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Nov. 16, 2013 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:05:33
Edition 132 - Jesse Ventura - JFK 50

A Special Edition - on the 50th anniversary of the killing of John F Kennedy we speak withGovernor Jesse Ventura.

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is a special edition of The Unexplained.
Why special, you ask?
Because after a wait and a lot of persistence and a great deal of goodwill on behalf of his people, at last we've tied down that interview with Governor Jesse Ventura.
Now if you're in the UK or another part of this world and you don't know anything about this man, prepare to be fascinated and prepare to have your mind challenged by his views, in particular this time around with the 50th anniversary here of JFK's assassination.
We're going to talk about his new book on that subject quite extensively.
We'll also talk about his political views, his views about the things that go on in this world.
Now, if you know nothing about Jesse Ventura, I'm almost tempted to say where have you been because his TV shows are pretty much everywhere.
But if I just read a paragraph, even just a quick line from his Wikipedia biography here, and I do recommend that you look at it, because boy, this man's had a colourful life and career.
James George Janos, born July 15, 1951, better known by his stage name Jesse Ventura, is an American politician, actor, author, veteran, and former professional wrestler who served as the 38th governor of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003.
Now, you might have seen him on conspiracy shows on TV, presenting them.
And that very much these days is his thing.
He has pretty strong political views, and if you read that biography of him, or if you live in the States and you know about him, you know that this man is no stranger at all to controversy.
And that's one of the reasons we've got him on here.
His book that he's talking about at the moment, which of course is appozite, bearing in mind that this is that 50th anniversary of the killing of JFK in Dallas, Texas, and all the questions that will always resound and rebound about it.
The book is called They Killed Our President, 63 Reasons to Believe There Was a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK.
Well, we hope to cover an awful lot of that ground with Jesse Ventura from the United States on this show very, very soon.
Just to say, as ever, thank you to Adam Cornwell for his great efforts for the show lately.
Designing, maintaining the website, getting the show out to you.
Couldn't do it without Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Now, if you want to get in touch with the show, all you have to do, go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv, and you can leave me a message there.
Or if you possibly can, a donation for the show.
Only through your donations can we continue to do things like this.
I don't want to hang about, though.
I want to get as much value as possible.
We have roughly 60 minutes or just under with Governor Jesse Ventura, so let's cross to him right now.
Governor Ventura, thank you very much for making time to come on my show.
And on behalf of my listeners in the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand, around the world, lots of them, thank you very much for making time for the independent media.
I think it's very important that people do that these days, and you have done that.
So thank you.
Well, you're very welcome, and thank you for having me.
And I'll tell you this, it's only the independent media that will talk to me on this particular subject of my book.
ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, and MSNBC won't have me on.
Now, why do you think that is?
Do you think that those networks, and I guess we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, but I think it's worth asking this now, why do you think the major networks in the U.S., and I guess that goes for us here in the U.K. too, won't touch this now?
Do you think that they believe it's bad taste at this time?
Well, not that it's bad taste.
It's just that in the words of Malcolm X, they've been bamboozling us for 50 years.
They've been helping to perpetrate this myth that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin of John F. Kennedy, and they're not about to admit that they did that for 50 years and that they fooled us all because they would thus then lose whatever little credibility they still have.
Well, listen, I want to cover as much.
Sure.
And I want to get into that.
I want to cover as much ground as we have available to us.
We're on the clock with this one.
There are a few things I'd like to ask before we get into the subject of the book and this whole topic of JFK the 50th anniversary, which is on us now, unbelievably.
First of all, for listeners who may not know you in the United Kingdom, I was trying to, before we came on here, to summarize what you're all about.
And I came up with one word that you might hate.
And please tell me if you do, Governor Ventura.
A truth seeker was the word.
Do you like that?
A truth seeker?
Well, I don't mind it because somehow lately the word truth has been made to seem bad.
And I cannot fathom how the word truth can ever be bad.
How can the truth ever be bad?
Well, that's a very, very good question.
And I'm sure we'll return to that one as well.
But there are people who in this world, and they're mainly politicians both sides of the Atlantic these days, who would kind of give you that impression.
One of the things that we said before we started recording here was that we'd make a hell of a bill, wouldn't we, in neon lights?
Jesse Ventura and Howard Hughes.
That has to be a once-in-a-lifetime.
I should ask you, what is it like to have the name of such a famous person?
Well, look, I've lived with it now for all of my life, which, you know, is a fair number of decades now.
And I was first aware of it when I had an accident at school.
They rushed me to hospital, and the doctor there was a very nice Indian guy.
And he said, Howard Hughes, he said, you are very famous.
And only then did I realize that my parents had given me this name.
Then, of course, I love America, and I started traveling to America.
And every time I arrived, when I got to passport control, they would say to me, Howard Hughes, you're putting me on.
So over the years, I've kind of got used to it.
But I'll tell you something, I've been on the radio over here for years.
That's my kind of day job when I'm not doing this.
And people never forget that it's Howard Hughes with the news because it rhymes.
So, you know, I thought of changing it, but I'm not going to.
I'm going to stay Howard Hughes.
I wouldn't, absolutely not.
You know, I would keep it.
But just interesting to ask that question, what it's like.
I mean, it would be like having the name Abraham Lincoln.
I suppose it would be, wouldn't it?
Yeah, I don't know, you know.
Or it's like Johnny Cash's song, A Boy Named Sue.
Oh, how do you do?
I love that.
You know, he named him Sue because he wasn't going to be around and he knew he'd have to get tough or die.
Yeah, no, I love that song.
I grew up listening to that song.
I mean, we haven't got time to talk about it here, Governor Ventura, but I used to play that song when I was a kid, and I could say every word.
You know, my name is Sue.
How do you do?
And you're going to die.
But that's another topic for another time.
Let's get into the book now.
This is an excellent book.
I've been reading it during this week in between work shifts.
They killed our president, 63 reasons to believe there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK.
These days, many, many people, arguably more and more, are coming to believe that.
But there are many reasons we're going to get into.
What I'd like to do, if this is okay with you, is tap dance around the book a bit.
So we're not going to do it exactly in the order that it appears on the page, but I want to cherry-pick some of the topics and whet people's appetites for this.
Sure.
Before this, John Kerry, U.S. Secretary of State, I'm sure you're aware of his comments over the last week or so.
And he said, intriguingly enough, now, would you expect this to come from a man like him, he sort of believes, kind of, that more than one person was involved in the assassination of JFK.
But when pushed, I think it was by NBC's Meet the Press a few days ago to elaborate on that, he refused to.
What did you make of that?
Well, that's what they all do.
Deep down, I think many, many people know that the public was lied to.
But a person in Kerry's position isn't allowed to admit it because then what little credibility the government did have with the people they would lose.
Because if the people realized that they got lied to about the murder of their own president, what could they possibly believe could come out of government that they wouldn't be skeptical of?
And my point is they should always be skeptical of anything the government tells you because the government is made up of people and people can be evil and evil can become powerful.
If you don't believe it, talk to the German people in the 30s.
I think they can tell you a pretty good story.
And there's a great quote from the end of your book that I'm going to save for the very back end of our conversation that says exactly that quite beautifully, I thought.
I interviewed a couple of years ago, Governor Ventura, a Dallas journalist, somebody who I think worked for KLIF, which was the radio station that broke this news in 1963 back then.
They had a music format and they interrupted it, went all news for this terribly serious and deeply shocking story.
Now, this guy in this contemporary era said he didn't really buy the conspiracy theories, so-called, about JFK's death, and he thought that Lee Harvey Oswald really was the lone shootist.
You must hear that a lot.
Well, you hear that from the apologists and the people in power.
Polls in the United States indicate today, with the release of the majority of the documents, but they're still withholding many, that 75 to 80% of the people do not believe the Warren Commission story today.
So that's overwhelming.
So the fact is we just simply have to convince the final 20% that aren't buying, and they never will probably, for whatever their own personal reasons are.
I did one syndicated big radio talk show here, and the host of it said in the end that he didn't believe it, that he still believed the Warren Commission.
And I wanted to say to him, because we were going off the air, what would it take to convince you?
You know, I gave you 63 reasons in this book.
What more could it possibly take?
And I really believe that there's nothing, that some people are so set and do not want to believe that there really is nothing you can do to convince them otherwise.
I wonder if the one thing is one prominent person still alive now, and we've got to lay it on the line once again, 50 years have passed, but one prominent person who will come out and say, everything you ever heard about this being a put-up job, as we say here in the United Kingdom, a set-up, everything you ever heard about that is absolutely true.
Or even somebody who's dead now who locked that secret away in a safe somewhere to come out.
We do have it.
Richard Nixon, President Richard Nixon, in his famous Watergate tapes, right on the tapes, Nixon is quoted as saying the Warren Commission is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.
And you believe that's the smoking gun?
Well, that's the President of the United States saying it, not me.
What about the deathbed confession that's been made a great deal of?
And I've heard and read a lot about this.
And it's in the world.
We didn't hear about it in this country because I aired it on my TV show and it got no play whatsoever.
We're talking about E. Howard Hunt, are we?
That's correct.
I had the bedside confession of E. Howard Hunt to his son St. John Hunt.
He listed the chain of command from LBJ to Cord Meyer down to David Sanchez Morales, a notorious CIA hitman.
Hunt called it the big event.
He said he was on the peripheral.
He was on the outside of it, but he knew of it.
And this was originally taken to 60 Minutes by his son, St. John.
60 Minutes was going to run with it.
They thought they had the story of the century, and all of a sudden the plug got pulled.
They wouldn't air it.
And so St. John then brought it to me because he knew I would.
And I thought there'd be headlines across the media.
Hunt admits to involvement in JFK slaying.
Not one word.
But of course, this is a guy who is heavily known, a CIA operative, involved in the Bay of Pigs, involved in many clandescent United States operations.
He has the credibility.
Why on earth would not one word be said about it?
Well, of course, some people would say that he has as much credibility as anybody involved in Watergate had.
And maybe that's not very much.
Well, why?
Watergate was real.
It was a break-in.
There's also a conspiracy to that, That Nixon was actually set up on that.
And that he was set up because he was talking too much.
H.R. Holdham and his chief of staff said whenever you'd hear Nixon say that Bay of Pigs thing, he was actually talking about the Kennedy assassination because he said Nixon liked to talk that way to where people, only people in the know would know what he was talking about.
And Nixon had gone to the head of the CIA and demanded all the information that they had on JFK.
We recently behold, all of a sudden, Watergate happens.
And look at the burglars themselves.
These were supposedly professionals, and they're going to tape a door shut horizontally and not vertically.
Come on, I'm a former Navy SEAL.
They teach you that.
Any operator of that caliber is going to know.
You don't tape a door shut horizontally.
The tape can be seen then.
You tape it vertically.
Governor Ventura, we recently lost, and I was a huge fan of the man, known both in the UK, US, David Frost, Sir David Frost, wonderful interviewer, known on television both sides of the Atlantic.
He, of course, got the money together and made the Nixon interviews happen.
Now, at the end of those Nixon interviews, I remember this well.
I was a kid then.
I remember watching riveted this stuff.
Nixon opened up and admitted his failings.
If Nixon knew this, why didn't Nixon admit it then?
That was a perfect opportunity.
I don't know.
You'd have to ask Nixon.
You know, you're asking me a hypothetical that I have no way of answering.
Why do you think?
I don't know.
I couldn't even speculate.
But you believe that.
I think because, again, nobody, John Kerry, makes a little statement, and when they ask him to expand on it, immediately he shuts the door.
For whatever reason, you're not allowed to.
Just like we're not today.
We're not allowed to ask any questions about 9-11.
I have, and that's caused me a great deal of problems.
I want to get to that, too, if we have time at the back end of this.
So you believe that Richard Milhouse Nixon carried around with him the most burdensome of weights throughout his time in office, the knowledge that this thing happened and he knew about it and couldn't talk?
I don't know.
All I know is what Richard Nixon said on the tapes.
He said that the Warren Commission was the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.
That's all I know.
All I can do is take what Nixon said, and obviously, why would he say that?
Do you think he may have been?
I haven't actually heard him say those words on the tapes.
I'm going to look them up and try and hear them now.
That wasn't just a reflection on the way that the Warren Commission was conducted, which itself was heavily criticized.
I don't know.
I have no idea in what context it was said.
All I can say is that he did say it on the tapes.
All right.
There are many theories, and over here in the UK, we've heard them all, just as you have heard more of them probably over there, as to who did this.
We have the mob, the mafia, Cuba, the Soviets, a high-level plot by the military-industrial complex, so-called, or any combination of those things.
There were people who thought that Kennedy's foreign policy, for one, absolutely stank.
Who did it?
Well, that's the million-dollar question that probably can never be answered because 50 years has gone by and it's been thoroughly covered up for those 50 years.
I like to answer this way.
My book, we give you different scenarios and options to choose of who you might think did it.
But here's what my book will tell you.
It'll tell you who didn't do it.
Lee Harvey Oswald.
That I can assure you of.
He did not do it, in my opinion.
And that alone then leaves it open because in murder, there's no statute of limitations.
Let's look at this for a moment, if we can, Howard.
The government's last investigation of the Kennedy murder was the House Select Committee in the mid-70s to the later 70s.
Their conclusion was that Kennedy was killed by a probable conspiracy.
So the government themselves have admitted in their last investigation that it was a conspiracy.
And it was sent to the Justice Department to act on it.
There's no statute of limitations on murder, and yet nothing's been done.
It's probably sitting there collecting dust if it's even still in a file.
And they weren't the only ones to be stopped in that way, because in your book, you talk about what happened to the investigation by the DA of New Orleans.
Oh, Jim Garrison, you know, he's been marginalized.
They've said all this horrible stuff about him.
He was a dedicated DA who had every right to invest a murder case that had participants in his district, apparently.
And the United States government did everything they could to block his investigation.
That's astounding.
How can they do that to a duly elected district attorney who's doing his job?
What does that tell you there?
Well, it's fishy, to say the very least.
And of course, his star witness, as I read in your book, David Ferry, I think his name was, he predicted his own death.
And like an awful lot of people connected with this whole scenario, he ended up dead.
Oh, yeah.
The one I really am intrigued by is Dorothy Kilgallen.
The journalist.
Yeah, the famous columnist who she was granted the only interview with Jack Ruby when he was in prison before he died mysteriously of a fast-moving cancer.
Which I might add to you, read Dr. Mary's Monkey and Lee and Me, two books.
You'll learn that Oswald was involved in a thing to try to kill Castro with a fast-moving cancer.
Well, anyway, that aside, Ruby gave Dorothy Kilgallen the only interview that he ever granted from his jail cell before he died.
Kilgallen came out and made the mistake.
She said she was going to break the Kennedy case wide open.
A week later, she's in her Manhattan apartment found dead of an apparent suicide.
Well, if you're a reporter and you've got the story that's going to the story of the century, why would you kill yourself?
A very good question.
And she wasn't the only one who was looking forward to the rest of her life who suddenly ended up dead.
A bizarre situation, to say the least.
Jack Ruby, just to remind, there may be some young people listening to this.
I don't think there'll be very many, but there may be who don't know who Jack Ruby was.
Of course, he is the man who, before Lee Harvey Oswald ever got to trial, pulled the trigger on him.
He's been described variously as deluded, a strange patriot.
Well, he was undoubtedly a patriot.
But this is the guy who ultimately took Lee Harvey Oswald out of the picture.
Well, and here's the thing that we'll reveal in our book, in my book.
Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald knew each other well.
How so?
That's another lie from the Warren Commission.
The Warren Commission said there was virtually no connection between the two of them.
And how did they know each other?
There's multiple witnesses.
Judith Ferry Baker will tell you she went out to dinner in New Orleans with Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald, and Ruby had told her that he knew Lee Oswald since Oswald was a kid.
So how has this thing played out then?
If these people knew each other, what kind of drama was being played out there, do you think?
Well, Oswald, to me, in all the research I've done, he was a low-level intelligence operative, which there are many of.
That's why he defected to Cuba.
It's now public knowledge that the U.S. had a false defector program in the late 50s and early 60s.
Oswald was part of that.
He received foreign language training in the military.
You don't get that unless you're, you know, in some type of intelligence.
I believe Oswald worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence.
And then when he got out of the military, he continued with an intelligence career.
Because as a child, they said he was fascinated with some 50s TV show about a guy that led a dual life as an intelligence agent.
And so Oswald was living out what he wanted to do.
And he was a low-level intelligence agent who I believe was set up to take the fall.
When a decision was made that a coup d'etat was going to happen in the United States, they were going to take out the president and take the government in a new direction, not by a vote, but by a bullet to the head.
Well, when a coup d'etat happens, you have to, number one, you have to have a pan patsy, someone to blame it on, and number two, there can never be a trial.
Well, both of those things were fulfilled.
They blamed it on Oswald, and by Ruby killing Oswald, there was never a trial.
And of course, if you were going to set somebody up as this word that Lee Harvey Oswald used when he was interviewed, I'm a Patsy, or when, you know, to journalists as they were walking by him, I'm just a Patsy here, a word that stuck in my head for my whole life, they created, if somebody did, an amazing backstory for him.
Here's somebody with a Cuban connection, marries a Russian woman, is fascinated by communism.
If you're going to find someone to do this, give him a story like that.
Lee did the majority of that stuff on orders.
See, when you work at that level of intelligence, you're told, like when he was passing out the brochures in New Orleans, the Fair Play for Cuba, remember they were stamped with Guy Bannister's address on them?
And Bannister was as far right-wing as you could get and as anti-communist as you could get.
Lehar Ryazwa was told to do things by his handlers.
That's how it works.
I have a friend who was at the time on the infamous SEAL Team 6 that people didn't even know about in the mid-80s.
When Reagan got involved in that arms for hostages fiascal, my friend didn't realize until it broke on TV that he was part of it.
Because he was, it's so compartmentalized.
He was simply given orders, you're going to take something from point A to point B. That's all they know.
They don't ask what the big picture is.
And that's what Oswald, Oswald was a low-level intelligence.
Why do you think they won't let us see his tax return?
Do you know that's one of the things we still can't see?
Lee Harvey Oswald's tax return.
Now, why would that be important?
That would be important because it would start a paper trail as to who was paying Oswald.
And if it came out that he was getting paid by the United States government in some manner, well, that changes the whole scenario, doesn't it?
That would be utter dynamite.
We have statutes here that mean that certain documents that are kept back from the public have to be revealed in a certain length of time.
Do you have that in the States, or will this thing always stay secret?
Well, we have it, but the president has the ability to re-sign and delay it even more, like what George Bush did with his father on the whole Iran-Contra thing.
So there is a possibility that not in our lifetime will this thing come out?
Oh, it's a great possibility.
Unless I become the president, if I become the president, then it'll all be revealed.
Let's hope that happens.
But no, absolutely.
The president can simply sign an executive order, and that stuff can get locked up for another 50 years.
What about this wife?
Wait, here's common sense now.
Howard, listen to common sense here for a moment.
If Lee Oswald is who they told us he was, this little disgruntled Marine private who became a Marxist-Leninist, defected to Russia, came back, got angry, and shot and killed our president, why would anything have to be locked up because of national security?
I haven't a clue.
And by the sounds of it, neither of you, but we can both guess.
How could he affect our national security?
But if he was a government agent, then they would have to lock up things, wouldn't they?
Governor Ventura, what about this wife that Lee Harvey Oswald had?
What did she say and where did she come into it all?
Well, he married her in Russia.
I've talked with her.
I've spent an afternoon with her.
And she was in a position where she would do any.
They were going to get divorced.
They were separated.
And she was fearful of being deported back to Russia.
That's why they had the second child, so that he would have a daughter born.
Lee loved his children, And he wanted her to stay in the U.S. so he could be with his two daughters.
That's why he had the second child, so that she would be born in the United States.
And it would be much more difficult for Marina then to be deported.
They had Marina over a barrel.
She'd do anything they wanted after Lee was dead because all they had to do was threaten to deport her back to Russia.
And she did not want to go.
And that's the ultimate sanction that the U.S. could have used.
What about the photograph?
There are so many questions I want to ask you.
The photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald, it's in the Oliver Stone movie.
Of course it is with the rifle.
Right.
Well, Marina claims she took it.
I asked her.
And, you know, experts have said that the photograph has been doctored and all that.
I'm not an expert.
You have to read the experts' testimony and judge for yourself whether you believe the experts when they talk about it being cropped at the chin line and all of that type of thing.
But Marina did tell me she took photographs.
Again, why would Oswald get those photos taken?
Did somebody give him orders to do that?
If they did, we'd love to know who that person was.
Well, if he's a low-level operative, he very well could have been ordered and said, look, we need some photos of you standing with these weapons.
And he'd have no idea at that time that he was being set up.
So low-level guy used to obeying orders without question.
Exactly.
Would do all of this stuff.
Yep, exactly.
The orthodox explanation is that he was there in the Texas book depository, whichever floor it was, I forget now, with this gun, and he shoots Kennedy.
Only problem with it, and it's been discussed so much, especially recently, is that the bullet that is said to have done the job went on a trajectory that a bullet can't go on.
You know, you fire a bullet, it goes in a straight line, but this so-called magic bullet went through all kinds of convolutions that it stretches credulity to believe that anything that you fire could do it.
Well, first of all, one thing that I found astounding, there's a book out there now called Mortal Error that tries to claim that one of the Secret Service guys' weapons misfired, and that's how Kennedy got shot the way he did in the head.
But they try to say that, wait till you hear this.
They try to state that the magic bullet would work because the more things it hits, the less it would be wrecked at the end because it loses velocity.
Have you ever heard anything so astounding in your life?
And they expect people to believe that.
They shot it through a cadaver's wrist and it had a huge amount of damage to the bullet.
And they're trying to say because it caused seven wounds, it lost its velocity doing every wound, and therefore it could end up pristine.
And what about the autopsy report?
I want to read just a couple of lines from your book, if I may, Governor Ventura.
Sure.
Because in the book it's laid out that it is claimed the autopsy report was substantially altered.
This is what it says in the book.
As wild as it sounds, in the official U.S. government autopsy photos of X-rays, there were different wounds on the body of the president.
And I emphasize that point because it's a point that bears emphasis.
Imagine such a thing.
The wounds were changed.
Well, there was further eyewitness testimony that indicated that what took place after the autopsy was they basically patched the wound in the back of JFK's head.
That is four lines from your book.
Well, and I base that upon the doctors at Parkland Hospital and the ambulance driver.
To every one of them and the nurses, they said the entire back right portion of the president's head was gone.
And they also said there was an entrance wound above the right temple.
And when, go back to the original tape when they announced Kennedy was dead and his press secretary came out and said to the press, the president was killed with a shot to the brain, and he raises his finger up and puts it to the right front of his temple, above the right eye.
Now, if he'd have been shot from the rear, wouldn't he have taken his hand and said he was shot from the back to the front?
And that's the crux of this for people who are not following this, and I'm sure they are.
This whole changing of the wound is all about the direction in which the bullet came.
Obviously, if the bullet came from the front, then you're talking about a whole different story.
Yep, and the thing is, all the doctors and nurses at Parkland, this was a trauma center.
They're used to dealing with gunshot wounds.
Every one of them said the throat wound was an entrance wound.
And they said that the back of the president's skull was blown out with an exit wound.
And Aubrey Wright, I think he's dead now, but I spoke to him a few years ago.
He was the ambulance driver.
He actually physically was one of the people that picked up the president's body and put it in the casket.
And he had to cradle the president's head to do this.
And he unequivocally told me, face to face, the entire back right portion of the president's skull was gone.
Now, who am I to believe?
Okay, but wouldn't Jackie Kennedy, who was in the car with him, the president's wife, wouldn't she have been aware if there was something that was counter to the official story going on?
She would have recollections.
Jackie Kennedy never, she only made one comment on the entire thing, but that comment is very telling.
Her only quote, because I think Jackie feared for the lives of her children after it happened, she was in shock.
But the only thing she said, her quote, they murdered my husband.
Now, she didn't say he murdered my husband.
She said they.
It was plural.
But maybe anybody in a situation like that would say they, just as an off-the-cover remark.
But why would you immediately take the position that it was more than one?
So that in itself is kind of suspicious.
The Zapruder film, the colour film, the only comprehensive film of what happened on that day.
There's a story about that because that film was not developed and printed in Dallas.
That film was taken away, and you say that film was altered, was messed with.
Well, there's a lot of indication that it certainly was, that they toned it down from the Actual reality of what it was really like: that there could be certain frames are missing and other things like that.
But the thing was, was the chain of custody.
The Zabruder film was taken, and we would have never seen it.
Time Life had it, it was in their vaults, and the American public was never going to see the Zabruder film.
Why not?
Well, the only reason we ever found out about it was Jim Garrison's trial.
He somehow discovered that it existed and where it was, and he subpoenaed it.
And it was shown at the trial in New Orleans.
Otherwise, the U.S. public would have never seen the Zabruder film.
And what do you think?
What do you speculate, if you do speculate, might be the missing frames?
What might be on there that would be telling?
Well, to me, even no matter what they did, it still clearly shows that the president flew back and to the left, which means the shot came from the front right.
That's what we would do to it.
And plus, the blood spatter evidence indicates that.
The blood spatter went all over the motorcycles back into the left on their windshields and the brain matter.
So if you follow the spatter evidence also, it shows that the shot came, the fatal headshot came from the front.
It was also a dumb, dumb bullet because in the x-rays it shows massive amounts of metal throughout the president's skull, which then that eliminates the Oswald weapon because Oswald was shooting a Manlicher Cartano, which is a Geneva Convention military-style rifle that only shoots a full metal jacketed bullet, which will not break apart upon impact.
And the dumb-dumb bullet is the kind of thing that an assassin would use, isn't it?
Exactly.
And the point is, it's even proven with their magic bullet.
The magic bullet could cause seven wounds and end up pristine, and yet the headshot broke into multi-small pieces.
How could they possibly come from the same weapon?
Governor Ventura, a few weeks ago, and the story came and went very quickly here in the UK, certainly, I was watching BBC Television News, and they had a headline about some new footage of that day emerging.
Do you know anything about that?
No, I do not.
In the United States now, we're getting inundated with TV shows that all claim Oswald did it.
I mean, it's laughable on television.
You don't see one show on TV questioning at all, but you see a dozen of them that all put the blame on Oswald.
And you clearly see that this is more government propaganda using the media to continue to push their position on the 50 year.
The other thing is suspect.
For 49 years, the government has never acknowledged the Kennedy murder in Dealey Plaza.
This year, on the 50th, they're going there, and they're not letting any of the disputers, any of the conspiracy people who have been going there for 49 straight years and having a moment of silence at 12.35 in the afternoon, they're being banned this year, and the people that support the Warren Commission are the only ones allowed in Dealey Plaza this year.
I thought America was a free country.
How can you stop those people?
By a city ordinance, you have to be ticketed.
They're giving out tickets, and they're putting up barricades, and only people with tickets are allowed inside the barricades.
And you think there's more to that than simply the matter of good taste on this occasion?
Well, why have they waited 50 years when the other side, the people that believe it's a conspiracy, have been going for 49 straight years?
I was there at the 40th, and I was the only elected person who appeared there.
I asked the question, well, the governor of Minnesota's here.
Where's the governor of Texas?
So for 49 years, the government has never saw fit to acknowledge Dealey Plaza.
But here on the 50th anniversary, all of a sudden, they now are taking it over for this particular year.
So if you think of it in those terms, if you look at it that way, it looks as if they want to sanitize this thing now and close it up in a little box with a ribbon round the top.
Well, Howard, you said that, not me.
But it does look as if somebody's trying to, as we say, put a lid on this.
Sure, it's propaganda.
It's, yeah, that's exactly what's going on right here.
You know, remember this.
Let me state this for all you British people know.
The United States is not the same country it was after 9-11.
It is not the same country today that it was before 9-11.
Is that because of the extra security?
Well, it's because they've trampled our Bill of Rights.
They're taking away our Bill of Rights and they're locking us down here.
We're losing our freedom, which we're not listening to what Benjamin Franklin said, one of the founders of this great country.
Benjamin Franklin said this.
He said, for those that will give up their liberty for security shall have and deserve neither.
Well, it seems that the people are willing to give up their liberty to be made safe now, and I think that's very dangerous because liberty is security.
Freedom is security.
We joked at the beginning of this about you becoming president.
Do you have political ambitions now?
Well, you know, I've been a mayor, I've been a governor, and I made the statement that they're sure setting it up for me.
It almost looks like they want me to with the current way that our government behaves with a government shutdown and all this nonsense that they're doing here.
Well, their approval rating is at 10% now, Congress.
And if I did run, I would run on a very simple premise.
You want to hear it?
I would run on this premise.
I would challenge the American people to make history with me and to elect the first president since George Washington, the father of our country, who does not belong to a political party or gang.
I refer to them as gangs.
And I believe I could win on that alone right now, the way public sentiment is here in the country.
Because these two parties, they're clearly showing the people that they come first and that the country comes second.
And you know what?
There are people saying that kind of stuff.
I don't know if this surprises you at all.
Over here.
British people are not dumb.
British people observe things and watch, and so they're not dumb when they take that position, because clearly that you know, like I said, they seem to be, maybe it's destiny.
They seem to be rolling out the carpet.
Because the other good thing is, too, as a third candidate, you never want to have an incumbent.
And in 2016, there will be no incumbent for president because President Obama will have done his two terms and will be gone.
So I studied American politics at university, always found it a very, very fascinating process.
Now's the time, and if you're going to do it.
Yeah, it certainly is.
If I were to make the move, and it would also have to be the time considering my age.
I'm 62 right now, and I wouldn't want to wait too much longer.
But I'm not saying that I will or won't, but I'm saying they're sure opening the door for someone like me to do it.
And you're in great shape.
Maybe this is your time, I think.
I want to get back.
I don't want to lose this point.
Back to November 63, because our time is limited.
Wait, for a moment, can you imagine the President of the United States being a former Rolling Stone bodyguard?
I'd love it.
Absolutely damn love it.
Maybe, I mean, maybe this is controversial.
I don't know, but we're independent media.
We can say what we like.
Maybe we need shaking up like that.
We do.
Howard, we do.
If America's going to survive, I'm warning the people.
And I'm not alone.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams all said the downfall of America will be when political parties take control.
They've already did that.
And when good people do nothing.
Exactly.
Okay, exactly.
I believe what I do is patriotic, and that is being a diligent citizen.
Being a citizen who pays attention and who questions his government whenever possible.
That's what they wanted for this country, was for citizens to practice due diligence and stay involved.
And that's all I do.
And what would you, as somebody who's been an actor in his time, what would you say to people who do accuse you of just being pure theater?
I'm not pure theater.
I've been a mayor and I've been a governor and I've did it to the best of my ability.
I've also served six years in the United States Navy.
That's 14 years of public service I've given of my life to my country.
And so anybody, well, let me put it to you this way.
There is one reason I don't think I could ever be president.
You want to know what it is?
Tell me.
I think to be the president, you have to be able to stand up and lie.
And I don't think I'm capable of that.
I don't think I'm capable of standing in front of TV cameras and talking to the American people and telling them what I know is a lie.
I'm going to cut that quote out and keep it.
Well, you can quote it, but that's why I believe that I may be unqualified to be president because I won't lie.
Let's get back to November 63, the serious business of what we're talking about here.
The grassy knoll, we're all been brought up on the grassy knoll.
Those of us who studied politics, we know what it is.
Who else was there or thereabouts, do you think?
Well, you know, I believe that certainly the fatal headshot came from the grassy knoll.
Lee Bowers, who was another one of those fatalities that died mysteriously, he was the railroad man who was up in the tower, who testified to the Warren Commission that he saw something strange.
He saw a flash of light and smoke from behind the picket fence, and he could see everything from there.
And of course, the Warren Commission then changed the subject and went on to something else because they didn't want to deal with anything like that.
But I think that most definitely the fatal headshot, everything lines up perfect for it to have come from there.
I've been to Dealey Plaza.
It's an easy shot.
It would be nothing to be accurate from right there.
And they've even had a gentleman named James Files, who today is in the Illinois Penitentiary, who claims to be the shooter.
And a lot of the things he's talked about have come true.
He said that one of the things he was an assassin for the mafia.
And he said one of the things he would always do, he would bite the bullet casing when he was done.
Well, a few years later, they found the bullet casing by the picket fence, and it had human teeth marks in it.
God, that is, I'd forgotten that.
Now you're reminding me.
That is a staggering fact that we cannot deny.
Well, that's astounding, you know, and it's something that you have to give Mr. Files a little bit of credibility when he makes a statement like that.
And sure enough, somebody locates and finds a copper casing, and it was determined that the marks the indentations were done with human teeth.
But why did they only find it years later?
Because nobody ever looked for anything.
And that's a whole other story.
Why didn't anybody look for anything?
One of the great things...
Let me give you an example of how closed it was.
When my mother died in 1995, she kept one of these big chests.
And in the bottom, my son, who was 14 at the time, we found every Minneapolis paper of that weekend.
She kept them.
And on the Minneapolis Monday morning paper, now they didn't have computers then, so that means the story had to go out Sunday afternoon.
Monday morning paper, subheadline, Dallas police declare case closed.
My son at 14 looked at me, Howard, and here's what he said, a 14-year-old.
He said, gee, Dad, they spend more time on a domestic.
That's amazing.
Staggering, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
How could they possibly declare the case closed Monday morning when they hadn't done any investigation whatsoever?
I saw a documentary on television here, and your stuff doesn't get on free-to-air television here much in the UK, and I think we need to see more of it.
But the documentary that you did for TV about JFK, I'd never seen this before.
The photograph of the tramps who were arrested, Who were taken off the street around that time?
They included some people who bore a striking resemblance to some people that we know in later years.
Oh, yeah, no, they weren't tramps at all.
One of them was Harrelson.
He's a professional killer who was clearly identified.
He's serving time in prison, or I think he's dead now, but he killed a federal judge, assassinated him.
These were professional men that were taken off this train.
They had new shoes on.
They called them tramps.
They were never booked.
They were marched through Dealey Plaza.
Fortunately, they were photographed, but there is no record of them ever even being questioned or anything.
And was I right?
Did you say in that program that E. Howard Hunt was there?
Well, they claim that Howard Hunt was the old one, but now they believe it's a guy named Chauncey Holt.
And Chauncey Holt has a record just like Howard Hunt.
He was a top forger who knew how to make identification tags, worked for the CIA and the mafia at the same time.
And there was this unholy alliance then between the CIA and the mafia.
They were attempting to kill Castro.
So the CIA had gotten in bed with the mafia.
And all it would have taken was to switch from Havana to Dallas.
You spoke to Castro, didn't you?
You went to Cuba.
Did you tell him anything?
What did he say?
Well, I asked him the last 20 minutes I was with him.
I asked him about Kennedy.
And because I said I'd studied it for years, and naturally he came up in some scenarios.
And he spoke for 20 minutes.
He said it was an inside job.
He said Oswald couldn't do the shooting.
You know that as well as I do.
He said at the time he was very close to the Soviets and the Soviets had told him, Kennedy, this man, you can talk to him.
And he then told me, which I didn't know at the time, that Kennedy had sent a French journalist named Jean Daniel to Castro to set up a meeting.
And Castro believed that Kennedy was going to change policy and end the embargo to Cuba.
Well, they were actually sitting together when word came from Dallas Kennedy had been killed.
And Jean Daniel talked about it and said when this happened, Castro stared at the floor for a couple minutes and then mumbled, this is bad.
This is very bad.
A lot of people have dirty hands, don't they?
I think so.
What about LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson, the man who became president?
And I've heard it said he was the prime person who had something to gain from this because he became the president.
Well, he certainly did.
In any murder, you have to look in any real investigation.
Now, let's categorize the Warren Commission did not do one of those.
They had a predetermined answer, and they only worked towards that answer, Lee Oswald.
But in any murder case, you always, your first suspect you look for is who had the most to gain.
Now, this clearly was a murder.
No one's going to deny that.
Who had the most to gain?
And when you look at that, it was Lyndon Johnson.
At the time, he was neck deep in two major scandals, the Billy Selestis scandal and the Bobby Baker scandal in Texas.
There was word out there that he could very well go to prison.
Now, all of that magically went away the moment he became the president.
Plus, Kennedy was going to not go to war in Vietnam.
He had already ordered the first thousand advisors out by Christmas.
Johnson immediately reversed that decision.
And you know what?
The first meeting Lyndon Johnson had as the new president Monday morning or Saturday morning back in Washington?
Now, wouldn't you expect it would be a state of the union, state-of-the-state meeting?
I would have thought so.
The meeting was on the Vietnam War, which hadn't even started yet.
So Johnson was right behind that.
In a way that Kennedy, of course, wasn't.
Exactly.
And it changed America today would be the world today would be completely different had Jack Kennedy lived.
There would have been no Vietnam War.
It's now known that Kennedy and Khrushchev were back channel communicating and had agreed they were going to try to end the Cold War by 65.
Imagine if there'd have been no Cold War or no Vietnam War.
What type of peaceful world would we live in today?
But instead, Vietnam came, the Cold War came, the war on drugs came, and we've been at perennial war literally my entire life.
And it took another 25 years or so, if my maths is right, for the Berlin Wall to come down.
Exactly.
But JFK, lest we forget it, and I hate to say it at this time because, of course, the man did so many wonderful things, and he was the spirit of the age and the era.
Let's not lose that.
But he is a man who was, as we've read extensively, pretty deeply flawed.
For a start off, he was a womanizer.
Yeah, so what?
Well, you know, he...
You'll never see any type of thing like that on Jesse Ventura.
But the point of the matter is this.
I care how JFK governed.
I don't care what his personal life was.
Right.
And you think that, and this was one of the questions that I was going to ask you, but you've answered it already, really, that had he lived, had he been allowed to live, then now we would be in a very different world, but perhaps a world that some elite somewhere would not want us to be in.
Maybe so, because always, I now, there's a great book that they keep from the American people called War is a Racket.
And it's written by Major General Smedley Butler from the United States Marine Corps.
He served about 100 years ago.
And Major General Butler, they can't criticize him because he won two Congressional Medals of Honor, not one.
And he tells you in the book that wars are rackets.
They're done so people make money.
He said, I didn't serve the American people.
I served the United Fruit Corporation.
Whenever they'd go into Central and South America, if they didn't get cooperation, they'd send in the Marines to get it.
The point being is Jack Kennedy was taking us on a road to peace, not war.
And notice how every assassination of the 60s and through time of modern era in the U.S. today, it's all men of peace and men who had powerful positions leading to peace.
Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X when he returned from Mecca, he was a changed man, and your own John Lennon.
You think John Lennon was one of this line?
Because of course, John, I'm from Liverpool too, so I revere John.
His whole life was about peace.
Exactly.
John Lennon will live forever because anytime there is a peace movement anywhere in the world, they will sing his song.
You mentioned Bobby Kennedy.
I remember very clearly the day that he died.
The news broke in the afternoon time here in the UK back on that day, and I was a small child.
I was with my grandmother.
She bought the paper.
It was front page of the paper.
What do you think was behind that?
Well, you know, if Jack Kennedy would have lived, you probably would have got 16 years of Kennedy presidency.
So he would simply have carried on the line.
Yeah.
Bobby had already made it known that he was going to reinvestigate Jack's death.
And Bobby, of course, had given the mob a really hard time, too.
Oh, yeah.
And they had already went to one Kennedy.
It was easier to take him out before he got in there.
So you think the mob's hands are well and truly soiled over?
I'm not saying who, but I'm just saying, well, I'll give you another little scenario.
How about this one?
Here's a conspiracy theory, and it's just a theory.
Teddy was supposed to die at Chappaquiddick.
I've never heard anybody say that.
Oh, I have.
And what exactly did they say about it?
What have they said?
And then if you take it beyond that, look at the untimely death of John Kennedy Jr. in a plane.
Yeah.
Light plane.
And I'm not saying they're all conspiracies, but I'm saying, gee, it sure seems pretty strange.
But of course, the media has said a lot.
Yep.
We lost them.
And that's a tragedy.
But the media and magazines that you read have always said this is a gifted family.
They were born to greatness, but they are just to believe they're cursed.
Curse.
The curse of the Kennedys, exactly.
Yeah.
Well, that's an easy way to push it off, isn't it?
If you're systematically destroying an opposition and you don't want the public to know about it, what a nice thing to say that they got a curse.
It wraps up.
Who believes in crap like that?
This may be taking a bit of a walk on the wild side.
I guess since I'm an atheist, I have a problem believing things like that.
Okay, this may be taking a bit of a walk on the wild side, but some of the people I've spoken to in the UFO and alien community, you know, when you do these shows, you cover the whole spectrum, the full nine yards.
They indicate to me that they feel that Kennedy had a problem with certain people because he was about to reveal the truth of what's out there.
Do you think there's any mileage in that?
No, not really.
And remember this.
You know, I did the show conspiracy theory.
It's entertainment.
You know, that was a job I did, and we did it for three years.
The shows were terrific.
They made people think.
But I want to tell you here, just because I did the show doesn't mean I necessarily believed it.
We had our hands tied.
Initially, when we did the show, we were going to show both sides of the conspiracy and allow the viewer to choose.
Well, the problem was many of the conspiracies dealt with the government, and the government won't cooperate on anything.
So it limited us.
So I said, okay, let's just show the conspiracy side since we can't get any cooperation from the government anyway.
So that's how the show evolved to simply show the conspirator side.
But I want to be on the record.
I do not believe in shape-changing reptiles.
So you're not a fan of David Icke's work, then?
No.
Okay.
I don't believe it.
And so, you know, and I just want to state that I don't, people can't label me a conspiracy theorist necessarily because I don't believe them all.
I'll do my own investigating, and just because I did a TV show, that's what I do for a living.
I saw your conspiracy theory program, as I said to you, on free-to-wear television here about JFK.
I saw it about six months ago.
I thought personally it was one of the best pieces of television on this subject that I have ever seen.
So in my opinion, that was one that I believe in, and that's the one I wanted to make sure was good.
Well, could ask to you for that because it was.
What would you like?
It is 50 years on now.
That's a hell of a long time, and none of us is going to live forever.
What would you like to happen?
ReJFK now.
What would you like to come out before the pair of us die?
Well, I've told my son this.
I said, I don't believe I'll ever know the truth, but my son just is 34 now.
I said, maybe by the time you're my age or older, the truth will come out.
And I said, if there's anything after life after death, I said, just think about it hard enough, and hopefully I'll be somewhere where I'll read your thoughts and I can then put it to bed for myself.
I don't think I'll ever know the truth.
No one's ever going to admit it.
I think that if a new tape came out and actually showed the shooter from the grassy knoll shoot the president, I still think you'd have the government saying that it wasn't true.
And what is the single most compelling piece of evidence that you've come across while investigating the death of JFK that tells you there was much more to that than met the eye?
Well, I think, you know, when you ask that, there's so many of them, but I would have to say visually watching the Zabruder film, when you see his head go back into the left and his Head explodes to the rear.
You know, that clearly it shows to me that the fatal headshot came from the front.
And the fact that when he comes out from behind the Stimmons freeway sign, he's already clutching his throat, which means the frontal throat shot has already been hit, and Governor Conley has not been hit yet.
So they want me to believe what, this bullet's hovering in the air, waiting to hit Governor Conley in a couple of seconds.
So I think that what the Zabruder film shows has to be the overwhelming thing that when you really truly look at it, you see that the shots did not come from the rear, but that a couple of them did indeed come from the front.
And Governor Ventura, you and I together have laughed at times in this conversation when we've talked about politics and things, but we have to say this very clearly, don't we?
That on that day 50 years ago, a good man died.
A great man died.
Not just a good man, a great man, a great man with a vision for peace who truly would have changed the world, I believe, had he lived.
And every one of us on this planet is paying a price for what happened that day.
How so?
In the fact that there are all these wars that have gone on.
And the entire Cold War and everything that took place moments after John F. Kennedy died, the direction of the country was shifted to a new old direction.
John Kennedy was looking to change it to a new direction of peace.
And when he died, the direction was shifted back to war again.
If I was able to make you president today and give you the keys to the Oval Office, apart from sit back and admire the view, what would be the first thing you'd do?
One of the first things I would do, I would pardon Bradley Manning and Snowden.
I would immediately pardon them because whistleblowers who expose the government for lying and breaking their own laws, they should be viewed as heroes, not as criminals.
Even if, as has been claimed, both sides of the Atlantic, they jeopardize security.
Security in lying?
Security in deceiving your people and spying on your own people?
We're supposed to, and they're doing it with my tax dollars.
They're watching me with my money.
Excuse me, Howard.
I don't care.
That's secure.
What about my security as a citizen?
What about my Bill of Rights as a citizen?
This government was made citizens first, not government first.
I said to you at the beginning of this, Governor Ventura, I was going to end this and park this conversation for now with a quote from your book.
And if I may, I'll read it.
You say, because it made a big impact on me this.
The plain fact of the matter is that the United States of America never admits it when we've done something wrong, never admits that we've made the wrong decision.
But think about that.
We know that decisions are made by people, and people do make wrong decisions.
The fact we won't ever admit it, that we were duped or wrong or did the wrong thing, is really very childish behavior.
Grade school stuff.
That's what you say.
I can't add anything to that.
I believe that wholeheartedly.
Because how can you have history if history is not the truth?
How can you build a house when the foundation is built on lies?
And therefore, we can never be a great country unless we become a truthful country and truthfulness starts with its own people.
Because we've lost sight of the fact that the government works for us.
We don't work for them.
And we need to take that back, that they work for us.
So nothing.
When you talk about security, I understand you've got to have security for the moment.
But when the operation's over with, everything should be revealed.
You should not have a country or a government that hides things from its people.
Governor Ventura, if I may call you Jesse this once, thank you so much for giving me your time.
Your people, to whom I'm very, very grateful, gave me an hour with you, and our hour is done.
And I would love to be able to speak with you again.
If you come to London, I'd love to see you here.
Well, I would love to come, but I quit flying because I won't deal with what I call the airport Gestapo.
Do they give you problems?
Yeah, I have metal in my body.
Okay.
So every time I go out there, I'm subjected to a sexual assault?
And isn't there they must know you, these people?
Sure, they do.
I tried to bring a federal court case.
I sued under my Fourth Amendment rights.
Reasonable search and seizure.
The federal judge threw it out of court and said she didn't have jurisdiction.
How can a federal judge not have jurisdiction over a Bill of Rights question?
Does that mean you're never going to fly?
Exactly.
Lord, well, I hope you get a boat here.
It would be nice to see you here in the UK saying some of the things you've just said.
As I said, I'm a huge Rolling Stone and Beatles fan.
They changed my life when they came to America on the Ed Sullivan show.
And I've always enjoyed English music, which, of course, they stole from the American black musician.
They did.
And I'm a fully paid-up Liverpuglian, right?
I was born there.
Liverpool gave me everything, my education and everything.
I owe everything to that city.
The story of that is that the Beatles got, because we're all connected with the sea, the ocean in Liverpool.
You know, we've all got, we all had relatives who were in the merchant navy, the merchant marine.
And they would bring back to Liverpool these records from America.
And that is how the Fab Four learned their craft.
And that's why that music came out of Liverpool.
So if you ever get over here, I will make it my business.
If you'd like to do it, I'll show you my city and my home.
Howard, I would love to do that.
If I ride the boat over there, I will take you up on that.
And I know I will thoroughly enjoy it.
Well, come on one of those Cunard ships.
It'd be good to see you.
Okay, thanks, Howard.
We'll talk again.
And there it is.
Governor Jesse Ventura.
The book is out now around the world.
It's called They Killed Our President, 63 Reasons to Believe There Was a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK.
And I'll put a link to Jesse Ventura's work on my website, www.theunexplained.tv, so you'll be able to get to the book and him from there.
Please let me have your feedback on this show.
Keep your guest suggestions and your feedback for the show coming.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for making it all possible for updating and maintaining the website, designing it in the first place and getting the show out to you.
Martin, thank you for your great theme tune that we continue to use.
And above all, thank you to you for spreading the word about this show and for listening to it wherever in the world you might be.
I love to hear from you.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I'm in London.
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