← History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories
History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories
The JFK assassination: Oswald’s second murder
00:34:00
Rob Attar returns with Gerald Posner to answer more questions surrounding the killing of JFK
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- [00:02]
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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 ordered the release of classified files surrounding JFK's assassination, we're re releasing all three episodes onto this feed. This is the last of the three episodes and follows on directly from episode two. So before listening to this, please do check out those first two episodes if you haven't. And now let's rejoin the conversation with Gerald. One thing I'd be interested to know, are there many of the prominent figures related to this case who believed in a conspiracy? For example, Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedy family, J. Edgar Hoover. Did any of these people actually believe there'd been a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy?
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Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. As a matter of fact, lbj, the Lyndon Johnson, the successor to Jack Kennedy, thought until his dying day that Castro was behind it. And it probably got in Kennedy. He knew about the efforts to kill Castro and thought that Castro killed Kennedy first. He was happy to accept the conclusion that it was Oswald alone when the Warren Commission presented it because he didn't want to go to World War Three. And he knew there was no way that he could go in and obliterate Cuba. At that time, a very staunch ally of Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union without the Soviets retaliating Bobby Kennedy for a long time had questions about the Mafia. He wondered if he, and also about Castro, whether he may have inadvertently caused his brother's death by that involvement. And I think he grudgingly came to believe after a number of years that it was very likely. Oswald alone, but still was very frustrated by that. Jackie Kennedy, it's never clear because she never spoke about it exactly how she felt. Now, I'm not surprised by that. Most Americans thought it was a conspiracy soon after the assassination because of the fact that Oswald was dead. And then when the Warren Commission came out a year later and said, by the way, when they said, we think it's a lone assassin, that actually gave more fuel to the idea it was a conspiracy because they said, look at that. A blue ribbon panel had to be called together in order to hide the truth. So I'm not surprised that top government officials or Kennedy family members would have shared the same doubts that many Americans shared. But I am intrigued that sometimes somebody will say to me, they'll write to me, or, you know, they'll send me a direct message that says, by the way, did you know that Lyndon Johnson thought that it was a conspiracy? As if that means it had to be a conspiracy. No. Top government officials and Kennedy family members can also get it wrong. I understand that we can't assume that just because they are top officials, are close to the family, that means they automatically get it right. And there's no doubt, though, that there were any number that thought it was somebody else involved.
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B
One other aspect of the case that we didn't talk about a huge amount in the first interview is the second murder that Oswald commits, which doesn't get discussed very often, does it, during his. Well, if you believe that he was the killer, his flight does. Is that just really a side note to story, or does that shed light on the Kennedy assassination? 2.
- [04:42]
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Thank you for mentioning the. The murder of J.D. tippett, the Dallas policeman that day, who many people who listen to a podcast and don't really follow the Kennedy assassination very carefully may say, JD who they don't even realize many people, that Oswald did, in fact murder somebody without any question that day. We don't have any of the questions that you had with Kennedy assassination, where he fired from a rifle from a long distance and got away in the immediate aftermath. And therefore you. You can't say, there's the person who did the shooting. What Tippett's murder shows, which happens about 40 minutes after the President's been killed, is to me, the definitive piece of evidence that Oswald is at the very least involved in the murder of the President. And what I mean by that is there are any number of people I'm sure that you've received messages from them who think that Oswald is just a patsy as he said afterwards when he was in police custody that he just had nothing to do with it. He's just this innocent 24 year old kid who happened to own the murder weapon. Somebody must have stolen that from him and they fired the shots at the Kennedy doesn't know what happened that day. Now the lie to that is the following. Of all the workers. Of the several dozen workers at the book depository from which the assassin fired only one was missing when the police had them all get together afterwards. And that only employee was Lee Harvey Oswald. The interesting thing about Oswald is nobody can deny this. He was somebody who was fascinated with politics. He defected to the Soviet Union. He talked about communist theory, he talked about capitalism. He thought he was smarter than he was. But he would get into a debate about you. He tried to form a pro castor organization. The Oswald that was so politically active if he had been working at the building from which an assassin had fired the shots to kill the President he had nothing to do with it. When he was told the President had been fired at he would be out in the plaza in which the motorcade had gone through asking questions. What happened? What did you see? Is the President dead? Is he alive? He would have been enveloped in that moment. He would have been soaking in the history of this presidential assassination. Instead, what does he do? He says oh by the way, I heard the President was shot. So I thought we must have the rest of the day off. He leaves the Depository, out the front door. He gets for the first time in his life into a taxi. And I see that may not seem like a big deal to most people but Oswald, they did not have a lot of money. He left almost all the money, had left $178 for his wife on their dresser drawer that morning when he left. But to get in a taxi means he's in a rush, he's willing to pay the money. The traffic is slow. He gets out of that, gets into a bus and somebody sees him who knows him and says he looked like he was in a real state. And he takes that bus back to his rooming house and why? To retrieve his pistol which he doesn't have with him and then he's walking somewhere. Now I will say one of the mysteries that remains unresolved forever is where was he going because we don't know. He never disclosed it before he was killed. But he had a plan. This is somebody who had a plan to kill the President. He had a plan to go somewhere, and he is walking along. And there had been an all points bulletin put out where the police have a description of the shooter based upon a construction worker at Dealey Plaza who had looked up toward the area where Oswald had set up the sniper's nest and saw Oswald at an angle and described somebody in his mid-20s, Caucasian, brownish hair. Fits a lot of people. The Dallas police stopped several that day who were walking around for some reason seemed suspicious. We don't know why. This Dallas policeman, J.D. tippet, thought that Oswald walking quickly through this neighborhood seemed odd, but he pulled him over. Dallas police procedure says that if you believe you have a suspect on a serious crime, you were supposed to call into headquarters and say, I'm making this stop, and let them know. Tippett did not do that, which indicates he didn't think it was a suspect, but there was something he needed to ask him. When Tippett, the policeman, got out of the car, he did not draw his weapon, which means he did not think it was a dangerous situation. But as he steps out and starts to walk around the car to ask Oswald the question, Oswald rips out his pistol and unloads the entire amount at Tippet. And this time, it's not just the gun and the ballistics that tie Oswald to it. It's literally eight witnesses, six of them close by, who see him, identify him, pick him out of a lineup after they say that's the guy, and then he walks away from the scene, cutting across grass. Wherever he was going has now been interrupted because he has to get away from the scene of the murder. He's reloading his pistol because the pistol is one of those, like an old Western six shooter in which the bullets come out the back and you have to put them back in. So he's reloading, and a person, a fellow who has seen the shooting from a distance, follows him and sees him eventually duck into a movie theater where Oswald doesn't pay for a ticket, but thinks maybe he can stay in that theater until all the sirens and everything else is gone. And he leads the police to that theater to arrest Oswald. Now, the reason it's so critical is whatever else you want to think about Lee Oswald that day, whether you think he just brought the murder rifle in or whether you think he just set up the plan or he was one of the four assassins or whatever Else the fact that he fled D. Lee Plaza immediately after the murder, he kills a policeman who stops him in cold blood, that is evidence of flight, is evidence of guilt. And I marvel at the people who to this day say he was just an innocent patsy, he had nothing to do with it at all. There are even people who make an effort to explain away the murder of Tippet by saying, oh, you know, not all of those eyewitnesses were that close. And maybe it was Tippett who was part of the conspiracy, who had been sent to silence Oswald and to kill him on the spot. And Oswald realizing that, pulled out the gun and killed him first. Well, you know, it's a great theory, but you need some evidence before you can start to really put things down in the history books.
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We had a question came in from Hugh Berkmeyer on Facebook and he says, why does JFK attract so many conspiracy theories while Garfield and McKinley have become almost forgotten? I don't know whether you'd add Lincoln into the mix too, as another president where perhaps there's not as many conspiracy theories. What is it about the JFK assassination that attracts people to think it was a cover up, whereas they don't maybe so much with other assassinations?
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Well, I mean, I think that there are some good reasons for it. I mean in Lincoln there was an actual conspiracy in that sense. You know, small kitchen conspiracy with Booth in that Kennedy for a number of reasons. First of all, we have video, so we have the movie of it. And now everybody's an armchair expert. They can get involved and determine what happened themselves. If we had had video of Lincoln, maybe it would be different. In addition, Garfield, the, the Lincoln assassination, they are even Archduke Ferdinand. They, they fit assassinations as we knew them in the past, which is somebody that comes up to the political figure with a pistol, fires at close range and then gets away. You often know the identity of the assassin in a very short time. You need to figure out whether there's a conspiracy behind it. Oswald is the first time in modern history in which we have a rifle shot from a distance and the assassin gets away in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. So there's some question about the identity of the assassin. And then you expect the assassin to be arrested and it's going to be a professional assassin, somebody of worth of note. Instead it's a 24 year old kid who defected. The Soviet Union is a loser in life. It can't be that person. It's impossible. In addition, Kennedy had a magic, the Kennedys did Camelot, the Best and the brightest. After the gray Eisenhower eight years of Eisenhower's president the Kennedy presidency started with so much potential for the future. He we had gone from black and white television literally to Technicolor. And the Kennedys represented so much potential for the future. The idea that that could all end for the warped motivation of a single person seemed just wrong. You wanted to give something else to the the assassin side of the scale. And a conspiracy does that very nicely. In addition, Kennedy had a lot of enemies. Every American president has enemies. But he had failed to provide reinforcements at the Bay of Pigs. The reinvasion of Cuba by the paramilitary who had fled Cuba. They considered him a traitor. They want him dead. The Mafia didn't like him. There was no question about that. So there were a whole series of people that celebrated his death. So we think, well, they must have been involved in killing him. And then sort of cherry on top of the cake or the ice cream or however you want to call it is the murder of Oswald two days later by Ruby. No wonder this particular case has more than any other presidential assassination or moderate assassination in terms of its conspiracy speculation.
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On the note actually of Oswald, what's his wife and I don't know whether his daughter's ever spoken about it. What have they said about Oswald, whether they believe he was the lone assassin.
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So Marina, his wife, her testimony was absolutely critical in some respects in painting the picture of the Oswald that we came to understand about the backyard photographs that she took about the assassination attempt on Walker, how he beat her at times and pummeled her, the violence that he had. People who thought it was a conspiracy early on said, you know what? She's probably said all of that because she's a young Russian here in the United States in this strange capitalist country. Her husband's been accused of killing the President. She's afraid maybe she'll be charged as an accessory. So she's saying whatever they tell her to say. Now when she became an American citizen, remarried and didn't have those fears, years later, she still kept to those same stories. She didn't change any of them. There's some people that said she told them for so many years she's come to believe them. Well, let's assume that that might be a field too far. But she has changed her view. She used to think that Lee was guilty and now from the time that I was doing my research in 92, I had had some contact with her, but not for quoting her in the book. She believed that he was innocent. And the most Important thing that I wanted to know and others who have spoken to her is, okay, what changed your mind? Because if she rescinded or recanted what she knows from her own experience, her own eyewitness accounts of what happened with Lee, then it would be major news. If she said, by the way, I never saw any of that information about him wanting to kill Walker until the FBI came in two days after the assassination, put it down on a table and said, you're going to swear you saw this six months ago. That would be news. But instead, she said, I'm convinced he's innocent because he was a CIA agent. He. There were two Oswalds on the way to. To Mexico City. He couldn't have done the shots in the time that were necessary. The shot came from the front. It was clear from that it's things that others have told her and convinced her are true, but have nothing to do with what she knows. So as an attorney, as somebody looking at history and trying to come to what the right answers are, my question always, for a witness to history, an eyewitness to history, is what do you know from what you have, from your own experience that you can attest to, and what do you believe from others and what they've told you? And in her case, it's very, very different. And the daughters are hard to say. They. They really haven't spoken out as much. Matter of fact, all three that the two daughters and Marina, to their credit, have not, in a day and age of social media influencers and everything else, made an Oswald channel, or, you know, a Patsy channel, or, you know, whatever you want to say, and made it into. They've kept their heads down. They were involved in the crosshairs. The children were very, very young of this amazing moment in history, but they have really stayed out of the public frame.
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So your book came out about 30 years ago. Be interested to know what kind of response have you had to the book in the decade since? We've had quite a. Quite a big response just to this podcast. So this book must have been. I mean, did it just go crazy when the book came out?
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Yes, surprisingly so. The book was put up by Random House, one of the traditional large publishers, on the 30th anniversary of the assassination. And I think there were 13 or 14 books put out that year. The editor of Random House, for any of your listeners who remember British journalistic history, was Sir Harold Evans. He wasn't yet Sir Harold. He was Harry Evans. He was the former editor of the Sunday Times and had created the Insight Team, which broke thalidomide and DC10, some great investigator stories. He thought it was the Mafia, by the way, which he signed this book. Was very disappointed when I came back in and said I thought it was Oswald. Then he read the manuscript and became convinced it was Oswald. And when we published that book on the 30th anniversary, we were the only ones with a book that said, there are a lot of mistakes in the Warren Commission, a lot of reasons to believe in a conspiracy, but if you look at all of it, it's Oswald alone. Every other one was a conspiracy. And the fear at Random House was, nobody's going to care and nobody's going to read the book that very few people think it's Oswald alone. And they'll say, why should I read a book and spend $30 and go through 700 pages? I already know that. And conspiracy people would say, that's absolutely garbage. You know, we've heard that before and not look at it. What we didn't appreciate was the extent to which after 30 years, 1993 of the assassination, two years after Oliver Stone had done his film JFK, that the most outrageous thing to say was, I think Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed the President. People thought you just landed from outer space or you were in a coma and had just woken up and had never seen any of the evidence. They couldn't believe that as a serious journalist, that was your conclusion. And what happened was two things. The mainstream press, the New York Times. The New York Times book reviews. Historians like Stephen Ambrose, people like William Styron, Tom Wicker, the New York Times and others said this book answers why we've had doubts for all these years. But is the story of what happened in the assassination. The book was a finest for the Pulitzer in history, made the bestseller list. It received great traditional press, legacy press reviews that convinced the conspiracy theorists that there really was a conspiracy. Because after all these years, you have somebody like me who had not been a study or the assassination, spend a couple of years on the case, conclude that it's Oswald alone. The book is published by Random House. And then the mainstream press comes in and embraces it because they are still covering up the truth. And the response to that was I was picketed in Boston to Boston that I was a dupe of the CIA assaulted on the street in New York. They opened up an FBI file at one point, received a. A dead fish, received a rat's tail in the mail. My wife and me, we stopped opening up the mail. Assaulted at one point on a plane I've written books about international heroin trade and Saudi Wahhabi fundamentalist and. And people inside the Vatican and mobsters hiding money. I've never had that level of vitriol that I had after doing a book that said Oswald alone killed the President. And I didn't understand it at the time. I do now in the sense that if you believe in your heart and soul that the President was killed as a result of a convoluted deep state plot by the CIA and others, and then 30 years later, somebody comes forward and says, I. I think that it was just Oswald. And the press that you hoped would be investigating the conspiracy says, yeah, we think he's right. And they embrace that book. You're just furious about it. You have to think that it's part of a coordinated campaign, I suppose, to keep the truth from getting out there. I was amazed at that response. I did not expect it.
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B
Just a couple more questions if that's okay. Are there any facts of the case that you find hard to square with the Oswald alone theory that you concluded is correct?
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I mean, no. I hesitate because I wish that I could say to you in the 30 years since this has come up and now I'm not sure about that, it's possible. You know, we've had advances in ballistics, advances in terms of technology and medical technology and in terms of what you can do in medical examinations, maybe someone would have developed some new 3D version with artificial intelligence of what can be done with autopsy photos. And they say no. In fact, look at this. It's shot from the side, not from the back of that. None of that has happened. And in the documents that have been released, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages of files released. At the time that I wrote the book in 93, I was convinced, based upon an examination of the contemporaneous evidence, that this is what happened in the case. Now, would the release of those documents add to our understanding of what happened? Yes, they well could. But would they change the fundamental rule that Oswald alone had killed the President? I was convinced that would not happen. Those documents that have been released, the secret documents unfurled in the last 30 years, they have added to our knowledge about the case, but much less than many people had hoped. People like Oliver Stone, the Director, and others thought that those files would upend the case, that they would change everything that we understood about it. And in fact, the biggest change came not from the release of the files but from the testimony of a Secret Service agent who was there that day in the backup car who said that when they raced to Parkland Hospital, the hospital where they brought the President was essentially dead, but they brought him there and they tried to revive him. Resuscitated in the emergency room. One that that Secret Service agent said, I found a whole bullet in the limousine soaked in blood. I put it in my pocket and never told anybody about it. And then as we were leaving the hospital that day, I dropped it on a stretcher in the hallway, figuring that somebody would find it and they would go into the exam. That changed my view of how the so called single bullet, the bullet that wounded Kennedy, the second bullet, landed on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital. For years, I assumed, and others had assumed, that when the governor of Texas, who had been wounded, had been moved onto a stretcher to be moved into the operating room, they took him off, that the bullet, that that whole bullet that was in him had plopped out of his leg. It now turns out that it was found, it had come out in the car, Secret Service agents found it and then dropped it on this stretcher. It's added to our understanding of how the bullet ended up there. Wasn't part of a plot. The CIA didn't come in and do it. It wasn't a second bullet or any of those things. So there are little answers that have come forward, but nothing that's shaken the conclusion. And as a matter of fact, even conspiracy theorists now you'll get a hundred letters that say that's not true. But many, maybe, I should say quite a few of those who think it's a conspiracy have concluded that Oswald was the shooter. They build a conspiracy still around that. That's a tougher one. But there was a period at which no one thought that Oswald was the shooter. They all thought that he wasn't the shooter at all, and the shooter came to the front. But there are a number today who say, you know, I think maybe Oswald was the shooter, but there's still something more to it. And that at least is a much more legitimate part of the theory than anything else. I think also there's one other thing you'll find, and I see this repeatedly now among people who follow the case carefully, make it sort of their hobby, their avocation, because the fact that the file is being released by the federal government, when the last files are released, if they haven't changed anybody's understanding of the case, they are going to say, ah, there still must be a file somewhere else. Their file still exists somewhere else. And if they never find that file, they're going to say then the real file, the smoking gun, the file that shows up as a conspiracy must have been destroyed. So you're never going to satisfy people who want that answer.
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B
Okay, Gerald, I think I've kind of been through all the questions we've had. Is there anything else we haven't mentioned at all? I mean, anything else you think we should have discussed?
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A
No, I mean, I just think that, you know, you are brave to tackle the Kennedy assassination in the sense that you understand there is a history to be told here. The problem is that a lot of people will disagree with that history. Many of them who have not studied the case in detail or looked at it or know the, the current status of it. But it is interesting that I find it is a lightning rod still for discussion in American politics. Not with Gen z. I have two God kids, 13 and 15, and their eyes start to roll with boredom at the second mention of jfk or that they just have no interest in it at all. But certainly with baby boomers and those who are around or those who memory of it. I was in fourth grade when he was killed, so I remember it. And it is like politics. Everybody has an opinion and they think the opinion is fact. And so it's, it's a, it's been a challenging topic to go ahead and sort of very calmly say here's the evidence. Please look at the evidence. Here's the credible evidence. Tell me if you think something is more credible or should be looked at or if I've missed something. I'm willing to have that discussion with somebody all day long because you can have those types of discussions. But in the end, I just think that. I hope your listeners will understand that on any given area of history, especially on the Kennedy assassination, if they are looking for every single small issue to be answered to 100% satisfaction, it's probably not going to happen. And the fact that the killer who I think is Oswald is not alive means there are some things that he took to the grave that we don't get to ask him. And that means that there's an unsettled feeling about it that I understand. But in the end, as much as we dislike it, the chaos history of history does run its course here very, very strongly, which is that things happen unexpectedly sometimes at the hands of one person. History can and does get changed in a moment's notice in ways that we don't expect and we don't like that. We like to think as people that we have more control over the way things play out. And Oswald having killed JFK on his own for this very warped motivation of personal glory and a bit of anarchy and this. And that seems as though I got if it could happen there, we have no control over just about anything. There is a human tendency, I think, to think that if things had gone differently, the world would be better. So most people who bemoan Jack Kennedy's death think that of only he had lived. He would have been smart enough not to get us involved in Vietnam. He would have been smart enough not to have done this or that. It would have been a better America. We wouldn't have gone through this America. We wouldn't have led to Nixon being elected in war, Watergate and Iran Contra with Reagan. There's no way of knowing that. But of course that adds to the sense that it has to be more than just, you know, a 24 year old kid deciding to shoot the President.
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That was Gerald Posner in conversation with me, Rob Attar. Gerald is the author of Case Closed, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of jfk. And that's all from us for now. But we'll be releasing a new another series of history's greatest conspiracy theories later this year. So do look out for that. Thanks for listening. This episode was produced by Jack Bateman.