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Nov. 18, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
21:50
Edition 769 - Eric Bushman
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across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I'm hoping that everything is good with you.
Now, this is gonna be something very, very unusual.
It's not something that I've particularly chosen to do before, but I think on this occasion, we need to.
This is one short interview about a particular topic and at a particularly important time regarding that topic.
The topic is something that I've talked about so many times on The Unexplained since I started it in 2006.
The killing of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President of the United States, November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.
Now, we've spoken to all of the authors and theorists about this, including the late and great Jim Mars over the years and many, many others.
There have been a variety of takes on this as to who could have done it, whether the mafia was involved, whether Cuba was involved, whether it was some kind of shady cabal behind the scenes that involved elements of the military-industrial complex.
Those theories and any way you mix them up into a soup persist to this day.
And this day is 60 years on from that happening.
So, I know that whenever I talk about JFK in the normal run of things with the show, there are some people who say, oh, you're talking about this again.
Don't want to talk about this again.
There's nothing new to say.
So, you know, I take that point on board.
This is the 60th anniversary.
I think it is important we talk about it now because there will be people alive now who will not be alive 10 years from now for the 70th anniversary.
It is a moment in time, a mile marker.
But my plan is, unless there is anything significant, any new documents, any great revelation, I am probably not going to talk about this topic for a very long time now.
So this is the last time for a good long while that we will address this, but it is the 60th anniversary on November 22nd.
Now, I'm doing something different on the radio show on Sunday night, talking to a number of people, a couple of them you won't have heard before, I don't think, about this.
Also hearing a little bit of archive audio.
But what I want to do here, and you will hear part of this on that radio show, is talk to somebody who's very much involved with it in Dallas today, the assistant news director of WBAP and KLIF Radio in Dallas, Texas.
Those are two great news talk radio stations, and if you live there or anywhere near there, or you hear them by night on AM radio in the United States, you'll know how big and important these two stations are now and always have been.
They have a very long and very prestigious heritage, both of them.
So I thought it would be a good idea to talk to somebody who's right at the heart of this.
So Eric Bushman, assistant news director at WBAP and KLIF is here.
He's going to be doing a special program on his station, one of them, on the actual day itself.
And I wanted to get an idea of what people are thinking about this, what he thinks about all of this, and the way that it will be marked, if it will be marked, in Dallas on that day.
So that's what this is for.
Thank you very much as ever to Adam, my webmaster, for his work, and thank you to you very much for being such a part of my show.
This is going to be a much shorter edition than we normally do.
It's probably going to be 20 minutes or so.
But I think these are 20 important minutes.
I don't think there are many in the United Kingdom who will be having a conversation like this around this anniversary.
And I personally think it's very important to be doing this and to be doing it now.
So, Eric Bushman, Assistant News Director at WBAP and KLIF in Dallas, Texas, talking with me just a couple of hours ago from when I'm recording this about the way that this is being looked at and the way that he is dealing with it on his radio stations in Dallas, Texas.
How will this anniversary, sad anniversary, be marked or recorded in Dallas?
Well, I think leading up to the 60th anniversary, I think the 60th anniversary is going to be quite similar to the 40th anniversary 20 years ago.
The 40th anniversary, ironically for me personally, is the first anniversary of the assassination that I attended personally in Dealey Plaza.
And it was a mass of people.
There was very little to no organization by the city of Dallas.
I think similarly, we're going to see that for the 60th anniversary.
The 50th anniversary, 10 years ago, the city took it over completely.
You had to be credentialed in order to be physically in Dealey Plaza.
And I don't, we've heard nothing from the city of them trying to take over the organization.
So it's going to be very interesting moving forward.
It's probably going to be a sea of humanity.
Parking in downtown will be good luck with that.
You're going to want to take the train, but that's what I anticipate.
And why do you think the city hasn't quite got behind it this time?
Is it that they don't want to take ownership of this, that they feel that the time has passed to be remembering these things?
Yeah, I really think so.
I think the city just acknowledges, yeah, it happened here, but they don't really have anything official to say for the 50th anniversary.
They didn't really have a choice in the matter and they had to do something.
But for this situation, I'm sure the Dallas Police Department will be around.
They're going to try to do crowd control.
I'm not sure if mounted officers will be involved.
I don't recall that for the 40th, but certainly the city usually just kind of leaves it to the sixth floor museum.
They leave it to local media to acknowledge it when it comes to the major anniversaries with the acceptance of, with the exception, excuse me, of the 50th 10 years ago.
And there's no real rhyme or reason.
We've had different mayors, different city councils, and it's just kind of just not something the city itself likes to bother with.
And yet, this being the 60th, it just occurred to me, and maybe I'm wrong, you know, I'm the other side of the Atlantic, that there will be people who are involved in whatever way on that day, or maybe were just part of it.
They were in the city on that day, who will be around for the 60th, but they may well not be around for the 70th.
And that's why I thought this one is kind of important.
Yeah, that's a very good thing to point out.
A lot of people who were alive at the time, a lot of people, whether they were involved in the assassination story itself or whether they were involved by just living here, that's a very small percentage of people who live here currently in the city of Dallas who were alive and living here in 1963.
But if they make it to the 75th, there's going to probably be few and far between who do.
I know every major anniversary that ends in a zero or ends in a five, you know, when the different documentaries come out, there's a three-part one on Hulu that I think is really, really good.
And they make the point of these people are still alive.
Like we're supposed to be surprised that there are people who are still living on planet Earth who were there at the time, who were witnesses, or who were involved in some way in the motorcade itself.
And that sadly, those primary sources, if you will, are really starting to die out.
There always used to be the hope, and I've been talking about this story as you will have been talking about this story all my professional life, but there was always the hope or the thought or possibly the expectation that somebody somewhere there may come out with some revelation, some explanation, some details that we perhaps haven't got heretofore.
Are your hopes, if you have them, or expectations of this diminishing now?
Yeah, and I certainly don't think that anything like that is going to happen.
I mean, the fact that you've seen all of these different, I believe they're called document dumps from the CIA and the FBI pertaining to the assassination, those document dumps, you know, started during the Trump administration.
They're continuing through the Biden administration.
And there's nothing that's really coming out.
It's more just interesting things.
I always like to say it's a whole bunch of nothing compared to a whole bunch of nothing that doesn't really add to anything.
It just continues to clutter, if you will, the table of evidence.
And I don't think it's a disservice.
I think it's great.
I think that everything pertaining to the assassination should be out there.
I think it should have been out there following the 30th anniversary, but it took Oliver Stone's movie shortly before the 30th, JFK, to really open the eyes of the American public that, hey, regardless of what you think of the assassination, there's a lot of holes in the investigation.
You can think that Lee Harvey Oswald did it and it was only three shots, but even if you are one of the smaller percentage that does believe that, you still have to admit there's a lot of things in the investigation that leave a lot to be desired.
So it's good that the government releases this stuff, but to have like one piece of paper that's going to say, okay, this is what happened, that's never going to happen.
And, you know, there are people, I think he was a Texan.
I knew him pretty well, interviewed him many times, the late Jim Mars, who spent, I think, 40 or 50 years of his life on this.
You know, he never gave up right up until his dying day.
And I remember him demonstrating to me in sound on a phone line 20 years ago how it would have been impossible for one person to loose off shots in that way from the window of the Texas Book Depository.
It simply wasn't possible.
He always believed.
Correct.
Jim Mars is one of several people who spent much of their life, if not their entire professional life, working on this, trying to get an answer, who refused to believe that only one man did this in three shots.
There are a number of other people who are the same.
Locally here in Dallas, there's a gentleman who I've known for years, Robert Groden, who was responsible in the 1970s for first getting the Abraham Zapruder film put on television in 1975.
He is still alive and he is still selling his life work.
And he does it in Dealey Plaza.
There are many people, I believe, as a matter of fact, when you mentioned Jim Mars, his book, Crossfire, that's one of the two books that the Oliver Stone movie is based on.
And so that's an extension of his work that is more accessible to the American public.
And then, you know, on the same time, there are other people who emphatically believe that what the FBI and then the Warren Commission told us in 1964 was correct and that there is no conspiracy talk.
Well, there is talk, but the conspiracy doesn't exist.
And I think of Vincent Bugliosi as a prime example on the other side, if you will, who have spent their lives' work defending the government's account of the assassination.
So regardless of what side you're on, what you believe, the assassination is a subject that, in my opinion, is never going to go away.
No one is ever going to be quite satisfied.
And it reminds me of Texas Governor John Connolly, who was shot along with President Kennedy, the only man shot that weekend, by the way, who survived, taking into account Dallas police officer J.D. Tippett and accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
And he said shortly after the assassination that it doesn't matter what I think or you think, all someone else has to do is change just the tiniest little bit and boom, we're on into another argument.
And maybe we should just accept the fact that that's what it is so we can all make peace with that and move on with our lives.
Opinion polls over the years have been done about this.
And I think the most recent ones, I think maybe opinion polls for years have showed that most Americans believe there are serious questions to be asked about exactly how this happened and that many people simply do not buy the official explanation that this was the action of a lone gunman who described himself up as a patsy before being gunned down and shot dead himself.
So I'm wondering how that plays in Dallas itself.
Do you find that people are more willing, more ready to believe this wasn't something that happened in the way that we were fed?
Is that more of a prevalent view in Dallas?
In Dallas, I think it's more of, I really think the atmosphere, especially when I moved here about 12 years ago, I started seeing a different side of what it's like to live here.
And I think a lot of people in Dallas really aren't so much Lee Harvey Oswald versus multiple gunmen.
They're more or less, here comes another November 22nd.
Let's get through this.
Let's hope that nothing bad happens, especially with the turmoil around the world right now.
And I think that's mainly kind of how the people of Dallas look at it.
They acknowledge it.
They understand it.
Some may even try to ignore it, especially when it always interferes with Thanksgiving.
This year, it's going to be the day before.
And I don't know if that's a conversation, conspiracy versus lone gunman, that really happens in the city of Dallas.
I think that's more of a conversation that has happened across the United States.
I know that that conversation has been dominant almost more in Europe than it has been in the United States.
A lot of the original questions about how in the world could this happen, your accused assassin gunned down in the police station two days later.
A lot of people in Britain, in France, they were calling out the Dallas police even before the United States was, that regardless of what you think happened, the fact that the accused gunman could be killed is absolutely ridiculous.
Is any of the media in and around Dallas at the moment, Eric, speaking to perhaps the relatives, the surviving relatives of people like the chief of police in Dallas or Jack Ruby, the man who fired that fatal shot?
Is that sort of thing being done?
Yes, certainly.
I know for me personally, I'm going to be hosting a two-hour special on Wednesday night, November 22nd on WBAP that will be airing at 6 o'clock in the morning on Thursday, local to UK time.
And this is about 8 o'clock Central Texas time to the United States.
And most of the material I'm going to use is stuff that I've already accumulated.
I have not put a lot of extra preparation into my program because I've accumulated so much.
I don't know what more there could be to add.
I think a lot of people are already like that.
I do know that the local media here in Dallas, Fort Worth, like always, will do some sort of special for an anniversary ending in a zero.
And that's something that is normal here.
But trying to do some new groundbreaking new look at it, I think that has been attempted so many times.
You could do a separate two-hour documentary on how local media has tried to take a new look at it every five years.
So I can't speak, obviously, for all the media, but something hopefully appropriate will be done by the four TV stations here, your two major newspapers and the major news talk radio stations, of which I'm a part of two of.
And that's what I can expect moving forward.
And Eric, how will you reflect if you can reflect the thought very prevalent that some kind of shabby cabal did this?
It's a very hard thing to swallow, isn't it?
Yeah, it is.
A lot of people don't like to think that some nobody named Lee Harvey Oswald, who had a ton of problems in his personal life, was able to walk into where he worked with a rifle, conveniently overlooking where the presidential motorcade was going to pass by, and literally end one presidential administration and start another presidential administration.
And so that, I think, is why you have so many people who would rather believe that it was an organized conspiracy, whether foreign or domestic, that resulted in the Kennedy assassination.
What's it like to go to the scene?
I've only ever seen it on television.
I'd like to visit Dallas for many reasons, and that might be one of them, but there are many reasons why I'd like to go to Dallas.
What's it like to actually look at the grassy knoll, stand outside the book depository?
People are shocked at how small it is in person.
I also would compare having to deal with traffic and walking out to the street, much like your famous Abbey Road.
I think those are the two prime examples where people, tourists, go out into the street to recreate a famous picture or be where something iconic happened.
And, you know, you have motorists just trying to get from point A to point B and you have tourists who are trying to take in a moment.
And it can be aggravating, especially in a place like Dallas, Fort Worth that is exploding in population.
But, you know, most people, when they get there for the first time and they see it for the first time, I know I did when I was about 12 years old.
You're taken back by how small it is.
And the same by being in the book depository.
And this question that I remember from when I was a teenager in my 20s and 30s, people would talk about, you know, the shame of Dallas, the fact that this is something that the city had to live down and was very grateful in the 1980s when Dallas became known for J.R. Ewing and the Oil Barons Bowl.
Yeah, I think that actually started in the 70s where Dallas really started to pull out from being called the city of hate.
And what happened was the DFW Airport came to be.
That started to show the economic opportunity in the city.
And that really is what helped Dallas get out of the weeds, if you will, from being victim, if I can use that word, to where the assassination happened.
I know a former mayor who was mayor in the early 70s, one time went to a municipal mayor's conference.
I'm not sure where it was.
I think it was in Chicago, but where all the mayors of the major cities get together.
And someone came up to him 10 years later and said, what's it like being the mayor of the city that killed the president?
And that man later apologized.
But that sort of mentality no longer exists here.
The Kennedy assassination is obviously a major, if not the biggest historic incident that occurred in the city of Dallas.
And I think most people now just look at it as a part of history.
And do people still remark, or maybe it's just too long ago and they don't think about this anymore, I don't know, about the fact that the president's body was got very quickly back to Washington.
Any investigation that might have been done in Dallas was severely limited because of that.
It was taken over as a federal matter.
Are people still talking about that?
Certainly people who are interested in the story very much are.
I do know that there's a lot of things with the autopsy that was left in question and questions about the professionalism of the autopsy itself.
And then, yeah, the fact that the Secret Service wanted to get the hell out of there, if you'll pardon the expression, of Dallas and get back to Washington.
And therefore, the legal aspect of a local autopsy was not allowed.
But sure, there are things like that that continue a part of the conversation many years later.
I'm grateful for you having this conversation with me, Eric.
I know how busy you must be.
Two stations that you are part of, they're two great American radio stations, cover a vast area.
I know both of them, WBAP And 570 Cliff KLIF.
There have been changes of ownership, changes of format over the years for these stations, but 570 Cliff was very much a part of this story, wasn't it?
I think it was the station that effectively broke the news.
Both radio stations, WBAP and KLIF, were on the air at the time.
WBAP's Bob Welch was one of the first people to report that shots had been fired and the president is believed to have been hit.
Of course, WBAP kind of went national very soon afterwards and played local NBC and ABC programming.
KLIF actually stayed local, and they were one of the last people to actually say on the air that Kennedy was dead because they didn't want to report all of the speculation and the hearsay that was coming out of Parkland Hospital.
They wanted it official from the acting press secretary who was at Parkland.
And once he did it, then KLIF would say on the air that indeed Kennedy had died.
When is that program of yours on WBAP again?
It will be at 8 o'clock on Wednesday night for two hours.
I'll be taking a look back.
We're calling it JFK Remembered 60 Years Later, a local time in the UK.
That'll be 6 a.m. the following Thursday morning.
Eric, thank you so much for your time.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
And my very grateful thanks to Eric Bushman for taking time out of what I know was a very busy broadcast day to do that with me.
Having done news for years, I know that you have to multitask these days.
There are so many things to do.
And finding time for anything that is not your core work is really incredibly difficult.
And just a quick correction on the time that you'll be able to hear what he talked about.
That's his special program on JFK.
It is 8 p.m. in Dallas, Texas, but that converts to 2 a.m. here in London.
So 2 a.m.
United Kingdom time on the 23rd to hear Eric Bushman's special from WBAP Radio on the events of the 22nd of November, 1963.
And thank you again to Eric.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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