It's night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ Costin's new radio.
And I gave it a great ideal of all.
Here is a bulletin from CBS News in Dallas, Texas. Three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.
The voice of Walter Cronkite on it was a Thursday afternoon.
Oh no, I don't let me.
It was a Thursday afternoon. Excuse me, it's a Thursday afternoon. In nineteen sixty three, when John Kennedy was assassinated by a gunman, shooting out of the fifth floor of the Texas school Book Depository as his depository, as his motorcade made its way through Dealey Plasm. I have followed that case for a long time. Ported on the assassination on the fifteenth anniversary in nineteen seventy eight, twentieth anniversary and nineteen eighty three from Dallas, Texas. Interviewed most many of
the principles. But no one who I know knows as much about what happened and also as much about what we don't know. Is my friend Tom Semilac. Tom Semilac, in the mid nineteen ninety served as the deputy director of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board, an independent federal agency that was responsible for the review and public release of classified records on the assassination, which you now housed at the National Archives. Tom has been
my guest before, and he joins us again tonight. Tom, another sad anniversary. Sixty one years ago today we lost the thirty fifth President of the United States.
Good evening, Dan, and thanks for having me. Yes, it's hard to believe that it's sixty one years ago today that President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, And of course for those of US Bostonians and New Englanders, and of course all Americans, but particularly here a special and very profoundly sad impact.
Tom. You've had a stellar legal career.
You're the general counsel, head of government relations for John Hancock, the US segment of the Toronto based manual Life and you're also a member of that company's leadership team. You've been with John Hancock since nineteen ninety nine, twenty five years now. You also had served as an Assistant Attorney General here in Massachusetts, I believe when Scott Harshbarker was Attorney General. So you've had a very interesting career. But I want to focus on your work with the Kennedy
Assassination Records Review Board. You were intimately evolved in this in the nineteen nineties, which would have been about thirty some odd years after the assassination. We are now sixty one years after the assassination. How much more do we know now than when your organization that tried to do such great work and often I think felt steymied. How much more information have we learned quantitatively in the last thirty years in your opinion.
Well, Dan, I think that the barometer of how much more we've learned can be gauged by what authors, historians, and researchers have done with the records that the Assassination Records Review Board declassify and sent to the National Archives Facility in College Park, Maryland, and that's where the records
are housed. There are records that are available online, and it really is satisfying to know that the work of the Review Board has led to a more complete history, if you will, of the assassination and the events surrounding it. The mandate for the Review Board was not to reinvestigate and come to any conclusion following up on what the Warren Commission had done in nineteen sixty four and the
House Select Committee on Assassinations had done in the late seventies. Rather, it was at that point, as you noted, thirty years after the assassination, rather to release the records for all Americans to go find and research and delve into and if they won't come to their own conclusions about what happened, well, this was.
The murder of a president of the United States in broad daylight in Dallas, Texas at high noon. Just to get people a little bit familiar who weren't around at that time. And again at sixty one years so you would have had to have been eight or two years old to really have specific memory. Rob, I know you have three cuts. Play the second catch. Just to continue to continue the theme.
The best picture has just been transmitted by wire. It is a picture taken just a moment or two before the incident. If you can zoom in with that camera, we can get a closer look at this picture.
Yeah, and that was probably one of the last pictures of President Kennedy alive just before before the shooting. And then of course there was the announcement that Walter Cronkite need at least it probably was made of the other networks. But we learned that afternoon around this was one thirty
Boston time, maybe well maybe a little bit. It's more like two o'clock Boston time, because the shooting had occurred about twelve thirty Dallas time, and this was the This was when the nation learned from Walter Cronkite that indeed President Kennedy had been assassinated cut three rob.
From Dallas, Texas.
The flash apparently official President Kennedy died at one pm Central Standard time two o'clock Eastern Standard time, some thirty eight minutes ago. Vice President and Johnson has left the hospital in Dallas, but we do not know to where he has proceeded. Presumably he will be taking the oath of office shortly and become the thirty sixth President of the United States.
Cronkite at all he could do but to compose himself, and of course Linda Johnson did take the oath of office from a federal judge. On what that had become if force one and everyone remembers the picture of Linda Johnson, obviously in a state of shock, and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and President Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy standing next to the president as that as that plane left left Dallas, heading back to Washington with the president's body.
My guest is Tom sam Aluk. Tom, I.
Want to chat a little bit more about your thoughts, and I go, I know you're not speaking here officially, but I'm fascinated by the fact that.
We still really don't know for sure.
What events set in motion the assassination of President Kennedy. I know you've it's been your life, life's work, and I'm sure people will have questions and theories, and I just didn't want this night to pass without our understanding and acknowledgment of a very important night. I remember, I know exactly what I was doing on this very night
sixty one years ago. Tonight, I was playing hockey, high school hockey, pre season hockey game, you know, without coaches, at a rink somewhere in the South Shore, which i'd have to I wouldn't be able to find for a million dollars, may not even exist. So much time has passed, but it all seemed very weird. You're younger than I am, Tom, if I'm not mistaken, I don't know if you recall what you were doing that night, you probably would glued to the television like most of America was.
Well, i'll date myself, Dan. I am a little younger than you, and I was in the first grade, and I remember, interestingly, they had not told us at school that the president had been shot. And so I got off the school bus after a complete day of school and was met by my younger brother, Bob, who was four years old, two years younger than me, and I remember exactly what he said, and he had learned from
being around the TV. And my mother was home, and I stepped off the bus and he was waiting for me, and he said President Kennedy was shot and jumped in missus Kennedy's lap. That's what a four year old had for an understanding of what had happened. And walked up the street with him into my house. And it was not unusual that my mother was in the family room ironing, but what was different was that the TV was on, but it was news and she was crying, and I
didn't quite understand. I knew that we had followed President Kennedy, and my oldest sister Carol, had had scrap books from when President Kennedy had been elected Senator from Massachusetts. But this was different because I knew we didn't know him. But my mother was crying and I knew was it was bad news. And like so many million Americans that do have memories of that day, it's kind of seared in your memory forever.
Even the memory of a first grader. My guess it's Tom Semilak served as deputy director the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. We will continue our conversation with Tom Samilak if you would like to join the conversation six one seven two five four ten thirty or six one seven a nine ten thirty.
My name is Dan Ray. This is night Side. This is a moment in.
Time that changed our generation. It changed the world. It was the opening, it was the ending moment of the peace and prosperity of the nineteen fifties post World War Two, and it opened up some tumultuous years which involved other assassinations and political unrest and upheaval. And we'll get to all of that with my guest Tom semelek Uh, and we're gon we're gonna drill down a little bit, particularly on now President elect Trump's pledge to get all of
the records. And I think I'm correct when I say that. If I'm not, Tom my friend will correct me. But I believe that Donald Trump has made a pledge that he will get all of the Kennedy assassination records out into the light of public day and transparent and done transparently. We'll continue on Nightside.
Stay with us.
It's going to be an interesting program. I promise you if you if you're young enough and you don't know a lot about the Kennedy assassination, you definitely want to stick with us. And if you're a little old and you remember it, we'd love to hear your recollections as well. Back on Nightside right after this.
Now back to Dan Ray live from the Window World to Night Side Studios. I'm WBS Radio.
You know, I think I misspoke. Kennedy was actually shot on a Friday. So it was it just so happened that the twenty second of November falls on a Friday.
There was it was and you know, this is better than I do.
Tom, I misspoke. I said it was it was a Thursday. It was actually a Friday that November twenty second. It was a Friday this year. It was a Friday sixty one years ago.
You know.
I I just I was talking to someone today, having interviewed Jim Levelle, the Dallas police detective who had was handcuffed handcuffed to Walt Oswald when Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby.
Vell was an interesting guy.
I did you guys ever get a chance to talk with him?
No, we did not. We focused on where the records were, and we did come into contact with a lot of interesting players and characters. One that comes to mind was, actually, if people saw the nineteen ninety one Oliverstone movie JFK.
Kevin Costner plays Jim Garrison, and there were records to be found in New Orleans, and Garrison was deceased by the time we were in business, but we dealt with people who had records, and we actually dealt with Garrison's successor, who was Harry Connick Senior, who interestingly the father of the well known entertainer and he had succeeded Garrison, and we dealt with his office on the records from the Garrison investigation.
Well, Garrison, if I recall, correctly, had some very specific beliefs and he then got ripped pretty good. I always felt I wasn't sure if Garrison was as nutty as people as the media portrayed him, or if he was right over the target conversely, and that there were people who wanted to, you know, to discourage people listening to him.
What was your impression of Garrison?
Well, I think that it's funny that debate continues even today. He did become a judge after Connick defeated him for a district attorney. I think he probably got some things right, but he kind of served the assassination up on a buffet platter.
It was like.
Everything was there and it probably didn't occur like that. We may not know everything that happened, but it wasn't every theory that you can imagine.
Yeah, well, it was interesting just getting back to this Dallas police detective. Anybody who's seen the picture of Oswald being shot, His name was Jim Level and I interviewed him in nineteen seventy eight. He would have been at that point he was I guess he was born in nineteen twenty maybe I'm guessing nineteen twenty or something like that.
So when I interviewed him, he.
Was very sharp, you know, he was I mean, you know, wasn't even probably fifty years of age at that point. He would he survived Pearl Harbor.
He was.
He actually was in the Navy and was on duty as a twenty one year old third class petty officer in Pearl Harbor. So he was at these two significant events that sort of book ended an era in American history,
Pearl Harbor to the assassination of Kennedy. When you think about it, I mean, World War two ended with the United States having dropped the bomb and becoming the premiere power in the world, and yet in nineteen sixty three, the Kennedy assassination kind of turned the world, our worlds up, our world upside down, followed closely by, you know, the Quagmar of Vietnam, civil rights assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
as well as doctor Martin Luther King. Just an interesting guy, almost like a not a Forrest Gump guy, because obviously this guy was a lot more together.
But it's I remember sitting with him and just thinking.
This guy was I did not realize, and he lived until he was ninety nine years of age. He lived a very full life and died in twenty nineteen. So I mean he was He was born in nineteen nineteen twenty and as they say, when I interviewed him in nineteen seventy eighteen, would have been doing the math fifty eight years of age. He was sharp as attack, recalling how he reacted and when when Ruby stepped out of the crowd. What's your sense the big picture here? Do
you think we will ever find out the truth? For a long time, I thought someone was going to give us a deathbed confession that he was the person who did this or did that. The longer we go, Tom, the less likely I think that is.
To be right. I think that Dan, many of us who have followed the assassination and bet involved in either rec release or in one way or another, have come to the conclusion in a long time that the unequivocal truth is lost to history. That's unfortunate. It was probably lost to history a long long time ago, not far, not long after the assassination itself, because of mistakes that were made in the investigation, because of the Cold War
environment at the time. I think that there were a lot of people who did not want to open any doors beyond a lone gunman that could have, in their view, made a very complex and dangerous world even more complex and dangerous if it was a conspiracy. They didn't want to find out, so they wanted it to be simple. And as a result, here we are six sixty one years later and not knowing what the truth is. And
that's not fair. It has been fair to the American public, and that's why the review board for which I worked made the effort to at least to be able to say that all the records are released. Unfortunately, as we'll probably get into here, that is not yet the case. But I hope it will become the case that we can say everything that we know to be part of the records is available to the American public.
Well, I guess it's Tom Samlik. He's was the deputy director of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records and review Board President Trump. And if I'm wrong, Tom, correct me here, because I just got to jump to news in a moment. Had made an issue of this on the campaign trail, He made an issue of it in twenty sixteen that he would release all the records that were available. That did not happen. We can talk about maybe why it
didn't happen. But now President Trump has a second bite at that apple, and I, for one hope, hope that this great mystery of our lives tom will somehow be clarified for us. Do you read what President Trump said, both in twenty sixteen or in advance of the twenty sixteen election and in advance of this election as his intention at least whether he follows through And we'll have to wait and see. But am I reading what he has said correctly?
Oh, you are definitely correct, Dan. He did not release all the records when he was president in twenty seventeen. He said that he would, but he was advised by certain people in the administration not to do so, so that left many records, uh not released. But you're correct. During the campaign he said that he would as a priority that he would he would release the remaining records if he became president again. And as we know, January twentieth, he will be sworn in as the forty seventh president.
And that is again eight years ago. So as you mentioned to me today, eight years has passed by. We'll get into a little bit more. We go to news. If you want to call, we got a couple of lines that are available six, one, seven, two, five, four, ten thirty six one seven, nine, three, one, ten thirty.
I'm more than willing to talk.
About this longer than this hour, so don't hesitate to fill these phone lines up. We will be back right after this with Tom Samlac, a great friend and a great attorney who served as deputy director on the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records and Review Board, coming back on night Side.
You're on Night Side with Boston's News Radio.
I guess it's Tom Samulak, deputy Director John F. Kennedy Assassination Records and Review Board. Tom, you again know so much more about this than any of us know. I just got to ask a couple of questions that I want to get the phone calls. Do you think that the records which would tell us how this assassination plot came to be?
Because that's that's what we don't know right.
Right? And Dan, I think that I've read some articles today on the sixty first, an first anniversary of the assassination, and about what remains classified and what they may mean to the assassination. People should understand that there are no smoking gun documents to be released because the review board for which I worked in the mid nineties would have
released them at that time. What isn't released and what we kept classified at the time, what was supposed to have been released in twenty seventeen and hopefully will be are things such as sources and methods, names of individuals
who were still alive. So what would happen when we were in operation was the CIA or the FBI would meet with us and they would be records that we had in the queue to be released, and they would give reasons why they couldn't be released, and typically they would say something like this individual named in the doc or sometimes even more a series of documents retired undercover in Europe, and if this record is released again this is in the mid to late nineties, if the record
is released, that person could be killed if their name is made public. So the review will would say, okay, the compromise is that we will redact the name of the individual but release the record, but the name will be released within twenty five years or upon the death of the person, so that was the compromise that we often reached because who were we, as the review would to jeopardize someone's life that the intelligence community said would have been at risk.
But okay, yeah, I understand, Yeah, I do understand that. Would have these been Americans who are now living abroad who had worked for one of the these agencies or what have they been a source of a foreign source who might have provided some information along the way?
Well, it was a range, Dan in some instances. My recollection is that it might have been a foreign official that had provided information to the US Intelligence Community CIA or another agency. So it could it could be any any one of the situations you mentioned.
Last question for me, then we're going to go to
phone calls. Last question for me is I remember the book that was written by Mark Lane in the wake of the Warren Commission report, Rushed to Judgment, which was a criticism of the Warren Commission report, if I recall correct, Yes, Okay, who was closer to the reality if you can answer this question to the reality of what happened the Warren Commission, which released its report ten months later in September of sixty four, or Mark Lane, who basically wrote a critique
of the Warren Commission report in retrospect in your opinion.
Well, let me put it this way, Dan, and invoking again the House Select Committee investigation of the late seventies, which, by the way, the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. In sharp contrast, fifteen sixteen years later in the late seventies, the House Select Committee concluded that there probably was a conspiracy involved more than Oswald.
So that was what was I think referred to as the Blaky report.
Was a professor of.
Yah, Robert Yes, exactly. Yeah, And so those are kind of the book ends of the investigation. And the reality is that Mark Lane did great research on a lot of testimony that, if cass together would would run counter
to the War Mission's final conclusion. However, will, as we said earlier, will never know because the Warrant Commission didn't want to open any doors, and by the time the House Select Committee came along, as Robert Blake the General Council said, the trail had run cold long before they got there. But they did uncover some new records, and we released some of the House Select Committee records that had been kept classified between night say nineteen seventy nine
and the mid nineties. And I have to say, when I saw the unredacted versions, I said, these are leades that should have been pursued. They were not, but they just run cold now. But I think that certainly there are possibilities that there was more to Bory Warren Commission articulated.
All right, let's let's get some phone calls in here and see what people have to say or ask of my guest, Tom Semok, former director deputy director of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records and Review Board. Robin Boston will start us off. Rob, you go right ahead. You got first on first crack at the question of comic Go ahead, Rob.
Hey, thanks for thinking. My car says I've been waiting for this because I was five years old, and get sent on from kindergarten. The documentary that I just last saw show that JFK's brain was stolen or missing or lost. The one piece of evidence that could have shown different trajectories of more than one bullet and the magic bullet
that entered and entered the body. That brain was put into a metal canvas that with themaldehyde, and they given to his secretary who put it into like a metal storage chest, and that was the last they ever saw a JFK's brain. What is that? What is that? Is that fact?
That is a pretty accurate account. I have to say the brain was lost for lack of a better way of characterizing it. And Dan, you may remember the fame pathologist, and he was also a lawyer from Pittsburgh, Cyril Weck, who didn't die that that long ago, and he was a medical consultant to the House Select Committee and also
a longtime critic of the Warren Commission. He actually discovered in trying to conduct research I think it was maybe nineteen seventy two, so almost ten years after the assassination, that they didn't know where the president's brain was. As startling as that is to hear, that is the reality, and it's a key piece of evidence.
Why would anybody have put it into a canister and given it to well, his secretaries was Evelyn Lincoln. I mean, well, I've never heard this one before, but this is a great piece of information.
Go ahead, sir, Well there are Dan, various theories on what happened in the president was reinturned I think in nineteen sixty seven at Arlington Cemetery, And there was some speculation that it was at that point that the that the president's brain was put in the casket, and when the casket was put back in the ground, it was there. No one has any definitive evidence on that, but that's a theory that's floated around for years.
But French trajectories is gone.
We got we got that. It was an interesting tom.
That's the war machine went on to make seven hundred and twenty eight billion dollars with the Vietnam War. The mob went on with Cuba to uh do whatever they did. JFK was the mob.
The mob by sixty three was well out of Cuba. Rob, you could put that one away, okay, Rob, The mob got.
Run out of They wanted to dismantle. They were talking about dismantling, you know, the syndicates and things, and and they had a lot of people scared. I mean, how
many times did they try and assassinate Castro? I mean did he not have a have an interest in in in CND and and and the Domino theory that if they did not want Vietnam to fall because they felt that communism would persist and they did not want the Kennedy brothers to be one half through another in succession and run the country for twenty four years, which which motivated the government to take him out. It's just too much coincidence.
Yeah, a lot, a lot there.
That could take four hours of conversation on all of those, but Rob, the one about the brain, I'd never heard of.
Thank you for that information. That was real interesting.
Thank you great.
Thanks, You're welcome, my guest, Tom Samlick. You would think, Tom, that that there was someone who would have if that's true, and it may be true, that someone would have been able to would have had to have been there, who would have been when if his body was disinterred in nineteen sixty seven, you think that there would have been a lot of new stories about it.
And that's that's the first I've heard of that story.
And I thought I knew a lot, a lot about this, but obviously you've heard of that before. As they said, you know more about this than I do. So that's why I appreciate you being with us tonight. And the number is mentioned.
Yeah, yeah, in subsequent books over the years, it has been uh has been raised.
Yeah, let's take a quick break back with Tom SAMMELUK got John, Peggy and Jane coming up, and I'm more than willing.
To take this into the next hour.
I'm not gonna uh make Tom stick for two hours, but we we very well may carry this for a couple of hours back on Nightside right after this.
Now back to Dan Ray Mine from the Window World night Side Studios on w b Z.
The news radio.
I'm going to try to get everybody in he let me go to John and Bellingham. John, you're all my guest, Tom Samluck, Deputy Director of the JFK Assassination Records and Review.
Well, go ahead, John, Good evening, gentlemen. How are you?
We're good with you, tight on time? You go right ahead. What's your comment? A question for Tom Samlock.
I just have a comment. I was I was ten years old at the time, and I remember we had an announcement at school that we had to all go
home early. Nobody knew what was going on, and we all got on the buses and the town I lived in, in the town of Shirley, Mass I have a friend that was we didn't know at the time, friends with the Kennedy family and we were almost home when three police cruisers pulled up to the bus and stopped us in the middle of the road and took our friend off the bus, not knowing that they were friends, and Jacqueline Kennedy had asked that the family meet them in Washington.
They were that close of friends. But it was scary. I mean the girl, the girl's name was Joan and her father was president of Suspend h Uh, a sweater factory in Manchester, New Hampshire, a really famous fetter sweater company. I guess they were friends for a long time. Pandora sweat. Yeah, okay, and all right, pretty scary, but still still in our heads for the rest of our lives, you.
Know, absolutely, absolutely, John appreciate that that story.
That's interesting.
It's interesting. Thanksgiving, Hey, save.
To you and yours. Let me go next real quickly. If I can to Peggy in South Austin, Peggy next on nights, I.
Go right ahead.
Oh.
I was twenty six years old and I voted President Kennedy. I had the whole family. Just came back from lunch working downtown to Boston. When my Brooss told us that President Kennedy was assassinated. All we could do was cry, and he sent us. He sent us home. Also those Kennedy, you know what I wad it and now and he got brought two minutes for me, all right, two.
Minutes for you, Peggy, to be honest with you. I have Tom Sai. I'm alect my guest, and I'm looking for people to ask questions. Let's go next to Jane in Shrewsbury.
Go ahead, Jane, Hi, Dan, I wanted to ask Tom about if he's familiar with the book called Mortal Error, The Shot that Killed JFK, which was written by Bonar Menninger and co authored originally by Howard Donahue as a co author. Yes, I'm familiar with it, and do you have any opinion?
I thought it was one of the most I thought it was one of the most bizarre theories and not based in fact at all as to what happened. If I recall correctly, the theory was, and Dan, you'll be able to picture this as many listeners will be from the Zapruder film and other films from that day, that the Secret Service vehicle is right behind the presidential limousine.
So this bizarre theory was that it was actually Secret Service agent that fired the fatal shot that inadvertently hit the president in the in the back of the head. There were lawsuits about this, and it's it's I think it's been debunked for years now, but there's thousands and thousands of books literally on the assassinations to get everything.
Theory of this book that it was done intentionally or unintentionally.
It was unintentional. It was the shooting had started, the Secret Service agent purportedly inadvertently discharged his his long long gun.
Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, I think I had heard of that, and of course that is the because they had went forward.
As well as backwards.
I guess, uh, well, sorry, Jane, are you a believer in that theory or just no.
No, no, I haven't read the book. Somebody else asked me to ask about it. But I was looking on the Wikipedia page about the book, and it says that the theory did not rule out that the second shot could have been a critical wound anyway, but it was just one of the possibilities that somehow a Secret Service agent fired because they never did a ballistics check or something like that.
Something like that, But I haven't read it.
Okay, well, thanks, okay, okay, any other comment on that one?
Tom, I know just that there were ballistics done. Some people find fault in the ballistics testing that was done, but it doesn't lead to that that theory that the author put out there.
Okay, Tom, I got a bunch of calls here. Do you want to stick with me for maybe one segment in the next hour. I'm sure some of these folks will.
Have questions in for you, because it's because it's you. I'll do whatever you want me to do. How's that.
Okay, Well, it's late on a Friday night. I'll try to see if we can wrap the question. So we're looking for people who have questions. Peggy, I think, wanted to tell us the story of her experience that afternoon, which I'm sure was a terrible experience, but I wanted to stick with them with my guest and questions for the guest. We'll take a very quick break. We'll be back with Tom Sammelak. He had served as the deputy director the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records and Review Board.
I thought the question from Jane and Shrewsby was a good one in the sense that it explored a theory that apparently has been discounted. This is the crime of the twentieth century, and it's a crime, Tom Samluk, that I guess we're never going to solve. But I want to see Donald Trump, President elect Trump, release every one of those records. You told me today, and I don't know if you can say it on the air tonight. Who was it that advised him not to release the records?
Well, I think that it was President elect Trump himself who recently said that it was Secretary of State Pompeo that had advised him not to release the records back in twenty seventeen, after he had said that he would, but then it didn't actually happen then.
And you know, it's interesting.
I put that together with Donald Trump saying a week or so ago that there would be two people who would not be in the cabinet, the former governor of South Carolina, NICKI Haley, for obvious reasons. And also he mentioned Mike Pompeo, and that if he felt that Pompeo maybe misled him, that might be the reason why he made that statement. No way of proving it, but at
least think about it. Connect the dots. We'll be back on Nightside with Tom Samulak talking more about the Kennedy assassination, which happened sixty one years ago today and sixty one years ago tonight.
People were in mourning
Across America, back on Night's side right after the ten collect News