Did Lee Harvey Oswald Assassinate JFK Alone? w/ Gerald Posner

For almost sixty years, the Kennedy assassination has occupied the hearts and minds of Americans. Hundreds of books have been written about the fateful day at Dealey Plaza in November of 1963, often offering elaborate and convoluted conspiracy theories about government plots, the Mafia, Cuba and the KGB.

My guest is investigative journalist and bestselling author Gerald Posner. He believes that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in murdering President Kennedy. His critically acclaimed book, “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK” was a 1994 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for History.

Gerald Posner’s website: www.posner.com

Transcript:

Erik: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Most Notorious podcast. For my American listeners who celebrated Hope You had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. So I am very excited to introduce this week’s guest, Gerald Posner. He is a New York Times bestselling author. His books include Hitler’s Children: Sons and Daughters of Leaders of The Third Reich Talk About Themselves and Their Fathers. And Mengele: the Complete History and Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King. The book he is here to talk about today was a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for history. It is called Case Closed, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. So great to have you here.

Thank you for coming on.

Gerald: Oh, thank you Erik, very much for having me on. It’s great to be with you on the podcast.

Erik: Yeah, so, so the JFK assassination has been a topic that I’ve, I haven’t covered on this show before. Not because I don’t find it interesting, but because it, it seems a little overwhelming. There have been hundreds and hundreds of books written about. Mostly focused on conspiracy theories. So how did you first decide to enter the fray, and did you have your own theories about the assassination before you began, or did you go into it not really expecting to reach a conclusion?

Gerald: Yeah, I, i, well, you know, when you say hundreds of books written about it in so many different theories, you know, so what was the delusional behavior that led me to believe I could write a book about it and, and do something new that hadn’t been done almost 30 years after the case.

And yeah, I did have a feeling about, you know, I was at law school when the House Select committee had reexamined the Kennedy assassination in the late seventies, and they concluded that it was likely a conspiracy. And I’d followed it, but I wasn’t what you call a conspiracy buff. I didn’t know the case inside and out, but it had always been of interest to me.

And, you know, I’d come out of law school and practiced law for a few years. So that idea of. Evidence and what might be there had always intrigued me. And then I went on to sort of do some books. You mentioned some of them like the biography on the Nazi Fugitive, Joseph Mangele.

And I went to Random House in 19 89 and said, You know, I’ve had this thought in the back of my mind. I’d love to do a book on the Kennedy assassination. I don’t think you can solve the case. Clearly, I wasn’t crazy enough to think that was possible, but I think as a lawyer, I know all the theories can’t be right.

It can’t be that the Cubans killed him and the, and or the KGB killed him, or the CIA killed him, or the mafia killed him. It can’t be a front shooter or two shooters from the back 10 shooters or three bullet holes. What let me go through as an attorney, look at all of the evidence and narrow down to the four or five issues that can’t be answered. And then that will become a primer for anybody who wants to study the assassination. Say, read this book first. You’ll find out all the things that are just wrong and false. And then you’ll find out what the real mystery questions are. And if you asked me at that time what I thought had happened without studying it, I thought probably the mafia was involved.

And that was because of Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Two days after the assassination, it had all the, the appearance to me of a mob rub out. So that was my bias going in. And Random House said, no, not interested. No one will really read a book like that. Sorry. And went ahead and that’s when I did the, the book on sons and Daughters of Nazi War criminals, Hitler’s Children.

Then Oliver Stone did the one good thing, you know, great filmmaker, terrible historian that he ever did for the Kennedy assassination. He did his film JFK in 1990, and I went back in 91 and went back to a random house and said, what about that book on Kennedy? And they said, you know, the assassination has sort of come on the radar for a whole new generation.

A book. Like that’s not gonna be a big book, but maybe there’s an audience for it now. And so that’s what I set out to do. It was not to solve the case, you know, case closed as the, as the title is, which I understand is an arrogant title in a case that will never be closed for most people. But the original idea was just sort of to settle it down to a handful of issues. It was about halfway through that research that I started to think, you know I think there is an answer to this, and it might just be the simple one of Oswald alone.

Erik: So important to your case is, is really understanding Oswald, his childhood, his military service the time he spent in Russia. His past experiences and how they shaped him into the person he was when he arrived in Dallas in the fall of 1963.

Gerald: Yeah, I think that, you know, Oswald was a cardboard stick figure in some ways. And certainly was in many of the books that are best sellers that, you know, very, very elaborate and Byzantine conspiracies in the death of the president. Oswald just sort of appears as this character who is too foolish to understand or do anything different, or he’s a cutout, he’s a, you know, a partial spy.

He, he doesn’t know what’s happening all around him. And it wasn’t until I got into the details of Oswald’s life, you’re right, this incredibly troubled, you know, childhood. We the, we have an unusual thing with Lee Harvey Oswald. We have somebody accused of assassinating, a political leader who had a psychiatrist do an examination on him when he was just a, a young teen.

At 13 years old, he was sent to a youth house for truancy not going to school, which seems a pretty light offense nowadays by standards. But the psychiatrist who was examined later after the assassination remembered him very well because he said, the reason I remember him is because he’d been sent to a youth house for a very minor offense, nothing very big, but he stood out because he had this aggressive sociopathic, sort of assaultive quasi violent personality that I thought needed either further treatment or possibly commitment.

That’s fairly unusual. It doesn’t mean he’s gonna go on to shoot the president, but you’re dealing with an unusual guy in Oswald, and he goes on from this troubled childhood to join the Marines because his brother had, because he thinks it’s gonna change his life and make it much better. And it’s terrible.

Some of his fellow Marines think he’s gay. They throw him in the shower, they call him Mrs. Oswald. He starts to read Russian language papers in the middle of the Cold War. They call him Osvaldovitch. He gets out of the Marines and he defects to the Soviet Union. In the heart of the Cold War thinking the Soviets will say, great, you’re a former Marine, you’re a hero.

And they tell him to go home and he tries to kill himself. So, you know, and from there it just keeps going on. But you are right. The, the background to Oswald really gives an answer to the why of the assassination. And I think you know this very well when you talk to, to authors and writers who have covered crimes.

If you don’t have an understanding for the motivation. Don’t have an understanding for why the murderer may have carried out the acts. It’s hard for people to believe it happened, and I think that’s one of the great failures in the Warren Commission and other studies of the assassination say, never really got into who Oswald was.

And one last thing, if I can say Erik, there was something else that changed my mind as I went through. It wasn’t just Oswald, it was what you could do with the evidence as a researcher investigator. Coming on 30 years after the murder of the President, that couldn’t be done by the FBI in 1964 when they were doing their work for the Warren commission.

So the Warren commission had to guess at some of the sequence of the shots, and they got it wrong. It turned out. Now ballistics experts were able to come in you know, nearly three decades later and tell you exactly what happened. So instead of the, the first shot hitting the president, which the Warren Commission thought had happened, that shot misses and the next two.

Take place over about 11 and a half seconds as opposed to the much more compressed five seconds that the Warren Commission thought. They also can explain with modern ballistics how the so-called magic bullet happens, and there’s no magic to it at all. So science had advanced to a certain degree. There had been questions by conspiracy theorists about whether the x-rays from the president’s autopsy and the pictures had been faked.

You can answer those questions now with a digital analysis. It hadn’t been available in 1964, so it was a combination of what was, could be updated in terms of the physical evidence and the investigation combined with the understanding of Oswald. That led me to the conclusion that he was the only shooter that day in Dallas on November 22nd.

Then the more difficult question is, was he there for himself or was he doing it for who?

Erik: Why the captivation with this case? I mean, there have been assassinations of other presidents. Why have so many books been written about this one? Why is it so hotly debated? Why do people want to believe that there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy?

Gerald: Well, you know, as to why I’ll start, I’ll answer the last part first and then back as to why people want to see conspiracy theories. I think that there is a historian he in the death of a president, William Manchester said. If you take World War II, for instance, on one side of the equation, you have the Holocaust, 6 million dead Jewish victims, millions killed also as, as Soviet prisoners.

Gay political dissidents, gypsies. On the other side of the equation, you have the Nazis the third, right, the SS. So you sort of have. The worst crime and the worst criminals. They match in some ways in the Kennedy assassination. On one side of the equation, on the on the scale, you have this young charismatic president with so much potential for the future.

After the gray 1950s in the Eisenhower years in, you come to the sixties in Technocolor and all the promise of Camelot and the potential for what might happen the other side of the scale. You have this just turned 24 year old sociopathic loser in life, Lee Harvey Oswald, armed with a cheap rifle and and a lousy scope who manages of the three shots to pull off one?

That’s the fatal shot. And he ends it all and it doesn’t feel very satisfying if you somehow put a conspiracy on that side of the scale with ahold if, if Kennedy was killed because he was gonna take us out of Vietnam or he was killed cuz he was gonna pull apart the CIA or the Russians were mad because he humiliated them at the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It gives a more meaning to Kennedy’s death. So I understand why people tend to gravitate toward that, but I have to say the reason I think conspiracy theories will exist forever on this is because you have the as person accused of being the assassin and killed two days later in police custody. So by a fellow, Jack Ruby, who looks like he’s out of central casting, is a mobster, you know, the hat and the suit and everything else. He’s running a strip club in Dallas. He’s a want to be tough guy. So no wonder you’re off and running cuz Oswald never has this day in court. The evidence is never presented. Then the Warren Commission goes ahead, this panel of experts appointed by the president which we wouldn’t trust a blue ribbon panel anymore in the country.

And they come to a conclusion as Oswald alone. They seal many of the documents sometimes in, in respect to the Kennedy family and others who didn’t want them out. But here we are almost 60 years later and we’re still waiting for the current president, president Biden, possibly in December of 2022 to release the last few thousand that are still there.

No wonder people think there’s something else behind the entire case. And one last thing is that I think it’s first – today we are accustomed if a, a terrible event takes place to have dozens of cell phone videos, almost immediately, you know, everybody’s got their, their phones out. This is the first time we see it play out on, on video the amateur home movie of the assassination, taken by a Dallas dress maker who was trying out his eight millimeter new Bellen Howell camera that day and happens to catch the entire assassination sequence.

No sound, but just the video. Without that, we’d really be left in the dark about what happened, but it was, remember a rifle shot from a distance the first time we had seen that in American assassinations and the assassin. Oswald gets away in the immediate aftermath of the crime. So now it conjures up all the ideas of, you know, the, the day of the assassins.

The, you know, the Day of the Jackal. Professional assassins is the same mystery that happens with the King assassination, a rifle shot from a distance and the assassin gets away in the immediate aftermath. So you don’t have a situation like you do with Sirhan Sirhan and Bobby Kennedy, or let’s say with John Lennon when Chapman shoots him, or when Reagan is shot by Hinkley, where the person comes up with a revolver and is tackled at the scene.

And even if there are questions about conspiracy, you know who the shooter was in this case, in the Kennedy case, you didn’t know who the shooter was initially. They have to be identified later. And when they’re identified as Oswalt, people say, I don’t think that person was capable of it. Add to all of what happens in the late sixties, Vietnam lies from the government, Watergate, Iran Contra later people lose faith in government. So I think that the Kennedy assassination holds a fascination because it seems to be the start of the decline of a loss of faith in government in many ways as well.

Erik: Right, right. Yeah. So the first part of your book documents Oswald’s Life, and it was like a slow burn that the pressure kept building and building. Oswald kept getting more and more unhinged, so angry, so resentful, and someone asks him at, at one point in his early life, I think they asked him, who, who do you like more boys or girls? And he replied, I just dislike everyone.

Gerald: Yeah, it’s very, it’s very good. And that almost is almost his attitude throughout. As a matter of fact, he takes it even over to, you know countries afterwards. You know, in the sense that I mentioned before, he had, he had sort of in the middle of the Cold War, gone over in 59 and had defected the Soviet Union.

They after he tried to kill himself, they let him stay, but they move him out to this provincial capital in Minsk, and they, and he’s stuck there. And he doesn’t really like Russia at first. He thinks that’s gonna be the great panacea for politics by the time he returns to the United States and he marries a young Russian girl. Marina, he takes us as his bride and they come back to the U.S.. They go through this slow process to get repatriated. He, he sort of says, you know, which country do you dislike? He says, a pox on both of them. He doesn’t like Russia, he doesn’t like the United States. He’s choosing the lesser of two evils in coming back to America.

And when he does get back to America in, in 1961, you see a somebody who thinks he’s smarter than he is. He’s, he’s, he’s certainly not, he has a political philosophy that, you know, at first he’s pretty much just a straight socialist to communism. But then he mixes it up a little bit. He’s got a little bit of anarchy in there, and he does see himself as a political warrior of sort.

So when he settles back into the US he’s had trouble holding a job. He’s not getting very far, but he commits himself to changing the world by 1963 by assassination. And it’s not Jack Kennedy. The person that he’s gonna try to kill is a retired army general. Edwin Walker. Most people who know about the Kennedy case have never heard of Edwin Walker. He was going to run for the Governorship of Texas. He was a right wing political activist. And Oswald thought that he was like the next Hitler. So stopping Walker was preventing Walker from becoming a governor who would be this reactionary right wing fascist governor.

And he, he forms his own little plot to go ahead and kill Walker. Gets to outside his house, takes a shot at him in April of 63 and he thinks he killed Walker. He leaves, but Walker is saved by literally a matter of a couple of inches because the bullet grazes along the edge of a window frame. That’s hard to see from where Oswald was outside the the house and just deflects enough to miss Walker. Nobody at that time knows that Oswald’s the shooter, not even you know, except for Marina, his wife, and she gets him to move to New Orleans because she’s so afraid he is gonna shoot at Walker again. And what is Lee Harvey Oswald this 23 year old fellow who’s defected to the Soviet Union, he’s come back to America.

He can’t get anything going for himself. He’s failed in the Walker assassination. He decides the real revolution is in Cuba with Fidel Castro. Forget Khrushchev and Russia. Forget the Americans and Kennedy. And in the sweltering heat of New Orleans in the summer of 63, he forms his own organization, A Fair Play for Cuba.

He stands outside, they don’t have a lot of money. He runs off these pamphlets and he hands them out to people to join his organization and he gets zero volunteers. Nobody joins him. It’s another failed venture. So by the end of the summer, Oswald’s decided he’s going to go to Cuba. That’s he’s leaving the United States entirely and he convinces Marina to go back to Dallas for a while.

She stays with a friend of theirs that they know. And when the White House announces on September 20, That Jack Kennedy’s gonna take a trip to Dallas. This political trip in Texas the coming November, Oswald’s on a 24-hour bus ride, overnight bus ride down to Mexico City and in Mexico City he spends a couple of weeks going to the Cuban and Soviet embassy trying to get a visa to go to Cuba, and they turn him down, goes to the Soviet Embassy twice.

They cable the KGB about him because he, you know, he speaks rudimentary Russian, the KGB cables back and says, you know, essentially he’s a nut. Get rid of him. And at one point, Oswald takes his pistol out. He owns a pistol and a rifle. By this time that he’s ordered through mail order, he slams it on the desk.

The Soviets get rid of him when he comes back to Dallas. Erik, in early October of 63, about six weeks before the assassination, this is a fellow who has, again, now failed in the last thing he wanted to do, which was to get over to Cuba. He has trouble getting a job. He finally gets one at this book depository.

And the Oswald that I came to understand literally was somebody who, Jack Kennedy was a gift on a silver platter. Meaning that when he opens the newspaper a couple of days before Kennedy’s motorcade goes in front of the place that he has a job, and he reads and sees that the motorcade will be going right in front of where he works.

This is a man who thought he’d enter the history books by killing Edwin Walker, this retired army general, and he suddenly has a chance. To throw a cog into the machinery of government at the very highest level. Kennedy himself, the Oswald that I came to understand could have been in the sixth floor of a building in downtown Moscow, shooting at Nikita Khrushchev.

It wasn’t so much hatred about Kennedy as it was about the system, and he was gonna change history. And in some ways he obviously did. The, unfortunately, here we are talking about him all these decades later, he managed to pull it off. It was the one thing in his life he was successful about. And that’s unfortunate because it was the, the worst thing in his life he was ever successful about.

Erik: Right. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about that because it’s always been a little confusing to me. So Oswald is a proponent of, of Communism. He tries to shoot Walker a right wing activist, and then he suddenly shifts to Kennedy, who is quite a bit left politically to Walker. What prompts him to focus his sights on Kennedy if his motivations are political, that that’s something that I’ve…

Gerald: No, you’re right. And I think that some of it was Castro motivated. He had been focusing on for nearly six months on Cuba. He knew that after the Bay of Pigs, that the Americans were certainly trying to destabilize and overthrow Castro.

He didn’t know about the, the secret plots. You know, people say that the, the CIA and the Mafia were in a partnership to kill a head of state in the early 1960s. Turns out that’s true. It wasn’t JFK, it was Castro. They, they tried six or seven different times. They failed every time. They couldn’t get the exploding pen to him.

They couldn’t get the scuba suit filled with poison to him. They didn’t even wound him. But, you know, the they, they were, they were out after him. And I think that for Oswald Kennedy represented the system in America that he had come to detest – this system of capitalism, just as Khrushchev represented for him, the corruption of this of communism that the Russian state had ruined communism.

So Castro was the real deal. And I don’t think for a second, it’s hard for some people without understanding Oswald. To appreciate how happenstance a political assassination could be of somebody who’s the president of the United States. And what I mean by that is that you would think that if you’re out to kill the president, it was a long term obsession.

It was something that you lived with day in and day out. Like Sirhan Sirhan wrote in his notebooks, you know, for weeks and weeks, Bobby Kennedy must die. Bobby Kennedy must die, was furious with him over the approval of jets for Israel in, in the war. The, that’s a different issue here. You have somebody that might have been ambivalent in some ways, but it was a strike against the system and it wasn’t a suicide mission.

What I, what I mean by that is he brought his rifle into the Book Depository where he worked, the place in which the motorcade would pass that day in a brown paper bag wrapped. And he told the person who drove him to work that day, cuz Oswald didn’t have a driver’s license. He was learning to drive. He told him it was curtain rods.

The place where he was living was a rooming house. And there were no curtains in his room. There were nothing to replace. But he said there were curtain rods. That rifle that he brought in. He wasn’t going to take it out and try to kill the president if there were people on the floor that he was trying to set up on, who were his coworkers.

They all left for lunch 30 minutes before. None of them came back. He didn’t know. He had never been to a presidential motorcade before. He had no idea what secret service protection would be. For all he knew they might have secret Service agents in the building or might have them on another tall building like the Dal-Tex next door looking over.

He wasn’t going to be there to be arrested and or killed, so he would’ve taken the rifle home. We will never know. In American politics or in European politics or wherever else, how many times somebody disgruntled or troubled went to a political rally and wanted to try to take a shot at a political leader and then never got the opportunity and ended up just going back home.

And that was the end of it. Bobby Kennedy, remember, was going to leave through the front of the Ambassador Hotel after he won the primary, but he was so tired and was so late, he decided the last moment to go back through the back way, which swerves through the kitchen. That’s where Sirhan was. If he had left through the front, he would’ve missed him.

That happenstance. George Wallace, when he was shot, Brenner couldn’t quite get to the front to shoot Wallace, but Wallace came back to hug a baby and moved right toward B Brenner, who then was able to get the shot off. So sometimes there’s a bit of luck involved with these cases, and that was certainly the situation for Oswald.

But I don’t think that, you know, Oswald literally only had a couple of days to decide this was something he was gonna try. Its one last thing. If I can just say. I think a lot of your listeners might be surprised that there is this, there’s a relationship Oswald has with Marina, his wife, his Russian wife, in which at times he’s abusive.

He, he batters her at times and she’s dependent on him because she’s in a strange country and she doesn’t speak English very well. And other times he might be the only person he’s really ever attached to that he has to go to visit her the night before the assassination because he needs to pick up the gun, which is being stored in, the rifle is being stored in a garage at the house where Marina is staying.

And he says to Marina, because they’re, they’re separated at this time. He says, please come back. Move in with me. I’ve saved up enough money. I’ll buy your washer, you know, and dryer. I’ll buy you that. We can have it now. Please come back. And she rebuffs him. She’s really tough that night. She says, no, I’m not gonna do it yet.

I’m not doing it. Was he serious? If she had said yes, Would he have not tried to kill Kennedy the next day? I don’t know the answer to that, but you know, the, the next morning she woke up, she said at one point during the night she had put his, her foot against his when they were sleeping together, and he pushed it away with sort of a ferocity and she thought to herself my he’s in a mean mood.

When she woke up the next day, he’d already left for work, but he had left on their dresser draw er almost $300, which is about their entire life savings. So he had left that for her. She didn’t see it at first, but in a little teacup he had also left his wedding ring. He’d never taken that off. So it was the only time he had done that.

So it was sort of his goodbye to her, and it was very hard to determine when he’s making this plaintive plea to her the night before for this long period of time. You know, let’s get back together, you know? Is the difference between Jack Kennedy being dead, Marina going with him or not? I’m not sure.

Erik: Yeah, that was a really rough relationship, poor Marina, and he treated her so terribly. Extreme emotional and physical abuse, and it just got worse and worse as time went on. It was rough to read.

Gerald: Yeah, it’s very, it, it, it’s, it is really remarkable because I think that, for instance, after the assassination, it would’ve been very difficult maybe for investigators to know that Oswald had ever been the one who fired the shot at Edwin Walker. The reason they found out was Marina, who provided them, his, his books that he had done, his little surveillance photos that he had taken to the house, told them the entire process of what had happened.

Many of your listeners might have seen on the internet if they do a Google search for Oswald, for backyard photos, seen Oswald all dressed in black holding a copy of the militant, you know, a left wing publication at the time. And his rifle and another time with his pistol, sort of looking like, you know, a, a dangerous character.

There was debate for decades about whether those photos were real or not, but Marina never hesitated. She said, I, I took those pictures. I remember when he came down that day, dressed all in back and with his gun and said, you know, take these pictures of me in the backyard. I thought he was crazy and I was worried the neighbors would see something and report it.

So, you know, Marina turns out to be sort of indispensable and piecing everything together because she’s the only one that has a view of what’s happening with Oswald day in and day out. And I think that she’s an eyewitness to history in the end, not expecting to be at all but much the victim during their relationship.

Erik: Why do people question those photographs? Is it because he, he looks militant? Is it because he was brandishing guns? Does that suggest to some people that he was ready to kill someone? Why the issue?

Gerald: Yeah, so I think the interesting thing about the, the photographs is that what really sets it off is not just the fact that Oswald was holding, you know, his guns and so therefore, you know, he’s, it looks as though he’s dangerous, but that he’s, he’s holding a copy of, you know, this magazine, which is a, a solid left wing magazine in terms of militant, and the problem with it is, People who thought that you know what? I think that the right wing killed Kennedy, maybe the CIA because he was furiouser than me.

He removed the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles. And they were mad with him. It must have been a right wing plot. Therefore they look at this picture with Oswald holding his guns and holding a left wing publication and they say, ah, that has to be a setup. That’s a fake picture. Because the right wing is making us believe that this fellow is not only the assassin, but that he’s a leftwinger.

So it’s everything you know, is immediately countered. There’s sort of an instinctive reaction to what it is. If Oswald had been holding a copy of the John Birch society, The John Birch Society was a very militant right wing organization, maybe the, there would’ve been a response on the other side that said, oh, they’re painting him as a rightwinger, he must be a, it must have been done by a communist group.

It’s so remarkable that it’s really the publication more than anything else that makes people say, I don’t think he would’ve, this wasn’t the real person. Somehow this is fake. Now. The tests had been run on those pictures from hundreds and hundreds of times. The latest technology that had been used on them in 1992 or 1993 when I was just finishing the work on the book again, concluded as had the House select Committee when they examined in the late seventies, no evidence whatsoever of fakery.

They that you can’t find anything. When I went back to some of the skeptics of those pictures and I said, look, the pictures themselves appear to be real. They still had questions. They said, no, we don’t believe it. The shadows aren’t right. It doesn’t look correct. And then I would say, but Marina. Marina said she took them.Why would Marina lie about them? And they said, well, because in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, she was worried about being deported or jailed. Maybe she would be charged as an accomplice. All right, I said, fine. So let’s say that she was afraid at first and she said she took the pictures, but now she’s an American citizen.

She’s living here for, you know at that time it was 30 years now, nearly 60 years. Why wouldn’t she today say the difference? And they say, because she has said it for so long, she believes it to be true. Now, let me tell you, Erik, if you get to that point where the best argument you have is that the witness who says that they did something really is lying, but they don’t know they’re lying because they said the lie for so long, they now believe it.

Let me tell you, I, I’m looking for better evidence than that.

Erik: Yeah. I, I want to ask you about the rifle and his ability to use it effectively. Tho those have both been questioned. People argue that his rifle was garbage and that he was a terrible shot.

Gerald: Yeah. I think that, you know, there’s two things with, with Oswald that’s sort of interesting is that he, when he gets into the Marines so this is early on, so I understand this.

He is, goes in, in, in 56. On the range he shot, I think it was two 12. That’s two points over the score required for a sharpshooter. That’s the second highest in the Marine Corps. That means he could hit a standing position, a 10 inch bullseye from a minimum of 200 yards. Eight times out of 10. When he got outta the Marines three years later, he is, motivation was really low. He was disgusted at the Marines and he, you know, hadn’t practiced. He went on a still hit 1 91 enough to qualify as a marksman. Now. That being said, it doesn’t mean he could pull off the assassination. Three years later almost four years later. And the questions about the gun, look, it, it’s, it’s a good killing machine.

It’s an Italian World War II Carcano that shoots a 6.5 millimeter 160 grain, fully jacketed bullet. That bullet is enough to kill anybody, but it’s not a great gun. Certainly not a high, high speed, new cutting edge Remington. It’s not the latest and greatest, but the one thing that is, I think, can’t be argued, even if somebody wants to say that there were multiple assassins that day on Dealey Plaza, is that the, the only bullets that hit the president and the governor of Texas that day are tied ballistically to that gun, to the exclusion of any other gun in the world. Which means that even if you had a world class assassin using the gun, that was the gun they used. You wanna say the gun, and I don’t say you, but if somebody wants to say the gun is junky, it’s not a great gun, it’s not good, it’s a bolt action gun. Understood. But whoever killed the president that day, take out Oswald for a second. Used Oswald’s gun. So that means that you then have to ask the question, did Oswald use the gun that day? And Marina recounts, you know, how many times and when they would be sitting in New Orleans he would sit outside the small apartment they had, just doing what I called dry runs, operating the bolt to make sure you operated it, you know, fast and quick.

When they say he’s not a great shot, I say, well, he was good enough for that day, three shots and one of them missed entirely the first shot, which is at the sharpest angle likely sort of deflected by a tree, which blocks most of his view. It goes about 400 yards out from the depository , nicks a curbstone and wounds a bystander, James Tate.

The second shot is the so-called magic bullet. You know, it’s the bullet that wounds Kennedy doesn’t hit any bone, it’s non-fatal, and then wounds Connolley sitting in front of Kennedy, if that’s the last shot. Kennedy lives no assassination, and the third shot is the one that Oswald has the longest time to prepare for.

So after the first shot, he misses, he’s got three and a half seconds to operate the bolt. Aim again through his cheap four power scope and, and take the second shot. He hits Kennedy in the high right rear section near the neck, but it goes right out the front of the neck. No bone hit. Then he has a full five to five and a half seconds, operates the bolt aims again. At the, at the point of the headshot, Kennedy looks about 25 yards away in terms of the scope. For Oswald. The luck that broke for him is that unfortunately the driver of the limousine did all the things wrong. So the driver of the limousine that day, William Greer was the oldest member of the security detail secret Service.

He was 52 years old. He told the Warren Commission, I heard the first shot. I knew it was a rifle. I knew it was a gunshot. I looked around to look at the president and I saw the second shot and he saw him hit. And then I turned back around and I hit the gas and I was accelerating outta Dealey Plaza.

When the third shot was hit, I heard this terrible sound in the back. Now that’s just not true. The reason we know it’s not is the film. The film doesn’t lie. It’s better than eyewitness recollections. And the film shows that Greer, the driver, actually looked around to look at the president after the second shot.

He slows the car down, which is only moving 10 to 12 miles an hour. It’s now moving at five to seven miles an hour. It’s not taking any evasive action. Kennedy is sitting. Because he’s wrapped in a back brace. We forget about that. His head’s low a little bit to the left. Oswald gets the straight on shot without any evasive movement and still almost misses.

He catches Kennedy in the high right rear portion of the skull, an inch and a half higher he would’ve missed. Kennedy would be alive. We now know with Reagan, when he was shot by Hinckley, if the shot had been just an inch over to the left, Reagan would’ve been dead. And sometimes that literally is the difference between a successful assassination or one that isn’t.

And so with Oswald, when people say, Hey, not a great rifle, I always say, well, that’s the rifle used. Then they say, Oswald, how do we know he was really as good a shot as he was in the Marines? Well, three shots. Only one really works for him. He was good enough that day.

Erik: Yeah, so interesting. John Shrank who tried to kill Teddy Roosevelt during a speech – he had bad luck. The bullet that he, he fired at Roosevelt should have killed him, but it went through a copy of his speech he had had tucked in his jacket. And then I think it went through his spectacle case and Roosevelt survived and even finished his speech to, to great dramatic effect. So luck is, is definitely important.

Gerald: I, I mean, you know, but that is one of the reasons, by the way, that I think that when we talk about that, you know, people don’t like to think there’s good or bad luck in general, you know, in life, unless they’re playing the lottery or something. So, to, to say that an assassination has an element of luck, yes.

You’re talking serendipity, circumstances, how it plays out. Agreed. The, but there is that involvement. I mean, even. In the case of the limousine with Kennedy, there was no bubble top on that day. They, the day was warm and beautiful day, and they decided to do without the bubble top on the car for the Secret Service.

Now, that’s not bulletproof, but maybe it would’ve reflected in the sun and blocked Oswald’s view completely. You know, you’re, you’re not clear on that. There’s so many things that you sort of play through in your head about what could have been done, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at the film the Zapruder film, you know, and I almost wanna say to the car when it’s turning the corner, go back, you know, turn around or get back.

I look at the the head of the Secret Service that day was inside the, the front of the car, the right front seat of the car, in the passenger seat in front of the governor. And you don’t see him jumping over the governor and onto the president. His first reaction isn’t to jump on, he’s sort of reacting slowly.

There is one Secret Service agents, Clint Hill, who jumps on at the back of the car after the third shot. He’s actually the agent assigned to Mrs. Kennedy. And he tries to climb in cuz he’s trying to protect her or what’s left of the president. So, you know, you look at those things and you’re right, they, they have to break just right, I use the word luck, but it’s just that bit where everything falls into place correctly. And and Schrank’s a good example where it didn’t, with Teddy, with Teddy, you’re right.

Erik: That’s part of the problem too, right? It’s hard for some to fathom that, that these things would all have had to have happened perfectly in perfect order.

Gerald: True. But I, but I think then it’s compounded because we don’t just have a disgruntled person who’s mad at the system hates Kennedy, hates America, whatever else who decides to do it. You have a just, he turned 24, the month before 24 years old. Not many people had defected to the Soviet Union in the heart of the Cold War and then decided to come back cuz they didn’t like it.

The not many people were handing out in the middle of the after the Bay of Pigs and all the, the, you know, the sort of the standoff on the Cuban Missile Crisis when we literally stood the Russians down because they had put nuclear weapons and missiles inside of Cuba. Not many people were walking around in an American City asking people to volunteer their time for Fidel Castro on communist Cuba.

So he was an unusual character. And then you get him killed two days later by a guy who looks like he has ties to the mafia. And we learned then the mafia hates the Kennedys because Bobby Kennedy, Jack’s brother is Attorney General and is really going after them and trying to break them up. As I’m saying it to you, I understand why people wholeheartedly embrace conspiracy theories.

It because it’s easy from a distance to look at it, or as you said, when we started this, you know, conversation, you said you stayed away from it because it looks like it’s such a moras because there are so many different things. It is hard to imagine that you could cut through that and come to what looks like a simple conclusion that Oswald did it.

I mean, I remember halfway through my research on Case Closed, I met with the editor, my editor at Random House, Bob Loomis and the head of Random House, Harry Evans who had been the editor of the London Sunday Times before – great investigative reporter. And I said to them, I don’t think you need to do a book that says, here’s, here are the four or five issues left in the Kennedy assassination.

I think you can do a book that says, here’s who killed Kennedy. And Harry said, who? And I said, Oswald. And he, he said, and who? And I said, just Oswald. And there was a moment at which, you know, you can almost see the eyes. They were thinking, uhoh, we signed him to do this book. He read, he, you know, went off and read the Warren Commission and he thinks that’s true.

When they saw what was new in terms of ballistics and what was different in terms of the interview that I got with Yuri Nosenko,, a Soviet defector who had handled Oswald when he went to Russia. The first such interview on the record, the things that were fresh. Random House got extremely enthusiastic about the book, but their concern was that nobody would buy it because we were publishing on the 30th anniversary.

I think there were 16 or 17 books that year. And all of them were conspiracy books. And this was the only one that said Oswald alone. And the fear at Random House is that nobody would care about a book that said it was Oswald, although I thought it was the truth. And the second part was that the few people, a handful who thought it was Oswald alone, wouldn’t buy it because they’d say, I don’t need to spend 25 or $30 to learn the details because I already feel that way.

What we underestimated was that 30 years after the assassination, even today coming on 60, but the 30 years after the, the murder, The most outrageous position to take was to say, I think Lee Harvey Oswald alone did it. And then to argue why. People were sort of looked at me as though I had just come in from outer space.

They didn’t think that that was possible, and you’d make your case at a certain stage. Of course, if you believe wholeheartedly that your own government, the secret government, CIA, FBI together with NSA had killed the president. They pulled off the perfect murder in Dallas in 1963 and then 30 years later Johnny come lately, a guy like me who’s never really been part of the assassination researcher group comes out with a book called Case Closed that’s embraced by the mainstream media, gets great reviews, New York Times, everything else.

They thought I was part of the conspiracy. I must have been recruited by somebody from Langley who said, come on and do this book and keep the conspiracy going because Oliver Stone is shaking it up too much. That sort of was amazing to me. I couldn’t quite believe that you would then think that anybody who sort of argued that Oswald alone was the historical truth was now part of the conspiracy. But I certainly saw that over time.

Erik: We were talking a bit about this before we began the interview. You, you brought up that just because you don’t believe that Oswald was part of a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, it doesn’t mean that there weren’t people at the time plotting to kill the president, right?

Gerald: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, I think it’s a critical point because people assume that if I say Oswald alone, that means I don’t think there were any conspiracies brewing against Kennedy. In fact, I think that there are probably conspiracies, or at least talk of killing a president with almost every US president in modern times since, you know, at least from Roosevelt to on, there’s some disgruntled group sitting around saying, we’d like to get that president. If a president was killed today, if it had been Obama or Trump or Biden. And we knew the assassin was. Then the question is, is there a group behind it, anti-abortion people? Is it Islamist terrorist is it a a group of pro-Russian activists? You know, who is it? I think that with the Kennedys, if you came to me, let’s say Erik with a a tape recording, you said, I just found this. We’ve uncovered it. It’s a group of mobsters sitting in New Orleans in the summer of 63 before the president was killed. It’s Carlos Marcello and in Louisiana and it’s Santo Trafficanti in Miami, and they’re saying, let’s get that no good SOB president. I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me that the KGB or the Cubans or some disgruntled group inside the American government didn’t like Kennedy, absolutely would understand that.

The question I’ve always had is, You have a conspiracy, you find it, you have to tie Oswald into it because although a lot of your listeners who haven’t looked at the evidence may not yet believe it, but if you come out of Dealey Plaza looking at the credible evidence, and you’re convinced as I am, that Oswald’s the only shooter that day, then how does he become part of that conspiracy?

Remember before I said that when he was on his way to Mexico City on a bus, that’s the first anybody in the public knew about Kennedy coming to Texas. So any conspiracy that’s formed to kill the president later in Dallas is gonna have to take place after that time. When Oswald returns to American early October, he’s in a rooming house with other people who are living there.

He doesn’t have a mobile phone. He does not have a pay phone that he uses. He’s at work during the day. He goes to see his wife Marina on the weekends. So somehow the conspirators have to bring him into the plot. He can’t do it by telepathy. So the question is, did he have any visitors at the house that we can’t identify?

No. They examined and they talked to all of the people who were living with him, including the woman that ran the boarding house. Did he get calls at any time? No. He used to make calls almost once a day in a foreign language. That sounds promising until you realize it was in Russian. And they track the calls, they’re all to Marina who’s sitting out at Irving at the house.

Did he get calls or make any calls at his place of work? No. When they go through all the pay records that are on the two payphone there. So in the end, there isn’t any effort to bring Oswald in. But more importantly, and you know this from reading his past, he’s not the type of person who conspiracies would immediately embrace as the perfect person to put into their plot.

Because Oswald is unstable, if you wanna say, but he’s very much a peculiar person. He’s his own person in every way. So if you think you’re gonna rely on Oswald to be the center point, the shooter in a conspiracy, boy, I’ll tell you, I just can’t imagine a group doing that.

Erik: The words dupe. Patsy of course are, are used in conversations about Oswald. But, but in studying his background his hatred of authority, his mistrust of everyone around him the idea that he would just willingly go along with someone else on this, especially if it wasn’t his idea.

Gerald: Yeah. And you know, you say something interesting, we forget that okay, so Oswald uses the word patsy. Just a patsy back when he’s in police custody. It’s a great word to use. And he’s having the time of his life. I mean, for those of us who have studied Oswald over time and see his pictures in Russia and there are plenty of pictures of him and see him in the United States and that he looks like the Cheshire cat who has swallowed the canary in some ways is almost, that’s kind of a smirk that he’s pulled it off.

He’s gonna have the greatest time now telling everybody he has it. But there’s something else. If he was a patsy, let’s say for a second, he was, so, somehow he’s told to bring his rifle into the depository that day or whatever or they plant his rifle in there. So he has no idea. He’s really a patsy. There’s no reason to kill Oswald two days later. There’s no reason Jack Ruby would ever shoot him because a patsy gets run over by a truck, essentially meaning the crime takes place, the patsy takes the fall for it and never knows what hit him. It’s just completely done. But what does Oswald do when the assassination takes place?

Remember, he’s absolutely intrigued by politics. His life is driven by, in many ways, he has this unusual view that he’s politically very smart. He says that he heard that the president of the United States had been shot in front of the building. So he said, oh, Workday must be over. So he decided to go home.

Now, the Lee Harvey Oswald, you get to understand from the book involved in politics, would’ve said- what the president’s been shot? He would’ve been out in front of Deley Plaza asking people what had happened and trying to find out. He was the only person who worked at the book Depository who left after the assassination.

And what does he do? He goes home to his boarding house, takes out his pistol, and then on the way to where we don’t know he’s going, because he obviously had some route to get out of Dallas on his road to escape. He runs into a Dallas policeman, JD Tippit, who has received an all points bulletin based on an eyewitness account of Oswald doing the shooting from the sixth floor from a construction worker Brenner, who supplies it to the police.

A generic description of mid twenties brownish hair of, you know, five 10. Four people were pulled over four or five people by Dallas policemen on that basis. And one of them was the one pulled over by Tippet. Tippet pulled over Oswald. Oswald got out of the car to talk to him, and Oswald unloads the 38 caliber to him and kills Tippit.

Now, no matter what you wanna say about Oswald, you cannot say a patsy. And the reason I say that is his actions from the moment of the assassination through the murder of Tippet indicate flight. It indicates some role of involvement. So whether if people who think Oswald’s innocent, they think he just brought the gun in, or he just did X, Y, or Z, there’s no question that oswald’s involved in the murder of the president or in the plot to kill the president because everything he does after the president’s death speaks of him running away and trying to get away, especially the murder of the policeman.

Erik: I wanna ask you about the grassy knoll. Tell us your take on that. Why are. Some people preoccupied with the grassy knoll and believe that it is a significant part of a larger conspiracy.

Gerald: Yeah, I think that you know the grassy knoll is the area to the right of where the the fatal headshot took place. It’s an area where Abraham Zapruder was right to the left of the grassy knoll. It’s a little area that slopes up in front of the street along there, along Elm Street. And some people say, oh, we think the shooter was ideally placed behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll. Now that’s where people, some people initially rushed toward the grassy knoll.

It’s unusual normally if there’s a shot or somebody shooting for people to rush unless you are a first responder to rush toward the shooter. But people did rush to the, the grassy knoll, not because they thought there was a shot there, but people were scattered everywhere on that. And the ear witnesses, by the way, the majority of their witnesses, there’s sort of an echo chamber in Deley Plaza.

The majority thought that the shots came from behind the president from behind the motorcade, the Texas School Book Depository the Dall-Techs. Some thought it came from multiple locations. A small group thought that it came from the area, the grassy knoll, but the, the grassy knoll became the center point for conspiracy theories over time.

And the main reason was that although still frames of the Zapruder film had been published in Life Magazine, Time Life had bought the rights to the film from Abraham Zapruder immediately after the assassination. It is hard to believe that in a day and age when we expect things to be on YouTube that night, if something has happened or on Twitter immediately with videos.

That the American public did not see the Zapruder film in its entirety until 1975 when Geraldo Rivera had it on America Tonight, this overnight program, and when you first see the Zapruder film, I had the same reaction. You see the headshot and Kennedy moves violently back to the left. He moves backwards and to the left, and it looks as though there’s this massive wound on the front right of his head.

It appears to be that he’s shot from that front. He’s hit from the front right. He moves back to the left. I’ve seen a hundred cowboy movies over time or action films. Every time somebody shot, they fall backwards right away from the bullet. That’s how it looks. So people said, oh my God, they’ve been hiding the Zapruder film for all these years from us.

They didn’t let us see it then. That’s because the head shots clearly from the front. Now. Not withstanding that film, it, it turns out that the x-rays of the autopsy and the photographs from the autopsy show that the bullet that hit the president came in in the high right rear portion of the skull. And what happens on that film frame is that there’s no way to describe this without being somewhat graphic.

I’m sorry. But the right front of the president’s head blows out as the bullet exits his head, literally like 20 to 30% of the brain. It, it floats up in this pink mist as you stop the film frame by frame. And the force of that forces the president in the opposite direction, which is exactly where he goes back into the left.

So the eye in a fast film makes it look as though, oh, it must be some shooter up there. And yet in the end you realize how the president was shot. There’s one other thing on that, Erik. We now know from the ballistics that have been examined of both the fragments from Kennedy’s headshot and the, and the bullet that had hit Kennedy before, that they’re tied to Oswald’s gun to the exclusion of any other gun in the world.

So that would mean that if there was a grassy knoll shooter, somebody was up there and fired a shot and, and got away and nobody was able to identify them, they missed everyone. The, you know, supposedly Oswald’s in the back shooting, you’re, you’ve got a plot to kill the president in conspiracy. So you can’t trust Oswald to hit him, cuz you figure he’s not a very good shot.

He’s got a lousy rifle. So let’s put a world class assassin up on the grassy knoll. They can take the president out with one good shot, and that shooter misses the president misses Mrs. Kennedy misses the governor misses Nelly Connelly misses the driver. The Secret Service agent misses all the people standing on the other side of the of the roadway as the, as the motorcade is passing.

I mean, I always say the real magic bullet in Dealey Plaza is the one supposedly fired from the grassy knoll. That doesn’t hit anybody.

Erik: I, I wanna go back for just a moment and ask you about Yuri Nosenko. You were actually able to interview him for your book, and he had a really interesting story to tell, and there are, were people who, who believed that Oswald was a Soviet agent, but that was more of an early theory, right? That, that the Soviet Union was behind this. And it’s changed over time to, you know, the FBI, the CIA, the mob, Cuba. But early on it was believed that, that the Soviets were the ones who were in cahoots with Oswald to kill President Kennedy.

Gerald: That’s right. Early on, they, you know, people thought, okay, he’s got a Russian wife he was in Russia.

The KGB might have turned him and sent him back here. But the one thing you know for sure is the KGB would be smart enough that if they sent Oswald back to America, the last thing he would be doing would be holding a left wing organization’s pamphlet when he was taking pictures in the backyard holding a rifle. He’d be holding instead the Republican Party, the John Birch Society or somebody else, right?

To say he was a true blue a right wing American, you know, always casting himself on the opposite side of it. He wouldn’t be handing out leaflets to in, in support of Castro because he’d wanna draw as much distance as he could from his sort of, you know, communist mission in that sense. So the, it was interesting to talk to Nosenko.

Nosenko was the KGB agent who handled Oswald’s file by chance when he was in, when he first defected the Russia. He’s the one, it’s the second time Oswald had a psychiatrist after he tried the suicide that we know of. And the Russians concluded that he was unstable at that time. Nosenko was so interesting because he had defected to the United States a few years after the assassination and James Jesus Angleton, who was head of counter intelligence and the CIA, thought that Nosenko was a fake defector, thought the Russians were planting him here, not just for Kennedy, but for a whole host of other things. So Nosenko was locked up sort of tortured for a period of five or six years.

Hard interrogation as a CIA would call it, here in the in America. And then finally the CIA decided, okay, Angleton’s wrong. He’s a real defector. And they gave him a new identity had his wife here and they moved him out in America. And it was sort of like witness protection. I had written a letter to the CIA public affairs officer in 1991 or 92 I think it was 92, I’d have to look.

But saying, by the way, could you please pass this letter onto Yuri Nosenko? And it’s an open letter. They could see it saying, I wanted to interview you for a reexamination of the case I was doing, et cetera. They came back to me a few months later and said, Nosenko is willing to do it. You’ll have to pay his airfare to get him to Washington if you come up to Washington.

And I said, fine. Then they decided that that wouldn’t work because they were afraid that if I paid for his airfare, I could figure out by the cost of the fair where he was coming from, what part of the country. So he would make his way to Washington on his own, and I would end up meeting ’em there. When I met with him, I asked him, why are you interviewing with me?

Clearly, other people have tried to talk to you over the years, and the letters sent to the CIA end up in, you know, a garbage can or a black hole or whatever, and he said, you’re the first person that asked for an interview since the Soviet Union fell cuz it had fallen, you know, before and you had Gorbachav in.

He said, I was always afraid the Russians would kill me cuz I was a defector. He said, now I don’t have that fear anymore. And I thought, you know, sometimes we talked before about luck. I know that part of journalism that’s good is being at the right place at the right time. I’d like to think that I always do it because I’m figuring out the like a chess move and I know that this is the right time.

But that was the case I never even thought of and worked to the benefit and Nosenko turns out to be a fascinating story. You’re right. He doesn’t change our view ultimately of, of Oswald, but adds a very personal view into it of what Oswald was like during that period in 59, 60, 60.

Erik: Hmm. One of the points brought up by some including a friend of mine who, who is a police officer, and we actually had a conversation about this a few months ago. He, he was extremely suspicious about the fact that Oswald was killed under police protection. He said he believed that for that to have happened, the police must have been in on it, that they must have had a deal. With Ruby, the mafia. You’ve heard this before…

Gerald: That police officer was thinking of normal police work. He was thinking that the president of the United States has been assassinated. So the place where the accused assassin Oswald has been held must be really secure. They’re not letting anyone just wander in there. Oh, what a mistake. That would be as an assumption. As a matter of fact, the the security over that weekend, Oswald is arrested and detained on a Friday night is just terrible.

First of all, the conversations that chief Curry, the head of the Dallas Police, the interrogations they have with Oswald, they’re taking notes, but they make no recordings. It wasn’t their practice to make recordings. The Secret Service, the Feds didn’t have any jurisdiction yet. But the place itself, the the, where the police were. There were reporters.. There were several dozen reporters from all different organizations. There was no specific sign in. Jack Ruby had a strip club that was frequented by the police. He was friends with a lot of the police. Jack Ruby was a guy who liked to be in the mix when something was taking place. And he was down at, at the police station on Friday night, handing out his business cards, bringing pizzas into people. Telling a French reporter by the way, when this is all over, come down to the strip club, I’ll give you free drinks. That’s Jack Ruby. When Oswald is taken out at nearly midnight on Friday night. To give a press conference, Ruby is in the back of the room holding a pad as though he’s a reporter. On Saturday, when Oswald is taken out again from the office, Ruby is still there.

There’s a picture where you can see Oswald moving, not far away from him. And on Sunday, and I go through, you know, sort of a detailed buildup of what happens with Ruby because people say, oh, okay, so you had one unusual character with Oswald who killed the president. But don’t tell me there was another lone guy, Ruby, who you know, pulled off this by happenstance.

And yet when you see Ruby, he sort of gets worked up into this frenzy over the weekend with his sister and others about what’s happened in Dallas and how terrible it is. In Jack Ruby’s tough and rough world, there’s a street justice to a guy like Oswald, but he’s not really planning on it because he goes down on Sunday, which is the day that Oswald’s supposed to be transferred from the police. And finally they’re gonna give up custody of him, take him over to the sheriffs, and they’ve announced that they are going to transfer Oswald around 10 in the morning and at nine o’clock the police cleared out the basement. Guards were posted, the two driveway ramps and the five doorways to the garage.

Okay. The press was allowed in to set up for the transfer. A crowd of a few hundred just regular people in Dallas had gathered in front of the police station by 10:00 AM to watch the event. But it was postponed because Oswald was supposed to be transferred in an armored truck that went awry cuz two armored vehicles arrived that were unusable.

One was too small to hold the guards and the other was too tall to fit under the jail’s eight foot driveway clearance. I know it’s hard to imagine. And so they said they delayed it for that. Then, A postal inspector showed up and wanted to interrogate Oswald because it’s a crime to have bought the rifle that was used in the assassination through the mail.

And he talked to Oswald for a bit and then right before they moved Oswald out, he wanted a change of sweater. So they changed his sweater and it delayed them a little bit more. Ruby, meanwhile, had gone from his house, woke up and had to go down to the Western Union office. The only one open in Dallas that day to send one of his strippers, a $25 Western Union Gram because she was short of money.

He went in at, he parked across the street from the Western Union Station. It’s only a block from police headquarters. He stood in line, the Western Union office. He was in no rush. According to the people there. He sent out the MoneyGram, it was stamped at 11:17. He walks out from the Western Union office.

He’s about 200 steps away from the entrance to the police station, walks down the street and the police officer who was guarding that entrance, moves away getting ready for the car to come up. And Ruby walks down the ramp and literally arrives at the bottom of the, of the basement as Oswald’s coming out.

And the Jack Ruby that’s worked himself up into a form of street justice, literally takes out his pistol, breaks through that part of the crowd, and shoots Oswald with one shot that turns out to be fatal. And sort of like in a, like a bad movie line. You know, you shot my president, you rat, type of thing. When he’s tackled- Ruby- he says to the cops, he’s yelling, it’s Jack.

You know me. You know me. So he thought- There was a crime, Erik in Dallas at that time called Murder Without Malice. It’s like unintentional. It is hard to explain. It’s not even like a manslaughter charge. And the most you could do is five years. Ruby thought that if he got guilty at all, it would be murder without malice because the crowd and the jury would be for him. He had no idea how much people hated what he did.

Erik: But, but people in the moment, just regular people had hated Oswald so much during his brief period of captivity that they were thrilled that Oswald had been killed.

Gerald: Yeah. You know, it’s, it is so interesting you say that because it is hard to believe, you know, now we look back on it and we’re just horrified that Ruby having ruined for history, the chance of, of what would, would happened.

But at that time, you know, the few hundred people that had gathered in front of the waiting for Oswald to be transferred and there was a CBS, a local CBS camera crew that was filming outside and when the news spread onto the street that Oswald had been shot. They didn’t know that he was fatally shot or whatever,, just that he had been shot.

The crowd breaks spontaneously into sort of like cheers and applause. It’s really a chilling moment because there was such anger at that moment toward the person that the public thought was the assassin. You know, we weren’t yet in conspiracy levels. There was no trauma, nothing else that Ruby’s gamble that it might work for him. You could almost understand how that could be the case.

Erik: Right. So for conspiracy theorists, there has always been a cloud of mystery, right? Surrounding Ruby’s death. Could, could you address that?

Gerald: Yeah. So, you know, Jack Ruby is one of the most talkative guys around. He would essentially give an interview to, to anyone. So there’s always the question of, okay, what about Ruby? And when did he actually end up dying? So. Ruby was you know, diagnosed initially. He thought he had a stomach problem and he went to Parkland Hospital, the same place where the president had been given they thought it was a stomach problem and then they realized it was actually cancer that he had, and he had cancer in his liver, his lungs. I think he might have, even at that point, gone to his brain.

They think he had probably had it for about 15 months. None of the physicians in jail thought his condition was a terrible one. He doesn’t die until January of 67, so three years after he shot Oswald. There is a time in which Ruby in 64 when interviewed by the Warren Commission 65, he’s always a little bit unusual, but he starts to get, and it might be a result of the tumor – the brain starts to get a little paranoid a little bit further out there. He thinks that there’s a plot. Ruby was Jewish. That there was a plot to embarrass Jews that had been run by a advertisement in the Dallas newspaper, that he could hear the cries of Jewish victims being murdered or tortured inside the jail cell.

He would tell other people, he asked Earl Warren to take him to Washington cuz he had big secrets to disclose in part about all of this. And Warren said, no, you know, after listening to Ruby we’re not taking him to Washington. People say, ah, see, he would’ve told the real secrets there. Ruby was a talkative person.

He, he never ended up saying anything that made you think otherwise. Except that it was unfortunate that he ended up crossing paths in history with Oswald on that day because the best thing that could have happened was a trial. And even though today, there’s no question, Erik, you’d have people who would still think it’s a conspiracy, but far fewer If the evidence had been presented in court and you saw what the case was against Oswald, but having that stopped, Ruby guaranteed that the conspiracies live forever.

Erik: Yeah, yeah. In your book, you do dedicate some of your page space to Jim Garrison and his investigation. Can you touch on him a little? I, I know Oliver Stone relied on Garrison’s perspective to tell his story. What do you think about Garrison’s involvement in all of this?

You know, so I have a separate chapter on Garrison because as an attorney, I’m particularly so incensed by him that Garrison has this sort of obligation as a prosecutor, elected prosecutor, to make sure that, you know, bringing a case if he thinks it’s right, but not a case in which you so firmly are convinced of the truth, that you’re willing to bend the facts and create falsehoods and then prosecute an innocent man.

And that’s exactly what Garrison did. Garrison really was a true believer. He did think that there was a, a big conspiracy in the case, and he was so desperate to prove that he didn’t care. That if he, the larger goal, the end definitely justified the means. So if the end was uncovering the, the conspiracy behind the Kennedy murder and it meant tramping on the rights of Clay Shaw, who was the person that he decided to put into the the hot seat as the prosecution, he didn’t care about that.

And so Garrison is one of those stories that even hardcore conspiracy theorists, those who think that there’s something else in the case, those who disagree with me, had over the years come to view the Garrison case as one of the worst examples of what had happened. They, Garrison’s was pretty far fetched, and then Oliver Stone resurrected him.

What I mean by that is that he put him back into the driver’s seat as Kevin Costner. But more importantly, I understand Hollywood needs a hero In a movie, Spielberg told the story of the Holocaust through Shindler. You like somebody who’s doing something good, you don’t necessarily want to tell it about the person who’s accomplishing the evil.

So and that was certainly the case for Stone. He’s looking for a real character and, and Garrison’s the only one who brought a case to trial. Even though underneath that is a very sordid story. So that made the Stone film even worse in some ways because it was based on Garrison. There’s a very good book that was recently put out by a writer who studied it for a long time.

Fred Litwin l i t w i n. I recommended to any of your listeners. It’s called On the Trail of Delusion, and it’s Jim Garrison, the great accuser. It, it takes the chapter that I have and brings it on 30 years later, almost in terms of a total deconstruction of, of Garrison. You can’t finish Litman’s book and not feel that it’s Garrison who should have been prosecuted at some point for, for the fake case that he ended up bringing.

Erik: So if you were to write a screenplay about the Kennedy assassination, is there a figure in this story that you would consider a hero that would, that would make a good protagonist? ?

Gerald: No. Unfortunately that’s, it is. I mean, on the one hand I feel like, you know, it’s a terrible thing to say there isn’t, but no, there, there isn’t. I mean, there are a lot of people that did heroic things like the Secret Service agent like Clint Hill threw himself on the car. There are, there’s Earl Warren, the Chief Justice, the Supreme Court, who didn’t want to be on the commission to look into his death. And Lyndon Johnson sort of, you know, said you have to, as otherwise the country’s gonna end up at war with the Soviet Union.

And he did his duty, even though he didn’t want to. There’s Bobby Kennedy afterwards, you know, doing his own investigation to see whether the mob was involved and concluding there wasn’t. And there are, there are people doing the right thing, but there isn’t, as though there’s an unsung hero here, there’s, there’s nobody who changed the, that trajectory of what was this destiny, if you want to call it that. And I don’t use destiny as something that’s preset, but as what played out of Oswald and Kennedy and then Ruby. Unfortunately.

Erik: Speaking of Lyndon Johnson, we haven’t really talked about him here, but there are some who believe that there was no one who had more to gain from President Kennedy’s assassination than the vice President. What do you say to that?

Gerald: Well, you know, so the question is, in a murder case, you know, as an investigator, one of the first things you ask yourself is who has the most to gain? Right? Is there a life insurance policy and the husband who was just killed? You know, who has the most to gain? Who has the most to gain in any presidential assassin?

The Vice President , almost always. Vice president’s gonna step into the most powerful position in the US government. So Lyndon Johnson, Bobby and, and Bobby Kennedy and Jack Kennedy, the three didn’t like each other that much. They asked, the Kennedys, asked Lyndon Johnson to be on the ticket when they ran for 1960 because it was a bit of a courtesy.

They thought he’d say no. And he surprised him by saying, yes. The assassination takes place in Texas, which is Lyndon Johnson’s home state. So you say, oh, now, oh my God, it happened in Texas. Johnson and the Kennedys don’t like each other. He’s the vice president, he’s about to be president. I understand all of that in terms of a classic crime genre.

But in the end, LBJ was convinced by the way that it wasn’t Oswald alone. He thought that Castro had had a role. He went to his dying day believing that because he knew about the plots the US government had at the highest level, Bobby Kennedy had enrolled the CIA to get together with the mob to kill Castro. And he thought that Castro realized that he was under assault and decided to hit back first. And nobody ever changed his mind about that. But when you look at Johnson, you know, other than the fact that it happened in Texas and other than the fact that the vice president automatically becomes the president, there was no reason to tie him in.

Erik: Right, right. So you’ve been working on this for 30 years now, and over that time, I would imagine that you’ve seen so many theories come and go. Trendy suspects. Right.

Gerald: Yeah, I think, I mean, although conspiracy books continue to come out, I think what’s happened is there’s a, there’s a public opinion poll done, I think two years ago that showed 25, 27% of the public thought it was oswald alone. Now, a reporter called me up at that time and said, aren’t you disappointed that after all these years, you know, 57 years of that, that it, it is only a quarter of people believe it’s Oswald alone? And I said, no, actually, I, I’m fairly ecstatic at that because after the JFK film in 91, I think it was down to 5%. More people have come to think that it’s Oswald alone, not because of Case Closed, they haven’t read Case Closed, but because there were a lot of people that were saying, you know what, we’re gonna wait to see what happens here. These documents are hidden by the US government. There may be something in them. Now they’re all out except for literally about 600 that have never been seen by the public. We know what some of those are.

It’s the CIA trying to protect its own reputation about what was going on in Mexico City and its agents it was using, but it’s not about the murder. So those documents are coming out without any smoking gun document. To use a bad phrase. Now, you know, I’ve always said that if, if there was a document that, let’s say for instance there was a conspiracy to kill the president and the CIA or some other government agency was involved in it, they pulled off the perfect murder, the near perfect murder in Dallas because here we are 60 years later and still can’t prove otherwise.

And, and good investigative reporters like me get duped to think it’s Oswald alone. I doubt that they actually put a document into the National archives that exposes the entire thing. So people that were hoping for like that type of document, that document would never have made it to the National Archives in the first place, if that makes sense.

So I always think people’s expectations were unrealistic when it came to that. What are they still fighting to hide? There are still people 60 years later, but there are sources inside the Mexican government or inside the Mexican police that were assets for the CIA in the early and mid sixties in Mexico City, which was a hotbed of espionage.

They’re now in their eighties and disclosing their names would still bring havoc to their families. I understand that. The law says you have to, the JFK Kennedy Act says you have to release documents in their entirety. No redactions. That’s what the CIA is fighting about. Plus, I think that they will be embarrassed to some extent about, and I’ve said this even in Case Closed- there was a cover up after the assassination by the CIA and the FBI. The FBI destroyed a note from Oswald. They were running as far away from him as they could. They had an open investigation and J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI was petrified that the FBI was going to, somebody was gonna say to the FBI -Hey. You were investigating this guy and you didn’t know that he had a job in the building on which the motorcade was going in front of, and he was dangerous, so they drew distance from him.

The CIA hid the fact from the Warren Commission that they were trying to kill Castro. They were petrified. The Warren Commission would learn about that. So, as researchers picked up evidence over the years that the FBI and CIA had lied or hid something from the Warren Commission, they assumed that they were hiding their involvement in the murder.

There was a coverup, but it wasn’t of their role in the murder. It was the coverup of their own bureaucratic reputation. They were trying to protect their own assets, if that makes sense. And that’s what I think we’re gonna see more of in the final documents released from the National Archives. The extent to which the CIA might have known that Oswald was almost violent at the Soviet mission.

They were taping or tapping into the Soviet mission that they knew he had taken on his pistol. He might have even said something against the president or threatened at the Cuban mission, and they never disclosed any of that to the FBI when Oswald came back into America in early October. So that would work to their great embarrassment.

That might be some of what we’ll see in those. And in addition, people were waiting for what I call the deathbed confession. You know, it’ll happen. Somebody who was involved in the plot, who knows something is going to come along at some point with a guilty conscience and say, this is what happens and the entire case will unravel.

So they were waiting at 30 years, they were waiting at 40 and at 50, and now we’re coming on 60. And they realize that time is is passing. So there are still books that continue to say, yes, there’s a conspiracy in the case, but with less fervor than there was in an earlier time when there were still more doubts about what would happen in the future.

Erik: So I, I hope that I’ve asked the right questions. It’s such a hotly debated subject and I, I’ll probably have listeners out there who are gonna, you know, ask me, why didn’t you bring up this? Why didn’t you…

Gerald: Everybody has their, yeah, everybody has their favorite issue. I get stopped sometimes on the street, literally, and somebody will say, Gerald Posner. It’s almost always a Kennedy person and they have a question, they think, I haven’t been asked. And they say, now I wanna ask you, what about this? So there are always those questions. And having, you know, moved into the question of true crime and the assassination, you’ll certainly get bombarded, I’m sure at some point by people say, oh God, you know, it’s not at all like that. What about this? But in the end, and I’ve always said, if somebody wants a hundred percent of all of their questions answered and they want no doubts at all about the case, that’s never gonna happen because we lost the person who I think was at the heart of it in terms of Oswald. However, what you can do as a reasonable investigator or journalist historian, is look at what the credible evidence is. Tell people what you rely on to draw your conclusions and then draw your conclusion about what you believe happened. And this is what I am confident did happen that day in history that the president of the United States was assassinated by a 24 year old who decided to put himself into the history books.

And as much as people don’t want to hear that, it’s unfortunately the truth in that case.

Erik: Well, well, gosh, this, this has been so interesting. So, so if people want to connect with you I know you are on Instagram, right?

Gerald: I’m on sub stack Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. And also on my website there is a contact me. That email comes to me. It’s just that I ask people to be patient. Sometimes I’m quick in answering and sometimes I’m really slow. But I do get back to everybody some point.

Erik: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to talk about this very controversial case.

Gerald: No, thank you so much for having me on. I mean I’m really glad because, you know, I know from listening to your other podcasts, you, one of the things you do so well is you give time.

You allow, you know, the time for explanations and delving into it and you ask questions. I think that the average person, the people in the public want to know. And so you did that here and I really appreciate the chance to sit down and talk to you about the case.

Erik: Thank you so much.