It just occurred to me that beside being Thanksgiving Day, tomorrow is the 49th anniversary of the assassination of our 35th president, John F. Kennedy.

This past summer I visited Dealey Plaza, a small boxlike area, with nowhere to run.

In 2006, I interviewed forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht, who in 1978 testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations about what his research revealed about that day in Dallas, November 22nd, 1963.

Four years later, on Monday, Nov. 22nd, 2010, the 47th anniversary of the day that rocked the world, I spoke to Dr. Cyril Wecht — again — on my radio program where he repeated why he believes it was impossible for Oswald to have been the shooter. You can read the transcript below, and/or listen to the program and decide for yourself.

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ASK (11/22/2010) monologue:

What really happened that day in Dealey Plaza? We’ll never know for sure.  At least not until Sept. 14, 2038, and even then we aren’t assured that the records will be genuine, tampered with or truthful.  And despite the Warren Commission’s official report, why can’t Americans see the records until that date?  What’s being hidden?  Who’s being protected?  Why so secretive? And why is it that today — the 47th anniversary of the most controversial event in our nation’s history, John F. Kennedy’s assassination is ignored by the lamestream media?

The murder of JFK is probably the subject of the most conjecture in our lifetime, on a par with the hidden circumstances of Obama’s birth and background.  JFK’s death is the most fascinating murder in the history of our nation. It is fraught with intrigue and theories.

A coup d’etat?  So many questions…

Why was the assassination evidence sealed for 75 years until 2038?  Was it because those involved wanted to hide something? Who were they protecting? Were they waiting for a whole generation to die off?  Or all of the above?

Why did the Warren Commission ignore the testimonies of dozens of credible eyewitnesses?

Why was the President placed in a situation that was in direct violation of standard security protocols: Why was the President in an open, unarmored car? Why were Secret Service agents positioned on the car behind the president’s, and not on the rear bumper of the presidential limo? Why weren’t Secret Service units and trained military units that were required by regulations to be there to provide ground and building surveillance NOT in place?

Why weren’t sewer covers along the route not welded shut?

Why was the route changed at the last minute to instead travel busy streets with many overlooking high buildings on each side?  Through a small, box-like “canyon” with no escape route? A route that was particularly hazardous with sharp turns requiring slow speeds, again in violation of protection protocols and regulations?  Why hadn’t the windows in those tall buildings been closed, sealed, and put under surveillance?

Why was Lee Harvey Oswald not allowed legal representation for the nearly two days he was in police custody? Was it a coincidence that he was shot and killed before he could be brought to trial? Or before he could make a public statement?

Why did the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 determine that the murder of the young president was “probably” the result of a conspiracy, but then never pursued the investigation beyond that declaration?

Why was this book about JFK’s assassination banned in the United States?

How did a New Zealand newspaper get and publish details of the charges against Lee Harvey Oswald hours before Dallas police knew about it?

Was JFK’s National Security Action Memorandum #263 establishing a policy that would have kept hundreds of thousands of Americans out of Vietnam what sealed his fate?

Was Kennedy killed because he was moving to end the Cold War, which was essential to the support of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the military-industrial complex?

Why were all of Kennedy’s cabinet members out of the country (an action unprecedented in U.S. history), traveling to Hawaii to confer on an agenda that would have reversed Kennedy’s Vietnam policy and that would subsequently be put before President Johnson just four days after Kennedy’s death?

Who is Gen. Charles Cabell and what is his relationship to Earl Cabell, Mayor of Dallas on the day JFK was shot in Dealey Plaza?

Why was the President’s limousine — on the same day of the assassination — cleaned by the Secret Service, thus washing away with buckets of warm water critical evidence such as bullet traces and fragments ? Why was precious evidence destroyed immediately?

Why was Texas Gov. John Connally’s clothing — complete with bullet holes and bullet traces — immediately sent to be cleaned and pressed?

Why was the president’s body removed from Dallas before and in violation of a Texas State law that required a civilian autopsy be performed before the body could be moved?

Why were 15 to 20 photos taken during the president’s autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital handed to a Secret Service agent, never to be examined by the Warren Commission?

How does one misplace a president’s autopsied brain?

Could a rogue element in the federal government, with the complicity of the media, dupe Americans by covering up the truth???

Questions, questions, so many questions. Many more than we have room for here.

The Zapruder film helps shed some light.

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Dr. Cyril Wecht, the forensic pathologist who testified before the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations explains why the physical evidence shows the murder of JFK was the work of more than one person and couldn’t possibly have included Lee Harvey Oswald.

What really happened that day in Dealey Plaza? We’ll never know for sure.  At least not until Sept. 14, 2038, and even then we aren’t assured that the records will be genuine, not tampered with or truthful.  And why not until that date?  What’s being hidden?  Who’s being protected?

The assassination of John F. Kennedy is probably the subject of the most conjecture in our lifetime. It’s the most fascinating murder in the history of our nation, that’s for sure. We’ve had lone nut gunmen going after presidents in the past — a couple of them even hit their target.  But this one is fraught with intrigue. More than a million words have been written about it. Thirdwavedave has contributed his fair share. Just take a look at the extensive research he’s done.  Once you look at the facts, I think you’ll agree it wasn’t a lone gunman.  Or two.

Four years ago (ASK note: now six years ago) while hosting an afternoon drive radio program, I interviewed Dr. Cyril Wecht, author of the 1993 book Cause of Death, and the forensic pathologist who testified in 1978 before the House Select Committee on Assassinations.  Dr. Wecht has never believed that Lee Harvey Oswald was the shooter who took Kennedy’s life 46 years ago.  I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Wecht a second time, in 2010. The transcribed the interview follows.

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The Interview:

Dr. Cyril Wecht:

“What happened insofar as the shooting was concerned, that obviously this was a conspiratorial plot that had been set up beautifully.  In fact, some people have conjectured — I do not have proof for this but it’s not unreasonable to think — that the motorcade route had been changed a short time before it took place on that Friday, Nov. 22nd,  1963. That’s Number One.

And Number Two, the whole idea of routing a car off the main line, Main Street in this case, over to Houston and then on to Elm — at which point by the way, the car was turning from Houston onto Elm — its speed was 12 miles an hour.  That means essentially looking at a car that’s almost as if it’s not moving. So you talk about a sitting duck.  It’s just a perfect set up.

And Dealey Plaza, for those people who are not familiar with it, is a lot smaller than what you might have been led to believe from looking at pictures from various newscasts and so on. It’s a relatively tight, box-like canyon. And with a car in a near standing position, it’s not a difficult thing at all to accomplish what was indeed achieved that day.

So I believe that there were at least four shots fired — there may have been more, but there were four shots for which we have proof. And by that I mean the audio proof that has been taken from Billy Joe Hargus’ motorcycle radio. The audio tape that has been examined.  It was first examined by professors (Mark) Weiss and (Ernie) Ashkenazi and presented to the House Select Committee back in ’78.  And it was redone in a more sophisticated, technologically advanced fashion by a top researcher whose paper, by the way, was published as the lead article in a top notch British forensic scientific peer review journal.  And then when you correlate that audio, the sounds with the movements, and the striking of the president and John Connolly, and then Kennedy again, and then you further correlate,  juxtapose all of that with the anatomic findings of the head wounds and all the other wounds, then you come up with that number of shots.

I believe that there was a shooter from the rear. I very much doubt that it was Lee Harvey Oswald from the southeast corner of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building.  And we have reasons for that which we can get into if you wish.  I believe the other shooter was off to the right front side, a little bit behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll.

I believe that there were two shots that struck the president in the head in synchronized fashion, and that fits in too with the audio tape, and is in a closer period of time than the 2.3 seconds which is the minimal amount of time that it took the best sharpshooters, the most skilled marksmen that the federal government could get together back in ’64, shooting that piece of junk non-automatic carbine Mannlicher Carcano weapon that Oswald is supposed to have shot.

And it was set up perfectly for Oswald to be a patsy.  You can’t have an assassination of a president and let it hang out there.  That’s not going to satisfy anybody and needless to say, not in the nation in which we live.  So you’ve got to give the people an answer.  And the answer has to be something that is marketable, something that can be sold, and by that we have a wonderful package like Lee Harvey Oswald who left the Marines, went into Russia, was there for a little more than two years, married the niece of a KGB colonel, came back, carried on about fair play for Cuba, made himself so visibly obnoxious, including even the day before the shooting, a couple of days before, going to a firing range and so on, making certain that people would remember his face and everything like that.  This was the perfect set up.

And then Oswald is picked up and obviously you can’t have Oswald then coming to trial. In no way in the world are you going to have a trial in which you get into Oswald’s background and get into all the forensic scientific ballistics evidence and so on.  So, enter Jack Ruby, longtime mafioso guy, FBI informant, police informant, pimp, hustler, restaurateur, gun smuggler to Cuba, you name it, he was everything rolled into one.  And he’s led in by a high-ranking police chief — an official — which of course the Warren Commission never got into.  They said that he just walked down the back ramp.  It is now an established, an official fact, an official established fact that Jack Ruby was led in by a police official.  You can go further and say that the police official led him in to kill Oswald, but he was led in — I mean, this just shows you the sloppy work done by the Warren Commission.  And that’s what happened 43 years ago.

Rushed to Parkland

At Parkland Hospital they did everything they could.  There were about 17, 18 physicians. As a matter of fact, one senior resident in surgery, having read an article published in JAMA and talking about an unnamed, anonymous high-ranking official who suffered from Addison’s disease — and many people came to know that that was John Kennedy — that doctor, Dr. James Carrico even had appropriate adrenal replacement medications ready, knowing that the President suffered from Addison’s disease. They did everything they could.  There was nothing that could be done. In fact the neurosurgeon Dr. Kemp Clark came in and he looked at the head wound and said there’s nothing that can be done to save this man.  They then finished up.

The president was pronounced dead at about one o’clock and they had a press conference.  And in fact, Dr. Perry, the lead surgeon, when he was asked at the press conference about the wounds, he said that he thought the bullet wound in the front of the neck was an entrance wound. It had all the characteristics.

…I think I may have criticized (them) in later years when in fact, the next year when some of them came to testify before the Warren Commission — and in later years too when they were queried by other government officials and by book writers and news media people trying to protect and defend and buttress and support the Warren Commission — that some of them began to change their tune and talk about different things and dance around opinions that they had previously expressed.  I have been critical of that, but not of any medical treatment.  There was nothing that anybody could have done to have saved John Kennedy at Parkland Hospital.

The President’s Brain

Brain matter was splattered different places and… the president’s brain was missing.  I pointed that out. It’s not brain matter from the day of the shooting. That would not have told you anything, I don’t believe. The president’s brain, which was preserved the day of the autopsy and saved in formalin for fixation to be studied two weeks later is what we properly do. The brain must harden in order for it to be serially sectioned and examined properly.  When they went back two weeks later, they did not section the brain. That is officially stated in the Warren Commission report.

It is also stated there that the brain is not sectioned in order to quote — preserve the specimen — unquote. Well, it’s interesting that indeed it was preserved as of April 1965 when it was sent over to the Smithsonian Institute by Admiral George Burkley, the president’s private physician. One and a half years later, October ’66 when they were logging in the autopsy materials — because they now had them given back, so to speak, on paper as a personal gift by Mrs. Kennedy in order to keep people from going in and examine these things and so on — in that inventory of October 30, ’66, the president’s brain is no longer listed.

So indeed it was missing and that was the basis for a large Page One exclusive story August 27th, 1972 written by Fred Graham in the New York Times based upon my exclusive interview with him.

So the president’s brain — some people knew that it was missing.  It isn’t as if I made a discovery that nobody in the world knew.  But the people who knew had never said a word, officially, and that was disclosed.  So here we are from August of ’72, thirty-four-years-plus later and the president’s brain has never been accounted for.  Nobody has ever stated officially on the record, from the government, from the Kennedy family, nobody officially on the record has stated where the brain went.

The people who tried to dance around this and cover for the Warren Commission and the government, they’ll tell you ‘Oh, Bobby Kennedy took it.  Teddy Kennedy took it, or this or that.  It was subsequently buried.’  If anybody says that, you ask them to produce a document, a letter, anything, you ask them to show you whatever they have that refers to that and which memorializes such an event. It never happened. That brain was deliberately taken because examination of the brain would have revealed that there were two shots that struck the president in the head.

The Bullet Hole

Is it possible for a round fired from behind a person’s head to blow out a person’s skull?

Ordinarily I would not expect that to happen.  A bullet that enters will make a significant hole and produce fractures that radiate on the top of the skull and the base of the skull, even, and obviously produce great damage to the brain.  But it doesn’t blow out.  The blow-out will occur where the bullet exits rather than where the bullet enters.

From a forensic scientific standpoint — a very important point in that regard, talking about the head wounds — let me tell you something else to show you how messed up everything was and how negligently it was performed, that as we speak today 43 years later, there is significant disagreement on both sides.  Not between the sides, but within the ranks of both sides even, (among) the critics and the Warren Commission defenders as to where the bullet hole on the back of the head was.  The pathologist who did the autopsy placed it in the right side at the base of the skull, just by that bony provenance you can feel in the back of your head.  It’s called the occipital protuberance.  That’s where it was placed.

In 1968, the Ramsey Clark panel — appointed by then attorney general Ramsey Clark — four distinguished forensic scientists, they examined everything, they moved the bullet hole up four inches — one hundred millimeters — four inches higher to the vertex of the skull.  Now we’re not talking about an insignificant difference.  We’re not quibbling about something that you can say, ‘well it’s a matter of how closely one measures’.  Four inches!  Unless you are a seven-foot giant, four inches is about the total distance from the back of your head, from the base to the top.  So this gives you an idea.

Skeptics

We know ten to fifteen percent of Americans, and interestingly not more, have continued to buy the Warren Commission over the years.  But more interestingly, 80 percent have rejected it, sometimes as high as 85 percent and never lower than 75 percent in all the national polls. And I’m talking about polls taken by the outfits that have attempted to support the Warren Commission: Newsweek, New York Times, Associated Press, Roper, Gallup, Washington Post, you name it.  I’m not talking about polls done by critic researchers.

So the people who continue to buy into this, they’ve got a lot of things to buy and swallow.  And something I always like to point out that maybe can win over — although that’s not my goal and purpose in life, I’ll settle for 80 percent of anything, anytime, pretty much — but let them know that the two pathologists who did this autopsy, (James) Humes and (J. Thornton) Boswell, career Naval pathologists who had 14, 15 years in, and who could be expected to follow orders from four-star admirals and generals, that they had never done a single medical legal autopsy gunshot wound in their entire careers. Let me repeat that for emphasis, clarity, and stated with total absolute certainty and no equivocation at all — never had these two guys Humes and Boswell done a medical, legal, gunshot wound autopsy in their entire careers.

So the people out there who say ‘Well, how could it have gone wrong?’ And ‘How could it have been so messed up?’ and so on?  Well maybe, you know, would they have a difficult time if you had somebody that died following heart surgery and you were told ‘Yeah the two guys that did it were doctors. One was a dermatologist and one was a gynecologist. They had never done any heart surgery before.’  You think anybody would have a hard time understanding then why the patient died?  Well, the same thing here.  I always like to make that point.  And maybe among that ten, fifteen percent of the people that buy whatever the government tells them will begin to question a little bit about how things could have been messed up as badly as they were.

The “Magic Bullet”

Arlen Specter was one of the junior legal counsel on the Warren Commission at that time. There’s no question about this, in fact Arlen Specter is quite proud of this and has never attempted to shy away from the fact that it was he who came up with the single bullet theory.  How it came to be is quite simple.  I wasn’t there but we know what was going on.

The Warren Commission, the staff people were faced with a very, very significant dilemma indeed, something that appeared to be an insurmountable physical incongruity.  They had the timing of the shooting of the Mannlicher Carcano which they had accepted as the murder weapon. And as I’ve already told you, it took 2.3 seconds from shot to shot to shoot, unload, reload, and that’s not allowing for repositioning and re-aiming at a moving target — and not questioning accuracy — just how fast could he get the shot off.  So they had that.

And then they had the Zapruder film.  Abraham Zapruder, a woman’s clothing merchant in Dallas, bought an eight-millimeter Bell Howell camera, took the pictures that day, and his footage is the most important piece of evidence in this entire case.

The film strip was examined by the FBI, the Bell Howell people and it was determined 18.3 frames — the individual units of the film strip moved through the camera per second — and by blowing up these little frames into 11 by 15 size pictures, you can move around as I had the opportunity to do at LIFE magazine headquarters in New York City in ’66, as the Warren Commission people obviously did in ’64, and study the shooting of the president and the wounding of John Connally at one-eighteenth second intervals.

I want to repeat that: one- eighteenth second intervals.  There’s not a word you can utter, a sound you can make, a movement you can accomplish, a thought you can entertain eighteen times in one second.  You can study this assassination at one-eighteenth second intervals and we see that John Connally is struck about one-point-five to one-point-six seconds after Kennedy is hit. One-point-five to one-point-six seconds. Well, that can’t be, can it, when you match up the Mannlicher Carcano with the Zapruder film?

So there they were.  I wasn’t there, I repeat, but can you imagine what that was like to them? Oswald’s dead. Johnson’s screaming for the report.  J. Edgar Hoover wants to get the report in. What do we do? There’s no conspiracy — we know it’s not the Russians, it’s not the Cubans, it’s not the Chinese.  We can’t have a conspiracy here in America!

So, enter Arlen Specter.  And look, whatever anybody may think of Arlen Specter, and as much as I have attacked and ridiculed the single bullet theory, in a way you gotta give him credit for being so ingenious as to come up with that.  I don’t know if anybody else would have or not, but in any event, he did.  And what he postulated was that ‘Hey! the reason that we have this physical incongruity is because we’re thinking about two bullets having made these wounds.’

Now leave out Kennedy’s head wounds for a moment.  The wounds in Kennedy’s back and throat, the wounds in Connally’s chest, right wrist and left thigh were — we’ve been talking about two bullets doing this.  What if only one bullet did this?  What if one bullet went into Kennedy’s back, went through out his neck, went into John Connally’s back, through the chest, came out the chest, went into the back of John Connally’s right wrist, exited from the front of the right wrist, reentered the left thigh, and that bullet then is the bullet that was found by, on, underneath the stretcher by a man named Darrell Tomlinson, a maintenance man at Parkland Hospital that afternoon, who had to go to the men’s room and, passing by the emergency room moved the stretchers and found this near pristine bullet with a weight loss of only one point five percent of its original weight with no deformity except at the base, and that from the impact of the firing mechanism, not from anything else.  And having left pieces of itself in four anatomic locations of Jack Kennedy and John Connally.  That is the single bullet theory.

The weight of the bullet, loss of 1.5 percent; the lack of any deformity that would have been produced when it destroyed four inches of the Governor’s right fifth rib and would have produced a common malunion, which is a fragmented fracture of the right distal end of the radius, one of the two bones going down from the elbow to the wrist, and the guy’s six foot four — Connally’s size — big bone guy.  That is a significant degree of destruction and impact of course, on the bullet.

The Trajectory

And then the trajectory, which I haven’t mentioned.  Under the single bullet theory, coming downward from the right rear and high up and it hits Kennedy in the back.  They moved the bullet hole on the back when they gave their testimony.  What do I mean by that?  With their mouths, with their memories, they moved it up from where they had depicted it on paper on the night of the autopsy with the body of the president in front of them. And when they gave testimony, these pathologists five months later they said that their memory was better evidence than was the diagram they sketched on the night of the autopsy.

If you have any listeners who are trial attorneys, ask them about the best evidence rule and ask them how that would go down in a case that they would be trying.

Then you’ve got the bullet coming out and everybody — and I’ll repeat everybody — on the forensic pathology panel — my colleagues — and the ballistics panel and the radiology panel, these are all separate panels on the House Committee on Assassinations, agrees that the bullet had an upward angle.  An upward angle of eleven to twelve degrees.  And that bullet is supposed to have been fired from the sixth floor window.

So it comes out, it’s moving upward at 12 degrees, it’s going off and to the left, and it turns in midair, it comes back and turns again and slams into John Connally behind his right armpit, the right posterior axillary area as it is referred to in the Warren Commission report, proceeds through his chest, pierces the right lung moving downward at an angle of 27 degrees, emerging from a level below the nipple on the Governor’s chest.

Go back to the Zapruder film.  Look where the Governor’s wrist is when he is shot. He’s holding the big white Stetson hat.  The wrist is clearly, unquestionably, significantly above the level of the nipple.  You got the bullet then moving downward coming out lower in the chest.  It has to come out and sweep upward, hook around, and go into the Governor’s right wrist, break the distal end of the radius, exit from the front of the Governor’s right wrist, and then proceed downward into the Governor’s left thigh.  The angle measured, at that point, from the Governor’s right wrist to the left thigh was 45 degrees.

And then you’ve got the bullet going down into several inches — remember this is a big man — of skin, fascia, adipose tissue — fat — and muscle, going down, striking the femur of the large bone from the hip to the knee, and then working its way back out in some magical fashion through the hole and into the Governor’s pants leg, to be found then at Parkland Hospital back on Friday afternoon of November 22nd.

Keep in mind that the reason I labeled it the “magic” bullet was — I think I was the first, but I don’t know, no patent rights — but the magic bullet theory is the way those of us among the critics refer to it because it is magic in all the ways I’ve said, and it is also magic in that it can change its origin anytime you wish it to.

On the night of the autopsy, that bullet found on the stretcher was concluded to have come from the president’s back wound.  The pathologist — here’s another good one for your Warren Commission defender listeners to know —  that the pathologists never even realized that there was a bullet hole in the front of the president’s neck.  I’ll repeat that for emphasis:  never knew there was a bullet hole on the front of the president’s neck.  As far as they were concerned, they were seeing only a tracheostomy, a surgical incision into the windpipe, which indeed had been made. And which indeed did obfuscate significantly the margins of the bullet hole. But a skilled forensic pathologist, which these guys were not, would have recognized nevertheless that it was a bullet hole.

So they concluded when they learned about a bullet which they could not find, that bullet having entered the back and they unable to locate it, when they were told about the bullet found back at the Parkland Hospital — information transmitted by the FBI that evening at Bethesda Naval Center — they said that the pressure applied to the president’s chest for external cardiac massage forced the bullet back out through the same channel, like a car going through a tunnel in reverse, and going back out through the same aperture from which it entered.  And that was the stretcher bullet then.

The next day when the pathologist spoke with the surgeons and learned of the bullet hole in the front of the president’s neck, they concluded that the bullet did go through his neck, and somehow after six and a half, seven inches of soft tissue, was so frightened by his starched collar despite moving 2,000 feet per second, just stopped dead and plopped down in the front of his clothing.  That was on Saturday, November 23rd.

Five and a half, six months later, under the single bullet theory, that bullet now had found its “energy” to have been rejuvenated, replenished, and now it was able to continue on through the Governor’s chest, the governor’s wrist, into his left thigh.

And now in March-April of ’64, the stretcher bullet, Commission Exhibit 399, the hero of the single bullet theory, the “magic” bullet is now from John Connally’s left thigh.  You love that? Absolutely love that?

I think that the President was struck twice in the head in synchronized fashion.  I think a bullet that went into his back and out, that was number three.  And I think that John Connally — it is possible, it is highly, highly unlikely that one bullet went into his back and on through the wrist and thigh.  But that is a possibility.  More likely than not, he was shot and struck twice, which would make it five bullets. But I leave in the possibility.

Connally’s testimony

One more thing, by the way, when you asked me about the single bullet theory.  I talked about its weight, about its physical condition, and about its trajectory.  One more thing that is very important. John Connally and his wife Nellie Connally to the day of John’s death and to this day Nellie Connally in a book that she wrote I think two or three years ago (From Love Field—Our Final Hours with John F. Kennedy, 2003), from the first press conference that John Connally had while still a patient in the hospital, repeated many times thereafter before the Warren Commission, before the Rockefeller Commission, before the House Select Committee, John Connally never wavered from his statement unquestionably, unequivocally, unhesitatingly, that he heard the shot, he heard the sound from the president, he turned to his right to see what had happened, he turned back, and then he was struck.  And then he was struck. Now both he and Nellie said that. And they repeated that, despite the fact that they were always confronted with the single bullet theory and so on.  So that too is a very important piece of evidence.  The man was very clear as to when he was struck when he was turning back.  And that is not a bullet that would’ve been through him in a fraction of a second.

The Zapruder Film

The Zapruder film was purchased by LIFE magazine from the Zapruder family. They purchased it in ’66 and they had the rights to it. Then the Zapruder film as I recall, was then given up, turned over by them back to, I don’t know, the Zapruder family, the heirs.  Abraham Zapruder was now dead, and they had exclusive rights, and the government of course had its imprimature also.  And so for those reasons legally in terms of ownership and so on, it was not shown publicly until that time (1975), although a copy had been spirited out, and among the critic researchers and others, there were some copies that people were studying.

Marksmanship

Let me just point out too, in case this hasn’t been mentioned — and again this is a matter of record — Oswald flunked the marksmanship test in the U.S. Marines and got a barely passing score the second time around.  Know that also.

I don’t know who did it, and I’m not being a weasel because I think somebody’s going to come and kill me.  That would’ve happened a long time ago if anybody thought I knew something as to who Mr. X, Mr. Y, and Mr. Z… I don’t know.  I’ve no way of knowing. But let me repeat for openers what I’ve already said: it was not the Russians, the Chinese, or the Cubans, and that’s official.  I know your audience might be big J. Edgar Hoover fans so I will point out – this came officially from Hoover.  And nobody has ever questioned this seriously, nobody, since early on.  Early on, there’s was nothing wrong with thinking it might have been some foreign faction, but that’s out the window.

So, we come back to the United States. And you know, Sherlock Holmes, who never ceased to amaze his colleague Dr. Watson with his brilliant deductions, was always queried by Watson, “My god Holmes, how in the world… what makes you think that… or how did you deduce that?”  And the great line that I love to quote from Holmes is, “My dear Watson, it’s elementary. Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the answer.”

OK? Now let’s come back to John Kennedy. The impossible.  Well, not that it was the impossible for foreign groups, but we’ve eliminated them. Alright?

So, some people like to say the Mafia. There’s no way that the Mafia would have dared to undertake something like this, no reason for them to have done that.  They were going to better improve themselves, and had they done that, it would have reached a point that probably the mindless Americans and so on… it would not have been safe.  And I don’t say this to be indelicate, insensitive and crude, but I’m saying that if you had an Italian name or something, it probably wouldn’t have been safe for you to walk the streets in America if it ever came out that the Mafia had done this.  And to have covered up — it’s not that they couldn’t have got shooters — but to cover up and accomplish all the things that had to be taken care of subsequently was beyond even the power and the ken of the Mafia.

Alright, so where are we going with this? Let’s look and see what we had politically.

What we had politically is this — and I’m not expressing my political hopes, beliefs, aspirations or biases. I’m just stating a fact that even the most ultraconservative of your listeners, I’m positive, would not disagree with. And that is John Kennedy was gonna be re-elected in ’64.  Only a political ignoramus would argue with that.  Look what Lyndon Johnson did to Barry  Goldwater in ’64!  You can imagine what Jack Kennedy would have done to Goldwater in ’64.

So you’re looking at five more years of John Kennedy, alright?  Now, what would have been the most likely scenario five years later in ’68 when John Kennedy finished his second term?  Who do you think would have been the most likely presidential nominee on the Democratic side? Did you ever hear of a guy named Robert F. Kennedy?  Ever hear of Robert Kennedy who just won the California primary, which was tantamount to the Democratic nomination for presidency?

Did you ever hear of an election in ’68 in which Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey by a fraction of a point, and a vote which was won, not by the Republicans who had every reason and rationale and right to vote for Mr. Nixon, but the Democrats who stayed home, or who even in anger voted against Humphrey because they were so, so disgusted that the vice president Hubert Humphrey had not come out and bucked his own president Lyndon Johnson regarding the Vietnam war?

You remember the Chicago 7 and that ugly situation in Chicago, right? That’s what lost the election for Humphrey.

Robert Kennedy would not have had that baggage. Robert Kennedy would have had all of the groups that voted for Humphrey. Traditionally the various ethnic groups, the African-American community, the liberal community, the labor unions.  And he would not have had the anti-Vietnam war activists because he was not, at that point, for the Vietnam war.

So Bobby Kennedy — it had nothing to do with what I would have liked or not liked, or what you or anybody else would have liked, I’m just talking about history.  That’s all I’m talking about, ok?

So you got eight more years of Bobby Kennedy, almost certainly. So that’s five and eight is thirteen. So let me ask you something: if you don’t like the politics of the Kennedys, and this may not be a very happy analysis for your listeners or even for you good folks, but I gotta tell you in answer to your question, if you don’t like thirteen years of what the Kennedys are likely to be doing — there’s maybe a detente in the cold war with Russia, maybe things are gonna be worked out with Mr. Castro, maybe we’re gonna pull out totally from Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement in the south, a lot of things that conservative Americans are just not happy about.

And I’m not arguing against that, I’m just talking reality, and I think I’m talking with historical correctness.

Well, do you sit back? Is this a ball game? Is this your favorite professional team playing this Sunday who are gonna be behind in the first half, and you sit back and you say ‘Boy, wait’ll you see the second half?’

Or your favorite baseball team and you say ‘Wait’ll we come up to bat in the 9th inning?’

No, this is thirteen years of a direction of American politics that is absolutely unacceptable, totally anathema to the politics of many people.

And that’s my take.  It wasn’t the — I mean, when you come back to America and you talk about what group?  What people?  Now, I’m not attacking conservatives and suggesting the conservative movement. I’m talking about…  and I would be willing if God could come up with the answer I’d bet every penny I own — I think that there weren’t more than five, six people, and maybe only three or four, who originated and planned and orchestrated this plot.

So I’m not talking about conservatives in America, about a force.  I’m talking about people that when the flag flies, when the Star Spangled Banner is sung, they see, they hear, they feel something more, more than you or I.  It’s just not their America. They weren’t gonna sit back for thirteen years and let the Kennedys ruin their America.

Going back now in history, and again like it or not, there was nobody that was gonna beat the Kennedys, with their charisma, and their charm. Call it phony, call it anything you want to, but as it was perceived, with their power, with their money, with their connections, there was nobody that was gonna beat them.

So you sit back for thirteen years and say ‘Oh boy, we’ll get our chance in 1976. And then boy, let’s see what we do.’

Uh, uh. Thirteen years is a lifetime. And thirteen years at that critical period in American history with Russia and Cuba and everything that was going on in this country, that was a very, very important thing.  And this is what I believe happened, and I believe it was then put into place with different people, as the spooks like to call it, with the right to know.

Here’s an example: I’m gonna rob a bank tonight, but I want a car.  I just tell you to meet me at the corner of Elm and Spruce. I don’t tell you anything else.  You may come to figure it out later,  the next day.  But for right now, ‘you just be at Elm and Spruce with your car’.

And the next guy? ‘You just bring your plane.  I’m going down to see some relatives in Mexico and I’ll see you out at the airfield.’ It’s not hard.  People say ‘Gee, who could do this?’  Maybe for us ordinary people, we don’t deal with this kind of stuff. But for the people that know how to do this stuff, you know they can accomplish anything.  As I used to say years ago, I could wind up in a motel somewhere seemingly drunk or under the influence of drugs with some dead blonde next to me and go figure, tell people how did I get there and so on, and that’s the end of me.

Charles Cabell

Charles Cabell was the Number Two man in the CIA.  And Earl Cabell was his brother who was the mayor of Dallas. That has to do with the changing of the motorcade route.

The Cabell brothers, yuh…