Category Archives: Warren Commission

“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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Revisiting the Warren Commission, Part One: Mistakes?

JFK Assassination, Warren Commission

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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