HellwQrld Presents: "Who Killed JFK? Lee Harvey Oswald" Episode 10: Chucky The Typewriter Wacked the President.
This week is the depressing finale to "Who killed JFK?" As Rob quickly runs through a list of names, gives few specifics for what happened during the shooting, blames a few big bads for ordering the assassination, bakes the "Patsy" line some more and then says kids won't vote for Biden thanks to the Warren Commission. It's a wild ride with a bad ending. Even Soledad pushes back a little cause it's so weak. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Poker and Politics, and welcome to the incredibly exciting finale of Who Shot JFK?
It's Lee Harvey Oswald.
And by incredibly exciting, I mean this is as about as disappointing as the final season of Game of Thrones.
This episode, terrible.
I'm joined by Hayley, who we've already heard laughing.
She's here, a.k.a.
Arizona Right Watch.
Um, hello, everybody.
Hello.
Um, you know, I thank you to everybody who stuck through this.
I'm sure there are tens of you.
A couple dozen.
A couple dozen people are just like, we gotta know, Mike.
We gotta know.
Reiner's gonna pay it off, right?
He's gonna pay off who killed Kennedy?
He's gonna tell us?
And, uh... He does for a second, and then he moves the fuck on.
So this, this is, why this is so disappointing to me is that the whole point of something like this, the whole point of doing a series where you talk about who killed JFK, is that at some point you have to get down to brass tacks.
You have to tell us how the shooting happened, you have to tell us the sequence of shots, you have to tell us who was firing from where.
You have to explain it, because that's how you tell the story.
Because the assassination of JFK was on video.
We saw it.
And you have to make your theory sort of match the video in some level.
Like when I talked about JFK the movie last week, like they, Oliver Stone does this really silly thing where Jackie Kennedy pulls Jack a couple inches to the side.
Exposing Governor Conley to being shot from the Book Depository.
And that breaks reality, but at least Oliver Stone is explaining what happened.
He's going through the details of the shooting.
And so, I don't know if I'm talking out of school here, but one of the writer-producers of the Who Killed JFK podcast and I had a DM discussion.
We had a chat.
I believe it was a good faith discussion from two people with different points of view.
I, the Oswald guy, him, the conspiracy guy.
And we went around the barn about, like, is the magic bullet legitimate or not?
Is it silly?
Is it ridiculous?
And I was responding to him and I was saying, well, the problem with your theory is that you have a bullet hit JFK in the back.
Then you have a bullet hit JFK in the throat, and neither of these bullets penetrate JFK.
And the whole point of rifles and jacketed bullets is that they hit people and they go through them.
Bullets just don't hit and stop.
These aren't musket balls.
This isn't the Revolutionary War.
Slingshot?
Yeah, this isn't a slingshot.
Like, this isn't just ping, bonk, and just leave a little dent in someone's head.
Like, these are rifles.
And when you hit someone with a rifle, the bullet goes through them.
That's the point of it.
That's why they were invented. We were going around the barn about this.
We were having our discussion and he was being sort of dodgy about the throat wound and what caused it.
Could it have been a piece of glass that hit Kennedy from the limousine's windshield that cracked during the assassination?
Or what was going on?
And I decided, you know, I'm going to put a pin in this because in episode 10, Reiner's going to put his cards on the table.
He's going to tell me where the shots came from.
He's going to tell me what shots hit what person and when, and then I will be able to, if I want to, revisit this conversation.
I can DM this guy and be like, Hey buddy, let's now listen to episode 10.
Let's have a chat.
And then I listened to episode 10 and Reiner.
He doesn't explain anything in the sequence of the assassination.
He makes some vague statements about things that happened and declares, he very grimly intones that one shot, we believe, is the kill shot.
It's like, buddy, we saw the Zapruder film.
His head explodes.
We know it was a kill shot.
We know that President Kennedy was hit in the head and he was killed.
And it's so weird that Reiner just does that thing where he's like, With what we know, we believe this to be a kill shot.
It's like, yeah, there was a kill shot involved because the president died.
That's that's that's I was able to put that two and two together a long time ago.
His head kind of did a thing.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
So it's like so that that part of this episode is so depressing.
Because In a way to me, almost any assassination media that you encounter is going to eventually get to that point.
Like, they have to do it.
It's kind of an implied contract that if you talk to me about who killed the president, or about who killed Kennedy, you're going to get into a sequence of gunshots.
And you're going to say what wounds were inflicted by what bullet, how many total shots were fired, and from what directions they were fired from.
Reiner doesn't even tell us how many shots were fired in the assassination.
He just says, we believe there were at least four assassins in at least four locations.
Why are you so vague?
You've had, I don't know, 60 years to pontificate about this, ever since Mort Sahl killed you.
And you get to this episode and you don't tell me what happened when over those critical seconds.
You don't explain it.
It's just sort of, uh, this guy was he, you just named four names for us to Google.
One of the, one of those names was listed previously in the pod, but the other three are just, just fall out of the sky.
It's very funny.
And it's just like, moving on.
Right.
That is not the point of this episode.
Right.
He's like, here are the four guys.
Here are the four triggermen.
Here are the four guys that actually fired the shots that killed President Kennedy.
Now we're going to talk about who put them up to it.
And then we're going to get sad.
And then we're going to impugn Oswald's motivations for doing what he did.
And then we're going to talk about how the world would be a utopia if Kennedy didn't die.
And scene.
And it's just.
It's really bizarre that this is a 10 part series, which each episode was roughly a half hour plus commercials.
So you spent five hours to talk about the Kennedy assassination.
And then in the final episode, you don't really talk about the Kennedy assassination.
You just bring up some names, be vague, and just move along.
And it's like, no, this episode has to get into the weeds.
This episode has to get deep into the Kennedy assassination and explain things.
I need to know.
This episode is 30 minutes long just like most of the other episodes which is funny because the longest episode was around like 40 minutes-ish.
They never really even reached an hour.
It's like you'd think the final episode would be like an hour long and they would explain further than one sentence why each of these four shooters that we've never heard of before We're involved.
Um, but so the way that it's like usually set up since most of them are about half an hour long is that they're kind of in these 10 minute segments, like chapters.
Um, and the first chapter is just setting up that they're about to tell you who the assassins are.
Then it goes to commercial.
You get a nice fat ass commercial segment.
Um, and then that's when, and then we come back from break and then from the 10 minute mark to around the 20 minute mark, we get who the assassins names are.
Uh, we get disappointment even from Soledad.
She's like, I can even hear the audience groaning now.
Um, We baked the word Patsy again.
And then again, commercial.
I will get into it, Mike.
We'll get into it.
We'll get into it.
But then it's like then it's then it's OK.
That's the end of that 10 minutes.
So we didn't we spent about five minutes kind of naming the the supposed killers of a president.
And then after that, it just it kind of ends the podcast.
It's like, that's it.
We named the assassins.
What does this mean for America?
What does this mean For the future of democracy, and it just gets weird.
Um, and that's the whole podcast.
They don't they this episode should have been if you want to name these guys.
First of all, you spent a fucking half an hour on a bunch of random ass fucking every episode had a big bad.
And none of the big bads were the fucking four people that we eventually name as the killers.
So I feel like you should probably have dedicated maybe an episode or two on these guys so we can get a little background information.
There was one that was previously mentioned in an episode.
Was that the Jean Suerte?
Yes, the French guy.
Yeah, the French guy.
That's about as best you can pull from this.
Anyways, we'll get into it.
It's just like, that's kind of the basic, you know, rundown of the episode.
The meat in this episode is very lacking, which is incredibly bizarre, because again, this is supposed to be the big payoff.
Instead of just getting to it, we open with this nonsense about how Dick Russert gets a message from the Brooklyn Waiter.
And the Brooklyn Waiter invites Dick Russert into the Great Game, which, this sounds like some QAnon shit.
This sounds like, like, hey man, I was on this website and the white rabbit told me I should look into who made the vaccines.
It really was.
It says he's now part of the great game of researching the JFK assassination.
And then this interaction, he bakes down the line, he's like, was that a clue?
So yeah, it does feel very QAnon-y, you know?
Yeah, right.
And so eventually, we find out that Charles Willoughby is the bad guy that the Brooklyn waiter told him about, because he was born with a very German name.
And we also get a reference to Richard Case Nagel, because we got to bring up Nagel at all times.
The, uh, so then Sonnet asks this great question, which is why?
Why is this the first time we're hearing his name?
The answer is so funny.
He's just like, he was a rogue.
Yeah, that explains it.
Right.
So four and a half hours into our five hour podcast series, why are we only learning about the final big bad now?
And yeah, exactly.
Literally, that's Reiner's explanation, is what Haley just said.
He just says he was a rogue.
And it's like, you can't talk about rogues in the first nine parts of your podcast series.
Rogues can only be brought up in the final episode.
And The best part of this was a guy named, they bring in a guy to talk about this, I believe his name was Rolf Moat Larsen.
This is a CIA officer you're supposed to trust.
Right, but the best part about this was I did my own research on the Rolf.
Tell me if you've heard this before.
I got chills when I heard Oswald say, I'm just a patsy.
Moat Larson recounted that famous clip.
I think I know what he meant.
He knew he'd been set up and that he was abandoned.
Oh my god.
So it was so weird that Reiner has somebody on the show to vouch for his side of the story, when that guy literally parrots Reiner's belief about the patsy line, which is just chef's kiss.
The moment I saw that, I practically fell out of my chair.
And then Rob says it's time to lay out exactly what happened, which he does not.
And then we then they bring up Operation Northwoods again for the millionth time.
They have some guy muttering about triangulation because I remember back in the day in the 90s during the Oliver Stone JFK era of the world.
Yes. That basically, like, everyone's talking about triangulation and this withering barrage
Yes.
of gunshots.
They were always, they're always talking about like this like spray of bullets.
And it's so strange, because basically, A lot, a lot later on in our society, we got way into sniper culture and then sniper culture became one shot, one kill, no excuses.
And that's the way like people think of this stuff now.
The way these people think of this stuff now is you have a very, you have a very professional assassin.
They have their high quality rifle.
They fire one bullet.
The target is dead.
And that would be how this would be handled.
The CIA would not be hiring this out to an innumerate number of assassins to just spray bullets into the president's motorcade.
It's hilarious.
The idea that it's just like, there's people at every angle of this goddamn scene, absolutely blasting at JFK.
This seems like an SNL bit.
It kind of seems like an old like, like, like, you know, comedy bit.
Just like a bunch of guns shooting at JFK, you know?
As he drives through.
It's so absurd, and their arguments for it are so absurd.
I mean, we're skipping way ahead in the pod, but Soledad makes the... One thing that I love about this series, besides Soledad We're having to read things that Reiner tells her to read and Solid Ed reacting with incredulity at things.
Her other job is to ask actual questions and then have Reiner just aggressively deflect from them.
And the most important part of that dynamic is that Solid Ed never then offers up a follow-up or never actually presses the question.
Whatever Rob or Dick Russert says as a defense to Soledad's question, she just accepts it.
After they name the four assassins, Soledad says to them, like, that's a lot of people for this secret plot.
And then we get this ridiculous excuse from- It was compartmentalized.
They didn't know one another.
Right, so they all did a plot with one another.
They were four rogues from the CIA mafia, Cuban exiles, and they plotted the assassination of JFK together, but without knowing it.
Right.
Their literal argument was is that you had four different assassins.
And Reiner lists like five locations.
So our fifth assassin is apparently unknown or unnamed.
But Rob finally breaks it down and he says, okay, there was a shooter in the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
There was a shooter in the Sniper's Nest.
There was a shooter in the Dallop Tech Building.
There was a shooter in the County Courthouse, I believe is what he said, but it's in the courtroom.
It's another building that's behind the motorcade.
Then there was one shooter on the Grassy Knoll, and there was another shooter on the Overpass.
So we got five assassins.
And according to Reiner and Rustert, when they're talking to Soledad about this, they state that this happened with none of the assassins knowing about each other.
Which seems to me to be a terrible way to conduct an assassination.
Because if I'm lining up to shoot the President, and then suddenly I hear two other gunshots erupting from different locations directed at the President's limo, like, my reaction is going to be, what the fuck?
I'm like, I'm being set up.
I mean, this is, like, you, like, to me, it's like, if I'm Chucky the typewriter, who, we've talked about this previously because it's hilarious, if I'm Chucky the typewriter, And my mob bosses tell me, I'm going to whack the president.
And they give me fat stacks of paper to whack the president.
And then I go to Dealey Plaza, and I line up in my location to whack the president.
And I'm lining him up.
And then suddenly, a barrage of gunfire strafes the president's limo, and I haven't pulled the trigger yet.
I am not pulling the trigger and I am running.
I am getting the fuck out of there because I'm being set up.
Something screwy is going on.
By the logic of this assassination to me, the moment the gunshots ring out, I think everybody else should be just completely like whoever didn't pull the trigger the first time.
Everybody else should be blown away by what's going on and be like, Whoa, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Like why is somebody else doing my job?
Why is there another shooter?
And I want you to think about, uh, How lucky this conspiracy has to be that I, a schmuck on the internet, can argue in good faith that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
If you've got five different people firing from all these different locations, the odds that you could possibly end up with a series of wounds that you could pin on Oswald is roughly zero.
Because we've got people, we've got two people firing from the front.
And we've got two other people firing from different angles behind Kennedy.
It would be so hard for all the wounds to line up in such a way that the government could blame Oswald for it.
It's absurd.
What if John Connolly had been shot in the chest from the front and died?
And the doctors that operated on him were like, yeah, he was shot in the heart by a rifle shot.
That would, so that's clearly an assassin from the front.
So now the conspiracy is blown.
Oswald cannot be framed for it.
Or what if Kennedy is reacting to a non-fatal shot that hit him?
And while that's happening, Jackie Kennedy is also hit by a bullet at the same time.
which is something Oswald could not do.
Again, conspiracy.
The fact that we have the wounds in Kennedy and in Connolly in such a way that you can't just be like, oh yeah, they could all have come from the rear and from above, and it could have been Oswald.
This is the luckiest conspiracy that ever existed.
And I know people are going to be like, ah, but they said the shot came from the front and they made the doctors lie and blah, blah, blah.
I'll get to that.
And again, the Parkland doctors literally got to the press and said the president was shot in the throat from the front.
And only after they found out about the wound in his back, were they able to put two and two together and figure out what happened.
Where did this shot that hit Kennedy in the face and blow the back of his head out?
Where did it hit?
Because the doctors would have commented on it if they had seen it hit him in the forehead or the temple or the face.
Did it hit inside his hairline above the top of his head?
And the doctors just didn't notice it?
This is such a strange argument.
It is such a strange conversation.
Again, we got five assassins.
We got five assassins, four of whom we named, three of whom we did not hear about at all before this thing started.
And we are caught.
The evidence, I'm going to say the evidence, Rob just says this is based off forensic evidence.
He doesn't explain further.
He just says this is based off forensic evidence.
And then the proof of the that these were definitely rogues.
It just comes from a, he's like, this is the, this Rolf Mowat Larson, former CIA officer says so.
And then you just get a quote from this guy that says, I see the hallmarks or the markers of this being a CIA operation that rogues would have conducted.
No further explanation.
And then, um, uh, uh, uh, the proof that, that, that a shot definitely came from the, the grassy knoll.
Definitely the kill shot came from the grassy knoll is you get a just a guy coming in CIA mercenary pilot Tosh Plum Plumlee.
And he's like, the shot definitely came from the grassy knoll.
And that's your proof.
And this is the fucking episode.
Actually, Plumlee, Plumlee and Reiner, they say that the killer shot came from the south overpass, that it didn't.
Oh, excuse me.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
South overpass.
Yeah, but this is the thing that's so ridiculous about that is again, Plumlee is not in any photos of the area.
There is no evidence that Plumlee was in Dilley Plaza.
Reiner has to lie about Plumlee because he has to ignore that Plumlee's whole story was that he was working with a group of people trying to prevent the assassination, which runs counter to Reiner's narrative that Plumlee was moving people in to commit the assassination.
And the other big problem with that, about the South Overpass being the location of the kill shot, is that a lot of the witnesses that are the big time grassy knoll guys were on the South Overpass.
I actually saw a YouTube video, there were like four guys, they were on the overpass, and they all talked about how they saw smoke and they heard shots from the knoll.
The thing about the smoke is that there are no weapons from that era that generate smoke, as Oliver Stone found out when he was making JFK.
And he literally had to just have a smoke machine generate the smoke, because he couldn't find a gun that would generate a billow of smoke.
Because Oliver Stone is incredibly dishonest and a hack.
But Reiner has to ignore those witnesses.
Because those guys would have literally been right next to the assassin firing from the overpass if that version existed.
And Reiner has to do this because he knows that Um, the grassy knoll does not line up with a straight shot hitting Kennedy in the front and blowing the back of his head out because me and Haley were on the grassy knoll and we were there and the grassy knoll is like basically directly to the side of the, of the murder X that is on the street.
Like you are.
You're more firing from Kennedy's right than you are firing from Kennedy's front.
If you're shooting from the grassy knoll.
Like if you hit Kennedy with a shot from the grassy knoll, it would probably hit him in the right temple.
It would have blown the left side of his head off, and it would have just caked Jacqueline Kennedy in gore.
The Zapruder film would have been Jackie becoming Carrie from the Stephen King novel, just being showered in blood, because that's the actual trajectory of a Noel shot.
It's through the head, through the right, out the left, not through the front, out the back.
And because Reiner knows that, he has to place the killshot assassin in a more frontal position to Kennedy, so he puts him on the overpass where there's no witnesses for that.
And his witness is Tosh Plumlee, who has no credibility whatsoever, and Reiner is just using him to try to excuse why he's going with an overpass shooter.
And yeah, and that was, uh, and this is where Reiner does the whole thing about this with our information is a kill shot.
And it's like, Oh, you two have seen the Zapruder film.
Thank you.
Genius.
You're the greatest.
So.
My favorite part of this segment.
Because it's about to lead into the commercial before they name the shooters in their pod.
And Soledad says, name the shooters.
And Rob is like, I'm not getting sued.
I'm going to let Dick take that one.
I thought that was so fucking funny.
He didn't say, I'm not going to get sued, listeners.
I'm not a liar, but he did say, I'm going to let Dick take that one because like, yeah, Rob's not going to actually name the shooters himself.
He's a coward.
Um, and then, and then, and then Dick Russell comes in and he's like, it's possible to make a highly educated guess to where those shooters were, which is steaming with confidence.
And then it hits the commercial.
And then Rob comes in first line.
He's like, The people we're about to name are all cold-blooded assassins
because he wants to let you know they're bad guys, even if we're smearing their name.
You know?
And this is what is so ridiculous about this, is that every conspiracy bit of media that exists,
They do this whole thing where they're just like, these people are the killers of killers.
These people dine on death.
They're the most bloodthirsty sociopaths the world's ever seen.
There was no way Kennedy was getting out of Dealey Plaza alive.
And then they explained to you how the world's best assassins needed a withering barrage of gunfire to finally hit a stationary target in a very slow-moving car in the head.
If these guys are really good assassins, there should have been one shot, one kill.
And you wouldn't have had to hire four of them.
And you wouldn't have had to hire...
They could have 360 no scope JFK.
Yes, that's what they, yes, absolutely.
They should have 360 no scope to him.
Yes.
This, this is the easiest assassination in the world.
He is, he is in a car, it is moving 11 miles an hour.
He is just sitting there smiling and waving, not a care in the world.
And any assassin worth their weight would be able to line that guy up and shoot him from any of the positions indicated.
It would not be hard.
The first shot would have been fatal, but instead from like the official Warren Commission report, the official Warren report is first shot misses, second shot non-lethal, third shot fatal.
The Reiner-Oliver Stone conspiracy world They add more bullets because, again, Kennedy is shot in the back, non-penetrating wound, so Kennedy's back wound and throat wound have to be separate shots.
Are all the wounds to Governor Conley from one bullet, or are they from multiple bullets?
Reiner does not say.
But with what Reiner has said, we have five positions for assassins firing from, so that should be at least five shots.
We have one shot that misses outright that has to be accounted for.
We have the back wound that doesn't penetrate that has to be accounted for.
The throat wound has to be accounted for.
The injury to Connelly's back, the injury to Connelly's wrist, the injury to Connelly's thigh, and then we have the headshot.
So we have all these wounds.
And Reiner makes the vaguest statements about the non-lethal wounds.
And the most important thing here, and this is what is so frustrating, is that when you are so lacking detail and so not presenting information, your You're you're just leaving it open for people to just guess and you're and you're making it so it's hard for people to pin you down on stuff.
But they spent all this time ranting and raving about how the Secret Service agent found that bullet in the back of the car that proves that that bullet didn't penetrate through Kennedy that disproves the magic bullet.
But then In this pod, Reiner has a little line where he says, based on the wound in President Kennedy's back and the wounds to Governor Connally, we believe there were assassins in the Daltech building in the county courthouse.
So if you're saying that the shooter from the Daltech building hit Kennedy in the back with the wound that left the bullet that the Secret Service agent found, That bullet was from the Mannlicher Carcano rifle.
So you're now saying that the guy in the Dell Tech building had the Mannlicher Carcano, he shot the bullet that hit Kennedy in the back and didn't penetrate, and then handed that gun off to somebody, and then they ran that gun up to the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository and hid it somewhere?
I don't understand any of this.
And the reason why I don't understand it is because Rob doesn't want me to understand it.
Rob is being so intentionally vague and refusing to give us information about what's going on.
Because the vaguer it is, the easier it is to defend your theory.
This is, it's like flat earth.
Like when you try it, when you're like, okay, flat earth person, explain how flat earth works.
That person's like, I'm not going to explain it.
I just don't feel the world spinning.
And, uh, I see the horizon and everything makes sense.
It's like, no, you have to build a narrative.
You have to build a system.
You have to build a narrative.
You have to build a working theory about how flat earth works.
And if you don't, I can just ignore you.
And this is basically what this comes down to with Reiner and his theory is that he makes vague allusions to what Schatz did what, but he doesn't spell it out.
He doesn't say it.
He literally does not indicate, like, he said there's a shooter in the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
He makes no claims about them landing any hits, about doing any damage.
He says there's a shooter at the Grassy Knoll.
He makes no claims about the shooter in the Grassy Knoll landing any bullets on Kennedy or Connolly.
All he says is, based on the evidence and the wounds in Kennedy's back and some of the wounds of Governor Conley, there were shooters at the Dow Tech building.
And then, based on our evidence, the shot from the overpass was a kill shot.
So, two of our five cold-blooded assassins just fired and missed?
They just sprayin' bullets and just praying they would hit their target?
Like, I, oh God, this is... I'm gonna read, word for word.
The evidence that he provides for Jean Sweatray?
Okay.
Jean Sweatshrey.
So this is the full line.
We think, we think another shooter was a man named Jean Sweatshrey.
We mentioned Sweatshrey in an earlier episode.
He was a notorious French assassin.
CIA files declassified in 1977 revealed that Sweatshrey was in Dallas on November 22nd and then quickly and quietly deported from the country almost immediately after the assassination.
That's it.
Moving on.
It moves on to another name that they name.
That's all the evidence that they provide.
He was in Dallas based on this document, which we will not give you any evidence to hunt down for yourself, and that he was deported quickly afterwards.
Which to me is the great question is, why am I bringing in an assassin that I then deport and leave a paper trail of his deportation as evidence that he was in town and we kicked him out of town afterwards?
Why are we bringing this guy in?
Why do we have to bring in the French assassin that needs a passport to get into America to kill the president?
Again, this isn't a tough assassination.
The president is in a car.
That is moving at 11 miles an hour with no protection around him.
He can be picked off super easily.
And yet we have to do all this work to kill him.
Yeah, so they named the Cuban exile.
Herminio Diaz Garcia.
Um, and you hear a quote from, uh, Fabian Escalante, a former Cuban intelligence officer who basically says that he thinks that, um, Diaz, uh, was definitely one of the people involved in the plot against Kennedy.
It says he was a gangster in Cuba in the 1940s, and he participated in a plot to kill the president of Costa Rica.
He says Herminio killed several people in the 50s.
So that's basically all the evidence they provide for him, and I think that this one is a little bit interesting.
Mike, you can provide whatever evidence you have on this guy in a minute, but there's an old article that I found in 1993 from the Washington Post about a television documentary that aired in Cuba that claimed that an anti-Castro group was responsible for the killing of Kennedy.
Um, and it says, uh, Fabian Escalante, uh, is quoted here.
And he says in the documentary, four to five gunshots from various positions were fired at Kennedy.
And then it's by the, these are the supposed assassins named in this movie.
Um, Leonard Patrick, David Yarris, Richard Gaines, and alleged members of Chicago organized crime syndicates and Cuban exiles Eladio de Vea and Herminio Diaz Garcia.
So that's him, but these are not the other five names that is named in the podcast.
And it says in the next sentence in this Weipo article that Escalante did not disclose what evidence they have to prove this.
So this seems to be somewhat where this part of this conspiracy comes from.
This particular guy, this Herminio Diaz Garcia.
But Rab went his own way with it.
So that's that for that.
Yeah, there is an article, basically, that a Cuban said his friend was a Dealey Plaza gunman.
CIA has files on source of the story.
And this was, I think, from the Daily Mail a long time ago.
And it was basically a Cuban-American man said he was a leading anti-Castro fighter, identified a mutual friend as having admitted he took part in the assassination of President Kennedy.
Rinaldo Martinez, who made the allegation in his video interview, named the man as Herminio Diaz.
Summers, the author of Not In Your Lifetime, notes that the story is hearsay.
Martinez, now deceased, admitted he has no proof it was true, only that the anti-Castro fighter told him the story.
So yeah, that is our grand total of all the information about this, which is, quote, trust us, it totally happened.
And as for Suarez, as far as RT, our gunman, the men who killed Kennedy was the first conspiracy media to really bring his name out.
And then In that situation, the guy, the people who had said that, they stated that Sarti, a guy named Roger Boganani, and Salvatore Pronini, I can't say these names right at all, but whatever, they were contracted by Organized Crime United States Predictor of Drug Assets.
So basically, Pernini denied the allegation, stating that he believed that at the time of the assassination, Sarti was held in a prison in France, and that Pagani was in Bordeaux's Fort de Halle, and Pernini himself showed that he had military papers proving that he was on a minesweeping boat from October 1962 until April 1964.
The French Ministry of Justice stated that Bercani was in prison on the day of Kennedy's assassination, and officials from the French Navy confirmed that military service.
So these claims against Sarti have been made previously, and the family of E. Howard Hunt also claimed that E. Howard Hunt had a deathbed confession where he indicated that Sarti was one of the assassins.
The Los Angeles Times looked at the materials that his sons gave them, And they found them to be quote-unquote inconclusive.
But Sarti was brought up for a moment in one pod, then he's brought up here, and then we are just moving along.
And then after that, We get my favorite part of literally the entire series, which is that Charles Nicoletti was one of the assassins.
And then they tell us that Charles Nicoletti's nickname was Chuckie the Typewriter.
Chuckie the Typewriter.
Chuckie the Typewriter killed JFK.
Chuckie the typewriter whacked the president.
Just never in a million years would I have thought that.
Never heard of Charles Nicoletti being linked to the Kennedy assassination up to this point, and never had heard that this guy was called Chuckie the typewriter, which is awesome.
Just awesome.
This is the whole line for Chuckie the typewriter.
This is all the proof you get in the entire podcast.
I'm reading this word for word.
We believe another shooter was a man named Charles Nicoletti, also known as Chucky the Typewriter.
He was part of the Chicago Mob and a hitman for Sam Giaccona.
You may remember Sam Giaccona was one of the two mobsters, along with Johnny Roselli, that agreed to help Bill Harvey assassinate Castro.
Nicoletti was murdered in 1977, right before he was due to testify to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
Moving on.
He named the next shooter.
Um, this guy also Nicoletti.
Um, yeah, he was definitely a hit man type guy.
Um, real, real, real piece of work.
Um, it seems that he, uh, was, was named, um, he was implicated.
In the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 2010, in a Playboy magazine article published by Hillel Levine, in which he's implicated in the article.
The article is called How the Outfit Killed JFK.
The article describes Nicoletti as a nearly six foot tall man with a lantern jaw, and he could be frightening just to see on sight.
So did you remember seeing this guy in the JFK assassination?
No, I do not.
You don't?
No.
You don't remember this guy?
No.
So yeah, this guy supposedly was also involved.
Mike, what do you got on Nicoletti?
I have literally nothing.
I just have what you saw, what you wrote.
I mean, there was so little information I dug up about Chucky the typewriter, just that literally some people made some vague comments that maybe he was involved in the Kennedy assassination.
And it's It is so strange, again, that you are throwing these names at us in the 11th hour, giving us a couple lines, and then just moving to the next guy.
Like, what are we doing?
What is the point of this?
Because if you're a casual person, if this is just your jam to listen to on your commute to and from work, what are you going to do with this information?
You're just going to hear it, and that's it.
And you're just going to be like, oh man, there was this guy called Chucky the typewriter, and he was in on the assassination that killed the president.
I mean, Reiter is just literally giving you random names that now you're going to say at a dinner party.
And that's it.
I mean, it's just so strange that there's no real weight behind any of these accusations.
There's no evidence provided.
The people who pulled the trigger to kill the president get maybe five minutes of runtime in this whole series, and then we're just off of them.
That's it.
I mean, it's just, what are we doing here?
And the final assassin is a guy named Jack Cannon, who I'd never heard about.
And Jack Cannon just worked for Willoughby, who's our new big bad that only got revealed at this point, this late point in the series.
And This also gives us another Richard Case Nagle reference, where he's like, Nagle knew Canon and figured that Canon was in on it.
Yeah, that was basically it.
That's the evidence is that Richard Case Nagle says this is true.
So you believe it.
Yeah.
And again.
The Nagel story is so ridiculous that to believe in the Nagel story is to believe that the KGB knew that President Kennedy was about to be murdered, that their man, that they sent to stop it, Richard Case Nagel, got himself thrown in jail roughly two months before the assassination of the president.
And then the KGB still couldn't stop it.
They still couldn't, they couldn't send Vlad and Boris over to Dallas to kill Oswald.
No, I don't believe any of that.
I don't believe Niggle's story.
It doesn't pass the smell test.
It's quite obviously nonsense.
It's ridiculous.
It was at this point where Reiner and Russert make the ridiculous statement that all these assassins were just firing bullets, not knowing that the other people were also firing bullets.
But to believe that, the whole thing about this was very carpentalized, very few people knew about it.
You had two different guys that were on the show that said, Oh yeah, I was on the bench.
I was waiting by the phone to get a call to go to Daily Plaza and kill the president if need be.
You had all these assassins and you had assassins that were waiting to assassinate the president on top of that.
Oh my God.
This is, this conspiracy is so large and so incoherent.
Oh man.
And that's where, uh, that's the part of the episode where you actually get the lag from Soledad.
I can hear the audience groaning as you say that.
Yeah.
Cause she asked, she asked, so who do you think actually orchestrated the assassination?
And is the responses, uh, the challenge to answering that is that people want a simple answer and it isn't that simple.
And then she's like, I can hear the audience groaning as you say that.
Right.
She's like, dude, what the fuck?
And Rob's like, hey, I'm gonna do as best I can.
And basically, he says that Alan Dulles had to know that it was happening.
And apparently Alan Dulles was... They talk about The Farm as if it's something that isn't a part of American pop culture, that people don't know what Langley and The Farm are.
And he's like, how could Alan Dulles be at the farm?
Oh, my God.
It's so crazy.
I mean, it's like, buddy, like, there isn't a movie about fucking intelligence agents that don't talk about the farm.
I mean, Jesus Christ.
Also, the proof that Alan Dulles had to be in on it is because, exact line, because it would be inconceivable that he wouldn't be aware of something like this.
That's it.
Right?
Yeah, exactly.
Why are you blaming Alan Dulles?
Because they have to.
It's obvious that he would be involved in it.
Why wouldn't he know?
You're silly for not thinking he wouldn't know.
Yeah, so I mean, it's just like, oh my god.
So they blame him, and then they blame James Jesus Angleton, the Poet Spy—they get to bring up the Poet Spy and the Wilderness of Mirrors again, because they love those terms, and they have to hit us over the head with them.
Atlee Phillips is a bad guy.
And then they have to build up more people, so they bring up the fact that Bill Harvey and Willoughby were the actual guys doing it.
It's just, literally what Soledad said is, man, there's a lot of people involved in this.
And Reiner and Russert started screaming about how it was compartmentalized.
She doesn't say it again when they give an even longer list of names of people who are actively planning the assassination, not just the idiots that were pulling the triggers.
And after we get all of that information about this, Um, where we again, just blame all the people that we've been blaming and including the new guy that we're blaming now.
And, uh, again, for reference, Bill Harvey, literally everyone in that episode was like, Bill Harvey was a violent drunk, which is the perfect guy to carry out the clandestine assassination of the president of the United States.
A guy that's going to get sauced and maybe sucker punch someone and scream that like, I'm doing to you what I'm gonna do to Kennedy.
That's, that's what I'm, that's what, that's the guy I'm, I'm hiring for the operation, kill the president and make sure no one catches it.
That would be, uh, the best thing in the world.
The, uh, this is the best part of the podcast though, is that we get to bake Patsy again.
Right.
And here I'm going to go on a rant.
So before I go on my rant, we're going to take our Rob Reiner mandated ad break.
So thank you all for the Swedish kroners that I'll be receiving as a result.
Appreciate all of you for dealing with this stuff.
And we're back.
And here we go.
It's time for the Patsy baking again.
This is so funny.
And this time Rob gets so hard into this, because Rob is just like, when they killed Caesar, they bragged about it.
When John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln, he bragged about it.
When you kill a great leader, you're beating your chest.
You're screaming to the world, I fucking killed that guy, and I did it, and I want everyone to fucking know I did it.
And Soledad's like, but what about the people who say that Oswald just wanted to leave his mark on the world?
And then Reiner's like, even more reason for him to bang his chest and scream that he did it.
Even more reason for him to be more adamant.
The idea that Oswald would not want to take responsibility for this is considered so foreign and so incoherent to these people that Reiner's actively mad at the idea that you would think that Oswald would not want to take credit for this.
Oswald 100% has to believe that he, like basically for, in Reiner's mind, for it to make sense that Oswald did this, Oswald basically has to be like, guess what everybody?
I killed the president and I'm proud that I did it.
I'm the murderer of the president.
Now, What I'm going to say is, because Reiner is baking, I have to bake.
And so Hayley is allowed to yell at me for thinking what Oswald's thinking at that moment, because this is a crime and I understand this.
But this is one of the conspiracy theorists' favorite things to talk about when they talk about the Kennedy assassination, is that Oswald elected to shoot Kennedy while he was behind Kennedy firing into Elton Street as the motorcade was going away from him.
And that if Oswald wanted to have a more sure effort to kill the president, he could have poked a gun out of a window that was facing Houston street where the motorcade was coming towards him.
And that even if his first shot didn't hit Kennedy, the limo would have no choice, but to drive closer to Oswald so that Oswald could fire a second shot at the limo as it was coming at him.
And this is true, that Oswald could have attempted to do that.
But this leaves out a very important thing, that Oswald owned a handgun.
Oswald pulled that gun on the cops that arrested him at the Texas theater and tried to shoot a cop with his handgun.
Any attempted sniper assassination of the president runs the risk of you just missing because you're a sniper and you're firing from distance.
Even if the shot is easy, it is not point blank.
Oswald owns a handgun.
If Oswald wants to 100% assure himself of the fact that he is going to kill President Kennedy, he just has to bring his handgun to work, doesn't have to put it in a large bag and try to trick his buddy about what's in that bag, about some curtain rods.
He could just bring the gun in a small bag.
And when his buddy's like, Hey, what's in your bag?
He'll be like, this is my lunch for work.
It's the same lunch bag I always have.
And then his buddy's like, yeah, that makes sense.
Lunch bag.
That's cool.
And then all Oswald has to do is wait on the corner of Houston and Elm.
The limo is moving no miles an hour anyways, but when it's turning that turn from Houston to Elm it's a 90 degree turn.
So the limo has to come to like an almost dead stop to crawl around that corner and make that turn.
So Oswald just has to stand there and wait.
And as soon as the limo slows down to make the turn, he just steps off the curb of the sidewalk into the street, draws his handgun.
Boom.
JFK is dead.
And if he wants to give Kennedy a couple more pops, he could do so.
Like nothing could have stopped Oswald from shooting Kennedy at point blank range, Franz Ferdinand style from World War I. He 100% could have done that.
But he didn't.
Oswald did not elect to kill President Kennedy that way.
He didn't kill Kennedy from shooting him from the front.
He elected to shoot Kennedy while Kennedy was going away from him, firing at Kennedy from the rear.
And the main reason why I believe he did that was because he didn't want to be seen doing it.
He wanted to, uh, have deniability.
His whole existence from the moment he shot Kennedy until he was arrested and then killed was to play the victim.
To scream, I'm just a patsy.
When he was in the Dallas Police Department, he proudly held up his handcuffs.
He had his arms high to show the press the fact that he was cuffed.
This was what he wanted.
He wanted to be the persecuted communist who was being unfairly targeted by the evil American Western capitalist machine that was railroading him and screwing him over.
By blaming him for the death of the president just because he went to Russia earlier in his life.
And that was it.
He was going to hand wave away all the evidence against him, which as we have painstakingly laid out on this podcast is extensive and undeniable.
The amount of- Rob Reiner even admits to a lot of the evidence, but then hand waves it away because it's inconvenient.
Rob Reiner hand-waving away Oswald leaving his wedding ring and the $170 behind by saying, Oswald knew he was part of something big, just didn't know what.
It's one of the most ridiculous and egregious efforts to try to explain away the damning evidence against Oswald that is just hilarious.
And this is the thing is that if Lee Harvey Oswald was laying on the floor of that Dallas Police Department bleeding out and somebody whispered in his ear, 60 years from now, an investigative reporter and a Hollywood A-lister are going to do a five hour podcast about how you totally didn't do it.
Oswald would have died with a smile on his face.
If he had any idea what American culture did to him after his death, he would have been the happiest clam in the sea.
He had a blockbuster, A-list talent, Oscar-winning film made that made him the patsy, that made him the poor victim of the CIA.
He's got all this media that have created this narrative that he was just a bumpkin who got roped into a plot far beyond his understanding and that they ruined this poor, just this poor dude who just wanted to make good and have a good life.
It's so ridiculous, because Oswald was none of these things.
He was a violent psychopath who beat his wife, tried to kill a general, killed the president, then killed a cop, then tried to kill more cops when they tried to arrest him then.
But have you considered that he's a good guy?
Yeah, exactly.
Are you done with your Patsy bit?
Uh, mostly.
I, I don't know.
I have a Patsy bit.
Go, go do your Patsy bit.
It's fine.
It was just, it was so funny.
I like that we both raged about it.
I think I tweeted, I think I texted you like the Patsy thing again.
Like my God, this man is baking the absolute hell out of the Patsy shit.
Um, so yeah, this is again, they're, they're saying that like that, that, That his comment, I'm just a patsy, is absolute goddamn fucking proof that
He's innocent.
Because why would you say that?
Why would you, as a person who's so reasonably mined to assassinate the president, say something so wrong when you're done doing it?
So anyway, I decided to look up a couple, because they were like, all the assassins throughout history take credit for it.
Fact check?
Wrong!
So I, um, Yes, obviously we know the Six Semper Tyrannis, thus always the tyrants.
Gavrilo Princip, after he assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he also seemed to kind of take credit.
He said, reportedly, I'm a Yugoslav nationalist aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs and I do not care what happens to me.
Um, the, um, the, uh, uh, assassin of President William McKinley.
Uh, Leon, what's up?
You're muted.
Leon Cholgosz.
Yes.
His name is very, his name is very tricky.
Yes, it is.
I was going to say, I don't know that one.
The last name.
How do you say it?
Cholgosz.
Sholgoff.
He also... Gosh.
He reportedly said, I killed the president because he was the enemy of the good people, the good working people, and I'm not sorry for my crime.
Okay, so yeah, he sure, sure, sure, sure.
But here's some other assassins that I don't know if we should take their word on it.
Mehmet Ali Agka, he was a Turkish assassin.
He murdered a journalist and then later shot and wounded Pope John Paul II after he escaped Turkish prison.
And his words after shooting the Pope attempting to assassinate him were, I am Jesus Christ the Messiah sent by God to save the world.
Rob, what do you think?
And then here's another one that I thought was interesting.
Okay, so Sirhan Sirhan obviously said I did it for my country.
That's credit.
Yigal Amir, after assassinating the Israeli president, Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, he said, I acted alone, which is a little bit similar to Oswald.
It's kind of Patsy-y, which is like, should we take his word for it, Rob?
Should we just believe him because he said he said it?
Is that how it works?
You know what I mean?
And the thing about most of these assassins that you're talking about is that they They killed their targets at point blank range.
They used a handgun and they shot the person in such a way that it was indisputable that they did it.
And again, Oswald could have done that if he wanted to.
Like Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley at the World's Fair in a room full of people where McKinley was shaking the hands of everybody.
Czolgosz had his gun under a napkin in his hands, and then when McKinley got close to Czolgosz to shake his hand, he revealed the gun from under the napkin and shot the president a couple times.
So like Booth shot Kennedy and, uh, Freudian slip.
I just gave away that Booth is a time traveler who actually killed JFK and Lincoln.
When Booth shot Lincoln, it was a point blank.
He crept into his suite in the theater and shot him in the back of the head.
When Gouthier shot Garfield, he shot him with a handgun at very close range.
Like the only American president to be killed by a sniper was JFK.
And a sniper commits an assassination via sniping in an effort to try to avoid detection.
That's the whole point of it.
And if Oswald wanted to do what all these other guys did, he could have.
He 100% had the chance.
This was the easiest Franz Ferdinand in the history of the world.
There were stories of previous motorcades.
Or at least one where some woman who was just like overcome with emotion, like ran towards the president's car and like tried to hug the president.
And people were like, Oh shit, if that was an assassin, nobody could have done fucking anything about that.
It's a good thing it wasn't.
Boy, that would have been bad.
So, I mean, that that's the situation is that.
If Oswald wanted to do it the Reiner way, he could have.
But I honestly believe that for Oswald, he wanted to spend a decade or so in prison before the death penalty came for him, where if anyone wanted to interview him, he would just be like, I was set up!
This is a bunch of horseshit!
And that was what he wanted to do.
He wanted to thumb his nose at America and the West and to be a fucking asshole about it.
And To just promote conspiracy theories about this and to die a martyr, to die as a martyr for the Soviet Union and communism, who was wrongly convicted of killing the president simply because of his leftist views.
That is what he meant when he said, I'm just a patsy.
What he was saying is, oh yeah, you're just trying to pin this on literal me, just a little old communist.
I'm just a small bean communist.
And that's why you're trying to blame me for the president being murdered.
And that's, that was what his angle was.
And All the like this whole series is just literally falling for the I'm just a Patsy line hook line and sinker and just baking it and becoming obsessed with it and getting to the point where we have some old man that they bring on and that old man's just like
Young kids these days, they, they don't want to vote and they don't buy into politics because the Warren Commission made them all miserable and sullen.
Okay.
We have to talk about that because after the Patsy bit, he names the four, he names the shooters, he bakes Patsy, we get commercial and then we get the last bit and it's like, okay, what are we doing with this final 10 minutes of this big series that we just did?
It turns into a totally another direction.
We're done with the series.
This is what we call the epilogue.
And he's it's kind of like a what what would have America been like if Kennedy had survived?
All the youth apathy today with politics is because of the Warren Commission.
It was just like Kennedy was going to end the war in Vietnam because because he said so and all presidents do what they promise.
World peace was about to be achieved.
They call him the martyred king?
That was weird, right?
That was a little... I feel like that kind of got into the mind of this whole podcast.
It was like, okay, you guys are not okay.
You guys were severely, severely traumatized when you saw this as teenagers.
And you have a weird perspective on the president in general.
You know?
These are people that are a little bit too into the president.
I don't know.
I don't...
No, Soledad even says it.
She's like, this happened at a time in Russert and Reiner's life where this really hurt them.
Like, Kennedy dying was like losing a father.
She basically explains that there is a psychological damage that was done to these two guys when Kennedy was killed.
And then, at least Reiner, I don't know about Russert, but at least Reiner got killed by Mort Sahl.
And he's just been broken ever since.
And it's just this thing where they admit that the assassination of President Kennedy psychologically damaged them, and it fucked with them.
And they've been searching for, like, why did this happen?
Why did this great leader get taken from us as a result of this shooting?
Dave, the myth-making around Kennedy, the fact that Kennedy has become this larger-than-life shadow president who could have sent America into an alternate timeline of peace and prosperity, of just everything is just roses and puppies and greatness and it's all awesome.
It's Such a massive part of the end of this episode where they even make the comment that he promised to get us out of Vietnam.
And it's like, he never publicly said that.
No, never.
Not once.
Again, his speech that he was going to give at the Dallas Trademark literally talks about how we have to stay with South Vietnam.
Like, South Vietnam is awesome.
Yep.
Like, literally, this is I've brought this up before, but it's just the idea that Kennedy was going to cut and run from Vietnam after he won re-election is such a craven and shitty thing to think of a politician.
But because we know Vietnam was a shitshow, because we know it was an absolute dumpster fire, we think that Kennedy would have avoided it and that we could have had a better outcome.
The thing about this that's funny to me is, let's just go, like, this alternate history stuff is something that you can argue it a million different ways, and there's a million different sliding doors, and the Kennedy assassination is a massive one.
Like, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson wins in a landslide over Barry Goldwater.
Barry Goldwater is considered kind of a laughable clown of a Republican nominee.
Yes.
Let's imagine, um, Goldwater versus Kennedy.
So, now, this is a thing that didn't come up in this episode, didn't come up in this series, because I don't think Rahner wanted to take shots at Lyndon Johnson.
I think that, like, his conspiracy is that bad people inside our government did this, not the Oliver Stone.
Our government did this sort of conspiracy theory.
But on the morning of the assassination, a guy was testifying before a congressional committee about corruption and bribery that Lyndon Johnson had committed in his political career up to this moment.
And he was literally handing over evidence and like reporters from time and life were
starting to see that there was some smoke here and they were getting ready to dig into
this story about all the shit that was going down with Lyndon Johnson and how he was, he
had made his family fortune through illegitimate means.
And suddenly President Kennedy gets killed.
Johnson's the president now.
The Democrats close ranks around him.
No one in the press really wants to go at the president about this stuff.
And all that stuff just kind of goes under the rug and it all melts away.
But let's just live in that alternate timeline where Kennedy lives and suddenly now he's embroiled in this scandal.
His vice president is a corrupt piece of shit.
So now Johnson either has to be dropped from the ticket and Texas is thusly inflamed or Kennedy has to carry him along.
The other thing that's going on is, now this is a really wild thing that was planned between Kennedy and Goldwater.
They wanted to conduct the 1964 presidential campaign as a running debate.
Kennedy and Goldwater wanted to campaign together for the presidency in 64.
They wanted to travel America and have Lincoln-Douglas style debates everywhere they went, just engaging with each other.
And maybe they would go do separate campaigns, but they would meet up for constant streams of debates over the course of the election.
So now let's imagine the Gulf of Tompkins happens, and Kennedy tells everybody, I'm not going to escalate the war, as these conspiracy theorists tell us, that Kennedy is trying to get us out of there.
And while that's going on, we also have the fact that there's more talk about various women saying, oh yeah, by the way, You know, kinda had sex with Kennedy.
That guy kinda does have sex with any woman who walks into his field of vision.
Maybe the press's whole turning a blind eye to Kennedy's rampant womanizing.
Maybe that gets exposed a little.
There's a lot of things that could have happened.
When Brezhnev takes over for Khrushchev and suddenly starts waving his dick around in the middle of 64, how does Kennedy react to all of that stuff?
There's a lot of things.
Oh, man, how did I forget the big one?
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 doesn't go through.
Lyndon Johnson worked the Senate, knew how things operated, was a Southerner, was more capable of presenting it as being, I'm a Texan, trying to help the South get modern, trying to make it part of the industrialized world that isn't a bunch of racist scumbags.
Whereas Kennedy trying to pass the Civil Rights Act is some Massachusetts Yankee trying to infiltrate his way into our Southern way of life.
I don't know if I can cotton to that good, sir.
I think that you could very easily make the argument that 1964's presidential election could have been a lot closer and a lot scarier than what ended up being Johnson crushing Goldwater in a landslide.
Because Johnson did pass the Civil Rights Act, did get a lot of shit done.
escalated the war in Vietnam to keep that from being an issue that Goldwater could attack him on for being soft on
communism.
Lyndon Johnson banging every chick in his general vicinity, not as well known at the time, so it wasn't brought up as
much and there was no real stories about it.
So, like, the whole Goldwater gets curb stomped and Johnson wins, that's not what could have happened in that next
decade.
The other thing about this, and the other thing that no one likes to bring up, is that Kennedy barely won the popular vote against Nixon in 1960.
We all have this idea that Kennedy was just this, like, just Obama-like figure of popularity, and he just swooped under his chariot and crushed shit, and while Kennedy did win the Electoral College by a lot, he won the popular vote in America, like, 50.1 to like 49.9.
Like, half of America looked at Kennedy and looked at Richard Nixon and was like, um, I'm gonna go with Nixon.
I like the cut of his jim.
So, like, The Kennedy that we've created is not the Kennedy that existed in reality.
He's not a real person.
It's like when you lose a parent and you just kind of mythologize them, like if you lose them young, even though like maybe they weren't so great all the time.
You know, it's kind of like that.
But also, Yeah, this is really big energy of we would have had full peace if this didn't happen.
This is the exact quote.
And this is so funny because the episode is Who Killed JFK or the podcast is called Who Killed JFK?
But since they decided to weasel their way out of that at the end, this is kind of how they kind of end this series.
To me, the names of the shooters and the men behind them is less important than the reason why it happened.
Kennedy represented progress.
He wanted to move us away from nuclear annihilation towards peace.
But sadly, it prompted a coup that profoundly changed history.
So that's pretty bold claim.
It's literally just he would have saved the world.
He would have saved the world if he didn't die, which is a No, that's not what happened.
That's just a goofy thing to think.
That's a very goofy thing to end your podcast on.
And yeah, this is kind of presented as like, thank you, Rob, for telling us the truth.
Um, you're handing off this story to the next generation.
What do you have to say?
And he literally ends it saying like, I hope they continue to demand truth from their government and not just about what happened to President Kennedy, but as a way to come to grips with our past.
If we want to continue to strive for a more perfect union in order to preserve our democracy, it has to be built on a foundation of truth.
And it's like, you just lied your ass off for 10 episodes.
Shut up.
Literally, Rob Reiner is saying, in order for our democracy to stand, the government needs to admit they killed JFK.
That is the closing line of the series, is that in order for our government to be seen as legitimate, they have to admit they shot the president in 1963.
And I just looked it up.
Brezhnev actually seized power from Khrushchev in October of 1964.
So just imagine the Kennedy campaign floundering.
Goldwater is close to having a chance to beat him.
And then suddenly, Kennedy's partner on the path to peace, Nikita Khrushchev, gets removed by Brezhnev.
And then Brezhnev's just like, Hey there, weak little Kennedy.
Like, uh, how you like them apples?
And so, I mean, it's just, The world is a lot different than what he thought it would be.
So it's just very strange.
It's a very strange thing.
This is such a bizarre ending to the series that like literally young people don't vote because of the Warren Commission and democracy itself is imperiled if we don't admit the Chuckie the typewriter whacked the president.
Yeah, it was also again, it was just It built up this thing for episode after episode that we were kind of going to hear about.
It was a false flag.
There was a lot of false flag buildup.
They kind of just write off Oswald pretty early into the series after a while.
He kind of becomes a secondary character, which is a very funny thing.
They never mention the attempted assassination of Edwin Walker.
Oswald's attempted assassination.
Oswald exists only to say he's a patsy.
That's his only redeeming quality.
He said he was a patsy.
He's a background character.
Right.
It's really weird.
He's like the character on the show that has a catchphrase.
Yeah, he's kind of the goofy character in this.
He's kind of like bumbling.
He didn't have a good life.
He's kind of just... I don't know.
He's kind of played off as a little bit goofy.
Doesn't know what he's doing.
Oh, I get framed?
What the heck?
You know, I don't know anything.
I haven't known anything since I was 15 years old, you know?
None of my friends are my friends.
Nobody likes me.
I suck.
You know, I'm kind of a loser.
You know, I'm not cool enough to to to plot an assassination.
I'm just kind of a nerd.
You know, you can feel the tape around his glasses in this rendition.
You can feel him getting stuffed in the lockers, you know?
He's a dork.
He's just Urkel.
He's like, did I do that?
I know!
He's like, did I kill the president?
He has two guys.
It's so...
It's so...
I just...
And then it's like he can't catch a bus after the...
It's very...
It's very like you would have Three Stooges music behind every scene with Oswald in the goofy movie that they make
about the JFK assassination.
Oh my god, it's just so silly what they do with Oswald.
The character is just a person who has the worst luck, gets framed.
Richard Case Nagle doesn't kill him for some reason.
That is one of the weirdest parts of the whole series.
They're like, Richard Case Nagle was told to kill Oswald because Oswald was going to be part of the massive plot to frame the president, but because Nagle's loyalty lied with America, he didn't do it.
And it's like, what?
Your loyalty lies with America, but you don't kill the guy that's absolutely needed for the plot to kill the president?
That's insane.
At the end of episode 9, they literally did the whole thing with Charles de Gaulle saying, the American people will accept these lies.
They will accept them because the truth is too painful.
And Reiner's like, I think the American people are ready for the truth.
And that's what I'm going to give them in episode 10.
And then the truth in episode 10 is, here are four names, and one of those names is hilarious.
It's Tricky the Typewriter.
And now I'm just going to mythologize John F. Kennedy.
The Murdered King!
Oh, Murdered King, you would have made the world so much better if the CIA hadn't murdered you.
Oh, oh, it's all screwed up.
And Solid Ad literally just gives him a big hug.
It's like, it's okay, Rob.
It's okay.
You can cry.
It's okay, Rob.
We'll get through this together.
And it's just, it just sucks.
I mean, because... It just sucks.
That's the final review.
Right.
But I'm just like, the thing is, is that you just see through the pain that Reiner, like that this thing is done to him, like him and Russert.
You can just see that these guys have that same Like energy, that same thing in them where they can't let it go.
The same way that QAnon people can't let go of the idea that Hillary Clinton drinks adrenochrome from the necks of tiny scared children.
The idea that Obama is actually from Kenya and is gay and his wife is trans and it's all going to come out one day now.
It's just this conspiracy.
They can't let it go.
And because the JFK world has created these narratives and they think they have evidence and they think they can tell a good story.
Like, a lot of these people, they get really upset when you call them cranks and conspiracy theorists.
Like, I get no pushback except from absolute chuckle fucks when I talk about QAnon.
But I'll have people with totally reasonable timelines, totally reasonable political views, and I'll post JFK stuff, and they'll be like, look, Poker, I love it when you dunk on QAnon, but you really have to accept that the CIA killed the president.
And I'm like, no, I don't.
There's no evidence for that.
And they're like, poker, just stick to the QAnon, the JFK thing.
I know the CIA did it, and that's just the way it is.
And it's like, but let me show you the evidence.
Let me show you the overwhelming evidence against Oswald.
Planet framed.
Patsy.
Boom.
Done.
Nailed it.
CIA did it.
And it's like, great.
I mean, it's just The fact that JFK people can't see that they're JFK pills is what's so aggravating about it.
Like, you think you have this...
Integrity.
Because you only believe in the Kennedy assassination.
That you're not a crank.
And it's like, sorry, you're, you're still a crank.
You're still a crank.
Just because the majority of Americans believe in this shit doesn't make them right.
It doesn't make it right.
Evidence makes you right.
And the evidence is against Oswald.
That's it.
So, yeah.
So that's, that's my, like, angry diatribe to end the series.
So whatever, like, final thought.
Hayley, read this for me.
Just hand Hayley a piece of paper.
Are you done with your thoughts?
Are we ending it?
Okay.
I'm not going to end it this way.
So the listeners can know they can hear how every episode of the JFK podcast is.
So hell world presents who killed JFK.
It was Lee Harvey Oswald is hosted by poker and me.
Haley, our executive producers are nobody.
Our writer is nobody because we do not write anything ahead of time.
With research by Poker and Haley, our story editors are nobody.
Our senior producer is Poker.
Our producers are Poker.
Our editors are Poker.
Our project manager is nobody.
Our associate producer is nobody.
Mixing, mastering, and sound design by... who did our song?
Eric did our intro.
Yes.
Thank you, Eric.
With editing by Poker.
Research and fact checking by Poker and Haley.
Archival audio in this episode, thanks to nobody because we use none.
Business affairs by nobody because that's wild.
Our consulting producer is nobody.
Recording in part at Riverside Studios, which kind of sucks, but it's what we got.
Show logo by, who did it?
I think that was your friend, the lady who reached out to you.
I'm drawing a blank on.
Oh, Elle's friend?
Shit.
Yes.
Elle's friend, whose name I can't remember.
I'm so sorry.
You will get credit at some point officially, but this is professional.
Production assistance by Nobody.
Special thanks to all the listeners.
Thank you for listening, all dozens of you.
If you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform.
