"Shots Have Been Fired"

What you're about to hear is one of the most incredible stories I've ever heard, and it's going to be getting quickly. So let me first introduce myself. I'm Solidad O'Brien. I'm a journalist. A few months ago, the film director Rob Reiner called me and he asked me what I knew about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a crime that happened sixty years ago. I told him I thought I knew the story. It turns out I don't.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history. I was sixteen years old when it happened, and it has never left me. In order to understand the magnitude of this world changing event, you have to start at the end of the story.

That's Rob. He knows a thing or two about telling a good story. He's the creative powerhouse behind movies like The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, stand By Me, and Spinal Tab.

That's just to name a few.

John F.

Kennedy was president at a time when the world was on the brink of nuclear war, and he tried to put us on a path towards peace.

I wasn't even born when this happened, but the way Rob tells it, it's like it just happened, because, in a way, it's a story that's not over.

In order to understand what really happened on November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, we're going to start at the end of the story with a paunchy, middle aged nightclub owner.

His name is Jack Ruby.

Ruby is wandering through a crowd in a parking garage.

I'm looking at a photo of this moment, I'd probably be thinking who is this guy?

I mean, he doesn't look like he's a cop or a reporter.

And it's not just any parking garage.

It's the parking garage of the Dallas Police headquarters. Hundreds of reporters are gathered to photograph Lee Harvey Oswald, the ex marine who is suspected of assassinating President John F. Kennedy, on a street in Dallas in broad daylight. Oswald is being moved to the county jail, and Ruby is there to witness it, or so it seems.

Oswald appears.

The police are escorting him down a hallway toward a car that will take him to the county jail where he'll wait for trial. The trial where America will finally get an answer to the question who would want to kill the President of the United States. Oswald is in handcuffs, He's flanked by officers. Ruby weaves his way to the front of the crowd. People at the station know Ruby officers would often come to his local club, so Ruby is able to easily position himself just a few feet

Oswald crumples to the ground.

One of the policemen who recognizes Ruby says, Jack, you son of a bitch.

The entire incident is caught on live TV. Americans around the country watch stunned as the man suspected of killing their beloved president is himself murdered. It's astounding, and I just have to ask, Rob, you were watching this live?

I was, and like the rest of the nation, I was in shock. I had so manyquestians who was Oswald? Did he actually kill the president?

And why? Why would Ruby, a local nightclub owner take it upon himself to kill Oswalt.

I know Jack Ruby says he did it because he wanted to spare Jackie Kennedy the grief of returning to Dallas for Oswald's trial.

Right and the sun sets in the east. Knowing what we know about Jack Ruby's mob connections, that is ridiculous. To understand what Ruby was doing, all you have to do is listen to what Oswald said the day before he was shot. It comes down to this one sentence, and he said it to the press, and it's been over sixty years and you cannot get that sentence out of your head.

I'm just a patsy. Usually criminals will say you got the wrong guy. But a patsy exactly.

A patsy is a pawn who takes the fall for somebody else. It this way, if Oswald is a patsy, when he goes to trial, he's going to reveal who set him up. Jack Ruby was there to silence Oswald, to hide the truth about what really happened and who really assassinated the president.

That leaves me with so many questions.

It should when you think of Ruby as a loose thread and you start to pull on it, others come loose.

Okay, for sixty years you've been pulling at those threads. But there have been lots of investigators, lawyers, journalists who've come to conclusions. You don't think conclusions means case closed.

I don't.

And in this podcast, I'm going to tell you why.

This is who killed JFK sixty years later? What can we uncover about the greatest murder mystery in American history? And why does it still matter today? I'm your host, Solidad O'Brien. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the youngest president in US history when he took office in nineteen sixty one. He was also the youngest US president to die when he was killed by an assassin's bullet almost three years later on November twenty second, nineteen sixty three. He was

And here is the President of the United States. How the crowd is after they're going wild?

The President in very obvious good spirits, and the President and his wife are going to be visible all through Dallas.

I think we all know this story Kennedy was riding in an open car motorcade through the city of Dallas. It was time to start campaigning for reelection, so he rode in the back of a convertible with his wife Jackie by his side, before an adoring crowd.

President's card now turning onto Element Street, and it appears as though nothing has happened in the motorcade route. Something I repeat, harp happened and the motorcade route park and Hospital has been a by then by the bear guns got boon.

We all know what happened because a man named Abraham Supruder, a local Dallas dressmaker, filmed it all on his eight millimeter camera. In the film, we see the motorcade entering Daily Plaza just before twelve thirty in the afternoon. Suddenly the president is shot in the neck. Seconds later we see the fatal shot.

To his head.

Then the President's limousine races to Parkland Hospital.

Kennedy apparently got ahead.

He fell fate down in back seat of his.

Car the flash Apparently official.

President Kennedy died at one pm Central Standard.

Time, approximately seventy minutes later. Lee Harvey oswae Xus Marine is arrested at a movie theater. I think I have about as much knowledge of this case as the average person, which is the basic Oswald kills Kennedy, Ruby kills Oswald, and then there are like a hundred theories trying to answer why. Sixty years later, we all still want to know why. How old were you when Kennedy was assassinated.

I was sixteen, and like everybody else, I remember exactly where I was when I heard. I was in my physics class in high school. I remember one of the students walked in whispered in the ear of my physics teacher, and he turned to the class and he said, I have some terrible news. They sent us all home from school and we turned on our televisions and we watched non stop. It felt like we lost our father. It's stunning, and you have to understand that we all heard that

At the same time.

So now you have a country of you know, one hundred and seventy million people at the time. I can't remember exactly all experiencing something at the same time. It's not like it was thrown up on social media and repeated over and over, and people saw it at different times. It is a profound collective trauma. In nineteen sixty five sixty six, the war in Vietnam was ramping up. Kennedy had talked about getting us out of Vietnam.

I was of draft age.

So my generation got very upset by what had happened to Kennedy because it directly impacted us, and so we really started distrusting the government. There was a phrase an expression that we had during that period, and it was never trust anybody over thirty.

I've noticed that people always seemed to frame the murder of JFK as the moment Americans started distrusting the US government. So, as someone who's not white, I can tell you people of color had plenty of reasons not to trust the government long before Kennedy died. When this happened, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, black people were already speaking about systemic oppression at the hands of government. Young white men may have started distrusting the government because now

Well, I maybe. I was nineteen at the time. I was performing at a club in San Francisco. It was called The Hungry Eye with my friend Larry Bishop, who was Joey Bishop's son, and we were opening for Carmen McCrae, now mort Saul, who was a brilliant political satirist. He was playing in the smaller room at the club, and so when we would finish our set, we'd go and listen to him and more. You know, at that time

The Warren Commission refers to the government's official story, which was published in nineteen sixty four following a ten month investigation into what happened on that day in Dallas. They declared Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, that he killed the president with shots from a rifle he fired from the sixth floor of a building called the Texas School Book Depository, which overlooked the president's passing motor cade. I know about the Warren Report because that's what I was taught in school.

You're right, I mean, there's a lot to sift through, and it wasn't until twenty fifteen. I was making a film LBJ with Woody Harrelson, and the producer Matt George, introduced me to Dick Russell. Now, Dick Russell wrote a book called The Man Who Knew Too Much, and after one conversation with Dick, all the pieces of the puzzles started to fall into place.

The Man Who Knew Too Much is about a CIA agent named Richard case Nagel who knew Lee Harvey Oswald. Dick Russell was a sportswriter in nineteen seventy five when he stumbled upon Nagel, and since then Dick's written three books about the sassination of JFK, making the investigation one of his principal beats as a journalist. Rob shared his fascination and after that one conversation they became a team.

So we went to Dallas. We visited Dally Plaza, and we talked to as many people as we could who were still alive that were there that day. I talked to bul Frasier, who was a guy who drove Oswell to work that day. We talked to forensics experts, We met with CIA asset named Tosh Plumley, who flew CIA agent E Howard Hunt and mobster Johnny ROSSELLI to Dallas that day and was positioned on the south knoll of Daily Plaza when the shots were fired. We tried to cover, as they say, the waterfront.

Those are all names that will make sense later in the series when we dive into the mystery of it all, But for now, Rob invited me to sit down with him and Dick Russell.

You know, Dick, I'm always.

Interested in helped people's obsessions be again. Is it wrong to say that you've had an obsession about this assassination? Yeah?

I think it's absolutely true. I mean I have had an obsession with it for many years, and in the mid nineteen seventies, when I was living in New York and freelancing for a lot of different newspapers and magazines, I spent pretty much two full years on this trail. It was in nineteen seventy six, but a Senate committee headed up by Idaho Senator Frank Church exposed a trove of CIA secrets that prompted the formation of the House

What do you want people to walk away from this podcast with?

I want the American people to know the truth, to be presented with all the facts, and that those facts will lead them to only one conclusion.

This was a conspiracy.

And if people don't know the truth about their government, the foundation of our democracy starts to crumble.

So the reason that we're here, the reason that you are doing this is you want the truth.

Yes, I want the truth, And to contradict a character in a film I directed, I think we can handle the truth.

So I guess I would say I'm doing something a little bit different here. I'm sort of taking off my journalist's hat for this one, because you're really the one who's done so much of the reporting on this story, and I'm going to let you lead me in this journey pushback where I think I need to push back, But largely I guess I'm trying to understand your point of view.

So I guess we start with the biggie, who do you think kill JFK.

Like any murder mystery, you start with the suspects who had the motive. To answer that, you have to understand that the JFK that was murdered in nineteen sixty three was a completely different JFK than the one who was elected in nineteen sixty. When Kennedy was running for president in nineteen sixty, we were in the throes of the Cold.

War with the Soviet Union. The stakes could not be higher.

To understand that time, Rob suggested we talk to John Meacham. He's a historian and a Pulitzer Prize winner, and he talks to us about what it was like back in nineteen sixty when the nation was paralyzed by the looming threat of nuclear war with Soviet Russia.

The fear was, and it was an ambient fear, that a small war, a small conflict one place, could be lead to a chain reaction where there would be total war that would be planet wide. The images we all have in our heads we have in our heads for a reason. Kids weren't getting under desks to practice in the event of a nuclear holocaust.

Was it terrifying as a kid? I mean, were the kids like panicking when there were those drills?

Yeah, it was terrifying.

This is the time that we were born in the whole idea of the domino theory that if one country went communist, another would go and then another and we'd be overtaken by the Soviet Union.

So then, John, did that existential anxiety lead to kind of a fervor against communism, almost to the point like that, you know, someone could be seen as a trader if they weren't against communism enough.

That's the motive force of McCarthyism.

McCarthyism comes from Congressman Joe McCarthy in the early nineteen fifties. He pioneered this atmosphere of fear in the US that communists were everywhere. Your neighbor could be a communist, your child's teacher could be a communist. People said, better dead than red. That's what things were like when Kennedy started to become a national figure.

When John Kennedy runs for president in nineteen sixty, he wants to be sure that the Democratic Party is seen as as tough on communism as the Republican Party.

I can remember the central question of the debate was could Kennedy in his youth stand up to Nixon and show his bona fides in terms of fighting communism?

Robi're Wright, the question was, what are you going to do about Cuba? In nineteen fifty nine, the Cuban Revolution had broad Castro to power, Batista had fallen. Suddenly you had the pos ability of what would emerge as a communist country ninety miles off the coast of Florida.

As an American of Cuban descent, I'll say that it's impossible to overstate the importance of Fidel Castro's communist Cuban Revolution in this moment in history. That put Cuba in alignment with the Soviets, which scared America, considering the island was only ninety miles off the coast of Florida. The Cubans, who were anti Castro and anti communists fled to the

Any misstep towards Cuba could have resulted in an all out nuclear war.

And people wanted to note, was Kennedy up to the job.

I do not shrink from this responsibility. I welcome it. Let every nation know, whether use us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, there any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, op post any foe to.

Assure the survival and the success of liberty.

Prior to Kennedy taking office, the Eisenhower administration planned a secret attack on Cuba called the Bay of Pigs, and the objective was simple.

Go into Cuba, start a revolution, toppel Castro, and bring Cuba back on side, if.

You will, with the free world.

The key to the Bay of Pigs was to make it look like this was solely expatriate Cubans and that the Americans had no involvement.

Turns out, the Cuban people were not sitting around waiting for a bunch of exiles to come and do.

This, just the opposite.

People still talk about the Bay of Pigs today because of how much of flaming failure it was. Here's what ended up happening. When the Cuban exiles invaded the island, they were met with a fierce defense from Cubans on the ground.

The CIA had urged Kennedy to send air support, but Kennedy he told them before the attack there would be no US fingerprints on this operation. And with no US air support, the exiles were left stranded and they were slaughtered. And now you got to remember, Kennedy inherited the Bay of Pigs from the previous administration. He had only been in office for about three months, and he went along with the wishes of the CIA to show you how

He felt betrayed, he felt stabbed in the back, disappointed, and disenchanted.

Publicly, he took full responsibility for the failure, but privately, after the Bay of Pigs, people heard him say that he would splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. The CIA didn't know that he wanted to tear them apart, but they would soon.

Rob said that if we were doing a podcast about JFK, we've got to talk to the guy behind the independent blog jfkfactx dot org. Since twenty twelve, Jefferson Morley has published a new development to the story nearly every single day. It's where a lot of JFK investigators go to get their information. Morley takes the fire hose of information and distills it into digestible bites. In another life, he reported on the CIA for the Washington Post.

Kennedy and the CIA were very alienated after the Bay of Pigs, and he eventually gets rid of Alan Dulles.

When you look up Alan Dulles, the guy has a nickname the Godfather of the CIA. He was the first civilian director of the CIA. He had close ties to the oil industry, the finance industry. President Kennedy fired him after the Bay of Pigs disaster.

Then comes to Cuban Missile crisis. From CIA surveillance planes discover the Soviet missiles are being installed in Cuba.

So this risk between the CIA and the president is happening in the backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis YEP.

After the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy's relationship with the Soviet Union grew hostile. The Soviet threat was becoming much more direct and Khrushchev was not happy about the Bay of Pigs and A year later, pictures surface that show that the Soviets are installing nuclear missiles in Cuba.

They bring the pictures to Kennedy. He's in his bedroom on the second floor of the White House.

That's John Meacham.

He's having breakfast. They bring it to him, and the first thing he says is how could they do this to me? He calls Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, who says, with great Ciceronian eloquence, sit, shit, shit, the sons of bitches Russians.

A few days later, the President shares the news with the nation.

Good evening, my fellow citizens. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western hemisphere.

That moment must have seemed surreal. It was unbelievable nuclear missiles fired from Cuba could reach Washington in like twenty minutes.

The President then convenes something called ExCom, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council. Every possible decision maker would be in the West Wing more or less around the clock for thirteen days.

Behind closed doors, the conversations between various advisors and military leaders get very heated and dangerous. The military leaders saw the opportunity that they had been waiting for to invade Cuba and make sure that the Soviets understood the superiority of the United States.

General Curtis LeMay is there.

He's the cigar chompiing sort of slim Pickens guy from Doctor Strangelove. At one point he looks at the young president and says, you're in a hell of a fix, mister President. And Kenny says, what did you say? And LeMay repeats it, You're in a hell of a fix, mister president.

There was a strict division forming.

There were fifteen people in favor of immediate attack, and there were nine in favor of some kind of diplomacy track.

Here's Jefferson Morley again.

The majority of those people in that first week said just attack missiles, destroy them, invade, throw out Castro, and let's get this thing over with. And Kennedy was in the minority.

Kennedy was frightened that he was hours away from having to push the button in a war that would have killed hundreds of millions of people.

I call upon Chairman Khrushow to haul and eliminate this clandestine, reckless and provocative threat to world peace and the stable relations between our two nations.

Kennedy writes a letter directly to kruz Job that's dick. They have been writing letters to each other since Kennedy took office. The letters started out as diplomatic, but with the start of the Cuban missile crisis, they take on a new tone. In the midst of the crisis, Khrushchov writes Kennedy back, saying quote, we must not succumb to intoxication and petty passions. I have participated in two wars, and I know that war ends when it is rolled

It almost feels like these letters are a way for them to see clearly the one thing that they have in common. Right, they're both standing in a room with people they don't trust. I think Kennedy understands that, just like him, kruse Ship also has a military apparatus that's ready to take nuclear action, and maybe that's what neither of these leaders really want.

Ultimately, the way we got out of it was through compromise. Through negotiation, we agreed to remove the missiles from Turkey. Khrushchev agrees, He stands up to his own hardliners in Moscow and agrees to take the missiles out of Cuba.

And Kennedy begins to rethink the Cold War, and he goes from being a pretty conventional Cold War politician to saying, we got to end this thing. We need a strategy for peace.

It's not nostalgic to say that the Kennedy of sixty one was not the Kennedy of sixty two, and that Kennedy of sixty two was not the Kennedy of sixty.

Fe Kennedy gave a speech at American University in June of sixty three is now known as the Peace Speech, and it marks his transformation from cold warrior on the campaign trail to a peacemaker who is blazing his own path.

I have therefore chosen this time in place discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived. And that is the most important topic on Earth, peace for in the final analysis, our most basic common link here's that we all inhabit this small planet.

The speech was so influential that it even reached the Soviet Union, where was translated and broadcast across the country. Khrushcheff called it quote the greatest speech by any American president since Roosevelt. Kennedy plans to pull a thousand troops out of Vietnam. He drafts a plan for complete military withdrawal by nineteen sixty five. He issues a limited ban on nuclear testing, all part of a comprehensive plan for

The national security leadership in general was disturbed by Kennedy's handling of the missile crisis. The Joint chiefs were furious, and the opposition within the CIA was the most bitter and virulent in the CIA station in Miami. Castro remained in power, which the Joint chiefs regarded as intolerable.

And Castro was public enemy number one to the United States.

He was.

Now let's jump forward to November fifth, nineteen sixty three. Now this is one year after the Cuban missile crisis and two weeks before Kennedy gets shot. Atwood was a deputy US ambassador in the Kennedy administration, and he gets a secret invitation from none other than Fidel Castro. Castro wants to talk to Kennedy about the potential of a peace agreement between the two countries. Now listen to how

About the Cuba initiative.

So Kennedy is backchanneling with Khrushev and now planning to do the same thing with Castro.

Right he's out on his own.

He's trying to find a path to peace, the complete opposite of what the CIA in the military wanted. So Kennedy leaves a note on his desk. Then he departs the White House for a campaign trip to Dallas. The date is November twenty second, nineteen sixty three.

President and his wife are going to be visible all through Dallas.

President cards now turning onto Elm Street, and it appears to something has happened in the motor Kate route. Something I repeeve hall happened in the motor Kate route.

Kennedy apparently got him head. He fell the down in back seat of his car.

The flash apparently official.

President Kennedy died at one pm Central Standard time.

Christ Jeov's son Sergei wrote in his memoirs that when his father heard the news, he fell to his and sobbed, and all over Russia the church bells were ringing. In JFK's memory. Right after the President's funeral, Jackie Kennedy sat down to write a letter to Nikita kruz Job.

Jackie writes, So, now, in one of the last nights I will spend in the White House, in one of the last letters I will write on this paper at the White House, I would like to write you my message. I send it only because I know how much my husband cared about peace, and how the relation between you and him was central to this care. He used to quote your words in some of his speeches. Quote in

So I guess my.

Next question is how in the world would the potential conspirators be able to pull something like that off.

Well, like so many political stories, it's all about the cover up.

Next time on Who Killed JFK?

I came away with the feeling that agencies of the United States government have an interest in preventing a full investigation.

We explore why so many Americans question the official investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy.

That's the shot that blew off his head. It's an as the horrifying thing I've ever seen.

Who Killed JFK is hosted by Rob Reiner and me Solidad O'Brien. Our writer is David Hoffman, with research by Dick Russell. Our story editors are Rob Reiner and Julie Pignero. Our senior producer is Julie Pinneto. Our producers are Tristan Nash, Dick Russell, Michelle Goldfein, and Amari Lee. Our editors are Tristan Nash, Julie Pigneto, and Marcus de Laudo. Our project