“Assassination and Escape: Oswald’s Actions, 12:30 pm to 1:50 pm, November 22”



We have now arrived at the critical moments.  What happened as the assassination occurred and what do we know of Oswald’s behavior during these most important of minutes? It turns out we know a great deal–so much in fact that we can even infer what was going on in Oswald’s mind on a minute by minute basis.  In this episode, we also speculate about the most mysterious of all questions. Where was Oswald going when he left his boarding house after the assassination? Here we engage in informed speculation, with an emphasis on the word “informed.”


Evidence Against Oswald: 8:00 AM, November 21, to 12:30 PM CST, November 22



How to help students understand the overwhelming evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald (and Oswald alone)?  Given the power of the evidence, no help ought be needed! Perhaps a concise run-through will do the trick?  Or a solemn and stately documentary? In a time when facts alone hold no sway, what is an historian to do? The answer is to marshal the evidence one more time, always one more time, until the bell, at long last, rings.  Even though it has been clanging now for more than sixty years, let up look at a day in the life of Oswald, the last day before the assassination, as the camera of evidence before him and before us, followed his every step, and recorded everything we need to know to state the obvious: that Oswald did it, and that he was a man utterly without help along the way.  This is a change of pace in our JFK series, a look directly at only one thing, the evidence against Oswald.


Lee Harvey Oswald and Edwin Walker Redux: Resume Building and Plotting in New Orleans, April to October 1963



What was Lee Harvey Oswald up to in New Orleans between his failed assassination attempt against Retired General Edwin Walker in April 1963 and his trip to Mexico City in late September in pursuit of a visa to Communist Cuba?  What was the mix of motives that drove Oswald in these critical months prior to November 1963, when the president of the United States unexpectedly came into his sights.  Listen to this podcast episode for some insights into these questions.


Final Episode: Oswald’s Mind in the Assassination Weekend



In this final part of the three-part podcast series, we look at Oswald’s interior concerns in the days and hours before 12:30 pm CST on November 22, 1963.  In so doing we elucidate the most elusive of questions, the question of motive.


Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK Assassination: The Stories Not Told



In this three-part series, we go into the mind of the assassin and try to understand Oswald’s motives.  This helps us understand why conspiracy thinking about the assassination makes no sense. If you believe that Oswald lacked motive, ability or opportunity to shoot JFK, a conspiracy seems to be a necessary alternative. In fact none of these three things were lacking in 1963.  There was no need for conspiracy. Oswald, however unbalanced, was actually quite smart.  His plans for greatness, deluded as they were, come down to two. Colored by the Cold War and the politics of a performative president, they gave him motives and opportunities galore to assassinate JFK. The conspiracy shysters don’t tell you about these realities and the politicians and explainers in the 1960s also did not want to talk about the geopolitics of the era, factors that make the mysteries of the assassination disappear, manufactured as they were by storytellers who only wanted to tell part of the story.


Announcing a New Series on my YouTube Channel, “JFK Demystified”



This is your host, historian Rick Reiman.  Go to my YouTube Channel, “JFK Demystified,” to view the first episode of a series of short videos called “On Background: Seeking the Hidden JFK Assassination.”  The series is on the evidence that is hiding in plain sight, namely the factors that block our view from the evidence that makes the assassination a simple thing to understand.  We look at the confusion regarding standards of evidence and proof, the con-men- conspiracy theories that lead people astray, the historical context that sends us back to the real world, and the accumulated evidence confirmed again and again by a series of investigation, each one clearing up the few original questions that arose from a legitimate concern that some of the evidence was hidden. It was, but it is hidden no more, a simple fact that speaks volumes about how history really works. Join me on YouTube for this series, “On Background.”  See you there.


“Into the Mind of the Assassin: Oswald’s Last Month, October-November 1963”



Continuing the series of JFK assassination episodes in this, the 60th year since the assassination, we look not at the thinking of the CIA, FBI, Warren Commission, Mob, Cuba, Russia or any of the other institutions that have been falsely imagined as being behind it, but inside the mind of the man who actually did it, and did it alone: Lee Harvey Oswald.  It may not be the most popular theory, but facts don’t have to be popular. They only need to be true.  This is an essay by myself, Rick Reiman, and narrated by myself, in response to the excellent insights of Burt Griffin, who wrote the new book, JFK, Oswald, Ruby: Politics, Prejudice and Truth. A staff member on the Warren Commission (1963-1964). Griffin challenges historians to take the assassination seriously as history, something that is simple to understand once contextualized in history.  Frankly, historians have not recognized their responsibility in this regard.  Historians, when are you going to do your jobs, and take this intersection of the Cold War and cvil rights, which is what the assassination was, seriously as history?  Until they do, this will continue to be a blot, a stain and a disgrace for the historical profession, as it has been for sixty years.

Photo taken by Marina Oswald.

“Final Word: The Landis Claim,” by Rick Reiman



Today, your host on Audiblyspeaking, Dr. Rick Reiman narrates his assessment of this year’s surprising news in the JFK assassination folklore: the claim by former secret service agent Paul Landis that he found a backseat bullet that allegedly refutes the famous “single bullet theory.”  The subtitle of today’s show might appropriately be, “Not so Fast.”


Half-Story Hoaxes, 2023: A Critique of Rob Reiner’s JFK Conspiracy Theories



Most of the thousands of books on the JFK assassination are re-cyclings and re-spinnings of the foundational myths of the first generation of conspiracy fabulation tales. To hear Rob Reiner’s repetition of the tired magic bullet trope that we have heard before–you know the one that has long since been debunked–it seems that the half-story hoaxes that I discussed in my first Warren Commission episode two weeks ago are not just historical relics of the past.  They continue to be retailed to an unsuspecting public.  Here is the rest of the story of the very-unmagical second shot in the assassination, as well as the first shot, told in the epistemological technicolor of the truth.


Dum-Dum Bullets or Dum-Dum Fabulists? Half-Story Hoaxes in the JFK Assassination



One of the chief reasons why people still believe the nonsense of a conspiracy in the assassination of John F. Kennedy is because of the fiendishness of those, out of malice or effort at pecuniary gain, deliberately lie to their readers and tell only half of a story they know too well to be false.  We examine two of the many half-story hoaxes, as I call them, which try to spread the lie of conspiracy by covering up the proofs of no-conspiracy which have grown to mountainous proportions in the 60 years since 1963.


Revisiting the Warren Commission, Part One: Mistakes?



Today is November 20, 2023, two days before the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  On the eve of this event, we look at the flagship government investigation of the crime, the Warren Commission and its work. Ironies abound in discussing the Commission. Its Report  has been savaged by many, most of whom have failed even to read it.  Critics, beginning with the conspiracy “buffs,” have largely cherrypicked the twenty-seven volumes of the documents and hearing transcripts for evidence in support of their claims, or for evidence that could be made to support their claims with sufficient imagination and blinders to ignore the other documents and testimony in the same volumes that counter their claims.  So it is with the Commission’s alleged “mistakes.”  In this two-part reflection on the work of the Warren Commission (1963-1964), we look at the Commission’s supposed errors or “mistakes,” and separate its actual failings from “unavoidable inabilities,” which, as we hear in this podcast, are not the same thing.

Part Two of this reflection series will focus on the strengths of the Warren Commission, strengths so powerful that they have survived three generations of scrutiny since that terrible day in Dallas.


NEW! The Annotated “Disappearance of the Lady Frances Carfax!”



You may have seen and heard the classic story of “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax” here on History Revisited and Audibly Speaking before, but this is a new version, now with annotations included from the observations in Leslie S. Klinger’s The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volume II (New York: Norton’s, 2005).  Listen to the story and the annotated digressions to journey through the dual labyrinths of the plot-line and the mind of Arthur Conan Doyle, in this, one of my all-time-favorites in the Sherlock Holmes canon!


Deja Vu History: The Biden Oval Office Speech on Israel and Ukraine of 2023 and the FDR “Arsenal of Democracy” Speech of 1940



No one has caught the similarities between the Biden Oval Office Speech on Israel and Ukraine of 2023 and the FDR “Arsenal of Democracy” Speech of 1940, other than the use of the phrase “Arsenal of Democracy.” Yet the parallels are eery and uncanny.  They are also portentous for revealing the resonance of the world situations of 1940 and that of today.  Listen and learn how the Biden speech drew on two FDR speeches, one in 1940 and one in the wake of Pearl Harbor (no, not that one, not the “Day of Infamy” speech but one a few days later) and you will agree on the striking similarities. I hope you will also agree on the gravity of their meanings as discussed here.


Fresh for Halloween! “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box!”



In the run up to Halloween, there no more terrifying, thrilling and horrifying story in the Sherlock Holmes canon than this, “The Cardboard Box.”  Publishers were frightened to publish it and its author, John Watson, was persuaded to do so only on his deathbed.  Listeners are strongly encouraged to listen only at noon, in the bright sunshine, when demons are at a distance and vampires asleep in their coffins. If you must listen to this of an evening, have someone with you to hold onto.  Listen…if you dare.


The Landis Claim: Paul Landis and the New “Magic Bullet” Myth in the JFK Assassination



In advance of the publication of Paul Landis’s new book on his memory as a Secret Service agent in the JFK detail on November 22, 1963, Landis has made a claim that has roiled the class of people interested in the controversies involving the JFK assassination.  In response to those parts of the claim that have been published (since the book itself will not come out until October) your host for this podcast, Rick Reiman, looks at the logical problems of the Landis claim, and why it should be considered little more than a myth and a mistaken memory.


For Constitution Day 2023: An Abridged Audio Narration of the National Archives’ Public Domain Document, “Putting the Bill of Rights to the Test”



This is Dr. Rick Reiman, professor of History at South Georgia State College.  Here I narrate sections from the National Archives’ public domain publication, “Putting the Bill of Rights to the Test.”  I read sections on the application of the First and Fifth Amendments. Listeners are encouraged to download the complete publication on the National Archives web site. The complete publication contains questions and primary documents that will enhance your experience in listening to this podcast episode and learning more about the Constitution.


The Georgia Indictment Against Donald Trump: An Abridged Audio Narration of the Indictment by D.A. Fani Willis, Fulton County, Georgia



The Georgia Indictment against Donald J. Trump may be the first indictment against Trump to go to trial. It also may be the only trial of Trump to be televised, and televised live.  Unabridged audio narrations of the indictment are numerous online, but to my knowledge, this unabridged recording by your host, Rick Reiman, which still clocks in at nearly 75 minutes, is the only one that limits the attention to the charges against Trump and the narrative of the acts of which he is accused in the indictment.  For those with limited time, this may be the ideal narration to which to listen.  Of course, all listeners are encouraged to read or listen (or both) to the complete indictment, widely available online through a simple Google search.