http://www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/06/05/countdown-to-dallas-episode-1-new-channel/

Transcript

The President’s car is now turning on to Elm Street and it will be only a matter of minutes before he arrives at the trademark

[Music] On October 14th, 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald applied and got a job at a place called the Texas School Book Depository

Here’s how it looked at the time
A nondescript red brick building perched on the southeast corner of Houston and Elm Streets
It offered a magnificent view of a place called Daily Plaza.
Here’s the building today
Now the question of just how Oswald got the job just 5 weeks before President Kennedy’s motorcade drove right by has been a longstanding question for those studying the assassination
Some think it’s fishy
Surely they say proof of a conspiracy
I’m Paul Brandus a longtime White House-based journalist speaker at seven presidential libraries
My latest is Countdown to Dallas.
In Countdown to Dallas I tell the rest of the story about Oswald and the depository
And for one surprising twist you might not know about stick around to the end of this short video
That mid-October 1963 story starts here in the Dallas suburb of Irving where Oswald’s wife Marina and their 21-month-old daughter June were living with a woman named Ruth Payne.
Marina was also days away from giving birth to her second daughter Marina the young Soviet

Immigrants a woman she met through the local immigrants

Marina was the victim of spousal abuse
Lee was a wifebeater hitting Marina on a regular basis
Ruth who wanted to improve her Russian took Marina in

That’s the backdrop
Oswald living on his own was also unemployed
He had just gotten back from Mexico City after a futile effort to get a visa to travel to Cuba
He needed a job badly
On the 14th Ruth Marina and some other women in the neighborhood were having coffee and the subject of Lee’s unemployment came up
Oswald had several job prospects
One was at a bakery
the other driving a truck but Lee didn’t know how to drive
One woman at that coffee Lenny May Randall mentioned that her brother Wesley Bule Frasier had just gotten a job at the Depository in downtown Dallas
She thought they might need an extra man
Now Marina Oswald’s English was poor
Lee did not allow her to learn it
So Ruth Payne called the depository and spoke with a boss there
His name Roy Truly
Truly said yes he could use another man to fill orders for school books
Tell Oswald to come down and apply
Now you have to remember what a pathetic work record Oswald had.
He’d been fired from two jobs in just the past 6 months
And a potential third employer checked on a reference who said Oswald was not a good employee
Oswald was unwanted
His skills were minimal
but a menial job filling boxes with books Oswald filled out this job application
His address was a lie
Said he’d lived in Dallas continuously
That was a lie
he had just gotten out of the Marines and was honorably discharged
Two more lies
that he had been on his last job for three years
Another lie
Five lies on one page
It’s a reflection of Lee Harvey Oswald’s habit of lying about well just about everything
But unlike other potential employers Roy Truly did not check on any of this
It was just a menial job after all
So Oswald lucked out
So that’s how Oswald got his job at the Depository
A group of suburban women having coffee
lacking the skills to work in a bakery or drive a truck
having poor references that might have resulted in work elsewhere
on and on
It took a series of small things for this job to work out
Now I mentioned one final twist to this story that may surprise you
I’ll get to that in a second
But it’s also important to remember this
When Oswald got the job President Kennedy’s visit to Texas had not been finalized
A trip had been announced but the final decision on Dallas would not be made until a month later
November 14th when the location for Kennedy speech at the Trademart was set
That decision that location was made by none other than Ken O’Donnell the president’s top White House aid
The Secret Service had recommended other locations
Other parts of town which would have meant different motorcade routes
Conspiracy theorists who are sure that Oswald’s job was some kind of setup
that he was somehow placed in the depository can never explain how all of these little things unconnected ranging from suburban women having coffee to President Kennedy’s own right-hand man picking that final location occurred
And here’s the final twist to this story
You might not know that in 1963 the Texas School Book Depository had another location at 1917 North Houston Street.
Roy Truly the boss nearly assigned Oswald to that location.
Had he done so Lee Harvey Oswald would have been nowhere near Dealey Plaza on the day of the president’s visit.
Great tragedies often take a series of small and seemingly unconnected events to occur
This was one of them
There are other stories to tell about Oswald his life
that very different era
decades of presidential security and the attitude of numerous presidents towards it
And also the science of cognitive dissonance
why humans are wired to think and process information and data the way they do
and why this fuels the beliefs that so many people have in assorted conspiracy theories
Not just the Kennedy assassination
but everything from Pearl Harbor to the moon landing to 9/11 even Princess Diana’s car crash
The science behind our beliefs that’s also explored
All of this and much more can be found in my latest book Countdown to Dallas and in a podcast of the same name Both are available everywhere