean, people have compared the fact that when Ronald Reagan was shot in the 80s, shot but not killed, I
00:13:32
Speaker
I know of one conspiracy theory around that particular shooting, but that's all and it's not a big one. And people sort of said, you know, because he survived, essentially, it was not nearly as big an event as the actual death in front of crowds of people.
00:13:47
Speaker
of an American president. I mean, also, of course, the Reagan was shot at relatively close range by a guy with a pistol, whereas Oswald was firing at a distance with a rifle. And so part of the disbelief, I think, comes down to the fact that this was one guy, he was a Marine, as we spoke about just a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about Kerry Thornley and his writing on Oswald.
00:14:11
Speaker
As it was trained as a Marine, he had been trained to shoot with a rifle, but nevertheless, it worked out assuming that he was planning to kill Kennedy, and that's how what it seems, couldn't have worked out better for him. Got him right in the head, killed him on the spot. Do you recall a foray about a computer game where you were challenged to recreate the fatal shots?
00:14:34
Speaker
Yes, I recall that there was a sort of a simulation to try and prove possibly if it were possible for him to have made that shot. Yeah, because one of the things which is interesting about the assassination of JFK is there's a certain kind of theorist who goes, well, the shots are so difficult, it's hard to imagine they were ever possible. And so the whole point of this game, which was released
00:15:01
Speaker
over 10 years ago now. But to go, well, you know, you can test that. You can see whether it's possible to take the shot. It had a very dodgy bit of PR around it, and that if you succeeded in replicating Lee Harvey-Otwell's shots exactly, there was a monetary prize, which made the whole thing seem just a little bit...
00:15:26
Speaker
But as people like to point out, yes, the shots that Lee Harvey Oswald, the shots he took are very hard to replicate. It doesn't mean they're impossible. The fact that it's hard to replicate two successful shots on a moving target from a distance and do them accurately
00:15:47
Speaker
doesn't mean they weren't possible in the first place. It just means that, you know, there's a certain degree of luck. And that comes out of the fact, one of the shots that Lee Harvey Oswald fired, and we're assuming here the official theory is correct, missed. Yeah, missed. It wounded a bystander, either with the bullet ricocheting or possibly you were from it kicking up into the road where it hit.
00:16:11
Speaker
Now, Kennedy's assassination was caught on tape. In this day and age, anything the president does is going to be videoed from many angles. But back then, there was no official film of the parade that I'm aware of, obviously not that part of it. But of course, the main tape that people talk about is the famous Zapruder tape. Mr. Zapruder was out there. He was just an amateur, wasn't he? He was just a
00:16:36
Speaker
just a regular member of the public out there with his own camera, happened to be filming it and captured the moment when Kennedy is killed. So, I mean, it's kind of a distasteful thing, but if you want to, I'm fairly certain it's up on YouTube these days, if you want to see a president have his head explode when he gets hit with a bullet and fall over dead, that footage exists.
00:17:01
Speaker
And it was first published, I believe, in Time Life as a series of images taken from the film stills. So most people's first experience of the Zapruda film wasn't as a moving image. It was a sequence of images on a page. And you get stories about people who didn't have access to the Zapruda footage itself.
00:17:25
Speaker
but did have access to the time-life issue and thus they took photos of the individual stills and recreated the film to then play and show people. So you get this really weird reproduction culture around the sopruda footage because most people don't have access to the moving image, all they've got are images of the moving image.
00:17:51
Speaker
And the sopretta tape has got to be one of the most analysed pieces of film ever. People have literally gone frame by frame through that thing documenting exactly what happens, when, at which point.
00:18:03
Speaker
And using that footage to try and locate other bits of footage, because what's interesting about the Zapruda tape is of course you can see in the tape other people taking film or taking photos at the fatal moment.
00:18:21
Speaker
So not only was this approved of footage used to analyze what went on, it was also used to basis for going, there must be more data out there. Indeed, we know the few cases where people think they took photos at the right time, but it turned out they weren't using the camera correctly or the film was exposed before it was developed. It was a really interesting documentary.
00:18:45
Speaker
oh, probably about 15 years ago, where they took all the surviving footage of the event in Deli Plaza and created a timeline going, well, we know exactly what route the motorcade took through Delos at the time. We know approximately where people were standing, so we can actually put them onto a map
00:19:08
Speaker
and create as much footage as possible of the motorcade going through. And so it turns out there's a lot more footage than just the supported tape, but it has become kind of the touchstone for cases where people want to analyze the visual record and see whether there's something which the authorities didn't see or didn't investigate at the time.
00:19:34
Speaker
Yes,
The Magic Bullet Theory
00:19:35
Speaker
so when it comes to conspiracy theories, they're all some variation on the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald either didn't fire any shots or did fire shots, but he wasn't the only person shooting on that day. If you've heard anything about the JFK assassination, you'll have heard references to a grassy knoll where supposedly people saw shots coming from this other, this little hillock nearby. And one of the main
00:20:03
Speaker
There seem to be sort of two main things where people say that Kennedy had to have been multiple shooters. One of them, and this is going to come up a bunch as we go through it, is the idea that so-so Oswald was firing from behind him. And one of the things people say that people have questioned with is the fact that Oswald, the angle that he'd chosen to shoot from is not the best one he could have chosen.
00:20:26
Speaker
He was, you know, from the angle he was, by the time he was actually able to aim at the motorcade, it was moving away from him. If he'd gone from sort of the other side and been able to shoot at it as it was coming towards him, that would be a much easier shot for him. And as someone who's played both Sniper Elite 4 and Sniper Elite 5, I recognize the wisdom in tracking targets as they move towards you rather than away. It's a lot easier to kill Nazis when they're moving towards you.
00:20:54
Speaker
than when they're driving away on their motorbikes. True fact. And so because he was shooting from behind, that means he would have shot Kennedy in the back or indeed the back of his head. But lots of people claim that now some of the shots, especially the shot that hit him in the head, had to have come from in front.
00:21:13
Speaker
And we'll look at that later. But that's one thing. The other thing, then, of course, is the famous magic bullet, because as we say, Harvey Oswald allegedly fired three shots. We know one of the missed. We know if we're going by the official theory, one of the missed completely, one of them hit Kennedy square in the head, killed him instantly. But the other one, which which hit him before that one,
00:21:38
Speaker
is the only bullet left that can explain, I think it's seven different wounds sustained by Kennedy and by Governor Connolly, who was sitting in front of him in the car. I think there's a bullet went through Kennedy's back, out his throat,
00:21:57
Speaker
through Governor Connolly's back out his chest, in and out of his wrist, and then finally lodged in Governor Connolly's thigh, if I'm remembering it correctly. And so that's where people have said, look, there's no way this is possible. A single bullet could not make all of these injuries, especially given that you had
00:22:18
Speaker
the spread amongst two people who were sitting opposite in different parts of the car. Now, for a long time, I thought, yeah, that's, I mean, that's proof positive, surely there's there's no, this is absolutely ridiculous. And this is where this was the main thing. Jim Garrison, who was played by Kevin Costner in the film, his wind back back
00:22:40
Speaker
And to the left. Which I believe that's where he's talking about how Kennedy's head went back into the left, isn't it? Which showed supposedly that he had been shot from the front. From the other direction, because he whips back with the shot, ipso facto, he must have been shot from the front, not from behind.
00:22:57
Speaker
But we'll get to that. And so he has a long bit about how, you know, the board must have done this way, it must have gone down this way, it must have paused in mid-air briefly, it must have gone this and that and so on. And it does sound completely unbelievable, but it's based on the idea that Kennedy was sitting in the back right of the car, that Governor Connolly was sitting in the front left of the car, and that they were both sitting in regular seats at the same level. And that's not actually true, is it?
00:23:27
Speaker
No, because Kennedy was sitting on a booster seat. He was actually elevated along with his wife, the future, Jackie Onassis. And they were also less left and right and more kind of centralized on that booster seat. The whole point was you wanted to see the president
00:23:48
Speaker
in his motorcade and so the president was sitting up on a booster seat to be more easily seen as opposed to which which was the president i mean there are there are three men in suits and a woman i'm fairly sure the woman isn't the president a woman could never be president but which are the three men so yes he was sitting up so it'd be easier to be seen by the public and thus why don't you put a bit of elevation
00:24:15
Speaker
into the trajectory of the bullet and the notion that as the bullet enters Kennedy's body, his body is itself in motion due to the gunshot. The magic bullet is less magical and more just a standard physical bullet after all, isn't it Josh?
00:24:35
Speaker
Yeah, if you actually look at how they were sitting, that Kennedy was in the centre of the car at a higher elevation, that Connolly was a bit off to his left, but not diagonally opposite him in the car, as other people are kind. Connolly had his
00:24:52
Speaker
right hand sort of resting on his left knee and was turning back to look at Kennedy. When you look at that position from above, it is actually possible. You know, there are diagrams of this you can see on the internet. You can draw a straight line. You can see it in the Zapruda footage.
00:25:09
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So I think the magic bullet thing I think came out of a bunch of faulty assumptions. So that one I think can fairly well be put to rest. But there's still plenty of other problems people have with the JFK session, and especially with the official finding of the Warren Commission into exactly what we're doing.
00:25:31
Speaker
a lot of people think the Warren Commission basically had a predetermined conclusion. This was the story, this was the theory, Oswald did it, he was a lone nut, and that was always going to be the finding of the Commission entirely. And the thing was,
00:25:52
Speaker
It kind of was. What a really interesting kind of footnote in the history of the Warren Commission is that Lyndon Johnson, who became the next President of the United States after the death of his predecessor, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was of the firm belief there was a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. He
00:26:13
Speaker
likely thought it was a Cuban conspiracy, so Cuban agitators. But the US Attorney General at the time, Nicholas Katzenbach, basically said, look, no matter what you think, Mr. President, that people need to have someone to blame for Kennedy's death.
00:26:34
Speaker
And so, Katzenbach has a memo, and he tells in this memo that President Johnson must satisfy the public, that Oswald, I quote, was the assassin, that he did not have confederate to a still at large, and that the evidence was such that he could have been convicted at trial.
00:26:54
Speaker
And so this is in the historical record. We happen to know that Johnson thought there was a conspiracy, but he was persuaded by his attorney general to go, no, we're going with the so-called lone gunman hypothesis here. And so the Warren Commission probably was set up from the get-go to prove the official theory.
00:27:17
Speaker
Now, that doesn't mean the Warren Commission was wrong. You can have a commission set up to get to a preordained conclusion, and that conclusion might still be the right thing to come to, given the surrounding evidence.
Criticism of the Warren Commission
00:27:33
Speaker
But there are certain people who will look at the historical record, look at these White House memos and go, yeah, but the Warren Commission was set up to prove Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
00:27:46
Speaker
Isn't that just a little bit suspicious? Doesn't that suggest that maybe there was some evidence they wanted to hide? Exactly. And also it doesn't help that the Warring Commission's final report is impenetrable, I think is a good description. It has no index, does it? It's just a collection of all the data.
00:28:07
Speaker
As people like to point out, the thing about the Warren Commission report was it was a best seller, but no one expected it to be because no one had bought these reports en masse in the past. So normally what you did with these reports was you just dumped all of the data in, and the Warren Commission extends to several volumes.
00:28:30
Speaker
And that's what you do. You just you print all the data. You don't need to print an index because no one's going to read the thing. They just want to read the index. But it turns out that actually people did want to read the Warren Commission report because there were those great doubts about had they got the right person, especially given the interesting death of Lee Harvey Oswald, which we haven't even got to yet.
00:28:55
Speaker
And so the fact that there wasn't an index meant that it did look ever so slightly as if the Warren Commission was trying to hide things in plain sight by making it really hard to actually work out what their reasoning was for coming to their conclusion.
00:29:13
Speaker
And then that was followed. So the Warren Commission, JFK dies November 63. The Warren Commission ran for, was it two years? I think they reported in 65? Or am I getting that wrong? That sounds about right. Now in 1976, there was the Church Committee. The United States Senate Select Committee to study governmental operations with respect to intelligent activities.
00:29:42
Speaker
Otherwise known as the Church Committee because the guy who ran it was a Mr. Church. I believe the guy who ran it was a literal church. An actual church. A building was in charge of this committee. Yeah, that sounds plausible to me.
00:30:00
Speaker
Now, one thing I was never quite clear of was it specifically about investigating the Warren Commission or was it investigating intelligence stuff in general in the Warren Commission? It was investigating intelligence activities in general, but there was a subcommittee that was looking at assassinations.
00:30:17
Speaker
Right. So they looked into the Warren Commission's findings. And while they emphasize that they didn't uncover any evidence sufficient to justify a conclusion that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy,
00:30:34
Speaker
But they did have evidence, well, here's the wording. This evidence indicates that the investigation of the assassination was deficient
00:30:55
Speaker
and that facts which might have substantially affected the course of the investigation were not provided the Warren Commission or those individuals within the FBI and the CIA, as well as other agencies of the government who were charged with investigating the assassination. So they basically found, look, we haven't ourselves come across evidence that the Warren Commission's findings are wrong, but we do think how the Commission actually worked was not up to standard.
00:31:21
Speaker
Indeed, one of their issues was the FBI basically focused on Lee Harvey Oswald and only Lee Harvey Oswald far too quickly. So they didn't consider other suspects or other associates. Lee Harvey Oswald did it, he got shot, end of story. So they, yeah, there are, I think it would be fair to say there are still questions. Yeah, and this is
00:31:51
Speaker
The JFK conspiracy theories are something which I've become, and I have to use my words carefully here, more sympathetic to with time. So I still think Lee Harvey Oswald likely was the assassin of President Kennedy, and I think he likely acted alone due to his very weird political proclivities, but
00:32:17
Speaker
Given that we have things such as the memo from Katzenbach to Lyndon Johnson, we have the Church Committee reports, I think if you have a modicum of knowledge about how the American political system works, there are
00:32:36
Speaker
there's enough suggestion to go there might be something more to the story. And it might be as simple as my kind of, and what's going to confuse my words carefully here, my favored 9-11 conspiracy theory, which is, it is quite possible that the intelligence agencies didn't act appropriate to intelligence they had at the time.
00:33:01
Speaker
and are now covering up that fact because it would be embarrassing to go, yeah, we kind of had enough information to arrest Lee Halveil for the few days before he tried to
00:33:13
Speaker
commit the assassination, so we probably could have prevented that, but we didn't really act upon the intelligence we had, and we don't really want anyone to know about it. And I think that's a plausible cover-up theory which would involve a governmental conspiracy around the assassination of JFK. Now, I'm not saying that is the case, but I think there's enough evidence out there that you have to at least consider that as a possibility.
00:33:41
Speaker
So we've talked about these sort of conspiracy theories coming up with problems with the Warren Commission, but of course,
00:33:51
Speaker
To be a decent conspiracy theory, you do actually need to offer your own version of events. And there are a bunch of different theories and a bunch of different supposed perpetrators of the conspiracy to kill JFK. They seem to be a bunch of recurring names. The CIA is one suggestion, they were behind it. One suggestion is the Mafia or other organized crime.
00:34:16
Speaker
And that sometimes is going to be the Italian mafia. Sometimes it's going to be Cuban gangs or Cuban revolutionaries, but they're going to be gang like activities. Others think, speaking of Cubans, the government of Cuba, if you mind, I remember this is 1963. The Cuba Missile Crisis is not long in the power yard. Teach-ins between America and Cuba are much higher than they are today.
00:34:45
Speaker
There's also now 1963 Vietnam
00:34:51
Speaker
hasn't started yet, but Korea has. I can never keep these wars straight. But I think there were suggestions that people in the military did not like JFK's stance towards whatever wars happened to be going on at that time. So there were suggestions that the military industrial complex might have wanted to get rid of him. So there are various theories that people who potentially had the power and connections to pull something like this off
00:35:21
Speaker
might have actually been behind it. We could then look the other way though and say, so what evidence is there that Oswald was just a lone nut? And mostly we talked about that a couple of weeks ago. We did because Kerry Thornley literally wrote the book on that, Oswald, which was actually based upon an earlier book he had written
00:35:42
Speaker
about a potential assassin with military training that the Warren Commission knew about and then went, eh, can you write the book on how Oswald actually committed the crime? But there's been a lot of research into Oswald and his background, and his background is
00:36:00
Speaker
Interesting to say the least, so trained as a Marine in the US, had communist sympathies, so ended up defecting to Russia, where he was welcomed with open arms by the Russian government because he was a Marine, trained by the best of the best in America, who was now living in Moscow.
00:36:21
Speaker
Lee Javier's world turns out to not enjoy being a good dutiful communist citizen, so eventually he returns back to the United States, which leads to the Russians thinking he's an American agent and leads to the Americans thinking that he's a Russian agent. Lee Javier's world
00:36:40
Speaker
doesn't really settle in well with his Russian wife back in mainland America. So he starts hanging out with a lot of distributable people and people with criminal tendencies and then eventually attempts to assassinate
00:37:00
Speaker
Governor Connolly, is it? No, it's not go. It's not go. He mentioned General Edwin Walker. Yeah, sorry. He actually does an assassination attempt using the same rifle, but misses. And we know about this for the sheer fact that the guy who was shot at, that's reported to the police. In also Lee Harvey also left a note to his wife,
00:37:27
Speaker
saying if I'm not home in the morning something will have happened, you may need to go to the police station. So it's also got kind of prior form when it comes to attempted assassination of political figures.
Oswald's Background and Motives
00:37:41
Speaker
And then there's the contested fact
00:37:44
Speaker
that Oswald supposedly killed a police officer, one J.D. Tippett, after the event suggesting he was having done the deed. He was trying to get away and was stopped by this police officer and killed him.
00:37:59
Speaker
to get away. The evidence is a little bit circumstantial, and that's something that has been questioned a bit because it fits in nicely with the narrative of the official theory, but because it's still a little bit, the proof of it is not conclusive. That's something that people have suggested might have been an embellishment of the powers that be to make Oswald look even more guilty.
00:38:25
Speaker
And also it doesn't help that they weren't able to really question Oswald about the attempted, the successful killing of a police officer. Because of course, he gets killed by Jack Ruby. Yeah, this is the thing that always blew my mind about the JFK assassination. Oswald was killed on live television when Jack Ruby ran up to him and shot him. A man who just wandered into a police station.
00:38:52
Speaker
It was just, and he's never really a big part of it. It's like, his version of events is that he just thought it was the right thing to do. He supposedly wanted to save Mrs. Kennedy. What did he say? He wanted to save Mrs. Kennedy. The tribulations of going through the trial of Oswald seem to think he was doing her a favor, although maybe that was justification he came up with afterwards. He did apparently take a lot of amphetamines.
00:39:21
Speaker
I mean, that was the style of the time. He was a bar owner or at least a bar manager. So I imagine he was high on the hooch and high on the drugs. So it's possible he was just not in his right mind at all and thought it would be a brilliant idea to kill Oswald himself. But yeah, the fact that this dude shows up kills the one person who, you know, knew conclusively whether or not the charges against him
00:39:51
Speaker
um were true or false and he's he's always just a bit of a footnote i always found that very strange yeah yeah it is really quite bizarre that as you say he kills someone on national tv and he gets punished for it but not not in the kind of way you would expect very strange
00:40:13
Speaker
Now, time is running short and we have other things to talk about. We do have to mention the fact that one year after our first JFK episode in November of 2015, we decided to come back to it by talking about the fact that none other than Bertrand Russell, a big name in the field of philosophy, he was a bit of a JFK conspiracy theorist and he had a bunch of questions
00:40:35
Speaker
about the assassination, 16 in total, which he published in a public, was it mega, there's a digest sort of thing. I don't think we've got time to go through the entire lot of them, but he basically, he specifically says, like what his question number seven was, how did Oswald manage to shoot the president in the front from behind?
00:40:54
Speaker
I think there's questions of the autopsy as well and there's some as well. So he was one of these people who references the fact that supposedly Kennedy, the fatal shot on Kennedy came from in front of him. And I believe that's mostly because of the back and to the left, right? It's the analysis of what JFK's, the direction JFK's head appears to jerk in when he was shot in the head.
00:41:16
Speaker
people took that to mean that he'd been shot in front, although then people have replied to that to say, well, actually, as we say, like, if you've seen the video, it's not pleasant. His head pretty much explodes. There's not much left of his head afterwards. And if enough, if you're shot in the back of the head and enough of your head is ejected forward, the remainder of your head will jerk backwards just due to conservation of momentum. So I don't think that that particular line of questioning was
00:41:45
Speaker
super convincing when it comes to the idea that Kennedy had to have been shot from in front. There are a lot of other questions. He mentions the supposed murder of patrol in Tippet and has questions about that. There are supposed forensic ones about photographs, gunshot residue tests, a bunch of stuff like that. He was just asking questions. He asked quite a few questions.
00:42:15
Speaker
Yeah, although the one which gets me about this list is question number one. Why were all the members of the Warren Commission closely connected with the US government?
00:42:26
Speaker
Why would they not have been here? It's a panel, in paneled by the government of the day, to investigate the killing of one of their own. You might go look at a perfectly formed panel that's going to be international, bringing people from all around the world.
00:42:45
Speaker
I mean, there's a really good reason, which is non-conspiratorial, as to why all the members of the Warren Commission were closely connected within the US government, because they were calling on favours from their mates to investigate something. Exactly. One interesting point was that he did, he equated the Oswald case with the Dreyfus affair of late 19th century France, which... I don't know what Richard Dreyfus has to do with any of this.
00:43:09
Speaker
Ah, well indeed, it was a different Dreyfus. There's more than one. There's more than one. That's impossible. Which we ended up, that inspired us to devote to the very next episode after this Bertrand Russell one to talking about the Dreyfus affair. Short version is in 19th century France, someone in the French military had been selling secrets to the Germans. They picked this officer Dreyfus, Dreyfus,
00:43:32
Speaker
because he's French. And also because he was Jewish. And yeah, because basically he was the sort of person who they thought was a good fit for the crime. He was Jewish, was the main count against him. He was I think half German or something. He was sort of, he was not the right kind of person, which made him the right kind of person to be the victim of this crime. He was found, tried, convicted. It was then proven that a different officer had actually been the one
00:44:00
Speaker
selling secrets to the Germans, and yet the military was incredibly resistant to opening the trial again, retrying Dreyfus. They really had their guy who they wanted to be the criminal, and they weren't actually interested in piffling matters about whether or not
00:44:17
Speaker
that was true. And so this was the analogy that people drew that Oswald fit the bill for someone who they wanted to be behind the death of Kennedy. And so that's what they went for. And that's all it was. But yeah, I mean, it's still I think as you say, there are still questions that can be asked.
00:44:41
Speaker
But I don't think there's, it doesn't feel to me like there's been enough to actually say definite of a year. Now it definitely wasn't Oswald. Definitely must have been some other sort of conspiracy.
00:44:51
Speaker
Now, Josh, are you aware that this piece by Bertrand Russell was one of the reasons why the CIA invented the term conspiracy theory in the first place? I was not. I mean, we probably mentioned it seven years ago when we talked about this. We've mentioned the CIA dispatch, which is about how the CIA want to kind of weaponize the term conspiracy theory. And some people have said, oh, this is this is evident that the CIA invented the term.
00:45:17
Speaker
which is nonsense because the first attested to mention is around about 1908 and that mention in the Oxford English Dictionary is obviously referring to previously called things that previously
00:45:32
Speaker
So this is what we previously called conspiracy theories. But it is true, the CIA would go, look, we've got people like Bertrand Russell who are questioning the official narrative. And we really can't have that kind of thing going on there. So it'd be really quite useful to call people like Bertrand Russell a conspiracy theorist and associate his views with conspiracy theories.
00:46:00
Speaker
So there are people in positions of power operating behind the scenes who are going, it's not a good look if intellectuals are questioning the official narrative of who killed Kennedy. We need to kind of shut this kind of thing down. And this, once again, leads some credence to the notion that
Alternative Theories on JFK's Death
00:46:21
Speaker
There is something deeply weird about, if not the assassination of JFK, the investigation and maintaining of the official theory around JFK.
00:46:34
Speaker
Now, just before we get into the updates for today, I do have to return to my favorite theory about the JFK shooting. And this is my favorite, not because I think it's the most convincing or the most likely to be true. Now, Josh, is your theory that a squid killed JFK? Unless that's some sort of a slang for a Secret Service agent? No.
00:46:57
Speaker
I'm going to explain my reasoning but please do go on. This is the theory that while Oswald was indeed in the book depository firing shots at the motorcade and did indeed fire the quote unquote magic bullet that hit Kennedy in the back and also wounded Governor Connolly, the shot, the fatal shot that hit Kennedy in the head and killed him on the spot
00:47:19
Speaker
was actually fired by a panicking secret service agent. The evidence people have for this theory, it started, I think, from the fact that JFK's brain went missing after the autopsy, his brain, or presumably what was left of his brain.
00:47:35
Speaker
was returned to his family, I think, with the rest of his body, was kept separately and it's just kind of gone. Nobody knows where JFK's brain went. And people have suggested that maybe the reason for this is that if his brain was still, had been kept in a state that could be examined again, people would find that the bullet fragments in it did not match
00:48:00
Speaker
the bullets fired by Oswald's gun. And people have pointed out that the rifle that Oswald had fired big, heavy, slow bullets that were designed to just go through stuff. And that indeed is what the magic bullet did. It hit Kennedy, it went straight through him, straight through Connolly, and didn't stop until it ended up in Connolly's thigh, which is, once you actually account for where people were actually sitting and realize you can draw a straight line,
00:48:29
Speaker
is exactly what that sort of bullet would have done. But the one that hit Kennedy in the head blew his head apart. It didn't. It didn't just go in and out. It caused an enormous amount of damage. And that's the sort of damage that you would expect from the kind of ammunition fired by the kind of pistols
00:48:46
Speaker
that secret service agents carry. So it's not particularly persuasive. It's a bit of a leap. There's not a lot of evidence there, but I just really like the fact that you can tell the story which says, for decades we were obsessing about the wrong bullet.
00:49:04
Speaker
that people were going on and on and on about this magic bullet, which it turned out was actually an incredibly ordinary bullet doing exactly what you'd expect the bullets to do. And all this time, it was the other bullet we really should have been looking at.
00:49:17
Speaker
This is awfully similar to some of the theories about the death of RFK. So the notion that Suhan Suhan's attack on RFK doesn't make much physical sense the way it's described. So usually the argument is, look, we've got a lot of mis-description of what went on at the time. And that's the reason why the assassination of RFK looks so weird. We're describing Suhan Suhan's actions in the wrong way.
00:49:44
Speaker
But one of the other explanations is no, the eyewitness testimony around RFK's assassination is accurate. But we also know the Secret Service agents assigned to RFK were firing to stop the assassin, Sirhan Satterhan. And it's just possible that maybe the bullet that killed RFK didn't come from Sirhan Sirhan's gun, it came from one of the bodyguard's guns.
00:50:14
Speaker
and you might end up going, well, I mean, okay, sure, the bodyguard was the one who killed RFK, but he didn't intend to kill RFK, but Sohan Sohan did. So we'll just, we'll fudge this and go, yeah, Sohan Sohan attempted to kill RFK.
00:50:36
Speaker
and RFK died and that's all you need to know. And certainly in the JFK case if you buy this theory it then becomes a matter of cover-up because as we say that the first shot that definitely did hit Kennedy fired by Oswald
00:50:52
Speaker
was not immediately fatal, but it was a bullet through the throat. He might not have survived that, even if he hadn't been shot a second time. So it's sort of like, well, why cause embarrassment? Why cause extra pain with what could have been and what have you? Let's just blame the whole thing on Oswald. It's a tragic situation, no matter what. And we're just making the best of it. And presidents are just like horses. What? Once they break their leg, you have to euthanize them?
00:51:22
Speaker
Yeah. Right. Yeah. But anyway, the reason I brought up squids is that wonderful story that gets told about how giant squids, as opposed to colossal squids, because it turns out there are so many squid sizes. Quite a few, yes.
00:51:37
Speaker
When people examined the corpses of giant squids, they found a lot of what appeared to be attack marks on male giant squids. And the thing about giant squids is that they use
00:51:52
Speaker
They used their penises to attack, because their penises have got a sharp, they've got little prongs, because basically when squids have sex they kind of just stab each other, inject semen into their bodies and swim away. And so it was assumed that
00:52:09
Speaker
male giant squids like to attack each other. And they go, oh, that's interesting. They've got a quite aggressive relationship. We've never seen that, but it appears that from the attack marks on their bodies, they are going around fighting all the time. And then we started to get
00:52:29
Speaker
video footage of giant squids. And it turns out that when you startle a giant squid, which is very easy to do, they get very confused and they stab themselves. And so it seems actually they're not attacking one another, they're just constantly stabbing themselves with their own penises and putting semen in their skin.
00:52:51
Speaker
And this relates to the JFK assassination. People firing wildly. Right. Okay. Right. Firing wildly squid penis. Yup. No, I got, I'm on board. Yup. Sub thermal semen injection. Now that is the name of a band.
00:53:08
Speaker
It must be, and if it isn't, it should be.
Relevance of JFK Conspiracies Today
00:53:11
Speaker
So we're nearing the end of this episode, but of course, given that we're doing the back to the conspiracy thing, we do have to run up by saying, what's changed? Since we last talked about this, have there been new developments? And it feels more like not so much new developments as a lack of developments in comparison to what else has been going on. It seems we've talked in the past about, when talking about other papers, I think Lee Basham's talked about this, the idea that
00:53:36
Speaker
Some conspiracy theories just over time, you just kind of stop caring about them a bit. We talked about this with the moon landings as well. 60 years later, I would venture that most of the people who were adults when Kennedy died are dead now. Like I say, my parents were 11 or 12 or something. It's been long enough now that
00:53:59
Speaker
probably even if you did come up with conclusive proof exactly what happened, probably not going to change the world so much. And indeed, as you said at the start, QAnon, things like that have really taken off in the time in between. And JFK's really been shunted to the side to the extent that when you're talking about conspiracy theories featuring a Kennedy, it's not really JFK anymore, is it?
00:54:23
Speaker
I mean, I just did a search for new development, JFK, and I found a post from online columnist.com, which is the most generic name you can possibly have for a website. And we come from the country where we have a news website called stuff.co.nz. Where do you get your news from? Stuff.
00:54:46
Speaker
And this is a new twist on JFK assassination, October 29th, 2021. And another strange twist to the 58 year old JFK assassination saga, the 58 year old son of CIA sniper trainer, Ricardo Morales Jr. claims his father recognized JFK's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as part of the CIA training class. So there are still people coming forward
00:55:13
Speaker
with new and unusual claims. But it should be noted this is a person born the year JFK died, claiming that he now remembers a story his father told him about Lee Harvey Oswald.
00:55:30
Speaker
Yes, and you've talked in the past about people appealing to supposed deathbed confessions from various people. When I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to confess to so many different conspiracies, including conspiracies that I could not possibly have been involved in because I wasn't even born at the time. And that way I will hide the true conspiracy I've been involved in amongst a bunch of lies about conspiracies I cannot have been involved in at all.
00:55:59
Speaker
But yes, as I was alluding to before, JFK has kind of been shunted out of the limelight by his own son, JFK Jr., who the world would have you believe died in an airplane crash in the early 1990s, but he's become a starring figure in QAnon.
00:56:15
Speaker
as supposedly he never died, he's still alive, and he's going to come back, which you've explained this to me in the past exactly how it makes sense for JFK Jr. to be a lead figure in QAnon, but I still don't understand it to me. And the fact that he appears to now be Hispanic.
00:56:33
Speaker
Yes, no, there's not a lot about QAnon that really makes sense. Oh, so actually one thing, and we noted this back in 2017, of course, when Trump was president, he promised to release all the files associated with the investigation into the assassination of JFK. And then it turned out he released a lot of files
00:56:59
Speaker
but yielded to pressure from the FBI and the CIA to block the release of some records. And at the time we noted, I mean, it still looks as if there's something they don't want to tell us. And once again, I think it's intelligence failures. I think they've got records that indicate that maybe if they had acted upon some information, they could have prevented the assassination.
00:57:26
Speaker
And then one last thing, we have in our notes, we have a long list of stories and things that pop up that could make for an interesting topic one of these days. One of them, which we never actually got around to using, was a story that went around in 2017, suggesting that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was none other than Jackie Kennedy.
00:57:46
Speaker
That would be the future Jackie Onassis. The future Jackie Onassis, that she had been hired by the CIA and trained that once once once Oswald started shooting, she was going to be the one to fire the fatal shot into Kennedy's head. And yeah, there's a lot of
00:58:06
Speaker
A lot of he must have been shot from the front stuff, supposedly stuff around the autopsy was supposedly faked, given that eyewitnesses spoke of a large wound at the back of the President's head, but the autopsy photos only showed a small wound in the back of his head. There's a lot of, I mean, most of this article is just questions about the assassination in general. The whole how could it have been Jackie Kennedy,
00:58:36
Speaker
Some people have looked at the Zapruda footage and claimed that you can see something shiny and possibly metallic in her hand, which could have been a gun. But it ends up talking about the fact that the Zapruda tape had been retouched or re-edited or something and kind of gets into the, you can't believe anything about anything. So what point is there in saying theories like this in the first place?
00:59:06
Speaker
And that is currently all we have to say about John F. Kennedy, the assassination thereof. Yeah, I mean, maybe if those remaining files under lock and key when the CIA and the FBI ever get released, there actually might be a major break in the case.
00:59:24
Speaker
Because there's presumably a reason as to why those files have not been released. And I imagine it's probably not about protecting the agents involved at the time, given it was 16 years ago this year.
00:59:40
Speaker
So there must be something worth keeping secret. Although as you sometimes find with the secret services, sometimes they just like keeping secrets for the sheer fact that keeping secrets is fun. And it gives you power.
00:59:57
Speaker
There's a long-standing gripe about the fact that we still actually don't know exactly what went on at Bletchley Park. We know about the breaking of the Enigma code, but there's still a whole bunch of stuff they did which is under lock and key. Most cryptographers and computational experts are going,
01:00:16
Speaker
look, there will be no commercial secrets left from Bletchley Park. I mean, maybe for the first 10 or 15 years, the British government may have had some advances in cryptography, et cetera, et cetera, that was worth them keeping secrets so they could use it at a later date. But, you know,
01:00:38
Speaker
It's been 80 years almost. We've probably reinvented almost all of those wheels, and most of the stuff that is probably under lock and key really should be public now, but due to the Official Secrets Act, they won't be for another 15 years or so.
01:00:56
Speaker
So who knows? Who knows? Now, what I do know is that that's the end of this episode. Wait, you know, hold on. The one person who does know is Donald Trump, because he would have had to have known what was in the papers, the CIA and the FBI didn't want to release to then use his presidential powers to block the release of those papers. So Donald Trump knows exactly what the CIA and the FBI know.
01:01:25
Speaker
And he was complicit in keeping that information from the public. I mean, that assumes he actually read any of it, which doesn't appear to be his strong suit. I mean, that's that's also true. Anyway, as I was saying, that's it for this episode, but there's still a bonus episode to come. What will you be talking about to our beloved patrons in the bonus episode?
01:01:44
Speaker
We'll be talking about how Posey Parker, and not Parker Posey, visited El Toro recently and got some tomato juice in the face. We'll be also talking about how Billy TK and Vinny Eastwood are going to prison, apparently for being conspiracy theorists. And we've got a little bit of COVID-19 news, the mystery of the disappearing data regarding the potential zoonotic origin of COVID,
01:02:14
Speaker
at the Wuhan markets in China. So if you're interested in hearing that, then you'd better just be a patron. Just do it. Just become one if you're not one of the many. Just fax us your credit card number, your security code and your name, and we'll definitely start charging you.
01:02:36
Speaker
Definitely. Somehow, magic, I assume, you'll get access to these bonus episodes that we recorded. I want to print out the waveform of the bonus episodes and fax them through. Then you can use a scanner to then recreate the WAV or MP3 file.
01:02:57
Speaker
I assume that's how it works, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could. There are those who would say that you can go to Betrayon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. But I mean, that sounds much more complicated than your way of doing it. Yeah. Facts make life easier. That's a facts. It is. It's a facts fact. It's the facts of life. The facts of life.
01:03:20
Speaker
Yeah, stop that now, please. In fact, before this degenerates any further than it already has, I'm just going to draw a line in the sand and say goodbye.
01:03:34
Speaker
You've been listening to a podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Ederson and Imdentit. If you'd like to help support us, please find details of our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podbean. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com.
01:04:06
Speaker
Marty, we gotta go back to the conspiracy.