Category Archives: JFK Assassination

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

December 22, 2023American HIstory, Books of the Times, JFK Assassination, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Memory, Oswald, Politics, United States history, Warren Commission, Zapruderhistoryrevisited

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.

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

December 15, 2023JFK Assassination, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Memory, Oswald, Warren Commissionhistoryrevisited

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.”

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

December 6, 2023American HIstory, JFK Assassination, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Memory, Oswald, Warren Commission, Zapruderhistoryrevisited

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.

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

December 4, 2023American HIstory, JFK Assassination, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Assassination, Memory, Oswald, Zapruderhistoryrevisited

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.

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Revisiting the Warren Commission, Part One: Mistakes?

November 20, 2023JFK Assassination, Warren Commissionhistoryrevisited

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.

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

September 15, 2023JFK Assassinationhistoryrevisited

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.

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Puzzle Pieces, Episode 2: The Warren Commission as History

April 14, 2023JFK Assassination, John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Memoryhistoryrevisited

In this, our second episode of “Puzzle Pieces,” in which we examine a separate mystery in American history, we look at the weaknesses of the Warren Commission’s efforts in 1964. This first investigation of the JFK assassination suffered from mistakes of its own making and errors over which it had little if no control whatsoever. Weaknesses could sometimes later become strengths, as their obvious highlighting could be–and were–addressed in subsequent investigations. Here we have a photograph of the Commissioners themselves–who did very little of the leg work for the Commission. The unsung staff did most of the work, and may be credited with many of the Commission’s monumental, if unsung and forgotten, successes. Next time on “Puzzle Pieces,” we go over those successes–here on AudiblySpeaking.

The Warren Commission delivers its Report, September 1964

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Puzzle Pieces: How Historians Work, Episode 1: “Today is the 60th Anniversary of the Backyard Photographs in the JFK Assassination”

March 31, 2023JFK Assassination, Uncategorizedhistoryrevisited

This is your host on “Audibly Speaking,” Rick Reiman. Today, March 31, 2023, is the 60th anniversary of the taking of the famous backyard photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald, holding the rifle he would later use to kill President Kennedy and the pistol he would use to murder Officer J.D. Tippit forty-five minutes after that awful act in American history. This is a classic case of how historians untangle facts from allegations, and how the facts in the JFK assassination are imagined away and replaced by the will-of-the-wisp of “What-Ifs.” Let this year, the 60th anniversary of that dark day be the year we start listening to most historians, rather then the inhabitants of “Dallas in Wonderland,” with their absurd conspiracy theories. Thanks for listening–and please share this with others if you like it!