← History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories
History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories
Who killed JFK?
01:15:47
Investigative journalist Gerald Posner examines some of the many conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of the American president
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- [00:01]
Gerald Posner
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- [00:35]
Rob Attar
On 22nd November 1963, US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. A US Marine veteran named Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested and charged with the murder, but he was then shot and killed before he could stand trial. The 1964 Warren Commission a established that Oswald had acted alone. But in the decades since, the idea that there was a conspiracy to assassinate the President has grown in popularity and is a view held by millions of Americans today. Welcome to history's greatest conspiracy theories from History Extra. I'm Rob Attar and in this episode we're going to be taking on one of the biggest conspiracy theories of them all. Today's guest is the American investigative journalist Gerald Posner, whose landmark 1993 book Case Closed, famously concluded that Oswald had indeed acted alone. This episode was first released on our History extra feed in January 2024. But in light of the recent announcement that President Trump has ordered the release of classified files surrounding the assassination, we decided it would be a good time to revisit him. Just a quick warning before we begin. We're not aiming to sensationalize the subject, but the nature of the topic means that you will hear some reasonably graphic descriptions of the assassination itself. Gerald, you spent many years researching the Kennedy assassination. What do you think occurred on 22 November 1963?
- [02:06]
Gerald Posner
I think that a single assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, armed with a relatively cheap rifle, managed to kill John Kennedy and end his presidency all on his own, without any conspiracy.
- [02:21]
Rob Attar
So how did you come to this conclusion?
- [02:23]
Gerald Posner
I researched the case for two years, interviewed hundreds of people, asked what could be done from ballistics and forensics experts who I said to them in 1991 and 1992 when I was doing this, what can you do today with bullets? With the film of the assassination, with the autopsy that couldn't be done by the FBI in 1963 and 1964 when they investigated it, and there was a lot I didn't think you could answer the question of who killed Kennedy. That wasn't my intent when I started out. But during the course of my research, I sort of followed the evidence and surprised myself by coming to the conclusion that it was Oswald as the shooter. And then when I investigated whether he was a shooter for a plot or whether he was doing it for his own worked motivations included that he wasn't part of a conspiracy. My publisher was shocked with that conclusion before they published because they didn't expect it and they were rather worried. As a matter of fact, the head of Random House at the time, you all know his name, Harry Evans, used to be head of the London Sunday Times, had created the insight team that went off and did that great investigative work on DC10, thalidomide, everything else. And Harry thought it was the Mafia. And when I told him it was Oswald alone, he sort of was worried that I had gone off and read the Warren Commission. That's all I had done until I showed him what was new. And then he became really a sort of a born again assassin advocate.
- [03:49]
Rob Attar
So there's a lot of things there that we'll come back to, to discuss over the course of this conversation. But actually I was interested to know before you began work on this book, what was your hunch on who may have killed Kennedy and whether there was or wasn't a conspiracy?
- [04:04]
Gerald Posner
People say they have no bias. Journalists like to say I have no bias when I go into a controversial subject of history. We all have sort of a feeling about what we think happened. And then the real difficulty is making sure that you, no matter what you think, you, you can follow that evidence. And what I thought happened was the Mafia was likely involved. I had been at law school in the late 70s when the government did another investigation into the case called the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And they had concluded that there was a conspiracy. 95% certainty, it turns out that that was on flawed acoustics evidence. But still that got my interest. And the reason I thought it was likely the mob, even though I hadn't investigated the case in any depth, was because Oswald was killed two days after he was arrested in police custody by a fellow, Jack Ruby, who looks like he's out of central casting in Hollywood for playing a mobster. So it looks like a silencing of an assassin by a Mafia related character. We all know that the Kennedys were hated by the Mafia. Jack John Kennedy's brother, Bobby Kennedy was the Attorney General and he was going after the Mafia very, very hard. So I thought, you know what, they must have struck out first to the President. That's what my feeling was going into the case.
- [05:17]
Rob Attar
Okay, so coming on then to talk about some of these conspiracy theories, and there are many in this case, but I wonder if you could perhaps outline what are some of the most popular, popular conspiracy theories about the killing of Kennedy.
- [05:28]
Gerald Posner
So I think that in the very beginning the idea was, I mean, there was a lot of speculation in the 60s, in the years after the assassination. Did Oswald in fact do it for either the Soviets because he had been a defector of the Soviet Union, or was he prompted maybe by a love for Fidel Castro because the Americans were trying to kill Castro together with the Mafia. Those lost favor over a period of time. And as the country became increasingly suspect about its own government. We learned about the lies in Vietnam, we saw Watergate, we saw Iran Contra. We learned that the government does sometimes conspire against the best interests of the people. The most popular suspects became the government itself, elements of the CIA, the FBI. They must have killed Kennedy because as Oliver Stone would later say in his 1990 film JFK, Kennedy was about to pull us out of Vietnam. Historians certainly debate that, or Kennedy was about to disband the CIA. Historians will debate that, but they say that's why he was killed by the so called secret government. And they're probably the biggest suspects. The Mafia is there as an assistance in the assassination, but not the main driving force.
- [06:43]
Rob Attar
And am I right to say that there are two different variants of conspiracy theory? One being that Oswald was a tool of one or more of these groups and the other being that actually there was another shooter as well who was working for the government, the FBI, CIA, etc.
- [06:58]
Gerald Posner
That's right. I mean, people who embrace the conspiracy theories often have the feeling that OSWALD Just turned 24 years old with a relatively cheap, World War II style Italian, you know, military rifle. He was incapable. And a cheap sight as well, on top of the rifle. He was incapable of pulling that off. And so therefore there had to be something more to it. A lot of people say there was a world class assassin somewhere on the grassy knoll. There's no physical evidence of it or contemporaneous eyewitness sightings. There are plenty of people in later years who came forward 10 and 15 years after the assassination to say, oh, I saw a puff of smoke over there, I saw somebody running, I saw blood along the line. But no contemporaneous accounts. People come in and get their 15 minutes of fame later and those accounts don't hold up. But still they stick with a lot of people. And I think the interesting thing is there, there are two Possibilities here. On the one hand, Oswald, when he was arrested, gives this very line that lives in history forever. I'm just a patsy. So people say, oh, that's amazing. They. So he's a patsy, he's been set up for the crime. Well, if he's a patsy, if somebody's really been set up for a crime, it's like they're hit by a. A train. They don't know what's happened to them because they're accused of the crime. The physical evidence is there to make it look like they committed the crime. They don't know the answer to it. They're eventually going to be convicted and go away and for the rest of their life claim they're innocent even though they were set up for the crime. What Oswal does after the assassination, forget the assassination itself for a second, is he leaves the place where he's working. He's the only one of the employees who leaves. He goes back to his rooming house across town, takes a pistol, and then runs into a policeman 15 minutes later who stops him and shoots him in front of a dozen witnesses. More witnesses you could imagine. So I always say Oswald after the assassination has all of the evidence of flight. Now, whether you want to say he's the assassin or not, he's clearly fleeing for something. Even if you think he only brought in the rifle that was used to kill Kennedy or he knows something. The only reason you would have to kill Oswald, in essence on Sunday, is if he knows something he's not a pass. He's involved in inside that plot. And it always seems to me that if Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a plot, knew something that could unravel the entire assassination, he would never have made it out of D Plaza alive. There would have been some dirty cop who would have been part of the payroll, who would have shot him at the scene and received a medal for killing the assassin, much less letting him sit around for a few days and have his way with police and actually.
- [09:36]
Rob Attar
Coming on to the D Plaza and to the assassination itself. One of the arguments that I've certainly heard is that from the distance he was at or the angle he was at, there's no way someone could have hit and killed the President. You know, it was without incredible good fortune. But I gather you don't hold that to be true.
- [09:54]
Gerald Posner
Well, I think there's a bit of skill and a bit of luck involved in the assassination. I know that drives a lot of people crazy to think that luck is involved. I don't mean luck like Fortune. Fortune. Or, you know, fortune telling luck. But things have to break just right for you. And with Oswald, the first shot, people say he's not that great of a shot. In this case, a marksman and sharpshooter in the Marines. But he hasn't fired the gun that often since then to be able to be that great. So the first shot misses, misses entirely, is deflected by these tree branches and goes 500ft off in the depository, nicks the part of a curbstone and concrete, flies up and wounds a bystander. The second shot, Oswald has three and a half seconds on the clock. Three and a half. He operates the bolt. It's a bolt action rifle. Aims again, shoots. And that shot's not fatal. As a matter of fact, Kennedy would live through that. It hits Kennedy in the high, sort of almost, you know, high neck, below the neck and the high shoulder area. Passes through without hitting any bone or any vital organ. President survives the next shot, which is the fatal shot. Oswald has the longest period of time, just a little over five seconds. He operates the bulk, aims back through the sight at the farthest point. The moment the Kennedy is actually hit with the headshot car is 100 yards away. It looks like it's 25 yards away in terms of the sight. And here's where I say, look. The driver of the limousine that day, William Greer, is 52 years old. He's the oldest member of the security detail. He turns around and looks at Kennedy after the second shot. You can see him on the film, the Zapruder film shows the driver looking back to see what the commotion is and what's happening with the President. He's looking at the President. He's not taking any evasive action. The car hasn't picked up its speed. It's moving at 10 to 12 miles an hour. As it's going down that street, it slows to five to seven miles an hour. Kennedy is in a back brace. We forget about that often. He's wearing that and he's lulled a little bit to the left because of the wound. His head's in that same position. Oswald gets the straight on shot because the car is not taking a base of action and still almost misses. He is Kennedy in the high right rear of the head. An inch and a quarter higher. He misses and the President lives. And it's a failed assassination, but it's a deadly and lethal shot. So my point is that one out of three shots is the shot that works for the assassin. It just gets in. Now, one sidelight I must say that I don't care how many times Oswald, in his mind he had tried to kill a U.S. army general in April of that year. He thought that was going to be his contribution to history. This right wing army general was running for the governorship of Texas. And the bullet deflects on a window pane and he misses. He thinks he's going to stop the next Hitler from coming. No matter how many times, though, you have thought about killing the President of the United States, when that car turns the corner, you're in the sniper's nest in the window where you work, it comes to life in front of you. You have the President, Jackie Kennedy, who doesn't often travel with him in that pink Chanel suit, the Governor sitting there like a caricature of Texas with the Stetson hat, the limousine, the people around at the Secret Service. So you may have thought about it, but your adrenaline has to be going through the roof. And some people might put the rifle down and not do it. The some people might be so nervous that they're shaking so much that after the first or second shots are missed and you're thinking to yourself, they're all going to be looking up here and seeing who I am, that you're going to run away from it. So there's something, and I don't say this in terms of admiration, I say just in terms of fact, Oswald had the ability to stay with those shots all through it.
- [13:37]
Rob Attar
While we're talking about Oswald and the shots he took, one of the things the conspiracy theorists point to a lot is this idea of a magic bullet. How could what we've talked about being the second bullet, how could that possibly have injured Kennedy and then injured Connolly, Governor Connolly twice, I believe. What does the theorist believe about that? And why do you think that's not true?
- [13:56]
Gerald Posner
Oliver Stone in his film jfk, great filmmaker, bad historian, he probably mocked this so called single bullet, magic bullet better than anyone, you know, goes through Kennedy and then hesitates for half second, then does a couple of somersaults and then makes a left turn and a right turn and goes on to wound comedy and emerges in very good condition. So the question I had when I went to ballistics people in 92 was can you do anything that the FBI couldn't do? And it turns out they could actually do a lot. If they could disprove the single bullet, if they could prove at that point that it was impossible, then fantastic. As a journalist, you've got the evidence there was a conspiracy. You don't Know how it happened. You don't know who shot him. You don't know anything else. But if the single bullet didn't happen, there has to be another shooter involved or someplace else because there are four shots and Oswald didn't have the time for that. So that was my starting point, in essence was that bullet. And it turns out that ballistics people said, oh, we'll tell you why the Warren Commission couldn't figure it out. They had to guess at it. They couldn't figure out any other way, but they didn't have the evidence for it. They didn't explain how the bullets slowed over a period of time. So it's fired from Oswald's rifle at like 2,000ft a second. They now know the speed at which it was hitting Kennedy at 13 or 1400ft, how it tumbled into Connolly. They know the speed of the bullet at every one of those wounds. And it's not just a theory because then they take cadavers the size of weight of Kennedy and Connally, they fire bullets at those speeds through those, creating those wounds, and all day long they produce equivalents of the so called single magic bullet. Bullets that are pushed down a little bit, flattened on one side, but otherwise in very, very good shape. So I think that there is ballistic evidence that that bullet wasn't so magical. It did in fact happen. But this is key. If I argue that with somebody who thinks it's a conspiracy or if I meet somebody who is agnostic on the case and I make the case that ballistics establishes that one shot happened as the Warren Commission guessed it did, that it inflicted a set of wounds on Kennedy and Conley hit at the same time. They think I am then saying it must be Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. That's not at all true. All you've done if you look at that bullet is decide that one bullet fired from the general direction of behind the President struck the President and the Governor that day, inflicting a set of wounds and then was later found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital. That doesn't tell you who fired the fatal headshot. It doesn't tell you the direction. It, it doesn't tell you if there was another assassin. Even if you then go through all of the evidence and conclude it's Oswald firing from the window, it still doesn't tell you if there's a conspiracy or not. So people think that confirming that the single bullet was real means that you're thinking it's a lone assassin. You're debunking all the Conspiracies no, it's just one element of deciding what else happened on that day. And I think far too many people who think it's a conspiracy get hung up on the ballistics. For me, as an investigator, if I was coming to this case today, what I would focus on is if Oswald's the shooter. I'll accept that. But let's find out if he was doing it for some group. That's the much tougher question here, you know, is going out beyond Dealey Plaza. But people get stuck in Dealey Plaza. I understand that.
- [17:18]
Rob Attar
Now, earlier on, you talked a bit about the Zapruder film, which is a huge part of the Kennedy assassination, and also the conspiracy theories. How do the conspiracy theorists believe the film helps their case? And why would you counter that?
- [17:32]
Gerald Posner
Well, I think in the beginning, if. If anybody watches the Zapruder film at regular speed, they just watch the film play through. They will have the same reaction that I had when I first saw it play in real time back in the mid-70s. I thought Kennedy was shot in the fatal shot from the front. That's what it looks like to the average person. You see the President going along and then the next thing you see is this violent reaction of the President back into the left head explodes with this mist of. Sorry, it's graphic brain and blood matter. And we've all seen enough movies to know that's how it looks like. People are shot. You're shot from one direction, you fall back in the other direction. So the Zapruder film, at first glance, seems to confirm the idea that people have there must be a shooter from the front. I get that. It's only when the film is slowed up. You now can digitize it. You go frame by frame that you see. And the reason frames are important is for those who aren't familiar with the case is the Zapruder film is our time clock for the assassination. It's about 18.3 frames a second. So we know exactly if there. If a shot takes place at a certain frame, it's an 18th of a second the frame before the fatal headshot. The measured by the back seat of the car and the President's suit. He moves a little forward, about 2 inches forward as the bullet hits the back of the head. An eighteenth of a second later, you can see it frame by frame as it explodes out the front of the President's head. And it does. According to ballistics experts and others you talk to do what you expect. The amount of force of that wound is so great that the President Goes back in the opposite direction. The car is starting to zoom out of TD Plaza, which accelerates that movement. He goes back into the left. It happens in. Literally plays out in half a second to one second and looks like on film, as though it's the reaction to the shot. There's something else on this. There are two motorcycle policemen. There are four all around the car, two in front and two in back. The two and back got sprayed with blood and brain bits as they drove. And so the reaction I had in others is when you hear that, oh, my God, that's additional evidence of a front shot. President shot bullet sprays the people behind him. The Zapruder film is indispensable in this way because as you do it, frame by frame, you see, again, it's, you know, sounds like a gruesome description, but you see those two motorcycle policemen, especially the one on the right hand side, drive right through the mist of blood from Kennedy's head. And that's. And that's how it happens. I think the Zapruder film also is critical for showing, not hearing, because we don't have any sound. Unfortunately, with it, the first shot, you don't see it, but you see the reactions of the people. You see the reaction of Mrs. Kennedy who turns to the right, the reaction to the Secret Service agents who turn and look behind them in the general direction of where the assassin is firing from. You have a small child on the street running along with the motorcade, who stops and turns and looks back up there at that time that first shot is fired. And then it provides the key visual evidence we know by the reaction of the men in the car, Kennedy and Conley, when they are hit by bullets, question becomes, were they hit by separate bullets, two assassins? Were they hit by the same bullet, the single bullet? So forget the fact that you can recreate the single bullet in terms of firing it and having it emerge in the same condition. The question now is, were they aligned in a position, sitting wise, where one bullet traveling through the two of them as quickly as it would have, could inflict the wounds that it did on those two men. And that's where the Zapruder film becomes critical, because then you can place them, you know, where they are in the car. And the answer to that is yes. So much so, Rob, that before Case Closed, the Zapruder film was cited almost always as evidence of conspiracy. It's evidence of the headshot being from the front and that the dissection that I took in the long discussion I have it on Case Closed Then pushed some of the assassination researchers to say, ah, it must have been tampered with. That's what they did. They tampered with the film to make it look like that so guys like Posner could come along decades later and conclude that it was really just a single assassin. That's impossible to. I mean, the House Select Committee on Assassinations looked at the autopsy X rays, the photos and the supporter film and looked for evidence of fakery and found none. But if you can't agree on what the evidence is, you can't agree on a discussion. So there are still people that now think this is a brutal film, has been tampered with. And one last quick aside, the Zapruder film should have been immediately available to the American public. But The Kennedy family, Mrs. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, did not want gruesome public displays of, of Jack made available. So that wasn't made available. Time Life bought the rights to it. They kept it for years. It wasn't shown until 1975 when Jones, Geraldo Rivera showed it on a program he had. Today, we're accustomed to having a, you know, three dozen cell phone videos of whatever happens and transpires, but I think it's one of the reasons people are skeptical about the cases, because they didn't see what happened for 12 years. And then when they saw what happened. This goes back to what we said before. In the very beginning, they said, oh, my God, that looks like a head shot from the front.
- [23:14]
Rob Attar
And you talked earlier about the importance of acoustics in this case. So if you say there's a pruda, film was silent. So how does the acoustics evidence come in?
- [23:22]
Gerald Posner
So the acoustics evidence comes in. I. I have a section in the book called Eyewitnesses and Ear Witnesses, and I'm an attorney in it seems like another life. It's decades ago since I've been practicing, but I know as an attorney how good and unreliable eyewitness testimony can be. You have an event play out in front of 10 people and they'll give you different accounts of what they saw. Not because they're lying, because they saw differently. They. One thinks the car was speeding, another thinks it wasn't. Somebody says this person was turning and they weren't. So eyewitnesses. You put it all together. The ear witnesses at the time, the contemporaneous ear witness statements, nearly 200 of them that were taken by the FBI and the Dallas police in the several days after the assassination. The largest majority, some couldn't determine where the sounds were coming from. DD Plaza is a bit of an echo chamber. The largest group of them, around 38% thought it was coming from behind the President. A smaller group, about like 12% thought it was coming from the front, the grassy knoll. A very small number. I think it's like 2% thought it was coming from two locations. That's critical because for a conspiracy to work, you have to have a shooter from the rear. And then if you believe that the fatal headshot came from the front, you should be hearing sounds from both the smallest number. All of that being said, as a journalist, my view is what's the best evidence? So it's not a popularity poll. If 95% of all the air witnesses said, oh, by the way, it came from behind and we think it came from the sixth floor of the Depository where I think Oswald was, I still couldn't really use that as evidence that Oswald did the shooting. It means that a lot of people thought that was the case by their ear witness. But that's not really accurate testimony for me. What tells me what happened is the autopsy X rays and photos. When I examine those with then medical examiners and look at the testimony about them, I'm convinced that the only evidence on Kennedy's body shows wounds that came from the rear. So now my belief is that those witnesses who heard it from the rear, the ear witnesses, are correct, but not because they said it, if that makes sense. You know, I think people tend to be persuaded by ear witnesses and eyewitnesses. And my question is, do we have better evidence? One last thing on the acoustics. The House select committee spends $6 million. It's a government investigation. In the late 70s they did some great work. They debunked a lot of conspiracy theories. They, they were fantastic. And then at the very end, when they're running out of money, they found an audio tape that had been came from a. It was on a dicta belt and they think it was a Dallas police motorcycle policeman who had their mic in the on position and it was recording what was around that motorbike. So they thought, oh well, if that Dallas policeman with that motorcycle was in the motorcade with the assassination, we might hear the assassination sounds. Then we could combine it with this brutal film. We'll know exactly how many shots there were. Great idea. They brought in these two acoustics experts to examine it and they said 95% certainty. There were four shots. And that got all the headlines. Then that was totally debunked over a period of a couple of years by the National Academy of Sciences and others who said the time on the Dictabel was actually a minute away from when the assassination happened. But let me say something. I think that's critical. Anybody who can listen to that sound of the Dictabel around the time that the two sound experts are saying there are four shots, I encourage them to do it, to find it on the National Archives, the American National Archives, and listen to it. Because here's what they will hear when they're listening for the sounds. Nothing. Because you expect to hear a sound of a shot or crack or something because there, there is no sound. There's a bell that rings every little once in a while. What the sound experts said is, oh, well, you can't hear it. Sort of like a dog. Dog can hear things you can't hear. But we see it in terms of spikes on this chart. There are these supersonic spikes. Those must be the shots. They aren't, in fact. And it turns out that that Dictabelt was on away from the Depository. It wasn't in the motorcade. It's a disaster. But still, you know, journalism. What do people remember? They remember the very, very dramatic headline of 95% certainty. They didn't say 100%, so they left themselves and out. They did give themselves a 5% out. That was wise. But nobody remembers that.
- [27:57]
Rob Attar
I wonder now if we could go on to talk a little bit about Oswald himself because a fair proportion of your book is actually dedicated to Lee Harvey Oswald and his earlier life. I wonder if you could briefly tell us about Oswald's early life prior to his encounter with JFK that day.
- [28:13]
Gerald Posner
I'm glad you asked that because sometimes people say, what's the single strongest piece of evidence that Oswald killed Kennedy? And they're expecting me to cite something about ballistics or whatever else. And actually I don't have a sound bite answer, but it's Oswald himself. Because it's only but once you come to understand Oswald that you get a feeling for how he could possibly end up in a window in Dallas shooting at the President of the United States. And he comes from, we overuse the word nowadays, dysfunctional. But Oswald did come from a truly dysfunctional one. A mother that was quite high strung that moved around with him. He wasn't very good at school. He was teased a lot at school. When he moved to New York City, he wasn't going to school. And at that time not going to school could get you into trouble. He was interviewed by a psychiatrist at a youth house who. That psychiatrist remembered him years later because the Reason he remembered him was because Oswald came to him on a very mild charge of truancy, not going to school, and yet displayed all these aggressive, passive aggressive, acting out personality disorders, on the edge of violence. So much so that he recommended that he either be institutionalized for a while or given regular psychiatric treatment. And instead his mother just took him back to Texas from New York. He is fascinated a little bit with contrarian left wing politics in the middle of the Cold War. But he goes into the Marine Corps. Why? Because his brother had his stepbrother and was successful for him. And Oswald thinks it's going to change his life. And what happens? His fellow Marines think that he might be gay. They call him Mrs. Oswald, they put him into the shower, they tease him. He hates the Marine Corps and at a certain point he decides that he's going to defect. The Soviet Union in the heart of the Cold War as a Marine, turn up in Moscow and say, I'm an ex Marine, I believe in Communism. They're going to treat him like a hero. And when he does that, the Soviets say, no, you have to leave, we don't quite believe you're real. And he tries to kill himself. They save his life and they move him out to the provincial capital of Minsk where he spends a couple of years learning to hate the Soviet Union, marries a Russian wife and works the long process to come back to the US which he still hates. And here he goes on a series of failed missions from trying to kill this ex army general to spending the summer of 63 only months before the assassination, handing out leaflets in the scorching sweltering weather of New Orleans to try to get volunteers for a new organization that he started to support Castro because he believes that Castro is the Communist who's really leading the true revolution. And he doesn't get a single recruitment. He's failed yet again. So he goes down to Mexico City in 8 September, only seven weeks before the assassination and tries to go to Cuba and gets rejected by the Soviets and the Cuban missions. When he comes back into Dallas six weeks before the assassination, he is just about to turn 24 years old and he thinks of himself as very bright. He has this political mix of leftism and a bit of anarchy and he's never really succeeded at anything. When he finds out he lands a job at the book depository through a friend of his wife, not through the CIA or the FBI, but through a friend of his wife who finds out it's available and gets lead the job. When he finds out it's in the Dallas newspapers a couple of days before the assassination is printed in two newspapers that the President's motorcade is coming directly in front of the building in which he's working. The Oswald that I came to understand, it's like handing him Kennedy on a silver platter. What I mean by that is he's looking to make his mark. He's ready to commit himself to killing this general, to change the course of history. He now has the possibility of throwing a much bigger cog into the machinery of government. The Oswald that I know, I say could have been in the sixth floor of a building in downtown Moscow shooting at Nikita Khrushchev. Now that surprises some people. But I think his disdain for the USSR at this point was only slightly less than his disdain for the United States the night before the assassination. He has to go to collect the rifle. Now, even if you want to say that he was collecting it for the world class assassin, he has to go and collect the rifle that's found the next day at the depository that's tied ballistically to the bullets that hit Kennedy and the governor to the exclusion of any other gun in the world. So he goes out to where his wife is staying at this house of a woman, Ruth Payne, and he has a discussion. He has a strained relationship with Marina, his wife. You know, he has at times beaten her. They're. They're very volatile relationship and she's separated from him. He says, come back. Come back with me. Let's make another effort. We can make this work. I'll buy you a washing machine. May not seem like a big deal, but the Oswalds had only a few hundred dollars to their names. There's a big, big purchase for him. And she rebuffed him. She said, I was so cold. Later she said, I was sort of like a fool. I just wouldn't give him any ground. And they had this discussion, which turned into an argument that went on for over an hour later that night when they were sleeping in the same bed. Marina recalled that at one point she put her leg against his and he pushed it away with this ferocity that she said surprised her. And she thought, maya's in a mean mood. When she woke up the next morning, he'd already left for work. She didn't notice or she would have gotten worried that on the dresser next to her he had left his wedding ring for the first time and had left like $187, which is almost their life savings on that dresser drawer. So the question is, people don't like to hear this, if Marina had said yes the night before, was Oswald asking her just as a fake question or did he mean it? Was he ambivalent about the assassination? I've written a piece of a few months ago on my substack in which I call him the equivocal assassin. People think that in order to assassinate a big historical figure, if somebody was going after, you know, Obama, Biden, Trump, you know, a British Prime Minister, they must be so filled with passion and rage and ideology that they're inflexible. The assassination is not movable with Oswald. It's an assassination that becomes available to him almost in this mixed world of his. And I really do think that there is a moment at which possibly he could put it aside. There's no doubt in my mind that if he had gone into D Plaza that day, he had no idea of what to expect with a presidential motorcade because he'd never seen one before. So he didn't know if there would be Secret Service or Dallas police in his building. There weren't. They didn't do that. But if there were, that would have been the end of it. His co workers, who left him alone half an hour before the assassination, if they hadn't left, he wasn't going to take out the rifle and start to shoot them and then shoot at Kennedy. It wasn't a suicide mission. So there are so many possibilities for this assassination not to have happened. But unfortunately it played out in a way that put him up in the sixth floor window with that rifle the next day.
- [35:06]
Rob Attar
A number of the conspiracy theorists that do believe in Oswald's involvement will charge that he was put up to it by the Soviets, the Cubans, the CIA, the FBI, Mafia. Did he have much contact with any of these groups or organizations whereby he could have been commissioned to do this murder?
- [35:22]
Gerald Posner
He certainly had no contact with the KGB once he had left the Soviet Union, and the Soviets have now released those after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Minsk office, which had those files, released them to Norman Mailer, who put them into a book called Oswald's Tale. Norman, who had the same publisher I did. Random House thought it was a conspiracy for decades, then sort of grudgingly came to conclude it was Oswald alone after he saw the the Ms. KGB files. The only other contact he ever had with the KGB was when he went to Mexico City seven weeks before to try to get to Cuba. But he didn't know that the agents he was dealing with, Oleg Nechaporenko and a fellow called Kostakov, were In fact, KGB agents, you could assume that they had them in the office, but he wouldn't know that. The Cuban intelligence he never had. When he was in the Cuban mission trying to get to go to Havana seven weeks before the assassination there were Cuban agents, the Directorate of Intelligence in that mission as well. It was a distinct post for the Cubans in Mexico City. But he didn't have direct contact with them as an operative in that. Then the question becomes the CIA and the FBI. The FBI working from them clearly had contact with Oswald. He had opened a file on him when he returned to the United States from the Soviet Union. They had interviewed him. One of the agents had gone to his house just again in November to talk to his wife. Oswald was furious with it. Had left a letter for that agent saying, leave me alone, don't bother anymore. I'm going to complain to your superiors at the field office for the FBI in Dallas. After the assassination, the FBI destroyed that note. J. Edgar Hoover, the vaunted head of the FBI, he was so worried that somebody would point a finger, somebody in the U.S. government would say, hey you, you at the FBI. You mean that you had an open file on this guy Oswald and you didn't know that he was a potential danger to the President? You didn't know that he was working at a building in which the motorcade directly went in front of? So what the FBI did, they lied to the Warren Commission. They destroyed that bit of evidence there. They pushed Oswald far enough away to show that he was just one of the many cases that they had investigations on but not so close that they would know too much. The CIA, on the other hand, they lied to the Warren Commission and had a cover up because they were petrified that the Warren Commission would discover that the CIA was in a plot with the Mafia to kill a head of state. Wasn't Kennedy, it was Castro. They tried eight, nine times to kill him. They never even wounded him. But it wasn't public information. It was still highly kept secret. They were worried that that would become public. And what we don't know to this day is not that the CIA had gone out and said to Oswald, become an agent for us. There are some people that think that everything Oswald did was part of a CIA plot. From the time that he defected to the Soviet Union, he must have been a fake defector. He was working for the CIA, came back for the CIA. You can't answer that in the sense that it's the type of information that that's what you believe. I go through the Bureaucracy and I show how it actually all happened. But if you think that somehow there's a secret government that's pulling the strings that makes it look like facts, that's what somebody believes on that. But there's no evidence of that, no credible evidence, nothing in the files, nothing that we can see, no contemporaneous evidence from anybody else. But what I do think, the CIA and why they're still fighting the last few thousand documents coming out on the Kennedy assassination, they've fought them for years, is that when Oswald went to Mexico City the CIA were watching with surveillance both the Soviet mission and the Cuban mission. These were, we just had had the Cuban Missile crisis the year before. The Soviets were in the middle of the Cold War. The Mexico City spine area was a major area for espionage. So the CIA might well have had assets, informants inside those two. At least in the Cuban mission they had assets inside the Mexican government who may have been providing information back to them that may have had their own surveillance on those missions. And what did they learn about Oswald's visits? The Soviets, we now know from their own tapes, say that Oswald took his pistol, which he took down with him the bus ride down there and at one point slammed it on the table. In a second visit he was so mad and they had to take the pistol away from him and, and quite him down at the Cuban mission at one point he got into a screaming match. And one of the Cubans later said, he even said that he could go back to America and kill the President or something like this to prove that he was a good Communist. Did the CIA know all of that? Were they aware that Oswald was in those two missions with his pistol and possibly threatening American officials? And then when he returns to America on October 1st, they don't tell anyone. You know, they can't spy in the United States. So by law they're supposed to tell the FBI they didn't do that. Same thing as 9 11. They followed two of the terrorists who were later on the the planes that crashed into the World Trade center into the US a year before the attack in California. They never told anyone. The FBI never knew about it until it was too late. So that would be to the eternal shame of the CIA. Not that they had Oswald as an asset, but that they had information about him that they should have brought to the attention of the domestic peacekeepers like the FBI or the Secret Service and could have prevented the assassination. That's what I think they've run from for all these years.
- [40:57]
Rob Attar
So you're saying there that they bungled it rather than they had some desire for him to kill the President.
- [41:02]
Gerald Posner
Here's my phenomenon. Bungled. They did what these agencies often do. They develop intelligence and information, and then they keep it to themselves. They don't share it, so it becomes proprietary. MI6 develops information. They don't give it to MI5. They want to hold it themselves. Then when you say bungled, when something plays out, then they know what they should have shared. So if Oswald had never come into play, if there had never been an assassination, hiding the information they had on Oswald in Mexico City would have meant nothing. They might have been able to use it for something else. But once he becomes a historical figure who's now accused with the assassination of the President, they think, oh, my God, what have we done? Then they don't want to have that public. They sort of compound the crime by covering it up. But I have no doubt that in this case, put it this way, I'm critical of the CIA because there were no other American defectors to the Soviet Union who were visiting the Cuban and Soviet missions in Mexico City, asking to go to Havana other than Lee Harvey Oswald. You've got one. It's not like you had 50, and you have to figure out which one's important. And the CIA has said over the years, and they said to the Warren Commission, oh, we don't even have pictures of them because our cameras weren't working that day. You know, I can't prove otherwise, but I'm skeptical.
- [42:19]
Rob Attar
Now, obviously, Oswald's story is complicated further by the fact that he himself is assassinated two days later by Jack Ruby. And this is often. And you alluded to this earlier, this is often put forward as evidence of a plot. You know, Oswald had to be silenced, potentially by the Mafia. What can you tell us about Jack Ruby and why he might have wanted to kill Oswald?
- [42:40]
Gerald Posner
You know, Rob, that's a great. So the greatest thing is if you. I, you know, sit down with somebody and, like, I'm talking to you, or that, and you go through all the Oswald material and everything else, and even at the time, I convince you in a half a day of discussions, and you say, my God, I really am convinced that Oswald's a shooter. Then you get to Ruby and it starts all over again. You say, well, come on, something's wrong here. And I get that. And the problem with Ruby is as well, from my perspective, you cannot, in a single sound bite, which, you know, morning television often wants, say why Ruby killed him in a way that people understand. So the thing With Ruby is, yes, an unusual character. He runs a strip club in Dallas. He's his own bouncer. He's got sort of this history of violence and everything else. He is worked up over the course of the weekend not by mobsters or by agents who are hiring him to kill Oswald but by his own family, his own sister who are sort of saying, what a terrible thing happened to the President, how disgraceful it is. Jack Ruby on Friday night, the night that Oswald's arrested is at D Plaza at the police station. Now, you think to yourself, how the hell is that possible? The police security is disgraceful. That evening. Ruby wasn't the only one who was there. You would think they would have it on total lockdown. Ruby comes in. All the cops know him because they hang out as his strip club. He is passing out his business card to agents at Francaise Reporter. He's telling them, by the way, when this is all over, come down to my club before you leave Dallas. Jack Ruby's the type of guy who likes to be where the action is. And where the action was that night in Dallas was at the police headquarters where all the world's press was coming in and gathering for this. Now, let's assume for a second that the conspiracy. There's a conspiracy to kill the President. And it's no matter who's involved. Forget for a second who the. This conspiracy is really good because to this day, the conspirators haven't been unmasked. And people like me, as independent journalists who get into it believe the fake story. Oswald alone. So the conspiracy is good. No evidence left at the scene to unmask it. But somehow the conspirators have done everything right but they forgot to take care of Oswald. You only have to kill Oswald if he knows something. If he's a real pass, you don't have to kill him. So if you have to kill him because he knows something you're prepared to kill him at Dealey Plaza. But Oswald gives you the slip. How does he give you the slip? He goes out the front door. That's what he left through the front door. Doesn't seem very much like this sip. It's not through a back door or something else with a side entrance goes out the front door. You miss him, he gets arrested. He's in custody. You now call up Jack Ruby and you say, jack, we have the most important assignment of your career. You've got to kill this guy who's in police custody because otherwise all the secrets of the assassination are going to unravel. And Ruby goes down on Friday night. Hs there a few hours after the arrest. One point, Oswald passes not far away from him in the hallway. And Ruby makes no effort to go to him. Shoot him? No, nothing to silence him. It's like Jack Ruby got an assignment to kill him and was like, jack, do this most important assignment, but at your convenience. Then on Saturday, the next day, Jack Ruby goes back to police headquarters. He's there again. He's handing out his business card. He brings in pizzas. Oswald comes out again. He's walked down the hallway. Ruby makes no effort to. And on Sunday, when Ruby does kill Oswald, he wakes up late. He's got a roommate, George Senator, who just says. And he gets a call from one of his strippers who says, I need a MoneyGram for $25. Can you send it to me? And Ruby says, I will. The only way he can do that is through a Western Union Telegram office. That's downtown, the only one open that day in Dallas. So he gets up, takes his time. By the time he drives downtown to send the moneygram to his employee Oswald was supposed to have been transferred from police custody to the feds. He was being moved out an hour earlier, but it got delayed because he asked for a change of clothes and a postal inspector. It turned out when Ruby gets to send the moneygram, he's a block and a half away from where the jail is. He sees the crowd down there. He goes in. He stands in line at the Western Union office. He's in no rush, according to the person. He sends the Moneygram at 11:25. It's stamped by the machine. Walks back out, has his dogs, these two little dachshunds in the car, locks it, walks down the street. And just as he does, the police are moving a car up to sort of block the street. They're about to move Oswald out of the downstairs area and get ready to transfer him. Ruby walks down the ramp. And as Oswald comes out, he walks up to the crowd, pulls out the gun and shoots him. Like out of a movie. One shot, fatal shot. Says, you shut my president, you rat. It sounds like a James Cagney line or something. And they tackle Ruby. It is this, as opposed to being what I call a careful plot to silence the assassin, it's an opportunity that presents itself to a guy who thinks people are going to clap him on the back and say, you know what? Thank you, Jack, for erasing the stain from Dallas of what this guy did to the President of the United States. There was a crime in Dallas at that time, crime in Texas called murder without malice. You kill somebody without malice, you get five years maximum. That's what Ruby thought he would get. At the most, he was shocked when he got convicted for murder at one other sidelight. Rob. You know, all these years later, there's all this debate about, okay, who killed Kennedy? Was it Oswald? Was he going to patsy, you know, could he ever had the ability to do it? People forget that in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, that doubt wasn't there. The American people, for the most part thought that the person who had been arrested, charged with a crime, worked at the building, whose gun had been found there, was the assassin. And the reason I say that's important is there's a local CBS affiliate that was taping the crowd that had gathered outside. A couple of hundred people who had gathered to see Oswald transferred that day in Dallas. When the word spread out onto the street that Oswald had been shot, they didn't know he was dead, but just that he'd been shot inside the basement. The crowd breaks into spontaneously into applause and cheers. It's really chilling because we don't like the idea of applause or cheers for any violence or murder. I get that. But it shows you the mindset of a Ruby that thinks you could do that. And people would say that was the right thing to do because we think now everybody must be horrified. I'm horrified and I'm furious. Because Ruby's murder of Oswald is why the case will never be closed. Notwithstanding my optimistic title of case closed, people always have doubts about it. Because of that, Oswald never got to the stand. The government never presented its evidence. He never. Oswald had the chance to contest it. And even if he had been convicted and gone to jail and later said, I still it was a massive plot, some people would have thought it was a conspiracy, but not nearly as many. Ruby's murder of Oswald is what really robs us of history, of knowing what happened in detail.
- [49:55]
Rob Attar
As you were saying earlier, at the time of Oswald's killing, most people seem to believe that he was. That he was the assassin of J.F. kennedy. But I know we've spoken about this beforehand. You say that, you know, nowadays the majority of Americans think that actually there was a conspiracy. So are there any key moments over the years that have shifted public opinion away from the single shooter to the idea of there being some kind of conspiracy?
- [50:18]
Gerald Posner
Yeah, I think. I mean, number one, Ruby's murder, that starts to put doubt in people's mind right away. So you have it. Within 48 hours, people wondering, I wonder what happened? And that makes perfect sense. Then the Warren Commission comes out a year later with its massive report, 26 volumes and everything else going to make a great overstatement here, which probably going to have a dozen exceptions to the contrary. But most people don't like the idea of a government commission to decide what happened on a big controversial historical area. Appointed ex CIA officers. Everything else, it just, you know, Alan Dulles was there. You have them meeting in private sometimes. Many of the files afterwards are still kept secret. They didn't release the autopsy X rays and photos because the Kennedys don't want them. But there were questions about that. They didn't release the Zapruder film. So you get this government commission that comes in and says, we think it's a lone assassin. And there's a general distrust with that that I think sort of moved it up even more. And then events unrelated to the assassination itself, like the lies over Vietnam, like the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, like Watergate. And all those things take place in which we America goes from a country from the 50s in Jack Kennedy's assassination to being a much more distrusting public. And then Jim Garrison in the late 60s, a district attorney from New Orleans who had an unsuccessful prosecution of someone. I think that when you look at that prosecution in detail, it's a bogus case. And Garrison knew it. But at the time it seemed convincing. Many people in America thought he must have something. He's a district attorney of a major city. He can't just be making it up. There has to be something. Maybe he can't prove it, but that's evidence that there's some plot here. So Garrison added to it. Then you have the House Select Committee coming out in the late 70s with the headline 95% certainty of assassination. And even though that gets debunked, most people just remember the headline. And then you have Oliver Stone in 1990 with his very good film. Good in terms of the power of the film, not in terms of its storytelling. Again, putting the Garrison case forward, it's amazing anyone thinks it's a lone assassin.
- [52:35]
Rob Attar
Actually, I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit more about the Garrison case because that is quite an interesting aspect of how the conspiracy develops, isn't it?
- [52:42]
Gerald Posner
Yeah, I think that Garrison's intent was sincere because he really did believe there was a conspiracy in the case. And he did think that some of it was hatched in New Orleans where Oswald had been in the summer months right beforehand and where there were these Anti Castro Cubans that Oswald had had interplay with. There had been reports from an area outside of New Orleans that Oswald had been spotted in the company of this sort of quasi mercenary type guy, David Ferrian. Unusual fellow. So Garrison picked up all of that and started to investigate it. If that investigation we now know had been not authentic. It was an authentic investigation, but had been honest, it would have closed on its own about four or five months later for failure to develop any credible evidence. And for Garrison finding out that the people supplying him the evidence were not reliable, had lied, made up the stories, were in other places when they said they were here or there. But instead he became convinced that he was being stymied by the CIA, that they were doing it. So he looked for something else. He found somebody that he thought was involved. This prominent member of the community, Clayshaw. And destroys Shaw's life in bringing these charges against him. The jury took 45 minutes to return and not guilty. But still Garrison became a hero of sorts among conspiracy theorists because they said he's the only one with the courage to go ahead and look into this. And they went down to New Orleans, they tried to help him. He was their real thing. And I thought it was interesting that over the years I have a chapter about Garrison and how disgraceful I think that probe was. There have been books published on Garrison that sort of meticulously take it apart and show that what he did probably constituted a fraud. But I think that by the time that Oliver Stone decided to do his film, many people in the conspiracy community had abandoned Garrison's theories. Because Garrison thought there were multiple shooters. There could be up to three or four. There were nine shots fired. @ one point he thought someone was firing from the sewer there. He had all types of theories. They had left Garrison aside. They thought that was a moment in time and they had moved on to other things. Stone needed what Hollywood needs. They need a heroic character. And the only person who fits out heroic character status is sort of a public official chasing the truth. And that's. That's Garrison. So he resurrected him, revitalized him, cleaned off his image. And that's a shame because I think in doing that he actually revitalized the most discredited of the theories. It's why Spielberg does the Holocaust through Schindler's List. You need a hero. Schindler's the hero. Putting together list. You can't tell the story just from the dark side alone.
- [55:30]
Rob Attar
So.
- [55:31]
Gerald Posner
So Stone opted for the only person does that. But it was unfortunate because people think of Jim Garrison as they think he is Kevin Costner.
- [55:41]
Rob Attar
Why do you think now, 60 years later, there are still so many people who, despite the work you've done, despite the Warren Commission, despite the fact that nothing has come through in recent years, no more evidence to back up conspiracy. Why do you think so many people still believe there was a conspiracy to kill JFK?
- [55:58]
Gerald Posner
So there was a national opinion poll done about six months ago that showed I think 33 or 35% of the public thought it was a lone assassin. And people said to me at the time, God that must be so disappointing to you. Only a third of the public, I said I was sort of exhilarated by that because it had been down to 5% after Oliver son's film. A third of the public thinking is Oswald is actually quite good. But you're never going to get a consensus on it because people don't have the time to study it beyond watching a movie. I get that they can't look into detail. Many things have been said so many times that are false but they believe them to be true. Such as world class assassins tried to repeat the shooting sequence that Oswald did and were unable to do it. That's just accepted as a fact. People saw Grassy and Al Shir and ran away. There was surgery done on the President when his body was being flown back to Washington to make it look like it was a back assassin. There's all types of things along this line. What I think is still keeping a large segment of people from settling on a decision is the fact that government still has secret files. It is mad that coming on 60 years later, the US government is its own worst enemy, as is most governments. You know, I mean we have, as you have, you have a process to get documents from the government. We have freedom of information. I know from practice on other matters I make a request under freedom of information for a document at some government agency. The bureaucrat who's handling that isn't even aware sometimes of the documents sitting in that file. And they aren't worried about it until I make a request for it as a journalist and then they're wondering why I want it. They don't know why. Gee, maybe it means something and they start to hold onto it. They over classify documents. They're their own worst enemies. The American public had a right to know what our own government knows about this case. These documents I've written about this should have been out decades ago. And when the CIA continues to make objections for privacy to say oh it discloses means and sources of collecting information that we don't want our enemies to know. You mean to tell me that 60 years after the assassination you have some information in those files that the Soviets, the Cubans or Eastern European governments haven't figured out about what you were doing back in 1961 and 1962, it's a joke. And if there is a 85 year old asset in the Mexican government who today has reached some prominence with their family and they were 23 years old at the time and providing information to the CIA, then redact their name so they can't be identified, but get the information out there. So this holding on to documents, even though I don't think there's any smoking gun in them, people think they must be hiding the real truth. And if there are only 10 documents left, they'd be saying they must be hiding the real truth. When the final document is released, it's not going to be an epiphany and people say, oh, it's now the lone assassin. They'll say they must have destroyed the smoking gun. So I understand. But still there will be some reasonably minded people say, oh, we've waited all this time, there's nothing in there that makes it change our mind. Because I do know, Rob, that one of the things I hear from people who have started to come around to what I call, oh, maybe it's Oswald. They were waiting for, I guess, lack of a better word, a deathbed confession from someone happens. You know, people get a guilty conscience. You have two dozen conspirators and then one of them feels bad when they're 90 years old and says, I'll tell you what really happened with Kennedy. And they've been waiting decades for that of just 60 years that never happened. So they've given up that hope. I think that that's one of the reasons that some of the conspiracy, some have lost their steam.
- [59:23]
Rob Attar
And do you think there's any evidence out there that could emerge that would either completely destroy the conspiracy theories or that would make you think again about Oswald?
- [59:32]
Gerald Posner
Any reporter or journalist who said, what I provide in Case Close is a snapshot of what I believe the evidence shows, the credible evidence at that time, 1993. Then I followed the case. I've done an update now for the latest edition of Case Close. So I follow the releases of the documents. Nothing has changed my underlying conclusion. But if somebody presented me credible evidence that show that Oswald was in fact working for the, for the Cubans, of that of course you'd have to change your mind. People get locked into this position of, oh, I, you know, I can't ever say otherwise. Here's the challenge, by the way, the key period that I spent a lot of time on is when Oswald comes back to Texas after being turned down by the Soviets and the Cubans in Mexico City. I'll tell you why that's critical. When he gets on a bus to go down on September 25th, he's on that bus transferring different transfers. It's almost a 24 hour journey from New Orleans. The White House announces the next day that Kennedy is going to visit Texas. The first public announcement. He's making a trip in November. They don't say the cities or whatever, but a political trip to, to Texas. So no idea that Kennedy's going to Texas before Oswald goes down to Mexico City. Nobody suggests that the Cubans and the Soviets were part of the plot. So they deny Oswald the visa to Havana on their own volition for their own reasons. If they had given him that visa, he would have been in Havana on November 22nd. But instead they say no, he comes back to Dallas. So it's that period from October 1st to November 22nd, essentially a seven week period in which if a conspiracy, I don't care if it's the Mafia, the CIA, whoever, they want to bring Oswald into it, even if you just think he has to get the murder weapon, you don't think he's the assassin. But they need to fold him in, they need to make contact with him in those seven weeks. You can't do it by text message, can't do it by telepathy. They have to have some telephone call. Somebody has to appear to bring him into the plot. The FBI got the records of incoming calls and outgoing calls from all the pay phones within like half a mile around his rooming house where he was living with seven other guys who said he never got any visitors. The same thing at the place that he worked at. I need the evidence of how a plot brought him in. That's what would then convince me there was a conspiracy. And, and one last footnote, for whatever it's worth. People think that if I say it's Oswald alone, that I am also saying there were no conspiracies against Jack Kennedy to kill him. That's not true. They're separate. For instance, I think there's probably some group of people talking about killing a President at any given time, whether it's Biden, Trump, Obama. If somebody walked up, shot the President and was tackled at the scene, we know who the assassin was. Like it was with Sirhan Sirhan at the scene. But we then would have to figure out who did it. Anti abortion people, right wing extremist. January 6th people, Islamic terrorists, whoever. So you don't know who the group is. I think you could have had a group of mobsters sitting around a table. Nobody's ever come up with this audio evidence, but you could have had a group sitting around in New Orleans saying let's get that no good president or let's kill his brother, the Attorney General. They've got to be taught a lesson. I wouldn't be surprised. Some disgruntled group of CIA agents or Castro was talking about killing the President because the President was trying to kill him. What I'm saying in this conclusion of Case Close is that whatever plots were being discussed about killing the President, whatever conspiracies might have been afoot, Oswald got there before the conspirators. He beat them to Kennedy. In essence. They would have pinned a medal on him, they would have clapped him on the back. Congratulations. But we assume in the public that because a certain group might want the President dead and then somebody else does it, that means they were working for that group. Not necessarily. So you need to show the evidence that connects the two and that's a tougher task.
- [63:25]
Rob Attar
Would you say that lack of a kind of evidence connecting Oswald with the CIA or FBI or someone in that time period is the strongest argument against there being a conspiracy?
- [63:35]
Gerald Posner
The strongest argument against a conspiracy is the seven week period after Oswald returns to Dallas from Mexico City. But I'd focus a spotlight just on that period because that's when the conspiracy has to happen. You have no sense of the time beforehand with Oswald. And you know, I've said to some people who believe it's a vast conspiracy, I've said, well, what if Oswald had gone to Havana, he never got back, he didn't know about Texas. And they said there were a dozen Oswalds. The CIA had a dozen people like him in different cities. Well, you can't answer that. You know, it means they just would have used somebody else in Dallas or somebody in Miami eventually or somebody in Chicago. You know, that's a good answer, but where's the evidence for it? So I'm not as convinced that that's the case.
- [64:22]
Rob Attar
We seem at the moment to be living in an age of conspiracy theories. There are conspiracy theories a lot about the present day. There are a lot of conspiracy theories around historical events. Why do you think this is such fertile ground at the moment?
- [64:33]
Gerald Posner
Well, we have learned more about how governments do conspire against public interest. At times those things have become clear in the States with investigations. But you are right that there's an immediate sort of globbing on the conspiracies. It varies instance by instance, but. And even 9 11, 911 Truthers believe the U.S. government controlled the planes that crashed into the World Trade center, not the, not the hijackers who were on board in the Kennedy assassination. William Manchester, the historian who wrote a book called Death of a President, said it very well. He looked back at World War II and he said, you know, if you look at World War II, you've got the Holocaust, you've got this 6 million dead Jewish victims, millions of dead political victims. You know, those were killed because they were gay prisoners, wore everything else. Worst crime, the other side of the equation you have Nazis, worst criminals, they sort of balance each other out. Worst crime, worst criminals. In the Kennedy assassination you have this young charismatic president with so much potential for the future. The gray Eisenhower years of the 50s are over. We're now living in Technicolor, quite literally. And the best and the brightest, Camelot, it's called, and it's cut down in Dallas by a bullet from a sniper. And on the other side of the equation you have this 24 year old sociopathic loser in life, Lee Harvey Oswald. It doesn't balance out. You want to instinctively put something heavier on the Oswald side. And if Kennedy was killed because the CIA had to stop him from disbanding the agency, the military had to stop him because he couldn't pull out of Vietnam, or Castro had to stop him because he was going to kill Fidel, otherwise it doesn't make you feel better that he's dead, but gives some meaning to his death. The conspiracy does that very nicely. And I think that sometimes conspiracies are used as a form of denialism and sometimes they're used because people believe that there has to be a more elaborate, complex and hidden truth behind the simple explanation.
- [66:34]
Rob Attar
That was Gerald Posner, author of Case Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of jfk. We recorded two follow up episodes with Gerald delving into much more detail about the conspiracy theory. And we'll be releasing them on this feed in the next couple of weeks. Thanks a lot for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman.
- [67:03]
Gerald Posner
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