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It was 40 years ago in this small plaza that John F Kennedy was murdered.

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What happened in Dallas that day shook America every bit as much as Pearl Harbor

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and more recently the events of 9-11.

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In many ways, America never got over it.

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The road and car is now turning onto Elm Street

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and it will be only a matter of minutes before you arrive at the street market.

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Our tradition is so contrary to this idea that you kill a president

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and it just is so traumatic for the country.

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It's such an assault on our sense of self, on our institutions, on the United States.

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On that November day and throughout the sad weekend that followed, there was a sense of terrible loss.

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But there was also a sense that events were spinning out of control.

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A suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, was arrested and paraded before the press.

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Did you kill the president?

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No, I have not been charged with that. In fact, nobody has said that to me yet.

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As thousands of people paid their respects to the president in Washington,

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Oswald was murdered on national television.

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He's been shot.

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Day by day in America, the confusion and doubt grew deeper.

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What really happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963?

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What really happened here in Dealey Plaza?

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The very first poll in regard to American sentiment about the assassination was conducted that weekend.

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And that poll indicated that two thirds of Americans already believed in a conspiracy against John Kennedy.

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They believed that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone,

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and 40 years later most Americans still believe in a conspiracy.

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The idea that a lone assassin could kill the president, a man so widely revered,

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that idea was simply too much to bear.

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Now a three-dimensional computer animation has been created,

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the result of ten years' work, which allows a detailed reexamination of the murder from all angles.

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So tonight we can reveal what really did happen in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

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The president and Mrs. Kennedy arrived at Love Field in Dallas on Air Force One at 11.38 Central Standard Time.

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In less than an hour the president would be assassinated.

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Kennedy was someone who gave the country hope.

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He's become a kind of mythological figure, an iconic figure.

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He's frozen in our minds at the age of 46.

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Mrs. Kennedy, right up there is the president shaking hands with the people.

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He's, uh...

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He's a man of great power, and he's a man of great power.

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Right up there is the president shaking hands with the people.

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He's, uh...

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He was a president who loved the people, the people loved him.

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He wanted to be able to wade into a crowd and shake hands.

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He wanted to be able to see and wave to people when his motorcade went down the street.

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The president and first lady.

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He didn't want to be shut off from his public and a democracy.

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The president and Mrs. Kennedy, with Texas Governor John Connolly,

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rode through Dallas in an open limousine, the last president ever to do so.

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When something terrible happens in the life of a nation, there has to be a reason for it.

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It's not good enough to say some nut with a rifle killed JFK.

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It's such a monstrous thing that there must be a monster plot.

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In a time of emotional rupture, a time of tragedy,

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conspiracy theories offer purpose and meaning.

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Purpose and meaning that make tragedy more than a simple twist of fate

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at the hands of, in this case, a lone gunman.

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He was this young man, clamorous young man,

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whom I think had the potential to be a really great president,

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shot down before he really had very much chance to prove it.

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They'd made it through town and it had been beautiful.

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And then all of a sudden, the day turns to chaos, you know, and it's unbelievable.

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It appears as though something has happened in the motorcade group.

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Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. You'll excuse the fact that I'm out of breath, but...

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Presidential motorcade had just passed through heavy crowds in downtown Dallas

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when three shots suddenly rang out somewhere in the crowd.

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People were screaming, oh no, oh no. They were running, running into each other.

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It was just complete chaos because no one knew where to run.

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This is from the United Press, from Dallas.

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President Kennedy and Governor John Connolly have been cut down

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by assassins' bullets in downtown Dallas.

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As the motorcade raced to Parkland Hospital, no one imagined that one man could wreak such havoc.

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Jackie Kennedy screamed, my God, they've killed him.

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The wounded Governor Connolly shouted, they're going to kill us both.

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They had done this. Something so horrible had to be the work of more than one man.

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America had many enemies. It had to be a conspiracy.

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Governor John F. Kennedy died at approximately 1 o'clock Central Standard Time today here in Dallas.

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He died of a gunshot wound in the brain.

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This is WFA TV in Dallas, Texas. May I have your name, please, sir?

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My name is Abraham Zapruder.

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Mr. Zapruder?

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Zapruder, yes, sir.

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Zapruder, and would you tell us your story, please, sir?

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I got out about a half hour earlier and got into a good spot to shoot some pictures.

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Abraham Zapruder, a local dressmaker using his 8-millimeter movie camera,

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recorded one of the darkest moments in American history, the moment at which the President was murdered.

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The Zapruder film is a visual record of the assassination.

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We are very lucky to have it.

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To think that if the film did not exist, that home movie of the assassination did not exist,

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we would never be able to prove with any certainty what happened at Deeley Plaza.

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The Zapruder film is the only film that caught the shooting from start to finish.

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The film itself has been cited as evidence of a conspiracy and used by some as proof that Oswald was not the only gunman.

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90% of what is out there is conspiracy-oriented.

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Talk about all the theories you want. This thing happened only one way.

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Dale Myers is a computer animator who's been studying the assassination for more than 25 years.

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To advance the analysis of the crime, Myers has generated an exacting computer simulation of the Zapruder film.

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He began by constructing a three-dimensional scale model of Deeley Plaza.

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The turn from Houston Street onto Elm Street, the Texas school book depository, the Grassy Knoll.

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They're all reconstructed exactly the way they were in 1963.

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He then animated the movements of Kennedy and Connolly over the Zapruder film frame by frame.

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When all of these elements come together, we can now leave Zapruder's pedestal and see the shooting from any point of view,

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each one an accurate representation of precisely what happened.

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If the crime were committed today, the forensic investigators would undoubtedly use this technique.

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Let's take a look at Abraham Zapruder's film in detail.

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Let's orient ourselves first off. Zapruder, of course, is standing on a four-and-a-half-foot high pedestal just west of the book depository.

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So he's looking up toward the corner. The limousine has just turned, finished and completed its turn, and starting to glide down Elm Street.

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Frame 133 is the first frame in which the President appears.

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As we advance the frames here, around frame 160 is approximately the time of the first shot, apparently a shot that missed.

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Governor Connolly said that he was looking to the left side of the car. He heard a shot. He'd just come back from a long hunting weekend.

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He immediately identified it as a high-powered rifle shot, and so he said he turned to his right because the sound seemed to come from over his right shoulder.

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And so we see him right here looking to his left, and in the next couple of frames we see his head turn, and now he's looking to his right.

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So by frame 167, Governor Connolly has turned to his right. So it's a very quick head snap, quarter of a second, like this.

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Now the car glides down toward the Stemmins freeway sign. The car disappears for a moment.

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You see Governor Connolly emerge first from behind the sign. He does not appear to be injured.

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Next frame, 223. You can see the white shirt. You can see his jacket. You can see a little bit of gray area where his tie is.

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And something happens between frame 223 and 224. We can really pinpoint the moment that the bullet strikes.

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Watch the jacket. You notice it changes shape. It's almost as if the jacket has popped out a little bit, kind of bulged out.

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Before, after, before, and after. In fact, a bullet has struck him in the right back, and has emerged about an inch below his nipple, blowing about a two inch ragged hole.

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In the next frame, the President comes out from behind the sign. We see kind of an anguished look on his face, and his hands immediately go up toward his throat.

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And they come up in a guarded manner, and the elbows rise in a very dramatic and a very high fashion. So he's kind of like this.

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But you'll note that both men are reacting simultaneously.

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This moment gives rise to what's called the single bullet theory, that the second shot hit both men passing through Kennedy to Connolly.

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This is challenged by those who say that Kennedy and Connolly were hit by different bullets from separate guns, and two guns would make a conspiracy.

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Here we have President Kennedy and Governor Connolly at the moment of the second shot. This is the moment they're hit, the equivalent of Zapruder frame 223.

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As we know, President Kennedy was struck in the upper right back. He had another bullet wound in his throat.

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It was believed to have passed through his throat, moving back to front.

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Governor Connolly struck in the right back, just near the armpit. That bullet emerged his right chest, about one inch below the nipple line.

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When we look at their positions based on the Zapruder film, this is exactly how they were seated at that moment, at frame 223.

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Governor Connolly is sitting slightly inboard of the President. In addition to that, he's turned sharply to his right.

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You can already see from this that any bullet striking the President in the upper right back and emerging out of his throat, that bullet is going to continue forward.

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It's going to hit Governor Connolly exactly where he was hit.

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Connolly has to be hit, and the fact that they both react at the same time clenches it.

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So, it's not a magic bullet at all. It's not even a single bullet theory, in my opinion. It's a single bullet fact.

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So, if President Kennedy and Governor Connolly were hit from behind by the same bullet, where did it come from?

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Using the men's body positions and the locations of their wounds, Myers can isolate the source of the shot.

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We could start with, for instance, Governor Connolly's entrance wound on his back.

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Connect that with the point of exit on the President's throat, and then take that line and project it rearward.

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What we end up with is a line that goes right back through the sniper's nest window, the sixth floor, the Texas school book depository.

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Dozens of witnesses pointed to the school book depository after hearing the shots.

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One witness reported seeing a gun in the sixth floor window.

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This is the building where Lee Harvey Oswald had been working as a clerk for five weeks.

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Within minutes of the shooting, dozens of police rushed into the building.

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The sixth floor was a maze of boxes.

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At 1.12pm, a deputy sheriff squeezed around a row of boxes in the southeast corner facing Elm Street

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and discovered the sniper's position.

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Two boxes stacked as if to support a rifle.

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Three shell casings scattered on the floor below the window.

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Photographers and fingerprint experts swept the scene.

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Ten minutes later, in the northwest corner of the building, between some other boxes, they found a rifle.

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After the shooting, Lee Harvey Oswald was the only worker missing from the building.

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The manhunt for him began.

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Police across the city were told to look out for a white male, 30, slender build, 5ft 10, 165 pounds, reportedly armed.

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It was on this street that four witnesses saw Officer J.D. Tippett motion Oswald over to his patrol car.

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As Tippett got out of the car, Oswald pulled a revolver and shot Tippett three times.

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Oswald moved closer and, as the officer lay on the ground, Oswald shot him once more in the head.

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The evidence of Oswald shooting Kennedy, I think, is overwhelming, but many people contest that.

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The evidence of Lee Harvey Oswald killing Officer J.D. Tippett is overwhelming and ironclad.

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Lee Harvey Oswald fled the scene of the assassination.

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Innocent people don't flee. They certainly don't try to shoot their way out.

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Now there were two manhunts underway in Dallas.

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The police didn't know they were chasing the same man.

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35 minutes after the Tippett murder, the police were told that a suspect had been shot.

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35 minutes after the Tippett murder, the police were told that a suspect was in a nearby movie theatre.

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The police arrested Oswald as he tried to pull his gun.

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Now we're inside of the Texas Theatre. Of course, everything is black. The movie is going on.

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Police suddenly jumped this man and started to drag him out of the theatre.

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That time they stumbled and sued inside of the Texas Theatre.

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The suspect jumped up, struck him in the face and yelled, this is it.

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The police rushed Oswald away from an angry mob that had gathered outside the theatre.

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Shortly after 2pm he was taken to Dallas Police Headquarters where they began to question him.

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These people have given me a hearing without legal representation or anything.

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I didn't shoot anybody, no sir.

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By that time the press corps, including those travelling with the President, were now crowding into the Dallas Central Police Station.

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All they wanted to know about was Oswald.

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The FBI actually had an open file on Oswald and one of the men in the building that day was FBI agent James Hostey.

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My immediate assignment was to go to the Dallas Police Station, to sit in on the interview and to tell the Dallas Police everything we knew about Oswald.

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The FBI knew that Oswald was a former Marine who had abandoned the United States and lived for almost 3 years in the Soviet Union.

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He had returned to the States with her Russian wife.

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The FBI believed that he was a committed Communist. They'd been tracking him.

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I work in that building.

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Naturally if I work in that building, yes sir.

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Back up man.

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No they're taking me in because of the fact that I live in the Soviet Union.

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I'm just a passing.

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I was trying to find him, but there was no urgency to find him.

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I mean he hadn't said I'm going to kill the President on November 22nd at 1230, catch me if you can, nothing like that.

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He disappeared and I figured I knew I'd find him.

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But just a matter, I had other things to do and it wasn't the most urgent case on my list.

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Now see I should have known.

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But no one in the FBI had any idea that Lee Harvey Oswald had the mind of a political assassin.

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Alarm bells began to ring in government.

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Lyndon Johnson, the Vice President, had visions of World War III.

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We got on the airplane.

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It was heavily guarded by a cordon of menacing looking men with machine guns at the ready because nobody knew.

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Was this a coup? Who else was to be murdered?

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Johnson had been briefed even as Vice President that if there were a Soviet attack on the United States,

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one of the first things the Soviets would probably try to do would be to murder the President and the other top leaders of government.

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As Vice President Johnson was sworn in as President with Mrs Kennedy at his side, US Armed Forces throughout the world were put on high alert.

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President Johnson was convinced that there was a communist conspiracy, a communist conspiracy engineered by Moscow.

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When were the missiles coming?

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The new President left Dallas for Washington with no idea if he'd make it.

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Air Force One carrying the President's body arrived at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington at 6.05 Eastern Standard Time.

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Millions of people watched on television as the coffin came into view.

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They watched Mrs Kennedy take her place in the hearse, bearing her husband's body.

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Mrs Kennedy is now coming down following the casket.

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Lyndon Johnson, who was now President, spoke briefly to the nation.

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I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help and God's.

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Johnson had been afraid in Dallas that the assassination was the start of an all-out attack on the United States.

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He was somewhat less anxious now, but in the days ahead he would be haunted by what he was learning about Oswald from the Director of the FBI.

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Johnson gets a call from J. Edgar Hoover saying that this Oswald, who we think was probably the assassin, had been seen in Mexico City at the Soviet Embassy perhaps or the Cuban Embassy.

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Johnson almost immediately said, oh my God, I've now got to deal with another problem, which is Americans are going to think that the Soviets did this or the Cubans did this.

208
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Ganaway also said the suspect had visited Russia and was married to a Russian. This is not immediately confirmed.

209
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They will say, go to war against the Soviets or the Cubans in revenge. He didn't want that kind of pressure on him.

210
00:20:11,000 --> 00:20:16,000
He knew that that could lead us to a war that would kill at the very least tens of millions of people.

211
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Suspect is again coming down the hall.

212
00:20:22,000 --> 00:20:27,000
Johnson's fears were based on fragments of information about a man nobody really knew.

213
00:20:27,000 --> 00:20:31,000
Lee Harvey Oswald was a mystery then and now.

214
00:20:34,000 --> 00:20:44,000
One of the things the American public misses here is they look at this case and they have lost somebody in their thinking of conspiracy over 40 years.

215
00:20:44,000 --> 00:20:48,000
They've lost the shooter, the assassin. They've lost Oswald.

216
00:20:48,000 --> 00:20:54,000
They have no idea who he was, what he had come from, what his background had been like. They have no idea of motive.

217
00:20:54,000 --> 00:21:01,000
And no idea where his journey to Dealey Plaza began. The person who knew him best was his brother.

218
00:21:01,000 --> 00:21:06,000
Turned the radio on and they were talking about a shooting of a police officer.

219
00:21:06,000 --> 00:21:10,000
And about that time, they announced it.

220
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They had an individual in custody by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald or Harvey Lee Oswald.

221
00:21:19,000 --> 00:21:22,000
And I said, that's my kid brother.

222
00:21:23,000 --> 00:21:26,000
And I said, that's my kid brother.

223
00:21:33,000 --> 00:21:48,000
After all these years, and we're talking about a long time, I think more than anything else, if I had an opportunity, had the facts that said Lee was innocent, I would be out there shouting it loud and clear.

224
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It is my belief, my conviction, no one but Lee was involved. Period.

225
00:22:03,000 --> 00:22:15,000
People need to look what transpired before that, everything. You've got to come all the way from childhood on up, especially that last year of his life, and understand what transpired in his life.

226
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He was a lonely boy.

227
00:22:20,000 --> 00:22:22,000
Needing attention, but not getting.

228
00:22:25,000 --> 00:22:34,000
Lee Harvey Oswald was born on October 18, 1939 in New Orleans, Louisiana. His father had died two months before.

229
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Lee wrote of himself that he was the son of an insurance agent whose early death left a far mean streak of independence, brought on by neglect.

230
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My mother constantly told us that we were a burden to her. And very early on, he learned that he wasn't wanted.

231
00:22:55,000 --> 00:23:09,000
Lee and his mother moved constantly. By the age of 13, he'd attended seven different schools. He was often a truant. As a teenager, they lived in New York City, where he had no friends. He often spent the days riding the subways alone.

232
00:23:09,000 --> 00:23:25,000
His interest in communism began when he was handed a flyer about the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, communist sympathisers executed as spies for the Soviet Union. By 16, he dropped out of school and was calling himself a Marxist.

233
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He wanted the attention by being unique. And if the worst of the world had been a Marxist, he would have been American.

234
00:23:33,000 --> 00:23:41,000
Lee's outspoken support of communism didn't prevent him from joining the Marine Corps at 17. He did it to get away from his mother.

235
00:23:41,000 --> 00:23:52,000
He didn't hide his infatuation with communism even though it turned other marines against him. He began to teach himself Russian. He praised Cuba's new communist leader, Fidel Castro.

236
00:23:52,000 --> 00:24:06,000
When he was in the Marine Corps, he was going the opposite direction from the rest of the troops. He wanted to be different from the crowd, stand out from the crowd, and whatever it took, he was willing to do it.

237
00:24:06,000 --> 00:24:15,000
Oswald learned to shoot in the Marines. He reached the grade of sharpshooter, able to fire rapidly with accuracy at a target 200 yards away.

238
00:24:15,000 --> 00:24:24,000
He stayed in the Marines for just under three years. Nine days after being discharged, he was on his way to the Soviet Union, where he intended to defect.

239
00:24:24,000 --> 00:24:29,000
He arrived in Moscow on a tourist visa on October 16, 1959.

240
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I heard from a friend in the American Embassy that there was a young defector staying in my hotel. Everything about him spelt loneliness and aloneness.

241
00:24:41,000 --> 00:24:47,000
Priscilla McMillan, who would later become Oswald's biographer, met him in Moscow, where she was working as a journalist.

242
00:24:47,000 --> 00:25:01,080
He told me he wanted to defect because there were a lot of things in the United States which he did not like, particularly capitalism and the

243
00:25:01,160 --> 00:25:06,160
He said he was a Marxist, and this was it, the Communist paradise.

244
00:25:06,160 --> 00:25:15,160
It was a rare American who thought the Soviet Union was paradise. The New York Times reported on Oswald's desire to stay in the Soviet Union.

245
00:25:15,160 --> 00:25:22,160
But the Russians were sceptical of any would-be defectors, and they were not interested in the Soviet Union.

246
00:25:22,240 --> 00:25:30,240
The initial reaction to any foreigner in the old USSR was to view them as CIA or some other intelligence agents.

247
00:25:30,240 --> 00:25:37,240
But after some research, we found out that he was not good for the CIA.

248
00:25:37,240 --> 00:25:42,240
So we decided to go with the Soviet Union.

249
00:25:42,320 --> 00:25:47,320
Six days after he got to Moscow, the Russians decided they didn't want him and told him to leave.

250
00:25:47,320 --> 00:25:52,320
Oswald to us looked like a misfit, an unhappy man.

251
00:25:52,320 --> 00:26:01,320
The man who did not know what to do, the man who was looking for something, the man who was looking for a job, the man who was looking for a job.

252
00:26:01,320 --> 00:26:06,320
He was looking for a job, and he was looking for a job.

253
00:26:06,400 --> 00:26:11,400
But the Soviets underestimated his determination and his flair for the dramatic.

254
00:26:11,400 --> 00:26:16,400
When he heard he'd been rejected, Oswald went to his hotel room and slit his wrist.

255
00:26:19,400 --> 00:26:21,400
He made a hysterical gesture.

256
00:26:21,400 --> 00:26:27,400
Probably didn't want to kill himself, really, but he wanted to force them to let him go.

257
00:26:27,400 --> 00:26:30,400
He wanted to force them to let him go.

258
00:26:30,480 --> 00:26:31,480
He made a hysterical gesture.

259
00:26:31,480 --> 00:26:37,480
Probably didn't want to kill himself, really, but he wanted to force them to let him stay.

260
00:26:37,480 --> 00:26:40,480
And believe it or not, he succeeded.

261
00:26:40,480 --> 00:26:43,480
He blackmailed them, as he did everybody.

262
00:26:43,480 --> 00:26:45,480
It worked.

263
00:26:45,480 --> 00:26:52,480
The Soviet authorities caved in and allowed Oswald to settle in the city of Minsk, where he was given an apartment and a job in a factory.

264
00:26:52,480 --> 00:26:55,480
Oswald stood out in Minsk.

265
00:26:55,480 --> 00:26:56,480
As an American, he was different.

266
00:26:56,480 --> 00:26:59,480
He enjoyed people's curiosity.

267
00:26:59,560 --> 00:27:02,560
He met and married a Russian girl, Marina.

268
00:27:02,560 --> 00:27:09,560
They had a child, but they lived the life of ordinary workers, and it was not the communist paradise he was seeking.

269
00:27:13,560 --> 00:27:19,560
The main spring of Lee's character was reaction against, negative.

270
00:27:19,560 --> 00:27:22,560
Wherever he was, it was better somewhere else.

271
00:27:22,560 --> 00:27:27,560
And after he lived in Russia for a while, Russia seemed bad to him.

272
00:27:27,640 --> 00:27:30,640
And America seemed better.

273
00:27:30,640 --> 00:27:36,640
In June 1962, disappointed in Russia, Lee decided to take Marina and go home.

274
00:27:36,640 --> 00:27:38,640
They headed for Dallas, Texas.

275
00:27:38,640 --> 00:27:43,640
Lee was convinced that when they arrived at Love Field, he'd be greeted by curious reporters.

276
00:27:46,640 --> 00:27:49,640
One of the first things he says, what, no reporters?

277
00:27:49,640 --> 00:27:52,640
He seemed definitely disappointed.

278
00:27:52,720 --> 00:27:55,720
He had his notes, how he was going to answer the reporters,

279
00:27:55,720 --> 00:27:59,720
why this and why that, why he went to Russia, and why he came back.

280
00:27:59,720 --> 00:28:02,720
But there was nobody to talk to.

281
00:28:03,720 --> 00:28:08,720
Home again in the United States, Oswald was a man of no importance to anyone but himself.

282
00:28:08,720 --> 00:28:11,720
He found work demeaning, he had very little money,

283
00:28:11,720 --> 00:28:14,720
he had no deep connections to other people except Marina,

284
00:28:14,720 --> 00:28:17,720
and he was physically abusing her.

285
00:28:17,800 --> 00:28:22,800
In January 1963, using an alias A. Hidel,

286
00:28:22,800 --> 00:28:28,800
he ordered a revolver at Smith & Wesson 38, the gun that killed Officer Tippett.

287
00:28:30,800 --> 00:28:34,800
In March, he ordered a rifle using the same alias,

288
00:28:34,800 --> 00:28:39,800
a Mannlicher Karkano 6.5mm, the gun that killed John Kennedy.

289
00:28:39,800 --> 00:28:42,800
He asked Marina to take his photograph.

290
00:28:42,800 --> 00:28:45,800
When I first met him and brought him over the house,

291
00:28:45,880 --> 00:28:49,880
the first thing he showed me was a picture of himself holding a rifle,

292
00:28:49,880 --> 00:28:52,880
and I could see he was proud of that picture.

293
00:28:52,880 --> 00:28:57,880
I had the strong impression that it was an icon of himself that he liked.

294
00:28:57,880 --> 00:29:00,880
Ruth and Michael Payne showed kindness to Lee and Marina.

295
00:29:00,880 --> 00:29:03,880
Ruth and Marina spoke Russian together and became friends.

296
00:29:03,880 --> 00:29:06,880
Lee kept his distance.

297
00:29:06,880 --> 00:29:10,880
He had these fantasies about who he was and what he could do

298
00:29:10,880 --> 00:29:13,880
and that nobody was really paying attention to him.

299
00:29:13,960 --> 00:29:16,960
He'd been spending his life, the latter half of his life,

300
00:29:16,960 --> 00:29:21,960
trying to be a revolutionary, trying to have an effect,

301
00:29:21,960 --> 00:29:26,960
trying to be important, make a mark on the world.

302
00:29:26,960 --> 00:29:31,960
No-one knows the exact moment that Oswald decided to become a political assassin,

303
00:29:31,960 --> 00:29:34,960
but in April 1963, he was ready.

304
00:29:34,960 --> 00:29:37,960
He was ready to be a political assassin.

305
00:29:37,960 --> 00:29:40,960
He was ready to be a political assassin.

306
00:29:41,040 --> 00:29:44,040
In April 1963, he was ready.

307
00:29:52,040 --> 00:29:55,040
Oswald had decided that he was going to commit himself

308
00:29:55,040 --> 00:29:59,040
in his young life at the age of 23 to political assassination.

309
00:29:59,040 --> 00:30:01,040
He would put himself in the history books,

310
00:30:01,040 --> 00:30:05,040
and the way he would go in the history books was not by killing Jack Kennedy,

311
00:30:05,040 --> 00:30:07,040
but by killing Edwin Walker.

312
00:30:07,120 --> 00:30:11,120
General Edwin A. Walker was a segregationist and vehement anticommunist.

313
00:30:11,120 --> 00:30:15,120
He had a growing following in Dallas and elsewhere in the south.

314
00:30:15,120 --> 00:30:18,120
Oswald spent more than a month plotting to kill him.

315
00:30:18,120 --> 00:30:21,120
He photographed Walker's home and worked out an escape route.

316
00:30:21,120 --> 00:30:24,120
He left Marina instructions in Russian about what to do

317
00:30:24,120 --> 00:30:26,120
if he didn't come back.

318
00:30:29,120 --> 00:30:34,120
The Walker attempt of April 10, 1963, is the Rosetta Stone,

319
00:30:34,200 --> 00:30:37,200
the Kennedy assassination,

320
00:30:37,200 --> 00:30:41,200
because it showed me getting ready to shoot someone

321
00:30:41,200 --> 00:30:43,200
and what went into it,

322
00:30:43,200 --> 00:30:48,200
and the feelings that he projected onto public figures,

323
00:30:48,200 --> 00:30:50,200
and that is what you have to study

324
00:30:50,200 --> 00:30:53,200
to understand the Kennedy assassination.

325
00:30:53,200 --> 00:30:57,200
Using his mail-order rifle, Oswald fired at General Walker,

326
00:30:57,200 --> 00:30:59,200
who was sitting inside his house.

327
00:31:00,200 --> 00:31:03,200
The bullet was deflected by the window frame.

328
00:31:03,280 --> 00:31:07,280
The world didn't know any of this until after Oswald died.

329
00:31:10,280 --> 00:31:12,280
This was entirely on his own.

330
00:31:12,280 --> 00:31:15,280
There wasn't anybody that he worked with,

331
00:31:15,280 --> 00:31:17,280
nobody knew about it except Marina,

332
00:31:17,280 --> 00:31:19,280
and she was keeping very quiet.

333
00:31:20,280 --> 00:31:24,280
Marina told me that she was in fear all the time

334
00:31:24,280 --> 00:31:26,280
of what he might do.

335
00:31:28,280 --> 00:31:30,280
After the Kennedy assassination,

336
00:31:30,360 --> 00:31:32,360
Marina spent weeks being interviewed

337
00:31:32,360 --> 00:31:34,360
by FBI agent Wally Heitman.

338
00:31:34,360 --> 00:31:36,360
Lee Harvey was on his route then.

339
00:31:36,360 --> 00:31:39,360
He, it seems to me, was determined

340
00:31:41,360 --> 00:31:43,360
that in order to make himself somebody,

341
00:31:43,360 --> 00:31:46,360
he was going to have to assassinate somebody,

342
00:31:46,360 --> 00:31:49,360
and that somebody would have to be big.

343
00:31:53,360 --> 00:31:56,360
They subsequently went to New Orleans,

344
00:31:56,440 --> 00:31:58,440
and one of the principal reasons

345
00:31:58,440 --> 00:32:00,440
that they went to New Orleans

346
00:32:00,440 --> 00:32:04,440
was that Marina thought that if she'd get Lee Harvey out of Dallas,

347
00:32:04,440 --> 00:32:09,440
that maybe he would not have all of these strange ideas.

348
00:32:10,440 --> 00:32:12,440
But returning to his birthplace

349
00:32:12,440 --> 00:32:14,440
only fuelled his political activism.

350
00:32:16,440 --> 00:32:20,440
New Orleans was teeming with thousands of anti-Castro Cubans.

351
00:32:20,440 --> 00:32:23,440
Oswald launched a one-man, pro-Castro campaign.

352
00:32:23,520 --> 00:32:25,520
He became the New Orleans chapter

353
00:32:25,520 --> 00:32:28,520
of the National Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

354
00:32:28,520 --> 00:32:30,520
He stood out enough that local television

355
00:32:30,520 --> 00:32:32,520
filmed him handing out leaflets.

356
00:32:34,520 --> 00:32:36,520
In August, he was arrested

357
00:32:36,520 --> 00:32:38,520
after fighting with anti-Castro Cubans.

358
00:32:38,520 --> 00:32:40,520
Again, he stood out.

359
00:32:40,520 --> 00:32:41,520
He appeared on television

360
00:32:41,520 --> 00:32:43,520
answering questions about Cuba.

361
00:32:43,520 --> 00:32:46,520
In your work with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee,

362
00:32:46,520 --> 00:32:48,520
what are you advocating?

363
00:32:48,520 --> 00:32:52,520
We advocate restoration of diplomatic trade with Cuba.

364
00:32:52,600 --> 00:32:56,600
We advocate diplomatic trade and tourist relations with Cuba.

365
00:32:56,600 --> 00:32:58,600
Are you a Marxist?

366
00:32:58,600 --> 00:33:00,600
Well, I have studied Marxist philosophy,

367
00:33:00,600 --> 00:33:03,600
yes, sir, and also other philosophers.

368
00:33:03,600 --> 00:33:05,600
But the attention was fleeting

369
00:33:05,600 --> 00:33:07,600
and his composure in public

370
00:33:07,600 --> 00:33:09,600
masked the turmoil in his private life.

371
00:33:09,600 --> 00:33:11,600
Marina was pregnant again

372
00:33:11,600 --> 00:33:13,600
and they were living on unemployment benefits.

373
00:33:13,600 --> 00:33:16,600
In September, Lee tried to convince Marina

374
00:33:16,600 --> 00:33:18,600
to help him hijack a plane to Cuba.

375
00:33:18,680 --> 00:33:21,680
A Russian woman who can hardly speak English

376
00:33:21,680 --> 00:33:25,680
with a baby in tow to hijack a plane,

377
00:33:25,680 --> 00:33:27,680
she thought that was the craziest idea

378
00:33:27,680 --> 00:33:29,680
that she had ever heard.

379
00:33:29,680 --> 00:33:31,680
She was able to convince him

380
00:33:31,680 --> 00:33:33,680
that that just would not work.

381
00:33:33,680 --> 00:33:35,680
In late September,

382
00:33:35,680 --> 00:33:37,680
Marina went back to Texas with Ruth Payne.

383
00:33:37,680 --> 00:33:41,680
Lee and Marina would never live together again.

384
00:33:41,680 --> 00:33:45,680
Lee seemed really sad when we drove off,

385
00:33:45,680 --> 00:33:47,680
so I felt he cared.

386
00:33:47,760 --> 00:33:49,760
It's just that he didn't...

387
00:33:50,760 --> 00:33:52,760
didn't really know how

388
00:33:52,760 --> 00:33:55,760
or nothing seemed to be working well for him.

389
00:33:55,760 --> 00:34:00,760
Lee's life leading up to November of 1963

390
00:34:00,760 --> 00:34:03,760
was just a series of disappointments.

391
00:34:03,760 --> 00:34:05,760
He'd had very boring jobs,

392
00:34:05,760 --> 00:34:09,760
he'd barely been able to support a wife and children,

393
00:34:09,760 --> 00:34:12,760
and he figured he'd run out his strength.

394
00:34:12,760 --> 00:34:15,760
Lee had told Marina that he really wanted to help

395
00:34:15,840 --> 00:34:17,840
the Cuban revolution.

396
00:34:17,840 --> 00:34:20,840
He went to the Cuban consulate in Mexico City,

397
00:34:20,840 --> 00:34:22,840
but they didn't want him.

398
00:34:26,840 --> 00:34:28,840
He went to the Soviet embassy

399
00:34:28,840 --> 00:34:30,840
and asked to return to Russia.

400
00:34:30,840 --> 00:34:32,840
They turned him down as well.

401
00:34:32,840 --> 00:34:37,840
He thought he himself was interesting enough

402
00:34:37,840 --> 00:34:41,840
and important enough that they would give him visas

403
00:34:41,840 --> 00:34:43,840
to go to their country.

404
00:34:43,920 --> 00:34:45,920
And he was rebuffed.

405
00:34:45,920 --> 00:34:50,920
In a way, this cut off his last exit, in a way.

406
00:34:50,920 --> 00:34:54,920
And when he left Mexico City to go back to Dallas,

407
00:34:54,920 --> 00:34:59,920
he went in a spirit of defeat and desperation.

408
00:35:00,920 --> 00:35:02,920
Oswald arrived back in Dallas

409
00:35:02,920 --> 00:35:05,920
where Marina was living on October 3rd.

410
00:35:05,920 --> 00:35:07,920
He'd no job and no prospects.

411
00:35:08,920 --> 00:35:10,920
He rented a room for $8 a week

412
00:35:10,920 --> 00:35:12,920
and looked for a job in the US.

413
00:35:13,000 --> 00:35:16,000
He'd call us a week and look for work.

414
00:35:16,000 --> 00:35:19,000
It was Ruth Payne who arranged for him to get a job

415
00:35:19,000 --> 00:35:21,000
at the Texas School Book Depository.

416
00:35:21,000 --> 00:35:24,000
He started work on the 16th of October.

417
00:35:24,000 --> 00:35:27,000
On November 19th, the route of the Kennedy motorcade

418
00:35:27,000 --> 00:35:29,000
was published in the Dallas newspapers.

419
00:35:29,000 --> 00:35:31,000
The route went right past the building

420
00:35:31,000 --> 00:35:33,000
where Oswald had a job.

421
00:35:34,000 --> 00:35:38,000
On November 21st, the night before the assassination,

422
00:35:38,000 --> 00:35:41,000
Lee visited Marina at Ruth Payne's house.

423
00:35:41,080 --> 00:35:44,080
It was the only time he'd ever arrived unannounced.

424
00:35:48,080 --> 00:35:52,080
One of the things he did when he left that Friday morning

425
00:35:52,080 --> 00:35:56,080
was put most of the money that he had on the dresser

426
00:35:56,080 --> 00:35:58,080
for Marina with a little note,

427
00:35:58,080 --> 00:36:00,080
get some shoes for Junie.

428
00:36:00,080 --> 00:36:03,080
And then he took off his ring and put it in a cup.

429
00:36:04,080 --> 00:36:09,080
And I have wondered, I think he was pretty depressed

430
00:36:09,160 --> 00:36:13,160
and discouraged about how things weren't going well for him.

431
00:36:13,160 --> 00:36:16,160
He wasn't changing the world or whatever it was

432
00:36:16,160 --> 00:36:19,160
he thought he was supposed to be doing.

433
00:36:21,160 --> 00:36:23,160
He had problems at home.

434
00:36:23,160 --> 00:36:25,160
He had problems on his job.

435
00:36:25,160 --> 00:36:27,160
He was completely frustrated

436
00:36:27,160 --> 00:36:29,160
about what was going on around him.

437
00:36:30,160 --> 00:36:32,160
This is not excusing what he did.

438
00:36:32,160 --> 00:36:34,160
This is understanding what he did.

439
00:36:36,160 --> 00:36:38,160
He wanted to be somebody.

440
00:36:38,240 --> 00:36:41,240
And this opportunity came about coincidental.

441
00:36:41,240 --> 00:36:44,240
Nothing planned, nothing organised.

442
00:36:44,240 --> 00:36:46,240
It happened that way.

443
00:36:46,240 --> 00:36:49,240
It's one of those happenstances of history.

444
00:36:50,240 --> 00:36:53,240
Oswald went to work at the book depository

445
00:36:53,240 --> 00:36:55,240
on the morning of the 22nd

446
00:36:55,240 --> 00:36:58,240
carrying a long object wrapped in brown paper.

447
00:36:58,240 --> 00:37:01,240
He told another worker it was curtain rods.

448
00:37:08,240 --> 00:37:11,240
The suspect is coming down the aisle

449
00:37:11,240 --> 00:37:14,240
and into this interrogation room.

450
00:37:23,240 --> 00:37:26,240
The suspect is coming down the aisle

451
00:37:26,240 --> 00:37:29,240
and into this interrogation room.

452
00:37:29,240 --> 00:37:32,240
The suspect is coming down the aisle

453
00:37:32,240 --> 00:37:35,240
and into this interrogation room.

454
00:37:35,320 --> 00:37:36,320
Louder!

455
00:37:39,320 --> 00:37:42,320
Well, I was questioned by a judge.

456
00:37:42,320 --> 00:37:45,320
However, I protested at that time

457
00:37:45,320 --> 00:37:48,320
that I was not allowed legal justice.

458
00:37:48,320 --> 00:37:52,320
On November 23rd, Lee Harvey Oswald was finally somebody.

459
00:37:52,320 --> 00:37:54,320
Did you kill the president?

460
00:37:54,320 --> 00:37:56,320
No, I've not been charged with that.

461
00:37:56,320 --> 00:37:59,320
In fact, nobody has said that to me yet.

462
00:37:59,320 --> 00:38:01,320
The first thing I heard about it

463
00:38:01,320 --> 00:38:04,320
was when the newspaper reporters in the hall

464
00:38:04,400 --> 00:38:06,400
asked me that question.

465
00:38:06,400 --> 00:38:08,400
When I saw him there,

466
00:38:08,400 --> 00:38:11,400
he looked like the cat that swallowed the canary.

467
00:38:11,400 --> 00:38:14,400
But he was proud of what he had done.

468
00:38:16,400 --> 00:38:20,400
Throughout that weekend, Oswald was questioned by the police,

469
00:38:20,400 --> 00:38:22,400
the FBI and the Secret Service.

470
00:38:22,400 --> 00:38:24,400
He wasn't admitting anything.

471
00:38:24,400 --> 00:38:27,400
His brother Robert went to see him in custody.

472
00:38:27,480 --> 00:38:29,480
I'm looking into his eyes.

473
00:38:29,480 --> 00:38:32,480
I'm looking for some sign, something.

474
00:38:32,480 --> 00:38:35,480
He says, brother, you won't find anything there.

475
00:38:35,480 --> 00:38:37,480
And he was absolutely right.

476
00:38:37,480 --> 00:38:39,480
There was nothing there.

477
00:38:39,480 --> 00:38:43,480
There was no emotion that you could see whatsoever.

478
00:38:44,480 --> 00:38:46,480
Even without a confession,

479
00:38:46,480 --> 00:38:50,480
the district attorney Henry Wade said he'd a strong case.

480
00:38:50,480 --> 00:38:54,480
I figure we have sufficient evidence to confirm that.

481
00:38:54,560 --> 00:38:57,560
I figure we have sufficient evidence to convict him.

482
00:38:57,560 --> 00:39:00,560
Was there any indication that this was an organised plot

483
00:39:00,560 --> 00:39:02,560
or was it just a man?

484
00:39:02,560 --> 00:39:04,560
There's no one else but him.

485
00:39:04,560 --> 00:39:07,560
That would never be tested in court.

486
00:39:10,560 --> 00:39:14,560
Now, this is the armoured truck that will carry Lee Oswald

487
00:39:14,560 --> 00:39:18,560
from the basement here of Downes Police Headquarters

488
00:39:18,560 --> 00:39:22,560
downtown to the Downes County jail.

489
00:39:22,640 --> 00:39:24,640
On Sunday, November 24,

490
00:39:24,640 --> 00:39:27,640
the press had been told they could cover Oswald's transfer

491
00:39:27,640 --> 00:39:30,640
from police headquarters to the county jail

492
00:39:30,640 --> 00:39:33,640
and to be at the basement loading dock by 10am.

493
00:39:34,640 --> 00:39:40,640
Cap instructed me to handcuff Oswald's right arm to my left arm.

494
00:39:42,640 --> 00:39:44,640
While I was doing all this,

495
00:39:44,640 --> 00:39:47,640
I said to him in jest more than anything else, I said,

496
00:39:47,640 --> 00:39:49,640
Lee, if anybody shoots at you,

497
00:39:49,640 --> 00:39:51,640
I hope they're as good a shot as you are,

498
00:39:51,720 --> 00:39:54,720
meaning, of course, they'd hit him and not me.

499
00:39:54,720 --> 00:39:56,720
He kind of laughed and he said,

500
00:39:56,720 --> 00:39:59,720
oh, you're being melodramatic or something of that effect,

501
00:39:59,720 --> 00:40:01,720
so nobody's going to shoot at me.

502
00:40:01,720 --> 00:40:03,720
There is Lee Oswald.

503
00:40:05,720 --> 00:40:07,720
He's been shot. He's been shot.

504
00:40:07,720 --> 00:40:09,720
Lee Oswald has been shot.

505
00:40:09,720 --> 00:40:12,720
I pulled on Oswald, jerked on him, trying to pull him behind me,

506
00:40:12,720 --> 00:40:14,720
but I was too close to him to move him,

507
00:40:14,720 --> 00:40:16,720
so I turned his body so that the bullet,

508
00:40:16,720 --> 00:40:18,720
instead of hitting him dead centre,

509
00:40:18,800 --> 00:40:21,800
it hit him about four inches to the left of the navel.

510
00:40:23,800 --> 00:40:25,800
It was like a cartoon almost,

511
00:40:25,800 --> 00:40:27,800
where you see a foot there and a hand there

512
00:40:27,800 --> 00:40:29,800
and a gun there and a head there,

513
00:40:29,800 --> 00:40:32,800
and it was a little scary, but very fast.

514
00:40:32,800 --> 00:40:35,800
He was down, and I didn't know it was.

515
00:40:35,800 --> 00:40:38,800
I didn't know for probably five minutes it was.

516
00:40:39,800 --> 00:40:43,800
And then when I found out, I thought, my God, I know that man.

517
00:40:43,800 --> 00:40:45,800
I'm not really that surprised.

518
00:40:45,880 --> 00:40:47,880
The shooter was Jack Ruby.

519
00:40:47,880 --> 00:40:50,880
The police and the press in Dallas knew him well.

520
00:40:51,880 --> 00:40:54,880
Why did you do it? Why did you do it, Jack?

521
00:40:54,880 --> 00:40:56,880
Why did you do it, Jack?

522
00:40:57,880 --> 00:40:59,880
He said,

523
00:40:59,880 --> 00:41:01,880
I did it for the people of America.

524
00:41:01,880 --> 00:41:03,880
He was my president.

525
00:41:03,880 --> 00:41:06,880
This man... He never said the name Oswald, by the way, never.

526
00:41:06,880 --> 00:41:09,880
He said, this man killed my president.

527
00:41:09,880 --> 00:41:12,880
The first thing out of his mouth is, I'm a hero,

528
00:41:12,960 --> 00:41:14,960
and that's what really floored me,

529
00:41:14,960 --> 00:41:17,960
because everyone was still in shock over what happened.

530
00:41:17,960 --> 00:41:20,960
He said, I'm a hero, and I went, no, you're not.

531
00:41:20,960 --> 00:41:22,960
Jack Ruby was 52,

532
00:41:22,960 --> 00:41:25,960
the tough operator of a local strip club.

533
00:41:25,960 --> 00:41:27,960
People knew he carried a gun.

534
00:41:27,960 --> 00:41:30,960
Some people speculated that Ruby was a hitman

535
00:41:30,960 --> 00:41:32,960
sent to silence Oswald.

536
00:41:32,960 --> 00:41:34,960
Was he part of a conspiracy?

537
00:41:34,960 --> 00:41:38,960
Jack Ruby was a wannabe, never was,

538
00:41:38,960 --> 00:41:40,960
but it's really a joke.

539
00:41:41,040 --> 00:41:43,040
But it's really a joke

540
00:41:43,040 --> 00:41:46,040
if you think Jack Ruby could be involved in a conspiracy.

541
00:41:46,040 --> 00:41:49,040
This is a man, if he knew anything,

542
00:41:49,040 --> 00:41:52,040
I guarantee you he'd tell somebody within one block.

543
00:41:53,040 --> 00:41:55,040
He wanted to be important.

544
00:41:56,040 --> 00:41:59,040
All the people that know him know him as an emotional person.

545
00:41:59,040 --> 00:42:01,040
He's...

546
00:42:01,040 --> 00:42:03,040
He does blow off easily.

547
00:42:03,040 --> 00:42:06,040
You're an exotic dancer at the Carousel

548
00:42:06,040 --> 00:42:09,040
owned and operated by Jack Ruby.

549
00:42:09,120 --> 00:42:11,120
That's right.

550
00:42:11,120 --> 00:42:14,120
How long have you been working for Jack Ruby?

551
00:42:14,120 --> 00:42:16,120
Let me see.

552
00:42:16,120 --> 00:42:21,120
I had been working for Jack maybe three months at that time.

553
00:42:23,120 --> 00:42:25,120
I was 20 years old.

554
00:42:25,120 --> 00:42:27,120
If you knew Jack,

555
00:42:27,120 --> 00:42:30,120
and a lot of people say this,

556
00:42:30,120 --> 00:42:32,120
that Jack did a lot of things

557
00:42:32,120 --> 00:42:35,120
because he thought he'd get a pat on the back,

558
00:42:35,120 --> 00:42:37,120
a medal,

559
00:42:37,200 --> 00:42:39,200
be praised for what he was doing.

560
00:42:39,200 --> 00:42:41,200
Jack Ruby grew up in Chicago

561
00:42:41,200 --> 00:42:45,200
where he got the nickname Sparky because of his temper.

562
00:42:46,200 --> 00:42:50,200
I knew Sparky in the 40s

563
00:42:50,200 --> 00:42:52,200
and in the 50s.

564
00:42:52,200 --> 00:42:55,200
He was in all the gymnasiums with all the boxers.

565
00:42:57,200 --> 00:43:01,200
It was well known that Jack Ruby was my sugar.

566
00:43:01,200 --> 00:43:04,200
He was not playing with a full deck.

567
00:43:04,200 --> 00:43:06,200
He was a nice guy,

568
00:43:06,280 --> 00:43:09,280
but he just wasn't playing with a full deck.

569
00:43:09,280 --> 00:43:12,280
Ruby's days in Chicago led many people to suspect

570
00:43:12,280 --> 00:43:14,280
that he ties to organised crime.

571
00:43:15,280 --> 00:43:18,280
The Chicago mob had nothing to do with Jack Ruby.

572
00:43:18,280 --> 00:43:22,280
Jack Ruby was working with the rag-tag guys on the street,

573
00:43:22,280 --> 00:43:25,280
downtown Chicago, some of them were bookmakers.

574
00:43:25,280 --> 00:43:28,280
They were just, you know, guys who made a buck

575
00:43:28,280 --> 00:43:32,280
through their wit and charm in some cases.

576
00:43:32,280 --> 00:43:34,280
But they were not.

577
00:43:34,360 --> 00:43:36,360
They were the gangsters.

578
00:43:36,360 --> 00:43:39,360
The gangsters had nothing to do with Jack Ruby.

579
00:43:39,360 --> 00:43:42,360
In Dallas, Ruby achieved a measure of respectability,

580
00:43:42,360 --> 00:43:45,360
but his temper was his trademark.

581
00:43:45,360 --> 00:43:48,360
I saw him get mad at customers

582
00:43:48,360 --> 00:43:51,360
where he'd be talking and nice and just very fine.

583
00:43:51,360 --> 00:43:54,360
All of a sudden, if he didn't like the way the guy was behaving

584
00:43:54,360 --> 00:43:56,360
rather than asking him to get up and leave,

585
00:43:56,360 --> 00:43:58,360
he would grab him from the very back

586
00:43:58,360 --> 00:44:00,360
and throw him out the door.

587
00:44:00,360 --> 00:44:02,360
And I mean, literally, no bouncers, nothing.

588
00:44:02,360 --> 00:44:03,360
He would do it.

589
00:44:03,440 --> 00:44:05,440
The Carousel Club's clientele

590
00:44:05,440 --> 00:44:08,440
included plenty of press and police.

591
00:44:09,440 --> 00:44:14,440
Ruby was a guy who hung out with the police.

592
00:44:14,440 --> 00:44:16,440
He had to make friends with the police

593
00:44:16,440 --> 00:44:19,440
because he was running an operation

594
00:44:19,440 --> 00:44:23,440
that could be shut down by the police.

595
00:44:23,440 --> 00:44:27,440
He kept coffee and sandwiches in the back for them.

596
00:44:27,440 --> 00:44:31,440
They were always in and out, and he was always down there.

597
00:44:31,520 --> 00:44:33,520
He liked to know what was going on.

598
00:44:34,520 --> 00:44:36,520
And because he knew the cops,

599
00:44:36,520 --> 00:44:38,520
he could come and go at police headquarters.

600
00:44:40,520 --> 00:44:43,520
He knew that what happened on that Friday afternoon

601
00:44:43,520 --> 00:44:48,520
was something that will never be forgotten in American history.

602
00:44:48,520 --> 00:44:51,520
And being Jack Ruby, he wanted to be part of it.

603
00:44:51,520 --> 00:44:54,520
He knew that there was going to be action,

604
00:44:54,520 --> 00:44:56,520
and he wanted to be where action was.

605
00:44:56,520 --> 00:44:59,520
Hours after the assassination,

606
00:44:59,600 --> 00:45:02,600
Jack Ruby closed the Carousel Club.

607
00:45:04,600 --> 00:45:06,600
Jack was hysterical.

608
00:45:06,600 --> 00:45:10,600
He said, I will shoot the son of a bitch if I have a chance.

609
00:45:10,600 --> 00:45:14,600
And he kept going on about Kennedy's children

610
00:45:14,600 --> 00:45:16,600
not having a father.

611
00:45:16,600 --> 00:45:19,600
At midnight on Friday the 22nd,

612
00:45:19,600 --> 00:45:21,600
Ruby was at police headquarters

613
00:45:21,600 --> 00:45:23,600
when Oswald was paraded before the press.

614
00:45:23,600 --> 00:45:26,600
Over the weekend, he was described by his sister and friends

615
00:45:26,600 --> 00:45:28,600
as upset and unstable.

616
00:45:28,680 --> 00:45:30,680
Early Sunday morning, the 24th,

617
00:45:30,680 --> 00:45:32,680
his housekeeper, who talked to him by phone,

618
00:45:32,680 --> 00:45:35,680
said he was mumbling, jabbering, not making sense.

619
00:45:35,680 --> 00:45:37,680
At 10 o'clock on Sunday,

620
00:45:37,680 --> 00:45:40,680
the press was waiting for Oswald to be transferred.

621
00:45:42,680 --> 00:45:45,680
At 10.19am, Ruby got a call at home

622
00:45:45,680 --> 00:45:47,680
from one of his strippers, little Lynn.

623
00:45:47,680 --> 00:45:51,680
She wanted him to wire her $25 so she could meet her rent.

624
00:45:54,680 --> 00:45:56,680
Just before 11, Ruby left his apartment

625
00:45:56,760 --> 00:45:59,760
with his dog, Sheba, and drove to the telegraph office.

626
00:46:01,760 --> 00:46:04,760
He parked and locked Sheba in the car.

627
00:46:06,760 --> 00:46:07,760
This makes no sense.

628
00:46:07,760 --> 00:46:10,760
You're going to plan to kill somebody

629
00:46:10,760 --> 00:46:13,760
and you bring your dog down to the killing?

630
00:46:15,760 --> 00:46:18,760
At Western Union, Ruby waited his turn in the queue.

631
00:46:18,760 --> 00:46:21,760
His wire transfer was posted at 11.17.

632
00:46:21,760 --> 00:46:25,760
Ruby then walked the one block to police headquarters

633
00:46:25,840 --> 00:46:28,840
Oswald's interrogation had taken longer than expected

634
00:46:28,840 --> 00:46:30,840
and was delayed a few minutes more

635
00:46:30,840 --> 00:46:32,840
when Oswald asked to change his clothes.

636
00:46:32,840 --> 00:46:36,840
Jack Ruby walked into the crowded hallway at 11.20.

637
00:46:36,840 --> 00:46:38,840
Oswald appeared within a minute.

638
00:46:42,840 --> 00:46:44,840
Jack loved President Kennedy

639
00:46:44,840 --> 00:46:50,840
and Oswald was walking with a smile in his face, Jack told me.

640
00:46:50,840 --> 00:46:52,840
And he couldn't believe that.

641
00:46:52,920 --> 00:46:55,920
He was smiling for having killed the President.

642
00:46:57,920 --> 00:46:59,920
And Jack became all excited

643
00:46:59,920 --> 00:47:02,920
and he pulled out the gun and shot him.

644
00:47:05,920 --> 00:47:07,920
There is Lee Oswald.

645
00:47:09,920 --> 00:47:11,920
He's been shot.

646
00:47:11,920 --> 00:47:12,920
He's been shot.

647
00:47:12,920 --> 00:47:14,920
Lee Oswald has been shot.

648
00:47:14,920 --> 00:47:16,920
There's a man with a gun.

649
00:47:16,920 --> 00:47:18,920
He's in absolute panic.

650
00:47:19,000 --> 00:47:24,000
President Kennedy was a symbol to Jack Ruby,

651
00:47:24,000 --> 00:47:27,000
an image to Jack Ruby.

652
00:47:27,000 --> 00:47:30,000
Kennedy was his God. He believed in Kennedy.

653
00:47:30,000 --> 00:47:34,000
And in his distorted mind, he did the right thing.

654
00:47:34,000 --> 00:47:38,000
That this man killed his President and he loved his President

655
00:47:38,000 --> 00:47:42,000
and he was taking justice into his own hands.

656
00:47:42,000 --> 00:47:44,000
Here comes Oswald.

657
00:47:44,000 --> 00:47:48,000
He is ashen and unconscious, unconscious.

658
00:47:48,080 --> 00:47:51,080
He is unconscious at this time now being moved in.

659
00:47:51,080 --> 00:47:53,080
It was all caught on television.

660
00:47:53,080 --> 00:47:55,080
The public watched in disbelief.

661
00:47:55,080 --> 00:47:57,080
In less than 48 hours,

662
00:47:57,080 --> 00:48:00,080
the President had been murdered, his assassins silenced

663
00:48:00,080 --> 00:48:02,080
and a man on the fringes of the underworld

664
00:48:02,080 --> 00:48:04,080
arrested for killing the assassin.

665
00:48:04,080 --> 00:48:07,080
The floodgates of conspiracy were wide open.

666
00:48:07,160 --> 00:48:10,160
On Monday, November 25, 1963,

667
00:48:10,160 --> 00:48:13,160
President Kennedy's body was carried through the streets

668
00:48:13,160 --> 00:48:17,160
of Washington to Arlington National Cemetery.

669
00:48:17,160 --> 00:48:21,160
There are moments that day which are still an indelible part

670
00:48:21,160 --> 00:48:23,160
of modern American history.

671
00:48:27,160 --> 00:48:35,140
The

672
00:48:37,160 --> 00:48:40,160
muffled drums for a dead President so young.

673
00:48:40,160 --> 00:48:43,160
The riderless horse.

674
00:48:43,160 --> 00:48:48,160
The President's son, John John, saluting as his father passes.

675
00:48:48,160 --> 00:48:51,160
The nation was in deepest mourning.

676
00:49:00,160 --> 00:49:03,160
In Texas, that same day,

677
00:49:03,240 --> 00:49:05,240
Lee Harvey Oswald was buried.

678
00:49:05,240 --> 00:49:08,240
His wife Marina was there and his mother

679
00:49:08,240 --> 00:49:10,240
and his brother Robert.

680
00:49:13,240 --> 00:49:16,240
And that was the day that Jack Ruby,

681
00:49:16,240 --> 00:49:19,240
under very heavy guard, was transferred to the county jail.

682
00:49:22,240 --> 00:49:24,240
I said to him,

683
00:49:24,240 --> 00:49:27,240
Jack, did you have any kind of connection

684
00:49:27,240 --> 00:49:29,240
with Oswald or with people?

685
00:49:29,320 --> 00:49:34,320
And he denied it vehemently again and again and again.

686
00:49:34,320 --> 00:49:36,320
He said, I'll swear on this Bible,

687
00:49:36,320 --> 00:49:39,320
I had nothing to do with anybody else.

688
00:49:39,320 --> 00:49:41,320
I did it all by myself.

689
00:49:41,320 --> 00:49:43,320
This is what he said to me.

690
00:49:43,320 --> 00:49:46,320
The people who knew Ruby didn't believe

691
00:49:46,320 --> 00:49:48,320
he was part of a conspiracy,

692
00:49:48,320 --> 00:49:50,320
but millions of Americans did,

693
00:49:50,320 --> 00:49:53,320
and President Johnson worried about it.

694
00:49:53,400 --> 00:49:56,400
What he wanted was a report

695
00:49:56,400 --> 00:49:59,400
that would hopefully allay the fears,

696
00:49:59,400 --> 00:50:03,400
the anxieties and some of the conspiratorial darkness

697
00:50:03,400 --> 00:50:08,400
that was populating too many people's minds at the time.

698
00:50:08,400 --> 00:50:11,400
The President decided to appoint a commission

699
00:50:11,400 --> 00:50:13,400
to investigate the assassination.

700
00:50:13,400 --> 00:50:16,400
He persuaded the nation's Chief Justice Earl Warren

701
00:50:16,400 --> 00:50:18,400
to look into the case.

702
00:50:18,400 --> 00:50:20,400
He said, I'm not going to do it.

703
00:50:20,400 --> 00:50:22,400
I'm going to do it.

704
00:50:22,480 --> 00:50:25,480
He sent Earl Warren to lead it.

705
00:50:25,480 --> 00:50:28,480
The Warren Commission was created for two main reasons.

706
00:50:28,480 --> 00:50:31,480
One was to settle the mood in the United States,

707
00:50:31,480 --> 00:50:33,480
but there was a second very key reason,

708
00:50:33,480 --> 00:50:37,480
and that was to dispel any rumours of foreign intrigue.

709
00:50:37,480 --> 00:50:40,480
We're living in a time of Cold War

710
00:50:40,480 --> 00:50:42,480
where there is great tension in the air,

711
00:50:42,480 --> 00:50:44,480
great fear in the air

712
00:50:44,480 --> 00:50:46,480
that there is a communist conspiracy

713
00:50:46,480 --> 00:50:48,480
directed out of Moscow

714
00:50:48,480 --> 00:50:50,480
which is seeking to destroy the free world

715
00:50:50,560 --> 00:50:52,560
and then the United States.

716
00:50:52,560 --> 00:50:56,560
Many Americans believe that Oswald's time in the Soviet Union

717
00:50:56,560 --> 00:50:58,560
and his admiration for Fidel Castro

718
00:50:58,560 --> 00:51:01,560
were proof somehow of a communist conspiracy.

719
00:51:01,560 --> 00:51:04,560
On the phone one day, President Johnson expressed his fears

720
00:51:04,560 --> 00:51:07,560
about the conspiracy theories to Senator Richard Russell

721
00:51:07,560 --> 00:51:09,560
who was on the Warren Commission.

722
00:51:11,560 --> 00:51:14,560
We've got to take this out of the arena

723
00:51:14,560 --> 00:51:18,560
where they're testifying that Fuchio and Castro did this

724
00:51:18,640 --> 00:51:20,640
and that they had an end,

725
00:51:20,640 --> 00:51:24,640
kicking us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour.

726
00:51:25,640 --> 00:51:28,640
The longer the Warren Commission takes,

727
00:51:28,640 --> 00:51:31,640
the longer the rumour mills turn.

728
00:51:31,640 --> 00:51:34,640
So the pressure is enormous.

729
00:51:38,640 --> 00:51:41,640
President Johnson pressed the Commission to work quickly

730
00:51:41,640 --> 00:51:45,640
and finish before the 1964 presidential election.

731
00:51:45,640 --> 00:51:47,640
The investigation lasted for only 10 months,

732
00:51:47,720 --> 00:51:50,720
but it built an overwhelming case against Oswald.

733
00:51:50,720 --> 00:51:53,720
25,000 interviews were done.

734
00:51:53,720 --> 00:51:55,720
Oswald's wife Marina was called.

735
00:51:55,720 --> 00:51:58,720
So was his mother and his brother Robert.

736
00:51:58,720 --> 00:52:01,720
There were 3,000 pieces of evidence.

737
00:52:03,720 --> 00:52:06,720
Ballistic tests showed that the bullets which hit the president

738
00:52:06,720 --> 00:52:09,720
could only have come from Oswald's rifle.

739
00:52:09,720 --> 00:52:11,720
His palm print was on the stock.

740
00:52:11,720 --> 00:52:15,720
His prints were on boxes in the sniper's position at the book depository.

741
00:52:15,800 --> 00:52:19,800
The Commission concluded that President Kennedy and Governor Connolly

742
00:52:19,800 --> 00:52:21,800
had been hit by the same bullet

743
00:52:21,800 --> 00:52:25,800
and that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.

744
00:52:26,800 --> 00:52:29,800
There was no evidence, the Warren Commission said,

745
00:52:29,800 --> 00:52:33,800
that Oswald was working for Cuba or the Soviet Union.

746
00:52:35,800 --> 00:52:39,800
But when the Commission published its report in September 1964,

747
00:52:39,800 --> 00:52:42,800
many Americans simply didn't believe it.

748
00:52:42,880 --> 00:52:45,880
They accused the Commission of rushing to judgment.

749
00:52:47,880 --> 00:52:52,880
I think they were more involved in it than just Oswald.

750
00:52:52,880 --> 00:52:55,880
I don't think that all the facts were brought out.

751
00:52:55,880 --> 00:52:57,880
I don't think that Oswald was...

752
00:52:57,880 --> 00:53:01,880
I think that he was working for the CIA, myself.

753
00:53:03,880 --> 00:53:06,880
The Commission was accused of covering up a conspiracy.

754
00:53:08,880 --> 00:53:11,880
The accusation was that Oswald was working for Cuba.

755
00:53:11,960 --> 00:53:15,960
The accusation that we had a predetermined idea

756
00:53:15,960 --> 00:53:17,960
to find that there was no conspiracy

757
00:53:17,960 --> 00:53:21,960
and that Oswald was the assassin is completely false.

758
00:53:21,960 --> 00:53:26,960
Let me say to you that the one thing I wanted to do

759
00:53:26,960 --> 00:53:28,960
was find a conspiracy.

760
00:53:28,960 --> 00:53:31,960
I was a 32-year-old lawyer at that point

761
00:53:31,960 --> 00:53:33,960
and I had political ambitions.

762
00:53:33,960 --> 00:53:36,960
If I could have found that Oswald didn't do it,

763
00:53:36,960 --> 00:53:40,960
I'd have been the senator from Ohio and not John Glenn.

764
00:53:41,040 --> 00:53:44,040
I would say we did a thorough search

765
00:53:44,040 --> 00:53:47,040
and we discovered all of the evidence

766
00:53:47,040 --> 00:53:50,040
and I think the best proof is that 40 years later

767
00:53:50,040 --> 00:53:53,040
and nobody's come up with any statement

768
00:53:53,040 --> 00:53:55,040
of anybody else who did it.

769
00:53:56,040 --> 00:54:00,040
But those Americans who pored over the 888 pages

770
00:54:00,040 --> 00:54:04,040
of the Warren Report and its 26 volumes of supporting evidence

771
00:54:04,040 --> 00:54:07,040
found inconsistencies and outright mistakes

772
00:54:07,040 --> 00:54:10,040
which simply fuelled the conspiracy theories.

773
00:54:10,120 --> 00:54:12,120
There's only a word in the Warren Commission

774
00:54:12,120 --> 00:54:14,120
about the Kennedy administration's determination

775
00:54:14,120 --> 00:54:16,120
to get rid of Fidel Castro,

776
00:54:16,120 --> 00:54:18,120
the leader Oswald so admired.

777
00:54:20,120 --> 00:54:23,120
Castro had established a communist government

778
00:54:23,120 --> 00:54:26,120
allied with the Soviet Union within 100 miles of Florida.

779
00:54:28,120 --> 00:54:31,120
The secret campaign to get rid of Castro

780
00:54:31,120 --> 00:54:33,120
was so important to President Kennedy

781
00:54:33,120 --> 00:54:36,120
that his brother Robert, the attorney general,

782
00:54:36,120 --> 00:54:38,120
ran the operation.

783
00:54:38,200 --> 00:54:41,200
The CIA supported guerrilla raids into Cuba,

784
00:54:41,200 --> 00:54:45,200
recruited assassins, Cuban exiles and members of the mafia

785
00:54:45,200 --> 00:54:48,200
to get rid of Castro in any way they could.

786
00:54:50,200 --> 00:54:52,200
It was top priority.

787
00:54:52,200 --> 00:54:54,200
Nothing else mattered.

788
00:54:54,200 --> 00:54:57,200
And that was the feeling we got from Bobby particularly.

789
00:54:57,200 --> 00:54:59,200
The object was very simple

790
00:54:59,200 --> 00:55:02,200
and I'll give you the exact words that were used.

791
00:55:02,200 --> 00:55:06,200
Get, quote, get rid of Castro and the Castro regime, unquote.

792
00:55:06,280 --> 00:55:09,280
And then, on September 9, 1963,

793
00:55:09,280 --> 00:55:12,280
in a widely published interview with the Associated Press,

794
00:55:12,280 --> 00:55:15,280
Castro threatened American leaders.

795
00:55:15,280 --> 00:55:19,280
We are prepared to fight and answer in kind, he said.

796
00:55:19,280 --> 00:55:21,280
The United States leaders should think

797
00:55:21,280 --> 00:55:23,280
that if they are aiding terrorist plans

798
00:55:23,280 --> 00:55:25,280
to eliminate Cuban leaders,

799
00:55:25,280 --> 00:55:27,280
they themselves will not be safe.

800
00:55:29,280 --> 00:55:32,280
The people who wrote the Warren Commission report

801
00:55:32,280 --> 00:55:35,280
were never told the reasons behind Castro's threat.

802
00:55:35,360 --> 00:55:38,360
If Americans now look back at the Warren report

803
00:55:38,360 --> 00:55:41,360
and say, however good it may be,

804
00:55:41,360 --> 00:55:44,360
the people who wrote it did not know a cardinal fact

805
00:55:44,360 --> 00:55:46,360
and that was that the Kennedy administration

806
00:55:46,360 --> 00:55:49,360
was trying to kill Fidel Castro.

807
00:55:50,360 --> 00:55:53,360
There is not a word in the Warren Commission report about this,

808
00:55:53,360 --> 00:55:56,360
not a word which suggests that Castro had a motive

809
00:55:56,360 --> 00:55:58,360
to assassinate President Kennedy.

810
00:56:00,360 --> 00:56:03,360
President Johnson always expressed his public opinion

811
00:56:03,440 --> 00:56:06,440
and President Johnson always expressed his public confidence

812
00:56:06,440 --> 00:56:09,440
in the Warren Commission's finding that Oswald acted alone.

813
00:56:11,440 --> 00:56:14,440
In private, he believed something else.

814
00:56:17,440 --> 00:56:22,440
President Johnson said to me on more than one occasion,

815
00:56:22,440 --> 00:56:24,440
his statement was,

816
00:56:24,440 --> 00:56:28,440
Kennedy tried to get Castro and Castro got Kennedy first.

817
00:56:28,440 --> 00:56:31,440
There's no doubt in my mind that President Johnson

818
00:56:31,520 --> 00:56:34,520
was at his grave believing that Castro was behind

819
00:56:34,520 --> 00:56:37,520
Lee Harvey Oswald's assassination of John Kennedy.

820
00:56:49,520 --> 00:56:52,520
In the 1970s, during Vietnam and Watergate,

821
00:56:52,520 --> 00:56:55,520
Americans had to confront a painful reality.

822
00:56:55,520 --> 00:56:58,520
Their government had lied to them on a very grand scale.

823
00:56:58,600 --> 00:57:02,600
Maybe the government had lied about the Kennedy assassination too.

824
00:57:04,600 --> 00:57:07,600
The pattern that we have now established for Lee Harvey Oswald

825
00:57:07,600 --> 00:57:10,600
is obviously the pattern of a man being run by the CIA.

826
00:57:10,600 --> 00:57:13,600
There's no question of it. Just hold on.

827
00:57:13,600 --> 00:57:16,600
I just want to tell you that 72% of the American people

828
00:57:16,600 --> 00:57:18,600
do not buy your report.

829
00:57:18,600 --> 00:57:20,600
They think at worst it's fallacious,

830
00:57:20,600 --> 00:57:22,600
at best it's incompetent.

831
00:57:24,600 --> 00:57:27,600
The Warren Commission was being denounced in many quarters

832
00:57:27,680 --> 00:57:31,680
as an outright fraud itself, part of a far-reaching conspiracy.

833
00:57:35,680 --> 00:57:38,680
Under this kind of pressure in 1976,

834
00:57:38,680 --> 00:57:41,680
the House of Representatives created a select committee

835
00:57:41,680 --> 00:57:44,680
on assassinations to deal with the conspiracy theories

836
00:57:44,680 --> 00:57:46,680
once and for all.

837
00:57:46,680 --> 00:57:48,680
When the Zabruder film of the Kennedy assassination

838
00:57:48,680 --> 00:57:50,680
was made public...

839
00:57:50,680 --> 00:57:53,680
The committee's chief counsel directing the investigation

840
00:57:53,680 --> 00:57:55,680
was G Robert Blakey.

841
00:57:55,760 --> 00:57:57,760
...with a black umbrella.

842
00:57:57,760 --> 00:58:00,760
We've made it our central programme

843
00:58:00,760 --> 00:58:04,760
to see what might have changed since 1963.

844
00:58:04,760 --> 00:58:07,760
And what it changed since 1963

845
00:58:07,760 --> 00:58:10,760
are advances in science and technology.

846
00:58:10,760 --> 00:58:12,760
Using the latest technology,

847
00:58:12,760 --> 00:58:16,760
the committee re-examined the bullets that struck the president.

848
00:58:20,760 --> 00:58:23,760
The X-rays and photographs from the president's autopsy

849
00:58:23,840 --> 00:58:26,840
and the movements of President Kennedy and Connolly

850
00:58:26,840 --> 00:58:28,840
in the Zabruder film.

851
00:58:28,840 --> 00:58:30,840
The committee reviewed all the evidence

852
00:58:30,840 --> 00:58:34,840
and reaffirmed that President John Kennedy was shot and killed

853
00:58:34,840 --> 00:58:36,840
by Lee Harvey Oswald.

854
00:58:36,840 --> 00:58:38,840
But was he part of a conspiracy?

855
00:58:39,840 --> 00:58:42,840
The committee combed Oswald's life for links to foreign governments.

856
00:58:42,840 --> 00:58:45,840
It heard testimony from one of the KGB officers

857
00:58:45,840 --> 00:58:48,840
who handled Oswald's file when he defected to Russia.

858
00:58:48,920 --> 00:58:50,920
He was nobody.

859
00:58:50,920 --> 00:58:52,920
He was a tumbleweed.

860
00:58:52,920 --> 00:58:56,920
Yuri Nosenko later defected to the United States

861
00:58:56,920 --> 00:58:59,920
and still lives there under an assumed name.

862
00:58:59,920 --> 00:59:04,920
To recruit such person who defected in Russia, American,

863
00:59:04,920 --> 00:59:06,920
returns back in America,

864
00:59:06,920 --> 00:59:10,920
and to give him mission to kill, no way.

865
00:59:10,920 --> 00:59:13,920
KGB never will go on this.

866
00:59:13,920 --> 00:59:15,920
Never.

867
00:59:16,000 --> 00:59:18,000
Never.

868
00:59:18,000 --> 00:59:20,000
Because it's so obvious.

869
00:59:21,000 --> 00:59:23,000
As for a Cuban connection,

870
00:59:23,000 --> 00:59:26,000
the CIA's plots to kill Fidel Castro have been uncovered

871
00:59:26,000 --> 00:59:30,000
and made public a year before the House Committee began its work.

872
00:59:34,000 --> 00:59:37,000
Committee investigators even went to Mexico City

873
00:59:37,000 --> 00:59:41,000
to check on allegations that Oswald, during his 1963 visit,

874
00:59:41,000 --> 00:59:43,000
conspired with Cuban agents.

875
00:59:46,000 --> 00:59:51,000
In 1978, Chief Counsel Blakey and several members of the committee

876
00:59:51,000 --> 00:59:54,000
actually went to Havana to interview Fidel Castro.

877
00:59:59,000 --> 01:00:00:03,000
I sat in President Castro's office and, albeit diplomatically,

878
01:00:03,000 --> 01:00:06,000
looked in his eyes and said,

879
01:00:06,000 --> 01:00:08,000
did you kill John Kennedy?

880
01:00:08,000 --> 01:00:10,000
And he said no.

881
01:00:10,000 --> 01:00:14,000
And then he told me why it would have been a foolish thing for him to have done.

882
01:00:14,080 --> 01:00:19,080
Castro told Blakey that it would have been insanity for him to attack Kennedy.

883
01:00:19,080 --> 01:00:23,080
That would have been the most perfect pretext, Castro said,

884
01:00:23,080 --> 01:00:25,080
for the US to invade our country,

885
01:00:25,080 --> 01:00:28,080
which is what I've tried to prevent for all these years.

886
01:00:32,080 --> 01:00:36,080
They've been so identified and so hard to the record.

887
01:00:37,080 --> 01:00:41,080
The Special Committee of Congress took two years to do its work

888
01:00:41,160 --> 01:00:44,160
and at the end of its investigation was just about to conclude

889
01:00:44,160 --> 01:00:46,160
that the Warren Commission was right.

890
01:00:46,160 --> 01:00:50,160
Oswald was the sole assassin and no-one had conspired with him,

891
01:00:50,160 --> 01:00:54,160
not the CIA, the FBI, the Soviets or the Cubans.

892
01:00:56,160 --> 01:00:58,160
But in the last days of the investigation,

893
01:00:58,160 --> 01:01:02,160
three scientists surprised the committee with evidence, they said,

894
01:01:02,160 --> 01:01:04,160
proved a conspiracy.

895
01:01:04,160 --> 01:01:07,160
With a probability of 95% or better,

896
01:01:07,240 --> 01:01:11,240
there was indeed a shot fired from the Gracinole.

897
01:01:12,240 --> 01:01:14,240
The scientists had analysed a sound recording,

898
01:01:14,240 --> 01:01:16,240
overlooked for almost 15 years,

899
01:01:16,240 --> 01:01:18,240
that was made at the time of the assassination.

900
01:01:18,240 --> 01:01:21,240
The scientists said that as the president was shot,

901
01:01:21,240 --> 01:01:24,240
a motorcycle policeman in the president's motorcade

902
01:01:24,240 --> 01:01:26,240
was driving through Dealey Plaza

903
01:01:26,240 --> 01:01:29,240
with his microphone stuck in the on position.

904
01:01:30,240 --> 01:01:35,240
The sounds the microphone picked up were recorded at police headquarters.

905
01:01:35,320 --> 01:01:40,320
This is a copy and the crucial evidence was only 8.3 seconds long.

906
01:01:40,320 --> 01:01:43,320
The recording was noisy with static listening.

907
01:01:54,320 --> 01:01:57,320
But the scientists said that with special equipment

908
01:01:57,320 --> 01:02:00,320
they could identify four gunshots.

909
01:02:00,400 --> 01:02:05,400
What you just heard were the sounds picked up at this microphone.

910
01:02:05,400 --> 01:02:07,400
This was a shock to the committee.

911
01:02:07,400 --> 01:02:11,400
Four shots was one more than Oswald had time to find.

912
01:02:11,400 --> 01:02:14,400
The committee has developed evidence

913
01:02:14,400 --> 01:02:18,400
of the outlines of a likely conspiracy

914
01:02:18,400 --> 01:02:21,400
in the assassination of President Kennedy.

915
01:02:21,400 --> 01:02:25,400
Our scientists looked at a tape we found

916
01:02:25,400 --> 01:02:11,000
and they found a tape of the

917
01:02:11,080 --> 01:02:14,080
four shots in the plaza.

918
01:02:14,080 --> 01:02:18,080
Three from the depository and one from the Gracinole.

919
01:02:18,080 --> 01:02:21,080
That meant there were two guns in the plaza.

920
01:02:21,080 --> 01:02:18,580
The other two were from the

921
01:02:25,080 --> 01:02:25,080

922
01:02:25,080 --> 01:02:25,080

923
01:02:25,080 --> 01:02:25,080

924
01:02:25,080 --> 01:02:25,080

925
01:02:25,080 --> 01:02:25,160
The other two were from the

926
01:02:25,160 --> 01:02:25,240
The other two were from the

927
01:02:25,240 --> 01:02:25,320
The other two were from the

928
01:02:25,320 --> 01:02:25,400
The other two were from the

929
01:02:25,400 --> 01:02:25,480
The other two were from the

930
01:02:25,480 --> 01:02:25,560
The other two were from the

931
01:02:25,560 --> 01:02:25,560

932
01:02:25,560 --> 01:02:25,640
The other two were from the

933
01:02:25,640 --> 01:02:25,680
The other two were from the

934
01:02:25,680 --> 01:02:25,760
The other two were from the

935
01:02:25,760 --> 01:02:25,760

936
01:02:25,760 --> 01:02:25,840
The other two were from the

937
01:02:25,840 --> 01:02:25,840

938
01:02:25,840 --> 01:02:25,920
The other two were from the

939
01:02:25,920 --> 01:02:25,920

940
01:02:25,920 --> 01:02:26,000
The other two were from the

941
01:02:26,000 --> 01:02:26,080
The other two were from the

942
01:02:26,080 --> 01:02:26,080

943
01:02:26,080 --> 01:02:29,080
Our scientists looked at a tape we found

944
01:02:29,080 --> 01:02:32,080
and they did a scientific analysis of it.

945
01:02:32,080 --> 01:02:36,080
And it indicated four shots in the plaza.

946
01:02:36,080 --> 01:02:40,080
Three from the depository and one from the Gracinole.

947
01:02:40,080 --> 01:02:42,080
That meant there were two shooters in the plaza.

948
01:02:42,080 --> 01:02:46,080
Two shooters in the plaza equal the conspiracy.

949
01:02:46,080 --> 01:02:49,080
Chief Counsel Blakey was convinced by the science

950
01:02:49,080 --> 01:02:53,080
and he became a believer in a conspiracy.

951
01:02:53,080 --> 01:02:55,080
Blakey was an expert on organised crime

952
01:02:55,080 --> 01:03:00,080
and he decided that the mob had conspired to kill the president.

953
01:03:00,080 --> 01:03:04,080
The key to this theory was Jack Ruby.

954
01:03:04,080 --> 01:03:12,080
I see Jack Ruby's assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald as a mob hit.

955
01:03:12,080 --> 01:03:16,080
I got organised crime connections for Ruby

956
01:03:16,080 --> 01:03:19,080
that just go on and on and on.

957
01:03:24,080 --> 01:03:27,080
At SOB I'll break his back.

958
01:03:27,080 --> 01:03:30,080
The Kennedy administration led by Attorney General Robert Kennedy

959
01:03:30,080 --> 01:03:34,080
had been fighting an unprecedented war against organised crime.

960
01:03:34,080 --> 01:03:38,080
And according to Blakey, Carlos Marcello, the mafia boss in New Orleans,

961
01:03:38,080 --> 01:03:43,080
was so angry at the Kennedys that he wanted to have the president killed.

962
01:03:43,080 --> 01:03:47,080
According to Blakey, he recruited Lee Harvey Oswald to shoot the president

963
01:03:47,080 --> 01:03:51,080
and Jack Ruby to make sure that Oswald never talked.

964
01:03:51,080 --> 01:03:54,080
I have the greatest respect for Robert Blakey

965
01:03:54,080 --> 01:03:58,080
but I cannot join him in this hypothesis.

966
01:03:58,080 --> 01:04:01,080
Committee calls Mr Salerno.

967
01:04:01,080 --> 01:04:06,080
The late Ralph Salerno knew as much about organised crime as anyone in America.

968
01:04:06,080 --> 01:04:10,080
He was hired by Blakey to be the committee's mob expert.

969
01:04:10,080 --> 01:04:14,080
He thought his former boss was wrong.

970
01:04:14,080 --> 01:04:19,080
The theory is Ruby is taking out Oswald.

971
01:04:19,080 --> 01:04:23,080
So Oswald can't say anything.

972
01:04:23,080 --> 01:04:28,080
Somebody has to take out Ruby so he can't say anything.

973
01:04:28,080 --> 01:04:32,080
And then somebody has to take out the guy who took Ruby out.

974
01:04:32,080 --> 01:04:37,080
It becomes an unending dilemma so it doesn't work quite that way.

975
01:04:37,080 --> 01:04:42,080
In that position, Mr Genovese was at that meeting, Mr Genconner?

976
01:04:42,080 --> 01:04:47,080
I reviewed for the committee the electronic surveillance that the FBI had in

977
01:04:47,080 --> 01:04:50,080
on organised crime figures all over the country

978
01:04:50,080 --> 01:04:54,080
and there was no indication at all of their involvement.

979
01:04:54,080 --> 01:04:59,080
Since that time, since that time up to the current day,

980
01:04:59,080 --> 01:05:04,080
you have had a large number of high level members of organised crime

981
01:05:04,080 --> 01:05:09,080
have made a deal with the government and testified against their fellows.

982
01:05:09,080 --> 01:05:14,080
None of them has ever suggested that they knew of or even heard of

983
01:05:14,080 --> 01:05:19,080
involvement by organised crime in the death of President Kennedy.

984
01:05:19,080 --> 01:05:24,080
The most critical evidence in the Blakey theory was the police recording,

985
01:05:24,080 --> 01:05:29,080
the sounds picked up in Dealey Plaza by the motorcycle policeman's microphone.

986
01:05:29,080 --> 01:05:34,080
It was this evidence, the scientists said, that established the near certainty

987
01:05:34,080 --> 01:05:39,080
of two shooters, one in the book depository and the other up on the grassy knoll.

988
01:05:39,080 --> 01:05:44,080
But the scientists admitted that their conclusion was based on a very big assumption.

989
01:05:44,080 --> 01:05:49,080
On November 22, the open microphone had to be in a very particular place

990
01:05:49,080 --> 01:05:52,080
when the first shot was fired.

991
01:05:54,080 --> 01:05:58,080
Within this pink circle at the corner of Houston and Elm streets,

992
01:05:58,080 --> 01:06:01,080
right next to the book depository.

993
01:06:02,080 --> 01:06:07,080
The committee said that HB Maclean was the motorcycle officer with the open microphone

994
01:06:07,080 --> 01:06:12,080
and that he was right at that spot when the first shot was fired.

995
01:06:13,080 --> 01:06:18,080
But Maclean told the committee that he was half a block away when he heard the shot.

996
01:06:18,080 --> 01:06:23,080
They just assumed that it was mine, or their acoustic people said it should be.

997
01:06:25,080 --> 01:06:29,080
But I don't care what they say, it wasn't mine.

998
01:06:30,080 --> 01:06:33,080
The committee found other words.

999
01:06:34,080 --> 01:06:39,080
Our best judgement with what we knew then was that it was HB Maclean.

1000
01:06:39,080 --> 01:06:45,080
If you could prove to me that there was no police officer in the place where he had to be,

1001
01:06:45,080 --> 01:06:48,080
you would falsify my theory.

1002
01:06:49,080 --> 01:06:54,080
If you look at the films taken in Dealey Plaza that day, you can do just that.

1003
01:06:56,080 --> 01:06:59,080
This is the film taken by Robert Hughes.

1004
01:06:59,080 --> 01:07:02,080
We see the President's car turning the corner right here.

1005
01:07:02,080 --> 01:07:05,080
Here is the book depository and the sniper's nest window.

1006
01:07:06,080 --> 01:07:10,080
Moments later we see HB Maclean rolling into the shot.

1007
01:07:10,080 --> 01:07:13,080
The last frame he's seen is right here.

1008
01:07:14,080 --> 01:07:18,080
Dale Myers took all of the available films of the motorcade that day

1009
01:07:18,080 --> 01:07:23,080
to create a second by second timeline of the motorcade as it went through Dealey Plaza.

1010
01:07:23,080 --> 01:07:28,080
He's established precisely where Maclean was when the first shot was fired.

1011
01:07:28,080 --> 01:07:32,080
This is the time of the first shot, the limousine is here on Elm Street.

1012
01:07:32,080 --> 01:07:39,080
HB Maclean is back here on Houston Street, about 170 feet from the pink circle,

1013
01:07:39,080 --> 01:07:45,080
which is the position he has to be at the time of the first shot if the acoustics evidence is valid.

1014
01:07:46,080 --> 01:07:50,080
HB Maclean could not have been where the acoustics evidence predicted,

1015
01:07:50,080 --> 01:07:54,080
and therefore the acoustics evidence is invalid.

1016
01:07:55,080 --> 01:07:59,080
In 1980 the Committee's findings were rejected by the FBI,

1017
01:07:59,080 --> 01:08:04,080
and in 1982 by an independent panel from the National Academy of Sciences.

1018
01:08:05,080 --> 01:08:08,080
The three scientists who claimed there were gunshots on the recording

1019
01:08:08,080 --> 01:08:11,080
declined to be interviewed for this programme.

1020
01:08:15,080 --> 01:08:19,080
So the Government Committee established to settle the case once and for all.

1021
01:08:19,080 --> 01:08:23,080
The House Select Committee on Assassinations in the end made a mess of it.

1022
01:08:23,080 --> 01:08:27,080
More controversy, more confusion, more theories based on contested evidence.

1023
01:08:27,080 --> 01:08:32,080
More myths overtaking the reality of what really happened in Dealey Plaza.

1024
01:08:40,080 --> 01:08:47,080
In 1991 the movie director Oliver Stone introduced a whole new generation to the Kennedy assassination.

1025
01:08:47,080 --> 01:08:52,080
No book or television programme, no investigation has done more to promote the idea of conspiracy.

1026
01:08:52,080 --> 01:08:54,080
than Stone's JFK.

1027
01:08:56,080 --> 01:09:00,080
The biggest business in America worth 80 billion dollars a year.

1028
01:09:00,080 --> 01:09:06,080
President Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy that was planned in advance at the highest levels of our government,

1029
01:09:06,080 --> 01:09:10,080
and it was carried out by fanatical and disciplined Cold Warriors

1030
01:09:10,080 --> 01:09:16,080
in the Pentagon and CIA's covert operation apparatus, among them Clay Shaw here before you.

1031
01:09:16,080 --> 01:09:22,080
It was a public execution and it was covered up by like-minded individuals in the Dallas Police Department,

1032
01:09:22,080 --> 01:09:29,080
the Secret Service, the FBI and the White House, all the way up to including J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson,

1033
01:09:29,080 --> 01:09:32,080
whom I consider accomplices after the fact.

1034
01:09:33,080 --> 01:09:39,080
Stone has convinced me that the most powerful historians of the 20th century are filmmakers.

1035
01:09:39,080 --> 01:09:45,080
It is those images that we remember, and most Americans are not aware of them.

1036
01:09:45,080 --> 01:09:52,080
Most Americans know of the Kennedy assassination through Oliver Stone's mind and Oliver Stone's images.

1037
01:09:52,080 --> 01:09:57,080
You realise that you're damaging the credibility of the country, possibly destroying it?

1038
01:09:57,080 --> 01:10:01,080
Let me ask you, is a government worth preserving when it lies to the people?

1039
01:10:01,080 --> 01:10:08,080
The film makes a hero out of Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, who was a district attorney in 1963.

1040
01:10:08,080 --> 01:10:12,080
He is the only public official who did bring a prosecution in the murder of John Kennedy.

1041
01:10:12,080 --> 01:10:18,080
I think he is to be applauded for saying and being the first one in the United States to say that the Warren Commission was wrong.

1042
01:10:18,080 --> 01:10:22,080
Philosophically, this is a conflict of truth versus power.

1043
01:10:22,080 --> 01:10:27,080
But Jim Garrison was regarded by many as immoral, unethical and even cruel.

1044
01:10:27,080 --> 01:10:33,080
He prosecuted the only man ever to go on trial in connection with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

1045
01:10:33,080 --> 01:10:40,080
I certainly wouldn't say with confidence that we would make arrests and have convictions afterwards

1046
01:10:41,080 --> 01:10:48,080
if I did not know that we had solved the assassination of President Kennedy beyond any shadow of a doubt.

1047
01:10:48,080 --> 01:10:54,080
You see, when a public official says something, people assume that he knows what he's talking about.

1048
01:10:54,080 --> 01:11:02,080
And Garrison would frequently say such things as, it's obvious, or I'm absolutely convinced, or I know.

1049
01:11:02,080 --> 01:11:05,080
And people say, well, he must know what he's talking about.

1050
01:11:05,080 --> 01:11:14,080
To sum it up, the federal government, including key officials and the President of the United States most specifically,

1051
01:11:14,080 --> 01:11:19,080
knew that President Kennedy was not killed by a lone assassin.

1052
01:11:19,080 --> 01:11:25,080
Garrison promoted himself as the only one brave enough to pursue the truth in the face of a federal government

1053
01:11:25,080 --> 01:11:29,080
bent on burying the facts of the Kennedy assassination.

1054
01:11:29,080 --> 01:11:35,080
He said he was uncovering a web of conspiracy with many plotters with complex motives to kill the President.

1055
01:11:35,080 --> 01:11:39,080
But in the end, he hung his entire case on just one man.

1056
01:11:42,080 --> 01:11:44,080
Quiet!

1057
01:11:44,080 --> 01:11:53,080
Arrested this evening in the District Attorney's office was Clay Shaw, aged 54, of 1313 Dauphine Street, New Orleans, Louisiana.

1058
01:11:53,080 --> 01:11:59,080
Mr. Shaw will be charged with participation in a conspiracy to murder John F. Kennedy.

1059
01:11:59,080 --> 01:12:04,080
Clay Shaw was a prominent civic leader. His arrests stunned New Orleans.

1060
01:12:05,080 --> 01:12:11,080
It was an incredible shock when Clay Shaw was arrested.

1061
01:12:11,080 --> 01:12:16,080
Here's a man who, you know, is a pillar of the community.

1062
01:12:16,080 --> 01:12:22,080
They took him in handcuffed and, you know, acting like he was some dread criminal.

1063
01:12:24,080 --> 01:12:29,080
I've always had only the highest and utmost respect and admiration for Mr. Kennedy.

1064
01:12:29,080 --> 01:12:33,080
The charges filed against me have no foundation in fact or in law.

1065
01:12:34,080 --> 01:12:39,080
Garrison never explained why Shaw might have wanted to kill the President.

1066
01:12:39,080 --> 01:12:47,080
He never explained Shaw's role in the plot and rested his entire case on the testimony of one man prepared to implicate Shaw.

1067
01:12:47,080 --> 01:12:53,080
A 26-year-old insurance agent from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Perry Raymond Russo.

1068
01:12:54,080 --> 01:13:00,080
Russo was prepared to testify at trial that while he was visiting the apartment of a friend, David Ferry,

1069
01:13:00,080 --> 01:13:06,080
he witnessed Clay Shaw, Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferry plotting to kill the President.

1070
01:13:06,080 --> 01:13:11,080
David Ferry died, leaving Russo as the only witness to the conspiracy.

1071
01:13:12,080 --> 01:13:18,080
Ferry was dead, Oswald was dead, whoever else was there was gone.

1072
01:13:18,080 --> 01:13:28,080
Perry Russo was the only one who could place, supposedly, Clay Shaw in that room when assassination was being discussed.

1073
01:13:29,080 --> 01:13:33,080
But Russo's testimony was a lie and Garrison knew it.

1074
01:13:34,080 --> 01:13:39,080
A polygraph technician for the New Orleans Police Department gave Russo a lie detector test.

1075
01:13:41,080 --> 01:13:45,080
I asked, did you ever see Clay Shaw at Dave Ferry's apartment?

1076
01:13:45,080 --> 01:13:48,080
He said, Mr. O'Donnell, I don't know.

1077
01:13:48,080 --> 01:13:51,080
I said, what do you mean you don't know?

1078
01:13:51,080 --> 01:13:56,080
I said, Perry, Mr. Shaw was a tall, distinguished looking man.

1079
01:13:56,080 --> 01:13:59,080
If he was there, you would know it.

1080
01:13:59,080 --> 01:14:02,080
I said, now was he there or wasn't he?

1081
01:14:02,080 --> 01:14:04,080
Give me a yes or no answer.

1082
01:14:04,080 --> 01:14:08,080
He said, if I have to give you a yes or no answer, it would be no.

1083
01:14:08,080 --> 01:14:10,080
He was not there.

1084
01:14:11,080 --> 01:14:15,080
It really, it just hit me like a sledgehammer.

1085
01:14:16,080 --> 01:14:21,080
When I told Garrison this, Garrison went into a rage, I mean, just absolute rage.

1086
01:14:21,080 --> 01:14:24,080
Holler and scream and he sold out some.

1087
01:14:24,080 --> 01:14:26,080
I walked out.

1088
01:14:26,080 --> 01:14:33,080
At the end of that, I said, no way can Garrison ever take Clay Shaw to trial.

1089
01:14:33,080 --> 01:14:34,080
No way.

1090
01:14:34,080 --> 01:14:39,080
His only witness, star witness, was just lying.

1091
01:14:40,080 --> 01:14:43,080
But Garrison did put Clay Shaw on trial.

1092
01:14:43,080 --> 01:14:50,080
Perry Russo was his star witness, but his case proved as baseless as Russo's testimony.

1093
01:14:50,080 --> 01:14:56,080
In only 54 minutes, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

1094
01:14:57,080 --> 01:15:04,080
What Jim Garrison and his staff did will go on and go into history, I guess,

1095
01:15:04,080 --> 01:15:08,080
as one of the great injustices of the legal system in this country.

1096
01:15:08,080 --> 01:15:12,080
The entire sorry episode was fading into well-deserved obscurity

1097
01:15:12,080 --> 01:15:17,080
when Oliver Stone's film resurrected Garrison as an American hero.

1098
01:15:18,080 --> 01:15:22,080
And JFK Stone portrays Garrison as a man like only a few others

1099
01:15:22,080 --> 01:15:27,080
whose dogged research into the assassination clearly pointed to conspiracy.

1100
01:15:29,080 --> 01:15:33,080
Jim Garrison, as I've said in other interviews, is a metaphor, is this protagonist.

1101
01:15:33,080 --> 01:15:38,080
I tried to put all the researchers from the 60s and 70s and the 80s into Jim's case.

1102
01:15:38,080 --> 01:15:41,080
I took that, Lerita's dramatic licence.

1103
01:15:47,080 --> 01:15:51,080
Dramatic licence to Mr Stone, but the public took it all to heart.

1104
01:15:53,080 --> 01:15:58,080
This was a package of unfathomable lies, packaged together, though,

1105
01:15:58,080 --> 01:16:03,080
with a cinema artist's great skill that was a blending and a melange

1106
01:16:03,080 --> 01:16:07,080
of real photographs and fictional scenes.

1107
01:16:07,080 --> 01:16:12,080
They merged together with such skill that you were unable to tell the difference.

1108
01:16:13,080 --> 01:16:17,080
The film also takes dramatic licence, as Mr Stone would put it,

1109
01:16:17,080 --> 01:16:20,080
with several fundamental facts beyond dispute.

1110
01:16:20,080 --> 01:16:23,080
Oswald was at best a medium shot.

1111
01:16:23,080 --> 01:16:26,080
The scope was effective on it, too.

1112
01:16:26,080 --> 01:16:29,080
I mean, there's the whole essence of the case to me.

1113
01:16:29,080 --> 01:16:33,080
The guy couldn't do the shooting. Nobody could.

1114
01:16:33,080 --> 01:16:36,080
And they sold this lemon to the American public.

1115
01:16:38,080 --> 01:16:41,080
Hardly. The distance from the sniper's nest in the window

1116
01:16:41,080 --> 01:16:46,080
to the president in the car at the time of the fatal shot was 88 yards.

1117
01:16:46,080 --> 01:16:51,080
For a former Marine sharpshooter, which Oswald was, the shot was well within his ability.

1118
01:16:51,080 --> 01:16:55,080
Well, I have here Oswald's scorebook from the Marine Corps,

1119
01:16:55,080 --> 01:17:00,080
where he, when he did his practising with more or less the same kind of rifle

1120
01:17:00,080 --> 01:17:06,080
that he used against Kennedy, he demonstrated that he was highly competent as a marksman.

1121
01:17:06,080 --> 01:17:11,080
For example, here is a type of target which is shaped very much like the head and shoulders

1122
01:17:11,080 --> 01:17:15,080
of President Kennedy sticking up above the rear seat of the car.

1123
01:17:15,080 --> 01:17:18,080
And this is a 200 yards, which is more than 200 yards,

1124
01:17:18,080 --> 01:17:21,080
which is more than twice the distance of Dallas.

1125
01:17:21,080 --> 01:17:24,080
And this rapid fire, which certainly was true of Dallas,

1126
01:17:24,080 --> 01:17:29,080
and he scores 48 out of a possible 50, which I can tell you is excellent.

1127
01:17:29,080 --> 01:17:33,080
Well, you say this, that's one day. Well, here's another one.

1128
01:17:33,080 --> 01:17:38,080
Same thing, 200 yards, twice the distance, and rapid fire.

1129
01:17:38,080 --> 01:17:41,080
And he scores 49 out of a possible 50.

1130
01:17:41,080 --> 01:17:45,080
So he was not only a very good shot at this long distance,

1131
01:17:45,080 --> 01:17:48,080
but he was consistent.

1132
01:17:48,080 --> 01:17:53,080
They're telling us that Oswald got off three shots with world-class precision

1133
01:17:53,080 --> 01:17:57,080
from a manual bolt-ax and rifle in less than six seconds.

1134
01:17:57,080 --> 01:18:01,080
And according to his Marine buddies, he's got maggot's jaws.

1135
01:18:01,080 --> 01:18:04,080
You know what that means? It wasn't any good.

1136
01:18:04,080 --> 01:18:07,080
Average man would be lucky to get two shots off.

1137
01:18:07,080 --> 01:18:10,080
And I tell you, the first shot would always be the best.

1138
01:18:10,080 --> 01:18:13,080
Here, the third shot's perfect.

1139
01:18:14,080 --> 01:18:18,080
Three shots in less than six seconds is completely wrong.

1140
01:18:18,080 --> 01:18:22,080
The first shot was fired at frame 160 of the Sepruder film,

1141
01:18:22,080 --> 01:18:26,080
the second at frame 223, and the last shot at frame 312.

1142
01:18:26,080 --> 01:18:29,080
So Oswald had 8.3 seconds to shoot.

1143
01:18:30,080 --> 01:18:34,080
Three shots with a rifle in 8.3 seconds.

1144
01:18:34,080 --> 01:18:37,080
For Oswald, that was plenty of time.

1145
01:18:38,080 --> 01:18:42,080
Dr John Latimer has simulated the Kennedy shooting on many occasions.

1146
01:18:42,080 --> 01:18:44,080
He is 89 years old.

1147
01:18:46,080 --> 01:18:50,080
This is exactly like the gun that Oswald used.

1148
01:18:50,080 --> 01:18:54,080
Since he got his shots off in 8.5 seconds,

1149
01:18:54,080 --> 01:18:58,080
I'll show you that it's possible to come close to that, and here we go.

1150
01:18:58,080 --> 01:19:03,080
So we'll slide in our telescope and get off one shot,

1151
01:19:03,080 --> 01:19:09,080
and then a second, and then a third,

1152
01:19:09,080 --> 01:19:13,080
taking a little more time for the last one, as he did.

1153
01:19:13,080 --> 01:19:16,080
The magic bullet enters the President's back,

1154
01:19:16,080 --> 01:19:19,080
headed downward at an angle of 17 degrees.

1155
01:19:19,080 --> 01:19:24,080
It then moves upwards in order to leave Kennedy's body from the front of his neck,

1156
01:19:24,080 --> 01:19:29,080
wound number two, where it waits 1.6 seconds.

1157
01:19:29,080 --> 01:19:33,080
Presumably in midair, where it turns right, then left,

1158
01:19:33,080 --> 01:19:38,080
right, then left, and continues into Connolly's body

1159
01:19:38,080 --> 01:19:41,080
at the rear of his right armpit, wound number three.

1160
01:19:42,080 --> 01:19:46,080
The single bullet that struck Kennedy and Connolly did not hang in midair.

1161
01:19:46,080 --> 01:19:49,080
It did not zigzag right and then left.

1162
01:19:49,080 --> 01:19:53,080
It went straight through the President and into the Governor.

1163
01:19:53,080 --> 01:19:57,080
In the film, diagrams have given Kennedy a very specific view

1164
01:19:57,080 --> 01:20:01,080
In the film, diagrams have Governor Connolly sitting directly in front of the President,

1165
01:20:01,080 --> 01:20:05,080
facing forward at the time of the second shot. Not true.

1166
01:20:05,080 --> 01:20:09,080
Governor Connolly was sitting six inches inboard from the President

1167
01:20:09,080 --> 01:20:12,080
and turned sharply to his right.

1168
01:20:12,080 --> 01:20:17,080
The stone film also shows the two men sitting at the same height. Not true.

1169
01:20:17,080 --> 01:20:22,080
The Governor was three inches lower than the President on a jump seat.

1170
01:20:22,080 --> 01:20:26,080
When the men are seen in their correct positions, it becomes clear.

1171
01:20:26,080 --> 01:20:29,080
There was nothing magic about this bullet at all.

1172
01:20:33,080 --> 01:20:37,080
This is Warren Commission exhibit 399,

1173
01:20:37,080 --> 01:20:41,080
the bullet that passed through the President's neck and the Governor's chest,

1174
01:20:41,080 --> 01:20:45,080
then broke the Governor's wrist and lodged in his left thigh.

1175
01:20:45,080 --> 01:20:48,080
It was found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital.

1176
01:20:48,080 --> 01:20:51,080
In Stone's film, it's referred to as the pristine bullet.

1177
01:20:51,080 --> 01:20:55,080
There's no way, the stone film says, that the bullet could have caused so many wounds

1178
01:20:55,080 --> 01:20:58,080
and emerged virtually unmarked.

1179
01:21:01,080 --> 01:21:06,080
The Malachor-Cacano bullet is meant to be a very penetrating bullet

1180
01:21:06,080 --> 01:21:10,080
to go through people with very little deformity.

1181
01:21:10,080 --> 01:21:13,080
It's meant to go through people without breaking apart.

1182
01:21:13,080 --> 01:21:16,080
And that's just what this did.

1183
01:21:16,080 --> 01:21:19,080
The only bone of substance that that bullet struck

1184
01:21:19,080 --> 01:21:23,080
was Governor Connolly's wrist bone above the thumb,

1185
01:21:23,080 --> 01:21:28,080
which is not a big bone, and for that reason stayed intact

1186
01:21:28,080 --> 01:21:32,080
except for flattening on one surface,

1187
01:21:32,080 --> 01:21:35,080
and that is not a pristine bullet.

1188
01:21:35,080 --> 01:21:39,080
According to the stone film, the bullet didn't hit either man,

1189
01:21:39,080 --> 01:21:43,080
but instead was planted on a hospital stretcher by Jack Ruby

1190
01:21:43,080 --> 01:21:46,080
as part of a conspiracy to frame Oswald.

1191
01:21:46,080 --> 01:21:50,080
But ballistics analysis has proved that this bullet did hit Connolly in the wrist

1192
01:21:50,080 --> 01:21:53,080
and that it was fired from Oswald's rifle.

1193
01:21:56,080 --> 01:22:00,080
The lead fragments that were recovered from Connolly's wrist

1194
01:22:00,080 --> 01:22:06,080
had an amount of antimony that precisely matched the stretcher bullet.

1195
01:22:06,080 --> 01:22:11,080
In fact, there was a 97% probability of a match.

1196
01:22:11,080 --> 01:22:16,080
And also, the microscopic scratches that were made

1197
01:22:16,080 --> 01:22:20,080
as this bullet spun down the rifle barrel

1198
01:22:20,080 --> 01:22:25,080
exactly matched that of the test bullet that was fired from Oswald's rifle.

1199
01:22:25,080 --> 01:22:31,080
This proves conclusively that the stretcher bullet was fired from the same rifle,

1200
01:22:31,080 --> 01:22:35,080
the Oswald rifle that was found on the sixth floor of the depository.

1201
01:22:37,080 --> 01:22:40,080
This is the key shot.

1202
01:22:40,080 --> 01:22:43,080
President going back and to his left.

1203
01:22:43,080 --> 01:22:46,080
Shot from the front and right.

1204
01:22:46,080 --> 01:22:50,080
Totally inconsistent with the shot from the depository.

1205
01:22:50,080 --> 01:22:54,080
Again, back and to the left.

1206
01:22:54,080 --> 01:22:58,080
Back and to the left.

1207
01:22:58,080 --> 01:23:01,080
Back and to the left.

1208
01:23:01,080 --> 01:23:04,080
Back and to the left.

1209
01:23:04,080 --> 01:23:08,080
For some conspiracy theorists, back and to the left is proof

1210
01:23:08,080 --> 01:23:11,080
that the president was shot in the head by a second gunman

1211
01:23:11,080 --> 01:23:15,080
in the head of the president's car on the grassy knoll.

1212
01:23:15,080 --> 01:23:19,080
But back and to the left in no way indicates where a bullet came from.

1213
01:23:19,080 --> 01:23:23,080
Bodies struck by bullets sometimes go forward and sometimes backward.

1214
01:23:25,080 --> 01:23:31,080
The evidence that's definitive in determining whether it was a shot from the front

1215
01:23:31,080 --> 01:23:35,080
or a shot from the back is the entry wound,

1216
01:23:35,080 --> 01:23:39,080
the cratered entry wound on the back of Kennedy's skull,

1217
01:23:39,080 --> 01:23:43,080
which proves that that shot was from the back, not from the front.

1218
01:23:43,080 --> 01:23:49,080
This is the president's position at the moment before he was hit the second time.

1219
01:23:49,080 --> 01:23:52,080
His autopsy x-rays and photographs show the precise location

1220
01:23:52,080 --> 01:23:55,080
where the fatal bullet entered the back of his head.

1221
01:23:55,080 --> 01:23:59,080
A bullet from the grassy knoll would never have been able to do this.

1222
01:23:59,080 --> 01:24:03,080
But from the sixth-floor window of the book depository,

1223
01:24:03,080 --> 01:24:06,080
Lee Harvey Oswald had a direct shot.

1224
01:24:10,080 --> 01:24:16,080
I think the young people of this country, bright and intelligent people,

1225
01:24:16,080 --> 01:24:20,080
believe everything that was said in the movie.

1226
01:24:20,080 --> 01:24:22,080
And that's sad.

1227
01:24:22,080 --> 01:24:27,080
The movie is skillfully woven together to put you inside the action

1228
01:24:27,080 --> 01:24:31,080
so that you're in the 1960s and you feel Dealey Plaza.

1229
01:24:31,080 --> 01:24:33,080
It's entertaining, it's a thriller.

1230
01:24:33,080 --> 01:24:37,080
But I think the American public has seen movies and know what they're about

1231
01:24:37,080 --> 01:24:39,080
and they know what's real and what...

1232
01:24:39,080 --> 01:24:41,080
I think the film viewers can make up their own minds.

1233
01:24:41,080 --> 01:24:43,080
I think the American people are intelligent.

1234
01:24:43,080 --> 01:24:48,080
A movie maker like Oliver Stone is going to reach many tens of millions,

1235
01:24:48,080 --> 01:24:51,080
more people than any historian will with a book.

1236
01:24:51,080 --> 01:24:56,080
So the problem that I and most historians would have with Oliver Stone is not his talent.

1237
01:24:56,080 --> 01:25:01,080
He's a wonderful filmmaker, but that he's used this to put certain myths

1238
01:25:01,080 --> 01:25:05,080
into the American bloodstream that abide to this day.

1239
01:25:06,080 --> 01:25:10,080
Do not forget your dying king.

1240
01:25:12,080 --> 01:25:16,080
Show this world that this is still a government of the people,

1241
01:25:16,080 --> 01:25:19,080
for the people and by the people.

1242
01:25:21,080 --> 01:25:25,080
Nothing as long as you live will ever be more important.

1243
01:25:28,080 --> 01:25:30,080
It's up to you.

1244
01:25:31,080 --> 01:25:34,080
In real life, Jim Garrison never made this speech.

1245
01:25:36,080 --> 01:26:02,160
The

1246
01:26:02,160 --> 01:26:08,160
In the 1990s, a determined effort was made to end this conspiracy thinking

1247
01:26:08,160 --> 01:26:10,160
about the Kennedy assassination.

1248
01:26:10,160 --> 01:26:15,160
And an assassination reviews board was created to go through the documents

1249
01:26:15,160 --> 01:26:18,160
and make the documents public.

1250
01:26:18,160 --> 01:26:24,160
60,000 documents accumulating to more than four million pages were made public.

1251
01:26:25,160 --> 01:26:31,160
Congress created the assassination record review board in response to Oliver Stone's film JFK

1252
01:26:31,160 --> 01:26:34,160
because so many people were convinced by the movie.

1253
01:26:35,160 --> 01:26:39,160
Today at the National Archives, people tore over the documents that were released,

1254
01:26:39,160 --> 01:26:41,160
desperate to find a conspiracy.

1255
01:26:41,160 --> 01:26:44,160
But to date, they haven't found it.

1256
01:26:46,160 --> 01:26:50,160
I don't care how much you want it, believe it, feel it, whatever else.

1257
01:26:50,160 --> 01:26:54,160
At some point you have to say, there is no evidence.

1258
01:26:55,160 --> 01:26:59,160
There is no doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy.

1259
01:26:59,160 --> 01:27:02,160
There's every reason to doubt that he had accomplices.

1260
01:27:04,160 --> 01:27:07,160
It is inconceivable that all these years later, 40 years later,

1261
01:27:07,160 --> 01:27:12,160
that this still could have been kept a secret, given a society like ours,

1262
01:27:12,160 --> 01:27:16,160
which is so open in so many ways, so porous.

1263
01:27:17,160 --> 01:27:22,160
I know that millions and millions of people in this country believe there was a conspiracy

1264
01:27:22,160 --> 01:27:27,160
because I think it's very difficult for them to accept the idea that someone

1265
01:27:27,160 --> 01:27:33,160
as inconsequential as Oswald could have killed someone as consequential as Kennedy.

1266
01:27:39,160 --> 01:27:42,160
There was no conspiracy at all.

1267
01:27:43,160 --> 01:27:47,160
The conspiracy was in the mind of Lee Oswald.

1268
01:27:47,160 --> 01:27:53,160
On November 22, 1963, the 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald was on the sixth floor

1269
01:27:53,160 --> 01:27:55,160
of the Texas School Book Depository.

1270
01:27:55,160 --> 01:27:58,160
He was in the window above Elm Street,

1271
01:27:58,160 --> 01:28:01,160
and the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy,

1272
01:28:01,160 --> 01:28:07,160
was in the motorcade that passed just below at 12.30 p.m. Central Standard Time.

1273
01:28:07,160 --> 01:28:11,160
And the rest, of course, is history.