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The how and the who is just scenery for the public. Oswold, Ruby, Cuber, the mafia, keeps him guessing like some parlor game, prevents him from asking the most important question, Why? Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefited? Who has the power to cover it up? Who? The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Harrison, is for war. The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers. Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War in his second term. He wanted to call off the Moon Race, cooperate with the Soviets. He signed a treaty to ban nuclear testing. He refused to invade Cuba in 1962.

He.

Set out to withdraw from Vietnam. But all that ended on the 22nd of November, 1963. That, Dominic, was Mr. X, played by Donald Sutherland in Oliver Stone's JFK, which came out in 1991 and is a very serious and sober documentary on the JFK assassination. I mean, of course it is, and is it? It's an absolute melange of assassination, related theories and conspiracy concoctions.

It is. I saw JFK at the Cinema, Tom, when I was a teenager, and it was actually the film that got me interested in American history.

Were you convinced when you watched it?

No, I knew it was controversial because I'd read articles in Empire magazine and in the newspapers about the controversies, because people had criticized it, the historians had criticized it. I didn't really think about whether or not it was true. What I loved was the idea that the assassination opened up a bigger story, which was the Cold War, the military-industrial complex, the Vietnam War, all of this stuff.

Buy services, FBI, CIA.

Yeah, I loved that idea. I wrote an incredibly boring A-level research essay about Canada's domestic policies. It was at that point that I started to doubt Oliver Stone's film because it struck me that he hadn't been sufficiently radical to explain this vast conspiracy.

Because the mafia are in it as well, aren't they?

The mafia, Anticastro, exiles, the CIA, the FBI, The Secret Service. We will talk about Oliver Stone's film a little bit later in this podcast. But in a weird way, the Oliver Stone film, it is like a history of post-war America and microcosm, isn't it? Because it has all these anxieties.

I was.

About to say packed into. It's not packed into because it's a sprawling, incredibly long film. We watched it a couple of days ago, actually, at home and I couldn't believe how long it was. We had to divide it over multiple days because I kept falling asleep.

But do you think that's because your attention span has faded due to the impact of TikTok.

Yes, I spent so much time on TikTok, Tom, that I can no longer watch it half an hour.

Well, five minutes.

Yeah, exactly. Obviously, the Stone film is merely an example of this enormous industry because the Kennedy conspiracy theory industry is, I suppose, bigger than today, even the Freemason's conspiracy theory, to mention one that we've already done.

Sure. I mean, it's up there with Atlantis and indeed, aliens. And aliens may feature in this episode, may they not? Because today we are talking about the conspiracy theories, how credible any of them may be, and you are going to give your judgment.

My verdict. Oh, my word.

As a distinguished historian in modern America.

What pressure? What pressure? Never have I entered a podcast under such enormous pressure? Sure you'll cope. One thing I will just say before we start, I enjoyed your Donald Sutherland. He's, of course, Canadian. I don't know whether you tried to incorporate that in the...

Yes, I did.

Yeah, very nice. He would say oot instead of out. That's what Canadians.

Apparently do. Well, unless he's playing an American.

Which is what he was doing, of course, hence the complexity of the accent.

It's an incredibly sophisticated accent because I'm playing a Canadian playing an American. I know that we've been getting some grief from Canadians for not doing any episodes on Canada.

So this is won. But no.

I wanted to do an homage to the Canadian accent to reassure all our Canadian listeners that we love and value you very, very much.

Oh, that is kind. All right, let's get back to the Kennedy assassination. We talked last time, didn't we, about the Dallas Police Department investigation, which I think we both agree was pretty thorough, actually. They made mistakes. They obviously made a horrendous mistake in allowing Jack Ruby into the basement when they were bringing Oswold out. But I mean, as we explained last time, they had gone to tremendous effort to try to stop that happening, hadn't they? But otherwise, they actually, I think, did reasonably well.

They think absolutely that they have got their man, don't they? Captain Fritz, the guy who's basically conducting the interrogation of Oswold, at two o'clock on the day after the assassination, he comes out and he speaks to a television reporter and he says, I can tell you that this case is cinched, that this man killed the President. There's no question in my mind about it. Apparently he had a very gravely accent.

Right, yeah.

He assumes it is absolutely done. It's a done deal. But presumably it's Ruby's murder that changes that.

It does in the long run. Everybody thinks it's done, I would say, by the 23rd of November. That's the day after the assassination. On the evening of the murder itself, so the 22nd, President Johnson, as he had suddenly become, spoke to J. Edga Hoover at the FBI and said, Obviously, I want you to look into this. Federal law enforcement agencies, not just the Dallas law enforcement agencies, should look into this. The following day, so the same day that Fritz is talking to the press, Hoover sent Johnson the FBI's preliminary findings. They list all the evidence and they say, Yeah, we completely agree with the Dallas Police Department. There's absolutely no doubt in our minds. Everything points to Lee Harvey Oswold's guilt. But as you say, the murder of Oswold by Jack Ruby changes everything. Because now Oswold cannot be put on the stand. There will be no trial, there will be no resolution.

It looks as if he's.

Been silenced. Yes, exactly. Even at that point, people are already talking actually about, should we have some form of resolution anyway? Because we need to put to rest public doubts. They know that there will be conspiracy theories.

Well, there already are, aren't there? In Paris and London, we talked about that in the previous episode.

Yes, the people are already saying, Is it a conspiracy? At that point, people are saying, Is it either a communist conspiracy or is it something like the Ku Klux Klan? Actually, Lyndon Johnson at Love Field waiting to fly off to be inaugurated, he had said, Should we go back to Washington? Is this a communist conspiracy? I mean, that's a reasonable supposition to make. On the afternoon of the 24th, that is the day that Oswold was killed by Jack Ruby, the Dean of Yale Law School, a guy called Eugene Rostau, whose brother, Wilt, ended up becoming Lyndon Johnson's national security advisor. Very suspicious. The Rostaus are a Russian Jewish family who become very, very fierce anti-communists. Or so they say. Well, Wilt Rostau is famously associated with getting Johnson into Vietnam and being the ultra-hawk on Vietnam. Anyway, that's by the by. Or is it? Eugene Rostow calls… Well, maybe, yes. He calls one of Johnson's aides and he says, I think we should have a presidential commission. Johnson gets the message. Hoover also thinks that they should do something, have something public. Hoover, that Sunday afternoon, the 24th of November, actually calls a Johnson aide we know from recordings and transcripts and so on.

He says, We should have something done so that we can, and I quote, Convince the public that Oswold is the real assassin. Now, for conspiracy theories, that is a smoking gun. That is absolute evidence that Jared Gehoover and the Johnson White House were plotting to implicate Oswold.

Because Oswold had said, I'm a patsy.

I'm a patsy. Yeah, that they're talking to frame him. Of course, there is another way of interpreting that conversation, which is that Jared Gehoover genuinely thinks Lee Harvey Oswalt is the assassin, that he is worried about a swirl of rumors and allegations, and he says, Listen, we have to get our case out there and show the public that he was the assassin, which he was. There are two ways that you can interpret that. One thing that they're all very worried about is the influence of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union weaponizing the conspiracy theories. The very next day, actually, the Soviet news agency TAS prints a report and it says, All the circumstances of President Kennedy's tragic death allow us to assume that this murder was planned and carried out by the ultra-right-wing fascist and racist circles by those who cannot stomach any step aimed at the easing of international tensions and the improvement of Soviet-American relations. In other words, the Russians are saying, This is America. There's a hotbed of fascism and racism in America, and this is what has claimed the life of the President.

The Soviets are interpreting it through the prism of their relationships with America, but the idea that it's right-wing racist people opposed to Kennedy's policies on civil rights, I mean, that is something that if LBJ thinks it, you can understand why the Soviets would think it as well.

Yes, although it obviously plays into existing Soviet propaganda. The Soviets, especially in the developing world, have been saying, Look at the scenes in Birmingham, Alabama. Look at all this stuff. The Americans are so racist, they stand for fascism. We, however, stand for racial equality and liberation. You can see why this is very sensitive for American Cold War halks because it's embarrassing for them. They're also very conscious that in the 19th century, in 1865, there had been all kinds of conspiracy theories about the death of Abraham Lincoln. The Washington Post on the same day, energetic steps must be taken to prevent a repetition of the dreadful era of rumor and gossip that followed the assassination of President Lincoln. In other words, the drive to set up a presidential commission, it comes from the context, they're going to do it at some point. What Johnson does is he sets up this thing called the Warren Commission. He gets the Chief Justice of the United States at the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, to run it. He is an ultra-liberal. He is a hate figure for many people on the right.

And is that deliberate?

I think the head of the Supreme Court is basically the most prestigious possible person you could have running this.

Can I ask you, at this point, is there an assumption that if you get the great and the good to investigate it and to issue a report, that people will accept it?

That is a really good question.

I mean, in the context of the degree of paranoia that emerges over the late '60s and '70s, it seems an incredibly naive idea that you just get a Supreme Court judge to sit there. But in the context of the early '60s?

I think what's so interesting about that question is that the early '60s probably are a transitional moment in the sense that there has always been distrust of authority in American history. We'll get onto this when we talk about conspiracy theories. Obviously the McCarthyism of the 1950s was the idea that in government, you have J. Robert Oppenheim was, to go back to one of our previous podcasts, that people like that were communist agents. There are a lot of people who would distrust such a thing. But I think in 1963, there is enough residual confidence in institutions for them to think a critical mass of Americans will be persuaded by this. Now, in 1973, 10 years later, maybe they would be saying that, Oh, God, everyone distrusts government. What's the point? I mean, they would have done it anyway, but of course. But in 1963, I think there was enough of them to think, Well, the great and the good, there's enough confidence in the system. They get a whole range of Democrats and Republicans. Actually, there are more Republicans than Democrats. People from the House of Representatives like Gerald Ford.

Yeah, of course, the great golfer.

Ends up becoming President, of course. If you're a conspiracy theory-minded person, you would say, Aha, no coincidence. Actually, if you're a conspiracy theory-minded person, distrustful of government, and you believe there is a deep state and all these things, and you would look at these names. You would look at the former President of the World Bank, John McCoy, the ultimate Washington insider, the former CIA Chief, Alan Dulles, US Senator, Richard Russell from Georgia, and so on and so forth. You would say, Oh, come on, you can't expect us to believe that these people are not implicated in the conspiracy.

But Russell is very reluctant, isn't he? He has to be strong-armed.

Nobody really wants to do it, to be completely honest with you. They just think, I've got a massive hassle, I'll get a lot of grief, I don't want to be staring at ballistics reports for the next few months.

It's a painful and unsettling thing to have to investigate, I imagine. I mean, lots of them must have known Kennedy personally.

It is. Richard Russell, for example, who's a segregationist, Democratic senator, but he's also one of these people who's been in the Senate since the 14th century, and he is a very institutionalized character. He doesn't want to do it. Johnson actually says to him, Well, I've told everyone you're doing it. It's too late. You have to do it to serve the nation. He very grumpyly says, Okay, fine, I'll do it. Hoover is always a bit, I mean, not ambivalent. He's actually extremely anxious about the Warrant Commission because he is worried that it will embarrass the FBI, that it will come out that the FBI had been aware of Oswold and they hadn't really done enough about it. He thinks, Oh, we'll just look like idiots. He doesn't really massively cooperate with the Commission. The commission doesn't depend on the FBI to do its work for it. They do their own work independently. So conspiracy theories sometimes say the FBI were actually controlling the Warrant Commission. They weren't. Hoover is very jealous of his institutional position, and so there's no way he would cooperate very enthusiastically with a different organization. They do all this work for the next year.

Their report is almost 900 pages long. The supporting volumes of testimony. There's 26 volumes, Tom. 3,000 different documents, 550 witness statements. I mean, it is a monumental undertaking.

Don Delillo in his novel Libra about the Harvey Oswold and the assassination, he makes the famous comment that this is the thing that James Joyce, if he'd lived to be 100 and moved to Iowa City, would have written. The point being that it contains within it complete and total portrait of America in the late '50s and early '60s, a bit like Ulysses' portrait of Dublin. I imagine as a resource for future historians.

Unbelievably useful. Yeah, absolutely, Tom. Because if you think about those 500 witnesses and people they interview, they're everybody from policeman, doctors, drifters who happened to be in the streets of Dallas that day, people who worked at the Texas Book Depository, the Oswold family, government people, the people in the motor cage, just this colossal range. The conclusion of the Warren Commission is unequivocal. Lee Harvey Oswold acted alone. He fired the crucial shots from the sixth-floor window of the Texas Book Depository. He went on to kill the Dallas policeman, J. D. Tippet. Jack Ruby acted alone in killing Oswold. They say that Ruby and Oswold were not connected in any way. No evidence, they say, can be found that Oswold or Ruby was part of a conspiracy. They say, of course, Lee Harvey Oswold's will never truly be known because he's dead. However, we can reasonably surmise that he was a loser and a loaner who had a very troubled life. He'd found some meaning in Marxism and it was this that motivated him to try to cement his place in history by murdering the President. End of story.

But they would say that, wouldn't they, Dominic?

Well, that is the thing, because, of course, when this comes out, there are a lot of people who distrust it. Maybe before we get into the conspiracy theories themselves, there is something about America, isn't there, Tom? That means that I think it is peculiarly vulnerable, if vulnerable is the right, it's not too loaded a word, to conspiracy theories. Because, for example, distrust of government is built into America's sense.

Of itself. Yeah, well, the constitution and the right.

To bear arms. The Declaration of Independence. Yeah, we did a series of podcasts about the American Revolution. The American revolutionaries undoubtedly have perfectly reasonable, I'm not going to say legitimate because obviously regarded as utter treachery, they have understandable and rational reasons for distrusting George III and being frightened about British intervention in the colonies.

But, Dominic, you say George III. I mean, it's not George III, is it? It's his ministers and the government. But the idea that George III is this maligned figure, a spider at the center of a web coordinating things, I mean, that is a paranoid understanding of what's happening that I guess does feed into American history.

Yes. The idea that the people at the top are plotting against the people at the bottom.

Because for a conspiracy to work, you need a Mr.

Big. Yes, George III is the Mr. Big of the Declaration of Independence, having previously not really featured in all the discourse around taxes and stuff when it was colonists versus Parliament. The other thing, of course, is that we talked about American Revolution podcasts. There is a very rich, if that's the right word, strain of anti-Catholicism in the years leading up to the American Revolution, an idea that there is a sinister conspiracy to subvert American religion, subvert American morals, all of that thing. The incorporation of Quebec, very disturbing to a lot of American colonists. That anti-Catholicism, for example, and various conspiracy theories like it. It might be Catholics, it might be the Freemasons, it might be Jews, might be the East Coast elite, they run through American political history, as they do in various degrees, of course, in lots of other countries as well. But I think America is founded on a conspiracy theory. Don't you think, Tom?

Yeah, just on the point that Catholics are conspiring against good, honest American protestants. I mean, that is a dog that doesn't bark in this issue, does it? Kennedy is the first Catholic President. The first Catholic mess to be celebrated in the White House follows his murder. But as far as I'm aware, the idea that it's the.

Vatican- I believe there are very niche conspiracy theorists who make this claim.

I'm sure there are. But I mean, it wouldn't be the Vatican, would it? It would be, I don't know, protestants. It's trying to kill him or something.

It'd be Lambeth Palace, something the archbishop of Canterbury.

Yes. That doesn't actually... That doesn't kick in.

No, it doesn't. But of course, when Kennedy went to Dallas, people were giving out pamphlets in the streets of Dallas that said John of Kennedy is a traitor. When Adley Stevenson, his ambassador to the UN, had been to Dallas, he had been jostled and jeered and attacked by people who thought he was selling out to the Communists. There is a ready audience for this thing. A year later, in 1964, a very well-known historian called Richard Hoffstatter published a book called The Paranoid style in American politics. It seems so perfectly timed because Hoffstatter was a historian of things like populism and anti-intellectualism and the status anxieties that drove people into having all these resentments and fears. America in the early '60s, there's a lot of this stuff around. First of all, there's the legacy of McCarthyism. Mccarthyism is only 10 years old. People who thought they were communists at the top of government. Then there is the resistance of the South, federal intervention in the cause of civil rights. They say an overreaching, overweaning government. Then the third element is in places like California or the Southwest, you have the growth of this new Barry Goldwater conservatism, libertarian conservatism, which says big government, big business, big institutions have basically eroded a lot of our freedom since the 1930s, since the New Deal, which is the stuff that Ronald Reagan is reading in the Reader's Digest, Tom, to go back to another of our previous podcasts.

We need to fight to get this freedom back.

Can I just ask, when are the first conspiracy theories specifically relating to Kennedy published? Because there's no internet, presumably people are talking about this in bars and whatever. When does it start to be published?

About a month after the assassination. The first iteration, Vincent buglarity has gone through all these conspiracy theories in his book Reclaiming History. A guy called Mark Lane, he publishes it in a libertarian weekly. He has an article called Defense Brief for Oswold. That's December 1963. Mark Lane then, a few years later, goes on to write a book, which is the key book in really igniting the conspiracy theory stuff called Rush to Judgment. Mark Lane is a communist. He's a very keen advocate for left-wing causes. Now you can see why he would be disposed to say, Oswold, who said he was being framed, I'm just a patsy, and has been accused of being a communist and was a communist and a Marxist, he's been set up and I really need to put this right. So Mark Lane's stuff is absolutely crucial. There are other communists. Say, for example, there's a guy called Thomas Buchanan, who is living in Paris, who publishes a book called Who Killed Kennedy in London in May 1964.

And who does he think.

Killed Kennedy? He says there are two gunmen. I think almost all these communists or left leaning authors tend to say this is a right-wing conspiracy. Now, sometimes they will say within the US government, but often they will say, Right-wing nutters, oil men, the Ku Klux Klan, coal warriors, all these people working together.

What about Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Costner in JFK?

Kevin Costner? Yes. Kevin Costner enters the story in 1967. Now, at this point, the conspiracy theory industry is gathering momentum, and you can see why, because this is the era of Vietnam. America has now got tens and tens of thousands of young men fighting and dying in Vietnam. The whole temperature of American life has changed. Riots on campuses, riots in the cities, the economy beginning to take a turn for the worse. Johnson embattled this real... It's that classic moment in a documentary, Tom, when the music changes from, Please, please me, and then suddenly it's The Grateful Dead or something. Thing, or Jimi Hendrix. The doors. The doors, exactly. We're at that moment in the story. Jim Garrison is the New Orleans district attorney. In 1967, he says, I'm actually going to solve the case myself. He charges this bloke who's called Clay Shaw, who's a local businessman and philanthropist who's very well-known as a society figure, but I think, not coincidentally, is gay. He charges him with being part of this huge conspiracy that involves anti-castro exiles, local right-wing businessmen, the Central Intelligence Agency, and a secret gay, underworld ring of people hanging around in gay brothels and things.

Plotting to assassinate presidents.

Right. He says this guy, Clay Shaw, is the man. Subsequently, almost everybody who followed the trial said it was the most appalling travesty of justice and circus. The Clay Shaw was totally innocent and he'd been dragged into court and forced to go through this incredibly demeaning thing that Garrison just got to be in his bonnet about him. The jury took just an hour to quit, Clayshaw. Actually, Garrison then, everybody wrote him off as a bit of a attention seeker and an eccentric. He would there, he would have remained had not his story come to the attention of Oliver Stone. Because actually, this is one thing that struck me about watching JFK back. Jfk would not be made today because it is- Homeophobic.

Actually, I was hesitating to say it's homophobic, but most people today would think it was homophobic because the idea is that rent boys, gay businessmen are all part of this conspiracy. I mean, it's pretty dodgy.

Well, the idea that there are conspiracies, that high circles are conspiring to break the law and then to conceal law breaking, of course, then gets turbocharged by the Watergate conspiracy. I mean, this presumably is what really gives the whole industry a massive shot of adrenaline.

I think two things. I think one, we mentioned Vietnam earlier, the sense the government has lied to you about Vietnam, that the government knew Vietnam wasn't going well, but it continued to throw more and more men into the the more.

The meat grinder.

Yeah. There's that. Then, of course, as you say, Watergate. Actually, if you want to think about the JFK assassination conspiracies and you look at them alongside Watergate, you would say the lesson of Watergate is that all this stuff is an absolute laughable shambles. Because when we did our Watergate podcasts, the only really way to do that, especially if you're not American, so you don't have a dog in the fight, is this this ludicrous farce, stupid schemes to lure people onto houseboats.

Things go wrong. I mean, basically, that's the implication, things go wrong. With the conspiracy theories, would it be fair to say that the key focus for conspiracy theories is the grassy null.

Yeah.

It is. This is the place where supposedly other shooters are either joining in with Lee Harvey Oswold or are shooting Kennedy to make Oswold look guilty even though Oswold hasn't actually done it. I mean, that riff on those two themes, really.

By the mid-'70s, you have the grassy null established as the focus of all the conspiracy theories. By the way, the grass you know is seconds, seconds walk, not minutes walk, seconds walk from the Texas Book Depository. Because as we said before, it's such a small space. We know that when people are asked, Where do you think the shots came from? Where did you hear the shots? Some say the Texas Book Depository, some say The Grass you know, which is right next to it. Actually, it's not that different.

But also, isn't the key to people obsessing about the grassy null, that there is video footage of it? Abraham Zapruder's film and lots of photographs.

Lots of.

Photographs, yeah. A decade on from it have had time to pour over every little of every photo. Exactly. They come up with very sinister. So a bit like Deep Throat obviously immediately glamorizes the whole Watergate conspiracy. They have the umbrella man.

Who.

Actually turns out to be someone who was protesting.

He's protesting it. Joseph Kennedy's links to the chamber and government.

We mentioned him. Then there's the badge man, the black dog man, and there are three tramps.

Aren't there? Yeah, the tramps who are supposedly very suspicious. I believe they are just tramps.

But they look very smart. They're very well-dressed tramps.

They're too well-dressed by all accounts. Yeah, because they're later rounded up, aren't they? And people have done enormous work on their shoes and stuff and said, Oh, their shoes are far too unscuffed for homeless people's shoes.

But with the Zapruder film, it has the moment where Kennedy's brains literally get shot out. It does look as though it's not coming from the rear of the head, which you would expect if it's coming from the book repository.

Yeah, and also Kennedy's reaction. People said that the way he lifted up his elbows and he looked very peculiar. They look at John Connollys reaction and they say, I mean, the trouble is you can analyze this frame by frame and you're seeing it what you want to see, Tom.

But just to say, I do think that just looking at the Zaprud film, it does look as though the shot is coming from in front of Kennedy rather than from the rear. I'll just put that.

Out there. Well, Tom is now-.

A grassy null truther.

Yeah, you're a grassy null truther. I'm glad to hear it because I don't think we should be singing from the same hymn sheet. Just before we go to the break, which Theo has been begging us to do, the final thing in the '70s that gives a massive boost to the conspiracy stuff is the House Select Committee on Assassination. This is a committee of the House of Representatives that has convened in late 1976. The '70s post Watergate is awash with conspiracy theoryism, a self-flagillation about abuses of power. There's already been a thing called the Church Committee into the CIA, into CIA abuses. This committee meets in the late '70s and it reports in 1979, so it's members of the House of representatives. It's a very confusing and mixed picture. Usually when you read accounts of this, they say that there was actually a conspiracy after all. Their evidence for that is they rely on a dictabelt from a Dallas motorcycle police officer. Acoustic evidence of the shots on the dictabelt seems to suggest multiple shots, more shots possibly fired from different directions. And so on the recommendation of their experts, they said, Well, maybe there were more shots, maybe there were more shooters.

However, very confusingly, they said that all the possible groups that could have been part of the conspiracy, so the CIA, the KGB, the mafia, whatever, were not complicit in it, they don't think. They also say, By the way, the Warrant Commission did a brilliant job. We really approve of the Warrant Commission's report. We just have this extra evidence. Now, that extra Dictabelt evidence is subsequently been debunked by other acoustic experts. I mean, this is as with all the forensic evidence. You ask a different expert five years later for a channel 5 documentary and they give you a different answer, Tom.

Yeah. Well, it's very like analysts looking at photographs of this monster take in the 1930s, then suddenly announcing they're all fake. But this is on the record that perhaps there is a conspiracy. And so that then begs the question of, well, if there is a conspiracy, who is behind it? And perhaps we should take a break now. When we come back, Dominic, we will go through the list of potential conspirators. Brilliant. I will get your opinion on each of the various range of suspects. We will see you very soon. Bye-bye. Hello, welcome back to The Rest of History. We have finally reached the stage where Dominic is going to take us through all the potential conspirators. Dominic, even in the first half, we have listed an awful lot of various organizations who could be involved. There's a wonderful comment by a bugliose who we've been quoting quite a lot, who says, With at least 82 gunmen shooting at Kennedy in Dealy Plaza that day, it's remarkable that his body was sufficiently intact to make it to the autopsy table.

So.

Could we kick off with your choice of what the least likely conspiracy theory is? Because I should tell you, I have actually asked.

Chatgbt- Oh.

No, gully. -to nominate its selection of the least plausible conspiracy theory. I'll be interested to see whether yours matches up with the mighty depths of AI.

No pressure then. In his mighty book, Reclaiming History, which surveys the entire sweep of the conspiracy theories, Vincent Berklee, who lists 44 different organizations, Tom, that have been accused, including the Nazis, the Teamsters, the French OAS, so the people that are trying to assassinate de Gaulle, and so on and so forth. Two hundred and fourteen different individuals, usual suspects such as Richard Nixon and J. G. Hoover, but they're also more exciting figures like my fellow old Moldvanian, James Jesus Angleton. I'm glad to mention him again.

Abraham Zapruder. Yes, the guy who.

Shoots the film. Conceivably, John Connolly, the governor of Texas, injured in the- Who gets shot himself. He was offering himself up, I think, Tom.

Say what? The idea there is that he shoots himself through his chest and the bullet goes back and blows off Kennedy's head.

Well, the list of gunmen, I love this, the list of gunmen. So not Lihavi Oswold, but Jack Ruby, Lyndon Johnson, firing from two cars back.

Well, he is a Texan and they couldn't fire guns in Texas.

You would think that would be noticed. The two most interesting ones are J. D. Tippet, the policeman who later died, and the driver of Kennedy's car, Bill Greer, shot Kennedy. Again, I think that would have been noticed. You would see that in the Zipprae.

Do footage. Are these the most implausible, in.

Your opinion? No. The two most implausible are there's a guy called George Thompson who says that 22 shots were fired in Deley Plaza that day and five people were killed. Five people, but none of them was John F. Kennedy.

He.

Says the man you see in the footage who seems to be John F. Kennedy, he is Officer Tippet, who is impersonating Kennedy.

So where's Kennedy?

Kennedy was later seen, he says, in New York a year later at a private birthday party for the writer Truman Capote, and then went on to live a life maybe in the Hamptons or something.

In seclusion. With Elvis?

Yeah, presumably. And Marilyn? That's not the most outlandish theory. The most outlandish theory is from a guy called Milton William Cooper. I will read you the summary. America and the world are controlled by the American Council on Foreign Relations, controlled by Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller and so on, and the International Trilateral Commission. These people are in league with aliens who invaded the United States and established a lunar base. One of the people who did the deal was George Bush senior, who obviously was involved in the oil business, but he was also actually trafficking in drugs with the CIA. Kennedy found out about Bush, the CIA, and the drugs, and he said, If you do not clean up the drug problem, which is undermining the morals of our youth, I will tell the world about your deal with the aliens and the Moonbase. The Moonbase, by the way, was built in collaboration with the Soviet Union. And so Bush and his colleagues, Kissinger and so on, they were not going to give into Kennedy's blackmail. They arranged for the driver of his car, Bill Greer, to shoot him and Dallas and framed Oswold for the murder.

That's the patsy. Yeah. Okay, so ChatGPT, it nominates aliens that it's actually the aliens who conspire to kill Kennedy. Right. And that's because they don't want Kennedy to develop the Moon project and discover the alien Moon base on the Moon. And there is one piece of circumstantial evidence that I think backs this up, which is that Captain Fritz, the gravel voice interrogator of Lee Harvey Oswold, was actually brought up very near Roswell, where the flying source are, of course, crashed in 1947.

Oh, that's very good.

I mean, it ties.

Well, it's no more plausible than some of the others, Tom. I think it's fair to say. I think.

Probably we can park those. But, Dominic, if I now, a bit like a baseball pitcher, hurl some of the conspiracies at you and you see whether you can hit them for a homer.

Sure.

You talked about this idea that the Soviet Union was behind it. Yeah. This is quite popular right from the beginning.

Plausible? No, and also not very popular. People who are interested in conspiracy theories about the Kennedy Association don't like the Soviet theory because it's unsatisfying. Too geopolitical. It's too geopolitical and it doesn't satisfy your need to have a secret cabal who are controlling American politics.

Right, but aside from that, is it plausible?

Yes, it is plausible. I mean, countries do assassinate people, but it didn't happen. We know that the reaction in the Soviet Union, they were at pains not to be seen to take advantage of it.

But they could put up a show of public grief while secretly rubbing their hands.

But we know from KGB internal files that were released in the 1990s, that the KGB themselves speculated about fascist and racist organizations in the American South.

Okay, so that's what they genuinely thought.

The relationship between Kennedy and Khrushchev actually isn't that bad. At the end of 1962, through the Cuban missile crisis, they have concluded the treaty on nuclear tests. Canada's Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, an anti-communist, he told the Warren Commission, he said, I cannot see what conceivable interest the Soviet Union would have in killing President Kennedy because the Soviet Union leadership from Stalin onwards, but particularly after Stalin, what they really want is stability. They fear instability in the global system. They fear an attack by the Americans. Killing the American President would be a bonkers gamble. It wouldn't gain them anything because it would just mean that somebody else of the same political persuasion followed him. If they were caught, they'd be in real trouble, they could be in a nuclear war. Why would.

They do it? What about Castro, who is Kennedy's great opponent in the Bear pigs and the Cuban missile crisis?

Again, superficially plausible, again, unsatisfying for genuine conspiracy theories, because if it's just a baddie, an offshore baddie, again, that doesn't satisfy your desire to have the key that explains all history and all politics. Oswold clearly was very interested in Cuba, he's obsessed with Cuba. But US investigations, I mean, they have a vested interest in seeing if it is Cuba, of course.

They properly investigate this.

Do they? They properly investigate it. There's no evidence whatsoever. We know from people who were with Castro on the day. So a French journalist called Jean Daniel, that Castro was shocked and worried on the day of Kennedy's assassination. He was worried that he would be framed for it. National security agency, Intercepts of Cuban communications, show that the leadership were actually talking to each other and saying, Oh, gosh, the next president will be even worse than Kennedy was.

Right, because presumably they don't know much about LBJ.

No, they don't at all. Castro and his men are going around asking people, What's LBJ like? Will he be hard on lying on us? Castro was actually interviewed, Tom. This is an amazing fact. Castro was interviewed by the House Select Committee on assassinations in the 1970s. They went to Cuba to interview him about it. Didn't know that.

That's amazing. He said, Why would we have done that? He said, It would be insane. If we were caught, they would attack us and they would kill me and they would destroy our revolution. Why would we.

Do it? Here's the twist. What if it's the Cuban exiles who are thinking exactly that?

Very, very popular now. There is a woman called Sylvia Odio who is a Cuban exile, and she claimed that in September 1963, Lee Harvey Oswold was one of three men who had come to her apartment to raise money for Cuban exiles. The Oswold had said, Oh, exiles don't have any guts because we should have killed Kennedy after the failure of the Bay of Pigs. One slightly weird thing about this is, of course, why would Oswold be hanging around with Cuban exiles? He hates the Cuban exiles because he loves Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution. Now, it is true that Kennedy had not given the Bayer Pigs invasion air support and that some exiles blamed him for this. On the other hand, there are three important counterpoints to this. Number one is that after the Bayer Pigs, Kennedy went out of his way to give more aid to Cuban exil groups and to butter them up a bit to show that he was still on their side. Number two is that the leaders of those exil groups, contrary to what people think, are not hardened criminals and plotters. They are the people who had been kicked out by Castro, who had fled Castro because of a Marxist revolution.

They are the professional classes of Cuba. They are professors, intellectuals, businessmen. They are not people who are accustomed to ordering murders and arranging murders. Number three is that actually Kennedy, by the end of his life, actually gets on better with the Cuban ex-sets than probably any point before. There's an example at the end of the Cuban missile crisis. He and Jackie had gone to Miami and done a whole big thing where they'd welcomed returning prisoners from the Bay of Pigs. There had been tens of thousands of people there who had been chanting liberty, liberty. Kennedy had said one day they'd given him a flag and he had said one day this flag will be returned to Free Havana. Everybody had cheered and been in tears. The idea that he has just hated is not quite right. The other thing, of course, there's no single piece of evidence. There's no piece of evidence that proves that a Cuban ex-sail did it.

Right. Those are presumably the leading external agents. Yeah. What about internal agents? So probably the most popular theory is that it's the CIA, right? Yes. Kennedy, after the Bay of Pigs, had said he wanted to smash the CIA up and destroy it.

To splinter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. But did he say that? It is commonly thought that he did say it. You'll see that quoted many times, but people have tried to find the source of the quotation and they've never really been able to find it.

But he doesn't need to have said it. All it needs is for the CIA to think he.

Said it. But his relationship with the CIA is not as bad as thought. He didn't smash it up. He gets a new guy in to run it called John McCone, who he has lunch with, I think, once a week or something. He gets on pretty well with McCone. Some of the CIA people are bitter about the Bayer Pigs. Some of them aren't. The CIA do have a history of being complicit in the assassinations of foreign leaders, but they have no history of intervention on American soil. Are they employing Oswold? Some people say Oswold was actually working for the CIA. Why? If Oswold is a loser, a loaner, and a Marxist, would the CIA employ such a man?

Unless he's just pretending to.

Be a loser. It's a hell of a deep cover that goes back to his childhood. I might be. I mean, fine if you.

Believe that. They're fiendishly clever, aren't they, in the CIA?

Well, if you believe that. But everything we know of the CIA suggests that the CIA has many clever people working for it, but they don't have supernatural powers to suborn people from the age of or six or something. The other issue with the CIA-.

All right, Mr.

Skeptic. -is why Kennedy? Because one of the reasons that we spent so much time talking about Kennedy's early life, his service in the Second World War, his time in politics, and all of that, to talk about the murder of victim, I think, personally, without any shred of doubt, there is nothing radical about Kennedy that would be a threat to the CIA's interests. He's keen on the Cold War, he doesn't like communism, he's a moderate domestically. Why would the CIA want to target him specifically? What threat does he represent to them?

Maybe he'd reveal the existence of aliens in Roswell. I don't know.

Well, this is the thing. One would have to reach for implausible explanations, I would say.

Okay, well, another very popular one, I think it's what powers James Elroy's novel American Tabloid, the guy who looks behind it is J. G. A. Hoover and the FBI. Am I not right in thinking that Lee Harvey Oswold's mother, two years before had said, she complained to newspapers in New York that her son was working for the FBI and that the FBI weren't working to get him out of Russia when he was in the Soviet Union?

Yeah, bonkers. Why would the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, tasked with solving federal crimes within the United States, why would they send a man to Russia? It's not in their remit. They have no history of sending people under cover to foreign capitals. He's not an FBI informant. They have him under suspicion because he's been to Russia and all of that stuff. The FBI have no history, again, of assassinating American political figures. The FBI would not have worked with the CIA because they have a deep institutional rivalry with the CIA. J. E. G. H. Is an extremely, when I say conservative, I don't just mean politically conservative, he is a cautious man who hords information and power.

But isn't it said that he hates the Kenneys?

He certainly has a rivalry with Robert Kennedy. Whether he hates John F. Kennedy is very unclear. He regularly meets John F. Kennedy. They work together and have done for almost three years. He has a huge file on J. N. F. Kennedy with all of his affairs, going right back to Inca Arvad in the Second.

World War. Maryland and everything.

Yeah. Is it plausible that if, for example, John F. Kennedy was going to move him aside at his mandatory retirement age in 1965 when Hoover turned 70, is it plausible that Hoover would arrange for Lee Harvey Oswold to murder Kennedy in broad daylight rather than use his big file with all the affairs? By the way, with both those, Tom, is it plausible that all of these people, public-spirited people, well educated, who were working for the FBI and the CIA would do their boss's bidding and that none of them would ever talk to the press about it or that it wouldn't fall apart like Watergate did? To me, it seems utterly implausible.

Okay, so on the principle of Qui Bono, who benefits from the assassination, one obvious person who benefits because he becomes President as a result of it, is Lyndon Johnson. What about LBJ? You mentioned that the theory that he shot JFK in the motor cage. Presumably, that's an insane idea. But is there any remotely thread of evidence that LBJ was involved? I have to say that he was very clearly, it seems to me, upset and distraught and shocked. But maybe he's a brilliant actor. I don't know.

People said, Oh, my goodness, it happened in Texas. That's no coincidence. In Johnson's home state, which he controls, Johnson doesn't control Texas, but also the lunacy to imagine that Johnson, who spends all this time in Washington, would think, Oh, I'll have him murdered in broad daylight in my home state. Thus bringing suspicion on myself rather than maybe have him poisoned when we're having dinner in Washington. Okay, why would Johnson do it? Why would he set up the Warren Commission to investigate it with many of his own political opponents? Some people have said, Well, it's because he wanted to go into Vietnam and Kennedy didn't. The reality is much more complicated. Of course, Johnson is in lots of ways, the results of his policies are more liberal than the results of Kennedy. I mean, Johnson is the great society in the war on poverty.

All right, but he does go in deeper into Vietnam and the idea that it's the military-industrial complex, that's what Mr. X is alleging in the passage from JFK that we began this episode with, and it's the famous quotation from Eisenhower. Oliver Stone opens the film with that.

He does. He does. Why Kennedy? Why is Kennedy a threat to the military-industrial complex in a way Noah the President is?

Because he wants to take America out of Vietnam War.

Well, first of all, historians disagree about whether Kennedy would have stayed in Vietnam War come out because the evidence, as we talked about before is so unclear because he's still making his mind up, actually. Kennedy has stood up to the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis. He is supporting anti-communist forces abroad. He's not soft on communism. The thing is, Tom, let's imagine that for some reason, the CIA, the FBI, military-industrial complex, whoever it is, think that Kennedy is a sufficient threat to them. He's such a radical. They completely misread him and they think he is so dangerous that he must be assassinated. Why do they not do that to Lyndon Johnson, who passes sweeping civil rights reforms, who passes the great society of domestic reforms, who tilts American politics.

Further to the left. Because Dominic LBJ is behind it all, obviously.

Right, in that case, fine. Why do they then not assassinate Richard Nixon? Nixon, who goes to Beijing, who goes to Moscow, who signs arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, and who does end the Vietnam War, why wouldn't you kill Nixon? Also, why wouldn't you kill Donald Trump? Trump, who has an incredibly hostile relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency and with most American institutions. Trump, who effectively withdraws from Afghanistan, Trump, who criticizes NATO. Why would these groups not move against him if they were prepared to move against Kennedy. The idea makes no sense, of course, because we know that American institutions generally do not kill politicians.

All right, so setting American institutions to one side, what about other shadowy, extra state organizations in America? So some of these were cited by LBJ himself on the first day, and Kennedy, as he was going into Texas, was worrying about them. These are right-wing organizations, Ku Klux Klan, all these people. What about them?

Well, sometimes people say right-wing businessman did it. I think we can dispel that immediately. Right-wing businessman had just had a bloody big tax cut from John F. Kennedy. So it's simply not in their interest to do it. The Klan are ultimately a very crude and unsophisticated organization. First of all, why would they be working with Lee Hervey, or why would he be involved in any way?

Okay, because he's.

A commie. Because he's a communist. Secondly, law enforcement agencies would have immediately, I mean, who are cracking down on the Klan, they would have immediately unearthed this. It's implausible that the Klan, such a shambolic in many ways incompetent organization, would have been able to get away with this incredibly sophisticated conspiracy. The FBI and the Dallas Police Department and the Warren Commission and the House of Representatives simply not noticed. I mean, Becker's belief that they.

Would do this. Okay, so one last extra government American institution is the mafia.

Okay, so the mafia is a very popular. I mean, almost every conspiracy theory involves the mafia, doesn't it? Just to give you a bit of context on the mafia, because we're in the few moments of the podcast now, but I think it's important to do this. The mafia in America originated in the late 19th century, become supercharged in the 1920s and 1930s by prohibition. That's the point at which it's becoming enshrined culturally in all these films and things. Then the mafia is in the headlines a lot in the 1950s because congressional committees are leading a big crackdown on racketeering, on corruption in the trade unions, all these kinds of things. Actually, Robert Kennedy was a key figure in all this, which is one of the things that has got people excited. Then, of course, in the '70s, the great age of conspiracy theories, you have The Godfather films. The mafia are in people's minds. Now it's possible, well, it's not just possible, it is well-known that the mafia loath Robert Kennedy because as attorney general, he was orchestrating a crackdown on organized crime. The question you have to ask yourself is, if they loath Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, would their way of getting rid of him or trying to blunt his investigation be to murder his brother?

To whack him, I believe is the technical term.

To whack his brother, but to leave Robert Kennedy himself in post. Robert Kennedy might well have continued to be attorney general for years. He, of course, might have become President, as he tried to do, campaign to do in 1968. Now, we know, again, FBI wiretaps, we know that mobsters, when they discussed the murder, were quite amused and quite gleeful that President Kennedy had died. But at no point do any of them ever say to each other, Yeah, and we did it. Yeah, lucky Luciano's why he did it or something like this. They actually, at one point, a big mafia chief called Sam Jankana is talking, one of his henchmen is talking to him, and they're talking about who killed Kennedy. They say, It was a Marxist guy. He was a Marxist and one of them jokes, Yeah, he wasn't just a Marxist, he was a Marxman who knew how to shoot. Then actually, we also know from an FBI wiretap that at a meeting in Philadelphia of mobsters in 1962, they had joked about, Wouldn't it be brilliant if somebody got rid of both of the Kennedis? The Philadelphia mafia boss, Angelo Bruno, had actually said to everybody.

He told them a story. I'm going to tell you an old Italian story. He'd said, There's a king and everyone thinks he's a terrible king. But actually, you know what? He's a good king because his son, who comes afterwards, is even worse. That's what would happen to us if the candidates ever disappeared. Vincent Bagliossi makes the point. He says, In the mafia's history in America, it is not the Cicillian mafia. The Cicillian mafia targets judges, local politicians, and so on are getting in its way. The American mafia has always gone out of its way to avoid doing that because it doesn't want attention to the federal government. So even local officials, by and large, have been able to campaign against the mafia and to call for crackdowns on crime without then being shot by a mafia guise. And he says, Are we ready to believe that the mafia, which considered it too risky to kill even a police officer, would find the risk acceptable if the victim were the President of the United States? First of all, that's that issue that the mafia has this studded, deliberate policy of not drawing attention to itself by targeting public officials.

Number two, why would the mafia, which is after all, a professional criminal organization, why would they have a hit in a public place in such a risky way? I mean, you could easily miss. Why would they involve a man like Lee Harvey Oswold, who in every respect runs completely contrary to what you would expect of a mafia hit man? He's not accomplished, he's not reliable, he doesn't even have a getaway car. Is it plausible actually, Tom, that any organization with a degree of competence, the CIA, the mafia, the Secret Service, the KGB, whoever, would have Oswold firing from the sixth floor and then allow him to walk out of the building to get on a bus, to get off the bus, to get a taxi, to go into a cinema, to shoot a policeman. That would seem peculiar operating procedures.

Wouldn't it? Just on the mafia, though, there is the figure of Jack Ruby. I know that you said that he wasn't involved in organized crime, but he's definitely organized crime-adjacent. I mean, he's running strip clubs. He must be. I know also that he denies that he was part of any conspiracy, but then he would have done, wouldn't he? Of all these organizations, Jack Ruby seems to have been closest to the mafia.

I suppose so, yes.

Does that in any way possibly lend credibility to the theory?

So you need to silence Lee Harvey Oswold. Why would you employ a nightclub owner from Dallas who wanders up a ramp in the one moment when the police are distracted, whose seconds earlier has been in a queue at the Western Union sending money to.

A stripper? Maybe there's someone in the police involved as well. This is.

What happened- And the Western Union to make.

Sure that Ruby is- I accept that the moment you start tucking on a thread of the whole thing comes to pieces.

And then, Tom, and then you have to silence Oswold. Ruby, however, does not die. Ruby goes.

To prison. Well, he does. In the long run. He dies in prison.

Yeah, but everybody dies, Tom. This is the thing about the conspiracy theories. They will point to witnesses and they'll say he died in 1982. He died in 1984, died in a car crash in 1967. Yeah, of course they all died.

Everybody dies. All right, Mr. Cinnock. All right, all right. Basically, none of those conspiracy theories you feel measures up, which then leaves the question, Well, who did kill Kennedy?

Who.

And why? I think that we should finish this episode. In our final episode of this immense epic sweep through the JFK assassination, we will look at your analysis of who was responsible for JFK's assassination and find out whether you agree with the Warren Commission. But if people simply cannot wait to find out the ultimate Dominic Zandbrook-approved solution to who killed JFK, you can, of course, join our chat community, as we love to call it. You can do that at therestishistory. Com, and we will welcome you with open arms. However, if you don't want to do that, if you want to wallow in conspiracy theories and not have them all put to the sword, then you'll have to wait till Thursday. But either way, we will see you very soon. Thanks very much for listening. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.