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Mort Sahl discusses JFK, Jim Garrison, and RFK

Mort Sahl and Elliot Mintz discus JFK, Jim Garrison, and RFK

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/08/22/mort-sahl-discusses-jfk-jim-garrison-and-rfk/

Elliot Mintz:

I met Mort Saul in the early 1960s. He was one of America’s great satirists,

0:10political commentators, comedians, and social observers.

0:17Although the landscape of the genre was dominated by Lenny Bruce and Mort,

0:24he was far more cerebral, less costic,

0:29and made a point of never using a four-letter word on stage

0:35or for that matter having a drink or smoking a joint

0:40ever. He recorded the first comedy album

0:46He was the first comedian on the cover of Time magazine. He sold out nightclubs all over the

0:53country. He wrote jokes for President Kennedy.

0:59He has appeared as an actor in a number of films, hosted a television show, wrote screenplays and autobiography,

1:07and became my first political and social mentor.

1:13There came a time in Mort Saul’s career where he developed an unquenchable

1:21curiosity about the assassination of President Kennedy and would venture to New Orleans

1:28where he volunteered his time to Jim Garrison, the district attorney who was

1:34portrayed in the Oliver Stone film JFK.

1:40Garrison prosecuted a man who he charged

1:45with being involved in a conspiracy to murder the president.

1:51For the record, that man was acquitted and Mortzaw returned to Hollywood where

1:58he was criticized, castigated, and deemed an unwelcome guest.

2:07He lives in Northern California now and we still remain friends

2:13over 40 years. He has never forgotten to call and wish me a happy birthday.

2:20I still consider him to be one of the most astute observers

2:26of the American political experience. KPFK listener supported Pacifica radio

2:32Los Angeles. My name is Elliot Mintz. is looking out. Mort, it is just like I can’t tell you

2:38what a gas it is to have you here tonight. Well, we moved heaven and earth, Elliot, as you know, and the

2:44listeners don’t know. Um the um there’s an abundance of riches in addition to uh

2:50uh first I was doing nothing. I don’t know how many of the listeners know that in addition to um doing the show after

2:57you and I got together and we decided to do this and it uh then of course uh they

3:03called from New York and said they had a Johnny Carson show for me in that way that they have of calling that always

3:09sounds like you know Operation Head Start. They’re going to help me urban renewal. The fact is they have a lot of

3:15letters and they can’t hold uh the audience on a chain that much longer. They want to know if I’m dead or not.

3:21So, uh, they’re going to import me for the show and they want to do it Monday and, uh, I that would mean, of course,

3:27flying in Sunday because you have to report at noon in order to, uh, brief the producer. So, um, there’s no way to

3:33do it. They won’t let you fly in that day because they’re afraid of weather delays. Then they wouldn’t let me. I

3:39said, uh, well, I have a show to do in Los Angeles, uh, on Sunday. And they

3:45said, cancel it. And I said, I can’t do that. And then they said I said, I’ll have to cancel this. Well, you’ve been

3:50canceling a lot of shows, you know, that won’t look too good. And um then of course the singular morality. Then they

3:57I said, “What about Tuesday?” They said, “Well, you couldn’t be on because Bob Hope is on Tuesday and he has a

4:02different position than you on Vietnam.” They told me that. So, I couldn’t be on with him. And um then, uh I finally put

4:10it off until Thursday. I’ll be on uh the Carson show uh Thursday night for those of you who have a duality of purpose and

4:17listen to KPFK and watch NBC, but uh they’re covering the full spectrum. I

4:22think Jim Garrison once described NBC as the network who believes in the right of the people to know, right?

4:28He’s not afraid of him, which is uh enough in itself. And I uh I spoke with

4:34um uh with Mark Lane this week who’s in New Orleans and I’ll be down there later this week uh after the New York trip.

4:41And um uh as you know he has a um bribery uh public bribery indictment

4:48against uh Walter Sheridan of NBC. And Walter Sheridan has a strange history uh

4:54for a broadcaster. Um as a matter of fact, Bill Stout of CBS once put it this

4:59way to me. He said when it came to the Garrison case, NBC didn’t use a reporter. They hired a house detective.

5:06They hired one of Robert Kennedy’s lawyers on the Hawa case to operate there. Yes, that’s who Walter Sheridan

5:11is. And he did the Frank McGee show which was called the case uh against Jim

5:17Garrison. and he went down there and Garrison has an indictment against him on the basis of uh publicly bri trying

5:24to bribe um Perry Russo to defect uh uh

5:29to the uh to California where he would not be extradited and to discredit Garrison publicly and um Garrison also

5:37charges in that indictment that uh Russo used uh I mean then not Russo Sheridan used the phrase I will destroy Garrison

5:44I’m here to destroy Garrison used it many times around New Orleans NBC turned that show over to Sheridan, not to any

5:52of its other um reporters. He felt, as he said in Playboy Garrison, that NBC

5:57had gone even they felt they had gone Sheridan had gone too far because they gave him equal time very quickly. They

6:03kind of backtracked. Uh, on the other hand, uh, we find with Newsweek, Newsweek’s continual blasts at Garrison,

6:09and I want to tell all the good liberals out there that that’s your journal. Phil Graham, the Washington Post, good social

6:15democrats, not Time magazine, not a fascistic magazine, but a good liberal magazine, Newsweek, uh, hired Hugh

6:22Ainsworth to cover Garrison. They said he’s an outstanding scholar, having worked for the Dallas Times Herald. Um,

6:29an outstanding scholar. Uh for instance um in his last exchange with Mark Lane in Dallas, he told Mark Lane uh uh uh

6:37something to the effect that uh Warren was not objective about uh Oswald because both of them are left wingers,

6:44extreme leftwingers. So that’s the guy that that Newsweek uh feels is an authority on the case. I want to begin

6:51at the beginning. All right. and follow this thing very very closely so we can really understand not only what’s

6:58surrounding the suppression of what Jim Garrison is doing in New Orleans but also what has been done against you

7:05personally. Now when did it there was a time that you were appearing in nightclubs and making billions and

7:10millions of dollars and selling record albums and you were a comedian and the rest of it and you didn’t talk about the

7:16assassination. Something then happened that obviously was to lead to the change of your entire life. When did it begin

7:22for you, Mort? When did you begin to Well, I began to uh ask questions about this case. I used to ask them socially

7:30and uh I couldn’t find anybody uh to answer me, but then I only mixed with liberals. Uh you know, so I that’s like

7:37looking for an honest man and not having a lamp. And then of course I uh I ran into um uh uh when I had the television

7:45show over at Channel 11. Uh we had uh Mark Lane was coming into town

7:52and he was originally scheduled on the Pine show and some uh benefactors steered him toward my program instead

7:59and he did cancel the Pine Show and they were furious and um as well they might be I suppose about a commitment and Mark

8:06Lane came on in October of um 196

8:14six right he came on with me and he made five appearances Publishers Weekly and the New York Times

8:20agree that Rush to Judgment is a national bestseller because of California and because of Southern California and more specifically because

8:26of that program. And uh yeah, we sold a lot of books. I told people it was the most important book in their lifetime. I

8:32told Lane when I met him that I thought he was the most important man in the country. Rush to judgement. Absolutely.

8:38And uh I think Garrison is now has now replaced him as the most important man in the country. Um when we um uh Mark

8:45and I got along very well and uh the shows were good. We found we didn’t need uh you know actors or fun and games or

8:52anything. We just had to talk and the people cared about it and uh we really got a storm going and because the people

8:59responded I kept going with it. Then of course the KAC show was in the works and I kept going with that. When the KAC

9:06show uh uh began to uh roll of course I got the first national interview with

9:12Garrison. And I got 90 minutes on tape with Garrison and Lane, which I uh uh I

9:17paid for my own trip to New Orleans because the station didn’t think it was worth it. After all, only a man investigating the murder of the

9:23president. This is radio station KAC. KAC. And I went down there and I came back and I played that. And of course,

9:28there was uh there was great suppression at KTV. The program director Jim Gates

9:34kept saying to me, um, well, theatrically, he said he said he wasn’t suppressing me. It wasn’t a matter of

9:39censorship. It was a matter of showmanship. And he said, “Theatrically, it’s boring just hearing you talk about Kennedy.” And even when I was finally

9:47fired at at KTTV the first time, which was uh a year ago, December, he came to

9:53my house and gave me my notice and said, “Your ratings are very bad and you’re going off.” And uh instead of leaving

10:00well enough alone, he uh then got nervous and said, “Uh uh, I think it’s

10:05because you just talked about the same thing all the time. Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, we’re sick of hearing about Kennedy.” and I’m excising the

10:11profanity. So, um, uh, you know, as we al always say, speak for yourself, John

10:16Alden. I haven’t found too many, uh, uh, people in the American electorate who are really sick of talking about

10:22Kennedy. I find people who are cowed and who are fearful, but I don’t care what

10:27happens to them for talking about Kennedy. Anything that happens other than having your head blown off in Daily Plaza is somewhat anticlimactic.

10:34Um, sane men have grown insane on this subject. Um, for Robert Vaughn to be

10:43quizzed by Senator Robert Kennedy to be pursued around Senator Kennedy’s mansion. Why was Mort Saul fired? Why

10:51does he claim he was fired? And for Robert Vaughn to say, I was fearful of the interrogation, so I said I didn’t

10:57know. And then for Robert Vaughn publicly to declen

11:02Kennedy is a very busy man. and he has the world on his shoulders and uh he doesn’t have time to even know who Mort

11:08Saul is. I don’t know what makes people move this way but only in this case I have found some continuity of integrity

11:14on the part of people in any issue but this issue. Uh now I’m I’m skipping here

11:20chronologically which I don’t mean to do on you but um let me raise a question. Yes. Um at its peak your KAC uh

11:28telephone talk show and the KTV television show what were the ratings like? What was the audience response?

11:34The ratings the ratings on the television show uh were good and healthy and I think that it’s important uh for

11:40the audience to know that uh we presented 30 to 40 minutes of

11:46sketches every week and I wrote them and I produced the program myself and I was

11:52in the office seven days a week and I did all the monologues in between and I booked the guests. I was on there for

11:57two hours. I spent seven days in that office and I made $600 a week. gross.

12:03Now, that’s a pretty cheap way to bring in a show which is sold out on sponsorship. No sponsors complained and

12:09you must be very guarded about that. When you hear remarks such as KAC made about Arbagasta Margolus to have no

12:16sponsors, it has become uh a device in our society because uh there is a an

12:24integimement of new left feeling that capitalism will censure people that it’s

12:30the sponsors. It very seldom is the sponsors. How were your sponsors on the program? I never had any trouble in

12:36television. We’re sold out and they never complained. We even kided them, especially the used car people. We were

12:41sold out. Uh Gates himself said at the end of the show that uh when he finally discharged me for something he called

12:47insubordination. He said uh you are uh which we’ll get to

12:53in a second. He said the the ratings were healthy and the show was a good entertaining show. Uh but this guy can’t

12:59follow direction. That’s said many times and of course that may be said with uh

13:04uh gleam toward uh heading you off the path so that no one else will hire you either because it is a limited industry

13:10to begin with uh limited in courage limited in perspective limited in goals.

13:15Um when the radio program was on at the same time uh of course I had Harold

13:21Weissberg on I had Lane on and we rang up tremendous ratings. Jack theer who was uh the uh potentate at KAC brought

13:29the ratings by and the evening shift at KAC had a 177 the last time he brought them by which meant it passed KHJ people

13:37were really listening why were they listening because I was talking about their president whom they love I was talking about the draft which is every

13:43young man’s stake and uh I was talking about where I thought it was at because

13:50I was taking their pulse uh now because So they of course in the superstate uh

13:56to paraphrase Garrison they must drop you for not communicating. The fact is they drop you because you do

14:01communicate. That’s the real crime to reach other people. Uh I was never such

14:06an extraordinary man until I became an ordinary man and joined the people of course when I began to express really

14:12what was on their minds. But I took a different course of action. I took a a course of action which satisfied me. Now

14:20when they dropped the radio program they gave me no notice. The night they chose,

14:25I said to the audience, “Should I disappear, it is not voluntary. I’ll stay here as long as you need me and you

14:30want to talk to me.” And uh if I disappear, you must rise as an army. It is not voluntary. I played Kennedy’s

14:36inauguration, Roosevelt’s inauguration, and a garrison speech for 20 minutes. And the next day, I was told not to

14:43report. The agency that represented me at that time did not contest this. They’re not interested in money in a

14:48capitalistic society. We’re together to gather. which agency was and um creative management associates and uh they did

14:55not rise as an army. Um they u in fact one of the executives up there quoted me

15:00a story by Jill Sherry in the free press. It’s good to know they read the free press, isn’t it? It’s amazing, huh?

15:06They don’t quote it when it’s not convenient though. It’s got to be the free press on their terms. They’ve got to figure out some way, you know, of

15:12bringing it back home for them on a personal level. That’s right. Document it. Bring it back home. Very well put. So, the uh they dropped the show and uh

15:21uh somebody uh oh, I guess I shouldn’t I shouldn’t betray the confidence. Somebody who was influential here in

15:27town said to me, “You’re going to be dropped on television now. The only difference is the first time you were fired, and a lot of you remember this.

15:34When I was fired on television, I talked about it on the radio. The station got 31,000 letters and reinstated me. This

15:39time, 31,000 31,000 in 3 days at one source, Jim Gates. I got a couple of

15:44thousand myself up in Las Vegas at Caesar’s Palace and other people at the station got letters. That was the core

15:49of them in three days. This time they cut the live show, the radio show. Mhm. And then the television show was

15:55controlled by tape. So I immediately received a letter saying, “You’ve been fired on radio. That is regrettable. Do

16:00not discuss it on television. If you do, uh, this will be insubordination.” And then I got a series of of letters for

16:07record. They would come every day, special delivery from Jim Gates at KTTV, and they would say, “Do not discuss

16:13this.” Uh, KAC maintained that uh, Mort is gone, but anybody’s free to, he has

16:18his platform at KTTV. So Mark Lane then directed one of the

16:24young men on the citizens committee of inquiry, which I want to talk about later, to call the station and say that

16:30it is obvious I’m the only public platform for the district attorney in New Orleans and therefore it is his

16:36opinion that that contributed to my being fired. They wouldn’t let the young man on the air. So since they had said I

16:42had my own platform in television, I put him on television. So they erased him from the television tape and sent me

16:48another letter and said, “You cannot bring this up. You’re not to discuss the radio station.” So I checked with an

16:54attorney and the attorney said, “That means that uh in their interpretation

17:00for them to beat you with chains and for you to go on the air and if I someone in the audience says, “What is that scar?”

17:05You say, “They hit me with a chain.” That’s term disparaging by them. You have a right to express yourself under

17:12an FCC license granted to Channel 11. as long as you don’t disparage them. So I

17:17went on the next week and I said that tape was erased. The young man was on there. So they erased that tape and they

17:23sent me another letter and they said if you mention anyone at the station by name or by title or refer to the fact

17:29that you have a radio program, you will be fired. That day I was in the office

17:35and Garrison called me from New Orleans and he said, “I have an exclusive for you to break on the air. I have

17:40eyewitnesses placing Ruby Oswald and Shaw together in Baton Rouge. Eyeball

17:46witnesses. So I went on the air and I told that on the air and I mentioned about three

17:52minutes about uh the radio program which I isolated so

17:58that if it was cut out they could see the rest of the show which was funny. It was a good show. Biff Rose was on, Phil

18:04Oaks was on, Hamilton Camp, Joyce Jameson. They erased the entire tape and

18:09sent me a letter the next morning firing me for insubordination in mid-contract

18:14at a time when they owed me $83,000. So that’s a capriccious form of behavior

18:20you might think for uh a large organization. But they saw fit to do that over this

18:28issue. They saw fit not even to call me in. And I want to make a a a point here that this is not capitalism is you know

18:35shape up or ship out. This is the way we do things. This is a different form. No one came to me and said, “Shape up.”

18:41That it was just over. No one spoke to me. Nobody. Just the vast silence. My

18:48guest is Mort Saul. And we’ll continue with much more. All right. So, here you

18:53are uh at KTV and KAC with incredibly high ratings. Uh 31,000 letters received

19:00in a period of 3 days. And having turned Los Angeles on to the obviously the most important issue of the day and you are

19:06fired, you are through. What was it like after that, Mark? Did you start to go around and look for other jobs right

19:11away? You see, KTTV, this pending legal action, I’m going to the union for arbitration through AFRA, which I’m a

19:19member and have been for 15 years to settle this. So, I’m not saying there’s a correlation between what I said about

19:26the assassination and uh what happened there, but uh the assassination is not

19:33my first experience at twisting the arm of the establishment, and it’s not my first experience at being threatened or

19:40paying for it. I’m the same guy who was on the cover of Time magazine August 8th, 1960. I’m the same guy who MCed the

19:47Academy Awards with Lawrence Olivier, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, and Tony Randall in 1960.

19:54And I’m the same guy that had my own show on NBC a few years ago. I’m the same guy that’s been under contract to

20:00all three networks. Now, what was the attitude? You know, we have to use a very broad canvas, if not a broad brush

20:08here, to see what the attitude is here. I am submitted to network shows at the

20:13same time because I have a national reputation. When I was submitted to the Dean Martin

20:18show, the agent was said, “Oh, no, not that guy. Never.” Because he’s making

20:23speeches and he’s gone crazy on that subject. I’ve gone crazy. It’s only a

20:29couple of years that they were selling Kennedy to me. They thought I was for Stevenson.

20:35That’s because I like to know who I’m voting for. And I confess when I meet a stranger. I don’t condemn him, but I ask

20:41who he is before I vote for him. They uh that happened to me repeatedly. And of

20:47course, you know, I I saw the whole liberal syndrome. I tried to call it the way I saw it in Los Angeles. And there

20:54were many subjects on that program. And while I want to stay with the assassination tonight, I just briefly uh

21:01want to point out that everybody knows who they are and that since uh God put

21:07me into the role of holding the mirror up to Dracula, who knows very well what he looks like. Anyway, uh they didn’t

21:15stand up to be counted when they were needed. I made the appeal. I stood up

21:20there and I said, ‘You know who you are and you know the fight I’m in. What’s at stake is America in essence. That’s the

21:28reason that when Bud Schelberg went to Watts and sold the television show off it or two and the articles to Playboy, I

21:35pointed out that Bud Schulberg knows better before he knew the history of the Negro people. He knew the history of the Jewish people and he knew the history of

21:41the unamerican activities committee and that we must all face ourselves. Now, that wasn’t pleasant for everybody, but

21:47we had to say it on the air. I talked about all the ex-left in Hollywood and what they had become since they joined

21:54the establishment. They hadn’t become right. They hadn’t become anything. They had become Unix. And I I wanted to

21:59remind them and ask them if it was worth the price because as Garrison says in the FA legend, the price is you. I

22:05pointed that out. I pointed out that the country is going down the tube because we’re not we have no hope. We have no

22:11optimism as we had under Kennedy and we’re trying to rationalize a war. I pointed out, as unpopular as it may

22:17sound, that there’s a vast store of Jewish people in this city who have turned their back on their commitment,

22:23which is survival, you know, who have gone uh who have gone the other way and

22:28uh who will give Ronald Reagan a standing reception uh a standing ovation that is in Hollywood Bowl because he

22:35says the right things uh about Israel. uh you know and well I suppose everybody will including Omar Sharif and Danny

22:42Thomas the only two Arabs in the in the show business community but the as hard as as it is going down again we have to

22:48point out that uh the Jewish people and I know some here who even fled from Hitler

22:55uh come full circle now and not only rationalize the war in Vietnam but make the same error they made in Germany that

23:02if they have enough money they will buy out. Garrison is painting a picture of a neo-Nazi group. And as Jack Ruby raved

23:09on toward the end in the jail, I helped them because it was a money deal. But I see I’m helping people who will burn my

23:15people. There are Jewish elements, Jewish liberal elements that turned

23:20their back on the president. And they know better. And I know some people out here and they’re in this industry and

23:26they’ve got their answer to me is a large blue pencil drawn through my name in case I can get a job. And imagine

23:34that all they think they can do to a man in America is take away his right to make a living. In between, of course,

23:41you’ve got uh all the liberals with their knees knocking looking the other way. I’d say something about the issue

23:47if I knew anything about it, but I don’t know. Well, I’m sure that they do. In fact, those who are most fearful are

23:54those who come up with the worst conjecture. Yes, I found myself unemployable

24:01completely. Completely. You couldn’t get a job anywhere. Yeah, they nowhere. You know what would happen when your agents

24:06would call nightclubs, TV stations. What would happen is America is not Germany

24:11and it’s not well well enough organized. So sometimes guys fall in the trap and a guy would call you and he’d offer you a

24:17job on Friday and by the time he’d get back to you on Tuesday, he would have changed his mind. What happened in the

24:23interim, Mort? Who would make the telephone calls to the booking agents? Well, I did and uh then after a while uh

24:31I uh didn’t and No, I mean who spoke with the booking agents and the people

24:36who could give you employment and say don’t touch Saul. Oh. Oh, you mean from the other end? Yeah. Well, uh several

24:43people. Uh vice president of a network here in this city and there are only three said to my agent if I try to use

24:51Mort, he said whom I respect, I’ll lose my job. That’s a man with seniority, I

24:56might add, at the network. Um, vice president of uh leading motion picture

25:04tele and television studio here said, “Don’t ever mention his name in this office.”

25:09That offended. They’re that offended by it. Who now were they functioning independently, Mark, because of their

25:15own hang-ups or was somebody actually like who threatened this the the the vice president of the network? Well, you

25:20don’t know because you know you don’t know. It’s hard to be both. As I told you the other night, a corpse and a

25:26detective, too. 15% of this puzzle is missing because people won’t come out of the bushes and say, they won’t come out

25:32of the shadows and say, “We are conspirators.” I don’t believe that the government calls everybody. I think that

25:38people are sufficiently corrupt and enjoy a mutuality of interest u that that they will behave as they do. One of

25:45the leading television commentators said to me when I said, “What are you going to do about the Garrison case?” He said, “Well, I’m going to stay away from him.”

25:52He told me that openly. that that would be his course. That would be his fearless course in informing the

25:57American people of who killed their president. Um I uh the best way of

26:02course was for everybody to call me paranoic and to uh look the other way. And I’ve had some uh pretty important uh

26:10people tell me that because what can they do? Can they uh admit again that this is not the best uh of all possible

26:17worlds because then they might have to do a patch. they might have to do a repair job and they’re not they’re not

26:22prepared sufficiently to even sweep the room and take care of it. Uh be

26:27custodians of the room hygienically uh let alone repaper the walls and make

26:32some improvements on the property. Um they are a by and large a gutless breed.

26:38There are several levels here in Hollywood. There’s the level of uh I’m not talented. He’s having bad luck. It

26:45might rub off on me and I’ll really be in trouble. I better keep away. the straight opportunism. But there’s some

26:50remarks that are hard to answer. There’s Bill Cosby who said, “I have a wife and kids. I can’t be seen with him.” Wow.

26:57How’s that? How’s that quote? A wife and kids. And I addressed my remarks to him one week. I’d like I said, I’d like to

27:02know what you’re going to leave your wife and kids. What are you going to leave your kids in America? We have America. That’s all we have. That’s all

27:11we have. And the signs are uh that we are losing her. More. What about your

27:18friends? What happened with them? Your close friends. People Well, they vanished. I know they’re around cuz I go to see them in pictures all the time,

27:25but I’m glad they’re still available to me on film because my memories are treasured. Really? Was it really like

27:31that? I mean, right now, a social ostrich. What kind What friends do I have now? Yeah. How many people could you call now and say, “Hey, man. I’d

27:37like to get together with you and rap.” You know? Well, uh,

27:42you’re the newest. Uh, I would say uh Mark Lane,

27:48Jim Garrison, uh Maggie Field, and uh Enrico Banduchi at the Hungry

27:56Eye. I’m in pretty good company. And man, that’s I would, you know, I wouldn’t go back for anything. Last

28:03week, uh I was here negotiating for something and I I uh had to go out to

28:08dinner. Had to do the thing. Had to go back, you know, and I went out went out for dinner. And it was very interesting.

28:15I walked into a restaurant in Beverly Hills and you all have to, you know, take a flight of fancy with me. Now you got to remember the breed uh which I

28:22was. I came down the pike and I was a great threat 1956 57 and they denied me

28:28and then then of course I I made it stick with the people. So then they try to absorb you and I was everywhere. You

28:34know when Paul Newman put his footprints in cemented Gromish Chinese I am seated for television. He asked me to. I’m that

28:41guy. I’m the guy. I made pictures and I did television shows and I addressed people at campuses. Okay.

28:48I uh so I went to dinner and uh I uh walked into

28:54uh a Beverly Hills restaurant and my former manager was there who still

29:00handles the affairs of Peter Lofford. He’s a guy who once threatened me with never working again in America. Peter

29:05Lford if I did both of them if I didn’t stop kidding President Kennedy. They loved him. You see, uh, they also, these

29:12same people then change gloves from the left hand to the right hand and see that you continue not to work for asking who

29:19killed him. President Kennedy, you know, is very lucky that I can be objective,

29:24as his memory is, that I can be objective about it. I didn’t love him, so I can give full time to finding out

29:29who did him in. Fantastic. You knew him, didn’t you? When I Yes, I did. And I wrote for him for 19 months. And uh, I

29:37said that on KAC. Senator Kennedy, as I understand it, asked Mr. Vaughn if I ever claimed that. And Mr. Vaughn said

29:44with with the customary courage, I don’t know what he said. Well, I said it. In fact, Senator Kennedy’s had the

29:49opportunity to ask me. And for those of you who can’t get a framework on this, you must remember that I go into the

29:55White House at will. I repeat to you, at will. I ate with Senator Kennedy last

30:01May and I ate with Lynden Johnson the May before that. And I was in Washington

30:06for 5 days in July. I went to the White House, three of them. I walked through the gate. They know me. They know me.

30:14And I refuse to go away. I’m like a very persistent epidemic. Now, back to the point. So, I walked into uh well, it’s

30:20interesting in light of uh in light of having that access and then doing a local television show and having people

30:28running for Congress, using me me in the most opportunistic vein. If nothing

30:33else, they should not think that I’m a fool and they should not think I’m ambitious on the level of a House of

30:38Representatives. I’ve rejected the best, you know. So, if I’m neurotic, I’m neurotic, you know, A1, you know, zero

30:46cool. But anyway, back to back to the uh uh Yeah, and I forgot to mention I used

30:51to sit in with Senator Fulbright in the afternoon at will, whom I really dig, although I’m sure that a lot of liberals

30:56out there think he’s a racist. That’s their way. At any rate, uh, so I walked into Stephanos and I walked in with a

31:04good guy, uh, to talk some business and there sits, uh, Mr. Evans, uh, who

31:10doesn’t say anything to me. I’ve openly accused him on the air. Who is Mr. Evans? Mr. Evans, Mr. Lford’s manager. Used to be my manager. I see. Confidant

31:16of the president at a certain recreational level. And, uh, who now thinks, you know, that guy is killing

31:22himself by discussing that subject, the assassination. He’s doing himself in. He’s self-destructive. It’s a terrible

31:28thing to watch, but they watched it every Friday night as long as it was on. He’s sitting in that restaurant and

31:35people came through the door, actors who know me and know him, and they refused to speak to me during the evening. They

31:41averted their heads. There’s that much terror. And then a manager came over to me who used to handle George Maharis and

31:47she said to me, “Hey, listen. I’m not with the hate group.” And I said, “The hate group?” She said, “I don’t care what anybody says. I’ll use you. I’m

31:54going to do a picture. There might be a part for you. I don’t care what anybody says. That’s in reference to paranoia.

32:00The next night I was in a restaurant called Dominics to further conduct business, which is the great in

32:06restaurants. And uh Jim Ares came in, very jovial, good guy, but then he’s a

32:12conservative. You don’t you have nothing to fear. He couldn’t get near you because he couldn’t find your body

32:18beneath the liberals pounding it. And uh there was uh George Axelrod who used to

32:23be my friend who two years ago asked me to direct a film for him. He now says,

32:29″You used to be America’s conscience and now you’re America’s insanity.” That’s his reply to my plea to clean up the

32:37Kennedy case because it started as a toothache. It is now an abscess and eventually the patient is going to die.

32:45You have no way to get away from Jack Kennedy. you chose him and you go you

32:50rise with him as the phoenix or you go down in flame with him. Sorry folks, but that’s the deal. Now, uh I watched all

32:58that last week. Those are all those are small examples, but they’re the microcosm of the whole thing. The people

33:03who are fearful uh to talk to you, who ask you questions and who run away from

33:08you. That goes all the way down to the actors who would run into me in Carl’s Market or the Mayfair on Santa Monica at

33:142 in the morning and when it was open that late and they’d say to me, “Uh, hey, what what’s with your friend Garrison? He better get his head

33:20examined.” They’d say to me, and I’d say, in essence, this is what’s with my friend Garrison. Because the Playboy

33:26thing was in work. The interview was coming. I’d say the president uh reached

33:31a you know reached an agreement with the Soviet Union about Cuba among other things and he sent the FBI in to bust

33:38the anti-Castro Cuban exile groups training and the next day the CIA gave him a blank check to go ahead and countermanded his order and that

33:45conflict is what brought the government down. People say you’re pl you’re you’re preaching rebellion. I said we had

33:50rebellion. The government was overthrowing Dallas for all we know and then they run off into the woods and

33:56I’ve got them coming and going man. I got them boxed in both ways. If they accuse Johnson, which a lot of them want

34:02to do because they want to help Roberto into the chair, then I say there’s no evidence connecting Johnson to the case.

34:08And if there is, why are you nominating him and rationalizing the war in Vietnam? Or then they come up to me and

34:14they say, “Well, if all of this is true, aren’t you afraid?” And then I say, “No, because a lone gunman did it in Dallas

34:19and he’s long gone.” I’ve got them coming and going because they have no position. But I tell you that I knew

34:25everybody in this town or no just that I don’t see them and there is no studio

34:31open. There is no television. There’s just a vast uneasiness because they have to meet you. They have to meet you

34:37because the plan isn’t complete. Eventually you’re going to get an invitation to uh a screening or a

34:44premiere and you’ve got to meet them in the lobby. And that’s what I got when they got to begin tugging at their collars. When Garrison came out here the

34:50last time to set up this thing on Eugene Bradley when everybody thought all he was doing was sitting in a daisy. That’s

34:57what he’s doing. And I took him in the daisy and we sat in there and all the actors who said I was crazy and all the

35:04comedians, three or four of whom in rebellion could have turned the tide ran up to me and asked to meet him. They’re

35:10all on his side because he’s here. Can you imagine what’s going to happen if he wins? I’ll tell you all out there and

35:16you all know who you are what’s going to happen if he wins. First of all, we’re going to get the country back. I like that part. Yeah. But there’s going to be

35:22a terrible retribution for those of you who denied him and think that your

35:27liberal credentials will let you change hats. You know, General Smemedley Butler of the Marine Corps talked about the

35:32revolution in Nicaragua. The vast majority of peasants had no political belief and they used to wear the the uh

35:38the rebels had a red hatband and the fascists had a blue hat and most people who were smart had a hatband that was

35:44reversible. uh Garrison has charged that all the attorneys defending all the people in

35:51this case are retained by the CIA and he stands flatly on uh uh on that charge.

35:57Now the cat defending Edgar Eugene Bradley was a former FBI man, wasn’t he? I noticed that. Yeah. Yeah. As a matter

36:03of fact, I noticed that too. Uh I also the New Orleans states item pointed out this week which our papers missed here

36:10that um Dr. McIntyre, Bradley’s associate there, has been active in a

36:16draft Jay Edgar Hoover for the presidency movement. Uh, I haven’t heard anybody bring that up, you know, since

36:22uh Walter Winchell, I’d hate to see Hoover step down to the presidency, but

36:27you know, if that’s if that’s the will of the people, let it be heard. Anyway, um um as Garrison always says whenever

36:34we say this, he always says to Mark Laney, he says, “Your sarcastic remarks about the director have made my job

36:41insufferably difficult.” But at any rate, tell for let me interrupt for a

36:47second. Tell us about uh Jade Goover. Um Hoover Well, Hoover is now 73. The

36:52mandatory federal age retirement uh retirement age, I should say, is 70.

36:57Johnson waved it for him. Well, of course, everybody says uh I mean the folklore is that he has so much on

37:04everybody that uh nobody can throw him out. He’s been in office 44 years. 44

37:10years. 44 years. Which means that uh he looks upon the president as a trenchant

37:16for one thing. And as Garrison has said, he’s the finest director the bureau has ever had and uh also the only director

37:23the bureau has ever had. So that’s fantastic. Um, of course the the bureau

37:30Mark Lane says is run and most people agree as a Gustapo like organization

37:36because it reflects the views of that one man who runs it and nobody messes with him. No one ever has. All the

37:43attorneys general walk down the hall to his office. He doesn’t uh report to them. The only one that tangled with him

37:49was uh Bob Kennedy. That was about the only one. What is the relationship like between Bobby Kennedy and Jade Gahouver?

37:55isn’t very good. As a reported in Look magazine, uh when the president was killed, Hoover informed Bobby Kennedy,

38:00called him at Hickory Hill, and he said, “Your brother’s dead.” And he hung up. Um Bobby Kennedy uh wanted to make

38:07certain that he realized that uh he was the boss, as I understand it, which is certainly right. Uh along with being

38:14attorney general, by the way, as Garrison has pointed out, Robert Kennedy had the right to arrest the members of the Warren Commission as accessories

38:20after the fact and ask that they be hanged, which I do not believe he did, although I haven’t gone into the record.

38:28Um why why is Bobby Kennedy walking around with his mouth shut? I don’t know. There are several answers. One is

38:34uh that of course the best source would be him. We would have to ask him. The second is that the elements are so

38:41terroridden that they would kill him if he said anything. The third is that it was a fat calam plea and all the people

38:48in the government were then told it’ll be anarchy. You must go along for the good of your country. Um there are in

38:56other words it’ll bring the country down if uh if they know what happened. Although ironically enough the way they

39:01brought the country up they brought the country down. We now not only doubt the CIA we doubt everybody. Uh there are

39:07people who say he has a deal with the president to carry on in 1972, but I will say that he is amazingly uh he has

39:15an amazing lack of inquiry about this case. Uh when I was interviewed in Washington by Jeremy Campbell for the

39:21London Observer, it’s funny how you’re heard in America. I was interviewed in Washington by the London Observer. Then

39:26the San Francisco Chronicle picked up the story and ran it on the front page on Sunday. The front page it says, “I

39:32know who killed Kennedy,” says Saul. front page, three columns with a photo headline. Um, I never heard from Robert

39:40Kennedy about that, even to admonish me for being irresponsible. Mark Lane has never heard from him, and certainly

39:45Garrison has never heard from him. In fact, uh, there’s evidence that he’s tried to uh, bulldo the Garrison uh,

39:52investigation. Walter Sheridan is his man, as was reported to me uh, last May

39:59when Robert Kennedy was out here. It was a dinner at at which was present Pierre

40:04Salinger, Andy Williams, Milton Burl, Robert Vaughn, and Ed Guthman who used

40:11to be administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy is now the national editor of the LA Times. And you know their view on

40:17Garrison. The only time they give up that cartoon section uh they let Johnson off for a day is to go after Garrison.

40:24Guthan got up and said, “Gee, Mort’s threw in the business and it’s a shame. He committed suicide by hanging out with

40:30Garrison and Lane. First of all, I appreciate their concern for the postmortem about me and I appreciate the

40:37judgment and I’m through obviously and uh I wonder what would make them say

40:42that. I wonder why Garrison and Lane would be the enemy. They’re only acting as patriots. They’re proving that they

40:49love their president. you know, they not that he because he’s a dead president, he’s not a remembered president or

40:55spirit uh in this um uh country. Mark, do you believe Bobby Kennedy right now

41:01has a pretty good idea who killed his brother? I don’t know. I don’t have any idea.

41:07Garrison has said that there is no way that the president would not know what’s going on here, which is not to say he’s

41:12a conspirator, but no way. But I don’t know uh I don’t know how Robert Kennedy I don’t know what he knows. Have no

41:18idea. He’s uh quite enigmatic about it all. You believe right now that President Johnson has a pretty good idea

41:24who killed Kennedy. Uh President Johnson of course must he

41:32must know just from an overlap of information. He must have some information. He must know

41:38that Lee Oswald did not do it. He has to know that in order for this immense cover up to go on. So does the vice

41:45president. You’re listening to KPFK. listener supported Pacifica radio Los

41:50Angeles. So we walk up to the house, there’s a tricycle in the driveway and we knock on

41:56the door and Garrison comes to the door in his bathrobe cuz he had the flu. And I put my hand out. I said, “I just came

42:01down to shake your hand.” And he said, “I hope you’re going to do more than that.” And that was the beginning. And

42:07we sat down and we talked to him till about 4:00 in the morning. And we talked to him about everything. And he’s got a

42:14great ortoral style, you know, and he’s a true believer. He really is a in the liberal tradition of this country which

42:20some people would call a liberal hyphen conservative tradition but prizing the individual against federalism and uh uh

42:30we went there on successive nights and he brought the detectives over to meet us the guys working among whom was Bill

42:35Gervich who later defected you recall he made a statement to the press defecting after he left Robert Kennedy’s office

42:43Bill Gervich who said Clay Shaw is being railroaded and Garrison Garrison has no case was in the office and he told me

42:50with great relish how they got Klay Shaw, how Klay Shaw had come in. They asked him to come in and Garrison said,

42:56″I’m charging you with conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy.” And Shaw said

43:01nothing. The perspiration broke out on his upper lip and he said, “I’d like to go home and consider this.” And Garrison

43:09said, “I don’t think so.” after looking at Andy Shamra, his assistant, because he knew that the guy wanted to clean out

43:16his apartment. They always know that. So, they went to the apartment. Of course, they got the whips and the chains, the executioner’s gown and the

43:22shoes in the shape of coffins, which he said was a Marty Gro costume, but of course, the shoes had never touched the sidewalk, nothing but a carpeted floor.

43:29The shoes in the shapes of of coffins. So, uh, they, uh, then Gervich told me

43:36that he was going to get Sergio Aracha Smith, another one of the Cubans who was in Dallas, whom Governor Connelly had

43:42not extradited. He was going to go down there. He said, “If we get the extradition, I want to go get him.” He said, “With great relish.” And uh, I

43:48said, “How much is involved in going into Dallas to bring a guy back?” And he said, “There’s nothing involved.” He

43:53said, “I go down there, I knock on the door, and he comes to the door and I say, I got you, I got you.” And he said,

44:00″Then we come back.” And I said, “What if he resists?” He said, “I hope so.” And we all laughed a lot. So, um, and

44:07the detectives would come in Garrison’s den, which has a bust of Burton Russell up there. And, uh, which the press

44:12doesn’t tell you. The press says to you, uh, Garrison has a picture of Napoleon.

44:18Yes, he does. But he also has a, uh, a bust of, uh, Burton Russell, and he

44:23quotes from Hamlet a lot. And you, we found out a lot of things about him. We found out that when uh when the uh the

44:30double day stores in New Orleans had uh James Baldwin’s book in other country and they seized it on the basis of uh

44:38pornography and we’re going to close uh the stores and they asked the district attorney to prosecute the case. Garrison

44:45called the guys that had the store and he said, “What are you going to do? You going to fight this?” They said, “No, we’ll just pay the fine and reopen.” He said, “You can’t do that.” And they

44:51said, “Why?” And he said, “Because next time they’ll burn your books.” And he helped them win. even though he’s the

44:56prosecuting attorney. So, we found out um a good deal about him and his

45:02character and the uh and the guys were walking in and out. A lot of the guys were voluntary because he only has a staff really of four and uh four people.

45:09Yeah. In the office. He’s got he’s got the the greatest DA’s office in the country before this case. I mean, he

45:15says he has no grey mice. They’re all lawyers who fight who are very hard to come by. Because if I wanted to say uh

45:21name a profession that’s the lowest, I would have to say the legal profession. Why do you say that? Oh, they Well, they really are the prostitutes of our time

45:28because their passion can be purchased and because uh uh the ones I’ve met are

45:34all starruck because they talk about the scales of justice, but boy, it’s no accident that she’s blindfolded and that

45:42her dress is tattered. They’re unbelievable. They are unbelievable. Anything goes. I had a lawyer out here

45:50for 10 years. When the president was killed, he used to give presents to his

45:55clients at the end of the year. I mean, he’d send you a picture or plastic glasses. And when the president was

46:01killed, he sent a card out. It said, “Because of our great loss this year, we’re going to send the money to a a

46:07donation in the sum of the gift uh to a clinic for mental health because it was a deranged person that took the life of

46:14our president.” Perfect liberalism. Um, all looking the other way. There wasn’t

46:20one member of the American Bar Association who said anything about defending Lee Harvey Oswald and there

46:26wasn’t one member of the American Civil Liberties Union that went in to defend Lee Harvey Oswald. And because as

46:31Garrison said to me in the den that night, because we lost an adversary proceeding because the law wasn’t

46:37protected by law men, then uh we lo we not only lost our president, we lost our

46:42justice, too. Mort, we we come to that point, I guess, in any discussion about this particular subject. you know, the

46:49inevitable reality that we must confront ourselves with, however difficult that might be.

46:55Who killed John F. Kennedy? Well,

47:01as far as we can tell, uh I must tell you that uh Garrison has

47:07every confidence that he’s going into court February 14th, which is a month away. Uh

47:13I um and I expect he will, but the

47:19scenario points toward a um a coalition

47:27uh of um anti-Castro Cuban exiles,

47:35oil rich psychotics. I’m quoting a district attorney in Texas, retired militarists,

47:41various voices of the right, that is at an operational level of the conspiracy and at a planning level.

47:48The Cubans were a good setup because uh they were disenchanted with the Kennedy administration

47:55and also they were lawless. You’ve got to remember that these informants who

48:00work for the CIA along the way, if you have government by hoodlam, what are you spawning? Every cop we know in LA has

48:06his contacts on Main Street or East Fifth Street. He’s got junkies and pimps and peddlers, etc., but he knows what

48:14they are and he keeps them within perspective uh to work for the greater good, as they say. The CIA keeps them on

48:20staff for 20 years and gives them a watch at the end of their service. And that’s the difference. This undercover

48:26thing of doing what you want to and countermanding orders of the president and writing blank checks and not being

48:33checked by the Congress uh spawns a government by hoodlam. That is not to say that the government u uh

48:40subsidized the assassination. We don’t know that and Garrison denies it. I said why do you say ex CIA men? He says

48:47because I can’t conceive of anybody in my government wanting to harm the president. But the point is somewhere

48:52along the line we gave up. We we gave in when the government said we know better

48:58what’s good for you than you know for yourself. That’s why,

49:03you know, the liberalism of today, you know, whether it’s Lawrence Sherman in the 28th district saying, “I’m going

49:10into the convention with a beast slate,” or Robert Vaughn saying, “The war is the

49:15aberration of of Lynden Johnson and not Robert Kennedy is puny.” Or Carl Reiner

49:22saying Dick Van Djk and I are going to host a black tie party at the Daisy for Eugene McCarthy or dissenting Democrats.

49:29This is 20 years too late, man. They’ve been drafting people like you for 20

49:35years so that eventually 435 honorable men in the Congress don’t don’t even

49:41object and nobody votes against the unamerican activities committee and nobody says anything about the war and

49:47nobody says anything about anything and nobody says anything about murder in the streets. I’ve been crying fascism.

49:54fascism. How how much success, how heady was the sensation and how intoxicated

50:00were the fascists in this country to get to a point where they thought they could go ahead with as bold a stroke as killing him in the street? Well,

50:06obviously what makes them think they can get away with it? The experience of getting away with it over the years. They tend to get power drunk because

50:13they’ve been successful. It gets crazier and crazier. They’ve extended fascism

50:19without challenge for so long in this country. A generation since 1945,

50:25the dark days, this long night started with Roosevelt’s death. You can chart the whole thing and it gets to a point

50:31where a whole generation doesn’t know any better. Robert Kennedy talks about uh ma massive retaliation and communism

50:38and capitalism and vehicular capability. You’re brought up on those terms, man.

50:43You can’t even tell when somebody is driving you anymore because it’s 20 years of madness. As much as my Jewish

50:50friends aren’t going to like it, the German people weren’t born crazy. They were made crazy by their government. They were made in the form which is most

50:57convenient to that government which is fascistic, which broke the backs of the unions. And you use anti-semitism as a

51:04dodge. Same thing is happening here. They’re trying to drive the American people crazy. And I’ll tell you something, I think they’re succeeding.

51:10There’s great evidence in the barbarism of day-to-day life and in the lack of direction and the degree of uh the lack

51:19of mental health in this country. Um and I’m not suggesting going to a psychiatrist because most of them are

51:24sellouts too. Sad to say because they know better, but all they want to do is repair you and get you back on the line

51:31to keep punching out Mustang frames. Uh that’s the that’s the trouble. Look what

51:36you have here. FDR dies. What was the plan? To make Germany an occupied

51:42agricultural state. But what happens afterwards? Truman goes into office and

51:48he forms the defense department, the Marshall Plan. He aids the fascists in

51:53the hills of Greece to stop communism. He expand he founds the CIA in 1947. He

52:00gives Jay Ed Garoover a blank check and they go ahead with the unamerican activities committee and they start the

52:06great witch hunts and McCarthy comes on and two bombs on the Japanese people

52:11civilian areas atomic bombs and the Korean war the bullstroke anti-communism

52:18we will not tolerate it uh anywhere the Truman doctrine outside the western hemisphere and uh Russia and Korea and

52:28uh China and Vietnam and Santa Domingo. You can see it step

52:33for step. 22 years of fascism. So your country becomes a colonial power. Now of

52:41course we’re not made for that because that’s not our tradition. So that’s the conflict. That’s why everybody is hung

52:46up and they say, “Well, why do the kids look so weird?” Because you’re driving their body in one direction, their head

52:51is going in another. They’re being pulled apart. It’s the same as taking a young man in this country and tying a

52:57stallion to one leg and one arm each side and pulling in in opposing directions. We’re not made for it. We

53:04weren’t measured for an SS suit. Man, if I was going to form a fascist state, I would go to the Germans. They’re set up

53:10for it. You know, it’s like Sinatra told me, you’re going to buy buy a record company. Don’t found one. He bought one

53:16that was set up already. You have to be efficient. He had a commitment, too, by the way. Sinatra. Yeah. The house I live

53:22in. I don’t hear that from him anymore. I don’t hear from anybody anymore. Where

53:28are all of you or don’t you care? Because I don’t know where you’re going to live. You know, you can only go to

53:34make a movie in England for 3 months. That’s almost closed. Where are you going to go? You can’t hide in

53:39Switzerland. You know, you are an American. You’re not going to feel that good. Everybody says, “Well, if you got enough money, you’ll feel good

53:44anywhere.” It’s really not true. There isn’t anything quite like America. And especially if you’re an American, you’re

53:51really going to miss it. I know you take it for granted, but uh you’re uh going to miss it. You’re going to miss uh you

53:57know the sun coming up in the morning. You don’t think so until you’re in the Holocaust. And of course, it’s too late.

54:03But to get back uh to your question and to stop theorizing for a while, um this

54:09uh this group uh of ex neonazis who would uh uh have brought us fascism

54:17in the name of national security. The facts on who shot the president are in the archives because of national

54:23security. Everything is national security. The CIA is national security. The FBI is national security. And uh

54:30meanwhile, you don’t recognize your own country. Look what we have here. Think of America as a body. You have uh and

54:37think of the pressure points in the first aid class. Mark Lane is saying to you, I’ve got his uh pulse on a left arm

54:44and he has an accelerated pulse and Jim Garrison’s got the right arm and he says it. Mario Savio is uh up there by his

54:51right temple and he says it and Stokeley Carmichael is down by his left ankle and he says it and Adam Powell says it in

54:58his own way. Everybody tells them and Dylan tells them and none of these guys

55:04know each other. They don’t hang out together as the saying goes. They say the same thing. They have that in

55:10common. The patient has a high fever and an accelerated pulse and I can’t find anybody who cares about this guy. They

55:16talk about heart transplants. So what happened to Mike Casperic? They don’t care. What happened to America? That’s

55:22what it’s all about. You don’t have to love your parents. I’m not demanding that. Miss Liberty, what about it? What

55:27about the pursuit of the American dream? An awful lot of good men died so that a

55:33good many of you can sit out there and think about whether you want to sell out or not. I’m worried that it’s too late

55:41for you to sell in. That’s what really terrifies me. I don’t know whether we’re over the hill or not. Naturally, I’m

55:47going to get up tomorrow and go after it the same way the bell rings. You come out of your corner swinging because we got to keep trying because this is all

55:52we have. But it is evident, you know, nobody has to be naive about the

55:58elements in this country. Why did I indict liberals earlier, the so-called social democrats of my routines when I

56:04say the far right? Because there aren’t enough evil men in this country. Their army, they are the generals, but the

56:10privates in their army, the vast ranks of the unwashed are the liberals. It is.

56:16In other words, evil men can only do evil because of the indifference of good men, to paraphrase a philosopher. And

56:22that’s what it is. The road to fascism was paved with those liberal bricks. Every young man who is headed for the

56:27left was castrated by a good liberal who wants him to fit in. And when you [ __ ] a gun and put it at the temple of a

56:33liberal, he signs the petition on the right, not on the left. There is no left in America. There is no dissension. A

56:40few university professors. How many people came up to you and said, “Uh, it’s a terrible thing what happened to

56:45Dr. Spock. They they’re just glad it didn’t happen to them, right? The only reason they’re talking about Vietnam is

56:51because we’re talking about Kennedy.” I know where they’re at. They have sold us

56:57out. That’s really what they’ve done. They’ve sold out a generation. Every time you meet a guy 40, you have a right

57:04to spit in his face because he’s cast a shadow over your future.

All

Related

For you

Delusion Episode 19, preliminary

mattkprovideo.com/2025/07/27/delusion-episode-19-preliminary/

and uh I’m going to introduce it and then we’ll I’ll ask you the first question.

Okay, so here we go.

So, welcome to another edition of On the Trail of Delusion, where I try to separate fact from fiction and the JFK assassination and try to give you something of substance rather than the usual idiocy you find on YouTube or on the internet um from the conspiracy idiots.

So, today my special guest is Dr. Chad Zimmerman. Dr. Zimmerman was born and raised in Sous City, Iowa. He graduated from Northwestern College of Chiropractic in 1999 and he practiced in Sous City uh in Colorado and now in Fargo, North Dakota. Um he also now has a true crime podcast called Footsteps in the Dark.

Now, what makes Dr. Zimmerman so interesting is he is one of the few doctors to have actually examined JFK’s autopsy X-rays and photographs. and I thought that he could basically come on here and really uh tell us exactly what those uh autopsy materials tell us. So, welcome Dr. Zimmerman. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me. Okay, so uh how did you get into the JFK assassination? Uh I think I read this might have been in your bio or somebody else that you talked to very similar. Um I got into it when I was in high school. My father took me to the movie JFK by Oliver Stone. I was transfixed by what I had just seen. And then my father started to kind of feed it and he bought me On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison. I started reading it. I happened to be on a trip to New Orleans at the time. Begged my mother to to let me go walk or take me around the French Quarter so I could go see 54 544 Camp Street and you know all the sites. And so uh I think the movie was the seed the books were the fertilizer. And by 96, I think it it was, I taught my uh former high school history class on the top 20 reasons I was convinced that uh JFK was killed as a result of a conspiracy, right? Um and then I went to school and I got smarter and after having physics education and medical education and different things like that, I happened to stumble across a book called Case Closed by Gerald Posner.

And then I became very confused. And when I’m confused, I start tearing things apart. And that’s kind of what happened. When I graduated chiropractic school, I got a job. I started developing an income. And I started purchasing resources. And one of those would have been the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report. I went through every single page of that. I bought a Canelo like Oswalds. I have ammunition just like it. And I got on the forums. I got on the old, you know, alt uh assassination.jfk stuff. I started interacting with people. Uh eventually I became a moderator in that group and spent a few years doing that. Got to have some really interesting conversations with a lot of very interesting people. And I just started working through it. I had my top 20 reasons why I was convinced it was a conspiracy. And I went through one of them, each one of them line by line. And I kept crossing them off. And by the time I got done, there was really nothing left, right? And my intent on it, I think, was probably a little ego gratification at that time in my life. And wanted to potentially write write the next great bestseller book or or something. But, you know, I think the draw to true crime for most of us is that we know it happened. We know there’s a truth that exists and that we want to find it. And that that’s where my where the JFK journey took me. I I had some, you know, very neat opportunities there. I was able to uh go to the archives, see the original autopsy photographs and x-rays and spent three and a half hours with Larry Sturdivan there doing that. Um, but then by the time I got by the time I got done, I had a US public that was 80% convinced of conspiracy, and I was now 20% that uh didn’t believe in that anymore. So, I kind of moved on from it, honestly. Right. Okay. So, very much one question about New Orleans. When you went to uh was was the Newman building still there when you went to 544 Camp Street? Yeah, it was. Oh, you didn’t did you go inside at all or? No, I didn’t go inside. We just kind of we walked around. Um I’m trying to We’re going back, you know, 30 year 29 years here. Um No, we didn’t do much. We walked around. I remember if it was that it was probably around that year. We took a trip. my mother and I to Dallas and that’s when I visited the Book Depository for the first time, right? And you know, I think at that time I was still pretty convinced of a of a conspiracy. Um, I had a roommate or a a gentleman that lived across the hall from me and, you know, he had a a big giant stack of VHS tapes full of of conspiracy theory um, shows on JFK. And so I would borrow those and and watch those. And and so I had, you know, a thousand times more information telling me it was a conspiracy than I had otherwise, which, you know, generally means you got to find 5,000 times more things to to change your mind. But uh I I think I did that in the course of you know four or five years. So okay. So look um obviously your expertise is really on the medical and ballistic evidence. So um perhaps you can tell us a bit about um how it how it happened that you went to the archives to see the autopsy materials. Well, okay. So that was about 2004. I got into this about 2000. started on the the old, you know, forum page and I just started asking questions and at some point I would I would naturally gravitate towards the things I had some background in which was medical and ballistic and I started looking at things. One of the things that stands out that I remember was there being confusion about where uh Kennedy was hit with the first shot. You know, was it at the base of the neck? Was it T2? Was it T3? Where was it? And I had a lot of resources available to me at the time. We had an autopsy report. Nobody really questioned the 14 cm uh uh dimension that was written, you know, right below the mastoid. And they thought, okay, well, there’s a starting point here. I had a I had an X-ray bank with hundreds of of full spine X-rays that my my employers had. And so I started making measurements. You could see the mastoid. You could draw it down. I used myself as a model. I took X-rays and so I started just investigating what’s the truth here. And you know pretty soon I realized that you know 14 cm below the mastoid in the neutral position like Kennedy pretty much was at autopsy um would land right near the base of the neck in a six foot tall individual. And and so I went through the steps of showing that and proving it to myself first and then then I would have discussions about it. Eventually it led to a web page. page. I got I kind of got tired of explaining a whole bunch of things over and over again. So, I created a a website where I would post articles on these various aspects that I was looking at. And it just, you know, kind of evolved over time. Um, I got into the ballistics aspect. I bought it. I bought the rifle. I had to make my own rounds because it was $200 to $300 a box for the western cartridge rounds. And so, I was cleaning those on the side. That was a lot of money to me back then. So, I didn’t want to shoot them. So, I bought a thousand rounds of old World War II ammunition, started pulling the bullets because they were all corrosive, uh, repackaging them into into new brass and and powder. And then I would go out and I would conduct ballistics experiments. And sometimes people would they’d say, “I think the first shot hit a tree branch. Could you go shoot it and show me what a bullet would look like if it does that?” And so I would I would go out on the lunch. I had long lunch breaks about an hour and a half and I could drive about 15 miles, you know, shoot some things, videotape it, come back, pull off the data, you know, and move on to the next thing. So, I did a lot of X-ray, I did a lot of ballistic stuff. Um, and eventually over time, developed a pretty good understanding of things, or at least I thought I did. And I wanted to see I I couldn’t test my hypothesis any further unless I had the actual autopsy photographs. We were extremely transfixed on on the fox number eight photograph, the very closeup one. Um that was, you know, the Groden books and the different books always published that thing to make it look like it’s the back of the head and you have the exit beveling and so it had to be a shot from the front. And I had gotten a high quality scan um from a disc I think I bought off a JFK Lancer or something and and I was convinced that it was oriented incorrectly that and that I could see a jar right kind of in that in that bottom right corner and so I wanted to see it. So my whole trip to the archives started with this burning desire that I I had to test, you know, a hypothesis. And so I had found out that Larry Curivan had gotten um permission to go. And so I I reached out to Larry and uh he forwarded his the letter he’d sent to me. I I read through his letter. I put my own letter together, sent it off to attorney Paul G. Kirk and then sure as heck I got I got approved to do it and so Larry and I scheduled the time to meet and flew out there and it was a really wonderful experience. It’s a tremendous facility they have there and obviously tremendous care that they they provide for these irreplaceable one-of-a-kind um American artifacts which is kind of what they are now. But um Larry and I spent three and a half hours in a room. We you know looking at them. We couldn’t touch anything. Um, if you wanted something moved, they had to move it. But, uh, we were able to to make some drawings of of some things. We wanted to to see if we could figure out answer some of the questions. You know, where where was the head where was the head wound at? Um, you know, what was the orientation of the F8 photograph? Uh, what could we see in the X-rays? That was a really big one and a really interesting experience because the the quality of the X-rays is you I mean, it’s infinitely better than the stuff that anyone else is looking at. Those are poor Xerox copies that are kind of black and white. Whereas we’re looking at an actual X-ray film that’s it’s actually light blue. It’s dark with shades of blue in it. And and there’s so much detail um in those X-rays and you could you could obviously see what were bullet fragments. Um you know they were as white as or you know as light as could possibly be. And so as we looked uh through those things, you know, I would say there was three, four or five really interesting takeaways that we got from that experience. And then I came back. I thought we had made some great discoveries and and uh I started digging through uh Humes and Boswell’s prior testimonies and I think it was probably the HSCA stuff and I was going through their testimonies as as they’re looking at the autopsy photographs and the X-rays. And sure enough, you know, here they’re describing what I saw and here they they’re describing what I saw, but they didn’t know what they were seeing in in many cases. You know, the one of the neat one of the most eyepopping discoveries was looking at the the lateral X-ray of President Kennedy’s shattered skull. And in the in the rear kind of lower posterior portion back here, you could see little bone shards. Okay, they were the same exact density as as the bone pieces you were seeing everywhere else, but here they were inside of the skull. And the only way those could have gotten there is by being blown into it from an entrance wound in the back of the head. So, we went looking for the, you know, where’s this entrance wound at? And on the the actual um lateral view, you really can’t see. And so, they they enhanced it, right? There’s the the enhanced lateral X-ray. And when you look as that look at that, sure as heck, you can you can see a a spot right in the center of the back of the head in the most rearmost portion of the head. Um there’s a defect right there. And it looks like there might it might have been a little bit of bevel beveing there. Um and it certainly correlates with what we found in the F8 photograph because the F8 photograph shows the entrance wound. That was interesting because here we’re looking at multiple color photographs of that image. Right. And and what you find out is that is that the camera angle’s from is kind of like from this angle down and in. And the ruler is where it’s at because they’re trying to point out where the where the entrance wound is. And so you could when you were looking at the at the pictures, you could kind of you could look at them and kind of tell what order they were even taken in. Um in one of the pictures, so imagine you have a a child’s bottle of bubbles, right? And you shake it up a little bit. You take the lid off and you have that film across the top of it. Yeah. Okay. There there was film across the hole in the scalp, but the film was was blood. Okay. And it was covering the entire hole. And then you’d look at the the next picture and that little film had broken and there was this kind of violet purplish light that was coming through there. And you’re looking at that and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, that’s the entrance wound right there.” Right? And so if you could take these pictures and triangulate them a little bit, make sense of them, you could exactly pinpoint where that entrance wound was. And we took we had a an old 1960s military stereoscope I bought off of eBay and we brought it there and we had them put them side by side and look so we could develop a three-dimensional image and things like that. Anyway, what I what I ended up concluding was that um the Warren or the the pathologists, you know, two and a half centimeters right slightly above the EOP, they were wrong and it was about an inch or so above that and it wasn’t where the Cowic entrance was. There there’s nothing at the Cowic entrance. Um and there’s no such there’s no such trail of fragments, right? Trails of fragments exist in closed systems. Um, a blown aart skull is no longer closed system. And you can’t rely on place, you know, the placement of things very well. And so we’re looking at this, we’re seeing this spot on the rear of most posterior part of this lateral X-ray. Uh, oh, and that’s where those pencil lines, right? Remember the whole thing about the pencil lines? Well, the pencil lines were on it. And the there’s a horizontal one that matches the bottom of the film. So, it’s the kind of we called it the horizontal film plane line there. And then the other one goes right up through the the middle of the the missing area of the skull, but they converge right back at that exact point. And it’s it’s that part of the film that’s cut off in the reproduction on the HSCA stuff. Um, that’s where the that’s where it looked like the entrance was. Okay. And so the question became, okay, how did the pathologists get it wrong? Um, and I’m always going to rely on pathologists because they’re looking at they’re looking at it, right? It’s hard to say they’re wrong, but they were wrong. And so why were they wrong? And so I started looking at the premortem X-ray of of Kennedy and okay, they measured from the EOP. Where’s the EOP? And I’m looking at this thing. Where’s the EOP? You can’t see a very distinct EOP on an X-ray. um it’s got to be probably even harder um when it’s the actual skull bone and there’s blood and all that kind of stuff. And so I I I had sent I’d read a book written by a forensic anthropologist. And so I thought, well, what the heck? Early days of the internet, everybody had a website and a contact email. I thought, well, send her send her an email. And so I sent her an email. I said, I’m looking at an X-ray. I’ve attached it. I’m just trying to find the EOP on this. it’s part of a class project maybe or something like that. Uh would could you help me out? And and she she emailed back. She goes, “Oh, it’s it’s called a bun EOP. That means they hardly have one. Very hard to, you know, to find.” And I thought, “Okay, well, maybe that’s the reason, right? You could when you’re looking at the back of someone’s skull, you can figure out the center of it. If you can’t figure out where the landmark is, it’s really hard to to say slightly above or really far above or give an exact measurement.” And so I thought, well, maybe the answer to this is really simple. um they couldn’t see the EOP. Maybe that’s why they got it wrong. And I think that’s so much of this confusion over the decades um has come from some such a simple little mistake like that. So how far So in their estimate, how far away how far was the entrance from what they were saying? Like was it they said slightly above? They’re saying it was an slightly I don’t I don’t know what slightly above means. Half 38 of an inch. It’s I would I would put the entrance at somewhere in the neighborhood of an inch to an inch and a half above the EOP. Right. Okay. I would put So why why do you think that the uh the HSSE got the it all wrong and saying the the entrance wound was in the cow area? Well, if now I’m going on old memories here, but you know, if you if you go back and you read through the the interviews of the pathologists, um they couldn’t figure out where it was, right? They’re looking at the picture, the back of the head photo photograph, and what and there’s a ruler here and there’s a hole here and they’re saying that’s not a bolt hole, right? I mean, that’s happened and they’re going, “Well, what’s that little white thing down there?” Maybe I think it maybe it was down there. Like they didn’t know. They had it in their heads that it was lower than it was and then they went looking for it and couldn’t find it and it resulted in all this confusion, you know. And then you have this this panel put together of, you know, experts looking at stuff. I don’t know how long they’ve looked at stuff, but um they looked at it long enough to somehow conclude that a a frail of or a trail of fragments that that leads nowhere. Like if you follow that trail, it hits bone and then the break in the bone’s way down here, right? So, uh what kind of trail is that where you got to make a left turn in order to find the fracture in the bone? So, I don’t I mean I don’t know like I remember years ago Bouiosi I was I was uh corresponding with him on some things. I just gotten back from the archives and, you know, he was putting the finishing touches on his book and I thought, well, I’m going to reach out to him and see if I strike Peter with anything and and just thought I had some interesting observations um for him. And I would bring up things about the X-rays or the photographs, anatomical placements, whatever. And they didn’t, you know, they didn’t agree with one of the previous uh esteemed uh bodies. But, you know, he asked me the same thing. He’s like, “Well, why, you know, why are you saying this when these people with these degrees say this?” And I don’t know, you know, all I can tell you is that, you know, I went to college from 1996 to 1999. Um, X-rays were not well in use, um, you know, probably until what, the 40s or 50s or something like that. Um, the quality and so you look at these doctors that are pathologists in the 60s. um you know what’s the quality of the textbooks that they’re working with when they when they went to school? I don’t know. Probably not very good. Um the things that I saw on the X-rays, I think a any firstear chiropractic student um will see the same things on an X-ray, right? There’s a difference between what a bone shard the the density of a bone shard versus the density of a metallic fragment on an X-ray. It’s night and day. But I’m reading the pathology reports and they’re getting confused and they don’t know what it is. Um, so it tells me that I think um in terms of our western medicine and our science and our education, we’ve just we’ve come a really long ways from the time that they went to school to the time I did. That’s the only way I can explain it. And so were the were there fracture lines coming out of the the entrance wound in the in the back of the head? Well, you couldn’t see that. I mean, you can’t see the entrance. the only way I mean when you you you know you’re taking something that’s threedimensional and squishing it into two dimensions. So it makes the whole three-dimensionality of it very difficult. Um and so when you’re looking like an like an A to P, you’re losing that depth perspective, right? Everything’s smooshed like this. Now you couldn’t see you couldn’t really see the entrance wound clearly in in the AP. You got understand the whole the whole skull is a fractured mess at this point. It’s it would take a long time to sketch out the fracture pattern on it, let me put it that way, okay? And try to figure out what’s left side versus right side on like a lateral view. Um, now could there were there some could there have been some fractures there? There probably were. I just man, it’s been so many years that it’s been a while since I’ve thought about that. I think there was. Um, but you’re going to lose a lot of that that depth being smooshed into the posterior fossa on a lateral view. And so you it’s going to be hard seeing anything coming from it. But then when you get up into, you know, into other areas of the skull, you’re going to see some of those those fracture lines. But it’s like I said, it’s very difficult um with a skull that that’s damaged to try to make sense of it all, you know. But as I recall, I think there was a fracture line there. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been terribly interested in that location anyway. Yeah, you lose a lot of that perspective, right? So, um, what there’s so many questions here. So, well, first off, I I really wish they’d actually make the autopsy x-rays and photographs public because, uh, but you know, there’s the bootlegs out there, and it’s I think they should should actually make them public so people can do their own analysis. Yeah. I, you know, I go back and forth. I’ve always gone back and forth on that. You know, I think of like if I had a child and a child was murdered, um, in some way, would I want, you know, images of that all over the place just because people have some sort of a, you know, stuck interest in it. Um, so, as a family member, I can understand why they might not want something like that. Um, and now in terms of of something that we’ve turned into a a political explanation for everything under the sun, um, you know, maybe it’s not a bad idea to put that stuff out there to

answer some questions for people or something, but, you know, is there is there a long-term effect in doing that? I don’t know. like, well, yeah, I agree with you, but I would not want these out if it was uh uh the only reason I want it out is the fact that we already have so many photos in the public domain right now. So, yeah, I I mean, I agree. I rather have the real thing out there. So, and particularly the X-rays. I don’t think there’s much harm in releasing the X-rays. No, I I the X-rays are very interesting to look at. Um, and I think, you know, putting, you know, the the color version F8 out there would end all of this so much of this nonsense that it shows a an exit crater from a frontal shot. It clearly does not show that. It shows exactly the opposite. Um, you know, but deep deep down inside, if you’re a Kennedy family member, like what does it matter? You you know, we there’s people that are flat-earthers out there. Like you could put give them everything. You know, there could have been a, you know, high quality videotape of the actual assassination and you give it to people, it’s just fake. Yeah. So, let me ask you a bit about the the entrance wound in the head. So, Dr. Boden said that um if if there was a lower lower than the collic entrance wound, then the the cerebellum would have been damaged, but the cerebellum was not damaged. So, do you do you see any problem? I don’t think that’s No, I don’t think that’s true. Um we saw the photographs of the brain. Yeah. Um the cerebell we looked at those if I remember I think we looked at those in 3D too. So you had you have the the left hemisphere the right hemisphere the right hemisphere looked like a plate of spaghetti. Okay. Left hemisphere was completely intact. Um, we looked there was a a view of it from the inferior angle and we could I could see um some very small uh linear little tears almost like I don’t know if it was like in the meningis or something you know but um it looked like something that would have happened when you put your hands down and tried to lift the brain out. It it looked very explainable, but no, there was no bullet damage to it. But you know, your cerebellum’s back in, you know, back there, right? Right. And you understand that. So calic and then, you know, roughly the the autopsy entrance point. So this is the two things they’re talking about. It’s got to be this or it’s got to be this, right? Nobody talked about this. And that’s going to be that’s going to be above the cerebellum right there. Right. And I think supports that, you know. Right. So what I find interesting is is is the we actually there are no photographs of the brain out there. There’s just some drawings. Correct. But the the fact that the left hemisphere of the brain is intact is proof that there’s no shot from the grassy null or the side. Well, absolutely. That’s that’s a near perpendicular shot, right? Yeah. There’s no way. And so that forces conspiracy people to say that that that the stringer those are those are not JFK’s brain, right? That there’s somebody else’s brain. Yeah. I mean it’s it’s fake. It’s tampered with somebody. You know, everything’s fake and tampered with when it doesn’t agree. So or you know I don’t I don’t know how you how do you counter the nonsense? Like I know. So was there any indication that any of those materials had been altered or or faked? Not that we could see. No, I mean, I don’t know how you would have done it in 1963 or 65 or whenever they think these things happened. Um, you know, I remember years ago, I remember reading that if you viewed the the photographs, I think it I think this came from Groten because I think Groden, which I don’t know how he got to be part of the HSCA, but he was, um, you know, I think he even admitted that the pictures were authentic. Yeah. Okay. And he he made the comment that if you looked at a stereop pair of of these pictures under under a stereoscope that had they been tampered with that it would be you know as obvious as could be. And you know we didn’t look at every single one of them in stereo pairs. We looked at F8. We looked at the brain. Um there was there was no evidence of that. But further, one of the things that stood out to me was uh if you looked I sent you a link to to Lee Oswald’s autopsy photographs, right? Yeah. Did you notice the double exposures and some of the terrible photography? Right. Kennedy, the best thing about him being, you know, hijacked from from Texas and sent to Maryland is they had the guy that taught the course um there that night and the photographs were fantastic. There might have been one or two out of four dozen or however many there were that were a little out of focus or something, but you could count the hairs on the side of his head. That’s how clear a lot of those pictures were. So, I don’t know how they would have been faked. Right. Right. No, I I I don’t know either. It’s it’s just it’s just uh I mean, the other argument they say is that Shringer um didn’t take the bachelor bachelor view of the brain, but he took the other one. But of course both both views of the brain must must have been consistent. How could you know? I mean I mean it just doesn’t make sense. You can you can slice and dice your way out of facts a million different ways. But what do you think of of Dr. David Mantic’s view of uh his density readings saying that the some of the X-rays were had been altered? Well, I mean honestly so at the point that I read that book, I was still I was kind of on the fence about a lot of things. I was very excited to see that a book was coming out um that was done by, you know, intelligent people with big degrees and and interesting ideas and people that were actually testing things. Uh that was my feeling going into it until I read the book and then it kind of got destroyed. Um and but I was really interested, you know, Mantic I thought had a really interesting idea. Um, and so he modified an an optical densitometer and took it in there and supposedly it made measurements at, you know, tenth of millimeter increments or some bizarrely small distance. Um, and so that was I read it. It was interesting and I went and I looked, you know, he’s in that book, they’ve got that pterodactyl superimposed over a lateral skull and kind of kind of mockery mockery built into the book. And when I went and looked at the X-rays, I’m like I looked at it and I’m like, you know, at this point in time, I’ve looked at hundreds of X-rays, something like that. Hundreds or thousands of them, I don’t know. And I mean, it was it was a part of my daily practice. And I’m looking at this this lateral X-ray. And I’m like, this is a lateral X-ray. Like it there was nothing crazy about it. You know, they always taught you in school, you know, step away from it, blur your vision a little bit. If anything doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t right. You know, that was the radiologist teaching us this. And here I’m looking at this thing and I’m backing away. I’m squinting. I’m looking at it. Nothing looked abnormal about that X-ray. And I don’t know how you’d fake that thing. um you know with the f fracture patterns and all this kind of stuff I would think anything faked and it would stand out like a sore thumb but nothing did. It looked very very very genuine to me. Okay. So then and that brings me point because kind of where we’re leading into there. One of the things that we wanted to look at was that 6 and a half millimeter fragment, right? That people think, oh, they took, you know, a slice of the bullet and x-rayed it and stuck it on there. And that was, tada, the case against Oswald. And the first thing that stood out to me looking at that actual X-ray is that it’s not a nice neat semic-ircular slice. It it has some irregular margin to it that doesn’t come through in the in the crappy reproduction that they that the HSCA put out there. And but when as we got and we looked in and started looking a little closer, I looked at Larry and I said, “Larry, there’s another fragment inside of that fragment.” And he looked and he’s like, “Yep.” And and I said, “But look at the rest of the film.” I said, “You have these grid lines, right?” And for for the viewer, what grid lines are. So, normally you take a film cassette and you put it in this tray, slide it into this big thing, and then you line your subject up and that’s called a it’s called a film bucky. And inside of the cassette, there are what what are called these rare earth screens. And when X-rays hit it, they glow. And so, they can use these rare earth screens to create um something that will help expose the X-ray utilizing less X-rays, right? Right? And so it’s a safety measure. We don’t have to use as much X-ray to create the image. And but if if you don’t have a film bucky, because the purpose of the film bucky is that when you push the exposure button, it’s supposed to vibrate really quick like this so you don’t create lines on the X-ray. Okay. Now, in my practice at the time, we had a plain fil film X-ray machine, and you could just turn the bucky off. You could still put a put a picture in there because some things they don’t want you, you know, x-raying extremities for instance. Sometimes they didn’t want you to to have the film bucky on and create any subtle little change to the x-ray. So sometimes we would turn it off. But anyway, I was able to replicate, you know, a skull. I had a a plastic skull and um, you know, took an X-ray of it with a film bucky off in order to create, you know, a baseline. Um, so anyway, we’re kind of circling around in different directions here. Kennedy’s X-rays were not taken in a film bucky. They they would lay the cassette right under his head or stick it right next to his head or whatever they wanted to look at and they would take the X-ray right there and always left these grid lines. Okay. Well, I’m looking at this 6 and a half millimeter fragment and inside of it there’s another fragment in there. And so there’s there’s enough contrast between the two fragments that we could still see the two fragments. And I thought, well, okay, if this was a fake, they’d have to put the bigger fragment in there later and you would you would still see these grid lines, you know, just shadows of these grid lines in there. And we didn’t see that. And I thought, okay, well, this to me seems like this is a legit that’s it’s a legitimate fragment on a legitimate X-ray. And so I remember coming back to my office and man that that sat with me for a long time and I I sat and thought about it and so I I decided to test it and I I took a small metal fragment and uh taped it onto this plastic uh skull that I had. Took an X-ray with the grid lines and um the the fragment obscured the grid lines from showing up. So you had this white nice neat white fragment with grid lines around it. So then I took um another fragment and I I I made just an X-ray of the of of a of a frag larger fragment. So now I have a film that’s all black with just this white round semic-ircular fragment. So then I I I had a piece of copy film. Now copy film works differently. It’s it’s exposed by, you know, fluorescent lights or whatever. And so you would take you go into the dark room and you would take you’d put your copy film down and then you would um put your your skull film down with the grid lines on it and and you’d make a duplicate um of or excuse me, I think I did it the other way around. I think I put the the black film with the big fragment in and I and I made an image of that or anyway, however I did it, this was a long time ago. I did one then the other um to do to to do what Mantic claimed was done. Okay. And when I developed it, it was perfect. But you could see the grid lines. You couldn’t see it around the small fragment, but you could see the grid lines within that larger fragment exactly like I predicted it would it would have to be. And that did not exist in that X-ray at the National Archives. So I became absolutely convinced that that uh it was it was original that that 6 and 12 millimeter fragment uh existed and was real and so so later down the road I ended up somehow I ended up in in contact with Mantic there was another researcher and because I can’t it was John somebody and I can’t remember so I won’t name it but we were he was the intermediary going back and forth and I brought this this fact up about these grid lines and how there weren’t any within the boundaries of that larger fragment. And he he came back, Mantic came back and said, “Oh, I checked my notes from the archives and it says that there were grid lines inside the fragment.” And I thought, “H, okay, now it’s now we’re he said, she said kind of a thing.” Um, I have the chiropractic degree, he’s got the fancy medical degree. I’m screwed, right? cuz this is where I would love for them to release those things cuz then I could show you what I was talking about with it. So anyway, we dropped the argument at that point. It was kind of a no-win situation. But um I went back and I looked at his OD measurements and you know he has this uh this line and it goes up like this and across the 6 and 12 millimeter fragment like that. And they’re taking it these at these extremely tiny minute increments and and stuff. Well, if there were grid lines, his little graph would go like this, and these would be the grid lines. There’s no evidence of the grid lines in his own OD data, right? So, so anyway, I’m pretty convinced that’s a that’s a legit X-ray, right? It’s a legit fragment, you know? So, okay. And and so tell me what the the entrance to JFK’s neck. There’s some people who would say it’s impossible for it to enter at the the base of the neck and exit the throat without hitting the the vertebra. And and so it’s an impossible shot, guys. Is that true? It’s not impos it’s not impossible. Um you just don’t hit the vertebrae. You know, like ver here here’s a these are lumbar spine vertebrae. You know, they’re only so big. They have spaces between and the whole nine yards. I mean, they can be missed. People people get shot in that area um frequently and and and the bone’s not hit, you know. So, I I most of the time that that argument gets made, it’s because they’re thinking of the anatomy incorrectly. Okay? You know, we forget that when you’re looking at the neck that the lower part of the neck is tilted like this, right? Well, how can a bullet that hits at, you know, let’s say this is C7. How can a bullet at C7 drop 2 in and still be at C7? Well, it’s because the plane is is on an angle like this, right? And so when you’re not think, you know, I I took eight months of of gross human anatomy. I dissected cadaavvers, um, all those kinds of things. and and we just we tend to think of things in terms of plane angles and things that the average person doesn’t. But the statement is nonsense. Um you certainly can. There was no evidence that a bone was hit with him. I saw his his his lower cervical X-ray. So if you go back to um to Dr. Latimer and you know he thought he saw little bone chips or something like that in that X-ray there. There’s nothing there. Um, I stared at that thing for like 10 minutes. I couldn’t find anything that looked like bone, little bone chips or anything. I think he saw just there might have been just some It’s very common. Most X-rays have some kind of small little artifacts on it. Um, just artifacts from film processing and stuff. There might have been some little small little linear things like that, but there were you couldn’t see any bone damage at all. um you go back to the pathology reports, you know, of course, you know, if you’re if you’re a non-believer in those and turn this off right now, I guess, but um they couldn’t find any damage to bone, right? The the the lung apex was bruised, not penetrated. So, a bullet had to traverse at a distance high enough to cause a bruise, but not damage the the the the lung apex. Um, if you look at the anatomy of the lung apex, it’s what is it? T1. The lung apex is at the vertebral level of T1. So, the bullet had to come in above that because the lung wasn’t hit. Right. Right. Pretty soon, now you’re above the collar bone. Now, you’re above the rib cage. You’re above everything. Now, you just have to be far enough to the right not to hit a transverse process or something. And that’s not that difficult. You know, honestly, if you look at the trajectories based on Dale Miner stuff, it works out just fine, right? So, what do you think of what and what do you make of the people who tell who tell us, well, look at what the Parkland doctor said and and and and they all we we have to take what they said seriously and and uh and that’s proof of a shot from the front. Okay. Okay. Well, my thought my first thought on that is let’s scrap the FAA and anything they do on on invest on on plane crash investigations and just go with what the people on the ground saw. Right. Right. We’d have more plane crashes. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it’s people forget people that aren’t in health care, I don’t think, quite understand that there’s an enormous difference between general practice doctor and an ER doctor and and a and a cardiothoracic surgeon versus an orthopedist. Um, they don’t know all things, okay? And your emergency per your emergency trauma people, they’re amazing people. um what they can process in in minutely short periods of time to save lives is amazing, right? And they’re the firefighters. You bring them in to put out the fire. Okay, great. But they don’t know how to put it back together again. That’s why they bring in the other surgeons, right? And so you’ve got a bunch of firefighters in the medical field that are trying to put out a fire and what was it a minute or two that went by before they noticed he was shot in the head? Um, and then he’s dead. Okay, wrap it up. Get it out. Get to the next thing. And then let’s let the people that have hours and hours of time on their hands to uh methodically go through this and figure out what happened. And so you you always have to lean towards your your your pathologists who are spending the hours with the body trying to trying to figure things out, not the people that spent minutes trying to save a life that that was unfortunately extinguished. Um, they weren’t with the body very long. Yeah. No, they’re 15 20 minutes and they were a very crowded room. Uh they were frantic trying to do all sorts of stuff. They’re not they’re not, you know, they’re not probing the wounds and checking angles and, you know, they had no idea what the extent of the damage to the skull was or wear bullets. That wasn’t their job. Um that’s somebody else’s job. So yeah. Yeah. No, I’m I’m struck by there was uh the ARB interviewed a forensic radiologist and Douglas Horn who was part of the the process asked that radiologist, what do you think of the Parkland doctors? He said, I I couldn’t care less. I have no, you know, just throw it out. I I don’t don’t even bring it up, you know, and and and I thought, yeah, you know, it’s I just don’t get why people are so fixated on the Parkland doctors. Well, I think you know the answer to be honest with you, the answer is that I I view the the followers of the Kennedy assassination kind of like I I I view people with with political attitudes. Um, you have 40% that always vote this way and 40% that always vote this way and you have 20% in the middle trying to figure things out. And that’s kind of the way it is in this in this group, too. the vast majority of the people in the community already have their mind made up and so they they naturally subconsciously seek out things that that support their opinion and then when they when they’re countered with something that disputes their opinion um you know then they they’ll go to extreme lengths to try to preserve their opinion by invoking you know Parkland ER doctors over the the autopsy pathologists um and and they feel perfectly justified in doing it. Yeah, but logically it doesn’t make any sense. Yeah. And it’s the same reason why I don’t uh I don’t really spend that much time debating on Facebook or elsewhere with hardcore conspiracy believers because I’ll never change their mind. But I want to post my articles so the people in the middle perhaps can read what I’ve written and maybe, you know, maybe they’ll be influenced. Yeah. Well, that’s all you can do. You can, you know, lead the horse to water and hope they take a drink, but that’s all you can do. Okay. Well, here’s a question for you from, you know, the the the hole in in Kennedy’s jacket and and and uh shirt. Isn’t that Isn’t that evidence of a very low bullet wound to the back?

Oh god. Uh no, it’s it’s not because bodies and clothing move, right? Um and so unless you have a clothing and a body in the same exact position, it’s it’s worthless uh information, you know. I I can’t tell you the dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of hours that I put in on that issue. It was stupidly insane. But I was 20some and I had a lot of energy, I guess. But, you know, I went through dozens and dozens and dozens of X-rays. We, you know, was Cliff Varnell was the guy that that was proddding me in all this stuff. And you know, he was the he was the guy this guy music buff in San Francisco who thought there’s no way a tailored outfit would ever bunch up, you know, uh which I thought was a pretty poor argument, but you know, I put the work in. I went through dozens of X-rays and we looked at things like, you know, what level is the chin at relative to the spine in a neutral in a relatively neutral position and um the 14 cm acchromian measurements and masoid measurements and reproduce it on X-rays and just over and over and over again. The reality is is that the second you you take a a a thin folded shirt and you put it on, the the linear relationships from this button to this button change, right? The dimensions change and then so it changes just from putting it on. It changes from, you know, moving your arm up. It changes if you lean back and the clothing gets pushed up a little bit. You know, you can watch on almost any news show where they’re interviewing people, somebody’s sitting in a chair wearing a suit and it’s got a big bunched up spot in it, you know, and so what did I do? I I I got a shirt. I measured the same distance. I, you know, glued on a piece of metal to it. Um, put it in front of an X-ray. If my arms down, where’s it at? What if I do this? And, you know, we did all of these different things. And sure enough, when it’s b it had to be bunched up to be in that position, right? Can a can a shirt and a jacket bunch up at the same time? Yeah, clearly it did. You know, um it it can or it can’t. Those are the two options. But right, they do bunch. You know, it’s a 50% thing. It maybe it you know, so I don’t know. It’s it’s again it’s gra kind of grasping at straws to try to make a preconceived conclusion work I think but um you know the data was the data in terms of when I went through the whole thing. So and and what what is your thoughts on the single bullet theory

you’re now I’m remember so in 2004 was right around the same time that I went to the archives um earlier that year I came to work on a Saturday I checked my email I had an email and I my my website was out at that time anyway I had an email from somebody that had come across my website and it said you know hey came across your website good job nice to see somebody you know, drawn a fine tooth comb through things a little bit. Keep up the good work.” And I thought, “Oh, well, that’s nice.” And I looked at the signature and and uh the person that signed it, it said it said Hugh Ainsworth. And I thought, Hugh Gosh, that name sounds really familiar to me. And so I goo maybe he’s part of the community or something. Hugh Ainsworth JFK. Oh, Hugh Ainsworth. Yeah, a morning Dallas Morning News reporter who is the only person in history who was there when Kennedy was shot, was there when Oswald was arrested, and was there when Oswald was was shot by Ruby. Like, wow. And so, I thought it was a joke, right? And I thought, so I wrote him back and I said, “Oh, I’ve you’re somebody I’ve always wanted to talk to. Um, is there a ch time that we could talk at some point?” So, I get a number and sure enough, it’s a Dallas number. And so I called it and then probably had a 10 or 15 minute conversation with you and we talked about Judith Barry Baker because her book had just came out and and things. And so anyway, um right around that that same time is when um the Discovery Channel had had reached out, Robert Ericson from the Discovery Channel and they had come across the article that I’d done on on the entrance wound location for the first shot at at the base of the neck and they said, “We’ve looked everywhere. this is the only thing that seems to have, you know, tackled that subject. And so we we’re going to do a show on the magic bullet and we would like to include that. And so, uh, they hired a film crew out of Omaha. Uh, Robert flew in and then I had one of one of our clients at the office who was about the same size as Bill as Kennedy. We spent about 12 hours in the office one day. Anyway, he asked me, this is a long answer to a simple question. Um he asked me the same question and I and I said it’s the single bullet fact you know it’s what do I think about it? It’s a fact. Nothing else makes any sense. It’s not you know I don’t know what else to call it. Um so that’s my thought on it. Yeah. No I I I agree. Um so uh what you know what other ballist did you do any other ballistic tests? I mean you you have a you have a mantler car and a rifle. Did you uh Yeah. So I did the first thing on my list was right. It was only one person in the history of the whole world has ever fired this thing three times in under six seconds and he was some sort of you know FBI super marksman right was is the narrative that’s out there. And I thought okay well let’s start there. Um and I I you know I shot guns. I grew up I hunted. I mostly shotguns and feeasant hunting and stuff, but so I bought one um took it out one day and I I put up a paper target on a box at 85 yards. Okay. And I I didn’t have a window or boxes to lean on to shoot through. So I just got down on one knee, so arguably a more unstable position. And I thought, well, I’m just going to try to shoot three times. Now, at this point in time, the gun I had just had the gun for maybe a month or something, and I hadn’t sighted in the scope on it. So, I thought, well, I’ll just use the iron sights. And so, I put three shells in it, got down on a knee, and fired three times. And if I remember right, I hit the target three times. And then I videotaped it, and it was like 5.8 seconds. And I’m like, well, this wasn’t that difficult, you know? I think it’s merely for a lack of trying that it’s so hard, you know? So, um, so it kind of started there and then, um, you know, there’s a lot of debate on what do the bullets do, right? What are they, well, they’re designed to hold together, so why did the one that hit Kenny in the head break up into a million pieces and the one that went through his neck, you know, stayed intact? And so, I think that’s that was kind of the fog that I was trying to work through, if you will. And so, I I don’t know, I just I’d get an idea, I’d go do it. I’d take my lunch break and go and fire some bullets. I I um I wanted to see I wanted there was something about the you know the head wound that intrigued me and I I at this point I don’t remember what but I ordered some synthetic bone spheres and these were like from Europe somewhere like a hundred bucks a piece or something and so I get these and I had this big five gallon bucket of of ballistic gelatin and I had the FBI’s recipe and all that stuff and so I filled these things up with gelatin and and I went out and I put a a cardboard box uh with a bunch of polyester uh stuffing in it and stuck it behind it and you know went and I shot and then videotaped it and it didn’t explode and I oh my goodness I can’t that I can’t ever let that one go public you know right um the reality was is that the thickness of those spheres it’s like 7 millimeters or something and where Kennedy got hit in the back of the head it’s thicker than that it’s probably more dense than that it’s a polyurethan um stuff that I was shooting at. So So I thought, “Okay, I’ll try it again.” I went to uh the the hardware store somewhere and I picked up some little square quarterinch tiles, you know, and I duct taped one to the front of it and then took a shot at it and that thing absolutely exploded um into a million pieces. And um but all I was a so then I took it and I and I x-rayed it and so I could see the fragment pattern if there was a pattern. There wasn’t. It was kind of all over the place. Um and then I dissolved the the gelatin and took out all the the metal particles and dug through the box and you know and I put ordered them all biggest to smallest on an X-ray plate and x-rayed it. And some of these things I think became images on my website or something. But I, you know, it was just, it was just, you know, the the nerdy professor kind of guy coming up with ideas and and testing them. But, you know, I learned an awful lot about that gun and and about the bullets and what they do and what they don’t do. And it just it helped improve my um, you know, my my my working thesis on on what I thought happened, I guess. Yeah. There was a lot of lot of bullets spent doing a lot of things. So, so can a fully jacketed uh amu round of ammunition uh produce fragments when hitting a skull? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean I mean some people say it’s impossible. Yeah, it’s not. I mo most of the time when I get challenged on that, I I invite the person up here and and tell them that I you know I’ll I’ll just place it on the side here. you’ll be fine. But if you want to be the target and back it up, we can do that. You know, or or the guns, you know, the I think I think it’s probably a half dozen times I’ I’ve done something like that where I’ve invited somebody, somebody had a claim about the gun, right? And and I’ll say, you know, I’ve got one. I’ve got I’ve got ammunition. You know, you you get that plane ticket. You can stay at my house and we’ll go and test your ideas. Nobody’s ever took me up on it. No, unfortunately not. That’s too bad. Okay. So, look, you know, is there is there anything else I didn’t cover on on the autopsy materials that you want to you want to bring up? Um gosh, let me kind of touch on some of it. Like I know there might be some people out there that that that talk about uh it’s about a centimeter below the cowic entrance where the where there’s a fracture there and they talk about there being um like a bullet fragment right there. Okay. And um it’s not b it wasn’t metal. Um it was actually a little piece of bone that had broke off when when the skull fractured. Um, and I was read looking at this earlier today that what was really strange about that is that the the same, you know, pathologists were looking at those in the 1970s and didn’t know what it was, you know, which goes back to my whole point is I I just don’t think the education was the same back then. Um, now we could talk that is there still inklings going on about the orientation of that F8 photograph? Well, I’m sure that I I never understood that to be honest. It’s beyond my understanding as a mere mortal, but uh yes, I’m sure that they’re still going on about it how it proves uh you front. We So, when we finally got to that photograph and we were at the you know, that the whole the big question, right, it was uh you know, am I going to win my own mental jackpot here? Uh and and have, you know, figured this out by looking at this black and white or not. And and so anyway, we got to that photograph and we looked at it and there was probably a 5-second pause and I was I looked at Larry and I’m like, “Holy crap.” And he’s like, “What?” I said I said, “There’s his cheek.” And he goes, “What?” And I said, “Right there. That’s his cheek.” Okay. And so when you’re looking at that photograph the correct way, President Kennedy’s cheek is here and he has that kind of nice orangish little tan, you know, and you could see it right there. You could see fuzz from the sideburn and the and some of the ear. And um and then you could see his upper trap muscle right here. here. And then one of the in one frame the camera had kind of moved like this and you had an expanded view of this area and you could you could actually see atapost tissue from when they had likely done the dissection through his neck trying to find where the where the bullet went, you know, and I I thought, “Oh my good, you know, the the thought you mentioned about, you know, why don’t they release these things?” And, you know, certain things like that would finally go away if they would release one of the color images of it. It was clearly a picture taken from the front. Um, I came I came back from there and I was so upset by it because it was so obvious. And at so later in life I I worked for a company that was a franchise and they would have their annual conventions every year in Dallas. And one time I went down there u I would take small groups down there um and give them a little tour or whatever. And anyway, I was down there one day and and Robert Groden was down there on a Saturday selling his wares, you know, and oh, I I had it took every ounce of my my willpower not to confront him on that because and I should I I regret it because I I left there and I said, you know, next year when I go down to this, I’m gonna do it this time, right? Uh, I ended up leaving the company and they they moved the annual event anyway to Memphis or somewhere or Nashville and I never got it done. But there’s no way anybody can look at the color version of that photograph and come away with the belief that it’s of the back of the head. Not one way. Anybody, Mantic, uh, uh, Groden, any of these guys, Gary Agalar, they’re lying. They’re absolutely lying. Is there just one photograph or is there more or more than one? No, there’s more than there’s I don’t know. There were three maybe three of them or four of them. I can’t remember. There were two at least. I know that for sure, right? Because they were numbers 44 and 45, I think. But, you know, my my challenge has been for years that if that if you’ve seen that photograph and you’re convinced that it’s of the back of the head, I will meet you at the archives with the camera crew, okay? we’ll go into this thing together and discuss, you know, because I I it I cannot understand how anybody who’s seen the color version of that believes that that’s on the back of the head without just pure deceit. Right. Right. Okay. Well, that’s I mean, if I if I can say it stronger, I would. I don’t know how, but Oh, yeah. Can say it stronger. So, I mean, I think I think covering covering that is good so on. Yeah. And that’s why I do wish this stuff would come out because I think that it’s deserving of some of some more expert analysis of people who really perhaps can’t go to the archives or can’t uh can’t get there to actually them. I I mean I think the personally I think um the thing that used to drive me in that argument was that you had you know depending on the polls 60 to 80% of Americans uh believing that there was a conspiracy and that that conspiracy somehow involved their own government right and and so when you have such a impressionable uh group of people of such size things that aren’t true that lead to things like that can cause people to do awful things in name of government hatred, right? And releasing things out there to satisfy um some of that I think would would eliminate some of that. But yeah, that I mean I remember that being the motivator for me, but you know, I can understand where the Kennedy family comes from too. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. For sure. I mean, I think that people were pretty upset when the RFK’s autopsy photographs were released um in that last round of documents from the Trump administration and and uh the Kennedy family, I mean, I think RFK Jr. said, “Okay, but I think the other parts of members of the family were appalled that that came out.” I can understand. I mean, it’s it’s a it’s for me to sit here um as somebody, you know, I was minus 11 years old when Kennedy was killed, right? I wasn’t even born yet. You know, for me to sit and try to stomp my feet and justify something to be released um speaks of a certain um you know, personal arrogance that my need to know is greater than a family’s need to remain private, you know, but two sides of the coin, you know. Yeah, for sure. Okay. Okay. Well, uh, thank you very much, uh, for being on on the trail of delusion. And, um, well, I’m when I I’m going to, you know, when this posts, I’m sure this will get a lot of comments and people will be, uh, probably quite upset and I’ll probably get some private emails from probably a few people, you know. Yeah. Well, that’s But, um, only way you get through uh, the truth to anything is to actually discuss it with somebody. So, hopefully there’s fruitful discussions in there somewhere. Yeah.

Countdown to Dallas, Ruth Paine’s House

Countdown to Dallas, Ruth Paine’s House

www.mattkprovideo.com/2025/07/01/countdown-to-dallas-ruth-paines-house/

The night before the assassination Oswald  came home with his co-worker from the  depository, Wesley Buell Frasier.
It was thursday november 21st.

Oswald never visited Marina on Thursdays . He always came home on friday
The reason he came home on Thursday was to ostensibly try and woo Marina back into moving in with him.
Oswald even told her that ” if you agree to  come back with me i will get an apartment  in dallas tomorrow”
Marina rebuffed him.

It’s believed at that point of course Oswald went to his other option which was to retrieve his gun.
Probably around 9:00 or so, it’s believed oswald went into the  garage to fetch his rifle.
Let’s go in.
It was kept in a blanket similar to this one
This is not the the exact blanket of course but a blanket similar to that 
oswald’s rifle was disassembled in 
at the book depository the brown  wrapping paper bag to conceal that 

So he came into the garage here took the pieces of the rifle out of the blanket.
Slipped them into the bag 
After that he probably left the package in here
Some historians think it probably would have been too risky for Oswald to bring the package into the house.
There was no reason to he could easily retrieve it and more safely retrieve it the next morning.
Now Oswald went to bed before Marina did 
She finished some house chores then took a long bath went to bed with oswald 
It was her belief that oswald was still awake at one point 
She touched his leg he shoved her leg away apparently the next morning on the bedstand as you  can see here this is a replica of the china cup that Marina brought with her from the soviet union .
According to her, Oswald that morning placed  his wedding ring and approximately $187.
He told marina then that she could use the  money to buy the washing machine that she wanted.
Oswald then went into the garage, according to the official version of events, picked up his rifle and then walked down the block to Wesley Buell Fraziers house
So Oswald retrieved his rifle from the garage walked not too far
about a block down west fifth street
this is where we are crossed the corner of west fifth and westbrook came here to the home of his workmate Wesley Buell Fraziers
Oswald came here with his package stood outside the garage

Here this window is the kitchen of the Randall home.
Linnie Mae Randall was doing the dishes in front of the sink.
She later testified that she looked out the window saw Lee harvey oswald with the long package.

Episode 18, rough cut

mattkprovideo.com/2025/06/24/episode-18-rough-cut/

subtitles should be readable later today

rest of us Okay So let me introduce it and then we’ll go from there Ready okay Welcome to another edition of On the Trail of Delusion where we try to separate fact from fiction try to separate the wheat from the chaff and actually give you something substantial on the JFK assassination rather than the usual conservative nonsense you find on YouTube

Today we have an extra special edition of On the Trail of Delusion I’d like to have my friend Steve Roe kick it off with some introductions Steve

uh hi everybody Good to see you And uh this is kind of an interesting story
it started with Dennis Morset here
he obtained the audio files of a wiretap operation of Marina Oswald back in roughly March of 1964
And for all those advanced researchers
they knew most people know there was a wiretap operation on her for a brief amount of time
But now for the first time now we can hear these audio files and surprisingly they’re very very clear
I mean the phone tap is there was a phone tap and then there was a uh a listening device or bug placed inside her home as well and that was placed up uh up in the attic
going over through some light fixtures in her living room dining room and uh bedroom
But those those are a little bit fuzzy
But anyway most of the wire type stuff is is really crystal clear
So uh it’s remarkable hearing it
let me give a little background on this just to lead it up
most people know that Marina was after the assassination was taken to the end of Six Flags and she was by the uh Secret Service and they held her under pretty much under guard
protected her and interviewed her And and then
Peter Gregory was one of the first main translators there
And then later they swapped to a other translator
from there uh she went uh I should back up and say that from there at seeing the Six Flags somehow she made contact with the manager there named James Martin or Jim Martin and Mr Martin became friendly with her and then convinced her uh he wanted to be her business manager
And a lot of this stuff in the tape is talking about this uh business manager agreement
And I’ll get to that a little later But uh so anyway Marina ends up signing a written contract for 10 years with Mr Martin as a business manager
And after the end of Six Flags uh she moved in with the Martin family
And there was some stuff that went on there that I’m not going to really get into
It’s not all that important Uh and there’s a lot of stuff in in this tape that’s you know it’s personal stuff
But uh anyway she had she spent some time with the Martin family and then there was some type of uh breakup on that thing and then uh she ended up in Dallas with uh some of the Russian immigrant community
And there was a couple of families that kind of took her in but most namely was uh uh a couple named uh Katcha Ford and her husband Beckon Ford
And a lot of these tapes and Mariana knows this very well is a lot of discussion in Russian with Katcha Ford
And Katcha Ford has a very very interesting life Uh
oh man I could take up another podcast getting into that
But uh she was in her 30s basically uh late 30s and Marina Oswald at that time was only 22 years old
We’re talking about March of 1963
So uh anyway they kind of befriended her took care of her and they’re trying to help her get out of this written contract with the Martin guy
And they got a a lawyer uh named William uh what’s his last name i forgot Dennis It’s McKenzie Bill McKenzie
So he he got involved with it and he’s trying to negotiate out and which they they eventually didn’t negotiate that contract out
for they wanted $40,000 to get to break the contract but that got negotiated down to 12,000 in July of 64 and we have film clips of that
so anyway the forger kind of were looking after Marina taking care of her and then decided you know Marina had two children
You know she had June and he had that baby Rachel
and uh so it’s a pretty full household over there at the Ford family
So uh meanwhile uh Marina got a lot of donations from well-wishers
you know kind-hearted people throughout the nation probably from the world trying to support her y
ou know and I think the estimate I saw was somewhere about $65,000 in 1964 somewhere there about
So she had some money built up and uh so decision was made that she wanted to get her own home and the Fords kind of helped her with that
and they located a rental home nearby not too far away in Richardson Texas
which is a suburb just north of Dallas
So they helped her with that Uh
okay Now meanwhile backing up a little bit she did testify to the Warren Commission in January of ‘ 64
So uh after that testimony uh let’s just say there were some people that were skeptical of her
I mean she wasn’t forthcoming
Some were thought otherwise and there was all kinds of stuff
And this got out uh you know Dennis and I talked about this a little bit uh whether it was Earl Warren himself or somebody else on the commission could be
Anyway the word got over to Jay Lee Rankin from the Warren Commission which was a chief counsel over there and he uh talked to the FBI and there were some they wanted what they wanted to do
They were afraid that she would skip out Uh there was probably some suspicion about her being a contact with Russian agents and whatever you know
and they just wanted to get surveillance on her
Well there was two types of surveillance
There was a physical surveillance where FBI did once she got into her new home over there in Richardson did stakeouts on her uh coming and going
who people she’s seeing and they did that
But also this is kind of this murky area Uh kind of a wink and a nod You know maybe
Dennis can elaborate on that a little later And uh
but uh they decided to get a wiretap monitor electronic surveillance
So uh this went through the FBI and the FBI was not happy with it
Uh you can see u Alan Belmont of the FBI his stuff that he was totally against it
Uh he thought it was pretty naive Uh
and then it and Hoover himself was pretty against it you know
he had thought that they this was this was really setting up the FBI to possibly get caught doing this wiretapping operation
and that would embarrass Hoover’s FBI Legitimate concerns
So anyway long story short uh this went up to uh uh they passed it up to the Justice Department which the FBI works under
the Justice Department and Robert Kennedy which we have the document on signed off on the wiretap and electronic surveillance
And so now this you know went through Kennedy
So this operation eventually went down to Dallas FBI officer and a guy named Matt Kingston an FBI agent
I guess he was kind of the technical wiretap guru I don’t know whatever
But he was he was the one that actually placed the wire taps on that rental home in Richardson
And uh I believe that was on February 29th right before uh Marina moved into that new place and so they set all this stuff up
Now what they had to do is monitor these wire tap
So not too far away Uh Marina lived at uh what was it 629 Belt Line Road
and they had uh some type of setup operation listening post at 1614 Beltline Road not that far away
and where the FBI was in there monitoring it
There was a man named Russian Russian uh FBI agent named Boguslav And Mariani
you have to forgive my Texas accent
So uh pretty bad in Russian but but uh anyway they did this and it went on for about two weeks
uh just shy of two weeks and it got discontinued
And but anyway that’s kind of the leadup background story of it Uh
so Dennis and I talked about this Uh you know you could do a Google translation but something gets lost in that
you know Yeah
So we decided to try to find a Russian speaker and uh Mariana helped us out a lot on this
So uh she understands the language uh all the inflections that goes on into the uh
how the people talk and and you know
you get a good feel talking live instead of just on a piece of paper
So uh what I’d like to do at this point is uh turn it over to Mariana and get her take on this uh these tapes Uh cuz a lot of it I don’t know maybe 35 40% of it is in Russian
Uh most of it’s with Katcha Ford Uh
there’s another lady named uh Anna I think that’s I forgot her name now Anna Ray and maybe another one too
But uh anyway Mariana how would you like to what’s your impression of these tapes when you first listen to


well um uh first of all thank you Steve I am I am not a professional interpreter
I’m actually a filmmaker and um um I was uh looking at it from the standpoint of um a Russian speaker
former Russian journalist who became a filmmaker and um to my opinion it could make um an interesting short film called The Widow
for the whole um you know these five tapes But um this is just my personal view um of you know it it could make an interesting story of a situation of a young girl 22 23 who um became involved in in probably the most significant murder in in American history
as as the widow of the murderer Um um these tapes uh to me say a lot about her character about who she was as a as a person as a human being Um I do believe at 22 you are a formed human being You can say what uh you know judging by what your interests are you are you are pretty formed in my opinion especially back then 22 was a mature age to my degree to my to my opinion but ask questions Maybe I could um shed the light I I wanted to add that she wasn’t just talking to women She was talking to George Bouche
I think um who was um um also seems like quite a character a lawyer um uh for a while And um there was an interesting dynamic between then because George was unmarried and 60 and she was 23 and uh she was bored out of her mind stuck in that house and she want to cook for him as many Russian housewives wanted like to to make a fish or to you know and he would say look I am unmarried um that would look strange I don’t want to you know compromise myself I don’t want to compromise you I can talk to Katya who is married I can’t talk to you after hours or I can’t come to you after hours A lot of very interesting details like that But ask questions

Sure Do you have any questions you’d like to ask

STEVE ROE:
yes I would like to know um your parents were alive your parents were alive in 1963 when this happened
Did have they ever talked to you about the GFK assassination what the their impressions uh did they believe in a conspiracy

Marianna:
I grew up in Moscow I was born and raised in Moscow And I must say that in in an in a family of Russian intelligencia right you know my father was a rocket scientist my mother was a playright
And honestly um I was born after you know I was born in the 70s
So um I think it wasn’t um uh it wasn’t very much of an agenda in the 70s in the in or especially the 80s in uh um in the Soviet Union
I think one of the biggest things was that it you know this was not connected of course from their standpoint with um KGB
That was the main point that this had no connection uh but my parents never discussed it and in fact you know any kind of his American historical milestones were not big in the 70s and 80s um uh in the family um you know in in the family circle I see what what did uh what’s your impression did she say did she give any information about what she thought about Oswald her husband yes
I think that um I was a little bit surprised that there was not in the private conversation between her and Katya and they were very very personal It just didn’t seem like she was um in love in any way of form You know
that was not it didn’t sound to me like she was um you know a young woman in love It w it sounded she was a mother of her children and it seemed like she had the duty uh to him Uh
for example there was a long conversation about the grave you know she would say things like
I want to make sure that his grave looks um decent that
it’s not just a little uh hill like Americans do but it’s a decent Russian type grave with a little fence and a cross
because then she ended her speech to Katya that they even bury dogs with you know with with some decency and he deserves it even though many people think he’s a dog
but he was a human being
So that was an interesting dialogue that I remember and that touched me because you know as a filmmaker I thought you know you take this dialogue and only at the end you revealed who that is that it’s the widow of you know the biggest murderer sort of you know that that that could be an interesting that could be an interesting scene Another um uh impression that I received from listening to her is that she wants to hope that it wasn’t him or wasn’t just him That maybe he took the gun maybe he took the gun but didn’t shoot Maybe there was someone else Maybe you know what if there was this uh uh can of coke how could he run so quickly and then very quickly his um conversation partner Karta says “It’s none of your business to speculate Let them deal with it It’s none of your business.” And she keeps saying “But I want to hope.”

But I understand but I don’t but I want to I understand So to me it it the impression was she understands he was a killer but she wants to hope that maybe he isn’t Yes Was there any anger in her voice at all absolutely not I’ve only heard anger in her voice when she was yelling at her kids Like from shut up to stop it And it was loud and completely you know unbelievable But in fact both she and Katya were yelling at their kids like crazy [Laughter] Russian kids

STEVE ROE:

what’s your impression of Katchcha?
when you listen to her you know she was I I don’t know how you describe her I wouldn’t call her a mother to Marina but maybe an older sister advisor

She seems to be to me in my impression she seems to be a lot more learning a lot more I don’t know she’s just kind of guiding and helping But what’s your impression of her um she was a I don’t know much about her background Um uh she seems like um uh older old older generation immigrant
So she’s much more integrated into the American society So Russian is much worse than Marina’s She also mixes Russian and English creative this ring English rose English um um sort of um a hybrid language like you know they would say the word lawyer and then they would conjugate it like the like it would be a Russian word
she seems like a yes like an older friend um and they discuss very intimate things from women’s sexual desire to cheating to other women
there’s so much gossip going on Um you know and when Marina pronounces the word cake in relation to one of the lawyers you know how cakes are Katya kind of nods says “Yeah I do.” You know and so it’s um you know I I wouldn’t particularly think of Katya as somebody uh very um spiritual or uh um super intelligent She’s a mother She is a housewife Um and uh if if she was aware I don’t know if she it was she was aware that these conversations were recorded No Right She wasn’t Right Of course Um it just seems I did seem there was a little bit of a like a backstabbing uh aspect to this so-called friendship Okay How how was Marina’s English uh uh it’s hard to say because she only spoke Russian with Katya Okay And uh but she did uh uh and and with the you know everybody who spoke with her spoke spoke Russian as well So they spoke Russian But she definitely could do it seems like you know she could say hello goodbye and understand when somebody would warn her don’t talk to journalists and you know we’re all asleep you know things like that She she could she could get by but she would definitely preferred to speak Russian to anybody who could So new to it I would say

Denns you you’ve gone through the transcripts or is there anything that that sticks out in your mind from the the transcripts yes my favorite parts um are on in tape number nine where they discuss the GFK case Marina and Katya discussed the GFK case and Tippet murder as well Um now it seems that Katya is reading the the newspapers and uh she she relays the information that she found in those newspaper to Marina and she she’s trying to get Marina’s reaction from the tom

Now I have a few parts here that I have

[Music] Okay Uh typic says “Yeah but the policeman caught him caught Leon in the theater and he didn’t get away He shot him he shot him in the leg in the chest in the back.” So um that’s a bit confusing but um she’s talking about the part where Lee Oswald kills Tibet And then Marina says “I don’t know why he did that.” Katya says “Maybe he just wanted to run somewhere to think about what to do next.” The first thing that she comes uh the first thing that comes to mind is a theater because it’s dark there And Marina asked “You think so?” Katia answers “Many people do that Just sit and think about what to do next.” So um there um

and then the fingerprint CIA relates to Marina that they found um a fingerprint um on the rifle and Marina tries to find um a way to to explain that She says um he Lee could have held could have held the raffle and his fingerprint stays on it and give the raffle to somebody else So she still believes she thinks that Lee did the shooting but she thinks that maybe there was a somebody else um doing the shooting as well but she doesn’t have anything to prove just um

so do you do you think in in your in your estimation is that did Marina believe Oswald was guilty and she was only searching for something to psychologically help her through this yes I think so Um however she relied a lot on the war commission She she trust the commission to have the the expertise expertise and all the knowledge to find the truth

But she she keeps an open mind She’s she tries to get as much information as she can but she doesn’t read the English newspapers only the Russian newspapers Oh okay [Music] Not sure how accurate were the Russian newspapers because maybe they had an agenda as well to um to direct the guilt on the uh far right in the US

That’s a possibility Yeah
Steve Roe:
Mariana you you you said an interesting thing about Katchcha
in your estimation was h you almost felt like it was a backbing type of operation
And you know what i think that’s kind of clear Uh okay Because I read through Katchcha’s Ford’s Warren Commission’s testimony and one time she called her an immature person
Yeah From her Warreb commission testimony, So uh so maybe she wasn’t really a true friend or whatever but uh she certainly
Marianna :
I my impression was you know I I don’t want to see you know criticize too much
My impression was that they were both immature from their conversations you know see none of them seemed like um you know they didn’t talk about anything uh intellectual or spiritual or um you asked about my family for example You know this is this was like a different class of people All they talked about was uh uh flowers furniture uh the price of steak at the time was $6 Uh you know they um whether their husbands were employed or unemployed Kaiser’s husband was unemployed Um they talked about sex and men Um but there was nothing about literature nothing about theater nothing She was talking that she was bored You know Marina was really bored So um it’s the type of person who would be very bored by herself and then they yelled at the kids and then they’re it seemed like a a bit of a not an intellectual pair of women Okay Thank you

Is Dennis still with us i’m not sure But um No it’s Yes I’m still there Okay
It’s it’s I mean it’s fascinating and I think it’s it’s I mean I think you know I’ve seen this in other posts that I’ve that I’ve put in that there in other interviews where Marina was always looking for some angle that maybe in fact she said I want to help It’s for the children She said in another interview I posted on my blog It’s for the children And I want the children to feel better about things If I could find some evidence that it wasn’t Lee or it was somebody else it’s be psychologically better for the children Do you get a sense of her concern for her children about what had happened uh if this is a question for me uh obviously it does seem despite the yelling it does seem like she is a good mother you know she she says things like how can I even go studies somewhere to you know they don’t understand I have those two kids and isn’t it full happiness to be a mother and um when somebody tells her oh she got knocked up again you know when she was still married to Lee she says don’t they understand by saying so you know rudely that being a mother is happiness um yes I think that she she had children’s interest in mind all the time so that she had

but also she was um she was um you know she Yes She was saying that if Lee w were to to be found innocent it it would be of course better for her for her and for the kids Yes Yeah That’s that’s very very natural uh thing for for a mother to feel Sure And she was a young mother by today’s standards She was a young mother But um so was Ka and you know I don’t think that that was such a big age difference um for Kaiser to call her immature I think that Marina was pretty mature for her age dealing with two kids and and being at the center of media attention with journalists basically showing up um at her door morning and night and the fact that she went through the you know immigrating to another country I mean that’s that’s a very very big step as well right so she was under huge huge amount of stress Uh that that’s that’s for sure And so I would I would not call her immature She was calm through all these five tapes you know aside from few segments with the kids She was calm and quiet and very composed So um you know she was never kind of losing it Um as except for like I said so Steve the Warren did the the Warren Commission got all the transcripts Did they get the tapes i’m sorry Can you repeat it did the Warren Commission get the transcripts and tapes uh they did not They they they have a bogus sloth uh actually did like a summary right Dennis and that got Yes that’s correct Just summary Uhhuh But uh in But in those summaries they don’t talk about microphones or What yeah They make it sound like it’s somebody who told them somebody who heard overheard a conversation without naming that person but they they try I think they were very careful not to mention any war tapes or tapping Did they make any judgments in in their analysis of what they were hearing or how they reported it conclusions

uh or was it just straight reporting

that’s correct Just before Bob he just he just did a summary and skipped over a lot of stuff but uh that’s what my impression was and then it’s what’s your impression of it yes I have a question for Mariana regarding those uh those reports from the VI Um we’ll talk about it in the email We mentioned that in the email where um George Buu uh no the Ford Ketty Ford and his her husband were in Mexico uh in September 1964 Uh we have we we remember that Leos was in Mexico uh city trying to get a passport to Cuba Cuba in late September and um we were not sure if the force were in Mexico in at the same time as Leos was there but you found out the you listen to the tapes and you figure out that they were in Mexico after that their kids went entered in school Is that correct uh uh so this was the situation Um I think Lee was in uh uh Mexico at the end of se September right and um uh George was in Mexico I think in uh uh July right but he was invited to come in September and he said he was signing a sigh of relief when um you know that he didn’t go when he you know found out what had happened side a side of relief and then of the Fords were saying Katya was saying that they went to Mexico in September as well and then uh she was saying on the phone that she doesn’t remember the exact date when in September and then I mean I can’t say 100% you know who knows maybe she was on guard or lying but she said I remember that it was under after the kids went to school started school so it was in September but I think she was hinting at early September versus late September But I don’t know what exactly happened When did they go

they went to Mexico but uh we don’t know in what city Could be it’s not necessarily Mexico City That’s something we we’ll never know Yeah Uh I think that uh yeah it’s unclear I think I think they mean Mexico City but not but I’m surprised that the Warren Commission didn’t try they were aware of that information They interviewed Marina Oswwell later on and they also interviewed the Fords uh is something that they could have asked them Yeah they for some reason didn’t ask uh you know that’s what Kata and Marina was talking about The Marina said said but you were never asked about Mexico so you shouldn’t be worried Mhm

Okay Great Any any other comments before we wrap up no

I would like to Maria to talk about herself about the work that she has done I think she won a prize for filming or in the film industry Can you elaborate on that um I uh uh made a film um called Women of the Gulag uh which was shortlisted for an Academy Award and um we made it with um uh Paul Gregory who actually wrote the book uh um about um uh Marina and Lee called the Oswells Um so that’s you know that’s how I you know I’m I’m even here because um Paul Gregory and I made this film together Paul was one of the producers of women of the gag and um later uh Paul published a book uh called the untold tale of Marina and Leo And uh that’s how I know about the transcripts and that’s how I ended up um uh translating and transcribing the tapes and thinking this could make at least a short film called The Widow

Beautiful Well we appreciate your help with the transition
Thank you so much Very much Yeah Thank you We really appreciate it It would make a good film
Thank you Fred and Dennis and Steve
You’re welcome
Thank you All right Bye Bye Bye See you later
Fred Litwin:
Steve Any comments ?

Steve Roe:
yeah Uh uh there’s a lot on that tape is kind of interesting Uh and Dennis knows this too Uh perhaps like uh Patricia McMillan Johnson Uh she was pursuing Marina all the way back in early 1964 Her name was mentioned in there That was kind of interesting to know Uh of course they later signed the Marina and Elite book earlier on but uh so yeah there’s there’s a there’s quite a good stuff There’s a good story about uh uh and Dennis and I were laughing about this about Darwin Payne Uh Dennis you want to talk about that

yes Um Darwin Payne um entered the house I think he didn’t even knock or maybe Marina didn’t hear the knocking and um and in any case
she let Marina let Darwin Wayne Payne was um a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald and she thought he was an FBI agent
and she just let him in and um the rest um I think uh she called uh decline for and the clan for asked her to kick him out that he should not be there and she was very worried that she she lets anybody in come in and you never know somebody could well not speak anything but it could be somebody who could do harm to her that’s true Darwin Payne is still alive I will ask him if he remembers that art Yeah he’d probably like to listen to that because that’s pretty interesting Yeah they ended up booing them out of there There’s all kinds of good interesting story A lot of it is uh talking about the the Martin contract uh how they were going to get out of it Uh Robert Oswall’s on tape as well And uh who else is in there i forgot Dennis Bullard quite a few other there’s some teenage girls talking I think one of babysitters over there uh talking about the Beatles that was pretty interesting so all these little side stories that go along with this tape uh the most important thing as Dennis alluded to was you know the Russian conversation uh with Katchcha and uh talking about her husband and that’s the most interesting And something in the tape that was interesting as well Uh Marina um learns about um I think Katu told her that Lee was seen drinking a Coca-Cola Coca-Cola 10 minutes after the shooting and she said that Lee would never eat or drink if he was nervous So she thought that after killing um after the shooting he would never eat or drink But of course it was not 10 minutes after the shooting It was 90 seconds I believe when when the patrol man Marion Baker uh saw when he entered the building when Baker entered the building And she Katel relates as well to Marina that a man was seen running across the yard um in front of the Texas school boat depository And Marina thinks that he could he could have done the shooting as well But she doesn’t believe that Lee had an accomplice that he had help but she thinks that somebody could just have happened to be there in Dlay Plaza and doing the shooting at the same time as Lee Um she bases um this thought on um that there was not enough space between two shots So um not enough space between two shot means two shoulders That’s what she thought

That’s interesting She was clearly reading some of the press to get this information about the timing of the shots Oh yeah But you you it is clear that she believes her that that her husband did it Uh part of it Yep And I think that was in Bogus uh report as well uh with General Walker too So I can’t remember where Walker’s name is mentioned in here but I think I can’t remember Do you remember Dennis yes it is mentioned

But uh I think she’s I don’t want to speculate I don’t want to misremember what she said about Walker

And other than that we’re pausing here Matt’s in here now Yeah Well what they did out this

what else there

yeah they they they concluded that she thought she he killed President Tippet and Walker in that that report Yeah And there is um there’s something um are we still recording or it will be edited it’ll be edited so don’t worry Yeah just to tell you one bit Um okay Marina says uh maybe Lee didn’t hit the president Now I hear some uh some feedback Could Can you hear the feedback as well okay Um okay Maybe Lee didn’t hit the president He knew better who he was shooting at Maybe she’s talking about Connelly because I think that’s that’s what she thought at first Is it what she said in her Secret Service interview that she thinks she thought that Lee was shooting McConnell by accident she shot Kennedy Not she but Lee shot Kennedy I think that’s what she means here But we’re not Russian and we can just go according to what we have here right i trust the translation is correct But

um that’s true I read that as well that she thought maybe he he was shooting at Connley

and uh Okay about the bag Um she but I didn’t see any bag with Lee when he arrived on Thursday He had nothing in his hands and he he was always in view He couldn’t have hidden a bag at that time Um but I think the Warren Commission shed said that he was having the bag in his back pocket Is it is a back pocket big enough to put that bag even if you fold the bag yeah you could obviously that that bag is folded and he could have stuffed that in his jacket or he could stuff them down in his pants or Oh yeah Yeah I think it’s probably a little bit big for his back pockets but uh I think she got a little confused on bag you know Uh she was thinking like I don’t know a laundry bag or something I don’t know But uh but yeah that thing was folded Yeah he could have hid that anywhere And of course that’s what you want to do is hide it you know So uh that’s that’s pretty clear to me And um other than depth um

and bringing that up too as well you know she when the police showed up over there the detective showed up over there helm and uh asked him if he had a rifle and she knew exactly where it was and there You know everybody knows that story Just an empty blanket Yeah Um other than that um Okay we covered um who approved RFK approved the the technical surveillance but did uh Robert understand what was the technical surveillance did he think it was just agents uh in a house watching the house or did he understand there were microphones and wart tapping did he understand that i think he did Dennis because uh you know he RFK was heavily involved with the mafia investigations too and they they all they wiretapped a lot of mafia leaders you know Okay Okay And I’m sure he understood that fully and I’m sure explained that to him And I’m pretty sure Ren King was very careful not to to mention any wire tapping He wanted Hoover to understand himself that he was he wanted tapping and microphones and do you think so because it’s just a phone call Franken never wrote a letter to Hoover asking whatever He just phone Hoover He knew there would be no trace of the call and no paper trail to to come back to at him later on So he just call Hoover even though there is a document that says that Ren King uh paid a visit to Hoover but uh the visit was crash scratched out and it was replaced with phoned Is it possible there was a visit and he didn’t want to people to know that it was a visit or does it make any difference a visit or a phone call i don’t know It’s a good question Um one question I have for you I’m I’m not asking for details but I I think was it clear that Marina was having some affairs um you know after the assassination

you want me to ask answer that Dennis stevie go there or should we even go there uh well I don’t think we need the details but it is a I think a well it’s question it’s in the record that certainly with Jim Martin uh uh when they business business manager yeah the business manager when they went to Washington DC for the first uh testimony they were in a hotel up there for the hotel run off But uh anyway uh they this was discussed in the tapes and we I don’t think Dennis talked about this This is pretty touchy area Yep Intimacy and and all this stuff and uh but yeah she did But uh I have all the tapes Anyway um I think Mariana did a transition of everything Russian So I can indicate later on to Fred where where to find that information Yeah it’s not that I’m just I think it’s more in a general sense I’m not interested in details No Martin for sure people Harold Wasber mentioned Robert Oswald as well I don’t know where he got that information from but Priscilla McMillan Johnson mentioned in her book about Robert Oh in the book Huh no no no

I think Marina talked to her about it or whatever But yeah that certainly brought up

but you know she’s a widow you know but there’s married men around too Yeah for sure Since she was young and good-looking Very good looking back then Yes Very good Yep And uh I think she they were they were talking about Josh Morenial as well Uh was it he was a strong man and Marina said she was ashamed of Lee because he was a weak man I guess she she meant that he doesn’t last long in bed Just a one minute or less than one minute You need a man who can last an hour or two and she mentions those things It sure did Yeah there’s Yeah there’s a lot of that talk in in those tapes and mainly with gotcha and but yeah there’s it’s pretty fascinating when you listen to it You know the bug uh that was placed inside the home it it’s very very hard to tell I mean it’s you know they’re talking from a distance but uh there’s the other people So I don’t know Dennis what do you think about that bug recording uh it’s helpful There is a lot a lot of feedback we hear all along throughout there are there are spots where you can hear people talking about baseball or something TV you can hear the TV but nothing interesting No not at all But fascinating looking through her life back then you know uh and uh I think I don’t know what we’re going to do with it Dennis Uh and we can edit this stuff out as well Yeah Do we do we do we want to put the recording do you want to put the recordings on uh on the YouTube for public

or you want to hold off or just certain things

well yeah Matthew will edit out the the sensitive part Yeah [Music] Well I’m sorry I’m not a very good communicator Um I don’t think I did Are you going to put the Are you going to put the YouTube uh audio on on you are you going to put the tapes on on YouTube yes I have um Well for now they are um they are private I have three of them I will up upload everything today and uh they will be available for the public uh sometimes uh tonight Okay good cuz once Matthew finishes with this audio with this recording we’ll uh be able to put all the links on my blog to the actual tapes Yes Yes Good idea And uh can Matthew play a few a few bits of the tapes uh during the podcast like in the middle yes If you if you actually tell him what to play Yes Yes Yes Yes We can definitely play some bits during the during the podcast Yeah Uh last thing I wanted to mention to see if you remember in tape one um FBI agent um was it Wallace Heightsman he’s talking to u he’s trying to distract Marina he said he’s going to take um Marina in a car and they are going to drive where Lee used to live in Oakliff during that time they could set up the microphones in the house Is that correct is that what they did or do you remember that or uh yeah I remember that hipman taking her out to to Beckley over there I think went along as well for for translating but I don’t know I I don’t know when they actually put the bug in if they put them all at the same time My understanding is reading through these these documents and I listen to Matt Pinkson’s oral history as well uh you know he was another did the wire tap I don’t know if he did the actual bug part He may have but he they did this before she moved in and and documents it say he uh he did it at night and as described it if I recall right uh he dressed up as a utility man kind of like a maintenance man came out there in like a work van Yes uh and just just masquerading there And then he went under I believe under a crawl space under the house and to place the wire tap on the phone Now he’d have to go inside Somebody had to go inside the home you know to put go up in the attic and put the bugs in I don’t know uh if he did that or not You would think he would have done that all at one time when she wasn’t there you know So that’s that’s kind of what I’m leaning toward Dennis you probably put them all in at one time Uh and then uh uh we’ll see what happens you know So but you know extremely clear I don’t know if you listen to them yet uh uh Fred but the wire tap just crystal clear right no I have not listened to them Yeah very clear

There’s a lot of interesting things There’s probably a few stories we forgot huh Dennis so there’s so much on those tapes Uh but a lot of it’s just it’s mainly uh you know mundane things like Marina shopping you know decorating furniture kids stuff and stuff like that So a lot of that on the tapes are are consumed with that type of talk you know uh the English part mainly where uh they’re talking about uh Jim Martin you know the contract and everything like that So and then of course Robert Oswald’s over there and he’s trying to help Marina as well get out of that contract So so there’s a lot of there’s a whole mish mash of stuff in there but the most important part is the Russian part in our opinion Right Well I guess what what what should happen is I guess uh we should give uh Matt the salient part portions and I don’t know whether uh he wants to then interview uh Denise to talk about each of those segments and then embed it into the video Yes I’d be better prepared as well Yeah Okay So look I’m going to end this recording and uh we’ll let uh Matthew do his uh his little editing job Well Matt’s right here You want got any anything you want to tell him right off before we sign off no Matt anything you need for me right now before we sign off all right the the Russian Polish woman You missed that on the first part Yeah All right I thought it was Okay Well thank you very much everybody This has been another edition of On the Trail of Delusion And thank you Steve thank you Denise and thank you Mariana Take care Thank you so much

did she give any information about her Husband, Oswald?

I’m Fred Litwin and welcome to another episode of On The Trail or Delusion,
where we try to seperate the fact from fiction, try to sepearate the wheat from the chaff and actually give you something substantial on the JFK assassination,
rather than the usual conspiracy nonsense you find on youtube,
Today we have three guests discussing the recently discovered telephone surveilance tapes of Marina Oswald.
My guests are Steve Roe who is……….
Dennis Moricet who is …….
and Marianna Yarovskaya who is….
Now lets have Steve Roe tell us the backstory of these tapes….

Marianna Yarovskaya

21:55 denny youve gone through transcripts
then dennis close up

re shoot steves asking marianna backstabbing question
did warren commission get the tapes
bodislave did a summary
bodislave just did a summary and skipped over a lot of stuff

32:33 woman

theres a lot on that tape thats kinda interesting, priscilla johnson was pursuing marina
darwin paine, dennis you want to talk about that?

thats true yeah, hed probaly like to listen to that

46:48 fred and dennis split screen

they concluded he (Oswald) Probably killed the president, tippur and walker at that point

thats true Ive read that as well. She thought that Maybe Lee was shooting at Connelly.

When the Police showedup at the Paine House, and asked Marina if Lee had a rifle, she knew exactly where it was. Everybody knows that story.

theres all kinds of good interesting stories.
Robert Oswald is onthat tape, some teenage babysutters talking about the Beatles.

robert kennedy approved surveilance

I think he was, Dennis, Robert Kennedy was heavuly involved with the Mafia investigations. And they wiretapped a lot of the mobsters.

Tap on Marina Oswald’s Room Reported by Ex‐F.B.I. Official
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