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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.

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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On The Trail of Delusion, Episode 17, Michel Gagne

On The Trail of Delusion, Episode 17, Michel Gagne

mattkprovideo.com/2025/04/10/on-the-trail-of-delusion-episode-17-michel-gagne/

Welcome to another edition of On the Trail of Delusion
where we try to separate the wheat from the chaff
separate fact from fiction
and try to give you something a little more substantial than the conspiracy nonsense you typically get on YouTube
today my guest is Michel Gagne
who is the author of an amazing book called
Thinking Critically About the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths and Conspiracy Theories
and here is a copy of his book
i hardily recommend it this should be in every single library well every personal library about the JFK assassination
and of course in libraries around the world
Michel is a teacher he teaches in Montreal at a CJP
which is sort of a a college and teaches a course on conspiracy
he also has a podcast PARANOID PLANET about conspiracy thinking and a variety of topics
and so it’s just want to welcome you to On the Trail of Delusion
well thanks Fred it’s it’s nice to see each other again
i think we’ve done this a few times but it’s the first time on your podcast
So let’s let’s start off and tell me a bit about how you got interested in the JFK assassination
uh well like many of us I mean I’m Gen X i was born in 72 so I’m in my early 50s
uh I was in university when the Oliver Stone film came out
i took my mother to see it for Mother’s Day back in what was it 90 I guess
it was Mother’s Day 1992
it was still kind of lingering in some of the smaller movie houses back then
and I I I don’t I didn’t become a conspiracist overnight
but it kind of just sat with me and became part of the the zeitgeist


you know like I I remember Guns and Roses had some lyrics about you know uh who was there when we shot Kennedy and the and also the the Rolling Stones had
a lot of the music I was listening to stuff on the Simpsons you know who killed Mr burns
of these things kind of fed reminded me about this whole enigma about the man on the grassy knoll
and I think I was on a trip to Europe with a choir back in ’95
i took a year off studies and it was just this ongoing joke about the man on the grassy null
and I think by the time I came back went back to university and kind of and the internet was around right the internet emerged somewhere around between ’92 and 95
so now there’s access to these other things and I remember trying to read the transcript of the uh the garrison trial of Klay Shaw
particularly the deposition or the the um what do you call it the Yeah is it do you call it a deposition in court
the testimony
yeah yeah
and I remember being left in my hunger
though it didn’t make me think less that there was a conspiracy theory
because at the same time I started following Fletcher Prouty
(o3:35:17)
There’s a man he was a young man at that time called Len Osanic
who before we had podcasts had this internet radio program
called Black Op Radio
so I guess from Oliver Stone I kind of discovered Mr X
(0:03:45:15)
Mr Colonel Prouty through Len Osanic’s website
I went to visit Len Osanic when I took some high school students on an exchange trip to Vancouver
And so I remember sitting in his studio when he was interviewing somebody about
I think it was flight 800
it had nothing to do with the Kennedy
but we’d certainly talked a lot about Oliver Stone and Kennedy
after that so I guess around that time this was the early 2000s
I was hooked i was into it i was even telling my high school students:
“Oh you know this conspiracy theory has got to be real.”
and I would even lecture about it at lunchtime
you know showing the the impossibility of the magic bullet
so I think all of those things made me obsessive over Kennedy
(0:04:33:23)
and I mean there were personal issues as well
I think emotional issues that made me want to believe
that someone was out to get me and
it took it was only about 2011 after I started teaching in a in a college
so a seup is a a junior college

which is kind of I would say it’s a bridge between high school and university
that doesn’t exist in the United States or in the rest of Canada
but it’s like a grade 12 freshman year combined

and that’s when I actually started teaching critical thinking and
I wanted to teach a course on conspiracy theories

I didn’t believe in most conspiracy theories
(0:05:18:04)

i had a very quick kind of slow interest in
9/11 conspiracy theories

but eventually I realized
no it wasn’t a missile that hit the Pentagon
0:05:11:18

and I think from that I started kind of
reverse engineering my own beliefs about Kennedy
until I took out the Warren Report from our college library
0:05:20:23
back in 2011 or so
and I looked all over for that zigzagging bullet
and I didn’t find it
and that’s when I lost my faith in Oliver Stone
0:05:26:01
that was the time that was the point in my life when I said
why did he have to lie about that to try to get me to believe in a conspiracy
so there’s a long answer for you
but between Oliver Stone’s film in ’91
and my reading of the Warren report in 2011
so that’s a 20-year period I was in the rabbit hole
and I eventually clawed my way out
many people don’t but I managed to I think
yeah I’m really happy you did as as did I and some other people
how long did did that journey take you to really climb out
I I remember around 2002 or
I was reading a book on 9/11 conspiracy theories
my brother came into the room he goes
“It was a plane.”
I’m like “Oh come on.”

You know and and then eventually he sent
I don’t know if it was he or someone else sent me a website
and it was one of these debunking websites about 911
and I think because I wasn’t as invested in 911
it was easy for me to kind of take a step back and go
“Well what if I am wrong about this uh it took a lot longer for me to be willing to reconsider the whole Kennedy thing
so it started kind of with realizing that 9/11 wasn’t an inside job
it was it was an inside job in the sense that there were 19 you know hijackers a
nd maybe maybe the FBI CIA kind of let it happen
or at least were I think it was just you know
really neglectful investigations

but it explained to me how these things can happen without a grand conspiracy and uh and I think from there I kind of eventually realized there’s more there’s more information uh I I went to grad school of course in the early 2000s and I think having to do your own archival research and I know you do that a lot of that now that goes a long way to make you understand all the minutiae of history that
7:22
and ironically I think it’s um it was Tink Thompson the famous JFK conspiracy theorist who was in it a short documentary by Errol Morris it’s called the Umbrella Man and Ting Thompson although I disagree with almost everything he says I wrote a very scathing review of Last Second in Dallas but he was right in this one thing is that when it came to the umbrella man so many people jump to conclusions without understanding that there’s a whole other story there that makes no sense to anybody except Louis Steven Whit the man with the umbrella and the reason he was there was not to shoot at Kennedy was to protest you know um uh the way that Joe Kennedy senior had encouraged the uh the British premier prime minister to uh uh what’s the word um to go easy on Hitler to appease Hitler that’s right so this idea that history it’s kind of like quantum mechanics and Hollywood movies have this economy of character characters everything has to fall in line there has to be kind of one single narrative thread history doesn’t work like that so I think going to grad school doing a lot of um archival research in my case it was on the Northern Ireland troubles I realized that the story we hear even sometimes we read in academic textbooks is a streamlined story that gives no room for chaos and chance and that’s really what I think happened with Kennedy is I realized there’s a lot more chaos and chance happening than people give it uh do and and that’s a big reason that made me kind of step back so I was not brainwashed by the CIA i was not uh compelled or or uh threatened in any way uh I just I just realized that I was I was listening to a very simplistic story that turned out to be manipulative and wrong it’s kind of funny when when when people sometimes people ask me if I believe in any conspiracies and when I tell them that yeah al-Qaeda conspired to bring down the World Trade Center then they look at me they don’t like that conspiracy yeah that that one doesn’t quite fit when when when you when you finally sort of changed your mind on the Kennedy assassination how did how did you feel i mean I mean for me it was a it was like a feeling of of relief i don’t know it was a feeling of oh my god it all makes sense now it’s like I I just felt this calmness overtake me how did you feel uh I felt the same way but not immediately i think at first I felt stupid and I think this is one of the reasons I got into conspiracy theories in the first place is growing up you know I was bullied uh like a lot of kids my generation parents divorced but uh there was no supervision left alone a lot and um you know and so there was a lot of opportunities there for me to either feel neglected or taken advantage of by you know older siblings kids in the street things like that and I think there was a certain sense of anxiety about safety about the world being an unpredictable place and conspiracy theories do give you a kind of a false sense of security you know who to blame you could point your finger i wrote a whole concluding chapter in my book about scapegoating so I think in that sense the conspiracy theories had given me a way of understanding history it wasn’t accurate but at least it fit with how I understood the world um so at first you know how sometimes when you feel embarrassed you say something stupid at a party or whatever your ears get warm and you start wondering like okay did any everybody see me you feel like you’re walking around naked in front of a crowd i think initially I kind of felt like that which is why I was reluctant to pick up the Warren report just in case it had something but by 2011 what was upsetting me more is whenever I taught about the Kennedy assassination in my conspiracies class and usually I focused on UFOs and other things but whenever I did I realized how excited I was getting as if I have to defend this almost like it’s a point of faith and uh I grew up in the Christian faith you grew up in the Jewish faith you know sometimes we feel as though we don’t understand something but it has to be true otherwise everything else falls apart right we can maybe hold on to some principle and over time I’ve had enough enough brushes with doubt in my faith that I realized that it’s not the end of the world to be wrong about something because the truth is the truth and it might actually make you more grounded in the things that are true and make you able to look past the things that are not and I think it was the same thing so because I was feeling this anxiety teaching about Kennedy
(11:38)
because I thought I knew the story
but I realized I never read Posner,i never read the Warren Commission report
i never read the HSCA report and by that time around 2008 Vincent Bugliosi’s book came out
it was just getting trashed by the conspiracist media that I was reading and I thought wow
that must be a horrible book uh
but it was so big and so expensive I didn’t want to actually read it myself
so eventually I think I had to I had to overcome that
look if I need to prove that my position is right I need to be able to understand my my enemy’s position is
the more I read my enemy’s position you know I did read Posner I did read some
I don’t think I’ve read all of Bugliosi has anybody I mean it’s just it’s just huge
I mean there’s like 900 pages of footnotes on a CD ROM how do you get through that
but I did read big chunks of it and eventually I thought
story makes so much more sense it’s simple It’s it’s easy to grasp
it doesn’t ask me to imagine human beings as they are in movies you know
they’re not Darth Vader they’re not Sauron
like me they desire things they hate things they fear things and in the end sometimes they act rashly
and all of that fit Lee Oswald
so I was listen to I was listening to one of your previous podcasts where you were talking about um that biography of Lee Oswald and and I forget the name of your guest there um that of
Scott Mosley
that’s right and uh and I remember he brought up this you know that once you look into Oswald’s life you realize there’s no need for the CIA to explain who this guy is
from a young age particularly if you’ve grown up like I did in a broken home from a young age these anxieties mount up and you can either become the resilient survivor or you become the victim who perpetually blames other people and at some point lashes out somehow and maybe this is a good time for me to say this but we might talk about Oliver Stone later on i have a lot of I don’t know if it’s empathy i I have some sympathy for Oliver Stone because as a Vietnam veteran he’s what Jonathan Kay calls a a damaged survivor right he’s looking for some reason that could say my friends didn’t die for nothing right he saw people’s heads blow off and you know he got into drugs he you know it was a horrible experience i completely sympathize with how angry he must feel about the Vietnam War but it doesn’t mean you make up stuff right it doesn’t mean that you somehow falsify history in order to justify your position and so he was at it again a couple weeks ago which is sad uh I’m more upset at the other people like Dugeno and uh and so on who I don’t think have a reason to have that veil over their eyes they just they’re just really bad critical thinkers um so I I forgot what your question was there but once you get to know Lee Oswald’s personal life yeah from there you can kind of understand how the other people are acting you know everybody is and I I pardon the expression but I sometimes say things to my this to my students you know the CIA what they ultimately do is you know f around and cover their asses you know uh it’s only after that they can rationalize that it was all for national security but in the moment of kind of anticipation of danger you do a lot of stupid things and then you realize you went too far and I think when we look around what was happening in Mexico City uh the way that the FBI was scrging around trying to find Oswald but not really find O look for Oswald you know there’s a lot of incompetence and a lot of shortness of time and we all cut corners and and unfortunately security agencies do that as well you know a lot of these security agents for for Kennedy were drinking the night before that is preposterous but it’s humanity so at some point we have to look all of this and I use I used this word uh I think it was the Cohen brothers who used in the movie it’s a it’s a cluster [  ] you know it’s one of these events that makes no sense until you realize that there’s bungling on a whole bunch of different sides including Oswald who’s trying to figure out until the last minute what to do and how to do it and how to run away right i don’t think you even thought about that until the third shot rang up um so anyway so I I’ll stop there because I think I’ve rambled i I think you’re raising a really good point about the fact look you know we’re talking about human beings here and so human beings you know make mistakes they do all sorts of things that maybe we can’t personally understand um I I mean you just find the conspiracy theorists who just don’t seem to accept that there might be an error in a document that the CIA sometimes makes a mistake or misfiles something or or or you know we even have people analyzing the routing slips for the CI documents and trying to oh my god this doesn’t make sense but you know would it would it make sense i mean it’s you know I worked I I worked at Intel for 9 years and if you looked at the emails I received from various people I mean why am I copied on this email i don’t I’m not interested but I’m copied doesn’t make any sense so that human factor is just missing from conspiracy books yeah two things the hobos right the uh the three men who were found the tramps who were found in this railway car actually like a half mile from Dy Plaza turns out they weren’t really all that close uh their booking slips were misplaced for was it 20 25 years 30 years and it was a conspiracist author who found them so eventually we found out oh so it wasn’t you know eh Howard Hunt after all uh the other thing is yeah I got copied on a list of Freemasons you know back in the 90s when I was really into these conspiracy theories I I had a colleague whose friend who family friend was in the Freemasons and kind of looking for all these Masonic secrets in Nova Scotia with Lee lines and basically rock formations that they thought were like ancient druidic temples or or you know things from the uh the Nice Templar i don’t know what it was but I kind of got into that he sent me some emails and eventually I started receiving emails from these Freemasons talking to each other and I’m like “Uh guys I’m not sure I’m meant to be here you know because I didn’t want to get in trouble.” So eventually they took me off their list so I can understand how a journalist will get uh you know information about bombing Yemen uh by accident when people are just not paying attention yeah and you know I mean it’s when I was back in conspiracy land I used to I used to feel a special bond with my conspiracy books you know there was like all this like sort of special knowledge that you know that I had access to and and and I could tell people about they weren’t that interested but I knew and it was like all this special stuff and then you change your mind you realize oh my god what’s in those books is pretty is a lot of nonsense yeah i remember reading I I see it over there across the room there this big fat book by um Mike Roupert called Crossing the Rubicon and Rupert was this uh Californiabased exapd guy who was really obsessed with the concept of peak oil and I remember reading that when I was starting my college career wondering how much of this is real or not but I wanted to believe Mike Rubert cuz he was an LAPD guy he seemed to know what was going on and he had this whole kind of secret personal life about um I guess the CIA trying to tap his phones or or bug his computers whatever it was and it turns out a lot of it was just this paranoia and a few years later you know I found out he shot himself and he was kind of ruined he he was running away to Venezuela he came to Toronto I actually met um one this uh what’s his name he’s a English professor for California but he’s Canadian he used to work in the foreign service area (19:27) peter Dale Scott that’s right i met Peter Dale Scott at McGill University really yeah around 2007 or so and again he was also talking about peak oil and 9/11 and Kennedy and I went to see the Peter Dale Scott to ask him about my grouper he’s like “Well I don’t know you so I don’t know how much I should tell you.” Right there was this cloak and dagger feeling um so what happens is when when you’re trusted in the group you get the stuff you feel initiated but there’s always going to be a a a smaller circle of initiates that you can’t enter it becomes really cultlike um I I never was in a cult per se but having grown up in the evangelical culture there are cultish elements sometimes and there are certain groups that I’ve been to certain churches that I was like okay I’m not sticking around here because this is a step away from the Kool-Aid um so I think having had like that that nearness to extreme fundamentalism made me a little bit more wary of that you know my father was very religious but my father was also very wary of extreme fundamentalism and so I think when I started realizing that my conspiracy quest was leading me in something like that but because it wasn’t religious it didn’t I didn’t realize what it was until later on when I was isolating myself from others very fearful having this very us and them you know um way of thinking and ultimately what’s interesting is I was never on the brunt end of discipline when I was a conspiracist but when I did write my book well then now the the very hateful comment started appearing some on Amazon uh D Eugeno and what’s his name the doctor the uh the oncologist (21:09) dr mantic Dr mantic yes yeah they both wrote some nasty things i also found out that David Mantic phoned Michael Shurmer who who who endorsed the back of my book and really tried to box in Shurmer to prove that Shurmer was incompetent didn’t know anything about the Kennedy assassination of course that’s not why I had Shurmer endorse my book it’s because Shurmer writes about critical thinking all the time i had John McAdams endorse my book because he knew about the Kennedy assassination so it was interesting how the discipline started coming in when they realized that not just that you’re saying bad things about them but you’re also saying I used to be one of them i think there’s more dislike for ex-members because we are apos we’re apostates right we’re not just crit critics who don’t get it we are people who got it and then decided that actually that was wrong very very true i totally agree so tell me a bit about um you know writing of this book or you know why you decided to write it the process of of writing it and the publishing it it’s it’s it’s a terrific book i mean I actually don’t keep this on my bookcase i keep this on my desk as a handy reference because I think it’s such an important book oh thanks Fred that’s that’s very nice of you because at first I was thinking does the world need another Kennedy book i know there’s what something like 30,000 publications on Kennedy so this is just another drop but what I did notice was that there was uh there was a lack of books that were not just skeptical but were looking at the arguments of conspiracists uh Pausner Bouiosi etc are excellent for identifying many of the factual mistakes but they’re lawyers right they’re people who are used to cross-examining witnesses (22:49) and I think they do good jobs in what they do McAdams did write a book called Assassination was it JFK assassination logic yep but it’s not really logic he’s a political scientist it’s more kind of practical wisdom if you wish or identifying um you know vague language and misunderstandings my advantage is that I was although I’m a historian by training I was teaching philosophy in a humanities department one of the courses that we all have to teach in my department whether or not you have a philosophy background is critical thinking and basic the basics of inductive deductive logic uh identifying fallacies these sorts of things and so that that led me to say hey this is not my expertise I better study more about that so I studied a lot of logical theory uh which of course for 17 18 year olds you can only kind of scratch the surface but it taught me to be much more disciplined the way that I study so in a sense what I wanted to do with this book is my problem as an historian even though I had a master’s degree by this point but I could still miss the uh I could still be mis uh misunderstand an argument because I was only looking at the facts and if you line up a bunch of true facts you can still end up with a false conclusion because there’s nothing linking those facts to that conclusion right there’s a there’s a there’s an assumption that these things prove the other but they don’t and I realized that that was a big problem with conspiracy theories it’s not so much that they have bad facts you could they might actually be quite right in fact as you know you argue with a conspiracy theorist and they will they will know the minutia of statistics so much more than any skeptic because they’re absolutely obsessed with it you know um Alex Jones is a great example right he can talk you under the table with statistics but only because he uses them to try to prove something he already believes is true he doesn’t understand anything about inductive or uh deductive logic so I thought that I would expose that the the problems in reasoning so I didn’t want to read every single possible conspiracy book out there i decided I’m going to take a cross-section certainly Garrison is one of them oliver Stone’s one of them uh there was there’s some stuff about Robert Groden in there Fletcher Prrowy Mark Lane and a few others no David Lifton uh James Fetzer David Mantic so I took some of their main writings and I tried to organize a number of chapters by theme i looked at a number of the people that were accused of killing Kennedy the CIA the FBI um the uh the military-industrial complex whatever that means right it’s a pretty large category um and Lynden Johnson uh as well as the Oswald so I kind of start with a section or it’s actually the second section of the book the first section looks at myths about Kennedy the second section looks at you know I think I called it who wants to be an assassin you know how all the different people who have been said to be uh suspicious and in the end yeah everybody’s suspicious who doesn’t like Kennedy but that doesn’t mean they killed him and then ultimately when you actually look at the um the nuts and bolts when you look at the forensics and that’s what the the second the sorry the third and fourth part of the book are it’s looking at the gunshots looking at the bullets looking at the uh the autopsy um evidence whatever is available i could not get into NAR i did ask but uh you know there’s only so many people can get in but what’s wonderful is that some television and print media have gotten professional doctors to look at this stuff (26:24) you know there’s this great show called Cold Case JFK that came out while I was already starting to write this book and this was a mint for kind of getting my head wrapped around well how could a single person do all that shooting and it gets interpreted as multiple shooters um and then of course trying to kind of unpack the the Zapruder film and these kinds of things so the I would say the latter half of the book deals more with forensic issues um you know weapons and bullets and pictures and the first half deals more with the issues of the story of Kennedy the story of Kennedy’s so-called enemies and how these stories get written according to certain agenda historians do this all the time if they’re responsible they’ll say “I realize that I left this out i left that out left that out but what I really want to focus on was say uh Kennedy’s love interests or Kennedy’s foreign policy but when you start with the conclusion without actually investigating all of the different possible opinions out there and conspiracy theorists are very good for cherrypicking only certain viewpoints then you end up constructing a story that’s a myth and by myth I don’t necessarily mean like um a story that is always an all completely false it’s a story that starts with um looking for meaning or purpose rather than looking for truth and if your purpose is to try to be vindicated for your anger about the Vietnam War then you’re going to cherrypick only those things that will vindicate your feeling of being outraged rather than understanding that a lot of stuff happened about Vietnam and it’s not your fault you suffered you hated it but that doesn’t mean that the man you liked was murdered because of it yeah i think Oliver Stone makes that horrible uh uh assumption or or or the way he approaches the the evidence is to say “Oh I want to I’m going to answer the question of why before I answer the question of how it was done.” And so he he answers that question he knows the why and then that forces him into a conclusion about how it was done and and and so it’s just a forced it’s just a wrong way to look at things very much so very much so uh when you start with a why you start ignoring the fact about why not or why this way and not another way it it makes it forc you to write history teologically you know you start with an idea of where everything is going to go so either it’s going to go to the military-industrial complex controlling the world or it should have gone to a fabulous workers utopia world peace and everything that you thought Kennedy was going to achieve and both of those uh both of those possibilities are wrong right the history kind of just takes on it’s chaotic you know I think that’s what I say in the in the opening uh in the pro the the preface of the book is when I realize that number one history is absolutely chaotic there’s too much chance to be able to say that this particular group was able to achieve exactly what they wanted and not get found out for it for example and at the same time human nature is very predictable and so AAM’s razor can allow you to say look is it likely that a guy like Oswald after all these years was faking being a communist since he was 15 years old or is it more likely that he actually believed in it and when you actually read his readings and I one of the great books uh was Norman Mailers’s Oswald’s Tale (30.00.00) right here’s a man who believed in a conspiracy who hired Russian interpreters to help him go to the so uh the former Soviet Union in the mid ’90s and tried to find the smoking gun and in the end what he found was a scared little child who thought that the world needed him but no one realized how great he was right there’s this narcissistic manchild who comes back to the United States so um so obsessed with his own uh his own self-standing his own uh self-importance uh that he beats his wife he doesn’t keep a job he tries to shoot uh a a retired general a racist i don’t think anybody should love um General uh what was his name walker general Walker but at the same time you know it shows it shows Oswald’s uh MMO from very early on uh and so you know shooting Kennedy was just one more thing to do on this on this line to proving to the world that he was a great person yeah you talked a bit about um how people line up their facts it’s kind of interesting with the new documents you have Jefferson Morley who looks at the new documents and says “Oh I have found a fact pattern.” First time I thought “A fact pattern and this fact pattern leads me to believe that counter intelligence was you know responsible for the assassination (31:2) and you look at the fact pattern and it’s like it’s it’s every part of it is all questionable yep you know and it and but he’s convinced you know because the pattern fits the theory in his mind and the pattern does not allow for other patterns to also exist simultaneously as as kind of a comparison right um yeah Mley was on my podcast i’m I’m always thankful when a conspiracy believer comes on my podcast (31:54) i’ve had very few Lenosic Jefferson Moley Nick Pope you know when they come on I want to give them a fair hearing but at the same time I always find myself having to push back a little bit because they they they they jump they they do this gish gallop you know these assumptions that well we know this is true so therefore this is also true and this is also true and at some point I say well hold on a second right you’re you’re are are you not making assumptions here so I’m thankful he came on but at the same time and I’m I’m getting this from Max Holland Max Holland’s word words here um Jeff Morley is dangerous because he’s a smart guy because he should realize that his theory is full of holes but he presents it as though it’s a given and he’s also smart enough to know where to stop he knows that he says enemies inside the Kennedy administration caused his death he doesn’t say the CIA murdered him right he’s leaving it open that if somebody says Cuba did it okay Cuba did it but the CIA just kind of stepped aside it’s not illegal they could just say we didn’t know what was going on or we didn’t catch on so Morely uh thrives in ambiguity and that’s where he finds strength but unfortunately um it’s kind of an empty shell yeah i think he also u finds strength in that in that a lot of people won’t check the primary documents that he cites so he’s citing all these primary documents hoping or or and and few people will actually go to them and actually read them for themselves and that’s where a lot of his stuff falls apart i mean he’s always I mean before the redactions in fact I’m doing a blog post right now about you know Morley was pointing to a certain CIA document about material coming out of out of the CIA in Mexico City about Cuba and oh this is going to there’s a lot of redactions this is going to tell us a lot about Oswald well then the redactions come out and it tells you nothing about Oswald and and you just see that sort of pattern over and over again yeah uh Mark Lane was also great for that um you you follow Just Stanton Freriedman was great for that holding up pages that were redacted and and assuming that under the dark print there’s going to be some great revelation um yeah it’s unfortunate i I have not spent a lot of time factchecking morally as much i mean when I was writing my book he didn’t stand out to me as one of the worst ones out there so I gave him a little bit of coverage here and there but I I found that um Fletcher Prrowy was so bad at doing this because he spent something like 20 25 years talking about classified documents that he allegedly had copies in his home but couldn’t share and when these documents are finally released particularly in the ’90s under the ARB you’re like that’s not at all what he’s trying to say right kennedy removing a thousand troops is not removing all troops it’s really just moving things around to send a message to DM who ends up getting assassinated by his generals so I found that um uh Fletcher Prrowy was constantly taking advantage of his status his his his title as a retired Air Force colonel as if he’s the inside man and he knows what’s going on did you talk about Did you talk about Fletcher Prrowy with Lenosic i did in fact I had him on uh long before I did my Kennedy series i did a series a short series on deep state and I had three people there i had Lenos Sanic talk about Fletcher Prrowy’s concept of the deep state you know the secret team running the world through the banks um I I think I may have had a long conversation with my co-host after that cuz I felt there’s so many things that need to be uh adjusted and explained and one of them is that Fletcher Prrowy I don’t think was himself an anti-semite but when you read him closely it’s essentially the protocols of the elders of Zion Americanstyle you know uh 20 for for the 21st century in fact he often would quote the report from Iron Mountain which was a satire but he used it as though it was a veritical report Allah you know protocols of the elders of Zion so there’s a lot of problems there with prrowy and then what happened is I had a former congressional aid called Mike Lofrren come on and he wrote a book about the deep state but of course Lofrren is talking about the revolving door between Congress and lobbyists right so that’s a very different kind of deep state it’s not Jews running the banks it’s just politicians who are in the pocket of you know weapons developers and then I also had um Kathine Olstead uh American professor at University of California uh not Berkeley the one up north in Sacramento uh near there anyways uh so uh she came in and and we looked at what she understood to be the deep state which is largely the IRS and income tax uh no she she doesn’t believe in a deep state she was saying this is where the idea came from after World War I this massive bureaucracy for admin administering taxation uh became kind of this secret opaque group that people were wondering what’s going on there it’s no longer our elected members to Congress it’s rather some kind of invisible bureaucracy that really runs our lives so I looked at these different concepts of deep state i felt that Leno Sanic’s version was the one that left me most wanting uh but yeah so I did did chat with Len what’s interesting about Len and I don’t think you’ve been listening to this and I don’t think he listens to my podcast he did contact me a few weeks later and he told me “Uh I don’t want to receive your updates your email updates anymore because your show is too paranoid.” I thought that was interesting i call it paranoid planet because I think all of us have a tendency to be paranoid uh what Lens suggests is that other people are paranoid but he’s he’s right um and if you can’t have a sense of humor about yourself if you’re not unable to say “I’m willing to be wrong on this,” then that’s when you’re most in danger of conspiratorial conspiracist logic yeah one thing about Fletcher Prrowy is that you know he did attend uh a conference for the Institute of Historical Revisionism which was a Holocaust denying outfit he attended one of their conferences and I actually put on my blog he wrote a letter to their journal um congratulating them on what a great magazine they were publishing um which is like bizarre you know you must know that this journal is dedicated to denying the Holocaust um and yet he loved the magazine because he got attention from them you know it was the same thing with Scientology he was an apologist for Scientologist but I don’t think he ever screamed at ashtrays or you know went to a Tom Cruz uh movie or whatever like I I don’t think that he was interested in Scientology’s teachings but he found a kindred spirit because they also thought like him that the world is being run by some kind of secret government and in many ways Fletcher Prrowy I think fits the description of the aging crank as as um uh Jonathan Kay describes in his book on 911 you know the crank is not is not a mentally ill person it’s not even a person of ill will it’s a person who’s kind of the the the hamster wheel is turning but they’re retired there’s not much for them to do so conspiracies becomes this kind of great puzzle and they start getting very imaginative with this puzzle you know Fletcher Prrowy never protested I think one day in the street about the Kennedy assassination but he was willing to say anything to anybody who came to his house namely Leno Sanic who filmed you know hundreds of hours or whatever of of interviews with him you know I mean many years ago I I was working on a political campaign here in Ottawa and so I went to a lot of events and you know you start going to a lot of events and like almost at every event you’d have somebody who would come up to you with like a big file some sort of big file of paper and they want to talk to you about it could be fluoride in the water or it could be it could be something or you know it could be a a building or something in Ottawa that’s taken over by the federal government or something but they have this massive file they’ve accumulated over the years and they have to talk to you about the something that’s really important that only they know about and you and those are the cranks you get them almost at every political meeting you go to yeah yeah um you know I was one of them i was one of them and what happens is I think you know I forget which philosopher said you know every human has kind of a god-shaped hole i think we all have a Satan shaped hole we all need to have some kind of a devil figure uh that can explain the why there’s evil in the world why there’s suffering and it helps to believe that some very powerful and and very secretive person or group is behind a lot of the chaos in our lives uh no religions try to explain that but what happens in a secular age when people don’t really have any kind of overarching system to explain why these things happen they end up creating new ones and I think that uh the you know I mentioned the Freemasons earlier uh the military-industrial complex the deep state these are all equivalences of some form of demonic uh world that helps us explain why we suffer why and I think it’s time for us to go back to the real villain it’s the the Jews i mean why invent something new we we we already know yeah i I don’t know if I said this with you because I know you’re Jewish but on my podcast every now somebody somebody will say “You know what the problem is?” I’m like “Please don’t say the Jews please don’t say the Jews.” Uh yeah yeah one of my best friends whenever whenever he calls me during the day and we talk about some problem he says “You know whose fault this is?” I said “Yes it’s the Jews.” Yeah yeah was he going to say that so Len you know I mean I have to laugh at Len Oanic i mean Black Op you listen to Black Opt you know this is the radio show the NSA does not want you to listen to yeah yeah yeah the NSA couldn’t give couldn’t give a [  ] about this show they don’t even know what’s in existence yeah i I I did ask him about that and he says it was tongue and cheek i think he does have a sense of humor um but you know Len has become a a kind of a he was I don’t know maybe not today but in the ‘9s he was a bit of an underground superstar i mean he’s the guy who got all these people on the record when no one on TV would talk to them you know Stone Mley and D Eugeno are in front of Congress now back then the only press they were getting was Black Op and he was having all those people on so in many ways it was a one-stop shop for conspiracy research right that’s what he calls it um but I think Len has a deep need uh to you know explain why the world is so and he found it in this kind of father figure Fletcher Prrowy and I I said this on my podcast it’s a little bit like that relationship in that Mel Gibson movie Man Without a Face no you you you’re the young man who befriends this aging man who is kind of ostracized by society and there’s some good in him but you don’t want to hear the story where he was a pedophile or that he uh hates the Jews or whatever right that’s just beyond the pale you think there’s enough in him to redeem you and so you follow his crazy stories ignoring the things that other people are trying to use to discredit him that’s why in my book I kind of started the section I talked about prrowy i said “Look Proud’s been accused of a number of things i want to focus on his arguments it’s it would be easy for me to say he hangs out with anti-semites but the the thing is he says Kennedy was going to pull out of Vietnam let’s deal with that let’s look at if NSAM263 or whatever it was really says I’m going to pull all the troops out of Vietnam.” And it doesn’t right and there’s enough background there and I looked at other historians um uh Mark Silverstone most more recently he’s just recently written a book called I think the the Kennedy withdrawal um and there’s also this great Stanley Carau has big fat book on Vietnam that I started reading way back in Seap then my high school teacher gave me a copy um when I was in university and I think I finished reading it while I was writing my book so it took about 20 minute 20 years for me to write read that whole book but once you kind of get the whole the whole context of Vietnam you realize that people like Fletcher Prrowy are really just creating a a fairy tale yeah i I I I uh talked to Mark Silverstone in Dallas he was there uh lecturing at the Sixth Floor Museum last um last November so it was nice to to meet him and his book is really really terrific there is sort of a Kennedy cult out there that sort of sees Kennedy as this this incredible peacemaker who is going to usher in a a whole new era of peace and dant peace with with the Soviet Union peace with Cuba he was going to end poverty he was going to you know fix race relations he was going he was do going to do everything and that’s why he had to be killed yeah um in in the first part of my book I talk about these three myths about Kennedy and the first one is one that kind of died with him and that’s what we might call the myth of the Irish mafia uh a lot of um journalists who were very anti- Kennedy at that time uh you know right-leaning journalists who knew about the affairs uh who thought that he was a reckless youth right in fact there was a book called JFK reckless youth um you know they kind of saw through the Kennedys as you know a good-looking corrupt um dynasty then there was the myth of Camelot which many of us still abide by today right this idea that he wanted civil rights he was going to change the world he was a progressive all these things turns out you know the the other president who was most like Kennedy was Ronald Reagan you know Kennedy wanted massive tax cuts uh Kennedy was a hawk and now he was against nuclear weapons but so was Reagan you know he was a hawk against communism and even though as and I think Silverstone’s interesting because he says Kendi until his death was of two minds about Vietnam we don’t want to put all of our what is it all of our ducks in that basket no that’s a mixed metaphor um we don’t want to put all of our whatever it is all all of our stuff in that one thing uh he was much more obsessed with Cuba right and and Berlin uh but Kennedy was a hawk in in in financial relations so the the m and civil rights yeah he was in favor of civil rights but he didn’t know a lot of black people uh he didn’t spend a lot of time you know on the campaign trail looking for uh you know places to support civil rights he was much more interested in international affairs international relations it’s only once the Klux Clan started bombing churches in Birmingham that he felt okay he has to take a stand now right before that it was kind of like let’s let’s do the diplomatic kind of uh you know behind the scenes thing um and and so this myth of Camelot is kind of misleading but it’s made us think of Kennedy as larger than life and then there’s this third myth that the conspiracies do they take they take Camelot and then I guess it’s like Camelot on crack they I call it the prince of peace myth uh he becomes not King Arthur he becomes Jesus Christ he becomes the crucified Messiah who unfortunately never rose from the dead right christians have a hope that he their messiah is coming back but the Oliver Stones Messiah is buried in the ground and he’s not coming back so we you know we we the conspiracy believers are the ones who have to change the world right it’s a it’s a very dark and depressing hopeless form of messianism and and it’s also not just changed the world but the but until we uncover the facts of the JFK assassination we cannot have a better world yes that’s right a better world is predicated on on uncovering the the malicious forces at play here yeah but that’s not entirely their fault i I think and as much as I don’t want to blame the victim here but Mrs kennedy really fed this whole idea that she even said it there will never be another Camelot what happened from 1961 to 1963 was essentially an aberration a good aberration of American history and we can never get that back which is unfortunate because you’ve had people I think uh Obama might be one um at the time I I’m always been a little bit more rightle leaning i thought John McCain would have made a fine president in 2000 certainly better than George W bush so I think there are a lot of people who might have had that you know maybe not the same thing as Kennedy but that kind of idea that the charismatic man can also be the servant of the people can also usher in an era of of change of positive change i thought Jimmy Carter lacked the charisma for that but he was a good man right so there are other people who could have taken on that Kennedy mantle but Mrs kennedy and other Kennedy supporters will not allow that to happen we have to keep living in 1963 and and we can never we can never let that moment go we can never move on uh from that moment a very good book to read is have you read Gary Wills’s book The Kennedy Imprisonment no I think I heard the name but I haven’t excellent it’s it’s Gary Wils is a Catholic theo the theologian and he wrote a really good book about the Kennedy family and and and uh you know some of the beliefs particularly about women that that John Kennedy got from his father about the multiple affairs I mean his father did that as well Robert Kennedy didn’t um but the imprisonment particularly of Edward Kennedy who basically wanted to have the type of affairs that his brother had but it was age of feminism where it was really frowned upon to sort of be that kind of macho guy who was always having an affair and sort of he was always getting caught and didn’t know how to behave but it’s it’s a very very interesting book i’m I’m just struck by you know again this this whole thing about you know this this this myth about Kennedy i mean I find it funny that had the CIA or the FBI really wanted to get rid of Kennedy that they could have easily just told the press about his affair with Sam Gian Kana’s girlfriend or Alan Romesh right the um which did endanger national security and at that time would have sunk his candidacy and would have been a very easy and quick way of to really sink him yeah yeah that was uh what was her name um ex Judith Xner exner uh but there was also Alan Romesh right who was an East German spy at least she was connected to the Stazzi yeah and of course the fact that that Hoover found out about the affair with Exner and rather than go to the press he actually went to the Kennedys with Robert Kennedy and said “Hey tell your brother to knock it off.” Yeah hoover conspiracists say that was Hoover blackmailing the Kennedys and it could be i would not put it past Hoover but at the same time here’s another person who’s often misunderstood hoover was devoted to the concept of serving the the state right he was a bureaucrat parex salons as was Alan Dulles yes so these people certainly they were not white sheep they were certainly uh morally ambiguous but everything they did was in the idea of national security and making sure that the state was safe from its enemies namely the Soviet Union and so I can imagine I I can imagine um Hoover keeping this under wraps because what if the Russians got a hold of this right but of course he puts it in his do not file file which means that now Hoover’s got a hold of this and But the fact that he warned the Kennedys to stop it tell tells me that okay he you know he could have derailed Kennedy immediately with a little leak he didn’t do that and and and certainly he could or he could have gone to the CIA and say you do it you leak it um he didn’t do that um just to change course do you want to tell us a bit about your class my class at school yes so well I teach a number of classes because so as I said I teach in the humanities department i have a history background so I like to teach everything kind of a from a historical perspective even though I don’t teach history per se um I teach the history of ideas and sometimes it pertains to religion or politics or ethics so uh there is a particular class that’s called knowledge and conspiracy theories i’ve been teaching it since I think 2008 so uh since I guess before some well next year my students will not have been born when I started teaching this course so I’m starting to feel old um uh and so I think it’s it’s it’s gone through a number of different iterations there are a number of different subjects that I like to look at obviously since I have the Kennedy book out I I do use the book as a as a textbook now but I think I can see myself kind of leaving the book for other people i know some other educators are using the book in their classrooms now and I’m very thankful for that uh but uh I might move on because right now I’m kind of doing a deep dive into eupfology uh I’m not saying I’m going to write a book on eupfology but there are some good ones out there and I might decide to make that my central theme so essentially what happens in this course is um uh as other teachers who teach similar titles knowledge and something else uh we all have to teach the basics of critical thinking and epistemology so what is knowledge what are different approaches to knowledge rationalism empiricism introspection revelation right there’s a number of ways that we claim to know things how reliable are they uh I look at things like paridolia you know looking at an image that is kind of confusing maybe a lot of visual noise and then seeing a shooter in the bushes or a flying saucer or something right so these are the different things that I look at that are more kind of generally related to epistemology the basics of inductive deductive logic and then and I’m starting this this week we’re hitting the Kennedy assassination so in fact uh starting tomorrow we will be watching the Oliver Stone film JFK Okay although sometimes depending on time I might watch something else we watched um uh was it JFK Revisited last year uh or maybe some other conspiracy film but you know even though it’s an older film JFK is kind of a one-stop shop for every conspiracy theory imaginable that’s right though it obsesses over the New Orleans thing so um uh we I end up making students write more about Garrison’s theories and then in class I talk more about ballistics and uh autopsy and and also about Lee Oswald’s psychology and things like that so over the next few weeks that’s what we’ll be doing we start with Oliver Stone’s uh theory then uh perhaps talking about how Gerald Pausner uh Patricia Lambert have responded to Stone and Garrison and then moving on to well what are the things that the video does not tell us about you know the the attempted assassination on um on General um I keep forgetting his name walker walker thank you uh Edwin Walker um I’m opening a parenthesis here this is really interesting um the fact that Edwin Walker had the same first name as Edwin Eddall Lee Oswald’s stepfather who cheated on Alswald’s mother and left or was forced to leave i forget where I read that but it’s kind of was really interesting that Oswald kept going after people who were the the dad he never had right so anyways I I close that because it makes it very interesting to see how someone like Lee Oswald in the context of all of the other assassins and and school shooters that we’ve seen in the 20th and 21st century most recently you know Thomas Matthew Krooks we’re still waiting for some kind of report i think the FBI is trying to find some kind of proof of a deep state in there but uh it appears like an Oswalt type of figure the more you understand shooters and what motivates them the less you need all of this cacophony of factoids um I I often talk to my students and this is one of the last class of the semester about my father meeting Mlein who you may be familiar with Americans will not be he was the shooter of the poly techchnique the University of Montreal shooter back in 1989 he killed 14 women blaming feminists for everything that was wrong in his life and my father was friends with his mom and I later met Makipin’s mom we had dinner she came and spoke to my students in many ways she’s a victim as well because she did not raise her son to act that way but she was physically abused and and emotionally abused by her husband who was a biggamist who also neglected the children both of whom ended up in tragic circumstances magnipin killed these women and killed himself his sister basically killed herself with heroin or drugs anyways um so I I look at Mle Pin as a type and then you know you put Lee Oswald you put Matthew Krooks you put a lot of these other people beside and you realize there’s a long line of a long pattern of people who pick up weapons particularly you know assault rifles or or or other types of of guns in the States and decide that they’re going to destroy someone and it doesn’t mean that they hate that person it means they are angry and they’re looking for something to tell the world I’ve had enough right and and I think Oswald was kind of like that i I know I’ve heard a lot of theories uh I’ve talked to former Warren Commission council Berg Griffin you know many people are not sure what exactly was Oswald’s motive but I think he fits a profile if it’s a profile of a person who is just empty and hopeless and the violence just allows them to stake to put that beacon in the ground saying here I stand look I’m somebody and you know what how is that different from from Oliver Stone who I don’t hasn’t shot anybody since Vietnam I hope but makes these films that says “Look I’m a somebody i matter i was hurt and I want to be vindicated you know I’m going to stand in front of Congress and say things that are absolutely false but I matter you know and I think that’s what it is it’s a cry for maybe not for help by that time it’s too late for help but it’s a cry for recognition right and how is that different from all human beings right we all want to be if not admired at least acknowledged and I see Oswald as a kind of a a very pathetic you know uh Shakespearean tragic character right so how do how do your students react to the whole Kennedy assassination and do they change their opinions over the course of of the course i think as most of my students are young you know they’re 17 18 when they start my class uh this is more it’s not a matter of debunking so much for them unless they have a a dad or an uncle who’s really into conspiracy theories there are some sometimes and they say it makes for very interesting conversations at home uh but I see it’s more like pre-bunking i I tell them look I apologize for assaulting you with all this historic history that you didn’t even know existed but I’ll show you why it matters as we go on during the term but there’s enough interest in things like true crime or esoterica you know when I deal with euphology or when students can do essays on you know who shot Tupac Shakur or why did Princess Diana die or how did she die you know uh a lot of students are emotionally invested in those things so I think they can’t help but see that Kennedy is not only is it like that it’s it’s the mother of all conspiracy theories uh so I’m sure some students are bored but you know I could be dancing naked there and they’d be bored anyways uh so uh you can’t please everybody but I would say that a lot of students realize that um this is a this is a very deep and complex uh story but fortunately you don’t need to know everything to start kind of unraveling the yarn you know I I on the first day of the semester I say “This is a crash course in [ __ ] detection and if you remember nothing about Kennedy after the semester I don’t care but I do care if you go back to your social media um you know um services you know I don’t even know what they’re called because I don’t use them you know your your Tik Toks or your whatever it is your Instagram.” And then and then you just swallow some more BS you know I said I want you to be able to look through advertisements political speeches conspiracy theories and other types of claims that are going to be abusive and manipulative and that’s the purpose of the course so I’ve always treated Kennedy UFOs and these other things as just a a case study in order to help them think for themselves i I don’t do this alone i did not invent this course a colleague of mine did uh James Jervis and I’m very very thankful that he proposed it way back when and uh you know we do have some basic stuff that I had to learn myself before I could teach it but the Kennedy part is something that was kind of a boule was that in English uh you know a thing I was dragging along my leg you know like in those cartoon prison uh I I was dragging this heavy uh ball of iron right we all have that ball we’re all dragging it and then I I realized I I could put some training wheels on it and turn it into something that was more positive you know a a learning experience so okay tell tell me tell us a bit about your podcast uh so back in 2018 or so you know every now and then I think I every now and then we get a midlife crisis i think I’ve had three by now and in the mid to late 2010s I was starting to feel like I do I want to teach until retirement i might want to do something else i even looked into some jobs in government i had thought about running for municipal politics i don’t think any of those things would have been suitable for me and then a friend of mine said another colleague he says “Why don’t you start a podcast?” And I knew nothing about the technology of producing stuff so I thought I can’t do that but fortunately I have a friend who is in the movie industry um Joan Lejo he’s my co-host co-producer and he knew a lot about it in fact his uh his ex-wife was a recording artist so he had a lot of experience with video audio technology which was exactly what I was missing i can write I can research I can tell stories i think I have a I have an okay voice for the radio you know I did some uh student radio when I was uh in in Sea myself so I thought well I guess I do have a certain skill set and so we started prepping this and it’s been going on for almost 5 years now uh three seasons but it seems like I I don’t know when a season should be over and uh at first I thought I’m gonna talk to just a few academics you know Joe Yuzinski came on uh I met a psychiatrist from the University of Chicago uh who was on and then eventually I thought I got to get to this Kennedy stuff eventually uh but not yet i didn’t want to just start with that but eventually you know I got around to doing a very long series on Kennedy and now I’m doing a long series on UFOs i guess those would be the two main themes uh I did one very interestingly on on cults and cultishness and I learned a lot in that i’ve always had an interest in these these groups not necessarily religious groups nexium is not a religious group but these very exclusive communities that would take advantage of people’s goodwill and desire for community right and completely turn that against them and and that’s when I learned not to shy away from the word cult if by cult you don’t mean a religious group you don’t agree with but rather uh an organization that abuses its members by gaslighting them by isolating them by disciplining them right so I looked at Scientology i looked at the church of unification i looked at Did you look at Jonestown i did i did i did like a three I did three episodes on Jonestown because I got to talk with um See it’s it was a while I’m trying to remember his name

um I I’ve got a blank but it it’s there i’ll I’ll scream it out in the middle of the night uh when I remember it but he’s the um he’s the director of the Jonestown Institute uh which is uh attached to the University of San Diego and uh his wife sisters his two uh sisters-in-law died in Jonestown uh one of them actually was one of Jim Jones’s mistresses and I think she had a child with him possibly so uh yeah so it’s very interesting because there’s a whole personal story the reason I bring that up is because Mark Lane was also involved with uh with Jim Jones yes and when I found that out I I was livid because it was one thing for Mark Lane to say silly things about Lee Oswald and try to sneak into the Warren Commission’s uh you know um auditions uh their their their uh audiences uh it was another thing when I found out and there’s even recordings of of him telling the people in Jonestown that the CIA wants to murder them and he was there on that day and of course he didn’t take the Kool-Aid he ran into the forest he ran into the jungle and survived and to this day I still wonder if he has survivors guilt and I don’t know because he was such a you know we use the word shy i don’t want to use that in a derogatory way but I think I think he fit the bill of the lawyer type who will make up anything in order to win the case and he used this he honed these skills arguing that Lee Oswald was set up uh by the CIA but he ultimately I think is partly responsible i mean Jim Jones bears the majority of the the blame but he is partly responsible for that massacre uh and so to me that is one of the examples of how deadly conspiracy theories can be uh it is shameful yeah yeah so getting back to your podcast oh can I can I say yes sure go ahead fielding McGee i remember Fielding McGee so I want to thank Fielding and I I apologize for uh for forgetting his name um can you recommend to our audience a good book on UFOs that debunks stuff well uh I had Greg Age on my podcast last fall and he has written the first well technically it’s the second comprehensive history of eupfology but the first was written by a man who now has been largely discredited as a bit of a nutbag uh eupfologist himself um so I think that Greg wrote a fantastic um chronicle of 50 years of the UFO uh movement let me see if I can find it here somewhere it’s it’s in my it’s in my office somewhere around here i forget where I put it um and it’s called uh when the when the flying saucers came so that I would say is a great book and it’s one that you can start with if if you like to read history and you read it slowly because every five pages or something it moves on to uh some other case and it looks not just in the United States but around the world so I thought that was a fantastic book for me to read uh I’ve been going back and reading some older uh UFO debunking books by Robert Schaefer by um Philip Klass uh these are all kind of you know I think I think they were remarkable men who spent decades and decades you know kind of holding holding the the the the fort of of critical thinking of uh of sober second thought uh to this movement that I hesitate to say cultish i think eupfologists are a little bit more open to outsiders and but they they definitely don’t like apostates uh you know people like us of course you have the people who mil things together who say JFK was killed because he was going to spill the beans about UFOs yeah that’s true but I I don’t see a lot of those maybe I’m just not reading those books but the the I would say the central euphologist today people like Nick Pope who was on my podcast nice guy but at the same time I think Nick Pope’s Nick Pope’s business is to promote Nick Pope and he does a good job at it but if you’re going to be on Ancient Aliens you’ve lost my you’ve lost my you’ve lost credibility in my eyes uh Leslie Kaine who I to me is uh she’s the Oliver Stone of the UFO world um you know a lot of these people I don’t think get into candidate you know what’s interesting they don’t even get into Roswell because they understand they know that nothing happened at Roswell a trail of balloons holding up a microphone essentially to listen in on whether the Russians were exploding nuclear bombs that’s what crashed at Roswell you know Project Mogul it was called and there’s no evidence of anything else what they found was the remnants of a box kite tin foil wax paper balsa wood glue and tape that’s what was found and then the story evolved into a huge flying saucer in fact several crashing all over New Mexico and they all know that it’s not the case and they all know that evidence is not there but they keep saying something happened at Roswell and then they keep using expressions like Britain’s Roswell Canada’s Roswell uh Brazil’s Roswell and at the end if there was no Roswell then all these other things are are to be doubted as well so you know you know that I I publish on my blog a uh a letter from Ray Palmer to Jim Garrison okay uh because they were friends and so uh they were all comparing notes about Fred Chrisman and what happened in Puet Sound with UFOs yeah yeah so I I found uh this letter that um that Ray Palmer had sent Garrison i did not find Garrison’s letter back to him unfortunately yeah palmer’s the guy who was running like a science fiction magazine and when he was when he found out that Kenneth Arnold had seen these quote unquote saucers skipping on water on he didn’t even describe them as saucers he described them as bat wings it’s very important to point out that what Kenneth Arnold saw were shiny distant bat wings moving like the the tail of a kite or he said saucers skipping on water so that was to describe their movement not their appearance but then Ray Palmer and other people flying saucers wow that’s catchy and they started talking about flying saucers and then for the next 50 years people are seeing what they’re not seeing bat wings they’re seeing flying saucers so no one’s seeing what uh what what Kenneth Arnold saw which I I’m almost convinced we’re pelicans but because of parallax because of glare in the sun the fact that he was expecting to see something unusual and and deep down he Kenneth Arnold was looking for a downed plane he took 20 minutes off in a transit from around Seattle to not Boise but he was kind of going into the interior across the mountains and he’d heard about this crashed Marines um transport plane that had crashed around Mount Reineer and there was was it a $5,000 award i mean a lot of money for 1947 uh he certainly could have that could have been half his year’s salary right and uh he didn’t find anything and on his way back he sees these lights now I’m not saying he made that up but it was convenient that when you when you got sucked out of 5,000 $5,000 and you can actually see something that might bring in the same kind of income and attention you know it it it kind of didn’t take too much for Kenneth Arnold to just go with the story he went to the media you know this was not a shy man who want to keep it to himself he went to multiple media outlets say “Guess what I saw?” And then he wrote a book and he became a euphologist did you follow the the Fred Chrisman story no which one’s that that’s the Pugid Sound hoax that’s the one in Nova Scotia no don’t no that’s right that’s right out in Washington State with him and and a friend and they were out logging and they claimed they saw these flying saucers and there were a beam came out of the flying saucers and and it killed the dog and and there was stuff on this island that they could get yes yes and and uh it was all a hoax of obviously but they that Ken they called Kenneth Arnold in That’s right and he believed it was true he got these two guys from the Air Force to investigate and the tragedy was the two guys from the Air Force their plane crashed on the way back and they both died yeah I remember that greg Agillian does write about that in in his book uh yeah and that’s interesting because of course when something happens like that and the people who host die uh then the story kind of dies with them or at least the the ability to disprove it dies with them uh and then it becomes larger than life it becomes another myth and you know one of the things that really uh uh sort of made Edward J epstein think was when he went to Sylvia Mar’s apartment for the first time and he saw all of her UFO books on a bookcase oh yeah and that got him uhoh what’s going on here okay she was very much into UFOs okay sylvia Mars i’m not Is she related to Jim Mars and anything no no sylvia Mar accessories after the fact oh oh oh yes i say I didn’t pronounce her name that way in my head i guess uh it’s it’s spelled uh m h e r okay i always thought it was meager i always Sylvia Mar okay my my mistake sorry i And I know that um Leslie Kane I pronounce it Keen all the time but uh you know all the Irish soccer players called Keen we pronounce it keen so I don’t know why she’d be any different so I hope you’re not at risk of having having to teach your course in French are you with some of the new laws interesting you might say that um I’ve been asked to teach the ethics course in French my college has decided to do that i’m I can teach in French i’m a franophhone though I’ve been teaching in English since 2001 but you know what i don’t think it’s right um I I I know I know this is not the subject of your podcast but uh you know Canadian politics is something I’ve always been interested in i majored in it in my undergrad and even at that time I want to go into politics uh I was uh you know as Canadians know what a federalist is or a separatist is i was a I was I was a centrist conservative federalist up until the Charlotte Town Accord or the the lack of an accord and then I think I kind of followed a lot of people like Lucen Bousuchard out the door and I became a a separatist a Quebec nationalist for a couple decades and then uh the the Quebec government started becoming very xenophobic against religious minorities uh and and other groups as well and that’s when I kind of thought you know I don’t know if I want to be part of this movement and I found my way back to a more kind of a centrist conservative federalist position which ironically we don’t have a party to represent us right now right it’s uh all the other parties been taken over in different directions so what’s happened in Quebec in the last few years according to me is very unfortunate rather than encouraging people to want to participate in the franophhone um you know nature of this province you have a very rich French history uh I mean the Catholic Church has been basically thrown out the window but there’s a lot of the um you know there’s a lot of the cultural elements there of Quebec’s history that I think it’s worth preserving and the language as well the problem is you can’t do that putting a gun to people’s heads and Quebec also has institutions that have been you know protected English-speaking institutions including hospitals and and seeps and high schools that I think need to maintain funding and their ability to teach to uh anglophones uh who who are born and raised in Canada and that’s what my college is meant to do and now suddenly we are compelled to teach more French get rid of our complimentary courses that this is unfortunate when I was in SEAP you could um take up to four classes and things had nothing to do with your concentration i took a class called the history of African-American rock i took a class on uh poetry uh I took an astronomy class these all really first of all they helped me de develop an interest in these things and and and they really helped kind of give me some some some cultural richness and now all this is dumped in order to make people ready for the working uh you know for for the working world and that includes just drilling them with a lot of French including making them take classes in French where it might not be their mother tongue i mean a lot of our our students do come from a a French background they can hack it but that’s not why they’re in an English- speakaking sea they’re there to actually become bilingual and so it was interesting up until the 19 up until the the early 2000s um most Canadian politicians who want to be successful across the board you know being elected as prime minister or leader of the oper opposition had to be bilingual and very often that meant they were franophones from Quebec or maybe from Ontario who also spoke very good English but since I’d say 2005 or six what’s interesting is it’s the Anglo uh politicians who are learning French and they’re the ones who are actually you know being more bilingual steven Harper Pierre Puv uh you know uh Jack Leighton right the none of these people come from Quebec and then they come and they can debate in French in Quebec and the Quebec nationalists are the ones who can’t express themselves in English as well as they used to now there are some exceptions i think that the block leader is is quite uh fluent but well you it also used to be that the well Renie Lec and a lot of the PQ leaders were very good in English we had gone to English schools uh abroad or elsewhere in Canada but yes I I you know when I grew up in Montreal I mean there was no French language immersion in public schools which was I really regret i mean I really wish they had French language immersion where I could have all we got was a half an hour of French a day oh okay and and our teachers were all from France because they really weren’t sure how to teach French and we used to have these horrible arguments in class about which word to use um various times and and so thank God that’s changed but I also think franophhone should have the opportunity if they wish to go to school in English um it’s very isolating when you you teach a a people to close in on themselves and Quebec for the last 50 years has been very open internationally um
if anything it’s because of the voters in Quebec that we had free trade with the United States for 30 years until Donald Trump decided it shouldn’t be anymore uh we had always a a very big

opinion and and they’re exporting Kebekqua culture in a way that is much bigger than actually the sum of its parts but the problem is what we’re seeing now is the people who are bilingual and triilingual and being effective are more and more people who come from the the minorities the Anglo and alophone minorities in Quebec rather than franophones and to me that’s that’s shameful uh when I was in university my hero was Ten Kier he was the co-founder of modern Canada in many ways with John A macdonald uh fortunately no one’s been attacking his statues maybe because he’s been forgotten but uh you know he’s a person who saw a great advantage to this bilingual bicultural uh you know non-American view of of a state here in North America and I I think it’s to our loss if Canada doesn’t preserve that um I know you might know I’m a member of the Aristotle Foundation and I’m a senior fellow and uh their view a bit like Qulette magazine which we’ve both contributed to is very much kind of a radical centrism you know some people say they lean right but they only lean right in the sense that they lean in the favor of common sense and if people on the right start acting crazy then they’re going to talk they’re going to speak up against that as well i love Qulett quette is just I just I just adore Colette oh my god john Kay does some good work you know he used to be at the National Post but uh I think maybe the National Post was a bit too right-wing for his flavor not that it was like super rightwing when he was there but he’s he’s a diehard centrist and uh he’s been to my college he’s spoken to my students uh you know uh he’s been on my podcast and and I really appreciate the work that he does i think we need more journalists like that there’s not enough there’s not enough in Canada definitely okay look I think we’ve uh reached the end of our time um again I well thank you very much but I strongly recommend that everybody go out and buy a copy of this book there will be links in the notes uh below and in the blog post accompanying this interview so go and buy Michelle’s book buy two copies give one to a friend they will thank you uh immensely and so um thank you i will thank you too thank you very much yes thank Thank you thank you Fred it was great to be here

okay so I’m going to stop the

recording if I can find the button it’s going to be edited

Delusion, Ep 5

www.mattkprovideo.com/2024/07/01/delusion-ep-5/

Steve Roe on “On The Trail of Delusion” Episode 5.

This is episode 5 of the podcast/Youtube show produced by author and JFK expert Fred Litwin, of which I am the editor and creator of all the motion graphics, titles and animations.

“On the Trail of Delusion”

This episode is a talk with Steve Roe, who authored one of the chapters of the book “Pieces of The Puzzle,”

which focused on the life of controversial former Army Major General Edwin Walker-

who tried to indoctrinate his troops along John Birch-er lines and engaged right wing politics after he resigned.

He was alleged the target of an assassination attempt by Lee Harvey Oswald.

I created the graphics with Adobe Animate, Adobe Photoshop and After Effects.

The producer’s website is:

http://www.onthetrailiofdelusion.com

Welcome to another edition of On the Trail of Delusion. I’m Fred Litwin. And today we’re going to do another episode to separate fact from fiction and try to actually give you something of substance about the JFK assassination rather than the usual fantasy stuff you see on YouTube. I’m very excited today. My guest is my good friend, Steve Rowe.

Steve Rowe was born in Michigan, but he actually grew up in Texas and he worked in the oil and gas industry for 35 years, including many, many years in South America, ten years in South America. There’s a lot of stories, I’m sure, with that. He’s married. He lives in San Antonio. In terms of the JFK assassination, he has he’s authored a chapter in Gail Nix, Jackson’s book Pieces of the Puzzle.

And Steve also has a terrific blog. And you could find the address where you can go to his blog in the notes, but a terrific blog on the assassination, on General Walker and a whole variety of other topics. So, Steve Rowe, welcome to On the Trail of Delusion.

Hi, Fred. It’s so good to see you. Like sex for the intro there. Yes. So. So tell me, I mean, basically, how did you get interested in the JFK assassination? Well, when it first happened. Right. Yes, Cliff, I was eight years old. I grew up in Dallas and I was in elementary school at that time.

Then.

So I pulled said I was there at recess. You know, I’ll try to bowl as quickly as I can. So, you know, we get called into the film room and I saw this ball. And so, you know, eight year old kid, we’re pretty impressionable. We don’t want to think, gosh, what’s going on in the world? The president name a little cable.

My mother was at home working parking park. Also. She would alternate route. So I found her kind of crying. She’s watching TV, the coverage room and the wireless rigs going on here. So that’s what kind of sparked it. And then a little bit later, when I got a little older, started going to the library and reading some

I started out in the conspiracy books mainly, you know, everybody.

I gave it up in the seventies, you know, just lost interest in that and my career going. And anyway, I picked it back up again and late nineties to early 2000 still believed in the conspiracy but right the changed my life.

So what led you to change your mind.

I just put the books away. Right. Went and went in to start reading the documentation. You know, Mary Farrah Fawcett. And this got through the documents, reading it. And but there’s always something that bothered me about that whole thing, even when I was a kid, you know?

Well, if there was a conspiracy, wanted to leave the building, you know. So anyway, I just went through the documents. We start reading up and come to find out a lot of the stories books were there will be is the. So you got to go primary documents. That’s why I did it.

n
I totally agree. I mean, primary documents completely changes your your life.

I remember one time I was living in Singapore and I bought Richard Trask’s book Pictures of the Pain, and I was still sort of on the fence. And I got this book and I started reading and said, Wow, this is real history.

This book doesn’t read like the conspiracy books. You know, it was it was such a pleasure to read something real.

Where did your interest come in? Start for for General Walker and that part of the case.

Back in 2000, 15 or so.

I was contracted by the only Jackson

where I wrote that chapter in a book. We were friends, you know, from Dallas, in Oakland, Dallas. We

so I got kind of involved with that as a group.

three, was going to talk about Joe Walker a year or two, too. So but, you know, it’s a really untold part of that. That’s fascinating.

and all in. I got really, really stick it an anchor still in the is a fascinating guy.

So that’s how I got it And I said, you know I need to get in here and

research it and

get some truth out there a little bit, especially about the shooting,

Well, I got to say, I mean, you you know, I’ve been very fortunate to have a tour of where General Walker used to live in Dallas. You given an amazing tour of the area, the laneway, the house, all the buildings around it. I mean, I strongly if you if you ever have a chance. Hi, hire Steve Rowe to give you a tour of the Walker shooting.

It’s absolutely amazing.
And believe it or not, this highly decorated Army general, Korean War vet, World War two commando, all that was a mama’s boy. He was a mama’s boy. Right. In fact, he’s got a big picture of his mother. And you can see a little better.

the threat from within

what he felt. There were a

threat of communists inside our government, inside of our

clergy, all over, you know, so these really, really paranoid about it. And we’ll go into why.

I had a conversation with a guy named Bob Rowan. He runs the New York military

symposium up there

he’s got a little fi about

General Walker.

00:08:32:00 – 00:08:37:13
Unknown
and he gets people to come in there. They remember General Walker and some of them do, you know, they were there.

00:08:37:12 – 00:08:37:19

00:08:37:19 – 00:08:41:04
Unknown
true. If there was a real life force, if it would be

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Unknown
Edwin Walker

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Unknown
I mean when I got that guy’s name through, so much history

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Unknown
from World War Two to

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Unknown
Korea to

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Unknown
civil rights

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Unknown
Germany on the front of the line there, to the Kennedy assassination, to the old history. It’s just incredible to

00:09:00:05 – 00:09:04:16
Unknown
that so much more interesting than my opinion, the JFK assassination.

00:09:04:16 – 00:09:05:01
Unknown
But

00:09:05:00 – 00:09:06:20

00:09:06:20 – 00:09:09:04

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Unknown
A little history about Walker first.

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Unknown
For instance, a point down here.

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Unknown
He grew up on a ranch up there.

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Unknown
The ranch has been around since the 1850s,

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Unknown
finally he went into the Frontier Institute in Kerrville, which is

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Unknown
that was a military school set up in 1923 by former Texas Ranger

00:09:30:17 – 00:09:31:02
Unknown
Yep.

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Unknown
And Charles Ryder,

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Unknown
There was an all male military school.

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Unknown
Walker is right there.

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Unknown
that’s. Walker The second time left.

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Unknown
Here’s a picture of the Walker family.

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Unknown
There’s only two boys.

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Unknown
father, George Walker, and his wife, Charlotte, which is the mama’s boy,

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Unknown
gentle walk was named after his grandfather.

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Unknown
And this is the name Edwin Anderson Walker. Same name.

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Unknown
They went to the New Mexico Military Institute. That’s a private school out there in New Mexico.

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Unknown
Well, New Mexico

00:10:00:08 – 00:10:13:11
Unknown
and then he got an appointment to a U.S. military academy or West Point, 1927 by a Texas senator there who, oddly enough, championed the 18 prohibition movement

00:10:13:12 – 00:10:14:23
Unknown
over.

00:10:14:23 – 00:10:16:01
Unknown
I got that from

00:10:16:00 – 00:10:17:23
Unknown
good author names, Peter Adams.

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Unknown
he book the insurrectionists.

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Unknown
It’s a book about

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Unknown
General Walker

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Unknown
mainly in his time

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Unknown
in the fifties and sixties, very well written book, well, sort of solid sources.

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Unknown
I recommend that book for all people instead. Walker

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Unknown
I graduated in West Point and 31 is

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Unknown
especially he was field artillery. So the commission now is a second meeting.

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Unknown
here to all your book of them in 1931 at West Point.

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Unknown
that’s a real interesting description from Philip the dead.

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Unknown
says.

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Unknown
He says Walker

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Unknown
was

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Unknown
certainly an assertive,

00:11:00:06 – 00:11:03:15
Unknown
kind of aloof character back then. I guess I’m maybe a little

00:11:03:15 – 00:11:04:12
Unknown
shy. I don’t know

00:11:04:12 – 00:11:04:17

00:11:04:17 – 00:11:04:18

00:11:04:18 – 00:11:14:22
Unknown
that he wasn’t an outgoing and boisterous fellow, well understood. And he graduated, you know, down in the bottom of his class, third class.

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Unknown
Yeah. This is just the stuff of the Walker papers up in Austin

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Unknown
Briscoe Library.

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Unknown
This is one

00:11:21:22 – 00:11:26:14
Unknown
description of his military service. I’m not going to bore you. They were like, in there.

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Unknown
highly decorated

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Unknown
Silver Star for bravery, the Bronze Star cluster, and then all through the campaign. Those

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Unknown
unbelievable.

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Unknown
You have a medal by the king of Norway.

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Unknown
after the war, not the Nazi.

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Unknown
Let them. Norway and the king came back to Norway and gave him a medal.

00:11:50:10 – 00:11:53:00
Unknown
now. One of the first

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Unknown
four experiences Walker had was with the

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Unknown
unit called the Special Service Force or Special Servers.

00:12:01:09 – 00:12:08:14
Unknown
This was a joint Canadian and American commando paratrooper force.

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Unknown
this specialized force, the forerunner of the Green Berets,

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Unknown
the Rangers,

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Unknown
Navy SEALs. I mean, they’re special

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Unknown
Walker was a colonel of the third regiment of there.

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Unknown
So they went to the Aleutian Islands up there off Alaska.

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Unknown
The Japanese had gone in there because of islands over.

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Unknown
by time they got there with the Japanese early on they left.

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Unknown
So after that they went into the Europe, they went into the most hardest fought battles. It was in Italy and

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Unknown
So they saw real heavy fighting.

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Unknown
They went into Rome, liberated Rome, and then they went over to France, southern France. And this picture right here is from a Canadian library archives up here. And they’re on a boat, a Canadian boat walker through on the right and the green

00:13:02:10 – 00:13:13:10
Unknown
this is a real interesting picture. This is a turning point of a war years later. This is when he went to Korea

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Unknown
this is where it became bitter

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Unknown
about the war experience

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Unknown
and politicians and the war, as you probably know, the United Nations was created in 1947.

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Unknown
Korea was a

00:13:27:05 – 00:13:29:05
Unknown
joint it was a United Nations effort.

00:13:29:05 – 00:13:30:22
Unknown
it ended up a stalemate.

00:13:30:22 – 00:13:43:16
Unknown
Truman was involved with him. And then when Eisenhower took over when he was president, and they met just through the through the line up there. But anyway, he became bitter with the way they were not fighting the war.

00:13:43:16 – 00:13:44:09
Unknown
He was there.

00:13:44:09 – 00:13:45:18
Unknown
He was at Heartbreak Ridge

00:13:45:18 – 00:13:48:01
Unknown
Artillery Infantry.

00:13:48:01 – 00:13:59:12
Unknown
He said they could have won the war. But MacArthur said that the they quote MacArthur out. Truman did in the way they fought the war was your soul.

00:13:59:14 – 00:14:02:22
Unknown
This couldn’t shoot at certain times.

00:14:02:22 – 00:14:07:15
Unknown
new artillery, older enemy sit there and walk back up.

00:14:07:15 – 00:14:09:19
Unknown
And this was kind of the genesis of his

00:14:09:19 – 00:14:10:16
Unknown
later right wing

00:14:10:16 – 00:14:12:07
Unknown
after the Korean War.

00:14:12:07 – 00:14:13:12
Unknown
He ended up in the

00:14:13:12 – 00:14:15:23
Unknown
command of the Arkansas military district.

00:14:15:23 – 00:14:17:08
Unknown
And here he is

00:14:17:08 – 00:14:18:22
Unknown
in Little Rock, Arkansas.

00:14:18:22 – 00:14:21:06
Unknown
This was called Operation Arkansas.

00:14:21:06 – 00:14:24:13
Unknown
There was a ruling by Supreme, but familiar with

00:14:24:13 – 00:14:25:22
Unknown
Brown versus

00:14:25:22 – 00:14:35:06
Unknown
Board of Education, which gave the public schools had to be integrated. The Supreme Court ruling by Earl Warren.

00:14:35:06 – 00:14:37:14
Unknown
Walker was in that district in

00:14:37:14 – 00:14:38:17
Unknown
they were going to

00:14:38:17 – 00:14:42:17
Unknown
integrate Little Rock Central High School

00:14:42:23 – 00:14:47:09
Unknown
The governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, fought there.

00:14:47:09 – 00:14:49:12
Unknown
you had his National Guard out there and

00:14:49:12 – 00:15:00:18
Unknown
black people, the Little Rock Nine try to enroll in that high school. The National Guard turned around while Eisenhower got real mad about this.

00:15:00:18 – 00:15:09:02
Unknown
He called them up there. They went they had a meeting at Camp David with the governor and they had a handshake deal.

00:15:09:02 – 00:15:17:06
Unknown
Was going to work it out to proceed, you know, with the law of the land. Well, that didn’t happen. So what happened then

00:15:17:08 – 00:15:39:01
Unknown
plans up in Walker had to draw up plans up to get civil rights. The National Guard is command and they sent troops over to integrate that high school. So they don’t play anything but private.

00:15:39:03 – 00:15:41:12
Unknown
Privately, Walker was not

00:15:41:12 – 00:15:44:15
Unknown
Thriller. It was against

00:15:44:15 – 00:16:12:17
Unknown
theory. People didn’t think the government should be doing that. But he was in the Army and he was taken, ordered, you know, and he did efficiently. So he brought 101st Airborne over there. And they went into town and with an overwhelming force and fought around the school and next thing you know, the students were admitted and he stayed there for two years.

00:16:12:17 – 00:16:18:10
Unknown
And then later, father, he stood up and closed school and

00:16:18:10 – 00:16:21:02
Unknown
in 1959.

00:16:21:02 – 00:16:25:12
Unknown
Walker gives command of the 24th Infantry in Germany.

00:16:25:12 – 00:16:27:07
Unknown
They’re really a high, prestigious

00:16:27:07 – 00:16:27:20
Unknown
thing.

00:16:27:20 – 00:16:30:11
Unknown
This is where Walker got in problems

00:16:30:11 – 00:16:30:22
Unknown
started

00:16:30:22 – 00:16:32:17
Unknown
indoctrinating his troops

00:16:32:17 – 00:16:42:02
Unknown
with what they called the pro blue program. And this was based off his his experience in Korea.

00:16:42:06 – 00:16:51:08
Unknown
He felt that the people now are the soldiers over there now needed to know why they were out there on the line against the communists.

00:16:51:08 – 00:17:05:05
Unknown
he cross the line when he started saying, Well, you need to check the whole front line. Your your your local politicians representatives look at their voting record and stuff like that, which is a direct

00:17:05:05 – 00:17:09:04
Unknown
violation of the Hatch Act, where the military can’t do that.

00:17:09:04 – 00:17:14:01
Unknown
The whole they can’t get political you to

00:17:14:01 – 00:17:15:23
Unknown
right to do that.

00:17:15:23 – 00:17:19:05
Unknown
tabloid paper there called the Overseas weekly

00:17:19:06 – 00:17:24:23
Unknown
newspaper up there in Germany picked up on this stuff and he’s picking up the hey, this guy’s

00:17:24:23 – 00:17:27:23
Unknown
doing some John Birch stuff up there. You know,

00:17:27:23 – 00:17:41:11
Unknown
they ended up on Walker’s command. They bombed back the state. And it’s sort of another big deal in the Senate and what they call the muzzling hearings

00:17:41:11 – 00:17:42:02
Unknown
a while.

00:17:42:02 – 00:18:00:14
Unknown
It was back in 1961 in the States. He went on leave and we thought about it. And that’s when he thought he would resign. When he did hear. So on November 4th, 61,

00:18:00:14 – 00:18:10:01
Unknown
he was probably down there that whole year or down. He he turned in his resignation at Fort Sam Houston,

00:18:10:19 – 00:18:13:18
Unknown
He resigned and I gave him an honorable

00:18:13:18 – 00:18:15:10
Unknown
discharge, I guess

00:18:15:10 – 00:18:19:04
Unknown
Now people ask, why did he resign? He could retire.

00:18:19:04 – 00:18:21:14
Unknown
30 years, a little over 30 years,

00:18:21:14 – 00:18:27:16
Unknown
if he resign, that mean he would going out on inactive status.

00:18:27:16 – 00:18:42:01
Unknown
if he was on inactive status and another war broke, now he could be called back, go back into the military. He didn’t want that. And the reason he didn’t want that, that was the smell

00:18:42:01 – 00:18:44:17
Unknown
Vietnam coming right up.

00:18:44:17 – 00:18:51:05
Unknown
And he wanted nothing to do with Vietnam. You’d already been through a bad experience and he thought, this is

00:18:51:05 – 00:19:05:01
Unknown
going to be a second career where politicians run the war, you know, no fire zone, no shooting time and come to think of it, he was right. Well, that’s why he resigned.

00:19:05:03 – 00:19:09:12
Unknown
And when he resigned, a forfeited pension,

00:19:09:12 – 00:19:25:01
Unknown
Back in 62. Walker was out in California and he was visiting some of these old special service veterans. And they were kind of like a little reunion out there. And a newspaper got wind of

00:19:25:01 – 00:19:36:22
Unknown
and they were asking him how why he was associated with the John Birch Society there gives his reasons, just like an outline.

00:19:37:00 – 00:19:38:11
Unknown
You know, Korean War

00:19:38:11 – 00:19:40:14
Unknown
why they weren’t allowed to win the war.

00:19:40:14 – 00:19:44:05
Unknown
They thought the John Birch Society was a common interest.

00:19:44:05 – 00:19:46:04
Unknown
They know they thought that

00:19:46:04 – 00:19:48:19
Unknown
the communists were getting into the

00:19:48:19 – 00:19:58:18
Unknown
military in the State Department, you know, all kinds of ways to bring them into society. And that’s why he called the threat from within.

00:19:58:20 – 00:20:10:04
Unknown
And he felt that the people he would like to associate with, whether or not he was a member or not, they don’t they don’t carry cards really,

00:20:10:04 – 00:20:14:21
Unknown
What do you do then? In 1961, after resigned, he moved to Dallas

00:20:14:21 – 00:20:16:15
Unknown

  1. Dallas was

00:20:16:15 – 00:20:26:08
Unknown
let’s just say there was a lot of right wingers there, some a little strange, some of them just very conservative, all shades of whatever.

00:20:26:08 – 00:20:55:21
Unknown
he felt that it was a good base of conservatives there or money there, people with money or real conservative. And that’s why he chose to live there. And so this is where he settled eventually. 04011 billboard that Fred, we went to that house, right? Yeah. Well, I noticed the flags are upside down. Yes, the flags were upside down.

00:20:55:23 – 00:21:01:17
Unknown
He would fly those was that’s a symbol of the country in distress.

00:21:01:17 – 00:21:15:19
Unknown
Yeah. Little interesting tidbit about those flags is after President Kennedy was assassinated, you turn them on right side up. So, wow, that just shows you his mindset.

00:21:15:20 – 00:21:17:00
Unknown
You know,

00:21:17:00 – 00:21:40:13
Steve Roe:
Somebody had the bright idea that he should run for Governor of Texas.
So he accepted it, you know,
But I don’t know whether, you know, in the back of his mind, you know,
everybody knew that he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.

00:21:40:13 – 00:21:59:14
Steve Roe
But, you know, but he’s Very popular, no doubt.
So to do that, he had to run in a Democratic primary. There was nine candidates running for the Democrat primary for governor, and he ended up dead last, of course.
But he did carry his own Kerr County and out there And I think Eckhart county out there in in western Texas

00:21:59:14 – 00:22:05:15
FRED LITWIN
Why did he not run as a Republican?

00:22:05:17 – 00:22:23:18
Steve Roe:
His family was traditionally Democrat. His mother was heavily involved in the Democatic party way back in the twenties, thirties and forties.
But of course, we know who won. John Connelly.

00:22:23:20 – 00:22:54:03
Steve Roe:
This is an ad here put in by Joe Brennan, one of the Birchers in Dallas.
Then you can see the tenure of that.
You know, “the Commies are coming!”
The red scare, the United Nations, these are all talking points of the Birchers.
Theyre a bunch of wackos basically.

00:22:54:05 – 00:23:33:22
Steve Roe:
After he lost that election he milled around a bit.

I believe around for a while, he got involved with a real highly publicized Event.
Some people call it the last civil war in America.
There was going to be an integration of University of Mississippi in Oxford.

The mans name was. James Meredith, a black former Air Force veteran, a resident of Mississippi
Who wanted to move from a black college into the University of Mississippi.

00:23:33:23 – 00:24:06:02
Unknown
So the real interesting story on him,
He filled out all the paperwork and they accepted him. They wrote a letter back and he said,
“Well, thank you for the acceptance But to be honest with you, that,
I’m a black man or Negro,

And they turned around and didn’t accept Him.
So He started all this court stuff
So one or two years later hes trying to enroll.

00:24:06:04 – 00:24:38:01
Unknown
The governor of Mississippi, namely Ross Barnett, was very well, I guess you could call him a segregationist,
but he was also friends with Ted Walker.
So Walker was kind of monitoring this from Dallas.
And saw that things were heating up.
And so a little bit before September 30th, Walker actually did write a letter to President Kennedy.

00:24:38:03 – 00:25:27:17
Unknown
I don’t know if he sent it. It’s in his papers.

Scolding President Kennedy for not honoring theMonroe Doctrine, Basically just being soft on communism.

Walker got a wild idea that he was going to have this big showdown.

Let’s go over there and support Governor Ross Barnett’s efforts to keep James Meredith out of the university

So we had a little press conference in his home in Dallas
and little famous speech from,
they wanted 10,000 strong for every state state come over to Oxford,
support Governor Barnett and then bring your tents and skillets.

00:25:27:19 – 00:26:03:01
Steve Roe

So he kind of started building this up,
the press asked him
what are you going to do?

I mean, Walkers, violence, you know,
He kind of avoided that question.

He ended up going over there.
he went with one of his Bircher buddies Robert Surry.

00:26:03:03 – 00:26:37:23
Steve Roe

But from there, he ended up he went to Oxford, , September 30th,

The marshals came down.

That’s the Justice Department. Robert Kennedy and the Kennedies were monitoring this,

In the back channels, they were trying to work out a deal with Governor Barnett, who’s a Democrat,
said, hey, you need to let this guy in.

00:26:38:00 – 00:27:08:17
Unknown
You know, you’re breaking law. You know, this is the law of the land, you know, So this went back and forth like a pingpongl tournament.
Nicholas Katzenbach, in going down there, represented the Justice Department. So when were the marshals show up on the 30th.

And this was going to be the day that James Meredith was enrolled in the university where they had him sequestered back in Meredith.

00:27:08:17 – 00:27:47:11
Unknown
All of a sudden, all these people show up on campus from all over
a lot of out of towners, rednecks,Klan.

These are pretty violent processes.
And of course, the students on campus as well.
So the marshals surrounded the area and then around sevenor 730 at night on the 30th, the riot broke out.

00:27:47:13 – 00:28:17:10
Unknown
Walker was there. There’s many people that saw him there.

And he was standing by the Lyceum building up there and people were saying he was directing traffic up there, telling the rioters what to do.
He was acting like a general on the battlefield.

People knew Walker, they looked up to him.

00:28:17:12 – 00:28:49:01
Unknown
The Kennedys and the FBI knew he was there.
They were trying to find him anywhere.
This riot Breaks out. And then two people were killed.

Dozens of people were injured. Marshal, amoung them.

Kennedy ordered the army down from Tennessee.
They crossed over from the state line of Tennessee to support the marshals.

00:28:49:03 – 00:29:24:18
Unknown
These marshal were pretty brave individual because they were thowing Molotov cocktails and throwing rocks, rifle gunfire.

And at one point, the marshals tried to call Bobby Kennedy and said,
hey, they’re firing at us. Can we shoot back?

And Kennedy said, No,
Thats not what you want to hear.

00:29:24:20 – 00:29:52:07
Unknown
But in the long run, that was the right call
because had the marshals shot back and killed somebody

Then you got a bigger thing on your hands.

So the army, came down, supported them and took control.

And by four or five in the morning, everything was under control there.

00:29:52:09 – 00:30:27:14
Unknown

Walker had gone back to his motel room over in Oxford.
And then in the morning he started leave with Robert Surrey in a car, and he was stopped at a checkpoint.

And he was arrested.

They took him right back to Oxford, to the courthouse there, and they gave him two or three charges.

00:30:27:19 – 00:30:57:08
Unknown
One of them was insurrection.

In this picture, you can see him leaving the courthouse and
They were going to take him up to the airfield and fly him up to Springfield, federal prison

And it was the orders were given to from the Justice Department to have Walker go through a Psych(iatric) exam.

00:30:57:09 – 00:31:36:03
Unknown

they want to know if this guy is crazy.

He was playing reckless and doing crazy things and was he able to stand trial

He supposed to go through a 60 to 90 day examination

Well, that didn’t work out good
Walker’s lawyers got on that right away and then they started working out a deal.

00:31:36:05 – 00:32:04:08
Unknown
The original bail on Walker was 100,000.

They worked out a deal with the federal attorneys up there that Walker could go hometo Dallas would get his psych exam there,

there were three criteria in it in that exam.

00:32:04:08 – 00:32:42:11
Unknown

One of the criteria was
was he insane?

And the other one, was he able to understand what the trial was going on?

The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of all people, came to the defense of Walker.

(MATTS NOTES, I looked uo online the criteria for being sane enough for trial and found:

adequately communicate with defense counsel
understand and process information
make decisions regarding the case, and
understand the elements of the charges, the gravity of the charges, and the possible penalties. )

00:32:42:12 – 00:33:05:19
Unknown
They wrote a letter to President Kennedy and told him, You can’t do this.

You cant lock a guy up for 60 days, to do a Psych exam.

Without due representation, He didn’t have a lawyer with him

Well, that was kind of one of the main sparking points to get him out of there.

00:33:05:19 – 00:33:44:05
Unknown

And of course, the next day they were reduced to 50,000, which the Walker family and friends did manage to scrounger name. Mike Walker flies back to Dallas and goes to sacking them and he passes and did a physical exam on well and like a weekend affair where, Dr. Robert Stubblefield gave the Psych exam.

00:33:44:07 – 00:34:28:11
Unknown
Same guy that did Jack Ruby and Stubblefield was with the Southwestern Medical Teaching Hospital over there and next door to Parker and Dr. Lloyd. Was that Parker? He was in charge of the psych ward and which is up on the eighth floor. Anyway, that’s where Walker have spent the week in there. That guy has a been in contact with the lady that did actually did give them to Newman, told them to do that before they were hit, that they woke up.

00:34:28:13 – 00:34:56:11
Unknown
This is a picture of Walker back in Springfield, you know, back in love. You know, we’ve seen that before. You know, the hero’s welcome. There’s another picture of Walker going back to her hearing in Oxford at the federal Circuit Judge Fullerton, which, of course, his mother for the and to the guy on the right is Robert Moore, one of his advisors and lawyers.

00:34:56:13 – 00:35:38:07
Unknown
He’s a controversial figure again. So anyway, they go in January 21st of 63, he goes up to Oxford and the grand jury drops the charges. The government didn’t want to pursue it. So they kind of back now the deal and all around that judge honored it and dismissed it. So now Walker is a free man. Here he is going back to Dallas.

00:35:38:07 – 00:36:15:16
Unknown
But the now his real soap opera,
He caught the eye of an evangelist out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, playing Billy James Hargis

. And really, Game Targets is an interesting character. He was a radio evangelists primarily, and a lot of radio stations were broadcasting them down throughout the south. He was kind of one of these fire brimstone preachers.

00:36:15:16 – 00:37:04:07
Unknown
J Edgar Hoover called him a hillbilly preacher.

What? He’s not wrong. Not a lot of people are not aware of is he’s also known as the balloon preacher. And when I say that he was back in the fifties, he actually went to West Germany during the occupation over there. And he convinced somebody over there, over here that he was going to get a bunch of Bibles together, stick them in these balloons, launches balloons all throughout West Germany on the line, and they would eventually show up in East Germany.

00:37:04:09 – 00:37:48:02
Unknown
So we walked carefully and dropped these Bibles behind the Iron Curtain Walker, who I guess felt that at the comments where a bunch of godless people, you know, they were they didn’t they didn’t want religion. So, you know, he was against the Communists.

So Walker and Argus or Kindred Spirits. Yeah. So they decide to go out on this midnight ride to the midnight ride, you know, from Paul Revere.

00:37:48:04 – 00:38:15:15
Unknown
And they were going to give a speaking tour throughout the United States. It was a bus tour starting in Miami, you know, two or three months with like what I thought, man, I am a worker. So the whole way through the United States, all the way up to the very end of Los Angeles. So they ended up there, very successful tours, big turnouts.

00:38:15:17 – 00:38:35:22
Unknown
We got a bunch of nominations out of it. And you got a lot of listeners who were. So Walker goes on to this tour, April 8th, 1963. Then what happened a couple of days later? this

00:38:35:22 – 00:38:59:00
Unknown
pauses for second or third. That’s water. Yeah. I’ll try to get through this as quickly as I can. Okay. Back on the air.

00:38:59:02 – 00:39:00:04
Unknown
Okay, So

00:39:00:07 – 00:39:15:07
Unknown
what happened on April ten? Here is a from this that original video, a simple Bob Welch screenshot of it. Somebody drives your walker, takes a shot at it

00:39:15:13 – 00:39:17:15
Unknown
and it gets to be it hits

00:39:17:15 – 00:39:20:01
Unknown
the bottom slash of that window frame.

00:39:20:01 – 00:39:42:21
Unknown
It goes through there and you see the detective there. It looks like McIlroy may be the to Gregory Peck gives that one out that night to look at that are Van Cleve and McIlroy in some other places.

00:39:42:23 – 00:40:28:10
Unknown
What he’s looking at it there’s another view, a close up view showing the show on the shot and right below the locking mechanism and Detective Sean, it’s there. Where does it go from there? It goes over Walker’s head and goes into a wall. It strikes a wall. Now, this wall was a wall, a floating, outdated oil wallpaper looking thing, you know, with flowers on it.

00:40:28:16 – 00:41:02:05
Unknown
When this the bullets strike above what they did or did go from there, it went through about eight or nine inches of lap and plaster wall and exit out the drawing room. And the bullet was found right there laying on top of things. We walk our literature. Their pamphlets were all bundled up and there’s some laying out there in the open, and that’s what it went through.

00:41:02:05 – 00:41:46:21
Unknown
And then the there’s another picture of Walker. Walker was slightly injured that night on his right arm. He was bleeding slightly. He took a little shrapnel from probably from the bullet face. And when it shredded out, maybe from where else, you know, striking his forearm, the man in front of him is a boxer with cigaret. We now see those that Mr. Sir is wearing a light colored shirt will kind of go back to the one of these theories you have there.

00:41:46:23 – 00:42:20:00
Unknown
But there’s no death. Lot of people thought was the staged fake shooting, the publicity. He didn’t need that He already had a I mean that’s that’s just what I let’s say he was injured, you know, I mean, how do you think that, you know, go anywhere near the diagram drawn by Bob sorry, at the Warren Commission, the woman gives you Orient there?

00:42:20:02 – 00:42:57:12
Unknown
Well, the north side on the very top would be the back of the alleyway behind the Walker home. So it would be the front entrance, Turtle Creek Boulevard West is on the left. So next monologue would be Jackson, Dr. Jackson’s home. And then on the other side would be the LDS Mormon Church that was there. Okay. Now, on the north side, you’ll see a emblem there called a right.

00:42:57:14 – 00:43:49:15
Unknown
That is the window where the bullet hit that we’re sorry through it. Now, down below that, you’ll see like a little rectangle there. That’s Walker’s desk. And we’ll talk with Walker, where he sat in that story of that shooting. And that will erode to the next wall. So this picture that was found in all Walker belongings, if you look from the bottom floor, the very left corner, that is the window where the shot this this picture was taken by Oswald.

00:43:49:19 – 00:44:11:20
Unknown
This is the back is the back of the house. Yes, sir. This is the back of the house. Right. Okay. Back of the house and the driveway in the back of the house. And picture was taken off that driveway to the left. There’s a lattice there. I don’t have a picture of that, but you can see it. Yeah.

00:44:11:22 – 00:44:44:04
Unknown
And then you have the 57 Chevrolet with a bunch that license plate. We just talking about that real quick because that’s all kind of conspiracy things that car belonged to. When Walker volunteered, it was Charles Clear was his name and Dallas police went out there after all this and see if they can see that car and they found and run the license tag on it.

00:44:44:06 – 00:45:26:23
Unknown
And it was Charles clear, no doubt about it. But law Oswald approached that license plate and it was found with Lonsdale, floor pants, conspiracy things about well, I wouldn’t much doubt when they found it and I know it’s in the record, both detectives out there, Stovall and the Astros, saw it had already been punched out and in Jesse Curry’s book, there’s a picture of that.

00:45:27:01 – 00:46:00:06
Unknown
It’s laying flat on a side of other possessions was well, so look there there it is. The license plate is there is not much that was laying flat for the first. Second thing is they later found a more high resolution photo of that and he blew up and I’ve seen it on my blog articles that much Americans thought it was.

00:46:00:06 – 00:46:33:15
Unknown
The way he found it out blew it up and yeah it’s it’s got a wide border didn’t have a license plate on the lane on top of something like this. Well that is not I mean not the they all the other things anybody else. Okay. All right. Now the shooting of a 14 year old kid that live. Fred, you probably remember some of this.

00:46:33:17 – 00:47:11:04
Unknown
We went out there a couple of years ago for 14 year old kid was staying at his grandfather’s house on Luton Street near Newton Circle, called, which is directly behind the Mormon parking lot, church parking lot. He heard the shot that night and he went over backwards fence, stood up a little box, leaning up there and looked over and was looking directly the LDS parking lot.

00:47:11:06 – 00:47:39:21
Unknown
There are two men that he saw and this gets in another conspiracy them. So the FBI went out there in June of 64. So they want to do their own investigation. They didn’t talk to Walker. They didn’t want to talk to Walker. Well, they did talk to Curt Coleman. And he did talk to, I think the Jackson and Mary Lou.

00:47:39:21 – 00:48:08:10
Unknown
They there was a first person live with her and did their own investigation. So what they did was they recreated were Coleman recreated where he was standing on that back fence. And this is a picture of it. They had to highlight it and read a little bit of the ones that are about the two men, which one? Their number one and number two is.

00:48:08:11 – 00:48:50:06
Unknown
And then number one was a man getting into a car right up there at the fence line real close to Coleman. Number two guy was going to a another vehicle park along the fence line that separates the locker room and the oldest parking lot. You can see let me just say their number one, where he where Kurt Coleman first saw that guy getting into the car park with a massive one.

00:48:50:06 – 00:49:39:19
Unknown
There seem to be the right side is along the fence line where another vehicle was parked. The two is where Kirk Irwin saw this guy walk in to that car on. That’s one. So just the really another view here of it to a level view of it. So a side view of it. B is where this 1958 Chevy two door vehicle was part therefore number two.

00:49:39:21 – 00:50:10:12
Unknown
God walked in. That vehicle in the sea is the alley that goes behind the work route that you see to the right of that C mark is a very, very important there’s like a little startling fixture there. So it’s like autumn or the wood there. You know, this is where the LDS church put their trash cans this block.

00:50:10:12 – 00:50:48:21
Unknown
The view from Kirk Coleman to the alleyway where the shooting occurred. So you could, whether you believe his Oswald or whoever, Kirk Coleman did not see him through the Kirk Coleman saw the other two, the two men, very important. I remember, Fred, we went out there actually over the old concrete pad that they would say, Right, okay, there’s another view, another view of it back in the

00:50:48:21 – 00:50:53:01
Unknown
church parking lot, looking straight down the alleyway.

00:50:53:02 – 00:51:26:15
Unknown
That’s the FBI white station. Wagner Number one was wherever that man first going into that or that station wagon for remember, too, is where he saw the other guy walking through the fence. And one C is the alley right behind or either for quality pictures without trying to pull them out a little bit. So what ties Oswald to this walker to

00:51:26:15 – 00:51:55:18
Unknown
the one of the first things that happened was this letter to Marina in Russian that was found in a Russian helpful crafts book that Ruth claimed gave to the Irving police officer to the marina who was sequestered over there, I believe the Six Flags and were some other stuff, too.

00:51:55:18 – 00:52:27:00
Unknown
But anyway, this letter or a two page letter was stuck inside that little helpful hole dance book. You know, it’s the Russian book. And so anyway, by the time I got that book up to give to the Secret Service that were, you know, had her under the guard there, they of course, checked everything out. Well, they found this letter.

00:52:27:02 – 00:53:02:14
Unknown
So now they’re asking questions. What is it, the Secret Service that a Russian speaker and a person they’re writing that came in from L.A., the Russian speaking community there, And he was working with Marina. So he saw this letter and he approached Marina about that. And then he went over, asked Ruth Bain if she asked if she wrote this letter.

00:53:02:16 – 00:53:42:20
Unknown
He denied it about it. She did. But the letter is written in all Russian grammar spelling, you remember. So Paul Gregory mentioned that and said it’s brand horrendous. And that was me. That comment was made by this Russian speaking agent named to prosecute Lee on her classic You read it. And so this is terrible. So him and Marina sat down together and try to interpret the translate one of the rules.

00:53:43:02 – 00:54:24:22
Unknown
Like you can see there’s too much detail in there that only Marina in our world would know. I’m mailbox key on. Let’s see where I was. All this might be on second page anyway. You know, I’ve got a check coming in. We pay, you know, go down and cashes check. And that’s true. You get fired. Jagger Charles Stovall, I mean, we have one more check for $33 and and then there’s other details in there.

00:54:24:22 – 00:55:09:11
Unknown
You know, Adriana You know, and we did. And then there was at the newlyweds, right? You paid water and gas. Yeah, And water. You absolutely did. And for all I know, no second page of it looks like I’m doing work, you know, of the Red Cross, you know, And then the most cryptic message is at the very end, if I’m alive and thick, imprisoned there, the city jail is down there, located across the bridge, across the viaduct here.

00:55:09:13 – 00:55:43:20
Unknown
Well, that’s the county jail, actually, the city jails or would be the nevertheless, what’s going on? You know, but nowhere in this letter, as you mentioned, Walker you know, and there’s a good reason why he did it. Why would he if he left this letter, went out that night, Why would if Marina would go find this letter ahead of time?

00:55:43:22 – 00:56:17:09
Unknown
Well, he’s gone and saw Walker’s name or General Walker or whatever. So you would what’s he going to do? You know, she probably would have gone panicked, probably would have maybe run out to run out to her house and contact somebody. Maybe maybe they’d contact the police. I mean, she was already getting beaten by him several times. And, you know, he’d left her.

00:56:17:11 – 00:56:42:21
Unknown
She knew he was out of there. So that’s why he probably did it. Probably do want to know where he was going. Didn’t want to tip her All Yeah, for sure was the common sense thing. I mean, I don’t want people say that anyway, but, you know, I did a handwriting analysis, but there are a few English words in there, like a Red Cross.

00:56:42:23 – 00:57:38:02
Unknown
They picked up on that. And, you know, the sign, what it’s all about, No doubt about it. Who else? Run it. Okay. What else it would track to Who? Lee Harvey cfc5 73 is the Walker bullet. That’s the one in the archives. And to the right is C read 99, the so-called magic one. It’s not legit, but they got this from David Long Pines site Interesting thing but you can see both of them are copper jacketed with a right twist and the length of that 573.

00:57:38:04 – 00:58:15:02
Unknown
So they were smashed was what, one in 518 of L.A. The the 3399 is somewhere around three inches. So, you know, it’s definitely damaged. So they look similar. Okay. Well, when police had that that slug in their possession, they sent through a city county lab over there. PARKER They have a got a lab. You know, this gun shots and stuff over there.

00:58:15:04 – 00:58:46:10
Unknown
They just kept a little lab. They’re trying to determine what well, they sent it over there and they can determine the caliber of the bullet. It was a smashed up condition. Well, when the FBI got ahold of it, they were they were charged with. What is it? Well, the FBI did have seen these or Western bullets they’ve gotten with you once.

00:58:46:10 – 00:59:20:14
Unknown
They had 3d3994. All they did, if you see that little ring on the bottom near the base of the bullet, that’s called a cannula, the that sits inside the cartridge, the bullet projectile sits inside the bullet cartridge, and it’s the same one. Where will they be compared to each other? And that’s how they terminate the 6.5 millimeter caliber bullet.

00:59:20:16 – 00:59:59:03
Unknown
Did you want to talk now about whether it’s steel jacketed? Yes. Well, that’s good. I’m coming right up to that. Okay. I’m sorry. Go ahead. That we can wait for for that afternoon. Right, Right, Right. Now, we’re talking about the okay, the slide here for if you remember the old Town record, the initial. Yeah. Yeah. School that was mentioned in the Oliver Stone’s latest Atlantic City movie.

00:59:59:05 – 01:00:24:11
Unknown
That’s the trade. You know, they were selling records and their shoes were not on it. And then, you know, we worked together to get the high definition photos with the hard drive, right? And all that. And we worked that together. We did a lot of work a little bit way away. We ended up flying it. And so I just did the same thing with five, seven, three.

01:00:24:13 – 01:00:59:20
Unknown
Well, let’s see, one initial I can find. So I did a browse through the collection and at the base of this bullet to the left or is Emma and as in like Nancy, this is where all the arresting are actually normally investigating patrolmen that came out to the locker room at night there were two of them and I will put in Billy the Norvell.

01:00:59:22 – 01:01:24:02
Unknown
Well, the FBI came around later 64 and they were charged with trying to find and verify all these initials and stuff like that or something. And they got around seven three when they were looking for. Officer Norvell Well, he no longer work for the police force. He’s on only place for some just for a few months. Well, they finally locate him.

01:01:24:02 – 01:01:49:10
Unknown
I think he was in Arlington somewhere or Irving, and they did locate him and the bullet were them. Took it out there to his place, and they were involved in this. And he said yes to the unit. And he said, Yeah, I put in an army, you know, And on it they said, okay. So he pointed out to me to put it on the base of the bullet, near the base of the bullet.

01:01:49:12 – 01:02:30:21
Unknown
Then there it is, there’s the air. So there’s this crazy, crazy theory out there that’s really embarrassing that about it All supposed to be still jacketed bullet because they mentioned steel jacketed bullet in the case report. The detectives actually normal found that bullet later and it’s got to be is couldn’t be you know the one in the National Archives I think you know and there were several people.

01:02:30:21 – 01:03:05:07
Unknown
So this is just that’s completely nuts. I don’t care if you call a plastic bullet or or silver bullet. There’s the M on that bullet in the National Archives. And that is Billie Jean Norvill in this exactly where he described it exactly like Elmer Todd describe is. Well, they were squished. So the still jacketed bullet is just another saying it’s an embarrassment.

01:03:05:09 – 01:03:25:05
Unknown
Right? Yeah. Well, sometimes and sometimes people make mistakes. I mean, the to the conspiracy people, you’re not allowed to make a mistake at all. So it’s like if it’s if somebody just tried to steal, I mean it’s and you could easily I think you can you can speak to this you can call a cop or jacketed bullet a steel jacketed.

01:03:25:05 – 01:04:02:02
Unknown
At first glance, I imagine. Yeah. Well, this was questioned by the Warren Commission member who was one of the guys that produced the question, Robert Frazier of the FBI. He said it’s worse this effect, what do they call bullets, still jacketed bullets, because I’ve seen the case report refrigerated. The people do call it, but it’s actually a copper alloy.

01:04:02:04 – 01:04:40:06
Unknown
So Frazier explained it, but unfortunately, don’t accept that. You know, he’s, of course, referring to conspiracy in the thousand, maybe conspiracy. Yeah. Way to the high levels of government. So they may not know that I can deny it. Let’s get to this escape route. Why people are interested in this, this and the FBI, when they went back in 64, went out and, you know, they had Oswald’s pictures and they took pictures themselves of comparison.

01:04:40:08 – 01:04:59:15
Unknown
And you see that in record. And there’s a longer in the Oswald pictures were a couple of pictures of railroad tracks. Well, that’s kind of funny. I didn’t know he was a train buff. Anyway, so they were out there trying to make sense of all this.

01:04:59:15 – 01:05:11:11
Unknown
But I drew this diagram. What they theorize could be an escape route by Oswald, and he looked up little left corner.

01:05:11:11 – 01:05:48:21
Unknown
I wish my corner would work, but under under the theorized is the walker home and crosses them and they are there’s an alley that goes directly across them which is no longer you know goes all the way to Irving Avenue. Now one of Oswald’s pictures, he had a looking down the alleyway, looking toward Allendale from the parking lot.

01:05:48:22 – 01:06:21:12
Unknown
In the background was a high rise building. What building was 21 Turtle Square. And that was being constructed during the time in March of 63 being under construction. So the FBI, what they do, they try to figure out what’s going on here, they were trying to pin a date when this might have been this picture might have been taken.

01:06:21:14 – 01:06:55:17
Unknown
It was taken in January, was taken last year. So, you know, pretty good about this. You know, they went to that building that owns that building and they said, well, it’s contact. They got to hold this guy. It was kind of a I forgot it was title was it’s been passable as night. It’s all in the record and he had logs on as he was going to walk in I’m sure which can hold inspector for if J from an FHA loan or whatever.

01:06:55:19 – 01:07:26:10
Unknown
And he was keeping logs of the construction, he was keeping slides, the construction pictures of it. And they looked at this Oswald photo and they could count the floors, but they know one thing. They noticed that there was no crane work going on, nobody working very fast, Moore told me. Well, they don’t work with you. so this would probably take him away.

01:07:26:10 – 01:07:58:20
Unknown
Camp and which we were then, I think the night March 9th or March ten, I think it was March 10th, because March 9th. But, you know, I tracked him down. Oswald was doing overtime at the Jaggers that day, which meant it’s better to think of anyway, So this picture was back there. So while we would take a picture like that, where would we shoot now?

01:07:58:20 – 01:08:30:14
Unknown
In the alleyway there, you know. So I just did a little recon themselves. They were looking to go straight down that alley. It ends up on Irving Avenue. And where did you go from there? Well, we could have gone down to Turtle Creek or wherever. So just kind of mill around there or around there. And then they noticed a 90 foot footpath going up there, not too close toward Blackburn Street, but not that far.

01:08:30:16 – 01:09:14:04
Unknown
We’re going up from the street. That turtle drive was the railroad tracks, which is the Missouri, Kansas, Texas railroad tracks. It’s no longer there. It’s now the Katy Track through right along that 90 foot footpath with the brush miles going up, there will be spot. We need a rifle right there. One of those railroad pictures up there. They noticed the railroad tie was going on them up on one side kind of water.

01:09:14:06 – 01:09:43:04
Unknown
So they went and rocked that track and they found it and then they noticed that that footpath wasn’t real close to the well. Maybe you just give a clue in. This is all a theory, Of course. Okay. Yeah. So anyway, they said, well, where do you go from there. From Marina. These, the city called the bus like since you know, we probably did.

01:09:43:06 – 01:10:29:10
Unknown
So they just tracked down a metro little railroad tracks down to the railroad trestle that crosses over to Blackburn Street there in the lower part of the picture. What, down Blackburn Street and on the corner of Cole Street and Blackburn is bus stop and it was there is still there and that was a bus stop. Well actually they start checking the bus lines do you know what would run that night I created the mousetrap engine bus.

01:10:29:12 – 01:10:56:17
Unknown
So they went through it and they found the bishop line. Which of number? Line number four would come right out of SMU, which would be on the right side of the picture there goes right down cold street to Blackburn and then takes a left from Blackburn, goes in the downtown, goes through downtown, crosses the viaduct over an oak cliff and goes down Bishop Street.

01:10:56:19 – 01:11:21:00
Unknown
And then from Bishop Street to Main Street. It probably wasn’t a bus stop there, but it got off right there near it and would be 1/10 of a mile walk through is really a four. So it was a doable idea. It was doable. That’s what we’re trying to prove. Might might Oswald’s have

01:11:21:00 – 01:11:27:11
Unknown
buried his rifle with his raincoat to protect it, to conceal it.

01:11:27:13 – 01:12:03:11
Unknown
One main thing, it’s a big Marine trench coat, right? Long, long waisted and a great long you know, it’s got to do, you know, this is this is this rifle is practically carbon, but it was 40 inches over one in 36, but it got a 48, you know, now making one year or a 36 year old, I could see liability, you know, I should back up and save a little bit.

01:12:03:13 – 01:12:35:18
Unknown
That time after March 10th. Two days later, he ordered a client rifle for the post office. Two days later we mailed it and he probably mailed off the seaport trader revolver as well. So close to that time, if not the same day. Right. So, you know, you just got to know what time they were going to come and a little bit more money.

01:12:35:19 – 01:13:07:20
Unknown
Why not buy a rifle with the seal Bailey on carbine on shorter. And so that’s what he did. And then probably wrapped it up in his raincoat and took it over there. We had it and he went out there before one time earlier and longer probably wasn’t there. And the station back where he had it, and I don’t know if he had who knows if he had an raincoat or where.

01:13:07:20 – 01:13:43:01
Unknown
The rifle in the brush. I don’t know. Right. Have nobody knows that. You know, this is all in dark. Makes you wonder why he wore black old backyard pictures of far away We were on well after that shooting all that you know everybody knows the whole story with New Orleans and he came back to Dallas and then finally had a job with the Texas Schoolbook Depository.

01:13:43:03 – 01:14:40:23
Unknown
And then they he was it got him. Exactly. Run. October 23 of 63. So there was a Walker rally at Dallas Memorial Auditorium. That’s Memorial Auditorium. I don’t know if it’s still there or not. The one with the big actually, the Beatles played there in 1963. They were there were when all these Walker people, friends that Adlai Stevenson was coming to town to give a speech on the invitation of Stanley Marcus, the Neiman Marcus store name, a real prominent businessman.

01:14:41:01 – 01:15:11:07
Unknown
It was Jewish. The but you know, it was I was it was a liberal, but it was not a liberal firm, he would say today. I mean, he was very practical man. I mean, very smart, extremely poor. And they weren’t he invited Adlai Stevenson to come down there from the United Nations to give a speech. Well, Walker, people got wind of the this was going to happen down there.

01:15:11:09 – 01:15:49:05
Unknown
And to my research and look, there probably Robert, sir, that really have involved with it in security not in the Dallas laboratory and for a rally day, the US rally day, the night before the Adlai Stevenson, they had to rent this thing out the night before the Stevenson trial and workers had anything worse than the United Nations. And so, I mean, they’re signed all over Dallas, you know, bumper sticker to get U.N. out of the U.S. marchers.

01:15:49:06 – 01:16:20:07
Unknown
Remember? So they they organized this night and you have today was a proclamation by Governor Connally. They would be like the USA and Texas, whatever, that William and the Walker people jumped on it and never have a U.S. They were. So why they did this and it was 8:00 at night and you can see the mission were free.

01:16:20:09 – 01:16:57:03
Unknown
I can’t remember how many thousands of people were there, but certainly under 5000, maybe 2000, maybe 3000 for a lot of these right wingers. Walker friends showed up and Walker gave a speech. And, you know, he just went over mental predatory stuff and got them all riled up, you know, And so when you think about it, your version of them get riled up about it.

01:16:57:05 – 01:17:48:08
Unknown
And it was Lee Harvey Oswald. He was there night since the walker that is or his writings this was the Arnold Johnson exhibit Oral Johnson was with the Communist Party then there for years SIPA USA and he was writing to well know but in this letter he mentions I’ve got to cut off here but anyway you can us ACLU meeting excuse me Southern Methodist University SMU they old speech they’re talking about and he got up and talked about Walker but ultra right in Dallas and Lee’s right October 23rd.

01:17:48:08 – 01:18:26:21
Unknown
I you know you read through anyway I tend to mean by Edward Walker in Dallas reading was preceded one day before the attack on Adlai Stevenson. We people know that so he goes on and bottom there is as you can see, the friction between left and right is very great here. Well yeah, that’s true. But I don’t know everybody in Dallas left the right mean the right people.

01:18:26:21 – 01:18:57:07
Unknown
Okay, right. We’re kind of a small minority, but aside from one very, very vocal. But anyway, author was there while he was there is talking and see you were there with Michael Paine. Did you go or that was not or there was an ACLU meeting with Michael Paine? Yes. Michael Paine With Oswald. To the ACLU. Yeah, to Kristin Crystal Lake happens and name was a friend of Michael Brown.

01:18:57:07 – 01:19:20:03
Unknown
These are females who got an a heated discussion with. But yeah, we stood up and talked about the war. I guess you could take his words, but he was writing about it. I don’t know why he was there. Or maybe word. I was like, You’re going to kill the human. You can bear himself. But we got out of there.

01:19:20:03 – 01:20:14:08
Unknown
But you know, so fascinating. Yeah. This is at the Adlai Stevenson speech the very next day. And it’s what, a lot a lot of shame on Dallas. Walker had riled up a lot of these people the night before. And yesterday he was going to go because it’s Adlai Stevenson was free to walk free and this picture here from Dallas Public Library is the guy in the middle standing up in the crowd is a guy be would be read sort of the national indignation convention 39.

01:20:14:12 – 01:20:44:11
Unknown
And I wanted to say that when it was all about protest about the in 61 about the they found out their air force base north of Dallas that the Air Force was training Yugoslavian pilots to fly their planes. So these people got all mad and well, this is a comment, but people, you know, so I thought you, this is it.

01:20:44:11 – 01:21:28:16
Unknown
You know, the commies are here and they’re taking over and our government is training them up and they want McGahee very anti-union, probably a merger. These guys drifted over that much but stood up and started making a ruckus, was interrupting Adlai Stevenson speech and seems as if on stage. And Stanley Marcus was onstage, sitting, sitting in a chair and this McGuinty kid just kept getting up and interrupt them, yelling at him, ask him questions, just disrupt what I mean, you he gets thrown out of the middle.

01:21:28:18 – 01:22:01:09
Unknown
Well, interesting story about this one. All these Walker people get in here, Stanley. Mark, this was, you know, rarity, concerned about the boisterous right wingers in Dallas. You know, they would yeah, it was really worried about Adlai Stevenson. So had a guy that was working for him that a security man was a friend of Jesse Curry’s security of Dallas police.

01:22:01:10 – 01:22:40:09
Unknown
And we had him go over there and talk to Curry and say, look, this is coming up. You know, we count on you guys. We have adequate security to Mr. Stevenson. Curry assured him, yes, we would. So we went back to Mark as a doorman to make sure everything’s okay. And well, anyway, come to find out when they start opening the doors to orient the police.

01:22:40:09 – 01:23:06:15
Unknown
There weren’t a big police presence, so they arrived later. So all these Walker supporters and right wingers, conservatives got in there and got their seats free. So they had a whole big contemporary these know, like Frank McGee just this was going up and down fine Confederate flags, air horns, you name it. So they were carrying all kinds of stuff.

01:23:06:17 – 01:23:37:17
Unknown
And I mean, just trying to embarrass students and interrupt them. So anyway, and meanwhile, it seems to get through speech, you know, and they start to leave. And this is when he gets hit over the head with a placard by a burger lady in court forever. She’s not back then it gets spit upon by the University of North Texas student Robert Hemphill.

01:23:37:19 – 01:24:06:04
Unknown
And anyway, Sam, Architects looking at him in the car and we’re starting to shake the car and everything. They got him out of here, a run over, people getting out of there. But, you know, I mean, it was a just a shameful event. And it’s as well as we’re talking about, and it’s so shameful that the mayor, Earl Campbell, gave a public apology.

01:24:06:06 – 01:25:09:19
Unknown
You know, in the newspapers. And that’s when you really turn on the right wing outlets and probably thought bad. Now what did I give that after Walker? I think the people their little little side story we’re getting toward the end here got who else thought General Walker was up to it? Well, Jack Ruby, of course. Why not? Yeah, that’s the first the first noted conspiracy theories and mostly people in those both in or well read know about Ruby Warren how he reacted that they on the 22nd you know Ruby found that watchman ad in the Dallas Morning News all upset about it one of the sisters now similar to her and you know, Ruby was

01:25:09:21 – 01:25:46:06
Unknown
very sensitive to his own faith. You know, and he knew that the Walker people, the Birchers and all and all these conservatives were were anti-Semitic. He knew that you couldn’t help. But I mean, they were they were people back in a year before. That was it a year or two months before that were putting swastikas on decals on the Jewish merchants downtown, some commissary nearby where Ruby had his blow.

01:25:46:08 – 01:26:23:18
Unknown
You know, he was very sensitive to anti-Semitism. And he he got into a lot of fights in the military. He would really it really bothered him and he noticed it wherever it was. Yes. Yes. You a very, very tough to love. Anyway, this is Robert Somerville writing up about Ruby on his the psych exam. And Ruby talks about taking that prelude and guys probably know very Prelude was an upper Let’s be diabolical back in the darkroom, you take those of you to stay awake.

01:26:23:18 – 01:26:54:08
Unknown
You know, we kept on our night out with his clubs and we go there when they close, collect the money well up. So we talked about Ray Lewis. What? I don’t know what this thing is, is if you combine liquor with CRB, I don’t care about about things. I don’t know what CRT stands for in, in your student research research out there.

01:26:54:08 – 01:27:37:23
Unknown
Know what he’s talking about. What was a drug or that pill or what not all we have taught him there you know he’s talking about the whites and the it’s it’s very detrimental to my people. We’re always a scapegoat or worse truth. I thought Jim Walker might be behind the shooting and he did it in the film that we’ve never a well, that’s kind of General Walker’s bizarre behavior.

01:27:38:01 – 01:28:08:12
Unknown
And that’s all I want to address a sensitive subject. I don’t want to really get down on this, but General Walker was a closet homosexual. They kept it secret all his life. But most of them then, you know, back then, especially here in the military, I mean, you could be booted out of the military, found out they kept it well-hidden, but there were whispers about it.

01:28:08:14 – 01:28:43:16
Unknown
He was arrested twice, was 76 and 77. I think it was. You know, I have those arrest records, but I was just slaves down some improper things with an undercover agent that you got arrested. And so that was in the seventies. And then and before that, in 72, if you recall, Governor George Wallace, which was Walker, was one of the big supporters.

01:28:43:18 – 01:29:26:01
Unknown
He led wars in fact, he attended Wallace’s speech here in Dallas four days before the assassination, when Arthur Bremer took that shot at Governor Wallace over there, paralyzed. I was critical of the law. Walker not really upset so many heads down to the park. I can’t remember the name. The partnership, the derivative on heart rate or whatever. And he goes down there and the it was like a midnight vigil.

01:29:26:03 – 01:30:08:14
Unknown
The heart for Governor Wallace And I’m sure there there’s a lot of people screaming for that. Well, anyway, the park has a curfew, I think curfew after midnight. Anyway, police went over there and tried to get him leave. Leave and he says, no, I’m not going anywhere. So I ended up arresting them, taking them downtown. And this picture right here is taken off film slide off where we William Jones archive.

01:30:08:16 – 01:30:42:06
Unknown
Excellent, really excellent work on these old brilliant films and really cleaning them up and let me this is this is Walker with a goatee look at all fancy now walking out of courtroom number five for this for this hearing for his violation. Walker insisted to be arrested. Go figure. Not at all. But he is increasingly getting more and more bizarre.

01:30:42:08 – 01:31:14:22
Unknown
I mean, to the point, you know, after assassination, these these right wingers all kind of kept a lower profile for, say, was very embarrassing. They were very entertaining and it would be a bad place to do that. So so we kind of went to, you know, a shooting story. When the shooting started, more people would come out. So they less and less people were interested in him, you know.

01:31:15:00 – 01:31:47:19
Unknown
So he started being kind of like a reclusive black individual. You know, if you’re you’d go out and you’ll see people let you know he wouldn’t one big proper guy that it was back in 60 what Walker do later he got his retirement back in 1982. He had a lawyer work on their and I got sent over to the Department of Defense.

01:31:47:21 – 01:32:22:04
Unknown
Then the palm prints decided not to subject to it. And I said, okay. After all, he had given pretty damn good service, you know. So did he get his pension back? You did, sir. It is difficult. 1982. You have this honorable discharge and retirement out of that. Well, he’s get a little financially strapped. They’re a little later. You know, you had a you had a big lawsuit that he won initially.

01:32:22:06 – 01:32:52:20
Unknown
And you’ll see Associated Press in the lower courts in Texas over the Ole Miss riots. What the grand jury, that they tried to sue him for libel and all that. And of course, we had many outlets, you know, reflect your own well on that, too. But he won that. And I think 108 Supreme Court of Texas, let it got knocked down.

01:32:52:21 – 01:33:25:06
Unknown
Enron, the US Supreme Court for all of us spring break. We fought it, Victor. Nearly one reason they did win because at that point these papers could not be sued for libel or political figures like somebody in office. If you’re talking about Senator so-and-so, you know, you know, went after he kicked his dog, whatever, You going to get sued for that?

01:33:25:08 – 01:34:17:13
Unknown
Well, Supreme Court extended that the public for years. So that’s a big ruling. And Walker didn’t give his $500,000. So that’s where it. Chief, you know what happened, General? He died in 1993. The this is the the governor of the state of Texas. And he died. The official cause of death was like all good. The the hard time pronouncing February that’s the heart ventricle goes into a like like a out of rhythm bill right.

01:34:17:18 – 01:34:54:10
Unknown
Some people call it a few of you know where you order for broken then the cause of that initially was pulmonary which was a direct result of is years and years. Smoke is just pretty heavy smoker he probably had emphysema or whatever, but he died at his home. We moved obituary years before he died. Another home there close to love Will.

01:34:54:12 – 01:35:28:01
Unknown
And that’s what happened this week. So he is buried down here in CenterPoint, Texas, and you’ll see a video about that. Perhaps we can go see that. That’s the family grave side me earlier and that’s where he’s laid to rest. And that pretty much concludes my long conversation. And thank you very much. Alive. The big question I want to ask you is what do you know?

01:35:28:03 – 01:36:00:15
Unknown
To me, it’s an open and shut case, but what what do you say to conspiracy people who seem to find a variety of minutia to claim that Oswald was not guilty of trying to kill Walker? The reason they do this, they do this, or they can essentially they take certain particular claims out of context where they like still jack jacketed bullet, but they don’t look at the walker, the letter of the marina.

01:36:00:16 – 01:36:29:21
Unknown
So you have to look at all the totality of evidence. Does it make sense? Does it follow that rational? You have to to look at everything. I mean I mean, that’s just the only sense. I mean, but, you know, these people are I don’t want to really get down on to horror here, but there’s people that are emotionally attached to Oswald that that will just defend him to no degree.

01:36:29:22 – 01:36:55:10
Unknown
But we got to look at all the evidence. And so we have to look at these pictures he took or they took these pictures. What earlier were his rifle right there close to the Walker shooting? What did he take? Backyard photos dressed up in black with two, four, or why? Why did it why did why did he why did he shoe Kennedy and take a shot at Walker when they’re there?

01:36:55:15 – 01:37:27:07
Unknown
Different people. yeah. That’s another thing. Yeah. No. Well if you understand these factors, you know, but you know Kennedy, you know, he never felt bad. But that’s not true. That is not true. He did. He did say some bad things, but he was insensitive. Kennedy’s Cuba policy. Yeah. Yeah. And you know that. You remember our trip down to New Orleans?

01:37:27:09 – 01:38:01:13
Unknown
we went down to the Lafayette Library to, yeah, close walking distance to this Magnet Street magazine street apartment. And in that book, in that library there was about William Manchester’s book, Portrait of a President before the Kennedy assassination, talking about President Carter. Well, guess somebody stamps their place of Cuba in the flyleaf of that book, you know, New Orleans, that’s that’s that’s in the record.

01:38:01:15 – 01:38:24:02
Unknown
You know, you have to find that, you know, he was he was an unhinged individual and he said it to say he’s he’s a pretty smart guy. I mean, you tell him and you read he was a wily coyote type of guy, but he’s a very arrogant. So, you know, I, I mean, he hardly get along with anybody.

01:38:24:04 – 01:38:52:09
Unknown
So maybe the more you think that is why it doesn’t make sense. You know, of course, he tried to hit a motive. Well, you know what to do this way. You that, you know, I think you’re just mad at the world in general. That’s that’s why. But of course, they’re not going to believe me anyway. No, they’re definitely they’re not going to believe you no matter what you say.


You know, it doesn’t matter. I mean, we have to they have to paint Oswald as completely innocent. Innocent as the the white snow around us. And It’s just it’s unbelievable. Yes. Yes, it is. It really is. Isn’t there something in general, more or less, the House Select Committee hearings Tuesday, I think they got something wrong. The wrong bullet.


You mean he we thought that’s not the bullet, but he was thinking the wrong thing. Yes, let me explain that. I went through the Walker papers over and that’s another badly misinterpreted thing. Walker not objecting to. Walker was objecting to the House Select Committee News, watching the televised hearings on TV and. Somebody held up the bullet that he thought was like a pristine bullet, just the bullet like C 399.
Walker was objecting. That was not the bullet that that shot at him easily is described as a hunka lit. And it pretty much was only one side of it. He was objecting to that. He was not objecting to. Well, that’s not the bullet that’s in the next longer. Well, this got all the way back to I guess somebody now selectable this is get the root of this and somebody at the Justice Department, Robert Coutu, is named all over.


A representative from the National Archives. Got that bullet out of the archives, went over to the FBI lab with the microscopes and knew that intimately. And they said, let’s it you know where the initial here’s the evidence boxes. We have Carl Davis name on there but they just badly misinterpret that and then they keep repeating it like it’s fact.

01:40:48:07 – 01:41:14:19
Unknown
Right. But you can’t you know, I don’t know. I mean, I just hope somebody with two brain cells out there can figure it out then. Well, look, thank you very much for for being on on the trail. The usual. We’ll have to save your story about C 399 and the initials on that for another episode. But it thank you very much.


A lot of fun lucky for us thank you for taking time out and good work.