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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 war.
Not the peace of the grave
or the security of the slave.
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 gunman 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 gunshot 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] From the hill?
[woman] Yes.
[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 shoot Mr. Kennedy for all the things he's done for us.
He tried to keep us from getting into war and everything.
It's a simple matter of a bullet 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 rifle shells,
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 shoot the President? -I didn't shoot 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, killing Patrolman J.D. Tippit.
A rifle 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 killed the President?
[officer] I think this is the man who killed 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--
[gunshot]
[reporter 19] He's been shot.
[indistinct]
[reporter 20] There's a man with a gun.
[Cronkite] Lee Harvey Oswald,
the man who Dallas police say killed 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 killed 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 murder 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 murder 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 killed 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 Dick,
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 bullet 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 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 gun.
[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 bullets 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]
[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 bullet hitting two victims,
and doing all this damage?
Arten 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 bullet made all seven wounds?
Arten Specter, he is the one
that gave birth to the single-bullet theory.
What if one bullet 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 bullet happily and readily obliges you.
It is indeed a magic bullet.
CE-399 was the magic bullet,
and all government investigations so far
have treated that bullet
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 bullet's chain of custody
from the Parkland employees to the Secret Service to the FBI?
Well, the magic bullet 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 bullet,
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 sighed 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 bullet that was found on the stretcher?"”
At 7:30 at night,
this is the day of the assassination,
November 22nd, 1963,
a bullet 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 bullet at 7:30 that night.
Now, here's where things get interesting.
Elmer Lee Todd received the bullet at the White House
from chief of the Secret Service, James Rowley.
And Todd documents, very clearly in writing,
that he got this bullet at 8:50 p.m.
How is that possible?
How can Robert Frazier receive the bullet
in the lab at 7:30 from Elmer Lee Todd,
when Todd didn't get the bullet 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 bullet.
[David Mantik] It gets worse, though.
Todd initialed that bullet,
the one that he got at 8:50,
and everyone else who touched the bullet
after that initialed it too,
including Robert Frazier.
I went to the archives to look at this bullet.
And specifically, what we want to know is,
do we see Todd's initials on this bullet?
He said he initialed the bullet.
It is not there.
Todd's initials are not on the magic bullet.
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 bullet
later identified that as the bullet they'd seen.
The internal record didn't show that at all.
The internal records said this bullet
didn't look like that bullet 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 bullet around.
His name was Bar dwell Odum.
I got Bar dwell Odum on the phone.
I sent him the documents that said that he had done this.
He said, "I never had that bullet.
I never showed any bullet to anyone.
"If I'd had the bullet, 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 bullet
showed up from who knows where.
Todd did not initial it,
and it ended up in the FBI lab as the magic bullet.
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 bullet.
The guy who is supposed to have gotten confirmation that
they did identify the bullet said he never did it.
And the record supports that.
So, there's-- there's good reason to be
very suspicious about the magic bullet.
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 bullet
after going through two men, smashing two bones,
and making seven wounds.
Dr. Joseph Dolce
was a much-honored battlefield surgeon during World War II.
He worked for the Warren Commission.
And so they gave us the original rifle, the Mannlicher-Carcano,
plus 100 bullets, 6.5 millimeters.
And we went and we shot the cadaver wrists,
and in every instance,
the front or the tip of the bullet was smashed.
Under no circumstances,
do I feel that this bullet could hit the wrist,
and still not be deformed.
[Goldberg] Dolce came to believe
that two bullets had struck Connally.
Since Arten 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-bullet 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 bullet
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 bullet struck both of them, although...
[reporter] You mean that you yourself didn't--
Weren't convinced about the single-bullet 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 bullet,
and that was the first bullet.
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 bullets, in fact,
came from that rifle. That was his rifle.
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 rifle.
We know that Oswald had possession of that rifle
because we have him photographed with it.
And we have his wife saying that it was, quote,
"Faithful rifle of Lee Oswald.”
[Stone] Is the rifle in evidence today
the same rifle the commission said
Oswald ordered through the mail?
The rifle 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 rifle out of the Book Depository.
One of the straps at the back of the gun is on the left side
of the stock embedded in the stock.
That's clearly not the rifle that was ordered,
or at least appears in the Klein' 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 rifle and a pistol 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 rifle in an assassination,
knowing there was a paper trail
that would lead right back to them?
Was there a palm print found on the rifle?
The foremost fingerprint expert the FBI had, Sebastian La ton a,
took that rifle and attempted to lift prints off of the rifle,
the stock and/or the barrel.
Uh, he testified to the Warren Commission
that he found no usable prints
anywhere on that rifle, on the metal or the stock.
But yet, Lieutenant Day in Dallas
before the rifle 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 La ton a 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.
[Hoover] Yes, I've seen the reports
on this investigation.
This man, Oswald, he had fired three shots.
He then threw the gun 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] OA, 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 rifle,
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 shooting.
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 guns,
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 bullet?”
He said, "The bullet 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 bullet right through the head.
[Goldberg] The day after the shooting,
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 gunshot-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 gunshot wounds
to determine angles, trajectory, range, sequence.
And then you've got to correlate
with the multiple gunshot 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 shooting.
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 bullet 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 bullets.
In a murder case,
that is a very serious problem for them.
So where did that bullet go?
It was just, like you say, a work of fiction.
A call came in from the FBI in Dallas.
A bullet 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 bullet.
How did that bullet 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 bullet,
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
bullets don't go in and out like that.
The bullet becomes encased. But that was their conclusion.
Keep in mind, they did not know that there was a bullet 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 bullet
had fortuitously ripped through the trachea.
So they enlarged that bullet hole.
And now they learned, for the first time,
that there was a tracheostomy
superimposed upon a bullet 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 bullet came from,
found by Tomlinson on the stretcher.
Four or five months later,
under Arten Specter's single-bullet theory,
that bullet has been rejuvenated, it's been revitalized.
That bullet has now gone through
Kennedy, through Connally,
and now, as of April of 1964, the Stretcher Bullet,
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 Arten 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-bullet 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.
(gunshot)
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 15 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 we're 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
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 killed.
One can only imagine that they wanted
the-- the damage to the brain
to be consistent with the hypothesis
that Oswald had done the shooting.
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.
Arten 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 bullet 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 gunman,”
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 kill 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 bullet wounds and things,
the face sheet showed the bullet 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-bullet theory,
one bullet 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 bullet 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 murder 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 shoot the President?
I didn't shoot 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.
Murdered on live television.
[reporter 1] This was the dreary funeral
of Lee Harvey Oswald,
alleged murderer 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 war 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 Nazi 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 May nor,
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 kill 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 Angle ton,
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, Angle ton, 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 killed.
And then Kennedy was killed, Oswald"s arrested,
and they say, "Oh, we know nothing about this man."”
[Goldberg] In fact, ARRB records show
that Angle ton 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 kill 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 19782
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 Dick 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 kill 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 shoot Kennedy.
The following day, a landlady reported to the Chicago police
that she had rented a room to four people
that had rifles 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 snipers,
and they detained them.
They were stonewalled by the snipers.
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 kill 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 kill 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 snipers.
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.
I 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 killed? 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 armes,
Col. Joseph Mobutu's forces captured President Lumumba
at the beginning of December 1960.
[Richard Ma honey] 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 North woods,
whereby the CIA would secretly perform
terrorist 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 kill us!”
Blow up the airplane!
Blow up this huge drone
and use that to start a war.
[Sutherland] The President declined the recommendation.
The North woods 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 war
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 war,
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 war 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 war.
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 war,
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 War-.
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 war.
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 killing.
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 gunman.
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 War II veterans.
They knew what gunfire sounded like.
They reported it to him that gunfire
had not just come from the-- the rear.
It had come from different sides.
There was gunfire 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 killed,
and that a man had shot him.
And I said to my dad and mom at that time,
"Why did he shoot 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 kill 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 slaves,
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]
♪