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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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Chapter 2 of “The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, an Audio Narration
Tom Buchanan moves his sad life from East Egg to New York City, and all those in his orbit pay the price in chapter two of this archetypal novel of the Jazz Age. The contrast between the glitter and the gutter, and the sadness of the last chance is seen in Myrtal, another person used and discarded by Tom.
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“The Great Gatsby,” Chapter One
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, was both a product of, and epitaph for, the Jazz Age of the Roaring ’20s. Journey to West and East Egg again, as your host Rick Reiman narrates one of the great American novels of the twentieth (or any other) century.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Observations on Christopher Nolan’s Film, “Oppenheimer:” Was Oppenheimer Autistic, and Other Questions?
Here is my review of the blockbuster movie by Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer.” It is a tour de force for so many reasons, but gaps in Oppenheimer’s biography still remains, as I try to show in this review.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Saving of the Democratic Way of Life: Fireside Chat of December 1940
In 1940, American democracy was gravely threatened as never before, and only the American people stood against it as a reliable line of defense. Could we say the same today if American democracy were similarly threatened? Here is an analysis of the famous “Arsenal of Democracy” speech, annotated by your host, Rick Reiman
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New! Audio Narration of the Sherlock Holmes Short Story, “The Resident Patient,” by Arthur Conan Doyle
A Russian Count and his mysterious son make an appointment with a doctor to examine the Count for catalepsy. Catalepsy being the doctor’s speciality, it makes sense. But the resident patient who lives at the doctor’s office may have a lively, or is it deadly, interest in the Russian visitors, unbeknownst to the doctor. What could possibly go wrong? Everything, unless Sherlock Holmes can penetrate the fog of crime in this short story by the inimitable Conan Doyle.
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NEW! An Audio Narration of Conan Doyle’s “The Stockbroker’s Clerk,” a Sherlock Holmes Short Story
Your audio narrator, Rick Reiman, takes you from London to the English Midlands, as we journey with Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson and “the stockbroker’s clerk,” in quest of the solution to a mystery and a hideous crime. Sherlock Holmes solves it only at the very end, and only with the aid of one of the criminals involved. See, or rather hear, if you can beat him to it.
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NEW! Rick Reiman Narrates the Sherlock Holmes Story, “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax,” by Arthur Conan Doyle
The odyssey is almost complete: Virtually the entire canon of Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan Doyle have now been recorded, available free to the public, by the work and from the voice of audio narrator Rick Reiman. You can also catch the classic Hound of the Baskervilles, either here on AudiblySpeaking (available at the podcast by that name on Apple Podcasts) or at Librivox.org. This is an other-directed public service worthy of the spirit of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Here is “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax,” for your enjoyment.
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The COMPLETE Audio narration of the Sherlock Holmes Story, “The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter”
You listened to the sneak preview of this Arthur Conan Doyle classic a few days ago. Now here is the complete recording to enjoy.
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