What Has The Government Been Hiding? 54 Years of Secrets & the Release of the JFK Records

[Music] good afternoon welcome to the sixth floor Museum at Dealey Plaza I'm Nicola long for the executive director this afternoon's program features a good friend to the museum dr. Larry Sabato director of the Center for politics at the University of Virginia and author of the fabulous book the Kennedy half century the presidency assassination and lasting legacy of John F Kennedy our award-winning author and journalist Phillip Sheen an author of a cool and shocking act the secret history of the Kennedy assassination and our moderator Dave Davies reporter and public radio contributor and fill-in host for fresh air at WH Yui FM in Philadelphia welcome all back to Texas this afternoon's program what has the government been hiding fifty-four years of Secrets and the release of the JFK records is the museum's response to the all anticipated curiosity calls and inquiries that we have received in the past months on the mandated release of the JFK records we are extremely grateful for all our speakers today for flying to Dallas to address this utterly absorbing and timely topic and to help place now into a meaningful and relevant contextual framework the significance of these records that are now being made publicly accessible after more than five decades of secrecy I'd like to recognize one of our museum founders Linda Lynn Adams for all her commitment and Verve for more than 30 years ago she worked so hard and tirelessly with some others actually in this room and med we did I saw you come in and she was also a founding board member but so this has been a very difficult story to tell in this city over the years and I'd like to thank them and also to our current board members Ken mangas and Lynn Novak and I was Dean Halima thank you very much for being here and for your leadership and I'd also like to thank the valiant team here at the sixth floor museum because it goes into planning these events and we're so extremely grateful and there are also others of you in this audience so I'm not going to mention but you know who you are who have very deep personal connections to this complicated assassination story and we're so grateful to all of you I'll acknowledge some of you in this room and the last like comment I'd like to make before turning over the stage to Dave Davies as we remember the centennial of Jay john f kennedy's birth this year and we're approaching the anniversary assassination next year 55 years but don't forget that the memorial that the citizens of Dallas worked so hard to create and offered to the city in 1970 the Philip Johnson Kennedy Memorial Plaza this is a significant memorial space a public space that is often misunderstood poorly appreciated and it is really a powerful place for reflection and it's an honor to the spirit of President Kennedy's life and this memorial needs a lot of attention and restoration work if you go out and look at it it's an actual disgrace so today we are making taking a collection for those of you who would like to contribute it to that restoration this is a community-wide effort that is being spearheaded by the sixth floor museum and this is local government property but this really needs to be a community shared effort so without wasting any more time I'd like to pass the stage over to Dave Davies thank you so much and please give a huge round of applause to our speakers let me just begin by reminding everyone to if you haven't thought of it silence your cellphone's or any other secret receivers or transmitters you might have and also I'll just note that the way we're gonna do this is we're gonna have a conversation for about 45 minutes and then we're gonna take questions that you will have submitted on those index cards so please take advantage of those and give us some interesting material to talk about um you know we're all here because we share something right and that's this interest in this fascinating crime you know more than a half-century ago and I just want to begin by asking the two of you what got you interested in the assassination what aspect of it really stirred your curiosity Larry Sabato well I'll be brief which is unusual for a professor but the truth is I'm I'm actually much more interested in the Kennedy life in presidency because I grew up in Norfolk Virginia Catholic family and some of you who are Catholic and remember that time it was quite literally an extra sacrament the eighth sacrament to support and vote for John F Kennedy 80% of Catholics did I knew nothing about politics I didn't think I knew Eisenhower was president but when I heard people at my elementary school talk about John F Kennedy was a priest some of the nuns I said to my dad well I want to do something and so he he took me out we went to the Democratic headquarters and we got a bunch of Kennedy for president literature and I went door-to-door in my neighborhood I was seven years old you would think that would be cute for most people it was but my most vivid memory is of a lady I didn't know it was several streets over who who simply said to me we don't support Papists and slam the door and it helps to toughen you up at seven it was good but I saw President Kennedy saw candidate Kennedy it's the only time I ever saw President candidate Kennedy four days before the election four and a half days when he happened to come to Norfolk they believe mistakenly that he was gonna carry Virginia and I followed along with my classmates and teachers that administration almost day by day was very important to us and that was how I got interested in the assassination because it was devastating I still remember having nightmare after nightmare and I'm sure that was true for most most children maybe adults at the time she didn't you covered a lot of stuff over the years what got you into the assassination well you know I'm not quite old enough to remember the assassination but you know I've certainly raised with an image of this golden legacy of John F Kennedy I didn't get much involved in questions about the assassination no over my lifetime what happened is I was minding my own business at my desk in the Washington bureau of the New York Times and the phone rang and it was quite a prominent American lawyer this is 2008 who said I had just published a book about the 9/11 Commission and he said I see you've got some nice refused wouldn't you like to do a similar book about the Kennedy assassination and about the Warren Commission and that is how I got involved in this and I went into this project thinking that he was I was able to explain the 9/11 conspiracy surely it will be easy to explain the Kennedy assassination which turned out to be a enormous mistake and I got lost in this subject for several years but at the end of this I produced a book about that began as a history of the Warren Commission and I must admit over the course of my work on that book I have been fascinated to discover that there's much more to that story than I ever knew and that I think most of the American public knows um I wonder how many of us in this room have believed at some point in a conspiracy theory about the assassination broadly defined I mean I'll raise my hand to that right okay all right Larry you write I mean she's me Philip that there was a real conspiracy and we can see it and it was the conspiracy to cover up what happened when the Warren Commission the Commission appointed by President Johnson after the assassination set about doing its work got some terrific investigators many of whom you interviewed how far did the FBI and CIA go in keeping evidence from the Warren Commission well that was my discovery others had discovered it before but I was struck by how much basic evidence had been hidden from the Warren Commission in 1964 how many important witnesses had never been interviewed and it's very clear in the hours after the assassination that both the CIA and the FBI set up to destroy evidence of what they had known about this man Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination and the story seems to be in many ways that there was a conspiracy there was a cover-up and they wanted to cover up just how much more they had known about this man Oswald and the threat he posed to President Kennedy Larry you write in your book about all the witnesses at Dealey Plaza who were never even contacted or interviewed by the Warren Commission what's been the impact of an investigation that didn't didn't look at what it should have well we've had fifty-four years of speculation and conspiracy and you can really date the decline of public confidence in government from November 22nd 1963 before before that at least for the post-world War two period I think people were optimistic they knew the United States had the premier position in the world and all the rest of it but the process began the deterioration in Americans trust in their own government they thought their government was lying to them and I agree with what Philip has just said I do want to say this for the Warren Commission I know you were you were kind to them in your book you were understanding about what what they had been through the staff deserves credit for doing what they could do with the information and the resources they were given President Johnson wanted it done quickly for his own reasons he was running for re-election in November he wanted it done well before that and most importantly he and Jagger Hoover and plenty of others wanted to make sure that Americans didn't think that Castro or Khrushchev that is two communist countries were involved in any way shape or form because it could lead to nuclear war well I don't think any of us in here would have wanted that I lived a mile from the largest naval base in the world nor Virginia and I would be I would be here I would be obliterated despite duck-and-cover wouldn't it work so you know I my personal opinion is that the CIA and the FBI and probably others in the administration simply did not want the embarrassment did not want to have to explain how they let this very strange individual one of I believe mining people to defect Americans to defect to the Soviet Union you had to be nuts to defect to the Soviet Union it was not a worker's paradise no matter what they said it was a horrible horrible place and and he did that and then came back and did a lot of other things they found strange like the Mexico City trip that we still don't fully understand and yet they let him slip through their fingers they knew they had let him slip through their fingers and they didn't want to face the questions that would come from the public what this is this was a preventable assassination so in the effort to reassure the American public there was no conspiracy they spawned conspiracy theories for decades and is also fascinating that so many of the principles President Johnson Robert Kennedy believed that he had been killed by a conspiracy let's let's turn to the new documents why are we now this year seeing thousands of documents why were they classified in the first place why are they being released now well we're seeing them because of Oliver Stone and his movie in 1991 JFK which really spun a million conspiracy theories about the assassination and really shaped shaped the thinking of a new generation about the assassination and because of the furor created by that film Congress passed a law the following year that forced the release of all documents in the government's files related to the assassination and put a 25 year deadline on release of those files and that 25 year deadline is what passed last month unfortunately the government didn't release the didn't meet the deadline to release all those documents and maybe or maybe not will see them before before April of next year so thousands have been released President Trump said he was going to withhold some Larry right at the request of the CIA and the FBI I believe he said that could do irreversible harm to our national security if they did I think Phil's being being awfully tough here they only had 25 years that's right I mean that's that's like that in governmental terms but they had no intention of releasing and the FBI and the CIA leadership were hoping that the president in office at the time when that date approached October 26 2017 would be sympathetic to their view that it would be unnecessary for the American public to see it it would cause irreparable harm to them and their credibility again it's 54 years ago who's gonna hold the current leadership of the CIA and the FBI which uses other methods and people and wasn't there at the time who's gonna hold them responsible for what happened in the late 50s and early 60s leading up to the assassination so it's unfortunate President Trump to his credit and you know I wouldn't call myself his greatest advocate but to his credit he he has pushed reasonably hard for the documents to be released now the true test will come in April but I I'm convinced that if they had had a more sympathetic president that is the FBI and the CIA we wouldn't be seeing most of what we're seeing now including 10,000 documents most of them old but a hundred and forty-four new ones from the FBI just yesterday we've been going through those on this trip so we've got something to work with now not that there's necessarily going to be spectacular revelations right so so do either do you see any legitimate reason for withholding this stuff now no I don't know okay other than if there is somebody you don't know what you don't know we've covered maybe 20% of it we've had a lot of people working on it including a lot of my students they love this and they've actually gotten into history on account of it that got to love history on account of it but it's only been a little while we've got a long way to go maybe there's something important in there I think we both believe there may be the names of people who were informants or agents of the CIA in the FBI in 1964 who might still be alive might be living overseas and might be in danger if their identities were exposed but that has to be a very small number of people and they can be protected if need be so I'm still assets that might be in danger in theory I just spent one just to give an example of the worthlessness of these redactions there's one memo from I believe the NSA to the government of an unnamed country but it's clearly in Central or South America served by Pan American Airlines and the day after the assassination someone their rights to somebody high up in that government and says we don't believe that your delegation to the to President Kennedy's funeral is senior enough and we believe that you should should add people at a more senior level more appropriate to the funeral which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do but they redact the name of the country yeah the leaders of that country I'm sure a long-dead and that's it that's an useful footnote in history maybe it's more than a footnote in that country but why can't we know that we're adults I think we can handle this don't you really and the danger is when something's not released the speculation about what might have been there can be more harmful you know these documents are available to everyone on the National Archives website and when you look at them what you will see is that there will be a memo from the San Diego office of the FBI to the to the Director of the FBI and a lot of it's full of acronyms and abbreviations and notations which would be unscrewed able to inscrutable Thank You inscrutable to to the uninformed what happen what are you to do when you look at these and or it's just a case where we're gonna the country's gonna crowdsource them and maybe find things that well it's gonna take years that's what I'll you had this very same thing happened to you on the day the first batch came out leading up to that a couple weeks worth of press calls not you you were very thoughtful but for us press people saying look we're gonna schedule a story for this on the afternoon of the release can you can we call you that afternoon a rundown on what's in there though there are hundreds of thousands of pages you know there's no way in the world to do it but we press widely preemptively wrote a newspaper also saying that it was going to be a mess when it happened and it was it was it wasn't that so we put them in different categories some of them you can interpret immediately and they're interesting and and there's a nugget that everybody can seize on in as you mentioned in other cases so many acronyms and it's just a vacuum-cleaner of gossip and and intercepts and nobody can figure out what it is or it's going to take years to figure out what it means so have you seen anything that sheds new light on important questions well we should be cleared that there was a there were a batch of about 3000 super-secret documents that we've not seen a word of until this most recent release and most of those documents are still secret today we still don't happen the documents we've gotten our mostly documents that had been released in the past in part we've got fuller versions of them but often we don't have complete versions that's right I I in the in the batches since October I haven't seen much that's all that newer different there was some there were some interesting releases over the summer they did put out an initial batch in July and there were a couple of documents in there that really were useful but in the most recent batch know you've in some of the documents that came out earlier this year in you you've plumbed a material on a subject that you have written about in your book and that is Osso alts trip to Mexico City about six weeks before the assassination when he visited the Soviet and Cuban give us a sense of what the what what are the interesting questions raised by that trip and what have we learned well this whole business about Mexico City is the great untold story I think of the Kennedy assassination saga and I don't think most Americans know anything about it which is that Lee Harvey Oswald just six weeks before the assassination takes a trip to Mexico City now remember Oswald's 24 years old former Marine knows how to handle a weapon and they declared Marxist who once tried to defect to the Soviet Union and we know from previously declassified files that Oswald while he's in Mexico is meeting with Cuban spies and Russian spies and Mexicans who are very supportive of Castro's revolution there's reason to believe that Oswald talks about killing Kennedy when he's in Mexico City and it's very clear from the record that the FBI and the CIA were determined not to get to the bottom of what happened in Mexico City and a lot of the documents that are still secret involved this Mexico City trip and what the CIA knew about Oswald in Mexico City and we also know that the CIA was following Oswald in Mexico City anyway one of the documents that we got over the summer was a document that revealed that in the years after the assassination the CIA weighed a theory in-house that suggested a motive for Oswald to have killed Kennedy which is something the Warren Commission duck they really didn't answer the question of Oswald's motives but it seems that the CIA believed that Oswald may have read a particular newspaper article just a few weeks before the assassination that revealed that Fidel Castro was under threat of assassination by the Kennedy administration that Oswald became enraged on Castro's behalf and then set out to kill Kennedy to kill Kennedy before Kennedy could kill Castro and that makes a lot of sense and it's interesting to see that the CIA month years after the assassination is weighing whether or not there really was a different story about the killing of the President right and we should note that although it's now established fact that the United States had entered several plots to kill Castro this was not known at the time of assassinate assassination and was kept from the Warren Commission so they couldn't they had no reason to explore that as a potential motive let's just go take one further step into the Mexico trip there's a woman named Sylvia Duran a Mexican national who worked for the Cuban embassy she's an interesting figure in this tell us about she's fascinating and she's still alive and I hope somebody is able to really get her to tell the full story but I I did my best she's pretty old I don't know she's pretty spry I think she has she has some stories to tell she she is the person who deals face to face with Oswald at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City Oswald is trying to get a visa that will allow him to defect to Cuba much as he once tried to defect to the Soviet Union there's reason to believe there was a brief romance between Sylvia Duran and Oswald while he's there she and we believe that a lot of the records that are still secret might involve surveillance of Sylvia OTO and Oswald at the time with Sylvia Duran she I'm sorry still be a Duran at the time the boss Walt's visit down there there's another Sylvia OTO and that's another fascinating story but so Sylvia Duran says that she was at a party where Oswald was there she doesn't say that others say that she was at a party with Oswald where he was heard saying so apparently during this Mexico City trip Sylvia Duran of the story is Soviet I ran invites Lee Harvey Oswald and two beatnik American friends who have never been identified to come to a family party and at this party there are Cuban diplomats and there are Mexicans who are socialists and supporters of Castro's revolution and people at this top at this party are talking openly about their hope that somebody would kill President Kennedy you know this is only a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis this is the very height of the Cold War and there was really reason in that at that time for people maybe to have wanted to see President Kennedy dead so whatever happened the CIA and the FBI didn't talk much about your thoughts on Mexico City or other aspects of this that you think we really need to know more about well that's certainly one and he was there for six days and we only know about a few hours don't apparently photographed and yes and phone conversations recorded at least at the embassies who knows and that was why we needed the Warren Commission to do that then and they did know about the Mexico City trip I guess they sent an investigator down briefly didn't return with much and that was the end of that the trail was hot then we actually would have gotten some useful information one way or the other I don't know how honest people would have been but we would have gotten something and we would have known some names to follow up on in in future years one thing though and again I'm not arguing it one way or the other because I want to be open to what we do discover in the rest of the document so 80% of them that we haven't been through but in these documents I've learned a few things I didn't know before about Oswald I had never realized that he had threatened the life of President Eisenhower it was not reported to the FBI at the time this was in 1957 he told a friend who was in the military that he wanted to kill Eisenhower and the real question was why Eisenhower was picked by Oswald the friend asked him and he supposedly said that he was the the the lead capitalist who was persecuting poor people in the United States sadly that individual didn't report this until after the Kennedy assassination but this guy had murder on his mind I mean he was a violent person we know he was a spousal abuse or in fact just the other week we had a chance to talk about this I got a call from a former Georgia congressman who said I really need to talk to you so I called him he's a reliable person and he told me about a very good friend of his who happened to live in Dallas at that time knew somebody who knew the Oswald's and was very worried because marina was getting ready to move back in to in with Lee and they knew for a fact that he had beaten her up and so on so this individual is very big and burly offered to help them move back into the apartment Marina was sent in while he held Lee back and he said to Lee I know all about you and I know that you've been abusing her if you lay a hand on her again I'm gonna come over and beat the blank out of you and at that point reportedly Oswald said oh no sir I won't do anything like that I'll never do it again and but I'm saying there there's so much there we could have discovered we knew he was a spousal abuser but you never know what you're gonna find when you pull up a rock here or there right and we also know - I was amazed I'm always amazed that this happens with just a few blocks from where we are at this very moment but Oswald in April of 1963 tried to kill General Edwin Walker I'm not sure what neighborhood of Dallas that was but not very far from here how many people know that story they attempted informed this out knowledge it said it's a lot most Americans don't know this he was a retired general and a right-wing activist and there was an attempt on his life from a sharpshooter at some distance away right right that fires into his house barely misses him and apparently same rifle same rifle and Oswald goes home that nights and admits it to marina reiden acknowledged she was aware of that assassination attempt just several months before the Kennedy assassination oh one other fact that's relevant to his violent past and I don't think people know this either he claimed to marina months before the Kennedy assassination that he was going out to kill former Vice President Richard Nixon now marina didn't know that Nixon wasn't actually coming to Dallas at that time he was going someplace else in Texas and he was doing it to psychologically abuse her but it just shows again the sorts of thoughts that were on Oswald's mind now that's not to say that no one else was involved or all the rest of it I'm not getting into those arguments today but there's a lot there when you when you do connect the dots you start to see a picture of an individual who could really have done this yeah you know there's so much Uranus and all of this and one of these fascinating details Sylvia died on the woman in Mexico City her birthday November 22nd have any of these documents that have been revealed contributed anything to the notion that there was a second gunman on Dealey Plaza or a mafia conspiracy - well they certainly asked those questions at the CIA that you mentioned the document where they were reassessing within the CIA how that earlier generation had had interpreted the events of November 22nd they asked a lot of good questions and I think they weren't completely sure to the extent that we know these other groups were not directly involved it's possible we don't know some things fact it's very probable we don't know some things but there are so many people who had so many motives to kill any president much less this particular president any president has loads of enemies and given the right set of circumstances maybe they would try to try to kill the president but you need proof in the end you have to find the proof theoretically it could have been the Mafia it could have been the anti-castro Cubans it could have been Castro it could have been the Russians it could have been I don't believe the Lyndon Johnson thing at all but you know there are some people who insist it was Lyndon Johnson there's so many motives groups and individuals who could have been suspected and are suspected of this but in the end you know maybe we need Columbo back you know we need we need somebody to find the proof what was the phrase a mystery wrapped in an enigma yes it was not original to this um how many people know the work of David liftin book best evidence this is something I read years ago I mean it's like an 800 page tome in which he gradually leads you through this evidence and convinces you that the president's body as it was taken to Bethesda Naval Base for the autopsy was actually stolen removed and the wounds on the president's body altered to conform to the single Bullet theory which at that point nobody about and then returned to the autopsy table for dr. Humes and other notice this is I cite this only as an example of just what a sprawling complicated confusing thing this whole thing is and you can really get lost in it I'm wondering how the two of you how do you evaluate new information how do you know what's credible look thanks a lot yeah look at at some point I've been thinking about it since I was a kid and I spent five years researching the Kennedy half-century a lot of that was on President Kennedy's life and administration not just death but after you spend that much time and you spent years on it too naturally you form an opinion it may be wrong you're you know you may come down on the wrong side you may find information a few years later that makes you reconsider it but my framework for evaluating and I know it's gonna a lien aid some people in the room I have come to believe having believed in conspiracies for years before I really took enough time to read everything I leaked our V Oswald acted alone now when you say acted alone by that I mean he's the one who shot the the bullets from this window over here and killed President Kennedy wounded Governor Connally I don't have an opinion about whether others encouraged him to do it because I don't know I don't have information about whether although I suspect he did down in Mexico City tell other people in advance of what his intentions were and then they didn't report it of course why would anybody in the Russian or Cuban embassy report that no to the American FBI of the Cubans and the Soviets knew the Americans were trying to to kill Castro and it tried repeatedly to do so and there are some great documents by the way in these releases that have nothing to do with President Kennedy but are about operation Mongoose things we've never heard before like poisoning all the crops in Cuba to starve the Cuban people to cause them to revolt and overthrow Castro and to send parts in airplane parts that have been monkeyed with so that they will cause planes to crash that would somehow cause people to rise up against Castro so there's a lot in there but anyway that's my framework and every new piece of information I get I suppose I evaluated in terms of that framework one of the great frustrations in this story going into it as a reporter or as in the story and it said you know the conspiracy theories about this a lot of them are logical it would make sense for the Mafia what the see Kennedy did it would make sense for Fidel or the Soviets or the Teamsters Union or the Ku Klux Klan to want to see Kennedy did so you've got away all those conspiracy theories because they make sense since at some level but you have to ask where is their evidence there just isn't credible evidence to support any of those conspiracy theories the one conspiracy theory I guess I might subscribe to is the one involving the idea that there are people who knew what a squall was talking about doing and may have encouraged him to do that and that leads you to Mexico City which as I say all for muck to my mind all roads lead to Mexico City if you want to understand unsolved mysteries about the Kennedy assassination it's conceivable they could have offered support or an offer for asylum afterwards or transit out was there any evidence that he might have been headed to Mexico after he was absolutely had he was absolutely heading for the border and in fact this idea that something happened in Mexico City was an idea pursued within the Warren Commission there was one staff member who became convinced on the for all the details of it but he finds a bus transfer stub from the Dallas bus company and he determines that Oswald is on his way to Laredo in his Lorado on the board Ernest okay so he's on his way to Laredo because somebody is waiting there to help him escape and this is an arrangement that would have been made in Mexico City six weeks before now none of that theory was put into the Warren Commission report because Chief Justice Warren and the other commissioners didn't want to encourage conspiracy theories right and it's interesting that the Warren Commission was aware of Sylvia Duran and you tell the story of why she was not interviewed so Sylvia Duran this woman who may or may not have had an affair with Oswald in Mexico City who definitely dealt with him face to face who may have taken him to this party where people were talking about killing Kennedy on the staff of the Warren Commission they thought she might be the most important witness they had available to them because she she knew Oswald she knew his mindset at the time she was a fellow socialist she mother he might have shared things with her and after much dispute in Mexico City she finally agrees to come to Washington to be interviewed by the Warren Commission staff and the staff is thrilled about this prospect but in what I think is probably the most baffling decision made by Earl Warren during the course of the investigation he refuses to allow her to come he says his words are according to the staff she's a communist and we don't talk to communists we don't believe communists so as a result this vital witness was never interviewed but she is still alive to this day in Mexico City and I always believed she has secrets to share yeah boy it's hard to believe that's really the reason well obably was remember when when Johnson recruited him he didn't want to take this assignment at all Earl Warren Earl Warren didn't and Johnson of course you couldn't resist Lyndon Johnson when he gave you the Johnson treatment but he put it in terms of patriotism and he said you would fight for our country were I to draft you and put you in the military and he saw dramatic that he actually says to Earl Warren if you don't take this assignment we're gonna have World War three yeah and it's going to be your responsibility exactly and apparently this leaves Earl Warren in tears this this prospect and then he finally gives in and accepts the job the point I agree with that the point I'm making here is that Earl Warren went on this commission as a point of patriotism and the way Johnson presented it to him was more not finding out the truth necessarily about the assassination but making sure the American public didn't turn on Cuba and Russia and force us into a nuclear war and part of that means that as you're conducting your study well you know you want to find out the truth if you can you're gonna shade it if you have to to make sure that certain things don't come out that might spark a public reaction that would result in nuclear war so to reassure the American public we deceive them and in the end it doesn't work well that's how it used to work what is interesting though let's say the Warren Commission hypothetically they did pursue this evidence that maybe there was a Cuban tie to the assassination maybe that would have spiraled into something much more serious on the international stage maybe Johnson would have been forced to react to invade Cuba you know the world might be different you can see where the hope was that there was no foreign tie and let's get let Johnson get on with his presidency yeah um you know we're talking about US government documents that can be released and they're limited to what the US government kind of did knew and observed I'm wondering what other records you think might be revealing to us I don't know that there's a archive of the New Orleans mob but well they're intercepts how them talk things in Havana for example I mean it was the Cuban government shared everything or the Soviets are there are there other areas that might yet you old food for a Venusian evidence well I know that over the years investigators have been very eager there are enormous KGB files on Lee Harvey Oswald from his time living in the Soviet Union and apparently he lives in the city of Minsk and he's had dealings there with Cubans and other people who may later figure in this drama and those KGB files have been sitting there all these years and the United States has never been given access to them well Boris Yeltsin gave Bill Clinton some of the some of them in the 1990s and this is amazing I don't think anybody anticipated that they exonerated the Soviet Union so again it's been so many years now how in the world can we be expected to piece it all together now which is why so many people are critical maybe too much so of the Warren Commission and really the commissioners not the staffers they only knew what they knew for the most part no the staffers of the Warren Commission and these these hotshot young lawyers most in their 20s or 30s at the time I'll tell you having talked to all virtually all the surviving ones they really worked their hard out and they were eager to find the truth even if the truth was an ugly conspiracy and Arlen Specter Pennsylvania senator who fashioned the single Bullet theory and was ridiculed his whole life you know one of the interesting things we had the Warren Commission we never had a trial of Oswald because Jack Ruby's assassination of him and there have been other attempts official attempts to come to the truth and one of them was the house House Select Committee on assassinations in the 1970s and what's interesting about that is you know some of the stuff is fuzzy what do people remember what did they hear about what somebody else remembered and that's always subject to test some credibility but then there are all these technical issues right ballistics evidence and what that Select Committee did was looked at this dicta belt this Dallas police recording of a a transmission of a police motorcycle that had been left in the open position when the assassination occurred and it's acoustical analysts concluded that there was four shots not three in Dealey Plaza probably another gunman on the grassy knoll and Larry in your book this is a this is something of a scoop it's a bit technical but what did you discover about that well the good news is that anybody's interested in this we basically disproved beyond any shadow of a doubt the conclusion of the house investigation in the mid seventies remember there are two government reports on the assassination the word commission says there was no conspiracy and the second investigation by the House of Representative special committee indicates there was a conspiracy but they didn't identify the conspirators well we we did not eliminate the possibility of conspiracy but we disproved beyond any shadow of a doubt using the most advanced sound techniques we hired a firm called sauna list at great cost that eliminated all profits from this book I might add yeah it hurt but I was proud that we were able to do it ken Stroupe here managed that - my associate director he's around here someplace I do want to say this though I think it's an interesting section of the book now you should all buy it it makes a wonderful holiday gift and there are signed copies down in the bookstore so you won't want to leave until you head and and so Phil's book is down there too cruel and shocking Act you have some extra money you can buy his what's that fascinating is that you discover it's not just a technical analysis of a different police officer who's Mike was at the trademart HB McLain who was the officer who was thought to have had his mic open always said he was never there and he was right cover there's this other officer Willie price who's farther down the road and it's you're telling them the end of the who they won't buy the book well I was gonna say this anyway but I'll say it right now I mean I've read a fair amount about the Kennedy assassination and I read both these guys books and they're both great reads there's just I found stuff that was new to me and it's really interesting it was a pleasure so I don't get any kind of any Commission's from this but I sure bet that I read well we appreciate if you could just spend an afternoon with anybody associated with this thing someone who's now deceased and they had to tell you the truth would you want to talk to somebody to tell you the truth somebody deceased living or dead living or dead oh I picked Linda Johnson that's I've everything about a lot more than the Kennedy assassination after all he was president for five and a half years he had access to everything he wanted to have access to he told Walter Cronkite at an ashley air interview after he had left the presidency that it was Castro and that he said the Kennedys were running a murder incorporated and the in the Caribbean and that that essentially Kennedy was trying to kill Castro Castro got to him first I think this would be blowback for the Kennedy the Kennedys efforts to kill katha get to kill Castro exactly but I would want to know precisely what he had discussed with various members of the Warren Commission not just Earl Warren he had his good friend Richard Russell senator from Georgia who absolutely refused at first to be on the Commission because Earl he was a conservative southerner all civil rights legislation and he did not want to be on a commission with her award didn't want to have his photo taken with her Orin and Johnson basically said I'm sorry I've already announced it which was a lie he hadn't announced it but he left Russell with no choice but to get on but along the way I know he had conversations with Russell and others he wanted to be kept informed he was worried that this would blow up during the sixty-four campaign and that was his focus in 1964 but that's just a tiny bit of it can I just work in one quick anecdote yeah you mentioned these documents if you're interested in these things being flashed up here this is from our research with all the new documents including ones released yesterday we have a dozens of them and I've sent them out on Twitter anything we think it's significant and interesting we set out on Twitter my Twitter feed is at Larry Sabato lar is a B ATO but one of them we're learning things again that don't have to the assassination but this one in particular grabbed me because it was it was from the CIA or NSA on the French it was NSA's about the French government to Gaulle and others their reaction to the assassination and essentially this piece said that the French government believed that Lyndon Johnson was a cipher he amounted to nothing he won't get a full term this is terrible for America and the Western alliance and and the US has to find real leadership soon totally false Tuesday I have to run into lady to Lynda Bird Johnson Robb daughter of Lyndon Johnson I told her about this piece because I thought she would enjoy it she didn't enjoy she got very angry about the French and then she said I shouldn't tell you this but I was there when my daddy called Dean Dean Rusk the Secretary of State and he called him over and he says Dean de Gaulle is threatened to leave dedo de Gaulle has said that we have to withdraw US troops from France and I simply want you in quiet terms to communicate one thing to him and that is that if he lifts a finger to do either of these things I'm going to send a bunch of American troops over there without permission to dig up every single American it was killed in World War one it World War two buried in France to defend France last we heard of it from de Gaulle the Gaul didn't follow through on most of that in that interesting and I don't think people know this and this is what you find when you start piecing together little nuggets of history oh I think these documents apart from the Kennedy assassination there are really fantastic snapshot about old war in that time and J Edgar Hoover in his absurd with mark everything was a communist the Communists were behind everything they were a tiny tiny little group in American they amounted to nothing except in Hoover's mind do we have the index cards for some audience when you bring them on up and I want to give Phil Sheen and okay so when you have questions for me just hand them up and do you want answer my question about who your dream interview would be person living would be Sylvia so there is this woman who popped her in front of her apartment I talked to her I talked to her and she she adamantly denied she'd had an affair with Oswald she adamantly denied he'd been to this party where people were talking about killing Kennedy but I kind of believed she wasn't telling me the truth okay but you if you had an afternoon when she had to tell you the truth okay right I'm following your rules here okay very good person who is no longer with us would be ambassador Thomas Mann a very proud Texan I believe a graduate of University of Texas he was the ambassador in Mexico at the time of the assassination he is absolutely convinced from the first minute he hears about the assassination that this involves Oswald's trip to Mexico City that he made connections in Mexico with people who are gonna help him escape they may have put him up to the assassination he is convinced absolutely in his mind this is true and he very quickly receives a call from Washington being told to shut down any investigation in Mexico City that might point to foreign involvement in the assassination he's told that there's not to be an investigation down there and how do we know he got this fall well that's what he tells us he's he said it to congressional investigators later and it's very clear from the record we do have that he was desperate desperate is the right word to find evidence in Mexico City that might support this idea that there was a Cuban involvement not Castro personally but Cubans in Mexico City but he discovers that the CIA representative in the embassy and the FBI representative in the MC have also been told not to investigate this there's something the agencies were desperate to hide in Mexico he comes back to Washington and becomes the senior adviser to President Johnson about Latin American issues and I believe he is the guy who is feeding information to LBJ to suggest there's a Castro connection which is why LBJ dies with the idea that there was a conspiracy that was never exposed you know we've been talking about how the government withheld documents and in some cases of destroyed evidence are there cases where they also sought to silence or intimidate people who had evidence or things to say that they didn't want to become public should be the best example of n um you know after immediately after the assassination and go back to my favorite witness the CIA tells the Mexican government to round up Silvia Duran and her husband and her family to interrogate them and to physically intimidate them and I suspect if they wanted to physically intimidate her not to tell the full truth about what she knew yeah this was obviously a very different time and it was before the Supreme Court decisions on individual rights when one is arrested and that kind of thing and I remember when I was researching my book I came down here and had an interview with Bill Alexander who was the assistant prosecutor in this area and and he he said something that I'll never forget he said I asked him what his greatest regret was and I thought he'd say well we shouldn't have transferred Oswald you know in that morning we shouldn't have let the public in but instead he said I just regret that I did not have two or three days alone with Lee Harvey Oswald to interrogate him and he said believe me we would have gotten the truth out and I knew exactly what he meant and every one of a certain age here knows exactly what he meant and it and it's true they did that they had there was one the fellow who drove Oswald to the school book depository we've had him several times the Charles fellow students loved talking to him he wasn't involved at all he knew was Walt as a co-worker and happened to live in the same neighborhood and drove him back and forth at the end of the week when he went to see his his wife but in any event he he was arrested because it was reported of course that he had driven Lee Harvey Oswald to the School Book Depository that morning and the police roughed him up one wouldn't believe I mean really roughed him up and put a confession in front of him I am involved in the in the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy and they finally realized he wasn't going to sign it because he didn't really know anything but they took him back home and and he's told us a number of times he shook all night who wouldn't you know to be suspected of that horrible crime so completely everyday never had a lawyer completely different time but you know we learn things from it and we've progressed I suppose go to a couple of audience questions here this is new to me what circumstances surround the disappearance of President Kennedy's brain I I know that story President Kennedy's brain it was removed during the autopsy at Parkland Hospital it's just an example of just these crazy mysteries about of this fez murder Bethesda I'm sorry but as de the brain is removed as part of the autopsy it is then delivered to the White House a couple of days later by one of the pathologists from Bethesda it is then given to President Kennedy's secretary Evelyn Lincoln who takes it to her office in she has an office at the National Archives at that point and past that point we have no idea where his brain went we have a suspicion that it was eventually given to Robert Kennedy and then interred with the president's body at Arlington but we don't have absolute confirmation of that I mean there's a reason to there is certainly no official version of whatever happened to the president's brain you know Robert Kennedy is an interesting figure in all of this I mean he's told many people he believed there was a conspiracy that's not what he told the Warren Commission is it it's a politician and this shocks everybody but they often say one thing private and other thing in public write that down so you'll always remind us yeah but you gotta make it is ought to be not telling the truth about your brother's murder though you know that does put it later well he was running for US Senate well clearly I mean it's it's very clear to me having spent a lot of time thinking about this researching it that that Robert Kennedy was evasive if not dishonest about what he really knew and what he really suspected about the possibility there was a conspiracy no there's this amazing scene at his home in Virginia in the hours after the assassination where he calls over the CIA director a guy by the name of John McCone takes him to the lawn of the Kennedy estate what's the hill and takes him on the lawn and says did you kill my brother did the CIA killed the President and McCone who's a fellow Catholic says I swear that that did not happen but Robert Kennedy right from the get-go believed that there might well have been a conspiracy involving even possibly the CIA to kill his brother and we now know at the end of his life we know from his friends and associates and his own family that he continued to believe that until he died even though he told the Warren Commission that he had no information no suspicion of the conspiracy there I think there was one other reason why he didn't tell the truth of the Warren Commission he was running for Senate he was worried that if the information came out about what the Kennedys and they work together on operation Mongoose and all the crazy things they tried to do to to get Castro you know tuberculosis in the wetsuit and and botulism pills and in a pen that was poison and it was floating cigars I think he was afraid that that was gonna come out both because they failed and also because it was it was see me you know if this was unseemly and so I don't think he wanted the public to know when he was in originally a tough battle with an incumbent senator Frank Keating in not Frank Keating key it well senator Keating forgotten his first name from Kenneth Keating Kenneth Keating the Republican senator from New York that Bobby Kennedy defeated in November 64 I think that's a plea in Robert Kennedy this operation Mongoose this assassination effort by the Kennedy assassination Robert Kennedy was in charge of L that was his 11 and he knew that if that got exposed that if he had been involved in the assassination of foreign leaders and it wasn't just Castro there were others that that would that would ruin his political career right so apparently he was willing not to tell the truth about his brother's murder as a result it is unsettling that those we entrust with national leadership my a believe in these conspiracies and then conspire to conceal them um what do we know about Jack Ruby I mean a lot of people look at this thing and say this wasn't an assassination it was two assassinations in a weekend too fishy one of the documents we just found and released was was a little document it was a tip given to the FBI and I believe 1977 okay this is 14 years after the assassination from a man in Dallas who claimed to be an FBI informant apparently had been paid by the FBI at least for some things who said that on the morning of the assassination as the crowds were gathering he was with Jack Ruby very near Dealey Plaza and that Jack Ruby said come on I want you to come with me down here let's watch the fireworks quote unquote and then he claimed that that after the assassination Ruby had no reaction no reaction to the murder of a president then went to the Dallas Morning News where we knew it he was Pearce and and Hugh they were they were here they were part of it and they know exactly where Jack Ruby was and Jack Ruby was was not in Dealey Plaza or any place near it Hugh Ainsworth this is a slight digression but it's worthwhile one was working for the Dallas Morning News that day but was not assigned to he had the day off he goes to Dealey Plaza to see the president right horrific events happens he pulls a utility bill out of his pocket and starts interviewing witnesses he ends up in the Texas theater when Oswald was captured right here and then at the police station when Oswald is shot and then in the weeks afterwards was just I think alone and apart among journalists getting real solid reliable information and gosh does he have stories and his book which is witness to history will also be available in the bookshop afterward along with these two guys so I think here's Pierce actually ran into Lee Harvey Oswald coming out of the school book depository Lee Harvey Oswald pointed him to a telephone I mean all right Harvey Oswald Lee Harvey Oswald seemed too awfully calm for all of this guy just mentioned that dr. Phillip Williams oh it was in here he asked one question he was at Parkland right outside trauma room one he was assigned to take care of mrs. Kennedy and he told me some interesting things as she was not in shock she was in complete control the entire time and was concerned only about the priest getting inside to give extreme unction to President Kennedy so Jack Ruby are there other things about his movements that day that either support or discredit the notion that he was part of a conspiracy to shut up Al's all because as Wald was the Patsy well I think you I think the more you know about Jack Ruby the more the more difficult it is to believe he's part of anybody's conspiracy he is a delusional blabber mouth I remember I think Hugh actually tells me he's a very important part of my book and he really is the great reporter on this story that when Oswald is killed and it's Hugh believes if there's one person in Dallas who would do something this crazy it was Jack Ruby that he was the guy he was the guy who had been responsible for this and I think all the evidence we have suggests that Oswald really was he loved President Kennedy he was shattered by the assassination he really did this act as a birth as an act of revenge he did it to to protect Jacqueline Kennedy from having to return to Dallas to testify in Oswald's trial and again if there's one man you would not pick to be part of the conspiracy to carry out you know the second crime of the century by killing Oswald its Jack Ruby well they've obviously got you fooled you know I have thought film was part of the conspiracy had a long time and I he's confirmed that today okay this is sort of a detail but it's an interesting part of the story how did as well to get from this from the School Book Depository building to the Texas theater it's amazing that it all happened within feet of where we are but Oswald goes to the street he gets in a bus city bus he knew the city bus bus system well that's where he gets the bus transfer but of course the traffic is horribly congested as a result of what had just happened in Dealey Plaza so he gets out of the bus gets into a cab and is driven to his rooming house in Oak Cliff and from there he changes his jacket of the rooming house gets his pistol miss Smith and Wesson pistol and begins walking walking away walking towards this Texas theater and during the course of that walk of course he kills officer Tippit and you know people would argue that there's certainly theories out there that that Oswald was not the assassin of the president but you do have to wonder why this man would kill an innocent police officer and be witnessed by so many people doing that except that one of these documents we just unearthed an informant to the FBI calls and says no in fact Oswald was not the one who killed tippet I saw it it was Jack Ruby Jack Ruby killed officer Taylor you know this is you can understand why everybody was confused I just I do think that the the tip of killing really is the rosetta stone of all this because many witnesses are very close to that and see it happen why would Lee Harvey Oswald kill officer Tippit unless he had something larger to escape from there's one says have you seen the movie coup in Camelot that reevaluate Zapruder film with current forensic analysis they don't let me out rebus I don't get to go to movies all right I haven't seen it I'd like to but I here's another one about another piece of media what are your thoughts on tracking Oswald on the History Channel and do you think there's reason to believe that the Cuban government has silenced Sylvia Durant that's a bear I saw a couple of episode it was bizarrely stopped they began running with the History Channel months ago began running this documentary series about about the assassination and then after a couple of episodes aired they stopped running it without animation it in the middle actually I have insomnia I actually watched the whole series in the middle of the nights the only time I ever saw it the whole thing here they're like four or five episodes you don't get out but you do stuff I don't know I'm in time inside that's why I don't get out I'm sleeping during the day because I can't sleep at night but Assent it was interesting I thought he did a good job on on the KGB and the caustic off the Russian KGB agent supposedly head of department 13 the assassinations Bureau who interviewed Oswald in Mexico City in the Russian embassy see why we're so interested Mexico City he did a good job of that he concluded that there the Russians just had no motive and it was incredibly stupid which is what the CIA concluded eventually in their re-evaluation the 70s about Cuba it just made no sense that they would do it his view was that that there was a home and it's true there was a safe house for anti-castro Cubans and you say well oswald wouldn't have been associated with them except he was in Oswald didn't oswald was a Marxist Leninist and couldn't tell you what that was it was a very mixed up person in many respects so that the theory is that Oswald was not walking aimlessly and he wasn't necessarily going to Mexico he was going to that safe house and by Barre the producer of the series insists that the safe house that everyone from the safe house disappeared the day after the assassination they never came back they took everything with them I don't know that's what he said that's in the History Channel series the History Channel I don't they didn't kill it because I saw it but they certainly didn't promote it in the way that you would think they would promote something like that neverending story someone asked about the performance of The Secret Service on the day of the assassination and there's this issue of witnesses who thought there there might have been gunshots from the grassy knoll reported finding people there who identified themselves as Secret Service agents and carrying weapons I believe the Secret Service says it had nobody there was nobody in Dealey Plaza we make of that well look it's one of the unresolved questions that I have about this because there's no easy answer to it because you do have responsible citizens who I don't think imagined this running up the grassy knoll and someone identifying himself as a Secret Service agent with a weapon told them they were to leave and that he was Secret Service and the rest of it and the Secret Service for the warrant Commission identified exactly where each Secret Service part of the detail was and every minute and none of them were in Dealey Plaza except on the cars as they went through I think I meant a Secret Service former Secret Service agent last night at another event and he told me that they only had they had six agents assigned to the assigned of the car and that was it that was about it they had others doing advance work and there some were out at the trademart and so on but there were only six with Kennedy I thought that was a low number but it's possible so I don't know that is that is a question I raised in the book I can't answer some of these questions why weren't these questions answered during the Warren Commission or shortly thereafter the Warren Commission didn't interview a lot of these witnesses right they didn't interview a lot of the witnesses they really didn't and over the times their stories have evolved a bit some of them well some of them and also as the wonderful policeman who was next Oswald pulling him pulling him and trying to save him but actually positioned him well for the bullet he told me that over over many many years he had come to believe that if everyone who said they were in Dealey Plaza could gather in one place they would fill the Rose Bowl you know how people make things that's like Woodstock for my generation there were there were fifty million people at Woodstock except there weren't um someone asks what about LBJ could he have been involved and we will note that Roger stone the renegade political consultant and supporter of Donald Trump wrote a book recently which I have not read the reviews said it throws a lot of stuff out but a lot not a lot of evidence what about the I think it I think it sold a heck of a lot better than our books well I think they're phony numbers fake news fake news okay but let's just indulge this for a second right you don't want to believe that like people who were elected to national offices would do such a thing and yet you've got Robert Kennedy asking the director of the CIA did you kill my brother maybe it's not so crazy is it crazy I know what I'll be crazy there's a logic to it there's a logic to it I don't think a lot of it motive or he was look he was delighted to become president that was his lifelong goal and there he was and he used to joke about the possibility that Kennedy would be assassinated and he would take his place so he knew about the 20-year cycle you know every xx the president elected every 20 years sooner or later passed on and was succeeded by the vice president I'm convinced it's one of the reasons why I accepted the vice presidency gave up Senate majority leadership which had much more power than Vice President but that's it's a giant leap from there to say that he participated in or even knew about the assassination in part because it was in Texas it would automatically some people assume that he was involved because it happened in in his state I just don't believe it again show me the evidence where is the evidence it's just conjecture I see but there was a logic to it and in fact Arlen Specter and I think I was one of the last people to interview him before he passed on but Arlen Specter who was this hard-charging Young Investigator on the Warren Commission said that he he's asked at the beginning of the investigation to prepare a list of witnesses who should be interviewed early on and he said the first witness we need to interview is mrs. Kennedy and the second person who we need to interview is President Johnson because he is a logical suspect in this murder if it were any other situation any other murder he's the first person we'd want to talk to benefits there's no evidence any connection we're saying well you know you've got lots of stuff on YouTube and the Internet generally about you know Johnson telling his men stris the night before what he had done except he wasn't where the mistress said he was and look you know after a while you realize that most of the things people say have no foundation a no basis in fact and that has to be true because there are you know a hundred different somewhat somewhat credible logical explanations for the death of President Kennedy who did it who was involved who came from abroad you know the day of the jackal all these assassination films people see them and then they apply it to the Kennedy assassination but they can't all be true and let you remember the you know the onion the satirical newspaper which I enjoy thoroughly they they produced a paper once which they they've sold I've got a copy of it and the headline is you know November 22nd 1963 and the headline is a hundred and forty-six people from the Mafia Cubans Russians and Lyndon Johnson shoot four hundred fifty three bullets at John F Kennedy and Dealey Plaza and you know if you if you really read all this stuff that's the conclusion you'd come to accept it can't be true it isn't true okay we're gonna keep throwing these at you here what about the deathbed confessions of the Mafia mafiosi I mean Carlos marchello who was the New Orleans mobster and then Santo Trafficante the Florida guy I think our alleged to have said in prison late in life do I have this right yeah we did it we ordered the hit well Howard hunt had a deathbed confession but I look on that I don't know the full truth of that but deathbed confessions are overrated sometimes people are looking for immortality on their deathbed so there is a there there is some justification for a mobster what names to a lawyer who was plugging a book it's a much better book yes much better book if it's true and had confession you know I guess what struck me about that was you have a Warren Commission that doesn't pursue things like that as actively as they should have and then you have when something like this happens you know people journalists would want to know would want to ask the follow-up questions really you did this how who did it who did you order who did you pay how'd it happen and of course if there were some empowered body like the House Select Committee in operation at the time you could put them under oath right ask what about questions but it just kind of hangs out there and you know one thing that really has changed over the years is you know I think back in 1963 in 1964 there was the assumption that when senior government officials offered information or offered their own conclusions they were telling the truth there was the assumption they were telling the truth what has happened in the 54 years since as we've had the Vietnam War we've had Watergate we've had around Contra we've had Bill Clinton's problems we've had every reason to believe that our government is not telling this the truth anymore and I think when we have our next great national tragedy there will be a much more aggressive investigation because the assumption will be made that we are not being told the truth and that's probably why we don't have these sorts of conspiracy theories or at least not the number of them or the volume of them that you get out of 9/11 in the 9/11 Commission um there's a woman named Sylvia oh you know we were talking about this notion that Lee Harvey Oswald had talked about wanting to kill Kennedy in Mexico at the party that Sylvia Duran may have been at there's a completely separate case involving another another Sylvia Sylvia oh do that happened here in Dallas I think right she still lives here I would um tell us about that so slightly complicated but the the shorthand version is that this young Cuban American woman living in Dallas gets a knock on her door in September 1963 from two Cuban mercenaries anti-castro mercenaries traveling with a man a young American who says he's a former Marine with rifle training who supports Castro's revolution or is after he's opposed to Castro's revolution and wants to see President Kennedy assassinated for not having overthrown Castro this is again weeks before the assassination and she tells this story to the Warren Commission afterwards and she says this man was Lee Harvey Oswald and it seems to be from what the Warren Commission can determine a credit she seems to be very credible and she's actually told other people back in shield she told people back in September about this encounter with this man and so why was Lee Harvey Oswald if Lee Harvey Oswald was the man why was he traveling with these anti-castro mercenaries talking openly about trying to kill President Kennedy her story is dismissed by the Warren Commission but years later there's reason to believe that she was telling the truth years later why let's know because her story was initially dismissed because the FBI was desperate to prove that it wasn't true they didn't really care what the facts were they just wanted her story to be ignored and dismissed because it complicated their idea that Oswald was the lone assassin that there was nobody else he was working with and this leads to all sorts of theories about whether or not anti-castro X Isles were somehow involved in this conspiracy that they wanted Kennedy dead because they blamed him for not having overthrown Castro right and anti-castro exiles often worked with mafiosi so and again Oswald could have associated with them because they had the same goal killing President Kennedy even if they were on opposite sides of Castro that's the theory the fascinating thing about these tantalizing descriptions of Oswald having spoken about wanting to kill President Kennedy is that this happened weeks before the assassination when he would have had no idea that Kennedy was coming to Dallas right and his it's an utter coincidence that he had a job at this building right it was a happenstance it was not arranged by the CIA he's hired by the Texas schoolbook depository which actually had two outlets in Dallas there's one in Dealey Plaza and I guess there was someone there's another elsewhere in the city it's really happens dance that he got his job here one of the questions is why was there no response to the question of whether or not Oswald worked for the CIA and we should throw in the FBI because there was a story that well because they deny it getting to our question about whether you can trust the government again look who will ever know other than the people who were running the CIA at that time they claimed that they had done a very thorough job of checking out whether they had ever used Oswald as a source for anything whether he was a double agent during the time he was he was in the Soviet Union and they insist that there is no connection whatsoever and again you mentioned about Ruby who who in the heck would use Ruby as a as a an agent of anything or is given the responsibility of killing an assassin well you could say the same thing about Oswald this was a very disturbed human being this is not all these things have not been invented about him he was a a very disturbed person there's so many conspiracy theories that involved the idea that Oswald was on the that he was working for the agency or he was working for the FBI but I would ask you to remember if he was working on the as an employee of either of those agencies or an informant or whatever would they have him living in the situation of higher poverty in in down was undernourished and apparently his case his kid was just was was was barely coherent business wasn't getting enough nutrition would he would they allow him to beat his wife to the point where marinas walking the streets with a black eye in purplish bruises and you know he was a delusional misfit why would they really have put this guy in their employ would they really have involved him in a conspiracy to kill the President of the United States how much responsibility does the FBI have for failing to identify Oswald as a danger to the Secret Service I mean it's clear they had looked at him well basically there's and again the new documents reinforce the fact which is very regrettable and was repeated prior to 9/11 the CIA wasn't talking to the FBI the FBI wasn't talking to the CIA and neither was talking to the Secret Service was telling The Secret Service anything they didn't even know Lee Harvey Oswald existed in fact in these documents you'll find the CIA takes potshots at the FBI and the FBI takes potshots at the CIA and they openly talk about within their own group withholding information from the other ones because knowledge is power and they have the power they have certain knowledge they didn't want to share it with with other agencies which we saw play out in the nine-oh-nine a lot the very same thing happened prior to 9/11 I think it's its bureaucratic human nature unless fashion it's fascinating feel that in your book you note that J Edgar Hoover in fact disciplined FBI agents in the Dallas office right and well this was clear-cut perjury by J Edgar Hoover J Edgar Hoover goes to the Warren Commission he's he's required to give sworn testimony and he says that the FBI made no mistakes we had no reason to believe this man Lee Harvey Oswald was a threat there was no need for us to report any this to the Secret Service before Kennedy came to Dallas we did nothing wrong here well it turns out as he's saying this to the Warren Commission under oath he's at the same time disciplining 17 agents within the FBI for having made terrible mistakes and having failed to act on evidence about Oswald including the fact that Oswald had this trip to Mexico City where he may have talked openly about killing the president there's this FBI agent James hosti Wright who was in the Dallas Bureau and actually tore up a note that Oswald had written to the FBI well he was ordered to do it was worth credit so the Sunday after the assassination and we were talking before this event with Hugh Ainsworth who were talking about James hosting the FBI agent and Phil you and Hugh agreed that you found him a sympathetic character why did he he was the guy who was assigned surveillance of Oswald in the weeks before the assassination and he actually did that surveillance pretty aggressively he did what he was asked to do in fact he reopens an investigation of Oswald after another agent had had closed it and it's very clear that a lot of information was withheld from hosty that the bureaucracy the FBI had not made it possible for Hosty to know the extent of the of the threat that Oswald posed for example all this information about Oswald's trip to Mexico City the fact that he's meeting in Mexico City with a KGB agent who happens to be an assassinations expert that wasn't passed on to host E in Dallas you have to believe that if host he had that information on November 21st he would have known that Oswald was a threat would have rounded him up and the world would be a different place guy had eight children and it really derailed his career didn't it it did and you know he he is the guy he's on the on the so President Kennedy's killed on Friday Oswald's killed on Sunday morning that afternoon Hosty is ordered to take this note a handwritten note that Oswald had presented to the FBI office just a couple weeks before apparently threatening the host he takes it to a men's room shreds it and flushes it down a toilet and you have to wonder what was in there what else did Oswald try to communicate to the FBI just a few weeks before the assassination now so the Sunday after the assassination he tears up as waltz note flushes it down the toilet and why do we know that today well he admitted it I'm trying to think how it we know it actually because of Hugh Ainsworth don't answer it you learns that again you know and he is the ultimate reporter on this story that Hugh writes a story in the 1919 77 the Dallas Times Herald he would defect it to the diet Dallas Times Herald from the Morning News they they discovered that this that this note had been destroyed had been destroyed by hosti and it creates a enormous firestorm in 1977 you know further proof of how somebody was trying to cover up something about the Kennedy assassination and from what we know of the note he was complaining about being harassed by the FBI that not doesn't necessarily tell us much about a conspiracy but tearing it up is gonna invite speculation it sure does tell us that he felt he was being harassed by the FBI and I believe Hugh is am i right that there would be there were people who thought that was a bomb threat he said he was going to he was gonna there was gonna be a violent act against the FBI further proof that Oswald was a violent threat to somebody um we began when I asked you how you got interested in this subject I mean Larry you said it your interest was really in the Kennedy presidency and it goes back to your child in a real connection and you know this was a president who was young and rich and charismatic and then cut off in the prime in this violent and mysterious way and I'm it's unfair to ask you to do this in two minutes but your book is called the Kennedy half century how has his presidency and the assassination affected politics in the decade since well I'm sure most of you have watched the the wonderful PBS series Ken Burns and his associated name I'm forgetting at the moment and yes Lynn exactly no vicar there they're wonderful series on Vietnam you can start just with Vietnam now can anybody ever prove that Kennedy would have either withdrawn from Vietnam or kept troops at a much lower level no you cannot prove it because politicians say one thing and do another but I spent a lot of time on that for my own book because it was important to me in to to millions of others my age how Vietnam happened how this disaster happened I am personally convinced having looked at all the documents and talked to as many people that were still living from that era who were involved that Kennedy would not have accelerated Vietnam certainly in the way that Lyndon Johnson did and wouldn't have gotten anywhere near the five hundred and thirty thousand troops at the peak for Lyndon Johnson so right there if you didn't have Vietnam imagine how things would have been different but not just in elections but in terms of the American psyche but I spent a third of my book actually going through the presidents since since John F Kennedy each one of them and showing how they used Kennedy's legacy to achieve their own the obvious case Lyndon Johnson but it goes all the way through the presidents right up to Obama that's what my book came out in 2013 so all the presidents were covered and every one of them Reagan in particular used John F Kennedy on foreign policy and tax cuts and also cultivated the Kennedy family had them into the Oval Office constantly didn't make the mistake that Jimmy Carter had made Jimmy Carter alienated the Kennedys right from the get-go so he had he had a tremendous effect he still does he always well because the Kennedys translate to the 21st century and maybe for all we know the 22nd in a way that other presidents don't their dusty historical figures and maybe because they're so young and Kennedy was cut down in his prime and they were so fashionable and they were so articulate that they'll always be used and people will always relate to them in some fashion or another and that's what I think we ought to remember about President Kennedy certainly his achievements but also who he was in life and what he did as president not just the moment of his death obviously had nothing to do with it those were other people acting there one person acting whatever it will you whatever you want to believe before we wrap up so you want to share a final thought er um I'm some diamond I'm often asked whether or not we'll ever have any final resolution what are these documents that were supposedly going to see between now and April will really resolve a lot of questions about the assassination and unhappily I'm absolutely convinced that is not the case that we are going to be with conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination forever because we now know so much basic evidence disappeared or was destroyed just within days of the assassination we're still arguing about the Lincoln assassination I mean people come up with new theories all the time go 150 years into the future do you seriously think we won't have new TV programs and new books on the on the Kennedy assassination even though the two books have already resolved anything but there will be more who will be pretenders and it will happen for centuries okay um I want to remind everyone that Phil's book a cruel and shocking act and Larry's book the Kennedy half century and Hugh Ainsworth's book witness to history signed copies will be available downstairs at the bookstore I truly recommend them join me in thanking these guys [Applause] you

Channel: SixthFloorMuseum

Views: 215,136

Rating: 3.8935659 out of 5

Keywords: JFK Records, John F. Kennedy, Sixth, Floor, Museum, Dealey, Plaza, Dallas, Texas

Id: 0sVLk7mhsEU

Length: 86min 33sec (5193 seconds)

Published: Wed May 02 2018