HellwQrld Presents: "Who Killed JFK? Lee Harvey Oswald" Episode #8: Inside Rob Reiner there are two Lee Harvey Oswalds
This week Rob and Soledad explain that Oswald knew the President was going to be killed but all he did about it was eat lunch with no witnesses. That seems a bit odd. Also Rob handwaves away Oswald bringing a large bag to work and the murder of Officer J.D. Tippit cause actually digging into those things makes Oswald look really guilty. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
I am joined as always by Haley, aka Arizona Right Watch.
Hello, everybody.
This is the episode where you definitely learn that Oswald definitely did it.
That's definitely a normal thing that Reiner's going to present in this episode.
It is.
This is the strangest episode because Reiner's theory about what happened to Oswald that day is so powerfully incoherent, I cannot wrap my head around it.
It is the strangest story you could possibly tell because there's like two theories you can have about Lee Harvey Oswald's innocence when it comes to killing President Kennedy.
Theory number one is that he was just a doe-eyed knave who had no idea what was happening that day.
And then he gets railroaded by the government when they frame him for it.
This podcast absolutely opens by them being like, he wakes up not exactly knowing what he's a part of.
Like, wow, that's wild.
And that is such a, and the way they phrase that and all of it is so strange given the story that they tell, because they're indicating the other side of the story, which is the side of the story that Oswald is a part of the plot to kill President Kennedy, but the way they frame it is that Oswald's this incredibly tangential character.
That Oswald's like, there's rings where you have like this inner circle of the conspiracy, then like a layer beyond that, then a layer beyond that.
And Oswald might be on like the fourth or the fifth layer of the onion of the people that are trying to kill President Kennedy.
And that is such a strange thing to say about the guy that you're going to frame up for the job.
The fact that the guy you're going to frame has no idea he's being framed, and as a result, has to get incredibly unlucky for your frame to work.
Like, the fact that you're going to pin this murder on this guy requires him to just win a reverse lottery, where he just happens to do two things that are, they are essential.
He has to do these things, or your efforts to frame him for the murder of President Kennedy fall apart completely.
They don't work.
Literally, the conspiracy is exposed.
And Rob Reiner's telling of this story has it such that those two things just break the conspiracy's way.
The conspiracy just gets really lucky twice that Oswald just happens to do the two things that massively implicate him as the potential assassin of the president.
Number one is bring a large bag to work, which could contain the gun with which the president was killed.
And number two, Oswald just decides to, you know, take lunch on the second floor, or maybe the first floor, depending on which story of Oswald you hear.
Oswald decides to have lunch in a situation where he doesn't have witnesses that can verify his whereabouts during the assassination.
And Reiner's telling of this story Indicates that both of these things are just total happenstance.
Like Reiner doesn't even say that like, uh, the, the conspiracy that is getting ahold of Oswald, they don't tell him, yo, Lee, when you, when you go to work tomorrow, bring, bring a large bag.
Why?
Don't ask questions.
Just, just bring a large bag.
And by the way, when, when, when.
Gun shaped perfect bag, you know.
Yes.
Bring the gun size bag to work tomorrow.
Why?
Don't ask questions, Lee.
We're paying you good money not to ask questions.
Just do it.
Bring the large gun bag to work tomorrow.
And by the way, when the president's motorcade comes by, duck into a corner.
Hide away.
As a matter of fact, make sure no one can see you for like a half hour before the assassination.
Don't have anyone capable of placing you in a place that would exonerate you from murdering the president.
And Oswald just being like, it sounds good to me, boss.
Totally.
You guys are paying me good money to do whatever you're telling me to do.
There's no way this is a setup to frame me for the murder of the president.
You got it.
And, and Reiner doesn't even say that.
Reiner just literally says that Lee Harvey Oswald is horny for curtain rods.
That is Rob Reiner just straight-faced, no concern for how ridiculous it sounds.
Rob Reiner's just like, Lee Harvey Oswald needed some fucking curtain rods in his fucking boarding house, like you read about.
That man needed those curtain rods, and he needed them then.
Because this is the story they're telling us and Rob even admits this on the pot, which is, I was wondering how much incriminating stuff he would actually say about Oswald.
And he said way more than I thought he would, but this is such an indefensible and bizarre thing that Lee Harvey Oswald does where again, I've said this before on the pod, but I have to restate it.
He didn't live with his wife.
They were estranged.
He beat his wife.
Ruth Payne.
CIA connected Ruth Payne.
Ruth Payne.
Like practically first sentence again this episode.
Yeah.
He was like, uh, Oswald's wife Marita is living with Ruth Payne.
You remember that bitch?
Yeah.
Like, he hits her in the, like, first line.
Sorry.
Yeah, yeah.
Rena Oswald lives with Ruth Payne.
You remember Ruth Payne, the sellout.
You basically orchestrated the murder of President Kennedy.
She wanted to learn Russian.
She wanted to learn Russian.
That's suspicious.
That's sus.
That's, as the kids would say.
Oswald lives in a boarding house away from his estranged wife, who lives with CIA agent Ruth Payne.
And the way Oswald has lived his life ever since he got the job a month ago at the School Book Depository was, he goes back, he sees his wife on Friday, he drives, and then his buddy drives him back to the boarding house, back to work on Monday, and then Oswald lives at the boarding house from Monday to Friday.
Day before the President shows up, Oswald says to his buddy, Buell Frazier, hey, can you give me a ride to my wife's place?
And he's like, why?
And he's like, I need some curtain rods.
I'm getting some curtain rods.
And Buell Frazier's like, okay.
And then the morning of the assassination, Buell Frazier even says this, that like, usually Oswald would be walking towards me by the time I was ready, or he'd be getting close to my car by the time I was ready, or sometimes I would have to drive to Ruth Payne's house and honk the horn to get him to come out.
This Friday morning, Oswald is fucking chomping at the bit.
He shows up bright and early.
He's like, today's work day, huh, buds?
You guys work?
You guys ever, like, work early?
Sometimes it blows.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
It blows your head off.
He's making jokes like that the whole ride.
So today, unlike the normal days, Oswald is just there.
He's ready.
He opens the backseat of one of the back doors and throws his not-a-gun package into the backseat of the car.
And when Buell-Fraser asks him, Lee, what is the package?
And Lee says, it's curtain rods.
I told you that yesterday.
And Buell-Fraser's like, oh, okay.
And Buell-Fraser also stated that usually when they got to work, they would just sort of, like, lollagag their way in.
Today, Oswald grabs the package and, like, just beats feet.
He just flies ahead of Buell-Fraser.
He just—and Buell-Fraser just thinks nothing of it, because this was the dough-eyed 1960s, and you didn't think that my weird communist friend who broke protocol and went home Yesterday instead of normally when he does it on Friday, and then just shows up with a large package, throws it in the back of my car and runs into work with it.
None of that is sus.
There's no way.
He's like, time to kill this day.
And it's like, what'd you say, Lee?
And he's like, I mean, time to take on this day.
You know what I mean?
So.
Like, and Reiner, and the best part about this, this early part, is that Reiner is so aggressively dismissive of the bag.
He is!
It's not the right size.
Well, first of all, yeah, he just literally just has Buell-Fraser, like, verify that the bag was too small for the gun, which, again, But when you look at Frazier's testimony about the bag, his testimony is basically, I wasn't really paying attention to it.
You would probably not want to think that your work bro brutally murdered the president.
Like, so, yeah.
But when you look at Frazier's testimony about the bag, his testimony is basically, I wasn't
really paying attention to it.
Like, you're a workaday Joe at your job.
It's Friday.
You're not giving a fuck.
You just wake up and you're like, OK, I'm just going to put in eight fucking hours.
Shut the fuck up Friday.
Everybody knows.
Right.
Just get through these eight hours and I get to have my weekend.
I just get to chill.
I just get to finally, you know, have some time to myself.
So he's not really paying attention to the fact that his Like, work buddy is way too in it to win it this morning with his large bag or any of that shit.
So, but the other thing, Rainer, besides Rainer just saying, oh, the bag was too small, Rainer describes the bag as quote, unquote, a fascination amongst researchers.
Which is such a bizarre way to describe literally the most essential piece of evidence we have in the Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone conspiracy.
I mean, not in theory.
Because if Oswald doesn't have this bag, Oswald cannot have killed the president unless you're telling me that he got the gun from somebody at work or he had smuggled the gun into work earlier that week or something.
Oswald bringing the bag to work is a huge red flag.
And you would think that because this is so important that Reiner would be working incredibly hard to exonerate Oswald by doing a lot more work to discredit the bag than just being like, yeah, Buell-Fraser and his buddy measured their disassembled rifle and they're like, nah, bag was too small.
Couldn't have fit that.
It's like, Get experts, like, work on this.
Do a little bit more than just, like, saying, oh, yeah, the bag was too small.
But also just, uh, they said, like, the the the the package wouldn't have fit in the backseat of his car.
He said, like, that gun wouldn't fit in the backseat of his car, even broken down.
It's like, how fucking big is this gun?
What is this, like, a fucking cannon?
No, I think he was talking about the bag.
I think he said the backseat.
That'd be wrong, obviously.
But Like because one of the other things that I remember back in my days when I was like totally pilled was people like there was the interviews where Bill Frazier said that Oswald was holding the gun with like the palm of his hand at the bottom and the gun and the package was under his armpit on the other side and there and like people were saying that like if he held it that way it would be too small based on the size of Oswald and the size of the disassembled gun.
But they didn't even bring that up.
And again, that doesn't really fit the way Fraser describing Oswald like running ahead of him to get into work.
It'd be really hard to have this large package like wedged against your side between like your armpit and your palm as you're like just rushing to work like penguin walking.
So, um, Oswald, Oswald, the package is so important.
And again, Reiner is just like, it's a fascination.
And Solid Ed's like, did we ever find out what was in the package?
And Reiner's like, no, we never found out.
And Reiner has to say this because shockingly, there were never any curtain rods found at the Texas School Book Depository.
So like what Oswald claimed was in the package, The police never happened to find a package of curtain rods in it anywhere.
That's so weird.
But he said, but he said he brought some.
Right?
Yeah, I know.
So straight.
Lee Harvey Oswald telling a lie.
I don't believe it.
It is funny how much this episode I need to say this.
This episode is for the listener who shouldn't be listening to this and you I'm just going to give you the quickest summary possible.
This whole episode, Lee Har, Lee Har, The Oswald Innocent is the name of the episode.
It's not the actual name of the episode, but it's my name of the episode.
It's just a big, well, isn't that convenient?
Because here's actually why he's innocent kind of thing.
And hey, did you hear him say, um, I haven't shot a damn person right when he got arrested and I'm a patsy.
Why would he lie?
That's literally this episode.
It's like, but that's not.
I don't even know why he mentioned it.
He said like, oh, as soon as he got picked up, he's like, I haven't shot a damn person as if that's supposed to... I'm supposed to... This is just... It's just he's innocent the episode.
He didn't do it the episode.
It's a very weird episode all around.
He didn't kill Tippet.
According to him, according to Reiner, Tippett's murder is so mysterious, it's worthy of another, it's another series podcast, which he's probably going to do, I bet.
That felt like such a tease.
If he actually does that, oh my god, because the Tippett murder has so much more evidence against Oswald than even the Kennedy assassination does.
If he even tried to dig into Tippett, he would just, he would be so on the fringes.
He'd just be direct to crazy town.
Like, three of the bullets that were pulled out of Tippett were so deformed they couldn't be traced to a gun, but the fourth bullet was traced back to the revolver Oswald had on him when he was in the Texas theater.
So it's like, unless there were like two people shooting Tippett and the other guy was working with Oswald, or someone threw a gun at Oswald after the Tippett shooting, I mean, it's just, wow.
But yeah, we'll get to Tippett in a minute.
Because this episode is so strange, because you go through it piece by piece, and then you look at the overview of the episode, and the overview of the episode makes no sense.
Because as I was saying, you either have Oswald as an innocent knave, or you have Oswald as in on the plot, and Reiner wants him in on the plot, but as an innocent knave.
Which is so bizarre.
It makes no sense.
Because, like, most of the people that have Oswald in on the plot...
They generally put him in the sixth floor and they either have Oswald doing one of two things.
Either Oswald was in the sixth floor and he was told that he was like auxiliary protection, augmenting the secret service, that he was supposed to be in the sixth floor with his rifle out looking for threats.
And they knew that Oswald would not be able to figure out where the actual shooters were firing from.
And that just putting him in this, in that window was going to get him like framed up.
Or they go even bigger and bolder, and they tell Oswald, look, we know Kennedy's policy against Cuba is weak, and we don't like it.
What we want you to do is to fire a shot, but miss the president.
Afterwards, Kennedy will be so scared shitless after his near-assassination that we're going to be able to tell him, look buddy, you're pissing a lot of people off with how you're coddling Castro and the Communists.
You need to fucking man up and up your game or else things could go really bad.
Literally, they're going to give him the little Susie speech.
Yeah, your daughter's really sweet.
Be a shame if something were to happen to her.
Or, in this case, more like a direct threat on a nice presidency you've got there, Mr. Kennedy.
Be a shame if something were to happen to it.
And, like, that was, like, what Oswald's job was in those things.
And then Oswald, like, either fires his shot, or he's looking at the president, and then Kennedy gets murdered.
And then Oswald's like, Oh, shit!
Oh, shit!
Oh!
Oh, no!
They've double-crossed me!
Fuck!
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
And now he's fucked.
But in Reiner's telling of this story, Oswald, eh?
He says this in the episode, like, after the fact.
He's like, after the assassination, Oswald remembers that what Richard Case Nagle told him about his impending frame-up.
So, eh?
It's so funny!
He just knows.
He just realizes, oh shit, Richard Case Nagle was right!
Oh no!
And I just love that Reiner knows that.
He knows even what his frame of thought was in that moment.
Right, right.
There's a lot of assumptions going on.
He's like, this had to happen because of this.
He was clearly, it was clearly because of this.
And it's like, you don't know that because you can't ask him and there's no, now we can just say anything.
Now we're at the point where we can just say anything, you know?
We can just say anything we want about the guy because he's dead and he can't explain himself.
He can't rationalize his actions to us because that's what's awesome about dead people.
You can say anything on their behalf.
It's why Republicans are like, you know who was awesome?
Martin Luther King because he loved Republicans.
And it's like, no, Martin Luther King Jr.
did not love Republicans.
Shut up!
But you know, that was a thing that he was like getting so into the like frame of thought of what Lee Harvey Oswald was thinking.
I was like...
No, you can't, you can't know this.
You can't know.
He was like, oh shit, this is exactly what, this is exactly what Nagel, Richard Case Nagel told me.
This is exactly, I'm being framed, you know?
Um, like, and it's like, cause I just got to say it in this bit, Soledad tweeted, like, nobody can fact check our podcast.
And it's like, Um, you know, prove to me that that's what Lee Harvey Oswald was thinking in that time moment, in that moment, right there.
Yes.
So, and this is what's so... Prove to me a lot of the shit you said this episode, honestly.
Right!
But this is the thing that's like so dumb, is that they opened the episode with stating, they gave us the wedding ring and the money, which was like, I'm like, holy shit.
Like, that is a massive, massive indicator of Oswald's guilt.
That he takes off his wedding ring, and that he gives Marina, like, just a fat stack of cash on his way out the door that morning.
Oh yeah, and by the way, when he was talking to Buell Frazier about needing a ride back to Marina's house on Thursday, Frazier asked him, are you going to need a ride back to her place on Friday?
And Oswald said, no.
Which is, now, of course, if you want to be like, oh, Oswald just meant he was going back to the boarding house on Friday.
Or it's Oswald just being like, yeah, I'm probably not going to be going anywhere after Friday.
Probably going to get arrested for killing the president.
Don't worry about that one.
You don't have to worry.
Don't worry about that.
And that's just what's so strange about the start of this episode, is we have the foreknowledge of Nagel, and then Oswald does this weird thing with the wedding ring and the money.
And then, after the assassination, Reiner and Dick Russert basically tag-teamed to do this whole story about how Oswald is now freaking out, he's been framed, he's doing things that are quote-unquote obviously intelligence-based, he's looking for a contact at a predetermined meet-up location after the fact, and all this stuff.
So, before the assassination, he is freaking out.
After the assassination, he is freaking out.
But during the assassination, he's just in a lunchroom going, man, this PB&J is great.
I love it.
Oh, man.
I'm gonna go over to this vending machine and get myself a Coke.
So he knows that Nagel said he's going to be set up to be framed for the president's assassination.
He is so weirded out that he's leaving his wife piles of money and the wedding ring.
But when the president is about to get into his line of sight, he doesn't think for a moment.
You know, I'm really freaked out right now, and I remember what Nagel told me, and I personally think, like, something is rotten in Denmark.
Something is going on here, but...
I'm not going to do anything to cover my ass.
I'm not going to do anything to protect myself in case something bad were to happen here.
I'm not going to just walk out with a bunch of my coworkers and watch the motorcade.
And literally all of us are just standing in front of the school book depository.
And then after something happens to the president, I can just look at them and be like, Hey, uh, the five of you, I was, I was standing right here with you when this happened.
Right?
Right.
But the conspiracy falls apart if Oswald isn't alone eating lunch and has no witnesses to back him up.
Which is why this is so ridiculous.
Reiner's story is so bizarre because if Oswald just goes out to watch the motorcade, This is all taken care of.
If Oswald doesn't bring the bag to work, this is all taken care of.
Like, literally, you are the poet's spy.
Joe Jesus Engleton.
And, like, after Kennedy gets murdered, like, you're somewhere in, like, the CIA, like, hot zone, whatever.
You're, like, in mission control.
And you're just like, Bob, Bob, are we sure Oswald was eating lunch alone?
Bob, are we sure he brought a bag to work?
And they're like, yeah, boss, we got the bag.
And Oswald did eat alone.
And you're just like, oh, thank God.
Oh, boy.
Oh, I was sweating bullets on that one.
Because if either of those two things didn't happen, we were screwed.
We were sunk.
And so, to me, you're just looking at this, and it's Occam's razor, where it's like, why is Oswald wigged out before the assassination?
Why is he wigged out after the assassination?
And why did no one see him during the assassination?
Because he did it.
Because he killed the president.
That's how you go from A to B to C. Not totally panicked, call a meeting of BB&J, totally panicked.
Reiner's story, oh my god, just the way he tells it, it's so frustrating because If you were that person, if you were the person tangentially tied to the CIA, who'd been approached by somebody, and that somebody told you, hey buddy, you're gonna be framed for killing the president, and you told that person to fuck off, for reasons that Rob never really explains, just like, Miguel never explains why Oswald tells him to go pound sand when he explains this to him.
Like, Oswald, he's like, no way, man.
My friends in the CIA are totally cool.
They'll never frame me for killing the president.
Okay, great.
It's like our industry is on the up and up, isn't it?
How dare you?
How dare you disparage my fellow man?
Yes.
How dare you disparage the good name of the CIA?
How dare you, sir?
How dare you?
And it's just that.
It's just that you have this story that makes no sense because If he had told the story, if he just left the wedding ring and the pile of money out of it, and all of that, and just literally made it Oswalt's calm, cool, and collected, then after the assassination he thinks something's up, like a nutball like me who actually knows this shit would bring up the wedding ring and would contradict that, but at least the narrative you told your podcasting audience would make sense, whereas the narrative you told them doesn't?
Because if Oswalt knows something's up, Why doesn't he do anything?
Why is he just working at work like it was any other day?
I thought something funky was going to happen.
And again, I've literally been told by my buddy who I was working with in the CIA in Japan, trying to get communists to defect to America.
Like, Oswald and Nagel were like war bros.
They were like intelligence bros, like working with the CIA to fight the KGB and shit.
Like, when my intelligence bro told me I'm going to be framed for the murder of the president, I blow him off and then the president is going to be literally within my line of sight two months later.
I just don't do anything.
I just like freak out, give my wife a pile of money, drop off my wedding ring, and then
just go to work.
And I was like, you know, maybe I was a little over emotional this morning.
Maybe I shouldn't have given that broad $170.
Maybe I shouldn't have put my wedding ring in that teacup.
Maybe I should just, you know, decompress, have a Coke, eat my PB&J, and just chill.
Boom, boom.
Oh no.
Oh no.
I didn't vlog.
Oh no.
I better now go conveniently close to another murder.
Right.
I now need to wander Dallas aimlessly.
Randomly be in the vicinity of where a cop gets killed.
What luck I'm having today!
Oh, what an unlucky day!
Oh, woe is me!
Oh, oh!
Just unlucky Lee Harvey Oswald.
Just one of them days when it rains before it snows.
One of those really bad days.
Really bad unlucky day for Lee Harvey Oswald.
I'm trying to have my Coke.
You're trying to drink your Coke and you're peaking your day, you're relaxing and the
next thing you know, something implicated in the murder of the president.
Oh my God.
And I never finished my story on the curtain rods, so when the reporters went to the boarding
house and took photos of Oswald's room, there were already curtains hung off of curtain
He did not need curtain rods in the boarding house.
The whole curtain rod alibi is bullshit.
And Marina and Ruth Payne both said that while Oswald was hanging out with them on Thursday, he never brought up curtain rods to them.
Never.
The whole thing is just so ridiculous.
And that's why Reiner just says, oh yeah, the bag was too small, we never found out what was in it, and the world will never know.
And just moves on very quickly.
He can't talk about it.
Just to talk about it is to really point to a massive indication of Oswalt's guilt.
And the other thing that he talks about, and Hayley brought this up, the other thing he glosses over very quickly is the murder of J.D.
Tippett.
He just, as Hayley said, he's like, this could be a whole other podcast, but the eyewitnesses are all over the place.
It's just, who knows?
We don't know.
And it's just, he just is so quick and just so hand-wavingly dismissive of Officer Tippett's death.
It's just, it's just crazy.
Because he knows that digging into Tippett's death will probably like, again, indicate Oswald's guilt.
So he has to just be like, and then this cop got shot.
Who did it?
Fuck if I know.
And then just boom, just on to the next chapter of the story.
Just move, move, move.
Because you have to bring up Tippett's death because it's a very famous part of the Kennedy assassination, but you can't dwell on it or else now you're screwed.
We went there.
Yeah.
We, uh, yeah, we drove by, uh, when, when I did my Hajj and I went to Dilly Plaza with Haley, we then did the full trip.
We went to the site of Tippett's murder.
We went to the, uh, the place where Tippett placed the phone call that he made right before he was killed.
And we did all that.
Top 10 records.
Top 10 records.
Yep.
I got a hat.
Yep.
You could have got some zines if you wanted.
They got zines there.
I think I did.
I got two.
I think I have those in my pile.
Yep.
It wasn't Tippett or JFK related.
They were just kind of artsy ones, but I did get a couple zines.
So shout out to the Dallas zine scene.
I see you.
I hear you.
Invite me to your zine fests.
Um, but, um, Yeah, that was cool.
And then we, because Reiner talked about how he's been to the theater.
Obviously, we haven't gotten that far yet, but he talked about how he had been to the theater and we went there and he, we didn't get, we didn't get so lucky to be able to see it despite how much time we spent in that area, because they opened very late.
Yeah, the JFK assassination tourism, except for Daily Plaza, which is just literally a street.
Daily Plaza is just open land, so you can just go there whenever you want.
But the rest of the Kennedy assassination tourism, they work on bankers' hours.
If you want to go to the Sixth Floor Museum, they have very strict, very limited hours.
I think the Sixth Floor Museum is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.
And they're basically open 9 to 5 every other day.
And they even say on the wall, the last ticket for entry is sold at 4.15 or something like that.
Because they know they got you.
They know that if you're going there, they know you're determined to see it because it's part of the Kennedy experience.
So they're like, yeah.
We don't make time for you.
You make time for us.
That's how this works.
So I mean, basically, I feel like everyone who goes there for a weekend or whatever, you probably go to the museum at like seven o'clock on Friday and then find out it's closed.
And then you have to go there during the day on Saturday to actually get to it because you're like, ah, shit.
What do you mean they're closed?
What the fuck?
It's just like, yep.
They also close off the gift shop behind all that.
And it's like, I just want to get to the gift shop.
I was here yesterday.
And they're like, do you have your ticket from yesterday?
And I'm like, no, but I was definitely here.
I have like 300 photos.
I can show you those to prove it.
And they're like, but do you have your ticket from yesterday?
And I was like, no, but I just want to get something for my mom.
And they're like, but do you have your ticket from yesterday?
And it's like, No!
I don't want to pay the 20 more dollars just to go to the gift shop to spend more money!
Why are you doing this to me?
And so I just didn't get anything else.
Right, they literally hate money.
They're like, we oppose capitalism.
We do not want you to give us more money.
like we we oppose capitalism. We do not want you to give us more
money. So yeah. But but that's just so we went to the Texas theater and they just were not open the two day and and
And even though we were there in October, which you would think is the fall, Dallas is just perpetual summer.
It is the hottest, muggiest, sweatiest thing.
It's so sweaty!
It's the most human city.
It's like literally, I don't know where the water is.
I don't, I mean, I don't know where the water is.
I know it's close to like the oceans cause it's like Texas and all, but holy smokes, it is just absolute precipitation.
1 million there.
It is just oppressive.
The moment I walked out of my hotel, every time it was just like, wham, just like you're just like walking through water.
You're just like, Oh God, like, Oh man, Dallas is so muggy at all times.
It is.
I was thinking about our trip so hard during this episode because Reiner kept saying, when he would mention the rifle, he would say it was the alleged rifle.
The rifle allegedly used.
And all it kept me, made me think of is the plaque on the... The carved up plaque.
You know, Rob Reiner's X-Acto knife did a few lines on that thing.
You know, you know, Rob was there going, allegedly, Mort Saul told me the truth and I'm gonna tell you the truth!
On the Sixth Floor Museum, listener, it's a historical landmark.
And like, it gives you like a little, I mean, it's actually pretty long little paragraph about the assassination and why it's a historical landmark.
And it says, allegedly, obviously, Because, you know, he kind of got a little bit murdered.
But the allegedly is so deeply carved out, like people just go to town on that thing.
So it's like even I got a magnet of that plaque in the museum and you can see it a little bit lighter, but in the magnet.
I love that.
I love that people do that.
They you know that they can never even if they wanted to.
Replace it.
I'm sure they have to fill it in every so often or else the word allegedly would literally just come out.
Like you would just be able to take the word allegedly out.
You've physically carved it out of the plaque.
So I'm sure they have to kind of like fill it in with more like iron every so often.
But there's no way that they go to the effort to replace that thing constantly because like by the next day that thing would be carved back into.
Like people have to be going to town on that thing constantly.
I was, I'm not sure if this is true, but I had heard that the city of Dallas would constantly remove the Murder X from the street, and then people would just replace it.
And eventually the city of Dallas just gave up and just let the Murder X stay there.
So it's just like...
It's a historical landmark.
It's part of America.
You go lean into it.
You need to have people like mean mugging and pointing.
I'll never forget like this one guy ran into the street but he ran to the double X where like the first shot hit Kennedy and Connolly and he thought he was in the right spot and then he realized he was in the wrong spot so he waited and ran over to the murder X and he gave like this big double point double down point like yeah!
I'm on the murder rags!
It was so funny.
I was like, oh my god.
We are a fallen people.
So this episode opens, actually going through it chronologically, after the teacup thing.
Kennedy sees the newspaper article that leads him to talking about how we're heading into nut country, and about how, you know, it'd be really easy to kill me.
Which, like, it's really funny that, like, Reiner talks about how Kennedy's in, like, this, like, devastating death battle with the CIA and all these other forces.
And yet Kennedy himself seems, like, really sort of like, you know, if I get whacked, I get whacked.
Thumbs the brakes.
Which, it's like, man, maybe, maybe, like, up your personal security.
Maybe don't do so many trips if, like, this is actually what's going on and the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
But hey, whatever.
And one other quick thing he says at the start is a Camelot has arrived in Dallas, which this was something that happened in the movie JFK as well, is that like right after Kennedy's death, one of the bad guys in the movie says, Camelot in smithereens.
And I find that annoying because the term Camelot just described the Kennedy administration.
Jackie came up with that like a week or so after the assassination, because like she was like trying to put a bow on her husband's time in office and put a positive spin on it.
She came up with Camelot after the fact.
People weren't calling it Camelot during his administration.
It was just after his death.
We were like, what can we say about this short-lived but brightly optimistic administration that we had here?
And that's where Camelot came from.
So a good call on Jackie with the branding there of her husband's administration.
Like that all happens.
And then, and then Reiner states, we've established that more than three shots were fired and not all from behind.
When did you do that?
How did you just literally statement without citation just directly?
I've already proved my conspiracy.
When, when did you do that?
Like, and this is, um, This is where episode 10 is so bad, because I actually have lots of episodes 9 and 10, and 10 is the most disappointing episode I've ever listened to.
And it's one of the most disappointing things I've ever listened to or watched in JFK conspiracy media, because Should I listen to 9 and 10 separately, or should they go together?
Separately, because they're totally not related at all.
Episode 9 is just literally all Jack Ruby, and then episode 10 is just, and now I reveal the truth.
I will tell you who killed JFK.
And then you just get nothing.
Like he's literally is just like, here are some names and they did it.
And then he just moves on to poor, poorly Harvey Oswald.
And man, if only Kennedy had lived, we would have had world peace.
Like he just literally names the assassins.
And then just, just again, just goes right onto the next point and I'm going to do my best.
We'll peek behind the curtain here.
Every now and then, when we're doing the regular three-man pod, I'll get on a jag, and while I'm getting on that jag, the mysterious El will yell at me, and his typical refrain is, keep it in your pants, Rockstar.
He'll just be like, save it for the pod.
Don't freak out.
Don't do this.
I have to save my critique of episode 10 for episode 10.
So basically that's what I'm doing.
I'm just going to keep it in your pants.
I'm going to keep it in my pants.
I will say though, just so the listener kind of understands this episode really does not for it being about the day of the assassination and Lee Harvey Oswald, it kind of feels like This is about to filter Lee Harvey Oswald out and now we're getting to the real story.
It really back-characters him in this.
It's kind of like, okay now we got over that character just like we got over the Angleton character and we got over the Nagel character and we got over Ruth Payne and we've established all these CIA pawns part of this greater story that we're about to tell you so we're done with the Lee Harvey Oswald and now because it ends now we get into we're going to get into Jack Ruby so it really does kind of feel like they're phasing him out of the story which it's like
And again, the episode was just like, he's innocent and isn't all this just... it's all just convenient that he was right here when two murders happened and did all this stuff that was just super connected to the murder.
So now it's time to end that character and move on to the real story.
This episode feels like a setup episode.
It's really weird.
Right, you would think that the main character of the assassination, other than the guy that got assassinated, would be the alleged assassin.
It's 29 minutes long.
Yeah, it's incredibly small.
It's one of the shortest episodes of the series.
And they just bang it out.
And basically, Oswald is just framed.
And that's it.
That's all there is to it.
And No fingerprints on the gun.
They made a big deal about that.
So what Haley's talking about here, this is a good jumping off point from that, is that Oswald is allegedly on the sixth floor, allegedly killing the president.
And when he's doing that, he is encountered by an officer named Baker.
And he's also encountered by Roy Truly, the superintendent who actually hired him, as I like to bring up, instead of Ruth Payne, CIA operative.
CIA-connected, very- CIA-connected Ruth Payne.
Yep.
Yep.
So, Oswald's encountered by them 90 seconds after the assassination on the second floor.
And this is the first major credible timestamp about where Oswald was after 1155.
Because at 1155, Charles Givens, an employee in the Texas School Book Depository, is with Oswald on one of the higher floors, either the fifth or the sixth floor.
And he asks Oswald if Oswald's going down to eat, and Oswald says no.
When you get to the bottom, pull the gate down, because the way the elevator contraption is set up is that when you pull the gate down, it automatically raises itself back up to the sixth floor.
So Gibbons is like, oh, okay, and does that for him.
And so we have that block of time between 1155 and then 90 seconds after the assassination.
So basically 1231 or so, where Oswald is unaccounted for.
And it is in that time that now we have basically Oswald's capable of pulling off the assassination.
But Oswald is met on the second floor by the cop and a supervisor.
And the Warren Commission and others have done reenactments of this.
They've had their Oswald stand in, like sneak out of the sniper's nest, and then run down the four flights of stairs and get to the second floor.
And they've been able to do it in under 90 seconds.
And Reiner and Russert are just like, but that doesn't count wiping down the gun and hiding it and blah blah.
And it's like, no, they did those things because those were part of the task that would have had to have been done.
The Warren Commission.
They were under a rock and a hard place here, between a rock and a hard place here, because this was public information that they couldn't avoid.
This was something that people knew about.
The supervisor and the cop were like, oh yeah, we ran into Oswald right after the assassination.
So they couldn't hide it.
They had to acknowledge it.
And it turned out that when they did the tests, and also Officer Baker, he reenacted his stop his bike, run into the book depository, Encounter Truly, go to the second floor, encounter Oswald.
And when they did that, timed out to about 90 seconds.
So both of these things could have happened and were plausible.
And this is the big problem, not only with just this episode, but with dealing with all the information and evidence about what happened in the moments after the assassination.
Because we're not even just talking minutes, we're talking seconds here.
We're talking about this incredibly small period of time where people aren't wearing iPhones.
They don't have an iPhone or a watch on them at all times where they have the exact time perfectly calibrated to know what it was.
There are not security cameras everywhere in every hallway or every building.
We just don't have all that kind of surveillance information that we would have nowadays.
And this leads to a lot of speculation and questions about what happened in those few minutes, because we have Trulian and Trulian Baker encounter Oswald, but then we also have Victoria Adams and Sandra, who's, I believe, I'm trying to remember her last name.
Sandra Stacey, I believe, but I took my notes.
I got to go look for my notes.
Sandra Stiles.
Sandra Stiles, yes.
So Sandra Stiles and Victoria Adams, they said they had left the fourth floor directly after the assassination, and they didn't encounter Oswald on the flights of stairs.
This is brought up in this podcast.
This is brought up in the movie JFK.
There is a book called The Girls on the Stairs that talks about this.
The problem with this situation is, again, we're dealing in minutes, and we just don't know when Adams was on the stairs.
We don't know when the two of them did this.
And as a result, Were they there exactly at that time or not?
Eddie Piper was an employee on the first floor after the assassination.
For whatever reason, he ran to a clock to see what time it was.
And then the next thing Eddie Piper saw was Truly and Baker running up the stairs.
When he was interviewed about it, they asked him, did you see Victoria Adams descending the stairs?
And he said, no.
James Romack and George Rackley were at the back of the Texas School Book Depository after the assassination and they stood there kind of like just frozen because they heard the shots from across the street and all that.
And Romack and Rackley's testimony was that they saw nobody leave the Texas School Book Depository by the rear entrance during those minutes after the assassination.
And Adams and Stiles said they left out the back of the of the depository after the assassination after they got down the stairs.
So those Piper, Romack, and Rackley's testimony would seem to indicate that Adams And Stiles had left later than not immediately.
But again, this is how you get into this quagmire of contradicting statements, of witnesses who saw one thing and another witness who saw a different thing, when we're literally arguing, when were these women on these stairs?
Was it 1231 or 1234?
You're arguing really tiny slices of time.
And that's what makes the Kennedy assassination so frustrating to deal with, is because if you want to build the counter-narrative to Oswald doing it, you can cherry-pick the witnesses you need to cherry-pick.
And a dude wrote a book about those two women being on the stairs!
I know!
I was like, man, every single, like, inch of this assassination has had a book written about it.
Right!
I mean, it was a scene in JFK that lasted five seconds.
And they made a book!
They made a fucking book about it!
It's like, this is the nature of it.
And this is the granular detail that these things get analyzed at.
But at the end of the day, if Oswald is on the second floor, and this is a quick episode 10 spoiler, but I mean, fucking whatever.
Episode 10, Chuckie the typewriter's on the sixth floor getting ready to kill the president.
Oh my god.
I love Chuckie the typewriter.
I know!
Chuckie the typewriter's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life.
But Reiner, in his conspiracy theory, does state there's a gunman on the sixth floor.
Which, like, how?
Where?
What?
No, Rob, no!
Like, how would this person get there with nobody seeing them?
How could a non-Texas School Book Depository employee walk into this Texas School Book Depository with a gun?
He's like, hey, I'm Tommy Two-Toes.
Let me in.
I'm Chucky the typewriter.
I'm here to fix your typewriter.
I'm totally not gonna get carried away with that one.
Oh, yeah.
Episode 10 is literally, our title for episode 10 is Chucky the typewriter whacked the president.
That's unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
Don't use that name.
Don't use that name for that guy.
Use his government name and just move along.
Do not call the murderer of the President of the United States, Chuckie the typewriter.
That is so silly.
I just, I don't care.
I don't care what the logic of it was.
Don't say it.
You just don't.
That'd be like saying, John Wilkes Booth, a.k.a.
Johnny Red Shoes, shot President Lincoln.
It's, what?
Why are we?
Oh my God!
What is wrong with you?
Leon Trollghost, also known as Leon the Lucky, leprechaun, laughing lunatune.
Oh my God.
No, no, no.
Don't give the President's assassin a dumb nickname.
It's incredibly silly.
But he just, And this is why the whole idea of Oswald being the guy you frame up is so bizarre, because he's in a building.
He's in a building of employees.
They all know each other.
They've all seen each other.
And you're having this assassin go to a high window in this building And somehow he gets into the building and then goes up six flights of stairs and gets to the sixth floor and no one notices this assassin.
And then after they kill the president.
Detective Baker is in the building almost immediately.
The Dallas police lock the building down within about 15 minutes after the assassination.
How does this guy think he's getting out of the Texas School Book Depository?
Wow!
If I'm Turkey the typewriter and my CIA handlers are like, okay, so you see this building with like, I don't know, like 50, 75 employees, whatever.
We want you to go in there.
We want you to go up to the sixth floor.
We want you to fire off a couple shots at the president and try to kill him.
And then we want you to get out of there.
And I would be like, are you having a laugh, mate?
Are you taking the piss?
What are you doing?
What do you mean, Gov?
Like, oh my God.
Like, what's going on here?
Like, I can't be on the grassy knoll, which is like literally just a pile of dirt.
I can just run over to this fence, shoot the president, and then run away or do this anywhere else.
I literally have to get into a corner window of the sixth floor of a building, crawling with people.
Like there's no, there's no way I won't get caught.
And they're like, yeah, shut up, whatever.
It's the strangest thing.
It is such a bizarre idea for a theory.
And so you have that.
And then Reiner doesn't explain why Oswald's packing his gun when the cops grab him.
He doesn't explain what Oswald drew on the cops.
I know.
He doesn't shoot him.
So I guess that whole scene is hilarious.
We didn't mention this part when we mentioned Tippett.
But the reason that the Reiner explains that the Tippett timing doesn't work made me laugh.
I had to click back.
Yeah.
He was like, well, the popcorn guy at the movie theater said that he saw Oswald at the time that Tippett was getting killed.
He doesn't name him.
He just calls him the popcorn guy.
And it's like, oh, well, for fucking goddamn fuck's sake, if the popcorn guy said that he saw Oswald, he was like, either the popcorn guy's time is off or someone else shot him.
And it's like, no.
So I have to.
Yeah, the popcorn guy's time is off.
Who gets any time to the exact minute in that moment in general?
And it's like, you don't even assign the guy a name, you just call him Popcorn Guy.
And it's like... That's what's...
It really goes to show how desperate you are that you don't want people to fact check what you're saying when you literally describe your expert witness who's going to discredit Oswald killing Tippett as the popcorn guy.
You're not actually going to dig into who they are and if they're credible about the timing of Oswald's arrival in the Texas theater.
I'm going to quote this exact.
Alright, so this is what Reiner says.
The Popcorn Guy.
The Popcorn Guy testified that this was at 11.15pm, but we know Tippett was killed at 1.15pm, but we know Tippett was killed at 1.16pm.
So either Oswald didn't kill Tippett or the Popcorn Guy is way off on his time.
That's what he says!
So the Popcorn Guy is way off on his time.
Why do I have?
Yeah, that's what happened.
That's what happened.
Like, you want me to be through?
He didn't kill this cop because the popcorn guy said that he saw him a couple minutes before he actually saw him.
You know?
Right.
Because a lot of this, like you said, is just kind of down to the minute.
It's like minute timeline.
It's like, oh, well, this doesn't really match up according to this person versus this person.
It's like, yeah, because not everybody gets the fucking time right by the exact literal fucking microsecond, which is what researchers and analysts like.
Like just like just people in general people like Rob have analyzed this to the exact like microsecond and it's like yeah this guy said that he saw Oswald at 115 and and Tip it was killed a minute after that clearly some something's off here clearly something's off here and your assumption is popcorn guy lied because huge CIA plot Right.
So Popcorn Guy's name is Warren Butch Burroughs, and his original testimony stated that he did not see Oswald come into the building.
He didn't see him when he came in, and that the main reason why this was an incident was That Oswald had ducked into the theater without buying a ticket because so basically there was a guy, Johnny Brewer, who was the manager of a shoe store near the Texas theater.
And Johnny Brewer sees Oswald run into the theater without buying a ticket.
Because now, back then, the way it was is you had the ticket booth outside the doors of the building.
So in order to get in, you'd have to go to the booth, buy a ticket, and then you're allowed access to the building.
And Brewer saw Oswald run into the theater without buying a ticket.
And he was like, well, that's fucking weird that this guy just ran in there without getting a ticket.
And he knew about all the stuff that had been happening, the cop being shot.
I don't know if he knew about the tippet, but he knew about Kennedy.
And he made the phone call to the cops and was like, hey, I just saw this guy run into the Texas theater without paying for a ticket.
When they interviewed Brewer originally, Burroughs originally, he was like, no, I did not see that man come into the building.
I did not see that.
And it was only much later that he created the popcorn story about how, oh yeah, at this time I sold Oswald popcorn.
And like, It's really strange that why is Oswald buying popcorn if he just like did not buy a ticket and just ducked into the theater?
Why is he going?
He's like, well, now that I've snuck my way into this building, time for some popcorn.
So that's odd.
But On the whole, the story doesn't make any sense timeline-wise because, again, Brewer's timeline fits with the timeline of Tippett being murdered and then Oswald running in there.
And also, we have plenty of witnesses who saw Oswald in the vicinity of the Tippett shooting.
And on top of all that, After the Kennedy assassination, Oswald takes a cab back to the general area.
He has the cabbie drive past his boarding house and then park a couple blocks away from the boarding house and then Oswald walks back to the boarding house.
When he gets into the boarding house, he puts on a jacket and grabs his revolver and then leaves.
And we know that he did, you know, we know the jacket part of it because the woman who was cleaning up the boarding house saw Oswald walk in without a jacket, walk out with a jacket on.
And then lo and behold, when he's arrested at the Texas theater, he's not wearing that jacket.
And the jacket was recovered in the vicinity of the Tippett shooting.
So did you hear about the jacket on the Reiner podcast?
Of course you didn't, because again, that'd be incredibly implicating.
But no, the popcorn guy had it right.
The guy that robbed Reiner wouldn't even name, because he didn't want you to fact check it.
He didn't want you to look into the story.
He's like, yeah, the popcorn guy said he was there when Tippett got whacked, so there's no way he could have whacked Tippett.
And it's like, oh, OK, well, if if I as an American cannot trust the popcorn guy, who can I trust?
That's that's what this comes down.
I mean, he asked you butter or no butter and you tell him butter and he's like, all right, I'll put butter on.
You want extra butter?
It's like, I want extra butter.
And it's like, I trust this man.
Right.
I trust this man's going to give me my proper butter intake amount.
And I trust he's also going to pinpoint the moment he saw the assassin of the president to the exact second.
If he gets that wrong, I don't know how we can trust anybody in this world.
No, no, no.
That would ruin everything.
The other thing about this is that the popcorn guy said that he sold the popcorn at like 107 and Oswald got back to the boarding house a little bit, like around one o'clock or maybe a minute later.
So if Oswald had run to the Texas theater to get the popcorn?
He would have had to have run about a six minute mile.
And I think people would have noticed a guy literally sprinting from the boarding house to the theater all covered in sweat and just hauling ass to get there.
Because I actually did the Google map from Oswald's boarding house to the Texas theater and it's exactly a mile.
And so, no.
None of that makes any sense.
The timeline involving Tippett and Oswald engaging each other and then Oswald going to the theater makes a lot more sense.
So now that we've cleared the hour mark, it's time for our Rob Reiter mandated ad break so we can get some Dutch Kroners!
Yay!
Yes!
We are back and loaded with Kronars!
Get this man to 100 Kronars in U.S.
dollars so he can cash out.
Yes, that's the dream.
The dream.
Come on.
One of these months, I'll have a hundred United States dollars worth of Dutch Kroner.
Bigwig CEOs listening and whales packed with money fund our podcast to be professionally edited.
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Money.
Oh, any listeners who are listening to this week's podcast, if I didn't sound great, it was because I had literally knocked out my Yeti microphone, and I was literally on the internal microphone on my webcam or something.
I played back the episode, and Hayley and Elle sounded great, and I was kind of echoey.
And then I looked at my Yeti, and my Yeti wasn't on.
And then I looked at my computer, and I saw the plug on the ground.
And I was like, oh my god, I can't believe I did that.
I'm so dumb.
So apologies for that audio difficulty, if anyone noticed it.
I hate having audio issues like that.
But anyhow, this episode, as an overview, it's just, oh, so after the assassination, They explained that Oswald just didn't kill Tippett because reasons.
And then that Oswald was in the Texas theater looking for his CIA handler to like make contact with so that they could get him out of the country.
And like, to me, it's like, buddy, you've been burned.
Like, did you not figure out that you were fucked from the moment this happened?
And that now you're on, you've been cut loose and you're screwed.
I just.
The idea that Oswald, again, just this doe-eyed knave who's like, oh no, like something went wrong with the president, but I'm sure I'm not in trouble.
And they mentioned this, that as he's at the theater, they state that a description of the assassin has already been relayed.
And they sneeringly state, based on the account of one witness in Dealey Plaza.
And it's like, what did you want?
Like this one witness, like gave a description to a cop of the guy he saw firing from the sixth floor.
Was the cop supposed to say, that's great, buddy, but until we get two or three more people to back your identification, we can't air, we can't broadcast this.
This would be irresponsible to just broadcast your description of the suspect.
That would be crazy talk.
And the other thing about it is that his description of the suspect is literally a young white dude who's thin.
That's literally, like, the description is just a man, a thin man in his 30s.
A white man with dark hair in his 30s.
It's like, pretty much 40% of the men in Dallas could be the guy who killed the president.
It's not exactly an incredible...
Incredibly descriptive explanation.
And the thing that's really funny about this is that when they talk about this, they say that they literally say the description comes from just one witness, and they don't even name That it's Howard Brennan was the guy that gave this description because Howard Brennan is of course a massively controversial figure in the conspiracy community because he was the guy that gave the description to the cops about Oswald.
So he had to be in on it.
And again, this is the thing is that it's so weird.
Who Rob and Soledad crush for being CIA adjacent, and who they don't crush for that.
Because again, Roy Truly gave them the job, and Howard Brennan gave the cops a description of Oswald right away.
So if anyone's CIA who's working to fucking entrap Oswald, it's gotta be Howard Brennan.
But nope, no comments about Howard Brennan.
Don't even name him!
Don't even name him in the episode!
And yet, him and Roy, totally innocent.
Ruth Payne, CIA scum.
It's really bizarre about that.
Oh God, I just forgot.
After the whole Rob Reiner, where he's like, who knows who did it?
Soledad asks Reiner, it's never been proven who did it?
And Rob says, nope.
Because again, the guy that did it was killed before he could stand trial.
That's why Rob.
It's like, yeah, yeah, Lee Harvey Oswald is the alleged murderer of Officer Tippett because he was never convicted in a court of law.
John Wilkes Booth is the alleged assassin of President Lincoln because he was never convicted in a court of law.
But we know he did it.
I mean, so it's just like, calm down, buddy.
The Booth family ain't suing you if you say that they're, uh, he killed the president.
I mean, calm down.
So, um, and, but, uh, the one last thing I loved in this episode beyond the whole, Oswald was running around looking for a CIA contact and the cops grabbed him.
Oswald draws on the cops.
Reiner doesn't defend that.
And then as Haley was like, I didn't shoot anybody.
Oh, well, we got to take him at his word.
And then one of the cops asks him if he wants a jacket to cover his head or whatever, as they're bringing him into the Dallas Police Department.
And Oswald says, why?
I haven't done anything to be ashamed of.
And boy howdy, if I was running the Bad Faith Oswalt Act It Alone podcast, instead of endlessly replaying the, I'm just a patsy line, I would be endlessly restating the, why I haven't done anything I'm ashamed of line, because that sounds like a fucking asshole who's proud he just killed the president and is not ashamed of having done so.
That sounds like a real piece of shit.
Me and my hostess Haley, my solid dad, we would spend 20 minutes talking about how an innocent man would say something like, I haven't done anything.
They wouldn't say, I haven't done anything I'm ashamed of.
And we would beat that into the ground until we've created this psychological narrative that Oswald was obviously the killer because he said a word.
Mm hmm.
And also he said, I haven't shot a damn person.
That was part of also during that bit, right?
Like Oswald said that so therefore he didn't do it is what's kind of implied.
Right.
But the but then the I don't know why they brought up the quote.
I'm not ashamed.
I haven't done it.
Why do you bring that quote up?
Because it sounds so fucking bad.
That's literally an asshole saying it with his chest to you.
They're like, hey, you want any covers?
You're like, I haven't done anything I'm ashamed of.
Clean!
By the way, fucking killed him.
And you fucking know it.
I'm never going to admit it.
Fuck you.
Yeah.
I mean, that's that that's saying it without saying it.
It's thrown into your face, but in a way that you can't prove that I'm saying what I'm saying.
And that's it.
I mean, it's just like Lee Harvey Oswald being a shithead.
And like, this is, again, one of the big things that Reiner goes over.
He's gone over in episode 10, they bang it into the ground a little bit also, but it's just this thing where it's like, Why wouldn't Oswald take credit for it?
Why would he not do that?
And I've said it before, but the answer to me is that Oswald is playing the role of the victim communist, the put-upon leftist who's being oppressed by the Americans who aren't giving him a fair shake.
And that's like the whole reason for why he gets framed by this whole thing.
That's why he says, I'm just a patsy.
Because he wants to, um, project that he's being persecuted for his political beliefs by the government and that they're doing an unfair and mean thing to him.
And it's bullshit.
It's absolute bullshit that I'm getting flim flammed like this.
And that's, that's the story of the, like, uh, this episode is just Lee Harvey Oswald, just the most, the unluckiest man in the world.
Just.
A series of unfortunate missteps over and over and over again.
Just the tough luck guy, you know?
You know, some mornings you just wake up, give your estranged wife a pile of money in your wedding ring.
You go to work with your co-worker who drives you to work.
You happen to bring a clumpy, large bag with you.
You happen to not be seen by anybody for a half hour before the president's killed.
You run away from your work after that happened.
You're in the general vicinity of where a cop gets murdered.
You weirdly take off your jacket that you were wearing and discard it, and then it's recovered near that area.
And then when the police set upon you, you pull your gun on them and try to kill them as they're arresting you.
Yeah, all of that.
Lee Harvey Oswald just caught a bunch of bad breaks.
That's all that happened on that day.
He didn't do anything.
He's just an innocent kid.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Oh, the last thing I was going to mention was, oh, two quick things.
One, they bring up a paraffin test on Oswald's cheek.
And they're like, they tested Oswald's cheeks for nitrates and it came up negative.
Paraffin tests are absolute garbage.
They have no, they have no redeeming value.
He really thought that was a smoking gun.
He was excited about that one.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, trust me, God.
Back when I was, back when I was on their side, I would, oh, paraffin test came up negative!
Get fucked!
And it's like, Actually, like the paraffin tests really have very little legal validity.
They're very, they're kind of meaningless in every way, shape and form.
And also they brought up that a woman saw Oswald on the second floor eating lunch.
And, um, they, no one else saw this, saw him there.
And that woman, uh, she came up with that story.
Uh, her name was Arnold and she only had that story come up to researchers, uh, 15 years later that she, uh, saw Oswald on the second floor eating lunch at 12, 25.
And this is a really important thing that I, I'm, I'm, I'm so glad I remembered this.
Solid Ad brings up the fact that Oswald still could have made it up to the sixth floor and killed the president in those five minutes, and Reiner gets incredibly angry and is like, but the motorcade was supposed to arrive at 1225.
Oswald would have missed it if he had been there eating his PB&J and drinking his Coke.
What kind of assassin would not be in position and ready to strike?
Keep that in mind for Episode 9 when we talk about Jack Ruby, because Rob's words are a petard he's about to be hoisted upon, which makes me laugh, because, God, this thing's so silly.
And they also... I completely blanked on this, but checking my notes, it made me chuckle.
Reiner aggressively butchers the final exchange of words between President Kennedy and Nellie Connolly, the wife of Governor Connolly, because generally speaking, and Nellie's told this story a bunch, because it's such a terribly ironic thing, is that Right when they turned on the Elm Street, there'd been this massive tension for pretty much the whole day because people were scared that some shit was going to happen in Dallas because of all the bad things that had happened to politicians there previously.
And instead of anything bad happening, it was just literally all gumdrops and puppy dogs.
It was just fun times for one and all.
And it was in that moment where the motorcade was basically finished, and Nellie Conley thought that everything had gone smoothly, that she turned to Kennedy and said, Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you.
And Kennedy looked at her and said, no, you certainly can't.
And then about 10 seconds later, he was dead.
So, I mean, just the irony of it all.
Rob Give us the quotes in this podcast is saying, Nellie Conley says, you can't say the people of Dallas don't love you, Mr. President.
And Kennedy replies, yeah, yeah, they do.
And Reiner says it in this deadpan, really dismissive way.
That's like, what the fuck?
And it was just really strange.
It was just absolutely really strange.
So that was hilarious.
So, um, that just made me chuckle, but that's like way inside baseball way JFK conspiracy nerd shit that like only that I and only I enjoy.
So I'm glad this episode only went an hour 15.
I thought it was going to go six hours because I was so angry at it when I listened to it.
But when Rob only gives you 28 minutes of gruel, you don't get to make that big of a sandwich out of the gruel to take a bite out of.
So thank you, Rob, for your short and incredibly insane episode.
Do you have any closing thoughts about this nutball episode, Hayley?
Um, I just really like that it is just Oswald Innocent the episode.
I do like that.
Um, you don't have to, you don't have to defend this guy Rob.
It's okay.
Yeah.
It's so strange.
Like this, the idea that Oswald was totally uninvolved.
Even though he was super involved.
That's what he's telling us!
And it's such an incoherent narrative.
It makes so little sense.
It's just like, what are we doing?
How can you say the words you're saying?
It's just so strange.
It's the strangest Oswalt innocent theory I've ever heard.
And I can't wrap my head around it.
So I hope you enjoyed this.
Episode 9.
Episode 9 is awesome, because it is the episode that Rob lies the most in.
I haven't done my note-taking listen to Episode 9 yet, but my freewheeling... I listen to them once when I'm driving home from work.
I listen to the pod, and then...
During one of my, my off days, I do the note taking episode, my drive home to work on episode nine.
I was like, Oh my God.
Nope.
That's wrong.
Nope.
That's wrong.
Nope.
He's fucking lying.
And he tells the biggest lie he's ever told in episode nine.
And I can't wait to fact check that.
So it's gonna be fun.
So I hope you enjoyed this one.
Hope you enjoyed next week.
If you enjoy the pod, keep listening.
Give me Dutch Kroners.
If you want to give me actual money, go to patreon.com slash PokerPolitics.
Give him money.
Give me money.
Help me out.
Hook me up.
Do a bro a solid.
If you give us the $50,000 option, we will actually throw a pizza party for you.
It'll be great.
So beyond that, tell your friends, tell your family, tell everyone to listen.
Thanks to Eric for the You Killed JFK intro.
Thanks to me and DJ Minimal Effort for this music.
Thanks to you guys for listening.
Thanks to Haley for being here.
Thanks, thanks, thanks, everybody.
See you all later.
Good speed, Patriots, and it's NFC Title Game Week.
