Category Archives: John F. Kennedy

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

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

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.

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

JFK Assassination, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Memory, Oswald, Warren Commission

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

American HIstory, JFK Assassination, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Memory, Oswald, Warren Commission, Zapruder

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

American HIstory, JFK Assassination, John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Assassination, Memory, Oswald, Zapruder

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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Puzzle Pieces, Episode 2: The Warren Commission as History

JFK Assassination, John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Memory

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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For Those in a Hurry: Summarizing the Evidence in the JFK Assassination

John F. Kennedy, Kennedy Assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, Memory

In this first part of two brief episodes, I summarize the evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald.  The evidence discussed was presented first by the Warren Commission investigation in 1964 and has only been further strengthened in the years since.  This episode focuses on only one of the two key questions: Did Oswald fire the shots that hit JFK and Texas Governor John Connally?  For Oswald’s motives, click here to buy my NEW Amazon ebook entry on the subject.

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