I have therefore chosen
this time and place
to discuss a topic on which
ignorance too often abounds
and the truth
too rarely perceived,
and that is the most important
topic on earth, peace.
What kind of a peace do I mean
and what kind of
a peace do we seek?
Not a Pax Americana
enforced on the world
by American weapons of w*r.
Not the peace of the grave
or the security of the sl*ve.
I am talking about
genuine peace,
the kind of peace that makes
life on earth worth living.
The kind that enables men
and nations to grow
and to hope
and build a better life
for their children,
not merely peace for Americans
but peace for all men and women.
Not merely peace in our time,
but peace in all time.
[tranquil music playing]
[woman] That straight, sleek
look that it should have,
and very often you'll find
a zipper hidden
in the, uh, arm and--
Good afternoon,
ladies and gentlemen.
You'll excuse the fact
that I'm out of breath,
but about 10 or 15 minutes ago,
a tragic thing, from
all indications at this point,
has happened
in the city of Dallas.
This is Walter Cronkite
in our newsroom.
Here's a, uh, piece of copy
that was rushed to-- to me
and was torn off
from the United Press.
President Kennedy
has been shot in Dallas.
Along with
Governor Connally of Texas.
They've been taken
to Parkland Hospital there,
where their condition is,
as yet, unknown.
[reporter 1]
And just now we've received
reports here at Parkland
that Governor Connally was
shot in the upper left chest,
and the first
unconfirmed reports
say the President
was hit in the head.
That's an unconfirmed report
that the President
was hit in the head.
[reporter 2]
Police began chasing
an unknown g*nman
across the railroad tracks.
Would you see if they need
some coffee or something?
These people
are awfully shaken up.
They were in the line of fire.
[man] The President's car
was some 50 feet
when we heard the first shot.
And then as the car
got directly in front of us,
a g*nsh*t from
the top of the hill
hit the President's side--
side of the temple.
[reporter over phone]
Where did the shots come from?
[woman over phone]
The shots came from the hill.
[reporter 3] Excuse me
just a moment, John.
Uh, there was just word
from the hospital
that they have dispatched
a call for a neurosurgeon.
All we can do now
is pray for him,
and that's about all we can do.
[reporter 4] President's wife,
Jackie Kennedy, was not hurt.
She walked into the hospital.
A priest has been ordered.
Emergency supplies of blood
also being rushed
to the hospital.
[reporter 5] Just a moment.
We have a bulletin coming in.
We'll now put you directly
through Parkland Hospital
and KBLX news director,
Bill Hamdon.
[reporter 6]
Two priests, who were with
President Kennedy,
say he is dead.
[woman gasps]
-Just two priests announced it?
-[man] Yes.
But it's not the truth, is it?
[Walter Cronkite]
The flash, apparently official,
President Kennedy died
at 1:00 p.m.
Central Standard Time,
some 38 minutes ago.
[boy] I just can't see
why anybody would want
to sh**t Mr. Kennedy for all
the things he's done for us.
He tried to keep us from
getting into w*r and everything.
It's a simple matter of a b*llet
right through the head.
[officer] All the information
that we have received
now indicates that it did come
from about the fifth or fourth
floor of that building.
We're checking it out now.
10-4 now, and 112.
We found empty r*fle hulls,
and it looked like the man
had been there for some time.
[reporter 7]
Police made a systematic
search of the building.
They found no weapon.
[reporter 8]
We just got the word.
Lyndon B. Johnson
has been sworn in
as the President
of the United States
just prior to a takeoff
to return to Washington.
[reporter 9] Behind the casket
is Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy.
They are helping her down.
Now, new President,
Lyndon Baines Johnson.
We have suffered a loss
that cannot be weighed.
[reporter 10]
At Bethesda Naval Hospital,
the autopsy team
has completed work.
Now the body of the slain
President and his widow
are at last brought home
to the White House.
[reporter 11] Who do you think
would do something like this?
Probably some segregationist
crackpot or something.
Just...
They had it all planned out.
I really believe that his blood
will be on their hands.
[reporter 12]
Here is the suspect.
Can we roll it please?
[Lee Harvey Oswald]
People have given me a hearing
without legal representation
or anything.
-Did you sh**t the President?
-I didn't sh**t anybody.
I emphatically
deny these charges.
[reporter 13] This is
24-year-old Lee H. Oswald.
He answers the description
of a young man
sighted at the
Book Depository Building.
[reporter 14] Police chased
Oswald into a movie theater.
Police said he fired at them,
k*lling Patrolman J.D. Tippit.
A r*fle was found in a building
where he worked.
[reporter 15] Police refused
to say whether they have
any fingerprints
from that weapon as yet.
The man obviously was an
excellent shot or very lucky,
in that witnesses
said three shots were fired,
at least two of them
found their marks.
[reporter 16]
At the Capitol Rotunda,
there will be
three short speeches
before the public is allowed
to start viewing the body.
Chief, do you have any concern
for the safety of your prisoner?
[officer]
No, but because necessary
precautions
will be taken, of course.
[reporter 17] Is there
any doubt in your mind, Chief,
that Oswald is the man
who k*lled the President?
[officer] I think this is the
man who k*lled the President.
I'm just a patsy.
[reporter 18] So great is
the crush outside the Capitol,
that people who have not
been in line can't possibly.
We are now switching to Dallas
where they are about to move
Lee Oswald and whether--
[g*nsh*t]
[reporter 19] He's been shot.
[indistinct]
[reporter 20]
There's a man with a g*n.
[Cronkite]
Lee Harvey Oswald,
the man who Dallas police say
k*lled President Kennedy,
himself is dead.
The man Dallas police
seized at the scene,
and are holding, has been
identified as Jack Ruby.
He is being held by the Dallas
police. Now, back to Washington.
[reporter 21]
Fifty-three countries
are represented in all today.
There are a dozen members
of ruling royal families,
30 foreign ministers.
[reporter 22]
Things should be all right
in the few months ahead.
[Dwight D. Eisenhower]
I'm sure the, uh,
entire citizenry of the nation
will stand faithfully
behind the government.
This bizarre sequence of double
killings raise great questions.
Who actually fired the shots
that k*lled Kennedy?
Was there a conspiracy?
The first wound described is
a wound in the back of the head
and would seem to indicate
a shot from behind.
But the doctors
also said there was
a wound in the throat
at the front,
which seemed to indicate a shot
from the other direction.
[Cronkite] The new President,
Lyndon Johnson,
appointed a commission
of seven prominent Americans
to investigate
the whole affair.
Earl Warren, Chief Justice
of the United States.
Richard B. Russell,
senator from Georgia.
John Sherman Cooper,
senator from Kentucky.
Hale Boggs,
representative from Louisiana.
Gerald R. Ford,
representative from Michigan.
John J. McCloy,
presidential adviser.
Allen W. Dulles,
ex-head of the CIA.
Are you convinced
that he was shot from
the School Book Depository?
Well, I think we better leave
all that, you know.
The evidence report
will cover all-- all of that.
[reporter 23]
The Warren Commission
makes these major findings.
Lee Harvey Oswald
assassinated President Kennedy.
He did it alone.
He was not a part
of any conspiracy,
either domestic or foreign.
[reporter 24]
Some other details
will be of interest
mainly to historians
and others having
some special interest.
[reporter 25] But there was one
further piece of evidence
that the public cannot see.
Abraham Zapruder's film
of the actual assassination.
This m*rder now
is the most thoroughly
documented crime
in American history.
And for those
who care to pursue it
down to the last detail,
it's all there.
[Oliver Stone]
This is Dealey Plaza.
To this day,
it remains a crime scene.
In the years
since the Warren Report,
many significant
re-investigations were made
into the m*rder
of President Kennedy.
Each one revealed
new facts and evidence
that shed more light on what
really happened here that day.
Starting in 1975,
after the Watergate scandal,
Senator Frank Church
conducted an investigation
into the abuses
and crimes of the FBI and CIA.
During that time, the public
learned of the CIA plots
to assassinate foreign leaders
like Patrice Lumumba
of the Republic of Congo
and Fidel Castro of Cuba.
Plots orchestrated
under Director Allen Dulles.
But the Church committee
didn't stop there.
Senators Richard Schweiker
and Gary Hart
were tasked to reexamine
the roles of the CIA and FBI
as the chief investigators
for the Warren Commission,
and look for signs
of conflicts or cover-ups.
J. Edgar Hoover writes,
"Yes, we did have
a relationship with Mr. Ruby
and he acted as our informant."
Now, who said that at the time
of the Warren Commission report?
Did anybody ever imply
that-- that Jack Ruby
was a confidential informant
for the FBI?
Nobody breathed that.
That was classified.
[Stone] Faith in what
the American public was told
by the Warren Commission
was starting to unravel.
The intelligence agencies
did all the wrong things
if they really
were looking for conspiracy
or to find out
who k*lled John Kennedy.
[Stone] The search for real
answers gained momentum.
Then, 12 years
after the assassination,
the most iconic piece
of evidence was leaked
and finally
shown to the public.
It's the film shot by the Dallas
dress manufacturer,
Abraham Zapruder.
And it's the execution
of President Kennedy,
and, uh, Bob and d*ck,
would you please narrate
what we're seeing
as we show this film?
[Robert Groden] Now, before
he goes behind the sign,
the President
is waving to the crowd.
When he comes out from
behind the sign, he is shot.
Then Governor Connally is shot.
[Geraldo Rivera]
He's already been hit.
[Groden]
He's already been hit.
[Rivera] And now?
[Groden] At the bottom of
the screen, the head shot.
[Rivera] That's the shot
that blew off his head.
That's the most upsetting thing
I've ever seen.
We'll talk about it in a minute.
[Stone]
Seeing the shock and brutality
of the actual assassination
caused a public outcry.
The government formed
the House Select Committee
on Assassinations, the HSCA.
The committee
will come to order.
[Stone] The HSCA
re-interviewed witnesses
and took new testimonies
that exposed
massive inconsistencies
with the original
Warren Report.
Has any other scientist to date
linked the so-called pristine
b*llet to the injuries?
Not that I'm aware of. No.
The Pentagon has destroyed
its Kennedy assassination file,
and we don't know
why that was done.
[Stone] But at
the end of that investigation,
what the HSCA
learned was considered
too damaging to be made public.
And close to
a half-million records
were to remain
sealed until 2029,
a fact that we made clear
at the conclusion
to our 1991 film, JFK.
The media controversy
that accompanied
the film forced Congress
to do something about
the secrecy
that still surrounded
these classified files.
Hearings were held
on Capitol Hill.
Most Americans did not
believe or support the verdict
of the Warren Commission
initially.
And now more than three in four,
according to all recent
samplings of public opinion,
think some conspiracy
was involved.
And in 1992,
the John F. Kennedy
Records Collection Act
was passed.
Clerk will report the title.
Senate 3006, an act to provide
for the expeditious
disclosure of records
relevant to the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy.
[Stone]
This act provided funding
and formed the Assassination
Records Review Board,
the ARRB.
The public wasn't going
to have to wait until 2029.
Declassification
was to begin now.
The board was given a budget
and timeline
of four years to declassify
and make public
as many documents
and records as possible.
They managed to collect
over two million pages
of declassified records
and artifacts.
They are all housed at the
National Archives in Maryland,
and since then,
the public has been free
to view, study,
and investigate.
There is now so much more
that we know,
and with those facts in hand,
we will go back
and piece together
what really happened that day,
and discover the reasons why.
Let's begin.
[reporter]
Something has happened
in the motorcade.
Standby, please.
[Whoopi Goldberg]
The JFK case
was such a mass of confusion.
For example,
the Warren Commission
was limited
to only three shots,
because three shells
were found on the sixth floor
of the School Book Depository.
[J. Edgar Hoover]
On that floor,
we found the three empty
shells that had been fired,
but they had
characteristics on them
so that our ballistics expert
was able to prove that
they were fired by this g*n.
[Lyndon Johnson]
Any of them fired at me?
[Hoover]
No, there was never any...
[Johnson]
All three at the President?
[Hoover]
All three at the President,
and we have them.
[Goldberg]
The FBI concluded that
all three b*ll*ts
struck inside the car.
[Hoover] He was hit
by the first and the third.
The second shot
hit the governor.
The third shot
tore a large part
of the President's head off.
The Warren Commission
put itself in a straitjacket.
They could not possibly allow
more than three shots,
because four shots or more
would have clearly
indicated conspiracy.
And they were not going there.
[James Tague speaking]
scratched my face
[Goldberg]
Records show the first shot
had missed
its target completely,
and the final shot
hit Kennedy in the head.
So, how does one account for
one b*llet hitting two victims,
and doing all this damage?
Arlen Specter was
a Yale Law School graduate
working in the Philadelphia
district attorney's office,
when he was asked to serve
on the Warren Commission.
Aha! What if one b*llet
made all seven wounds?
Arlen Specter, he is the one
that gave birth to
the single-b*llet theory.
What if one b*llet went into
Kennedy's back
and came out his neck,
and then went into Connally's
back, piercing the lung,
destroying four inches
of the right fifth rib,
exiting from
the front of his chest,
going into
the back of the wrist,
shattering the distal end
of the radius.
In a 6-foot-4 guy like Connally,
that's a big heavy bone
comminuted fracture.
Exits from
the front of the wrist,
goes into his left thigh.
Whatever you want,
whatever you need,
this b*llet happily
and readily obliges you.
It is indeed a magic b*llet.
CE-399 was the magic b*llet,
and all government
investigations so far
have treated that b*llet
as absolutely
foundational to this case.
How important
is chain of custody
in a legal proceeding?
Chain of custody
basically refers to
the integrity of evidence.
If I, uh, pick up
a piece of evidence
and I transfer it
to somebody else
for holding or processing,
my name is the first name
on this list.
The second person
who touches this
and takes possession
of it is next.
And if you don't do that,
there's no way to prove
that the evidence
you collected on day one
is the same one you get on
day 25 when you go to court.
Can you walk us through
the magic b*llet's
chain of custody
from the Parkland employees to
the Secret Service to the FBI?
Well, the magic b*llet was
supposedly found on a stretcher
at Parkland Hospital,
and went through several hands
before it got
to the Secret Service.
Richard Johnsen was the first
Secret Service agent
to handle it, and he carried it
back to Washington, D.C.
When he got back
to Washington, D.C.,
he gave it to the chief of
the Secret Service,
who was James Rowley.
And at the White House,
James Rowley
gave it to Elmer Lee Todd,
and Todd then took it
to the FBI lab
and gave it to Robert Frazier.
We have interesting information
produced by John Hunt,
a private citizen
who went to the archives
on four or five occasions
to track down the story
about the magic b*llet,
and what he found
was truly astounding.
He practically moved into
the National Archives
in Washington, D.C.
They allowed him
to set up a desk
with a computer
and his own scanner.
And he also, uh,
did something different.
He didn't interview policemen
and FBI people,
and he wasn't
swayed by their excuses.
He went straight to,
"This is what you told
and you signed your name."
[Goldberg]
Working with the FBI
and Warren Commission
documents,
John Hunt asked
the most basic question.
"Was CE-399 in evidence
the same b*llet that was found
on the stretcher?"
At 7:30 at night,
this is the day
of the assassination,
November 22nd, 1963,
a b*llet appears in the record,
and it's signed for
by Robert Frazier,
who is the main investigator
at the FBI lab.
And it's not just one document.
There are multiple documents
that indicate
that Frazier signed for
a b*llet at 7:30 that night.
Now, here's where
things get interesting.
Elmer Lee Todd received
the b*llet at the White House
from chief of the Secret
Service, James Rowley.
And Todd documents,
very clearly in writing,
that he got this b*llet
at 8:50 p.m.
How is that possible?
How can Robert Frazier
receive the b*llet
in the lab at 7:30
from Elmer Lee Todd,
when Todd didn't get
the b*llet until 8:50?
You would think that they would
have handled it, uh, you know,
like it would have been gold
going to the bank.
There it is in the record,
someone is lying about
when they got the b*llet.
[David Mantik]
It gets worse, though.
Todd initialed that b*llet,
the one that he got at 8:50,
and everyone else
who touched the b*llet
after that initialed it too,
including Robert Frazier.
I went to the archives
to look at this b*llet.
And specifically,
what we want to know is,
do we see Todd's initials
on this b*llet?
He said he initialed the b*llet.
It is not there.
Todd's initials are not
on the magic b*llet.
I was very interested in finding
out what the Review Board
would show us about this.
So, we began scouring
their evidence,
and we found out
something very interesting.
We found out
that the Warren Report
had from an FBI report
saying that the guys
that found the b*llet
later identified that
as the b*llet they'd seen.
The internal record
didn't show that at all.
The internal records
said this b*llet
didn't look like
that b*llet at all.
But the FBI had reported to the
Warren Commission that it did.
They'd lied.
We then talk to the FBI agent
that was supposed to have
carried that b*llet around.
His name was Bardwell Odum.
I got Bardwell Odum
on the phone.
I sent him the documents that
said that he had done this.
He said,
"I never had that b*llet.
I never showed any b*llet
to anyone.
"If I'd had the b*llet,
there'd be a 302.
"I would have filed a report,
particularly in that area.
Everybody was very uptight
about getting everything right."
So, we scoured for 302 reports.
His name appears nowhere
in the record.
This is just something
that the FBI invented.
It's conceivable
that some mysterious b*llet
showed up from who knows where.
Todd did not initial it,
and it ended up in
the FBI lab as the magic b*llet.
One can only surmise
that, somewhere in the FBI,
they realized they had to close
the loop on Oswald's guilt.
And so they just
switched it out.
Because none
of the four people,
either the guys at Parkland,
or the two
Secret Service agents,
could identify the b*llet.
The guy who is supposed to have
gotten confirmation that
they did identify the b*llet
said he never did it.
And the record supports that.
So, there's--
there's good reason to be
very suspicious
about the magic b*llet.
The chain of custody doesn't
start from the laboratory.
It starts from the crime scene.
Each piece of evidence
should be photographed,
documented,
and preserved properly.
From the scene,
evidence is collected,
sent to the laboratory.
We have to keep
the chain of custody
when they enter the lab.
Who examined?
Who did the further analysis?
And each step have to maintain
until you submit to the court.
If this chain broke,
then my evidence
becomes inadmissible.
[Goldberg]
The other problem
is the lack of damage
to the b*llet
after going through two men,
smashing two bones,
and making seven wounds.
Dr. Joseph Dolce
was a much-honored b*ttlefield
surgeon during World w*r II.
He worked
for the Warren Commission.
And so they gave us the original
r*fle, the Mannlicher-Carcano,
plus 100 b*ll*ts,
6.5 millimeters.
And we went
and we shot the cadaver wrists,
and in every instance,
the front or the tip
of the b*llet was smashed.
Under no circumstances,
do I feel that this b*llet
could hit the wrist,
and still not be deformed.
[Goldberg]
Dolce came to believe
that two b*ll*ts
had struck Connally.
Since Arlen Specter
pre-screened
the medical witnesses
for the commission,
Dolce's name is not in
the Warren Report,
and his testimony
is not in the volumes.
And even Connally
refused to accept
the single-b*llet theory.
[reporter] Former Senator
John Sherman Cooper
is the first member
of the Warren Commission
to agree to talk on television
about what went on
inside the deliberations.
Yes, there were disagreements.
I think the most serious one
that comes to me
the most vividly,
of course, is the question
of whether or not the first shot
went through President Kennedy
and then through
Governor Connally.
[Goldberg]
Although it never specified
the order of the shots,
the Warren Report
had one b*llet
going through Kennedy
and Governor Connally,
another missing the car,
hitting a bystander on
Commerce Street, James Tague,
and the final shot
hitting Kennedy in the head.
I could not convince myself
that the same b*llet
struck both of them, although...
[reporter] You mean
that you yourself didn't--
Weren't convinced about the
single-b*llet theory, which...
No, I wasn't convinced by it.
Neither was Senator Russell.
[Goldberg] Senator
Richard Russell of Georgia
did not want
to serve on the commission.
After he attended
the first meeting,
he quickly became disenchanted
with the proceedings.
Particularly the roles
of J. Edgar Hoover
and acting attorney general
Nicholas Katzenbach.
His personal papers at the
University of Georgia Library
contain a memo
written after the initial
December 5th, 1963,
executive session.
"Something strange
is happening.
"Warren and Katzenbach know
all about the FBI
"and are apparently
planning to show Oswald
"as the only one considered.
This to me is
an untenable position."
His papers revealed that he
wrote a dissenting opinion
for the presentation
at the final
commission meeting
of September 18th.
On that day,
he shared his concerns
with President Johnson.
[Goldberg] He also thought
that Oswald did not act alone.
Russell was strongly influenced
by the Zapruder film
and by the testimony
of Governor Connally.
I understand there's some, uh,
some question
in the minds of the experts
about, uh, whether or not
we could both have been hit
by the same b*llet,
and that was the first b*llet.
Uh, I just don't happen
to believe that.
I don't believe
that I will believe it.
[Goldberg] This forced
the other commissioners
to include Connally's dissent
in the report.
And as a result,
they could not absolutely deny
the possibility
of a conspiracy.
Russell became
the first commissioner
to criticize
the Warren Report in public.
He was followed
by commission members
John Sherman Cooper
and Hale Boggs.
But then Walter Cronkite
interviewed John McCloy
during a four-night special,
co-hosted by Dan Rather.
Are you satisfied
that as much effort
was put into challenging that
case as into establishing it?
I'll answer
that in just a moment.
If I may just say one thing,
I would--
I'd like to say
in the first place,
I had some questions
as to the propriety
of my appearing here
as a former member
of the commission
to comment on
the evidence of the commission.
[Goldberg] McCloy never
answered Cronkite's question.
But even worse,
CBS employee Roger Feinman
later discovered
internal documents
showing McCoy
consulted extensively
on the series
through his daughter, Ellen,
an administrative assistant to
CBS President Richard Salant.
In 1992,
reporter Jerry Policoff
confronted Salant
and Ellen McCoy
with the documents revealing
John McCloy's instructions
for the content of the show.
Only then did Salant
admit to their concealment.
CBS, NBC,
and The New York Times
continued to support
the commission's finding
and never publicly reviewed
the 26 volumes
of supplemental evidence.
Mr. Dulles, let me put some
of the criticisms to you.
Surely.
Some of the papers
and some of the documents
that are in the archives
are-- are there
but are withheld from public
view by the FBI, the CIA,
an organization with which
you have some experience.
Is there anything in those
which years from now
when they may be released
will upset applecarts?
Oh, no, I don't think so.
No, I think everything
that really is-- is vital
insofar as forming
a judgment as to what
really happened
has been made available.
[Goldberg]
The Warren Commission
was aware of something else
that was wrong
with their evidence.
All kinds of ballistic tests
show that the b*ll*ts, in fact,
came from that r*fle.
That was his r*fle.
You took
a picture of him with it.
-No, no.
-His home prints
and fingerprints
are all over
the School Book Depository.
[Marina Porter]
You have been misinformed.
The ballistics tests
did not prove anything at all.
[reporter] This is
the weapon that was used.
A rather well-worn
military r*fle.
We know that Oswald
had possession of that r*fle
because we have him
photographed with it.
And we have his wife
saying that it was, quote,
"Faithful r*fle of Lee Oswald."
[Stone]
Is the r*fle in evidence today
the same r*fle
the commission said
Oswald ordered
through the mail?
The r*fle that Lee Oswald
allegedly ordered under
an alias of Alex Hidell,
was obtained through Klein's
Sporting Goods store in Chicago.
it was a mail-order, got it out
of American Rifleman magazine.
He wrote on the coupon
he wanted
a 36-inch model,
Mannlicher-Carcano,
6.5 millimeter, for $19.95.
Robert Frazier
was one of the examiners
and he was
a firearms expert for the FBI.
And he testified
that he did measure it,
and the measurement
was 40.2 inches in length,
from barrel to stock.
There's a 4.2-inch difference
in the one he ordered,
versus what they found
in the Book Depository.
[Goldberg] Klein's
may have indeed delivered
a different Mannlicher-Carcano
model to Oswald,
but there are other
anomalies to the story.
The model that Oswald ordered
showed these
strap attachment points
on the bottom
of the barrel and stock.
[Brian Edwards]
In the photograph
is Lieutenant Carl Day,
with the Dallas Police
Department
bringing a r*fle out
of the Book Depository.
One of the straps at the back
of the g*n is on the left side
of the stock
embedded in the stock.
That's clearly not the r*fle
that was ordered,
or at least appears in the
Klein's Sporting Goods store.
[Goldberg] The straps shown in
the so-called backyard photos
are on the bottom and
not on the side of the stock.
Marina Oswald took backyard
photographs of Lee Oswald
holding a r*fle
and a p*stol on his hip.
And in that first photograph,
that she took three of,
Commission Exhibit
133A and 133B
show a ring on the ring finger
of the right hand.
133C, the ring appears
on the left hand.
In fact, the Dallas Police
showed Lee Oswald
one of the pictures
while he was still in custody.
He said, "That's my face,
but I don't remember
ever having that
picture taken of me."
[Goldberg] But after
all these questions are asked,
the underlying mystery remains.
Why would anyone use a r*fle
in an assassination,
knowing there was a paper trail
that would lead
right back to them?
Was there a palm print
found on the r*fle?
The foremost fingerprint expert
the FBI had, Sebastian Latona,
took that r*fle and attempted
to lift prints off of the r*fle,
the stock and/or the barrel.
Uh, he testified
to the Warren Commission
that he found no usable prints
anywhere on that r*fle,
on the metal or the stock.
But yet,
Lieutenant Day in Dallas
before the r*fle went
to Washington, said he found
a partial palm print on the
trigger guard on the left side
and a partial print underneath
the stock on the barrel.
But Sebastian Latona
said there was no evidence
that a lift had
even been attempted.
[Stone]
No partials at all?
Nothing that he could
use in court.
There has to be eight points
of identification.
He found nothing
that would match that.
[woman on recorder]
J. Edgar Hoover, on 2192.
[Johnson]
Yes?
[Hoover]
I've seen the reports
on this investigation.
This man, Oswald,
he had fired three shots.
He then threw the g*n aside,
and, uh, he apparently had come
down the five flights of steps.
A stairway
from the fifth floor.
[Johnson]
You can prove that?
[Hoover] Oh, yes.
Oh, yes, we can prove that.
[Johnson] Did anybody hear,
anybody see him?
[Hoover] Most of the employees
were down on a lower floor, but
he was stopped at the second
floor by a police officer.
And some workers,
some manager in the building
told the police officer, "Well,
he's all right, he works here.
You needn't hold him."
So they let him go.
That's how he got out.
[Marrion Baker] At the time
that I heard those shots,
I ran into that building and
made it up to the second floor.
It was approximately a minute
and a half to two minutes.
[Cronkite] In possibly
less than two minutes,
investigators came
to the School Book Building
with stopwatches
and critical eyes.
Not only police and government
agents traced that route,
Chief Justice Warren and some
other commission members
did it for themselves.
I was interested in finding
a specific witness
to the assassination,
which was Victoria Adams.
She worked on the fourth floor
of the Texas School
Book Depository,
and she knew Oswald.
I went to the National Archives
searching for
her original testimony.
I was told that the tape
containing her
testimony was missing.
And later I learned
that that tape
had been destroyed
by the Warren Commission.
And so I finally
ended up finding her
and getting
her side of the story.
Vicki Adams was 22 at
the time of the assassination,
and she testified
that immediately
after the assassination,
she ran down the back stairs
to get outside
to see what was going on.
If that were true,
she would have seen Oswald
on the back stairs.
But she testified that she saw
and heard no one.
She had realized
that something was wrong,
because no one
was believing her.
So she asked David Belin,
who was questioning her,
"Interview Sandra Styles,
a coworker who went
down the stairs with me."
This became
a rather serious problem
for the Warren Commission,
because discrediting one woman
was easy to do.
But discrediting
a corroborating witness,
that may have been
a little bit tougher.
So Belin said,
"We don't need Sandra Styles,
we have you."
[man]
We've had Mr. Belin here
with us too,
one of our counselors
who's been here
several times, and...
He knows this city now
as very few people do.
[Barry Ernest]
According to Vicki's
original FBI testimony,
she left the window
on the fourth floor
within 15 to 30 seconds
of the assassination.
The Warren Commission elevated
that time to one minute.
She said she arrived
on the first floor
within 60 seconds
of the assassination.
The Warren Commission elevated
that time to several minutes.
So what
the Warren Commission did
was successfully
deceive the public
into thinking that Vicki was
just another confused witness.
Case closed.
Reenactments prove,
the report says,
that Oswald did have time,
just enough time to fire
the shots, secret the r*fle,
and get down to the second floor
cafeteria.
But in 1999, I found a document
in the National Archives
that had been suppressed
for 35 years.
It was a letter written
by Assistant US Attorney
Martha Jo Stroud.
It was a transmittal letter
forwarding
Vicki's signed testimony
to J. Lee Rankin,
the head honcho
of the Warren Commission's
investigation at that point.
In the last paragraph
of that letter,
almost as an afterthought,
we're introduced to a woman
by the name of Dorothy Garner.
Garner was Vicki's
immediate supervisor
who had stood
at the window with Vicki.
The letter quotes Garner
as saying that she saw
Vicki go down the stairs
before she saw Officer Baker
and Roy Truly come up.
When I found and interviewed
Dorothy Garner,
she confirmed everything.
She said that she had been
at the window with Vicki,
that Vicki had left
the window immediately,
that she actually followed
Vicki outside the office
and to a point where she could
see her going down the stairs.
And during that whole time,
she never saw Oswald.
So the Stroud letter became
a very dangerous document
for the Warren Commission.
[Goldberg]
Without the Review Board's
declassification process,
we would never have learned
of the corroborating testimony
of three witnesses
that provide powerful evidence
that Oswald was not
on the sixth floor
at the time of the sh**ting.
Legally speaking, the autopsy
should have been done in Dallas,
and there was a forensic
pathologist, Earl Rose.
He was there
to assume jurisdiction
and to do the autopsy.
He was pushed
up against the wall
and threatened,
hands on g*ns,
a lot of expletives and so on.
He followed them
out of the driveway,
and they took the body
illegally out of Dallas
in violation of the laws
in the state of Texas.
[Goldberg]
After Air Force One
left Dallas for Washington,
two of the key doctors who had
tried to save Kennedy's life
at Parkland Hospital,
held a press conference.
They were Dr. Malcolm Perry
and Dr. Kemp Clark.
When were the two
major points of evidence
revealed by Kemp Clark
and Malcolm Perry
at the press conference?
Dr. Perry performed
the tracheotomy
to help Kennedy breathe,
and at a press conference
right after
the failed resuscitation
efforts in Dallas,
he was asked,
"Well, where was the b*llet?"
He said, "The b*llet looked like
it was coming at him.
He had an entrance wound
in the throat."
[Douglas Horne]
Kemp Clarke
was the head
of neurosurgery at Parkland.
He said that the President
had a gaping wound
in the occipital-parietal area.
That's, you know,
the right rear of the head.
And so the description
he gave of that
was entirely consistent
with an exit wound.
We have a transcript today
of what they said
at the press conference.
So it's White House transcript
1327C.
That's a very important
historical document,
because the Secret Service
confiscated the videotapes
from the local TV stations.
[Goldberg] There is, however,
a surviving clip of Dr. Perry
recorded not long
after the press conference.
[Goldberg] What Clark and Perry
both revealed that day
would indicate
an assassin from the front.
And Assistant
White House Press Secretary
Malcolm Kilduff's statement
seems to support
this conclusion.
It's a simple matter of a b*llet
right through the head.
[Goldberg]
The day after the sh**ting,
Dr. Perry was seen
by Nurse Audrey Bell,
who had been with him
in the operating room.
[Audrey Bell] Saturday morning,
when I got over there,
Dr. Perry
came up to the office.
I said, "You look awful.
Did you get
any sleep last night?"
He said, "Well, not too much,
between the calls from Bethesda
that came in during the night."
I said, "What about?"
He said, "Oh, whether
that was an entrance wound
or an exit wound
in the throat."
He said, "They were wanting me
to change my mind."
In his Warren Commission
testimony,
he basically retracted
what he had said
and they forced him
to back down
and intimidated him
on the witness stand.
It was really quite
embarrassing for me
as a physician
to see how someone else
who was telling the truth
was basically forced
to recant his own opinion.
Did it occur to you at the time
or did you think,
"Was this an entry wound
or was this an exit wound?"
Actually, I didn't really
give it much thought
and I realized that perhaps
it would have been
better had I done so.
But I actually
applied my energies,
and those of us there all did,
to the problem at hand.
And I didn't really
concern myself too much
with how it happened or why.
In 1975, Dr. Shires hired me
on the faculty
at the University of Washington
in the cardiac
surgery division.
So I got to know Malcolm
when I joined the faculty.
We developed
a professional relationship,
and we would operate together
on complex cases.
I was particularly interested
in, uh, Dr. Perry's position
with the JFK assassination
because he did the tracheotomy
on him after he was shot.
The problem is that Malcolm
categorically refused
to ever discuss
the assassination,
uh, and he wouldn't
answer my questions
about that neck wound.
And then one night
after we had operated together
for many hours
on a complex case,
we were sitting in
the surgeons' lounge alone,
drinking coffee,
and I once again asked him
about that neck wound.
And this time, he said
it was an entrance wound,
unquestionably
an entrance wound.
One of the-- the main reasons
Dr. Perry changed his testimony
and publicly agreed
it was an exit wound
is a Secret Service agent, uh,
put the pressure on him,
and that person was Elmer Moore.
In 1970,
Elmer Moore was the head
of the Secret Service office
in Seattle
and a graduate student
named Jim Gochenaur
became friends with him,
and he admitted
to Gochenaur that he regretted
putting pressure on Dr. Perry.
So I asked him directly.
I said, "Mr. Moore,
did you pressure Dr. Perry?"
He stopped for a minute.
He says, "Well, I was
ordered to do that."
He expanded on it.
And he said
that Inspector Kelley
had ordered him
to talk with Perry
and, uh, convince him
that it could be
either an exit
or an entry wound,
not an entry wound.
And I thought
it was pretty interesting
that he would admit to something
that's pretty close to a felony.
[Donald Miller]
Elmer Moore was also in charge
of getting
the doctors at Parkland
to change their testimony,
and agree
that there was no big hole
in the back of Kennedy's head.
[Goldberg] Charles Crenshaw,
a third year resident,
was in the emergency room
at Parkland that day.
He later said in public that
he felt the wounds in Kennedy
originated from the front.
From here, through.
[Gary Aguilar]
Charles Crenshaw wrote a book,
Conspiracy of Silence,
in the wake of the film JFK,
saying, "Look,
I was at Parkland Hospital.
"I saw Kennedy,
I was involved in the treatment,
"and Kennedy's wounds
were not consistent
"with a shot from above
and behind because
he had a defect involving
the right rear of his head."
[man over recorder]
Using the most precise
medical terminology
that you can use.
[Audrey Bell over recorder]
Okay, let's see,
it was on the right rear
and he shifted the head,
a little bit, to the left,
lifted up the, well, kind of
the matted area, the flap.
And you could see
the, uh, hole,
and there was, uh,
brain and spinal fluid
dripping down out of it.
Then I noticed it was dripping,
you know, down into a bucket.
[Stone]
As early as 1981,
copies of the autopsy photos
were leaked
and distributed
among JFK researchers.
The image
of Kennedy's head wound
contradicted what was witnessed
by the Parkland doctors.
I recall the injury being
right along in this area.
[Mantik] It's as if the autopsy
materials were designed
to hide what
was really happening,
as opposed to what
they should usually do.
They're supposed to reveal
the full extent of things.
[Goldberg] The evening
of the assassination,
the body of President Kennedy
was returned to Washington.
The autopsy was performed
at Bethesda Medical Center,
a naval institution.
All of the top
forensic pathologists
in the United States
were within one-hour drive
or flying time from D.C.
Not one of them was called upon.
There were two
Navy pathologists,
Commander James Humes
and his associate,
J. Thornton Boswell.
These two military pathologists
who had never done
a single g*nsh*t-wound autopsy
in their entire careers.
This is something that really
has to be emphasized
to every American.
I don't care,
Democrat, Republican,
liberal, conservative.
This is your president,
and you've got
multiple g*nsh*t wounds
to determine angles, trajectory,
range, sequence.
And then you've got to correlate
with the multiple
g*nsh*t wounds in Connally.
This is a formidable task
that would have required
two or three major forensic
pathologists to-- to undertake.
So they called
Humes and Boswell.
They realized
they were over their head.
They called in an expert
from the Armed Forces
Institute of Pathology,
a guy named Pierre Finck.
Dr. Humes and Boswell
started the autopsy
before their forensics
consultant even got there,
but they realized
they were in over their head.
So they asked to have
a medical examiner
because Dr. Finck,
who is a forensic pathologist,
wasn't doing autopsies.
He hadn't done one
in more than two years.
So they asked for permission
to bring in somebody
who knew what they were doing.
Permission was denied.
[Aguilar]
There were a lot of people
at the Bethesda morgue.
The latest count
by all the researchers
that I know of is
about 33 people.
There was a gallery, bleachers.
Apparently, all three rows
were filled with people.
These three autopsy
pathologists were given a body,
told, "Here's the body,
he was shot from behind,
he fell forward,"
which they wrote
in their autopsy report,
figure out how the wounds fit
the known circumstances
of the sh**ting.
But what this really speaks to
is the fact that the autopsy
was not in the control
of the surgeons
that were charged
with doing it.
It was in the control of people
who were there,
who were telling them
what they could do
and what they couldn't do.
[reporter] Let's talk about
those two wounds, Captain.
You examined this
whole area of the back.
[James J. Humes] Yes, sir.
[Wecht]
So on the night of the autopsy,
Humes and Boswell said,
"Hey, we got a b*llet hole
in the President's back,"
which they
examined with the finger,
then with an instrument,
then took x-rays,
then took out the lungs.
And no b*ll*ts.
In a m*rder case,
that is a very serious
problem for them.
So where did that b*llet go?
It was just, like you say,
a work of fiction.
A call came in
from the FBI in Dallas.
A b*llet was found.
Darrell Tomlinson,
a maintenance man
at Parkland Hospital,
trying to get to the men's room,
passing by the ER,
found the stretchers
blocking the way,
bent down,
moved the stretcher,
and there was a b*llet.
How did that b*llet get there?
Humes and Boswell came up
with this totally
absurd conclusion
that when the President lay
on the stretcher,
supine position,
and pressure
was applied to his chest
for cardiopulmonary
resuscitation,
that pressure, applied
anteriorly, forced the b*llet,
which had gone
deeply into the tissues,
back out through like a tunnel.
In and out, a car in reverse.
And what's
very important to note is
b*ll*ts don't go
in and out like that.
The b*llet becomes encased.
But that was their conclusion.
Keep in mind, they did not know
that there was a b*llet hole
in the front of
the President's neck.
Commander.
Now, Captain Humes,
how many autopsies
have you performed?
[Humes] Approximately 1,000.
It wasn't until the next morning
when Humes decided,
"Hey, maybe we outta talk with
the surgeons
at Parkland Hospital."
Earlier that day, the
doctors at Parkland Hospital
had determined that the b*llet
had fortuitously
ripped through the trachea.
So they enlarged
that b*llet hole.
And now they learned,
for the first time,
that there was a tracheostomy
superimposed
upon a b*llet wound.
"Aha!" said Humes and Boswell.
"Now we know!"
The shot fired from the rear,
entered the back,
moving around
2,000 feet per second,
comes out, then stops,
sees the starched white collar,
gets frightened to death, plops
into the front of his clothing.
And that's where
the b*llet came from,
found by Tomlinson
on the stretcher.
Four or five months later,
under Arlen Specter's
single-b*llet theory,
that b*llet
has been rejuvenated,
it's been revitalized.
That b*llet has
now gone through
Kennedy, through Connally,
and now, as of April of 1964,
the Stretcher b*llet,
Commission Exhibit #399,
the hero of the
Warren Commission report,
is now from
Connally's left thigh.
How is that possible?
It's unbelievable!
...which is scientific evidence
that the wound was made
from behind and passed forward.
[Aguilar] Dr. Humes destroyed
his original autopsy notes.
Now, Dr. Humes,
the chief autopsy pathologist,
and what we all know
as doctors,
notes taken while
you're doing something
are much more important,
and are likely
to be closer to the truth
than anything you write later.
And he admitted that
he'd destroyed autopsy notes.
You destroyed
your original notes
in a medical legal autopsy?
And remember, that night
Oswald is still alive.
You're going
to be asked, doctor,
at some point in time under oath
to give sworn testimony.
Why did you
destroy those notes, doctor?
Doesn't a pathologist
keep his notes?
And he said, "Well,
I destroyed my own autopsy notes
"because they were splattered
with the President's blood
and I didn't want them to become
objects of morbid curiosity."
The third doctor, Dr. Finck,
who was there,
also wrote some notes
and complained
bitterly about the fact
that his notes disappeared too.
He was so upset
because he had to go home
and reconstruct
all of his notes from memory.
The two FBI agents
at the autopsy,
Frank O'Neill and James Sibert,
they reported what they heard
during the autopsy,
what they heard
the pathologists say,
specifically Dr. Humes.
They were interviewed
by Arlen Specter in early 1964.
He proceeded to write
very unfavorable comments
about them in a summary memo
for the record.
We know with confidence
why he didn't like
what they had to say,
because they were
providing evidence
that the single-b*llet theory
could not be true.
[Goldberg]
Neither Sibert nor O'Neill
were asked to testify
for the Warren Commission,
and their written notes
became classified.
In 1997,
their depositions were taken
by the Assassination
Records Review Board.
[Douglas Horne]
Both Sibert and O'Neill
were shown the photographs
of the back of JFK's head,
the autopsy photographs that
are the most controversial.
And they both said
that they didn't
see anything like that
at the autopsy.
O'Neill had said, "It looks
like it's been doctored.
"I don't mean the photo
has been doctored.
It looks like the head
has been put back together,"
you know, by embalmers
and then photographed."
That was what
he said under oath.
Sibert did not remember
drawing a diagram of the wound
for the House committee.
So he drew a new one
for the Review Board.
And it's one of our
most important wound diagrams.
And it shows what
could only be an exit defect
in the right rear of the skull.
[Goldberg] This new evidence,
combined with
the Review Board's
declassification
of 40 witnesses
who saw a hole in the back
of Kennedy's head,
constitutes powerful evidence
of a shot from the front.
(g*nsh*t)
Who was
the autopsy photographer?
John Stringer.
He was a Navy civilian.
He was widely respected.
He had written a textbook
on medical photography
for the Navy.
So he was
the photographer of record.
He photographed
the autopsy itself
and also photographed
the President's brain.
[Stone] The autopsy photos
of the President's brain
are housed
at the National Archives.
These photos cannot be scanned
or reproduced,
but are only available
to be viewed on site
by researchers authorized
by the Kennedy family.
[Horne] Half of
the brain photos are taken
of a brain from above,
superior views,
which is what Stringer said
he shot of the complete organ.
But the other half of the brain
photos in the archives
are taken of the bottom,
called basilar views.
Now, we were very careful
to question Mr. Stringer
about all the photographs
he took,
and ask him what kind of film
he used for black and white,
what kind of film
he used for color.
Jeremy Gunn showed Stringer
the color positive
transparencies of the brain,
and Stringer immediately noted,
"Well, these aren't Kodak.
These might be Ansco."
He said, "I don't see the name
of the manufacturer on here,
but these don't have the
right notches in the corner."
So Jeremy Gunn said,
"Did you use this film
with these notches in it?"
Stringer said, "No."
"Did you take basilar views
when you shot the brain?"
And he says,
"Not as far as I know."
[Goldberg] Doesn't
this all lead to the question
if Stringer did not take these
photographs, then who did?
Robert Knudsen
was a Navy photographer
who was detailed
to the White House in 1958.
If you read his obituaries in
The New York Times
and The Washington Post,
you will see
that he is credited
with photographing
Kennedy's autopsy,
except officially he was not.
[Horne] Robert Knudsen
was not interviewed by
the Warren Commission.
So they finally found
Robert Knudsen in 1978.
And to its credit,
the House Select Committee
did a deposition of him.
To their discredit,
they never published it.
They buried it for 50 years
and it got released in 1993.
And I know why they buried it,
because everything he told them
about autopsy photography
contradicted what
they thought they knew
in the official record.
[Mantik] After
his death in 1989,
his wife was interviewed by
the Assassination
Records Review Board.
He told her that one photograph
in particular,
presumably
the back of the head,
had been severely altered.
[Jeremy Gunn]
Where was the wound covered?
[Jeremy Gunn] In one sense,
uh, probably worth saying
that what you're saying
is very different
from what
the United States government
has said for a long time.
And why didn't he say
something to somebody?
[Horne]
John Stringer is still
the autopsy
photographer of record,
I think they both took pictures
and I personally think
that many of
John Stringer's pictures
never made it
into the official collection.
And a lot of the ones
we're looking at
are Robert Knudsen's pictures.
[Mantik] Saundra Spencer worked
at the Anacostia Facility,
a Naval Photographic Center,
which was quite separate
from the Bethesda lab.
That weekend,
she received film.
[Horne] The photographs
that Saundra Spencer developed,
which never made it
into the official record.
The only evidence we have
of them is her testimony.
Saundra Spencer
was visibly upset
when she looked at the
official autopsy photographs
because she said,
"I developed pictures
of him and his family
for almost three years
and he never looked like this."
She said, "He looks terrible
in these photographs."
-She started to cry.
-[Stone] In front of
the Review Board?
[Horne] Yes, she started to cry
in front of Jeremy and I
and the person
from the archives,
and she said,
"He did not look this bad
in the photographs
I developed on Sunday."
He was very cleaned up.
It was very respectful.
And in one of the photographs
she developed,
there was a brain,
an intact brain,
sitting next to the body,
the nude body of the President.
Strange, first of all,
that it's intact
because FBI agent Frank O'Neill
told the Review Board
that over half of the mass
of the brain was missing.
[Mantik] So the brain autopsy
or autopsies,
there were probably
two such events,
uh, occurred later and
were not done on November 22nd.
[Aguilar] Anybody
that's seen the Zapruder film
can see Kennedy's
head explodes
and debris flies
all over the place.
Jackie Kennedy climbed out
onto the trunk
of the limousine,
picked up
a chunk of the President's
brain, had it with her,
took it in and gave it to, uh,
one of the doctors
at Parkland Hospital.
When you look at the autopsy
photographs of the brain,
which I've seen
the originals of,
you can just see
that the brain is disrupted,
but very little
of the tissue is missing.
Then we look at the autopsy
report of the brain,
what they call the
supplemental brain examination.
The brain in evidence
that's weighed there
weighs 1,500 grams.
1500 grams is--
is above average weight
of an adult male brain.
There was one report
of 8,000 autopsies
and the average weight of
an adult male brain
was 1,336 grams.
So they're saying
that President Kennedy's brain
was well above
the average weight.
Where did all that brain tissue
disappear to?
That flies around Dealey Plaza
that Jackie has in her hand,
that everybody is picking off
of their clothes?
[Chesser]
There are two photographs
of the brain at the archives.
I viewed those in 2015.
The brain looked to me
to be distorted.
My first thought was
that the brain had been sitting
in a jar of formaldehyde
for a long time.
The Review Board
had a consultant.
A renowned
forensic pathologist.
He looked at the brain
photographs and he said,
"This is a very
well-fixed brain.
It's all gray.
It's not pink at all.
"It's been fixed for two
or three weeks in formaldehyde.
It's been fixed
at least two weeks,
maybe as long as three weeks."
I looked at Jeremy Gunn
and he looked at me
and the hair stood up
on the back of my neck,
because I knew that JFK's brain
was examined...
less than three days
after he was k*lled.
One can only imagine
that they wanted
the-- the damage to the brain
to be consistent
with the hypothesis
that Oswald
had done the sh**ting.
So if you had a defect
going all the way
to the back of the head,
like so many witnesses
testified to it,
it might raise questions
about whether that huge defect
could've cau-- been caused
by a single shot to the head
as Oswald is supposed
to have done.
[Chesser]
At a teaching hospital,
there was
no shortage of brains.
Autopsies were very frequent.
Frequently, the brain was saved
for teaching medical students,
so it would not
have been difficult
to find a brain
for replacement.
This is just one more reason
why this cannot be
President Kennedy's brain
in the photographs that
we have stored at the archives.
What we have here... is evidence
that impugns the authenticity
of the brain photographs
in the National Archives.
If there was a trial today,
these brain photographs would
not be admissible as evidence.
I'd hate to be
in your shoes today.
You have a lot to think about.
You've seen
much hidden evidence
the American public
has never seen.
You know, going back
to when we were children,
I think that most of us
in this courtroom thought
that justice came
into being automatically.
That virtue was its own reward,
that-- that good
would triumph over evil.
But as we get older,
we know this just isn't true.
Individual human beings
have to create justice
and this is not easy,
because the truth
often poses a threat to power,
and one often has to fight power
at great risk to themselves.
[Goldberg]
The one physician present
at both Parkland Hospital
and the Bethesda morgue
was George Burkley,
Kennedy's personal doctor.
Arlen Specter did not depose
George Burkley,
but Burkley did an interview
with the JFK Library in 1967,
and was asked this question.
[interviewer speaking]
[interviewer] I see.
[Miller] The reason
he didn't say anything was,
he was intimately involved
in the coverup.
[Goldberg] Burkley signed
the autopsy descriptive sheet
with a b*llet in the back
at the level of T3.
And he also signed
Kennedy's death certificate,
which also placed
that wound in the back.
That death certificate
is not in
the Warren Commission volumes,
and the descriptive sheet
in the Commission volumes
does not have
Burkley's signature.
In 1977, through his lawyer,
he wrote a letter
to Richard Sprague,
Chief Counsel of the House
Select Committee
on Assassinations.
He said he had
information indicating
that others besides Oswald
must've participated
in the assassination.
He was willing
to talk about it at this time.
Sprague,
who made clear his intention
to fully investigate
the CIA's involvement,
was forced out two weeks later.
Dr. Burkley
submitted a written statement
to the House Select Committee,
but there is no official record
of him being
deposed as a witness.
In 1982, he told
JFK researcher Henry Hurt,
"I know there was
more than one g*nman,"
and when Henry Hurt
tried to recontact
Burkley for more details,
Burkley
cut him off at the knees.
"I don't want to talk
about it anymore."
The very next year,
Burkley talked
to Michael Kurtz,
another JFK researcher,
told him that he knew there was
a conspiracy
to k*ll the President
and that he recalled
an exit wound
in the back of
President Kennedy's head.
Now, that's
a very significant statement.
That the only doctor we know of
who was present at
both Parkland for treatment,
and at Bethesda
during the autopsy,
told Michael Kurtz in 1983
that Kennedy had an exit wound
in the back of his head.
When Kurtz tried
to recontact Burkley,
Burkley cut him off
at the knees.
"I don't want to talk
about this anymore."
Dr. Burkley was deceased
by the time
the Review Board was impaneled.
So then Jeremy decided, well,
we can ask
the executor of his estate,
his daughter, to sign a waiver
so that we could
go to the law firm
that Mr. Illig
used to work for,
because he was deceased also,
and see if there were
any records
in the file of Mr. Illig
that would have
revealed what it was
he wanted to tell
the HSCA in detail,
and she said she would do that.
And then Jeremy
called her on the phone,
she had completely
changed her mind
and adamantly
refused to sign it
and terminated the phone call.
The face sheet for the autopsy,
where it shows the front
and back silhouette of the body,
where you mark scars
and b*llet wounds and things,
the face sheet
showed the b*llet wound
in the back at the level
of thoracic vertebra T3,
which is five and a half
to six inches below.
[Goldberg]
That location coincided with
what Sibert and O'Neill
wrote in their report.
And in order to make the facts
fit the single-b*llet theory,
one b*llet
doing all this damage,
the doctors needed an exit
point for the back wound.
The Warren Commission raised
the wound in the back
so that it would align
with the alleged exit wound
in the front of Kennedy's neck.
Commissioner Gerald Ford
did this simply
via the stroke of a pen,
changing the description
in their report
from back, to back of the neck.
As I recall,
they said about Gerald Ford
that he could not chew gum
and walk at the same time.
Now, all of a sudden, he
becomes a forensic pathologist,
and a photographer, and
a criminalist, and an expert,
and he knows
where the b*llet hole was
and he moved it up.
[Goldberg]
But then in 1979,
the House Select Committee
moved it lower in the back
because they had pictures
from the autopsy.
It is conceivable that,
at the time,
the Warren Commission thought
no one would ever
see the autopsy photos.
When the Review Board
declassified
the notation showing
what Ford had done,
the former commissioner replied
that it had nothing to do
with a conspiracy theory.
He was only trying
to be more precise.
This is directly contradicted
by a conversation Ford had
with French President
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
Ford told him
the assassination
was not the work
of one person.
It was something set up.
"We were sure it was set up,
but we were not able
to discover by whom."
[Stone]
With all the documents
declassified
by the Review Board,
we can see
this scene in a new light.
In regards
to the JFK assassination,
conspiracy theories
are now conspiracy facts.
The forensics show evidence
of multiple shooters
with Oswald,
not even at
the sixth floor window
at the time
of the assassination.
And his fingerprints not found
on the supposed m*rder weapon.
Still, there was no trial
for Lee Harvey Oswald.
These people
have given me a hearing
without legal representation
or anything.
[reporter]
Did you sh**t the President?
I didn't sh**t anybody, no, sir.
[Stone] Attorney Mark Lane
tried to represent Oswald
in the proceedings,
but was denied
by the Warren Commission.
Did the accused man
get a fair trial?
I can tell you
from my experiences
having tried several
hundred cases to verdict,
and being responsible
for thousands of cases
as head of the criminal courts
and running
the homicide bureau,
that I don't believe there's
any courtroom in America
where Oswald
would've been convicted
on the evidence
that was presented
before the Warren Commission.
[Stone] Instead of a jury
of 12 American citizens,
judgment was passed
by a panel of seven
appointed wise men
and career statesmen.
A judgment perpetuated
by the media at that time.
Looking at the
declassified documents,
we see there's
even more mystery
behind Oswald to uncover.
A man who was,
in his own words, a patsy.
m*rder*d on live television.
[reporter 1]
This was the dreary funeral
of Lee Harvey Oswald,
alleged m*rder*r
of President Kennedy.
Burial was in
an otherwise empty plot
in Rose Hill Cemetery
outside Fort Worth.
A plot that we were told
was bought
long ago by Oswald's mother.
No one was on hand
for the funeral as mourners,
except the family
of the dead man.
[reporter 2]
Oswald spent his early years
in an orphanage.
At the age of 17,
he joined the US Marine Corps.
A year later, he was sent
to one of the most
secret US bases in the world,
Atsugi in Japan.
From here,
the CIA operated spy flights
over communist China
using U-2
reconnaissance planes.
[Goldberg] During the 1975
Church Committee investigation
of US intelligence activities,
Committee member
Richard Schweiker
remarked about Oswald,
that everywhere
you looked with him,
there are fingerprints
of intelligence.
[man] Many people
said he was a forthright,
upstanding American
as a young person,
and yet they later depicted him
as a Castro-loving,
Cuban-loving,
Russian-loving person.
[Jefferson Morley]
In the spring of 1963,
Oswald started
handing out pamphlets
for the Fair Play
for Cuba Committee,
a pro-Castro, pro-Cuban
Revolution group
that was popular
on college campuses.
And some of them,
he stamped "544 Camp Street,"
which was an office
in downtown, uh, New Orleans
near where
the CIA's offices were,
right across the street,
in fact.
There was also the home of
the Cuban Revolutionary Council,
which was
the leading anti-Castro group.
Why would a pro-Castro activist
put his headquarters
in the same headquarters
as the leading anti-Castro
group in the country?
'Cause he was a provocateur.
This gets back to being
an agent or a double agent,
because he played both roles.
Here was Oswald
who had two associations.
One, he has a group
of anti-Castro Cubans.
At the same time,
he was handing out leaflets
for the Fair Play
for Cuba committee,
uh, with the other side
of the fence.
So the two groups that had
the most motivation
to assassinate the President,
he was dealing with.
[Goldberg]
And not surprisingly,
many of these groups were
known and, in some cases
supported,
by the US government.
In the spring of 1963,
Oswald began associating with
men who, it would be revealed,
had clear connections
with these government efforts.
One of these men, David Ferrie,
had been with Oswald in the
Civil Air Patrol back in 1955,
and was known
as an extreme anti-Communist.
He was also a trainer
and a pilot for the CIA
in its secret w*r against Cuba.
Oswald was involved with these
Cuban exile training
activities with Ferrie.
I do know
that I saw him one time
with a man
by the name of Guy Banister.
And, uh, what Guy's role was
in all of this,
I-- I really don't know.
[Goldberg] Banister
was an extreme right-winger
who was close to the FBI,
the CIA,
and the American n*zi Party.
Banister gave Oswald his own
office at 544 Camp Street.
Oswald now began
to use his office
to print up and stamp
pro-Castro literature.
After the assassination, when
the FBI questioned Banister,
a former FBI agent himself,
they did not ask him
about Oswald.
At some point, the FBI, I think
probably after the assassination
decided they didn't--
they wanted to disconnect
Oswald from the FBI,
and-- and of course, Banister,
who's associated with the FBI,
would have to be
disconnected as well.
The problem with that,
many of those handbills had
the 544 Camp Street
address on them.
There was a message
from New Orleans to the Bureau
written by Special Agent Maynor,
uh, who actually
mentioned pamphlets
that had the 544
Camp Street address on it.
And before
that message was sent,
it was scratched out.
[Goldberg] The Warren
Commission pushed the idea
that Oswald
was a staunch communist,
citing evidence
of his defection
to the Soviet Union in 1959.
His trip to Russia raised
a number of questions
that we wanted to get into.
For example, when
any American went to Russia
and renounced
his American citizenship,
and subsequently
changed his mind
and wanted to come back
to this country.
Upon returning to this country,
there was a thorough debriefing
by the CIA,
with one exception, as far
as we can ascertain, Oswald.
Now, that smacks
of an intelligence relationship.
[reporter]
Did you k*ll the President?
No, they're taking me in
because of the fact that
I lived in the Soviet Union.
[Goldberg]
State Department Intelligence
Officer Otto Otepka
had noted the marked increase
in the number of Americans
defecting to Russia
at the time.
He also noted that some of them
came from the military.
He, therefore, suspected
that some of these men
were fake defectors.
They had been assigned
by the CIA
to garner intelligence
behind the Iron Curtain.
He sent a letter to the CIA
asking which ones were real
and which were their agents.
Oswald was one of the names
on Otepka's list.
Otepka's request was forwarded
to James Angleton,
Chief of Counterintelligence.
He instructed that there be
no research done on Oswald,
but Otepka continued to work
on the Oswald case.
The thing of significance
was that he was really
interested in Lee Harvey Oswald
before the assassination,
and he actually had a study
of these defectors in his safe.
Well, things got worse.
His office was not only bugged,
they planted people in
his office to spy on him.
They started putting
confidential documents
in his burn bag,
and then tried
to blame him in saying
he's burning
confidential documents.
The guy has gone,
you know, wacko.
[Goldberg] As a result,
he was formally removed
from the State Department
on November 5th, 1963,
just 17 days
before the assassination.
So you will not see Otepka's
name in the Warren Report.
And he was not called as
a witness before that body.
In fact, Angleton, the man
who had access to all
the Oswald files at the CIA,
coordinated
the agency's response
to the Warren Commission's
requests.
[reporter]
The CIA Deputy Director
of Plans, Richard Helms,
swore to the Warren Commission
that the agency never had
or contemplated
any contact with Oswald.
The line that the CIA fed
the Warren Commission,
that they really didn't know
anything about this guy.
We now know that
that was complete nonsense.
Oswald was
a figure of intense interest
for four years
before the assassination.
And a dozen senior CIA officers
were very
well acquainted with him.
Everything he did,
where he went,
what his politics were,
his family life.
I mean, remember, they were
reading his mother's mail.
That's how closely
they were watching him
right up until
Kennedy was k*lled.
And then Kennedy was k*lled,
Oswald's arrested,
and they say, "Oh,
we know nothing about this man."
[Goldberg]
In fact, ARRB records show
that Angleton and the CIA were
receiving reports on Oswald
up until one week
before the assassination.
So, you know,
the whole investigation
would have been
totally different
if-- if the public and
the investigators had known
just how much the CIA knew
about the alleged lone nut.
[Goldberg] One of the places
Oswald leafleted in front of
was Clay Shaw's
International Trade Mart.
Shaw, who was arrested by
New Orleans DA Jim Garrison
on charges that he
was part of the conspiracy
to k*ll President Kennedy,
always denied he was
associated with the CIA.
[interviewer]
You have never yourself had
any CIA connection?
None whatsoever.
Any association
with the organization?
Not a one.
[Goldberg]
The Review Board has shown
these denials to be false.
Shaw was both
a highly valued contract agent
and had
a covert security clearance
for a project code
named QKENCHANT.
New Orleans attorney
Dean Andrews
had worked with Oswald
in May of '63
in an attempt to upgrade
his military discharge
from its "undesirable" status.
After the assassination, a man
calling himself Clay Bertrand
phoned Andrews and asked him
to consider going to Dallas
to defend Oswald.
Under oath, Clay Shaw denied
that he was Clay Bertrand,
and Andrews claimed
that because
of the medication he was on,
he had only imagined
the phone call.
But today, because of the work
of the Assassination
Records Review Board,
we now have evidence
and 12 people who confirmed
that Shaw
used this name as an alias.
Andrews later admitted
that Shaw was Bertrand
to author Harold Weisberg,
but made him promise
not to reveal this
until after Andrews' death.
[John Newman] In the FBI,
uh, a stop or flash was placed
on Oswald's files,
which meant that no one
could ask for
a document in those files,
or no one could even add
a document to those files
without going through
the FBI's espionage division.
And that lasted for four years.
It was essentially
a blinking red light
on Oswald's files at FBI.
On 8 October, 1963,
an FBI agent whose name
was Marvin Gheesling
took that status
off of Oswald's files.
What that action did
was to lower
Oswald's threat profile
at the FBI
just weeks before
the Kennedy assassination.
And what that would mean
is there was no reason
to put Oswald's name
on the security index.
One thing
about the security index
is when you have
a Presidential motorcade
going through
a particular route,
anybody who's on that index
has to be removed
from where they are.
They cannot be
on the parade route.
And, of course, that exposes
the President
to a dangerous situation
that he shouldn't have been in.
That action at the FBI
didn't happen in isolation.
The same thing happened at CIA
at exactly the same time.
[Stone]
Who was the CIA's liaison
they chose to work
with the House Select
Committee in 1978?
George Joannides.
He was the case officer
for the Cuban students
who had a series of encounters
with Oswald
before the assassination.
And then, 13 years later,
when Congress
reopens the investigation,
the CIA calls Joannides
out of retirement,
and make him the point person
to deal with
the Congressional investigators
who are looking into the CIA's
possible role
in the assassination.
The HSCA
knew nothing about this,
and I went to Bob Blakey,
the head of
the HSCA investigation,
and I said, "Bob, did you ever
know this guy, Joannides?"
And he said, "Yeah, you know,
we dealt with him a lot.
He was the liaison."
And I said, "Did you know
what he was doing in 1963?"
And he said, "He wasn't
doing anything in 1963.
"We had
an agreement with the CIA
"that nobody
who was operational
"at the time
of the assassination
would be involved
in the investigation."
And I said, "Bob, Joannides
was running those Cubans
"who were in touch with Oswald.
He was running the Cubans
"who were blaming Castro
for the assassination.
"He was d*ck Helms'
hand-picked man in Miami,
"controlling the group that
had the most to do with Oswald
"before and after
the assassination.
And then he came along
and he stonewalled you."
The reason why they brought
Joannides in to do it
was to hide
the connection to Oswald.
He was definitely shocked
because
he saw just how clever
they had been.
They had gone right to
the heart of his investigation,
and figured out
how to paralyze it.
I remember that he said,
you know,
"I'll never believe anything
the CIA tells me again."
[Goldberg]
Even the Assassination Records
Review Board
had trouble getting documents
from government agencies.
What were some
of your difficulties
working with the CIA?
One of the censors at the CIA
was at a meeting with us,
and there was a document
that we put up on the screen
and said,
"We are prepared to release it."
And I asked him, you know,
"Tell us why we shouldn't
release this record?"
And it was silence
for about two minutes.
And he finally said,
"I know there is a reason,
I just can't think
of what it is."
[Goldberg]
In late 1992,
a month after
the Records Act was passed,
the Secret Service began
its compliance plan.
But by January of 1995,
it had begun destroying
important documents.
The destruction of records
is actually referenced
in the Assassination Records
Review Board final, uh, report.
Very, um, very disappointing.
Uh, they were records
that related to trips
that President Kennedy had
taken, uh, in the fall of 1963
prior to him going to Dallas.
[John R. Tunheim]
There were many threats made
to President Kennedy's life
during the year 1963.
They're called threat sheets.
And the Secret Service
fought us
on release of those records.
They even enlisted
Vice President Gore's
wife to help them,
because she had
a very legitimate concern
for mental health records.
And the idea was that this might
disclose the names of people
who had mental health problems.
In the end, when we required
agencies to disclose,
to swear under oath
that they had
located all
assassination records,
had turned
everything over to us,
the Secret Service refused
to sign the document under oath.
I think that was telling.
[Goldberg] Few people knew
that there had been at least
two prior plots to k*ll
President Kennedy in 1963.
One was in Chicago
on November 2nd.
The second was in Tampa
on November 18th.
Kennedy ended up
not going to Chicago.
Tell us about that plot.
An informant, on October 31st,
an informant named Lee
gave a warning to the FBI
stating that four Cubans
were headed to Chicago
to sh**t Kennedy.
The following day, a landlady
reported to the Chicago police
that she had rented
a room to four people
that had r*fles
with telescopic sights
and a sketch of the motorcade.
The FBI passed that
on to the Secret Service,
and the Secret Service
botched the surveillance
of these four individuals.
Two of them escaped,
but they actually picked up
two of the sn*pers,
and they detained them.
They were stonewalled
by the sn*pers.
They didn't get
any information out of them.
While this was going on, there
was another threat coming in
from another alternate patsy
named Thomas Arthur Vallee,
who was making
open and loud threats
that he would
assassinate Kennedy.
They only picked him up
when Kennedy canceled his trip,
on November 2nd
at 10:00 in the morning.
What you found in Vallee
and the whole Chicago plot
is so many similarities to what
eventually happened in Dallas
that it can't be
considered coincidental.
Vallee, if we compare him
to Oswald, is an ex-Marine.
He had been posted,
like Oswald, in the Far East
on a station
that was linked to the CIA
because there were
U-2 surveillance planes on it.
It was easy to portray him
as disgruntled, anti-Kennedy,
a loner, armed.
Uh, he had
another intelligence link
that he shared with Oswald.
He trained Cuban exiles
for combat,
which was a CIA responsibility.
And Oswald, we know,
at least offered to do that.
He most likely did train Cuban
exiles, but we know he tried to.
Oswald, as we know,
was moved
from New Orleans
to Dallas in October
to be there just
at the right time...
for the motorcade.
And he's placed
in a tall building,
where he gets a job.
He's adjacent
to the perfect k*ll zone.
Now, if we look at what
happened to, uh, Vallee,
he's moved like a pawn,
in August,
from Long Island to Chicago
to be there in time
for the motorcade.
And where does he get a job?
In a tall building
adjacent to the motorcade
with a perfect view
of a k*ll zone.
It would have
forced Kennedy's motorcade
to do a sharp turn, slow down,
and be in a point
where you could've had
perfect triangulation of fire.
And what about
the trip to Florida?
On November 18th,
Kennedy was scheduled
to do a 27-mile-long
motorcade in Tampa.
Secret Service was very nervous
about the Floridian Hotel
where the motorcade
would've gone by.
It would have
forced a sharp turn.
Nobody fired away at him.
But in this case,
the patsy would've been
a Gilbert Policarpo Lopez.
He was a Cuban exile.
He attended Fair Play
for Cuba Committee meetings.
And what do you think
was the relevance of it?
[Paul Bleau]
Well, if he had been
assassinated in Tampa,
Lopez, he would've been
the, uh, potential patsy,
if they had to admit
to a front shot...
because Oswald was behind.
There were rumors
that he had assisted Oswald
in the assassination in Dallas.
Had anyone--
anyone tried to speak
to the Warren Commission
about these incidents?
[Bleau]
Abraham Bolden
was the first Black
Secret Service agent
assigned to
the White House detail,
and he was
hand-picked by Kennedy.
He was in Chicago,
uh, when this plot went down.
So he was there when
the Secret Service was briefed
about the four sn*pers.
And he witnessed how much
the security
was lax for Chicago.
And he also witnessed,
after the assassination,
the steps
that were taken to keep
the Chicago plot
completely secret.
No paper trail,
compartmentalized,
agents ordered
to keep silent about it.
This information
did not make its way
to Secret Service agents
that were protecting Kennedy
for future motorcades,
including Dallas.
[Goldberg] Secret Service
Agent Elmer Moore
was aware of Agent Bolden
and the Chicago plot.
I met with Elmer
three times face-to-face,
several phone calls,
very short, one very long one.
I first asked him,
"Did you ever interview
Thomas Arthur Vallee?"
And he says, "Oh, Washington
wouldn't let me
see the files on that."
I said, "Oh, well,
what about a man,
a Secret Service agent by
the name of Abraham Bolden?"
His demeanor completely changed.
He stood up from his chair,
he pulled out his revolver,
and he put it on the table
right in front of me.
He leaned over
the table and he says,
"Jim, tell me right now,
who are you working for?"
I said,
"I'm an independent researcher."
He told me...
in a very loud voice...
and with a very stern look
on his face,
"We finally got him."
[Bleau]
Abraham Bolden was one person
who did try to say what he knew
to the Warren Commission,
but they blocked him.
He was blocked from talking
and eventually railroaded
into some phony crime
and put into jail
for a number of years.
[Stone]
The National Archives is home
to forensic evidence
of Kennedy's assassination,
and government files
regarding Lee Harvey Oswald.
But the Review Board
also declassified
many documents
regarding Kennedy's plans
for withdrawal from Vietnam,
and how he planned
to shape his progressive,
new American foreign policy.
A policy that,
if put in motion,
would completely derail plans
secretly already set up
by the Pentagon and the CIA.
I never realized
Kennedy was so dangerous
to the establishment.
Is that why?
That's the real question,
isn't it?
"Why?"
The "how" and the "who"
is just scenery for the public.
Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, the Mafia,
keeps 'em guessing
like some kind of parlor game.
Prevents 'em from asking the
most important question: "Why?"
Why was Kennedy k*lled?
Who benefited?
Who has the power
to cover it up?
Who?
[Donald Sutherland]
His first year in office,
Kennedy must shape
his own policy as President,
sometimes in conflict with what
his predecessors have done,
especially in foreign policy.
And by the fall of 1963,
Kennedy had made many enemies.
He was working on an American
withdrawal from Vietnam.
An upcoming State visit
to Indonesia in '64.
An independent,
unified democracy in the Congo.
Through Nasser, a balanced
policy in the Middle East.
Normalization of relations
with Cuba.
And a détente with Russia.
Even going so far
as to offer them
a joint mission to the moon.
But back in April of 1961,
the first stain on his
administration asserted itself.
Kennedy, who had campaigned
as a strong anti-Communist,
signed off on
the Bay of Pigs invasion plan.
His approval of the plan
contained two
distinct limitations.
America would supply
arms and equipment,
but there would be no Americans
in the landing force.
Second,
after preliminary air strikes
by Cuban exile pilots,
there would
only be further strikes
after the invasion
secured an airfield.
Dulles believed
that Kennedy would,
like Eisenhower,
support the operation
with direct US military
intervention if needed,
all the while assuring him
it would not be necessary.
Well, first, I want to say that
there will not be,
under any conditions,
be an intervention in Cuba
by United States armed forces.
[Sutherland]
The invasion was a disaster.
Victory has 100 fathers
and defeat is an orphan.
Further statements, uh...
detailed, uh, discussions,
are not to, uh,
conceal responsibility
because I'm the responsible
officer of the Government.
[Sutherland] In public,
Kennedy accepted the blame.
In private,
he and his brother suspected
they had been
lied to by the CIA.
Allen Dulles confessed that
the mission was bound to fail
as it was planned by the CIA,
without US military support.
He confessed this
while, uh, preparing
an article
for Harper's Magazine
with the young editor,
Willie Morris,
that he couldn't have done this
with his small group of exiles,
his Cuban brigade.
He needed the Marines
and the Air Force to go in,
and he thought Kennedy was
going to be young and pliable,
and that in the 11th hour,
Kennedy would be forced
to send in, uh, the full
might of the US military.
[Sutherland] While drafting
the article in 1965,
Dulles told his editor,
"That Kennedy--
He thought he was a God."
[David Talbot]
Jack Kennedy did stand firm.
He did not send in the military.
He did not make it
an even bigger global crisis
than it already was.
Kennedy is just furious.
He knows he's been lied to,
deceived by his senior military
and intelligence advisers.
He announces that the agency,
uh, is going to be downsized.
And he vows famously,
he tells friends
he's going to shatter the CIA
into a thousand pieces
and scatter it to the winds.
It wasn't just the Bay of Pigs
that angered President Kennedy
when it came to the CIA.
In that same month,
in April of 1961,
he was also being lied to
about a coup in France,
a military coup
that was aimed at
overthrowing
President Charles de Gaulle,
one of our strongest allies.
[Sutherland] Allen Dulles,
who had a long history
of antagonism with de Gaulle,
falsely reported to Kennedy
that the vast majority
of the French military
was staunchly opposed
to de Gaulle's support
of Algerian self-determination.
What he didn't tell him
was that as far back as 1959,
the CIA had
discussed his overthrow.
This coup attempt, orchestrated
by four French generals,
was quickly put down.
And several news reports
pointed to Allen Dulles' hand
in supporting the episode.
JFK assures
the French ambassador,
"I have nothing to do with this.
I stand in full support
of President de Gaulle."
But he says something
very, very alarming.
He tells the French ambassador,
President Kennedy,
that "I'm not in full control,
though, of my entire government.
"I'm not in control of the CIA
and I can't speak for
what's happening there."
That's a stunning admission
for a US President to make.
[Sutherland] In 1960,
the Congo had been
granted its independence
from Belgian colonial rule
and carried out
a democratic election.
In the disorder
of the transition,
the Belgians,
backed by England and France,
sought to eliminate
its charismatic Prime Minister,
Patrice Lumumba.
Eisenhower
and CIA Director Allen Dulles
favored the European nation
in this colonial conflict.
Eisenhower gave the go-ahead
to have Lumumba assassinated.
Kennedy never knew this.
He gets elected
the following November of 1960,
and he heads
in the opposite direction.
To those new states
whom we welcome
to the ranks of the free,
we pledge our word that
one form of colonial control
shall not have passed away
merely to be replaced
by a far more iron tyranny.
[Sutherland] But events
are already in motion.
With the backing of British
and US intelligence and arms,
Col. Joseph Mobutu's forces
captured President Lumumba
at the beginning
of December 1960.
[Richard Mahoney]
Dag Hammarskjold,
the UN Secretary General,
calls JFK,
uh, who's the President-elect
at this point,
and asked him to intercede
to get Lumumba
released from prison.
When Kennedy
intervenes to save Lumumba,
that's a signal
directly to the CIA
that they have to
dispatch this guy immediately.
And so 48 hours before Kennedy
takes the oath of office,
Lumumba is delivered
into the hands of his enemies.
He's taken out
and shot in the head.
Kennedy doesn't know this
until months later.
Who finally tells him?
The CIA?
No, they still keep it a secret.
He's informed by his
UN ambassador, Adlai Stevenson.
His face crumples,
he's holding his hand,
he's grimacing in anguish,
hearing about the assassination
of Patrice Lumumba.
[Sutherland]
Within a very short
period of time
after the assassination,
Hammarskjold died
in a mysterious plane crash.
The photographs show his body
as the only one
not burned or charred,
and he had a playing card,
reportedly the ace of spades,
stuffed into his shirt collar
above the knot of the tie.
There are
controversial documents
that indicate Allen Dulles
was involved
in the sabotage of the plane.
[Lisa Pease] John Foster Dulles
and Allen Dulles,
they felt, you know,
what they had to say
was good enough
for the rest of the world,
that they knew
more than the President.
There were things
they didn't tell Eisenhower
that they were doing
under his administration.
[Talbot]
And actually, Jack Kennedy
does move to decapitate
the top of the CIA.
He lets it be known
that Allen Dulles,
as well as his two top advisers,
Richard Bissell,
who is also very involved
with the Bay of Pigs,
and General Cabell,
who was, uh, the right-hand man
to Allen Dulles.
So the top three people
in the CIA,
Kennedy forces them out
before the end of the year.
Have you ever committed any
act of violence in your life?
No.
[Sutherland]
The existence of communism
so close to American shores
kept Cuba on Kennedy's plate.
And the Joint Chiefs of Staff
presented a plan to Kennedy
called Operation Northwoods,
whereby the CIA
would secretly perform
t*rror1st acts
in the United States
and blame them on Castro
to justify bombings
and an invasion of Cuba.
And you see all these plans
being sent
to McNamara and to Kennedy.
[Horne]
"Fake an attack by Cubans
against the
Guantanamo Bay sentries.
Sink a US ship
in Guantanamo Bay
and blame it on Cuba."
The one that scares me the most
was very sophisticated.
Uh, take an airliner and fly it
as a drone over Cuba
without any people in it,
with a tape-recording
that would play,
"We're under attack
by Cuban aircraft!
'Oh, my God,
they're going to k*ll us!"
Blow up the airplane!
Blow up this huge drone
and use that to start a w*r.
[Sutherland] The President
declined the recommendation.
The Northwoods plan
was our big find
in the way of military records.
They are universally
recognized today
for their importance.
It's one of those releases
that the Review Board members,
the board members themselves
were justifiably proud of
that came out of
the JFK Records Act.
[Stone] In addition to
the problems with the CIA,
Kennedy's own military advisers
started pressuring him
to send troops to Vietnam.
A country that
Kennedy had visited
10 years earlier
as a Congressman,
and witnessed firsthand
how the French
were losing their w*r
against the Viet Minh
in the fight for independence.
Once he became President,
Kennedy wanted
to avoid the same trap.
The Vietnam decision
is finally arrived at,
which is NSAM 111,
where Kennedy
says no combat troops
but will increase the advisers.
And that was his decision,
in the Kennedy presidency.
never to cross that line.
[Sutherland] Near the end
of his first year in office,
Kennedy received a report
from Walt Rostow
and General Maxwell Taylor,
his foreign policy
and military advisers,
that called
for increased training
of South Vietnamese troops,
increased bombings
of the North,
and the use
of US combat troops.
The influence
on Kennedy's reluctance
to committing ground troops
was his ambassador to India,
John Kenneth Galbraith.
[James K. Galbraith] My father
went to see, uh, Walt Rostow.
He went in to talk to him.
Rostow gestured on his desk
to the, uh, pile of papers.
The Rostow Taylor report
was plainly visible.
Uh, my father asked to see it.
Walt said that
his security classification
wasn't sufficiently high.
My father did not think that
Walt Rostow's
security classification
was higher than his.
Uh, and at the given moment,
uh, the phone rang.
Walt turned to--
to answer the phone
and-- and Dad
picked up the report
and walked out
of the office and read it.
[Sutherland] Kennedy
sent Galbraith to Saigon
to write a report that would
differ in its recommendations
from what Taylor and Rostow
had given to him.
Kennedy knew what he wanted
and he knew what my father
would deliver, which he did,
which is a very detailed
and skeptical report
about the efficiency of the
South Vietnamese government,
about the capacity
of any military force
to prevail in
the security situation
that was in existence
in South Vietnam at that time.
[Sutherland]
Kennedy told Galbraith
to deliver his report to
Defense Secretary McNamara,
and he,
in turn, gave instructions
to begin the withdrawal
to General Harkins,
the commanding General
of all forces in Vietnam.
The Pentagon dragged its feet
on formulating plans,
and McNamara called for
a meeting in May of 1963.
One of the most important finds
of the Review Board
are the notes
from this meeting.
[Horne] McNamara said,
"It's not fast enough.
I want you to accelerate it."
He says,
"I want to pull out 1,000 men,
uh, in December
by the end of the year.
"And I want you to pull out
complete units,
not just individuals."
He wanted units to come out.
[Sutherland]
After the withdrawal plan
was approved,
Kennedy sent
Secretary of Defense McNamara
and General Taylor
to Saigon in September of '63.
He planned on using
their report as the basis
to formally order
the withdrawal to begin.
Kennedy controlled the report,
since it was
actually being written
under the supervision
of Bobby Kennedy.
[Newman]
Three days later,
that leaks out
into the newspapers.
Then his opponents find out.
And McGeorge Bundy
says to Kennedy, "Hey, look,
"if they're talking about it
in the newspapers,
we might as well
put it on paper."
And they put it,
and it was NSAM 263.
And that's how it was
actually written and why.
Well, here's one of the things
McNamara said
in the secret debrief.
He said, "We had agreed,
the President and I,
"that we had trained them,
"we had given them
everything we could.
"And if they couldn't win,
too bad.
We had to get out even if
they were going to be defeated."
So McNamara and Kennedy had
decided that they were willing
to pull out of Vietnam
in a losing scenario.
That's very important.
But later in that month,
McGeorge Bundy,
who's the National
Security Adviser,
puts together a memo
based upon the--
the truth about the w*r,
which is just going terribly.
And he does it in a way
to try and make sure
that Kennedy would be able
to go along with this.
[Sutherland]
This is reflected in
the National Security
Action Memorandum:
NSAM 273.
[Newman] The way Bundy writes
the first draft of 273
is to say,
"Look, we need to intensify
"the w*r effort
against the communists.
"But the way
we're going to do it
is to increase
South Vietnamese forces."
There's not a word
about American forces
or Americanizing the w*r.
While Kennedy's body
is still in the casket
in the rotunda
over in the Capitol building,
is when Johnson changes NSAM 273
to a new version.
And when it comes
to the key paragraph,
paragraph seven,
which just talks about
how we're going
to intensify the w*r,
instead of changing a few words,
there's two big hash marks
through that paragraph,
and it's completely rewritten.
And I said--
I asked Bundy in an interview,
I said,
"Who told you to do that?"
He said, "Johnson did."
[Sutherland]
These changes allowed the US
to unilaterally engage
in combat in Vietnam
rather than simply
supporting and advising
South Vietnamese troops.
And within days,
we're talking about
sending out the DESOTO missions.
These-- These naval excursions
along the coastline
of North Vietnam
that ends up with The Maddox
and the, and the so-called
Tonkin Gulf attacks.
And then
the resolution in Congress
opening the door
to intervention in Vietnam.
[Sutherland] In the Review
Board's declassifications,
there's evidence
that Johnson was fully aware
of Kennedy's
Vietnam withdrawal plans,
disagreed with them,
and worked on Robert McNamara
to make him renounce them.
[Lyndon B. Johnson speaking]
In retaliation
for this unprovoked
attack on the high seas,
our forces
have struck the bases
used by the North Vietnamese
patrol craft.
[Sutherland]
And as declassified
memos have revealed,
by autumn of 1964,
during his campaign
against Barry Goldwater,
Johnson had already decided
that he was going
to escalate the Vietnam w*r.
In fact, the directive
that would become
the Tonkin Gulf Resolution
had been written before the
Tonkin Gulf Incident itself.
Three months
before the election,
Johnson had already planned
for an extensive air w*r.
It was to begin
after his inauguration.
[Johnson] We intend
to convince the communists
that we cannot be defeated
by force of arms
or by superior power.
[Pease] When news
came of Kennedy's death,
all over the planet,
people were mourning
and crying
and going to embassies.
In Latin America,
the people just lit candles
because they didn't even
have electrical power,
but they wanted
to honor his k*lling.
In the Yucatan Peninsula,
peasants cleared an area
and planted a peace garden.
[Philip Muehlenbeck] Nasser
learned of Kennedy's death
in the middle of the night.
He got up, dressed,
went down to his office,
and then realized,
"Well, there's nothing
I can do about this."
According to his son,
Nasser went to a--
a great state of depression
after Kennedy's death.
Uh, relations with Egypt
gradually deteriorated,
and they increasingly shifted
their allegiance
towards the Soviet Union
as well.
A mass was held in the leading
Catholic Church in Cairo,
which has a capacity of 600.
They somehow fit 4,000 people
into that church.
Algeria, which had
special feeling for Kennedy,
declared a state
of mourning for a week.
Flags were flown,
uh, at half mast.
The US ambassador to Egypt said
that he thought the Egyptians
had seen in Kennedy
the best of what
they saw in Americans.
That Kennedy had represented
a kind of ideal of America
to ordinary Egyptians.
[Sutherland] Castro got
the news of Kennedy's death
while discussing détente
with the French journalist
Jean Daniel.
He then exclaimed,
"This is bad news.
Everything is now
going to change."
When Khrushchev paid his
respects to President Kennedy
at the American embassy,
he was reportedly
holding back tears.
Robert Kennedy knew
that after his brother's death,
relations with the Soviet Union
hung in the balance.
My father, he wanted to convey
a message to Premier Khrushchev
saying that our family knew
that the Soviets were not
involved in the assassination.
That it was a right-wing plot
from our own country.
In other words, the CIA,
or forces aligned with the CIA.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
The day that his brother died,
my father's first phone call
was to the CIA
desk officer at Langley
and he asked them, "Did your
people conduct this horror?"
[Talbot]
We know from how Bobby operated
that terrible day,
November 22nd, 1963,
at his home in,
uh, McLean, Virginia,
that he immediately suspected
there was not a lone g*nman.
Why do we know this?
Because he was being told
by his closest aides,
people like Kenny O'Donnell
and Dave Powers,
who were in the limousine
immediately behind
President Kennedy's limousine.
They were both
World w*r II veterans.
They knew
what g*nf*re sounded like.
They reported it to him
that g*nf*re
had not just come
from the-- the rear.
It had come
from different sides.
There was g*nf*re
from the front as well.
It was a crossfire.
[Kennedy Jr.]
I was in the East Room,
with my dad and with Jackie
and a couple of my siblings,
and Lyndon Johnson came in,
and told the adults in the room
that Lee Harvey Oswald
had been k*lled,
and that a man had shot him.
And I said to my dad and mom
at that time,
"Why did he sh**t him?
Did he--
Did he love our family?"
And the way that they acted
was that this only
compounded the tragedy.
[Sutherland]
Many people at home
felt that after
Kennedy's death,
a period of depression and
cynicism overtook the country,
and that America
was somehow changed forever.
Our overwhelming disbelief
in the Warren
Commission's findings
contributed to
increased skepticism
of all our foundational beliefs
about government.
But I think Allen Dulles'
appointment to
the Warren Commission
is one of the great frauds
of American history.
I don't think that even if
you had 10 more commissions,
you'd never
get away from the idea
that maybe there was a plot.
We just didn't
find any traces of it.
What really happened
with Allen Dulles was
the CIA lobbied to have
him put on the Commission,
'cause they needed to have one
of their own on the Commission
to make sure that
certain doors remained closed.
I think there's a direct thread
between the events of 1963
and the kind of horror show
that America is having
to endure right now.
And I think once
you k*ll a President
in broad daylight on the
streets of an American city,
and everyone knows
that powerful forces did it,
that sends a signal not
only to the American people,
but to the American media,
to the American future leaders.
And if America really wants
a democratic society,
then we should get to the bottom
of this traumatic crime
that continues to reverberate
throughout American history.
They poll historians,
they poll the American people,
and they say, "Who were
the most popular Presidents?"
Well, one metric
that you can use
to objectively-- at least
judge the foreign policy,
is how many boulevards are named
after that President
in foreign countries?
How many hospitals, how many
colleges, how many schools?
How many statues are--
are standing of that President
in capitals all over the world?
And in that sense,
President Kennedy
beats every other President,
hands down.
[Stone]
Although many of Kennedy's
progressive
and unprecedented goals
and changes in policy were
undone after his assassination,
a few powerful ones remain.
I think Mr. Kennedy has done
some significant things
in civil rights,
and I would include
the Attorney General.
I think both of these men
are men of genuine goodwill.
And, uh, I think
there is a necessity now
to see the urgency
of the moment.
I'm asking from you
an unequivocal assurance
that you will not bar entry
to these students,
and that you will
step aside peacefully,
do your constitutional duty.
[Stone] In showdowns
using federal troops,
the Kennedy administration won
admission of Black students
to the last public colleges
in the south.
George Wallace made it clear
that this fight was not over.
And the-- the South
this year-- next year
will decide who
the next President is,
whoever the South votes for
will be the President.
And you're gonna see
that the South
is going to be
against some folks.
[Stone] That night,
Kennedy addressed the nation
in what many
consider the finest
Presidential speech
on civil rights
since Abraham Lincoln.
...and that the rights of
every man are diminished
when the rights
of one man are threatened.
If an American,
because his skin is dark...
cannot enjoy the full and free
life which all of us want,
then who among us
would be content
to have the color
of his skin changed?
One hundred years of delay
have passed
since President Lincoln
freed the sl*ves,
yet their heirs, their
grandsons, are not fully free.
And this nation, for all
its hopes and all its boasts,
will not be fully free until
all its citizens are free.
We face, therefore,
a moral crisis
as a country and a people,
and this is a matter
which concerns
this country
and what it stands for.
And in meeting it, I ask the
support of all of our citizens.
Thank you very much.
[somber music playing]
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