Adventures in HellwQrld Presents: Who Killed JFK review
This week Mike reviews the new documentary "Truth And Lies: Who killed JFK?" released by ABC News. The opening half hour is really poorly done and then the show goes hard "Oswald did it" which is welcome but they left a lot of evidence against Oswald off the table. I offer commentary about all of it and it's really thrilling, honest I swear! Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
And I'm going to be talking about who killed JFK, a new TV show, documentary, a bunch of bullshit, whatever you want to call it, that was aired by ABC in the past week.
And it was confusing.
It was disjointed.
Felt like it was edited together with a bunch of staples and duct tape.
Stuff didn't flow very well.
And it opens very conspiratorially.
Like the opening talks about how there are quote-unquote plot holes in the Warren Commission and that it was rushed.
There was a young man, name was Corey Bradford, I do believe, in my notes.
Yep, Corey Bradford.
And he played the role of young guy who it said under his name, he was like social media influencer.
And he was there to be the guy that was saying, look, man, the kids these days, we're not buying the Warren Commission.
So he was the problem with Corey's time on the show was that he really didn't express a lot of knowledge about the Kennedy assassination.
He felt very surface level.
And that was frustrating because I would like everyone involved in a show like this to have some depth to their arguments, some level of knowledge that would be respectable, where you can listen to them and go, yeah, that guy knows what he's talking about.
And Team Conspiracy, they didn't have really a bunch of heavy hitters.
Oliver Stone was in the thing for a little bit.
And I mean, he sucks.
So whatever.
And there was a very weird bit of editing.
And I swore I heard Cyril Weck's voice in the show, which for old head JFK conspiracy people, Cyril's, Cyril's part of the furniture.
He's a forensic pathologist who refused to accept the Warren Commission's findings and thought there was a shot from the front and all that good stuff.
But he didn't get any sit-down.
It was just a very weird little thing that happened, which I'll get into.
So the show opens, again, with like a lot of just no context lines being thrown out.
And then after it does that, we start early on with the Kennedys and their kids.
And the general gist of it is that JFK and Jackie were young and beautiful and their kids were adorable.
And gosh darn it, it's just so unfair.
This hot, sexy man got taken away from us.
Because, I mean, we just really haven't had that many fuckable presidents.
And especially at that time, because FDR, I mean, snooze, Eisenhower, no way.
Truman, no, no thank you.
So you, you really had this run of like 40 years of unfuckable presidents.
And we finally got a guy we wanted to bang and he got dropped.
And Lyndon Johnson, nah, not really.
I mean, we kind of lucked out with Clinton and Obama.
And I mean, maybe you could think that George W. Bush was a little fuckable, maybe.
But yeah.
Anyhow, that was the start.
And the thing about all of that is, is that we're not talking about the assassination.
We're doing buildup.
And this show is like two hours long, which sounds long, but when you're covering something as massive as the Kennedy assassination, it sucks to have time taken up by people not talking about the subject and instead just being like, gosh, Bagora, the Kennedys, weren't they magical?
It's like, yeah, now tell me who shot him.
What's going on here?
And then because I'm an old person, watching Chris Connolly from MTV, VJ fame, being the somber, serious Kennedy guy was just really hilarious to me.
And Connolly opens the show with this really annoying statement where he says that even if you think you know who did it, the why eludes you.
And him saying that is really saying that people who think Oswald did it, they don't really have a good motive for why Oswald did it.
So you're just kind of left in a lurch.
You're just left saying, yeah, Oswald did it, but it's just that kind of thing where you're supposed to be frustrated by the lack of obvious reasons for why Oswald killed Kennedy, which the show does get into to its credit.
But the opposite side of that coin, where you're a conspiracy theorist, no conspiracy theorist has any questions about the why, because for them, the conspiracy is the why.
The CIA wanted Vietnam, Israel wanted its nuclear plants, the Federal Reserve wanted to continue to exist.
The FBI didn't want Hoover being forced out of power by the Kennedys.
The mob wanted their casinos back in Cuba, etc., etc.
We don't know the why is only for Oswald people because conspiracy folks know the why and they know it down cold.
And so after that, we finally get down to the assassination.
There's this weird music that plays while we were watching Jackie and JFK at Love Field.
And we get an audio, we got a recording of Lady Bird Johnson talking about the assassination and what was like the day of the assassination.
And we do get the Nellie Connolly, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you line and how Dallas was kind of dangerous because Kennedy was pushing for civil rights and Dallas is part of the Jim Crow South and incredibly racist and they weren't really happy about that.
So we get all of that and we've built up to the assassination and then it just gets weird because the show never really goes over a shot by shot second by second analysis of the assassination.
There are some explainers done in other in like spots, but no talking head, and the show is full of talking heads.
No talking head just sits down and grinds it out with us and says, okay, this is what happened here.
Then this is what happened here.
This is the headshot and on and on and on.
There's none of that.
There's just this sort of piecemeal.
We cover the magic bullet here.
We cover the head wound there.
They never mentioned James Taig's name.
They never mentioned the guy that got hit by the bullet that missed, which seems like a pretty glaring omission.
And that kind of thing where you just don't go over the nuts and bolts of the subject you're supposed to be covering.
I get it.
This is for people that really don't know what's going on.
This is a very surface level explainer for the Kennedy assassination.
In a lot of ways, it's a really aggressive bait and switch because they do a lot of talking about conspiracies.
And then the show goes hard, Oswald, in the second half.
And I feel like if I was someone who was thinking that the CIA did it, I would come away from this show pretty disappointed because the show eventually does land on a very Oswald done did it mentality, which is good.
But the way they get there and the evidence they use to support that claim is like lacking.
It's frustrating.
It's very frustrating the way the show carried itself.
So the first thing they say that's really annoying is they say the first shot was a massive explosion, which is completely inaccurate.
The first shot was something that most people heard as a motorcycle backfire or a firecracker.
It was something that people did not recognize as a gunshot.
And this is one of the main reasons why the Secret Service didn't react very quickly, because they heard a noise and they're looking at JFK for his reaction.
And Kennedy doesn't really react to the first shot at all.
He, like, this is a pruner film.
He brings his arm down and he could have brought his arm down just because he was finishing a wave because right afterwards, he brings his arm up and he starts waving again.
And he's just waving and smiling.
And that noise didn't phase him.
And if you're a Secret Service agent and you're trying to put two and two together about what just happened, what caused that noise, the other thing you're looking at is the guy you're protecting.
And the guy you're protecting doesn't seem to worry about this.
He has no reaction to what happened.
So then in your mind, you're like, oh, I must be out of my mind.
I must be paranoid.
I'm hallucinating.
I thought that pop was dangerous.
And it's only after the second shot when Kennedy reacts that now it's time to, it's go time.
Now we got to do something because the president's been hit.
And obviously he's in great danger.
So they don't really get into that.
And they're aggressively wrong about how the first shot was interpreted by people.
And then we get this weird bunch of things that people say where like, someone makes the claim that the Secret Service agent saved Jackie Kennedy's life, which is uh, a plot line from Quantum Leap.
I mean, if Oswald wanted to kill Jackie he could have, I mean, the headshot lands.
Oswald very easily could have worked the bolt and Jackie was prostrate across the back of the limo, she would have been very easy for Oswald to have hit.
I mean, she's a much bigger target than than her husband was at that point and if he wanted to shoot her he could have.
But he had already he'd done his damage.
He killed the president, he didn't seem any need to shoot the first lady on top of it.
So very strange that they said that uh, Clint Hill saved Jackie Kennedy's life.
I mean, if Oswald had like shot and missed, that would have like, maybe made some sense for that.
But that didn't happen.
So it's just very strange, a very strange statement.
And then uh, we have a video going for the Grassy Knoll, people running up the Grassy Knoll, and this, the videos of the the Grassy Knoll, surge from all the people running towards it.
They are running about a minute after the shooting and they're running because a cop on a motorcycle he was.
He saw another cop in that area and he stopped his bike and he ran over to that other cop to like, talk to him about what was going on.
And when people saw that cop park near the grassy knoll and start running, they thought he was chasing someone and they're like, oh shit, that cop's going after a guy.
We should follow him and help him out, because we want to help the cops catch the guy that killed the president.
If this was not a like bang bang bang, the president gets killed and all these people heard a shot from the knoll and they start running towards the knoll to find the shooter.
And that again the show opens with this really pro-conspiracy tilt to it, which is, given how it ends, the bait and switch.
There is very, very strange, it's very interesting that this is what they did.
So um, we then and uh, Brad Garrett, who's one of the talking heads, says the first shot hit the president, which it did not.
And then there is this section about this repruda film, and this is what this is.
The thing that was so aggravating is they, they throw these stingers, they throw these lines in to where the commercial breaks were when this aired on ABC.
And these stingers, these little like lines before the commercial breaks, are so frustrating because they they're cliffhangers, they're designed to be provocative and get you through the commercial break and then when they come back, they really don't engage them.
They don't engage what was said and uh, there is this uh statement.
Uh, one person the guy who I believe was Cyril Wecht says it was impossible.
There was one assassin.
Then another voice says there was a 95 probability of four shots.
And uh, Mary Jordan, one of the other uh talking heads that we have on the show like, rolls her eyes at the single bullet theory.
And What's very important about this 95% probability of four shots thing is that this was the determinations of the House Select Committee ON Assassinations, and the evidence they used to find that was totally fraudulent.
But this line is just thrown into the documentary and is never talked about.
It's never extrapolated upon.
We don't get any more information about it.
It's just this disembodied voice says there's a 95% chance that there were four shots fired.
And it's left at that, which again, when the show gets into the whole Oswald did it thing, you as a viewer who are a conspiracy theorist or someone who thinks a conspiracy was what happened with the Kennedy assassination, which is the majority of Americans.
So I think that that viewpoint is something that has to be addressed by this documentary.
You as a conspiracy believer are going to look back on that and say, why did they have this person say there was a 95% probability of four shots and then dropped it?
Why did they go so hard Oswald and not explain what that was about?
Because that feels very conspiratorial and that feels like something that needs to be addressed.
It really this show really feels like the conspiracy side and the Oswald side are talking across one another and not with each other.
There's no engagement.
There's no point counterpoint.
There's no the conspiracy theorist theorist says this.
The Oswald guy counters with this.
The conspiracy theorist counters back with this.
There's no debate or discussion.
It's just these talking points get thrown out from one side or the other and then vanish into thin air.
And it's just bizarre.
It's not a great way to convey information.
And then we get Oliver Stone saying the Warren Commission was bullshit and everybody knew it.
It's like, oh, thank God, Oliver Stone's really objective opinion about what happened in Dealey Plaza.
Thank Christ for that.
Thank God you were here, Oliver, to clear that up for us.
I had no idea where you were on this issue.
And then, and this is where the show starts the turn because they get into the fact that a witness saw Oswald firing from the sixth floor, and then Oswald was confronted on the second floor.
And the supervisor for the Texas School Book Depository vouches for him, and that's how Oswald makes his escape.
And that was told very straightforwardly, very matter of factly.
It was well said, which is good.
That's the way a documentary should do.
It should convey information clearly and concisely to its audience.
And then they just crush Oswald for killing Tippett, which is really hilarious because there was all this.
I mean, again, the whole thing about the assassination is just, did he do it?
What was going on?
Was it really Oswald?
Were more people involved?
Will we ever get the truth?
Blah, And then when they get to the Tippett killing, there's like, yeah, the fucking Oswald shot that cop.
That piece of shit.
Fucking Lee Harvey Oswald, that cop killing son of a bitch.
And you're just sitting there thinking, didn't he kill the president?
Shouldn't we be a little more mad about that?
But they were very upset about Oswald killing J.D. Tippett.
Back ABC News, back the blue.
Presidents, back them, maybe.
That's their mentality.
And Corey Bradford pops back in and I mean, really, if I'm Corey Bradford, I'm beating the shit out of my agent.
And I'm also beating the shit out of ABC News because they really made him look really bad in this show.
It's really frustrating because they just bring him in to say things and he says them.
And then they just edit around him to make him look like a doofus.
And the real crusher of that hasn't happened yet.
But when I get to it, this is where if I was Corey, I'd just like grab something and throw it at a wall because I'd just really feel, I'd feel that I was taken advantage of.
I would feel like ABC News set me up to make me look like an idiot, which would be really frustrating.
And he makes the statement of Oswald being grabbed in two hours set off alarm bells.
It really fueled the conspiracy theories.
And if you took a drink for every time Corey said that quote unquote, this fueled the conspiracy theories, you would be drunk if not unconscious because they just they it's a crutch that they just put into his script where he just says it over and over again.
The autopsy is fueling conspiracy theories.
The Zapruder film fueled conspiracy theories.
Oswald's arrest being so quick after the assassination fueled conspiracy theories.
Kennedy's body being smuggled out of Parkland fueled conspiracy theories.
Just literally everything that happens just fuels conspiracy theories and he doesn't stop saying it.
If someone made a supercut of him saying that, it would be he'd say a lot.
Basically what it comes down to.
So that happens.
And then Mary Jordan gets into this whole, how could a nobody like Oswald kill Kennedy?
Which this is something that kind of gets beaten into the ground in the show is that the whole how could a bum murder this great man, it had to be something bigger than that.
That Kennedy couldn't have just died at the hands of Joe Blow, the schmoe.
And it's just, hey, man, that's what happens with firearms and lack of protection.
That's, that's what gets you killed.
So don't know what to tell you.
Guns don't know that they're aimed at famous people.
They just shoot.
They just shoot and they hit and people die.
So yeah, sucks.
And the other thing that happens in this section, and this is again, a lot of the, before they go crazy, Oswald, they do a lot of this talk about how people were very scared of a conspiracy and how this fear of conspiracy validates belief in conspiracy theory, which it doesn't.
People had a fear that something was going on, but it doesn't make that fear rational.
It doesn't make that fear based in evidence or reality.
Howard Brennan, the guy that ID'd Oswald and gave the information to the cops, Brennan does not ID Oswald when he's put into a police lineup.
And then after Oswald's killed by Jack Ruby, Brennan comes forward and says, I could have ID'd him, but I didn't because I was afraid there was conspiracy.
And if I was the only witness that could ID Oswald, I would be putting myself and my family at risk.
And that's why I kept my lips shut.
Which a lot of conspiracy theorists are like, yeah, he's full of shit.
He just couldn't ID Oswald.
So what you believe is what you believe when it comes to Brennan.
Lyndon Johnson very much was afraid that there was a conspiracy and that the Soviet Union could be rolling their tanks through West Berlin and then rolling their tanks through West Germany and were ready for getting ready for World War III.
So Johnson's fear of a conspiracy becomes evidence for a conspiracy, which again, I mean, you're in the moment, you're worried.
You're worried that this is bigger than just a crank killing the president.
And then it doesn't happen.
Then we roll back again.
We get away from the assassination and we get in the more Cold War stuff, which, yeah, great.
But can we talk about the actual story, the actual thing that happened, the thing that this documentary is supposed to be based on?
And we get more people talking about, oh, Oswald was such a loser.
How could the great man die by his hand?
Blah, blah, blah.
And then Oswald gets arrested and the show starts being like, yeah, Oswald probably did it.
And then they get mad about the fact that the Dallas police didn't have a tape recorder.
Mary Jordan talks about how them not having a tape recorder is bad.
Then she kind of gets into this whole thing about maybe it was more than just incompetence, that is why they didn't record Oswald's interviews when he was in the police department being asked about if he killed the president or not.
And then someone brings up Camelot, which is very funny because Camelot was a turn of phrase coined by Jacqueline Kennedy, I think, five days after the assassination.
Nobody called the Kennedy administration Camelot in real time.
It only became the party became part of the nomenclature after his death.
And Jackie wanted to like put a pin on it and make his presidency seem super deluxe awesome because that's what you do when you're the widowed spouse of the president who got murdered.
You want everyone to know that, hey, during his time in office, he did a kick-ass job and it was really awesome.
And boy, howdy, if you didn't live through it, you missed out because it was great.
And again, more people start whining about the fact that Joe Dumdum killed the president.
And it's this sort of begging the question about the conspiracy and how it's just like, man, wouldn't it just make more sense if it was a conspiracy?
Just that kind of thing.
And no, it wouldn't because there's no evidence for that.
I'm sorry.
The evidence goes where it goes.
You don't get to make up evidence to make yourself feel better.
That's just at the breaks.
That's life.
And then we get a lot of talking heads freaking out about Oswald calling himself a Patsy.
And everyone's like, oh, shit, that's got to mean something.
Rob Reiner was on his phone screaming at his agent about like, how the fuck did he not get on the show?
Because it talked about the Patsy claim.
And the thing about the Patsy statement that I always bring up and none of these people look at is that Oswald prefaces saying he's a Patsy by saying the only reason why they picked him up is because he lived in the Soviet Union.
What Oswald is saying is that he is a Patsy because he's a communist.
He's not saying he's a Patsy because the CIA or the mob or someone else put him up to it.
He's saying he's being railroaded because of his political views, which is the angle I think Oswald was taking before he got killed by Ruby.
Was kind of.
His dream was that he was going to be the put upon communist who got jammed up for killing the president and it was going to be his excuse for all the evidence against him.
How did his gun get in the Texas schoolbook depository?
How did these witnesses see him?
How did all these things happen?
Blah.
And all he has to do is just uh say look, it's all bullshit.
The CIA planted all of it, the witnesses were paid off, etc.
Because this was a plot to frame a communist for the killing of the president.
So they're their evil doers can get away with whatever they're doing.
And if Oswald was a patsy in the sense of some entity put him up to it.
He could have named names.
He was in front of the press, they were holding microphones in his face.
He could have started burning that house down he should.
He could have started condemning people, but he kept his lips shut for some reason really strange.
And uh, we then get to the JFK being flown out of Dallas without an autopsy.
Corey Bradford gets to do a lot of work about how this looks really bad.
We then get an again one of these annoying quotes that happens right before a commercial break, where someone says, why would the pathologist destroy his notes?
And then this time when they come back, they actually get into why he would burn his notes and the answer is because they had Kennedy's blood on him and he didn't want those notes displayed somewhere as a morbid fixation of the thing where, oh look, you can look at Kennedy's blood soaking, the autopsy notes that were taken about him and they actually address what was happening.
And it would be nice if they had just done that instead of doing this uh hook, this teaser to keep you through the commercial break where that witch is just dishonest and um, we then get the uh, we get to talk about the autopsy and why they took the body and they don't really like nail it down and make it clean and clear.
But the reason why the Secret Service took the body is because Lbj was not going to leave Jackie Kennedy in Dallas for the autopsy while he flew back to Washington to start like being president, because abandoning the newly widowed former first lady to like stay in the hospital where her husband had been pronounced dead,
that would be a bad look and and Lbj did not want to do that and he's like, look, I need to get, I need Jackie on the plane.
I need Jackie to come back with us and if she's not leaving without the body, then we're gonna get the body.
And this is one of the big things about the Kennedy assassination is that so many of the things that are conspiratorially minded and people see as being suspect are things that were done in a desire to accommodate the widow of the former president.
They were just like, look, we're doing this for Jackie.
We're going to do this.
We're going to do that.
He had his autopsy at Bethesda because that's what Jackie requested.
She first was like, I don't want an autopsy.
And then they were like, no, you have to have one.
He was killed and a murder requires a forensic autopsy.
And she relented and then stated, oh, he was a Navy man.
So let's go to Bethesda Naval Hospital.
She could have gone to Walter Reed.
And this was all being done while Air Force One was flying from Dallas back to DC.
So the conspiracy is the conspiracy theorists would have had to have had two different teams of bad autopsy doctors waiting at Walter Reed or Bethesda to find out where Jackie was sending him to get chopped up.
So that was not really brought up.
They didn't mention that she was behind Bethesda and that.
There's so many small details.
So much information was not relayed.
And these are not things that were trivial.
These are things that are important and they help establish that Oswald did it.
And the show just doesn't tell you about these things.
And it's very frustrating because, again, you have two hours and you waste some of those hours on the Kennedys.
They were young and hot.
And the Cold War was scary and all that kind of stuff.
And it's just talk about the thing at hand.
Talk about the subject.
Nobody watching this show needs background.
We don't need B-roll.
And then we have forensic pathologist Michelle Dupree.
He comes in to explain it.
And she basically says the autopsy was right and that Kennedy was shot in the ways that he was shot.
And they bring up the fact that at Parkland, Kennedy's body was not moved around.
They didn't see the wound in his back.
They talk about the tracheotomy and how that fucked everything up because the trach wound obliterated the wound in the president's throat.
They didn't get into the whole thing where one of the doctors that was treating Kennedy at Parkland thought they could have just jammed the tracheotomy tube through the bullet wound.
And of course, the doctor that actually did the tracheotomy decided to make an incision.
They decided to cut and expand the bullet wound and then put the trache tube in.
So that was that.
And then we get this teaser for that we're going to dig into this recruiter film.
And then we don't.
And instead, we get another weird background thing about the Kennedys.
And this background thing about the Kennedys was that JFK liked to fuck a lot, which was really bizarre.
Again, you've got, you've got an hour 20 here to explain to us who killed the president.
And we wasted a bunch of it on the fuckability of President Kennedy and how much he liked and how much he liked to fuck, which great.
That's not relevant.
I don't care.
I don't care how faithful or unfaithful the man was.
Let's get back to the head wound.
Let's get back to Oswald's culpability.
Let's talk about stuff.
Let's break down this recruiter film.
Let's do some research.
And this JFK fucks section also included the part where one of the talking heads was like, yeah, he went into Dallas with no bubble top because he wanted to show everybody he was fucking king shit and he wasn't afraid of anybody.
And oops, not great.
And which was really strange.
I mean, Kennedy did not like the bubble top.
Did want to quote unquote see and be seen.
He really wanted to present this air of approachability that he thought was very important to him.
He didn't like the idea of Secret Service agents running alongside the car that he was in because he thought that put a wall between him and the crowds.
And it made him look like he was fearful of his constituents, which is something he didn't like.
But the whole bubble top thing, that the bubble top was on, and then the rain stopped.
And I think it was Howard McNeil or Lehrer of the McNeil Lehrer hour, but one of the two, those two old reporter guys basically said that he was running the beat for the presidential reporting.
And he goes up to the Secret Service as they're getting the limo out of the car for out of Air Force One for the trip.
And he says to one of the Secret Service agents, he's like, hey, Bob, I'm writing copy for the motorcade.
So I want to have like stuff pre-written so I can just bang it out while the president's at the trademark giving his speech.
So is the bubble top going to be on or off?
And the Secret Service agent was like, oh, it's on right now, but it's really nice out.
So I guess we could take it off.
That would make sense.
And then the Secret Service agent radios ahead to the trademark.
And the trademark tells him that, yeah, there's no rain over here.
There's no rain there.
It's now a clear, beautiful December afternoon in Dallas.
And once that all is approved, they're like, okay, we got not a cloud in the sky, not a drop on the ground.
Let's take the bubble top off.
And the rest is history, as they say.
So it wasn't Kennedy storming out to the limo and saying, get that fucking bubble top off.
I want my beautiful blonde locks flowing in the wind as the crowd basks in my beautiful, gorgeous, sexy eyes and my incredible fuckability, which this show is way too into.
So yeah.
And we have a quick aside to the paraffin tests, which is really weird because the paraffin tests are usually an argument used by the conspiracy theorists.
They just like throw in, oh, yeah, the paraffin test said that his hands tested positive and shows that he did fire a gun, which if you are a conspiracy theorist, you're just throwing something at a wall and screaming because you know that the paraffin test came up negative on his face.
And for the conspiracy theorists, this proves that he didn't fire the rifle because the whole thing is that you've got the rifle pressed against your cheek, you're working the bolt.
That's where the paraffin or the chemicals be resonating.
And if you don't have, if you don't get a positive test on the paraffin on your face, you didn't work a rifle, you couldn't kill the president.
Of course, paraffin tests have very little evidentiary value, but that's either here or there.
It's very weird that they brought that in as a sort of like condemnation of Oswald when usually the paraffin test is an exoneration of Oswald.
And then we get into Oswald being shitty and his brother, Robert Oswald, shows up and gives an interview.
And Robert's always been, my brother did it.
He's never been a conspiracy theorist.
So seeing Robert on this show is like, whoa, holy smokes.
Like Robert's bringing the hammer down on his, on his idiot brother.
Then we get a Soviet agent who talks about Oswald's defecting to Russia and he's like yeah, Oswald kind of sucked.
And we uh start really crushing Oswald here and being like yeah, Oswald was kind of a loser and a real piece of shit.
And he sucks.
And um, we talk about Oswald being in Mexico and did he state that he was going to kill the president or not?
It's uh interesting.
It's a kind of like, was that evidence credible?
Who knows, we don't know.
I mean, basically one guy reported it and it's his word, it's his word.
And we then get into Ruby shooting Oswald.
We bring up the mob being tied to Ruby in some way, shape or form.
And then people are like, who did the was?
Was he a patsy for the mob?
And blah blah, blah and all that kind of stuff.
And they don't bring up the Western Union telegram.
They don't bring up anything about Ruby's day that morning.
They don't bring up all the evidence that shows that it was a chance encounter, because they don't bring up the fact that Oswald was supposed to be transferred at 10 in the morning, that Ruby overslept and that he only was leaving his house at 10 to wire money to one of his workers at his nightclub and the time stamp on the Western Union envelope was at like 12, 17,
and then he shot Oswald at 12, 21, so it was four minutes after that.
So literally, if one more person was in the Western Union between Ruby and the teller, or the teller was a little less prompt in handling Ruby's transaction, Ruby can't shoot Oswald, so.
But none of that's brought up, even this.
Even though this is a pro Oswald did it documentary, at the end of the day it still leaves a lot of information out that would be help them in their, in their efforts to convict Oswald in the minds of the viewer.
And we then have Dale Myers, who is our big Oswald did it guy and he does a full-blown computer reenactment of the single bullet.
Doesn't get into the lack of damage on the bullet, but he does.
He does get the bullet to go through all the to all the wounds.
It hits Kennedy in the back, exits his throat, hits Connolly in the back, exits his chest, hits his wrist, hits his thigh blah blah, blah.
And this is really funny because they do this, they have uh, Dale Myers and they really build up his credibility.
They go deep into his backstory, they explain how this guy is a guy that's dug into the Kennedy assassination for like 50 years, done a ton of research, he knows his shit, this guy's on top of everything and he is got a computer simulation that spells out how the single bullet worked.
And then they just smash, cut to Corey Bradford.
He's like I don't know about all that and it's like man, I would be so angry if they did that to me where they have this guy, like break it down, like at a cellular level, about what happened in the single bullet theory and then they just smash, cut to me, being like nope, I don't buy it because again, Corey doesn't really have a lot of information to convey here.
At least that we see.
I mean they, they very much paint him as this surface level conspiracy believer and they're just doing the whole hydrogen bomb versus coughing baby thing, where Dale is this lifer in the Kennedy assassination and Corey's a tech talk influencer who has some questions and it's just a total mismatch.
They just make him look so bad.
I mean, the way you do that to make Corey not look shitty is for Corey to open by saying, single bullet theory.
What's up with that?
How does that make any sense?
It zigged and zagged and it dipped and dived, like like what's going on there, and then you bring in Dale to bring in the hammer, and then it makes it look like Bradford asked the question and then Meyer gave the answer.
And that makes both sides look reasonable, because one guy was wondering what was going on and then the other guy delivered.
But instead what they did was they literally have Myers show everything and just just lay it out for us, and then they just bring in Bradford to be a dum dum and just say i'm not sure that that falls.
Does that really work?
I don't get it.
And it's just like, wow, that is, that is some mean spirited editing.
Someone in the production company was like, I don't like this Corey kid, we're gonna, we're gonna make him look like an idiot.
And uh, we.
Then, after the single bullet thing by Dale, we go to Oliver Stone and he just like basically redoes the JFK, uh, assassination recreation from the movie, which is like horseshit pretty much.
And then Dale comes back and makes a point with a graphic that i've always wanted to see and like just man, I love you Dale you're you're, you're my, you're my, you're my dog.
Uh, because basically what Dale does is he shows this graphic of where a gunshot from the Grassy Knoll would have come from and the damage it would have done to Kennedy.
And the thing is is that everyone always thinks that the book that the Grassy knoll is in front of Kennedy and that's the whole back and to the left, is that he was shot from the front right.
But the grassy knoll is really to the right of Kennedy, it's like it's exclusively to his right.
It's very little in front of him, it's it's right front, not front right.
And Dale has this field of fire from all the angles that the Grassy Knoll shooter could have fired from, and any of them would have hit Kennedy in the right side of his head and exited the left side of his head and they would have just absolutely caked Jackie, Kennedy and gore because, like um, the Zapruder film shows the right side of his head exploding.
And this is what's really frustrating is that There is no shot that can be fired that can do the back wound that conspiracy theorists have been arguing for for all these decades.
The grassy knoll cannot generate a wound to the back of Kennedy's head.
It would have generated a wound to the left of Kennedy's head.
The Zapruder film would have been very much different for us to see if the shot had come from the knoll because the cloud of blood from Kennedy would have been on the other side.
It would have, it would have clouded Jackie, not obscured everything because we're seeing the right side and the cloud of blood is on the right, but the cloud of blood would have been on the left and then Jackie would have been just like hit by skull, brain, and all this other shit.
That'd have been that.
And the fact that Dale actually had that graphic was just chef's kiss.
That was like so good.
It was a very clear explainer of why a grassy knoll shot doesn't fit the conspiracy theories and was the best part of the documentary by far because I've always wanted that graphic and I got it.
Then they brought in Rep Luna to just say some crazy shit at the end because obviously like her staff wants to get her in front of a camera to talk Kennedy whenever they can because that's how she gets her attention.
But she just says a bunch of gobbledygook.
There's really nothing to get into there.
And then there's this olive branch for conspiracy theorists where they say, you know, the CIA and the FBI, they would have had enough information to detain Oswald so that he wouldn't have been capable of shooting Kennedy if they had but shared their information and like talked this out and worked it out, but they didn't.
And that's how it happened.
So it was kind of more, this kind of this thing where it was like, there wasn't a conspiracy, but there was mistakes.
It was the kind of the gentle landing that they did for the conspiracy people.
And then Bradford said some dumb stuff and the show was easy.
The show was over.
And that was that.
And so the pros was that they did crush Oswald.
They had a good graphic about the magic bullet and the headshot, which were great.
So Dale Myers, MVP of the show by far.
The bad was they missed a lot of stuff.
There was no breakdown of the Zapruder film.
They didn't want to show it.
They didn't want to show the headshot.
They would show the Zapruder film.
They would show Kennedy waving.
They would show Kennedy arms coming up and reaching at his neck.
But they never showed the headshot through the Zapruder film.
There is a secondary film called the NYX film.
And the NYX film is from the other side of the street.
It's from the opposite side of Zapruder.
And so when the headshot happens, you basically just see Jackie and you just see Kennedy like just topple backwards and then crumple over.
But like you really don't see him.
You mostly see Jackie.
You see Jackie starting to crawl out of the limo.
But they don't break down the Zapruder film because they didn't want to show the headshot, very obviously.
And they went to painstaking depths to avoid showing it, which I get.
I mean, you're trying to keep the show not like NC 17 rated because the headshot is incredibly gruesome.
But this is the Kennedy assassination.
And we do have the Zapruder film, and it's kind of important.
So, I mean, put a disclaimer on it or something, and let's talk about it.
But that was a little annoying.
What was very annoying was they missed so much quick evidence that could have stuck in about Oswald.
They didn't bring up the $170 and the wedding band being left on the nightstand that morning.
They did not bring up the fact that Oswald carried a package into work that day and told his co-worker who gave him a ride it was curtain rods.
They did not bring up the fact that Oswald broke his routine and went to see Marina on Thursday night instead of Friday night because her house is where the Manliker Karkana rifle was and that he was going there to get the gun so that he could then kill the president with it.
And this is all stuff that you can say all those things as quickly as I said them.
These are things that do not require a lot of attention to detail.
You don't have to say a lot to explain them.
These aren't tough things to understand.
They're very basic facts of evidence that you can just put out there and just let people know.
Boom, boom, boom.
That the motorcade route is released, I believe, on like Tuesday or Wednesday.
So Oswald now knows that Kennedy is going to drive by, ride by his place of work.
And that's what makes him hit up his co-worker to get a ride to Marina's house on Thursday and blah, blah, blah.
And all of that.
And that's just, you could, you could have cut out the JFK fucks segment and slid all that in there and backed up your case against Oswald so much better.
It would have been so much more effective.
Well, one other thing I do have to give them credit for is they did get into the Edwin Walker assassination attempt by Oswald, which was important.
It's very important to show that Oswald had tried to kill previously before he did kill Kennedy and Tippett, which is a lot, a thing that conspiracy theorists have to avoid.
They don't bring up the Walker shooting.
So that's another check mark in their favor.
But like the first 30, 40 minutes of this documentary is very weird.
It feels like they really didn't want to do an Oswald did it video because they know that's not very popular and it's not going to sell.
So they ham it up and they do as much conspiracy blither blather as they can.
And then they sharply pivot into Oswald acting alone after that.
And then they try to make it up to people by throwing an Oliver Stone and Rep Luna at the end to give Team Conspiracy a little a little shine, a little rub.
It's like how you have the bad guy beat up the good guy in the wrestling match and he pins him.
And then after the match, the bad guy is like talking shit to the crowd about how he just beat the shit out of their hero and that guy sucks and he's a bum and I'm the big badass.
And then the good guy gets up and hits him with punches, throws him out of the ring and is like, yeah, you may have gotten the better of me today, but I'll get you next time, old evil Steve and so on.
And that's what that felt like.
It just felt like they really wanted to not upset what was probably the majority of their audience by being so heavily Oswald did it that they had to let Team Crank get a few parting words in there at the end.
So I'm going to give it like a C plus because they got a bunch of things right at the end, but the early stuff is just so unfocused and scattered and they never explained why a disembodied voice said it was physically impossible for one assassin to do the shooting or why another disembodied voice said that there was a 95% chance of a fourth shot being fired.
They never explained any of that.
So they just they just left so many weird conspiratorial things hanging out there that it's just frustrating.
I mean, it just feels like if they had just gone into this thing saying, look, we're going to do an Oswald did it show and that's it.
They could have and they would have been very effective because they because Dale Myers rocked.
They had good people.
Again, Chris Connolly being the serious, somber JFK guy was interesting, but I think he, he, I think he did his job okay.
Mary Jordan was a little annoying.
She had a little too much conspiracy in her like tone and stuff.
But all in all, it was okay, but it could have been better.
It could have been tighter.
Didn't really didn't need to know that JFK and Jackie were very beautiful.
And I really didn't need to know that JFK fucked a lot.
That was kind of things that were already known.
But yeah.
So who killed JFK by ABC?
If you want to watch it, go ahead.
But anytime you see someone other than Dale Myers talking, you know that you're probably not getting the best information.
And it just frustrating.
Just kind of frustrating that there was a better documentary out there.
And if they just did a little more editing and just tightened up about 15 minutes or so of it, they could have had a real product on their hands.
But given the dearth of Oswald did it things in our media, this was an oasis in a desert.
I got a drink.
I got a drink of Oswald Acting Alone out of it, which was nice.
It was refreshing.
So yeah, that's that.
It was not as terrible as it could have been, but it could have been better.
So thank you all for listening.
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