The JFK Assassination Part 1 with Mackenzie Joy Brennan

This is what I'll do after the grid goes down. I'll tell people what I remember from The Simpsons. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we talk about the mother of all conspiracy theories, I would say, not clickbait. With me today is our law-talking correspondent, Mackenzie Brennan. Mackenzie, hello. Hi. I think I agree. It's definitely in the top ten bracket of conspiracy theories. Should I spill the beans, such as they are? You should, for the people who have a playlist going while painting a ceiling and haven't just looked at the title. What are we talking about? Heck yeah. In fact, I have a song to add to the playlist because I was a big Conor Oberst fan. I think it's called "Sold Out." It mentions this. It mentions a magic bullet and a grassy knoll. So that's your first clue. There you go. And to quote my favorite reference to get this out of the way, it is, of course, the line in Veep in which Selina Meyer says, "I wouldn't be your Veep if there was a grassy knoll full of Jodie Foster fans at your inauguration." And Mackenzie, who are you? And tell us about your life until you joined us on this podcast. Yeah. So I've always been super obsessed with the Kennedys in general, and I think in COVID went down the various rabbit holes associated, but I've worked in various government entities as, you know, on both the legal side as a lawyer and on the policy side. I also do, like, true crime ethics commentary on the side, and now I'm knee deep in historical constitutional research about, you know, the foundations of our country. So all of these things intersect with this story. And I think that's part of why it appeals to so many people is that it covers so many fields of our lives and interests. Yeah, true crime ethics commentary is a very underrated side hustle, I would say. Thank you. It's I'm glad people are starting to talk more about it and the fact that, like, we can indulge in our human interests and also not compound harm while we're doing that. Yeah. And trying to figure out the difference between the public's right to know and, you know. One's own desire to know. Yeah. Which can sometimes feel like each other, especially if we're not examining ourselves very hard. That's a great line to draw and way of putting it, because obviously we all have some lurid impulses. And this story is is unique, obviously, because it is American human interest. Like, we all do deserve to know collectively. Right. But there are cases where that is not true. And we see through this case where, like, we did get all the details as they came out. Because we were entitled. How much that can complicate the understanding of a narrative and how messy that can get. Yeah. And I can't wait to get into all that with you today. It's been an interesting road, you know, just in terms of so many of the things that intersect with this. And I wonder kind of in terms of your interests at this moment in time, like, why do you think we should be talking about the story? It's always relevant, right? Like, I think for those of us in our generation, too. There was a resurgence of the relevance of the conspiracy theory specifically when the Oliver Stone JFK movie came out. And I believe that was 91, which was, you know, we'll get to it towards the end when we're talking about remaining like recriminations that come back about this and sources of misconceptions. But a lot of that movie was fake. The movie that makes me ask the question, why does the district attorney of Louisiana have the. JFK assassination in his jurisdiction if it happened hundreds of miles away? Right. And also, how does Harry Connick Junior's dad fit into all this? Oh, great point, which I remember learning in law school that he was an attorney in his own right, which was wild. But obviously, like, think of the fact that this comes up so frequently in cultural references that there's the grassy mill reference that specifically is one of the conspiracies. It's not any of the established facts we'll get to. So I'd say like the you're wrong about of what I want to hit is misconceptions, conspiracies, public opinion at the time and since then, because obviously there have been other sources of conspiracies. And what's really interesting to me is what modern science has actually added to the forensic understanding and what we can look back on now that seemed maybe bizarre or unexplained that actually does track with the science, which. Good one. That's my favorite part. Yeah. Because you can see forensic science kind of growing up with these conspiracy theories. Yeah. And think of where it was at the time. Right. Really, really un-evolved in comparison. I mean, where was it? Do you have an example? I feel like the famous murders I can think of are like Sam Shepard, which inspired the fugitive, which, you know, famously, I think, points to a time when you were kind of like, we found this guy near this thing that happened. So, you know, we do. Yeah, it's probably him. And I think that also. Probably in retrospect, plays into people thinking that there is a conspiracy going on here because the forensics. Right. In a very narrow sense, we're not advanced and we'll get to why blunders really compounded some of those issues and kind of compounded it in a way that made conspiracies more likely than believing the facts. Yeah, I can only imagine. Because there were a lot of things and I think this is more a part two addition, but like with the initial. Autopsy handling and people wanted certain things to be very formal and not in the hands of, say, the Dallas County medical examiner. And there are also choices about propriety of what hospital we went to because we're the Kennedys and he's the president. But that meant that they didn't get a forensic autopsy done. And that actually makes a huge difference in murder cases. So it's I think there's kind of two prongs to it. There's the forensics weren't very advanced. And then there's the weird bureaucratic. Slash presidential blunders that were made in the very early days that were still feeling the aftereffects of the holes that that left. Yeah, so to speak. Oops. Well, you know what? It's a come up. Sometimes you're not even trying to make puns and yet they happen around you. Yeah. So how about that? I thought, like, our first bit can be the context of the assassination and what JFK was doing in Dallas. What it meant for the country and then moving to obviously Lee Harvey Oswald himself was killed shortly thereafter. That probably contributed to a lot of, you know, eyes gazing askance at who's doing what. So what do you know about the assassination and what's the context that it lives in in your brain? Yeah, I feel like I know the pop culture version, which is, you know, something that has come up on the show. A lot. But just the fact that the pop culture universe, I would say of like roughly, you know, 1950 to 2000, let's say the age of mass media before the Internet replaced TV is kind of the most viable form of communication where it was like one of the fairly finite list of pop culture phenomena that was referenced all the time. Right. And then people understood visual references to it. And there's like, you know, what jumps to mind? And this is, you know, JFK inspired a boom in this as well. But that there's like an episode of The Simpsons where Lisa becomes a beauty queen and then because she has to step in to replace the winner and there's like a visual homage to the photo of LBJ being sworn in on Air Force One or whatever plane it was in that episode of The Simpsons, you know, and so they just sort of the outline of it in terms of like this big sort of cartoon that it became, I think it feels like maybe the way we talk about 9-11 now. Where there's this like big layer of like gallows humor around it to protect ourselves from like the abject horror of it, if you think about it too hard. And yeah, so I mean, the pop culture version, right, to me is that you have the Kennedys in Dallas. It's 1963. Everything's groovy. Well, it's not groovy yet. It's it might things might be a go-go by then, though. And that he's this like young, youthful, tan, healthy president, actually very sickly. So funny. Yeah. But a very tan, sickly person, which still throws people off. If you're chronically ill, just get a tan, I guess. Well, I've actually read about that because one of the reasons that I love this, it became a hyper fixation, obviously, but he was jaundiced that some of the right the conditions that he had actually made him have a yellow hue to his skin. But in especially like the proto color imagery that we had at the time, it made him look. Very tan and healthy. But like it was exactly the opposite. Incredible. But like lack of forensics, lack of like high res. Like today, people will be like the president is looking jaundiced or something. Absolutely. But also there'll be a lot of conspiracy theories about how he's a Catholic, just like that. Disgusting. That's something. Yeah. And, you know, the so many movies and shows and just random things I've seen throughout my life are like flooding my brain right now because there's. It's everywhere. The history of it. And there's. Yeah. And there's a thing about your parents talking about it if they're kind of boomer age or around there, which certainly my mom remembered it. very closely. Yeah. So what was her story? What was her memory of it? Well, I guess, I mean, nothing particularly unusual and probably like the same story I have about 9-11, which is I went to school like usual. And then the teachers told us something terrible had happened. Actually, 9-11 on the West Coast, you woke up to it. I woke up to it. Yeah. Yeah. But but where it's a normal day and then it's not. And you're just kind of like a kid who's not directly affected by it at all, but just who's like, I think maybe it's like these things are powerful, partly for a kid because they're kind of an early moment of seeing how little control adults have over their world at the end of the day. I was going to say that. Yeah. Like anything that that gives a small person an indication of the grownups being very, very concerned. I remember that with 9-11 and not to get on to a tangent of that, but it does track that that seems like a parallel experience. Yeah. But when my mom was saying, there was a plane crash with such sobriety and I'm sitting there thinking like, well, you know, a plane crash is bad, but why are you talking like this? Yeah. And in our family, my mom was pretty little at the time of the JFK assassination. But I do think it's wise to share with some of the younger listeners what this meant for the generation that like she her parents, it was their anniversary and they're in New York. So, you know, a center of many things and too many places and trains were closed for my grandparents to go out that night. And they were a Republican family. But my grandma cried. You know, it was just there was enough unity at the time. And it was so bizarre. Although I will say four presidents have been definitely assassinated. There are a couple questions about other poisonings before that, but four definitively assassinated in office. And they were all in the period from 1860s to 1960s. So that really was a bad time to be a president, huh? Yeah. Who are our four presidents? Yeah. So we have Lincoln, obviously, was 1865. Then James Garfield, 1881, William McKinley, 1901. And then JFK was 1963. That's what I would have said it was more. But then I guess we get into attempts, you know, like Squeaky Fromm and Gerald Ford. And our our last topic, Reagan. Yes, yes. And America's the 1980s is special little guy. I feel like, we must mention that what is it Hinkley as a memoir that's like, you know, Jodie Foster is a lesbian because of me. And it's like, okay, we were talking about this, like, don't open your mouth. We Yeah, we were all rooting for you. I know, when people like you should talk as little as possible, which, as you can imagine, is very difficult for me, because that's my whole job. Yeah, but you didn't do this. So I think that's a very good caveat. See, I need to call you sometimes to like, your moments of self litigate on my defense against my anxiety. I think that would be good. Yeah, some people should have more anxiety about speaking. Some should have less. There you go. So yeah, it does. It feels like it was one of these, like these pretty rare, absolutely earth shaking moments. And interesting for us, that it's it's the first time that there really is a 24 hour news cycle. It's noted as one of the only times early on that the TV stayed on. And that people were actually reporting for 24 hours. So thanks. I mean, look, I never like to bring up the devil. But like, maybe that is when the devil climbed out of a test pattern. Is that one of those like, you know, the like Vitruvian man circle, and it cuts to like technical difficulties? Yeah, let's just make a devil one of those, you know, because the idea of people needing to be encouraged to pay as much attention as possible to the media at any hour of the day, in a way that was ultimately designed for profits is like, no, a big part of how we ended up here with everyone overstimulated and getting dumber all the time. Well, it's interesting, because like, this really did merit being there for 24 hours. Yeah, I imagine that once that seal is broken, then it's hard to not justify like, hey, we can do this around the clock for profit. Even if nobody's dead. Yeah. And to have the text knowledge sheet. To do it. Yeah. I mean, in a weird way, it's like World War Two, where you develop all these, you know, tools for warfare and weapons, and then the war ends. And you're like, well, shucks, what are we going to do with all this technology? And of course, that did lead to like, major advances in non weapon directions as well. But you know, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. You sure can't. You can't put him back in the devil box. Well, yeah. And so the kind of I feel like the resident pop culture images, and I never thought of it this way before. But much like Midsommar, it is daytime horror. Right. And the Kennedys are writing very slowly in a convertible down the parade route, which I realize this is a reason we don't do this anymore. Not to say they're asking for it. But in retrospect, yeah, but right. And also not to give too much credit to conspiracy theories, which as we all know, is not something I like to do. But it's one of those things where I'm sure the question of stupid or conspiracy theory comes up a lot. Absolutely. And I feel like there's a good quote, which is said more succinctly than I'm going to say it. But something like don't credit conspiracy, what you can attribute to stupidity, and especially where like, multiple government agencies playing with one another is concerned, which is we'll get to it at the end. But that really is what it ended up being is a bunch of bureaucratic blunders. Plus, you know, evil is always evolving, you know, what threats look like is evolving, right? Because you look at American, prevention in Southeast Asia at the time, famously, and you're like, why do we think they would be so competent domestically? If, you know, right, they're really not doing well. Yeah, exactly. Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line. It's like, think after the Revolutionary War, a similar sort of thing that they were used to fronts of people marching on each other. And we essentially would line up from time immemorial and shoot at each other in a line. And for us, the Revolutionary War was the first time when we really got a bit of higher ground in more ways than one because the Americans knew the terrain and they didn't have to do the let's all shoot each other in a line thing. But the British did. Anyways, yeah, things are always evolving. The thing is, once you start trying to topple other countries, which became a big part of our foreign policy, then you don't know the area as well. But that's getting Yeah, getting into the whole latter half of the 20th century. Yeah, bottom line, I guess, is like, government distrust and social unrest can breed a lot of suspicion, even when the government is trying to do something somewhat above board with the Warren Report and Commission. Like it really shows the ripple effects of mistrust in the government. Yeah. Well, and this connects with, you know, something I think a lot about the OJ Simpson trial. Spoilers. And also, I guess, where we are now, or, you know, you have, we'll come back to this story one day, but for now that you have, you know, the OJ Simpson jurors really not willing to believe any of the forensic evidence, or at least quite a lot of the forensic evidence being presented to them in a way that's very frustrating and hard for a lot of people to take and especially emphasizes this great racial divide, because the jurors are mainly people of color and are not inclined to trust the LAPD. And white America is, is absolutely shocked by this, but also, you know, hopefully with the benefit of time, it's possible for everybody to maybe see that, you know, to me, the issue here is that the LAPD had a terrible track record, obviously, and especially in terms of the way that they treated black people who lived in LA. So it kind of created that suspicion that anything must be poisoned. It's a great like microcosm version of what we see going on here. Right. Well, and they were also by not being believed being found guilty of something they actually had done, right? Because regardless of how they behaved in this case, it also was about how they had behaved as an entity for this entire time. And also, interestingly, you have also a situation, and I feel like this is relevant, where you have, you know, a group who's asking for our trust, who has not behaved in a trustworthy way consistently. And now that they have to actually try to do something, they're not able to do it. And so, you know, I think it's really important to think about that. And I think it's really important to think about that as well. And take the evidence they're gathering really seriously. They've been cutting corners for so long that they don't actually know how to handle evidence properly anymore, even if they want to, you know, so this thing of like, looking at the incompetence, especially of groups that are kind of clashing, and have overlapping areas of authority, you're like, yeah, even if the stakes are incredibly high, you can't rise to the occasion if you haven't been practicing. Yeah. And it's really the magic formula for maybe for conspiracy theories in general. It's tough when the division is so deep within the country. And this is where you look to leaders who divide rather than unite, which is something that obviously plagues us still. But you'll see how there's kind of strife from both sides. So one side thinks that he's too communist, one side thinks he's not communist enough. And thus, nobody is happy. There's no side that anybody trusts. And then how are you ever going to believe the findings that comes out of a government that is thus structured? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's all it's, it's sounding more familiar than I am. ever thought it would right and so i feel like there's like a very strong just kind of iconic set of images that have ended up in the american subconscious about this that like you would understand even like probably a very small reference to right where you have like the very photogenic uh despite whatever issues are bubbling below the surface presidential couple who are riding in a very slow moving convertible and that they've got the governor and his wife and what a police officer in the car as well yeah so it's a it's a convertible with three rows of seats and in the back you have jfk and jackie in the middle jump seats you have governor connelly and his wife and then in the front you have two secret service officers and it's like a 10 mile long motorcade as will come into play there is also a car behind them with uh secret service agents riding in the car and it's like a 10 mile long motorcade as will come into play there is also a the jump board and they will hop off but we'll get to that you know hard to imagine that they really went over what to do if this happened or maybe they did right but it's uh but the fact of putting the sitting i realize this is kind of the reason we don't do this anymore but the fact of putting the sitting president and like a slow moving open target is really just something and it yeah it brings up the question of incompetence or conspiracy like if you were playing a video game this is the ideal way to track a target this is the the bison and the oregon trail of human tragedies where you're just like well i can just shoot so many oregon trail bison because they walk across the screen like we're low on ram sitting ducks and so we basically have this very slow moving target and someone somewhere shoots at the presidential motorcade and hits the president i can't remember who else gets shot but i want to say that a couple of people also in the car do and then we just have this like day of confusion for the american people from what i can tell where you have famously walter cronkite breaking in to a soap opera multiple times to give updates and tell people that the president has died and again in a way i think immortalized by the simpsons taking his glasses off in a way that shocks a nation because he's not a grown-up he's just a man he's one of us and and of course later we find out i don't well there's like a lot of aftermath that i won't try and recount but there's also and for anyone who grew up watching parker posey in the house of yes especially the iconography of like jackie kennedy wearing the pale pink chanel suit that gets covered in her husband's brains or at least that's like the kind of macabre way that we talk about it historically but there's like something about that image that like i keep picturing in my head it's like the entirety of the thing and then we apprehend the dallas police i guess apprehend a guy named lee harvey oswald who then gets shot in the gut by a nightclub owner like the next day and dies and then we have to make kevin costner movies about it for the rest of our lives the end naturally and oh and then there's like a guy who's taking video and accidentally takes footage of an assassination and so it's like we've had them before but we've never been able to look at footage of them and hopefully we won't be doing it again in american history well yeah obviously that's become pretty commonplace um thinking of the kirk video that circulated um there's a pruder footage it's really interesting this was another turning point i think in a resurgence of conspiracy theories because the film itself was not originally released the first look that the public got was when the war and report itself came out and that was only in stills so the film itself was not originally released so 64 october 64 pretty quick turnaround that is fast the warren commission releases the report yeah and it's very thorough we'll go through the process but people only saw the stills and it's in the motion that we eventually saw in the zapruder footage when it aired on geraldo in 1975 that you see some of the things that stirred up footage oh my god not geraldo yeah right imagine having a resume so varied that nobody even remembers that part of it anymore that was it was huge it spurred a whole new assassination investigation in 76 because that's the source of that well we'll get to what it was the source of well yeah so let's get into it so what am i wrong about and like what was unfolding in the kind of nuances that it was hard to see at the time and also like yeah a little bit of like who was jfk honestly because it also feels like we're so far away from this time now that i don't know there's a real risk of aestheticizing it and it's like i don't know you guys i i think these people had some problems that's my analysis yeah i would say like probably like the moment will suggest um you can over correct in both directions about who jfk was he was obviously a very flawed president and you have bay of pigs and all that stuff that i think to go into in any depth would be its own episode yeah but he's got the cold war on his hands and he's got the cold war on his hands um he is a very aesthetically pleasing president he's got the cold war on his hands yes right yeah and then he's got this beautiful young wife who is very good at tying together loose ends and keeping up appearances like jackie was pregnant during the campaign and still did a fair amount of work and then gave birth to john john who i had a co-worker when i worked in the government who worked with john john and he was like i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this while he was famously trying to pass the new york bar but um you had this beautiful family she was the epitome of catholic suffering hidden wow so she gave birth and she had just had a a baby die in august of 63 so right before this happened man yeah and you can see her really being an icon of kind of surviving gracefully for america and to that i have to say that's great and also like i don't think you should have to be that graceful absolutely like that should not be our standard but also hats off to you yeah for going through that or hats on because she looked great in hats she looked great in that little pillbox hat um and you were correct about the the brains on the suit in fact her estate has required that outfit be held until a hundred years after she was alive so nobody can see it um who sort of overlapped with the event god fair enough can you imagine like courtney kardashian would be wearing it to a planet hollywood event or something god right forgot about that so obviously her husband had his dalliances as well another source of suffering that she lived through with a sad smile poor gal yeah so they went to dallas because um we're getting to the end of the show and we're getting to the end of the show and we're getting to the close to the next election 1960 was when jfk was elected and it was huge that they got texas to begin with we didn't have the party lines that exist now we still had a lot of southern democrats and that is largely why lbj was on jfk's ticket in 1960 was that he pulled in texas still only won by a narrow margin so they really had to to fight back against the republican resurgence that was very racially driven in the south it's why we ended up losing that whole southern democrat wing is that they didn't and don't like civil rights in a majority sense and that's not to say the people fit this obviously i'm from a southern state i get it yeah but that enough of them do that they'll vote for it and it can be capitalized on by some of the worst people in the world like george wallace and the power yeah like the power is with the george wallace's right even on the democratic side so you had like intra party fighting likely because of the southern versus northern democrats war um governor connelly who was in the car with jfk and uh one of the texas senators ralph yarborough both democrats were feuding with jfk so you have war from democrats you have dallas specifically actually went for nixon in 1960 prior people from his cabinet and administration had actually been like physically accosted on recent visits to dallas so they actually recommended that he not go because it was such a hostile atmosphere and he's like no it's fine i'm not really a communist and that's why they hate me so huh let's do it so people are like that's our that's the communist catholic president of the united states yeah disgusting so the number of shots because you brought up a number of shots and who was shot i know this is gonna be very important in a second yeah so i don't want to get into the specifics until we get into the forensics because i think sometimes if you're introduced to the fake version right first it's tough as so many of us were by kevin costner right so i don't want to get into the real nitty-gritty but governor connelly was also hit and jfk it's largely thought by just about everybody that he was killed by the last shot and that was the one that went through his head and neck and that is not really disputed and that is not really disputed and that is not when you see in the zapruder footage and and you also have accounts from people like clint hill who the secret service agent who hopped off the running board of the car behind and crawled up under the trunk which is also an iconic image because he's trying to get jackie back in the car she's trying to grab pieces of his head and you just picture the strife of that moment and like the weird muscle memory of well i have to grab that to fix him oh my god i feel like you can you can tell that something really disturbs people if we turn it into sort of a series of references and jokes because like i i saw um invasion of the body snatchers again recently and something that really i mean it's such a great all the bodies well the first two body snatchers movies are great i have not yet been won over by the 90s one but i mean they're such great movies and i feel like there's a lot as to why but in the one from the 70s with donald sutherland there's a scene where you know the way these pods work is that they'll kind of send their like suckers into your body and develop a copy of you and then when they're done kind of creating your copy they'll like suck all the juices out of your body and then you'll just kind of turn into dust and then the pod copy that's been made of you will like take your like dusty remains out to the garbage man the next morning um it's where this happens to donald sutherland and it's like or it happens to a character who he cares about and who he's like holding in his arms thinking that maybe he can revive them and then it's clear that like the pod has had too much time and this person just like disintegrates in his hands and like the look of horror on his face and like trying to hold on to that person i think that that's such a relatable feeling and you think of somebody with her composure and everything that good etiquette demanded of a wife at the time yeah and she's like trying to put her husband back together like a pie that she dropped on her in-laws doorstep and for propriety too uh you know she held his head and neck until they got to the hospital because it was evident immediately to the doctors there that she was holding it together and that would have been an awful photo and it's also part of what probably confused some of the transfer from what was in the car the clothing left over because she was trying to cover his head and face yeah how many bullets where they were um obviously not to blame her a lot of this falls on forensic teams and more of his leadership down the line with what autopsies and photos demanded but arguably the propriety went a bit too far but you still feel for what she must have been going through in that moment and just the days of it you know you see that photo of her when lbj is being sworn in on air force one on the way back and she just looks stricken yeah like what the hell just happened that's funny because i know what the images are of it but it never occurred to me that she was like literally holding his body together yeah and still performing um i really enjoy the movie jackie i know that natalie portman is not a traditional jackie look-alike choice but she's still performing and she's still but it really humanizes her experience and i think natalie portman does a great job but that moment of like the first bathroom that she's able to get to to cry and wipe her face of his blood and brain matter yeah like when does she get to do that and when she gets off the plane she still has on her tights bits of blood and she tells ladybird let them see what they've done to him so that strength is there too yeah yeah so we have this immediate aftermath and then in terms of the forensics and who's handling this i wonder if we should talk about that aspect of it yeah we can hit it briefly and i think we'll go into greater detail yeah when we get to why certain things went wrong but is there like is there a thing of like the you know the white house being like no wait for us to get other better people to do it okay yeah but not better more proper oh and that's where you really have where's dana scully when you need her i know she's good and proper but i think that's a big piece of why things went wrong in fact better minds than mine have reached that conclusion that you know they wanted him to get military hospital treatment at bethesda because of his background and that would be the proper place for the president's for gunshot murders even to this day forensic autopsies are crucially different because you don't have things like dna in a case like this even in the best case scenario it's just the path of the bullet how the injuries on the body especially on the flesh that is going to degrade rather quickly yeah you know exit wounds where clothing was torn all of that stuff corresponding to the inside yeah and part of me is like let's i without being too gross about it and i'm like you know what let's just be gross let's commit to being gross because it is a very forensics based episode and i think if you let it if you let yourself be clinical you know because i think that you can talk about these realities without sensationalizing them and this probably has a lot to do with my mom being a doctor yeah but i mean yeah i feel it does feel i imagine that it's like just a reality that you have like a very limited amount of time before the body that you're examining you know begins to degrade to decompose yeah and you don't have the quality of evidence that you once did i imagine well that certainly is true um and i imagine that would have placed a pretty hard time limit on a lot of things even if everything else had gone to plan oh no unfortunately they wanted him to lie in state oh no the kennedy family slash administration because obviously we have a lot of overlap between the two you have bobby kennedy in the administration that was its own huge controversy at the time because there were the nepotism questions unlike other nepotism related administration choices bobby was relatively qualified so we will give him that but he also you know he's representing the administration and the family so he takes a key role in this and yeah that's odd again intentions i don't think you can blame anybody for these things except for not deferring when they should have deferred but because they wanted him to lie in state the person who wrote the autopsy report the guy who did you know not a forensic pathologist but the doctor who was at the military hospital which again also with military they don't question orders whereas somebody who is not qualified at a different hospital may have said hey i don't do forensics i don't know how to do this right but you follow orders when you're in the military but he completed the report from photos no because they had to get him ready like yeah and that is the thing where you're like okay i get why people would come up with a conspiracy theory about this because i feel like partly yeah conspiracy theories exist to like i feel like i see people if there's i'm sure there's a name for this as a logical fallacy but i feel like i see people doing this all the time of being like well i mean for them to do that that would be too stupid they would never do something that stupid there's no way i have news for you about people we do stupid things i wake up and i do six stupid things before breakfast honestly especially with retrospect i mean obviously not everything can be accounted for by monday morning quarterback syndrome but like i don't know that a grieving person even in a position of power who's qualified when the whole country is there waiting for propriety to tie all these things together is it weird that they didn't think of this i don't know especially when you have a military hospital where no one's saying it well i mean it's certainly surreal to think of them not of it not occurring to anyone because in a way how would it but like you know pretty soon the question of who did this and how is going to be like i cannot stress enough how much time people are going to spend on that you know but but at the time it feels like a tragedy rather than a mystery yes right so this feels like it's not really an autopsy but maybe like a fifth of an autopsy or something i think it would probably be good for somebody who died of natural causes it would have been totally sufficient if we knew everything if it were someone who wasn't the president and who died in a normal way then it would be great but unfortunately all of the relevant details are completely different so sorry yeah yeah and then there are some things like there was a shell that was under his coat on the stretcher that he was brought in on and so that also helped eventually prove that yes that bullet that hit the back of his head did exit it exited and was left on the stretcher because it was in his coat when he was taken in but when the clothing was separated from the body it's like where the hell is this is it in the back of his head is it in his brain still but they don't see it in his brain wait we got to put him in the rotunda of the capital so we figure out what your report is and sign it because we got to be done yeah well secrecy and haste are always good for this type of thing awesome yeah yeah and it is so odd to think about sort of the white house as an arm of the kennedy dynasty and not the other way around which it seems like maybe is what's happening here too yeah i i think especially in a position like this there's probably a whole lot of deference given to the family also Because I think of the ferocity and rightful indignation that you feel from accounts of Jackie at this time, and she did not want death photos of her husband getting out there. And so do you defer to that woman as the White House? Right. Probably more likely to if her brother-in-law is working there and he also doesn't want them released. I don't know. Yeah. Well, and this is why you can't have the presidency exist above the law, right? Because it seems like if we treated it as we would a normal crime, then people wouldn't have bent the rules in so many different places. Well, speed is an enemy, too, because, you know, the remedy for anything going astray of the law is kind of destroyed when he's buried. Like with time, I think any of these decisions could have been challenged successfully, but you can't redo a forensic autopsy like you can't. Yeah, it's just it's. Gone, right? So even if you were to exhume him and be as gauche as that would require at the time, you don't see the skin pieces. Medicine is a very gauche field, and I think that's one of the best qualities. Yeah, I tend to be, too. So that's fine there. So there are going to be two paths diverging here. And I wonder when you want to get to Lee Harvey Oswald and his assassination. Well, I was just kind of wondering about him. Yeah. So maybe now what happens with him? Because the way I think I remember it and spoilers, I guess I do think Oswald did it. There's I have never found it particularly convincing, except for maybe in like the 10 to 15 minutes after watching JFK before Googling. I had the same experience before Googling, like how much of this was real? Did he really do blank? And then it's like, oh, no, that was for effect. Yeah. But what I remember is that Oswald shoots the president. He goes to what I like to call. The book suppository, because I'm so funny and he flees. And I feel like he ends up in a movie theater for a little while there. Is that true? He sure did. Did you also get that like chain email in the early aughts that was like, can you believe that Lincoln was shot in a theater? And the guy ran to a barn. And JFK was shot in a barn? I forget what the parallel was, but it was the the book piece in the theater piece. There's something about it. But yes, he was. And then he worked for the Texas School Book Depository. And so that piece on its own, I didn't know before going into this. I had some great sources and I feel like I should have shouted them out earlier. But one of them was the deep dive article in Life magazine on the Warren report that was written by then Representative Gerald Ford, who was on the Warren Commission. So he goes through all the findings and whatnot. I did not know before that. That. That Oswald was an employee of the depository. That makes a lot of sense. And also all these things that tie Oswald up and coming author Gerald Ford. You know, I just love his journalism. Jesus Christ. I always picture him as Chevy Chase, which is just bad for everybody involved. I always picture him as the Simpsons depiction. Do you ever see that episode? Oh, that's cute. No, I only saw him like they would always poke fun at how clumsy he was on SNL because it was a very safe joke for them to make, which they love. Right. They're like, oh, I love. I love to be provocative. Yeah. Well, he fell down. Simpsons Simpsons. And now we have a president who really looks like he's about to just like tumble down the stairs and where no one's allowed to talk about it. We don't dare. Yeah. But in the Simpsons, George H.W. Bush moves in to spring and like next door to the Simpsons and then Bart drives him insane. And so they leave and then the Fords move in and Ford comes over and is like, hello, Homer. Do you like beer? Do you like nachos? Do you like football? My name's Jerry Ford. How about we watch football and drink beer and eat nachos? And they both fall over and go, no. See? OK, so he fell over a lot. Very good. I would watch it. It's great. This boy, this is not selling him as a reliable source. If he falls down all the time. I don't know. I fall down a lot and I'm pretty scrupulous about facts. So great. And he obviously is working from the report itself. And then we have a Nova documentary on the forensic testing that they've done recently. And then there's that four days in November book. So, yeah. Should we talk about Lee Harvey Teabag? Let's do it. Yeah. I will just point out that my introduction to this whole topic, I feel, was that as a kid, I watched reruns of The Drew Carey Show. And, of course, Diedrich Bader's character is named. Oswald Harvey, which you only find out why it's funny as you learn more about American history. Yeah, that's that's a fun little treat. This guy. It's so funny that people suspect that. And I think this is born of the sentiment at the time, which was how can this little nobody of a guy do this? And now, as I'm looking, I was doing this stuff. Yeah. Like, if you're looking at the profile of him now in our era of mass shooters, which has brought us all very close to. The expertise of what makes a violent person who shoots a stranger, it's like this is absolutely consistent with who would try to shoot a president because he is so uninteresting and so unimportant in the The Life magazine piece. The Warren Commission wrote that he had not a single meaningful relationship, and it became clear that never in his life here in Russia or anywhere else was Lee Oswald satisfied with the environment in which he found himself. Well, that does sound familiar, right? He told his wife, who was a gal that he brought over from Russia, that he would be premier of Mexico in 20 years. Like, no. And he was altogether just the worst. In high school, he was evaluated by a psychiatrist who diagnosed him with a personality pattern of disturbance with schizoid features and called him quite disturbed as a youngster impacted by emotional isolation. So his mom was a piece of work, too. I feel like we're also in classic blame the mother era and psychology where they're like, mother picked the baby up too much. Mother didn't pick the baby up enough. It's got to be one of the two. Very true. And also, moms weren't allowed to not be parents. So, like, you had this problem a lot that it's like she didn't really want this child. Yeah. So it's interesting that when you force women to have babies who they have neither desire nor ability to care for that they're, you know, that sometimes it like is unpleasant for the babies. It's a side topic, but it's relevant. Yeah. God forbid we learn from that lesson because, you know, there's a reason that they have all those charts of 18 years after Roe v. Wade that violent crime drops and yada yada. Anyways, but she she really was a piece of work. She actually is the origin of the Leah Harvey Oswald was a government agent rumor, and it was not a convincing source. We'll get to why. She's OK. But yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. She was very, quote, aggressive, dogmatic and difficult. There's a fun description of her in her interview. They said that as they were trying to interview her and this is a government body, you know, your son has purportedly and by all appearances shot the president. And they said that she would just tell wild stories, frequently forget what she was talking about, meander through blind asides and then yell at them when they interrupted her to get her back on track answering the question. And he also had a brother who fled the mom for some stability. So it sounds like he had a rough upbringing as diagnosed first around age 12 when he went to juvie for the first time. And what's the deal with the whole Russia thing? Yeah, so he was definitely he was a communist. He was a sympathizer. But in the way that a lot of angry young men find causes to be angry about, like, I don't think he was committed to anything. He got very bored in the USSR. He's behind the Iron Curtain for almost three years, for two plus years. He brought a wife back. The commission described her as his handsome Russian wife, and she came back with him after his two plus years in Russia. I remember finding out that she existed because weirdly, I think there was like a TV movie about her and like the post JFK economy starring Helena Bonham Carter. And it's because I cannot imagine being more friendless in a way than being the young widow of Lee Harvey Oswald. And I believe having young kids at the time, like my God. Yeah, they had two daughters, which is just great. Great for everybody. And also her mother in law was not great or stable. The way that men are able to like, you know, and I know women do this sometimes, too. But like, boy, are there a lot of men and non-binary people. We can all be awful. Don't worry. But the way that men will like, like, create a human life and like, look at it and behold it and realize, wow, I am the most important person and role model and figure of love and authority for this tiny human being whose soul I'm responsible for. And then they're like, what? What if I just like go get caught committing a pointless crime or like, what if I what if I climb Annapurna? What about that? Don't. Right. I just had a baby. What if I almost die? I think I should do that. Well, and it also didn't give him enough. of purpose like if you wanted to look for ways to influence the world if you think you're going to be consulate in 20 years yeah good grief i mean i guess he did influence the world but not in a way that he got to hang out and you know stroke his ego with well this is the thing is like it's the easiest shortcut to being quote-unquote famous yeah but so he's leaving his family a couple weeks before the assassination too because he visited both the cuban and soviet consulates in mexico and this is an oft-cited trip it was very well investigated by the warren commission and it has been speculated upon and fictionalized by folks like oliver stone but really the consulates largely ignored him which makes sense and it made him very angry uh he described crushing frustration to his family members and then wrote a violent complaint letter to the consulate and he wrote a violent complaint to the consulate and he wrote a violent letter to the soviet consulate in dc for them ignoring him what what do you think just i mean and i know we don't know but like in turn do you have any kind of personal theories about like what this was about for him like why communism is something to fixate on is it like a way to rebel partly i don't know if you've met this type of young man i certainly have often a white straight young man who is a leftist who found out about marxism yeah no i yeah i i sure have and i have had a bad time yeah i have too because i i tend to early on take them at their word and then in practice it's like you just wanted something to be angry about right or you were like already angry generally and you wanted to pick a thing to say that it was about that's what i mean yeah i remember very clearly during the blm protests seeing a lot of white men come out of the woodwork and they were like oh my god i don't know what to do with this for the marching and the breaking of things and i don't know where they are now uh i don't see a whole lot of policy work from them i don't see a lot of you know day-to-day posting of things that are helpful and don't center them so to me this tracks so much with the exact type of person who's going to do this and he's running to different places he's fleeing people you know he's going to russia he's going on this trip to mexico and wherever he goes there he is and he's unhappy classic early 20s behavior i really think totally and he buys a bunch of guns you know he had two guns on him the day of and actually shot somebody else officer tippet this is what he was originally arrested for in that movie theater because he talked to a police officer who essentially was going to ask him where he was going i think there was probably a way out of this yeah that didn't require killing another person but that was what he was originally found for but we can talk about his mom as the origin of the government agent rumor now because it actually dovetails kind of nicely yeah oh my god yeah yeah because that part is very interesting right like i did not realize both how early this originated like this was not an oliver stone thing this was not a 1990s thing it wasn't a 1970s thing and thus all these things about like well did you know he spent time in russia did you know that he went to the cuban embassy and had these things it's like yeah they did very early and there was no other source in the entire investigation with the warren commission in the entire investigation done in 1976 and since that has shown any connection to anyone of relevance but he just liked to yell about it the only source was his mom and the reason for this are you ready oh yeah so when he went to russia for two plus years she never accepted that her son just left her hmm he didn't leave her with any money she became destitute while he was gone she didn't accept that she could have a boy who just left her for no reason and go to russia because she was in such a shitty spot yeah him having left so that was the source of her first asserting this was actually before the assassination really yeah she took this as far as going to dc while he was still in russia she wanted to ask the government as an entity to recall her agent son uh yeah that does i feel like i i have read that reddit post like this week basically you know right like that's a real unhinged parent who can't process reality kind of a thing to do and also he was a dick like she very clearly was destitute and he was just like peace sorry yeah yeah and the thing you're saying about him fitting the profile so well that we now understand for kind of you know young male american assassin it's like yeah like boy has that data set presented itself in the ensuing years and imagine if we had taken it seriously at the time as like this is an archetype that we should take seriously and also it's not like we didn't have the means to know because if we look at the other presidential assassins like yeah right because wasn't it it was like of if the other three one of them was like a guy who emma goldman found really annoying and who was like kicked out of a utopian commune and then you know you have frustrated actor yeah and then a young frustrated actor who who's like great idea was to shout six semper tyrannus after murdering the president which i hate to say it is very dorky it's dorky nobody knows what that means now i mean unless you're from virginia because it's not on their flag but he also was just like butthurt that his frustrated man so marguerite oswald his mom that is a hell of a name i love the name marguerite i never hear it it's my grandma's name and this must have torn her up to have the same name as oswald's mom but so mom's wall so she actually tries to get into the white house when she's in trying to get them to recall her agent son and a while after her trip nobody talks to her they ask her to leave but months after that she gets a letter from lee harvey and he's like i'm bored here in russia i'm coming back she thinks that this is because her covert request has been granted ah yes and that was the only source she said that the president clearly had accepted her demands and then after the shooting she revived this rumor or belief for her and that was the only source yeah and again it's like i do think that we put a little bit too much trust in sources that are you know close to somebody who perpetrated or was the victim of some kind of terrible tragedy because i think there's room for magical thinking in that that like we as the public maybe want to latch on to but then we can use the proximity of the person as a reason to trust them more and ignore the fact that they're in fact more incentivized than the average citizen to want to come up with a story about how this all could have happened in a way that's not true and i think that's a really good point i think that's or something that we collectively want to believe already which is that a we can't trust our government right now and this is true so b they must be lying about this and c it's very disquieting to believe that just some random little dildo can go to his workplace and kill the president that's too much it is i don't like it and yet i like it so much more than you know any other theory that anyone could come up with i mean i like truth yeah i like truth too yeah i like truth but like i can see wanting to lean into marguerite's version but they did so there are sworn denials from both the secretary of state dean rusk and fbi chief edgar hoover which like a lot to be said about both of them but they also actually went to moscow's u.s embassy to interrogate personnel they went to all the agencies and had independent people comb through agency records that could be related to make sure that nobody was holding out on them and because of the risk of there being cold war conspiracies after this the soviet government really panicked right after the assassination because they were like oh shit this could blow up so they actually sent a lot of stuff over and cooperated in those early days of report forming huh yeah that's interesting you don't hear that's some nice cooperation i guess love it i mean it's self-serving but well of course but it's it's nice to see people act even in their own interests in a way you know yeah yeah because you see like a lot of the corruption today you know what people talk about is like well you know people are selfish and it's like i get that but people are being manipulated to act in a way that doesn't even serve their own interests actually totally yeah it's like these guys we are proud of russia for not cutting their nose to spite their face in this instance good job and of ourselves whenever we happen to manage it yeah yeah oh oh the other thing that's fun about lee harvey was that it seems like his two options that he was entertaining before the assassination it was either assassination or write a book and he right and he went with assassinate but he wrote an epigraph that suggests that it would not have been a very good book well even basic words are misspelled i mean i gotta say i didn't have incredibly high hopes yeah yeah this and again this does align a also very well with our conversation about you know with hinkley and the reagan assassination attempt where you have someone who's like you can see this kind of like indecision and like just drifting around and kind of like interestingly enough doing something that affects the span of history is sort of like on a weird whim you know oopsie yeah yeah like i i gotta do something next week and nothing is jazzing me i gotta do something big it's either a haircut or this you know yeah yeah bangs try the bangs next time but like super narcissistic and he's living in a delusion world about his relevance it also made me think of like how there probably was a red scare shade to the conspiracy thinking too like of course people want it to be a conspiracy because we have an enemy right now yeah and that also feels better and it wouldn't be nice if the enemy was was communist and not just like an all-american guy boy yeah an angry boy from yeah any place that any of us could be from yeah so i think that's most of his fun background um his wife was very cooperative with the warren commission just speaking to what she must have been going through i don't yeah i don't know man well okay and something that mackenzie i didn't learn until i don't know much later in life maybe even adulthood was that it seems like part of why this tragedy was able to begin to seem like a mystery to people when arguably it wasn't really very mysterious at all was that lee harvey oswald didn't linger very long on this mortal plane um which i find so interesting can you tell us about that and like what how did what happened there i think you're absolutely correct that that is a big piece of why a lot of conspiracy theories were born out of this case um it really is like the perfect storm for all of these conspiracy theories and theories but uh yeah he did not live even a week beyond the assassination and arrest and i think the fact that another unknown gunman with frankly not a dissimilar profile to lee harvey oswald himself just like yeah this random guy with a rough patchy background and connection thus to all these questionable groups you know he was affiliated with different unions in chicago which is not a bad word at all but i mean his name is jack ruby i would certainly hope he's affiliated with various unions in chicago and also would it would it be fair to say that his life involves broads um okay both of those are really fun facts because okay first he's actually jacob rubenstein so jacob embrace your faith right um he changed it when he moved to dallas from chicago so honestly fair well understandable yeah and two there's a lot of people who think that jacob rubenstein is a pretty strong evidence actually that he was gay but um right jacob jack ruby you get in here this instant but he certainly did facilitate the procurement and transportation of ladies allow me to do a little gay vocal stim to quote suddenly last summer we procured for him thank you that was elizabeth taylor thank you perfect i love it i thought liz was in the room but i yeah he he never married he's his own interesting character on his own but so where's our movie yeah where's our jack ruby biopic honestly and so this because you think about it and i mean i again it's like this is a case where i feel like the impulse for conspiracy makes total sense to me because it's horrifying to think that you know the leader of the free world especially during the cold war can be taken out just by some random anti-social 24 year old and yet when you look at american history in terms of assassination what can't a white 24 year old with no good work prospects do yeah in this one field they're just everywhere and they're prolific it also makes total sense to me that like if you had famously assassinated the president and then we're i mean what you can tell us about the circumstances about this but if like the public had sort of reasonable access to you like it kind of makes sense that somebody would be like hey i don't know what to do with this i don't know what to do with this i don't know what if i you know did a vigilante thing totally and it was you know we were talking last time about people in our family and and stories from the public about how earth-shattering this was and that it really there was party line crossing unity about how awful this was and and people said even after oswald was arrested like he's not going to live to see trial right because there was so much hatred on every side towards this person yeah and also i'm actually you know if he's not going to be kept in isolation from other prisoners then i feel like that could have been very dangerous for him too understandably yeah yeah like everybody's against him um rightfully so like i'm i'm not a an oswald stan but you know the odds were there right now somewhere out there there is a 14 year old girl who is standing lee harvey oswald and i i am sending her all my best and the best of luck best wishes i hope she finds good role models to lead her elsewhere she'll figure it out you know so yeah um honestly the incident itself was so fast where was he when this happened to give us like set the scene for us here a little bit yeah and it's great because you can actually it's great um it's interesting from a historian's perspective yeah and especially those of us who did not live through it um you can see so much footage and you can see so much footage and you can see so much in fact there's a famous photo do you want to look it up right now i don't have it saved yes i do but it's it won a pulitzer prize because it is virtually give me the words to google this jack ruby shoots lee harvey oswald is the title of the photo what is it virtually i'm sorry it's virtually the moment that a bullet goes in to his body and it was by robert h jackson not to be photo i mean cartoonish face right exactly it shows what i imagine to be kind of the surreal nature of the moment where everyone is kind of just like not yet reacting or just starting to react and oswald looks like someone just hit him with a snowball yeah he looks like he's saying it does look like he's saying doe it's very anticlimactic i mean but it's so climactic that i think that's that juxtaposition is what's so interesting so he's being moved out of the to county jail where presumably he would have awaited trial with minimal security i would imagine what's what's the story there i guess i mean maybe there's a thinking that there are so many folks around that nobody would dare fire a shot kind of in the sense of the other assassinations that we've seen fail like john hinkley was in a crowd and so nothing really landed with the scenario that occurs a lot that you want to shoot somebody but there's too much going on which is why in kennedy's case having an open car isolated from everything moving very clearly in the open was such a good scenario for a shooting this maybe they were assuming like there's reporters everywhere we're in the police station right there's no way or they didn't care right because you are opening yourself up to immediately being caught which i presume happens here yes i mean in fact as he draws a gun one of the police who knew him he had nine uh criminal charges up until the time he was arrested for this said jack you son of a bitch and so they know this is jack uh and they're like ah classic jack and does he does he say anything about what his motives are for this or what what's his deal here yeah um i just got a photo from you what did i just send you yeah uh well it appears that he has a breast on either ear yep and he he looks delighted about it that could sound confusing he he's standing there with uh you know i would assume a show girl would be accurate behind him and she abroad to be sure yeah and she's got i think some sequin pasties on either nipple and she's just got her she's got jack ruby's head sandwiched between her breasts like a lovely panini and he looks like he's like mid-sentence and the woman kind of looks like katherine o'hara actually she does um and he looks like he's having an okay time um you know he looks like one of the stooges supporting the historical thesis yeah absolutely he did so he did own a nightclub strip club the carousel club was the name of the the place that he owned and what in your opinion is his deal what causes a man to go from mere strip club owner to assassin of a presidential assassin i think he was quite a sentence i might say i know right in any other context do you think it was an error but i think he was an angry man it's ironic we talked last time briefly about how lee harvey oswald was first detained in juvenile detention for truancy and lee harvey was 12 years old i believe and jack ruby also detained for truancy his first detention at 11 oh my god but so i don't know who can say i would love to do a deeper dive on him someday because it really is interesting that he maybe was living with a boyfriend if you want an episode on jack ruby like comment and subscribe yeah comment jack ruby and he seems uncovered as characters in this play go you know there's there's the vague assumption that he's like mafia connected and also to quote dominic dunn on the oj simpson trial like even the minor characters in the story are all astonishing they are capital c characters yeah so he he's also hanging out around the police station a lot after the assassination and he was very upset about it one of the early press conferences several people actually made this correction so nobody jumped to the conclusion that because ruby knew this he had to be involved but oswald had been arrested previously in new orleans for disturbing the peace when he was doing some rally with a cuban advocacy group now at the press conference the dallas police got it wrong and ruby stood up with a whole bunch of other people and said no this group wasn't anti castro it was pro castro because there were two free cuba type groups and one was pro one was anti so he was clearly very involved all this to say in the specifics of the case and who lee harvey oswald was and was like he's getting invested in this time between kennedy's assassination and oswald's so oswald falls to the floor he does not die immediately in fact they have time to ask him anything you want to tell us now and he shook his head and also uh people outside applauded should have asked him something more specific but i'm sure it would have been hard to think of something at the time to anticipate the theories that would come out like yeah exactly yeah the last like banner thing about this in my opinion is that nixon in his response to this had a classic freudian slip and said two rights don't make a wrong of the two assassinations nixon no no nixon he just said it so he corrected himself nixon get it together it was too late but yeah oh buddy i mean this is all very sad and stupid but yeah there's a great line in the book that i'm reading right now uh doppelganger the naomi klein book and it's something you know she puts it better than i can but there's something so frustrating about and a lot of us will recognize this from the current moment too but having to take seriously the threat posed by such goofy foolish stupid people and that weird juxtaposition of circumstances when it's like exactly these people are are absurd and i don't want to take it seriously but the threat they pose or the outcome of what they've done is so grave and our brains have trouble with that i have trouble with that yeah and i think that's that is a theme that's only sort of multiplied i guess since the story we're talking about totally because people are just people and maybe that's like a side effect of the news coverage that we've gotten in the intervening years is like we learn more about to the point of many of your shows like these aren't these big evil behemoths that we could never understand or conquer it's just like some guy named jacob who was mad right and you can usually if not get to the bottom of it get pretty close yeah yeah but really right the truth is that you have this like this horrifying reversal of the world as you know it and where my perspective except for maybe in a 48 hour period after seeing jfk for the first time has always been isn't it horrifying you know basically and how do we accept how much damage some random 24 year old man who doesn't feel like he's been praised to the degree that he he felt necessary it is due to him yeah isn't it awful what that kind of combination of alienation and entitlement can create and why are young men why are so many young men like that and how do we have less of that perhaps but then it does seem like a lot of people and in a way it's hard to fault them responded to this especially at the time this almost impossible to comprehend reversal of maybe what they believe to be the order of things and thought well it's got to be a massive conspiracy because only you know a of powerful evil world leaders acting together could possibly cause something so massive and it's like no it's just to quote crossroads it's just some guy he's just some guy random evil i think there's some subconscious comfort yeah to feeling that there's control that there is some cabal that is like that someone somewhere is in control yeah omniscient daddy because then we can just swap out that person and then everything will be fine but i think now more than ever it's so you describe oswald rightfully as he was that audiences today and maybe that makes this a good time for this episode more than any time in the past can recognize that like there is a huge capacity of one angry young man who feels he hasn't gotten what he's owed and everybody in his life has let him down but he's very important like the capacity of that archetype to do tremendous harm especially with a gun on a random day is we all know it um more than people in 1963 knew it we know it now well and then and then it feels like also that in the that this began maybe this phase of sort of public assassinations as something that people kind of learn to fear and you know especially if you're a civil rights leader or engaged in civil rights and the kind of positive reinforcement that that sends to the assassinating type i guess that like you can get a lot of attention if you destroy someone who's trying to do something good with their lives yeah um and actually this takes us nicely without getting us into any of the findings to why the warren commission was necessary i mean we all know why well yes we do but i mean i bet we can sure imagine but yeah tell us about that and and what is the warren commission and whose idea is it and how does this kind of get set in motion tell us about that a little bit first of all it's daylight tons of witnesses slow moving presumably security why isn't it easy to figure out exactly what happened in all the details so that you know it's a fair question and it was definitely a prevailing one especially as people grasp for answers and within a week of oswald's shooting which was only a couple days after the assassination itself so within two weeks of the assassination also 60 percent of the public responding to a gallop poll so pretty reputable pollsters yeah thought that there was a second shooter oh so that's interesting isn't that remarkable and so that's a narrative that's out there kind of from the beginning very early and why do you think that is i think it's because of jack ruby and i think it's because we didn't have easy answers when the circumstance seemed to you know dealie plaza where this happened is essentially a bowl which makes for a lot of problems with acoustics and uh huh we'll get to that down the line with with forensics but you know it's daylight the secret service exists this is a planned parade there are tons of witnesses why didn't we know that night and part of that could be kind of the instinct of needing someone to blame or similar to that instinct of like why don't we have resolution on this now and that transforms into well we should have resolution now because i'm very disquieted and here are all the reasons i can think of why we should have an answer now and you know how groupthink kind of goes with those moments yeah and so much of the show has been about that and i think the red scare too right and this idea that there are these nefarious forces trying to destabilize the united states i mean and it's not the most unreasonable thing to think because this is a time when like certainly the united states is pulling a lot of shady shit in terms of espionage and it's really you know we're receiving that in return yeah and it also is easier to unite against a common enemy yada yada yeah and it's out there pretty early that he had connections to pro cuba movements that he had spent time behind the iron curtain so we needed fact finding publicly and assurances for the american people and then for lawmakers doubly cautioning you know behind the scenes from the administration that like there are huge implications if there's a communist conspiracy here so let's determine whether that happened and then put it to rest with the public right and to be fair like if you were investigating this you would want to look into that like it would be ridiculous not to at the time yeah it's just that if you've disproven it you know everybody gets to move on then move on and and like we said before the soviet union actually cooperated a lot pretty early on because they didn't want this to be you know a mutually assured destruction trigger yeah that's like we didn't even kill this guy and now we're getting blamed for it right they're like listen we don't want that either i mean yeah like we saw that strange love movie yeah we didn't kill your boy it's yeah so we convene this commission under the name of chief justice earl warren and this is really funny um so the first article that is thought to acknowledge the rash of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists was a piece in the new yorker in 1967 called the buffs by calvin trillin and it's talking to to and about all these quote-unquote assassination buffs self-appointed about why they think certain things went wrong and we'll touch on some of it. It's so interesting how easily these theories are put to rest with like one piece of forensic evidence. For instance, they talk about like, well, one doctor says that they in Dallas was interviewed and said that they were sure there was an entry wound in his throat. And we already talked about the weirdness with the autopsy. There was an exit wound in his throat. So for a physician to eyeball entry versus exit, there was a bullet wound in the throat. But then there was this tracheotomy performed to put the tracheostomy in and that masked that wound. So something where there's one like very clear explanation for it that doesn't take too long to think about. Yeah. Once you know the information, it's it's clear, but you could see how somebody would put that together with their own impulses potentially. And one of the folks interviewed in the buffs, long story short, too late, was talking about how they. Were suspicious of the Warren report and commission because Chief Justice Earl Warren wasn't liberal. He was appointed by a Republican. And so that, in retrospect, is really funny, too. And why is that? Because I know you know this. Well, isn't famously the Warren court, basically the like period in the Supreme Court where we introduced all of I always feel that I'm going to use the wrong legal language, but basically like that we had all these cases that led to the precedents. That give defendants the kinds of rights that people have been upset about ever since that are basically considered to be far too liberal, if anything. Yeah, absolutely. And other civil rights issues were touched on by the court. The point being that Chief Justice Earl Warren actually became a very liberal jurist, even though he was Republican appointed. So all of these things that you can see going into. So, you know, a little a little bit a little bit of inspiration for anyone. Yeah. Might be considering that. It's fun. Good point. Yeah. Well, OK, so we have the Warren report and I would imagine that like basically immediately there would be the need for some kind of an inquest. Yeah, you would think so. This had to happen. So and is it the fact that there's like there's the investigation of the assassination and then as the Warren report, basically an investigation of the investigation? No. So the commission itself is probably in large part a stand in for the trial of Oswald. Obviously, the. OK. Commission is slightly broader because there's the why did this happen? Not just proving one person's guilt, but like getting into bullet trajectories and findings and all that. And it ends up being a two hundred ninety six thousand word report. So the Warren report is just what was issued by the Warren Commission. So the commission is what does all the investigating. And it was pretty comprehensive. They have a presidential panel and that that was headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren. It had Arlen Specter on it, who is famous for switching parties in Pennsylvania. A parade of stars. Yeah. And their process involved, you know, going to government agencies, getting assistance from agency lawyers, then having independent commission people checking the agency's work so that if any punches were pulled, they would verify that against internal confidential records and make sure that nobody was hiding anything. They got depositions from all the relevant parties. So Marina Oswald, the handsome Russian wife that we talked about, Marguerite Oswald, the domineering mom who had her own conspiracy theories, and then Jack Ruby, who they called a sad and strange little man. Oh, yeah. And should we wait? Should we make merch that says sad and strange little man, sad and strange little man? I would love a hat that said that. But, you know, sometimes we all wake up and are like, oh, I am a sad and strange little man. That's going to start being like the stim I use to to hate on myself whenever I'm feeling bad. Just look in the mirror like you sad, strange little man. It's such a good dig from somebody in a position of authority, too. Yeah. Yeah. And then they they just like followed all the rumors to their origin, because by this time, obviously, you know, you have 60 percent of the public right after who thinks that there's a second shooter. Yeah. So all these rumors, at least phase one of the rumor mill is out there. The information exists already. So they checked into these things and followed each rumor to its origin, which I think is a good way to do it. So they traced that government agent rumor back to the mom and also found that there were no other sources. And they checked into the trip to Russia. They went to Russia. They looked into Ruby's prior associations. They looked into what security measures failed. And they also. They also went to Dallas and they reenacted the Zepruder footage, which they had in full frame by frame. And could you tell us very quickly, like, what is why do we why does that footage exist? And what is this film for? You know, just if someone's listening, who's like, I am a Martian and I am inhabiting a human body and listening to this podcast. First of all, thank you for spending your limited time listening to this. But yeah, what is what is the effect of watching this film? And what is the kind of little backstory behind it? Because it's such an odd. It is such a weird stroke of faith that this exists at all. Totally. Yeah. Send more Chuck Berry to the aliens. So Abraham's Zepruder was just like this, this dressmaker who was out to watch the parade with a lot of Dallas. And he had what we would consider a pretty primitive eight millimeter video camera and ended up capturing the moments of all of the shots fired. And it became. Became a huge basis for the investigation and all of the images that you have seen, all of them of the assassination and the moments immediately before and after are from that footage. So we are really at the advent of video, but not very far into it. So the fact that anybody had a camera trained on the car and was filming at this moment is huge for the investigation. Yeah. And it's just it's an eerie thing to watch. It's very eerie. Yeah. It's just, you know, and of course, it's I think unless you were some kind of like a V buff, like any kind of consumer home camera, you wouldn't be recording sound. And so it's just this like this eerie little soundless is, you know, what, about a minute, maybe less than a minute. This very short clip that it's less even the fact that it exists is eerie in itself. I think it is. And the fact that he was able to kind of steady cam it pretty well. I mean, it's it's grainy, but he does keep it trained. And on the car, that's how, you know, Bigfoot wasn't in the film, because when the camera starts jiggling wildly famously, it's the law. So, yeah. So I imagine, of course, like from like mainly kind of from the perspective of ballistics and trying to evaluate, like, well, was there a second shooter or not? Is that the most important thing about it? Yeah. I mean, in retrospect, it maybe has caused more confusion than good because of some neurological impacts of where the wound happened. And that's super. Super interesting. Well, I can't wait till we get to the forensic stuff, because that wasn't really known at the time. But I think part of why they did not release it to the public initially, in addition to all the, you know, propriety concerns that the Kennedys had, that it does cause more confusion, potentially, because there's not a whole lot of new information. We knew the car was there. We knew that he was hit in the head. But this shows the. Back into the left kind of impulse that JFK's body does when he's hit. And that made people think that it couldn't be from the depository because of where that building was located in relation to the car. If he's reacting to the blow of a bullet, he should not be moving back into the left. So that caused a lot of confusion. I think it shows where people were sitting in a very basic sense, and it gives at least like one. Piece of media that you can examine to get the best view of where everybody was. Yeah. And also something, I guess, to compare eyewitness testimony to as well. Yeah. Yeah. And when you you were used to doing investigations without video footage, it's like, well, yeah, this is great. This is better than we would have had in any other circumstance. Yeah. So they the commission goes to Dallas group field trip. They go to reenact the footage frame by frame because the way that they. Knew it at the time of the report and the way that it was initially released is like frame by frame pieces of information. So they try to replicate each frame from the footage on location. They get the same car or the same type of car. Wow. They get a man with JFK's same build. Wow. I had no idea they did this. This is very impressive to me. I know. Right. Poor Governor Connolly. He has to go in the reenactment. He doesn't. Oh, he doesn't. OK, thank God. They do get him a stand in, but the stand in is wearing his actual coat with the shot in it. Wow. Right. So it's really thorough. Yeah. And they use they have to use like a surveyor. Those, you know, three point surveying systems with different people operating it to get the exact location because there was no modern technology. I mean, we take for granted how easy that would be now. Right. But they painstakingly recreate. There's a reason we put all that time into. Figuring it out. Yeah. Yeah. And they actually mount the recovered rifle. from Lee Harvey Oswald in the same window with a camera fitted to the scope so it sees exactly what he saw right see this is the thing right it's like because I know that people we love a conspiracy it's comforting it's you know etc but like is there anything better than truly putting your all into trying to figure out exactly what happened as well as you can doesn't this sound fun you guys I think this sounds so fun and it also I can picture because I'm kind of like this like the commission doing such a good thorough job and thinking like once I give them all the information yeah and show them how thorough I was and why we reached the conclusions we did like then they'll get it but then people still reach other conclusions and or don't read all the information yeah I mean I think that like there's this element where the law itself or the American legal system is kind of based on this thing that's always been very beautiful to me which is this professed belief in the value of everyone agreeing to like have you know a trial or a hearing and you know these various ceremonies that are meant to be a search for truth and then how it seems like despite that being the claim so often in practice because of like this or that law this or that statute this or that filibuster like the sort of handshake wink wink kind of a thing that can happen that a lot of human behavior and impulse and excuses and sort of you know our various cultures of lying and corruption and whatever else like get in the way of that but that the fact that there will always be people who believe in that and take it literally there will always be that redemption there for me or that possible redemption I think so yeah and we can embody that redemption because this really does bring us back to that theme of like when a government breeds mistrust and when a society breeds mistrust too because there were also societal triggers for this you know the anti-civil rights crowd etc that when there's so much social unrest and government mistrust people will be suspicious even when you're being candid and even once you've decided to put all the information out there so it's tough because the people who did the warren commission investigating probably didn't create the bed that they were sleeping in to that extent even though they were government folks but like this is a there were two dozen 500 page volumes of what they put out and then the warren report is let's read it a summary of it jesus fuck wow wow so it's like it's so much information and the report itself is is that almost 300 000 word report and all this goes into it and so basically what they conclude and then we can break down the rumors but they conclude that there were three shots fired and one missed governor connelly feeds into a lot of conspiracy theories because he fervently disagrees based on what he heard which is tricky right because it's like on the one hand i feel like he's a victim you know like he went through this he's he's a victim of that and he you know and he has a closeness to this that basically almost nobody else will ever have and yeah yeah you know as far as i can tell i'm not an expert but like based on the research that i've done and the way this has come up and what i've looked at experiencing something traumatic can be a very traumatic experience and i think it's can enhance your memory of it and can also make that memory harder to access accurately and it i don't think there's a hard and fast rule i think both of those things happen to us you know i think they're both true yeah and i think that like your brain is probably going to prioritize the processing of other information than shot number right and survival related information because you know that you have to protect yourself in that moment yeah and your loved one because he's with his wife nelly so oh my god yeah wow and the president i mean you're also there with the president of the country and yeah and it like we said and as will become really relevant in the forensic um like audio testing it's a bowl it is a an urban atmosphere that's a bowl dealy plaza so that is terrible for accurate acoustics right and is that because there's so much more echo potentially yeah absolutely so it's it's off of all these buildings apparently in like war atmospheres this becomes a nightmare in figuring out where shots are fired also because it's bouncing off buildings of different materials in different sizes and you just can't your brain can't account for what that does to sound and also interestingly like you know because of our proximity to world war ii you know and also korea for what it's worth there would be so many of the people investigating this who did have some kind of experience with with wartime or you know who would have some of that insight because it's interesting to think about demographically you know yeah and i'll end this part with something that i'll definitely reiterate but somebody from the nova documentary said what you think happened to jfk says more about you than it does about what happened to jfk yeah you know wow yeah i think that's true and it is like it's one of those stories where they're especially as we have kind of investigated and reinvestigated there have been so many theories over time that there's kind of something for everyone to pick to sort of you know show what resonates with you because you have so many options to resonate with yeah by now and different varieties of conspiracy too like you can pick your favorite that fits what your leaning is you probably have every conspiracy theory flavor and i know we're probably going to get into some of that next time but yeah tell us a little bit about what we're gonna what we're gonna talk about when we when we turn to the investigation. Yeah. So I think this is the really meaty stuff. And I want to do two different stages of rumor fodder. I have it in my outline as like fodder one, fodder two. So like where these things were born, what the people who believed them thought or what the public thought. Once we get into the more niche theories and branches of information, it'll less be the public and more what this camp thinks. And then the second stage of rumors, because there's a whole bit of fallout from the report itself that people had either made up their mind already or this didn't resolve their questions or it raised more questions, etc. So there's this first wave. And then we'll have a little beat for when everybody learned about the Zapruder film in motion. There's a second house investigation of what went on. They release a new report kind of to appease the public. And then the 1991 JFK movie revives this whole thing from the 70s to 90s. And then we'll have the last list of rumors. And yeah, it feels like we're kind of looking at like different generations of Americans kind of bringing new baggage to this as well. I mean, would it be would it be fair to say that we're kind of looking at the evolution of the American conspiracy theory? Because it feels like whether we know it or not, it seems to me that like a lot of the kind of Trump era conspiracy theories that we're living with and, you know, living through in many ways, because, of course, there are so many conspiracy theories, especially online, that it seems like they are able to sort of germinate faster because of the way we communicate now and the way we can sort of be siloed into people who are, you know, equally conspiracy minded, as opposed to just trying to talk to whoever we happen to work with, like we used to do back in the day. But the way that we're living with it is, you know, we're living with it in a way that we're the way that people try and make sense of what's going on politically in the world we're in. It feels like this is like where we developed our American culture of conspiracy theory making. And I wonder if we're maybe even in a way going to kind of get into a little bit of a taxonomy of American conspiracy theories with the responses that we can see people having to this. I would love to do that. And it hadn't occurred to me to track it so closely to the respective eras. But I think we can we can do that as we go through. I think we can do that as we go through. I think the documentary came out right before Trump. So it's even removed from our current reality. And we can touch on where we've gotten now when conspiracy theories are espoused by the White House in many contexts. And that's very different, very new in this volume. And this beautiful, wonderful, full circle moment. Isn't that nice? Isn't that special? Because, you know, the White House used to inspire. Crackpots who refuse to accept the laws of physics. And now that's who works there. Yeah. And so it just goes to show something. It shows something. And we will talk about it all together. We'll hold hands and figure it out. I'm just I don't know. I love talking to you about these topics in a way because I feel like there will always be people who, despite how much conspiracy theories become our national pastime, really. Cannot give up the belief that explaining the truth as clearly as possible and putting your whole heart and soul into it has value and matters. and we'll change people's minds because you can't change everyone's mind but that doesn't mean that you don't still have to do it yeah where's that line i don't know i haven't found it i maybe i'm just as stubborn because i keep trying to do the same thing um yeah but there's got to be some merit to somebody standing by the truth right so we're doing it right but it's kind of like i think when you know when i was younger because i was raised on like triumphant 90s legal thrillers right where i was like well you just like you enter your evidence into the record and then you say you can't handle the truth or no i guess that's what you say if you're testifying you say something else and you get military law it doesn't even count that's fine you bring in your surprise witness at the end and then everyone goes oh my goodness well i guess i have no choice but to accept the truth to despite how it challenges my previous worldview and then you grow up and you learn that things are perhaps more complicated than that it's wild i think that truth won't get people out of some ways of thinking yes well and also i think it's like it's kind it's kind of like a moment of really maybe renewing your vows with the truth in a way and like choosing to love it not because it fixes everything all the time but because you still care about protecting it even if it it doesn't have the power to stop everybody in its tracks the way you maybe once thought when you were younger and it's better than not being with the truth and it is vulnerable in a way you maybe didn't imagine and needs to be protected yeah and you like being with the truth more than you like not being with the truth to continue the metaphor and that also doesn't mean i'm gonna light my home with stark overhead lighting you know the truth can still be cute the truth can have brain recharge time yeah it's imperative the truth can promote sleep hygiene yeah well i'm really excited for next time and until then just like keep looking for the truth keep researching keep just finding joy and learning things everybody because i think it's just the best and i think a lot of that is its own reward too you know because the more the more we seek out information i think the more often we feel truly connected to each other because if we get if we create a world to be out of wishful thinking then that inevitably will distance us from the people who can't confirm the reality that we want to be true and we drift farther and farther away from each other and we can't afford that the truth as they say is out there you