Listen to this audio version of my Youtube video explaining the “Single Bullet Theory” of the JFK assassination, and WHY IT IS TRUE. Many conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination discredit themselves by disputing this thrice-confirmed theory first revealed by the Warren Commission in 1964.
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Motive. It is the thing that all juries want but do not need, in our system of justice, to determine guilt or innocence, The Warren Commission did not hazard a hypothesis on the question of Oswald’s motive, seen singularly. But they did list a series of potential motives, seeded by his early life, and seen by his comments and those of others, that might have played a part in the formation of motive. Here I summarize this penultimate chapter in The Warren Report, and argue that there is much to praise and much to critique about the Commission’s handling of this critical phase of the life of the assassin.
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This chapter may be seen as the Big Enchilada of the Report. Did the Warren Commission provide a credible investigation of the possibility of conspiracy in the crime? The staff wracked its collective brains to see where any possible conspiracy might have emerged given the facts in the case. It also tracked down leads offered by private citizens that seemed the least bit credible. This chapter of more than 130 pages, the longest in the Report, is the fruit of their work. One thing seems clear from this chapter and this podcast episode: Jack Ruby’s shooting of Oswald either was not premeditated or was reached just seconds before he rushed up to Oswald in the basement of the Dallas city jail and set countless conspiracy theories into motion.
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Continuing our summary of The Warren Report investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we come to Chapter Five. The whole tenor of the investigation changed with the subject of this chapter. It concerned the events that led to the federalization of the investigation itself, the violation of Oswald’s civil liberties in the Dallas jail climaxing in the assassination of Oswald himself by Jack Ruby during the transfer of Oswald from one jail to another. The events of this chapter transformed the assassination from something seemingly weird to something seemingly unbelievable. In this summary, host Rick Reiman discusses the oddities of a criminal justice cast of characters in Dallas more concerned with reputation and appearance than the requirements of law and truth. Chapter Five reminds us that the assassination and Dallas’s part in it were shaped by the realities of time and place, a very different time and place than any we are familiar with today.
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In Chapter Four we have an overview of the evidence against Oswald. Here I summarize the chapter.
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A recent podcast episode by the excellent historians of the JFK assassination, Gerald Posner and Fred Litwin, prompted this podcast episode of mine. Given the need to speculate about so much that is important about the behavior of Oswald on November 21 (pre-assassination) and November 33 (post-assassination), is it possible to employ speculation as a technique for getting at the truth of why Oswald assassinated JFK, and what his post-assassination purposes might have been? Can informed speculation ever rise to the level of good evidence? And if so, what are the standards that such evidence must meet to achieve this state? Questions, questions, questions. I hope that Messers. Posner and/or Litwin respond to these questions, which are expanded upon in this episode of Audibly Speaking.
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It’s core findings remain untouched. Its conclusions have stood the test of time. In this episode we see the tour de force that lies at the foundation of this seminal chapter in The Warren Report: Chapter Three. While subsequent research has expanded on the insights we gain from this chapter, which distilled the most important work of the Warren Commission, nothing has seriously contradicted its fundamental conclusion. What has deteriorated is not the Warren Report conclusions. No, those have stood the test of time. What has deteriorated is the American people’s ability to separate fact from fiction and to accept fact even when it is staring them in the face–as it is here. Will Americans continue to follow the carnival barkers of conspiracist thinking? Americans through “Their government,” as FDR would say, has, with the Warren Report, done them the favor of representing them well. Will the Americans people in the age of Trump accept the truth or follow the carnival barkers?
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Today I summarize the Warren Report’s Chapter Two, “The Assassination.” It is a chapter that promises much but really delivers less than meets the eye. Focusing on the details that form the background of the assassination, and continuing by trading in the shadowlands of lacunae about the event, chapter two is a mere overture to the real opera of the assassination, the fireworks that begin with Chapter Three, “The Shots from the Texas School Depository.” Stay tuned for that chapter in our next summary episode on Audibly Speaking.
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The Warren Commission’s Warren Report, at 888 pages, is a long slog. For those for whom it is too long, I begin here a series of summaries of each of the chapters in the Report. Each chapter exhibits the strengths and weaknesses of the Commission’s investigations. The Commission’s faults can be exaggerated and it accomplishments overlooked. This series opens with “Summary and Conclusions,” including one of the most controversial, if not the most controversial, sentence in the entire Warren Report.
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We have an intermission episode in this series on the JFK assassination, with a personal view of the memories of the host on the assassination and why he was not taken in by conspiracy theories, in contrast to so many of his boomer cohorts along the way.
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Today, Audibly Speaking reviews the magisterial book by famed prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. We revisit the things that make it unique and utterly unanswerable as a riposte to the crazy conspiracy theories that still pollute the writings about the 35th US President.
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Why did Lee Harvey Oswald go east from his boarding house in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, only to go west before his fatal encounter with Police Officer J.D. Tippit on November 22, 1963? The only possible answer was that his plans must have changed, along with his destination, at least temporarily. Ironically, however, his confrontation with Tippit, murderous though it was, may not have changed his destination at all, because he continued his journey west in its wake. An advertisement in the Dallas Morning News, never examined until now, may explain this mystery, as I explain in this episode.
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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.”
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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.
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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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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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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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