← History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories
History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories
The JFK assassination: 95% certain?
00:44:34
Rob Attar and Gerald Posner delve deeper into some of the questions surrounding the killing of JFK
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Host
This.
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Gerald Posner
Is a History Extra Production.
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Host
Welcome to History's Greatest Conspiracy theories. Back in January 2024, we interviewed the American journalist Gerald Posner about the assassination of jfk and we subsequently recorded two more episodes where Gerald and I delved deeper into the story and tackled questions submitted by listeners. In light of the recent announcement that President Trump has audited the release of classified files surrounding JFK's assassination, we're re releasing all three episodes onto this feed. This is the second of these episodes, so if you've not yet heard my original conversation with Gerald, which was released last week, please do listen to that first, as this one is very much a follow up discussion. I began by asking Gerald a question from franchise505 on Instagram which was what is the wildest conspiracy theory that he's heard about the JFK assassination?
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Gerald Posner
Boy, I tell you, there's very good competition for the wildest theory I've heard about the JFK assassination. I think that my personal favorite is probably that the President was killed by the driver of the presidential limousine who was a Secret Service member that that driver turned around, which he does on the home movie of the assassination. You can see the driver turning around to look at the President after the second shot. He hears the the shot that there's motion in the back of the car and looks at the President. Now there's a frame, a still frame of the home movie in which it appears that there's a glint of light or that from the area of the driver's hand. And there are a number of people that have concluded over the years the driver had a small revolver in his hand that was basically hidden, shot the President from the front, that was the fatal head shot, and then turned around and drove off. Now the reason I say that that's the most outlandish of all the theories is that not only do you have a a dirty Secret Service agent, but nobody else in the presidential limousine noticed that the driver just shot the president. Mrs. Kennedy didn't see it. The Governor of Texas and his wife who were in the front seat where the driver's hand was, essentially didn't notice. The driver just fired a small revolver and the Secret Service agent sitting in the passenger side of the the car next to the driver didn't notice. The driver had found a shot and then the driver turned around and drove on and that was the end of it. Only these people who have seen the glint of light or that little flash of light on the picture and have determined that, and they don't say it just to create mischief, as is done sometimes on social media, where somebody says something and throws out a firebomb of an issue just to see what the response is. They believe it wholeheartedly. And I marvel at the simplicity of that at the same time that I marvel at the outrageousness of it.
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Host
Well, this is interesting actually, because we had someone, Norman Cox, emailed in with a theory that's a bit similar to that, but not quite the same. So I'd be interested to know your take on this one. I'm not sure that he necessarily believes this theory, but he said he saw it on a TV documentary. The theory is that Lee Harvey Oswald's shot missed, but the protection Squad travelling in the car behind JFK then jumped out, took out their guns. In turning round to aim presumably at Oswald, one of the safety catches was removed and the weapon was fired, killing the President. So this theory seems to be that the people behind Kennedy accidentally killed Kennedy responding to the shooter. I mean, have you heard that one before?
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Gerald Posner
Yes, as a matter of fact. Not only is that just an unusual theory, there was actually an entire book put out on it called mortal error, a 500 page book. Now, hard to imagine you could make that into more than a tweet, but somebody did, and it was actually done by a fellow Donahue who's a ballistics expert. And the theory is that after Oswald or whoever the shooter is, for those people who don't like to say it's Oswald, the assassin misses the target. There's no world class assassin at the grassy knoll or anywhere else. Nobody else has hit the President. So now in this, the President is wounded and there is, here's the basis of reality. Many of the conspiracy theories have something that is true in them and then they sort of expand out from that into a very fertile meandering hypotheses and speculation. The truth here is that the Secret Service agents, the car behind the President, did in fact immediately sort of stand up. They were at attention. One of them, George Hinkley, took out a automatic weapon which was there sort of AR15 military style looking weapon. And there is a picture of him holding that weapon, what I call it, not a relaxed pose, but he's got it there ready in case he happens to see who the shooters are. What's happening in Dealey Plaza. And the idea is that that bullet was fired from there. He pressed the trigger and it hit the President right where I believe the Warren Commission, where the autopsy shows the President was hit, which is the high right rear portion of the head that I believe that shot came from the sixth floor of the Depository by Oswald. But let's say for a second it came from that rifle. Yes, that Secret Service agent was in a position where maybe that bullet could have hit in that part of the head. Now the problems with it is, and this almost to me on its own would mean that you wouldn't need a 500 page book to resolve it. The point at which Secret Service agent is holding the actual rifle is after the moment at which the President's already been hit by a headshot. He picks the rifle up, the President's already been hit, he couldn't fire it while the, the gun was still being held down. So it doesn't fit in terms of time. There were no bullets missing or nothing had been fired from that gun afterwards. And again this is what I call the application of common sense to some of these matters. Let's assume that that theory is right, that the timing was correct, the Secret Service agent had picked up the automatic rifle that's in the car and in the moment in panic had pressed the trigger and that bullet fired and killed the President. Everybody in that car, all the Secret Service agents, the follow up, the public officials have to then be in a conspiracy of silence going forward forever. Nobody ever tells it. Nobody leaves a deathbed confession, nobody writes a letter to a child and says by the way, I'm going to tell you what really happened in the case. So the idea of that happening and it's a clever theory, I still marvel at the fact that it became a book. And I occasionally get emails from people that say by the way, they've just read the book and they're very convinced by it and they say have you read this? Did you know that this is what actually happened in the case? And they're rather convinced that it's the case.
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Host
I think the point you make about so many people would have seen this and yet hadn't come forward seems to me to be quite a compelling one. We had another good question question or interesting question about assassination itself. This Is from Alex Plotkin on Facebook. Alex says how was it that Oswald had access to fire his shop from the book depository? Shouldn't the law enforcement agencies have cleared that area of access? Did their guidelines omit this or were procedures not enforced by these agencies?
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Gerald Posner
Yeah, so it wasn't that the procedures were not enforced. There were no procedures. The extent of what I call the great protection of the President of the United States started as often the case with government, we react to things rather than doing them proactively. So the reaction to the Kennedy assassination was that, you know, suddenly there was tremendous security at every presidential motorcase. So before the Kennedy assassination, not only did the Secret Service not have a role, that tall buildings on the motorcade route had to be cleared or checked, which they did not have a role for, that they didn't even require the local police to do it. But think of this in a day and age where we're worried about security of world leaders. The motorcade route was published in the local newspapers and both of them, Dallas had two papers published three different times over a two day period. So not only did they say the President is visiting Dallas and will be speaking at this location in, at a luncheon, but they showed you with a dotted line the route the President would follow. So that if you wanted to be a shooter or you wanted to be somebody to call mischief or you wanted to throw a Molotov cocktail onto the, the cars that went by, you could pick any one of literally hundreds of buildings along the route. Why was this? The building from which Oswald fired was because it happened to be the place where he was working. He had landed a job a couple of months earlier, which of course raises suspicions for people that say how is that, how was he alone on the sixth floor and able to set up a sniper's nest to fire? Because his co workers, half a dozen of them, had left him half an hour before and had gone downstairs for lunch. The if one or two of them had returned, it would have been better than the Secret Service having swept the building. It wasn't a suicide mission. He just wouldn't have tried to kill the President. But he was left alone on that floor. So the idea that there was protection detail that could have stopped the President from being shot that day, there wasn't. In addition, remember the President's on that particular day, not only is the motorcade route published, but he's in a convertible. There is a bubble top that the limousine had and people say, oh, that had been honored to stop the assassination. Not necessarily so the bubble top wasn't bulletproof. It might have caused a glare from the sun from the plastic on it that might have blinded the shooter, that might have been different. But all of the things that we think of with the great presidential protection, the beast, the so called car that's now used by American presidents to drive around, that's bulletproof and bomb proof. That all came in after JFK was killed.
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Host
Okay. And we had a couple of questions about the Zapruder film, which we did talk about in the last episode. We had a question from Wesley Lyons emailed in. Wesley wanted to know about the sound. And they said, if I remember correctly, one of the conspiracy proofs was of the apparent sound of a fourth Gundam shot. Now, I know we did talk about this a little bit last time. I wonder if you could expand on that again and whether the sound for the Zapruder film does add anything to our understanding.
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Gerald Posner
Yeah. So there's no sound on the Zapruder film. The Zapruder film is this home movie of The Assassination, the 8 millimeter movie that Abraham Zapruder, dressmaker in Dallas was going out that day, had been his secretary suggested, why don't you try out the new camera. You have the spell and howl. He took it there and he takes. He's shooting a picture of the President as he comes around the corner, which happens to be on the street in which the shots are fired. And he provides essentially over this 30 second video, the home movie, as I call it, of the assassination. What's missing on the Zapruder film is sound. So we have no sound. We have to interpret what's happening on the film in terms of the reactions of the President to being shot. When the bullet hits him the first time. We can see the headshot, the fatal headshot, because of the red mist of blood. And where many of us determine the first shot is fired because you see people on the street turning around and looking back up towards the area of the Book Depository. Roswell is now where sound comes in is that in 1975-1978, literally 12 to 15 years after the assassination, the U.S. congress, a congressional committee, had a reinvestigation of the case, the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And they debunked many of the conspiracy theories. They did fantastic work. They looked at the authenticity of materials, the shooting sequence. And then they found near the end of their work that there was an audio tape of literally a dictabelt, a police dictabelt that used to record police recordings on sort of old fashioned dictabel. That would go around and. And somebody said that Dictabelt has recorded possibly the actual sounds of the assassination. Because the motorcycle policeman from the Dallas motorcycle policemen who went around, if they had something to call into the station, they would press the button on the speaker on their motorcycle and they would say, you know, Officer two seven two here at Main Street, I see X happening. Somebody had pressed the button to transmit to the main police station and it left it stuck in the on position. Which raised the possibility that if that motorcycle was in the vicinity of the assassination and the sound was stuck in the on position, the Dictabelt might have recorded the actual shots of the assassination. It's great, great possibility. And then we would know, are there three shots? Are there six shots? You know how many? If there are more than three shots. By the way, the reason this is critical is everyone, me, everybody who studies this case would say it has to be more than just Oswald because Oswald has time for only three shots. So if we hear a fourth shot, that means there's a second shooter. You've got a conspiracy. From that moment on, when the Select Committee called in sound experts, they listen to the recording and what you hear is just silence with a bell ringing at one moment. You don't hear crowd noise. You don't hear any sound of shots. But these sound experts said, you know what we see, though, sort of these what look like supersonic little impulses at four points along here, we think those are actually the bullet sounds. They aren't being recorded. They're showing on the Dictabel. And that would mean there are four shots. At the time that Kennedy was killed, they ran out of money. I love it when government investigations run out of money. They closed up shop and they said, 95% certainty. There was a fourth shot. And that was the headline. Anybody who was alive in 1978 may remember. Even the British press, filled with House select committee, concludes 95% certainty of a conspiracy based upon four shots. That's where he remembers the sound of the shots. Subsequently, the National Academy of Sciences sound experts, everybody else came in, they've examined it. There have been books written about it. I covered in a chapter. And it turns out that the Dictabelt in question was finally isolated to a motorcycle policeman who was nowhere near the assassination site was actually out near where the President was going to give his talk. The sound of the bell is a bell going off near there. It could not have recorded the sounds of the assassination. The impulses are not bullet sounds. So it's a great possibility. It turned out to be incorrect in terms of the evidence. Most people who follow the case even tangentially remember the headlines 95% certainty of conspiracy and don't remember the page 32 retraction six months later.
- [16:03]
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Gerald Posner
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Host
So we had another question about the Zapruder film, which is again quite involved, so you might need to sort of explain what's being asked here, but it's from Mikael Covey or Michael Covey on X and they said, does the Subruder film show Kennedy killed by a bullet striking his forehead and moving back along the hairline until it exits out of the back of his skull? And again, I guess that would challenge the official view that he was it was based the wounds at the back of his head.
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Gerald Posner
Right? If this is true, I think that's a great question. And the reason that's a great question. If most people who know nothing about the case just go on and find a live version of the Zapruder film, meaning in real time. So it's not slowed up, it doesn't get not in slow motion. And they watch it for the first time when they watch it, I bet you that 99 out of 100 people will say at the moment of the headshot, oh, it's clear where he was shot. He was shot from the front. Because Kennedy's reaction as you watch the Zapruder film is the car's driving forward. And then you See the President move violently back and to the left of the car. Well, we've all seen plenty of, you know, movies in which somebody shot by bullet and they go in the opposite direction, bullet hits them and they fall over backwards. So when we see this, it fits with what we expect to be a bullet from the front. And that was my reaction. I first saw the ZAPRUDER Film in 1975 when I was in my first year of law school. I thought myself then a very clever analyzer of facts. And I left that screening of the Zapruder film when it was first made public, convinced that the government had lied to us for decades. Because it was clear to me without any question that the President had been shot from the front. Now, that being said, why is it that I am convinced and the forensics people who have studied the case and the select Committee and the. And the autopsy doctors are convinced the bullet actually came from the opposite direction from the back. And that is because the autopsy. What I say as a researcher, as a historian is show me the best evidence. So we have the film that makes it look as though Kennedy shot from the front. Is there better evidence to determine where the President shot from? Yes, the better evidence is the autopsy X rays and the photos and the autopsy report that will show you where the President's skull has been hit. Those show that the bullet entered actually in the right high rear portion of the head and blew out the front, the right front of the President's brain. Now, the question immediately comes up if you have a massive conspiracy, well, maybe those autopsy X rays and photos have been doctored. Maybe they've been faked to make it look like that. That was examined by more than a dozen Experts in the mid-70s by the House Select Committee, who concluded there was no evidence at all of tampering, fakery, composite work, or anything else. They are real of what they showed that day. There are some other theories that say, well, even if they're real, maybe the conspirators were able to get the President's body and switch coffins and do surgery on the head to make it look like he was shot from the back. Those have been, well, demolished. And how is it possible that if the President was shot in here, in the right rear, he reacts on the film in the way that we see him moving back into the left? And it actually took a Nobel Prize winning physicist, Louis Alvarez, to figure it out. He came up with something called the jet effect. Just like a jet engine has a propulsion, so a plane is taking off, it produces this Power, it's a reverse thrust. The thrust is coming out the rear of the engines and forcing the plane forward. What happens on this is Alvarez took the speed of the bullet that was fired from Oswald's gun. By the way, ballistic shows fired from Oswald's rifle to the exclusion of every other gun in the world. It's a military rifle. It's 165 grain full metal jacketed bullet fired at 2,000ft a second. It hits the President's head at that point where he is on the Zapruder film at about 1700ft a second. And when it comes out, it does what a full metal jacketed bullet is supposed to do. It doesn't fragment, supposed to go through the body and it comes out and blows out the front part of the head. About a third to 40% of the president's brain matter, sorry, it's graphic, is blown out at that moment. Alvarez calculates the force of the bullet versus the force of the material that blows out the front of the President's head and concludes that that propulsion effect of that wound was so great that it should force the President back and to the left. And that's exactly what we see on the film. And it's not just a theory. They have now redone that test in ballistics time and time again on cadavers and with figures that look like the size and weight of the President shooting into producing that effect and having the President's body go back into to that effect. One last thing for anybody watching this recruiter film, they are unlikely to know that President Kennedy, who had a very bad back and was on all types of medication, was also in a back brace that day. He often wore back brace. The back brace goes from just under the top of his ribcage to just above his waist. So when he's wounded beforehand on a bullet that's not fatal, but goes through without hitting any bone near his neck area, somebody might have collapsed. But Kennedy doesn't collapse in part because he's propped up by this back brace that's holding him there. And it's one of the reasons that the shooter gets the straight on shot because the President is wounded. His head's all a little bit to the left. His wife Jackie Kennedy is trying to see what's going on. She's actually pushing down, trying to push down on his arm to see what's happening. And there's a full five seconds from the second shot. The shooter gets the full time to aim, shoot, hit the President and then we get that motion backwards. But It's a very good question, and I understand why so many people are suspicious about it when they first see it.
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Host
And actually, we've had a question that very much ties into the last one. And this is from Victoria Gray on Instagram, and she says, do you have an explanation for JFK's missing brain?
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Gerald Posner
It's not just one thing that's odd. It's a hundred things that are odd. So now I say to you, you know, the President was shot from behind, lost all this brain matter. They did an autopsy and X ray. Oh, by the way, did I tell you the President's brain is missing, so we can't examine it today? Yes. Then you think something must be wrong with that. What do they hide that for? That has been answered. I wish that I was the person who could claim credit for having figured out what finally happened to it. But it was actually a writer and historian, Gus Russo, who did a very good book a few years ago that follows Robert Kennedy, the President's brother, who was then the Attorney General of the United States and remained the Attorney General after the assassination. And he, together with Jacqueline Kennedy, the President's wife, were absolutely concerned, Petrified might be too strong. But they were really almost obsessed with the idea that if they were not careful, it was possible that in the future, some parts of the bloody clothing, the President's material, could be become part of a gruesome public display. They never liked the fact that the Lincoln assassination, there were still parts of the remnants of the. The assassination that showed. And Bobby Kennedy had that brain reinterred with his brother. His brother was originally buried in one grave at Arlington, the national Cemetery, and then was moved to a different grave a year and a half, almost two years later. When that second grave is done, there are pictures there of a small box of that. That brain is in the second location where Jack Kennedy is. Nobody is going to ask the Kennedy family to take the President's body out in order to look at the brain again.
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Host
So was the part of President Kennedy's brain that remained in his body, had that been removed during the initial autopsy? Is that when it first went missing?
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Gerald Posner
No, it actually went missing as material was turned over later, after the Warren Commission was done, as I call it, to the Kennedy family and others. There's a very odd thing in this. We're talking 60 years later about documents that still have not been released, and yet some of the evidence in the case. In my view, this was badly handled in many, many ways, although I think the government came to the right general conclusion about Oswald. It made a ton of mistakes that fed conspiracy theories afterwards. One of them being that not all of the physical evidence was kept by the government. The National Archives has Mrs. Kennedy suit still. It's not going to be released for another 80 years to the the public. The revolver that was used by Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald was given back to the Ruby family and they sold it to a collector. Now it's evidence in one of the most important cases in American history. How do you allow that to happen? So I'm not surprised. There was a tremendous desire by government officials to be as accommodating as possible with the Kennedy family. And I understand that they've gone through this tremendous tragedy. And to the extent that the Kennedys wanted some of the evidence that they considered no longer necessary returned to their custody, I understand why the government did it. But it just wasn't the smartest move in terms of history.
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Host
Unsurprisingly, we had quite a few questions about Lee Harvey Oswald in the kind of the warring commission view and in your view, the sole assassin of President Kennedy. Ed Bojangles on X says, was Oswald an agent with the CIA? And if not, how do you explain all the relationships with known CIA contacts and how do you explain how he was able to re enter the country without an interview after defecting the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War?
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Gerald Posner
So you know, there are two things on that. First of all, there is something said so often that it's one of those canards that's been accepted as fact, which is Oswald had a lot of contact with CIA agents. He had contact with George De Mor who was sort of this Russian emigre who had been contacted by the CIA's sort of immigration division and said provide us information. So there's no doubt de Moreenshield had had agency contact but wasn't an agency asset in that sense. And when Oswald was in the Soviet Union, the people that he dealt with at the embassy, did one of them have an agency connection? I'm sure that during the middle of the Cold War that many of the people that worked at the British and French and American embassies had intelligence information that they shared as well, but he didn't have the contacts that they are talking about. When I say that they being the conspiracy theorists, they believe that he had contacts with CIA agents in Mexico City only weeks before the assassination. They believe that he met with CIA agents at different times and would have therefore been involved in a much larger and wider plot that there's no evidence of whatsoever. There are even people that say Oswald had a 201 file, which is a CIA personnel file. There's a 201 file on Oswald, but it's a file about him and his return from the Soviet Union. There's a story that broke last year that the CIA was monitoring mail of his mother, the Soviet Union. In fact, one letter was read that his mother had sent and now it's morphed into the fact that they were looking at all of Oswald's communications that had been sent. And even if they had, there was nothing unusual in them. But the key is, let's assume for a second that Oswald was an intelligence asset, that he worked for the kgb, he went to work for the KGB when he was in Russia or he worked for the CIA and he was a double agent or he was an agent for Castro's intelligence agency and had somehow been brought in when he was in New Orleans in the months before the assassination. It still doesn't answer the question if he is the assassin of the President as to whether he did it as part of that employment as a CIA, KGB or Cuban agent or whether he did it on his own. So I always think that the idea of Oswald having an intelligence connection is clearly the evidence is not there for it. But even if it had been there, you still need to ask the next question. One last thing. I don't have it in front of me. I have a great footnote, if I can call a footnote a great footnote in case close that addresses the issue of how did Oswald come back into the United States after he'd gone to the Soviet Union and defected? And then he marries a young Russian girl and then decides he wants to come into the U.S. that must be evidence that he's really a CIA agent because they let him back in. It turns out that Oswald's defection. He was one of dozens of people in the heart of the Cold War, believe it or not, who, who went over and said, I'd rather live in the Soviet Union than live in the United States. Some of them actually revoked their American citizenship. Oswald did not. So it made his repatriation a little bit easier. Even in the instances in which people had revoked their American citizenship there was a process to follow and they did. Oswald complained repeatedly, as I go through in the book, about how slow the bureaucracy was to get him back into the country. And in fact, his was just about the normal amount of time, about 17 to 18 months. It goes through a series of different requests that have to be made. There's even a case in which somebody who had revoked his citizenship and had sworn loyalty to the Communist Party came back faster than Oswald. So the idea that you could go to the Soviet Union, condemn the United States, in some cases even revoke your citizenship and then say, I want to come back, was it unique to Oswald? It was the way that it worked for many of those defectors who later decided that they were wrong and preferred to come back to America.
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Host
Now we had also a couple of questions by email from Robert Bannerman. And the first one I'd like to put to you is one about General Walker. He says Posner states that Oswald fired General Walker in April 1963. However, witnesses said that whoever fired this shot left the scene in the car. We know that Oswald did not drive. So who does Pozner think was a co conspirator of Oswald in this alleged attempted murder? And I think we might need to explain a bit more about the General Walker incident for those who don't know much about that.
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Gerald Posner
So I think an important episode in Oswald's life happens in the spring of 1963, only months before the JFK assassination. It is the idea that Oswald has determined that he's going to be the person who stops a right wing former army officer, General Edwin Walker, who has gone into American politics and is thinking of running to become the governor of the state of Texas. Oswald considers Walker very, very dangerous politically. A real fascist, thinks that he is an up and coming Hitler. I think that Oswald may have given Walker too much credit in that sense. But this is Oswald's view of him. And Oswald decides that he's going to stop Walker by killing him. Now, no one knows it at the time. It's his, his own plan. He goes out, he monitors the house, he has photographs of it, he does some surveillance. He has to take the bus out there. And he gets an idea of how he wants to do it. The idea that there were witnesses to the Walker shooting are things that came up later when I mean later. I mean, after the assassination, people came out of the woodwork and said, oh, by the way, that Walker shooting, I think I remember that night when it took place in April of 1963, 18 months ago. And I remember a car zooming out of there. Oh, I remember the Walker shooting. That was the night that somebody must have run over here. So there are witnesses that came forward that described things that wouldn't be Oswald long after the fact, not on the night of the shooting because the police who went out there took statements and there were no witnesses. No witnesses to what had happened. What happened is that Oswald went out hiding his rifle on a bus under a trench coat. Okay, Maybe only in Texas could you actually get a rifle hidden. And nobody's going to give it a second look in California or New York. He might have had more difficulty with that, that he wasn't going to a shooting range. He gets to Walker's house, sets up in a tree and shoots at the general, who is in his study reading. Now, a question becomes, Walker doesn't die because Oswald misses him. And the immediate question that I have, that anybody has, is, hey, wait a minute. You mean to tell me that this fellow, Lee Harvey Oswald, who a few months later shoots the President of the United States in a moving car and manages to kill him, can't hit a stationary target and wound him just a few months earlier, can't be the same shooter? Something's wrong in that. And what. It's a good question. What actually happens is Oswald thinks he has killed Walker, shoots at his head, leaves the scene after only one shot, convinced he's done that. And what happened is he couldn't see it. The window that he fires through has a very thin wood sash across parts of it that form these panes. And the bullet, when you later examine the window frame, hits right along the edge of one of the wood sashes, just enough to be able to deflect the bullet. It literally passes a couple of inches from Walker's head and hits behind in a bookcase, saving Walker's life. How do we know that this is Oswald who did it? Because Oswald not only kept the records, but then discloses to his wife, Marina, the Russian wife, everything that happened. And she's so worried that he's going to go back. He's terribly dejected, she says, from missing Walker. He's going to go back and try to shoot him again. That she makes him move to New Orleans, a place where he had family connections. She wants to get him out of Dallas because she's convinced he's going to try to do it again? So there are two things about the Walker assassination attempt. There are some people that say it couldn't have been Oswald because there was a car that drove away afterwards. That testimony came out long after the effect and never was something that I can find any credibility to. There are other people that say, I don't believe the Walker shooting because it's only Marina who says it. Marina is the only one who provides the evidence about it. But that's absolutely critical because they're all the real time contemporaneous photographs that Oswald had taken, his own effort about, his own discussion about it. A month before Oswald shot at Edwin Walker on March 1st of 1963, he had a little small apartment that he was renting with Marina. He came down the back steps into the backyard. She was hanging laundry up. And he was dressed totally in black, black pants, black shirt. He had a pistol that he bought by mail order tucked into his waistband. And he had the rifle that was later tied to the the JFK assassination in his hand and a copy of the Militant. And he asked Marina to take photographs of him. She was so embarrassed. She said that the neighbors would see him and think, oh my God, something was going on. And one of those photographs went to his friend George de Mornshield. On the back it said, hunter fascist. Ha ha ha. Another was sent to the Militant magazine. Another Oswald wrote in his own handwriting to his daughter June so she would have something to remember him about. This is a fellow who by the spring of 1963 is committing himself to using violence to make political changes. Edwin Walker's his first effort but not his last.
- [37:09]
Host
And I suppose on that score, though it obviously does lend support to the idea of Oswald being prepared to kill political targets. Whether or not he did kill Walker doesn't necessarily prove or disprove what happened with Kennedy either.
- [37:22]
Gerald Posner
100%. I think that's so important. You know, I do a biography of Oswald and about a third of my book, In Case Close is really a story of Oswald. And I think that for many listeners, if they pick up a conspiracy book, even one that is a best selling conspiracy book, they may find very little about Oswald. He comes in conspiracy theories to be sort of a stick figure who's inept, incapable of pulling out something as great as, you know, the assassination of the President of the United States. You don't know much about him in the portrait that I have of him laid out from records from psychiatrists who saw him when he was a teenager, from, from his own brother and stepbrother and others. He has a very troubled background past and he does try to kill Edwin Walker. But all of that together doesn't mean that he's going to try to shoot jfk. That event stands on its own. The thing that I think is important is that the Kennedy assassination when Oswald is in the window shooting at the President, if you know Oswald, you aren't surprised. Yes, you're surprised an assassination of the President's about to take place, but it's not something that's absolutely stunning. What you think. Think is what I thought when I finally came to that conclusion, which is that for Oswald this was like winning the lottery. And I hate to put it like that, but this is somebody who has been unsuccessful in most of the things that he did in life. Even on those things that he thought would be game changers, it would change everything for him. Like defecting the Soviet Union where he expected to be greedy as a hero. And then he wasn't. He tried to kill himself and they moved him out to this little provincial capital of Minsk and then he came back to the United States, sort of the place that he thought was the lesser of two evils. He tries to kill Walker and that fails. And then he forms an organization to get people to support Fidel Castro in the middle of the Cold War. And he doesn't get a single volunteer. And Suddenly this young 23 year old about turning 24 year old who has had all of these failures has the opportunity handed to him on a silver platter. The President of the United States motorcade is going in front of the building where he is working. And all of his political zeal and revolutionary zeal and ideas that he could change the system through violence it meets on that one afternoon on November 22, 1963. For Oswald, he's about to throw the biggest wrench into the machinery of government that is possible. The fact that we're talking about him 60 years later when I say he hit the lottery. For Oswald, this was the height. It couldn't have been something if he had planned it for years that would have been better. But only by understanding Oswald can you appreciate how he took advantage of this opportunity and thought of it as something he could do.
- [40:07]
Host
That's it for the second episode on the killing of JFK with Gerald Posner. Gerald is the author of Case Closed Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of of jfk. Please do come back next week for our final part where Gerald tackled more of your questions on the subject. Thanks for listening. This episode was produced by Jack Bateman.