Danny Jones Podcast - #149 - Top Secret JFK Documents the Pentagon Will Never Release | James DiEugenio
Aired: 2022-08-16
Duration: 02:30:57


=== Oliver's Impactful Speech (14:35) ===

[00:00:09]  First of all, thank you for doing this.
[00:00:10]  Sure.
[00:00:10]  I appreciate you being here.
[00:00:11]  I know it took a while for us to make this happen.
[00:00:13]  I apologize that this is my second podcast with no air conditioning, but hopefully we can make it work with the fan back there.
[00:00:21]  I edited a book about all four assassinations of the 60s, which of course is JFK, King, Bobby Kennedy, and Malcolm X. That's called The Assassinations.
[00:00:34]  All right.
[00:00:34]  My two previous books, one is called Destiny Betrayed.
[00:00:39]  All right.
[00:00:40]  And that's essentially about New Orleans and the JFK case.
[00:00:44]  And my other book is called The JFK Assassination The Evidence Today.
[00:00:51]  That book is really an extended critique of Vincent Bugliosi's book, Reclaiming History.
[00:01:04]  If you recall, that has to be one of the longest books ever written.
[00:01:10]  If you combine the actual text with the footnotes section and the resource notes section, that book is over 2,500 pages.
[00:01:22]  And I kind of figured that nobody was actually going to read the whole thing and actually review the whole thing.
[00:01:30]  So I decided to go ahead and do it because I knew since Bugliosi had such a big name, you know, he's passed away now, of course, that he would get some press notices.
[00:01:42]  And I also knew.
[00:01:44]  That these press notices were not going to be based on the book because no reviewer is going to read 2,500 pages about the Kennedy assassination.
[00:01:52]  So I decided to take that on myself because I didn't want it to become any kind of standard in the field.
[00:02:00]  Okay.
[00:02:01]  And so that's what that book is really about.
[00:02:03]  It's a critique of his book, Reclaiming History.
[00:02:08]  Well, Vincent Bugliosi was also a notorious psychopath and a liar.
[00:02:16]  Not many people know that side of him.
[00:02:19]  Okay.
[00:02:20]  His book about the Manson murders, obviously, I learned that from Tom O'Neill, who did Chaos.
[00:02:27]  Right.
[00:02:28]  The book about him and basically how he hired writers to come to the court hearings and everything like that.
[00:02:36]  And all the, he's a very spotty past.
[00:02:39]  I had met with Tom previously.
[00:02:42]  Okay.
[00:02:43]  Because of my work on Bugliosi.
[00:02:45]  Because in my book on Bugliosi, see, I had never read Helter Skelter before.
[00:02:51]  Okay, but since I was going to do this very long overview of Bugliosi's career, I had to read that book.
[00:02:58]  Right.
[00:02:58]  Okay.
[00:02:59]  And when I read that book for the first time, I couldn't believe it.
[00:03:03]  I could not believe that the whole mainstream media had fallen for what seemed to me to be a very incomplete story about that whole incident.
[00:03:13]  At the very least, it was incomplete.
[00:03:16]  Okay.
[00:03:16]  And but this is what made Bugliosi's career.
[00:03:19]  Right.
[00:03:19]  So I had to deal with it.
[00:03:21]  And I deal about 20 pages in my book.
[00:03:24]  I deal with that whole helter skelter Tate LaBianca murder thing.
[00:03:30]  All right.
[00:03:31]  Now, that was my last book before this book.
[00:03:37]  Okay.
[00:03:37]  Which, and this is, I guess I should talk about how this started.
[00:03:44]  Yeah.
[00:03:44]  How did this all happen?
[00:03:45]  I gave a speech in 2013 in Pittsburgh about not really about the Kennedy assassination, but it was about John Kennedy.
[00:03:56]  Okay.
[00:03:57]  And, Rob Wilson, who was the producer of this film, and Oliver Stone, who was the director of this film, JFK Revisited, they were there.
[00:04:07]  Okay.
[00:04:08]  Oliver was not there when I gave, he's not physically there in person on the day that I gave the speech, but Rob Wilson was there.
[00:04:18]  Several years later, my publisher, Tony Lyons, got in contact at Skyhorse, got in contact with Oliver because he wanted him to do an introduction to a revised version of the JFK assassination, the evidence today.
[00:04:38]  So I went down to his office.
[00:04:40]  To give him some ideas.
[00:04:42]  And Rob was there and he brought up this speech I had given.
[00:04:47]  Okay.
[00:04:48]  And Oliver said, I didn't see that.
[00:04:52]  And I go, No, I don't think you were there.
[00:04:53]  That was Sunday that I actually gave that speech.
[00:04:56]  And I said, It got a really rousing ovation.
[00:04:58]  And it actually did.
[00:05:00]  I wasn't exaggerating at all.
[00:05:02]  So a few weeks later, Rob Wilson calls me up and said, Bring down that PowerPoint speech that you gave in Pittsburgh.
[00:05:13]  Oliver wants to see it.
[00:05:15]  So I brought it down and I showed it to Oliver, and that sort of kind of sealed the deal.
[00:05:22]  Okay.
[00:05:23]  He said, let's go ahead and do a documentary on this.
[00:05:27]  All right.
[00:05:27]  And so that's what happened.
[00:05:30]  And Rob was a producer, and I was the writer, and Oliver was a director.
[00:05:35]  And that's how JFK Revisited started.
[00:05:40]  Okay.
[00:05:41]  Which is a fascinating documentary.
[00:05:42]  I just rewatched it.
[00:05:43]  The documentary, right.
[00:05:44]  There's a four hour version.
[00:05:47]  Which is called JFK Destiny Betrayed.
[00:05:50]  In this book that we're going to talk about, it has both scripts, plus, it has something I think is really, really important.
[00:06:03]  The reason that this documentary created such, you know, no JFK documentary ever had the impact this thing has had.
[00:06:12]  It's still going, okay, to this day.
[00:06:15]  All right.
[00:06:17]  It's because we interviewed almost, I think, 30 people for the film.
[00:06:24]  And this book has a lot of those interviews that did not make it into the film.
[00:06:31]  Because we had 48 hours of interviews.
[00:06:35]  All right.
[00:06:36]  And like I said, there's a two hour version, a four hour version.
[00:06:38]  So there's no way everything was going to get into the movie.
[00:06:41]  How do you see this four hour version?
[00:06:43]  Is that available?
[00:06:43]  Okay.
[00:06:44]  Yes, it is.
[00:06:45]  That's called JFK Destiny Betrayed.
[00:06:47]  Okay, it's a different story.
[00:06:48]  So, if you want to know how this happened, how we ended up with two versions.
[00:06:56]  Originally, what I wrote was a three hour script.
[00:07:00]  That's what my contract was for a three hour script.
[00:07:04]  But Oliver really, really liked the Kennedy stuff.
[00:07:09]  Okay, there's two parts of the film there's a stuff about the assassination, and there's a stuff about Kennedy's foreign policy.
[00:07:17]  Why he got assassinated.
[00:07:18]  Right.
[00:07:18]  And that's supposed to be, like Oliver said, that's supposed to be the motive behind the assassination.
[00:07:23]  And I think we did a good job on that part.
[00:07:26]  Okay.
[00:07:26]  I'm actually very proud of that because there's hardly anybody has ever talked about, for example, JFK and Indonesia or JFK and the Middle East.
[00:07:35]  But we did get it into this film.
[00:07:38]  So when we submitted the film, it ended up being four hours instead of three.
[00:07:45]  So then Oliver showed it to this German financier.
[00:07:51]  Uh, Morris, I think his name is Morris Borman or something like that.
[00:07:55]  And he said, you know, I like it, but you should actually do a two hour version for in case some broadcast network only wants to do it in one night.
[00:08:07]  Okay.
[00:08:07]  So that's how it came into a four hour version and a two hour version.
[00:08:13]  Now, the four hour version is actually played, for example, in Australia.
[00:08:18]  They played the whole four hours.
[00:08:20]  All right.
[00:08:21]  And we really had a big impact in Australia.
[00:08:27]  They did three major stories in the newspapers about the film.
[00:08:33]  And in Australia, because it's one country in the continent, the newspapers cover the whole country, you know, 40 million people.
[00:08:42]  Then, they got me, they wanted to do a television interview with me.
[00:08:49]  Okay.
[00:08:50]  And they drove me down to Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, these studios they were running from the BBC.
[00:08:57]  And Channel 9 had me on their program.
[00:09:01]  And then I talked to somebody later about this, and he goes, Jim, you were on Channel 9?
[00:09:06]  And I said, Yeah.
[00:09:07]  He goes, Jim, that's the biggest network in Australia.
[00:09:10]  Over a million people could have seen you.
[00:09:13]  I go, Oh, okay.
[00:09:14]  I didn't know that.
[00:09:15]  Then I got on in this Vestia out of Moscow.
[00:09:19]  Okay.
[00:09:20]  And they did an interview with me also.
[00:09:23]  We also made the cover of Paris Match, which is one of the biggest magazines in France.
[00:09:29]  650,000 circulation, I think.
[00:09:32]  So the impact this film has had is for a JFK documentary, it's really, really unprecedented.
[00:09:39]  And I firmly believe that it's because we got so many distinguished experts into this film.
[00:09:48]  That has never been done before, where you have people like Henry Lee, people like Cyril Wecht, people like Jeff Morley, like Gary Aguilar, et cetera.
[00:09:58]  You'll never see a roster of luminaries.
[00:10:03]  In one JFK film.
[00:10:05]  It's never happened before, and I don't think it'll ever happen again, simply because nobody's going to pay that kind of money, which we did flying these people in from all over.
[00:10:14]  And in fact, what happened is we had so many people that it ended up being cheaper to go to them than to fly them into LA.
[00:10:27]  So what we did is we went, for example, to Georgetown.
[00:10:32]  Okay, we rented a whole floor of a hotel and we flew in everybody on the East Coast.
[00:10:37]  That we were going to interview.
[00:10:39]  Then we went to Dallas, got another hotel floor, flew in everybody from the Midwest and the West that we were going to interview.
[00:10:49]  We went to New Orleans, we went to San Francisco, and then we did a reshoot in LA.
[00:10:55]  Okay.
[00:10:56]  Now, when this started.
[00:11:00]  Were you there for every day of filming with Oliver?
[00:11:02]  Yes.
[00:11:02]  Wow.
[00:11:03]  Okay.
[00:11:04]  When this started, Oliver was only going to do a few interviews.
[00:11:09]  And that's actually what he said when we talked about going ahead with the film.
[00:11:15]  It ended up, Oliver did about 80% of the interviews.
[00:11:17]  I give him a lot of credit for that.
[00:11:19]  He did the overwhelming majority of the interviews himself.
[00:11:24]  What we would do is I would write the questions.
[00:11:27]  Okay.
[00:11:28]  Then wherever we were, he would call me into either his office or his hotel suite.
[00:11:34]  We would go over the questions and then he would do the interviews.
[00:11:39]  And I think that really helped the film.
[00:11:42]  Because, like, for example, Henry Lee, he brought his wife.
[00:11:49]  I think we shot him in Dallas.
[00:11:51]  Okay.
[00:11:51]  And during that whole on camera interview, his wife was running around taking pictures of him being interviewed by Oliver Stone.
[00:12:01]  You know, like this was a big deal.
[00:12:03]  I guess maybe it is for a lot of people.
[00:12:05]  Yeah.
[00:12:05]  You know, and so, and I think that that really, and by the way, let me say another thing about this.
[00:12:15]  Oliver did, I give him all the credit in the world, he did a lot of work to sell this thing.
[00:12:22]  Okay.
[00:12:23]  And, In fact, it was him going to the Cannes Film Festival.
[00:12:28]  All right.
[00:12:29]  That, and you can see that, by the way, on YouTube when they introduce him at the Cannes Film Festival.
[00:12:36]  This huge amphitheater, like 2,000 people, and he gets a standing ovation.
[00:12:41]  Okay.
[00:12:42]  And it was because of that Cannes Film Festival that he went there personally to promote the film.
[00:12:50]  That's what I think really allowed it to be sold.
[00:12:53]  I think it's been sold in 11 countries now.
[00:12:56]  Okay.
[00:12:57]  And he did a lot of interviews.
[00:13:00]  He was doing like three interviews a day for about a month.
[00:13:04]  Okay.
[00:13:06]  And that's what I think really kind of gave it the impact.
[00:13:11]  For example, when he got back from con, we knew that we weren't going to get the MSM to really seriously discuss or debate the film.
[00:13:25]  Why did you know that?
[00:13:26]  Because they don't like Oliver.
[00:13:29]  To put it mildly, okay, they essentially trashed his feature film, JFK.
[00:13:35]  But you were on TV in other countries.
[00:13:37]  Yes, yes.
[00:13:38]  But we knew we weren't going to get it in America.
[00:13:41]  So, what Oliver did was he went around the MSM.
[00:13:48]  For example, he did an interview on RT with Barry McCaffrey about the film.
[00:13:54]  That got a million views.
[00:13:56]  All right.
[00:13:57]  And so he kept on doing that.
[00:14:00]  And I thought the MSM was just going to ignore us.
[00:14:04]  All right.
[00:14:05]  But the fact that he kept on doing all these interviews and that he came off extremely well in these interviews, okay, that's when the MSM brought out the heavy guns and started blasting us, which I didn't think they were going to do, but they did.
[00:14:23]  Like Tim Weiner in the Rolling Stone, Max Boot in the Washington Post, okay.
[00:14:32]  There was also airmail.
[00:14:34]  A guy named James Kurchuk did a hatchet job on us.
[00:14:37]  Okay.
[00:14:39]  And we replied to them.
[00:14:41]  And I challenged James Kurchuk to a debate.

=== The Month Window Surprise (02:39) ===

[00:14:44]  All right.
[00:14:45]  If you're going to attack us, why don't you get out from behind your computer and let's go ahead?
[00:14:51]  And then you know what he did?
[00:14:52]  He blocked me.
[00:14:54]  He doesn't want any part of me.
[00:14:56]  Okay.
[00:14:58]  And so that's, I was really kind of surprised that happened.
[00:15:03]  And I guess that.
[00:15:05]  Is actually kind of in a weird way a good thing because they actually had to notice us, all right, which I didn't think that they were going to do.
[00:15:16]  But like I said, Oliver did so many of these interviews.
[00:15:18]  I did a few, but he did many, many more than I did, okay?
[00:15:23]  And that's what made them come out of the woodwork.
[00:15:27]  And to this day, as we're doing this interview right now, when the DVD went on sale, Which I think was about a month ago.
[00:15:38]  You guys actually sold DVDs.
[00:15:40]  Wow.
[00:15:40]  Yeah, the DVD is a combination of both the two hour and the four hour version.
[00:15:45]  And me and Oliver did a commentary over the two hour version.
[00:15:49]  Oh, wow.
[00:15:50]  It was number one for three weeks.
[00:15:53]  And then this week, it dropped down to number four.
[00:15:56]  Okay.
[00:15:57]  So, in other words, people really wanted to see this thing in its whole entirety, you know, and Shout Factory, which did, they did a very nice job putting it together.
[00:16:10]  So, from when the film broke, which was in November, okay, was it November?
[00:16:18]  No, it was in July of last year.
[00:16:21]  See, this is what's so exceptional about this.
[00:16:25]  If you know anything about the movie business, from when a film premieres to when it goes to sale to public in the DVD version, that's usually what they call a six month window.
[00:16:42]  Well, our film had like an 11 month window until it went to DVD, okay?
[00:16:51]  Which is really, really something.
[00:16:53]  And by the way, it's still on Showtime.
[00:16:56]  I think they have the contract.
[00:16:58]  Up until the end of this year.
[00:16:59]  Oh, really?
[00:17:00]  It's only one year?
[00:17:01]  No, it was more than one year.
[00:17:02]  Okay.
[00:17:02]  Yeah.
[00:17:03]  Okay.
[00:17:04]  And so, and they're still going to show it.
[00:17:07]  So, the success of this film, as far as a documentary on the JFK goes, it's unprecedented.
[00:17:15]  And like I said, I believe it's because of all the people that we had in it.
[00:17:20]  And like I said, and we still have these excerpts in the book.

=== Single Bullet Theory Flaw (15:48) ===

[00:17:24]  So, if you're really interested in seeing the rest of what these people said, and some of it is really.
[00:17:29]  Is we had so much great stuff that we by necessity had to keep some of it, you know, out.
[00:17:37]  But, like, for example, the interview with Henry Lee.
[00:17:42]  For people who are listening who don't know who he is, who is Henry Lee?
[00:17:45]  Henry Lee is probably the most famous criminalist in the United States, maybe in the world.
[00:17:51]  Okay.
[00:17:51]  Okay.
[00:17:53]  He testifies at all kinds of trials.
[00:17:57]  He's a specialist in what he calls reconstructing the crime.
[00:18:04]  Okay, from the elements that he has.
[00:18:06]  Okay, and then he puts together what he believes happened.
[00:18:10]  He's world famous.
[00:18:12]  He used to be a captain in Taiwan, came to the United States, went to NYU, and he became this world famous criminalist.
[00:18:21]  All right.
[00:18:24]  He, about the Kennedy assassination, he told Oliver, he said, look, in about.
[00:18:37]  70 to 80% of the cases I study, I can render an opinion.
[00:18:43]  About 10%, okay, I can only give what they call a partial, all right?
[00:18:53]  And then in the rest, I just can't give an opinion.
[00:18:58]  In the Kennedy assassination, that was the case.
[00:19:02]  I can't give an opinion.
[00:19:03]  And the reason I can't give an opinion is because this autopsy material, Is one of the worst I've ever seen.
[00:19:12]  Okay.
[00:19:12]  It's completely, it's qualitatively and quantitatively, it's one of the worst autopsies I've ever seen.
[00:19:21]  And by the way, a student of his, because he has his college up in New Haven, okay, got online and said at one of the first classes he was at, Henry Lee went off on the Kennedy autopsy for 20 minutes.
[00:19:40]  On how bad it was.
[00:19:41]  It was almost like how not to conduct an autopsy.
[00:19:45]  All right.
[00:19:46]  And so he said that he just couldn't render an opinion.
[00:19:49]  And then he commented, and this is in the book.
[00:19:53]  He says, You have this bullet coming in from a right to left angle in Kennedy's skull, the back of his skull.
[00:20:04]  And then it comes out this angle, okay, left to right, out of his front temple.
[00:20:15]  And Oliver asked him, Well, What kind of an angle is that?
[00:20:18]  He goes, That's like a 90 degree angle.
[00:20:21]  And he just sat there and he goes, You know, like it was something that was really kind of very bizarre to him.
[00:20:28]  And remember, this guy has seen so many gunshot homicide cases.
[00:20:34]  I think he said about a thousand.
[00:20:36]  Okay.
[00:20:37]  But this was very, very bizarre to him, this case.
[00:20:40]  Okay.
[00:20:41]  And so that was a very interesting interview that he did with us.
[00:20:45]  And then we have people like Brian Edwards.
[00:20:49]  Who was a police investigator for like 22 years in Lawrence, Kansas?
[00:20:54]  And today he teaches criminal justice.
[00:20:58]  And he talked about how he was a sniper.
[00:21:02]  He was on a sniper detail, a SWAT team.
[00:21:05]  Okay.
[00:21:06]  And he said, look, every time you shoot from a high to low angle, which is what is in the Kennedy case, because Oswald's supposed to be on the sixth floor of Texas School Book Depository firing downward.
[00:21:21]  He goes, You're going to miss the first shot, okay, because it's going to be too high.
[00:21:28]  Okay, it's very difficult.
[00:21:30]  Any sniper will tell you, all right, that this is one of the most difficult shots that there is.
[00:21:36]  All right.
[00:21:37]  And then he talked about how he had been a witness in many, many cases.
[00:21:42]  All right.
[00:21:43]  And a very serious problem in the Kennedy case is what we call chain of custody, which means, and by the way, Henry Lee did a nice job on this also.
[00:21:53]  Okay, how it begins at the scene of the crime.
[00:21:55]  Goes to the police headquarters and comes into court.
[00:21:58]  Why is the chain of custody so important?
[00:22:00]  Because if you don't have a good chain of custody on evidence, it leaves a defense wide open to attack you.
[00:22:11]  Because what that signifies, and they said this, that either somebody altered the evidence or somebody could have substituted the evidence if you can't account for every step in the chain.
[00:22:25]  And so in the Kennedy case, for example, there is no brain.
[00:22:31]  Kenny's brain is gone.
[00:22:32]  It disappeared somewhere around in 1965 or 1966.
[00:22:37]  And nobody can account for it.
[00:22:39]  All right.
[00:22:40]  And why is that important?
[00:22:42]  You say his brain disappeared.
[00:22:44]  What do you mean by that?
[00:22:45]  It's not in the National Archives.
[00:22:47]  They talk about a brain being preserved in formaldehyde, like a fully intact brain.
[00:22:52]  That's what you have to do.
[00:22:54]  Now, I'm glad you brought that up.
[00:22:57]  See, what you're supposed to do if you're doing a gunshot autopsy with one of the gunshots to the head.
[00:23:04]  Okay, you're supposed to go ahead and preserve the brain, okay, in what you just said, a formaldehyde solution.
[00:23:13]  And what that does, and Cyril Weck talks about this in the film, okay, what that does, it makes the brain more solid.
[00:23:21]  So you can do what they call cereal suctioning.
[00:23:25]  And you do that in one of two ways, like either a bread loaf like this or a pie cut like this.
[00:23:32]  Now, why do you do that?
[00:23:33]  Because.
[00:23:36]  And Michael Chesser talks about this also in the film.
[00:23:38]  He's a neurologist because that's the way that you track the bullet path through the brain.
[00:23:49]  Okay, you can see it more clearly.
[00:23:51]  All right, and if there's more than one bullet, also you can find that.
[00:23:56]  Well, Kennedy's brain disappeared.
[00:24:00]  The only record, the actual record we have of it, which is very odd, it comes in at 1500 grams.
[00:24:09]  Now, why do I say that that's odd?
[00:24:14]  Because the average brain weight, and they did a Dutch study of this, about 8,000 specimens, is about 1,350 grams.
[00:24:26]  That's the average brain weight.
[00:24:28]  So the question becomes.
[00:24:30]  So, like 2.9 pounds or something?
[00:24:32]  Yes.
[00:24:32]  A little bit under 3 pounds.
[00:24:33]  So the question then becomes how is Kennedy's brain weigh more when, as anybody can see in the Zapruder film, That Kennedy's head gets blasted, blood and tissue, you know, in the air, okay, all over Jackie Kennedy, all over the back seat, okay, and all over, you know, flying around Dealey Plaza, all right.
[00:25:01]  And when the doctors and nurses came out to the car, there's pictures of the car and it's blasted, okay, with debris out the back.
[00:25:11]  And so, how can Kennedy's brain weigh more?
[00:25:15]  Than the average, when everybody can see the damage of that headshot.
[00:25:21]  Okay.
[00:25:22]  Now, in the film and in the book, we talk because I'm firm, I firmly believe that today this is the best evidence.
[00:25:35]  Okay.
[00:25:35]  That there was a conspiracy to kill JFK.
[00:25:39]  Because John Stringer, when he testified before the Assassinations Record Review Board, which was the body set up after Oliver's film came out.
[00:25:50]  To declassify all the documents on the JFK case and also to pursue an inquiry into the medical evidence.
[00:25:59]  When he was shown the pictures that he was supposed to have taken of Kennedy's brain, he was the autopsy photographer that night.
[00:26:10]  He said he walked up to the pictures because they were, Jeremy Gunn, the chief counsel, had them hanging from a, you know, a.
[00:26:24]  A holder.
[00:26:25]  He walked up and he said, This is Ansco.
[00:26:32]  That's a type of film.
[00:26:35]  I didn't use Ansco.
[00:26:38]  Okay.
[00:26:38]  And you see these numbers here at the bottom?
[00:26:42]  That means they were in a press pack, they were taken serially.
[00:26:47]  I didn't do that.
[00:26:49]  Okay.
[00:26:50]  And so Jeremy Gunn then asked him, He said, Are you ready to deny you took these pictures?
[00:26:56]  And he goes, if that's Ansco and that's a press back, I didn't take these pictures.
[00:27:01]  Okay.
[00:27:02]  So this was what you call courtroom evidence.
[00:27:07]  Okay.
[00:27:07]  Because if you're going to present pictures or an illustration, it's part of the tenets of the law that whoever took the picture of the illustration has to certify to the court that that's what he took.
[00:27:24]  This gets back to chain of custody.
[00:27:26]  All right.
[00:27:27]  And so he said, No.
[00:27:29]  That's Ansco Phil.
[00:27:31]  And by the way, by the end of the interview, he did say it was Ansco.
[00:27:33]  He used Kodak.
[00:27:35]  Okay.
[00:27:36]  All right.
[00:27:36]  And so he didn't take the pictures.
[00:27:40]  And in the film, we talk about this you know, who might have taken them.
[00:27:44]  Okay.
[00:27:45]  And between that, between the brain weight, okay, and the fact that there appears to be a front to back shot.
[00:27:58]  Okay.
[00:27:59]  And we talk about this in the long version of the film because there's a little dust like particles in the front and the larger fragments are towards the middle of the brain or the back of the brain.
[00:28:09]  That detains that.
[00:28:11]  Kind of denotes a front shot.
[00:28:14]  Okay.
[00:28:14]  So this is very important.
[00:28:16]  And we got even more of it in the book than we did into the film.
[00:28:20]  All right.
[00:28:21]  It's very important evidence, I believe.
[00:28:23]  One of the most, one of the, like, the backbone of this whole conspiracy is the Warren Commission is doing everything they possibly can to stick to the three bullets.
[00:28:42]  Theory.
[00:28:43]  Why were they trying to stick to that?
[00:28:45]  Why were they so.?
[00:28:47]  It doesn't seem like it would make that much of a difference if there was another bullet.
[00:28:51]  Yeah, that's correct.
[00:28:53]  The one commission says that only three bullets were fired.
[00:28:59]  All right.
[00:29:00]  Why couldn't they have just said, okay, there were four?
[00:29:01]  Because there were only three shells found at the scene of the crime.
[00:29:07]  Okay.
[00:29:07]  Okay.
[00:29:08]  And so they had to do that.
[00:29:11]  All right.
[00:29:11]  Because if there's more, That ipso facto denotes a conspiracy because you only got three shells.
[00:29:20]  Okay.
[00:29:20]  You only can have three bullets.
[00:29:22]  And so if you said it was four shots, and by the way, they actually said this.
[00:29:28]  Norman Redlich actually said this.
[00:29:31]  Okay.
[00:29:31]  If we don't have the single bullet theory, then it denotes a conspiracy.
[00:29:36]  All right.
[00:29:36]  Now, let me talk about.
[00:29:39]  Before you could do that, it just seems like from my perspective, it would be way easier and way less trouble.
[00:29:46]  To say, yeah, we don't know where the fourth bullet shell is, than to, on the other hand, have to deal with this whole magic bullet debacle.
[00:29:54]  That seems like more of a problem than it would be just to say, oh, there's a fourth bullet shell we can't find.
[00:30:00]  We don't know.
[00:30:01]  That's an interesting question because the FBI, and we talk about this in the film, they had a different version of the three bullets.
[00:30:13]  Okay?
[00:30:14]  They said all three bullets hit the car, inside of the car, the automobile.
[00:30:19]  They didn't have a single bullet theory.
[00:30:22]  Okay, and I think we should explain what the single bullet theory is.
[00:30:25]  The single bullet theory says that one projectile went through Kennedy, emerged out of his throat, went into Conley, through his back, out his right chest, smashed, by the way, it decimated one of his ribs.
[00:30:47]  It then smashed his wrist, his right wrist, and then somehow.
[00:30:54]  Went this way into his left thigh.
[00:30:58]  Okay.
[00:30:59]  For and which they tested this theory on cadavers, right?
[00:31:03]  By shooting cadavers the same way.
[00:31:05]  And then it never duplicated the same result.
[00:31:07]  See, the amazing thing about this is that after going through all that, the Warren Commission said that this bullet, which is called Commission Exhibit 399, emerged pretty much intact.
[00:31:25]  And anybody can see it, and we show it in the film.
[00:31:27]  All right, that is pretty much intact.
[00:31:30]  In fact, it's only missing something like three or four grains, not grams, you know, grains.
[00:31:36]  All right.
[00:31:37]  And if you look at it, it doesn't look like it hit anything.
[00:31:42]  All right.
[00:31:42]  And we have Joseph Dolce, who was one of the doctors who worked for the Warren Commission, but they didn't want to talk to him.
[00:31:50]  All right.
[00:31:51]  And he said, look, we test fired dozens of bullets into cadavers.
[00:31:58]  Okay.
[00:32:00]  None of them came out.
[00:32:01]  Looking like this.
[00:32:03]  And he was a surgeon during World War II.
[00:32:05]  And he said, in my opinion, it's not possible, okay, for something like this to happen.
[00:32:12]  Now, they said that you had one single bullet going through two people.
[00:32:22]  You had one that completely missed the car, hit the curb, bounced up and hit this bystander named James Tegg, you know, bloodying his face.
[00:32:33]  And The third bullet is the headshot.
[00:32:37]  Okay.
[00:32:39]  So we're supposed to believe that two bullets hit Kennedy.
[00:32:45]  Okay.
[00:32:45]  Pretty much where a sniper would want to hit him.
[00:32:48]  And this other shot completely missed the car.
[00:32:51]  And in fact, Teg was sitting on Commerce Street, which is a different street than what Kennedy was on Elm Street.
[00:32:59]  So you have this one bullet that completely missed the car, completely missed the street.
[00:33:05]  Hit a curb and bounced up and hit James Tegg, a bystander.

=== The Bystander Bullet Hit (03:52) ===

[00:33:12]  Now, the FBI did not want to believe that because they thought the single bullet theory was absurd, which I think most people would agree.
[00:33:24]  So, Hoover, who the head of the FBI at that time, he did everything he could to cover up the James Tegg hit.
[00:33:32]  He denied it that it ever happened, you know, for years.
[00:33:37]  Okay.
[00:33:38]  And then they actually kind of cemented over the curb, okay, where the bullet struck.
[00:33:46]  All right.
[00:33:46]  This is how badly the FBI wanted that to go away.
[00:33:51]  All right.
[00:33:51]  And so this ended up being a dispute between the FBI and the Warren Commission.
[00:33:56]  All right.
[00:33:57]  The Warren Commission figured we can't cover up the James Take thing anymore because there's too many people talking about it in Dallas.
[00:34:05]  So we have to do is to stay with the three shells.
[00:34:08]  We have to make up this magic bullet theory.
[00:34:11]  Okay, so that's, and this is what they did.
[00:34:15]  All right.
[00:34:16]  Now, let me add one other thing.
[00:34:22]  What most people don't know is that there wasn't just one magic bullet in the Kennedy case.
[00:34:31]  All right.
[00:34:32]  Because if you examine the headshot, the one that takes Kennedy's life, the official story has.
[00:34:44]  Two fragments flying through Kennedy's head, landing in the front seat of the car.
[00:34:53]  And this is supposed to be the head of the bullet and the tail of the bullet.
[00:35:03]  In the x rays, there is a 6.5 millimeter object evident on the x rays, which anybody can see.
[00:35:17]  Now, why is that important?
[00:35:18]  Because 6.5 millimeters is the exact caliber of the bullet that they tell us Oswald was using that day.
[00:35:30]  Most people believe that that is an object from the bullet that went through Kennedy's skull.
[00:35:40]  Now, if it is, it has to be from the middle of the bullet because you've got the head and the base of the bullet in the front of the car.
[00:35:51]  So, we're supposed to believe that this bullet comes through Kennedy's skull.
[00:35:58]  It breaks into three parts.
[00:36:01]  The middle part stays in the skull, and I mean towards the back of the skull.
[00:36:08]  And somehow, the rear portion of the bullet either goes either up or down to go around this middle part, flies out right behind the front, and ends up in the front seat of the presidential limousine.
[00:36:24]  So, this is what I mean.
[00:36:25]  You really have two magic bullets in this case.
[00:36:29]  And by the way, that was actually going to be in the film.
[00:36:32]  I wanted it to be in the film.
[00:36:34]  Yeah, I wanted it to be in the film.
[00:36:36]  Okay, but I wasn't the final editor, of course.
[00:36:39]  By the way, we should talk about that.
[00:36:41]  We ended up with five editors on this.
[00:36:43]  I don't think you have that many on your show, but we ended up with five editors on this program.
[00:36:49]  We had three guys who were really editors.
[00:36:54]  We had.
[00:36:55]  Two guys who did the long version get credit for the long version.
[00:36:58]  We have another guy who came in and he did a shortened version, and we had two assistants.

=== Five Editors and Censorship (03:33) ===

[00:37:04]  Oliver really likes editing.
[00:37:06]  Okay.
[00:37:07]  He spent a lot of time in that editing room.
[00:37:11]  Wow.
[00:37:11]  I personally don't like editing.
[00:37:13]  Okay.
[00:37:14]  But he does.
[00:37:15]  Okay.
[00:37:16]  And we spent literally months on end editing this film.
[00:37:20]  I would say, you know, at least 10 months, you know, editing the film.
[00:37:28]  All right.
[00:37:29]  And I think it pays off.
[00:37:31]  I think the short version, if you've seen the short version, opens with this very nice montage of what happened in Dallas that day before it gets into the actual story.
[00:37:45]  Okay.
[00:37:46]  And what happened was when CV19 hit, it forced us out of Oliver's offices.
[00:37:56]  Okay.
[00:37:57]  CV and low COVID.
[00:37:58]  Yes.
[00:37:59]  And so what happened was that.
[00:38:02]  I was actually there for a lot of the editing, going down to his office every day.
[00:38:07]  But then when that happened, you know, I wasn't there anymore after that.
[00:38:12]  Okay.
[00:38:12]  So I didn't, I didn't, I didn't, well, I didn't have any really control over the final cut anyway.
[00:38:16]  But, but I wasn't even there to offer any advice after because of the, because of that.
[00:38:22]  There's so many smoking guns in this thing, in this story.
[00:38:26]  And it seems amazing that they're still trying to hide.
[00:38:33]  Documents, evidence, testimonies, whatever it may be.
[00:38:37]  To you, through all of your research and all of your studies, the books that you've written and working on this film, what to you is the biggest smoking gun of this whole thing?
[00:38:49]  Or to you, what is the thing that sort of blows your mind, no pun intended, more than anything?
[00:38:58]  Okay.
[00:39:01]  When you just mentioned that they're still hiding stuff, which is accurate, there's 14,000 pages.
[00:39:09]  That are still being kept from the American public.
[00:39:12]  And I believe this is a direct violation of the law.
[00:39:15]  All right.
[00:39:16]  Because Trump said, if you recall, that he was going to let everything go.
[00:39:23]  I think it was in 2017.
[00:39:27]  The day that this was supposed to happen, the FBI and the CIA go into the Oval Office.
[00:39:34]  Obviously, they read him the Riot Act.
[00:39:36]  What's the Riot Act?
[00:39:37]  Well, usually what they do is they give this speech.
[00:39:41]  If you do this, you'll be endangering Agent X. Over in the Far East, Agent Y down in Central America, Agent Z over in Africa, and you will have blood on your hands, okay, if you do this, okay.
[00:39:57]  So, in other words, 50 years ago, they still have these same agents in the same places.
[00:40:02]  Well, most people are dead from that.
[00:40:04]  Yeah, right, right.
[00:40:05]  Obviously.
[00:40:06]  Okay.
[00:40:06]  And so, what happened is he caved, you know, Mr. Independent, Mr., who was going to blow into Washington and upset the power structure.
[00:40:16]  He caved.
[00:40:18]  And what he did is, I believe, in direct violation of the law because you had to see the law says that if you were going to delay anything past 2017, you had to write an explanation for every document you were going to withhold.

=== Stiles' Controversial Stair Story (15:26) ===

[00:40:37]  Well, he didn't do that.
[00:40:39]  Okay, so what I'm trying to say is there might be stuff in there that is even more incriminating, you know, than the stuff we have today, right?
[00:40:49]  All right, but if you had to ask me.
[00:40:53]  What I believe is the most serious in the film, we talk about the three secretaries on the fourth floor.
[00:41:09]  Oh, the three ladies.
[00:41:11]  Yeah.
[00:41:12]  Vicki Adams, Sandy Stiles, and Garner.
[00:41:20]  If you believe the one commission, Oswald has to get the shots off, runs the other side of the sixth floor, shoves a rifle in between the boxes, walks out the back, flies down the stairs, okay, and ends up on the second floor.
[00:41:42]  Victoria Adams and Sandy Stiles were coming down those stairs at the same time.
[00:41:53]  I've been on those stairs.
[00:41:56]  These are not the kind of short cushioned stairs that you get in modern office buildings.
[00:42:02]  They're the kind of tall wooden rickety stairs of old fashioned, because I think the building was built in the 30s or something.
[00:42:11]  It's hard enough to believe that they wouldn't have seen him.
[00:42:16]  It's almost impossible to believe that they wouldn't have heard him coming down those stairs.
[00:42:22]  Now, what happened in 1999?
[00:42:28]  As a result of the review board declassifying more documents, we found this third witness, Dorothy Garner.
[00:42:39]  She was the Adams and Stiles supervisor.
[00:42:44]  What makes this so important is that she didn't go down the stairs, she stayed on the foyer on the fourth floor.
[00:42:55]  She said she didn't see anybody.
[00:42:57]  The first time she saw anybody coming up the stairs, it was a policeman, Marion Baker.
[00:43:02]  All right.
[00:43:03]  So here you have the two secretaries going down the stairs.
[00:43:09]  You have their supervisor staying right there, and nobody saw Oswald, which I believe is really, really, really hard to swallow.
[00:43:21]  Okay.
[00:43:22]  Yeah.
[00:43:22]  And so the Warren Commission, of course, they understood this.
[00:43:27]  So even though they knew about Garner, they didn't call her as a witness.
[00:43:33]  And there's a letter going from the local Department of Justice attorney, okay, who says that we know about Garner.
[00:43:43]  She stayed on the fourth floor.
[00:43:45]  All right.
[00:43:46]  And the Warren Commission got this letter in June.
[00:43:50]  All right.
[00:43:51]  And so they still had three months to go.
[00:43:54]  And they never called her as a witness.
[00:43:58]  Sandy Stiles, who went down the stairs with Victoria Adams, she was never called by the Warren Commission as a witness.
[00:44:09]  So what they did is they completely distorted Victoria Adams' testimony in the Warren Report.
[00:44:18]  To make it sound like she had gone down the stairs much later than she actually did, in order to make this easier to believe.
[00:44:29]  Because if you don't make it easier to believe, then you have a pretty good alibi for Oswald not being on the sixth floor.
[00:44:40]  Okay.
[00:44:41]  And we, if you see the film, we had Barry Ernest, who wrote a book about this, about Victoria Adams, called The Girl on the Stairs.
[00:44:52]  Okay.
[00:44:53]  And I thought he did a very good job in that.
[00:44:58]  Now, the three keystones that I tried to make in the film that we were going to build the structure around, forensically speaking, okay, was going to be this the Victoria Adams, Sandy Stiles stuff, the stuff I already mentioned with Stringer about how this is very hard to believe.
[00:45:20]  This is Kennedy's brain.
[00:45:22]  And the third part is CE 399.
[00:45:25]  Okay, those are the three keystones that I thought, if we can present those in an effective way, then I think the average viewer, okay, is going to go along with us with everything else that we do.
[00:45:42]  Okay, and I thought that Oliver did a nice job in presenting those three keystones.
[00:45:49]  All right, but to get back to your original question, I believe that that is very, very hard to swallow.
[00:45:57]  All right.
[00:45:58]  The whole thing about Adam Stiles and Garner.
[00:46:01]  All right.
[00:46:01]  And if Oswald's not on the sixth floor, then the Warren Commission collapses.
[00:46:06]  Yeah.
[00:46:07]  Well, the documentary makes it incredibly obvious that this is a conspiracy.
[00:46:13]  What do you think about Kennedy's speech about secret societies?
[00:46:17]  You know, we didn't really deal with that in the film.
[00:46:22]  Right.
[00:46:22]  Okay.
[00:46:24]  And to be perfectly frank, I haven't studied it that closely.
[00:46:29]  All right.
[00:46:30]  And there's a lot of controversy about this, about what he actually meant by this.
[00:46:35]  All right.
[00:46:37]  Knowing JFK, though, you know, Kennedy went to Harvard and Ivy League school, which is Harvard and Yale are very big recruiting grounds for these secret societies and to go into places like the CIA or the State Department.
[00:46:59]  Are they?
[00:47:01]  Yale?
[00:47:02]  For the CIA?
[00:47:04]  Yeah.
[00:47:05]  The CIA and the State Department.
[00:47:06]  Usually, Yale is CIA, Harvard is State Department.
[00:47:10]  Okay.
[00:47:11]  And they have a lot of secret societies there.
[00:47:14]  Well, Kennedy never joined one when the whole time he was at Harvard.
[00:47:19]  All right.
[00:47:20]  And on top of that, Kennedy didn't like working intelligence.
[00:47:27]  He, when he first went to the Navy, he was working intelligence.
[00:47:32]  He didn't like it.
[00:47:33]  And so he got out of that.
[00:47:36]  Okay.
[00:47:37]  And instead, He went into these.
[00:47:42]  If you've seen the movie PT 109, okay, instead he went into these little cruiser boats, these patrol boats, okay, and which are really very dangerous.
[00:47:55]  And he almost got killed on one, okay.
[00:47:58]  So he did, he kind of didn't.
[00:48:01]  If that speech is what a lot of people say it is, I can understand where he was coming from intellectually.
[00:48:09]  Yeah, the reason I bring it up is because just looking in hindsight, looking at this whole conspiracy, the whole JFK conspiracy, it is.
[00:48:21]  Do you think that there's people, bureaucrats in government, that maybe do know about the truth of this?
[00:48:29]  And they're just saying, like, okay, it's obvious.
[00:48:32]  We get it.
[00:48:33]  You all know that we did this, but we can't admit it because it's national security.
[00:48:41]  Like, what if they do admit it?
[00:48:44]  What's the worst that could happen?
[00:48:48]  Well, the whole thing would produce a mass.
[00:48:54]  I mean, look.
[00:48:55]  Would it be good for the United States of America?
[00:48:57]  Yeah, but they don't care about that.
[00:48:59]  You don't think they care about what's good for the United States of America?
[00:49:04]  What they care about is the establishment.
[00:49:05]  And the establishment, of course, is a combination of the highest institutions in the government with the major media outlets.
[00:49:15]  That's roughly what the establishment is today.
[00:49:17]  And both of those groups, they essentially sold out to create this massive cover story about the Kennedy assassination.
[00:49:28]  Now, what you said is are there people to.
[00:49:33]  Well, it's 59 years ago.
[00:49:35]  So I really kind of don't think that there's very many people still around, okay, in the government who were part of it, you know, but we have this thing called institutional memory.
[00:49:51]  All right.
[00:49:52]  And this is why I think that they continue to maintain this story.
[00:49:56]  Now, I know for a fact, for example, Al Gore, when he went to Congress, he was a friend of Bernard Fensterwald, who was an attorney in Washington who was very interested in the Kennedy assassination.
[00:50:13]  And they were both from Tennessee.
[00:50:16]  And Fensterwald said, Al, look, before you go home on Friday, I want you to stop by my office for.
[00:50:24]  A few weeks.
[00:50:26]  Okay.
[00:50:26]  And I'm going to lay out these documents for you.
[00:50:29]  And I want you to go ahead and read them and copy them if you want.
[00:50:34]  And then tell me what you think later.
[00:50:37]  Well, about 11 months later, Gore said, Bernie, you're right.
[00:50:45]  It was a conspiracy.
[00:50:48]  So, this is the kind of schizoid mentality that America has to live with on this Kennedy case, where you have this small group of people that really knows what the heck happened, all right, versus these guys in the media, like the late Peter Jennings, the alive Dan Rather, okay, who spent their careers.
[00:51:16]  You know, spreading this BS about the Kennedy case, you know, and that's I think that's very deep, debilitating because what it does is it erodes the belief of the public in both the media and in our institutions, our governmental institutions.
[00:51:38]  And I think that's been very bad for the country.
[00:51:41]  Okay.
[00:51:41]  I mean, look what you have today you have the rise of QAnon.
[00:51:45]  Right.
[00:51:46]  Okay.
[00:51:47]  Who thought that JFK Jr. was going to resurrect himself?
[00:51:51]  Okay.
[00:51:51]  Have you ever heard of Operation Mindfuck?
[00:51:54]  No.
[00:51:55]  I'm sure you have.
[00:51:55]  You haven't?
[00:51:56]  No.
[00:51:57]  Operation Mindfuck came about, I forget when it was, I think it was in the early to mid 60s, possibly before.
[00:52:07]  But what it was was it was a plan to attribute all national calamities, assassinations, and conspiracies to the Illuminati.
[00:52:21]  And what they were doing was they were publishing all these underground articles on these underground publications about the Illuminati trying to tie all of these national and international conspiracies and assassinations and stuff like JFK to the Illuminati to try to attach this crazy person's stigma to all these things like this.
[00:52:42]  Sounds like a great CIA operation.
[00:52:44]  And yeah, it does.
[00:52:46]  And I believe the documentary that I learned about this was one of the.
[00:52:53]  Latest documentaries by, I forget his name, the BBC filmmaker who's done a lot of great documentaries.
[00:53:03]  I can't, why is his name escaping me right now?
[00:53:05]  Oh, yeah, I think, I know, I know who you mean.
[00:53:07]  Okay, he did the one on Bin Laden.
[00:53:11]  No, no, I don't think, maybe.
[00:53:13]  Yeah, he did one, Power of Nightmares.
[00:53:17]  Yes, yes, yes, yes, same guy.
[00:53:19]  Okay, yeah.
[00:53:19]  So, yeah, and he talks about in his film that it was his latest film where he covers.
[00:53:24]  The rise of Mao and Mao's wife.
[00:53:28]  And he ties it back to the history of the United States and all these other things, and the opium war in China with Britain.
[00:53:36]  It's a very complicated and very hard to follow documentary, but it's very good.
[00:53:41]  And he talks about Operation Mindfuck and how Lee Harvey Oswald and one of his early roommates were both working on this Operation Mindfuck.
[00:53:55]  And I was hoping that you might know something about it, but you don't.
[00:53:58]  Because I don't know much about it other than the fact that I totally disagree with him about Kerry Thornley.
[00:54:03]  Okay.
[00:54:03]  Because that's what the guy you're talking about, his Oswald's friend.
[00:54:07]  Okay.
[00:54:08]  Okay.
[00:54:08]  I totally disagree with him about Kerry Thornley.
[00:54:10]  And Kerry Thornley was the guy who was also a Marine, right?
[00:54:13]  Yes.
[00:54:13]  Okay.
[00:54:14]  Yes.
[00:54:15]  And Kerry Thornley ended up being a very useful witness for the Warren Commission against Oswald.
[00:54:20]  Right.
[00:54:21]  Okay.
[00:54:21]  Very useful.
[00:54:22]  In fact, of all the Marine guys, he was probably the worst.
[00:54:26]  Uh, at labeling Oswald as a real communist, okay.
[00:54:30]  Which, if you watched a film, okay, we don't agree with that, okay.
[00:54:34]  We think that Oswald was a part of the anti Fair Play for Cuba committee operation, which both the CIA and the FBI had.
[00:54:44]  But that's very interesting.
[00:54:46]  I hadn't heard of that before.
[00:54:47]  Jordan, maybe you can pull up a proper description of that.
[00:54:50]  Because I totally boxed it.
[00:54:51]  That sounds exactly how the CIA would do something, which resulted in QAnon, I believe.
[00:54:59]  Okay.
[00:55:02]  Because what they try and do, of course, Is they try and distract the eye, okay, and do a little slate of hand and switch things around from left to right, okay?
[00:55:15]  And so it gets all what we call indecipherable.
[00:55:19]  It becomes such a mess that people just throw up their hands and say, you know, we can't figure this thing out, you know?
[00:55:26]  So here's a description of it on New York Magazine Operation Mindfuck was a freeform art project, prank, political protest.
[00:55:35]  Of the 60s and 70s, designated to sow the culture with paranoia.
[00:55:40]  The key figures behind it were Carrie Thornley, co founder of the satiric religion called Discordianism, and Robert Anton Wilson, a Discordian staffer at Playboy.
[00:55:54]  Through every means available, Wilson explained in a memo laying out the plan the mind fuckers intended to attribute the national.

=== Operation Mindfuck Origins (03:31) ===

[00:56:04]  That's what I was talking about.
[00:56:07]  Now I'm familiar with this.
[00:56:09]  I read about this.
[00:56:09]  Okay.
[00:56:10]  Yep.
[00:56:10]  Attribute them, the conspiracies, to the Illuminati and other hidden hands.
[00:56:14]  So they planted stories about the Illuminati in the underground press.
[00:56:19]  And then towards the bottom, it says when the New Orleans jury refused to convict one of the men who the conspiracy hunting district attorney Jim Garrison blamed for the JFK killing, Garrison's booster art.
[00:56:39]  Kunkin of the Los Angeles Free Press got the note revealing that the jurors were all Illuminati initiates.
[00:56:48]  Okay, well, that's something I don't believe at all.
[00:56:52]  Okay, all right.
[00:56:53]  What do you think about that?
[00:56:55]  First of all, Kerry Thornley and Wilson were these kind of pranksters.
[00:57:03]  There's very little doubt about that.
[00:57:07]  Whether or not this was an effective CIA operation.
[00:57:12]  I don't know now.
[00:57:14]  And Adam Curtis is the name of the guy who did it.
[00:57:16]  Adam Curtis, right.
[00:57:16]  He's the director of the film.
[00:57:18]  Yep.
[00:57:18]  Okay.
[00:57:19]  And I disagreed with his take on Thornley.
[00:57:21]  All right.
[00:57:22]  Thornley, I believe, was actually part of the plot.
[00:57:29]  Okay.
[00:57:31]  And I've written about this at length.
[00:57:33]  I wrote a very long two part article.
[00:57:36]  Thornley denied to Jim Garrison that he ever met Oswald in New Orleans that summer of 1963.
[00:57:45]  This is a lie, okay?
[00:57:47]  Garrison had something like six witnesses who saw Thornley with Oswald that summer in New Orleans.
[00:57:55]  Thornley then became one of Oswald's chief accusers in both the media and before the Warren Commission.
[00:58:05]  And in fact, he was on a local TV station, all right, blasting Oswald as a real communist at the very same time that he was telling a friend of his who he went down to the TV station with.
[00:58:19]  That, yeah, I knew Oswald, and no, he wasn't a communist.
[00:58:24]  All right, so I have a lot of problems with Kerry Thornley, uh, you know, as to his credibility.
[00:58:32]  Now, this, it might be true, okay?
[00:58:36]  It might be true.
[00:58:37]  But Kerry Thornley is a very suspect person in the whole Kennedy case, all right?
[00:58:44]  From the time he meets Oswald in the Marines to the time where he's with Oswald in the summer of 1963, all right?
[00:58:54]  And I believe that, see, Garrison actually indicted Thornley.
[00:59:04]  All right, for perjury before the grand jury.
[00:59:07]  All right, a lot of people, and there's a guy who actually wrote a book about this, think that he would have been better advised to pursue that perjury case against Thornley.
[00:59:21]  A guy named Joe Biles wrote a book about this, then he would have been in his prosecution of Clay Shaw.
[00:59:28]  Okay, now on the bigger question that you brought up.

=== QAnon as Digital Religion (03:09) ===

[00:59:35]  It's hard for me to accept that QAnon was just something that came out of nowhere by a couple of guys in their basement, you know, and it attracted all of these, you know, rabid believers.
[00:59:55]  And in fact, what has happened is that a lot of people in the MSM, like Stephen Gillan, who's a professor at the University of Oklahoma, And he gets printed in the Washington Post.
[01:00:10]  What they have done is just what you said.
[01:00:13]  They've tried to group together the critical JFK researchers with the QAnon people.
[01:00:22]  Okay.
[01:00:23]  And what they do then is just mess it all around, stir it all up, and say that it's somehow all the same.
[01:00:31]  When in fact, it's not the same at all.
[01:00:34]  All right.
[01:00:35]  Because what the Kennedy critical community is, is.
[01:00:40]  A logical, intellectual, research kind of group that tries to show the.
[01:00:50]  It's not.
[01:00:52]  The QAnon is really faith based.
[01:00:55]  Okay.
[01:00:55]  It's almost a kind of religiosity about it.
[01:00:58]  All right.
[01:00:59]  We don't do that.
[01:01:01]  QAnon is a little bit different because it's more of the people who are heavily invested in the QAnon are like.
[01:01:11]  Outcasts or lonely people who don't have a sense of community that find a sense of community online on these crazy message boards like 4chan.
[01:01:23]  So that's where it began, right?
[01:01:25]  It was on that forum that it began, wasn't it?
[01:01:27]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:01:28]  I believe it started on 4chan and then it started to develop kind of like develop into its own organism.
[01:01:36]  And so many people became involved in it and it started to blow up that the people who were in charge or in control of the message board.
[01:01:45]  Started to just take it and run with it and sort of started to lean into it.
[01:01:49]  There's an incredible documentary about it called Cue Into the Storm by Colin Hoback.
[01:01:55]  It's a HBO documentary that goes deep into it and the psychology of the people behind the message boards that kind of like started that whole flame.
[01:02:06]  What is QAnon now?
[01:02:07]  And I believe the guy's name who's who was has been running it ever since, he's Running for some sort of office, I think.
[01:02:18]  Oh, no.
[01:02:19]  Oh, God.
[01:02:21]  In Arizona, I want to say it is.
[01:02:22]  That's scary.
[01:02:24]  Or he has something to do with that woman in Arizona.
[01:02:27]  Anyways.
[01:02:28]  But yeah, no, the QAnon thing is very, very different.
[01:02:30]  But I can see why they want to lump in.
[01:02:33]  Yes, it's very convenient for them to show, well, see, this is the same as this, when in fact it's not at all.
[01:02:41]  Okay, it's not even close.

=== The 544 Camp Address (15:32) ===

[01:02:45]  Now, getting back to the film, I said that there were these three keystones that we tried to do, and we did this in the book as well as the film.
[01:02:59]  And what we tried to do.
[01:03:02]  Was create a kind of like archway, which we could bring all these other things into play once those things were established.
[01:03:10]  And one of the things that we tried to put in there was about Admiral Berkeley.
[01:03:18]  Okay.
[01:03:18]  Admiral Berkeley was the only physician who was at the Parkland Hospital when they brought Kennedy into the emergency room, and who was also at Bethesda that night during this horrendous autopsy.
[01:03:34]  He was there present during the autopsy when they took him to Washington?
[01:03:37]  Yes, at Bethesda.
[01:03:38]  Okay, that's the Bethesda.
[01:03:39]  Berkeley was there.
[01:03:40]  Okay.
[01:03:40]  All right.
[01:03:42]  And.
[01:03:44]  Oh, okay.
[01:03:44]  I know you're talking about Dallas.
[01:03:46]  And he was Kennedy's personal physician.
[01:03:47]  Right.
[01:03:48]  He signed his death warrant and everything.
[01:03:49]  Right.
[01:03:50]  That's why he was in Dallas.
[01:03:52]  All right.
[01:03:52]  And so, as Doug Horn talks about in the film, and it's in the book, there are several times where it looked like Berkeley actually wanted to talk.
[01:04:08]  All right, one time was in 1964 where he did an oral history with the Kennedy Library.
[01:04:15]  And the interviewer says something like, Do you agree with the Warren Commission verdict?
[01:04:25]  And Berkeley says, I'd rather not address that issue right now.
[01:04:30]  Okay.
[01:04:32]  Then, when the House Select Committee began in 1976, which was the second federal investigation of the JFK case.
[01:04:41]  He wrote a letter to Richard Sprague, who was the chief counsel.
[01:04:46]  And the intimation in the letter was something that he had information that would question the official verdict.
[01:05:00]  Well, it turns out that Berkeley ended up doing a reversal and he wouldn't talk.
[01:05:09]  Okay.
[01:05:09]  In fact, the House Select Committee didn't even do a deposition with him.
[01:05:13]  Then.
[01:05:16]  During the review board, okay, they tried to get his secret files, which were at his lawyer's office.
[01:05:26]  I think his name was William Illig, okay.
[01:05:29]  And his daughter originally signed off on this.
[01:05:34]  She said that she wouldn't sign for it because he had, I think he died in '89.
[01:05:38]  All right.
[01:05:40]  His daughter originally signed off on this, said it was okay with her.
[01:05:44]  Then when Jeremy Gunn, the chief counsel, tried to get her to sign an official document, It looks like somebody got to her because she then reversed field.
[01:05:54]  All right.
[01:05:56]  But Berkeley is, I believe, a very important part of the story because it looks like he has this desire to tell the truth about what happened.
[01:06:10]  Then suddenly he thinks better of it and says, you know, maybe I shouldn't do this.
[01:06:15]  I want my pension.
[01:06:17]  Okay.
[01:06:17]  And I want it to continue.
[01:06:18]  And by the way, Johnson.
[01:06:23]  Continued with Berkeley after the assassination.
[01:06:27]  And Berkeley stayed as his personal physician to the day Johnson left the White House, okay, in 1968.
[01:06:35]  Now, was there a reason behind that?
[01:06:37]  I don't know.
[01:06:38]  Okay, but it's kind of interesting.
[01:06:40]  And Doug Horn talks about it in the book.
[01:06:43]  So we thought that if we could bring in these major evidentiary issues, that we could also place in people like Berkeley, okay, who seems to have, you know, kind of conflicting feelings.
[01:07:01]  Okay, and conflicting impulses about what he really believes about the JFK case.
[01:07:09]  And I thought that was an important thing to bring in.
[01:07:12]  Absolutely.
[01:07:13]  Going back to Oswald, why explain to people who aren't familiar with it what was his involvement specifically with the CIA in New Orleans?
[01:07:25]  Obviously, we know he was working in Japan for the Marines, doing surveillance flights over China.
[01:07:32]  That was.
[01:07:33]  Well, actually, it's even worse than that.
[01:07:35]  Okay.
[01:07:35]  Okay, because one of the things, this was one of the things I wanted to put in the film.
[01:07:42]  Okay.
[01:07:44]  When the House Select Committee of Assassinations convened, they assigned a woman named Betsy Wolf to the Oswald file at the CIA.
[01:07:58]  She requested charters from every division of the Central Intelligence Agency.
[01:08:05]  I think there's something like nine.
[01:08:07]  Okay.
[01:08:09]  She read through all the charters.
[01:08:12]  Then, from that information, she put a little graph on the wall saying, okay, then this is what Oswald's file should have done within the CIA.
[01:08:26]  So then she saw the file.
[01:08:28]  And guess what?
[01:08:29]  It didn't do anything like that.
[01:08:32]  Okay.
[01:08:32]  It didn't go through what she thought it would have done, which was the Soviet Russian division.
[01:08:38]  Okay, because when Oswald leaves the Marines, he defects to the Soviet Union.
[01:08:44]  So he thought, she thought, well, that's where his file should go, is the SR division.
[01:08:50]  They didn't go there at all, period.
[01:08:52]  So she started interviewing people within the CIA, trying to figure out what the heck happened to Oswald's file.
[01:09:00]  All right.
[01:09:01]  And so finally, in the autumn of 1978, she interviews a guy named Richard Gambino.
[01:09:10]  Who at that time is the chief of the Office of Security, which, by the way, that's where Oswald's file went.
[01:09:17]  It went to the Office of Security.
[01:09:19]  All right.
[01:09:20]  And he tells her look, it doesn't matter how many documents come in, and it doesn't matter if they're pre stamped, okay, to go somewhere.
[01:09:35]  If you intervene at the first gate, which is called the Office of Mail Logistics, That is where those documents will go to.
[01:09:47]  So here she finally, in November of 1978, she has the eureka moment.
[01:09:54]  Somebody rigged Oswald's file from the beginning within the CIA, so it would only go to the Office of Security.
[01:10:03]  And the only guy who had access to all the files was a guy named James Angleton, okay, who, of course, is the legendary counterintelligence chief at the CIA.
[01:10:14]  All right.
[01:10:14]  Now, how hot was Betsy Wolf's work?
[01:10:23]  It was not even transcribed in the memoranda form.
[01:10:28]  It's all in handwritten notes, which I was very lucky to get from a guy named Malcolm Blunt, who's one of the consultants on the film.
[01:10:37]  All right.
[01:10:38]  Somehow they didn't think this was important enough to transcribe in the memoranda form.
[01:10:45]  All right.
[01:10:46]  And from what I understand, Betsy Wolf doesn't like.
[01:10:50]  To talk about those days.
[01:10:51]  I think she's an attorney in Maryland, okay, the last time I looked.
[01:10:56]  And she understandably doesn't like to talk about that.
[01:10:58]  Now, having said that, that somebody obviously rigged Oswald's file from the beginning, it looks like, well, it doesn't look like it, it sure as heck looks like, that Oswald was sent to the Soviet Union, okay, to try and garner intelligence about.
[01:11:24]  What was going on there because there really wasn't a heck of a lot of intelligence that the CIA was getting.
[01:11:30]  So they sent over this string of defectors, Oswald being one of them.
[01:11:35]  All right.
[01:11:36]  And the problem was that the KGB understood who Oswald was from the minute he stopped in Moscow.
[01:11:43]  So what they did is they kicked him out of Moscow.
[01:11:47]  They sent him to Minsk, 400 miles away.
[01:11:51]  And instead of him spying on them, they spied on him.
[01:11:55]  Okay.
[01:11:56]  There was a whole ring.
[01:11:58]  Of intelligence informers around Oswald, as well as there being electronic surveillance in his beautiful apartment they set him up in.
[01:12:08]  All right.
[01:12:09]  And so Oswald realized that, well, I'm not making a lot of headway.
[01:12:15]  Yeah.
[01:12:16]  And so they brought him back to the United States.
[01:12:22]  And then it looks like, and again, I think it's even stronger than that, the CIA and the FBI had.
[01:12:32]  Anti Fair Play for Cuba committees crusades going on.
[01:12:36]  The Fair Play for Cuba committee was this liberal group in New York City that said that we object to what Kennedy's doing with Cuba, okay, and we believe that we should have better relations with Castro.
[01:12:56]  And they had some very big names like Norman Mailer who were part of this group.
[01:13:03]  And obviously the CIA and the FBI.
[01:13:06]  Who were very anti Castro.
[01:13:08]  Okay, they really didn't like the Fair Play for Cuba committee.
[01:13:14]  So they set up propaganda and infiltration campaigns against this group.
[01:13:21]  David Phillips and James McCord were two CIA agents who were involved with this on the CIA side.
[01:13:30]  And Cartha Deloach was one of the guys involved on the FBI side.
[01:13:36]  Okay, and these are pretty high level guys in those two agencies.
[01:13:41]  Lee Harvey Oswald has all the earmarks of being in on this Fair Play for Cuba committee operations to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba committee.
[01:13:54]  First of all, when he goes to New Orleans in the spring of 1963, his flyers that he makes up are stamped 544 Camp Street, okay, which just happens to be the building where Guy Bannister and David Ferry are working out of.
[01:14:15]  At this time.
[01:14:17]  All right.
[01:14:17]  And of course, if you're supposed to believe Oswald's a communist, it's very hard to believe that he's hanging out with these extreme right wingers like this.
[01:14:27]  Okay.
[01:14:28]  So, Guy Bannister and their office on 544 Camp Street.
[01:14:33]  Yeah.
[01:14:33]  Bannister's office is at that building.
[01:14:36]  And David Ferry was seen many times at that office.
[01:14:39]  Okay.
[01:14:40]  And of course, David Ferry knows Oswald from his Civil Air Patrol days.
[01:14:46]  Back in the 50s.
[01:14:47]  So when Oswald comes into New Orleans, then, according to Bannister's secretary, actually two secretaries, he had an office at that building.
[01:15:02]  And he was making up this 544.
[01:15:04]  And when Bannister heard that he had put that address on these flyers, he got livid.
[01:15:14]  And so then, of course, Oswald gets literature from the Fair Play for Cuban Committee in New York, and they tell him, We don't think it's very smart for you to try and start a Fair Play for Cuban Committee in the Deep South in New Orleans.
[01:15:34]  All right.
[01:15:35]  It's not a very, let's say, propitious way to begin a committee, okay, for the FPCC at this time.
[01:15:44]  But he goes ahead and he does, and he, of course, he's the only member that we know of in the whole city of New Orleans.
[01:15:50]  Then.
[01:15:52]  He starts leafleting in public in the rush hour in these streets of New Orleans.
[01:16:00]  Now, I've talked to people who were in the Communist Party at that time, and they said, Jim, that's a dead giveaway sign that the guy is not a true communist.
[01:16:13]  And I go, why?
[01:16:14]  Because the last thing you want to do is confront somebody in public with this kind of stuff.
[01:16:24]  Because it makes them stand out if they accept it and start reading it, et cetera.
[01:16:28]  Okay.
[01:16:29]  And all these other people are going to see them.
[01:16:30]  What we did, of course, is we would go at night and we would slip the literature under the door so that when they would come out and see it, they could take it right into their apartment.
[01:16:43]  Okay.
[01:16:43]  And not have this stigma of being associated with this kind of thing in public.
[01:16:47]  So that was a dead giveaway to me that Oswald was not really what they said he was, which was supposed to be a communist or a Marxist.
[01:16:56]  So, saying he was an agent provocateur.
[01:16:58]  Right, right.
[01:16:59]  And so, then, of course, he does one of these on Canal Street, which, of course, is one of the busiest thoroughfares in the whole city.
[01:17:09]  He does one of them outside the International Trademark, which is where Clay Shaw works at.
[01:17:15]  Okay.
[01:17:15]  And this is when Clay Shaw's assistant, Jesse Kaur, actually called out cameras from a local TV station.
[01:17:27]  And that's why we have films of Oswald doing this.
[01:17:30]  He goes and he hires two people from the unemployment office to help him, okay, in this leafleting at the international trademark.
[01:17:38]  Jesse Kaur, Shaw's right hand man, had also been at the Canal Street demonstration.
[01:17:46]  He saw that Oswald had put 544 Camp Street on that flyer.
[01:17:51]  What does he do?
[01:17:53]  From Shaw's international trademark, he sends it to the FBI office and he says, Note, last page.
[01:18:02]  Which is where the address was.
[01:18:04]  That's very well, it's more than interesting because it tells us that Jesse Kor, working for Shaw, knew what was at 544 Camp Street.

=== Secret Service Detention Fail (09:46) ===

[01:18:17]  And he was trying to tell the FBI okay, somehow, someway, you got to get this guy to stop doing this.
[01:18:24]  All right, which dictates that the FBI was in cahoots with Guy Bannister, which, of course, they were.
[01:18:31]  Then this culminates, of course.
[01:18:35]  With the fist fight between Carlos Bringier of the DRE, the student director at Nationale, okay, the faction in New Orleans, and he gets in a fight with Oswald, and they actually go to court, all right?
[01:18:55]  And Bringier, who actually threw the punch, he walks off scot free.
[01:19:05]  Oswald goes ahead, is guilty, and gets a $10 fine.
[01:19:11]  He was in detention also after he was arrested.
[01:19:14]  And what does he do in detention?
[01:19:17]  He calls the FBI.
[01:19:21]  Now, I asked you, what kind of a communist calls the FBI when he gets detained for getting in this street altercation?
[01:19:30]  Very, very, very unusual.
[01:19:32]  All right.
[01:19:33]  And then after this is all over, he goes around to the newspapers, it gets on TV.
[01:19:38]  Gets on the radio, starts talking about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
[01:19:43]  So, this has all the earmarks of being part of an operation to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, especially down to this.
[01:19:55]  In the newly documented papers, Oswald was writing the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in 1962, not 1963.
[01:20:06]  He was writing them in 1962.
[01:20:09]  And the guy who moderated, The televised debate, a guy named William Stuckey, he wrote a letter to the FBI in 1962 asking them if there was any Fair Play for Cuba committee representative in New Orleans at the time.
[01:20:31]  So, this has all the earmarks of being a created event and well in advance, okay, of when it actually happened.
[01:20:41]  So, this is why most people believe.
[01:20:45]  That Oswald was not really a communist.
[01:20:49]  He was really what you called it, an agent provocateur.
[01:20:55]  I mean, if you can find any communists that Oswald worked with in Dallas or New Orleans, that's news to most people because nobody's ever been able to find any communists that he worked with in either place.
[01:21:07]  And in fact, it's exactly the opposite.
[01:21:10]  He hangs out in Dallas with these white Russians.
[01:21:16]  Which are the people who wanted to overthrow the, you know, Khrushchev and bring back the czar?
[01:21:21]  Okay.
[01:21:22]  And he's hanging out with these rabid right wing Cuban exiles and sympathizers who want to overthrow Castro, you know, and bring back, you know, Batista.
[01:21:33]  You know, so it's very, very hard to believe, you know, that Oswald was really what the Warren Commission said he was.
[01:21:43]  Now, there were two assassination attempts before Dallas, correct?
[01:21:48]  There were Chicago and Tampa.
[01:21:51]  Your city.
[01:21:52]  The city we're in right now.
[01:21:54]  Exactly.
[01:21:54]  Can you explain what happened in Chicago first?
[01:21:57]  All right.
[01:22:00]  I actually just did a column on this for Consortium News.
[01:22:04]  About the whole Secret Service thing.
[01:22:10]  In late October, early November, there was information that came into the FBI that there would be an assassination attempt on Kennedy in Chicago.
[01:22:29]  And what's so very odd about this is the code name to one of the informants was Lee.
[01:22:38]  Was that Oswald?
[01:22:39]  We don't know.
[01:22:40]  Okay.
[01:22:41]  The other information came in from a landlady who was renting these apartments to these guys who looked to her like they were Cubans.
[01:22:52]  All right.
[01:22:53]  And they had some rifles in there where they were staying, plus a map of the motorcade that Kennedy was going to take.
[01:23:06]  So, The FBI gets this information.
[01:23:09]  They give it to the Secret Service.
[01:23:13]  The Secret Service picks up, I think, three people two of the shooters, and a guy named Arthur Vallee, whom most people believe was supposed to be the Fall Guy.
[01:23:26]  Okay, because he worked on a building where the motorcade was passing by, I think on the third or fourth floor.
[01:23:33]  Okay, and he had a lot of resemblances to Oswald.
[01:23:37]  Okay.
[01:23:38]  And they thought he was going to be the stooge for this assassination attempt.
[01:23:45]  All right.
[01:23:46]  They never got any more information out of these people.
[01:23:51]  But a guy named Abraham Bolden, who worked out of the Secret Service office in Chicago, knew about it.
[01:23:59]  And he also knew there had been a cover up of this attempt.
[01:24:03]  Kennedy didn't go to Chicago that day.
[01:24:06]  All right.
[01:24:06]  He said that because of the overthrow of the DM government in Saigon.
[01:24:10]  That was the official story, but most people think they didn't go because of this assassination that he heard about to the Secret Service.
[01:24:18]  And so he doesn't go.
[01:24:20]  And there's a cover up about this within the Secret Service.
[01:24:25]  There were not written reports, there were only oral reports.
[01:24:29]  The documents were all sequestered, okay?
[01:24:33]  And they were not in the central files.
[01:24:36]  This ends up being a very serious mistake because the attempt in Chicago.
[01:24:46]  Had so many similarities to what happened in Dallas, okay, that a lot of people believe that if that information would have been forthcoming, Dallas might have been prevented, okay.
[01:25:02]  For example, you've got a guy who resembles Oswald, this former Marine, valet, yeah, okay, who had been a trainer, okay, and many people think Oswald had been one of the training camps in New Orleans, all right.
[01:25:17]  And you're speaking about the people that were training the Cubans, right?
[01:25:21]  That has to be CIA because that's yeah, all right.
[01:25:24]  And you had this tall building that the motorcade was going to go by right off this freeway exit ramp, all right.
[01:25:34]  And so the modus operandi looks a lot like Dallas, all right.
[01:25:42]  And so, if you would have been alerted to this, you might have been able to.
[01:25:48]  To prevent what happened.
[01:25:49]  Now, in Tampa, there was a guy named Gilberto Lopez, who was a former Cuban, came to this country, was part of the Fair Play for Cuba committee.
[01:26:00]  All right.
[01:26:01]  After the assassination, he goes to Texas.
[01:26:06]  Then he goes to Mexico City and he ends up being the only passenger on a Cubana flight to Havana.
[01:26:14]  Okay.
[01:26:18]  That day, that particular, which I believe was the 18th, all right.
[01:26:23]  This time, Kennedy was not going to back out.
[01:26:26]  He came to Tampa.
[01:26:28]  Okay.
[01:26:29]  It was the longest motorcade, I think, 17 miles.
[01:26:33]  And it went by the Floridian Hotel, which I believe at that time was one of the tallest, if not the tallest building in Tampa.
[01:26:42]  All right.
[01:26:43]  This time, because of Chicago, all right, there was all kinds of security.
[01:26:50]  I mean, it was every place.
[01:26:54]  Vince Palomera, who's an expert on the Secret Service, said if you combine all of the agents from different law enforcement groups, Whether it be Secret Service, whether it be local police, whether it be state police, there were literally dozens of people crawling on every floor of that Floridian hotel.
[01:27:13]  All right.
[01:27:13]  And so they who, if this was really a planned assassination, it was this that stopped it.
[01:27:19]  Kennedy was so grateful for this that he insisted on staying after.
[01:27:26]  And he wanted to congratulate every single person, okay, at that Floridian hotel that day personally.
[01:27:33]  And he did.
[01:27:34]  As Vince talked to one of the guys he did this with.
[01:27:37]  All right.
[01:27:37]  So, yes, there were at least two attempts to kill Kennedy in just November of that year before the actual murder took place in Dallas.
[01:27:50]  Very interesting.
[01:27:52]  Yeah.
[01:27:52]  You know, because I think the obvious implication Kennedy wasn't getting out of 1963 alive.
[01:28:02]  Okay.

=== Hidden Relevant Documents (03:56) ===

[01:28:03]  One way or another.
[01:28:05]  Come hell or high water, right?
[01:28:06]  You know, they were going to get him.
[01:28:09]  You know, where do you think this goes from here?
[01:28:13]  Like, what do you think happens?
[01:28:14]  You think that this stuff, I think, because originally in the documentary, they talk about 2029 being a significant year for releasing documents.
[01:28:22]  Oh, well, in Oliver's film, JFK, at the end of the movie, he put this crawler on the screen that the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations are classified till the year 2029.
[01:28:37]  Mm hmm.
[01:28:39]  This got a lot of people angry because they didn't know about it.
[01:28:44]  And so they started bombarding Washington.
[01:28:47]  Okay.
[01:28:48]  Why?
[01:28:49]  Why is this a secret?
[01:28:51]  And this is what created the Assassinations Record Review Board.
[01:28:57]  So they were supposed to have solved this problem, except they didn't.
[01:29:03]  All right.
[01:29:04]  It was not enough people and it was not enough money.
[01:29:09]  Okay.
[01:29:10]  To break through everything.
[01:29:13]  And so they put a lot of documents on what they call time delay, which means that they would mark a document, like, say, they stopped in 1998.
[01:29:26]  They would mark a document, like 1999, 2001, 2003, when they thought it would be safe to go ahead and open up the document.
[01:29:40]  Except that.
[01:29:45]  That didn't work for everything.
[01:29:47]  And so, because of that, they had to mark a lot of documents, what they termed NBR.
[01:29:58]  What does that mean?
[01:30:01]  Not believed relevant.
[01:30:04]  It turned out that a lot of the documents they believed not to be relevant were pretty relevant.
[01:30:08]  Like, for example, that the mayor of Dallas, Cabell, was a CIA asset from 1959.
[01:30:23]  His brother was Charles Cabell, who was the deputy director of the CIA during the Bay of Pigs.
[01:30:31]  Who Kennedy fired.
[01:30:34]  All right.
[01:30:35]  So most people would believe that that's kind of relevant.
[01:30:39]  But they just had to go leave in this haste out the door.
[01:30:43]  And they ended up.
[01:30:44]  And so this is what happened.
[01:30:45]  A lot of these documents got either misfiled or they just didn't have enough time to go through everything.
[01:30:54]  And Biden last year opened up, I think, 1,400 pages.
[01:31:04]  All right.
[01:31:06]  And there's still 14,000 left.
[01:31:09]  Now, we are today.
[01:31:12]  Were those pages significant at all?
[01:31:14]  Did we learn anything from them?
[01:31:14]  We don't know.
[01:31:15]  Okay, well, to be perfectly frank, I haven't looked at the 1,400 yet.
[01:31:20]  Okay.
[01:31:23]  But if you take a look, this is 2022.
[01:31:30]  If Biden releases all the documents this year or next year, That will only have saved what six years?
[01:31:42]  Okay, so all this hubbub around JFK and the ARB ends up shaving at the most maybe six years from what the original declassification date was, you know.

=== Burden of Proof Debate (06:18) ===

[01:31:59]  And to me, this shows you who really runs Washington, right?
[01:32:07]  Okay, these people, these hierarchies.
[01:32:11]  Okay, in power, okay, are determined that, you know, we don't care what the people think, all right?
[01:32:22]  If we don't want to declassify these documents, we're not going to declassify the documents, all right?
[01:32:27]  And that has been, I believe, the signal message, you know, of the whole aftermath of the Kennedy case that secrecy rules, okay?
[01:32:40]  And, and, People, give an example.
[01:32:48]  When the FBI went in for their first declassification session with the ARB, they told him, look, if we want to declassify a document, we have the power to do that.
[01:33:04]  All right?
[01:33:05]  You can object to it, but we have the final word.
[01:33:09]  And the FBI guy there turns to his lawyer and he says, Can they really do that?
[01:33:17]  The guy goes, Yes, they can.
[01:33:20]  Okay, because these guys, you know, they're so used to being in control that to them, it was a really bad experience to lose that control.
[01:33:33]  Because, see, in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, which is what we had before the review board, you didn't see the document, but you had to argue why it should be declassified.
[01:33:49]  You bore the burden of proof, okay, without seeing it.
[01:33:54]  In this particular case with the review board, it was different.
[01:33:59]  The CIA or the FBI had to prove that it shouldn't be declassified, even though the review board had it right on the screen in front of them.
[01:34:08]  All right.
[01:34:09]  So the burden of proof was on them, which is, I believe, the way it should be.
[01:34:14]  You know, I mean, secrecy, I don't have to tell you this or anybody listening to this show.
[01:34:20]  You know, secrecy is the enemy of democracy.
[01:34:23]  You really can't have a democracy.
[01:34:26]  If the CIA and the FBI and the State Department can inform the public, okay, you're going to get to see this, you're not going to see this.
[01:34:35]  Okay, and that's the way it is, you know?
[01:34:38]  Yeah, I don't know.
[01:34:41]  I don't know.
[01:34:42]  That was always my position, but I don't know the answers when it comes to national security issues.
[01:34:53]  And to obviously, there are certain parts of the government that have to keep secrets.
[01:35:00]  In order to protect our nation, right?
[01:35:02]  Because you have other countries like whatever may be, Russia, China, whatever other country it is, that we don't want to keep secrets from for our own good.
[01:35:17]  And, you know, even when it comes to like a great example is Edward Snowden and the NSA spying on Americans trying to find terrorists.
[01:35:26]  Do the big debate is, do we, should we be okay with giving up?
[01:35:32]  Certain freedoms for security?
[01:35:37]  Should we be able, are we obligated to give up certain comforts and certain freedoms for the greater good of the country?
[01:35:44]  Well, you know what Benjamin Franklin said about that?
[01:35:48]  One of his great sayings.
[01:35:49]  What?
[01:35:50]  The guy who values security over liberty deserves neither.
[01:35:57]  You know, yeah, there are valid things that.
[01:36:03]  Have to remain secret for at least for some period of time, all right.
[01:36:07]  The general rule is that after 25 years, it should be declassified.
[01:36:14]  That was a general rule, except that that's not abided by, okay, very much at all, right?
[01:36:21]  All right, now if you ask me, I believe the review board was a great concept in theory, it was okay, that you would have this five person citizens panel.
[01:36:37]  Okay.
[01:36:37]  And they would see the document and they would go ahead and make up their minds after listening to the case whether it should be declassified or not.
[01:36:47]  I think that's the way it should be done throughout the government.
[01:36:51]  All right.
[01:36:51]  You know, there's things that I believe you've heard of Suitland, haven't you?
[01:37:01]  That's the big Pentagon repository.
[01:37:03]  No.
[01:37:05]  That's where all the documents are that the Pentagon doesn't want to give up.
[01:37:08]  What's it called again?
[01:37:09]  Suitland, Maryland.
[01:37:10]  Suitland, Maryland?
[01:37:11]  Yeah.
[01:37:12]  And reportedly, that complex is something like 20 acres, okay, where they have literally storehouses full of documents, you know, dating back to World War I, okay?
[01:37:30]  And I just believe that, and see, this is the problem we have in this country.
[01:37:38]  Because what happens is that after a very controversial event, whether it be the Vietnam War, you know, or the Kennedy assassination,
[01:37:53]  or one of the other assassinations of the 60s, or the invasion of Iraq, okay, what you get for the most part is people involved in the event.
[01:38:10]  Either talking to journalists or writing a memoir.

=== Dulles and CIA Motives (14:48) ===

[01:38:17]  That's very problematic, of course, because if you're involved in the event, then obviously you want to put the best face you can on what you did.
[01:38:29]  Okay?
[01:38:30]  You don't want to talk about, well, I screwed up this and I screwed up that and I should have done better and et cetera.
[01:38:38]  A very good example of this is David Halberstam's book, The Best and the Brightest, which was.
[01:38:45]  More or less the standard accepted wisdom on the Vietnam War for a very long period of time.
[01:38:52]  Okay.
[01:38:54]  Today, most informed people like myself, you know, think that that book is a big propaganda piece in which Halberstam, through his own biases and through the fact that he had been a former hawk.
[01:39:16]  Which is something he doesn't like talking about in The Best and the Brightest.
[01:39:20]  Yeah, Halberstam was a hawk.
[01:39:21]  What do you mean by that?
[01:39:22]  What's a hawk?
[01:39:23]  He wanted to win the war.
[01:39:24]  Oh, okay.
[01:39:25]  He wrote a book called The Making of the Quagmire, in which he essentially says that prior to The Best and the Brightest.
[01:39:32]  The Best and the Brightest was 72, I think.
[01:39:35]  Making of the Quagmire, I think, is 1968.
[01:39:38]  Him and Neil Sheehan, his buddy from the New York Times, went to Vietnam and they thought that the Americans should win this war.
[01:39:47]  And then we were holding back.
[01:39:49]  And that Kennedy was wrong, all right.
[01:39:53]  And we had to eventually commit American firepower and American troops, all right.
[01:40:02]  They essentially, Halberstam at least, more or less tried to cover that up in his book, The Best and the Brightest, all right, in which he looks at it now as a huge mistake, okay.
[01:40:18]  Yeah.
[01:40:19]  All right.
[01:40:19]  And he completely leaves out.
[01:40:24]  Kennedy's withdrawal plan, all right, which, of course, as we talk about in the film with John Newman and Jamie Galbraith, which he had devised in 1963.
[01:40:37]  There was a big meeting in Hawaii in May of '63 in which McNamara went over there, demanded all the schedules for withdrawal.
[01:40:48]  When he got them, he turned around and said, This is too slow.
[01:40:52]  We have to get out faster.
[01:40:54]  And then that fall, Kennedy goes ahead and signs NSAM 263, which confirms the first thousand troops will be coming home in December.
[01:41:05]  This will be part of a phase withdrawal plan, okay, which will be completed in 1965.
[01:41:11]  Now, the review board did a really good job on this.
[01:41:17]  Okay, this is one of the best things I think that they did in making this all, you know, people had dismissed it before, you know, but.
[01:41:26]  It's all true and it's all real.
[01:41:28]  Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam.
[01:41:30]  So here's my question is why did we have to wait until 1997 to get these documents out that settled the debate?
[01:41:40]  You know, because that's when they came out in 1997.
[01:41:44]  And that actually, if you can believe it, that actually made the big papers, the New York Times, for example, the Philadelphia Inquirer, with the headline Kennedy had planned to exit Vietnam.
[01:41:58]  All right.
[01:41:58]  So, in other words, After 34 years, all right, we get the truth about Kennedy wanting to get out of Vietnam.
[01:42:08]  All right.
[01:42:08]  And this is what I mean.
[01:42:09]  This is the problem we have with excess secrecy in this country.
[01:42:13]  Yeah, it's not a good look for the CIA, especially with operations like Operation Northwoods, I think it was.
[01:42:21]  Right.
[01:42:21]  That's another one that the review board got out.
[01:42:24]  Yeah, that was astounding that that came out.
[01:42:28]  Go ahead and create a provocation, you know, of either a Cuban government attack in Miami or the blowing up of a plane over Havana.
[01:42:44]  All right.
[01:42:45]  And then, manned plane, right.
[01:42:47]  Yeah.
[01:42:47]  A drone kind of thing.
[01:42:48]  And this was going to create the excuse for an invasion of Cuba, which Kennedy was totally against.
[01:43:01]  Okay.
[01:43:02]  You know, he just did not.
[01:43:03]  And this is why during the Bay of Pigs and then during the missile crisis, he refused to do that.
[01:43:11]  All right.
[01:43:12]  He, when the Bay of Pigs was failing, he accepted the failure and he was not going to commit the Marines and the Navy, which is off the coast, to bail it out.
[01:43:24]  And then during the missile crisis, when everybody was urging them to bomb the missile silos or send in the Army, all right, excuse me, Marine Corps.
[01:43:33]  He refused to do that too.
[01:43:35]  And it's a hell of a good thing he didn't because we later found out that Castro had these mini nuclear weapons.
[01:43:44]  All right.
[01:43:44]  And I think he had something like 10 of them.
[01:43:47]  All right.
[01:43:48]  They were small scale, you know, kind of Hiroshima style bombs.
[01:43:53]  All right.
[01:43:53]  Which would have incinerated any kind of invasion force, you know, at that time.
[01:43:59]  All right.
[01:44:00]  And that, of course, would have escalated.
[01:44:03]  You know, me and you might not be here.
[01:44:05]  Okay.
[01:44:05]  If that would have happened.
[01:44:06]  All right.
[01:44:07]  And so that was Operation Northwards.
[01:44:10]  Again, this did not get declassified until the 90s.
[01:44:16]  Until the review board.
[01:44:18]  And the Bay of Pigs, when he found out that the head of the CIA was.
[01:44:22]  Now, during that time, the head of the CIA was Alan Dulles, right?
[01:44:25]  And when he found out that he had been duped by Alan Dulles or that he had been lied to, that was like a really big turning point for Kennedy, right?
[01:44:33]  Yes.
[01:44:34]  Yes.
[01:44:34]  And we talk about that in the film.
[01:44:38]  How did he change?
[01:44:39]  How did that change him?
[01:44:40]  Well, what happened.
[01:44:42]  Was that when Kennedy's brother, Bobby, conducted?
[01:44:49]  Well, he didn't conduct it, but he was part of what they called the Taylor Commission, which was the White House investigation of the Bay of Pigs.
[01:44:56]  All right.
[01:44:58]  Bobby Kennedy came to the conclusion after doing an extensive review that the CIA knew the Bay of Pigs would fail.
[01:45:10]  All right.
[01:45:11]  That they knew that these 1,300 people.
[01:45:14]  Ragtag collection of Cuban exiles was not going to be able to stand up to Castro's regular army, which was about 30,000 guys with tanks and mortar and cannon, okay, on this lonely beachhead, all right.
[01:45:34]  And in addition to that, Castro had like 150,000 reservists, all right.
[01:45:41]  And so Bobby Kennedy came to the conclusion that Alan Dulles knew that this operation would fail.
[01:45:50]  And he was banking on JFK caving and at the last minute sending in American forces to bail out the operation.
[01:45:59]  Right.
[01:46:00]  And Bobby Kennedy essentially brought Robert Lovett into the White House because Robert Lovett had been a former Secretary of Defense and he had wanted to get rid of Alan Dulles years earlier.
[01:46:19]  Okay.
[01:46:21]  And he had been.
[01:46:23]  Part of a report called the Lovett Bruce Report.
[01:46:27]  David Bruce was the other guy.
[01:46:29]  And they had written a report saying that what Alan Dulles has done with the CIA is unconscionable.
[01:46:35]  All right.
[01:46:36]  And so Bobby Kennedy brought in Robert Lovett.
[01:46:40]  And he said, look, we tried to get Alan Dulles, get rid of Alan Dulles back in the 50s, but we couldn't do it because his brother was a Secretary of State.
[01:46:50]  All right.
[01:46:51]  So now you have the perfect opportunity to go ahead and get rid of this guy.
[01:46:56]  All right.
[01:46:57]  And so he has, you know, I believe completely transformed what the CIA should be, which is an intelligence collection group, into a covert action group.
[01:47:12]  All right.
[01:47:13]  And now, because of this, this Bay of Pigs disaster, okay, now you have a great pretext to go ahead and fire the guy.
[01:47:23]  And so this is what Kennedy decided on doing.
[01:47:26]  And He was supposed to have said during this thing, this whole 1961 episode, that he wanted to shatter the CIA and throw it to the wind, okay, into a thousand pieces and throw it to the wind.
[01:47:43]  And he does get rid of the top level and he does cut the budget, all right.
[01:47:48]  And then he puts his brother, okay, Bobby, in charge of these secret operations against Cuba at that time called Mongoose.
[01:48:01]  All right.
[01:48:02]  And he makes, and Bobby makes sure that this is not going to spin out of control.
[01:48:08]  I want to see every plan that you submit.
[01:48:12]  Okay.
[01:48:12]  And I want to know who's going to be involved.
[01:48:15]  And I want to know how many guys you're going to use.
[01:48:17]  And I want to know what you're going to do.
[01:48:19]  And the CI really didn't like this.
[01:48:21]  What was the goal of Mongoose?
[01:48:23]  It was to, what they were trying to do was to stop Castro because they'd be preoccupied.
[01:48:33]  With defending the island and therefore not be able to make excursions into South America.
[01:48:39]  Okay.
[01:48:39]  Now, a lot of people say that was trying to overthrow.
[01:48:42]  There's no way in the world that these, this ragtag band of Cuban exiles, okay, was going to overthrow the Castro regime.
[01:48:52]  All right.
[01:48:52]  And in fact, by 1963, Des Fitzgerald says, look, this is ridiculous.
[01:49:00]  You know, we should just stop the whole thing because I think it's really helping Castro.
[01:49:06]  Okay.
[01:49:08]  Instead of weakening him, it's making him a bigger hero in the eyes of the Cuban public.
[01:49:13]  All right.
[01:49:14]  And so that's how it eventually got phased out.
[01:49:17]  All right.
[01:49:18]  Now, what my point was, though, that the CIA didn't like what Bobby Kennedy was doing.
[01:49:25]  All right.
[01:49:26]  And under Dulles, they essentially didn't have to submit these kind of plans or anything like that.
[01:49:34]  All right.
[01:49:35]  And this is one of the things that Robert Lovett complained about in his original report.
[01:49:40]  He goes, These guys over lunch will make up an operation, Dulles will approve it.
[01:49:48]  And it will then go ahead and become active the next day.
[01:49:51]  You know?
[01:49:52]  All right.
[01:49:53]  And so that's one of the reasons that Kennedy, JFK, brought in the new leadership.
[01:50:00]  He fired the top level Bissell, Cabell, and Dulles.
[01:50:05]  All right.
[01:50:06]  And he tried, he complained more than once about the fact he didn't know what these guys were doing most of the time.
[01:50:16]  He complained to the French ambassador.
[01:50:18]  When he found out that the CIA was in cahoots with the OAS, the secret army organization, to try and overthrow de Gaulle.
[01:50:26]  And that was one of his most infamous quotes, is what he said to the prime minister of France.
[01:50:32]  No, the French ambassador.
[01:50:33]  The French ambassador, right.
[01:50:35]  He said that he made the famous quote saying, I don't think I'm in charge.
[01:50:38]  Yes.
[01:50:39]  You know, I can't speak for the CIA because I don't know what they're doing so much.
[01:50:44]  Okay.
[01:50:45]  You know, but he said, You can tell Charles de Gaulle that I'm in complete support of his government, you know.
[01:50:52]  And so then he actually promised to send over a fleet from the Mediterranean, you know, if De Gaulle needed it.
[01:51:00]  All right.
[01:51:01]  And so, yeah, this is one of the comments he made, okay, about not being in control of the Central Intelligence Agency.
[01:51:08]  All right.
[01:51:09]  And it was utterly true, of course, you know.
[01:51:14]  Kennedy really, really suspected a lot of the worst things about what the CIA.
[01:51:23]  You know, was really doing all right, and he actually once with one of his friends from the Senate, okay.
[01:51:36]  Um, he got so angry, all right, with them trying to go ahead and convince him to do something, which I believe was the assassination of Trujillo, okay, that he literally broke a plate over the dinner table, okay.
[01:51:58]  Saying he didn't want to hear about any more of this stuff.
[01:52:01]  All right.
[01:52:02]  Okay.
[01:52:03]  And this is the kind of struggle, you know, he was in.
[01:52:07]  And this is why, in I think it was '62, he issued a set of diplomatic notes.
[01:52:14]  All right.
[01:52:14]  To all the ambassadors through the State Department, saying the guy running American foreign policy in each and every foreign country is the ambassador.
[01:52:29]  Okay.
[01:52:30]  Not the CIA.
[01:52:32]  I want the ambassador to be the ultimate guy in charge.
[01:52:36]  Which makes perfect sense.
[01:52:37]  The guy's feet on the ground.
[01:52:38]  He understands the people of the culture.
[01:52:39]  But that's not what's happening.
[01:52:40]  No.
[01:52:41]  And what do you think the fundamental problem is with that?
[01:52:47]  What was the problem with Alan Dulles?
[01:52:49]  What was his motivation or what was the CIA's motivation and what was the root of this conflict or this ambition for the CIA?
[01:53:02]  Alan Dulles came from Sullivan and Cromwell.

=== Congo Cooperation Tragedy (16:06) ===

[01:53:06]  Which was a very high powered, huge law firm out of New York City.
[01:53:14]  His brother was the managing partner.
[01:53:17]  He was a senior partner.
[01:53:19]  Some of their assignments, well, actually, a lot of their assignments, were for these big, huge, sprawling corporations.
[01:53:26]  And a lot of these corporations had very powerful interests in the third world.
[01:53:32]  Okay?
[01:53:34]  And so, if you know anything about what the CIA has done in the third world, Like our bends, you know, in Central America.
[01:53:42]  I've watched a lot of Oliver Stone's documentaries.
[01:53:45]  Okay.
[01:53:45]  Then you understand what their objective is.
[01:53:49]  And what their objective is, okay, is the opposite of what America is supposed to stand for, which is supposed to be spreading democracy.
[01:54:00]  What they were trying to do was keep dictatorships in power so that they could have the resources of this, whatever the third world country was.
[01:54:10]  Being exploited by American or British or European conglomerates.
[01:54:17]  A very good example being Congo, which we spent some time on in the film.
[01:54:22]  Right.
[01:54:22]  Okay.
[01:54:23]  And in the book, and we talk about in the book with a guy named Richard Mahoney.
[01:54:32]  All right.
[01:54:33]  And he was one of the preeminent experts on Africa and the Congo.
[01:54:38]  He's in the film.
[01:54:39]  We did an extended interview for him in the book.
[01:54:42]  Okay.
[01:54:43]  And his book, JFK Ordeal in Africa, was a milestone in figuring out just who JFK was.
[01:54:53]  Because JFK's stance on the Congo and the whole episode with Dag Hammarskjöld and Patrice Lumumba was so different than what Eisenhower did before and what Johnson did after that it's almost impossible.
[01:55:15]  To compare the three men, I don't think you can because Kennedy actually backed Lumumba, who was his revolutionary leader in the Congo, who wanted to kick out Belgium.
[01:55:28]  All right.
[01:55:29]  And Hammerschild, who was a secretary general, who actually wanted to have third world democracy.
[01:55:37]  Now, in the book and in the film, we talk about what happened to those two men.
[01:55:47]  Lumumba.
[01:55:50]  Who was assassinated with the help of the CIA three days before Kennedy's inaugurated?
[01:56:01]  I don't think that was a coincidence.
[01:56:03]  No.
[01:56:04]  They got rid of him three days before Kennedy was inaugurated.
[01:56:07]  And what exactly was the CIA's interest in Congo?
[01:56:10]  Well, in the Congo, the CIA was in cahoots with Belgium and England to try and thwart Lumumba's ambition, which was to make Congo.
[01:56:22]  An independent state and to have its own resources for its own people.
[01:56:27]  Okay.
[01:56:28]  He was a, to them, he was a very dangerous guy because not just for Congo, but because they feared that he could spread this Pan Africanism idea throughout the continent.
[01:56:44]  All right.
[01:56:44]  And Congo, for example, is a very rich country with a lot of great resources.
[01:56:49]  And so they helped track Lumumba.
[01:56:54]  When he escaped from prison, okay, because they got Mobutu, who was his chief Pentagon army guy, to betray him, okay, and to have him arrested.
[01:57:06]  And when he escaped, the CIA helped the Belgians track him down, okay, and turn him over to his enemies in Katanga, which was the breakaway colony.
[01:57:22]  And then I believe, and I think this is in the book, when he interviewed Mahoney and Newman.
[01:57:29]  John Newman, they put him before a firing squad, buried him, disinterred him, poured sulfuric acid over his body, buried him again, disinterred him again, poured more sulfuric acid over his body.
[01:57:54]  They literally didn't want this guy to exist.
[01:57:58]  Okay?
[01:57:59]  And this is all.
[01:58:01]  72 hours before Kennedy's inaugurated.
[01:58:03]  Right.
[01:58:04]  All right.
[01:58:04]  Now, Dag Hammarskjöld, of course, we spent some time on him in both the book, okay, with Mahoney, okay, and the film.
[01:58:13]  And what we did is we tried to show that we don't think the Dag Hammarskjöld plane crash was really an accident, okay?
[01:58:28]  And I think that was in September of 61.
[01:58:30]  Who was he again?
[01:58:31]  Dag Hammarskjöld was a secretary general of the UN.
[01:58:35]  And he was talking to Kennedy about.
[01:58:38]  He was actually pretty good friends with Kennedy.
[01:58:40]  Right.
[01:58:40]  Okay.
[01:58:41]  And they cooperated on this whole Congo thing.
[01:58:43]  Right.
[01:58:44]  All right.
[01:58:45]  And Hammerskjold, the night his plane went down, Edmund Gullion, all right, who was very interested in this whole Congo thing, he sent, and I think it was the ambassador at that time.
[01:59:05]  He sent a telex to Washington and words to the effect this is not an accident.
[01:59:14]  Okay.
[01:59:15]  And he was convinced that this was sabotage.
[01:59:21]  And most people today, if you watch that film, Cold Case Hammerskjold, all right, and if you read Susan Williams' book, Who Killed Hammerskjold, it's pretty obvious that.
[01:59:35]  Hammerskald was murdered.
[01:59:36]  We show a picture.
[01:59:38]  Yeah, with the Ace of Spades in his pocket.
[01:59:40]  Right.
[01:59:41]  His is the only body that is not charred and burned.
[01:59:46]  And he has a playing card in his tie collar, which the witness who actually was at the scene said it was the Ace of Spades.
[01:59:56]  All right.
[01:59:57]  Now, does anybody think that Hammerskald was playing cards at the time of his death and the card blew up and him shoved down into?
[02:00:08]  No.
[02:00:08]  No, it's pretty clear somebody planted that card there as a message.
[02:00:14]  All right.
[02:00:14]  And so what happens in Congo is that after Hammerskjold's death, this galvanizes Kennedy.
[02:00:23]  All right.
[02:00:24]  It galvanizes Kennedy.
[02:00:25]  And I believe it was because of Gullion's message that Hammerskjold, who he greatly sympathized with, was actually killed.
[02:00:36]  It wasn't an accident.
[02:00:38]  And he more or less takes control.
[02:00:41]  Of the whole Congo operation after.
[02:00:43]  And he sees it through.
[02:00:46]  He strikes down the breakaway province in Katanga, and he helps appoint a new democratic leader in Congo.
[02:00:58]  Now, all of that, and again, this is one of the things that we go through very thoroughly in the book, JFK Revisited, is all this stuff, like magic, is reversed.
[02:01:16]  After Kennedy is killed.
[02:01:18]  All right.
[02:01:19]  And what happens in Congo during his funeral procession, they were literally like changing documents about Vietnam.
[02:01:26]  Right.
[02:01:26]  Right.
[02:01:27]  And so in Congo, what happens, if you can believe it, Johnson allies himself with Belgium, the colonizing country, and the CIA sends in the Cuban exiles to essentially wipe out the last of.
[02:01:49]  The revolutionary followers of Lumumba.
[02:01:52]  Now, there was an excuse for this.
[02:01:54]  It was called the Simba Rebellion.
[02:01:57]  But everybody who has studied that, like Jonathan Quitney and Mahoney, you know, that this was a horrible overreaction, okay, to what was really a bunch of natives, okay, trying to defend the part of them, defending the legacy of Lumumba.
[02:02:15]  And so they brought in, and by the way, I know a guy who was there, Carl McNabb, and he said, Jim, Now, remember what Kennedy said about who was supposed to be leading foreign policy in foreign countries.
[02:02:27]  He said he was a CIA pilot.
[02:02:31]  He said, We took over the embassy, okay, during that whole thing.
[02:02:36]  Okay, we were essentially running the place and we were bringing in all these fighter planes, okay, to go ahead and finish off whatever was left.
[02:02:48]  Okay, and so then what happens, of course, is Mobutu becomes the leader of Congo.
[02:02:54]  And he ends up essentially embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars, okay, that Lumumba would have gone ahead and tried to build an economy on, okay.
[02:03:05]  And he became probably the richest guy in Africa after Kennedy's death.
[02:03:10]  Wow.
[02:03:11]  So, in other words, what we tried to show in the book and the film, okay, is that is it really just a coincidence that all these things change after Kennedy is killed?
[02:03:25]  Is that Vietnam, Congo?
[02:03:29]  The Middle East, the rapprochement with Castro, the attempt at detente with Moscow.
[02:03:36]  Could all these things have really just reversed themselves, you know, out of sheer accident, out of sheer serendipity?
[02:03:46]  And I, for one, have come to the conclusion, and I write about this in the book, is that, you know, I don't think you can accept this all as simply an accident.
[02:03:58]  You can't.
[02:03:59]  Yeah, that somehow when you reverse that many policies and you reverse them so dramatically, you know, and really, if you really think about it, it's almost like Kennedy never existed.
[02:04:17]  They were so eager to reverse the things that he wanted to do that it was almost within 18 months, it's all gone, it's all disappeared, you know.
[02:04:32]  Between Johnson and the CIA, you know, it's essentially into the ether zone.
[02:04:38]  And I've come to the conclusion, although I haven't written about this, that what happened between Johnson and Nixon and Kissinger in their maniacal attempts to completely eliminate Kennedy's foreign policy was really the beginning of the neocon movement.
[02:05:06]  Okay?
[02:05:06]  The neocons who felt, if anything, that America needed to assert itself more.
[02:05:13]  Okay, instead of being what Kennedy wanted it to do, was essentially a kind of cooperation.
[02:05:20]  Okay, with people like Sukarno, with people like Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt.
[02:05:26]  Okay, and that's all essentially evaporated today.
[02:05:32]  You know, it's gone.
[02:05:34]  And, you know, this is really, if you ask me, this is what we tried to get across.
[02:05:41]  Okay, that.
[02:05:45]  What happened to American foreign policy after Kennedy's death is really a kind of tragedy.
[02:05:53]  It's kind of an epic tragedy because it wiped out what was going to be something completely different.
[02:06:05]  Okay.
[02:06:06]  And it essentially, see, I make the argument in both the book and the film that what Kennedy was doing was a conscious rebellion.
[02:06:19]  Against what had come before him, which of course was John Foster Dulles and Eisenhower.
[02:06:26]  All right.
[02:06:26]  And we talk about in the long version and in the script, in the long version in the book, we talk about the Algeria speech, which I believe, and maybe I should talk about that and explain what that is.
[02:06:43]  Yeah.
[02:06:43]  Okay.
[02:06:44]  Definitely.
[02:06:45]  The Algeria speech, at the time Kennedy made this speech in 1957, he was a senator.
[02:06:52]  France was involved.
[02:06:55]  In a horrible, bloody, atrocious war on the north coast of Africa against its colony of Algeria.
[02:07:07]  And America more or less implicitly supported it.
[02:07:11]  Kennedy took the floor of the Senate.
[02:07:14]  I think this was in June of 1957.
[02:07:20]  And he makes what is probably.
[02:07:26]  The boldest and the most, the best word is provocative speech that I can think of any senator making in that whole decade.
[02:07:41]  He essentially took the floor and said, We are on the wrong side of history.
[02:07:49]  We should not be backing the imperial French empire, which is going to collapse anyway.
[02:07:57]  We should be backing the people who want to make Algeria free.
[02:08:02]  All right.
[02:08:03]  And it's not just for Algeria, because this is going to split France apart into a civil war, which, by the way, it did, into a civil war.
[02:08:12]  Okay.
[02:08:12]  The people who want to stay in Algeria and the people who want to get out of Algeria.
[02:08:16]  But beyond that, beyond that, we should be at work in freeing Africa, the whole continent, not just Algeria.
[02:08:28]  And then he said, I can't believe that the people in this Senate don't understand that what is happening in Algeria now in 1957 is the same thing that happened in Vietnam in 1954.
[02:08:44]  How could we forget Den Ban Phu?
[02:08:47]  It happened just three years ago.
[02:08:50]  And now we're watching it being replayed right in front of our eyes and nobody's saying anything.
[02:08:55]  To read that speech today, even today in the new century, Is really something to see that a guy would say that, okay, and be so vociferous about being anti administration and anti colonial, okay, that Edge Kennedy was.

=== Third World Neutrality Critique (06:23) ===

[02:09:12]  And by the way, this was met with a hailstorm of criticism.
[02:09:19]  Kennedy's office clipped all the editorials and the columns.
[02:09:25]  I think, and this is in the book, I think out of about 150 responses, Over two thirds of them were negative.
[02:09:37]  Wow.
[02:09:37]  And even the people in his own party, like Dean Acheson and Adlai Stevenson, even those guys criticized Kennedy for making that speech.
[02:09:50]  All right.
[02:09:51]  And Kennedy actually thought, did I make a mistake?
[02:09:58]  When on the timeline did Eisenhower's speech about the military industrial complex happen?
[02:10:04]  That was when he was leaving.
[02:10:06]  Okay, right.
[02:10:07]  That was at the end of his presidency, right?
[02:10:09]  But what I'm saying was was that after Kennedy took the floor?
[02:10:13]  Yes, right.
[02:10:14]  And by the way, a friend of mine, Aaron Good, found out that Eisenhower made his great domino theory speech just a few days after Kennedy made his Algeria speech.
[02:10:28]  Okay, so in other words, Kennedy makes his speech that we have to start freeing these third world countries.
[02:10:34]  And then a few days later, Eisenhower says no, because there's this domino theory that if one country goes communist, all the other countries are going to go communist also.
[02:10:45]  And by the way, I should say that, you know, the whole struggle in Algeria was not communism.
[02:10:54]  Okay.
[02:10:54]  It was, and as Kennedy said, look, this is not about communism versus capitalism.
[02:11:01]  This is about colonialism versus nationalism.
[02:11:06]  Okay.
[02:11:06]  And we're not going to be able to defeat.
[02:11:09]  The nationalism.
[02:11:11]  Okay.
[02:11:11]  So, what we should do is we should try and ally ourselves with it in some kind of a positive way so that when these people win and take power, they will not look back and say, wait a minute, these guys never wanted us to take control anyway.
[02:11:29]  It's really an amazing speech to read.
[02:11:32]  And the fact that he made it in 1957, okay, that early, is really, and then a year later, I think.
[02:11:41]  And we talk about this in the book.
[02:11:43]  Okay.
[02:11:44]  He wrote an article for Foreign Affairs Magazine, okay, in which he went expounded on this at length.
[02:11:56]  See, we did a long interview with Robert Rakove, which is mostly in the book.
[02:12:02]  And Robert Rakove is a professor at Stanford who wrote on this specific subject.
[02:12:07]  It's called, I think his book is JFK, I'll be Jay in a Non Aligned World.
[02:12:13]  And he studied.
[02:12:15]  At length, both the speech and the article that JFK wrote about it.
[02:12:20]  And he was very impressed by the foresight and the vision that was expressed in those two instances.
[02:12:29]  Okay, how different it was than John Foster Dulles.
[02:12:33]  Okay, I mean, with John Foster Dulles, you were either for us or against us.
[02:12:39]  Okay, there was no in between, there was no being non aligned, there was no neutrality.
[02:12:45]  Okay, but Kennedy was very open to the idea of neutrality in the third world because what he said.
[02:12:53]  Was essentially, look, if we compete with the Russians in the third world, I think we can win because I think we have more to offer, okay, to these third world countries.
[02:13:11]  And Indonesia is a great example.
[02:13:14]  Indonesia is a great example.
[02:13:15]  Kennedy, when Sukarno wanted to nationalize a lot of the American industries there, Kennedy sent an economic advisor over.
[02:13:26]  Because he wanted a better deal for the Indonesian government than what the American companies were offering.
[02:13:35]  All right.
[02:13:36]  He wanted the majority split to go to the Indonesian government.
[02:13:42]  All right.
[02:13:42]  Of course, when Sukarno is overthrown, which, by the way, as we talk about in the book, Bradley Simpson, who was probably the foremost scholar on Indonesia in the United States, very good interview.
[02:13:54]  All right.
[02:13:55]  He essentially says, Sukarno would not have been overthrown if Kennedy had lived.
[02:14:02]  Right.
[02:14:03]  Okay.
[02:14:03]  And when you understand what happened in Indonesia that year, 65, you know, the estimates go if you see that movie, The Year Living Dangerously, there was anywhere from 500,000 to 850,000 people killed as a result of the Suharto takeover.
[02:14:24]  Okay.
[02:14:24]  And Brad Simpson, who has studied that at length and in depth, says that wouldn't have happened if Kennedy had lived.
[02:14:32]  See, this is another thing that we tried to do we tried to show that there was a definite cause effect.
[02:14:45]  And see, that's most historians like myself, you know, you should show that if you're going to make an argument.
[02:14:53]  If you're going to say such and such is true, okay, then you have to show a cause and effect relationship.
[02:15:00]  Okay, did this happen because this happened?
[02:15:03]  All right.
[02:15:04]  And we tried to do that.
[02:15:06]  Okay.
[02:15:07]  And I think we did in several situations.
[02:15:10]  What do you think the answer is to some of these institutional problems with the rot that we have in government, with people being able to stay in office for ungodly amounts of time and to be able to bring family members in and to be in cahoots with other companies and with lobbying and with just lining up like shit like Nancy Pelosi, for example?

=== Saudi Arabia Power Play (05:06) ===

[02:15:36]  Like, if you take a look at how old somebody like Steny Hoyer is, okay, if you take a look at how old somebody like Nancy Pelosi is, okay, if you take a look at how old somebody like Schumer is, okay, these people, they have a great job and they have the aura of power, all right, and they don't want to give it up.
[02:16:01]  You know, they'll stay there forever, you know, if you don't do something about it, all right.
[02:16:08]  Now, as far as the other question, the neocon philosophy, I believe, has become so pervasive that is there really a whole lot of difference between what the Republicans want to do and what the Democrats want to do?
[02:16:35]  Other than just like optics and.
[02:16:38]  I don't think there's a whole lot of difference.
[02:16:39]  No, I don't think so either.
[02:16:41]  You know, I mean, of course, we did get out of Afghanistan, but that was such an utter complete disaster from the beginning.
[02:16:48]  And I mean, God, we were there for 20 years, and what did we accomplish?
[02:16:51]  Nothing, you know.
[02:16:54]  But if you take a look at, I mean, when you got a guy going to Saudi Arabia and he fist pumps NBZ, okay, then.
[02:17:06]  NBZ?
[02:17:08]  The guy who had Kasogi killed.
[02:17:11]  Okay.
[02:17:12]  The crown prince.
[02:17:14]  Okay.
[02:17:15]  Yeah.
[02:17:15]  You're talking about Jamal Khashoggi?
[02:17:17]  Well, that was the journalist the Saudi Arabians had killed.
[02:17:21]  Yeah.
[02:17:21]  And most people think that he had them killed.
[02:17:23]  The crown prince had them killed.
[02:17:25]  Oh, for sure.
[02:17:25]  Right.
[02:17:25]  Yeah.
[02:17:26]  All right.
[02:17:26]  Yeah.
[02:17:26]  I think it's pretty obvious.
[02:17:28]  Yeah.
[02:17:28]  I mean, what?
[02:17:29]  20 guys go over there for no reason because they're not ordered.
[02:17:32]  They just want to get rid of him because he writes columns for the Washington Post.
[02:17:34]  Right.
[02:17:35]  You know, and so, you know, and by the way, this is another thing.
[02:17:42]  Thanks for giving me all these openings.
[02:17:44]  All right.
[02:17:47]  Kennedy did not like the way that John Foster Dulles had turned away from Nasser and Egypt and turned towards Saudi Arabia as a counterweight against Egypt.
[02:18:05]  And again, we talk about this in the book.
[02:18:07]  All right.
[02:18:07]  Is that Kennedy?
[02:18:12]  Thought that Saudi Arabia was everything we don't want the Middle East to become.
[02:18:18]  You know, the why was that because it was extremely fundamentalist?
[02:18:22]  The Wahhab religion, or whatever it is, is an extreme form of Islamicism.
[02:18:28]  Okay, and they adapted that just for the reason of keeping the Saud empire in power.
[02:18:37]  Okay, whereas Nasser, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.
[02:18:45]  He did, he essentially eliminated the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt.
[02:18:49]  He went to war against the Islamic Brotherhood.
[02:18:53]  All right.
[02:18:54]  And he threw them in prison and had them executed, the leaders executed.
[02:18:58]  All right.
[02:18:59]  And if you take a look at the way he dressed, Nasser had a suit and tie on.
[02:19:07]  He didn't have this Hajib thing that these Saudi Arabians want to encourage.
[02:19:11]  All right.
[02:19:11]  And so he thought that Saudi Arabia.
[02:19:15]  Was an object of the past.
[02:19:17]  He wanted to encourage a guy who was a socialist, which was Nasser, okay?
[02:19:23]  A guy who was a nationalist, who was Nasser.
[02:19:27]  A guy who really was a progressive, that was Nasser.
[02:19:31]  And he wanted him to be the example for the Middle East, all right?
[02:19:38]  And of course, you know, that didn't work out, okay, for several reasons, all right?
[02:19:47]  But I believe if Kennedy would have lived, That would have been a different situation in the Middle East, you know, because the last thing that the guys in Saudi Arabia wanted to see was secularism.
[02:20:05]  All right.
[02:20:05]  They didn't want to see a lot of kids going to school learning English, you know, and dressing westernized and stuff like that.
[02:20:15]  All right.
[02:20:15]  You know, this is the way they keep power.
[02:20:18]  All right.
[02:20:19]  And Kennedy, he didn't want to even meet with the leader of Saudi Arabia.
[02:20:24]  He actually told his driver as he was going over there, What am I even doing meeting with this guy?
[02:20:30]  He was in some hospital down in Palm Springs in Florida.
[02:20:33]  And I think Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, says, Look, Palm Beach.
[02:20:37]  He's like 10 miles away from your house.
[02:20:40]  Okay.
[02:20:41]  He's in the hospital.

=== Oral History Format Insight (05:45) ===

[02:20:42]  You got to go see him.
[02:20:44]  Wait, wait.
[02:20:44]  The king of Saudi Arabia was in a hospital in Palm Beach?
[02:20:47]  Yeah.
[02:20:47]  For what?
[02:20:48]  I don't know.
[02:20:49]  I think it was like a kidney problem or something.
[02:20:50]  So he wanted to see a doctor in Palm Beach.
[02:20:52]  Yeah.
[02:20:53]  So he wanted to see somebody in Florida.
[02:20:54]  That's fucking incredible.
[02:20:56]  And so Russ says, you got to go.
[02:20:58]  You can't just ignore him.
[02:21:00]  And so as Kennedy's going over there, he's bitching and moaning to his driver, you know, oh God, I didn't even want to see this guy.
[02:21:06]  Yeah.
[02:21:09]  Wow.
[02:21:09]  Wow.
[02:21:10]  And so that's one of the things we did in the book.
[02:21:12]  We have Robert Rakove, who's a scholar at Stanford, and we have Philip Muhlenbeck, who I think is at George Washington University in Washington.
[02:21:23]  And I was so glad we got them in because they have done so much good work on Kennedy's foreign policy, excavating things, undiscovered things that I, not even I knew about before.
[02:21:37]  All right.
[02:21:37]  And they did two very good books, Betting on the Africans.
[02:21:41]  And JFK, I'll be Jay in the nonline world.
[02:21:44]  And we got two really good interviews with them that we put in the book.
[02:21:49]  And I really like that.
[02:21:50]  You know, between those two guys, between John Newman, Jamie Galbraith, and Mahoney, I think this is one of the very first times that you're going to see in this format, the oral history format, that you're going to see a really strong and insightful look at what Kennedy was trying to do.
[02:22:13]  What was he trying to do with the classified information regarding UFOs?
[02:22:19]  We had a guy who did a very long essay for this, Seamus Coogan, who did a very long essay on this for us.
[02:22:28]  My website's canadiesandking.com.
[02:22:31]  And he showed that those are fake documents.
[02:22:35]  Okay, so this whole idea that somehow.
[02:22:40]  And then there's this other Marilyn Monroe thing.
[02:22:43]  Oh, yeah, he was banging Marilyn Monroe.
[02:22:45]  No, no, no, no.
[02:22:46]  Please don't even go there.
[02:22:48]  Okay.
[02:22:48]  It's not true.
[02:22:49]  We have a, I guess you don't read my website.
[02:22:53]  We have a two part on that.
[02:22:55]  Okay.
[02:22:55]  With this whole Anthony Summers stuff, we're exposing that too.
[02:22:59]  All right.
[02:23:01]  They were supposed to have a shared interest in aliens.
[02:23:06]  Oh, Marilyn Monroe and Kennedy.
[02:23:08]  Well, it's an interesting topic.
[02:23:12]  Even the people in the UFO community have admitted that that document is a forgery.
[02:23:18]  Okay.
[02:23:19]  So, no.
[02:23:21]  That whole angle is more or less BS.
[02:23:27]  Okay.
[02:23:28]  So, no.
[02:23:28]  So, there was no evidence that he was interested in that.
[02:23:31]  Look, there was no thing that he was going to open up this archive, okay, about the whole Blue Book thing.
[02:23:37]  No, no.
[02:23:38]  That's not true.
[02:23:39]  Not true.
[02:23:40]  And in fact, it's been shown to be the opposite.
[02:23:42]  Oh, okay.
[02:23:43]  Okay.
[02:23:43]  It's been shown to be that pretty much fakery.
[02:23:46]  Well, there is one president who supposedly.
[02:23:49]  What was the story?
[02:23:50]  One of the presidents took somebody apparently to Area 51.
[02:23:55]  Was it Reagan?
[02:23:56]  One of the presidents took Jackie Gleason because Jackie Gleason was obsessed with the UFOs.
[02:24:01]  I think he even had a house built in like upstate New York that looked like a flying saucer.
[02:24:08]  And that's one I didn't know.
[02:24:10]  Yeah.
[02:24:11]  And who was the president that took Jackie Gleason to like flew him?
[02:24:15]  They were like having whiskey one night.
[02:24:18]  And he's like, You want to go see an alien?
[02:24:20]  And he like took him to Area 51 or one of those somewhere in Nevada.
[02:24:25]  Let's tell people that are listening and watching, that are people that are watching andor listening, let's tell them about your book, where they can find your book, where they can read more about what you're doing.
[02:24:32]  The book is called JFK Revisited.
[02:24:36]  And you can get it on Amazon.
[02:24:39]  All right.
[02:24:40]  And you can probably get it in some of the bigger bookstores.
[02:24:43]  And like I said, it consists of the two screenplays the short version of the film and the long version of the film.
[02:24:52]  The first one is called JFK Revisited, the second is called JFK Destiny Betrayed.
[02:24:57]  And then what happens is that at the end, you get the excerpted interviews from all the people about, I think, 27 or 28 people that we did for the picture.
[02:25:11]  Okay.
[02:25:12]  And in that sense, it's a very, very unusual book.
[02:25:16]  Okay.
[02:25:17]  Because, like I said at the beginning, you're never going to see this kind of a lineup, okay, of luminaries for one film.
[02:25:25]  You know, you get Dr. David Mantic, Dr. Cyril Weck, Dr. Henry Lee, Dr. Gary Aguilar on the forensic side.
[02:25:34]  And you get people like John Newman, JFK historian on Vietnam.
[02:25:42]  You get people like Jamie Galbraith, University of Texas professor, whose father was John Kenneth Galbraith, of course, very influential in Kennedy's Vietnam policy.
[02:25:52]  You get people like I mentioned, Philip Muhlenbeck and Robert Rakove.
[02:25:56]  And it's really, really a stellar cast that, like I said, you will never see, you've never seen it before, and you will never see it again.
[02:26:05]  Okay.
[02:26:05]  And so that's the second part of the book.
[02:26:08]  Okay.
[02:26:08]  That's, in fact, that's quite a long one, it's like 200 pages.
[02:26:12]  Of those excerpted interviews, which I believe are so fascinating.
[02:26:16]  All right.
[02:26:16]  So, in other words, what you get in the first part is what we wrote about.
[02:26:22]  Okay.
[02:26:23]  Except it's all footnoted.
[02:26:25]  There's like 500 footnotes to the screenplay.

=== Stellar Cast Interviews (02:54) ===

[02:26:28]  All right.
[02:26:29]  And then you get the actual authorities at the end of the book with stuff that we didn't have enough time to put into the film.
[02:26:37]  So, there's never, I don't think there's ever been a book quite like this.
[02:26:41]  And I think, you know, it shows that what we did in the film.
[02:26:47]  We've referenced it all.
[02:26:49]  Okay.
[02:26:50]  Where can people watch the full four hour version of the film?
[02:26:52]  You probably have to get the DVD.
[02:26:54]  Got to get the DVD.
[02:26:55]  That's amazing.
[02:26:56]  DVD.
[02:26:56]  I didn't even think of it.
[02:26:57]  And the second part of the film, the second part of the book, rather, you get stuff that was not in either the two hour or the four hour version of the film.
[02:27:06]  So it's really, you know, I'm very proud of the book.
[02:27:09]  I think it turned out very well.
[02:27:11]  Okay.
[02:27:11]  And it's very unique in that sense.
[02:27:15]  Well, I appreciate you doing this.
[02:27:16]  I mean, it says a lot about your, uh, Your work and your research and your writing, the fact that Oliver Stone partnered up with you to make a movie.
[02:27:24]  Two.
[02:27:24]  Two movies.
[02:27:25]  Yeah.
[02:27:25]  A long version and a short version.
[02:27:27]  Yeah.
[02:27:29]  What's next?
[02:27:30]  Is there anything.
[02:27:30]  Well, there's actually an historical project that I've been working on for a long time.
[02:27:36]  And I don't know if you're aware of this.
[02:27:41]  It's based on the Ludlow Massacre of 1913, 1914, which took place in Colorado.
[02:27:51]  And this was probably the bloodiest, most deadly labor company management confrontation in American history.
[02:28:03]  And in fact, it's so bad that very few people know how many people died because it's very hard to figure out the information.
[02:28:11]  And I've done a screenplay on it, which took me a very long time to write.
[02:28:16]  I actually went to Denver and got all this archival stuff.
[02:28:20]  And I have a producer named Bob Debrino who is working on trying to sell it.
[02:28:26]  It was a confrontation between the United Mine Workers and John Rockefeller Jr., who had taken over John Rockefeller Sr.'s empire, and which Colorado Fuel and Iron was a part of.
[02:28:43]  And this ended up in an explosion of violence where the miners moved out of their company owned buildings.
[02:28:54]  Onto a nearby plane called Ludlow into a tent colony.
[02:28:59]  This went on for months, and Rockefeller ended up financing because it bankrupted the state.
[02:29:07]  He ended up financing the National Guard, and they essentially torched a tent colony.
[02:29:16]  There's actually pictures of this that I found where they actually burned the tent colony to the ground.

=== Ludlow Tent Colony Fire (01:35) ===

[02:29:22]  Okay.
[02:29:23]  And the miners then.
[02:29:27]  Essentially went nuts and they brought in all of these explosives, weapons, grenades, dynamite.
[02:29:35]  They went on a 10 page, excuse me, a 10 day revenge rampage, exploding and burning all the Rockefellers' property, okay, in Colorado.
[02:29:48]  It got so bad that the people, the representatives in Congress, had to get a private consultation with President Wilson.
[02:29:59]  And Wilson had to send in the army, okay, to put this thing down.
[02:30:05]  And so, this is what I'm working on.
[02:30:06]  As you can see, I'm attracted to these kind of subjects, okay?
[02:30:11]  Yeah.
[02:30:11]  And so, as am I?
[02:30:13]  Yeah.
[02:30:13]  So, I thought this was a very interesting subject, okay?
[02:30:16]  And so, this is something that I'm trying to put together now as a screenplay, okay?
[02:30:23]  And like I said, I have a guy named Bob DiBrino who's helping me market it right now.
[02:30:30]  Also, Gray Fredrickson, who was the producer of Godfather 2.
[02:30:37]  Okay, he won the Oscar for that.
[02:30:39]  He's helping me also.
[02:30:41]  Amazing.
[02:30:42]  So, when that comes out, I'll be back down to Tampa.
[02:30:44]  Perfect.
[02:30:44]  I'm looking forward to it, man.
[02:30:46]  Thank you very much for coming down.
[02:30:47]  And on behalf of the listeners, we are very grateful for you and all your work.
[02:30:53]  And I will again make sure to link it all below.
[02:30:57]  Thank you so much.