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Sept. 22, 2023 - RFK Jr. The Defender

46:34

War and Peace with Navy Seal Jack Carr

Former Navy Seal, Jack Carr, an Afghanistan veteran, discusses U.S. military strategy with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in this episode.

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	Hey everybody, I have really an amazing guest today and I really feel honored to have him.
	Jack Carr is a former Navy SEAL special operations team as team leader, platoon commander.
	He served as troop commander and a task unit commander over his 20 years in naval special warfare.
	He transitioned from an enlisted SEAL sniper To a junior officer leading assault and sniper teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, to a platoon commander practicing counterinsurgency in the southern Philippines, and then to commanding a special operations task force in the most Iranian-influenced section of southern Iraq throughout the tumultuous drawdown of U.S. forces.
	He is a warfighter, but in addition to that, he is an extraordinary writer.
	He's one of the most successful writers today.
	He's been called the most impactful men's fiction author of his generation.
	He exploded as a writer onto the bookshelves in 2018 with The Terminal List, his Goodreads choice award-winning debut novel of conspiracy and revenge.
	Since then, Carr has gone on to write five more novels in this thrilling series, sold millions of books.
	And his fictional protagonist, James Reese, has been brought to television and screen by actor Chris Pratt, who incidentally is married to my niece. - Yes.
	A little fact people don't know, don't care to know.
	Anyway, your biography goes on and on.
	It's extraordinarily impressive.
	You've led a really interesting and eventful life, which we see throughout your novels.
	You know, and I've admired you for a long time, Jack.
	I really wanted to get you on this show.
	And I called you immediately after reading the postmortem that you wrote on Afghanistan, this very, very moving postmortem.
	And I just wanted to start, I want to let you talk and not me.
	People see enough of me talking.
	But in 1971, the Pentagon Papers were released.
	Daniel Ellsberg had led the team that wrote them in the Rand Corporation.
	And it was a question about how did we get into Vietnam?
	And it was a very, very candid inside view of the decision-making process that had gotten us into that war.
	And, of course, the Pentagon, and after my uncle died, and I think it was that 26 volumes was completed.
	They intended to sit on it forever, but Daniel Ellsberg released it in 1971, and it showed this very, very candid conversations between Pentagon officials and State Department officials and White House officials, in which they all very candid conversations between Pentagon officials and State Department officials and White House officials, in which they all knew that the war was unwinnable, but they had to
	And they made these decisions with incredible cynicism that just shocked the American people when they saw it back then.
	Now, that kind of cynicism, that kind of lying, government lying, has been normalized by the media, by the government, and the cynicism is no longer surprising to the American people.
	And that's one of the reasons I was so moved by your account, because it shows that there's part of us that is still susceptible, still believes that our military should behave as they're supposed to.
	So tell us what you found in reading these candid inside accounts that were classified Well, the modern iteration of the Pentagon Papers.
	Well, the heartbreaking part of all that is that the American citizenry is not surprised by the Afghanistan Papers.
	And that's a book by Craig Whitlock from the Washington Post.
	And through two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, they were able to gain access to these interviews with senior ranking officers coming back from Afghanistan in conversations that those officers thought were going to remain classified through these Freedom of Act lawsuits, those are now public.
	And every American should read Craig Whitlock's book, The Afghanistan Papers, because he juxtaposes what they're saying in what they think are going to be classified conversations.
	So there are true opinions about the war in Afghanistan and what they were saying in front of Congress.
	So therefore, essentially lying to Congress, lying to the American people, and essentially lying to their troops at the same time.
	And you can go back and you can go and read transcripts or go on YouTube and watch those same type of officers in front of Congress year after year after year saying the exact same things.
	We are making progress.
	All we need is a little more money, more troops.
	And you can take off the year and it's the same thing.
	It's the same answers to the same type of questions and just prolonging this conflict, the conflict that they did not understand the nature.
	Of this conflict from the very beginning, very clear.
	If they had studied the Soviet experience in Afghanistan from 79 to 89, they drew the wrong lessons and applied them to this country, Afghanistan, through a lens of imperial hubris, is how I put it.
	So the whole thing is heartbreaking because it led to 20 years of war.
	And during this 20 years, most people knew we were going to leave eventually.
	At the 10-year mark, 15-year mark, 20-year mark, 25-year mark, We're good to go.
	But one of the worst parts for me is that these senior ranking officers who we've sent to the best schools, a lot of them have doctorates even, we've paid for their master's.
	They've checked all these boxes throughout this career and really to impress the person above them in the chain of command.
	And now they're presiding over this withdrawal of U.S. forces for which they had 20 years to prepare, and that's the best they could do.
	It is heartbreaking beyond allot.
	So I encourage every American to read that book, The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock.
	But thinking about it again, it is just a different time that we're in, 1971.
	There are so many more distractions now.
	And as you said, this behavior by the federal government has been normalized.
	It's expected.
	We expect them to lie to us.
	We expect them to fail and then fail upward in these positions.
	And we expect these politicians to be lifelong and these bureaucrats to be appointed Essentially for life, this is what we get.
	So that's why I'm so excited about your candidacy and what you're bringing to this fight, because you're not afraid to say what you believe.
	You aren't owned by anybody else, and you're willing to take those hits.
	You're willing to take those arrows and those daggers and say what you truly believe.
	So it's a tough space to be in that you're stepping into right now, but you've had a life to prepare for it as well.
	Jack, let me ask you, thank you for those very kind words.
	Let me just ask you, because you keep looking at this, when I posted about your piece, I said something about we literally learn nothing from Vietnam.
	It is extraordinary, because...
	When we left Vietnam, we were like, that is never going to happen again.
	We will never be so stupid.
	And then we went into Iraq in 2001.
	We were like, what is going on?
	And now, you know, then Afghanistan and Yemen and Pakistan and Syria and Libya.
	And now we're in Ukraine.
	And it's like, you know, it's like they say about the definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior over and over and expecting different results.
	And of course, the whole punchline to Afghanistan was identical to what happened when we left We lost 13 people.
	Tell me what your take is on that last day withdrawal when all those people were unnecessarily killed because I think they wanted to...
	The brass wanted to hit a deadline, wanted to do it before September 11th.
	So they basically sacrificed 13 American lives so that they could get a good press release.
	Is that your take on it, too, or is that just me?
	No, and that is why so many people were outraged, because you don't need to have studied military history, strategy, tactics, have a touchpoint with anything in the military to apply common sense to that problem set and ask that question, why did these senior level military leaders Why
	would they do that?
	And if they were being forced to do that by members of the administration that certainly didn't know tactics, why did not one single senior officer take those stars off, drop them on the table, and say, I'm resigning in disgust in trying to get the administration to take a breath and say, oh, maybe we should hold on to Bagram and not put these soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines at this gate in total chaos in a tactically disadvantageous position?
	But any citizen can apply common sense to that and come to that conclusion and ask that question.
	And it's not just those 13 members who were killed.
	There were numerous people that are wounded and have lost arms and legs, are in wheelchairs for life, dealing with post-traumatic stress, dealing with traumatic brain injury.
	And so we concentrate on those 13 people who died, but there are other people who have been impacted for life and their families have been impacted for life because of what happened on that airfield that day.
	So for me, looking at it from the outside, having been out since 2016 and looking at it from the outside in, I cannot imagine why you would do that to your troops.
	Your responsibility as a leader is to lead and to advocate for those troops and to resign in disgust and protest if you're going to be forced to put them in a tactically disadvantageous position at that gate.
	So thank you.
	It is so heartbreaking for me.
	Heartbreaking to watch.
	Heartbreaking for every, not just veteran to watch, but every citizen who cares about this country and cares about the next generation to watch what happened there essentially in real time and then to be manipulated by the press and by politicians and to be distracted to other things.
	Just forget about those 20 years.
	Forget about those 13 people.
	Forget about what happened at Abbey Gate.
	Forget about what happened in August of 2001.
	Get distracted over here by this.
	It's heartbreaking.
	Absolutely.
	They keep jangling the keys and say, look over here.
	Exactly.
	That's exactly what they do.
	And I think there's a lot of similarities between pharmaceutical industries and the lobbyists and the same thing with defense industry and those lobbyists.
	These are corporations.
	These are businesses that need to show profit.
	And they've been making a lot of money for a lot of years.
	It's very hard for us to find a war we don't like.
	These days, because of these connections between the military, between the senior military leaders, lobbyists, media, and all these corporations that have their fingers in all these pieces of the pie across most of the states.
	And it is just, it's a corporation.
	Those corporations need to show profits.
	So what do we do as soon as we're out of Afghanistan?
	Well, we find another war.
	And when we bring more countries into NATO, what does that mean?
	Oh, it means that all NATO countries have to use The same type of ammunition and the same type of armaments.
	And that's a lot of sales taking place right there when a new country joins NATO. So there's a lot at work here.
	But I think 1947, we can go all the way back then and we can see the Department of War being changed to the Department of Defense.
	A Secretary of War is now a Secretary of Defense.
	And we don't really...
	Kind of the irony is that we don't use the military for defense, even though we changed the name back then when we reorganized the military and reorganized the intelligence services.
	And what that did was just grow an entirely new industry that was fairly new to America back then, but it's only grown since.
	And what do we get from that?
	Well, we get what we saw in Afghanistan in August of 2021.
	Yeah, and I know that you've read Eisenhower's speech in January 17, 1961, his farewell address, warning America that, you know, the emergence of this military-industrial complex, in which he said, the quote that you just said, new to the American experience, that would undermine and subvert our democracy, that would transform America into an imperial state abroad, a security surveillance garrison state at home.
	In that same speech, in a little, mostly forgotten paragraph, he also talks about the rise of this federal scientific bureaucracy and the medical cartel, and makes a similar warning about that.
	So it's interesting that you just said that about the pharmaceutical company.
	Just, you know, not to belabor this point, but for any Americans, I'm sure there's a lot of your listeners and few of mine that don't understand what happened in Kabul, Or maybe miss the—because the media did not play a lot of it.
	You know, it was a very dramatic footage with these tens of thousands of terrified people running from the Taliban.
	And you can see the Taliban.
	They are also on the airstrip shooting in the air and hurting people.
	I'm trying to get them away from the airplanes, and you have these Americans frantically loading the airplanes, people climbing on the planes, and literally, I think they're mainly C-130 transports or some big cargo transport.
	And then they take off with people literally hanging on the wings and, you know, dropping off one by one onto the runway.
	They're just horrific, horrific photos.
	Just talk about that and what they should have done instead.
	Yeah, we owned an airfield, Bagram, not too far away, with standoff distance between those walls and a place where the enemy can set up.
	And yeah, they can mortar, they could hit, but we can...
	Triangulate that fairly quickly these days, and we could have pushed out to make it even more secure knowing that they were drawing down and leaving from Bagram.
	Instead, we went down to an airfield, a civilian airfield for lack of a better term, and there was no standoff.
	There was no, you could see photos and video of those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, and they are face to face with people through these gates and people throwing babies over the walls, not knowing what's on the other side.
	It would happen to be on the other side with a lot of Constantinowire and you have babies bleeding out in this wire.
	People just wanted to get out of Afghanistan because they knew what was going to happen to them if they'd had any sort of connection to the U S if they had, or not even if they'd had that connection, guess what?
	If you have an issue with, let's say, a neighbor or another business, they can just tell the Taliban, these people over here, guess what?
	That's my business.
	That's my competition.
	They helped the Americans over the last 20 years.
	Oh, guess what happens?
	The Taliban go to that house and behead that head of the household or whatever it might be.
	So there's all that going on as well.
	So you are not in a good position if you either help the Americans or think someone's going to tell the Taliban that you helped the Americans.
	So it was just complete chaos.
	And that chaos did not need to happen.
	If you have 20 years to prepare, you don't even need 20 years to prepare.
	You just need to look at that terrain and look at Bagram and see how you can secure that airfield or you already had it secured.
	Just push it out maybe a little bit farther to make it a little more secure for this month that we're getting out.
	If that's what we're going to do, get out all the way out.
	It's just common sense, which is what Carlon Klausiewicz said was the most important attribute of a battlefield leader was common sense.
	And he's not the only one to say that.
	And that common sense is severely lacking across the board in senior military leadership ranks and politicians that apply common sense to these problem sets.
	And we don't do that these days.
	And every time I talk about Eisenhower and his speech, I encourage people to go listen, watch the entire thing because we all know the military industrial complex piece.
	But that entire speech is very important to watch from beginning to end.
	Let me understand, because, you know, you're a very interesting guy.
	What do you...
	And I'll just tell you my reaction when we went into Afghanistan.
	My reaction was that we should have a limited objective, which was to remove and punish Osama bin Laden.
	When we took on to invade and then rebuild the country and do regime change and then nation building there...
	It seemed to me that like we were ignoring not only what happened to the Russians, but what's happened to every...
	I mean, Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires.
	That's where empires go to die.
	The Russians died there.
	I mean, everybody since Alexander the Great, the British Empire.
	Nobody's been able to hold on to it or do anything useful for the people there.
	So from the beginning, I was very skeptical about it.
	But you were fighting in Iran at that time.
	And were you completely gung-ho at that time?
	Or was there part of your brain that was saying, I don't completely 100% trust the people who are giving me my orders from the top down?
	Was there any of that in you at that point?
	I've always had a mistrust of authority and senior-level leadership.
	I don't know where exactly it comes from.
	I think it might be just innate or perhaps watching too many episodes of Baba Black Sheep with Robert Conrad as Pappy Boynton as a kid.
	I think it was just in me from an early age to question.
	But for that, what we were afraid of is that we were going to miss it, meaning I was deployed to Guam at the time.
	September 11th happens, and phones start ringing up and down the floor of our barracks, and we go down to the basement, turn on the TV. Only TV was in the basement there, and we watched the Twin Towers fall on TV. I was the intelligence rep for my platoon as a SEAL, so I'd read up on Osama bin Laden.
	and on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan had been a particular interest to me over the years.
	So I had a solid foundation and all of us just hoped that we were going to be able to get in this fight because really in special operations or in military in general, your job is to be prepared for war.
	It's not to go to war, it's to be prepared for that call.
	And that was our generation's call.
	So we were going to answer that call.
	We wanted to get downrange, but what we all thought was that, oh, what if they send another Or what if they wrap this thing up before we can get there?
	And that's what we thought.
	We thought it was going to be.
	Because since the end of Vietnam, we'd had Desert One.
	We'd had Grenada.
	We'd had Panama.
	We'd had the first Gulf War.
	We had Mogadishu.
	So things that were really flashpoints.
	We hadn't been in sustained combat operations since the end of Vietnam.
	And so now we're going into one and...
	Looking back over the previous 20 years, most things were flashpoints, which we thought this was going to be because it's essentially a manhunt for one person in particular, but and his senior level leaders and management and bomb makers.
	But really, we're going after Osama bin Laden and his top level leaders.
	So we thought we've gotten pretty good at manhunting over the years in Bosnia and Panama was essentially a manhunt for Noriega.
	So we had some background in this at this point.
	So we thought we were going to go in and take out Osama bin Laden and essentially be done with it.
	And so the big worry was that we were going to miss it.
	Obviously, looking back over the last 20 years, that was not a threat because if you stayed in long enough, you were going to get in the fight.
	But no, from the beginning, we thought it was going to be a lot quicker because it seemed like the objectives were limited.
	And it was to go to take out Osama bin Laden to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his top level leaders who planned 9-11.
	So that's what we thought.
	But then, OK, now we stay and now we're building these big bases and we're building these big chow halls and we're building outstations.
	And now we have this war on drugs and opium going on.
	And now we're building this road all around Afghanistan.
	And now we're building wells and we're writing protection for building wells.
	And you're seeing more and more troops come in, and you're seeing more and more contractors come in, more and more chow halls go up.
	All those things you need to do to support any town or city in the United States, you need to do for any base overseas that you're starting from scratch.
	And that takes a lot of money to do that sort of thing.
	So it grew, and it grew way larger than anything any of us, most of us, people that I talk to, thought it would grow into from the beginning.
	We thought it was going to be very limited.
	It did not turn out to be limited, as we all know now.
	And a similar thing happened in Iraq.
	We just couldn't understand the nature of the conflict.
	And so we kept pouring money, kept pouring troops, kept pouring more contractors at the problem and it didn't help the problem.
	There's a great book called The Accidental Gorilla by David Kulcolan and where he talks about going into a place and creating more problems than you went there to solve in the first place by creating these accidental gorillas, kicking these doors in, taking out the bad guy.
	But guess what you just did?
	Well, his son just saw that.
	And that nine-year-old, 10-year-old, 12-year-old, guess what he's going to do now?
	He's going to turn up, he's going to hate America and end up being a terrorist.
	They're going to fight a few years down the line.
	But Afghanistan is interesting in that you could join the military after September 11th, 2001, and retire from the military all in this 20-year span of one war.
	And we haven't had that really in our experience up to that point.
	Yeah, well, Vietnam did last 20 years, too.
	But, you know, the interesting thing is when these guys go join Raytheon and General Dynamics and Boeing and Lockheed, and then their next job, you next see them on CNN. We're talking about giving advice about the next war that we really need to get into, that it's absolutely critical that America go into Ukraine or wherever.
	It's just this big money laundering scheme.
	It really is.
	And it's very clear that that's what it is.
	But as a citizen, now I think we're in a position where we say, what are we supposed to do?
	Because this gigantic bureaucracy, this gigantic government that has so much power, what are you supposed to do to change this?
	Because up until World War II, leaders were held accountable.
	George Marshall helped.
	We didn't start all those names that we know from World War II, from Patton to Eisenhower.
	They didn't start in those positions for the most part.
	Someone else did, but they didn't measure up.
	They were held accountable.
	They were replaced.
	And that's Jordan.
	People know George Marshall for the Marshall Plan after World War II, rebuilding Europe.
	But really, it's that lead up to World War II and during World War II where he held leaders accountable and replaced them if they didn't measure up.
	So then we got all those names that we all know that we all associate with leading us to victory in World War II. Same thing with President Lincoln in the Civil War.
	He didn't start with Grant.
	He went through a lot of generals before he got to Grant.
	So leaders were held accountable for most of our history.
	And for some reason, after World War II, that starts to wane.
	It certainly does during Vietnam.
	And you're seeing these guys who are four-star generals one day who are approving this purchase or this program that is going to greatly enrich Corporation X.
	And next thing you know, a couple months later after retirement, they're on that board going to a couple meetings a year and making a lot of money.
	And I can't really think of a general other than someone who was held accountable for personal behavior that has been held accountable for professional behavior over the last 20 years or since the end, since Vietnam.
	can't really think of a general other than someone who was held accountable for personal behavior that has been held accountable for professional behavior over the last 20 years or since the end, since Vietnam.
	So there was a shift at the end of World War II.
	So there was a shift at the end of World War II.
	You had accountability up until that point, and then you really haven't had it the same way leading up to today.
	So for whatever reason, whatever that shift is, and I think it has a lot to do with these corporations and these senior level officers that can approve programs and weapon systems and then go sit on a board in retirement or multiple boards in retirement.
	And it's very similar to the pharmaceutical industry in that respect.
	Similar models.
	But I don't know how you get away from that now that it is so big and so powerful.
	So many lobbyists.
	So much money.
	So many of these projects in multiple congressional districts.
	So it's this huge monstrosity at this point that really is an industry.
	And as a citizen, what are you supposed to do?
	We can still vote.
	That's why that vote is so important.
	And that's why everyone has to go in and vote.
	Because people have sacrificed from the inception of this country up until today to give us that right, but also because it is one of the only things that we can do as a citizen to change things.
	So we have to take that time to do that.
	And it's always shocking to me how few people actually vote in this country.
	So if you're going to complain about it, you better get in there and vote.
	You know, Doug McGregor points out that in World War II, there were only seven, four or five star generals.
	Yeah.
	And we all, we can all name them.
	These were, you know, famous, like Marshall and MacArthur and Omar Bradley.
	And there was just seven of them.
	And today there's 44 generals.
	Four and five-star generals.
	And it's not...
	Back then, the entire world economy was mobilized for that war.
	And you had seven guys who were running the whole thing.
	And now, you know, what are all these people doing?
	And we know what they're doing.
	They're making deals.
	They're carving up their little fiefdoms, making sure that they get the contracts, that they...
	It's just a bureaucracy that feeds on itself, and that is essentially predatory on the American public.
	It is not making us safer in this country.
	$8 trillion on war has not made America safer.
	It's made it more dangerous to be an American here and abroad.
	It's weakened our economy, which ultimately is the real source of national strength and national security, a strong economy.
	It's sad to see what's happening.
	Let me ask you this.
	I get asked about this all the time, and I've never really looked into it, but have you looked into any of the conspiracy stuff around 9-11?
	I have a little bit.
	I have to say this.
	If you want to avoid this question, God bless you, because I try to avoid it because I can't afford to be involved in another conspiracy theory.
	You hit your limit?
	Yeah, I hit my limit.
	My uncle used to say that he was worried about a coup d'etat from the Pentagon.
	And he said, I made it in Laos.
	They got mad at me.
	The Bay of Pigs is another, and I can't afford a third mistake.
	He thought they were, he was scared of them, that the military might do something or that he would be impeached.
	Oh, I've hit my limit on conspiracy theories.
	But I am very curious because you're such a thoughtful person and you came in, you know, as a functionary in the orthodoxy, you know, kind of a high priest of the orthodoxy.
	Oh, it's interesting to me whether you have any doubts about the official narrative.
	Well, I wrote a book.
	My fourth book is called The Devil's Hand, and I offer another narrative about 9-11 there.
	So I do have that.
	But in The Devil's Hand, I go and explore some alternate theories into 9-11 and an Iranian connection there.
	And in my latest book, actually, I go back to November of 1963 and offer up a fictional possibility for what happened then.
	And I know that you've talked about this before, about the first call that your father made in November of 1963 was to the CIA.
	And there was a reason for that.
	I think a lot of things changed.
	I mean, he made three calls that day.
	He made one to a...
	To a desk officer at CIA. And then McComb, who was the CIA director, you know, CIA was only three quarters of a mile from my house.
	We could walk, in fact, every morning when the CIA was being built at Langley, My father took me and eight or nine of my brothers and sisters horseback riding through the campus there, which was, you know, the beautiful kind of rolling woodland and fields and forests, former farms over there.
	And we watched the building go up.
	And then when they appointed McComb, they fired Dulles.
	And they appointed McComb.
	Originally, President Kennedy wanted to appoint my father because he really wanted to reform the agency.
	But my father and my grandfather said, you can't have a brother of the president running the intelligence agency because it's just bad for democracy.
	You don't want that kind of, you know...
	Collusion between the, or potential for collusion.
	So they brought in this very kind of rigid Roman Catholic Republican, John McComb.
	And of course, the people, the clandestine services at CIA never told him anything.
	He was kind of, I would say, a useful idiot for them because the people like Bill Harvey and David Attlee Phillips and James Jesus Angleton, who are actually running all of the dirty business there, We're not sharing that with the president.
	My father then had McComb over.
	McComb came over to our house right over as soon as the president was shot.
	And when I arrived home, my father was walking with him in the yard.
	And we went down and hugged my father.
	And he left McComb.
	McComb then left.
	But he, during that short walk, he said to McComb, did we?
	Did your people do this to my brother?
	And then he made one other call that day to Harry Ruiz Williams, who was one of the leaders of the Cuban Brigade, and who was one of the few members of the Cuban Brigade who had remained very loyal to my father.
	And he was a, you know, close personal friend.
	He had fought alongside Castro and the Sierra Maestre.
	And then in 58 and 59, he'd been an engineer.
	He was highly educated.
	He thought Batista was a tyrant.
	And then when Castro declared that it was a Marxist regime, Ruiz turned against him and joined the resistance.
	And he was very, very close to my dad.
	And so my dad called him up.
	And he was still...
	You know, one of the big leaders in the Cuban community, my father called him up.
	He was staying at a Washington hotel and he said, you know, did your guys do this to my brother?
	Oh, that was his first instinct.
	But go ahead.
	I interrupted you.
	I didn't mean to, Jack.
	Oh, no.
	No, I think that's very telling that those are his first instincts on that day.
	So I thought about that a lot over the years.
	And I think a lot of things in this country changed on that day, not for the better.
	And I heard you talk about this before, about your father almost being appointed or being a possibility to lead the CIA. And I think how different things could have been.
	Had that been the case?
	I mean, I understand the optic of not wanting your brother running an intelligence service if you're looking at what's going on in other parts of the world with those types of interior type of agencies, but I often think how different things would be had they gone through and actually done that.
	Because then we get the Warren Commission and Dulles, I mean, it shouldn't have been called the Warren Commission, right?
	Oh, he ran the Warrant Commission.
	He was, you know, because he instigated himself into the Warrant Commission.
	There's Alan Dulles, who, when my uncle was killed, he said to a young reporter, I'm glad the little shit is dead.
	He thought he was a god.
	So that was his...
	He had a big resentment against my uncle who had fired him.
	And then he becomes the head of the...
	All the other guys on the Warren Commission had full-time jobs.
	Earl Warren was the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
	All the other ones were congressmen and senators.
	They were, you know, full-time job.
	The only one who wasn't working was Dulles.
	So he ended up running the whole thing.
	He's the only one who showed up for every single meeting.
	And, you know, and of course, now we know that he was conspiring the whole time.
	He was meeting at night with the CIA agents who were hiding their involvement, you know, Johannides and Angleton, who was his best friend.
	And they were all meeting with each other and collaborating on what they would say the next day and what questions would be asked and what their response was.
	And it was a mess.
	I want to make an observation.
	I don't want to talk because you're like one of the most interesting people I've ever had on this, but I want to just share a thought with you about this.
	Your article was about government lying to us and about the normalization of lying.
	I've been thinking about this since I read your article.
	The lies really started with my uncle's death and them realizing that they're going to tell a big lie about this, that everybody knows a lie.
	I mean, when I was a little boy in 63, November 63, well, I was standing there next to my uncle's casket in the East Room of the White House.
	I'm 10 years old.
	And Lyndon Johnson comes in and tells my father, I was standing beside my father, my aunt Jackie, and my mom.
	And Lyndon Johnson comes into that room and says that Lee Harvey Oswald has just been shot by a man, and the man's name was Jack Ruby.
	And I said to my mom at that time, I said, why did he shoot?
	You know, they said, he's the guy who killed, you know, Uncle Jack.
	And I said, why did the man shoot him?
	Did he love our family?
	So in my 10-year-old mind, the story didn't make any sense to me.
	And Ruby, of course, said that initially, he said he later, you know, came clean.
	And they wouldn't let him out of that jail cell.
	But he said originally his story was he was trying to kill Oswald in order to protect Jackie from a long and difficult trial.
	So he goes into a police station that's loaded with friends and murders the man in broad daylight.
	And then it turns out he's, you know, working for Carlos Marcello's mob and Sam Giancana's mob, who were the guys who were part of the CIA group that was trying to kill Castro to get their casinos back in Havana.
	But anyway, it made no sense to me.
	It's made no sense to the American people ever since.
	Even Congress in 79, when they investigated it, said, no, it was a conspiracy.
	That was the conclusion of the House Select Assassinations Committee report.
	But the mainstream press, led by the New York Times, continues to push this lie that it was a single shooter, a madman, Lee Harvey Oswald.
	Even now that we know, Lee Harvey Oswald himself is a CIA asset.
	But they just tell the lie again and again.
	Now, when I was a little boy, Nobody in our country would believe that the American government would lie to them or that the press...
	The press were the most...
	Chancellor, Hundley Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, the most trusted people in America.
	The press never lied.
	And then Gary Francis Powers is shot down in his U2. In 1960, in May of 1960, right during the election, Eisenhower is about to go to Russia to do a summit to make peace with Khrushchev.
	Alan Dulles is running the U-2 program.
	He sends the U-2 over Russia.
	It's shot down.
	The pilot's supposed to kill himself.
	He has an arsenic pin that he's supposed to hit himself with, but he doesn't.
	And the Russians don't tell that they've captured him.
	They accuse America of sending a U-2.
	Dulles tells Eisenhower to lie about it.
	We don't have such a program.
	So Eisenhower goes on national TV and says the Russians are lying about this.
	And then the Russians, a day later, produce Gary Francis Powers, the pilot.
	Everybody in the world now knows that the U.S. government lied.
	And the American people said, oh, they lied to us, too.
	This is shocking.
	And before that, Americans could not believe the government lied on.
	Then, you know, they get away with this big lie in 63 about my uncle.
	And then they do that.
	You know, the Pentagon Papers comes out in 71.
	And everybody says, oh my God, they've been lying about the entire Vietnam War.
	And then, you know, ever since then, it's just become like de rigueur that they, you know, they lie about everything.
	And now the press lies to us about everything.
	And the press is now...
	A lie with the government, the press, which is supposed to be speaking truth to power, instead is broadcasting public government propaganda to the rest of us.
	That's why I do think it's important to really investigate President Kennedy's death and have some kind of truth and reconciliation commission to come clean, because if you don't go back and correct that initial lie, You know, it just, it sets this precedent for them lying about everything, and they can get away with it.
	Oh, yeah.
	No, I've thought about that since my earliest days.
	And then, of course, we have the Pike Committee and the Church Committee hearings in the 70s, where they unearth numerous oversteps, that would be the kindest way to put it, by institutions of the federal government, specifically the CIA. And there's the reform that comes out of the Church Committee and the Pike Committee.
	And those reforms are put into place in the late 70s and early 80s.
	And I think you have some changes, but you're right.
	You go back to November of 1963.
	You go back to 60, 61, 62 in the lead up of the years leading up to November of 1963.
	And there was a definite change in the tone.
	Of the government, of the intelligence services, of the military, and what the people expect.
	Now we expect those lies.
	But we're so distracted by all these other things, raising families and paying rent and taxes and all the rest of it, juggling life.
	That those lies just continue to get told.
	More get told.
	More money gets spent.
	More programs are in the hopper for whatever war is next or whatever war we're pushing for going forward.
	And it really did start back there in November of 1963.
	I mean, it was so profound.
	I talk about it in my last book, and I don't know if you remember this or not, but we met at Megan and Billy Berzel's wedding at Hansport.
	And just so people know, my sister's daughter, Megan Townsend, my eldest sister's Kathleen, She's two years older than I am.
	One of her four daughters is Megan Townsend.
	Megan married Billy Burtzel, who's a Special Operations.
	At their wedding, almost all of the ushers were from the Special Operations, from the Green Beret and the Seals.
	I think there was one who was a ranger.
	But yeah, so you and I met at his wedding.
	Yep, yep.
	And he was a Marine.
	We were actually in Najaf, Iraq together, fighting together.
	We didn't know each other then.
	We met after Najaf, Iraq, summer of 2004.
	I ended up doing something in Mali together years later and stayed dear friends ever since.
	But so we got to go out there and it was incredible to be there.
	And I don't know if you remember this, but I got to escort Ethel the next day for the christening.
	I did a reading and then escorted her to the breakfast that we had the next day.
	So I got to sit with Ethel and with your wife Cheryl and sit at this table together.
	And my experience there made its way into my last novel.
	And people who have read it will know the characters that I'm talking about, but they inspired this storyline that I wanted to explore.
	And I did so.
	It was...
	I can't force a storyline, so it has to be natural.
	And at book number six, which is my last one called Only the Dead, that's where it was natural to go into this storyline and go into the past and to these connections to November of 1963 and the father of my main character who is a Navy SEAL, but his dad was a Navy SEAL in Vietnam and then went into the CIA.
	And so there's all these things coming together and it was the right time and the place.
	But for people who have read the novel, they'll know the inspiration of Ethel Kennedy to my latest novel.
	But the point being is that it's been with me for my earliest days and that seminal moment in our history And I thought about it quite a bit.
	I have a first edition of the Warren Commission report inside.
	And if you are elected president, is there any possible thing that the CIA could say to you that would make you not release whatever files are left over?
	That they were mandated to release in 2017, by the way.
	So we have two administrations, two different parties that got a visit from the CIA on the eve, essentially, of releasing these documents and didn't.
	I can't imagine Well, I can't imagine what they said to Trump.
	Trump said that he was going to release him, and he doesn't give a damn about the CIA. He would love to have heard him.
	Well, I can't imagine what they said to him.
	what, you know, Biden, I don't know what is going on in his head now, but I know he's surrounded by, you know, his whole life has been immersed in the military and intelligence apparatus, and he does what they tell him to do.
	He's got Avril Haines, who's the master of the cover-up, who's his director of national intelligence.
	I can't imagine, there's 5,000, almost 5,000 documents that they haven't released.
	The key documents that people most want to see are documents of the travel itinerary, the travel schedule of Bill Harvey.
	Bill Harvey was a Miami stationer chief, but he was stationed at Langley and fought with my father every day.
	At one point, he was put on administrative leave because he screamed at my father, we wouldn't be in this mess if your brother hadn't chickened out at the Bay of Pigs and had gone in there and cleaned up that mess.
	You know, if he wasn't a coward or something, he was telling my father that my uncle was a coward.
	My uncle is the only president of history who's won the Purple Heart.
	And my father was a volatile person who did not like his brother insulted.
	but they sideline Harvey.
	They sent him over to Italy.
	And there's been testimony that he flew to Dallas on that day.
	And if that's true, it fits in with a lot of the other evidence that there's a very inculpatory.
	And that's one of the things that people want to know about.
	And that apparently is in those documents.
	Listen, 62 years after my uncle's death, what could they possibly have in there?
	That is so top secret.
	The Soviet Union has collapsed.
	The enemy is gone.
	What are they trying to hide?
	I also go back to if they are not guilty of anything, they have sure gone way out of their way to make themselves look very guilty.
	So I don't quite get it.
	And I'm very curious if we ever will find out or get notes from the meeting that Trump had with whoever from the CIA came over, essentially on the eve of releasing those documents, which for those listening, once again, mandated by law to release those documents in 2017.
	What they possibly could have said.
	I am so curious about that meeting in particular.
	Maybe we will find out one day, but maybe not.
	But your original question was about conspiracies.
	So a lot of conspiracies have become fact over the last decade, decade plus.
	So, you know, it's good to be skeptical.
	You don't need to be cynical to be skeptical, but you can definitely be skeptical.
	Ask those questions.
	Remember that our elected leaders are just that.
	They are our employees.
	And those tax dollars, those weapon systems going into new NATO countries and into Ukraine or whatever other war we find next, that's our money.
	That's our tax dollars being spent by our employees.
	And we tend to forget that just because of how much power the federal government has.
	So someone like you going in there who is obviously not afraid to speak truth to power and returning us to those days, those pre- November 1963 days where we do have trust in government again.
	And that's a long road, but I'm hopeful.
	I try to remain hopeful because I have kids and one day maybe grandkids.
	And I try to remain hopeful so I can manifest that future for them.
	It's been more difficult as every day passes.
	because there is something else that happens that makes you just rethink of our direction and then think as a citizen, what am I supposed to do?
	And so I try to do what I can through the, the power of popular fiction through my novels.
	First nonfiction comes out in a year and it's on the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing.
	So I want to keep some of these lessons alive so that future generations don't have to learn them in blood.
	Like those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines had to learn in August of 2021 in Afghanistan.
	So I want to keep those lessons alive so we can apply them going forward as wisdom.
	And we really neglect to do that time and time again.
	We neglected those lessons of Vietnam.
	We did not apply them.
	to Afghanistan and Iraq and if we did we applied the wrong lessons so applying those lessons as wisdom is something that is extremely important to me as a citizen and as a parent for me seeing somebody like you out there doing what you're doing my hat is off to you sir Well, thank you very much, Jack.
	And thanks for this conversation.
	I hope you'll come back.
	Our Ernest Hemingway said that if you want to write about life, you've got to go live it first.
	And you really have, you've lived an amazing life.
	And, you know, you've emerged, as your critics say, the most important men's fiction writer of this generation.
	Thank you so much for joining us.
	And thank you for your service to our country.
	And thanks for your commitment to telling the truth, Jack.
	Thank you very much.
	Thank you so much.
	Thank you for everything you and your family have done for us as well.
	And I'll talk to you again soon.
	Yeah, soon.

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