From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They call me Ben. We're joined with our guest super producer. Back to the freight train, Williams. Most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. As you are listening to this on the day this podcast publishes, it is an infamous anniversary in the United States. Sixty years ago, the President of the US John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was assassinated November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, in a
presidential motorcade in Dallas, Texas. The tragedy of this day fundamentally altered the course of American and indeed global history. Decades later, the world entire still has questions about what led to this murder and how it occurred. We've asked these questions previously in Stuff they Don't Want you to Know, But tonight we are immensely fortunate to be joined with the legendary director, the actor, the activist the writer now podcaster Rob Reiner, creator and co host of Who Killed JFK?
Thank you for joining us, Rob, It is a profound honor.
Oh thank you, Ben, this is so sweet to you. Thanks for having me.
Can I just get my fanboy thing out of the way really quick? But this is Spinal Tap is my favorite movie of all time and that force everyone in my life to watch it while I literally tear up because it's very nice and hilarious and it's just everything I love about rock and roll.
It's so good. Well, I hear you're work it. It'll make you feel good that we're now engaged in the filming a sequel. We're going to do it. It's the first time in forty years we came up with an it and the four of us are going to get out there and and make a sequel to Spinal Tap.
Yeah, take it.
The three of us are musicians and uh we we've you know, got video degrees and everything. So we we just are right in that exact place where this is spinal like where Spinal Tap just is like I don't know, it's a mecha.
It looms large and I just wrapped up a podcast documentary about the Stones in seventy two, and I had a lot of tape I was working with from them from those days, and I realized, I think you were doing their voices. I think the spinal tap guys are the Stones circa seventy two, with their soft spoken, little British littlets something to it. Maybe I'm wrong, but.
In the film, there's a fine line between stupid and clever and try there, We try to hit that line, and isn't that?
Isn't that also in some ways part of the discourse that has surrounded uh, the allegations of conspiracy in the JFK assassination.
You know, look at that. Wow, I gotta I gotta put a neck brace on uh and call my insurance agent because.
He's got a point, though, Rob stupid and clever, that that's something that we see a lot with conspiracy stuff, because yeah, that's true. Maybe clever is a bit of a misnomer, but it's all about like how close are there facts involved? Is there some logical reasoning behind it? Or are people just passing the time right?
Right? No, you're you're exactly right. Because the name, the words conspiracy theory have gotten a weird take now because everybody, uh, you know, who's aspiring to you know, QAnon or disinformation or they're going on wacky websites and things. Anybody who talks about conspiracy theory has got a tinfoil hat and you know is running around, you know, spotting UFOs all over the place. But there are actual conspiracies that actually happened, and this is one of them. And the podcast that
we do Who Killed JFK? That I do with Solo Dad O'Brien is the deepest dive and the most comprehensive look at that conspiracy and how it happened. And you know, as we say in the podcast, it's the greatest murder mystery in the history of America. Nothing like it has ever happened before. And the America was traumatized. There was a concentrated trauma put at the heart of America at that point, and people who were alive at the time
will never get over it. It was a colective trauma that gripped the entire country and we're still feeling the effects of it today.
And that note about never getting over it, there's something there's something poetic with the beginning of episode one. I think maybe we Also, before we start with the first episode of Who Killed JFK, let's travel back, if it's all right, to your experience to the moment the day of the assassination. Again, it's November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, just a few days before Thanksgiving.
You are, I.
Believe, sixteen years old, right. Could you paint the picture for us and for our listeners of that experience.
Yes, I mean anybody who was alive at that time and was aware knows exactly where they were when they heard that news. You can talk to anybody, they'll tell you exactly where they were what was happening. I was sixteen, as you said, I was in high school. I was in my physics class, and I'll never forget a student walked in whispered into the teacher's ear, and he turned to us and he said, I have some terrible news, and he related to us what had happened to the president,
and we were all just stunned and shocked. We were sent home from school. Everybody was sent home, and we turned on our televisions and we watched none stop a television on the reports up until and I was one of the people who watched the person who was accused of killing President Kennedy Lee Harvey Oswald. I watched him get assassinated on live television. I mean it actually happened. I watched this man. We found out his name was Jack Ruby, who's a local nightclub owner of a place
called the Carousel Nightclub. He went into the Dallas police station, drew a gun, and stood right in front of Lee Harvey Oswald then shot him to death. And for many of us, that was the moment at which we said, what the heck is going on here? The man who has supposedly killed the president is now being murdered himself. Why is that happening? Who's doing this? Who's behind all this?
You're talking to three guys who were born in the eighties, so you know, when we first encounter this, we get to an age where, you know, our parents decide we can learn about the JFK assassination, or our schools decide
we are allowed to learn about it. We have all of this information already built in, right, but in going back and listening to Who Killed JFK this podcast, we're being presented with this information as it was happening, right, So we get that experience that you're sharing with us now, Rob.
And one of the things you mentioned early on is how comedians like Mort Sahl and Dick Gregory were kind of they're using their material as a way for America to begin to process this information, right, Yes, Yes, And what's interesting about that is these guys were both brilliant social and political satirists.
These were the most incisive, well observed type people who looked at American life and observed it in the most intelligent and fine way. And when they diverged from their normal routines. In the case of Mortsaul, I was nineteen when I watched him go. I was opening for The Hungry Eye for a singer named Carmen McCrae, who's a great jazz singer. And when I would finish my set with my partner Larry Bishop, we'd go into this smaller room where Dick where mort Saul was not doing his
normal routine. He was only talking about the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission report on the assassination had come out and he was attacking it, saying it's full of lies, it doesn't make any sense. And that and people like Dick Gregory, who went on Geraldo Rivera's show, and for the first time they exposed the Zapruder film, which was the film that the only film that really captures the assassination by a guy named Abraham Zapruder, was a local dressmaker.
Those people, those two comedians, really started the conversation moving forward. People started getting engaged, and those people could draw your attention. They were great speakers, They were great incisive commentators on the times. When I saw Mark Saul, I started really getting into it. I read a book called Rush to Judgment by a writer named Mark Lane, and he completely disbanded the Warren Commission and pointed out the inconsistencies, the
things that were left out, the lies. When you started getting into realizing that this was not only a cover up by the government of what had happened, but it uncovered as you track it over the years, this conspiracy that American forces got together to kill an American president in broad daylight on an American street. And the more you look into it, the more disturbing it is. And you know, I was saying that, you know, you look at something like this and that sixty years has gone
by and unless you're following it closely. There are revelations that come out in drips and drabs, and when they come out, unless you're following it all, you don't know what that has to do with anything else. So this podcast what it does is it takes sixty years of revelations, puts it all in one place and hopefully makes it understandable to people and completely you know, fills in the puzzle of what actually happened on that desk.
Yeah, and this is something that I think is key the contextualization. We were talking a little bit off air rup. People who are somewhat familiar with the JFK assassination and the ins and outs of it may be surprised to learn that documents pertaining to it were classified until quite recently and new information begins to emerge. Who killed JFK? Does a phenomenal job of connecting some of these puzzle pieces.
And already you've mentioned some very bright points about this that remain controversial, especially the Warren Commission, which I think you do a supreme and scrupulous job of pointing out some possible conflicts of interest possible.
Yeah, Okay, well, guys, I'm going to rob Here's what's interesting about this Yeah, there were huge conflicts of interests. First of all, there's still almost five thousand documents that have not been released to the public, and you know, we may never see those documents. But the conflict of inters that you're talking about, and there were two investigations. People have to understand. There are two official government investigation
of the assassination of JFK. The first was the Warren Commission, which came out in nineteen sixty four. The second one was done by a group called the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and now it came out in the mid seventies. It came out to actually the report came out in
the late seventies. Both of those investigations were compromised. And the way in which that happened is in the first investigation, the Warren Commission, Lyndon Johnson was very concerned about things getting out that might implicate the Russians or the Cubans in a way that might ultimately cause a nuclear war, and he wanted to avoid that. He didn't want any information to come into the investigation that would do anything but point to Lee Harvey Oswald as a loan gunman.
So what he did is they put together This commission headed up by Chief Justice Earl Warren, but his name was mostly titular. In this they put in charge of the gatekeeper sense of all information coming from the CIA, into the hands of a man named Alan Dulles. Alan Dulles was the first civilian head of the CIA in the nineteen forties. Now, Alan Dulles was one of the
architects of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The Bay of Pigs invasion was an attempt by the to train Cuban exiles to go into Cuba and overthrow Castro, who had overthrown Battista just a few years prior. Now, Alan Dulles had this plan with the CIA, working with these Cuban exiles, they went into the Bay of They went into Cuba, and they did invade, and they thought that Kennedy would offer air support, that once the troops got in there, they would send American planes and they would take back Cuba.
Kennedy told them before the and by the way, Kennedy inherited this plan from Eisenhower and Nixon. He was only in office for two or three months when they when they did this, he told them ahead of time, I will not send American airplanes because I don't want the United States footprint. I don't want any fingerprints on to be tracked back to the United States. He told them that, and Dulles said, there's no way, don't worry about it. Once we get in there, he's going to see this
and he's gonna want to send those those airplanes. He never did, and what happened was all the Cuban Xes. They were slaughtered on the beaches in Cuba, and it was a complete and utter disaster. Months later, Kennedy fires Alan Dulles, and very you know, is known to have said, I want to take the CIA and break it up into a thousand pieces. He was furious at the CIA because they were doing these covert activities without presidential approvals.
I mean, they were doing them separately and then you know, then reporting back to the president. So he wanted to get rid of it. He puts Johnson puts Alan Dulles in charge of any information coming from the CIA into the Warrant Commission, and you know, obviously nothing got in. No, No, we didn't know. We didn't know about the CIA's connection to the mafia. We didn't know about the CIA's extra
judicial killings. Of heads of state, which they did many of We didn't know about a lot of the involvement with the Cubans in Cuba. We didn't know any of this stuff. So Alan Dalles is compromising that. Now. The big revelation, the big, big, big revelation was in the second investigation that was for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And we bring this up in the podcast as well. And this didn't come out, This didn't come out until
years after the investigation. But the man put in charge of being the liaison between the House Investigation and the CIA was a man named George Joannedes. You've never heard of his name, you don't know who he is, but I can. What I'll tell you is George joaned was a former CIA agent and he was the head of a counter intelligence program that developed assets, one of which was Lee Harvey Oswalal. So the guy who was the gatekeeper again to the CIA was a very guy who
they wanted to who they should have questioned. We interviewed Robert Blakey, who was the counsel to the House Select Committee. He had no idea that this is what Joe and Edes did. And when he found out many years later he was furious. He said, if I had known then what I knew now, I would have put Joe and Edes on the stand. He was the answer to many of our questions of how the CIA was involved in
the assassination. So you know, there you have two big pieces of information there, separated by men many many years, and we try to put it all together in one place.
And uh, there's also the question a lot of our fellow listeners will be asking, which is is there such thing as a former CIA agent?
It makes you think, right, no, there's there's no such thing. I mean a CIA agent. You you you you may not be active in the way you were when you were being paid by the agency, but you have security
clearance and uh, you have it for your life. And you you know, it was an interesting thing recently with a Trump I think try to strip uh And did I think strip John Brennan of his security clearance because you didn't like what John Brennan was saying about him and about his uh, you know, his involvement in January sixth. So yes, you're you're always connected once you once you're there.
Even about the clearances, I mean the relationships, these lifelong relationships and attacks that you can leverage even minus the security clearances. Correct, I mean I think that stuff is money in the bank.
Yeah, No, that's true power.
Just a real quick insert here for anybody that wants to go deep down the rabbit hole. I'm looking at a declassified document here that describes mister Johanned's work from December nineteen sixty two to April nineteen sixty four, and it describes him as the case officer for the Cuban Exile Group Directorio Revolutionnarios. Studient Teal is known as Student.
Yeah, it's a student directed anti Castro group.
And there's there's something else too, And I know people are yelling at their phones right now, or however you listen to shows the House Select Committee, you have this, you have this terrifying observation rob in who killed JFK? Where you say, look, these are two fundament only flawed
investigations and they reach two very different conclusions. And one thing, one thing that I think stands out for people were who were born after the assassination is to is to read the conclusions of the House Select Committee and see that they have dropped the C word. They have said the assassination seemed to be the result of a I believe the quote is probable conspiracy, but.
Then yes, I mean the the Warrant Commission basically said that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman, did it all by himself. The House Select Committee said it was probably a conspiracy based on all the investigation they had done, but they didn't say who was involved in the conspiracy. They never could get that far because of this guy, George Joanniedes. They they didn't They didn't name the mob, they didn't name the CIA, they didn't talk about the
Cuban exilese. They just said, based on the information they had, it was probably a conspiracy. So you have two diametrically opposed conclusions, and that those are the two government records now.
And Warren Commission is nineteen sixty four, so very soon after the assassination, and the House Select Committee isn't until nineteen seventy six. So just imagine, like again, already we've got decades separating, a decade separating these two things. And you wonder why Americans in general, you're talking about drips and drabs information coming out from the very beginning. It's like we're getting little bits and pieces, right, and I swear it feels like it's designed that way.
Yeah, well, I don't know design, but if you think about you mentioned Dick Gregory. The House Select Committee was born out of an investigation by Idaho Senator Frank Church. They had a committee there set up in the Senate and that was based on information that was coming out that the CIA was doing all kinds of things that they were not aware of. And it came out as a you know, a revelation during that that they were doing these extra judicial killings, that other things were going on.
And then Dick Gregory went on The Heraldo Show and they showed the Zapruder film for the first time. Now, the Zapruder film was you know, the Warrant Commission saw it. The public had not seen it. Nobody still need photographs, just some still photographs, but we didn't have a context and we didn't see it. When that came out and the Church Committee started revealing what they knew, that gave
birth to the House Select Committee. And that was, like you say, well over ten years after the Warren Commission came out. So now all of a sudden, you have another flashpoint. Now when Oliver Stone made his film a JFK in nineteen ninety two or ninety one. I believe it was that also triggered the JFK Records Act and the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board, which was
another investigation. So these things are separated by many, many years, and during each of these investigations, more and more and more information came out. So, like I say, it's very tough to follow. And unless you're tracking all this stuff when it comes out, you wouldn't. You wouldn't know how to put those pieces together. That's what we try to do in this podcast.
And you do it.
Yeah, I would say accomplished so far. And folks, full disclosure here we are in media arrests. We are listening along with you all. We do not know how this story concludes yet. I do want to throw one thing here. That's an interesting note, Rob.
That I before you say that, before you put a pin in it, I want to hear the interesting note. But by the end of it, by the tenth episode, you will hear what we believe happened that day, and we will name the shooters that we believe for shooting, and we will name the positions that we believe those shooters were in So I'm just.
Will you come back on the show?
Sure? Sure, absolutely, Okay.
So it'll be later than this, early in the morning, we promised you.
Yes, I agree.
So there's something interesting in speaking of contextualization. There is a there is a deep temptation often that pulls us away from objectivity when we start connecting dots, right, because
humans identify patterns. And I noticed that of the seven official members of the Warren Commission, one died under it or disappeared under extremely mysterious circumstances before the House Select Committee, uh and the Church Committee got their crack at this, and would be Hail Boggs right, disappeared over over the hinterlands.
Of Alaska, and there was a plane crash that you know, we can't say for sure what happened there. We don't know, and we're not going to, you know, be some conjecture over this. It happened. And but there are a lot of mysterious deaths that occurred right after the Warren Commission came out. There was a very famous woman who was
married to a CIA agent. Her name is Mary Meyer, and her sister was having an affair with Jack Kennedy and she at the minute the And this is one of the reasons I wanted Sola Dad O'Brien to to do this with me, because she did a podcast about this called Murder on the Towpath in which this woman
was assassinated walking in Georgetown. And day that she was killed, James Angleton, who was the head of counterintelligence for the CIA, along with Ben Bradley, who was editor of The Washington Post, they arrived at Mary Meyer's art studio and confiscated a diary that she kept. So there's that. And you know Dorothy kill Gallan, who was killed shortly after attending the Jack Ruby trial and was the only one to have
actual interviews with Jack Ruby. She was killed. And there was a number of people that we did a study and there were about I think eighteen critical key witnesses who died of either a heart attack or suicide or accident or jump out of a window something within two years of the assassination. And they ran some numbers on it and it's like seven hundred trillion, I mean, some crazy number the odds of all of those people dying
in that way. But you know, we don't get into any of that stuff, because we can't prove why these people died, I mean, and so what we've tried to do in the podcast is just stick with what we know. These are things we know, and then you know, we do our best guess as to put together based on everything we know, what actually happened.
And we'll pause here for a word from our sponsor before we return and ask Rob Ryder who killed JFK.
And we have returned.
You know, we talked a little bit off Mike before we started rolling, just about this event being sort of the beginning of this massive polarization of the American people, and it being you described it as sort of an end of innocence, and I think in Ben you wrote in the outline here this really was a moment that you could trace back to when distrust in our government
really kind of began as much more of a mainstream thing. Rob, can you kind of couple all those ideas together into sort of your thoughts on what that end of innocence means?
And well, I mean, we you know, after the Second World War, we were the heroes, We were the good guys, and we could do nothing wrong. I mean, we you know, we had prosperity and people, you know, the gi Bill and people were living in you know, the suburbs, and they were, you know, things were doing, you know, better for a lot of people, not for not for black people,
but for a lot of Americans. And then you have this moment happened in nineteen sixty three where it's like your father was taking I mean, you know, the leader of the country was just killed like that. And we knew at the time, I mean, which came out that Kennedy was trying to make a forge your path to peace. He gave a very famous speech at American University where he talked about we cannot go down this road of nuclear holocaust. We have to find a way to forge
a path to peace. Well, in the context of that, he wrote a memo which is on file that he was going to call for the removal of a thousand troops out of Vietnam that year and the removal of all military out of Vietnam by the end of nineteen sixty five. Now we don't know would he have done that, would he not have done that. What we do know is that he wrote the memo, and certainly the hardliners in the CIA and the military knew that, and they
were worried that that was going to happen. So what happens. Kennedy gets assassinated, Johnson becomes president, and the next thing you know, we're stepping up the war in Vietnam. And that to me was the beginning of a huge divide in America.
Benefit though staying in Vietnam, Like I think I understand, but just from your respective like the hardliners, as you mentioned, like who is benefiting from US maintaining a presence in Vietnam? And it was such a disastrous you know conflicts.
Well, first of all, ideologically, the hardliners are thinking, and that was certainly the thoughts of the day, there was a better dead than red. They believed that there was this domino theory and that if one country went fell communists, that there would be a domino theory and the rest of the world would go communists. They were actually afraid that the world was going to turn into a communistic world.
So ideologically that's what they thought. Now on a purely economic standpoint, you know it, you make money, you go to war. And in the military industrial complex, which by the way, Eisenhower warned us beware, in the military industrial complex. They want they want to be able to do that because it's good business. So those two things are happening there. And for young people, they're being sent off to war to die in a war that they don't believe is
just they don't believe is legal. And if you remember, I mean people who want to study their history, there was a thing called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was all about the fact that we were told that our ship was fired on in Vietnam in this Tonkin ship was fired on and so I mean in the Gulf of Tonkin, and that was the pretext for why we went to war in Vietnam. So you had a lot of distrust going on and the country started to divide.
There were protests all over the country, and we divided as a nation. And I believe that it was the beginning of the divide that you see now. This country couldn't be more divided than they are now. And I would point back to what happened and going into Vietnam that was the beginning of that divide.
Well, and there's so many things to talk about here that branch from that. But we learn in your podcast that JFK was maintaining maybe off the books, we would say, contact with Soviet officials, like the highest Soviet officials and Cuban officials, and attempting to smooth things out directly rather than through the mechanisms that would normally you'd need to go through.
To have vice conversation. Back channeling. He was back channeling with Kruse Jeff. He was back channeling with Castro directly with Kruse Jeff and Castro to make sure that and this is on the heels of the Cuban missile crisis, which happened a year after the Bay of Pigs. The Cuban missile crisis, as people know, or you know, maybe they're learning for the first time, was we were on the brink of a nuclear war, and those of us who were alive at the time will never ever forget it.
We found out that there were nuclear weapons in Cuba that were put there by the Russians ninety miles away from America, and they could reach Washington in twenty minutes. So we were doing drills in school. Now they have active shooter drills. In my time, they had a duck and covered drill that you under the desk. You'd get
under a desk in case of a nuclear Now. I used to make a joke about it, which is, you know, it was a known fact that the material that they made school desks out of could actually repel a nuclear bomb. But it's of course it's ridiculous.
It's optics though, right, it's this idea.
No, that's with safety, you know, yeah, that we better you know, keep ourselves safe. So we were all believing that that's what we were a minute away from a nuclear holocaust, and that was that was the basis fun, you know, which we lived. So uh, he started to back channel. He said, you know, we can't let this happen. What can we do? They you know, he settled the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy did. He He made a deal
with kruse Chef. We had missiles in Turkey. He said to kruse Chef, will take those missiles out of Turkey if you take these missiles out of Cuba, which happened. But then he said, from there on we got to make sure that nothing like this happens again, because we the whole world. We're going to blow up the whole world if we do this. And so he started back channeling to Castro to kruse Chef, and the CIA was
well aware of that. They became well aware of that, and that added to their distrust of Kennedy in terms of his fight against communism.
And also there seems to be this it was a thing that the American public was largely unaware of, but there was internal descent escalating into chaos at the same time this there was this move for de escalation.
Yes, right during the Cuban missile crisis, the hardliners in both the CIA and the military were pushing Kennedy like crazy, make a strike, take them out, take those missiles out, go after them. And they were very upset with him when he chose this this other path. It was it was contentious. There was a lot of screaming, yelling going on in the White It's thirteen days, very famous time, thirteen days where we all lived on the edge of are we going to be blown up?
Do you feel rob that there was a somewhat of a like lack of respect amid the unelected power structures of US governance, because from what we've been reading, it seems as though when Kennedy enters office, you know, the the CIA still still high off the oss World War two actions. They're kind of coming in with this attitude that, yes, you will be a figurehead and you will do what we the adults say is.
Well, not only that, yeah, not only that. But Kennedy campaigned in nineteen sixty as a anti communist, you know, strong against communism. There was a big debate, you know, with with Nixon. It was on television. I think it was one of the first televised debates, and he had to show that he had real bona fides in fighting communism. He ran as a anti communist, strong willed, a guy who would stand you know, in his inaugural desk, We'll stand up to any foe. We'll fight anybody to do this.
And he knew in order to win he had to show his strength against communism. But as the realities presented himself, he realizes that that strength that he showed could lead to world hundreds and hundreds of millions of people being killed. And so the reality set in and he said, no, I got to go a different, a different direction here.
And they were mad. They were angry at him because they assumed that he was going to be a you know, a real, real, you know as an extension of the McCarthy days, where go after the comedy, get him out of government, get you know, anybody could be a comedy. They're lurking, you know, get get rid of them. Uh, they thought he was going to be one of those guys.
That's a proper witch hunt, though not the way it's kind of been dog whistleified by the Trump administration. You know, that was people actually being persecuted who did not have any affiliation.
Yes, yes, a lot of them were.
Yeah, yeah, And it makes me wonder about the just real quick, the concept of greater good, which seems to be you know, both an ideological motivating force for a lot of the more hawkish factors here. And I have to say it, one of the things that I went back and rewatched after listening to the first several episodes
of Who Killed JFK? Was a few good men and there's you know, there's there's something there that reminds me and probably a lot of our listeners too, reminds me so viscerally of that rationalization where where we have characters who are saying, look, did I do something quote unquote wrong? Maybe, but I did it for the right reasons. Do you feel. Do you feel that that was sort of a common mentality in the operations.
I mean that is, you know, the military is there to protect us, and that's good, we want that. But the question is how far do you go to protect us? Are you willing to commit war crimes? In the case of Nazi Germany? Are you willing to do anything? And that's what the character that Jack Nicholson plays in Few Good Men. He says, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. I'm doing what you can't do. And so the question always is how far are you willing to go in order to protect people?
Are you willing to blow up the world? I mean, who wins? Nobody wins in that situation. You're not protecting anybody.
And unfortunately, as just mere mortal voters, we don't get to decide how far that line is.
No, we don't, no, no. But what we're hoping is that we, as normal voters, are electing people who have the good sense to know where that line is, and that that's where we are now. I mean, we're we couldn't be more divided. You've got one guy who's willing to do anything, you know, Donald Trump is willing to do anything to keep power. And that means he even said it. I'm not making it it up. He said it.
We'll put the vermin you know, we'll take and we'll put them in in in camps, and we'll make sure we're familiar with We'll get the blood, you know, the disgusting, the thing that's poisoning the American bloodstream, will put him in camps. That's he said that.
But he's also plagiarizing Adolf Hitler too.
Well, yeah, because he can't make that stuff up. He's not smart enough. But I mean, and I always heard that he had mine kamf on his ben stand. Well, he probably had it on his best name. He didn't read it. I mean, I don't know how much of you bred who knows. I don't know what he does with reading.
Mine from the Bible, and he didn't read either of them.
Yeah, right, he probably held mine comp He held my comp up the wrong way too. But guys, but we're getting too far a field here. But the truth is, we want to elect people who know where that line is and not to cross it, because when you cross it, you're not protecting people.
You're also not electing a lot of the decision makers to your point, directly and representative democracy. There's no one, No average voter votes for a Supreme Court nominee, No average voter votes for the people in charge of the NSA or the CIA.
No. But what you are voting for is you're voting for a president who nominates Supreme Court justices, who nominates a secretary of Defense, you know, any of the positions. You're nominating somebody, or you're voting for somebody who has the power to nominate people who are sensible, who know where the line is. That's representative government, and that's what you want. You want somebody who's reasoned, who's intelligent, and who can make the right decisions.
Hey, let's take a quick pause here for a word from our sponsor, and then we'll return with more from Rob Ryner.
And we're back.
Let's jump right into our conversation with Rob Reiner already in progress.
Let's take it back to nineteen seventy five, to the Church Committee again, because it's directly related to this. That's when the American public learned about a couple things that you might be familiar with if you're listening to this show. Mk Ultra and Cointelpro specifically when it comes to assassinations.
I'm thinking about Cointelpro. If you jump five years after JFK's assassination and you look at Martin Luther King Junior, you look at JFK's brother RFK, So it's like, again not directly perhaps related to Cointelpro, but it is a secret it is a secret thing that we didn't know about, that the FBI was doing to investigate people that they thought would be counter to the vision of the world that they had, Right.
That's right, that's right. And you mentioned it's counterintelligence program. I mean, that's what they're doing. They're trying to root out anybody that goes against their ideaology. You mentioned kut mk Ultra was a program that was designed at the CIA, and this was during the Cold War where there was a lot of concern about moles infiltrating our intelligence community and getting information, and we wanted to try to see if we could get our people inside the you know,
the Soviet Union, inside the KGB. There was this big cat and mouse game going on, headed up by this head of counter intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, who was a brilliant guy. Genius but also paranoid beyond belief that he thought there was, you know, a mole everywhere you look. So this mk Ultra program was designed to try to create spies, people who would look like, you know, dissidents or whatever. And there was a program set up at a place called Nag's Head, and we'll get you'll get
into this. You'll hear this in the other episodes. It was in North Carolina where they took disaffected youths, Oswald being one of them. He was part of that program. And we have somebody on the podcast who knew Oswald in that program, who was there at Nagshead. And what they did was they used LSD. They used all kinds of uh techniques of torture and things to try to uh,
you know, get inside somebody's mind. This was like in the days of the Manchurian candidate, that you could create this elusive illusion of somebody who was not who they appeared to be. Now, it didn't really work, they didn't really were able to be successful. But the fact is they were uh uh training people to be assets, assets for them that somewhere down the line they could could use. And Oswald was part of that Oswald was part of that.
He also went and learned Russian. He learned Russian, and he was sent to the Soviet unions as part of an operation to see if they could infiltrate somebody into the you know, to the Soviet Union. It was a failure. He didn't get anything. But we know that that happened because he was stationed in Japan during you know, when he was a marine. He was you know, a radar
operator for the U two spy plane. And there was a guy who was also in military intelligence that was teamed up with Oswald on an operation to try to flip a Soviet colonel to come into the CIA. So
Oswald was part of an intelligence community. We knew that that and once he went to Russia in nineteen fifty nine sixty, around sixty to fifty on sixty they opened a file on Oswald, but they call it two h one file, And for four years they had reams and realm of documents connecting the CIA with Oswald, and none of that came out in the Warrant Commission report that Warren said, there's no there's no connection. We don't know
anything about Oswald. And there were thousands of documents that showed that they did.
That's what I was going to ask, because there's no acknowledgement that he was an asset or a reference to who his handlers might have been, or he was just a lone wolf. He was treated like a civilian who just went nuts and did this thing of his own volition.
Well, it's interesting, you know you said he said I was just a patsy. I was a patsy. Now, you know, if you're accused of murder, the first thing you're saying is I didn't do it. I don't know, I didn't do it. You're not saying I'm a patsy. A patsy is a guy who knows that something else is going on, that he's being set up for. And then when you had people ask well, well didn't he want to you know, he was a lone wolf and didn't he want to
make a name for himself. Well, if you want to make a name for yourself, you say what you did. You don't say I'm a patsy. You say I did it because I believe America. You know you do, you know you do that. It's the exact opposite.
Okay, I've read some things and I've heard some things that Oswald was potentially meeting with a group of Cuban exiles in Dallas right before the assassination. Did you find anything that may corroborate that.
No, we didn't find that he was meeting with a group of Cuban exiles. What we did find was that it's known, this is on record that he went to New Orleans a few months in April May. He went to New Orleans and he joined what they call the fair Play for Cuba Committee. Now that was a legitimate organization. They had chapters around the country, but when he went to New Orleans, he started his own chapter. And he was the only member of the fair Play for Cuba Committee.
There was no other members. He was the only one, and he handed out leaflets. And if this is something we know because we we have photographs. In one of the pictures he's handing out leafless and there's a CIA operative in the background of one of those photographs. Now, the other thing is when he handed out these photographs, it was done at a place where there were uh anti Castro people. He was supposed to be procaster a lot of anti Castro and there was a big fight.
They took his leafless, they threw up in the air. There was a scuffle, there was a melee, and was all caught on film. I mean they they they and it went on the news. So who's you know, who's filming this, who's doing this? I mean, you have to make it so that you're you know, setting up this guy that he's a pro castro guy and uh, you know, otherwise he's just a lone guy sitting on the corner handing out leafless. You know who go who films the guy handing out leafless at any corner anywhere?
No narrative, somebody making a movie.
Yeah, there's a bit of a there's there's this emphasis kind of on narrative. And even in the even in the internal conversations which are now public knowledge regarding the Warren Commission, we see that there is this strong drive from people who are kind of driving the commission, even though they're not official members. I believe it was jagg Or Hoover, famous dude who said, look, we're going to make this look like this story.
Uh and yeah, you had not only Jay go Hoover, but you know, we have audio tapes of Hoover talking to to Johnson saying, we can't let this thing get out of hand.
The House wants to investigated, the Senate wants to investigated, but we got to keep a lid on this thing because it's it's going to go crazy, so we have to control it. And then there's a very famous memo by a Nicholaszenbach. He was the deputy Attorney General under Robert Kennedy, and he released a memo saying, we have to convince the public that Lee Harvey Oswell was the
lone assassin. Now this came out three days or a few days right after the assassination, and they were already saying this is Oswal and we got to make the public believe this. So everything was designed to create that narrative, like you said, and we get into it in the third episode when we get into the forensics of how the narrative really starts to fall apart. It really falls apart because we get into the famous single bullet theory
and they had a big problem. I mean, people who study this stuff, no, it's impossible to do what this one bullet was supposed to have done. And you know, for your you know, listeners who don't know about it, the Warrant Commission said that three three shots were fired from the sixth floor of the Texas school Book Depository building, which overlooked the Presidential Modecade on Elm Street. Three shots. Initially they said the first shot hit Kennedy and in
the back the second shot. They had a problem because they said all three shots hit. The problem they had was the first shot missed. And they found out that the first shot missed because it hit a curb and a piece of concrete flicked into a bystander's cheek and he started to bleed. So now they were left with two shots, and that two shots had to do all the damage. One of the shots we know was a shot to his head. That was the fatal head wound,
the shot that killed Kennedy. Then they have one bullet left to say that a bullet went into from the sixth floor. From the sixth floor, the bullet went into the Kennedy's back right six to eight inches blow's neck, then traveled up and came out his neck. Then made a turn to the Magic Connolly. Hit Connolly in the in the ribs, breaks some ribs, then makes another turn, hits them in the wrists, breaks the wrist bones, then makes another turn and and it winds up in his thigh.
That's what they had to make you believe. And the guy who came up with that was a fellow named Marlin Spector who became a senator at the time, he was just a lawyer who was, you know, representing the committee, and he came up with this single bullet theory, this magic bullet that did all that damage. And they said, well, that's what. And by the way, you can see that bullet. It's on file in the in the archives and in the Warrant Commission, and it's limited as evidence number three
ninety nine, and it's pristine. It didn't just looks like it didn't hit anything.
You know, rub should should we maybe take this as an opportunity to address the elephant in the room That seems to me it should be a larger elephant. But it's seems to have also been glossed over by the media a bit. Paul Landis, Oh yeah, wells, yeah.
See that's interesting you bring up Paul Landis, because again it goes back to drips and drabs things coming out over a time. If people Paul Landers came out with a report about I don't know, a couple of months ago whatever, and we interviewed him for the for the podcast Oh cool, Yeah, he's on there. And and this guy was on the trail car. He was a secret service aation who was in the trail car. He's riding on the running board behind Kennedy when the head shot came.
He talks about how brain matter and the skull matter flew in his direction and he had a duck to get out of the way of getting hit by brain matter.
And he talked about how when they got to Parkland Hospital, which is where they're going to take care of Kennedy, that when he helped Jackie Kennedy up out of the seat, it was a blood pool of blood on the seat where they were sitting, and he looked in the back on the top of the seat resting there was a bullet and it was this bullet and he didn't know what to do because he thought, oh, this is a piece of evidence. And he knew the bullet had been fired because it had striation marks on it, but it
was essentially pristeine. There was no other damage to it. And he picked it up because he thought, you know, it's a piece of evidence. What if somebody takes it and you know, and then he went into the hospital and didn't know what to do, and he put it on the Kennedy's by Kennedy's leg when he was being worked on. And so when you hear this and you take it not in context, you go, well, so what there was another bullet there? But what you have to know is that this is the bullet that Arl Inspector
claimed to have gone through two people. Now, if that happened, then how out of the bullet wind up in the back but it bounce back after it wounded, you know what I mean? Of course, is so crazy that unless you can put all these pieces together, you go, well, so the guy found a bullet, big deal.
And what would the American public have done? There's another question we can't answer. What would the American public have done in the sixties had they known these and other discrepancies? You know, Rob entering into this, we knew there was a lot of stuff that we wouldn't get to in our conversation, like the autopsy reports, Uh, the one that got birds. Yeah, the fact that Texas Governor Condoley also said, I don't think that was the same bullet.
No, he said that he died. He said the bullet that Kennedy did not hit me. What would the public have done. I think they were worried what the public would have done, because it would have put I mean, as it is, we have distrust in government now. They the trust level and government is so low now that I think that at that time, it would have, you know, just blown the lid off of any trust of the
Justice Department, the intelligence community, the military. You know, they were trying to keep a lid on that so that they you know, that trust remained in government. But my contention is you trust when you know, and if you know the truth and you're open and telling the truth, you can say, hey, we made a mistake, we did something wrong, we should not have done that. And if you do that, you gain trust, you don't lose trust. And then that's what we need the basis of all democracy.
And that's why I've stuck with this for so long. I believe that the that the foundation of a strong democracy is that the American people trust in the institutions of government. We have to trust and by the way, people desputs know the best way to gain power is to fomote foment distrust, and that's what trusts. I've been doing it. It's right out of the authoritarian playbook. You just make people distrust things and then you say I can fix it. I'm the only one that can fix it.
This goes to one of the I think the big questions. And I can't speak for everyone, but this is after after listening to the show and just the caliber the level of research and investigation that you have done here. One of my one of my big questions is why now, like why this moment in time do we get the answer for who killed JFK.
Well, I think again, it goes back to right now we're seeing the potential end of American democracy and if people don't think that that could happen, we're seeing it right now and fold in front of our very eyes. And what we need to do is be honest and
truthful with the American public. We have a lot of things that we've done wrong in this country, you know, starting with what we did to Native Americans, then what we did to black people who were slaves for so many hundreds of years, and we have to come to grips with all this stuff in order to make a more perfect union. The people who started this country there
weren't you know, they didn't know everything. They you know, Jefferson had slave, they had slaves, but they did provide us with a working document that could make us better, that we could keep doing what we need to do to make us better to form a more perfect union. So we have this opportunity, and the only way we're going to forge a more perfect union is to level with people to say this is the truth, this is true,
and this is not true. And we're living at a time where it's very, very hard to get the truth out because we're loaded with the information. You know, you see on TikTok they come out with all of a sudden. Ben Laden is saying something and it's amplified on TikTok, and then everybody jumps on that, and you go, no, that's not right. You don't kill people because you don't believe in their ideology, or you don't like Jews, or you don't like Muslims, or you don't like black people whatever.
That's not making it a more perfect union. So that's why we want to do this. We we want to put try to keep putting us back on the right track.
You know, it's funny Rob that, like, my kid is fifteen and just an absolute product of the Internet, much more than any other generation, where it was a fully formed thing by the time they, you know, were of age and just using it from as early as they can remember. But my kid very much understands the idea of vetting information that they're presented with, you know, the idea of being the arbiter of good information well time people.
True, hats off to your kid, man, because most kids, from what I understand, and I just was at the symposium where they talked about the dangers of AI and and and the genius or are working on AI, they don't know how to control it. They don't have the single foggiest idea of how to regulate it. And what they say is a lot of young people will look at something informationally on on social media. They'll read the headline and then they'll go to the comments.
I was hoping of the generation. Yeah, maybe it's maybe it's not. Maybe my kid is no similar their peers, but well, I.
Mean thinking, you know, like I say, hats off to your kid, because I mean, if he's really you know, studying this and figuring in trying to figure out what's true and what's not true. Then hats off to them.
I was just hoping that it was maybe indicative of the generation, but your research seems to say otherwise. But who knows, you know, every individual is different, So yeah, yeah.
Hey guys, I just want to articulate to everybody listening into you, Rob, why I am so excited that you are one of the minds behind this project. And it has to do with how your brain functions because of what because of the way it's functioned in the past, simultaneously focused on the macro and the micro. Just see if I can get this out so I can ask you the question. So, if you go back to the fall of nineteen ninety one and you put yourself on that bridge when you began filming a few good men.
If you're you are overseeing the creative vision of this project, so that means like having that overview feel right while micro not micromanaging, but keeping yourself focused on the micro thousands of decisions that go into getting one shot right. But you're also a producer on that project, which means you are getting to see kind of the stuff that happens behind the scenes that allows the filming to begin.
Even how do you think those experiences over all of these years shape the way that you've looked at this assassination as some kind of set of machinations potentially, You.
Know, that's a perfect summation of how I approach things. It's exactly how I do it. You know, as a director, I do have to see the overall big picture. I have to see what that looks like. And at the same time, I know that these little specific details are what make up that big picture. So you look at it and you say, does that make sense? Does that not make sense? I'm somebody who I love puzzles. I like to do puzzles. I like to figure out how
does something work, how do those pieces fit together. I'm not just jigsaw puzzles with crosswords and Sudoku and all of those kinds of things. So I do look at things in a macro way, but then I also look to individual little fine points and does that make sense? Does that fit? Does that piece fit into that puzzle? Or is that and maybe it does and maybe the puzzle goes in a different direction. A lot of times you look at something and you have a certain predisposed
idea as to what something will be. But then all of a sudden, the thing will tell you that it isn't, that it's something else. And then you have to be open minded enough to go down the road of where that's leading you. And so you go down all these rabbit trails to find out what and then eventually the puzzle comes into shape and you see what it really is.
And I've been at this particular puzzle for sixty years, and it wasn't until I met a number of different people who started filling in pieces and certain things that I thought, hmmm, that's not maybe true. But then when I started putting it all together with all the information that I had, I went, Okay, I get this now when we lay it out at the end of this podcast, I can't tell you one hundred percent for sure that these were the four shooters and that these were the
four positions we're in. I just gave something away spoil or alert. But I can tell you the best educated guests, based on all the information that's been provided, the one thing I know one hundred percent for sure it was a conspiracy. There's no question about that. There is no question about that. This man Learvy Oswell did not do what they said he did. Did not happen that I know for a fact. Other than that exactly how it
was put together. I can offer you what I think happened, and then you know, we hopefully it'll spawn more discussion.
And that I think is our button, that is that is leading us to the rest of the story of rob. Thank you so much for your time. We're not blowing smoke when we say that this truly is, at least in my opinion, a top notch, top caliber investigation, connecting things in a way that they have not been connected before,
to the point about puzzles. And you're taking on this herculean task right of unraveling an official narrative that was forced upon the American and global public for more than half a century, interrogating claims that have for so often and for so long not been given the scrutiny that they deserve. We are, as we said earlier, right there with everybody listening. We're tuning in as you answer the
question who killed JFK. And you know, usually at the end of these conversations we ask a question that feels kind of odd to ask a creator of your stature, but where.
What's your favorite color? What's your favorite color? What are I is there?
I guess the way to to make this a little more bespoke is, sir, is there a way for people to reach out to you and your team if they, like Paul Landis, have additional information that might help us out.
I mean we you know, it came out through it's being released through iHeartRadio, and there's a team there that can field information. Listen. By the way, I'm seventy six years old, and you know, I'm the last, maybe the last generation alive that will present this, and I'm sure that there's going to be a lot more information down
the road that's going to come out. Like I say, almost five thousand documents are still being witheld, so we I'm hoping that we can keep this alive long enough for all of us to find out the exact truth.
I gotta add really quickly, it looks like you're the exact same age as Stephen King. This obviously loomed very large for him as well. Yeah, eleven twenty two sixty three. You know, we talked about comedians and satirists and science fiction and stuff. So many amazing ways that folks like that who maybe you wouldn't immediately think can really shed light on this stuff. I learned a lot of this stuff from that book, and a lot of it is
historically accurate. Of course it's a work of fiction, but you know the yeah, same exact date, So no wonder this is something that has been on his mind in the same way.
Yeah, maybe you're ourginary if you were eleven, but you never ever, ever will forget that where you that moment and how it affected you. It won't.
It doesn't stand by me too, didn't you didn't direct stand by me?
Well? I did direct stand by me. I also directed misery, which was a standard, and you're so buried in your output.
I got heet sometimes your castle Rock.
We did seven Stephen King books. Yep.
If we didn't even talk about LBJ from twenty sixteen and incredible.
Yeah, we also talk about oh, so many things, the conversations LBJ had in the wake of things Hoover. The list goes on and on, and we're telling you, folks, the best way to get these answers. Anytime you are hearing this conversation and you think, oh, Robin, the guys didn't get to this point. We promise you tune in to Who Killed JFK? And let's keep to your point, mister Reiner. Let's keep the story alive every Wednesday. You know what a time, folks. We are super excited about
Who Killed JFK. It really is as I said earlier, it really is a top notch investigation. And my only regret is that we didn't get to everything. But I am pretty confident that Robin Solidad are going to get to most things in this one.
Oh yeah, the level of detail in that show is astounding. You know, it's a weird line. Sometimes when we do an episode like this, we're promoted, like in a way promoting a show, right, but we're just having a conversation with someone talking about these topics. But just this show man, it's intense.
And also just to have someone who's as much of a legend as Rob is, and I think we're all fans of various facets of his work, and you know, it's one person who can truly say is a gentleman and a scholar and a legendary director and humanitarian and just.
An overall good guy.
I think we were all blown away by his candor and generosity and just Wow, I'm still kind of reeling from that.
And as Rob would say, the puzzle continues, the mystery unfolds. He gave us some light spoilers. We would like to hear your thoughts, folks on what they rightly call the greatest murder mystery in the history of the United States. Let us know. We try to be easy to find online.
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